Transmission

Noise

‘We want to abolish the unknown,’ writes one Leela researcher. It is a common enough desire. As humans, we want to know what is lurking outside our perimeter, beyond our flickering circle of firelight. We have built lenses and Geiger counters and mass spectrometers and solar probes and listening stations on remote Antarctic islands. We have drenched the world in information in the hope that the unknown will finally and definitively go away. But information is not the same as knowledge. To extract one from the other, you must, as the word suggests, inform. You must transmit. Perfect information is sometimes defined as a signal transmitted from a sender to a receiver without loss, without the introduction of the smallest uncertainty or confusion.

In the real world, however, there is always noise.

Since 1965 the Russian Academy of Sciences has published a journal called Problems of Information Transmission. It is, insofar as it is possible for a scientific publication (even a Russian one) to convey an emotional tone, a melancholy read. Threaded through recondite papers on Markov Chains and Hamming Spaces and binary Goppa codes and multivariate Poisson flow is a vocabulary of imperfection, of error correction and density estimation, of signals with unknown appearance and disappearance times, of indefinite knowledge and losses due to entropy. Sparse vectors are glimpsed through a haze of Gaussian white noise. Certainty backslides into probability. Information transmission, it emerges, is about doing the best you can.

In media dissections of the impact of the Leela variant viruses, the period when there was most noise in the global system has come to be known as Greyday. Greyday certainly lasted more than a day and was only grey in the most inexact and metaphorical sense, which means the person who invented the term was probably not an engineer. Nevertheless, the name captures a certain cybernetic gloom that hung about the time, the communal depression of network administrators yearning for perfection while faced with appalling losses, drop-outs, crashes and absences of every kind.

Greyday was an informational disaster, a holocaust of bits. A number of major networks went down simultaneously, dealing with such things as mobile telephony, airline reservations, transatlantic email traffic and automated-teller machines. The details of those events are in the public domain. Other systems were undoubtedly affected, but their military, corporate or governmental owners have been unwilling to discuss in public what may or may not have happened. As for the number of smaller cases, the problem becomes one of counting. Home computers? Individuals? Do you know anyone whom Leela did not touch in some way?

Leela’s noise passed effortlessly out of the networks into the world of things. Objects got lost: a van carrying armaments from a depot in Belgrade; a newly authenticated Rembrandt. Money in all sorts of physical forms dropped out of sight, but also money in its essence, which is to say that on Greyday a certain amount of money simply ceased to exist. This is a complicated claim. Money tends to virtuality. It hovers about in the form of promises and conditionalities, lying latent in the minds of market technicians until actualized through confidence, central bank fiat or a particularly long lunch. It is hard, in the end, to judge whether some of the money which did not exist after Greyday actually existed before it. Had Greyday not happened, perhaps a certain amount of unborn money might have come into the world. We cannot be certain. We do know that money disappeared, but how much and where it went are questions to which the market makers don’t really want an answer. Better, they say, to forget about it. Better to move on, dream up more.

So Greyday names a moment of maximal uncertainty, a time of peaking doubt. We have records of events which may not have taken place. Other events took place but left no record. All that can be said with honesty is that afterwards there were absences, gaps which have never been filled.

Empty hotel rooms, for example. Three rooms whose occupants are no longer there. When a person disappears, the objects they leave behind can be almost unbearable in their muteness. The more personal they are, the more they seem to underline the absence of their owner. The chambermaid at the four-star Hotel Ascension in Brussels turns down the bed, leaves on the pillow a chocolate and a voucher for a complimentary shoe-shine. On the dressing table is a litter of British coins, taxi receipts and other small items. Walkman headphones. An electrical adaptor. She hangs the suit-carrier in the cupboard and moves the washbag from the top of the television into the bathroom. The passport on the bedside table she does not touch. The maid working the morning shift receives no response to her knock. She enters to find everything exactly as her colleague left it. The bed has not been slept in. The toothbrush is dry. At lunchtime, the management take a call from a business associate of the occupier. He has failed to keep an appointment. Ten minutes later he calls again. At two, the hotel bills the absent businessman for an extra night. The police are not called until the following morning, by which time it is clear that something untoward has happened to Guy Swift.

A room upstairs at the Clansman’s Lodge Hotel in Scotland. One of the better ones, with a view over the garden and the loch. A mess of chintz and lace and rose-patterned wallpaper. A bowl of pot-pourri on the nightstand and a white plastic drinks-maker on the dresser, next to a little basket containing filters, creamer and vacuum-packed sachets of coffee. Most of her things are there, the expensive Banarsi saris, the make-up bags, the rows of spray cans and bottles in the bathroom. She has left a little portable DVD player and a stack of unwatched discs, still in a duty-free bag. She has left the giant stuffed monkey someone bought her as a get-well present. Under the bed is an empty cigarette packet and a torn-up copy of the shooting script, but Leela Zahir herself is not there. Her mother, sedated and incoherent, manages to communicate that she thinks some clothes have gone. Also her daughter’s laptop. Iqbal is holding Leela’s passport, but it is possible she has another. The police are reassuring. In rural Scotland, an Indian girl will not be able to travel far without attracting attention.

Events at the Riverside Motel in San Ysidro are more violent. Acting on information provided by a member of the public, the FBI has traced a man on their most-wanted list to a room on one of the upper floors. Though the suspect is not believed to be armed, he has known militant connections and the team assembled at the FBI field office in San Diego includes staff from the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Written orders have been received confirming the authorization of maximum force. Weapons specialists from the police, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms draw equipment from stores and under the direction of a senior officer from the San Diego Police the team proceeds at speed to the named location. A command post is established in a nearby parking lot, and a discreet perimeter is set up around the motel, a priority being not to cause panic among shoppers at the outlet mall. Staff are evacuated from the area before the team moves in.

