Mappa Mundi (27 page)

Tomorrow Guskov would look more closely at the Patient X data. It appeared to show that the Selfware system's ability to reroute all meaningful information paths to maximum efficiency had taken the INFINITY command to heart. Like all mindware, Selfware relied for its information on NervePath's inbuilt monitoring capacity, taking its data from the output signals that detailed the electrochemical status of the environment surrounding individual NP machines and also from the NP Cluster Wizards that sat “offline” inside gaps between the neural cells, preprocessing information from small, localized areas for transmission outside the host.

The key difference in Selfware, from what he could see, was in the way it communicated with the NP programming, asking for specific tests between local and distant connections and then authorizing operations on pathways and patterns. Because it occasionally required the NP to undergo individual nanyte replication, as the system first had when it entered the host and saturated the nervous system, it was capable of dictating the relatively minor definitional change that allowed the NP to reengineer its own sensitivity to other cells in the body, making their communications capacity something that Selfware could use. Thus Guskov believed that Selfware had co-opted not only the Central Nervous System, but every cell of the body, transforming them into neural components by spreading the NervePath technology into the wider somatic ecology.

Guskov guessed that it was a definitional vagueness of what constituted “neural communications,” sitting somewhere in the NP programs, that had precipitated the event, allowing it to range far wider than Armstrong had perhaps intended. He wasn't sure about her intentions, now he'd read her files from the mental health institute
where she'd spent two years, nor after Calum's own testimony about her view of reality.

Whatever her intention, by the time of the critical incident Patient X's whole physical being was both a functioning animal and a holographic, fractal processing machine with a fixed goal, donated by Selfware's own embedded design, of coming to an accurate and comprehensive perception of the physical world. Armstrong had wanted, Guskov thought, to find out if there was more to life than physics, chemistry, and biology. Maybe she had wanted to find God, or his absence. Guskov would be interested to know the answer, not only because of its interest as a question but for personal reasons. If it hadn't been for God and his works, Mikhail knew he would not be here right now, lying and thinking, unwilling for dreams to come. He turned away easily from such thoughts.

How you got something like Selfware into a strip of coding no more than a quarter-second in transmission and that seemed actually to work without fouling itself up in recursive problems was a feat that he would have loved to be able to perform. Either Armstrong hadn't fully understood what she was doing or she was a genius. It didn't matter to Guskov, he would have her on his side, and now, before the Ministry or someone like Mary Delaney got to her and filled her head with the crude, repressive ideas (culled from the same stock as certain views of God himself) that he had worked all his life to erase.

Guskov was sure, if Natalie Armstrong could be brought in safely, without any further dramas or accidents, that she would fully understand the scale and importance of his project, perhaps better than anybody else could. She might even be able to help him succeed, and that was a dark task now that they had been pushed into the closed environment for the final stages. Too hard, he'd thought often. The trap was closing too tightly. From such a place how would he manage to whisk Mappa Mundi out of the Pentagon's grasp? Would he have to resort to the use of partial systems as they had, to ensure its success?

His Pad timer beeped to remind him to stop.

He composed his body in a comfortable position and cleared his mind. Muscles relaxed and thoughts softened, flowering out of him. Empty, inactive, he invited sleep to begin. Like death, it would come in the instant when awareness ceased to exist. Every night he watched for it and effortlessly it slipped past.

Would Patient X still sleep, or had he passed beyond this world?

He let the idea drift away into stillness. Silence. Darkness.

Natalie returned to a blazing light, finding her body in the middle of automatically turning away from its glare. She was in a room with a high window, long and narrow like a slit in a castle turret, and the sun shone through it onto the bed where she lay under a sheet and a blanket. The industrial toughness of the sheets under her fingertips smelled of overheated linen. Her own smell was rank and animal and she was damp with the remains of a heavy night sweat. Across her back the tags of regulation pyjamas tugged erratically.

For an instant she had no recollection of the last fifteen years.

