PopCo (37 page)

Ben sips his tea. ‘Artificial intelligence, machines, control screens … I loved all that stuff. In Theology, I did a lot of work on Indian religions. Going back to my roots, kind of. I’m half Indian but I had pretty much repressed my Indian side for years, especially at school, where you just try not to be too different. People would think I was Greek, or maybe Italian. I didn’t correct them. In my final year thesis I looked at Artificial Intelligence, Otherness and the Enslavement of Consciousness. It was something to do with reading the capitalist economy as an AI programme. I had stopped looking for aliens by that point. Anyway, I started an MA immediately after I graduated – I wasn’t about to go and start working for the establishment I’d been criticising – but then my dad was made redundant and I had to leave the MA rather quickly, get my hair cut and get a job.’

‘You had to leave?’

‘Well, I didn’t have to. My parents didn’t ask me to or anything, but they had a huge mortgage and no income. I had to help them. So I started sending my CV out to, well, everywhere really. So many of the people on my degree had ended up in call-centres or doing media sales and these did seem to be the only jobs you could apply for with an arts degree and no real work experience. I even applied for work at fast-food chains, can you believe that? I had this vague idea that I would try to get the most pro-capitalist job ever and try to screw the system from the inside. But these places know better than to employ philosophy graduates. Anyway, I also sent my CV to a few videogames companies. Amazingly, one of them picked me up. My coding skills weren’t that up-to-date by then but they liked my degree, combined with my background. They put me on story-lines, continuity and tea-making with the RPG team. A year later
the company was bought by PopCo and I paid half my parents’ mortgage with the bonus. PopCo liked me and soon they paired me up with Chloë and told us to create and project-manage a game of our own. So we came up with The Sphere. And now here I am.’

I finished my tea a while ago so now I reach for my little bottle of Arsenicum. You need to take homeopathic remedies on a clean mouth, so it’s good to wait five minutes or so after finishing tea or whatever before taking them. I tip a little pill into the lid and then chuck it onto my tongue. In the background, the Polish woman is still reading
Neuromancer
, this time with Miles Davis in the background.

‘I’m glad we ended up here together,’ I say.

‘Me too.’

‘If only I didn’t feel so ill …’

‘What’s that you’ve just taken?’

‘Arsenicum. It’s homeopathic. I don’t think it’s the right remedy but it’s the closest one I’ve got.’

‘What happens if it’s not the right remedy but close?’

‘Um, it doesn’t really work properly. But I haven’t got anything else.’

Ben looks concerned. ‘Where would you get the right remedy?’

‘The Internet. Or, if it was a low potency, from a health-food shop. But I don’t know what the right remedy is. I have to note down all my symptoms and then look them all up. I don’t have any of my books here, so …’

‘Is there no other way?’

‘Well, yeah. They have online repertories. But there’s no Internet here so I’m just going to have to make do.’ I smile. ‘It could be a lot worse. Mind you, I really could do with some nicotine gum as well. And …’ I sigh. ‘I really, really feel like some sweets. I don’t know. It’s hard with there being no shops here.’

‘I could go to the shops for you.’

‘No, really …’

Ben gets up and pushes his black glasses up his nose. ‘Hang on,’ he says. ‘I think I have an idea. I may be able to get you on the Internet. Back in a bit.’ Then he leaves the room.

If he is going to get me on the Internet (I can’t think how) then I will need to have my symptoms ready to look up. How am I feeling? It is very odd, trying to repertorise your own symptoms
and prescribe yourself a remedy, but I don’t really have much choice.
So, how do you feel, Alice?
I feel like shit.
Can you be more specific?
I think about what I would do with a patient. I have never had any patients, of course, not real ones. I have prescribed for Atari, for Rachel and for Dan. This is how a lot of homeopathy occurs. Someone learns the art and then uses it casually with friends, colleagues and relations, like the neighbourhood witch. I imagine myself with a cape and a pentagram, and smile. This isn’t helping. I take out my notebook and a pen and flick to a new page before writing my name and the date at the top of it. On the way to this clean, new page, I pass my idea: pages and pages of brainstorm-style notes and diagrams. Is this idea any good? Do I care? I’m not sure.

