What You Make It
Authors: Michael Marshall Smith
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
WHAT YOU MAKE IT
A book of short stories
This collection is dedicated to the three people without whom … to Nicholas Royle, Stephen Jones and Howard Ely.
Chapter 3 - Hell Hath Enlarged Herself
Chapter 6 - The Man Who Drew Cats
Chapter 9 - More Bitter Than Death
I like short stories. I hope you do too, because this isn't a novel. If an honest-to-goodness
novel
is what you're looking for, then put this volume back on the pile. Propped up, so other people can see it. Or better still, take it with you anyway. You can snuggle down into novels, draw them over your head like a warm duvet and go away for a while. It's like taking a road trip in another country – while the land's got you in its clutches, you can't go home again. Short stories are different. They're evenings out, or day trips, an hour spent gazing out to sea. You don't have to do lots of packing beforehand or set timer switches or arrange for someone to feed the cat, but they leave their mark on your life all the same. Sometimes more so: short stories don't have the luxury of time to draw you in – so they have to come in low, under the radar, and hit you with the very first shot. They're doorways to other worlds, perpetually left ajar, dreams that you experience while you are still half awake.
Novels are time out of time: short stories are part of real life, and sometimes the shortest song can contain the longest single note.
What follows is a selection of the stories I have written in the last decade. Some of them are about fairly normal things, others less so. A few come at similar ideas from different angles, others stand alone; some have a life of their own now, having previously appeared in a variety of formats, while others are shiny new. They include both the first story I ever wrote, and the most recent. Everything else is bracketed between them. Through one of those coincidences which seem too telling to be merely random, while I was putting this collection together I was in Edinburgh for the Book Festival. In the evening I took
my wife – who was but a dot on an unseen horizon when the first of these stories were written – to the place where I was sitting when I got the idea for that first short story, just over ten years previously. It was a strange feeling. Two days later, back in London, I attended a book launch for the writer who did more than any other to inspire me to write in the first place – and whose fiction I'd been avidly reading on that day in Edinburgh a decade before. This was the writer's first official visit to this country in seventeen years, and it seems odd that it should fall in the same week that I had stood on The Mound in Edinburgh and remembered how it had been.
But that's the way life is, a sea of coincidences and strangenesses and dark heartbeats – and what follows is an attempt to capture something of it. Then it was 1987. Now it's 1998. These stories chart the journey from there to here, and I hope that amongst them you'll find a couple of evenings to remember.
Michael Marshall Smith
London, October 1998
I got a new job a couple of weeks ago. It's pretty much the same as my old job, but at a nicer company. What I do is trouble-shoot computers and their software – and yes, I know that sounds dull. People tell me so all the time. Not in words, exactly, but in their glassy smiles and their awkward ‘let's be nice to the geek’ demeanour.
It's a strange phenomenon, the whole ‘computer people are losers’ mentality. All round the world, at desks in every office and every building, people are using computers. Day in, day out. Every now and then, these machines go wrong. They're bound to: they're complex systems, like a human body, or society. When someone gets hurt, you call in a doctor. When a riot breaks out, it's the police that – for once – you want to see on your doorstep. It's their job to sort it out. Similarly, if your word processor starts dumping files or your hard disk goes non-linear, it's someone like me you need. Someone who actually
understands
the magic box which sits on your desk, and can make it all lovely again.
But do we get any thanks, any kudos for being the emergency services of the late twentieth century?
Do we fuck.
I can understand this to a degree. There are enough hard-line nerds and social zero geeks around to make it seem like a losing way of life. But there are plenty of pretty basic earthlings doing all the other jobs too, and no one expects them to turn up for work in a pin-wheel hat and a T-shirt saying: ‘Programmers do it recursively’. For the record, I play reasonable blues guitar, I've been out with a girl and have worked undercover for the CIA. The last bit isn't true, of course, but you get the general idea.
Up until recently I worked for a computer company, which I'll admit
was
full of very perfunctory human beings. When people started passing around jokes which were written in C++, I decided it was time to move on. One of the advantages of knowing about computers is that unemployment isn't going to be a problem until the damn things start fixing themselves, and so I called a few contacts, posted a new CV up on my web site and within 24 hours had four opportunities to chose from. Most of them were other computer businesses, which I was kind of keen to avoid, and in the end I decided to have a crack at a company called the VCA. I put on my pin-wheel hat, rubbed pizza on my shirt, and strolled along for an interview.
