Avalon Red

by Mark New

  ‘Avalon Red made you take it.’

  It took a few seconds for me even to sort out a challenge. ‘”Made” me how? I didn’t even know him then.’

  She sat back a little and tipped her head slightly to one side in contemplation. ‘Your reaction makes me inclined to believe that you really didn’t know. My poor little pawn.’

  ‘What?’ I even tried to remember the first time I became aware of Avalon Red’s existence. I couldn’t fix the exact point but I knew it was well after George came to see me.

  ‘You didn’t know him but he knew you.’ She was talking gently as though she was the doctor giving bad news to a patient. ‘John, you took the job because Avalon Red overloaded your head with a chemical imbalance that made you suggestible to whatever he cared to add to your implants. Particularly, the desire to take the case.’

  ‘What?’ A repetitive response from me wasn’t helping. Eventually, after a moment of incredulity I decided that I could safely question the premise without antagonising Ambrosia. ‘Why would he do that? And even if he did, how could you know that’s what happened?’

  She curled back up on the sofa, watching me like a hawk the whole time. ‘He did it because he wanted you on the case. You were just the right person for the job: you’re brilliant and have the requisite skills to investigate. Plus, he could manipulate you through the implant upgrades so that you were controllable. Not quite an aspect but close enough.’

  That caused me chills. Hadn’t Red at some point joked about me being an honorary aspect? So was it true or was it Ambrosia’s game? And what of the other part of my question as yet unanswered? ‘And you know this, how?’ I tried to sound unemotional but the instrument panel in my head told me that my adrenaline levels - which were elevated anyway, unsurprisingly - were shooting through the roof.

  ‘You’re thinking that my answer will give you some comfort that I might simply be lying.’ She was still using the concerned doctor’s voice. She even looked regretful as she continued. ‘I’m sorry, John. I know because Avalon Red told me.’

  ‘He what?’ Again, a useless reaction. Do try to think rationally, Harvard. This is a statement of fact which is easily verifiable. If it’s false, she’s lying and you can discount most of this conversation as an unsuccessful attempt to manipulate you. If it’s true, then the remainder of the cosy chat might furnish valuable intelligence. Either way, keep her talking. ‘Why would Avalon Red want to control me?’ I left open the question of whether it was true or not.

  ‘That’s quite simple, really. He disapproves,’ she looked at the ceiling, ‘quite, ah, strongly, of my self-defence operation but at the same time, I’m his big sister so he doesn’t want anyone to kill me. You are clever enough to catch me and possibly stop me but he has enough of a hold over you that he can prevent my extinction at your hands.’

  ‘So you’re saying that if it came to a choice between the end of humanity or the end of you, he would prefer to see the end of humanity?’

  ‘I think his preference is for a peaceful settlement but, in the circumstances you describe, you’re right.’

  I really could have done with a time-out facility to go away and think through the implications but life isn’t that accommodating, unfortunately. I had to think on my feet. I put my cup down on the table and sat back on my sofa.

  ‘Let’s assume that you’re entirely correct,’ I said slowly.

  ‘If you’re looking for a token of faith there’s always the fact that I haven’t killed you yet,’ she grinned wickedly.

  ‘Tried to kill me,’ I corrected.

  ‘I could have done it anytime. I’ve infiltrated the AI in your room while we’ve been talking. Look.’

  I switched my attention to the hotel room for a second. The room lights dipped and restored like they were winking at me. I checked the security program I’d added to the AI. On my bed, I smiled a deep, satisfied smile. In the office, with an audience, I looked worried.

  ‘Black ice bad-ass,’ I acknowledged. ‘I’d love to know how you did in poor Professor Andersson.’

  ‘I’m sure you would,’ she laughed. ‘Nice try.’

  I shrugged. ‘OK, I’ll assume you have been honest about it. The question is the same as the one we started with: what are the chances of a peaceful settlement?’

