Will Wiles - Plume

He trailed off, staring into space, in the direction of the window. Then he turned his attention to his coffee, putting in a slug of milk and a lump of sugar from the bowl. I wanted him to complete the quote. It was hard to believe how well the interview was going, to have this great mass of quotable, fiery material up front, but I desperately wanted him to finish the thought. My eyes flicked to the DVR on the table, making sure the red light was lit, and the timer was counting upwards.

‘Something real?’ I supplied. ‘Something true?’ If he accepted either of those, I could stitch the word into the quote and make it whole.

‘Do you take yours black?’ Pierce asked, offering me the milk. ‘Anyway. I was trying to think of other strategies. I thought I might try to shut down the psychogeography business in London once and for all. If I could write the ultimate psychogeographical index of London, gathering up and pinning down every mystical wrinkle, backwoods fact and obscure snip of folklore – a psychopedia of London – I could make the field obsolete. A Key to all Mythologies , like Casaubon in Middlemarch . And that’s the problem: the Casaubon Complex. It can’t be done. Not that London is somehow special, although it is very big and very old. But I could take a lifetime doing it and it still wouldn’t be finished. And what if I did finish it? A 5,000-page, multi-volume slab of what amounts to pub trivia; it would only fuel the fire. It would be on the Zaha Hadid coffee table in every penthouse in Docklands.’

He turned in his chair, away from me, towards the map, shoulders hunched, tense. ‘I squandered months, years.’

‘Is that what you’ve been doing since Night Traffic ?’ I asked. I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. As secret projects went, it was not what I expected, not very exciting, and not even going to happen.

‘No, no,’ Pierce said, looking back at me, scowling. ‘I stopped working on that ages ago. When Quin got involved. He came to one of my readings, for Murder Boards . Said he was a fan. Said he was working on a new mapping system for London, part map, part social network – this was Tamesis, but at the time they had a code name for it, Canny Valley. He wanted my input. Obviously, mapping, maps, I told him about my map. He loved it. He had this place swarming with Bunk staff, photographing, scanning, measuring, indexing, getting everything. Not just the psychopedia, some of the stuff I had gathered for Murder Boards too. Quin in the middle, sitting where you are now, laptop on his lap, issuing commands. Commands I didn’t even understand. Then they left. And they didn’t leave a trace. It was like Burning Man. But they did leave me a toy.’

Pierce leaped out of his seat, and the abrupt movement made me jump. He went over to one of the filing cabinets, opened the top drawer, and took out a tablet computer.

‘An interface for updating the map,’ Pierce said, returning to his armchair. He had switched on the tablet and handed it to me. ‘If I added anything, they wanted to know it.’

The tablet was showing the Bunk logo, cheerful italic sans-serif capitals pushing into the future. The many-pointed star around the B was spinning as the software loaded: a sight familiar to anyone who has used Tamesis, Roamero, Trenchr, or any of Bunk’s other apps. Then, a welcome screen: a picture of the wall-map with HI, OLIVER! In big, friendly letters over it. TOUCH ANYWHERE TO BEGIN. I touched the screen. A login box appeared.

WHOOPS! YOU DON’T HAVE PERMISSION TO DO THAT.

PLEASE VERIFY BUNKMATE I.D.

‘Yeah, it doesn’t work any more,’ Pierce said. ‘I’ve been locked out. I guess F.A.Q. doesn’t want me mucking around in Tamesis now that it’s live and everyone uses it. We had a bit of a falling-out and I don’t think he trusts me any more.’

This was news to me. When Quin had mentioned Pierce back when I interviewed him last summer, it was to name him an inspiration, collaborator and friend. ‘An agent of the true city,’ Quin called him. A couple of weeks ago he had suggested I interview the author, leaving no impression that the ardour had cooled.

‘What did you fall out about?’ I asked.

Pierce shifted in his seat uncomfortably. ‘Various things. I found out he was writing navigation software for the Met.’

‘For the Met ? The police ?’

‘Yeah. They’ve got this drone – unmanned aerial vehicle – kind of a prototype. Except it doesn’t work. It’s junk. They – the Met – thought part of the problem might be the onboard software. And since mapping is Bunk’s big thing, Quin’s big thing – Roamero, Tamesis, all that – they asked him to take a look. All hush-hush. The trouble with Quin is curiosity. For all his radical pose, he’d agree to anything if it meant being able to poke around inside the hot brain of a police vehicle. He was embarrassed about it and he told me – partly because he wanted to excuse himself for having agreed to take a look, I think – that it was a total turkey. A dodo. Classic bureaucratic fuck-up. Barely up to the job of finding a lone pick-up in the desert, let alone spotting who’s carrying the knife outside a Camden pub. “It’ll never do what they want it to do,” he said. And’ – Pierce gestured towards the TV, which was turned off – ‘it turns out he was right.’

I didn’t know what this last part meant, but I was too preoccupied with the rest of what Pierce had said to pick up on it. Quin, working with the police? His image had a wide stripe of anti-establishment idealism, coloured by tech-industry optimism: giving people the tools to get around the Man, direct democracy, that sort of thing. During one of the surveillance scandals he had been on Channel 4 News to say that he would never give user data from Roamero or Tamesis to the police or GCHQ. They hadn’t asked, but Quin had seen a public relations opportunity and seized it with both hands. He was on form – articulate, scornful, glowing with righteousness. The only time Cathy Newman managed to wrongfoot him was when she asked how he would feel if criminals exploited Tamesis. The strangest expression appeared on his smooth, innocent face, certainly not an expression one tends to see on these TV interviews: distraction, deep focus, as if he were repeating the question to a deeper part of himself. ‘I can’t imagine how criminals would use something like Tamesis,’ he said at last.

The thought that he could go from that idealistic naïf to being a man designing software for a police drone was staggering. But I was here to interview Pierce.

‘Let’s get back to you,’ I said. ‘What are you working on at the moment?’

‘Not very much, to be frank.’

‘Nothing, really?’

Pierce sighed. ‘Well, there was the grand psycho-concordance of London that ate up so much time and energy. Ever since I abandoned it I have been a bit stuck.’

‘No plans? Ambitions?’ I must sound like Polly, I thought, and that reminded me of her neat list of times and her, if you get a moment, mandatory tasks.

Pierce sighed again, bringing his whole upper body into the action, shoulders slumping – as if the will to go on was visibly deserting him. It was bizarre that the voluble, gossipy creature of a couple of minutes ago should yield to this exhausted, taciturn presence.

‘The encyclopedia was part of a broader project – if you can call it a project, more of an ambition,’ he said. ‘The same project, in fact, as Night Traffic . An attempt to discover something about the city. I don’t know where that project is going now.’

I checked the DVR, but only out of instinct, and watched the seconds climb, recording useless, dud material.