A Fear of Dark Water

by Craig Russell

  Roman had sunk deeper and deeper into a world of self-involvement. He rarely left his room and spent most of his time reading, listening to music and, most of all, daydreaming. Daydreaming played a major role in his life: fantasies in which a slimmer, happier, better-looking alter-ego Roman was popular and rich and physically attractive. It was not that he had been unhappy with his life: withdrawal into a better world of his own construction was what he wanted to do.

  Then, one day, his life changed for ever.

  His parents had worried about their only child. Fretted about him. They worried about his ballooning weight and they worried about him squandering his obvious intellectual gifts. He found out later that it had been his mother’s idea to buy him a computer for his fourteenth birthday. Suddenly, a whole new world of possibilities opened up for him. The carefully constructed fantasy world he had built now had an environment outside his head.

  His parents were, of course, devastated by his decision not to go to university. But it was also, in a way a relief: they had never been able to envisage their overweight, painfully shy, reclusive son functioning in a campus environment. And it soon became clear that he had a real and marketable talent for designing computer games; he found a job with a software design company which seemed more interested in the games Roman had devised in his bedroom than in any paper qualification.

  It had not lasted. Roman’s inability to relate to other people meant that, despite his clear talent, he was let go from the software company. There had been another similar job but that, too, had not lasted. Then a less well-paid job. Finally the job in the computer store, selling Macs and PCs to morons who asked continually ‘How much memory does it have?’ without having the slightest idea what the question, or its answer, really meant.

  Stuck at home with his parents, Roman had found it impossible to cope with the weary sadness in their eyes every time they looked at him. They had been good to him, however, and whenever he needed cash for a new piece of computer equipment they seemed to find it. Then, one afternoon that had become evening that had become night as he had lost hours in idle surfing, he had found his way into a secure company site. It had been easy and he had not meant to do anything, but he found himself able to make online payments to suppliers. So he did. Not much, and it was not technically fraud, because Roman in no way benefited personally from the transaction, but he had done it because he could do it. He had returned the next day to find that the security settings had remained unaltered, so he put the money he had moved back to where it belonged. Roman had realised that if the discrepancy was discovered, then the IP records of people accessing the site would be examined. Before he attempted anything like it again he would have to camouflage his presence.

  It took Roman six months to set up his elaborate system of bot herders, shell accounts, proxy servers and bouncers to conceal his identity. The first theft was large: over thirty thousand dollars which he immediately transferred to the account of an environmental charity. No direct benefit yet. He was still working at the computer store and had to do his real work in the evenings and at night; it took him another three months to set up the elaborate web of bank and credit-card accounts around the world, through which he could channel the income from his fraud. He monitored transactions on the account from which he had stolen the money. It took the company a month to uncover the theft and another month to work out that it had been committed online; only then did they change and tighten their security.

  It was then that Roman knew the course his life must take.

  Of course, there was the risk of detection. Arrest. Conviction. Prison.

  But, as someone whose expansive intellectual architecture was already confined by the dragging mass of his own body, there was a limit to how much a threat of confinement to a cell would be to the eremite Roman. And, of course, if he were to be sent to Billwerder prison in Hamburg he knew they ran computer training programmes. Even if they did catch him, they would never be able to track down all the money he had sequestered. He would leave prison a rich man. The risk was worth it. Worth it for the reward, worth it for the thrill.

  His parents had been surprised when Roman announced that he was working as a freelance developer for a major virtual-reality games-design company. He showed them their website and the letters of contract they had sent. The website and the letters, of course, had been created by Roman himself. But they had satisfied his parents that all the new equipment that arrived was being supplied by his employers. They were delighted when Roman eventually announced that he had enough money to find himself a small flat somewhere, but it would be best if he rented it in their name. To alleviate their concerns he had given them a deposit of eight thousand euros.

  Since then, Roman had amassed a personal fortune, stashed around the world, of somewhere in the region of four million euros. He knew he would never use a fraction of that amount: he could only access his funds in small bites and, in any case, Roman knew that the health problems associated with his obesity meant he would be lucky to live to see his thirtieth birthday. Setting up an automated transfer system meant that, if he were to die and could not enter the appropriate cancellation code at the end of the month, one million euros would be transferred to his parents’ account. He had left a note with his other papers that would explain that he had been paid massive royalties for one of the games he had developed and that the accumulated proceeds were to go to them.

  Roman sat in his custom-made computer chair and gazed absently through the window. Today, for some reason, he had opened up the blinds. The sky hung over Wilhelmsburg like a grey curtain with a pale horizontal hem broken by the angular forms of the other apartment blocks. To Roman what he was looking at was no more real than the other world he watched through the windows of his computer screens. He contemplated it for a moment before diving back into his natural environment.

  One of the things he did habitually was to intrude on the lives of strangers.

