I caught the early train back to Bristol. I wanted to confront her. I wanted to let her know how betrayed I felt. But then, as I watched the full moon set over the flooded Severn Estuary, I caught my reflection in the carriage window.
I’d already tried to kill myself. What else could I do?
W
HEN WE PULLED
in at Bristol Parkway, I stumbled out onto the station forecourt in the orange-lit dawn chill. The sky in the east was dirty grey. The pavements were wet; the taxis sat with their heaters running.
After a few moments of indecision, I started walking. I walked all the way to Tori’s new bed-sit. It was September and there was rain in the air. I saw a fox investigating some black rubbish sacks outside a kebab shop. It moved more like a cat than a dog, and it watched me warily as I passed.
T
HE
A
KRON CARRIES
half a dozen propeller-driven biplanes. They’re launched and recovered using a trapeze that can be raised and lowered from a hangar in the floor of the airship. Ack-Ack uses them to fly solo scouting missions, deep into enemy territory, searching for the Baron’s lair.
Today, he’s got a passenger.
“He’s gotta be here somewhere,” shouts Lola Lush over the roar of the Rolls Royce engine. Her pink silk scarf flaps in the wind. She’s a plucky American reporter with red lips and dark, wavy hair. But Ack-Ack doesn’t reply. He’s flying the plane with his feet while he peels a banana. He’s wearing a thick flight jacket and a leather cap.
Below them, the moonlight glints off a thousand steam-driven Allied tanks. Like huge tracked battleships, they forge relentlessly forward, through the mud, toward the German lines. Black clouds shot with sparks belch from their gothic smoke stacks. In the morning, they’ll fall on Paris, driving the enemy hordes from the city.
T
HE STREETLIGHTS ON
her road were out. She opened the door as if she’d been expecting me. She looked pale and dishevelled in an old silk dressing gown. She’d been crying; her eyes were bloodshot and puffy.
“Oh, Andy.” She threw her arms around my neck and rubbed her face into my chest. Her fingers were like talons.
I took her in and sat her down. I made her a cup of tea and waited patiently as she tried to talk.
Each time, she got as far as my name, and then broke down again.
“He’s left me,” she sobbed.
I held her as her shoulders shook. She cried like a child, with no restraint or dignity.
I went to her room and filled a carrier bag with clothes. Then I took her back to my flat, the one we used to share, and put her to bed in the attic, beneath the skylights. The room smelled stale because I’d been away so long.
Lying on her side beneath the duvet, she curled her arms around her drawn-up knees. She looked small and vulnerable, skinnier than I remembered.
“Andy?” she whispered.
“Yes, love?”
She licked her lips. “What do your arms look like, under the bandages?”
I flinched away, embarrassed. She pushed her cheek into the pillow and started to cry again.
“I’m so sorry,” she sniffed. “I’m so sorry for making you feel like this.”
I left her there and went down to the kitchen. I made coffee and sat at the kitchen table, in front of the dusty typewriter. Outside, another wet morning dawned.
I lit a cigarette and turned on the television, with the volume low. There wasn’t much on. Several channels were running test cards and the rest were given over to confused news reports. After a couple of minutes, I turned it off.
At a quarter past six, her mobile rang. I picked it up. It was Josh and he sounded rough.
“I’ve got to talk to her,” he said. He sounded surprised to hear my voice.
“No way.”
I was standing by the window; rain fell from an angry sky.
“It’s about the monkey,” he said. “There’s a problem with it.”
I snorted. He’d screwed Tori out of her rights to the character. As soon as it started bringing in serious money, he’d dumped her.
I said, “Go to hell, Josh.”
I turned the phone off and left it by the kettle. Out on the street, a police siren tore by, blue lights flashing.
I mashed out my cigarette and went for a shower.
Tori came downstairs as I took my bandages off. I think the phone must’ve woken her. I tried to turn away, but she put a hand on my arm. She saw the raised, red scars. She reached up and brushed my cheek. Her eyes were sad and her chest seemed hollow. She’d been crying again.
“You’re beautiful,” she said. “You’ve suffered, and it’s made you beautiful.”
