Into Everywhere (13 page)

Cho Wing-James dismissed the failure. ‘We have learned what not to do,’ he said. ‘Next time we will do better.’

‘Soon there won’t be time for a next time,’ Tony told him.

‘Unfortunately, we are not in the miracle business.’

‘That’s a shame. Because if you want to stay in business, a miracle is exactly what you need.’

Lisa meant only to knock back a few stiff ones to calm herself and numb the feeling of the ghost at her back, but of course that wasn’t how it ended up. She woke on her couch sometime the next morning. The empty bottle on the tile top of the coffee table; the parched-mouth pinch-skulled hangover; the black fog of remorse and self-loathing. She managed to feed Pete and check the hurklins, then collapsed on her bed and dozed into the afternoon, waking with a stab of unfocused panic that crystallised into the realisation that she’d missed her appointment with Bria at the code factory. She used her piece-of-shit phone, cursing its nannying autocorrect, to send a text – she’d come down with some twenty-four-hour bug, could she come in tomorrow, same time? – and then hauled her sorry carcass into the shower. Bria replied while she was in there, confirming that tomorrow was fine, asking how she was.
Convalescing
, Lisa texted, not wanting to get into a conversation, made a pot of coffee and choked down a couple of slices of toast, and used her phone again, found there was an open meeting that evening in a church basement in Three Rocks.

On the drive over she steeled herself to confess her lapse, but lost her nerve and blurted out a lame apology when the chairperson took her aside at the beginning of the meeting and asked if she wanted to speak. She sat at the back and listened to the testaments of two volunteer sinners, left as soon as she decently could, and cursed her stupidity and cowardice all the way back home. Her lapse had badly frightened her. Reminded her that she was always just one drink away from reverting to her bad old ways, hiding inside a bottle, using booze to numb the inescapable presence of the thing in her head. She would atone by rededicating herself to finding out everything she could about the cause of the breakout that had killed Willie and the others. She would avenge his death by defeating her own ghost. Every day was day one. Every day you started over.

So the next morning she rose at dawn and spent three hours mucking out the hurklin pens and topping up the dry-feed hoppers and checking the water dispensers. They looked more like ambulatory oysters than tortoises, hurklins, perched on random arrangements of unpaired peg-like legs that made soft clickings as they shifted about. Now and then feathery sense organs flickered from under the margins of their shells, tasting the air like snakes’ tongues; strings of crude, crystalline eyes were set in the leading edges of their shells, but they mostly found their way by taste and touch. There were almost a hundred of them in the pens, some standard stock, some part of a breeding experiment, crossing a big old male she’d bought from her one of neighbours with selected fresh-caught females from a guy over in Stone Creek. The first-generation crosses included three females with deep green shells marked with pleasingly random swirls of black. Lisa was planning to inbreed them with one of their brothers to see if their patterns stayed true.

After she had cleaned herself up, she drove into the city for the second time in three days, pretty much a record. Pete rode on the passenger seat, happily sticking his head into the slipstream. She’d asked him one time why dogs did that, and he’d told her it was fun, she should try it.

The code farm was in a business park halfway across town from the Alien Market. Inside its anonymous box a clutch of egg-shaped work pods were set out in an eight-by-four grid; the servers and a chill-out area were tucked under the platform that supported the conference room and Bria’s glass-walled office. No basketball hoops, table football, air hockey or antique arcade machines, none of the testosterone-fuelled competitive atmosphere and raucous bonding rituals of most code farms, which exploited a transient population of young, mostly male coders by working them remorselessly for two or three years and replacing them with new recruits after they burned out or were flamed by exposure to raw algorithms. Bria employed more women than men, gave them long-term contracts with benefits, shared out bonuses from exploitable finds, encouraged her coders to decorate their pods according to individual taste. One had been made over into a replica of a spaceship cockpit; another was lined with a thin shell of polystyrene carved and painted like antique stone; the one that Bria and Lisa commandeered (from a young woman who told Lisa that she had been inspired to become a coder when she’d studied sandbox code at college, which made Lisa feel like a relic from deep time) was tiled with picture postcards from Earth – anodyne views of beaches, mountains, monuments, city streets and parks – and little vitrines containing robots dressed in a variety of national costumes. It was at once knowingly kitsch and deeply nostalgic.

