“You should listen to your elders and betters, ya know?” He speaks with seriousness and urgency behind the façade of friendliness. “My kids are about your age and they’re exactly the same. Always pokin’ their noses in where they don’t belong. Bitin’ of more than they can chew…”

I stand on the bank, sceptical but knowing instinctively somehow that the words that the Fisherman is saying are important. I glance around and see that we’re standing in a narrow valley with no trees or buildings nearby. Weathered limestone boulders jut up through grass that’s thin, short and nibbled down by the regular grazing of sheep. The stream is clear, fast-flowing and only a couple of feet deep. I idly wonder if there are any fish to be found in there but the Fisherman is unconcerned. He continues with his lecture.

“Mark my words, sonny. You’re already in deeper than you know. Here I am, up to my waist in water, reeling ‘em in…been doin’ this crap fer years and I sure as hell know where the rapids are and where there’s sommat tasty t’catch. You kids could get bitten by sommat awful and never know until you’ve reeled in your line…”

The Fisherman rambles on with his metaphors as the ground beneath my feet takes a sudden lurch. Is it an earthquake? Dream-logic throws up one possibility after another, but the Fisherman, the surrounding area and the rushing stream are unaffected.

“…what I’m sayin’ is, you’ll be in over your head pretty darned soon and there’ll be nothin’ more I can do t’help you. You didn’t notice the warnin’ signs we sent you already? And now I’m here, having t’spell it out to you like this.”

The ground starts to sway under my feet as the bland grey of the rocks and the vivid green of the grass take on a multicoloured tint. The voice of the Fisherman takes on a tinny, warbling echo as the whole panorama breaks down like a failing analogue television signal. I feel a wave of nausea hit as the Fisherman looks on with what is now genuine concern.

“I’ll try to get in touch with you again, sonny. Before it’s too late. Hate to have it pan out like this, what with you bein’ so close to her an’ all…”

*

I didn’t remember waking up. I had, however, somehow crawled from my bedroom to the bathroom with what must have been superhuman tenacity, and prepared to throw up in the sink. Just as I was wondering why I hadn’t opted for the toilet, or indeed whyI hadn’t thrown up yet at all, I saw her standing in the doorway in her pyjamas with a towel over one arm.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Head…hurts…metallic taste on my tongue…” I rasped back.

“That’s the worst hangover I’ve ever bloody seen.” She turned around curtly and returned a couple of minutes later with a glass of water. The remains of two soluble tablets drifted lazily downwards inside, like a pair of miniature depth charges, fizzing as they went. “This might help.”

She sat down on the floor of the cramped and immaculately-cleaned bathroom and refused to leave until I finished the glass. The flavour of the tablets mixed badly with the peculiar taste in my mouth; it was worse than orange juice and toothpaste. Steeling myself, I finished the second half of it in one gulp.

“You’re not going anywhere today,” she ordered. As if I had any intention of doing otherwise.

“Huh? It’s just a…ouch…hangover. It’ll clear up in a couple of hours.”

“You seriously think that’s all it is? I saw how much you knocked back last night and you didn’t even bring anything up. Something’s wrong.”

I wasn’t in any mood to argue. Staggering back to my room, I made it as far as the living room sofa. She brought my dressing gown from my room and draped it over my shoulders. As my thought processes began to reconnect, I realised that she was right. We weren’t exactly sober when we got back but we’d gone to our respective rooms in a fairly orderly fashion after drinking a reasonable amount…and the food would’ve soaked up most of it. The thought of the food didn’t even initiate a gag reflex, but the headache was no better.

“I’ve got work today but I’m guessing Stu’s still got yours on lockdown. Are you going to be okay here while I’m out?” Her voice took on a softer tone but a bizarre ringing in my left ear, like simulated tinnitus, started to drown her out. I assured her, unconvincingly, that I’d be fine. “Just give me a ring if it gets any worse.”

“Sure,” I replied. “I’ll keep an eye on that album you had saved on that online auction too.”

One of her hobbies was collecting music in dead formats. A shelf in the living room was dedicated to the things: cardboard sleeves, jewel cases, digipaks, keepcases; CDs, laserdiscs, even a minidisc or two, all in various stages of disc rot or general wear. Steering clear of the cliché of vinyl, she instead amassed an enviable collection of digital media that were forgotten and abandoned during the course of the previous four decades: there was a thriving little subculture of people who had a thing for this outdated and unfashionable digital-era stuff, and rarities sometimes fetched considerable sums at auction. This one wasn’t particularly valuable, but she’d wanted a copy of it for herself for a while.

Apparently the auction was due to end mid-afternoon and I had already promised her that I’d make a bid for it on her behalf before someone with a strategic advantage – an imagined stereotype of some jobless obsessive hoarder in his parents’ basement who had the spare time to lie in wait for it – got there first. In my current state I was in an even better position to do this than I’d anticipated; I was usually tied to a terminal for most of my working day but I literally did have nothing better to do all day today.

My part in this pastime of hers had started with an offer to use digital audio recovery software to restore missing data from some of the recordings that were in the worst condition, but she was as interested in the packaging and information booklets as much as the content itself (which could, in many cases, be found online in a dedicated audiophile Cloud anyway). Before long I was following her around second-hand shops and trawling online listings to track down these quirky little pieces of a bygone era.

I hoped that today’s auction would take my mind off the nagging headache, so after she had got her work-related things together and cycled with furious determination into town I unrolled her spare terminal screen and proceeded to hang it on an uncluttered patch of the living room wall. The screen she used most often, framed in untreated pine, looked more fashionable (not to mention more environmentally-conscious) but for tasks like this I preferred the larger and flexible screen that could be set up wherever it was needed. With that hung on the wall in a comfortable position and my handheld successfully synched, I was ready to stake out the sale.

*

In between periodically checking the sale’s listing, I had another look at the online profile of the client that my employer had been working for. Behind the typical corporate sheen of the public online presence (a fancy term for what online designers called the replacements for traditional web pages), it was strange to see the variety of affiliate organisations. Most conglomerates were little more than umbrellas for smaller companies that had been absorbed, merged, split up by court order in the name of ‘fair competition’; in many cases it was a laughable exercise in sister companies competing against each other, with the outright winner still being their parent company.

As such there was usually little underlying logic behind the choice of takeovers. Like hungry bottom-feeders that roamed the ocean floor, the big multinationals swept up and absorbed smaller organisations without any apparent discretion; in this case though I was sensing some definite pattern in the profiles of our employer’s corporate siblings and was racking my brains to make the connection between them.

Sadly I wasn’t really in any fit state to make sense of that, so went back to the task at hand. It was a special edition of some indie band’s album from a decade previously that came in a peculiar novelty case; assuming we won the sale I’d probably have to volunteer myself to be at home to sign for the thing when it was delivered unless her more flexible work schedule allowed otherwise.

As expected, there were a couple of obsessive collector types eyeing it up but in the end it was a fairly straightforward purchase since neither seemed prepared to match the maximum buyer’s price that I’d been instructed to offer. Unsure about whether it was a worthwhile thing to own in the first place, I wired the payment over straightaway and went to the kitchen to see if the cupboards had somehow miraculously replenished themselves.

Unsurprisingly they hadn’t, but the headache and that annoying tinnitus made me decide that I wasn’t particularly hungry anyway. Assuming I was suffering from some strange side-effects of dehydration and general tiredness, I switched on the kettle and prepared myself for a boring afternoon of green tea and aspirin.

*

By early evening, when I heard the sound of a bicycle lock and footfalls on the stairwell outside, I was on my fifth cup of tea and the painkillers were engaged in a war of attrition with whatever was causing the throbbing inside my skull. She found me huddled in front of the terminal’s screen with the curtains drawn, the screen’s contrast and brightness turned three-quarters down, surrounded by empty tea-stained mugs and half-deaf in one ear.

“Feeling any better?” She asked, tossing her bag into her bedroom and flopping down at the other end of the sofa.

“Nope. This sure as hell isn’t a hangover,” I answered. “You won the auction, by the way.”

“And you spent the whole day staring at that thing with a headache?” she admonished me incredulously.

“This is as likely to be eye strain as it is alcohol. I dunno what it is, but I swear sitting here like this hasn’t made it any worse.” I received a casual ‘humph’ in response. “There’s this maddening tinnitus in my left ear, too.”

