Midnight Lamp (18 page)

‘I shouldn’t have said yes. Ax, I… I…could have killed you.’

‘I could kill you, Fiorinda. With my bare hands, probably, if you didn’t use your magic. And I
have
killed people, unlike you, protector of the poor. You’ve trusted yourself to my arms time and again. Why shouldn’t I do the same?’

A few inches away the storm howled, wild and tremendous. Ax stroked her hair, dear to him even in ruins, put his arms around her and drew her close, and a flying palm branch
crashed
against the glass. Fiorinda gasped, and pushed him away, blank terror and panic in her eyes.

‘Augh!’ she cried. ‘The paparazzi van! I think they’re still out there!’

She jumped up and ran, her shawl flying behind her. Ax and Sage were left stranded, in hope and dread, fully aware of the danger they were in, stone cold sure there was no other way. No way to win but by risking everything.

The paparazzi van had been picked up and thrown across the soft slope that led down to the ocean. The surveillance team and their armed support had managed to get out of the wreck. When the Rugrat arrived they were staggering in the blast, gathered round an injured team-mate. The air was full of whipped sand and water, flying gouts of spume. The noise of wind and waves was incredible.

Doug Hutton got out. The Rugrat only moved for its personal owners: but they could assign another driver. Fiorinda had come to the gatehouse in her nightdress and a waterproof, ordered them out here, and assigned Doug. ‘Come on,’ he shouted. ‘Let’s have yer. Not even peeping Toms deserve to be out in this. Git yer arses in the car.’

Ax approached his lunchdate with Lou Branco in a fairly confident frame of mind, only mildly irritated by the automatic limo that was sent to fetch him (hate those things). Who’s Lou Branco? The most powerful agent in town. He handles everything, nothing escapes him, he never makes a mistake. With Lou on board Harry’s project was bound for glory, but the great man must be handled with extreme care. Ax had been briefed, and done his own research. He was ready for off the wall opinions and strange questions: he thought he could handle one more capricious emperor, after all these years.

The limo took him to a brazen tower in searing, gridlocked Downtown; a perfect young woman showed him to a hushed reception area. He was provided with glossy magazines on an e-reader and a tray of snacks, and left to wait. Here am I, he thought, pure-minded guitar-boy from Taunton, dealing with the entertainment industry, the parasite that ate the world, on a level the most rich-as-fuck sell-out rock gods barely reach. The ghost of a very long buried Ax Preston stirred, and he laughed. The receptionist behind the desk, another perfect young woman, smiled at him uneasily.

Wonder if she’s real.

Mr Branco appeared at last, dressed for a game of golf: the barrel-bodied toad Ax remembered from the Pergola party, but sober. He spoke warmly to his receptionist, and gave Ax a shifty, flat-eyed look.

‘I hope you didn’t mind me sending the car?’

Oh, so the limo can be a put-down, in Hollywood syntax. Always grateful for local information. ‘Not at all.’

They went around the corner, walking in the astonishing heat and glare and eye-stinging fumes of downtown, to an intimate little Vietnamese kitchen. The restaurants Mr Branco had mentioned at the Pergola had been show-off venues: this was not one of those. Hm, thought Ax. Something going on. Maybe he’s promoted me to best-buddy secret lunch counter status. Or maybe not.

‘Is this place okay?’ asked Mr Branco, airily, as they sat down. ‘D’you like Vietnamese food? I’m expecting a call. I thought, I should choose somewhere you wouldn’t be embarrassed if I have to run and leave you with the check.’

‘This is fine,’ said Ax, wondering what the hell was up. ‘Whatever suits you.’

They ordered noodles. Hollywood’s most powerful agent looked thwarted when Ax proved able to handle a pair of chopsticks. ‘Now, about Harry’s movie. I have to tell you, Ax, there’s things that worry me.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘This is a story about rockstars. But your uh, band, the Chosen Few, never had a record deal. You never had a US tour either, am I right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You were burning your albums in de back bedroom in de projects, Mom and Pop helping out, managing yourselves and peddling the music over the internet. Until the net in Europe collapsed.’

