Wolves Read online

  I’ve acquired ideas about what money looks like from our interns. They all come from money – how else could they afford to work for us? I thought money came well-dressed, labouring under brittle, cutesy names like Flick and Roddy. I always assumed the dev team were safely proletarian – grafters on a credible wage. Strange that money could throw up a sport like Ralf. Ralf the workaholic, Ralf the star.

  It doesn’t take me long to decide to accept his offer. The company we’ve been working for has had six years to break through and in that time the technology we pioneered has matured. It’s become cheap. It’s become easy to use. We’re a ponderous service company trying frantically to reinvent ourselves as a portal for user-generated content, all on a shoestring and a series of half-baked promises from various government-sponsored industry foundations. We won’t be the first outfit in this sector that’s been encouraged to death. It’s not anyone’s fault. It’s just the way of things. The first person through the door almost always gets shot.

  Ralf wants me to handle business for what amounts to an inventor’s atelier. He wants to stay on the dirty, technical side of the IT divide, establishing patents for software engines which I’ll go on to sell to bigger, public-facing companies. But if we establish just one good idea, and get bought out for our trouble, I will count this venture a success. We are not living in the nineteenth century. The pace of change far exceeds any individual talent – even one as focused, as monomaniacal as Ralf’s.

  For a while, Loophole (the name was my idea) is a sofa in an out-of-the-way corner of the club’s sheltered and heated tea-garden. We lounge about under canvas in oversoft armchairs, overheated laptops scorching our knees as we hammer out, like struggling poets, a form of words that will get Ralf’s work noticed. Ralf’s family have money, and this cushions us, covering our own needs. It will not drive the company – for that we need investment.

  This is my job. For eighteen frustrating, toe-stubbing months, the only work I find for us is old work, throwing together image recognition systems to paste virtual movies over billboard posters. Ralf is patient with me, but I can’t help thinking that I’m scoring three stars at best. This is my fault. I’m the one charged with dreaming up new applications for imaginary light, but I have to bring in money as well, and here I am reaching for easy solutions, again and again.

  By the time of my thirtieth birthday, Loophole is two. A weedy toddler, it employs six people to crunch code in the club’s refurbished basement – a start-up company indistinguishable from dozens of others all crammed in the same three-block radius, all of us more or less dormant as we wait for our long-talked-about spring: the moment everyone is wearing spectacles and drinking in imaginary light as unthinkingly as they run water from a tap. ‘Because that’s what it will take.’

  Michel accepts another cocktail from the tray and sits back in his chair. It’s autumn but hot, and the roof-garden stinks, quite frankly, of damp vegetation and rot.

  Michel came to celebrate my birthday, not sit through my litany of professional disappointment, but I cannot stop. ‘When people go out of their way to adopt a new technology, they want something useful for their effort, not gimmicks, not games, not even stories. And the fact is, AR is all gimmick. That’s its point. It gimmicks and games the world. You know, Hanna had this pinned years ago, when you first introduced me to her. She knew straight away it was arse-about-face.’

  Michel nods and smiles, patient with me. He is surely weary by now of my mordant view of my work.

  Outwardly the party is a success: an exclusive club; friends and workmates; even a girl who’s sweet on me, off snorting cocaine with her girlfriends in the upstairs loo. The fact is, though, the club is the club – our workplace, a budget option. The colleagues outnumber the friends. Plus, I discovered today that Mandy has been given her own programme on national radio. For some while she’s been reading her poetry at comedy clubs and bars across the city. She has become a minor urban celebrity. Now, with her 3.30pm slot, there will be no getting away from her. She has new hands now. Slimmer. Stranger. Too many fingers. She shows them off in the mugshot the newsfeeds have run. Becoming writer in residence at a service hospital south of the city, she lucked into some neurological experiment or other. They give her a cachet, those wild arachnid hands. They’ve pushed her up the rankings faster than any improvement in her poetry. I don’t know why I feel angry. A defence mechanism, I suppose, knowing what I did, or rather, failed to do for her. Perhaps somewhere, in her ever-expanding opus of radio-friendly doggerel, there is a chilly piece about me. Maybe there isn’t even that.

