Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  Vogelaar

  His shout burst through the lounge like a nuclear blast, tearing to shreds all conversation, all thought. Sleepy jazz muzak tinkled away in the sudden silence. On the low glass table in front of him, an abstract composition in coffee and foamed milk surrounded a jagged heap of shattered porcelain.

  He stared at the display.

  ‘Do you understand me?’ Xin asked.

  His knees gave way. Nyela’s muffled sobs sounded in his ear as he sank back into the leather chair. Nothing had happened. The scalpel had not plunged into her eye, had not sliced through pupil and iris. It had simply twitched, and then stopped dead still once more.

  ‘Yes,’ Vogelaar whispered. ‘I understand.’

  ‘Good. If you play by my rules, nothing will happen to her. As for what will happen to you though—’

  ‘I understand.’ Vogelaar coughed. ‘Why all the extra effort?’

  ‘Extra?’

  ‘You could have killed me by now. As I left the building, on my drive across town, even here in the bank—’

  The picture vanished, and then he saw Xin again.

  ‘Quite simple,’ he said, back to his chatty old self. ‘Because you’ve never worked without a safety net and an escape hatch. You believe in life after death, or at least you believe in lawyers opening deposit boxes and releasing their contents to the press. You’ve made arrangements in case you die suddenly.’

  ‘Do you need help?’

  Vogelaar looked up. One of the lounge staff, with a startled look on his face, a hint of disapproval. No screaming and shouting in banks. At most, they were places were you could contemplate a dignified suicide. Vogelaar shook his head.

  ‘No, I – it’s just that I’ve had some bad news.’

  ‘If there’s anything that we can do—’

  ‘It’s a private matter.’

  The man smiled with relief. It wasn’t about money. Someone had died, or had an accident.

  ‘As I say, if—’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The staffer left. Vogelaar watched him go, then got up and left the lounge hurriedly.

  ‘Go on,’ he said into the phone.

  ‘Your sort of insurance rather depends on the idea that if anyone’s out to cause you harm, they’ll go after you,’ Xin continued. ‘So you can warn them to keep their hands off. If I don’t turn up to take afternoon tea tomorrow at such and such a time and place, with all my bits and pieces intact, the bomb goes off somewhere. It’s a lone wolf strategy, because for most of your life you were a lone wolf. But you’re not any longer. Perhaps you should have changed your plans.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘You haven’t. That bomb will only be detonated if it’s your life at stake.’

  ‘My life, and my wife’s.’

  ‘Not exactly. You’ve changed your mind but you haven’t changed your habits. Earlier you’d have said, get the hell back on the next plane out, Kenny, there’s nothing you can do. Or, kill me and see what happens. But now you’re telling me, leave Nyela alone or I’ll make things hot for you.’

  ‘You can be sure of that!’

  ‘Meaning that you could still set off the bomb.’ Xin paused. ‘But then what would we do with your poor innocent wife? Or to put it another way, how long would we do it to her for?’

  Vogelaar had crossed the foyer, and went out into the crowds on Friedrichstrasse.

  ‘That’s enough, Kenny. I see what you mean.’

  ‘Really? Back when Vogelaar only cared about Vogelaar, life was hard for people like me. Back then you’d have said, go on, kill the woman, torture her to death, see where it gets you. We’d have played a little poker, and in the end you’d have won.’

  ‘I’m warning you. If you harm even a hair on Nyela’s head—’

  ‘Would you die for her?’

  ‘Just come out with it and tell me what you want.’

  ‘I want an answer.’

  Vogelaar felt his mind soar, saw his whole life spread out beneath his wings. What he saw was a bug, biting, pinching, stinging, playing dead or scuttling lightning-fast into a crack. A drone, a programmed thing, but one whose armour had been corroded these past few years by regular doses of empathy. His instincts had been ruined once he realised that there was in fact a purpose to life, that there could even be a purpose to dying so that others might live. Xin was right. His plans were out of date. This bug was sick and tired of creeping into cracks, but right now the future held nothing else.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I would die for Nyela.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To save her.’

