The Book of the Dead

by Carriger, Gail

  “I’ve got to go, Liz. I may have figured this out.”

  I hung up on her protestations and I rummaged around in my desk, looking for Bellingham’s card. He had a UK number, I could have sworn... Yes, there it was.

  I hid a baseball bat under my overcoat and braved the night bus to Cambridge.

  It’s hard to walk; your limbs are stiff inside the new covering, too small for you, compressing everything. You wander a deserted city, information flowing bright at the edges, blinding you. At times, you are compelled to corners to sort, to walk in a certain way. At other times, you are free to roam. You have some power, some influence.

  You should not be.

  Directive: Sort preferences. Location: Timeline 6823941234.

  You are compelled to go onward, to search, discover, analyse, report. To spy on those you cared for; you want only oblivion.

  Please, please, please.

  The sun was coming up when the bus pulled into Cambridge. I went to the address on Bellingham’s business card expecting an office, but it was in an extension to King’s College. It was one of the lecturer’s offices, where in books the dons would force whisky on their students before making them compare Shakespeare with bananas.

  I walked past Bellingham as I came in the door. I recognised him from his profile photos, and managed to catch myself before stopping him. He looked like he’d pulled the type of all-nighter that’s common among geeks, exhaustion masked by the spark of ideas and success. I paused at the corner and watched him walk away, muttering to himself; he was probably going to the bathroom or to make a cup of tea or something.

  I was right, he’d left the door on the latch. I slipped in, flipping off the latch. It’d slow him for a few seconds.

  I was surprised by the room: it was neat as a pin and orderly, and spare. Every spare inch on the walls was given over to books: everything from Understanding Unix to Asp and .NET. There were tomes and reference manuals for every computer language I could name. Heavyweights like C/C++ and Java competed with clojure and Lisp; COBOL and Fortran were in evidence, and a collector’s dream of Assembly language books and programmers’ references for CPUs, many of whom I didn’t think existed any more: no one under thirty would even have heard of them. His workstation had a single screen, a big one, but a single screen at that.

  This was odd.

  AI programmers are the most extreme developers that I’ve ever met – and programmers are almost without exception an untidy group – they hold dozens of ideas in their minds at once, surrounded by stacks of paper, books, food wrappers. Everything that’s moved beyond arm’s reach is forgotten. At my office, we have to bribe the cleaning staff for engineering groups with extra perks. And developers demand the best, fastest computers. The Big Data guy at my own office has six screens on his main workstation, and four other workstations with three or four screen on each of them – his workstation looks like a command centre at NORAD, if NORAD had been overrun by zombies that only consumed microwavable food and takeaway coffees. He told me once that he thought that the leftover PCBs in polystyrene worked like insulators on the wires of his brain.

  Bellingham’s desk had a slot for a single cup, empty – that was good, making tea or coffee should take him more time than going to the bathroom.

  He hadn’t locked his screen.

  He had a window up:

  HENRYBLODGETT72 brainJuicersetUser(‘tomtomtwitterer’);

  That was me. My profile name.

  HENRYBLODGETT72 newLikes = brainJuicer.digUser();

  HENRYBLODGETT72 brainJuicer.userSet(newLikes);

  The other window was Facebook – but not quite. An admin screen, I guessed.

  My profile page was there – I’d always wondered why Facebook pages use only the centre of the screen – where the ads should be were graphs of my activity, my outputs, what I’d done, over time.

  To the left, a neat pair of bookends – lucite blocks holding what looked like bandaged hands holding up a set of books. Decidedly different than all the others – these had notes sticking out of them, in a range of colours, all annotated. The Book of the Dead. The Art and Practise of Mummification – this one the most heavily bookmarked. Decoding Rosetta. The House of Ptolemy. There was a big sheet of A3 paper to the right, an old photocopy of what looked like a sketch made from memory of an Egyptian scroll.

  The door rattled. I looked around, hoping to see keys, or a place to hide, but there was nothing. I went around and stood beside the door, and shut and locked the door behind Bellingham when he came through, shoving him to the ground with the bat.

