The Seams of the City

Scene 1: Cathedral Close

“The future is another country: they do things differently there.”
— Paraphrased opening line of ‘The Go Between’ by L. P. Hartley

“We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.”
— Ada Lovelace

The needle of the spire lifts the thread towards the empty sky, the ground spread beneath like fallen fabric, casting its warp and weft across the confines of the close then out beyond the crumpled city walls, furrows stretching towards frayed edges, conducting ethereal lint.

Scene 2: Tombland Books

‘Frack the land, they’re here!’ The wiry lines at the edges of Holloway’s mouth drew into a slackened snarl as his fingers swiped thin air.

‘Beacons!’ he whispered to Fia, a fellow Stranger, much younger than Holloway and newer to the other side of the data-line. She was browsing an early edition of Mandelbrot’s The Fractal Geometry of Nature, a hardback still in its fragile dust jacket, the continued existence of which, Holloway, being an itinerant book dealer of sorts, very much appreciated.

What Holloway certainly didn’t appreciate was the digital map superimposed inside his glasses; unresponsive to hand gestures, frustrating instead of augmenting reality, as good as vapourware. While he would occasionally resign himself to using the unreliable Beacon feature to try and locate other Strangers, now it was indicating something else; a cluster of luminous pin-points which appeared to be following him around the city streets without a corresponding human presence, Stranger or otherwise. Since the UI in his glasses had frozen, Holloway couldn’t swipe this incoming wave of ghosts from his field of view.

Strictly speaking, Strangers were unable to buy things in shops, but Holloway had a special arrangement with the owner going back decades. The interior of the bookshop housed relics from the pre-digital age, entombed in high-rise wooden shelving, waiting to wake from the dead. Holloway had come to the shop to engage in some under-the-counter trading or, failing that, enjoy an afternoon of unfocused reading, but the geolocated apparitions on the map had unnerved him, and now he was anxious to leave.

Fia rolled her eyes and slid the Mandelbrot back onto the stack of misaligned spines, resisting the urge to straighten them. She flicked a few loose strands of photo-reactive hair under her beanie hat and followed Holloway out into the street.

Scene 3: Norwich Cathedral

I started thinking about Edith Cavell as I passed her memorial the other day. A soldier is hanging a laurel on the memorial but is also part of it, as if one memorial exists inside another, or the stone marks the membrane of a portal, absorbing people and things from this world into some sort of interior, petrified dimension.

Anyway, I was imagining what Edith’s sense of conviction was like. As you know, I can be curious about how values and meanings take shape within the world; within us, but I don’t feel a sense of higher duty in the way that Edith perhaps did… for God and Country and all that.

Edith was a tutor of nursing in Belgium when the tightly wound coils of Europe sprung at one another in 1914. She was responsible for treating wounded soldiers on both sides of the horror show. She also helped English and French prisoners of war escape occupied territory by issuing them with false papers and hiding them in her house until they could secure transit.

While there was talk that she had dealings with MI6, she was tried and shot for being a traitor, not a spy. The Germans were conflicted about making a scene out of her execution but didn’t want to be considered soft on women operating behind enemy lines since they thought it would encourage more of the same. Needless to say, she ended up on postage stamps all over England and became a household name alongside the Crimean lamp lady, Florence Nightingale (who, incidentally, partnered with Harriet Martineau, another daughter of the city).

I think you might have some similarities to Edith here. You, too, experienced war and the stifling, overcrowded desolation of camps and makeshift hospitals. I sometimes also think you might be driven by a kind of conviction which I lack, but how close to Edith’s, I can only speculate. I can’t and shouldn’t speak for you or her. Sometimes, on matters such as this, I wonder if we can even speak for ourselves. I’m stuck on this sense of motivation. Why are we compelled to do the things we do?

Scene 4: Fye Bridge to Elm Hill Loke

Fia knew that Holloway was predisposed to hate technology; to suspect those flighty ones and zeros were sending him further into the abyss. However, he relied on the glasses to correct his vision and, given his long-suspended Ethos credit score, getting another pair was out of the question. Fia, on the other hand, was able to work with this stuff. The phantom beacons were an interesting problem to solve, rather than something to evade.

