Something Coming Through

9. Carbon-Based Life Form

London | 6 July

The police released Chloe after three hours, told her that they would escort her home. It was the kind of offer she couldn’t refuse, but after a brief argument she persuaded them to take her to Disruption Theory’s office instead of to her flat.

They gave her a ride in a police launch, banging up the centre of the river past embankments of construction coral and rakes of pontoon apartments and clusters of houseboats. She called Daniel and told him she was okay.

‘How were the police? Did they treat you all right?’

‘They interviewed me and let me go. Right now they’re bringing me back to the office. In, guess what, a police launch.’

She was hunched over her phone on the bench seat behind the helmsman and a policewoman, earbuds plugged in, speaking close to the screen. Her hands trembling ever so slightly. Spray gusting over her as the launch passed under Blackfriars Bridge.

Daniel said, ‘I wondered why all the noise.’

‘I’ve decided it’s the only way to commute. I asked them to turn on the siren and lights, but the guy driving this thing— Wow.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘We went over a bump or a wave or something. The guy said I’d already attracted enough attention.’

She was trying to make light of it, to assure Daniel that she was okay. To assure herself.

Daniel said, ‘Helena tried to get access to you. So did I. They invoked the usual terrorism bullshit. Jen and I are with Helena in her chambers right now, in fact. Did they make you sign anything?’

‘They took a statement.’

‘But did you sign it?’

‘They didn’t ask me to sign anything,’ Chloe said. ‘And I only told them the truth. If you want to check it, I have a copy.’

‘I’ll take a look. So will Helena.’

‘I didn’t do anything wrong.’

‘I know. Did you say they were taking you to the office?’

‘I didn’t want to go home.’

‘I’ll get there as soon as possible,’ Daniel said. ‘Hang in there. Don’t talk to anyone.’

She wanted to ask him about Ram scooping up fragments of the disintegrating avatar, but he’d rung off.

There were no journalists waiting for her at the little dock that stuck out from the low wall of the stopbank, no journalists waiting outside the entrance to the warehouse. She stood in the shadowy street under the plaque on the wall that indicated the new level of the river and called Neil. Because she wanted him to know that she was okay; because she needed to ask him something.

He’d seen a clip of the attack on the BBC news, wanted to know if she was all right.

She told him she was fine. ‘Did you know there are police cells in Kingdom Tower? I was locked up in one for more than an hour before they realised that I didn’t have anything to do with the so-called assassin.’

‘Apart from knocking him to the ground,’ Neil said.

‘By total accident. I was trying to brain him, and splashed that stupid knife thing of his instead. I had no idea it would blow up like that. Anyway, the police took a statement, released me without charge, and gave me a ride back to work.’

‘You did the right thing,’ Neil said.

‘I’m not so sure. The one thing you’re never supposed to do when something kicks off is get in the middle of it. And by the time I reacted, it was too late.’

‘You did the right thing,’ Neil said again. ‘My sister, the hero. A reporter from the Daily Mail called me. She got hold of my mobile number, offered cash for photos of you.’

‘I hope you accepted. She’d be paying for what everyone can get for free on the web.’

‘She wanted childhood photos,’ Neil said. ‘You know, with Mum.’

‘Oh.’

‘Don’t worry. I told her exactly where to go.’

‘I bet you did.’ Chloe smiled, imagining Neil’s freezing politeness.

He said, ‘If you need a place to hide out until this blows over, Sue and I can put you up. We’ll put up the barricades, send out for some Indian from Raja.’

‘I don’t want to put you guys in the middle of this. And I think my boss is going to come up with some kind of plan.’

‘As long as you’re okay.’

‘I’ll tough it out.’ Chloe paused, then said as casually as she could, ‘By the way, did you get around to checking that database, and asking your friend if he could help out?’

Only Ram Varma was in the office. He wasn’t surprised to see Chloe: Daniel had told him she was on her way.

‘You’re famous,’ he said. ‘All over the media.’

The big monitor on his workbench was patched with half a dozen windows playing loops of the assassination. From the committee room’s cameras, from the TV crew’s camera, from Jen Lovell’s phone. There were feeds from BBC 24 and Sky News, too. The avatar smiling at the assassin as the knife came down, a blur of motion off to one side resolving into Chloe swinging at the man with the water jug, a white flash, the man and the avatar collapsing. Different angles. Slow-motion recaps. Stills.

According to the BBC, the assassin was Richard Lyonds, an unemployed accountant. He’d been fired from his accountancy firm for stealing from a client’s account, had just been released after spending two months in prison for shoplifting, did not appear to have been associated with any of the anti-Jackaroo groups.

