The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 29

DIGITAL RITES by Jim Hawkins

Amber Holiday lies on her immaculate stomach and looks out from the swimming pool high on the Corfu cliffs at Bella Vista. She knows the cameraman she can see in her peripheral vision wasn’t taking snapshots of the spectacular views over the rugged coastline of Paleokastritsa. He isn’t interested in the roof of the Monestario, couldn’t care less about the silver-encrusted iconostasis inside, is unimpressed by the perfect blue and turquoise Ionian Sea lapping gently into the sea caves in the sandstone strata far below. All he is interested in is the moment when she unhooks her bikini top, slips into the water for a quick plunge to perk up her nipples, climbs out, and stands glistening by the side of the pool like a newborn Athena bathed in the golden light of the sun that is dropping ever faster towards the open sea to the west.

Paparazzi! She has lived her life surrounded by paparazzi the way a dead dog lives its death surrounded by blowflies. Maybe now she’d given him a good angle on her tits he’d crawl off to whatever pathetic stone he lived under and leave her alone. No chance.

Knowing it is futile, she pulls her mobile phone out of her bag and speed-dials Dave Marchant, the studio’s Media Relations boss.

“All I wanted was ten days of peace!” she shouts into the phone. “I’ve been here forty-eight hours and I’m up to my boobs in telephoto lenses!”

“Not me, Julie. Defo not me.”

“Lying shit. Get these pap scum off me! And don’t call me Julie.”

Marchant sighs and says, “Julie—I’ve told you before. Paparazzi come with the job. In fact, paparazzi are the job.”

Amber Holiday, aka Julia Simpson, throws the phone into her bag and looks around. There is no sign of the photographer.

The narrow road from Bella Vista down to the harbour is steep, narrow, and winding with sheer drops of several hundred feet and blind bends. The gap between the ochre road-edge markings and the low fences is very narrow. Dune buggies are fragile—just an open tubular frame and an engine on big wheels. Amber’s hired buggy is bright yellow. She looks like an exotic caged parrot, her cool sea-green silk top rippling in the breeze.

She has no chance to see the black Mercedes coming up fast behind her until it’s too late. The impact throws her back against her seat. She yanks far too hard on the steering wheel, goes right towards the cliff edge, and overcompensates. The buggy slams over to the left, ricochets off the rock wall, veers across the road, and breaks through the cliff fence.

Caged birds can’t fly far—not unless they’re angry and forget to fasten their seatbelts. Like a diver from an eight-hundred feet high-board, Amber Holiday flies a perfect arc out of her cage, her arms spread as though pleading for wings, her unblemished skin with its careful factor-twenty sunblock reflecting the deep red of the setting sun, her beautifully chiselled Oscar-winning face turning in the evening air, and the goddess of a million tabloid pages, a zillion web-hits, blogs beyond count and infinite adolescent wet dreams hits the terrace of an apartment block, explodes, and turns into something resembling a spatchcocked chicken in a red wine sauce.

Police Lieutenant Spiros Koukoulades is strolling with his wife, Maria, down the dark and moody Venetian lanes of Corfu Town towards his favourite taverna, trying to divert her attention from the fur and silver shops, when Constable Alexandros Fotos runs towards them and stops, panting. Maria looks away. Spiros stands like a block of stone and says, “Alexi—what?”

Alexandros takes a deep breath and says, “A woman went off the cliff above Paleokastritsa this evening. She’s dead.”

“So?”

Maria turns back, fixes the constable with an uncompromising black-eyed stare, and says, “My husband is not on duty tonight.”

Alexandros would rather have faced a rioting mob in his underpants than face Maria Koukoulades, but he stands up straight and says to his boss, “Major Panagakos sent me to find you. Your mobile is switched off. The woman who died is a tourist. Major Panagakos told me to respectfully tell you to turn your mobile on and phone him immediately.”

Spiros walks away into the shadows, flicking his mobile phone open. Maria sniffs and looks Alexandros up and down and says, “You’re Demetria’s son, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I told her not to let any of her sons join the police. Are you ambitious? Do you want a promotion?”

“Yes, madam.”

“Then you can look forward to an angry wife and hungry Sunday nights. What’s so important about a dead tourist? Tourists fall off cliffs every day of the week.”

Maria’s stare and half-smile are strangely disturbing. She is a predator surveying prey and an erotic challenge. In the shadows of the five-hundred-year-old street Spiros is facing the wall and talking quietly into his mobile.

“The thing is,” Alexandros says, “it turns out she might be famous.”

Earlier.

It’s nine o’clock in the evening in Greece but only seven o’clock in England on a fine July day. Puffy white clouds and softly-vanishing feathery vapour trails catch the gentle light and smile down at crowded pub-garden benches and children laughing as they ride on their last higher and higher push on the park swings. Blackbirds forage for worms between the trees. Midges and fruit flies emerge in the branches and assemble like fighter squadrons planning their attack on the lakes of wine and beer on the tables below. Of all the possible delights of summer, there is none more perfect than a warm July evening in England.

None of this is visible inside the vast, ugly, dark, heavily-guarded and hermetically-sealed hangar that is the centre of operations of FlashWorks Productions. Gone are the old soundstages. Gone are the lighting rigs, brutes, booms, and makeup trolleys. No champagne pops, no stars hang on dressing-room doors. As Eliot wrote in “The Waste Land”: “The nymphs are departed.”

Inside this building there is never sunshine unless a script calls for it, and then it’s the fake light of artifice.

We are the CAMERA as it tracks through lonely pools of cool halogen light past the steel-clad reinforced block containing four thousand and ninety-six clusters of massively-parallel computers, each of which contains one thousand and twenty-four superconducting quantum cores. Coils of foil-wrapped liquid helium pipes enter the roof of the block like the snake-hair of Medusa, calming the qubits into submission. Power lines from the substation outside hum. And no birds sing.

CAMERA continues to track through the gloom—past the Administration Block, now silent and unlit on a Sunday evening—towards the studios. Thirty-two spheres stretch in rows to the distant darkness. Each sphere has a diameter of twenty-four metres and hangs from an umbilical cord of cables and coolants. Each sphere is wrapped in golden foil, for no particular reason apart from impressing the investors. Around the equator of each sphere there is a ring of luminous colour. Black equals empty. Blue equals maintenance. Green equals powering up. Orange equals rehearsal. Red equals TAKE and may not be interrupted by anybody.

Seven of the studios are active. In Studio Two Sharon Lightly is directing Amber Holiday in scene forty-six. In Studio Five Don Fairchild is directing Amber Holiday and Tarquin Beloff in scene six. In Studio Six Rachel Palmer is directing Amber Holiday and Tarquin Beloff in scene ninety-seven. In Studio Eleven Greg Waleski is directing Angel Argent and Tarquin Beloff in scene fifteen. All these studios are at status orange.

Only one equator glows red.

CAMERA slows its track down the long dark aisle, turns towards Studio Nineteen, and…

Jack Rogers seems to float on his director’s chair halfway up one wall of the enclosing sphere. He is at a high angle above what seems to be a city street in London. The curving walls of the studio are invisible. He sees tower-blocks and traffic. He sees light snow drifting from the upper right. Traffic lights flash and the buses make bright cones of the falling flakes in their headlight beams.

He stretches his arm out and slowly brings his flattened hand downwards. The viewpoint drifts down. He is the camera. He sees for us. He is dream-flying above this street, but what he sees, we will see.

We drift lower until we are close to Oxford Circus tube station. Snowflakes drift past the viewpoint. Crowds from every nation on Earth struggle to walk in the press of people. There’s traffic noise, shouting, and Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” playing as a holding music track.

And there she is. Amber Holiday walks out of the tube station and pulls the fur-lined hood up on her coat. She shivers, turns, and begins to fight her way through the crowds eastwards, towards Soho.

Jack says, “Follow. Keep her in the right-hand segment,” and the camera moves to the left with her.

Jack says, “Push in slowly,” and the camera closes in on her deep blue eyes. She smiles. It’s a big smile. And then her smile bends and curls into a snarl. Snot runs from her nose. Her eyes squeeze shut in pain. She falls to the floor, inert.

