Mappa Mundi (11 page)

The thing that made her want to scream was that in all the years they'd spent working so hard to pin Ivanov to the wall, Jude had never once realized that the core of his problems sat next to him, worked in the same office, smiled as she put down his coffee on the desk, kissed him goodnight on the cheek, hugged him after a crisis, drank beers with him on Fridays at Goodenough's bar, sat with him at baseball games and passed the popcorn. He was smart, but when he wasn't being so smart he was stupid. Stupid in the best way; blind when he'd given his loyalty. He'd never make time as a double agent like her. And she wondered what that was like.

She flew a light changing to red, got blipped automatically by the local traffic AI, flipped it her code, and watched its terse warning vanish from the Porsche's onboard system.

Jude was the nicest guy she knew. She liked him enormously. Sometimes she even thought she loved him, or could have if her life had allowed it, which was why he must never find out that the gene-sequencing lab Ivanov had been running wasn't only perfecting the DNA of privileged unborns all over the USA. It had a secondary purpose, far more ethically suspect, that it carried out in the name of national security. She was sworn to protect it but she wanted to protect
Jude, so he would never know anything about Mappa Mundi. Ever. Not if she could stop it.

Her foot on the accelerator was pushing so hard, she had to draw it back consciously, stockings sliding in her shoe, heel digging the floor. The car slowed from eighty to fifty. The roaring in her ears subsided. With the loss of velocity Mary felt the first faltering of her confidence in her ability.

She knew it was too late. In her jacket she was aware of the weight of her gun, holstered neatly below her left arm.

She wondered if there was some other way out. Jude could be redirected. Or maybe this was supposed to happen, this discovery, part of a larger plan that small movers like Mary weren't clued up on. She knew that not everybody in the NSC had such rosy views of Mappa Mundi as her boss did. If they'd decided to take counteraction from the top then perhaps Jude finding out some silly clue was no accident. They'd leak something and then sit back smugly to watch her as she was forced to fry Jude for it. The key to the truth must lie in the way that he'd found out, if he was lying to cover for a trip to England and not something dumb like a dirty weekend in Rio.

The more she thought about this, the more likely it seemed, and she convinced herself it wasn't just ego. Research would tell, however. A little bit of research.

At the next lights Mary pulled a U-turn on red and headed back towards the airport amid a squeal of tires, an angry cloud of black exhaust smoke, and a parade-day applause of car horns. This time the traffic AI recognized and ignored her.

She flicked her Pad to hands-free mode to call in and check with her support services—yes, the calls and instructions to England had gone out OK and no replies about anything worth noting had arrived, she was told. Her mood lightened a little and she accelerated smoothly into the inside lane before dialling the number of a general, a personal friend at Fort Detrick, to whose offices she was put straight through.

“It's Mary Dee,” she said.

“Well, Mary. What a nice surprise. Kinda thought I'd be hearing from you sooner though,” said General Bragg, his voice gravelly and rounded, like a friendly grandpa's.

Mary wished she could see his face to clue into exactly what that meant. “Oh yeah?” She kept her grin on. “I've been busy on my cover. It's not all expense accounts and private planes on the federal side of the tracks, y'know.”

“Oh, now, Mary, I can't believe you haven't got some fancy runaround all to yourself, a big girl like you.” But he sensed she wasn't quite levelling with him among all the bantering and added, “So, what's rockin' your boat?”

“I'll tell you, Jim,” she said, and this time she wasn't fooling. “I need to know how the test on CONTOUR went.”

Once she'd told him the codeword for their business she heard him take an uneasy breath. “I thought this was no straight ace,” he said.

Mary's chest felt like the steering wheel had hit it. She veered sharply and almost struck a slow-moving van on her outside. As far as she'd known until that moment, CONTOUR had never been tested—and it was supposed to remain untested until it had been stabilized. As she was correcting the car with a savage jerk of the steering wheel that almost sent her into the central reservation General Bragg said, “There was an authorized—authorized out of your bosses' offices, that is, NSC-approved—single, low-percentage prototype test using a simulation verified system.”

