Unusual Images on a Laptop

As Carson was coming back from the toilet he spotted his chance. The table where the fat lecturer had been sitting was now only occupied by his two sports-jacket-wearing companions. Algernon was sitting with his back to the toilets and hadn't yet spotted him so Carson made a break for it out the door. Only to be confronted by the fat man, standing outside to take a call on his mobile. The fat man spotted Carson immediately.
“I'll call you back,” he said into his phone and catching Carson's eye, “I've got one of our keen student's here. He wants to show me his sketchbook.”
Carson could here laughing on the other end of the line. This was obviously something that the the bald old lecturer did often. It didn't look like he was going to get out of going up to the studio with the guy. So if he was going to be able to come up with a couple of month's sketchbook work at a moments notice he was going to have to go to plan B.



“These are fantastic pictures.”
The words were said by a figure bent over the screen of a laptop placed on a desk in the well-to-do study of an Edwardian house. He pointed out a few features of the picture.
“This is a live feed from one of our best guys,” he went on. He thought of himself as a scientist, although he was designated as a simple receiver operator. He was addressing superior, standing behind him, showing her how much he knew about the technology, how indispensable he was to the project. But of course it didn't hurt to flatter the boss, “It can't have been easy finding a talent like this guy.”
“It wasn't.” answered a slightly Russian-accented female voice from behind him. “Don't waste him.”
Although the answer was curt, the receiver operator could here that he had earned a brownie point with his toadying and decided to quit while he was ahead and shut up. He concentrated on keeping the images on the monitor as perfect as possible for as long as his boss was in the room. The images being relayed to his receiver were everyday stuff from the concourse of a shopping centre. But from his point of view the most important thing was that they were showing none of the stuttering gaps that had been plaguing the equipment as recently as last week.
He could see the local branch of Starbucks, crammed with the town's students, each student with a laptop open in front of them. The cynical thought that they were probably using the Starbucks broadband to download pirate movies occurred to the operator, before quickly being discarded. The local university only attracted the most committed and academic students. Students with no time for anything but work.
The view moved on down the mall, passing WH Smiths, Borders, Burger King and all the usual units to be found in any mall across the whole of the country. Then the view passed through the door of a shop, the likes of which could be found in any other student town, an esoteric shop, a head shop in the old hippy parlance that the operator could still remember from his far off 70s youth.
The view on the screen lingered on the shelves of Tarot cards, bongs, dream catchers, books about Buddhism and jewellery.
The view stayed in the shop for quite some time until a young woman came into the shop. A serious looking young woman dressed in casual clothes, but with a few accessories that showed she might be a regular visitor to the shop. She had a metal pendant in the shape of some eastern symbol around her neck on a leather thong, and her hair was bound with a colourful felt band. She looked through the books for a while. When she had chosen one, a thin but expensive little book, she went over to chat to the guy behind the counter. They were completely relaxed and unselfconscious, even though at times the camera sweeping around the room hovered just inches from their faces. Even if the camera had been the size of a hose fly it would have earned a swat by now. The conversation was a little indistinct though, just a few words could be heard here and there.
See if you can get better sound,” the operator's boss instructed, and he called up a software control panel that partially covered the image on the screen. He fiddled with the sliders a little, sometimes resulting in a deterioration inn the image, sometimes an improvement, until the conversation could be made out.
He was just in time to hear the guy behind the counter say, “See ya later Rachel,” to the departing girl.
As the girl left her eyes lingered on a reflection in the shop window. Her reflected face seemed to be staring into the camera, making direct eye contact with the operator. It was an unnerving effect because the technology was supposed to be undetectable. He was always trying to avoid saying stupid things in front of his boss, but sometimes he couldn't help it.
“Can she see us?” he found himself asking. It just popped out, he couldn't help it, but he new it was a mistake as soon as he said it.
“That's impossible,” his boss said, “don't get spooked. Just do your job.”
The brownie point he had earned earlier evaporated in an instant and the young woman on the monitor seemed to shake herself out of a daze and hurry out of the shop as if she had suddenly remembered an appointment. The view on the laptop monitor followed her for a couple of steps before dissolving into static and random images of different locations in the mall.
“You do realise we are going to need to be able to keep the technology going for more than twenty minutes when it comes time to present it,” the scorn in the words directed at him sent shivers down the operators spine.

