Glow (17 page)

Raf tries to translate all this in his head. He knows from the Pankhead email that Lacebark are in financial trouble. By now they must be aching for cash so badly that they’ll accept contracts from other companies for services that have nothing to do with mining. Nostrand Discovery is a potential client. In that case ‘Mr Rose’ can probably afford to play it a bit more aloof.

‘Shall we head on through?’ says Belasco.

After the security guard presses a button on a panel, the steel door in front of them emits a buzz and then a clunk. Belasco holds it open for Raf. And Raf steps out, somehow, into the open air.

Many times in his life, Raf has carelessly said, ‘I thought I was dreaming’ or ‘I had to pinch myself’ or ‘It was a total nightmare’. But he won’t say those things again after this. Because never, ever before has he had any experience which made him feel so much like a drowsy and gullible consciousness floating through its own depthless improvisation.

He stands in a London street. Above his head, there is a sun, but the sun is both weak and very close, as if the world is ending. On his left there is a post office, followed by a laundrette, a mobile phone shop, a fried chicken shop, a pound shop, a pawnbroker, and a pub, and on his right there is a Chinese takeaway, followed by a greengrocer, a charity shop, a butcher, a hairdresser, a kebab shop, a bookie, and a chemist; and all these are easy to identify even at a distance because their signs just say post office, laundrette, mobile phones, and so on, in an invariant sans-serif typeface. Most of the road has white zigzag lines on either side, but farther on, past a bus stop, a few cars and vans are parked. And about two hundred metres away, blocking the end of the street in a way that you would never see in real life, is an orthogonal pair of two-storey council blocks overlooking a small park with swings and a tree. Everything is a bit too bright and concentrated, sickening, like undiluted orange squash. Raf can hear radios and car horns and the rumble of an overground train, and he can smell chip fat and bus exhaust and fishmonger’s ice melting in the gutter, but there isn’t enough bustle here to generate any of those harmonies, just a few men and women walking up and down the street, nearly all of them Burmese, dressed in cheap sportswear, pretending to have somewhere to go. And there’s no chewing gum on the pavement, no stickers on the lamp-posts, no paint flaking from the windowsills of the flats above the shops – none of the scurf and sebum that distinguishes a body from a mannequin. He’s rendered architectural models on his computer with more texture than this.

Of course, if you put everything together rationally, it becomes apparent that Lacebark have built some sort of film set or theme park here inside the freight depot, but at first sight, before he understood what he was looking at, it seemed more like a dip in the bandwidth of reality itself. When at last the trance breaks, he walks over to the greengrocer and picks up a delicious-looking plastic mango from a cardboard box at the front. Underneath the top layer of mangoes there are chunks of styrofoam to bulk up the pile. If that climbing gym was a mountain, this is the village at the foot of the slopes. Perhaps in some way the tacky fake hologram on his driver’s licence was the visa that got him across the border.

‘Our team can build one of these for you in less than three weeks,’ says Belasco behind him.

Raf turns. ‘My colleague was right. This is . . . very impressive.’ He tries to imagine what this place would look like if it were abandoned for a while like that tennis court, and how its progress would compare to a real street that was abandoned at the same time. At first, dilapidation would reveal the differences, but later it would begin to elide them: the two worlds would diverge and then converge, in the same way that two half-siblings might look the same as kids and different as adults and the same again as skeletons. Belasco politely takes the mango from him and puts it back in the box.

‘Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but some of our higher-ups do wonder why we need our own MOUT facility like this. They find it hard to imagine London being exotic to anyone. After all, it’s just London, isn’t it? But if you did your training in Lagos, for instance, terrain like this is going to seem really sparse and exposed. And we also have guys accustomed to desert or mountain operations for whom the opposite is true. They can learn so much in just a few days of exercises here. It justifies the cost even before we start running any of the more specific tactical simulations.’

‘The people who designed all this – were they Londoners themselves?’

‘No,’ says Belasco. ‘We find that natives of the simuland have a tendency to introduce unconscious distortions into their models.’

