Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

  Not over, then, but she knew that.

  She is walking now, mostly to stay ahead of adrenalin’s treacherous wave, which is filling her with a fierce energy of panic and anger. She has no direction yet, but she moves anyway, putting distance between herself and the Waxman and the clinical sympathy of the ambassador. One foot in front of the other, because if you stop, you fall. Still not knowing her destination, she veers towards a tram shelter, passing sharply in front of a gaggle of legal juniors pulling heavy cases full of paper and exciting an irritable ‘Excuse me!’ She waves it away, thinking that foot traffic is tidal, too. Someone is doing Smith’s job this morning: the city hasn’t seized.

  She can feel the outrage, the rhythm of Hunter’s life, in Bekele’s Ethiopia, his London; in Kyriakos and Megalos; in Athenais and her demons and her dead son: this is how Hunter saw the System, this bitter mix. And Gnomon, Smith’s so-clever device, was stolen, in her estimation, by Hunter’s mind: the cuckoo’s egg hatching to reveal not a cuckoo at all, but another bird altogether.

  Or: not stolen at all but intended. Anticipated, like everything else. What if Hunter’s horror at that intrusion was as choreographed as the rest?

  With that comes a darker understanding: Hunter knew, in advance, exactly how Smith would die.

  Knew, or instructed.

  *

  As she sits in the shelter of the tram stop, a soft chime informs her that her ‘blood, hair and tax’ data collation is complete. She asks the System to alert her when the next tram is arriving, and begins to read.

  Diana Hunter paid her taxes down through the years with an almost monotonous regularity. Her official existence, rolling backwards from her unruly retirement to her brief literary stardom to her administrative work for the System’s various not-quite governmental contractors and a first job in the filing section of the agricultural exports division of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, is paralysingly dull. It all makes perfect sense, up to and including a late-life rebellion in the face of age and the awareness of mortality. She’s ordinary, predictable and solid.

  Except that she makes no sense. Where everything about her professional identity is clear and sharp, her personal preferences are a muddle. For the first part of her life she buys blandly: basic underwear, occasional flourishes of romance; basic dresses and skirts and trousers, occasional party outfits – but all of it conventional, off the peg and middle of the road. She buys furniture the same way, and food, and alcohol. Everything is monotonously median.

  Median is the key: not a mean average person, blended, but a person who is like the largest number of other people in her demographic. A template person.

  This is not a file. It is a ghost book – or rather, a book about a ghost person.

  When Hunter the administrator becomes Hunter the novelist, all that changes, but again in a predictable way. Her hair samples reveal sleeplessness, an increase in alcohol and caffeine, and her spending fluctuates in line with the arrhythmic heartbeat of publication and payment. She acquires caprices, collections, unlikely tastes. Where did she come across semiotics? How did she acquire an interest in meaning and significance, in playful academic surreality and the philosophy of self? Well, all right, say that she studied online. She chatted and read and thought about everything. She was always a secret Einstein, a Ramanujan, a lifelong thinker stuck behind a desk who, upon finally emerging from the shadows after decades of silent consideration, is full of sophisticated notions and seems to appear from nowhere. She reinvented Wittgenstein’s wheel. Fine.

  But if you sample the physical evidence of this woman’s life, the algorithm generates a completely different profile for who she should have been: a pattern of splashing out on vintage Westwood pieces, buying McQueen at auction and high-grade sample items from pop-up boutiques, sourced by word of mouth and highly prized. Shopping was a challenge and an art – even a game. The software posits a bric-a-brac house full of curiosities gathered over decades, a wayward impulse purchaser of the strange and unique. If you take the library and the art into consideration, the jagged mismatch is even stronger: there’s no gradient in it at all, no recollection of a life lived in the median. Even the fairly cursory connectome analysis of Hunter’s home available on the commercial server says firmly that the woman was who she had always been. There’s no fracture line in her. There is pain and change, but it never undoes her. It only changes her direction of travel.

  There seem to be two Hunters – one real, one a ghost.

