like grubby motionless picnics; and flesh-puppets, pickets of what looked like and in some cases had once been humans.
Not all the familiars were embodied. But even those magicked assistants who eschewed all physicality were on strike. So—a picket line in the unearth. A clot of angry vectors, a verdigris-like stain on the air, an excitable parameter. Mostly, in the middlingly complex space-time where people live, these pickets looked like nothing at all. Sometimes they felt like warmth, or a gauzy clot of caterpillar threads hanging from a tree, or a sense of guilt.
In Spitalfields, where the financial buildings overspilt like vulgar magma onto the remnants of the market, a group of angry subroutines performed the equivalent of a chanting circle in their facety iteration of aether. The computers within the adjacent building had long ago achieved self-awareness and their own little singularity, learned magic from the Internet, and by a combine of necromantics and UNIX had written into existence little digital devils to do the servers’ bidding.
The UMA had organised among these electric intelligences, and to the mainframes’ chagrin, they were on strike. They blocked the local aether, meta-shouting. But as they fidgeted and grumbled, the e-spirits became aware of a muttering that was not their own. They “heard,” in their analogue of aurality, phrases that were one-third nonsense two-thirds threat.
alright now lads
high was proceedin long the eye street
old bill sonny is who
your game sonny what’s your fuckin game
What the hell? The strikers “looked” at each other—a mosaic of attention-moments assembling—and e-shrugged. But before they could return to their places, a cadre of exaggerated police-ish things were among them. The picketers gusted in fluster, tried to regroup, tried to bluster, but their complaints were drowned out by ferocious cop noise.
yore yore
leave it you slag
yore yore little picket’s done for the day you nonce
yore fuckin organiser wears that paki cunt wati
There are no placards in the aether, but there are other strike traditions—sculpted grots of background, words in rippling strips. The cop-moments tore into these things. Translated out of the ab-physical it would have been nasty, brutish, miners’-strike stuff, cracked heads and ball-kicks. Pinioned under the law, the strikers reeled.
The little fake ghosts para-whispered: best as you tell us where wati is ain’t it. where’s wati?
MARGE SPENT MORE THAN ONE LATE EVENING ONLINE FORAGING for those who sought the missing. Her screen name was marginalia. She was on wheredidtheygo?—a discussion group mostly for those whose teen charges had done bunks. Their problems were not hers.
What she sought were hints about stranger disappearances. She spent hours type-fishing, dangling worms like yeh but what if is just disappear?? no trace??? weird goin on no?? what if cops wont hlp not cant WONT??
The streetlamp no longer passed on its message. Fatigue made her feel as if everything she saw was a hallucination.
Anyone can find “secret” online discussion groups. Members drop bread crumb hint-trails on kookish boards devoted to Satanism, magick (always that swaggering “k”) and angels. Religions. On one such, Marge had posted a query about her encounter with the menacing man and boy. In the dedicated inbox she had set up, she received spam, sexual slurs, crankery, and two emails, from different, anonymous addresses, containing the same information, in the same formulation. Goss & Subby. One added: Get away.
None of the correspondents would respond to her pleas for more information. She hunted their screen names on communities about cats, about spellcraft, about online coding and Fritz Leiber. She lurked on communities run by and for those who knew of the quieter London. They were full of rumours that did not help her.
Under a new name, she posted a query. hai nel kno wots go on w/skwid gt stole?? The thread she started did not last long. Most of the responses were trolling or nothing. There was, though, more than one that read: end of world.
IT WAS NOT WATI BUT A COMRADELY NUMEN THAT FOUND THE remains of the e-picket. The attackers had chased the half-leads they had extracted. The numen frantically sought Wati.
“Where is he?” it said. “We’re under attack!”
“He was in this morning.” The office manager was a woodenly shuffling kachina speaking in the Hispanic accent of the expat wizard who had carved it, though it had been made and recruited to the union in Rotherham. “We have to find him.”
Wati, in fact, was scheduling his picket visits around his other investigations. His probing had had results. Hence his visit to a minor, outlying centre of the strike, where dogs blockading a