Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

  ‘They’ve broken the attacking code into parts. It’s all jumbled to make it hard to analyse or identify. A machine doesn’t care about the order of transmission, only the instructed sequence of execution and operation, but for a human, obfuscation makes the code very hard to understand. Sophisticated software can have millions of lines. This is less than that, but it’s still like reading a book where all the stories are jumbled up and there’s just a line of numbers at the beginning to tell you where to start. This goes a step further and hides it from most security, too: it arrives in parts and self-assembles. Nasty.’

  ‘It won’t work?’ I asked her.

  ‘No. Not for Fire Judges. Our stuff spots it as soon as the reassembly begins. To make it work in the Spine, you’d need …’ She shrugged.

  ‘You’d need someone on the inside,’ Colson said. ‘Which they don’t have, so they can just go fuck themselves. Pardon me. But it’s a salutary lesson: if you want to crack a real deep system with self-correcting adaptive security like ours – security which ultimately boots hard questions to a human boss – you need someone to open it up for you, just a little bit. Note to self.’

  ‘I think that’s part of the point,’ Lindsey told my granddaughter. ‘They don’t just want your company, they want what’s in your head. And yours,’ she added when Colson scowled.

  ‘Can they do that?’

  ‘No,’ Lindsey said, and then, ‘or rather, probably not. But they’re talking about bringing in all manner of anti-terror and national security legislation which hasn’t been used this way before. Some of it hasn’t been used at all. With the existing compulsory purchase law they can certainly compel you to give up the software if there’s a need. If you don’t comply, that becomes a much simpler matter for them in various ways. The rest is new.’

  ‘They can’t press-gang her, surely?’ I objected.

  ‘Oh, no. They can, however, declare all research around her work to be classified. If they choose to see the software as a weapon, say, then you’d need a permit from the MoD to continue to develop it. If you tried to leave the country while a case was ongoing they might construe that as flight with intent to reveal classified material. You could be interred in the national interest. That’s not imprisonment, by the way, and there’s no trial. It’s not clear how long they can maintain it, but they can freeze your bank accounts, both personal and corporate, and be very, very aggressive about unfreezing them. A few months is usually all it takes to destroy someone. There’s reputation damage to consider as well, of course. And officially unconnected troubles with authority which may suddenly appear to complicate things.’ She glanced at me.

  ‘What about afterwards? Assume that we win it all.’

  ‘Then you could seek redress. I imagine you might see a small payment sometime before Annie’s ninetieth birthday.’

  At the far end of the table a young man was taking copious notes. He seemed very young indeed. I wondered if he was on work experience, and then realised he was probably a full fee-earning lawyer.

  Colson shrugged and leaned back. ‘There’s another option.’

  Lindsey nodded. ‘There is.’

  ‘We can take this public.’

  ‘You can.’ Something in her voice was off. I looked at her and saw that she was very closed down and tight. Her eyes were fixed on the table and on her hands.

  ‘What would happen?’ I asked.

  ‘They would either back down and pretend it was an error or hit you as hard as they possibly could.’ No indication of which. Junior the note-taker turned a page.

  ‘Do you have a sense of which?’ Lindsey has instincts, but more than that she has connections. She works for the government as often as against them, taking the cases she likes. She tries, in short, to make a difference. I expected her to have an opinion, and to share it.

  ‘I can’t advise you on that,’ Lindsey said. ‘Obviously, it is desirable, where the wishes of the state are clear and appropriate, for citizens to participate in the defence and betterment of the nation.’ A wooden generality. ‘It would be better if this were settled amicably.’

  ‘And if it can’t be?’

  ‘Then we must act in accordance with the law while seeking to maximise your gain and minimise your exposure.’ More generalities.

  ‘Would you take this public?’

  ‘I am not the client. Do I propose it? No. It would not be appropriate for me to suggest action beyond my area of expertise.’

  I rolled my eyes. Annie put her palms briefly against her cheeks and puffed air out, the way she did when she was tackling a particularly knotty piece of code. Colson, on the other hand, seemed to find Lindsey’s responses entirely enlightening. He raised a hand like a schoolboy.

