Edge (16 page)

    Richard felt choked by hands that did not exist, punched by invisible fists inside his chest.

    "Jeez," said Zoe. "What's with the fucking kid?"

    "I don't– Richie? You all right?"

    A cramp pulled him over. Hot fluid spewed from his mouth.

    "Oh, gross."

    "Richie…"

    "Sorry." He wiped his mouth. "I'm really sorry."

    Zoe picked up her Jack Russell.

    "Hey, Opal. You keep a pet, you gotta clean up after it, y'know?"

    "Fuck you." Opal put her arm around Richard. "Just go away."

    His world lurched again.

    
She's hugging me.

    The world was so strange.

Next morning he walked with Brian through Brixton, past blocks of flats with piles of bin-bags stacked outside. Rotting rubbish emanated a stink; it felt as if the air had thickened, becoming heavier, and you had to push through it to get anywhere.

    "No pick-ups for six weeks," said Brian. "And that shit Fat Billy is making like it's not his fault."

    "Oh," said Richard.

    "And like, the weird thing is people believe him. Like if he had more powers, he'd be able to sort out the mess."

    Back in the squat, there had been a couple of people with shirts whose logos were the A-on-pentagram symbol of New Anarchism.

    "You're an NAer?"

    "Shit, no. They're stupid. OK, through here."

    They passed along an alleyway, skirting more rotting refuse, and came out onto a grimy road. Opposite was a shop with a handpainted sign – Cal's Cycles – and ceramic sheeting protecting the window. The metal door was guarded by three locks; Brian pressed his thumb against one, and extended his keychain from his belt to open the others.

    "Give us a hand with these, will you?"

    "What do I do?"

    There was a trick to jerking the ceramic shutters open. Richard tried to helpe push them up, into the slots over the windows, but Brian did all the work.

    "Cal won't be in till ten, most likely. You'll recognise him by the tats."

    "Tats?"

    "Bare arms and tattoos, kind of old-fashioned, but at least the designs move."

    Inside, the shop smelled of sawdust and oil, and the floorboards were grey with age, iron-hard. Racks hung from the ceiling; from them bicycles were suspended, looking insectile, like praying mantises, in the vertical position. Gauntlets and boots filled shelves and two glass display cases, one of which doubled as a sales counter. There was a phone pad for taking payments, and a stained coffee mug which someone had left standing overnight.

    "If we don't clean that," said Brian, "it'll just stay there growing fungus, maybe evolve intelligence. Could do with the conversation round here."

    "You want me to work on software?"

    "Got a bunch of gauntlets out back. Whole batch has buggy controlware. You up for sorting it out?"

    "I… don't know."

    "So let's find out."

    The workshop-storeroom was cluttered with electronics and mechanical components, the air tangy with oil and metal dust, sharper than out front. A large scratched wallscreen would serve as Richard's display, and a small graphite processor pad for the actual programming, instead of a phone. On one wall, triggered by Richard and Brian's entrance, a movie poster brightened into animation: a grey-haired man performing gekrunner-style moves but with bare hands and ordinary shoes, and beneath him the words:
Le Mouvement,
C'est Moi.

    "Early parkour guy," said Brian. "French, coming to London to talk about the Tao of free-running. Old school, before your actual gekrunning, cause they didn't have these little doodads."

    He handed over a gauntlet with a cracked-open casing.

    "Looks like a car motive cell." Richard followed weblines with his finger. "Viral engineering, viruses carrying the electronic–You know."

    Pain rotated inside his forehead.

    "You all right, Richie?"

    "Sorry, yeah." Richard rubbed his forehead. "No problem."

    "OK, good. See, that control web is the kind of thing NAers don't get. Actually, just the fastenings on your clothes need a technical civilisation, stuff dug out of the ground with machinery, trucks for transport, factories, and shops, right? They don't get how complicated it all is."

    Richard looked around the workshop, remembering the redwood-panelled rooms at home, clean and elegant but never welcoming, not comfortable like here.

    "You're not rich, though. You, Opal, Jayce, and all the–"

    "Him."Brian's expression closed down. "You want to stay with us, you do not nick from your friends."

"I wouldn't–Oh. Is that what Jayce did?"

    "Uh-huh. Now, you know the first rule of hacking, right?"

    "Er…"

    "You start with a cup of coffee, refill every twenty minutes, repeat until task finished. I'll put the kettle on while you crank up the display. Give us a shout if nothing's in English."

    Richard popped the service interface onto the wallscreen – the text was Korean – but he found a ReadMe and babelled the contents. By the time Brian put coffee down beside him, he was already deep in the code, sketching diagrams in the side panes as Mr Stanier had taught at school. When he surfaced back into day-to-day reality, his coffee was cold. He sipped from it anyway.

    Mr Keele periodically said that optimum cognition requires frequent breaks, so Richard flipped open another pane to browse the news. Unable to help himself, he murmured a query into a bead microphone, and watched as the results blossomed inside the new pane, with FRIENDLY ENEMIES? as the headline, a picture of Father and someone else – someone familiar – dressed in tuxedos, and the caption:
Philip Broomhall
greets Zebediah Tyndall at City dinner.

    He thumbed on the audio…

    
"Despite the hard-fought takeover battle between Tyndall
Industries and BroomCon regarding Hixon Media, the corpo
rate rivals appeared to put aside their differences before the
Lady Mayor of London. However, appearances can be decep
tive, since both men–"

    …then silenced it.

    Hands shaking, he made the pane disappear, then continued to stare at the screen where it had been. After some time, his attention drifted as if on gentle currents into the coding panes, and then he was back at work, forgetting everything, at home with himself once more.