The key to this is writing down what you would notice about yourself if you were an impartial observer. My necklace idea at least proves my mind is active. Is my mind
unusually
active, though? I’m not sure. Maybe I should do the ‘generals’ before I do the mentals. I am cold and I have a desire for warm drinks (especially gunpowder tea and – still – miso soup). Miso soup is salty, as well. In fact, I am craving salt. I imagine plates of chips and crisps and soy sauce. I feel better keeping still in bed and movement makes me worse. But do I feel better from coughing, or talking? These are forms of movement as well. I cough experimentally. Nope. Don’t feel any better from that. I make some notes. Is there anything else that makes me feel better or worse? I feel better when Ben is here. I add
Better from company
to my notes and then think some more. Following my strange dream on Saturday night, all I have dreamt of is birds, oddly enough.
Dreams of birds
, I write down. It is so hard to try to note your own mental symptoms. Come on, Alice. What thoughts are you having? What, if anything, has you obsessed?

Here’s one thing. Earlier, when I was talking to Ben about milk, something happened in my mind. I can’t exactly describe it but something changed. All I’ve been thinking since then is this: just because everyone does something, does that mean it is correct? Mark Blackman proved that people will do something just because everyone else does. And I’ve been wondering: since I have devoted a lot of my life to
not
doing what everyone else does, why is it that I accept so much that is obviously wrong? Why is it that even I assume that some things are OK simply because everyone accepts that they are? Of course, I always knew that bad things happen in
the world. I am not an idiot. But my attitude has always been that you just have to try to get through life, for as long as possible, without deliberately making things worse but, also, aware of the fact that you can’t make anything better. In the end, there’s probably no four-dimensional being watching us to see if we make the right choices. There is no judgement. You live your life and hope that you won’t be involved in any wars and then what? It’s all over, and you become earth.

War. When Hitler was around, it was quite clear who the enemy was. But who, or what, do people fight now? I sense that people simply fight their own, individualistic wars against their noisy neighbours, or drug addiction, or the mobile phone receiver in their garden (but not the one in the next town, or the unjust war 1,000 miles away). Perhaps the world seems like too big a thing to try to save, especially when there are so many enemies out there. It’s too late! Save yourself! Does that make more sense? I have always felt incapable of ‘saving’ anything: myself, the world, whatever. One person doesn’t matter. One person can’t matter, unless that person is a head of state. I think about my grandfather and all the small personal battles he fought. He was against greed, and acquisitiveness, and plundering the environment for whatever treasure you thought it might contain. If he received bad service in a shop, he would never confront the assistant. Instead, he would come home and write a long letter to the Managing Director of whatever company it was, complaining about their exploitation of their staff and how, since this company so obviously exploited its staff, and since this led to a bad service, he wouldn’t be shopping there again. One time I suggested to him that perhaps the member of staff
was
to blame. Surely people should take some responsibility for their actions? If their company was that bad, surely the employee could just leave? ‘We
all
have to fight the system,’ he said to me. ‘Otherwise no one will.’

Another strange memory: an essay I did at university.
Is
The Tempest
a racist text?
I remember drawing meaning out of the word ‘text’, using Barthes to argue that text lives in a dimension of its own, not stuck in its own time, and needs the reader to take things to it in order for it to make sense. As a text,
The Tempest
is racist if you read it as a story about Caliban, the indigenous inhabitant of the island, being colonised and enslaved by Prospero. But what about theatre companies who cast Caliban less as a ‘monstrous’
native and more as an ambiguous magical creature? Are those texts racist? Is it OK to enslave magical creatures? No one seems to mind Prospero’s domination of Ariel, after all. At the time of this essay, we had a seminar in which someone argued that
The Tempest
could not be seen as a racist text because in Shakespeare’s time people hadn’t been educated to recognise racism or be against it. You couldn’t blame Shakespeare and his audiences for their attitudes, this person argued, because they hadn’t been educated to have different attitudes. Educated by whom? The Disney Corporation? I argued back that everyone is capable of logic, and everyone is capable of moral reasoning. Just because most people think something is OK does not mean you should think so too. Slavery would never have been abolished if everyone just sat back and said, ‘Oh, everyone else says this is all right and after all it is jolly convenient …’ I remember at the time wanting to mention Francis Stevenson, who was against slavery before it even became popular. But no one had heard of Francis Stevenson, or (officially) proved he existed, so I didn’t say anything.