Access to Room 206 is swift and brutal. The door gives way immediately under the impact of a 35-pound close-quarter battle ram. Agents shout a warning to the occupant, who does not respond. Shots are fired. The occupant goes down. An ambulance is called and arrives quickly, but the victim is pronounced dead at the scene. Later the corpse is transferred to a morgue in San Diego. Unfortunately for the arresting team, when examined it turns out to be not Arjun Mehta, suspected terrorist and subject of a federal warrant, but an unidentified South-East Asian teenager. The dead boy is found to be carrying a cheap.22 handgun.

Within minutes local news media is on the scene. The officer who fired is taken back to the field office for debriefing and psychological assessment, while the Riverside Motel is cordoned off and a series of photographs of the room are taken, photographs which will rapidly leak out on to the internet and spawn detailed speculation about (among other things) the brands of packaging in the waste-paper basket, the crumpled Oakland Raiders shirt in the bathroom. Some information trickles out to the media. The boy’s name was Kim Sun Hong, a high-school student from San Diego. The gun was of a type sold for $7.98 in certain out-of-state gun stores. What he was doing in Arjun Mehta’s room remains, for the moment, a mystery.

Though dramatic, the disappearances of Guy Swift, Arjun Mehta and Leela Zahir are not unique. They form part of a much larger pattern of virus-related disturbance: on Greyday there was heavy traffic across the border between known and unknown. The easiest story to resolve, or at least tell, is Guy Swift’s, for the simple reason that he came back. His foray into the zone lasted just under a month, during which time an intensive (if under-resourced) search was conducted across the UK and northern Europe. Police followed up sightings in Bremen, Malmö, Le Havre, Portsmouth. The media circulated the theory of underworld involvement, and at one point police announced that they believed the ‘runaway UK business-man’ had orchestrated his own disappearance to avoid financial problems.

After his return to the UK, Swift went to ground. The initial wave of media attention focused on the possibility of legal action. Everyone confidently expected a damages claim, a claim he surely would have won given the extraordinary treatment he had received, but it quickly became apparent that all he really wanted was to slip out of sight. The supposedly flamboyant marketeer turned out to be a poor interviewee. His few press statements were unrevealing, almost monosyllabic. After a while, the media lost interest.

Today anyone wanting to speak to the ‘London highflyer’ discovered ‘washed up on holiday beach’ has to find him first. Following Tomorrow*’s collapse, its Shoreditch offices were sold and the old sweatshop now houses a direct-mail company. Its former CEO is no longer resident at his old riverside address and does not appear on the electoral register elsewhere in London. Research confirms that a Battersea estate agency handled the sale of the In Vitro apartment on behalf of Tomorrow*’s creditors, but they will say only that the new owner is a US-based financial institution which uses the place as accommodation for senior staff visiting London. Swift’s former CFO and creative director, both now working at the Geist Agency, claim to have had no contact with him since his ill-fated Brussels trip. Interestingly both hint that it was Swift’s changed personality and lack of interest in Tomorrow*, rather than its ongoing liquidity problems, which ultimately caused its demise. Speaking on the phone from LA, where she is working as a lifestyle manager, his former assistant Kika Willis puts it simply: ‘He wasn’t Guy any more. It turned him into a freak.’

Determined digging will finally lead up a long rutted farm track which runs off a winding b-road in the North Pennines. At its end, sheltering under a lowering granite escarpment, is a single-storey stone cottage with deep-set windows and a slate roof, a squat little structure designed to withstand battering by the Northumbrian wind and rain. The bleak landscape around it has changed very little in hundreds of years. Sheep graze moorlands marked by dry-stone boundary walls. Down in the valley a river cuts a channel through rich pasturage that is waterlogged in spring and frozen hard in winter. The nearest village is five miles away. From a distance the house appears disused. Rusting agricultural equipment sits outside, and on a rainy day the only hint of colour is the red paintwork of the elderly Ford Fiesta parked by the door. The plume of smoke rising up from the chimney comes as a shock, a sign of human presence where none was expected.

The man who opens the door does not look much like the press photos which circulated at the time of his disappearance. He wears a full beard, which hides much of his face and gives him a severe and patriarchal look. He is dressed in shapeless cord trousers and a thick cableknit sweater with a hole in the sleeve. It would be hard to imagine someone who looks less like a London media-agency boss.

As Guy leans over an elderly gas stove to boil water for tea, the visitor seated at the kitchen table can surreptitiously look at his or her surroundings. The oak table is scarred and pitted by years of use. A set of windchimes hangs by the window, and on the sill by the sink there is a row of odd misshapen pots holding garden herbs. The impression is of neatness, domesticity. As he brings the tea, served in big blue and white enamel mugs, you might notice his hands. They are calloused, the nails cracked and dirty.

Guy likes to talk about the earth. It is, he claims, the source of life. ‘Before,’ he recalls, ‘Ig lived under a great deal of geopathic stress.’ He subscribes to the theory that London (and to a lesser extent other cities) causes an immense distortion of the earth’s natural energy field, a distortion which inflicts physical and psychological suffering on the people forced to live inside it. ‘It took,’ he says, shaking his head, ‘a total life change to get me well again.’ Moving to this remote spot was the only solution. ‘Otherwise things would have run away from me completely.’

The earth is also behind Guy’s post life-change career choice. The pots on the windowsill are his. One room of the cottage has been converted into a workshop, complete with a wheel and a small electric kiln. At the drop of a hat he will demonstrate his throwing technique, or offer to share the secrets of a favourite blue glaze. Despite his enthusiasm, he is not the most talented potter, but, though they may be lumpy and erratic, his pieces have a certain charm. They are sincere pots. The new Guy Swift is a sincere man.

