by Al Robertson
Leila must have looked worried.
‘Oh, being non-human won’t be a problem,’ East continued. ‘Just look at what we’ve done with Hugo Fist! He’s a ventriloquist’s dummy and everyone loves him. And of course I won’t force anything on you. You’ll be free to shape your future, to live as you’d like to live. As someone rich enough to buy Station from the gods, if you felt like it!’ A moment’s thought. ‘Not that we’d ever let you, of course.’ She became conspiratorial again. ‘It’s everybody’s dream. To be able to do whatever they want. Then share it all with the world.’
Leila found that she didn’t have too much to say. East rattled on, sketching out scenarios. ‘You could be an entrepreneur, we’ll follow the businesses you invest in. Found a hospital! Perhaps that would be a good outlet. And I’m sure a lovely way of remembering your brother. Get involved with my lovely gun kiddies, though I’m not quite sure that’s you. Or you could just party…’
East didn’t mention Deodatus. Leila assumed that she didn’t know about it, so decided not to bring it up. She was sure that East would get very excited about it – and she was equally sure that hearing it played back to her as the basis for a new entertainment series (‘Perhaps you could find and solve a new crime every week!’) would make her feel like the worst kind of dilettante. And, of course, there was the more practical problem of corruption. If Cassiel was right, the Rose might somehow be colluding with Deodatus. Perhaps other gods had joined her.
At last East finished. ‘I’m so glad we had this little talk,’ she said. ‘I’m so excited about the work we’ll do together.’
‘But what if I don’t want any of it?’ asked Leila.
‘I know,’ said East sympathetically. ‘It’s a lot to get used to. But with great wealth comes great responsibility – to all those who look up to you. Think of this as one way of managing that responsibility.’ She leaned in and kissed Leila. The soft, warm touch of her lips left a tingle shaking through Leila’s skin. She was infuriated to feel herself warmed by a sharp pulse of sexual desire. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said the god. ‘That happens to everyone, please don’t take it personally. Anyway – yes of course, there are other options. And I’d hate to force you into anything you’re not happy with. Remember that, Leila. I’ll give you a few days to get used to it all. We’ll talk again soon.’
And then East was gone, and Leila was alone. The divine invasion had left her feeling exposed, as if her life was something that the gods could walk into and change on a whim. She imagined herself as East wanted her to be – a reality star, a brand puppet, someone whose every movement or emotion would be interpreted as an endorsement or a sales pitch. She realised that she’d end up seeing herself like that too – that the authentic Leila would be so hard to hang on to. ‘Oh, Dieter,’ she groaned, falling back on her bed, ‘I’ve got to find you.’ She needed to move the investigation on as quickly as possible. Rather than waiting for any results from Ambrose, she’d share all the names in the Deodatus file with Cassiel, in return for full access to anything she found out. She thought about negotiating by mail, but worried about security. She also found herself quite looking forward to surprising the mind with her progress.
So Leila messaged her saying: ‘We need to meet up.’
Cassiel’s reply was an address, a time and a note: ‘Congratulations on your discoveries. I look forward to learning more about the beneficiaries of the other two pay-outs. And the policy holders too, of course.’
Leila couldn’t hide her frustration. ‘Oh for gods’ sake,’ she said. ‘How did she know?’
Chapter 9
Cassiel was waiting at a corner table in a busy café, dressed in the same smart-casual suit. Leila looked round, wondering if she’d see any more pressure men, but there were none. She sat down at Cassiel’s table.
‘So how did you work out I have the names?’ she began.
‘You need to ask?’ replied Cassiel, sounding a little surprised. ‘I query InSec for additional information daily. More in hope than expectation, I have to say. This morning, they referred me to you. You’ve bought the investigation, you must have the details of the other beneficiaries. And the deaths that triggered Deodatus’ payments to them.’
‘Ah, of course.’ Leila tried to sound blasé. Inside, she was kicking herself. ‘I, er, just wanted to hear it in your own words.’
‘And you’re going to share them with me. Thank you.’
Leila readied herself for a negotiation. ‘Not unless I get something in return.’
‘I can do far more than you with them. I’m not hindered by your narrow, personal focus. And I can draw on resources that would surprise you.’
Leila thought of Ambrose. She smiled. ‘Yeah. Me too.’
‘I doubt even you can hire Totality-level professionals within twenty-four hours.’
‘It’s already done.’
‘Probably a cowboy.’
‘Someone I trust implicitly. With access to Pantheon level weaveself search engines. He’s going to work out where Deodatus has taken Dieter.’
‘And will he succeed? Those machines don’t always find what they’re looking for.’
Leila said nothing.
Cassiel sat back. ‘And you won’t have enough information on the other two beneficiaries to search so deeply for them. Or even understand why they and your brother are so valuable to Deodatus. Without that knowledge you might find it difficult to negotiate his return, even if you do locate him. And of course, you won’t be able to find out how Deodatus might represent a broader threat to our two societies.’
‘Gods, Cassiel, must you be so smug?’ But the mind was right.
‘I’m merely sketching out the situation. So we both share the same sense of it.’
‘Then let me do some sketching out of my own. I’ve got the names you need. You won’t get them from anyone else. I won’t give them to you unless you agree to share anything you find out about them, Deodatus and the whole shebang with me. Clear?’
