Into Everywhere (16 page)

‘We were running the code in different configurations, and it suddenly popped out at us,’ Eli Tanjung said. She was the youngest of the wizards, a solid, solemn young woman with glossy black hair and a trace of a moustache on her upper lip. A plastic circlet spiky with plug-in circuitry was clamped around her head.

Rael Manzano also wore a circlet. ‘We could not believe what we saw,’ he said. ‘We stared at it for an hour at least. Such unexpected beauty!’

‘I believe a demonstration is in order,’ Cho Wing-James told Tony. ‘We’ll run it from the beginning, let you see for yourself.’

The silvery flow in the big window blinked out, resumed. At first, Tony saw only a uniform stream of mercury light, but then he felt a weird moment of doubling, as if he was watching himself watch the window, and began to make out knots and vortices like unstable whirlpools, or the teardrop shapes that water currents made in rivers when they divided around obstacles. The patterns were everywhere he looked, and there were patterns within the patterns. An eternal silver braid flowing past, beautiful and compelling . . .

‘That’s enough, I think,’ someone said, and the window blanked and he came to himself with a start.

‘You see?’ Cho said. ‘You see?’

‘I saw something,’ Tony said. ‘But I don’t know what it was.’

‘Similar patterns were discovered more than a century ago,’ Cho said. ‘Only those infected with a specific and very rare kind of eidolon can see them. Apparently, that is what infected us.’

‘And it has spoken to us,’ Eli Tanjung said. ‘It has shown us the way.’

‘Some of us have felt a compulsion to draw diagrams similar to the one I showed you,’ Cho said. ‘We believe that it is something encoded within those patterns. Its meaning isn’t clear, not yet, so we are hoping to stimulate our eidolons into providing us with more examples.’

That was what the wizards had been doing when Tony had arrived. Taking turns to wear circlets that with pulsed magnetic fields poked and pried at the eidolons in their heads, trying to stimulate them, trying to make them reach into the narrative code and pull out something comprehensible. If the stromatolites contained data relevant to sleepy sickness and other meme plagues, Cho said, tugging at stray strands of his hair, this was their best chance of finding it.

Tony told Aunty Jael again that he wanted a word in private. When he climbed up to the balcony, pushing through the dull hum of its privacy screen, another hand was waiting there – one of the skinny white-skinned hands, this one with a stencilled 3 on its chestplate.

‘Just how dangerous is this eidolon?’ he said.

Thinking about it made the inside of his skull itch.

‘It is hard to say. However, it appears to interact only with Ghajar narrative code.’

‘I suppose that I’m also infected. As is Lancelot Askia.’

The idea that his uncle’s man harboured a copy of the eidolon gave Tony a thin satisfaction.

‘I have tested the neural activity of the wizards,’ Aunty Jael said. ‘All of them possess the characteristic signature of the eidolon. If you like, I could also test you. As for Mr Askia, I doubt that your uncle would give me permission.’

‘What about you? Are you infected?’

‘Alas, no. My mind is fixed. Also, the eidolon appears to have infected only those in the immediate vicinity of the light storm. Several of my hands were caught up in it, but my mind was, of course, elsewhere.’

Tony remembered when he had first seen Aunty Jael’s true self. He had been eight, about to become her pupil. Ayo had taken him down to the basement of the laboratory, to a small room lit by a warm blood-red glow, with a ladder of shelves holding what looked like the spines of printed books. His big sister had put on white cotton gloves and pulled out one of those books, showed Tony that it was a slice of brain just a few nanometres thick in a rectangular leaf of grainy plastic.

‘The plastic contains circuitry that infiltrates the laminated cytoarchitecture,’ Ayo had said, holding the plastic leaf in gloved hands. ‘And the circuitry of each leaf is connected to all the others. The brain provides the template for the mind that is generated by all of this, and the circuitry animates it. All this, everything on these shelves, is needed to support an imperfect simulation of a single human mind. Remember that, little brother. Aunty Jael may appear cleverer than us, but that is only because she is able to think faster. It is a shallow kind of thinking, and her viewpoint is fixed. Unlike us, she is unable to change. And that, in the end, is what counts.’

