by Carl Neville
Well. You would have to ask the proprietor they say, then wink at her.
Should she wink back? What does that imply? Instead she says, trying not to sound too much like a tourist, Can I? She raises her ROD in the direction of the display. They nod back and she takes a photo.
So interesting and enigmatic, she must come back later to find out what all this means and then, ah, what time is it?
Conversation 2
ROD No 6549872d./ 27659h
Open Cache
Audio file
Time 20:45 GMT/08/04/2018
Location: 51.4937° N, 0.0993° W/ “The Elephant’s Drunk”/Canteen
Tereza: So interesting, fascinating really… If you look at the Connaught team, there is this obsessive wordplay. So with “Technological Escalation”, that’s a good example of how they have these twinned puns, partially anagrammatic or based on phonetic overlaps. So they pair up Technological Escalation, which they don’t see as a dangerous point in a conflict but the preconditions for anything, anything at all happening, you see, so I mean they have their own internal contradiction, they need us, an enemy, an untrustworthy antagonist, a phantom, a mirror to continuously try and pre-empt, to get ahead of, so anyway the point was, Eschatological Technovation. So that’s how they pair things up, quite obsessed with mirroring and splitting and recombining elements across a divide which so clearly mimics the relations of the Partition and there’s another important thing here which is, oh, have you heard Connaught’s Defect! speech. That’s really interesting. There’s this big misunderstanding I think about Connaught’s speeches and declarations, that he’s just mad, a crazy ranter with Foerster’s syndrome or whatever, but it’s the power of nonsense, it’s that we need to consider the poetics of his speech. I mean the ways his poetics activate particular neurological events.
Barrow: Another?
Tereza: I shouldn’t technically, I am allergic to alcohol, but there’s so, so much of it in the PRB. Stockholm is almost dry compared to London and…
Barrow: Well London seems dry compared to Glasgow, for instance, or Birmingham.
Tereza: So…
Barrow: So you were telling me about the emerging…
Tereza: Oh I’ll do a presentation on it if you like, a formal thing, it will be a you know… there is a pattern to the deep structure of how these things are played out, that we are crunching all the data on, the unconscious element of it. So, is it deliberate that they chose Stockholm to try out a particular bio-weapon? I mean no, Stockholm Syndrome right, there’s a level of unconscious or conscious patterning which is why if you have read really deeply, I mean that one’s obvious, but there are deeper levels where you are tapping into collective understanding and are you having another drink what time is it someone’s got a Dev I hope so or I let me get everyone another drink alright you are nearest that makes sense I’ll have a what’s the blue one, how strong is that, that’s whoa that’s like a wine or something just a half then oh alright a pint you persuaded me, ha! Oh hey, Katja! Katja, you are late!
Lewis 09/04/2018 01:32
She dries herself off head to toe, wraps the towel around her waist then goes into the room where Katja is asleep, stretched out half-naked on the bed, strikingly blonde, blonder than she remembers, angular haircut an electric white ziggurat in the light fluorescing up from the floor.
Her ROD buzzes and she sees it’s Abhishek. The message welcomes her, they need to be up early tomorrow to meet at the office, they’ll be working together and starting the hunt for pirate servers that are breaching the Partition in the south of the city.
She smiles, sees the maps that Katja has pinned up on the wall above the bed, then lies down beside her, careful not to wake her up, but she opens her eyes anyway, throws her arm over her and says Hello, how long have you been here?
Thirty minutes or so.
Is she too sleepy? Katja pulls her closer, kisses her.
What made you decide to come here?
Someone has need of me, she says. Someone in distress. I can sense it.
A friend?
Perhaps. It feels closer than that, she says, but they are both unsure what she means, and so they allow silence to percolate in and rinse the moment away.
Instead Katja says, Oh, happy birthday.
Lewis laughs, that was last week.
Where’s Abhi?
Still in work.
