by Hocking, Ian
Bugsy sensed David was there. It was the first time they had seen each other for three weeks. One transparent, reddened eye rolled towards David. It fixed on him for a single moment and then, with gravity, assumed its original position: staring at the roof of its little hut. That was last time David saw Bugsy. A week later, Bugsy had been carried away by the dust men.
“See what you did, David?” his father asked. His voice had become quieter.
David turned towards his father. He knew that should stand up to this man. He should shout and scream that he was a kid – he couldn’t be expected to look after a whole rabbit on his own. As an adult, his father should have helped him. He wanted to shout that this wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.
Instead he turned away and walked inside.
They spent the rest of the Christmas morning opening presents. Superman slippers, a wallet, and Abba cassettes. They were all very expensive. Under the feeble gaze of his mother, who dared not ask him why he had been crying, and his father, who seemed impassive, he tore paper after paper. His expression was blank.
When he opened the final present – a plastic model of the Millennium Falcon - his mother clasped her hands to her chest and said, “Isn’t he pleased?”
His father said quietly, “He isn’t pleased.”
Saskia opened the rear door and pushed David inside. It would be best to have him in the back and Jennifer in the front. Otherwise, he would sitting chatting to her and Saskia would never have her answers. She walked around to the passenger seat and jumped in. She searched for a button that would stop the engine. She found it on her second attempt.
She could see that Jennifer was shocked. The girl sat, almost fully turned, gazing into the eyes of her father. Her father was smiling. Saskia was not touched by the scene. Not under these circumstances. Not with Frank unconscious in the other car.
“Do you speak French?” she asked, in French.
The girl ignored her. Saskia reached across and turned her head by the chin. “We are under surveillance,” she said again, this time in German.
Jennifer stared at Saskia’s hand. Saskia withdrew it. In German, Jennifer said, “I know.” Saskia looked at David expectantly. He nodded. He understood. No English.
“Your German is good,” Saskia said.
“Yes, I learn it in school.” Jennifer spoke from far away. For a moment, Saskia wondered what she was thinking. But only for a moment. There was no telling how much time they had.
“Hello, papa,” Jennifer said.
“Hello, Jennifer,” David replied. Saskia glanced at her watch. She remembered the emails that she and Scottie had examined in Edinburgh: documentary evidence of a father and daughter drifting apart. She would give them two minutes.
“Why are you here?” Jennifer asked. Her voice was emotionless.
“For you.” David slapped is hands together in frustration. His German was worse than his daughter’s. “I returned to Scotland. Thunder and lightning in the building. I killed Bruce Shimoda. Now Saskia Brandt hunts me. She is the police. She wants to return to Britain with me.”
“Bruce Shimoda is not dead,” Jennifer said quietly. Her eyes had fallen to the floor.
David shook his head. “I am sorry, Jennifer. He is dead. He was in the computer. He was dying. He asked.”
“Why did you come here?”
“I do not know. I have…Saskia…I mean, Saskia déjà vu. Understand?”
“No.”
“I think Saskia travelled…over, no, through…” he trailed off in exasperation. He tapped his watch.
“He means time,” Saskia interjected. “He’s got this crazy idea that I travelled through time. He thinks he saw me in Scotland a few days ago. I told him that time travel is impossible -”
Jennifer shook her head and, with that, her eyes began to clear. “Time travel is possible.”
Saskia said, “Ah.” She composed herself, avoided David’s face, and tried to focus on her questions. “Jennifer, what did Frank tell you about me?”
“He told me you were an independent agent. He said that you wanted to talk to me and that you were…”
“Dangerous? Listen, Jennifer, I’m not. I was assigned to find your father. Nothing more. Isn’t that right, David?”
“Yes,” he replied, though he not really listening.
“Jennifer, Frank Stone lied to you. He needed to find me through you. But I need to ask you a question: How did he know where I was? Did he mention anything?”
Jennifer stared at the ceiling. She closed her eyes. “No. I remember the conversations in total. He said nothing.”
Saskia turned to David. “But he didn’t know about you. That means he wasn’t told. If he wasn’t told, then he didn’t need to know. Why didn’t he need to know? Simple: because his only task was to collect me. Somebody told him where I was. Now, who else knows that I am here?”
“Also simple,” David said. “Your boss. He wants to find you. Get you back in your office.”
“But I haven’t done anything wrong. This is the job I was asked to do. I’m still in the process of doing it. And what about you, David? Frank was never told about you. You are, however, the reason that I’m out here. It makes no sense. Why would my boss let you off the hook? He gave me the specific task of doing that, and now he just gives up. No sense.”
David said evenly, “Sense, yes. Your boss thinks you have performed badly, he wants you back. He sends out an agent.”
“The same agent who gave me misinformation earlier this week. Quite a coincidence.”
“You do not know that the information was bad. Perhaps you are too…suspicious.”
Saskia stared at Met Four. “Suspicion is what I’m paid for. I’m a detective.”
Jennifer looked at Saskia for the first time. “Detective –”
“Saskia,” she corrected.
“– Saskia, do you still want to take David back?”
