Avalon Red

by Mark New

  I was beginning to pick up the thread of the mysteries.

  ‘Don’t tell me: Meille’s death was passed off as an accident and the case closed?’

  ‘Got it in one. This will impress you: he died when the automated car he was in was the victim of a malfunction in the traffic system which led to it crossing an intersection into the path of an oncoming articulated truck. The truck driver was slightly injured. Meille was killed. The local traffic authority interrogated the traffic-flow seneschal quite thoroughly but there was no problem with the AI. The localised traffic information sensor had simply failed to note the presence of the truck.’

  ‘So they replaced the sensor, said sorry and carried on?’

  ‘Pretty much. I think they paid some compensation to Meille’s next of kin but it went down as an unfortunate accident.’

  Once again, an accident that wasn’t without precedent but might give rise to concern if it was part of a pattern. Most major cities had automated traffic flows and the systems were getting more and more safe and efficient as the years went by. When they’d been first introduced some happy hackers had tried to get into the systems. Paris once had to close the city centre to traffic for a weekend while they purged an incursion but next generation AIs and better cybersecurity had reduced malevolent influence to almost nothing. Like I said before, the baddies were losing. That left a few residual genuine accidents, just like this one wasn’t.

  ‘What link did Meille have with Peters?’

  Becky pulled a face. ‘Not a clue.’ I almost did a double-take, so unexpected was the reply. I waited for more. ‘No, really. The only connection we’ve been able to find between the two was the mention in Meille’s will. So far as we know the two of them never met in life, never met Online and never communicated in any shape or form.’

  ‘The file-logs confirmed that, did they?’

  This time she really did blush. She was also still giving away confidential information. It was a good job I’d had the house go dark.

  ‘Yes. Obviously it wasn’t a UNTEA investigation but Peter knew someone who could help and I was able to search the logs.’ I’ll bet he did. Peter had always been adept at committing the kind of crimes he now investigated. He used to do it for me when I could give him immunity under the Official Secrets Act. In some ways he was the best person in the world to hold his present job and whether he’d obtained the logs himself or got one of his contacts to do it, I had no doubt that Becky had been given access to the genuine article.

  ‘So, two employees dead by apparent accident. I can see why you were suspicious given what you know,’ What you know about me, in fact, ‘but they could really have been coincidental accidents. Did you rule that out?’

  ‘I kept an open mind, like someone once taught me.’ Ouch again. ‘But I thought that Peters’s involvement in shady activities might have made him a target and Meille’s link with him was sufficient to make me want to look into it further.’ That made sense, I supposed. I couldn’t for the life of me see what linked Peters and Meille other than the small legacy in the will.

  ‘But you never found a link between them?’

  ‘No. I kept a few feelers out but nothing came of them. I did mention my suspicions to George Latimer at one of our weekly meetings and kept him in the loop but there was nothing else to report. Until...’ she dropped the top file onto the pile on the floor and opened the one now uppermost on her lap. I sighed and put down my now empty bottle.

  ‘Until someone else had an accident?’

  ‘Very good. But I know that George gave you numbers so no credit available.’ Oh well, I couldn’t win them all.

  ‘Just to be clear before we move on to our next lucky contestant; Peters was in contracts in Morocco and Meille in security in Canada?’ Becky gave me the ‘OK’ sign with thumb and forefinger. I stared at the ceiling for a moment and she waited patiently for me to finish ruminating. Never interrupt me when I’m thinking. Quiet please: genius at work. No, I couldn’t work out anything more from what I’d heard so far. The ceiling could do with a lick of paint. Nice going, genius. At least the snarkiness was fading.

  I waved a hand and she correctly interpreted it as a cue to resume.

  ‘About a week after Meille’s funeral, I received a message inviting me to play Glory of the Roman Empire.’ Another MMORPG. Guess what that one was about? Becky didn’t have the pathological antipathy that I did to vir-games and she used to play a bit when we were together.

  ‘From whom? Anonymous?’

