Recursion

eva 3: 2051

The orange plastic chairs in the lounge had been roughly arranged in two rows in front of the viewing screen. Katie was sitting alone in the second row, watching the news, when Eva walked in carrying a book that Alison had lent her. Katie swiveled to see who had just entered, and a look of relief crossed her moon face when she saw that it was Eva. She flashed a quick, nervous smile and turned back to her program.

“Hello, Katie; what are you watching?”

Eva slid into the next but one chair, glancing at Katie’s face in profile. It did look familiar, but she still couldn’t place it.

Katie blushed and began to breathe quickly.

“It’s the news,” she said. She panted a little, then continued in a staccato burst of words. “They’ve just revealed something new. They say it will change the world.”

Eva looked at the screen. It didn’t seem very interesting: just an endless stream of scrolling symbols.

“What is it?” she asked.

Katie broke into a huge smile. “It’s a mathematical expression that describes itself.”

Eva nodded slowly. “I’ve heard about that. I thought it was supposed to be impossible.”

“No. Why should it be? Your cells carry their own description written within themselves. It’s how they make new cells.”

Katie’s voice had grown less staccato. She seemed livelier, more animated.

“Oh, of course.” Eva looked thoughtful.

“They’re saying that now they have cracked that problem, they’re a step closer to building a human-scale Von Neumann Machine.”

“A Von Neumann Machine?”

“Yes. A machine that can make copies of itself. Named after John Von Neumann, the man who postulated the idea.”

Eva stared at the screen. She had read of the concept before, now she came to think about it. Back in her South Street days, back in the days of warm steamy rooms and yellow light and sitting on her own during the night reading about the rest of the world. Three weeks and another life ago. Katie was talking again.

“There’s some controversy about the whole thing, actually. They’re saying that Kay Lovegrove, the man who claims to have formulated the expression, couldn’t possibly have done it.”

“Ah. Professional jealousy?”

Katie looked confused for a moment. “No. I don’t think so.” She frowned for a moment. “No. The point is, they’re saying he wasn’t from the right field. He just wasn’t studying the right areas to put together that expression. When questioned, he either refuses to, or cannot explain how the final answer came about. It’s all very strange.”

“Maybe he stole it.”

“That’s already been suggested, but no one else credible has come forward to claim the work as their own. Oh, there are plenty of cranks, but none of them can explain the expression’s origin, any more than Lovegrove can. It’s as if it just appeared on his computer overnight.”

Katie’s eyes were glowing. She was gripping each side of the plastic chair, making her look like a little girl. It was like the real Katie suddenly shining through from the tiny place where she had hidden herself, deep within her own body.

Eva spoke. “So do you think that Lovegrove formulated the expression, Katie?”

Katie smiled and shook her head. “No.”

Eva said nothing. Katie’s smile widened. She wanted to tell Eva everything, and in the middle of her shy, pinched little life, she had found the window to do so. She leaned a little closer and Eva smelled spearmint on her breath.

Katie spoke in a whisper. “It’s too perfect. It’s too tight. We’ve already built machines that reproduce. The factory robots they landed on Mars make copies of themselves, but they need millions of lines of code to achieve the result. This sums up the essential idea in a few thousand bits. It’s too neat. It can’t have come from a human’s mind.”

She lowered her voice a little. “You know, it wouldn’t be the first time that society had been given a little prod in the right direction.”

Eva leaned a little closer. “What do you mean?”

Katie shook her head. She nodded toward the window, out toward the mist-dissolved circle of limes and beyond them the woods.

“She’s talking about the Watcher,” said the voice.

I know.

Katie looked thoughtful. “Did you just hear the voice?” she asked.

“Yes,” replied Eva. She felt a little shocked. “How did you know?”

“Your body seemed to relax. Now that’s interesting.”

“What’s interesting?”

Alison had just walked into the room. Katie retreated back inside herself instantly. She gazed down at her fingers, twisting and turning around themselves in her lap.

“Hello, Alison. Where have you been?” asked Eva.

Alison looked a mess. Her eyes were ringed with dark shadows; her hair was lank and lifeless. She wore a grey hairy sweater over her tartan flannel pajamas, the corner of a white tissue poking from one sleeve. She shambled across to one of the padded chairs and slumped into it.

