PopCo by Scarlett Thomas
Esther and I are now staking out the entrance to the Great Hall.
‘Watch them come out, then merge,’ she commands.
‘Yes, sir,’ I say, messing around.
Apart from the fact that she hates Georges and I did, well, what I did, with him, Esther and I have more in common than I would have thought. She must play Go, of course, everyone does. I wonder what sort of player she is; how she forms ladders and how far ahead she thinks. I wonder if she knows the moment she’s made a losing move, as I do, even if the end of the game is still hundreds of moves away. She looks crazy, with her head poking out of this bush, but there’s no one here to see. They must all still be inside. Yes – I can hear some clapping and a whoop or two of joy (Georges makes people whoop with joy and I have to say that if he hadn’t turned me on so much I’d probably hate him too just because of that).
‘Soldier: move out,’ Esther says a few minutes later, as the first people begin to emerge through the door. The idea is that we will join the crowd and act like we were in there all along.
I can’t help smiling at the cod military terminology she uses. It’s obviously not just me and Dan, then. Does everyone end up doing this? Where do we get it from? Probably a combination of videogames, grandparents, Sunday matinees and news reports. Is this our language now – even though most of us have only ever used it in simulations? I’m not sure. Perhaps everything is a simulation, now. Anyway, this war-terminology stuff reminds me of a focus group for a board game that I observed when I first joined the company. (Observing a focus group was one of those induction activities, along with ‘Use the Computer Safely!’ and ‘Manufacturing Techniques!’) The game was so obviously based on Hasbro’s Risk that it never went anywhere but the people playing it in the focus group didn’t seem to care.
‘Peasant revolt!’ said one of the women players, as she attacked a country occupied by more armies than she could ever defeat. I remember her being the kamikaze queen of the game, lucky with the dice.
‘Die, peasant scum,’ said the man she was attacking, in a deep, put-on war lord voice. ‘I will be ruler of the world!’ He kept missing the ashtray and flicking cigarette ash all over the table.
‘Terrorists!’ said another woman when the other three players attacked her, one after the other. ‘I have the biggest continent, I will rule the world. Those who oppose me are terrorists …’ She was thin and ghostly with a pale, academic face. There was another man, too, although I don’t remember him very well.
They banged their fists on the table as their global meltdown escalated. Terrorism must be stamped out! Suppress the masses! Of course, they were friends and all very drunk, playing the game after a dinner we’d laid on for them (with lots and lots of very nice wine that I was able to sample afterwards). At the time I was intrigued by their ability to iron the complexities of war into this thin sheet of banter; their playful neutralisation of horror. Now I wonder, do we all do that without even thinking about it? And do we all call our enemies ‘terrorists’, now?
We may as well be scuttling across the path under fake bushes and dustbins, we’re that obvious. ‘Look more natural,’ I hiss, but Esther is in a semi-crouch position, looking furtively to the left and the right and – I do believe – holding her hand in the shape of a gun, as if she were about to pull it from a holster low on her hip. The last people pass and walk off towards the barns.
‘All clear,’ Esther says to me.
‘Esther!’ I whisper, but she’s already made it over to the door. Of course, we’ve now completely mistimed this and she runs straight into Georges.
‘Hello, Esther,’ he says. ‘Games before dinner?’
Her hand’s still in the shape of a gun; two fingers pointing down.
‘Nice speech,’ she says.
He looks almost small in his black suit, his hair shining, looking newly cut. I am waiting for him to look over and see me but he doesn’t. ‘Thanks,’ he says in an odd way. Then he’s gone.
‘Cunt,’ says Esther when I join her by the door.
There’s no one in the room in the barn when I get back but the smell of perfume tells me that someone has been here recently. I actually wish someone was here so I could ask them the time. It must be almost seven, and I probably should be walking over to the cafeteria for dinner but I just don’t know. I left Esther about fifteen minutes ago and then went looking for Dan. He wasn’t in the Great Hall, or up the hill, or around by the Sports Hall. I am not familiar enough with this place to know where to look for him. He was probably in his room, although I don’t know where that is.
