Into Everywhere

by Paul McAuley

  ‘I need to see them.’

  Tony was afraid and angry. He half-hoped that this was some trick of his uncle’s. A bluff with nothing behind it, an attempt to shut down the work on the stromatolites before the deadline expired.

  Opeyemi said, ‘My word should be enough, but I’ll arrange it.’

  ‘Who knows about this?’

  ‘Don’t worry, nephew. I came to you first. If you follow my advice and act quickly, you will be able to come out of this with some kind of honour. First, you should shut down the research. Suppose your wizards actually found something? The traitor could send the information to their friends. Second, you should put the wizards to the question. I will be happy to help you with that. My people have considerable expertise.’

  Two years ago Tony would have surrendered to the canon law of Opeyemi’s counsel. But he’d been tempered by hard lessons in the freebooting business since then, and knew a thing or two about countering threats and intimidation. He met his uncle’s blinkless stare and said, ‘I’ll find this traitor, but I will do it my way. For now, everything will continue as normal. I will do nothing that could alert the traitor and give them the chance to destroy all evidence of their actions before they are brought to justice.’

  ‘And exactly how do you propose to do that?’

  Tony flatly lied. ‘Oh, don’t worry, uncle. I have a few ideas.’

  ‘Then you had better get to work,’ Opeyemi said. ‘If you don’t identify the traitor soon, I will be forced to act for the good of the family, and you will lose what little reputation you have left.’

  ‘Oh, I rather think this enhances my reputation,’ Tony said. ‘After all, other people believe that the research is important. And sending the wizards to Dry Salvages is no longer an option, because the recipient of those messages might well be Raqle Thornhilde. Once I have got to the bottom of this, I will ask the council to reconsider its deadline.’

  15. Crashing And Burning

  On her way out of the city, Lisa stopped at Skate Planet, the only skateboard store in Port of Plenty, on the whole damn world, and bought a twelve-pack of Club-Mate. The soda, juiced with caffeine-laden yerba mate, had powered the Crazy 88’s exploits back in the day: Lisa had a lot to do and sleep didn’t figure in her plans.

  When she got home, she dug up a plastic box buried in the pounded earth floor of the pen of the big male hurklin. Inside, wrapped in layers of polyester soft-shell material, was the exabyte drive that contained a mirror of the files in her confiscated massively parallel computer. She placed Willie’s tessera in the box and reburied it and stamped the earth flat, cracked open the first bottle of golden rocket fuel, and fired up Sorabji’s Opus clavicembalisticum on the sound system (Pete gave her a soulful look and padded out of the room). She liked to work to music, mostly solo piano pieces, some ambient stuff, Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, her father’s favourite album. Silence was a big empty room in which every distraction echoed; music was a train that took her somewhere useful, sharpened her focus, inspired connections and little leaps of logic, shut down extraneous thoughts. And for deciphering this mad strange code, what better inspiration than Sorabji’s enormous, wild, incantatory masterpiece? As its opening bars rang out, she plugged the mirror drive into the powerful tablet she’d borrowed from Bria, and got down to it.

  She was certain that the narrative code was connected with the mystery artefact that had zapped her on the Bad Trip: that was why she could see the distortion in the silvery flow, the sparks in its wake. Something that had reached out to her. She needed to find out what it was. What it did and how it did it.

  She brought up a sandbox, froze the playback when the distortion appeared, and used the zoom tool. She was hoping to glimpse some kind of fractal activity, but the edges of the distortion were smooth all the way down to the limits of resolution. She ran the looped playback over and again, watched the distortion appear and disappear until she couldn’t really see it any more, closed the sandbox with an angry gesture and shut off the sound system. She felt threadbare, shaky, sick with frustration. Silvery eels swimming everywhere she looked. The ghost leaning at her back.

  She needed to run the real thing again. She needed the data from Bria’s decompiling, pattern matching and reverse lookup. She needed to sleep, but knew that she couldn’t. She needed a fucking drink and swore that she wouldn’t. Instead, she opened another bottle of Club-Mate and began to read up on Ghajar algorithms.

