That picture still existed. Most likely it was another rabbit hole left behind for James While to stumble down, but there was nothing else to go on. He ordered Apotheo Net staff to compile the data into a working AI personality, which he then spun up within an offline server in his jet's cabin. At the press of a button, this copy of Olan Harrison would express itself into the real world as a holograph.
James While pressed the button.
He looked young, as he had forty years ago when first riding his meteoric rise to mastery of the world's communications; a vital and strong man with a full head of tousled golden hair. He blinked 'awake', taking a moment to look around himself, though that was an affectation; movements of the holograph's head didn't change the angle of the single camera lens While had allowed him to 'see' through. Still he looked down at his own hands, then last of all looked up at James While.
"Hello, James," he said.
To hear his own name in Olan's voice, absent the crackle of old age, brought a swell of sadness mixed with anger. This was the man who had betrayed his own legacy.
"Tell me this wasn't all you, Olan."
Harrison smiled. "I imagine you're very confused now. Angry. I understand that."
"But you did it. Tell me who joined you. Tell me where they are."
The holograph looked around, taking in the curved walls of the jet.
"I see we're on your jet. You're running me disconnected from any network. Very astute."
"Tell me who killed you."
Olan frowned. "He's dead? I see, that's a pity. But I'm not a live copy, James. However the real Olan died, I wasn't present for it."
"But you know who was close to him. You must have suspected what they were planning."
"Did you know what I was planning, James?"
While paced. Looking at Olan made him angrier. That they'd left this copy behind was an insult to him.
"Why didn't they erase you? When they killed Olan why didn't they delete your file too?"
"I couldn't say. Perhaps they thought I would misdirect you? I doubt your people could pick out a rogue command in the complexity of this personality program, even if they knew it was there."
James While paced faster. Every avenue was closed to him. It felt like the world was made of mirrors, only reflecting back the world he already knew. There had to be a way through, but he couldn't find it. There was no pattern to crack, or at least none he could see.
He cut the holograph, and with a gesture sent the file down to several research teams below. If there was anything inside Olan's code, they'd pick it out. Probably they'd only waste their time. He didn't have a choice but to try.
In his plane he paced.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
* * *
Joran Helkegarde stumbled upon the pattern by accident.
He didn't see it at first. In his efforts to gather the first hundred coma victims for his shielding experiments, drawn evenly from across the whole of the world, he had to make a register of all the sufferers out there.
Bordeaux was already tracking four hundred and thirty-four. His own estimates, based on existing distribution patterns, put the global number somewhere between seven hundred and two thousand. That left three hundred to sixteen hundred unaccounted for, and that was an untenable ignorance.
He chartered a jet to Bordeaux. Sovoy joined him, as he joined him in everything now, as if by clinging to Helkegarde's shirttails he might absolve himself of his own guilt and responsibility.
He found Bordeaux in shambles.
The bunker was ancient; once a nuclear weapons silo, all metal gantries and waterlogged basements. The tech for tracking coma sufferers was ridiculously outdated, with little automatic transfer between precise GPS coordinates as transmitted by monitoring teams on the ground, often necessitating hand-passed lists of data to be entered into joint servers before popping up on a disorganized rabble of big screens.
James While hadn't been here himself, too lost in the big picture up in the sky. The SEAL Heads had been fired, erasing any sense of oversight. Bordeaux was a headless beast, flailing uselessly at a level of institutional incompetence that would have seen the Multicameral Array broken within a week.
Here, with no one knowing what a success condition even was, following a directive that no one understood or knew how to enforce, they just muddled along. In many areas Joran's own expansion of research activities had shoved monitoring into smaller, less well-equipped spaces. In one room they scratched coordinates onto chalk slates while paddling through inch-deep drip water. The best minds had already been fired, or shifted at Joran's own command into his research stream, gutting the original intent of Bordeaux. The data at its very source was corrupt.
"Shit in, shit out," Sovoy said.
So Joran cracked the whip. High on a diet of stimulants from James While's own supply, barely sleeping and living at a frantic minute-to-minute pace, he snapped Bordeaux into shape while also juggling the progress in Istanbul, construction of his thirteenth Prime Array, and setting up prep for the buffer experiments.
He kicked out his own Multicameral, Logchain and Apotheo Net teams, sending them off to satellite facilities and re-dedicating Bordeaux to its original purpose; tracking the spread of the infection through the global population. He installed hundreds of networked systems keyed into glass display panes running down the spine of twin grand halls on the upper level. He oversaw code that allowed statistical analysis of the influx of data on a dozen different parameters, while at the same time sending out new iterations of line-detecting equipment and rigorous checklists for monitoring teams to follow. He set Sovoy in place as the Bordeaux Head and authorized him to whip consent however he had to.
Within days the quality of the data improved exponentially. Coma subjects who had fallen through the cracks were now registered, as working teams formed organically and the true importance of the mission seeped into the minds of the people working there.
Sovoy gave stirring speeches from the top gantry, about the future and global survival, and with that the doors above were sealed. Working shifts spun around the clock. Data poured in, and at last Joran began to see meaningful trends. The magnetic reading equipment he'd manufactured based off the shielding pods in the Logchain gave simplistic hints at hydrogen line activity, measuring more its impact on other factors like brain wave, barometric pressure, true North orientation and radiation, but the data was there.
