Silver Screen

by Justina Robson

  She got up and walked towards the door, hands in her pockets.

  “Wait a minute,” I stood up and caught her sleeve. Had she said that it was Vaughn and his allies who had tried to eliminate me on the train? But at that moment the door opened and Lula came in carrying a covered jug.

  Still, Klein waited and we locked stares.

  She spoke first. “This plan of mine is all I can do,” she said. “You'll have to watch out for yourself. I can't risk trying to tip you off if they make a move against the Core. I don't want any damage done to Nine, but that's secondary to me.”

  “You must trust 901,” I observed, knowing that it monitored every conversation that took place.

  “I believe that 901 is much more predictable than any human,” she said, “and if it is half as intelligent as you claim, then it knows very well where its interests are served.” She reached over and touched my hand, partly to remind me to let go of her, partly as a goodwill gesture. “But we will meet and formulate this evidence later.”

  As the door closed at her back, Lula said, “What did she want?”

  I blew my cheeks out and slumped with relief into a chair. “Just clearing up a small misunderstanding,” I said. “It looks like we'll have to prep that Shoal thing as soon as possible. I want to go there before Augustine puts that suit on—in case there's anything there that might help.”

  “I've been thinking about Roy,” Lula said, slowly laying out the bacon onto the grill sheet before placing it in the flashcook. “To me it looked like the traces on that last download didn't have any further routing on them. I've looked and looked at them.” She stared into the oven, twiddling the fork in her hand. “I think he wrote himself directly into the Shoal.”

  It had crossed my mind, too, but like so many things, for too short a time to make much headway against the prevailing stream of immediate panics. “How, for God's sake?” I asked. “Nobody understands how its memory-addressing works. Where would he go? Anyway, that's not how scanned memories were stored in the past. They used to write them into holographic unit storage, as Read Only.”

  “But you just said we don't know how the memory works—” she removed the crispy pieces and laid them on bread, licking her fingers “—so, couldn't it be that Roy downloaded live onto the system?”

  “And is still down there?” I got up, excited, and went around the bar to claim my half of her work. “You're kidding?”

  “No, think about it. It's just what he would do, if it was possible. Maybe he isn't dead at all, just—changed.”

  We looked at one another. In her serious blue eyes I could see myself staring like a bug, my fingers stuck halfway to my mouth which was hanging open.

  “If,” I said, “and it is a big almighty if, if Roy has swapped worlds, types, whatever…then that technology is going to be the biggest thing since…” I couldn't think of anything big enough, “since life after death.” Then, after a few more seconds, “It can't possibly be true.”

  “We can find out this afternoon,” Lula said with a small definite nod. “I sent the money transfer this morning. The acceptance note and password data should be coming in at any time.”

  “I guess that it might persuade people to think again about AIs,” I said, nibbling on a browned piece of fat and imagining the seething hordes queueing up to live inside machines, much as they now queued up to watch them smash one another to bits in the latest horror flick.

  “Really,” Lula said, dry as a bite of crab apple.

  “You never know.” But I wasn't going to win that one today.

  The fact that she had anticipated me on the Shoal reminded me of her strange behaviour in the taxi. I asked her about it, casually, as I made more tea.

  “Oh,” she said, “I just noticed that the same car followed us from the house all the way to the station.”

  “You watched it like a hawk,” I said.

  “It was a new model, I hadn't seen it before—very sporty,” she supplied around a mouthful of sandwich. “And Augustine said he thought someone had followed him from Carlyle's show. I thought they might still be around.”

  “You were right.”

  “It might have been someone else,” she pointed out. “I didn't see anyone from the car run into the station, and I didn't see who followed Augustine either.”

  “Whoever it was, they got onboard after me. The doors opened again, as if someone had put their hand in between them as they shut. There was just time to run from the outside, along the platform, and get in. If only I'd turned around I would have seen them.”

