Zero history

61. FACIAL RECOGNITION

They’d had a shower with H. G. Wells and Frank, Garreth’s bandaged leg, tucked through something that looked like an inhumanly capacious and open-ended condom. Toweling him off, she’d seen a bit more of Frank, “Frankenstein.” Much evidence of heroic surgery, so-called. As many stitches as a patchwork quilt, and indeed she suspected literally patchwork, the back of his other calf tidily scarred where they’d taken skin to graft. And within Frank, if Garreth wasn’t simply taking the piss, a good bit of newfangled rattan bone. Frank’s musculature was considerably reduced, though Garreth had hopes for that. Hopes generally, she’d been glad to see, and hard sensitive hands sliding all over her.

Now he lay on the Piblokto Madness bed, in Cabinet’s not-velour robe, Frank encased in a slippery-looking, black, Velcro-fastened wrapper through which a machine the size and nostalgic shape of a portable typewriter case pumped extremely cold water, very quickly. Heidi had used something similar, on their final tour, to help with the wrist and hand pain drumming had started to cause her. Garreth’s had arrived an hour before, by courier, a gift from the old man.

He was talking with the old man now; very much, she thought, as to a wife in a long marriage. They could convey a great deal in a very few words, and had their own slang, in-group jokes of seemingly infinite depth, a species of twin-talk. He wore a headset, cabled to his no-name black laptop, on the embroidered velour beside him, their conversation being conducted, she assumed, through one or another of the darknets they frequented. These were, she gathered, private internets, unlicensed and unpoliced, and Garreth had once remarked that, as with dark matter and the universe, the darknets were probably the bulk of the thing, were there any way to accurately measure them.

She didn’t listen. Stayed in the warm, steamy bathroom, drying her hair.

When she came out, he was staring up at the round bottom of the birdcage.

“Are you still talking?”

“No.” He removed the headset.

“Are you all right?”

“He’s done. Folded.”

“What do you mean?” She went to him.

“He had something he’d never told me about. Grailware. He’s giving it to me. For this. Means it’s over. Done.”

“What’s over?”

“The business. His mad career. If it weren’t, he’d not have given me this.”

“Can you tell me what it is?”

“Invisibility. A sigil.”

“A sigil?”

“The sigil of forgetting.”

“That thing’s chilling the blood in your brain.”

He smiled, though she could see the loss in him, the pain of it. “It’s a very great gift. Your man will be bricking it, if he knows we have it and he doesn’t.”

Which meant Bigend, she knew, and shit-scared. “Then he’ll want it for himself, whatever it is.”

“Exactly,” he said, “why he mustn’t know. I’ll convince him that Pep’s stayed off the cameras with tradecraft.”

“Pep?”

“Mad little Catalan. Perfect master car thief.” He looked at his watch, its black dial austere. The men who guard the Queen, he’d once told her, were not allowed to wear shoes with rubber soles, or watches with black faces. Why? she’d asked. Juju, he’d said. “He’ll be in from Frankfurt in twenty minutes.”

“How are you assembling all this so quickly, yet finding the time to soap my back and whatnot? Not to complain.”

“The old boy,” he said. “Can’t keep him from it. He’s doing it. It’s modular. We got that good at it. We have our bits of business, our set pieces, our people. We got really fast. Had to, as the best ones present themselves abruptly. Or did.”

“Can you really be invisible? Or is it more bullshit, like your rattan bones?”

“You’ll hurt Frank’s feelings. Think of it as a spell of forgetting. Or not remembering in the first place. The system sees you, but immediately forgets.”

“What system?”

“You’ve seen a few cameras in this town? Noticed them, have you?”

“You can make them forget you?”

He propped himself on his elbow, instinctively rubbed the slick, cold surface of the thing around his leg, then quickly wiped his palm on the embroidered coverlet. “The holy grail of the surveillance industry is facial recognition. Of course, they say it’s not. It’s already here, to a degree. Not operational. Larval. Can’t read you if you’re black, say, and might mistake you for me, but the hardware and software have potentials, awaiting later upgrade. Though what you need to understand, to understand forgetting, is that nobody’s actually eyeballing much of what a given camera sees. They’re digital, after all. Stored data sits there, stored. Not images, then, just ones and zeros. Something happens that requires official scrutiny, the ones and zeros are converted to images. But”-and he reached up to touch the edge of the bottom of the birdcage library-“say there’s been a gentlemen’s agreement.”

“What gentlemen?”

“Your usual suspects. The industry, the government, that lucrative sector the old boy’s so keen on, that might be either, or both.”

“And the agreement?”

“Say you needed the SBS to rendition a dozen possible jihadis out of the basement of a mosque. Or trade unionists, should they happen to be down there, promiscuous as they are. Just say.”

“Say,” said Hollis.

“And didn’t want it seen, ever. And shutting the cameras down wouldn’t be an option, of course, as you might well pay for that, later, on BBC. So say your Special Boats boys bear the sigil of forgetting-”

“Which is?”

“Facial recognition, after all, isn’t it?”

“I don’t get it.”

“You’ll see it, soon enough. It’s on its way over, courier. His last gift.”

“Did he say that?”

“No,” he said, sadly, “but we both knew.”