Mappa Mundi

by Justina Robson

  Natalie didn't understand what any of that would mean. There was no precedent.

  She also saw a classic spike-and-slow-wave fugue moving through his temporal lobes. It was the clear indicator of a person undergoing a profoundly spiritual and religious experience. The only area functioning at a recognizably ordinary level was his visual cortex and that, although his eyes were closed, was working steadily, manufacturing the visions of his dreams.

  From what she saw she wasn't sure that Bobby could have been conscious; not in the way she and the others were at this moment.

  “What is that?” McAlister asked mildly, frowning in piqued curiosity as she sent the messages to her father, quickly adding a screamer notice to get his immediate attention.

  “I'm not sure,” she said, feeling inadequate. “I can't tell if this is him on his own or the NervePath.” She carried on, talking to herself, trying to think. “This couldn't be a hypothalamic overreaction. It's far too big. Maybe it's in the programming. I'm downloading from the NP now to see if it's really purged. Damn it. We were moving so fast because of this fuckwit Ministry pressure.” She cast a look of loathing in McAlister's direction.

  “If they are working then I think we'll have to go for some kind of reset and shut them down completely, destroy them, rather than risk any worsening,” she added.

  Her father came online with a chime of bells, and his image appeared alongside Bobby's fairground lights. His pale eyes were sharp and accusatory as his office camera obediently panned around to include her in its shot. “Did you look at the program? Have you checked it?”

  Natalie was angered by his suppositions. She glanced up from the desk where she was watching the download and said shortly, “That's Bill's job, not mine.” She turned to McAlister, watching him cock his head to listen to the earpiece that connected him to the wider awareness of the MoD. “Where is Bill?”

  “No shutdown,” McAlister said at the same time to her father, as though she weren't there. “If you do that we'll never be able to find out what's happened in there.”

  “Yes, James.” Her father switched his interrogation from Natalie to McAlister in one quick move. “Where is Bill? I've been calling him for an hour. No answer.”

  Natalie saw her father glance at her and realized that he was more afraid than angry. She was so startled she barely registered that he was trying to signal to her, something about McAlister.

  There was a second of silence in which McAlister's face reddened. “How would I know? We're searching for him all over the city.”

  “What?” Natalie glared at him, stopped in full flow, her fingers suspended over the inverted desk controls. “Since when?”

  “He hasn't been seen since the experiment finished,” her father said.

  McAlister sat up and straightened his tie nervously.

  Natalie stared at him, uncomprehending. “You didn't tell me!” She looked up at the screen and saw her father acknowledge his mistake with a sneer. “Jesus shit!” She circled the desk, shoved McAlister out of the way, and started summoning the code that had downloaded from the NP in Bobby's head.

  As it streamed up onto the secondary monitor she sat back in the chair, which felt like it had just dropped down an elevator shaft and was still going strong.

  “Well?” McAlister asked, unable to help himself. He was twitchy with eagerness or terror, she didn't know which.

  Natalie shook her head helplessly, seeing Calum's rage about to incandesce as he also read the results from his Pad, “I didn't do this.”

  “I'm not saying you did.” He kept himself under control, she didn't know how.

  “What is it?” McAlister again.

  Natalie resisted an urge to pick up the chair and break it over his head. She held up her finger, giving him no answer, and ran a quick diagnostic to find the fault. It took less than a second. No effort had been made to conceal it. It was a single, tiny change in the end-point section.

  She put it on the large screen. “This is at the end of our legitimate program,” she said. The purge command, which she had written herself and checked that afternoon, had been added to. The last line now read:

  if (currentPoint.checkstate( )==END) {

  SelfWare.Init(INFINITY);

  }

  Her father's florid face went white.

  “What does that mean?” McAlister bleated, insistent. He looked like he was ready to jump on the desk and start throttling her.

  Natalie said, “Some bastard has taken my Selfware program and loaded it alongside the therapy session. When the purge was run it automatically started the secondary system. But that's not all.”