“You sure you don’t want to get that checked out?”

“I’ll book a doctor’s appointment tomorrow then if you’re so worried about it. Aren’t you even remotely excited about getting that thingummy-whatsit’s record or what?”

She moodily yanked out the long looped hair tie that had been keeping her tresses coiled up while she’d been cycling and, after deftly winding it around her wrist, went over to her terminal and lightly tapped the corner of the pinewood frame.

“You didn’t have to sit there all day just for that, you know,” she pointed out. “I’m sure another one would’ve cropped up sometime. Those  guys weren’t all that obsure from what I’ve read.”

“It was that special edition one with the longbox CD case; I thought you’d want one of those. I sent the payment straight across, too.” She gave a brief half-smile by way of thanks and switched her terminal onto standby with another sharp tap to the edge of the screen.

“Since I still have my shoes on and you’re not really fit to go all the way out to the corner shop, dinner’s on me tonight.” I made an effort to get to my feet but didn’t quite make it. “I guess it’s soup for you then, right?”

“Yeah, sorry. I really don’t think I’m up for anything extravagant. That should be easier for you to prepare, anyhow.”

“It’s no hassle. I’m just worried that you’ve been like this all day. I’ve never seen you knocked flat like that, apart from when those chavs did a number on you last week.”

Pausing only to give her cat a scratch between the ears on her way out, she grabbed a shopping bag and made for the door. “I won’t be long. Don’t do anything stupid, like using the last of my teabags.”

After the front door clanged shut I went back to staring aimlessly at the large terminal screen with the names of our client’s numerous subsidiaries and affiliates floating in a simulated cloud, like bees captured in slow motion around a flower. The display format was actually a very accurate representation of how I felt about it: it was as though there were unseen strings holding them together, and those invisible threads were hanging there in midair, silently mocking my as my head continued to throb.

Another writing challenge from 2DT (highlighted in bold)

Mrs K arrived too late for food however, so used it as a convenient excuse to find somewhere else that was, in her words, a bit more sophisticated. As predicted, she insisted on not only choosing the venue but paying as well; a nearby eastern-style fish restaurant with an expensive cocktail menu was decided to be the ideal answer.

The layout was dominated by a couple of long tables that run almost the full length of the main room, but we took one of the smaller four-seaters that were in a small alcove between the bar/counter and the frontage that gave a panoramic view of the street below. The ground floor had pretty much the same layout, but the upstairs room was quieter since the drunks who were a regular fixture in this part of town were put off by an insurmountable obstacle in the form of a flight of stairs. The menu could have been lifted into grey old England from any middle- to up-market area of Mrs K’s estranged husband’s home town of Tokyo, but as with all Eastern-style places the proprietors were a pleasant family of Koreans.

Half an hour passed while the manager extolled the virtues of the North/South unification of his homeland, then went back to the usual topics of conversation when he realised that we’d been here before. There were, apparently, separate scripts for new customers and regulars. I was on the whiskey and apple juice (a good combination, sir. Trust me,”), Mrs K had some gin cocktail (“Really, dear? It’s called Mother’s Ruin for a reason, you know,”) and her daughter had ordered a Long Island iced tea (“It won’t end up over your head this time. Honest.”).

It was, much to my embarrassment, shaping up to be a posher night out than I expected. The two of us were dressed casually, as the interior of Synapse demanded, but Mrs K seemed to have planned to eat here in advance. Most people imagine scientific researchers as tired, malnourished-looking sorts who go into a work-induced premature ageing process by the time they reach middle age and dress accordingly, but she was in a dress suit with her copper-coloured hair, only now showing hints of grey, neatly combed and tied into a businesslike bun. She never used Bunsen burners in her line of work as far as I knew, but there were I was sure plenty of other things lying around her lab that she’d want to keep her hair out of.

Looks-wise, neither of her children bore much of a resemblance, although Stu’s hair had the same reddish tinge and could well be tamed like hers was if he’d felt so inclined. Her daughter on the other hand had at least inherited her pale, glowing complexion and neat, well proportioned figure, but often lamented at how the only other physical attribute she’d got from her mother was her lack of height. Fortunately she also enjoyed the same razor-sharp wit that Mrs K did, and in what I’m guessing was the tradition carried down the female line, used it to great effect in torturing any males fortunate enough to be at the receiving end. This evening, though, Mrs K seemed to be in high spirits and was almost suspiciously restrained in her penchant for intellectual verbal sparring.

“We had a small windfall from the sponsor,” she explained as we sat waiting for the main course to arrive. “The new photobioreactor went online earlier this week and since it’s gone for more than four days without leaking or exploding, the boss gave each of us a bonus.”

I was never sure where truth ended and fabrication began in her work-related anecdotes, but I guess that someone who had to stick religiously to hard facts, and was met with disappointment so frequently, had to find an outlet somewhere. I’d experienced her particular brand of scientific humour before often enough; the infamous incident a couple of Christmases ago involving the fruit punch and dry ice for instance had been a memorable enough lesson for us all.

“Aren’t you doing the clinical computing stuff anymore?” I asked. The last time we’d talked, she couldn’t stop going on about bioneural network chips and the end of silicon. I was answered with a sigh and a ladylike sip of her cocktail before answering thoughtfully.

“You may or may not have heard from my darling daughter…” insert trademark withering stare here, “…but the papers were officially signed a couple of months ago so there was no reason to stay in that department, thank heavens. I’m now back to my greenhouses where I belong, and finding enough ways for the greenery to print money for the board members. It meets the targets, they stay off my staff’s backs and I can concentrate on my pension.”

She didn’t go as far as literally sitting back in satisfaction to emphasise the point, but the sensation of relief was palpable all the same. Neither of the two children had ever outwardly shown reactions to the divorce – Stu of course had characteristically said very little about it during the whole drawn-out process – but it was a good outcome for all concerned. The fact that the three of us were sitting here in a restaurant like this without the food and decor dredging up any bad memories for the two people accompanying me here meant that certain wounds had indeed healed. It almost felt like Mrs K had chosen the venue for that reason…although the food and drink were indeed superb. The innovative incorporation of fish tanks into the front windows must have appealed to her as well; I had to admit there was something hypnotic about watching the fish gliding to and fro.

“So, what’s the occasion, mum? Is this the belated celebratory meal for cutting ties with dad?”

“I just happened to be in town,” Mrs K answered. “Stuart’s apparently working late tonight and he won’t answer his phone, but since you were just around the corner this evening I decided to meet you here. We never seem to cross paths very often…” she sighed a little and took another sip of her cocktail, as though the effects of the alcohol would have an immediate effect, “…and I suppose it’s high time I admitted that the two of you were right all along. Neither of us wanted to make the process difficult for your education or home life; I think even your father tried in his own way.”

She was eyeing her mother with suspicion across the table, but much to my surprise had the restraint to say nothing in response.

Changing the subject, Mrs K added, “Anyhow, it’s a shame Stuart can’t be here tonight.”  She was clearly even more attuned to her daugher’s feelings on the matter than I was.

“Something went wrong with the latest contract,” I explained. I wasn’t really allowed to divulge the details, and Mrs K had the good sense to not ask. “My hands are tied so it’s really up to him to negotiate and pull out quietly. He’s been pretty much unreachable by handheld all day. I have enough to worry about lately anyway, to be perfectly honest.”

“I’d say. Seriously, mum, you couldn’t make it up.” She jerked her thumb sideways at me with her drink in the other hand. “Some scumbags beat him up in an alleyway and his flat got burgled a couple of days later. He’s crashing at my place while things settle down.”

The inquisitive look that Mrs K gave me was, I think, not unfamiliar to the microscopic subjects of her research projects. It didn’t clearly insinuate anything, but was accompanied by the tiniest of smiles that made my ears burn. I was in no fit state at that point to decide whether she was simply winding me up or was putting two and two together to make five.

“Oh, really? So I’m not to assume then that both of my beloved children have finally settled down and set to working on providing me with grandchildren?”

