by Adam Brookes
The Losmen Maluku lay behind a spiked steel gate. Mangan rapped, and a sleepy-eyed boy in a vest let him in. The guesthouse was a squat concrete block painted a horrible bright green, the rooms opening directly onto a courtyard. Mangan paid for three nights, asked if there were other, more private rooms. The boy shrugged and showed him to a smaller room, one of three at the back of the building, the windows looking straight at the rear wall and a rear gate, Mangan noticed. He dropped his duffel bag on the bed, went to the bathroom, stripped and stood under cold water from the plastic shower head, tasting the sea salt as it washed off his skin.
He had, he thought, a couple of days. They’d know, soon. Widodo or the galley boy or the kapten or one of his mates would talk about the tall Inggris with the red hair and the bruises, who couldn’t keep his supper down. They’d talk in a bar or by a dock and someone would overhear and store it away, pass it on, send a text. He wondered whether to log on, to burrow down into darknet and let London know everything. He even got as far as putting his flip-flops on and taking his laptop, ready to go looking for an internet café, but he thought better of it, lay on the bed, turned the lights off and smoked another cigarette, and began, in his haphazard way, to plan.
The next morning, Mangan woke to a prayer call, put on sunglasses and a cap, found ginger coffee and toast in a little place with a cat, and sat and watched the street for half an hour under a lowering sky. He watched the kids in their maroon shorts and spotless white shirts and little backpacks meandering to school down the potholed, dusty streets, dodging the mopeds and the Toyotas, stopping at the food carts. He paid his bill and made his way to the airline office at the edge of the town. A plane came once a week, on Thursdays. Forty-eight hours away. He paid cash for a seat, the booking clerk tapped his details ponderously into a yellowing computer, and he wondered how far his name would sink into the network.
He wandered back through town, the morning heating up, still, humid. At an internet café he spent an hour browsing the news. He checked his own website, which still stood, in all its earnestness. The tech wallahs in the basement of VX had not been ordered to take it down. So someone—someone meaning Hopko—still regarded him as operational. He checked a bank account online, working through a tangle of passwords and security, and yes, there was his “salary.”
So they still had some use for him. For now. Apparently.
He considered, again, trying to duck down into darknet, a flit into the encrypted file-sharing site they used for comms, but decided against it, again. He left the café and wandered back through town.
At an ATM, he took out the maximum, as he did whenever he could, adding to the wad in his money belt.
He passed a little stationery store that seemed to have some books. He went in, looked at the shelves. And there, at knee level, dusty and forgotten, was a set of poorly bound English-language classics. He bought Conrad and some more cigarettes.
As the day wore on he read, slept, paced the room, smoked. He turned on the fan in the early afternoon, and as it hummed and creaked he lay on the bed and tried to map it all out, to work through contingencies. The thought of it brought a flood of adrenalin, made him jittery. Prins Hendrickstraat. Teng. Lawyer.
He stood, paced. And as he did so, he thought of Trish, wondered how he would explain it to her, tried to form the words in his mind, mouthed them, whispered as he paced. Well, you remember the Chinese colonel, right? The one we ran? Who gave us riches, but for all the wrong reasons? The one who died in some tacky casino on the banks of the Mekong River with a needle sticking out of his groin? Him? Well, he gave me a thread, you see. Just after we had thrown him to the dogs, and just before he was dragged off by MSS, he half-whispered, half-spat it at me. A name, an address, nothing more. And that’s where I’m off to, right now, with my duffel bag and my laptop and my threadbare cover. To pull this thread of possibility. To see what spills out.
Why?
Because I need it, of course. I need it all to matter. I need to know that I didn’t back away, that I sought a resolution. I need to matter. Me. Does that make sense? Do I convince you?
She had told him once, her arms folded, sitting ramrod straight, in that starchy, brittle, voice of hers, not to expect the stories to resolve. The stories just hang there, she said, without endings.
He watched a column of ants make its way from the window to the pink plastic trash bin in the bathroom, implacable.