My Hide It! pack is still safe under the cabinet. It feels lumpy in my fingers as I pull it off and dump the contents on the bed. Somewhere in here is a small watch face that doesn’t have a strap any more. Ah, yes: five to seven. The watch is five minutes fast, so I’ve got roughly ten minutes to get to dinner. Do I need to change? No. I’m not changing more than twice in one day, even if I do have to see Mac. I try thinking about seeing Esther again, as a sort of experiment. I don’t feel sick. That’s a good sign. Sometimes when you make a new friend it can feel a bit muddled and stupid afterwards; worse, even, than bad sex.
New friendships can also be like a children’s birthday party; a big table laden with cakes, sweets, crisps and multi-pack chocolate bars wrapped in foil. It’s as if there’s just too much sugar there, all at once, piled on the table. You stuff yourself but it’s too much and you just can’t think about sweets again for a long time. Or sometimes new friendships – the ones destined to be focus-grouped but never launched – can be like playing an out-of-tune string instrument; when you find yourself carefully fingering the chords for your favourite song but hearing the sound coming out all wrong. Your input is the same as always but the thing responds erroneously, playing you back an unfamiliar non-tune which gives you a headache. Your favourite (and only) amusing story is batted back with a ‘what happened next, then?’, or a discordant, polite nod. So far, this isn’t like either of those situations. Well, it isn’t for me, anyway. But perhaps it is one of them for her. Making friends never gets any easier. Even if everything’s right: you’re having fun at the party and the music sounds OK, you might find you are a discordant sugar-overload for the other person. This happens all the time.
I yawn and wonder how quickly I can get to bed after seeing Mac. Will there be more activities? I heard someone saying something about after-dinner games before. Maybe I will wake up: I do like games. Maybe we are going to be fired, though, and we’ll just have to leave after seeing Mac. Time to get up off this bed, Alice. Don’t fall asleep. I’ll count to five. I’ll count to five and then I’ll get up. Then I realise that something about my belongings, laid out on the bed, is not right. Nothing’s missing – on the contrary, there are too many things here. There’s something from my Hide It! pack that I didn’t put there: a folded-up piece of paper. I feel prickly as I consider that someone else has been here and found my things. Then I open the piece of paper. It’s a PopCo With Compliments slip, with the following letters written on it.
XYCGKNCJYCJZSDSPPAGHDFTCRIVXU
To an unaccustomed eye, perhaps this would seem like a barcode or maybe even a really crazy reference code from some official letter. It is, of course, a code, but neither of those sorts. This is a cipher that someone wants me to break.
I’m almost the last in line at the cafeteria. Dan waited for me by the entrance, so it’s me and him again, standing just in front of the two people from lunch – the dark-haired guy and the girl with the feather earrings – as if coming to the cafeteria is such a small subroutine in the videogame version of our lives that it has been programmed to happen in only one way.
‘Ah, it’s the vegetarians,’ the woman says from behind her hatch. She glances beyond me and Dan to the couple behind us. ‘Many vegetarians,’ she says, laughing to herself. ‘Here you go.’ Four plates appear, each with a pile of red sludge.
This time we’ve got it wrong, not that we had any choice. The
‘Oh well,’ Dan says, shrugging. ‘There’s a load of cheese boards on the tables.’
‘I think I might actually become a vegetarian anyway,’ I say, randomly. Even though I love Steak au Poivre, my stomach can’t handle anything very complicated at the moment. The red sludge may actually turn out to be something hot and comforting, perhaps with lentils, which would suit me right now.
