Free Flower of Scotland 2 by William Meikle Page B

which let you hear the band breathing. 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.
    When he opened the door he had the happy look of a puppy that had just wet all over the new carpet.
    "Come away in, ma man," he said. "Ye’re no’ goan tae believe this shit."
    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 in exactly the optimum position in the room.
    "This is it!" he said. "This is effin’ it."
    He was dancing around on his toes, full of nervous energy. I didn’t want to get too close to him; he might be giving off sparks. I finally managed to get him calmed down enough to tell me what was going on.
    "It hisnae even made the mags yet," he said. "Ah got it fae a contact out in Livingston, in Sony’s labs. Ah’m unner strict orders no’ tae let it oot o’ my sight. It’s like gonnae be the biggest thing since the telly wiz inventit."
    He plunged on, almost talking to himself.
    "TQ - that’s whit they’re gonnae ca’ it - Total Quality - the ultimate in Biotechnology. Dae ye see this wee beauty here?"
    He held up a box, about the size of a packet of cigarettes, but black and shiny with strange nodules protruding from its surface. It was sleek and strangely organic, like something one of Giger’s aliens might leave behind. It made me want to stroke it, and get as far away as possible, both at the same time.
    "Those fiendish Orientals have done it again, have they?" I asked, more to slow him down than out of any genuine desire to be illuminated.
    "They hiv that," he said, shaking his head in admiration. "It’s a new form of computing, 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 intelligent proteins and attach it up to the latest in micro-circuitry."
    "What’s it for?"
    "Well," he said. "Originally it was for the home entertainment industry. They wanted something that could track and monitor how you played games … you know, all the little twitches and movements of the controller that are different for every individual? They wanted to use the learning power of the new chip to tailor each game to each person, so that the computer can learn what you’re good at … and more importantly, what you’re bad at. They’ve even been experimenting with voice recognition and vocal control to get rid of manual controllers completely."
    "That must take a lot of computing power."
    "You’d better believe it," he said. "This wee beauty can go ten times faster than anything else on the market. It’s right up there with the Cray that gets used for weather forecasting."
    He hadn’t noticed it, but he’d lost his accent as soon as he started talking technology, and lapsed in to his ‘Sunday’ voice. He stopped talking when he saw that I had switched off.
    "OK," he said, taking pity on me. "Here’s the gen. Once they started building it in the lab they realised they had a side effect. It worked even better than they imagined at collecting information and recording it. It’ll record onythin’ that ye play to it, and they havnae reached its limit. It’s a bottomless pit, like."
    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