Nirvana Bites Read Online Free PDF Page A

actually.’
    Several pairs of eyes widened simultaneously.
    â€˜Birthday present from The Parents.’ He looked round the room wild-eyed. I don’t have any iffy games,’ he said, forced on to the defensive.
    â€˜Is that running down our phone line?’ growled Frank.
    â€˜No,’ protested Nick, but then realised quite how deep a hole he had dug. ‘I – I run it through my mobile,’ he stammered.
    â€˜Techno-turd,’ muttered Frank. ‘Fucking laptops and mobiles. Yuppie scum.’
    It needed to be said, but I think we all felt a frisson of excitement at the potential. Now that we knew about it, we could trade on Nick’s middle-class guilt and have a new toy.
    Our previous lack of access to technology had not been because we were a bunch of Luddites. Until now, we had simply lacked the means. If you have no choice, you might as well pretend that what you don’t have is ideologically unsound. Until you have it, of course.
    â€˜You’d better get it, Nick,’ I said in a no-nonsense voice.
    He stumbled obediently to his feet.

4
    THE FOLLOWING DAY I sat at the front of the Docklands Light Railway train as it hurtled towards Stan’s pad in Canary Wharf and pretended to be the driver. The evening before, we had spent many hours surfing the Net with the zeal of the converted and I had plenty of questions for my client. I left the train and followed the directions Stan had given me. I walked the pale, deserted streets, made uncomfortable by the sterility and paranoid by the sensation of being watched by hidden cameras.
    There used to be real people living here. In real homes. As part of real communities. There are no homes now. Only apartments, studios, lofts, penthouses and units. The fact that there are no launderettes is not surprising. But there are also no shops, pubs, cafés, or garages at street level. Or seemingly anywhere one person might encounter another face to face. Where do these people go on a Sunday morning when they just want to pop out for a paper and a packet of fags?
    The answer is underground, in gleaming subterranean shopping malls peopled by troglodyte yuppies who can choose between forty different ways to drink coffee.
    I felt so oppressed by Stan’s choice of habitat that a hideous thought occurred to me. Suppose the whole Stan saga was some ghastly wind-up S&M-style. Suppose Stan was actually in on the harassment in some way and was manipulating us all for some weird motive. I didn’t know him well enough to reject the possibility.
    I turned a corner and arrived at Stan’s block. It was a standard Docklands structure – lots of glass and steel and shiny, shiny surfaces. The only thing that distinguished it was the unmarked white removal van parked on the street outside. It was clear from the forest of estate agents’ boards and unmarked buzzers that Stan’s was the only flat currently occupied.
    I pressed the buzzer for his apartment on the entryphone and was irritated when the door buzzed to let me in, no questions asked. So much for security. So much for Stan being careful, as I’d warned. I felt myself sucked into the dimly lit interior and punched the lift button. I stepped into the metal capsule, which ascended in utter silence to the top floor. The doors whispered open on to a rectangular landing with a huge window overlooking the street. The penthouse door was directly opposite the lift and was slightly ajar.
    OK, he was expecting me, but this really was an outrageous breach of security for someone who was supposed to be terrified. In a flash of irritation, I was about to push straight in and give Stan a piece of my mind. But then a huge WHAT IF ? sign lit up in fluorescent neon in my brain. At the same time I heard low voices from inside Stan’s flat. My stomach did one of those horrible lurchy things that cause you to calculate the position of the nearest toilet and the likelihood of getting to it in