They sit in rows, all facing the same way. Light – fluid, synthetic, over-spilling from the screen in front of each – coagulates in spectacle-lens glass before draining away over skin that, no matter what ethnicity box (optional) its owner might have ticked on Degree Zero’s application form, in this room is recast in grey. All of them wear headphones, thick and padded as the walls of sanatoria. Some have sandwich packages open in front of them, others rice-noodle concoctions composted in plastic tubs; every desk sports, standing sentinel beside its glide-pad, a lone porta-bottle with an inbuilt perma-straw extruding from its lid. In many ways, it’s a generic office scene – with one divergence.
It took Phocan a while to put his finger on it last time he came here to Berners Street as well; but passing through this outer room packed full of low-grade modellers, concentrated airlock between public-facing, poster- and award-draped lobby and the Art Dept’s inner sanctum, just before reaching the keypad-operated door to whose code sequence this room’s denizens aren’t privy, he recalls Eldridge mentioning it to him on that other visit too, at the same exact spot he’s twigging on right now: none of them have phones. Not charging on the desk, nor peeping from pockets, nor even sprouting cables from the recesses of shirts and jackets: they’re verboten. Slip one out, or even have its ring crow from your handbag to betray you, and you’re gone – no grace, no first-time pass, just your P45. These guys don’t even have an internet connection: beyond DZ’s intranet, or more precisely narrow avenues of this (the CAD, Maya and Autodesk files to which they’ve been given individual clearance), their isolation is complete. It’s non-stop lockdown in here, one that’s met not with the racket of tin mugs rattling on bars and catcalls ricocheting down corridors, but instead with quiet mouse-clicks, insert components, line, repeat line, circle, pan, zoom, centre, undo, save, as edges are laid down and rotated, surfaces rolled out, objects created, their mosaic patches willing themselves into definition, landscapes unwrapped – and, simultaneously, rewrapped, cooped within strict geometric confines, parameters and ratios recalculated with every mutation, several times a second: a collective, restless and resigned sketching, in variously transposed or extrapolated versions, of cell walls.
‘They’ve all done vocational degrees,’ Eldridge tells him this time, barely bothering to lower his voice as his tapping fingers tease open the inner door. ‘For them, coordinate space began in 1982, with Tron – a decade before they were born. Try talking to them about soil mechanics, dead loads or cadastral surveys, and they’ll go completely blank. This stuff,’ he thumb-jerks back dismissively, ‘is all they know.’
Memories, shared, follow him and Phocan as they step over the threshold: Imperial College’s banked lecture halls, Fluids 21, Bernoulli and Boundary Layer equations, Hyde Park railing-hopping, drunk 2 a.m. dips in the Serpentine, a roast chicken carcass left out on the table of their digs’ kitchen for so long that a new carapace grew right across its quadripartite rib-vaults … They remain unvoiced, though, Eldridge contenting himself with quipping:
‘Fuckin’ kids.’
They laugh – but there’s a double edge, an unease, to their laughter. Is the coders’ youth the actual gag? Or is it the fact that this group’s baby-facedness allows these two men in their prime to cast themselves as old that furnishes the punchline? They are old: in this world, forty’s ancient; not having a command of Blender, Topsolid or Tekler wired into your neural system places you in not simply a previous generation but, beyond that, an entire evolutionary category that new mutations have consigned to oblivion. Isn’t that the real joke? Phocan’s ilk thinking they’re midwifing the future into being, when all the time they’re navigating their own obsolescence? Eldridge, despite the bohemian tendencies he harboured even fifteen years ago, now realised or at least half-realised in ‘creative-industry’ employment, has always had a sharpness Phocan felt he himself lacked: call it self-awareness, insight … Perhaps his irony today’s a roar against extinction – fading now, dying off too as they enter the inner room.
This space, although no larger than the outer, equally devoid of natural light, seems instantly more airy, spacious and just generally patrician, a field marshal’s CIC. To its walls are pin-tacked scores of photographs and diagrams of spaceships and space stations, both real and fictitious: docking bays and sleeping quarters, exercise pods, gyrodynes and probes. Beneath these, lying on the floor, hand-drawn sketches sample and remix the elements and features of their vertically arrayed source images: a solar panel here, an observation window there, the axels of a centrifuge set one way, rubbed out, relaid along another axis … On a large table in the centre of the room, just where a papier-mâché landscape of the battle terrain would be if this really were a military HQ, there sits a scale (1:72) model of the Kern Federal Starship Sidereal. It’s incomplete – partly because still under construction, partly because Herzberg, Incarnation’s art director, is using the old cut-away effect, the better to facilitate understanding and corroboration between all involved parties: graphic designer, construction coordinator, set dresser, screenwriter, prop builder, costume designer, VFX supervisor, CG director (Eldridge), cinematographer, first, second and third assistant directors and, end of the line, apex of this particular food chain, director (Lukas Dressel). Right now, a core triumvirate of the above (first, second and fourth listed) are conferring round the carved and whittled styrofoam ship, soliciting, or fending off, a set of interjections from their Special Technical Adviser Ben Briar.
