Descent (25 page)

‘What,’ I asked, ‘would everyone or even a significant fraction of everyone want an eye in the sky for? I’m just not seeing the market for this.’

‘Aye, well, tae see it yi need an eye in the sky,’ Calum said. ‘But seriously – there’s the practical applications: traffic, finding yir way around, hyper-local weather forecasting – killer app in Scotland, that – keeping an eye on yir weans out in the street … and then there’s entertainment.’

‘Entertainment?’

‘Look.’ He threw a demo onto my glasses. ‘Keep a haud ae the table.’

I did, and just as well: my POV suddenly rose above the table, through the ceiling and a rendering of the levels above, to soar over the shopping centre and then skyward, to hurtle across the country with the occasional terrifying swoop to rooftop height, all the way past Glasgow and Edinburgh to the North Sea and back to make a graceful descent through roof and ceiling to where I sat. The whole episode took about three minutes.

‘Jeez,’ I said, taking my glasses off with a shaky hand. The room seemed to be spinning. ‘Just as well I don’t get motion sickness.’

‘Aye, that could be a problem,’ Calum acknowledged, amused. ‘But you see the potential, right? Make a virtual visit anywhere on Earth – and some places aff it, for that matter. It’ll no just be a consumer item, it’ll be a market in itself as folks fall over theirsels tae provide guidance tae interesting sites, commentary, tags, augs, stuff I cannae imagine now, that’s the beauty of it.’

‘You’ll need a hell of a lot of processing power.’

‘Aha!’ said Calum. ‘That’s no a problem. Two reasons. First, you’re still thinking in terms ae virtual reality, whereas this is real time or recent actual images. Second, a shedload ae the processing can be offloaded ontae redundant capacity on the drones themselves, and eventually the satellites.’

‘The cloud in the clouds.’

‘That’s exactly what we’re thinking ae calling it.’ He rubbed his hands. ‘Possibilities there and aw, but I’m no at liberty tae talk about them yet.’

I could imagine them easily enough. Most drones’ on-board electronics are off-the-shelf kit. Chips are so cheap they’ve become a byword. Almost all of those on drones have gigs of memory and capacity to spare. Time-sharing distributed computation across the sky could be a useful little sideline, assuming another company didn’t think of it first.

‘What about legal problems?’ I said. ‘Privacy issues, for a start.’

Calum waved as if wafting away vapour. ‘Maist ae that’s covered by existing legislation on CCTV, drones, et cetera. And after aw, we’re only gaein folks access tae cameras that are already out there and up there, so it’s up tae their owners tae comply.’

‘But this feels different, somehow,’ I said. ‘All these invisible virtual presences? It would feel like being haunted.’

‘Nae mair than’s already the case.’

I sensed a stubbornness there, the holding of a line.

‘Company lawyers all over it, are they?’

‘Aye,’ he admitted, with a grin. ‘And they’ll hae the sma print watertight, nae worries on that score.’

‘Oh well,’ I said, already bored with the topic. ‘They’re the experts, I guess. When does this new marvel hit the street?’

‘We’re going live early in the new year.’

I blinked. ‘Fuck. That’s fast.’

‘Everythin’s fast. I’ll make sure you get an invite tae the launch party, and a freebie sub.’

‘In the hopes of a good write-up?’

‘Thought never crossed my mind.’

‘Ah, thanks anyway. I need all the work I can get to pay rent on a two-person flat.’

Back on dangerous ground. I gave Calum a fractional headshake and a toughing-it-out grin. We sipped in silence for a few moments, in mutual tacit agreement not to got here. Calum leaned forward, his face keen again.

‘Speaking ae drones,’ he said, ‘what do you reckon tae the new ones?’

‘The silver spheres?’ I hazarded.

‘Aye.’ He tapped the side of his nose. ‘No sae new tae us, eh?’

‘The thought had crossed my mind,’ I said.

Calum chuckled. ‘I reckon they’ve been secretly deployed for years – decades, even. Now the NSA and whit have you has something even mair amazing come out of their black-budget programmes. Something we cannae even fucking see, probably. Nae need even tae disguise them as UFOs. So the companies they worked with are free tae roll out the old stuff as civilian applications aw shiny and new. That’s why BAS and rest ae the aerospace defence companies are apparently developing them sae fast – aw the development work’s been done awready! They’re no just spheres now – there’s airships and aw sorts turning up at Farnborough and the like.’

‘Yeah, I’ve seen them in news of air shows.’ I laughed. ‘Like the old cigar-shaped motherships.’

‘The what?’

I filled him in on that ancient piece of UFO lore. He looked round, and grinned.

‘Kindae fits in wi the 1950s revival.’