Ragdale Scar, the escarpment behind the cottage, plays an iconic role in Guy’s life. It is the source, he says, of his healing power. Somehow it seems best to skirt the question of his having a healing power in the first place. He has had little success in selling his ceramics, and, though he put up a notice in a nearby village pub, no one has yet come to him to be geopathically realigned, despite the conditional refund offer. Recently he has started to supplement his dole money by helping a crew of local men repair field walls.

His most treasured possession is a small bottle of sand. It comes from the beach in Puglia where he was found by cara-binieri in what the British Consul in Naples drily terms ‘a state of distress’, having been dumped from a dinghy into the sea some distance from shore by a crew of Albanian people-smugglers. The story he told the police was barely credible, and when it was confirmed caused ripples throughout the European Union, not least in the offices of the nascent Pan European Border Authority, which was later held directly accountable.

He was, he thinks, partly to blame. Blind drunk and heinously misaligned, he allowed himself to be taken to an unknown suburb of a strange city by a woman of easy virtue. He describes himself now, with a certain prim disgust, as a ‘drinker and substance abuser’, though these traits were, he accepts, evidence of the distorted geomagnetism of his living and working environment. He has no distinct memory of what happened to him between leaving the lapdancing club with the woman he knew as Irina and waking up some time later, lying on a bed in a small room with green bamboo-patterned wallpaper. Black plastic had been taped over the window. Apart from the bed and a chipped melamine dresser, the room was empty.

His head ached and he was naked apart from his tie, which was tied round his head like a Japanese headband. He was still wearing his watch, which told him it was 5.10 a.m., news that threw him into a panic because of the pitch meeting later that day He found his clothes under the bed and stumbled out of the door to find himself looking down the stairwell of some kind of apartment building. The door on the other side of the landing was open and through it he could see a bedroom full of Chinese men, sitting two or three to a bunk, smoking and playing cards beneath lines of drying washing. He wondered if he was in some kind of hostel.

A bell rang. Someone must have opened the front door, because the next thing he heard was the sound of shouting, and heavy boots coming up the stairs. Half awake and hung over, he reacted slowly All around him chaos was erupting. Chinese men were running by, clutching trousers and cigarette cartons and pairs of trainers. A pair of young East African women, one carrying a baby in a sling, ran on to the landing, then turned round and fled back inside. Guy decided to return to his room. Whatever was happening had nothing to do with him. A moment later he was gripped in a head-lock by a man dressed in a dark blue Belgian police uniform.

‘All right,’ he remembers calling out in English. ‘Christ. Take it easy.’

The policeman forced him to the ground and kneeled on his neck. ‘English,’ Guy gurgled. ‘I’m fucking English.’ By that time he had worked out what was happening. He was in the middle of an immigration raid.

He did not make the connection with Operation Atomium until he was already in the police van. He had been squeezed in with the East African women, several Chinese still in their underwear and a shaven-headed gendarme who looked blankly at him when he tried to talk to him in English. Going through his pockets, he realized his wallet and phone were missing. He supposed Irina had stolen them. At least she had left his watch. It was a good watch. It was water resistant to 200 metres.

As the van made its way through the streets of Brussels, the Chinese men started to smoke and talk in low unconcerned voices, as if this were just another confined space, just the latest in a series. The police van filled up with a blue tobacco haze, and Guy tried to work out the quickest way of extricating himself. With no ID it would, he supposed, take an hour or two to establish his identity. He would be short of sleep, but he should still make the meeting. He might get time to have an hour’s nap. There was even a potential upside to what was happening. In a certain light, being picked up in PEBA’s first coordinated sweep could be viewed as a work-related activity. He was seeing the system in operation. His misadventure was actually research. Mentally he started to script a new section of his presentation. At Tomorrow* we believe in getting our hands dirty. We believe in firsthand knowledge of the brand in action… He settled down on the metal bench and smiled at the people opposite him. All he needed was Nurofen and access to a phone. Everything was going to be fine.

A temporary processing centre had been set up by Belgian immigration in a hangar at Zaventem Airport. The van parked at a side entrance and, still smiling, Guy was given a number and led into a holding area. Sitting on plastic seats were tall Somalis and tiny Latinos, Nigerians and Byelorussians, Filipinos and Kazakhs. Groups of young men conferred in huddles. Parents comforted crying babies. There were more illegals than Guy had expected. It looked as if they had turned the city upside down and shaken it. An impressive operation.

After a few minutes of relatively interesting observational research, his good mood began to fray. His chair was uncomfortable, and the elderly Arab next to him kept falling asleep on his shoulder. Though he tried to attract the attention of the guards, none seemed interested in talking to him. He spoke loudly and clearly. I am EU cit-i-zen. I need ta-xi to my ho-tel. As the minutes lengthened, his serenity waned to irritation.

He tried to snatch some sleep, but was kept awake by the noise and the brightness of the hangar’s halogen lights. One by one the detainees were being interrogated in a row of roofless cubicles at the far end of the hangar. Afterwards, most were returned to the holding area. At 7.45 a.m. his number was finally called. He went in shouting, giving full vent to several hours’ worth of indignation. Leaning across her ugly little desk, he berated the immigration officer, demanding instant access to the British Consul and throwing around phrases like ‘wrongful arrest’ and ‘unlawful detention’ with all the righteous anger of a man whose free passing has been subject to both let and hindrance, and who reckons that local standards of assistance and protection have fallen well below what Her Britannic Majesty would expect.