“Where?” She knew there wasn't a site on Earth that was sanctioned for this and especially not inside the continental US. Some bastard was playing tricks right at the top.

“Zone Five. But this came from your—” General Bragg was beginning to be upset for her, and this she could do without.

“Verify that,” she answered, smooth and confident, as though she'd only been checking a fact. “Get you later, Jim. I've got a plane to fly.”
With her mouth clamped shut on the Happy Jockette routine and her foot making the car's engine scream, she left black marks on every turn between there and the terminal.

She'd clear things with Bragg later. All that mattered was that some bozo had moved to a live test of Mappaware. If she didn't know that meant her boss hadn't known either. She pulled off at the next service point and sent a message in before making arrangements to leave Orlando within the hour. She abandoned the Porsche to its fate in a short-stay parking lot, keys in the exhaust pipe and a pager message to the hire company. By late evening she was waiting in an outer office at the Pentagon, buttoning the sharp cut of her suit to its most uncompromising. She'd had a few hours to figure things through and she was well prepared by the time Rebecca Dix summoned her.

Rebecca had been called out of a presidential dinner and looked fit to spit bricks. Seated on the edge of her desk she nodded at Mary and gestured at the wall display where the CONTOUR message was displayed. “Your analysis, Agent Delaney?”

“General Bragg confirmed he received a notification of an authorized live test of CONTOUR on a small, isolated, and insignificant population within the bounds of the A12 Testing Agreements—”

“I can fucking read it myself,” Rebecca said in a mild voice. “What I want to know is, what you think this is in aid of.”

Mary met the severe dark stare of the First Adviser to the NSC with calm certainty.

“Bust the project open.”

“Has anyone got hold of it yet?”

Mary saw Jude in her mind's eye. “No.”

“If they do—” they both knew what Rebecca meant, because of the test site and Jude's connection “—you'll take care it goes no further.”

“Ma'am.”

“Mary?”

Mary looked at Dix's face, trying to show no feeling.

“Do you want me to replace you? Don't worry if you do. I can arrange that—”

“No, ma'am,” Mary said firmly, looking straight ahead, at attention.

Dix nodded slowly. “When it gets too much, Mary, don't be afraid to ask for help.”

“That's okay. Thank you, ma'am.”

After she'd finished the sandwich, Natalie had about ten minutes to read the files, or less. She was familiar with the language they were written in—because she'd helped to create it—but what she saw wasn't easy to interpret for two reasons. First of all, it was badly written. Second, it did things the logic of which she didn't understand until she ran the program in her simulation suite and saw their effect blossom.

In her Patient, starting at a normal position, the emotional centres at first shut down to almost insensitive levels and frontal-lobe activity dropped off the scale. Then the program worked to link and stimulate all those things about a human being's makeup that act subtly to darken the heart. The result was something like paranoid schizophrenia. The program itself was a crude recipe for making someone mad, as sophisticated in comparison to Natalie's work as a skateboard was to a space shuttle. But she betted it worked, after a fashion, well enough that it would make anyone burn down a house or shoot themselves just to escape the sudden and incomprehensible spiral of misery and mania their lives must have become.

Natalie erased it from her machine. Why was it so simple to do the worst for people, when fixing exactly the same naturally occurring fault was so bloody hard? These fifty shitty lines: enough to screw up anyone they touched, and it would take years of work to scratch the surface of a solution. If she'd written this, how long could it have taken? A week? A month? But here it was, brute, short, sharp, and ugly as raw sin, sitting on top of her years of labour and those of all the others on the project; taking their technology's power, its potential
for healing, its immense subtlety, and making a dumb gun to blow brains to hell.

Natalie removed the disk from her systems, taking it in thumb and forefinger, and dropped it in her pocket. Filth. She certainly would be seeing Jude again, no mistake about that. But for now he would have to sit and spin because she was about to lose the only job she'd got left.

