Fractions (5 page)

It would even be better for his soul. He was becoming almost literally two-faced – the way he'd looked when he'd turned away from the screen! There had been only one moment when his mask had dropped, and that was when he'd mentioned the Black Planner…

Dear God
, she thought. Suddenly frantic, she hit her door switch, keyed open the lock on a drawer and scrabbled for her
VR
glasses. She put them on and punched herself into the security net. The sensation of diving, of swimming and twisting like a shark, was all the more exciting for being – even for her – a rarely exercised, dangerous privilege. A quick scan of Jordan's company records revealed an odd hiatus in the placing of a remittance – ah ha! She studied the traces, fragments of entry code snagged on tortuous logic branches, undetectable without the correct keys. Forensic diagnostics stripped them, returning pointers. She lowered thresholds on associative criteria, letting suspicions harden into certainties; then unleashed the now almost paranoid detection protocols and hit fast-forward to follow them. They took her to a Black Plan locale vacated in recent seconds. After clocking confirmations they leapt from one conclusion to another, finally locking on to an undoubtedly criminal penetration virus. She rode its backwash as far as she dared, far enough to confirm that Black Plan purposes lay just a few implications down the line. Disengaging, she encountered some paramilitary construct; its routines and hers conducted a brief, hostile interchange at a level far too fast for her to follow. It turned away from her and tracked the penetration virus, on business of its own. Mrs Lawson followed a secure path home, then backed out, feeling slightly nauseous.

Oh Jordan, Jordan. You are a silly boy. You are going to catch it, and so am I for letting it happen.

Unless…

Unless…

She let her conscience have its say for a few moments, then set to work deleting and revising, editing reality. When she was satisfied she sat back and picked up a phone.

The system crashed again and again. The afternoon passed in a trance of work, to the sound of crying alarms. Melody Lawson fought a rising sense of panic, becoming increasingly convinced there was something new in the networks and that it might be, if not the Watchmaker itself, a rogue
AI
of unprecedented range. She didn't know if anyone else of her credibility and experience would see it that way.

There was one man who would. Perhaps two.

Two would be best.

She waited until the day workers had left, called her family to say she was working late, then checked and rechecked the security of her office and its systems. As she did so she ran through the memory trick – one digit in this corner, another on that shelf – that recalled a number she'd never dared write down or even keep in her conscious memory. She used it to call the most secret and mistrusted and deniable of her contacts.

And all the time the question that bugged her, that stuck in and perplexed her mind, was what did the
ANR
want
with all that silk?

Betrayed.

Cat lay in the bed, gazing at the
LCD
on the plastic cast, watching the numbers flicker and her fingers clench and unclench. The anaesthetic, whatever it was, made her feel remote and detached, as if her anger were a dark cloud that she drifted into and out of. After Kohn had left she had checked her status, hoping against all she knew about him that he'd been bluffing. Except that of course he hadn't. She wasn't a prisoner any more but a patient: recommended to stay one more night in case of delayed shock, but otherwise free to go.

Her hospital bill had already been charged to the Dzerzhinsky Collective's account. They'd take a loss on that, with no ransom to recover it from. Small change, smaller consolation. She decided to run them up a phone bill as well, and called the Carbon Life Alliance's hotline. The answer-fetch took her message without comment, and told her to await a response.

She put on some music, and waited.

The response surprised her. She'd expected some low-level functionary. She got the founder-leader of the Carbon Life Alliance, Brian Donovan. He came to her like a ghost, a hallucination, a bad dream: jumping from apparent solidity at the end of the bed to being a face on the television, and back again, talking all the while through her headset phones. It was as if all the machinery in her bay of the ward were possessed. She felt like muttering exorcisms. Donovan looked like a necromancer himself, with long grey hair and a long grey beard. He was stamping about inaudibly and cursing very audibly indeed. Cat found herself cringing back against the head of the bed until she realized that Donovan's wrath was directed not at her but at Moh.

‘…don't
need
this.
Nobody
does this to me, nobody gives me this kind of aggravation. Not if they want to
live.
' He inhaled noisily, obviously wearing a throat-mike. He looked her straight in the eyes, a remarkable feat considering how he was patching the projections together and probably viewing her through the grainy line-feed of a security camera somewhere up in a corner of the ceiling.

‘Well, Miss Duvalier,' he said, visibly calming down, ‘we can't let this insult pass unchallenged.'

She nodded quickly. Her mouth was too dry for speech.

‘D'you have anything on the bastard? Not his codes – I've picked them up already from the hostage claim last night, and I'm working on that. But where does he hang out in Actual Reality, eh?'

Cat swallowed hard. ‘I just want this matter settled,' she said. ‘Not to start a feud.'

‘I was thinking in terms of a legal challenge,' Donovan said. ‘Releasing you without demanding ransom is so far out of line that it'd be a very painful challenge for him to meet. I would like to present it to him in as public a manner as possible.'

