Fairyland
Page 24
‘If I don’t?’
‘Then we have to dispose of him,’ Alex says. ‘Really, I’d rather we didn’t. Aside from the moral consideration, it’s very expensive, and a waste of a resource.’
Morag wonders if Alex Sharkey has ever had a moral consideration in his life. He looks like a kind of anti-Buddha beaming benignly there in the swivel chair in his white suit and green and orange plaid shirt, his hands clasped over his considerable belly. Whatever he wants from this, it is more than the story he has fed her, the fairytale of being under the thrall of a mad genius who supposedly created the fairies single-handed, who even now is warping them to her own ends. He is as deeply involved in this as poor Armand, but his motives are well hidden. Morag isn’t sure if he really is working against the Children’s Crusade, or if he simply wants to rip them off in some unspecified way. What she is sure of is that she isn’t going to give up. For Jules’s sake she can’t give up. She’s pretty sure that Armand, or at least his warewolf alter ego, killed Jules and Nina, and killed the poor little girls, too. If Armand can’t or won’t help her, then at least she can hand him to the police at the first chance she gets.
Morag thinks all this as, behind one of the screens, she pulls on the stiff, matted sweater and creased trousers over damp underwear. The fleece lining of her coat is badly stained, and dry mud lies in the seams of its silver quilting. But at least she’s warm again.
Max has clamped one of the squares of tape, adhesive side up, in a tiny stainless steel frame. Now he feeds this into a scanning tunnelling microscope rig that’s plugged into one of the computer’s external sockets. The rig’s vacuum pump whines, and then the shapes tumbling above the holostage fade to show a rumpled landscape in shades of glowing green, its hills and dales speckled with tiny, hard-edged lozenges. Max zooms in on one of the lozenges. Resolution grows fuzzier as the thing fills the stage. It is some kind of fembot, a trapezoid about a micron on each side, its top surface an array of light-collecting diodes patterned like a compound eye.
Max twiddles a ball to move the view to one of the edges of the microscopic machine, then increases the magnification until the screen is filled with a pattern of fuzzy spheres: the doped buckyball molecules which make up the fembot. At the bottom of the screen, a stack of red and pink lines shrink and grow, then stabilize.
‘Germanium and gold,’ Max says. ‘This configuration is the type of readout port used by the cops. The bug takes a single random, time-stamped picture and stores it. The cops retrieve a population of bugs, a couple of million or so, and use heuristic techniques to recover a time sequence. Crude but effective.’
‘They were watching your every move,’ Alex tells Morag, as Max inserts the second square of adhesive tape. ‘You knew about it, didn’t you? It’s why you jumped in the water.’
The second sample consists of a scattering of a different type of fembot, lumpy and amorphous like so many agglomerations of soap bubbles. Each has a slot in its leading edge where it can clamp on to host cell ribosomes and force them to make novel proteins, and paddle-like effectors that use fluctuations in charge for propulsion through fluid media.
‘Cool stuff,’ Max says, raptly scanning one fembot after the other, loading the images into the computer.
‘Fairydust,’ Alex tells Morag. ‘Some of them seem to do nothing; others will change a person’s mind permanently, if they’re given a chance. Know how it works? Our memories are distributed through our brains in branching strings. These fembots find a memory string and rewrite it. You lose that memory and gain a belief. I think it happened to me, when I was much younger. Different clades of fembot transmit different memes. Some are very strong, like the loyalty plagues used in Africa—’
‘I know how it works,’ Morag says.
She suddenly has a clear vision of the refugee camps, a million men, women and children with a single, myriad-branched thread, spun by Papa Zumi’s loyalty plague, connecting them all. The few people who broke or were spontaneously cured of the plague were hunted down and killed by government men in black suits and video shades. Those young men—they weren’t infected. They had chosen to do it to themselves. That was what was so terrible and so sad. They had given up an essential part of themselves for their suits and shiny shoes and for their rooms in the five star hotels, for access to a hospitality bar and satellite TV. They were carriers of power, but it was not their power. When the time came, at the command of Papa Zumi’s government in exile, they surrounded the clinics. When negotiations between the UN and the imperturbable Papa Zumi broke down, the young men moved in and marched all the aid workers out at gunpoint. The next day the young men were dead, along with a million refugees.