Yet, here I am and I am fighting against nothing, nothing at all. And suddenly I don’t know if this is right, any more. And I don’t know what has made me think about this; whether it is this cold, or Ben, or Georges, or Kid Lab or Mark Blackman or Kieran or Doctor Death … And I have no idea what to do about it, either, and I still don’t know who the enemy is.

It doesn’t go on the list, anyway.

By the time Ben comes back, I have the following list of symptoms:

Ben has Esther with him. She is carrying a laptop case. They almost fall into the room.

‘For God’s sake,’ Esther says.

Ben laughs. ‘We’re here now.’

‘No one’s supposed to know I have this thing. Hi, Alice.’

‘Hi,’ I say. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Internet access,’ Ben says. ‘Brought to you, by us.’

Esther puts the laptop case down on the bed and sits next to me.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asks.

‘A bit shit,’ I say. ‘Thanks for bringing this …’ I gesture at the laptop. ‘I didn’t know …’

‘Don’t tell anyone I’ve got it,’ she says. She leans over and unzips the case. The laptop inside is small, thin and silver. She opens it and fires it up. ‘I’ll jack you in,’ she says, ‘and then we’ll go and get you some tea or something.’

‘Thanks,’ I say.

Esther presses a few buttons. I don’t know what she is doing.

‘There,’ she says.

‘Huh?’ I say. ‘It’s not connected to anything.’

‘It’s in the walls,’ she says.

‘It’s wireless technology,’ Ben explains. ‘This whole estate has wireless broadband. You can just open a laptop in any of the rooms and immediately connect to the Internet. It’s pretty cool, actually. I wish I had my laptop here.’

‘It’s the future,’ Esther says. ‘And it’s here.’ She laughs. ‘Well, have fun. Ben? Tea.’

They leave me alone with the laptop.

At home it takes ages to log on, and then twenty or so seconds for each page to load. On this thing, it’s all instantaneous. The homeopathy site I like most is French, with an English section. It has electronic versions of all the most important text books, and entire
materia medica
that, if you bought them, would cost hundreds of pounds and run to several large volumes. I load up Kent’s repertory and start looking up the symptoms.
Company, desire for
and
Fear, disease of impending
have many remedies listed under them, in varying degrees. Two remedies, however, Kali-Carbonicum and Phosphorus, appear in the most serious degree in both.
Fear, touch
of
has only five remedies listed under it: Arnica, Coffea, Kali-Carbonicum, Lachesis and Tellurium.

Dreams of birds
. I look this up under
Sleep, Dreams
but find nothing. Sometimes this happens in the repertory. You don’t find what you are looking for in the place where you expect it and you
have to be a bit more inventive. I am sure I have seen references to birds in the repertory before. Often, when I think I have seen things in the repertory but can’t remember where, they turn up in the
Mind, Delusions
section, since this is the part I browse most often. The delusions are like poetry.
Delusions, choir, on hearing
music thinks he is in a cathedral. Delusions, existence, doubted his
own
. I love the
Delusions
section. I bet I will find something about birds there. I click around from page to page until I find it.
Delusions
,
birds, sees
. Sees birds. Is that the same as dreaming of birds? It doesn’t really matter. If birds are a theme you have to take them where you can find them in the repertory. I note down the remedies under this rubric: Belladonna, Kali-Carbonicum, Lac Caninum.

Cross-referencing with the Generalities sections for coldness, warmth and so on, and the section in Stomach for desires and aversions, I find Kali-Carbonicum in all the relevant rubrics, except
Desires salt
. Phosphorous is there, as is homoeopathic salt itself, Natrum Muriaticum. I have come up with Kali-Carb on all but one of my symptoms, however, including the most odd one (sees birds). This is what I need, I am sure of it.