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  Arjun glimpsed a secret in this yes-no logic. Hungry for more computer time, he would beg or steal it where he could: libraries, college labs, the houses of richer or luckier schoolfriends. He particularly loved to run simulations. Anything would do: commercial god-games; cities and armies; a simple world of different-coloured daisies; clusters of digital cells switching each other from red to blue. Watching populations of computer creatures grow and die, he found himself meditating on scale, wondering in a teenage way if his own world was nothing but a stupendous piece of programming, a goldfish-bowl system running for the amusement of other cosmically bored teens.

  True or false?

  Either way this particular system was a problem. He soon found himself in full retreat from it, buffeted by puberty, by the awkwardness of interacting with other people. People were a chasm, an abyss. Their violence, their vagueness, their unknowable motivations and inexplicable changes of mood had been woven into a nightmarish social world. Why would nobody understand? They were, making no sense. At last laying his hands on his own machine, he became a computing hermit, fleeing into a place where communication was governed by clearly laid-out rules. Logic gates. Truth tables. The world of people could go and rot. He closed his bedroom door on it.

  His life might have progressed in any number of directions had he not, one evening, left a floppy disk in the A-drive of his PC. When he started up the following morning, his screen suddenly went blank. He pressed keys. No response. He rebooted. The machine ran slow. He rebooted again. And again. Finally, after an interminable crunch and stutter from inside the case, a message appeared in front of him.

  u r a prlz0n7r ov th3 10rd$ ov mlzr00L

  He kept shutting down and restarting, but the problem only got worse. His beloved computer had been reduced to a pile of scrap metal. To get it running again, he had to reformat his hard drive, which meant that he lost all his data. Everything. Months of work erased by this catastrophic visitation. He started to research what it was that had happened, and found that he had been hit by a thing with a name, the Carnival Virus, a string of code that had hidden itself in an innocuous floppy disk and had used his computer to make copies of itself. Every restart had given birth to another generation. Life.

  Information on computer viruses was hard to come by. Even a sketchy impression of where they originated was difficult to form without his own internet connection, and in India at that time, that was an impossibility. By writing off for disks and magazines and making occasional cripplingly expensive calls to foreign bulletin boards, he managed to get hold of a few code samples, which he studied like religious texts. In the privacy of his bedroom he created several simple viruses, careful to keep backups of his data in case (as happened once or twice) he accidentally infected his own machine. He taught himself assembly language, and by his late teens had begun to excel in all sorts of more conventional programming tasks. His parents, who were worried by his reclusiveness, his bad posture, his unwillingness to play sports or bring friends round for tea, began to see an upside to his obsession. Computers were the coming thing, Mr Mehta would remind his colleagues at the firm. My son will be an engineer.

  It was only when he went to college, and at last had proper access to the data riches of the net that he was able to properly satisfy his curiosity. He started to burrow into the underground, logging on to chatrooms and IRC channels, navigating with a thrill past the braggarts and hypers, the ranters and flamers and paranoiacs who infested this grey area of the computing culture.

  Screw you lamer, don’t come running to me when it wipes your hd, i just distributed the thing. Well anyway enjoy doods, cya at my next release…

  That was the style. If you had knowledge you wore it with arrogance. You put down the pretenders and the fools like a dashing musketeer, a programming dandy. Arjun was shy. Even online, hidden behind the anonymity of a screen name, he lacked confidence. For a long time he just lurked, watching and listening, gleaning information about security flaws, vulnerabilities, techniques, exploits. But in the true underground, the untraceable underground of temporary private channels and download sites with shifting addresses, exchange was everything. If you didn’t give, you didn’t get.

  So, feeling trepid and illicit, badmAsh started to appear on virus-exchange boards, offering to trade code for code. To his pleasure and surprise, he found that people wanted what he had, and he soon became popular, respected. It gradually dawned on him that behind the bluster most other traders were not that talented – they were handymen, tinkering with already existing routines. They were not the originators, the architects. badmAsh became something of a star.

