Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  Close beside him, someone had begun to whimper, in high, singing tones. Everything sank back into darkness, because the fact that his eyes were closed was starting to defeat the vision of that terrifying room. His mind found its way back to reality, except that nobody seemed to have told his body. It didn’t respond, it wouldn’t move. He was starting to fight against that weird rigidity by emitting those whimpers, real sounds that anyone who had been in the room could have heard as clearly as he did himself, and finally, by summoning all his powers, he managed to move the little finger of his left hand. He was wide awake by now. He remembered stories about people who – having apparently passed away – had been carried to the grave, while they actually saw every moment with crystal clarity, and without the slightest chance of being able to attract anyone’s attention, and he whimpered still louder in his panic and despair.

  It was Diane who rescued him.

  ‘Owen, I’ve cracked Yoyo’s password.’

  A twitch ran through his paralysed body. Jericho sat up. The computer’s voice had broken the spell, dream images gurgled away down the drain of oblivion. He took a few deep breaths before asking:

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Eat me and I’ll eat you alive.’

  My God, Yoyo, he thought. How overdramatic. At the same time he was grateful that she had clearly chosen the access code in a fit of rebellious romanticism, rather than opting for the more secure variation of a random sequence of letters and digits, which would have been much harder to decode.

  ‘Download the content,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve done it.’

  ‘Save it in Yoyofiles.’

  ‘With pleasure.’

  Jericho sighed. How was he going to wean Diane off her habit of saying With pleasure? Much as he liked her voice, her tone, the words bothered him more each time. There was something servile about it that he found repulsive. He rubbed his eyes and squatted on the edge of the desk chair, his eyes fixed on the monitor.

  ‘Diane?’

  ‘Yes, Owen?’

  ‘Can you— I mean, would it be possible for you to delete the phrase With pleasure from your vocabulary?’

  ‘What do you mean exactly? With pleasure? Or the phrase with pleasure?’

  ‘With pleasure.’

  ‘I can offer to suppress the phrase for you.’

  ‘Great idea. Do that!’

  He almost expected the computer to grant his wish with another With pleasure, but Diane just said silkily, ‘Done.’

  And how amazingly simple. Why hadn’t he thought of it years ago? ‘Show me all the downloads in Yoyofiles from May of this year, sorted by time of day.’

  A short list appeared on the screen, totalling about two dozen entries. Jericho skimmed them and concentrated his attention on the time leading up to Yoyo’s escape.

  There was something.

  His weariness fled instantly. About half an hour before Yoyo left her flatshare, data had been transferred to her computer, two files in different formats. He asked Diane to open one of them. It was a shimmering symbol of intertwined lines. It pulsed as if it were breathing. Jericho took a closer look.

  Snakes?

  It actually did look like a nest of snakes. Snakes twining into a kind of reptilian eye. It seemed to rest in the centre of a body, from which the snake bodies emerged: a single, surreal-looking creature that somehow reminded Jericho of school visits.

  Where did snakes go creeping around all over the place in mythology?

  He looked at the second file.

  friends-of-iceland.com

  en-medio-de-la-suiza-es

  Brainlab.de/Quantengravitationstheorie/Planck/uni-kassel/32241/html

  instead of

  Vanessacraig.com

  Hoteconomics.com

  Littlewonder.at

  Jericho rubbed his chin.

  You didn’t have to be particularly intelligent to understand what it meant. Three websites were to be exchanged. He wondered how Yoyo had got hold of the data. He asked Diane to open the three pages at the top, one by one, all of which were innocuous and generally accessible pages. friends-of-iceland was a blog. In it, Scots emigrants to Iceland swapped experiences, provided useful tips to new arrivals and those who were thinking of emigrating, and put photographs on the net. en-mediode-la-suiza was also devoted to the charms of living abroad. Produced in Spain, the page provided a great deal of visual material about Switzerland, in the form of 3D films. Jericho looked at some of them. They had been filmed from a plane or helicopter. At a low altitude he flew over Zürich, landscapes of the canton of Uri and picturesque collections of houses and barns that lay scattered along a winding river.