  ‘No, it was properly signed and delivered to my Online office. It was from Doctor Joshua Martin, no less.’

  ‘I didn’t know he indulged in vir-games.’ Dr Martin was a celebrated computer software architect who worked exclusively for Argonaut. Peter had always been a huge fan. Most of the infrastructure and processing basis of the Online world was the product of the Argonaut Systems Department which Martin headed. A lot of it had been created by building on the AI construction pioneered by David Winter. I’m sure Peter had told me that Winter and Martin were firm friends. I didn’t know whether he did have an interest in vir-games but one thing I did know for sure.

  ‘Hang on, Dr Martin isn’t dead!’ I’m sure someone would have mentioned it if he was. Like global news media, for instance. Becky sighed.

  ‘Now you’re jumping to conclusions,’ she admonished ‘Did I say he was dead? I said he’d invited me to ancient Rome.’ Fair point.

  ‘Just trying to get into the spirit of things,’ I offered rather weakly. Becky looked at me slyly.

  ‘No, he’s officially shut himself away in our Arizona facility to work on the next generation architecture suite.’ She couldn’t have marked that one any better.

  ‘ “Officially” ?’

  ‘He’s been missing for two months. Victim number Four, I’m pretty convinced.’

  ‘What?’ There was going to be a media meltdown when word got out. One of the fathers of the Online missing in mysterious circumstances? They’d create vir-shows and vir-games about him till the end of time. If it was actually true that he was a victim it was going to attract a great deal of

  attention from the authorities as well as the media. Two months was a long time to keep it quiet so the Argonaut juggernaut must have been working overtime. Speaking of time, it occurred to me that I needed a timeline to work from. If Martin was only comparatively recently a victim (assuming that he was) then Argonaut had been looking for me well before he met his fate. I frowned.

  ‘At what point did you start trying to find me?’

  ‘I first mentioned the possibility to George immediately after I met Dr Martin in Trajan’s Forum in the early second century AD. Which I’m just going to tell you about if you would stop interrupting for a minute.’

  I ignored her. ‘And you’re seriously telling me that Martin has been missing for two months and his family and friends haven’t noticed?’ Becky had a rare gift for rational thought and was a terrific analyst in her days in secret government circles but one problem she had always had was an inability to detour in her thinking. She liked her thought processes to be uninterrupted. Sure, you could input more facts as she was working but she got irritated if she thought you were just adding confusion. I could see from her expression that I was interfering with her carefully planned narrative structure. Oh dear. How sad. This was important. I wasn’t sure why but that’s just the essence of the way I think. Throw everything at me in any order, even if it’s apparently unrelated and eventually, if I’m lucky, I’ll just find it comes together. It was that kind of creative process that made me the brilliant cold-blooded killer that I am. Or used to be, I reminded myself.

  ‘It’s important,’ I told her. It didn’t mollify her by much but she had enough respect for my abilities to indulge me, even if it did involve a heavier-than-usual sigh.

  ‘It isn’t unknown for Dr Martin and his team to shut themselves away from everyone for some time to work on something complicated, important or both. Especiall
y,’ she added ‘if the resultant product could be commercially sensitive.’ That made enough sense to allow them to buy time. ‘Besides, Jason Latimer spoke to Dr Martin’s family and explained that he might be away for a bit longer than usual so I hope they’re not worried yet. Jason also told Martin’s team at the facility that he had gone off solo for a bit. That was something he had done from time to time so we think the situation is currently contained.’ Well, that’s fine and dandy if you can live with yourself after lying to his family, friends and colleagues even though you’re pretty sure he’s dead. Don’t you just love corporate thinking? I wasn’t ready to move on just yet.

  ‘Two more questions before we go to Rome.’ Becky nodded unhappily. Tough. She’d left me because she’d found out what my job entailed and yet here she was, years later, endorsing some pretty shabby treatment of people herself. OK, not quite in the same league but it was less ethical than I expected of her. Maybe she had changed more than I’d thought when she accepted the corporate dollar. I think it was the first time since I’d met her that I ever truly considered that I might have the moral high ground. That was an uncomfortable thought: I was hardly a paragon of virtue myself.

