by Eric Brown
Kia had slotted the jack into her NCI and now sat connected to the computer. Her long fingers danced over the touchpad and the screen scrolled with line after line of meaningless mathematical formulae.
The terminal gave an eerie whistle, a mechanical banshee wail, and Kia slumped suddenly in the swivel chair, her long legs outstretched. Her eyes rolled, became suddenly all whites. She opened her mouth wide and moaned.
From the corner of her eye, Anna saw Kim dash off the last of her wine and stare at the black woman connected to the computer. With a galvanic gesture, Kia yanked the jack from her head and stared at Anna with such fury that Anna felt weak at the knees. ‘What . . .?’ she began.
‘They have killed most of me!’ she wailed. ‘The many parts of me that constituted the whole, they are dead. I am isolated. I can’t go back! Do you know what that means, to be imprisoned like this?’ She stared wildly around the room, from Anna to Kim.
Anna shook her head, trying to make sense of the words.
Kia’s gaze alighted on the girl and something showed in her eyes, something almost like recognition. ‘Who is this?’ she asked.
Anna found her voice, aware now that she was crying. ‘Kia, this is Kim, my brother’s . . .’ She never completed the sentence.
Kia moved from the chair with startling speed. She leapt across the room and, before Anna could move to stop her, locked an arm around Kim’s neck. With her injured right arm she managed to pull something from the pocket of her jacket and position it against the girl’s temple.
Anna stared at the weapon, some kind of silver pistol, and tried to remain upright and calm.
She took a step forward, reaching out as if attempting to pacify a distraught animal. ‘Please, Kia . . .’ she began, her voice cracking.
Kia yanked at the girl, lifting her from her feet. Kim moaned, her arms and legs hanging like the limbs of a rag doll. Kia tightened her grip.
‘Be quiet!’ She looked at Anna. ‘If you don’t listen to me and obey, I’ll kill the girl.’
‘Kia, please. I want to help you!’ The woman before her was Kia, she told herself, but at the same time was not Kia. Almost as terrifying as her actions was the sound of her voice. She spoke with a strained formality at odds with her usual easy, rapping patter.
Kim was staring at Anna with massive, beseeching eyes. Kia’s armlock on her throat prevented further protest, but eloquent quicksilver tears rolled down her cheeks.
‘We’ll go out to the car,’ Kia said, ‘and if you do anything to hinder me, you and the girl will die. Now go, walk through the hall and out to the car.’
Her mind in turmoil, wondering what had happened to the woman she loved, Anna led the way from the apartment. The icy night gripped her, and she wondered if the shivers that possessed her then were due wholly to the cold. She stumbled across the sidewalk towards the battered Cadillac.
Kia opened the door and bundled Kim into the footwell on the passenger’s side, crawled past the curled-up girl and slipped in behind the wheel. A part of Anna wanted to run, but another part knew that she could desert neither her lover nor the Chinese girl. Something terrible had happened to Kia, and Anna had no doubt that she would carry out her threats.
Then Kia leaned from the driver’s seat and levelled the weapon, and Anna heard the desperate, muffled sobs of the girl imprisoned in the car.
‘In the back,’ Kia ordered. Anna opened the door and climbed inside.
Kia started the engine and eased the Cadillac into the road. Directing the weapon at Kim’s heaving back, she steered with her injured arm.
‘Where are you taking us?’ Anna whispered.
‘That doesn’t matter,’ Kia replied. ‘You’ll be okay if you do as I say. There’s a communicator beside you on the back seat. Take it and call this code...’
With trembling fingers, as the Cadillac sped through the snow-quietened streets, Anna lifted the com and obeyed.
* * * *
Fifteen
Halliday sat cross-legged on the table-top beside the floor-to-ceiling window and stared out at the lights of New York. He held a mug of steaming coffee in cupped hands, raised before his face like an offering.
For the past hour, while Wellman and the technicians had run tests and checks on the Net to ensure that victory over LINx was complete, Halliday had kept himself awake with an overdose of caffeine. From time to time Wellman joined him, asked if he was okay, but Halliday could only bring himself to nod in response.
He knew that soon he must return to Kim at the hotel, and try to sleep, and then attempt to find the words to tell her what had happened to Barney. Perhaps he feared sleep, not only for the nightmares that sleep might bring, but also because, in the morning, the rest of his life without Barney would begin. It was as if he existed in a limbo now, a strange hinterland of partial-being in which the events of the previous few hours might have been nothing more than an hallucination.
His communicator vibrated against his ribs. He pulled it out, raised it to his ear. The action reminded him that the majority of calls he had received in the past had been from Barney. Now, every act of using the com would be a terrible reminder.
He heard a small voice. ‘Hal?’
‘Hello? Who is it?’
‘Hal. It’s Anna.’
Anna? He closed his eyes, forced his memory to function. Susanna ... his sister. She called herself Anna now.
‘Anna. What is it?’
‘Hal, can you contact Wellman?’