Though factually he was probably justified in most of the points he made, his approach was unhelpful. The officer appeared unruffled, addressing him first in French and then (when he screamed at her that she was a stupid deaf bitch who would lose her job in two minutes if she didn’t fucking call him a cab) switching to English to ask in a flat monotone, ‘What is your name?’

He told her his name. She asked his real name. He told her his name again, and then told her to fuck off.

‘You speak very good English,’ she said. ‘What is your first language?’

‘English, you idiotic tart.’

Banging the table was a bad idea. She must have pressed some kind of panic button, because two policemen ran into the room, threw him to the floor and sat on his back, cracking his head against the concrete a couple of times to make sure he got the point. Only when they judged that he was calm did they let him sit back down on the chair. Each time he spoke he was told to be silent. The third time he opened his mouth one of the policemen casually slapped him round the face. He was too stunned to be angry.

The immigration officer had no further questions for him. He made conciliatory faces at her, increasingly desperate faces intended to convey strong European fellow feeling. She supervised as the policemen took his fingerprints and would not meet his eye as he was frogmarched out of the room towards a part of the hangar he supposed was the secure area, a screened-off wire-mesh enclosure patrolled by policemen carrying semiautomatic weapons.

The enclosure held about a dozen men, who eyed him suspiciously. He looked at his watch. It was just after 8 a.m. At 8.30 a.m. he finally gave in to the crushing realization that none of his fellow prisoners had a mobile. He had repeated the world telephone in various accents, spreading out the fingers of one hand and making circling motions with the other. He was stuck. He decided to try to get some sleep.

At 9.15 a.m. two Afghans tried to steal his watch. They were prevented by the guards. After that he tried to stay awake.

At 10.20 a.m. he was called into a second interview room. Two men sat behind a desk. There were no other chairs. His police escorts stayed at his side. As one man addressed him in bursts of rapid French, the second translated into a strange, guttural language full of z’s and j’s. Guy kept asking them to speak English, repeating that he did not understand, that there had been a mistake, until the interviewer threw up his hands in an expression of mock-despair and said something which made everyone else in the room burst out laughing. A formal declaration of some kind was read out, in which he was addressed as Monsieur Georges something or other. ‘Please,’ he told them, ‘je ne comprends. I’m not that person. I’m British. Moi Guy Swift, citeezahn Breeteesh.’

The immigration officer smiled. ‘Of course, Mr Swift,’ he said sarcastically. The policemen led him out of the room.

It was the man’s smug expression that made Guy panic. Certainty in a job well done, good riddance to bad rubbish. He started to scream that he needed a lawyer, was being kidnapped, had to get to an important meeting. A policeman winded him with a swift blow to the stomach, which stopped him struggling long enough to be handcuffed and thrown back into the wire-mesh pen. He shook the wire, shouting for help and banging the fence posts with the heel of his shoe in the vain hope that someone else in the room, some British police observer perhaps, would hear his accent and come to his rescue. He made so much trouble that he was taken across the tarmac on to the specially chartered plane with his hands and legs cuffed to a wheelchair. Tape was stuck over his mouth to stop him shouting, and a motorcycle helmet was shoved down over his head to prevent him biting his escorts or knocking himself out, both of which he had been seriously considering as options. At 2 p.m., when he was supposed to be sitting down with Director Becker and the other members of the PEBA public presentation working group, he was at 35,000 feet, flying deportation class en route to Tiranë, Albania.

How Guy Swift, young marketeer, British national and vocal speaker of English came to be identified as Gjergj Ruli, Albanian national, suspected pyramid fraudster and failed asylum seeker in Germany was one of the more bizarre stories to result from the infection of the Schengen Information System by what is now known as Variant Eight Leela, the so-called transpositional worm. The ‘shuffling’ action of Leela08, which randomly reassociates database attributes, was responsible for the destruction of a huge number of EU immigration records before it was finally spotted and the system closed down some thirty-six hours after Guy Swift’s deportation. The same infection in machines hosting the Eurodac fingerprint database produced a number of false positives, identifying innocent people as known criminals, failed asylum seekers or persons being monitored by European intelligence services. Combinations of the two types of infection led (at a conservative estimate) to some thirty mistaken deportations. Since Operation Atomium relied almost entirely on two bullet-pointed strengths — [slide 1] the fast identification of deportation candidates through Eurodac and the SIS; and [slide 2] special powers to accelerate processing of deportation candidates — it led to a situation in which (among other abuses) people were plucked from their homes at night and deposited in some of the world’s more troubled places without so much as a change of clothes, let alone money or a way of contacting home. Ukrainian brothers Pyotr and Yuri Kozak made contact with members of a Russian oil-exploration team who spotted them begging outside a bar in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. A Pakistani grandmother, 71-year-old Noor Begum, who had been visiting her family in Bradford, was repatriated from the Yemen via a religious charity.

Asked to describe Tiranë, Guy Swift just shakes his head. ‘I won’t talk about that place,’ he mutters. On his return, doctors described him as being ‘in poor physical condition’. The nature of the twenty-six days he spent in Tiranë can only be guessed at from the testimony of Albanians who saw a man fitting his description foraging for scraps behind restaurants in the city centre.

The only aspect of his time in Albania that Guy is prepared to discuss is the kindness shown to him by someone called Rudolph, a seventeen-year-old Liberian he met near the ferry dock at the port of Durrës. It was Rudolph who helped him sell his watch, which he had miraculously managed to keep safe, in return for a berth on one of the regular powerboat runs which took would-be Europeans to the Italian coast.