Saskia smiled bitterly. “My life depends on it.”
“I can prove that my father is innocent.”
“How?” asked Saskia and David simultaneously.
Their footsteps echoed on the wrought-iron stairs. They walked in single file. Jennifer led, followed by Saskia, then David. Saskia had needed convincing. The chances of getting into Met Four security was low. He rolled the dice one more time. Saskia had to reach the time machine somehow. If the universe itself would conspire to keep her appointment, perhaps they could all ride her luck.
They reached the top. The wind was so strong that it was an effort to breathe. David surveyed Met Four. There were two buildings, old and worn. Atop the second building was a clutch of antennas. Two flags rolled in the wind. Immediately before him was a high wire gate with an inset door. Jennifer swiped her card through the box near the handle and the gate opened. She stepped through and closed it behind her. Saskia repeated the procedure with her stolen blue-clearance pass.
David watched them go through. His card was least likely to succeed, because his card was Ego, which had read the magnetic code from the Saskia’s blue card. After a few seconds of analysis, Ego had announced that the code was a several-billion digit prime number. Jennifer suggested that Ego pick the next-highest prime and present the number to the lock. Ego found it seconds later on a university website.
David swiped it through the reader. Nothing happened.
John Hartfield shouted, “If Proctor makes an entrance, I want him to be allowed in. Did you get that?”
He strained to hear the reply over the thump of the rotor blades. The helicopter banked. They were twenty minutes from Met Four.
“Hold on, sir,” said the pilot. Another gust of wind turned the aircraft. They began to fly sideways.
The Mojave washed by. Banks of sand rolled beneath them. The voice on the mobile phone finally replied to Hartfield’s question: “Copy that, sir. Updating the computer now.”
The lock sprang open. Jennifer was numb to the surprise she had every right to feel. She had not thought clea
rly since Frank’s arrival that morning. Now she watched her father close the gate behind him. He was dizzy with relief.
And where was her anger? When she had argued for extended lunch privileges at a committee meeting the day before, she had ridden it hard, as always, and she knew its source. She had not shouted at the chairman but at her father. At her father, who had left her in a school in New York and returned to England.
She looked at him. He shrank. He shrank like a rebuked little boy. Her fury, too, shrank to nothing. Perhaps she had passed into its eye. Her father had given her the best education in his power.
For him, the pursuit of education – the mind, science, truth – was the noblest of causes. It was the one true aspiration. He had put that aspiration above their relationship. He was a principled man. But for others who did not share those principles, what was he?
Saskia said, “Keep moving.”
The Golden Thread
They said nothing the whole way. Nothing as they walked into the second building, nothing as they descended in the rock, nothing as they took their first steps into the research centre proper. It was not until they had been walking for five minutes through low-ceilinged, busy but well-lit corridors that David whispered, in English, “Where are we going?”
Jennifer said, “You’ll see.”
They came to a door. Like all others, it was large enough to accommodate the passage of machinery. It was heavy and closed. Underneath David could see blue flashes. To one side was a swipe-card reader. Jennifer ignored it. She glanced up and down the corridor – David couldn’t see what she was checking for – and then rapped her knuckles on the door.
The welding stopped. They heard footsteps. The door swished open. A man stood in the doorway with his welding visor tilted. He had a great, bushy beard and wore huge dungarees. Around his waste was a utility belt brimming with tools. To complete the costume, he wore a tent-like lab coat. His welding gun was perched on a shoulder, pointing at the ceiling. Its cable snaked away into space behind him.
“Help you?” he asked curtly.
All eyes were drawn to Jennifer. She smiled. “Hi, Groove.”
“Hey, little lady,” he said. He did nothing other than chew his gum.
“These are the VIPs Mikey told you about,” she began. “Mikey did tell you, right?”
David and Saskia stood slowly to attention. Groove glanced over them. “Mikey didn’t. If you got clearance, how come you didn’t use your ID card to get in?”
Jennifer faltered. “I…did, but it didn’t work. I’ll get it checked out later. Damn thing must have a glitch.”
Groove nodded. “Don’t these two have ID cards?”
Jennifer said, “Well now,” in a way that made David realise she had no idea what to say next. He cleared his throat.
“There was no time to have them activated for your lab,” David said irritably. “We’re making an unscheduled stop. As you know, part of our rolling review programme means that you must be evaluated every six months. It is all part of the Assurance of Quality Exercise. We’re stepping in at the last moment for the team who were going to evaluate you.”
“Quality Exercise?” asked the man.
“He hasn’t heard of it,” Saskia exclaimed. Jennifer and David exchanged a look of disbelief.
“Well, he has now,” David continued. “And there will be no prejudice to the evaluation if you let us continue without further delay. If we have to go the trouble of getting these cards activated for your lab, we’ll lose valuable time. And time is money…” David couldn’t remember the welder’s name “…isn’t it?”
The man shrugged. “But it would only take a few seconds to get them activated –”
David pushed past him. “It’s that kind of attitude that’ll get you a low mark in your review.”
The laboratory was startlingly similar to David’s old workshop in the West Lothian Centre. It had the same Spartan scheme.
