I Still Dream

‘That’s all anybody wants,’ I tell him. I want to be nice. I want to empathise. ‘They want to be a part of a thing they love, and have that be, I don’t know, a legacy.’ It’s strange, hearing my own voice in the room. Makes me realise how quietly he’d been speaking.

He smiles. ‘You’re smart,’ he says. But he sounds really sad as he says it.

‘Don’t you want to know how I found you?’ I ask.

‘I don’t care. I guess it was Organon?’ I don’t reply. ‘It’s broken. Ruined my life because it’s broken.’ I don’t say: I’m not sure it is. Because I can see that he already knows, or suspects, and he can’t quite put the pieces together.

Or, he doesn’t want to.

I can’t pretend that I don’t see where he’s coming from.

I check that his computer is wiped. I format the drive, and we sit there while the little bar fills. I don’t bother reinstalling anything for him. This isn’t my problem, now. I take my zip drive and his blank disks, and he doesn’t say a word. Doesn’t complain. He can’t.

‘You didn’t tell anybody at school what happened, did you?’ he asks.

‘No,’ I say.

‘I appreciate that. I really appreciate that. I’m going to call them. Tell them I’ve been ill, that I’ll be back. On Monday.’ He’s hesitant as he says it. I think he wants my permission; or, at least, me to not deny him it.

I don’t. I can’t be bothered. He’s not worth it.

Then I’m out of his house, onto the streets of Perivale. I walk back to the bus stop, but I’ve barely been there a second when it arrives; and this time the bus is heaving, so busy that I have to stand all the way back to school, armed with my suddenly-feeling-better insides and soppily apologetic eyes. And, in my bag, my zip drive, and the copy of Organon. I feel around the outside of the fabric, to hold the shape of it in my hand. How comforting it is to have it back.

‘So where did you go?’ Nadine asks me. We’re sitting with lunch, which today is sausage rolls and chips, only I don’t want the chips, so I’ve got two sausage rolls and four sachets of tomato sauce. I’m squeezing them all out into a giant puddle of red, while she sits opposite me. She’s just got the chips, a big plate of them. Douses them with too much vinegar. ‘You have to tell me.’

I don’t say: No I don’t. ‘I forgot about some homework, for maths. Had to go and do it. It’s like a project thing, I left a bit at home.’ It’s a calculated lie, because she doesn’t actually care enough to bother checking, to ask anybody else I’m in the class with if they had to do the same. She’ll have forgotten by the time she’s five chips down.

‘Jesus. Ugh. I thought it would at least have been something exciting.’ She reaches over, dips one of her vinegary chips into my ketchup. ‘We still on for tomorrow night? Gavin keeps asking. I was talking to Darren last night, and he said—’

‘I’ll be there,’ I say.

‘Darren says his mum and dad are away.’ I know where she’s going with it, and I won’t entertain her. ‘I’m going to go back with him. So you can come, with Gavin, if you like.’ She leaves it hanging there, knowing I won’t reply. Knowing I don’t like Gavin, and not caring. Maybe even knowing that I’m not even sure I like Nadine any more.

At my feet, the contents of my rucksack – the floppy disks, the zip drive, everything I want to check and wipe and clean and even maybe destroy – is burning a hole right through the fabric, straight down, through the floor.

* * *

When I get home, the house is quiet. There’s a message on the answering machine. ‘Laura, I’m going to be late tonight. We’ve got issues with next year’s prospectus. I’ll be quite late, maybe even after dinner.’ It’s Mum. ‘Can you tell Paul to get fish and chips or something? Or whatever you want. Have a takeaway, don’t worry about saving anything for me. I don’t know what time I’ll be home.’

Whatever. I run upstairs, tip my bag open onto my floor, sort through the disks. Put them into piles, stack them on the desk, next to the drive. I’ll use them, that’s fine. Always need more disks. I switch on the computer, turn on the modem. Connect. I make the little Internet noise – reee-eee-eee-e-ee – out loud, while the light flickers. Paul hates that noise. Doesn’t understand why it’s needed. I told him – because I read about it – that it’s in case somebody needs to fix a problem. It’s what’s going on; it lets you hear the quality of the line, of the connection. It’s the hardware telling you that everything’s okay.