She was fourteen again, on the mental ward at McKillick, waking to another day of grey hell. In response she pushed her face into the pillow to get away from the light's contrary insistence that the world was a bright and wonderful place. The sheets, their smell, their feel, the smothering depth of the pillow's impersonal softness; this was safety in its purest form and she would stay there until Nurse Williams physically dragged her out into the hostile emptiness of the room. It was one of the rituals of every long and miserable day.

McKillick was a mixed ward, locked to the outside, but well-funded—which meant a high level of staffing, daily visits from doctors, and a reasonable standard of hygiene in the toilets and bathrooms. Natalie had never given them much thought before, but now, with a sharp reminder that seemed old somehow, like a distant view, she suddenly remembered what ward life was like, what she had to face.

Right from the first day she'd learned what madness cost, when nature forced her to trail into a cubicle, only to find a foot-long turd sitting on the seat waiting for her, clumps of soiled paper scattered over the wetted floor and stuck to the wall. Brown fingerprints pattered all over the tissue box and continued on some of the sink surfaces. Natalie had backed out rapidly, baffled, expecting to turn around and find herself in some train-station waiting room, its benches providing roofs for sleeping tramps. She went to the desk to complain and a nurse found her another toilet, with only a few scattered drops around the seat, which she wiped off with tissue and water. “I'll get it done,” she'd promised, and left Natalie sitting there, the door unlocked, having to hold it shut against intruders by stretching out her foot and pressing hard with the inadequate tips of her toes.

Self-pity and disgust welled up in Natalie until she thought she was going to be sick. How could she be left like this—sat on the bog in front of total strangers, letting them lock and unlock her in places? She knew she should be doing things for herself, that it wasn't normal to be like this, but the will to muster
normal
was absent…even before the thoughts had finished her anger subsided into the squashy, grey void inside. Her foot fell to the tiles. Numbness filled her.

She was pulling her knickers up when a man opened the door and stood staring at her. He didn't seem aggressive, only irritated. His face made it plain he was waiting for her to get out so he could go. As she fumbled with her clothing and moved towards the sink he shuffled past her, unzipping his trousers to let go with a stream of pee that splashed up everywhere from the slippery surface of the plastic seat, spattering her dull grey skirt. She looked at it and realized she had no idea where the skirt had come from, either. She ran to her room, changed the skirt for a pair of tracksuit trousers, and put it in the laundry hamper. But she was new to the routine and hadn't put it in her name-tag bag, so whether it was hers or not that was the last time she saw it.

Without the need for concentration that such expeditions demanded the quietness of her single room quickly brought back catatonia. At least, so it must have appeared. Physically she lay on the bed, stared at the ceiling, breathed. But inside her head her mind was rushing, racing at a speed she couldn't name. In fact, there seemed to be no distinction between her and the speed: it was the only sensation she had, strong and powerful as a river, unstoppable as a damburst, as though something had broken deep inside her and the outside world, all of it, was rushing in, the difference in levels between them so great that the flood might never abate.

There was no room for an identity in the deluge. No single fact, memory, or image rose from the flow unless she were made to sharpen her attention. Then the force receded to the back brain, letting her drift for a time like a stick on the surface of a stream, talking to her therapist, eating her meals, going to the toilets with new vigilance. But she knew that while she did ordinary things, all the time she spent on them was time in which the dam was refilling to the brim and that soon she must surrender to the rush or it would simply take her when it was overdue.

Natalie was genuinely surprised when ten minutes seemed to pass and no one had come. She rotated carefully again, seeing herself as a sickly turkey on a spit of disappointment, and then recalled with a curious black humour that she was almost thirty. Drugs, cognitive therapy, and flat afternoons of the TV tuned to uplifting and educational materials specially designed to engage those of short attention span were years in the past. In a flash, the events of the last hours came back to her and she opened her eyes, laughing softly with relief and despair at the same time.

It wasn't possible. Like Jude's file with her handwriting on it. Bobby X couldn't have walked right through her.