Page one of my new novel, as yet untitled

Chapter 1

Carson had had a few. The world was starting to rotate around him. Of course the world consisted only of a dark corner of the Dog and Parrot, a too-heavy-to-pinch table strewn with dry roasted peanut packets and spilled bear, two half-drunk pints and a friend called Algernon. Algernon was nursing his pint, as usual, he couldn't drink more than three in a single night without turning into a gibbering madness. Carson on the other hand was methodically working his way through pint after pint of lager. Around lunch time, they had retreated from the studio space they shared with all the other second-year students and had taken up residence at the pub. If things played out as usual there was very little chance that they would be going back to university that day.
“It's so important to do lots of research before you even think about beginning to paint,” Algernon said. It was a bit of a non sequitur, silence had reigned at their table for at least twenty minutes and the last thing they had talked about at all had been movies, or perhaps music, but certainly not art.
“Delacroix was against using reference,” Carson said.
“Yeah, but, you're no Delacroix.” said Algernon, and giggled to himself in his snorting, spitting, time-wasting way. Algernon had a knack of saying the most annoying, insulting and insensitive things to everyone.
Why on Earth do I hang out with this guy? thought Carson – although guy wasn't exactly the word that floated through his mind. I need cooler friends.
He looked around the Dog and Parrot to see if any cool people happened to be hunched anywhere in the dark on a beautiful June afternoon. He didn't see any. There were only two other tables with pubgoers at them. One group was three men, a giant dressed in black with a bald head and a big black beard accompanied by two smaller men in grey sports jackets. Carson had seen them in the pub often before and guessed that their clothes probably smelled even more of cigarettes and beer dregs than the furniture, or even the carpet.
The other group was four or five young professionals, estate agents perhaps. They were dispiritedly picking at their pub lunches and sipping at halves of lager.
The first of the lunch time crowd, thought Carson, better run to the bar and get a couple of pints to prop on the table while I wait for them to eat their chicken kievs and scamper back to the business parks and porter-cabin offices they came from. He necked the half pint that was left in the glass in front of him and grabbed it to take back to the bar.
As he was waiting at the bar to be noticed, the giant bald-headed man settled on to a stool beside him.
“You're second year Graphic Design,” he said.
“How did you know that?” asked Carson.
“I'm one of the lecturers,” was the slightly disconcerting reply. Carson had believed that he was safe from the crew of lecturers in the Dog and Parrot because they were all famous devotees of the Red Lion.
As Carson hadn't been able to muster any kind of response, the man seemed to feel duty bound to keep this laughably slim excuse for a conversation alive.
“I haven't seen you up in the studios,” he said. The studios were on the fifteenth floor of a concrete tower and were always referred to as being up.
“That's not all that surprising,” Carson said, “you spend all your time in here.”
“I don't have to pass the course though,” the giant bearded man said. Rather heartlessly in Carson's opinion. He hated being reminded of the impending doom of having to put together enough work to satisfy the course requirements. The longer he put off doing any serious work and the closer his deadlines encroached, the more work he was going to have to do, in a shorter and shorter amount of time.
The man gave his words time to sink in, and then carried on, “I hope you're out sketching, at least as much as you're in here drinking. If I were you I'd have my sketch book out right now. There are some real characters in here, in this beautiful chiaroscuro light.”
“I'm sketching,” Carson lied languidly.
“That's great,” the waves of enthusiasm coming from the beery, bleary giant were a surprise. He seemed genuinely interested, “have you got your sketch book with you?”
Of course Carson didn't, the last time he had touched it was two weeks ago to rip a page out and note down a shopping list. Time to pull a great excuse out of the hat, he thought to himself.
What he actually said was, “It's up in the studios.”
“Cool, I'll come up with you after and we'll take a look,” he got up to return to his group holding three pints in a triangle in his giant hands. He had gotten served by sign language, or perhaps just the raising of an eyebrow while he had been talking to Carson.
Even though the pub was almost completely empty Carson was forced to wait patiently another ten minutes until he was served. He spent the entire ten minutes wondering where he was going to magic up a sketchbook with a couple of months work in it. By the time he was back sitting with Algernon he had a few ideas.
The first idea was to sneak out unnoticed. Of course there was no need to tell Algernon about his little uncomfortable encounter at the bar, but he would need him to neck his pint and come away to another pub. If need be and if Algernon refused to budge Carson was absolutely prepared to ditch him, and it wouldn't have been the first time..