Off the Rails

∨ Off the Rails ∧

47

Roll

Here we go, thought Nikos Nicolau, counting down the seconds in the corner of his screen. This is going to be so damned cool. From team player to team leader at the touch of a button. The screen counter had stopped at 11,353, but if even a fraction of that number turned up he’d have proven his point. The bait-and-switch site had worked like a dream, setting up a flash mob that would last for four minutes, the duration of the song.

He waited until exactly 3:00 P.M. then hit Play. A video of the band opened onscreen, and the first power chord sounded. The band was called Shark Monkey (feat. Aisho DC Crew) and the song ‘Practically Perfect People’ had become a club anthem two years earlier, because the band members had taught the movements of their supremely vacuous song to the inmates of a South Korean prison. Since then it had replaced Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ as being the most imitated dance song ever to hit the Web. Even tiny kids in nursery schools knew the steps, which were a damned sight cooler than anything Michael Jackson ever recorded. And the best part was that he could get them to Rickroll* in the station without ever noticing the irony in the song’s lyrics.

≡ Named after the singer Rick Astley, whose fans turned up at stations to perform his greatest hit.

Nobody can be controlled.

Nobody can be patrolled.

What we do is what we love.

Nobody orders from above.

Where we are is where we stand.

The hottest lovers in the land.

And here he would be, controlling them through a broadcast to 11,353 iPods, BlackBerrys and assorted PDAs, beamed into the grand concourse of St Pancras International station. He remembered the Kissroll staged there a couple of years back, two hundred lovers smooching beneath the disproportionately vast, tacky statue called ‘The Kiss’ that dominated the station atrium, but this was on a different scale entirely.

More importantly, it would bring an end to the argument he’d been having with Rajan and the others about pedestrian flow in public areas. Rajan had argued that the public could be persuaded to walk in non-instinctive directions if properly directed. Groups generally moved in broad clockwise circles, Nikos had told him, because the nation drove on the left and people were used to driving clockwise around roundabouts. Customers entering shops usually headed left, circling the store and exiting from the right; it was the natural thing to do. But in countries where they drove on the other side of the road, the system was reversed.

The webcam feeds sent back by his viewers a few minutes earlier showed that the group in the station was automatically following a clockwise route. Social engineering only worked if the instructions didn’t contravene human instinct. Certain rules held true whatever the circumstances; build a block of flats with elevators opening onto the street, Nikos had argued, and they’d be avoided by residents because the lift-space became the property of the street rather than the tenants. Design a public lavatory where the urinals could be seen from the pavement, and the British public would be reluctant to use them. Deep-rooted beliefs in what constituted public and private spaces were hard-wired into the human psyche.

Except that something was wrong. The café’s broadband speed was pitifully slow, but as he checked the incoming feeds he could see that no-one was dancing. The song was already up to its first verse. What had gone awry? The chorus was coming up.

Gonna live like practically perfect people.

Gonna love like practically perfect people.

Live and love like practically perfect people.

Live and love like practically perfect people.

It wasn’t exactly Rimbaud, but it felt about right for the duped drones down on the concourse. He studied the feeds again. Nothing. They weren’t dancing. Why wasn’t anything happening? The video was playing perfectly. He could see it on the site. He opened the site’s admin page and checked the stats. He ran through the set-up and hit Log but found nothing unusual.

Then he saw it.

Although the destination was correct in the body of the site instructions, the Flashbox he had created to run as a site banner was wrong. Where he had typed in the location of the event, a pre-logged template had set the destination to King’s Cross station instead of St Pancras.

He had forgotten that although the two stations shared the same complex, they were entirely separate termini. He had lost concentration for a moment and clicked through to the wrong place.

Breaking into a sweat, he toggled back to one of the video feeds and zoomed out to take in the whole scene. Instead of the great vaulted ceiling of the Eurostar terminal, he found himself looking at a cramped, tiled hall. He had sent his flash mob to the wrong station.

Christ. The concourse at King’s Cross underground was minuscule compared to the one at St Pancras. A sinking sickness invaded Nikos’s stomach. He had instructed 11,353 people to meet there. Maybe some of them had figured it out and had made their way to the right meeting point, but what if the rest were trying to cram themselves into the small underground ticket hall beneath the main station? The result could be a massacre, like the ones that occurred at Mecca or the Heisel football stadium; people could be crushed to death in the ensuing chaos.

Sweating violently now, he killed the video and wiped his trail, removing the online instructions, shutting down the website, clearing the computer’s history. He was using his backup laptop, the one he had stored in his UCH locker, the one the police didn’t know existed. If there was any comeback, at least he had bought himself some time – until someone ran a trace from the host.

He knew that he would have to go and see for himself. It would be like rubbernecking at a traffic accident, but he had to make sure that his conscience was clear. Slipping the laptop into his rucksack, he zipped up his jacket and ran out into the rain.