Haterz (44 page)
That was the annoying thing. There was actually no proof that Elise Olsen had directly come up with the plan, or instructed Michelle to carry it out. No one could be directly blamed. The funds had come from a marketing budget, just before it vanished at the end of a financial year. Elise notionally had control of it, but various people had sign off on it. I knew that in the ensuing court case, she would look older and tireder, but still maintain that she’d known nothing about it. Nothing about it at all.
In fact, as far as the courts could determine, no one at all had known anything.
It was almost as though Sodobus had
accidentally
paid me to put its enemies out of the way.
I’ve said before there’s nothing at the heart of the internet. Not even a giant cat. But perhaps I was wrong.
R
AY
R
ICHARDSON HAD
heard my theories. He still thought I was a nutter. But today, on that lovely lazy day, he looked around him at the chaos we’d created together.
“Sod you all,” said Ray Richardson, smiling. He took a photograph of the crowded plaza and texted it to his wife. She laughed and then went into labour.
T
HAT ABOUT WRAPS
it up, really. Jackie Aspley started getting work again. Partly because of her articles about
I Dated the Internet Serial Killer
. And partly through the story of her remarkable marriage to Pastor John.
I
’D PREPARED TWO
versions of my presentation. One which left Amber out of it. One which dropped her right in it. In the end I used the second one. And I’m completely happy about that. After all, she had used me and broken my heart. She and Guy have split up now. Well, no, they haven’t. That’s my last lie. He’s sticking by her through the court case, and says he’ll wait for her, until she gets out—if she gets convicted. Some people are just puppies, aren’t they? Of course, I don’t know the latest details. We’re no longer Facebook friends.
R
AY
R
ICHARDSON CAME
back from paternity leave early, as they’d placed him in charge of Sodobus [UK]. It was really the chance to be boss of a poison chalice, but he couldn’t pass it up. Amanda made that quite clear. Ray came out of both the internal enquiry and then the rather more thorough police enquiry with flying colours and smelling of roses. It could be shown that staff had been directed to not tell him anything about anything that mattered, and that there had been a deliberate policy to try and hang various scandals on him, all of which he’d spotted and flagged up.
The police inquiry, without saying so bluntly, found that Ray Richardson had been hired as a scapegoat. Sodobus needed to be absolved of their sins before they became involved in running the internet. They’d brought him in to eventually take the fall for their tax problems, and kept him in a silo and flung mud at him. It all looked rather shoddy and racist.
The least they could do now was keep him on. It would make them look good (if anything could). And he was the only executive they had who looked anything like clean. His wife negotiated a pretty amazing pay deal for him, ensuring that, even if Ray’s job only lasted six months, Baby Tintin would never go hungry.
Ray promptly made a lot of announcements about corporate honesty. He then fired the entire Marketing and Communications team. People assumed this was a brave example of clearing out the stables, but he did it simply because they annoyed him. Marching out of the office with their possessions in boxes, they looked like a lot of suddenly-unemployed shop dummies.
After that, he did very little else, really. He made a lot of good noises, but he was basically having a grand time running a fire sale.
H
E DID DO
one final thing, though.
Years ago, Sodobus had bought a small island off the Scottish Highlands. The original idea had been to farm organic vegetables, but they’d not flourished in the soil. It had become a science and weather monitoring station, issuing daily reports that it was, indeed, still raining. The reports are made by the one man who lives on the island, alone apart from a cat that enjoys frightening the seagulls. It was the last place in the world you’d think of looking for anyone.
The man was hired for the post by Ray personally.
The man makes his daily reports by radio. The island does not have internet access.
He’s very happy.
With a Foreword by Joanne Harris
June Cryer is a shopaholic suburban housewife trapped in a lousy marriage. After discovering her husband’s infidelity with the flight attendant next door, she loses her home, her husband and her credit rating. But there’s a solution: a friend needs a caretaker for a spectacular London high-rise apartment. It’s just for the weekend, and there’ll be money to spend in a city with every temptation on offer.
Seizing the opportunity to escape, June moves in only to find that there’s no electricity and no phone. She must flat-sit until the security system comes back on. When a terrified girl breaks into the flat and June makes the mistake of asking the neighbours for help, she finds herself embroiled in an escalating nightmare, trying to prove that a murderer exists. For the next 24 hours she must survive on the streets without friends or money and solve an impossible crime.
‘Christopher Fowler is a truly original writer. I’ve loved everything of his I’ve ever read, and with
Plastic
he’s raised his game even higher.’
Peter James
‘The dark reverse of a personal growth novel, a hoot of a crime thriller.’
The Independent
HOW DOES IT FEEL, NOT BEING REAL?
In Hollywood, where last year’s stars are this year’s busboys, Fictionals are everywhere. Niles Golan’s therapist is a Fictional. So is his best friend. So (maybe) is the woman in the bar he can’t stop staring at.
Fictionals – characters ‘translated’ into living beings for movies and TV using cloning technology – are a part of daily life in LA now. Sometimes the problem is knowing who’s real and who’s not.
Divorced, alcoholic and hanging on by a thread, Niles – author of
The Saladin Imperative: A Kurt Power Novel
and many others – has been hired to write a big-budget reboot of a classic movie. If he does this right, the studio might bring one of Niles’ own characters to life. But somewhere beneath the movie – beneath the TV show it was inspired by, the children’s book behind that and the story behind
that
– is the kernel of something important. If he can just hold it together long enough to figure it out...
‘A disturbing, self-reflective type of brilliance.’
Pornokitsch
on
Death Got No Mercy
‘There’s a lot to love here.’
Total Sci-Fi
on
Gods of Manhattan