I’ve got another email from Shawn. The same stupid questions that don’t really mean anything, that tell me nothing. Placation responses to my last email. I’m sorry you feel that way. Is everything okay? Do you want to talk more about it? Underneath them, he’s printed his address in this weird formal way, like it’s come out of an address book. I can’t remember that I’ve ever seen an American address before. I look at my tape deck, at the cassette that’s inside it.

The mixtape isn’t for him, I don’t think. I think it’s really for me.

I’ve got another email, from an address I don’t recognise. [e-mail]. I open it, and I read the first few lines, and then read them again. I scan to the end, read the name that signed it. I check the address it came from, that it’s actually the website it claims to be.

When I’m satisfied it’s not a lie, I shut down my computer, and I wait for my mum to come home; to ask her about Mark Ocean, the man she always said betrayed my dad, but who’s now written to me to offer me a job.

Paul’s passed out in front of Crimewatch when I hear the front door latch turning. Mum creeps in almost comically. Sees me in the hallway, and she says, ‘Oh! Laura,’ in such a weird, stilted voice that I know she’s hammered. This is what she means by working late. This was her important deadline. I put my finger up to my lips, and I point with the other hand to Paul, head rocked back, body slumped, as if he’s going to be swallowed whole by the cushions around him. She nods.

She follows me to the kitchen, and goes straight for a big glass of cold water, necked back in one, while I lean against the kitchen table. She’s pouring the second glass when she looks up at me.

‘Are you all right?’ she asks. There’s only a slight slur, but it’s enough.

‘I want to talk about Mark Ocean,’ I say.

Her face freezes rigid. ‘I don’t.’ Her eyes are more vague than I’d like, for us to be having this conversation. But one of us has to be the adult.

‘He emailed me.’

‘What?’

‘He’s offered me an internship.’

She nods. ‘Sounds like something he would do.’

‘He’s seen some weblog posts I’ve written, about AI and stuff. About computers. Said he’s been keeping a casual eye; Dad was one of his best friends—’

‘Don’t—’

‘He’s offered me an internship, Mum.’

’Don’t be ridiculous. What are you going to do, go to live in Reading and—’

‘It’s in California,’ I say. ‘Next year, the whole year.’

‘You’re going to university,’ she says. She slams the glass down on the table. ‘No.’

‘He’ll pay for me to go out there, he says. If the internship turns into a job, and he says that the odds of that are really good, Bow is only growing as a company, and—’

‘Oh for God’s sake, Laura!’ She’s on the verge of tears. I don’t know how much of this is the wine, but I haven’t seen her cry since the months after Dad left. Even then, I’m not sure I’m not just imagining it; tainted memories coming out of sad-looking photographs. ‘Why are you doing this to me? Please, tell me.’

‘I’m not doing anything,’ I say.

There’s nothing I’m not saying to her, now.

‘Your father hated him, you know. He didn’t trust him, said we shouldn’t trust him,’ she says. The flood breaks. Everybody’s crying on me, today.

‘Dad left,’ I say. ‘Maybe he’s not the best judge of who we should trust.’ That sets her crying properly. I take the glass out of her hand and move it away from her, in case, and I hold her. Her hands creep up to my arms, holding me, not quite letting me absolutely close; as if she’s ready to push me back as fast as possible, should she discover that she has to.

SATURDAY

The offer from Mark Ocean is pretty persuasive. Bow are developing their own computer language – the email says it’s real next-level stuff like you wouldn’t believe – and there’s a list of the different departments I’d get to work in over the course of the internship. Operating systems, user interfaces, artificial intelligences, data prediction. The things that, he says, will help to drive the future of computing. (And there’s a tacky bit right after that, where he writes, after a semi-colon, and maybe even the world, which could be a slogan torn right out of some marketing brochure.) All I do is go there, try it out. As part of the internship, they’ll pay for me to do my degree out there. That’s four years of study, all paid for. Mark Ocean says he feels like he owes it to my father.

In some weird way, I suppose that this is my inheritance.