They continued North towards the bridge, dodging zoned-out pedestrians and absent-minded traffic. At the Maid’s Head hotel, the point where Tombland forked into Wensum Street and Palace Street, a wedding party was leaving in a procession of TeliPods, the little auto-taxis queued up like a line of oversized pharmaceutical capsules. Fia glanced at the guests filtered out of the revolving doors in fluttering hollo-fabric and felt a shimmer of envy mixed with distrust. They seemed lightyears away from the wispy neo-hobo just ahead of her.

They turned left into a shaded passage by a public house just before Fye bridge, where the sentinel presence of the Cathedral spire slipped from view.

Scene 5: Elm Hill

Fia continued to shadow Holloway as he struck out along the path beside the river, muttering to himself about ‘stealth agents.’ A tired-looking couple with a young child sat on a bench in the small green space to the left of the path eying both Strangers with suspicion. At the end of the green, they hit a roulette wheel of narrow escapes and dead ends, the labyrinth of parking spaces and medieval streets intercepted and remade via Holloway’s glitchy specs into a holographic rat maze.

Holloway stomped towards Elm Hill before pausing to catch his breath on the cobblestones of the old square, or rather slightly above them. A general civic unease with the deteriorating historical terrain had resulted in the stones being preserved beneath a layer of translucent paving, giving the impression of treading on a vast museum display case.

‘Glasses have glitched again,’ said Holloway. ‘Can’t tell if those Beacons are still around.’

‘It’s okay,’ said Fia. ‘It’s probably just a bug with the Seams link.’ She gestured to the empty street then back to Holloway’s face. ‘Let me see.’

‘I think I know what they’re after…’ said Holloway, shaking his head. ‘There’s a cursed logic to the whole thing.’

He loosened the drawstring of his backpack and pulled out a notebook bound in scraps of salvaged paper, a mix of typographic styles running at uneven angles, covered with a hasty layer of varnish for protection. It caught the light as he handed it over.

‘Give this to Mariam. Don’t lose it. There are no copies.’

With that, he flung one strap over his shoulder, leant towards the angle of the hill and launched up and away from her, a strung-out marionette of spindly legs, lopsided backpack and bald patch.

Fia turned to look back down the street, casting her eyes over the multicoloured patchwork of buildings and yards, a jumble of habitation straight out of the kind of fantasy role playing games she used to play with colleagues after work. She glanced past her boots and through the elevated surface, imagining herself hovering above the cobblestones like a phantom stone-taped at the ground level of another era.

She opened the notebook in her gloved hand and let the pages flicker past, revealing an unruly scrawl with the occasional image summoned from a tangle of pen-strokes; the signs of free thought on paper. Holloway was obsessed with his own invisible maps; not the digital kind that intruded into his glasses, but the multitude of impressions caught in the real seams of the city, “the scent of a single weathered threshold or the touch of a single tile,” as he oddly liked to put it, quoting someone she couldn’t remember the name of.

Fia sighed and slid the notebook into her coat pocket before pulling out a small scroll which then unfurled into a transparent screen. Her fingers ran across the luminous surface with unconscious ease, gathering glimmers of thought, hinting at new questions. She tapped the edge of the scroll so it rolled itself back up, then slid it into her pocket and walked absent-mindedly back to towards the river.

Scene 6: Black Friars Monastery Ruins

"<Lovelace>, this is where <Mariam> found me."

"It wasn’t that long ago, <Fi>. It must be all the stuff that’s happened in the last few months. You were asleep when she found you. You were dreaming weird <Dreams>".

"Enough about my <Dreams>. How long has it been now?"

"92 days."

Fia slipped into the ruins of the Dominican friary and crossed the outline of the cloisters towards St George’s Street. While she didn’t recall sleeping much during her first few nights adrift, her Introspect journal had recorded periods of unconsciousness during the early hours; slumped on benches, in some cases still standing or wandering the lanes on somnambulistic autopilot, shifting between pale pools of light. One night, after walking beside the river in this depleted state, she had stumbled upon these ruins and fallen into a shadowy heap among the worn-down stubs of flint.

