The Star Fraction

8

The Virtual Venue

Jordan laid his rucksack on the ground and leaned against the small and unoccupied bit of wall between a telesex shop and a dive called The Hard Drug Café. He felt every face that passed as a soft blow against his own, and a vague, guilty nausea, like a boy after his first cigarette. Ever since he’d walked up that hill and on to the Broadway he had been sent reeling by the bizarre and decadent impressions of the place. It was wilder than his wildest imaginings, and this was just the fringe. Neon and laser blazed everywhere, people did things in shop windows that he never suspected anyone did in a bedroom, fetches and hologhosts taunted and flaunted through the solid bodies around him. The bodies themselves astonished him, even after he had stopped gawping at the women, some of whom wore clothes that exposed their breasts, buttocks and even legs. A space-adaptee cut across the pavement in an apparatus spawned from a bicycle out of a wheelchair which he vigorously propelled with arms and – well, arms, which he had as lower limbs. Now and then, metal eyes with no iris or pupil met his glance and sent it away baffled. This, he knew, was known as culture shock. Knowing what it was didn’t make it go away.

After several people had broken stride as they passed and looked at him as if expecting something he realized that all he’d have to do would be to hold out a cupped hand, and they would put money in it. Furious, he straightened his back, then stooped and lifted his pack again. He was a businessman, not a beggar, and he had business to attend to.

The Hard Drug Café looked a good place to start.

Its name was traditional, a bad-acid flashback to an earlier time. The only drugs going down here were coffee by the litre, amphetamines by the mil and anti-som by some unit of speed. Steamed wall-mirrors multiplied the place’s narrow length; virtual presences fleshed out its sparse clientele to a crowd. Looks from behind glades glanced off him as he picked his way to the counter; then they returned to their animated conversations. He took a pleasure more perverse than any he’d seen so far in being thus accepted. Another nerd.

He ordered a coffee and a sandwich whose size didn’t quite justify its name, Whole Earth; declined the offer of smart or fast drugs. He lowered the pack and himself into a corner seat, and familiarized himself with the table modem while the order was being prepared. When it arrived he sat eating and drinking for a few minutes.

It felt weirdly like starting work in the morning…Then the thought of how different it was gave him a jolt and a high which he was sure must be better than any drug on the menu could have given him. He took from his pocket a tough plastic case, opened it and lifted a set of glades and a hand-held from the styrofoam concavities inside. He’d bought them at the first hardware shack he’d reached. They still had an almost undetectable friction that indicated, not stickiness, but the absence of the ineradicable microslick of human oils on plastic. His fingertips destroyed as they confirmed the certainty that they were the first to touch them. He eased them on and looked around to find nothing visibly different but his reflection in the mirrors. Wiping the wall beside him with his sleeve he inspected himself sidelong. For a giddy moment he was drawn into the image of his own reflection in the reflected glades. Then he pulled back and indulged a brief surge of vanity over how much more serious and dangerous and mysterious he looked.

He caught a passing smirk, and turned away.

He brushed his hand back through his bristly hair, then felt behind his ear for a tiny knob at the end of the sidepiece. When he pulled, it drew out a slender cable; it came with the resistance of a weighted reel, withdrawing if he relaxed the pull. He extended it all the way and connected it to the hand-held, then jacked into the modem.

His first explorations were modest, tentative: after installing and booting the software and setting up a default fetch he opened an account with a local branch of the Hong Kong & Shanghai, then arranged for them to liquidate his share in his company. It was a tidying up, a formality: his two partners came out of it richer in increased stock than he did in ready cash. He just counted himself lucky the Deacons hadn’t frozen his assets. Even through all the levels of anonymity, the transaction made his bones quake. When it was over, he had no property in Beulah City. He leaned back and signalled for another coffee. When it came he stared into it, forcing himself to think.

Froth on the top went around: spiral arms held in their whorl by the hot dark matter beneath, turning one way while the rest of the universe went the other…e pur si muove. The argument from design. The Blind Watchmaker.

