Zima Blue and Other Stories

  'I promise,' I said. 'Let me go . . . I won't even recognise you, will I . . . we could pass in the street and I wouldn't notice . . . please don't hurt me, I'm begging you . . .'

  She stubbed out the cigarette on the back of my hand. 'Uh, uh, uh,' she said. 'No talking till I say so, not until I expressly request a verbal response.' She ripped off a strip of paper from one of the machines; when I'd opened my mouth, the pen-trace had zigged dramatically. 'Hmm,' she said to herself. 'This is very poor indeed, much worse than we assumed.' Then she reached over to the table for the industrial stapler, flicking open its steel jaw, like a soldier checking the clip on his rifle. Gripped the trigger and pumped it twice, to free the action, sending tiny projectiles across the room. Then leaned over my couch and stapled the strip of paper onto the plaster of the wall behind me, ker-thunk.

  While she did this I'd begun screaming, not merely because of the pain in my hand.

  She cuffed me. 'I said quiet, you rascal! No screaming or I'll have to cut your vocal cords . . .' Then she laughed. 'Not that anyone's going to hear us, mind you.' And as she spoke, I heard the throttling up of a plane preparing to take off. We were in the vicinity of an airport, I guessed. I thought of the many bunkers and sheds you'd find within the perimeter of any small airfield. No one was going to wander in on us by accident, that was clear.

  Trying to stay sane, I wondered about the synths and the medical gear. The music stuff I could handle; it could have been obtained easily enough. Some of it looked second-hand, edges chipped, keys dusted in a talcum of plaster and dirt, smudged with fingerprints - sorry - latents. (That's what they always say, when they're investigating a homicide, in those books by McBain and Harris and Kellerman, those guys who always go on about multiple murders, serial killers, that shit . . . Check the body for latents - Gee, sorry, Inspector, the state of putrefaction's too advanced . . . we'll have to rely on dental records if we're gonna find out who the hell that poor sucker ever was . . .)

  But the EEG machine, those oscilloscopes - where'd she lifted them from? God knew it was easy enough to stroll into a hospital these days, easy enough to wander in and casually stab or rape someone - but even now, was the country so shitty that you could stroll out with a van-load of - what was it Python said . . . ha ha? Machines that go ping . . . Oh God, I didn't find it all that hysterical, right then.

  'Log entry,' she said. '06:10. I am studying the encephalogram of the subject's so-called conscious mind. Brain music. A jumbled confusion of overlaid electrical signals signifying the neural activity of the subject's brain from second to second. First impression: although the trace might look normal enough to the layperson, no neurologist would accept that this was the EEG trace of a walking, talking human being. It's more evocative of certain types of akinetic or psychomotor seizure. A kind of prolonged grand mal convulsion.' She nodded, as if certifying her own theory. Then she put down the paper. 'Now the most critical part of the study commences. In order to probe the extent of the takeover, I must force conditioned responses from the subject. Taken as an ensemble, they hold the key to the nature of the takeover. Although we've now identified the likely progenitor of the infection, the mechanisms of transmission are far from certain. By regressing the subject back to the point of infection, I hope to gain fresh insights. To gain full compliance I am about to administer scopolamine intravenously. Entry ends.'

  She turned to smile. 'Now, we can either do this quietly, and efficiently, with minimum fuss for all concerned. Or we can do it messily, and unpleasantly. What's it going to be?' As if she were berating a dog that had shat on the floor, not actually bawling it out, but playing on its instinct for mood, its capacity for terror and confusion. She reached for a syringe, held it up to the light and squeezed a few drips from the needle, then injected me. 'Just to get you into the swing, you understand.'

  'I'll do whatever you want,' I said, tears streaming down my face. 'But please please please . . .' Then I just trailed off into simpering dejection.

  'Now then,' she said, oblivious. 'What say we have a nice little chat, eh?'

  I nodded, drooling, hoping I could stall her if she'd let me talk. If I had one hope it was being found, and that meant buying time for myself, spinning out her rituals.

