Paul McAuley - Something Coming Through

‘I found them,’ Eddie said, staring at her from beneath the brim of his hat, ‘the old-fashioned way. Asking questions, following leads. One of them from LFM, as a matter of fact. Someone who thinks they can predict significant breakouts. You would have seen it too, if you hadn’t “quit”.’

He actually drew the quote marks in the air.

‘I found them because they’re trying to reach out to everyone,’ Chloe said. She was amused by Eddie’s petulance, wondered if he’d already taken a down payment for something he knew he probably couldn’t deliver. ‘Don’t take it personally. Besides, it doesn’t look like they’re anything special.’

‘That’s what you think,’ Eddie said. ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do. How we’ll sort out this little conflict of interest. I found them first, so I get first dibs on whatever these people are selling. After that, if your pointy-head academics want to interview them, add them to their database or whatever, it’s fine by me.’

Chloe smiled. ‘We aren’t in the playground, Eddie. If these people stumbled on something useful, came into possession of an active artefact or whatever, I’ll tell my boss, and he’ll make an offer. And you and your client, if you have a client, can do the same.’

Eddie stuck out his lower lip like a disappointed child. ‘So it’s like that.’

‘Same as it’s always been,’ Chloe said, ‘out here on the street.’

Eddie stalked off to a spot in the shade of a stack of shipping-container flatlets and fired up a small drone that wobbled away towards the stage. A tall young man wearing blue jeans and a black windcheater was chatting to the two policewomen. Chloe spotted the Bluetooth headset plugged into his right ear and guessed that he was from the Metropolitan Police’s Breakout Assessment Team, a junior officer who’d drawn the short straw and given up his Saturday afternoon kick-about to check out this little gathering.

Girls and boys in grey jumpers and black trousers or black skirts filed onto the stage and, conducted by a motherly woman in a dashiki, began to pipe out ‘Amazing Grace’ on recorders. Chloe dumped her half-eaten lunch in a recycling bin, put on her spex and walked towards the stage, and the guy in the black windcheater cut across the grass to intercept her, saying that he was surprised to see someone from Disruption Theory.

‘Isn’t this pretty vanilla for you guys?’

‘Everything’s a data point,’ Chloe said, quoting her boss, Daniel Rosenblaum.

‘Are you planning to interview Mr Archer and his acolytes?’

Chloe supposed that Mr Archer was the white-haired guy on the Facebook page. She said, ‘Would that be a problem?’

‘Depends on how they do. Probably not. What about Mr Ackroyd?’

‘You’ll have to ask him.’

‘I expect I will. Take care, Ms Millar.’

Just to let her know that he had her number.

The schoolkids ran through a pretty good version of ‘Scarborough Fair’, bowed to the scattering of applause and were led off the stage by their conductor. Chloe could feel an energy gathering in the little crowd. An MC took to the stage, an amazingly confident young woman dressed in a metallic silver leotard and black tutu who hunched into the microphone and to a backing track of car-crash rhythms began a rap about the great change coming and hard times ending. When she was done and the whoops and applause had died down she asked everybody to raise their hands for the man with the plan, the man who knew.

‘Give it up for Mr Archer. Mr Archer going to speak the truth to you right now.’

There was an awkward pause, some kind of hitch. The MC stood at the edge of the stage, talking to people, shaking her head. The sound system started to reprise the clanging smash of her backing music, then cut off abruptly. Several people were helping someone climb onto the stage.

Mr Archer was a slight old man wearing what was probably the suit he planned to be buried in. His white beard was neatly trimmed; his pink scalp showed through his cap of fine white hair. The MC ushered him to the microphone stand and he clung to it and looked around like a grandfather dazed with pleasure at his own birthday party. A hush fell over the small gathering.

Chloe’s spex were capturing everything. Eddie’s little drone hung in the sunlit air. The moment of silence stretched.

‘Uth,’ Mr Archer said. ‘Uth! Uth!’ And, ‘Penitent volume casualty force. Action relationship. Flow different. Uth! Uth!’

Most in the audience chanted Uth! Uth! too. Those who weren’t part of the cult, who hadn’t drunk the snake oil, looked at each other. A couple of kids in front of Chloe started to jeer.

Chloe felt a sinking sense of disappointment. She’d seen it all, in her time. Fiery-eyed preaching. A woman who spoke through a pink plush alligator. People standing face to face, staring into each other’s eyes, sharing significant gazes. Ritual bloodletting. A young girl walking amongst her followers with a silver wand, touching them at random, causing them to fall into faints and foaming fits. A hundred different attempts to express thoughts for which there were no human equivalents, no words in any known language. Speaking in tongues was commonplace. She’d seen it a dozen times.

Mr Archer spoke for some time, enthusiastically expounding his thesis in his private language, repeating his catchphrase at intervals, smiling as his followers chanted in response. The two kids who’d been jeering walked away; others followed. Chloe wondered how it would end, a procession or a mass hug or a conga line, but instead the old man simply stopped speaking, laboriously stepped down from the stage, and hobbled off at the centre of a cluster of acolytes. His audience gathered up their children and drifted towards the camp. They looked pleased. They had spoken in public. They had marked their territory. They had let out the ideas jostling in their heads, like that ancient rock star who’d shaken out a box of butterflies at an open-air concert in Hyde Park. Most of the butterflies had died, but it was the gesture that counted.

This was something that couldn’t be quantified by Disruption Theory’s surveys: the happiness of the people possessed by alien impulses and strange memes. The ecstasy of expression. The simple childlike joy of creating a channel or connection. Although the breakout was nothing special, Chloe was glad to be reminded of that. She took a flyer from one of the kids who were handing them out to the few non-believers who remained, slipped it into her messenger bag and got out of there while Eddie Ackroyd was packing up his drone.

It was too late to head back to Disruption Theory, and she was too buzzed to fold herself into her studio flat. She returned to the park’s café and sat with a carton of iced coffee and wrote up a short report on her tablet. She studied the flyer: the speaking-in-tongues Santa Claus, Mr Archer, photoshopped against an alien landscape, with a single word, BELIEVE , printed above his head. After a minute, she pulled up the copy of the Facebook page that had led her to the park. The same kind of landscape in the background, a cluster of towers or spires in some kind of red desert.

Chloe looked from screen to flyer, flyer to screen, then dropped the Facebook page into an image editor, cropped out a portion of the background and fed it into a search engine. Got a hit for the website, a bunch of old sci-fi flicks, landscape photos from the fifteen worlds gifted to the human race by the Jackaroo…And, hey, look at that, a set of images posted on a tumblr by someone calling themselves Mangala Cowboy. Drawings and paintings of red cliffs, dunes of red sand saddling away towards distant hills, a crowd of thorny spires glowing in orange sunlight. A view of the spires from a distance, a view from a high angle, as if from a plane or helicopter. The same spires at night, outlined in dabs of red phosphorescence. A close-up of thorny projections silhouetted against a pink sky. They looked like teeth, or the ends of broken bones. A tangle of grey vegetation with a fleck of incandescent yellow burning in its centre. A pavement of black slabs winding around red rocks. Some kind of room or space outlined in dense black scrawls. A flock of what might be balloons drifting across the freckled face of a fat sun. And over and over again, the same cliffs, the same dunes, the same spires.