Paul McAuley - Something Coming Through

London | 2 July

Four days till she was due to appear before the parliamentary select committee, Chloe Millar couldn’t take it any more. The rehearsals and group exercises, the pre-exam nerves and pointless speculation, the third degree about the New Galactic Navy…No to all that business. She banged out of there and minicabbed it down the A13 to check out a lead in Dagenham. Traffic glittering in hot sunlight, factories, housing estates and big box retail outlets, sewage works and power stations. A glimpse of the Reef’s dark blister and the river beyond. A welling feeling of relief with an undercurrent of guilt that she tried to ignore.

The minicab was negotiating the Ripple Road junction when her phone rang. Jen Lovell, Disruption Theory’s office manager, wanting to know where she was and what she was up to.

‘I’m chasing a lead. A good one.’

‘We’ve all had to give up our Saturdays. Even you, Chloe.’

‘There’s a cult. Definitely turned, about to break out. They announced it on Facebook, a public meeting supposed to start at one o’clock. I’m late, but these things never run to schedule. I won’t have missed anything important.’

‘Preparing for the select committee: that’s what’s important.’

‘They haven’t shut us down yet,’ Chloe said. She wasn’t going to feel guilty. She was doing her actual job. ‘It’s probably just another snake cult, but I can’t be certain until I see it in action.’

Her destination was a displaced-persons camp at the eastern edge of Old Dagenham Park. A row of single-storey prefab barracks and half a dozen L-shaped stacks of repurposed shipping containers, built a decade ago for refugees from flooding caused by climate change and rising sea levels, privately rented now.

Chloe found a bench in the shade of a gnarly old chestnut tree, ate chips out of a cardboard clamshell, and watched people gathering around a makeshift stage where a scrawny old geezer in tattered jeans and T-shirt was setting up a microphone stand and a stack of speakers. Young children ran about, transformed by face paint into rabbits and tigers. A pair of policewomen watched indulgently. They were wearing new-issue stab vests, spun from tough self-healing collagen derived from a species of colonial polyp that rafted on Hydrot’s world ocean. The Met’s logo stamped in dark blue on the pearlescent material. High above, an errant balloon bobbed on an uncertain breeze, a silvery heart blinking random Morse code in the hot sunlight.

It reminded Chloe of the music festival where she’d first been kissed, seriously kissed, by a boy whose name she’d forgotten. She’d been, what, fourteen. A late starter, according to her mates. She remembered a Hindu procession that wound through the streets of Walthamstow to the temple each year: drummers, men with painted faces in fantastic costumes, men animating giant stick-puppets of gods and dragons. She remembered one Hallowe’en, the first after First Contact, when every other kid had dressed up as a Jackaroo avatar.

The geezer bent to the microphone, dreadlocks hanging around his face as he gave it the old one two one two. And a shadow fell across Chloe and someone said, ‘Give us a chip.’

She looked up, saw Eddie Ackroyd in his uniform of black jeans, black T-shirt and abraded and creased black leather jacket. His pallid face was shaded by a straw hat; his ghostly blue eyes swam behind slab lenses in heavy black frames.

‘The café’s over by the tennis courts,’ Chloe said. ‘You’ve plenty of time to get there and back before the fun starts.’

Eddie didn’t take the hint, settling beside her with a grunt and sigh, taking off his hat and fanning himself with it, fixing it back over greying hair he’d backcombed to hide a bald spot. He smelled of kif smoke and old sweat. The slogan on his T-shirt read I’m a secret lesbian .

‘Lostgirl X, large as life and twice as pretty. You may have taken the corporate shilling, but you still dress like you work the street. Kudos.’

‘When did you become the fashion police, Eddie?’

Chloe was wearing her usual weekend gear: baggy knee-length shorts, a market-stall T-shirt with a stencilled peace symbol, New Balance hiking shoes. Her messenger bag, one seam patched with Elephant tape, leaned against her thigh.

Eddie said, ‘I bet you still carry that little blade. The one you pulled on Gypsy Nick that time.’

‘Keep pushing me and you’ll find out.’

The members of this little cult were driven by urges they probably didn’t understand, prompted by some kind of alien algorithm or an eidolon, a memory fragment, that had crawled out of an Elder Culture artefact and infected them like bird flu, but they were also having fun. Chloe had been happy, waiting for them to put on their little show in the summer sunshine, but now Eddie Ackroyd’s sour little cloud was raining on her parade.

He said, ‘It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I don’t see you in the market or the Ten Bells…’

His fish-eyed stare reminded her that he was the kind of guy who liked to sneak a glance at your tits when he thought you weren’t looking

She said, ‘I guess we move in different circles now.’

‘And you don’t seem to be editing on LFM any more.’

‘You said that the last time you saw me, Eddie. Remember what I told you?’

Chloe resented his assumption that they were colleagues. They had both been part of the Last Five Minutes wiki since its early days, they were both in the Elder Culture business, but as far as she was concerned that was it.

When he didn’t answer her question, she said, ‘I quit. I have other things in my life now.’

‘We could use your help. There are still too many crazy people trying to impose their crazy ideas.’

‘That’s why I quit.’

It wasn’t the only reason. It wasn’t even the main reason, which was that she’d finally realised that she’d never find out what had happened to her mother, and she wasn’t angry about it any more. But yeah, she’d also become tired of dealing with the relentless bat-shit paranoia of the green-ink merchants, and she’d suspected that Eddie and some of the other editors had been actively colluding with them. Most of the people involved with the maintenance and curation of the LFM wiki had lost parents or partners or children; Eddie had become an editor because he loved conspiracy theories, liked to believe that he was one of the chosen few with special insights about the Jackaroo and the Spasm, the lone-gunman plague, the Big Melt, blah blah blah.

He said, ‘So how’s it going, running errands for those sociologists? Looking for stuff to prop up their theories — is that why you’re here? Or are you doing a little work on the side?’

‘I’m chasing a lead, Eddie. How about you?’

‘Well, right now I’m wondering if you’re following me.’

‘I might wonder the same thing about you.’

Eddie pointed his chin towards the people bustling around the stage. ‘I’ve been working on them for three weeks. And this is the first time I see you.’

‘You’ve been working on them? What does that mean? Interviewing them? Gaining their confidence? Becoming their best friend?’

‘I’ve been keeping close tabs on them. Recording their stories for a client. And now they’re about to reach critical mass, the first time they try to reach out to the world, you just happen to pitch up.’

‘It isn’t a secret,’ Chloe said. ‘They put it up on Facebook.’

It wasn’t much, a poster designed by someone who thought that rainbow gradients and dropshadowed text were cool. An image of a man with a Santa Claus beard photoshopped against a false-colour alien landscape overprinted with The Master Is Coming!!! in a shimmering banner, and a modest line of type stating time, date and place. A typical symptom of a small-scale breakout, but this one had caught her attention, she’d needed a distraction from the nonsense about the select committee, and here she was.