Regeneration

by Stephanie Saulter

  It was another avatar, one of the ephemeral battalion that Gabriel had collectively come to think of as Kaboom, although he could not tell whether it was a shadowy network with a central command or just disaffected individuals with a shared ideology. Either way, they were making great sport of a leaked image of patients on their submerged beds, detoxing in the hydrotherapy pool, and ridiculed the efforts of the police and EM officers crawling all over Sinkat and as yet finding nothing.

  He did what he could to counter their scorn: wit and sarcasm here, updates from the hospital and the smoothly operating power plant there, links to newstream reports. He didn’t need to add anything to the sober assessments of journalists who were openly discussing the likelihood of a targeted attack, and there was nothing he could do to counter the thread of anger and fear in the minds of his friends, his colleagues, and himself. It showed in the unfamiliar emptiness of Sinkat Basin, where boats nosed in and out but people more used to swimming walked the quays and bridges instead; it flared in the tension between himself and Agwé when he made the mistake of musing aloud that some live shots of business as usual at the turbines, farms and factories of the estuary would be a useful counter-narrative. It had been wishful thinking rather than anything he wanted her to act on, but she hopped aboard the next shuttle-boat, chin tilted high and full of braggadocio.

  “No way,” she said, when he wavered and tried to claw the idea back. “We’re professionals. No matter what these fuckers say, we get the job done. Right?”

  “Right,” he’d replied weakly. “That’s us. Professional.”

  He knew in that moment it would be their lifelong in-joke, a shared armor against every insecurity and slight, the tune they would whistle past the graveyard. They would work twice as hard to maintain that aura of impregnability, in the eyes of others as well as in their own.

  He was on his way home, still monitoring despite having handed over to the night shift, mired in a swamp of unfairness and meanness. As he walked, the cranial band brought him the latest iteration of Kaboom, slipping into a streamchat with a group that had started off more sympathetic than suspicious; a few well-placed barbs later and they were talking conspiracy and cover-up. He noted that Kaboom had added nothing new for several exchanges now; in all probability had gone to seed doubt and distrust elsewhere. Something in him snapped.

  He looked around, realizing that he had passed unheeding from Sinkat into the Squats and was working his way home through the narrow streets on autopilot. He changed direction, messaging his mother as he did so.

  Stopping off to see Herran. Won’t be long.

  That might prove to be very true, if Herran was not in the mood for visitors, but he responded immediately to Gabriel’s next message and admitted him before he’d even rested his fingers on the identipad at the entrance to Maryam House. As the door slid sideways, Gabriel blinked in surprise.

  He must have hacked the security vidcam. Waving at it, he stepped into the building that had once been his home.

  Sadness lapped at him as he crossed the lobby. He had known death in this place, had felt the lights of other minds go out, and he still remembered the numbness that had descended on his own. The magnitude of the loss then had been so great that he, just a child, hadn’t been able to comprehend it. He wondered if he would handle it any better now, and wondered too, as he mounted the steps and stopped outside Herran’s door, how much of his willingness to wear the band was down to his wish to protect himself, not just from the fears of others but from his own fear of ever experiencing that sudden, gaping emptiness again.

  He tapped out a familiar pattern on the door—of course Herran knew he was here, but it was a necessary part of the ritual. It slid open, and he stepped inside.

  Herran had lived in the same small, tidy apartment for as long as Gabriel could remember. He was a diminutive man, much shorter than Gabriel, with a mop of curls in the faintly glowing Bel’Natur red also borne by Gaela and Callan. As always he was sitting in front of his bank of screens, watching vid images, stream feeds, and code scrolling across. The tiny pulsing light of his cranial band was almost lost against the riot of his hair; Gabriel’s mind balked at the thought of how many channels he must be monitoring. He had pale gray eyes with long lashes and a scarred upper lip, in a face as imperturbable as glass.

  Gabriel stopped just at arm’s length and held his hands forward, palms out. “Hello, Herran,” he said. “Are you well?”

