Mappa Mundi (25 page)

He caught hold of one of the other technicians he knew as the man passed him—a guy from NervePath Neurosurgery. “What's going on?”

Roscoe's face was alert with a kind of excitement that didn't know if it was going to get itself smacked down but wasn't able to stop anyway.

“Bobby's gone, man. Clean off the face of the earth. He was being treated by Doctor Armstrong. Something happened to her, too.”

“What?” Dan tightened his grip even though Roscoe was tugging against it, clearly keen to go somewhere else. They had never had much time for each other. “Where is she?”

“Q-1.” Roscoe twisted himself free and shook off Dan's touch. He gave him the once-over and curled his lip. “You should sort yourself out sometime, Connor. You're gonna give the place a bad name. She's been far too good to you.”

Dan gulped air, not at the insult, which was beneath him, but at the information. He was still in his overcoat and he had the feeling that he was wearing odd shoes, but he didn't bother to check. It turned out that Roscoe was right. In the observation gallery of Quarantine-1 Dan found Charlton standing on her own, looking into the room beyond with a faraway expression on her face. Her arms were folded tight around each other as though they were burrowing away from the light.

Dan stepped up beside her and breathed his gin-breath slightly to one side. “What's up?”

“Oh, there you are!” She half smiled and they both looked through together. “She's asleep. Well, maybe more like a coma.”

Dan looked at the small body in the bed and he wouldn't have believed it was Natalie, except he could see the short spiky red hair standing out stark against the white pillow.

“Why?” was all he could say. He found his hands on the window frame, pawing at its solidity.

“Don't know,” Charlton said softly. “Something about getting cross-infected.” She glanced nervously across at him. “Doesn't make sense, though, does it? I mean, she already had NP saturation, from doing her own work. So even if there was a spill, it wouldn't make any difference to her, would it?”

Dan was looking down at the monitor readings. He wished now that he'd studied harder when he had the chance. Natalie looked healthy enough; her heart was good, her blood pressure only a touch high. “Is there a readout on those things?”

“Not allowed to have it on,” Charlton said. “But if you've got an access code higher than me you might get it. They're working up in the main processing suite, finding out what happened. You should probably be there.”

“Probably.” Dan fiddled with his Pad, logging into the Clinic system, verifying his Emergency Code, the passwords to the scanners … it seemed to take a lifetime. As he waited someone checked with Charlton over the intercom.

“No,” she said to them. “No changes.”

“How long?” he asked, making a mistake with his clumsy fingers and having to punch in the word again.

“Just half an hour,” she said. “Seems like a lot of fuss to me. They say she fainted. She was exhausted. You saw her tonight. Maybe she needs to sleep it off.”

Dan finally got the response he was looking for. As he focused his aching eyes on it he had to watch for a good few seconds before he could understand what he was seeing.

“Fucking Ada,” he whispered. Charlton's question followed him as he raced through the door and headed for the central suite. There was no way that could be right.

He got a much colder reception from McAlister and Calum Armstrong.
Then he felt every molecule a dirty, unshaven, disreputable loser as they filled him in, their cold, clipped tones like those of robots.

“… Sabotaged the experiment causing an overrun of an unplanned system.”

“Some kind of transitory crossover occurred, causing the program to jump host systems—upgrade Natalie's own inert NP structures …”

“… Don't fully understand the physical processes …”

Dan realized, after he'd heard them rabbit for a couple of minutes, that it all added up to one thing. Natalie was infected with a live Selfware system—that stuff she'd written that he thought was a recipe for making yourself more intelligent and had tried to persuade her to sell on the Internet—and it was still running and they were doing nothing to stop it.

“… Searching for the primary candidate …”

“Just shut up!” Dan yelled over the top of their jabber. “Shut up a minute. Why haven't you shut it off?” He turned to McAlister, the only human physically present, and cast a look over Armstrong Senior and some other man he'd never seen before on the live-link.

“It's password-protected,” McAlister informed him. He looked smug about it.