That was her first thought. The second was that they would now certainly section her again and send her straight back to McKillick. She stopped laughing and pulled the sheet up to her neck. Perhaps it
had been a dream? Maybe, the dark voice of her mind said, she was still in McKillick and had been all the time.

“Natalie, I mean, Dr. Armstrong!” Charlton said, hurrying over. “You're awake!”

“Yes.” Natalie's mouth seemed very furred and thick, as though it didn't want to work. “Can I have some water? What time is it?” And then, to check the truth of her suspicion, “Bobby! Where is he? What happened?”

“It's nearly six,” Charlton said, pouring a cup of water from the decanter in the bedside cooler. Natalie saw Charlton was wearing a quarantine suit instead of her usual nursing uniform. Her voice was muffled by a mask.

Charlton handed the water over and didn't speak until Natalie had taken a sip. “Nobody knows where Bobby is. Don't worry about that now. I must call your father and tell him you're awake.”

Natalie started looking around for her clothes. She was pushing herself upright, groaning when she suddenly looked back at the light. Six o'clock? She caught at Charlton's arm and snagged a handful of loose suiting with an almost fatal lunge off the bed.

“What time did you say?”

“Six o'clock. In the evening.” Charlton suddenly seemed to feel that the pretence of normality was out of order. Her stiffly held posture slumped. “You've slept fourteen hours.”

“Wait a minute.” Natalie, her mind feeling clearer with every second, took another look around and then peered back at Charlton. “What room is this?” It was an unnecessary question, but she asked it to put the doubt in her to its final rest.

“Q-1,” Charlton replied uneasily. “They put you in here after you didn't wake up. Dr. Armstrong—your dad—thinks that something in Bobby's experiment might have affected you.” She glanced sideways, leftward, down, searching for a convenient lie. “There's been a lot of…well, he can tell you.”

Natalie made herself sit on the edge of the tall bed frame and set her feet on the floor. “What's been going on? How can Bobby still be missing?”

“It's all right,” Charlton said, without conviction. She moved out of Natalie's reach. “I'll fetch him.” She slipped through the door quickly and it closed with a hiss of air from the lock system. There was no internal handle on the quarantine rooms. From the far corner the tiny lens of a camera watched Natalie get up and search in vain for anything else to wear.

There was suddenly a very strange sensation in Natalie's mind, as if thoughts were gathering like bees, a heavy swarm soaked in sweet and sticky autumn sunlight. She opened her mouth to speak to whoever was watching, but the buzz and pressure took all the words right out of her mouth, out of her thoughts.

Shit
, she thought.
Here we go again. And I thought this was all behind me.

Natalie felt herself changing, being changed. She was herself. She was not as she had been, not even a second before. A word stood out in her mind, like all surprises in the world rolled into one, a big candy-cone, roller-coaster, nuclear-detonation word: Selfware.

She looked at the camera's sad eye, saw the lens oscillate and shimmer as though it was falling through water, and then there was only whiteness: a pure arctic blindness that swept in from all sides quickly followed by silence, pressure, dark.

Apparently she woke on the instant, back in the bed in Q-1 with the sheet tucked over her. This time she decided to take the hint for what it was worth and use the time to figure out exactly what was going on outside this damned room.

Natalie was looking at a scan of her own brain on her Pad a half hour later when Dan came in and gingerly sat on the bedside, rustling in his overalls. It was seven and the Clinic's offering of dinner had gone cold on her table. She glanced up at him and grinned. “Heard you stopped it. My hero.” She looked at the scan in its still form as she put it aside. It was not like her old mind at all. She wasn't sure what it was like.

“But the little bastards are still in there and functional,” Dan said in a kind of a question, nodding at the scan image. “They still changed from the old MapScan system you had into NervePath.” He made a few big gestures that Natalie understood to indicate a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, and he shrugged, asking her how such a thing could be.

She shook her head to show him she was no wiser. “I guess Bobby infected me. But they're there. And capable,” she said and pushed the scanner away to reveal some printouts. She twitched the paper forward for him to see. “Here, look at these. They're my art therapy.”