Misspent Youth

7. AUNTIE

TIM HAD BEEN GIVEN the Honda e-trike for his sixteenth birthday. It was powered by a three-cell regenerator module, which gave it a top speed of eighty kilometers per hour; on a full tank of recombined electrolyte its range was six hundred fifty kilometers. The manor’s garage, with its solar panel roof and domestic regenerator module buried under the concrete floor, was capable of supplying enough electricity to keep three big cars running all year round. An e-trike barely registered on the supply monitor. Not that Tim used it much during the winter months: Riding in the icy insistent rain was difficult and dangerous. Now that April was here, ending the succession of miserable damp days that comprised England’s new wintertime, he was taking it out again.

It took him barely ten minutes to ride over to Manton on Sunday morning, and that was using the shabby D-class roads linking the villages around the vast reservoir, the Europol team following a constant hundred meters behind in their Ranger. Manton was perched on the brow of the slope above Rutland Water’s eastern shore. What once had been a small village had been bolstered over the last four decades by a sprawl of extensive houses that all looked out over the water. They were primarily retirement estates, closed and protected from the rest of the world by a solid foundation of wealth, providing for every domestic and health requirement.

Tim’s aunt Alison lived there. She’d bought a two-bedroom bungalow, one of the smallest homes on the estate, but with the best view across to the reservoir’s peninsula. Tim braked the e-trike beside the wide gates that guarded the entrance to the estate and flashed his identity smartcard at the sensor post. They swung open slowly, and he drove in past the sign warning that Livewire Security guarded the estate with an armed response team. The Ranger slid in behind him.

Every house along the avenue had an immaculate garden, as if that was a clause of occupancy. This season’s daffodils and tulips were in full flower, carpeting the borders between perfectly geometrical GM conifers that came in an astonishing variety of colors. Jet-black, hemispherical mower robots grazed slowly on the lawns, the only source of activity while the residents sat around on their patios, warding off the sunlight with big canvas parasols. They were all over fifty, their skin and hair belonging to people twenty years younger. It was their movements, methodical and considered, that gave away their age. That and what Tim regarded as a truly awful dress sense—circa nineteen fifties golfers—which seemed to afflict the whole community.

There was a small burgundy-red BMW 23 series parked on Aunt Alison’s drive. Tim pulled up behind it and locked the e-trike. He had his helmet under his arm as he rang the doorbell.

“Tim!” his aunt exclaimed as she swung the door back. Her eyes narrowed as she saw the Europol team in their Ranger. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming? Oh.” A palm slapped theatrically against her forehead. “You did. Didn’t you? Come in, darling. Sorry about the mess. Do the police have to come in with you?”

“No,” Tim said firmly.

Aunt Alison was his father’s sister, ten years younger and, as far as Tim was concerned, a lot more lively. She had the huskiest voice he’d ever heard; a gin-and-forty-cigarettes-a-day voice, his mother called it. Her whole easygoing attitude, her casual old-fashioned dress sense (though infinitely superior to that of her neighbors), and complete lack of domesticity made it plain to Tim that she’d had one hell of a good time when she was younger—and not so young, as well. He really liked Aunt Alison; they’d always got on well together, mainly because she always seemed to treat him like an equal. The one time he’d run out of the manor, age thirteen and after a particularly bad fight with his mother, this was where he instinctively headed.

“Are we going out for lunch?” Alison asked as she led him through the chaos that was her living room. Every wall was covered in big stainless-steel poster frames, holding blowups of the fantasy books she used to write. Nubile women in brass bikinis—or less—clung to bronzed, muscle-bound men as they fought off wyrms and goblin hordes with magic glowing swords; gloomy forests and dark castles tended to feature heavily in the background. The scenes had always inspired Tim when he was younger. He’d even loyally read a couple of Alison’s books, though he preferred straight science fiction himself.

“No. I was just coming to see you about dad and next Tuesday.”

“Oh right.” Alison went out onto the patio. “You remember Graham, don’t you, Tim?”

“Sure.”

Graham Joyce was sitting in one of the sunloungers. He leaned forward and gave Tim a firm handshake. “Tim, greetings and salutations.” For a man in his eighties he retained a remarkably vigorous air, possessing a gaunt face that genoprotein treatments had never quite managed to soften and a shock of unruly snow-white hair. His voice was like a forceful foghorn.

