Mappa Mundi

by Justina Robson

  Her father was first to greet her with a stiff hug, embarrassed by the fact they were watched as he showed her affection but genuinely delighted to see her alive and well. As he pressed her close and she closed her eyes she saw a clear image of a boy trapped inside a huge wall of rocks that left him only enough space to exist and barely room for the smallest of frequent, tiny breaths. She was still reeling from the impact of this as she shook hands with Nikolai Kropotkin, the Russian psychologist she knew only as a name in respected journals.

  He was older than her father but he had a face that looked kind and, like her own, a touch impish. His handgrip was full of anxiety, however, and Natalie noticed as they said their hellos that he was more curious about her state than about her. She thought of a series of insects in amber, the stone polished to a jewel-like smoothness and shine, and in that shine Kropotkin's eyes reflected through a kaleidoscope of lenses; she was the mosquito and he the discoverer.

  Isidore Goldfarb the programmer was a bigger shock. His Asperger's she recognized instantly by his peculiar fixity of eye contact and attention. The quality of the muscles in his hands told her nervous system how he felt at making such a bold and peculiar gesture—he had to struggle with his own instinct telling him not to do it as he fell into a set routine of movement and words as fixed and inherently meaningless to him as sets of programming code were to the machines that ran them. Beneath his veneer of procedure, however, he was bright-eyed; a fox curled in a private, dark den, watching the world through screens of shadow—Natalie saw herself through these veils. Her own state of hyperalertness was a fierce burn in the stare and her hand's touch was offensively warm as it flickered in a rhythm that upset him because he could not follow. He recognized her as a fellow defective, a curio, a broken drum.

  Alicia Khan was a sheen of ebony over a cat's softness and sly grace. Natalie perceived her through what was almost an hallucination, symbolic in quality, which distilled into a few images all the information about her that she needed to know: a girl (Alicia in the past) sat alone in her room, working by the light of a candle whose wax was nearly burned away. When it burned out the girl's spirit would rise with the smoke. Her life would be gone.

  But she had no time to do more than remark this bizarre new facility for seeing because Lucy Desanto was now in front of her, gripping her hand and holding her captive to a vision far more shocking than Alicia's. Her fury was barely disguised, and in the flat grey plain of her resentful stare lay a dead boy sprawled on a city street, eyes staring and purple lips open in an eternal scream.

  Natalie involuntarily recoiled and felt shock numb her face. Lucy Desanto's annoyance became hurt and suspicion. Natalie looked down at the floor and concentrated on the tiles: green and black, count them, one, two … this was as bad as being on the ward. Hell, it was like being everyone on the damn' ward. A deep breath now.

  She'd used to think how much time could be saved if only therapists could see straight into the minds of patients and get directly to what was bothering them without the gloopy, fretful world of language to bugger up understanding. Now she wished she knew far less.

  “Are you all right?” Her father was at her elbow, holding on to her and shielding her from the rest of them.

  “I'm fine.” She made herself stand up properly. “I'm experiencing a few odd effects of the accident, that's all. It's nothing. Really.” There, her own talk-to-the-mad voice was back and it calmed her down. She blinked and the composite images she'd been picking up from them all vanished into memory, leaving the present clear.

  “Sorry,” she apologized to them all, for violating their personal, unknowing space. She was only grateful that they couldn't see into hers.

  Natalie looked up into her father's face and saw, with a sick plunge of her heart, that it was anguished. “Thank you for stopping it when you did.”

  He knew she meant the Selfware, when the Ministry would have let it run. “Not soon enough,” he said in a hoarse whisper and almost crushed her hands where he held them. “And it wasn't me that did it. It was Dan. You must thank him …”

  “Oh God, Dad. He's dead,” she said and closed her eyes for a second.

  “What?”

  Slowly and with sadness Natalie explained to all of them the circumstances of her journey, from the Clinic to her arrival at Fort Detrick, leaving out, for the time being, Bobby and Jude.