  Natalie used the laser pointer and highlighted the last word. “This parameter. It should be a small number. A finite series …” She trailed off as her mind struggled to understand what such an alteration could do. “I don't even know what that means, running it with no upper limit. I guess it just … carries right on forever. But the theory says it shouldn't be able to…there's a very large noise problem with higher numbers of iterations …” She spun in her seat and rounded on McAlister, her anger brightening. “It doesn't take a degree to spot who's done this, now, does it? And you've lost him!”

  “Never mind that,” her father growled. He turned to McAlister as she started accessing the scanner systems, “There's your proof of what's going on. I told you before. Now, let's get on with the shutdown before anything worse happens with that bloody voodoo software.” He shot a baleful look of reproach at Natalie and then reached forward to break the link.

  “No,” McAlister said quietly from his position, half hunched against the desk as if he expected physical violence. “No shutdown.”

  Natalie froze in midtyping. There was a second of absolute silence. In it McAlister stood up and straightened his tie. She saw that he knew all about Bill somehow. It was in the way he tried to form a sickly kind of confidence and take command.

  Her father sat back slowly, eyes narrowed, mouth a thin, lipless gash. “Bobby is my patient.” His voice was calm. “And I will decide what is best for him now. We are going to shut down. Natalie?”

  “The scan-and-transmit system is ready. I'll just take a handset to his room and get it done,” she said, pushing back from the desk.

  “No,” McAlister said again, this time with more authority.

  She pushed past him and he plucked weakly at her.

  “It's Mikhail Guskov's orders!” McAlister bleated as they were about to leave him.

  Natalie half turned, her hand on the door jamb.

  “We keep it running. It's important. For the project. Mappa Mundi.”

  To her astonishment she saw that McAlister was holding a gun on her.

  “I'm sorry,” he said, glancing at the screen and then back at her. “You have to listen.” He waved the gun a little bit and with difficulty put the safety off.

  Natalie thought he was more likely to shoot her because of incompetence rather than through intent. She snorted and asked, “Since when do you work for him?” Although there were strong links between Guskov and the Ministry she doubted they'd jump to his tune.

  “Please, maintain the experiment,” he said. “A little longer.”

  She glanced at Calum and saw him calculating, listening.

  “If you try to stop it in any way,” McAlister continued, “I will have to prevent you.”

  “Do the Ministry know?” her father asked.

  “Not yet,” McAlister conceded with a significant nod that Natalie assumed meant he was in Guskov's pay before he was in the Ministry's. He waved the gun between her and the door. “We will go to the patient's observation area and monitor from there. I'm sure the MoD monitors on this conversation will update those who need to know.”

  “Put that toy away,” Natalie snapped at him. “You look ridiculous.”

  McAlister did so, sheepishly, she thought. Now what? she wondered. Will we shut it off or what? We can't leave Bobby like that.

  But they did.

&n
bsp; In the observation area she and McAlister sat at the nurses' station. Natalie watched McAlister watching her, trying to ingratiate himself again with a little smile or some insider comment about this being the real cutting edge.

  Natalie didn't understand her father going along with something as brutally unethical. Could he be agreeing just because doing the right thing meant being expelled from Mikhail Guskov's inner circle? He'd never shown signs of that shallowness before. Was there more to it?

  She racked her brain to remember anything from the files that Jude had shown her that might explain things, but nothing did. Meanwhile Bobby slept and they sat, and time passed and Natalie's whole being demanded she do something; stand up, dare McAlister to shoot her, grab the scanner now sitting so damn' close on the station top, and save Bobby from whatever her wretched system was doing to him.

  Outside there were other agents from the Ministry, armed ones. If she tried it, would they be quick enough to come to her aid? If they did, who would they shoot first?

  The clock ticked the world around to two-oh-five and she remained frozen with worry and indecision.

  A minute or so later, still trying to work up the courage to dare McAlister's gun, Natalie found herself thinking, Gosh, that's bright in there, who turned the lights up?