‘He used a taser knife,’ Ram Varma said. ‘They aren’t commercially available, but there are build instructions on the net. Take two thin blades, glue them together with an insulating spacer, wire them up to a battery and capacitor stack in the handle, and you’re good to go. You shorted out the capacitors when you threw water over the guy. He got the full benefit of their stored charge.’

‘How did he get it past security?’

‘He hid in a cleaning cupboard, sneaked out when the session began. Someone in security is going to catch it,’ Ram said. ‘Bad luck for the avatar that it was so lax, but good luck for me.’

He told Chloe that he’d just received the preliminary results of the analysis of the avatar fragments that he’d dropped into ice-cold mineral water and managed to smuggle out in the confusion after the attack.

‘I rode down in a lift full of policemen, sweating like a pig. And once I was outside I realised that I couldn’t do my prize justice. So I called one of Ada Morange’s people, an exobiologist I met at that conference in Lyons last year. Ten minutes later a courier on a motorcycle appeared, and rushed it over to a lab in Imperial College. They did a quick combustion analysis, and ran a sample through an atomic-absorption spectrometer,’ Ram said, and pulled up graphs of spiky lines on the big monitor.

‘I see it, but I’m not sure I understand it,’ Chloe said.

‘It’s mostly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. A carbon-based life form. Also calcium and phosphorus,’ Ram said, pointing to different spikes. ‘Potassium and sulphur, sodium, small amounts of iron and copper…Pretty similar to the composition of the human body. The stable isotope ratio suggests that either it was made here, or it was doped to make it look as if it was. The Americans probably know this stuff already, and much more. The Chinese and the Russians and Indians too. The Brazilians…Anyone who has managed to get hold of a fragment. But no one shares information, and there’s a ridiculously high signal-to-noise ratio in the rumour mill. So all of this is new to us. I’m told that Dr Morange herself is very interested.’

Ram was smiling like a kid whose every Christmas had come at once. He was about Chloe’s age, soft-spoken and capable, one of the smartest people she knew.

‘It was a cool move,’ Chloe told him. ‘Actually pulling something useful from this mess.’

‘Most of the sample had dissolved by the time it reached the lab, but the people at Imperial managed to filter out and stabilise what appear to be fragments of a giant macromolecule. Like DNA, but much, much bigger. Maybe the avatars are woven from a single such molecule. Different sections could have different properties, different functions. Memory storage, information processing, musculature and so on. Amazing, right? Way ahead of anything we can make. As you might expect. Right now, I’m waiting for the results of electron and atomic force microscopy. Hopefully before the police and security services work out what I did. Because while we’re analysing the fragments, they’ll be analysing every microsecond of footage of what went down. It’s like a race where you know you won’t reach the finish line, but try to get as close as possible.’

Ram switched the monitor back to the tiled news feeds. One of them showed a woman scurrying from the front door of her house to a taxi, barging through a scrum of reporters and cameramen and photographers. Richard Lyonds’s ex-wife, according to the chyron. Chloe felt a pang of sympathy.

‘There you are,’ someone said.

Chloe turned, saw Daniel Rosenblaum and Jen Lovell in the doorway.

‘Let’s go into my office,’ Daniel said. ‘We need to talk.’

He asked if she wanted coffee or tea or maybe something stronger. She said that she’d drunk about a gallon of bad coffee when she’d talked to the police, and handed over the envelope containing a copy of her statement. Two pages, single-spaced. Daniel gave it to Jen, asked her to copy it to Helena.

‘I only told them the truth,’ Chloe said.

It still sounded weak.

‘If there’s a problem, Helena will deal with it,’ Daniel said. ‘She’s on your side. We all are. Ada Morange is very pleased.’

‘Ram told me. I have some other news. About Fahad Chauhan—’

But Daniel wasn’t listening.

‘Ada suggested a press conference, but I have a better idea,’ he said. He was drinking tea from a big white mug with WORLD’S BEST DAD printed on it.

‘I really don’t want to have anything to do with the press,’ Chloe said.

‘This would be a one-on-one interview. One of my friends from the production company that did my series? He works for Channel Four now. He’ll give you the questions before it starts, and you can choose which ones to answer, let me handle the rest. It will be very friendly, very relaxed. It will be great PR,’ Daniel said enthusiastically, ‘and it will give us control of the story.’

Chloe thought of Neil. She thought of Richard Lyonds’s ex battling past cameras and shouting reporters. She said, ‘Will it get the press off my back?’

