Arms Race (11 page)

I laughed at my own wit. I laughed, but the spectre of scandal had been raised, and
now it must be drowned.

I took up my pipe, and turned the ivory in my hand. The piece was old, from a bazaar
in Rangoon. I turned down the lamps and opened my pores, and I bent to the flame.
I took the future into my lungs.

We are not here to forget what we have done, I said, letting the smoke curl between
us, thin and lazy, a riddle too banal to solve. We are not fools. The past will not
hurt us.
It is the future we must forget. We are here to escape what we will surely
do.

From the river, the deranged stridency of frogs. Sweat ran and dripped from my brow
in quickening rhythms. I drew down again upon the smoke, and I closed my eyes and
it was suddenly there above us: the great wounded bird of progress. Steel talons
reaching forth, its eyes put out, buckshot burning in its wings. The limestone crags
were lit with fire, horizon to horizon, the clouds aflame. The jungle should burn
and the cities should burn. I heard a mechanical screaming, felt iron and bone beneath
my skin, saw her face, saw fields of corpses, cities of glass, cities of tents, rivers
of ice, of people, faces, dreams, light, all—cancelled.

I lunged towards the native and the table tipped. The lanterns fell, blue fire breaking
in waves across the ground. He leapt back from his chair, and I was in the dirt on
my hands and knees.

The future must never reach us here, I cried out. Never. Surely you must understand.

Luang stood away at a distance, looking like one who has eaten meat that has turned.
Then he came slowly forward, and crouched and peered into my face, and his eyes softened.
I saw then that he had not understood. He had not understood at all.

DATA FURNACE

I TAKE the London Overground to work—on foot. Snow crunches and squeaks beneath my
boots. The last train to run this line's a rusted carcass, buried in a snowdrift
at the bottom of the Surrey Quays cutting.

I work in IT. Before the Switch I was fat and timid, and I thought it was my fault.
It's amazing how little of anything is your fault. Live in an era where you stumble
out of bed and catch the train to work: you're fat. Live in an era where you stumble
to work in knee-deep snow: no gym class can match that. I feel fit and decisive.

I leave the train line and cross the ice downriver of Tower Bridge. The wind-blasted
shell of City Hall, the gutted apartments along the reach of the Thames, the abandoned
spires of the City: they're all so deformed by frost
they look like they were designed
by children. An evacuation plane struggles overhead. I choose not to watch. It feels
like every last breath of heat has been sucked from the world.

Which is typical, really. The rest of the planet's on its way to burning up, and
we get an ice age. Thank you, Britain, you miserable bastard.

From Wapping I detour west to wait for my workmate Umi in the usual spot, beneath
the memorial to the Great Fire of London. I don't know how you'd commemorate the
desperate bonfire that's consuming the city today. When the freeze slammed down it
was firewood and coal first, then the Regency tables and Ikea chairs, the carpets
and floorboards, staircases and doors, towels, TVs, PlayStations, sex toys, tyres,
dead animals, corpses—all burned.

I check my phone. Seven forty-eight. Umi's running late, but then, she's not expecting
me. I've been at the airport for the best part of a month, waiting with my family
for an evac flight. I click the phone off and check my reflection in the empty screen:
a small, hopeful face smudged behind thick glasses and beard. An old man's face,
Marie says, though I'm not yet forty. I blink, trying to remember my speech.

Footsteps make me turn. At the edge of the square, a tall figure in blazing red stands
in the cold steel light.

George?

Umi! I yell.

She strides across the square, her energetic face full of worry. What happened to
your flight?

Marie and Jordan made it out, I say. Last night.

What about you?

I meet Umi's gaze, and just like that my decisiveness flees. I look away.

Tell me you didn't put off leaving
again
, Umi says.

No, I mumble. I—missed the plane.

Oh, George! Umi says, with such exasperation that I realise this is the easiest lie.
No one would believe me capable of more, or less.

They called the names and ten minutes later it was gone, I say. I was getting coffee.

Umi's hand goes to her mouth.

