Déjà Vu: A Technothriller (34 page)

Saskia said, “Keep moving.”

They said nothing the whole way. Nothing as they walked into the second building, nothing as they descended in the rock, nothing as they took their first steps into the research centre proper. It was not until they had been walking for five minutes through low-ceilinged, busy but well-lit corridors that David whispered, in English, “Where are we going?”

Jennifer said, “You’ll see.”

They came to a door. Like all others, it was large enough to accommodate the passage of machinery. It was heavy and closed. Underneath David could see blue flashes. To one side was a swipe-card reader. Jennifer ignored it. She glanced up and down the corridor – David couldn’t see what she was checking for – and then rapped her knuckles on the door.

The welding stopped. They heard footsteps. The door swished open. A man stood in the doorway with his welding visor tilted. He had a great, bushy beard and wore huge dungarees. Around his waste was a utility belt brimming with tools. To complete the costume, he wore a tent-like lab coat. His welding gun was perched on a shoulder, pointing at the ceiling. Its cable snaked away into space behind him.

“Help you?” he asked curtly.

All eyes were drawn to Jennifer. She smiled. “Hi, Groove.”

“Hey, little lady,” he said. He did nothing other than chew his gum.

“These are the VIPs Mikey told you about,” she began. “Mikey did tell you, right?”

David and Saskia stood slowly to attention. Groove glanced over them. “Mikey didn’t. If you got clearance, how come you didn’t use your ID card to get in?”

Jennifer faltered. “I…did, but it didn’t work. I’ll get it checked out later. Damn thing must have a glitch.”

Groove nodded. “Don’t these two have ID cards?”

Jennifer said, “Well now,” in a way that made David realise she had no idea what to say next. He cleared his throat.

“There was no time to have them activated for your lab,” David said irritably. “We’re making an unscheduled stop. As you know, part of our rolling review programme means that you must be evaluated every six months. It is all part of the Assurance of Quality Exercise. We’re stepping in at the last moment for the team who were going to evaluate you.”

“Quality Exercise?” asked the man.

“He hasn’t heard of it,” Saskia exclaimed. Jennifer and David exchanged a look of disbelief.

“Well, he has now,” David continued. “And there will be no prejudice to the evaluation if you let us continue without further delay. If we have to go the trouble of getting these cards activated for your lab, we’ll lose valuable time. And time is money…” David couldn’t remember the welder’s name “…isn’t it?”

The man shrugged. “But it would only take a few seconds to get them activated –”

David pushed past him. “It’s that kind of attitude that’ll get you a low mark in your review.”

The laboratory was startlingly similar to David’s old workshop in the West Lothian Centre. It had the same Spartan scheme.

There were computer terminals around the periphery and connecting doors in each wall. The ceiling was low and the lighting muted. To his right was a machine David did not recognise, undoubtedly because its guts were strewn over nearly a quarter of the floor. It was some kind of supercomputer. It smouldered.

Groove stepped over to the machine, slapped down his visor, and continued. He was unwilling to actively participate in their review.

In the centre of the room, where the white tiles sloped gently down, was the LSD: Liquid Storage Device, and David’s twenty-year-old pun was certainly intended. The great tank swirled. Colours rolled into one another, reached the exterior, touched the transparent plastic, and sank back. David watched the tank and he watched Jennifer and Saskia. They were both slightly hypnotised. They were looking at a distributed processing computer. It was constructed of microscopic computing devices that did nothing but receive chemical activation from their counterparts. They were a legion of stupid little devices. But when they acted in unison, they formed a powerful storage and processing unit: a general computer. The colours arose from sweeping patterns of activation: at one end of spectrum, red, were inhibited cells; at the other were blue, excited cells.

This device was a larger copy of its predecessor at the West Lothian Centre. That device had run New World, the artificial universe in which Bruce had seen and Caroline had died. David wondered at the purpose of this newer device. It would not necessarily perform the same job.

He snapped out of his thoughts. They had a role to play or Groove would become suspicious.

“So,” he announced. “Where shall we start?”

