This was not what Helena wanted to hear.
Her uncle tried to comfort her, “If it is any consolation, without him to secure in the SAEZ, Indexiv have slowed their advance. You’ve given us time to prepare for the real conflict to come.”
He looked at her as she listened. She knew he was puzzled, that he suspected something had happened to her out there in the wilds, that perhaps she was telling the truth about being tortured. She was conscious that it had left her subdued, insecure, and nervous. She jumped at loud noises, her heart racing.
“Hels, this is going to be a conflict unlike anything we’ve seen before. I worry that it will be something unseen since my father’s time.” He frowned to himself, distantly thoughtful.
What he meant was a war that had not been seen in all the time of the Oligarchs.
She offered herself for a role more central to the war effort, but no one, least of all her uncle, was interested in recruiting her. Johannes insisted the best AIs had suggested her for the new role.
“The team has people calling it to see if they can join. Powerful people. You are well placed.” He was firm about it. “When all this is over, you’ll see we made the right choice. For now, concentrate on making progress. It could turn the tide.” Helena was sceptical but knew she the debate was at an end.
In the meantime, she was trying to live with her AI. It was hard to accept that she was more than one person now that her body contained two real intelligences. In turn, it used every opening she gave it to voice its thoughts. Helena struggled to focus on her uncle because it was telling her that Ngasi had been right, Indexiv would not stop until there were no Normals left.
Your uncle understands this, or at least fears its possibility.
Johannes, seeing her attention wander, tried again, “Hels, you’ve given us time, hopefully enough time, to stop this war from escalating into something no Oligarch wants. Be happy and find those rogues for me.” He smiled. He had run out of things to say to try to encourage her.
“I’M SORRY HELS, there was nothing we could do for Edward. It was a decision his parents made twenty-four years ago. It could not be undone just because it was unpleasant. But what you did for us was not in vain.” He paused and rubbed his neck, absently massaging the spot where he had been shot.
“You helped us deny Indexiv the competitive advantage, the edge that would allow them to sterilise all Normals, regardless of their usefulness to us. Thanks to you, we might resist this attempted hostile takeover. Major shareholders are wavering, refusing to vote immediately on whether they’ll agree to the offer made by Indexiv. We have a chance.”
He was being honest with her, even if she couldn’t bring herself to accept his version of events. Blinking, as if to clear her mind of the mist of the last few days, she smiled and felt content that she had done something to make a difference.
Her AI said nothing, but its presence was one of reproachful silence.
Chapter 10
THE DAYS stretched out with no resolution. The conflict, so intense at first became little more than an ongoing story in the news. Helena slept fitfully, ate voraciously, slowly rebuilt her life.
Euros and Indexiv benefited from their aggression, the management of both companies lauded for their strategies, one for resistance, the other for decisiveness. Spread betting had Indexiv marked as the eventual winner but consensus was it would be a gradual grind rather than the swift victory most had initially considered likely.
A widening of the war, which markets and shareholders really feared, did not materialise. Helena’s arrival in London took the impetus out of Indexiv’s blistering opening assault, left both sides space to regear and assess their route forwards.
It was obvious from commodities markets that many of the other corporations were quietly steeling themselves for a larger conflict, using the time to prepare, but for a while London felt as it always did.
Helena heard nothing in public about why the Companies were at war, nothing about sterilisation and nothing about genocide. The moments in which she’d given voice to what was happening within Indexiv’s sphere of control had been thoroughly excised from the Cloud. Despite half a day looking, including a couple of hours visiting the most insane corners of conspiracy land, she couldn’t find any trace of her words. Euros had made sure they’d never be seen again.
Publicly, Indexiv was promoting a strategy of reduction through redundancy, or shrinking the number of Normals allowed to have children to zero. Such a strategy was still the subject of fierce debate up and down society but it was an end so spread out, so distant in its implementation that very few stood up and condemned it.
Regardless of any dissent, Helena was isolated from such public conversations. Nevertheless, she felt a sense of urgency that she’d lacked before the Amazon Fell.
Helena missed her old role, and tried to keep in contact with a couple of friends from the diplomatic corps, especially Max and Maddy Magnusson. The general message from above was to let it go and the Magnussons felt that gently insistent pressure more so than Helena.
Helena found her progress within her new post hugely frustrating. Keen to get into it, to help make the difference Johannes had spoken of, the first thing she had done was to requisition problem solving AIs. Yet two weeks after the request had been submitted they had not come online.
She angrily told her counsellor that she’d spent more time in therapy than working.
“Perhaps that’s for the best,” suggested Hugo, a tall man with a large backside and narrow legs. She’d put up with him for her own sake, knowing the company would be evaluating her recovery, knowing also that she needed what he had to offer. She’d had nightmares most nights, moments when innocuous actions by strangers had left her frozen, seeing Noenieput as if it were happening right in front of her all over again. She was not well.
Lurking behind all of that was her AI.