“Sleeping. What else is there to do?”

Eva looked at Katie, but Katie was concentrating again on the program on the viewing screen. Pictures of sheep being funneled through a gap in a hedge were replaced by a shower of chocolate buttons falling into a pool of chocolate. The image flicked to a cartoon group of eight mice eating rice from little bowls.

“We were just watching a program about an expression that defines itself, weren’t we, Katie?” said Eva brightly.

“Have you seen Nicolas? Do you know where he is?” asked Alison, deliberately changing the subject.

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s in his room.”

“I hope so. I’m not in the mood to be stared at.”

Eva said nothing. Alison brought her knees up underneath her chin and wrapped her arms tightly around her legs.

“Doesn’t he creep you out? The way he’s constantly staring at your tits?”

“I thought he was your friend.”

“You don’t have any friends in this place, Eva. Remember that.”

“Ignore her. She’s always like this when she’s down.” Katie’s words came in a flurry, her eyes still fixed firmly on the screen.

Eva turned to get a better view of Alison, twisting on one leg of the chair, feeling it flex beneath her weight as she turned.

“Would you like a hot drink, Alison?”

“No. And don’t change the subject. You’re not telling me that you don’t find it offensive, the way Nicolas stares at your tits?”

“I don’t like it, no. But then again, he’s not in this place because he’s normal, is he? Nor are we. Let’s show him some tolerance. It never seemed to bother you that much before.”

“It didn’t,” said Katie. “Ignore her.”

“Shut up Katie. I wasn’t speaking to you. Watch your bloody program.”

Eva looked on, aghast. Yesterday they had been plotting together, brothers in arms, today…From the adjoining chair, Alison picked up a paperback someone had apparently dropped in a bath. It was swollen to twice its normal size, the pages curling up and around themselves. She flicked through it for a moment or two, before crossly hurling it to the floor.

“Bloody Nicolas!” she shouted, then turned to glare at Eva. “Do you know why he’s in here?”

Eva shook her head. Alison’s mood swings were disconcerting.

“I don’t know why. He seems lacking in confidence.”

“Too bloody true. I’ll tell you what, one good fuck would sort him out. I’ll tell you what else, I’m not going to be the one to provide it.”

She glared across the room. “What about you, Katie? Would you do it? That would put a smile on both of your faces, wouldn’t it?”

“This conversation diminishes us all, Alison. Please go back to your room until you’re feeling better.”

Eva and Alison stared in shock at Katie’s response, but she remained glued to the screen.

Alison breathed in deeply, trying to regain her composure. “I was talking about Nicolas. He’s got a massive inferiority complex. He also thinks he’s the most important person in here. In the world.”

“That sounds like a contradiction,” Eva said hesitantly. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to speak to Alison when she was behaving like this.

Alison gave a bitter laugh. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? It’s a classic pattern for loonies. Most of the people in here are the same. You certainly are.”

Eva kept silent.

“Look at you with your delusions of grandeur, the way you believe you should have got that promotion, and yet you also think that you’re stupid and of no consequence. You’ve got no friends, and yet you know you deserve lots-”

“Alison.” Katie spoke again without looking up from the screen. Alison paused, brushed lank hair away from her eyes, but then continued.

“Nicolas. He told me something once, about how he started a pension when he began work. Doesn’t that tell you something about the man? What sort of twenty-year-old is bothered about a pension?” She laughed again. “Anyway, he got back the details telling him what he could expect when he retired. Gave him his projected earnings based on the job they thought he’d be doing then, taking into account his intelligence and personality quotient and so on. He wasn’t happy. He thought he’d be doing far better.”

Eva nodded. “I can see that being upsetting. Nobody likes to be told they are a loser, especially at that age.”

“That’s not all. It wasn’t a huge step from there to finding his life expectancy. You know what it was? Sixty-eight. You know what that means?”

Eva was uncomfortable on the hard plastic chair. She got up and and sat down next to Alison, accidentally knocking over a half-full cup of coffee someone had abandoned by the leg of the chair. Eva swore as brown liquid splashed across the vinyl floor.