  The Ghajar had been a gypsy species that had left almost no trace of its civilisation or culture apart from its ships and a few so-called landing towers. Most of their ships had been abandoned in orbital sargassos, but several crash sites had been identified on First Foot and other Jackaroo gift worlds. Some archaeologists believed that the Ghajar had beached their ships much as whales and smaller cetaceans, because of disease or panic or suicidal ennui, had stranded themselves on beaches on Earth. Others said that the crashed ships were casualties in a war between factions of the Ghajar, and suggested that so-called mad ships recently discovered in a remote sargasso, which killed or drove crazy anyone who approached too closely, were weapons which had been used in that war.

  One thing was certain: all Ghajar ships were infested with algorithms, quantum stuff embedded in the spin properties of fundamental particles in the molecular matrices of their hulls, riddled with errors and necrotic patches that had accumulated during millennia of disuse. Coders analysed and catalogued the algorithms, stitched viable fragments together, and spent hours and days trying to get them to run in sandboxed virtual spaces.

  Ghajar ship code had played a pivotal role in the development of various kinds of quantum technology and had helped to solve four of the so-called hard mathematical problems; one of Ada Morange’s companies had used it to develop the AIs that acted as interfaces between the ships and their human pilots. But Ghajar narrative code was another country. Unmapped, untranslated, incomprehensible. Lisa googled some scholarly articles, most of them by a professor at Peking University, no doubt the researcher Carol Schleifer had mentioned. Lisa had trouble following his deep theoretical analyses, but the conclusions were plain: no one knew what narrative code did, what it contained, or how to read it. And no one ever seemed to have observed the distortion she’d seen, either.

  It was four in the morning. She was wired but bone-tired, and was still seeing little flashes in the air. She crashed for a couple of hours, woke around dawn and fed Pete, brewed a pot of coffee and whizzed two chopped bananas with almond milk in a blender and drank her breakfast while watching the looped playback just one more time. Okay, another.

  It was too early to phone Bria. Lisa called anyway. It went straight to voicemail.

  She was in the barn, checking on the hurklins, when a car horn sounded out in the yard. Sheriff Bird was standing at the gate, and a black SUV and a powder-blue Range Rover were parked behind his tan patrol car. The geek police were back.

  16. Conceptual Breakthrough

  Tony went straight from church to the laboratory . Junot Johnson intercepted him outside the workshop, saying that there had been a development.

  ‘The wizards have been working all through the night,’ he said. ‘They believe they have made what they call a conceptual breakthrough.’

  ‘Is this something real, or some kind of theoretical business no one else would ever be interested in?’

  ‘Maybe one, maybe the other,’ Junot said. He had a grainy, bloodshot look: he must have been up all night too. ‘They’re working on that Ghajar stuff again—’

  ‘After I told them to give it up? Has time started running backwards here?’

  ‘I know, Mr Tony. They’re a stubborn lot. But this time they may be on to something. That last experiment? The blue light you told me about? They think it was some kind of eidolon. They think it’s done something to their heads, lets them see stuff they couldn’t see before. They think that it could help them to read the stromatolite data.’

  ‘What kind of eidolon? Is it
harmful?’

  ‘I don’t know. They’re more interested in what it does than what it is.’

  ‘I could be infected, too. So could you.’

  ‘It’s possible, Mr Tony. Although if you remember, I was in the city at the time, buying elements for their maker.’

  ‘You should have told me what they were doing from the very first,’ Tony said. He was angry and scared. First Opeyemi, and now this. It was as if everything was spinning away from him. ‘I have just had a very difficult conversation with Opeyemi – I am certain Lancelot Askia told him all about this. But you waited until now . . . It’s unacceptable, Junot. Completely unacceptable.’

  ‘I realise that, Mr Tony. And I’m sorry,’ Junot said, with a hangdog look of contrition.

  ‘“Sorry” will not fix this mess. But there is something you can do. Opeyemi told me that someone is sending clandestine messages off-world. He believes it is one of the wizards. If he is right, we must deal with the traitor straight away. Are they working on this so-called breakthrough right now?’

  ‘They’re all in the work space, yes.’