In New York one coma-candidate was shaping up to have an immensely strong signal. Another just north of London was growing likewise. He ran through lists of names and placed check marks against the ones he wanted. He splayed them out across a global map, surveying the spread, and it was then that he saw the pattern.
He called Sovoy, and Sovoy came in. They only had five days of accurate, detailed data by that point, but the flashing lights and shifts were as clear as the evidence for neutrinos pulsing through deep pools of water. It was no surprise they hadn't been noticed before, with the stream of information already so unreliable. Now it was as clear as day.
"Here," said Sovoy, tapping the screen. "Here, another a day later. Then here. Project it backward to the start and we're talking about one hundred already. Maybe more."
Joran stared. It was there. It was going to complicate things for him. It was a second wave assault that had to be stopped. He called James While at once and sent the filtered data up in a rich stream.
"The shadow SEAL are taking coma-sufferers," he told While, having learned by then to give him only the top line summary. "Day by day, so we don't notice, spreading the distribution, but the pattern is there. They're taking them right out from under our noses."
James While's eyes lit up. Joran thought he'd never seen him so excited.
"Take your one hundred," While said, with a new purpose that had been absent from his voice for weeks. "And lock the rest down. They're not getting a single one more."
14. S
UFFER
In the light of day Lara's left temple was hot and tender, her left eye still saw only white, and the pain in her arms pounded with every beat of her heart.
The President's bedchamber was hot and sultry, though the windows were open and the curtain drawn. Witzgenstein was gone, peeled away from a position circled around Lara's head some time before the dawn. The feeling on the line as she'd disengaged had tickled, like damp strings trailing along her scalp. She'd kissed Lara's forehead tenderly.
"You'll see," she said quietly. "No, don't wake up. I'm building something better."
She'd gone.
Now a man that Lara didn't know was standing before her. He wasn't from New LA, which meant he had to be one of Drake's people. He was older, in his fifties, with gray hair and sad eyes. He just stood there, looking down at her, like a robot frozen mid-program.
"Hello," Lara said, reaching out to him on the line. The sense of him was foggy and imprecise, part of a new world only beginning to come into focus, but she could feel Witzgenstein's influence upon him. He was a flat, lukewarm gray beneath the bridle of deep red. There was some sense of the reins stretching back through the air, but Lara couldn't focus clearly enough to distinguish where.
All of this was new.
She shuffled to her feet. The man didn't move.
"You're guarding me," she said, but he didn't respond. She took a step; the slight jolt sent an electric shock of pain up her thigh, up her spine and into her skull. She grunted and took another step toward the door.
Now the man moved, clearly barring her path.
Lara slowly turned around. The room was luxurious, if musty and marred by damp patches on the walls. Thirteen years of neglect. The bed was still perfectly turned down, a four-poster of dark walnut with cream blankets trimmed with royal blue. The walls were custard-colored with white paneling, ornamental plaster tracery scrolled across the ceiling, the curtains were a pale blue floral, the carpet a faint gray, and the windows looked out over the familiar South Lawn.
Like a hotel. Like a nice hotel.
She went to the bathroom, every step like an old woman's, and her guard followed. She moved over to the accompanying sitting room, where a large window arch, spoked like a wheel, gave an excellent view over people busily hacking into the lawn's overgrowth.
Priorities, of course. The White House had to look nice.
She sat down. Her guard came to stand over her, now holding a tray with some food on it; a few rounds of bread, some cheese, chicken slices, orange juice. Luxuries, most likely mined from one of the supply depots before Witzgenstein burned them down. With a cool, damp flannel pressed to her pulsing temple, Lara ate.
She looked out of the window, as if pining for Witzgenstein's return. She didn't look at her guard, didn't speak to him again, but on the line she turned her entire attention to unpicking the fog around him.
There was a great deal of work to be done. Her success of the night before had come in a moment of intense emotion, fueled by pain and rage, with her clumsy misdirections masked by the hate Frances and the others felt.
That wouldn't work for long, or for the things she needed to achieve.
She had to get better. Like a lawyer honing a sharp argument, whittling away all the unnecessary evidence, trimming off unnecessary words and building an airtight, argument-proof bullet of logic, she dug deep into the line.
It made her head ache worse. It was like staring at a fuzzy watercolor portrait, a vivid mixture of colors, temperatures, emotions, motions and scents overlaid atop the real world, jumbled together in a white-static barrage that most people would never think contained any meaning. How often did you look at anything through a microscope and really understand what you were seeing?
It dizzied her. Just in this room, just gathered round herself and the man and the spaces Witzgenstein had moved through, the information was so dense it made a kaleidoscope of sensation. It helped that he stood still, and she sat still, and neither of them spoke, but the fog remained baffling. At moments of frustration, as the fog stubbornly refused to part, that frustration bloomed off her like three-dimensional ripples, causing subtle distortions that made the line much harder to read.