  ‘No, Jan. You’d die because altruism is an egotist’s crowning glory, and you’re a deeply egotistical man. Nothing appeals more to a man’s self-importance than martyrdom, and you’ve always had a very high sense of your own importance.’

  ‘Don’t speechify, Kenny.’

  ‘You have to know that you won’t save anyone with your death, not if you try to cheat. You’d be leaving Nyela on her own. There’d be no end to her suffering. You’d have achieved nothing.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘So what’s your escape hatch this time?’

  ‘A dossier.’

  ‘This is what Mayé wanted to blackmail us with?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the Crystal Brain. It’s on a memory crystal.’

  ‘Who knows about it?’

  ‘Only my lawyer, and my wife.’

  ‘Nyela knows what’s in the dossier?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And your lawyer?’

  ‘He doesn’t know a thing. He just has instructions to retrieve the crystal if I should die a violent death, and upload the contents to a distributor feed.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell him what was in the dossier?’

  ‘Because it’s nothing to do with him,’ Vogelaar snorted, growing angry. ‘The dossier only exists to protect Nyela’s life, and mine.’

  ‘That means that as soon as I have this crystal— Good, fetch it. How long do you need?’

  ‘An hour at most.’

  ‘Is there anyone coming by here before then we should know about? Cleaner, kitchen porter, postman?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘Off you go then, old friend. Don’t dawdle now.’

  * * *

  Vogelaar was no tree-hugger. He drove a solar-powered Nissan because Nyela was concerned about the environment. He realised of course that more small cars meant less traffic in the city, but something in his genes cried out for a jeep. But now that he was crawling painfully through the government quarter, he cursed aloud every vehicle bigger than his own, and felt a sweeping rage against all the damned ignorant drivers hereabouts.

  And in fact Germany was the country with the most innovative car technologies that had ever been left to slumber in a drawer. Hardly any market worldwide was fonder of petrol motors and speedsters. While in Asia and the USA the number of hybrid cars on the roads had been steadily dropping in favour of ever more sustainable designs, in Germany the hybrid itself had never even made a dent. Nowhere else were hydrogen, fuel cells and electric cars condemned to such a miserable waking death. And nowhere else in the world did men set such store by having a big, imposing car, and by driving it themselves – despite the availability of sophisticated and totally safe autopilots. It was as though whenever the Germanic national character set out to find itself, it always ended up, with tiresome predictability, behind the steering wheel. The only thing less popular hereabouts than the compact car was the future itself.

  All of which explained why the Nissan crept along so slowly. Vogelaar swore, and slapped the wheel. When he finally turned into the car park at the Crystal Brain, he was bathed in sweat. He leapt from the cabin and strode hurriedly across to the main entrance.

  Einstein looked him square in the face, briefly.

  The building had been put up in 2020, not far from the government quarter, but it still looked as though i
t had just landed. It was a cubist glass UFO with dozens of perfectly faceted surfaces where the logo ‘Crystal Brain’ came and went, glowing like a passing thought. Worlds showed like ghosts in the façade as you approached, different from every angle: raptors loping across the Jurassic savannah, Stone Age hunters hurling their spears at mammoths, Assyrian kings holding court. He saw Greek hoplites, Roman emperors, Napoleon on horseback and Egyptian princesses, pyramids and Gothic cathedrals, the Kon-Tiki and the Titanic, satellites, space stations, moon bases, the stern face of Abraham Lincoln, Shakespeare’s bald head and smiling face, Bismarck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Konrad Adenauer, Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon, Mahatma Gandhi, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Helmut Kohl, Bill Gates, the Dalai Lama, Thomas Reiter, Julian Orley, geocentric, heliocentric and modern representations of the universe, abstract diagrams of quantum worlds on the Planck scale, molecules, atoms, quarks and superstrings like model building blocks, the invention of the wheel, of printing, of curried sausage. All this and infinitely more was there, holographically embedded in the huge walls; it came to life, breathed, pulsated; the figures turned their heads, winked, smiled, shook hands, walked, flew, swam and vanished again as the viewer moved around them. The exterior alone was a masterpiece, a wonder of the modern world, and yet it represented barely a fraction of what was hidden within.