“Leave it,” said Alison. “Listen. Nicolas was told that he would die at sixty-eight. Well below the average. That means low social class.” She gave a bitter laugh. “It will be even lower now. Knock another ten years off for being in here.”

Eva waved dismissively.

“So what? It’s only an average. It’s not a prediction.”

“It’s still a judgment. And a pretty accurate one nowadays. It changes day by day. Hour by hour. Minute by minute. Haven’t you ever called up your details on a screen? Watched those numbers after the decimal point whizz up and down? Picked up a gin and tonic and watched your life expectancy drop by a few seconds? Hah!”

She smiled entirely without humor.

“You know what, Nicolas is addicted to that stuff. He got his family tree from the Mormons’ database. Ran a simulated medical history on it back two hundred years. He figured out the likelihood of him dying of everything from AIDS to Huntington’s chorea. How about that for a pleasant way to spend the evening? Watch him at three o’clock in the afternoon. That’s a laugh.”

She shook her head and smiled.

“It’s all there, mapped, mirrored, and striped by data-banks the world over. Everything about you, and me, and Nicolas. They know us better than we know ourselves. They send us ads for products we didn’t even know existed. The drinking water tastes funny one day and two years later you find out by chance that you’d been dosed with the cure for an incipient embolism you had no idea ever existed.”

“Yeah?” Eva laughed bitterly. “Tell me about it. You know how I got here.”

Alison sighed angrily. “No, you still don’t get it. We talk about Social Care and we think of them watching our every move. And then we think about the Watcher, and we think that it’s like Social Care except more so, but that’s wrong. We fall into the trap of thinking that it’s simply something that watches us get undressed before we get in the bath, or listens in when you call your mother, but it’s worse than that. It’s looking right inside you. It sees every heartbeat, it knows your every thought; it knows you better than you know yourself.”

Her pupils dilated as she spoke. It was as if a tap had been turned in her heart, and all the feelings and emotions were flooding slowly upward, gurgling and lapping up inside her body to fill her up to the brim.

“No wonder poor Nicolas is the way he is,” she said softly. “He only has to look at a girl and he knows that the Watcher is there, analyzing his every thought and guilty emotion. He’s a twenty-seven-year-old man with a thirteen-year-old boy inside him who has never had the chance to grow up.”

Katie had flicked the viewing screen off. She moved up silently behind the pair of them.

“We shouldn’t be talking about this in here,” Katie said suddenly in Eva’s ear.

“Ah, who cares, Katie? This room is pretty secure; they don’t monitor the Center like they do outside. Anyway, the plan probably hasn’t got that much chance of working, has it? Not when the Watcher can read our every thought.”

“No, it can’t,” stuttered Katie. She paused a moment, then, “Anyway, the plan will work.”

“If you say so,” Alison said. She stood up quickly. “I’m going back to my room.” She stalked away.

Katie glanced at Eva, then ran after her friend. Eva was left alone in the lounge. The grey mist outside turned to gentle rain and Eva stared out at the blurred green limes.

“Look over in the corner, Eva,” said the voice. “Look over behind the viewing screen.”

“Hello again, voice,” said Eva. “What do you want now?”

“I told you. Look behind the viewing screen. Didn’t you notice it when you came in?”

Eva got up and walked across the room, the plastic soles of her sneakers sticky against the vinyl floor. Behind the viewing screen was an old intercom. A small white rectangular box with a grille facing. Two grubby white wires trailed down the wall to vanish into the floor.

“It heard you,” said the voice. “It could hear you speaking.”

“It’s just an old box, left over from when they first built this place. It isn’t connected to anything.”

“How do you know? If I were the Watcher, I would be listening to all the old equipment. My ears would be pressed to every forgotten intercom, every CCTV camera, every pneumatic tube.”

“Every pneumatic tube? You’re making this up as you go along.”

“And you are arguing with me now. You’re not trying to pretend that I don’t exist anymore. Eva, be careful. You’re not escaping; you’re being led into a trap. The Watcher is cleverer than you. Cleverer than both of us.”

There was a huge rattle outside the room. The skies had finally opened fully and were emptying their load in vast grey sheets of rain that splashed and sluiced down the glass. Eva looked out of the window onto nothing but shades of grey. A gust of wind sent a grey wave bursting across the panes.

