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by Simon Royle

  If he chooses an Arabic name then is there a relationship to that Geographic? Or is the fact that he is a Caucasian more relevant and the name is meant to be translated? If the first name means something then so does the surname, Muraz. There isn’t a straightforward translation into English for Muraz, unlike with Gabriel. Therefore if it isn’t straightforward, perhaps it is an anagram.

  She stood and stretched. Her one hundred and seventy-eight cents frame twisted to the right and left to work out the knots in her spine which sounded with satisfying pops as she wrenched it sideways again. She straightened and walked across the black floor barefoot until she reached Dom sitting in the north-eastern corner of the room. Dominique, ‘just call me Dom’ Signora, was an anthropologist with triple degrees in social, biological and cultural anthropology, and he loved jazz.

  She said, “Have you got anything on his DNA?”

  Dom swiveled in his Siteazy to face her, his hands on his thighs. “No matches. Nothing. Of course, this guy’s too good. But his DNA is fascinating.”

  “Why?” she asked and sat cross-legged on the floor beside him. He turned the Siteazy back to the Dev in front of him and tapped a key on the console.

  “Look at this,” he said, pointing to the DNA chart. He had constructed a most likely origin from the DNA — matching it with other known DNA and bringing it down back through time to its various sources. “This is some mix. French, Polynesian, English, and Greek. How’s that for a combo? These are the most obvious strands. Do you know how many matches we have on record?”

  “No, not off the top my head,” said Marty with an innocent smile.

  “Sorry, of course you don’t. Well, the answer is none, and the probability of that…”

  “Yes. Off the scale. That I do know.”

  Dom stretched out his legs in front of him and folded his hands behind his head. He said, “I’m thinking about his whole meditation thing as well. He had to learn that somewhere and certainly his demeanor is really more Asian than anything else. Well, the point is, when you throw that into the DNA mix the whole picture becomes even more confusing because now it adds Asian culture into that mix.”

  “What about the linguistics of the statement?”

  “Ah the linguini,” said Dom, and smiled at his own joke, his eyes darting to Marty to see if she smiled too. “I was hoping you’d ask me that because it rounds out my current theory nicely. The answer is the linguistics are almost deliberately American in Geographic origin. Which supports my theory that this Jibril comes from everywhere.” At this Dom let out a burst of laughter and Marty had to smile.

  “All right. Go down the strands again and see if you find any close matches,” she said, rising in a fluid motion, not using her hands to push herself off the floor. She turned and walked south west to the opposite corner of the room.

  Entering the University of Dubai at fourteen, and before she had finished her first year in behavioral sciences there, Fatima Farzi had written a book on behavior that became the course book for the first year students the following year. By her second year she had passed the level of knowledge acquisition required to become a doctor and asked her professors what she was going to study in her third year. Typically, a Masters in behavioral sciences was a four year course. Her professors, with nothing left to give, asked her to keep writing. She had just turned seventeen when she produced the new course material for the whole four years. Working on it full-time she finished it within six months. She was now nineteen, a virgin, extremely shy, and perhaps the most brilliant member of the team.

  Marty laid a hand on the teenager’s shoulder and leant forward to see what she was working on. Fatima jumped slightly and turned to Marty. On seeing it was her, she relaxed and smiled. She loved Marty like a big sister, and Marty felt the same way about Fatima, protecting her from the masses of UNPOL.

  “Anything?” she asked, and nodded at the image of Jibril, or Gabriel, on the screen.

  “Yes, the absence of behavior is a behavior in and of itself, and that is all I’ve got. Sorry.”

  “That’s OK, it’s not your fault. I’ve got nothing either, just ideas and they keep changing. But what do you mean, the absence of behavior?”

  Fatima smiled her shy smile, which Marty knew meant that she was about to hear something very clever and unique.

  “I cataloged his behaviors from the moment of containment to his escape. He gives away nothing. There is no behavior. He doesn’t get angry, sad, happy, confused or mad. The whole time, he maintains a singular behavior. And that is his behavior. He is totally under control at all times. His behavior is no behavior. Which means his behavior is control.”

