PopCo

  Ben gets off the bed and runs some tap water into a glass. There’s silence for a minute or so while he drinks it.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says, eventually, looking at the floor.

  I am rolling a cigarette with shaking hands. ‘What for?’

  ‘If I was too … If it was too …’

  I smile. ‘No. That was pretty great.’

  Now he suddenly smiles too, a sweet lopsided grin in his usually serious face.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Am I allowed to talk now, then?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You told me not to talk that time before.’

  ‘I don’t like talking during sex,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah.’ He frowns now, the serious face back.

  ‘This is afterwards, though. We can talk now.’

  ‘Is this, you know, all this … Is it just fucking?’ he asks me. ‘Just so I know.’

  ‘I don’t know, yet,’ I say. ‘Are you and Chloë …?’

  ‘What?’ He shakes his head. ‘Oh. No. Just colleagues.’

  ‘Oh. Good. I mean … I still don’t know, but … maybe we should just wait and see or something.’

  He nods, almost too quickly. ‘Cool.’

  ‘I’m sure there’s some public health campaign warning young people about this sort of thing, though …’

  ‘Good.’ Ben takes a puff of my cigarette. ‘I hope we catch lice and the plague and gigantism from each other.’

  I smile again. ‘Yeah.’

  We fall asleep on the bed until well after dinner.

  Chapter Eighteen

  When I wake up for the second time, Ben has gone. I removed my contact lenses some time ago and the room is now a night-time haze of fuzzy furniture-shapes and dulled edges. I walk the short distance to the bathroom and start running a bath, the steam making everything even less clear. If Ben was still here he would be a shape too, a lump in the bed. He’d also be a collection of smells, small noises and mysterious connections. If he was staring at me I would know, even if I was facing the other way. I read this ESP book about six months ago while briefly considering proposing something called the KidKenesis pack. The whole idea was doomed from the start. Kids developing their ESP and holding séances is not considered very wholesome entertainment in today’s market.

  In the bath, I finish the rest of the book about the girl and her horse, holding it up close to my face so I can read without my lenses. She finds the boy in the end, of course, and learns his secret. It turns out that he is an orphan with no money, living in a barn with only his horse for company. At the end of the book the girl is planning to ask her parents if he can move in with them. It all becomes a bit overdramatic, a bit Cathy and Heathcliffe, although I would certainly read Book 2 of the series if it was here. What did the book tell me about teenage girls, though? Not very much. The girl in the book never bought anything; she was just interested in her horse. What would you sell to a girl like that? I expect that girls like that grow out of their horses and their Heathcliffes by about age fifteen and then the brand-awareness kicks in. Even then, what could you sell to a girl like that, apart from mobile phones, CDs, make-up, clothes and cheap alcohol? It’s certainly a conundrum.

  My hair has achieved the consistency of straw mixed with glue over the last couple of days. I rinse it in the bath, having previously noted the absence of a shower attachment in here. I need a container to pour clean water over my head. I look around for one. Then, suddenly, the idea seems rather wasteful. Perhaps it something to do with the moors, and not being in a city. In the city water is like magic. You turn on the tap and out it comes. From nowhere! It’s a miracle. But out here, where the cold water is supplied from a spring (and doesn’t taste like bleach) it seems as if the water still belongs to the earth, or, at least, belonged to it much more recently. Out here, the earth might be watching to see what you do with its precious, clean water. I know what’s making me think of this, actually. It’s all that stuff about the Lost Elements. If I waste water rinsing my hair, will it be taken away from me? Also a conundrum.

  I rinse my hair in the bath water again in the end and wrap myself in a fluffy towel before replacing my contact lenses. The room snaps back into focus, suddenly including distinct colours and actual corners. I need some food. Perhaps some company? It is only once I am dressed and ready to leave the room that I notice the white envelope that has been pushed under the door. Irritated by the timing of my unknown correspondent, I chuck it on the desk until later, forgetting to worry about it being discovered or intercepted.

