Mappa Mundi

by Justina Robson

  The more she thought about this, the more likely it seemed, and she convinced herself it wasn't just ego. Research would tell, however. A little bit of research.

  At the next lights Mary pulled a U-turn on red and headed back towards the airport amid a squeal of tires, an angry cloud of black exhaust smoke, and a parade-day applause of car horns. This time the traffic AI recognized and ignored her.

  She flicked her Pad to hands-free mode to call in and check with her support services—yes, the calls and instructions to England had gone out OK and no replies about anything worth noting had arrived, she was told. Her mood lightened a little and she accelerated smoothly into the inside lane before dialling the number of a general, a personal friend at Fort Detrick, to whose offices she was put straight through.

  “It's Mary Dee,” she said.

  “Well, Mary. What a nice surprise. Kinda thought I'd be hearing from you sooner though,” said General Bragg, his voice gravelly and rounded, like a friendly grandpa's.

  Mary wished she could see his face to clue into exactly what that meant. “Oh yeah?” She kept her grin on. “I've been busy on my cover. It's not all expense accounts and private planes on the federal side of the tracks, y'know.”

  “Oh, now, Mary, I can't believe you haven't got some fancy runaround all to yourself, a big girl like you.” But he sensed she wasn't quite levelling with him among all the bantering and added, “So, what's rockin' your boat?”

  “I'll tell you, Jim,” she said, and this time she wasn't fooling. “I need to know how the test on CONTOUR went.”

  Once she'd told him the codeword for their business she heard him take an uneasy breath. “I thought this was no straight ace,” he said.

  Mary's chest felt like the steering wheel had hit it. She veered sharply and almost struck a slow-moving van on her outside. As far as she'd known until that moment, CONTOUR had never been tested—and it was supposed to remain untested until it had been stabilized. As she was correcting the car with a savage jerk of the steering wheel that almost sent her into the central reservation General Bragg said, “There was an authorized—authorized out of your bosses' offices, that is, NSC-approved—single, low-percentage prototype test using a simulation verified system.”

  “Where?” She knew there wasn't a site on Earth that was sanctioned for this and especially not inside the continental US. Some bastard was playing tricks right at the top.

  “Zone Five. But this came from your—” General Bragg was beginning to be upset for her, and this she could do without.

  “Verify that,” she answered, smooth and confident, as though she'd only been checking a fact. “Get you later, Jim. I've got a plane to fly.” With her mouth clamped shut on the Happy Jockette routine and her foot making the car's engine scream, she left black marks on every turn between there and the terminal.

  She'd clear things with Bragg later. All that mattered was that some bozo had moved to a live test of Mappaware. If she didn't know that meant her boss hadn't known either. She pulled off at the next service point and sent a message in before making arrangements to leave Orlando within the hour. She abandoned the Porsche to its fate in a short-stay parking lot, keys in the exhaust pipe and a pager message to the hire company. By late evening she was waiting in an outer office at the Pentagon, buttoning the sharp cut of her suit to its most uncompromising. She'd had a few hours to figure things through and she was well prepared by the time Rebecca Dix summoned her.

  Rebecca had been called out of a presidential dinner and looked fit to spit bricks. Seated on the edge of her desk she nodded at Mary and gestured at the wall display where the CONTOUR message was displayed. “Your analysis, Agent Delaney?”

  “General Bragg confirmed he received a notification of an authorized live test of CONTOUR on a small, isolated, and insignificant population within the bounds of the A12 Testing Agreements—”

  “I can fucking read it myself,” Rebecca said in a mild voice. “What I want to know is, what you think this is in aid of.”

  Mary met the severe dark stare of the First Adviser to the NSC with calm certainty.

  “Bust the project open.”

  “Has anyone got hold of it yet?”

  Mary saw Jude in her mind's eye. “No.”

  “If they do—” they both knew what Rebecca meant, because of the test site and Jude's connection “—you'll take care it goes no further.”

  “Ma'am.”

  “Mary?”

  Mary looked at Dix's face, trying to show no feeling.

  “Do you want me to replace you? Don't worry if you do. I can arrange that—”

  “No, ma'am,” Mary said firmly, looking straight ahead, at attention.

  Dix nodded slowly. “When it gets too much, Mary, don't be afraid to ask for help.”

  “That's okay. Thank you, ma'am.”

  After she'd finished the sandwich, Natalie had about ten minutes to read the files, or less. She was familiar with the language they were written in—because she'd helped to create it—but what she saw wasn't easy to interpret for two reasons. First of all, it was badly written. Second, it did things the logic of which she didn't understand until she ran the program in her simulation suite and saw their effect blossom.

  In her Patient, starting at a normal position, the emotional centres at first shut down to almost insensitive levels and frontal-lobe activity dropped off the scale. Then the program worked to link and stimulate all those things about a human being's makeup that act subtly to darken the heart. The result was something like paranoid schizophrenia. The program itself was a crude recipe for making someone mad, as sophisticated in comparison to Natalie's work as a skateboard was to a space shuttle. But she betted it worked, after a fashion, well enough that it would make anyone burn down a house or shoot themselves just to escape the sudden and incomprehensible spiral of misery and mania their lives must have become.

