Hari Kunzru - Transmission

Within twenty-four hours of Leela01 being identified and countered, variants were reported. Some were obviously the work of copycats, crude alterations to the subject line of the delivery email, superficial tweaks to the code. Others were more profound, and analysts were reluctantly forced to classify them as entirely new organisms. Leelas03, 04 and 05 were identified. Leela06 (the so-called RingtoneLeela), which programmed cellphone handsets to play a melody from You’ll Have to Ask My Parents, caused particular alarm. It displayed a knowledge of mobile-telephony systems which shocked the telecoms corporations, forcing them into a hasty security redesign. Ringtone is also one of several Leela variants which have never been conclusively linked to Arjun Mehta, a gap in the record that opens up vertiginous and troubling possibilities. Were other people out there dreaming of Leela Zahir?

In the first few days of the outbreak, various groups and individuals claimed responsibility. Maoist revolutionaries in Chiapas sent a fax to a Mexico City newspaper announcing that Leela was the latest step in their campaign to cripple the infrastructure of global capitalism. A Lithuanian hacking group called the Red Hand Gang revealed that they had concocted it to demonstrate their superiority to their rivals, the Riga-based HacktiKons. Serial confessor James Lee Gillick III was (as usual) ignored, since he had no access to computers in his Ohio penitentiary. The Shoreditch Brigade, which preoccupied the British tabloids for several days, turned out to be a student rag-week prank.

Behind the scenes, global law-enforcement agencies took action. Subpoenas were obtained for the logs of service providers. Phone records and news-group postings were examined for clues to the source of the epidemic. In China the government seriously considered shutting down internet access altogether. Gavin Burger announced to the Washington press pack that ‘sources within the computer underground’ were cooperating with federal investigators, and the bulletin boards confirmed that more or less anyone with a record for computer crime was being taken in for questioning, from old school superstars, the Mittnicks and Poulsens, to script kiddies who had been caught defacing corporate websites, people no one seriously believed had the knowledge or motivation to create anything on Leela’s scale. Day by day the atmosphere curdled, became vengeful and uncertain.

Arjun watched the arrest of seventeen-year-old Thierry Hofmann on CNN. Breaking news: virus suspect held. As technicians carried plastic evidence bags containing hard drives, disks and manuals to a waiting van, the Swiss teenager was led out of the front door of his parents’ Montreux home by a pair of uniformed policemen, a look of absolute incredulity on his face. It was that look which broke Arjun, shattered the screen he had erected to shield him from what was taking place. Even Hofmann’s release the next day could not wipe it away, the panicked turn towards the camera as a hand pressed down on his head to ease him into the police car. Bewilderment and fear. Bewilderment and fear that rightfully belonged to him.

He curled up among the foil trays and coffee cups, the printouts and crushed corn chips on the floor of his room, and started to cry. Perhaps if he said sorry to the people he had harmed, who had lost their data? Vignettes of forgiveness ( I’ll make it up to you, even if it takes a while ) spooled through his mental projector. But what about those who had lost money, or couldn’t get an ambulance when they needed one? Were people being hurt by Leela? Had anyone been killed?

At that moment he understood. Sooner or later they would find him and then life as he knew it would be over. All I wanted was my job back. All I wanted was to work and be happy and live a life in magic America. None of that would count for much in court. Would there even be a court? They were calling him a terrorist, which meant that he would probably just join the ranks of the disappeared, the kneeling figures in the orange suits against whom anything was justified, to whom anything could legitimately be done. It was the revenge of the uncontrollable world. He had tried to act but instead had made himself a non-person.

The Dutch steward gabbled a paragraph of corporate communication, his wayward accent reinventing his employers as ‘Europe’s leading locust airline’ and advising passengers of the ‘streamlined chicken process’ planned at UK airports. Gaby, whose own vowels (when she concentrated) had been hammered flat into near-perfect London slumming posh, smiled wryly at the boy’s mistakes, distracting herself from what she always thought about during take-off and landing, which was death. The sudden eruption of light and air into the cabin, the unpeeling of the fuselage — the pictures were compulsive, almost pornographic in their specificity Twice a flight she would imagine the cold sucking wind freighted with pillows and carry-on bags and vodka miniatures and headsets that would rush past her in the final moments of consciousness, and would feel close to the mystery, to the centre of things.

With a bump the wheels hit the tarmac. Death disappeared in the boredom of the scramble in the aisle, and by the time she walked into the arrivals hall at Inverness she had, as always, forgotten it. They had sent a runner to meet her, locally hired crew rather than Indian, a smug Glasgow film lad all distressed denim and hair gel, chewing gum and smoking a fag while checking himself out in the mirror at one of the concessions. He threw her case in the back of the minivan and in what was apparently his fuck-me voice told her to call him Rob D. On the way down the A82 he spoke a name-dropping monologue to her breasts, and she looked out of the window at the rock and the yellow gorse and the sparkling water of Loch Ness. As far as he was concerned, the whole production was tits-up, the Pakis didn’t know scheduling from their erse and now with these reporters running round he wouldn’t be at all surprised if… When he ran out of opinions he fell silent and played house music on the CD, and she got a chance to look at the notes they had given her.

They translated the title of the film as Tender Tough, which made it sound as if it was about meat. The plot concerned a disillusioned cop who becomes a gangster after the death of his family in a food-contamination scandal, then is redeemed by a young dancer who shows him the path of peace and righteousness before herself dying tragically in a bungled shoot-out. The stars were a guy called Rajiv Rana and the one who all the trouble was about, the heroine, Leela Zahir. In his publicity photo, Rana was wearing a white wife-beater and leaping through digitally enhanced flames. In hers, Leela Zahir was wearing a baby-blue sweatsuit and peeping out from behind a tree. The publicity materials gave their birth dates and star signs. Rana was in his late thirties. Leela Zahir was precisely twenty-one.

When Dan Bridgeman had phoned her about the trip, he had presented it as a bad job, a favour Gaby would be doing the company. Bridgeman & Hart made a speciality of handling PR requirements for foreign crews on location in the UK, but that usually meant Americans or French, occasionally outfits from other parts of Europe. A request from an Indian producer was a novelty No one really knew what to do. After all, as Phoebe Hart pointed out at lunch, they had their own media, didn’t they? Mainstream film people knew the basics about ‘Bollywood’: chorus lines and chiffon saris. They also knew that Indians functioned in their own way, had their own publicity and marketing and distribution networks, and one didn’t really need to worry about them. However, the situation had been explained. An off-the-film-page story had broken about their lead star, and they were being besieged by requests from all kinds of media outlets. There was some additional unspecified complication, but on the whole it seemed to be something Β & Η could help with. They wanted someone to firefight. Gaby wasn’t on anything important, so the firm sent her.