There was clearly something that Mrs K knew and the other two of us didn’t, but that important detail was immediately forgotten: the level of pent-up fury from the accompanying innuendo and baseless assumptions was about to reach critical mass. I was desperately pretending not to be paying attention, busying myself looking outside through the fish tanks/windows despite the fact that it was already dark outside. When the awkward silence continued for several more seconds I figured that the nearby genial old Korean gentleman, and a refill for my glass, was the only escape route.

“You’re not leaving already, are you?” Mrs K enquired with faux innocence. “The main course hasn’t arrived yet and it’s only half eight.”

“Going back to the bar,” I stammered hoarsely. The look currently on her daughter’s face would be familiar to Pliny the Younger when documenting the imminent eruption of Vesuvius. “I know it’s still early but I need to drink another between night and blue murder.” My brain was currently failing spectacularly in providing me with any other sort of defence.

*

With that moment of awkwardness aside, it wasn’t a bad evening. Mrs K, gracious in paying for the bill but apparently getting more than enough payback in terms of personal amusement at our expense, casually waved as we parted ways outside the restaurant and took a cab back to her hotel. Unlike the buses with their tandem flywheels, taxis had a more compact coaxial arrangement that in theory reduced the price of the fares in comparison with the more expensive biofuel-powered vehicles. If Mrs K had chosen the latter just to enjoy the fruits of her own research, I wouldn’t have been in the least bit surprised.

As we walked home I was treated to some half-drunken complaints about Stu’s absence. “What’s mum driving at anyway?” she mumbled irritably. “I haven’t heard a sodding thing from him since yesterday.” I was almost as good as her mother was in anticipating the shifts of her moods, so replied with something suitably neutral and noncommittal. The drink was making me unsteadier than I anticipated; I hadn’t had that much, had I?

It was a comfortable kind of silence as we walked home though; the evening sunshine and cloud that followed meant that it was fairly mild at this time of night. I wouldn’t let her walk herself home alone even if I wasn’t headed in the same direction; she gave off this deceptive air of vulnerability, which might be dangerous…for a would-be assailant in the event, if not for her. Logically, I knew she was safe enough unless a particularly large gang of troublemakers was around, but after recent events I was naturally paranoid about such things. Of course, there was a less-than-logical reason…or had her mother’s teasing got to me?

I was wondering about the potential after-effects of the elder lady’s mind games as I watched her daughter walking on ahead towards the staircase to her flat as defiantly as the evening’s alcohol would let her. Even when inebriated, her gait gave the impression that she was barely touching the ground, and the rubber-soled trainers she insisted on wearing on evenings out like this made her steps virtually silent. In the comfortable haze that the alcohol had provided, my gaze drifted involuntarily to the movements of her calves and skirt hem.

“Roll your tongue back in, stop having any funny ideas and get the spare key card out,” she interjected curtly. “I left mine on the kitchen table.”

Anyhow, it was a lot of fun to write and I look forward to working it into the main plotline somewhere. Hooray for boobies!

—

As is often the case, the outing was her idea; but she looked far from responsible, grinning gleefully at the look on my face. The digital scree of what was referred to as ‘experimental bubblegum industrial’, performed through the product of a programmer she’d been admiring for months, didn’t seem to be abating and I wasn’t sure how much more I could stand. Whether she relished my suffering more than the performance itself I don’t know; enjoying events like this seemed to be an ironic statement rather than what we sensible people would consider to be an evening’s entertainment, so it could fall either way.

“You’re having fun, right?” she asked cheerfully when the thunderous shriek came to an abrupt conclusion.

“I think…” my reply was cut off by a squeal from an electric violin and a supporting ‘musician’ with a handheld terminal plugged into a keyboard. Seven – yes, I counted them – minutes later I enjoyed another reprieve.

“I think…” I attempted again, “the violinist isn’t bad.” That was as diplomatic as I could manage, but the reaction I got from her expression suggested it wasn’t as clever as I’d assumed.

“Are you kidding me? It’s purely for show. She’s just some hipster who dug out her grandad’s Velvet Underground records and didn’t know where to stop!”

I thought back to the first time we met, when she had picked her own electric violin in garish electric blue to get back at her dad, and added matching highlights to her hair to complete whatever image she’d had in mind. I figured that this was a conversation that was going to hit an awkward and unpleasant dead end: she was chewing on the rim of the styrofoam cup in the way she often did when she was annoyed about something, so I decided on a change of tack.

After the third ‘movement’ we moved to the bar and progressed onto two of something colder, taller and (out of necessity, in my case) stronger. I made a point of focusing my attention on the only pleasant aspect of the spectacle on stage, which at least dampened my companion’s enthusiasm for it.

“Sloppy, derivative, egotistical…” she mumbled as they resumed the cacophony of…whatever it was. “if you really rate that snotty little bitch over the Synapse session I did last week, I’ll repay you for that drink by returning it to you OVER YOUR HEAD.” The shouting was as much for hearing herself over the noise as it was for emphasis.

“Nah,” I replied. “Your playing’s smoother and your dress sense is better…” I waited for the gaze from those liquid brown eyes of hers to soften for a moment, “but HER BOSOM WOULD MAKE YOU DREAM…”

A jarring squeak of a broken violin string jumped out through the PA, accompaniment to her slender arm flipping the glass up, up, up and over. To me it worth the discomfort, but that Long Island Iced Tea WAS a cold one.

Some people who know me may be aware of how I’ve been procrastinating over doing a home recording project for absolutely ages, but this month I decided to use that online event as the motivation to stop merely talking about it and *do* something, whether it turned out to be good, bad or somewhere in between. Long story short, I did it.

Like NaNoWriMo, the object of the exercise is not to create something perfect, or even ideal; it’s about having fun and seeing what you can do in a tight timeframe. My approach to writing words doesn’t lend itself well to this (hence the sporadic chapters for the SF serial I post here), but songwriting is rather different. I’ve had some half-formed ideas that hadn’t yet been made into recordings for a while, so RPM was the ideal excuse to get these things together and makes some proper songs.

By around the middle of the month I was all out of ideas and started to come up with completely new ones just to meet the ten song target (the end result was a few seconds shy of the other, 35 minute, target!) and of course I had to give myself a crash course in home recording in general just to get started.

How do I connect my amp/D.I./microphone to my USB preamp mixer? How do I configure the mixer in my recording software? How do I set recording levels, stereo mixes and arrange drum loops? What about mic placement? How do I even go about arranging song structures? All these questions, which I’d put off for months because I thought I couldn’t do it, needed to be addressed in order to record ten songs in four short weeks.

I can’t say I’m completely satisfied with the results: the mixing levels are a bit off, there are bum notes and background noise, a couple of tracks turned out very different musically from what I intended them to be and generally they’re a bit on the short side. Even as I recorded them though I had already decided to come back later after the Feb 29th deadline to redo them as and when – I saw RPM as an opportunity to set out ‘rough drafts’ of song ideas for later.

I’m not proud of these ten songs as ‘good’ music. They aren’t. I’m simply proud of the fact that I had the motivation to record them in the first place, and made the first steps in being a recording musician…even just as an amateur one. It was educational, but most importantly it was fun.

All ten tracks are available to listen on my RPM Challenge profile page but I’m not going to upload any of them for downloading here just yet. The simple fact is, I know I can improve on them with the luxury of more time, so I’ll wait until then. Assuming I don’t write any new material in the meantime I should be happy with enough of it to make an EP-length record that I’ll make available to anyone who wants it in 320 .mp3 and lossless formats.

Credits and thanks

I owe Ian and Mike a huge amount of thanks for their help and advice, and of course for the RPM team who came up with a neat idea that gets amateur musicians working on something crazy and fun. Because we can. And when we do, it feels great.

My flat wasn’t far from the office. As a matter of fact, the main reason why I chose the location was to make the journey to work as short and convenient as possible. It certainly wasn’t because the place itself was particularly pleasant (it wasn’t) or because it was in a desirable area (likewise). As the New Austerity bit in and the physical quantities of possessions people owned began to fall accordingly, it would be reasonable to assume that issues such as littering and the tipping of discarded belongings in public places would follow suit. Apparently this neighbourhood wanted to keep the traditional image of an industrial dystopia alive, despite the best efforts of various recycling and recovery organisations; the activity of those outfits ebbed and flowed around various parts of town and right now it looked like my area hadn’t been part of their rounds for several months.

