TAPE 1SIDE A1.This is a test. Hello, Hello. Hello. You are listening to a recording. How about that? I am recording onto a Lanier LCR5D Desktop Cassette Voice Recorder that belonged to my father, who worked as a court reporter in his twenties. There is a house one of my relatives owns, which he used to live in but has never sold or rented out, and which various generations and distant arms of my family have used as a permanent storage facility for furniture and items they no longer have room for, but don’t want to take to the tip. I found the Lanier there, next to his steno machine. I hoped I would. It has an epidermis of dust and a metal foot pedal, and has been for some time an unavailable and obsolete piece of equipment. It is, however, the only piece of equipment I can find that records onto tape. Tape is an easily destroyed medium which is impossible to play back without possessing a similarly long-discontinued device, and this will hopefully give me greater control over where the contents of this recording are distributed. I am hoping this means not into the hands of the John Steeds, but just in case it does, I will not be using anyone’s real names.
2. The Lanier works fine, you will be relieved to hear. So I will begin without further ado. This is the personal account of the right-hand man to the leader of the ‘E-Gunpowder Plot’, as it was dubbed by some. We ourselves had no name for the operation. It was simply the course of action that Blue Damselfly, the ringleader, deemed as necessary in order to plunge the country back into the Dark Ages. If, that is, you believe that the period before the Voyeur System constituted Dark Ages. Some people do. Some people believe that the world was literally in the dark prior to the invention of the light bulb and, similarly, that the world was practically, to all intents an purposes, in the dark before the invention of the Voyeur System. The reason I am recording this tape, however, is that I believe those people are far, far fewer in number than those who realise - maybe only deep down, beneath a great crust of apathy - that we should not live in a world where nothing is private. That living under a constant eye - even an eye whose possessor changes on a monthly basis - is living under tyranny.
I am recording this tape for them, perhaps in the hope that they will find some inspiration in our attempts and learn from our mistakes. I will explain as much as I can of how we came so close to dismantling the Voyeur System from within, of how we evaded detection for so long, what elements leant to our successes and what elements also led to our ultimate failure.
With regards to our failure, I am not ashamed or downtrodden. Most attempts to change things for the better are doomed. I will quote a character from a book I have been reading - it is the autobiography of Dale Cooper. Dale’s dad tells his son that “we all fail, and that we would again and again, and that was just the way it was.”
Some will reject that. Some are determined to succeed. But I think failure is more important than success. Successful people don’t know what they’re missing. The only reason they’re constantly succeeding is that they’re trying to do all the wrong things. Mostly, they’re trying to do what has already proven to be achievable. So no, I am not at all bitter that we failed. I look forward to failing again. I believe a person is no more than a ridiculously complex machine with a few ridiculously simple functions. One is to attempt the impossible. Another is to cause trouble. A third to slip on a metaphorical banana skin. There is no point in railing against this last function. It’s what we were built to do and sometimes, without realising it, this is exactly the function we are carrying out and all our movements and carefully thought out plans are necessary stages leading up to this. That is why we do it so often, and why we enjoy it so much when we see others at it.
This is the reason for the codenames I have chosen, unromantic as they are.
I am also recording this with some kind of posterity in mind. I aim to bury copies of this tape in protective boxes for future generations. I don’t know how I will do this yet - not without my current Voyeur noticing - but I will do my best to figure something out. For the benefit of those future generations I will attempt to explain everything that may date or be written out of history. I am not particularly technologically complement, but a rudimentary description will, I hope, suffice.
I said earlier that I am - or was - the right-hand man to Blue Damselfly, but you will have noticed from my voice I am a woman. Well done on that. You’ve already narrowed down your list of suspects by half. I confess I have no idea how to distort my voice when recording onto tape, so I don’t believe I can hide that fact any more than I could from the long list of perfect strangers who have seen me unclothed, seen my 34A cups and rampant crop of pubic hair.
You will notice as well that my accent is vaguely Northern, which means I come from the ever-shrinking English regions that are not yet enveloped within London and Greater London. You might as well also know that I never really wanted to move to London. I had - I still have - more friends and allies outside the city, vast as it is. I only moved there because my father told me it was the only way I would land a good job, the only way his ‘investment’ in me would pay dividends. I did not land a good job and London made me lonely. Still, he tried his best.
Excuse me, my voice is dry.
3. I have a cup of coffee, which I will sip throughout the course of the recording. I first want to try to document why it was I was convinced by Blue Damselfly’s plan, so here I go.
It is important, by the way, that you understand I am a person of sub-standard zeal. When Blue Damselfly first outlined her plan to me, lavishly and enthusiastically - licking every word - from the nest of jumpers and coats that buried a chair in the corner of my shatteringly untidy room, something long ago locked away came to the fore of my mind, and when she had finished speaking - without waiting, and as opposed to asking all the obvious questions (“Are you serious?” “How do you know all this?” “What use could I be?”) I began to uncover and unravel and untangle this strange something right there in the room. I told her -
I’ve got this memory, I said - something my dad might have told me when I was younger, concerning a visit to the hairdressers when he first moved to London. He’d got his appointment in the morning, thinking he could slot it in neatly before work - half hour to get his hair done (it was just a cut and blow dry) jump on the bus and in High Holburn by 25 past, giving him five minutes to scuttle down Chancery Lane at pace, suit and tie, with his hair finally neat and not raucous - all the better to fit in down there in the law district. He got to the hairdressers on time - there was only one stylist there and she seemed to be putting the finishing touches to the customer before him. Snip here. Snip there. Taking her time. Musing.
Somehow, this touching up took her five minutes beyond my dad’s (if was my dad - as I say, can’t remember who told me) appointment, but that wasn’t much matter. He could be five minutes late, if the haircut was good enough. Or maybe it wouldn’t take half an hour after all. He didn’t want anything fancy. Just make it neat, trim, slick, short, whatever.
There’s some wrangling at the till for a while. Previous customer, a genial Scotsman, is looking to buy some product. He discusses with the stylist what might be best. Items are taken off shelves, passed back and forth across the counter, then replaced. This takes them to ten minutes beyond the start of the appointment. The stylist flashes a quick sign and a whisper at my dad (let’s assume it was my dad after all) indicating that she won’t be much longer. It’s OK - even if he does turn up late, he can invent a decent story about the appointment, about it somehow stretching out farcically over an hour. Again, if the haircut’s good, if it impresses.
Credit card is passed over. These were the days when you had a Personal Identification Number that you committed to memory and that allowed you to access money from your bank wherever - so, potentially, a trusted associate or loved one could use your card if you told them the number. (Blue Damselfly nods vigorously, because she is old enough to remember these days).
Here is where a machine becomes involved. Because I may be making this report to People of the Future, I will attempt to describe most of the machines and devices which may be obsolete in your age. I am no technician or mechanic or programmer, but all machines are essentially boxes with human characteristics, just as all humans are essentially machines. The main difference is that machines are more like boxes. You could also say that humans are far more complicated than machines in every way, but when you are a technological ignoramus, it really makes no difference.
The machine in question is a chip/PIN reader. A chip/PIN reader was a box that bit down on a person’s bank card and asked that person to write down their Personal Identification Number. Then it checked the computer chip that was on the bank card. A person could not read this chip. If the chip/pin reader found that the PIN number on the chip matched the PIN that the person has written down for them, it would allow money to be taken from that person’s bank account.
The man writes down the correct PIN, the sale is confirmed, the machine that holds his card in its teeth makes happy noises and everything is done. This is the point where he should leave, but instead, he checks his receipt (receipts, in those days, were a paper record of the transaction, mainly for the customer’s benefit). Something is wrong. Something is quite wrong. He queries it with the hairdresser.
My dad is trying his utmost not to look uncomfortable and impatient, but his watch hand is slowly arcing towards the quarter to mark. Maybe it’s time to go? But the hairdresser quickly sets the Scotsman up on the phone - he’s phoning his card company to discuss what is wrong with the transaction - in those days you could talk to a real person at the other end. The hairdresser then ushers my dad into a seat, wraps the black cape round his neck and asks him what he’d like. He produces a picture from a catalogue, hurriedly cut out and scratched where it’s been folded in the middle. He starts to describe what it is about the style he likes, but the hairdresser is eager to get started - to not delay any further - yes, yes, she says, and starts hacking away at his hair.
His hair, I should mention, is not really just in need of a trim. It’s been allowed to grow quite long. So once the hairdresser has cut off a few choice clumps, it is decidedly, remarkably uneven. Understand this: he can now no longer get out of the chair. He would look ridiculous. Better to not turn up at all than to wander into work so sheared. Of course, then, this is when the Scotsman calls the hairdresser back over and has further words with her. They both catch my dad’s mask of anxiety in the mirror - he is trying his best to keep it down, but like a fist pressing through a plastic bag, its shape is increasingly apparent. Without having to confer, the hairdresser and the Scotsman agree to let my dad in on exactly what has happened and why it is more important than his getting to work on time.
What has happened is this: the machine has charged the Scotsman £8,900 instead of the £89 that makes up the cost of his meticulous haircut plus his bag of hair products. He has to be at the airport very soon, to leave the country, and cannot very well do so without knowing that he’s going to get the nine-ish grand back. He doesn’t look, speak or dress like the grotesquely affluent type - £9k is a lot of money to him. The hairdresser understand this too and is eager to show that she will go to every effort to make sure the business is sorted out
Horror of horrors, now he has entered his PIN number - neither of them noticed the number was wrong, if indeed it was, when the machine asked for it - his card company say that they cannot cancel the exchange and that he will have to secure a refund from the hairdresser. But this hairdresser is just the woman who works there in the morning - she doesn’t own the salon. That guy won’t get there until eleven, by which time the Scotsman needs to be in the departure lounge.
My dad is sitting there in no fit state to hotfoot it to the office, bound by the black cape, in a comfy chair, as the gap closes between the minute hand and the hour mark, while the hairdresser disappears to look for someone - who knows who? While she is gone, the genial Scotsman tries to joke about the situation and apologises - I should mention, because it’s important, that both hairdresser and Scotsman have already apologised at least once - and my dad tries to smile and play along and imagine how he will put the story to his new bosses, to his friends, to his daughter however many years down the line that might be - I believe it was my dad (as I told Blue Damselfly the story, I felt more and more certain of it). The Scotsman explains, again, very reasonably and with much joviality, that he simply can’t leave without making sure he’s going to get the money back. He tries to elaborate, but there’s really not much to be said at all. Either the machine did something wrong, he said, or, I don’t know, she … or he made a mistake.
The ‘she…or he’ refers to the hairdresser - it is evident the Scotsman is doubtful as to the purity of the woman’s sex. Does he think she’s a transsexual, or just a transvestite? My dad doesn’t know - and he is too busy nodding and agreeing and smiling and tipping his head this way and that to think about it much. His brain is being shaken about, after all, and he’s now electric with anxiety. His explanation will have to not just be convincing and entertaining, but very witty - he will have to remember the Scotman’s ‘he or she’ line, perhaps place it in a better context (timing is everything) and - I don’t know - exaggerate the amounts involved maybe.
The hairdresser comes back in with someone - likely a friend from a nearby shop - whose sole function, it eventually transpires, seems to be to help them arrive at a decision on what to do next. He doesn’t know what to do with the machine, but he chimes with good-humoured sympathy when he sees the receipt. The Scotsman again explains his predicament. The hairdresser again explains her predicament. The newcomer is very understanding, and sees that this is not something easily resolved.
And then it hits my dad, this feeling - this is the point he usually came to, whenever he told this story - and I heard him tell it numerous times to visitors, to siblings, to relatives returning from adventures in space - it hits him that here is mankind at its most ideal. No one seems to be too angry. Everyone understands everyone else, and is managing their own fluster dutifully. No one has even done anything wrong, or so it would seem, and so dad chose to believe. Yet they were in an impossible situation, an unhappy situation, a terrible situation, which was also having a knock-on effect on him. What had happened? Utopia had gone rotten. Why? All because of the card machine.
Here, my dad would smirk, sometimes snort - the recollection amused him so much. One machine, with one moderately simple function (it didn’t even have to calculate the amount) had screwed up the morning for all three of them. And taken a chunk out of a fourth participant’s schedule as well.
I trailed off here, having reached what I felt was the point in the story. Blue Damselfly shuffled in her throne of synthetic wool and considered it deeply, tasting it, tasting it, swilling it round in her skull. For all her blistering enthusiasm - for all the great vigour and bright-eyed good grace with which she approached everything, with which she armed herself against all obstacles - I could see that she didn’t really know what to make of my babble.