  Michel, meanwhile, has sold the film rights to his first novel. The Shaman, it’s called, and though the book advance was tiny, times being what they are, the film option was so big Michel’s agent thought it was a printing error. Even parcelled out the way it is, in dribs and drabs over a dozen years, and hedged around with all manner of new writing commitments which Michel must religiously fulfil, the deal is a life-changer.

  ‘Bryon Vaux wants an original treatment for the next one.’

  The name means nothing to me.

  ‘You know. Vaux. Friendly Fire.’

  Friendly Fire came out a couple of years ago. It was the culmination of a long line of modish, cynical war films that compensated for acts of unlikely heroism ‘in the field’ with liberal conspiracy theories back home.

  ‘I’ve not seen it.’

  ‘Be happy for me, Connie.’

  Jesus. ‘Of course I’m happy for you, Mick. What am I saying? Why do you need me to be happy for you? Fuck you.’

  Michael grins, at which point it occurs to me that he is working and writing for one of the most powerful media producers on the planet. He is more than a friend now. He is a contact.

  ‘How’s the family?’ (You can almost hear the crunch of gears.)

  Michel nods – a successful sommelier contemplating his cellar. ‘Not bad at all, thanks.’

  Michel and Hanna’s daughter is exactly the same age as Loophole, and a deal chubbier and healthier. They’ve had to abandon their sailing plans because of her, though the runaway success of Mick’s writing would probably have scotched them on its own. This is the first time I’ve seen Mick since that visit, and I haven’t seen Hanna at all. She never comes into the city; perhaps, even if she did, she would avoid me. I think of her sometimes. Who am I kidding? I think of her all the time. Her hands. The taste of her mouth. Christ, and since then she has had a child. Impossible not to wonder about that. ‘Do you still have the boat?’

  Michel nods. Without enthusiasm, he says, ‘We’ll have it finished, then decide what to do with it.’ The boat was their project, the thing that bound them together, the myth they shared. Now that they have some, they’re throwing money at it. But they have a child now. They don’t need a dream.

  ‘He wants to shoot something on those new cameras.’ So much for a proud father’s tiresome anecdotes about his family. Michel wants to talk business. We’re back with Vaux again. ‘He wants the next one to spill out of the screen, out of the cinema, I mean. To be distributed. I told him some of my ideas. He’s keen.’

  ‘That’s great. Great.’

  It’s not until the following morning, waking in an unfamiliar bed, that it occurs to me – Michel is trying to put some work my way.

  Eight months on, Michel brings Hanna and their daughter Agnes into town to see what Loophole has made for them.

  We’re meeting just outside the north-eastern suburbs, where the railway, after passing through several deep cuttings, embraces the earth at last and disappears into a mile long tunnel. The tunnel’s brick ventilation chimneys crop up in the portfolios of virtually every film and photography student in the city. Not that you can see the chimneys now the bracken is out. The hills’ trademark gold and brown is vanished for the summer under this shaggy, silly green.

  Where the tunnel begins, so does the granite, and the suburbs leave off entirely here, lending the city a sharp edge you would otherwise find on
ly in storybooks. The houses rise in tiers against ferny rock-faces. They are always wet, even at the height of summer, because this is where the peat beds drain. At night, the culverts echo round the town, filling the streets with a sound that is part magical river, part overworked toilet mechanism.

  The station is built into the foot of the gorge, and the road bridge runs over the rail line at an unlikely height. I lean against the parapet, a favourite of suicides and graffiti artists, waiting for the train. I recognise Michel by his thinning hair, Hanna I do not clock at all at first, and little Agnes is hidden from me by the natty pink parasol attached to her buggy. There is a lift to street level, a new all-glass contraption, already tagged. Mick and Hanna are practised pack-horses now; ignoring the lift, they carry the buggy out of sight, up flights of covered stairs. They’re flushed when they emerge from out the entrance. Michel sees me and makes some comic business, staggering towards me. Hanna’s got the buggy. Agnes is asleep.

  ‘Don’t worry about her,’ says Hanna, loudly, in reply to my murmured hello. ‘At this time of day she’d sleep through the Last Trump.’

