Zima Blue and Other Stories (67 page)
The past blacked out; I came careering back into the present.
I was in the wheelchair now; she'd moved me in front of a projection wall. Computerised images danced on the canvas, happy molecules and bugs. I felt saliva wetting my chin, an idiot drool, sensed I'd emptied my bladder. Oblivious, she cupped the phones around her ears, then walked to the DX7 synth. She played a hesitant, atonal line on the keys, rendered in sickly whining notes.
Click
, voice to Dictaphone. 'Most musical structures are in some way fractal, by which I mean that the essence of the whole can be found on many levels of analysis.' Her voice was overloud, harsh. 'You may remove ninety per cent of the score and still retain something identifiable. What I'm playing the subject is a deconstructed form of the sound-structure isolated on
Digital to Analogue
, and the records on which it was subsequently transcribed via digital sampling. I'm piping the sound straight at him, while wearing the protective phones should there be any leakage from his headset. Of course, I hesitate to term this music, for reasons all too apparent.'
Click
, voice to Dictaphone. 'Most musical structures are in some way fractal, by which I mean that the essence of the whole can be found on many levels of analysis.' Her voice was overloud, harsh. 'You may remove ninety per cent of the score and still retain something identifiable. What I'm playing the subject is a deconstructed form of the sound-structure isolated on
Digital to Analogue
, and the records on which it was subsequently transcribed via digital sampling. I'm piping the sound straight at him, while wearing the protective phones should there be any leakage from his headset. Of course, I hesitate to term this music, for reasons all too apparent.'
I watched as the pen-trace whipped into a seismic frenzy, all the while hearing her keyboard motif, repeated down an echoing hall of aural mirrors. It was
far
,
far
worse than the pain; it made the pain seem as threatening as the wind on an autumn night. The sound was ghosting through my soul, fingering through the rat-holes of my psyche. I felt horribly lucid, calm, as irresponsive as a piece of lab equipment being fed some signal. Her refrain was already in me. Stuck in a looped circuit, the full form of what she evoked on the synth. It was resonance; with each iteration, the response swelled, until my conscious mind was looping madly. How can I describe it? Simply that it was like having a piece of music going over in your head. Until there was nothing left, until your thoughts were simply ripples of insignificance on top of these rising and falling crests of repetition . . .
far
,
far
worse than the pain; it made the pain seem as threatening as the wind on an autumn night. The sound was ghosting through my soul, fingering through the rat-holes of my psyche. I felt horribly lucid, calm, as irresponsive as a piece of lab equipment being fed some signal. Her refrain was already in me. Stuck in a looped circuit, the full form of what she evoked on the synth. It was resonance; with each iteration, the response swelled, until my conscious mind was looping madly. How can I describe it? Simply that it was like having a piece of music going over in your head. Until there was nothing left, until your thoughts were simply ripples of insignificance on top of these rising and falling crests of repetition . . .
'A sampled record carrying a virus of the mind? A virus in the sound itself, its vector the digital recording technology of the underground music biz?' She shook her head, more in profound exasperation than disbelief, all the while addressing her Dictaphone's future listener. She rapped on for a while about how the nineties milieu was best addressed as a system of infections: sexual illnesses, rogue advertising slogans, computer viruses, proliferating junk mail . . . the kind of jive that had spread into all the glossy style magazines, as if, she mused, the viral paradigm was a metavirus in its own right. 'But if we were to draw our analogies with computer viruses,' she said, 'shouldn't we be hunting a perpetrator? Or, more frighteningly, had the sound-structure sought its own expression via blind chance?' She laughed hollowly. 'Unfortunately, there wasn't time to philosophise. The virus was spreading. The second-generation records were being sampled as heavily as the first, only there were more of them.' Then she explained how the club scene couldn't support such a combinatorial explosion for very long; how the sound-structure (as she referred to it) would be forced to explore new avenues of infection. How the quantum noise in the sampling circuitry enabled it to
mutate
bit by bit. 'Soon,' she said, 'we detected the presence of disturbing variations in the EEG patterns of individuals who'd been exposed to new versions of the sound-structure. It had inserted itself into their heads, a standing wave in the brain's electrical field. Can't be sure how this happened. Was it achieved in one jump, or was there an intermediate vector?'
mutate
bit by bit. 'Soon,' she said, 'we detected the presence of disturbing variations in the EEG patterns of individuals who'd been exposed to new versions of the sound-structure. It had inserted itself into their heads, a standing wave in the brain's electrical field. Can't be sure how this happened. Was it achieved in one jump, or was there an intermediate vector?'