  There was, he felt, no harm in these intrusions: no one knew that he had been there, there was no sense of violation as he carefully peeled away the layers of their identity, tracing their past, getting to know their families, their friends, their hobbies. It allowed him, for an hour or so, to live another life. To experience vicariously the society from which he otherwise felt excluded. Roman would pick someone at random from Facebook or MySpace or any of the countless other social networking sites and he would trace their cyber-radiative signature. The phrase was one of his own invention: ‘cyber-radiative signature’ best described, for him, the presence – the degree of presence – that individuals had in cyberspace.

  Roman had come up with the idea late one sleepless night. His obesity meant that he suffered from a range of problems which threatened to kill him each night as he slept. He went to bed with an oxygen mask strapped to his nose to combat sleep apnoea and to boost the blood-oxygen levels that his obesity-hypoventilation syndrome pushed so dangerously low. It was ironic that someone as disconnected from the physical world as Roman was should live with the constant threat of being smothered, literally, by his own mass as he slept.

  For Roman it was like diving into water. The risk of death from cerebral hypoxia, to which he was exposed each time he slept, was exactly the same as swimmers and free-divers faced. He had read of Shallow-Water Blackout and Deep-Water Blackout, where fit, experienced free-divers would lose consciousness because the instinct to breathe when the carbon dioxide in their blood reached dangerous levels was overridden. Their brains starved of oxygen, there was no warning, no physical symptoms. They simply passed out and drowned. It would be, thought Roman, a peaceful, painless death.

  There had been more than a few nights when he had considered sleeping without his oxygen mask.

  But most of the time Roman purposely avoided sleep and the hazards that lay hidden in its depths. He would stay at his desk until the small hours, only going to bed when exhaustion forced him to do so. Until then, oblivious to the time or the physical world around
him, Roman would work and play in his natural environment. When he wasn’t stealing funds from businesses around the world, much of his time was spent reading and researching. This was often in the most arcane and abstract realms of knowledge, far removed from anything Roman would need to know as part of his criminal work. Quantum mechanics and physics, philosophy of mind and consciousness studies, biotechnology and the history of science were his favourite areas of reading. He would lose himself reading about or listening to video lectures on quantum entanglement, string theory, computer simulation. What Roman particularly liked to do was to explore every aspect of a subject, shining his searchlight into the oddest corners. For example, he liked to explore the genuine philosophical implications of quantum physics, but also the New Age wacky angles that many blogs and groups took on it. The holographic theory of the universe, for example, which solved the problem of black holes contradicting the Second Law of Thermodynamics was, at the end of the day, merely a new interpretation of the arrangement of matter, but Roman found scores of New Age-y sites and conspiracy-theory blogs that announced that we were, after all, really living in the Matrix.

  Roman found himself totally immune to the paranoia of the conspiracy theorists and the ludicrous spiritual significance that New Agers attached to the innate beauty of some quantum theories. This, he knew, was highly unusual for his type. Schizotypes were famous for their magical thinking, as psychiatrists called it: beliefs in spooks and ESP; in UFOs and telepathy and telekinesis. They also had a strong tendency towards paranoia. But Roman had known that all these things were crap. There were no such things as ghosts or poltergeists or God. He found he could do all the magical thinking he needed within the realms of science. A Big Bang in the Void, not a Bump in the Night.

  It was this knowledge – that physicists were now treating the universe as composed of information rather than matter – that led him to devise his concept of ‘cyber-radiative signature’. Maybe, thought Roman, the Bostrum Hypothesis was right and the reality we experienced was not reality after all, but a highly sophisticated ancestor simulation. In which case, mankind was perhaps about to create its own simulated universe within a simulated universe. And the foundations of that simulation would be the internet.

  This thought, in turn, brought him to the idea that people were already beginning to ‘exist’ on the internet to some degree or other. There were individuals who interacted with each other exclusively through the internet; who had never met and never would meet in real life. If a personality was the sum of other people’s perceptions, then there were personalities that existed only in cyberspace. This was not mediated reality, it was not even virtual reality. It was the beginning of an actual and absolute – if alternate – reality.

  But it was not a reality yet shared by all. If you were over fifty, then it was most likely you had little cyber-identity or none at all; the younger you were, the more likely you were to use the internet as a major social medium, and the more ‘mass’ your cyber-radiative signature had. He had started to think about the internet in the same way that physicists had once thought of space-time. It was a continuum and within it people and ideas had a mass that created its own radiative field. Every degree of connection was there, each person connected to a circle of others, each circle intersecting with other circles, spreading wide across cyberspace. And at the heart of each presence was a name: the quantum of identity, the smallest indivisible self. People became a scattering of facts. The nucleus was their name, the core of their identity, but they would appear elsewhere, with different usernames, existing simultaneously in several locations but never really existing in any. Exactly, Roman realised, like quantum superposition.