  Michel says, ‘Nights are a different story.’

  ‘Here.’ I rummage about in my bag and pull out two pairs of goggles. ‘Gifts.’

  They are similar to the goggles Dad’s blind soldiers wore years ago. The cameras in their earpieces are smaller and neater now. The lenses are half-silvered, rather than black.

  The top half of her face hidden behind balloon lenses, Hanna takes my hand and lets me lead her over to the parapet and a view over the city, rising behind industrial parks and new housing estates. Michel stands a little behind her, resting his hands on her shoulders.

  ‘Ready? Blink twice.’

  I dig out a pair of goggles for myself and, as I turn to face the city, the lenses blink, shiver, and seem to fill with blue paint. The paint drains away until the lenses are half full. ‘Try not to move your head.’ The paint spills and spreads over the city. The land turns blue, then freezes and fractures. Planks, spikes and planes of blue fall from the buildings and bed down between them. The blocks turn and shuffle.

  The city is buried under a torrent of blue geometric shapes, a child’s building blocks, dropped and scattered, none of them smaller than a house. There are glitches. One high tower stubbornly clings to its blue coat. Elsewhere, landmark buildings have evaporated entirely, deleted by the program as it struggles to integrate reality and artifice.

  (Ralf grew up playing console games whose squirrely physics engines sometimes allowed cars to ride along the undersides of overpasses, or avatars to sneak through the netherspace between two imperfectly adjoining walls. At low moments he jokes that, if nothing else, at least Loophole has managed to revive these mistakes at a grand, city-spanning scale.)

  The core illusion is starting to take shape. It appears that a blue lid has descended over the capital – a lid pierced to let through the spires, towers and chimneys of its tallest buildings. It is not yet fluid, not yet a flood. There are too many gaps, too many rectilinear holes. But as we watch, so Ralf’s program renders its effects at finer and finer grain, until at last it really seems as though the city is flooded with blue paint.

  The graphics engines kick in then, turning the flat blue to a living, moving sea. Technically speaking, Ralf’s coup de grace is trivial, but even over the sound of the traffic I hear Hanna’s gasp.

  Imagine the city’s rivers rising unstoppably, and breaking their banks. (The mainland has sunk. Here’s all that’s left . . .) The waters spread and slow, pooling here, threading there, exploring and rejoining. New islands form. The rail terminus upon its little rise becomes an island, while to the north the city’s royal parks and theatres, its pleasure grounds and colleges, are made an island chain. The southern half of the city is almost entirely inundated. The towers of the large estates rise dramatically above the little waves, their lower storeys drowned. I take Hanna’s hand in mine. ‘Why run off to sea when the sea will come for you?’

  I say it softly; too softly for Michel to hear.

  Hanna shoots me a nervous half-smile, her fingers nerveless, waiting for me to let go of her hand. When I don’t, she moves away.

  I lift the goggles from my face. ‘So there we are.’ Michel is still staring out to sea across the city, caught between realities. We have captivated him. Good. This being, after all, what we set out to do. ‘You like it?’

  Of the gloomy vision encapsulated in Michel’s bestselling book, and rendered positively apocalyptic in Vaux’s forthcoming film, Ralf and I have so far generated only the sunniest, smoothest caricature. Michel’s narrative demands much more. It calls for foam and breakers, smashing tides and rips. But we have to begin somewhere.

  ‘It’s amazing,’ Michel says.

  Hanna says nothing. She cradles her goggles in one hand and rocks the buggy against her hip with the other. The child is awake now. Hanna takes down the parasol and chucks her under the chin. Agnes turns her heavy head and blinks at me, her eyes wide, her mouth pursed in outrage.

  She looks exactly like me.

  There’s a cafe nearby I know is good, its interior a thick froth of old attic tat and second-hand furniture. Setting this pair down to eat anything in it is much more of a problem than I anticipated. They don’t eat meat any more. They want to know the source of everything. They are concerned about their sugar intake, about the tolerability of wheat, about the sufferings of the rural poor. The coffee has to be absolved of crimes against humanity. Hanna subjects even the muesli to interrogation. ‘Do you think these Brazil nuts are sustainable?’

