Looking for Jake Part 11

I do not leave the study now. I am learning what I need to know for my defence. I wait for the ghost city to wax back to me, and when it comes I investigate it to the limits of my vision.

There is a drainpipe by my window, on my other wall, my ghost wall.

I have heard them scrabbling a short way up it, sc.r.a.ping the rust and mortar. I have listened to them whispering, daring each other to climb it. Calling me names, gearing each other up with hatred and poison to break my window and scare me to death.

I do not know what I have done or what he did-the man who lived in that other house. Perhaps he was just old and funny and stupid and lived where no one could hear him scream and beg.

I will not call them evil. They are not evil. But I am afraid that they are capable of it.

14 October I sat in the study and waited all day and they came at last at night, and I cried for them to stop Looking for Jake, By China Mieville and stood on the chair with my pyjamas flapping idiotic around my ankles. I watched as one pulled chalk from its trousers and began to scrawl on the wall opposite my window.

It was too dark to see. But when they had made me cry they fled, and the ghost city stayed beyond my window until just before dawn, long enough for me to read what had been written for me.

YOUR DEAD OLD MAN.

15 October I have gone out and looked around, and everywhere, in all the parts of the city, wherever I have been, youth seems to fill London.

I have heard animated swearing from girls and boys on bicycles and buses. I have seen signs that read "Only two children at a time" on the doors of small groceries. As if that were a defence. I have wandered the streets in a strange state staring around me at the little monsters that surround us.

For the first time in my life I see people look at me and glance away embarra.s.sed. Perhaps I have not showered recently enough-I have been preoccupied. Perhaps it is just my broken walk. They could not know that I am newly like this. I was not this derelict thing until a week ago when the children came.

I am afraid of all these unchecked unbridled younglings. None of them are human. They are all like the ones who come to torment me at night.

I cannot look at them, at any of them, without this horrible fear, but also with a jealousy. A longing. I thought at first that this was new, that it had come through the window with that alien moonlight. But when I look at other adults looking at children, I know that I am not alone. This is an old feeling.

I have prepared myself.

I returned to the hardware shop, where the man who fixed my window in place did not remember or perhaps recognise me. I bought what I will need for tonight.

I have spent this day, this perhaps last day, walking slowly around with my hands behind my back (they sought out that old-man grip to go with my old-man limp). And when I saw that it would soon be time, that the afternoon was nearing its end, I shambled home again.

I am ready. I am writing this as the light wanes. So far the old pane, the haunted pane, shows the same sky as its siblings.

I am sitting just below the window with my walking stick by my feet and my new hammer across my lap.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville Why me? I have pondered. I was not especially cruel I do not think, in any measured or repulsive way. I have had little to do with children.

During the night visitations, I have seen glimpses of flapping, ridiculous shorts half a century out of date, and discerned the old-fas.h.i.+oned, clipped voices of my merciless besiegers (the tone is not disguised even when sneering in wide-eyed sadism). And yes of course I have thought of the years when I was like them.

Perhaps it is as simple as that, that I look out at my own times running in those hordes. Is this to be that sort of ba.n.a.l morality tale? Am I my own abuser?

I do not remember. I can see myself running through rubble with others, and sifting for prizes and smoking vile things and torturing stray animals and all the rest, but I do not remember singling out some old man to be his personal harpy. Perhaps I deceive myself. Perhaps that is me, out there.

But I cannot believe that h.e.l.l is so trite.

I believe that I am just an old man, and that they have a game they have waited sixty years to finish. A game that makes them drunk with contravention. With wickedness.

I am watching and waiting. And when the sun has gone and the light behind that intricate pane flickers and changes, when I look down to see those spirits scamper to their stations with all that monstrous baleful energy, then we shall have a race.

* * *Why not just break it now and have done? Shatter the d.a.m.n thing.

I have thought of it a thousand times since this began. I have imagined hurling my shoes or books or self at that old gla.s.s and sending it into the sky in hundreds of pieces. Pattering down onto the gra.s.s so far below.

