Then he pulls the trigger.
Joe winces, is about to turn away, but the hammer falls on an empty chamber. So the soldier pulls the trigger again: empty. And again: empty. And again: empty. And again: empty. And again: empty.
The sound cuts off completely.
For a few seconds the soldier remains still, gun to head, but then he seems to come out of the state he was in. He looks puzzled and lost. He examines the gun that he’s been holding to his head.
He stares at the camera.
The look in his eyes is pure terror.
The screen goes black.
“What do you make of that?” Abernathy asked.
Joe looked at the screen with horror.
“If that gun had been loaded …”
“He would be dead. I’m sure an official report would have said it was suicide.”
Joe shook his head. “The sound,” he said. “The sound made him do it.”
Abernathy nodded. “A US science research program in the mid-1970s discovered a sound that could compel certain people toward self-destructive acts. And by certain people, I mean certain already mentally unstable people. The guy in the film was suffering from what they called combat shock back then, and what we call PTSD these days. He already had self-destructive tendencies. The sound did nothing but amplify those tendencies. Untold millions of dollars sunk into a project that worked on a tiny percentage of people, getting them to do something that—deep down—they already wanted to do.
“Not exactly a great return on investment, now is it? Needless to say, the project was discontinued. The equipment that produced it was mothballed. Presumably it’s in the same warehouse as the Ark of the Covenant.”
“And you think that the people behind X-Core could be using sound as a way to control their audience?” Joe said, horror-struck.
Abernathy looked grave. “Of course I don’t. I’ve just been spending two days trying to find a way to put X-Core into some kind of context, and I dragged this old film out as an illustration of just how desperate I am.
“But if we were to believe it was mind control, for even a second, it would lead us to a rather overwhelming question, don’t you think?”
“And what might that be?” Joe asked.
Abernathy looked grave. “Controlling them to do what?”
PART 02:
THE CEREMONY OF INNOCENCE IS DROWNED
Dreams of metal
Dreams of freedom
Locked up inside the cage
We call the human heart
I feel the wires
I hack your system
I scream and scream and scream
But no one seems to hear.
“Systems of Error”
Le Cadavre Exquis
CHAPTER NINE: GRETCHEN
Ani looked at the piece of paper in her hand and checked it against the number on the door of the house in front of her.
They matched: she knocked. She was feeling so awkward about imposing herself on people she didn’t know that the knock was so faint it hardly made a sound.
Someone inside, however, heard it and the door opened.
Ani was looking up at the tallest woman she had ever seen. Over six feet in height and stick-insect thin, the woman greeted her with a wide smile and said, “Ani, right?”
Ani nodded, rendered speechless by the woman’s sheer daunting physical presence.
“Hi, I’m Gretchen,” the woman said brightly. “Come on in.”
She ushered Ani inside, into a long hall surfaced with immaculate oak floorboards. Five doors led off the hall, three to the left, two to the right.
“Alex called and said you were in a tight spot. I told him to send you on over.” She smiled warmly.
“Thank you. This really is kind of you.”
“Nonsense. Any friend of Alex’s is automatically on my list of favorite people in the world.”
She led Ani to the second door on the right and into a living room that was shelved out, wall-to-wall, and had more books on display than she had ever seen in someone’s home before. Ani noted that there was very little fiction. It was mostly books on every conceivable subject from contract law to particle physics.
”Wow,” she said, and Gretchen smiled.
“Wow’s good. You must be exhausted. A cup of tea?”
The tea was dark and rich and tasted of rose petals. It was like no tea that Ani had ever tasted before: exotic and strange and delicious. Ani sipped at it as Gretchen sat next to her, cross-legged and wide-eyed.
“I’m not going to pry,” Gretchen said. “I want to help. Alex told me you needed somewhere to hide out. I figure you probably just need a bit of space.”
Ani smiled, relieved. It felt like a heavy weight that she hadn’t even known she was carrying had been lifted from her shoulders. She wouldn’t have known where to start, anyway. All of it sounded crazy, even to her, and she’d lived through it.
She looked around the room, her gaze sweeping the bookshelves again. “You have a lot of books,” she said, immediately regretting stating something so obvious.
Gretchen seemed not to notice her awkwardness and nodded. “This is just a few of them. I guess you’d call it overflow.”
“Overflow?”
“The books that didn’t fit into the main collection.” There was a sparkle in Gretchen’s eyes. “You want to see the actual library?”
“Library?” Ani said. “Sure.”
So Gretchen led her farther down the hall and stopped in front of the last door on the left. She put her hand into the neck of her blouse, pulled out a key on a chain, and used it to unlock the door. She gestured for Ani to enter, and Ani shrugged and did as she was asked.
The library was huge.
Absolutely huge.
Ani was sure that the room must have been really spacious even before its conversion; but then its generous Georgian proportions had first been doubled by having it incorporate the neighboring room, then redoubled when the ceilings of both rooms had been removed. Four rooms had effectively been knocked into one, making a grand, light, and beautiful library: one vast room with every available piece of wall that wasn’t a window or a door shelved up to the upper floor’s ceiling twenty feet above. Although there were mezzanine galleries halfway up the structure, the upper shelves were still only accessible by the use of the kind of sliding ladders Ani had only ever seen on TV and in films.
