by Sam Leith
‘Theoretically -’
‘Theoretically hell. This would be – would be an act of war. It would wipe out companies, pension plans, stocks. It would cause chaos. This would be like dropping a coincidence bomb on America.’
‘I suppose, in -’
‘Professor, I need to make some phone calls, now. I would appreciate it if you were able to give us a little more of your time.’
‘Actually, as I was going to say,’ Hands returned, ‘I see that gambling or stock markets would present a problem, economically speaking. But I’m – when I said you had a problem I meant something rather more serious than that. A run of numbers in a gambling parlour is one thing, but a singularity is a problem of a quite different order of magnitude.’
‘I don’t see.’
‘There is something that baffles physicists about the beginning of the universe. We know a little about what gravity was like, in the very first moments of time. And the chances of the initial state of the universe having arisen by accident are one in ten to the power ten.’ Hands’s eyes rolled up and right and his tongue appeared in the corner of his mouth. He remembered: ‘To the power 123.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘That is fantastically improbable.’
‘I thought you just said that there was no such thing as probability.’
‘Not as a force, no. But let’s talk as if probability exists as you understand it. For the sake of argument. The state of gravity at the beginning of the universe was so improbable that the odds-to-one against it are so great that if you wrote a 0 on every single atom in the universe, you still wouldn’t be able to write it down. I’m saying this machine could do something much more damaging than bankrupting a couple of casinos or crashing the United States’s economy.’
‘There is nothing more damaging than crashing the United States’s economy,’ said Red Queen. ‘Trust me.’
‘No. I don’t think you understand me. This machine could, if it – strange to put it this way – took a shine to the notion, pull our universe inside out through its own asshole.’ Far from being dismayed by the prospect – in the way Red Queen was dismayed, deeply dismayed, by the prospect of explaining a threat to the economy to the boss – Hands seemed positively to perspire with excitement.
‘Is that professor-speak?’ said Red Queen.
‘Yes.’
‘Singularity,’ said Red Queen thoughtfully.
‘Yes.’
‘Universe pulled inside out?’
‘Yup.’
‘Asshole.’
‘Yes.’
‘I wasn’t asking. Professor Hands, we would appreciate it if you stayed in overnight. I’ll have someone bring you a toothbrush. The universe being pulled inside out through its own asshole,’ Red Queen repeated wonderingly. ‘Nice. Well. That’s a bridge we’ll cross when we come to it. Keeping this thing from getting anywhere near Binion’s Lucky Horseshoe Casino is the problem I propose to tackle first off.’
Red Queen got up and walked out of the room.
As Alex drove west, whistling on his way, little strangenesses proliferated in the world around him.
In one town in Nevada, the cashpoints malfunctioned. Hundreds and hundreds of dollars poured onto the pavements and were blown down the street by the wind. Children chased them. Adults chased the children. Some adults attempted to return the money to the banks. The banks blamed a lightning strike.
In Baton Rouge, a man in a tall hat removed it and a hummingbird flew out. He stopped in astonishment, not noticing the hummingbird, seeing nothing remarkable in the white sunlight on the sidewalk, overwhelmed only by a sense of déjàvu so powerful he forgot for an instant who he was.
Every narcoleptic in Mississippi went out at once. All of them were crossing roads at the time. People thought there was a plague. Cars backed up, honking, at pedestrian crossings as the pedestrians slept. And here, there and everywhere sleepers shared the same broken dream: of an old man in a shack in the mountains, a rainbow in the dark sky, a terrible wind. None of them remembered the dream.
Chapter 11
Alex had the idea of going to bed in Memphis, but he realised not long after dark that he wasn’t going to make it. So, just around the time his eyes were getting tired and the road was starting to seem strange, he stopped at a motel outside Tupelo. He got a room, and asked the clerk where he could get food at this time of night.