"<Lovelace>, recall the journal for that evening."

Mariam possessed an instinctive radar for the fragile blips emitted by new strays. Many years back, she had helped to found the Strangers Camp at Chapelfield Gardens and was now its de facto coordinator. Mariam had mixed feelings about this, assuming the role out of habit, drawing on her previous experience in places far away from Norwich, where much bigger camps had existed with a different set of problems.

During an early morning reconnaissance walk, more to do with Mariam’s own insomnia than any routine, she discovered Fia asleep in the ruins of the friary and shook her awake.

‘Sorry flicker, but you’re not safe here, plus, don’t take offence, but you’re starting to stink. You should come with me. What’s your name?’

‘Fia.’

‘Love it. Short and sweet.’

‘It’s Portuguese.’

‘Ah. I’m Mariam. Apparently, I’m named after a woman who used to make these things a very long time ago.’ Mariam held up the brass-coloured pendant on her necklace, which comprised an intricate assembly of dials.

‘Looks like an astrolabe…’ said Fia, squinting to make out the detail in the darkness and smiling in the dozy way of someone still waking up. ‘Incredible.’

‘It helps guide me,’ said Mariam.

‘Really?’ said Fia, with an incredulous smile.

Mariam smirked. ‘Nah, not really… it’s pretty useless… but it’s cool, isn’t it?’

As they walked back along the lanes, Mariam explained the deal.

‘I mean, to be honest, stinking a bit comes with the territory, although we do have tents and showers and biodegradable sanitary pads. In case you’re wondering, the toilets are those bio-pro ones… just about bearable depending on who’s been using them. Imagine you’re at a permanent music festival. We help you stop acting like the walking dead, and you help us by… well… doing whatever you can do to help. What were you doing before?’

‘Developer’ replied Fia. ‘I mean, software developer.’

‘Ha!’ Mariam paused to tap the side of her head. ‘Not all this head business for the government?’

Fia hesitated. She closed her eyes and shook her head. ‘Plants… I mean modelling genetics in plants.’

Mariam sensed an awkwardness from Fia and knew immediately that the response was a half-truth. She also didn’t feel the need to challenge it.

‘Hmm… we don’t need any models of plants. But I guess you’ve heard of Seams?’

‘Enough to get frustrated with them.’ said Fia. ‘A lot of the code is still written in Rust. I’ve started patching my scroll to work with them, but I don’t have any valid keys.’

‘You mean you couldn’t hack your way in?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Hmm… that’s good to know, at least. Well, we always have devices lying around that need to be stitched or patched or whatever…’ said Mariam. ‘You could be a Seamer.’

Seams were a way of creating independent peer-to-peer networks. They could operate outside any regulating authority, providing a way to be both online and off-grid at the same time. They stitched the Stranger’s outdated digital devices together; Fia’s scroll, Holloway’s glasses and all the various bits of obsolete jailbroken junk that the Strangers used to create their own kind of shared digital existence.

"<Lovelace>… is that my journal or <Mariam>’s?"

"It’s part of the <Pattern>, <Fi>. Trust."

"Trust what?"

"Trust the <Pattern>, <Fi>."

Fia let out a sigh of exasperation as she continued walking along St Georges Street to St Andrews Street, then further west to St Benedict’s Street. At the top of Westwick street, she paused to consider her direction. Behind her, a collection of precariously stacked apartment blocks loomed over the river on the site of the old Norwich Corporation Electricity Works. The previous building, long demolished, had once featured the entire text of Sir Thomas Moore’s Utopia handwritten over its Victorian brickwork in fine white paint.

Fia continued through the narrow gap of St Gregorys Alley. She noticed some familiar figures standing at the edge of the plane by St Gregory’s church.