  “OK,” said Marty, “and where does that leave us? What else?”

  Fatima chewed her bottom lip as if debating whether or not to share with Marty what she knew. Marty waited patiently, softly smiling an encouraging smile. Fatima blurted out, “I think he’s really handsome,” and blushed bright red, her eyes flashing and looking around the room to see if Dom or Stanislav had heard.

  “So do I,” Marty said and squeezed Fatima’s shoulder lightly. “Very handsome. But how about his behavior? Is there anything else you sense?”

  Fatima had been feeling guilty, but on seeing Marty’s smile and hearing her confirmation, felt better about what she had really been thinking about Jibril. She said, “If he is controlling his behaviors to the extent that he can hide all of them from our observation then the conclusion we can draw is that he is operating on at least two levels. One level is his public persona and the other is his real persona. The important thing here is that we believe his public persona is his real persona when in fact it is a fabrication. This means that he is capable of controlling not just his behavior but the behavior of others so they perceive him incorrectly. He exploits the concept of ‘at face value’ and projects that face value convincingly through his passivity. Getting people to perceive something when you’re doing nothing is quite a skill.”

  “Yes. That’s good thinking, Fatima. Excellent. How about why? Why is he doing this? You’ve given me what he’s doing and I agree with you, but why is he doing it?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Can you think about that for us?”

  Fatima smiled. “That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ll think some more though. Are you hungry yet?”

  “Not yet. Why don’t you wait. I should be ready in another hour and then we can eat together, OK?”

  Fatima rolled her eyes at Marty’s look and stance. Fatima loved to eat and her body reflected that. At ninety kilogs in weight and only one hundred and fifty cents tall, Fatima was a plump girl with the most beautiful eyes that Marty had ever seen. “OK, Marty, another hour.”

  Marty smiled at her and straightened up. With a pat on Fatima’s shoulder she walked across the room to Stanislav. Stanislav sat in between and equidistant from Dom and Fatima, in the south east section of the circular room. Marty had chosen the north west area in honor of one her favorite flicks, and she and Dom guarded the door that entered from the northern-most point of the room. They each had a quarter circle of Devscreen that could be divided up or made single at a touch on the track-balls in their Devcockpit consoles.

  Stanislav entered the ‘School of Hard Knocks’ the day he was born, traveling the hardest road of them all to the 188th floor of UNPOL Headquarters Deep Trace Operations Unit. An orphan raised by the City of Tyumen, Stanislav was brilliant at mathematics. The Tyumen Technopark had been his gateway to being recognized, as his skill in cryptography and eavesdropping was first exploited by the Russian mafia. Upon leaving the squat cement block of a school where his brilliance at mathematics was ignored by his teachers, he was recruited by the Russkaya Mafiya and placed in Tyumen technopark to steal secrets.

  He was seventeen when he was arrested for supplying confidential information gleaned from the airwaves of the Corps and Ents operating in Tyumen. Ordered to contribute a year of his time to working with UNPOL, cracking criminal gangs operatin
g in the Urals, he was so successful that within four months he was transferred to UNPOL Headquarters and given the opportunity to work with them on a permanent basis. As thin as Fatima was fat, Stanislav was one hundred and eighty cents tall and weighed fifty-five kilogs. He was also an albino.

  Stanislav was hopelessly in love with Fatima, but never dared to say it. He didn’t have to, because Fatima knew it, but she was hopelessly in love with Dom, who also knew it, but he was hopelessly in love with Marty and hoped she didn’t know it. Marty loved them all but she had already given her heart to another and all that was left was for her to guide them and love them with what was left over. Misfits all, including Dom, who was so handsome, and so perfect, and so chronically insecure. The Cave was their sanctuary and Marty, through being ‘normal’, was their leader and representative. The thought made her smile. She was the biggest misfit of them all.

