“Your proper tech guy,” he said and, plonking down the empty on the bar, hunted around for a fresh bottle, “does it because of the challenge, to do something nobody else has done, to change something.”
He held up a second bottle of whisky with its seal intact, but to my relief put it back in favor of a half bottle of Bell’s which was already a quarter drunk. It was good to see that Skinner still remembered when any booze was a luxury and that I wouldn’t be wasting the good stuff on poisoning the faux bonsai pot plant that had unwisely chosen to sit beside the sofa.
Having found the bottle, Skinner turned and pointed it at me. “Do you know what I did?”
One of us had lost track of the conversation—I suspected it was Skinner.
“No,” I said on general principle.
“I’m a magician, I am,” he said. “I can see things that are really there.”
Like what lay beneath the shiny neon-lit illusionary landscape of the internet.
“It’s all wires,” he said, and filled my glass. “A big, frankly fucking messy, network of real physical wires that connect everything up.”
And the big problem was how much information you could push down those wires—regardless of whether those wires were made of copper, glass or EM radiation at 30 MHz or lower. Skinner, who’d been working at WGCon at the time, a company I’d never heard of, suddenly saw very clearly how he could double the information flow.
“It wasn’t even that brilliant,” said Skinner—just a compression algorithm that he’d stumbled on almost by accident. “And I was a good little employee. So I took it to my manager, who said it wasn’t within the company’s core competencies or some such fetid dingo’s kidneys, and I should get on with the work I was assigned.”
“Which was what?” I asked.
“Who cares?” he said. “I can’t even remember. The point is, even if they couldn’t see the potential, I could. So I mortgaged my house and sold my dog to raise finance for InCon Systems and built the fucking backbone of the fucking internet.”
He handed me the bottle and collapsed cross-legged onto the floor.
“And then I bought my dog back,” he said, and watched as I dithered with the bottle and asked whether I was drinking or not.
Since it was unavoidable, I made a production of pouring and drinking.
“Give us that,” said Skinner when I’d finished, and I handed him the bottle.
“There’s no glamour in infrastructure,” he said as he filled our glasses again. “Steve and wee little William, right? They make stuff everyone uses every day but nobody thinks about the plumbing until it goes wrong.”
He lurched to his feet again and posed dramatically with the bottle.
“And I was fine with being the invisible man,” he said. “After all, I had everything else—the jet, the house, the company . . . the attention from the hostess in the VIP suite.” He sighed. “Not what it’s crapped up to be.”
He slumped down onto the sofa opposite me and poured himself another drink.
Seawoll, who counts alcohol appreciation among his many cultural refinements—the others, from what I can tell, being competitive swearing, blues music and Doctor Who—would not have been happy at the way Skinner necked it neat with no ceremony. Even if it was Bell’s.
“Did I tell you about my place in Santa Barbara?” he said. “I did, didn’t I? Of course I did. That was a wake-up call, I can tell you. We were going to change the world, everything was going to be friction-free and fun to be with. But it turned out you couldn’t even have a nice house on the beach without having someone come and literally shit under your window. There’s always someone got to spoil the party, right?”
Because despite all the interconnectivity and increased access, the world was getting worse and all the internet was doing was throwing this decline into sharp relief. What was a billionaire supposed to do? There was a limit to the effectiveness of charity, and paying more taxes just meant the government wasted your money on bureaucracy and cushy jobs for civil servants.
But Skinner wasn’t just any old billionaire, he was part of the tech generation, the great disrupters, the can-do cyber-revolutionaries who’d ridden the wave of the information revolution. If they couldn’t find solutions, then who could?
“I thought about Mars,” he said. “No, seriously—I thought I’d team up with Elon and get the fuck out. But I don’t really hate people that much. And if I wanted to live in an inhospitable desert, I could just move back to Australia.”
So if he wasn’t going to escape the Earth and live in Elon Musk’s planet-sized gated community, how was he going to make life better on Earth—for everyone?
“What do people need?” he asked me.
I was tempted to say another ten to twenty percent on the specified room dimensions in the Metric Handbook, along with greater storage space. But I was beginning to lose the fine control of my voice—not a good thing when you’re undercover—so I said “More money” instead. This allowed Skinner to patronize me a bit and feel superior—which would, hopefully, cause him to say things he wouldn’t normally say.
“What they need is help,” he said. “Intelligent help.”
Something that could cut through the morass of misunderstood data and outright falsehoods that flooded into their lives. Something they could rely on to be impartial and thorough.
“And loyal only to them,” said Skinner. “Think what people could do with the real, full potential of the information age.”
“They’ll just have it filter out the stuff they don’t want to hear,” I said. “That’s what they do already.”
“But what if their agent was intelligent in its own right?” said Skinner. “And capable of making its own value judgments? What if it knew what was good for you and brought important informat—infor—stuff to your attention?”
“People will ignore it,” I said.
“Maybe not,” said Skinner, slightly plaintively. “I hate exercise but I have a trainer, which I pay for out of my own money, who bullies me into exercise. You’d tell your agent what your goals were and it would tell you the truth.”
