‘Reprogram.’
‘Change its core behaviour? You can’t do that once a symbiot is made.’
‘Why not?’
‘It just hasn’t been done before.’
Egon clapped and smiled with delight. ‘Those words are music to my ears.’
Geof smiled too. ‘Why do you want to save it so badly?’ he asked him.
‘That’s easy. If it is a new life-form, then it is a miracle, but if it is also holding the minds of the people it has consumed ... then it is something else again.’
‘All we have to do is stop it expanding and then convince the world to leave it alone.’
‘That’s all.’
Geof fell silent.
Egon surreptitiously returned to his work. Geof put the feed of the scopes into his overlay and sat staring at the sample, a black leech attacking the nose of the scope.
‘Doctor Shelley —’
‘Egon is fine now, don’t you think, Geof?’
‘Okay. Egon, do you know if Shen Li and Morritz Kay had much contact?’
Egon laughed and bumped his face on the multiscope. ‘Not since the interview, I’m sure.’
‘What interview?’
‘You haven’t seen it? It’s most amusing, especially when you know both the parties. Here.’ Egon opened a link that replayed a recording of a panel discussion in 2115. Shen Li and Morritz Kay were being questioned about their respective inventions and Morritz was getting angrier and angrier until he took off his moccasins and began beating the other man with them. The film crew were too stunned to stop it.
Geof found it somewhat amusing. He hadn’t known his sensei before he retired from public life.
‘Morritz is a ... difficult man, isn’t he?’
‘Oh yes. As much as any other. Once you wait out his initial hostility he becomes nearly normal.’
‘Why does he seem to hate Shen so much?’ Geof asked.
‘Morritz doesn’t like symbiots,’ Egon said offhandedly.
‘And that’s enough. What’s his reasoning?’
‘I’m not sure he has one. It’s either an instinct or he hates them for making his charm-tech seem like it was from pre-rec. Shen did make his research obsolete overnight.’ Egon laughed. ‘He’s a good scientist though.’
‘So it’s unlikely they worked together?’ Geof asked.
‘Extremely. Very extremely highly unlikely. Why?’
‘I don’t want to say yet.’ In the background Geof set the chaise to search for any other records, visual or otherwise, of the bauble he had seen Shen making and Morritz Kay wearing.
‘As you wish.’
~ * ~
While he mopped up the last of the sauce, Geof was double-pinged from two anonymous addresses. For weavers this was like a knock on the door.
Geof ducked into immersion and traced the connections as they fell short, fading away like water in the sun. Pointing anywhere and nowhere.
‘Everything comes from somewhere ...’ he muttered to himself. He sent an army of crawlers out to do the work.
It was merely a process of elimination. Where the trails ended were highly infected with Kronos. Was it trying to contact him? Did its mind seek him out like its bodies were doing?
He set the chaise to map the infection to see how far it had spread and he quickly began noticing other anomalies in the data. There were areas of the Weave that had been infected immediately after Kronos appeared. The rest of the super-network could thus be categorised by the moment of contagion and the level of penetration.
In the nodes that Kronos was only now reaching there were sometimes anomalous contradictions in the energy increase. It wasn’t doubling as precisely each time like it should have been if it was mirroring. He couldn’t see what was different, only that the data weight in Kronos didn’t always match that of the Weave. Like an organism it was an imperfect copy ... Alternatively it might mean that someone was changing the data on the Weave.
Is this what the anonymous connection wanted me to see? Like a thief wanting to get caught?
There must be something they were doing that they wanted him to see. All he had to do was find what they were affecting and then he would find them. Since his only way of seeing that they had done anything at all was by the discrepancy in data weight between the Weave and the Kronos infection, this would be a very hard chore indeed.
It must be raw data, he thought. Data was the most susceptible at input, before it was processed; visual recordings were positionally matched with streams and object tags, communications were logged and classified, and passive adjustments were passed onto the Will. Before the processing of all that data there was a lag, sometimes of seconds, that could, theoretically, be hakked.
‘Okay. I see you,’ he said. ‘But why have you brought me here, stranger? Why are you showing me this?’
Geof waited for another ping, but none came.
There were only so many people in the world capable of erasing their tracks like this, or in fact finding him behind a Services shield. But how many of those would need to approach him in this manner? All the members of the Primacy had direct contact with him, so it must be an outsider on the inside.
One name came to mind.
He began a new search for all signs of Takashi Shima’s stream, both on the Weave and off. Takashi walked lightly on the Weave but in the real world his whereabouts were always known. He had taken to living out of a mesh café after embarrassing his family one too many times.