The coded note crackles in my pocket as I walk across to the dining area. Esther’s there, waving. ‘Saved you both seats,’ she says. This is the only free table left anyway. In fact, it’s the only table in the room that isn’t full and won’t become full, which gives me a thrilling sense of unpopularity, of being an un-clique. Glancing across the room, I can see Carmen and Chi-Chi sitting with some of the K people. They’re all wearing T-shirts featuring nonsensical English expressions from Japan. ‘Cream Pain’. ‘Oops! Hair’. ‘Bullying Peter’. ‘Moon Hazard: Space’. Stuff like that. As far as I understand it, there used to be a little website devoted to this stuff and then PopCo bought it. They haven’t amalgamated it with K or anything; they’re just keeping it going as it is, but with the extra marketing push only PopCo can give. The K crowd always seem to be laughing (when they’re not going bonkers, of course). I never understand why. Surely life isn’t that hilarious?
The guy and the girl from the queue sit down at the other end of the table and grab the bottle of red wine before we get the chance. This time, though, as soon as they’ve tipped more than half of it into their glasses, a new bottle appears from somewhere.
‘Cool,’ Dan says, grabbing it. ‘Wine, ladies?’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Thanks.’
‘No. Don’t drink,’ says Esther. She has a plate of red stuff too.
‘Ah, the vegetarian trick backfired on you, too,’ Dan says.
‘What?’ she says back, confused. She thinks for a second. ‘Oh, I see. No, I am an actual vegetarian. Well, a vegan, actually.’
I’m watching Dan. He didn’t send the note. It’s not there in his face. Oh, fuck it, I’m not going to panic about this. I don’t even know what it says yet. It won’t take me long to work out, though. It looked quite Vigenère-ish to me. Ten-minute job, maybe a bit more, although there isn’t much text to go on. With anything Vigenère-ish, it helps to have as much enciphered text as possible, as you can see patterns in it more easily. The Vigenère method of cryptography was thought to be unbreakable for over 300 years but once you know how to unravel it, it is surprisingly easy, and very fulfilling to break.
It wasn’t a Caesar shift cipher, that’s for sure: you can tell one of those just by looking at it. A Caesar shift cipher is one of the most simple of all substitution ciphers, and involves one of two identical alphabets being simply ‘shifted’ one way or the other. If ‘a’, for example, is enciphered as Z then that’s a shift of minus-one. Every letter will be enciphered as the one just behind it in the alphabet. In this system, with a shift of minus-one, if you found a C in the ciphertext, you’d know it was actually a ‘d’ and so on. One of the most famous contemporary uses of a Caesar shift cipher is, according to SF geeks, in the naming of the fictional computer HAL from 2001, A Space Odyssey. Taking into account a Caesar shift of minus-one, HAL of course reads IBM. I used to have a little Caesar-shift wheel, where you could set the letter A to any other letter in the alphabet and the rest would just follow from there. But I did so many of those things when I was a kid that I eventually didn’t need the wheel, and somehow became familiar with twenty-six different ways of, for example, spelling the word ‘and’. BOE, CPF, DQG and so on. It must have been when I was nine or ten, and my grandfather communicated with me almost exclusively in this way until I learnt more sophisticated methods of cryptanalysis, at which point he began using more complicated ciphers to leave me notes that said things like: ‘Gone to the shop for milk’, or ‘Back later’.
Another thing about Caesar shift ciphers, like almost all ciphers, is that they have their own little conventions that you can look out for. The text in my pocket starts with the letters XYC, if I remember correctly. Caesar shift ciphertexts don’t usually start with two consecutive letters for the simple reason that not many sets of two consecutive letters in the English alphabet actually form the beginnings of sensible, common words. You’ve got A and B, which are pretty rare together at the beginning of words; S and T, which are the main two to watch out for – but I’ve already done it in my head and it’s not S and T (the third letter would be X if it were); H and I, N and O, O and P, and of course D and E, which, rather worryingly, do start the word death. But, if this were a Caesar shift cipher and the first two letters were D and E, then the third would be I. Unless someone’s writing to me about a deity this isn’t very likely. The thing to watch out for, though, is that the Caesar shift could merely be the first layer of code and that when you look at the beginning of a message you may actually be looking at the end. Sometimes people will write something out backwards and then apply a simple Caesar code to it. But this doesn’t feel like that.