The boat was a small inflatable dinghy, carrying two crewmen and four other passengers, a Bangladeshi couple and their two children. The sea was choppy and visibility was poor. When the lights of a customs launch were spotted in the distance, the two traffickers immediately pitched all five of them into the sea. As Guy fell overboard, he remembers his absolute sense of certainty that he would drown. Asked what passed through his mind, he refuses to answer. It was, he says, ‘just luck’ that he swam in the right direction. He was washed ashore just before dawn on a tourist beach south of Bari. At first light he was found, semiconscious, muttering incoherently and clutching handfuls of European sand. He has, he says, no idea what happened to the Bangladeshis.

Guy Swift dominated the media for two or three days after his return. Arjun Mehta, the ‘evil scientist’ (New York Post) whose ‘twisted genius’ (London Evening Standard) threatened the world with ‘techno meltdown’ (Sydney Daily Telegraph), has rarely been out of the headlines since the last confirmed sighting of him at the Riverside Motel in San Ysidro. Despite an immense investment of police time and resources, Mehta, whose image is now one of the most widely circulated in the world, has never been apprehended. The FBI believes he is no longer alive, a position they recently reaffirmed despite the negative outcome of DNA matches performed on a corpse, thought to be his, dredged out of the LA river.

The San Ysidro Factory Outlet Center has become a favourite pilgrimage site for conspiracy theorists, who take notes and photographs, speak into dictaphones and measure distances with pocket ultrasonic devices. Like the Zapruder footage or the Watergate Tapes, the mall’s surveillance record of Arjun Mehta’s seemingly aimless amble from the Timberland Store to Starbucks has been pored over, debated and scrutinized for signs of tampering by the police and security services. As Leela researchers try to forge connections, reaching into ever-more recondite areas of speculation, the other people on the tapes, the ‘pony-tailed man’, the ‘loving couple’ and the slight figures of Kim Sun Hong and Jordan Lee have all been the subject of intense research. So far the results are inconclusive. As time passes and the volume of secondary material increases, the true meaning of the Leela occlusions is becoming, if anything, more obscure.

Attention has focused on the $8.99 yellow-rimmed ‘Freebird’ plastic sunglasses purchased by Mehta during the so-called ‘coffee-walk’. Their conspicuousness invites speculation that they were some kind of signal, a position reaffirmed (or according to other Mehtologists, refuted) by the ethnicity of the clerk. Sunglasses manufactured in South Korea. Bought from a clerk of Vietnamese origin. On various Leela websites a photograph of the Seoul plant where model 206-y was manufactured is presented as evidence. Beside the company name is the Cho-Sun Plastics logo: a dancing female figure.

From Mehta’s behaviour on the tapes, it appears he was unaware that he was being followed. As he walked into Starbucks, he was picked up by the in-store camera, which recorded him putting down his bag, conspicuously polishing his new Freebird model 206-y’s and fishing in his pocket for money. Some weeks after the coffee-walk a tape surfaced, purportedly made by a student sitting at a table near the cash register who was conducting an interview for a graduate history project. In the background of a conversation about the Little Landers, a Utopian agrarian community which existed in San Ysidro in the early years of the twentieth century, two voices can be heard. Spectrographic analysis has confirmed that they belong to Arjun Mehta and Ramona Luisa Velasquez, whose biography on the LeelaTruth site alleges that soon after the conversation she was fired, ostensibly for joining a union. It should be noted that even LeelaTruth’s floridly paranoid webmaster has failed to connect this to the main thrust of his Mehta-disappearance theory, which unites the Rosicrucians, CNN and the opening of the global pineal eye.

A transcript of the so-called Little Lander tape:

VOICE 1 [Arjun Mehta]: Latte to go please.

VOICE 2 [Ramona Velasquez]: Regular or tall?

AM: Tall.

[inaudible]

RV: There you go / That’ll be two thirty-five /

Sugar and lids are over there.

AM: Thanks.

RV: No problem / [inaudible: on a ten?]/ Have a nice day.

AM: [inaudible]

There is very little, short of cabbalistic letter substitution, that can be done to extract hidden meaning from this exchange. This has not stopped prominent Leela researchers from claiming variously that (a) Velasquez passed some kind of tool or document to Mehta in the coffee cup; (b) she was in the pay of a governmental agency (probably the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms); or (c) the drop-outs on the tape were caused by the high-frequency electronic data bursts which the Old Ones use in place of human speech.

Despite being labelled a terrorist by governments and media agencies around the world, Arjun Mehta has admirers. According to Julia Schaffer of the Symantec Corporation, who has written extensively on Mehta’s programming techniques, the viruses he unleashed represent ‘a revolution in code’. The range of the innovations in the Leela variant viruses is, she says, ‘simply breathtaking’. Her research group has developed several applications based on Mehta polymorphic engines. ‘He was a black hat,’ she admits, ‘and that’s kind of a shame.’ Pinned to the corkboard by her desk she has Mehta’s picture, next to that of Claude Shannon.

The figures of the outlaw and the unrecognized genius are dear to many in the computer underground, and Mehta (combining both) has become a hero to a younger generation of disaffected hackers who feel their contributions are undervalued by the corporations and misunderstood by an ignorant and hostile public. Judging by the hagiographic tone of postings and zine articles, there is certainly no shortage of people who would be willing to assist the fugitive if he arrived on their doorstep. The supernatural perfection of his vanishing act has only added to his mystique. A series of autonomist tracts written in Italian and signed with his name caused a huge stir in left-wing European political circles. The hope that the genius hacker might also be a revolutionary was so strong in certain quarters that it has survived the revelation that the Leela papers were the creation of a group of Bologna-based radicals, who had appropriated Mehta’s name as a gesture and invited anyone else who wished to use it to do the same. In recent times ‘Arjun Mehta’ has authored statements on the food industry and the World Trade Organization. His Virugenix employee ID photo, the same one Julia Schaffer has by her desk, has been screen-printed on to t-shirts with humorous anti-capitalist slogans. Arjun Mehta, Gap loyalty-card holder and habitué of Seattle Niketown, is rapidly changing shape.