Or I could simply have it taken out again. I could replace it with a pane like all the others. I could return that gla.s.s trap to the bemused shopkeeper. I could leave it carefully in a skip for some other unsuspecting soul. I could sink it in the ca.n.a.l, a piece of disintegrating debris among so many, emitting its ghost light to the fishes.

But the children would still be waiting.

They are not in the window but beyond it. And they have not yet had blood. They have picked me. I do not know why, perhaps there is no reason, but they have picked me. They have me in their sights. I am to be the victim. They have been poised on the brink of this all my life.

Wherever I hide the window, they will be waiting. And if I break the gla.s.s into my own world, Looking for Jake, By China Mieville then nothing will have changed for them in theirs. They will stand in stasis in that hidden city and wait, and wait, and I am afraid of when and how they might find me.

They are just out to see how far they can go.

But if I watch, and strike at the right moment, if I am fast enough, I will take the fight to them.

I will strike a blow for old men.

If I can shatter the gla.s.s when their alley waits beyond, if I can smash it into their city, then things might be a little different. It might be a way in.

I want to emerge from the ruins of that window and drop (a short drop if you hang from the rim) into the alley (into the ghostland, immersed in the dead city, but I will not think on that) and I will wave my stick and run for them.

b.l.o.o.d.y little hooligans.

If please G.o.d I catch one I shall lay it over my knee and by G.o.d I shall give it a hiding, a b.l.o.o.d.y good hiding, I shall teach it a b.l.o.o.d.y lesson, I will, I will thrash it, and that will, it will put an end to all this nonsense. I can't run away. I have to put a stop to this. They need to be taught a lesson.

(Oh but even as I write that, I feel so stupid. It is an idiot's plan. Insane. I catch a glimpse of the rucked skin on my old hand and I know that I can no more climb from the window and drop to the ground in that other city than I can leap mountains. What can I do? What can I do?) I will try. I will do my d.a.m.nedest.

Because the alternative is untenable.

I know what they are gearing up to. I know their plan. When the window changes, I will look out once more over that dingy alley, and their message, their chalk threat, will still face me.

And I must make it up and out and at them tonight because if I do not, if I hesitate or I am slow, if I fail, if they are faster, if I do not go out...

They will come in.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville Imet Aykan in a pub sometime late in 1997. I was with friends, and one of them was loudly talking about the internet, which we were all very excited about.

"f.u.c.king internet's f.u.c.king dead, man. Yesterday's bulls.h.i.+t," I heard from two tables away.

Aykan was staring at me, gazing at me curiously, like he wasn't sure I'd let him crash this party.

He was Turkish (I asked because of his name). His English was flawless. He had none of the throaty accent I half expected, though each of his words did sound finished in a slightly unnatural way.

He smoked high tar incessantly. ("f.u.c.king national sport: they wouldn't let me in f.u.c.king 'Stanbul without sufficient s.h.i.+t in my lungs.") He liked me because I wasn't intimidated by him. I let him call me names and didn't get my back up when he was rude. Which he was, often.

My friends hated him, and after he'd left I nodded and murmured agreement with them about what a weirdo, about how rude and where he got off, but the fact was I couldn't get worked up about Aykan. He told us off for getting moist about email and the web. He told us wired connection was dead. I asked him what he was into instead and he took a long drag on his stinking cigarette and shook his head, dismissively exhaling.

"Nanotech," he said. "Little s.h.i.+t."

He didn't explain that. I left him my phone number, but I never expected to hear from him. Ten months later he called me. It was only luck that I still lived at that address, and I told him that.

"People don't f.u.c.king move, man," he said, incomprehensibly.

I arranged to meet him after work. He sounded a bit distracted, a bit miserable even.

"Do you play games, man?" he said. "N64?"

"I've got a Playstation," I told him.

"Playstation licks s.h.i.+t, man," he told me. "Bulls.h.i.+t digital controls. I'll give you the ads, though.