“In here,” Jennifer said quietly. She checked to see that Groove was absorbed in his work. Then she opened one of the connecting doors. The new room was much smaller. It had the same white-tiled floor. On the right-hand wall were four cubicles with closed, transparent doors.

“What’s this?” asked Saskia.

Jennifer opened her mouth but David answered. “These are virtual reality cubicles. They’re closed because they’re designed for microbots. However, I’d say that the microbots are malfunctioning.” He pointed to one of cubicles. There was the ghost of a red stain on its door.

“What’s a microbot?”

Jennifer continued in her father’s tone of voice, “It’s a very small robot, too small to see. They hover in the air while you’re inside the computer. When there are millions of them, they join up to form surfaces.”

“OK, what’s going on?” Saskia asked wearily. She massaged her temples. “What do you mean by ‘inside the computer’? And why should they form surfaces?”

“The device in the laboratory contains and runs a whole universe,” Jennifer said.

“Oh really,” Saskia replied. She became weak.

“More or less,” David said. He had given this speech a thousand times to VIPs in the West Lothian Centre. The intervening years fell away. “You can describe a square with only one value: the length of any given side. Using the same kind of economy, you can describe complicated shapes and systems too. The information content of the whole universe – everything you would need to describe the galaxies, the systems, the planets, all the way down to the leaves on a given tree – is not the same size as the universe itself. Oh yes, it’s a mind-bogglingly large amount of information. But there are ways to cut down the bulk. For example, I expect this computer has a single planet. Correct?”

“Correct,” Jennifer said. She was standing by her father’s side now. Saskia took a small step back.

“Our universe, of course, is detailed all the way down to the quantum level. But it isn’t really necessary. As long as some kind of supervising agent – the computer itself – ensures that mechanical actions work according to the simplest laws of physics, everything is fine.”

Saskia opened one of the cubicles. “David, please understand that I have had little sleep. My boredom threshold is therefore much lower.”

David raised his palms defensively. “I just want you to be informed, that’s all.”

“Right,” she said. It looked no different from a shower cubicle. “I put on the headset, we play a computer game. A fair summary?”

Jennifer said, “We should get going.”

Each of them stepped into a cubicle and put on a headset. David jiggled his until it fit over Ego’s earpiece. Jennifer said, “Computer, activate all cubicles. Safe mode. Confirm microbots deactivated?”

“Confirmed,” said a voice in David’s ear. It was the computer.

Then Jennifer: “Computer, run Project Asgard.”

Jennifer heard a click as an audio channel opened. Before her was perfect blackness. Then a blue grid. Overwriting it were the words: “You are: Supervisor”. The display faded to nothing.

“Nothing’s happening,” said a voice in her ear. It was the German policewoman.

“You must picture the planet,” Jennifer said. “The computer picks up your thought processes and scans them for images.”

Her father whistled. “Nifty.”

“Fine,” Brandt said. “But I haven’t seen the planet yet. How do I know what it looks like?”

“Saskia, just imagine any planet,” her father said tersely.

Jennifer closed her eyes. The blackness became deeper. She pictured the planet, opened her eyes, and she was in orbit. The huge world shone beneath her. She could see clouds swirling over the continents below. From space, the clouds had a three-dimensional quality. The land was green-yellow. The seas were a sparkling blue. They darkened, still glistening, as they passed into the shadow of the sun. The terminus was directly below.

“Computer,” she said. “Locate Point One.”

A green square appeared over a quadrant of the largest continent. It was far to her left, well beyond the terminator, where it was night. “Everybody, can you see the green square? Picture it and the computer will take you there.”

“Something’s wrong,” said Brandt. “My screen is still black.”

“Can you see any text?” Jennifer asked.

“No,” Brandt replied. “Wait. Yes. It says ‘Visual cortex scan failure’.”

From nowhere, David said, “Jennifer, Saskia has some…individual characteristics that the computer may have problems with.”

Jennifer frowned. Mikey had said that the visual cortex reader had a ninety per cent success rate. “Computer, lock guest two with my position so that she is five metres to my left with my orientation.”

A moment later, Brandt whispered, “Fantastisch.”

“OK, Dad?”

“Here,” he replied.

