Fractions (15 page)

‘I look after data security for Beulah City,' Mrs Lawson said. ‘Cracker turned keeper, as they say. I must admit that what I learned in my young and foolish days has been enormously useful professionally. And I still share your concern about the dangers of
AI
, though some of your actions have been quite a nuisance to me in the past.'

‘And yours to me,' Donovan said. It wasn't entirely flattery: Beulah City's censorship filters made it a tough one, although with its relatively backward systems it seldom deserved disruption anyway.

‘However,' Mrs Lawson went on, ‘we should all be willing to let bygones be bygones when we find that we have a common interest, don't you think?'

‘And what common interest is that?' Donovan asked.

‘I think you know what I'm talking about,' Mrs Lawson said.

Before Donovan could respond he heard a discreet murmur in his head informing him that somebody else in the Clearing House wanted to speak to him. It had to be someone high up in the informal hierarchy to get through at a time like this. Mrs Lawson, too, seemed to be getting paged. Donovan chinned the go-ahead, wondering if she had set him up for this. He remembered her, now, quite unassisted: she'd been devious even before she'd got religion.

A privacy bubble snapped into existence, enclosing them and two others: a man in black who looked like one of the Men In Black, the mythical enforcers of the mythical great
UFO
cover-up, his face a bloodless white, eyes sapphire-blue, forehead bulging in the wrong places, suit ill fitting; and a small man in what appeared to be a company fetch, blue overalls with a name-badge. Southeast Asian, probably Vietnamese.

The Man In Black spoke first. Even his voice sounded not quite right, a pirated copy of the human. Donovan wondered what irony underlay this simulation of a simulacrum, or whether it was a genuine attempt to intimidate.

‘Good evening. I am an agent of the Science, Technology and Software Investigation Service of the United Nations. You may refer to me as Bleibtreu-Fèvre.'

Donovan felt as if he were a cat watching a snake: he and Stasis had the same enemies and the same prey, but he regarded the agency, with its allegedly enhanced operatives and its undeniably advanced technology – more advanced than the technology which they existed to stamp out – as dangerously close to the kind of evils which for years he'd feared and fought. There had been occasions in the past when the Carbon Life Alliance had had to collaborate with Stasis, and they'd always left him with a crawling sensation on his skin.

‘Dr Nguyen Thanh Van, Research Director, Da Nang Phytochemicals,' the Vietnamese man said. The voice and lip-synch had a thin quality that indicated either primitive kit or heavy crypto masking.

Donovan and Lawson introduced themselves for Van's benefit, and Bleibtreu-Fèvre continued.

‘This afternoon,' he said, ‘I personally intervened in an emerging situation involving some dangerous drug applications which were – inadvertently, I do not doubt – being developed by a, shall we say, subsidiary of Dr Van's company. Earlier today, and unknown to me at the time, the security of that research was compromised by a swarm of information-seeking software constructs. Shortly thereafter, as I am sure you are well aware, a series of transient and potentially catastrophic events took place in the datasphere. One might be prepared to pass this off as coincidence were it not for two facts. One is that the focus of the disturbances has been traced to the facility in question. The second is that, while the disturbances have affected a wide range of services and enterprises, a statistically improbable number of them have centred on research programmes which in one way or another are associated with Da Nang Phytochemicals.'

Dr Van's fetch flickered slightly, as if he'd been about to say something and thought better of it.

‘Almost but not quite the most disturbing feature of these events is that a considerable volume of research data, much of it hard-to-replace genetic archive material held at widely separated sites around the world, has simply disappeared. The
most
disturbing aspect of the problem is this:

‘A preliminary analysis of the scope and power of the source of these disruptions indicates that we are dealing with, at best, a virus of unprecedented sophistication and at worst with a manifestation of an autonomous artificial intelligence.'

‘The Watchmaker,' Melody Lawson murmured.

‘That is indeed a possibility,' said the Stasis agent.

‘Why have you contacted us?' Donovan asked in as innocent a voice as he could manage.

‘
Don't fuck me about
!' Bleibtreu-Fèvre snarled. The vernacular vulgarity was a small shock after his previous stilted diction. ‘You know very well that the West Middlesex cell of your organization attacked the artificial-intelligence research unit at Brunel University last night. The drug laboratory was broken into around the same time—'

‘Nothing to do with me,' Donovan interjected. Bleibtreu-Fèvre acknowledged this but continued implacably.