Oh well, she says, as she half sits up and pulls her t-shirt over her head, easing Lewis’s towel out from under her. His loss.
09/04/18 08:15
Tereza drinks a litre of water, turns the kettle on then off again. She’ll get a cup of tea and a little pick-me-up in the office.
Why are we all crammed together in here? I had a flat across near the headquarters, she says, as Abhi hovers behind her trying to get a cup out of the sink.
Yes, me too, maybe it’s the Games. Lack of space. Maybe it’s so we can bond, Abhi says with a smile.
And so noisy at night.
The Games, he says again with an apologetic shrug.
Not just outside, she says, looking irritable. Perhaps he made a lot of noise coming back late, so he approaches the next subject carefully: Are you there for the training session?
I think we all know each other well enough don’t we, she says. Then she changes her tone. Of course, I’ll try, she says, then, I don’t suppose Barrow has to share with anyone. Anyway, another gulp of water, I’m behind, I will see you in there.
Sure, Abhi says, as he goes into the bathroom to clean his teeth. A moment later Katja is tapping at the door. Come, come, he says, I’ll go into the kitchen.
How are you feeling? How’s Tereza? she asks.
Me, fine, fine. Tereza, hungover I think.
Some Special T will help with that.
Plus, he lowers his voice, I think she blames me for being moved across for the investigation.
I thought you had requested her.
No, no. A total surprise to me. I think maybe her department would like a little break from her, as extended as possible may be the best thing for them.
I see.
Be a little cautious, I think. Don’t take her so much into your confidences. How did you find Barrow?
Civil, she says. Reserved. Something about him I couldn’t quite put my finger on. What did you talk about?
Oh, nothing important, Abhishek says. Where’s Lewis?
She’s gone out already, gone to get D7.
Barrow
The autopsy has come back.
He turns on the kettle, warms the pot, spoons in some leaves. For a few moments he deliberately does not think about the results. Up since 5:30, he would like to sleep more, to feel that some essential fibres of his being were less frayed and careworn, and he thinks about the Special T in its caddy, but he has been abstemious since the undercover years, when he took more pills, lost more nights and days than even the most committed Bohemians and Hedonic Liberationists. No, he will just sip his regular tea, feel the silt of the years accumulate, both as ballast and as burden.
There are foreign elements in Alan Bewes’s blood, specifically XV2, a relatively new and incompletely understood compound, administered within twenty-four hours prior to his death. So now this is a murder inquiry.
He has sent a message to Waterston and is awaiting further instructions. Presumably the department will send in a number of other, more qualified people, and his return to SSF will have been short indeed. He may get to accompany Rose to her lecture in a few days’ time, meet up with some of her old acquaintances. A surge of something sharp but cloudy: old lovers, no doubt, his brief reverie interrupted by the sound of his ROD buzzing.
A message back: AWARE OF GRAVITY OF SITUATION. MANPOWER IN SHORT SUPPLY. BARROW HOLD FORT FOR NOW. UPGRADED FROM SUPERVISORY TO LEAD ROLE. REPORT DIRECT TO W. BYPASS SQUIRES. USE THIS CHANNEL.
He takes a moment and another sip of tea to let the full implications of the message, especially Bypass Squires, take hold. Then he r
eplies, typically Barrow in its terseness, no doubt: UNDERSTOOD.
The team are already downstairs in the meeting room, reading their new briefs. He fills a mug and carries it down carefully, settling into a chair at the round table. He watches the responses discreetly, moving his eyes from face to face regularly as they read the report and the update he has hastily prepared.
Does everyone understand their roles in the light of new information? Shall we reconvene in an hour?
Barrow clears his throat.
The colleagues in SSF3 have been up all night working on this since the autopsy results came through, and I have already extended the team’s thanks to them for having serviced our request so quickly and comprehensively, he says, then hands over to the SSF3 colleague.