  Martine Shorne, Marty, Queen of the Dev. She understood more about the labyrinths of the digital landscape than anyone she knew. Most people have blood running through their veins but she had Dev code running through hers. Somehow, and she didn’t know how, it had just always been there. She saw the essence of data and was able to perceive its origin and meaning.

  Stanislav was laid out on his sleeper. A Dev helmet over his head, the mirrored visor reflecting the black of the ceiling.

  She left him alone and walked back to her Devcockpit.

  Chapter 10

  A Change of Plan

  Jonah’s Env, Unit A, 20th floor, Woodlands Envplex, Woodlands, New Singapore

  Thursday 12 December 2109, 10:15am +8 UTC

  Picking up my Devstick I smiled thinking of the trip ahead. I couldn’t remember feeling this excited about anything in a long time. My smile faded as I remembered Gabriel’s thoughts again inside my head, ‘You are not Jonah’, and I remembered that the only thing of me that I really knew for sure was mine was my thoughts. The door to the Env swished open and I headed out.

  I got on my Devstick and called up a map of walkys around the Envplex my Env was in, and planned a trip on the walkys that would take me around the edge of New Singapore to the main Lev ports that allow travel to Phuket. Taking a vac was unusual behavior for me, but I believed that my message to Sir Thomas and the little shopping excursion I was planning would allay suspicions. I rode the Lev down to surface and walked over to the nearest walky that took me to the main southeast walky from my Complex in Woodlands down to Tampines and Changi — the main Lev concourse and airship port. It was a sunny day but humid. Soon my cotton outer was soaking up the sweat tracking off me in little streams, but it felt good to be out and about as I traveled the walky with my hand on the rail as advised by the safety warnings.

  At Tampines there was an old open air market where all kinds of things were sold and purchased. It was here that I planned to use my cred and buy some beach clothes. The morning’s late starters had all but gone by the time I entered Tampines. I got off the PSE1 walky and headed over to the Lev that would take me to Sun Plaza Park. It was just after ten and if I could get the shopping done quickly I could still make it to Tha Sala before lunch.

  The Sun Plaza Open Air market was a mass of white sails and brightly colored banners, each proclaiming the wares of the stalls under the sails. I entered into a narrow aisle between the stalls and asked my Devstick to give me a layout of the market. The map came up and the clothes stalls were two rows over from where I was. I cut through the aisles selling fashionable teenage outers and footwear. A pair of white cloth shoes caught my eye, hanging from the sail of one of the stalls.

  A fat Chinese woman, sat on a blue plastic stool which was placed on a low wooden table, looked down at me from within the stall. I reached up and touched the shoes with my hand and said, “Do you have these in a size 10?” She nodded and using a long plastic pole with a hook on it, extracted another pair and dipped the pole. They slid down to my hand.

  “How much?”

  “Twenty cred.”

  I nodded. I could have bargained but that wasn’t why I was here. In my pro bono work with UNPOL the one thing I see time and again is how criminals are caught because someone else is caught. Your name comes up because you bought something or called the person who has been contained and as such you get tagged for surveillance. I assumed that since I was the last person to talk with Jibril, that no matter how innocent I may appear, I would be tagged. With my call to the Vacenv, my message to Sir Thomas and buying beach clothes on cred in Tampines market, I hoped to show whoever might be watching me that I was going to the beach.

  I called up my cred and held up my Devstick, the fat woman held up hers and I checked to see that only twenty cred had been deducted from mine. “Thanks,” I said, and got a smile in return as I walked on.

  Two rows over, all of the stores were selling clothing, inners and outers of all descriptions. About twenty meters down the lane, between the stalls, I spotted what I was looking for — the stall I had seen when I had been here before. I headed towards a sign saying ‘Life’s a Beach’, which had a smiling droopy mustached guy standing on a beach wearing nothing but a sombrero next to the name written in red on a white background.

  The guy behind the stall was about one hundred and fifty cents tall and couldn’t have been older than nineteen, with a beard that refused to be and mustache equally struggling to define itself. He looked up at me and with a smile said, “Hi man, you need some threads for the beach?”

  He had a very high toned squeaky voice and, stifling a laugh, I said, “Yeah.”

