Hari Kunzru - Transmission

Between 06.50 and 09.23 CEST, when Patrice returns, spots through a haze of tiredness that something weird is happening and pulls the power plug out of the wall, his computer sends emails in a constant stream, contacting hundreds of thousands of people around the world to say:

Hi. I saw this and thought of you .

At 14.05 KST fifteen-year-old Kim Young Sam, who is cutting his English class at Seoul Science High School, comes back to his bedroom with a bowl of microwaved instant noodles and wonders why he has mail from France. He opens it and clicks on the attachment. Nothing happens. Ten minutes later, when his computer sends copies of the email to everyone in his address book, he does not notice because he has fallen asleep.

Kelly Degrassi, insomniac, mother, receptionist at the offices of the Holy Mount Zion Church in Fort Scott, Kansas, opens and clicks.

Darren Pinkney (dairy farmer, Ballarat, Australia) clicks.

Altaaf Malik (student, Leela Zahir fan, Hyderabad, India) clicks and is disappointed. No pictures.

Ten minutes after the first mail went out from Patrice’s computer, forty more people have unknowingly distributed it to their friends and contacts. Half an hour later 800 have done so. By the time Patrice phones technical support at his internet-service provider to say that he thinks something might be wrong with his connection, the mail containing what will come to be known as ‘first variant Leela virus’, or Leela01, has made its way on to over 17,000 hard drives around the world.

The truth is that Leela was not one thing. She was not even a set or a group or a family. She was a swarm, a horde. At the same time as Leela01 was being spread via email, other Leelas, other things with her face, were being uploaded to shareware sites, were tunnelling their way into webservers to be doled out as Applets, were propagating at a phenomenal rate through peer-to-peer networks. There were versions of her that broke completely with the past, that were targeted at the complex operating systems used by businesses and universities, at the stripped-down ones designed for cellphone handsets and personal organizers. So many Leelas. So many girls with the same face.

The glory of all these variants, the glamour that caught so many people unawares, lay in their power of metamorphosis. Since the first virus crept on to the first unprotected hard drive some time in the 1980s, a process of evolution had been under way, an arms race between virus writers and scanners that had thrown up new and unforeseen mutations. In the beginning all the detectors had to do was trap a viral sample and write software to look for a tell-tale trace or signature. So the viruses began to use encryption to hide themselves, and the scanners responded by learning to hunt for the decryption routines. Soon the viruses began to appear in multiple shapes. The scanners evolved with them, and learned to look not just for signatures but for giveaway behaviour. Unexpected events could signal an intrusion. Changes in file size. Unauthorized modifications.

Leela was a step beyond all of this. She could take on new forms at will, never staying stable for long enough to be scanned and recognized. Each generation produced an entirely new Leela, her organs rearranged, mutated, hidden under a novel layer of encryption. Worst of all, from the point of view of the people tasked with finding her, she could camouflage herself within the programs she infected, inserting herself in between legitimate instructions, covering herself over by resetting all references to the changes she had made. When the scanners peered at a Leela-infected file, it looked normal. It still functioned. Nothing appeared to have been altered since the last clean sweep was made. Legitimate programs were doing legitimate things. Until they stopped. Until she took over.

Release + 3 hrs: 17,360 hosts

Release + 4 hrs: 85,593 hosts

Release + 5 hrs: 254,217…

So when Arjun appeared at work the next morning, haggard and drawn from a night without sleep, despite the infection raging around the world, not one sample had come into Virugenix for analysis. Leela was in the wild, and for the moment entirely invisible.

Who clicked? Did you click? Were you curious enough to try? Packets of data streamed through the wires, through MAE-West and East, into hubs and rings in Chicago and Atlanta and Dallas and New York, out of others in London and Tokyo, through the vast SEA-ME-WE 3 cable under the Pacific and its siblings on the sea bed of the Atlantic. Data streamed up to communication satellites, or was converted into radio waves to be spat out of transmitters, passing through people and buildings, travelling away into space.

Leela found Guy Swift at 35,000 feet as he was travelling back to London from New York, and when she reached him it barely registered because he was asleep. She had been batched with other messages, compressed and trickled down from a satellite to a computer on board the Airbus A300 in whose first-class section Guy was reclining, drowsily checking emails on the airphone. He removed his laptop from its padded ripstop case, swiped his company credit card through the reader on the phone and hooked the two devices up. Then, just for a moment, he closed his eyes and drifted into a place of abstraction and warmth. A few seconds went by. The abstraction darkened, and he experienced a sudden unpleasant sensation of falling through his own interior space, through himself. Cast unpleasantly out into consciousness, he breathed heavily and opened his eyes to see ten new mails in his inbox. Check it out! Disoriented, he clicked. Nothing happened. His annoyance registered as a little spike of distaste, a momentary disturbance in the smooth sine of his working day. Hotel shower, breakfast tray, lobby, limo, lunch meeting, shopping, hotel, limo again — the grid of Manhattan streets sliding by, the silent driver easing him out towards the airport — all noiseless, perfect…

Time at origin: 02.14

Time at destination: 07.14

Time here:?

What time was it up here? What time was now?

Some time later Guy watched blearily as London assembled itself around his taxi. Beside him on the seat was a bag from a lingerie boutique, a last-minute gift for Gabriella. Leaning forward, he called out directions to the driver, who was listening to a phone-in programme on the radio. Up ahead, he caught sight of the building where he lived, a mountain of blue glass looming over a pair of low-rise eighties blocks. He loved that moment, the best moment of any journey. Coming home.

Home. In Vitro.

As every Londoner knows, In Vitro, Sir Nigel Pelham’s landmark housing complex, is a blue-glass ziggurat, twenty storeys high at its peak, curved along a shallow arc on the south side of the Thames. Each of its 324 luxury apartments has a balcony, screened in such a way as to give the illusion of complete solitude. ‘The effect,’ said Sir Nigel in an interview with Archon magazine, ‘is one of absolute calm, a heavenly sense of floating free of the cares of the world.’ The lifts and other services have been placed at the rear, leaving the river view uninterrupted. The lowest accommodation is four storeys above the ground, and Sir Nigel’s partnership has crammed the space below with all the amenities appropriate to an international-standard residential development. At the concierge desk, a map is available showing the location of In Vitro’s Olympic-sized swimming pool, its gymnasium, saunas and solaria, its float tanks, tennis courts, bowling alley, underground parking and innovative Hopi Indian meditation space, a white padded room into which hidden speakers pipe the natural sounds of the American South-west.