“So . . .” I shook my head. “So leave it alone. Let it be, get off their back before you piss them off any more and they go to the police.”
“Fucking pofuckinglice . . .” Aykan’s voice swam in scorn. “They won’t give it to the police, the police couldn’t find their own thumbs if they were plugging up their arses. No, man. It’s not the police I’m worried about, it’s these Hunger motherfuckers. Haven’t you clocked what kind of people these are? These are bad people, man. Major bad ju-ju. And anyway, man, what the fuck you mean leave it alone? Don’t be such a shit-eating coward. I told you, didn’t I? I told you this was a fucking war, didn’t I?” He was shouting by now. I tried to get him to shut up. “I’m not looking for advice. I just wanted to let you know what was going on.”
He broke the connection. I did not phone him back. I was tired and pissed off. Paranoid prick, I thought, and went back to bed.
Aykan kept sending his obscure emails, advising me of some new change to An End To Hunger.
The letter to donors did not last long, but Aykan was relentless. He directed me to their sponsors page, and I discovered that he had rerouted every link to a different revolutionary left organisation. He created a small pop-up screen that appeared when the “Donate” button was clicked, that compared the nutritional value of rice with what was rotting in European food mountains. He kept hinting at some final salvo, some ultimate attack.
“I keep watching them, man,” he told me in one of his irregular phone calls. “I swear they are so on my tail. I’m going to have to be really fucking careful. This could get very fucking nasty.”
“Stop talking rubbish,” I said. “You think you’re in some cheap thriller? You’re risking jail for hacking—and don’t shout at me, because that’s what they’ll call it—but that’s all.”
“Fuck you, bro!” he said. “Don’t be so naive! You think this is a game? I told you . . . these fuckers aren’t going to the police. Don’t you fucking see, man? I’ve done the worst thing you can do . . . I’ve impugned their philanthropy! I’ve fucking sneered at them while they do the Mother Theresa thing, and that they can’t fucking stand!”
I was worried about him. He was totally infuriating, no longer even coming close to conversing, just taking some phrase of mine or other as a jumping-off point to discuss some insane conspiracy.
He sent me bizarre, partial emails that made almost no sense at all. Some were just a sentence: “They’ll love this” or “I’ll show them what it really means.”
Some were longer, like cuts from the middle of works in progress, half-finished memos and snatches of programming. Some were garbled articles from various encyclopaedias, about international politics, about online democracy, about computerised supermarket stock-taking, about kwashiorkor and other kinds of malnutrition.
Slowly, with a stealthy amazement and fear, I started to tie these threads together. I realised that what looked like a patchwork of mad threats and ludicrous hyperbole was something more, something united by an extraordinary logic. Through these partial snippets, these hints and jokes and threats, I began to get a sense of what Aykan planned.
I denied it.
I tried not to believe it; it was just too big. My horror was coloured with awe that he could even dream up such a plan, let alone believe he had the skills to make it work.
It was utterly unbelievable. It was horrific.
I knew he could do it.
I bombarded him with phone calls, which he never picked up. He had no voicemail, and I was left swearing and stalking from room to room, totally unable to reach him.
An End To Hunger had been ominously quiet for some time now. It had operated without interruption for at least three weeks. I was going crazy. There was a mad intensity to everything, every time I thought of Aykan and his plans. I was scared.
Finally, at ten minutes to eleven on a Sunday evening, he called.
“Man,” he said.
“Aykan,” I said, and sighed once, then stammered to get my words out. “Aykan, you can’t do this,” I said. “I don’t care how fucking much you hate them, man, they’re just a bunch of idiot liberals and you cannot do that to them, it’s just not worth it, don’t be crazy—”
“Shut up, man!” he shouted. “Listen to me!” He was whispering again.
He was, I suddenly realised, afraid.
“I don’t have any fucking time, bro,” he said urgently. “You’ve got to get over here; you’ve got to help me.”
“What’s going on, man?” I said.
“They’re coming,” he whispered, and something in his voice made me cold.