We have what looks to be an outage in the security scanner on 03/04 as the 722 from LAX disembarked and was being processed. It has subsequently been patched but whoever came through at that point could have brought in anything, there was a total blackout. We have no footage from inside the scanning room. But we do have footage of the queue. This is Julia Verona, the girl currently at the Bewes’s house. She’s on the return leg of an exchange trip. She came in on a press flight. Strings were pulled by her exchange partner Thomas. He is responsible for organising some elements of the opening ceremony of the Games and can issue press passes and access to interested non-Co-Sphere critics, artists and so on. Subject to the usual checks of course.
Who would have signed off on this bit of rule bending higher up the chain? Barrow asks.
It looks like it was Bewes himself.
And where are they now?
We don’t know. We can’t get access to the ROD location; location information has been optional since 12/03 in the first of the implementation phases of the Vote and Verona has a guest ROD. Obviously, we are in the process of trying to locate them.
But they could be anywhere within the Co-Sphere?
Potentially, if they have used transport systems that don’t require bookings and even if they have we now have to apply for access to records in other Institutions. Increasingly citizens use a plet called Evaness, designed to wipe data, meaning that the booking disappears from the system the moment the journey’s completed or the transaction goes through.
If we can’t trace them through the transport network, then how? Tereza asks, tetchily.
We have a search request for 31 Harborne Road, we are going to go in, they may still be in the house.
How much information do we have thus far on the previous twenty-four hours of Bewes’s life?
He was in the office all day. Several meetings. His schedule is on your RODs. After work he went straight back to Harborne Road. Everything points to Verona.
What information do we have on her?
Everything I have on her I have, give me a second, just sent to your RODs.
We’ll put out a level five enquiry order for Verona, Barrow says. As for the Diplomatic repercussions, we will have to deal with them later.
Tereza
A politically motivated murder? An assassination? Ridiculous. They need some more people, some expertise, she doesn’t want to be involved in an investigation of this nature, this scale. This Barrow is bad luck, a…what’s the word… a Jonah — interesting word, yes, Biblical, in the whale’s belly. A Jonah: someone who will cause others to be swallowed along with him, into the Leviathan, yes, that was the old word for a huge sea monster, a whale, wasn’t it? She seems to have been assigned to the donkey-work, and other people get brought in and are given special dispensation to go running about because they went to some academy somewhere, whereas she gets shifted across departments and has to do all this administrative work, which is nowhere near her speciality area anyway. Why her? They could have sent Suhl. A twitch of angst — perhaps they wanted to get rid of her, get a break from her. Another twinge, she wonders how she behaved in the Canteen last night, her face flushes. Katja got her home, a model of solicitude and concern. Was she flirting? A few drinks and suddenly she starts acting like the queen of the night. And then she could hear the two of them in the bedroom, and an impulse came over her to go and tap on the door, ask can I join you, but instead she rolled over and took a Dev and was asleep in three minutes, a thin blue sheet of anger and loss bisecting the deep, artificial dark. She swerves into the toilet, looks at herself in the mirror — her cheeks are a bit red, the patch will be warning her about her blood pressure soon, she should lose some weight, she is not as pretty as Katja, not as tall and elegant at all, and she thinks she can see Barrow has an interest in her, well he’s wasting his time there. She wouldn’t describe Lewis as pretty, if those things really matter anyway, but they seem to, don’t they? And she doesn’t have particularly good memories of Stockholm and isn’t thrilled to be back in the same team as them. She closes her eyes and rests her hands on the sink.
Well, just get on with it. Fill out the forms, get the Health Department to send you out a care package, and, more importantly, don’t drink till this is all over!
Katja/Barrow
Katja is on her way to her desk when she sees Barrow leaning out of his office and trying to catch her eye. She puts down her Passocon and sits across the desk from him.
She smiles and assumes that it must be something connected with one of her specialisms. He sits back, the chair creaking, rotates toward the window. She sits slightly more upright in hers, as his posture relaxes hers becomes more formal, guarded, professional. There’s a long pause in which she wonders whether a question will come at all.