At this, Raf feels oddly indignant. How can these tourists think they’re qualified to author a précis of a city they can’t possibly understand? Anyway, they can’t really be that concerned with accuracy if they’ve decided to populate their south London microcosm mostly with Burmese extras, one of whom has just strolled into the ‘laundrette’, making Raf wonder how you get recruited for this sort of work, and what the wages are.

‘Let’s take a look at the control room,’ says Belasco.

Behind another steel door up the back stairs of the ‘pub’, two white guys of about Raf’s age sit in voluptuously ergonomic office chairs before a wall of monitors that alternate video feeds with digital control panels. The room is dark except for the shifting diode light that falls across their bodies like crepuscular rays through a stained-glass window. One of them, Raf notices, was just in the middle of eating a supermarket chicken wrap, and there’s a certain stale quality to this control room that reminds him of the fourth hour of an Xbox session at Isaac’s flat. On the floor is a copy of Villepinte’s
Lacunosities
.

‘From here we can observe and communicate with anyone in the facility,’ says Belasco. ‘And it’s also where we set ambience, climate, time of day. The default is a three-hour day/night cycle with seasonally appropriate weather but of course we can alter that as we like.’

Raf can’t stop himself asking, ‘So instead of three hours you could set it to about twenty-five hours?’

Belasco looks at him quizzically. ‘Sure. Now, Max, give us 4 a.m., heavy rain, please.’

The guy on the left types a few commands on his keyboard, and as darkness falls outside, the screens all switch over to night-vision emerald.

‘It doesn’t look like much from up here,’ says Belasco. ‘You might want to see for yourself.’

Raf wouldn’t have believed he could possibly be enough of a mug to get bewitched twice in a row. But when he goes back downstairs, he can feel grudging tears of wonder in his eyes, like when you’re watching a Hollywood romance that you know is cynical factory product but by the end you just can’t help yourself. Because when he sees the pavement dragging worms of dappled amber out of the reflections of the street lights in its wet rough stone, he could be walking home from a rave in the rain, serotonin still trickling through the gutters of his head. It’s as fake and as real as Cherish’s kiss. The water must be coming from a few hundred sprinklers in the roof, but there’s such a depth to the sound of it, and he wonders if Max upstairs is playing a tape of a real downpour to give the impression of clouds stretching off for miles overhead, the same way a video game will enclose the player in a cuboid called a skybox to suggest a deep horizon when it’s really just a sort of frescoed ceiling. As he looks across at the two council estates lit up like docked spaceships, there is an orange spark in his peripheral vision, and when he turns his head he sees something he can’t possibly have seen – but before he can get a proper look, the ‘sun’ comes back on, and in the time it takes his eyes to adjust, the anomaly has scurried out of view. The rain carries on for a few seconds and then sputters off like a garden hose, leaving the street puddled but bright, and some small stupid part of him wants to search the sky for a rainbow. He realises Belasco has come down the stairs behind him.

‘You know, I wouldn’t like to work in a dark control room all day,’ she confides. ‘But for Max it’s the perfect job. He has a condition called solar urticaria. His skin is very sensitive to sunlight. He gets a rash.’

Raf wonders how the solar urticaria messageboards compare to the non-24-hour sleep/wake syndrome messageboards. Someone should organise a football league for all these different disorders. ‘Denise, is it possible that I saw . . .’

‘What?’

He doesn’t want to say any more. If he’s wrong, it will make her suspicious. A real Nostrand executive wouldn’t be so impressionable that this training facility would make him hallucinate. But he has to know.

‘I expect it was just a trick of the light . . . but is it possible that I saw an animal?’ He clears his throat. ‘A fox?’

Belasco nods. ‘You’ve got sharp eyes, Mr Rose. When the US military was setting up its first simulated Iraqi villages, the soldiers told them it wouldn’t be realistic without the animals. Donkeys, goats, dogs . . . They even got camels, I heard. We try to match that standard. So, yes, we have, uh, we have foxes, and we’re in the process of sourcing some pigeons.’

