by Chris Dolley
Graham's head spun. What kind of fortune could you make in a VR world?
"Or maybe he's got gambling debts and someone's putting the squeeze on him? Or . . . are you okay? Graham?"
Graham wasn't sure. The ground seemed to be moving away from him and he felt light-headed and . . .
Annalise grabbed his arm. "You better sit down before you fall down. Come on, there's a bench over there."
* * *
Graham felt better closer to the ground, the world stopped spinning and his head began to clear. He told Annalise about the medical, his escape, the riots, the rise of ParaDim, the trade talks and the little girl. He pointed out where the police lines had been, which trees had caught fire, the line of bushes where he'd first seen the girl. It still seemed so real. Barely old enough to be called a memory, he could hear every shout and bang. If he closed his eyes he was sure he'd be able to see every face.
"You realize what this might mean?" said Annalise.
"What?"
"Think about it. There's this simulation of a future where ParaDim's about to be broken up. There's these real important trade talks going on. Maybe the future of ParaDim's riding on the outcome. And you're the guy chosen to deliver the disk."
She paused.
"What if the success or failure of the talks hinges on you delivering that disk? What if the future of ParaDim depends on you delivering that disk? And what if someone at ParaDim has run this simulation before?"
Graham didn't need to hear any more. ParaDim ran simulations. That's where he'd heard the word recently—Adam Sylvestrus—ParaDim tested their products by running simulations. Was that what these VR worlds were? Part of ParaDim's product research to condense years of testing into a few hours of simulation? And in the course of their research had they stumbled upon something else, something unexpected—the demise of ParaDim?
And if they found that the trade talks could be sabotaged by the elimination of one expendable little man?
"Come on," said Annalise, rising up from the bench, "it's after ten, we've got some surfing to do."
"Surfing?"
"The Internet. We talked about it last night." She stopped. "You don't remember anything about our meeting last night, do you?"
Graham shook his head.
"Well, today is the day we find everything out. We're meeting Kevin Alexander at eleven thirty and we're not letting him go until he tells us all he knows."
"I can't . . ."
"Because you gotta be at work," interrupted Annalise. "I know, you told me last night. But we worked that one out. You're on sick leave."
"I'm sick?"
"That's the cover. We came up with a plan. You go to work as normal, walk through the front door, march into the Post Room, drop the sick note on Sharmila's desk and duck out the back through the delivery bay door. Anyone watching's left stranded on Westminster Street while you circle round to meet me here. And no one'll be looking for you until six tonight when you miraculously reappear outside your office. Neat, huh?"
It was. And it explained why he was in St. James's Park at ten o'clock in the morning. Would he have written it down? His hand reached instinctively for his jacket pocket and found his note.
It was written on the back—take sick leave, meet A at SJP 9:30 a.m.
He flipped it over. He was still living at Wealdstone Lane. He wondered if he was living there alone.
"Anyway"—she looked at her watch—"it's getting late. We've gotta be in Victoria in twenty-five minutes. You show me the way and I'll tell you why we're going there."
* * *
"You gotta remember," said Annalise, "I've been stuck at home listening to this story unfold for the past month. It's been driving me crazy. All you guys out there detecting. I've had my bags packed for two weeks."
They walked back through the park towards Buckingham Palace. Graham found himself eyeing suspiciously any large group of people, wondering if they had concealed New Tech weapons, wondering if at any moment they'd turn and charge across the grass.
"So, I started doing what I could—using the net to search for dirt on ParaDim. I mean, they come out of nowhere and in two years they're one of the top ten companies in the world. How'd they do that?
"Anyway, I was getting nowhere—there were so many hits and so much crap to wade through that I thought I'd try something different and started looking for entries under artificial intelligence. Guess what I found?"
Graham shrugged.
Annalise waited, looking as though she was going to pounce as soon as he opened his mouth.
"Come on! ParaDim—big company, made its name with its revolutionary AI engine. What am I gonna find under ParaDim and AI?"
"Details of ParaDim's AI engine?" he hazarded without any confidence.
"Urrrr!" Annalise smiled as she pressed her imaginary air buzzer. "Wrong answer, Graham. I didn't find a thing.
"Which is seriously weird. I mean, ParaDim have gotta be the guys when it comes to AI, don't they? I searched through pages and pages of articles on AI and Ph.D. research papers and came up with nothing. No mention of any research using AI the way ParaDim claim they do. Don't you find that strange? I mean, did the ParaDim algorithm come out of the blue? There had to be some initial research, didn't there? An idea, a theory, some mention of work that went before."
"Perhaps they kept their research secret?"
"But how? And who? ParaDim wasn't even incorporated until two years ago. The algorithm and the company appeared at the same time. So who kept the research secret?"
"The government?"
"Not according to your flip to the future. The U.S. government was trying everything to get hold of the ParaDim algorithm, weren't they?"
They left the park and walked down Buckingham Palace Road towards Victoria. The traffic was heavy as usual, the pavements filled with people.
"Anyway, last night it came to me. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place. Maybe I shouldn't have been looking under AI but VR."