For a long time the police could not explain Kim Sun Hong’s presence in Arjun Mehta’s hotel room. The boy was from a conservative middle-class Korean family, a good student whose main interest was in computer gaming. Nothing in his previous behaviour suggested any propensity for violence, let alone terrorist connections. Questions abounded. Had Mehta met the boy in a chatroom? Was there a paedophile link? Had Hong been coerced into assisting Mehta in his ‘campaign to undermine America’ (Fox News)? Civil-rights groups accused the police of covering up their reckless use of firearms. Korean-Americans demonstrated outside San Diego City Hall. The claim that the teenager had ‘levelled his weapon’ at Officer Corey Studebaker was widely disbelieved.

A breakthrough in the police investigation came only when analysis of mall surveillance tapes recorded images of Hong and another boy following Mehta at a distance. Jordan Lee, a classmate, was identified as Hong’s companion and rapidly broke down under interrogation. The story he told police was so fantastic that for some days they refused to believe it. Could he and Hong, aged respectively thirteen and fourteen, really have been acting as bounty hunters?

The Criminal Investigation Bureau of the Korean National Police Agency substantiated the background to Lee’s tale. Logs subpoenaed from the Boba Fett Game Café did the rest. It seemed that five days before the Riverside raid, a computer centre in Seoul was hit by variant 04 (rhizomatic) Leela, not one of the more destructive strains but difficult and time-consuming to eradicate. The incident would barely have registered had the centre not housed the servers for ElderQuest, an online role-playing game vastly popular in Korea.

ElderQuest is set in a fantasy world with the usual furniture of dragons, wizardry, castles and large-breasted barbarian women. Players, of whom there are four million in Korea alone (almost one in twelve of the entire population), join adventuring groups, trying to gain the power and experience points which will allow them to move up in the social hierarchy of the cod-medieval land of Yerba. When not battling an array of monsters, players spend time in various kinds of social interaction. Marriages are contracted. Political factions are formed and dissolved. There is even a legal system, set up to curb the actions of those who abuse ElderQuest’s complicated barter system. Economists have written papers about the evolution and management of the game’s markets. Korean social scientists are starting to look seriously at so-called Virtual World Syndrome, whose sufferers appear conflicted about the value of their real and game-world experiences.

The Leela infection meant that the ElderQuest servers had to be shut down and reset from backups, an operation which took two days and involved some loss of data. Effectively, all the characters operating within the game-world found themselves back where they had been two days previously, minus all experience and attributes picked up in the interim.

This was annoying for many people but disastrous for the Honour Friend Sword Clan. The day before the shutdown their surprise attack had decimated the superior forces of Lord Farfhrd’s Power Blood Pledge Society, gaining them control of Castle Obsidian and a huge quantity of treasure. Now safely in possession of the Axe of Maldoror, S’tha the Muscular had attained the forty-fifth level in Swordsmanship and would henceforth receive tithes from all the lands around the castle and the nearby free city of Bigburgh. It was the greatest victory in the clan’s history. After the reboot the Power Blood Pledge, who now had foreknowledge of the attack, descended on S’tha’s camp under the protection of an Adamantine Shield spell and killed sixteen characters, including S’tha himself, who was reincarnated in Freetown as a first-level apprentice with three gold pieces, a knife and a small leather buckler. S’tha and the Honour Friend Sword were understandably angry.

S’tha (in real life 26-year-old Li Kwan Young, well known to Seoul police) had not simply lost imaginary status and treasure. So popular is ElderQuest that its potions, scrolls, weapons and armour have real-world value: the going rate on eBay for a good-quality summoning spell is over $80. Young, who had amassed an enormous magical armoury (allegedly through extortion of other players), had lost a genuine fortune.

Young wrote several outraged emails to the game administrators. He was told there was nothing they could do. In desperation he and several other players from Honour Friend Sword turned up at the offices of NambiSoft, the game’s owners, to demand the reinstatement of their victory. When security tried to remove them from the building, a scuffle broke out in the lobby and the police had to be called.

By any standards, the following day’s posting to the ElderQuest message scrolls was an escalation. Honour Friend Sword offered fireballs, invisibility lotions, the Stay Wand of Ha-Shek and other game goods to the value of 30,000 gold pieces to anyone prepared to ‘undertake a RL quest’ to ‘disincarnate’ the person who caused the server reset. Mehta’s picture was being widely circulated by the FBI. The amount of the bounty was huge. To the amazement of the police investigators, it appeared Jordan Lee was telling the truth. Every reality-challenged role player in the world had been out looking for Arjun Mehta. He and Hong were just the ones who got lucky. They had skipped school and tailed him to San Ysidro, checking his face against the FBI mugshot. To get the gun, they had traded Tiger Woods’s home phone number with a Thai kid who came into Boba Fett’s to play Starcraft. At the Riverside Motel, Jordan had got scared, and after a whispered argument Hong (who in the previous month had logged 210 hours connected to the ElderQuest servers as Peenar the Stealthy, an eighteenth-level footpad) had climbed through the window alone. At the critical moment Jordan was waiting on a street corner two blocks away. He did not see Mehta at any point after he came out on to the balcony.