Playstation ads sing sweet hymns, but you want a f.u.c.king a.n.a.log control stick, or you're playing once removed. You know anyone with N64?"

As soon as we met he handed me a little grey plastic square. It was a game pack for a Nintendo 64 system, but it was rough-cast and imperfectly finished, its seam bizarrely ragged. It had no label, only a sticker scrawled with illegible handwriting.

"What's this?" I asked.

"Find someone with N64," he said. "Project of mine."

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville We talked for a couple of hours. I asked Aykan what he did for a living. He did that dismissive smoking thing again. He muttered about computer consultancy and web design. I thought the internet was dead, I said. He agreed fervently.

I asked him what nanotech stuff he was doing, and he became ragged with enthusiasm. He caught me with crazy looks and grinned at odd intervals, so I couldn't tell if he was bulls.h.i.+tting me.

"Don't talk to me about little miniature f.u.c.king arterial cleaning robots, don't f.u.c.king talk to me about medical reconstruction, or microwhateverthef.u.c.ks to clean up oil slicks, OK? That's bulls.h.i.+t to get people on board. What's going to be big in nanotech? Eh? Like any other f.u.c.king thing . . ." He banged the table and slopped beer. "The money's in games. "

Aykan had extraordinary schemes. He told me about his prototype. It was crude, he said, but it was a start. "It's old school meets new school," he kept saying. "Kids with f.u.c.king conkers, in the playground." The game was called Blood Battle, or b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, or Bloodwar. He hadn't decided.

"You buy a little home injection kit, like you're diabetic. And you build up your own serum from the pack provided. Like when you play a wargame you choose how many f.u.c.kers on horseback and how many artillery, right? Well, you have different vials full of microbots that interact with your blood, each type with different defences and attacks, and there are miniature repair robots like medics, all of these f.u.c.kers microsize. And you make yourself a blood army, with electrical frontline, chemical attack forces, good defences, whatever you've decided.

"Then you go to the playground and you meet your little friend who's also bought Bloodwar, and you p.r.i.c.k your fingers, right, like you're going to be blood brothers, and you each squeeze out a drop into a special dish, and you f.u.c.king mix 'em up. " I stared at him incredulously while he grinned and smoked. "And then you sit back and watch the blood s.h.i.+mmer and bubble and move about. Because there's a war on." He grinned for a long time.

"How do you know who's won?" I asked eventually.

"The dish," he said. "Comes with a little display and speakers in the base. Picks up signals from the 'bots and amplifies them. You hear battle sounds and your troops reporting casualties, and at the end you get a score and you see who's won."

He sat back a minute and smoked some more, watching me. I tried to think of something sardonic to say, but was defeated. He leaned in suddenly and pulled out a little Swiss army knife.

"I'll show you," he said intensely. "You up for it? I can show you now. I'm primed. We know you'll lose because you've got no troops, but you'll see how it works." The knife waited above his thumb, and he gazed at me for the go-ahead. I hesitated and shook my head. I couldn't tell if he was serious or not, if he'd actually injected himself with these lunatic game-pieces, but he Looking for Jake, By China Mieville was weirding me out.

He had other ideas. There were spin-offs for Bloodwar, and there were other more complicated games, involving outside equipment like airport metal detectors that you walked through, that set off particular reactions from your tiny little internal robots. But Bloodwar was his favourite.

I gave him my email address and thanked him for the N64 pack. He wouldn't tell me where he lived, but he gave me his mobile number. I called it at seven the next morning.

"Jesus f.u.c.king Christ, Aykan," I said. "This game, thing, whatever . . . it's total genius."

I had been curious enough to rent a console from Blockbuster on my way home, to play the thing he'd given me.

It was utterly extraordinary. It was not a game. It was a totally immersing piece of art, a multilayered environment that pa.s.sed through anarchic and biting political commentary, bleak dreamscapes, erotic staging posts. There was no "gameplay," only exploration, of the environment, of the conspiracies being unmasked. The viewpoint s.h.i.+fted and changed vertiginously. There were moments of shocking power.

