Mappa Mundi (45 page)

“It's so cold in here.” She walked quickly to the air-flow grille on the far wall and touched the pad next to it. “You don't mind if I turn this down?”

Jude decided she was serious, even though he felt warm. She was shivering. “This blackout. What was it like?”

“Well, I didn't fall asleep, I wasn't exactly out. It was more like …” She searched the air above her forehead for the right words, looking left and right. “Like this wave of total black nothing, this enormous emptiness, this sense of great, big, huge space and there were sort of two things in this space but the gap between them was so big that—” she held her hands in front of her, palm to palm, and mimed trying to push them together “—they'll never meet.”

He nodded. He didn't know what to think.

“Oh, J, I'm sorry.” She shook herself. “Bad timing. You must feel miserable.”

“I was going to say it sounds like depression,” he said and decided to brazen it out. “You've been working too hard. You need a vacation in Costa Rica. Some sun. A nice beach. A few cocktails. A new boyfriend.”

“Are you offering?”

Jude was surprised at the come-on and at his reaction to it—anger. He smiled against his will, pretending she wasn't serious.

“Not this week,” he said. “I've got to get back for the funeral.” Now he felt angry with himself. What was the matter? A few bits of circumstantial and he was flipping out all over, suspecting everyone.

“The dead guy in Atlanta.” He drew the conversation back to work, where it was safer for the moment. “He had some information about a viral engineering project. I think it may be related to the stuff at Dugway. I'll send you the files and you see what you think.”

“Sure.” She stood back and reached down to the papers on his desk, her hand loose and shaky. “Is that—?”

“White Horse's paperwork,” he said, putting his hand on top of the brown folder before she could open it and see the top page. “Gotta fill it in this morning. Insurance stuff.”

Mary moved back and looked at him in apology. “Oh. Listen, you want coffee? Anything like that? I need sugar.”

“Sure, double latte,” he said, giving her the apology-accepted smile.

She walked out, back straight and taut with what he thought was embarrassment.

Jude let his hand move from its protective position and picked the file up, sliding it into a drawer. He stared at his desk and reread the outlines of what he'd written on the vial analysis. If it showed up at Dugway tomorrow but without the capacity to replicate Micromedica internally, then Tetsuo was a much weaker choice of servant than Guskov usually made.

Jude checked on the local investigation into Tetsuo's murder and wasn't surprised to find the case open, pending further enquiry. If he'd been a government hit, like White Horse, then Jude didn't know if holding the story back from public attention was worth waiting on any longer, despite what Natalie'd said. She might have the ability to change things, but he doubted he was going to get anywhere other than six feet under. He felt beyond tired. He knew he was going to make a mistake soon, if he hadn't already.

Mary, in her own office, leaned against the shut door and tried to get her wits together. She was sure, just by its weight and shape and the colours of the pages in it, that the thing on Jude's desk was her goddamned Pentagon file on Mikhail Guskov. If it was, then Jude was all the way in there and she was up to her neck in trouble—he hadn't got it on his own, he must have contacts close to her. He must know about her. He must. But if he did he was a way better actor than she'd ever have believed. And who were his allies? Who was with him on it? God, she didn't want it to be true.

And then again, she'd been on this road before and baulked it. That had to change.

Her mind was still shocked by the event of the morning. She'd told him about it, just to get some relief and have another opinion. She hadn't told him how scared and helpless she'd felt as it was happening, as she was losing control of herself. Maybe it was stress. Could that make you crazy this way? The irony of it happening to her, who'd done similar things to others, wasn't lost on her.

She opened her eyes and stared through her windows, seeing nothing.

I won't kill him
, she thought, flattening the part of her that told her she was being weak.
I'll watch him closely. If it
is
the Pentagon file then I need to know who he's with, don't I? Any rash moves and I might miss the rest of the conspiracy.

She found herself gasping for air, almost like laughing although nothing was funny. The decision felt like a punch to the gut. Disappointment welled up in her, at her own weakness and how easily she gave in to it.

Why did it have to be him? Why did it have to be Deer Ridge, of all forsaken places? Why? She wanted, needed, to answer those questions—chance was not enough.

The Sealed Environment was exactly as dull and uninspiring as Natalie had dreaded. She assumed, judging by the constant appearances of shoddily finished edges, splashed paint, and the smells of solvents, that most of it had been kitted out in a great rush. Certain zones, including the test areas, were beautifully done, with no detail spared. They must have been completed when the work was still going to schedule. But then some event had forced everything to be brought forward. It could have been many things, of course, but she was prepared to bet that it was the work at Deer Ridge and the actions of White Horse that had started this rush.

Fundamentally she was not happy or confident that the whole unit was sealed and conditioned as it should be. But that was not her problem.

She had ten minutes to settle into her room—a cube that wouldn't have disgraced some 1990s programming shed with a bed instead of a desk—but it had all mod cons including workstation, wallscreen, and even running water. She took five minutes, and that was spent wrestling with nostalgia as she unpacked her bags and saw things that, in all innocence, with Dan still alive and her mind more her own, she'd packed days ago. Natalie smothered her face in them and for an instant smelled home.