At such times she managed her breathing, and counted panes in the window arch, and worked toward control. She'd done meditation before, in yoga classes after her later panic attacks, and they'd become a staple of her life in her barista days, keeping her functioning while she went into Sir Clowdesley every day. She knew about staying calm, perhaps better than anyone left alive.
Each time, calm returned faster, so the room became a placid fog again. Outside the room there was a whirlwind of activity, keeping the great ongoing painting of the line in constant motion, but in here, in her garret prison there was enough quiet to work by.
And work she did.
It was like learning a language. She sliced colors into a dozen varieties, then a hundred, seeing the shades and giving them names, remembering the color game Amo had played with her on their first date. 'Fawn', he'd said, holding her hand, 'Isabelline. They're both kinds of brown.'
So she subdivided the line; in color, in sound, in emotion, in taste, in smell, in every way she could parse it. Gradually the fog sharpened like an image resolving on a screen, pixel by pixel, turning into something she could recognize and understand.
By midday she saw enough to see the precise lines of the red bridle encircling her. Witzgenstein held it there, and it in turn led out to Witzgenstein. Any brute force moves across the line, any movement in the real world outside a certain parameter, and Janine would know. The bonds were strong, but even after a morning of focus Lara could see their low resolution. There were gaps, and weaknesses, through which she could slip out her thoughts and her influence. Through those gaps she reached back along the red tether to Witzgenstein.
Out there she was a hot red sun surrounded by a whirlwind of control and change. Near her were others, amongst them the blips for Cynthia, Alan, George, Frances, each in their own pain from the previous night's beating.
She reached wider afield, and found Crow. He was a purple spark in a fuzz of gray, held tightly in his own bridle of red. She tried to pick through it, to get a message down to him, but the bridle was too tight.
She found her children. They were separated from each other in tight, confined spaces; frustrated and sad, and the sadness that brought forced her back before she bulged through the bridle too much.
Through the long afternoon she dug deeper, drilling into the line like she was a builder in one of Amo's Deepcraft worlds, avoiding the thick seams of Janine's control and erecting new concepts and signposts to help her find her way. Hour by hour she forced back the fog until the whole of the White House hung around her in clear, sparkling relief.
There were levers she could pull, enough to bring Witzgenstein down from within. Support she could co-opt, minds she could turn, with time. The evening flew by as she planned. Perhaps after one more night spent worming her way tighter into Witzgenstein's heart, through kisses and whatever else she had to do, the keyhole would be open and the key would be ready to slot in and turn.
She didn't get the chance.
Around midnight Witzgenstein came back, placed a cold hand round her throat, wrapped the bridle tight around her body, and accused her of being a witch.
* * *
Lara looked up into Witzgenstein's eyes, while the bridle crushed her body as surely as the demon's hand ever had.
"I saw the others," Witzgenstein said, her voice calm but a ball of fury rising behind it on the line. "You wouldn't believe what happened to them. Frances, Alan, George, Nancy, Cynthia."
Lara tried to speak, but Witzgenstein tightened the bridle, choking her flat. The lines of it were imprecise, but precision didn't matter when you had brute strength. With her left hand she squeezed Lara's throat, with her right she pressed down on her swollen left temple.
The white pain in her eye exploded.
"Bruises all over t
hem," Janine went on, feigning calm, "as if they beat each other rather than you. I don't know how that might have happened." She paused and looked into Lara's terrified eyes. "Unless it was witchcraft."
Lara couldn't get a breath in. The panic bulged and there was nothing she could do to calm it. Janine kept pressing down on her temple while squeezing with the bridle, so hard that Lara could no longer even wriggle, could only lie prostate and gaze up at her cold blue eyes.
"You're not a witch, are you, Lara?"
She tried to gasp 'No', but it came out hoarse and breathless. Silver dots flashed across her one good eye as the lack of oxygen started her toward unconsciousness. In some silent, calculating part of her mind she recognized the enormous power Witzgenstein held, even as she recognized again how crudely she used it. The gaps were still there; too slim to slip through right now, but with the right time, with the right practice, perhaps she could-
"No more," Witzgenstein said, giving her a firm shake; like her body was a baby's rattle. "I am a Christian soul, but my patience has bounds. I accept that it's possible they struck each other, but so many times, and with no memory? I inspected your injuries last night, Lara. They each have as many as you. How could that happen? Tell me!"
Lara felt her eyes bugging. Her face grew hot and purple.
"Answer me with your witchcraft," Janine hissed. "Do it now, or I end our little experiment right here."
She was angrier than Lara had ever seen. Magenta lines burned off her like New LA on fire, and all that anger poured into the bridle, burning Lara's skin where it touched. Up close it was both fascinating and terrifying, and it was going to kill her if she didn't act now.
So she acted on the line.
What she sent out was crude, a push against the bridle that didn't budge it, that accurately represented her own strength, but not her precision. Witzgenstein blinked, looked at Lara with new eyes, then at once pulled back.
The bridle retreated. She rocked back.
"What was that?"
Lara choked. She gasped. Her body trembled as sensation came back. For a moment shock overwhelmed her, as she grasped just how close to dying she'd come.
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 186