‘—and that one of your penetration viruses – illegal, and hazardous in its own right, I may add – was destroyed within that very area a few hours ago. Immediately thereafter your own interface with the system was crashed, presumably by the new
AI
. You then triggered a retaliatory demon attack, which by another coincidence destroyed the lab that I had been investigating. You, Doctor Van, are legally responsible for your company's research, which is apparently of such great interest to this dangerous entity. I will take your cooperation as a gauge of the sincerity of your claim that you know nothing about any such connection. As for Mrs Lawson, it is very much to her credit that she contacted me on her own initiative, after encountering some early indications of the phenomenon.'

So that was it. Donovan suspected that a bit of ass-covering was going on here. Lawson had contacted him, and must have decided at the same moment that a parallel call to the legal authorities would be a good idea. Bleibtreu-Fèvre, no doubt frantic about how an otherwise minor lab-leak on his turf was escalating into a software-security crisis, would have been monitoring every call from the area and pounced on the opportunity.

‘In what context?' Van asked, relieving Donovan of the necessity of revealing his curiosity. The angel-fetch brushed a wingtip against the Man In Black; some private communication passed between them and then Melody Lawson said: ‘I was investigating a Black Plan penetration of our business systems.'

‘That's interesting,' Donovan said. ‘I encountered the Black Plan in the same frame as the new entity – dammit, we might as well
call
it the Watchmaker – and there are all sorts of rumours flying around about a possible connection between them.'

‘Are there indeed?' remarked Bleibtreu-Fèvre. He said nothing more for a few moments, his fetch taking on the barely controllable abstracted look that Stasis agents showed when accessing the net through their head patches. Then he snapped back to alertness.

‘What were you doing when your constructs encountered the…Watchmaker?'

Donovan sighed. A few hours ago, nothing had seemed more important than avenging the insult from Moh Kohn. Now that was only a squalid squabble.

‘I was pursuing a conflict with a common mercenary who had broken, ah, certain rules of engagement in the course of last night's armed action—' He stopped and frowned at Bleibtreu-Fèvre. ‘You said the drug-research project had been penetrated by some info-seeker agents.'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, this mercenary, Moh Kohn, was definitely hacking about in the system.' Donovan thought back to his conversation with Cat. ‘
And
he had visited a lab on campus shortly before. One that had been broken into.'

Bleibtreu-Fèvre's eyes seemed literally to light up. He turned to Van.

‘Have you contacted the researcher, Janis Taine?'

‘I regret to say she has disappeared,' Van said. ‘Possibly your intervention had something to do with that.'

Bleibtreu-Fèvre glared at him.

Van looked back, unperturbed. ‘The message she left was untraceable,' he added.

‘Then she's in Norlonto,' said Melody Lawson. ‘It's the only place within easy reach where that sort of crypto is legal.'

‘And where Stasis can't go,' Donovan added maliciously. ‘You'll have to turn it over to Space Defense.'

‘We have a problem here,' Bleibtreu-Fèvre said smoothly. ‘Stasis is the first line of defence against contingencies like the present situation. If we should fail,
SD
has a standing instruction to prevent any possible takeover of the datasphere by any
AI
not under human control. I am not at liberty to spell it out, but expressions like
clean break
and
fresh start
tend to crop up. Their response to a threatened degradation of the datasphere might be unacceptably drastic.'

Donovan took in this information with wildly mixed feelings: a certain grim elation that his fears of uncontrolled
AI
were shared by the most powerful armed force in history, and a sickly horror at what that armed force could do. If Space Defense ever decided to treat earth as, in effect, an alien planet, they'd have to prevent any organism, or any transmission, from ever getting off the surface again. Comsats would be lased, launch-sites nuked. Electromagnetic pulses from these and other nukes would wipe most computer memories. Production networks would unravel in days. They wouldn't even have to burn the cities. The riots and breakdowns would do that for them.

‘Call it nine gigadeaths,' Bleibtreu-Fèvre said. ‘So. I hope I can count on your cooperation, both in containing the problem and in maintaining absolute secrecy.'

