Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

  I like her, but she needs to get out more.

  ‘Gone for a burton,’ the barista murmurs as she brings my coffee, and tuts at the screen. I look again.

  The cadavers of single-instance identities are very odd. I keep having to remind myself that this is not just a cast-off, it is the whole of someone. It seems too irresponsible to put all of oneself in one place, and so macabre to insist on being inside it as it breaks, to let oneself evaporate and be unmade.

  Diana Hunter’s photograph fills the screen, black and white and cold.

  An hour later, I am holding her corpse by the hand.

  *

  The librarian’s body, lying on the slab, is smaller than I’d expected. If she were a book and not a woman, you’d say she was quite foxed. She’s been read in the bath a few times in her life, and the steam has done her dust jacket no kind of good at all. Many of her pages have been folded down and up again, and you couldn’t call her a recent printing by any means, but even so she’s a handsome edition, bound in dark brown with an elegant design. Mr Shand would approve.

  ‘Where are you from?’ the coroner wants to know. I know her from somewhere. I’ve met her before – or rather, this instance has. There’s a legacy connection of neurons firing in its brain. Who was it, before it was me?

  I say I’m from around. She rolls her eyes.

  ‘You’re not the investigator from the Witness. She’s coming later. Where are you from?’

  I think about it. I can feel the shape of her mind in the way she stands, in the tone of her voice and the line of her eyes. I’m very old, and I’m used to reading subtext from the expressions of one body among a multitude. Trisa Hinde is not a mystery.

  ‘I represent an interest that very much wishes to know what happened to this woman. I will not inform you directly. You should feel free to infer reasonable conclusions from the speed with which I was cleared to enter.’

  ‘That would to most people be effectively the same as telling me you are from Government House.’

  ‘But not to you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then we understand each other.’

  ‘We do not. We have a stand-off which would normally end the discussion to prevent mutual social and hierarchical embarrassment and the possibility of disadvantageous career friction.’

  That concludes the chit-chat. I look closely at the dead face, and Trisa Hinde explains the mechanism of exhaustion which brought the librarian’s life to an end. The holes in her skull, where they put in the chitosan shunt, have been closed with sterile medical putty. I can smell it in the air over her face: alcohol, death and putty.

  ‘They kept her alive for as long as they could,’ I say, my fingers tracing the outline of her skull.

  ‘Yes,’ Trisa Hinde agrees, ‘except in so far as they also killed her.’

  There is an old superstition that the eyes of a murdered woman hold the last thing she saw in life, and that her voice, if breath is moved through her lungs and mouth, will speak the name of her killer. Diana Hunter’s retinas hold no such imprint, and if her voice speaks when I depress her chest, it is too quietly for me to hear. Perhaps she has already whispered everything she knows to the coroner, or the assistant who washed the body.

  Trisa Hinde watches me all the time I’m there, but doesn’t say anything else. I’m not sure what I hoped to learn from the body, but I don’t.

  *

  On the way out, I ask for a copy of Diana Hunter’s interrogation. A gentle, distantly mechanical voice asks for my name. I think of the mirror and say: ‘Regno Lönnrot.’

  – I’m afraid that will not be possible, the Witness says. Diana Hunter’s files are still under investigative seal. Please do reapply in a few weeks. We value citizen scrutiny.

  ‘I understand. Thank you.’

  A moment later, as I’m walking out of the main door, a runner arrives from the file room. ‘So sorry, so glad I caught you, these are marked urgent. The reader’s an old model but it works, I hope that will do, you just have to—’

  I look up at the cameras, and they look everywhere else.

  Thank you, once again.

  *

  In Hunter’s house, I find out no more than I did from looking at her corpse. It is the strangest place, like a pencil sketch of a person. It tells you so much about her, fills in all the blanks, and yet it leaves you no wiser at the end. In the books and the pictures, in the half-finished manifestos and the ridiculous Faraday cage, you see the broad shape of a rebel mind – I find I rather like my dead former target – but not the close pattern of the woman.

