Total Quality Reproduction

I'd never heard him so excited. Not even when he got his first CD
player.

"You must come and hear this" he'd said on the phone. "It's amazing -
like nothing else ever."

I was used to John's enthusiasm, but I couldn't prevent a small sigh
from escaping. He must have caught it, even over the crackling
line.

"No, really. I mean it. This is mega. You'll be astonished, astounded,
astronomically amazed."

I couldn't help it - I giggled and gave in. On the way over I wondered
what it was this time. Last time it had been the new speakers - the
ones which let you hear the band breathing if you really, really wanted
to. Before that it had been laser discs, before that quadraphonic and
so on, as far back as eight-track cassettes.

John was a hi-fi bore. I put up with him because he was generally a
good guy and we enjoyed much of the same music. But get him on to the
subject of equipment and he was off and running - tweeters, woofers,
RMS., crackle and hum- - he could bore you for hours about any one of
them. Recent advances in technology had sent him into heaven and he
spent most of his waking life studying the magazines and buying the
latest add-ons. You probably know someone just like him. There used to
be a lot of them around.

Whatever it was I hoped he hadn't spent too much money on it. We were
supposed to be going to see U2 at Wembley in a couple of weeks and it
was his turn to pay for the petrol. I'd been stung by him before.

"I just had to have it," he'd say. "It's so much better than before.
You do understand?"

Trouble was, I did understand. I was much the same way about Stephen
King books, but at least they didn't require an overdraft every time I
wanted to buy one.

I was all ready to bawl him out, but when he opened the door he had the
happy look of a puppy that had just wet all over the new carpet.

"Come in, my man," he said. "You're not going to believe this."

He led me into the living room. I could see that he'd cleared out even
more furniture. Now all he had was the system, his albums and a sofa,
placed, I'm sure, in exactly the optimum position in the room.

"This is it!" he said. "You're going to love it."

He was dancing around on his toes, full of nervous energy. I didn't
want to get too close to him, he might have been giving off sparks. I
finally managed to get him calmed down enough to tell me what was going
on.

"This is so new it hadn't even made the magazines yet. I got it from a
contact in Sony's labs and I'm under strict orders not to let it out of
my sight. This is going to be the biggest thing since
Television."

I wanted to ask him how much he had to pay for it - whatever it was,
but he was too fired up - he was plunging on, almost talking to
himself.

"TQR - that's what they're going to call it - Total Quality
Reproduction - the ultimate in Biotechnology. You see this little
beauty here?"

He held up a black box, about the size of a packet of cigarettes.

"Those clever Japanese have done it again, have they?" I asked, more to
slow him down than out of any genuine desire to be illuminated.

"They sure have." He was shaking his head in admiration. "It's a new
recording medium, all based on a single chip. It's built around a
genetically engineered cell, a bit like an amoeba really, but what
they've done is pump it full of what they call intelligent proteins and
attach it up to the latest in micro-circuitry."

He stopped when he saw that I had switched off, all that technological
stuff just depresses me. I couldn't even get my Physics O' Level.

"OK," he said, taking pity on me. "Here's the bottom line. It will
record anything that you play to it - anything at all, and they haven't
found its limit yet. It's like a bottomless pit."

I'll admit it. I was amazed. "You mean you could put the complete works
of Dylan into that little box? Clear off a whole shelf of albums and
replace it with a fag packet?"

He laughed. "If you really wanted to, yes. You could put your whole
collection into it an still have room for more." He moved over to the
stereo and plugged his new toy in.

"Just wait till you hear it. The quality is superb. I've recorded 'Bat
out of Hell' and 'Sergeant Pepper'. Sit in the middle of the sofa - you
get the best mix there."

The box intrigued me, I must admit. I'm not too hot on technology, as
I've already said, but even I knew that Sony did not let stuff like
that out of their research labs - especially not to a long haired
ageing hippie enthusiast who just happened to want to hear how it
sounded.

I suspected a put on. "Hey John, what else does it do?"

He turned, a questioning look on his face.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, does it make coffee? Or does it light your fags for you?"

