Mappa Mundi

by Justina Robson

  Cole took her order with another hand-signal. They both watched him pour and shake the cocktail.

  “Seems like fate,” Jude said. “I think we're not meant to get him. My guess is that the government find him too useful. Someone watches over him. I'm going to ask Perez for some casework that doesn't involve his areas next. Something simpler, like fraud.”

  “How about voluntary body-chemistry control?”

  “That's a science already?”

  Mary flashed her whitened teeth and laughed. “It will be now that they've finished perfecting NervePath systems. Glandular balancing using Micromedica for common disorders will lead to doping yourself with your own hormones in the time it takes to say Olympics, don'tcha think?”

  “Puts self-help in a whole new light.”

  “And the drugs empires will have to pack up and get with the pace.” She took a sip of her martini as soon as it arrived and fished out the olive to eat it. “So what do you think of this invitation to Utah?”

  Jude hadn't given it any thought since she'd mentioned it. Fort Detrick, not Dugway, was on his mind. “Another army technoporn show,” he said. “Probably something to do with the biothreat.” They'd been invited to views before, where a new advance in defense or offense was wheeled out for inspection. They were allowed in because their work was supposed to uncover similar systems being produced on the black market. Jude had never seen any of the biogear outside a BSL-4 zone so far, and he never wanted to. “When is it?”

  “In a few days. Perez is going to send you the details.” Mary shook her hair back behind her shoulders. “Anyway, enough about all that. Did you hear about this rumor of experiments at Deer Ridge? I thought you said you had family there?”

  Jude was startled, but he knew not to show it. He'd seen a few reports on the smaller or more outrageous newsnets and it was in one of their itemized postings from their own FBI datapilots. “Yeah. My sister. Half sister. She didn't know anything.”

  Mary looked disappointed. “I was hoping maybe there'd be a lead there, into something.”

  “If there is,” he said, “it's going to be some kind of government thing. Just like these Ivanov cases. We've never successfully prosecuted any other agency for use or development. They always pull that national security number.” He reached over to her hand where it rested on the edge of the table and squeezed it briefly to console her.

  “Sorry. I'm being a horse's ass, I know.”

  “Maybe, like you say, it's got nothing to it.” She shrugged.

  He watched her closely as they took a drink each. She didn't seem concerned. He wished that he could stop being so picky-paranoid. He needed help badly and she was cool in a crisis. He trusted her. So why couldn't he talk?

  “She's gone AWOL somewhere, though,” he said, trying out the idea.

  “She? You mean your sister?”

  “Yeah. I let her have the apartment while I was away, and when I got back, nada. Not even a note. But she's always been pretty flighty. Could have just gone off and planned to come back in a few days. She often does that.”

  “You don't sound convinced,” Mary finished her martini and wiped her fingers on the napkin carefully, taking a moment over each one.

  “Yeah, I'm not entirely. This business could get the media real edgy. I know she'd like to use it any way she can to push AIM forward. I'm worried she might go and get a few of the active ones and stage some kind of protest about it.” And if that didn't sound like lying lame shit he didn't know what did.

  Mary nodded. “She never had to stay on the Reservation, though, did she? I heard you say often you'd send her money and she'd send it back.”

  “Uncle Sam's filthy dollar,” Jude agreed, snorting at the memories of White Horse's terse notes. “Thinks it comes with a debt attached.”

  “Who's the parent in common?”

  “Father. Magpie Jordan. Used to be called Joe sometimes but he never liked Christianized names.”

  “You've got it as your second name.”

  “Yeah. But I don't use it. Not unless White Horse is around. She doesn't like my English name much. Mom chose that, and she hasn't got a lot of time for her either.”

  “Does it mean anything? You never told me.”

  Jude grinned at her. “Magpie's a name for someone who likes to tell tales and lies. Dad was good at all that. Very funny. My mom thought he should have written it down but he never did.”

  “Sorry.” Mary put her hand on his shoulder for a moment.