‘We made a reasonable living, mainly from our live gigs.’

‘That’s very cute, I love it, and the little British pay-download site. But e-commerce with Europe is something US citizens still don’t want to mess with, and over here you have nothing, except in the used and obsolete format import stores, am I right? So we have Sage, whose records are banned in seventeen states, which doesn’t work for me at all. And that’s it. You’re a complete unknown, and so is your, uh, nice little girlfriend. Look, Ax, I don’t know. A movie about rockstars is a longshot. What is there that comes to mind? There’s “Spinal Tap”. But when that came out the general public had heard of Spinal Tap, even if they were only funny, stupid English has-beens. The average American has never heard of you guys.’

‘I see.’

‘Your little amateur Brit net videos may be very amusing, but who’s seen them? It’s not enough, I’m sorry. I don’t know what we can do with this.’

Amateur videos. A light dawns. Oooh,
fuck
.

Ax concentrated on his noodles. ‘This is very good food,’ he said, after a moment, looking up with a flashing smile. ‘Thanks for bringing me here. You know, I can see why people love LA.’

Sage had taken his board to Janelle’s cottage, to trade information. They worked in her tiny studio, and talked about the virtual movies. Emotional triggers,
qualia
triggers. How to write code that will step-up for the controlled-space venues: but step down smoothly for home use, or a conventional theatre—where the movie is being delivered to several hundred, a thousand, different sets of wiring—

‘The people still want to go out and sit in the dark together,’ said Janelle, ‘even if they’re paying hellish prices for the gas to drive there: and we like that, it’s hugely valuable for the associated retail, including our cut of the gas money. It’s a constraint. We have more and more custom-built venues, which means more and more people finding out what virtual movies can really do. But we’re legally obliged to keep the immix, what we call DCD, direct cortical delivery, to a minimum, and we don’t push that limit. You can tell them to take the risk, Mr RockGod Genius. We can’t. We have to obey the mass market.’

‘Right.’ It was news to Sage that he was an effete pure artist. But you accept the jibes, because you know why—

‘But we have our dirty tricks.’

‘Janelle, it’s all dirty tricks. Everything that goes on in the brain is cut and paste, make-do, recycling and gaffer tape, it’s amazing we can even get around.’

‘Heheheh. No one’s as dirty as me. Try this.’

The screen image, notebook flat, showed a tall young woman with buck teeth, in period costume, sitting alone in a darkening arbour. It had the slightly
off
finish inherent to digitised graphics. ‘Now with the qualia triggers.’ Instantly, the scene had the quality of an outdoor recording, twenty four frames a second, on silver-nitrate coated celluloid. ‘Eleanor Roosevelt,’ said Janelle’s voice, ‘She’s just discovered her young husband, the rising FDR, in his first major infidelity. She’s in love, betrayed, she knows it won’t stop, but she’s deciding to live with it, because the marriage is the best deal she can get. You notice the way I make it feel like film? That’s a trick in itself, and it pisses the classic movie people off, but they can’t stop us. Unmediated code-built perceptions, the kind you give them at your gigs, don’t sell. The mass market can’t handle more than 3% reality. Are you ready for the emotional triggers?’

The arbour implicit, the synasthesia of this darkening grove with grief and shame and desolation, bitter fury you must suppress forever
—

The awful pain was Fiorinda’s.

‘Whaddya think?’

‘I think I’d rather be poked in the eye with a sharp stick. I’m impressed.’

‘Is this the writer of
Arbeit
talking? Well, there she is. The greatest American that ever lived, and I made her. I made her, the way she feels inside.’

‘She founded the UN or something, didn’t she? Hmm.’

‘Nyah, you English are such fucking cynics. Okay, that’s what immix code has done for the virtual movie business, for which we thank you kindly. We don’t have to sweat our guts out pixel by pixel, creating emotion out of light and shadow. We can lie about the quality of the illusion, direct to those frisky, trusting little neurons.’

