Mappa Mundi (23 page)

But it was what he was saying that rooted Natalie to the spot. Despite many recent distractions her head was still full of the minute workings of Selfware, and her own hopes of it, and in hearing Bobby's voice she was slowly becoming sure that this was its doing.

A chill crept over her from the bones outward as she listened to the bizarre litany. Selfware was not supposed to be active in him. Hell, it wasn't even complete in the system they'd used on Bobby. He'd never been exposed to the full program. Besides which, Bobby had been normal when they had purged all systems in his head more than six hours ago. Everything had shut off.

It didn't sound like him, except for his local accent. They weren't words he would have chosen or things she would have thought him capable of talking about. This was no sweet-talk from the influence of a drug, or even from an overflow of neurotransmitters triggered by the activity of the NervePath.

Was she responsible for this?

“What do you think it is?” she heard the nurse behind her murmur uneasily over Bobby's continuing paean to life, space, and time.

Natalie didn't answer. She studied Bobby minutely.

He was sitting up, his legs crossed under the sheet and his arms raised, like a swami at prayer. His face was radiant with the joy of his beatific insights and his gaze was dreamy and distant, looking far from the little room, its mundane beige decor and stupefied, equally mundane staff. “Marvellous,” his word for what they had done to him, echoed through Natalie's mind, because that was what he was seeing now, whatever it was.

“Let's get him sedated for the time being. Bring the portable scan unit in here.”

She had to buy herself some time to figure out what was going on. She would have to call her father.

“… the sign and the symbol are more than the signified,” Bobby was now relaying.

“Through symbolization a single meaning becomes hyperplastic within the mind. The limits of comprehension are broken. The reality they strive to reveal, concealed within the illusion of words, is set loose.”

Natalie took a sedative shot from the nurse and administered it herself, slowly, because she wanted to hear what he was saying. It sounded horribly like the kind of things she'd heard from speculating physicists and language theorists. It was the kind of thing she would have half-expected to hear from a person who was capable of witnessing and understanding the world beyond their five senses. Or, of course, some peacenik student out of their head on pot.

“The mind flows in constant dialectic between the inner universe of the single self and the outer, material universe, in twin streams of pure information, each shaping the other to greater specificity. And the hidden dimension of gravity and the dimension of spatial expansion and collapse that is Time …”

Bobby's lips stopped moving and his muscles relaxed. Natalie caught him as he fell back to his pillows and straightened his legs out for him, smoothing his blankets, tucking him in.

Serene, he slept. Natalie wondered if maybe he'd had a secret hobby—quantum mechanics and consciousness theory, perhaps. No reason he couldn't. For all they knew this might have been a dream state and he was babbling something he'd read in a magazine.

Contrary to what her father thought she believed, Natalie did not have faith in any theory of quantum consciousness, where all minds were united as one in a unified field that interacted weakly with the physical world. Some people even thought that consciousness itself had determined the entire feature set of the physical world. She thought that was too quirky, too coincidental, and altogether such an ill-thought-out wish-fulfilment version of the quantum world that she wouldn't have touched it with a ten-foot pole. Such ideas oozed a tacky mental ichor that contaminated everything it touched with a blight of dreamy false premises. On the other hand, if someone maintained that a person's awareness of the world defined the way in which they understood it and themselves, she was all for that.

All the same, Natalie hadn't entirely given up on quantum theory
and a possible link with consciousness, despite the fact that a brain was too warm a place to allow the kinds of changes that such things demanded. It was possible that there was a quantum element that was crucial to conscious states, aside from the very obvious observation that since
everything
was made up of quanta then of course there would be quanta involved in consciousness. At any university there were hordes of philosophers prepared to argue the toss—if consciousness is not physical the metaphysical leaps gladly in—but Natalie wasn't sold on beliefs about insubstantial and nonphysical souls, minds, or spirits of any kind. She considered herself a scientist and she couldn't go that far. But sometimes she would have liked to. In the case of Jude's file, for instance, it was a tempting idea and so far her only one.