Sometimes I wished the local litter-louts could be more original. A mouldy sofa, a broken TV set, even the obligatory abandoned shopping trolley…like the dentist waiting room that seems to source its newspapers from a newsagent specialising in selling nothing but the previous day’s editions, the whole street had a tired ‘can’t be bothered to try any more’ feel. Suffice to say, I wasn’t going to miss the place. Travelling to work would be more of a hassle, but who knows what, if anything, I was going to be doing there for the next few weeks?

It didn’t take long to throw the essentials such as clothes, toiletries and work-related stuff together since I had few of the first two and anything that came under the latter category was still missing, presumed stolen.  By the standards of your typical burglar, this person or persons unknown had an uncanny eye for what was important and what wasn’t; amongst the standard strewn furniture and opened cupboards, there was some intelligence and purpose behind what appeared to be simple druggie desperation. It still didn’t seem quite right.

We lugged what was left of my worldly possessions – which depressingly fitted into three suitcases and a rucksack – to the nearest bus stop. She insisted on carrying the bag and one of my cases, with the only concession to my attempts at chivalry being that I carried the two heavier ones. Fortunately we didn’t have long to wait before a bus pulled up and, with travel cards in hand, we boarded.

The tandem flywheels beneath the floor switched out of idle, shifting from a medium-pitched hum to a more laboured and purposeful throb as it picked up speed and turned out of my street and onto the main road. Going via the city’s inner ring road, it skirted around the retail district we had used that morning as a short cut, and it gave more pleasant views as well. Small pockets of parkland and waste ground nestled between the grey buildings like weeds poking up through paving stones; flyovers arced gracefully between dual carriageways in a semi-haphazard fashion that must have been meticulously planned at first until the clumsy hands of planning committees forced compromise.

She was gazing out of the window at the passing cityscape with a look of concentration mixed with some emotion that was more deeply-buried and inscrutable. Every time we travelled by bus or train she’d insist on taking the window seat and would often zone out like this for minutes at a time; conversation from her during these journeys was sporadic and followed her own trains of thought. I knew better than to initiate a dialogue and waited for her to say something on her own accord instead.

“If this job really goes bad, are you going to move back home?”

“I doubt it,” I replied without hesitation. “If push came to shove then sure, but only if I had to. I’m kinda settled here. I don’t particularly want to go back, anyhow.”

“You don’t get on with your parents, is that it?”

“I don’t not get along with them. We never had a massive argument if that’s what you mean. We just…grew apart and I found I couldn’t go back to being the kid in his parents’ back bedroom anymore.”

She seemed to weigh up my situation but wasn’t entirely satisfied with my answer. “Don’t you, y’know, miss being with them?”

“I dunno. Really. It felt like we just ran out of things to talk about and I outgrew the place. It really isn’t anything more complicated than that. You don’t talk to your mum much these days either, do you?”

“That’s different. I don’t approve of a lot of stuff she’s said and done so we don’t see eye to eye.” She hesitated. “I’m not saying you should go, but I was, well, curious about why you stay out here.”

“I’m not sure myself half the time. I’m helping Stu out with getting the office on track – the boss is planning a second branch somewhere nearby so expanding the thing will take time. I’m not inconveniencing you by taking the spare room, am I?”

“For the zillionth time, no. Got it? Andrea’s off doing her own thing whenever she feels like it and to be quite honest, I’d have trouble with the rent if there wasn’t someone dependable around. The latest article I’m working on is doing all right but I appreciate your being here. Okay?”

I mentally counted to three to let that raw nerve momentarily settle down. “Okay. I get it. It’s fine by me as long as you let me know if I’m out of line, or if you need anything else sorting out. You’re the one who’s doing me the favour, after all.” She swayed sideways a bit on her seat, almost hitting my shoulder, and hurriedly steadied herself, as though she’d momentarily dozed off. She mumbled something about the state of the buses and their crappy suspension, at which point it reached the stop near her place. Dragging my sorry excuses for belongings from the luggage racks, getting one or two angry glares from the other passengers in the process, we spilled out onto the pavement and made our way to the nearby block of flats.

*

I was given the typical welcome from the cat, in that she gave one of those cursory glances before resuming whatever it was that she was doing. This time she was meticulously cleaning herself; it never ceased to amaze me how a creature that rarely got itself dirty in any way devoted so much time to personal hygiene.

The spare room was almost as neat and spotlessly clean as the flat’s smallest occupant, although it had that tired, bereft look that most rooms have when they’ve been relieved of their contents. Apparently, no amount of dusting and vacuuming could completely remove the perceived traces left by the previous resident in my mind, so I started unpacking as quickly as I could. After my alarm clock was perched on the bedside table, my shirts hung on the clothes rail and fresh linen fitted to the bed it began to feel more ‘lived-in’ and welcoming.

The morning’s exertions with suitcases and bus rides made lunch all the more appealing, although she’d already slipped into Lone Occupant mode since there wasn’t a great deal in the fridge. Searching through the packets and jars for something that would qualify as a sandwich filling, I was insistent on staying in to eat all the same.

“Are you going to give up on it or what?” she asked as I made the third circuit around the kitchen cupboards.

“I’m not admitting defeat just yet…” I mumbled. “Think of it as settling in properly or something.”

This was true. Eating out today would only accentuate my lingering feeling of being a guest in her flat and I wanted to feel settled and comply with her request to ‘make myself at home’. A dried-out lump of cheese, a tomato that had miraculously avoided going soft and the ubiquitous bottle of soy sauce were the best candidates on offer. There was only white bread naturally, but I still felt like I’d won a small victory. Me, 1: new kitchen, 0.

We ate in comfortable silence and the grilled sandwich soon gave my stomach a satisfying glow. The nagging headache still hadn’t gone away, but I was finally starting to feel a bit better overall. As we sat at adjacent corners of the small living/dining room table facing the window she mentioned that she still had unfinished business at Synapse and headed to the bathroom (“The toilets in that place are bloody awful. No way I’m hovering my rear end over the seat like last time.”)

As if on cue, her handheld rang as soon as she was out of the room. “That alert tone’s my mum. You don’t mind getting it, do you?” she shouted through the door. The unsaid inference was that she’d rather have me take her own mother’s call, and I got on well with the lady in any case, so I answered it without complaint.

“Hi there, Mrs K. Yeah, she’s getting ready now. We’re dropping by this afternoon but I think she said something about getting some work done there this evening too. Around then? Sure.”

I didn’t need to explain what was going on immediately after her mother had hung up; she put two and two together from listening in on my half of the conversation and was quietly uncomfortable about meeting her own mother while being, technically, at work.

“You don’t have to work on a weekend, you know.”

“I do know. It’s just that I want to catch the Saturday crowd this week. It ought to add the finishing touch and then I don’t need to go near the place again. Did my mum mention anything about eating out?”

I assured that her that she hadn’t. “She tries to treat me – and you – whenever she wants to meet me in town like this.” I assured her that I’d noticed. “Just saying.”

I, on the other hand, couldn’t think of anything in particular to look forward to in the forthcoming week, so was all for taking it easy this evening. Anticipating a sub-zero atmosphere when mother and daughter were in the same room, I decided it would be wise to tag along. There were worse places to be on a Saturday night than a live music venue with a sarcastic freelance journalist and a middle-aged genetics researcher when the drink started flowing. So I hoped, anyway.

*

Back downstairs, we got another round of coffee in while Stu powered up his portable terminal and set about e-mailing the client. Our position at this point was precarious: torn between needing the work and being genuinely worried about biting off more than he could chew, he wanted them to clarify a few things before allowing me – or any of my colleagues – to restart our respective tasks on the project.

“As far as I’m concerned, our job’s on ice until I can be sure everything’s watertight,” he explained. “Time’s money, but it’s their money as well as ours. I’ll arrange extra firewalls and bring the data in from the Cloud and onto our own server.”

The Cloud was, of course, on a server as well but the idea of having it literally under our roof offered us, and our client, some measure of psychological security at least; the server could handle it, and we would work from the office. From my point of view, a source of food and refreshments was only downstairs, and I could hardly use my own flat in any case.

Indigo Blue was a coffee shop by day and bar/restaurant by night. It made sense since we could run our business as we felt necessary and hold meetings downstairs. It was a public establishment of course, but various areas could be reserved for conferences so we could, when necessary, have face-to-face meetings without needing to make our own offices tidier and more presentable.