“Picture the square. That’s how we get about in this world. Picture a place and you go there.”

Jennifer closed her eyes and thought about Point One.

She dropped.

Her stomach rose and her fingertips fluttered. There was no wind, no sound, only the sudden expansion of an object that was the size of the Earth. It was like catching the eye of God. The clouds met her and she passed through. She did not get wet. Underneath were forests of thick vegetation. On this planet the environment was pristine. Vegetables ruled the Earth. Further down she fell. In real terms, her speed would have been thousands of miles an hour. She turned to her right and saw the setting sun become obscured by the planet’s curve. It was like a time-lapse film. And now, as she came closer, her perception of up and down shifted. She felt that only this planet could be ‘down’ – not her own feet, though she would never feel the tug of this new world’s gravity.

And then she stopped.

She was in a ravine. The only light came from a bonfire, far away. There were no stars or and there was no moon. A glance to her left and right confirmed that her father and Brandt were there. They were spectral, translucent figures. The ravine ran north-south. The central stream was wide but shallow. Jennifer crouched and saw the bed of rounded stones. As always, she reached out to touch them. As always, her hand passed through the water and the pebbles effortlessly. They could touch nothing. They were visitors.

The ravine was widest at their point of landing. To their left, rock had tumbled from the face to form a scree slope. To their right was a flat plateau of shingle. It stretched out for nearly a kilometre before it met the right-hand wall of the ravine. At its face was a little hut. It was crude but sturdy. From this distance, nothing could be seen but for a bonfire set before it.

“There,” she said, pointing. “We need to go there.”

“OK,” her father said.

She closed her eyes and imagined the bonfire. Upon opening them, she had arrived. The hut was in full view now. It had been built in an easily-defendable crag. Two large rocks flanked its sides. The cliff was insurmountable. Any predator would need to cross the unprotected flat. The hut was, up close, a log cabin, and a well-crafted one at that.

As she watched, the door opened and man walked out. He seemed to move cautiously. He gripped the rail of his veranda with one hand and a long spear in the other. He crept down the steps until he was quite close. Then a grin broke on his young face. He ran towards the flames. He was wrapped from head to foot in fir fronds. They had been tied in place with a string-like material. They allowed to move his limbs quite freely. He even wore – Jennifer noted with a smile – a fir skirt.

“Welcome, one and all!”

“Oh my bloody God!” David shouted.

“David! Alright, mate?”

“Fine! You? How?”

“Could people stop shouting,” Brandt asked.

Bruce walked nearer the fire and sat. His guests remained standing. “How? This is me, with my memories, backed-up a few moments after you left, back in Scotland. A little bird told me about Project Asgard, which is where it’s happening for digital folk, so I had to drop by.”

David’s voice was incredulous. “What do you mean, a backup?”

“I’m just a code now, just digital. There’s nothing physical about me. That means I can be copied and downloaded like any other file. A pretty big file, of course.”

“Do the researchers know that you’re here?”

Jennifer answered, “No, they don’t. That’s why Bruce has tucked himself away in this ravine. I saw him the day he arrived. He fell from the sky.”

“Excuse me,” Brandt said. She sounded angry. “Are you the same Bruce Shimoda who was killed by a bomb four days ago?”

“Ah,” Bruce said. He sat back and looked sadly into the fire.

“Go easy, Saskia,” David remonstrated.

“What?” she snapped back. “Was he killed or wasn’t he?”

“I don’t remember,” Bruce said. “I remember running from the metal shark. I ran up a hill…and then I was here. I guess that was the last back-up point. I had already written the instructions to have it sent to this computer.”

David asked, “How could you do that? And how, incidentally, did you make this nice little log cabin? I don’t see a crane.”

“Jennifer was kind enough to give me access to the computer.”

“That explains it,” David said.

Saskia cleared her throat. “Again, I would like to interrupt. Jennifer, you said that you had some evidence. Is it this man? I’m afraid that merely having a back-up of someone does not allow you kill them.”

Bruce turned to her. “Saskia, that was euthanasia. I was dying. New World had a free-running evolutionary program that meant it was full of viruses. Asgard – this place – isn’t.”