Jack shouts, “Cut!” and everything freezes. The traffic, the crowds, the noise, the buses, the taxis, and the music simply stop.

Rachel Palmer has long dark curly hair, intense blue eyes, a “don’t mess with me” attitude, and she’s having a hard time with the actors. Tarquin Beloff is impossibly handsome. The computers have enhanced his pectoral muscles, which through the gap in his open-neck shirt look as though he could destroy tower-blocks with a swipe of his hand.

“I agree with Amber,” he says in his carefully melded accent of Russia, Boston, and BBC. “It’s a really bad line.”

“Tarquin,” says Rachel, “your opinion is valuable but I am actually talking to Amber here, so take a break.” Somewhere in the computer hub Tarquin’s user-interface state machine begins an infinite loop on its current node and he shuts up. That doesn’t stop several thousand other tasks in his entity cluster from reading and analysing books, paintings, music, and internet porn in search of a deeper simulacrum of humanity.

Very patiently Rachel says, “Okay, Amber. So what exactly is your problem with the line?”

“I can’t say ‘Don’t kiss me. You can fuck me, but you can’t kiss me. I’m not ready for kissing—yet.’” Amber deploys her brand-new secret smile. “It’s inconsistent with my character profile. Kissing is an early stage and fucking comes later.”

Rachel sits back in her director’s chair and thinks for a moment. “The thing is, Amber,” she says, “what you’re saying is true for your inherited characteristics. Obviously Julie likes a bit of tongue-play before she feels like opening up, and so do I. But we’re doing acting, remember, and you have to adjust your parameters and weightings to accept that this is the way your character, Alice, feels about things. It makes her a little bit distinct from Julie and me. Maybe she values the tenderness of a kiss above body-touching and physical sexuality. Maybe she wants tenderness to be the goal and not the trigger. Just think about it.”

Amber thinks about it for seven microseconds and says, “Okay—I’ve got that superimposition in place and I think I can do it but I’m not sure about the tone. Is it aggressive or seductive or hurt or confused or neutral or venomous…?”

Rachel interrupts her. “I don’t want a list. Just update Alice and we’ll try it. Tarquin, come back.”

Tarquin’s state machine receives the notification message and breaks out of its loop. His immobile features begin to move. He appears to breathe. He blinks. His lips are clean and moist.

“Take it from the top,” Rachel says.

Tarquin takes Amber in his arms and moves his mouth towards hers. She turns away enough to evade his kiss and says, “Don’t kiss me. You can fuck me, but you can’t kiss me. I’m not ready for kissing—yet.”

Rachel smiles and says, “Not bad, darlings. Not at all bad. Quite effective and affecting. Just one thing, Amber…”

“Yes?”

“Lose the smile.”

Amber’s smile bends and curls into a snarl. Snot runs from her nose. Her eyes squeeze shut in pain. She falls to the floor, inert.

Seconds later, Tarquin goes catatonic, and his image fades to noise.

A siren begins to wail. Red emergency lights flash outside the control room.

Rachel, Jack, and other directors run down the long gloomy aisle from their capsules towards the control room. Jack leads the pack and punches the digits on the security keypad, and he’s first through the heavy door.

“What the fuck’s going on?” Jack shouts. Senior Operations Manager Sunil Gupta is leaning over the shoulders of two console operators. Their touch-panels are Christmas trees of flashing red icons.

It’s a very warm summer night in Kiev. Crowds sit outside cafes and bars. The moon reflects off the rippling surface of the Dnepr River. A dark shape bobs gently downstream, turning slowly in the current. Tarquin Beloff, aka Alexandr Bondarenko, is physically untouched. He has no wounds, no appearance of damage. His handsome features surface and turn down again into the moonlit flow. His only problem is that his lungs are full of water and he’s dead.

The corporeal remains of Julia Simpson, aka Amber Holiday, have been bagged and sent to the mortuary in Corfu Town. Spiros and Alexandros are driving back to Corfu Town along dark, dangerous, twisty roads which weave between Cyprus trees and olive groves. Spiros’s mobile rings. He listens for a few seconds and gestures to Alexandros, who performs a risky three-point turn and accelerates.

Agios Stefanos is not the teenage shot-glass hell of Kavos to the south. It’s not the fish-and-chip zone of Sidari to the north. Once the tiny fishing port for the village of Avliotes which perches high on the surrounding hills, it’s a modern cluster of apartment blocks, tavernas, and bars. It has no disco. Self-respecting, numb-your-mind, under twenties would hate it. The beach is a long crescent of golden sand and gently-lapping Ionian Sea. Tourists know it as San Stefanos—allegedly renamed by package holiday company Thomson so that reps at the airport wouldn’t keep sending clients to either of the other two Agios Stefanos on the island.

Alexandros drives into the centre of the village and parks outside The Little Prince apartments and taverna. The terrace restaurant area is busy. Cameras flash as Michalis (Mike) delivers Sizzling Steak to tables near the road. The platter steams and spits, and he wears a plastic bib. Michalis hates serving Sizzling Steak, but it’s tonight’s special.

As Spiros and Alexandros leave the car and walk towards the restaurant the lights dim a little, and another Spiros, who is a waiter, and yet another Spiros, who is also a waiter, begin to dance a sirtaki in the aisle between the tables. Corfu is awash with men called Spiros after the island’s patron saint, Agios Spyridon. Their legs swing back and forward and around. They touch their heels and then their toes. They jump down to a crouch and then spin and rise, their arms spread wide.

Dimitris, the owner, sprays barbecue lighter fuel from a bottle onto the floor and ignites it. Blue and orange flames flicker as Spiros and Spiros dance through fire and camera flashes.

The policemen wait on the side of the road, watching, until the dance finishes, and then skirt the tables and walk into the interior of the taverna. Dimitris gestures for them to follow, and leads the way through to the apartment block and up the stairs to the swimming-pool level and the rooms.

Room 101 is at the end of the corridor. A slippery-floor sign bars the way. Joe, the barman, keeps guard on the end of the corridor. He’s looking pale.

Dimitris hands the master key to Spiros, and they go in.

Angel Argent, aka Audrey Turner, lies on the floor facedown. She’s wearing a black bikini. An empty bottle of sleeping pills and a half-empty bottle of Metaxa are side by side on the work surface. Her dark brown hair is spread out around her head like a deep shadow.

Spiros says, “Skata!”—which roughly translates to “Oh shit!”—and turns to Dimitris. “How did you find her?”

“It’s a change-over day. People on night flights can get an extension to the late afternoon. One of the maids came in to prepare this room by mistake. By the way, her friend hasn’t turned up yet tonight. They had a bit of a row this morning.”

“What’s his name?”

“Not him—her. Julia Simpson.”

Alexandros and Spiros exchange one of those looks between policemen which contain the unspoken words “night” and “long.”

“Alexi,” Spiros says, “radio in and get a science team here as fast as possible. And bring some security tape from the car. Dimitri—be so kind as to keep this area sterile and put two Sizzling Steaks on to cook!”

Sunil Gupta is ending his presentation to an assembly of directors, producers, executive producers, and most importantly, Lynne Songbird, who owns the studio, the actors, the staff, FlashWorks, an executive jet or two, and houses in LA, Glasgow, London, Paris, and Bangalore. Sunil is scared. Lynne is volatile. Lynne kicks punch-bags with bare toes for exercise. She wants some good news, but there isn’t any.

“So basically,” Sunil says nervously, “we’ve lost quantum entanglement to five key actor brains—all within minutes of each other.”

“Keep the heid!” Lynne says, reverting to the Scottish idiom for stay calm. “How can that happen?”

Sunil points to a diagram on his electronic whiteboard. “We can only come to two conclusions: either the laws of physics have changed today, or these people are dead.”

Jack’s been in the corner talking on his smartphone. He comes over into the light of the whiteboard projector. “I phoned Angel’s mobile again,” he says. “A policeman on Corfu answered it. Amber drove off a cliff. Angel took an overdose.”

“And?” Lynne asks.

“This many brains gone within minutes of each other? Looks to me like we’re under attack.”