‘More like fucking 1850s, some of it.’

‘Aye,’ he said. He puffed out and contemplated, through a cloud of opium-scented vapour, a nearby seat wide enough for two men or one lampshade lady to sit on. ‘Aw this Victoriana. Funny, that.’

‘How d’you mean?’

He frowned. ‘Well, here we are living under the state banks, and in Scotland we’re in the fourth year ae the five-year plan that came out ae yon New Improvement bash. Total fucking road tae serfdom. And yet everything else seems tae be going the other way.’

‘It’s like they did in China,’ I explained, reaching for a half-remembered snatch of revolutionary polemic. ‘Nationalise the banks and privatise everything that isn’t nailed down.’

‘I’m no just talking about the economics,’ he said. ‘I mean, like, everything else.’

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘I see you are fumbling for the concepts of “culture” and “civil society” and “ideology”. Allow me to enlighten you.’

‘Thanks but no thanks, Sinky,’ said Calum. ‘I hadnae planned on an entire afternoon ae drinking. I’ll look them up.’

‘You do that.’

‘It’s still communism,’ he said, sounding worried. ‘It just disnae look like it.’

‘Indeed,’ I said, wryly. ‘The absence of a Party nucleus in every cell of society and of red flags and enormous portraits and slogans in prominent locations might give that superficial impression to the casual observer. And how is your father, by the way?’

Calum gave a slightly caught-out laugh. ‘Aye, well. He’s still banging on about how it’s aw doomed tae end in bread queues and labour camps but he’s no doing sae bad outae it. Still cannae get a loan fae the bank but hit on the idea ae raising money by selling shares in the garage online in Nigeria or some such dodgy scheme and he’s making it back hand over fist converting petrol and diesel cars tae electric, and fitting solar roof panels and that.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Right. So he’s prospering by doing exactly what the government wants him to do, in ways the government hadn’t actually approved?’

‘That’s about the size ae it, aye.’

‘Well, there you go,’ I said. ‘The totalitarian state in action. Sends a shiver down the spine. The dawn knock will be next, mark my words.’

We laughed, drank up, agreed it was good to have a serious talk about personal issues now and again, and went our separate ways. I headed up the familiar streets of Greenock’s West End to my parents’ house, where I’d arrived unannounced the previous afternoon as though I was still a student with the weekly pile of laundry. We’d talked on the phone a lot in the past couple of weeks. Mum had gone from grief at the loss of Gabrielle – whom she’d liked a lot – from her life to cold fury at Gabrielle for breaking my heart. Sunday lunch was over, the table cleared, but my mother had saved a few slices of chicken with rye bread and salad for me, and had just brewed coffee. I ate at the kitchen table, with Dad and Mum sipping coffee and finding as many different indirect ways as possible of asking me if I was all right. I evaded the topic by enthusing about what Calum had shown me.

‘That’s what you talked about?’ Mum asked, crow’s-feet crinkling.

I chewed, swallowed, sipped. ‘More or less. We talked a bit about Gabrielle at first, but …’ I shrugged. ‘What’s to say?’

‘Oh well,’ my mother said. ‘It’s good you have an old pal to turn to.’

‘Oh, Calum’s a rock,’ I said. ‘Talking to him helped a lot.’

Six weeks later, at a dire pre-Christmas party in the Glasgow offices of a night-soil export company that I was writing puff pieces for, I heard on the Inverclyde High graduate grapevine that Calum and Gabrielle were an item.

To his credit, Calum was shifty and apologetic when I confronted him about it.

I gave him plenty of time. I went home for Christmas, stayed in Edinburgh for Hogmanay, and in between went to a number of parties where I could reasonably expect to encounter the new couple. They weren’t at any of them. Around the sixth of January I decided that enough was enough. That evening, settled back in my recliner, fortified by a half-empty bottle and a full glass of Nepalese whisky on the table beside me, I called Calum.

‘Oh, hi, Sinky. I’ve … kindae been expecting tae hear fae you.’

Going by what I could see in his phone and the acoustics of his voice, his flat was bigger than mine. I’d never been in it, but something about the pictures on the wall behind the back of the sofa he was sitting on stirred a vague sense of familiarity, though I hadn’t seen them before.

‘Happy New Year to you, too,’ I said. ‘Give my regards to Gabrielle.’

‘Next time I see her, aye.’

I waited.

‘Look, man,’ he said. ‘It’s no like I stole yir girlfriend—’

‘As far as I’m concerned,’ I said, ‘that’s
exactly
what you’re doing, old pal. As far as I’m concerned, she still
is
my girlfriend. We’re just going through a bad patch.’

‘That’s no the way Gabrielle sees it.’