“And you can't hack it in ten seconds?” Dan was incredulous. He found he was striding up to McAlister, taking his jacket in handfuls and lifting the weasel off the ground and it felt good. “Shut it off!” He glared over McAlister's shoulder at Armstrong, “She's your daughter, for God's sake!”

Armstrong looked sick. Dan had never seen him so disturbed. He almost looked like he was going to lose consciousness.

The other man, a heavily bearded guy, spoke for him, “We're working on it.” He had a strong accent. Dan didn't know what it was.

“Let me go!”

He ignored McAlister's kicking and instead shoved him up against the wall, bashing his head against the corner of one of Armstrong's many
degrees and valedictory certificates. “You're saying you have your sneaky fingers up everyone's ass here and you don't know the passwords?”

“It's her private—”

“Well, Knitted Guy must have had them, right? Or how could he get access to it? Think of that? Jesus, I bet I even know what they are …”

“If you do, then use them!” Calum barked and Dan saw that he meant it, every word.

“It would be a total breach of securit—” McAlister began as he found his toes on the ground again.

Dan swung him around and, with a shove, laid him flat out across the desk, arms and legs spread, so that he went sliding across it like a starfish, knocking the stylus holder flying. Dan was already working on his Pad, trying to find the route in.

The Defence chaps weren't all evil. He was given a helping hand by the “expert” working in Bill's place who took him into the right areas and got him to the Initialize Edit screens in quick time. There was silence in the room as Dan sat and thought, wondering if his bet was going to be as good as it had seemed two minutes ago or if he was going to crash and burn out big time, taking Natalie's chances with him. His hands shook.

But Dan did know the passwords because she only had three different ones and used all of them to try and stop him playing games on her machines at home when she was out. If she'd used another one … but he didn't want to think about that.

The second try worked. It let them into the edit protocol and Dan watched as the engineer rapidly located the INFINITY parameter and reset it to INTEGER:1.

“If I set it to zero after it's already been active it may do something unforeseen. Can't tell without looking at its databasing.” This was explained with a shrug that said the engineer wasn't sure there was a lot of hope with the figure 1 either.

But Dan didn't care. One change was better than a billion changes.

He was ahead of McAlister all the way down the corridor and into Q-1. The scanner system transmitted the new instructions and Natalie's multicolour flare reports died back to something like normal.

“I want all the Security systems reset immediately,” McAlister was saying into his lapel phone as Dan turned from the readouts. “Yes. Every single one. Erase them all from the system and conduct full interviews with all staff before restoration of any privileges.”

Gently moving Charlton to one side Dan took a swing and punched McAlister in the jaw. His hand exploded in pain but McAlister went down and stayed down, his tinny earpiece just audible as it fell out of place and flopped wormlike onto his collar.

“McAlister! Are you all right?”

Kneeling, Dan leaned down to the lapel and said, “Mr. McAlister is taking a short break. He'll be with you just as soon as he can.”

Charlton nudged him with her foot. “Thanks,” she mouthed and patted Dan's shaggy head.

“Woof woof,” he said and looked at his bloodied hand. “This Lassie thing is much tougher than I thought. Shit on a stick, I think I need the vet.”

“Come on,” she helped him up. “Let's get it sorted out.”

“I'll take that, if you don't mind.” A large military policeman roughly the size and heft of a tank was in the doorway, hands on his hips. He glanced down at McAlister and then stepped over him and clapped a pair of handcuffs over Dan's wrists.

“Mr. Connor, this way please.”

Ian Detteridge stood in the hallway of his own home and watched his wife backing away from him, her hands over her mouth. She had them clamped there quite tightly, but they didn't block the whimpering sounds.

He looked down at himself and saw a faint shimmer of light where his legs should be.

Something wasn't right. He didn't understand it. His mind was like the wind. It came and went in fits and starts. His body had become so pale and flimsy that light and air passed through it freely. All he could cling to was the firm sense of who he was, not what, but even that was shaky now, because he could see so much more than before and what he saw was changing him.

“Dervla,” he said, making an effort to be still. “It's okay. It's only me.”