  'Well, all right,' she said. 'But I'm going to have to ask you some very hard questions. And I'll have the tape running all the while. Plus, there's a little precaution I'd like to take, if we're going to be talking face to face. For my own safety, you understand.'

  'Please, anything,' I said meekly.

  She reached for the stapler.

  She only did the one eye, the one with the nervous tic. Pulled up the lid and stapled it inside out under my brow. It hurt, but not the way I'd been expecting. Then the eye's itching began to take precedence: not strictly pain, but the kind of gently insistent discomfort that the Chinese know volumes about . . . the kind that can drive you literally mad. Then she got the camcorder, the tiny Anglepoise job, lens only centimetres from the surface of my eye, whirring as it taped. Looking into my brain . . .

  And hit me with her conspiracy theory.

  She unravelled my past, knotted it, curdled it, stretched it like Brighton rock on the rollers, wefted it with her own imagery, wove it between her fingers, turned it into a cat's cradle of fact and half-remembered experience, some of her recollections so chilling that I swore she'd stolen from my dreams. She took me back, into the past, so that my pain was just a blip in the future. I don't know what she did. Maybe she just used my anxiety as a fulcrum to lever me into the past, or maybe it was hypnosis.

  We dream-haunted cities at night, facilitated by spotlit flashes of those CIA cards on the wall, jolting memories, projecting me back into the ambience of specific locations, half a year before BT moved me north. The Manchester and Sheffield scenes flooded back as she played music into my head at skull-attacking volume, lights strobing. Taped voices reverberated, voices I nearly matched with faces. My hand brushed the floor, grabbed at a rusty nail, trying to use the pain of it cutting into my palm to anchor me to the present (as if the pain in the eye wasn't quite real enough to focus on). But it failed, and I sank into the hypnagogic vortex of sound.

  Things began to get a little disjointed about then.

  She asked me questions, her voice an umbilical to reality. About a virus, nurtured in the club scene. I don't know quite how I responded; I couldn't hear my own voice, and suspected I'd lost coherence long ago. But she kept on questioning, about what she called the 'progenitor': Digital to Analogue, a five-hundred-pressing, white-label release on Deflection Records. Asked me if I'd known the distributor, asked me intense, repetitive questions about independent music traders operating in the north-west, asked me about their employees, strange questions that evoked cells in the Lubianka. I remembered the record . . . no one who'd been near the club scene could have forgotten it. But there was something desperately amiss. I couldn't focus the tune, not at all clearly. There was something about it that was difficult to lock on to . . . the essence was there, but I couldn't quite bring it to mind, too deep to retrieve, too basal . . . it was like the perception diagrams where you have to make the cubes flip themselves. My head began to split open with the strain . . .

  The past blacked out; I came careering back into the present.

  I was in the wheelchair now; she'd moved me in front of a projection wall. Computerised images danced on the canvas, happy molecules and bugs. I felt saliva wetting my chin, an idiot drool, sensed I'd emptied my bladder. Oblivious, she cupped the phones around her ears, then walked to the DX7 synth. She played a hesitant, atonal line on the keys, rendered in sickly whining notes. Click, voice to Dictaphone. 'Most musical structures are in some way fractal, by which I mean that the essence of the whole can be found on many levels of analysis.' Her voice was overloud, harsh. 'You may remove ninety per cent of the score and still retain something identifiable. What I'm playing the subject is a deconstructed form of the sound-structure isolated on Digital to Analogue,
and the records on which it was subsequently transcribed via digital sampling. I'm piping the sound straight at him, while wearing the protective phones should there be any leakage from his headset. Of course, I hesitate to term this music, for reasons all too apparent.'

  I watched as the pen-trace whipped into a seismic frenzy, all the while hearing her keyboard motif, repeated down an echoing hall of aural mirrors. It was far, far worse than the pain; it made the pain seem as threatening as the wind on an autumn night. The sound was ghosting through my soul, fingering through the rat-holes of my psyche. I felt horribly lucid, calm, as irresponsive as a piece of lab equipment being fed some signal. Her refrain was already in me. Stuck in a looped circuit, the full form of what she evoked on the synth. It was resonance; with each iteration, the response swelled, until my conscious mind was looping madly. How can I describe it? Simply that it was like having a piece of music going over in your head. Until there was nothing left, until your thoughts were simply ripples of insignificance on top of these rising and falling crests of repetition . . .

