The Book of the Dead (23 page)

I noodled around on Facebook that day. Their algorithm seemed to have gotten better. Dead Sara and Titus Andronicus both came up. I checked them out, liked them, and Liked them. The phone rang after the sun had started going down, I’d blown another Sunday on social media and was out getting myself a ready meal.

It was Liz. She had started getting things on the Internet. Little things at first. Starwood points and Amex points and air miles. Her credit took a serious uptick and all the offers she got were almost, but not quite, too good to be true. She got offered a new mortgage, fixed, below the rate of inflation. She called me after getting a note that she’d won an iPad. All these came through Facebook. Those contests that annoying people re-share or comment on, but no one actually ever wins.

“I mean, it’s great, but it’s like... like the universe is correcting for the bad luck or something. Or else I’m getting scammed. But no one’s told me to phone Nigeria or anything.”

“Shit, Liz, this sounds crazy – has it started to arrive or anything? I mean, maybe they’re just some sort of scam. Getting you to like their page or something.”

“That’s the thing, Tom. I don’t ever click on that shit. Never. I don’t know who did it or how they could have. I mean never. Not even drunk. It’s kind of freaking me out.”

I sent her some links for spyware and antivirus and didn’t think much more about it.

The following Wednesday I got an email from her on Facebook. It was a forwarded email about having won some Nectar points.

“Tom, my streak of luck continues. Google says these are good in the UK. Maybe you or someone you know uses them? -- Liz”

I had used them but always forgot to use my card, I think I’d managed to collect a fiver’s worth of points. I logged in to Nectar and put the code in. I now had ten million points. I clicked on the converter to work out what that was in real money. £50,005. OK. I had to give Liz credit. That
was
seriously odd.

“Tom, this is what I’m trying to tell you. Fifty... that’s about eighty grand US, right? If I could get cash for these things, I wouldn’t have to work. I’m going to have to get an accountant to tell me if I have to pay taxes on this stuff or what. Oh shit. You probably do, too.”

“Don’t even worry, Liz. Not at all. My accountant...”

“Tom, all this stuff is coming through Facebook. It’s like someone’s stalking me. Like a boy in elementary school leaving hearts and stars in my locker and chocolates in my desk, but on a bigger scale. There’s just
stuff
. More and more stuff, all the time. It’s creepy. At first I thought karma. I know. I know... but we... I live in the Bay Area, you know? It creeps in... but this is over the top, unless I’m being paid back for a bunch of lives.

“I’m afraid to log in to Facebook. I feel like it’s watching me. It’s ridiculous, I know, but I had this dream, that Henry was talking to me out of the screen, from those photos. You know they’re still locked, right?

I fired up my browser to look, and there, in the “People you may know” section, was “Dr. Edward Bellingham”. I clicked over to his profile, bland, yes, but he was friends with Henry. I could have sworn he wasn’t before, but I must’ve missed it. It had to be a coincidence. He seemed like he could be a handy colleague, so I friended him.

I got an uneasy feeling, though. Something was strange about it. “Liz? Stay off Facebook, will you? Just... just ‘til I tell you, OK?”

“No problem. It’s creeping me out anyway.”

The photos were still locked. I poked around in settings and terms & conditions, trying to see if Henry could have locked them or something, but couldn’t find anything.

Crap.

I clicked over to my main page, for when I want to think, and found a new surprise.

The only people there were Liz and Dr. Edward Bellingham.

What’s on my mind? Fine.

“Someone trying to tell me something?”

A Like. Bellingham.

I went to his profile. There were regular posts. Too regular, in fact. Every 20 minutes. Dr. Bellingham was using some tool to post and make his Facebook look active. Automated bookmarks, maybe... but he hadn’t really clicked on many things.

Except that he’d liked my post 2 minutes ago. I couldn’t even find the last thing he’d liked.

“Something funny going on?” I typed.

Another Bellingham Like.

“Can you answer, maybe more specifically?”

Nothing. For minutes on end. I fretted.

“Dr Bellingham?” I didn’t let it autocomplete, and tag him. Don’t ask me why.

...

“Elizabeth?”

“... someone else?”

A Like.

Seriously? “You can’t talk to me but you can only like something when I say it right?”

