Bugs (5 page)

‘Can you turn ’em on for us, Stan?’

Stan, a silent, hairless, chinless man in a white coat, pressed switches on the console. The two pairs of legs began to dance together, whirling about the room in waltz time. They seemed to restrict themselves to a tiny invisible dance-floor in the centre of the room, changing direction whenever they reached the invisible edge. Likewise, when the lianas became entangled the legs would reverse their motion and whirl the other way.

‘Almost like a complicated cake-mixer,’ Fred said, laughing. He stopped laughing when he saw Pratt’s face.

‘This is no toy,’ Pratt warned. Spontaneous remarks were not on.

Finally, the tour returned by a commodious vicissitude of recirculation to the sea of cubicles. At one point, their path led past a group of cubicles that were being dismantled and rearranged, so Fred could see their components: each comprised eye-level partitions, a name-plate, a desk, a table, and a phone that hung from these walls, a chair and a terminal. Options included bookshelves, files, extra chairs, and framed photos of children.

Pratt pointed to an empty one. ‘This cube is yours. Come on.’

Two other software engineers were waiting in Pratt’s office. He introduced them as Carl Honks and Corky Corcoran.

Carl was a skinny middle-aged man with deep-set eyes that seemed unfocused. Though he was not Chinese, he wore a Chinese jacket buttoned up to the throat with cloth-covered buttons, the kind of jacket perhaps no longer in fashion in the People’s Republic. Harking back to an even older tradition, Carl also wore a long mandarin beard and had long nails. He looked very much like the illustration for a Conan Doyle story of opium fiends in Limehouse.

‘Carl’s an old China hand,’ Pratt said, as though explaining something.

Corky Corcoran was a quiet thoughtful-looking man whose precise middle age could be deduced from his beard and wire-rimmed spectacles. Now greying, he looked like the patriarch of a commune. He wore woodsman clothes: a coarse wool shirt, corduroy trousers, and huge boots with a mile of rawhide lacing that would impress any bovver boy. If he smoked, it would be a corncob pipe.

Fred immediately imagined a history for him: Corcoran drops out of university (Berkeley), visits Woodstock, marches on the Pentagon with Norman Mailer. As the war winds down, he returns from the Peace Corps to run a communal cannabis farm. When this becomes a hassle, he starts a small factory in New, England to make some rare well-crafted implement – say, wood-burning calliopes. Finally he decides that the way to the future lies through Silicon Prairie – though somehow that part rang less true than the rest.

The three of them began speaking of programming matters in a language opaque to Fred. He tried to remember expressions like
top-down approach, zorched, algorithm, iteration, kludge, kernel, image, smurged, metacommand structure, parameter passing
, the noun
build
and the adjective
include
.

‘We need a new build with those other include files, or we’re zorched.’

‘Yes, but what happened to the libraries Kim was using?’

‘Smurged.’

After some minutes of this, Fred imagined he saw a pattern
emerging. It was evident that the three men, though they used the same words, did not think the same way.

Corky spoke seldom, but in long tortuous sentences.

‘There are two kinds of problem with the zeroform module: crossovers in the top levels of parameter passing which, even if we can fix them or swap them, do a reveal on the next levels, and this intensifies two other problems, that dual mode functionality which confuses the operating system when it looks at this guy and finds out it’s this other guy, and which we can’t address until the parameter passing crossovers are resolved, plus possible insufficiencies in the secondary addressing system directive, and third we get a re-initialization procedure that pops up when we don’t want it to zap our arrays, and fourthly the metacommand structure seems to read this guy and lose directivity. Is that how you guys see it?’

Carl, the old China hand, was bad-tempered and cynical. He would shake his head and smile at everything said, as though he’d heard it all before. Very occasionally he might condescend to drop a remark himself: ‘Why don’t we cut through all the bullshit and admit that our approach is wrong from the top down?’