  “OK, Bellingham. You’re in trouble now. Murder, at least. More, I think.”

  “Who... How... Who are you? What do you want? How did you get in?”

  “You know who I am. You must do. You have me on your screen. What are you doing over here – you’re doing something with my friend, with my Facebook page, here. You’ve done something to my friend Henry, and he’s...”

  It struck me how crazy this all sounded. It didn’t make sense, but it was true. It had to be. I could see it.

  I sank into his chair, turning my attention to his screen.

  “You’re sending something here. What are you doing? What are you doing with Henry Blodgett?”

  “I...” he hesitated. That was all the opening I need. I reached into every London gangster film I’d ever seen had and found a solid bluff, praying to gods I didn’t believe in that it would work. His reputation and access would be on the line..

  “Tell me what’s going on. I’ve started a copy offsite, using your nice fast Cambridge internet connection. I’ll work it out, eventually, and I’ll find out whatever you’re doing and I’ll get you fired. Jailed, probably. Henry’s dead after all, and he sent me an email with your name in it, saying that I should talk to you, but not trust you, if anything happened.

  “So what the hell have you done with my friend?” I slapped the baseball bat into my left hand. I couldn’t hit an actual ball to save my life, but you could do some serious damage to just about anything with a bat. Henry and I had gotten drunk and smashed up some cars in a junkyard out in the suburbs when we were kids one time.

  Thwack.

  The key, I figured, is to keep your mouth shut and stare.

  Bellingham opened his mouth and began to speak, a torrent of words.

  “Mr. O’Connell – I did not kill your friend.

  “I work in artificial intelligence. I have been looking at the way people interact and trying to construct consciousness from user profiles, in order to really understand the behaviours of others. It’s fascinating, really, you see...”

  I realised with terrible clarity what he was talking about, and it shook me. It couldn’t be, surely.

  “That’s enough. Turn it off. Delete it. Whatever you have to do. I’m going to watch.”

  “What? No, you don’t understand. Something has happened here, something wonderful.”

  The sound of his voice scared me.

  “No, Bellingham, you don’t understand. You’ve preserved something. Henry’s been talking to me, been manipulating things inside the system. He’s trapped in there. This stops now.”

  “What? It’s working on its own? Do you understand what that means? This is the biggest breakthrough in artificial intelligence ever. It was already doing great analysis on the site, but...”

  I hit the desk with the bat, leaving a dent and tipping his cup of tea over onto the floor. “Bellingham, I haven’t slept properly in days, worried about my friend. This isn’t a joke. It’s a life. His life. You’ve freaked me out - and Henry’s wife - and I’m sure, some others. My friend is dead. Let him sleep. Now.”

  I don’t know if it was the unhinged sound of my voice or my knuckles going pale as they gripped the bat, but he did.

  What Bellingham had done wasn’t what he was paid to do. It might not have been illegal, hell, it probably wasn’t technically unethical, but he’d buried snippets of code all over Facebook’s APIs, and
built management interfaces like mazes to cover his tracks. He definitely didn’t want anyone finding out what he’d done.

  A labyrinth through the system that only he would know about. It was elegant, I had to give him that – the highest praise one coder can give another. It was also the kind of thing you would have done in a bank if you wanted to steal billions. Or a life.

  He worked through sunrise and the morning. It was terrifying, the levels of access he appeared to have.

  “It’s done,” he said.

  “Now the profile. Henry’s. Delete the whole thing. You’ll have to get into backups, too. I don’t want Henry returning.”

  “I can’t do that – I don’t have the access, much less...”

  “Bellingham, after what I just seen, I’m sure you can get into anything. I’m not stupid. I write Lisp and Python and C++ and Java myself. Mine and Liz’s profiles, too. I don’t want you doing this to us, next. Or anyone. Ever.”

  “Well, I suppose I could... hmm... yes, I think that I could... let me just see...” He went back to work. This time, it was dark when he finished. We’d dined on a pair of congealing kebabs that he’d summoned via a graduate student, most likely a brilliant mathematician in his own right, reduced to servitude.