Scene 7: St Gregory’s Alley

St Gregory’s Square, also known as Pottergate Square, was now frequently referred to as ‘Stranger’s Square’. The medieval church of St Gregory had, for many years, been an antique emporium, absorbing the possessions of each era as they persisted past the lives of their original owners into extra time. Outside, the clock on the church tower continued to measure the unsteady moments of the present day. Arguments, rants, and protests against the general state of the world would break out like bursts of bad weather across the broken paving as clouds of resentment and discontent reached their nebulous limit.

Fia sat on one of the old stone benches to the side of the central path and tracked the line of the tiling, using the unbroken parts to calm her mind. She was in earshot of three figures engaged in agitated conversation just behind and to the right of her. Glancing over her shoulder, she recognised the group immediately. They were all Chargers, those Strangers responsible for finding discreet ways to recharge the high-capacity batteries used to electrify day-to-day life in the camp. The source of power was often illegal, and the job was considered risky, which meant it had acquired a certain respect among the residents along with its own rough-and-ready sub-culture. Most of the talk was coming from a middle-aged man in a trench coat and cowboy hat. Fia couldn’t quite remember his name. Jay or Gabe, maybe.

‘Frack that… no fracking point. They ain’t letting on now… hiding the truth.’

‘Yeah, but what to do about it?’

‘It’s all over the camp… but Chargers get the heat for it… you know… the Canary. I say enough is enough… we go to Argyle Street.’

The volume took a sudden plunge, slipping to irritable murmurs. The main voice raised its volume again as someone broke away from the group.

‘Oi… Hazy boy… where you off?’

A man wandered over to Fia. He was roughly her age and gaunt-looking with long straw-blonde hair tied back in a bun. He wore the type of heavy-duty patterned Baja hoodie which looked like it had been hand-stitched by nomads at high altitude. Overall, he gave the impression of a sort of hippie scarecrow.

‘Hey, Fi,’ he said. ‘Haven’t seen you round here lately.’ His accent loitered at the urban edge of broad Norfolk.

Fia answered with a silent wince to indicate that she didn’t think she had been missing much. Her hyper-colour locks bounced slightly in the breeze.

‘What’s up with you, then?’ he said, sitting down beside her on the bench with what she took to be a sarcastic mirror of her pose.

‘Nothing is up with me,’ said Fia. Her own accent had a hybrid dynamism to it, the rough-smooth sandpaper of Norfolk followed by the soft chisel of Portuguese.

‘You’ve been off with Doc. Not doing you a favour that. You should stay with us more. I mean, my head’s in the clouds but at least it’s not floating off into outer space.’

Holloway was known as Doc Holloway or ‘Doc’ in the camp due to possibly having studied for a PhD, which in the eyes of some Strangers made him more qualified for vagrancy than any of the serial substance abusers. His precise subject of academic enquiry, that untapped seam of knowledge he had chosen to pick at through the blinding epistemic darkness for years on end at some point in the past, was still a mystery to most.

‘I don’t need to stay with anyone.’

The man reached into the large central pocket of his hoodie and pulled out a battered metal vape.

‘Do you have to suck that thing now?’ Fia raised her eyes as the man turned the device over before shoving it back into his pocket.

‘Stressful times… reckon you’re in a mood ‘cause the Doc’s been acting funny. I’m right, aren’t I?’

‘He’s paranoid about his glasses.’

‘Well… don’t know about his glasses, but you’ve no-doubt heard about this Loomer thing?’

‘The Canary…’ said Fia, that soft chisel picking at the words with incredulity.

‘Shhh…’ said the man, shaking his head briefly towards the group he had just left. ‘They don’t trust you… probably don’t trust me now I’m talking to you.’

The man shoved his backpack off the bench onto the ground and opened the top flap to reveal a jumble of dented cans.

‘See, I got some more sprays after we went to the coast on the last charge. Got enough to finish the tree, I reckon.’

The man’s name was Hayz, the tag he used to embellish the various spray-can murals which shape-shifted their way over the city’s forgotten concrete, up-cycling the remaining ruins of brutalist architecture into lucid dreams of bold form and vivid colour.

‘Gonna try to paint the town… well, the underpass tonight. Wanna come? We can talk more there.’

‘Maybe,’ said Fia, almost surprising herself at her own reply. ‘I’m going back to the camp first for while. I need to speak to Mariam.’