‘Which bit’s the CC?’ Briar’s asking.
‘CC?’ repeats Herzberg.
‘Crew compartment. Where they live.’
‘We kind of thought they’d live all over,’ Herzberg tells him. ‘The stokers, Tszvetan’s crew, his homies, his lieutenant smugglers, can be quartered below deck, under these giant propellant tanks. The Princess gets the guest suite, which is adjunct to the Sidereal’s main body. We’ve made it that way to accentuate her purdahed status. Tszvetan himself we’ll see mostly pottering about the navigation deck. That’s where we need shoe leather from you.’
‘Shoe leather?’ now it’s Briar’s turn to be stumped.
‘Stuff to do while he’s speaking his lines. Buttons to press, levers to pull … that kind of thing.’
‘There haven’t been “levers” on spaceships since the 1967 Soyuz,’ Briar coldly informs him.
‘Well, whatever,’ Herzberg counters. ‘Touchpads, vocal interfaces …’
‘Tszvetan’s a pilot,’ Berul, Incarnation’s screenwriter, pipes up here. ‘A navigator, captain, helmsman. He steers his way. It’s important to frame him like this: at the bridge, in command of his direction, of his fate – until the thanadrine episode, at least, when he’ll veer wildly off course …’
Federal Starship Commander Tszvetan is what, in the industry, they like to call an archetype. His bloodlines run far back: through Han Solo to Rick Blaine to Drake, Raleigh and such licensed privateers. Throw a little pinch of Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell and Huck Finn into the mix and you’ve more or less got Tszvetan’s character pool: rebellious, independent and, by virtue of these traits, through choice rather than duty, fiercely loyal. His rich back-story, worked up through weeks of research conducted first in parallel and then amalgamated in a Dorset hotel to which the whole scriptwriting team had, like a jury, been sequestered, involves loss of parents, kidnapping, being set adrift in a small space-pirogue that washed up or rather (pace Superman) crash-landed on a ‘random’ planet, Kern, upon whose populace the strapping if barely bridled colt, reaching maturity, made such a strong impression (winning the Tagel Races three years in a row, notching up endless kills of enemy pilots during the Third Saraõnic War, etc., etc.) that Kern’s ruler, Louis Q, conferred upon him the effective status of a nephew – ironically, since unbeknown to both, they are in fact related, by occluded blood. As ranking federal officer and decorated ace, and royal ward to boot, Tszvetan has been granted quite a bit of leeway to conduct his own free galaxy-wide enterprise – enterprise that, in a star system as wild as this one, borders at times on rampant criminality; although it’s also vital, given the tangledness of inter-federal treaties and alliances, to be attuned to the nuance of any given situation, each chance deep-space encounter, and to tailor one’s behaviour accordingly. Nor should this buccaneering interfere too much with his official duties – which, of course, it doesn’t: wise Louis Q understands, like the Felipes and Elisabeths of yore, that these activities go hand in hand, each acting as a spur and tonic to the other.
At Incarnation’s outset, we find Tszvetan guiding the Sidereal into Doon Leer, giant harbour of the planet Argeral, erstwhile foe of his adoptive Kern but now, post-Landis Détente, its trading partner and uneasy ‘ally’. Due to various subplots put in solely for the sake of complicating things – i.e. of signalling complexity – the Sidereal has been posing, through its three-moon-cycle voyage over from Kern, as a scientific mission sent out to observe various celestial transits; but, once clocked and hailed by Doon Leer Port Authority, it casts aside this cover, announcing itself as a vessel full of smuggler-traders – which is true, but not the whole truth. In reality, Tszvetan has been sent as Louis Q’s own proxy, under orders to advance the latter’s suit of tendering to Argeral’s Crown Princess Tild an offer of betrothal.
‘You’re losing me,’ says Phocan as Eldridge recaps the plot for him. ‘Tendering proxy what suits?’