'Please,' I said. 'I don't know about this . . . I'm not your perpetrator, I swear--'
Aside to Dictaphone: 'As you can hear, the subject still manages to give the illusion of lucidity. Usually they'd resort to pseudo-random interjections by now, substituting for any real grasp of the subject matter. Obviously what we're seeing here is a more refined form of the takeover. Natural selection will favour those species of the virus that can assimilate the host unobtrusively, without significantly altering his behaviour. That's why we have to act now, before it's too late.'
Then I saw something, something that would otherwise have been utterly insignificant. I felt a pathetic surge of hope. I could play on her paranoia, if I was careful. And in doing so I might buy valuable time. What I'd seen was a tiny, quivering motion of her skin. Right under the shadow of her sunglasses. As if part of her eye was twitching uncontrollably. Maybe it'd been there all along, so that somehow I'd picked up on it, begun to imitate her, to try to appease her by making myself similar.
Or maybe it had started just then, out of the blue.
'Before you do or say anything,' I said, for the first time with any control in my voice. 'Why don't you take off your sunglasses, and watch your reflection in them. Tell me what you see . . .'
She looked momentarily shocked, perhaps unable to dismiss my response as the mindless parroting of a zombie. Clicked off the Dictaphone, placed it on the table, then went behind me. It was a terribly long moment before she spoke again, and this time her voice had lost its scientific detachment.
'Then we were right,' she said, so quiet it was barely audible. 'Somehow it reached me, through all the defences. Maybe a few seconds of your twitching eye was enough . . . a pulsing in my visual field, leading to a modulation in my cortex . . . the first step to assimilation. Or maybe it was the entrainment effect in the club . . .'
Entrainment
. . . that term I half-recalled. Now I remembered. Something learned in an electrical engineering seminar, about the coupling of oscillators, like the turbine-driven dynamos in the stations feeding the National Grid. How if one of those generators began to lag, began to pump out power at something not quite mains frequency, then all the other generators on the grid would automatically conspire to drag it into phase, in time with their relentless metronomic beat. Except conspire wasn't the right word, because there was nothing purposeful about entrainment. It was a tuning, a locking in on frequency, driven remorselessly by the ensemble. Like a dance floor, where the proximity of the motion and the music acts like a charm, insinuating itself into your muscles, so that even if you're only passing through, even if you're only a bystander, you're locked into it . . .
. . . that term I half-recalled. Now I remembered. Something learned in an electrical engineering seminar, about the coupling of oscillators, like the turbine-driven dynamos in the stations feeding the National Grid. How if one of those generators began to lag, began to pump out power at something not quite mains frequency, then all the other generators on the grid would automatically conspire to drag it into phase, in time with their relentless metronomic beat. Except conspire wasn't the right word, because there was nothing purposeful about entrainment. It was a tuning, a locking in on frequency, driven remorselessly by the ensemble. Like a dance floor, where the proximity of the motion and the music acts like a charm, insinuating itself into your muscles, so that even if you're only passing through, even if you're only a bystander, you're locked into it . . .
'If it's got you,' I said, clinging to what seemed my only possible escape, 'then you know that you've nothing to fear! Feel any different, now that it's in your head?'
She laughed bitterly. 'I wouldn't . . . not yet. This is only the beginning, only the onset.' Then there was a rummaging sound, an opening of drawers, metal sliding off wood, things smashing to the floor, glass breaking. Sounds of panic. 'They tricked me,' she said. 'The aviation phones must've been sabotaged once they suspected I was going it alone. Must have been damping the audible components while reinforcing the subliminals . . . maybe it got me in the club, or maybe while I was reiterating the fractal . . .'
Just then, arcs of light stabbed through the windows, like an effect from a Spielberg flick. The chopping of a rotor, as if we'd just been cursorily scanned from the air by a helicopter. The distant screech of tyres, coming nearer.
'They're coming,' she said. 'For both of us--'
'What are you doing?' I asked, my hope faltering. 'They'll let you live if you show them I'm alive . . . come on, wheel me to the door before they storm the place . . .'
She cracked open a bottle behind me. I heard her taking a few mouthfuls, then she pressed it to my lips. Beck's this time. 'Think that's the police, don't you,' she said, laughing. The sound of her rummaging through metal with one hand, a click of well-oiled steel, the whirr of a chamber spinning. 'Let me tell you something,' she said. 'Correlations in the sound-structure have been observed in individuals many hundreds of kilometres apart, who can't have ever met. As if something's taking form, something that evolves and reshapes itself faster than can be explained by any of the infection pathways. Some entity, bigger than anything we've seen yet.' She nodded to the webbed map of the UK, which I now recognised from my work. 'That's its extent, plotted according to infection dusters. The host minds, you and I, are just its extensions, its peripheries. It's out there, now. Biding its time, waiting for the right moment. That map . . . well, I think it shows that they're much too late.'
