Ned Beauman - Glow

‘So in Burma it would be fine?’ says Raf.

‘That’s not what I said,’ says Fourpetal. But he doesn’t sound as if he particularly objects to the implication. ‘I now begin to worry that you’ve misunderstood,’ he adds. ‘The real bombshell in that email from Pankhead wasn’t that Lacebark may or may not have mistreated the wives of some union organisers out in the jungle. The real bombshell was that Lacebark are insolvent and have been trying to hide it. One is a PR problem. The other is an actual problem.’

5.22 p.m.

Walking into the restaurant, Raf sees that the Maneki Neko cats are both turned off, and for some reason he finds their stillness eerie. The waiter from last time comes out from behind the counter with an index finger held up. ‘One?’

‘No,’ says Raf, ‘I just wanted to — I was in here with Cherish the day before yesterday?’

The waiter nods.

‘She left me this note. I think it might be important but it’s mostly in Burmese. I was hoping you might be able to tell me what it says.’ Raf feels ridiculous making the request — if you bought an anime DVD with no subtitles you wouldn’t just stroll into your nearest sushi restaurant and expect them to give you a helpful recap — but neither he nor Isaac nor Fourpetal could think where else to find a Burmese speaker.

The waiter looks down at the note and then smiles. ‘Cherish didn’t write this. Ko write this.’

‘Who’s Ko?’

‘Cook.’ He calls out something in Burmese. A second man comes out of the kitchen. They exchange a few words then glance back at Raf and chuckle.

‘You want know what this mean?’ says the cook. He has bushy eyebrows and a long scar down his cheek. On the wall behind him hang two calendars, both still turned to January.

‘Yes.’

Ko takes the note and begins to read. ‘Three onion. Four garlic. Two spoon ginger. Two spoon cumin. One spoon coriander. .’

And Raf remembers what he said to Cherish about wishing he knew how to make the curry they were eating. ‘So it’s just a recipe?’

Ko doesn’t appreciate Raf’s tone of disappointment. ‘Yes. Best recipe!’

Raf hesitates. ‘Look, I think something bad might have happened to Cherish,’ he says. ‘Have either of you heard from her since Wednesday?’

Both men shake their heads.

‘So you friend of Cherish?’ Ko says.

‘Yes.’

‘Want to buy some glow?’

Before Raf can respond, the waiter barks something at Ko. Raf is surprised when the uncomfortable silence that follows is broken, quite aptly, by one of those Myth FM jingles that the DJs play over and over like a nervous cough to fill space while they try to remember which advert they’re supposed to cue up. After that, a pop song. Raf realises this must be Dickson’s new ‘community programme’ playing on the radio in the kitchen. ‘You listen to Myth?’ he says.

‘Yes,’ says the waiter. ‘Burmese show.’

‘Do you know anything about those guys who present it?’

‘They are motherfuckers,’ says Ko with feeling.

‘Then why do you listen to it?’

Ko shrugs. ‘Who else play real Burmese music?’

When Raf gets back to Isaac’s flat, he finds the other two sitting side by side on the sofa with Isaac’s laptop on the table in front of them. ‘Anything?’ says Fourpetal.

‘No. Good thing you didn’t steal the note — you would’ve felt like an idiot. What are you looking at?’

‘Watch this,’ says Isaac.

The video is from the 2009 Special Operations Forces Exhibition in Marka, Jordan. The description on YouTube explains that while no video or audio recording was allowed inside the conference presentations, a Campaign Against Arms Trade activist posing as a business journalist managed to smuggle in a hidden camera. One of the speakers he filmed was Brent Hitchner, the CEO of an American company called ImPressure. In the video Hitchner looks no older than twenty-four and he wears a baggy grey suit over a green polo shirt.

The presentation begins with a series of clips projected behind him. A British journalist reporting on CNN: ‘Sources in the 82nd Airborne Division told me that for a long time Fallujah was seen as a basically pro-American city, and local sentiment didn’t really begin to turn against the occupation until an influential local cleric, Abdullah al-Janabi, called for protests outside this primary school.’ Shaky footage of Iraqis shooting their AK-47s in the air, this time with a female journalist speaking over the top: ‘The bodies of the four Blackwater contractors were mutilated, dragged through the streets of Fallujah, and strung from a bridge.’ An American army officer talking to yet another journalist: ‘Public opinion here, you know — it just. . There’s a tipping point.’

Then the screen behind Hitchner cuts to a girl of about twenty-two who sits in a bare white room looking straight at the camera, and Raf thinks she must be some sort of prisoner under interrogation until somebody off-screen asks: ‘How often do you drink Suspiria vodka?’

‘Oh, I never drink Suspiria.’

‘When we interviewed you six months ago, you said you drank Suspiria every time you went out.’

‘Oh, yeah, well. . I guess I don’t any more. I prefer Ketel One?’

‘Can you remember why you stopped drinking Suspiria?’

‘Oh — not really.’

‘Can you remember anything about the last time you ordered Suspiria?’

‘Oh, well. . I think we were at Slate? And I ordered a vodka tonic, with Suspiria, and then Ellie said something about how that guy in all the ads — the guy in that, like, hat thing? — how he’s kind of a douche? And I was, like — I mean, yeah, it’s funny because he is kind of a douche, so. .’

‘What does Ellie drink?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’

‘Does Ellie drink Ketel One?’

‘Oh — I think, yeah, maybe she does?’

The video cuts to a twinkling animation of the ImPressure logo. ‘At ImPressure•, we call Ellie a “disruptor”,’ says Hitchner — evidently the punctuation mark in the company name is silent. As he fiddles with his lapel mic and looks out across the crowd he seems simultaneously very nervous and very cocky. ‘We’re the first company to do serious research into disruptors, and it showed that someone like Ellie may negate, on average, about three thousand dollars in marketing spend. And that’s just offline. God forbid the bitch has a blog too! Of course, Suspiria wish they could just make Ellie disappear off the face of the earth. They can’t. But maybe they can spend two thousand dollars marketing directly to Ellie until she changes her mind — net gain of one thousand, right? Or, even better, maybe they can find two of Ellie’s friends — let’s call them Frannie and Georgie — and Suspiria only have to spend five hundred dollars each to change their minds, and if Frannie and Georgie both change their minds, then Ellie has an eighty-five per cent chance of changing her mind too — net gain of seventeen hundred, on average. But before they can do any of that, they have to identify Ellie, and they also have to identify Frannie and Georgie, and they have to understand the relationships between them, and obviously all this has to be automated because they can’t pay individual attention to every disruptor. That’s where ImPressure• comes in. There are a lot of companies out there marketing on social networks. But they take the network structure as a given. That’s a mistake. You can’t neutralise disruptors just by browsing Facebook. We map the networks ourselves, both online and offline, using super-precise, input-agnostic flow mathematics, and then we figure out how to hit the weak points. It’s like pressure-point fighting — that’s where we got the name. For Suspiria, as a pilot project, we even installed cameras in five nightclubs in LA and used ImPressure•’s facial-recognition module to cross-reference the drinkers with party photos they’d already posted online. In one night we got more metadata on local vectors of influence than any conventional market research company could hope to put together in a year.