‘It seems we have an agreement,' Donovan said, looking around. ‘Pay-offs can be arranged later, but can we take it from here that the usual immunities apply?'

‘Of course,' said Bleibtreu-Fèvre impatiently. ‘Now, details.'

The division of labour he proposed was straightforward. Lawson would network with her counterparts in other communities to discreetly monitor the
AI
's activity. Donovan would assist her in using any logged traces of their respective encounters with the entity to develop specific attack viruses for it, while calling off his normal sabotage programme. Van would make a full investigation of the various projects that the Watchmaker
AI
had targeted, and try to reestablish contact with the fugitive researcher Janis Taine.

‘It seems a reasonable hypothesis,' Bleibtreu-Fèvre concluded, with a sort of civil-servant pedantry that had Donovan wishing he could clout him, ‘that Taine has fled to Norlonto, possibly in the company of Moh Kohn, if he indeed took an interest in her research and visited her lab. So we should track these two down if only to eliminate them from our inquiries. Ha, ha.'

He took notice of Donovan's attempts to attract his attention.

‘I think I can help you with that,' Donovan said as he stopped shrinking and enlarging his fetch, the cyberspace equivalent of jumping up and down. ‘Let me explain…'

The dead Leninists were live in Bydgoszcz, belting out
The Money that Love Can't Buy.
Kohn was trying to filter out the band's smoke-scarred heavy-water sound and listen to the buzz. A lot of talk about the Alliance's actions and the
ANR
's intentions, a lot of politicking going on. After a random walk through it he realized he'd been neglecting Janis for at least two tracks, maybe three smokes…He said as much to the off-duty fighter he was talking to, bought another couple of litres and turned from the bar. He almost collided with a young man who had obviously been leaning forward from the stool he was sitting on, listening to their every word.

Big-boned, sandy-haired, he had the look of a country boy without the rude health: a bit ruddy-faced, a bit flabby. Young, very intense and slightly drunk. He swayed out of Kohn's way, and looked right back at him, unabashed.

‘Hello,' he said. ‘I…couldn't help overhearing.'

‘Yes. And?'

‘You were asking that guy about what the
ANR
's up to, yeah?'

‘Uh-huh.' There didn't seem to be much point in denying it.

‘I've been trying to find out about that myself.' The man kept his eyes fixed on Moh's, raised a brim-full glass of whisky to his lips and sipped it. The cool-dude effect was more or less ruined by a startled look as he swallowed. ‘There's one theory I've come across. It involves the Last International, the Watchmaker, the Black Plan and barcodes.'

Kohn heard his own voice as a distant croak.

‘
Barcodes
?'

‘Barcodes containing the number 666.' The youth's face broke into an engaging grin. ‘That's the only bit that surprises you?'

Kohn had the disconcerting feeling of having lost a move.

‘I think we should talk about this,' he said. ‘Come and sit down?'

The man followed Kohn to the table, dragging a rucksack. Kohn sat beside Janis and the man sat at right-angles to them. He smiled at Janis, almost as if he recognized her, and said, ‘Hi. My name's Jordan Brown.' He stretched out a hand to shake. She introduced herself.

Kohn decided it was time to shift the advantage slightly.

‘Dunno about the lady here,' he said, ‘but I'm always happy to meet a refugee from
BC
. Welcome to space.'

‘How do you know where I'm from?'

‘Clothes,' Kohn sympathized. ‘Accent. Traces of skin conditions.'

Jordan looked indignant for a second, then laughed.

‘Stigmata!'

‘Don't worry. They'll wear off. OK, Jordan, you might find it a bit more difficult to figure us out. Janis is a scientist and I work for a protection agency. Some people would call me a communist. Much-abused label, but…'

He waved a hand to take in all the unfortunate associations he might have evoked.

‘Doesn't bother me,' Jordan said. ‘I believe in taking people as you find them. I'm an individualist. And a capitalist.'

‘And surprisingly well informed,' Kohn said. ‘Considering.' He leaned back. Over to you.

Jordan peered around in a way that triggered Kohn's memory of how Janis had looked over her shoulder that morning.

‘Uh…is the
ANR
legal here?'

Kohn smiled. ‘That's not a simple question but, if having an office block with its name in lights is anything to go by, yes. And we do have free speech, as you may have noticed.'