‘He’s delivering a question-popper – a marry-me-baby: Louis Q wants the heiress-apparent as a trophy bride who’ll cement the pax romana between his kingdom and hers, Kern and Argeral. That’s why Tzsvetan’s pitching up now in Doon Leer …’
It’s over at a second table, in the corner of this room, by an elite detail of Eldridge’s own lieutenants, his most trusted modellers, that Doon Leer is being designed. These modellers, too, are stealing freely from the pictures pinned up to the wall; but they’re transcribing straight to screen without the intermediary of paper. Their overriding brief is simple: Go Big. Dressel wants the film’s depiction of Argeral’s port to be iconic; to not only serve as source, reference and gauge-stick for all future sci-fi auteurs, but to loom in the imagination of a whole civilian generation too, haunting their dreams and colouring their experience of a hundred real-world spatial interfaces – their era’s Strangelove War Room. Argeral’s the big boy in the B-Roth star system: the actual seat of military power (although, like several other former vassal planets, Kern, due in no small part to Tszvetan’s prior heroics, has managed to inflict local defeats on the imperial fleet, thus carving out small pockets of resistance) and the de facto economic hub. Everything passes through Argeral; no matter from what dark provincial back reach of what sub-planetary shithole they’ve been mined, traded or plundered, through the zones of which provisional or regional authorities they’ve passed in contraband form, it’s upon arrival here that material, goods, services, etc., become converted into credit – in Incarnation’s lingo (the writers have compiled a phrasebook), ‘charged’. And Doon Leer, being the administrative, military and fiscal portal through which each and every vessel, soul and item entering or leaving Argeral must be processed, is the feature of the planet that first greets voyagers as they press their eyes to viewfinders and windows: glowing, throbbing, tractor-beaming their small ship, whatever orders they might relay to its puny motors, down towards it. Dressel wants this whole economico-galactico event field, this politico-spatial set-up, translated into establishing-shot tableau, into a wide-lens ballet of tugs, giant cargo freighters, tiny pilot drones gliding up and down beams cast out by port traffic-control towers, avenues and corridors of light and movement all converging on this greatest of all harbours; to render perspectivally the city’s power and majesty, vectorially the fascination its approach occasions: all lines lead to Doon Leer.
Accordingly, the Art Dept boys and girls have pilfered their way through Canaletto, Cole and Turner, not to mention Berkey, Paul and Hoesli: a gondola-sprinkled grand canal here, a network of citadels and lookout posts joined by ribbed generators there, funnel-clouds swirling at their edges, all projected in one-point. For their main template, they’ve lifted the bare bones of the vista that greets Dorothy and her friends as they skip down the yellow brick road to the Emerald City: Doon Leer, in the preliminary sketches, rises crystalline from grey-zone conurbations that proliferate about it, from the outlying agro- and industrial sectors feeding into and off it, buffer zones between its glory and the unkempt wood and desert lands that stretch for miles around Argeral’s surface before giving over, past the planet’s rim, to the abyss of outer space. The city’s composed (at this distance, at least) of squares, or rather rhomboids, stacked atop each other like innumerable slanted bricks – slanted, and electrified too, since they glow. All of which gives the metropolis the look of somewhere in a perpetual state of assembly, a throbbing compact of great crystalline slabs, an expanding vert and azure chessboard.
This is easy for the modellers to render, since squares and rhomboids are their building blocks too. What’s not so simple is the port’s multitude of aerial ingress and egress routes: make them too straight and the whole vision will look rigid and anachronistic; too wavering and the core vanishing-point optics will get lost.
‘We were picturing,’ Eldridge is telling Phocan now, ‘the way bees come and go from hives. There’ll be infinite variations in the routes, but overall, since they all eventually pass through the same tiny hole …’
‘It’s funny you should think of bees,’ says Phocan. ‘Just last week we were working with the Institute of Zoology, tracking exactly that. I got stung twice.’ He folds his left sleeve back to show two swollen patches on his forearm. ‘We decided in the end,’ he continues, buttoning up again, ‘that you can devise algorithms just as good from PIV.’
‘PIV?’
Phocan holds a pinched thumb and finger to narrowly opened lips; for an instant Eldridge thinks he’s miming toking on a joint, as was their wont back in South Ken – before, realising that Phocan’s blowing, not drawing, he deciphers the charade:
‘Ah – bubbles. You mentioned that – also in relation to helping model the final sequence, when the ship begins to … with the wind … Holland, right? Sledges …’
‘Bobsleighs,’ Phocan corrects him. ‘Next week. I can sound them out about staging a break-up, get quotes, and so on.’