  Further blurring the borderline between life and not-life, the internet had brought computer viruses into their own. When floppy disks were the primary transmission vector, rates of infection were low. Now that files could be sent over phone lines, the number of incidents soared. From his college terminal Arjun watched in fascination as malicious code flared up like a rash on the computing body of the world, causing itching and discomfort to a public educated by science fiction and the Cold War to regard the convergence of machines and biology with uneasy reverence. Computer virus. Future terror.

  Arjun himself had little time for science fiction. For him it was all Romance. Pyaar. Being the hero of the Vx boards was a sterile thing in some ways, because the point of being a hero is to get the girl, and on the Vx boards there were none. Not one. Not even (as in other zones of the net) anyone pretending to be one.

  Pyaar. Pyaar. Pyaar. Throughout South Asia you can’t get away from it. Perhaps the rise of Love has something to do with cinema, or independence from the British, or globalization, or the furtive observation of backpacking couples by a generation of young people who suddenly realized it was possible to grope one another without the sky falling on their heads. There are those who say Love is just immorality. There are those who believe it is encouraged by amplified disco music. There are even those who claim that the decline in arranged marriage and the cultural encouragement of its replacement by free-choice pair-bonding are connected with the obsolescence of the extended family in late capitalism, but since this is tantamount to saying that Love can be reduced to Money, no one listens. In India (the most disco nation on earth) Love is a glittery madness, an obsession, broadcast like the words of a dictator from every paan stall and rickshaw stand, every transistor radio and billboard and TV tower. While Arjun tried to concentrate on public-key cryptography or the Hungarian naming convention, it kept knocking on his bedroom door like an irritating kid sister. Will you come out and play? He would have paid no attention to it (what could be vaguer and less logical?) but sickeningly all its absurd rituals and intricacies led back to something he wanted, something he had started to crave with a longing bordering on panic.

  Touch.

  Love was the price of touch. Love was the maze through which you had to find your way In the May heat, when the heavy air was like a hand on his body as he lay awake at night, he could feel the need for another person as a hard ache inside, an alien presence which had formed in his chest like a tumour.

  As far as it is possible to piece together, the sequence of events runs like this.

  At 21.15 PST, Wednesday, badmAsh appears on #vxconvention, which at the time is running on a server belonging to a private internet-service provider in Indonesia. By 21.28 PST he has completed a negotiation with a regular user known as Elrick21 to swap a copy of a packet-sniffing utility for a compressed file containing a list of around a million email addresses, the kind of list that spammers use to send people messages about penis enlargement, great investment opportunities and requests for urgent business assistance. In return for the home phone number of pro golfer Tiger Woods (which badmAsh had acquired as part of a batch in a previous trade, and which Elrick21 thinks ‘would be cool just to have’), he also acquires a list of a dozen or so IP addresses belonging to computers on to which, unknown to their owners, Elrick21 has installed a piece of software known as a remot
e-access trojan.

  Between 21.32 and 21.37 PST badmAsh attempts to communicate with these machines. Only one responds: a PC physically located in the banlieue of Paris, which its owner, a junior doctor called Patrice, has hooked up to a broadband connection so he can play Second World War flight Sim games. Patrice sometimes thinks he would rather be a fighter ace than a medic with a crummy apartment in a bad part of town. Patrice tends to leave his computer on all the time. Right now (it is early on Thursday morning in Paris) he is still at the hospital, and so is not present to watch badmAsh establish communication with the trojan, send a set of commands to his machine and take control of his email software.

  Between 06.50 and 09.23 CEST, when Patrice returns, spots through a haze of tiredness that something weird is happening and pulls the power plug out of the wall, his computer sends emails in a constant stream, contacting hundreds of thousands of people around the world to say:

  Hi. I saw this and thought of you.

  At 14.05 KST fifteen-year-old Kim Young Sam, who is cutting his English class at Seoul Science High School, comes back to his bedroom with a bowl of microwaved instant noodles and wonders why he has mail from France. He opens it and clicks on the attachment. Nothing happens. Ten minutes later, when his computer sends copies of the email to everyone in his address book, he does not notice because he has fallen asleep.

