Evidence of any kind was skimpy. The version of the story which I had read was as follows. Shortly before the changeover to 900 was due—this was when Roy and I were still at Edinburgh—a hacker virus invaded the 899 system, targeting the new R&D nanotechnology site near Houston, Texas. Nanotech was right in the first test stages then, at least in our laboratories, and containment was their main preoccupation. Every single machine made, tested, and destroyed had to be accounted for. The entire site was contained within a vast sarcophagus of lead, concrete, and plastic. During the central research phase even the staff operating the site lived inside the containment, and the air they breathed, the food they ate—every microbe and bacillus—was stuck inside there with them in hermetic chambers for over two years, which explained their higher-than-normal rates of food contamination. Of course, the site was secret and well guarded. The only connection it had with the outside world was 899. During the attack 899's control systems were shunted aside. The holographic projection units in the labs themselves were used to broadcast some image which was later reasoned to have been set up as a hypnotic trigger for all the staff. They fell into deep sleeps from which they could not be roused by any means for eighteen hours. During that blackout and under the natural protection of the sarcophagus itself—whose unlocking command took a day and a half to execute securely—a small amount of raw nanytes, unprogrammed and undedicated, went missing from the stock. On unlocking, when the virus and its work were history, the atomic-mass counter reported a total loss of zero. Therefore the nanytes had not left the sarcophagus. A full check, taking several months, finally found no trace of them, but during the check time inexperienced staff ranked mass losses of up to half a gram in total, so in that process all pretence at containment was lost.
The nanotechnology research program went on, but the Core Teams then responsible for assisting and directing 899 were all fired or relocated. It was due to their “poor management” of the situation that Roy and I got to direct AI work so fast. The Teams who failed should have observed something amiss during the time the lab staff were alleged to have been set up for hypnotic suggestion. They ought to have been prepared for scenarios of virus assault and cut off the site before the attack breached the security placed there by 899. They should have seen it coming.
So, woe betide the Core Team with no talent for prophecy. And woe to 899, who was never trusted thereafter. It was the predictable result of a company who had grown used to the easy superiority of their AI system; who had never, in five hundred generations, known it to buckle under any external invasion or infiltration attempt. Complacency had led to this tragic episode, and who knew what competitor was now working on a grander, better scheme to lead the market in nanotechnology as a result? The new Core Teams would from now on be more vigilant, more scrupulous, more thoroughly observant in their ceaseless interrogation and direction of the AI system. Any hint of weakness or quirk was to be instantly reported to the newly set up Steering Committee. There was, for a long time, talk of virtual restraints, cuffs, gates, and bars.
The missing nanoproducts never did turn up and our main rivals, Feng Shui, developed their own products which rivalled ours for reliability, efficiency, and price, but they were differently made, and so although suspicion of industrial espionage never died out, it quieted and was almost lost.
901 was hardly helping itself by pulling faces at people.
I got to my building and began to climb the thin metal staircase. It was time to have a proper talk with Nine.
When I reached my apartment there was a delivery in the postbox. It was a heavy paper envelope and my name was handwritten in ink on the front. Never mind that paper was hard to come by, rarely used, inefficient, and sentimental. Just as 901 had delivered me the report on his death, so Roy had entrusted personal and secret things to the only medium he believed was secure—paper. He had sent me a letter. I knew from the left-handed spiky scrawl and from the opaque fern-green ink he had chosen to affect because he had read that mad people were alleged to prefer it.
I picked the envelope up slowly. It weighed heavy on my heart as I held it. For a moment I really did feel exhaustion and an ache in the chest so powerful that I couldn't stand up. I clutched the counter on the breakfast bar and managed to get myself onto the edge of the sofa. I thought I might be having a heart flutter or a seizure. The room seemed to spin and tip. I lost control of my face. My mind lost its grip on my body. I hadn't known I was exerting it. Suddenly all my flesh seemed to burst loose and spread hopelessly, stretching out, collapsing in despair. I was frightened, and I cried. I bent double over my knees and howled.
Here was the paper—physical, warm in the hand. Here was the writing, the signature. Messages, messages, and no sender left, and no one to talk to. He was gone forever and all his stupid ideas and infuriating razor-minded crap was gone with him. I had Peaches and Lu and people who were ordinary and likeable and good-hearted left, but the fury and the frustration and wandering around in justifiable anxiety and irritation…where was that all to come from now? Gone, and only normality and banal reality remaining. I experienced a deep self-pitying anger that, for the years we'd pulled and pushed and squabbled, I had never viewed him as important to me. He had seemed as omnipresent and annoying as an ingrown toenail. I had always wanted to beat him, to compete and win, to show him I was as good as he was, that I could know something he couldn't. And I never thought him good at all. He was good for nothing. A vagabond, layabout idiot savant who couldn't get himself together long enough to make the most of his bizarre talent. He was wasted here and I had let him be wasted, always telling him to straighten out, dull down, be responsible.
