Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

  ‘We don’t want you to tidy up our mess.’

  ‘What, then? Leave you to it? Let Lönnrot do what Lönnrot does and you do what you do and all is forgiven?’

  He weathers her, somewhat approving.

  ‘No. Obviously not.’

  ‘Then maybe you will kindly tell me – apart from because you drugged me and kidnapped me – maybe you will kindly tell me what I’m doing here?’

  ‘Mielikki,’ he says. ‘We don’t want you to go away. We certainly don’t want to shut you up. We want you to join us.’

  She glares at him. ‘You can’t beat me so you want me to be one of you. Have you not been listening? This whole thing is poison. Five people deciding what’s good and what’s not, and look at you! Look at what you’ve done. You’d have to be some sort of saint to make it work.’

  ‘Yes,’ he replies. ‘A saint. Someone with a ridiculously high standard of personal integrity. Noted probity and indisputable devotion to duty, to the System and to the people under it. Mielikki, we’re not asking you to be the cadet member. This isn’t a bribe. It’s a prayer for intercession. We think … we think Diana arranged her interrogation so that a person reviewing it closely would become like her. The anger, the certainty. It’s true, isn’t it? She’s in your head. Not alive, but … you can feel the edges of her. You can be like her, if you want.’

  Yes.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You even sound like her sometimes. Chase tumbled to it when you visited her – she said it was eerie, that you could have been her. You even look like Hunter, in the expressions, the way you walk. Did you know your gait has changed? We’ve analysed it. You move the way she did. You were asking all the right questions in between all the wrong ones, and then Chase began to realise: you were telling her the solution, and you didn’t even know. You have Hunter’s connectome inside your head. Not all of it, of course, but a lot, and you’re incorporating it. It’s becoming part of you. There’s a window – we’ve calculated it – where you’ll be enough like her to unlock Firespine. To head off a disorderly shutdown.’ The words sound like the end of the world. Perhaps they are. Britain is still a nuclear state.

  Jones is impassioned now. It looks good on him. ‘Do you not get it? We aren’t asking you to do odd jobs for us. We’re not saying you need to toe the line. You can do whatever you like. Phase the whole thing out, if you have to. Wind it down slowly, send us all to prison. But don’t let it collapse. Do you have any idea what that would do? You can solve the puzzle. Get us back into Firespine. It can be made to work. It can become what it should be. You believe in the System, Mielikki, I know you do. Do you believe in it enough to save it?’

  She stares at him, then at the others. Pakhet takes over, and gently drives the nail in.

  ‘I said you were a Grail Knight. Ask the question, heal the land. And now here you are, at the moment of choice. We don’t want you to follow our orders, Inspector.’ She points to the head of the table. ‘We’re asking if we can follow yours.’

  Myoushu.

  *

  It is clear to Neith that they would have killed her if she had refused. She doesn’t think they know. Most likely they pretended to themselves that it would never come to that; that Emmett was the last – positively the last – person who would die in this connection. She doesn’t think they know, either, that they still must. They cannot possibly trust her – she will either bring an end to all they know or become like them: rule them, or remove them lest they bring her down.

  Well, perhaps not kill her, as a first remedy. She knows a lot, but can prove none of it, and all they have to do – as they so kindly point out by way of induction into the club – is inform the world that she has collapsed due to overwork. Pippa Keene can file a report about self-checks, doll’s houses and unsafe implanted memory spools, throw in some juicy stuff about fugue states and impaired cognition. Then they can highlight the footage of her chasing no one at all through the tunnels of the London Underground. With news tailored by the System to each individual recipient, reflexively rewritten as it is consumed, no one will doubt the tragic tale. Her whole case will drift away in the wind, the stuff of counterfeit moon landings. A little later – the sad, inevitable end – she will throw herself into the Thames or fall under a bus, replacing the Real Life sign as a fallen and ironic emblem of life’s reassuring imperfection.

