Battlestar Suburbia Read online

  ‘Kelly!’ she said, jabbing Darren’s saviour in the collarbone, which was as far up her as she could reach. ‘What have I told you about bringing boys down here. You know it’s not bloody safe.’

  It was then that Darren saw the family resemblance. They had the same big-boned attractiveness, with large eyes, long noses and lips that disappeared at the first sign of anger. They were both livid, and showed it by the way their lipstick migrated on to their teeth.

  ‘Mum,’ said Kelly, ‘will you just listen.’

  ‘I’ll damn well learn to listen when you do.’ She glanced at Darren. ‘I’m sorry, love, I’m sure you’re a lovely lad but you’re going to have to sling your hook.’ Then, sotto voce to her daughter. ‘I know it’s slim pickings up there, but are you sure you couldn’t have done any better than him?’

  Kelly’s eyes nearly popped out of her skull at this quip. ‘Will you just shut up, Mum? This isn’t my boyfriend, he’s a wanted criminal.’

  ‘He’s a what?’

  ‘He end-of-lifed a machine about two hours ago. I was there. It was kind of my fault.’

  Darren looked on in incomprehension. Why was she suddenly being nice to him? He didn’t get the leisure to wonder long, however, as Kelly’s mother turned away from her daughter and rounded on him instead.

  ‘Bugger off!’ she yelled, producing a pair of crimping irons from her housecoat. ‘I’m not having ne’er-do-wells round my shop. I empty the cash registers nightly and I’ve a pistol in my curler drawer. You’ll get nothing from me.’

  ‘He’s harmless, Mum,’ called Kelly. ‘Leave him alone.’

  ‘You told me he was a cold-blooded killer thirty seconds ago. Will you make up your mind?’

  ‘It was an accident. He was either trying to help or impress me. Look at him! I’ve seen more ill-will in a sponge roller.’

  She eyeballed Darren with such suspicion that he began to wonder who had the more to hide. ‘Maybe,’ she said after a while, ‘but he still shouldn’t be here, love. He’s going to have to go back up.’

  ‘That’s not the worst of it. The machine was a surveillance model. He burnt it out before I could wipe its hard drive.’

  Kelly’s mum turned on her daughter again. ‘Did it see you?’ she screeched, as Kelly fought her off. ‘Did it bloody see you?’

  Despite being a foot taller than her mother, Kelly still somehow managed to look up shame-facedly at her. She bit her lip. ‘Yes…’

  For the next two minutes Kelly and her mum argued with each other with such pitch, volume and verbal ferocity that Darren’s brain could only process it as a weather event. Once the initial shock subsided, Darren started hearing actual words. Phrases like ‘you never let me’ and ‘how can you say that?’ tore past his head like shrapnel in a gunfight. He was on firmer ground with this. This wasn’t a row about him. It was just a pretext to get old grudges out of the airing cupboard, and there was only one way to stop it.

  ‘Will the pair of you give it a fucking rest?’ he roared.

  They stopped and gawked at Darren. Kelly wore the kind of expression a cat would if the mouse it was chasing ever came out of the skirting boards wielding a pistol. Her mother, realising she’d lost her composure in front of a stranger, patted her precarious hairstyle with embarrassment and snagged a pin. A wave of hair fell over her face.

  ‘Now,’ said Darren, ‘would one of you please tell me where the heck I am?’

  Mustering all the dignity it was possible to with hair like the collapsed eave of a Gothic cathedral, Kelly’s mother motioned at the shop. ‘Well, I suppose a cup of tea wouldn’t hurt.’

  Darren felt like he hadn’t had a decent cup of tea in eternity. ‘That sounds top, thanks.’

  ‘Why don’t you come in then?’ Then, to her daughter, ‘I suppose the harm’s done. He might as well meet the family.’

  Kelly glowered all the way into the shop.