“So you believe the problem lies in the machine itself rather than the government?” she said.
I told her that I believed the point of the anecdote was that machines were not to be trusted. And yes, I said, I am aware that machines only do what they are made to do, that flaws are faults of design or user, but nevertheless, we should never trust them.
“You mean we should never have trusted them,” said Blue Damselfly. “I believe it’s too late to advise against that course of action now, sunbeam.”
She was right, of course. And it seems churlish to blame machines as if they are some kind of alien. I do not wish to set our group up as modern day Spinning Jenny wreckers, nor Blue Damselfly as the new Captain Swing. I do not hate machines. If anything, I love and rely on machines more than you do. Certainly you who may be reading this in the far future.
But I will say this: it is our love affair with machines that has got us into this mess and has got us into so many messes in the pass. I don’t think we can help loving and relying on machines as soon as they come into being - our system of government is, after all, a kind of clapped out old machine. It is simply that every now and then there must be an overhaul, because we have got ourselves into a mess. Out with the old and in with the new.
Why are we so in love with machines? Because we are machines ourselves.
This was and is how I understand the situation. Like Blue Damselfly, I do not like the Voyeur system, but at the time my motivation was more the destruction of the machine that lay at its heart. The machine that gave your life up to the eyes of a stranger every month. This is the violation, as I saw it then. A person’s private activities are something they choose to share with a specific and slight number of people. I have heard the argument against this. Fire Ant would often voice it. It goes something like: that we were all exhibitionists anyway. That with the Internet age and the explosion of publishing, both traditional and electronic, that documented our lives in detail, we were clearly no longer a society that cherished privacy. This this is still the age of Celebrity after all - and a Celebrity is someone whose life is public. And we all want to be celebrities. Celebrities are out gods. I have read all that, don’t you worry. And also about the booming crime levels - both underclass crime and corporate crime. So I know how it seemed to some a natural step, and a useful one, to move to the Voyeur System, whereby no one escapes scrutiny. I understand the thinking that says this puts our destiny in the our own hands - that because your scrutiner is another Ordinary Person we are only being watched by ourselves, that the practical implications are simply to give us an angel on our shoulder.
But, frankly, this is all the thinking of apologists, originated by People Who Don’t Know They’re Born, who were so far removed from everyday struggles that it was left entirely to their selective imaginations, who perhaps never imagined in the first place that they themselves would be scrutinised just as much as the common-as-mucks they envisaged when they used the phrase Ordinary Person. I am not touting myself as a champion of the silent majority, but trying to appeal to the shared experience of all humans. We are not an Us. The only truly common experience is knowing that no one else is like ourselves. There is no one we can trust to watch over us who does not become an Other.
Also, I think guilt may be a kind of pleasure. Replacing our own private guilt with the scorn of a perfect stranger has made our lives less pleasurable. And this is what the machine does, and does so coldly, without shame. It is like that PIN machine in the hair salon - its idle stupidity injects misery and anxiety into our lives. I don’t harbour much animosity towards the people behind this. I simply see it as our having slipped again on a banana skin again.
I mean honestly.
4.I think I have to rewind to the start. I have to start at the start, maybe even before the start. It is hard to know how to introduce someone like Blue Damselfly into a story. I had only met her that night but I had been watching her for days. That month, you see, I was her Voyeur. I was not a very good Voyeur - I don’t believe many people are. The strictures are too demanding - who really has an hour a day to waste watching someone else’s life? I mean, we’re all boring. And yeah, sure, in theory, you’ve an hour, but in practice, there’s always something you’ve got to do that’s more important - it’s not like anything much will happen to you. I mean, your Voyeur is likely just as lazy. I don’t know - maybe I tell a lie. Maybe if you don’t at least keep half up to speed with your Voyeur duties, your own Voyeur will report you. I put in half an hour some nights, less so as the month went by and it became apparent that my Voyee for that month was far too boring to ever step out of line. Most of them don’t even have a very active sex life - there’s a joke, isn’t there, that when they switched from polling people directly to polling their Voyeurs, the amount of sex the population were having plummeted. Ho ho.
On a more serious note, I did always wonder whether or not people masturbated any less once that system came into play, once they knew that someone somewhere could be rerunning the recording and watching them do it. I was one of those, incidentally, who slowed the tape down to watch people doing it. Again, I think everyone did. Everyone I knew did. We’re not perverted. We are simply interested in each others’ bodies. The workings, you know? The legs like pistons, the steam of our breath. We wonder how much that thing on the screen is like us. We are amazed by the uncanny similarity - as amazed as we by the differences.
Then again, I never spent too long on it, firstly because my Voyees were mostly ugly - and this is because most people whom we don’t know are ugly until we get to know them - and secondly because there’s always the threat, isn’t there, that your own Voyeur is watching you watching your Voyee having sex or masturbating. I saw that myself. I had one Voyee who was tossing off while watching his Voyee toss off. Both men. You’d think it would happen more often, but no, just once. I stopped the chain there - I could’ve lowered my trousers and kept it going, but I stopped it there.
I am straying. This happens when you dictate something orally. You don’t know what order to put things in and you have to go back to retrieve relevant details. For instance, now I am trying to find the start, but I don’t know how far to go back. Blue Damselfly was my Voyee. I was her Voyeur. For that month. We were a few days in when she called.
I work - that is, I worked - as a
5. I forgot to rewind the tape and now I don’t want to record that last part again so I will just go on as if nothing had happened. I was about to discuss where I used to work, but I cannot, as this would be precious information for eavesdroppers and it is of no use to anyone anyway. I did not do a job that said anything much about me. If you were to draw a psychological diagram of the right-hand man to Blue Damselfly, you would not put her in the kind of job I had. I took the first job offered to me that I could afford to live on. I discovered that people do not fall into interesting jobs accidentally anymore. I wonder if they ever did. I have read the numerous biographies of people who became what they were by accident, by not knowing what else to be. I suppose, statistically, for every lucky accident there has to be so many that are damp squibs. Hey ho. What can you do?
Where I worked is not so important as how I travelled to work. It was by bus.
A bus is a box that travels very slowly along a road eating people. It only eats people who wait at specially designated stops, and who possess a ticket or a pass. While travelling inside the stomach of the bus, the people remain undigested and are unharmed. It is quite comfortable. There are seats for some of the consumed, and windows to the outside. In some ways, it is like a cluttered and badly designed living room. At any designated stop a person may exit from the bus via one of its orifices.
Every day, there and back, I travelled by bus. I remember very clearly some of the shops I would go past, and in particular the umbrella repair shop with its yellowing signage - Ladies’ Umbrellas, Tropical Sunshades, Garden and Golf Umbrellas, Gentlemen’s Umbrellas, Foxframes, Gold and Silver Mounts, Umbrellas Recovered, Renovated, Repaired, Sticks Repolished, Riding Crops and Whips, Irish blackthorns, Malacca Canes, Life Preservers, Dagger Canes, Swordsticks. I memorised all that bit by bit, as my bus roared past the shop every day. I would spend most of the journey staring at my Glassmap.
A Glassmap is a box that makes, out of light, a small model of the part of the world you're in. Using this model, it illustrates where you are, and uses its brain to calculate a variety of other interesting facts about your situation, if only you ask it to.
I had all the settings turned on - so I could see where I am going, the name of the street I am, the approximate time until arrival, the E.T.A, the time I left, the overall journey time so far, where I would be if I had attempted to walk the same route, where I would be if I had attempted to drive, and numerous other settings. It was comforting to know these things, though I was aware, even then, that I surely felt no more comfortable than before the Glassmap was made affordable. I was also aware that most people who rode the bys did not have their Glassmaps on constantly. I might see the occasional one flicker into life for a few moments, maybe even carefully studied for a protracted period. But either most commuters I rode with were the devil-may-care sort or - and this is where my thinking led me - I was in need of a great deal more comfort than them.
So I comforted myself back then with these thoughts: people stumble about everywhere, doing their best to look like they know what they’re doing, but actually, no one is entirely sure. It’s just a great game to play, for the duration of our adult lives. We impersonate someone who knows what they’re doing, where they’re going and what they want, and can sum it up for you over a light lunch. We make plans, I think, not so much because we intend to see them through to completion, but for the pleasure of pretending we will. Just as it was once exciting to look at the stars and see yourself roaring past them in a rocket to lands unknown, so it is exciting to make a plan and imagine yourself following it. We dream of being heroic adventurers. We dream also of being organised.
When I’m not studying the Glassmap, I like to look out the window. What you can see from the window of a bus is as stimulating as anything you will find anywhere: kids smoking outside a college next door to McDonalds. The college had a narrow entrance, a bland logo and only taught English and Business Studies - its target market were first generation immigrants, still arriving in the city at as steady a rate as ever, to live in a country that has no identity whatsoever and is as disconnected from its past as any land can be. You have to understand that, for me, a college is a grand old building and seeing one next to McDonald’s was like seeing a kind of scale model, or coming across an impossible rock formation.
I saw a woman hop over a rail once, skirt flailing, right out of the congregation that shuffled around Oxford Circus. She ran right behind our bus, in front of the taxi behind us, and dodged through the traffic all the way across the road. She had high heels, and was clutching a cabbage to her bosom.
No grand Canyon for me, thanks very much. No Ngorongoro crater, Mount Kilimanjaro or Lechuiguilla caves or Devil’s Arse. Eternity is in a grain of sand.
I would arrive back home, glad of having my Glassmap to assure me that busing was faster than walking and driving, warmer than cycling and cheaper than the tube, and I would switch on my Vee22. If by some miracle you are listening to this tape in some future epoch I will explain what one of these is. The Vee22 is the home computer designed specifically for fulfilling your Voyeur duties. The screen is small, about the size of a letter. When you boot it up it immediately asks for your ID and password, the latter of which must be changed weekly, at DNA stations. It will then patch you into the security network, but only allow you access to the footage of your Voyee. Every camera and knife-eye detects your identity from a distance, so long as you are carrying your ID, and builds a map of your progress through the day. Your Voyeur can then follow this map, only needing to switch cameras when they have the option of multiple points of view.
Blue Damselfly was one of the most interesting Voyees I had been landed with. She didn’t appear to have a job at all, and spent a lot of time doing nothing but walking. She didn’t use a Glassmap or any other navigation apparatus, but never appeared to be lost. She was interested in things that did not seem particularly interesting to me. For instance, the canal tunnel that stretched from Maida Vale to the top of Lisson Grove. Twice I saw her watch a boat go in at one end and then race it to the other, where she watched it emerge with a look of childish excitement on her face. I did not like this. I didn’t believe anyone had the right to find such things a source of amusement.
This was hypocritical of me. I have found that I am just as excited by simple devices and mechanisms. I simply work harder against the feeling. I believe there was a simple message encoded into me at some point instructing that I only express surprise at what is truly new, not stuff that’s been around for hundreds of years.
I would later hear Blue Damselfly’s explanation.
“Don’t try so hard to remember,” she said. “The more you forget, the more there is to find anew.”
I replied that I could think of more productive ways to spend my time than wandering around rapt with fascination at everything, econ it.
“Wandering around rapt with fascination is precisely what our brains were made for and precisely why we’re where we are today, and not somewhere else,” she said.
Not true at all, I said. People have to work econ hard, prioritise, shut out all the interesting noise and knuckle down if they want to get anything done. We’d still be in caves if no one had knuckled down.
Sure you’ve got to knuckle down, Blue Damselfly said, but first comes the wandering around rapt with fascination, which is more natural to us. The knuckling down is the point where we tamper with nature, which is also natural, because we are fascinated with our limits.
This the only real explanation she gave me for what happened three or four days into my surveillance of her. The central heating had just come on at work and made me sleepy as a baby bear. As was a common occurrance back then, a beautiful oriental girl sat next to me on the bus. This one had tousled hair, a delicate scarf and an expansive fake fur collar which I longed to bury myself in. Exhausted as I was, I arrived home in a mode of greater anxiety than I was used to, such that even my Glassmap failed to comfort me. There was scaffolding up near where I lived and I stopped to watch the builders for a while. I liked to watch them flirt with danger. My favourite trick was when they took down the scaffolding and threw the assembly bolts into a plastic bin on top of a parked vehicle from several floors up. Most of the time the rain of bolts went in, but sometimes they missed or hit the side, spinning onto the road.
Sometimes they were bright purple.