She left Bobby content in his bed and went to make contact with her father. His pet Ministry official, McAlister, a man of political ambition, had already been alerted and was waiting for her. As she arrived he was sitting in her father's seat, studying the large-screen wall monitor, where pictures of exactly what was going on in Bobby's head were displayed. He looked faintly amused and bemused, like a two-year-old watching television.

The sight made her stop in midstride.

Bobby X's brain was ablaze, and not with ordinary shifts of activity. It looked more like the Christmas, Eid and Diwali illuminations than a real-time scan of a mind at work. Surges raced from frontal lobes and around the dopamine pathways, drove through the hippocampus like juggernauts, sparkled in the language centres, flickered like fireflies inside the blindsight area, and shone with the force of minor novae in the key zones that gave Bobby his sense of self, his awareness of his own body, his sense of joy, and, last but not least, his awareness of living things.

Natalie didn't understand what any of that would mean. There was no precedent.

She also saw a classic spike-and-slow-wave fugue moving through
his temporal lobes. It was the clear indicator of a person undergoing a profoundly spiritual and religious experience. The only area functioning at a recognizably ordinary level was his visual cortex and that, although his eyes were closed, was working steadily, manufacturing the visions of his dreams.

From what she saw she wasn't sure that Bobby could have been conscious; not in the way she and the others were at this moment.

“What
is
that?” McAlister asked mildly, frowning in piqued curiosity as she sent the messages to her father, quickly adding a screamer notice to get his immediate attention.

“I'm not sure,” she said, feeling inadequate. “I can't tell if this is him on his own or the NervePath.” She carried on, talking to herself, trying to think. “This couldn't be a hypothalamic overreaction. It's far too big. Maybe it's in the programming. I'm downloading from the NP now to see if it's really purged. Damn it. We were moving so fast because of this fuckwit Ministry pressure.” She cast a look of loathing in McAlister's direction.

“If they
are
working then I think we'll have to go for some kind of reset and shut them down completely, destroy them, rather than risk any worsening,” she added.

Her father came online with a chime of bells, and his image appeared alongside Bobby's fairground lights. His pale eyes were sharp and accusatory as his office camera obediently panned around to include her in its shot. “Did you look at the program? Have you checked it?”

Natalie was angered by his suppositions. She glanced up from the desk where she was watching the download and said shortly, “That's Bill's job, not mine.” She turned to McAlister, watching him cock his head to listen to the earpiece that connected him to the wider awareness of the MoD. “Where is Bill?”

“No shutdown,” McAlister said at the same time to her father, as though she weren't there. “If you do that we'll never be able to find out what's happened in there.”

“Yes, James.” Her father switched his interrogation from Natalie to McAlister in one quick move. “Where
is
Bill? I've been calling him for an hour. No answer.”

Natalie saw her father glance at her and realized that he was more afraid than angry. She was so startled she barely registered that he was trying to signal to her, something about McAlister.

There was a second of silence in which McAlister's face reddened. “How would I know? We're searching for him all over the city.”

“What?” Natalie glared at him, stopped in full flow, her fingers suspended over the inverted desk controls. “Since when?”

“He hasn't been seen since the experiment finished,” her father said.

McAlister sat up and straightened his tie nervously.

Natalie stared at him, uncomprehending. “You didn't tell me!” She looked up at the screen and saw her father acknowledge his mistake with a sneer. “Jesus shit!” She circled the desk, shoved McAlister out of the way, and started summoning the code that had downloaded from the NP in Bobby's head.

As it streamed up onto the secondary monitor she sat back in the chair, which felt like it had just dropped down an elevator shaft and was still going strong.

“Well?” McAlister asked, unable to help himself. He was twitchy with eagerness or terror, she didn't know which.

Natalie shook her head helplessly, seeing Calum's rage about to incandesce as he also read the results from his Pad, “I didn't do this.”

