All The Way Here

Matt reached out to the world, strolling through forums and games, listening to conversations and watching. Clicking through news feeds to catch up with the landslide of stories concerning Kira; and to watch their tone gradually changing from outrage to acceptance to feted as the saviour of all. He downloaded torrents of chat shows, documentaries, current affairs programmes and anything else which seemed likely to illustrate what was happening in the minds of the world.



"The New Messiah?" was the headline of an article in the New Christian Times, written without any sense of irony. It hadn't been shouted down in the response columns, unless the editor had removed all dissent. At best, there was a smattering of disquiet stampeded over with hundreds of believers quoting scripture to support a murderer. 'It's akin to Jesus turning over the tables in the temple', wrote one commentator, 'sometimes you have to break some eggs to cook an omelette.' A Hindu Temple in Mumbai had even set up a shrine to Kira.



Now Matt checked the hiscores of various MMORPGs, he was shocked to discover how many fairly high ranking players had names that were derivatives of Kira. He wondered how many more were too low levelled to be listed. He made himself a noob, so he could go in-game and on Vent without any of his on-line friends disturbing him. The making of a legend occurred in such subtle ways. "Yeh hes teh pwnage!!11! Jsut like Kir4 ftw!" was the comment announced, in a crowded area, which finally sickened Matt enough to log out and check his programmes instead.



He had established a link with street CCTV, via the police department, several hours ago, but had no idea what Mello wanted him to watch for. Unless he happened to be glancing at the right camera at the right moment, just as a white-haired, pyjamaed short-arse went for a walk, Matt couldn't see how this was going to help. Meanwhile, his Trojan flicked through the last census returns and national security records, held at the Office for National Statistics in London, searching for all of The Wammy House alumni. He already knew that Roger didn't have the data.



Running as a constant undercurrent came the dangerous lure of That Mainframe. Matt knew that he could find Near. All he had to do was retrace his steps of a fortnight before, gateway through Wammy's and return to the stage where he was watching Near again on his cameras. But the stakes were too high. It would take days and Mello could return now or at any time in the future. The Mario Clause lay coiled and waiting for him in the depths of the system, like some Leviathan rising with the end of days. It would have to be the last resort.



Matt's mobile 'phone beeped once and he checked his messages. Mello was fine. He had somewhere to stay. Things were going according to plan. Matt re-read it a couple of times, searching for hidden meaning. There appeared to be none that he could see. That was alright then, but what was the plan? Biting down irritation under a fireblanket of trust, Matt returned to his laptop and belatedly began the process of destroying his on-line personal presense. His FlickR account was the first to go, along with a few years worth of pictures. It hurt more than he had expected it to. As if the erasure of his cyber self was wiping out his real-life identity too.



"It doesn't matter." Matt spoke aloud, trying to inject some cockiness into his tone, as he deleted his Facebook and MySpace accounts. "It doesn't matter." Then he stopped dead in his tracks. No, it didn't actually matter, because his name wasn't on them. Slamming hard into a mental wall formed of eight years of resentment, Matt suddenly exhaled. It didn't matter, because his name wasn't Matt. Kira could look all he liked for Mail Jeevas, but he had ceased to exist nearly a decade ago and had never been on-line. "Yay for Wammy's." Matt told the monitor, dully, then went to play some Final Fantasy.



Two days later, an e-mail arrived in the secure account that he had created at the beginning of all of this. The name was a real blast from the past and Matt smiled as he opened it. No huge text, just a telephone number, which he immediately rang, "Linda! It's Matt, how you doing?" They spoke for a few minutes of banal things and pleasantries. But both being prodigies of The Wammy House, it was depressing how quickly they lapsed into speaking only of achievements or the attempting thereof. Such things were so much more difficult to quantify in the real world. "But you have a gallery, which is something. You get to show off your art."



"Yes." The single word dissuaded all further commentary on the subject. "And what great success have you made of your life, Matt?"



Matt gazed at his PS3 and the sea of monitors. Even to his acclimatised nose, the room seemed filled with the odour of stale smoke. He came close to lying and creating some huge fantasy about how he was practically the chairman of ICI, but always the quiet rebel, he chose a skewed kind of honesty. "To be honest, I bum around all day doing fuck all. Nursing my institutionalised inferiority complex and playing computer games." He lit a cigarette and sat down again, strangely deflated. On the other end of the telephone, Linda began to cry.



Three more days of picking over mental scabs, Matt came to the conclusion that not to be first at The Wammy House was to spend the rest of your life trying to recreate it. He led whole clans in expeditions into the Wilderness of MMORPGs, strategically planning so that no-one got killed and everyone returned with loot. Mello, as far as Matt could piece together, had risen to the top of various criminal gangs, until he reached the ultimate one. He could well be at the top of the Mafia now, given that Kira had killed so many of them and Mello was Mello. Linda had placed herself at the epicentre of some blossoming London creative scene, celebrities coming just to be seen with her. All kudos for those who had their portraits done by the Wammy reject turned artist. Same shit, different scene, watch the geniuses take over the world, climbing over competitors to be number one, only to find that it didn't count. At least Near got it right first time and was handed his little empire on a plate.



Then the Vice President of the USA gave another live address to the nation and, by extention, the world. The Special Provision for Kira was being disbanded. Near's gang was over too. Matt watched it to numb to work out if he was devastated in a tribal way, all of the Wammy's kids now defeated, or in a worldly sense, as Kira was winning. Or even if didn't care at all. Matt turned from the monitors, lit a cigarette and sought to lose himself in the nearest game to hand.