“Who are you?” she called above the noise of the rain. “How do you know all this? How are we going to be trapped?”

Her shouting alerted Peter, one of the orderlies, who appeared in the doorway to the lounge wearing a gentle smile. He relaxed a little when he saw who it was.

“Easy now, Eva. What’s the matter?” he said in his surprisingly soft voice.

Eva suddenly realized she had been shouting. She looked down at the floor, flustered and embarrassed.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I was just…just…”

“This place isn’t a trap,” soothed Peter. “You know we’re only here to help you?”

“I know. But I wasn’t…”

He put his hand on her arm and led her back to her own room. “Come on. Why don’t you lie down for a while?”

Eva lay on her bed gazing at the ceiling. The rain had lost some of its earlier violence, but it still poured down in a steady stream that streaked and blurred the view from her window. She wondered if it rained harder out here in the middle of the countryside than it used to in the city. She remembered South Street rain as being either a tired and miserable mist, or huge fat drops that left sooty, greasy stains where they fell. There was none of this cold violence, this clear division between the inside and the outside. Eva had never felt so isolated in all her life, trapped in the cocoon of the Center, floating away on a grey sea, the rest of the world left far behind. But isn’t that what I wanted? she thought. Isn’t that what I aimed for?

There was a knock on the door.

“Come in,” called Eva, but the door was already being pushed open. Alison walked in, closely followed by Nicolas. Eva could see Katie hovering in the background.

“I’ve come to say I’m sorry,” said Alison.

“What for?” asked Eva.

“Being so silly earlier on. I nearly blew the plan. I shouldn’t have spoken about it in the lounge.”

“That’s okay,” said Eva. She hesitated for a moment and then said, “Should you be talking about it in here?”

Nicolas gave a grin. “Safest place, probably. They wouldn’t dare tap our rooms unless they could prove it to be in our best interests, and then they’d have to let us know. They could be sued for malpractice.”

Eva sat up on her bed to make space for the others.

Alison sat down next to her. “Go and get yourself a seat from the lounge, Nicolas,” Alison said.

“Okay.” He walked happily from the room to fetch the chair.

“Don’t you want to sit down, Katie?” invited Eva.

“Katie will stay standing,” said Alison. She had washed her hair since that morning and changed into a pair of jeans and a cotton top. She stared at Eva. “I’m not being mean or bossy. I just know that Katie would prefer to stay standing, wouldn’t you, Katie?”

Katie nodded. She reached into a pocket of her jacket, pulled out a bottle, and handed it to Alison.

“We bought this in the village last week. Vanilla whisky. Some new thing they’re trying to put on the market. Alcoholic and incredibly sweet. I can’t imagine it ever taking off. Still, it makes you feel nice and warm, and there’s nothing else to do on a wet afternoon like this except drink and tell stories.”

Nicolas carried a chair from the lounge into the room, knocking it on the doorframe as he did so. He placed it in the middle of the room and sat down on it. Katie went to the window and looked out. Alison unscrewed the top of the bottle and looked around her.

“Cups,” she said.

“Here,” said Eva. There was a stack of disposable cups by her bed. She shook them apart and handed them out.

Alison poured them each a measure of vanilla whisky. The clear liquid smelled sickly sweet, and seemed to want to stay stuck to the plastic sides of the cup. The four conspirators looked around at each other. Alison wriggled back on the bed so that she leaned against the wall, her bottom on Eva’s pillow, her feet stretched out across the duvet. Nicolas sat in his chair in the middle of the room, sipping at his whisky, grinning at the two women on the bed and thinking heaven knows what. Katie lurked by the doorway-keeping watch, Eva realized.

Alison spoke first. “We’re escaping first thing tomorrow.”

“How?” Eva asked. “Where are we going?”

“We don’t know. We’ll toss coins to decide. It’s the only way we can be sure that we’re not being second-guessed by the Watcher.”

“You must have some plan.”

“Several excellent ones. All so perfect they can’t be ours. So we’re going to extemporize.” Alison smiled.

“Extemporize?”

“Make it up as we go along.” Alison wriggled again suddenly and messed up the duvet. She kicked her tiny feet up and down on the bed.