  The little man looked at him obliquely. His head and upper body were rocking slightly as he reached out and touched Gabriel’s offered hands with his own. “Gabe,” he said. “Well. You?”

  “Yes. Well, no, not exactly.” He pulled up a chair. “I’m fine, but a lot of the people I work with are in the hospital.”

  “Bad water. Getting better.” He blinked. “Rhys fix.”

  He was still looking at Gabriel. It felt strange to be so much the focus of Herran’s attention; before the band, he would most likely have been gazing at something completely unrelated on the screens while talking to a visitor. This new, more normal arrangement should be less disconcerting. Oddly, it was not.

  Gabriel shook his head and focused on the problem at hand. “Yes, they’re getting better, and Rhys and the police are going to find out what made the water bad. But in the meantime there are streamers saying horrible things, trying to turn other people against them.”

  “People stupid on streams.” Herran’s voice was matter-of-fact. “Always.”

  “They aren’t being stupid, Herran. They’re actually really clever. Remember when you showed me how to monitor streamchats, when we talked about avatars? Well, they’re using avatars for this: a lot of avatars.”

  He paused, trying to organize his thoughts. His own sense of outrage would not simply sweep Herran along; the little gem’s rigidly logical mind meant he had to explain things in a way that conveyed the precise nature of the problem.

  “They’re telling lies about Thames Tidal,” he started, “saying things to make people think we’re dangerous or careless. That would be okay if they stayed up long enough for us to respond, but they’re like . . . like midges. They’re everywhere, stinging and stinging, but you can’t grab hold of them.” He mimicked flailing at a cloud of invisible insects. “They pop onto the streams, into chats and forums, and they always sound like they belong so the regulars don’t realize they’re being infiltrated. They never post direct accusations, nothing that could be reported to administrators, or the police—it’s always just suggestions, insinuations, the kind of thing that gets people thinking there really must be a problem. But there are no links to anything out in the real world, no evidence, nothing that could be followed up. They post maybe five or six times, then they dump the avatar and they’re gone. The real users mostly don’t even notice—they’re too busy turning the slander into gossip. I’ve been seeing the same pattern for more than a week now, ever since the turbines were damaged. It’s getting worse—it’s become really nasty, and I don’t think it’s random. I want to know who’s behind it.” He looked Herran in the eye. “I want you to help me.”

  Herran looked back at him, impassive. “Bad people,” he agreed, “but not against rules.”

  “It might not be illegal, Herran, but it’s wrong. They shouldn’t do it. And everyone says they don’t do it, which is why if I can find out who’s breaking their own rules, I can make it fucking embarrassing for them.”

  Herran sat and rocked for a full minute. “Swearing,” he finally observed. “New. Okay.” He turned back to his monitors. “I find. Quick quick.”

  “You will?”

  “Yes. Need data.”

  Gabriel felt the request to share his files as a tug through his band. Herran could have broken through with no more effort than it would have taken him to scratch his nose or shuffle his feet—no datastream that Gabriel knew of was secure enough to keep Herran out if he wanted in, and he had written the encryption code for the bands himself. But in his own strange, brusqu
e way he was always scrupulously polite about personal digital space. Gabriel gave him access and he got to work.

  As expected, it did not take long; barely long enough for Gabriel to have made them both tea.

  He had drunk only a little of his when Herran announced, “Five streamers.” He was studying the machine code scrolling across one of his screens. “Many layers encryption. Good job.” He sounded faintly impressed.

  “Are they working together?”

  “Sequestered,” Herran said. “Invisible. Different platforms, different streams. No sharing, no messages.” He checked something. “Mostly different times.”

  “You mean they’ve got nothing to do with each other?” That felt completely wrong; the pattern in the files he had shared was too consistent.

  “Same apps, encryption, avatar generators,” Herran said. “Special. Not seen before. Built for hiding and faking.”

  “So they’re all using the same set of tools and doing the same things with them,” Gabriel said slowly, “but they’ve got different shift patterns and areas of responsibility? And they don’t communicate with each other at all?”

