I’ve been here a little over three years, and by many I’m counted an old hand. I no longer get off on the company’s narrative. I’m not cynical about its prospects, but I’m prepared to be realistic. This company, so small, so undercapitalised, could well remain small and undercapitalised forever. It doesn’t have to die, but nothing says it will ever actually come to life. Things can stay half-realised forever. Companies. People.
These days, I prefer the company of the coders. I haven’t much in common with them. There’s not a mathematical bone in my body. I don’t share their love of trivia, their taste for science fiction, their distrust of the body. What I do enjoy – what I admire – is their love of the work for its own sake. These are the people who wander round the office abstracted all day, shifting several dozen variables around in their heads, trying to make them fit, trying – in their own arcane manner – to assemble them into something beautiful. Beauty counts for a lot with them, though some of them have a funny way of showing it.
I thought at first that Ralf’s persistent star rating of everything from a cup of coffee to a gallery visit was a tiresome conversational gambit. I’ve come to understand that it is actually a kind of fetish – without it he would be lost in a world robbed of meaning.
‘How did the presentation go, Ralf?’
‘Three stars.’
‘Weren’t you at your sister’s wedding last weekend?’
Ralf strokes his goatee beard. He’s a couple of years older than I am, due for his thirtieth birthday next month, but he has to grow his bristles out a lot to make them show. ‘I would struggle to give it more than two.’ Ralf shaves his head. He is heavy-set, with sloping shoulders. He wears baggy jeans, and stands always with his legs splayed. He looks like a three-stage rocket.
Ralf likes putting people right. You come up with a theory about something, and Ralf says, ‘I think we ought to label that an
hypothesis
.’ It’s the easiest thing in the world not to take him seriously and I should know because for the first couple of years, I really didn’t. I knew he was talented. I knew he knew far more than me about subjects I considered ‘my own’, including some corners of the fashion business. But even while we worked together, brandspacing the show factory of a major automobile manufacturer, still I considered him one of the backroom crew – one of life’s more capable functionaries.
Since coming back to work, however, I have been struck by the sheer adultness of what we cheerfully call ‘the dev team’. They have quietly acquired an independent existence. After work they gather in their own preferred members’ club. Past the listed frontage its interiors are retro plastic and bespoke plywood. There is a noisy dining room on the third floor. In each cubbyhole there is a jet-lagged sprawl of men and tablets, laptops, clever phones and empty cocktail glasses. This is where the true if unacknowledged movers of our industry come to relax.
Ralf has brought me here tonight to talk through some work. He has not told me what. ‘What will you drink?’ he asks me and before I can answer he has snapped his fingers at a passing waiter. I have never seen anyone do that – let alone get away with it – outside of an old movie. I sense some shift, some change in him. I was expecting to meet the rest of the dev team here tonight, but Ralf and I are on our own.
‘I want to ask you something.’ Ralf’s show of self-possession would be unremarkable in any other man. Coming from Ralf it’s frightening.
‘Go ahead.’
‘How wedded are you to your work?’
What kind of question is that?
‘I don’t mean the company,’ says Ralf. ‘I mean the work.’
I shrug. ‘The work’s the work.’ This will hardly do. I try again. ‘The work’s the important part. The company—’ I’m not sure where I’m going with this. ‘The company can get in the way of the work. If you know what I mean? It’s a frustrating time. What about—’
‘Drink up.’
‘We’ve only just got here.’
‘Put your spectacles on,’ Ralf says. ‘I want to show you something.’
Ralf must be on better relations with the club than I realised, because he has mounted this surprise of his in their basement – a cramped, windowless null-space that must once have been furnished, going by the patches of glue still adhering to the poured concrete floor.
The room is quite empty. I stand, waiting for the system to kick in and for something to appear in this neutral and depressing grey interior. After a while I reach up to reboot my spectacles.
‘There’s no need. Leave it. It’s working.’
‘It is?’
‘It’s working.’ Ralf’s eyes glitter in the half-light. It occurs to me that he’s not wearing spectacles. Whatever it is he wants me to see,
he
will not see it. He says, ‘Why don’t you explore?’
I walk round the room, trying to prepare myself for God knows what surprise.
