Exodus Code (24 page)

‘More drinks al round,’ said Cash, who, like Jack, was nursing the beer with which he’d begun the meal.

Sliding his chair closer to Jack’s, Hol is said, ‘don’t mind if I do, boss.’

‘That was one of the best meals I’ve eaten in a long time,’ admitted Jack.

The music in his head from the meal was, thankful y, soft and sultry. Since his conversation with Olivia Steele, and his understanding of what might be happening to him and the world, Jack had been doing his best to embrace his synaesthesia rather than fighting the intensity of his multiple perceptions. He had noted that, since he’d boarded the
Ice Maiden
, the synaesthesia had lessened. He’d also not seen the vision of the woman’s face since he’d left the Coopers’ house and travel ed further from the geyser.

‘You could do with a little more flesh on your bones,’ said Hol is, who had used his Creole grandmother’s recipe for the étouffée in hopes of impressing this mysterious handsome stranger. Hol is hadn’t felt this giddy after meeting someone for the first time since he’d seduced the chef at the Mardi Gras bal after only two mouthfuls of his gumbo.

Sam laughed. ‘Who’re you kidding, Hol is? You’d like your flesh to
be
on his bones.’

‘I wouldn’t mind that either,’ said Eva, who’d been drinking red wine steadily through dinner.

Everyone was suddenly silent. Vlad’s eyes widened in astonishment. Jack bit his tongue. Then Hol is snorted, Sam grinned, Cash guffawed and the table erupted in laughter.

Eva blushed bright red. ‘Did I say that out loud?’

‘Oh, yes,’ laughed Vlad, ‘very out loud. Maybe you should switch to water if we’re going to get any work done at al tonight.’

Jack put his hand on Eva’s. ‘Your flesh on mine wil be a pleasure I’l look forward to.’ Then he turned and put his hand on Hol is’s arm. ‘Yours too.’

‘Wel , now that we’ve got al the important stuff out of the way,’ said Cash, shaking his head, ‘and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but can we get down to some business of the non-sexual kind?’ He rol ed his eyes at Eva, who shrank into her seat.

Jack explained what he’d learned from Dr Steele about synaesthesia and how he thought something was heightening it.

‘The medical community’s response,’ said Jack, ‘has so far been to keep these women sedated, like Gwen. The problem is that when they have any moments of lucidity, some of them are aware of what’s happening and have already tried to kil themselves. Some of them have succeeded.’

‘Synaesthesia is a pretty cool thing,’ said Vlad. ‘I mean when it’s not out of control. I know a few gamers who can see their compositions and their coding in colours and shapes.’ He popped the top off another Jax. ‘If you think about it, it’s almost like their brains are able to construct meaning from downloading multiple codes al at the same time, like a synaesthete’s hard drive is way more sophisticated than the rest of us.’

‘Are you a synaesthete, Vlad?’ asked Jack.

Vlad shook his head, tilting his beer bottle. ‘Only shapes and colours dancing in front of my eyes are drug-or alcohol-induced, sorry to say.’

‘I am,’ said Eva. ‘Wel , mildly anyway. And I never knew what it was cal ed until I took a psych class in university and my professor was one. It would real y disturb her if we came to class wearing too much perfume. She could hear the smel s. Created too much noise in her head. She said she couldn’t concentrate.’

‘Which is part of the problem with whatever’s happening to these women,’

said Jack, accepting a slice of pecan pie from Hol is. ‘The numbers that are being official y tracked could be much lower than the reality. It’s difficult to know how many women are simply dismissing their symptoms and trying to carry on as usual.’

‘That’s real y horrible,’ said Vlad, pul ing another chair over and stretching his legs across it. Jack noticed how intently Eva was watching Vlad. Jack checked Vlad out, approving of what he was seeing but he thought Eva might have to make the moves. Vlad was either oblivious to Eva’s longing or he was consciously ignoring her. Jack thought he could smel her desire from across the table.

‘To lose control of your mind,’ said Sam, ‘that’s… that’s crazy.’

Hol is leaned across the table and slapped Sam upside the head. ‘Mr Understatement, thank you.’

‘Hel of a thing,’ said Cash, ‘if your wife comes after you with the cleaver when it’s her time of the month.’