  ‘Good. I want you to search their accommodations. Look for anything that could be used to connect to the city net. It might be a phone, it might be some sort of homebrew device. Turn everything upside down and inside out. If you don’t find anything, I want to be certain that it is because there is nothing there, not because you fucked up again.’

  ‘I will do my best. Although the man Askia searches their stuff regularly, and he hasn’t found anything I know of.’

  ‘Yes, because he could have planted something. Because this traitor may not exist outside of Opeyemi’s scheming.’

  ‘I don’t follow, Mr Tony.’

  ‘My uncle knows about this breakthrough, and will have guessed that I would want to use it to argue for an extension of the council’s deadline. So he may have had his man plant damning evidence that one of the wizards is a traitor, and when I fail to find it he will accuse me of incompetence. You see it now?’

  ‘Clear as ice, Mr Tony.’

  ‘Then get to work. Search every square centimetre of the wizards’ accommodations. Meanwhile, I will get up to speed on this discovery of theirs.’

  The wizards were clustered around a big window in the work space. One of Aunty Jael’s hands stood behind them – this one tall and very thin, clad in polished black plastic that reflected a stream of silvery light waterfalling through the window. Lancelot Askia sat in his usual place in the kitchen area, watching everything with sleepy insolence.

  The hand did not turn as Tony approached. Instead, an image of the face that Aunty Jael chose to present to the world floated around the screen that ringed the flat-topped cylinder of its head, saying, ‘Something wonderfully interesting has happened.’

  ‘So I heard,’ Tony said, and asked Cho Wing-James if he had cracked the archival genetics.

  ‘Not exactly,’ the wizard said, running his fingers through his disordered mass of hair. ‘But I think that we have cracked something that can.’

  His explanation came in an eager rush of technical terms. Tony held up a hand to silence him, asked Aunty Jael for a summary. It seemed that the storm of virtual light had contained densely packed sequences of information that had interacted with the wizards’ visual cortices and printed copies of an eidolon in their brains.

  ‘The eidolon is a kind of translation tool,’ Aunty Jael said. ‘The Ghajar appear to have used it to hack into the archival genetics via the stromatolites’ transmission system, extract data, and render it into so-called narrative code.’

  ‘That is what we are studying now,’ Cho Wing-James said.

  ‘And can you translate this narrative code into something I can understand?’ Tony said.

  ‘That’s a very interesting question,’ Cho said, and opened a small window that displayed a kind of starburst with lines of unequal length radiating from a central point. The wizard set it rotating, asked Tony if he had ever drawn something like it, or if it had featured in any of his dreams.

  Tony felt a clammy twinge of unease and said, ‘You had better tell me exactly what this eidolon has done to you.’

  ‘To begin with, it helps you see patterns in the narrative code,’ Cho said. ‘Eli and Rael saw them first.’

  ‘We were running the code in different configurations, and it suddenly popped out at us,’ Eli Tanjung said. She was the youngest of the wizards, a solid, solemn young woman with glossy black hair and a trace of a moustache on her upper lip. A plastic circlet spiky with plug-in circuitry was clamped around her head.

  Rael Manzano also wore a circlet. ‘We could not believe what we saw,’ he said. ‘We stared at it for an hour at least. Such unexpected beauty!’

  ‘I believe a demonstration is in order,’ Cho Wing-James told Tony. ‘We’ll run it from the beginning, let you see for yourself.’

  The silvery flow in the big window blinked out, resumed. At first, Tony saw only a uniform stream of mercury light, but then he felt a weird moment of doubling, as if he was watching himself watch the window, and began to make out knots and vortices like unstable whirlpools, or the teardrop shapes that water currents made in rivers when they divided around obstacles. The patterns were everywhere he looked, and there were patterns within the patterns. An eternal silver braid flowing past, beautiful and compelling . . .

  ‘That’s enough, I think,’ someone said, and the window blanked and he came to himself with a start.

  ‘You see?’ Cho said. ‘You see?’

  ‘I saw something,’ Tony said. ‘But I don’t know what it was.’