  ‘What aspects of this case are particularly not covered by your expertise, if you don’t mind me asking?’

  Lindsey looked up and directly at him. You might have come into the room and thought nothing was happening, unless you knew Colson, knew that he never paid full attention to anything.

  ‘I would say that I’m unfamiliar with Turnpike and what commercial and real-world pressure it might bring to bear. I can advise on the law.’

  ‘So it’s not just a shell company.’

  ‘Oh, no. It’s a long-established administrative amanuensis. Dating from the seventeenth century again, actually. I imagine the connection is fairly direct: the state seeking to create and protect necessary infrastructure, sometimes against the wishes of fairly rowdy local landholders. The Civil War was something of a landmark moment in that discussion, I suppose: Magna Carta versus the divine right. The rights of the individual against the rights of supreme lordship. The former bounding the latter, and so on.’

  ‘Just so long as no one gets beheaded.’

  ‘The state in this country no longer employs extreme methods in the enforcement of its will.’

  Colson leaned back. ‘Of course not.’ Whatever private discussion they were having seemed to be over.

  ‘Well, all right,’ I said. ‘That’s a nice historical background. For today, your advice is?’

  ‘To explore your options. See what may be negotiated before things deteriorate. To consider what you most wish to achieve.’

  And with that, the meeting was over. We all got into one of the self-driving cars and let it take us away.

  ‘What was that about?’ I asked Colson, after a long silence during which no one spoke.

  ‘The nice lady is doing her best for us,’ Colson said. ‘But she’s being fucked with and she’s a little bit scared on her own account.’

  ‘Lindsey?’

  ‘Yes. Did you see the little squit at the end of the table taking notes?’

  ‘Lawyers do that. They keep records.’

  ‘Yeah, they do, but he wasn’t hers. He was someone else’s record.’

  ‘That would be illegal,’ I said. ‘It’s a privileged meeting.’

  Colson shrugged. ‘They bug those when they want to. Gitmo and all that. You’ve got to understand, there’s how you were always told things were done, fair play and boundaries and all that, and there’s how they actually were, and then there’s now. Thirty years ago there was maybe a bit of to and fro about breaking the rules. Now it’s just normal. If our lot want to know something they’re not allowed to, they ask the Yanks nicely. When the Yanks want to spy on their own, which they mustn’t ever at all, they call GCHQ for a favour, see? And since they pretty much bankroll the place, well, we make resources available, don’t we? But you need to get your head round this: if you’re having a conversation in the clear, it’s being overheard.’

  Annie was back, and looking at Colson. ‘You think she was trying to give us a message?’

  ‘They’ve put her on notice. If she does anything they don’t like she’ll be out of the club. Maybe they pull her licence. Maybe they call an audit and their special analysis team finds discrepancies she can’t account for because they weren’t there until yesterday. Maybe they just let the Georgia
ns know she’s helping us and let them sort it out.’

  I wanted to laugh at him, at this conspiratorial notion of Britain sub regno exploratorum. It was not a country I recognised – but Annie and Colson both did, both accepted it as an article of faith. I looked up at the sky, at the benign orange glow of the city reflected in low cloud, and saw it abruptly in a new mode – the sun a scorching eye of scrutiny deflected from us only by the ambient indifference of fog and mist.

  ‘You’re sure,’ Annie said.

  Colson nodded. ‘I was sure,’ he said, ‘from the moment she told me that Turnpike was the merger of state and corporate power. That didn’t ring any bells with either of you?’

  ‘It sounds like something you’d say,’ Annie muttered.

  Colson nodded. ‘Yes. It is. She’s a very smart, very educated lady, your Lindsey, and she’s just done a very brave thing right under some bastard’s nose. She’ll probably get caught for it later, so we’ll want to be sure she’s got a soft landing somewhere. She told you she couldn’t advise on something that was outside her professional competence, right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘But she didn’t actually give us any concrete advice either.’

