Dark Matter (37 page)

Reim drained his cup and placed it down
with a clunk.

“My lab houses some of the most potent
microscopic killing machines known to man—natural and man-made. Old and new. My
job is to imagine the missile, and create the anti-missile.”

“Earlier I put HIV in the family court. The
viruses I deal with would be tried at Nuremburg.”

Rasputin had wanted to know what the sting
was, and now he knew, he was profoundly disturbed at the revelation. Why would
Reim be telling him such sensitive information? He had known him barely a
month.

“The first test,” said Rasputin. “What was
wrong with it, precisely?”

“It indicated either, as I said, error, or
that you are a mosaic of improbable—I could say
impossible
—degree. Your
blood is that of a chimera. It is as though the sample were drawn from a vat
into which had been poured blood from every person in Perth.”

Rasputin smirked. “I’m a complex guy.”

“This is serious. The DNA of every single
cell in your body ought to be identical. In rare cases, there is a mix of two
or more sequences. Sometimes a chance mutation in the developing foetus gives
rise to two distinct DNA patterns. Other times it is the result of two embryos
merging, or one eating the other”—Rasputin shivered—“but
never
is the
variety of practically endless extent.”

“And yet, here we are,” said Rasputin. He
felt the familiar surge of contrariness that took him when he felt at fault.

Reim fixed him with his eye. “You should be
dead. You should be a bag of blood, going rigid in your skin.”

“Your test must be wrong.”

“It’s not.”

“Then your logic is.”

“Clearly.”

There was a pause as Reim surveyed the test
results, as if they might change beneath his gaze. Rasputin dismissed the
fleeting notion that Reim was grumpy because he didn’t fit with the world as
Reim knew it. He wondered if he glimpsed in Reim’s face the younger man beneath
the layers deposited by time, an academic at the height of his powers, not
willing to cede defeat, to suffer being baulked by dumb matter. But no, he realised,
not every academic was stamped with the image of Thorpe. The contrast between
the two men was stark, and who cared if their differences had lain dormant in
their substance at birth, or arisen contingent on a procession of accidents of
history, writ ‘power’ or ‘kindness’ tabula rasa.

“To put this in perspective,” Reim said at
length. “A single mutation in the LMNA gene causes Hutchinson-Gilford Syndrome,
and accelerated aging to a life expectancy of 13 years.”

Rasputin put his cup down and flexed his
hand into a fist. The veins in his arm stood up. He could see the blood
coursing beneath, flowing in a confusion of red and purple worms, every surge
and ebb driven by the fist of muscle that had beat in his chest thanklessly for
two score years and more.

Motion caught his eye, and he glanced
upward to see the shifting dapple of the moat’s reflection on the ceiling. Dark
bands moved through it in waves, reflections of ripples on the water disturbed
by an enormous koi that had breached its surface. He recalled a remarkably
similar pattern, a mesmerising thing, seen on the skin of a cuttlefish. It had
been a warning sign.

Reim said, “I can see you’re troubled. I
know my boys, and I think you are a little the same. You put on a brave face,
but you are scared.”

Rasputin hunched over, made a study of his
hands so he didn’t have to look at the old man as he replied. “I’ve been scared
so long it doesn’t register any more. I guess I must be terrified.”

“We’ll nut this out.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

Later, as Rasputin trod the lawn adjacent
to the moat, he visualised the lab he now knew to be sequestered beneath it. He
resented knowing it. Yet another sign that something stank in the state of
Denmark. Yet another harbinger of doom that would forever be part of him, part
of his memory, unejectable as the grit that invades the oyster. But unlike an
oyster, he knew of no defence with which to target the unwelcome invader. There
was no substance he could bind this knowledge with, quarantine it. On the
contrary, he felt it, even now, reaching out and connecting with the rest of
him, unceasingly informing and being informed by the universe of his
experience. Reim’s lab and he were now forever welded.

Rasputin took a bus home. He was
seated, head juddering on the window’s glass. He watched cars pass, streaking
by in the freeway’s rightmost lanes. He knew the speed at which each was
travelling. Time and displacement idly married in his head to yield this. He
mentally issued a ticket to a Commodore pushing 114kph—human speed camera, yet
another career he might pursue. Provided he didn’t become a dead ‘bag of blood’,
ossified, to sit forever at the road’s side, a memorial.

He retrieved his phone and, in a fit of
pique, typed a message to his unknown interlocutor: “You called it a
Miracle
Machine
. I’m a human multanova. Some miracle.”

He sat back and waited for a reply, fearful
and eager. Was this how a crack addict felt when calling his dealer? This
dealer only dealt information, but Rasputin had a prescient sense that it had
the same potency of life or death.

Minutes lapsed. He issued two more tickets.
Then came a reply.

“Whoever said that was a miracle?”

Rasputin jumped to reply. The stilted,
conversation-through-a-straw of texted communication began again.

“You.”

“No I didn’t... Try this: Imagine an alien
observing the front yard of a Mr. and Mrs. Jones. In the drive is the family
car, engine idling, lights on, and radio blaring. Seated behind the wheel is
Mr. Jones, twiddling his thumbs while he waits for his wife to finish powdering
her nose.”

Rasputin waited for the next burst of text.

“Question: What would our alien make of the
Jones’s car? What would he perceive its purpose to be?”

Rasputin had no idea what the question was
driving at. He waited, praying for more.

It came.

“Answer: A small dwelling, perhaps for
pleasure, supplying heat, sound, and light.”

“I get it. If he didn’t see it move, how
would he know a car is for transport.”

“Good boy. I never said what kind of miracles
the machine makes.”