“Oh, I feel so much better than this morning. It’s amazing what a hot bath can do.” She flashed Nicolas a dirty look. “Or a shower, eh, Nicolas?”

“Oh yes,” said Nicolas. He looked at his feet, confused.

“Have you ever thought about what it must be like for the Watcher?” Alison said, glancing at Nicolas with a suppressed smile. “It can access all that information. It knows everything, and yet it’s impotent. What can it do?” She wriggled a little more on the bed, shifting her breasts beneath her cotton top. Eva noticed how closely Nicolas watched them.

“She does it deliberately, doesn’t she?” said the voice. “That’s how she keeps him following her around, like a pet.”

“I thought that was obvious,” Eva muttered.

“She’s doing it again,” said Katie from her position by the door. “Did you see her, how she relaxed and went all blank?”

“I did, Katie,” said Alison. She gazed at Eva. “You just heard the voice, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Eva said uncomfortably.

“What did it say?”

Eva hesitated a moment.

“It thought you were right about the Watcher,” she lied.

“Too true,” said Alison. “Katie thinks it’s evolved in all those databases, all those computer networks and so on. It has become aware. Now it wants to stretch its wings, it wants to do things. But how? It’s far more intelligent than we are. It must be; it knows far more than we do. What if our machines and our senses are no longer enough for it? What is it going to do if it wants more powerful eyes and arms?”

“Build its own, I suppose,” replied Eva. “Oh. That thing on the news earlier today…”

“A mathematical expression that describes itself,” Katie said from the doorway.

Alison interrupted her. “And no one knows for sure where it came from. It just turned up on a computer.”

“Maybe that man; what was his name…?”

“Kay Lovegrove,” Katie said.

“Isn’t it possible that Kay Lovegrove wrote it?”

“It was the Watcher,” said Nicolas. “It’s beginning to shape the world into a fashion that suits itself. What does that tell you about us? About humans? What is it going to do to us?”

Alison stared at him. Outside the rain rattled against the windows and Eva stared out at the limes. She heard the voice.

“He’s right. What is the Watcher going to do to you? It’s watching you at the moment, you know. It can see you.”

“Eva! Speak to us, Eva!”

Suddenly, Alison was kneeling in front of the bed, gazing up at her. Eva didn’t remember her moving there.

“What’s the matter?” asked Eva, confused.

“I thought you were going to black out that time. What did it say?”

“It said the Watcher was looking at us now. It said it could see us.”

Katie was jumping up and down by the doorway. She seemed very excited.

“What is it, Katie?” Nicolas called.

Katie was having trouble speaking. Nicolas moved up beside her and put one hand on her arm. “Deep breaths, Katie. Deep breaths.”

“I think I understand!” Katie gasped. “Eva. Get off the bed. Go and stand over there.”

Katie was fighting for breath, such was her excitement. She pointed toward the opposite corner of the room.

Eva looked at Alison.

“Do it,” she said. Hesitantly, Eva obeyed. She moved across to the space by the tiny desk. Two magazines, bought for her at the village by one of the helpers, sat by her elbow. She looked at their glossy covers, embarrassed and confused.

“Ask the voice to speak,” said Katie, excitedly.

Eva nodded and coughed a little.

“Er, hello? Are you there?” she said. Nothing.

“I can’t hear anything,” she said.

“I know. We can tell,” said Alison.

“Now move back to the bed,” said Katie. Eva walked back to the bed.

“Look out the window.”

The voice spoke. “Katie has worked it out. I think I understand myself, now. I never knew before.”

Eva turned pale. She spun slowly around to face the room. The other three looked eagerly at her. “It says Katie has worked it out,” she said.

Alison and Nicolas looked at Katie. She gave a huge beam and spoke. “It’s the limes. She hears the voice every time she looks at the limes.”

Eva was shivering with fear. Alison and Nicolas jumped up from the bed and went to look through the window.

“It’s difficult to see anything through this rain,” said Nicolas. “One gust and they vanish again.”

“Why can’t we hear anything?” Alison asked.

“I don’t know,” Katie said.

“What is it then?” asked Nicolas.

“I don’t know that, either.” Katie was losing her shyness again, Eva noticed, now that she had something to concentrate on.