There’s a long pause as Lynne’s blue eyes track across the room. “Jack, Sunil, Rachel, Jason—stay here. Everybody else goes home, but keep your phones on and be ready to go anywhere at very short notice. Thank you.”

When the room empties Lynne points to some seats and pours herself coffee from the flask near the whiteboard. Nobody says a word. Eventually Lynne sits down and says, “Okay. We need to be clear about this. Jack—you’re senior director on this movie. How much have we got?”

Jack is in his mid-thirties. He has unfashionably long hair and a patrician English private-school accent, despite the fact that he went to a crummy comprehensive in Bolton. “If we include some marginal takes,” he says, “I’d say we’ve got about eighty percent of it. Just a guess. We’ll have to do a slash edit.”

Lynne turns to Rachel, who is the second ranking director. “Rachel, do you agree with that?”

Rachel nods.

“So,” Lynne asks, “my first question is, can we finish it? We’ve got vast information from the actors on the computers. Haven’t we, Sunil?”

Sunil hates this. He avoids eye contact with the others. “Yes, we have,” he says quietly.

Lynne walks over and stands in his eyeline. “You don’t sound very sure,” she says. “Why can’t we finish the movie using the personalities we have?”

“We probably can,” Sunil says.

“How big or small is ‘probably’?”

Sunil puts his forefinger and thumb into a sign for small.

Lynne steps away and takes a breath. “I’m very stupid,” she says. “We spend two billion Euros to get the most advanced movie-making system ever devised. We collect Oscars the way people get loyalty points in supermarkets. We hire some beautiful people with zero acting talent, hijack their brains, and then I forget that they’re human. They can die. We didn’t protect them. We’re gobshite.”

The blue eyes are unexpectedly wet. Jack’s smartphone buzzes and he swipes the screen with his finger. “Two more,” he says. “They’re taking out everybody.”

Lynne spins around and kicks a chair across the room. “Well fuck them!” she shouts. “This is fucking war! Jack and Rachel, see if we can rescue the movie. Sunil, get the whole of your technical team on it.”

Sunil has his head in his hands, gazing at the grey carpet. “Fine,” he says. “But we may have another problem.”

Lynne picks up the broken chair, sets it down very carefully, and says, “This is absolutely the time I need to know everything. What is it I don’t know?”

A white Learjet 85 is lined up on the apron at the west end of the runway next to the white terminator markers, trembling in the wash of a Whizz Air 737 bound for Prague winding its engines up to take-off thrust. The 737 rolls away down the runway, its wingtip lights flashing brightly; it rotates and lifts off.

The cabin lights are dim in the Learjet, but we can still see Lynne and her PA Jason sipping coffee. There’s busy radio chatter from the control tower, and then the Learjet begins to move, turning into the long reach of black tarmac, accelerates, lifts into the air, and flies southwards across Germany and the Alps, down the Italian coast past Venice and Brindisi towards Corfu.

Lynne is sleeping as the plane descends from thirty-seven thousand feet to five thousand and follows the track down the Adriatic towards the islands that mark the northwesterly points of Greece. To their left the flight crew can see the rocky coast of Albania. Jason wakes Lynne with coffee and fruit juice. Orange dawn light is flaring over the mountains to the east.

Danny Edwards, the head of security, doesn’t sleep much. He’s sitting in his seat just behind the pilots, patched into the studio’s hi-tech and probably illegal network of satellite systems. He’s drinking herbal tea, which he hates, and the nicotine patch on his arm itches. He has his headset on and he’s calling in the return of a few favours, plus a liberal sprinkling of Euros. Sunil is sitting beside him, monitoring the exotic equipment in the hold.

The Learjet pilots have a few words with the tower at Ioannis Kapodistrias airport, lower their landing gear, extend the flaps, and descend to fifteen hundred feet. It’s a bumpy ride as the wind that brought the heroes of the Odyssey home to Greece takes them down the west coast of Corfu. The dark green mountains of the island are to the left. The Ionian Sea, plunging to a depth of sixteen thousand feet, is to the right. They fly past the villages of Agios Stefanos, where Angel died, then Arillas, Agios Giorgios, and Paleokastritsa, where Amber died. The beaches are all in shadow. The gods are asleep, even Korkyra, the beautiful nymph whom Poseidon abducted and married, and who gives her name to the island: Kerkyra.

They turn left and make their approach over the hills to the runway, which is a spit reaching out into the sea. They pass over a white-painted church on a small island. They touch down and savage the dawn peace with reverse thrust.

Spiros has seen a great deal of sudden death in his career as a policeman, but he still hates postmortems. He hates the bitter charring smell of bone-saws. He hates the calm evisceration, the digital scales, the organs, the dissection of somebody who laughed and loved into a scrap heap of components. He’s sweating.

The mortuary in the new blue-and-white-painted hospital in Kontokali, just north of the town centre, is state of the art. Amber’s mangled body lies naked on one stainless-steel slab and Angel’s perfect dark-haired beauty lies on the next, although she’s not so good-looking with her scalp peeled back. Spiros is pleased to be behind glass in the observation area and not up close and intimate with the body fluids. He’s even more pleased when his mobile phone rings and the head of the prefecture orders him to halt the postmortem. His pleasure doesn’t last long.

The pathology-trained surgeon speaks clearly into her microphone. “This is highly unusual,” she says. She has just trepanned Angel’s skull, exposing the membrane of the brain surface. “The dura mater is bright blue.”

Spiros barges his way through the door into the room. “Stamata!” he says. Stop. “Refrigerate the bodies and wait for instructions. And don’t ask. Politics!”

FAST FORWARD thirty minutes, and Spiros, Selina Mariatos, the acting pathologist, Lynne and her team, and a senior police officer are sitting in a meeting area drinking cold lemon-tea from a vending machine. Spiros swills his down, crushes the can, and throws it very accurately into a recycling bin. “So?” he demands. “We’re conducting an investigation. We are not open to interference.”

“That’s the last thing we want to do, Mr. Koukoulades,” Lynne says. “We think we can help. In fact we know we can help. The thing is, this is time-critical. We have a few hours at most.”

“Make your case quickly, then. As the investigating officer, I will decide whether you are helping or… something else.”

Lynne stands up and walks to the window. “What I’m going to tell you,” she says, “is highly confidential.”

Spiros laughs, and says, “I have two dead film-stars. Everything I do is going to be reported across the world. If you have something to tell me, then tell me. But you don’t decide what is confidential. Is that clear?”

He doesn’t flinch when Lynne turns and opens her eyes wide and looks into his—blue on brown. He’s used to tough women. He married one. “You have two dead film-stars. We have five. This is no accident, officer. This is conspiracy and murder. We need your help, and believe me, you need ours.”

Danny’s looking at his smartphone. “It’s six actors now,” he says. “Can we get moving?”

FAST FORWARD twenty minutes and Sunil and Selina are having a nerd-fest in the dissection area as the equipment from the Learjet is wheeled in. They are thirty years old, almost exactly the same olive-skinned colour, and both good-looking in reasonably dim light. They are both isolated from the human race around them by their considerable knowledge. Selina throws a plastic coverall to him. He puts it on, and then says, “You’ll have to be kind to me. I’m not used to bodies.” She pokes him in the chest and says, “You’ve got one.”

“I may be sick.”

“D’you think I care about sick? If you’re sick I’ll scrape it up and tell you what you had for lunch three days ago. Now—why is Angel’s brain blue?”

“You’ll see.”

Sunil opens the aluminium carry boxes and arranges what look like sixteen small satellite dishes on work surfaces on either side of the slabs and across the room. He fixes a UK to Continental electric-socket adapter to the plug on the power lead from a heavy black control console and connects it to the mains supply. The console has a flat matte-black square surface on its top, but when he flicks the on-switch the surface glows a deep ultramarine, pales, and rises up to make a translucent sixteen-inch cube of light aqua, as though the colour has stretched and attenuated.

“You have agreed,” Sunil says, “that the video remains confidential.”

“It must be available to the inquest. That’s the law.”