  So then, what happens if you begin with the hair samples as the identity, and remove the name and its associated history as a factor in your searches? Then the data are interpreted differently, and the life pivots to settle on a different part of the graph: hard intellectual labour in a cyclical pattern consonant with long-term project work managing a creative-analytical endeavour such as large-scale architecture or urban planning. And if you follow the DNA to the places where it is stored and the list of patients and customers, and you then cross-reference those lists – you don’t find anyone called Diana Hunter. The name is a fantasy, a mask for someone else.

  Magic is the invocation of names.

  It is supposed to be impossible to make someone disappear from the System. People are neither created nor destroyed. They are tracked from birth to death. They are not lost, misfiled, misappropriated. Still less can a person who does not exist be made up. There are no Forsythean tricks to be played, no birth certificates to be stolen from dead children and used to begin a fable of identity. Correct accounting of persons is critical. How many ghosts do you need, in a distributed quorate democracy, to fix a vote? To change tracks and prune possibilities? How many ghost stories would you have to tell to influence the people who actually do exist to accept something they would otherwise refuse?

  This is the depth of the compromise. Let Lönnrot dance invisible in Trafalgar Square; it hardly matters. But let ghosts vote, and what have you? The shadow of Annie Bekele’s game, where the System is not a mechanism of governance by the people, but a means of control that only appears to be a means of expression.

  Who, then, was Hunter? A Fire Judge. A maker of codes and structures. A creator of long-term projects. Who and how and what and why?

  Neith’s breath catches as she opens the next entry and the Squid seems to be answering her question in as many words. It is a photograph, a screenshot clipped from a bigger article the curator has not bothered to retain. The Squid’s long arms have reached into someone’s discarded files, and found this, incomplete and pixelated by enlargement the way older pictures begin to show the grain of negative film. That, surely, is Diana Hunter, and the hand on her shoulder, manicured and beringed, is almost certainly Smith’s. Neith would know those fingers anywhere, after their crass intrusion into her daydreams.

  But the figure standing next to Hunter – occupying by force of fevered certainty the position of first acolyte – is not Smith. It is someone pale and lean, spiked hair dark around sharp, androgynous shoulders, eyes and mouth filled with the evangelical certainty of a new student.

  The narrow convalescent has been transformed, grafts of obliquely striated muscle and clear white skin laid over the bone of her skull to make that succulent, mocking smile, exercise and a good diet putting flesh on her ribs. More than anything, a sense of purpose shines from her, a fierce filial loyalty.

  Anna Magdalena.

  And also – quite obviously, from this angle – Regno Lönnrot.

  Obviously does not equal actually.

  It is possible that someone has chosen, quite deliberately, to take on the image of Diana Hunter’s failure-turned-pupil, or that Neith’s own pattern recognition, faced with a reasonable likeness and a low-resolution image, is playing tricks. Remember Marcus James Dean and Adolf Hitler: it would be typical of Lönnrot to invoke such a spectre. Hunter’s fiction implies that Anna has become – has swallowed or been swallowed by – Gnomon, and ultimately emerged as Lönnrot; but that cannot be relied upon as an absolute truth. />
  Only a symbolic one.

  But Mielikki Neith is a detective, and she can feel the closing of the loop: the moment when all the questions one has in a case begin to answer one another, and the branching possibilities twine together rather than grow apart, until in the end there is only one way forward and one way back and each feeds the other.

  Five men and women living on earth whose task is to reveal – to de-crypt – the mysterious choices of God.

  According to the files in Neith’s investigation folder, there are five positions listed in the senior echelons of Tidal Flow. The names have been lost – a data retrieval error, apparently, at the System’s Edinburgh storage facility. It is the more embarrassing because it also means that the surviving members of the department have not yet been paid for last month. The Inspector might have believed it last week – would have, with the faith of someone who truly knows a thing cannot but be true, by definition, or the sky must fall – but not, for one instant, today.

  What was it she thought, just a moment ago? Yes. Someone is doing Oliver Smith’s job this morning.

