A Box of Birds

by Charles Fernyhough

  ‘Do they know you’re here?’

  ‘Who? The sanity police?’

  He puffs out breathlessness through a round O of a mouth, then pins it out into a smile.

  ‘I needed to see you.’

  We’re upstairs in my living room. He’s sitting on my cream sofa, clutching his rucksack on his lap. I’ve made him some tea but he seems to have forgotten about it. I crouch next to him in my dressing gown, trying to resurrect the stove.

  ‘I need you,’ he’s saying. ‘It won’t work without you.’

  I sigh, or perhaps it’s a yawn. ‘You think I’m a competent person, Gareth. I’m not. I’m useless.’

  ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘You just don’t yet know what the organism is capable of, Dr Churcher.’

  ‘Gareth...’ I break up some kindling and poke it into a complex of glowing coals. ‘How did you get up here?’

  I sense him turning on the cushions, watching me. I blow gently on the glow, trying not to disturb the warm powder that’s sitting there. A skinny ghost of flame uncurls from the ash-speckled black.

  ‘I climbed up the fire escape. I reversed the evacuation procedure. Pretending there wasn’t a fire made it much easier.’

  ‘You could have been killed.’

  He seems to take it as a compliment. I catch him looking out towards the balcony, trying to work out if anyone else is here.

  ‘Have you seen James?’ he says.

  The question throws me. I punt the stove door shut and crouch there, watching the brand-new flame.

  ‘What, since yesterday afternoon?’

  He looks at me, eyebrows raised. I’m trying to work out whether he could have seen us together on the bridge last night.

  ‘Has he invited you over to meet the storytellers yet?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘He lives in a squat in Pelton. When he’s not living it up in college, that is. There’s no mum or dad on the scene. His family is a bunch of militants with an unhealthy interest in this guru called David Overstrand.’

  ‘I don’t know much about James,’ I breeze. ‘You might have noticed, I have quite a few students to keep track of.’

  He scans the interior of my treehouse suspiciously. He’s wearing a white shirt unbuttoned at the neck. It has a faint nylony translucence, like fish-skin, an almost-wetness that clings and makes his nipples visible. It’s come untucked at the waist, and there’s a long rip running upwards from one corner. He must have snagged it on a bush or something on his way through the forest. On top of the shirt is a thin grey anorak, the sort that elderly men go shopping in. He’s shivering. That sweat smell must be old. He perches forward on the sofa with his elbows on his knees, ready for an escape, fire or no fire.

  ‘So why did you need to see me?’

  I stand up from the stove, still wobbly with sleep. He glances at me, looking pained. I go and sit down on the other sofa, facing him, tightening the dressing gown over my knees.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said, Miss. It’s all starting to make sense.’

  His sticky-out ears turn forward like an owl’s. He seems attuned to sounds as much as anything. For a weird moment I wonder if he uses those thyroid eyes at all.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Sansom. What they’re up to.’

  I catch him glancing over towards the kitchenette. It seems to have struck him that I actually live up here.

  ‘And what are they up to?’

  ‘Actually, it’s pretty obvious. It just took a few lucky accidents for me to see it clearly. Have you ever had the feeling that something strange is going on, that you’ve got access to knowledge you shouldn’t possibly have? That’s the tip. I’m offering you the iceberg.’

  I think of McQueen. The iceberg chills, right through to the heart. ‘Go on.’

  ‘It’s about Ermintrude. The Lycee’s top-secret server. And what’s on it that Sansom want so much.’

  I told him about the server myself, in my lab this afternoon. But I’m certain I never referred to it by name.

  ‘What do you know about Ermintrude?’

  ‘I went on to the network when you were out of the room. I saw the icon on your desktop and I knew it was the big one. I couldn’t get on to it. It’s really secure.’

  ‘It needs to be. With those mapping data, you could be marketing an effective treatment for dementia within three years.’

  ‘Exactly. Which is why Sansom want it so badly.’

  ‘And which is why they’re not getting it. I told you about the passwords. To get anything off Ermintrude you’d need to know every single one. That’s a lot of heads you’d have to hold a gun to.’

