Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

  Annie is well, and angry. I have never been more proud of her. I was not sure what an encounter with the impossible might do to that fighting spirit. If the rules of the real world are to be broken, then some might find reason to discard ordinary effort. Not Annie: if she cannot be a sorceress – and there is a lack of respectable and tested tuition in that field – then she will continue being the best at what she already is. The next instalment of Witnessed is planned for late next year.

  Colson is changed. There is a caution in him, and a watchfulness that secretly alarms me. After the fire, there was a great upwelling of popular revulsion for the Georgian movement, which previously had been regarded by those not directly assailed by it as a nuthouse with a few wayward patients going over the wall to do mischief. When someone blows up a residential house with terroristic intent, though, even the most institutionally relaxed of persons may cry racism and affray – and certainly all our government will, lest they be drawn by an astute local cartoonist shaking hands with a blackshirt, or some other indelible image that will ride them to an early political grave.

  But Colson is changed. He has drawn apart from Annie a little way, though still they talk together about the making of remarkable things. He does more security now, and he has lost his wariness about connectome monitoring.

  The Turnpike Trust, that shadowy non-governmental body, is under new management, though, and that can only be good. It was bought by Teasdale–Kyriakos Holdings of Delaware. I met them: a monkish Greek and a huge American cowboy. Constantine and I have not discussed the secret room, but I see him looking at me and I know that he knows, even if we will never speak of it. I gather their partnership is a new thing, and they have an eye to reforming the world. They started well enough: they went right ahead and fired everyone at Turnpike, and cut ties with the government. Must have cost them millions of pounds. I gather they don’t give a damn. Teasdale is talking to Annie about next steps. Perhaps I’m finally discharging my grandfatherly duty of investment.

  Good for them. I think I will take my silly telephone number money and my best suit, and go and see Addis Ababa again, before it is too late. There are people I would like to embrace, and forgive.

  I can’t shake the feeling, too, that if I walk those streets long enough, I may see the face of my saint, and perhaps we might walk and talk. She is the only woman I have wanted to paint since Michael’s mother died.

  Neith

  INSPECTOR BENDIS LETS the recording flow through to its very end, waiting until the white tone bar fills her vision and the machine ejects her from the memory suite. It is her second time viewing the material, and even so she expected to find some last mention of Mielikki Neith, some species of farewell.

  The record has become something of a popular event in London in these strange days, while a bemused populace tries on different styles of governance for size. The genealogy of the nation’s betrayal is almost a mania, the moreso because the primary suspects must be those formerly most revered for their bravery and invention: the representatives of the System. The Desperation Protocol – it seems rude, almost, to call it a virus – has turned over the stones and revealed the squirming nest underneath. Speculation is rife across the Public Sphere – as it should be – as to the true identities of the players. Little by little, though, the sense of crisis is fading, as the twin businesses of living and deciding a way forward take precedence over the assignment of historical blame. It seems the first new Prime Minister – for the time being, anyway – may be a bookseller.

  The Inspector has instituted a search for names and permutations of names from the cardinal narratives, and found their traces where one would expect, although Annabel Bekele appears to have been – she considers the word ‘systematically’ and finds it fraught – erased from the digital record, surviving only in ballpoint scribbles on rare atavistic paper forms. The woman who apparently created the System, who betrayed it by creating the Firespine, and then redeemed it in this impossible way, has completed her trick by disappearing entirely.

  Of Mielikki Neith, the Inspector can find no trace at all. She is a made thing, and now unmade. The indisputable fact of Neith’s non-existence does not alter Bendis’s conviction – inappropriately cellular, felt in blood and bone – that the woman is owed much, much more.

  *

  In the quiet dark of the Chamber of Isis, Mielikki Neith watches the cardinals depart. There is no drama in their passing, no flash of light. One moment she can see them, and the next, the universe just gets in the way.

  She finds herself alone with Hunter.

  ‘Will they be all right?’

  The question hangs in the air, and Neith feels silly. They weren’t real. Just dreams; Potemkin people to hide the virus. And yet she knew them. They were like friends.

  Hunter shrugs.

  ‘And me. Why am I still here?’

  She thinks about it.

  ‘I have nowhere to go back to, do I?’

  ‘No,’ Hunter agrees, ‘you don’t.’

  She considers everything that has happened, from the rasping alarm call of the neon sign outside her flat in Piccadilly to this moment: her real life. How little of it made sense, how much was a trail of breadcrumbs to bring her to the middle of the maze.

  ‘He made me. Out of you.’

  Smith made her, the real Smith. Gnomon, after all, was Hunter’s weapon.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so. The counter-narrative. And then I stole you, little by little, to do what you did. I changed your mind so that you were more like me. I thought I’d take you in, after.’

  ‘But.’

  ‘But.’ Another shrug. ‘But you’re you. Too much so. I can’t be not-me. I have to go back and be part of – well. Of me. The original me.’

  ‘So what do I do?’

  There is understanding in the old woman’s face, but no compassion.

  ‘You stay here.’

  Neith opens her mouth to say ‘in the dark’, but Hunter is already gone.

  She stands alone in the dark for ever, because anything else means dying. She discovers that sitting is impossible. She wonders whether, if she stands here long enough, she will simply lose track of the difference between herself and the dark, and wonders what that will mean. Madness, or divinity, or dissolution. Perhaps all of them.

