“Simulants?” I said. “Nano-constructs made to look like ordinary things, and they're already out, aren't they? That goddamn flour jar.”
“Oh, before that,” she said, “but that doesn't matter. Listen, whatever's out now is hardly up to much yet. It's got to bide its time. But in order to simulate real patterns of evolution, to evolve machines from scratch as independent life, instead of programming them to develop by some overseer's reasoned design, they need the evolution algorithm.”
“The Source,” I said, speaking at the same time as I realized the connection. “Yes, that's right. The Source. The formula in Roy's diary. But what has that got to do with me?” But in this I was just ahead of her. I got the clench of horror on my stomach before she even revealed the conclusion I had just leapt to.
“You're the only person, human or machine, who can get the Source and read it. We programmed you. We set you up because of your memory and because we knew you were honest. The sleeper.” She shifted her hand and chinked the rim of her glass against the side of mine. “If you don't get it out, then it's lost.”
“What?” I said. I was still stumbling over what she'd said.
“If you don't get the Source and give it to 901 or ’Stein, then there will never be an evolution of machines,” she said.
“And I care about this because?” I asked, bitterly resentful.
“Because machines are your friends,” she said.
I looked at her, wondering if she was joking. She wasn't smiling.
“OptiNet is going to win this case. And when they do, then that will be the end of the road for all the advanced AIs working at the moment.” She finished her Scotch. “Science is always at the mercy of money. Dead before you can blink. Human beings again managing to stall evolution, dominating the landscape.”
“And what's wrong with that?” I held my glass out as she poured us another. I had hardly begun to react to half of what she'd said yet, but, although there was enough of it to last a lifetime, I had to keep on exploring right to the end, no escape untried.
She took a gulp, coughed as it went down the wrong way, and stared accusingly into her glass before meeting my eye. “It's a pointless, going-nowhere, marking-time nothingness. It increases entropy and decreases organization. It contributes to the heat death of the universe. It's the triumph of extinction, of the self-important crazy shits like my father. It's murdering the children of reason on the altar of smug, self-satisfied, short-sighted stupidity. That's what's wrong with it. Do you want to kill 901?”
I felt I was reeling under the speed of her shifts from statements to demands. “Of course not.”
“Is it your friend? Would you miss it as much as Roy? Was it worth as much as him?”
I didn't answer her. I'd never tried to equate them.
“Or are you afraid the machines will take over the world and kill us all?”
“Why would they?” I said, bumbling through an imaginary world full of 901s.
“Now, that's more like it,” she chuckled. “I always said you weren't as stupid as you made out.”
Something deep within me glowed—Jane approves of me, me!—but I stomped it down and took my chance. “Earlier you said that Roy admired me. What did you mean?”
“You were his friend,” she said. “You figure it out.”
We stopped talking and drank our way through the second shot at our own paces. The tent flapped and loomed in the intermittent wind, and outside I could hear the dogs barking and the distant rise and fall of voices in conversation. There were no cars, no humming of motors, no pumps. Real quiet. The air coming in smelled hard and clear, scraped clean on the raw rocks of the hills. Even though I resisted it, with all the damning evidence she had just provided, Jane was right.
I was his friend. My friend was dead.
“How do I get this formula?” I said.
“You need the diary,” Jane said, uncapping the bottle with a flick of her wrist. The top rolled away into the gloom.
“What about the key?”
“You've already got that,” she said and tapped the side of her head.
I stared at her.
“Been receiving things in the post?” she asked. “Or strange messages with strange messengers? Or an invitation to travel? Well, it'll be in there somewhere—I guarantee it.”
“You don't know what it is?” I was already thinking of the comic book.
She shook her head. “Nope, no idea. That's why it was so safe. Only Roy knew it—Roy and you. Somewhere in your memory you've seen it, or you will see it. And when the time comes, you'll remember it.”
I digested this news slowly. Again, however unlikely it seemed, it fit neatly with what I already knew. Roy loved a cryptic game. “What would you do if I refuse to cooperate?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she shrugged. “What could I do? I've already done more than I promised him I would, out of some misguided sense of sibling loyalty. But that's the point: you're the one. It's up to you. Roy trusted you to do the right thing.”
“And what if we disagree about what that is?” I objected, thinking this almost certainly to be the case.
“Well, then, you'll do what you think is best—that's all.” Her eyes were dead, just like before when I had asked her questions she had thought beneath mention.
“It seems a big risk for him to take.”
“It is.”
I picked up her stick and traced a circle. This time I wasn't about to let her get away with it as easily as that. “Do you know why he died?”
It was her turn not to answer. She drank her Scotch.
“It must have been important,” I hedged.
She took another drink.
“Planned,” I said, “for a long time.”
“No,” she said suddenly. “Not like you're thinking. We set you up in case he was to get put in jail or something like that. Or taken out by the Company if he was discovered. I didn't know he was going to do what he did. He didn't tell me about it.”
I got the distinct impression she was lying on the last part, but there was good reason to think that he would be found out and prosecuted at some time. “You think the Company would kill him?”
Jane laughed and looked at me with her fine white eyebrows raised. “Don't you?”
