PopCo (24 page)

‘Oh yes. It’s owned by Sony. Someone said that if you were a citizen of Bulgaria, the most economically sound decision you could make would be to give up your job to play EverQuest all day. You’d make more money in the long run.’ He swigs from his bottle of beer.

I frown. ‘How do you make money playing a game?’

‘People sell their avatars in online auctions. Or they trade the Norrath currency – Platinum Pieces – with pounds or dollars on auction sites. A typical person can make about $3.50 an hour
working on EverQuest by farming the bots and selling them on. You’d be amazed what rich kids and addicted executives will pay for a customised character, or Platinum Pieces, so they don’t have to go through the difficult parts of the game themselves. They have money in the real world, with which they can purchase power in the virtual world. Imagine what people like that would pay for a pair of Nikes for their avatar, or a Porsche for him or her to drive around in. The characters are usually supposed to walk everywhere, of course, that’s always been a convention of fantasy gaming, but, well, what if your character could buy a car? How cool would that be?’

‘Maybe horses would work,’ I say, uncertainly. Ben has returned from the kitchen with more beer. He passes me a bottle. ‘Is this stuff real, though?’ I say to Kieran. ‘Is this actually true?’

‘True, yes. Real? Of course not. None of it’s real. That’s the point.’

‘Do you know about all this?’ I say to Ben. ‘Selling virtual branded products in virtual worlds and so on …?’

‘Yeah, of course. Kieran’s based in Berkshire with us. He tried to convince us to get the characters in
The Sphere
to wear virtual K clothing.’

‘It would have rocked,’ Kieran says to Ben. ‘You know it would. And there’s still time …’

‘Not up to me anyway, is it? But I don’t think it would work at all. Gamers don’t want brands like K shoved down their throats. We don’t want them to think we’re opportunistic scum, after all.’

‘Way too cynical. Way too cynical,’ Kieran says, shaking his head. ‘I can already see Zuni in a tight little Ursula vest-top with her tits almost spilling out. Oh,
baby
.’

‘Zuni’s meant to be about twelve,’ says Ben.

‘Oh, baby, baby,’ says Kieran, before grinning wildly and drifting off towards the kitchen.

Somehow, Grace and Hiro’s game is still going on.

‘That guy’s kind of odd,’ I say to Ben.

‘Kieran? Yeah. They all are in his team. They all live in those online worlds almost all the time. Don’t know how he’s managed to stay offline for so long here.’

‘Maybe he’s got a secret computer,’ I suggest.

Esther comes over to stand with us, drinking a cup of black coffee.

‘You know that Kieran and his lot are inadvertently creating the most vacuous profession ever, of course,’ Ben says.

‘Which is?’ I say, putting my empty beer bottle down on a table.

‘Virtual retail assistants to sell the products in the virtual world. Not automated ones, but actual people who will log on and hang around all day at the store peddling branded goods.’

‘Why not automated?’

‘Cheaper to have real people.’

There’s a big groan from the people closest to the game. Someone must have made a bad move. I can’t quite see from here. Hiro has his head in his hands, though, so I am assuming the bad move was his.

‘Were you talking to that Kieran guy?’ Esther says to me.

‘Yeah. He’s a bit odd, isn’t he?’

‘He was a bit full-on with Mac this afternoon. What was he saying?’

‘Just talking about all this virtual product research.’

‘That stuff’s scary,’ Esther says. ‘Imagine, you’re in your online game world, walking around looking for something to kill, or information, or healing magic or something actually relevant, and then some twat comes along trying to sell you a pair of imaginary trainers.’ She frowns. ‘Kind of like life, I suppose. Hmm.’

‘Kieran never actually said which PopCo products were going virtual, if that’s the expression,’ I say. ‘Apart from the K stuff, obviously.’

‘I know they’re trying to do mini-games,’ Ben says. ‘One of our team is working with one of their team on it.’

‘Mini-games?’ I say, confused.

‘Like games within the game?’ Esther says.

Ben nods. ‘That’s right. One idea was to develop mini virtual hand-held consoles you could buy for your avatar, which is a bit of a mindfuck, if you think about it. The idea they went with, though, was for a card trading game. You can buy, sell or trade these virtual cards inside the game or outside it, and then when you meet someone in the game you can challenge them to a battle using cards.’