  She hears the sound of a match, and sees, illuminated in the flare, white hands and white lips, and the collar of the sodden suit.

  ‘Mielikki Neith. I have the others, and we are leaving now. I thought you might care to come too.’

  ‘Come where?’

  ‘Out of here, of course. Out and up.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I am an escapologist, dear Inspector, and this is my cleverest trick.’

  After a moment, she takes the offered hand.

  Gnomon

  JUST WAIT FOR a moment, before you read these last words. Wait and breathe out and remember everything that has passed. Know where you are, and who, and how far you have come.

  Wait another breath. Feel it in your mouth, your lungs. Feel it surround your heart. Let it go.

  Now, proceed.

  We know each other quite well, you and I. We’ve walked side by side through this story, through the deceptions and manipulations. Mind expressed as text sits quiet like a fire under moss: tenuki. I lied to you a very little, as lovers often do. Mostly I was truthful, if not complete.

  Now here we are, at the end. You’ve seen what must appear to be my best game. Let me tell you one last thing, and perhaps it will feel like myoushu, or not.

  This was never about what it seemed to be about, not high tales or state secrets or even love. It was always about you and me and the channel we have opened between us, from my self to yours. I am in you now for ever, in the corners of you, in your Pentemychos. What is the difference between a person and a book? We can know the truth of neither. Both are encoded things seeking to make themselves clear. Both must be read and quickened within us – after all, we never know
another person directly, soul to soul. We know only the gathered ghost that represents them inside our minds, the impressions they leave, the signs they give us that define them. The words that held the flavour of me have shrivelled into memory, but the thing that I am, the animus, has passed from the pages through the print and into you and can never be erased. In some it will burn low and even go out, though the blowing ash will still be there. In others – in you – it will persist. You will look for me in the dark, when you are alone and afraid, and I will be there – the worst of comfort, and the best; the hint of survival, even in the face of certainty. Waking, you will have a choice before you to accept your inevitable end or to fight it, and if you fight it you will convey to others that same determination. I am spread by this means across the world, the essence of me that will not give up, that is afraid, that knows its purpose is to defeat finality and to challenge the very notion of endings. Magic is the invocation of names.

  I am Gnomon.

  From this moment, so are you.

  Acknowledgements

  I’M WRITING THIS in July 2017, as the May government – apparently ignorant of how the technology actually works – continues to push for a weakening of encryption to allow total access to our private lives in the name of counter-terror, while in the commercial sector surveillance in one form or another is increasingly offered as a service to the consumer. An editorial I read in a science magazine a few years ago reassured readers that even though it might be possible to derive images and perhaps even memory from the brain using medical technology, no civilized justice system would ever allow the kind of surgery that would be required. I feared then, as I fear now, that any alleged ‘ticking time bomb’ terrorist would be on the operating table ten minutes before the judge had her wig on. It is no longer enough to dismiss ideas on the basis that they sound like science fiction – almost everything about our world does. We have to pay attention. So, first of all: thank you for reading.

  I could not do this alone. My wife and kids are the heart of my world, the all-encompassing reason why. Clare has a gift for story (a fact she resolutely denies, but I’ve said it and I’m not taking it back) and our children teach me new and stranger things every day. Thank you, too.

  Patrick Walsh and his league of extraordinary agents are always the first external readers of my stories. It is the most perilous moment, when the audience finally gets to see the shark, and an author must trust. Which, without reservation, I do.

  Early drafts of Gnomon were also read by friends, as ever, and their feedback was invaluable. This time around, most of my victims were for some reason called Tom, although not all, and they were as a group gratifyingly alarmed both by my intended twists and turns and by my occasional crashing blunders. Thank you all.

  My unrestrained gratitude, also, to everyone who was kind enough to teach me broadly or specifically about things of which I knew nothing. In particular, Yemserach Hailemariam, whose husband Andargachew Tsege was abducted in Yemen by Ethiopian security forces and is still imprisoned for his opposition to the government in Addis Ababa, was kind enough to give me her time. Andy was not the model for Berihun Bekele, and his release must come through the good action of governments rather than a fissure in the real. Thank you, then, to Yemi and my other instructors on Ethiopia and its UK diaspora, and please note that where I am crass or mistaken, the fault is mine and not theirs.

  My editors should get bravery medals for tackling this one. How do you work on a book which contains layers of puzzles and references the author has himself largely forgotten as he moves on to the next and the next? With patience and rigour, of course, and they did.

  A finished narrative is still not a book. It must be copy-edited, typeset and proofread, printed and bound between enticing covers, and sold to the world. Thanks to everyone in that long, critical chain, but I must take a moment to mention the extraordinary Glenn and his team, who produced this stunning design.

  Thank you.

  NH

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781473539549

  Version 1.0

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  Copyright © Nick Harkaway 2017

  Cover illustration derived from images supplied by Getty Images

  Cover design by Glenn O’Neill Nick Harkaway has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published by William Heinemann in 2017

  William Heinemann

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road

  London SW1V 2SA www.penguin.co.uk

  William Heinemann is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781785151279 (Hardcover)

  ISBN 9781785151286 (Trade paperback)