“I'm not saying you did.” He kept himself under control, she didn't know how.

“What is it?” McAlister again.

Natalie resisted an urge to pick up the chair and break it over his head. She held up her finger, giving him no answer, and ran a quick diagnostic to find the fault. It took less than a second. No effort had been made to conceal it. It was a single, tiny change in the end-point section.

She put it on the large screen. “This is at the end of our legitimate program,” she said. The purge command, which she had written herself and checked that afternoon, had been added to. The last line now read:

if (currentPoint.checkstate( )==END) {

SelfWare.Init(INFINITY);

}

 

Her father's florid face went white.

“What does that mean?” McAlister bleated, insistent. He looked like he was ready to jump on the desk and start throttling her.

Natalie said, “Some bastard has taken my Selfware program and loaded it alongside the therapy session. When the purge was run it automatically started the secondary system. But that's not all.”

Natalie used the laser pointer and highlighted the last word. “This parameter. It should be a small number. A finite series …” She trailed off as her mind struggled to understand what such an alteration could do. “I don't even know what that means, running it with no upper limit. I guess it just … carries right on forever. But the theory says it shouldn't be able to…there's a very large noise problem with higher numbers of iterations …” She spun in her seat and rounded on McAlister, her anger brightening. “It doesn't take a degree to spot who's done this, now, does it? And you've lost him!”

“Never mind that,” her father growled. He turned to McAlister as she started accessing the scanner systems, “There's your proof of what's going on. I told you before. Now, let's get on with the shutdown before anything worse happens with that bloody voodoo software.” He shot a baleful look of reproach at Natalie and then reached forward to break the link.

“No,” McAlister said quietly from his position, half hunched against the desk as if he expected physical violence. “No shutdown.”

Natalie froze in midtyping. There was a second of absolute silence. In it McAlister stood up and straightened his tie. She saw that he knew all about Bill somehow. It was in the way he tried to form a sickly kind of confidence and take command.

Her father sat back slowly, eyes narrowed, mouth a thin, lipless gash. “Bobby is my patient.” His voice was calm. “And I will decide what is best for him now. We are going to shut down. Natalie?”

“The scan-and-transmit system is ready. I'll just take a handset to his room and get it done,” she said, pushing back from the desk.

“No,” McAlister said again, this time with more authority.

She pushed past him and he plucked weakly at her.

“It's Mikhail Guskov's orders!” McAlister bleated as they were about to leave him.

Natalie half turned, her hand on the door jamb.

“We keep it running. It's important. For the project. Mappa Mundi.”

To her astonishment she saw that McAlister was holding a gun on her.

“I'm sorry,” he said, glancing at the screen and then back at her. “You have to listen.” He waved the gun a little bit and with difficulty put the safety off.

Natalie thought he was more likely to shoot her because of incompetence rather than through intent. She snorted and asked, “Since when do you work for him?” Although there were strong links between Guskov and the Ministry she doubted they'd jump to his tune.

“Please, maintain the experiment,” he said. “A little longer.”

She glanced at Calum and saw him calculating, listening.

“If you try to stop it in any way,” McAlister continued, “I will have to prevent you.”

“Do the Ministry know?” her father asked.

“Not yet,” McAlister conceded with a significant nod that Natalie assumed meant he was in Guskov's pay before he was in the Ministry's.
He waved the gun between her and the door. “We will go to the patient's observation area and monitor from there. I'm sure the MoD monitors on this conversation will update those who need to know.”

“Put that toy away,” Natalie snapped at him. “You look ridiculous.”

McAlister did so, sheepishly, she thought.
Now what?
she wondered.
Will we shut it off or what? We can't leave Bobby like that.

But they did.

In the observation area she and McAlister sat at the nurses' station. Natalie watched McAlister watching her, trying to ingratiate himself again with a little smile or some insider comment about this being the real cutting edge.