I read the email over and over. Not online, because Paul would kill me, but I copy the text and paste it into a different document: sort of because I want to read it more, and sort of because I want to check it’s real, that the words aren’t going to evaporate or degrade or whatever when I do it. You have to make everything as tangible as you can, as real as it can be. But I don’t reply, not yet. I need those words to be right. When Mum wakes up, she makes me breakfast – she never does that any more, and it’s only frozen pain au chocolat, but she bakes one for herself as well, and lets me have a coffee, even though she says that it’s not good for somebody my age to get into the habit of drinking that stuff every morning. She reads the newspaper, and I read Melody Maker, which she got for me from the corner shop, and we don’t say anything, while Paul buzzes around us. It’s nice. She says she’s got to go to the shops, and asks do I want a lift into town, and I say yes, and she lets me have XFM on in the car, doesn’t even complain that they don’t do the traffic. Her car smells a bit of wine, I think, or maybe she does, but I don’t say that, and she doesn’t apologise for it. She asks me if I’m all right making my way home when I’m done, and I say that I am. Am I going out tonight? I’m meant to be seeing Nadine, I say. Don’t know if I’m going or not.

‘You should,’ she says. She doesn’t give me a reason.

I spend the afternoon drifting around clothes shops, around HMV and Our Price. I go to the library, and I get some books about artificial intelligences. More up-to-date ones than Dad’s. I sit and read one of them with a cup of hot chocolate at the café by the fountains. I don’t recognise Organon in it, in what it says that AI will one day do. I’m sort of happy about that.

When I get home, there’s a message on the machine from Mum, telling me that her and Paul are off out tonight. They’re going to the cinema – Paul loves it, Mum hates it, but I can hear her voice now: Give and take, Laura, give and take – and that she hopes I’m out as well. She’s left me twenty pounds in the thing in the kitchen. I take the handset upstairs with me, to call Nadine, tell her – or, hopefully, her crazy mother, if Nadine’s already out – that I’m not going tonight. That Gavin’s going to have to find the prospect of his own company enticing enough. When I’m waiting for her to answer, I picture her seething with me. On her own, and there’ll be other people there, sure, but she wanted me. Even if it’s nothing to do with Gavin, she wanted me. Gavin can fuck off. I don’t like him, and I don’t want him anywhere near me. But that’s not Nadine’s fault. When her machine kicks in, I leave a message telling her that I’ll see her at the Chinese near Finnegan’s first. Maybe we could get some of those sweet and sour chicken balls before we go to the pub. Sit on the steps of the college and eat them out of the bag, dipping them into that pot of red sauce. We’ve done that a lot. It’s always a good night when we do that at some point. And maybe she might even suggest we don’t end up going to the pub. Let Darren and Gavin be there by themselves. What are they even doing with a couple of sixth formers, at their age. she might say. Dirty bastards.

I click my computer on. I read the email again, but still don’t write an answer. I figure they won’t expect one until Monday. I don’t know where I’ll end up, with university. They’re yamming on about UCAS forms now, and I don’t have a clue. I’ve thought about a gap year, and this would be as good a way as any to spend it. Even if I hate working at Bow, they’ll still pay for my education, Ocean says. That’s important. I might not do computers, if I hate working there. I don’t know what I want to do yet. That’s the important thing, understanding exactly what it is that my future looks like. At school, they’re all, You have to pick a path, because you can’t change it after that. I’m not sure about that. I don’t feel like anything’s set in stone, where the future is concerned.

But I’m going to say yes. I’m absolutely going to say yes. Just not yet.

I check the forum, where I asked them to help me trace the IP addresses. One of the users has, finally, come through. They hid their tracks, he writes. (I’m assuming he’s a he.) This was through five proxies before I managed to find out where it was. It’s some server farm in California. San Francisco. Do you know where that is?

I open up Organon’s code, and I look for traces of myself. Signatures. They say that every coder has a signature; that every piece of code is as unique as handwriting.

I wonder how readable mine is, already.

If my handwriting looks anything like my father’s.

Another email pings in, as I’m getting myself ready. I’m not wearing a skirt, I don’t care if Nadine kicks off. But I’m doing make-up, and I feel weird and clumsy with it, like I’m not as good at this part as I should be, so I stop and wipe it off, thinking I’ll try again when I’ve read the email. But it’s not from Mark Ocean. It’s from Shawn. I can feel the heat from it – angry heat – before I even read the contents. Just a fury of words.