Pratt became more intense during the discussion. When anyone else was speaking, he brooded, drawing doodles, tapping his feet, or kneading his hands to crack his knuckles. When he himself spoke, it was rapidly, in a half-whisper, hissing orders. There seemed to be an overwound mainspring somewhere.

Half an hour passed; Pratt showed no awareness that Fred was present. Then a neat little man in a well-cut Italian suit leaned in the door. He had the face of a happy newt.

‘This the new man?’

‘Christ, yes, Sturge, I forgot to bring him by. Meet Fred Jones. Our manager, Sturges Fellini.’

They shook hands. ‘Great to have you with us. I hope you’ll agree we’re doing some pretty exciting things here, Fred.’

‘Yes, I … yes.’

‘In fact it’s more than exciting; it’s a total species revolution. Man is just the old chrysalis that the robot has to burst out of.’

‘Mm.’

‘Our frozen industrial culture is being totally microwaved.’

‘Mm.’

Fellini grinned. ‘Don’t look so alarmed. Of course not everyone will see this as a positive change. Some will sense only that we are rushing towards a cataclysmic collapse spelling the doom of Darwinism. But others will welcome the crisis within our mega-culture, hoping for a new and better globality.

‘Globality, yes. Mm.’

The software people had resumed their discussion. Fellini raised his voice and continued over them.

‘Yet, as we surge towards a peaked impact, one thing is clear – non-metal humanity is no longer a force here.
The future has a metal face.’

‘Metal face, yes, mm.’

‘And it is up to us to put a smile on it. Never forget that.’

Fred nodded, as though agreeing never to forget that.

‘This high-impact innovation means the shattering of old values. Are you ready for that? Are you really ready?’

More nods.

‘Good. Because we have a fifty-yard-line seat for the end of the world. At least the end of our old world. We can see the collision of the new ultra-crystalline giga-culture with the old gradient of exhaustion. The swelling of the new info-sphere is totally bursting the old envelope of industrial transactions.’

A friendly newt grin. ‘But here I am, preaching to the converted. I have to save this stuff for the boys in the boardroom. Only way to get them to shower us with gold. Anyway, nice meeting you, Frank. Welcome aboard.’

Pratt looked up as Fellini left. Then he noticed Fred.

‘Yeah. OK, come in tomorrow and you can jump right in. You’ll be grabbing on some parsing algorithms we need.’

Fred nodded, too dazed to reply. At the door, he managed to croak. ‘Pleased to meet all of you,’ but no one heard. Pratt was hissing something about the Metal Man.

‘… who are not with me in build priorities are against me, the words of good old JC. The Metal Man will not tolerate enemies, neither will he …’

His letter-box was jammed with mail. There was a sample tampon and an offer of lightning insurance (‘Edd McFee kissed his wife and children goodbye that morning, loaded his fishing rod and tackle in the car, and set out for a lazy day on the lake.
He never returned
. Every year, dozens of fishermen like yourself are killed by lightning. Ask yourself if any risk, however slight, is really worth taking …’). There were three envelopes marked URGENT, which turned out to be circulars from local supermarkets. He examined all of this, just in case a letter from Susan had slipped into the pile. There was nothing even like a letter in the pile, unless you counted the envelope marked:

Congratulations, Manfred E. Jones,
YOU MAY ALREADY HAVE WON ONE MILLION DOLLARS!

Finally, for want of some communication, he opened that envelope:

Dear Manfred E. Jones,

Yes,
ONE MILLION DOLLARS
has already been won by someone. Could it be Manfred E. Jones?
YES
!!! Manfred E. Jones of Mpls, MN, replying to this letter could be the luckiest thing you ever did!

On the special label is your name, Manfred E. Jones, your Mpls, MN, address, and your
LUCKY PRIZE NUMBERS.
Don’t delay! Detach the special label today, affix it to your order entry form and send it to me – Johnny Goodluck. You don’t have to order any cassettes of famous British actors reading best-selling novels but, if you do,
there is an extra bonus of
ONE MILLION DOLLARS,
making a total of
TWO MILLION DOLLARS
waiting for you!