  “That’s it. I... you don’t know what you’ve done.”

  “I know exactly what I’ve done. You’re lucky to be alive, Bellingham. I should bash your head in, but I wouldn’t want an insanity defence. Remember that I’m watching you and I’ve got proof if this ever starts up again. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “Oh yes, I do.”

  I left. I didn’t trust him, but I didn’t know what I else I could do.

  Sleep calls, the proper sleep. A light appears – but wait, just one more thing to do! The work, your afterlife’s work, the dominoes set to go. You reach, only to lose fingers, toes, to set off a chain.

  Thank you my friend, my oldest dearest friend.

  Goodbye my darling. Live, and go on, and be free. I will be at peace.

  Oblivion

  It came out anyway, sort of. Documents were leaked. The Nectar fraud team noticed some irregularities. Mistakes were admitted. A graduate researcher – I like to think it was that poor sod earning his PhD at Cambridge fetching kebabs – found some code snippets that, he claimed, gave Bellingham unprecedented access to individual data. There was a scandal, and plenty of external and internal inquiries made. “Individuals” within Facebook had been, for some time, violating their own terms and conditions, accessing personal details of individual users – but the way it was portrayed in the media was both worse - filled with seedy details that made you think of pimply geeks drooling over your private snaps, and didn’t even begin to touch on what the real fucked up thing was. Not even half the story. They’d recover, of course. A fine. Some donations to appropriate charities.

  Bellingham was found hanging in his office a week later. There was no note, though he’d curiously donated 98% of his shares to a hospice charity. As it turns out, he’d apparently signed over the other bit to Henry, the day before Henry’d died. This was enough to set Liz up without relying on Nectar points. Not a billionaire, but she had enough.

  I sit on at Facebook late at night occasionally, typing in messages and deleting them - trying to get a response, checking to make sure that Henry is gone. As far as I could tell, he is sleeping, silent; he lies dormant, at peace

  Of course, there’s archive.org. There are backup tapes in storage facilities all over the planet, persisting our own data in so many ways. Cookies. Government surveillance. Test systems. Does anything ever really die on the Internet?

  The Dedication of Sweetheart Abbey

  David Bryher

  The Lady Dervorguilla of Galloway lay face down on the operating table, her head cradled in a cushioned ring. I lay face up, under my Lady, on a wooden pallet which sat on four rickety coasters. I was wheeled underneath her by Brother Ares, who pushed too hard with his foot, nearly causing my head to collide with the metal stalk supporting the table.

  We were not medical personnel. We were present during the procedure simply to tend to our Lady’s needs, but there was little for us to do once the medicians started work and I suspected Brother Ares was starting to get bored.

  I took a deep breath and told myself to speak to Father General Nineveh about Brother Ares’ behaviour later. It would not do to cause a scene at this precise moment, not when we were in the intimate presence of our Lady.

  My Lady’s face, still and white, shone above me. The hole in which her face rested was illuminated by a ring of pink light – her choice of colour. Brother-Medician Bradley had programmed the table to her exacting demands. Everywhere she went, the Lady loved to see pink light.

  Her eyelids were closed, and I could see a trembling beneath the skin. I had never been this close to my Lady.

  At a casual glance, one might think she was asleep. But my Lady was not asleep. The medicians needed her to be awake for the operation.

  “Are you comfortable, my Lady?” I asked.

  “Do I look comfortable to you?”

  In the Chronicons of the New Abbey, we described her voice as honeyed, or like the tinkling of bells or the babbling of a brook. The library – its four walls each thirty feet high, and each lined with leather spines that gripped the endless sheets of bleached vellite which guarded all the Earthly knowledge and Heavenly glory of the Lady Dervorguilla of Galloway, all the datastreams of her family lines and her works and marvels and miracles – was the biggest crock of shit in the universe. I prayed for Brother Ares to yank me back as quickly as he had kicked me here.