‘No doubt the bottom-feeders will try to dig up some dirt, but the rest will be happy to rerun footage of the Q&A. You aren’t the main story, Chloe. The crazy accountant is. But we can definitely make good use of this. Put out our side of the story. I’ve already talked to the press, of course. When you were arrested, and a brief statement after you told me you’d been released. But they need to hear you tell your story. You need to put it out there.’

‘Just a few questions.’

‘They’ll be gentle lobs over the net, I promise. All you have to do is pat them back.’ Daniel took a noisy slurp of tea, twinkled at Chloe over the top of his mug. ‘How are you holding up?’

‘I didn’t know what I was thinking when I did it,’ she admitted. ‘I’m trying to work out what I think about it now.’

‘And?’

‘I feel like a fraud.’

‘Far from it. You’re a hero. And that’s another thing we need to talk about. Richard Lyonds is probably a lone nut who blames the Jackaroo for everything that went wrong in his life. But there are plenty of people who agree with him, inside and outside the Human Decency League. So I think that we should find a place where you can lie low for a few days. Just in case.’

‘You’re saying what? That I might be a target because I tried to save the avatar?’

Daniel nodded, suddenly very serious.

‘Have there been actual threats?’

‘So far, no more than the usual garbage from people who think we are interfering in things man was not meant to know. But it’ll get worse before it gets better. You’re still required to appear before that committee, but after that I think we should find you a nice quiet place where you can wait out the fuss. Ada Morange has offered to fly you out of the country. Or there’s the bothy my family owns in Orkney—’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘It’s very cosy, very quiet.’

‘And if any crazies find out where I am, it’ll feature a re-enactment of Straw Dogs. I have a better idea,’ Chloe said. ‘You remember Fahad Chauhan, the kid who drew all those pictures? He and his little sister were hiding out in the DP camp where that breakout occurred. Before that, it turns out, they were living in Norfolk. Martham, this little town in the middle of the Flood.’

‘I don’t think this is the time to get into that again,’ Daniel said.

‘Hear me out and you’ll see how we can kill two birds with one stone. Three years ago, Fahad’s father went up and out, to Mangala. His ticket was paid for by a construction company, Sky Edge Holdings. He was acting as a consultant on a project to build a pharmaceutical plant. Still is, I guess, because he hasn’t come back.’

Neil had passed on that information from his friend in the Foreign Office, telling her that she should keep it to herself. It wasn’t exactly against the law, he’d said, but it was against procedure. Chloe had promised that she wouldn’t tell a soul, but this was kind of an emergency…

Daniel studied her for a moment, then smiled, showing most of his big white teeth. His smile always reminded her of a picture of Red Riding Hood’s wolf in the fairy-tale collection she’d been given one Christmas.

He said, ‘You think the father sent his kids a souvenir. Some kind of artefact. And you want to go look for it.’

‘I want to check out where they used to live,’ Chloe said. ‘It’ll get me out of London, away from all the fuss. And it’s in Norfolk, way out in the Flood. Who would expect to find me there?’

‘Did you think of this just now?’

‘I was going to ask you anyway. But you can see how the two things fit together. You want me to get out of London; I want to follow up on that breakout. Fahad’s father went up and out, but his mother might still be living in Martham. She might know where Fahad and his sister are. They might even have returned home. And there might be other artefacts. The father has been gone for three years. He might have sent more than one.’

‘Or this might just be a wild-goose chase.’

‘Eddie Ackroyd’s client thinks otherwise. And even if there is nothing to it, it’ll still get me away from media attention.’

Daniel studied her. ‘It really has hooked you, hasn’t it?’

‘I think it’s something real. And didn’t you hire me because I can tell real artefacts from fakes?’

She felt her heart beat while Daniel thought about that. She told herself that if he said no, fuck it, she’d go anyway.

At last, he said, ‘I’ll have to talk with Ada Morange’s people. And if I do let you go, it will have to be after the committee reconvenes. None of us are going anywhere until then.’

‘Okay.’

‘Also, I wouldn’t feel right if you went alone—’

Jen Lovell knocked on the frame of the open door. ‘There’s a problem,’ she said, and before she could explain more two men appeared behind her. One was flourishing a piece of paper as he shouldered past, telling Daniel that he was being served with a warrant that ordered him to surrender all fragments of the avatar at once.

