I pinged Marquita on video.
She didn’t answer right away, and when she did I almost didn’t recognise her. Gone were the braids; her hair was cropped short, almost shaven, and she was much too thin.
‘Hello? Who’s this?’
‘Marquita, it’s me. Pearl.’
‘I’m sorry, who? How did you get into my contacts?’
‘Come on, don’t be like that.’
Her voice was the same. My chin was quivering. I wanted to run into her arms.
‘I’m not going to say anything about anything,’ I said. ‘I just need a sign that this isn’t as bad as it looks. Any sign.’
There was a small silence.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said slowly, gently. ‘I think you’ve got a wrong number.’
‘I don’t have a wrong number, Marquita.’
‘Well, then I’m going to have to hang up. I don’t know what this is about, but please don’t contact me like this again. I can’t help you. If you need help you have to approach my husband through official channels. I’m not involved.’
‘Wait!’ I said. ‘There’s nothing sinister here. I’m not looking for a handout. Please don’t hang up.’
Small children were clamouring in Portuguese: ‘Mommy, Ishaan pushed me.’
‘She touched my porridge!’
‘He looked at me.’
‘Stop that, you two!’ Marquita turned away from the camera and made shooing motions. To me, she said, ‘I’m so sorry. I have to go.’
Tears were streaming down my face.
I didn’t say anything, but I listened to her scold the kids for a moment or two before the line cut.
She was gone.
I sat looking out on the blue-tinged morning, at the blurred pools of amber surrounding the streetlamps, at the rising tide of rush-hour traffic. I tried to take in what had happened, but I felt numb. Soon another minicab pulled up to the kerb. The driver rang the bell. Dr Sorle stirred at the sound, and I watched him awaken even as Alison showed Bethany and Kostya out. She took the dogs with her.
Dr Sorle was in pain. He managed to sit up anyway.
‘We didn’t dare take you to the hospital,’ I said, offering an analgesic. He didn’t take it.
‘What happened to the briefcase?’
‘It’s OK. Unlike you.’
‘I’m not going to any hospital.’ He started the slow process of putting on his shirt. ‘I’m going to turn myself in to the police. I’ve had enough.’
‘No, sir,’ said Alison from the doorway. ‘You shouldn’t be out of bed.’
His face was strained. ‘This can’t go on. My family are in danger.’
I said, ‘They went to your wife’s parents.’
He stared at me. ‘You—’
I held up Two Phones’ phone. ‘You’re right to be concerned. Pace is certainly tracking your wife. But I don’t think they’ll lash out at your family in America.’
I felt his reaction to the slight emphasis I’d put on my last two words. His nostrils flared.
‘OK,’ Alison said mildly. ‘We can involve the police if that’s what you want.’
‘I have to take a leak.’
‘Come on. I’ll show you.’ Alison led him to the toilet. Once the door was closed, she ducked into her own bedroom and I heard drawers opening. She careered back into the hallway and positioned herself outside the bathroom. Dr Sorle emerged tentatively.
‘There you go. Back in bed for now. Come on, you’ve lost quite a bit of blood.’
While she was talking she had taken his arm and was gently leading him back to the bed.
‘I can’t. I have to go.’
‘Of course you do.’ She pressed him back until his knees caught on the edge of the bed. Her right hand went into the pocket of her dressing gown and grasped something.
‘No, honestly, I need to—’
‘Do you feel faint? You do, don’t you. Just lie down for a moment.’
As she was talking, Alison brought a syringe out of her pocket; in a practised manner flicked the safety cap off with her thumb.
‘Just some medication to help with the pain,’ she murmured as she plunged the needle into his glute, right through the fabric of his boxers. He grabbed her wrist too late.
‘I don’t want any medication. I have a high pain threshold,’ he snapped. ‘What is that? What are you doing? You can’t just . . .’
He’d jerked her off-balance and for a moment I thought they were going to have a wrestling match over control of the needle, but he soon subsided on to the bed, mumbling.
‘I’m a vet, Doctor,’ Alison said, standing up and straightening her clothes. ‘We don’t go in for the niceties. Sorry.’
I stood there gaping.
‘Alison, you shouldn’t have done that.’
‘Maybe not. But we need a chance to think this over, and if he calls the police then they’ll take him into custody and what happens if he . . . you know, if he changes into 20,000 leagues under the sea in a police cell?’
‘And his family?’
‘If his family are in danger, it isn’t because of the police. It’s because of Pace, and Pace won’t be any happier with him in police custody.’
‘I’m not sure of that,’ I said. ‘Pace might own the police.’
‘Own the Edinburgh police? Get real. This isn’t America, you know. We haven’t privatised everything yet. And have our own oil, thank you very much.’
* * *
We left him sleeping and went downstairs. Alison made coffee.
I put my hands on the brick wall of Alison’s kitchen and I pushed, as if I could get back to the Resistance somehow, to Filippe. Far away, high up, I could feel big spaces brush my wings. Emptiness feels like emptiness, it has no reality at all, no matter, no energy, nothing where the Resistance used to be, not even boundaries, not even edges, not even hints. I couldn’t get there from here anymore, and I felt queasy for trying.