‘You'll find him hard to trace in the nets,' Cat said. She saw Donovan begin to bristle. ‘But,' she went on hastily, ‘I can tell you his usual haunts.'

The
CLA
leader listened to her, then said, ‘Thank you, Miss Duvalier. And now, you would be well advised to do your best to disappear. I'll be in touch.'

‘How will you—?' she began, but Donovan had vanished.

Screen and phones filled again with the jackhammer beat of Babies With Rabies.

 

The Felix Dzerzhinsky Workers' Defence Collective rented a unit in one of the student accommodation blocks, and for now it was Kohn's place. Bed and desk and terminal, cupboard, shelves, fridge, kettle. Door so flimsy it wasn't worth locking. Moh had painted a hammer-and-sickle-and-4 on it, and it worked like charms, like wreaths of garlic, like silver crosses and holy water don't.

He called up the collective on the open phone and left a message that he was off-active and looking forward to some good music when he came home. In their constantly shuffled slangy codes, ‘music' currently meant party, ‘good music' meant some heavy political problem had come down. He pacified the ravenous cravings that usually followed marijuana with a coffee, biscuits and a tobacco cigarette. A week of night shifts and his circadian rhythms were shot. And any day or week or month now he could be trying to deal with not one but two insurrections. One of which would target sites he and his company were paid to protect.

Once he would have welcomed both. Now, the thought of yet another of the
ANR
's notorious ‘final' offensives filled him only with a weary dismay, for all that he wished them well. Still theoretically a citizen of the Republic, true-born son of England and so on and so forth, Kohn had what he considered a sober grasp of the
ANR
's chances. On any scale of political realism they'd be registered by a needle twitching at the bottom end of the dial.

As for the other lot, the Left Alliance…Their only chance lay in the remote possibility of detonating the kind of social explosion which they had discounted in advance by the alliances they'd made – with the cranks, the greens, the barbarians, the whole rabble that everyone with a glimmer of sense lumped together as the
barb.
Socialism
and
barbarism. Some factions of the old party, fragments of old man Trotsky's endlessly twisting and recombining junk
DNA,
were in the Alliance, just like they were in all the other movements: lost cause and effect of a forgotten history that had taken too many wrong turnings ever to find its way back. Nothing left for him now but to fight a rearguard action, to hold back the multiplying divisions of the night, where red and green showed the same false colours in the dark.

Good music.

He thought about Cat, how nearly he had come to killing her, but her image was pale, fading off into the background. He kept seeing Janis Taine – his memories sharp, delineated, definite. Like the woman herself. One of his most distinct impressions was that she wasn't at all impressed with him. Part of him, he realized, had already marked that down as a challenge.

Memories. She was investigating memory. He'd discovered this interesting fact while checking damage reports after coming off-shift, and it had brought him moseying and nosing along this morning. Her conversation had confirmed it, and now it was time for him to investigate it.

Kohn had a problem with memories. He had vivid memories of his childhood and of his teens, but there was a period in between where it was all scratches and static. He knew what had happened then, but he found it almost impossible to think himself back to it, to
remember.

He got up and laid the gun gently on the desk and connected it to the back of the terminal.

‘Seek,' he told it.

In his own mind he called it The Swiss Army Gun. He'd customized it around a state-of-the-art Kalashnikov and a Fujitsu neural-net chip, upgraded its capabilities with all the pirated software he could lay hands on – he'd stripped processors and sensors out of security devices he'd outwitted, out of little nuisance maintenance robots he'd potted like pigeons, and he'd bolted the whole lot on. He suspected that its hardware capacity by now vastly exceeded its resident software. Besides the standard features that made it a smart weapon, it ran pattern-recognition learning systems, natural-language
HCI
, interfaces that patched images to his glades, and enough specialized information-servers to start a small business – gophers to explore databases and bring back selected information, filters to scan newsgroups – all integrated around and reporting back to a fetch that could throw a convincing virtual image of himself: his messenger, decoy and stunt double.

Someday he would get around to
documenting
it.

He set it to find out more about the project Janis Taine was working on. Terminal identifications, effortlessly and habitually memorized; official project definitions, pasted from the admin database; traces of Taine's library searches; molecular structures decoded down from the gun's chemical analyser – all of them pulled together by Dissembler, the most successful and widespread piece of freeware ever written, a self-correcting, evolving compiler/translator that lived in the eyeblink gap between input and output. Mips – processing cycles, computer power – had always been cheaper than bandwidth. The computers got cheaper by the week and the phone bills stayed high by the month. Dissembler exploited this differential, turning data streams – sparse and skimpy, stripped and squeezed like the words of poetry – into images and sound and text endlessly adjusted to the user's profile. Anonymous, uncopyrighted, it had spread like a benign virus for a quarter of a century. By now not even the software engineers who'd built it into DoorWays
^™
– the current smash-hit, chart-topping, must-have interface – had a clue how it worked.

