False Value

by Ben Aaronovitch

  Skinner looked down at his poor gutted crab as if surprised to see it so empty.

  “Emil,” he called. “We’re finished.”

  I hadn’t, but I don’t think he noticed.

  * * *

  —

  You can access the bank of Regent’s Canal via a footpath just the other side of the bridge from Skinner’s postmodernist penthouse. It runs along the canal before dropping you into the damp urine-scented shadow of the railway bridges further west.

  Nobody knows why some systems—rivers, forests, possibly the London Underground but we’re not sure—acquire a genius loci. Not even the genii locorum themselves know the why and the how of it—they only know it happens. Although they don’t call themselves genii locorum—they say they are spirits, gods and goddesses and, when the mood takes Beverley, òrìṣà.

  Why Regent’s Canal had acquired a genius loci was a mystery, and why she was a female orangutan that escaped from London Zoo in the 1950s is doubly so. But since I’ve met unicorns, talking foxes and a very belligerent tree, I no longer find these things so surprising.

  Professor Postmartin says that the most important thing is to keep detailed notes. That way some lucky bugger in the future can get a decent dissertation out of our experiences.

  Genii locorum are by definition territorial, so if you think you’re going to spend some time working in their locality it’s best to put in some propitiation. Alcohol works most of the time. But tradition, in this case, suggested bananas.

  I was squatting down to put the boat in the water when a canoe came gliding out of the darkness under the bridge. It was open-topped, and while the low light made it difficult to see details it looked to me like it had been hewn from a single log. For a moment I wondered if I’d slipped into that dangerous half-life memory of the city where gods and ghosts mingled with the stone memory of the architecture. But then I noticed that the two passengers were both wearing orange Gore-Tex anoraks. The figure at the front was doing all the paddling while his companion sat cross-legged in the back with an air of placid enlightenment.

  I recognized them both, so I stopped trying to float my offering and waited for them to pull in to the bank beside me.

  “Hi, Melvin,” I said.

  The pinched little white man in the bow had once been an estate agent until an unwise grift had propelled him into a brief career as King of the Rats. Now he was estate manager for the Goddess of the Canals and, obviously, her boatman too.

  I waved my bananas at the figure seated in the back, who reached out an inhumanly long arm to tap Melvin on the shoulder. He leaned back and the goddess murmured something in his ear. He nodded and turned back to me.

  “She says thank you for the bananas, but what she really needs is a toaster.” I noticed he took the bananas, though.

  “A toaster?”

  “Yes,” said Melvin. “One of the large catering types with eight slots.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I waited while more instructions were conveyed from the back of the canoe.

  “Dualit for preference,” said Melvin. “And she’s holding you responsible for ensuring both your mother and Molly ethically source their palm oil.”

  “And in return?” I asked, because after a couple of years you learn the rules of these exchanges.

  Melvin handed me a Sainsbury’s bag. It was heavy and inside were irregular-shaped bits of plastic.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “We don’t know,” said Melvin, pushing the canoe away from the bank. “That’s why we’re giving it to you.”

  As the canoe vanished into the gloom under the bridge I heard the goddess make a soft inquiring sound.

  “Who knows?” said Melvin. “But hopefully we’ll get a toaster out of it.”

  I cautiously reached into the bag and touched a piece of plastic. There was an immediate flash of vestigium—the same rotting fish sensation as the demon trap at Stephen’s flat.

  I sighed and called Nightingale as I walked up toward the bus stop.

  * * *

  —

  “Were you followed?” asked Stephen when he opened the door.

  Well . . . Nightingale is parked two hundred meters down the road. Silver’s observation team is out the back of your flat. And Silver herself is with another team in a suitably battered white Transit van around the corner. But apart from that . . .

  “No,” I said, “I was careful.”

  He nodded and let me in.

  “It’s a context problem,” Silver, who turned out to have a double first in Psychology and Sociology from Bradford University, had said. “People have much narrower knowledge bases than they think they do.”

  What they mostly know about police and intelligence work they get from the media. This is why it’s easier to infiltrate political groups than criminal ones. However revolutionary they think they are, they see police officers as slightly thick bovver boys in big boots. When a personable middle-class guy turns up in a khaki jacket, a CND badge and smelling of patchouli, they’re practically invisible. Criminals, on the other hand, deal with the police all the time and know what they smell like. All of this, Silver reckoned, went double for Americans, who intellectually knew the rest of the world existed but didn’t really believe it.

  “Not deep down where it counts,” Silver had said. “Which is lucky for us.”

  As the one whose delicate brown body was in the firing line, I was a little bit more cautious. People are often short-sighted and stupid, right up to the point where they’re fucking perceptive—that point usually being the most inconvenient moment possible. And people don’t like to think they’ve been taken—and they tend to express their displeasure forcibly.