The VCA, it transpired, was a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting effective business communication. The suave but shifty chief executive who interviewed me seemed a little vague as to what this actually entailed, and in the end I let it go. The company was situated in tidy new offices right in the centre of town, and seemed to be doing good trade at whatever it was they did. The reason they needed someone like me was they wanted to upgrade their system – computers, software and all. It was a month's contract work, at a very decent rate, and I said yes without a second thought.
Appleton, the guy in charge, took me for a gloating tour round the office. It looked the same as they always do, only emptier, because everyone was out at lunch. Then I settled down with their spreadsheet-basher to go find out what kind of system they could afford. His name was Cremmer, and he wasn't out at lunch because he was clearly one of those people who see working nine-hour days as worthy of some form of admiration. Personally I view it as worthy of pity, at most. He seemed amiable enough, in a curly-haired, irritating sort of way, and within half an hour we'd thrashed out the necessary. I made some calls, arranged to come back in a few days, and spent the rest of the afternoon helping build a hospital in Rwanda. Well actually I spent it listening to loud music and catching up on my Internet newsgroups, but I could have done the other had I been so inclined.
The Internet is one of those things that more and more people have heard of without having any real idea of what it means. It's actually very simple. A while back a group of universities and government organizations experimented with a way of linking up all their computers so they could share resources, send little messages and play
Star Trek
games with each other. There was also a military connection, and the servers linked in such a way that the system could take a hit somewhere and reroute information accordingly. After a time this network started to take on a momentum of its own, with everyone from Pentagon heavies to pin-wheeling wireheads taking it upon themselves to find new ways of connecting things up and making more information available. Just about every major computer on the planet is now connected, and if you've got a modem and a phone line, you can get on there too. I can tell you can hardly wait.
What you find when you're there almost qualifies as a parallel universe. There are thousands of pieces of software, probably billions of text files by now. You can check the records of the New York Public Library, send a message to someone in Japan which will arrive within minutes, download a picture of the far side of Jupiter, and monitor how many cans of Dr Pepper there are in soda machines in the computer science labs of American universities. A lot of this stuff is fairly chaotically organized, but there are a few systems which span the net as a whole. One of these is the World Wide Web, a hypertext-based graphic system. Another is the newsgroups.
There are about 40,000 of these groups now, covering anything from computers to fine art, science fiction to tastelessness, the books of Stephen King to quirky sexual preferences. If it's not outright illegal, out there on the Infobahn people will be yakking about it 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Either that or posting images of it: there are paintings and animals, NASA archives and abstract art, and in the alt.binaries.pictures.tasteless group you can find anything from close-up shots of roadkills to people with acid burns on their face. Not very nice, but trust me, it's a minority interest. Now that I think of it, there is some
illegal stuff (drugs, mainly) – there's a system by which you can send untraceable and anonymous messages, though I've never bothered to check it out.
Basically, the newsgroups are the Internet for traditionalists – or people who want the news as it breaks. They're little discussion centres that stick to their own specific topic, rather than wasting time with graphics and java applets which play weird tunes at you until you go insane. People read each other's messages and reply, or forward their own pronouncements or questions. Some groups are repositories of computer files, like software or pictures, others just have text messages. No one, however sad, could hope to keep abreast of all of them, and nor would you want to. I personally don't give a toss about recent developments in Multilevel Marketing Businesses or the Nature of Chinchilla Farming in America Today, and have no interest in reading megabytes of losing burblings about them. So I, like most people, stick to a subset of the groups that carry stuff I'm interested in – Mac computers, guitar music, cats and the like.
So now you know.
The following Tuesday I got up bright and early and made my way to the VCA for my first morning's work. England was doing its best to be summery, which as always meant that it was humid without being hot, bright without being sunny, and every third commuter on the hellish tube journey was intermittently pebble-dashing nearby passengers with hayfever sneezes. I emerged moist and irritable from the station, more determined than ever to find a way of working that meant never having to leave my apartment. The walk from the station to VCA was better, passing through an attractive square and a selection of interesting sidestreets with restaurants featuring unusual cuisines, and I was feeling chipper again by the time I got there.
My suppliers had done their work, and the main area of VCA's open-plan office was piled high with exciting boxes. When I
walked in just about all the staff were standing around the pile, coffee mugs in hand, regarding it with the wary enthusiasm of simple country folk confronted with a recently landed UFO. There was a slightly toe-curling five minutes of introductions, embarrassing merely because I don't enjoy that kind of thing. Only one person, Clive, seemed to view me with the sniffy disdain of someone greeting an underling whose services are, unfortunately, in the ascendant. Everybody else seemed nice, some very much so.
Appleton eventually oiled out of his office and dispensed a few weak jokes which had the – possibly intentional – effect of scattering everyone back to their desks to get on with their work. I took off my jacket, rolled up my sleeves and got on with it.