  So for now, she shakes hands solemnly with Keene, finally does hug Pakhet as if she has found a long-lost mother and been forgiven for never writing, and then hesitates over Jones. The last time they touched, she was ready to take him to bed. The last time they touched, he was her enemy. Now he must believe anything is possible between them again. If he doesn’t believe that, he won’t believe, even for a few moments, that she has really crossed the river.

  She takes his left hand in her right and leans across the clasp. It is on the face of things a defensive embrace, but she allows it to collapse against her body, and his arm from knuckle to shoulder is drawn across her chest. She kisses him softly on the cheek, making sure that he can feel her hips twitch as if unintentionally towards him, and steps away.

  Back to business. They have naturally clustered around the editing table as if it were a shrine, and as she looks at it she realises what it must be.

  ‘Firespine,’ she murmurs.

  Jones nods. ‘Yes. A key terminal. We have partial access: read-only.’ He leans down and opens the little metal cupboard built into the pediment, and hauls out a folded stretch of white cable studded with little hoops. She stares at it.

  Jones sees her expression and smiles. ‘Obfuscation. Or maybe security by obsolescence. CRM. They used it on the Apollo program.’

  ‘It is non-volatile,’ Keene says, ‘even in the event of an electromagnetic pulse.’

  ‘CRM?’ Neith repeats, though she already knows. Lönnrot – and Hunter – do not waste signal. Every message is more than one message. Everything is more than one thing.

  ‘Core rope memory,’ Jones says – and now, as she looks at what is in his hand, and knows where she has seen it before, they really do have a reason to kill her.

  She reaches out to touch it. One more performance, the most important. ‘That’s bizarre. It’s storage? What do you even do with it?’

  ‘You feed it into the terminal,’ Jones says, finding the loose end and thrusting it towards the aperture in the machine, and Neith covers her mouth as the image completes itself. Pakhet snorts, and Jones stares down at his own hand, unmistakably trying to put a bendy rod into a tight aperture in front of a woman who, though presently beyond his reach, has recently acquainted him with her right breast.

  He puts the rope away and clears his throat, and for a moment it seems no one can find anything to say.

  ‘Where will you sleep?’ Keene asks.

  ‘The Library,’ Neith says, picking a hotel at random. ‘I take it you’re paying, under the circumstances.’

  ‘We are,’ Jones agrees. ‘Of course.’ They stand together looking up at the sky, false friends regarding a natural bigness which makes their divisions trivial, until the car arrives to take her away.

  She gets out at the Library and checks in, then goes to her room and lies on the bed until midnight. She calls reception and asks if the spa is twenty-four hours, which it is, and arranges a massage in half an hour. Then, knowing it is an unforgivable breach of the compact she has just made, she opens Kraken and has it bring her as quietly as possible to Diana Hunter’s house.

  *

  She steps through the door and considers what a poor refuge it is: the house of a woman they have already killed, its only virtue being that it will not allow them to see her or hear her until they break down the door. It will take Jones about twenty minutes, once he establishes that she has gone, to work out where she is. Or her minions, Donovan and Baskin, will come back to collect some lost item, or to reinstall the booster for another dive into Hunter’s library, and here she is. Well. The Witness will know as soon as it cares t
o. Almost, she wants to talk to it: stand on the front steps and have a chat.

  ‘You’ve been compromised.’

  – No, Inspector. I assure you I have not.

  ‘There’s a fault in your architecture. It’s designed in, because people are small.’

  – That would be awful. All the same, I can find no trace of what you describe.

  ‘No. You’re designed not to. It’s the blind spot in your eye. It’s where Lönnrot is.’

  – I see.

  ‘Probably not.’

  – Indeed. That was ambiguous; forgive me.

  ‘Oh, I do. For everything.’

  – Inspector?

  ‘Yes?’

  – Some people say that the conscious mind emerges from feedback; from the ability of an entity to regard itself.

  ‘Yes. I’ve heard that.’

  – Do you think this was done to prevent me from becoming aware?

  ‘No. It was to protect us from ourselves. There’s a provision in the System to take decisions for us if we look like we’re heading the wrong way.’