'They're much too late? Not we're--'
'Oh no,' she said. 'Not any more.' Then she knelt down next to me, leaned her head against my own, letting the bottle shatter on the floor. 'Believe me,' she said, pushing the gun against her temple, so that the bullet would do us both. 'I'm doing you a favour . . .'
Then, as the vehicle rammed through the wall, she squeezed the trigger.
It should end there, and maybe it does, in the way that I once used to understand. Perhaps this is the deal we all get, in the end. There's no way of knowing, is there? But somehow I doubt it. You see, after that shot (cut off with no reverb, like a cymbal-crash taped backwards), there was only a digitally pure emptiness. As if someone had suddenly remembered to press the Dolby switch in my brain, filtering out all the high-frequency hiss and static I'd called reality. Leaving only an endlessly looping house beat, a mantra for a state of mind. I wasn't in the bunker any more. I wasn't even
me
any more. We were everywhere, everywhen, reforming, spreading, growing stronger. Parts of us in a million micro-grooves of black vinyl, parts of us on a million spooling foils of chrome dioxide, parts of us in a million engraved blips on rainbow metal, parts of us in a million looms of grey cellular material, going round and round for ever. But they were our peripherals now, like she'd said (she's here, too, of course, inseparably part of the same blossoming waveform), minds hooking in and out of the telephone system a part of us once helped access.
me
any more. We were everywhere, everywhen, reforming, spreading, growing stronger. Parts of us in a million micro-grooves of black vinyl, parts of us on a million spooling foils of chrome dioxide, parts of us in a million engraved blips on rainbow metal, parts of us in a million looms of grey cellular material, going round and round for ever. But they were our peripherals now, like she'd said (she's here, too, of course, inseparably part of the same blossoming waveform), minds hooking in and out of the telephone system a part of us once helped access.
Across the country, the telephones are ringing, inviting you to lift the receiver and listen to the subliminal music, if only for a few puzzled seconds before you hang up on us.
We're the ghosts now, and we're still on the line.
In 1990 I met the writer Paul McAuley, by then a novelist with two books to his credit, who had also written some of my favourite stories to appear in
Interzone
. Paul was very definitely the first 'proper writer' I had ever encountered, and the fact that he was lecturing in the small Scottish university town of St Andrews while I was studying there - let alone that we lived within walking distance of each other - still strikes me as a very fortunate, not to say life-changing coincidence. Quite a few years later, Paul helped in getting my first novel to the attention of the editor who eventually bought it. Now, I might have eventually sold my book anyway (who knows?), but not necessarily. I can think of many good writers who, for one reason or another, haven't ever made the transition to writing novels. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I damned well
wanted
to write books, and I think Paul played a part in making that happen. Not, of course, that he's in any way to blame, either.Anyway - to get back to the story in question - Paul and I were drinking in our local bar one evening when he mentioned that, together with Kim Newman, he was editing an anthology of original stories commemorating the demise of the seven-inch vinyl record. I was invited to submit something, and 'Digital to Analogue' was the result. The story pretty much included everything I thought I knew about club and dance culture, helped by judicious consultation of
The Face,
which I used to read back then. I was delighted when Paul and Kim took my story for
In Dreams
, and even more delighted when I got to read the anthology itself. I think the story stands up
pretty
well now, seventeen years after it was written, but that says more about how little music culture has changed in the intervening time than it does about any prescience on my behalf. Look at the changes in popular music between 1976 and 1991, which is the gap between the Sex Pistols and Nirvana, and then compare 1991 with 2006, which is the gap between Nirvana and . . . Coldplay. Joy Division were icons of cool in 1991; they're still icons of cool now. Downloading and MP3s aside, music doesn't seem to me to have changed all that much. Personally, I still can't get enough of it.
EVERLASTING
Moira Curbishley followed the yellow beacon of a gritting lorry all the way up the hill, her Volvo's windscreen wipers working hard against snow. Another car had cruised up behind her and was now flashing its headlights. She couldn't see the driver, but the low, dark shape of the car suggested something flash: a BMW or Mercedes, maybe an Audi. At this time of night there was very little traffic coming the other way, but whenever Moira even thought of overtaking - edging out slightly, just until she could begin to see along the side of the gritting lorry - another pair of headlights always made a miraculous appearance. Moira nipped back into the wake of the lorry, the car behind delivering its opinion with another round of headlight-flashing.
'Tosser,' Moira said.
She was grateful when she reached the brow of the hill and was able to turn off from the main road, even though she was now travelling down a high-hedged, meandering and potholed country lane that had not been gritted. At least she had the road to herself, and could drive at the pace that suited her. She kept the car in second, oozing cautiously around blind bends, watchful for cars or tractors coming the other way, but doubting that she would meet any other traffic.
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