What made media media was that only a mind slightly hanging off its hinges could let whatever it was through, and the way it came through was garbled. Low signal, high noise. Any single medium would produce indecipherable gibberish. Yet in aggregation the signals had yielded suggestive results. A hobo in Palo Alto might mumble ‘Harra fugg… a-budda. Zzzzally! Mmmrgfff’ at precisely the moment that a heavily medicated paranoid schizophrenic in the Bowditch Hall at McLean’s would exclaim, from swampy dreams: ‘Paternoster! Carthago delenda est! I am Caligula!’ And if you combined the sounds of their voices the recording might throw up a fragment of a word in Aramaic.
Sosso, a true believer, liked to use the image of each medium being a single string on a huge harp; you’d hear one note but you needed to hear the chord. Or the assemblage being a pipe organ: the more pipes you could hear the closer to the tune you got.
In a system they’d grimly termed ‘tag and release’, operating over more than two decades through homeless shelters, out-patient mental health units, combat veterans’ trauma units and addiction clinics, thousands of potential media had been identified and fitted with transponders, typically hidden in the fillings of their teeth, or in metal pins fitted somewhere in the skull or jaw where they could benefit from bone conduction.
The second generation of these devices were able to tell when the medium was asleep or unconscious, and flag the signals received accordingly. It was generally believed in the Directorate that sleep – or catatonia, states arising from hypnotic or psychedelic drugs, alcoholic dementia or near coma – was the most likely to yield what Sosso called ‘accurate’ or ‘high yield’ material.
Sosso’s team worked on these. They used bleeding-edge voice recognition and translation software to sieve the data, compiling and noting sentence fragments and unusual or foreign words. They combed different overlays and combinations of voices, experimented with staggering inputs according to the different time zones or lunar phases, squelched the bass or treble, speeded and slowed the recordings, even played fragments backwards on the off chance of backward-masked messages. Mostly, they came up mud.
They also tracked the frequencies of particular phonemes – according to time logged and geographical concentration. This was often what yielded the result.
Sosso had a piece of software that allowed her to mouse over a satellite map of the States. On the top-right side of her desktop were two panels – one a ticker tape of sentence fragments that had been tagged as of interest; another a dynamic list of the most common utterances, ranked in order of frequency, available for the last year, last week, last twenty-four hours, last minute.
Marked on the map with mobile red dots were tagged media – mostly, they were concentrated in western California and Florida. Manhattan was red. There was a scarlet dusting over Oklahoma and Montana, too.
If Sosso moused over a dot she could pull up a file: personal history and utterance history broken down statistically. A ticker tape of current utterance could be displayed, over the voice, in real time. The signals from Montana were always lousy, crackly as hell, but in the big cities, they freebooted on the cellphone networks.
Media who said the same thing as each other within a two-minute window would be colour-tagged blue for affinity. They’d return to red if a twelve-hour period had passed without a recurrence. If there was a recurrence, or something else significant to suggest a synchronicity, they’d go a brighter blue and slightly increase in size. A very thin blue line would connect them on-screen.
The usual global utterance rankings tended to have mushy collections of sibilants, non-signifying smacky-lip noises, belches and high whinnies of anxiety at the top. Few words made it in. The less imaginative obscenities sometimes made the top thirty. ‘Kill’ and ‘help’ and ‘mama’ occasionally nudged into the top hundred.
In the days preceding the arrival of the Intercept, the patterns had been altogether stranger. Usually, no more than a couple of blue lines at any one time appeared on Sosso’s map: a sketchy dark blue diagonal would connect the Mission District in San Francisco with the French Quarter in New Orleans for, maybe, forty-eight hours. A disconnected line would strike from Fire Island to Key West, flicker, evanesce. Accelerated to the one-second-to-six-hours timescale they used to scan manually for patterns, it looked like a broken 1980s screen saver: a dusting of red dots jittering like midges in the summer air, blue lines appearing at random and then disappearing a second or two later. Rarely, very rarely, one of the blue lines would sprout another line from one end, like an elbow, or two lines would intersect at a non-perpendicular vertex. Then that would go.
In the run-up to the Intercept, lines had appeared and stayed. Sleeping madmen were babbling the same things thousands of miles from each other, at opposite ends of America. These lines on the map formed a double-looping cat’s cradle with two huge empty patches. The lines intersected in Atlanta, where an unnamed vagabond – he had signed himself ‘Nobody’ in a smudgy scrawl when he’d been admitted to the Salvation Army shelter where he’d had the seizure and been tagged in ’98 – was saying, by the look of it, the same thing as his brother lunatics coast to coast.
The utterance charts for the media involved in this event were highly unusual. Underneath the noise, some consistent patterns were emerging: Nobody was producing them most consistently and urgently, but fragments of these utterances were uniting media on a sweeping continuum of tangents up the south-east.
A disyllable or trisyllable that seemed to be ‘Meat hook’, ‘Me door’, ‘Meet her’, ‘Ammeter’, ‘Umma’ or ‘Ramada’ was coming up. ‘Ankara’, ‘Gon’ and ‘Nameless’. ‘Wadis’, or ‘at ease’, or ‘hotsy’, too. Nobody had been able to make any sense of it and, in truth, Sosso would probably have been as freaked out as anybody else if they had. Most of the time Sosso – who was a true believer but inclined to the comforting notion that whatever signals came through from wherever would be deliberately impossible to understand – would affect excitement if they could coax half a line of a Kraftwerk lyric out of the whole of the continental United States.
It was the pattern and consistency of the affinity tags that was striking. It seemed impossible to account for by chance alone. And perhaps, Sosso had speculated, that was all they could hope for.
But in the last twenty-four hours, the blue dot that was the crossing point of the weird figure of eight started moving west – in fits and jerks. Right at that crossing point – still, apparently, ranting like a champ – was Nobody. The transmitter showed he was on the move, and his direction and pace seemed to be shadowing the data from the casino numbers.
Chapter 12
The point of the journey, for Alex, had become the driving itself. He felt as if he had left his old life – not for a holiday, or for a week, but entirely and irrevocably. He had moved deeper into his solitude. Even while he was moving forward towards Carey, he felt as if he was moving further away from everything else.
Road sadness crept up on him. He used the car stereo less and less. At first, he had driven with the windows down and the air rushing in, but as the hours passed he found the noise not exhilarating but distracting, and he stopped it. He wound the windows up, put the air con on. It made a gentle whoosh. When it got too cold, he turned it off. Then as the car heated he turned it on again. He did this automatively, unthinkingly, until day cooled into evening and he left it off altogether.
The road sadness was half pleasurable: less sharp than his initial homesickness. But it was what was going on, and he gave himself to it. The America he was driving through was familiar to him from films, but it wasn’t the America in the foreground of films but in the background: the highway America that was endless and the same everywhere.