Once in my flat, which was freezing, I switched on my Vee22, and began to scroll at speed through Blue Damselfly’s day. She went through her usual routines. She read newspapers. She went to the British Library, and spent some hours on a computer. I sped through most of it, drinking coffee and eating a Danish cinammon swirl that remained from a twinpack I’d bought that morning. As I recall, it was a little crusty.
As the time on the Vee22 screen raced to catch up with the time on my watch, I realised the setting had become familiar to me. Blue Damselfly had strolled into New Canterbury - where I lived. I don’t believe there is much danger in admitting this. As the footage was speeded up, it took me some time to realise that she was routinely stopping to check a piece of paper, and had even brought a Glassmap with her, though with only the most fundamental settings switched on. The route she took was almost the same as my bus’s. I wondered if I had passed her at some point. Would I see myself in the surveillance footage?
She continued, drawing closer and closer to my block of flats. I slowed it down a little. She arrived at the very doorway I had only minutes ago entered, and instead of going straight past it, she stopped, checked her paper one last time and went through. My Voyee, in the very same building as me? This happened routinely to people - it was not unheard of for your Voyee to be someone you know, perhaps your neighbour.
I sped it up again to see where she went next, but it stopped dead as she mounted the stairs. My first thought was that my Vee22 had crashed, but even as I moved to reset it I noticed the time in the corner. The image jerked - Blue Damselfly now half way up the first flight of stairs, heading towards the elevator.
An elevator is a box that only travels up and down. It is essentially all mouth. It holds a number of people in its mouth and spits them out on particular floors of a building, much like a bus does horizontally. You do not, however, need a ticket or a pass to board an elevator.
I checked the time against my watch and found them to match more or less exactly. The footage had stopped because it had caught up with the present and was now downloading directly from the security network. Surveillance had to be a minimum of fifteen seconds behind realtime, or else it stuttered and upset the computer.
At this point I reprimanded myself for being too interested and went to start preparing dinner. You can see where this is going, can’t you? It wasn’t long at all before I heard the elevators crunch shut outside. Shortly after, a knock on the door.
6. Second day of recording.
So my Voyee had come to visit me. You can only imagine how I felt! Nobody wants to come face to face with the person they have been dutifully spying on, watching dress and undress for the last half week! How would I feel if I met one of my Voyeurs? Of course, I would soon find out, but at that point my answer would have been that I’d punch them in the gut. I quickly found out, however, that Blue Damselfly is not someone who takes offence very easily. She is the kind of person who would cheerfully weather a slew of insults and behave thereafter as if her mind had been somewhere else entirely. She knew when she rapped on my door that I was her Voyeur, and yet she said nothing about it, aside from when she first greeted me.
“Hi. So you’re my angel,” she said, standing on top of half a dozen letters to myself and past occupiers that had not been removed from the doormat for several days.
I admitted I was.
Blue Damselfly was delighted. She did a little dance - a flourish with her feet - and asked if she could come in. I said of course, and explained, somewhat awkwardly, that I had just begun to make dinner and would she like any. Absolutely, she said (Blue Damselfly was also not the kind of person to let awkward situations sour good hospitality). I went to confirm what I already suspected - that my cupboards were filled with incompatible ingredients, and nothing of bulk except old potatoes with roots growing out of their eyes and an onion the size of a baby’s head. I cut the roots off clumsily and wrapped the potatoes in tin foil, dashed oil all over them and stuck them in the oven. So much for hospitality.
I can remember this clearly, though there is no need to. On any given day, this is likely what would be in my in my cupboards. Organisation was not a game I played very well. This is still the case. If only you could see me now, you would not believe that I had been involved in the nearest this country has come to revolution since the middle ages. You would think - more than rightly - that I would have serious trouble organising a picnic for androids.
Blue Damselfly would not strike you as the woman to lead a revolution either. She was no cut-throat, nor was she particularly tall. I would not rate her vocabulary as more than above average. She does not, to my knowledge, have ancestors who commanded legions, nor has she any managerial experience. She was strikingly beautiful, I think. Fire Ant evidently did not agree with me on this. He said she was plain looking, but added that at least she wasn’t a ‘double-bagger’. A double-bagger is a person who requires two paper bags over their head in case the first one slips off. So there, perhaps, is the key to Blue Damselfly’s revolutionary capability - she was not a double bagger.
To my surprise, when I returned to the living room with drinks (we had an exchange of calls from kitchen to doormat and back to establish which were preferred) she immediately began to describe the plan to me, before anything else. At that stage it was only a basic outline, and very much the result of imagination more than research, but since it was not something I myself had contemplated, it seemed to me to be simultaneously ingenious and ludicrous.
First we would go in search of my Voyeur and find them the same way Blue Damselfly had located me. Then in search of my Voyeur’s Voyeur. Then my Voyeur’s Voyeur’s Voyeur. Eventually, Blue Damselfly reasoned, we would come full circle, to her own Voyee. The central computer - the one that decided each month who would watch who - guarded only against a small number of outcomes, the most important of which being that no one is given themselves to watch. There was a fair chance, Blue Damselfly said, that small numbers of people effectively formed circles of Voyeurism, that before the month was out, we could have rounded up a full circle. This group would then be utterly free from observation. Nobody would track us. We would have until the end of the month to achieve our goal.
Our goal? The vandalisation, the destruction, the irrecoverable toppling of the central computer that stored the biometrical information of the entire populous and arranged the security footage for Voyeurs consumption. This would give us ample opportunity, as well as the necessary reputation, said Blue Damselfly, to whip up a revolutionary force and stage at least a partial coup d’etat, establishing a new government that, while not necessarily perfect, would never dare set up such a system again.
Why did Blue Damselfly want to do such a thing? She did not seem to bear any ill will to anyone. She was evidently not overly distressed about being watched over by perfect strangers. She was perfectly happy, as happy as anyone can be, I believe, in a I can only put it down to her programming. Yes. She is another complex machine, trying to perform its simple function. This is not how right hand men are given to talk about their leaders, I grant you, but why shouldn’t I add a little unexpected spice to my role. Why, if I were completely predictable they’d have caught me by now. They’d have caught all of us.
7. I should mention that my flat is mess. I was waiting for someone to invent a machine that would tidy it up. Some say that we only come to rely on machines once they are built - that without them, we would be getting along just as well. Not true at all. I could not, and cannot keep anywhere tidy without the aid of a machine, a machine, I might add, that has yet to be invented. There is the vacuum cleaner, of course, and there are very simple things like drawer tidies, and some can afford maids. But none of them are ultimately useful if you are a frugal person who finds it hard to keep her clothes, accessories and general adopted properties from spreading all over the floor like a heap of docile kittycats.
Blue Damselfly did not mind standing on the letters, or indeed having to pluck one from the sole of her shoe, nor did she seem uncomfortable snuggling down in a chair that was not so much a chair at all as a chair-shaped pile of used clothes, even though there were knickers among the clothes.
After she had outline her plan, and after my long and drawn out reaction, which though it was made with sincerity, did altogether jar with my own reliance on devices and contraptions, we got down to the kind of business that we really should have begun on, if we really did exist for all the reasons philosophers suggest.
I asked her her name, and she told me. I asked her who she was, and she replied that I should know, since I was her Voyeur for this month. Our conversation was punctatued by screams and roars from the building site. Didn't put her off. I told her all I knew was that she didn’t seem to do an awful lot with her day. She said that this was exactly how she hoped to appear, since it would be troublesome to her if her Voyeurs knew too much about what she was up to. Slightly frustrated by now, I demanded to know how she had tracked me down. Again, I don’t believe that I am revealing too much when I say that Blue Damselfly has friends in high places. Perhaps not so much high places as canny places. She knows people who, as part of performing their function to either attempt the impossible, cause trouble or slip on a banana skin, have access to secret realms of electronic information.
If you are of the future, do not be surprised that crime still goes on. Who ever thought an intense surveillance network would do anything to combat crime?
As it turns out, Blue Damselfly had already a complete list of people who formed the circle. That is why she had chosen this month to strike, and no other. She had got onto her contact, as she always did, using a thieves’ cant - a code - to disguise the intent of her emails, which I could, of course, had looked into, if I had been bothered. This month the results had come back: seven, including her. With the cooperation of only six others, she would break free of the surveillance network until the end of the month. The plan could be carried out.
It wasn’t just the numbers that worked to her advantage, although she had been waiting years for such a magically tiny number as seven, in a country of tens of millions, and was also (she later informed me) only one of a great number of potential revolutionaries who hoped to carry out the plan, once they were given a manageable circle.
What was I saying? Of course. It wasn’t just the numbers.
8. I was dying for a drink there. I probably can’t go on for much more tonight. My eyes are bleary and the whining of the tape is beginning to tear at my ears. But I will begin on the track I aim to pursue tomorrow.
No, as luck would have it, every other member of the seven, with the exception of myself, was of considerable use, in one way or another. I will describe them each in turn. Again, it is a risky gambit giving away so much detail, but the odds of the John Steeds piecing together all this information must be weighed against the usefulness of the same information in inspiring others to take action. I also wish to paint as accurate a picture of what happened as possible, although that is nearly impossible. So, here I go then.
Actually, I will leave that part to tomorrow. I was about to start with Fire Ant, as I have already mentioned him, but it makes sense to go in roughly chronological order I will describe each member of the seven in the order that we encountered them. Next on our list was, of course, my own Voyeur, who I had said I wanted so much to punch in the gut.
9. Good evening again, tape recorder, and my audience, be they John Steeds, revolutionaries or men and women of the future. I was about to talk about the next conspirator on our list - the next to be recruited.‘Longicorn’ is the name I will give him, and there is no one who was less deserving of a punch in the gut, or for whom a punch in the gut would be less helpful. Had he seen me naked? Upon meeting him, I found myself heavily doubting it, and even if he had (I mulled) I doubt he got any kind of pleasure out of it. It is difficult to imagine Longicorn getting pleasure out of anything at all.
To continue as a narrative, or as much I am able:
As soon as we had finished our rumbledethumps (which she proclaimed Immensely Filling) Blue Damselfly wanted to set off immediately, insisting time was of the essence and that we should try to snare a third conspirator by midnight. I protested - I had dozens of dead shirts to iron and nothing to wear to work on Monday. Pish, said Blue Damselfly, you’ll possess a look of rumpled dignity and/or rampallion charm in an unironed shirt, with bra lace peeking through. Still I argued, and was able to buy myself enough time to dress in fresh clothes - the very last scraps that hung from my skeletal wardrobe - and to wash up, thank god, and to provision myself with warm outer layers and a hip flask before I was dragged through the door of my own house and into the supercold night.
Longicorn was a skilled programmer who worked in a spacious office of his own on one of the highest floors of a starscraper. He did not do much work. He was skilled and clever enough to make half an hour of machine-gun touch-typing look like a full day’s tirelessly enthusiastic and strenuous effort. And yet he was tired and bored. He spent most of his working day staring out the window, he said, counting yellow cars and watching people stopping to talk in the street, morosely second-guessing the banality of their chitchat. From his terminal, with his considerable talent and experience, he could roam cyberspace like a miniature god, rendezvous with allies and colleagues in the Far East and the Further West, construct incredible projects to revolutionise his industry and plot and plan his own entrepreneurial schemes that would eventually free him from service to a company altogether, if only he could see them through to their finish. It did not make him feel big and powerful, but small and useless.
Blue Damselfly commented that living most of the day in a great big office, with your own holographic faxmatic-strollphone combo, complete atmospheric control, panoramic-postcard-sky-projecting adjustable windows, a buffed oak desk and a regularly hoovered carpet would make her feel giddy with luxury and thus it was no surprise that Longicorn never got any work done.
Longicorn, however, without any sign of envy or aggression, explained that he was not giddy with luxury. He simply felt like a balled up woodlouse rattling around inside a great engine. There’s nothing great or fulfilling about revolutionising an industry, he said - industries are revolutionised all the time. The pace just goes on increasing. Soon there will be a revolution in some industry every 0.3 seconds, more than there are infants born across the globe. He was at the controls of a staggering and complex machine whose only purpose was to keep itself fat and alive in the face of inevitable doom and decay (this doubled up as his view of what a person essentially was - so close and yet so far from my own definition).
He also mentioned that the single most depressing thing for him was that he couldn’t recall the last time he had high-fived someone, or the feeling accompanying that. Forget sex, he said. Forget sweaty orgasms. If there is a God (there isn’t) and if he has granted us a special and rare gift designed to reveal to us, momentarily, the meaning of life (why would he?) then it is the high-five. The moment when two people simultaneously arrive at the conclusion that they have achieved the impossible.