“Because it was intelligent?”
“Because it was objective,” said Skinner.
* * *
—
I think we might have finished the second bottle, and I was hoping if he got really drunk Skinner might relent and show me the top floor where Deep Thought lived, but a trio of assistants cautiously skittered in and informed him that he had a scheduled conference call with Tokyo coming up.
September gently but firmly ejected me from the room and I staggered out in the direction of the exit in a haze of expensive alcohol and geek overload. Fortunately Old Street roundabout has a lot of coffee shops, so by the time I was on the Tube I was sober enough for people not to start edging away.
God, I thought, Mum’s going to be upset if the rapture arrives and Jesus looks like Robin Williams.
It was dark, cold and windy when I emerged from South Wimbledon, and by the time I reached the bus stop opposite the Esso station I was sober enough not to think it was a good idea to drag Beverley out to pick me up.
Nothing beats a long wait at a bus stop as a reality check. And by the time I was sharing a seat on the top deck of a three-axle Volvo with an enormous white guy in a gray hoodie, my initial fanboy rush had worn off.
I could see how Skinner had managed to raise millions of venture capital. It was almost as bad as Beverley when she was doing maximum river goddess. And if he really had a working artificial general intelligence, then good for him. It only became my problem if it was running off the Mary Engine and/or wasn’t an AGI at all, but something mystical and possibly malevolent.
One way or another, we were going to have to go up to the top floor of Bambleweeny to find out.
I got home to find Stacy Johnson ensconced in our li
ving room, having a convivial chat with Beverley and Stephen, while Mrs. Chin and Maksim fixed an impromptu supper in the kitchen and Oliver sat slumped in the corner of the room like an ominous weather forecast.
Stacy waved a bottle of Red Stripe at me from the sofa.
“Hello, Peter,” she said. “I thought you’d be coming with Tyrel.”
“I must have missed him,” I said, and glared at Bev, who sat in the comfy armchair with her feet up and serenely rode out my displeasure.
“We’re having New York Chinese,” she said.
“It was good of you to put up Stephen’s mother,” said Stacy. “You’ve only been in the firm two weeks.”
“He makes friends easily,” said Beverley.
I counted heads—somebody was missing.
“Where’s Keira?” I asked.
“Out the back with Abigail,” said Beverley.
“Doing what?”
Both Stacy and Beverley gave me identical looks of incomprehension.
“I’ll just pop out and say hello, then,” I said.
When Silver found out about this particular breach in operational security she was going to pop her clogs.
Bev has a double garden that runs down to her river. In the summer we practically live in it, but on a cold January evening it was dark and wet with drizzle. Maksim, frustrated son of the soil that he is, had strung waterproof fairy lights down the central path—if only so we wouldn’t walk all over his sacred vegetable patch. Down on the riverbank was a bubble of green light—Abigail’s pop-up tent set up angler fashion, with a door facing the water and the porch door open.
There was definite laughter, possibly even giggling, coming from the tent.
I announced myself before crouching down to look inside—the giggling stopped. There was some furtive movement, more giggling and then the inner tent door unzipped and Abigail looked out.
“Hey, bruv,” she said. “Is it dinner yet?”
I saw Keira over Abigail’s shoulder—she was grinning.
“No, but do you guys want anything?”
Abigail looked back at Kiera, who shook her head.
“We’re good,” said Abigail and so I left them to it—whatever “it” was.
As I walked back up to the house, a talking fox stuck its head out of a bush and told me not to worry.
“I’ve got teams front and back,” it said. “The package is safe with us.”
“Just so we’re clear,” I said, “Abigail is the package?”
“No,” said the fox. “But the bag of cheese puffs she’s carrying might be.”
“Hahaha,” I said. “Boom bloody boom.”
“On Earth as it is on television,” said the fox, and ducked out of sight.
That was the problem with foxes—too bloody clever by half.
So we had New York–style Chinese, only with chips, because that’s what Kiera and Abigail wanted with their spicy beef and shredded vegetables. Johnson arrived just in time to help me move the second gate-legged table into the living room so we could all sit down together. Even if some of us were on folding garden chairs.
We still had some of the Cass Light and soju left over from New Malden’s last propitiation and two bottles of the reasonable red that we keep for emergencies—such as visits by Beverley’s more discerning sisters. Mrs. Chin was shocked that we allowed Abigail and Keira to have a glass of wine each. I stuck to water for the duration, although I did have Beverley carbonate it while nobody was looking. Oliver was offered a drink but refused it because he said that even if it wasn’t contraindicated by his meds, he preferred to keep a clear head.
Stacy wanted to know where we got our ginger from and Beverley admitted that Maksim grew it in the conservatory.
“If Maksim says okay I’ll send you some over,” she said.
Johnson asked me whether I’d caught my rat yet, and while I didn’t do anything as stupid as give Stephen a significant look, I made a note to make sure he knew who the rat was.
It had been a long day, but fortunately Johnson and Stacy wanted an early night.
“But we’ll see you all tomorrow right,” said Stacy.
