Byron14: I am interested in your product.
whatwherewhen: Hello, Byron14. I hoped you would be.
On the ninth day after a man called Gauguin nearly burned me alive in a warehouse in Istanbul, I struck a deal with a stranger by the name of Byron14.
I said: I need papers, cash, clean, untraceable.
Byron replied: I want the base code of Perfection. Do I take it you do not, in fact, have this?
Not yet, I confessed. But you help me, and I will rip Perfection apart. I will tear Prometheus to pieces, I will…
You seem to be taking this quite personally, Byron mused.
You’ve got some fucked-up shit with Gauguin, haven’t you? I retorted.
No answer for a while, then,
Fair enough, he said. Okay. Let’s make a deal.
Byron14 was as good as his word. Within twenty-four hours of making our bargain, fifty thousand lira in mixed bills was waiting for me in a brown jiffy bag at a post box in Beyoğlu, and twelve hours after that, a forger by the name of Emine contacted me informing me her services had already been paid for and when would I be able to meet?
We met that evening on a yacht on the Sea of Marmara. The boat was called Good Intention, had high white sides and wooden finishes, a steering wheel with the face of a dragon carved in its centre, and a mahogany cigar-smoking Indian by the door to the bottom deck. Emine was in her mid-fifties, with an almost spherical face framed by an almost spherical burst of grey hair. The walls of the yacht were hung with watercolour paintings of Istanbul, none very good, all homemade. She wore a blue chiffon robe over a white cotton shirt, and as she led me into her workshop beneath the waterline her ankles jangled with jewellery, wooden charms and silver bangles, blue glass eyes to ward off evil. “Come, come, come!” she barked, leading me downstairs.
Her business was passport reclamation. “I’m an artist,” she exclaimed, “but people don’t appreciate my work, so I do this on the side. Come, come!”
She sat me down on a stool by a long bench covered in inks and glues, magnifying glasses and bits of computer cable. Opening a blue Tupperware box she started flicking through passports — Turkish, American, British, French, Russian, Indian, Japanese, Egyptian — all acquired from the foolish, the naïve or the dead.
“Are you British?”
“Yes.”
“You want to still be British?”
I shrugged. There are worse passports.
“You’d make a lovely American,” she exclaimed. “But no, too many people hate America, no good, no good. Iranian? No — wrong face for an Iranian. I can do you Bhutan, no one knows anything about Bhutan, and it’s clean, totally clean, you can use it for eight years no problem, money-back guarantee.”
“British is fine.”
“British passports are tricky, tricky! Barcodes, and now they’re putting in chips, I have to get my nephew to help me out with that sort of thing, he’s very good, bang bang, new identity, passport programmed happy good! In the old days,” she added, voice dropping with a sudden wistfulness, “it was just about making beautiful documents. But computers get everywhere now, all the old skills, dying; dying for machines.”
I smiled my most beatific smile, and resisted pointing out that certain professions, including mine, had proven themselves both flexible and immune to change.
UK passport photo requirements: professionally printed, 45mm x 35mm; in colour on plain white paper, taken against a plain cream or light grey background. The frame must include your head and shoulders; your head can occupy no more than 34mm of the height of the space, and no less than 29mm. You must wear a neutral expression, with your mouth closed, looking directly at the camera, without any head covering unless it is worn for religious purposes.
I told her all this, and she looked bewildered. “Just stand still for photo!” she barked.
The passport she eventually doctored for my purposes was of a British woman who “Went to Bangladesh,” she sighed, “and never came back.”
I was on a flight for Tokyo the same night.
Chapter 35
It was not the first time I had been poor, but I was out of practice. I had assets, years of cash squirrelled away in the event of emergencies, documents and new IDs; but none were in Turkey and too many could be traced by Gauguin. How easily my little empire had crumbled, but strangely I didn’t care. I thought I would feel regret at the loss of belongings, and yet, informing the clerk at the airport that I had no baggage to check in I felt curiously happy. My shoulders rolled back, my head drifted up, and when the plane taxied down the runway, I looked out of the window and found that I was smiling.
I had nothing in the world to call my own, but I had a passport, a destination, a bargain and a purpose.
It wasn’t merely the £1.2 million that Byron promised upon completion of the job that gave me a sense of ease; it was the job itself.
I was going to Tokyo to crack open the little piece of software that seemed to obsess both Byron and Gauguin, whose name had haunted me around my travels between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. I was going to steal Perfection, and it was good.
I’d asked:
whatwherewhen: What’s your interest in Perfection?
Byron14: What’s yours?
whatwherewhen: They pissed me off.
Byron14: Is that all?
whatwherewhen: Reina used it, in Dubai. Reina died.
Byron14: So? Software didn’t kill her.
whatwherewhen: It told her she was broken. Every day a reminder: you’re not trying hard enough, not eating, exercising, drinking, being, buying — buying your way to perfection, with Perfection. Perfection is owned by Prometheus, Prometheus flew in Princess Shamma bint Bandar, a deal to be struck, perfect things, perfect truths, perfect way to be Muslim, perfect hajj perfect zakat perfect fucking lives made fucking perfect and Reina was perfect already, she was depressed and never said it, alone and never spoke, she was good and she was fucking good she was the best one of them all and
I stopped typing, made myself a cup of tea.
Byron was waiting.
whatwherewhen: I think Gauguin would have been happy getting the diamonds back and arresting me, if you hadn’t got involved.
Byron14: You may be right.
whatwherewhen: I made a mistake when I got involved in this. I stole the jewels out of spite, not professionalism, and here we are.
Byron14: Perhaps.
whatwherewhen: If it weren’t for you, I could walk away.
Byron14: I doubt that.
whatwherewhen: I’m forgettable — Gauguin would forget me. He’s more interested in you. He called you a killer and a terrorist.
Byron14: That’s his point of view.
whatwherewhen: What gives?
No answer.
whatwherewhen: You want my help; I hate being a sucker.
Byron14: The man you call Gauguin and myself were lovers.
The answer was so simple, so easy, that I thought for a moment Byron was mocking me. But no jibes followed, no sign in our conversation that there was anything other than simple truth.
whatwherewhen: And now?
Byron14: I doubt he knows what he wants. It is good that you dislike Perfection, and good that you blame it for your friend’s death. You are right, to a degree. It has no mercy for those who do not conform. But you should understand that what you regard as a mobile app is a far more potent tool. It rewards conformity with financial and social advancement. At a hundred thousand points your diet, your exercise habits, your interests begin to habitually skew towards that which the creators of Perfection have dubbed “perfect”. At five hundred thousand points, your speech, your hobbies, your friends are all beginning to be turned the same way. At a million points you are invited to join the 106, where everyone is as perfect as you, and by the time you have reached this target, you are perhaps very different from who you are before. Perfection taps into every part of your life. It monitors phone calls, reads emails, accesses your bank account, tracks your internet search history, uses GPS to trace your location, rides shopping loyalty cards and mines data on your purchase habits, has access to the microphone and camera of your phone, can monitor your sleep, your waking hours, your work habits, your leisure activities. At its most basic it is a tool for marketing. The services you use — health, fitness, food, fashion — the services which make you perfect — are all paying a handsome fee to the app for their referral. At the purely theoretical end of its operation is the truth that Perfection comes with a pre-defined notion of what perfect means, and “perfect” is beautiful, confident, arrogant, rich, pampered and obscene. If there is a new Illuminati for our time, then it is the elite of Perfection, and unlike the legends of the Illuminati which went before, the only purpose of the 106 is to feast and feed. Do you want to destroy Perfection?