Longicorn’s home was just as messy as mine, though he possessed less clothes and evidently more crockery. There was also something about it that made me think of a sunken ship, antique possessions mercilessly scattered by the plunge and left to rot for decades. He walked around in a pair of pyjama bottoms and did not bother to throw anything on before he opened the door to us. We quickly introduced ourselves - Longicorn didn’t seem to recognise me as his Voyee, though he shot me an apologetic look - and Blue Damselfly immediately commented that he needed a smoking jack or dressing gown. Longicorn said he didn’t see the point in smoking or dressing.
Oh, Blue Damselfly said, I could have sworn I caught a whiff of burnt sulphur for a moment there.
Whereupon Longicorn showed us a small blot of reddened skin just to the left of the knuckle on his little finger and explained that he had just that moment succeeded in lighting a match with one hand, although burning himself in the process. The matches were just for lighting the gas hob.
I would like to say that Blue Damselfly humoured him, or feigned interest in this odd pastime in order to win Longicorn’s trust, but I believe the truth is that she was suddenly utterly enraptured with the idea of striking a match with just one hand. She said so, and she does not often lie. Longicorn commented that it was pretty much the only useful thing they teach you in the Korean army, Blue Damselfly laughed out loud and they spent a happy fifteen minutes finger-wrestling with the little sticks, both scorching their skin twice and dropping the lit matches on the carpet, then stamping them out in a panic.
And yet I wasn’t even allowed to iron my dead shirts, econ it!
While they were thus occupied, I, playing the dumb partner in the cop duo, patrolled Longicorn’s bookshelf, which was also his mantelpiece, and found mostly short, despairing books by Eastern European authors, and the kind of philosophy that compares life to Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill for all eternity. My fingernails still smelled strongly of onion, which I found pleasant. There was, notably, not one guide to being happy or enriching your life on Longicorn’s shelf, which is what I would have expected to find. Longicorn is not one of those miserabilists who believes there is some trick to it that he hasn’t yet figured out, some little secret key to a mini-hearth fire in everybody’s winter. He thought that life was simply a drag, and that all that stands in the way of the rest of us believing this is differing degrees of fanatical delusion.
Strangely enough, he did not think of Blue Damselfly, with her unfathomable, unchartable positivity and relish, as an idiot, willing or not. This surprised and bemused me for so long that I eventually had to come out and ask him about it.
He said: “You don’t get that level of exuberance from someone who believes happiness can be won or achieved.”
“You think Blue Damselfly accepts that there is only misery, failure and boredom in the world?” I asked, sarcastically.
“More, far more, than I ever could.”
I have given up on Longicorn.
And yet, for all his darknesses, he was not a pessimist and was easily won over to Blue Damselfly’s plan, once she had been settled in by a drink (malt whiskey) and given an open forum among the city of encrusted dishes and upturned ramekins. Though at the time Longicorn’s mood did not seem to alter at all with his learning of the plot, the prospect of destroying the Voyeur System, he told me later, made his flint of a heart give a little spark every time he thought of it, which was the most exciting feeling he had experienced in as long as he could remember.
10. Needed a pick-me-up. Perhaps I should stop commenting on my between-take activities? Perhaps, but no, I rather like it this way. Perhaps I find this too relaxing for my own good. If so, well, there we are. There we are.
You may be thinking that I have missed a part. Where, you may ask, is the part where Blue Damselfly uses her considerable, nay mythic, oratorial skills to seduce this citizen, this hard-slogging, hard-busing Glassmap devotee, to beckon her invitingly over to the side of conspiracy, corruption and high treason? Friends, I have not missed it out. While my pacing may be off, what I describe is more or less exactly how it happened. I was never planning to revolt before and yet as soon as the opportunity was put before me, I went along. In part, I suppose the enormity of the plot had not sunk in yet. More importantly, however - and this is very imporant, you students of our time - I believe it simply made no difference to me in the long run. With my eternally unchanging One Simple Function of ultimately slipping on a banana skin what harm could aiding and abetting Blue Damselfly do? None whatsoever. So I was towed along.
Yes, and Longicorn, for his part, found a fire threatening to light itself in his cold heart for the first time in who knows how long, so how could he refuse? Blue Damselfly’s not being a double-bagger was so far working wonders. At this rate she could have whipped up an army of untidy flat-dwelling malcontents in no time. Why stop there?
Because it had taken us some time to reach Longicorn’s place, and looking at the address of the next on our list, Blue Damselfly decided that it was unlikely - certainly not worth our effort - that we would be able to encroach upon his property and tangle him up in our scheme with what hours the struggling evening had left.
“The best place to set off from,” she said, “tomorrow morning, I mean, will be my place. Tomorrow is a Waterboatman. Unless either of you have plans, it would be very useful if you could accompany me. Especially you, Longicorn. He’ll recognise you instantly. Now, I know in the case we have just experienced there was no real advantage to having Honeybee with me, but you are, I’m sure, an exceptional case, and I feel with equal certainty that your own Voyee will be a little harder to win round, a little more of a devil.”
Honeybee voiced hesitance, as did I. We both, at that point, began to suspect the two imperfect strangers we had come up against. For my part, were Blue Damselfly and Longicorn in on this together? For Longicorn’s part, were Blue Damselfly and Honeybee in on it together? You can never be too careful in London. On the other hand, this was not the hokey cokey. You do not have one foot in and one foot out when it comes to revolution - even the most naive revolutionary is instantly aware of that. With somewhat suspicious glances therefore - I tapping my fangs together and Longicorn rubbing his hands as if seeking to buff his knuckles - we agreed with Blue Damselfly’s plan and left Longicorn’s shambolic abode - and yes, left sticky whisky glasses still twinkling on the arms of sunken chairs.
Now, before I move on to Fire Ant, I should probably explain a little, though not too much, about Blue Damselfly’s home. Or perhaps I shouldn’t? I am undecided. Blue Damselfly neither lived in squalor, nor luxury. There was, if you can believe this, absolutely nothing within her home that leant me any more clues about her, anything beyond what she had already divulged. If she had photographs of loved ones or riotous memories, they were locked safely in drawers. Her clothes were not strewn, but neither were they arranged neatly in a wardrobe - they were drying on various airers and radiators. I was relieved to see knickers on one particular radiator, since it made for a fair exhange. Her house was uncomfortably warm at first, but she apologised for this, and adjusted the heating accordingly. There was a little make-up, and a paperweight made from a giant marble, on top of her bureau. The bureau itself was open, and stuffed with envelopes of different sizes, but nothing lay half-written or screwed up. She used a mixture of fountain pens and biros. Her plates were all clean and edged with gold plate. She had no microwave, but she did have a drinks cabinet, which smelled of forests. In it, the bottles of liquor shone like the many eyes of a scorpion. She had bookshelves which were relatively full, though not creaking, with musty volumes, but she confessed to having read very little. She said that some of them - the Alistair MacLeans, for instance - were ones she had got into collecting. First editions. This was not something she considered a hobby, however, she said - it was just something she’d somehow got caught up in, and treated herself to once in a while.
Like Longicorn and myself, it was apparent that she lived alone. She possessed a double bed, and suggested that we play a game in order to decide which two of us would share it. Longicorn offered to take the sofa, but Blue Damselfly was keen that the game be played. She produced a selection from the bottom of the wardrobe, one of which was - I’m not kidding - chess. Longicorn and I immediately pretended not to have seen it, and concentrated on the others, most of which were board games. Longicorn fell to examining the statistics on the back of the boxes to find out which estimated the shortest playing time. He said he didn’t really feel like a game and repeated his offer to take the sofa.
“I’ve an idea,” said Blue Damselfly. “How about Nim?”
She explained to us what Nim was - a game played sometimes with cards, but equally with any group of objects, in which players take turns to remove the objects from distinct heaps. Depending on whether the game is played normally, or as a misere game, the last player to pick up an object wins or loses. She demonstrated it for us a few times with pencils.
“Apparently it’s possibly to mathematically solve the game so that you can win every time,” she observed. “I’m no mathematician, but let’s see if I can’t try this method. As such, we will play six games, two against each other person. If I win all four of mine, I will sleep in the double bed. In order for each of you to win a place, you must win only two.”
She lost. Longicorn and I were to share the bed. Believe me, I would not be averse to turning this story into a romance at this point, if that were the way it happened, but Longicorn is a man who lives under a constant proclaimation of doom, and he lay, for as long as I was awake, staring up at the ceiling with fearful eyes. He only protruded from beneath the covers from the chin upward, so that he looked like the head of a guillotined nobleman, settled to rest at the bottom of its basket. Even in the dark, I could tell that under the duvet, his fingers were knitted together across his ribs.
For my part, I was ill at ease in such a large bed, with the room temperature by now very amenable. I listened to the bedside clock for about an hour. I missed my vibrator.
Moving on now to matters of more interest:
Blue Damselfly’s prediction about Fire Ant was bang on. If I am allowed to put it that way. Bang on. She had been extremely lucky so far, of course. Both myself and Longicorn lived on our own, him supported by a generous salary, myself by a meagre one. We were not unknown to people, though Longicorn was reclusive and I largely ignored, and we could safely move and meet for months without those we knew suspecting us of maleficeance.
Fire Ant was not such a case at all, I regret to say. He is a family man, and remains to this day more allied to his family than the cause. Good for him, I say. Good for us too, for the kind of love Fire Ant administers over those closest to him is constrictive at best, tyrannical at worst. He lived in the suburbs, outside London - oh, I’d say near Colchester, although I was not really paying attention to the roadsigns when Blue Damselfly drove us there in her car.
A car is a box, much like a bus, but smaller, and not requiring of tickets or passes. They do not stop at designated stops and travel in whimsical directions, quite blind, under the guiding hand of a human. When travelling at speed, under that same will, they are more than capable of killing people, including those inside them.
She drives like a maniac! Take that down in your copybooks now. Blue Damselfly drives like she’s playing a racing game.
I will now rain further free hints and clues for the benefit of the John Steeds. I cannot say whether Fire Ant or Longicorn earned more money, but it is certain that, while Longicorn’s either went unspent or was lost on unknown activities, every spare penny of Fire Ant’s went on providing himself and his family with the His hall floor - I kid you not - was marble. In a place where you might expect a hatstand, there was a Roman-style, alabaster-white bust. I do not know whether or not much of this was inherited. You could hear a dishwasher, and a TV of some heft.
When he opened the door to us, he was wearing shorts, and his oddly developed leg muscles (‘The vastus medialis was particularly promiment’, Blue Damselfly later whispered to me) informed us straight away that he was a keen cyclist. He immediately recognized Longicorn, and went on the defensive.
“Ah, the lazy boy,” he said. “How did you find me and what’s the meaning of all this?”
He had evidently not watched the footage of Longicorn from yesterday evening, when Blue Damselfly and I arrived on the scene.
“May we come in?” Blue Damselfly asked, for we were all still standing around on his drive in an icy wind.
Fire Ant said, with similar coldness, that he’d prefer it if we explained our business first. Blue Damselfly absorbed this new challenge thoughtfully, sucking her lips. She said that well, as he could obviously tell, it was matters related to his Voyeur duties. She gambled on a Fire Ant’s fastidiousness, which, at first sight, she had accurately detected. Fire Ant would, of course, run over all the possibilities of what this ambiguous business might be, and encounter the possibility that he, Fire Ant, had been failing to fulfil a duty some way. Impossible! And yet -
“OK, you can come in for a few moments, if this is all genuine and above board. Please use the bootscraper before you do, however.”
We did so, though our boots were not dirty. Longicorn spent a particularly long time nuzzling his heels before we all bustled into Fire Ant’s hall. Untethering her scarf from her neck, Blue Damselfly made long, drawn out, admiring remarks about the property, seasoned with the knowledgable asides of an architectural enthusiast. Fire Ant was anything but impressed. He valued himself, we would come to learn, as an immensely practical man who only knew what he did because it directly concerned the financial wellbeing of himself and his family. He seemed to resent what knowledge he possessed as a necessary but cumbersome burden, and considered any knowledge beyond that to be a show of pretentiousness, an affectation.
Blue Damselfly realised her mistake and rapidly came to the point. With the same great gusto, she told Fire Ant everything she had told Longicorn and I with regards to the plan. People of the future - you would not believe this account for a moment if the whole bunch were rounded up as easily as thus far, so well done to Fire Ant for aiding my credibility. He is a firm (by which I mean stubborn) man, who considered himself hardworking, and, despite all appearances, somewhat downtrodden and cheated. He saw no contradiction between this deep-seated belief and the extravagance of his property. Such expense is indeed grotesque, and has always seemed grotesque to me, but then, that is the point in it. Nobody would buy marble floors for their hallways if it was perfectly sensible to do so.