  “That's okay. Long time ago. Another drink?”

  “Why not? You get them.” She got up to go to the powder room.

  While she was away Jude thought he probably would tell her. The weight of not doing so was almost painful and he felt deeply tired. He worried that White Horse was in so much trouble he couldn't even touch it. He didn't know what he could do to help her.

  He ordered the drinks and was waiting, looking at the high screen where that day's baseball highlights were being cycled, when his Pad bleeped a triple tone.

  He flicked it on to read the incoming information—a coded line, a private word.

  It was from a contact of his at the Centers for Disease Control labs in Atlanta. A guy who'd helped him out a time or two before.

  New Russian connection. Meet me.

  It was flagged urgent and included the times of flights and a series of instructions.

  Jude put it back in his jacket as Mary returned.

  “New mail. Anyone I should know about?” she asked lightly, winking.

  For a second something about the wink bothered him. It was like a flirt, but Mary didn't do that routinely. It was like a signal, but he didn't know what it meant. The news from Atlanta was still sinking in. He shrugged it off.

  “Nobody nice,” he said and picked up the menu, almost as an afterthought, so he didn't have to meet her eyes and get the third degree. He paused. “How high up are our investigations supposed to go?”

  She sat back in mock surprise at the question. “How high? As high as it takes. We're here to enforce the law for everyone.”

  “Right.” He flipped the menu. “Want to eat here?”

  “No,” she said. “Not yet. Jude, come on. What's bothering you?”

  He stared at the list. “I think I got into something up to my neck and I can't get out,” he said finally.

  She nodded. “Go on.”

  “I don't know if I should.” He stuffed the menu back into its holder and flicked it away from him across the bar before turning back to her. “We've been friends a long time and it's probably better you don't know.”

  “Jude, for Chrissake.” She smiled and nudged his shin with the toe of her soft shoe. “Let me help. Is it to do with White Horse?”

  “Not entirely.” He linked his fingers together and turned his hands inside out, stretching, listening to his two loose knuckles crack. He felt he was at a critical point, an intersection in events, where his next move, one way or another, would precipitate an instant and inevitable plunge into the future, from which there would be no means of escape. He sighed, breathless at this insight, helpless before it. Like a person listening to an old recording of themselves they've forgotten ever making he heard himself speak.

  “I need a couple of days to think about it, okay? I'm going to stay away from work and just try to get it done on my own, yeah?”

  “But then, if it isn't done, you'll let me help you?” She sat forward and stared intently into his face. “If it's dangerous …”

  “I don't know,” he said. “I'll tell you later.”

  During the next hour, they drank three more rounds, talked about nothing in particular, caught up on some more details of her Florida experience. None of this could drag his mind from the file contents and Natalie Armstrong. He was barely able to keep up his end of the conversation. When she was leaving Mary said, “If you want to talk …”

  “Sure. Thanks.” Jude watched her go. He realized he liked Natalie because she was sparky, like Ma
ry. He asked himself, as he worked his way through a fourth beer, why he'd never gone to bed with Mary. He wondered, feeling suddenly lonely, if she'd like to and why he was thinking about this now when he'd never thought about it much before, whether it was his fear trying to grab on to something—anything—like a drowning man reaching for a shadow in the waves that might be either driftwood or emptiness. And then he thought about Fort Detrick and his mind went blank.

  By eleven that night he still hadn't come up with a plan that wasn't a hundred percent impossible to carry out, and none of the guys he'd once known in the army had had any clue what he was talking about when he'd called to poke around. So, for want of any other action, he booked his flight to Atlanta.

  Jude was entering the details into his diary when a curious possibility about the files back at his apartment occurred to him. It was so obvious that he wondered why he hadn't thought of it before. Suppose that those papers were all in one file because they all related to one man? The combination of the idea and the drink made him dizzy.

  He paid Cole and left, hurrying home with his head down against a light rain that had just started to fall.