A random visual recognition scan turned up a result on Takashi’s avatar and Geof followed it to a mimic layer of Sector 261, STOC. He watched in multiple views, code and visual, as Takashi Shima went from omnipole to omnipole, running verification and viral scans on the passive sensors. He used the default avatar, like most serious weavers did, not bothering to create a false facade of themselves and simply representing their body as it was. Takashi was short and covered over in a symbiot larger and thicker than Geof’s own. Even his head was covered with bulbous oculars that made him look like some sort of lizard.
There was something strange about how methodically the avatar was behaving. Though Geof didn’t know Takashi, he didn’t imagine the black sheep of Shima would be so careful — unless that was what he was like when he was immersed. Geof tracked the command path back to see where the body of Takashi was, now that he had left the palace, but the path dissolved. This avatar had no controlling profile, it was independent...
Geof appeared in front of the avatar as it went to the next omnipole to check its sensors for error.
‘Takashi Shima?’
‘Yes?’ The symbiot man looked up at him.
‘What are you doing?’ Geof asked, as he probed the avatar to see where its commands were coming from. He could detect no external signal. This avatar was akin to an ARA, only more complex.
‘Just checking these sensors. Something is very wrong in this place.’
Geof encapsulated the avatar and filed it into his chaise, which began breaking down its protocols. It was a detailed simulation of Takashi, and probably not the only one. It had commands to explore the Weave as Takashi would do and to wipe all visual records of Pierre Jnr. It was very sophisticated.
What are you up to, Takashi?
Geof pursued Weave-borne rumours to the new den Takashi had made for himself. He was a minor celebrity now, taken in by a keen young crowd of weavers and gamers, living out of a mesh bar at the coastal end of Yantz.
Geof created a mimic layer, so that he could stand in Cybermesh as if transported, watching all the cameras and sensors reported in real time. He looked over the clientele on their couches, the girl jamming rubbish into a disposal chute behind the bar.
Takashi was not in view, but Geof detected the signal of the proprietor behind a sliding wall. There were no cameras in this restricted area — Cybermesh’s own little black box — and it would have been safe from Geof, if not for Lewis the proprietor check
ing on his most important client.
Delicately, Geof syphoned the sensors and camera data of the man and could see into the restricted area; the cushioned floor and gratuitous pillows. Geof looked down at the relaxed form of Takashi Shima.
He wired into the other man’s connection and watched as he coordinated the programs of seven different simulations he had made of himself. Some he had set to miscellaneous tasks, like the one Geof had found in STOC, others he had rapidly parsing surveillance footage.
For a long time nothing happened, but then one of the simulations found what it was looking for. A pair of cameras pointing at the stage of a lecture theatre. There were only four people in the audience, sitting spaced apart, all looking up to the podium where a small boy with an oversized head stood before them.
The simulation edited out Pierre Jnr, erased him from the record, and then resumed its search.
As Geof stood there another avatar appeared beside him, another Takashi, quietly staring down and studying his real-world form.
‘It’s not what it looks like,’ Takashi said.
Geof turned to look at him. ‘What isn’t?’
‘Everything.’ Takashi’s smile twitched and Geof’s connection was snapped.
Geof blinked, surprised to find himself back in the load space.
A ping came into his queue with a data attachment, file name ‘Sector 261’.
Takashi: Make sure my brother sees this.
Geof demersed and took stock. He pulled up a satellite view and began running a pattern analysis. His gut knew the answers before the run listed the results. It was just as Takashi’s report said.
Seven months ago Omskya Sector 261 had stopped having traffic accidents, their transport was running on a to-the-second timetable, the people were becoming significantly more healthy through strict dieting and exercise. Their data trails had stopped and they no longer accessed the Weave or took part in the Will.
Geof didn’t know what that might indicate or if it was important at all.
As he pondered, the chaise pinged results on his earlier query. The bauble had been seen elsewhere, caught in surveillance footage at Magnus Towers. Risom was wearing one on a cord around his neck.
Geof to Pinter: We need to talk.
Pinter: What have you found out, Geof?
Geof: New anomalies.
Pinter: Pierre Jnr?
Geof: We need to see the Prime. In person.
Pinter: He doesn’t see anybody.
Geof: I need to. I’ve learnt about something that fills me with doubt.
Pinter: And you won’t tell me what it is, I suppose?
Geof: Can’t risk it.
Pinter: I’m not sure the Prime will risk seeing us at this point. He is busy dealing with the aftermath.
Geof: If I don’t see him in person, I won’t share the information.
Pinter: Ozenbach, this isn’t like you. What has happened?
Geof: I’ll tell you when I see you. Not safe.
Pinter: Paranoia protocols it is.
Geof: ?
