All Fall Down (16 page)

Masjid dropped his gaze to Peter again. Time was running away. The panic in his chest spilled into action. He half carried and half dragged the dead weight of his colleague the short distance to the maglev car. Once Peter’s body was inside he returned to the airlock. “Computer, lock down this facility, security level alpha, authorisation Masjid Currie Alpha Fall.” He stepped out of the airlock, pushing the outer security door closed. Masjid put his hand on the security device, “Computer, complete lock down, authorisation Masjid Currie Omega Fall.”

He stood at the door and thought about burying the specimens, as Peter had said. Time was passing. But he was a scientist, and he needed more evidence before he made his decision. He needed, at least, to know what Peter had meant by mentioning Sophie. Was she inside, maybe? If he detonated the explosives he and Peter had implanted years ago, he might kill her. And how would that appear to the MI team? Sophie missing, an explosion a few kilometres outside the Colony. No, the timing was bad. And what had been in that coded message Peter had sent to MI?

           
As he walked back to the car, the single light died at the tunnel’s end, loosing the murk to the enveloping darkness. The car’s interior light guided him the last few steps.

           
“Fuck.” He put his head in one hand as the car shuttled him away, and reached out his other hand to Peter’s body, which grew cold to his touch.

Djembe stood, pushed back his chair and walked around the small library. He measured his steps carefully, all the same length, feeling the library floor on the same part of his feet each time. Everything was in order. No unauthorised messages had left the Colony, never mind the system, since the incident. The traffic in the days before the incident was normal, showing no signs of coded messages or anything suspicious. He wondered when the coded message they'd been given had been sent. How long had the Cadre sat on it before acting?

           
Within the comms matrix, each message was filtered by the AI, with human checking as a back up. Jonah Kingsland, the Central Operations Room Manager, had the technicians checking the messages in some detail. Colonist blogs and personal messages since the death showed nothing untoward: there was speculation in some about the cause of death, all of which centred around suspicion of a vendetta killing.

           
He'd checked the system traffic logs. Nothing had come through the wormhole or exited it. At least, he thought, nothing had been caught on the sensor nets strung from Fall to the wormhole. There was some extra particle discharge following his own ship's entrance to the system, which he attributed to the accident that had almost killed them on their way.

           
Djembe paused by a library shelf, running his hand over the books' spines. Everything was in order. All the books in the library were accounted for. Each had its proper date stamp. He had never seen such a tightly controlled communications system. The librarian had finished stamping books, periodicals and journals, returning them all to the shelves around him. The spaceport manifests were filed away. Passenger lists, vehicle names, destinations and cargoes all checked. Djembe had already decided to write up a case study on the communications protocols in place on Fall. He knew so many places that would benefit. Incident and Disaster Management was by its nature a stressful time. People were prone to panic, to make mistakes.
 
Yet despite the AI’s apparent eccentricity, and the run in with Jonah before he’d started, Djembe had started to respect the systems they ran here. They were methodical, efficient, there was clear structure, a pattern to everything. There was order.

           
After their rapid re-deployment from Krisa, and his tiredness, the order had calmed him. Order removed anxiety, which helped him feel less tired. He dared smile a moment, stood by the library shelves.

           
Djembe returned to the main reading desk. Back in his seat, he placed his palms on the table and lightly drummed his fingers. The comms system was so well controlled that he’d completed his first two days work within two hours. The consequence map could be amended at the next the team meeting. With no information having escaped from Fall, swathes of the map’s forest of information and outcomes would collapse, burn, disappear. They could relax about Fall's classified existence remaining so.

He stared into space for a while, allowing his mind to roam through a mental image of the consequence map. When seen in a holoroom it was a tangle of vines and holicon clusters, like walking through a thick jungle. At each cluster was a decision node or an event, where reality could change, where consequences occurred. New pathways sprang away, some thin like tendrils, minor paths, almost inconsequential. Others as thick as a thigh, heavy with impact. But a Consequence Planner had to learn to read the jungle of intersecting actions and consequences. The slimmest, most delicate thread still had decision nodes, still led to obvious actions, which could push a mission back onto a dangerous track. The calm blues and greens of controlled society could explode suddenly into fiery red trunks of war, sickly yellow explosions of disease or the silver of panic and mounting horror. MI had used these hologrammatic thickets for centuries, since shortly after the AIs had come online, to keep peace, to forecast dissent and disease.

 
On the desk his fingers made feather-light brushes along the contours he visualised as he viewed the map with his mind's eye. This was a technique he’d learned during his training as a Planner. Borrowed from meditation techniques, he freed his conscious thinking to explore the intricate allure of the consequence map, using a calm, deep and regular breathing rhythm as an anchor.

Breathe in: there is a highway, it stretches to a dark horizon; red lanes, yellow, blue; it falls, colours bleed.

Breathe out: paths snake out; roads branch off; surfaces curl into tubes; junctions become darting sparks.

Breathe in: rumours are categorised; probabilities assigned; communication blackouts implemented; touch papers are lit.

Breathe out: wicks flame; possibilities are exploded; paths crumble; ways are lost; colours fade.

