• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

‘Suppose we make it something you’d want to do anyway. I mean, like today you’ve sort of had your wish come true, got booted out of BC with a nice little stash. So…what would you have done, if you hadn’t got any further with your search?’

‘Found somewhere to live. Got a job – in futures maybe – and, uh, read and written a lot.’

‘What would you write?’

‘Philosophy. Kind of. Oh, not just atheism, humanism, I’m sure there are plenty doing that out here—’

‘You’d be surprised,’ Kohn remarked.

‘—but I want to do more. I want to attack all these cults and ideologies. I have this, this vision that life could be better if only people could see how things really are. That it’s your one life, it’s yours, you have this inexhaustible universe to live it in and God damn it isn’t that enough? Why do we have to wander around in these invented worlds of our own devising, these false realities that are just clutter, dross, dirt on the lens? – all these beliefs and identities that people throw away their real lives for.’

‘Like, there is no God, and you shall have no other gods.’

‘That’s it. That’s what I want to write.’

‘I have a better idea,’ Kohn said. The understanding of how good an idea it was glowed within him, spreading like an inward smile. ‘Would you like to be on television?’

Only cable, and with a small subscriber base, he explained. But items did get picked up sometimes by the networks, and the Cats had schedules to spare since all they put out was their own edited exploits and an alternative news-slot with a bit of radical/critical/marxist analysis thrown in.

‘If you can just talk like that to a camera you’ll be fine,’ Kohn said. ‘Nothing to it. No interviewers. No professionals to sneer. It’s your show. Say what you like – basically we hate the barb and the mini-states, and if you do too then you’re on our side; anything rational would be better than those smelly, cosy subtotalitarianisms. The only viewers will be watching because they want to, so you won’t bore anyone. And, you being a capitalist, you can measure your success by the credits that you clock up!’

‘Oh man.’ Jordan had fire in his eyes now. ‘That sounds great. Too good to be true.’

‘No, just true enough to be good.’

‘Speaking of clocking up credits…what do you guys, your comrades, do with the money you make?’

Kohn frowned. ‘Savings bank account.’

Jordan laughed. ‘You’d do better buying gold and keeping it in an old sock!’

‘What else could you do with it?’ Kohn asked, genuinely puzzled.

Jordan looked at him, shaking his head. ‘Call yourselves mercenaries…Look, you’ve got an inside track on the whole micropolitics of this place, you’re in the middle of a free-trade zone, you don’t pay taxes, you’ve got access to news and rumours more or less as they break…You know, I could make a bit of money from what I learned on the net tonight!’

Kohn looked at Janis for guidance. She shrugged. ‘Sounds feasible enough.’

‘Great!’ Kohn straightened up and raised his glass. ‘Here’s to the international communist–capitalist conspiracy, to which I’ve always wanted to belong.’

For Jordan they drank to philosophical speculators, which they all thought was rather good, and for Janis to mad scientists who did awful things to rats. After that they got loud and, eventually, quiet. ‘Is Molly Biolly a crank band?’ Janis was looking at the stage when Kohn swung into the seat beside her, returned from another prowl through the buzz.

‘I don’t know. What—?’

‘That guy at the back, looks like Brian Donovan. Like the picture of him on the back of his book.’

Behind the holo image of three girls in second-skin plastic doing indecent things with synthesizers stood the scratchy spectral fetch of a man with long grey hair and a long grey beard. He seemed to be staring at them.

‘Weird,’ Kohn said, sliding away from and in front of Janis.

‘Isn’t it just a projection?’ Jordan asked.

‘The band is,’ Kohn said, not turning round. ‘But this stage has its cameras, too, so you can patch in a moving point-of view from somewhere else…That’s how a fetch works, out in