Alex gives her a shrewd look. ‘The fairies in the Magic Kingdom are releasing thousands of different kinds of psychoactive viruses and fembots. We’re pretty sure the fairies aren’t designing them; they’re evolving them at random, and selecting the ones that are most successful at whatever they’re supposed to do. The Interface samples the air and tries to sort out those which may be useful from those which aren’t. But these are airborne contaminants the warewolf picked up from inside. Some of them may be the fairies’ own loyalty plague.’
‘Most of them fall into the spectrum of Interface samples,’ Max says, ‘but there are significant outliers.’
Light flashes over the holostage, clears to show half a dozen slowly rotating lumpy shapes.
Alex says, ‘Fairy and Crusader fembots are very different from the fembots used by meme hackers. For one thing, they are manufactured by assemblers capable of sexual reproduction. That’s why there are so many different kinds of fembots associated with the Crusade. It’s just like biological sex in simple organisms, in which the parents act as their own gametes. The assemblers fuse, randomly exchange discrete bits of genetic information—in this case, algorithms—and separate. I think there’s a degree of induced mutation at this point, too. The two new assemblers are chimeras of the sum of the combined genetic information of both parents. The fittest offspring are those which can infect people and make fembots which turn them into Children’s Crusaders most successfully. It’s artificial evolution—’
‘Except,’ Max says, We’re not sure what the endpoint is.’
‘We don’t even know if there is an endpoint,’ Alex says. The assemblers spread like HIV. Or worse, actually, since a kiss is enough to do it. But there aren’t any assemblers here, only their products, and besides, these are all dead—they only work in serum. See how they’re kind of collapsed?’
Alex smiles at Morag, but she isn’t impressed by this technical garble. She says, ‘We already know where he comes from.’
Max says, ‘She thinks it’s a show, chief. You should let her go.’
Alex says, ‘What about it? You want to go?’
‘Of course not. I don’t think that this is a show at all. It’s all too familiar.’
‘Well, if you want to stay, you can help out,’ Alex says. ‘Have you ever taken out a control chip?’
Morag has, many times. During her paramedic training, she spent a month at the Leith parole clinic, where she inserted control chips into newly convicted zeks and took them out of zeks at the end of their sentence. Like little independent consciences, like so many copies of Pinocchio’s Jiminy Cricket, control chips are forever alert for wrong-doing. They limit zeks’ movements to proscribed areas and induce a cataleptic reaction if the zeks take any kind of psychoactive drug or become involved in proscribed situations.
The warewolf’s chip seems no different from civilian parole models. It nestles in a sliver-dim terminal implanted in his right eyesocket. Morag anaesthetizes the eye muscles with a curarine spray, slightly displaces the eyeball, and plucks the chip using a microstage scaffold that fits itself to the contours of the warewolf’s eyesocket. She can do nothing about the pseudoneurons that fembots will have spun to connect the chip’s hardware to the neurons of the warewolf’s own cortex, but without the control chip the wetware is inactiva
ted. The chip is no bigger than a pin; Max scans it and announces that it’s a genuine army device.
Alex prises open the man’s jaws and squints at his tongue, but just shrugs when Morag asks what he’s looking for. ‘We’ll bring him around,’ he says. ‘Maybe he can tell us something.’
‘That’ll be the day,’ Katrina says.
She’s right. Armand does nothing but shiver and weep for an hour or so, and then can only tell them what they already know. Max scrolls up a plan of the Magic Kingdom, but Armand says he doesn’t know where the fairy nest is. Somewhere underground. Close questioning reveals that it is centred on a generator pit; Max locates one in the theme park itself, and a backup system under the resort hotel complex.
‘Except that is still in use,’ Max says.
They don’t learn much else from Armand. By degrees, he is ingratiating, then stubbornly sullen, and then almost hysterical, denying everything.
