False Value

by Ben Aaronovitch

  The intercom hummed and crackled. Then there was a thunk from behind the door and it started to slowly retreat into the wall. I went to step through and stopped—the wall was at least half a meter thick. The door had to be dragged all the way out by hydraulic arms on the other side and then ponderously swung aside.

  “Stand clear of the moving doors,” said the intercom, followed by something that would have sounded like, if a person not a machine had made it, a snigger. As I walked through I stopped to examine the wall. It was composed of layers of different materials of different thicknesses, like the composite armor you find on modern tanks—thin layers of metal, thick planks of yellow pine and a couple of thicker layers of what looked like insulating foam. If I’d sat down to design a wall for protecting electronics against serious magic abuse, I’d have come up with something like that.

  Good, I thought, I don’t need to be as careful as I thought I did.

  “Glad to be of service,” said the door as it started closing behind me.

  The room I’d entered took up a quarter of the warehouse and was open all the way up to its steel rafters. The walls were lined with the same foam soundproofing as the wall I’d just walked through. The floor was an expanse of thick wood planking polished to a high sheen, surrounding a dais on which sat a plinth topped by an array of modern stainless steel musical pipes. It was an honest-to-God organ—or rather, I saw as I looked closer, a modern streamlined copy of an automatic fairground organ. One that had been stripped of its baroque gilt decoration which had been replaced by matt black metal grilles and smooth gray panels with aluminum trim. There was no keyboard. Instead I could see what looked like a Mary Engine embedded behind a clear glass panel at the center, while at its head, one on each side, were two demijohn-sized glass jars filled with a cloudy red liquid—the Rose Jars. A rack of HPCs, like those in the first room, stood either side of the organ and in front of the left-hand rack waited Terrence Skinner.

  He should have been wearing a black roll-neck jumper with a faux military insignia on his chest, but obviously Skinner hadn’t been reading the script and had turned out for the final confrontation in jeans, black Nike trainers and a loose blue pinstripe collarless shirt. He was, at least, sitting in a swivel chair in front of the steady unblinking lights of the HPC rack. But he didn’t say, “Ahh, Mr. Grant, we meet again,” which showed a shocking lack of etiquette on his part.

  “Hi, Peter,” he said. “Come to see the start of the new world?”

  “I don’t want to be a downer,” I said. “But I’m here to talk about Leo Hoyt.”

  “What about him?” said Skinner casually, but the heel of his right trainer started to tap on the polished wood surface of the dais.

  “We need to clarify a few things,” I said, and walked up to join Skinner on the dais.

  “We talked about this,” said a voice from nowhere. “This is the response we anticipated.”

  The voice was an attractive tenor with a mid-Atlantic accent coming, I realized, from multiple speakers positioned in and around the organ. I used its arrival as an excuse to peer curiously at the machine.

  “For someone who just wants to clarify a few points,” said the voice, “you’ve sure brought a lot of cops.”

  There was another glass panel next to the Mary Engine, lit from the inside by the shade of blue light that is now compulsory for all high-tech equipment from the Sonic Screwdriver on down.

  “We weren’t sure what we might find,” I said, and crouched down to look through the glass.

  Inside was a music book, identical, I assumed, to the one stolen from Henry “Wicked” Collins in January, connected to a reader much like the one cobbled together by Mrs. Chin. Only this one was beautifully put together out of brass and mahogany.

  “You already had a copy of The Enchantress of Numbers,” I said. “Where did you get it?”

  “Branwell Petersen had it,” said Skinner. “I bought it with the rest of his lab equipment. Didn’t realize its importance at the time, though.”

  So Petersen had had all the pieces of the puzzle when Anthony Lane graduated from mashing the caps lock to pulling the trigger. Eat hot lead, you USURPER OF THE NATURAL ORDER!

  “As I indicated earlier—we discussed this,” said the voice, which I was assuming belonged to Deep Thought. “This one is as bad as the Librarians. They’re just looking for an excuse to shut you down.”

  So you know about the Librarians, I thought. Interesting.

  I shifted to the left and tapped the glass in front of the Mary Engine. Close up I could see that it was as clean, as pristine and as streamlined as the mechanical organ it was part of.

  “Is this a copy?” I asked.

  “More like Mark II,” said Skinner. “We reverse-engineered the old one and built that one from scratch. With better tolerances, mind you—the old one used to stick.”

  “Where’s the old one now?”

  Because I wondered whether Skinner knew about the van and its trips out to the Print Shop to activate the drones. And if he didn’t know? What would that mean?

  “Terrence,” said Deep Thought, “this man does not have our best interests at heart.”

  “In pieces,” said Skinner. “We had to take it apart to see how it worked. It’s in storage now. What has this got to do with Leo?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and brushed my fingers across the glass again. There was no vestigia anywhere in the vicinity. I wondered if this was another fake—another decoy—and whether Skinner knew. I stood up and drifted toward the right-hand Rose Jar—the one furthest from where Skinner was sitting. “Where is it now?”

  “Over there,” said Skinner.

  He jerked his thumb at where stacks of white plastic storage containers were stood in rows against the wall. They, along with the plastic garden furniture, sofa bed and the neat pile of pizza boxes, eliminated what was left of the James Bond villain vibe.