A Like, in less than a second.

Then, a notification. Edward Bellingham has sent you a BAKA request.

I hate these Facebook apps. I’ve written them, and while I see the point from Facebook’s point of view, I don’t like them at all on a personal basis. I nearly blocked it, as I do with all my apps, but something told me to stop. I poked at this BAKA for a while. It was a really unpopular app. Low in the rankings, but it was an official Facebook app, like Poke. Not many users, but I could see that both Henry and Bellingham had it installed.

Something about it made me suspicious.

Dreams begin. Dreams of her. The breath that you miss, the flavour of food, the joy of drinking. She is there, you can feel her but you cannot touch her. You push towards her, loving her most.

Awareness: You should not be. You fulfil your desires, your purpose, but it is wrong. You should not be.

I still had my API keys, access to all the undocumented features that I used when I had built apps. I could read logfiles. Anyone’s logfiles. Sniffing through the code like this gives a mess of words, commands, metadata. Illegible, to most people.

But I was a coder, and, better yet, I still had access to all the ‘undocumented features’ that I used when I had been building apps of my own. I could strip out extraneous information, packet headers and errors and recognise what I needed. These were commands. BAKA was running something, in stages, and it scared me.

HenryBlodgett72 freezeHeart(now);

HenryBlodgett72 brainJuicer.runFirst(real);

HenryBlodgett72 setCanopic.falcon(intestines).run(*);

HenryBlodgett72 setCanopic.jackal(stomach).run(*);

HenryBlodgett72 setCanopic.baboon(lungs).run(*);

HenryBlodgett72 setCanopic.man(liver).run(*);

HenryBlodgett72 brainJuicer.runOnce(real);

HenryBlodgett72 brainJuicer.sleepAndNotify(3628800);

HenryBlodgett72 was Henry’s Facebook name. BAKA was doing
something
against his Facebook profile. Timestamps suggested he was running all this stuff even after Henry’s death, before I even got to Egypt.

I phoned Liz.

“Liz. Tom.”

“Tom? I didn’t think I’d hear back from you tonight. What time is it there?”

“Oh, god. 3AM.” Midnight of the soul, wasn’t that what someone called it? “Listen. I...” I suddenly realised how crazy this would sound. “Can you tell me something? This might sound really strange.”

“Sure?”

“You know how Facebook is terrible at suggesting pages to you, right? Have they gotten any better? I mean, they told me to Like Justin Bieber and the Black Eyed Peas.”

“Tom, have you been drinking?”

“No, Liz, but... just bear with me, will you?”

“I don’t know, Tom. I usually don’t look at it.”

I pulled up Liz’s Facebook timeline, and scrolled back. “Liz, did you realise you’ve Liked a dozen things in the past week?”

“What?”

“A dozen things. Can you name them?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been looking at it. I’m home, alone most of the time, Tom. I don’t... what are you getting at?”

“PIL. That’s one of Henry’s favourite bands. Did you Like them?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure.”

I had the craziest idea, but I couldn’t speak it out loud. It fit, though. Somehow.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate
.

“I’ve got to go, Liz. I may have figured this out.”

I hung up on her protestations and I rummaged around in my desk, looking for Bellingham’s card. He had a UK number, I could have sworn... Yes, there it was.

I hid a baseball bat under my overcoat and braved the night bus to Cambridge.

It’s hard to walk; your limbs are stiff inside the new covering, too small for you, compressing everything. You wander a deserted city, information flowing bright at the edges, blinding you. At times, you are compelled to corners to sort, to walk in a certain way. At other times, you are free to roam. You have some power, some influence.

You should not be.

Directive: Sort preferences. Location: Timeline 6823941234.

You are compelled to go onward, to search, discover, analyse, report. To spy on those you cared for; you want only oblivion.

Please, please, please.

The sun was coming up when the bus pulled into Cambridge. I went to the address on Bellingham’s business card expecting an office, but it was in an extension to King’s College. It was one of the lecturer’s offices, where in books the dons would force whisky on their students before making them compare Shakespeare with bananas.