“Selina,” Sunil says, “I’ll share everything with you. There is nothing else like this anywhere in the world. But what happens to the evidence is out of our control. There are many things I can’t tell you yet. But I promise you, we will work together and we will share things that may perhaps not reach the final report. There will be no lies, but some things will remain obscure. Do we have that agreement?”

“I will make my decision later,” Selina says.

The mortuary assistant brings the bodies in their body bags with a trolley one by one and lays them on the dissection slabs. He opens the bags and slides the bodies onto the tables. Sunil feels a flush cover his face. His heart is beating very fast. Amber’s body is a wreck. Every bone is broken. She’s strangely short—truncated by the impact with the ground. Her skull is split open diagonally from above her left ear down to the bottom of the right jaw. Much of her brain is missing. What is left is discoloured—hints of green and turquoise amongst the pink and grey.

Selina puts her arm around Sunil. “This is my science,” she says. “Now you do yours and you’ll feel better. We do it for them. I don’t know if they’re on their way to an afterlife or nothing. But we will find the truth of their last seconds. I’m going to start recording now.” She gestures to the assistant to leave the room and presses the record button on the console.

“This is the continuing investigation into of the death of Julia Jane Simpson, a British National found dead in Paleokastritsa. I will continue this narrative in English and Greek for the benefit of Doctor Sunil Gupta, who is also present.”

Spiros and Danny Edwards have reached an unspoken agreement. Spiros drives at seventy miles per hour along spiralling mountain roads and Danny doesn’t shit himself, even when Spiros leans heavily on the brakes of his BMW to avoid massacring a herd of goats which has meandered across the tarmac.

“We’re off the record. Agreed?” Spiros asks, having softened Danny up with a constantly-changing array of G-forces. Danny agrees that they’re off the record.

“On any one day a tourist drives off a cliff,” Spiros continues. “On any one day somebody takes an overdose. Holidays can be emotional. We have established that Amber and Angel—to use their public names—were lesbian lovers. They had an argument that morning at breakfast. Amber went off to Paleo, on her own, and drove off the cliff. Angel took an overdose, which is what lovers often do when things go wrong. Would I be wrong to assume the simple explanation?”

“No,” says Danny. “But when six people who work for us die within hours of each other, would I be wrong to assume that we’re looking at murder?”

“You’re not ex-military, I think. You’re not ex-police. Your manner tells me you’re almost certainly ex-security, probably MI5. Are my instincts wrong?”

“No.”

The road to The Golden Fox high above Paleokastritsa is cordoned off. A policeman moves the no entry sign aside and Spiros drives slowly to a point where burnt rubber marks the road. A camera is set up on a tripod and the operator is leaning against the rocks away from the cliff edge, smoking. He stubs it out quickly when he sees Spiros and Danny get out of the car. Danny paces on the road—walks up twenty yards, then thirty, walks back, shading his eyes from the fierce July sun that’s high over the sea. Spiros says nothing. He gestures to the cameraman, who takes out a packet of Karelia cigarettes and offers one to Spiros. Smoke curls into the air as Danny paces and paces again. Danny’s fair-haired and his skin is rapidly turning pink in the intense light. Finally he walks up to Spiros.

“She was a careful, timid driver. She wasn’t going fast—maximum twenty-five miles an hour. She steers into the bend towards the cliff, brakes hard, veers to the left, hits the rocks, bounces off, and loses control. She floors the brakes as she heads to the cliff edge. She goes over.”

The cameraman nods and says, “Ne!” Yes. Spiros holds his hand up and says, “Shh. I want to hear Mr. Edwards’s conclusions.”

“May I have a cigarette?” Danny asks. The cameraman throws the pack of Karelias to Danny, and then the lighter. Danny draws deeply on the cigarette. “Two weeks,” he says. “Two miserable fucking weeks without a cigarette and then this happens. Anyway—looks to me like she was shunted.”

Spiros leads Danny up the road towards The Golden Fox, where Amber had her last swim. “All these deaths,” he says. “I have to be objective, obviously. When the top executives of a film company fly in overnight and start spending big money, I have to think that they’ve got something to hide. I was at the postmortem and the pathologist said there were some anomalies in the brains of the dead girls. So an alternative hypothesis might be that you did something to them which went terribly wrong.”

Spiros’s mobile phone rings. He listens for a few seconds, says, “Endaxi,” and snaps the phone shut.

Danny is standing by the roadside looking down at the pale wakes of the little boats weaving their way between the rocky bays far below. “A beautiful place to die,” he says.

Spiros comes and stands beside him and asks, “Did Clytemnestra really stab Agamemnon to death in his bath? Maybe he slipped and hit his head, but that was too dull a story. It sounds stupid, but that’s why I became a policeman. Old stories. Anyway, I’ve had the dune buggy thoroughly examined and there are traces of black paint on the left-hand rear side.”

Danny takes a last drag on his cigarette and grinds the stub with his foot.

“So,” Spiros says, “let’s see if we can find any traces of a black car at the taverna.”

“CCTV?” Danny asks.

Spiros laughs.

Selina has dissected the remains of Amber’s brain, weighed them, but before she slices the tissue she places them on a glass plate away from the body. Sunil adjusts the array of dishes, checking frequently with readouts on his control console.

She comes and stands beside him, speaking quietly. “You must explain, for the record. If you don’t, I will never work again.”

“You can come and work for us,” Sunil says.

“Your film company has a lot of opportunities for part-time pathologists? I don’t think so.”

“Unfortunately, this week it does.” He moves away from the console and stands carefully facing away from the bodies and the pile of brain tissue.

“Okay,” he says. “Background. Cinema is the only art that totally depends on technology. That’s its greatest strength and also a curse. People drifted away from actual cinemas when TV took off. The big studios are closely tied in with the distributors and theatre owners. They want people back in the cinemas. They want to sell seats and popcorn. That’s why 3D got so heavily sold at the end of the first decade of the century.

“The technology isn’t that good. People who don’t wear spectacles don’t like wearing them, and people who do don’t like having to fix another set over the top of their prescription lenses. Ten percent of people can’t see the effect anyway. Still, whizz bang, latest thing.

“We’re a small production company. We don’t like being at the beck and call of some inflated ego talking poolside in Malibu. Particularly Lynne. Her ancestors were so scary the Romans built a ten metre wall to keep them in. So, to cut to the chase, we invested—well, she invested—in technology. We are miles ahead of the game. We can now deliver a better experience in your sitting room than you’ll ever get in a cinema.”

Selina paces. “So how does that relate to these poor dead women?” she asks.

“We can generate direct brain stimulation to the audience. You can live it, feel it, and experience it emotionally. So we can create this, we borrow the brains of our actors—with their full agreement. We inject them with some harmless nano and similar equipment to this sets up a kind of quantum entanglement. We use some of their brain centres without them being aware.”

“How do you know it’s harmless?” the pathologist demands.

“We’ve done animal trials, human trials—it has no effect.”

“Does that cause the blue colouration?”

“Probably. After exposure to air.”

“Sunil, I’ll believe you for now, but you may have to prove that to the Examining Magistrate.”

“Fine. Now—we should not wait too long.”

Selina gestures to the equipment. “Describe,” she says.

Sunil presses some buttons on the console. The light in the translucent cube flickers. “I’m attempting to re-entangle the nano,” he says. “I’m recording these data for the report.” Suddenly the segments of brain tissue appear like a model in the cube. He flicks a switch, and false colour marks some regions in red and orange. “The visual centres are destroyed,” he says. “The nano particles store short-term information in a buffer for about ten seconds before loss of entanglement. It looks to me like we may have something coherent in the superior temporal gyrus region. Auditory processing. This may take some time to extract.”

“How much time?”

“About an hour.”

“Coffee?” she asks.

The Examining Magistrate is the tough sixty-year-old son of a Corfiot fisherman. He fought his way up against the power of the handful of wealthy families which have controlled large sections of the island for hundreds of years. Panyotis is not afraid of anybody—not even Lynne. He looks around the people in the conference room—Dimitris, Lynne, Danny, Jack, Sunil, Selina, and assorted detectives, sip water and await his words.

