Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [241]
FreeSpace (the name had once seemed trendy, but now dated us painfully – ‘very TwenCen’, as I’d overheard someone say) had its modest offices above a Space Merchants franchise just across the road from the Camden Lock market. (I’d quit running Space Merchants, kept enough shares and options in it to keep a steady if small income, and left it alone. It had moved into selling actual space products now, most just novelties – moon-rock jewellery, free-fall crystals and so forth – but also some of practical use. Microgravity manufacturing had come up with unexpected applications, as I’d known it would.) We’d had the offices for ten years, and they still smelled of fresh paint and new wood and cement. The concrete walls were decorated with space movement posters and NASA Inc hologram views, but the first thing anyone saw when they came through the doorway was my desk with a huge notice behind it saying YOU’RE WELCOME TO SMOKE. I no longer smoked myself – although medical science had already beaten what we (misleadingly, nowadays) called ‘the big C’, there was no easy fix for the habit’s bronchial consequences, and at sixty-two I needed all the breath I could get. The notice was a matter of principle, like the washroom soap-dispenser’s mischievous little sticker announcing that its contents had been Tested On Animals.
The morning after the election I was the only person in the office who wasn’t late in and hung over. Each bleary-eyed arrival was greeted by me looking up from the online news (panic in Whitehall, pound in free fall, riots in Kensington, airports mobbed) and saying: ‘Oh, you stayed up for the results? Who won?’
Having thus protected my anarchist credibility I’d have another secret gloat at the results. The composition of the new government wasn’t official yet, they were still arguing, but it looked like it would be Republican, New Labour, True Labour, and a couple of Radicals on the government side, with the Unionists the official opposition and the small parties in the wings. Plenty of the last – even the World Socialists (the new name of the SPGB) had scraped together enough first preferences to get one MP elected. Sadly, my parents hadn’t lived to see it. It had taken the party a hundred and eleven years to get into Parliament, but they were still on course for that twenty-fifth-century global majority.
Then I’d get back to organising an emergency executive committee meeting for 11.00 that morning. No answer, not even an answering-program, from two of the members: Aaronson (research) and Rutherford (international liaison). Hmmm. I immediately contacted several potential rivals for each position – rather than our internal security group, who were prima facie most likely to be police spies anyway – and set them to work investigating.
But the other seven duly popped up on my screen, and all of us on each other’s. I decided to say nothing about Aaronson and Rutherford, and just shrugged when their absence was remarked in the pre-meeting chit-chat as people shuffled paper, booted up notepads, settled in their seats and looked at me expectantly.
‘OK, comrades,’ I began, ‘from here it looks like we’ve woken up to not just a new government, but a new regime. Now, call me a romantic old fool, but I think it’s the start of a revolution. A very British revolution, I’ll give you that, but it’s been a long time coming and revolutions are a law unto themselves more or less by definition. I wouldn’t bet on this one staying in the proper channels. This could be good news for us, or bad, depending on how things turn out. The question is, can we make a difference?’
All the eyes on the screen made a laughably simultaneous swivel as everybody checked everybody else’s reaction. Ewan Chambers, the Scottish rep, spoke first.
‘I agree with Jon. Things were looking pretty wild in Glasgow last night, something a bit more than a street party and no’ quite a riot. And from what