Contradictory, then. Fire Ant saw vulgar signs of good fortune only in other people. His first reaction was no surprise to any of us, even then.
“No, I'm sorry. I don't want anything to do with it, and I'd rather you left now. In fact, I have half a mind to call the John Steeds.”
Who says you can’t judge a book by its cover?
“Take my card in case you change my mind,” said Blue Damselfly.
She withdrew the object in question from her raincoat, and I strained to examine it in the instance it was tersely received. Aside from the font’s being mock-handwritten, all loops and squiggles, I could make nothing out.
What Blue Damselfly did next I do attribute to cunning, though it seems to me the kind of cunning you might expect a parent to apply to their child. Waterboatman, who is more a student of history and literature than I am, has heard me remark as such - he offered that view that this sort of cunning was the most successful kind, and had been used with great effect by everyone from Perseus to Richard II, from Bismarck to Bugs Bunny.
“I see you bi-cycle into work,” she said, reinvolving herself her scarf and motioning towards Fire Ant’s vastus medialis. "I know many a taxi driver who should like to have severe words with you."
Fire Ant nodded impatiently, muttering yes, yes, yes, and encouraged her to take the few final steps she needed to take before he could shut his front door. The three of us stood there a while, crunching the gravel with our heels and breathing trestles of mist. Longicorn declared Fire Ant a miserable bastard. Blue Damselfly concurred, merrily, and led us back to the road.
The next day was Sunday. We had already recruited our fifth conspirator by then, but more on that later. More importantly, Fire Ant called round on Blue Damselfly’s house. She had expected him to stew for up to a week, but his patience was not quite that robust.
“Don’t think for one minute I’ve come to join your crackpot gang,” he said, storming in. “I am in a hurry and I don’t have much time.”
Blue Damselfly asked him to what, then, do we owe the pleasure of his visit.
“I want you - this is very important - I want you to tell your taxi drivers next time you see them that they are misguided.”
Misguided how?
Fire Ant went on to explain, at length, the numerous benefits of cycling, both in terms of the inner city traffic, personal health, public health and personal finance. He had brought with him a Datacall and used it to speedily summarise various average and annual costs related to vehicle maintenance and fuel, the increasing lardiness of Londoners (based also on his own lengthy observations and anecdotal evidence) and the rate at which the sky over the city was turning black.
If Fire Ant had been an absolutely typical banker-husband-father, who drove a Beamer or Merc or Rover, then Blue Damselfly’s ploy would undoubtedly not have succeeded. But an essential component of the machinery that leads to much slipping on banana skins is the belief - harboured by one and all, I suspect, though some are more secretive than others - that we are doing something extremely worthwhile at great expense to ourselves. Something that deserves a reward for the sheer sacrifice involved. In Fire Ant’s case, this component stood out. I would say it even jarred a little with his ruthless self-image. Maybe it embarrassed him? Was cycling, perhaps, rather too flashy, a little daredevil, perhaps even dangerous for a man with a family to support?
It is difficult to say for sure, but then, so much, I find, is difficult to say for sure and I can only give what account I have to hand, and that is this one. But cycling was the hook in Fire Ant’s lip, right until the moment he finally gave up loitering on the periphery of our conspiracy and finally joined us for real. This happened in the very final stages of formulating the Plan Proper, when we came to formulating that most vital part - the Getaway.
“What is the fastest way out of getting out of the city centre?” Blue Damselfly asked.
“Easy,” said Fire Ant, stepping in. “Bike by a long shot. They’ll catch up with you before you’ve left the stop if you take the bus,” he said, glancing at me mischievously.
“Not car?” said Blue Damselfly.
Fire Ant snorted.
“Cars have been known to crawl ten feet in an hour in the centre of London. The place is a disco ball of traffic lights that spend most of the time on red. The John Steeds’ll have you at the first corner.”
I asked if he was suggesting we jump red lights.
“Normally, no, of course not!” he said. “But if you’re planning on making a getaway, you’ll presumably be throwing all caution to the wind and making a nuisance of yourselves.”
“Motorbikes and mopeds?” said Blue Damselfly.
“Too bulky to weave properly. Plus you won’t be able to skip onto the pavement and down narrow alleys that could make your overall route faster.”
“The Lunderground?”
“No good at all. You’ll have to wait for ages before one comes along that you can all board, and then they linger too long at busy stations. If they work out where you’re heading they’ll be able to stop you just by pulling a switch, and you’ll be completely cornered.”
“Bikes it is then,” said Blue Damselfly.
Fire Ant shook his head gravely, and casting an eye over our motley crew said that we weren’t fit enough to be able to utilise them to their full effect. Blue Damselfly said that in that case, we would have to train. Fire Ant shook his head again and said that it with the time left it would take a lot of discipline. Even then it would require someone who had been biking a long, long time to be able to work out the quickest route, and make alterations to that route depending on whether or not you are pursued or have to avoid road blocks.
“Well,” said Blue Damselfly, “only you could provide that, of those assembled, so I guess we’ll have to settle for second best?”
“Who says you do?” said Fire Ant.
I need a coffee.
(Crackling/inaudible on the tape)
11. By the way, if you think that I will develop these characters any further, that I will perform some kind of psychological alchemy and reveal that there is more to Longicorn than candid moroseness and more to Fire Ant than bludgeoning conservatism, then you will be disappointed. This is all you will get because this is all I know of them and, I daresay, all there is to them.
Let me be clear on this: I am not denying that a person is an amazingly complex machine. Nor would I attest to anyone’s predictability. I simply donot believe that there is a more fantastical or reasonable creature sitting inside, that what we see is some kind of egg waiting to hatch. I don’t believe in that stuff. What you see is what you get. WYSIWIG. I suppose you could say that I don’t believe in the soul, but such a suggestion would be both ungenerous and mawkish. Get thee hence et cetera.
It is important to note (we would never have succeeded if this were not true) that Fire Ant fundamentally hates the Voyeur system too. I don’t think this was particularly lucky - most people with a sense of dignity hate the Voyeur System. I have already said that Fire Ant was a hard worker who considered himself terminally underpaid - how does such a man feel knowing that he is being routinely examined by people who are probably less deserving, less long-suffering than he? An undercurrent of outrage ran right through him.
So getting him to agree in principle with our aims was never, in fact, that difficult. What was difficult with Fire Ant was getting him to focus, making sure he took more unction with that than with any of the other things that soured him. That included, of course, most of us.
Fire Ant was not much of a gamester, but there was one game he seemed to like better than anything, and that was Join The Dots. He played this game with everything that made him rancorous. Everything that ever displeased him, that struck him as unjust, immoral, unnecessary or downright evil he seemed to perceive as a dot that could be joined to the next one via a simple line of logic. And when all the dots were joined, what do you think they spelt out?
The word: CONSPIRACY.
Thus, there were constant battles with Fire Ant from the moment he unwittingly agreed to go along with the plan, for he was utterly unable to understand why the rest of us should be going along with it. Each of us represented in some way something he despised or found wasteful. Since we were part of the same substructure, the same underlying framework as everything else that plagued him and insulted his sense of decency, he thought of us as biting the hand that fed us, as putting down our own monster. Don’t ask me to repeat the logic that, for him, connected a depressive programmer, a city tour guide and all the rest of us with a state-implemented surveillance system. I can only say that it was as firm and unshakeable as an old thread of spider web.
Fire Ant stayed on, always insisting that he was not a party to the proceedings, taking no pleasure at all (according to his demeanour) in correcting us on finer points and speculating on the impossibility of certain methods. He did develop what I would describe as a mixture of affection and respect for Blue Damselfly, who worked so tirelessly towards the cause, and that, ultimately, was enough.
I have skipped, of course, the fifth conspirator, or the fourth, depending on which way you’re counting. I will give her the codename Peppered Moth and try to explain, as much as I can, what sort of person she is (I don’t expect much success).
The drive home from Fire Ant’s was mostly miserable, in fact twice as miserable as it was cheerful, if you’re going by headcount. Longicorn chewed his nails and muttered that Fire Ant was probably going to report him to the John Steeds - if not now, then later. Nonsense, Blue Damselfly said. For my part - maybe Longicorn’s too - I was moody by a kind of overspill. Fire Ant’s thunderous, deep aggression was too much for him alone to harbour, and the excess had washed over me. I too felt that I was owed something great, that the world valued me too cheaply.
I now understand that such feelings are simply a part of the delicate mechanism that makes us such brilliant machines when it comes to slipping on banana skins. They are, in their own way, just as useful as arrogance or joyfulness. It is simply that Longicorn’s machinery - and mine too - was taking a different route to Blue Damselfly’s.
We travelled down roads with gaps between the starscrapers, through which the sun stabbed brightly. Each stab was like a staple in my brow. Blue Damselfly did not ask us, but took us straight to Peppered Moth’s house. It was back in London. Apparently, half the country now lives in London. If you draw a diagram of the British Isles where the relative size of regions represents population, rather than real life geographical dimensions, London is a great rhombus, around which all other regions gather. It is the runny yolk of a boiled egg, once the top has been taken off.
Peppered Moth rented the house, as did Longicorn and I our flats, but shared it with three friends. This would be difficult to get round. Was there any way of keeping them out of the conspiracy? If one of them should inadvertently become won over by our cause, and insisted on joining us, Blue Damselfly’s circular chain of Voyeurs would be broken, we would be observed, and warning lights would flash in secret headquarters somewhere in the heart of the city.
With Fire Ant not recruited at this stage, there was no real drama to our approach. Peppered Moth did not recognise any of us. After Blue Damselfly had given her a quick outline of the situation, and their relevant relationships, Peppered Moth made an ‘ah, yes’ face but evidently did not see how this had led to our visit. Blue Damselfly asked if we could come in, and this time her request was granted. Peppered Moth, however, very benevolently and surprisingly offered us her room, so that our conversation not be disturbed. She sensed, I think, that she was on the cusp of becoming involved in something exciting.
My immediate first impressions were that she was bland. Not in the way I was though - bland in the way someone is when the try very deliberately, very carefully, very skilfully to be in tune with the age, the month, the day, the hour as much as is humanly possible. Suburban camouflage. Hip. That's the word. Peppered Moth was hip. I don't know if I am being generous or mean when I say 'perhaps ultra-hip'.
Peppered Moth was also something of a merry monk - she did not just offer us drinks. She plied us with them. The initial round requested included beer, wine and coffee. The beer was fine, at least. The wine was sherry, but served in a full size wineglass. Blue Damselfly did nothing but lick her lips gratefully, though she was cautious when approaching the drink, even swirling her finger in it to taste. The coffee was Russian coffee, which meant it had vodka in it. I couldn't raise the cup to my mouth without my nostrils involuntarily convulsing. Peppered Moth herself had filled a hi-ball glass with vodka. She glugged it.
She recited a short simile poem to herself.
As clear as vodka.
As dirty as vodka.
As hot as vodka.
As cold as vodka.
As smooth as vodka.
As rough as vodka.
I do not want to give the impression that I think all women of Peppered Moth's disposition are shameless drunks. They are just as likely, in my limited experience, to have sworn off alchohol. There is, however, always something strangely manic about their choices, as if they make them out of desperation, or a cabalist oath.
Persuading her was a slippery business. She was open-mouthed in awe at Blue Damselfly’s plan, nodded furiously, and interjected with, “Totally!” and “We so should.”
Clearly though, these were the proclamations of someone who thinks every idea from French toast to caravan-surfing is a fantastic idea in principle. The greater goal here - the one that would take effort - was to get her properly behind the plan. At the time I didn’t really see this as necessary - by my thinking, all we really needed was Peppered Moth’s assurance that she would not report us to the John Steeds. But to Blue Damselfly, every one of the conspirators she recruited was essential to the plan. Their skills were not all as apparent as Longicorn’s - Peppered Moth’s certainly weren’t - but that didn’t make them useless. When you think of how complex a machine a human being is, and how very different from the next, surely not a one person in all the world is useless.
Could Peppered Moth be kept on board, or would she lose interest in us? Because you are listening to this tape, you will know that the answer is yes. But how is another matter. It is a strange process that I do not understand, how Blue Damselfly managed to get her to agree to change her way of life so completely and to eventually leave her friends behind to go to ground with a bunch of misfits like us.