He drove the car down the road to a restaurant called Steak Break. There – eyeing through the near-pitch-darkness of the dining room the portion being eaten by a courting couple at the next-door booth, he ordered just a starter – ‘chicken tenders’, which turned out to be giant, volcanically hot kidney-shaped chicken nuggets – and a baked potato, which came soggy-skinned, waxy-fleshed, wearing a tinfoil leisure suit and a pompadour of whipped buttter.
It tasted comforting. Beer came in a large, fridge-cold glass. He had two sudsy pints as he ate. The waitress said something about his accent, and he wondered briefly, flattered, if she was trying to flirt with him.
The couple left and he was the last customer there. The waitress followed the couple to the door – dark wood, four patterned-glass panels, tiny curtains on a brass rail – and flipped over the wooden ‘We’re Open!’ sign on its chain.
It was only quarter past ten. As he sat in the restaurant his phone pinged. He looked at it. Two messages. One must have arrived earlier in the car, while he was driving.
The first one was from Rob. It said: ‘One for all and all for one? (3, 3, 2, 3, 4).’
For Alex and Rob, the crossword game was a sort of distant intimacy, mixed up with showing off, mixed up with competition. They’d been doing it since a drunken evening in their second year as undergraduates. Months could pass between them, but then one of them would think of one and the other would get it.
The first one after that evening had been a scrap torn from an A4 pad in a college pigeonhole: ‘Cows hidden from Nazis? (3, 6, 5, 2, 4, 5).’ Alex had scribbled ‘The Secret Dairy of Anne Frank’ on the note there and then in the porter’s lodge and popped it back into Rob’s pigeonhole.
Latterly they’d come through as text messages. Never a proper letter or an email. Never, since the first days of it, in person. The rule – though again, it had never seemed to be actually formulated or discussed – was that until you’d guessed the last one you couldn’t send one of your own.
Rob was better at it than Alex. Alex thought about this as he chewed his potato. Something something in something something? Something something of something something? Something something to something something? The something something something something?
That set him off thinking about the sentence Rob had once asked him to make sense of: ‘Dogs dogs dog dog dogs.’ When Rob had explained it – dogs that other dogs pester (dog) in turn pester other dogs – Alex had tried it on Carey. She’d failed to be as impressed as he’d hoped. She’d said, with a sad sigh: ‘Yeah. That’s about the way it goes.’
Rob had been interested in the way the sentence was jointed. Carey, having had it cracked open for her, had simply lit on the meaning – the least important part. Rob had been interested in whether it also worked for fish: fish fish fish fish fish. Carey had said that was stupid because fish didn’t fish – and if let’s suppose they did, the ones that had been fished would hardly be in a position to do any fishing themselves.
Alex had let it go, pleased simply to be with her on a summer lawn by the river.
The second text message, the one that had just arrived, was from Carey. ‘Where are you, boy? Weird things are happening. Have a good afternoon. Miss you. Talk tomorrow? Night.’
Alex wondered what he’d say. He’d phone her. If he did, would the dial tone, or caller-ID, tell her he was in America, though? A payphone? Would that be different? He didn’t want to freak her out. He didn’t want to spoil the surprise.
The box with the ring in it – he hadn’t felt comfortable leaving it in the room, with its flimsy door �
�� dug into his hip as he leaned forward to flag the waitress for the bill.
‘Could I get the check?’ he said, enjoying the American words coming out of his English mouth, resisting doing an accent.
The something of something something.
When he got back to the motel he was tired and turned straight in, setting the alarm on his mobile phone for seven thirty. In the middle of the night he half woke up. The room was cool, and through the flimsy curtains he could see the moon over the parking lot. He could hear crying from the next-door room. Then he frowned, turned over, and sank back into sleep.