The shelves were packed with books.
Many, many thousands of books.
More books than in her local municipal library and her school library combined.
Then tripled.
But there weren’t any of the lurid paperbacks, celebrity biographies, or motivational books of the How to Be a Winner variety that seemed to fill the bookshops and libraries these days. Just thousands of leather-bound volumes that were arranged in what, to Ani, seemed like totally random order.
Looking at a nearby shelf, Ani saw a book on microbiology sitting sandwiched between a book on comparative religion and one on Chinese grammar. Next came a book on knots and splices, which was followed by a biography of Charles II, and then a copy of an Advanced Listener’s Guide to Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
Gretchen must have seen a look of puzzlement on Ani’s face because she laughed.
“I know, it must look like a pretty chaotic shelving system.”
“It’s certainly not alphabetical by author. Or organized by subject …”
“Believe it or not, there is a method to my madness,” Gretchen told her. “Ask me a question. Anything. Popular culture. Political history. Geography. Geometry. Philosophy. Physics. Biology. Botany. Literature. Languages. Anything.”
“We were talking about US presidents in class yesterday…. Err … okay, who was the eleventh president of the United States of America?”
“Easy,” Gretchen said, grinning. “The closest book containing that information is … by your left hand. Not that one, two along. That’s it.”
Ani took out
the book that Gretchen had guided her to. It was thick, bound in green leather, and had The World in Numbers stamped on the spine in gold letters.
“Page seventy-eight,” Gretchen said, then she squinted a little and added, “line twenty-four.”
Ani raised an eyebrow and then located page seventy-eight. It was immediately obvious that she was in the right place because there was some run-on text at the top of the page, then a little way past that was a title: US Presidents Chronologically.
Ani counted twenty-four lines down the page and came to a name. To double-check the answer, she counted to eleven down the list of presidents.
“James K. Polk,” Gretchen told her. “As I said, an easy one. There are one hundred and seventy-nine other books in this room that could have given that answer, but you would have had to move farther to find them. One is even a biography of Mr. Polk—a fascinating man, and well worth looking into.”
“Okay,” Ani said. “That’s mentalist creepy.”
Gretchen shook her head. “It’s just the way I organize information. And to be honest it’s the only way I do remember things. For some people feats of memory are accomplished by leaving pieces of information along a familiar route, by inventing mnemonics, by associating ideas with things, or by building elaborate memory palaces. Me, I remember everything I have ever read, and where every book I have is located.”
“You remember everything that you read?” Ani’s voice was halfway between amazed and incredulous.
Gretchen nodded. “Well. Yeah. Sort of. My brain files information away in a really weird way. Always has. A strange cross-referencing thing. Don’t fully understand it myself. But then I don’t need to. Long, tall, and short of it is if I’ve read the answer somewhere, then my brain will tell me the book/page/line that I need to answer the question. If it’s an easy one like James K. Polk, I’ll know the answer, too. In fact, most of the time I’ll know the answer. Just thinking book/page/line will get me to recall it—the hard storage of the library is analogous to my brain’s filing system. If what I’m trying to remember is really obscure then I sometimes have to follow book/page/line and then look at the answer in the hard copy.”
“That’s amazing.”
“It’s just the way my brain works.”
“It’s still amazing.”
“You really think so?” Gretchen actually looked grateful for the compliment, and Ani found herself wondering how other people reacted to her hostess’s remarkable gift. She knew from bitter experience that being perceived as even a little different could lead to some pretty cruel treatment from one’s peers. Gretchen wasn’t just different. She was, Ani was sure, unique.
Ani smiled and nodded.
“If I get on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire then you are definitely going to be my ‘phone-a-friend.’”
It was when she was sitting at Gretchen’s dining table over a vast assortment of tasty carry-out treats from a nearby Gujarati restaurant that Ani realized just how hungry she was.
She was wolfing down something made of beans that tasted of coconut and sweet chili when she noticed that Gretchen was studying her. Gretchen’s face was friendly and warm, but there was something else in her eyes and Ani thought it was concern.
Ani finished her mouthful and then said, “Uncle Alex told me not to involve you in my problems.”
“He’s overprotective. To a fault. Let me tell you something about your uncle Alex. He saved my life. Long story, not particularly relevant, but basically I met him when I was at a crossroads in my life. Could have gone either way. He showed me kindness and understanding. Put me onto a positive path. Showed me that the thing that made me weird in most people’s eyes was actually the thing that made me strong.
“Now my gift means that I earn a healthy living. I compile information for companies and provide research services for authors, scientists, and historians. I’m the go-to girl for quiz show questions. I even provide statistics for government bodies, selected multinational companies, opinion pollsters, and economists. I’ve turned a neurological quirk into a career.
“I owe it all to Alex. And if I can repay a tiny part of the kindness that he showed me by helping out his niece in an hour of need, then I’d like to do that. I really would.”
“Overprotective or not, Uncle Alex is right about this. I can’t drag you into it. I’ve been chased by men with guns.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Gretchen looked horrified. “Guns?”
Ani nodded.
