- 1 - [01 Aug 2003|03:15pm] [ music | Chris Clark - Slow Spines ] The sun rose like it was coming after us. I'd been up all night trying to dig a failed microphone out of my shoulder. It's tricky for me when part of the gear goes, because I don't use an external powerpack to run it. The gear is run off my metabolism and little piezoelectric generators in my feet that turn movement into power, like those running shoes that light up when you walk. I need to eat every three hours to keep everything going, like a hypoglycemia case. Whisky's good, too. And if I'm honest, I'd had most of a bottle that night. You know, keeping the gear running. I let the oily old airhypo clank down onto the steel work table and took a look at my shoulder in the little hand mirror I'd lifted from the hotel in Morocco last year. The thumbpad on the mirror's grip was getting sticky, but after a few tries it held its reflection as a still image. The builder dose I'd shot into the setting hadn't taken. The tiny carbon tubes were growing wrong, and the hole in my shoulder looked like it was filled with miniature black pasta. I poured the last half-centimetre of whisky into the wound to wash out the dose. It felt like long hard fingernails digging into my skin, and the thought of that was enough to send me unsteadily up on to my bare feet and out to the window. I looked out on London at dawn, waiting for the tiny machines in my shoulder to die. At this time in the morning, the streets still hold the darkness, the spires and domes and towers bobbing above it. A lunatic's armada, masts and sails of copper and slate tacking lazily over an ocean of shadows. The markets would open soon; bananas from the Windwards, strawberries from Norway, Finnish cloudberries, horsemeat from Japan. The Italian coffeehouses unlocking their doors, greyfaced minimum-wage kids exhaustedly wrestling themselves into workshirts and calling themselves baristas. Wishing they'd made the cut for a job at one of the five remaining American-style fastfood places in London. The German stalls frying ribers and bratwurst in the cold air. I started listening six years ago. It was wild, then. The sound of London was changing. The boom in street food after the burger joints went away. Like any army, London marches on its stomach, and as a post-imperialist state, it, like Japan, expresses itself through its food as much as it does in art and fashion. And so you started hearing flocks of Thai arguing over mangoes in the markets. Gorgeous Norwegian-accented English, bizarrely thanking us for our television while bitching us out for our crappy beef and eggs. The tidal movement of French, German, Dutch, Spanish. More loud Chinese, sounding like chorus and bells. The chimes and snarls of more Middle Eastern voices. The sneaky grinning sound of Russian. All the borders went away. We were all one place, gathered together in the sudden absence of That Other Place. I listened to it all. I was the first to try it. That's how people noticed me. Back then, I was working off a powerpack slung on a belt, cobbled together out of two old Sony CD players. A cannibalised Logitech webcam mounted on one shoulder. Mikes ripped out of a bunch of dumped mobile phones arranged on a jacket I found for twenty quid in Camden Market, black microfiber and hazmat-orange plastic. An always-on GPRS link that sent back whatever I was "seeing" and "hearing" to my home computer at 33K, which published it to the web. When I got a better connection, I added a glove that recorded feedback. If you had something similar -- and this was new, touchlogging was a few years away -- I could transmit to you the exact feeling of a handshake, a texture, and, later, a climate. The slick smoothness of a sweaty dancing boy. My fingertip on the full softness of a catwalk model's lips. The precise tactile recording of my hand finding an Italian girl's clitoral piercing, four years and one month and two weeks ago. I turned away from the window. It had been one of those nights, and nothing seemed to be clearing my head out. The setting was ready for another try. I locked another small vial into the airgun and fired a fresh dose into my shoulder. This time it took, building microscopic cables into my internal power grid and constructing a cradle to take the mike. The new microphone panel, a matte black oval the size of my little finger's nail, slid into the cradle and locked in. I pressed the base of my right thumb and held it to activate the system, and then unrolled the computer to run a diagnostic. The mike was good, and I was broadcasting at 5 meg. The camera panes in my eyes were a little fuzzy, but so was I. The whisky said it was time to sleep. You should always listen to the whisky. The phone rang. The landline phone, that I never use, because only two people have the number. My heart leapt, mad adrenaline surge, spastic whisky-soured attempt at an erection. It's her, that's all I had in my head for a second, something's happened, something's changed, I don't care, it's her. Of course it wasn't. It was the man who had the line installed. It was the man who calls when he wants to make a spy out of me. And he wanted to send me to America. (c) Warren Ellis 2003

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