‘There have been disturbances in the mass media,’ Red Queen said. ‘Running up to this. That was one of the things that caused us to keep the file open on what seemed to many of us like a lost cause. It seemed perfectly possible the machine was just imaginary: something Banacharski had made up – though, remember, we have some partial material from his communication with Holderness. And, well, some of that material either demonstrated that this machine existed, or it demonstrated the opposite. He was very paranoid. It’s possible some of what he told Holderness was disinformation, especially towards the end. But…’ Red Queen trailed off. ‘Then the thing with the airplane. The thing with the frogs…’
‘Frogs?’ Porlock said,
‘You didn’t hear about that?’
Porlock looked slightly irritated.
‘Downtown Atlanta? It was on CNN. It led Fox. Frogs fell out the sky. Thousands of them. From very high up. Several citizens were killed.’
‘I’ve been working a lot of double shifts. That’s been known to happen, though. Don’t the frogs get sucked up by tornadoes? We’ve just had not one but two hurricanes…’
‘The killed citizens: 60 per cent of them were Atlanta-stationed employees of MIC Industrial Futures, Inc.; 40 per cent of them were Atlanta-stationed employees of subsidiaries or affiliates of MIC Industrial Futures, Inc.; 10 per cent of them was a postman.’
‘A postman?’
‘Yes. We think he was just unlucky. As opposed to the other citizens killed by falling frogs.’
‘What sort of frogs were they?’
Red Queen admired that sort of attention to detail.
‘Mostly the sort of frogs that are hard to identify when you drop them from a mile up. Almost all of them – that is, the epicentre of the frog event, or whatever you call it – fell on MIC’s Atlanta offices. They took out the glass roof of the atrium. It was over the cafeteria. A lot of people in hospital with very nasty cuts. The offices are still closed.’
‘Our Friends are sneaking in and planting more bugs, then…’
‘Yes. Lots more. MIC, as I don’t need reminding you, is the company that was paying Banacharski. From a good way back. They were funding his chair at the Sorbonne. When he resigned in protest at being funded by an arms company it looked like he was resigning in protest at being funded by an arms company, but everything we’ve since learned suggests that actually he was resigning in order to work directly for the arms company. The letters to Holderness talk about a man, Nieman, an operative for “the firm”, who’s clearly Banacharski’s liaison for his research. He lived for several years with no visible means of support. So MIC are all over this. We think it was their freelances who went after the guy they found in the plane.’
‘What about the guy in the plane?’
‘Still in hospital. Still a waste of time.’
‘You know MIC has links to government.’
‘What arms and baby-milk company doesn’t?’
‘Very serious links. We are, theoretically, on the same side.’
‘We are on the same side – but in this, no. This machine is a game-changer. If they get it they’ll be their own side. And the frog thing. It can’t be chance. As I was saying, though: the mass media.’
When Red Queen talked about the mass media, that didn’t mean newspapers and television. It meant the hundreds and thousands of the psychically sensitive, wandering mad. To most people, they were a disaggregated army of street-corner crazies, but for the DEI they were an underground railway, an early warning system, a giant biological radio tuned to sketchy transmissions from… well, that was the question. Red Queen preferred to remain sceptical, but running the mass media was Sosso’s department, down in the underhangar. Red Queen didn’t have to worry about it in detail. It was valued. Funding depended on it.
Sosso’s theory of it was only ever going to be a theory: whenever anything became empirically testable, it lost its Dubya status and was transferred out of DEI. Dubya was the Directorate nickname for any file coded UU, for ‘Unknown Unknowns’: double-U. But Sosso’s theory was this.
Old-style ‘mediums’ – Victorian charlatans in robes and false noses, wired up to jerry-rigged table-knocking devices – purported to have some control over their gifts. But media, to use the correct plural, were actually as passive as air and relatively common. The Chinese were rumoured to be ‘training’ them in very large numbers; harvesting Falun Gong and the Tibetan monasteries and ‘repurposing’ the prisoners in permanent detention. That gave even Red Queen the creeps.