  ‘No, I suppose she didn’t.’

  ‘And you’re a bit disappointed.’

  I nodded again.

  ‘So the thing I said that she said she couldn’t advise on: that’s the thing she would advise if it wasn’t outside her professional competence. See? That’s what she thinks we ought to do. Blow it all wide open. But she can’t say that with squit in the room or they’ll say she advised us to break the law or whatever and take away her funny hat.’

  ‘She’s a solicitor,’ Annie said primly.

  ‘Whatever. That’s what she’s telling us to do.’

  ‘I thought she was telling us not to do that.’

  ‘Yeah. Squit probably thinks so too. Fuck him.’

  ‘You’re getting all this from what she said about Turnpike?’

  ‘Basically. It was a bit of a red flag. What, it really doesn’t mean anything at all to you? Still?’

  ‘Colson,’ Annie said. ‘You’re an info-rat. Not everyone’s brain works that way. The merger of state and corporate power: why is it important?’

  Colson scowled as if both the question and the answer were part of some conspiracy of which he particularly disapproved. ‘It’s one of the basic victory conditions of Italian Fascism,’ he said.

  We thought about that, and after some time the silence became heavy, and grim. They came home with me to take counsel and refuge. We drafted a legal reply and then, knowing we would be assailed, we reached out to the strange and wayward ghosts of the Internet’s liberty – to Anonymous and its curious, non-existent cousins: the Magnificent Seven and the Round Table; the Fourth Stooge, the Gray I and the XX-Men. We called campaign groups and newspapers and we let our defiance be known. Everyone was angry for us. Everyone said they would help.

  The next night, someone threw a bomb against my armoured window.

  *

  That night I dreamed of Alem Bekagn for the first time in a long, long while. It was narrow and terribly hot, and filled with the sound of others screaming and weeping. However I answered his questions, the lean fellow with that relentless obsequiousness of manner, he still had his men break one finger bone each day in a vise. They came for me with great punctuality at five in the afternoon, so that the pain kept me awake all night and it grew harder and harder to feed myself or drink. My tongue swelled and my breath stank. Much of this is true, but in this version, in the end, I did not escape my cell. Instead I died in a corner between sunrise and sunset, choking on the awful lizard dryness that had at last become so large that I could not breathe. They put out my corpse, but no one came to take it away. Michael was never born and nor was Annie. My whole world never was, and that was the worst of it, that my extinction at that wrong moment kills not only my future but my hope.

  It is an alternative history. The true one is a curious footnote to the Massacre of the Sixty – and because I am known to have survived, my testimony of imprisonment is discreetly disbelieved by British historians – but I was there. After the car journey, my captors walked me in through the stark and businesslike gate and closed the door on my protestations. All night, I listened to the cresting and crashing of absolute fear in sixty men and women, and the next morning I watched them begin to die. I drew their faces on my walls, scratching faint cartoonish sketches with a stub of pencil, but when I looked at what I had made I realised it was the beginning of a new artwork. My portraits were coming from that obscure place inside me where I saw the certain universe of Anaximander of Miletos and knew it for a profound truth of alien science, and where the gods and demons of classical Greece were scrimshawed on the plastic toaster ovens and Apollo rockets of the dawning Age of Aquarius.

  I screamed at myself, at my useless, ridiculous and empty posturing and my art. What possible virtue is there in painting, and most especially in painting inner vistas of futurity and madness, when madness is the common currency of everyone around? If I wanted to confound society in this place, I should colour my walls with the rich greens of fertile land and the evening sun. I should draw myself a window on a pastoral landscape. I should remember the faces of the dying when they were in repose. On that wall I could paint the Emperor’s Cuckoo, now hanging on a gibbet outside the palace. I met him only the one time, to talk to, but he had a pleasant singing voice and a fondness for mild Belgian beer. He lived alone in a little apartment in the new city, and counted a myna bird his closest friend. I forget his name. I read, recently, that he never existed at all and it was scandalous to suggest he did. Well, he existed then, at least enough to die.