The owner of our company – technically mine and Stu’s boss – was some middle-aged friend of his mother who specialised in security, especially of the electronic and commercial varieties. She had the foresight to buy up the space above Indigo Blue before the drift of businesses back into city centres had gained momentum, so avoided the later rise in property prices; not only was she ahead of the curve in terms of establishing the business, she also saw the potential in this young graduate who had a way with firewalls and number-crunching. Stu didn’t look like a security guard in the physical sense, but he had a quiet and deceptive sort of way of keeping promises with various sorts of people, and shrewd business acumen into the bargain. Before she’d retreated to the background and placed him in charge on the ‘shop floor’ he had severed all ties with his father’s corporate world and didn’t rely on his mother’s connections either. She figured him to be adaptable and reliable, and turned out to be absolutely right.

“You know, if you really do want my spare room we’re going to need to help Andrea move her stuff out first.”

I was so wrapped up in worrying about what I would be working on that week I’d almost forgotten what the other task for the day was.

“I’m afraid, sis, that I’ll have to sit this one out,” Stu declared miserably. “There’s nothing to stop either of you though. You’re going to need a van too, aren’t you?” He went back to checking over his equipment.

“There isn’t enough of my stuff still in my flat for that,” I countered. “Still, I don’t expect Andrea will have a great deal either. Have either of you heard from her?”

Both shook their heads and went back to their respective screens. He on his portable, her on her handheld. “I’ll give her a shout and see where she’s at,” she said. “Especially since we were all supposed meet here this morning.”

A few seconds later a reply buzzed in to say that Andrea had moved her belongings out already and was well and truly vacated. Don’t worry guys, I got my own van. Thanks anyway, see you all later. It seemed a bit abrupt and strange that she hadn’t waited, but I was all for sorting that out later. Apparently that wasn’t good enough for some of us.

“She lived in my place for six months but shifted her stuff without a word?”

“I wouldn’t dwell on it,” I replied, again trying to keep things calm. “She doesn’t need any help, so don’t get bent out of shape about it. Makes things easier for me, right?”

She gave a resigned sigh, flicked off her handheld and dropped it into an inside pocket with one smooth movement. “Let’s get your shit on the road then, eh?”

We walked out of Indigo Blue, leaving Stu sitting in the same window seat, still working on his portable terminal and staring thoughtfully at the screen. It could’ve been a message to the client, a rethink of security procedures or simple one of those maths puzzles he was so fond of. My part in the project was pretty much on hold for now so as much as it pained me to leave my best friend agonising over all our wages for the foreseeable future, he was my supervisor so ultimately it was his responsibility now and his alone.

Fortunately the rain had stopped for a while and the walk back was a more pleasant one.

“What’s the job entail, exactly?” she asked. “Beyond the programming jargon, that is.” Her way of never mincing words was actually beneficial in her current line of work, since that branch of journalism actually rewarded acidic wit and sarcasm. Talk about landing on your feet.

“A marketing company that’s basically mass-producing music wholesale. You remember the voice synth software and the mascots that came out in the mid 2000s?”

“Yeah. The second- and third-gen stuff wasn’t so bad. We used one of them in college for a live music project.”

“Seriously?” I hadn’t heard about this one.

“It was a bubblegum electropop-stroke-industrial outfit,” she explained. “We were absolutely awful, looking back on it. Like some mixture of Nine Inch Nails and Kate Bush, without the talent. Anyway. The vocalist got laryngitis a couple of days before the gig – she was out on the piss or something – and we didn’t have any way of doing the vocals. I hit on the idea of using the sound engineer’s laptop to make up lyric samples and loop them in on the fly. He set up a screen for the drummer to watch so he could keep time and she e-mailed the lyrics to us while she sat at home ill.”

“Did you get it to work?”

“Pretty much. We only had forty-eight hours or so to get the vocal samples working and looped a lot of them to save time, but we just about pulled it off. I was doing electric violin, some of the keyboards and had to get the timing of those sodding vocal loops right while we were on stage. Actually, I’m amazed it worked at all.”

I was genuinely impressed. “So you know how this software is sold now, I assume?”

“No idea. I’ve run into some of those music marketing people in recent months, but our scene is so wrapped up in trying to be a scene, there’s no room for anything that has even a whiff of commercialism to it. They never get very far so eventually stopped trying.”

“I’m not surprised that music that’s so obviously manufactured isn’t a hit with the indie kids,” I agreed. “Mainstream stuff moves just as fast though, so the principle’s the same even if the products are different. What’s in fashion now could change in a few months and they have something falling out of the charts and failing to sell. ‘Alternative’ music fans have a bit more discretion…or a different kind of gullibility…”

“Voice synths and virtual idols are waaay more artificial than even the most pretentious bands I’ve worked with!”

“You sure about that?” I grinned. “Anyway. Our job was to help create an artificial pre-packaged product for the mainstream, but make multiple versions at the same time to cover all the bases then run scenarios to simulate how they’d do in a real-life situation. I worked on character profiles, someone else kept an eye on celebrity news; another did social network trends to keep the results in line with what’s popular, and so on. We were supposed to filter those through another program and whittle them down to what was supposed to do well commercially.”

“So, they’re doing some sort of A.I. thing? A fully fledged virtual idol? It sounds like pure science fiction to me.”

“It’s nowhere near there yet, no. What they want to create is a brand or style that’s fluid enough to mould itself to whatever the market demands at the time and ‘simulate’ potential failures before they get to the customers. Kinda like evolution sped up to save time and money. Chart wars that happen inside computers, or even virtual artists growing up and arriving in shops fully formed.”

“Automating the success or failure of music before it’s reached the fans, and tailoring it to what they want?”

“Yeah. The programme I had running was creating dozens of potential fictitious ‘artists’ simultaneously, and the client would sell the handful that made it through to the end. The programme would simulate the early life and personality of the artist too, altering the sound of their voice and their songs, and give spin-off books and whatnot.”

“Sounds kinda…dishonest to sell something so calculated and processed. I know marketing has been around since forever, but it feels like they’re cheating somehow. It’s blurring fiction with reality.”

“I know what you mean. I’m a bit worried about where it could lead…what about the uncertainty and unpredictability that makes music special?”

“What if it’s what people want? Do they care where a product comes from, or how it’s made, as long as they like it? They seem to think that if they tell people often enough that we want what they’re selling, we’ll believe it eventually. Or is marketing less of a blunt instrument now?”

I should’ve expected her to take such a dim view on the subject, and to be honest she was only echoing the doubts I myself had. “It’s what people think they want, I guess. Which isn’t the same thing, in my opinion. At best, all we’re doing is some mathematical experiment that has no hope of working properly in the real world. It might be as dumb as trying to predict earthquakes or the stock market. At worst…yeah, I’d be more worried if it DID work as the client intends it to.”

“It reminds me of an old sci-fi story about a scientist who used a computer to compose the ‘perfect’ piece of music,” she mused. “It was called ‘The Ultimate Melody’ or something. Apparently the inventor actually found what he was looking for but when he finally heard the song, it made him a blissed-out vegetable.”

“You mean we shouldn’t be playing God with artistic expression?”

She gave one of her rare smiles. “Maybe that’s why the Devil has all the best tunes?”

I’m not even sure why she kept this old photo in particular: visiting her father’s home has always been a rare event but even though that visit was so soon before the big ‘quake hit, I could never work out what sentimental value it held for her. I probably found myself just as attached to the image as she ever was – perhaps because I can imagine the circumstances under which it was taken so vividly.

I know where and when it was, at least. Pausing halfway down that narrow, well-known street, hemmed in by tourist-y stalls on both sides, something in one of them caught her attention…or more likely formed a convenient excuse for her to turn her gaze away from the camera and its owner. She pauses for a moment, deep in thought. That hardness to the lines of her eyes – the defensive glare that makes her gaze seem to retreat in to itself – wasn’t there back then I suppose. A lot can happen in a decade. Knowing the ‘her’ I know now, I can just about relate to that younger self in that photo. Appearances change but she may never admit that, deep down and out of the reach of a camera lens, she hasn’t changed all that much.