  He stands up suddenly.

  ‘Have you got a car?’

  ‘You could hardly call it a car.’

  He looks around for the door, and then turns back to me, flustered.

  ‘Look, Miss, Sansom are smart. They’ve spotted something that no one else has spotted. If you’re going to stimulate the Lorenzo Circuit, you’ve got to speak its language. Even if we knew exactly where the pathways run, how are we going to get information into them in the right format? There’s a system incompatibility. An assumption that silicon chip cannot speak unto neurone. Which is true, if you want to look at it that way.’

  He’s going too fast. But mania is fast. Fast is the point.

  ‘What other way is there of looking at it?’

  ‘It’s simple. There needs to be a solution that will make the stuff that a computer does directly intelligible to a human nervous system.’

  ‘Is this the idea you were trying to sell in New York?’

  ‘Yes. And it’s the reason you’re going to give me a lift to Sansom.’ My laugh alarms me. I must sound as demented as he does. ‘When?’

  ‘Now.’

  ‘We’ve obviously got a hijack situation here, but I can’t see a gun.’

  He grins. ‘Not hijack. Just blackmail.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t need a gun, Miss. I’ve got the fact that you allowed me to get within sniffing distance of Ermintrude. The Lycee’s most important and secret mainframe computer. I’m sure Security would like to get their hands on that particular narrative.’

  ‘Are you threatening me?’

  ‘I’m trying to persuade you. It’s for your own good. This is going to make you a very rich humanoid.’

  My heart thumps, a sucker for the adrenaline rush. If he blabs to Security that I let him onto the network, I’ll lose my access privileges. I can’t make sense of my data without access to Dougal. A fierce burning breaks out on my neck, metastasizes to my armpits, and then fades to a fizzy calm.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘You only have to get me into the car park. You don’t have to show your face. You can wait for me in the car.’

  ‘What makes you think I can get you through the Sansom barriers?’

  ‘You’ve got a pass card. I’ve done my homework, Miss. I’ve been looking at all the published articles on human–machine interfaces. Checking the acknowledgements sections very carefully. You know, the bits where people thank their mums and their girlfriends for making them all those cups of tea? I’d say that a certain ex-boyfriend of yours used to work at Sansom on exactly this same topic.’

  He’s bluffing. Even if he’s found out about the Pereira Effect, he can’t know that I’ve still got Mateus’ swipecard.

  ‘If I did have a pass card, it would be years out of date. They change the codes every day.’

  ‘Not necessarily. Sansom suffers from a worrying complacency about security. The new iris scanners have made the buildings so secure, they’ve let other things lapse. The car park security system was due to be upgraded last year. They got the new server in place but it didn’t work. For about three weeks people could come and go as they pleased. Then Conscience got a bit too excited one day and a couple of them got into the main compound. The Sansom bosses thought: We can’t have this, so they just went back to the old
system and seemed to forget about it. They never updated it. The old cards still work.’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘He said.’ He jerks a thumb over his shoulder, meaning James. ‘All the Conscience people know the loopholes in Sansom security. They don’t want to use them until they’re ready for something big. The buildings are safe, sure. But the main compound: it’s not the fortress you think it is.’

  ‘And you can get all you need just from looking around the car park?’

  He nods. ‘You don’t even have to get out of the car.’

  I want him out of here. I want to go back to bed and forget this ever happened.

  ‘If I drive you to Sansom and let you have a look around, will you go straight home afterwards?’

  ‘After fast food,’ he says.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Sansom

  ◉

  A car is not a self-portrait. Just because my vehicle is falling apart, it doesn’t mean my life is.

  ‘Kyrie eleison,’ Gareth says. ‘What do you call this?’

  ‘It’s a Shanghai-VW Santana. Chinese thing. Built by communists for communists.’

  ‘What’s a communist?’

  I think for a moment. ‘It’s a sort of dreamer.’

  ‘How can you afford to run it?’

  ‘I can’t. You’re paying for the petrol.’

  I have to dismantle his door from the inside. He climbs in and settles down with both hands folded in his lap, as if afraid of touching anything.

  ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this. It’s the middle of the night.’

  ‘Don’t worry. It won’t take long.’

  I have to reach down to put my driving shoes on. He finds this funny, that I have special shoes for driving.

  ‘Wait...’

  He reaches into his rucksack and pulls out a tiny camcorder. He flicks the screen out and starts filming my shoes as I drive. I can’t stand people watching me drive. All that handbrake and checking mirror stuff. Especially when you’re in a communist-era Santana which stalls every time you apply the brakes.

  ‘There you are,’ he says, turning the camera up over my mud-spattered jeans. ‘Documentation. Proof that all of this happened.’

  ‘I could live without that.’

  My Lycee pass card gets me out of the Forest Campus and onto the empty road east towards Sansom. The night has a broken, unreal feel about it, as if only the flaring nets of streetlight were holding it together. Thankfully we have this cat-eyed blacktop to ourselves. The streetlights drop away and we’re lost in the darkness of open countryside. It’s ten minutes before we pass another car.

  ‘You’d better not be long,’ I tell him. ‘The place is going to have security all over it.’

  ‘Unlikely. It’s Sunday morning. They’ll all be tucked up in bed with their heated wife-systems.’

  ‘There’s going to be a man on the barrier. He’ll want to see some ID.’

  ‘Every door will open,’ he says, ‘if you know where to put the explosive.’

  The turn-off to Sansom is marked by a discreet green-and-gold plaque. It’s the sort of poised understatement that only the world’s top corporations can afford. From here to the West Gate there’s half a mile of evergreen forest. Half a mile of disorienting blackness: Sansom’s first line of defence. The darkness is studded with tiny red diodes, unsleeping camera lenses. The forest films itself; owls and badgers star.

  ‘There’s the barrier,’ Gareth says. ‘This is where you’re glad you brought your pass card.’

  I drop to third. The Santana moans, slowed by its own racing engine. Second. I need to keep the revs up to stop the thing from stalling. The booth is lit, and occupied. We’re close enough to see the dismaying silhouette of a man.

  ‘Shit. I told you ...’

  Gareth hangs the camcorder around his neck and starts rummaging in his rucksack. I pull up alongside the window and wait for the guard to raise his eyes from the Italian football. His voice crackles from a speaker on the sealed glass.

  ‘Bat,’ he says.

  I gawp at him like a tourist.

  ‘Bat,’ he repeats. ‘Bat.’

  At which point my passenger is reaching across me, holding what looks like a small black metallic butterfly. He’s filming the booth-man, and the booth-man is getting camera-shy. I take the thing and display it coolly on the dip-moulded dashboard.

  ‘Go on,’ the man says, glancing at the bat and triggering some event on his console. The barrier goes up. I don’t even need Mateus’ pass card.

  We’re through. The five-metre chain-link fence rattles shut behind us. Sansom spreads out before us, glass-walled and light-studded, a Manhattan of the mind.

  ‘So where did you get that?’

  The illuminations scan across the close-shaved knots in his cheeks. He picks the bat up from the dashboard and tries to unscrew the end.

  ‘Conscience. They’ve all got them. To one of those bunny-lovers, a Sansom ID bat is as much a fashion accessory as the elegant green lapel-ribbon. You’re only as good as your Sansom access privileges.’

  ‘But won’t the guard know it’s stolen?’

  ‘He would, if he’d been wearing his virtual lights. He’s supposed to have them glued to his face. Our friend was slacking, having a footie break. That’s why he didn’t like me filming him.’

  ‘I see what you mean about security.’

  ‘Like I say, it’s not actually that hard to get into the compound. It’s so tight inside, they don’t really bother.’

  We cross the light railway track. The camcorder fills the car with turquoise reef-light.

  ‘So if you had that thing all the time, why did you need me?’

  ‘I needed your opinion. I need to know what you think.’

