James Smythe: The Machine

(Outside of it all: I had an apartment, and cupboards full of ramen noodles, which my mother hated, because she said I should eat Chinese noodles, and a fridge full of bottles of Mountain Dew and Red Bull, imported from this shop in the Bund. I had a 3GB fibre-optic line, which was the best I could get in my apartment, but I wanted an upgrade, so was thinking of going wireless, but hadn’t.)

We were mid-raid when we heard the static for the first time, and we didn’t know what to think – we did think it was something in-game, and they had been doing these events, heralding the arrival of the next expansion, and this new enemy, this dragon called The Redeemer – so we just got on after it finished. Some people said it was everywhere, and that was fine, because the dungeons weren’t going to raid themselves.

Dhruv Rawat, doctor, Bankipore

My biggest case that day, I remember, was a man with a swollen foot, so swollen he could barely even walk on it. I pricked it and it was swollen with yellow pus, so I sent him to the hospital, but he told me he wouldn’t go, that he didn’t have the time. Can you not do something for me here? he asked, so I did what I could, drained some of it, wrapped it up, sent him on his way. It’s infected, I told him, you have to take care of it, you have to go to a hospital. Okay, okay, he said, I will. After I saw to him I went back to my hotel, and to the restaurant. Mostly, in those days, I didn’t eat meat, and their menu had more vegetable dishes than most, so it suited me. I was eating my dinner when I heard a woman’s voice; it was the news reporter from before. Hello again, she said, you’re staying here as well, or just eating? No, I said, I’m staying here. I thought you lived here, she said. I do, I told her, but I don’t have a place. It’s a long story. I love it here, she said, which I thought must have been a lie, because there wasn’t very much to love, not really; the mountains, sure, and the cricket club, but she would never have been allowed in there – mostly that was for the richer men from Patna, though they had offered me membership when they heard that I had moved into the area, because they liked doctors. The people are so genuine . She said it with real conviction, and I suddenly had to believe her. I asked her why she was there, what she was filming for, and she told me, but I can’t remember now. I’m Adele, she said, and I introduced myself, and we shook hands over the table. That’s when we heard the static for the second time, and I carried on eating, and she watched me as if that was more interesting than the noise itself.

Elijah Said, prisoner on Death Row, Chicago

Even as everybody else scrabbled around in the mud, searching for the cause of the static, I was reading a letter informing me of the date of my impending death. The letter was delivered at its scheduled time, because all of these things had a schedule: when I would be told; when I would be given my time with friends and family; when I would be led to the chair. Usually, such an envelope brought a hush upon the corridor; the prisoner was led to the imminent room with the counsellor, and that only meant one thing, and the corridor would fall silent. Not so for my envelope, as only seconds after it was handed to me, the static began again. There was no counsellor. My clock remained ticking; I prayed to Allah as I read the date, the words that committed me for my past indiscretions.

Andrew Brubaker, White House Chief of Staff, Washington, DC

POTUS shouted over the static, Find out what the fuck this is, so I called Meany in R&D, even as it was still going on. We were in a car headed back toward Andrews, to get on the flight that we had abandoned only hours before, and the driver turned around instinctively, because he knew that we weren’t going anywhere. We’d had some intel from a source that it was – and I stress, intel is rarely accurate, never 100 per cent accurate, and frequently completely wrong, because it’s spun out of gossip and rumour itself, for the most part – but we’d had intel that it was some sort of weapon. I had that on a piece of paper handed to me as I got into the car, and I was expecting a briefing on it on the plane, so I knew next to nothing. Meany’s name was on the report, so I called him as soon as it started. Tell me this isn’t a weapon, I said, and he said, Sir, listen; this sounds like a warm-up. Bear in mind, I’ve got Meany in one ear, the damn static inside my head, so I’m shouting. It’s not warming up, it’s here, now, because I can hear it. Are you measuring this, taking readings, finding out where the fuck it’s coming from? Yeah, but there’s nothing, sir, he said. We’ve got oscilloscopes and digital audio stuff, and nothing’s getting picked up, but we can all hear it. And it’s happened twice now, so that might indicate that it’s warming up, or that the first time was a warm-up. I don’t know.

None of us knew. In the FBI – I came from the FBI, FBI to secret service desk job to politics, like that was a normal route – there’s a rule about serial killers. First time they kill it’s to see how it felt, or because it was an accident. The second kill was because they found something in the first that they liked, and they wanted to see if they could recreate that feeling, that high. It can still be a coincidence, and it’s not quite a pattern.

I heard POTUS on the phone to the First Lady, checking on her and the kids, and then… We know it wasn’t static now, right? It was that garbled, fragmented noise that you get when you drive out of a tunnel with the car radio on, as it becomes clearer, picks up the signal again. It suddenly went from noise to words. My Children , it said, and then faded back into the static as quickly as it came. Our driver, I forget his name, he looked like he was going to hurl. Pull over, I screamed at him, and he did. The agents in the vehicles flanking us ran from their cars, swarmed ours, and I threw open my door. Get him to the White House, I said, and then I saw POTUS, and he looked absolutely terrified. I’d seen this man face down talks about nuclear disarmament, negotiate peace treaties, win an election, for God’s sake, and he always looked calm. That was how he was going to be remembered, we always said during the campaign: the calm President, the cool one, the collected one.

In the FBI, it was one kill for a mistake, two because they liked it. We used to sit in the offices and pray that a third body never turned up, because if it did… Well, then you’ve got a real problem on your hands.

James Smythe was born in London in 1980. Since completing a PhD at Cardiff University he has worked as a computer game writer and currently teaches creative writing. He also writes a fortnightly blog for Guardian Online. The Machine is his fourth novel. Previous novels include The Testimony and The Explorer (published by Voyager). He lives in West Sussex.

‘Reminiscent of Ian McEwan at his most macabre, it is fiction that demands to be taken seriously. The Machine uses violence and unshielded emotion to precise and devastating effect, reeling the reader towards a conclusion that feels both utterly shocking and grimly inevitable’

‘A book about memory, about the impossibility of making the future match the past, and the danger of following a desire too far’

‘Like Ballard, Smythe understands, and ruthlessly demonstrates, the nightmare that results when our fantasies are realised. The result is at once terrifying and moving’