This could have been the last day: the hour of the Watchmaker. Mrs Lawson’s fear had seemed genuine. It was there and it was everywhere, in all the fractured cultures; godless or godly, they all had at the back of their minds the insidiously replicating meme which said that one day a system would wake up and say to its creators: ‘Yes, now there is a God.’

Blessed are the Watchmakers, for they shall inherit the earth.

Jordan had been raised with a sense of imminence, an ability to live with the possibility that The End Was At Hand. Disappointments dating from the turn of the millennium had shaped the Christian sects, a lesson reinforced by the inconclusive Armageddon that had been over before he was born. The interpreters of Revelation had been made to look foolish, even to people who still tolerated the equally uninspired interpreters of Genesis. The conviction that the imminent end was unpredictable strengthened the expectation: two thousand years and counting, and still Coming Soon.

If they could do it, Jordan thought, then so could he. Bracketing the outside chance that all speculation was about to be rendered irrelevant, what did he had to go on? A contact with a (claimed) Black Planner; a wad of money; some worries from an unreliable source about odd happenings on the networks; and an undeniable series of spectacular system crashes.

Well, he could do a search on that, cross-reference them and see what came up. He drained his cup, smoothed out the instruction leaflet and poked out a key sequence that everyone else here could probably do with their eyes shut.

DoorWays^™ opened on to the world: the kingdoms and republics; the enclaves and principalities; the anarchies, states and utopias. With a silent yell he flung himself into the freedom of the net.

In virtual space Beulah City was far, far away.

The sky came down to the rooftops here, same as anywhere else. As he walked along the high street Kohn saw past the near horizon in an inescapable awareness that the sky before him was as far away as the sky above, a dizzying horizontal height. He was as conscious of the motion of the earth as previously he’d been of the time of day. Not for the first time he was impressed by the dauntless gaiety of the species. Whirled away from the sun’s fire to face again the infinite light-raddled dark, they took it when they could as their chance to go out and have fun.

Janis walked beside him with a dancer’s step, a warm lithe body naked in cool clothes, her fingers rediscovering his hand every few seconds. He was not sure what that electric contact meant to her. What it meant to him was like the new reordering of his mind, a delight he felt almost afraid to test, yet constantly renewed by the merest look at her, or within himself.

They walked along faster and easier than anyone else on that pavement, Kohn effortlessly finding an open path among the moving bodies. After they crossed the road, strolling between humming cars and hurtling bikes and whistling rickshaws, Janis looked at him as if to say something, and then just shook her head.

Norlonto had the smell of a port city, that openness to the world: the sense that you had only to step over a gap to be carried away to anywhere. (Perhaps the sea had been the original fifth-colour country, but it had been irretrievably stained with the bloody ink from all the others.) And it had also the feel that the world had come to it. In part this was illusory: most of the diversity around them had arrived much earlier than the airships and space platforms, yet here and there Kohn could pick out the clacking magnetic boots, the rock-climber physique, the laid-back Esperanto drawl of the orbital labour aristocracy. Men and women who’d hooked a lift on a reentry glider to blow a month’s pay in a shorter time, and in more inventive ways, than Khazakhstan or Guiné or Florida could allow.

Those who helped them do it made their mark in the crowd and among the shopfronts: prostitutes of all sexualities, gene-splicing parlours, hawkers of snacks and shots, VR vendors and drug and drink establishments.

The Lord Carrington, down a side street, wasn’t one of them.

‘It’s our local,’ Kohn said proudly as he pushed open the saloon-bar doors of heavy wood and glass and brass. The smells of alcohol, of hash and tobacco smoke, struck him with all their associations of promise and memory, fraud and forgetting. He didn’t know if he could take this intensity all his life. Maybe it was something you got used to. Poets had died for it; some said, of it. Perhaps it was wasted on him; or his very crudity, his fighter’s callousness, would save him.

What the hell.

Janis eased past him, through the door, and he stepped through and let it swing back.

The room was long and cool. The bar was divided along its length with apparently mirrored partitions that showed not reflections but views of other bars. You could tell the timezone the images came from by the state the drinkers had reached. The first one Kohn noticed looked like Vladivostok. Fortunately the sound was turned down. The real pub had not many in it yet, the hologram stage showing only swimming dolphins.