‘Stop. Now. Take half a step to your left. Yes. Now, turn a little to your right. There. Now. Gently. Sit down.’
‘Sit down?’
‘Yes.’
I make to sit on the floor and the back of my knee catches the edge of something. I jolt, turn, and straighten in a single movement, staring at empty space. I reach out and touch—
‘There you go.’
I explore it with my hands. It’s a chair. I step back and take off my spectacles. A regular chair. Chrome, wood, a padded vinyl seat. ‘Oh. That’s neat.’ I look around the room. ‘You hid the cameras, too.’ There they are; I can see them now. There is one in each corner of the room.
‘Of course. If you’d seen the cameras, you’d have guessed the trick straight away.’
I put my spectacles back on. ‘What happens if I move the chair?’
‘Let me show you.’ Ralf picks up the chair and carries it across the room. The lines of the chair stutter in the air, wheel, turn to grey-blue wireframe, and disappear again in an instant. He sets the chair down and steps away. The chair folds itself out of the air, folds itself back in again and disappears.
‘It’s brilliant.’
It is. The effect is seamless. I step towards the place where I know the chair to be. It takes me a moment to spot the four spots, grey on grey, where the chair’s feet connect with the floor – a junction no camera trickery can mask. ‘What’s all this for?’
Ralf barks one of his trademark humourless laughs. ‘You tell me. Seriously. Tell me. I need to know.’
As if I’m not pulling fourteen-hour days as it is. ‘Well, Ralf, I think it’s a great demo, but—’
‘I’m leaving the company.’
‘You are?’ Does the dev team know? Does the company know? What will they do without him? ‘What will you do?’
He casts his hand about the empty – the
seemingly
empty – space. ‘This. Ideas like this. Ideas without an immediate return. I want to play with this stuff, and I want you to monetise what I come up with. If you can. If you can’t, then probably they weren’t good ideas in the first place. That’s the thing, you see. I have lots of ideas. I just don’t know how to rate them.’
I don’t understand this. ‘And for this you need to quit your job?’
‘I’m setting up on my own.’
‘Oh.’
‘Will you join me?’
‘Oh.’ Christ. ‘How?’ This whole conversation is becoming more and more strange. ‘Who’s going to pay for all this?’
‘I will.’ He sees my confusion. He smiles. ‘Whose club do you think this is?’
This certainly goes some way towards explaining how Ralf – Ralf, of all people – gets away with clicking his fingers at the staff.
Strictly speaking, Ralf does not own the club. His sister manages it. Strictly speaking, he doesn’t own the building. The family do – at least, they run a property company that operates, not just these premises, but the entire block and several beyond it.
I’ve acquired ideas about what money looks like from our interns. They all come from money – how else could they afford to work for us? I thought money came well-dressed, labouring under brittle, cutesy names like Flick and Roddy. I always assumed the dev team were safely proletarian – grafters on a credible wage. Strange that money could throw up a sport like Ralf. Ralf the workaholic, Ralf the star.
It doesn’t take me long to decide to accept his offer. The company we’ve been working for has had six years to break through and in that time the technology we pioneered has matured. It’s become cheap. It’s become easy to use. We’re a ponderous service company trying frantically to reinvent ourselves as a portal for user-generated content, all on a shoestring and a series of half-baked promises from various government-sponsored industry foundations. We won’t be the first outfit in this sector that’s been encouraged to death. It’s not anyone’s fault. It’s just the way of things. The first person through the door almost always gets shot.
Ralf wants me to handle business for what amounts to an inventor’s atelier. He wants to stay on the dirty, technical side of the IT divide, establishing patents for software engines which I’ll go on to sell to bigger, public-facing companies. But if we establish just one good idea, and get bought out for our trouble, I will count this venture a success. We are not living in the nineteenth century. The pace of change far exceeds any individual talent – even one as focused, as monomaniacal as Ralf’s.
For a while, Loophole (the name was my idea) is a sofa in an out-of-the-way corner of the club’s sheltered and heated tea-garden. We lounge about under canvas in oversoft armchairs, overheated laptops scorching our knees as we hammer out, like struggling poets, a form of words that will get Ralf’s work noticed. Ralf’s family have money, and this cushions us, covering our own needs. It will not drive the company – for that we need investment.