Finally, he starts to flail out wildly. Katrina gets Armand’s arms in a lock behind his neck and marches him into the maze of cubicle screens. Morag hears her shout that she’ll whale the shit out of him if he doesn’t calm down, then the meaty sound of a couple of blows, then silence.
‘She needs to blow off steam,’ Alex says, as if to mollify Morag.
But Morag feels little sympathy for the man. He’s a kind of shell, eaten away from the inside, pathetically obsequious, devious, and violent. Something about him breathes his victim status—more than sympathy, you want to pitch him out of a window and have done with him.
Katrina returns and says she put the little fucker to sleep. It is late, past midnight. Morag makes a nest of bubblewrap in a corner, pillows her head on her folded coat. She falls into a light, uneasy sleep, waking from bad dreams to the half-light of the biolumes, the low mutter of conversation elsewhere in the room. The swags of cable seem ominously like snakes, the random pinhole speckles in the ceiling tiles a movement away from making some kind of sense, but Morag falls asleep again before they do.
She is shaken awake by the washed-out blonde woman, who puts a finger to her lips when Morag starts to ask why. It’s cold and quiet. The overhead lights shed a timeless greenish glare on the cubicle partitions, the scarred desks, the dusty grey carpet tiles.
As Morag gets up, stiff with cold, there’s a muffled hammering downstairs. ‘Quickly,’ the blonde says, and hurries away.
Max is gone, although all his equipment has been left switched on, humming and blinking like some electronic Marie Celeste. The lights are out in the rest of the building, and Morag must fumble her way down the spiral staircase. The blonde hisses mat she must hurry, there’s no time.
‘No time?’
Just then the hammering stops.
‘They’re in,’ the blonde says, and snatches up Morag’s hand and pulls her along. ‘Hurry!’
Alex Sharkey is waiting with Katrina in a tiny basement room. Armand is curled on its oily concrete floor. Alex grins at Morag and says, ‘I was right all along. It’s the Children’s Crusade. It’s her.’
Katrina has a little flatscreen TV. ‘They’re at the back now,’ she says. ‘A van there. That’s where they’ll be expecting to take us out.’
‘She’s come for us,’ Alex says. ‘I knew she would.’
The blonde closes what looks like a fire door. It has thick rubber flanges at top and bottom, along both sides. She dogs it shut with some effort, throwing three big levers one after the other.
‘So we’re locked in here,’ Morag says. She’s still half-asleep. It isn’t quite real to her.
There are two big air cylinders strapped to the wall by the door. The blonde opens their valves, and a high-pitched whistle fills the little room.
Morag’s ears hurt, then pop when she swallows. Now she understands. Positive pressure. She says, ‘Max is a love bomber.’
Katrina, grinning like a wolf, flicks the little control ball on her flatscreen with exaggerated shifts of her shoulders and elbows as she scans between the building’s surveillance cameras.
‘They’re through the front door,’ she says. ‘Right up the stairs. Nice moves in the doorways. They keep low, they let their weapons look round corners first. These kids are wired. Interesting choice of weapons, too. Tangle spray, tasers. Looks like they want to take us alive. Ah, this is good, now we have them. They are looking around. They don’t quite believe what is happening. Oh, now they do. They really do believe. Looks like a regular prayer meeting starts up there.’
The blonde stands with her back to the sealed door. She says in a small, flat voice, ‘We did so much work here. This building doesn’t even exist on any database, we were so thorough. I’m sorry to leave it.’
‘Max would say never get attached,’ Alex says.
‘That’s because he steals anything he wants,’ the woman says. ‘To him, the world is just a department store and we’re mice living in the chinks. All he needs is his data.’
‘He left his computer behind,’ Morag says.
The blonde says, ‘That’s just a terminal. The data is all over the world, encrypted in Web servers and commercial nets. We were using half a per cent of the Russian Stock Exchange system at one time. That’s a lot of processing power.’
Suddenly, the little fairy is hovering in front of Morag’s nose. She swipes at it and it gives her the finger before flying up into the glare of the buzzing fluorescent circlet and vanishing in a pop of silvery falling flakes.