  Diana Hunter, Oliver Smith, and three others she cannot name. Three Fire Judges yet to account for. Three sources of information – and therefore, perhaps, of redress and restoration of the System to its pristine state. Three more targets for Lönnrot, assuming that revenge or something with a similar outline is what Lönnrot wants. Hunter wanted something more sophisticated, but Gnomon, in the story, was sent to kill four people, and in reality was intended to roll up Hunter’s narratives into one. Now? Lönnrot’s intentions must be considered notably unclear. If it is futile to debate the unwritten motivations of a fictional character, how much moreso when that identity is enlivened in the mind of a woman whose cognition is itself artificial, and whose underlying self was created by the woman around whose death everything now revolves? Has the hound slipped the collar? And if so, what end now appeals? What did Hunter intend, and will Lönnrot pursue it? Nothing has a clean beginning. Everything starts with something else.

  Diana. Gnomon. Smith. Zagreus.

  Some part of her whispers that Zagreus, too, had a genesis. Lönnrot killed Smith, but was not satisfied. Behind Smith, then, what?

  You are a woman traversing the skins of an onion. How many layers will you unravel?

  Lönnrot or Anna? Very well, Lönnrot may be unpredictable, but is Lönnrot all there is to Anna Magdalena? Or vice versa? Is that what Neith should assume? The broken woman taking on the part of Gnomon in who knows what weird psychological extremis after the killing of Hunter to become Lönnrot. A defensive fugue, after the death of the woman in whom she vested … what? Identity? Stability? Love? Is Lönnrot acting on Hunter’s orders, or simply in line with what it is to be an ancient intelligence from the future, entering this universe through a hole in time?

  And why does Neith’s instinct rebel? It is so obviously true, so reassuringly mundane: a madwoman kills in the pursuit of her obsession. It is an ordinary story, tragic and a little ironic, but it obeys Occam’s razor, requires no multiplication of entities.

  Perhaps that’s the problem: it is so neat, so narratively elegant, and Hunter and Smith and all their cohorts are masters of persuasive lies.

  Ignore, for a moment, the question of the underlying reality – the Inspector finds herself considering those damned concentric spheres again, the vertigo of an infinite yet circular chasm, and shudders away – and ask: who is Lönnrot to Firespine?

  For Firespine is at the heart of this. Athenais crossed five rivers of Hades, of which the last, ubiquitous one was fire. Annabel Bekele built a network spine for a company called Fire Judges, then designed with her grandfather a game which reflects Neith’s own reality, even names her – another of Hunter’s all-too-clever guesses. Kyriakos, playing the game, unlocked a secret room which explained everything – and had already released a predatory monster into the global network. Lönnrot – Gnomon – showed her the same door in the underground tunnels, and all of Hunter’s protagonists went on journeys of catabasis, down into hell and out again, bringing someone with them, resurrecting and changing.

  Firespine. What was it Pakhet said of Hunter? That she had stopped the flow of the river of life, and only a sacrifice would set it going again.

  Firespine is how this trick is done. It must be.

  Firespine. Five rivers of death, one river of life. Phlegethon is a wall of fire, a river that permeates everything, as the System is everywhere, as a network spine controls and regulates and touches every part of the software it supports.

  In other news: the Monitoring Bill, amended to a fast-forward implementation, has passed with a majority of nearly 70 per cent. As the detailed results scroll upward in her vision, Neith realises she is looking for trails of the number 4 – and then that, even if it is not there, she no longer believes in the truthfulness of what she is reading.

  Hunter’s face in the photograph is the flickering oscillation of horror and pride.

  The same man who was present for the birth of my daughter.

  The Inspector runs a query through the Witness. Yes. Assisting at the interview and rehabilitation, Magdalena, A. And likewise at the Hunter interview.

  She crosses the road, and walks a hundred metres to the tram headed in the opposite direction.

  – You will be late for your meeting with Pippa Keene, the Witness warns her.

  ‘I haven’t told you where I’m going.’

  – Nonetheless.