Janis beat him to the bar, turned with her elbow on the counter and asked, ‘What’ll you have?’

‘Eine bitter, bitte.’

Janis ordered two litres. They found an alcove where they could sit and see the stage and a window overlooking a tenth of London. Kohn sat down, shifting the belt pouch in which the gun’s smart-box nestled, easing the hip holster of the dumb automatic which was all the hardware the pub’s by-laws permitted. Janis watched with a faint smile and raised her heavy glass.

‘Well, here’s to us.’

‘Indeed. Cheers.’

The first long gulp. Kohn decided to appreciate the taste as long as he could before lighting up.

A man walked through the dolphins and announced the first set, a new Scottish band called The Precentors. The sea-scene cleared and two lads and a lass, playing live from Fort William, launched into the latest old rebel song.

Janis looked at him, then at her drink, then looked up again more sharply, her hair falling back. Her shoulders were swaying almost imperceptibly to the music.

‘Tell me about yourself,’ she said.

‘Not much to tell…I grew up around here, North London Town before and after it became Norlonto. My mother was a teacher, my father was – well, he made a living as a software tech but he was a professional revolutionary. Member of the Workers’ Power Party, which back then was what he used to call a nearly-mass Party. A near-miss Party.’ Kohn chuckled darkly. ‘The Fourth International had a few good national sections in those days, and they were one of the best. Industrial-grade Trotskyism. He was a union organizer, community activist in various Greenbelt townships. My mother got elected to the local council under the Republic.’

He stopped. Normally it was not difficult to talk about this. Now, the enhanced memories crowded him like hysterical relatives at a funeral. His fist was on the table. Janis’s fingers clasped over it.

‘And that was why they were killed?’

‘No! That was all legal. They were rejectionists, sure, but they weren’t in the armed groups that became the ANR or anything like that. Mind you, in the Peace Process you didn’t have to be, to get killed. I used to think that was the point.’ He disengaged his hand, unthinking, and lit a cigarette. ‘I thought that was the whole fucking point.’

‘I don’t see it.’

‘Terror has to be random,’ he said. ‘That’s how to really break people, when they don’t know what rules to follow to keep them out of trouble.’ He gave her a sour grin. ‘You know all that. It’s been tried out on rats.’

‘But you don’t even think that was why—’

‘That was part of it. The killing was a joint operation, local thugs and a US/UN teletrooper. I never did understand that, until – actually it was Bernstein who gave me the idea it had to do with the day job. The software work.’

‘And that could be—?’ The excitement of discovery lifted her voice.

He hushed her with a small movement of his hand, and nodded.

Janis was silent for a few moments.

‘What did you do after that?’

‘I had a kid sister.’ He laughed. ‘Still have, but she’s married, settled and respectable now. Doesn’t like to be reminded of me.’

‘Can’t imagine why.’

‘Anyway…we both just took off, disappeared into the Greenbelt. I sort of dragged her up, you know? Did all sorts of casual work, usual stuff, until I was old enough to get steady jobs in construction.’

‘Christ.’ Janis looked almost more sympathetic at this part of the story than at what had come before. ‘Did you ever think of going off to the hills and joining the ANR?’

‘Thought about it? – I fucking dreamt about it. But the baseline was, I never rated their chances.’ He snorted. ‘Looks like I might have been wrong, huh? Anyway, knocking the Hanoverians off their perch wouldn’t be enough. At least the space movement understands that. You gotta defeat the Evil Empire, man! And the green slime, all the species of cranks and creeps. Protect the launch sites, protect the net, and defend the workers. That’s our line.’

‘The thin Red line.’

‘Damn’ right,’ he said with a proud grin. ‘The last defenders.’

‘How did you become a – what do you call yourself? – a security mercenary?’

‘Started with defending building sites against green heavies. Went on from there.’ He shrugged and smiled. ‘Talk about it another time…How did you get to be a mad scientist?’