  Noodles with hoi-sin sauce and little grilled shitake mushrooms and spring onions on the top. Iced coffee. Is there anything these chefs won’t make? Someone’s left a style magazine in the dining room, so I flick through that as I eat. The magazine turns out to be not much more than a catalogue for products you could buy to support your slightly non-mainstream lifestyle. I’m sure magazines used to contain more than just advertisements and features about products. Perhaps it’s just because I work in this kind of industry and am constantly in contact with marketing people that I see an interview with a controversial rap star as a ‘feature about a product’. An infomercial, perhaps. Anyway, this guy has just done a deal with one of the soft drinks companies and now they’re asking him to clean up his act. The magazine interviewer asks him if he thinks he’s selling out. How is being in a magazine like this not exactly the same thing? All this stuff just bewilders me. I find myself looking at some ‘anti-ad’ ad for jeans, considering the model’s black/grey nail polish, wondering if it would look good on my toenails, and then remind myself that I don’t want to be cool and I don’t want to look like everyone else. I push my plate away, knowing that someone else will clear it up, and for a second I think about my favourite supper from when I was a child: homemade soup with bread and cheese, followed by tinned fruit.

  Back in the East Wing, there’s noise coming from the kitchen area, so I go in to see what’s going on. The East Wing kitchen is bigger than the one in the West Wing, and is joined, by an archway, to a large drawing room. It’s a chilly night tonight and someone has lit the large open fire and stocked it up with dry wood. There are lots of people in here – almost everyone on the project – milling between both rooms, making toast and jam and coffee, or helping themselves to wine. Lots of people seem to be gathered around the table in the drawing room, where Hiro is playing Go with someone I can’t quite see. I look in the fridge and find it full of cold beer. I almost wish it wasn’t there, and that I could experience the sensation of wanting something and not being able to have it. Then again, maybe having it is nicer after all. As the cold, bitter liquid slips down my throat, I can’t imagine drinking anything else.

  ‘Alice Butler – the skiving cow!’ Esther says as I turn around, smiling at me from the kitchen table. ‘Do you want some of this?’ She offers me a half-smoked joint.

  ‘Go on, then,’ I say, taking it and sitting down next to her. ‘So what did I miss?’

  ‘Fuck all. Loads of statistics about how many brands kids are aware of by the age of seventeen, how their brand loyalty works at that age and stuff. Turns out that all the cradle-to-the-grave marketing bollocks really is bollocks …’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘That theory that you can make £100,000 out of someone in a lifetime of consuming if you can get them interested in your brand at an early age. Turns out that kids today just don’t have any brand loyalty at all. They know what’s cool, but that changes regularly. Even the big names are losing out to new brands that come along and claim to be cooler. Ha!’

  ‘Why “ha!”?’

  ‘Well, it’s just a bit sinister otherwise, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. Although the other way sounds possibly a bit too Chi-Chi.’

  ‘Hmm. Oh, actually, you did miss something this afternoon,’ Esther says. ‘Mac was there, and …’

  She pauses to relight the joint I’ve just passed back to her and Ben comes to si
t with us. We exchange a shy smile.

  ‘What’s up?’ he says.

  ‘Ah – the other fucking skiver,’ Esther says, blowing smoke out. ‘I’m just telling your partner in crime about what you missed this afternoon.’

  ‘It started off being “fuck all”,’ I say to Ben. ‘But she’s just remembered the important bit, I think.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she continues. ‘Mac was there, all smug and smiling. So Furlong’s presenting all this crap about marketing to teenagers. All the stuff we basically know but the marketing people don’t seem to accept: don’t make brands look too mainstream; don’t make them look like something your parents would buy; emphasise anti-authority messages and stuff about not fitting in; don’t advertise on TV – make the kids think they’ve found the brand themselves and so on …’

  ‘I told you,’ I say. ‘This just sounds like K to me.’

  ‘Yeah, well, K works, doesn’t it?’