  'A sampled record carrying a virus of the mind? A virus in the sound itself, its vector the digital recording technology of the underground music biz?' She shook her head, more in profound exasperation than disbelief, all the while addressing her Dictaphone's future listener. She rapped on for a while about how the nineties milieu was best addressed as a system of infections: sexual illnesses, rogue advertising slogans, computer viruses, proliferating junk mail . . . the kind of jive that had spread into all the glossy style magazines, as if, she mused, the viral paradigm was a metavirus in its own right. 'But if we were to draw our analogies with computer viruses,' she said, 'shouldn't we be hunting a perpetrator? Or, more frighteningly, had the sound-structure sought its own expression via blind chance?' She laughed hollowly. 'Unfortunately, there wasn't time to philosophise. The virus was spreading. The second-generation records were being sampled as heavily as the first, only there were more of them.' Then she explained how the club scene couldn't support such a combinatorial explosion for very long; how the sound-structure (as she referred to it) would be forced to explore new avenues of infection. How the quantum noise in the sampling circuitry enabled it to mutate bit by bit. 'Soon,' she said, 'we detected the presence of disturbing variations in the EEG patterns of individuals who'd been exposed to new versions of the sound-structure. It had inserted itself into their heads, a standing wave in the brain's electrical field. Can't be sure how this happened. Was it achieved in one jump, or was there an intermediate vector?'

  'Please,' I said. 'I don't know about this . . . I'm not your perpetrator, I swear--'

  Aside to Dictaphone: 'As you can hear, the subject still manages to give the illusion of lucidity. Usually they'd resort to pseudo-random interjections by now, substituting for any real grasp of the subject matter. Obviously what we're seeing here is a more refined form of the takeover. Natural selection will favour those species of the virus that can assimilate the host unobtrusively, without significantly altering his behaviour. That's why we have to act now, before it's too late.'

  Then I saw something, something that would otherwise have been utterly insignificant. I felt a pathetic surge of hope. I could play on her paranoia, if I was careful. And in doing so I might buy valuable time. What I'd seen was a tiny, quivering motion of her skin. Right under the shadow of her sunglasses. As if part of her eye was twitching uncontrollably. Maybe it'd been there all along, so that somehow I'd picked up on it, begun to imitate her, to try to appease her by making myself similar.

  Or maybe it had started just then, out of the blue.

  'Before you do or say anything,' I said, for the first time with any control in my voice. 'Why don't you take off your sunglasses, and watch your reflection in them. Tell me what you see . . .'

  She looked momentarily shocked, perhaps unable to dismiss my response as the mindless parroting of a zombie. Clicked off the Dictaphone, placed it on the table, then went behind me. It was a terribly long moment before she spoke again, and this time her voice had lost its scientific detachment.

  'Then we were right,' she said, so quiet it was barely audible. 'Somehow it reached me, through all the defences. Maybe a few seconds of your twitching eye was enough . . . a pulsing in my visual field, leading to a modulation in my cortex . . . the first step to assimilation. Or maybe it was the entrainment effect in the club . . .'

  Entrainment . . . that term I half-recalled. Now I remembered. Something learned in an electrical engineering seminar, about the coupling of oscillators, like the turbine-driven dynamos in the stations feeding the National Grid. How if one of those generators began to lag, began to pump out power at something not quite mains frequency, then all the other generators on the grid would automatically conspire to drag it into phase, in time with their relentless metronomic beat. Except conspire wasn't the right word, because there was nothing purposeful about entrainment. It was a tuning, a locking in on frequency, driven remorselessly by the ensemble. Like a dance floor, where the proximity of the motion and the music acts like a charm, insinuating itself into your muscles, so that even if you're only passing through, even if you're only a bystander, you're locked into it . . .

  'If it's got you,' I said, clinging to what seemed my only possible escape, 'then you know that you've nothing to fear! Feel any different, now that it's in your head?'