Pinter: Old joke.
~ * ~
Ryu saw the elevator coming down. No one was supposed to be there. The elevator shouldn’t even move from his level without his consent.
Was it Pierre? Would the doors open to show the melon-headed boy looking at him with his calm eyes?
Two men stepped out. Colonel Pinter and Geof Ozenbach.
‘What are you doing here? Is this a coup?’
‘Nothing like that,’ the Colonel said calmly. ‘There is something we need to talk about. Geof insisted we meet in person.’
‘How did you get through my security?’ Ryu asked.
Pinter turned to face Geof, as if that explained it. Geof shrugged. ‘I couldn’t let anyone know we were coming.’
‘What has happened now?’ Ryu asked.
‘It’s what has been happening. I traced your brother tampering with the Weave,’ Geof said.
The Prime and Pinter looked at each other. ‘You’ve been in contact with Takashi?’
‘Yes. I caught him erasing evidence of Pierre Jnr from the Weave. Did you know about this?’
Ryu thought a moment before answering. ‘Yes.’
‘Did you?’ Geof asked the Colonel.
‘Ryu shared it with me when I took my posting.’
Geof was stunned. ‘Why? Why are you doing this?’
‘I thought it best that the public weren’t aware. I didn’t want to cause a panic,’ Ryu said.
‘Geof, you can see the logic,’ the Colonel added.
‘You agree with this?’
‘For the time being.’
Geof felt unsteady on his feet. ‘I’m sorry, I thought ... I thought you might be under Pierre’s influence.’
‘Ha, perfectly understandable.’ Pinter reached out a steadying hand. ‘You were right to question.’
‘Is there something else?’ the Prime asked. ‘I don’t appreciate you forcing your way in like this.’
Geof nodded, calming down his breathing. ‘It might be nothing.’
‘We’re all here now, Geof,’ Pinter said. ‘Take your time.’
‘Colonel, need I remind you who is in charge here?’ Ryu asked.
‘I’m sorry, Prime. Did you not wish to hear what is troubling our weaver so much?’
Ryu sighed and scratched at his eyebrow. ‘Just make it quick, Ozenbach. There is a lot I have to get through tonight.’
‘Okay, well, as I said, it may be nothing.’ Geof opened a connection to the needle’s controls and set the windows to opaque then began feeding documents onto them. ‘I have found an unexplained thread of coincidence that my gut tells me is not coincidence. At the time I didn’t think anything of it, but when I was consulting with Shen Li he was working on something. He wouldn’t tell me what it was, but he was obsessing over it. This.’ He showed the images and basic specifications of the bauble.
It was a small thing, a centimetre in diameter. The base sphere was made of nano-smoothed poly-metal, with over fifty tiny plates making a second shell around the outside. It looked mathematically decorative.
‘What is it?’
‘I’m not sure yet. First, I saw Shen making it. Then, I noticed Morritz Kay wore one on a bracelet. He wouldn’t tell me what it was either. A background search I put going then found the same bauble in Risom Cawthorne’s possession at Magnus Towers. The thing is, there are no records of interaction between Shen and Morritz. Morritz Kay loathed Sensei Li. Which leaves me with the question of how he could have gotten it, and then how Risom acquired one.’
‘And, do you have an answer?’
‘Morritz Kay is manufacturing them in the millions.’
‘What does it mean?’ the Colonel asked.
‘All I know is that Shen Li made it, Morritz acquired it and is mass-producing them and Risom Cawthorne was seen wearing one.’
‘What was on the train?’ Ryu spoke for the first time in a while. He had let the others postulate while he watched his value topple. His value was on a clear downward trajectory and nothing he could do would stop it now.
‘What train?’ Geof asked.
‘The one Risom escaped on.’
‘That was a cargo distributor. It had thousands of items on it.’
‘But it did have a manifest, did it not?’ Ryu asked.
‘Of course, by default.’
‘Could you cross-reference with the salvage report to see if anything was missing?’
‘Yes, Prime.’ Geof went silent as he ran the command. ‘This could be something.’
‘What?’
‘Can you wait while I follow up?’ Geof asked.
‘Please.’ Ryu waved Geof towards one of the large swivel chairs.
‘Would it be possible to get some water?’
‘Of course, order what you like.’
Pinter ordered an anise and chose a glass from the drawer.
‘Did you know that there is a drink named after you?’ Ryu asked him. ‘The Scorpion.’
The Colonel looked up. ‘No. I wasn’t aware. How does it taste?’
‘I can’t say I’ve tried it.’ Ryu looked grim. ‘It looks certain that you will overtake me as Prime. You or Representative Betts.’
Manifestations Page 33