“Then I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist that you tell me the whole story,” Gretchen said sternly.
Ani put her fork down on her plate. “But Uncle Alex …”
“Alex sent you here. To me. It wasn’t an accident. He chose me. No matter what he might have said, he thinks that I can help you. So let me help.”
Ani narrowed her eyes, saw the earnest expression on Gretchen’s face, and her resolve weakened. “Well, okay …”
Gretchen sat, openmouthed, throughout Ani’s story. She was mostly silent, too, only occasionally asking a question to better understand a detail.
When she was done, Ani felt exhausted at the effort of mentally reliving it all.
“Then I came here. And met you.”
“That is the single most extraordinary thing I’ve heard in a long, long time. And I can’t imagine what you’re going through. But it does present us with two areas for immediate inquiry.” Gretchen held up a finger. “First: these men with guns. There aren’t that many people in this country allowed to carry a sidearm; fewer still without some kind of uniform. It’s possible that it was one of the intelligence services, but the behavior you described of the men waiting at your place sounds undisciplined. Sloppy, even. It ignored the operating procedures for all the major law enforcement agencies, and that leads us to considering less official bodies.
“I’d guess that we’re talking about freelance operators, out of their depth in UK urban environments. So that would seem to suggest that the men were mercenaries, guns for hire, ex-military men who have seen a lot of overseas action and are picking up work back home doing this kind of odd job.
“That’s good, but it’s also bad. It means that orthodox law enforcement and intelligence services aren’t in play here, which means this won’t end up on your permanent record. You’re not being chased by the government. Or the police. Or Jack Bauer and CTU. Or the Peacekeepers from The Hunger Games.
“The bad news is exactly the same. It means orthodox law enforcement and intelligence services aren’t in play here, which means we have no way of knowing the rules of engagement. Whoever is giving the orders is free of all moral and legal obligations and government oversight. If they decide that shoot-to-kill is a viable strategy, then shoot to kill is what they’ll do.”
Gretchen caught Ani’s shocked expression and winced. “Which is very unlikely,” she said hurriedly. “They seem to want something from you. Unfortunately, it all means that our first area for inquiry ends here. Without more information we cannot know our enemy.”
She held up two fingers.
“Area two, however, may be a little more fruitful. X-Core. Something definite and tangible. We can find out more about it.”
“How?” Ani asked. “You’re not telling me that you have total recall of all musical subcultures?”
Gretchen shook her head.
“I was thinking Google.”
In an office upstairs that housed a computer system that had Ani as close to drooling as she got, they made a breakthrough.
Gretchen had seen Ani’s look of amazement and had misread it.
“You thought that just because I had a lot of books that I wouldn’t be interested in tech?”
“Not at all. It’s just that looks a lot like a liquid-cooled Digitechnic with, what, i7 processors …?”
“Actually they’re an i9 prototype that will never see commercial release, with eight core multi-threading processors. Top level Intel employees issue. Way more than I’ll ever need
, but it was a gift from a grateful client.”
“Some gift.”
“He was some client. I can’t tell you his name, but if you know computers, you’ll have heard of him.”
“You’re full of surprises.”
“We all are. It’s just so few people actually choose to do anything constructive with them.”
Twenty minutes online and another surprise surfaced: a publicity photograph of the band Precision Image that had four guys and an older-looking woman looking at the camera with moody impatience.
“Huh,” Gretchen said.
“Huh?”
Gretchen was looking at the photo with narrowed eyes. “I know her.” She tapped the area screen the woman occupied with her fingernail. “At least I recognize her from somewhere.”
She studied the woman’s face, then closed her eyes.
“The Times. Three years ago. Beginning of September … no, that’s not right … it was a Saturday … August—August the twenty-first. There was a photograph. Definitely her. Page two. Second column.”
“Okay, that’s pretty creepy and amazing,” Ani said. “What was she in the news for?”
Gretchen typed quickly into Google’s search bar, clicked on the first link, and showed Ani a news story. Sure enough, there was a picture of a woman who bore an uncanny resemblance to the woman in the Precision Image photograph.
August 21st
SCIENTIST LEFT RED-FACED OVER “ALIENS ARE COMING” MESSAGE
“Alien” Signal Merely a “Telescope Glitch”
For two frantic hours last night, scientists across the globe were furiously preparing for a “first contact” situation, convinced that they had just picked up a message from alien beings in an area of deep space.
Though it may sound like a scenario lifted straight out of a science fiction movie, there are advanced protocols in place for just such an occurrence, and within minutes of the signal being detected, observatories around the world were training their telescopes on a distant part of our galaxy in the belief that something out there had just announced its presence.
It all began simply enough: with a series of lights sparkling on the instrument panel at the Pabody/Reich Observatory in Shropshire. Dr. Imogen Bell—the researcher in charge of Pabody/Reich’s new SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program—was routinely monitoring a remote part of the galaxy, following the path of a signal that was broadcast into space in 1974 from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The Arecibo signal contained a basic set of details about the human race—the formula and structure of DNA, a diagram of our solar system, a picture of a human being and a representation of the telescope itself—and was transmitted at a frequency of 2,380 MHz.
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