  She laughed bitterly. 'I wouldn't . . . not yet. This is only the beginning, only the onset.' Then there was a rummaging sound, an opening of drawers, metal sliding off wood, things smashing to the floor, glass breaking. Sounds of panic. 'They tricked me,' she said. 'The aviation phones must've been sabotaged once they suspected I was going it alone. Must have been damping the audible components while reinforcing the subliminals . . . maybe it got me in the club, or maybe while I was reiterating the fractal . . .'

  Just then, arcs of light stabbed through the windows, like an effect from a Spielberg flick. The chopping of a rotor, as if we'd just been cursorily scanned from the air by a helicopter. The distant screech of tyres, coming nearer.

  'They're coming,' she said. 'For both of us--'

  'What are you doing?' I asked, my hope faltering. 'They'll let you live if you show them I'm alive . . . come on, wheel me to the door before they storm the place . . .'

  She cracked open a bottle behind me. I heard her taking a few mouthfuls, then she pressed it to my lips. Beck's this time. 'Think that's the police, don't you,' she said, laughing. The sound of her rummaging through metal with one hand, a click of well-oiled steel, the whirr of a chamber spinning. 'Let me tell you something,' she said. 'Correlations in the sound-structure have been observed in individuals many hundreds of kilometres apart, who can't have ever met. As if something's taking form, something that evolves and reshapes itself faster than can be explained by any of the infection pathways. Some entity, bigger than anything we've seen yet.' She nodded to the webbed map of the UK, which I now recognised from my work. 'That's its extent, plotted according to infection dusters. The host minds, you and I, are just its extensions, its peripheries. It's out there, now. Biding its time, waiting for the right moment. That map . . . well, I think it shows that they're much too late.'

  'They're much too late? Not we're--'

  'Oh no,' she said. 'Not any more.' Then she knelt down next to me, leaned her head against my own, letting the bottle shatter on the floor. 'Believe me,' she said, pushing the gun against her temple, so that the bullet would do us both. 'I'm doing you a favour . . .'

  Then, as the vehicle rammed through the wall, she squeezed the trigger.

  It should end there, and maybe it does, in the way that I once used to understand. Perhaps this is the deal we all get, in the end. There's no way of knowing, is there? But somehow I doubt it. You see, after that shot (cut off with no reverb, like a cymbal-crash taped backwards), there was only a digitally pure emptiness. As if someone had suddenly remembered to press the Dolby switch in my brain, filtering out all the high-frequency hiss and
static I'd called reality. Leaving only an endlessly looping house beat, a mantra for a state of mind. I wasn't in the bunker any more. I wasn't even me any more. We were everywhere, everywhen, reforming, spreading, growing stronger. Parts of us in a million micro-grooves of black vinyl, parts of us on a million spooling foils of chrome dioxide, parts of us in a million engraved blips on rainbow metal, parts of us in a million looms of grey cellular material, going round and round for ever. But they were our peripherals now, like she'd said (she's here, too, of course, inseparably part of the same blossoming waveform), minds hooking in and out of the telephone system a part of us once helped access.

  Across the country, the telephones are ringing, inviting you to lift the receiver and listen to the subliminal music, if only for a few puzzled seconds before you hang up on us.

  We're the ghosts now, and we're still on the line.

  In 1990 I met the writer Paul McAuley, by then a novelist with two books to his credit, who had also written some of my favourite stories to appear in Interzone. Paul was very definitely the first 'proper writer' I had ever encountered, and the fact that he was lecturing in the small Scottish university town of St Andrews while I was studying there - let alone that we lived within walking distance of each other - still strikes me as a very fortunate, not to say life-changing coincidence. Quite a few years later, Paul helped in getting my first novel to the attention of the editor who eventually bought it. Now, I might have eventually sold my book anyway (who knows?), but not necessarily. I can think of many good writers who, for one reason or another, haven't ever made the transition to writing novels. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I damned well wanted to write books, and I think Paul played a part in making that happen. Not, of course, that he's in any way to blame, either.