The five most common words that begin coded communications are: Meet, The, Take, Enemy and Go. The ten most common words in the English language are the, of, to, and, is, a, an, it, you and that. The most common letter found in standard English language texts is always E, followed by T and then A, O, N, R, I and S (in various orders depending on which frequency analysis you read). The most common digraph in English is ‘th’. More than half of all English words end with E, T, D or S. The most common letters beginning words in English are T, O, A, W, B, C, D, S and F.
I wonder what the bloody message does say, and prickle slightly. I wish I had time to just crack it now. It could turn out to be nothing at all, which would make me feel so much better. Maybe it is from Dan but contains such a small message, or joke or whatever, that there’s no reason for it to be hidden in his face. Perhaps he has even forgotten that he put it there. He’s never written to me in code before, though. Why would he start now? Don’t worry, Alice. You just decided not to worry. OK. I drink all my wine and accept Dan’s top-up. That feels a bit better. ‘Thanks,’ I say.
Dan’s putting a small red hardback notebook into his pocket.
‘What’s that?’ I say, more paranoid than usual.
He flashes me a weird grin. ‘This? This is the future, baby.’
‘Seriously. What is it, baby?’
He shrugs and passes it to me. Inside, on the first few pages, there are dreamy landscapes rendered in the same sorts of candy colours you see on Japanese toy websites: lemon, candyfloss pink, baby blue, strawberry, mint green and white. There are watercolours, pen and ink drawings and dark pencil sketches: thick dusty lines. I flick further through the book. There are various drawings of some sort of dome structure and some more or less illegible notes. Then more pen and ink drawings, in simple black and white, of people; characters, from the look of it, each one drawn from various angles, and in different poses. There’s a thin, scrawny girl carrying a rucksack, and an ethereal presence that seems female and in some way magical. Then – and I can see where this is going now – a kid with a big sword and a small pet lizard in the palm of his hand.
‘You’re doing the graphics for a videogame?’ I say.
‘Let’s see,’ Esther says, holding out a small hand.
‘They’re really rough,’ Dan says. And although he clearly doesn’t want to, he passes the book to her. He looks at me. ‘Not exactly,’ he says, answering my question. ‘It’s more … I don’t know. Research or something.’
‘What for?’
‘Hmm.’
‘Hmm?’
‘These are ace,’ says Esther. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone use the word ‘ace’ for over a decade. ‘Really lush.’ Ditto.
‘Anyway, what’s hmm?’ I say to Dan.
He seems to be eating the red stuff rather tentatively. I’ve eaten most of mine. It’s OK, actually, and comforting, just as I had thought. There’s a nice-
‘Nice hand–eye coordination, Butler,’ Dan says.
‘Yes, well,’ I say. ‘My life-meter has taken a battering today, what with all the sport and then strange military manoeuvres with Esther.’
‘Don’t blame me,’ she says, still looking through the book, but smiling.
‘I see,’ Dan says. ‘Life-meter. We’re using videogame metaphors now.’
‘Yes. We are. So …?’
‘All right. I’m designing a videogame. There.’
‘But you said …’
‘It’s not for work. It’s a side project.’
I drop my voice to a hiss. ‘For another company?’
‘No. It’s … hard to explain.’
‘What is? Come on, why is it hard to explain?’
‘My game. It can’t exist. It’s purely design.’ Dan exhales as though he’s just told his parents he made the next-door-neighbour pregnant or something. ‘So …’
‘Aren’t all games purely design?’ Esther says. ‘None of them exactly exist. It’s just binary code, isn’t it?’
Someone on the K table drops something and there’s a sharp crashing sound and then cheers and clapping. I thought they were supposed to be cool? You’d think they’d have sent out a trend-spotter to find a more interesting way of responding to a crash in a pub/restaurant/cafeteria. Am I jealous of them? I don’t think so. Us three, here in the corner of the room, with no bright lights or spot-lights or anything: we’re a huddle. We could be huddling under an old canopy and the effect would be the same – unless it was a really bright or stupid canopy and then everyone would laugh at us.