“I looked so different back then!” she’ll protest. No one can deny that. A decade has distanced her less than she would’ve liked, however… I wonder why she’s held onto this image that connects her so closely to the self she’s tried to leave behind.

I only remember taking that journey twice in my life. The first time, my brother and I were herded like a couple of sheep by our mother through airport terminals, railway stations and crowded streets, in two cities on two continents. It felt like some sort of obligation, as much she tried to convince us otherwise. The weather wasn’t different – it was an unusually cold and snowy winter worldwide that year, I later learned – but the language was different; I felt out of place, like being on some other planet. Signs and notices were printed in what looked like indecipherable runes, an almost off-limits place ‘not for us’.

When we returned home I made a promise to myself to learn how to read and speak this strange language that I was half-expected to know; I never thought it something I ‘ought to do’, although my father made some half-hearted effort to instil that point of view into us both before eventually giving up. Naturally we resisted, but I took it upon myself on my own initiative soon after. It wasn’t with the intention to blend in on subsequent visits; it was a challenge to do something, and go somewhere, without feeling restricted or reliant on anyone else. I must admit that I’m prone to doing that sometimes.

The second time was different, being as it was several years later at a different time of year: one airport on a grey, drizzly afternoon; another in clinging humidity and warm sunshine. I knew my way around this time, and it was my father’s turn to feel left behind. With his camera in hand and murmuring something about capturing a milestone for posterity, we walked the pre-Quake streets and boarded an underground train.

Of all the routes we could’ve taken, this was the line with the trains whose air conditioners didn’t seem to work too well so the carriage was sweltering. It was at least cleaner and more spacious than its London equivalent but the tense silence made me even more uncomfortable than the cramped seating did. Above ground, I still felt a sense of dissociation; one figurative foot here, one where I had come from. As I walked down the bustling shopping arcades, hearing the spoken words of the locals and understanding them clearly this time, I still felt like a visitor just passing through. This was not ‘home’, no matter how welcome he tried to make me.

In a rare show of enthusiasm, he walked amongst the crowd with his camera, offering to buy me snacks and gifts, and begged me to pose for a photo. At this point I was trying my damndest to stop being in awe or afraid of him; he was just another wealthy middle-aged man amongst a crowd of similarly dressed people, accompanying their children at one of the city’s oldest landmarks. That inborn impression still had some hold over me, but I was going through some rebellious phase, fuelled by being talked into coming here, again on his terms and was feeling really fed up with the whole charade.

I pretended to be engrossed in one of the stalls that was selling some type of cheap souvenir or other; lucky cats, t-shirts, it didn’t matter. With a toffee apple in one hand and a carrier bag full of trinkets in the other, I displayed the best show of nonchalance that I could as he clicked the shutter, gave a barely perceptible smile of approval, then suggested we move on to the next attraction. It was a sham; a public display of a devoted father and his teenage daughter on an ordinary day out although, at the time, being the stubborn adolescent I was, it still meant more to him than it did to me.

Later that day he made a respectable effort by offering the usual spiel about his only daughter coming all this way and how that meant it was only fair to get me something extra special. Getting strange looks from the other department store customers on such a hot day, I picked out a white three-quarter length overcoat with a matching beret. That afternoon I sipped iced coffee with him in a Starbucks while we watched the hurried mass of people swarming across that enormous pedestrian crossing like insects, and conversation finally dried up. Both of us were clearly tired of the pretence and were ready to go our separate ways again.

I’d always been vaguely aware of how my mother fought long and hard to keep my brother and me back in England when our father was constantly pressuring her and us, but he now seemed to be showing resignation and a grudging acknowledgement that the decision was mine and mine alone. Even before the Quake shook this entire city to its foundations and prompted so many people here to rethink their lives I was far more content keeping this hard-nosed and overbearing individual at arm’s length.

Returning to the cold, grey and relatively uninteresting place of my birth didn’t seem so bad when I felt I had everything I needed to get by on my own. Looking at the shopping bag containing the hat and coat – a rare but much-appreciated show of parental concern and generosity – I was sure I could face the cold and discomfort better than before. The task was completed; my obligation was fulfilled and now I could draw a line under another phase of my life.

The call came suddenly, but not unexpectedly. She was quietly happy that we were heading in the direction of Indigo Blue rather than Synapse, but she was still pleased simply to be walking through town in the rain either way. The congestion charges that had been implemented nationwide reduced the volume of traffic but it only served to increase the numbers of buses and pedestrians on the streets in city centres. Walking through the mute, rain-drenched early morning crowds gave me an ironic feeling of isolation.

“D’you ever feel lonelier now you’ve moved to a bigger city?” I asked. Our conversations often started in an out-of-the-blue fashion; I wasn’t always the one to initiate it and neither of us minded.

“Not really. Gives you a sense of security and anonymity, doesn’t it?”

“I s’pose. Doesn’t it feel as though you’re just…passing through or something?”

“I like that,” she answered. “When everyone’s wrapped up in the own trivial problems and doesn’t pay attention to me, it gives a sense of privacy. Does that sound weird?”

“Nope. Makes a lot of sense actually. You seem more…at ease since you moved over here, is all.”

“I guess it’s because I can stop by and catch up with Stu whenever. I can make sure he’s looking after himself and keeping out of trouble, that way.”

I wasn’t sure if she was being serious about that last point or not. Looking at the two of them side-by-side, it was easy to wrongly assume which of them was the driven, outgoing businessperson and which one was the musician who drifted between jobs and seemingly lived on their wits. With his unkempt mop of shoulder-length, dark reddish hair and casual attire, Stu looked more befitting the lifestyle of his sister than the role of the young pro who managed to salvage a small ailing company. I’d seen him in a suit on precisely two occasions: once at his university graduation and again for his Masters award a year later. I joked at the time that if his father looked like a Yakuza boss, Stu looked like one of his henchmen.

When we finally arrived at Indigo Blue, he was sitting at a table near the window with the establishment’s breakfast special on a chipped plate that looked like it had been machine-washed to within an inch of its life. He looked happy and relieved to see me in one piece, but something in his expression hinted there was more he wanted to talk to me about. I could pretty much guess what it was.

“Breakfast?” he asked. She shook her head.

“Made my own. Cooked some for the walking wounded here too.”

I figured I’d need more caffeine before the day was out so leaned over the bar to get the manager’s attention and ordered three.

“The rest of us’ll be here soon,” Stu explained when I sat back down. “I wanted to get business over and done with first. I’ll have to give a full run-down when we’re back at the office but long story short, the shit’s well and truly hit the fan and the client is hounding me for answers.”

“What was it this time?” she asked.

“A next-gen music marketing thing,” Stu replied. “It’s not an A.I. exactly, but it’s based on an evolutionary mathematical model that they wanted our Cloud capabilities for. What with the mainstream celebrity industry being as saturated as it is, some of the big businesses are staking their hopes on literally growing their own pre-packaged and outsourcing the number-crunching to third party companies…which is where we came in. I guess my background made me a first choice for being part of the next fictional electropop star de jour…”

“Hooray for cultural stereotypes,” she interjected.

“Well, yeah. I’m not saying that didn’t help. Trouble is, there’s apparently a major spanner in the works. Don’t worry, it’s not your fault and it might not amount to anything but…they’re getting really jumpy about the security implications and I don’t like that one bit.”

“Hold, on,” I countered. “Don’t forget that this is all because of a simple break-in of my flat. Someone would then have to hack into my terminal, glean something from its cloud link, and make something useful from what they found. All I was doing was nudging the programme you gave me with occasional tweaks to the component parameters.”

“Personality profile, right?” Stu asked.

“Yeah. Really innocuous things like tastes in books and movies, musical influences, even trivial details like family and favourite foods. I don’t think any of that is going to scupper the development process or make a case for industrial espionage, is it?”

Stu gave a short sigh, which was as close to being outwardly stressed as he ever got. “It’s best we get this sorted in the office, really. Mind if we take this upstairs?”

The office occupied a top floor that looked like a traditional garret flat with sloping ceilings and uneven floors. This wasn’t a problem considering how most of our equipment consisted of terminal screens; this way, they were at a comfortable angle when attached directly to the ceiling and didn’t require much space either. Occasionally, eight or nine of us occupied the office, lined along the walls with the screens lit up but today it was just us three. Stu’s other employees often worked from home for reasons of convenience, as I did.

