Looking for Jake and Other Stories

as to what Aykan had done. Eventually I clicked the “Give Food” button and waited.

Nothing happened.

The usual little message, thanking me on behalf of hungry people, appeared. I waited a couple more minutes, then left. Whatever Aykan had planned, I thought, it hadn’t come off.

A couple of hours later I checked my email.

“How the fuck . . .” I said, and paused, shaking my head. “How the fuck, you insane genius bastard, did you do that?”

“You like that?” The connection was terrible, but I could hear that Aykan sounded triumphant. “You fucking like it?”

“I . . . I don’t know. I’m very impressed, whatever.”

I was staring at the message in my inbox. The sender was listed as “Very Hungry Foreign People.”

“Dear Kind Generous Person,” it read. “Thank you so much for your Generous gift of half a cup of wet rice. Our Children will treasure every grain. And do please thank your Kind Organisers at An End To Hunger for organising their rich friends to throw rice at us—that is the advantage of employing Sweatshop labour and trade union busting. That way they can afford rice for us poor people. Whatever you do, do keep sitting back and not asking any questions of them, keep them happy, don’t agitate for any corporate taxes or grassroots control or anything like that which would threaten the large profits that allow them to buy us Cups of Rice. With humble love and thanks, The Hungry.”

“Every motherfucker who clicks the button’s going to get that,” Aykan said.

“How did you do it?”

“It’s a fucking program. I stuck it on the website. It scans your fucking hard disk for what looks like your email address, and sends off the message when you draw attention to yourself by clicking. Try pressing ‘Reply.’ ”

I did. The return address listed was my own.

“It’s very impressive, Aykan,” I said, nodding slowly, wishing someone else had written the letter, made it a bit subtler, maybe edited it a bit. “You’ve done a real number on them.”

“Well it ain’t over yet, bro,” he said. “Watch this space, you know? Watch this fucking space.”

My phone went at five the next morning. I padded nude and confused into the sitting room.

“Man.” It was Aykan, tense and excited.

“What the fuck time is it?” I said, or something like that.

“They’re onto me, man,” he hissed.

“What?” I huddled vaguely on the sofa, rubbed my eyes. Outside, the sky was two-tone. Birds were chirruping imbecilically. “What are you on about?”

“Our fucking philanthropic friends, man, ” he whispered tersely. “The concerned folk over at Feed The World central, you know? They’ve rumbled me. They’ve found me.”

“How do you know?” I said. “Have they contacted you?”

“No no,” he said. “They wouldn’t do that—that would be admitting what the fuck was up. No, I was watching them online, and I can see them tracking me. They can already tell what country I’m in.”

“What do you mean?” I said. I was fully awake now. “Are you intercepting their email? Are you crazy?”

“Oh man, there’s a hundred fucking million things you can do, read their messages, watch who they’re watching, bounce off internal memos, keep tabs on their automatic defences . . . Trust me on this: they’re looking for me. ” There was a silence. “They may even have found me.”

“So . . .” I shook my head. “So leave it alone. Let it be, get off their back before you piss them off any more and they go to the police.”

“Fucking pofuckinglice... ” Aykan’s voice swam in scorn. “They won’t give it to the police, the police couldn’t find their own thumbs if they were plugging up their arses. No, man. It’s not the police I’m worried about, it’s these Hunger motherfuckers. Haven’t you clocked what kind of people these are?

These are bad people, man. Major bad ju-ju. And anyway, man, what the fuck you mean leave it alone?

Don’t be such a shit-eating coward. I told you, didn’t I? I told you this was a fucking war, didn’t I?” He was shouting by now. I tried to get him to shut up. “I’m not looking for advice. I just wanted to let you know what was going on.”

He broke the connection. I did not phone him back. I was tired and pissed off. Paranoid prick, I thought, and went back to bed.

Aykan kept sending his obscure emails, advising me of some new change to An End To Hunger.

The letter to donors did not last long, but Aykan was relentless. He directed me to their sponsors page, and I discovered that he had rerouted every link to a different revolutionary left organisation. He created a small pop-up screen that appeared when the “Donate” button was clicked, that compared the nutritional value of rice with what was rotting in European food mountains. He kept hinting at some final salvo, some ultimate attack.

“I keep watching them, man,” he told me in one of his irregular phone calls. “I swear they are so on my tail. I’m going to have to be really fucking careful. This could get very fucking nasty.”

“Stop talking rubbish,” I said. “You think you’re in some cheap thriller? You’re risking jail for hacking—and don’t shout at me, because that’s what they’ll call it—but that’s all.”

“Fuck you, bro!” he said. “Don’t be so naive! You think this is a game? I told you . . . these fuckers aren’t going to the police. Don’t you fucking see, man? I’ve done the worst thing you can do... I’ve impugned their philanthropy! I’ve fucking sneered at them while they do the Mother Theresa thing, and that they can’t fucking stand!”

I was worried about him. He was totally infuriating, no longer even coming close to conversing, just taking some phrase of mine or other as a jumping-off point to discuss some insane conspiracy.

He sent me bizarre, partial emails that made almost no sense at all. Some were just a sentence: “They’ll love this” or “I’ll show them what it really means.”

Some were longer, like cuts from the middle of works in progress, half-finished memos and snatches of programming. Some were garbled articles from various encyclopaedias, about international politics, about online democracy, about computerised supermarket stock-taking, about kwashiorkor and other kinds of malnutrition.

Slowly, with a stealthy amazement and fear, I started to tie these threads together. I realised that what looked like a patchwork of mad threats and ludicrous hyperbole was something more, something united by an extraordinary logic. Through these partial snippets, these hints and jokes and threats, I began to get a sense of what Aykan planned.

I denied it.

I tried not to believe it; it was just too big. My horror was coloured with awe that he could even dream up such a plan, let alone believe he had the skills to make it work.

It was utterly unbelievable. It was horrific.

I knew he could do it.

I bombarded him with phone calls, which he never picked up. He had no voicemail, and I was left swearing and stalking from room to room, totally unable to reach him.

An End To Hunger had been ominously quiet for some time now. It had operated without interruption for at least three weeks. I was going crazy. There was a mad intensity to everything, every time I thought of Aykan and his plans. I was scared.

Finally, at ten minutes to eleven on a Sunday evening, he called.

“Man,” he said.

“Aykan,” I said, and sighed once, then stammered to get my words out. “Aykan, you can’t do this, ” I said. “I don’t care how fucking much you hate them, man, they’re just a bunch of idiot liberals and you cannot do that to them, it’s just not worth it, don’t be crazy— ”

“Shut up, man!” he shouted. “Listen to me!” He was whispering again.

He was, I suddenly realised, afraid.

“I don’t have any fucking time, bro,” he said urgently. “You’ve got to get over here; you’ve got to help