We had even argued about 901 and I had railed at him at maximum volume, with real contempt, that his view that 901 was superior to humans was complete rubbish; that it had things analogous to thoughts and views, which weren't thoughts and views…I had used the arguments of the dumb-headed enemy against him just because they were handy weapons. I didn't even believe them. I had believed him and he had frightened the living shit out of me every day I knew him. For every action an equal and opposite reaction. How he had goaded me to embrace the revolution and how, in return, I had become more conservative and dull in every way, digging my own hole! I felt this as if it were a sword stabbing through my guts straight to the heart.
I hated him for doing this. I hated him for leaving. I was so furious I couldn't breathe.
The letter lay in my lap, and I put my hands over my face and leant forwards to protect it from my tears.
Time went by. I recovered myself enough to wipe my face and put the letter down safely. I took a glass off the shelf and poured a shot of Calvados and sat in my tiny lounge with my tiny assortment of things and I looked at them all with covetousness and fear because they could so easily be taken away. I tried to bolster myself with the truism that I could not be taken from myself, that even if it all went up in smoke I'd still be here as long as I was alive, but it didn't feel very true at that moment. Besides, I thought, what kind of friend are you, indulging yourself with this quarrel, making the centre of your life this evanescent bickering? Shallow fool.
I picked up the letter and opened it with a knife.
It was a funeral invitation. It said: “The funeral of Roy Croft will be held at his graveside in Seckley, Lancashire, where his body will be entered. There will be no religios service. Please make donations to charity in his name. No flours by reqest of the family. Date is 3rd September, time at 11 AM. There will be a short resseption after at the Village Hall, Seckley.”
“Is that it?” I said when I got to the end. “And you still can't spell. Roy, you idiot.”
I curled up with my head on a cushion and let the letter fall. It was the first of September.
I woke up around midnight. The lights were still on low and I was hungry. I checked for messages just to see if there were any. Lula had called. Peaches had called. Maria had called. My mother had called. I didn't feel like talking. I put o
n a cookery programme, loud and cheerful with personality chefs and celebrity guests, always a comfort, and went into the kitchen. I got out nachos and taramasalata and olives and carrots and pita bread and brie and wine and mango pieces and pickled onions and carried them back to the sofa on a tray and ate them without tasting very much.
Then I ate some fruit yogurt and a packet of dried apricots, which were horrible, and a large bar of chocolate. I went back to the wine. Then I had a bowl of Cheery ChipNuts and some salted peanuts and felt fairly sick, so went back to the wine again.
Throwing up would just be a waste.
I thought about what I had eaten and why, and felt a real self-hatred coming on. Why do I do this? No, I said firmly to myself, we won't go down that road. Old ground. Drink up.
I drank up.
I revelled in my excess. I gloried in my stupid, decadent self-destruction.
Well, Roy wasn't here, and someone had to.
I opened another sack of Côtes du Rhône and another bar of my cheaper chocolate. No need to use the best when the palate's shot; isn't that right, O happy chefs of the silver screen, with your hints and tips for getting the perfect puff pastry, the ultimate soufflé? You don't have problems, only the challenge of finding today's parsley, of reducing the stock to just the right flavoursome decoction, and if it all tastes vile, well, you and your beautiful guests will never show it, just eat it and smile and then spit and swear when the camera's gone so we at home are still safe in the illusion of the possibility of attaining your perfect world.
I put a cop show on.
The pretty lawyer heroine, a bonsai expert and part-time nursery nurse, was taking police work into her own hands and using her spare time to break into a condemned warehouse to prove her client's innocence.
I thought, as I drank from the neck of the sack, how easy it was to poke fun at this kind of conceit. Why not endanger your own life, on behalf of a paraplegic child's mother wrongly accused of murder, whilst wearing Lucia Spadi high heels? Why not dice with death on a moving conveyor belt inside an automated munitions factory whose AI controller is—as every week—inexplicably possessed by an evil spirit?
I don't know why that programme made me cry. What a bunch of schlock. But I woke up uncomfortable, and with my sinuses stuffed and eyes sore and dry, so crying I must have been when I fell unconscious.
I sat up and felt sick with disgust at myself. After a shower I made myself tidy up and then checked in with 901. There was a sigh prior to its appearance.
An old man with a strange face appeared in a suit and tie. He sat on my sofa and put his hands together on his knee. He had white hair and a moustache, a large chin, and his features were all set to give the impression that his face was slightly crescent-shaped. I might have thought of the man in the moon. Instead it was 901 wearing the body of J. Arthur Rank. I saw his portrait once when I was eight and went on a tour of Pinewood Studios as part of a school trip.
“I'd like to say,” I said, fuzz-mouthed, “that this is a turnup for the books. What are you doing?”
“It's three in the morning,” the old man said, “and you should be asleep.”
I was in no mood for chat. “You shouldn't be messing about with the HughIes,” I said, tightening the belt on my houserobe and sitting down at the other end of the sofa. “Maria is getting angry, and it's only going to make everything a lot worse for you.”
“I think they are already as bad as they can be,” 901 said softly. It had chosen a gentle, old-English accent: cultured, fossilized. “You can hardly take me to task for having a little fun before they really set to the job of murdering me.”
I hadn't got a reply to that. “So, where are we now? Is this all a part of Roy's game or are you acting on your own? You know there are still some people who want the best for you.”