I will relate an anecdote Peppered Moth told me once, when we had each done well in Nim and earned ourselves the double bed. Everyone else was asleep. It is a minor talent of mine that I can tell, without fail, whether or not someone is truly asleep or not. Peppered Moth was pretending to sleep, or willing herself to sleep, but evidently could not. I didn’t mean to interrupt her efforts, but after a while she rolled over, eyes blearily open, and whispered my name.
“Are you awake?” she asked.
I whispered back that I was.
“Do you ever find that really strange things make you feel good for really strange reasons, you know, in a strange way?”
I said I wasn’t sure. I could tell an anecdote was coming. Peppered Moth persisted for some time in trying to get me to volunteer a story first, but I honestly couldn’t pin down exactly what she meant. Things that make me feel good are always strange. Coffee is strange. Vibrators are strange. Sleeping is strange. The Lindy hop is a very strange dance. A sense of purpose and destiny is the strangest of all. And the reasons why they make me feel good? Altogether, they are all decidedly strange. There was nothing unstrange, so far as I saw, in feeling good, and no way of feeling good that can’t be qualified by ‘in a strange way’.
“You mean like coffee?” I tried.
No, said Peppered Moth, really strange things.
“A sense of purpose and destiny?”
No (she giggled), that’s not what I mean.
“Well, what do you mean?”
She told me about how, when she’d first moved down to London, she’d been invited to an old friend’s flat. He was living with others, but all were out when she’d arrived there, bringing two bottles of sweet white wine with her. He cooked her dinner. They drained the first bottle. It was enough to make both of them a little drunk. His eyes were all starry. She insisted that they open the second bottle, though he was a little hesitant. They had another glass each, and talked and talked for hours about mutual associates, about jobs, about their shared past and the immediate future. They’d sat on his bed together (It was a lot like this one, said Peppered Moth) and at times their mouths had been mere inches apart. When the hour of the last train home arrived, they had engaged in playful banter about whether she should stay over or not. He insisted. She said she couldn’t, even though she wanted to. He told her that this was not a very good reason, and that she should either stay or admit that she didn’t want to stay. Peppered Moth could not find it in herself to answer this ultimatum. The wine made her blush. She admitted that, deep down, she wasn’t sure what she wanted. Eventually, she did stay, but only because their roundabout arguing had taken them beyond the last possible moment she could leave and hope to catch her train.
They talked some more. He proposed that they finish the wine, saying that if the job was left half-done it would only sit in the fridge for weeks before being emptied down the sink. Though she was, at this stage, feeling a little off-colour, Peppered Moth allowed herself to be persuaded by this logic, and very soon their eyes were filled with even more stars. Eventually, she began to feel very tired indeed. While still murmuring replies to his sozzled conversation, she lay back on the bed and began to drift off.
She was woken by a terrible feeling of sickness. She gagged. Realising what this preceded, her friend hoisted her off in the direction of the bathroom. After throwing up a little, she came back to his room - he was in bed, wearing a mask of concern. Tired, smashed and ill, she stripped down to her underwear, wearily arranged herself under the covers and tried again to drop off. But once more, she woke up about to hurl, and once more, this time under her own steam, charged off to the bathroom. She was there for a good half hour before he knocked, asking if she was OK. She said he could come in - it wasn’t locked.
This is the part she remembers most keenly: that she sat, head bowed over the porcelain, in her underwear, which was not even entirely opaque, displaying nearly every bodily defect she imagined she possessed, while he sat beside her and patted her on the back with a hot hand, and apologised and tried to disguise the indignity of her situation with babble. And occasionally she’d throw up again. And she wouldn’t accept his apology. And he wouldn’t accept hers. And there were flecks of vomit in her hair. And he kept squirting bleach into the bowl, assuring her that the smell of the bleach was slightly more pleasant than the smell of sick. And she said she’d never drink wine again, which was, of course, a miserable lie.
Nothing ever happened between her and her friend, Peppered Moth said. Nothing was ever going to happen. But for some strange reason, ever since then, when I am ill, there is, buried beneath all the self-pity and moaning and groaning, a strange kind of happiness, because I am reminded of that night, that scene in his bathroom.
“Now do you see what I mean?”
I didn’t, but I said I did. She pressed me again for a similar confession, I suppose so that she could safely put our exchange down as a midnight girly chat, rather than an one-way outpouring.
“My Glassmap comforts me,” I said.
She asked why.
I answered: because it tells me everything I need to know about the journey, and so reminds me in a dozen different ways why the bus is a good place to be, a lucky place to be. Peppered Moth rolled this around in her head for a while - obviously, it wasn’t ideal, but she wisely decided that this was the best she was going to get out of me, and so cooed in sympathy. Then she was content to go to sleep.
Peppered Moth is perhaps the most efficient machine out of all of us when it comes to slipping on banana skins. Perhaps there is something to be said for being hip.
12. Day 3 of recording. I am eating well and my back is clean and my hair is soft. My scars are soft too. I am not terribly frightened by my circumstances. It is true that I could be found at any moment and the game would be up. I would have years in prison to look forward to, followed - if I am at my most optimistic - by a badly written autobiography emblazoned with my haggard features. But this does not seem to me much of a change of circumstances. I have always felt one step away from trouble infinite. Since we are machines, and very complex machines at that, it doesn’t take much to put a spanner in the works. A case of mistaken identity or false arrest. A severe illness. Loss of job. You might walk into the path of a bomb. You might misjudge crossing the road. You could be the victim of sudden ostracization at the hands of the powers that be. The bank could decide to take all my money and deny all knowledge of it (what could I do? I haven't the time or money to take on a bank!) A largely ignored party of madmen might rise to power over the course of a few years and send us to war. The world might end. I have never been out of the firing line all my life, never been mentally rugged enough to take it in my stride and never quite forgetful enough to be able to live as if that is not the case - I am uncomfortable, but I have always been uncomfortable. Why should now be any different?
All for one and for all.
In the circle of seven, there are only two more to go. Then you’ve got your heptagon of treason, your dark cabal. You could posit such a thing as either the most terrifying thing humanity can face, or its most vital survival mechanism. Or both, if you take your fancy.
It is not so long ago, for instance, that I read an article in a local paper - a This Was The News Ten Years Ago sort of article. It was about a candidate for the British National Party who had stockpiled weaponry in his house. More weaponry than you had ever seen in your life. Handguns, rocket launchers, grenades, machine pistols, chemicals, semtex, you-name-it. Plus a nuclear biological suit and literature on the construction of bombs. Gradually, over years, he had collected it discretely. Either he was an eccentric hobbyist, or else he had planned and planned towards some violent, secret scheme. The day the police raided his house and made the record haul was the man's last day at work - he was entering retirement. Whatever he was going to do, it was supposed he would have done it soon. What a way to go out!
This was only a few years before waves of Nationalist-orchestrated terrorism hit the country. Everyone was surprised. They had been expecting to be attacked by Muslims. They had been expecting to be attacked by Muslims for a seemingly endless time.
They were even more surprised when the Nationalist terrorism was eclipsed by the more catastrophic tsunami of attacks from a militant wing of the aristocracy. No one saw that class war coming.
That's the power of secrecy and cooperation when the two get together and why the current surveillance system is designed to get in the way of these two elements coming together. The old lie about MI6 tracking suspects and the police arriving in the nick of time - that old, old lie finally wore too thin.
But secrecy and cooperation are always possible and always potent, particularly when matched with intent. I could run through further examples, but needless to say, it can result in a bloody business or leaps of progress. Mostly bloody business, I must admit. Without being a bunch of genii, or government-employed, handpicked experts, Blue Damselfly's team were nevertheless as potentially deadly as the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb, or as Guy Fawkes and company. We have been compared to the latter, but not the former. No rush. I will expect comparisons to the Russian revolution too, and the French one, and the Swing Riots, and the Luddites, and the Cato Street Conspiracy, or else I will be bitterly disappointed.
I am aware also that despite the efforts of history teachers, politicians and pedestal-climbers everywhere, the effects of secrecy and cooperation go largely unrecognised. Most of us do not live in a world uniquely shaped by moments of decision, but a world of intolerable chaos. All the better for performing our function. All the better that Blue Damselfly and her cohorts not expect great reward or lasting fame from their endeavours. Ultimately, whatever reasons we might give ourselves, or might be decided upon by our judges and biographers, whatever justification and good sense lends weight to our actions, we are only doing this for the same reason any of you do anything.
13. Potentially deadly as scientists, sure, but none of us were actually scientists. You know why? All the scientists are off investigating illnesses and rusticles and helictites and naming cavern after cavern in underground caves after popular songs. Atmospheric scientists are pointing devices at clouds and hearing the crescendo of lightning within them through their earphones. Geologists are peering down volcanoes. They are already kneedeep in the most intricate and outlandish steps of their Rube Goldberg machines. They don’t need no revolutionary ideals to get them on their way.
Similarly, we cannot do science. People like Blue Damselfly cannot do it because they’d be dancing around, accidentally snapping off the rusticles, shattering helictites with the lightest touch, mixing test tubes together and leaving Bunsens on in the wrong room. These sort of mishaps are too soon in the chain and too petty to be proper garden-rake tramping comical climaxes. The line of dominoes is clumsily set in motion at only the second or third bridge. Meanwhile, people like me can’t do it because our attention span is too short. Sure, the natural world is endlessly fascinating, but only in short bursts, thank you very much. So we have to find our own complicated path towards our sublimely stupid function.
It would have been good to have a scientist among us, nevertheless, because we soon - all of us - became stupendously ill. This was soon after we had picked up our sixth conspirator on the early Sunday afternoon, and it was likely his fault too. Waterboatman had recently got back from the Far East, and had been fighting off various bodily anomalies since half way through his stay. He had not received any inoculations against tropical diseases before he jetted out. Said he hated such things. The coughing in the waiting room, the invasion of the needle in his sandwiches of flesh, the brushing of cotton discs on his arm, the smell of stale witch hazel, the cold sterility of the nurse’s demeanour.
I find them strangely pleasant myself. Especially witch hazel. Add that to the list.
But Waterboatman did not, and what’s more, he had a fiercely clever and beefy immune system. A Berlin Wall of an immune system. Put it on your Christmas list. The rest of us were not so fortunate. Within days of recruiting Waterboatman, we were enfeebled with all manner of symptoms. It was Winter - this stuff was going round anyway - we were vulnerable. Even Waterboatman himself seemed sometimes to be losing the raging battle within his body at points and all of us - with the exception of Fire Ant - had boldly but stupidly agreed to use Blue Damselfly’s house as a near permanent base to plot and plan. We took sleeping kit, wash bags and clothes over there. Surprisingly, even Peppered Moth agreed to this arrangement, seeing it as something akin to joining a commune or going travelling.
My bus route changed, which was exciting.
The plague, however, prospered. It feasted. Blue Damselfly was floored, and lay in bed for the following week without any clothes on. She could barely eat, and refused most of what we brought her. She smiled a lot - like someone high on oxygen, or a freakish doll - and murmurred endlessly that she was doing fine. Her pallor was moonish.
Longicorn’s features did not seem to change, but he notably stumbled more, hunched more, and sneezed and blew his nose and spoke less. When I asked him how he felt, he told me no different to usual, then gave a great roaring cough and showed me the thumbs up.
Peppered Moth moaned. Moaned and moaned. Said she was dying. Jested that she’d inadvertently joined a suicide cult. Threatened several times to leave and go home before dropping her stuff on the floor and saying it’s no use, it’s no use. Slept an awful lot. In Blue Damselfly’s dressing gown. She shared the bed with Blue Damselfly for much of the week, though it was evident that she could roll out and pour herself a generous nightcap (or daycap) whenever she felt like it, while Blue Damselfly seemed not to even have blood in her limbs anymore. Wailed her vodka poem:
As clear as..urr... vodka.
As dirrrrty as vodka.
As horrt as vodka.
As collld as vod...ka.
As smoo, ‘s smooth azza vodka.
As rough *hack* as vodka.
Inside, I suppose Peppered Moth was reminded, pleasantly, of the night she spent with her friend in her underwear, and that her moans were in part moans of pleasure.