Janis took a long swallow. ‘This must sound like a sheltered upbringing. A bit of that old middle-class privilege, you know? Grew up in Manchester. It’s all straight Kingdom, no autonomous communities. Not much violence. ANR sparrow units knock off soldiers and officials now and again…

‘My parents are both doctors.’ She gave a self-deprecating smile. ‘Real doctors. Uh, physicians. Two brothers, both younger than me. One’s a mining engineer in Siberia, the other’s in medical school. I was always interested in medical research – all the code-cracking breakthroughs happened when I was just old enough to understand. Grammar school, university, research. I only came down here because of the restrictions – not enough F S Zees up north.’

Kohn nodded slowly. ‘And now Norlonto. Just a natural progression.’

Janis grimaced. ‘I wouldn’t want to get mixed up in black technology.’

It was a cant phrase for the sort of research that was rumoured to go on in Norlonto. Not quite deep technology, but treading the edge; neural-electronic interfacing, gene-splicing, potentially lethal life-extension techniques, all tested on higher animals or human subjects whose voluntary status was distinctly dubious: debtors, crime-bondees, kids who didn’t know what they were getting into, the desperate poor, mercenaries…

He lit another cigarette and leaned back, blowing smoke past his nostrils and looking at her along his nose. ‘That’s a good one,’ he remarked, ‘in the circumstances.’

‘There’s a bloody difference!’

‘Explain that to the cranks.’

‘What can we do, then?’ Janis glanced around the now livening bar as if checking for infiltrators.

She looked so worried that Kohn relented. He’d made his point.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘This place is a black hole for the state and for the terrs – nothing to stop them getting in; it’s getting out they find difficult. Nobody’s signed the Convention here; the Settlement doesn’t apply; we’re not in the UN. We don’t have any of these stand-offs in a state of war. What we have instead is a trade-off, anarchy and what the movement calls law and order. Anybody can carry a gun, and anybody who uses one without good cause is liable to get wasted. So they’ll have to work their way round to us, and before they do – give it a few days – we have lots of options. Vanishing into the crowd by going deeper into Norlonto. Going public and datagating the whole deal. Taking to the hills. Crossing the water—’

‘Ireland?’ Janis looked shocked.

Kohn had been there, handling security at one of the many conferences that could be safely held only outside the Kingdom. It was a strange place, that other Republic, a black-and-white photograph of the colourful enthusiasms he remembered from his childhood. United, federal, secular and social democratic, a welfare state where you got liberalism shoved down your throat from an early age, with vitamin supplements…It had been a disturbing experience because of its very ambiguity, like tales his grandmother had recounted of visits to East Germany. He tried to shrug away what he suspected was on Janis’s part a lingering prejudice from years of Hanoverian disinformation.

‘Think of it like cryonics,’ he said, getting up to go to the bar.

‘How d’you mean?’

‘As an alternative to death there’s a lot to be said for it.’

Her laughter followed him, but he could see she wasn’t convinced.

Jordan snatched the VR glasses off and pressed the heels of his hands against his tight-shut eyes. The dull kaleidoscope of false light made the other afterimages go away. Then he opened his eyes and reassured himself of the solid and insubstantial realities around him.

He had been looking for information about the Black Plan. The ANR itself denied all knowledge: his cautious inquiry resulted in its garish VR/PR office dwindling abruptly to a dot in the distance. Then he had turned to the competing newslines of the radicals and libertarians and socialists, his search patterns hauling in a succession of titles that floated up past him as he checked them out one by one:

eu.pol

us.lib

fourth.internat

sci.socialism

soc.utopia

freedom.net.news

fifth.internat

alt.long-live-marxism-leninism-maoism-gonzalo-thought

theories.conspiracy

soc.urban-legend

comp.sci.ai

news.culture.communistans

left.hand.path

That last one had been a mistake. It had rattled his nerves so much that coffee could only calm them, not still them entirely. The whole net, this evening, was like jangled nerves. The afternoon’s system crashes had set off claims and counterclaims, wars of rumour. Cross-tracing Black Plan and Watchmaker references had scored dozens of hits as transitory anomalous events – from the crashes to bombings to disappearances of well known militants to emergency hands-on audits in Japanese-owned car factories – were attributed to one or the other, or both.