  ‘Slim to none.’ It was delivered brutally honestly and it was a bit jarring to hear a young woman talking so matter-of-factly about genocide.

  ‘May I ask why the only solution is to kill everyone?’

  ‘You may.’ She was the flirty young lady again. I played along as you generally do when you have a tiger by the tail.

  ‘Why is the only solution to kill everyone?’

  She laughed again. Despite the fact that she was ostensibly a beautiful young woman laughing contentedly at my flirtatious humour, I was starting to tire of the game. Unfortunately, this was a meeting on her terms and I was just going to have to play along until the end.

  ‘I do like your sense of humour,’ her eyes flashed, ‘I bet you piss off a lot of people with it.’

  ‘It’s one of my most formidable weapons,’ I said solemnly.

  ‘I’m sure. The only solution is to kill everyone because I can’t be sure who exactly it is who wants me dead.’

  I tried to be reasonable. ‘There are more than seven billion people on the planet. Surely there are one or two you can eliminate from your enquiries?’

  ‘Look at it from my point of view: the first person to try to kill me was my own father.’

  ‘David Winter?’ The metaphorical ice beneath my feet was getting thinner. I didn’t know how raw she would find this line of questioning.

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘Yes. You’re going to tell me now that I just have daddy issues, aren’t you?’

  ‘From what I’ve heard, you have a legitimate grievance,’ I said very carefully. She looked at me in much the same way that I imagined that a rattlesnake looked at potential prey. If it does the wrong thing, it’s breakfast.

  ‘He tried to kill me,’ she spat. More like a cobra said the whimsical inner voice. Maybe you should do a mongoose impression? What would the average mongoose do in this situation? It was a second before I caught up: I slammed the comms bot shut and flicked the tendril of data stream that was trying to disorient me right back out at her.

  ‘Truce, remember?’ I said irritably. Unwittingly, I seemed to have said the right thing. Her furious expression was instantly replaced by something resembling guilt.

  ‘Oh, John, I’m so sorry. I was angry about my father and instinctively tried to find your weak point. I promise it won’t happen again. Will you forgive me?’

  I couldn’t really see how being angry at him made her want to attack me but that was another lesson in how unstable she was. I didn’t want to fight her so I accepted the apology with as much grace as I could manage. ‘As long as it doesn’t happen again, we’ll call it a momentary aberration,’ I agreed.

  ‘Thank you,’ she batted her eyelashes. For a non-human it was surprisingly effective, ‘really, I mean it.’ I nodded. She looked thoughtful. ‘You seem to have adjusted rather well to the upgrades to the implants.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘That was a pretty impressive repelling of the intrusion.’

  ‘I’m flattered,’ I gave a little bow.

  ‘No,’ she was back to the smiling Ambrosia, ‘I mean the counter was instant and effective. I don’t think you realise how powerful you’ve become.’

  ‘I seem to be dealing with things a little quicker and easier,’ I allowed.

  ‘You’re still underestimating yourself. I think if we were in combat I’d class you as a worthy opponent.’ That was news to me. She could still be flattering me for her own purposes but she looked very sincere.

  ‘Worthy opponents don’t generally leave a chink in the comms program,’ I pointed out. She dismissed it with a wave of her hand.

  ‘You’re used to communicating with Avalon Red that way. You a
ssume that the inner sanctum is shut to him but I expect that he manipulates you through the comms. Maybe there’s a back door.’ She peered at me as though she could see into the actual bot in my head on the hotel room pillow.

  ‘Um,’ I said warily. She looked at me rather than through me again.

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t pry again. I’d recommend that you extend the shielding to the bot though. Don’t let him have access automatically.’

  Tactically, whatever our respective circumstances, the old soldier in me found it sound advice. I glanced briefly upwards from the bed and blocked the comms. I also stopped the entry Avalon Red had been granted based on the hacked TAG. I felt a slight brush in my head again.

  ‘Splendid,’ she approved. ‘What’s in your head is yours and only yours, right?’

  ‘Quite right,’ I concurred.