  This house is a sophisticated lie. It appears to tell you everything, to point to a woman. It does not. It is a construct.

  I touch the surfaces, the wood, the old, familiar sofas. I open the drawers and inhale: archetypal dry oak and old polish. The leather has cracked. There’s a hint of saddle soap, and a square which has been replaced more recently. It positively invites one to peel it up and find the secret paper hidden underneath.

  I think … not. This house is a rabbit hole, a snare for the unwary. It exists to consume resources and focus while something more important happens elsewhere.

  I told you: I am very old, and I have lied a lot.

  The Witness investigator arrives sooner than I’d expected. Dear Mielikki Neith: she’s rather splendid. I put a pillow under her head before I leave.

  *

  The librarian is dead. How does the story go? One blind man says: I have touched the elephant, and it was something like a snake. The next does not agree. He says he, too, has touched the elephant, and it was something like a tree.

  I have touched the librarian, and she was somewhat like the truth.

  But not entirely.

  Zagreus. I keep coming back to Zagreus. Zagreus, who wants the cardinals dead, or mixed together – and Diana Hunter, the only one of them who is dead, and yet who somehow seems to have known more than anybody.

  What are they to each other?

  Hunter and Zagreus. Zagreus, and Hunter.

  I open the interrogation files and swallow hundreds of hours in one bite.

  A little later, Oliver Smith calls.

  *

  A chime sounds in my room, the synthetic rendering of flutes, and the System tells me someone wants to talk. I accept the invitation, and a screen slides upward from the desk.

  The caller is a young man with a fleshy patrician face; wavy hair and tweeds. He is in the first flush of his prime, newly promoted, newly certain of his decisions. ‘I have something for you.’

  I recognise his voice immediately, and the name is written in tight little letters along the top of the screen: OLIVER SMITH.

  ‘Oliver,’ I say. ‘I’ve been waiting for you to call.’

  ‘No, you haven’t. You sucker-punched the Inspector.’

  ‘I don’t have to sit inside all day, do I?’

  He rather wishes I would. He doesn’t want to say so. He’s nervous. How sweet! I love nervous men. They make such interesting mistakes.

  ‘There’s a car coming for you in the morning. Eight o’clock. We can talk then.’

  ‘I shall look forward to it.’

  ‘Okay.’ He isn’t happy. ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘No.’

  He waits for me to say something else, but I don’t. Oliver is not someone who’s good with silence. He likes affect and interaction. He wants to know what’s going on in your head. That’s going to be a problem for him in this connection. Well, I don’t want to upset him. Not yet.

  ‘Good,’ he says. ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Oliver?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I would like you to use my name, too.’

  ‘Anna?’

  ‘No.’

  He thinks he understands what’s happening. He can work with me. ‘What should I call you?’

  I give him the same name I gave the System. ‘Regno Lönnrot.’

  I can see him subvocalising. His lips twitch around a
n unvoiced Teutonic ‘o’, as if he’s got an egg in his mouth.

  ‘Call me Lönnrot,’ I suggest, ‘if it’s easier.’

  ‘All right,’ Oliver says. ‘I will. Lönnrot.’ He smiles his best smile, open and kind.

  When he’s gone, I play the call over and over again, listening to the cadences, the hesitant insinuation. I set it on repeat; I have a bath and listen to it while I review Diana Hunter’s life.

  The true one, because the Witness doesn’t lie to me. Not ever.

  Oliver. I begin to understand.

  *

  I kick myself adrift in time and go looking for Diana Hunter.

  This is the year she should be born, the rump of the American century and the beginning of the technological era. The world is in recovery from an addiction to fear, and not doing well. In place of a bipolar tension it is kindling bushfire wars, getting up to speed for another hundred years of horror. Governments lie to themselves as much as to their citizens or their enemies, unnatural ebullience overvalues dross and sells worth at bargain prices, and the watchword is ‘free’, not ‘freedom’. Once again, the populace votes for lies and tinsel on a Christmas tree of ordure while on the world’s other face death is more common than shoelaces.