T
HERE WASN’T ANY
food in the house. I went down to the shop on the corner but it was closed. The Internet café over the road was open, but empty. All the monitors displayed error messages.
The girl at the counter sold me tea and sandwiches to take out.
“I think the main server’s down,” she said.
W
HEN
I
GOT
back to the flat, I found Tori curled on the sofa, watching an episode of the animated Ack-Ack Macaque series on DVD. She wore a towel and struggled with a comb. I took it from her and ran it gently through her wet hair, teasing out the knots. The skin on her shoulders smelled of soap.
“I don’t like the guy they got in to do Baron Von Richter-Scale’s voice,” she said.
“Too American?”
“Too whiny.”
I finished untangling her and handed the comb back.
“Why are you watching it?” I asked. She shrugged, her attention fixed on the screen.
“There’s nothing else on.”
“I bought sandwiches.”
“I’m not hungry.”
I handed her a plastic cup of tea. “Drink this, at least.”
She took it and levered up the lid. She sniffed the steam. I went out into the kitchen and lit another cigarette. My hands were shaking.
When I got off the train last night, I’d been expecting a confrontation. I’d been preparing myself for a fight. And now all that unused anger was sloshing around, looking for an outlet.
I stared at the film posters on the walls. I sorted through the pile of mail that had accumulated during my absence. I stood at the window and watched the rain.
“This isn’t fair,” I said, at last.
I scratched irritably at my bandages. When I looked up, Tori stood in the doorway, still wrapped in the towel. She held out her arm. The old scar from the scooter accident looked like a twisted claw mark in her olive skin.
“We’re both damaged,” she said.
A
BOUT AN HOUR
later, the intercom buzzed. It was Josh.
“Please, you’ve got to let me in,” he said. His voice was hoarse; he sounded scared.
I hung up.
He pressed the buzzer again. He started pounding on the door. I looked across at Tori and said, “It’s your decision.”
She bit her lip. Then she closed her eyes and nodded.
“Let him in.”
H
E LOOKED A
mess. He wore a denim shirt and white Nike jogging bottoms under a flapping khaki trench coat. His hair was wild, spiky with yesterday’s gel, and he kept clenching and unclenching his fists.
“It’s the fucking monkey,” he said.
Tori sucked her teeth. “What about it?” She was dressed now, in blue cargo pants and a black vest.
“Haven’t you been watching the news?” He lunged forward and snatched the remote from the coffee table. Many of the cable channels were messy with interference. Some of the smaller ones were off the air altogether. The BBC was still broadcasting, but the sound was patchy. We saw footage of burning buildings, riots, and looting. Troops were on the streets of Berlin, Munich and Paris.
I asked: “What’s this?”
He looked at me with bloodshot eyes. “It’s the monkey,” he replied.
W
E SAT TOGETHER
on the sofa, watching the disaster unfold. And as each station sputtered and died, we flicked on to the next. When the last picture faded, I passed around the cigarettes. Josh took one, Tori declined. Out in the street, we heard more sirens.
“You remember the online simulation? When we designed it, we didn’t anticipate the level of response,” he said.
I leaned forward, offering him a light.
“So, what happened?”
He puffed his Silk Cut into life and sat back in a swirl of smoke. He looked desperately tired.
“There were literally thousands of people on the site at any one time. They played games with it, tried to catch it out with trick questions. It was learning at a fantastic rate.”
“Go on,” I said.
“Well, it wasn’t designed for that kind of intensity. It was developing faster than we’d anticipated. It started trawling other websites for information, raiding databases. It got everywhere.”
Tori walked over to the TV. She stood in front of it, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. “So, why hasn’t this happened before? They’ve had similar programs in the States for months. Why’s this one gone wrong?”
He shook his head. “Those were mostly on academic sites. None of them had to contend with the kind of hit rates we were seeing.”
“So, what happened?” I asked.
He looked miserable. “I guess it eventually reached some critical level of complexity. Two days ago, it vanished into cyberspace, and it’s been causing trouble ever since.”
I thought about the error messages on the monitors in the café, and the disrupted TV stations. I sucked in a lungful of smoke.