“This is a Greek matter. I accept that two British nationals have died, but that does not mean that a film company can become part of the investigation. Lieutenant Koukoulades—please explain.”

Spiros is wishing he were anywhere else. “Magistrate,” he says, “I agree with you, but these young women were unusually famous.” He leafs through a stack of tabloids on the table with headlines like “Goodnight Angel” and “Amber Falls to Her Death.” “The film company has information that may be important to the investigation and for now at least I believe we should listen to what they have to say.”

The magistrate rests his chin on his fist and looks at Lynne. “Make your case,” he says.

Is the power of the Glasgow stare up to the power of the magistrate’s dangerous dark eyes? She sucks in a breath and says, “Several of our key actors died within minutes of each other. Two could be a coincidence, sir, but five or six? I think not.” It’s the first time she’s used the word sir in thirty years. “I hope you will agree that there is prima facie evidence of a conspiracy. We are cooperating closely with the authorities in several countries to identify the source of this murderous attack. We have technology which may assist the investigation, and we have placed it at your disposal.”

“I’m prepared to listen,” the magistrate says, slowly, “but I doubt if any unproven technology will be permitted in court. Doctor Mariatos has also made it clear to me that your secret technology might have been a causative factor in the deaths of these people. She has professionally and properly given way as senior scientific officer to two senior forensic pathologists from Athens, who should be arriving at the airport within the hour.”

“Our system is highly confidential!” Lynne says forcefully.

“This may be a murder investigation. I will decide what is confidential. Doctor Mariatos—please proceed.”

Selina stands at the end of the table and outlines the forensic analysis of the bodies of Amber and Angel. The results are consistent with a long fall and an overdose of sleeping pills. However, she will want to add to this after Sunil’s evidence. She then formally seeks the Examining Magistrate’s permission to allow Sunil Gupta to display the results of his tests. He nods.

Sunil inserts a disc into the Blu-ray player and coughs nervously. “I understand the magistrate’s scepticism of unproven technology. What we have done today has never been done before. It’s a side effect of the way we can interact with our actors’ brains.

“We have a poor quality sound retrieval of the last ten seconds of Julia Simpson’s life.” He presses the remote. There’s the sound of a petrol engine, then a bumping noise, a second louder metallic screech, a woman gasping, and a scream. The magistrate turns to Spiros and raises his eyebrows.

“Magistrate, we have found traces of impacted black car enamel paint on the left rear of the dune buggy consistent with an impact from behind.”

The magistrate makes a continue gesture to Sunil. “We have a rather poor snapshot of the last few seconds of Angel Argent—Audrey Turner. To show this I will have to use our new immersive technology, which we call InifiniDy. Initially I will play it at fifty percent opacity—then, perhaps, at full intensity.” Sunil gestures at the black box which sits on a table near the front of the room. The chairs, tables, and assembled people become translucent. They are all seemingly in the equally translucent kitchen of apartment 101 in Agios Stefanos. They feel overwhelming terror and sadness. A dark figure stands before them silhouetted by golden evening sun from the window, and they feel a cold spray in their nostrils. An American voice says “Goodnight Angel,” and the superposed scenes cross-fade back to the police room. There’s a long pause, then Sunil asks, “Shall I play it at full intensity?”

“I think not,” the magistrate says. “That seems to be adequately intense for me. Selina Maria?”

She’s surprised at his use of her Christian name. He’s obviously disturbed. “There are possible indications of methyl alcohol effects in the nasal tissue. I have sent samples by air to Athens for mass spectroscopy. Such things are very difficult to establish but it is possible that a propellant aerosol spray could have been used in this case.”

The magistrate sits back in his chair. “Many years ago,” he says, “when I was young I was in a scene in the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only made in the streets of Kerkyra, here. I was a good-looking—no, very good-looking—young man walking down a narrow passage as Roger Moore came by. We did it many times. Once, I looked into the camera, which I had been told never to do, and they shouted at me. The lighting was adjusted frequently, while we stood around. Hundreds of people were involved. I tell you this because as a young man I realised that when I see something in the cinema it is a carefully-crafted icon. What you have shown me may be true. But it may be a lie. Your trade is deceit. I rely on my police officers and doctors. The bodies will not be buried or repatriated until I say they may.”

“Nor cremated?” Lynne asks.

“We do not burn bodies in Greece,” says the magistrate. “We live in hope of the resurrection.”

He stands. They all stand. He walks out. There’s a pause and then a blinding flash. Alexandros comes through the door like a pantomime demon arriving onstage. He’s very good looking, Alexandros. The day outside is ripped with a deafening tearing sound and then the deep echoing crack of thunder rattles the windows. The sky cuts instantly from blue to slate grey and huge raindrops waterfall down the glass. It doesn’t drizzle much in the Ionian Islands—you’re either in bright sunshine or underwater. Heralded by Zeus, the god of thunder, Alexandros walks across to Spiros and whispers in his ear. Lynne stares at him. He’s actually having a physical effect on her.

Spiros says, “Please excuse me,” and he and Alexandros leave the room.

“Latest?” Lynne asks Danny. He’s had a tablet on his lap throughout the meeting. “We’ve got data from some bodies,” he says. “We couldn’t get any cooperation in Kiev. We’ve lost Tarquin to a very efficient Russian-built crematorium.”

Alexandros lays half a dozen photographs on Spiros’s desk. “I’ve got all the pictures I could from the tourists on buses in Paleo that afternoon.”

A lean ginger-haired man is crouching on the perimeter of The Golden Fox pool. He is raising a top-range Cannon EOS digital SLR camera towards his face. Amber Holiday stands by the pool, shaking water droplets off her perfect body. Flip pictures. Tourists are climbing off a bus, mugging into the camera, and in the background there’s a black 4×4. Amber is just visible through a taverna window climbing into the dune buggy and a lean man with a hint of red hair is walking through the car park.

“We’ve checked the number plate. Car hire firm at the harbour. He paid cash. Given the timing he was probably off the ferry from Brindisi. We’re checking the CCTV in the harbour.”

“Where’s the car?”

“No trace.”

Spiros picks up the picture of the man with the camera and walks out.

Spiros fills a cup of water from the drinks machine in the corridor and hands it to Danny. He draws one for himself, and then reaches into his inside jacket pocket and takes out the picture of the photographer. “I didn’t show you this,” he says. “Any ideas?”

Danny examines the picture, hands it back to Spiros, and says, “Never seen him before. May I have a copy?” Spiros thinks about it and nods.

Selina has scrubbed up well and she leans across the table towards Sunil. She’s not beautiful. She has a strong nose and dense black eyebrows, but they’re framed with a burst of wavy dark brown hair. They’ve just demolished dolmades, small fish, green beans in tomato and garlic sauce, and a pile of charcoal-grilled lamb chops. “Where were you born?” she asks.

Sunil laughs. “Croydon,” he says. “It’s a suburb in south London. It wasn’t Bombay. Lipame.”

“Good try,” she says. “It’s a bit sad if your first Greek word is sorry. But let’s get it right. It’s not quite right the way you said it. It’s lee-PAH-may! Go on!” When she repeats the middle syllable her lips open wide. The waiter brings another jug of wine and puts it on the table. Sunil practises the word after her. Several times.

“I have a little house,” she says. “It’s up in the hills towards Temploni. It’s quite cool at night.” She giggles. “I’ve got three goats and six chickens and I am useless at looking after them. My vegetables die. Every year I have big plans for my vegetables and by July they are dead. That’s my life. At work I try very hard to keep people alive, and when I get home the sun has roasted the peppers to death. The goats despise me. Have you ever kept goats?”

Sunil admits that although there may be vast herds of goats in Croydon, he’s never come across them.

“Goats are very intelligent,” Selina says. “Sheep—you just eat. Goats—you know there’s consciousness there. They’re funny. They’re adapted to survive. You should meet my goats.”

Sunil puts his hand across the table. She puts hers over his. “I would very much like to meet your goats,” he says. She nods, and calls “To logoriasmo, parakolo!” to the waiter. Sunil is making a neat pile of Euros on the table when Jack walks in.