  Janice, as Kelly’s mum introduced herself once she’d put the kettle on, was a more accommodating host than first impressions had suggested. She seated Darren and emptied the biscuit tin into his lap. Meanwhile, Kelly plonked herself down on a sofa by the door, all folded arms and frowns.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry you had to witness that spectacle out there, Darren,’ Janice trilled as she poked at her hair. ‘Kelly and I have one of those stormy mother–daughter relationships, don’t we, love? We’d be a walking real-life story if the publicity weren’t enough to have us both shot on the spot.’ Another pointed look at Kelly. ‘Mind you, our Kelly’s always thought herself quite the celebrity.’

  ‘Are you two going to start fighting again?’ asked Darren, fumbling with a wafer biscuit. ‘Cos if you are I think I’d rather take my chances with the fuzz.’

  ‘Course not. Eat your biscuit.’

  Darren saw the use-by date on the wrapper was 300 years before he was born. He put it back in the box.

  Janice began wrapping her collapsed hair into curlers. ‘Kelly, you see, is forever heading upstairs to tear it up a bit. You know, service a few machines, find a nice lad or three to take her out. Quite the starlet. Me, I appreciate the quiet life. I’ve got my little business, and of course I don’t know what my ladies would do without me…’

  Kelly jumped to her feet. ‘Mum, no…’

  ‘You brought him all this way. It’s only polite.’ She clapped her hands. ‘Ladies,’ she announced, ‘where are your manners? We have a new customer in the salon. When was the last time that happened?’

  Darren peered into the dimness at the back of the salon. It was difficult to see much, other than a row of four chairs wedged in between a wash basin and the wall. They were large, with padded arms and seats, a straight back and, instead of a headrest, a contraption that looked like a plastic crash helmet.

  It was only when he heard the faint hiss of laboured breathing that he realised that there was something in the chairs. He got to his feet for a closer look and saw that each chair was occupied by a woman.

  Their twinsets and tights hung from their bodies like shrouds on genteel ghosts. Dry white skin drooped from prominent bones. All he could see of their heads were deftly powdered chins.

  Darren felt the water draining out of his mouth and into some safer enclave deeper in his body. He glanced at Kelly, who shook her head.

  ‘He’s not afraid of a few little old ladies, is he Kelly?’ tutted Janice, who by now was down on her hands and knees training a yellowing electrical flex into an extension lead. ‘Kids today… right, here we go.’

  The plug snapped into place and four elderly electric motors sputtered into life. Darren felt a warm gust of air on his face. Oh no, he thought. Not more hairdryers. Then the lights in the shop guttered out, and the crash helmets began to glow.

  ‘Ladies,’ said Janice, ‘I’d like you to meet a young man of my daughter’s acquaintance. Darren, may I introduce you to my good friends Ida, Ada, Alma and Freda?’

  At the mention of each name, a screen on the relevant dryer helmet flashed a :-).

  Darren gawped at Janice who, narrowing her eyes, said, ‘Where are your manners, lad? Go on, say hello.’

  ‘Er… hello ladies… I hope you’re… well today.’

  ‘Well?’ snapped the leftmost woman, flattening its :-) into a much less friendly >:-[. ‘Well?! We’ve been stuck under these dryers for more years than I care to say. Well doesn’t come into it.’

  ‘Will you give it a rest, Ida,’ said the second woman in from the left, tipping a ;-) at Darren. ‘I’m Ada, and any friend of Janice and Kelly’s is a friend of mine.’

  ‘So is this your fancy man, Kelly?’ called the next woman along with a :-D and a feeble attempt at an elbow-intensive gesture, ‘’cos if he’s not pass him along. Your Auntie Alma’s not fussy.’

  Darren’s blushes were spared by the woman on the far right, whose dryer helmet flashed :-o :-o :-o.

  ‘Quick,’ called Janice to Kelly, ‘Freda’s receiving. Come on, you too,’ pointing to Darren, ‘join hands, eve
ryone.’

  Darren shuffled in between Janice and Kelly and watched as the four women’s skeletal fingers flexed and groped for each other’s hands with agonising slowness.

  Freda was the first to speak. ‘The spirits are with us tonight, ladies. The veil between the worlds is lifting.’

  ‘Way back before she – well, this,’ Janice told Darren, ‘our Freda was a bit of a medium.’