Helena was honest with Hugo about everything except that. If he knew what the medical team had diagnosed she’d be locked away for good, left to rot in a place where she’d never be able bear witness to what she’d seen.
As it was he spent much of his time trying gently to get her to see that what she thought she’d seen wasn’t true, that it was a story she’d told herself to deal with being tortured.
“I’m stuck, Hugo. I know you don’t believe me but I need to work this through if I’ve got any chance of sleeping through the night.”
Hugo sighed, “It’s not about belief, Helena. It’s about what you need to see so that you can let go of what happened to you.”
So she played his game, hoping that it was helping her move on. At times she’d see her face in a mirror and feel like a stranger was looking back.
Her first day in Special Situations was straightforward. She was met by the team’s director, a beautiful Russian called Alexander, who introduced her to the rest of the team. There were nine of them, less than a quarter the size of the team in her previous role.
For the most part they shook her hand, kissed her cheek then went back to whatever task they’d been focussed on before she’d arrived.
“Welcome aboard,” said Jane, who shared Helena’s office. “I hope you’re used to waiting around.”
Alexander raised his eyebrows, “You’ll see that we’re not flavour of the month with anyone, Helena. We’re dangerous upstarts to some, irritating sideshow to others. We’re hoping your years of negotiation will help unblock things for us.”
It was hard not to be demoralised; she had expected to make progress quickly. However, there was little or no information available on who their quarry actually was; there was nothing on their ages, their sexes, their capabilities or even their names. Without an AI’s lateral solving prowess working on the problem, they might as well forget it.
Yet no one was rushing to help the team get what they needed, as if Euros resented its own people looking under the carpet at what they’d hidden there.
The lack of information, let alone th
eories to hang it on, created an atmosphere where Helena found it easy to come in late and leave early. When there was nothing to be done, why hang around getting depressed? She preferred to feel the heavy weight of impotence in surroundings of her own choosing.
TO HER DELIGHT, however, Helena quickly developed a good friendship with Jane. The two of them had completely different backgrounds; Jane’s family were primarily English, almost none of them had moved overseas in a hundred years.
Jane was shorter than Helena with a button nose and porridge skin. Her family was generally less well placed than Helena’s. However, she was sparklingly bright and her family had invested in a quaternary AI for her, which was dedicated to learning. Jane was coy about her achievements, but Helena understood from some of the other team members that she was some sort of prodigy in the fields of anthropology and cultural analysis.
Jane’s role was to analyse trends within Normal society that would help reveal the nature of any Normal awareness of Indexiv’s strategy and to develop tactics for using those memes to Euros’ advantage.
She found that Jane shared her love of classical music, especially Schubert and Chopin. Jane was also a film buff and the two of them decided to see a film together as soon as they could. Helena let Jane into her world, and began, in bits and pieces to tell her what had happened.
“You’re my confessor,” laughed Helena one day.
“Don’t be silly,” said Jane.
“Oh, I’m not.” Helena was serious. “Hugo is a company man, everything he says is reviewed by someone looking out for signs I’ve lost it.”
Jane looked scandalised. “He’s supposed to take everything in confidence!” She leant forward, “Do you really think he’s passing on your conversations?”
“I don’t know,” Helena admitted. “Maybe I’m just being paranoid. I’m sure they’re keeping tabs on me though. I know I would.”
“You mean because of the executions?”
Helena found it hard to say the word, to discuss what she’d seen. It felt like her own body betrayed her when she broached the subject. She nodded.
“I’m not here to judge, Helena,” said Jane. “All I know is that you’ve been given a chance to do something about it.”
“If we ever get those AIs,” said Helena. They shared the despair of the moment in good humour.
THE DREAMS started the day after her meeting with Johannes. Helena could not pin down any direct similarities or parallels between the different dreams, even though she had ample time to study them; her AI recorded them for her to watch.
They disturbed her best attempts at sleep leaving her grumpy and hungry as she used her implants to keep her awake on an hour’s sleep a night, day after day.
If each dream had been the same, or an echo of an obvious theme, she would have been able to glean some insight; yet her dreamscape changed each time she closed her eyes and, apart from the feeling of deep-seated anxiety on waking, the scenes rarely overlapped.
For the first couple of days she put them down to the trauma she had suffered. Her AI denied that they had anything to do with its own erratic behaviour. Her own research on errant AIs supported its claims although there was substantially less than she’d expected to find in the public realm. It wasn’t officially a restricted technology but the absence of easily accessible research made her wonder what everyone was worried about.
After the first month they began to recede, coming every other night then every few days. Her Secondary AI reported that her hormone and serotonin levels were returning to normal. Although not completely vanquished she felt more like herself than she had done for weeks.
HELENA MOVED to south of the river, to a part of London favoured by fashionable third and fourth generation Oligarchs. Most of her second generation peers lived closer to their respective corporate HQs, but the pay rise that came with the new job meant she could afford somewhere slightly more salubrious. Her apartment was on the eighty-second floor; the type of elevation she’d wistfully aimed at for more than three decades. The flat was properly lateral, taking up most of the floor she was on with open views on three sides. She relished the privacy she was afforded at having what amounted to her own entrance, with enough space for a separate office, sitting room and an additional spare bedroom. The flat was comfortably above the ground, well above the poorer Oligarchs, but not too ostentatious that she needed to borrow to pay the rent.