He was annoyed with me - I could see it. It was a rare sight. John
never lost his cool, but he was close to it now.

"You think it's a joke? This thing is going to make me rich. I risk my
neck to get it - and you think it's a joke?"

I finally saw the look of guilt on his face.

"Oh John. You didn't?"

"I did," he said, finally smiling. "And not from Sony either. What we
have here is the latest super-computer from the University Research
Lab. One of the technicians told me about it. I was telling the truth
about the biotechnology, and it just happens that it can work as a
recording mechanism, so I thought I'd borrow it for the night, just to
try it out."

I saw now why he had invited me - he needed someone to tell him it was
all right. He'd stolen a piece of technology, worth God knows how much,
and was using it to record his album collection, and he wanted my
approval.

Sometimes I wondered if he would ever grow up.

"Just wait till you hear it though - then you can tell me whether it
was worth it or not," he said, fiddling with something at the back of
his box of tricks. I knew that it didn't matter to him what the
connections were - he was able to knock up anything electrical in no
time at all.

He was talking again, still trying to convince me that what he'd done
wasn't really bad.

"The technician says that this baby will do just about anything you
would ever want a computer to do. It was originally seen as a mega
graphics processor - you know, the stuff which does the virtual
reality? Anyway, they've had a few teething problems with it, but the
recording and playback has been perfected."

He did something at the front of the box and the music began.

Have you ever wanted to hear John Lennon sing Bat out of Hell? Or Meat
loaf murdering When I'm Sixty Four?

We both sat there, stunned, as the amalgam continued. Meat Loaf and
Harrison duets, John Lennon and Jim Steinman swapping guitar parts.
Weird is not the word for it.

After we'd had a beer, John did some experimenting. What he had stolen
was not just a recording device - it was the world's best mixing
machine. It could pick up the nuances from one musician and transport
his playing style into any other song. After a while we had Jimi
Hendrix playing on Stairway to Heaven and Michael Jackson dueting with
Otis Redding and Sam Cooke.

John was getting excited.

"Think what we could do with this. It could be the ultimate Karaoke
machine. All those songs that you've always wanted to hear your
favourite stars doing - now you can have it."

I could see some problems, which I pointed out to him. It wasn't ours,
we didn't know how it worked, we had no idea how to program it, and it
seemed to play what it wanted, not what you wanted it to. We were
arguing about it while Elvis sang with Robert Plant on Bohemian
Rhapsody. It was just reaching the climax when the black box started to
smoke.

We both lunged for the power cable.

I reached it first, but I was too late to stop the box from
overheating. It exploded, sending a small cloud of oily black smoke out
to hang in the middle of the room. That wasn't all, though. Our clothes
were covered in tiny yellow dots, like pollen grains. Looking around I
could see that the whole room was spotted with them, including the
sleek black casing of John's stereo.

I managed to pull one off my T-shirt and rub it between my fingers. It
burst with a tiny popping sound leaving an oily smear across my
palm.

"What the hell is this?" I asked, showing John the smear.

He looked over at me, eyes wide with a mixture of fear and
wonder.

"I think - and I'm not sure - but I think whatever was in that box may
have reproduced. What we have here are spores - and I don't think we
want to see what happens if they ever come to maturity."

We spent the next hour cleaning up, breaking the remains of the box
into as many small pieces as possible and cleaning the oily grease from
the surfaces in the living room. The yellow dots were the most
persistent but we tried to get rid of most of them.
I discovered that could be taken off our clothing with a piece of
Sellotape and we spent a good half hour trying to track them all down.
We burnt the Sellotape and afterwards we went for a walk and
distributed the remains of the black box in various locations as we
made our way round the pubs.

As we split up later that evening, both more than a little the worse
for drink, John made me swear an oath of secrecy, just like when we
were kids.

Over the next week we scanned the newspapers and TV reports for any
mention of the black box, but all was quiet. Either its absence hadn't
been noticed yet or - more worryingly - someone was covering it
up.