  When Vogelaar stepped inside the Crystal Brain, he was entering the world’s greatest concentration of knowledge in the smallest space.

  He walked through the foyer’s shimmering dome. Lifts rose and fell to either side of him, seemingly unsupported, a sophisticated optical illusion. They were a fractal representation of the building itself, just as everything in the Crystal Brain was built using the principle of self-similarity. The smallest component, the memory crystal, resembled the largest, the building itself. A crystal in a crystal in a crystal.

  The world’s memory.

  The tales that mankind had to tell about the world could fit either in one single book, or into so many that even a whole extra planet full of libraries would not be enough to hold them. The Bible, the Qur’an and the Torah knew nothing of evolution, or of the tangled chains of causality, or of Schrödinger’s cat, nothing of the uncertainty principle or standard deviation, nothing of non-linear equations and black holes, nothing of the multiverse, of extra-dimensional space or of how time’s arrow could be made to point backwards. These books were sturdy, impregnable vehicles of faith driving down a one-way street to the absolute truth; they made vast claims, but they were compact.

  Look beyond these, though, and the planet was bursting with information.

  History alone was a vast academic discipline: millions and millions of works dedicated to deciphering the past, like a cloud chamber filled with the trails of fleeting elementary particles. It was almost impossible to determine their speed and direction, regardless whether they had to do with the colour of Charlemagne’s hair or with whether he had ever even existed. There was huge variety in the fields of physics, philosophy, futurology. The dizzying number of all articles published to date, all the essays, novellas, novels, poems, song lyrics, the works of Bob Dylan alone and then all the commentary about them! The verbiage of assembly instructions for stainless-steel barbecue grills, the meteorological data that had heaped up since records began, the collected speeches of the Dalai Lama, the totality of every menu from every Chinese restaurant from Cape Horn to the Bosphorus, the avaricious words from every one of Uncle Scrooge McDuck’s speech balloons, the angry, exasperated replies that his hapless nephew quacks in turn, the careful record of every leaflet from every packet sold of haemorrhoid cream or anti-depressives …

  There was definitely a storage problem.

  The book was definitely not the answer.

  But CD-ROMs, DVDs and hard drives had also run up against the limits of their capacity, helpless in the face of the exponential growth of information. They were threatened by digital oblivion. Given how long chiselled stone slabs could last, Christianity could take comfort in the thought that the Ten Commandments still existed somewhere. Books could only last about two hundred years, unless they were printed with iron-free ink on acid-free paper, in which case their life expectancy was triple that. Celluloid film was estimated to last about four hundred years, CDs and DVDs maybe one hundred, while floppy discs lasted maybe a decade. Even so, floppies were still in theory better than USB sticks, which showed signs of amnesia after only three years, but then again there were no floppy disc drives any longer. There were thus three principal obstacles to a permanently accessible and truly compact global memory: limited storage capacity, rapid storage decay, rapid hardware obsolescence.

  Holographics had solved all three problems at one blow.

  The eight storeys of the Crystal Brain housed racks of crystals and laser reading desks, roomy lounges for historical sightseers; it was an El Dorado for an alien who might happen along one day far in the future, clearing away the rampant vegetation in search of human artefacts. Vogelaar, though, blind to the glories around him, made for one of the lifts and rode it down to the second sub-basement, where storage space could be rented for private data. He authorised himself – eye-scan, hand-print, all the usual – and was let through to an atrium glowing with diffuse light.

  ‘Number 17-44-27-15,’ he said.

  The system asked him if he wanted a place at the lasers. Vogelaar declined, saying that he would take his data away with him.

  ‘Aisle 17, section B-2,’ the system said. ‘Do you know your way about, or would you like directions?’

  ‘I know my way.’

