As he met the main street he thought he saw a figure step out of a shop doorway with purpose and set out after him, but the afternoon had maybe made him paranoid, so after a couple of looks he decided he was mistaken and forgot about it.
Later I'd have cause to remember it myself, but when he got back I had just received a message from Peaches, who had already returned to the station. She'd been looking into the missing nanoproduct from the recent project.
“Richard Mori swears the whole thing was a mistake. There's no missing nanytes to account for from the station labs. It was a measuring error,” she sighed. “But all the measures are taken by 901 subunits, so go figure. However, as he said, if 901 is in on it, then there's no proving what happened. It has access to all the records. The official news of the moment is that 901 is deliberately working against the Company. If it weren't for the trial being such a big item already, they'd have pulled the plug. You should hear the shit they're talking. Anyway, I'd better get off the line before one of the monitoring morons notices it. See you soon.” She cut the transmission.
I sat and wondered if Roy's case wasn't as stupid as it seemed. Maybe it was a time-buying gesture for 901's temporary survival, set up to run until something else I couldn't even guess at would happen. And maybe the two nanyte-theft incidents, for all their apparent similarities, weren't really connected. Both of them could be fronts; the obvious movement that hides the sleights that another hand makes. If that were true, then I was so deeply in the dark I may as well discount them from my calculations altogether.
Taking the trial itself as a cutoff point then, it looked like there were only a couple of weeks left in which I had to do whatever I was going to do about it. Sitting and doing nothing seemed like an attractive option considering the way things were starting to look, but then I would never know why he had done it at all.
And Jane had said he admired me, with that funny expression on her face. What was it? Amusement? Disbelief? No, sadness, I thought, and envy. But why should Roy admire me?
This train of thought was broken as Ajay came in from the garden. “Look,” he said, holding out a thick envelope, “the post brought this for you.”
I took it. It had been posted from Seckley four months ago, and held at the sorting offices by request until the specified delivery date—today. Butterfingered, I tore at it, struggling with the several miles of sticky tape wound around its edges. Inside was a heavy clear-plastic folder through which was clearly visible the cover of Issue #10, Volume #5, the very last and final part of the story of Roy's favourite comic book character, Thunder Road.
Seeing the comic took me back instantly to the first time I had held it, inside Roy's last dorm room at school, a few days before we went to Edinburgh.
It was the night before the operation which would secure our direct interface implants. I wandered into Roy's room at the other end of the dorm. His door was always ajar because he never bothered to waste activity on anything which was not commanding his immediate attention. He thus created a natural wake of disorder and mess by which he could easily be tracked. Inside, the only light came from the flatscreen in the wall. He had originally been allotted a room with a window, but had swapped it with another boy because he didn't like natural light interfering with his work/sleep patterns. As far as I could see, the phases of his day had no pattern. I kicked my way through the dirty clothing scattered on the floor and sat down on the edge of his bed. The mattress made a creaking sound and something that felt suspiciously like forgotten biscuits crunched beneath the sheet.
“Hey, moron,” I said, “what you doing?”
For a couple of seconds he continued working with invisible dough, shaping and pulling some construct with the aid of his virtual gloves. On the screen a dull octagonal blob mutated and spun. It was a representation of some complicated modular form he was fiddling with.
“I was just making a toolkit,” he said, and straightened out of his slouch as if just remembering he had a spine. “But it's not working out like I hoped.” He pulled the gloves off and dropped them on his desk. After a second of bizarre antics the system closed down the screen. Abruptly it was dark.
“Lights,” he said.
When the soft glow brightened he had turned in his chair. His blond, floppy hair hung over the right half of his face and his pallor was unusually grey, even for him. I wondered how many nights he had been without sleep, working away on his secret projects. The fear of his prodigal mathematical ability burning out drove him well beyond my own limits. He crossed skinny wrists over one another on the back of the chair and rested his chin on them.
Although I did want to talk about the operation, I also didn't want to bring it up myself and look like I was scared. I said, “So, what's wrong with it?”
He shrugged. “I haven't quite figured out what the purpose of some of them will be yet. It's hard to make something when you don't know what it's for. I know I need something to pin down exchanges whilst I can copy them, but I don't know how to do that without alerting the head of the network. I was thinking of a way to replicate them using the modular symmetries that would let them pass as normal but reflect a mirror copy of themselves into my data.” He glanced sideways in an offhand way, as if it weren't very interesting.
From his vagueness I sensed he was close to success. Further, since the things he was talking about were obviously to do with eavesdropping on illegal data traffic I had an idea what he was about. “You're determined to find material proving there's an underground mafia in the comms corporates, aren't you?”
“Might be.” He shrugged again and grinned. “Got to try it, haven't you?”
Roy lolled in his seat, waiting for my reaction. He was as loose-limbed as the worn-out toy rabbit on his bed, its arm hanging by a thread. I resented this relaxation in the face of our impending surgery, and anyway thought he was paranoid. Surely, if there were such a mafia, they would run things far more effectively than the facts suggested? They would never have let AIs such as 899 and Astracom's Baby ’Stein be put in positions of such power in the first place.