  Kelly Degrassi, insomniac, mother, receptionist at the offices of the Holy Mount Zion Church in Fort Scott, Kansas, opens and clicks.

  Darren Pinkney (dairy farmer, Ballarat, Australia) clicks.

  Altaaf Malik (student, Leela Zahir fan, Hyderabad, India) clicks and is disappointed. No pictures.

  Ten minutes after the first mail went out from Patrice’s computer, forty more people have unknowingly distributed it to their friends and contacts. Half an hour later 800 have done so. By the time Patrice phones technical support at his internet-service provider to say that he thinks something might be wrong with his connection, the mail containing what will come to be known as ‘first variant Leela virus’, or Leela01, has made its way on to over 17,000 hard drives around the world.

  The truth is that Leela was not one thing. She was not even a set or a group or a family. She was a swarm, a horde. At the same time as Leela01 was being spread via email, other Leelas, other things with her face, were being uploaded to shareware sites, were tunnelling their way into webservers to be doled out as Applets, were propagating at a phenomenal rate through peer-to-peer networks. There were versions of her that broke completely with the past, that were targeted at the complex operating systems used by businesses and universities, at the stripped-down ones designed for cellphone handsets and personal organizers. So many Leelas. So many girls with the same face.

  The glory of all these variants, the glamour that caught so many people unawares, lay in their power of metamorphosis. Since the first virus crept on to the first unprotected hard drive some time in the 1980s, a process of evolution had been under way, an arms race between virus writers and scanners that had thrown up new and unforeseen mutations. In the beginning all the detectors had to do was trap a viral sample and write software to look for a tell-tale trace or signature. So the viruses began to use encryption to hide themselves, and the scanners responded by learning to hunt for the decryption routines. Soon the viruses began to appear in multiple shapes. The scanners evolved with them, and learned to look not just for signatures but for giveaway behaviour. Unexpected events could signal an intrusion. Changes in file size. Unauthorized modifications.

  Leela was a step beyond all of this. She could take on new forms at will, never staying stable for long enough to be scanned and recognized. Each generation produced an entirely new Leela, her organs rearranged, mutated, hidden under a novel layer of encryption. Worst of all, from the point of view of the people tasked with finding her, she could camouflage herself within the programs she infected, inserting herself in between legitimate instructions, covering herself over by resetting all references to the changes she had made. When the scanners peered at a Leela-infected file, it looked normal. It still functioned. Nothing appeared to have been altered since the last clean sweep was made. Legitimate programs were doing legitimate things. Until they stopped. Until she took over.

  Release + 3 hrs: 17,360 hosts

  Release + 4 hrs: 85,593 hosts

  Release + 5 hrs: 254,217…

  So when Arjun appeared at work the next morning, haggard and drawn from a night without sleep, despite the infection raging around the world, not one sample had come into Virugenix for analysis. Leela was in the wild, and for the moment entirely invisible.

  Who clicked? Did you click? Were you curious enough to try? Packets of data streamed through the wires, through MAE-West and East, into hubs and rings in Chicago and Atlanta and Dallas and New York, out of others in London and Tokyo, through the vast SEA-ME-WE 3 cable under the Pacific and its siblings on the sea bed of the Atlantic. Data streamed up to communication satellites, or was converted into radio waves to be spat out of transmitters, passing through people and buildings, travelling away into space.