Esther suddenly bites her lip. ‘Do you think that in a hundred years’ time we’ll all be living in these games, working in virtual industries buying and selling imaginary products, while some invis
ible underclass of people actually collects the rubbish and makes our food and does all the work in the real world?’

Her question hangs in the air for a second or two. I am tempted to say that we already are almost living in this world, when a squeal of victory from the Go table implies that Grace has won.

*

When my grandfather returns, I am still full of questions, but it seems that none of them will be answered tonight. I put myself to bed while he and my grandmother talk in hisses downstairs. This must be the latest I have ever stayed up. At three o’clock in the morning I am still not asleep. My grandfather knows the location of some hidden treasure. How can I sleep with that knowledge? I switch on my lamp and look at my necklace, with its odd number–letter combination, 2.14488156Ex48, and the strange symbol – almost like a figure 8 but not quite – and I wish I knew what it meant. I am also, of course, kept awake by the realisation that this whole business – the treasure map, the necklace and so on – was the reason for my father’s disappearance.

The next day I am too tired to go to school. My grandfather lets me sleep in until about ten o’clock and then makes me a big bowl of porridge for breakfast. I have so many things I want to ask him that my brain jams and I sit silently at the kitchen table, not knowing where to begin. In the end, I ask something rather strange.

‘Can I see it?’ I say, looking into my bowl at the bits of melting sugar making swirly patterns on the surface of my porridge.

‘See what?’ my grandfather says.

‘The Stevenson/Heath manuscript.’

‘Why would you want to see that?’ he says, as if I have asked to look at something as boring as the inside of an umbrella, or the back of a teaspoon.

I can feel my face burn with a weird sort of anger. ‘It’s the reason for everything!’ I say, more forcefully than I intended. ‘Surely I’ve got a right to see it? I wear this necklace … I don’t even have a father any more because of this. I just want … I just want to
understand
, that’s all.’ This is the first time I have ever been angry with my grandfather, and this fact, combined with everything else, makes me start to cry. And now I am a cry-baby too, which makes
me angry with myself. This anger is exploding inside me like a parcel-bomb. While it wrecks my insides, my grandfather just looks at me as if he doesn’t know what to say or do. I am sure we have reached some kind of stalemate, with me crying into my porridge and him drinking his tea as if nothing is going on, when he suddenly gets up and puts his cup in the sink.

‘Hang on then while I find it,’ he says.

Telling me the back-story of how this manuscript came to be in existence takes the best part of the morning. The story is all about a pirate called Francis Stevenson who threw a coded treasure map into the sea over 300 years ago. The map was intended for his lost love, a woman called Molly Younge. The instructions on his accompanying letter told her to find his friend, an ex-servant called John Christian, and that John would have the key to unlock the code. Francis trusted that his friend John would not betray Molly, or she him, and left instructions that they should share the treasure. Of course, what he sent off in the bottle was actually a riddle that would baffle people centuries later.

The message never got to Molly. In fact, it wasn’t seen by human eyes for at least a hundred years. Tide and current took the bottle and its intricate instructions to an uninhabited bay somewhere near Cape Cod. From there, it was washed behind a cluster of rocks and simply rested there until it was covered in debris from a rock-fall. The area was first excavated in the late eighteenth century and it was then that the bottle was discovered. One of the excavators thought it looked interesting and put it in his pocket to take home to show his wife. She suggested showing the contents – a strange scroll of paper covered in numbers, and a short note mentioning something about a key and a man named John Christian – to a scientist they knew. This scientist was Robert Heath. Heath and his friend worked on the manuscript together for several years. Heath was able to examine portions of the text that had faded over the years and establish what the tiny numbers were, thanks to some lemon juice, charcoal powder and his new magnification device. The two men knew that what they had was a treasure map. And they were determined to find the treasure.