“The fuckers tricked me,” he went on. “They kept it looking like they were searching, but they were better than I thought—they clocked me ages ago, they were just biding time, and then . . . and then . . . They’re on their way!”
“Aykan,” I said slowly. “You’ve got to stop this crazy shit,” I said. “Are the police coming?”
He almost screamed with anger.
“Godfuckingdammit don’t you listen to me? Any fucker can handle the police, but it’s this charity wants my fucking head!”
He had invited me to his house, I realised. For the first time in years, he was ready to tell me where he lived. I tried to cut into his diatribe. “I know shit about these bastards you wouldn’t believe, man,” he was moaning. “Like some fucking parasite . . . You got no curiosity what kind of fucker lives like that?”
“What can I do, man?” I said. “You want me to come over?”
“Yeah, man, please, help me get my shit the fuck away,” he said.
He named an address about twenty minutes’ walk away. I swore at him.
“You been close all this time,” I said.
“Please just hurry,” he whispered, and broke the connection.
Aykan’s house was one in a street of nondescript redbricks, and I was staring at it for several seconds before I saw that anything was wrong. The front window was broken, and fringes of curtain were waving like seaweed through the hole.
I sprinted the last few feet, shouting. No one answered the bell. I pounded the wood, and lights went on opposite and above me, but no one came to his door.
I peered in through the hole. I grabbed careful hold of the ragged glass frame and climbed into Aykan’s house.
I stood, my breath shallow, whispering his name again and again. The sound of my own voice was very thin. It frightened me, such a little sound in that silence.
It was a tiny flat, a weird mixture of mess and anal fastidiousness. The bed-sitting room was crowded with Ikea-type shelves wedged tight with carefully ordered magazines and software, all exactly lined up. In the corner was a collection of extraordinarily powerful hardware, a tight little network, with printer and scanners and modems and monitors wedged into unlikely angles. The coffee table was revolting with ashtrays and unwashed cups.
I was alone.
I wandered quickly through all the rooms, again and again, back and forth, as if I might have missed him, standing in a corner. As if he might be waiting for me to find him. Apart from the shattered window, there was no sign of trouble. I waited and moped, but no one came.
After a few minutes I saw a green light winking languorously at me, and realised that his main computer was on sleep mode. I pressed Enter. The monitor lit up, and I saw that Aykan’s email program was running.
His inbox was empty, except for one message, which had arrived earlier that evening.
It was listed as from AETH. I felt a slow surge of adrenaline. Slowly I reached out and clicked on the message.
We’re so very disappointed that you don’t consider our mission to improve the lot of the world’s hungry to be a worthy one. We are motivated to try to help the poorest people on Earth, at a cost of nothing to our users. We consider this to be a winning situation for all sides. Without us, after all, the poor and the hungry have no voice.
It is a matter of great sadness to us that you do not share our vision, and that you have found it necess
ary to undermine our work. As you see, we have been able to trace you, through the sabotage to our website. We do not believe that this situation would be satisfactorily resolved through your country’s courts.
We think it only reasonable to inform you that we take your conduct very seriously. We have our mission to consider, and we can no longer allow you to endanger those lives for which we work so hard.
We intend to discuss this matter with you. In person.
Now.
And that was all.
I waited in the cold, reading and rereading that message, looking around me in that quiet flat. Eventually I left. I debated taking the computer away, but it was too heavy, and anyway, it was really beyond me. I was never more than a day-to-day user. The kind of stuff Aykan had on there I’d never make head or tail of.
I called his mobile hundreds of times, but got only a dead signal.
I have no idea where he went, or what happened.
He could have broken that window himself. He could have written that email himself. He could have lost it completely and run off screaming into the night, with no one at all on his tail. I keep waiting, and hoping that maybe I’ll hear from him.
He could be hunted, even now. Maybe he stays out of sight, keeps offline, uses pseudonyms, a thief in the night, letting dust blow over his online tracks.