She was caught up in examining the stress points on the threads that made up a jersey T-shirt when her alarm sounded to tell her to go
and meet her workmates. Head still fascinated by the shear-stress variations in the filaments that had been caused by the knitting process, she almost fell over her own feet. She had to shake like a dog to get back into a kind of normality and realize, late, that she'd no memory or awareness of the transition between ordinary thinking and that peculiar, total absorption in something she'd never even noticed before.
Couldn't
have noticed before.

When she saw the others and shook their hands, the talent seemed to have stuck.

Her father was first to greet her with a stiff hug, embarrassed by the fact they were watched as he showed her affection but genuinely delighted to see her alive and well. As he pressed her close and she closed her eyes she saw a clear image of a boy trapped inside a huge wall of rocks that left him only enough space to exist and barely room for the smallest of frequent, tiny breaths. She was still reeling from the impact of this as she shook hands with Nikolai Kropotkin, the Russian psychologist she knew only as a name in respected journals.

He was older than her father but he had a face that looked kind and, like her own, a touch impish. His handgrip was full of anxiety, however, and Natalie noticed as they said their hellos that he was more curious about her state than about her. She thought of a series of insects in amber, the stone polished to a jewel-like smoothness and shine, and in that shine Kropotkin's eyes reflected through a kaleidoscope of lenses; she was the mosquito and he the discoverer.

Isidore Goldfarb the programmer was a bigger shock. His Asperger's she recognized instantly by his peculiar fixity of eye contact and attention. The quality of the muscles in his hands told her nervous system how he felt at making such a bold and peculiar gesture—he had to struggle with his own instinct telling him not to do it as he fell into a set routine of movement and words as fixed and inherently meaningless to him as sets of programming code were to the machines that ran them. Beneath his veneer of procedure, however, he was
bright-eyed; a fox curled in a private, dark den, watching the world through screens of shadow—Natalie saw herself through these veils. Her own state of hyperalertness was a fierce burn in the stare and her hand's touch was offensively warm as it flickered in a rhythm that upset him because he could not follow. He recognized her as a fellow defective, a curio, a broken drum.

Alicia Khan was a sheen of ebony over a cat's softness and sly grace. Natalie perceived her through what was almost an hallucination, symbolic in quality, which distilled into a few images all the information about her that she needed to know: a girl (Alicia in the past) sat alone in her room, working by the light of a candle whose wax was nearly burned away. When it burned out the girl's spirit would rise with the smoke. Her life would be gone.

But she had no time to do more than remark this bizarre new facility for seeing because Lucy Desanto was now in front of her, gripping her hand and holding her captive to a vision far more shocking than Alicia's. Her fury was barely disguised, and in the flat grey plain of her resentful stare lay a dead boy sprawled on a city street, eyes staring and purple lips open in an eternal scream.

Natalie involuntarily recoiled and felt shock numb her face. Lucy Desanto's annoyance became hurt and suspicion. Natalie looked down at the floor and concentrated on the tiles: green and black, count them, one, two … this was as bad as being on the ward. Hell, it was like being everyone on the damn' ward.
A deep breath
now.

She'd used to think how much time could be saved if only therapists could see straight into the minds of patients and get directly to what was bothering them without the gloopy, fretful world of language to bugger up understanding. Now she wished she knew far less.

“Are you all right?” Her father was at her elbow, holding on to her and shielding her from the rest of them.

“I'm fine.” She made herself stand up properly. “I'm experiencing a few odd effects of the accident, that's all. It's nothing. Really.” There,
her own talk-to-the-mad voice was back and it calmed her down. She blinked and the composite images she'd been picking up from them all vanished into memory, leaving the present clear.

“Sorry,” she apologized to them all, for violating their personal, unknowing space. She was only grateful that they couldn't see into hers.

Natalie looked up into her father's face and saw, with a sick plunge of her heart, that it was anguished. “Thank you for stopping it when you did.”

He knew she meant the Selfware, when the Ministry would have let it run. “Not soon enough,” he said in a hoarse whisper and almost crushed her hands where he held them. “And it wasn't me that did it. It was Dan. You must thank him …”

“Oh God, Dad. He's dead,” she said and closed her eyes for a second.

“What?”

Slowly and with sadness Natalie explained to all of them the circumstances of her journey, from the Clinic to her arrival at Fort Detrick, leaving out, for the time being, Bobby and Jude.

The room was quiet for a minute or two after as they all absorbed the information. Only the sound of the cooling motors from the kitchen and the air vents hummed through the narrow lounge. Natalie sat down with Calum. They were facing Kropotkin, who spoke first.

“So, they are using it already.”

“The versions are badly produced, badly written and run on low-percentage, old-version NervePath,” Natalie said. “I don't know where they were made or anything like that. I can show you a sample of one system.”