Scene 8: Chapelfield Gardens Bandstand

“Enter Stranger…”

The retro flourish of the hand-painted lettering on the A-board gave the impression that the sign had been discovered in one of Norwich’s many antique shops. Set back on a patch of grass in between paved footpaths, the sign marked the boundary of the Chapelfield Camp; one of many micro-settlements scattered across the County.

In his distant youth, Holloway had visited Tokyo and remarked that Japan with its asset bubble burst was an echo from the future, the large, blue tarpaulin tents of Ueno Park rematerialised many decades later in East Anglia as a colourful patchwork of pop-up domes, designed for pitching on uneasy ground, zip-locked, collecting eviction slips like junk mail but ready to fold into themselves at a moment’s notice.

Mariam rested her arms on the worn wooden rail of the central bandstand, drumming her fingertips on a thermal travel mug of CBD-infused herbal tea, an azure-blue scarf slung under her greying shoulder-length hair, her astrolabe pendant glinting in front of her. She watched the steam rise from the cup as she listened to the surrounding conversations; exchanges delivered in person or extended through the frantic relay of high-bandwidth signals. The sky was dimming; the camp like a gas-lit theatre anticipating an evening performance. Rows of foldable tables and chairs were unfolded. The Strangers started to form a fast and loose queue at the small kitchen marque, recalling the old soup kitchens of Hay Hill back when Mariam had first arrived in the city.

Every so often, Mariam felt a shimmer of dislocation from the world, as if she were experiencing familiar things for the first time and assessing them with new-found suspicion. She was having this sensation about the queue for the soup. In the past, in other camps, she had, perhaps, been too organised. She still carried the burden of the consequences. Despite an attempt to avoid tracking or recording the camp’s inhabitants and activities, Strangers would frequently still act as if they were part of some greater organising principle.

The word ‘Stranger’ had once been a local term for migrant weavers who had come to Norwich to escape religious persecution in the continental lowlands during the Elizabethan era. Now it had a wider association with people who had dropped out of mainstream society completely; some in wilful opposition to the data profiling required by the Citizen Support Platform; others because they had no choice. The County authorities tolerated the spectral existence of these new Strangers in so far as they represented a kind of warning to the curious about what would happen if you tried to live outside the enclosures of conventional society. Strangers could slip into the anonymity of the dispossessed, forfeiting their access to public and private services by becoming ghosts of their former quantified selves.

Mariam looked over her shoulder towards the queue for the soup. One of the younger male Strangers had just grabbed another man by the shoulder.

‘Oi. I fracking knew it was you!’

‘Eh? What I done now?’

‘Been glitching with my fracking stash bud… thieving beggar.’ The men raised their fists awkwardly, just as a woman of about Mariam’s age raised her voice. She had short hair and was wearing a stiff cardigan that almost passed as some kind of body armour. It was unkind but perhaps not untrue to say that she looked like she could also have been at whatever stash was in question.

‘Leave off you two!’ she shouted. ‘No fighting on my anniversary!’

The men hesitated before the accused tried to answer back.

‘Oi Rose…’ said the younger man. ‘You don’t even know what day it is… least if it’s your anniversary.’

‘I know very well what day it is you cheeky sod,’ said the woman. ‘Now leave off…’

‘He glitched it all himself anyway!’ said the older man, letting out a tired goblin cackle.

‘I said leave off!’ the woman raised her finger.

Rose Lane had named herself after the place where she claimed she had spent most of her time after being ‘unable or unwilling’ to comply with social housing regulations. Her exact date of entry to the camp was unrecorded and quite possibly misremembered, but this day was functioning as her third anniversary. Strangers might have looked to Mariam for organisation, but Rose reminded them of what long-term survival on the streets meant, and this had earned her some respect among the more unruly Strangers. The accuser skulked off, muttering to himself. Mariam smiled and looked down just as Fia approached the bandstand.

‘Frack the land, he’s disappeared, hasn’t he?’ Mariam’s intonation drew tight.

‘He thought he was being followed.’ said Fia.