Sage was trying out the wireless contact lenses that virtual reality designers in the US used now, in place of eyewrap technology. They process photonic code, and they have a working memory… You have to blink, in a controlled manner, to get the virtual movie to reveal its secrets: then you can read the structure of the extra information that your eyes are receiving, riding on the visible light—

‘The Eleanor movie… Does that make you one of the people whose project didn’t get the money, because the studio gave it to Harry?’

‘I wish I could say yes, but I’m not even at the end of that line. Don’t feel bad: I couldn’t stand to make Eleanor as a three-percent studio release. One day, when I’m old and rich, I’ll do her the way I want her. I can live on the dream.’

He blinked and looked around: Janelle’s face an iridescent blur through the veil. She was grinning. ‘How does it feel, seeing the world through my eyes?’

‘Excellent. Can I open a clear window, so I can see out while I’m working?’

‘No, but it’s not a problem. You keep a pair of fx blocking eyeglasses by you. If you like ’em, coding lenses you shall have. They cost, but Digital Artists can afford a few freebies. When did he take over, Sage?’

‘Who?’

‘Ax Preston. You were
Aoxomoxoa
. You were the one with the screaming hordes of fans. I was just wondering: how come
you
didn’t end up king?’

‘He didn’t take over.’ Sage gazed into the code, his hands moving over the toggles on his board, finding out what she did: getting the feel of this. ‘We gave him the job. Janelle, we were a bunch of arrogant, talented kids, who thought it was cool to be up close to the momentous events of our times. So young, unbelievably young it seems now. One night at a government reception, the guns started blazing and we didn’t have a clue… I’d seen friends and strangers mown down in front of me. I’d been beaten up, I’d had to do whatever the revolutionary goons wanted. Then this guitarist guy, who had saved our lives—I’d known him for years, and thought he was a jerk, but also,’ A private grin, ‘somehow an attractive person. Well, he had a plan. He said
follow me,
so I did.’

‘And on this rock Ax Preston will build his church?’

‘Nah, nothing like that. If you’re looking for a new religion, Ax is not your man. I thought you were Jewish, anyway?’

‘Halfbreed, by ethnicity only. Allie Marlowe’s Jewish, isn’t she? Your fashion princess office manager. Tell me, how does she like “
Arbeit Macht Frei
?”’

‘Not a lot. Are they still running Hollywood?’

‘You bet. Where do you stand on all that, by the way? Islam versus the West?’

‘Ooh, a plague on both their houses, what else? That whole thing is a deadly distraction from the main event, it’s a waste of time. Okay, now I show you mine. What do you want to know about the Zen Self?’

‘Anything a humble movie-techie can understand. Hey, you better take out the lenses, that’s enough for a first trial.’

She took the contacts from him, warm and sticky from his body, and dunked them into the miniature autoclave that stood on the desk beside her. ‘One day we’ll have
disposable
super-computers you can wear on your eyeballs, my God, but so far, you get a good pair of these you treasure them like you treasure your eyes… I keep two pairs, more I could not afford. You know, there’s one thing I can’t figure. European fusion consciousness experts don’t believe the Pentagon project can produce a weapon?’

‘We think they’re heading up a blind alley.’

‘It’s impossible, but you want the research stopped anyway. Right.’ She gave him a sidelong glance. ‘But if the brain-lab process can’t make a human weapon, how come you beat Rufus? Can you tell me that? Or is it top secret?’

‘By convincing him to try arm-wrestling with me, basically.’

‘Huh?’

‘If he hadn’t accepted the challenge I couldn’t have touched him. It had to be of his own free will. I’m going to need to install some stuff, in a temporary buffer, it’ll vanish in a few hours. Is that okay?’

‘Sure. Fuck, is that the deal? Fusion consciousness gives you superpowers, but no first strike capability? You can’t use them, like, for profit, or in anger?’

‘No, Janelle. The science is neutral, as always, and the barriers the Pentagon effort faces are technical. I’m telling you what happened to me.’

Their eyes met, and she felt a shiver of awe:
he truly knows, he has truly been beyond…
Then he smiled, a grim little smile that changed his beautiful, wide open face. ‘But I knew he would fight, Jan, and I knew I would win. That wasn’t a duel, that was premeditated murder. He didn’t have a chance.’