Looking for Jake: Stories by Mieville China

Author:Mieville, China [Mieville, China]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780345486103
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2005-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

AN END TO HUNGER

I met Aykan in a pub sometime late in 1997. I was with friends, and one of them was loudly talking about the internet, which we were all very excited about.

“Fucking internet’s fucking dead, man. Yesterday’s bullshit,” I heard from two tables away. Aykan was staring at me, gazing at me curiously, like he wasn’t sure I’d let him crash this party.

He was Turkish (I asked because of his name). His English was flawless. He had none of the throaty accent I half expected, though each of his words did sound finished in a slightly unnatural way.

He smoked high tar incessantly. (“Fucking national sport: they wouldn’t let me in fucking ’Stanbul without sufficient shit in my lungs.”) He liked me because I wasn’t intimidated by him. I let him call me names and didn’t get my back up when he was rude. Which he was, often.

My friends hated him, and after he’d left I nodded and murmured agreement with them about what a weirdo, about how rude and where he got off, but the fact was I couldn’t get worked up about Aykan. He told us off for getting moist about email and the web. He told us wired connection was dead. I asked him what he was into instead and he took a long drag on his stinking cigarette and shook his head, dismissively exhaling.

“Nanotech,” he said. “Little shit.”

He didn’t explain that. I left him my phone number, but I never expected to hear from him. Ten months later he called me. It was only luck that I still lived at that address, and I told him that.

“People don’t fucking move, man,” he said, incomprehensibly.

I arranged to meet him after work. He sounded a bit distracted, a bit miserable even.

“Do you play games, man?” he said. “N64?”

“I’ve got a Playstation,” I told him.

“Playstation licks shit, man,” he told me. “Bullshit digital controls. I’ll give you the ads, though. Playstation ads sing sweet hymns, but you want a fucking analog control stick, or you’re playing once removed. You know anyone with N64?”

As soon as we met he handed me a little grey plastic square. It was a game pack for a Nintendo 64 system, but it was rough-cast and imperfectly finished, its seam bizarrely ragged. It had no label, only a sticker scrawled with illegible handwriting.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Find someone with N64,” he said. “Project of mine.”

We talked for a couple of hours. I asked Aykan what he did for a living. He did that dismissive smoking thing again. He muttered about computer consultancy and web design. I thought the internet was dead, I said. He agreed fervently.

I asked him what nanotech stuff he was doing, and he became ragged with enthusiasm. He caught me with crazy looks and grinned at odd intervals, so I couldn’t tell if he was bullshitting me.

“Don’t talk to me about little miniature fucking arterial cleaning robots, don’t fucking talk to me about medical reconstruction, or microwhateverthefucks to clean up oil slicks, OK? That’s bullshit to get people on board.

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