  “Same tools,” Herran confirmed, “no communication.” He cocked his head as though a surprising thought had occurred to him, and added, “Onstream.”

  “Good point. Where are they, physically? Are they posting from the same location?”

  “No.”

  He thought about that for a moment. “Are they all in London?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you give me addresses? Do they move around?”

  “No.” Herran’s eyes unfocused as he parsed information through the band. “Onstream from working places.”

  “So we know where they work—”

  “—work from,” Herran corrected. His face had gone vague, slightly confused, and he rapped the heel of one hand against his temple as if he might shake more useful words loose that way. “Not work for.” A directory listing appeared on the screen and he moved aside so Gabriel could look at it.

  “Oh! ‘Working place’ . . . You mean a business hub. For freelancers.” Gabriel chewed at a fingernail in frustration. “They can be used anonymously. Fake names . . .”

  “Yes. Every time different.”

  “But you can track the tablets, right, no matter what false ID they layer over them? Because they must go onstream from home too, or wherever they are the rest of the time—nobody’s ever not onstream, even if they’re not active.”

  “Other tablets, maybe. These silent. No standby signal. No tracking.”

  “So,” Gabriel said, “we’ve got five people who have tablets and software that go dark when they’re not onstream. And they’re only ever used for one purpose, and only from locations where the users can remain anonymous. They have no contact with each other via these tablets. They could be using different ones to communicate, but since they’re all in the city they could also be meeting up in person, getting their instructions that way.”

  “Possible,” Herran agreed.

  “For people who aren’t doing anything illegal, Herran, they’ve gone to a great deal of trouble.”

  Herran blinked at him. “I watch,” he said after a while. “Maybe find more.”

  “Thanks. Will you message me what you’ve got so far?”

  “Yes. I make easy for you.” His fingers slipped over the input screen, organizing the data into a form that someone other than himself could understand, while Gabriel sat back and tried to think through what to do with the information.

  They had confirmed the existence of a conspiracy, one far more clandestine and well-resourced than he had anticipated when he’d asked Herran for help. They might not know who was behind it, but the sheer slickness of the operation eliminated several possibilities.

  These are professionals. The word echoed in his mind, hollow and mocking.

  They had no proof that the five anonymous streamers had broken the law, though he was far less confident about what he and Herran had done. And even if Herran did find out who the streamers were, it wouldn’t be enough; they still had to find out for whom they were working.

  Herran sent him the link, picked up his cup and sipped his own cooling tea. His gray eyes regarded Gabriel steadily over the rim. “Aryel ask about Zavcka,” he said.

  The change of subject was so abrupt that Gabriel felt momentarily disoriented. “Because she’s getting out of prison?”

  “Yes. Worry for Eve.”

  “But Zavcka Klist doesn’t know about Eve.” He suddenly realized why Herran might have brought it up. “She doesn’t, does she?” he asked in alarm.

  “No,” said Herran. “Bad access from prison. Also, looking wrong places.”

  “That’s a relief. But when she gets out—”

  “I watch.”

  “Thank you, Herran. Thank you very, very much.”

  12

  Sharon Varsi paused just inside the door of the incident room assigned to the Thames toxin investigation, surveying the three people already gathered around the table. After a silent moment she sat down and looked expectantly across at DI Achebe. She’d felt a twinge of sympathy for him when she’d put him in charge of the case, knowing from experience how disagreeable it was to conduct an inquiry with a senior officer peering over your shoulder. Now, as his worried brown eyes met hers, her heart sank. Achebe was a competent officer and he’d worked on tricky cases before. Asking her to join a conference this early on was unlikely to be a good sign.

  It comforted her somewhat that Rhys was there. Achebe introduced the other attendee, Fayole, a field supervisor from Environmental Management. She was a gem woman about Sharon’s age with vivid blue hair braided and coiled on top of her head, casting a faint sapphire glow all around her face.