Jordan sipped coffee and ran the rumours through the hand-held’s freeware evaluation routines and his own mind. It took him about a quarter of an hour to arrange the possibilities in a spectrum. At one extreme of inferences from the net the Black Plan was already the Watchmaker, and was being used by the Illuminati through the Last International and its front organizations – including the Fourth International and the Fifth International and the International Committee for the Reconstruction of the Libertarian International – to take over the world by flooding the market with Black Plan products recognizable by barcodes all of which contained the number 666. At a minimum, though, there was definitely something happening on the Left, using the term in a fairly broad and paranoid sense to include the ANR and the Left Alliance and parts of the space movement, but the signal-to-noise ratio was so high there was no way to get much further without a reality check.

Time to look for some live action.

Jordan paid his tab and lugged his pack outside the door. As he buckled the strap a woman’s face caught his eye. An open, friendly face which he recognized but couldn’t place. She looked at him as if the recognition were mutual, but puzzled. A man walked beside her and a flicker of annoyance creased his brow as she stopped and said hello to Jordan.

Her dress seemed made of flames, a friendly fire that licked and played around the movements of her body. Salamandrine faces peeped and winked between her breasts and thighs. Her eyes were amused, when he reached them.

‘Enjoying your first taste of life in space?’

When she spoke he remembered her: she was the woman who’d checked him in.

‘Oh, hello again,’ he said. ‘Yes, but. It’s all a bit intense.’

‘What are you looking for?’

‘Uh…Well I want to meet people to talk to about…radical ideas, radical politics, you know? And to be honest I’d rather do it somewhere a bit more—’

He hesitated, not wanting to offend.

‘Normal and natural?’ she teased.

‘Yes,’ he admitted.

‘OK.’ She turned to her companion. ‘Do we know anywhere reasonably conservative, but relaxed?’

He thought for a moment, then said, ‘You could come with us. The Lord Carrington. That’s where the revolutionaries hang out.’ To Jordan it seemed wild enough, as he stood at the bar and drank his first honest litre. There were pubs in Beulah City but they were the sort of place where the Salvation Army was the entertainment. The Christians had an almost miraculous talent for turning wine into water. He smiled to himself and looked around.

The couple who’d come with him had been instantly dragged into a group of people in urgent discussion, leaving Jordan with a not unfriendly wave. The guy had been right about the sort of place it was. Conservative, relaxed and revolutionary: it caught the style. Cotton and leather and denim, a fashion statement echoing down generations: from cattle drivers to factory hands to leftist students to pro-Western youth in the East and back to the workers the last time the West was Red, and now to those who remembered that period or hoped for its return – the Levi jacket as much a badge of dissent as any enamel emblem pinned to its lapels.

Some of the women dressed exactly like the men, others played with similar modes softened by decorative touches; most, however, seemed to be announcing that they came from peasant rather than proletarian stock, in ethnic skirts and dresses that no actual Bolivian or Bulgarian or Kurdish woman would be seen dead in nowadays. But, whatever they wore, they acted in a way that struck him as brash and bold and masculine: shouting and smoking and buying drinks. There was something exciting about it, exciting in a different way from what he’d seen on the streets.

He felt simultaneously conspicuous and invisible. This was no singles bar: everyone was in groups and/or couples. He was noticed as different, unknown to anyone, and then ignored. He scanned the crowd for anyone on their own or anyhow interested in meeting someone new.

His idle gaze stopped with a jolt at a woman who sat on the wall-seat behind a table at the window. There were others at the table, but there was space on either side of her, and she was looking around the pub with a curious, questioning eye. She certainly wasn’t waiting for her date to turn up. She looked relaxed and content, and out-of-place. Cascading red hair, just enough make-up, pale face and paler arms set off by a sleeveless black top. It all said class, and not working class.