“Everybody loves the monkey,” I said.
A
HANDFUL OF
local and national radio stations were still broadcasting. Over the next hour, we listened as the entity formerly known as Ack-Ack Macaque took down the Deutsche Bank. It wiped billions off the German stock exchange and sent the international currency markets into freefall.
“It’s asserting itself,” Josh said. “It’s flexing its muscles.”
Tori sat on the bottom of the stairs that led up to the attic. Her head rested against the banister.
“How could you let this happen?” she asked.
Josh surged to his feet, coat flapping. He bent over her, fists squeezed tight. She leaned back, nervous. He seemed to be struggling to say something.
He gave up. He let out a frustrated cry, turned his back and stalked over to the window. Tori closed her eyes. I went over and knelt before her. I put a hand on her shoulder; she reached up and gripped it.
I said, “Are you okay?”
She glanced past me, at Josh. “I don’t know,” she said.
T
HEY ENGAGE THE
Baron’s planes in the skies over France. There’s no mistaking the Baron’s blue Fokker D.VII with its skull and crossed-bones motif.
The Akron launches its fighters and, within seconds, the sky’s a confusing tangle of weaving aircraft.
In the lead plane, Ack-Ack Macaque stands up in his cockpit, blasting away with his handheld cannon. His yellow teeth are bared, clamped around the angry red glow of his cigar.
In the front seat, Lola Lush uses her camera’s tripod to swipe at the black-clad ninjas that leap at them from the enemy planes. Showers of spinning shurikens clatter against the wings and tail.
The Baron’s blue Fokker dives toward them out of the sun, on a collision course. His machine guns punch holes through their engine cowling. Hot oil squirts back over the fuselage. Lola curses.
Ack-Ack drops back into his seat and wipes his goggles. He seizes the joystick. If this is a game of chicken, he’s not going to be the first to flinch. He spits his oily cigar over the side of the plane and wipes his mouth on his hairy arm. He snarls: “Okay, you bastard. This time we finish it.”
T
HE FIRST TWO
planes to crash were Lufthansa airliners, and they went down almost simultaneously, one over the Atlantic and the other on approach to Heathrow. The third was a German military transport that flew into the ground near Kiev.
Most of the radio reports were vague, or contradictory. The only confirmed details came from the Heathrow crash, which they were blaming on a computer glitch at air traffic control. We listened in silence, stunned at the number of casualties.
“There’s a pattern here,” I said.
Josh turned to face us. He seemed calmer but his eyes glistened.
“Where?”
“Lufthansa. The Deutsche Bank. The Berlin stock exchange...” I counted them off on my fingers.
Tori stood up and started pacing. She said, “It must think it really is Ack-Ack Macaque.”
Josh looked blank. “Okay. But why’s it causing planes to crash?”
Tori stopped pacing. “Have you ever actually
watched
the original series?”
He shrugged. “I looked at it, but I still don’t get the connection.”
I reached for a cigarette. “He’s looking for someone,” I said.
“Who?”
“His arch-enemy, the German air ace Baron Von Richter-Scale.”
Tori stopped pacing. She said, “That’s why all those planes were German. He’s trying to shoot down the Baron. It’s what he does in every episode.”
Josh went pale.
“But we based his behaviour on those shows.”
I said, “I hope you’ve got a good lawyer.”
He looked indignant. “This isn’t my fault.”
“But you own him, you launched the software. You’re the one they’re going to come after.”
I blew smoke in his direction. “It serves you right for stealing the copyright.”
Tori shushed us.
“It’s too late for that,” she said.
The TV had come back on. Someone, somewhere had managed to lash together a news report. There was no sound, only jerky, amateur footage shot on mobile phones. It showed two airliners colliding over Strasbourg, a cargo plane ditching in the Med, near Crete. Several airports were burning.
And then it shifted to pictures of computer screens in offices, schools, and control towers around the world. All of them showed the same grinning monkey’s face.
I pushed past Josh and opened the window. Even from here, I could see the same face on the monitors in the café across the road. A thick pall of black smoke came from the city centre. Sirens howled. People were out in the street, looking frightened.