‘I mean, we’ve got a basic model with the Berlin water people, as you know, but …’
‘Sure. And with the bubbles: I’ll be watching them through tug-, freighter- and drone-tinted lenses. If anything good comes up …’
He tips Eldridge a wink, to let him know their shared past buys him certain privileges, sneak peeks at material that, strictly speaking, should remain, like the Sidereal’s royal passenger, partitioned off, restricted. Eldridge nods gratitude, and moves them onwards past the next block of collaged source-pictures. Dressel and Herzberg, as one would expect, want the establishing shot’s wide-frame to evolve into a slow zoom into the metropolis itself, mirroring Tszvetan’s POV as the Sidereal is guided down to its assigned docking station. Then a ground-level pan across large swathes of processing bays, weighing houses, custom-filter basins … This horizontal realm is the domain of Doon Leer’s chargers – ‘chargers’ being the name for the army of navvies and low-ranking port officials who load, unload, tariff-rate and zap (‘charge’) the contents of each vessel’s manifest (and of course, anything else they might find stashed behind the floor- and ceiling-panels) with Argeral’s own special brand of radium-tinged sub- or supra-electricity. In Argeral, energy is the unit of measure: goods, services, credit – all just names for, varying modes of, charge. Charge may now be galaxy-wide standard, exchangeable and leverageable all over; but only in Argeral can it be conferred upon an entity and thereby (as it were) ‘minted’, a transformation that’s effected by its formal passage through Doon Leer – which passage’s most basic, sweaty, greasy nut-and-bolt work is conducted by the aforementioned dockworkers. These chargers are a race unto themselves – several races, several species: they’re made up of itinerant labourers from all corners of the B-Roth system. Swarthy Arwaks, pointy-headed Tallians, three-handed Girodeans and such like: nomadic populations who’ve migrated here but never really settled; who sleep in Doon Leer’s inns and brothels, or on mattresses in dosshouses, or in makeshift lean-tos purposed from discarded cargo shells. They work under the protection of their charismatic foreman Ourman, in whom Tszvetan will recognise a kindred spirit (a sequel, already in the pipeline, is to follow the heroic-but-conflicted Ourman as he conveys, amidst the chaos of a bloody uprising or coup, the entire charge-reserves of Argeral to safety). Although (not only in the obvious phylogenetic sense but also in a civil-legal one) aliens, these chargers are typical of Doon Leer’s general population, which is also largely made up of outsiders – migrant traders, brokers, diplomats, spies, slaves, charge-drawn here from all over.
‘That’s the thing with great imperial capitals,’ Berul, whose team have case-studied a trans-historical selection of these, is impressing just now on Briar, Herzberg and whoever else will listen. ‘Empire, whether Roman, Inca or American, is always about movement, you see. If a place gives off a “rooted” vibe, if its inhabitants all look or talk the same … well, then you’re signalling to your audience its parochial, small-planet character. But if you want to convey real heart-of-the-beast centrality, engine-room levels of power – then you have to show a restless scrum of wildly different bodies: haggling, hustling, darting and colliding their way across every urban surface.’ His hands haggle and dart about the air in illustration, before hovering beside his ears. ‘And you have to lay down a soundtrack brimming with a cacophony of languages …’
Berul, Dressler, Herzberg, granted the power to generate a universe, are gods. The rules governing all Incarnation’s actions and events, from most momentous plot reversal to least consequential background filler, are compiled in a big, fat tome entitled, quasi-biblically, The Book of Incarnation. The designers and coordinators are their priesthood; the modellers, their clergy. Briar’s a kind of one-man Inquisition, wheedling out sacrilege and apostasy – though from time to time, when theological debate arises, it becomes clear to the true faithful that the Two Cultures man is (as he himself put it in as many words on his arrival here in London) acting as the enforcer of his own church’s dogma. They may birth worlds, but these worlds must be underwritten by the possibilities laid out in the big Book of Physics he’s constantly waving at them. Underwritten, too, in a more literal sense, by backers and producers, who’ll oblige the crew to send them rushes at the end of each day’s shooting, run barely edited scenes past button-pressing focus groups, then demand reshoots and re-edits, rewrites. They’ve already put the script through seven drafts. Gods or not, Dressler and co. have no illusions about this, know all too well that they exist in a closed feedback loop with baseness and stupidity. Their deck on the trireme might be a little higher, oars and benches softer, but they’re galley slaves, just like the kids stuck in the outer room. Beneath their feet, the render farm hums, sending vibrations from the basement up through the whole floor, as though the entire building, like the Sidereal, were being held in the tractor beam of something larger than it, an inexorable, if opaque, process.