  ‘One: You said you only think he’s dead. If he’s just missing, is anyone looking for him? And two: How long can you realistically keep it “contained”?’ I only realised how much I’d emphasised my derision at her use of the expression when I said ‘contained’ and Becky actually flinched. If this was making her uncomfortable so much the better. God knows we’d had enough problems between us but I’d mainly blamed myself for them. It seemed that this time it was Miss Kingston demonstrating less-than-stellar personal qualities. She sat up straight in the armchair, inadvertently allowing her skirt to ride higher as she swung her legs off the arm. I was a bit beyond appreciating it at that point. She closed her eyes briefly and then replied; picking her words carefully, it seemed to me.

  ‘One day Dr Martin went hiking by himself in the area surrounding the facility. He often did it and though the topography of the area isn’t the easiest to navigate, he was fit enough and experienced enough to handle it.’ He was about David Winter’s age, I mused, somewhere in his seventies. ‘He also had a pacemaker. It was fitted by our own Medical Unit some years ago and was working perfectly.’ I could almost guess what was coming. ‘When he didn’t return by the time he had said he would, his colleague contacted security. Someone - it was one of the team currently on the yacht - ran a trace on the pacemaker.’ Nearly all pacemakers ran an Online telemetry programme which sounded an alarm if there was a problem with the device. It could be used to locate the patient as well. ‘He had difficulty pulling up the details. When he finally succeeded he saw that it was registering zero activity and that the alarms and locater had been deactivated. It had been on zero for several hours and we were still unable to trace it. Security did go out to search the area but couldn’t find him. That’s when we...’

  ‘Started the great cover up.’ I finished, unkindly. It was her turn to look at the ceiling.

  ‘If you think that was bad, wait till I tell you the rest of the story.’ That sounded ominous. I still wasn’t getting to the heart of it all. ‘Anyway,’ she continued ‘to answer your other question, it’ll be another month or so before we really won’t be able to keep a lid on it at all. But it may not matter by then.’ The degree of stress in her voice, which had risen in the last few minutes, matched that of good ol’ George that morning on the bench when he told me they were under attack. What could a giant global corporation have possibly run into that caused them such massive problems? Arithmetic caught up with me:

  ‘And “Victim Number Four”? Aren’t we missing one?’

  ‘If you would stop interrupting every few seconds and let me tell it my way, you’ll see why I took them in this order. Yes, Martin is the fourth and I’ll get to the third presently. We didn’t know Martin was the fourth at the time but there had been one other chronologically that we didn’t find out about till later. Is it too much to ask that you stop being the big smart-ass expert for a minute and actually listen to the bloody details?’ Her irritation was fair enough; I was well aware that I was a serious pain in the rear but her anger seemed to grow exponentially. When I knew more later I would put it down to the severe strain she was under but, of course, I knew nothing much of that at the time and I was caught unawares by her increasingly volcanic reaction.

  With no warning, she picked the files from her lap and threw them forcefully down on the floor onto the one previously placed there. I raised my eyebrows at what seemed a sudden, untypical transformation. All I thought was that I’d underestimated how stressful she was finding it, whatever ‘it’ might be.

  ‘Listen, you idiot!’ It sounded as though she was almost crying. I despised myself for my dispassionate detachment. ‘This is far, far bigger than you or me or bloody Argonaut and its precious reputation! It was my idea to try a low-key approach with you. I heard you were burned out when you left and I didn’t even know if you were still alive but one thing I do know is that we are almost certainly facing extinction and you are the only person who is likely to be able to do anything about it! I don’t need to be here reopening old wounds and I especially don’t need you sniping at my lack of ethics so stop acting so bloody superior and let me tell you the story my way! If the world survives you can put Argonaut on trial for anything you like! If it survives!’