There were computer terminals around the periphery and connecting doors in each wall. The ceiling was low and the lighting muted. To his right was a machine David did not recognise, undoubtedly because its guts were strewn over nearly a quarter of the floor. It was some kind of supercomputer. It smouldered.
Groove stepped over to the machine, slapped down his visor, and continued. He was unwilling to actively participate in their review.
In the centre of the room, where the white tiles sloped gently down, was the LSD: Liquid Storage Device, and David’s twenty-year-old pun was certainly intended. The great tank swirled. Colours rolled into one another, reached the exterior, touched the transparent plastic, and sank back. David watched the tank and he watched Jennifer and Saskia. They were both slightly hypnotised. They were looking at a distributed processing computer. It was constructed of microscopic computing devices that did nothing but receive chemical activation from their counterparts. They were a legion of stupid little devices. But when they acted in unison, they formed a powerful storage and processing unit: a general computer. The colours arose from sweeping patterns of activation: at one end of spectrum, red, were inhibited cells; at the other were blue, excited cells.
This device was a larger copy of its predecessor at the West Lothian Centre. That device had run New World, the artificial universe in which Bruce had seen and Caroline had died. David wondered at the purpose of this newer device. It would not necessarily perform the same job.
He snapped out of his thoughts. They had a role to play or Groove would become suspicious.
“So,” he announced. “Where shall we start?”
“In here,” Jennifer said quietly. She checked to see that Groove was absorbed in his work. Then she opened one of the connecting doors. The new room was much smaller. It had the same white-tiled floor. On the right-hand wall were four cubicles with closed, transparent doors.
“What’s this?” asked Saskia.
Jennifer opened her mouth but David answered. “These are virtual reality cubicles. They’re closed because they’re designed for microbots. However, I’d say that the microbots are malfunctioning.” He pointed to one of cubicles. There was the ghost of a red stain on its door.
“What’s a microbot?”
Jennifer continued in her father’s tone of voice, “It’s a very small robot, too small to see. They hover in the air while you’re inside the computer. When there are millions of them, they join up to form surfaces.”
“OK, what’s going on?” Saskia asked wearily. She massaged her temples. “What do you mean by ‘inside the computer’? And why should they form surfaces?”
“The device in the laboratory contains and runs a whole universe,” Jennifer said.
“Oh really,” Saskia replied. She became weak.
“More or less,” David said. He had given this speech a thousand times to VIPs in the West Lothian Centre. The intervening years fell away. “You can describe a square with only one value: the length of any given side. Using the same kind of economy, you can describe complicated shapes and systems too. The information content of the whole universe – everything you would need to describe the galaxies, the systems, the planets, all the way down to the leaves on a given tree – is not the same size as the universe itself. Oh yes, it’s a mind-bogglingly large amount of information. But there are ways to cut down the bulk. For example, I expect this computer has a single planet. Correct?”
“Correct,” Jennifer said. She was standing by her father’s side now. Saskia took a small step back.
“Our universe, of course, is detailed all the way down to the quantum level. But it isn’t really necessary. As long as some kind of supervising agent – the computer itself – ensures that mechanical actions work according to the simplest laws of physics, everything is fine.”
Saskia opened one of the cubicles. “David, please understand that I have had little sleep. My boredom threshold is therefore much lower.”
David raised his palms defensively. “I just want you to be informed, that’s all.”
&
nbsp; “Right,” she said. It looked no different from a shower cubicle. “I put on the headset, we play a computer game. A fair summary?”
Jennifer said, “We should get going.”
Each of them stepped into a cubicle and put on a headset. David jiggled his until it fit over Ego’s earpiece. Jennifer said, “Computer, activate all cubicles. Safe mode. Confirm microbots deactivated?”
“Confirmed,” said a voice in David’s ear. It was the computer.
Then Jennifer: “Computer, run Project Asgard.”
Jennifer heard a click as an audio channel opened. Before her was perfect blackness. Then a blue grid. Overwriting it were the words: “You are: Supervisor”. The display faded to nothing.
“Nothing’s happening,” said a voice in her ear. It was the German policewoman.
“You must picture the planet,” Jennifer said. “The computer picks up your thought processes and scans them for images.”
Her father whistled. “Nifty.”
“Fine,” Brandt said. “But I haven’t seen the planet yet. How do I know what it looks like?”
“Saskia, just imagine any planet,” her father said tersely.
Jennifer closed her eyes. The blackness became deeper. She pictured the planet, opened her eyes, and she was in orbit. The huge world shone beneath her. She could see clouds swirling over the continents below. From space, the clouds had a three-dimensional quality. The land was green-yellow. The seas were a sparkling blue. They darkened, still glistening, as they passed into the shadow of the sun. The terminus was directly below.
“Computer,” she said. “Locate Point One.”
A green square appeared over a quadrant of the largest continent. It was far to her left, well beyond the terminator, where it was night. “Everybody, can you see the green square? Picture it and the computer will take you there.”
“Something’s wrong,” said Brandt. “My screen is still black.”
“Can you see any text?” Jennifer asked.