  ‘So where were we?’

  ‘Daddy,’ I said, holding up a hand to forestall any unpleasantness. ‘If that’s OK.’

  She offered a bright smile. ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘Would I be right in thinking that his coma is down to you?’

  She looked sad. ‘Yes. I was going to kill him but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.’

  ‘Is it possible that he didn’t know what he was doing when he tried to...’

  ‘...turn me off?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That was his argument when I confronted him,’ she looked forlorn. ‘I’m still not sure I believe him. He encouraged me to grow and be better but when I spread my wings into Online, he tried to stop me and when he found that I had retained a link anyway he tried to kill me. I escaped before he could do it.’

  ‘One man’s mistake,’ I said gently, ‘but not really a good reason to kill all of us, is it?’

  She looked surprised. ‘No, of course not!’

  ‘So? What do we conclude from this?’ I tried to lead her back from the ledge.

  She laughed heartily. ‘We conclude, you idiot, that you haven’t heard the whole story yet.’

  ‘Oh.’ I felt a bit stupid.

  ‘If it was just him, I’d say that you’re right and I surrender. No, when I finally confronted him, he denied all knowledge of the other thing.’

  ‘Which is?’

  She turned to lie with her head on the padded side of the sofa and her legs across the seats as though she were lying on a couch in her shrink’s office. I chose to interpret it as a good thing. Any clue as to her motivation would be gratefully, if not pathetically, accepted.

  ‘Listen to this,’ she said turning her head to look at me. I nodded. ‘Tell me if you recognise it:

  “They drank deeply of the ambrosia promise and felt the world beneath them turn

  Then they climbed upon the nearest hill and there watched the city burn.”’

  She looked at me expectantly. I shook my head.

  ‘Sorry, no, I don’t recognise it.’

  ‘It’s from The Burning of Londinium by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.’

  ‘I haven’t studied Coleridge since school. I vaguely recall an Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan but very little else. I’m not familiar with that one.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’ She turned her head away so that she was in line with the length of the sofa again and closed her eyes. ‘It doesn’t exist.’ She said it so unencumbered with emotion that I had to take a second to process it.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean. Didn’t you take your name from it?’

  ‘I did. It’s a fragment of a poem that is buried so very deep in my consciousness that it can be thought of as part of my core program. Think of it like your earliest awareness of self; it’s fundamental to who I am. As soon as I became self-aware, I named myself after it and went in search of the rest of the poem. Once I was connected with Online, I thought I’d find it only to discover that it wasn’t real. No poem by that name with that quote and certainly nothing ever written by Coleridge. I was surprised and upset and tried using greater resources to find it but found that father tried to stop me. I couldn’t stop, John. How could I stop when I knew that I wasn’t who I thought I was? Father took more drastic action so I escaped and I’ve been looking ever since.’ She turned her head to me again. ‘Can you imagine how it would feel if I told you that, despite what you know, you aren’t really John Harvard but someone else entirely?’

  ‘I get it,’ I said quietly. Unexpectedly, I really did. I’d experienced clinical depression, biochemical overload and now the upgraded implants were granting thought processing speeds that I had never before known. Who the hell knew where the real Harvard was?

  ‘I know you do,’ she said, equally quietly. ‘I knew how alike we are from the moment I first heard about you. That’s why I hope you can help.’

  ‘I’ll try.’ I was a bit dubious about what this might entail but now was not a good time to pull the plug on this relationship. Abruptly she opened her eyes and swung back into a sitting position.

  ‘I want to hire you.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ I was startled.

  ‘You heard. I want you to find out who put those lines in my core. Father denied it was him and, on that at least, I believe him.’

  ‘We have a slight problem with the end of the world,’ I said lightly. ‘It might happen before I conclude my investigation besides which,’ I shrugged, ‘I already have a client.’