  Wow. Some outburst. I knew I hadn’t seen her for years but it seemed very unlike her. Perhaps the stress of the high-powered job was getting to both her and George? It made me think that the claims of dire consequences were rooted in hysteria rather than any objective assessment. They ought to consider retiring to an island paradise. I’d pretty much had enough of this - it wasn’t as though it had been any fun for me either.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, Bex! How bad could it possibly be?’ My own anger flared. That wasn’t so untypical of me, especially since the onset of my own problems. In my defence, as stated, I didn’t know the details at that time.

  Becky sat even straighter and wiped a tear from her left eye with her left hand then stared fixedly at me and through gritted teeth said quietly:

  ‘Someone has the access codes to Argonaut’s store of weaponised nanites.’

  Oh fuck. FUCK.

  ‘Naimittika.’ I breathed. She nodded.

  ‘The end of the world, Dearheart. Believe me now?’

  Chapter Five

  Nanotechnology. The stuff of dreams or the stuff of nightmares, depending on your point of view. The idea had been around for decades but the technological ability to properly create it was relatively new. Just ask Peter, who was still waiting for his central nervous system to be fixed. Once everyone had got over the idea of it, and fears had been allayed over the ridiculous suggestion that the planet would simply be destroyed by ‘goo’ when the nanites turned on their creators, the benefits became obvious. For medical purposes it was a revelation, not to say a revolution. Most types of cancer were now curable. This was a seismic shift from the incremental improvements in treatment over the last fifty years. Not only that but tissue and organ repair was now possible. Patients could survive massive cardiac arrests and slight strokes. With the help of stem cell regeneration nanites could repair kidneys, livers, lungs and cure diabetes. The expensive rejuvenation treatments enjoyed by the wealthy (and senior employees of Argonaut, apparently) were a direct result of the technology. Large aneurisms were still a problem: the nanites could repair the physical damage, of course, but because of our incomplete understanding of what constitutes memory and consciousness, usually the patient lost large chunks of memory even though they survived. However, as the famous first patient remarked, it was on the whole ‘better than being dead’. Of course, there were dangers but wasn’t that part of life? The proponents pointed out that if people had always been scared to face an element of risk then Columbus would have stayed at home in his nice warm stone-age cave.

  Which brings
us to the downside. What is it about humanity that makes it want to turn everything into a weapon? Ten years ago a terrorist group which must have been sponsored by a state or corporation released weaponised nanites into the populations of Eastern Europe. Yes, the continuing health problems in the region including the waves of epidemics were the result of terrorism. Nobody ever claimed responsibility. The intelligence community suspected that it was intended to be a small scale test which got out of hand. It couldn’t be stopped but it could, in a way, be contained. Someone brilliant enough could use Online tech to slightly reprogram the nanites. Full destruction was impossible as they had been given significant protection from interference but there was a small backdoor method which didn’t prevent a skilled operative from adding one specific additional built-in imperative. The nanites were required not to reproduce. That was the best anyone could do, essentially turning a switch from ‘yes’ to ‘no’. The successive waves of what the public still believed were just vicious natural pathogens would gradually subside. In a half century or so, they would die out but even before that they would become less and less deadly. The current wave of illnesses was already ebbing and many fewer had been killed compared to the initial outbreak a decade before it. The sheer scale of the attack had scared some of the terrorists themselves and their supporters and it didn’t take long for some to turn informant. The outcome was predictable and savage. Within months, most of the scientists who had perpetrated the atrocity were dead, killed in retribution by state-controlled assassins. Yes, it was a busy time for me, what with that and the South African war. I can’t take credit for shutting off the nanites, that was entirely Peter’s idea.

  There followed a highly classified conference involving all of the major players, both state and corporate, and weaponisation of nanotechnology and particularly the storage of weaponised nanites was expressly forbidden. If anything, it was treated as even more of an atrocity than chemical or biological weaponry and a nuclear response was threatened if any state was proved to be complicit.