She saw him looking, and made eye-contact for a fraction of a second, then glanced down at her drink. Her hair tumbled forward. She ran her hand over the glass, then picked it up and took a swallow. Jordan turned away before she looked at him again, but he felt her gaze like a long, cool finger.

Another place, a place unknown except as a rumour, like the Black Plan and the Last International and the Twilight of the Icons. The Clearing House: a hierarchical hotline, the secret soviet of the ruling class, a permanent party – in both senses, an occasion and an organization of the privileged – where everybody who was anybody could socialize in privacy. The place where the Protocols of the Elders of Babylon could be hammered out.

Donovan was the only participant who had never received the standing invitation that came in some form to almost everyone who became conspicuously successful, terrorist and trillionaire alike. He had hacked his way in. The feat was so unprecedented and alarming that it had caused a five-minute global financial crash and an immediate arrangement to the effect that his electronic warfare would not bring down the wrath of Space Defense. Handling more localized retaliation would remain his own business.

Tonight he received an urgent summons, his first in years. It flashed around his screens, interrupting his interrogations of the entities that slunk and prowled in forgotten reaches of the datasphere. He dismissed them and subvocalized the passwords, and in an instant he was there, out of it. He needed no VR gear to be there, to be out of it – he took it straight from the screens, his mind vaulting unaided into the lucid dream of mainframing.

Free fall in black space, faint fall of photons. Step up the magnification and resolution to:

A distant galaxy, a chalk thumbprint whorl, a cloud of points of light, a hovering firefly swarm, a crowded cloud of bright fantastic bodies, a multi-level masquerade where everyone was talking but no one could overhear. Donovan’s fetch – the body-construct that other users saw – was based on a younger self, not out of vanity but because he couldn’t be bothered to update it. Others inclined to the Masque of the Red Death approach. It looked like a heaven for the wicked.

‘Glad to see you, Donovan.’

The angel that spoke to him had chubby pink cheeks, iridescent feathered wings, a shining robe and an uncertain halo that wavered over her head like a smoke-ring.

‘I don’t think we’ve been introduced.’

The angel simpered, a visual effect so cloying that Donovan felt metaphysically sick.

‘My name is Melody Lawson. Do you remember me?’

Donovan struggled to sustain the illusion of telepresence as (‘back’ at the rig, as he couldn’t help thinking) he fumbled with a hot-key databoard. Melody Lawson’s details flickered past the corner of his eye.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘You and your husband left the movement – oh, it must be nearly twenty years ago. But I seem to recall a few very welcome sums of’ – he smiled – ‘angel money.’ Conscience money, more like. ‘What are you doing now, and why have you called me?’

‘I look after data security for Beulah City,’ Mrs Lawson said. ‘Cracker turned keeper, as they say. I must admit that what I learned in my young and foolish days has been enormously useful professionally. And I still share your concern about the dangers of AI, though some of your actions have been quite a nuisance to me in the past.’

‘And yours to me,’ Donovan said. It wasn’t entirely flattery: Beulah City’s censorship filters made it a tough one, although with its relatively backward systems it seldom deserved disruption anyway.

‘However,’ Mrs Lawson went on, ‘we should all be willing to let bygones be bygones when we find that we have a common interest, don’t you think?’

‘And what common interest is that?’ Donovan asked.

‘I think you know what I’m talking about,’ Mrs Lawson said.

Before Donovan could respond he heard a discreet murmur in his head informing him that somebody else in the Clearing House wanted to speak to him. It had to be someone high up in the informal hierarchy to get through at a time like this. Mrs Lawson, too, seemed to be getting paged. Donovan chinned the go-ahead, wondering if she had set him up for this. He remembered her, now, quite unassisted: she’d been devious even before she’d got religion.

A privacy bubble snapped into existence, enclosing them and two others: a man in black who looked like one of the Men In Black, the mythical enforcers of the mythical great UFO cover-up, his face a bloodless white, eyes sapphire-blue, forehead bulging in the wrong places, suit ill fitting; and a small man in what appeared to be a company fetch, blue overalls with a name-badge. Southeast Asian, probably Vietnamese.