  ‘I should think so,’ says the waitress, playing along because she knows me, because I come here for breakfast every day, because she expects we’ll have a laugh about this later.

  Michel’s woodland redoubt, Hanna’s waterborne odyssey – it saddened me when they abandoned these innocent, impractical escape plans, and chose a more ordinary life for themselves. But here they are embracing something even more childish. Do these two seriously imagine that global collapse might still be averted – averted simply by everyone clubbing together for the common good? They are becoming the sort of tweedy vegetarians who take used carrier bags with them when they drive to the supermarket in search of organic salad. Seeing them sip their microbrewed coffees, it’s not hard to imagine what the End Times will actually look like: a planet of corpses clad in ‘I Told You So’ unbleached cotton Tees.

  I don’t feel like laughing, seeing what I have seen – Agnes’s scowling, furious, vengeful baby face. I wore that very expression in a photograph I still own. I can picture it exactly – me in my pushchair, my mum behind me, and all around us the water meadows seeming to go on forever (though even then there must have been plans afoot, in some grey municipal office somewhere, to grub them up).

  Is Agnes mine?

  Hanna and Michel have both put on weight. New motherhood is alibi enough for Hanna’s slight and pleasant filling-out. Michel has no excuse. He has been passing his good fortune straight to his stomach, snacking inappropriately on the gooier, oilier brands of fairly traded flapjack.

  What if little Agnes is mine? If she is, then these two make no sense at all.

  I’m not at all surprised that, once they no longer had to worry about money, Hanna and Michel decided to have a child – or changed their plans around a child they hadn’t expected. Why look the gift horse in the mouth? In these happy circumstances, I can imagine Hanna letting her dreams of escape fall away, replacing them with something more normal, more adult and – yes, why not? – more comfortable. (The boat is gone. Sold. The beach house, too. They live in the suburbs now, though I don’t suppose they call them suburbs. They live in a puddle of satellite green, twenty minutes’ drive from the nearest railway station. The train into town takes an hour.)

  But if Hanna had the slightest suspicion about the child’s paternity (and how could she not?) why on earth did she go through with the pregnancy? Why would she give her life up to a lie, and f
or the sake of a future quite different from the one she was planning for herself, and was working so hard towards?

  If it’s my child – and of course it’s my child! just look at its face! – then Hanna is using her to freeboot on Mick’s fortune, binding him to her in a way he wasn’t bound before, when she couldn’t even say for sure whether he’d help her crew her boat.

  ‘You know,’ says Michel, ‘there is another reason we wanted to come see you today.’ He takes Hanna’s hand. Hanna stiffens. Smiles. Tries to.

  Christ. He knows.

  He says, ‘We wondered if you would be prepared to be Agnes’s godfather.’

  ‘What?’

  Michel says it all again, word for word, laughing – dippy old Conrad, tuning out of the world, as usual. ‘Well?’ He talks about this as though it was another piece of work he is pushing my way. He wants to help out. He wants to get me involved. I wish Hanna would say something. Or do I? Christ, I don’t know. What would she say?

  Agnes. Just look at her. Sleeping again. When she sleeps she looks just like her mother.

  When she’s awake—

  Vaux’s film company approves our work on The Shaman. The executives there are so delighted with our AR visualisations, they try to steal the underlying code. I keep Michel out of the loop while we sort this one out, because Michel and Bryon are working hard on the screenplay and I don’t want to throw grit in the works. Chances are Vaux, from his lofty perspective, probably doesn’t consider this theft at all; just a piece of business as usual.

  But we have patents pending on the realtime mapping algorithms that drive our flood simulator, and we need to establish priority.

  It’s a struggle to remain patient and civil with these people, but it eventually pays off: Vaux’s production company offers to buy us out. I’m resistant at first but Ralf is passionlessly pragmatic – the money they are offering us will pay for another year’s R&D. ‘We either have faith in our ability to come up with the Next Thing, next year, or we don’t,’ Ralf tells me. ‘If we don’t, then why are we in this business?’