Or maybe he was caught. Maybe he was taken away, to discuss the politics of charity.
Every week, some email or other recommends I visit An End To Hunger. The site is running well. Its problems seem to be over.
’TIS THE SEASON
Call me childish, but I love all the nonsense—the snow, the trees, the tinsel, the turkey. I love presents. I love carols and cheesy songs. I just love Christmas™.
That’s why I was so excited. And not just for me, but for Annie. Aylsa, her mum, said she didn’t see the big deal and why was I a sentimentalist, but I knew Annie couldn’t wait. She might have been fourteen, but when it came to this I was sure she was still a little girl, dreaming of stockings by the chimney. Whenever it’s my turn to take Annie—me and Aylsa have alternated since the divorce—I do my best on the 25th.
I admit Aylsa made me feel bad. I was dreading Annie’s disappointment. So I can hardly tell you how delighted I was when I found out that for the first time ever I was going to be able to make a proper celebration of it.
Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t got shares in YuleCo, and I can’t afford a one-day end-user licence, so I couldn’t have a legal party. I’d briefly considered buying from one of the budget competitors like XmasTym, or a spinoff from a nonspecialist like Coca-Crissmas, but the idea of doing it on the cheap was just depressing. I wouldn’t have been able to use much of the traditional stuff, and if you can’t have all of it, why have any? (XmasTym had the rights to Egg Nog. But Egg Nog’s disgusting.) Those other firms keep trying to create their own alternatives to proprietary classics like reindeer and snowmen, but they never take off. I’ll never forget Annie’s underwhelmed response to the JingleMas Holiday Gecko.
No, like most people, I was going to have a little MidWinter Event, just Annie and me. So long as I was careful to steer clear of licenced products we’d be fine.
Ivy decorations you can still get away with; Holly™ is a no-no, but I’d hoarded a load of cherry tomatoes, which I was planning to perch on cactuses. I wouldn’t risk tinsel but had a couple of brightly-coloured belts I was going to drape over my aspidistra. You know the sort of thing. The inspectors aren’t too bad: they’ll sometimes turn a blind eye to a bauble or two (which is just as well, because the fines for unlicenced Christmas™ celebrations are astronomical).
So I’d been getting all that ready, but then the most extraordinary thing happened. I won the lottery!
I mean, I didn’t win the lottery. But I was one of a bunch of runners-up, and it was a peach of a prize. An invitation to a special, licenced Christmas™ party in the centre of London, run by YuleCo itself.
When I read the letter I was shaking. This was YuleCo, so it would be the real deal. There’d be Santa™, and Rudolph™, and Mistletoe™, and Mince Pies™, and a Christmas Tree™, with presents underneath it.
That last was what I couldn’t get over. It felt so forlorn, putting my newspaper-wrapped presents next to the aspidistra, but ever since YuleCo bought the rights to coloured paper and under-tree storage, the inspectors had clamped down on Aggravated Subarborial Giftery. I kept thinking about Annie being able to reach down and fish out her present from under needle-dropping branches.
Maybe I shouldn’t have told Annie, just surprised her on the day itself, but I was too excited. And if I’m honest, partly I told her because I wanted to make Aylsa jealous. She’d always made such an issue of how she didn’t miss Christmas™.
“Just think,” I said, “we’ll be able to sing carols legally—oh, sorry, you hate carols, don’t you . . .” I was awful.
Annie was almost sick with excitement. She changed her online nick to tistheseason, and as far as I could work out she spent all her time boasting to her poor jealous friends. I’d peek at the screen when I brought her tea: the chat boxes were full of names like tinkerbell12 and handfulofflowers, and all I could see were exclamations like “noooo!?!?!? crissmass?!?! soooo kewl!!!!!” before she blocked the screen demanding privacy.
“Have a heart,” I told her. “Don’t rub your friends’ noses in it,” but she just laughed and told me they were arranging to meet on the day anyway, and that I didn’t know what I was on about.