I was stunned. I had pulled an all-nighter, and called him as early as I thought I could get away with.

"What is this s.h.i.+t?" I asked. "When's it coming out? I'll buy a f.u.c.king console just for this."

"It's not coming out, man," Aykan said. He sounded quite awake. "It's just some s.h.i.+t I did.

Nintendo are b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, man," he said. "They'd never licence it. No f.u.c.ker'd produce it anyway.

It's just for my friends. The hardest thing, let me tell you, the hardest thing isn't the programming, it's making the housing. If they read off CDs or whatever, no f.u.c.king problem.

But putting the software into that poxy stupid little plastic square, and making it so it'll fit in the casing with all the right connectors. That's the hard bit. That's why I'm not doing that s.h.i.+t anymore. Boring."

I still own it, Aykan's guerrilla software, his illicit work of art. I still play it. Two years on I'm still discovering new levels, new layers. Later, before he disappeared, Aykan translated the scrawled t.i.tle for me: We Deserve Better Than This.

Aykan's occasional emails to me often included web addresses for me to look up. I say Aykan's emails, although no name ever appeared in the "Sender" column, and they were never signed.

Whenever I tried to reply to them, they would register as coming from a nonsense address, and the messages would bounce back to me. But Aykan never denied the emails were his, and sometimes even asked me if I'd received certain of them. He irritably dismissed questions about how or why he sent them anonymously. If I wanted to contact him, I had to do it by phone.

This was a time when ma.s.s-circulation emails were getting out of hand. Every day I'd get one or two urls to look up. Sometimes they were p.o.r.nographic, with a message like "Did you know Looking for Jake, By China Mieville that was possible???!!!" from some sad lad or other I vaguely knew. More often they were links to some weird news story or other. Usually they looked too dull to chase up.

Aykan's, though, I always checked. They were pretty extraordinary. Essays, art pieces, things like that.

Sometimes he provided a pa.s.sword to get into hidden pages online, and when I visited them they were incomprehensible internal reports that looked very much like governments talking to governments, or rebel groups talking to rebels. I couldn't tell if they were hoaxes, but if not, I was rather alarmed.

"What's all this s.h.i.+t you keep sending me?" I demanded.

"Interesting, huh?" He sn.i.g.g.e.red, and put the phone down.

Sometimes he directed me to one or another of his online projects. That was how I realised that Aykan was a virtuoso of programming. Once, on one of our infrequent rendezvous, I called him a hacker. He burst out laughing, then got very angry with me.

"f.u.c.king hacker?" He laughed again. "f.u.c.king hacker? Listen bro, you're not talking to some seb.u.m-faced little sixteen-year-old geekboy with w.a.n.k-stained pants who calls himself Dev-L."

He swore furiously. "I'm not a f.u.c.king hacker, man, I'm a f.u.c.king artist, I'm a hardworking wage-slave, I'm a concerned motherf.u.c.king citizen, whatever you want, but I'm not a f.u.c.king hacker."

I didn't care what he wanted to call himself. Whatever he thought he was, he left me awestruck -disbelieving, really, utterly bewildered-with what he could do.

"What search engine do you use?" he wrote to me once. "How often does your name come up?

Try it now and then again tomorrow morning."

According to searchsites.com I appeared on seven websites, all of them work-related rubbish.

When I typed in my name again the next day, I was nowhere. I looked up my company's website and there I was, halfway down the page. But when I ran my name through searchsites or runbot or megawhere, I had no luck. I had become invisible.

"What did you do, you f.u.c.k?" I yelled down the phone. I was excited, though, feigning anger badly.

"How's that, huh? I ran you through my hide engine." I could hear him smoking. "Don't worry, man," he said. "I'll take you out of it. But it's good, huh? Tomorrow I think I'm gonna run Jack f.u.c.king Straw through it, or maybe every f.u.c.king s.e.x-related word I can think of." He put the phone down.

If he did run those words through his engine, it had stopped working. I checked the next day.