Ned Beauman - Glow

‘Now, when we started ImPressure two years ago, we thought we’d mostly be selling booze, and we were fine with that. But then we realised that what marketers call “mind share” is not that different than what you guys might call “hearts and minds”. Abdullah al-Janabi is basically a disruptor like Ellie. For the first time in history, most of the world’s population lives in cities, plus all the bad guys have seen pictures of the Gulf War: they know about smart bombs; they know they can’t win in the open. So cities are where conflict happens now, and embodied social networks are a lot more dense and complex in cities than they are in jungles or deserts. What I’m saying is, psychological operations units have to do the same job as a lot of marketing departments. Except that PSYOPS has barely moved on since the Second World War. Our investors told us that the Pentagon wouldn’t be interested in our technology. But the private sector has always been a lot more open to new ideas.

‘I’m going to give you a case study. Obviously I can’t name any names, so I’ll just tell you that our first PMC client was handling operational security for a European company in a resource-rich region, and they were worried about volatility in the town nearby. We took their data, built an influence map of the town, and we were able to report that nearly seventy per cent of potential disruptors listened to one local FM radio station. So the client quietly purchased that radio station and gradually began to shift its coverage. At the same time, we were able to report that there were also five potential disruptors who were especially dangerous and were not going to be receptive to targeted marketing — including one old blind guy who never left his shack but had huge suction. So the client took steps to make sure those five potential disruptors couldn’t do any more damage to mind share. ImPressure facilitated all this from our offices in San Francisco. Since then, there hasn’t been any trouble in the town, and that client has renewed its contract with us — and expanded it to four other locations. That’s—’

Fourpetal pauses the video, leaving Hitchner standing there with his mouth open and his eyes closed. ‘The client he’s talking about there is an Australian private military company called Cantabrian who were working for a French oil firm in the Niger Delta — apparently that would have been common knowledge for everyone in the audience. We know from the fateful email that Cantabrian is the company that this chap Bezant ran until he was poached by Lacebark. And it was while he was still at Cantabrian that they took out their big contract with ImPressure. If Bezant is such an admirer of ImPressure•’s product, there seems to be a good chance that he encouraged Lacebark to employ them too. Or even if he didn’t, he must at least have recalled the measures they prescribed down in Africa.’

‘You think Lacebark have bought out Myth FM,’ says Raf.

‘They probably approached Theo, and Theo said no, and they were worried he’d tell people about them,’ says Isaac. ‘So that’s why they took him away.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Dickson’s running the place now and he’ll do anything for a bit of cash. Theo built that station from nothing. I’ve been playing on Myth for five years. I can’t fucking believe this could happen.’

Like the Knights of Malta, Raf thinks, broadcasting is a way of having more square feet of embassies than you have square feet of sovereign territory. ‘Those new DJs doing the Burmese programme. .’

‘During the Second World War, our Political Warfare Executive started a German-language jazz station,’ says Fourpetal. ‘The Germans knew it was all propaganda but they enjoyed the programming so much they couldn’t help listening anyway.’

‘Lacebark are trying to worm their way into the Burmese immigrant community in London.’

‘And we have no idea why.’

‘Maybe it’s all about Cherish. She was born in Gandayaw. Her father was a Lacebark executive.’

‘There’s no reason to assume your new girlfriend is the only Burmese immigrant in London with a connection to Lacebark. And even if she is, how can she possibly be “ten times more important than the Xujiabang deal”?’

‘She’s ten times more important to Raf!’ says Isaac, loyally.

‘Yes, well.’

After Fourpetal leaves, Isaac opens two cans of lager. ‘We’ll find her,’ he says to Raf. ‘We will. Theo, too.’

‘I’m really worried they might have got hurt already.’

‘Do you want a bit of DMBDB? It’ll make you feel better.’

‘What’s DMB—?’

‘DMBDB. It’s a new dissociative. I got a gram from Barky yesterday. Supposed to be nice and mild. Although no drug has ever succeeded with a five-letter abbreviation. It’ll need surgery on the name.’

‘Isaac, seriously, where do you and Barky even hear about all this shit?’

‘Mostly on Lotophage.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I assumed you were already on it.’

Isaac passes him the laptop, Raf starts browsing, and before he knows it, more than an hour has passed. Lotophage, it turns out, is a messageboard for exceptionally dedicated and adventurous drug abusers to exchange advice and compare experiences. It’s all in English but it’s registered in Russia and hosted in the Netherlands; in almost every post he sees references to AFOAF or SWIM, and he wonders if those might be drugs themselves until he works out that they stand for ‘a friend of a friend’ and ‘someone who isn’t me’, which is the ragged legal cloak you’re supposed to wear if you’re telling stories about taking controlled substances.

And these people really know their chemistry. A random post about DMBDB argues that it’s not as good as MDPV ‘because the heterocyclic ring doesn’t allow the tertiary amine to be metabolised into a secondary amine, as it does in diethylcathinone’; another about the acetylation of opioids explains that ‘adding a cinnamyl ester to the 14-hydroxyl group on oxycodone can increase potency through means other than simple lipophilicity changes by acting as additional binding moieties — the 14-cinnamyl ester on oxycodone can raise potency to over fifty times that of morphine, for instance.’ Raf and Isaac might know a bit of trivia about the pituitary but they’ve never burrowed down this far. If anyone ever invents a cost-effective method of synthesising real MDMA without sassafras as a precursor, this is where the news will break.

The forum reminds Raf of conversations he’s overheard between engineers at Myth FM (including one friend of Theo’s who used to be a Communications Systems Operator in the Royal Corps of Signals before he was discharged for petty theft) about radiation patterns and capacitor rods and feedpoint impedance: the expertise is so commonplace that it should be boring to anyone with an A level in science and yet here it all feels occult, lawless, newly discovered — a pragmatic trade that does not have and has never had a theoretical or scholarly crust. And while there are sub-forums for salvia and ayahuasca and opium, the most animated discussion is about novel synthetic compounds imported from laboratories in China. Like medieval naturalists, the Lotophage users know that everything they study has been created for a purpose, but the prime intelligence is so distant and mysterious that they can only guess at its thinking.

Nonetheless, at the centre of it all, Raf feels a gap. What is absent is pleasure. In this sense Lotophage also reminds him of talking about sex with the boys at school when he was about sixteen. One of the main reasons human males have sex is because it is enjoyable to feel your penis being stimulated to ejaculation. To Raf this is not a controversial claim. But back then they always did their best to pretend otherwise. It was acceptable to talk about getting a ‘good blowjob’, for instance, but if you had ever been careless enough to talk about a ‘good orgasm’, or just ‘coming really hard’, everyone would probably have called you gay for weeks. Somehow there was felt to be something clammy and effete about valuing direct physical pleasure for its own sake — which is absurd, because the truth is that the supreme priority of any mammalian brain, especially a teenage boy’s, is to put itself in situations where it will get the chance to bask in hedonic neurotransmitters. Lotophage is the same. They fetishise the means, but never the ends. Why do these people even take drugs? Why do they spend their money and break the law? Presumably because they want to feel pleasure. And yet you wouldn’t know that from reading their posts. Pleasure is always hidden behind words like ‘potency’ and ‘recreational dosage’. They seem ashamed of pleasure, even though really they’re pleasure hobbyists. By contrast, when Raf and Isaac cut pleasure open with neurochemistry, it’s not because they want to kill it — it’s because they want to look deeper inside its lambent heart.