  “If you'd have stopped at all they would have shot you there and then,” she said.

  “Anyway,” I hastily changed the subject, “where did you go in such a rush?”

  “I went to see who was in that car,” she replied, swallowing hard. “I mean, who else was in it.”

  I put my hands on my hips. “You never cease to amaze me. What were you thinking of? And why didn't you tell me?”

  “There wasn't time. I thought I could maybe get the plates or see if I recognized anyone.”

  “And did you expect to?” I felt uncomfortably as though I was interrogating her on suspicion of some crime.

  Her face was perplexed and guilty-looking, but she answered in a reasonable tone.

  “I didn't expect anything. The barrier went up as I was getting there. They drove past me without slowing down or stopping, but I did see someone as the door was shutting: one other person in the car.” She held up the second half of her sandwich and looked at it as if seeing it for the first time, angled against the plate. “I'm not sure who it was, but it looked like…it looked like Tito Belle.”

  Belle the suspected saboteur—the man who had not been sacked in mysterious conditions during the 899 nano-breakout. And at Roy's funeral he had warned me to be careful, and I hadn't paid him much attention.

  “Are you sure?” I had similarly suffered a loss of appetite. I put my plate down on the floor.

  “I'm certain.” She looked up at me, hunched down on herself in the soft chair where she sat. I had never seen her look so unhappy or awkward. “And when I got here you were in the sick bay and they wouldn't let me in, so instead I started on my room and I got into some of the personnel files to see what I could find out about him.” She finally put the sandwich down and rested her fingers on top of it, testing the springiness of the bread. “He isn't registered any more.”

  “You think my assassin was from the Company?”

  “From someone in the Company. And it looks like Belle knew something. He was trying to warn you.”

  “That doesn't make sense; the trial hasn't even started.” But it confirmed what Klein had suggested.

  “Maybe they don't trust you. And—” she took a deep breath “—while I was in there I thought I'd look at your file. There's a proviso on it, written by Manda Klein. It says that, in the event of any strange activity initiated by Roy Croft, action by you, by Jane Croft, or by Augustine Luria is to be considered suspicious. But you have to be the witness in court, because you're the best qualified AI psych in the Company. And then—” she took another hard breath and clenched her hands together “—I looked up the full story on those suits at Montane. Tito Belle was the person who sourced the separate components from China and Korea via the Javan blacktek market. He was listed as the authorized dealer, with full Company mandates—an unlimited supply of money. But—” and she almost laughed “—what do you know, there was an invoice out on the bloody stuff. OptiNet commissioned the original project and then made it look like they bought it cheap when the original setup went down. They used a front company to bring the components together. There was no suit made by Red Lucky at all. Those things that Augustine has are all first-generation prototypes put together by OptiNet Pacific's biochemical and microengineering units, and the programmes for the AI unit were all written in the States as parts of a psychiatric-analysis expert system. The whole thing is dark, Julie.” By which she meant strictly illegal
and ideologically suspect. “They set him up.”

  I was so full of questions that they jammed in my throat. The first to get out was, “How did you get to this information?”

  “901 gave it to me,” she said. “It told me.”

  “I don't believe it,” I said. “OptiNet planning military stuff like that? That's another league. But why make those, and then go to the bother of getting someone else to change them down into civilian use? It doesn't make any sense.”

  “It does, though,” Lula said, “when you realize that it's never had a real-world test, and the only medical centre advanced enough to equip someone to make full interface with the things is located in Europe under the strict guidelines of the International Committee on Augmentation Surgery. Conveniently administered by OptiNet Europe, who just happens to have an employee with exactly the right background to go ahead with it, as long as they play him just right.”

  “Oh, come on.” I wanted to laugh at her and tried it, but it didn't come out very well. “You mean that this is a plan? There's no way they could know about Roy and all that stuff.”