  Stephen led me down the standard too-narrow hallway beloved of 1960s municipal architecture and into what I guessed was the living room. The curtains hadn’t just been closed but were also taped in place along the bottom of the window. The original furniture had been pushed against the walls and covered in dust sheets. And the center of the room was dominated by a table tennis table covered in stuff. That was the best description for it—stuff. A computer was in there, plus what looked like the inside of a vinyl enthusiast’s amplifier, complete with thermionic valves and a wooden framework that looked like the key readers Wicked the Showman had described to me all the way back in December.

  When the world was a lot less complicated.

  Stephen looked around, obviously missing something.

  “Damn,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  As soon as he was gone I edged round the narrow gap between the shrouded furniture and the table to confirm that The Enchantress of Numbers was the music book being fed into the reader. I had a go at tracing wires—the music book would be read by an optical reader which fed into a chunky, hand-soldered circuit board fitted with the thermionic valves, which in turn fed into an adapter of some kind, which fed into a port in a battered-looking MacBook.

  “It turned out that I didn’t need the valves,” said a voice behind me.

  I turned to find a tall, willowy East Asian, probably Chinese, woman in the doorway. She had wide-spaced brown eyes behind archaic half-moon reading glasses and a narrow thin-lipped mouth. Even without the cardigan or knowing she was an associate of Stephen’s, I would have pegged her as a librarian. Something about the cheerfully suspicious way she regarded me. As if wondering if I was going to start talking loudly or fold over a page corner to mark my place.

  “If you’re done with them, my dad could use them as spares,” I said.

  A couple of pairs of Sovtek 300B triodes could easily fetch as much as £300, if you could find them.

  “I’m not done with them quite yet,” she said. Her accent had some of the—I assumed—New York drawl Stephen had, but it was overlaid with a mid-Atlantic precision. “But perhaps we can make
a deal before I leave.”

  She was obviously dying for me to ask what this thing on the table did, so I asked who she was instead.

  “My name is Mrs. Patricia Chin,” she said. “I work with Stephen at the Library.”

  “You’re a practitioner?” I asked.

  “Of a kind,” she said. “You might call me a member of the Ordo Machinis Spectandis.” She gazed at me over her glasses. “Do you know what that means?”

  “You maintain the sacred machines to further the greater glory of the God Emperor of mankind?” I said.

  Mrs. Chin looked at Stephen.

  “He talks like this all the time,” he said. “Just ignore him.”

  “Somebody has to watch the machines,” said Mrs. Chin. “We are the people at the Library who do that.”

  “Watch the machines for what?”

  “Signs of life,” she said.

  I opened my mouth to say something clever, and then decided to aim for something better.

  “What kind of life?” I asked.

  Mrs. Chin gave me an exasperated look.

  “The same kind of life that animates you or I,” she said. “I thought you were a student of the Newtonian synthesis. Do you not understand the implications of the anima vitalis?”

  I was pretty sure Nightingale had yet to cover anything like that, but my Latin was good enough to make a stab at a translation.

  “The animating spirit,” I said.

  I remembered Nightingale telling me about a friend of his. One who’d speculated that any complex system could become a genius loci—the telephone network was the example he’d given. His friend had died before Alan Turing came along, and thus missed the internet, which he either would have loved or thought signaled the beginning of the End Times.

  I pointed at the tangle of connections on the table.

  “Is that alive?”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Mrs. Chin. “But let me show you something.”

  She flipped a switch and the music book started to run through the optical reader, before concertinaing down into a neat pile on the other side of the table. Then she turned the MacBook so I could see the screen. One window showed the dashes and dots as they were recorded by the reader, another interpreted it as what I recognized as hexadecimal code, while a third showed a sound waveform.

  “Is it supposed to be making a noise?” I asked.

  “Damn,” said Mrs. Chin, and used the trackpad to unmute the machine. Music started, mid-fanfare—a Baroque concerto as played by a tinny imitation steam organ.

  “So it was music,” I said.

  Babbage’s hymn to the Enchantress of Numbers turned out to be just that.

  “This is the filtered version,” said Mrs. Chin, adjusting the sound program. “With all the channels enabled.”

  The music was still dominant, but interlaced with discordant notes and rhythms. Mrs. Chin changed it so these sounds were played as dull electronic tones, and they became even more obvious. I looked at the hexadecimal display on the screen.

  “A message hidden in the music?” I said.

  “A message, perhaps,” said Mrs. Chin. “A code, definitely. A hexadecimal code.”

  “Doing what?” asked Stephen.

  Mrs. Chin shrugged.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Why would it be hidden?” I asked. “It was written in the 1830s. Nobody had even invented hackers back then. Nobody apart from Babbage and Ada Lovelace even knew what a universal machine was—let alone how to program one.”

  “Your point?” she asked.

  “If Babbage wasn’t worried about cybersecurity,” I said, “what was he worried about?”

  “Let’s hope we don’t find out,” said Mrs. Chin.

  Which, because the universe can’t resist a bit of irony, was when the windows blew in.

  9

  I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That

  I HEARD THE glass breaking and turned in time to see the curtains bulge inwards as something the size of a brick hit the left-hand curtain. The tape holding the curtains in place held for a moment and then the bulge pushed into the room, dragging the rest of the curtain behind it. It maintained its height above the floor in a suspiciously unbrick-like manner and made a noise like an angry lawn strimmer.

