Atcode

by David Wake

Oh, my old Inspector – retired now.

  On a yacht.

  Yes, lucky sod. Larson had clearly parsed Braddon’s Thinkerfeed.

  I did. You don’t mind.

  Only those with something to hide want privacy.

  Like Entwhistle.

  I need to see Mister Mantle too.

  I don’t–

  I have a warrant.

  He’s not here.

  Where is he?

  I don’t know.

  Braddon rethought Larson’s observation: Only those with something to hide want privacy.

  Larson lolled sarcastically.

  Braddon noodled and remembered via Noodle that Mantle didn’t know. He was en route in a private helicopter with an unbrow pilot, destination unknown. Mantle had a clear thought of giving the pilot his instructions in a sealed envelope.

  How could he not know?

  Mantle likes his privacy, Larson thought.

  Secrets? In this day and age?

  It was a case of secrets: why was Taylor on the bridge? Why did Mantle’s Thinkerfeed have gaps? And how could it have gaps?

  A nepenthatrine cocktail taken in a cage.

  And what was Steiger up to?

  Who’s Steiger?

  Look it up yourself, Braddon thought and he went inside.

  Everyone reacted just as they had when he’d first arrived: nervousness from the three by the sofa, disregard from Hogan and interest from Entwhistle.

  “What happened on the day Taylor died?”

  “Detective Sergeant,” Entwhistle said, “please.”

  “The sooner–”

  “It was a normal down day.”

  “Down day?”

  “There were no instructions and the timer didn’t go off.”

  “Instructions? Timer?”

  “It’s… Why don’t I give you the tour?”

  “Very well, but on the day in question, did anything untoward happen?”

  “Not that I’m aware,” Entwhistle replied. He glanced around the room and each of them shook their heads.

  “What did you do?”

  “Played games, jigsaws, read, depending.”

  “I made soup,” Valerie piped up. “It was parsnip with coriander.”

  “And Taylor?” Braddon asked.

  “He had some,” Valerie said.

  “He was happy,” Entwhistle said, “no more, or less, than usual.”

  “And… how did he get to the bridge?”

  “We don’t talk about that with…”

  “They’re not allowed out,” said Larson from the door to the balcony.

  “We are allowed out, Emile, we’re not prisoners.”

  “Yes, true, but…” They twist everything. “You have everything you need here.”

  “It’s very nice,” said Valerie. “We do have everything we need.”

  “And Taylor was happy?”

  “It’s a comfortable cell,” said Entwhistle.

  “It’s not a prison,” Larson insisted.

  “I meant it’s a monastic cell.”

  “Hardly.”

  Braddon could see what the man meant. They had luxury here, fine food, soft furniture and those thin glossy, printed digests of thoughts that he could see lying on the coffee table – magazines!

  “What happened that evening?” Braddon asked.

  “We went to bed at nine, nine–thirty,” Entwhistle explained. “I read. Taylor stayed up, Hogan?”

  Hogan grunted.

  “You stayed up, Hogan… with Taylor.”

  “I did,” Hogan replied, barely looking up. “Taylor said he went to his room.”

  “What time was this?” Braddon asked. He noodled the time of the accident and remembered that it was 22:21. The woman driver took two minutes before her shock turned to ‘not my fault, not my fault, not my fault’.

  “No idea,” said Hogan.

  “Mister Hogan, you must have some idea.”

  “Lizzie Bennet had just turned down a proposal of marriage,” Hogan replied, showing Braddon his… what was it?

  Book! It’s a book. “So you were the last up.”

  “Anyone can go to their room and then leave,” Hogan said. “We’re not prisoners, are we, Emile?”

  “They aren’t,” Larson said. At Braddon, they really aren’t.

  “We all are,” Hogan said. “All those people down there, their lives dictated by the whims of those creatures Mantle keeps above us. Emile?”

  At Braddon, he means us!

  At Larson, he means you and those who work for Mantle in the floors above.

  No, he means all those with brows.

  Braddon glanced towards the window, saw the hills in the distance and knew the city was below them, out of sight.

  “Your lives are dictated and organised by the rich and famous,” Hogan continued, “and even if you can follow their thoughts, you know nothing about them.”

  Mantle has gaps in his Thinkerfeed.

  At Braddon, he likes his privacy.

  Only those with something to hide like their privacy.

  Don’t twist our thoughts.

  “Detective Sergeant, I promised you a tour,” Entwhistle said. “Would you like to see how it’s done?”

  “You’ll take me to see the cerebrities!”

  Good grief, no, Larson thought. We don’t want your thoughts polluting them.

  My thoughts–

  “No,” Entwhistle said, interrupting Braddon’s exchange with Larson, “I’ll show you the Cage?”

  Shit no! “You can’t!” Larson shrieked.

  “I’ve no choice, Emile, he has a warrant.”

  No, no, no… “I think not, Entwhistle.”

  “Or would you prefer to show him around the Suites?”

  You bastard.

  “Lead the way,” said Braddon, lolling at Larson’s reaction. Which was the greater secret here, the cerebrities, who everyone followed, or the business dealings?

