Downtime - Marc Platt [33]
Before he could even tap in a reject, the screen was emblazoned with a logo: a letter W with a spinning globe of the world balanced on the letter’s central peak.
‘What the Gorbachev is this?’
‘I don’t believe this,’ complained Bonderev.
‘I believe it,’ said Diaz. ‘I’m only surprised it hasn’t happened earlier. Get rid of it.’
The screen had begun to flicker. It suddenly whited-out totally – an angry glare as if the terminal itself had taken offence at her judgement.
But the seething white had a fascination too. It dragged you in. Got behind your eyes. Bonderev could feel it pulling.
With a clunk, the screen went dead.
‘That’s enough of that,’ Diaz complained. ‘Bloody commercials. That’s what I joined up to escape from.’
‘You should have joined the Foreign Legion,’ Bonderev said. He was gazing disappointedly at the empty screen. In his head, the little red cursor was suddenly scattering
‘MIGRAINE’ glyphs by the thousand. Spreading out, jumping systems. This lot seemed to be dancing a triumphant galop.
6
Putting it Together
New World University is famed as the first establishment for further education to employ tutorial methods run solely by computer program.
The University stands on the north bank of the Great Coker Canal to the North West of London. The 350-acre site, once an industrial estate, has been re-landscaped into pleasant parkland by Capability Green, the well-known firm of ecological developers. From the bank of the canal, planted with rushes and irises and stocked with waterfowl, the wide lawns sweep up through drifts of daffodils to the University complex itself.
This first ‘green-field’ university is designed in a style reminiscent of Sixties red-brick, but combined with an accessibility entirely in tune with the Nineties. Ranks of pyramidal ziggurats march triumphantly across the horizon – a fusion of nostalgia and hope, just as education must build on the past to lay out the future.
Extract from Carbuncle, The Architects’
Monthly.
The event was going well. Maybe too well. There was always room for disaster.
Christopher Rice was starting to enjoy his role as mine host to a select throng of the academic glitterati, but perhaps that was just the champagne. The main hall of the university’s Charles Bryce Memorial Gallery was exactly the right choice of venue. When the guests got bored with each other, they could admire New World’s fine collection of paintings and ethnic Tibetan art.
A number of Fleet Street gutterati had also manifested themselves. Christopher had faxed the media and was gratified to find columnists from the tabloids in about equal numbers to those from the broadsheets. Students, who were cheaper than casual labour, moved in and out of the guests with trays of wine glasses. They were wearing their green New World sweatshirts and yellow New World caps as they would for any other study day. The guests plainly found this a novelty. ‘Just as if McDonald’s were doing the catering,’ brayed one particularly asinine woman. ‘I wonder if we could borrow a few for Marina’s twenty-first?’
Christopher summoned up a smile for her as he passed. It was all facade, all pleasantries. Just below the surface, they were all piranhas. There was a shoal now, mainly tabloid, over by a set of computer art displays. They were milling hungrily around Anthony, who, Christopher was forced to admit, had to be today’s focus of attention. With the opening up of New World FM Radio to the national wavelengths, they needed a high-profile front man. Anthony had done pirate radio in the Sixties, Radio 1 in the Seventies (briefly), and the graveyard slots on Radio 2 and London Broadcasting in the Eighties. He was only on a six-month contract anyway. After that, Christopher hoped, enough talent would emerge through the students for him to dispense with the old lag. If there was a DJ
equivalent of the ham actor, then Anthony was at the Spam end of the