 

Josh walked along the Embankment south of the river, watching the solar barges drift past. There was no reason to be in this part of London particularly – there were other places that Richard Broomhall could be – but this was central, with hostels and more: an entire ecology of homelessness, a bleak, pervasive undersea of living that was easy to fall into and hard to escape. Every few minutes, he checked his phone display. At 10:01am, finally, output appeared:
Entry OK.
Thirty seconds later, an appended message brightened:
1st gen
replication successful, 53 processes spawned.

    Although Petra had slipped the querybot inside the net's defences, she did not know how subtle and pervasive it could be, and he had not told her. Most of his spawned code would suicide quietly in a kind of controlled apoptosis, deliberate suicide just like human cells, for the sake of the body's health. The risk of being traced back to Petra was low. He would have liked more detailed progress reports from the burrowing code, but more traffic meant greater likelihood of monitors noticing and–

    His phone buzzed, and for a moment was too blurred to make out.
They've found me.
But he blinked and refocused, to identify the caller as Kath Gleason, from Sophie's school.

    "Hello, Josh."

    "Miss Gleason."

    "Kath, please. I just thought I should check in with you."

    "There's no news."

    "I didn't think there was." In the phone image, she shook her head. "Your, er, Mrs Cumberland came in to see Eileen. Asked for Sophie to be taken off the school roll."

    Eileen was the headmistress.

    "The school roll…?"

    "Mrs Cumberland said that regardless of the outcome, Sophie would never return."

    Josh rubbed his face.
There's only one outcome.

    "I'm sure Maria's right."

    "Probably. It's just– We asked about you, for confirmation, and she said you're out of the picture."

    "Out of the picture."

    "That's what she said."

    He looked up at the rotating wind-turbines, the long row stretching past the Houses of Parliament, and said again, without knowing why: "I'm sure she's right."

    "Oh, then… Are you in Swindon at the moment?"

    "Nowhere near."

    "I just wondered if you were going to be around."

    Josh stared at her in the phone.

    
Christ, she's hitting on me.

    Sometimes a woman was interested and he didn't get it – in fact, he still didn't believe that Petra could fancy him – but this was blatant. With Sophie worse than comatose – persistent vegetative state meant there was nothing left to awaken – and Maria filled with confusion, hating him… How did that equate with him being available?

    "The Brezhinskis aren't doing too well," Kath went on. "The father's still bottling things up inside, the mother's still drinking, and Marek… We'd like to see him back in school."

    "It sounds as if the family needs help. Would the school pay for counselling?"

    "I… don't know."

    "There's someone who could help, so long as she does get paid. I can put her in touch with the family directly. You can vouch for her, if Mr Brezhinski asks you."

    "Vouch for whom, exactly?"

    "Dr Suzanne Duchesne. I'll send you her details."

    "Well, I–"

    "Thank you, Kath. It's good to meet a teacher who really cares."

    "Oh. Thanks."

    He killed the call.

    Christ, what a bitch.

    After some ten seconds, the phone buzzed again – She's calling back, for God's sake – but it was his querybot, returning initial results. Only one instance showed an above-fifty-percent match: some three seconds of unfocused footage, a youth in white shirt and veil-cap ascending a staircase. The location was a college, so it should be filled with young people, and for a moment Josh did not understand how the probability rating could be so high – it was his own algorithm, after all. But the timestamp was 19.57, far too late for normal classes.

    Two nights ago. Even if it's him, he could be dead.

    Bad thinking. Useless pessimism.

    The college was within walking distance – another reason for the high probability – and at close range he could redfang querybots into the building system without going through the Web. And the physical movement would help him forget about Kath Gleason, and the images she invoked in his mind, with a montage backdrop of Sophie-memories: playing in school, playing in the garden, giggling at a worm, lying in a bed surrounded by monitors.

    He walked fast.

Perhaps it looked better at night, but in daylight the college exterior showed cracked paintwork and dull windows. Someone had smeared black goo over the spycams, which did not bode well for trawling through the surveillance logs. Josh decided to make the college's problems worse, just for the time being, by slipping interference bots into the building system and blanking out recordings for the yard and corridors he passed through. Once inside, a garish display screen showed adverts – salsa classes every Wednesday, homemade cakes for sale tomorrow lunchtime – and a searchable timetable.

    In the brief footage of Richard Broomhall, this noticeboard appeared in the background, so the staircase over there must be where he ascended. But where had he been going? Josh flicked through the timetable. If Richard went up a floor, there would have been just one class about to start:
Intermediate Mandarin, room 17,
instructor T. Maxwell.
A trivial hack popped up a fragment of low-level data:

 

    Josh could have accessed the relevant schema to check, but PT clearly designated part-time employees. Maxwell could be anywhere, so rather than stake out the home address or manually search the college premises, a realtime GPSID hack was called for.

    On resigning from Ghost Force and the Army in one go, Josh went through a series of exit interviews, including one with Lofty Young. They had sat inside the quartermaster's office next to Pre-Deployment Stores, and shot the breeze for a few minutes. Then Lofty had reached into a drawer, and pulled out a shoulder-holstered handgun, a black phone, and three iridescent memory flakes. Leaving them on the desktop, he stood up.

    "Ah, the old bladder. Must go for a slash-ex."
Ex
meant military exercise, and what he meant was, he needed to pee. "All part of getting old, like noticing how every little thing needs thumbprint and vocal confirmation these days. There's still shedloads of stuff floating around, mind, that's impossible to track."