Stu’s terminal was powered up as usual but this time his own server was also humming away under the desk. It was unusual for anyone to have a server, especially of this modest size and spec, in their home or workplace but on a number of occasions Stu found it useful. It wasn’t strictly illegal – tobacco smoking wasn’t strictly speaking illegal either, but that was virtually extinct in everyday situations – but it was rare enough. Not unlike my valve amplifier that, until recently, lived in my flat. In this case, the extra power consumption was deemed socially and financially acceptable on the grounds that it was strictly for business use.

“Long story short,” Stu began, “I’m actually bricking it. I didn’t realise how important this job was, but then I didn’t realise the wider implications either. What I thought was just another small marketing or advertising job is actually part of something really goddamn heavy.”

The other two of us sat in silence, coffee mugs in hand, and let him continue.

“I’ll be straight with you here: if I’d known the crap that this was attached to, I might have walked away at the first meeting. I’m not into that commercial nonsense at the best of times, but that’s not the problem here. The reaction I’ve had from the client just doesn’t fit what it looks like from my end. You’re dead right that taking a private terminal is stupid and pointless; they must know that but started putting the pressure on me all the same. The only way I can explain it is by saying their e-mails – which were encrypted in the same way that seriously confidential info is sent – set my bullshit detector off.”

Stu’s ‘bullshit detector’ might sound like a facetious term, but he didn’t get to where he was by using his academic credentials alone. He had a feel for this sort of thing.

“Didn’t you say that someone would need the clout of a multinational IT firm to get anything out of that?” she asked me. Stu gave a brief wave of his index finger to acknowledge her point.

“Quite. Which is why, in my increasingly-paranoid opinion, I reckon that’s exactly what they’re afraid of. This client of ours seems to have been a bit economical with the details since their reaction has been way out of proportion if I’m to take their brief at face value. Which I’m not doing, by the way. If this reaches up and out as far as I think it does, I’ll be putting myself and my employees at risk to some god-knows-how-big turf war between the big hitters. I didn’t spend all this time building myself a stable career and getting so many good people on board just for it all to be kicked over by faceless corporate arseholes. I won’t let that happen. I can promise you that. Both of you.”

Extending his concern over this to both me and his own sister suggested to me that it wasn’t just risky business: whoever was slugging it out with our client apparently wouldn’t rule out getting personal while they were at it. In our line of business this simply didn’t normally happen; considering their family background though, I could easily see why the two of them were particularly unsettled. Unless we could find out where this was going, I was now part of that, like it or not.

*

The second thing I noticed was the small tabby cat sprawled across the small of my back.

The first thing I noticed was that I was still aching and sore all over.

Trying not to pay too much attention to the mutely outraged creature that slid reluctantly off to one side, I gingerly raised myself to a sitting position and did the usual waking-up checklist that’s standard routine when I find myself somewhere other than my own bed. Rubbing my eyes I blinked stupidly around the room and slumped back on the sofa that had been my resting place for the night.

“Feeling okay?” the nonchalant voice near the window asked. “Hope you didn’t notice, but she decided to throw up onto the, uh, throw night before last. I changed it before you used it, though.” My recently-awoken brain failed to grasp the pun and I mumbled dumbly.

“I need the three S’s and a good coffee…”

“The coffee I can help you with,” she continued, trying to sound oblivious to what she believed was a show of comic genius. “As for the other three, you’re on your own.” She didn’t pause to point towards the bathroom but I knew where it was anyway. I glanced at my watch, which I hadn’t even bothered to take off before crashing out.

“What’s with the early start?” It was around half eight on a Saturday morning but generally she was whatever you call the polar opposite of a morning person. If anything she was currently showing more intent concentration than I normally saw her show, whatever the time of day. She was hammering away at her keyboard and barely glanced in my direction at all.

“You’re not the only one…on both counts that is. A lot of this crap really doesn’t add up. Get a shower; you look like shit.” She scratched her elbow and stretched lazily, cat-like, with half a dozen joints cracking audibly. “Hey Starla, leave him alone.” The cat gave up sniffing at my hand and followed its mistress in casually padding into the kitchen. I picked up my overnight bag (which, surprisingly, I remembered had been left next to the sofa) and shuffled into the bathroom.

*

There was a large steaming mug of freshly-brewed coffee waiting for me when I emerged from the bathroom, now feeling a couple of degrees more human. One mouthful of the proffered mug’s contents made me feel a couple of crucial degrees further still. Her expression was even more serious.

“Seems like a few people have been through the same mill as you in the past few days. Not that it’s any consolation for you or anything,” she added almost, but not quite, as an afterthought. She leaned on the back of her chair, demurely took a sip and scratched her shin.

“Sure. Getting jumped on by a bunch of yobs in an alleyway is one thing but a break-in a matter of a couple of days later is bloody ridiculous.”

“Well, yeah. That’s bad luck, even by your standards. What’s weird is how many round here have had the same thing happen to them.” She paused as if to go further, and then thought better of it. “First things first though. I’ll get some breakfast rustled up. The others have been wondering where you’ve been.”

She stood up out of her chair and ambled back towards the kitchen while the cat, now fuller and happier, flopped down onto the sofa next to me. The old adage of pets resembling their owners drifted into my mind and I inwardly waved it away.

Glancing around her living room it was clear how the general look of the place was a partial result of the current burglary rate, among other things. As in my (now ransacked) flat the array of electronic gadgets was less than what would’ve been usual even less than a decade ago: where a bulky, humming beige PC rig would’ve stood there was now a simple terminal: a monitor with a couple of connecting wires for power and data to the screen. An electric violin was propped lazily against the wall nearby, plugged straight into a smaller box roughly the size of a cigarette packet. Items such as clocks, the toaster and microwave were practically bolted down.

“So much for suggesting you move into my spare room and save yourself a bit of hassle,” I observed morosely. “We even get along well enough to not rip each other’s heads off after a few months. Putting up with wholemeal bread is one thing, but housebreaking’s a bit much, right?” Not that her place was any less at risk, in theory anyway.

“True enough,” she agreed. “But you wouldn’t be able to sit in your undies and crack one off in your living room whenever you felt like it if I was around, would you?” Pointing out that I bloody didn’t, and she wouldn’t know even if had, sounded like a lame retort so I settled for giving her wisecrack the contempt it deserved and gave a mere sigh of disapproval instead.

“Andrea can be a pain in the arse sometimes, mind. When she’s not barfing on the furniture she friggin’ microwaves bacon, for crying out loud. Bloody philistine.” We simultaneously looked at the grilled bacon as if in affirmation.

“She isn’t that bad, surely?” It didn’t seem like the wrong thing to say but she seemed to find issue with it all the same.

“Don’t tell me you fancy her or something, do you?”

I could take one uncalled-for jibe in the space of five minutes but decided to take the bait this time. I kept my voice even, just in case. “What the hell do you mean? We’re not high school kids, you know. It doesn’t mean I fancy the pants off her just ‘cause I don’t dislike her. I’m not the one who lives with her, I guess.” Almost enough to calm her down. Almost. “Besides, she’s not my type, if there is such a thing. I didn’t get that bad a concussion.” I pointed at the largest of several bruises. She gazed cynically back at me, as if physically weighing it all up.

“Okay. Whatever.”

She casually let the matter slide while somehow still being vaguely amiable about it. Meeting her gaze somehow nervously, I figured normal service had somehow resumed and relaxed slightly.

Although she’d managed to be up and about at such an early time of day she was still in ‘casual’ mode with an ill-fitting flannel shirt, in all probability a self-declared hand-me-down from her elder brother, and wasn’t quite ready for leaving the flat. Although most of us were in that vague respectable-yuppies-in-training region she managed to somehow carry herself as a well-off professional while only making the minimal effort to separate herself from ‘shabby chic’ undergraduates who were often seen in this part of town. Even though the headband of a clunky pair of retro-style headphones kept her hair out of her eyes the usual dragonfly hairpin was firmly in place and she’d already donned her incongruous combo of knee-high stockings, cycling shorts and faded black denim skirt.