She activated her Pad and Kropotkin switched on the display systems in the lounge—no area was without its opportunities for constructive thought. All of them looked through the code intently, although Khan and Desanto had no training in it. Kropotkin used his own Pad to work the central computer system by remote and rendered it as a display: an engineering diagram of an active simulated brain.
The colour-coded picture fragmented and separated into three-dimensional segments, so that all the deeper structures came into view.

“This is the Deer Ridge phenomenon?” Khan asked.

Natalie didn't know that the news of it had broken, but Guskov obviously knew all about it.

“Yes. I wrote an erasure routine and that was used to remove the programming from those people under the effects last week.”

“How many survived it?” Natalie didn't see any trace of foreknowledge that would suggest he'd been consulted about the original test idea. In that at least he was telling the truth.

“Fourteen out of twenty-one. Not bad, considering.”

“Thirteen,” Natalie said.

They all looked at her.

“The woman whose house was burned down by Martha Johnson, the storekeeper. She died as a result. So that makes it thirteen survived, even though she may not have been directly infected.”

Guskov nodded. “In that case we should include the other two who were murdered by those under the effect.”

“What was the programme supposed to do?” Lucy Desanto was sitting right on the edge of her seat, twisting the two rings on her right hand. Natalie felt her anxiety and horror without having to try.

Kropotkin glanced around to check whether anyone else was going to volunteer information and replied, “It was meant to disturb and disable coordinated civil action.” He said the words in a lofty way and laughed ruefully. Natalie's own smile was twisted.

Lucy and Alicia looked momentarily baffled by their humour. Natalie explained. “It's far too abstract a goal—disable coordinated civil action. The programmers, who weren't really experts, and the other people on the team had to translate that into something that can be done in a living mind by a bunch of switches … they failed. It isn't possible to use NervePath and Mappaware to perform a wide-ranging social task. You can only use it to work within the individual's worldview
and their own experience. This program is a monster. All it does, once you initiate your cooperation and friendly allegiance patterns, is send a huge shunt through your amygdala, punching you with anger and fear. Depending on how well those patterns were recognized or how much they filtered into the rest of your understanding—it's an emotional nuke. Way too big for the job. Way too stupid.”

“And in about fifteen minutes it would turn you into a barbarian,” Lucy said, nodding.

“Irreversible psychosis,” Kropotkin agreed. He glanced at Guskov and in that brief second of eye contact the many long years of knowing each other was vivid. “Isn't that so?”

“You forget, Nikolai, that the British experiment prior to the Selfware test was a success. There are treatments that can restore these people within a matter of hours. It is anything but irreversible. That is the essence of the entire State of Mind—unlimited freedom of choice.”

“These choices.” Desanto interrupted him, her voice guttural. “What and who will make them? Supposing you are infected by a system that is a dogma, offers no choices—what would induce you to use anything that would change your world then? It would go against all you believed. It would be unthinkable. In that single step you would be imprisoned, your own jail and jailer.”

“You should know the answer,” Guskov returned, smoothly grinning at her discomfort, enjoying it. “You have just such a memeplex as the foundation of your identity, Lucy. And have you the will, the inclination, or the ability to contemplate renouncing it? Can you imagine other people's minds that are not fettered in this way?”

Natalie was surprised at such an instant and open confrontation. The emotional atmosphere in the room dropped a degree. Goldfarb had to sit on his hands to prevent them twitching in discomfort. Her father cleared his throat.

“We all have our delusions,” Calum said sternly. “There's no need to victimize one Catholic and think the rest of us aren't as stuck in our
ways. But her question is a good one, and your answer is not as good. In a natural environment ideas come and go from the Selfplex in a way you could speak of as though it was natural selection—strong contenders that find themselves acceptable to the existing structures are promoted, weak ones that find no support in the architecture fade and are forgotten. It is the Selfplex that determines value and acceptability. But Mappaware is much more radical in the way it manipulates the patterns of thoughts. It is possible to remove all awareness of choice and never to have it re-emerge. Mappaware can close some gates forever.”

Natalie found she was staring at her father in surprise. She'd always seen him as so fixed, and here he was, talking about freedom.

Guskov tipped his chin down in a nod of agreement. “Mmn, you're right. Now we are getting to the heart of the matter. I know you're not here because you all agree with my views on this Free State or about the Mappaware itself. We should clear the air before we attempt to work together. The project depends on it.”

“Yes, but what's the point when we all know you'll have your way?” Lucy said. “Far from being any kind of a free choice, it's your work all these years that's led to us being here, with no choice but to go forward and try to use this abomination of a tool to do some good. Even your decision that the world needs this kind of freedom is something you took on your own. How democratic is that?”

“I've explained this before,” Guskov sighed. “The technology was never in doubt. Its existence was determined as soon as Micromedica proved that it could function intersynaptically without disrupting normal process—it was only ever going to be a matter of time.”

“But you'd planned long before that,” Alicia Khan said. “You and Nikolai together had ideas on this subject in the 1990s.”