Grabbing the notes and her Pad Natalie ran the three corridors from her office to the conference centre and took her place just as the satellite feed from the USA kicked in and their boss of bosses, Mikhail Guskov, came online to address them and give the state of play.

The meeting at the York Clinic was for the entire country, and not just for Natalie and her local crew. The centre was packed with over a hundred attendees and her lateness was only noticed by the autologger at the door who checked her credentials and gave her a tired kind of Ministry spiel about the sort of standards expected of premier contractors. She was deleting it when the address lit up the big screen of the auditorium and a hush fell.

Mikhail Guskov was in his fifties, but with the vigorous energy of a younger man, perhaps even of two or three younger men. His blue eyes glinted with it, and it quivered in the thick hair of his beard, his rough moustache, and the heavy and ill-cut nest that crowned his head in brown and grey. He reminded Natalie of an alpha wolf, and no doubt that was how he felt about himself, because his paternal pride was detectable even through miles of transmission. She didn't know where he was—none of them did—but for the duration of the link his presence was here and they, despite their own egos and achievements, waited on his every word.

“Dear Friends.” He began, as he always began, in warmth and good humour. “A delight to see you all again and to have read your reports, every one of which, I am pleased to say, has edged us further towards our goal of mapping the human mind. In the last hour a simulation run has achieved a sixty-percent-accurate translation between the
neural function and the synthesized theoretic model. Only you and I can know what that really means.” He waited, not disappointed, as a flurry of whispering and excitement rushed around each room he spoke to; sites across the world were suddenly enlivened, with fresh enthusiasm on tired faces and quick movements from exhausted bodies.

Natalie watched the energy dynamic run and circle, flow like a tangible fluid. It brushed through her and she, too, was lifted, even though she was a watcher, not a participant. She calculated very quickly that Guskov's message meant that the time-crunch problem was no longer an issue. There had been a burning uncertainty about whether the real-time cross-mapping of mind and matter in an individual was a calculation that was NP-complete or not. NP-complete problems required more time than existed in the universe to solve. But their excitement was unbounded now that he revealed the sixty-percent correlation. Only forty left to go! Six years on from the inception of NervePath technology, and ten years on from the successful development of nanomedical gear, the biggest and most ambitious scientific endeavour to date was going to finish.

There would be a comprehensive science of the human mind, even, if they dared think further, of the very essence of every person alive. Natalie didn't believe in souls, but if she had she would have been afraid now, because even that final, sacred thing wasn't going to be outside her reach any more. It was measurable, definable, and mappable. Soon she would be able to point to it, or its absence, just as she could point to the image of a mind and say, “There, Mrs. Jones, that's why you're feeling so awful, the crossmatch between your worldview and experiences is failing right here. Don't worry, it's only a nervous breakdown and quite natural, you'll be fine as long as you can wait it out.”

And if Mrs. Jones couldn't wait it out, then Natalie would be able to prescribe a therapy to hurry things along. But she knew as well as the man next to her that this leap forwards now brought them up
against the hardest of problems—Mappa Mundi would enable them to alter people's minds. As she'd written on Jude's forehead, so she'd be able to rewrite neural paths in a process that amounted to the direct creation—and deletion—of people.

Natalie had been so sure, until now, that this was good. Despite the potential for harm, there were so many positive things it could be used for, to free individuals from biologically induced or incident-oriented mental torment. As a tool for self-understanding and development it would be invaluable. She believed in it absolutely. But in her pocket the disk sat, butchered, incompetent, a solid piece of ill-will. Its existence—certain from the start to come about because they were all only human—made her doubt their illusions of control. Mappa Mundi was protected by European and US governments, under the strictest security. But so what?

Natalie was hardly listening to Guskov, she was so immersed in the problem of what to do with her knowledge. Because maybe he already knew. Maybe there were wheels within wheels. It didn't take a psychiatrist to understand that people were creatures of many identities, many loyalties and weaknesses. Someone in this meeting was responsible for the abomination she had just read through, and showing her hand might be the least useful thing she could do.