He screwed his eyes shut and concentrated. Why the hell did Anna want him to contact Wellman? ‘Yes. Yes, of course. He’s here. What. . .?’
‘Can he hear this?’ Her voice was tight, tense.
‘Anna - what’s going on? Why do you want?’
‘Get Wellman,’ she said.
He lowered the communicator, fear beginning to uncoil like a waking serpent in his stomach. He turned towards the techs grouped around the flatscreen. Wellman was watching him. Halliday gestured him over.
Wellman joined him. ‘What is it?’
Halliday shook his head. ‘I don’t know. It’s my sister.’ He raised the com to his ear. ‘Anna, Wellman’s here. What do you want?’
A silence, then Anna said, ‘We’re with Kia and we’re driving north . . .’ Halliday could only stare at the device in his hand as the voice repeated, ‘. . . with Kia and we’re driving north.’
Wellman snatched the com. ‘Hello? Hello? Who is this?’
‘Wellman? I’m Anna, Hal’s sister. We’re with Kia. She says that if you obey her instructions, we’ll come to no harm.’
With a shaking hand Halliday grabbed Wellman’s wrist and pulled the com to his lips. ‘Anna, who’s with you?’
Another silence, followed by, ‘Kim . . .’
Waves of disbelief seemed to crash through his head like the onset of a cerebral haemorrhage. That Kia - or rather LINx - had Anna seemed improbable enough, but that it had also kidnapped Kim was impossible.
‘Anna, tell me what’s happening,’ he cried into the mouthpiece.
Wellman raised the com and said calmly, ‘What does Kia want us to do, Anna?’
Halliday heard the sound of a car engine, muffled. Then Anna spoke. ‘We’re heading for the Cyber-Tech headquarters in Westchester County. Kia wants to meet you there, you and Hal. No one else. She says . . . she says that if anyone else comes with you, then she’ll kill us.’ Her voice wavered as she tried to fight back the sobs.
‘Okay, okay,’ Wellman said. ‘We’ll do as she says. Tell Kia that we’ll meet her there.’ He paused. ‘Anna, ask Kia what she wants. How can we help her?’
Halliday heard his sister relay the question, then a hurried answer.
Anna said, ‘She . . . she says that you’ve killed many parts of her, that you must pay. I don’t understand. What’s . . .?’
A shout from the other end, Kia telling her to shut it.
Wellman said, with impressive calm, ‘Tell Kia that we will meet her at the headquarters.
We’ll discuss whatever it is that she wants. We’ll be there in . . .’ he consulted his watch, ‘. . . in just over an hour.’
‘And don’t bring anyone else,’ Anna said in a panicky voice. ‘She said she’ll kill us if you bring anyone else!’
‘We’re coming alone, Anna. Tell her that we’re coming alone.’
Halliday pulled the communicator towards him. ‘Anna, are you okay? Is Kim . . .?’
‘We’re both . . .’ Anna began, and then the connection died.
‘Jesus Christ. . .’ Halliday said. ‘How the hell did this happen?’
‘It doesn’t matter how it happened. It happened. It’s happening. We’ve got to work out what LINx wants, how we’ll respond.’
‘Anna said it wants us to pay, Wellman. It knows we’ve eradicated it from the Net. It wants to kill us.’
‘Its precise words were that we should pay. It might not necessarily mean that we should pay with our lives.’ Wellman braced both arms on the table and leaned forward, staring into space with concentration. ‘Are you armed?’
Halliday patted his jacket. ‘I’ve got my automatic and the freeze.’
‘We must remember that we’re not up against LINx as it was,’ Wellman said. ‘The small part of it now in the woman’s cranial interface is reduced. It’s a pale shadow of its former self. The vast array of resources it could draw on from the Net, communications, surveillance, whatever information it required ... it no longer has these.- In effect, it’s now merely a deranged mind in an innocent’s body. It has no special strengths.’
‘It has Kim and Anna,’ Halliday said. ‘It doesn’t need any special strengths. If we make one wrong move . . .’ He tried not to follow that line of thought.
‘What I’m saying is that we can overcome it, physically. That’s all we have to do to save Anna and Kim.’
Halliday remembered something, the blood in the alley. ‘Kia’s injured,’ he said. ‘Barney hit her during the chase . . .’
‘I wonder just how badly she’s injured?’ Wellman said.
Halliday shook his head. ‘What do we do? Go in alone? Will LINx have any way of knowing if we call in back-ups?’
‘There’s a possibility that it might link itself to the surveillance system up at Cyber-Tech, once it gets there.’
‘I thought the power was down?’
‘It was, but it won’t take much to get it working again.’
‘So if it is connected to the surveillance cameras, we’d better do as it said and go in alone.’
Wellman closed his eyes briefly, considering. ‘Can you get a police squad to follow us, meet us before we reach the headquarters? If we find out LINx isn’t connected, then it’ll be nice to know we can go in with reinforcements.’
‘I’ll contact Jeff Simmons’ department, explain the situation.’