‘Well, he’s going to have to fend for himself tonight,’ said Mariam as she gazed into the space above the tree line, tracking implications along with the restless birds and wary drones. She and Holloway had ‘history’ together, a kind of unsettled romantic relationship which mirrored the uncertainty of life in the camp.

‘He gave me his notebook.’

‘Really? That’s not a good sign.’

‘He asked me to give it to you.’

‘You keep it for now.’ Mariam’s voice betrayed an anxiety at odds with her matter-of-fact response. ‘Read it if you like. You’re clever… you might be able to work out what he’s on about. Anyway, I think Rose is expecting you to sit with her over there, so you better get some of that soup.’

Scene 9: Chapelfield Gardens

Fia joined the diminishing queue at the marque, picked an empty metal bowl from the stack and held it out as she approached the vat of soup, unsure if she was hungry. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was responsible for Holloway’s behaviour, that perhaps she was to blame for it. Thick bean soup, made with produce gleaned from a sympathetic out-of-town allotment, was ladled into the bowl. Fia headed to a group of deckchairs to the right of the marque to sit beside Rose who was drinking something from a metal flask.

‘Ha! A bit of anniversary ChargeUp. Sure you don’t want a sip, my lovely?’

Fia shook her head. ‘No, thank you.’

ChargeUp was a drink that had either been devised or appropriated by the Chargers; a bootleg blend of various stimulants and depressants intended to give you a sense of dazed enthusiasm for the task at hand.

‘You need to get slack more often my darling,’ said Rose. ‘Give you some right scenes in your head.’ Her smile exposed the battle-hardened survivors of a long-running interdental war. ‘Good with the Fair too. See, about this Loomer business. Life here is hanging about doing frack all or doing the same thing over, so I don’t see why it would all be a show.’

‘Well, Holloway would say that the particular bits of experience…. like eating this soup or staring at the grass… the boring bits… they’re kind of the point,’ said Fia.

‘Is the Doc a Loomer, then?’

‘You’d have to ask him that.’ Fia stirred the soup around, watching the beans catch on the edge of the spoon.

‘Well the Fair’s fun and games, but making all this up in a big Loom or whatever… having them lot that was kicking off before be a part of it… a big waste of everyone’s time if you ask me. Still… we go on, don’t we? You alright darling, you’re looking a bit pale.’

Fia was still concentrating on the act of eating the soup. Rose often made Fia feel uneasy about her identity, which was something Fia felt she needed to be.

‘I’m okay,’ said Fia. ‘It’s been a strange day.’

‘Well you’re a Stranger aren’t you?’ said Rose, laughing at her observation. ‘Oh yeah, can you look at my goggles? I want to do the Fair tonight but they’ve been playing up again. You’re the only Seamer I trust.’

Hayz, who was sitting a way off to the left of the kitchen marque, had just finished his soup. He turned his dented vaporiser over to inspect the small display before starting in on a long draw. A young woman sat at an angle to him. Her face was pale and round, with freckles scattered over flushed cheeks. Her hand rested on the side of her head as she sucked on a red lollipop and stared at the row of tents which constituted the other side of the makeshift street. Astrid often gave the impression that she was looking through things rather than at them, or that she had noticed something behind you that would not be there if you turned around. Hayz exhaled a cascade of scented cloud from the edge of his mouth.

‘Yeah, no way I’m getting in your tent, Hayz,’ said Astrid, coughing. ‘I mean, I used to vape, but I wouldn’t do it in a tent.’

‘You should try it with the THC,’ said Hayz. ‘But there’s no chance I’m getting any of that until we go back to Yarmouth. Anyway, that lollipop you’re sucking is probably less regulated than this stuff with the amount of sugar in it.’

‘Tell you what else isn’t good for tent life,’ said Astrid, screwing her face. ‘Bean soup.’

Hayz sniggered. ‘That’s another level of tent problems.’

‘They should just hook us straight up to the biogas processor… don’t need them special toilets. Reckon you could heat bean soup for weeks with the gas from eating it. Self-sustaining and all.’

‘You’re weird,’ said Hayz, shaking his head as he exhaled.