John was getting paranoid, seeing secret service agents around every
corner and it was becoming harder and harder to coax him out of his
flat. He kept complaining about problems with his stereo system, but
that was an old story. He always had problems with his system. Maybe I
should have listened more when he was talking about the problems - but
then again, I don't think it would have made any difference.

There was only one thing that stood out as being out of the ordinary
that week, and I didn't make the connection at the time, but I can now
see how it all fits in.

It was Wednesday night. John called me and his tone was strange. I'd
heard him excited before of course, but this time there was something
else there, something that sounded like fear, madness.

"Put your television on to BBC 1," he said, "And tell me what you
see."

I did as I was told.

"Tony Blair is giving a party political broadcast," I told him. "He's
sitting at a desk looking serious."

And then John asked a strange question.

"What do his ears look like?"

I was stumped. "They look like ears. What would you expect them to look
like?"

He put the phone down on me, but I thought I heard the word
"elephants".

I didn't think any more about it until later that week.

I was watching the news on the TV when the black chap turned into
Ronald Reagan then Margaret Thatcher then what looked like Bette Davis
playing Good Queen Bess. Just after that they had Arnold Schwarzenneger
scoring the winning goal in the cup final, but I really knew something
was wrong when James Dean and Marilyn Monroe turned up on
Eastenders.

I tried to reach John on the phone. I had suspicions that this had
something to do with his little black box. Either he wasn't at home or
he was laying low.

Knowing John I thought it would be the latter. I realised how far
things had gone when I was waking over to his place. I passed the TV
rental shop and Mahatma Gandhi was being interviewed by Gabby Roslin,
followed by Bin Laden reading the weather.

Several people walked past looking at the discs they had just taken
from their Walkmen, discs which obviously didn't play what was marked
on the label. I stopped one of them - a guy I knew vaguely through an
old friend - and he let me listen to what was supposedly The Smiths'
Greatest Hits.

It had William Hague singing Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now. At least
whatever was happening seemed to be caused by something with a sense of
humour.

As I passed the cinema an angry crowd emerged. I gathered from their
shouting that they hadn't expected Kim Basinger to turn into E.T. in
the middle of a love scene with Richard Gere.

And everywhere, if you looked closely enough, there were thousands of
the tiny, yellow, pollen like grains.

It took five minutes shouting and three minutes' worth of threats of
physical violence before I could get John to open the door. He was
drunk and smelled of cheap wine. He had been crying, that was obvious,
and I could see why as soon as I entered the living room.

His stereo system - all those sleek black boxes on which he's spent the
best part of ten thousand pounds - had been reduced to a pile of broken
rubble, its electrical intestines strewn across the floor.

I was almost speechless.

"Who? What?" I managed to say, then, seeing the look in his eyes,
"Why?"

He motioned at the centre of the room. He'd moved the television back
in and he was watching a game show. Richard Nixon was the question
master and the panel contained, among others, the Pope, Ian Paisley,
Terry Wogan and Madonna. Suddenly it changed to a football match.

I didn't have my glasses on but I knew something wasn't right. As I
moved closer I could see what it was. The players wee all elephants.
Life-size, male, African elephants, kitted out in full football strip.
Behind me John was roaring with laughter and crying, heavy, sparkling
tears.

"You see what we've done? We've transformed the viewing habits of the
British public." He started laughing again, just before I slapped him.
That calmed him down enough.

"We did it," he said. "We let the little buggers out and they've taken
over the airwaves. It's got everywhere - into the radio, TV, films.
It's really taking over." He laughed loudly again and I could see that
the tears had dried up. He seemed to be genuinely amused. "Great, isn't
it."

After thinking about it for a bit I had to agree with him. The
programmes were a definite improvement on what passed as entertainment
on British Television.

"But what if they find out?" I wanted to know.

"I don't think they ever will," he said as he passed me a beer and we
settled down in front of the TV, "But if they do, I think the public
will make heroes of us. Just one thing?"
He was being serious for a moment and I saw his look stray to the
stereo - or what remained of it.

"Whatever you do," he went on gravely, "Don't let them make you listen
to the radio."

It's discovered that it likes Westlife."