  Leela found Guy Swift at 35,000 feet as he was travelling back to London from New York, and when she reached him it barely registered because he was asleep. She had been batched with other messages, compressed and trickled down from a satellite to a computer on board the Airbus A300 in whose first-class section Guy was reclining, drowsily checking emails on the airphone. He removed his laptop from its padded ripstop case, swiped his company credit card through the reader on the phone and hooked the two devices up. Then, just for a moment, he closed his eyes and drifted into a place of abstraction and warmth. A few seconds went by. The abstraction darkened, and he experienced a sudden unpleasant sensation of falling through his own interior space, through himself. Cast unpleasantly out into consciousness, he breathed heavily and opened his eyes to see ten new mails in his inbox. Check it out! Disoriented, he clicked. Nothing happened. His annoyance registered as a little spike of distaste, a momentary disturbance in the smooth sine of his working day. Hotel shower, breakfast tray, lobby, limo, lunch meeting, shopping, hotel, limo again – the grid of Manhattan streets sliding by, the silent driver easing him out towards the airport – all noiseless, perfect…

  Time at origin: 02.14

  Time at destination: 07.14

  Time here: ?

  What time was it up here? What time was now?

  Some time later Guy watched blearily as London assembled itself around his taxi. Beside him on the seat was a bag from a lingerie boutique, a last-minute gift for Gabriella. Leaning forward, he called out directions to the driver, who was listening to a phone-in programme on the radio. Up ahead, he caught sight of the building where he lived, a mountain of blue glass looming over a pair of low-rise eighties blocks. He loved that moment, the best moment of any journey. Coming home.

  Home. In Vitro.

  As every Londoner knows, In Vitro, Sir Nigel Pelham’s landmark housing complex, is a blue-glass ziggurat, twenty storeys high at its peak, curved along a shallow arc on the south side of the Thames. Each of its 324 luxury apartments has a balcony, screened in such a way as to give the illusion of complete solitude. ‘The effect,’ said Sir Nigel in an interview with Archon magazine, ‘is one of absolute calm, a heavenly sense of floating free of the cares of the world.’ The lifts and other services have been placed at the rear, leaving the river view uninterrupted. The lowest accommodation is four storeys above the ground, and Sir Nigel’s partnership has crammed the space below with all the amenities appropriate to an international-standard residential development. At the concierge desk, a map is available showing the location of In Vitro’s Olympic-sized swimming pool, its gymnasium, saunas and solaria, its float tanks, tennis courts, bowling alley, underground parking and innovative Hopi Indian meditation space, a white padded room into which hidden speakers pipe the natural sounds of the American South-west.

  Guy had bought his place at the height of the late-nineties b
oom. As Tomorrow* took off, he felt it appropriate that as CEO of a world-class agency, he should have a world-class pad. There were other factors which influenced his decision. He sometimes suspected, though he could never be sure, that the apartment was one of the reasons Gabriella agreed to move in with him. Sometimes he even suspected that subconsciously the main reason he bought it was to persuade Gabriella to move in with him. It was a psychological area which would not repay close scrutiny. The price of course was astronomical, but at the time it had seemed worth taking on the debt just to see the look of envy on the faces of his contacts when he invited them over for the housewarming.

  Though Guy was a millionaire, it was in a rather technical sense. While his picture in Future Business magazine’s list of the 100 Top Young Entrepreneurs of the Next Millennium was printed next to a ‘personal worth’ figure of £3.1 million, almost all of this was based on a valuation of Tomorrow*, in which, after the last round of venture capital funding, Guy now held a reduced stake. His liquid assets were relatively modest. At the time he had rationalized the purchase of the apartment as a networking opportunity. Surely in the corridors of such an exclusive place, he would bump into all sorts of potential clients.

  To his disappointment he found when he moved in that the complex was eerily deserted. The facilities, while beautifully maintained, were little used. Though most units were allocated before the development was even complete, many were owned by foreign nationals and remained unoccupied for much of the year. Others were company flats, or corporate lets whose occupants changed every few weeks. When Guy met residents of In Vitro in the gym, they nodded warily and tried to hide their surprise at encountering another person in this normally empty place. The sauna heated and cooled untenanted, and in the meditation space the coyotes cried unheard. Early in the morning, before the European markets opened, a few people could be found swimming laps of the pool, but they were usually strangers to one another. In the lifts, occupants fixed their gaze on the flickering digits of the LCD display. Sometimes they sneaked glances at the faces reflected in the polished steel doors. Sometimes they did not.