  Brainlab.de/Quantengravitationstheorie/Planck/uni-kassel/32241/html, finally, came from Germany and consisted of closely typed lines of text, examining over twelve pages a phenomenon that physics described as ‘quantum foam’. It described what happened if you applied quantum theory and the General Theory of Relativity to the so-called Planck length, which gave you foaming space–time bubbles and at the same time a scientific dilemma, because those bubbles overrode the calculations of General Relativity. The text was remarkable for its lack of paragraphs, and was plainly written for people whose notion of ecstasy involved a blackboard scribbled all over with formulas.

  Scotland, Spain, Germany. The joys of Iceland. The beauty of Switzerland. Quantum physics.

  Hardly designed to provoke fear and horror.

  Curious, he called up the websites that were supposed to be swapped. Vanessa Craig was revealed as a student of agricultural science from Dallas, Texas, who was spending a few months on an exchange programme in Russia. In her online diary she wrote quite unexcitingly about her little university town near Moscow. She was homesick and lovesick and complained of the low temperatures responsible for the innate melancholy of the Russian soul. Behind Hoteconomics, an American website offering up-to-the-minute economy news, was Littlewonder, an Austrian portal for handmade toys, specialising in the needs of pre-school children.

  What was all this? What did travel reports, toys, quantum physics, the global economy and the notes of a shivering American have in common?

  Nothing.

  And that was precisely the quality required by dead letter drops. You walked by, looked at them without suspecting for a moment that they might contain something other than what they actually contained. Yoyo must have found their common properties. Something you couldn’t see, but was still there. Again Jericho opened the Spanish address with the film clips from Switzerland, clicked on the snake symbol and moved it aside.

  Nothing happened. As if pulled by elastic bands, it darted back into the empty space of the display.

  ‘Weird,’ Jericho murmured. ‘I could have sworn—’

  That it’s a mask.

  A mask to reveal hidden content in the apparently harmless context of the pages. A decoding program. Again he dragged it onto the Spanish website, and again it slipped away.

  ‘Okay then, friends of Iceland. Let’s see what you have to offer.’

  And this time it happened.

  The moment he dragged the snake symbol to the blog, an extra window opened. It contained a few apparently unconnected words, but his instinct hadn’t failed him.

  Jan in business address: Oranienburger Strasse 50, continues a that he statement coup Donner be There are

  ‘I knew it! I knew it!’

  Jericho clenched his fists. Excited now, he went to work. The snake icon was a key. Anyone who had concealed messages in the pages was using a special algorithm, and the parameters for that algorithm lay in the mask. He opened the page with the essay about quantum foam and repeated the procedure. Further words were added to the fragment:

  Jan in Andre runs business address: Oranienburger Strasse 50, 10117 Berlin. continues a grave that he knows all about One way or another statement coup Chinese government implemented of timing and Donner be liquidated. There are

  * * *

  There are? Whatever t
here were, this stuff here was far more likely to alarm somebody who was the focus of State surveillance! What looked at first glance like sheer Dadaism was really part of a larger message, the text of which had been sent to an unknown number of mailboxes.

  Dead letter drops existed wherever states and institutions spied on one another and agents had to avoid being seen together, Jericho thought. During the Cold War they had been the most common form of message transmission. Almost anything at all could be used: rubbish bins, holes in trees, cracks in masonry, public phone books, magazines in waiting rooms, vases and sugar bowls in restaurants, the cisterns in public lavatories. The drop was a place accessible to anyone, where you left something that anybody might see, but which only the initiated recognised as a message. Transmitter and receiver agreed on a period of time, the transmitter deposited what he wanted to pass on – documents, microfilms, demands for cash, journalistically controversial material – left a sign at an agreed place that something was waiting in the drop, and disappeared. A little later the receiver came along, picked up the transmission, left a sign of his own that it had been collected, and also went on his way. The system worked as long as the physical exchange of hardware was involved. Since encrypted messages were now passed on via the internet, they had fallen out of fashion, and were reserved for cases where the information to be passed on could not, with the best will in the world, be transmitted down a fibre-optic cable.