Raf has spent only about twenty minutes with Belasco, so it’s not as if he knows her very well, but there was something about how she stumbled over her words just now that made him wonder if she was telling a lie of her own. ‘Now, if I may, I’m going to show you an example of a core scenario installation that we have up and running at the moment.’

This turns out to be one of the flats on the second floor of the council block on the left. As they follow the open walkway down to number 14, a smell reaches Raf that is surely too vigorous in its tang to have been pumped out of an artificial scent machine. He looks at Belasco, and she’s wrinkling her nose, but also staring rigidly ahead, almost as if it’s a bodily odour that she’s too embarrassed to acknowledge. She unlocks the front door of the flat, and once inside Raf realises that somewhere in the swirl of the stench is that toothy peat musk he remembers from the fox on the night bus the weekend before last – but there’s also tamarind and bleach and dung and a lot more, which makes it almost the only stimulus he’s encountered since he set foot in this depot that has the same sensory complexity as real things have out there in the unbounded world.

‘Our associate here is playing the role of a high-value target,’ Belasco says, leading him through to the kitchen. A slender Burmese guy stands at the sink soaping his hands, and it feels strange to walk in like this without even nodding hello, but Raf isn’t sure whether it’s like a theatre and the actors have to pretend you’re not there. This ‘core scenario installation’ has been arranged to look like a makeshift laboratory: cluttering the counters are flasks, beakers, burettes, and funnels – many of them clamped upside down to steel ring stands and interconnected by loops of tubing, like the renal system of an android – as well as plastic tubs, latex gloves, rubber stoppers, paper towels, cotton wool, coffee filters, a couple of electric hotplates, and all sorts of other props. On the table is a laptop; on top of the fridge is the exact same brand of cheap radio that Raf has in his own kitchen, tuned to a station that in the circumstances seems pretty likely to be Myth FM; and on the windowsill is a sort of DIY incense burner made from two empty cans of Rubicon guava juice that have been glued end to end with extra holes drilled in the lids and half the sides cut off. It seems as if the set of a ‘core scenario installation’ is dressed with an especially close attention to detail – if you’re trying to evoke a believable world it’s natural that you spend more time on the sections that people are going to pay attention to – but that still doesn’t quite explain Belasco’s weird reaction to the odour.

‘This apartment has even more cameras per hundred square feet than the rest of the facility,’ she says, ‘but they’re all concealed, for realism. We can analyse every tactical simulation with incredible specificity. The action couldn’t be clearer if it was in chess notation.’

Now the Burmese guy is filling an electric kettle from the tap. The linoleum tiles on the floor have a hexagon pattern.

‘So what’s he supposed to be making here?’ says Raf. ‘Explosives?’ If this is how Lacebark have chosen to array their simulated high-value target, then presumably at least one of their real high-value targets is believed to be hiding out in a real laboratory somewhere.

‘For the purposes of the tactical exercises, all that matters is that there may be volatile chemicals in the apartment.’

Raf rehearses his next question in his head a few times before he voices it. ‘I’m curious to know how much evidence you have that a tactical exercise in a controlled environment like this can translate to concrete results out on the street.’

‘Do you mean from our own experience? I don’t have direct access to a lot of that information. But based on what I’ve heard from Lacebark personnel in London, it’s hard to overestimate how helpful this facility has been to prepare for their recent operations.’

How far can he push this? ‘Those operations . . .’

‘Obviously I’m not at liberty . . .’

‘Right. Sure.’

‘Is there anything else you’d like to see?’

Raf shakes his head. ‘This is already a lot to take in,’ he says, truthfully.

As they leave the kitchen, Raf turns back for one last look, and by accident he makes eye contact with the Burmese guy, who is standing there watching them go while the kettle boils. For an uncomfortable second they have both broken character, although if any coded signal passed between them, Raf wouldn’t be able to say what it was. He follows Belasco back down the stairs and out into the ‘street’. Rain is still trickling from the trees.