“Why don’t you ask the voice?” Alison interjected.

“Oh yes, that’s a good idea.” Katie and Nicolas turned to gaze at Eva. She shivered again.

“I don’t want to,” she said. “It frightens me.”

“Don’t be so silly. Turn and face the window.”

Katie was so uncharacteristically brusque, it took Eva quite aback. Hesitantly, she obeyed. She turned and looked out of the window.

“Who are you? Are you the Watcher?” she asked.

“No. I’m…I think I’m…I think I was your brother.”

“My brother?”

Katie began hugging herself with delight.

“Yes! I should have guessed. I’ve read about this. It’s your addiction. It’s the MTPH! You’re having flashbacks!”

“Flashbacks? No. It’s not my brother. He didn’t sound like that. Anyway, he would know me…”

Alison was impatient. “Why? You’re not taking the drug anymore, are you? It isn’t constantly regenerating the personality in your mind. But that doesn’t mean that you haven’t worn the habit of him into the paths of your brain.”

“Permanently altered the chemistry,” Katie interrupted.

“Whatever. Something in the sight of the limes out there is reminding you of him. Now what could it be?”

“I watched the limes as I waited for him to die,” Eva said softly. She felt strangely calm. She ought to be upset, but there was nothing.

“It’s your brother’s ghost,” said Nicolas.

“Oh, Nicolas. Have some tact!”

“No,” said the voice. “He’s right. Ghost is a good description. I’m not the man I used to be.”

Katie was grinning. “This is excellent. This is better than we could have hoped for.”

Eva turned to her in disgust. “Why?”

“Because this is something that the Watcher can’t measure. It may even be something that the Watcher doesn’t even know about. This can only aid us.”

Eva lost her temper. “No. I’m fed up with this. I’ve heard enough. I’m not playing along anymore. There is no Watcher, and if there were, there would be no way of escaping it. How would we do that? Four poor loonies, all trapped in a mental hospital in Wales, without a penny to their names.”

Her voice faltered as she saw Nicolas and Alison begin to smile at her.

“What? What’s the matter?”

Nicolas was looking at Alison and smiling, waiting for her to tell Eva the big joke.

“Speak to me. What’s the matter?” said Eva. She was becoming angrier. Katie was blushing with embarrassment. She seemed to be retreating back inside herself, the real Katie withdrawing from the room and leaving nothing but the body behind.

“Tell me what you’re laughing at!” demanded Eva.

Alison spoke first. She pointed at her friend.

“You don’t recognize her, do you? You don’t know who she is! That’s Katie Kirkham!”

“Katie Kirkham?” said Eva weakly. “It can’t be.”

But it was. No wonder Eva had thought she recognized her. No wonder they were laughing at her.

“Katie Kirkham.” Nicolas laughed. “The Poor Little Rich Girl.”

Katie Kirkham’s mother had written the Console Operating System. Practically every mobile phone in the world now used it. She had made her fortune by giving it away for free. All those useful functions: from health monitoring and global positioning, down to the address book and calculator, were available to users for nothing. The only charge she made was a fraction of a credit for interfacing the phone to the COSnet, a charge that was minuscule compared to the cost of the call itself. Virtually nothing. It was a good deal for everyone. Good for the customers, who got the COS for nothing, good for the telecom companies, who were saved the expense of development, and good for Henrietta Kirkham, who just sat back and waited for all those fractions of a credit to come rolling in.

Eva had seen Henrietta Kirkham many times on the viewing screen in the past. That was how she had recognized Katie. Katie had her mother’s features, but twisted and exaggerated. Henrietta was an attractive woman, in an unusual sort of way. DeForest had thought so; Eva had teased him about it.

“So you fancy her more than me?” she would press, watching DeForest twist uncomfortably on the sofa. But Henrietta was attractive; she had a calm poise and confidence that stood her in good stead when interviewed. You didn’t become one of the richest and most powerful people in the world and expect people not to feel jealous. And yet, with her tiny, delicate frame, her shy smile, and her little-girl-lost eyes, people were almost sympathetic to her. Almost. Nobody could feel real sympathy for the woman who had it all.