I looked at Beverley.
“We’re going to do some work in the park,” she said. “Remember?”
“Right,” I said, and looked at Keira and Oliver, who were putting on their coats. “Are you sure you want to get involved? It’s going to be wet and muddy work.”
“Fresh air will do them good,” said Stacy and that, apparently, was that.
Thankfully Abigail was staying the night—in the tent, communing with nature or more likely conspiring with the foxes—so I didn’t have to drive her home. While Beverley organized her pillow nest I took the opportunity, while doing the prewash for the dishwasher, to talk to the two fugitives from justice I was harboring under my roof.
Mrs. Chin had kindly done the surfaces and floor and was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a frown. At her instruction Stephen was doing the pots and pans, and something about the way he obeyed made me wonder about their relationship.
“Are you his Master?” I asked her as I checked between the tines of the forks.
Mrs. Chin snorted.
“I’m his instructor,” she said. “His rabbi, if you like.”
“But you’re a practitioner?”
Stephen chuckled.
“Start a fight,” he said. “Find out.”
“Hush,” said Mrs. Chin. “Tell him what happened today.”
“The police visited while you were out,” said Stephen.
“Shit,” I said. “What did they say?”
“They wanted to know whether I’d been in South Tottenham recently.” He pronounced it totten-HAM.
“And what did you say?”
“I told them not only had I never been there in my life, but that I didn’t even know where it was,” said Stephen, who hadn’t been that impressed with London’s finest law enforcement.
I couldn’t tell who Silver and Nightingale had sent because Stephen pretended not to remember their names, and his only description of them was that the male officer had been fat and bone stupid and his female partner a squat bottle blonde with some kind of accent.
I didn’t recognize either by the description, but if they belonged to Silver they wouldn’t have been stupid. In any case, it seemed to have had the required effect. Mrs. Chin and Stephen weren’t going anywhere for the moment.
And now that they were off their guard, and slightly terrified, I reckoned it was time to get some answers.
“Who made the drones?” I asked.
Stephen kept his back to me and Mrs. Chin scowled at me over her teacup.
“I’m willing to bet they followed you here from the States, which means you’ve got to know who they are,” I said. “Or is your reference section not as extensive as you think it is?”
Mrs. Chin’s scowl deepened and then flattened out. She shrugged.
“We’re American,” she said. “We like our freedom. Even a New York liberal such as I doesn’t like the idea of government sticking its nose into our business. The magic community like it even less. And the shades go berserk at the thought of it.”
“Is that what you call the Fae?” I asked. “Shades?”
“Close enough,” said Mrs. Chin. “You get a lot of fringe practitioner groups on the West Coast. Communes, cults, anarchists, preppers, militias—whatever nonsense is going around.”
And mostly the Librarians ignored them, because they never lasted long enough to be worth adding to the card files.
“You’re a practitioner, aren’t you?” said Mrs. Chin. “You know how it works—either you learn how to do it properly or one way or another you stop doing it.”
“Except for the preppers,” said Stephen. “They get eaten.”
&n
bsp; “We don’t know that for sure,” said Mrs. Chin.
Some preppers, particularly those of a magical bent, fearing—or perhaps hoping—that the collapse of society was imminent, abandoned their suburban lifestyle for the more sparsely populated states of the West. Presumably because fewer people means fewer zombie hordes or whatever. Several of the groups that moved to Montana in the last ten years had vanished without a trace. Since their whole plan, in the first place, was to live off the grid the circumstances of their disappearance were hard to determine. Although rumors filtered east of a creature that stalked the night and ate heavily armed survivalists for breakfast.
“Or they got tired of roughing it and dispersed,” said Mrs. Chin.
“There were survivors,” said Stephen, and Mrs. Chin snorted.
“Rumors,” she said. “And beside the point in this instance. Mostly you can ignore the West Coast.”
“Mostly,” said Stephen.
“We think they came out of San Francisco, or possibly Portland,” said Mrs. Chin. “We don’t know what they call themselves, but we call them the squids.”
I nodded, remembering the rotten seafood vestigium of the demon trap. That made sense. Whatever they were called, they’d first come to the attention of the Librarians when they attacked a witches’ coven in Santa Cruz that the Library was negotiating with.
“We were recovering an overdue book,” said Mrs. Chin—that being code for a book that the Librarians thought should be in their safekeeping rather than somebody else’s. “And members of the coven started turning up dead. Stephen was handling the negotiation.”
“Dead how?” I asked.
“Lots of different ways,” said Stephen, drying his hands and sitting down at the kitchen table.
One was beaten to death by her husband, another caught in a shooting at Betty Burgers, one drowned, another died of anaphylactic shock after a jellyfish sting and two had died of unspecified natural causes.
“Demon traps,” said Stephen, who’d stumbled over one of the bodies when he “entered” their house to “retrieve” the overdue book. “There was no mistaking that vestigium. I checked around and I’m pretty sure there was no jellyfish, at least not a real one, and you could feel the vestigium of the second demon trap from outside on the sidewalk.”
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