“I wouldn't bother,” I said. I was looking at the floor with its difficult terrain of shoes, clothes, towels, and datablocks. The only neat thing in the place was his collection of paper comics aligned on the shelves over his desk, each one smoothly and safely fitted into its own protective coat of smartplastic. Only his fingerprints would release the seals.
He saw me raking the shelves with my envious gaze and mistook it for a desire to read the books instead of to be one of them, home and dry and under no threat of brain damage.
“Thunder Road,” he said, “every issue. Great detail.” He leant back and pulled one free from its place in the regiment. His knuckles shone pale as the envelope opened and he took the book out. When he held it out, I had to take it. It was kind of an honour to be offered. Roy was funny about paper. Curiosity overcame my resentment. I looked at the cover and then paged through it quickly, aware of his eyes glued to my face. It was important to have the right reaction. Say the wrong thing and this rare moment of communion would pop and vanish like a bubble.
I needed Roy to like me. I felt I wasn't his equal and so couldn't command his respect, but had to be on good terms with him. Association with his brilliance might rub off some shine on me.
I scrutinized a page that caught my eye. It was a single drawing of Death as a skeletal horseman. The lines which made it up looked out of control. The horse, a terrified animal, eyes rolling, bent hard against the frame in its mad bolt. In a leery balance, the shape of the scythe cut down out of the picture frame altogether and right to the edge of the page. The skull in the hood, distant on the enormous horse, held no promise except emptiness, but its eye sockets were inescapably fixed on the viewer, so that once the lines of horse and scythe had led you there, you could not look away. Once you were trapped there, the entire image seemed to be falling towards you with unstoppable momentum. I had a brief vision of the empty plain that Death had hurtle
d over in its unwavering search for me and then, for the first and only time in my life, felt the dizzying fear of vertigo. I shut the book as fast as I dared. From the front the face of the eponymous traveller, Thunder Road herself, shielded by a black cowboy hat, stared into the open gateway of some hellish red and yellow cyberworld.
“Good, huh?” Roy's voice croaked with his excitement. He slid the book carefully out of my hands and returned it to its sheath. When he had set it home he was suddenly energetic, tapping his fingers against his thighs in a rapid drumming. “Now you see what you can do with a sheet of paper and just a single image. Didn't that have a whole lot in it?”
“Yeah,” I said, not sure why he had shown me that one or even if he had picked it on purpose. “D'you like it?” I asked stupidly.
“Don't talk shit, Jules.” He rolled his eyes.
“I mean, what about it?”
“Do you have to ask?” He gave me a sudden flash of his full eyes, lifting the lids and goggling so that they stood out like two blue marbles. He tapped his head. “Just go with it. Whatever.”
So I assumed that it was his way of communicating that he also felt the imminent approach of that terrible brink. I thought so at the time because I didn't really understand Roy and gave him more of a poetic heart than he was due. Now I know why he showed me Thunder Road's descent into the underworld, and that Death the great leveller was not coming to finish Thunder's travels, but to drag her into a different world where an entirely new nightmare was waiting to unfurl.
Roy had already gotten into the habit of being cryptic about everything and even then he'd begun the habit of leaving bombs in my mind—as if I were a kind of handy book depository—waiting to be triggered in the future by the conjunction of a timed event and my inescapable memory. These bombs were information-dense and took time to fully explode. One thing I now saw that Roy had been telling me was that he and Jane had already been to the new undersea world of the Shoal. That I had the actual book in my hands again only meant one thing. I would have to go there myself to look for the accursed Source, whatever it was.
Under my fingers the soft plastic opened. He must have retuned it to my prints.
I took out the book and opened it to Death's page.
If I had been expecting writing in the margins or any such stuff, I was disappointed. Only the hypnotic stare of the skull rewarded my curiosity. I turned to the front and started reading, hoping that the missing volumes of the story wouldn't cause me too much of a problem.
I was reading page two when Augustine burst into the house, full of his story about the machine artist.
“They've sold out,” he burbled on when he had related most of the tale, “and it looks like there's going to have to be crowd-control police. Half of them want the show banned; the other half just want to see the creatures rip each other to pieces.” He saw me watching him closely. “What is it?”
“This doesn't feel like a game any more,” I said, finally saying what had been growing in my mind ever since my encounter with Armour. Maybe it was the increased strategic perspective it had so kindly given me, or maybe just an accumulation of data and the shock wearing off; whatever it was, I was feeling less and less enthusiastic about the situation with every passing minute. Augustine's smile faded and I could see he was struggling to think of a cheering thing to say about it. His meeting with Bush Carlyle hadn't inspired him, however. He was as disturbed as I was.
“Never mind,” I said. “It's too late for regrets: the whole thing is already well underway. The question is, what exactly are we…am I…going to do about it now?”