  “We’ve met before, I think,” Sharon said, reaching across to shake hands. “There was a recruitment drive a few years ago, about encouraging more diverse applicants to the public sector—”

  “That’s right,” the woman replied. “And there was a reception at City Hall after the last election.” She dipped her head with a mixture of pride and resignation. “They like sending me to things like that.”

  Rhys snickered in amused recognition and Sharon’s mouth quirked too, an acknowledgment of all that Fayole’s remark implied. They were all members of the vanguard, and knew only too well the dubious honor of being forever trotted out as an example for others to follow. Sharon thought it unlikely that Fayole’s normal area of responsibility included this part of the city; if it did, she suspected they’d have encountered each other more often. It was quite possible that her superiors, sensitive to criticism of the department and now under particular scrutiny from Mikal, had assigned her as liaison purely for public relations reasons.

  Achebe looked perplexed, but apparently decided that whatever undercurrent was passing between the others was beside the point of his investigation. “We’ve come to some conclusions,” he said. “Unfortunately, they raise some new and disturbing questions.”

  Rhys smiled wryly, and Sharon could see the strain. “In other words, the mystery deepens.”

  She glowered at him. “That’s possibly my least favorite phrase. Ever.”

  “Sorry, but it does.” He turned politely back to Achebe.

  “The incidence of toxicity in Sinkat Basin correlates with the presence of an algae,” the detective inspector said. “As I understand it, that’s not unusual—all sorts of microorganisms live in the river, but they’re in relatively low concentrations and in balance with each other.” He looked over at Fayole for confirmation. When she nodded, he continued, “What’s allowed as runoff from farms and so on is highly regulated, mostly to keep the Thames from being flooded with the kind of nutrients that can make things grow out of control and cause a bloom. But some variation is normal and expected, and within limits it doesn’t trigger an alert from the monitoring system.”

  “So was there enough of this algae to do that or not?” Sharon asked. There was value
in Achebe’s slow, methodical explanation, but knowing that didn’t increase her patience.

  “There wasn’t,” said Fayole, “because it’s normally harmless. There was a spike that we can’t explain, but the amount was still below the level that would generate an alarm.”

  “Then why is it important?”

  “Because it was altered,” Fayole said. “This one was engineered. Our teams recovered samples from various spots along the river—to be honest, we didn’t realize that there was anything different about them at first. The change is very subtle; it wasn’t until they looked at this one particular sample, collected where Sinkat Basin joins the main channel, that they noticed it was secreting something . . .” She trailed off, looking at Rhys.

  “It’d been hacked to produce the toxin,” he said bluntly, “but it doesn’t do it all the time, or at least, not at high enough levels to be a problem. The samples from further upstream are virtually dormant—they look and act just like the ordinary, unmodified organism. The samples from downstream are also dormant, but they are fewer, and they’re degraded and dying: they look just the way the active sample Fayole’s people sent to toxicology looked by the time we got it. The reaction had stopped. It was the concentration of toxin that allowed us to deduce what had happened. In the river it would’ve become so diluted I doubt we’d’ve been able to detect it.”

  “You’re telling me,” Sharon said, “that not only has an ordinary river microbe been turned into a gillung poison factory, but that it doesn’t start making said poison until it’s actually in the place where they live?” Her insides felt cold. “And then it dies?”

  “Basically, yes.”

  She stared at Rhys, aghast, and then at the others. “How is that even possible?”

  “It reacts to something,” Rhys said. “We don’t know what, but it’s the only explanation that makes sense. It traveled downriver, photosynthesizing and reproducing and generally behaving the way a boring little brown algae is supposed to behave. It appears to have been quite efficient because it hadn’t been too diluted by the larger volume of water, and that suggests that it was rapidly making more of itself—but as Fayole says, not enough to set off the monitors. By midday it started to arrive just where the river washes through Sinkat, and there it encountered something that acted as a catalyst. It triggered our innocent little algae to start pumping out toxin at an enormous rate, burning itself out in the process.”