Sequela (10 page)

Fumbling his Book out of his pocket he texted Betta:
I fucked up. Dee's mad at me – I can't explain now – can you go over?
He grabbed his shirt, walked quickly to the door and left.

Alfred Blotch, Minister to Peter

Blotch polished his badge with the sleeve of his robe and surveyed the room before him: eighty square feet of abrasive blue carpet filled with bank after bank of wood-effect diamond-shaped desk modules. Each module seated four headsetted volunteers facing in towards each other. In front of each volunteer was a keyboard and monitor along with a round palm-sized 'call-ready' button built into the desk. The glowing call-ready button was designed to allow the volunteers to indicate to the system when they were ready to take their next call, turning red when they were on a call, amber when the call was over and green when they had hit the button. Together the buttons provided Blotch and his floor manager with a visual map of call volume and of who was working hard and who was not. Long green pauses indicated a slow day and on busier days, when the buttons hardly showed green long enough to be perceived, a lingering amber glow amongst the sea of red was quick to draw the eye.

It was busy today, a red day. This was good for the Real Church but bad for Blotch's headache. The room had the acoustics of a leisure centre and the slightly sympathetic tone that was required with most calls gave the constant gabble of voices a depressing edge that wore him down across the day.

Blotch started his two-hourly tour of the helpline floor, walking slowly like an adjudicator, hands behind his back. The static built up in his robe as it dragged behind him, the grain of its hem catching and releasing on each rough carpet fibre. Tuning in and out of conversations as he walked, he let each 'hmm', each 'I understand', each 'let it out' wash over him. These were the boring ends of the conversations. Every now and then there was a tantalizing 'Is she still friends with your wife?' or a 'Really, three of you?' but for the most part it was platitudes and comfort.

Halfway through his floor walk there was a blip, blip, blip from somewhere inside his robes. An escalation. Blotch nodded to the floor manager and returned to his office, a few doors along the corridor. This was the only time he got to hear the good stuff himself. And it was usually pretty good – calls were only escalated where the caller was in particularly bad trouble, or where the subject matter of the call was deemed dodgy in some way. Those calls could be enjoyable but even they frustrated him. If he knew that some of the calls had ended well – an averted suicide, an abandoned insurance fraud scheme – that would be something. But even as centre manager, there was no ringing back caller 8592 and asking, 'Did you manage to resist having it off with your brother's wife?' No closure; no job satisfaction. His life was a montage of cliff-hanger endings from cancelled soap operas.

Blotch closed the door to his small office and squeezed in behind the desk, putting in his earpiece as he settled himself in his chair.

'Hello?' he said, hopefully.

'Hello, Minister,' came a voice in automatic comfort mode. 'It's Simon Shaw here. I've got a potential call-back for you.'

A call-back. Dull. And probably nothing.

'Go on.'

'A disgruntled admin worker. Works in the administration centre in St Paul's. He called to moan about his co-workers' wearing. He's being bullied but that's not the interesting part. One of his moans was that they have been using sacred areas of the building as exchange booths.'

Blotch felt his colour rising.
'This is an outrage!'

'Not just an outrage, Minister, illegal too. The installation or use of existing structures as exchange booths is explicitly forbidden inside any leased religious building – I checked. It's a standard part of the template lease drawn up by the Religious Buildings of the City Protectorate after the expulsion.'

'Right, I see. That is interesting. Did you prime him for a call-back?'

'I did, Minister. He's asked that someone call him tomorrow evening.'

'Great. That's great. Good work Simon. Put it in my calendar please and attach the call reference so I can review the call before I get back to him. Thank you.'

'Thank you, Minister.' There was a click and the voice was gone. Simon was a good worker – straight back onto it, no lingering around for praise.

Blotch had briefed the floor yesterday on their new mandate and it was already paying off. This was just the sort of information he was looking for – City people doing dodgy things, wearers in particular, illustrating the need for moral guidance inside the City.

Blotch opened up his email and scanned down the list. There it was – '75
^th
ANNIVERSARY!!!' He opened the message. Somebody called Harmonie was planning next year's Real Church anniversary celebrations and was 'exited' to hear about everyone's ideas. From putting up bunting to serving up world peace, they needed help with everything. As part of its celebrations, the Real Church was running a campaign to re-establish a presence in the securitised City of London and reoccupy the Real Stairway after a 25-year absence. Here, Harmonie had pasted in a picture of the Real Church's landmark church and former City headquarters, the crystal formation-inspired 'Real Stairway'. Its precipitous north face, designed to reflect light and shine a beacon of purity out onto the City, had been digitally defaced. It now displayed the logo of HSBC, the current leaseholder, at the top of a banner of red and black adverts that reached to the ground.

It was the word 'promotion' that had got Blotch interested in the email. Promotion and a solid gold Real Church necklet were to be awarded to the individual who made the single largest contribution to the Real Stairway campaign. Nominations were to be made by the employee's line manager. Blotch took in a long breath, testing the seams of his tunic to their limits. Promotion and a solid gold necklet – you couldn't argue with that.

Blotch moved on to today's unanswered mail. Top of the list was a news bulletin from Reuters. He scanned down the headline list. This was usually as far as he got, but today something caught his eye. 'V set to take wearing market by storm'. He clicked through to the main site.