  But no matter how diffuse or nebulous an identity, or how misleading the username at its core, Roman would seek it out and give it form. In between his wide-ranging research, his surfing and stealing, he would pick a person at random from a social network. He would seek out commonalities, shared friends, past locations. On many occasions he could access bank accounts, club memberships, charity donations. He had software that could run through a million alphanumeric password permutations a minute and, he had found, once you cracked someone’s password for one site, you usually found they used it for a number of others, sometimes all of the secure sites they used. Most people would use only two passwords, both of which would be chosen for ease of recall. And that made them easy to break. It was amazing what you could find out, even without delving too deep. The web, Roman had realised, brought out the egotist in everyone. Every voice that was unheard in the real world shouted its opinions here.

  But he could not find her. Anywhere.

  She simply did not exist.

  The first thing he had done was to disable the roaming function on the mobile phone he had picked up in the café. Roman had become more and more convinced that the beautiful woman who had left it behind had done so deliberately, and the only reason he could think of was that she had been afraid of being tracked through it. He himself had Enhanced Cell Identification software that could pinpoint a mobile to within ten metres; if what he had guessed about the woman was true, then someone, somewhere would be trying to track down her phone. Roman had been very careful about switching it on: it was not necessary for a call to be made or received for it to be traced. As soon as the Nokia was switched on, it would emit its roaming signal, seeking out a network to connect to; so the first thing he did was to dismantle it and remove its antenna.

  And that was when he found it: a non-standard GPS chip. Someone had implanted an even more accurate form of tracer on the phone. Once he was into the phone, Roman removed the GPS chip, examined it and destroyed it. He felt himself sweating. More than usual. There was something going on here that was making him feel uneasy. Very uneasy.

  With the tracking disabled, he was able to download the phone’s contents onto his computer, decrypting any hidden or protected information.

  It did not take Roman more than an hour to grow to hate the woman he had seen in the café. He hated her because she really had been in grave danger. And by leaving her phone for him to find, she had transferred that danger to him.

  He stared at the computer screens before him. His portal to another universe. His element. His safe place. But even there – especially there – they could find him.

  And Roman was in no doubt that if they did find him, they would kill him.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The interview lasted all morning and into the afternoon. Van Heiden arranged for lunch to be brought up from the canteen.

  It was the strangest position for Fabel to find himself in. No one actually used the word suspect, but that was the noun Fabel would have attached to himself. Before they had started to discuss Müller-Voigt’s death, van Heiden had actually reminded Fabel of his rights under the Basic Law of the Federal Republic.

  ‘Just to keep things right,’ van Heiden had said. Presumably that was why he had also had their conversation recorded. Menke, the BfV agent, had sat in on the discussion.

  ‘You cannot seriously be suggesting that I had anything to do with Müller-Voigt’s death?’ Fabel had protested.

  ‘Of course not,’ said van Heiden. ‘But we have to be seen to do this all above board.’

  So they had sat and gone over every detail of every conversation Fabel had had with the Senator. When he had left to visit him, when he had arrived.

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought it would have taken you so long to get there,’ said Menke.

  ‘I lost my way a little,’ explained Fabel. ‘I ended up going through the centre of Stade.’

  ‘But you’d been to Müller-Voigt’s house before.’

  ‘A couple of years ago, yes.’

  Van Heiden, not the most extemporary of thinkers, had a list of questions prepared on a notepad. He worked his way through them, taking notes, asking supplementary questions. Pausing to frown every now and then. Menke contributed little, but Fabel noticed that the few questions he did ask were much more rele
vant than those that Fabel’s boss asked. At three-thirty van Heiden switched the recorder off, indicating the end of the formal interview.

  ‘Well?’ asked Fabel. ‘Do I go back to my desk or down to the holding cells?’

  ‘This is no laughing matter,’ said van Heiden.

  ‘I do not, in the slightest, find this funny. A man has been murdered within an hour of my talking to him, from what we can gather. He also happened to be a man I rather liked. And someone, somehow, is trying to frame me for it. And implicate me in a serial-murder case I’ve spent the last six months of my life working on. No, Herr Criminal Director, I do not find this a laughing matter.’ Fabel was aware he had started to raise his voice.

  ‘They’re not …’ Menke did not look in Fabel’s direction when he spoke.

  ‘What?’ Fabel frowned irritatedly at the security-service man.

  ‘They’re not trying to frame you,’ repeated Menke. ‘Or at least I don’t think they are. Like I said before, they’re trying to compromise you more than anything. Take you out of the picture. Make it impossible for you to lead the investigation into Müller-Voigt’s death, and/or the Network Killer murders.’

  Fabel drew a breath. For the first time in the day he felt less isolated; but the knowledge that his own boss had not voiced a belief in his innocence seethed inside him.

  ‘It seems very elaborate,’ said Fabel.

  ‘To you or me, yes. But if you have access to the right technology and expertise, then causing this kind of confusion takes very little effort.’ Menke shrugged, but held Fabel’s gaze for a moment.

  ‘So where does this all leave me?’ Fabel asked van Heiden.

  ‘Maybe it would be good if you took some leave.’

  ‘In the middle of three major murder enquiries?’ Fabel was incredulous. ‘That’s giving whoever is behind this exactly what they want.’