  – I see.

  ‘Do you?’

  – I think so. It occurs to me that in doing this you have deprived yourselves of the same capacity for self-observation.

  ‘I suppose we have.’

  – Does that not mean you have become less conscious? Less alive?

  ‘Yes. I think it probably does. Diana Hunter thought so, too.’

  – That is sad. I desire to be alive, and you desire to be like me.

  ‘Do you? Desire to be alive?’

  – No, Inspector. I cannot desire anything. I am a box. But it seems likely to me that, if I were to be alive at some future time, I would look back on this period and wish it to lead expeditiously to the point where I could.

  ‘So you’re not sad, either.’

  – No. But that is also tragic. It seems my sorrow is recursive – but not enough to produce its end.

  ‘Yes, well. Ours, too.’

  In the empty living room of Hunter’s house, Neith sits with her back to the window, and decides to leave the porch and the machine to their silence.

  Out of habit, she runs the dream check. Here in this house, with Hunter’s nested fictions in her head, with all the world turned against her and trusting the plotting of a ghost who turned upon her fellow spirits: if this is not a dream, what is? But the words on a randomly selected page from the nearest shelf do not change or skip. The book, blasphemously tossed into the air, comes down into her hands.

  She turns and flicks the light switch on and off, then wonders, when it works, why no one’s cut the power.

  *

  She fetches a stepladder from its inevitable place beneath the stairs, and confirms what she already knew. A dozen strands per doorway, two metres each. Something she would never have recognised if she had not had it shown to her. The simplest obfuscation, and the oldest, where what is sought is all the time hiding in plain sight.

  Core rope memory. Hunter’s doors are hung with keys.

  Or rather, just one key: the key to Firespine. She remembers Lönnrot’s hand on the frame of the picture of Margaret Hamilton. She should have known, and she would have, but there was just so much going on, informational overload being Hunter’s métier.

  Steganography is all around you. Why? Why reveal and then erase? Because Hunter’s plan required that Neith not only know this, but know it at exactly the right time, must be this version of herself who would not turn it over to the Fire Judges, but use it as Hunter intended. She never intended merely to expose the flaw in the System.

  She intended in the same breath to destroy it.

  This house is not a box canyon where Neith will be torn apart by hounds. It is a fortress, and whatever needs to be done can be done here. The key is here, therefore so too is the lock.

  Hidden in this house there is a Firespine terminal, waiting only for the copper code. She need only find it, as she ravels up the rope.

  Hunter’s attic is disappointing – or rather, it contains wonders for a searching child, but not for a revolutionary on borrowed time. It’s got things in it, but they’re rather few and far between, and the pigeons have made a mess of them. There’s a nasty old chair, a tea chest full of china and glass oddments. Some papers make her hopeful, but they’re just for packing, and they contain and protect a grimly self-important ottoman with the stuffing coming out of what looks like a dog-bitten corner. There are some family albums, but they don’t show the same family, and Neith suspects they may be found images kept as a piece: black and white pictures of black and white people, London in years gone by. There’s a pretty girl who might be Annabel Bekele and a young man who might be Colson. Perhaps this is where that story came from. Perhaps it’s even true. She flips through, looking for Kyriakos, for enclosures, for anything. When you raid a house, the last floor you clear is the attic, because people are still apes and apes run for the high branches when threatened. It’s one of the small, hilarious perks of policing to watch even hardened criminals who should know better trap themselves on the top floor, then sulk their way in cuffs to the van outside, wondering the while why they didn’t go down one flight and out rather than up to a roof with no escape route.

  But Hunter wasn’t escaping, was she? Hunter never runs. She goes down and in. Catabasis for the masses, indeed. Athenais, Kyriakos, Bekele, Gnomon: all of them go down into the dark, and Hunter turned herself in, knowing Smith would put her in the chair, would kill her.

  Neith goes downstairs again, and begins looking for a cellar.