What made media media was that only a mind slightly hanging off its hinges could let whatever it was through, and the way it came through was garbled. Low signal, high noise. Any single medium would produce indecipherable gibberish. Yet in aggregation the signals had yielded suggestive results. A hobo in Palo Alto might mumble ‘Harra fugg… a-budda. Zzzzally! Mmmrgfff’ at precisely the moment that a heavily medicated paranoid schizophrenic in the Bowditch Hall at McLean’s would exclaim, from swampy dreams: ‘Paternoster! Carthago delenda est! I am Caligula!’ And if you combined the sounds of their voices the recording might throw up a fragment of a word in Aramaic.
Sosso, a true believer, liked to use the image of each medium being a single string on a huge harp; you’d hear one note but you needed to hear the chord. Or the assemblage being a pipe organ: the more pipes you could hear the closer to the tune you got.
In a system they’d grimly termed ‘tag and release’, operating over more than two decades through homeless shelters, out-patient mental health units, combat veterans’ trauma units and addiction clinics, thousands of potential media had been identified and fitted with transponders, typically hidden in the fillings of their teeth, or in metal pins fitted somewhere in the skull or jaw where they could benefit from bone conduction.
The second generation of these devices were able to tell when the medium was asleep or unconscious, and flag the signals received accordingly. It was generally believed in the Directorate that sleep – or catatonia, states arising from hypnotic or psychedelic drugs, alcoholic dementia or near coma – was the most likely to yield what Sosso called ‘accurate’ or ‘high yield’ material.
Sosso’s team worked on these. They used bleeding-edge voice recognition and translation software to sieve the data, compiling and noting sentence fragments and unusual or foreign words. They combed different overlays and combinations of voices, experimented with staggering inputs according to the different time zones or lunar phases, squelched the bass or treble, speeded and slowed the recordings, even played fragments backwards on the off chance of backward-masked messages. Mostly, they came up mud.
They also tracked the frequencies of particular phonemes – according to time logged and geographical concentration. This was often what yielded the result.
Sosso had a piece of software that allowed her to mouse over a satellite map of the States. On the top-right side of her desktop were two panels – one a ticker tape of sentence fragments that had been tagged as of interest; another a dynamic list of the most common utterances, ranked in order of frequency, available for the last year, last week, last twenty-four hours, last minute.
Marked on the map with mobile red dots were tagged media – mostly, they were concentrated in western California and Florida. Manhattan was red. There was a scarlet dusting over Oklahoma and Montana, too.
If Sosso moused over a dot she could
pull up a file: personal history and utterance history broken down statistically. A ticker tape of current utterance could be displayed, over the voice, in real time. The signals from Montana were always lousy, crackly as hell, but in the big cities, they freebooted on the cellphone networks.
Media who said the same thing as each other within a two-minute window would be colour-tagged blue for affinity. They’d return to red if a twelve-hour period had passed without a recurrence. If there was a recurrence, or something else significant to suggest a synchronicity, they’d go a brighter blue and slightly increase in size. A very thin blue line would connect them on-screen.
The usual global utterance rankings tended to have mushy collections of sibilants, non-signifying smacky-lip noises, belches and high whinnies of anxiety at the top. Few words made it in. The less imaginative obscenities sometimes made the top thirty. ‘Kill’ and ‘help’ and ‘mama’ occasionally nudged into the top hundred.
In the days preceding the arrival of the Intercept, the patterns had been altogether stranger. Usually, no more than a couple of blue lines at any one time appeared on Sosso’s map: a sketchy dark blue diagonal would connect the Mission District in San Francisco with the French Quarter in New Orleans for, maybe, forty-eight hours. A disconnected line would strike from Fire Island to Key West, flicker, evanesce. Accelerated to the one-second-to-six-hours timescale they used to scan manually for patterns, it looked like a broken 1980s screen saver: a dusting of red dots jittering like midges in the summer air, blue lines appearing at random and then disappearing a second or two later. Rarely, very rarely, one of the blue lines would sprout another line from one end, like an elbow, or two lines would intersect at a non-perpendicular vertex. Then that would go.