Jack stared at Cash for a beat, then grinned and got up from the table.

‘Know what, Cash? I think you might have hit on something. I should have thought of that.’ Jack went over to the chalk board where Hol is, in an effort to give the ship’s meals a little flair, wrote a daily menu. Jack looked at Hol is.

‘May I?’

‘Course, darlin’.’

Jack wiped his sleeve across the board, erasing most of the menu. He picked up the chalk, addressing al of them. ‘I’ve been assuming that al of these women with heightened synaesthesia are reacting to something in their surroundings, and according to Dr Steele who’s treating a number of the cases in Wales, there must be some kind of external trigger.’

Jack wrote Gwen’s name at the top. ‘Gwen has the chromosome for synaesthesia.’ Jack noted this under Gwen’s name. ‘But what if because she had a baby recently she also has a particular combination of chemicals in her body that have been triggered along with her synaesthesia.’

‘If that’s true,’ said Vlad, ‘then it would also explain why not every woman who is a synaesthete is experiencing this heightening, because it’s not just the synaesthesia – it’s their hormones, too.’

‘I think so,’ said Jack. ‘But there’s stil a piece missing.’

Jack drew a circle round Gwen’s name and the word synaesthesia, then an overlapping circling with the word hormones in the centre. Then he drew a third and put a question mark in it. ‘If we’re going to help these women, we need to find what’s in this third… circle.’

Jack stared at the image he’d drawn on the board, a Venn diagram. He didn’t know if it was coincidence or not but it looked weirdly like the symbol Gwen had carved on her forearm.

Eva, who had been silent throughout the conversation, spoke up. ‘I think Vlad and I may have discovered the third trigger.’

EVA UNROLLED A thick sheaf of printouts in front of Jack.

Cash rol ed his eyes. ‘Nothing fancy, lass, keep it simple tonight. He can see the numbers and al the data tomorrow.’

Eva gulped her water and stood up. She put on her glasses. ‘For the past week, Vlad and I have been monitoring a series of submerged tremors, eruptions in the deepest parts of the ocean floor. None of which have resulted in major tsunamis as you might expect, and none of them have impacted major land masses. They’ve hit mostly on the edges of shorelines. But they’ve resulted in underwater geysers like the one that broke through the surface in Wales.’

‘Which ones?’ asked Jack.

‘Coast of Vietnam. Off the far northern coast of Scotland—’

‘And,’ interrupted Vlad, ‘the islands south of New Zealand, and the southern coast of Peru.’

‘Peru?’ asked Jack.

Vlad nodded. ‘Shel ey’s running a program that’l look for tick points, see what comes up.’

‘Shel ey?’ asked Jack.

‘Tick points?’ asked Hol is.

‘When you’re comparing things in a paper chart the traditional way,’ said Jack to Hol is, ‘you’d give tick marks or check marks to elements of similar qualities, to situations or variables that overlap. Sort of like the centre of my Venn diagram.’

Vlad nodded. ‘If those geographic areas have anything in common, Shel ey wil find them much faster than any of our brains.’ He looked at Jack. ‘Shel ey’s the ship’s artificial intel igence. She also keeps the systems on the ship running, but I think you knew that since you gave her the virus that shut us down.’

‘I needed your attention.’ Jack sipped his beer, and looked across at Eva, who Jack decided was as adept with technology and probably as smart as Vlad, yet she kept deferring to him in the conversation. ‘So you named your AI after a Romantic poet?’

Eva shook her head. ‘We named it after a Romantic poet’s
wife
.’

‘Go on, Eva,’ said Cash, smiling. ‘Finish your report.’

‘The final thing I’d add is… wel … I haven’t real y discussed it yet with anyone else,’ she paused, taking a sip of her wine and not her water before continuing, ‘but, wel , I think there may be a way to connect the underwater eruptions with the cases of heightened synaesthesia.’

Jack looked over the map that Eva had created. ‘Let me see this on your screen.’

Eva gathered up her files and led Jack and Vlad across the passageway to the communication centre. Cash headed up to the wheelhouse with Sam, leaving Hol is to clean up in the mess.

‘I’l check on Gwen,’ said Cash, on his way down the corridor.