The man with the warrant identified himself as Chief Inspector Adam Nevers, of the Met’s Alien Technology Investigation Squad, otherwise known as the Hazard Police. Like the Breakout Assessment Team, they dealt with possible and actual threats created by contact with the Jackaroo and Elder Culture artefacts. Disruption Theory had a fairly good working relationship with BAT, which monitored cults, sects, self-styled prophets, and crazes, manias and other behavioural changes that could be traced back to contact with artefacts, algorithms and eidolons, but the Hazard Police, which tracked down illicit imports and hazardous artefacts, was more belligerent and had sweeping search-and-seizure powers.

Daniel scanned the papers and said that he had never been in possession of the items in question. Adam Nevers said, ‘If you don’t hand them over or tell me where they are, Dr Rosenblaum, we will have to search the premises.’

‘I’m afraid I must plead commercial confidentiality.’

Chloe watched the two men standing up to each other, Daniel beginning to realise that he was outgunned but refusing to back down.

Nevers said, ‘Perhaps I should give you a moment to consult with your employers, sir. I’m sure they’ll advise you to do the right thing.’

‘I’m in charge here.’

‘But you answer to Dr Morange.’ Nevers pronounced it the right way, with a hard g. ‘Tell her people why I’m here, and what I’m looking for. We’ll wait outside.’

Inside the office, Jen and Daniel had a brief intense exchange, Daniel spreading his hands in a gesture of surrender, pulling out his phone. Outside, Chief Inspector Adam Nevers said to Chloe, ‘I saw what you did. Pretty cool, stepping up like that.’

He was an imposing guy in his early forties, dressed in a light brown summer-weight suit and a crisp white shirt and a gold tie with an impeccable Windsor knot. He nodded to his partner, a younger man with a mop of blond hair, who started to amble slowly around the big room. No doubt scanning everything in it with his spex and, Chloe was pretty sure, giving Nevers time to try to dig something useful from her.

She said, thinking of the best form of defence and all that, ‘Is it true that you lot report directly to the Human Decency League?’

‘As a matter of fact we came here to retrieve property that belongs to the Jackaroo. It isn’t a good idea to piss them off. They aren’t always as friendly as they like to make out. As I’m sure you know.’

The other policeman was standing in a corner of the workroom, spex glinting as he looked around.

Chloe said, ‘I thought the HDL set up the Hazard Police because they’re against all things alien. But you’re here to help the Jackaroo?’

‘We’re helping to protect people from meddling in things they’re not meant to know,’ Nevers said, with a nice little smile.

‘Like q-phones, construction coral, biomachines that clean up the sea and the air, easy travel to other planets…’

The two of them were sparring, having fun.

He said, ‘Do you enjoy your work, Ms Millar?’

‘If I didn’t, I’d be doing something else.’

‘And you get on with your colleagues.’

‘Why shouldn’t I?’

‘What about Dr Morange? Have you ever met her?’

‘Just once, for about thirty seconds.’

It had been a couple of years ago, soon after Chloe had joined Disruption Theory. They’d all been Eurostarred to Paris, a party held in a section of the catacombs. Vaults and passages done up with swags of blue material, video screens, big tropical plants, three different bars, a seafood buffet, fairground rides. It was impressive, but not a patch, apparently, on the Wagnerian debauches of the company’s heyday. Disruption Theory’s crew had huddled together, outnumbered by Karyotech Pharma’s teams of scientists and philosophers, lawyers and administrators, but Daniel had seemed completely at ease, glad-handing a group of investment managers, taking the arm of one of the chief scientists and walking away through a stand of tree ferns, deep in conversation. Later, he’d taken Chloe to meet their host. Ada Morange, who had suffered from an exotic variant of lymphoma for twenty years and required a hospital’s worth of advanced medical technology to keep her alive, sat in a carbon-fibre wheelchair within a bower of ferns and orchids. Chloe, slightly tipsy from three glasses of vintage champagne, wondered if she should curtsy when Daniel introduced her. The thin ravaged old woman, with her fierce gaze and cap of synthetic hair white as snow, had a queenly presence.

One of her assistants bent to explain who Chloe was; the entrepreneur fixed Chloe with her dark gaze, saying, ‘Daniel tells me that you have a talent for finding the strange and new.’

‘I spend a lot of time on the streets.’

‘One day something will come through that will amaze us all. Perhaps you will be the first to see it.’

‘Please enjoy our party,’ one of the assistants had said, before Chloe could think of a reply, and that was that, for the interview.

Nevers said, ‘She’s one of those people who think they can change history. I’d like to ask her what makes her think she has the right. By the way, how did you enjoy that little display in Dagenham?’

There it was.

Chloe thought of the two policewomen and the BAT officer, of Eddie Ackroyd. It wouldn’t surprise her in the least to discover that Eddie was feeding information to the feds.

She said, ‘I thought that the Hazard Police are trying to close down people who deal in illegal imports. Why would you be interested in a silly little breakout?’

‘Was that what it was?’

Chloe, with a sharp uptick of unease, saw the other policeman go into Ram’s tech suite. She said, ‘Sure. Just another snake cult.’

‘Conan the Barbarian,’ Adam Nevers said. ‘Great little film. Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Earl Jones. Arnie is searching for the man who killed his mother, finds what he thinks is a harmless cult. Except, as it turns out, it’s a lot more than that. You never know what a silly little cult might grow into, never know when one of their so-called breakouts might become a problem. Start infecting innocent people, spreading…The trouble with this Elder Culture stuff is that we don’t know what any of it really does. It’s completely outside our experience. We’re like a bunch of toddlers hitting an atom bomb with hammers.

‘I used to work in the drug squad. I saw some sights then I can’t forget. Shine isn’t too bad at first. Users become comatose, have vivid dreams. But those heavenly visions turn into terrible nightmares, real heart-stoppers, unless users up the dose. Soon, they have to take massive amounts just to maintain, and the residue destroys their circulatory systems. People lose arms, legs, they have strokes…And meq is much worse. Repetitive behaviour, full-blown psychotic attacks, self-harm, what users call wilding.

‘The first dead meqhead I saw had killed herself by banging her head against the floor until she fractured her skull, turned her brain to jelly. Her kid was in the next room. A four-year-old girl, watching TV. Too frightened to talk for more than six months afterwards. Some people say, well, that’s what happens if you use illegal drugs. But meq and shine are far worse than anything we had before the Jackaroo came. We can’t handle them. And what does it say about us,’ Nevers said, in a level, serious voice, holding Chloe’s gaze, ‘when just about the first thing we do when we reach other worlds is look for stuff to get us high? That when we find things that are a cross between animals and machines, all we can think to do with them is squirt extracts of their blood into our veins. That’s some sorry shit, right there.’

‘And that’s an impressive speech.’

Chloe was wondering if she was supposed to agree with him, to renounce her work right there and then.

‘You and I know it isn’t all shiny new toys, don’t we?’ Nevers said.

‘But the difference is, maybe, you see the worst in people, and I hope for something better.’

‘That we’ll find enlightenment, make the Jackaroo worlds into utopias, that kind of thing?’

‘Why not? Why measure us by the worst we do?’

‘Like the New Galactic Navy, for instance?’

‘That didn’t have anything to do with Elder Culture tech,’ Chloe said.

‘They killed themselves right after you talked to them. Can’t have been a nice feeling.’

‘It was six weeks later.’ She knew that it sounded defensive, knew that he knew it too, and felt a hot twist of anger. She’d been through talking therapy, afterwards, she’d put it behind her, and now Nevers and the select committee wanted to dig up the bodies and use them against her.

Nevers said, ‘You get involved with people who do something stupid, it isn’t your fault, but it stays with you. I’ve been there myself.’

‘I can’t really discuss it,’ Chloe said. ‘Not until after I’m called back to the select committee, anyway.’

‘And I’m not going to pry,’ Nevers said. ‘We’re just having a friendly chat. Sharing notes about our common interests.’

He asked her how she liked interviewing people, said that it must be different from chasing down Elder Culture artefacts and alien beasties. She said no, not really. In the artefact biz you have to know how to find leads, and that means talking to people, getting them to give up what they know.

She’d shadowed Frances Colley at first, watching her talk to all kinds of people about their crazy theories. Although most of them didn’t seem crazy. Serious and intense, but not bug-eyed gaga. They were functional. They held down jobs. They were mostly of above-average intelligence, many of them professionals. Teachers, IT technicians, even a policeman, trying to make sense of the changing world by what Frances called dangerous simplifications. Chloe had learned from Frances how to maintain a non-judgemental attitude, how to let people explain their ideas in their own words, without leading them.

She was telling Adam Nevers about her first solo interview when Jen asked him if he and his colleague would like to join a phone conference with someone from Ada Morange’s research lab. Chloe drifted across the workspace, ducked into the tech suite. Ram said it was all good, that the policeman had just looked around, hadn’t touched anything or asked him about the breakout or the kid’s pictures.

‘He was scanning the shit on my workbench. The so-called eidolon detector Frances brought in the other day. I told him if he could make sense of it he could get a job here any time.’

Chloe felt a little better, but then saw, lying on the tray of the big archival scanner, Mr Archer’s flyer.