He went on like this for some time. Minutes passed: ten, twenty, thirty. Each slow breath took him down a different path, let him feel the crumbling possibilities of the potential consequences. Tangles slipped, straightened, merged, narrowed. Along this particular line, dark maroon colours of revolt became the cobalt blue of barely tolerated conspiracy theories. In one path had been a risk of Fall being discovered and dissenting factions, where they still existed, blockading the mineral supply routes. That had led to further risks of AIs not being maintained and society crumbling.
 
It showed eventually as an acid yellow of babies born into fear, but with the comms controls already in place, it became the soft green of children told fairy tales of monsters and evil princes. Weaving here the clamour of hiding in bunkers became the babble of picnics in the sunshine. Each breath brought the sounds of innocence. Breathe in. The chaos of screaming was picked apart, stripped away. Breathe out. All that was left for him was the murmur of newborns, simple in their needs, predictable in their actions, limited in their range of expression.

When he felt he had meditated on the consequence map long enough, Djembe opened his eyes slowly. In front of him sat the librarian. “Have you been asleep?”

Djembe blinked, “Meditation. I was calculating the effects of what I’ve learned on what we had predicted.” Djembe blinked again; his vision was slightly blurred. The librarian appeared to shimmer, his clothes to move.

“Well, aren’t you interesting? Meditation in a cyber environment? Whatever next? You’re the most interesting thing that’s come into my environment since the caterpillars.”

Djembe rolled his eyes, shook his head, “Given all that I’ve…” He trailed off, blinked. Blinked again. “Your clothes are moving.”

“Yes, I keep meaning to talk to Jonah. I can’t find a coding source for them. Do you think I'll be OK? I consulted the AI Thought Space but they don't know either. AIs aren't supposed to get infected. Especially not with biologicals.” The librarian took a deep breath. “To tell the truth, I feel a bit anxious about it.”

Djembe frowned at the caterpillars. He had never come across the phenomenon before.

“Have you visited Jonah's special holo suite, by the way? Maybe they're something from there. It’s quite the menagerie in there. Aren’t they funny? Green loopy things. Do you have any idea what they are? I mean, you know, apart from caterpillars.” The librarian, Verigua's avatar here, looked at Djembe expectantly.

“I do not understand. Do you have an ecology sub programme that you’re running in my construct? I’m going to have to look at my AI meshing protocols.”

“Oh dear Commander, no, I would never dally around with your funny MI constructs. I know how dearly you hold them as proof of, whatever it is you humans invest in your little societies. No no no. These things keep cropping up in different environments in my cyberspace. I’ve run all sorts of diagnostics on them. They make me. I hesitate to say the words, they're so
human
. But they fit. They make me nervous, anxious. Would you test one? I saw your tool things earlier when I was stamping books. I must say, they do look very clever and sparkly!”

Djembe focused on the librarian’s arms. Green caterpillars moved in binary code, stretching into ones, curling into zeroes, up towards his shoulder. “What kind of code is it?”

“Good question, Commander. It's not AI-designed, I can tell you that. Feels biological, like your presence in here.”

Djembe stared at them. “
...illicit biological research...
” came to mind.

He leaned forward, put a finger underneath a loop, carefully pinched it with another, leaned back with the caterpillar. With his other hand he pulled the modified syringe pen from his uniform, and twisted part of the barrel with the same hand. He plunged the syringe into its soft flesh. Opposite, the librarian shuddered. Djembe relaxed his grip. The caterpillar clung to his finger, and started to wriggle to his palm. When he looked up to the librarian, the AI had reverted to its black cat form. The caterpillar kept wriggling. His diagnostic tool had had no effect. It stayed in its standby state: it couldn't even see the caterpillar.

“Would you be ever so kind and help me find out what these are and where they come from, Commander?”

“How long have you had these... bugs in your machine?”

           
The cat cocked its head, yawned, “A few weeks. I think it’s time to talk to Jonah, Commander. AI's do not develop bugs. Leave the environment, change back into your proper uniform. I’ll ask Jonah to take you into his holo suite.”

           
Around him the library melted away; the image of the caterpillar shrank to a black dot, disappeared. The antigrav support lowered him to the floor, still surrounded by the dull blue glow of the hardlight wall. He changed out of the immersion suit, pulled on his MI uniform. When he asked the computer to remove the wall, Jonah Kingsland was already waiting outside.

           
“Verigua reckons we’ve got some talking to do. Now you’re gonna have to see my creation,” Jonah looked distracted. “Must be serious if Verigua wants you there. Come with me.”

           
Djembe glanced around the Central Operations Room, at the technicians working on holographic arrays, at the diagnostic graphics, at the security holos of the Colony. “I can give you an hour before the next project phase begins.”

           
“Whatever. Just come with me.”

Sophie rubbed a thumb over the disc in her palm. Small prickles pushed into her flesh, leaving an array of dots, turning fragments of the whorls and loops into shiny relief. From her thumb activation the disc would create a cyberghost which would now be walking out of the dark room. It would follow an inspection route; it would be Sophie checking key operations as usual. In those areas existing holograms would briefly polarise; anyone standing nearby would be left with a subliminal imprint of her image. They would remember her passing through the room, quietly, quickly. She would be in the background noise of their memories, retrievable, verifiable. Verigua would see her, too. Nanocode would be drifting through the algorithm storms and sub-personality constructs that underpinned the AI’s neural network.

           
On the short walk from her room to Daoud’s office she ran through her procedures for the next few hours. The hidden systems, distraction and chaff she'd need.