Jordan sighed, shoulders sagging a little.

‘Stigmata again…'

Kohn nodded. ‘The right of free speech is one thing,' he said. ‘But the stuff in that glass is the best thing going for helping you exercise it.'

Jordan took a sip of whisky and began to talk.

While Jordan was getting a round in, Janis and Moh conferred frantically.

‘Do you think he's…on to us?' Janis whispered.

‘Some kind of agent?' Kohn shook his head. ‘Anything like that, it'd be someone I know…He's just sharp. Heard me asking around.'

‘We could get him in on this. You want to keep off the net, and I'm no good on it. He is.'

Kohn gazed at her. ‘That's an idea.'

They shifted apart as Jordan came back, looking down and moving like someone steering a car with his elbows. He smiled at Janis as he put the drinks down.

‘I'm impressed,' Kohn said. ‘Really. You've sifted an incredible amount of stuff off the net, come up with a big spread of ideas about what's going on. How did you get that good, back there?'

Jordan scowled at his drink, then looked up. ‘I don't know,' he said. ‘I was using better kit than I've ever had before, and I was doing the same sort of thing as I do at work. Did at work. A feel for how the markets move, like Mrs Lawson told me today.' He laughed. ‘And a feel for virtual reality from playing Paluxy, I guess.'

‘What's Paluxy?' Janis asked.

‘Dinosaur-hunting game. It's in the only
VR
arcade Beulah City's got. Noah's Park.'

‘I see,' Kohn said. He glanced sidelong at Janis, who didn't see, either. ‘You came here looking to put some flesh on what you found. So did we.' He spoke slowly, trying to get his zooming, looping thoughts into some kind of formation-flying. ‘Or, maybe,
we
're the flesh. So now you've got a choice. You can go and do whatever it is you really wanted to do in Norlonto that you couldn't do in
BC
– read, net-surf, get laid, whatever – and
forget about this.
Or you can come in on it with us. If that's what you decide, we'll tell you all we know.'

Moh leaned closer and spoke quietly, barely moving his lips. He was sure even Janis couldn't hear him. ‘And if you betray us, I'll kill you.'

He straightened up and smiled at Jordan as if he'd just given him a hot betting tip, watching the fear and eagerness that seemed, now, so evident on Jordan's carefully impassive face.

‘OK,' Jordan said. ‘Let me think, OK? You're not talking about anything that…would be criminal,
here
?'

‘Nope,' Moh said.

Janis shook her head fiercely.

‘You're not working for the' – he lowered his voice, his face squirming with distaste – ‘
government
or the
UN
or anything like that?'

Moh guffawed, putting an arm around Janis's shoulders and slapping Jordan on the back.

‘You're all right,' he said.

Jordan looked pleased and embarrassed.

‘So what's this big secret, and what do you want me to do?'

Moh looked around. ‘Surprising as it may seem, this ain't exactly the time or the place for talking about secrets. As to what we want you to do, basically it's just what you have been doing. But with a bit more to go on, which is what we can give you. I live near here and you can use our place as a base until you get somewhere for yourself. If that's what you want.' He passed Jordan one of his business cards and gave him a quick rundown on the Collective.

‘So what do we tell the comrades?' Janis asked.

‘As near the truth as possible,' Kohn said. ‘Jordan's helping us with research, and building up a database of possible contacts, customers…'

‘OK,' Jordan said, ‘but why me, and why for you?'

‘Suppose we make it something you'd want to do anyway. I mean, like today you've sort of had your wish come true, got booted out of
BC
with a nice little stash. So…what would you have done, if you hadn't got any further with your search?'

‘Found somewhere to live. Got a job – in futures maybe – and, uh, read and written a lot.'

‘What would you write?'

‘Philosophy. Kind of. Oh, not just atheism, humanism, I'm sure there are plenty doing that out here—'

‘You'd be surprised,' Kohn remarked.

‘—but I want to do more. I want to attack all these cults and ideologies. I have this, this vision that life could be better if only people could see how things really are. That it's your one life, it's yours, you have this inexhaustible universe to live it in and God damn it isn't that enough? Why do we have to wander around in these invented worlds of our own devising, these false realities that are just clutter, dross, dirt on the lens? – all these beliefs and identities that people throw away their real lives for.'