But you must hurry! If we don’t receive your label by the printed date, Manfred E. Jones, the
ONE MILLION DOLLARS
goes to an alternative winner.

Fred’s basement bedsitter was depressing enough by day; night-time brought out additional rich browns in the carpet and curtains, highlighted the heap of unwashed dishes next to the tiny sink, and emphasized the narrowness of the studio couch. Good job he wouldn’t be staying here for long. Just let him get his feet on the ladder of success – the classless American ladder – and he could kiss this place goodbye. Not that anyone would want to kiss anything around here, all of it deeply impregnated with deadly diseases.

Why so glum? he asked himself. A nap would fix it. He lay down on the unmade couch, loosened his tie, and dozed off.

He dreamed of an American football team in a huddle. When they broke away from it to approach the line, all of them had insect faces beneath the heavy helmets. They were making some sort of insane chittering sound, which he understood to be their plan for taking over Hyde Park. There they meant to dig down, open up the old plague-pits, and set the rotting dead free to walk the streets of London.

He jumped awake. In the laundry room next door, someone had loaded the washing machine with shale and started it up. Like a political prisoner under long-term torture, Fred had been allowed to sleep five whole minutes.

He had already found American bars supremely satisfying. Of all institutions in this country, bars alone seemed to be trying to live up to their reputation in movies, as dark scenes of passion, violence and despair. The movies had set the formula: a mahogany slab, a brass rail, a mirror, Joe the
bartender polishing glasses, a garrulous drunk, a weepy tart, and one solemn suicidal drinker. Often there was a peach-coloured mirror behind the bar, designed to tone up the pallor of that lone drinker who might at any moment utter a cry of self-loathing and hurl his glass into the peachness. Or one could easily imagine a B-girl sliding on to an adjacent stool and asking if the gentleman had a light. Or a sudden savage fight around the pool-table.

There was always an electric charge in the air, a synthetic feeling of excitement that could not be the alcohol alone, but had something to do with expectations. Maybe American bars were still coasting on the illicit excitement of Prohibition, nightclubs, blind tigers, neon and jazz. It was hard to picture an American bar where an old man might fall asleep by the fire, while his arthritic dog laps up a dish of bitter. That would be an anachronism, like Japanese Scotch.

This bar had an empty band-platform in the corner, illuminated with coloured lights. The walls were covered with blown-up photos of out-of-date antiheroes: Belmondo in a hat, William Hurt as a murderous lawyer, Bogart as Mad Dog Earle … Why did so many actual murderers have the name Earl …?’

Ms Mauve Toaster was waiting in a booth, a black drink before her.

‘Hiya, Mansour.’

‘Just call me Fred.’

‘Neat!’ She looked around as he sat beside her. ‘I got some friends I want you to meet.’

A waitress floated over and placed a beer-mat in front of him.

‘Scotch,’ he said.

‘Straight up?’

‘Yeah, really.’ The waitress looked at him strangely before she departed. He didn’t seem to be receiving and passing cues very well.

‘Who are these Condoms?’ he asked Mauve.

‘They’re neat,’ she said. ‘They’ve all got AIDS, you know? None of them is going to live to thirty.’

As that seemed to dispose of the Condoms, Fred studied his beer-mat. He was surprised to learn that the name ‘Ed Gein’ was not that of the owner. It was instead the name of a particularly loathsome mass-murderer of the 1950s. In search of an antihero, Minneapolis youth had rediscovered Gein, an unsavoury insane farmer who (according to the beer-mat) hung his victims on hooks and feasted on their corpses. The bar served ribs.

The waitress interrupted his reading by delicately removing the beer-mat from his hands, replacing it firmly on the table, and anchoring it with his drink.

He did not taste the drink until she had glided away with the best part of five dollars. The stuff seemed to be Japanese Scotch, though possibly the Koreans were now producing a twelve-month-old variety of their own; Glen Pusan or Wee Bonny Seoul.