  But no sign of Diana Hunter. No glad Mr and Mrs Hunter of Dingly Crescent, nor of the Panorama Penthouse, nor Siddhartha Close, nor any other street. No hamlet, croft, village or town, no mansion nor mud hut resounds to her first outraged howl. No hospital boasts her arrival in desktop-published news, no local paper carries a picture of the joyous day, no cards go out. No flowers are sent, no bouquets of nappies and baby clothes.

  Where is she?

  *

  Did she study anywhere? Learn anything? Did she fall in love unwisely, dance naked in a fountain after too much tequila, and grow to a more mature age grateful for the absence of digital cameras in her youth?

  Who is this man she married? Where did she get that scar?

  Where is she?

  *

  Here: a glimpse of the place called Burton, a castle that is almost a bastide: a high hill with a white stone town, walled even higher so that only one road enters via a northern gate and invaders must shoot uphill and into the sun. Amid the heritaged ruins of medieval war, she trains for a new one, a most intimate and speculative conflict of the mind. It is the SERE school of privacy, a secret agent’s playground.

  I press forward, then stop. The air is greasy and elastic, as if the whole place is made of dough or modelling clay.

  Modelling clay.

  It is a Potemkin place. If I explore it, there will be more. I will create it with my feet, with each step I will generate more of this pocket reality and it will roll up behind me as soon as I can no longer see it: a perfectly reflexive realm. A simulation.

  It is a fable, this place where magicians learn their trade. Like the house, like the flower of a carnivorous plant, it exists to draw the eye.

  Beneath the surface, a universe of gliding monsters.

  *

  This is more familiar, this green-black dark, down here at the bottom of the sea. At the limit of Hunter’s interrogation, there is a quiet place, a standing wave hidden in the noise. On the other side of things there is another room, the one that becomes the Chamber when the cardinals are all set out. This one is just an echo. They’re all just echoes, remember.

  Are we hunting a shark in this black water?

  No. Something bigger. And it’s highly debatable who is hunting whom.

  That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Everything, but everything, depends on which direction you are looking, and where you stand.

  *

  That’s the night I go to meet Oliver in his car, and it stalls out in the middle of the empty tunnel.

  Hello, Oliver.

  He gets out and comes towards me, and I let the lights go out behind me, one by one. Darkness approaching, like the place where he left me.

  Hello.

  He babbles a lot, about how he can give me things I don’t want. He babbles because, while I know him, he doesn’t yet know me.

  It’s me, Oliver. I’ve come all this way. Shall we talk?

  Yes, he says. Let’s talk. Talk is good.

  We talk about how I am angry with him, and how that can be resolved, and we talk about Hunter and Kyriakos and Athenais and Bekele and what it all means.

  I realise that he doesn’t understand what is happening.

  I recognised your voice when you called, I tell him. You wanted to roll up all the worlds. To put Diana Hunter’s dreams all in one place so that you could see her real life.

  Yes, he says. For the Fire Judges, I did.

  He’s waving that absurd little badge, the flambeau like the torches on the walls of his cavern. For the Fire Judges, as if that changed things.

  You made an instrument to do the job, but Diana took it from you. She was better than you.

  Yes.

  He thinks all that is obvious between us, as if we’ve already discussed it all. Perhaps we have. Back and forth we go, and he still doesn’t understand.

  You wanted to kill all the cardinals, I remind him, and he says yes again, so I tell him my real name, and then I whisper his.

  ‘Zagreus.’

  At last – at last – he looks properly alarmed. A little while later, he begins to scream.

  It’s satisfying enough, but it doesn’t feel real.

  *

  There is a way of looking at things which says that I am a cuckoo’s dream, dropped into the mind of a woman who died, and she raised me as her own and I owe her a debt.

  There is a way of looking at things which says that I existed before, and everything I remember is true, but my universe was overwritten and destroyed by another simulation, and another and another, and that’s just the way of things.