Lisa and Bria closed up the pod, activated its Reynolds trap and deployed the security protocols, worked their way through checklists and alerts. The soft green glow inside the shuttered pod and the ozone whiff of the humming trap were calmingly familiar, somewhat abating Lisa’s uneasy mix of guilt and shame. Bria hadn’t mentioned yesterday’s missed appointment beyond asking Lisa how she was feeling, but Lisa suspected that her friend knew that she’d taken a tumble off the waggon. It was an echo of her paranoia from the bad old days, when she’d worked zero-hour contracts in corporate code farms and sneaked carefully calibrated doses of shine during her shifts, and put a certain distance between the two of them.

At last, Bria activated the multi-spectrum scanner and told Lisa that she should do the honours. Lisa snapped open the little acrylic box and used silicon tweezers to pluck the tessera from its nest of cotton wool and set it in the foamed-plastic cradle.

It didn’t look like anything special. A small flat chip of tile, roughly rectangular, surfaced with a dark grey sheen that had flaked off along one edge to reveal a tangle of fine black threads and a fugitive glitter of micronodules in a ceramic matrix. No different to the thousands of tesserae scattered across the walls of tombs in the City of the Dead in patterns that no one had been able to prove were anything other than random.

Lisa angled the Reynolds trap over the cradled tessera and with delicate concentration advanced the ball of the ultrasound probe until it kissed the smooth grey surface. Checked the frequency and timer settings, touched the on/off icon.

Most tesserae were inert. Some, triggered by the proximity of animals, biochines or humans, tickled optic nerves and generated hazy glimpses that might have been fantasies or fragments of the lives of the Ghostkeepers, the Elder Culture that had built the City of the Dead. And a few contained active intelligences. Ghosts, eidolons. But no eidolon appeared when the probe sang its mosquito song. Instead, the tessera was immediately enveloped in a flowing silvery-grey fog. Lisa believed that she could see movement in there, but it was hard to make out what it was. For a long moment, the rest of the world folded into the blind spot where her ghost lived . . .

The timer shut off the ultrasound probe; the flow vanished. Lisa tried to blink away silvery after-images. Her eyes prickled hotly and she felt the stab of an incipient headache.

Bria said, ‘Are you okay?’

‘I saw something. Like fog, or water . . .’

Lisa wondered if Willie had seen it, too. She watched eels of phantom light swim through the dim air of the pod while Bria ran through checks on the sandbox, finally announcing that the mirroring had been successful and bringing up the looped playback on the big 3D screen.

The code’s graphic display was simpler than most, appearing as the same kind of silvery currents that had briefly enveloped the tessera, but with far greater resolution. Lisa could see rippling moiré patterns in the flow now, like the play of sunlight on white sand at the bottom of a shallow sea. A Cartesian grid distorted by continuous coordinate transformation. And she was beginning to see repeating elements emerge in the fractal complexity, although the overall pattern seemed to be endlessly variable. She remembered a quote about architecture and frozen music. But this was moving, liquid, alive.

Bria brought up a wire-frame model of the grid, said that the initial results from decompiling, pattern matching and reverse lookup had already located several points of glancing similarity with Ghajar narrative code. ‘I guess Carol Schleifer was telling the truth. But no one has ever found this stuff in a tessera before.’

‘Run it again,’ Lisa said.

There was something compelling about the rippling patterns rolling through the screen. A weird hypnotic beauty. After a little while Lisa glimpsed a flash of movement, as if something had momentarily come into focus, there and gone. She leaned in, trying to spot it again, and there it was, a brief distortion in the flow, dividing it as a fish divides a river current, blinking out as suddenly as it had appeared.

‘There!’ she said. ‘Did you see that?’

Bria hadn’t. Lisa asked her to rerun the last thirty seconds of the playback, pointed to the anomaly when it reappeared.

‘I’m not sure what I’m supposed to see,’ Bria said. She was leaning side by side with Lisa, bright lines gliding across her face.

‘There’s a kind of displacement in the flow,’ Lisa said. ‘Let me loop it.’

