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Meatspace
Nikesh Shukla
The second novel from Costa First Novel Award shortlisted author Nikesh Shukla.'The first and last thing I do every day is see what strangers are saying about me.'Kitab Balasubramanyam has had a rough few months. His girlfriend left him. He got fired from the job he hated for writing a novel on company time, but the novel didn’t sell and now he’s burning through his mum’s life insurance money. His father has more success with women than he does, and his Facebook comments get more likes. Kitab is reduced to spending all of his time in his flat with his brother Aziz, coming up with ideas for novelty Tumblrs and composing amusing tweets. But now even Aziz has left him, travelling to America to find his doppelganger.So what happens when Kitab Balasubramanyam’s only internet namesake turns up on his doorstep and insists that they are meant to be friends?Meatspace is a hilarious and troubling analysis of what happens when our lives become nothing more than an aggregation of shared content, when our online personas are more interesting than real life. A brilliant follow-up from an acclaimed young novelist writing at the sharp edge of modern life.
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This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2014
Copyright © Nikesh Shukla 2014
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014
Nikesh Shukla asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
FIRST EDITION
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007565078
Ebook Edition © June 2014 ISBN: 9780007565085
Version: 2015-06-02
For Nimer, who introduced me to IRC in the mid-nineties
Why I Sent a Lamb Chop Into Space
Whenever my best mate and I have stood in line at Tayyab’s in East London, our nostrils tingling with burnt mustard seeds, we’ve ogled the wall of fame – from Daniel Craig to Talvin Singh – and wondered, how in the name of all things sacred do we get on here? I mean, a novelist and an artist, we may not be in the same league as James Bond or the guy who won the Mercury Music Prize in the 90s when being Asian was last cool – we knew whatever we did had to be a cut above.
So it was lucky that I had a book called Meatspace coming out.
Meatspace is what people who live their lives online call real life. Meatspace. There’s something so strange, odious and fleshy about the word. It shows that we’re just a collection of wobbly brains living in meat pods. Nick (Hearne – he’s an artist) and I thought it would be funny to take the word literally. And send some meat into space.
We were sat waiting for roast dinners at Hackney City Farm, enjoying the faint, malt-y mist of pig shit and chicken feed seeping through the windows when we had the idea. What could be more ridiculous than sending some actual meat into actual space? And how easy would it be?
Pretty easy, it turns out – all we needed was a weather balloon, some helium and permission from the Civil Aviation Authority and we were good to go. We bought a GoPro camera, made a makeshift pod out of its packaging and forked the sizzling lamb chop.
We took the lamb chop 88.8 miles from Tayyab’s in East London and out to the Cotswolds, filled the air balloon with helium and let go. The original idea – sending some meat into space – was just the tip of the iceberg, though. What followed was a lesson in endurance.
The plan was: the chop would rise at 325 metres a minute, for 95 minutes, before the balloon was predicted to burst 50 miles away over Hungerford, West Berkshire. The payload would then parachute back to earth with a predicted landing near Andover, Hampshire, 68 miles from the launch site. We would ping the GPS, go and collect and film a little retrieval skit with a ‘stunt’ chop we had in a coolbox.
We drank coffees in a supermarket car park and waited for the GPS to start pinging when the chop re-entered the atmosphere. But it never pinged. We waited and we waited. We had a little sausage sandwich barbecue in a park (in a designated barbecue area), ran into Lucy and Russell, whose farm was going to be the original launch site until predicted journey simulations put the pod in the sea. And nothing.
We returned home broken.
The lamb chop was lost.
We launched a local campaign to try and see if anyone had found it. Amazingly, someone did. Nick got a call from a farmer who had found the pod in his threshing machine. The farmer said he was near Yeovil, which was further south than predicted, and sounded like a straight up dude.
Except, he never returned the pod. He wasn’t a straight up dude.
The farmer made arrangements to meet at locations in Dorchester, a service station in Bridgend, and Weston-super-mare, but failed to show every time. He dodged between different phone numbers and locations, every time giving excuses why he couldn’t return the camera. By this time the launch team began to believe that this was life imitating art. The main theme of Meatspace is the lies that we tell ourselves and others in the modern social media-obsessed universe. Was this a case of elaborate catfishing? Or purely somebody attention seeking? I mean, we weren’t dealing with a case of rare diamonds here. It was a bedraggled lamb chop.
The weird part was, in the book, a stray fact from a character opens up a Google search hole of all their social links, and private information. And with this farmer, an accidental text he sent to me – meant for his girlfriend – lead me to his rugby team, Facebook, LinkedIn and more. It was bizarre. It was life imitating art.
After five months of book promo and having babies, Nick and I called the rozzers. And, amazingly, the camera reappeared. A few weeks ago. We were mentally exhausted by this point. So much so that the irony of the handover, in a KFC, escaped us till afterwards. When we saw the footage, it was unbelievable. Utterly unbelievable. We’d sent a Tayyab’s lamb chop into space.
And the thing we gained, apart from the footage, apart from the promotion for my novel, was an absolutely ridiculous adventure that genuinely bonded Nick and I for life. Sounds cheesy, but besides the bizarre achievement of sending a bit of meat hurtling towards the moon, chasing the tail of a farmer who refuses to give the camera that filmed it back to you does great things to a friendship.
Oh, and we made it on to Tayyab’s wall of fame.
This article originally appeared on Vice.com
Meatspace
Pronunciation: mi:tspeis
noun
[mass noun] informal
the physical world, as opposed to cyberspace or a virtual environment.