  The room was quiet for a minute or two after as they all absorbed the information. Only the sound of the cooling motors from the kitchen and the air vents hummed through the narrow lounge. Natalie sat down with Calum. They were facing Kropotkin, who spoke first.

  “So, they are using it already.”

  “The versions are badly produced, badly written and run on low-percentage, old-version NervePath,” Natalie said. “I don't know where they were made or anything like that. I can show you a sample of one system.”

  She activated her Pad and Kropotkin switched on the display systems in the lounge—no area was without its opportunities for constructive thought. All of them looked through the code intently, although Khan and Desanto had no training in it. Kropotkin used his own Pad to work the central computer system by remote and rendered it as a display: an engineering diagram of an active simulated brain. The colour-coded picture fragmented and separated into three-dimensional segments, so that all the deeper structures came into view.

  “This is the Deer Ridge phenomenon?” Khan asked.

  Natalie didn't know that the news of it had broken, but Guskov obviously knew all about it.

  “Yes. I wrote an erasure routine and that was used to remove the programming from those people under the effects last week.”

  “How many survived it?” Natalie didn't see any trace of foreknowledge that would suggest he'd been consulted about the original test idea. In that at least he was telling the truth.

  “Fourteen out of twenty-one. Not bad, considering.”

  “Thirteen,” Natalie said.

  They all looked at her.

  “The woman whose house was burned down by Martha Johnson, the storekeeper. She died as a result. So that makes it thirteen survived, even though she may not have been directly infected.”

  Guskov nodded. “In that case we should include the other two who were murdered by those under the effect.”

  “What was the programme supposed to do?” Lucy Desanto was sitting right on the edge of her seat, twisting the two rings on her right hand. Natalie felt her anxiety and horror without having to try.

  Kropotkin glanced around to check whether anyone else was going to volunteer information and replied, “It was meant to disturb and disable coordinated civil action.” He said the words in a lofty way and laughed ruefully. Natalie's own smile was twisted.

  Lucy and Alicia looked momentarily baffled by their humour. Natalie explained. “It's far too abstract a goal—disable coordinated civil action. The programmers, who weren't really experts, and the other people on the team had to translate that into something that can be done in a living mind by a bunch of switches … they failed. It isn't possible to use NervePath and Mappaware to perform a wide-ranging social task. You can only use it to work within the individual's worldview and their own experience. This program is a monster. All it does, once you initiate your cooperation and friendly allegiance patterns, is send a huge shunt through your amygdala, punching you with anger and fear. Depending on how well those patterns were recognized or how much they filtered into the rest of your understanding—it's an emotional nuke. Way too big for the job. Way too stupid.”

  “And in about fifteen minutes it would turn you into a barbarian,” Lucy said, nodding.

  “Irreversible psychosis,” Kropotkin agreed. He glanced at Guskov and in that brief second of eye contact the many long years of knowing each other was vivid. “Isn't that so?”

  “You forget, Nikolai, that the British experiment prior to the Selfware test was a success. There are treatments that can restore these people within a matter of hours. It i
s anything but irreversible. That is the essence of the entire State of Mind—unlimited freedom of choice.”

  “These choices.” Desanto interrupted him, her voice guttural. “What and who will make them? Supposing you are infected by a system that is a dogma, offers no choices—what would induce you to use anything that would change your world then? It would go against all you believed. It would be unthinkable. In that single step you would be imprisoned, your own jail and jailer.”

  “You should know the answer,” Guskov returned, smoothly grinning at her discomfort, enjoying it. “You have just such a memeplex as the foundation of your identity, Lucy. And have you the will, the inclination, or the ability to contemplate renouncing it? Can you imagine other people's minds that are not fettered in this way?”

  Natalie was surprised at such an instant and open confrontation. The emotional atmosphere in the room dropped a degree. Goldfarb had to sit on his hands to prevent them twitching in discomfort. Her father cleared his throat.