She saw, as the loop ran over and again, chains of flashes flickering in the anomaly’s wake. Bright vortices emerging, spinning away in the silvery stream. She froze the playback, pointed them out to Bria.

‘I think I see something,’ Bria said. ‘But maybe only because I want to see it.’

They seemed very obvious to Lisa. Cream-into-coffee swirls that flowed across the Cartesian grid without distorting it. Fingerprints on a blank page. Gas clouds birthing stars. Ghostly jellyfish caught in a rip tide . . .

After a timeless interval, Bria said, ‘I think that’s enough.’

‘Just a little longer,’ Lisa said. ‘There’s so much detail in here.’

‘You’ve been staring at that loop for almost an hour now.’

It had seemed like a handful of minutes, but when Bria switched off the display and cracked open the pod Lisa realised that her eyes were dry and painful. Her mouth was dry, too, and there was a bone-deep ache in her lower back.

Pete, lying in a splash of sunlight by Bria’s free-form desk, looked up and wagged his tail when they came into the office, asked if the hunting had been good.

‘We definitely caught something,’ Lisa said. ‘All we have to do now is figure out what it is.’

She paced back and forth, drinking from a bottle of spring water. She was gripped by an electric excitement. She was thinking, in no particular order or pattern, about manipulation of three-dimensional superimpositions, interference transitions, Steiner structures, Floquet-Bloch states and high-lying Rydberg states, K-theory topology, harmonic oscillators, optical manipulation of topological quantum matter, selection components in a system-density matrix . . . If asked, she couldn’t have explained why these particular concepts and conjectures seemed relevant. She knew only that they might have some kind of correspondence with the vortices spawned by the displacement in the flow of narrative code, might help her fix the alien and unfamiliar within the topologies of conventional maths and Elder Culture algorithms.

She said, ‘It isn’t a simple data matrix. There’s definitely something active in there. But is it an intrinsic property of the stored information, or is it something else? An emergent property, some kind of observer effect . . . What? What’s so funny?’

‘You have the look,’ Bria said.

‘What look?’

‘The look when you’ve hit upon what you call an interesting problem.’

‘I think Willie must have seen it, too.’

‘Because of his ghost?’

‘I think so. Yes. Because our ghosts interact with the code in some way.’

‘Of course, we still don’t know that the tessera came from the breakout site,’ Bria said. She was playing devil’s advocate, as she so often had back in the day, trying to prevent Lisa’s wilder flights of speculation from soaring off into the wild blue yonder. ‘We don’t even know where the site is, or if it has anything to do with what happened to you during the Bad Trip.’

Bria had checked the records; Outland Archaeological Services hadn’t registered Willie’s jackpot. They’d gone wildcatting.

‘It’s a
clue
, is what it is,’ Lisa said. ‘A clue about what Willie found out there, what he was hoping to find . . .’

Perhaps she didn’t need to find out where the tessera came from. Perhaps it contained everything she needed to know, if she could only figure out how to decipher it.

She said, ‘I need to read up on Ghajar narrative code. Carol Schleifer said that someone at Peking University is trying to crack it, read the text, whatever. Maybe I should talk to them. Could you do me another favour, let me use your q-phone? It would be a lot quicker to talk directly than exchange emails. And what about decompiling and reverse look-up? How long will it take to check this code against the catalogues?’

Bria held up her hands as if trying to fend off an unstoppable force. ‘Before we do anything else, perhaps we should think about taking this to the police.’

‘And have Nevers take it away from me, like he took everything else? No way.’

‘But if it’s linked to the breakout that killed the Outland crew, that killed Willie—’

‘Willie left the tessera behind for a reason. Maybe he wanted me to find it. Maybe he wanted me to see whatever it was I saw in the code. And he knew I’d be able to see it, because of my ghost. This could help me understand what the Bad Trip did to me, Bria. It could help me find a way of fixing the damage it did. But if I give it up to Nevers he’ll destroy it, or deep-six it in some vault. Because that’s what people like him do with stuff like this. And then I’ll never know what it is, or what it can do. But if you want out,’ Lisa said, because she knew how much she was asking of her friend, ‘I understand. I can take it elsewhere.’