I found it strange that she had any misconceptions over my opinion of her wayward flatmate, since I thought it was obvious as to which one of them I usually found easier to get along with. Unfortunately, she didn’t seem to appreciate the supposedly obvious reasons why I was more comfortable hanging out with her instead of the one who was currently in her bad books. Eager to get out of this rare moment of tension and take in some fresh air I stood up to leave, in the hope it would prompt her to power down her terminal and tell me whatever it was she’d planned for the rest of the day.

Several minutes later, after she’d finished explaining what it was about my recent escapades that didn’t sit right with her and going to her bedroom to change into her infinitely more stylish white shirt/black cardigan get-up we were ready to go. Someday the whole world would find out that, in the comfort of her own home at least, she looked like the illegitimate daughter of a Jpop idol and a member of a 90s Seattle rock band, rather than the kind of respectable woman who kept high street department stores in business.

“They said something about meeting at Indigo Blue to, uh, congratulate you on your miraculous return to the land of the living but quite frankly I can’t be bothered with standing at the door while some bald chimp in a suit IDs anyone under the age of thirty-five…” she began, clearly indicating I was supposed to come up with a better alternative. Cheers for that.

“Head over to Synapse and sort out the next live night while we’re there?” I ventured. She wrinkled her nose in an exaggerated statement of distaste.

“I know that’s gotta be organised, but the area around the bar has this sticky floor…”

“Stops the students falling over during happy hour.”

“…and the guy who runs the place is sleazy bastard…”

“You were wearing a T-shirt that read ‘Stop staring at my tits’ last time, and he’s too dense to ‘get’ irony.”

A gust of wind tugged at the sidelocks around her fringe. In a show of what must’ve been feigned resignation she replied, “As long as you don’t keel over or whimper like a girl…” and started cursing herself for not bringing a hat. It had already started to rain quite heavily and the wind was getting up a bit too so I suggested taking a short cut through the main shopping arcade.

The weather was supposed to be pretty bad for the rest of the day, but I wanted to visit my own place first and double-check what had been taken. The combination of wind and rain had already claimed its first victim here: a broken umbrella lay crumpled and discarded in the gutter, like some multi-legged insect invader from outer space.

*

My flat had been well and truly ‘fucked over’, to quote the attending police officer when he thought he was out of earshot (thanks to a cutting edge – and somewhat experimental -medical procedure I’d undergone a few years ago, he wasn’t). Because of the local policy with the appliances, what little of value I owned was still there but even so I noticed that my terminal was missing and, less worryingly yet no less irritating, the amplifier I’d jerry-rigged with both preamp and output valve stages was also gone. Not much surprise there.

In private residences at least, that sort of electronic luxury wasn’t frowned upon but wasn’t particularly commonplace either. I was going to miss that. I almost grinned inwardly at the fact that my second guitar had been pinched though: if the past three years’ worth of modifications and DIY repairs didn’t make its ownership obvious to whoever sold it on (I was on first-name terms with one or two shopkeepers in the local area) they’d make it nigh-on worthless in terms of resale value. These days, residents made a conscious effort to ensure we had little in our homes that was worth stealing…someone clearly knew what of mine was. Arseholes.

“Kinda weird that they’d take your terminal though, right?” True enough, it didn’t have quite the same level of password encryption hers did, but owing to what I’d been using it for my terminal had ample security provided by my employer. The system we were using – basically the same setup as netbooks of the late 2000s, only with a high-resolution monitor like the deskop PCs of the old days – meant that physically taking a terminal was virtually pointless.

Most functionality, such as the ‘homework’ I’d been provided with a week before my unfortunate accident in that alleyway, was simply done through accessing the main ‘cloud’ remotely. No hard drives, no document storage; it was all done by retrieval through a web browser/desktop OS via a secure connection. What little on-board content the terminal had was this OS, some additional software for rendering graphics and sound, and of course user-side encryption (which, needless to say didn’t allow much scope for workarounds). Unless you had the hacking power of a multinational behind you, there literally wasn’t anything in it for the average housebreaker…who was usually a junkie who knew a lot less about computing than we did.

“I really don’t get it. It’s like the yobs that roughed me up and away threw my mobile a few yards away.” I found this weird as hell but she seemed even keener to point out that something was profoundly amiss here.

“The usual stuff was taken, but why your terminal? Who the hell would be able to make use of it, let alone want it in the first place?”

I sat down on my own sofa – shredded by someone with a Swiss army knife and too much time on their hands, presumably – and thought over what I’d been working on. “It was a simple additional task a client had asked for. Toss in a couple of parameters every few hours to nudge the programme…not strictly part of the contract, but no hassle to do. It was all running in the main cloud we’d set up for them, so it was just a side-job I was doing for them.”

I wasn’t a programmer by trade; I was more on the database side but in small corporations we had to be multi-skilled to some degree or other. This bit of the job was a small one and even with my terminal gone it wasn’t that big a deal in terms of honouring our contract, but a stolen (and possibly breached) terminal was going to cause issues, however remote the chances of hacking were. Monday would suck.

“Monday’s going to bloody suck, isn’t it?” She kicked at a broken CD case, which coughed up a scattering of plastic teeth from the tray, their charge now safely stolen…no, wait. I nodded mutely at our simultaneous observation of the week ahead and dug a broken disc out of the foam padding of my office chair. Anyone else would’ve asked “oh well…who collects CDs anymore anyway?” but our group shared a number of common quirks and indulgences. For all our swapping of digital downloads, packaged media was one of them. She mumbled a sympathetic “…oh, for fuck’s sake…” as I reunited broken disc and case, dropped it into a wastepaper basket, closed the door with its ruined lock and followed her down along the balcony to the stairwell.

the poor light at this time of day messes with the colour balance. My carpet’s green and the LED’s blue, honest

The gain, filter and volume were really sensitive at the lower end of the range but if I tweaked the knobs above around a third of the way I couldn’t get any changes at all. It didn’t alter the sound of the pedal, but it made finding the right settings tricky. Fortunately I tracked down a knowledgable UK-based pedal tech who mods and builds FX boxes in his spare time and after some helpful e-mail exchanges he agreed to work on it.

Changing the control pots is tricky business in these pedals because they’re soldered directly onto the PCB. Similarly, swapping the IC chip is also a fiddly job for whoever’s working on it; I eventually decided to go the whole hog and have the circuitry completely replaced but housed in the original enclosure because it fits neatly next to the other pedals on my board.

Mike also replaced the jack-style 9V power socket for a standard barrel-type as used in Boss pedals, which means I can run it off my pedal board’s main power supply without a special adapter plug. The red on/off LED was also swapped for a blue one, which doesn’t really make much difference apart from being brighter and looking cooler! The main difference was in the fact that the innards are now made up of better quality, hand-picked components, which includes the IC chip.

The original RAT pedals used an LM308N but the newer reissues, including mine, use a OP07DP. There’s nothing especially wrong with the newer versions – they’re still really versatile and sound great – but they sound slightly different from the old ones. There’s not a drastic difference in sound quality, but it’s there. My LM308N-powered RAT does actually sound slightly, yet noticeably, better now.

When the filter knob’s turned right down the pedal is at its most trebly and cutting. There used to be a harsh fizzle to the sound on this setting but now it’s a more smooth and musical grittiness; the distortion is generally warmer and more…natural is the best way to describe it without the aid of an uploaded sound clip. I used to be able to get a fuzz-like tone out of this pedal in addition to the thick, compressed and grungey sound but it now also has a more ‘open’ quality on lower gain settings that’s more like an overdriven amp.

Thanks to the chip change and the improved pots on the controls, I can now get a wider range of sounds out of this thing. I’ll have to sit down and play around with it to get used to the way it works with my guitar, but I’m finding more subtle settings in between the usual mild blues-y clip and full-on feedback mayhem.

RATs are really useful and cool-sounding pedals if you’re after a distorted guitar tone that sits well in the mix at any volume, but the only options open to those of us who are fussy enough to want the old-school RAT sound are either 1. paying over the odds for a second-hand original or 2. paying a similarly extortionate amount for a boutique clone.

Then there are people like Mike who are dedicated guitar geeks with the know-how to build a quality piece of equipment and who are honest and decent enough to do so at an affordable price. I’m dead chuffed, as they say, that a good piece of gear now sounds even better. There’s no excuse to get on with this home recording malarky now, is there? Watch this space folks.