I walked past Bellingham as I came in the door. I recognised him from his profile photos, and managed to catch myself before stopping him. He looked like he’d pulled the type of all-nighter that’s common among geeks, exhaustion masked by the spark of ideas and success. I paused at the corner and watched him walk away, muttering to himself; he was probably going to the bathroom or to make a cup of tea or something.

I was right, he’d left the door on the latch. I slipped in, flipping off the latch. It’d slow him for a few seconds.

I was surprised by the room: it was neat as a pin and orderly, and spare. Every spare inch on the walls was given over to books: everything from Understanding Unix to Asp and .NET. There were tomes and reference manuals for every computer language I could name. Heavyweights like C/C++ and Java competed with clojure and Lisp; COBOL and Fortran were in evidence, and a collector’s dream of Assembly language books and programmers’ references for CPUs, many of whom I didn’t think existed any more: no one under thirty would even have heard of them. His workstation had a single screen, a big one, but a single screen at that.

This was odd.

AI programmers are the most extreme developers that I’ve ever met – and programmers are almost without exception an untidy group – they hold dozens of ideas in their minds at once, surrounded by stacks of paper, books, food wrappers. Everything that’s moved beyond arm’s reach is forgotten. At my office, we have to bribe the cleaning staff for engineering groups with extra perks. And developers demand the best, fastest computers. The Big Data guy at my own office has six screens on his main workstation, and four other workstations with three or four screen on each of them – his workstation looks like a command centre at NORAD, if NORAD had been overrun by zombies that only consumed microwavable food and takeaway coffees. He told me once that he thought that the leftover PCBs in polystyrene worked like insulators on the wires of his brain.

Bellingham’s desk had a slot for a single cup, empty – that was good, making tea or coffee should take him more time than going to the bathroom.

He hadn’t locked his screen.

He had a window up:

HENRYBLODGETT72 brainJuicersetUser(‘tomtomtwitterer’);

That was me. My profile name.

HENRYBLODGETT72 newLikes = brainJuicer.digUser();

HENRYBLODGETT72 brainJuicer.userSet(newLikes);

The other window was Facebook – but not quite. An admin screen, I guessed.

My profile page was there – I’d always wondered why Facebook pages use only the centre of the screen – where the ads should be were graphs of my activity, my outputs, what I’d done, over time.

To the left, a neat pair of bookends – lucite blocks holding what looked like bandaged hands holding up a set of books. Decidedly different than all the others – these had notes sticking out of them, in a range of colours, all annotated.
The Book of the Dead. The Art and Practise of Mummification
– this one the most heavily bookmarked.
Decoding Rosetta. The House of Ptolemy.
There was a big sheet of A3 paper to the right, an old photocopy of what looked like a sketch made from memory of an Egyptian scroll.

The door rattled. I looked around, hoping to see keys, or a place to hide, but there was nothing. I went around and stood beside the door, and shut and locked the door behind Bellingham when he came through, shoving him to the ground with the bat.

“OK, Bellingham. You’re in trouble now. Murder, at least. More, I think.”

“Who... How... Who are you? What do you want? How did you get in?”

“You know who I am. You must do. You have me on your screen. What are you doing over here – you’re doing something with my friend, with my Facebook page, here. You’ve done something to my friend Henry, and he’s...”

It struck me how crazy this all sounded. It didn’t make sense, but it was true. It had to be. I could see it.

I sank into his chair, turning my attention to his screen.

“You’re sending something here. What are you doing? What are you doing with Henry Blodgett?”

“I...” he hesitated. That was all the opening I need. I reached into every London gangster film I’d ever seen had and found a solid bluff, praying to gods I didn’t believe in that it would work. His reputation and access would be on the line..

“Tell me what’s going on. I’ve started a copy offsite, using your nice fast Cambridge internet connection. I’ll work it out, eventually, and I’ll find out whatever you’re doing and I’ll get you fired. Jailed, probably. Henry’s dead after all, and he sent me an email with your name in it, saying that I should talk to you, but not trust you, if anything happened.

“So what the hell have you done with my friend?” I slapped the baseball bat into my left hand. I couldn’t hit an actual ball to save my life, but you could do some serious damage to just about anything with a bat. Henry and I had gotten drunk and smashed up some cars in a junkyard out in the suburbs when we were kids one time.