I spent the morning cabling like a wild thing, placing the hardware of the network itself. As this involved a certain amount of disrupting everyone in turn by drilling, pulling up carpet and moving their desks, I was soon on apologetic grinning terms with most of them. I guess I could have done the wire-up over the weekend when nobody was there, but I like my weekends as they are. Clive gave me the invisibility routine that people once used on servants, but everyone else was fairly cool about it. One of the girls, Jeanette, actually engaged me in conversation while I worked nearby, and seemed genuinely interested in understanding what I was doing. When I broke it to her that it was actually pretty dull, she smiled.
The wiring took a little longer than I was expecting, and I stayed on after everybody else had gone. Everyone but Cremmer, that was, who stayed, probably to make sure that I didn't run off with their plants, or database, or spoons. Either that or to get some brownie points with whoever it was he thought cared about people putting in long hours. The invoicing supremo was in expansive mood, and chuntered endlessly about his adventures in computing, which were, to be honest, of slender interest to me. In the end he got bored of my monosyllabic grunts from beneath desks, and left me with some keys instead.
The next day was pretty much the same, except I was setting
up the computers themselves. This involved taking things out of boxes and installing interminable pieces of software on the server. This isn't quite such a sociable activity as disturbing people, and I spent most of the day in the affable but distant company of Sarah, their PR person. At the end of the day everyone gathered in the main room and then left together, apparently for a meal to celebrate someone's birthday. I thought I caught Jeanette casting a glance in my direction at one point, maybe embarrassed at the division between me and them. It didn't bother me much, so I just got my head down and got on with swapping floppy disks in and out of the machines.
Well, it did bother me a little, to be honest. It wasn't their fault – there was no reason why they should make the effort to include someone they didn't know, who wasn't really a part of their group. People seldom do. You have to be a little thick-skinned about that kind of thing if you work freelance. There are tribes, you know, everywhere you go. They owe their allegiance to shared time (if they're friends), or to an organization (if they're colleagues): but they're still tribes, just as much as if they'd tilled the same patch of desert for centuries. As a freelancer, especially in the cyber-areas, you tend to spend a lot of time wandering between them; occasionally being granted access to their watering hole, but never being one of the real people. Sometimes it can get on your nerves. That's all.
I finished up, locked the building carefully – I'm a complete anal-retentive about such things – and went home. I used my mobile to call for a pizza while I was en route, and it arrived two minutes after I got out of the shower. A perfect piece of timing, which sadly no one was on hand to appreciate. My last experiment with living with someone did not end well, mainly because she was a touchy and irritable woman who needed her own space 23½ hours a day. Well it was more complicated than that, of course, but that was the main impression I took away with me. I mulled over those times as I sat and munched my ‘Everything on it, and then a few more things as well’ pizza, vague-eyed in front of white noise television, and ended up feeling rather grim.
Food event over, I made a jug of coffee and settled down in front of the Mac. I tweaked my invoicing database for a while, exciting young man that I am, and then wrote a letter to my sister in Australia. She doesn't have access to email, unfortunately, otherwise she'd hear from me a lot more often. Write letter, print letter, put it in envelope, get stamps, get it to a post office. A chain of admin of that magnitude usually takes me about two weeks to get through, and it's a bit primitive, really, compared to write letter, press button, there in five minutes.
I called my friend Greg, who's a freelance sub-editor on a trendy magazine, but he was chasing a deadline and not disposed to chat. I tried the television, but it was still outputting someone else's idea of entertainment. By nine o'clock I was very bored, and so I logged on to the net.
Probably because I was bored, and feeling a bit isolated, after I'd done my usual groups I found myself checking out alt.binaries.pictures.erotica. ‘alt’ means the group is an unofficial one; ‘binaries’ means it holds computer files rather than just messages; ‘pictures’ means those files are images. As for the last word, I'm prepared to be educational about this but you're going to have to work that one out for yourself.
The media has the impression that the minute you're in cyberspace countless pictures of this type come flooding at you down the phone, pouring like ravening hordes onto your hard disk and leaping out of the screen to take over your mind. This is not the case, and all of you worried about your little Timmy's soul can afford to relax a bit. Even if you're only talking about the web, you need a computer, a modem, access to a phone line, and a credit card to pay for your internet feed. With Usenet you need to find the right newsgroup, and download about three segments for each picture. You require several bits of software to piece them together, convert the result, and display it.
The naughty pictures don't come and get you, and if you see one, it ain't an accident. If your little Timmy has the kit, finance and inclination to go looking, then maybe it's you who needs the talking to. In fact, maybe you should be grounded.