  *

  On the far side of the river Fleet, the houses are old to the point of Olde Worlde. They’re not so formally grand as the one Diana Hunter turned into an electromagnetic oubliette, but they are in better repair, the brick and paint washed, the sash windows glossy. The houses closest to the main road are bigger, and mostly divided into flats. On the side by the old heath, where parents and children have flown kites on windy days for as long as people knew in London how to make them, there is a row of cottages, and it is here that Mielikki Neith finds first a rose garden and then a gardener.

  He’s a tall gardener, and thinner than his file pictures. He looks tired and very grey.

  ‘Dr Emmett,’ she calls, opening the gate, and when he turns towards her she can see that he has something wrong with his face.

  ‘Inspector,’ he says. His skin must be painful: he’s not opening his mouth more than he has to, and he’s slurring. ‘Come inside. Don’t worry, you can’t catch it. Or, not just from sitting on a sofa.’

  He turns away from her without waiting for her answer, and leads the way inside. His joints are stiff, too, and she can see the wrongness on his neck as well as his cheeks: black pinheads erupting through the pores as if he’s been inlaid with jet.

  They pass through a Dutch door into a kitchen and he carries on past a narrow curtain into some sort of den. She can feel the weight of the low ceiling, smell the wood fire sucking the air from the snug. As if in answer, Emmett says something about opening a window. Without knowing why it should be so hard, she reminds herself she is an Inspector of the Witness, and goes in.

  On a spindly opium table there’s a jug of water and a tray of glasses. Emmett sits. There’s an air of disarray in the house that feels recent. She senses a marital argument.

  ‘You took some time off,’ she says as she pours water, offering him the first glass. He takes it.

  ‘Yes,’ he agrees. ‘Had to.’

  ‘Illness.’

  He waves his hand: more traces of jet on his fingers, swollen knuckles. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought, when I first heard, that you might have been upset about Hunter.’

  He shrugs. ‘That too. No idea if I’d actually have stopped work for that, by itself.’ Patrician diction, like the old BBC before it was done away with. Can you miss something you never experienced? Never mind that now.

  ‘May I ask what the matter is?’

  ‘You haven’t looked?’

  ‘I came to talk.’ Not to tell you how much I already know.
r />   He sighs. ‘I was diagnosed with a combination of variant sarcoidosis and syphilis. The sarco is inherited, apparently. The syphilis, I need hardly tell you, is acquired. My good wife evidently has some explaining to do, though she clings to the assertion that the blame is my own. A point of some debate between us. And not susceptible to the normal modes of discovery. We were in Switzerland for Christmas.’

  Where the Verpixelungsrecht and its cousins make the kind of surveillance carried out in London quite impossible. Awkward.

  Emmett sees her understanding and chuckles. The chuckle becomes a choking cough, alarming in its convulsive power. His bones must crack. She goes over to him, but he holds off a warding hand and inhales deeply from a metal cylinder the size of a wine bottle, with a fat mouthpiece like a diver’s. A moment later the hacking fades.

  ‘The sarco,’ he explains. ‘The syphilis set it off. Can’t treat it properly until the antibiotics work, and they’re taking their own sweet time. Well, I say that. To be honest we’re bang on schedule, but I’m not enjoying it. Doctors make the worst patients. We don’t like being at the pointy end, you see, and we tend to squirm on the hook. My self-diagnosis was that I’d inhaled a whiff of the stuff I use on the aphids. I prescribed plenty of water, some controlled dieting and medicinal Scotch. The sexual angle didn’t really occur to me at the time, and now I’m not allowed to drown my romantic sorrows because of course that would interfere with the antibiotics, which adds insult. Barbara … well, Barbara will come round. I imagine she’s ashamed at the moment, but we’ll work it out.’ Something gravelly turns over in him on the last word, phlegm or something worse in his lungs. ‘So now you know. Charming as it is, I can’t imagine it’s remotely interesting to a full Inspector. What can I do for you?’

  ‘You did the Anna Magdalena interview, years ago. A medical intervention.’

  A week ago she’d have asked the Witness. A week ago, she could have been confident of the answer.