“The question is, what is it?” he said, sitting down in his overcoat and lacing his fingers in and out of various knotted holds on one another. He reached out and tapped my knee. “It could all be coincidental, you know. Or else it's been on the cards so long that we're only caught up in the fringes of it, not even important. Could be any of those things.”
“And I'm having an ego crisis?” I suggested. “Imagining myself at the centre of things?” It wasn't outside the realms of possibility. I did have that history of poor self-esteem and paranoia. “But what about the nanytes business, then? I'm sure something is in that flour. What the hell is it, though?”
“Time bomb,” he said and grinned. “Perhaps we should just wait for Roy to rise like the undead and tell us the punchline.”
I couldn't help laughing. That would be typical. I had hoped for it myself. But the denial about his death would persist a while longer if psychological statistics were to be believed, so that was normal.
Lula put her head around the door from the bicycle shop, where she had been putting some new bearings into a set of wheels for Ajay. (He had taken the opportunity of my afternoon at home to go outside and dig the foundation for a new garden shed.) “You have noticed that we're all party to the theft and not doing anything about the rest of it?” she said. “Inaction is as much of a decision as action.”
“All right,” I said, “so we're positively engaged in doing nothing at the moment. But if we keep it up, then events will roll over us. We could get the blame later if we're found responsible for not telling what we know. One thing for sure, we'll never get to the bottom of Roy's game.”
“You mean you won't,” Augustine said, leaning back and looking at me speculatively. “Strikes me that that is all a personal thing between you and Roy and 901.” The way he met my eye, raised his eyebrow, I saw he had been thinking this all the time but hadn't said so, waiting for me to get up to speed. I felt stupid.
Lula had her finger stuck in the end of a socket wrench. She swung the ratchet attachment around and around, twirling it and listening to the buzz. Clickety-click. She made a rhythm out of it, then tried to become erratic, but failed. “Let's break it down some,” she said, punctuating her analysis with ratcheting. “First of all there's the trial. Let's assume there are no secret agendas. That involves you, Julie—and us where we get to submit our opinions. The decision is out of your hands, though. Most of what happens will be determined by the way the lawyers choose to argue the case.” She twirled the wrench with a small circle of her hand. “Then there's 901. If the court decision comes down in its favour there'll be a big stink about what it's going to do with its new rights. But we'll think about that when we get there. If the decision goes against it, then it's likely the Company will choose to do something to restrain its activities, and we'll be doing that ourselves.”
“And then there's your damned foreign blacktek AIs.” I looked at Augustine, trying to be funny and not achieving it. “When will they come up for review—before or after you've been eaten alive by them? I want to see those reports on that psych code as soon as—”
“Yeah, yeah,” he waved his arm, “but we can all get by without serious damage in all of those cases. The only thing left is whatever Roy was fiddling with. I'd be surprised if that didn't involve some serious bad shit. At least when you're found out, we'll all be fired. And who knows what headcases he was trafficking with? I'd leave that one.”
“Nah,” Lula said, “you're not going to leave it, are you, Julie?” She was grinning and looking at me in a knowing way, the wrench a pendulum beneath her swinging finger.
“If I go ahead,” I said, “you'll be involved by association. It's up to you. Peaches can probably plead ignorance or coercion, but not you two.”
They looked at one another and shrugged.
“We're still here,” Augustine said.
I hadn't expected to move on that fast. I was stunned and pleased by their show of solidarity, though. It had a warm, good feeling to it, and the dangers didn't seem that real. And if I didn't carry on there was a good chance I'd regret it for the rest of my days.
“Better get ready for some serious bad shit, then,” I said, making a goggly face to show I wasn't put off by the threatening possibilities ahead, and they smiled; but the smiles faded rather quickly and we all ended up looking at the carpet, thinking privately, the silence worried by al
l the unsaid reservations. We knew we still hadn't come up against the underlying reality of it. We were just players, still, with the stakes rising. That was all.
Ajay came in, muddy and out of breath, and started to haul away the biogene sack containing the seed and nutrients for growing his shed. “Two months, it says,” he panted, his voice disappearing with him through the kitchen and out. “Two months for a damn shed, but fully secured, no rot, cheaper than the timber versions…hope it likes the northern light…better than next-door's damn rabbit hutches…”
I went into the kitchen and looked through the window to where he was enthusiastically forking the greyish gravel into his prepared bed. Across the fence the damn rabbit hutches looked rickety and hastily made. Nails and planking everywhere. No wonder they were always coming through the fence and into the cold frames. I could see one rabbit now, its brown nose pressed through a gap in the wire of its run, twitching away, no doubt hoping that all the digging was going to be for a vegetable patch. I pitied its disappointments and went outside to tamp down some of the loose earth with my feet. For a while Ajay and I walked over the ground in neat rows.
I couldn't dampen down the excitement of being centrally involved in whatever was going on. I knew it was only pride, but I couldn't. I thought I was going to get to discover something important. I could almost taste it.
“Are you coming home for Christmas?” he said.
Contemplating further ahead than a few weeks was so strange it brought me up short. “I don't know,” I said. Christmas? By then it would all be over. “I hope so.”
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