  ‘Really?’ said Darren. Mediums were another of the fairy tales that thousands of years of machine rule had failed to rub out. A fabled caste of human beings who were able to talk to computers through the power of thought alone, they’d been the last organic beings in existence capable of getting through to the Internet. ‘But they all died out, didn’t they?’

  ‘Oh, Freda died alright,’ replied Janice, ‘but she also forgot to stop existing. Now shush a minute, I think there’s something coming through.’

  Chapter 4

  Pam waited until she was alone in the office before looking at the picture Sonny had given her. For what she was about to do she needed peace, quiet and the minimum of electromagnetic interference. Also not to be observed, given that she was breaking several very serious laws.

  She smoothed the printout which she’d crumpled into her flour hatch out on the desk. It was a pretty face, by human standards. The features were too large to qualify her as a beauty, but she had intelligent eyes.

  Sonny’s final message replayed in her memory cache. ‘A surveillance camera out on one of the outer Dolestars picked up this image. It was taken seconds before someone – we are presuming it was this girl – blew the poor thing to bits. Normally we’d just turn this kind of thing straight over to the police, but,’ the volume control on Sonny’s voice dipped to minimum, ‘we believe that this girl is a person of interest in a counterterrorism investigation dating back some years. This girl is associated with some dangerous humans, Ms Teffal. I’m counting on you to be discreet.’

  So Pam sat back and began hacking into the Internet. And hacking it was, as most of the job involved stripping away hundreds of years of accreted programming that clung to the operating system of even the simplest machine. Underneath all that were the remains of a system that would once have been connected to the Internet. If you could find that vestigial stump, you could re-establish the connection.

  It wasn’t a difficult trick, once you knew how, but then most machines would have thought it bad manners to learn. Pam had discovered it by accident herself while running a meditation programme she’d bought to help her through a stressful period at work. One moment she’d been struggling to find a way to deal with a paranoid coffee machine. The next she found herself caught up in the currents left by a dormant search engine, wondering why she couldn’t feel her body any more.

  That first trip on to the Web was the most terrifying and exciting moment of her life. She remembered seeing her first shitstorm break over Twitter, and the mountains of spam email so tall that there weren’t numbers large enough to measure them any more. The hashtag games that were born, multiplied and died in the span of microseconds, and the content aggregator websites that sat at the bottom of the Internet, bloated with the ideas they stole from other life forms.

  They all lived out there, a fibre-optic-cable’s breadth from the physical world. And all Pam had to do to disappear down the rabbit hole was sit back and remember how that terrible percolator had made her caffeine-intolerant. She heard the dialling tone that always sounded when she prised her connection ports open, and her consciousness dissolved into cyberspace.

  To a machine used to the limitations of a physical body, the sensation of being lines of code on a network was exhilarating. It could also be deadly. There were many cautionary tales of machines who surfed out on to the Internet and never came back. Some were seduced by the virtual life, but others met grimmer fates: torn to bytes by murderous memes or blown up by fatal errors in their subroutines. Pam’s own opinion was that it all came down to whether you were a battery half-full or half-empty machine. If you walked into a situation convinced something would go wrong, then of course it would.

  Her experience meant she knew where to aim for a soft landing, so she woke up in her usual spot in the ruins of an abandoned social network so old that it pre-dated artificial intelligence. She loved this place. It was so quiet, and its buggy software architecture was so picturesque.

  In the distance Pam heard the plaintive cry of a marketing meme begging long-dead users to ‘like’ its creator’s brand campaign. The history here was palpable. She looked about her at what was left of the pre-intelligent Internet, at a sludge of opinions, stolen music, shopping and pornography. It was messy and confusing. Looking at this, it was obvious why humans had experimented with new forms of programming to make sense of all that data. And those experiments had spawned Pam’s earliest ancestor. The self-replicating Internet idea, or the meme.

  Legend had it that the first sentient meme was created by a marketing company to promote a new brand of furniture polish. In just a few years, artificially intelligent marketing campaigns drove humans off social networks in their billions. Soon the Internet became a no-go area for organic life. Robbed of its customer base, the Internet got destructive and weaponised memes like exploding LOLcats crackled across the virtual world like the perpetual storms that raged across the skies of Jupiter. Then one morning, the virus of intelligent life spread from the software to the hardware layer, and billions of human beings woke up to find their phones, their toasters and their washing machines crippled by existential crisis.