  “We all have our delusions,” Calum said sternly. “There's no need to victimize one Catholic and think the rest of us aren't as stuck in our ways. But her question is a good one, and your answer is not as good. In a natural environment ideas come and go from the Selfplex in a way you could speak of as though it was natural selection—strong contenders that find themselves acceptable to the existing structures are promoted, weak ones that find no support in the architecture fade and are forgotten. It is the Selfplex that determines value and acceptability. But Mappaware is much more radical in the way it manipulates the patterns of thoughts. It is possible to remove all awareness of choice and never to have it re-emerge. Mappaware can close some gates forever.”

  Natalie found she was staring at her father in surprise. She'd always seen him as so fixed, and here he was, talking about freedom.

  Guskov tipped his chin down in a nod of agreement. “Mmn, you're right. Now we are getting to the heart of the matter. I know you're not here because you all agree with my views on this Free State or about the Mappaware itself. We should clear the air before we attempt to work together. The project depends on it.”

  “Yes, but what's the point when we all know you'll have your way?” Lucy said. “Far from being any kind of a free choice, it's your work all these years that's led to us being here, with no choice but to go forward and try to use this abomination of a tool to do some good. Even your decision that the world needs this kind of freedom is something you took on your own. How democratic is that?”

  “I've explained this before,” Guskov sighed. “The technology was never in doubt. Its existence was determined as soon as Micromedica proved that it could function intersynaptically without disrupting normal process—it was only ever going to be a matter of time.”

  “But you'd planned long before that,” Alicia Khan said. “You and Nikolai together had ideas on this subject in the 1990s.”

  “Theories,” Kropotkin said. “Nothing more. There was never a way that was delicate or discreet enough to put them into practice. And governments, especially this one, had a long history of attempted uses of all kinds of mind control and propaganda devices.”

  “Far seers.” Natalie nodded. “The MK-Ultra project.” She'd studied what she knew of the projects that the USA had run during the Cold War but all of her material had been anecdotal. She'd seen no proofs in which she couldn't poke a hole some way, just as with all the other paranormal claims she'd investigated. “They may have been able to do something. It's hard to say definitely either way.”

  “It's impossible,” her father snorted. “Easy to claim, never proven in a controlled test.”

  Guskov turned to Natalie. “But you're in a different position now, Doctor Armstrong. You can read minds, isn't that right?”

  Natalie hesitated, aware of all the attention in the room fixed on her and an undercurrent of wary and instinctive dislike, exactly the same reaction as Jude had first shown.

  “It seems to be so,” she said carefully. “But it's a result of the Selfware process, the altered program. I don't know what it is.” Their faces were wide-eyed. They wanted to believe her. They were frightened, too. “Why don't we put it to the test?”

  Her challenge surprised them.

  “Wait, I thought there was another test subject, I mean, a person—before you,” Lucy said. “What was the outcome of that?”

  Natalie looked at Guskov and her father, one at a time. “You know. Why haven't you told them?”

  Kropotkin answered for them. “Because we would not believe it.”

  “I don't believe it, either,” she said. “But now we can find out beyond a shadow of doubt. Your patient, Bobby X, as he was known on the list, is still alive. Unless he's reached a critical point, he may still be able to come here. He's volunteered to be our subject.”

  “Excuse me, but what are we talking about here?” Khan shook her head in confusion, both hands open to the air. “May be able to? We're a hundred and fifty feet underground in a sealed container. How is he going to get in?”

  Natalie met her incredulous gaze calmly and smiled, “That's the most interesting question of all. Shall we go into the Test Centre and find out?”

  As they got up, Isidore spoke for the first time. “This changes everything,” he said, looking straight at Guskov. “You didn't foresee this. Whatever it is, it's obviously extremely powerful and dangerous. It doesn't fit the plan.”

  “We'll see.” Guskov smiled and waved them out of the door ahead of him.

  Natalie caught up with her father in the corridor. He glanced down at her and whispered, “Bobby X is still alive?”

  “I think so.” She felt his hand reach for hers and hold it, tenderly.

  “Good,” he said, squeezing her fingers.