  They are interrelated, Larson thought, his emoticon undercurrent full of sulking.

  “Are you coming, Emile,” Entwhistle said, “or do you need to be somewhere?”

  “I can do my work from anywhere,” Larson pointed out.

  “Then why don’t you stay here and do that.”

  Braddon couldn’t help lolling again.

  They left Larson fuming and Braddon stopped following him to avoid his emoticons filling up his inbox. He was out of recognition range soon enough.

  Entwhistle led the way, going past the lift and up the stairs. Six flights later, they came out on the 30th floor. This was the first storey that required a key to gain access via the lift, but they’d just walked up.

  It was a huge open plan space, almost empty, except for a great block of metal the size of a small room in the centre. Beyond the semi–transparent walls, Braddon could see features inside, colours and shapes that looked like furniture. It resembled a high security prison cell for a VIP and had what looked like an airlock on one side.

  They walked slowly towards it across a hard, echoing floor.

  “It’s designed to warn anyone inside that someone is coming.”

  “In case someone without a brow arrives.”

  “Oh no, brow and unbrow,” Entwhistle corrected. “Inside the Cage, you can’t pick up any signals, so any number of cyborgs could gather here… so I understand.”

  The Cage was constructed of copper mesh, designed to prevent 7G signals passing in or out – a Faraday cage. Frightening.

  “Isn’t this rather…” but Braddon couldn’t come up with the right word. Thinking was so much easier.

  “Paranoid,” Entwhistle said.

  Braddon lolled, then said, “You’d better not let Mantle hear you say that.”

  “I’ve told him to his face, many times.”

  “And he said?”

  “He laughed. It amuses him. He’s well aware of his paranoia. Hard not to be, I believe, as so many people check his Thinkerfeed entries, so many that it would be imposs
ible for one man to know about them all.”

  “Hmm.”

  Entwhistle led the way forward to a transparent ‘porch’, a double doorway separated by a glass corridor that was the only apparent access.

  “This is computer controlled. It detects body heat and has vision cameras,” Entwhistle explained. “To control it, you have to be inside. To go inside, you have to pass certain conditions.”

  Braddon squinted: a black sofa, a table, computers like those in a museum, a coffee machine and what looked like a small palm tree in a large ceramic pot. It looked functional and comfortable, large enough for about half a dozen people to work without feeling cramped.

  “These conditions are?”

  “The injection.”

  That got Braddon’s attention. “Pardon.”

  “Anyone, human or cyborg, who wants to go inside must pass through the antechamber. Only one door can be open at a time and it will only open the inner door when the subject has received an injection.”

  “Of what?”

  “Benzodiazepine mainly, and a few other drugs.”

  “What do they do?”

  “They cause amnesia,” Entwhistle explained, “so anything that you experience within the Cage isn’t in your memory.”

  “For organic memory, but what about your brow?”

  “To get out, you have to delete everything in your iBrow device’s outbox.” Entwhistle tapped his forehead. “Or not have an iBrow fitted.”

  “Ah.”

  “I could show you, but then you’d forget.”

  “It sounds thorough,” Braddon said.

  “Foolproof.”

  “Is anything?”

  “How do you know I haven’t already shown you inside and you’ve forgotten?”

  Braddon found that a disturbing idea. He felt stumped. “I could noodle it.”

  Entwhistle shook his head very slowly, side to side, each movement negating the idea utterly.

  “There’d be a gap in your thoughts,” Braddon said, “nothing to noodle.”

  That got the slightest of nods.

  “Do you go in?”

  Entwhistle rolled up his left sleeve. There was a neat collection of pinprick marks like a good grouping on a shooting range target. “It always feels like the first time.”

  “What do you do in there?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “But…”

  “We follow instructions written on cards.”

  “What instructions?”

  Entwhistle shrugged: “I can’t remember.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing… except some of the instructions we have to take outside the Cage and execute later. Sometimes they are just when to go back and process another set, other times a task that needs performing outside.”

  “Like what?”

  “Share dealings, purchases – quite varied.”

  “Anything illegal?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “Could Taylor have been following an instruction when he was killed?”

  “Quite likely.”

  Braddon glanced at the Cage and the desk inside.

  Could… but then whoever killed Taylor had to have been on the motorway bridge. Another unbrow following one of Mantle’s secret orders? It bought the list of suspects back to the unbrows, even if they were acting under instructions.

  And Mantle himself, even in New York, was a suspect.

  “Do you know what a Turing Machine is?” Entwhistle said. “It’s a theoretical–”

  “I can noodle it.”

  “Please, it’s important that I explain. Human–to–human communication is the social glue that binds societies together.”

  Yes, but without brows, it’s so slow, Braddon thought, but instead he said, “Go ahead.”

  “It’s a theoretical machine devised by the great mathematician, Alan Turing. He broke the Enigma code in the last century’s Second World War. Anyway, this machine was a little device that went up and down a strip of paper–”

  “Paper?”

  “Yes… hypothetical machine, I did say.”

  “Did you?” Braddon said. Braddon felt that Entwhistle had used some other word like ‘hypothetical’, but the man had no thoughts, so Braddon couldn’t check.

  “It reads a symbol, which is an instruction, and so moves or writes a new symbol, according to its onboard program.”

  Braddon had the sudden recollection of the young girl jumping from one square to another, bending down to pick up the stone. She could easily have changed the symbol on the ground.

  “I see,” Braddon said, “but this is hypothetical, he never built one.”

  “He didn’t need to, although he did build real computers to crack the Enigma code. It was a thought experiment to develop–”

  How can you have a thought experiment before brow technology?

  “Detective?”

  “Sorry.”

  “He developed mathematical proofs about such a machine, one of which was that all computers could be reduced to Turing Machines – he called them ‘automatic machines’ or ‘a–machines’, but we now call them Turing Machines. So, anyway, any proof about a Turing Machine applies to all computational devices.”

  “I don’t see the relevance.”

  “We are a Turing Machine.”

  “Ah, you carry out instructions.”

  “Exactly,” said Entwhistle, beaming with a double bracket of a smile. “And, although we don’t have access to anything other than each individual instruction at a time, our decisions affect the world.”

  “Hypothetically.”

  “Stocks and shares, millions traded daily, acquisitions, assets stripped, lives made or lost.”

  “Very real then.”

  “Precisely, but the Halting Problem applies – who can say whether one set of instructions will come to a stop or have the desired outcome? Do you know whether the Noodle computers will return the information you request? No, not until it does so.”

  “Or there’s an error.”

  “See, it times out, but no–one can tell beforehand.”

  “No–one?”

  “By mathematical proof.”

  “So, Mister Mantle could set a sequence of events in motion that had… unforeseen consequences.”

  “And consequences that no–one would have any conscious knowledge about.”

  “Except perhaps Taylor.”

  “He may have suspected something, maybe not.”

  “And Mantle set this up?” Braddon asked. “He’s the master programmer.”

  “Oh yes, the cards make that clear.”

  “I thought you took the Benzodiazepine?”

  “I do, but some of the cards require action outside the Cage at a time when the drugs have worn off. Some have coding instructions.”

  “Coding?”

  “If these shares are worth more than 50 dollars, then sell them, otherwise sell these other shares.”

  “So these cards are like computer instructions?”

  “The first computer designs, Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, used punched cards, Jacquard cards, originally invented to control a loom.”

  “Reuben Mantle programming his pets.”

  “We’re not pets, despite what others may have thought transmitted to you,” Entwhistle said. “I know they do, but we’re not his pets. We’re his computer components.”

  “And you could be running a program now?”

  “Who knows?” Entwhistle said. “Shall we go?”

  As Entwhistle led the way back down the stairs, Braddon checked his feeds and noodled Mantle: wherever the man was, he was asleep, and there seemed no thought anywhere about when he might be back. Warrant or no warrant, Braddon wasn’t going to interview him anytime soon.

  They came back to the Special Services lounge on the 27th floor.

  Braddon couldn’t come up with anything else to ask.

  So, you’ll be leaving, Larson thought. He wasn�
��t in the room, but following Braddon from higher up in the building.

  Yes. “I’ll be leaving,” Braddon said. “Unless anyone has anything to add?”

  One of the women stood. “We’re not monsters.”

  She took him by surprise without even an ‘ahem’ of thought.

  “It’s…”

  “Jilly.”

  “Jilly, I don’t think you are monsters.”

  “I had a reaction,” she said, touching her forehead. She was attractive, apart from the livid scar like an accent above her eyes.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Taylor was a nice man, he looked after us, and he didn’t deserve to die.”

  “Do you think he committed suicide?”

  “Oh no, never.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because he had plans.”

  “What plans?”

  “He was going to get out of here, escape. He had money coming, he said, a lot of money. He talked about a desert island, a paradise for humans, a place we could all live away from the… cyborgs.”

  “We’re not cyborgs.”

  “No,” she said, sweetly. “You are the monsters.”

  Braddon didn’t know what to think, even less what to say. Instead, he looked at each in turn: Jilly, Valerie, Michael and then Hogan and Entwhistle. As he did so, he thought for the lift.

  “Good–bye,” he said.

  “No doubt I’ll see you again,” Entwhistle said.

  “No doubt.”

  The lift thought: Floor 34, going down.

  “We have everything here,” Jilly said. “A view of trees, ponds, gardens, houses. Your lift down to hell is here.”

  It pinged behind him: Floor 27, going down.

  Braddon wondered how she could know, but when he turned round, he saw ‘27’ on a display above the doors.

  Ground, please.

  The lift doors closed, and he felt his stomach rise as it plummeted.

  Thank you for your visit, Janice thought.

  The lift opened and Braddon entered the lobby. Janice on reception waved, her thoughts a smiley of pleasure. She held something to her ear and her lips were moving: he couldn’t hear what she was saying.

  Braddon went outside, the wind surprisingly chill in comparison to the sunny warmth he’d experienced on the balcony.

  If this is hell, then it’s freezing over.

  Even the weather was better in the paradise high above him. Why did Taylor want to leave? If he did, would anyone stop him? Killing him to stop him leaving seemed somewhat counter–productive. But he had plans. Money coming in.