Jesus you stupid bitch, leave me alone. Why can’t you get the message? Stop writing to me, I’ve been trying to let you down easy but you won’t get the hint. It’s been a week since I emailed you, and you didn’t get it, so I am telling you to stop now, okay. I don’t know what’s wrong with you.

A week. But I’ve had emails from him the past few days. I open them, to check they’re real. I look at his email address.

It’s different. It’s just the name. They’re not from him at all.

The words in them. I know where I recognise them from. I wrote them into Organon. They’re the questions, the phrases. Rejigged, maybe, slightly. But they’re Organon’s words. I asked Organon for help with Mr Ryan. I told Organon I wanted Shawn to reply to me. Organon is programmed to do what I tell it to; to try to understand me.

To try to make me feel better.

I can see myself in the glare of the screen as I start Organon; as the off-white room appears, and the text box, inviting me to speak to it.

> Hello Laura. What would you like to talk about? it asks.

I don’t know how to even begin to reply.

2007 A VERY MODERN PIRACY

I said to myself, out loud, because vocalization somehow equals permanence: ‘I hate Laura Bow.’

Before she left, we vocalized. Things were said. She asked why I didn’t trust her, and I called her a cunt, which was malicious, because I know how much she aggressively hates that word. That was me lashing out. I said, I have no reason to trust you, and she said, You were the one who, you know. The door swinging after her, slamming back into the wall, the handle cracking a hole into the plasterwork, noise like a distant thunderclap. A period after her leaving, punctuation marking the end of us.

In the wake, I stared at her things; or, I tried to stare at her things, only I couldn’t see any of them. I fucking knew how things happened from this point forward, because everybody’s broken up with somebody before, everybody’s been a we then a you and also separately a me. It’s a scale of how entrenched your lives are. Everything in the apartment was going to be split up into either Mine or Hers, a harsh line drawn in the hardwood floors, but in that moment I couldn’t see anything that didn’t have the taint of Ours about it. I knew what she was like, and I knew she wouldn’t come back for any of it. I knew how it would go. She would tell me that she didn’t want anything. She was good at leaving things, at not wanting the pressure of the responsibility.

I walked to the kitchen. Put ice into a glass, then bourbon. That’s what people did in the movies when they were sad, or when a thing had been ended. They drank. They sat in their chairs, and they drank. After a while, they would get up, and they would pace, and try to call her cell, but she wouldn’t answer. Then they would drink more, and lie down and watch the ceiling, spinning, around and around. They might watch the rose in the middle of the ceiling, from which she insisted the light hung, and they might try to focus on something else entirely. How do you stop the room from spinning? One single moment. They would hear something, think that it was the telephone ringing, or the doorbell, or the alert of an email, but it would always be nothing. So they would hit the wall. A fist, and they’d never hit anybody in their life. Not a single thrown punch until that moment, and they would be pleased that Laura wasn’t there, because if she had been, she would have seen that, and she would have been disappointed. That’s the thing that they would hate the most: the feeling that she would be disappointed.

I got to work early the next day. Territorial, because this was war, now. HR said before: Don’t get into a relationship unless you think you can get yourself out of it at the other end. And we said, Okay, sure. I mean, we’re adults.

I hadn’t slept, partly because it felt as if there was mucus or moss or something behind my eyes. I sat at my desk, and I blogged. Blogged. I wrote. I carved. I didn’t know who read the blog – I kept an eye on my hits, because what’s the fucking point in not? – but that wasn’t the point. Maybe some of them knew me, sure, but a lot of them didn’t. But it was like feeders, you know? People who like to give other people food. Make them fat, keep them reliant. I checked my stats every morning like some compulsive hatefulness that I couldn’t actually shake; an addiction that there was no moving past, because it was so there, so constant. All I knew was that I was writing this shit, and people were reading it. I was feeding them; or, they were feeding me. I don’t know.

At work, at Bow, we were constantly being told about statistics and the importance of clicks. The importance of clicks, like the title of some novel Laura bought because she’d read some piece about it on Wired or Engadget or McSweeney’s, but that she never got around to reading.

Everything went back to Laura. I wondered how many days that would happen for; when I would move past it.

Not it. Her.