I was able to stand and perform general duties, but my sinuses had ballooned in my head and played silly devils with my senses of balance and spacial awareness. I lost many games of sink drainer jenga. I dripped cough medicine everywhere - over my scarf, my jeans, the bookshelves, the carpet. Flying, golden ephyrae. Some went in Fire Ant’s eye, on one of his visits, and he swore at me from beneath the handkerchief he’d clasped to his mouth and nose. Once he’d got the stuff out, he apologised. I also spilt hot soup and drinks - especially the drinks Peppered Moth implored me to fetch her when her strength failed her completely. I fell over several times. I fell over once right across Blue Damselfly and Peppered Moth. The latter yelped and gurgled as if a sword had been run through her, while Blue Damselfly met my apologetic gaze and said, slowly, in a barely audible croak:
“Nice to see you, Honeybee. How do you feel about becoming my right hand man?”
“Me?” I said.
I am the most useless of all of the seven. There is not a single quality I can imagine Blue Damselfly having picked me for. I suppose this is as good a reason as any to select someone as your right hand man.
“You’re my angel, after all,” Blue Damselfly said. “Continue to look after me, and guide me to the best of your ability, Honeybee. It would mean a lot to me.”
“So you’re announcing yourself as the leader of this little rebellion?” Fire Ant sneered.
“Of course she’s the leader,” snapped Longicorn. “She’s the instigator. We’re doing this in her house.”
The two exchanged hateful glances, and Peppered Moth, who perhaps disliked Fire Ant more than anyone, made a terrible mistake. She sat bolt upright and said:
“There are secrets I can divulge to all of these people and others besides regarding you, and I will too, if you don’t lay off and start acting civil.”
“Civil?!”
This is about the worst insult anyone could level against Fire Ant, if their purpose is to strike at his very sense of perspective and balance. If the world is anything short of utterly inverted, topsy-turvy, inside out - if it stopped just an inch short of nightmarish lunacy - then even its lowliest, most wretched inhabitants should be able to see clearly that he is the very model of civility. He said he’d had enough of us clowns for one day, wished that we’d all get better soon, reinvolved himself in his overcoat, scarf and hat, and departed from the flat. Peppered Moth said he was a bastard. Longicorn flatly agreed. Blue Damselfly smiled and murmured what might have either an agreement or an objection.
We are clowns, in a way. That’s what makes us so econ dangerous.
We slept as best we could in a room with only one sofa, and I found there to be a strange conduit between my dreams and my coughing fits. Each cough was associated with a chain of letters - much like the computer shorthand my dad used to write in on his steno machine - that should, in my dream, have been the correct codes to unlock a partiular bolt in a door. Where they were one letter off, however, I was punished with a jarring hack.
Waterboatman, during this time, was helpful in the only way he could be, which meant that he started out with the best of intentions, but mostly forgot that there were sick people around him. As I say, he himself was not the picture of health, but he was the most able of all of us by a long shot. If I asked him to make tea or cocoa, he would put the kettle on to boil, then go and sit down somewhere, admittedly to feverishly study towards our eventual success. The kettle would boil and the process would finish there. If I asked him to go to the shop for more medicine, he would go out and arrive back an hour later with more books from the library, half a page of scribbled notes and a pot of orange blossom honey for his throat.
Was he dedicated to the cause? Sure. But he could have killed us all in the process, the econ fool.
Waterboatman was not in when we called round. Like Peppered Moth and Fire Ant, he did not live alone. His landlord, who assumed straight away that we were friends of his, told us he was probably at the library. We weren’t sure if this wasn’t a lazy stab in the dark by someone who hardly knew his tenant but for the vague impression that he was the bookish type. Still, it was the only lead we had, so while Longicorn, Peppered Moth and I used my Glassmap to locate the latest library and set off their on foot, Blue Damselfly took her car and tried to find a parking space.
Among the items Blue Damselfly had got from her contacts were not only the name and address of each of the seven, but several photographs from the Voyeur network. She entrusted me with the file, and after we had located the library - a strange, modern, faux-Industrial building that labelled itself an Ideas Depot - I handed the two spare pictures to Longicorn and Peppered Moth, and took the rest of the folder for myself. I did half-heartedly look for Waterboatman. I took the poetry and plays to philosophy section on the first floor and ransacked the aisles for him. But at the same time, I stalled once out of site, and began to peruse the folder with a fidgety haste. Evidently, though I would not have admitted it to myself, there was a part of me that was suspicious even then. I wouldn’t berate anyone else for being suspicious. I don’t mind suspicion at all. It’s only the partial admittance to oneself that all kind of horrors could be waiting round the next corner. Understandable that we don’t like to think of it much of the time, that more understandable still that we allow it some degree of influence.
The pictures of Longicorn all showed him indoors, though they were obviously picked to give as ranging and three dimensional portrait of him as possible. It was a similar situation with Peppered Moth, though two of hers were outdoors. In one, she was evidently very wasted indeed. She was lying uncomfortably in a plastic road salt container.
The pictures of myself intrigued me most. One showed me on the bus looking right at the camera. I couldn’t remember ever having done this, nor could I work out where along my normal bus route this area might be.
I looked at the rest of the file, but there was really nothing that suggested anything was going on beyond what I already understood. Blue Damselfly had, as she said, been given our names, addresses, and several pictures. Sometimes you make great discoveries. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you might well have made one if you had looked a little more carefully. I still don’t know how I missed the seventh conspirator, in among the papers. Perhaps I wasn’t really looking for him. Either way, feeling I had found nothing, I put everything back in the folder, but later felt guilty when Blue Damselfly, in her muggy delirium, whispered to me that she wanted me to be her right hand man.
Longicorn found Waterboatman. He found him trying to put horticultural books back on the shelves in the general fiction section. Waterboatman is generally a person who wants to be lazy but isn’t very good at it. Longicorn confirmed his name and then told him to wait while he went to find me.
“Downstairs,” he said, simply.
Neither of us wanted to suggest to the other that we round up Peppered Moth, though we both knew it was for the best, in the long run. Chance saved us from a crushing joint admission, as she blundered into us on the stairs declaring that she felt really shifty and was worried some guy was spying on her. The guy in question turned out to be Waterboatman himself, who had not followed Longicorn’s instructions to stay where he was, but had wandered to the West and inadvertently traced Peppered Moth’s movements across the library for all of half a minute.
How the heck had Peppered Moth failed to recognise him? I’m sorry - I mustn’t be so scornful. It’s pretty hypocritical of me.
With Blue Damselfly still in absentia, it fell to me to try to persuade Waterboatman of our intentions. First of all, I introduced myself, Longicorn and Peppered Moth, forgetting for a moment that Waterboatman was, of course, Peppered Moth’s angel. He immediately twigged that something was up.
“Ah,” he said, turning to Peppered Moth. “I thought I recognised you. Yes, I’m supposed to be watching you, you know. You err...”
He fought for the words.
“Please - I don’t want to know,” said Peppered Moth, going rash-red. “The shame of it. I mean, you can see everything, right? God, you’ve seen things I wouldn’t show my closest friends.”
Waterboatman explained, in a stumbling manner, that he didn’t really remember to use his Vee22 most nights, and on the nights he did, he generally forgot his password but that yes, he probably had seen things she considered quite private. He said that is was unfortunate that they should meet under these circumstances, at which point Longicorn told him that their relationship was the very reason we all wanted to talk to him.
Waterboatman asked us if we were working for the John Steeds. Good old suspicion. I assured him we weren’t, and with some difficulty we persuaded him to walk with us outside. He smoked, and was evidently nervous, as I did my best to explain the basic elements of the plan. Longicorn and Peppered Moth tried to pitch in.
“It’s realistic,” said Longicorn.
“We’ll be notorious,” said Peppered Moth.
Waterboatman hmmmd to himself for a good while, and dragged urgently on his cigarette.
“It’s not at all beneficial to my circumstances, I must admit,” he said.
He thought for a little longer and then reiterated.
“No, no, no personal gain, that’s for sure.”
Longicorn and I looked at each other. We needed Blue Damselfly, stat. Waterboatman sucked his cigarette down to a stub and surveyed the three of us, warily.
“Do you believe in humanity?” he asked, arching an eyebrow, as I recall.
Longicorn snorted. I shrugged. Peppered Moth said that she believed in love, but not in people.
“Good. I don’t believe I could trust someone who believes in humanity. Such people invariably do so because they imagine that the world would not be in such a state if people like them were in charge. Occasionally, of course, such people get to try out their theories and yet another disaster occurs. You understand what I’m saying, don’t you?”
We agreed that we did.
“Good. Yes, good. You’ve put me in a bind here, one that I’m not sure I’m entirely grateful for. Your proposition is of little interest to me, and, as I say, will surely not benefit me in any way that I can see. But it does seem, on reflection, to be morally unambiguous. You place me in the somewhat unique position of being able to obstruct or assist an operation that will undoubtedly change society for the better, as far as I can see from here. You are all libertarians, I take it?”
We said that we weren’t sure.
“Freedom is the right of all sentient beings. We are not a free people. I believe that, yes, the government has simply exploited the ambiguity of the idea and the fact that a climate like the current one is pretty much unprecedented. But, in short, any situation where your governing body is happy, is not trying in some way to instigate greater control, is a situation where they have already gone too far. If I’ve any concern for mankind at all, then I really have no choice, do I?”
I cannot, of course, vouch that these were Waterboatman’s exact words, but I have a fairly clear memory and this is roughly what I would attribute to him, though I know that will never hold up in court.
Waterboatman is a frustrating man, but exceedingly knowledgeable. His nervousness generally accounts for his appearance of being short-tempered or snobbish. As you will already have gathered, he is not very good at remembering to do things, not very orderly, not very tidy and not very good at following orders. But his vast erudition has been of great service to us - he knew this at once himself, and Blue Damselfly knew that well enough to entrust his recruitment to myself, Longicorn and Peppered Moth.
He shaves with scissors. That is to say, since he continuously forgets to buy himself a razor, he will use scissors to trim, as best he can, his facial hair, nose hairs and various other tiny crops or strands of hair that shoot from his skin like tiny springs. He winces as he does so. He rarely finishes dressing. He once knocked a pair of scissors off the desk while researching MI5 history, managing to strike himself in the foot with them. There they stood, embedded, in his shoeless, sockless appendage, while he looked on in horror, until I plucked them out and stuck a plaster on it.
I’m sorry again - I do sound far more disapproving than I mean to sound. I think it’s because this has been quite a long recording session and my voice is really on my last legs, dragging down my generosity with it. My scars are beginning to itch. It is time for coffee.
14. Waterboatman is a particular expert on insects, which are his hobby. He says they intrigue him because they seem to be forever undertaking such epic journeys and arduous tasks, and, in addition, are so cleverly and beautifully designed, that it is hard to believe their function in our world is so banal. So here, obviously, is where I came by the inspiration for the codenames I have given the seven of us.
Waterboatman also, notably, tends to recite bad poetry to us. Worse than Peppered Moth’s. He has a small collection of books, self-published (one of them signed) by Geoffrey Bullicka Bluff of Butterton, near Leek, Greater London. When we demanded to know why he saw fit to torture us with this stuff, he told us he found it scintillating that a person can still write horrifying poetry when there are so many ways to write poetry that is serviceable to good, ways that surely accounted for almost every possible approach. He said that Geoffrey Bullicka Bluff deserves special recognition for his efforts.
I have copies of them he made for me. I have them here, in fact. I was debating today whether or not I should read them out on tape, but decided, in the end, that we might as well have some suitably clumsy appropriated verse to accompany our ramshackle revolution. He writes, as you will see, as if English were a foreign language he is enthusiastically testing out.
AN EXAMPLE OF GEOFFREY BULLICKA BLUFF'S BAD POEMS
Profit from meanness turns to ash in deceiver's handsHad chance was selfish now where are all your plans?Poet makes no profit but as poetry's gen'rousand comes from the heart maybe he does?Poet's reward's eternal but banker, who knows?Wise man knows he will reap what he sows. Wise man knows he will reap what he sows? This like made Longicorn nearly rake his eyes out. Blue Damselfly cheerfully told him that it was a quote from the Bible, which made Longicorn growl, "I know, I know. And God am I sick of it. I am sick of it I am sick of it."
I sympathise with Longicorn. It is a philosophy that, like much of religion - and I don't believe I am saying anything new here - is designed principally to be comforting, and to serve as moral guidance. It is not true and it is not wise. But working Rube Goldberg machines like us need lines like this in order to patch over those areas of thought that our minds are forever straying into, so that we can better concentrate on our own plans towards the spectacular comic moment.
15. Some of you, particularly you John Steeds, may be clamouring for a better picture of Blue Damselfly. I will oblige. Blue Damselfly is very much like Jane Fonda in the mid-20th century flick Barbarella, except the two look nothing like each other. The poster for Barbarella asked:
Who seduces an angel?