‘Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies.’ Sherry Turkle
‘Have you ever had that moment when you are updating your status and you realise that every status update is just a variation on a single request: “Would someone please acknowledge me?”’ Marc Maron
Contents
Cover (#u1b61002b-af7d-5a00-85c2-d7bbfdaaed0a)
Title Page (#u4a21752f-e9cd-5ecf-b430-922f06ea427f)
Copyright (#u3cc786f1-29be-5a53-b38a-f6d63fddfc4a)
Dedication (#u26313ea2-9a5d-5a74-99fe-fbdded78d585)
Epigraph (#u6ef702f2-72ef-5cda-92f4-b5a0d57bc76b)
History
AZiZWILLKILLYOU Episode 2
History
AZiZWILLKILLYOU Episode 3
History
AZiZWILLKILLYOU Episode 4
History
AZiZWILLKILLYOU Episode 5
History
AZiZWILLKILLYOU Episode 6
History
AZiZWILLKILLYOU Episode 7
History
AZiZWILLKILLYOU Episode 8
History
AZiZWILLKILLYOU Episode 9
History
AZiZWILLKILLYOU Episode 10
History
AZiZWILLKILLYOU Episode 11
History
AZiZWILLKILLYOU Episode 12
History
AZiZWILLKILLYOU Episode 13
History
AZiZWILLKILLYOU Episode 14
History
AZiZWILLKILLYOU Episode 15
History
History
Aziz vs the True Death
Acknowledgements
About the Publisher
History:
Which alcoholic drink has the most calories? – Google Hayley Bankcroft – Facebook Olivia Munn – YouTube Olivia Munn nude – Google [109] – Twitter kitab_balasubramanyam@gmail.com [4 new] (#u7f94ab5b-7931-5b57-9c90-833efb99fc36)
The first and last thing I do everyday is see what strangers are saying about me.
I pull the laptop closer from the other side of the bed and press refresh on my inboxes. I have a Google calendar alert that tells me I have no events scheduled today, an assortment of Twitter and Facebook notifications, alerting me to 7 new followers, a favourite of a tweet thanking someone for liking my book, an invite to an event I’ll never go to, spam from Play and Guardian Jobs. Hayley Bankcroft has sent me a direct message about an event we’re both doing next week. Amazon recommends I buy the book I wrote. There’s a rejection email from an agency I’d applied to do some freelance marketing copy for. I didn’t want the job, but now I haven’t got it I feel annoyed and hurt. I think about tweeting ‘will write copy for food’ but decide against it.
There’s an email from my dad. He doesn’t usually send me emails; he prefers text messages. It’s a forwarded message from a woman on a dating website. In it she’s written ‘Would love to meet your son and be his new mummy’. In bold at the top, Dad has written ‘Kitab-san, Wen u free?!!!!’ I ignore it. I never want to meet one of his girlfriends. Ever.
The only other 2 messages from actual humans are a friend request from the one other person with my name on Facebook, which I ignore when I see the next one is from Rach: an email letting people know her new address. I wonder why she wants me to have this information. Am I supposed to think, ‘Oh, she’s moved out of her parents’ house, which even being in Zone 6 and involving interacting with her racist brother and the cat that hated me and her dad’s collection of plaid shirts with effervescent sweat patches was still preferable to living here with me? Or, more realistically, ‘Why is she moving out of her parents’ house now, 6 months after dumping me, 6 months after moving out, 6 months after she told me she couldn’t bear the way I lived any longer and that I was draining her enthusiasm for life? Is that what I’m supposed to think?
She’s moving to North London, where she lived when we first met. I used to like meeting her at her flat. It overlooked a park and had a big kitchen I would sit in while she made coffee with the landlord’s Gaggia filter coffee machine. There was a disused railway line we’d take walks down. I haven’t been there in years.
That flat was amazing. We cooked all the time, she didn’t own a television, just stacks of books, a balcony where she grew tomatoes and a posh coffee machine. It was a middle-class idyll. None of the furniture pointed at an entertainment source. We were those people. For the life of me, I can’t work out why we chose to move her to my place instead of me to hers.
She was clinical in collecting all of her things when it ended. The only trace of her was a t-shirt of mine she took ownership of while we were together but I got full custody of in the break-up and the chutneys she left in the fridge. I notice them every time I open the fridge.
I hate chutneys. They’re a painfully white condiment, a colonial response to the spicy Indian pickle. I keep meaning to throw them away. When she’d first moved out, I spent a drunken night spooning onion chutney into my mouth because that was the closest I could get to what she’d tasted like.
The related Google ad next to her email is for ‘house-warming gift ideas’. I click out of my emails and think of things to tweet. I’ve got nothing to say. I look at the account of this other Kitab.
I’ve known about his existence for a while now. Around 6 months ago, his Facebook profile had started showing up in my self-Googling. I was surprised at first. Another Kitab with my obscure surname. Another one. Another me. He kinda looked like me too. He had fair brown (what I call caramel, ex-girlfriends have called ‘dusty’) skin and the hairstyle I had in the 80s, swept up into a Patrick Swayze cowlick of quiff and oil. He had eyes like mine, almond-shaped and -coloured and he had my mouth. Full kissable lips. Or at least this is how I would describe myself on an internet dating profile – caramel-skinned, quiffed black hair, almond-coloured eyes and big full lips.
He wore a white turtleneck sweater, like a Bond villain. His location was listed as Bangalore, India and the avatar photo itself looked like a warped driving licence scanned on a low-resolution photocopier. I was immediately disappointed that my namesake was so Indian-looking.
The related Facebook ad on the search results page for Kitab Balasubramanyam is an identity theft-solving app. It’s 69p. I don’t buy it.
I wonder why he’s decided to add me.
I tweet: ‘Feet hurt. Too much bogling last night. #boglingrelatedinjuries’