  Dan got to the Clinic and found chaos. Police and military vehicles clogged the gateway like a log jam in a sluice. When he was allowed in he found the corridors were full of people who were all but running, weaving around each other in both directions, talking to microphones and one another in blurts of request and instruction that bounced off the walls and roof to mingle into a senseless din. The alarms were switched off, but the resulting background of silence was more disorientating than their normal screaming. The lack of motivating noise was unsettling. He gathered from fragments he overheard that there'd been some kind of Micromedica breakout—a contamination—and that something had gone bad with Bobby X.

  Dan's first thought was to find Natalie. But when he asked where she was the security officer scanning his Clinic card gave him a flat glance. “Report to your station. Someone there will inform you of your duties.”

  Dan had to bite his lip to prevent himself from saying “Fuck you” right into the little shit's face. Two minutes in charge and it was Zeig Heil all the way. He took his card and brushed through the knot of people at the doors to the Therapy wing, treading on more than one foot.

  A temporary hub had been set up in the waiting area. He saw familiar faces there. They all looked pale and strained. Nobody smiled. Standing among them were two officers in biosuits with air-groomers in their hands. Their headgear was hanging off and trailing down their backs, so obviously if there had been any danger of live NervePath in the air it was gone now.

  He caught hold of one of the other technicians he knew as the man passed him—a guy from NervePath Neurosurgery. “What's going on?”

  Roscoe's face was alert with a kind of excitement that didn't know if it was going to get itself smacked down but wasn't able to stop anyway.

  “Bobby's gone, man. Clean off the face of the earth. He was being treated by Doctor Armstrong. Something happened to her, too.”

  “What?” Dan tightened his grip even though Roscoe was tugging against it, clearly keen to go somewhere else. They had never had much time for each other. “Where is she?”

  “Q-1.” Roscoe twisted himself free and shook off Dan's touch. He gave him the once-over and curled his lip. “You should sort yourself out sometime, Connor. You're gonna give the place a bad name. She's been far too good to you.”

  Dan gulped air, not at the insult, which was beneath him, but at the information. He was still in his overcoat and he had the feeling that he was wearing odd shoes, but he didn't bother to check. It turned out that Roscoe was right. In the observation gallery of Quarantine-1 Dan found Charlton standing on her own, looking into the room beyond with a faraway expression on her face. Her arms were folded tight around each other as though they were burrowing away from the light.

  Dan stepped up beside her and breathed his gin-breath slightly to one side. “What's up?”

  “Oh, there you are!” She half smiled and they both looked through together. “She's asleep. Well, maybe more like a coma.”

  Dan looked at the small body in the bed and he wouldn't have believed it was Natalie, except he could see the short spiky red hair standing out stark against the white pillow.

  “Why?” was all he could say. He found his hands on the window frame, pawing at its solidity.

  “Don't know,” Charlton said softly. “Something about getting cross-infected.” She glanced nervously across at him. “Doesn't make sense, though, does it? I mean, she already had NP saturation, from doing her own work. So even if there was a spill, it wouldn't make any difference to her, would it?”

  Dan was looking down at the monitor readings. He wished now that he'd studied harder when he had the chance. Natalie looked healthy enough; her heart was good, her blood pressure only a touch high. “Is there a readout on those things?”

  “Not allowed to have it on,” Charlton said. “But if you've got an access code higher than me you might get it. They're working up in the main processing suite, finding out what happened. You should probably be there.”

  “Probably.” Dan fiddled with his Pad, logging into the Clinic system, verifying his Emergency Code, the passwords to the scanners … it seemed to take a lifetime. As he waited someone checked with Charlton over the intercom.

  “No,” she said to them. “No changes.”

  “How long?” he asked, making a mistake with his clumsy fingers and having to punch in the word again.

  “Just half an hour,” she said. “Seems like a lot of fuss to me. They say she fainted. She was exhausted. You saw her tonight. Maybe she needs to sleep it off.”