  At least that was what people said.

  In fact the drop was celebrating an unparallelled renaissance, particularly where electronic encryption was forbidden or if there was a risk that the net police had been given a spare key. The new drops were harmless files and websites that anyone could access. What they contained was unremarkable as long as the content was suited to the transmission of the message. A sentence consisting of twelve words could be broken down into twelve parts and distributed across twelve websites. Word one, The, could appear in the second line of a travel piece, word two in the sixth line of the third paragraph of a specialist scientific article, and where it was absolutely imperative that a word should not appear, it was broken down into individual letters that could be found anywhere.

  However, no one could do anything with the files while they weren’t in possession of a key that separated the words or letters from their contexts and combined them to form a new, secret meaning, a mask, like the kind used in former times, when the Bible or the works of Tolstoy were made to reveal the most incredible content simply by placing a sheet of variously perforated cardboard over a particular page. The matter that appeared in the holes produced the message. In the world of the World Wide Web that mask was a program. Parts of such a program had clearly made their way onto Yoyo’s computer, along with an indication that three drops had been replaced by three different ones. Jericho had no idea how many drops were involved overall. It could be dozens, hundreds. Clearly, other addresses were needed for the meaning of the message to be revealed, but Jericho was beginning to understand why Yoyo must have become convinced that she had kicked a hornets’ nest.

  Jan in Andre runs business address: Oranienburger Strasse 50, 10117 Berlin.

  Who could that be? Someone called Jan or Andre, perhaps even a woman – Jan in: Janine? Could you run a business address? Unfortunate choice of words. Something was missing, although the address seemed to be complete.

  continues a grave that he knows all about One way or another

  Something was continuing, and someone knew about it.

  that he knows all about

  He? Not a woman, then? Jan in Andre. Was that one continuous name? Now the controversial bit:

  statement coup Chinese government

  Here Yoyo’s eyes must have popped out of her head. The Chinese government, mentioned in the same breath as the idea of a coup. A person who had knowledge of it, possibly to the cost of the people undertaking the coup. Who or what was to be overthrown? The government in Beijing? Were there plans for a coup in parliament, amongst the military, abroad? Hard to imagine? It was more likely that the statement referred to a coup in another country, and that the Chinese government was involved in it. A coup that had succeeded or failed, or else was still to come.

  Was there anyone who could have blown the cover on Beijing’s role?

  implemented of timing and Donner be liquidated

  Gobbledygook apart from one word: liquidated. Liquidate Donner? Donner and Blitzen? Donner kebab? Hardly. As everywhere throughout the fragment, crucial passages were missing here too. The text might have been completed with a few words, but it might equally have been hundreds of pages long, and everything that Jericho thought he was reading into it might prove to be erroneous. But if that wasn’t the case, a murder was being reported, announced or at least recommended here.

  He studied the text once more.

  timing. This was about a sequence of events. A sequence of events that was under threat? Yoyo must have assembled the puzzle just as he had, reached similar conclusions and immediately gone into hiding as if the devil were on her tail. And it was perfectly possible to see the Chinese State security service in that light. And yet her escape didn’t really make sense. She had been working with controversial material for years. The fragment should surely have aroused her curiosity, stirred her enthusiasm, and instead it had thrown her into a panic.

  Had it? Or had she hurried enthusiastically to Quyu, to round up the Guardians and start doing background research in the shelter of the control centre?