  There is a way of looking at things where both of these are true.

  I stand on the cold rooftop of a white-tooth tower overlooking the house where Diana Hunter never lived. It all depends on your point of view: you could call this over, now, and go home, and live a fulfilled life until it ended.

  You could, perhaps, but not I.

  Diana Hunter is dead, at the hand of Oliver Smith, and Mielikki Neith will uncover all of that. She’s a good woman, within her limits, and you could not call me a good anything, not anything at all.

  I am Gnomon, sometimes called the Desperation Protocol, sometimes the Coldest Hope. In the hour when heaven is falling, I will stand. Does it matter if I came from here or there? If one of my ten thousand was a murderer and a thief? Or perhaps all of them? Or if all of them were just one murderer?

  No.

  Does it matter, then, if I am born in a lie?

  Not even a little.

  How I came to be what I am is of no concern to me at all. I concern myself with what comes next.

  If the librarian is dead, how am I even here? Without her, how does the Chamber still exist? If the Chamber is not real, how did I step from one universe into another, or travel through time? How did I bring a demon shark to eat Oliver Smith? If Smith is in the intestines of a shark, why do I still feel Zagreus, like a stink on my skin?

  Zagreus: the first iteration of a serpent.

  There’s a way of looking at things where everything makes sense.

  Dear Mielikki Neith. It all comes back to you.

  catabasis

  LET’S TAKE STOCK.

  Here is Mielikki Neith, Inspector of the Witness, in the embassy of a foreign power. In the cot between two filing cabinets and an old, non-regulation refrigerator, she lies with her head in her hands. In a moment, she will stand, and begin the very last part of her journey into the dark. For now, she is caught in that place between waking and gloom that comes with deep sleep. Her mind is working deep and slow, like the idle of a diesel fishing boat, just below the threshold of action. She is paralysed by scope. Today she must lift the world.

  In which direction? In Hunter’s fictions, things have come
to a point of crisis – a hanging instant, if you will – and dead Smith’s insurgent interrogation seems to be working. Does that mean she is about to die to protect her secrets? To hide a life something like Annabel Bekele’s? Something turbulent and hopeful and disappointed, culminating in this disillusioned age and angry death, and – what? What is it she hopes to achieve? Revelation? Regenesis?

  He didn’t realise I was leaving the Fire Judges.

  Should she understand that Hunter was literally a Fire Judge? That she was one and she stopped because of Anna Magdalena?

  In the story, Athenais works for resurrection in the underworld – yes, for a lost child – so let’s say that Hunter considered the System her child. What then? Is this a map? Not a plan in motion but one in stasis?

  Endings and apocatastasis.

  Who, then, will close the deal? Not Smith. Lönnrot’s declared interest is obscure.

  Steganography is all around you.

  Yes. Still.

  Neith shudders and stands. The embassy staff are busy, so she waves from the doorway and takes her leave. Only the ambassador acknowledges her departure, and that lightly. The doings of this small island are a curiosity only, something everyone who lives here is prone to forget.

  *

  In the street outside, the Inspector looks up to see not the reassuring strangeness of London’s white towers emerging, comfortingly futural, from the old town, but an architecture both structural and human composed in this moment of altered perception entirely out of lenses. The whole world is poxed with electronic eyes, from the street corner traffic lights and the individual security arrangements of the boutiques to the people walking and talking into devices inevitably networked to the digital siphonophore hanging invisible in the sky. The System is a good only if it is inviolate and impartial. If not, it is a monster.

  A woman held captive by a demon made of eyes.

  Firespine. The Fire Judges. Hunter believed the System was infected, or corrupt.

  She was right.

  The universe has cancer.

  Yes. Evidently it does. Ghosts in the wire. A shark. Something malignant: Smith, or Zagreus.

  If Smith was alone, then it should now be over – except that Smith did not walk under a bus or off a cliff, he was torn apart in a tunnel in a most portentous way. Except that Lönnrot can walk through walls.