  I had four walls and a ceiling, on which I should draw the Emperor’s court as it was in better times. I should memorialise the dying and save a little part of them, of who they were before agony resketched them as friezes of Purgatory.

  Except that when I drew – holding in my mind those friendly lines, the patterns of shade that defined a fat man’s chin or the hips of a serving woman – it did not matter how closely I hewed to the task, what emerged was the sort of contemptible, wild imagining from which I had made my useless fame. The shark was everywhere, tiny and vast, playful and appalling. One of the smallest sketches was the most awful, somehow staring out of the wall and watching you as you moved, the way portraits are supposed to, though I have never seen it except in this one case, as if I had captured a perfect essence of predation and execution in my little cell, and now I was imprisoned with my own personal memento venatoris. I did not own my hands, my arms. Day upon day I threw my pencil away, and – seeing how I failed and failed – whenever they came and snapped another of my bones, they likewise replaced the stub with another. Sometimes it was a fine artist’s charcoal or a soft lead, sometimes a colour, so that I would be drawn, bruised and shaking and stained with sweat and the inevitable piss of sudden agony, to repeat my failure. They encouraged me to addict myself to that combination of failure and pain and thereby made me torture myself. I could not stop trying, and each attempt embroidered the mosaic of image and strangeness on my walls and ceiling until the cell was the best work I had ever done, and the most bizarre, a many-eyed woman gazing at me from above while my own image cowered in a corner and was lifted up by three others, like some Bible scene in a church.

  One morning the surgeon came in, and his face was grave. He told me that my case had been reviewed in great detail in the light of the stricter policies now being introduced to deal with recidivism in released politicals. He was very sorry about the length of my detention, he said. He himself admired the modern intricacy of my work and its bold rejection of consensus – its assertion of Africa over the white north-west – and it had been burdensome to him to torment me. It seemed to him that here in this place I had purged out some deep unpleasantness, likely the inner contradictions of my art and my unawakened politics, and if I were released I should be
an excellent and enthusiastic son of progress. My gift, he said, was to bring an underlying truth before the physical eye, as I perceived it unerringly with my inner, artistic one – and such a gift was vast and not lightly to be put aside. However, there were no grey areas in the revolution, and his perception was not of itself sufficient to release me. Indeed, he regretted very much that the steering committee of Alem Bekagn had ordered me done away with. I was to die in this place, at the order of a government which knew nothing of me, to atone for a crime of portraiture. My end was appointed in a month, the earliest convenient date.

  He left the room to allow me to compose myself, and I went a little mad. It was intolerable – inconceivable – to hear that, for no better reason than an unimaginative taxonomy, I would lose my life. I became obsessed with the knowledge that I would die, and day by day I played a game of it to prepare, as if by endless repetition I could somehow change sides and be not the corpse but the death, and thus survive myself. I lay upon my bed and imagined that I was breathing my last, that I was in mortal agony on a torture table or coughing as my broken ribs gouged my lungs. I was starving and could not go on, or dying of thirst, or shot and feeling the red hot rounds unmake my heart. I died and wept and died again, over and over, until I could not stand it and wished the day would come sooner. Finally one morning something in me shattered and could not be pulled back together, and the illusion that complicity in my own demise might undo the fact of it was blown away. I knew then, with only a fortnight to go, that I must at all costs escape, and since Alem Bekagn was in the normal way of things escape-proof, the only remedy for its walls being bribery or favour – and I had no means to effect either – I must take an extraordinary route for my departure. I must, I determined with a feverish certainty, learn to walk through walls, and to do that I must make the walls my own. I must cover them in the outpouring of myself, complete the image that had insistently been midwifing itself through me, and in that action I would gain control of matter and time and be made free. I gathered up the stubs and fragments they had left me and began to work, and when they came I extended my hand almost absently so that they could perform the vandalism upon it, only to find that in this the committee had relented, and in place of the vise they had brought me a parcel of brushes and tubes of oils taken from my own supply.