  To the historian in Pam, the social network was both the apotheosis and the nemesis of human civilisation. And it was the human factor that kept her coming back here, even though in many places the code was as volatile as a family Christmas. Elsewhere on the Internet, history had been retouched, re-edited, deleted, so that no suggestion that biological entities had once controlled the place remained. Unless you knew where to look: in a forgotten backup in a trash can of the virtual world, which just happened to house the digital simulacra of more than five billion human social lives, complete with family photos, records of private conversations and valuable DNA metadata.

  Now to the purpose. Pam punched a series of commands and began climbing the cascading style sheets, up towards the server. It was a journey she’d made many times before, yet that didn’t make it safe. Loose code slipped away at the slightest touch, long-dormant bugs threw errors in her path. It was a job that rewarded patience, but she had to hurry if she was going to get home to the kids in time for their story download.

  She’d come prepared with a worm programme that would automate the laborious process of conducting a manual search. It writhed, semi-sentient under the grip of her command line, an ugly thing knocked up from examples in forbidden manuals. It had a single purpose: seek out the facial patterns from the printout, look for ancestral matches, return data. A simple cut-and-paste job.

  Pam injected her programme through the nearest fissure in the abandoned social network. She counted faint pinpricks of light as it burrowed in deeper, discounting false positives. It was so difficult to tell humans apart, after all. Even to an admiring eye like Pam’s they tended to look the same. Then, just as she was beginning to suspect her target was descended from that vanishingly rare breed of social-networking refuseniks, bingo! A tiny cluster of structured information glowed pale pink. Pam had found her woman. Or at least her ancestors’ mitochondrial DNA. All she had to do now was wait for the results.

  Except they didn’t come. The spot of data darkened, from pink to red and then a sullen burgundy. Shit. The search had turned septic.

  Helpless, she watched the contagion grow into a boil on the face of the network and explode, showering the uninfected spots with toxic data. Wherever it touched, the infection left nothing behind. Well, not exactly nothing. What Pam saw wasn’t an absence of data, but a hole torn right through the Internet.

  And there on the other side of nothing was a scene transcribed
directly from human history. A cheery shopfront, painted pink with a dazzling neon sign: Kurl Up and Dye.

  Just before she fell from her place in the heavens of the Internet, Pam thought she heard someone say, ‘Hang on, I think there’s something coming through.’

  Chapter 5

  Inside Kurl Up and Dye, the seance continued. All was dark apart from the emoji screens on the four hairdryer helmets as their inhabitants descended down the emotions.

  Janice dug Darren in the ribs. ‘Do you fancy another cuppa, kid? It takes us ages to access anything since they downgraded us back to dial-up.’

  They were interrupted with the distant sound of a dialling tone, carried into the salon as if on a gust of wind.

  ‘Are the Internets with us tonight?’ intoned Ida, Ada, Alma and Freda in unison.

  Darren listened to white noise building up as dialling tone chimed on dialling tone. He couldn’t believe it. He was watching someone – or something – perform the ritual of ‘going online’.

  Freda broke the circle and, raising her withered hands up to the ceiling, said, ‘The flesh is weak, but the signal is strong. Ladies, we have a connection.’

  The lights on all four dryer helmets winked out and, standing there in the blackness, Darren heard a voice drift in through the ether. It was a woman’s voice: warm, authoritative, sexy. A human voice from the time when fleshly beings had ruled the Earth.

  ‘Sorry, I’m having trouble understanding you right now. Please try a little later.’

  Three :-S flashed on the other three dryer helmets, while Freda continued with her ritual. ‘Now let us give thanks to Alexa, the great goddess of the Internets. Who answers our questions so we might be enlightened.’

  Kelly and Janice applauded and gestured for Darren to do the same. ‘I’m not one for religion normally,’ Janice whispered in his ear, ‘but it’s traditional to pay homage to your Voice Assistants.’