  A drone? Like the one I’d heard on my last visit?

  Stephen yelled “Out!” and grabbed Mrs. Chin, who shouted at him to get the laptop. He made a lunge for the table, just as the bundled shape swerved around. There was a crack, as loud as a gunshot, and a ragged blackened hole appeared in the curtain material.

  When a projectile whizzed past my shoulder with a lethal-sounding buzz I decided that the assessment portion of my response was over and it was time to take such proactive steps as were commensurate with public safety. I hit it with a fireball—I’ve been getting better at those, and this one went straight into the hole in the curtain and exploded.

  Whatever was bundled in the curtain dramatically changed shape and caught fire. It fell suddenly to the floor, the flaming remains of the curtain setting the shrouded furniture behind it on fire. I was definitely going to lose points for that, so I doused it with a couple of water bombs.

  “The laptop,” said Mrs. Chin.

  “Too late,” said Stephen.

  I turned to see him poking the blackened remains of the MacBook. Had the shot been aimed at it rather than me? If that was true, then it was one hell of an accurate shot. Which didn’t bode well for any follow-up.

  “The laptop,” hissed Mrs. Chin again.

  “It’s fucked,” said Stephen.

  “Bring what’s left,” she said, and pushed past me toward the end of the table. “I’ll get the music book.”

  I was going to tell them to wait. But just then a gust of wind blew in through the smashed window, and with it the angry lawn strimmer sound of more drones. Lots more drones.

  “Down!” I shouted, and grabbed Mrs. Chin by her collar and yanked her to the floor with me.

  There were multiple cracks this time—definitely gunshots, definitely from outside the window. It was dim and musty under the table and smelled of spilled solder. Stephen and Mrs. Chin had definitely been en route to losing their deposit even before the drones showed up.

  A fist-sized hole appeared in the table top with a crash, and the floor vibrated with an impact against the living room wall. I smelled dust and, strangely, burning paraffin.

  “Out, out, out!” I shouted. “Now!”

  I cast a shield and stood up. There was a chorus of bangs and I staggered a bit as half a dozen projectiles hit my shield at the same time. I know from experiments that shields can only soak up so much kinetic energy before it bleeds back into the caster.

  Behind me Mrs. Chin was swearing and demanding that we at least try to grab the music book but Stephen, sensibly, was dragging her out the living room door by main force. It was too late anyway, because the table had been blown to bits and floating over its remains were a trio of weird-looking drones.

  If they were drones.

  Instead of the quadcopters I was expecting, these were big fuckers the size of microwaves, built of glistening white plastic and shaped like insects, with dragonfly wings instead of rotor blades. They even had six jointed legs and a gaping round opening in place of a mouth.

  Beverley is totally fine with insects, even spiders, and once popped a beetle in her mouth just to show off. But creepy-crawlies freak me out—even mechanical ones. However, while the tendency of magic to reduce nearby microprocessors to sand is often a bugger, it does have its uses when nobbling modern technology.

  As it happened I’d developed a spell for just that purpose. And, while we’re still arguing over its Latin name in the vernacular, we call it the car-killer. I bounced one at the middle drone, a big one just to be sure, and threw up my
shield in case more were on their way.

  Which was lucky, because the stupid thing had no effect.

  This time I saw the actual shots.

  A flash from its gaping mouth, a gout of smoke and a shudder as a projectile as big as a golf ball ricocheted off my shield—I’ve learned to keep it angled upward—and hit the ceiling. As plaster and bits of the concrete decking showered down, I decided it was time to go.

  “Are you clear?” I shouted back, and got no reply.

  The two drones flanking the first fired simultaneously, one shot high, one shot low. I instinctively jumped back as the lower shot clipped the bottom edge of my shield. They were obviously probing my defenses, so either they were smarter than they looked or a person or persons unknown were controlling them remotely.

  I risked a glance to see if Stephen and Mrs. Chin were okay, only to find they’d already scarpered. I used a sub-forma to fix my shield in place and dived out the door after them. There was a satisfying smash behind me as at least one drone ran into the fixed shield. But without me there to renew it, the thing wasn’t going to last long. The front door was hanging open, so no prizes for guessing where Mrs. Chin and Stephen had got to. I followed them out into the cool air of the walkway, just as they reached the staircase. They paused to look back, and as they did I heard a police siren whoop once, cut off and then whoop once again.

  That was one of the signals I’d agreed with Nightingale and Silver earlier—it meant that he was giving me two minutes to get clear and then he was coming in. If I didn’t want me and my criminal friends to get arrested, we had to move.

  To reinforce the notion the siren started up and, this time, ran continuously.

  When I reached the stairway Mrs. Chin and Stephen were already down the first flight.

  I turned and raised my shield again as the three drones came zinging out of the doorway and, without pausing, swooped in my direction. I was about to try another fireball, when the lead drone faltered and then crumpled in on itself like a plastic bottle being squashed for the recycling bin.