‘Like, there is no God, and you shall have no other gods.'

‘That's it. That's what I want to write.'

‘I have a better idea,' Kohn said. The understanding of how good an idea it was glowed within him, spreading like an inward smile. ‘Would you like to be on television?'

Only cable, and with a small subscriber base, he explained. But items did get picked up sometimes by the networks, and the Cats had schedules to spare since all they put out was their own edited exploits and an alternative news-slot with a bit of radical/critical/marxist analysis thrown in.

‘If you can just talk like that to a camera you'll be fine,' Kohn said. ‘Nothing to it. No interviewers. No professionals to sneer. It's your show. Say what you like – basically we hate the barb and the mini-states, and if you do too then you're on our side; anything rational would be better than those smelly, cosy subtotalitarianisms. The only viewers will be watching because they want to, so you won't bore anyone. And, you being a capitalist, you can measure your success by the credits that you clock up!'

‘Oh man.' Jordan had fire in his eyes now. ‘That sounds great. Too good to be true.'

‘No, just true enough to be good.'

‘Speaking of clocking up credits…what do you guys, your comrades, do with the money you make?'

Kohn frowned. ‘Savings bank account.'

Jordan laughed. ‘You'd do better buying gold and keeping it in an old sock!'

‘What else could you do with it?' Kohn asked, genuinely puzzled.

Jordan looked at him, shaking his head. ‘Call yourselves mercenaries…Look, you've got an inside track on the whole micropolitics of this place, you're in the middle of a free-trade zone, you don't pay taxes, you've got access to news and rumours more or less as they break…You know, I could make a bit of money from what I learned on the net tonight!'

Kohn looked at Janis for guidance. She shrugged. ‘Sounds feasible enough.'

‘Great!' Kohn straightened up and raised his glass. ‘Here's to the international communist–capitalist conspiracy, to which I've always wanted to belong.'

For Jordan they drank to philosophical speculators, which they all thought was rather good, and for Janis to mad scientists who did awful things to rats. After that they got loud and, eventually, quiet. ‘Is Molly Biolly a crank band?' Janis was looking at the stage when Kohn swung into the seat beside her, returned from another prowl through the buzz.

‘I don't know. What—?'

‘That guy at the back, looks like Brian Donovan. Like the picture of him on the back of his book.'

Behind the holo image of three girls in second-skin plastic doing indecent things with synthesizers stood the scratchy spectral fetch of a man with long grey hair and a long grey beard. He seemed to be staring at them.

‘Weird,' Kohn said, sliding away from and in front of Janis.

‘Isn't it just a projection?' Jordan asked.

‘The band is,' Kohn said, not turning round. ‘But this stage has its cameras, too, so you can patch in a moving point-of view from somewhere else…That's how a fetch works, out in
AR
. Shit, he is watching us. And he knows we know. Let's make some space, keep it natural, knock back the drinks and head for the door. You first, Jordan, then Janis.'

Kohn stood, gulped whisky. The figure moved forward, through Molly Biolly, a ghost through ghosts. Some yells of complaint and disgust went up. The fetch glided across the edge of the stage and into the crowd. Irrationally, people made way. Smoke coiled into colours inside it.

The band, which had been
TALKIN BOUT MY GENE RATION
!!!! fell to mouthing soundlessly, like terrorists on television. The crowd in the pub was silent, too, eyes focused on the moving image.

The fetch pointed a translucent arm at Kohn. Its lips moved out-of-synch as the speakers boomed back to life.

‘
MOH KOHN
!' it said. ‘
I ACCUSE YOU OF BREAKING THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
!
IF YOU DO NOT APOLOGISE IN PERSON AND IN THE FLESH TO MY EMPLOYEE, ACCEPT A RANSOM AND CLEAR HER NAME WITHIN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, I WILL SEE YOU IN THE NEAREST GENEVA COURT. IN THE MEANTIME AND WITHOUT PREJUDICE I OFFER A REWARD FOR YOUR ARREST AS A RENEGADE AND A PUBLIC MENACE
.'

Donovan's fetch looked around, as if to make sure everyone had heard that, and vanished.

Kohn was backing off – on the balls of his feet, ready to lash out.

The music came back on. Somebody laughed. Just a terrorist dispute. Attention returned to the band; heads turned away.