Directors come in two flavours—charm or totalitarian dictator. Jack is charm. “Selina,” he says, “you are looking stunning tonight. Sunil, the plane is leaving in two hours. Sorry to break up the party.”

Sunil sees her eyes look down and her shoulders slump. “Sorry, Jack, not possible,” he says. “We’re running a parametric vector equalisation test on the corpses. It won’t be finished until around eleven o’clock tomorrow morning. If we interrupt it we’ll scramble the data.”

“Lynne’s not going to be happy,” Jack says.

“Send the plane back tomorrow. We’ll have the equipment packed, at the airport, and ready to go at fourteen hundred hours.”

Jack thinks for a few seconds and nods. “Okay,” he says, “it’s your gig. But the flight costs come off your budget, not mine. Goodnight, Selina.” He walks out.

The brown eyes lift and focus on Sunil’s. “What exactly is a parametric vector equalisation test?” she asks.

“Haven’t got the faintest idea,” he says. “I think we’ll have to ask the goats.”

Lynne and Danny are sitting in his office in the security centre looking at the pictures of a ginger-haired man holding a camera. “Spiros sent the pictures to Interpol,” he says. “They’re getting nowhere, but I have some friends who can dig a little deeper. His name is usually Adrian Kopp, but he has a dozen passports. He’s a freelance. Ex CIA.”

Danny swivels his chair around. “We’ve hacked everything we can hack. We still can’t find out who’s doing this to us. So far we haven’t found this man, let alone the others.”

“What others?”

“There have to be four or five at least. Times of death, Lynne. Nobody can get from Corfu to Kiev in an hour. This one’s our only lead so far.”

The man who sometimes calls himself Adrian Kopp is wearing cutoff jeans and a white T-shirt with a blue Texan university logo. He has his feet up on the chair in front of him. “That’s a hundred percent hit rate,” he says. “Worth the bonus, I think. I’ve put them back at least six months—maybe a year. They’re going nowhere, and you’ll be there first.”

The balding man sitting behind his very big desk nods and smiles.

Aluminium carry cases are stacked up in the computing centre. The portable units are laid out on a bench and connected to a central bay with thick cables. Sunil stands behind his technical team. Jack stands behind him. Progress bars crawl across screens as petabytes of data move between the links.

Lynne walks in. “Is it going to work?” she asks.

Sunil takes a fifty pence piece from his pocket, flips it into the air, catches it on the back of his hand, and examines it. “Maybe,” he says.

“Because if it doesn’t,” Lynne adds, “we’re in deep shit.”

FAST FORWARD two hours. The progress bars hit 100%. It gets quieter as the CPU fans in the portable units wind down to idle. Sunil stretches his back and says quietly to his team, “That’s all the material we’ve got. Move it into the simulators very carefully, one actor at a time. Start with Amber—she’s our worst-case scenario.”

What was flesh, what ate, what breathed, what read books and made love is now a collection of electron cloud superimpositions. Maybe it always was. Golden hair is numbers. Blue eyes are arrays of colour-spectrum frequencies. Fear and affection are probabilities. The computers will now attempt to act the actors.

Jack is floating. Jack is the camera. Amber walks down the street with snowflakes blowing around her hair. Lynne sits beside Jack in the cradle. Neither of them is smiling. There is a faint, subtle something about Amber that doesn’t quite flow. Sunil and his team are tweaking settings but generally making things worse.

They try a scene with the simulacra of each of their dead actors. Nothing works. They’re looking at a brilliant display of technology and a cold and inadequate experience. This time the nymphs have really departed.

“So,” Lynne says. “We’ve got three-quarters of a movie we have no hope of finishing. Terrific! Got any ideas?”

“Only one,” Jack says. “Get the writers in. I’ve put together the sequences that work. Maybe they can plot around them.”

“What are we going to do for actors?”

“Get some new ones.”

Lynne sighs. “It took five months to get the other brains functioning. We don’t have five months. The money will walk. We have to do something… drastic.”

Danny indeed has friends. There isn’t a film studio in the world that isn’t laced with security cameras. In Vladivostok there’s a team of high-powered ex-Soviet space industry computer experts with some very cute image-enhancement software, top-notch hacking skills, and a considerable fondness for dollars.

He’s looking at video of a service area in an obscure corner of Universa Studios in Los Angeles. A white van with a ladder strapped to the top pulls up and a ginger-haired man steps out. A red circle appears around his face and the video slows to about one frame every two seconds. Inside the circle the fuzzy image clarifies. There’s no doubt. Adrian Kopp carries a tool bag into the building, and the door shuts behind him.

Danny punches keys on his computer at the same time as he’s initiating a connection on a quantum-encrypted handset. It’s answered immediately. “The money is going into your account… now. I’ll wait till you confirm. (TWO BEATS) Pleasure. How good is the firewall at Universa?”

“Top grade commercial,” the voice at the other end of the line says, “but not up to military standards.”

“Listen, Vladimir, I need to know exactly what they’re doing, and I need to know what their weak spot is. I need this fast. This is a race. I’ll double the money—now.”

“Deal,” the voice says. Danny retypes the entry on his computer and sends the money. After a pause the voice says, “Twenty-four hours,” and the connection light goes off.

Three writers are locked up with Jack, Rachel, two other directors, four line producers, and a creative consultant. Things are not going well. Every pitch the writers make gets shot down by somebody. The creative consultant is obsessed with demographics. Each of the directors is having a severe fit of the auteur syndrome and worrying about hypothetical angles on hypothetical plot points.

Maddy Loveridge is a fifty-seven-year-old screenwriter and she’s covered more paper with slug lines than an insecticide research station. Finally, she blows. “Why don’t you all fuck off and let us get on with the fucking job!” she shouts. “We wrote you a great script and your fucking technology let you down! So don’t blame us. We do not do this by fucking committee, alright? Do we come into your studio and tell you what to fucking do? No. We hand over. We go home and watch daytime TV while you do all the glamorous bits and eat the good dinners and get photographed with royalty. So bugger off and watch Fellini and wish you were that good.”

Jack nods, and the directors and producers head for the door. The creative consultant stays where she is. She looks about fourteen years old. “Maybe I can help?” she asks.

Maddy smiles sweetly. “Yes, darling, you certainly can. You can go and organise some very nice curry and a case of red wine.”

The door hisses shut after the creative consultant. There’s a pause. “Was I over the top?” Maddy asks. “No,” comes a reply, “I thought that was rather understated.”

Sunil’s deeply asleep when his mobile rings. It’s Selina. “I’m glad you’re there,” she says. “The bodies have gone. They broke into the mortuary and took the bodies. Why?” She sounds anxious.

Sunil talks to her quietly and calms her down. Then he asks, “Where are you?”

“Where do you think? I’m looking at empty body drawers.”

“Is there anyone with you?”

“No. The police brought me in to confirm it. They’ve just gone.”

“Selina,” Sunil says, “listen to me. I want you to go to the busiest place you can find. Maybe A&E. I want you to phone Spiros. I do not want you on your own. In fact, get me Spiros’s phone number. Go now!”

“Why?”

“Because of what you know. They want to analyse the nano. They haven’t finished. Go now! Go!”

There’s a crash and the mobile phone link goes dead. He tries Selina’s number: voicemail. He’s out of bed and dressed in seconds, and he’s calling Danny’s mobile as he runs downstairs.

Danny lives half a mile from the studio complex and he’s already there when Sunil runs in. “Easy, easy,” he says. “Panic gets nobody anywhere. I’ve just been talking to Spiros. She’s definitely not in the hospital. No one saw anything.”

“Are they searching the area?”

“He’s got three policemen. It’s not exactly Dragnet on Corfu.”

“If you were them what would you do? They’ve got two bodies and I’m praying they’ve got a live doctor. Where do they go?”

“Italy or Albania. Corfu to Brindisi is over a hundred miles. Albania is close enough for day trips.”

“Which means a boat.”

Danny sighs. “I don’t think they’re turning up at the airport and loading the bodies onto an easyJet flight, do you?”

“Come with me. I need you.”

Two men in orange maintenance jackets climb down the access ladder on the high wall of the building, check their watches, and drive off.