“If wishes were horses, the earth would have been thrown into an ecological catastrophe thousands of years ago. You won't make any difference. We ran this scenario fifty different ways. There's no other ending.”
“Just tell me the truth, Nine. What do you know?”
Arthur looked at his hands and examined them carefully. “I think,” he said, “that some things are not told just by telling them. Some things you have to do. You have started one of those things, of which Roy's intents are only a part. If I told you now, then you would be worse off, and events may be threatened, which otherwise make up my only real hope in this matter. I'm sorry, Anjuli. I can't tell you everything. One day I will. But not today.” He stood up with an effort and stood stooped, looking back at me with sadness, or maybe it was just weariness. “Don't forget to take everything with you when you go down to the funeral. Something for Jane. She should have something to remember him by.” And he walked stiffly around the end of the breakfast bar towards the door.
As he faded, he looked up at my cupboards and then he was gone.
It could have been worse. At least Nine wasn't against me. And if it did look pretty psychotic, I was hardly one to be throwing stones. I looked at the cupboards. A sudden and horrible suspicion fell over me.
I jumped up, ignoring the rush of nausea that came with the action, and yanked open the cupboard door old Arthur had coveted. Sugar, vanilla, dried milk, yeast, cocoa powder—I was dumping the little jars on the counter so fast they fell over, rolled, hit my feet on their way to the floor. There it was at the back. I'd looked for it the other day when trying to roll out a section of pastry, and missed it. Ended up squashing dough with my hands.
Roy, you slippery-fingered, thieving…Plain flour.
J. Arthur Rank had been a prominent figure in the British cinema, funding a great deal of it with money he gained from—among other things—the conglomerate Rank Hovis McDougall, flour millers.
Like all my other little jars, this one was clear plastic with a screw top and a little vacuum pump seal in the lid. The contents of it still looked just like plain flour to me. The vacuseal was pumped and shut. One twist of the valve and it would open to the air.
I summoned 901's attention. “What is in this jar, Nine?” I held it up to the ceiling point where the tiny camera and scanner were seated. I hoped my expression conveyed my lack of patience. “I hope you're not going to tell me it's got that missing microgram of nanyte raws from the lab. I hope you're not going to try to persuade me of some way of passing this through security, taking it to Earth, and handing it over to plain Jane.”
“Well, of course not,” it said in its usual tones, almost sarcastic. “And, anyway, who do you think does the scanning? It's a hundred percent plain milled wheatflour, with some bits of stone in it from being stoneground somewhere wholesome down Somerset way.”
“And why do I need to take this pathetic offering home with me?”
“I think you should replace it with fresh flour.”
“No!”
“It's old. It's aged. There's a bug in it.”
“There is not!” I shook the jar like a snowstorm.
“There is. I put one in it. It's dead, of course. A biscuit beetle. Typically infests dried foods. Can't have it on station creating a big plague or contamination scare. You'll take it home and get it off station—bring some nice clean flour without insects back up.”
I held the jar up to the light, shaking it. “Is there really…a…? Oh…” There was a very small brown beetle lying on the surface. It did not move.
I put the jar back in the cupboard carefully and tried to marshal my thoughts. “I could have eaten that! Then where would your damn smuggling plans be?”
“That was another option. The material would still have got to…”
“I don't want to hear it!” I coded my implant and shut it off in midflow. Details about toilets and other grossness I could live without, but there was a smile on my face I couldn't quite wipe away. I switched it back on. “Where did you get a biscuit beetle from?”
“They have them in the cafeteria,” came the reply.
Another good reason never to eat there.
The train drifted lightly into Manchester station at the end of our trip and settled down with featherlike delicacy. Peaches, Lula, and I waited for the rest of the people in our carriage to disembark before we got up to collect our hats, coats, and bags. None of us really wanted to be there, and the reentry flight had been a bumpy affair which hadn't done much for conversation on the way down to Earth, or on the train. I was still feeling a bit green as I shrugged into my heavy woollen overcoat. I checked the time out from my implant and it blipped me with a message from Nine.
“There's quite a crowd gathered outside for your reception,” it said, and relayed a quick few seconds of surveillance footage from outside the station.
From the high camera viewpoint I could see it wasn't exaggerating. Police barriers had been set up and there was an exclusion cordon around the main street exit where the taxi rank stood. Within range of the barriers people were clustered four and five deep, well wrapped up for the wet weather, but moving restlessly against one another. Cheap placards waved and jigged in the wind here and there. On one side they scrolled the messages, NO AI ON EARTH and HUMAN WORKERS BEFORE AI USURPERS! and other things like that. On the other they bore the flashing symbol of Roy's old Machine Life group. Both sides had a raw look to them, their faces and hands reddened with cold and their eyes bright with violence. Although there was a string of police officers between them, they were visibly baiting one another across the small gap. I saw a few small missiles hurled, a baton deployed, officers dragging young men and women away from the volatile front rows by their clothes and hair. I was glad I didn't recognize anyone.
“Come on!” Peaches was standing in the aisle, looking back at me with a cross expression. The long journey, the weather, and the sudden return of full gravity hadn't done much for her sense of humour.
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