It wasn't even a very good coffee. The milk was burned.

George! Where are Marie and Jordan? Do you know who took them in?

I shake my head.

You should be at the airport. Find where they landed, get the next flight.

They said I had no chance. Miss a flight, back of the queue. It'll be months.

I know people at London City Airport. Let me make some calls.

The airports are all shutting down for winter, Umi. Maybe for good.

We'll find you
the money for a private evac. It's not—

I'm bloody well staying! I shout.

I'm not sure which of us is more surprised. In the silence that follows, I hear someone
singing, slow and childlike, in a neighbouring street.

Umi stares at me. You still don't want to leave, do you?

You don't, I say. You think
we're going to be fine. You think humans can adapt. You've told me a thousand—

I'm not married, George.

I don't want to talk about it, I say. Let's go to work.

Umi stamps her feet in the cold. Your wife and son are gone, and you're coming in
to work?

We're out of coffee at home.

Stop it.

Well, how else am I going to keep warm?

Umi looks up at the monument's frozen flame. Good question, she says.

Work is the Isle of Dogs Secure Data Centre. Umi and I are systems administrators.
We've got four thousand servers locked in an old Victorian factory, hosting most
of what's left of Britain's internet. The building's a jumble of towers, silos and
gantries, built like an industrial cathedral, so heavy and sheer it could have been
carved from solid brick. A flaking billboard takes up half the back wall. The slogan's
gone, but you can still make out a woman's
giant face. She looks like Margaret Thatcher,
only hot, and encased in ice.

Inside the front door, I lean my baseball bat in the corner and brush snow from my
beard. It's been a month but nothing's changed. Old Man Canary's already awake. He's
a cheerful old homeless guy the boss lets live in the stairwell. His rheumy eyes
peer out at us from his nest of green sleeping bags.

Back? he says, giving me a gummy grin.

I missed you too much, I say.

Here you go, friend, Umi says.

Today she's brought him two bread rolls. He pops one under each armpit to thaw. She
films him on her phone.

Yes! he chortles. Winning!

Umi uploads the clip on our way up the stairs. The heat-stroked outside world is
obsessed with videos of the stupid shit people do here to keep warm. My favourite's
a group of teenagers driving a herd of cows up the stairs to their Hyde Park penthouse
squat.

I'm smiling when we reach the disguised security door on the top floor, but straight
away I get the feeling something's wrong. Umi's stopped talking, and I realise it's
dangerously quiet. She opens the rusted fuse box on the wall and presses her thumb
to the scanner. The door hisses open.

After the derelict stairwell it's like walking into a spaceship: long, gleaming aisles
of black servers stacked
ten high in glass-fronted cabinets. Bundles of cable branch
overhead like arteries. Dotted among the servers are the towering remnants of the
original factory machinery, all soot-iron black and thick with rust. High windows
throw a glacial light across the ancient engines, pistons and gears. Everything stands
dormant, like the frozen carcasses of long extinct species. Without the heat from
the server exhaust fans it's unbelievably cold.

On the far side of the room Joe, the old French guy who owns the place, is sitting
on the edge of his desk. He knocks snow from his woollen cap onto the floor. He looks
round and his smile drops away.

George! he barks. You put off going
again
?

I missed my flight, I say, crossing the floor. What's going on?

Your
flight? Joe says. What about Marie, and—

Gone, I say. Safe. Given a knighthood.

But—

Why's everything off?

Joe stares at me, and shakes his head. It's time for me to go too, he says.

I feel like I've been winded.

You see this? Joe says, and for the first time I notice his swollen face. I got jumped
in Greenwich. They shot my outrider and I was lucky to get away. I can't wait for
winter either; I'm not getting any younger. I hate to shut this place down, but I
have to go.

I don't know what to say. I look over at Umi. Normally she's so full of ideas that
there's no point in bothering with your own. Now she just shrugs. I give her a look
like, what the hell—you knew about this?

What are we supposed to do? I say to Joe.