  ‘Please retrieve your crystal within five minutes.’

  A glass door slid back at the end of the atrium. Behind it, aisles branched off to either side, their walls apparently smooth and featureless. Lines ran along the floor, marked with aisle and section numbers. Vogelaar went to his aisle, stopped after a few steps and turned his head to the left. Only the closest examination revealed that the mirror-smooth wall was in fact divided up into tiny squares.

  ‘17-44-27-15 is being prepared for delivery,’ the system said.

  A faint mechanical click sounded from the mirror. Then a thin, rectangular rod slid out. The transparent object inside was about the size of half a sugar cube. One of millions of crystals that made up the totality of the Crystal Brain, high-efficiency optical storage media with integrated data processing and encryption. They had no moving parts and were practically indestructible. Memory crystals had a storage capacity of one to five terabytes, and were readable at several gigabytes per second. Access time was well under a millisecond. The storage was written in by lasers, etching electronically readable data patterns into the layers of the crystal. A single layer could hold millions of bits; one crystal could hold thousands of pages. Vogelaar’s dossier took up only a tiny fraction of that.

  ‘Please remove your crystal.’

  Vogelaar looked at the tiny object and felt his mood plunge. Suddenly he was overcome by despair. He sank down against the wall opposite, unable to pick up the little cube.

  How could it all have gone so horribly wrong?

  It had all been in vain.

  No, it hadn’t. There was still a chance.

  He considered just how far he could trust Xin. In fact, incredible though it might sound, he could trust the killer, to a certain extent, at least within Xin’s own strictly defined limits of madness and self-control. Vogelaar didn’t doubt for a moment that, in the final analysis, Kenny managed to keep his madness at bay with his manic penchant for numbers and symmetry, his constant search for oases of order and his highly personal code of honour. Xin knew perfectly well that he was mad. On the surface, he seemed eloquent, convivial and cultured. But Vogelaar had some idea of just how hard Xin found it to hold an ordinary conversation, and how hard he tried regardless. There must be some final scrap of humanity left alive inside him, a yearning that he could not admit even to himself, a need to be something other than what he was. Something that pre
vented him from simply gunning down anybody in his way, from setting the world on fire, from becoming the final all-engulfing flame. If he gave Xin this crystal, he would have to make a deal with him for Nyela’s life and his own, although perhaps it would only be Nyela. One way or another, he’d have to decide whether he was going to give the killer everything, this dossier—

  And the copy of the dossier.

  ‘Please remove your crystal within the next sixty seconds.’

  He shrugged himself away from the wall, took the little cube between his finger and thumb and held it up to the light. He could see tiny faultlines inside, history in miniature. He put it in his pocket. He left the basement as quickly as he had arrived, took the lift upstairs, quickened his pace as he came out onto the car park, and started the Nissan. By some miracle the traffic had ebbed away, so that he was able to park in front of the restaurant before his time ran out. This time he didn’t allow himself a moment’s delay but got out and walked to the entrance with his hands raised, palms outward. He saw the bald man through the glass pane of the door, a silenced pistol in his right hand. Slowly, he opened the door and peered into the gloom. Leto’s feet were sticking out from behind the bar.

  ‘Where’s Nyela?’

  ‘Went in there with Kenny,’ said the bald man, in a thick Irish accent. He motioned with his gun towards the swing doors. Vogelaar didn’t spare him a glance as he walked through the dining area and into the kitchen. The gunman followed.

  ‘Jan!’

  Nyela wanted to go to him. Xin held her back, a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Let her go,’ said Vogelaar.

  ‘You can say hello later. What happened, Jan? Your kitchen looks like it was hit by a herd of elephants.’

  ‘I know.’ Vogelaar looked at the chaos left behind by his fight with Jericho, his face expressionless. ‘Do you want to clean up, Kenny? Put everything back? You’ll find all you need under the sink: scourers, cleaning spray – I know that you can’t bear to look at a mess.’

  ‘That’s in my own world. This is yours. Where’s the crystal?’