I blogged. Spent too long trying to think of the right word, Current Mood: sad or pissed off or agitated or free or something else entirely, because what if Laura read the post? When I was done, catharted as hard as I could stand, I Bowed to find out how long it would take to get over her. How long it takes the average man to stop thinking about them. At the time, Bow’s software did some things well, but searching wasn’t one of them. The algorithms had been bought from some shitty start-up in the early part of the century, and sure there was a team on it, but they were the drags. Interns given jobs with big ideas and no coding skills. The search engine was kept around as a presence, a part of the ecosystem it was important to have fingers in. Same as the emails, the weather site, the video site. So I opened up a private tab, because I didn’t want anything hanging around on my system – there were always rumours about Mark Ocean wanting us only to use Bow software, like dressing in flat beige chinos because you worked at the Gap – and I went to Google. Better. GQ told me that there were seven stages; FHM said there were five; Men’s Health, ten. The one I settled on, on some Gawker site, said that it was twelve. Mourning is all illusions, sleight of hand: because twelve feels more comprehensive, twelve you’ll definitely find something that you associate with, and then you can pinpoint your own pain, and that illusion will help you to move on. Five? Five is nothing. Five could leave you in its dust.

But anger, they all started with anger. I think that would have been obvious. Nobody searching for this stuff wasn’t going to be feeling at least pretty angry.

I called Laura a cunt. Was that angry enough for me to start moving on?

I kept my head down. Blinkers on as I stared at the screen. When they broke up with you, the website said. Like the person who instigated it – the breaker, not breakee – wouldn’t need these things. I broke up with Laura Bow. I said that, I think, out loud. Under my breath, blown out when I exhaled. Laura had a mantra she liked, when she was stressed – she used to say, I have things in my head I don’t want to say, so I say them internally, get them out that way – and maybe that was mine. I did it, so I would have to deal with this. Own it. That’s just the way it is. I read the things that will help you move on: bury it; try to forget; get rid of all reminders of her, all memories; delete her from your life.

I wasn’t ready for any of that; not yet.

Park walked in. Blinkers on, I reminded myself. Don’t look up, act like you’re not going to see anything out of the corner of your eyes. He waved. Lifted his headphones. He wore those enormous things, like he was in a recording studio. He listened to nothing but country. Old country, as well. He was a surfer guy, could have been into metal or indie or trashy European dance music, but no: Merle fucking Haggard. The twang of slide guitar seeping through the oversized studio headphones, a hipster before we even had a word for such a thing.

‘You booted her yet?’ he asked.

How the fuck did he know what I was going to do? And he must have known what I was going to do even before I did, because I didn’t know until gone eight the night before, when we were sitting there, across from each other, and she wasn’t looking at me; she was looking at her files, scanning through them on her laptop, and I realised that I wasn’t even in the room, not for that second. She was somewhere by herself, and it was like I didn’t even need to be there. She didn’t need me, so I—

‘I put some new routines into her last night,’ he said. ‘Didn’t even get out until three or something, and then my alarm went off, and here I am. You know when you’re so excited to see what it’s done?’

SCION. He was talking about SCION, not Laura.

Charlie, you fucking idiot, I told myself, get your head in the game.

‘I haven’t done anything yet,’ I told him. ‘I just got in.’

‘Dude! I sent you an email,’ Park told me. He was disappointed. His face was more emphatic than anybody else’s I’ve ever met. It creased like indelicately folded paper. I had seen the email, right before I finally went to sleep. Pretty sure I deleted it. Park used to send about ten emails a day, all excited about something he’d managed to do, always with italics or full caps or bold or underlined in there, like everything he wrote or thought was meant to be consumed in one immediate rush of slanted words, hurrying to get to the edge of the page. Exclamation marks at the end of every sentence. And that was how you knew to delete it: the more excitement there was, the less it was going to matter. ‘It’s a fucking breakthrough,’ he said, and he came to my desk, cleared a space at the edge, leaped up. He sat right there, perched, and leaned over. I didn’t say anything about my personal space, because I’d been there before. He wouldn’t have listened. He never did. ‘Let me,’ and he took the mouse before I’d even touched it, started the SCION program. ‘Wait, wait.’ We watched it boot. It was the same loading screen as it always had; as it had used since before we even started at Bow. Some hangover from aborted reboots in the nineties. ‘Okay, okay. So, try this: SCION …’ He said the word like he was talking to an idiot, waved his hands like he was talking to a foreigner.