He dozed for a while, woke, lit another cigarette, waited for dark.
12
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland
Information can be defined as that which reduces uncertainty.
The more information you have, the less uncertain you are.
Pearl, in the air-conditioned lab, lacing together code in the cold, blue quiet of the afternoon and eating Skittles.
The question she had set herself: how do you reduce uncertainty in the swarm, a swarm of a hundred, a thousand, a million drones? How does a drone know where another drone is, what it is doing? How sure can the drone be? Several questions, in fact. Questions that would ensure her continued presence in freezing-cold labs like this one, that would take her into the chilly, secret depths of the defence industrial complex. She reached for another Skittle.
In nature, swarms have ways of knowing. Ants know. Termites know. Starlings know, in their great murmurations. Pearl had seen a murmuration once, a million birds over a lake in Virginia at evening, the great black billow against the setting sun.
Ants will build a vast colony of underground chambers and tunnels. They will excrete pheromones that indicate what they are doing. Other ants will read the pheromones, and will behave according to what they read, dropping a grain of sand here, picking one up there.
Is each ant consciously building a vast colony? Does each ant say to its ant self: Today we are building such and such a chamber, off such and such a corridor, of these dimensions, and at that depth? Is each ant present at the hatching of its choices? Presumably not, because they are ants, and their brain cells number only a quarter of a million, so self-awareness is unlikely. But if not, how does the colony get built?
Pearl sat back, blinked at the screen.
Is it possible that each ant possesses no consciousness of itself or of its role in the building, but when millions of ants interact, consciousness grows between them? The millions of ants, therefore, are one consciousness.
How might we define and measure such consciousness?
How might we create it?
“Spooky,” said Cal, who was standing behind her. She jumped.
“Don’t do that,” she said.
“Sorry,” he said. “Are you there yet? Artificial super-consciousness?”
“Not quite,” she said. She felt jangled, tense. Cal bent down, looked at her closely.
“You don’t look too good.”
“Didn’t sleep.”
“Again?”
She nodded, feeling sudden tears condensing on the surface of her eyes. She thought of her father calling her as she stood frozen at the top of the stairs. She thought of the impact of his thick hands on her.
“Hey,” Cal said softly. “What is it?”
“It’s just … just everything. The security clearance. Everything.”
He looked puzzled for a moment.
“But that shouldn’t—” he caught himself. “Well, look, whatever I can do. Support, you know?”
She was wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Thank you.”
“I’ve never seen you cry before.”
“I don’t, usually. I’m just tired.”
“Sure,” he said, considering.
“What?” she said.
“You’re sure there isn’t anything you want to talk about?”
He reached for her hand but she pulled it away and shook her head, miserable.
“Well, I’m here, okay?” he said, and turned away.
“Cal.” He stopped, turn
ed back.
“When you did your clearance, you put, like, all your relatives on it, right? I mean, you just list them all. Everybody in Hong Kong and in China?”
He looked surprised.
“I don’t have a clearance, Pearl.”
“Oh. I thought …”
“You thought what?”
“I don’t know. I just assumed.”
“You only apply for a clearance if you are going to be in a national security job, or a defence industry job. Most of us don’t go that way.”
“Right.”
“You’re … kind of unique like that. I mean, there have been some guys gone from here to NSA, math guys, Ph.D.s. But, you know, most of us don’t want to work in secret.”
“Right.”
“Or on weapons systems.”
“Right.”
He smiled at her and walked back across the lab to a workbench where dozens of disassembled quadrotors lay strewn about, bringing to Pearl’s mind an image of butchered animals, slaughtered birds.
She turned back to her desk, took a deep breath, tapped the space bar to bring her screen back, and forced herself into the code.
Take human cells. Human cells are not, by themselves, conscious. But if you put thirty-seven trillion of them together and make them interact according to certain rules, you have sight, hearing, touch, memory, love, a liking for chocolate, the ability to appreciate MUKBANG videos and cheesy pop songs and the poetry of Bai Juyi.