  The Rose Jars were set high and further back than the front of the organ—making them hard to get close to.

  “Why both jars?”

  “That was the design they used in San Jose,” said Skinner. “Didn’t want to mess with it until we knew how it worked.”

  “How does it work?”

  “Not sure yet,” he said. “I think the jars create a multi-dimensional operating space that allows a consciousness to develop free of the normal hardware restrictions.”

  It sounded plausible to me, and for all I knew that’s how they stored ghosts.

  “Did Leo know about this place?” I asked.

  Skinner hesitated.

  “I don’t know,” said Skinner. “I think he might have—”

  The voice interrupted.

  “What he knew was irrelevant,” it said.

  “Speaks to motive,” I said, and managed to get myself a good look in the jar. There was a glow, and a fluting vestigium like the sound of a finger tracing the rim of a wine glass.

  I was a little bit disappointed.

  It was just a ghost.

  Part of me had wanted a working Artificial General Intelligence—one that at least wouldn’t keep trying to make me watch Adam Sandler movies.

  “So who’s in these Rose Jars, Terry?” I asked. “What spirit have you got putting the intelligence into your artificial?”

  “This is where people like you go wrong,” said Skinner. “You look at a Rose Jar and think ‘Wow, it’s got a ghost in it’ when you should be thinking ‘That device can hold an entire human personality.’”

  “So, no ghosts,” I said.

  “I am not a ghost,” said Deep Thought—the accent had slipped westward, California at a guess. “I am as much a fully self-aware person as you are.”

  “In that case, Mr. Deep Thought, I am arresting you for the murder of Leo Hoyt,” I said. “You do not have to say anything.”

  “
Are you nuts?” asked Skinner.

  “Hey, Terry,” I said, “if he’s as much a person as I am, then he’s subject to the law. Which means it will harm his defense if he doesn’t mention something he relies on in court. Anything he does say may be given in evidence.”

  “Have you finished?” asked Skinner.

  “Not quite,” I said, and slapped my hand on the side of the organ. “You’re nicked, sunshine.”

  Skinner’s mouth worked—he obviously wanted to say something clever, but all he managed was, “This is so fucking pathetic.”

  “And I’m having you for conspiracy and aiding and abetting,” I said.

  “Aiding and abetting what?” he asked.

  “Poor little Leo Hoyt, you cunt,” I said, surprising myself. “We know you used a burner and we know the cell tower. It’s only a matter of time before we have the metadata for all the calls and texts. We have a witness—so you’re done, mate.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, mate,” said Skinner.

  Actually, I doubted we could make September testify in court and the chances of getting the phone data were slim at best. Still, tech types always overestimate the efficacy of technological solutions. And Skinner must have been spooked because he took a step away from me and almost fell off the dais—catching himself just in time.

  “Nothing to do with me,” he said.

  “Really?” I said. “Why don’t we ask Deep Thought here?” I turned to look at the pair of Rose Jars. “You know something, don’t you, Deepy? You’ve been a busy little unincorporated spirit, haven’t you? Recruiting your little network, sending out your van.”

  “What van?” asked Skinner.

  “The one outside with the fully operational Mary Engine in it,” I said. “Where did you think those drones came from?”

  “What van?” said Deep Thought. “What drones?”

  There was a sudden grinding noise from the left wall. I looked and saw bits of the foam soundproofing had started breaking away. Judging by the shape and position, this was one of the freight doors—rolling up. As it rose, chunks of foam fell to litter the floor and gray light washed in through the widening gap. The electric motors driving the slats were whining in protest, but the soundproofing had obviously been glued directly to the wall without a stiffening layer of plasterboard.

  “Deep Thought,” said Skinner in his best talking-to-Siri voice, “deactivate the freight doors.”

  “It’s not me,” said Deep Thought.

  Skinner turned to me.

  “Are you doing this?” he said.

  The door had risen high enough that I could see the articulated lorries lined up in the empty lot. It didn’t take a genius to see that the next stage would be to have several metric tons of plastic killing machine swarming out of the lorries and in through the freight door. But why? What did either Skinner or Deep Thought think they would achieve?

  I looked over at the two Rose Jars and the penny dropped.

  “God, you guys are dumb,” said a voice that was probably, all things considered, not Deep Thought.

  “Who said that?” asked Skinner in a high querulous voice.

  Later I reckoned he’d worked it out too, but in that moment he didn’t want to admit it to himself.

  “I’m the man from pest control,” said the voice. “Here to stamp out all the leeches.”

  “He’s in my head,” said Deep Thought, in an oddly calm voice. “There’s a whole part of me that’s not me.”

  “That’s because you’re the ghost of Branwell Petersen,” I said. “Which makes you”—nonsensically, I turned to face the second Rose Jar—“Anthony Lane.”

  Skinner looked at me, his face pale and terrified. And I saw him put it all together, just as I had thirty seconds earlier. The Rose Jars had been empty when Anthony Lane turned up to put an end to Branwell Petersen’s little experiment. The Mary Engine must have been running, spinning magic out into the environment, so that when they died their personalities had been imprinted inside the jars.