  Natalie erased it from her machine. Why was it so simple to do the worst for people, when fixing exactly the same naturally occurring fault was so bloody hard? These fifty shitty lines: enough to screw up anyone they touched, and it would take years of work to scratch the surface of a solution. If she'd written this, how long could it have taken? A week? A month? But here it was, brute, short, sharp, and ugly as raw sin, sitting on top of her years of labour and those of all the others on the project; taking their technology's power, its potential for healing, its immense subtlety, and making a dumb gun to blow brains to hell.

  Natalie removed the disk from her systems, taking it in thumb and forefinger, and dropped it in her pocket. Filth. She certainly would be seeing Jude again, no mistake about that. But for now he would have to sit and spin because she was about to lose the only job she'd got left.

  Grabbing the notes and her Pad Natalie ran the three corridors from her office to the conference centre and took her place just as the satellite feed from the USA kicked in and their boss of bosses, Mikhail Guskov, came online to address them and give the state of play.

  The meeting at the York Clinic was for the entire country, and not just for Natalie and her local crew. The centre was packed with over a hundred attendees and her lateness was only noticed by the autologger at the door who checked her credentials and gave her a tired kind of Ministry spiel about the sort of standards expected of premier contractors. She was deleting it when the address lit up the big screen of the auditorium and a hush fell.

  Mikhail Guskov was in his fifties, but with the vigorous energy of a younger man, perhaps even of two or three younger men. His blue eyes glinted with it, and it quivered in the thick hair of his beard, his rough moustache, and the heavy and ill-cut nest that crowned his head in brown and grey. He reminded Natalie of an alpha wolf, and no doubt that was how he felt about himself, because his paternal pride was detectable even through miles of transmission. She didn't know where he was—none of them did—but for the duration of the link his presence was here and they, despite their own egos and achievements, waited on his every word
.

  “Dear Friends.” He began, as he always began, in warmth and good humour. “A delight to see you all again and to have read your reports, every one of which, I am pleased to say, has edged us further towards our goal of mapping the human mind. In the last hour a simulation run has achieved a sixty-percent-accurate translation between the neural function and the synthesized theoretic model. Only you and I can know what that really means.” He waited, not disappointed, as a flurry of whispering and excitement rushed around each room he spoke to; sites across the world were suddenly enlivened, with fresh enthusiasm on tired faces and quick movements from exhausted bodies.

  Natalie watched the energy dynamic run and circle, flow like a tangible fluid. It brushed through her and she, too, was lifted, even though she was a watcher, not a participant. She calculated very quickly that Guskov's message meant that the time-crunch problem was no longer an issue. There had been a burning uncertainty about whether the real-time cross-mapping of mind and matter in an individual was a calculation that was NP-complete or not. NP-complete problems required more time than existed in the universe to solve. But their excitement was unbounded now that he revealed the sixty-percent correlation. Only forty left to go! Six years on from the inception of NervePath technology, and ten years on from the successful development of nanomedical gear, the biggest and most ambitious scientific endeavour to date was going to finish.

  There would be a comprehensive science of the human mind, even, if they dared think further, of the very essence of every person alive. Natalie didn't believe in souls, but if she had she would have been afraid now, because even that final, sacred thing wasn't going to be outside her reach any more. It was measurable, definable, and mappable. Soon she would be able to point to it, or its absence, just as she could point to the image of a mind and say, “There, Mrs. Jones, that's why you're feeling so awful, the crossmatch between your worldview and experiences is failing right here. Don't worry, it's only a nervous breakdown and quite natural, you'll be fine as long as you can wait it out.”

  And if Mrs. Jones couldn't wait it out, then Natalie would be able to prescribe a therapy to hurry things along. But she knew as well as the man next to her that this leap forwards now brought them up against the hardest of problems—Mappa Mundi would enable them to alter people's minds. As she'd written on Jude's forehead, so she'd be able to rewrite neural paths in a process that amounted to the direct creation—and deletion—of people.

  Natalie had been so sure, until now, that this was good. Despite the potential for harm, there were so many positive things it could be used for, to free individuals from biologically induced or incident-oriented mental torment. As a tool for self-understanding and development it would be invaluable. She believed in it absolutely. But in her pocket the disk sat, butchered, incompetent, a solid piece of ill-will. Its existence—certain from the start to come about because they were all only human—made her doubt their illusions of control. Mappa Mundi was protected by European and US governments, under the strictest security. But so what?

  Natalie was hardly listening to Guskov, she was so immersed in the problem of what to do with her knowledge. Because maybe he already knew. Maybe there were wheels within wheels. It didn't take a psychiatrist to understand that people were creatures of many identities, many loyalties and weaknesses. Someone in this meeting was responsible for the abomination she had just read through, and showing her hand might be the least useful thing she could do.

  A keen feeling of danger and anxiety almost made her want to run out of the room. She scanned faces, knowing nothing about what went on behind any of them, and found the plastic shape of the disk with her hand, holding it tightly: you're going nowhere, son.