Drones are not, by themselves, conscious.
How do we build consciousness between them?
Later, Cal made her go with him to a little Korean place they loved, just off campus, and she went willingly, the relief washing over her. Maybe he likes me after all. They ordered bibimbap, which came in big stone bowls, the rice sticky and laden with radish and bean sprouts and shiitake mushrooms and peppery beef and a glistening fried egg atop it all. They both loaded it up with hot sauce, and were silent for a while as they wolfed it. But then Cal wanted to probe.
“So, maybe you need some time out. A vacay.”
“I need time out from my dad.”
“Why? What’s he done now?”
“Oh, just being him.” Careful, she thought.
Cal waited.
“He’s just on my case, is all,” she said.
“He’s just on your case,” Cal said. He’s mirroring.
“You are very lucky, Cal, to have yours eight thousand miles away.”
“Am I?” he said. “Am I lucky?”
“Well, they can’t interfere.”
“Actually, I miss them. I love them a lot; and I am very, very grateful to them for the sacrifices they made so I can do a Ph.D. at Hopkins and sit here eating bibimbap with you.”
She frowned.
“I wish they were here,” he said.
“Okay, so I’m just a really bad person and you’re a really good Chinese son. I get it,” she said, the tears beginning to come again.
“The point I am trying to make, Pearl, is the relationship you have with your parents is weird. It’s not great, from what I can see. Other people have good relationships with their parents. I do, with mine. It’s possible. But you are stuck in this weird place and it’s not healthy.”
“They’re my parents.”
“There’s something going on and you’re not telling me what it is.”
“Okay, Cal. Thanks. I don’t think it’s really your business.” I sound like a petulant nine-year-old, she thought. He was insistent.
“You say that they nurture your gift. But I don’t see that. I see you being stifled by them.”
“You only care about how well I code, how useful I can be. My gift.” She caught herself. I am being ridiculous.
Cal was unhurt, infuriatingly calm.
“That is ridiculous. Your gift, Pearl, is not separate from you. If your parents are constricting your talent, they are constricting you.” He leaned forward. “What is it? What’s happened?”
“Nothing.” She was sullen. “Anyway, we are going on a vacation, apparently. Fall break. To the Caribbean.”
“Really? The whole family?”
She nodded.
“And how do you feel about that?”
“You sound like a therapist.”
“I think a therapist might do you some good. Maybe you’d tell them whatever you’re not telling me.”
Pearl got the check. She always paid. Cal was horribly broke. He lived in a basement and seemed to subsist on peanut butter sandwiches. They left, and Cal walked her back across campus to her car. He gave her a kiss on the cheek, and she badly wanted that kiss to continue and migrate towards her mouth where it might linger, but it didn’t. Why would it, after she had said the things she’d said? He walked away, gave her a wave, and her heart sank. He’s an adult, she thought. He has the emotional control and judgement that I lack. And as she got into her car, and pulled away, she realised that she had a secret. She did not know its meaning or its significance, other than that she could not share it, not with Cal, not with anyone. The secret separated her from others, from Cal. The secret was called Beetle, and knowledge of it made her complicit with something, in something.
And she did not know what.
Yet.
A Tao family vacation was a special vision of horror. Pearl’s mother making lists, packing boxes of tea, bags of dried cuttlefish, surgical stockings. Her father sitting in the living room, curtains drawn, certain he could game the internet to find the right deal on last-minute plane tickets. The endless discussion of hotels, of medical insurance. Pearl sat on the sofa in her pyjamas, thumbing her phone and listening to them, wondered how on earth they ever managed the process of emigrating from China to America.