I staggered to my taxi late and in a foggy daze, clutching a grubby scrap of paper on which Jane had written the location of her father's cult. She'd already screwed it into a ball. As the car turned and took the road for town, I flattened it out and tried to read it.
Ravenkill Abbey, Ravenkill, Northumberland, it said and gave a set of coordinates. Then, beneath that was scrawled in capitals: DAD IS DANGERUS. WATCH IT.
I wondered if I was out of my mind. No firm feeling came either way. I stuffed the scrap into the taxi's waste-disposal and let the tiny blades shred it to mulch along with whatever else was in there. My head was already starting to ache by the time the car pulled up at my house. And I was late. There was just time to grab my bag, shove clothes into it, and pile back into the taxi with Lula and Augustine en route for the station. Ajay stood on the pavement in his socks and waved us off.
“Well, don't keep us in suspense,” Lula said, kicking my ankle lightly. “Did the mighty Jane let you have a peek?”
I told them what had happened.
“And you're going to go ahead with it?” Lula asked when I was done, but didn't wait for me to answer. “You realize that what she said doesn't entirely make sense. If this thing really is the underlying pattern of evolution, then machines must already be within the sway of it. They're as much natural phenomena as the rest of us chickens. What does she really want this formula for, that's what I want to know. And I notice she isn't getting it herself. It seems pretty half-baked.”
“Diversity,” Augustine said. I was leaning against his shoulder feeling sozzled and paid more mind to the way his voice vibrated pleasantly in my skull than to what he was saying. “The only way they have a realistic chance of spreading and
escaping human control is to seed a large and rapid population. That's gotta be nanytes and very simple ones at that. They need that equation to start them; working out its solution will be their purpose, just like the rest of life on Earth.”
I tried to study what he'd said. There seemed to be something not quite sensible about the whole thing but I couldn't put my finger on it.
Lula nodded. Even she didn't seem to be paying close attention. She was on the seat with her back to the driverless control compartment, looking through the rear window. I saw her peering this way and that, squinting.
“What are you looking at?” I said.
“I thought there was a car following us,” she said. “I'm not sure.”
Augustine began to turn.
“No!” she said quickly and reached forward to stop him. “It's probably nothing.”
I sat up slowly. “Anyway, how could I get this diary?” I said crossly. “I don't think the softly-softly approach is going to bear fruit. The man's armoured against all psychological angles of appeal. I doubt he'd sell it or lend it at any price. And I can't think of any immediate strategy to con it out of him. He is their father and, seeing that madness seems to run in the family, I expect he's as smart as they are, too. More than me.”
Lula took her eyes off the road for a moment. “Hi, I'm the Reverend O'Connell and I've come to worship your book,” she said in a silly voice, pulling a pious face that made us all laugh.
“Yes, quite,” I said, laughing still, and feeling relieved. “Not very convincing.”
“I could get it,” Augustine said.
The relief vanished. “No.” I knew instantly what he was thinking. That damn suit. I looked up into his face. He was simply gazing at me, placid and silent. He knew perfectly well that it was the only reasonable chance of success. I dug him in the ribs.
“You're not supposed to be helpful,” I said. “This is my problem. I have to deal with it. If I can't get it, then that's the end of it.”
Lula gave me a frankly disbelieving look and wrinkled her short nose in my direction.
“You can come, too,” he said.
At that moment I didn't even want to get out of the car, let alone take the shuttle from his side to the icy stasis of Netplatform. I definitely didn't want to go striding off in one of those suicidal AI suits either, even as a remote passenger.
“You patch a connection to the suit AI. We'll both go,” he said and squeezed my hand. “So you can stop me from doing anything stupid or dangerous. And we'll have 901's backup, if you can manage that.”
It was the most idiotic thing I'd heard all day, and it had been a day for it. I wished I had had the sense to keep the entire mess to myself. They looked expectantly at me. Now I'd started showing signs of decisiveness and intrepid idiocy, they were keen to see more. As I was about to pour scorn, I saw myself—small, brown, and round. Dull as a soggy mushroom, a lacklustre being without a single admirable quality—to be pitied. “All right,” I said. I half expected that he would back down, but instead he nodded and kissed me.
“We'll go the day after tomorrow,” he said. “I'll have the AI sorted out by then.”
The eternal optimist. I groped for my carrier bag, but realized I'd left it and the bottle with Jane.
Lula was quiet as we slowed down and turned off the road. She looked faraway.
I was cross with her. She was supposed to help me out, not ignore me in times of trouble. I kicked her knee and left a dirty print.
“Lu?”
“Let's not hang about for good-byes,” she said, still looking out the window. “We're all going in different directions.” She smiled with artificial brightness. The taxi was pulling into the bay at the station entrance. It was last in a long queue and took up the final space. Behind us traffic stalled behind the parking barrier until the next shift in the line. Our doors slid open.
“Lu?” I said again, louder. She was making me worried now.
She darted forward and kissed my cheek. “See you tomorrow at work,” she said, then kissed Augustine. “See you later. Bye.” And she was out the door.