This is my job. For eighteen frustrating, toe-stubbing months, the only work I find for us is old work, throwing together image recognition systems to paste virtual movies over billboard posters. Ralf is patient with me, but I can’t help thinking that I’m scoring three stars at best. This is my fault. I’m the one charged with dreaming up new applications for imaginary light, but I have to bring in money as well, and here I am reaching for easy solutions, again and again.
By the time of my thirtieth birthday, Loophole is two. A weedy toddler, it employs six people to crunch code in the club’s refurbished basement – a start-up company indistinguishable from dozens of others all crammed in the same three-block radius, all of us more or less dormant as we wait for our long-talked-about spring: the moment everyone is wearing spectacles and drinking in imaginary light as unthinkingly as they run water from a tap. ‘Because that’s what it will take.’
Michel accepts another cocktail from the tray and sits back in his chair. It’s autumn but hot, and the roof-garden stinks, quite frankly, of damp vegetation and rot.
Michel came to celebrate my birthday, not sit through my litany of professional disappointment, but I cannot stop. ‘When people go out of their way to adopt a new technology, they want something useful for their effort, not gimmicks, not games, not even stories. And the fact is, AR is
all
gimmick. That’s its point. It gimmicks and games the world. You know, Hanna had this pinned years ago, when you first introduced me to her. She knew straight away it was arse-about-face.’
Michel nods and smiles, patient with me. He is surely weary by now of my mordant view of my work.
Outwardly the party is a success: an exclusive club; friends and workmates; even a girl who’s sweet on me, off snorting cocaine with her girlfriends in the upstairs loo. The fact is, though, the club is the club – our workplace, a budget option. The colleagues outnumber the friends. Plus, I discovered today that Mandy has been given her own programme on national radio. For some while she’s been reading her poetry at comedy clubs and bars across the city. She has become a minor urban celebrity. Now, with her 3.30pm slot, there will be no getting away from her. She has new hands now. Slimmer. Stranger. Too many fingers. She shows them off in the mugshot the newsfeeds have run. Becoming writer in residence at a service hospital south of the city, she lucked into some neurological experiment or other. They give her a cachet, those wild arachnid hands. They’ve pushed her up the rankings faster than any improvement in her poetry. I don’t know why I feel angry. A defence mechanism, I suppose, knowing what I did, or rather, failed to do for her. Perhaps somewhere, in her ever-expanding opus of radio-friendly doggerel, there is a chilly piece about me. Maybe there isn’t even that.
Michel, meanwhile, has sold the film rights to his first novel.
The Shaman
, it’s called, and though the book advance was tiny, times being what they are, the film option was so big Michel’s agent thought it was a printing error. Even parcelled out the way it is, in dribs and drabs over a dozen years, and hedged around with all manner of new writing commitments which Michel must religiously fulfil, the deal is a life-changer.
‘Bryon Vaux wants an original treatment for the next one.’
The name means nothing to me.
‘You know. Vaux.
Friendly Fire
.’
Friendly Fire
came out a couple of years ago. It was the culmination of a long line of modish, cynical war films that compensated for acts of unlikely heroism ‘in the field’ with liberal conspiracy theories back home.
‘I’ve not seen it.’
‘Be happy for me, Connie.’
Jesus. ‘Of course I’m happy for you, Mick. What am I saying? Why do you need me to be happy for you? Fuck you.’
Michael grins, at which point it occurs to me that he is working and writing for one of the most powerful media producers on the planet. He is more than a friend now. He is a contact.
‘How’s the family?’ (You can almost hear the crunch of gears.)
Michel nods – a successful sommelier contemplating his cellar. ‘Not bad at all, thanks.’
Michel and Hanna’s daughter is exactly the same age as Loophole, and a deal chubbier and healthier. They’ve had to abandon their sailing plans because of her, though the runaway success of Mick’s writing would probably have scotched them on its own. This is the first time I’ve seen Mick since that visit, and I haven’t seen Hanna at all. She never comes into the city; perhaps, even if she did, she would avoid me. I think of her sometimes. Who am I kidding? I think of her all the time. Her hands. The taste of her mouth. Christ, and since then she has had a child. Impossible not to wonder about that. ‘Do you still have the boat?’