For some reason best known to himself, her father had chosen Aruba for their idyll, a tiny fleck of cactus-strewn rock festooned with resorts off the coast of Venezuela. They were booked into a hotel near the airport. Her parents were keen it should have a buffet. Pearl thought of the beach, the sea. She wondered if she’d be able to escape for an hour, go walking on the sand. Or snorkelling, maybe. Or she could stay in her hotel room and pretend to work. The sudden thought of Cal made her stomach dip with worry. Talking to him like that! Idiot. She pictured him in his lab coat, that smile, his holding her hand. She found his astuteness frightening. He would see her, see through her, and that would doom everything, ensure her failure as a friend, as a lover. Soon he would understand that she was an outgrowth of this family, rooted in its strangeness and its unspoken understandings. And when he understood that, well, why on earth would he want her?
Who is Beetle?
She got up from the sofa and went to the kitchen, where her mother had started preparing dinner, mincing garlic and ginger, slicing pork. She walked to the counter and leaned against it, watching her mother chopping, her thin hands, tiny wrists. Two years before, her mother had had breast cancer and most of the weight she’d lost had never returned. Pearl remembered her sitting in the darkened living room during chemo, her cheeks sunken, silent, her father’s anger at all of it. Her mother looked at her and frowned.
“Can I ask you something?” Pearl said.
“Depends what.”
“It’s important.”
“Ask then.”
“Will you not be mad at me?”
Her mother said nothing, just stared down at the chopping board, the knife through the ginger root. She is so easily threatened, thought Pearl.
“Will you tell me who Jiachong is?”
Her mother replied too quickly.
“I don’t know. Who is it?”
“It’s a nickname, right? Jiachong? Beetle?”
Her mother had put down the knife, peeling more garlic now, though it seemed to Pearl that there was enough already chopped.
“Can you tell me who he is? Or she? Maybe it’s a she,” Pearl said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Pearl sighed. “I think you do, Ma. Maybe do
n’t tell Dad I asked.”
Her mother was still fiddling with the garlic. Pearl saw a little colour appearing in her cheeks. Autonomic nervous response signalling anxiety, she thought.
“Don’t tell me what?” Her father was standing in the kitchen doorway.
Pearl felt the world rock a little, her own adrenalin response kick in, her hands gripping the counter.
“Don’t tell me what?” He was wearing shorts, black socks and sandals. A white undershirt, turned grey in the wash.
Her mother put her hands flat on the countertop and dropped her head. Then she turned and said brightly, “Oh, nothing, we were just talking about the vacation plans.”
Her father was walking slowly across the kitchen towards her, his hands on his hips.
“What was our daughter asking about?”
At these moments, the ones where her father’s anger was building, Pearl, since childhood, would find herself retreating inwards, her attention taken by a view from a window or a pattern of sunlight on a wall. She was looking out of the kitchen window now, at the dogwood in the yard, wondering at its gnarled fragility, as her father came and stood very close to the two of them.
“Mei shi,” her mother said. It’s nothing.
He stood there in silence for what seemed a long time. Her mother would not look him in the eye. Then he turned and walked from the room, and Pearl heard him going downstairs to his office in the basement. She found her hands were shaking a little, and her mother put her arm around her and pulled her close, just for an instant, before she too turned away and went back to the garlic.
13
Mangan found the freighter through a little agency online. It was a Panamax container ship of Liberian registry, the MV Paragon, leaving from Marseille. Two cabins available, both with shower. Cafeteria and recreation room. Meals included.
He paid cash for the flights to Jakarta, island hopping in little six-seaters to start with, the pilots smoking kretek and reading the paper. He paid cash for the flight to Paris, drank himself half-insensible in economy, touched down in an iron rain at Charles de Gaulle and shivered in the taxi queue. At Gare de Lyon, he paid cash for a TGV ticket to Marseille. He booked nothing online, made no calls, minimised his exposure, moved quickly. Jet-lagged, disoriented, he showed up at the shipping line’s offices, asked who he could talk to. A harried woman in a headscarf thrust medical forms at him, telling him to report to the docks in four days’ time. He was lucky, she said. The cabins for paying passengers were usually booked, but this one was waiting for him, just so he could pay in cash. He holed up in a hostel, ate kebabs and mahjouba stuffed with peppers and harissa in Nouailles after dark.