  “I'm going to switch the lights down …” she said, moving towards the control. But before she could she heard McAlister whisper, “Jesus wept! Are the cameras on?”

  She glanced back over her shoulder at the same moment her fingers located the lights command and found them already switched into twilight mode. McAlister had leaped forward and now hesitated, his fingertips just touching the glass wall of Bobby's room, his mouth hanging half open.

  Bathing his sweaty face in a pale lustre, the sheets around Bobby were glowing as though lit from within or as if they'd been passed under a violet light in a nightclub. Their super-whiteness stood out vividly, suffusing the room and giving McAlister a yellowish shadow that stretched up and over the control panel.

  Natalie didn't understand what she was seeing. Turning around, she scrubbed at her sore, tired eyes with her hand, but when she looked up the brightness remained, slowly, steadily intensifying. She moved to the window, pressing her face to the safety glass, and saw the head, face, and shoulders of Bobby X shining like a low-budget movie special effect showing the waking of a saint or a demon.

  The emergency alarm went off at the same moment, maybe triggered by her father's conscience or the sensitive nanodetectors in the room, Natalie didn't know. McAlister jumped at the shrill sound and started mouthing off some protest, dabbing at the sweat rolling off his forehead. In contrast Natalie felt cold as ice. In that instant her courage finally took form. She reached behind her for the scanner and shouldered through the doors.

  As she fumbled with the control settings she saw the light on her hands and lab coat. Its quality began to change from the stark white of the shining, making her waste precious seconds looking up at the bed where she saw Bobby's whole figure begin to emit a violet gleam. She felt heat brush her hands and face and her eyes watered and hurt. She loaded the shutdown commands and tightened her finger on the trigger but the scanner kept returning a “Failed Send” message. Frantically she checked power and systems—they were all OK.

  The heat became stronger and she had to step back, almost blinded. She kept on trying with the machine, but it occurred to her then that whatever was coming off Bobby was probably distorting the scanner's signal and she might as well have been trying to make contact using a tin can and a piece of string. It was only then that she realized she was afraid.

  She looked up and narrowed her eyelids to tiny slits as she backed off and saw Bobby's face on the pillow, his smile deepening as the glow increased. He looked deliriously happy.

  Natalie felt sick. She had no idea what to do. In the distance she could hear McAlister making calls, urging her to come out, to get away, his voice as high and hysterical as a child's. She began to turn away, shielding her exposed skin from the glare. She heard the alarm change its note to the tones for a contamination alert. There was a soft pop and the light dimmed back to its twilight night-state, gleaming red in the alarm's added suffusion.

  Natalie's eyes struggled to adjust, watering profusely. She turned back, thinking Bobby must be burned or dead, and saw the sheet on his bed drift lightly downwards. It settled into a series of fold mountains and valleys. It lay on the surface of the dimpled foam mattress that rose out of its human-made hollows to meet it. Bobby was nowhere to be seen.

  A few uneven, racking breaths came to her aid and she let go of the scanner, hearing it clatter down onto the tiled floor although that didn't matter now. She stared at the bed and her mouth worked silently around some meaningless syllables of disbelief. She wanted to laugh, reminded instantly of Jude's file and the manner of its appearance; things seemed to be popping in and out of reality, like there was nothing to it, like it was easy, obvious. The gut-trembling that she'd never felt on seeing the papers and memos appeared now, weakening her knees. She groped around for something to hold on to. The bed was the nearest thing and the relief as her hand felt its solid presence was indescribable.

  From the door she heard McAlister squeak, “Where the hell did he go?”

  Someone called her name from far away. It was almost inaudible.

  Natalie leaned on the bed, feeling its heat and the smell of Bobby's sweat seeping up around her. Of their own accord her hands spread out, confirming that he was gone. Now she did laugh, a kind of coughing gasp that wasn't a sign of amusement. It must be a prank—but nobody involved in this had enough sense of humour to pull a practical joke.