Jordan Lee was never charged with anything, although Boba Fett’s computing equipment was confiscated, and it eventually lost its licence. As the only person to have spent time observing Mehta in the hours before his disappearance, Lee rapidly acquired celebrity status. He underwent hypnosis on television, testified before the Homeland Security Select Committee of the House of Representatives and now makes regular public appearances at gaming and paranormal conventions around the US.

A major area of disagreement among Mehtologists is how Arjun made his escape from the Riverside Motel. Various methods have been proposed, ranging from the theory that he impersonated Consuelo Guttierez, an off-duty chambermaid inexplicably sighted at work that morning, to the possibility he spent several hours wedged above a ceiling panel in the bathroom. However he managed it, his trail went completely cold in San Ysidro, and most people believe he crossed the border, probably in disguise. There was no further activity on his bank account. He did not, despite careful surveillance, appear to make contact with family or known acquaintances. How is it possible, in a world of electronic trails, log files, biometrics and physical traces of every kind to slip so completely away? Researchers have tried to prove connections with the criminal underworld, or the various international terrorist organizations to which, in the first hysterical days of the manhunt, he was linked. So far, nothing convincing has emerged. Were there friends who might have provided assistance? One possible accomplice was the ‘pony-tailed man’ caught on camera at the outlet mall, whom many people have identified as Nicolai Petkanov, the boyfriend of the woman whose car Mehta stole when fleeing Redmond. A convicted virus writer, Petkanov denies ever having met Mehta, but confirms that it was a trace placed on a landline at the address he shared with Christine Rebecca Schnorr which led the FBI to the Riverside Motel. Schnorr has admitted a romantic relationship with Mehta, a relationship of which Petkanov was apparently aware. Whether this makes his cooperation in a plot to assist Mehta more or less likely is hard to know. Schnorr, confusingly, denies that she had any kind of conversation with Mehta after he left Redmond. She and Petkanov have both recently relocated to Mexico, where they intend to set up a body-modification parlour in Oaxaca.

Journalists researching Mehta’s background have focused on his use of the North Okhla Institute of Technology server as a test-bed and distribution node for his viruses. When they became established in new host machines, certain Leela variants even downloaded plug-ins from this site. The lack of security was universally condemned, and admissions for NOIT’s information-science courses have boomed. Unfortunately Mehta seems to have formed no strong personal bonds with anyone from his course, and interviews with former teachers and classmates have yielded few clues.

Aamir Khan, manager of Gabbar Singh’s Internet Shack and Mehta’s only known close friend, is considered the most likely source of help. Sought by police in connection with various offences under the Indian Penal Code relating to the distribution of pornography, Khan has not been seen since soon after Mehta’s identification as the originator of the Leela viruses. Did he organize fake papers for his friend, then fly him to a clinic in Shanghai for facial reconstruction? Did he send him through a network of mujahedin safehouses to an underground madrassa in Kandahar? Gabbar Singh’s is now a fancy-goods shop, much to the disappointment of the stream of teenage boys who turn up to hang around outside the door. The manager, disregarding the entrepreneurial opportunity staring him in the face, has hired a chowkidar to drive them away.

Mehta’s family no longer live in Noida. The media attention, not to mention the grief and worry about their son, led them to flee India for Australia, where they now stay close to their daughter and son-in-law in the Sydney suburb of Fairfield. Mr Mehta, who has retired from the world of business, refuses all interviews. Priti Chaudhuri and her husband Ramesh released a statement through their lawyer to the effect that they have not had contact with Arjun since he fled Redmond and do not believe in the ‘wilder accusations’ made against him.

Like Arjun Mehta, Leela Zahir has never reappeared. Despite the evidence that she had planned her exit, India went into hysterical mourning on hearing the news, as if their star were dead instead of missing. One fan announced that he would walk backwards from Bangalore to Madurai to propitiate God to bring her back. There were unconfirmed reports of people setting themselves on fire.

Tender Tough looked doomed, but, with a certain amount of coaxing from his backers, Rocky Prasad managed to swallow his artistic scruples about completing the film with another actress. The version which made it to the screen includes scenes in which the young dancer Shanti is seen only from behind, and throughout the film the character’s voice has been dubbed, yet it contains several moments which possess an extraordinary retrospective poignancy. The song ‘Now You See Me, Now You Don’t’, including the legendary battlements sequence, can still, after all this time, be heard blaring from every tea stall in the country. Frame by frame, people have searched it for some clue about Leela Zahir’s state of mind. Her Scottish ‘illness’ and her history of personal problems soon came into the public domain, providing weeks of fodder for the film magazines, but as the camera lunges towards the tiny figure dancing on top of the castle, it reveals no sign of sadness or disaffection. Quite the opposite: in no other performance does Leela look so completely, joyously engaged with the world. She is so alive that her imminent absence appears obscene, proof of a terrible and oppressive power over human life.

The film, it goes without saying, was a huge hit. Prasad, Iqbal and Rana were photographed drinking virgin coladas at the lavish première, held in a Mumbai hotel banqueting suite decorated to look like a Pacific Island. After ritual expressions of sorrow at Leela’s absence and a few minutes of vague embarrassment, things more or less proceeded as normal. Deals were struck, catty remarks were made behind glamorous backs, and everyone looked over each other’s shoulders as they chatted, in case something scandalous was occurring on the other side of the room. The film world knew they had lost something in Leela Zahir. They just didn’t know what they ought to feel about it.

A more honest reaction came from Leela’s people, the faithful cinema fans who had projected their desires on to her towering luminous face. Eighteen months after its release, Tender Tough was still showing daily at one Mumbai cinema. People had already started to refer to the missing actress as Leeladevi, and among the cinema-goers, Hindu and Muslim alike, her simplicity, her beauty and above all her supernatural absence had come to seem like holy qualities. Little votive pictures appeared on market stalls. In a village in Bihar, a boy was reported to have been miraculously cured of blindness while a pirated VHS of the film was being shown on the headman’s television.