  No, that would have been absurd. She wouldn’t have left her father without a word. There could have been only one reason, that she was worried about putting him and herself in danger by making too close contact. Because she assumed that she was under surveillance. More than that! That night she must have had cause to worry that her enemies would be outside the door in a few minutes, because she had broken into their secret information channels and been noticed.

  They had detected Yoyo.

  Jericho called to mind her piece on Brilliant Shit, had Diane load the text and read it again:

  ‘Hi all. Back in our galaxy now, have been for a few days. Was really stressed out these last days, is anybody harshing on me? Couldn’t help it, really truly. All happened so fast. Shit. Even so quickly you can be forgotten. Only waiting now for the old demons to visit me once more. Yeah, and, I’m busy writing new songs. If any of the band asks: We’ll make an appearance once I’ve got a few euphonious lyrics on the go. Let’s prog!’

  No one victorious would write like that. It was a cry for help from someone losing control. When she was uploading the web addresses and the mask, she must have realised that she’d been located. That was why she had left so quickly.

  He studied the fragment again.

  ‘Diane, find 50 Oranienburger Strasse, 10117 Berlin.’

  The reply came in an instant. Jericho looked at his watch. Two minutes to twelve. He connected the hologoggles to the computer, logged on and chose the coordinates entered by Yoyo.

  The Second World

  Since the middle of the last decade, when Second Life had been restructured after its predictable collapse, there was no longer a central hub, any more than the space–time continuum had a real centre, just an infinite number of observation points, each of which created the illusion of being the centre, the way an earth-dweller felt that his location was fixed and the whole cosmos was something spinning around him, moving away from him or towards him. An astronaut on the Moon and every creature in the universe felt exactly the same, wherever they happened to be. In the real universe, the totality of all particles was interlinked, which meant that every particle was able to occupy its relative centre.

  Similarly, Second Life had turned into a peer-to-peer network, an almost infinite, decentralised and self-organising system in which every server – like a planet – formed a hub, which was connected by a random number of interfaces with every other hub. Each participant was automatically a host and a user of the worlds of others. How man
y planets Second Life comprised, who inhabited or controlled them, was unknown. Of course there were lists, cybernetic maps, well-known travel routes and records that made it possible to realise oneself in the virtual world in the first place, just as the outside universe was subject to physical boundary conditions. Within these standards, avatars travelled to all the places on the web that were known to them, and to which they were granted access. But there was no longer anyone who was familiar with everything.

  Jericho would have expected to land at such an unknown place, but Yoyo’s coordinates led to a public hub. Almost every metropolis in the real world had been virtually copied by now, so he travelled from Shanghai to Shanghai, to find himself back in the People’s Square, or at any rate in a nearly identical copy of it. Unlike the real Shanghai, there were no traffic jams and beyond the city boundaries no districts like Quyu. On the other hand new edifices were constantly going up, staying for a while, changing or disappearing with the speed of a mouse-click.

  The builder and owner of Cyber-Shanghai was the Chinese government, and it was financed by both Chinese and foreign companies. The Party also maintained a second Beijing, a second Hong Kong and a virtual Chongqing. Like all net cities based on real models, the charm of the depiction lay in the relationship between authenticity and idealism. It could hardly come as a surprise that more Americans lived in Cyber-Shanghai than Chinese, and that most Chinese-looking avatars were bots, machines disguised as living creatures. In turn, some Chinese had second homes in Cyber-New York, in virtual Paris or Berlin. French and Spanish people tended to live in Marrakech, Istanbul and Baghdad, Germans and the Irish liked Rome, the British were drawn to New Delhi and Cape Town and Indians to London. Anyone who dreamed of living in New York and couldn’t afford it found an affordable and entirely authentic Big Apple on the net, only wilder, more progressive and even a bit more interesting than the original. People doing business in virtual Paris didn’t seek seclusion, but were interested in as many interfaces with the real world as possible. BMW, Mercedes-Benz and other car manufacturers didn’t sell fantasy constructs in the cyber-cities, but prototypes of what they actually planned to build.