Tony said now, ‘So far all it has given us is that funny diagram. And we do not know what it means.’

‘Not yet,’ Aunty Jael said.

‘And even if they can use this eidolon to translate the stromatolite data, they may not find anything that can be used to understand and treat sleepy sickness.’

‘I am cautiously optimistic,’ Aunty Jael said.

‘But it isn’t anything I can take to the family council,’ Tony said. ‘And there’s another problem. The thing I came here to tell you.’

He quickly explained Opeyemi’s story about one of the wizards sending messages, his belief that it was a ploy to undermine the little authority he had. But when he threw the link that his uncle had given him to Aunty Jael, expecting her to find something that would prove that the clandestine messages were fake, she said that they not only appeared to be genuine, but packet analysis showed that they had originated in her laboratory.

‘Do you know who sent them?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘How it was done? How anyone could hack the common exchange from here? I thought you had locked down comms.’

‘There are no direct lines, but there are a number of devices and utilities that communicate their status with central services. Someone appears to have used one of those connections to tap into the city net, and then reach out to the common exchange. Fortunately, a unique numerical string is inserted into every communication with central services, identifying the device that sent it. These messages were all sent from the same place: the power transformers.’

‘Are you certain?’

‘While we have been discussing this, I have used one of my hands to locate an unauthorised device attached to the downlink with central services. It is accessed by a simple transceiver, similar to those used to control various probes in the stromatolite aquarium.’

‘Show me.’

Aunty Jael’s opened two small windows, one showing a small bead inside a cable junction box, the other the X-ray image of the scrap of circuitry it contained.

‘I looked for fingerprints but found none,’ she said. ‘Likewise with DNA. Traces of talc suggest that the person who built and installed it wore gloves.’

‘So we know how these messages were sent, but we still do not know who sent them.’

‘Correct.’

‘I don’t suppose you can break the encryption.’

‘Oh, I’m certain that I can. But it will take time.’

‘How much time?’

‘Less than that left before the heat death of the universe,’ Aunty Jael said.

‘Is that supposed to be a joke?’

‘I thought it very like one.’

‘If I were you, I’d stick to wizard work,’ Tony said.

‘Your culture does not recognise me as a human being, and I was long ago stripped of all the rights that human beings enjoy,’ Aunty Jael said. ‘I became a chattel, and was purchased by your grandfather for my skills and expertise, not for who I am or who I once was. Since then I have always carried out my instructions without complaint, have always tried to do my best for your family. I have especially enjoyed working with you, Master Tony. Your adventures have been thoroughly stimulating, reminding me of my younger self and giving me a sense of freedom I thought I had long ago lost. And I hope that my endeavours on your behalf have given you some small respect for my judgement, and that you will listen carefully to my advice now. Because I have a very good idea about how I can help you catch this traitor.’

Later, Tony realised that Aunty Jael had been warning him about her own plans. That her little speech was both a confession and a boast. But at the time, he thought that it was a plea to be taken seriously. And the thing was, her idea did seem like a good one. Simple, direct, and something they could try at once.

Lisa was fingerprinted and photographed in a clinical room somewhere in the basement of the UN building, the inside of her cheek was scraped for a DNA sample, and she was taken up in a freight elevator to an open-plan office and left in a small side room painted Disney Princess pink. Sitting in a plastic chair bolted to the floor, handcuffed to a battered table like an actual criminal. Headachy light from a buzzing fluorescent circlet bounced off the pink walls. Someone had scratched their tag, Bullpup, in wonky Gothic lettering in the plastic tabletop. The door was slightly ajar. She could glimpse people coming and going in the office, hear clipped exchanges on a police radio.

She tried a couple of breathing exercises to calm herself.

She tried not to stare at the black eye of the camera up in one corner of the ceiling.

After about twenty minutes, the agent who had escorted her through booking and processing returned and asked if she wanted anything to drink.

‘I think this is where I say I’d like to speak to a lawyer.’

‘There’ll be time for that later, ma’am.’

The agent was a trim young African-American woman with an accent from somewhere in the Deep South. She’d taken off her jacket to reveal her shoulder harness and the automatic pistol holstered under her left arm. According to the photo ID she wore on a lanyard her name was Aimee Cutler.