  ‘Similar patterns were discovered more than a century ago,’ Cho said. ‘Only those infected with a specific and very rare kind of eidolon can see them. Apparently, that is what infected us.’

  ‘And it has spoken to us,’ Eli Tanjung said. ‘It has shown us the way.’

  ‘Some of us have felt a compulsion to draw diagrams similar to the one I showed you,’ Cho said. ‘We believe that it is something encoded within those patterns. Its meaning isn’t clear, not yet, so we are hoping to stimulate our eidolons into providing us with more examples.’

  That was what the wizards had been doing when Tony had arrived. Taking turns to wear circlets that with pulsed magnetic fields poked and pried at the eidolons in their heads, trying to stimulate them, trying to make them reach into the narrative code and pull out something comprehensible. If the stromatolites contained data relevant to sleepy sickness and other meme plagues, Cho said, tugging at stray strands of his hair, this was their best chance of finding it.

  Tony told Aunty Jael again that he wanted a word in private. When he climbed up to the balcony, pushing through the dull hum of its privacy screen, another hand was waiting there – one of the skinny white-skinned hands, this one with a stencilled 3 on its chestplate.

  ‘Just how dangerous is this eidolon?’ he said.

  Thinking about it made the inside of his skull itch.

  ‘It is hard to say. However, it appears to interact only with Ghajar narrative code.’

  ‘I suppose that I’m also infected. As is Lancelot Askia.’

  The idea that his uncle’s man harboured a copy of the eidolon gave Tony a thin satisfaction.

  ‘I have tested the neural activity of the wizards,’ Aunty Jael said. ‘All of them possess the characteristic signature of the eidolon. If you like, I could also test you. As for Mr Askia, I doubt that your uncle would give me permission.’

  ‘What about you? Are you infected?’

  ‘Alas, no. My mind is fixed. Also, the eidolon appears to have infected only those in the immediate vicinity of the light storm. Several of my hands were caught up in it, but my mind was, of course, elsewhere.’

  Tony remembered when he had first seen Aunty Jael’s true self. He had been eight, about to become her pupil. Ayo had taken him down to the basement of the laboratory, to a small room lit by a warm blood-red glow, with a ladder of shelves holding what looked like the spin
es of printed books. His big sister had put on white cotton gloves and pulled out one of those books, showed Tony that it was a slice of brain just a few nanometres thick in a rectangular leaf of grainy plastic.

  ‘The plastic contains circuitry that infiltrates the laminated cytoarchitecture,’ Ayo had said, holding the plastic leaf in gloved hands. ‘And the circuitry of each leaf is connected to all the others. The brain provides the template for the mind that is generated by all of this, and the circuitry animates it. All this, everything on these shelves, is needed to support an imperfect simulation of a single human mind. Remember that, little brother. Aunty Jael may appear cleverer than us, but that is only because she is able to think faster. It is a shallow kind of thinking, and her viewpoint is fixed. Unlike us, she is unable to change. And that, in the end, is what counts.’

  Tony said now, ‘So far all it has given us is that funny diagram. And we do not know what it means.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Aunty Jael said.

  ‘And even if they can use this eidolon to translate the stromatolite data, they may not find anything that can be used to understand and treat sleepy sickness.’

  ‘I am cautiously optimistic,’ Aunty Jael said.

  ‘But it isn’t anything I can take to the family council,’ Tony said. ‘And there’s another problem. The thing I came here to tell you.’

  He quickly explained Opeyemi’s story about one of the wizards sending messages, his belief that it was a ploy to undermine the little authority he had. But when he threw the link that his uncle had given him to Aunty Jael, expecting her to find something that would prove that the clandestine messages were fake, she said that they not only appeared to be genuine, but packet analysis showed that they had originated in her laboratory.

  ‘Do you know who sent them?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘How it was done? How anyone could hack the common exchange from here? I thought you had locked down comms.’

  ‘There are no direct lines, but there are a number of devices and utilities that communicate their status with central services. Someone appears to have used one of those connections to tap into the city net, and then reach out to the common exchange. Fortunately, a unique numerical string is inserted into every communication with central services, identifying the device that sent it. These messages were all sent from the same place: the power transformers.’