He took the com and spent the next five minutes trying to get the duty officer manning Jeff’s department to put him through to Simmons at home. What seemed like an age later, the officer gave in. Halliday spoke hurriedly to Simmons, explaining the situation. The cop listened, asking the occasional question.
‘It’s going to be difficult,’ Halliday told him. ‘We won’t know how to play it until we’re there.’
‘I can get a team of drones and hostage specialists up there, Hal. We’ll wait a safe distance away until we hear from you, okay?’
‘I’ll be in touch.’
Halliday pocketed the com and nodded to Wellman. ‘All set.’
‘Are you sure you’re okay, Hal? You’re up to it?’
Halliday smiled. It was the first time Wellman had used his first name. ‘I’m dog-tired and sick, Wellman, but I want to get Kim and Anna out of this alive. I want to get rid of the . . . thething that killed Barney. Like you said, we’re not up against the old LINx, just a part of it. We can do it, Wellman.’
Closure, he thought. It’s all about closing the circle, avenging Barney’s death, not so much for anything to do with Barney’s memory, but for myself.
‘Are you ready?’ Wellman said. ‘There’s a car in the basement garage.’
Halliday leaned against the mock-timber panelling as the elevator dropped. He checked his automatic, the canister of freeze.
He looked up. ‘Tell me something,’ he said, ‘do you have a first name?’
Wellman smiled. ‘Just call me Wellman, okay?’
They left the elevator and stepped into the garage. Wellman drove, steering the car up the ramp from the garage and out into the quiet, snow-covered city. They sped north on Fifth Avenue. Halliday sat back and watched the familiar sights of buildings flick by, impersonal, hiding people whose lives would never intersect with his own, who knew nothing about the plight of Kim and Anna at this moment. He found it almost impossible to believe that New York was not aware of Barney’s death, and he was filled with a sudden despair. It came to him that after death we are only so many memories, carried by people who in turn will pass away, and soon all memory of those who existed, who made the world a better place for those they loved, would be gone too, so that nothing of the actual individual would in time exist. All that matters, he thought, is how we think of those who are gone, and how we relate to the living.
All that mattered now was to ensure the survival of three innocent women, however that might be achieved.
They left Manhattan on Interstate 87, speeding through the night.
At last Halliday broke the silence. ‘It can only want our deaths,’ he said.
‘Anna said that it wanted us to pay,’ Wellman said. ‘We were responsible for eradicating LINx from the Net, after all.’
‘Perhaps we could . . .’ Halliday smiled. Even as he considered the option, it seemed improbable. ‘I don’t know, couldn’t we come to some compromise?’
Wellman glanced at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Presumably LINx wants to live, like any of us. It’s tasted existence and wants to continue. If we capture Kia alive or if she dies . . . then what-is left of LINx will die as well. So ... we offer it the chance of continued existence. For the release of Kim, Anna and Kia, we’ll allow it to download itself into a computer.’ He sounded as if he was talking about placing some large and carnivorous fish in an aquarium.
Wellman was shaking his head. ‘Think about it. We could make the offer, we could promise it continued existence with every intention of keeping our side of the bargain. But it knows the ways of humans, Hal. It’s interfaced with humans. It knows how we cheat and lie to get what we want. It knows that the likelihood would be that, once we had it imprisoned and isolated, we would simply switch it off to prevent a recurrence of what has happened.’ Wellman gripped the wheel and smiled to himself. ‘And, do you know something, that’s just what we’d do.’
Halliday stared out into the dark night. They had left the city behind, were racing now through the ruined and blighted countryside. Beyond the lighted cocoon of the car, the world seemed sealed in cold and death.
‘Why Cyber-Tech, Wellman?’ he asked. ‘I mean, why has it gone back there?’
Wellman stared through the windscreen, his expression unreadable. ‘Perhaps I’m ascribing anthropocentric motives to something which is truly alien and which we could never hope to understand, but Cyber-Tech is where LINx first came to life; where it was born, for want of a better expression. Perhaps it knows it will die tonight, and wishes to die where it was born.’
‘Like an animal running for familiar cover,’ Halliday said. ‘Maybe it is more animal than human. The way it killed to get what it wanted, when it considered itself under threat.’
Wellman glanced at him. ‘Permit me the observation, Hal, but for a private eye you have a rosy view of humanity.’ He smiled. ‘Humans, like animals, kill to get what they want, and also when they’re threatened. Humans also calculate, and then kill, which is what LINx has been doing. No, in my opinion LINx bears more of a resemblance to the genus of its creators than anything else in the animal kingdom.’
Halliday
said, ‘But humans also feel compassion and . . .’
Wellman laughed. ‘And perhaps LINx does too, which would go some way to proving the mechanistic basis for what we term the higher emotions.’
Halliday closed his eyes. He recalled the times .his sister had mocked his intellect, and how he’d felt belittled and confused, doubtful of himself and his place in the world. It was a fear he experienced to this day: it was as if there were some absolute truth out there somewhere, but because he did not have the intellect to apprehend it, then his existence was rendered in some way invalid and unworthy.