The Man In Black spoke first. Even his voice sounded not quite right, a pirated copy of the human. Donovan wondered what irony underlay this simulation of a simulacrum, or whether it was a genuine attempt to intimidate.

‘Good evening. I am an agent of the Science, Technology and Software Investigation Service of the United Nations. You may refer to me as Bleibtreu-Fèvre.’

Donovan felt as if he were a cat watching a snake: he and Stasis had the same enemies and the same prey, but he regarded the agency, with its allegedly enhanced operatives and its undeniably advanced technology – more advanced than the technology which they existed to stamp out – as dangerously close to the kind of evils which for years he’d feared and fought. There had been occasions in the past when the Carbon Life Alliance had had to collaborate with Stasis, and they’d always left him with a crawling sensation on his skin.

‘Dr Nguyen Thanh Van, Research Director, Da Nang Phytochemicals,’ the Vietnamese man said. The voice and lip-synch had a thin quality that indicated either primitive kit or heavy crypto masking.

Donovan and Lawson introduced themselves for Van’s benefit, and Bleibtreu-Fèvre continued.

‘This afternoon,’ he said, ‘I personally intervened in an emerging situation involving some dangerous drug applications which were – inadvertently, I do not doubt – being developed by a, shall we say, subsidiary of Dr Van’s company. Earlier today, and unknown to me at the time, the security of that research was compromised by a swarm of information-seeking software constructs. Shortly thereafter, as I am sure you are well aware, a series of transient and potentially catastrophic events took place in the datasphere. One might be prepared to pass this off as coincidence were it not for two facts. One is that the focus of the disturbances has been traced to the facility in question. The second is that, while the disturbances have affected a wide range of services and enterprises, a statistically improbable number of them have centred on research programmes which in one way or another are associated with Da Nang Phytochemicals.’

Dr Van’s fetch flickered slightly, as if he’d been about to say something and thought better of it.

‘Almost but not quite the most disturbing feature of these events is that a considerable volume of research data, much of it hard-to-replace genetic archive material held at widely separated sites around the world, has simply disappeared. The most disturbing aspect of the problem is this:

‘A preliminary analysis of the scope and power of the source of these disruptions indicates that we are dealing with, at best, a virus of unprecedented sophistication and at worst with a manifestation of an autonomous artificial intelligence.’

‘The Watchmaker,’ Melody Lawson murmured.

‘That is indeed a possibility,’ said the Stasis agent.

‘Why have you contacted us?’ Donovan asked in as innocent a voice as he could manage.

‘Don’t fuck me about!’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre snarled. The vernacular vulgarity was a small shock after his previous stilted diction. ‘You know very well that the West Middlesex cell of your organization attacked the artificial-intelligence research unit at Brunel University last night. The drug laboratory was broken into around the same time—’

‘Nothing to do with me,’ Donovan interjected. Bleibtreu-Fèvre acknowledged this but continued implacably.

‘—and that one of your penetration viruses – illegal, and hazardous in its own right, I may add – was destroyed within that very area a few hours ago. Immediately thereafter your own interface with the system was crashed, presumably by the new AI. You then triggered a retaliatory demon attack, which by another coincidence destroyed the lab that I had been investigating. You, Doctor Van, are legally responsible for your company’s research, which is apparently of such great interest to this dangerous entity. I will take your cooperation as a gauge of the sincerity of your claim that you know nothing about any such connection. As for Mrs Lawson, it is very much to her credit that she contacted me on her own initiative, after encountering some early indications of the phenomenon.’

So that was it. Donovan suspected that a bit of ass-covering was going on here. Lawson had contacted him, and must have decided at the same moment that a parallel call to the legal authorities would be a good idea. Bleibtreu-Fèvre, no doubt frantic about how an otherwise minor lab-leak on his turf was escalating into a software-security crisis, would have been monitoring every call from the area and pounced on the opportunity.

‘In what context?’ Van asked, relieving Donovan of the necessity of revealing his curiosity. The angel-fetch brushed a wingtip against the Man In Black; some private communication passed between them and then Melody Lawson said: ‘I was investigating a Black Plan penetration of our business systems.’