  Dan finally got the response he was looking for. As he focused his aching eyes on it he had to watch for a good few seconds before he could understand what he was seeing.

  “Fucking Ada,” he whispered. Charlton's question followed him as he raced through the door and headed for the central suite. There was no way that could be right.

  He got a much colder reception from McAlister and Calum Armstrong. Then he felt every molecule a dirty, unshaven, disreputable loser as they filled him in, their cold, clipped tones like those of robots.

  “… Sabotaged the experiment causing an overrun of an unplanned system.”

  “Some kind of transitory crossover occurred, causing the program to jump host systems—upgrade Natalie's own inert NP structures …”

  “… Don't fully understand the physical processes …”

  Dan realized, after he'd heard them rabbit for a couple of minutes, that it all added up to one thing. Natalie was infected with a live Selfware system—that stuff she'd written that he thought was a recipe for making yourself more intelligent and had tried to persuade her to sell on the Internet—and it was still running and they were doing nothing to stop it.

  “… Searching for the primary candidate …”

  “Just shut up!” Dan yelled over the top of their jabber. “Shut up a minute. Why haven't you shut it off?” He turned to McAlister, the only human physically present, and cast a look over Armstrong Senior and some other man he'd never seen before on the live-link.

  “It's password-protected,” McAlister informed him. He looked smug about it.

  “And you can't hack it in ten seconds?” Dan was incredulous. He found he was striding up to McAlister, taking his jacket in handfuls and lifting the weasel off the ground and it felt good. “Shut it off!” He glared over McAlister's shoulder at Armstrong, “She's your daughter, for God's sake!”

  Armstrong looked sick. Dan had never seen him so disturbed. He almost looked like he was going to lose consciousness.

  The other man, a heavily bearded guy, spoke for him, “We're working on it.” He had a strong accent. Dan didn't know what it was.

  “Let me go!”

  He ignored McAlister's kicking and instead shoved him up against the wall, bashing his head against the corner of one of Armstrong's many degrees and va
ledictory certificates. “You're saying you have your sneaky fingers up everyone's ass here and you don't know the passwords?”

  “It's her private—”

  “Well, Knitted Guy must have had them, right? Or how could he get access to it? Think of that? Jesus, I bet I even know what they are …”

  “If you do, then use them!” Calum barked and Dan saw that he meant it, every word.

  “It would be a total breach of securit—” McAlister began as he found his toes on the ground again.

  Dan swung him around and, with a shove, laid him flat out across the desk, arms and legs spread, so that he went sliding across it like a starfish, knocking the stylus holder flying. Dan was already working on his Pad, trying to find the route in.

  The Defence chaps weren't all evil. He was given a helping hand by the “expert” working in Bill's place who took him into the right areas and got him to the Initialize Edit screens in quick time. There was silence in the room as Dan sat and thought, wondering if his bet was going to be as good as it had seemed two minutes ago or if he was going to crash and burn out big time, taking Natalie's chances with him. His hands shook.

  But Dan did know the passwords because she only had three different ones and used all of them to try and stop him playing games on her machines at home when she was out. If she'd used another one … but he didn't want to think about that.

  The second try worked. It let them into the edit protocol and Dan watched as the engineer rapidly located the INFINITY parameter and reset it to INTEGER:1.

  “If I set it to zero after it's already been active it may do something unforeseen. Can't tell without looking at its databasing.” This was explained with a shrug that said the engineer wasn't sure there was a lot of hope with the figure 1 either.

  But Dan didn't care. One change was better than a billion changes.

  He was ahead of McAlister all the way down the corridor and into Q-1. The scanner system transmitted the new instructions and Natalie's multicolour flare reports died back to something like normal.

  “I want all the Security systems reset immediately,” McAlister was saying into his lapel phone as Dan turned from the readouts. “Yes. Every single one. Erase them all from the system and conduct full interviews with all staff before restoration of any privileges.”