I waited till you were meant to be gone, he says. Go back to the airport.

You can't leave.

Joe raises his frosty eyebrows.

It can't last, I say. It switched, so it has to switch back. It's not so bad.

Joe crosses to the fire door. He shoots back the bolts and swings it open. Sunlight
slices across the vast confusion of snow-collapsed roofs. In the distance, the toppled
London Eye looks more like an ear.

Not so bad? he says.

Could be worse.

Joe laughs. It
will
be worse, and you're too scared to move. Did you ever hear about
how to boil a frog?

How to
what
?

Boil a frog. You take a frog, and put him in a pot of boiling water, and he jumps
right out. But you put him in cold water and turn up the heat, nice and slow? He
stays until he is cooked.

The old geezer's lost his mind.

He gestures to the fire escape. I've put it off long enough, he says. Sometimes you
just know when it's time to jump.

What, out the fire escape?

A metaphor, George. I'm going to Laos.

When? I ask.

Joe checks the time on his phone. Soon.

Today?

Umi's already shut most of this down. We weld the doors shut, and if things get better
like you say, we'll come back.

You're just abandoning all this?

Joe looks pained. What can I do? We've abandoned the whole country. I lock up, and
I hope.

I want to argue, but I don't know where to begin. In my family a crisis was something
you solved with cleaning products. I clear my desk in silence, while Umi goes to
shut off the back-up generators and double-check that the fire escape is bolted.
We herd Old Man Canary out the front door and into the snow.

Leaving? Canary says. No no no.

Yes yes yes, I say. Joe's going somewhere warm.

Canary's eyes light up.
Warm?
he says.

Sorry, I say, putting an arm around his shoulders. Not us.

We stand around while a pug-faced bloke welds steel bars across the door. The acetylene
snarls and cracks. The surrounding factories and warehouses are locked and dark.
Joe tries to give us money. I try to refuse but end up taking it. Canary starts shouting,
and Joe gets upset and leaves without even shaking our hands. It all falls apart
so quickly.

I sit in the snow and close my eyes and try not to think. Marie says it's one of
my talents. I try not to think about her packed into the belly of the enormous army
plane, holding Jordan close as the noise of the propellers rose to a howl. She could
have gotten off, but she didn't. I hear Old Man Canary muttering as he wanders away
somewhere, probably to die. Sleep rough these days, and in the morning they prise
you off the footpath with a shovel. Umi's voice, talking on her phone, fades into
the distance, and then there's just the wind blustering around the factory eaves.

I missed my flight for this.

Footsteps approach, and I open my eyes. It's Umi. She crouches at my side, her breath
blowing clouds. I squint up at her.

Cheer up, she says, grinning. I've found somewhere we can go.

Sure, I say, my teeth chattering. The Harrods sale?

It's close by. And it's got a furnace.

There's nothing left to burn, Umi.

There's one thing left.

What?

Data. C'mon.

It sounds like she's lost her mind too. But there's a confidence in her voice that,
right now, is as enticing as a hot bath. I stumble to my feet.

We only get as far as the back of the factory. Umi points to the wooden fire escape
zigzagging up the wall. The door at the top is set in the old billboard, exactly
where Margaret Thatcher's giant right eye should be. It looks like the Iron Lady's
winking at us.

There, Umi says. I didn't check the fire door—I unlocked it.

It takes a second for this to register. Something leaps in me.

Oh my god, I say. We can go
in
the fire escape?

Yes. Joe left me to shut everything down. I just took out the fuses. We turn everything
on and we're live.

What if he comes back? I ask.

Umi smiles. No one comes back. Except you.

We laugh, and I feel weak with relief. My brain's going
ohmygodohmygodohmygod
.

Umi boosts me, scrabbling and kicking, onto the bottom rung of the fire escape. I
nearly lose my glasses. It's high and windy, the narrow stairs slick with ice. The
whole dim sweep of the frozen docks falls away at my feet. It looks like the Thames
is filled with ash. At the top I give the door a tug.