‘For the thanadrine scene,’ Eldridge is explaining now to Phocan, ‘we’ll need – I’m running ahead – some kind of mechanical rig.’
‘To move around the performers’ bodies?’ Phocan asks.
‘No. Well, yes and no: to move around their bodies and to move their bodies themselves around. It’s to take place in zero gravity.’
‘Cool.’
‘The setting for it,’ Herzberg says, diverting Phocan back to the styrofoam Sidereal, ‘is the Observatory – this chamber here, with glass walls all round it. The lighting’s the main thing: the spaceship’s own lamps will all be off, but the two actors will be lit by the reflected glow from moons and other planets, coming through the glass. The scene takes place at the end of the voyage back to Kern; the end, too, of a long solar night, just as the predawn rays of Fidelus are creeping round the edge of Ardis Minor, into the home-planet’s atmosphere. We want the light to glide around their bodies in a way that looks good and is consistent with the solar-planetary layout we’ve constructed.’
‘In that case,’ Phocan reasons, ‘we should build two rigs: one for the human figures, and another for the light and camera. Car-plant robots are good for this. And we can model it all first with ray tracers.’
‘What’s that?’ Briar wants to know.
‘You fire rays from a camera,’ Phocan explains, ‘to a point you’ve designated as the light source in the take, and track the photons as they ricochet around whatever surfaces and objects you want in there. That way, you can see how light will spread and dissipate across the scene – by reading its path backwards.’
‘You’re going to put Joel Reney and Rosanna Wilmington into a car-building machine?’ says Briar.
The Degree Zero gang and Phocan all giggle at this notion.
‘No,’ says Eldridge, ‘we’ll use mo-cap performers.’
‘From Bergen,’ Phocan adds. ‘The Movement Underground.’
‘From what?’ Briar’s confused now.
‘Bergen. It’s in Norway,’ Phocan tells him.
Eldridge explains patiently to Briar: ‘Most of the actual filming in a film like this is done with stand-in bodies – when we use real bodies at all, that is. Your Joel Reneys and Rosanna Wilmingtons just turn up at the shoot’s end, speak a few lines, let us film their faces so that we can paste them over to the performers’ craniums …’
‘… pick their cheque up …’ Herzberg adds; then, catching a glance from Eldridge, adds: ‘Here, I meant to ask you …’ and leads Briar off to the room’s far side.
‘That guy’s scary,’ Eldridge confides sotto voce to Phocan and Berul.
‘Special Technical Adviser?’ Phocan whispers. ‘And he doesn’t know about ray tracers?’
‘He’s more Realism Tsar than STA. If NASA didn’t use ray tracers on the Shuttle or the International Space Station, he doesn’t want to know … Talking of craniums, though: we might need some help from you with the skull-blade alignment episode.’
When Phocan stares back at Eldridge blankly, Berul prompts: ‘Scene 25 …’ His listener’s face showing no uptake, he adds: ‘Please tell me that you’ve read my screenplay.’
‘I don’t believe,’ says Phocan measuredly, ‘that Pantarey were sent a copy …’
Berul turns away in frustration. Eldridge rolls his eyes. ‘Paranoid retards. I’ll take care of that.’
Unclipping a small walkie-talkie from his belt, he orders a subordinate to send him Soren, Degree Zero’s runner, whom in turn he tells to go forth and amass the NDAs and restriction waivers requisite to the procurement, in a format either hard or soft, of Incarnation’s script for Phocan. Soren, who’s got tiny whiskers on his upper lip, velveteen threads as yet untouched by any razor, scurries back off through the outer room, then through the lobby, out of the production building and across the courtyard to the mews in which the stable conversion that accommodates DZ’s legal department is housed. On his way, he sees two junkies ambling towards the staircase leading to the render farm basement. He passes Deli Svevo’s blue delivery cart, purveying the ranking staffers’ lunchtime sandwiches, and passes also couriers wending their way by pushbike, motorbike and foot across the cobblestones, darting up and down narrow staircases leading to offices and workshops of DZ and other companies, picking up envelopes and packages, pulling others out of Velcro-fastened bags, scanning their barcodes, flashing e-pads up for signature, then radioing dispatch for their next assignment, haltingly conducting conversations over FaceTime and WhatsApp all the while in Russian, Polish, English, Arabic and Spanish. Amidst its transience, its impermanence, there is a durability to all this that Soren, if he wants to progress in this business, or perhaps simply in life, would do well to note. Empires will crumble, Death Stars will explode, but scurriers will always be there.