Seconds stretched into minutes. Nothing
more came. Rasputin abandoned his resolution to remain silent. He typed again.

“That it? No more pearls?”

The bus crossed the Narrows Bridge and was
swept by a dark band of shadow beneath an overpass.

Finally, a reply: “Next time, wait the
extra minute for the 97. It doesn’t wind through Bentley like a drunk old maid.
You’ll get home ten minutes sooner.”

Rasputin’s head whipped up. His gaze
strafed the interior of the bus, and then, ridiculously, the cars passing on
either side.

His fruitless search brought home the fact
he had no idea with whom he had been talking. Was he young, old? Was he a he?
Why had he assumed he was a man—just because he had said so?

He hunkered into the seat and willed the
bus homeward.

“That shouldn’t be there,” said Jordy.

His attention was focused on a point just
above the finger he had planted on the computer monitor.

Rasputin watched, uncomprehending but
alert. He had done nothing else since arriving home to find Jordy waiting on
the other side of the door, hovering in the lounge room.

Jordy had followed him through the house as
he shed accoutrements—keys, phone, a pen he had forgotten to return to Reim. At
the first sign of agitation, Jordy had made a shushing motion, and led him down
the hall and into the office, where they now sat.

“A dangling hook. Innocuous enough, but I
wanted to find what had put it there. It has the whiff of a virus. Something
inveigled.”

“What are we looking at?”

“Your phone.”

Rasputin glanced in the direction of the
kitchen, where he had left his phone on the counter, charging. The thing was
barely making eight hours per charge.

“My phone is in the kitchen,” said
Rasputin. “Have you been drinking?”

“Don’t be pedantic. This is an image of the
software running on your phone. A virtual copy. I downloaded it last night. I
couldn’t cope with your belly-aching about its crap battery life, so I thought
I’d see if it was running any programs that could be culled.”

“Okay. Pretend I understand. What’s got
your knickers twisted?”

Jordy’s eyes lit as he turned back to the
screen. He was enjoying this.

“Software is like an ecosystem. Getting
about in it, solving a problem, is like hunting. This thing here”—he tapped the
screen—“is spore.”

Rasputin picked up the analogy, with the
first glimmering of understanding. “What are you hunting?”

“Maybe nothing.”

“You already know
something
,
otherwise why the cloak and dagger.”

Jordy’s fingers scrabbled over the
keyboard.

“First rule of the hunt: find out what the beast
craps. Gives you an idea of what sort of animal it is and, more importantly,
what it eats.”

Jordy opened a terminal window, and deftly
executed a series of commands. A clot of text appeared at the bottom of the
window, and was then thrust upwards and out of view as more text—numbers,
letters, and snippets of English—began streaming upwards.

“Packet sniffer,” said Jordy, flicking a
hand at the flowing characters. “It’s our Beagle Hound. The computer is running
a virtual version of your phone, and the sniffer will tell us if it is
excreting anything abnormal.”

“You mean besides my conversation.”

“Yep. In addition to that.”

Rasputin trained his attention on the
torrent of text streaming over the window. It was a wash of zeros, punctuated
by small clots of other digits and characters.

“What am I looking at?”

“These,” said Jordy, his finger tracking a
clot of text racing upwards, “are typical mobile telephony protocols. It’s
called handshaking. The phone is trying to talk to a cell tower, tell it where
it is. It isn’t getting a reply though, so it’s trying extra hard. It doesn’t
know it’s only a pretend phone living in my computer.”

“And that,” said Rasputin, nodding at the
wall of zeros, hands laced over his expanding gut.

“A whole lotta nothin’.” He turned to
Rasputin, and grinned evilly. “The transmission of which is sucking on your
battery like a plague of mosquitoes on a Shetland Pony.”

“Poor pony. Can’t you just kill whatever is
doing it?”

“Don’t you want to know what it is?”

Jordy turned back to the screen. “I’ll
admit, it had me stumped for a while. I couldn’t find where in the protocol
stack it was being spliced in.”

“Then I remembered that I was on the hunt.
Sometimes hunting is passive, sometimes you need to act. You need to beat the
bush, startle your prey out. You see?”

“I see a nerd going to metaphorical
extremes to extract a little excitement from what is—let’s face it—glorified
accounting.”

“I’m ignoring you, because in a moment you’re
going to hug me.”

 
Jordy’s hands played over the keyboard again
as he spoke. “So I thought: let’s poke the beast. This virtual copy of the
phone is living in a zoo. Let’s put it outside, in its natural habitat. So I
gave it a location.” Jordy punched a key and his hands fell still.

Rasputin watched the screen for any change.
Nothing.

Then something caught his eye. A change,
almost too small to notice. A clump of non-zero characters drifted in the wash
of zeros, a log amid the stream, floating between the larger islands.

He continued to watch and soon saw another
one. They repeated, regular as the handshakes Jordy had identified.

“I see them. What are they?”

Jordy brought a different window into
focus. It contained a map of Perth. In the middle of the CBD stood a red
marker, a virtual tack.

“This app outputs location as latitude and
longitude co-ordinates. I’m piping them straight into the virtual phone. I’m
fooling it into thinking it’s outside.” Jordy lifted the tack marking the phone’s
pretend location with the mouse cursor. “Watching?” he said, and pinned the tack
to the middle of the Swan River.

Rasputin returned his attention to the
packet sniffer. He saw the small clot of non-zero characters rise. They were
very nearly the same.

But not quite.

“That,” said Jordy, tracking the changed
cluster of characters, “is a GPS co-ordinate.”

Jordy swivelled to face Rasputin, and only
now did his demeanour sour.

“Your phone is tracking you.”

“And telling someone,” said Rasputin.