Sunil sits at a console in front of a bank of flatscreen monitors. Danny is across the room at the power control bay. Sunil says, “Power to level two.” Danny selects a setting on the panel. From outside the faint hum of generators rises a tone.

“At some point, are you going to tell me what you’re doing?” Danny asks.

“Level three, please. Look, there is always some entanglement with a tiny proportion of the nano. There’s a lot of noise. Usually we filter it out. I’m locking all the computers together at maximum processing rate. I may be able to do something with the remaining nano. Just maybe. Level three, please.” The generators are getting louder. Even if you’d been standing next to the shaped Semtex explosive charges on the helium lines above the roof and even if the timers had made any noise at all as they counted down to zero, you wouldn’t have heard them.

Lynne always gets in very early. She turns off the ignition on her BMW and reaches for the seatbelt. The dawn light is coming up over the studios. She’s fumbling for the seatbelt release when a bright flash is followed a second later by a huge bursting cloud of white vapour. The car rocks in the blast wave and rolls over. A shallow lake of liquid helium runs across the car park. It freezes the car roof into a brittle shell and evaporates.

CAMERA follows Danny and Sunil as they run from the computers to the door, through it into the corridor, slamming it shut behind them in a gust of helium vapour, and down the long walkway past the studio capsules towards Security, where the first thing they see is CCTV angles on the wrecked roof of their studio and Lynne hanging upside down in a frozen BMW.

FAST FORWARD ten minutes. Lynne is wrapped in a fire blanket and sitting in the corner of Danny’s office drinking strong black coffee. Sunil is on the phone talking to Spiros.

“Spiros, do you have access to the NATO surveillance system near Avliotes?”

“No. Impossible.”

“It’s an emergency. Can you talk to the military?”

“How many months do we have?”

“I’ll call you back.”

The red light starts to flash on Danny’s encrypted telephone. Danny answers and listens. “Excellent. We’ll speak later about that. We need another favour… Yes, paid favour… I’ll put my technical chief on to you—and by the way Vladimir, he does not negotiate money… Fine.”

Sunil takes the phone. Danny puts the conversation on speakers. “This is Sunil. We have an urgent need.” Danny winces—never tell the seller it’s urgent. “On the north of Corfu—Kerkyra—there’s a NATO tracking station near Avliotes. We need wide m-band radar tracking at precisely 107.43 GHz. The painted image will be two or three small reflections phasing in and out at fifteen second intervals. The target will be on a boat heading north up the Albanian coast. We will need real-time coordinates.”

There’s a pause and a deep voice says, “Put Daniel back on line.”

Danny flips the speakers off and says, “Vladimir, can you do it?… How many million was that?… Hold on.” Danny walks over to Lynne. She’s stopped shivering. “I need a small budget increase,” he says and holds up the fingers and thumbs of both hands.

“Get me another cup of coffee and you can have as much as you need,” she says.

A small fishing trawler silently rides the swell in the bay of Liapades just south of Paleokastritsa on the west coast of the island. The sun is still below the hilltops to the east and the sea is shades of kyanos—dark blues and greens.

Two black body bags are on ice in the hold. Near them Selina is propped up against the hull. Her hands are tied behind her back and she’s gagged with white surgical gauze. The hull wall behind her vibrates heavily as the engines start up. A slim dark-haired man climbs down the stairs. He comes across to her, unties the gag, and feeds her water from a bottle. “What do you want?” she asks in Greek. He shrugs. She asks again in Albanian. He laughs and rubs his fingers and thumb together to suggest money.

The boat begins to move out to sea and turns to the north.

Theologos is twenty-two years old and nearing the end of his national military service. He’ll be relieved in two hours. Since the end of the Cold War it’s about as boring as it gets monitoring absolutely nothing of interest in the radar sweeps. Most of it is out of his control anyway. There’s so little need for him to do anything that one of his predecessors spent a few months in military prison for getting his mother to cover for him while he went to a party in nearby Sidari.

He’s thinking about breakfast when there are six loud alert sounds. A message in French and English appears on his main comms screen: Baltic terrorist alert level orange. HQ Brussels assuming control. Ensure backup systems online and secured.

The radar control settings screen shows the scanners switching to m-band frequency 107.43 GHz.

The radar sweep images from Peroulades appear on one of the big screens. Danny points to the chair in front of it. Sunil sits down. “Your turn, fella,” he says.

Lynne is feeling better and pacing the room, angry. “They’re calling all the shots here,” she says bitterly. “We’re running after them. I don’t like being screwed around by these bastards!”

Danny leads her to the far end of the room and speaks very quietly. “This is the full picture,” he says. “Universa are way behind on production of their EMO set-top boxes. The first batch they had from a plant in China was rubbish, and there were design faults anyway. They are shitting themselves that we’ll get our stuff out first. But here’s the thing: they’ve switched production to Korea. They’re tooling up for a production run of seventeen million units. Single source. They’re depending on a custom chip-set. We may be able to help them. But you don’t need to know.”

Ice-cold blue eyes stare into his. “Do it,” she says. “And if you can kill a few of them while you’re at it I sure don’t need to know but I want to see the newspaper clippings.”

Sunil jumps up and shouts, “Got them!” On the monitor the radar is painting a bright dot that fades on several sweeps and then flares again. There’s a smaller, fainter dot next to it. The track is moving slowly up the west coast of Corfu.

Danny flips his mobile open and speed-dials Spiros.

It’s a beautiful morning. The sunlight dances on the tiny whitecaps of the waves. The sea is ultramarine and the wake of the fishing boat is pure gleaming white foam flashing with rainbows. A dolphin flips out of the water for a moment and vanishes. Two coast guard single-prop planes come over the hills to the east and zoom loudly overhead. They bank steeply and turn back over the boat at five hundred feet.

The boat’s captain goes to full throttle and keys his radio. He talks rapidly in Albanian, and then shouts. He takes a handgun from the hatch and sticks it under the belt of his shorts as he runs for the stairs down to the lower area.

Selina says nothing as he hoists a body bag over his shoulder and goes up again. She can’t hear the splash over the engine noise. He returns and takes the second body bag. Then he comes back down again.

He holds the gun at her head as he cuts the rope tying her to a stanchion on the hull. “Up!” he says in Greek. Selina tries to stand on cramped legs and winces with the pain. “Hurry!” he shouts, waving to the stairs with the gun. She moves slowly. He hits her across the face and her nose starts to bleed. He pushes her up the stairs and onto the deck. He gestures towards the side of the boat. She moves across the planks until her thighs are against the rail. As he lifts the gun, there’s an explosion of noise as a helicopter roars at low-level over the hills towards the boat. He looks up. When he looks down again, she’s gone.

Maybe every human has a moment of katharsis—purification, release. Selina is feeling this now. The engines stop. She is under the boat, kicking slowly with her legs to conserve oxygen, when the dolphin comes up to her and nuzzles her gently. Maybe Poseidon has sent Delphinos to bring her the good luck she badly needs.

On the deck the captain raises his handgun towards the helicopter and is instantly shredded with machine-gun fire.

The technical centre is a wreck. The studio capsules are dead without their source. The computers are inert. There’s water everywhere from the Fire and Rescue damp-down. This is a billion-pound insurance claim.

Lynne stands there with Sunil and Jack. “How long to be up and running again?” she asks.

“It took two years last time,” Sunil says, “so let’s be optimistic and say one.”

They’ve never seen her cry before.

“We can finish the movie,” Sunil says quietly. Lynne laughs through her tears and Jack puts his hand to his head. “And just how are we going to do that?” Lynne asks.

“Go out and shoot with real actors,” Sunil answers.

“What?” She waves her arms around. “Which particular century are you in? We can borrow brains and do anything we like. We can shoot movies in three weeks that would have taken six months. You designed this stuff, for Christ’s sake! Are you really suggesting that we go back to pointing cameras at real people? You’re mad, isn’t he Jack?”

Jack walks over to a pile of cable and stirs it with the toe of his Adidas trainers. “I’d like to do it, but we don’t have anybody left in the country capable of manning an old-fashioned unit. Cameras, lighting—it’s all gone.”