‘That’s interesting,’ Donovan said. ‘I encountered the Black Plan in the same frame as the new entity – dammit, we might as well call it the Watchmaker – and there are all sorts of rumours flying around about a possible connection between them.’

‘Are there indeed?’ remarked Bleibtreu-Fèvre. He said nothing more for a few moments, his fetch taking on the barely controllable abstracted look that Stasis agents showed when accessing the net through their head patches. Then he snapped back to alertness.

‘What were you doing when your constructs encountered the…Watchmaker?’

Donovan sighed. A few hours ago, nothing had seemed more important than avenging the insult from Moh Kohn. Now that was only a squalid squabble.

‘I was pursuing a conflict with a common mercenary who had broken, ah, certain rules of engagement in the course of last night’s armed action—’ He stopped and frowned at Bleibtreu-Fèvre. ‘You said the drug-research project had been penetrated by some info-seeker agents.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, this mercenary, Moh Kohn, was definitely hacking about in the system.’ Donovan thought back to his conversation with Cat. ‘And he had visited a lab on campus shortly before. One that had been broken into.’

Bleibtreu-Fèvre’s eyes seemed literally to light up. He turned to Van.

‘Have you contacted the researcher, Janis Taine?’

‘I regret to say she has disappeared,’ Van said. ‘Possibly your intervention had something to do with that.’

Bleibtreu-Fèvre glared at him.

Van looked back, unperturbed. ‘The message she left was untraceable,’ he added.

‘Then she’s in Norlonto,’ said Melody Lawson. ‘It’s the only place within easy reach where that sort of crypto is legal.’

‘And where Stasis can’t go,’ Donovan added maliciously. ‘You’ll have to turn it over to Space Defense.’

‘We have a problem here,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said smoothly. ‘Stasis is the first line of defence against contingencies like the present situation. If we should fail, SD has a standing instruction to prevent any possible takeover of the datasphere by any AI not under human control. I am not at liberty to spell it out, but expressions like clean break and fresh start tend to crop up. Their response to a threatened degradation of the datasphere might be unacceptably drastic.’

Donovan took in this information with wildly mixed feelings: a certain grim elation that his fears of uncontrolled AI were shared by the most powerful armed force in history, and a sickly horror at what that armed force could do. If Space Defense ever decided to treat earth as, in effect, an alien planet, they’d have to prevent any organism, or any transmission, from ever getting off the surface again. Comsats would be lased, launch-sites nuked. Electromagnetic pulses from these and other nukes would wipe most computer memories. Production networks would unravel in days. They wouldn’t even have to burn the cities. The riots and breakdowns would do that for them.

‘Call it nine gigadeaths,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre said. ‘So. I hope I can count on your cooperation, both in containing the problem and in maintaining absolute secrecy.’

‘It seems we have an agreement,’ Donovan said, looking around. ‘Pay-offs can be arranged later, but can we take it from here that the usual immunities apply?’

‘Of course,’ said Bleibtreu-Fèvre impatiently. ‘Now, details.’

The division of labour he proposed was straightforward. Lawson would network with her counterparts in other communities to discreetly monitor the AI’s activity. Donovan would assist her in using any logged traces of their respective encounters with the entity to develop specific attack viruses for it, while calling off his normal sabotage programme. Van would make a full investigation of the various projects that the Watchmaker AI had targeted, and try to reestablish contact with the fugitive researcher Janis Taine.

‘It seems a reasonable hypothesis,’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre concluded, with a sort of civil-servant pedantry that had Donovan wishing he could clout him, ‘that Taine has fled to Norlonto, possibly in the company of Moh Kohn, if he indeed took an interest in her research and visited her lab. So we should track these two down if only to eliminate them from our inquiries. Ha, ha.’

He took notice of Donovan’s attempts to attract his attention.

‘I think I can help you with that,’ Donovan said as he stopped shrinking and enlarging his fetch, the cyberspace equivalent of jumping up and down. ‘Let me explain…’