What is Julia Verona researching?
Oh, that information must be in the same report he has to hand. Has he really called her in for that?
She’s studying the, Katja flips through the pages in her handout, music of the Breach.
Specifically?
Specifically? She’s looking at the works of…
Somehow Barrow knows before she has said it.
The music of Vernon Crane.
A Poem from the PRB “Pachamummer”
What is this child to me?
My child?
Am I to say, I gave you life?
Are you to say; you are my mother?
My womb and breasts?
My milk, blood, love and punishment?
Rather I would be a creature of Fire
Burn the threads tying me
into the flesh of another.
A creature of Stone,
From whom no blood or love
can be wrung.
Sheila Hampson
2
Julia Verona 16/3/2018
Julia Verona heard of Vernon Crane at a party held out at a warehouse conversion in Silverlake, the launch for a new journal on the lost tradition of Soviet Magik called Kosmokomosol. The next day, thirsty and hungover, she found she had made a note of the name on her phone and wondered whether it was some guy who had tried to pick her up. Vague memories of an intense conversation in a shadowed corner and too many strong cocktails. She had a flyer for the event too, folded into the pocket on her phone case: a picture of a hammer and sickle cut out of the stars and stripes on one side and a Möbius strip on the others that ran:
USAUSSRUSAUSSRUSAUSSRUSAUSSRUSAUSSRUSAUSSRUSAUSSR
Slowly memories returned, Timor boasting of his time spent in Kosygingrad and how he had come back with a plastic replica of Mount Rushmore with Lenin, Khrushchev, Kosygin and Vashdev on that had got confiscated at US customs under some new bill or other, and how he had just started printing them up and selling them at his gallery across the road anyway, converting the dollars into communal credits at local timebanks and, sure, she had been talking to someone, an older expat, about her trip to the PRB. He must have mentioned Crane to her. That’s right. She got some water then went back to bed and looked for the name on her phone, found nothing, switched domains to one of the approved Co-Sphere search engines and saw there was a page on the US portal for Urkive.com, with the title Works by Vernon Crane.
&nbs
p; She needed permission to access it, clicked on the Urkivist link. There was an email address for a PRB bridge site, [email protected], so she sent out a personalised request, explaining that she was a graduate student doing research in PRB musical forms at U-CAL, due to spend a few weeks in the PRB doing research and attending a conference, and that a friend had recommended she explore Crane’s work.
Mid-week she went out to eat KorMex food with So-Mee and talked about their upcoming exchange visits; So-Mee’s to the almost Unified Korea.
Well, I’ll be busy, will it work out, let’s see, she shrugged. And if it does, what that’s going to mean for the domestic situation, the global order. I guess we are at a tipping point she said, deliberately parodying the Connaught campaign’s election slogan, leant in across the table, face flushed, a little drunk, hair almost touching what was left of her kimchi enchiladas. If Pyongyang gets too crazy, I can always escape down to Busan for a few days. You’re going to be doing a little partying too, hey?
If I can, she dropped her voice a little, if Tom will give me any time. He keeps sending me these updated itineraries. Looks like a lot of Tom time. He sends ten messages a day, I don’t know how he’s getting them through.
So-Mee laughed. He’s sure got a crush on you, girl, she said. Anything going to happen there?
God, no, she said. He’s sweet but, so… needy.
Like a little British puppy. Following you all around. Still, he got you an actual flight.
What does that mean? You scratch my back I’ll scratch your…
No, she reached out across the table and slapped Julia’s hand, I don’t mean that. Anyway, Kevin.
Sure.
Sure. Remember when Dorian went and she had to get a flight to Hokkaido, cross to Vladivostok on the ferry, take a train across the whole of Europe, then under the Channel to get there? Sure, she said it was an amazing, amazing experience, but more or less by the time she got there it was time to come home by the same route.