  “Natalie? Doctor Armstrong?” The voice from far away zoomed in as it spoke, hesitant and frightened.

  Baffled, she looked under the bed, and found what she expected: nothing.

  She spun around, thinking how ridiculous this was, and halted dead in her tracks.

  Bobby X was standing right in front of her.

  “Doctor?” he whispered. He held out his hand towards her shakily, peering.

  “Bo—” she began, relieved, hand on her heart, ready to say what a scare he'd just given her, when he faded.

  It was like watching a ghost. Suddenly she could see the open door through him and McAlister's dumb, stupid shape standing there like a stuck pig, mouth catching flies.

  “Natalie?!” Bobby's tremulous voice was fading, too. It sounded like a badly tuned radio station. He pawed at something in front of him as if he was being attacked, blinking and squinting.

  She realized that he couldn't see her any more.

  “It's all right, I'm here Bobby.” Natalie reached towards him quickly, moving to grab his hands. Her fingers passed through his and closed on nothing.

  “Natalie!” he cried. His beatific happiness of a moment before was gone. The shadows of his face were racked with terror, their uneven flicker making him look as though he was winking.

  She snatched over and over again at where she could still see traces of his outline. Her fingers slapped into her palms, her fists clenching emptily right inside his arms. She could feel nothing but a faint tingling like pins and needles where they closed on a void.

  In fear and despair Bobby threw himself at her, trying to catch hold, but just as her hands had, his hands swiped right through her. In that instant her whole body was engulfed with prickling tremors and, as sure as she was of her own name, Natalie knew that she and Bobby were crossing over.

  Then he was gone.

  In his place came a numb blackness. Natalie fell into it as though into a vast, open mouth. With her last moment of awareness she felt its hungry breath engulf her.

  On the surface of another world McAlister was calling, “Help! Help!”

  Jude met Mary at Goodenough's bar and restaurant, a place close to his home where they occasionally went for a quiet conversation out of work hours. He took care to arrive before her, walking in out of the stale afternoon and hopi
ng that the smell of fried onions and a mesquite grill would be enough to put him in a better frame of mind. Closer to and the bar's scent of spilt beer and margarita mix sent an acid line up his nose.

  Neither odour hit the spot and he didn't stop as Cole, the barman, gave him the nod and said quietly, “Hey, Jude,” front runner in the longest, oldest running-quip contest. Cole's grin was soft with self-mockery as he vigorously polished a glass pitcher with his white cloth. His rheumy, lugubrious eyes, specially modelled, Jude thought, on bloodhounds, tracked Jude's movements to the end of the bar. Cole waited until Jude sat down and then flicked a thick finger towards the Red Hook pump, questioning.

  Jude nodded. The music was softer at this end where one of the speakers was broken. It sounded furry. Cole put the beer glass down on a mat, noted Jude's expression and ambled off again to unpack a few more pitchers from the washer. Jude looked along the ranks of cold beers, bottled fruit drinks, spirits above them in line upon line of bottles of endlessly different shapes, sizes, colours, and promises. It looked like treasure. From far behind him he heard the click of pool balls and the thump of a cue landing on its butt on the floor. The men playing spoke in soft voices he couldn't hear.

  He checked what his datapilot had to offer on Fort Detrick. He'd not got far when Mary swept up.

  “Hey, Cole!” she called.

  “Mary, Mary,” Cole said, “how's that garden going?”

  Jude stood and gave her a hug of greeting. They kissed each other on the cheek and she settled down, cool and graceful, her blue eyes sparkling with the promise of complicity he'd been counting on to lift his spirits.

  “I'm sorry about Florida,” was the first thing she said. “I guess I screwed it up some without you. It happened so quick in the end. I wasn't expecting them to bail on us that fast. They must have had insider knowledge.”

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “Apology accepted. I read your account. Tough break.”

  “Lost your man again,” she said, carefully checking him for reaction.