‘Just noticed?’ said Astrid.

‘I wish I had,’ said Hayz, looking across at the other Strangers. ‘Who else is weird?’

‘Loomers,’ said Astrid, cracking the lollipop slightly.

‘Yeah, but they’ve all just got something in their heads about life being a stitch up.’

‘They’ll get you Hayz… like when the Chargers made you run starkers round and round the bandstand for that… what do they call it?’

‘Hazing ritual.’

‘Ha!’ Astrid waved her lollipop in the air. ‘Love it. Of course I missed all that since I had to pop out Kitty and I’d gone to King’s Lynn.’

‘Yeah, well…’ said Hayz. ‘Mariam isn’t weird. Fia isn’t weird.’

‘What? Mariam is a traumatised war survivor. She’s all kinds of weird. Used to work for social services and all. Fia is definitely weird.’ Astrid rocked back and forth on the flimsy deckchair making it squeak slightly. ’Fia is definitely an android.’

‘Androids don’t exist.’

‘I mean she must be chipped.’

‘Could be. Don’t know who’s chipped here… you’d reckon that most of them don’t work no more.’

‘She used to be some kind of engineer, so she could have been chipped to work better or something.’ Astrid paused. ‘I’d never get chipped. I think I’d rather die.’

‘Yeah… I’m not keen either,’ said Hayz.

‘You don’t like things you can’t see and touch,’ said Astrid with a knowing smile. ‘That don’t mean I don’t like her… I mean Fia.’ Astrid curled the stick of the lollipop up to the side of her mouth, exaggerating her grin. ‘Don’t mean you don’t like her, either.’

‘Yeah… well… that stuff is like telepathy.’

‘Frack that. I do real telepathy,’ said Astrid. ‘You can only use true magic if you lay off the tech… no Loom, no Fair… no Seams… nothing.’

‘Go on then’, said Hayz. ‘Read my mind.’

Scene 10: St Stephen’s Gate

The underpass beneath St Stephen’s Roundabout generated a self-sustaining emptiness; an intersection of uninviting passageways repelling hesitant pedestrians back towards the safety and convenience of motion-sensitive crossing points.

At the centre beneath the roundabout, Hayz dumped his backpack onto the subterranean concrete, loosened the drawstring and clattered around inside the main compartment, pulling out an assortment of paint canisters and spray fittings. Fia watched as he arranged his dented tools with chaotic care; Daydream Yellow, Mystic Green, Atmospheric Blue.

‘We’re hooking up the network,’ he said, surveying the tiles wrapped around walls, already partly covered by a frantic twisting of psychedelic roots. The mural imagined a giant ur-plant rising several stories above them, sustained by spectral nutrients or decomposing dreams.

‘Just following the flow… live-streaming.’
Hayz grabbed a can, shook the spray to life and started to work his way outwards on one of the organic superhighways, easing the luminous fibres into relief.

‘Why do you do this?’ said Fia, arms crossed, looking for a suitable surface to lean against.

‘Do I need a reason?’

‘No… but do you have one?’

‘Well… if I don’t, it stays trapped inside,’ said Hayz, ‘like it’s pacing in a prison cell or something. Seems like bad news if it stays there, so I’ve got no choice really. Either it goes on the wall or… I don’t know, there’s always been a wall to take it.’

‘I mean… it’s impressive,’ said Fia. ‘It looks like the cover of an old vinyl record my Grandfather would have owned.’

‘Ah, vinyl’, said Hayz. ‘Music you can hold and smell. That reminds me.’ He removed his glowing wristband and set it down on the ground, stirring an index finger around the 360-degree display to queue a track from local storage. The surface vibrations of the band created the sound of rolling synth waves filtered through a taut mesh of pulses. ‘For some background ambience.’

Fia screwed her faced slightly, ‘Yeah, my Grandfather wouldn’t have listened to this.’

‘Still keep in touch with family?’ Haze asked as he continued the outline of a new root.

Fia looked up at the LED ceiling lights. ‘They’re in a different world now.’