Moh did, but tried not to think about it. It was part of the memory damage.

He launched his hastily assembled probe.

Mindlessly sophisticated programs swarmed into the university's networks, expanding like a lazily blown smoke-ring, searching out weaknesses, trapdoors, encryption keys left momentarily unguarded. Most of them would get trashed by Security, but there was a chance that one would come back with the goods. Not for some time, though.

Kohn got up and reached to separate the basic weapon from its smart-box, the extra magazine that made it like a dog with two tails, then remembered where he was going and stayed his hand. Whether the rifle was smart or dumb, he couldn't take it with him. The Geneva Convention's Annexe On the Laws of Irregular Warfare, Inter-communal Violence and Terrorism was painstakingly explicit about that.

 

The university's branch of the Nat-Mid-West Bank backed on to a long-established patch of waste-ground, now symbolically fenced off and holding a couple of wooden cabins, their walls emblazoned with rampantly pluralist graffiti. New Situationists, Alternative Luddites (they wore space-rigger gear and blew up wind-power plants), Christianarchists, cranks, creeps, commies, tories – all had had their say, in colour. It was legally defined as a holding area and more cynically known as a Body Bank. It wasn't guarded, and no one tried to escape.

‘Now let's see what we've got, Mr Kohn,' the teller trilled as she minced away from the counter and tapped at a keyboard, taking care with her nails, which extended a centimetre beyond her fingertips. ‘You have four against the Carbon Life Alliance, right?'

‘Three,' said Kohn.

‘Oh. Oh, I see.' She looked up at him, a neat pair of creases appearing for a moment between her plucked, pencilled eyebrows; then she looked down again. ‘Well, isn't this your lucky day? One of your people is held by the Planet Partisans, and they have a standing arrangement, so that's one out of the way. Bye-ee! Your friend's just been released. Ah. The
CLA
are willing to offer ten thousand Dockland dollars—'

‘No thanks.'

‘—or equivalent in negotiables – arms or neurochemicals at today's opening prices – per combatant, less equipment losses.'

‘What?'

She looked up and fluttered thick black eyelashes.

‘You
did
damage a timing mechanism, didn't you?'

‘It wasn't worth fifty grams!'

‘Oh, that's
quite
acceptable. Delivery as usual?'

‘The Ruislip depot. Yeah, we'll take it.'

She buzzed through to one of the huts and told Kohn's three hostages they were free to leave, then brought the papers over for him to sign. He hadn't seen her before. She wore floating chiffon, a mass of brown ringlets, plus heels and lipgloss. After the uniformity of the hospital and the greenery-yallery of the campus, it was like meeting a transvestite. She saw him looking and smiled.

‘I'm a femininist,' she explained as she passed over the release forms.

‘A feminist?'

Kohn's father had reminisced about them, but this didn't match.

‘A fem
inin
ist,' she repeated sharply.

‘Of course…Well, thanks and good luck to you. I hope I never meet your fighters!'

It was a polite form of words when you first encountered a new outfit, but the woman took it seriously.

‘We don't
have
any,' she told Kohn's hastily retreating back. ‘We don't believe in violence.'

 

Not long after midday and already he wanted to sleep. He would crash out for a couple of hours, then take some more anti-som and go home. Give the comrades time to set up the music.

Kohn walked back towards the accommodation block. His head felt like it had sand in it. He thought over what the teller had said. A faction without a militia. Just wait till the gun heard that one. Some people were really sick.

Quite suddenly he felt as if he had been walking towards the redbrick accommodation blocks for…for some indeterminate time. The sunlight bounced off the concrete paving slabs and hurt his eyes. He flipped the glades down. Colours stayed vivid: the garish yellow-brown of the withered grass, the blinding grey of the concrete, the booming silver overcast through which the sun burned like its tiny burning-glass image through paper. Placing one foot in front of the other became difficult, complicated, tricky, an awkward business, more than he'd bargained for, a whole new belt of slugs. Worse, associational chains kept echoing away in his head, amplifying and distorting, repeating and refining – no, that wasn't quite it…

Kohn persisted. Marching grimly forward was one of his skills, on his specification, part of the package.

The colours of objects detached themselves like damaged retinae and spun into spectrum-sparkling snowflakes the size of icebergs that crashed in utter silence through the earth.

At the same time another part of his mind filled with lucidity like clear water. He knew damn well he was sliding unstoppably into an altered state of consciousness. Hurrying groups of students parted in front of him – not exactly fleeing, but separating to left and right as he stalked forward, hands clawed, eyes invisible and easily pictured as burning mad. It was beyond him to understand why it was happening. Couldn't have been the anti-som, or the joint he'd smoked in the lab…