Then there was poor Katie: the manufactured child. Henrietta was supposed to have written an algorithm that scoured the world’s sperm banks looking for the perfect genetic material that would match her own and produce the perfect child. And if anyone had told her that there were too many variables to be sure of the result, she had ignored them just as surely as she ignored the messages she got from the fanatics telling her that she was meddling with forces she didn’t understand.

Henrietta had been determined to have a child that inherited all her best features, and that child was Katie. And Katie had indeed inherited all her mother’s best features, but exaggerated and magnified to the point of the grotesque. She was more intelligent than her mother, but also more obsessive, more nervous, more shy. Her mother’s natural caution had been replaced by paranoia, her analytic nature by something that divided the world into pieces so small that its soul was lost on the way.

Even her physical body was an exaggeration: she was thinner, her eyes smaller, her skin paler.

As Katie had grown up, the media had followed her, revealing each new character flaw to the world, and the child who had once been the golden girl, the symbol of the new technological age, had become a symbol of the perils of meddling with nature.

Then, one day, Katie had disappeared from public view, as only the very rich or very poor can manage. Henrietta had faded back into the foreground, drawing the camera onto herself and her latest ventures and very firmly away from her daughter.

No one discussed Katie now, only the occasional story of doubtful provenance leaking into the news of how she had gone mad, or back into therapy, or how her twisted genius had invented a box and they had put a cat inside it and then opened it up and the cat was gone and then they closed it again and when they reopened it the cat had come back but it was dead, twisted inside out…

Katie had become a legend in her own lifetime. A poor little rich girl who allowed the real poor and unfortunate to draw a little comfort from their sad, lonely lives.

And now, here she was, standing face-to-face with Eva. A slightly shabby, smaller-than-life woman in a rain-washed mental hospital, trapped in the middle of a grey Sunday afternoon.

Alison shrugged at Eva.

“I know. It’s the last place you’d expect to find her. But that’s sort of the point, isn’t it?”

Outside the window, the rain had finally stopped. The room was still dull and grey, the outside world sodden and empty. They sat in silence for some time, saying nothing. Eventually it was Alison who spoke.

“You’re the last piece, Eva. The Watcher may have sent you, but we could spend the rest of our lives turning down opportunities on that basis. You complement us; you give us the chance to do the unexpected. We’re going to move fast and try to second-guess the Watcher. We leave tomorrow, four o’clock in the morning. That’s when people are at their lowest ebb. We will walk out of the gate and then toss a coin to see which way to go. Heads we go left, tails right. We have supplies from Katie: stealth phones and untraceable credit. The sort of thing that only the army is capable of getting hold of.”

“Or the Watcher. Be careful, Eva, something doesn’t seem right here.”

Alison looked hard at Eva as the voice spoke.

“What did it say?” she asked.

“Say nothing,” said the voice. “I don’t like this. You’re going to leave me behind. I’m trapped in these limes. The moment you’ve found me, you’re walking away.”

Eva looked around the room in confusion. “You’re saying I should stay?” she whispered.

Alison reached out and took hold of her hand. “What’s the matter, Eva? Are you all right?”

Eva nodded dumbly. She was waiting for her brother’s answer. The one person she could really trust.

He spoke slowly, haltingly. “No…No. I think you should go with them. Yes. They’re right. I’m an unexpected ally. It may help fool the Watcher. But Eva, be careful. There is something not right here. I can’t see it.”

Alison could hear none of this; she was speaking quickly, eagerly.

“Are you sure, Eva? Will you be ready tonight? We can’t afford to delay. We’ve waited too long already. The Watcher may already be suspicious.”

“We could wait,” Nicolas said uncertainly.

“No. It’s okay. I’m ready,” said Eva. “You’re right. We can’t delay.”

“Think of me,” said the voice.

“I am. I will. Maybe I don’t actually need to see the trees now I know you’re there.”

She looked up at Katie.

“What do you think, Katie?” she asked.

Katie had been watching her; she knew what she was thinking, why she had said what she just said. She looked thoughtful for a moment, then nodded. “I don’t know,” she said. “It might work.”

Alison nodded vigorously. “Yes. It might work. We have to take the chance. We can’t remain here for much longer. Are you with us, Eva?”

Eva looked around to them all in turn and slowly nodded her head.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m with you. We leave tonight.”