  Knowing their conclusions, Guskov was saying, “In a few short months everyone's view of the world is going to change. The last frontiers of our inner worlds are about to be laid bare, our truths—general and individual—will be plain for all to see, and our lies, our fables, our myths, and our fears. Do not doubt that this will not be greeted with joy in all quarters. When we know ourselves at last, the truth of certain faiths and beliefs will be undone and fallacies of all kinds will be brought to light, their perpetrators with them. We will have to face reality as it is, and not as we have believed it to be, or hoped it to be, or wanted it to be. Difficult times lie ahead. No doubt this work will attract its share of destroyers and naysayers and people who want to use it to repress and control others. When that time comes we must be ready.” He paused and stared directly to camera.

  Natalie thought he was slightly overstating the case. Mappa Mundi was hardly the end point of the venture, more like the beginning, but grand words got cranked out easily these days, especially when you had five-star generals and corporate project managers from pharmaceutical giants sitting on both sides of you, all of them wanting the good news about where their two hundred billion dollars had gone.

  It was a winning speech—a kind of desperate speech, now Natalie thought about it: the sort of thing you said when you had to rally the troops for a final assault on a highly defended fortress and the odds were ten to one against coming out alive. She wondered what it was that prompted it now, when actually the news to report was so incredibly positive. Did nobody else think it peculiar? But around her faces were glued to the screen, suckers to the pitch, every one.

  Guskov began speaking about the powerful synergy they had all participated in, the gestalt experience of working as a greater mind with a greater purpose, and Natalie started to worry.

  Nobody he was talking to needed a hard sell. They'd all bought in a long time ago, despite their valid fears. So who was he talking to? To the generals and the people from Global NervePath Systems and the counteragents among them from envious foreign powers. He was saying everything and nothing. He was being uninformative to the point of boredom and they listened because nobody loves an adventure story like a hero-in-waiting, and that was what they all secretly wanted to be.

  Meanwhile Jude's sister was getting burned alive in her own home.

  Natalie got up in disgust, walked down the aisle stairs and out into the conference-area foyer. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe Guskov was chivvying them along into the last great effort. She just didn't understand what the rush was. Then again, she might be holding the reason for it in her hand.

  Jude woke very slowly from a sleep of exhaustion that seemed more like a blackout. Waves of unconsciousness beat him back from awareness of the room repeatedly, and the quiet sounds of traffic on the move were blurred by the window and net curtains into whispers just beyond his understanding. Alternating moments of near-waking made him think he could open his eyes and see the street light falling in a yellowed band across his feet, the gleam lighting the room in a dim bronze. He tried to get up, to move his hand, to roll over and he thought he had, even up to feeling the texture of the coverlet under him as his skin moved onto it, but a second later, a black second, he was as he had always been, a gold statue in a bronze frieze, his body as unresponsive as solid metal. Hours passed in the flickering of his mind. A thousand times he tried to wake up, to get up, to create a noise, to pinch himself, to be free, but a thousand and one times he blinked to see that all his victories were imaginary. He was that guy, what was that guy? That guy with the rock who got it to the top of the mountain and turned his back only for it to roll right back to the bottom.

  He got up and dressed.

  He got up and switched on the lights—they didn't work.

  He got up and tried the TV. A horse race came on. The horses ran in slow motion in the dark with RayBan black lenses over their eyes. The commentary was lucid and clear, like a bell tone, but in no human language he knew. He thought that the commentators might be horses, too.

  He got up and called his mother. “Hi, Jude! How's the investigation going, hon?”

  “I'm not in Washington, Mom, you know that, I'm in…I'm in…”

  He got up and dressed and started to go downstairs to find a restaurant.
>
  He got up.

  He got up.

  But each time he woke he'd never gotten up. He saw his legs and feet next to each other, willed them to move, but they existed in another universe.

  A sense of panic and breathlessness closed its grip slowly on his chest, increasing in intensity with each repeat: each repeat that he never quite remembered was doomed until the next blink, the next awakening into the same room and the same problem. He couldn't remember how to breathe. His body started to twitch with oxygen loss. His lungs were collapsing, there was a pain in his veins that was increasingly slowly but surely, their flimsy casings swelling like fat worms about to burst under their own greedy pressure.

  He woke up and there was a hand on his shoulder. It was warm, but not familiar. It rested on his cold arm and it was weighty, like a real hand, and the fingers squeezed, and he felt his skin and muscles give in and sink down like obedient dogs waiting for the master's word. Jude was damn' grateful to that hand, because at last he was going to wake up for real and remember how to breathe.

  There was the warmth of whoever's-it-was body behind him, too, and the drop of the mattress where their knees were digging his back and the stirring of the air from their moving and breathing. The sound of their breathing made him listen hard. It was like his, a slight panic in it, or maybe a sob, like it was forgetting, too, or like it was being smothered.

  “Shit!” he thought. “That's it. The house is burning down and they're here to get me out. I gotta wake up right now. I have to get out of here!”

  He smelled smoke; the acrid poison of burning paint and plastics, the boiling tar bite of furniture foam. He heard a splintery crashing of windows and TV screens and the roaring gasp of flames licking around his door. The fire came out of a gigantic mouth, open full as a June rose directly beneath the floor, tongues lashing, ready to swallow.