Tim smiled. “Hiya.” The old novelist was one of his favorite adults, even more disreputable than Alison, if such a thing were possible. Graham had won the last Booker Prize, back in 2012, as the publishing houses collapsed in tandem with the copyright laws. That didn’t make him as famous as Jeff Baker; these days novelists belonged to the same chunk of history as Hollywood and rock and roll, but Tim had plenty of respect for Graham. It was more than just the elder statesman thing; he always spoke with such passion that it was impossible to doubt what he said.

“What are you two cooking up?” Tim asked.

“Murder! Revolution! Martyrdom!” Graham chuckled, a sound like an aggressive avalanche. “Going to join us?”

“I’ll give it a miss, thanks. I’m seeing my girlfriend later.”

“How is Zai?” Alison asked.

Tim winced. “Annabelle.”

“God, you’re as bad as your father,” Alison said. She settled back into her own sunlounger and picked up a tall glass of gin and tonic. “I remember what he was like back in the seventies and eighties. Not that the nineties were much better. I had to be very careful about introducing him to my girlfriends. He tried to get most of them into bed.”

Tim was fascinated by this sudden revelation of parental behavior. “Really?”

“Pay no heed, Tim,” Graham commanded. “Alison’s so-called history is all feminist revisionism. Your father was a fine bloke. I’ll overlook the fact he annihilated my world and cast all us delicate sensitive artistic types into eternal purgatory. So who is Annabelle?”

“She’s a friend. Lives over in Uppingham. I really like her.”

“Good for you. Is she pretty?”

“So much!” Tim looked around the patio. The wisteria creepers that twined round the awning poles were in full flower. Alison’s garden was shaggier than those of her neighbors, but it was just as attractive. And the view across the water as the sun shone on the ripples was fabulous. “Do you really think you’re in purgatory?”

“Come on, you know we were the lucky ones, Tim,” Alison said. “The only reason I can afford to live in this dreadful ghetto is because I made a mint writing…what do you call it? Pre10. Yes, pre10 console games.”

“Right.” Tim produced a mildly awkward grin. He’d grown up with every byte in the datasphere being free. That was the natural way of things; instant unlimited access to all files was a fundamental human right. Restriction was the enemy. Evil. Governments restricted information cloaking their true behavior from the media and public, although enough of it leaked out anyway. He’d never really thought of the economic fallout from the macro storage capability delivered by crystal memories. It was a simple enough maxim: Everything that can be digitized can be stored and distributed across the datasphere, every file can be copied a million, a billion, times over. Once it has been released into the public domain, it can never be recalled, providing a universal open-source community.

After the turn of the century, as slow phone line connections were replaced by broadband cables into every home, and crystal memories took over from sorely limited hard drives and rewritable CDs, more and more information was liberated from its original and singular owners. The music industry, always in the forefront of the battle against open access, was the first to crumble. Albums and individual tracks were already available in a dozen different electronic formats, ready to be traded and swapped. Building up total catalogue availability took hardly any time at all.

As ultra-high-definition screens hit the market, paper books were scanned in, or had their e-book version’s encryption hacked. Films were downloaded as soon as they hit the cinema, and on a few celebrated occasions actually before they premiered.

All of these media were provided free through distributed source networks established by anonymous enthusiasts and fanatics—even a few dedicated anticapitalists determined to burn Big Business and stop them from making “excessive profits.” Lawyers and service providers tried to stamp it out. At first they tried very hard. But there was no longer a single source site to quash, no one person to threaten with fines and prison. Information evolution meant that the files were delivered from uncountable computers that simply shared their own specialist subject architecture software. The Internet had long ago destroyed geography. Now the datasphere removed individuality from the electronic universe, and with it responsibility.

Excessive profits took the nosedive every open-source, Marxist, and Green idealist wanted. Everybody who’d ever walked into a shop and grumbled about the price of a DVD or CD finally defeated the rip-off retailer and producer, accessing whatever they wanted for free. Record companies, film studios, and publishers saw their income crash dramatically. By 2009 band managers could no longer afford to pay for recording time, session musicians, promotional videos, and tours. There was no money coming in from the current blockbusters to invest in the next generation, and certainly no money for art films. Writers could still write their books, but they’d never be paid for them; the datasphere snatched them away the instant the first review copy was sent out. New games were hacked and sent flooding through the datasphere like electronic tsunami for everyone to ride and enjoy. Even the BBC and other public service television companies were hit as their output was channeled directly into the datasphere; nobody bothered to pay their license fee anymore. Why should they?