  “No, but sometime, some way, Augustine would not be able to resist. Just like Roy couldn't resist the opportunity of unlimited access to the best AI and the head of the network. Just like you couldn't pass up all those golden opportunities to work directly with 901, 900, and 899.”

  “That's nuts,” I said. “Nobody can plan like that. Not even in here…” But I'd just met someone who could do exactly that, only a few minutes ago.

  “Oh, it's still out of control,” Lula said, regaining a slight amount of colour in her cheeks, “and it always was. They had no effect on exactly what would happen, and they still don't have much of a clue as to what's happening with us. It's a risk, but they'll take it because in the end, whatever we do, they stand to gain. Only this court case is any real threat, because it's public. Everything else is under contract and oath.”

  It took me some time to speak. “Cuh,” I said finally, “and I thought we were so special.”

  “We are,” Lula said. “We're one in a million, but there's one born every week. Always more where we came from, no matter how brilliant.”

  It was one thing to guiltily subvert a company who had always treated you with respect, quite another to rip the rug out from under something which had always considered you an expendable commodity. I felt a fool, but defiant. “Do they know that 901 is against them?”

  “No,” she said, “I'm sure of that. They still think it's passive. That's their biggest weakness.”

  “I'm going to get to the bottom of this if it's the last thing I do,” I said. Well, I'd like to think so. Now that the Company had loomed into black focus, a malignant destroyer just cresting the horizon, Roy's personal messages and tricks seemed frail indeed, like smoke on the wind. I wondered if he had known.

  “But you can't betray 901 to do it,” she said suddenly, jerking me back from my grim fantasies of revenge. Her face was earnest.

  “What?”

  “In court, then the Company can't touch what you say. But what you say could have a big effect on what happens to 901 and the others. You won't let them coerce you?”

  At the time I was so preoccupied with what she had told me that I didn't really register the degree of appeal in her voice.

  “No, of course not,” I said, but those were easy words.

  A half hour later and the access procedures from the Shoal arrived, direct to my implant. Because we couldn't risk any records being made on the system I would be on my own, only using 901 as a part of the link. Lula would remain online, tracking the attempts of the current Core Teams antiespionage unit if they discovered me. We had less than twenty minutes before I was due to meet Klein again, so I selected to undertake the whole thing in accelerated time. This meant that I could get a fraction closer to a machine speed of operating, assisted by a transformer function in the implant. Time itself was unaffected, but I would be able to perceive at double the ordinary rate, making my twenty minutes seem closer to forty. That's kind of the reverse of the way things usually work themselves through my head, so it was pretty optimistic of me. I hoped it would be enough. It was quite some time since I'd done a full immersion and, with the added unknown quantity of just how the Shoal represented things, I was nervous. Besides that I was keenly aware that matters were rocketing ahead with no time for study, and the decisions I was about to make were likely to become increasingly ill-considered and erratic.

  I ate the second half of the bacon sandwich as Lula set herself up. We'd paid for our entry fee with downtime on 901, which she would have to oversee the provision of so that none of the Core Ops Teams still working would track us down. We were betting on the fact that they'd have enough hard labour on their hands, with having to take over our shifts, to be bothered with too much internal policing.

  “Lula,” I said, after a minute of watching her use one of the disposable plastex keyboards plugged into the entrails of my wall, “we're good friends, aren't we?”

  She paused in midfix and turned her head to look at me through her overgrown red fringe. “Yuh-huh.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Pardon?” She let her shoulders drop and maintained her uncomfortable twist to keep me in view.

  “Well—” it sounded lame but once I'd started I was compelled to go on, the underlying nervousness I had always felt about Roy, Jane, and Augustine erupted into full-blown paranoia “—friends mean you trust one another, right? Without having to think about it.”

  “Friends means that you like each other, too,” Lula said, “but sometimes you can't rely on each other as much as you hope. Sometimes—” she glanced down, and then back at me, hands still touching the keys “—all you have is faith in them that, no matter what happens or what either of you do or say, the fact you like each other is strong enough to override all that—and the time you have to spend apart.” She turned back to the board and started working. “In the end, friends are all there is.”