  ‘So …’

  ‘So halfway into all this, some of the videogames people and that weird virtual-worlds guy start asking Mac questions about why PopCo doesn’t do any of this, and asking how we’re supposed to compete in the teenage market with our marketing teams stuffed full of dinosaurs that think of demographics in terms of ‘age’ or ‘gender’, not in terms of skateboarders, ska-girls, Rage Against the Machine fans and so on, and then a couple of people mention that they’ve been telling the marketing people this stuff for ever anyway and just get ignored, and we’re all creatives, so what’s the point of telling us because we can’t do anything about any of this …’

  ‘Breathe, Esther,’ Ben says.

  She inhales. ‘Oh, yeah. Thanks. Anyway, Mac says that as a result of this research, we’re going to have these new mirror-brands. One for videogames, which Chloë seemed well chuffed about, one for the robotics people, one for the plush-toy lot and one for the teenage-girl product – if anyone ever thinks of one. Within the mirror-brands, we’re going to create marketing plans ourselves, like, make the marketing plan as part of the product … Or the product as part of the marketing plan? … I can’t remember which way round it was. Maybe the product is the marketing plan. Oh, and he said a lot of this would become clearer tomorrow and that he expected the “missing persons”, i.e. you two, to be present at the seminar because it will be very important.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Ben says.

  ‘Everyone’s well chuffed because they think all this is going to mean more freedom to design crazy stuff without being told we’re not allowed to,’ Esther says. ‘But I have a funny feeling it’s just going to mean lying to teenagers a lot.’

  ‘That’s a very nasty anti-corporate attitude you’ve got there, Esther,’ says Ben, with a half-smile.

  ‘Yeah, well. Call me old-fashioned, but …’

  ‘Who’s old-fashioned?’ asks Dan, coming over.

  ‘Esther,’ I say. Then, jokingly: ‘Can you believe she doesn’t want to lie to children?’

  ‘Who lies to children?’ Dan says.

  ‘We do,’ she says. ‘All the adverts and …’

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ Dan says. ‘Kids can see through all that stuff. They’re more sophisticated than we were. That’s why we have to hit them with more sophisticated messages. They’re able to sort through the information they are given and find the relevant bits. Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘I think she’s joking anyway,’ says Ben. ‘Aren’t you, Esther?’

  ‘What? Yeah, whatever.’

  ‘Hey,’ Dan says. ‘Did you know that Grace is doing pretty well against Hiro in there?’ He gestures to the drawing room. ‘Thought you might want to see.’

  We all walk through to the other room, where the heat from the fire immediately covers us like a soft woollen blanket. The game must almost be over, from the look of the board. Not much space is left at all; the whole 19×19 area has already been colonised by black and white formations of stones. Every final Go board is different, of course, and the patterns unique. Yet, although they are unique, each pattern made by stones on a Go board looks like an ancient symbol from a forgotten language, or a collection of pixels from a bigger picture. Great Go players can look at the final patterns on a board and tell you pretty much everything that has happened in the game – much in the way that forensic detectives can tell you exactly how, where and when a crime took place from looking at little more than a speck of dust. A glance at this board tells me that it has been a very close game indeed, although I couldn’t say who has won. The players know, of course. They won’t have to count the intersections, they will just know.

  Ben has been talking to a guy I recognise from seminars but can’t name. He is pretty scruffy, wearing old jeans and a black T-shirt. His hair is shoulder-length and a bright ginger-pink colour which I’m not sure is entirely unnatural. He is wearing glasses with thin silver rims and has a strange symbol tattooed on his right arm. At first, when I look at it, it seems to take the form of an uncompleted figure 8, lying on its side, a bit like the symbol for infinity but with unclosed tail lines at both ends and a small line underneath it. Then I recognise it. It’s ℵ1, AKA aleph-one, the symbol for Georg Cantor’s second level of transfinity. I am still contemplating this when Ben turns and smiles at me.

  ‘Alice,’ he says. ‘Meet Kieran.’