How the film star vanished from the Clansman’s Lodge Hotel came to light only after the tragic death of the wife of media mogul Brent Haydon. During the eighteen months of her marriage, Gabriella Haydon-Caro had been a fixture on the European and American social circuits. She and her husband, who at fifty-five was gradually stepping down from the day-to-day running of his various interests, had described a glittering eastward path across the globe, from their Bel Air home to their ski lodge in Aspen, through the Grenadines, the Hamptons, Barcelona, San Tropez and finally Mykonos, where they chartered a yacht to take a group of friends on a three-week cruise around the Greek islands. Their progress was fawningly documented by European paparazzi, and several photographers witnessed the third Mrs Haydon’s death from Elia Beach, the nearest public vantage point to the Paloma’s mooring. It seemed impossible that she had not seen the jet ski skimming across the water. Indeed pictures appear to show her looking in its direction seconds before she dived from the deck of the yacht. She was killed instantly.

A few days after the body was flown to Firenze for cremation, a French lawyer stunned the world by announcing that two weeks previously Mrs Haydon had deposited with him a computer disk, with instructions that in the event of her death it be passed on to newspapers in the US and Europe. The disk turned out to contain a single document, an erratic and rambling narrative which is part autobiography, part diary of the first year of her marriage. She describes an unhappy early life, alienated from her father and unable to make friends because of her mother’s peripatetic lifestyle. Repeatedly she returns to her sister’s suicide. In one undated line, she writes, ‘Chaque jour plus vite: Caroline, moi.’ She appears to have married on a whim, meeting her husband when he came to view a penthouse in the building where she lived with her former boyfriend. ‘I just wanted to go somewhere,’ she writes. ‘I didn’t really care where.’

Though affecting, most of the material is only of personal interest. The important passages concern the period just before she met her husband, when she was working as a film publicist and became involved in the Leela Zahir disappearance. The Indian media had developed a particular fascination for her because of a rumoured entanglement with Rajiv Rana. The document appears, in part, to be a statement to them, in which she confesses to helping Leela leave Scotland.

Mrs Haydon’s testament appears to show that Zahir’s disappearance was not abduction (as her mother claimed) or suicide, but a well-planned bid to ‘escape prison’. ‘Why would she stay?’ she writes. ‘She had nothing. It was a kind of prostitution.’ The idea that Leela Zahir, idol to the nation, was actually the ‘slave of her brothel-keeper mother’ shocked India profoundly. Leela’s suffering augmented her holiness, and angry mobs gathered outside several houses owned by members of the film community, burning Faiza Zahir’s Pali Hill residence to the ground in a night of rioting that spread across Mumbai and left several people dead. Faiza Zahir was abroad at the time, and now occasionally rings journalists from her new home in Dubai to denounce the ‘Caro bitch’ as a liar.

Gabriella Haydon writes that she was looking out of her window at the Clansman’s Lodge Hotel, when a face appeared at it looking ‘like Cathy in Wuthering Heights’. Since she was on an upstairs floor, this was quite frightening. As she stared in horror, she realized it was Leela Zahir, who had somehow climbed up on to the roof and then down a drainpipe to tap on her window. She let the girl in and found that she was warmly dressed, and carrying a small backpack. To her surprise Leela ‘hugged me and said I was her only friend. We sat on the bed and she told me about her life and the things her mother made her do. I was horrified.’

Gabriella claims Leela had a well-thought-out plan of escape, but needed help. ‘I was sympathetic to her,’ she writes, ‘and I hated all the people involved in that film. So I said I would hide her in my room and drive her to Inverness Airport the next morning.’ She did not ask where she was heading after that, but ‘she said she had a friend. A boyfriend, she said, and then corrected herself. He was not a boyfriend, but she’d talked to him on the internet and they were going to meet each other. She did not say any more.’

The next morning, while police were beginning an intensive search that would eventually involve helicopters and teams of divers searching Loch Lone, Gabriella made good on her promise. ‘We said almost nothing to each other during the journey. Then she took her bag and walked into departures. I thought of asking to go with her.’

By the early autumn, the various Leela-variant viruses had been brought under control. Shaken sysops were able to go into work without a sense of dread, and computer-security specialists started to count their money. Of course blame had to be apportioned somewhere, and by general consensus it fell on the Virugenix corporation. With its reputation shredded and its share price locked into a downward spiral, the company’s senior management was forced to resign en masse. Even this was not enough to turn things round, and within a year the Virugenix brand had disappeared from the world’s screens, its assets absorbed by its rivals. From a secret address in Montana, former Ghostbuster Darryl Gant now runs Mehtascourge.org, one of the more extreme Leela research sites, which focuses on hunting down the man he sees behind many of the world’s ills, from his own redundancy to the scaling down of the American space programme.

Gant has his work cut out. There are sightings of Arjun Mehta and Leela Zahir around the world, sometimes alone, sometimes in company. She is seen begging in the streets of Jakarta and talking on the phone in the back of New York cabs. He is spotted one day at an anti-globalization demo in Paris and the next coming on to the pitch in a hockey match in rural Gujarat. He has got enormously fat. She has been surgically altered to look like a European. One persistent report, mostly from Pacific Rim countries, has a young man fitting Mehta’s description accompanied by a South Asian woman of a similar age, ‘tomboyishly’ or ‘punkily’ dressed. They are sometimes seen kissing or holding hands. According to conspiracy theorists, there is only one possible explanation, only one pattern that makes sense.