‘That so…’ Hayz’s voice trailed off with the fizzle of his spray as he traced the line of a root to the floor. ‘I guess it’s different for me and Astrid ‘cause we grew up on the communes. Don’t have anyone on the other side.’

‘Are you two… together?’ said Fia. ‘You and Astrid?’

Hayz shook the can… paused… shook the can again. ‘Nah… well… it’s complicated,’ he said, finally. ‘I mean… who really is together?’

‘Mariam and Holloway,’ said Fia. ‘I mean, they seem like a couple…’

‘If Maza and the Doc are the best example of a relationship we have, then we may as well give up and leave it to the Nodes.’

‘There’s something odd about paring off, isn’t there?’ said Fia, suddenly interested in the thought.

‘That sounds like something Astrid would say,’ replied Hayz. ‘She don’t think the family thing makes sense… maybe to Nodes in their little boxes, but not if you’re a Stranger.’

‘I guess all Strangers are a kind of family now,’ said Fia.

‘Yeah, well… remember what I was saying in the square…’ Hayz switched one can for another. ‘You think the Doc going off has anything to do with this Loomer business?’

Fia felt a tightening in her stomach and a flush of heat around her head. She breathed out slowly and removed her beanie hat, the locks of her photo-reactive hair transforming slowly from dark green to purple as they fell about her face.

‘Who says he’s gone off?’

‘Nobody… he’s just… gone off, hasn’t he?’

‘I don’t know. Something happened with his glasses… Beacons appearing around him. He said he felt as if he was being pursued by ghosts.’

‘Plenty of ghosts in Norwich… or maybe he’s just lost the plot.’

‘Okay, not ghosts exactly… he said it was related to an idea he’d had about portals.’

‘Ah okay…’ said Hayz, nodding in slow-motion. ‘Portals… portal ghosts.’ He moved away from the psychotropic tangle of roots towards one of the tunnel walls. Holding the nozzle down, he wound the white line of the spray into a series of overlapping loops.

‘Want to step through it and see what’s on the other side?’

Fia felt an uneasy energy again, as if something inside her had shifted its presence to the surface of her skin, leaving an unstable emptiness. She laughed nervously.

‘I think his portals are metaphorical… I mean, he can’t mean actual portals. I don’t know. I need to work this out,’ Fia slid her backpack off her shoulder and pulled out her scroll along with Holloway’s notebook.

‘Why do you need to work this out?’ said Hayz.

‘Because I feel I ought to. I want to understand things. That’s why I used to work in computational modelling.’ Fia gestured to the wall. ‘Take this plant. I would help write software to simulate the growth of plants based on environmental variables.’

‘Sounds complicated.’

‘Not so much if you break things down. Everything is an abstraction of something else.’

‘So you just keep breaking things down into smaller and smaller pieces? I would lose the plot if I did that.’

Time stretched and contracted as Fia looked at the notebook and the scroll, while Hayz continued to work on the mural, neither of them speaking, the music from the wristband plotting out offbeat electronic pulses like deep-sea sonar.

Eventually, Fia looked up at the mural again. ‘You know, this kind of represents the Seams…’ she said. ‘It’s a co-dependent network. The mycorrhiza in forests inspired the tools we use to communicate.’

‘Yeah, I know.’ replied Hayz. ‘Mushrooms connect you to the deep stuff… give you ideas.’

Fia glanced down at her scroll again. That was the first time she noticed the Beacon; a glowing circle with the letters ‘Hol’ next to it.

‘He’s here,’ said Fia. She touched the pulsing ring of light, which expanded outwards across the surface to reveal a map of the underpass. The Beacon re-appeared on the map just outside the entrance to one of the tunnels.

‘Who?’ said Hayz.

‘Holloway. His Beacon just appeared. He should be by the entrance.’

Hayz turned his music off, leaving the hollow soundstage of the tunnel to shimmer with Fia’s footsteps as she walked towards the foot of the slope. Holloway’s glasses lay on the ground, the frames twisted slightly so that the lenses pointed in different directions. The lenses themselves were intact, the optical HUD elements still glowing, blurring out into unfocused space.