  ‘Hi,’ I say. ‘You’re …?’

  ‘Kieran does the virtual-world stuff,’ Ben says. He looks at Kieran and raises an eyebrow. ‘Alice doesn’t believe you exist.’

  ‘Someone said you were designing virtual products to be sold in virtual worlds,’ I say suspiciously.

  ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ he says, swigging from a bottle of beer.

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Seriously. Although I get other people to do the actual design. I’m more of a grand-designer.’ He laughs a technician’s laugh. ‘I work out what sort of products would work, create tests and commission artwork. We’ve released a couple of beta versions inside a controlled virtual environment, with avatars that will support additional customisation, and, yeah, it’s going pretty well.’

  ‘What’s an avatar?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s like your on-screen character,’ Kieran explains. ‘You know, the little picture of the person that moves around on the screen. It’s actually a term borrowed from the Hindu religion that usually means the incarnation of a deity …’

  ‘What products can you make for a picture of a person?’ I ask uncertainly.

  ‘Ha.’ Kieran laughs, again. ‘Well, how long’s a piece of string?’

  I have noticed that this is the generic computer-person’s response to everything. That, or something involving the acronym WYSIWYG: what you see is what you get, pronounced wizzywig. This last always intrigues me as it doesn’t seem to apply to anything at all in life, which seems to run on completely invisible forces, power, religion, desire, electricity and so on.

  ‘Go on,’ I say. ‘Humour me.’

  ‘Well, the trainer and clothing companies are in this research big time, which should tell you something,’ he explains. ‘The big corps have whole teams on it, 24/7. The idea is that in a few years’ time you’ll log on to your online multi-player game, EverQuest, or whatever, and be able to buy little branded sneakers and T-shirts for your character. Have you ever been on EverQuest?’

  I shake my head. ‘No.’

  ‘Ah. Well. EverQuest takes place in a world called Norrath. The whole thing is, shall we say, huge. Norrath’s GDP per capita is higher than China’s and India’s, its GNP is somewhere between that of Russia and Bulgaria and its currency is more valuable in US dollars than the yen and the Italian lira …’

  ‘What, really? And this is a virtual world?’

  ‘Oh yes. It’s owned by Sony. Someone said that if you were a citizen of Bulgaria, the most economically sound decision you could make would be to give up your job to play EverQuest all day. You’d make more money in the long run.’ He swigs from his bottle of beer.

  I frown. ‘How do you make money
playing a game?’

  ‘People sell their avatars in online auctions. Or they trade the Norrath currency – Platinum Pieces – with pounds or dollars on auction sites. A typical person can make about $3.50 an hour working on EverQuest by farming the bots and selling them on. You’d be amazed what rich kids and addicted executives will pay for a customised character, or Platinum Pieces, so they don’t have to go through the difficult parts of the game themselves. They have money in the real world, with which they can purchase power in the virtual world. Imagine what people like that would pay for a pair of Nikes for their avatar, or a Porsche for him or her to drive around in. The characters are usually supposed to walk everywhere, of course, that’s always been a convention of fantasy gaming, but, well, what if your character could buy a car? How cool would that be?’

  ‘Maybe horses would work,’ I say, uncertainly. Ben has returned from the kitchen with more beer. He passes me a bottle. ‘Is this stuff real, though?’ I say to Kieran. ‘Is this actually true?’

  ‘True, yes. Real? Of course not. None of it’s real. That’s the point.’

  ‘Do you know about all this?’ I say to Ben. ‘Selling virtual branded products in virtual worlds and so on …?’

  ‘Yeah, of course. Kieran’s based in Berkshire with us. He tried to convince us to get the characters in The Sphere to wear virtual K clothing.’

  ‘It would have rocked,’ Kieran says to Ben. ‘You know it would. And there’s still time …’

  ‘Not up to me anyway, is it? But I don’t think it would work at all. Gamers don’t want brands like K shoved down their throats. We don’t want them to think we’re opportunistic scum, after all.’