The blonde says flatly, ‘We grew stuff all through the building, too. All wasted.’
Alex says, ‘It’s for the greater good.’
‘Bullshit,’ the blonde says flatly. ‘This will cost you even if you don’t get in.’
‘Oh, absolutely.’
‘Or we’ll track you down.’
‘Oh, you won’t need to do that.’
Katrina says, ‘Half the fuckers are actually praying. One poor fool is rushing around, clutching his head—maybe he never was a true believer after all.’
‘Oh, they are all true believers,’ Alex says.
‘They’re getting a righteous rush now,’ Katrina says.
Morag asks, ‘Who are they?’
Alex says, ‘A unit of the Children’s Crusade. I’ve finally caught her attention. But these are only foot soldiers. They’re not what I want. Anyone outside, Kat?’
‘Two on the roof opposite the front. We got everyone in the back.’
‘It’s a confined space,’ the blonde says. She hands out clear plastic goggles, and little filter masks that fit over nose and mouth. ‘The fembots can only get in via the mucosal membranes,’ she tells Morag. ‘The mask has a reactive filter, little effectors help push air through when you breathe in, flip-flop a charge that blows anything off when you breathe out. It won’t clog, although it might grow a little warm if you use it too long. Take shallow breaths.’
The edges of the mask and of the goggles seem to slither and squirm as they make a tight seal with Morag’s skin. Katrina has fitted goggles and a mask over Armand’s face; now she picks him up in a fireman’s carry as the blonde unclamps the door.
There are two children by the stairwell, and two more in the corridor leading to the loading bay at the back of the building. Murmuring and weeping, they fix thousand metre stares on thin air, as if looking right through the building at some terrible and glorious apparition.
Morag steps around them, breathing shallowly. There’s no resistance in the little mask; only a band of pressure around her mouth and nose reassures her that there’s a barrier between her nervous system and the billions of fembots swarming in the air, each one pregnant with a dazzling vision.
A van is backed up to the loading bay in the rear of the building. A padded floor and benches, straps dangling from the roof. Morag hangs on to a strap as Katrina drives off at speed into the grey early morning. Armand rolls back and forth on the cotton padding as Katrina takes a tight corner without slowing down. The back of his head keeps bumping against Morag’s boots.
Morag takes off her mask, and discovers that the back of the van smells of cheap incense. Katrina stops the van and jumps out. Alex opens the rear doors, and Katrina picks up Armand and carries him to her taxi, which is parked where they left it last night. The blonde jumps down and walks away down the street without looking back, even when Alex shouts after her that he’ll keep his side of the deal and he expects Max to keep his. She turns a corner, is gone.
Morag says, ‘What bargain?’
‘Max is monitoring the Children’s Crusade. He hacked into their communications. That’s why we knew about the possibility of a raid.’
‘And he ran away.’
‘He has to set up a new node.’
‘You like this, don’t you? This stupid conspiracy.’
Alex says, ‘I don’t have much choice.’
‘Let’s go!’ Katrina shouts.
A gang of children, all dressed in white T-shirts and blue denim coveralls, are running towards them. Morag climbs into the back of the taxi, beside Armand, and Alex heaves himself into the passenger seat as Katrina guns the taxi’s engine.
There’s a bang on the roof. A moment later, a child’s face appears upside down at the windscreen. It is as vacuously pretty as a cherub, with a mop of golden curls and plump, rosy cheeks. Katrina punches; the switch that connects the taxi’s battery into the bodywork. There’s a blue flash. The child rolls sideways and falls on hands and knees beside the taxi, and Katrina drives away as fast as she can.
When the taxi arrives at the head of the impasse, Katrina cuffs Armand to the frame of the taxi’s front passenger seat and tells Morag to wait there and watch him. But Morag isn’t going to sit in the car with the warewolf, even if he is unconscious and she has taken his chip out herself, and in the bleak early morning light she follows Alex and Katrina over the railway bridge to their tall narrow house.