‘Oh, I’m well aware of that,’ I said. ‘You got her on the rebound. Good luck with that. But, you know, smart of you to move in on her when she was—’

‘That isnae how it wis. No fucking way, man. She got in touch wi me, some time after you saw me in Greenock. I think she’d heard we’d met – I mean, she could figure that out fae yir ain postings and that – and she wanted tae gie her side ae the story. Suggested we meet for a coffee. I thought, fair enough, nae harm in that. Arranged tae meet after work. She came through fae Edinburgh and I met her in Flannagan’s by the station. We talked for a bit and time wis getting on so we had a wee bite tae eat, and went on tae a pub tae have a couple of drinks before she went hame.’

‘And?’ I prompted. ‘One thing led to another, was that it?’

‘Well, no that night, but we were getting on well and talking away and we agreed we might hae mair tae say so a couple of days later I nipped through tae Edinburgh and, well …’ He spread his hands. ‘Whit mair can I say, man? We just totally fell for each other.’

‘You’re saying that like it was an accident? Jeez, give me some fucking credit for not having been born yesterday.’

‘I knew yi widnae take it well, Sinky, and I’m sorry about that, but I cannae let you being upset stand in the way ae me and Gabrielle being happy.’

Upset?
My oldest friend goes off with the love of my life, and he thinks I’m
upset
?

‘Oh, I get that totally,’ I said. ‘“All’s fair in lust and counter-insurgency” – all right, I get that. What I don’t get is, you must know how unlikely it is that Gabrielle’s going to be with you for long, seeing as you’ve got her on the rebound, and how much I’d try to get her back. So you must know that puts you and me in—’

‘A bit ae a conflict situation?’ Calum scratched behind his ear like a puppy trying to charm after having shat the carpet. ‘Well, I’m sorry about that, pal, and I have nothing mair tae say except it’s of your making, because there is no fucking way Gabrielle is going back tae yi.’

He was glancing off camera as he said this and I got the impression he was not alone. At the same moment I realised why the pictures on the wall behind him looked so familiar despite my not having seen them before. They were the kind of pictures Gabrielle liked – the kind of pictures that a little over a couple of months earlier had been on the walls of our flat.

‘Jesus Christ! She’s
moved in
with you! She’s right there in the room with you
right now
.’

‘No, she is no,’ said Calum.

At this bold-faced lie I lost it entirely and said a few things that on sober recollection were probably ill-advised. Calum ended the call before I could say all of them.

Calum’s response had been so inept that I half-expected him to invite me to the launch party for his employers’ flying panopticon in an attempt to mend bridges. He didn’t, but early in February I got StrathSat’s flood of publicity in my inbox anyway, including a complimentary three-month SkEye trial package. Out of sheer economic necessity I tried it out and wrote up a piece about it, for which I made a couple of hundred pounds and a trickle of sliced and diced micro- and nano-royalties from the reposts on other sites.

I swear it wasn’t until a week later, when I was bashing out an article about a new building going up (or growing up, more like, which was the point of the piece) in Glasgow and found myself blinking into SkEye to check how the on-site work was going at that very moment, just as casually as I used Google, that I had the idea of seriously abusing the app for nefarious purposes of my own. (This week-long delay, as we all now know, put me well behind the curve of early adopters.) The nefarious purpose I had in mind was using SkEye to see what Calum and Gabrielle were getting up to.

I finished the article and submitted it, then sat back, holding my glasses in hands that shook a little. Obviously my body was suffering from some drug deficiency, so I topped up the e-pipe I’d bought one dark evening in January with a shot of Focus and took a couple of puffs. The idea of turning the project that Calum was so enthusiastic about against him and Gabrielle made me smile. At the same moment I recognised it as unworthy, unfair, unethical and quite possibly illegal. About ten seconds later I put the glasses on and started searching for Gabrielle.

That wasn’t as easy as it later became. I’d unfollowed and unfriended her on all accounts, and she was blocking me from contact. A face search would have taken too long for my current impatience (as would – though I hate to say this – retrieving my pictures of her from the files where I’d buried them to prevent myself continually looking them up). The time was about a quarter to five – she’d be leaving work soon. I zoomed across town to the BioQuarter, swooped on the Stem Cell Centre, and snooped on the public site to find out which room she was in. Her name wasn’t on the personnel list. Damn. I dug deeper, searching on her name, and found she’d completed her research at the beginning of December. Since January she’d been teaching undergrads part-time in the Biology Department at Glasgow University to support herself while she wrote up her thesis for submission in the summer. And just as I’d suspected, she’d moved to Glasgow. The site didn’t give her address, of course, but I could easily guess what it was.