Alison was looking at me carefully out of tired green eyes. In this light her upper lip looked shrunken like a desiccated slug, so that her mouth was more of a slit.
‘Pearl, what’s upset you so? You look like someone died.’
I said, ‘Bethany embezzled the money that built the Resistance and now it’s gone.’
Alison was quiet for a time. She spoke carefully.
‘When you say Resistance, what actually do you mean?’
I told her. Best I could. Which was not very well. She took in the information with wrinkled forehead and silence. Eventually she asked, ‘So you’re saying this organisation is controlled by an artificial intelligence.’
‘It’s controlled by an emergent intelligence,’ I said. ‘The thing doesn’t operate according to human logic. I think it has HD elements that allow it to slip time. It can model consequences of specific actions and find points in a chain of events that are vulnerable to small influences.’
‘What kind of small influences?’
‘Usually helping someone in some way that isn’t very costly or difficult. Providing access to information, or sustenance. Think of “for want of a nail” sort of thing. The Resistance will step in at a point where the provision of a nail would be critical to some desired outcome. Or it might be a case of preventing something from happening. Like stopping someone and talking to them – you might do it because you feel compelled to, without knowing the reason. Maybe the reason is that they miss their bus, and then they avoid getting killed in a crash. But no one knows. The nature of the Resistance doesn’t provide information about the path taken. It’s just inputs and outcomes.’
‘But this person has to be special in some way, right? Would the Resistance intervene for just anyone?’
I shook my head. ‘It’s for people whose actions down the causality stream are valuable to the whole.’
‘According to whose judgement?’
‘Good question. I’m not sure what exactly it’s programmed to do. Dr Sorle said something about humanity levelling up.’
‘And this money transfer was going to make the Resistance possible. But how does that work? If the technology hasn’t been invented yet, then how can it exist for you to tell me about it?’
‘HD,’ I said.
‘Hilda Doolittle? High definition?’
‘Higher dimensions. Think hyperspace.’
‘Ah,’ she said, nodding. She thought for a while. Then she said, ‘This whole Resistance business doesn’t make a whit of sense. You can’t orchestrate kindness. The whole point of kindness is that it doesn’t give you anything back. Kindness is like feeding the birds. You offer seeds and don’t control where they go or what they do. The idea that you would only do certain good things on certain days or at certain times because of strategy – that’s madness.’
‘Trying to optimise outcomes is madness? But it’s what we do in all sorts of ways. Whenever we share information with each other, provide resources, we’re doing it in the expectation that something beneficial to us will come out of it, even if only indirectly. How is this any different? The Resistance just acts across time instead of distance.’
‘What if you helped someone and then found out afterwards that you had enabled them to do something unconscionable? Would you not take back your kindness?’
‘I don’t know what I would do,’ I said. ‘But you can’t control everything. The world is chaotic. You can’t predict outcomes with certainty and it’s lunacy to try.’
‘Exactly,’ Alison said. ‘Which is why you won’t convince me the Resistance is a worthwhile enterprise.’
I had to look away because my eyes were flooding with tears. Where was I in the causality stream of the Resistance? Kisi Sorle had stolen my component and launched me here to convince Austen Stevens to invest in futures that Stevens thought would be immortality for himself, but would really become the Resistance. I had been used to offer proof of a thing that would now never come to pass, thanks to Bethany’s tampering.
And Bethany had pulled her money out on account of the violence committed by the Kisi Sorle I had scanned. Violence that was only possible because of the briefcase again: my component, the part of me that held me here, kept me from inhabiting all of myself, kept me in ignorance of my true purpose.
But the man who represented Pace Industries and its crimes in Kuè? Still in the briefcase.
How messed up is that.
Plant
The drug is keeping your consciousness down and you can’t seem to fight it.
You dream you’re in the garden with your wife and daughters. You’re planting vegetables. And he’s there, on the ground. All cut open, so that his guts are spread out but he’s still alive. You’re sowing unusual seeds in his body. The old man will lie on the ground, his flesh bursting with these potentials. He will be in agony as they curl and dive through him, consuming his resources, ending his ego’s hegemony over mute flesh. His mutinied cells will talk back to him in many languages across worlds and times, and there is nothing he can do about it and you feel so happy, for the first time you can remember since you were a boy you feel that the world is right. Doctor, he will cry out. First do no harm. And you will break your oath like breaking the sound barrier. You will hear nothing of his cries. Nothing but blue sky when he’s gone.
Superunknown
I knew what I had to do. And now that it was upon me, I was scared and vaguely aggressive. I felt like a jockey before a race.
‘He won’t sleep long,’ Alison said. ‘I didn’t give him enough, and he’s liable to fight it and try to get out of bed even though he’s sedated.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘I need him to be awake. He’s the only one who can open the briefcase.’
Her eyes lit up.
‘I’m going to have to leave you for a while,’ I said to her. ‘I need you to keep an eye on Dr Sorle and the briefcase. Try to keep them apart. I think the pterosaur only happens when he gets into it.’
There were blue shadows under Alison’s eyes; beneath the mask of freckles, she flushed.