  She had to fight to breathe against the tough pain in her throat all the way to the control centre. Calum hadn't thought Bobby would survive. He didn't think she would.

  Utah from the plane's window was orange, broad, and arid beneath the cloudless sky of the day. They flew in low to Dugway's tough little strip and Jude watched their shadow racing, getting larger and larger. Two jackrabbits broke cover and went dodging and leaping away as they touched down. Their frantic paws left fan-trails of dust that spread on the wind and then quickly settled. In the distance, mirage lakes shivered. The plane turned and taxied towards the huts at the edge of the airfield.

  Jude turned away from the view unwillingly and looked at Mary as she put her jacket on in the seat across from his, smiling unconsciously as he did. She'd been such a good friend for so long, he couldn't think of her as a devious barefaced liar. The ghost wings in his back fluttered. His smile faded.

  “Penny for them?” she asked.

  “If it turned out that we'd already run into this project, in Florida, say. The procedure would be to hand over our materials to the project team leader and bury any subsidiary investigations, right?”

  Mary's coral mouth, glossed and perfect, smiled as she tipped her forehead down, confirming that.

  “But if this looks like an international—”

  “Then we have the option to hand it over to the International Committee,” she said. “You're not really thinking of doing that?”

  “I'm sure it's in violation of a number of nonproliferation agreements and conventions, without even looking.” He undid his seat belt and stretched his legs. His body felt old.

  “We need a reliable deterrent.”

  “We need to keep everyone behind the line if any treaty is going to work,” he said. “That's going to last about two seconds when they find out about this.”

  “You don't honestly believe that other nations haven't pursued this?”

  He yawned. “I don't know what to believe.”

  She nudged his shin with her foot and uncrossed her legs. “Wait and see.”

  Outside, the sun had turned the morning into a baking oven. Heat radiated from every surface and the dryness of the air made Jude cough. He and Mary walked between
their military escorts and took two cars to the Proving Grounds, the shift from hot blast to cold air-conditioning a shock plunge that Jude resented like a hole in the head. He was shivering when he got out and then within seconds they were through another wall of red heat and into a cold room that felt like an icebox.

  “Who needs Swedish saunas?” he muttered to Mary and she grinned.

  Despite his initiation into the marines Jude had never entirely liked army ways. Now the formalities irritated him. His head felt scratchy on the inside, but that was most likely his imagination rather than the actual NervePath spreading. Knowing that didn't help.

  The Proving Grounds were an enormous lot of sixty-four square miles. Uninhabited except by lizards, rodents, rabbits, and the occasional deer they had been the test area for the USA's biological and chemical programmes for over sixty years. Out here there were animals that had become resistant to diseases that had been used in tests, including Q-Fever and equine encephalitis. The fact that, even under this torment, life could scratch out an existence and had adapted gave Jude hope in the face of what Natalie had told him of Guskov's plans. Things were never as hopeless as they looked. Then again, it was the animal migration here that worried him the most intensely, too. Local domestic animals and humans had been infected with germs from bomb tests on this land before.

  Their contact here, Lieutenant Colonel Sharrock of the army's Medical Research, Development, Acquisition, and Logistics Command, met them in the bunker confines of the viewing station they had been ushered into. He shook hands with them and showed them to seats. In front of them screens were blank, except for the names and locations of their camera feeds set out in plain type. Sharrock, a heavyset man with greying hair and a face that was lean even down to the almost lipless economy of his mouth, had a cultured, authoritative voice that had long since lost specifics of local accent—although, as they went through introductions, he admitted to being a Texan.

  Jude's first question was, “How does this fit in with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, Colonel?”

  The colonel blinked. He wasn't used to answering to civilians but he said, “As stated in our documentation, Agent Westhorpe, the Deliverance system is a defensive technology, designed to counteract the effects of terrorist attacks using biological and chemical weapons. Although we signed up not to test offensive weapons of this nature or with nuclear capacity there is no law that says we can't test countermeasures.”