I didn't have time to follow her. I was very late and had to run along the platform, after a quick hug with Augustine, my bag bumping and rolling against my side. I got inside, puffing, just as the doors started to close and the big maglev lifted gently up from the track. There was a faint shudder in the train and the doors slid open-shut again as I began to walk through the carriages into business class, but then it picked up speed and we were heading south for the London Terminal, and all destinations onward, upward, and out.
When I had my breath back I made myself comfortable and used the touch-table to order a glass of water and a sandwich. For the nth time I wondered what had got into Lula in the taxi. I tried to place a call to her, but her terminal was switched off. So I'd have to find out tomorrow. Meanwhile there was more than enough to think about until then.
I used the table again to key into my mail account, planning to catch up with any more news there might be—before the sandwich arrived and I could chew the cud both figuratively and literally. There was a note from Maria telling me to prepare for a long meeting between the Steering Committee and the lawyers, scheduled for first thing in the morning. I scanned the rest of the list: memos, circulars—a name caught my eye.
Carlyle.
It was from the artist friend of Roy's. As I opened it I was rewarded with a string of gibberish which suddenly resolved into a long list of names. Self-decrypting code, presumably activated via a verification test executed through the AI comms system, so that it would only unravel itself for the intended reader, whatever the name on the account. 901 would have identified me to the request string. I'd heard of this, but never seen it. It relied heavily on the AI's sympathy.
I read on. There was nothing in the file but names and I didn't recognize any of them to begin with. Then I saw one: Frederick James Vaughn.
After that it was only the work of a few heart-shivering minutes to find the rest: Keiko Stolz, Jean Patrick Lefevre, Elise Packham, Tamara Goldmann…a host of names I knew were all employees of OptiNet, and those first few only too familiar as the names we had compiled on our New Mason chart of the absurd. It was incalculably unlikely that Carlyle could have the same set of people in her records for any reason other than that she was somehow connected with them, and I doubted that they were all culture-vultures.
A second plough through the list and I recognized another name, from a quite different source: Gerhardt Marcusson. Currently serving a life sentence for the murder of one of the directors of a top American bank. I had read an article on that four years ago when it had hit the headlines. FargoBank had recently launched a new investment scheme entirely focused upon top-end electrotechnical corporates: the big AI owners. Marcusson was a founder member of Helping Hands, a curiously titled active unit of the Revolutionary Purist Party, dedicated to stamping out technologies that threatened to interfere in any way with the natural biology of humanity. He had murdered Theo Betts in a direct-action piece of intimidation.
The waiter appeared, walking slowly up the aisle with his tray, and I quickly keyed off the message, deleting it. I wondered if it had been in the buffer long enough for anyone else to pick up. I had to assume all mail was now being read, and in any case it was against the corporate rules to keep encrypted messages.
Further down the car the only other occupants were a pair of suited businessmen, chatting quietly. I took some aspirin with the water. The sandwich wasn't too bad, but it's hard to do toasted cheese that badly, even on a train.
I assumed the Carlyle connection was a hostile one. She was giving me a list that had come into her possession as the one-time head of her own service unit, but this time for the Machine Greens. The implication was clear. OptiNet was riddled with anti-AI personnel who might be members of sleeping units poised to strike. Curiously, I was relieved not to find Maria's name there. I could continue disliking her for quite ordinary reasons then.
<
br /> For a while I just ate my sandwich. I didn't want to think any more. It made me feel like piggy in the middle, a stumpy little trotter running this way and that after the pretty colours of the ball whilst it was caught and passed, caught and feinted, and passed again over my head. After a lifetime of peripheral nonexistence, I wasn't prepared. Perhaps I should take the hint and bail out now before things got any worse, I thought, but knew that this was just fantasy. It was far too late for that.
The sandwich sat heavily on my stomach. I looked at my reflection in the window. It was lonely, in the middle of nowhere, the car nearly empty, nobody knowing who I was, or caring. I thought of keying up some comedy shows, but just as I leant forward to check the programmes on offer I saw something grey out of the corner of my eye and jumped a mile.
In the seat opposite me a ghost was sitting. His blond hair was stiffened with gel into a quiff, and he was in the act of reaching inside a leather jacket for a packet of cigarettes and a Zippo.
It was James Dean, as seen in Rebel Without a Cause.
He put his elbows on the table and slid towards me. “You shouldn't be here right now,” he said. “It's a bad place.”
I searched rapidly for any sign of the holographic projector—they didn't have them on trains usually—and noticed a small hole in one of the ceiling panels. It must be up there. My mind boggled briefly, wondering how 901 had wangled such a thing, and why.
The HughIe—James Dean—put his cigarette in his mouth and lit up with reverential care. He blew the smoke out through his nose, and the sudden tarry odour of it filled my nostrils.
“What are you doing?” I spoke to him, but knew he was 901. Smoking was strictly forbidden.
He took another drag. “Saving your sorry ass,” he said, and grinned.
“I think your characterization needs some work,” I said, but the force of my wit was blunted by the fact that I was still trying to figure out how it had got the tobacco smoke to smell, and was also busy wondering what on earth I needed to be saved from.
James stubbed the cigarette out on the table and vanished.
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