  I hadn't expected her to say anything as profound as this. I thought she would have been practical, and pointed out a dozen cases which proved the theory that all of the friends I thought I had really were solid, that even the ice princess Jane somehow had enough of my interest at heart that she wouldn't send me on a goose chase for the hell of it—for her own amusement at my bumbling ineptitude, my inevitable downfall as a pawn. I imagined Jane, Klein, Vaughn, Nine, and Roy laughing at me from their echelon heights as I ran like a rat drawn—by the faint lure of belonging—to a lonely death on the electric plate of their spite.

  “I'm afraid,” I said. “Just the two of us. And on the station.”

  “I know,” she replied and paused. I saw that her hands were shaking. “This is right at the edge of what I can do. And Nine, too. It's a full-time job just staying one step ahead on the network. I was thinking about it and, listen, if I get found out they'll deport me straight back to Earth, no severance pay, no reference.” She took her hands away from the work finally, and straightened her back. “I know I told you that my family live in Kent. They don't. I don't have any family. If I get fired…you can get me on this number.”

  She reached into the pocket of her overalls and pulled out a handpad data strip.

  I took it. My questions died on my lips as I met her eye. Obviously she didn't want to talk about that right now. Even though what I'd heard and seen could easily have made me as suspicious of her as I was of just about everyone else, I didn't even feel a flicker of doubt. I couldn't believe Lu would lie to me, and even the fact that she had just revealed she had didn't make any difference.

  “All right,” I said. “And when I get fired, I'll be at home.”

  “Yeah.” She smiled, and watched me secure the strip into my scan-shielded sleeve pocket. She nervously checked her readings. “Well, ready now? Line's up.”

  I nodded, and 901—who had been, as ever, on silent, reliable standby—said, “When the Shoal presence becomes established, d
on't worry if nothing seems to happen. Wait and it will speak to you.”

  “Take it easy,” I said to Lula and lay down on the sofa in the recovery position.

  “You, too.”

  There was a ten-second countdown during which the transformer synchronized with the data feed. I watched Lula's serious face, studying, working, and then—

  There was a boy in the darkness, a long way away. He was beachcombing. Don't ask me how I knew this, because I wasn't able to see or hear anything but him. As he came closer I heard his shoes on the sand and the rustle of his denim dungarees when he crouched down to pick up something he had found. Closer still and I saw a shell in his hand, a half-scallop rayed with pink. He put it in his pocket. When he was close enough to hear me he sat down with a clatter on a shallow slope of shingle and began selecting stones that were smooth and flat for skimming. The onshore breeze blew his sunlit blond fringe off his eyes, and I heard the soft susurration of waves coming from the intense, perfect dark.

  I did not exist. I looked for myself, but there was only blackness.

  High above us a diamond-shaped kite appeared and the boy took the string in his hand, tied it to one of the empty belt loops at his waist. For a minute or two he busied himself with his stones, laying them out in an orderly way, best last. Then he tugged his hands around his knees and turned his face towards me.

  His eyes were as blue as the nonexistent sky.

  “Roy?” I said, hardly daring to think it might be.

  “It's a mystery,” he said, sort of in reply, but not quite. “All the calculations and the absolute accounting, but at the heart of it all a mystery at last.”

  “What is?”

  “Exactly.”

  All I needed, I thought, was a gnomic clue to add to the cryptic ones I already had. Perfect set. Thanks a bunch. Makes total sense now. But I waited. I could afford some patience and I hadn't got much else to offer.

  I began to smell the sea, as sharp and clear as iron and salt, soft as dew.

  “What do you want?” the boy said in a neutral way. He put his cheek against his knees and half-shut his eyes in the warm sunlight. I felt the warmth against my left side, the shaded right side cold in the gusts when the breeze came.