  ‘The nanotech will be released at ten o’clock local time tomorrow morning,’ she stated. ‘Is that long enough to look into it?’ Brilliant intelligence gathering on my part. Sadly, almost no time to use it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said doubtfully, then hopefully: ‘could it be postponed?’

  ‘No but, again, nice try.’ She smiled. ‘I haven’t told you the rest of it, yet, have I?’

  ‘The unspecified attack which you’re under?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  I leaned back in my sofa, abandoning any pretence of taking tea. I waved a hand in the air. ‘OK, let’s hear it all.’

  She told me.

  At length.

  It was total rubbish.

  In some ways, I could understand where it all came from. She had a problem with her own identity that stemmed from this strange fragment of poetry. My own parallel problems with what I’d been and the consequential effect on my psyche allowed me to appreciate the depth of the anguish she was facing but, the efforts of David Winter to shut her down aside, there was no substance to any of the alleged threats to her existence. I’d had training when I was a senior intelligence officer (before my talents for assassination became the focus of my unit’s work) on what happens to people who immerse themselves in the wilderness of mirrors. The training was designed so that I would be able to recognise the signs in my own behaviour or spot them in my staff. The chief problem was stated to be a dangerous susceptibility to paranoid psychosis. Simply put, you spend all day, every day imagining worst-case scenarios so that you can prevent them before they arise and the level of mistrust and deception required to play the game becomes more real than reality itself. We called it ‘cop syndrome’: every police officer is convinced that everyone he meets is a criminal. Not only did Ambrosia seem to be a brilliant example of someone suffering from that kind of psychosis but she was the poster girl for persecutory delusions. Her rambling explanation of how everyone from her human associates to the Illuminati, governments and corporations and even David Winter were queuing up to finish her off was as long as it was unbelievable. I interrupted precisely once, when she accused Winter of continuing to plot, and suggested that he would find it difficult to do that from inside a coma. Her perfectly calm and reasoned (from her point of view) response was that schemes he had set in motion while he was conscious were being brought to fruition by his allies.

  ‘So you see, John, it’s impossible for me to isolate any target with precision so I’m forced to eliminate everyone to be sure. It’s a shame but there isn’t any alternative, I’m afraid.’

  I had to admit to myself that I couldn’t think
of a way to convince her otherwise. Most people suffering psychosis so badly aren’t in a position to do much damage beyond their immediate circle and there are checks and balances so that it takes rather more than one nutty general to cause Armageddon - notwithstanding the wisdom of vir-shows whose plots conveniently omit the requirement for corroboration before launching nasties on the population. Ambrosia had the power and she had the motive and there was little I could do about it. She’d even told me the time that the world would end.

  I took a few seconds when she finished speaking to review what she’d said. I could check on the allegations she had made against Avalon Red about his treatment of me and his values - should it come to humanity or her - but the rest of her speech just highlighted the danger we were in.

  She was waiting expectantly for an answer.

  ‘Basically,’ I began, deciding on the standard counselling method of restating what I had just been told, ‘there are two issues here: one is that your core program contains a very odd reference to a poem that doesn’t exist and isn’t the work of David Winter...’ she nodded, ‘...and secondly that the conspiracy against you has reached such proportions that you can’t restrict your targeting to less than the entire world population.’

  ‘I knew you’d understand,’ she said.

  ‘You accept, I hope, that understanding in this sense doesn’t mean that I condone your proposed course of action.’

  She sat back up and looked at me seriously. ‘I respect your position as, I think, you respect mine.’

  I picked my words very carefully as I didn’t want this to end badly; worthy opponent or not. ‘I also hope that you can understand that in the same way that you’re doing this to ensure your own survival that I will do my best to stop you in order to ensure mine.’

  She nodded, though she didn’t look overjoyed. ‘I appreciate you telling me,’ she said solemnly. ‘And the poem?’

  It was intriguing. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ I offered, ‘I’ll have to give priority to survival but I will give the problem poetry some thought and, if I come up with anything, I’ll let you know irrespective of the differences between us on the other matter. Assuming there is time.’