He smiled and held out his arms. He longed for her to hold him and tell him it was okay. He was sure it wasn't. The feeling wouldn't go away and he was afraid. He couldn't remember how he'd got home. The will to be there and being there were the same thing. They'd occupied the same instant.

“No,” she whispered, cowering against the wall. “Oh, Mary Mother of God. Get away. Please. Go away.”

Her terror made him want to scream.

“Mummy?” Christine appeared in her bedroom doorway. “What's the matter?” She sounded very scared. She looked down the corridor at him. “It's Daddy,” she said joyfully. But then her face crumpled up at the edges into the same awful uncertainty that Ian felt. “Why isn't he real?”

“I'm right here, darling,” he whispered, crouching down, trying to put on his happiest face. “As real as can be.”

In that single moment he saw the woman she would become, tougher and more intelligent than him or his wife, resourceful, but forever low on self-esteem so that she hesitated over opportunities and lived a life that was long, yet barren, haunted by hopes and fears that kept her permanently in a state of hiding from the world. The sudden cruelty of the vision made him feel sick with pity, for himself, for her, for the whole world of people who couldn't see what he saw: the heart of nothing from which everything poured out, instant upon instant rising and vanishing as space opened before and closed after, leaving them forever stranded on the knife-edge of the present. He longed to
tell her that she needn't worry about not being good enough. Anything was more than good enough, for him or the Universe.

But Christine looked at her mother, shaking and unable to talk, and wouldn't come. She said, barely audible, holding her teddy bear closely in front of her in the clutch of soft arms he'd never feel again, “Are you dead now, Daddy?”

And Ian knew that in any way that mattered, he was.

White Horse reached Jude's apartment in the evening and looked around for him. He had been back. His bags were there. But he was gone.

She cursed in every language she knew, walked straight to the kitchen, and opened the freezer, taking out the bottle of Stolichnaya that was its only inhabitant. Pouring herself a shot she drank it in one go and bit down on the cold burn with bared teeth as she poured another. She'd heard some things in the car on the way back from wherever. She wished she hadn't. They made being alone now so very hard. They made waiting for Jude a torture. Her nerves felt like each one of them was pierced and hanging on its own fish-hook, soul stretched out to dry, thinner than tissue paper.

She took the second shot in two gulps and then took the third into her brother's tight-assed white sitting room, to the sofa that enveloped her like a snowdrift, and flashed on the news channels. Her burns were about due for another pill but they didn't go well with drink and she needed that more than she needed to escape the physical pain. Despite the knockout drug that was wearing off she felt high as a kite.
Got to get down. Got to spread this around so it doesn't burn a hole right through my head.

And stay sober enough to talk sense when Magpie did show up. She picked up a deck of cards that were in the magazine rack and started shuffling. She'd play patience. She'd play it real hard. She was dealing her second game when the house system went off with one of the billion stupid signals for incoming calls. The notes of Beethoven's Fifth, rendered in flat chimes that were as witless as the original was
thrilling, circled her and then faded into their announcement of bad news. Wherever Jude had gone to he must have switched his Pad off and it was rerouting here.

She listened as the answering service took a message,

“Um … Jude, old chap. Dan Connor here. Well, you probably don't remember me. That is, I live with Natalie. Armstrong. There's been a bit of a do. Ah … the thing is, there was this woman from, well, it doesn't really matter, from some agency or other and she was asking about Natalie and I … I might have told her, that is, I might just have mentioned your name once. I'm not really sure. But you should know that you might get a few questions about it and, er—she's going to be fine, just fine. Going home to, you know, and staying with her father a few days and, yeah. It'll be great. Fine. I thought you should know. You know. Okay. Oh, got your number off the autologger at the hotline, but I'm erasing it now. Okay. Bye, then.”

White Horse looked down at the face of the Queen of Spades she'd just turned up. She wondered who Natalie Armstrong was and what she had to do with it. And what hotline? She dealt three more cards and took off the Ace of Diamonds. She kept on playing, watching the deal, lining up the suits.