Read Online Dante's Numbers by David Hewson - Free Book Online Page A

James Stewart, their heads floating in the ether.
    “Note,” the skinny one identified by his shirt as Josh Jonah, Founder, Ideologist., Visioneer , ordered, “the absence of noise.”
    “I can hear you ,” Quattrocchi snapped, to no avail.
    “If we were in an ordinary projectionist's room,” Jonah continued, “we wouldn't be able to have this conversation. There would be film rattling through the projector. Physical artefacts. Need less expense. Time and money thrown away without reason.”
    “I am an officer of the Carabinieri. Not an accountant.”
    “We're all accountants in the end.” It was the other Ameri can, a big muscular man with a boyish face and a ponytail of long wavy dark hair. Quattrocchi peered at his T-shirt. It read, Tom Black, Founder, Architect, Corporate Conscience. Black seemed younger than his partner. A little less sure of himself, too. “In the sense that we pay for things. You'd like to get movies quicker, cheaper, easier, wouldn't you?”
    “Right now,” Quattrocchi blurted out so loudly that he felt sure his voice had carried into the cinema beyond, with its audience of VIPs, “I would like to know where Allan Prime is, why we have a dead actor in the park out there, and what the hell is going on around here.” He glowered at their shirts. “Who is Lukatmi anyway? Some Indian god? And who the hell are you?”
    The two men looked at each other and Tom Black smiled.
    “That was kind of the positioning we were looking for. Three million dollars got blown there. Worth every penny,” he said.
    “We're backers,” the skinny one boasted. “We've got money in this thing. Without us, this movie would never have got made.”
    “What—” Quattrocchi began to say.
    “Lukatmi's got nothing to do with India,” the quieter Ameri can interrupted. “Lukatmi. ‘Look at me.' It's a philosophical statement about not hiding away, about being a part of the digital lifestream, a star in your own right, out there for everyone to see.”
    “Like YouTube,” Bonetti added, and Josh Jonah howled, “No, no, no, no, no! How many freaking times do I have to say this? YouTube is yesterday… “
    “When Google bought them…” Tom Black shook his head. His broad, young face was so sorrowful it looked as if someone had died. “…it was all over. They don't understand the whole mash-up thing. The behemoth days are past.”
    “Lukatmi is just the medium, not the message,” Jonah added, taking over, clearly the boss. “Except for the paid-for content, we don't own a damned thing. It's not for us to dictate to human beings what they create or what they see. If you have a problem with that, don't watch.”
    Quattrocchi suddenly realised he'd read about these people in the newspapers. They'd found some loophole that allowed them to be absolved of any legal responsibility for what was, on the surface, carried by their network. They were, if he understood this correctly, like a dating agency. Their computers put someone wanting something in touch with someone offering it. The relationship was consummated in a way that had, so far, allowed them to escape the attentions of the law, on the simple grounds that they never published anything directly themselves. If the material that people found on Lukatmi turned out to be copyrighted, blasphemous, or, with very few restrictions, pornographic, they weren't to blame. It was anarchy with a listing on NASDAQ. Millions and millions of people had flocked to their site since it had gone live less than a year before. The two founders had become paper billionaires as staid investment houses and international banks poured vast sums of money into a company that seemed to be little more than two geeks with a big and possibly dubious idea.
    One thing still puzzled him. “What on earth has all this got to do with the movie business?”
    “Everything,” said Bonetti. “This is a revolution. Like when silent movies got sound, when black-and-white turned to colour. It