After 2010, the nature of entertainment changed irrevocably, conforming to the datasphere’s dominance. New songs were written and performed by amateurs. Professional writers either created scripts for commercial cable television or went back to the day job and released work for free, while nonprofessional writers finally got to expose their rejected manuscripts to the world—which seemed as unappreciative as editors always had. Games were put together by mutual interest teams, more often than not modifying and mixing pre10 originals. Hollywood burned. With the big time over, studios diverted their dwindling resources into cable shows, soaps, and series; they didn’t even get syndication and Saturday morning reruns anymore, let alone DVD rental fees and sales. Everything was a one-off released globally, sponsored by commercials and product placement.

It was a heritage Tim had never considered in any detail. Then a couple of years back he’d watched Dark Sister, the adaptation of one of Graham’s novels. The pre10 film was spooky and surprisingly suspenseful, and he’d made the error of telling Graham he quite liked it. The novelist’s response wasn’t what he expected. Graham held his hand out and said: “That’ll be five euros, please.”

“What?” a perplexed Tim asked. He wanted to laugh, but Graham looked fearsomely serious.

“Five euros. I think that’s a reasonable fee, don’t you?”

“For what?”

“I wrote the book. I even wrote some of the screenplay. Don’t I deserve to be paid for my time and my craft?”

“But it’s in the datasphere. It has been for decades.”

“I didn’t put it there.”

Tim wasn’t sure what to say; he even felt slightly guilty. After all, he’d once complained to Dad about not raking in royalties from crystal memories. But that was different, he told himself: crystal memories were physical, Dark Sister was data, pure binary information.

“Fear not, Tim,” Graham said. “It’s an old war now, and we were beaten. Lost causes are the worst kind to fight. I just enjoy a bit of agitation now and then. At my age there’s not much fun left in life.”

Tim didn’t believe that at all.

“DO YOU WANT A DRINK, Tim?” Alison asked.

“No thanks.” Tim held his helmet up. “I’m on my e-trike.”

“Good man, Tim,” Graham said. “Don’t touch drink, and don’t smoke, either.” He pulled an undutied Cuban cigarette out and lit up.

“Are you coming to Brussels on Tuesday?” Tim asked. “You haven’t answered any of Lucy Duke’s txts about it.”

“I certainly haven’t. Arrogant little woman. Did you see any of them?”

“Er, no.”

“Someone should teach her to say please.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. So are you coming?”

Alison sighed, and swirled the ice cubes around in her glass. “No, Tim, I’m not. I’m sorry, I don’t think I can cope with that damn circus.” She gave him a long glance. “You do realize it’ll be a circus, don’t you? Those wretched politicians will hijack every news stream to make capital from this.”

“I know.”

“Well then. Besides, I don’t think I’ll be much of a priority for my big brother. He’ll want to see you more than anything. And your mother.”

“You sure?”

“Yes. I’ll watch the news streams from here.”

“Okay. But Mum’s having a welcome home party for him on Saturday evening. She says she’d like you to come to that.”

“I’ll be there. I do want to see him, Tim, just not under the spotlight.”

“I understand. I wish I didn’t have to do it, either.”

“You’re not worried about meeting him again, are you?” Alison asked gently.

“Well. You know. No.”

“Tim, he’s going to be delighted to see you. Really. You’ve sailed through these last eighteen months. Anybody would be proud to have you as their son. Hell, I’m proud just to have you as a nephew.”

Tim chewed on his lower lip, hating to show any vulnerability. “You think?”

“God, yes.”

“I really missed him, you know. I mean, not that we did much father and son stuff together, soccer and things. He was a bit old for that even with his ordinary genoprotein treatments. But he was always there, you know, he’d listen and try to help. I don’t suppose I told him how much I appreciated that. Not very often, anyway.”

“I’d hope not! You’re a teenager. You’re supposed to spend the entire era in a bad sulk.”

“No way!”

Graham and Alison burst out laughing. Tim blushed, trying not to smile.

Alison patted his knee. “It’ll all work out fine. You’ll see.”