Global pharmaceutical and technomedical giant V is set to make a late but spectacular entry to the viral wearing market. This morning V announced the appointment of Dr Kester Lowe as head of its new viral design department VDV. Dr Lowe, formerly of the London Institute of Immunology and Viral Medicine, is widely considered in the scientific community to be one of the greatest new thinkers in the field of viral design. The lack of information forthcoming from the Institute on Dr Lowe's projects and clients is indicative of the high-profile nature of his previous work. Clients the Institute was prepared to namecheck include the UK MoD and US DoD, along with private companies Tollbooth, Rigatronics and Stark Wellbury, where Dr Lowe worked as a consultant to the nanoscreen design department on their delay technology.

Although V is just the sort of client to whom the Institute already provides contract consultancy services, Dr Lowe's move has nevertheless raised some eyebrows in the old-school ranks of the scientific community. Dr Bayliss of the Department of Nanotechnology, University of San Diego, sees this as another nail in the coffin for pure research science in the UK: 'To me the UK has always held a tiny flame of hope – it was a place where the academic's golden dream of no-strings funded pure research still lived on, though of course the funding pool has been steadily shrinking for the last century or so. But when brilliant young academics like Dr Lowe start jumping ship and moving to the private sector you wonder whether they have seen the future and that future spells the end for any kind of pure research.'

According to V, Dr Lowe's remit in his new role is to become the first true 'virus designer' in the eyes of the wearing public. So far, V is being sketchy on the details of how Dr Lowe's viruses will differ from the STV mods currently being commissioned and designed, but its boasts that his appointment will "usher in a new age of viral wearing" are tantalising to say the least.

While V insists that Dr Lowe will be free to assemble his own "crack viral development staff", two existing staff members are already known to be heavily involved in the set-up of the department: the infamous Alexis Farrell, who continues to elude the constraints of any official job title, and Gerald Harper, formerly of V's small viral screening division.

Blotch smiled grimly to himself. This could be good or bad. Or both. He picked up his Book, typed in a number he preferred to hold in his head, then stared at it for a moment. Some air was required. Squeezing out from behind his desk he whipped the waterproof poncho from the back of his door and slung it over his arm. He looked around his office. He didn't need anything else.

On his way through the building Blotch went back past the call centre floor and gave a wave to the floor manager, pointing towards the exit to indicate that he was going out. The floor manager nodded and waved back. Continuing towards the headquarters' atrium, Blotch passed through a glass-sided corridor. It was the main route into the building and the occupants of the flanking rooms were often pointed out to guests by their hosts as if they were rare species in a walk-through aquarium. It was a point of great pride with the Church leaders that the Real Church was the first established in the UK to follow the "American" model; it was a business and wanted to show it.

On one side was the network room, where banks of operators sat at terminals, or walked around with their Real Church branded Books. They were working the net. They wrote blogs, posted on forums, tweeted, mapped on webweb and spent countless hours duplicate tagging on MSAR, iSee+ and Google Reality to make sure whoever won out in the augmented reality market, they would continue to be represented. They talked to other Real Church followers and reached out to those who hadn't yet heard of the Church. The room cast a net around the world and attempted to keep it pulled tight. It was thanks to this room that they were streets ahead of the Church of England and the other traditional churches in terms of reaching a new audience. They had technology on their side, which seemed to hold a lot more weight with most young people than centuries of pomp and ceremony, something which the old churches had either chosen to ignore or failed to notice.

On the other side of the corridor were the fundraising and achievements departments: one bringing in the money; the other sending it out in one way or another. Blotch passed through and entered the atrium. He dodged around the tall concrete tablet that stood annoyingly in the centre of the room, recording the Real Church's mission and values, and headed out of the tall glass doors. As he exited, he came out next to a woman who was swiping her Book at the donation point, a small-scale representation of the Real Stairway with a panel on the front.

'Thank you,' he said to her with a small bow. She scuttled away, smiling shyly.

Blotch glanced either way down the broad avenue where the church sat and then shuffled across, pausing in the middle to give way to a struggling Volvo. At the coffee shop he got himself a cup of tea and then settled at one of the three empty pavement tables. He cursed quietly at the smallness of the metal chairs. The tables were small too. Just big enough to each have three placemat sized displays built into them.

The number was still on Blotch's Book when he took it out again. While the line rang he gazed across the road at the church and contemplated the lasered inscription above the building's faux-crystal doorway, singing out the Real Church's motto in gold leaf:
Bringing Moral Balance
. A small congregation was dribbling out from the entrance to the smaller East Chapel where they held weekday services. He noted how few of its members paused at the donation terminal. It was a hobby of his to watch the worshippers exit. It was always interesting to see where the different people would go next and the coffee shop gave him the perfect view either way down the street with its three bakeries, its upmarket lingerie boutique and its branch of the Pigs. The local Pig branch had been tastefully named
Holes Only
for the nickname of the infection-free suburban branches and the owner was such a fan of puns that he had incorporated a snooker hall on the top floor. If Blotch saw a worshipper disappear in there it wouldn't be the first time. For now most of them had stopped to check the lunchtime lotto on their Books. At least they had the decency not to have them on during the service. Blotch fixed on a man in a depressed green coat that came down to his shins.

'The Hospital: Lady speaking.' The smooth telephone voice sent a shiver down Blotch's neck. He had almost forgotten he was on a call.

'Lady,' Blotch lowered his voice instinctively, 'it's Minister Blotch here. I'm glad I caught you. I've got a favour to ask.'

'A favour? A paying favour?'

'Potentially.' Blotch flared his nostrils. People could be so indelicate about these matters. Glancing up and down the street he realised he had lost the man in the green coat. He looked back up at the church inscription and forced himself to refocus. 'If my memory serves me correctly you used to have a contact at V.'