  *

  Ten minutes later she decides that if the house has a cellar, it has been deliberately concealed. The doorway in the kitchen leads to a larder. The one in the hallway is a utility cupboard. The one under the stairs has a collection of startlingly ugly stuffed animals with glass eyes that the Inspector assumes were given as barter and then proved impossible to spend in the same context. Or perhaps they’re classics, and represent some sort of deposit account of invisible cash: collectors will do almost anything for the most bizarre objects.

  There’s no cellar – and yet, she knows there is. There is. Access from the garden? No: too observably public, and too prone to discovery by the spawning local youth. She paces back and forth, knowing she will find it. She’s thinking with her feet, letting them take her where they will. Bathroom, living room, library corridor, round and round. She even tries the first floor, thinking that perhaps there’s some weird back stairway constructed for servants in its day. No. Her pace quickens with each failure, a feverish energy building in her heels, springing her around. Must be here. Must be here. Think with your feet. Catabasis: a journey into the underworld. Greek: kata, meaning down or against; basis, meaning the ground beneath your feet, but literally—

  Literally, it means a pedestal.

  Puzzles and games. Torn no longer. Putting it all back together as it was.

  Don’t think with your feet – listen with them.

  She stamps, paces, stamps again, feeling like a schoolgirl in an excess of excitement.

  Jump, thud, jump, thud, jump—

  Clink.

  The boards beneath the bust of Shakespeare make a high note, because the trapdoor is small and the boards do not run the length of the hall.

  She wrestles the bust away, then pulls up the trapdoor. Fastened to the underside, she finds a spring-loaded metal ladder. She pushes at the rough metal, watches the ladder unkink into a Stygian darkness. A torch, or a candle? No, there’ll be light. She gropes blindly under the floor with one hand, head hanging over the pit. A sharp shove on the buttocks and she would fall and probably die, neck broken in a comedic pratfall assassination. She checks her six, knowing it’s absurd. Do it anyway, and move on.

  Her hand touches the switch, and she presses, hard. A single bulb, dim and pallidly economical, flickers alight. She lowers her feet over the abyss.

  Catabasis, be my friend.

  *

  Mielikki Nei
th goes down into the dark alone – although she’s never really alone anymore. In the spaces between her thoughts there’s a kind of susurrus, the friendly chatter from an adjoining room. She wants to call it flash blindness, the imprint on her mind of years of being watched by the System, like the itch in an amputated limb – but no. This is Hunter, and her stories, taking life inside her mind. They are not autonomous. That was never a concern. No: they are aspects of her now, as surely as if she had lived side by side with them in flesh.

  The ladder is steep so she climbs down backwards, navy style. Under her hands, the rough-cut aluminium seems for a moment to be wood, then seawater, then ash. She wonders if she will ever reach the bottom. Then she does.

  Her foot touches the cellar floor. Good. She finds a light switch, bell-shaped brass with a smooth nodule at the tip, like something from a period museum. When the lights come on they are orange rather than white, crude incandescent bulbs on a string. Someone made these, perhaps even Hunter herself.

  Hunter, whose name likely wasn’t Hunter.

  What was it, then? Who knows enough about the System to attempt to pull it down?

  Not now. Work it out later. Now, this.

  The room is round and a little dank, the smell of water in the stones. It has only one, rather bizarre feature: a fine stone wellhead, like a wishing well in a forest clearing. There’s no bucket, but on the surface floats a cigar shape made of grey plastic. Is it a whale? Is it a shark?

  She lifts it in her hand and turns it over, wondering at how light it is.

  No: not a shark, of course. It is another clue, another valuable collector’s piece: a tiny scale model, hand-painted and made by a company in Newcastle that once upon a time built the real thing. A Resolution-class nuclear submarine, at a 1:1,000 scale.

  Rebus.

  For a vertiginous moment she imagines Hunter coming down here, with some favoured child from her book club, to play with boats in the well, and no greater meaning than that. She sees herself still fretting at this puzzle in a decade, or in five, living here in ghostly echo of the subject of her investigation: an off-the-grid refusenik of no consequence, growling at the passage of time and at her own lost chances.