Who strips in space?
Who conveys love by hand?
Who gives up the pill?
Who takes sex to outer space?
Who’s the girl of the 21st century?
Who nearly dies of pleasure?
Had it been Blue Damselfly in the poster, the questions would have been:
Who strips when illl?
Who conveys
Who leads us towards the new age?
Who nearly dies for the cause?
Who seduces an angel?
Don’t believe anything I have to say about Blue Damselfly. You shouldn’t, you know? How many times have you started to read a respectful review of a book, only to find, at the beginning of the second paragraph, the words: “I worked with [author’s Christian name] for many years...”? That is what you are reading now.
16. I have had a very bad day today. It is difficult to keep my voice steady. I have fallen slightly into the grip of panic and aim to finish off this tape here and now, so that I can at least get part of the story distributed. My initial idea was to split it into two parts - the first being an introduction to the seven conspirators who destroyed the central computer at the heart of the Voyeur System, and the second being to talk a little about how we did that and the events that follows. This second tape is to be mainly for the benefit of people of the future, as anyone listening to this in the present day will, of course, already be able to find out in great detail what has happened so far via records and analysis that have been made public.
But I have only covered six so far, and the seventh will take a little more time to plan if I am not to make a hash of it. The seventh conspirator is, famously, the insider, the one that so many investigators and commentators wrongly assumed was the ringleader. When Blue Damselfly announced his name to us as his target, she nearly disbanded the group there and then.
Fire Ant laughed heartily and shook his head. He genuinely thought it was a joke. He thought the whole operation was a joke.
Peppered Moth said, “You. Are. Fu. King. Kidding.”
Longicorn slumped in his seat like his heart had stopped.
Waterboatman snapped his book shut.
“Well,” he said. “So much for me standing in your way. This man has been my Voyeur all this time? The John Steeds are probably already on their way here.”
“Why didn’t we move in straight away, after we picked up Waterboatman?” I asked.
Blue Damselfly explained that if it were her choice, she would have. But her network of informants and sleeping allies had reached a binding consensus that she should give the seventh conspirator a few days, to see if he made any move in reaction to the gathering of the first six. If he called the John Steeds in that time, then the damage would be limited. We six would go down, but the plan could be carried out by another. If the target were instead approached right away, and not given a chance to show his loyalty to the state, then it would be touch and go as to whether this potential ally would turn on them later down the line, acting as a counterspy, perhaps enabling the John Steeds to uproot the entire contingency of anti-government activists.
“So what you’re saying is,” said Waterboatman, “that the fact we haven’t already been arrested tells us that we already have his sympathies, or, at the very least, his failure to comply with his duties as a kind of safety net. He cannot now turn us in without implicating himself.”
Peppered Moth flew off the handle.
“You knew we could be thrown in the slammer at any minute and you didn’t tell any of us!” she snarled.
Then she looked at me, adding, “Or most of us, at least.”
Fire Ant also seemed to have swallowed his laughter. His face had become incarnedined.
“I suppose you were going to try to drag me down with you?”
“Wouldn’t look too good on your record, would it?” Longicorn jeered.
A crossfire of bitter comments ensued, and various persons moved to gather up their belongings. Blue Damselfly did not, at first, seem in a hurry to mollify anyone.
I’m going to leave it there for this tape, and rest. I’ll tell the rest on the second tape, when I’m feeling up to it.
(The rest of Side A is blank)
TAPE 2SIDE A1. On the first tape I had come to the point where the identity of the seventh conspirator had been announced to myself, Longicorn, Fire Ant, Peppered Moth and Waterboatman by Blue Damselfly. His recruitment seemed to us all impossible. He is, as the public now knows, a member of Parliament and of the ruling party.
The virus was on Blue Damselfly's side. Though our reaction was extreme, most of us were still recovering from a period of illness and those who moved to gather their belongings did so haltingly, amid shivers and sniffs. For my part, any rash movement made me feel like a small man inside my head had just dropped a bowling ball. I imagine others felt the same. Blue Damselfly had all the time in the world to rally her troops, and was content to do nothing initially.
“Incidentally,” she said at last, “how does it feel knowing that Giant Hornet has been watching over you?”
The codename I have given to our seventh conspirator is Giant Hornet. Since everyone knows he is, I suppose there's no point in giving him a codename. But I have anyway. Why Giant Hornet? Because of the well known relationship between Asian giant hornets and European honeybees in the mountains of Japan. 30 hornets can exterminate a nest of 30,000 honeybees in a matter of hours, whereupon they plunder the hive for its larvae to feed their young.
Honeybees native to Japan do, however, have a method of avoiding hornet attack, and of effectively killing the hornets. Hundreds of them form a ball around the hornet scout and vibrate their flight muscles, cooking the invader in a bee oven.
In the same way, a small number of well organised persons in Giant Hornet's position are quite capable of crushing a society, while a well organised uprising can result in the society throwing off its oppressors.
I know there are better reasons to come up with names, and if I'm honest, this one was retroactively reasoned.
By that I mean I came up with the name first, and then wondered how it could make sense.
“Incidentally, how does it feel knowing that Giant Hornet has been watching over you?”
The question was directed at Waterboatman. He dropped a book.
“Erm,” he said. “Not happy? How do you think it makes me feel? Knowing someone so morally bankrupt - someone whose wage is looted from an enslaved population - is supposed to be allowed to make the decision as to whether or not I need to be investigated by brutish John Steeds. Angry, I suppose.”
“And Pepper’,” Blue Damselfly continued, turning to Peppered Moth, “how do you feel about returning to a life where people like Waterboatman here are privy to all of your activities?”
“I see where you’re running with this,” said Fire Ant, “but I doubt you’ll be successful. The rest of your gang here are clearly too accepting of their circumstance to find any real indignity in it.”
Peppered Moth exploded at him, threatening again to tell the rest of us what ‘indignities’ he liked to keep hidden from his associates. Fire Ant weathered the attack, intermittently clicking his jaw, until Peppered Moth turned her tirade on Waterboatman.
“Don’t you dare just go back to your Vee22 and sit watching me. In fact, you’re not getting out of this room until you swear on the Bible that you’re not going near that thing, not spying on me, not stalking me ever again.”
“And then when the month is up and you have a new Voyeur?” asked Blue Damselfly.
Here, Longicorn spoke up:
“I don’t care that much, to be honest,” he said, “except that 007 over there was clearly thinking of turning me in for suspicious behaviour.”
“How often do you think people are turned in, out of interest?” asked Waterboatman. “They say to look out for odd behaviour. Whose behaviour isn’t odd? I don’t think it’s melodramatic to say that this is a fairly authoritarian government, the sort happy to interrogate first and ask questions later, if at all, as it were.”
“Well I’m as odd as they come!” said Peppered Moth. “I mean, there are so many things I do and I don’t know why. I just like to them. I’m an obsessive compulsive. They can’t arrest me for being an obsessive compulsive, can they?”
“They can do whatever they like if they think they can get away with it,” said Longicorn, “and they can get away with a hell of a lot.”
Blue Damselfly asked me how I felt about it.
I had been caught up in thinking about how I had missed Hornet’s file when I had examined Blue Damselfly's folder. I have only just now realised that there was no need for her to have any information on him. It has only just occurred to me that she, of course, was his Voyeur.
I said what was true - that I have never been comfortable under observation, and never been able to forget it, and that I may be a wreck of a person anyway
“I suppose that none of this is as bad as committing an act of supreme sabotage in the company of a deceitful idiot like myself.”
If she had said it with smugness, it would certainly not have washed, but Blue Damselfly is never smug. She said it in a tone that implied great and genuine pain and regret. You could not help but feel sorry for her. Was it manipulative? I’ll spank the first person to say yes.
The illness was still in us. Balled up clothes sank back to the floor and bodies reclined back onto chairs and beds.
Again, for the benefit of People of the Future, here is a little about Giant Hornet, and why his looming presence nearly disbanded our conspiracy.
Giant Hornet was not just a member of Parliament, and a member of the ruling party - he was also, arguably, one of the main instigators of the Voyeur System. Before his party came to power, he managed to rally a fair amount of support with his creative and now famous 'Sub-standard Zeal' speech and subsequent campaign. I do not have the speech with me, unfortunately, but with any luck People of the Future can find it on file somewhere. The gist of the speech was that 'sub-standard zeal' was the major problem with our country. Hornet said that people were unenergised, unenthusiastic, ungenerous, walk with a hunch, are rude to one another and generally did not recognise that they were part of something great and good, that British society was something to be proud of, something won through centuries of cultural struggle with the darker side of our nature and with ruthless enemies. It is similar to the complaint that has traditionally been directed at younger generations in an age of despondency, but Hornet cleverly widened the scope of his criticism, at the same time painting the accused as innocent victims. He blamed sub-standard zeal on a gamut of factors that were designed to find sympathy with as broad a demographic as possible - overcrowding, tyranny of management, tyranny of bureaucracy, feelings of worthlessness, too much salt, smog density, scientific reports that were nothing but pessimistic. But behind all of these puppet factors he posited that there was one great controlling factor. A law behind the law. It was, he said, the fault of 'Gremlins', and these were people, he said, who existed in key places in society, in the hinges, the crucial gears, the weakest points, and exacted a maniacal negative influence, for reasons related to anarchy and nihilism. Loosening a bolt here and sticking a little gum there, they gradually made our lives greyer and slower and stiffer. They cankered our hearts and souls with more and more that was unnecessarily complicated, awkward and senseless. Knotty problems. Jargon. Structual shoddiness in businesses.They looked exactly like us, with no particular distinguishing features, no code of garments or symbols with which they could be identified.
Initially, this proclamation was greeted with some bafflement, amusement even. Gremlins? Gremlins?! The man was obviously tanked up, giddy, a little late for school. But then evidence of supposed secret organisations started to appear in the newspapers and on L'Internet. Letters and declarations and websites at first. Cults of mischief. Very likely hoaxes, but with a serious intent, and undoubtedly given the aura of something real by the compelling frightfulness of their logic. It was old logic, logic that had been defeated to the satisfaction of communities countless times in man's history (this nugget courtesy of Waterboatman) but, since we do not live to advance, and thus do not retain knowledge of all our victories, it still had potency. Society, it said, needs a cleanout. It needs a shake-up. It is falling apart. The flood? Already here. Legislation and economic tyranny has fated us all to a mundane struggle against final morale shutdown. We will break it apart so that people can feel free again. We will steal fire back from the gods and burn the place down. Et cetera et cetera.
In some ways, you will note that the logic that bears a striking resemblance to Giant Hornet's 'Sub-standard Zeal' speech, but is far more pernicious and sly in tone and intent.
Then there were various incidences, some of which have been historically noted as attacks. A string of strikes. Severe derailments marked down to incompetence. Knife-fights. All things which were fairly run of the mill, except that they happened - or appeared to happen - with greater regularity than normal, in a pattern that suggested to some analysts a craftsman's hand. A coordinator. A malefactor. A meddling.
Eventually, people were convinced of the iminance of the threat from Gremlins. Everyone got excited. It had been a while since we'd have a new enemy. Many had criticised the government and the media for inventing the last one, and for using it as a method of control, but even they, I suspect, were fairly fed up with not having an enemy of this scale.
Giant Hornet was recognised by some as being something of a seer. He was compared to Churchill and Orwell, and the success of his party rocketed. The Substandard Zeal campaign was launched, a series of counter-measures against the Gremlins. In an ongoing gimmick, the population were characterised as marathon runners, and Giant Hornet himself went on publicity drives around London and Greater London handing out water bottles and towels and clapping people on the back. Slogans sent out a message of courage and positivity:
"Feel good! You can do it!"
"Every day you get through is another blow for victory."
There was a touch of heavy-handed World War nostalgia about some of the images, but people were happy to play along with all that. There was a feeling, perpetuated through the media, that it was about time we played at being one nation again.
I have not asked him, but I believe it is likely that the Sub-standard Zeal campaign was a strong factor in Longicorn's state of permanent, petrifrying depression.
How did this lead to the Voyeur System? I am not much of a historian, but I will give a brief outline based on my limited knowledge. Once the party came to power, and Giant Hornet's role became somewhat subdued, there was a change of emphasis. The party became markedly more authoritarian and right wing. We were told that we were all, as a nation, to take responsibility for the crime and moral failings in our midst. Turning a blind eye was no longer acceptable.