When she woke up on the 25th, there was a stocking™ waiting for Annie at the end of her bed, for the first time ever, and she came in to breakfast carrying it and beaming. I took enormous pleasure in waving my YuleCo pass and saying, perfectly legally, “Happy Christmas™, darling.” I was glad that the ™ was silent.
I’d sent her present to YuleCo, as instructed. It would be waiting under the tree. It was the latest console. More than I could afford, but I knew she’d love it. She’s great at video games.
We set out early. There were a reasonable number of people on the streets, all of them doing that thing we all do on the 25th, where you don’t say anything illegal, but you raise your eyebrows and smile a holiday greeting.
Technically it was a regular weekday bus schedule, but of course half the drivers were off “sick.”
“Let’s not wait,” Annie said. “We’ve got loads of time. Why don’t we walk?”
“What have you got me?” I kept asking her. “What’s my present?” I made as if to peer into her bag, but she wagged her finger.
“You’ll see. I’m very pleased with your present, Dad. I think it’s something that’ll mean a lot to you.”
It shouldn’t have taken us too long, but somehow we were slow, and we dawdled, and chatted, and I realised quite suddenly that we were going to be late. That was a shock. I started to hurry, but Annie got sulky and complained. I refrained from pointing out whose idea walking had been in the first place. We were running quite a while behind time as we got to central London.
“Come on,” Annie kept saying. “Are we nearly there . . . ?”
There were a surprising number of people on Oxford Street. Quite a crowd, all wearing that happy secret expression. I couldn’t help smiling too. Suddenly Annie was running on ahead, then coming back to haul me along. Now she wanted to speed up. I kept having to apologise as I bumped into people.
It was mostly kids in their twenties, in couples and little groups. They parted indulgently as Annie dragged me, ran on ahead, dragged me.
There really were an astonishing number of people.
I could hear music up ahead, and a couple of shouts. I tensed, but they didn’t sound angry. “Annie!” I called, nonetheless. “Come here, love!” I saw her skipping through the crowd.
And it was really a crowd. Was that a whistle? Where’d everyone come from? I was jostled, tugged along as if all these people were a tide. I caught a glimpse of one young bloke and with a start of alarm I saw he
was wearing a big jumper with a red-nosed deer on it. I just knew to look at him he didn’t have a licence. “Annie, come here,” I was calling, but I got drowned out. A young woman next to me was raising her voice and singing a note, very loud.
“Weeeeee . . .”
The lad she was with joined in, and then his friend, and then a bunch of people beside them, and in a few seconds everyone was doing it, a mixture of good voices and terrible ones, combining into this godawful loud squeal.
“Weeeeee . . .” And then, with impeccable timing, all the hundreds of people sort of caught each other’s eyes, and their song continued.
“. . . wish you a merry Christmas we wish you a merry Christmas . . .”
“Are you mad?” I screamed, but no one could hear me over that bloody illegal rumpty-tum. Oh my God. I knew what was happening.
We were surrounded by radical Christmasarians.
I was spinning around, shouting for Annie, running after her, looking out for police. There was no way the streetcams wouldn’t spot this. They’d send in the Yule Squad.
I saw Annie through the crowd—goddammit, more people kept coming—and ran for her. She was beckoning to me, looking around anxiously, and I was batting people out of the way, but as I approached I saw her look up at someone beside her.
“Dad,” she shouted. I saw her eyes widen in recognition, and then—did I see a hand grab her and snatch her away?
“Annie!” I was screaming as I reached where she’d been. But she was gone.
I was panicking: she’s an intelligent girl and it was broad daylight, but whose was that bloody hand? I called her phone.
“Dad,” she answered. The reception was appalling in this crowd. I was bellowing at her, asking where she was. She sounded tense, but not frightened. “. . . ok . . . I’ll be . . . see . . . a friend . . . at the party.”
“What?” I was yelling. “What?”
“At the party,” she said, and I lost the signal.
Right. The party. That’s where she’d make her way. I controlled myself. I shoved through the crowd.