In the comms centre, things had been settled back in their place since the storm. The computer screens glowed in the dim light and an occasional beep from a monitor punctuated the silence. Vlad perched on the end of his desk, his hands in his pockets, while Eva picked up her iPad. The massive screen on the wal powered up, displaying a map of the world with the epicentre of each of the deep-water events flashing in red. Jack stepped in front of the map, folded his arms and stared at it in silence.

On the flat screen on Eva’s desk, a young woman dressed in an off-shoulder black velvet gown, her hair pul ed back from an intel igent pretty face appeared. She was sitting at an old-fashioned writing desk, a fountain pen in her hand. At first glance, Jack thought she looked like a woman from the nineteenth century, demure and modest. Looking closer, he noticed a nose piercing, a neck tattoo and more than a delicate amount of skin showing when the dress shifted from her shoulder.

Jack laughed. ‘So this is what you think Mary Shel ey would look like today?’

‘Shel ey, meet Captain Jack Harkness,’ said Eva.

A sultry woman’s voice with an English accent answered. ‘The pleasure is al mine, Captain. Welcome aboard the
Ice Maiden
.’

‘Thank you,’ said Jack.

‘I believe I’ve corrected the glitch in my programs that al owed you to seduce me so spectacularly.’ Shel ey’s voice was youthful and playful.

‘My apologies for that, Shel ey.’

‘Apology accepted. May I ask… were you the creator of the program you used? It appeared so elegant, so graceful, and yet it was quite brutish in its approach. Its power took me quite by surprise.’

‘Let’s just say it’s not from around here,’ said Jack.

Vlad and Eva glanced at each other, puzzled and slightly disconcerted by the nature of the exchange. Shel ey was a powerful AI, but social conversation was not her strongest program. They’d never needed it to be.

‘May I show the others what I’ve learned?’

‘Be my guest,’ said Jack, setting a flat disc the size of a hockey puck on top of Vlad’s desk.

Jack tapped the top of the disc and in an instant Mary Shel ey was standing in front of Vlad’s desk, morphed from a talking head on the screen to a ful y formed female, a hologram, but an incredibly sophisticated one. Nothing translucent or wavering about her. To the eye, she looked alive, standing before them clad in a body-hugging calf-length black velvet dress that looked like a character from one of Vlad’s steampunk stories. On her feet, Shel ey was wearing a pair of shiny cowboy boots.

‘I must admit to always having had a sil y fascination with the Wild West in America,’ she giggled, kicking up her heels. Her fountain pen remained firmly gripped in one hand and her black leather journal in the other.

‘Wow!’ exclaimed Eva, staring wide-eyed at their avatar.

Shel ey curtsied towards Eva.

‘Wel , fuck me,’ grinned Vlad.

‘That function,’ said Shel ey, pirouetting in front of Vlad, ‘is not yet operational.’

‘Wel done, Shel ey,’ said Jack. ‘You’ve adapted the software to your scaffolding quite quickly.’

‘Yes, Captain. It feels as if it has been an integral part of me al along.

Although I’m stil absorbing a few minor details, I predict I’l be ful y functioning for your needs in the next few days.’

‘I can’t wait,’ said Vlad, keying commands into his computer and staring in awe at what he was seeing. ‘Look at this, Eva. She’s synchronised with al the ship’s systems, including a mobility function.’

‘Yes, Vlad, I can be accessed in this form anywhere on the ship and off via the satel ite.’

‘Bloody bril iant!’

Jack laughed, pleased that his gift to the
Ice Maiden
was making Eva and Vlad happy. He knew Cash would approve and he certainly owed him a favour, more than one. It was also the least he could do given what he was coming to realise about the submarine tremors, the wide-spread synaesthesia and his own fragmented memories, Jack had a feeling that their pleasure may be short-lived.

Eva leaned over Vlad’s shoulder, checked out his screen then stared back at Jack. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. You’ve multiplied her functionality, adapted her modalities, increased her scope and intel igence… It’s like you’ve…’

‘Made her bigger, better, smarter and sexier?’ said Jack, winking at Shel ey who winked back.

‘Al those things,’ said Eva. ‘But she stil looks like our avatar.’