They both died some years later, having made no progress at all with the cryptanalysis of their document. On the death of Robert Heath, the original manuscript, along with his notes and correc
tions, were placed in a museum near to Heath’s home. There they stayed for almost another hundred years, until someone working at the museum realised that this exciting collection of papers could be used to stimulate interest in the local area – perhaps attract more visitors to the museum. Pamphlets were printed containing a copy of the original manuscript and Heath’s notes, and sold at the museum for a dime apiece. Before long, other towns were doing the same thing with their own mysteries and treasures. Treasure hunting was becoming a popular activity, particularly in places where there had been pirate and merchant traffic in the past.

Everyone knew about Captain Kidd’s treasure, for example. The writer Edgar Allan Poe had become very interested in it, and in cryptanalysis in general. As well as taking a keen interest in a coded document called the Beale Papers (which some say he even authored as an elaborate hoax, perhaps as a result of his interest in the Stevenson/Heath manuscript, as the two are similar), Poe evidently spent a long time in the area near the museum, trying to solve the riddle of Francis Stevenson’s treasure. At some point, he wrote a foreword to a reprint of the pamphlet, but these copies were almost all lost in a fire at the museum, which also destroyed the original bottle containing Francis Stevenson’s last message to the world.

While my grandfather tells me this story, and while rain beats relentlessly on the windows, I gaze at the small pamphlet in my hands. Inside the thin, blood-red covers, are Francis Stevenson’s original words, now set in some twentieth-century typeface, and then the columns and columns of numbers which hold the secret of the treasure. It’s hard to believe that something that sounds so much like a story could ever be real.

‘This is the American Cryptogram Association version of the pamphlet, of course,’ my grandfather says, nodding at it. ‘Real treasure-hunters might do better to try to find one of the ten or so copies of the original Edgar Allan Poe pamphlet that survived that fire.’

‘Why?’ I say. ‘Are they better?’

‘No, no.’ My grandfather chuckles. ‘They are rare, collectible items. Each one is worth something like three-quarters of a million dollars. They are treasure in themselves.’

‘Gosh,’ I say, making the sort of impressed whistling sound that people use at school sometimes if someone has a particularly good
sandwich in their packed lunch, or scores a decent goal playing football at lunchtime.

‘You know that the Voynich Manuscript was originally found by a rare-books dealer, of course. These people are the source of many of these mysteries, and some of them become rich on it, although not, of course, poor Voynich, who could never sell his book and was never able to read it.’

‘Poor Voynich,’ I repeat.

My grandfather gets up to put the kettle on, talking as he bustles around the kitchen. ‘When I first came across the story of the Stevenson/Heath manuscript, I was sure it would turn out to be a hoax, possibly a Poe hoax. Everybody who was interested in cryptanalysis knew the story “The Gold Bug”, by Poe, which was agreed to be the first time an actual cipher and its explanation had been included in a fictional work.’ My grandfather smiles, reaching for the tea caddy. ‘Of course, if you want to find actual codes and ciphers hidden in texts, they are all over the place. In Shakespeare, according to the Baconians; in the Bible and so on. Anyway, as I said, I was pretty sure that this one would turn out to be a hoax. I had glanced at some material connected with it before the war, but then of course, my and everyone else’s attentions were elsewhere.’ He pours water into the teapot, which he then places in front of me on the kitchen table. He places two mugs along with it, and the milk and the chipped little sugar bowl. Then he sits down opposite me again and starts messing around with his pipe.

‘Just after the war I had reason to visit an aunt of mine in Torquay. While I was there, I got thinking about the Stevenson/Heath manuscript again. The Torquay library has an archive of historical documents, and I thought I would pop in and have a look at the parish records for St Andrew’s church in Plymouth in the early 1600s, to see what I could find. Of course, I wasn’t trying to find details of Francis Stevenson’s birth or anything quite so obvious – especially as he hadn’t been born there. One of the things that had struck me as fictional in the story I’d heard, actually, was that Stevenson was supposed to have been an orphan, with no family ties. Anyway, I looked in the St Andrew’s register for things like John Christian’s baptism, or records of Stevenson’s church attendance. I found nothing. Then, out of the blue, I found parish records for the area of Tavistock in which Stevenson had been adopted.
And then I found it. 1605, October. A baptism of a boy called Francis Stevenson. Thomas Younge was listed as his godfather, and Mary Younge as the godmother. The baptism was witnessed by a doctor, Christopher Marchant.’