  We’re headed north, towards the biggest of the glass-fronted buildings, whose shopping-centre-in-space dome I can just see from my rooftop. I came here with Mateus once, a few months before our disastrous trip to Quebec. He was giving a promotion talk to some of his colleagues. The thing I remember most about the interior was the complete absence of any corporate ID. They’ll splash their logo across the façade of a twelfth-century abbey, but they wanted no trace of it in their European headquarters. After his talk they called him upstairs for further discussions, and I sat in the car park with the radio on, waiting for him to come down. At least I know there’s a car park. Gareth is filming a low bunker unscrolling on our right. The architecture is bomb-shelter. Strength, maybe, but Sansom doesn’t do beauty.

  ‘Animal wing,’ Gareth says. ‘They’ve made it student-proof.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You don’t think what?’

  I can feel the Santana losing it. I have to jam it into second and rev like mad.

  ‘Wind your window down.’

  He gets it half-way and then the handle comes off in his hand.

  ‘It’s the smell. There isn’t one. Whatever your security systems, you can’t lock in the stink of five thousand experimental mice.’

  ‘Maybe enculturated chimps don’t smell. They take showers and stuff.’

  I shake my head. ‘Look. There are windows. Daylight. You couldn’t maintain an artificial light routine in there. It’s the little things, Gareth: the fact that there are no anonymous-looking feed sacks piled up by the back door. No furnace chimney, so nowhere to burn dead bodies. Trust me. There are no animals in there.’

  We round the corner of the main building and clatter across the empty car park. I pull up facing the dome. The entire building is see-through, the guts of it detailed by the blue light of low-energy screen-savers. The huge entrance atrium is boutique-bright. Three guards are at the desk, talking.

  ‘So what’s the plan?’ I say.

  ‘I’m just going to have a look round. You wait here.’

  ‘You’re not going in. That bat will be useless. They change the codes every day.’

  ‘If you’re worried, I’ll leave it with you.’

&nbs
p; He reaches over and clips the bat to my lapel. His hand seems to linger, and for a moment I think this student–teacher thing is going to turn awkward. But then he’s palming his camcorder and banging the door open, and I’m watching him cut across the front of the car, heading back the way we came.

  My heart climbs the ladder of my ribs. If he tries to get in there, we’re in real trouble.

  He reaches the corner of the main building just as a security Land Cruiser is swinging into view. His pace doesn’t change. The Cruiser slows as Gareth passes. He’s headed around the back of the building, towards the place he thought was the animal wing. A mock antique street sign reads FLUORSPAR ROAD. There’s an exchange of words that has my heart lodging in the back of my throat. Satisfied, Security crawls on.

  Then I can’t see Gareth any more.

  Over in the atrium the guards are finding a joke in something. Two perch high up behind the bleached-wood counter, while the other, the storyteller, leans on it like a drunk in a bar. They’re all wearing virtual lights. Anyone who hisses through that electronic door will have their name, title and affiliation flashed up instantly on the inside of those goggles. The virtual lights know everything because the bat knows everything: access privileges, personal details, even how many credits you’ve got left in your refectory account. I touch the black metal with the tip of a finger, trying to imagine the volumes of information micro-chipped away in there. I wonder which poor Sansom lab rat this one codes for.

  They didn’t fit clocks in the communist-era Santana, so I fitted one myself: an old strapless fake Rolex from Kuala Lumpur, stuck to the dashboard with Blutack. It says 01:32a.m. The temperature inside the Santana nudges lower. I realise how much I depend on this communist-era heater. Tiredness weighs in my stomach, adds its millisecond-drag to my eyes. I close them, wanting the comfort of darkness, but then I feel too vulnerable. Until Gareth is back in this car with me, I need to stay awake.

  I waited here for an hour and a half that day. It was early spring, before the clocks went forward, and no warmer than this. The lights were burning on the second floor. I assumed they were asking Mateus if he felt ready to take on a new challenge. Looking back, the portents seem more sinister. Should I have noticed the signs of his disappearance in those unblinking second-floor lights? Could that even have been the moment when he accepted whatever deal was on the table and committed to going to work for Sansom overseas? I call up the list of countries where Sansom has headquarters: Taiwan, Germany, Australia, America ... A global network of massive corporate understatements, where staff are bussed in and out in secure convoys. When you want to start up a new life, useful places to hide away.