Lisa said, ‘Exactly what have I been charged with, again?’

‘That is what we are here to determine, ma’am. The coffee’s not so bad. Or if you like I can fetch a soda.’

After Agent Cutler delivered a cardboard beaker of thin burned coffee, Lisa was left alone again. A tactic to weaken her, she supposed. To let her worry about the deep shit she was supposedly in.

More than an hour passed before the agent returned, toting a tablet and a document case, followed by Adam Nevers. Lisa did her best to hide her relief that this time he wasn’t accompanied by the Jackaroo avatar. She didn’t know if she could stand being cooped up with the fucking thing in this cramped cell.

‘Agent Aimee Cutler and Chief Investigator Adam Nevers questioning Lisa Dawes,’ Nevers said, after he had settled on the other side of the table. He gave the time and date, told Lisa that the interview was being recorded and that she should remember she was under caution.

Lisa looked him in the eye and said, ‘I’d like to talk to my lawyer.’

Nevers smoothed the point of his neat little beard between finger and thumb, a gesture that reminded Lisa of a second-rate stage magician she’d once seen. ‘We can do that,’ he said, ‘but it would put things on a formal footing. Are you sure you want that?’

He was dressed in a grey silk suit today, a burgundy tie with a yellow stripe on the bias, his usual crisp white shirt.

‘I’m handcuffed to this table,’ Lisa said. ‘How much more formal can it get?’

Nevers glanced at Agent Cutler; the woman stood up and unlocked the handcuffs. Lisa massaged her wrists while Nevers told her that she wasn’t under arrest because at the moment he didn’t see the need.

‘So am I free to leave?’

‘You’re under caution. If you refuse to cooperate or demand legal representation, I’ll have to charge you. Under the terms of the Technology Security Act we can hold you for forty-eight hours without access to legal support, and you’ll be asked the same questions I’m going to ask you anyway. So I hope you see that it’s to your advantage to keep things informal.’

‘Charge me with what?’

Nevers ignored that. ‘You are here to help us with our inquiries. As is your friend, Ms Mendoza-Trujillo. I’ve just had a very interesting conversation with her. I hope you’ll be equally cooperative.’

He paused, letting Lisa think about that. A classic prisoner’s dilemma tactic. Threaten two suspects separately, offer each of them the chance to betray the other. But Lisa was certain that Bria would have told Nevers everything he wanted to know. She was an upstanding citizen who believed that she didn’t have anything to fear from the police, and she would be concerned about her business, her employees, her livelihood. Yes, absolutely, she would have talked, and Lisa didn’t blame her one little bit.

‘Let’s start with the stone,’ Nevers said. Agent Cutler unzipped her document case and took out a plastic bag and laid it on the table. It contained the tessera.

Lisa was certain it had been truffled out by the avatar which had accompanied Nevers and his agents when they had pitched up at her place for the second time. So much for her hiding place.

Nevers said, ‘For the record, I am showing Ms Dawes evidence article number BK89 slash zero three eight. Do you recognise it, Ms Dawes?’

‘It looks like a tessera,’ Lisa said.

‘Is it the tessera formerly owned by your husband, William H. Coleman?’

‘I’d have to take a look at what it contains before I can answer that.’

‘We dug it up from its hiding place inside your barn,’ Nevers said. ‘Would you like to reconsider your answer?’

‘It isn’t illegal to possess tesserae,’ Lisa said. ‘I deal with them all the time.’

‘And where did you get this particular tessera, Ms Dawes?’

‘I think you know where.’

‘I’ll remind you again that you’re under caution. Refusal to answer my questions could have serious consequences.’

‘If you’re going to arrest me then arrest me.’

‘If I arrest you, you’ll stay in jail overnight, come back here tomorrow. And you’ll still have to answer the question. And if, as you believe, we already know the answer, what will you have proved?’

Lisa decided to call the man’s bluff, partly out of stubborn pride, partly because she did not like him. ‘I can’t tell you because I signed a contract with my client.’

‘So you are claiming, what? Client confidentiality?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Show Ms Dawes evidence article number BK89 slash zero two six,’ Nevers told Agent Cutler.