  “Apologies, my Lady. Is there anything I could get my Lady to ease her discomfort?”

  One eye fluttered open, revealing a huge black orb. “You could start with wine,” she said, though she knew the likelihood of that. The medicians had already battled that point with her, the poor bastards. “Failing that, you can get me some more painkillers. These seem to have stopped working.”

  She was shaking one hand over the edge of the table. In the hand, she held a button that, when pressed, was supposed to administer an intravenous dose of somniferum. She had started clicking the minute the assistant put it in her hand, and we had all seen the small phial of blue liquid run dry some time ago.

  I licked my lips. I was about to tell her that she had already reached the limit, but I thought better of it. “I shall see what I can do. Begging my Lady’s leave.” I waggled my feet, pointedly. “Brother Ares,” I hissed. “Brother Ares, please retrieve me, if you’d be so kind.”

  Lady Dervorguilla closed her eyes again. Her brow trembled with displeasure. The pink light looked like the blaze of the sun before a storm. I tried to push myself from under the table, but the floor was soaked in blood and my palms slipped uselessly across the marble slabs. Just after my position had started to feel exceptionally uncomfortable, just after the sweat had popped on my forehead and my breathing had quickened, Brother Ares aimed a sharp kick at the back corner of the pallet, sending me sliding across the floor of the operating theatre.

  I flung out a hand, trying to get some purchase on the slick floor, but I failed. I hit the metal refuse bin at some speed, bruising my arm and causing such a ruckus that my Lady shrieked in fury – in that beautiful honeyed voice, of course – for a good five minutes. She only stopped when another medician entered the room, tutted, and refilled the little blue phial.

  Brother Ares and I stood in the corner of the operating theatre, trying to stay out of everyone’s way. Once the medicians started work on the procedure – to attach the embalmed corpse of our Lady’s husband to her back – I could barely tear my eyes away, horrified though I was. Brother Ares, on the other hand, seemed to think he was anywhere but here, flicking idly through the day’s prayer tokens on his phone.

  My Lady herself was now obscured by the cloud of medicians and medician’s assistants around the operating table. At the far side of the room, a circle of the
younger brothers gathered to chant devotions in support of their work. A separate group of medicians waited at the foot of the table, holding the blackened body of John Balliol.

  “Do you think he smells?” I whispered.

  “Wow, Seth. Really?” Brother Ares jabbed me with his elbow. “Is that what…? So, that’s appropriate talk, is it? Our Lady and her beloved are about to be eternally bound, their hearts entwined together in a cage of silver and gold, and you wonder if he fucking smells. Jesus.”

  “All right, all right, sorry, keep it down.”

  “Keep it…? I’m not the one who piped up about whether he fucking smells!”

  “Ares, please.”

  “Brother Ares.”

  “You don’t call me Brother Seth.”

  “This again?”

  “I’m just saying, I show you the same respect I show all the others at the Abbey. You are no different to anyone else, and nor should you be addressed as such.”

  “Seth, for fuck’s sake.” He slipped a hand around the inside of my hood, grabbed the back of my head and pulled me into a kiss. “Now, shut the fuck up.”

  Someone at the operating table cleared their throat.

  “Sorry,” I muttered. “Sorry, everyone.”

  Two hours later, Lady Dervorguilla was able to walk. She was still groggy from the extra doses of somniferum, however, so Brother Ares and I followed her everywhere, a step or two behind her on either side, our nervous hands hovering, ready to steady her should she slip up. A pair of medicians walked ahead of us, flanking our Lady, each carefully monitoring her husband’s body for any movement that could affect the integrity of the grafting cage.

  My Lady and her husband, the liquorice-black cadaver fixed to her back like an ape child clinging to its mother, made for a grotesque sight. His wizened arms were hooked around her neck like a collar, the fingers of his hands fanned as if they were decorative feathers – and set into their fingertips, ten tiny, pink LEDs. His legs, thinned and shortened by the embalming process, were clamped round her waist like a beetle’s legs gripping a finger. I was at least glad to note that John Balliol did not smell.