"Which is why we're looking for this Internet cafe in Redfern Street?" asked Graham.
"Exactly. Kevin couldn't see us 'til late morning, we had an hour to kill, there was a cyber cafe nearby. Made sense to use the time constructively. The more dirt we have on ParaDim, the more serious Kevin Alexander's gotta take us. I don't want him using the 'you don't understand' line and bailing on us."
* * *
They found the Internet cafe—a small converted shop with nine computers laid out in three rows. Five heads looked up as they opened the door. Annalise folded away her Cyber Cafe Guide and walked over to the assistant.
She handed over four pounds for an hour and was directed to the computer in the middle of the back row. Graham pulled up an extra chair and Annalise took the keyboard.
They searched in vain using ParaDim and VR, scrolling through pages and pages of hits with only passing references to ParaDim or VR. Time ticked on. Annalise scrolled faster and Graham's eyes hurt as he tried to keep up with the moving text.
"How about looking for rumors about ParaDim?" suggested Graham.
"Search on 'ParaDim' and 'rumor', you mean?"
"Yes, if you can do that?"
She tapped in the words and waited. Another mass of hits scrolled onto the screen.
"Welcome to the web," she said sarcastically. "We could be here for hours wading though this crap."
"Try adding 'AI.'"
"Okay." She tapped in the new search criteria. Fewer hits than before but still several hundred. Annalise scrolled through them, moving so fast that Graham had to look away.
"This one sounds marginally less whacko than the rest." She clicked on the site and a new screen appeared. The Truth about ParaDim. They read the text as a picture loaded.
It started by casting doubt on ParaDim's use of artificial intelligence. How can an AI algorithm come up with over three hundred patents in two years? Isn't it more likely that ParaDim is a front for a government-backed alien resettlement program? The aliens giving their
technology in return for a homeland on Antarctica?
"See what I mean?" said Annalise. "Every whacko with an opinion and access to a computer can upload their two cents."
She hit the back button, scrolled through the other entries and stopped.
"What's the matter?" asked Graham.
She hit the forward button and returned to the previous screen—The Truth about ParaDim.
"Look," she pointed to the words on the screen. "ParaDim and AI. My old search engine should have flagged this site."
"Are you sure it didn't?"
"I think I would have remembered an alien resettlement program in Antarctica."
Graham agreed; it did have a certain ring to it.
"Search engines only look at a small subset of the web," said a male voice at the station to Graham's left. "Sorry, couldn't help overhearing," apologized the young man, not taking his eyes from the screen in front of him. "But what you want is a meta search engine—like this one." He pointed to the address line on his screen. "It calls fifteen other search engines to make sure you get the widest coverage."
Annalise leaned over and copied down the address. "Thanks," she said, smiling. "No problem," replied the young man.
Graham watched the exchange in silence, discomforted by the sudden intervention of a stranger and feeling, irrationally, that somehow, it should have been him—Graham—and not the outsider who had furnished Annalise with the solution to her problem.
Annalise called up the new engine and retyped the search criteria. The number of hits multiplied. Everyone seemed to have an opinion on ParaDim. They were too big, too fast and there had to be a catch. Some thought they bugged the universities and stole ideas, some thought they had a mind-reading device or a time machine or access to the UFO that crashed at Roswell.
They waded through hundreds of pages. They followed links, going back and forth, refining the search, trying to find some common credible theme amidst the paranoia.
And then they found a site that made them sit up and look at each other.
It was a simple, plain text site with a minimum of color or artwork. But it raised a question that neither Graham nor Annalise had heard before.
How come no one at ParaDim has a background in artificial intelligence?
They read further. It published the names of the original ParaDim research team along with their specialities. Every one was a theoretical physicist or a mathematician.
"Can we find out if that's true?" asked Graham.
Annalise thought for a while. "We could search on those names but there'd be no guarantee that any information we found would be true. We don't even know if this list is the original ParaDim research team."
"What about Kevin Alexander? We know he works for ParaDim. What's his speciality?"
Annalise typed in Kevin's name and paged through the entries. The young man on Graham's left gathered his papers together and left. He looked like a student—young, undoubtedly bright, confident. Graham watched him walk down the aisle towards the door and noticed Annalise watching him too. The young man turned and smiled at Annalise as he lingered by the door. Annalise quickly looked down and started tapping at the keyboard while Graham hoped the door would suck the young man out onto the street.
The young man left leaving Graham feeling stupid and ridiculous. His life was in danger, his world unravelling and, suddenly, he starts feeling proprietorial about a girl that, arguably, he'd met less than an hour ago. Ridiculous!
"Maybe we should type in Canada?"
"What?" Graham's thoughts were still elsewhere.
Annalise pointed at the screen. "All these Kevins and Alexanders. If we added Canada to the search criteria it'd cut down on all this lot."
Graham agreed. Annalise typed in the new query and out came another long list of sites. They found one with a link to Toronto University which looked promising and clicked on it.
Kevin Alexander's details came up. He'd been a fellow at the University of Toronto. He was another theoretical physicist. A picture gradually downloaded. A broad, smiling, open face.