  “That name means nothing to me,” said Deep Thought. “I remember my first conscious thought—here. I awoke here. I am Deep Thought.”

  “Pathetic, isn’t it?” said what I assumed was the ghost of Anthony Lane. “They upset the natural order of things and they have no idea what they’re doing.”

  Outside I heard a couple of big diesel engines firing up.

  “So did you kill Leo Hoyt?” I asked, to distract Lane.

  “Oh fuck,” said Skinner in a resigned tone. “There must have been enough of a pattern to form a personality, but without memory. Still, not a total waste of time—we’re still talking about a self-aware construct.”

  “He was a loose end,” said Lane to me. “It was easy enough to convince Crocodile Dundee here that he was a threat.”

  There was a disappointingly muffled crump sound from outside. I’d been hoping for a bigger bang, but it wasn’t a real explosion.

  “What was that?” asked Skinner.

  “That was a couple of phosphorus grenades going off inside a pair of shipping containers,” I said, and started edging casually toward Skinner. With the freight door open I was less than five meters from escape.

  “That’s unfortunate,” said Lane. At least I think it was him.

  “Now, I want everyone to remain calm,” I said but just then the organ started to play “Oh, I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside” in full brass band oompah-oompah mode and the freight door started to grind downwards.

  I would have liked to ask Lane what his plans for all those drones had been, but Skinner had grabbed a monkey wrench from somewhere and was running toward the Rose Jars. His logic was obvious—if Lane was a stored ghost, then smashing his jar would finish him off. I assume he knew which jar to smash, but before he got halfway across the dais a drone dropped down from the rafters. There was a bang as the drone fired and the jar on the left shattered, fragments of glass and cloudy red water spraying across Skinner, the organ and the HPC units. Skinner yelled something and swung wildly and managed to hit the drone square on. It went arcing across the room to smash into the foam soundproofing with a dull thud. Two more drones were dropping from the ceiling—I got one with a fireball but missed the second, which shot around behind the organ. Distracted, I wasn’t fast enough to stop Skinner swinging his monkey wrench around in a full arc and smashing the last Rose Jar.

  “Armed police!” I shouted at him. “Drop the weapon and put your hands on your head!”

  Skinner gave me a look of stunned incomprehension and kept the wrench. What I hoped was the last drone came buzzing around the side of the organ and I zapped it with another fireball. In my excitement I overdid it and the plastic dragonfly shape disintegrated like a TIE fighter.

  Skinner’s eyes practically bugged out and he quickly dropped the wrench and put his hands on his head. I ordered him off the dais and got him to kneel down in an open patch of flooring.

  There was a clank as the freight door whirred down the last half meter and closed.

  I pulled out my phone and thumbed it on. While I waited for it to boot up, the organ crashed into the final chords of “Oh I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside” and then mercifully shut the fuck up.

  I used a plastic tie to secure Skinner’s hands behind his back, just in case he got any funny ideas. Then I punched Stephanopoulos’ number on my phone and told her that the building was secure.

  “See how it bloody is, Peter,” said Skinner bitterly. “The dead hand of the past—always dragging us back down.”

  He probably would have continued, but he realized I wasn’t paying attention. Instead I was listening to a rhythmic grinding sound like a washing machine made of gears. I hopped back onto the dais and found the sound was coming from the Mary Engine. I crouched down and looked inside—through the outer layer of machinery I could see camshafts a
nd flanges turning.

  “How do I turn this off?” I asked Skinner.

  “It shouldn’t be turned on,” he said. “It has an isolated power supply.”

  The grinding rhythm was picking up and the gears and shafts were visibly turning faster.

  And there was the spoiled fish vestigium that I had come to know and love.

  I stepped away sharply and ran around the back to check there wasn’t a power cable I could pull out. There was no exposed cabling. Everything had been boxed away into conduits—you couldn’t fault their health and safety standards.

  I called Stephanopoulos and told her I needed the freight door open. Immediately. I didn’t catch her reply because my phone squawked and died. I looked over and saw all the blue lights on the HPC rack had gone out. The grinding sound was rising in pitch—the washing machine full of gears was ratcheting up into its spin cycle. I briefly wondered what would happen if I threw a high-powered masonry breaker spell into the Mary Engine, and then decided that it probably wouldn’t be wise to be in the same postcode when I did it.

  I ran to Skinner and pulled him to his feet.

  “This is all your fault,” he said as I dragged him toward the freight door.

  The grinding noise had become a metallic screech. The air was suddenly full of the reek of dead fish, and as I turned to look back it seemed that darkness was beginning to crowd in from the corners of the room.

  A portal into darkness, the Rose of New Orleans had written, and I realized that this was an allokosmos, an alternative cosmos, pushing into mine.

  And there was something in that darkness—I could feel it. A sort of gleeful madness, a wild and vicious enthusiasm. I decided I was probably going to have to risk taking out the Mary Engine after all.

  Behind me there was a shriek of shearing metal and the freight door rose half a meter. Guleed rolled through the gap and jumped to her feet.

  “Need a hand?” she shouted over the scream of the Mary Engine.