‘I’ll get my assistant to cancel my appointments for today. And maybe I’ll call my colleague Gunther for backup . . . You know that the police will be looking for Bethany now, because of the car.’
I shook my head. ‘Don’t say her name to me. She’s a vandal.’
So much careful, delicate work. So many sacrifices. And now everything Kisi Sorle had done would be for nothing. Because of her stupidity. The irony was that I’d feared for her safety, had pursued Two Phones partly because I had been afraid for her. If someone had killed her before she got to St Kitts—
‘One other thing, Pearl. On the phone the other night you said “prehistoric frog”, didn’t you?’
‘Oh, that. Yeah, I put it in the freezer at Bethany’s house. What you really need to know about the briefcase is that it’s unpredictable. I don’t know where the frog came from. I can only guess it comes from the same place as the pterosaur.’
‘And the briefcase has a pattern of bullet holes identical to what was in the pterosaur, and the wounds in Dr Sorle.’
‘That man upstairs isn’t necessarily Dr Sorle. He . . . You should treat him like a multiple personality case.’
‘There’s no such thing as multiple personalities, that whole line of psychology was wrong—’
‘Just treat him like that anyway, OK?’
I handed her my phone.
‘I won’t be needing this where I’m going.’
I got myself cleaned up while Alison was talking to her assistant downstairs. Then I dragged the briefcase over to the bed where the man was tossing and moaning. He was feverish, semiconscious. He was also subtly different. This wasn’t Dr Sorle anymore. I braced myself.
‘Maybe I should give him antibiotics.’ Alison came in wearing chinos and a cardigan over a Dogs Trust T-shirt. ‘I’m reluctant to involve a doctor. I’m already criminally liable. This could end very badly indeed for me.’
The briefcase was looking quite a bit worse for wear, and the bullet holes were leaking what I first thought was smoke, but actually seemed more like a gas of light. Or plasma . . .
Just for old times’ sake I tried the latches. Still locked.
The man in the bed opened his eyes. He brought his right arm to the bandage wrapped around his ribs, then to the bandage on his left arm, then to the one on his shoulder. Three wounds. He grimaced and sat up.
‘Oh no you don’t,’ Alison said, moving as if to press him down again. He ignored her and got to his feet. Dr Sorle had yielded easily, but this man shot a hostile look at Alison that stopped her in her tracks.
‘Kisi,’ I said. ‘What are you doing? You’re going to wear out your body.’
‘Don’t be absurd. I am healing the body.’
He peeled back the shoulder bandage and took a look at the injury. It was getting better very quickly.
‘My waveform is much more efficient than his.’
‘Lie down anyway,’ Alison said. Then she added, ‘Please.’
He sat on the edge of the bed as though compromising.
‘I feel like hell,’ he said.
‘The Resistance is down,’ I told him. ‘The funds were moved. I don’t know if there’s a way to get them back. Probably not.’
Actually, there probably was. If you had it in you to force Bethany back on a plane, take her to the bank under threat and make her put the money back where she’d found it. I didn’t have it in me and I didn’t want Kisi to have it in him, even though he probably did.
Kisi’s face had closed. He was somewhere between rage and despair and exhaustion. Just looking at him was scaring me.
‘It’s over,’ I told him. ‘You’re unstable. The briefcase is un-stable. You were lucky last night when they shot you. I still can’t believe you’re not dead.’
He caught sight of the briefcase and gave a rough guffaw, then winced as his ribcage moved too much.
‘Dead would be easier.’
‘Kisi. You owe me a debt. Are you the kind of perso
n who uses others the way you’ve been used? Or will you honour your promise?’
He was shaking his head.
‘I don’t know how to give it back to you. It looks different here than it looked in HD. It looks like a physical object but it isn’t that.’
I said, ‘I need you to open it.’
Alison said, ‘Pearl, you can’t seriously—’
I held up a hand without looking at her.
‘Be quiet, Alison,’ I said. ‘In fact, it might be better if you left.’
Her eyeglasses flashed as she tilted her head sceptically.
‘That depends. What are you going to do?’
‘Whatever I’m going to do, you don’t need to see it.’
Alison snorted. ‘Look, I’m the one who’s going to end up cleaning up whatever mess you make, so let me have a little respect. This is my home and my business. Whatever you’re going to do, you can’t do it here.’
Kisi pushed himself to his feet, hissing.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Do we have a car? Let’s just go.’
I had been running all the permutations of what might happen and how easily we could be stopped, and I had already decided we were at a dead end. We could go out the front of the house and be taken – or followed. We could go out the back alley and it would be the same. I couldn’t call Marquita for backup, I couldn’t disappear into HD leaving the briefcase behind because that would solve nothing. I had to take the chance that this would work, and the briefcase would become part of me and I’d be whole again, and I’d know whatever it was I’d forgotten. It was an outside chance, but I couldn’t risk becoming separated from the briefcase again without trying it.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve waited too long to do this. I’m going in and I’m going to put my component back if I have to sew it into my guts myself.’
Alison was shaking her head.
‘It’s a terrible idea,’ she said. ‘Just hold on. There are people I can call. I have friends. I have a son who is quite handy in a crunch. We don’t need to do this alone.’
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