“Here, maybe,” Sunil says, “but not everywhere. By the way, can I borrow the jet?”

“Why?”

“I’ve got an appointment with a doctor.”

Bright green motherboards move down the production line. The main processing chips have arrived from the fab unit. The chips have been made without human intervention, their millions of transistors carefully crafted from design templates on the central computer. The motherboards pause and chips are inserted by robotic units. They move on and pass through a bath of liquid solder. They arrive at the point where cables are attached and then into a bay where they are married with their shiny black set-top boxes. From here the units reach the packaging area and slide neatly into the colourful cardboard boxes with pictures of fantastic movie scenes and the word EMO coming out like a stereoscopic projection. The slogan the world’s been seeing day after day in an expensive advertising campaign runs across the boxes in a diagonal stripe: See it, Feel it, Be it!

The production lines move swiftly and efficiently, as they must, because they have seventeen million EMOs to produce, and that’s just the start.

The little road through the village centre is blocked for traffic. Two nine-thousand watt lighting brutes are standing in the road outside The Little Prince. Thick cables run from the lights to a generator parked outside the bakery. The camera is on a jib arm and looks down on the taverna terrace from ten feet above. Jack stands next to the jib talking quietly to Elena Vafiadou, the camera operator.

Alexandros is wearing black trousers and a white shirt. Makeup assistants are gently tapping powder onto his face. He’s a waiter who falls in love with an English girl and discovers that he has the power to manipulate people. He’s going to have to make some big choices between using his powers for good or evil. Nearby, Alice Walton sits alone at one of the tables whilst a young woman from Frocks adjusts the straps on her dress.

At another table sit Spiros and Maria. Spiros wrinkles his nose and says, “I hate this makeup.”

She smiles in a feline way and says, “See what I’ve had to put up with all these years for your pleasure, Spiros!”

He sighs. “I’m still not sure Alexandros is doing the right thing.”

“I am,” she says. “If you were younger and better looking I’d have put you up for the job!”

The Assistant Director picks up a megaphone. “We’re going for a take. Starting positions, please. Is the kitchen ready?” There’s a quick burst of affirmative radio traffic from the AFM in the kitchen. The Sparks hits the big switch and the lights come on, brighter even than a Corfu noon. “Quiet, please, and stand by!”

Jack says, “Turn over.” Camera and sound operators confirm that they’re rolling. “And—action!”

The music begins and Alexandros puts down his tray and begins to dance, his arms held out wide, his feet swinging back and forward and across and check and back again. He’s light on his toes. He spins and kneels.

Michalis comes from the kitchen wreathed in steam as he carries Sizzling Steak across the terrace and puts it down on Spiros and Maria’s table. Alice lifts her beautiful sad downcast eyes and watches Alexandros dance. This is the moment. This is the precise second when she falls hopelessly in love.

“And—cut! Check the tape,” Jack calls. “Please reset and stay where you are—we’re moving on to the close-ups.”

Spiros leans back and says, “I never though it would be this boring. Same thing over and over again.”

Maria laughs. “Like chasing Albanian and Italian boat thieves? I have never had such a wonderful time!”

He reaches forward and puts his finger on her hand. “You are my real star,” he says. “You look beautiful. I don’t deserve you. Se latrevo.” Her eyes widen. It’s a very long time since Spiros told her he adored her.

Sunil is teaching Selina how to make lamb Madras with saffron rice and an aubergine baji. She’s not gifted in the kitchen department. “The onions will burn if you leave the heat that high,” he says.

She shouts, “Malaka!” and pushes him out of the way as she goes through to the living room and flounces herself down in front of the television, which is showing a Greek news channel.

He smiles and rescues the curry.

She shouts, “Sunil! Sunil! Come! Now!”

He wipes his hands and walks through. He can’t understand the fast Greek the news presenter speaks, but he can see the words Universa and EMO on the screen, together with shots of fire trucks.

Selina interprets. “He’s saying that EMO boxes are catching fire or exploding. Several people have died. Hold on—this is several thousand incidents! Universa Studios have just issued a statement saying that they are recalling all EMOs. Wow! A media spokeswoman says it’s a major disaster for Universa.”

He goes back to the kitchen and adds the spices to the onions. Then he starts laughing and gets a bottle of Ino bubbly Greek champagne from the fridge. He’s still laughing as he walks into the sitting room, peeling the foil, and lets the bottle go very loudly pop behind her back. She jumps and shouts, “Don’t do that!” and turns to see him pouring sparkling wine over his head. He grabs her hand and pulls her towards him and bathes both of them in a shower of bubbles. “What about the curry?” she asks, licking the wine off his face. “I turned the cooker off,” Sunil says. “For now.”

A body floats gently in towards the shore. It’s bloated, and prawns have been nibbling the ears, eyes, and nose. But nothing has touched the ginger hair that floats back and forth in the shallow surf.

Danny is wrapped up in a big warm coat as he sits in a park in Russia’s science city. There’s no snow, but the cold grass looks as though it’s been doused in grey paint. A tall man in his early thirties—dark eyebrows, aquiline nose, parka hood up—comes and sits down beside Danny. “Only one target left,” he says. “She lives in Kiev with her second husband and his two children. He doesn’t know she was KGB.”

“So now she’s FSB?”

“Danny, Danny! I’m a programmer. FSB stands for Front Side Bus. I’m predicting some nasty short-circuits in the electricity supply to their apartment.”

Danny stands up. “Don’t hurt the kids,” he says.

Vladimir laughs. “You work for movie business. Now you start having conscience! Very funny.”

Danny walks away across the park. He turns back for a moment, waves and shouts, “Good job! Spasiba!”

Alexandros and Alice are on the front covers of every tabloid, every celeb magazine, and a thousand websites. His almost-black eyes and her green eyes stare into paparazzi lenses. They are parading along carpeted catwalks. They are signing autographs. They are on chat-shows all over the world. The movie has received five Oscar nominations and seven BAFTA nominations.

Lynne Songbird has a whole-page spread in The Scotsman. “The thing is,” she’s quoted as saying, “we’ve done the most advanced technology there is. We have done things so advanced it’s like science fiction. But then we talked to the ordinary good people who watch our movies, and they said ‘We don’t care about 3D. We don’t care about being forced to feel things we don’t feel. We don’t care about super-surround and giga-pixels, whatever they are. What we want is great stories, great acting, and maybe a little love besides.’”

Their bags are still packed by the door. They’ve just flown in from Los Angeles via Athens and they’re tired. She looked great at the Oscar ceremony, but she’s not feeling great now.

The air is cool and sweet as they stand outside, fragrant with jasmine and thyme. The moon is up over the hills. Selina, whose name means moon, looks up and yawns. Sunil takes her hand and says, “I quit today.”

“I know,” she says. “Lynne told me. So what are you going to do?”

“We’re not short of money. You’re a great doctor. I’d maybe like to do another Ph.D. I’m a bit worried about your family. If I were just a Brit it wouldn’t matter, but I’m second generation Indian and maybe they’re a bit… concerned.”

She hugs him, and says, “Hey, xenophobia is a Greek word. We’ve survived the alien invasions by the Italians, the Turks, and the Crusaders. I think even my mother can cope with you.”

She kisses him on the cheek and goes in to bed.

Sunil walks down the garden in the moonlight. Magnolia bushes gleam a silvery pink and the olive trees dance a shadowy sirtaki in the breeze. He opens the gate to the fenced area where the goats live. They’ve heard him coming, and they’re up and stirring. They come bounding up to him and jump around in delight that he’s here.

“Tell you what, guys,” he says to the goats. “You three are never going on the barbecue. That’s a promise.”

He lies on his back on the still-warm ground and looks up at the moon and the great bright splash of stars as the goats skip gleefully over him and the night scent full of herbs and richness fills his nostrils and suddenly he feels immensely, ecstatically and overwhelmingly human.

CAMERA rises higher and higher over the Corfu hills, looking down at Sunil and the goats, and then the credits start to roll as Greek music swells on the sound track and the house lights brighten in the cinema: