Places in the Darkness

by Chris Brookmyre

  You can’t have one without the other: the memory of what once was treasured without the agony of its absence. She thought when she came here that if she could distract herself, anaesthetise herself, then the blotting out of all those good memories would be a price worth paying for the absence of the pain. But to be thus anaesthetised is to feel nothing, not merely for yourself, but for anybody else. It is how she became this wraith, feared but friendless, needed but despised.

  Corruption is a form of decay. Something good inside you has to die before you can do something truly bad. Then with every further bad thing you do, a little more of what was good inside you dies.

  This is why she is embarking on a suicide mission on behalf of a crazy girl she has barely met. She needs to believe that there is still some last fragment of good left inside her.

  “Okay, who’s hungry?” asks the woman.

  Excited hands go up in response, restless feet jumping up and down.

  “I think it’s time for lunch.”

  One of the kids is looking Nikki’s way. She may have pulled aside one branch too many, trying to see a little more. The little girl tugs at the male helper and points.

  Nikki withdraws and freezes. Logic is telling her the man is unlikely to make much of it. Toddlers love making things up.

  “Come on, everyone,” the woman beckons, holding open a door leading out of the garden and into an adjacent building.

  The little girl who was pointing trails obediently after her friends, no longer interested in what she may or may not have seen among the bushes.

  The man has decided to check it out, however.

  “I’ll catch you up in a minute,” he announces.

  Damn it, Nikki thinks. The distance is too short to give her time to get back down the grate. She’s going to have to deal with him.

  The door closes, so at least there won’t be any witnesses, particularly tiny ones who shouldn’t see shit like this.

  Nikki grips her electro-pulse. She has the drop on him so she could easily zap him unconscious, which will prevent him from raising the alarm via his lens. But if he fails to return, somebody is going to come looking for him in just a few minutes. That alarm is getting raised one way or the other, and Nikki has some questions she’d like answered.

  She takes him down in a heartbeat, swiftly removing his wrist disc to disable his gesturing. Not that he would be able to concentrate on those options and menus when he was reeling from the shock of a blow.

  She flips him onto his back where her lens identifies him as Tobias Muller. Nikki figures he is part scientist and part kindergarten teacher, so he’s probably not schooled in withstanding interrogation techniques, or even schooled in withstanding the prospect of being punched in the face. He’ll tell her anything she asks.

  “I’m looking for a girl named Amber. Where is she?”

  “She’s in isolation,” he replies, terrified. “I don’t have clearance. She ran away. She got confused. She needs help.”

  “She wasn’t confused, she was seriously distressed. Her head’s all messed up, but she was adamant about one thing: she said someone took her baby.”

  Muller swallows. He’s scared, but she isn’t sure whether he’s more frightened of what might happen to him if he doesn’t answer her questions or of what might happen to him later if he does.

  “Well, like you said, her head is messed up.”

  “Don’t jerk me around, son. I know ways to hurt you that would make you puke if I even described them. She had a fresh caesarean scar on her. What’s going on here? Who are these kids? How come Amber doesn’t even have an identity?”

  He’s trembling. Nikki recognises this particular flavour of shock and fear. It’s what happens when assumed impunity meets cold reality: people who have been getting away with something so long that they almost forgot it was wrong. Almost. One hint of retribution is all it takes for the illusion to come crashing down. This guy is already thinking about how he can cut a deal. Probably never broke a regular law in his life.

  “None of them has an identity, officially. When they come here they get given a colour rather than a name. Amber, Scarlet, Cyan.”

  Deniability, Nikki thinks. These women were never officially here on CdC. She thinks of the container at Dock Nine, diverted because of the all-stop, the whole place shut down and cleared of witnesses.

  “So they’re smuggled in? To have children?”

  Muller nods, sweating.

  “Where do they come from?”

  “They are recruited. Carefully screened. They are very well paid.”

  “They come here pregnant?”

  “No. They are artificially inseminated. Every part of the process is monitored, from conception to birth. Diet, fitness, sleep patterns. No expectant mother is better looked after, believe me.”

  “And what happens after birth?”

  Muller pauses again, because they both know the answer.

  “They give the children up. It’s all agreed in advance.”

  “And these children who don’t officially exist and have no rights become Neurosophy’s property?”

  “These children are being cared for perfectly, all of their needs met. They’re being given a gift.”

  “Not the gift of a normal life on Earth, where they can breathe fresh air and visit the countryside or spend a day at the beach.”

  “The children on the Arca will not have these things.”

  “Yeah, but they’ll have family. They’ll have parents. And they’ll have rights. These are children. They’re not your subjects to experiment on.”

  “Their welfare is our primary concern, I assure you.”

  “Sure. That’s why this is all off the books, because nobody would have a problem with the ethics of it if they knew.”

  “All humanity will benefit from this gift, in the long run.”

  “Said every mad scientist ever. Where’s Amber? Where are all these children’s mothers? What happens to them post-partum?”

  “Once they are fully recovered, they return to Earth. With a substantial payment.”

  “Yeah, you already said that. Which counts as a red flag. No amount of money would give you insurance about a secret this big, and I can’t see you people leaving yourselves vulnerable like that.”

  Muller is trying to steal a look towards the door, hoping to see help on its way. He’s even more nervous now. She’s homing in on something he really doesn’t want her to know, and suddenly she susses it.

  “You motherfuckers. You wipe their memories.”

  Muller swallows, guilty as hell.

  “First you ensure they have no credibility, so nobody would believe them. They can’t prove they were ever here. They have no recourse, no rights, no claim on their own children. But the real insurance is that you take away their memory of having the child.”

  “It’s part of the advance agreement. It’s a kindness to them. They are told they will not remember why they came here.”

  “Will they remember a fee was agreed? Because it strikes me that money leaves a paper trail.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that. I’m a paediatrician.”

  Nikki thinks of the women she has met who had traumatic memories erased, and why she wasn’t tempted having seen the results. They still suffered the same sadness but could no longer remember what was making them feel this way. She wonders how many women down below now have this desolate sense of loss, of aching emptiness, but don’t know that they have had their child taken and their memory of it destroyed.

  “So what about Amber? It didn’t work with her, did it?”

  For the first time, Muller looks pained rather than guilty.

  “She changed her mind,” he says.

  And she wasn’t the first, Nikki would wager.

  “She wanted to keep the baby,” she says. “But she had no rights and you people took it from her.”

  “They couldn’t let her. She knew too much.”

  They, Nikki notes. He’s dista
ncing himself from this.

  “She endangered the child. She tried to escape with the baby, so they sedated her and did the wipe then, hoping that would solve the problem, but it was too soon. I tried to tell them. I knew it was wrong. It’s not like overwriting a piece of data in the mesh. This kind of memory is more than that: it’s something you feel, something you instinctively know. She was still lactating, all these hormones telling her body something that contradicted what was in her mind.”

  “So what is this gift you’re giving the children? Because it would have to be a hell of a thing for you all to be able to live with yourselves pulling this shit.”

  Muller almost seems relieved to be asked this.

  “Oh, it is,” he says.

  Then Nikki hears a door open and Muller looks up, hope and relief lighting up his face.

  She rolls off him and wheels around rapidly, only to find herself staring down the barrel of a suppression rifle. Staring back is what should be a familiar face, except that it is topped with blonde hair, not black.

  “Officer Nicola Madeleine Freeman,” Blondie declares. “I think it’s time for you to meet my maker.”

  SENTINELS

  Alice freezes, her cumulative terror of finding herself on the wrong side of rectitude paralysing her into a wordless stare, which her interlocutor mistakes for intransigence.

  “I mean, Jesus Christ, Beatrice, you know you’re not supposed to be wandering around unsecured sectors. The staff around here don’t have clearance. What happens when they get a look at Alice Blake on a feed? They’ll think, ‘Hey, apart from her hair, the new head of the SOE looks exactly like this woman we keep seeing around Neurosophy. What’s up with that?’ You scope me?”

  Still Alice fixes him with her stunned, silent and ostensibly sullen stare, rapidly coming to terms with this evidence that her plan is working. All it took was that single extra item—a blonde wig—and he thinks she is the doppelganger.

  Beatrice, he called her.

  Alice. Beatrice. A and B. Is there a Clarice?

  Beatrice has been kept under wraps. They are conscious of the suspicion it might raise should her resemblance to a certain high-profile new arrival become widely observed, which implies she can’t have been visible prior to Alice coming here. And to keep her out of sight before would suggest that they knew Alice was coming to CdC, otherwise why bother.

  When did Beatrice get here? And as she has no ID, not merely a protected one, how did she get here?

  “People don’t see past the hair,” Alice says. Which is apparently true.

  “Look, just get inside where you’re supposed to be. Who the hell is Wendy Goodfellow, anyway?”

  “It’s a false ID I’ve been using to remain incognito.”

  He leads her down the corridor towards a security-controlled door. Alice hangs back so that he can get there first and obligingly open it for her.

  A sign indicates that she is now inside the Research and Development Sector of the Neurosophy Foundation: Maria Gonçalves’ inner sanctum, hallowed ground requiring a commensurate clearance level.

  Suddenly anxious of the growing silence as they pass deeper into the controlled sector, she feels compelled to ratify her insider credentials.

  “And what of our fugitive, Amber?”

  “Dealt with,” he replies curtly, which doesn’t sound good. “What about yours? I thought you’d gone to Wheel Two. Wasn’t there a lead on someone else who might have been involved in the raid? A pilot?”

  “Yes. I’m following that up but I need to check on something first.”

  Alice passes several laboratories matching her idealised expectations of what cutting-edge research facilities on CdC ought to look like, but she also sees workshops that resemble the chaos of Trick’s den, only blown up on a massive scale. There are windows onto all of these, open doors, open-plan spaces. She knows there must be closed doors elsewhere. Locked doors. Amber claims she was kept prisoner here. She is the principal subject of their mission, but Alice has her own agenda too.

  “One of the intruders, Yashmin Sardana, took her own life before I could question her. I know she saw sensitive materials. I want to see what she was exposed to.”

  “You know what she was exposed to,” he replies. “She saw the Project Sentinel legacy files.”

  Legacy, Alice wonders: implying something historic. Something finished.

  He is giving her a curious look, one that threatens rapid progress to outright suspicion.

  “Are you questioning my methods?” she asks.

  That sets him straight, puts him back in his box. Nobody wants to cross Beatrice, it would appear.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “We already missed the pilot by making assumptions. I want to review the precise materials she accessed. This is so that I can be absolutely sure not only of what she did and didn’t see, but what she may have inferred, even mistakenly. Rumour is our enemy here.”

  “Indeed. I’ll send you the exact file Slovitz left open on his terminal during the incursion. It was like the asshole was leaving a trail of breadcrumbs.”

  Alice realises that this is no good, as the file will go to Beatrice.

  “Remember to send it to Wendy Goodfellow,” she says, pitching her tone at irritable. “I already got a ton of stuff open in this profile and I don’t want to be switching back and forth.”

  She counsels herself to breathe as she watches for his response. Then he straightens as he alters the recipient and prepares the material, attentively obedient having been given an order.

  “Here it comes. Weird thing is we still don’t know how Slovitz got the older file. We couldn’t find the original anywhere. Professor Gonçalves assumed it was lost in the fire twenty-five years ago.”

  “So Slovitz never worked on Project Sentinel?”

  He gives her that curious look again. She figures she’s on strike two, despite her apparent seniority.

  “The fire was before he came here.”

  “I meant, even indirectly? Some tangential reason his work caused him to happen upon it?”

  “Always possible, I guess. But his area was behavioural modification and adjustment: neural inhibitors and disinhibitors. It was effectively his own invention that he boosted. Trying to sell it on the black market, the greedy sonofabitch. Imagine the chaos that would have sown.”

  Alice spots an empty seat in the corner of an otherwise cluttered lab. There is nobody around, and it looks like it’s the cleaner’s year off.

  “I’m going to take a moment to review this stuff,” she tells him, by way of dismissal.

  He doesn’t seem to hear her, adopting that zoned-out look indicative of dealing with an incoming message.

  “I’ll just stay here and make sure you’re not disturbed,” he replies, leaving Alice none the wiser as to whether he heard her or not.

  There are two files, one time-stamped as a recent creation and the other bearing no such indications; indeed none of the metadata that would mark it as native to the system.

  The recent, smaller file turns out to be effectively a preface for the other. A plain cover page bears the name “Project Sentinel—Legacy,” beneath which are the dates the project must have been operational. The later date coincides with that of the Neurosophy fire.

  On the following page, Alice is confronted by recent photographs of herself and her doppelganger. Her own image was taken during a seminar at the FNG building in New York a month ago. The other is the same one Yash included in her warning message to DeLonge. It looks like it was taken on a boat or maybe a pier. Beatrice is dressed in military-style fatigues, blue water sparkling in the background. They are both flattering images, something affectionate in their choice.

  Beneath them, a single paragraph informs her that:

  While Sentinel’s development phase was prematurely terminated by the disaster and its breakthrough technology lost, the first fruits of the project continue to thrive and are being monitored closely as we endeavour to honour Dr. Sh
elley’s legacy by recreating her work.

  She activates the indicated link, which turns out to be the accompanying undated and non-native file. It is a compendium document, a mish-mash of media across multiple formats, some of them redundant for more than two decades. If it were a physical object, she would be blowing dust off it right now.

  Once more she is confronted by photographs of two identical females, but this time they are newborns. Twins. They are lying side by side in transparent cots, facing each other, eyes closed, thumbs in mouths in perfect symmetry. They are identified only as A and B.

  Alice and Beatrice.

  She stares breathless for a few seconds, then swipes to the next page. It shows several images of the same infants, intubated and linked up to a dozen monitoring systems while a neurosurgical procedure is carried out inside their tiny open skulls.

  Following these images are screeds and screeds of technical detail Alice does not have time to read, far less digest and comprehend, so she skips to a grab, that being among the formats she recognises amidst the jumble of information.

  It shows one of the neurosurgical procedures being carried out, the surgeon’s fingers serving to further emphasise the tiny size of the baby’s head: possibly premature, as twin births often are. Alice recoils, her squeamishness exacerbated by the possibility that she is looking at herself on the operating table. She is about to stop the playback when the camera tracks up and picks out the surgeon.

  It is Maria Gonçalves, decades younger, a wisp of silver hair sticking out from beneath her cap.

  “Aside from closing up, the procedure is over,” she says, addressing the camera. “But the process itself has only just begun, and will take around twenty years to complete. If you are watching this, Alice, then you must have passed that stage some time ago and your subsequent progress been deemed satisfactory. It has been suggested that I record this now, in case you have difficulty believing me when I tell it to you personally. Wait, it’s Alice first, right?”