Helena’s own tastes had been skewed by her experience in Southern Africa. Even after weeks back home she found it hard to buy the range of stuff she had once considered essential when living in London full time. Shopping, whether remotely or immersed in the virtual environment of the Cloud left her bewildered, repulsed and emotionally drained.
After supper one evening the doorbell rang and the flat’s AI announced that Henry Arken, a twenty-seven-year-old, fourth generation Oligarch, was waiting to see her.
Helena had received no visitors since she’d joined Special Situations. She had no idea who he was. The building’s AI was only permitted to inform its inhabitants of their visitor’s name, age and details of the Family to which they belonged. Those who weren’t Family could only enter the residential sections of the building by prior permission.
She had not heard of the Arkens, but the flat was confident he was an Oligarch and let him into the lobby on the twentieth floor. Everything beneath that was maintenance.
She examined the image of his face and decided to find out what he wanted before letting him in.
“Hi. Ms Woolf?” he asked. His soft, grey eyes searched her face, looking for something she wasn’t sure she could give.
“Yes,” she replied.
“I’m Henry, but you know that,” he said bashfully. She smiled in spite of herself. “Can I come in?”
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I was a friend of Edward’s,” he said, looking directly into the camera.
Helena gave him permission to enter as a thought arose; he was her lead and she should follow where he led.
Helena knew herself well enough to follow her instincts. As she was waiting for him a call came through for her; it was Jane, wanting to know if she was free later that evening. Helena was irritated at having to decide two things at once. She let Jane’s call hang in the Cloud and abandoned her to the messaging service.
Helena tapped her feet while she waited; her Primary AI hummed in the background, its curiosity bubbling up through her own. She paced back and forth, finally pulling a chair from the kitchen and placing it towards the front door. She opened all the blinds in the flat; the last dregs of daylight oozed through to illuminate the already bright entrance. As the last of the blinds whirred open under her Tertiary AI’s command, Henry reached the front door. Helena was forced to keep her heart rate steady and to subdue her instinctive sweat response.
It is entirely possible Henry is one of the people I’m looking for.
The door opened for the young Oligarch and he came in quickly. He started when he saw Helena waiting for him and then smiled sheepishly as the door closed behind him.
“Hi,” he said. It was easy to read his nervousness, and as he looked round the hallway of her flat she assessed him.
He was about the right age to have known Edward, and he too did not have a full complement of nanomachines. Too young for the rite of passage, thought Helena.
He’s waiting, muttered her AI.
“Can I get a drink? I’m quite thirsty.” Helena got up from her stool and backed into the kitchen, trying to appear as calm as she could. Something about him unnerved her.
“You said you knew Edward?” she said.
Following her into the flat, he shielded his eyes against the glare of the sun. Helena allowed the service unit to create a glass of iced water for him. Stepping away from it, she let him collect the drink for himself.
After noisily gulping the water down he returned the polymer cup to the service unit and took another without asking. Sipping at the second
he looked at her, working up his opening line.
“He was a good friend of mine.”
“I’m sorry about his death,” said Helena.
He looked as if he were about to cry. What she would do if any of her family died? Especially Michael. The thought was hard to grasp hold of in any real sense.
“I’m glad I’ve found you at last,” said Henry.
“Why?” she asked him, surprised that she’d been the centre of someone else’s investigation. Her AI was agitated, but she asked it to stay quiet while they talked. It grunted its assent and watched on in heavy silence.
“Edward said you could be trusted.”
Helena frowned, “I’m sorry, but I really didn’t ever know him.” As she said this she remembered that others had thought she’d be sympathetic enough that they’d sent her the package with Edward’s coordinates inside. She could see the connections, but there was no sense to them. Somehow she was at the centre of her own investigation.
Not for the first time she wondered how long it would take the Lateral Solvers to finger her for debriefing once they arrived.
“You brought him back. He heard your argument with Adam von Freiburg; he saw the slaughter for himself. He said you could be trusted.”
Helena caught herself fidgeting. “I don’t understand: trusted with what?”
He smiled. It was the grin a young man wore when he tried to appear more confident than he knew he had any right to be.
“With me.” The tone of the words betrayed the desperation she’d glimpsed on his face when he was in the lobby.
“Get out!” Helena lent back and activated her combat routines. Her Secondary AI increased her adrenaline and endorphins; the nanomachines lacing her body coalesced around her muscles and joints, increasing her strength, reducing her response times to milliseconds.
Henry looked at her, fear plain on his face.
“Please, don’t send me back out there.” He looked over his shoulder at the hallway and the door beyond. His left hand gripped the cup fiercely. “Not when it’s taken me so long to find you.”
A Family War: The Oligarchy - Book 1 Page 22