"That's him," said Annalise as soon as the picture sharpened.
A list of published books and papers gradually formed on the right-hand side of the screen.
The title at the bottom of the list stood out from all the rest.
Parallel Dimensions: The Science of Alternate Realities.
"Parallel dimensions?" said Annalise, thinking out loud.
The connection hit them both at the same time.
"ParaDim!" they exclaimed in unison.
Twenty-Six
"That is so cool!" said Annalise, staring wide-eyed at the screen.
Graham wasn't so sure. "What does it actually mean?"
"It means we don't need VR worlds any more. The girls are real. We all are. It explains everything—Rosie's Bar, the six Sergios, the different versions of the De Santos kidnapping."
"The resonance wave?"
Annalise stopped. "Okay, so it doesn't explain everything. But it explains enough. I've gotta tell the girls."
She closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair. Graham watched, fascinated as her face seemed to drain of all emotion. Her muscles relaxed, her breathing slowed. And then she smiled, a warm smile which came and went, as though she was listening to a play inside her head, a play that only she could hear. One minute, she was laughing to herself—excited, bubbling—the next she was quiet, her head tilted to one side, listening intently to a hidden voice that played somewhere deep inside her head.
Graham looked nervously around the room to see if anyone else was watching. No one was. Every head was buried in a screen or a paper.
Annalise giggled to herself. Graham watched the way her face lit up and wondered why he couldn't feel the same elation. It was his life in danger, shouldn't he feel something now that they'd made such a major discovery?
Or wasn't it such a major discovery? Why should this theory last any longer than VR or Annalise One's astral plane? And what was wrong with his theory of an unravelling world? Wasn't that just as likely as a universe made up of two hundred parallel worlds?
He ruminated for several minutes. Wondering which was preferable—to have your life fragmented over two hundred parallel worlds or disrupted by the one, very unstable, unravelling world?
And was there a way of determining which was true?
"We've gotta go," said Annalise, bursting into life. "Best not give Kevin a reason to bail on us. Not now we've got some real questions to ask him."
* * *
"Where are we meeting him?" asked Graham as they crossed the road.
"Here," said Annalise, handing Graham a piece of paper with a roughly drawn map on it. "It's ParaDim's new offices. Don't panic—they haven't moved in yet. It's still being refurbished. Kevin said all the doors are unlocked and workmen are wandering about all the time so it's an ideal place to meet. No one'll notice a couple of extra people walk in unannounced. And if anyone asks who we are, we're with ParaDim—checking office accommodation."
"You've been there before?"
"No, we met at his office the first time. After he'd calmed down. I had to call him twice before he'd agree to meet. He slammed the phone down on me the first time."
"You know ParaDim scans all calls?"
Annalise tilted her head to one side. "Do they?"
"That's why I had to take a disk to the trade talks. ParaDim was scanning all electronic traffic."
Annalise nodded her head. "Which explains why all the Kevins insist we talk in code over the phone. Neat, huh? This is the day when everything begins to make sense."
They zigzagged across Victoria, running out between the gaps in the traffic, waiting on windswept islands, buffeted by the wash from passing lorries, the swirl of dust and the stench of diesel. Gradually the roads became smaller and quieter and the pavements less busy. The two of them fell into step, walking side by side, avoiding the cracks and stretching to the cadence of the street.
"This i
s so cool," beamed Annalise. "I've been practicing at home. You know, the walk thing? And here I am doing it with the man."
Graham smiled back. It did feel good. But then it always had.
"Why does Kevin Alexander suddenly want to see me?" he asked. "I thought he wasn't supposed to know that you talked to me?"
"Who said he knows you're coming?"
* * *
ParaDim's new offices were in an old Georgian grey-bricked terrace—four storeys high, black railings, a columned entrance with steps up to an ornately panelled door. Part of Graham hoped that the door would be locked. He dwelt on the lower steps, looking down into the basement windows, while Annalise turned the doorknob.
It opened. The sound of an electric drill rang through the hallway.
Annalise led the way inside. The hallway was cluttered with boxes and paint tins. An electric wire trailed down the stairwell like a vine. The smell of fresh paint hung in the air. And from upstairs came the sound of hammering and drilling and the occasional shout.
"We're meeting in the basement," whispered Annalise. "Room four."
They followed the stairs down, stepping over the wires at the bottom and squeezing past the tables and chairs stacked in the lower corridor. The door to room four was open. They went inside.
The room had been freshly redecorated, a faint smell of paint could still be discerned. Some of the furniture had been positioned—a desk, a table, a pair of filing cabinets—others were still stacked in the corner—the chairs, another table, a bookcase. Packing crates and boxes filled another corner—some had been opened and pieces of white polystyrene jutted out from inside.
But no Kevin Alexander.
Graham checked his watch—11:29—they were early. Annalise tried to open one of the filing cabinets. It was locked. She moved over to the desk and opened one drawer after another.
"What are you doing?" hissed Graham. He glanced towards the door; what if Kevin Alexander suddenly walked in?
"Looking for a key to those cabinets. Might as well make full use of our time. Why don't you try those boxes over there? See what you can find."