  “Awesome,” he replied, smiling even more broadly. He had braces on his teeth. “So where you headed to, dude?”

  I returned his smile and said, “I’m heading up the coast to the Thai Geographic for a few days.”

  “Cool.”

  I spotted a pair of black knee-length swimming shorts and asked, “How much?”

  “Oh those, they’re great man, super-fast dry and the color never fades. Only fifteen cred and I’ll throw in a ‘Life’s a Beach’ T-shirt.”

  “I tell you what, I’ll give you thirty creds for the shorts and that white cotton — that is cotton right? — shirt hanging there, and that bag,” I said, pointing first at the shirt hanging on the wall of the stall behind him and then a ‘Life’s a Beach’ white cloth bag on the side of the stall.

  His eyes suddenly got older and wiser and dropping the beach bum slang he said, “I’ll tell you what, forty creds and it’s a deal.”

  I looked at him, smiled and said, “Deal.” He climbed up on a stool to get the shirt and grabbing the shorts and my free T-shirt stuffed them into the cloth bag and handed them to me with another smile. I held up my Devstick and swiped the transaction.

  “Stay loose dude,” he said, dropping back into his beach character now the deal was done.

  I retraced my steps out of the market and back to the Lev that had brought me here. Twenty minutes after I’d left the PSE1 walky I was back on it. Mission done, my thoughts turned to the travel that was ahead of me, and especially the fact that within a couple of hours at most I’d be by the sea on a white sandy beach.

  Reaching Changi ten minutes later I headed for the Lev port that would take me to Phuket. The massive domed concourse of the Changi Lev and airship port was as busy as any place that operates on a continuous time cycle with zero downtime. In the cool muted echoes of the concourse I checked the times for the Levs to Phuket and saw that I had at least twenty minutes to spare before a Lev with an empty seat was available.

  I was hungry. I hadn’t had anything to eat that day and I’d been awake for over four hours. I headed down a short walky to the lower level of the concourse where travelers of all Geographics were taking a time out. Just off the walky there was a small cafe set by a fountain with a violinist entertaining the people while they ate.

  I took a table near the fountain and studied the Devscreen set into its surface, selecting a croque monsieur and a latte as I confirmed the deduction from my cred. Three servb
ots were serving food and taking orders, their squat white bodies shining and bearing the blue Panasonic logo. One of them dispatched itself from the serving hub and propelled itself towards me around the edge of all the tables. With a polite 'thank you for your custom' it deposited the toasted sandwich and latte carefully on my table and left. The violinist was playing a jaunty tune with her eyes shut and swaying to the music. She looked young and was probably a student picking up extra cred doing a double.

  I had left the Dev on and the screen was scrolling through suggestions. This perfume, that timepiece, toys for kids… Suddenly my eye caught a suggestion that sent a thrill through me. I hit pause on the Devscreen and the feed stopped scrolling. The suggestion was for travel to the Moon, but what had caught my eye was the particular resort which was being suggested. ‘Buy two, get three free nights at the Nineveh Hot Springs Resort.’ The word ‘Nineveh’ seemed to get larger and more focused the more I looked at it. I quickly glanced around me, but no one was paying any attention. Gabriel had said that Jonah was vomited out onto the shores of Nineveh.

  Was this it? Was this the sign? Gabriel had said that a sign would come and when I saw it I would know it and do the right thing. A quick find on the Devscreen mapped out the route to the Moon travel port which was situated in the right of the Changi concourse. Did he mean literally do the right thing, meaning go to the right?

  I was in a dilemma. I’d spent all morning thinking about being normal and now I was confronted with doing something very abnormal. I had never been to the Moon. Never even thought about going to the Moon. Not only that but my actions in the morning would look doubly suspicious. Shit! OK, think. I checked the Dev again for the departure times for the Moon. My message inbox light was flashing red on my Devstick. I had ten mins before the next flight took off for the Moon and after that an hour’s wait. I opened my inbox and saw that there was a reply from Sir Thomas. I opened it.