To Leila’s surprise, Cassiel laughed. Soft light shimmered inside her. ‘You know, I have to admit that you’re pretty good at this. That is indeed very clear. But you’ve forgotten that I’ve already agreed to pass on any information I can.’
‘You gave me a maybe. I want a definitely. I want to know what you know, when you know it. Not just whatever you feel like, whenever you feel like it.’
‘This is a Totality as much as a Pantheon matter. We’re very careful about sharing information relating to our own internal affairs.’
‘Full disclosure or no deal.’
‘And you need to think about what you’re getting into. We don’t know what Deodatus is. The pressure men might be dangerous. The Rose is doing her best to block me.’
‘But she sold me the case.’
‘I’m a professional, Leila. You’re not. Perhaps she saw you as less likely to succeed than me. Perhaps she thinks you’ll be easier to neutralise.’
‘She hasn’t threatened me so far. Look, I don’t care how risky it is. Nothing’s going to stop me from getting Dieter back. Are you going to help me?’
‘I’m not supposed to work with amateurs.’
‘You said you weren’t bound by normal structures. That you played the devil’s role. Doesn’t that mean you can make your own rules?’
Cassiel chuckled again, the same soft light shimmering inside her. ‘You’re a hard person to argue with.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Agreed, then. Full disclosure at all times, as soon as is conveniently possible. But I have a condition of my own. You don’t make any major moves without talking to me first. I don’t want to find myself tripping over you at a critical moment. Agreed?’
Leila could see the sense in the mind’s request. And if she needed to, she could always ignore it. She nodded.
‘Now, the names,’ said Cassiel.
‘The policy holders wer
e Andre Herrera and Mo Fafanwe. The pay-outs went to Herrera’s partner and Fafanwe’s daughter.’
‘Thank you,’ said Cassiel. A moment’s pause, then she continued: ‘Intriguing. A competitive eating champion and a military psychiatrist.’
‘Excellent weave searching,’ Leila told her. ‘But are you sure those are the right ones?’ She tried to give her voice an edge, but she was actually quite impressed.
‘Oh yes.’ Leila didn’t want to ask how Cassiel was so sure. The mind stood up. ‘I’ll find out all there is to know about them both. And then I’ll be in touch.’ She stepped away with an elegant, economical precision, then turned back and said: ‘Oh, and there’s one more thing. I’ve moved offices.’ An address flashed into Leila’s mind.
‘Noted.’ Leila was curious. ‘Why?’
‘The flies. I had the room cleaned several times. Moved within the complex. They always came back.’
Leila couldn’t resist a jab. ‘I thought that sort of thing wouldn’t affect a professional like you?’
Cassiel took the question at face value. ‘I should have been able to get rid of them,’ she agreed. ‘I tried to swat them.’ She held a hand up. Fingers merged into a flat, wide, rectangular shape. ‘With this.’ An instant for Leila to see, then nanogel deliquesced again and Cassiel’s hand reformed. ‘But I could never even touch them.’
‘They’re tricky little sods,’ agreed Leila, remembering the fly in the hospital. It had been unusual too, she realised. ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘I ran into a weave-enabled fly. In Dieter’s room, just after he died.’
‘Have you seen any since?’
‘Not that I’ve noticed. Were yours weave enabled?’
‘I didn’t sense anything like that.’ Cassiel sounded worried.
Leila tried to reassure her. ‘I only spotted it by accident.’
‘No,’ said Cassiel. ‘You don’t understand.’ Light flurried in the translucent nanogel of her head. ‘I’m a weapon,’ she continued. ‘I have very high-level virtual and physical combat skills. But I could never hit a single one of those flies. And if they were digitally enabled – well, I didn’t even see it. They blocked me, Leila.’
The uncertainty in Cassiel’s voice was unexpected. Now Leila was surprised to pick up the softest hint of fear.
Chapter 10
Leila leaned back in one of Ambrose’s armchairs. Her black pendant rolled against her chest. Virtual leather creaked comfortingly. His office was heavily overlaid with weave content. She’d never seen the reality that lay beneath it. She stretched her feet out towards the simulated fire that burnt in his office grate. She’d arrived a little early and, to kill a few minutes, had asked him to talk her through the small print of her deal with the Rose.
‘You do realise you’re now fully responsible for the investigation into Dieter’s death?’ he said, sounding very unimpressed.
‘Well, InSec weren’t doing anything with it.’
‘Yes, but if anything kicks off, you’re on your own. Their duties are limited to making a final arrest of any demonstrably guilty parties. You should have just bought a majority share.’
‘Well, it’s done now. How soon till we can go and see what the search engine’s found?’
‘A few minutes.’ He was at his desk, punching invisible keyboards, peering at invisible screens. ‘Just activating my old digital exploration security systems. Setting up buffer selves for us.’
‘Seems a bit extreme.’
‘That box scared me, Leila,’ Ambrose told her. ‘If the search engines come back with any psychoactive malware piggybacking on them, I want to be ready. We’re not taking any risks.’
Leila nodded. A thought struck her. ‘Did Dieter build all this?’ she asked.
‘He fine-tuned it. Look, if we’re going to get set up for any exploring tonight, I need to concentrate.’ He focused intently for a minute or so, then sighed with satisfaction, reclined his chair and closed his eyes.
‘Taking a nap?’ asked Leila.
‘Making sure the meatware’s comfortable. You’ll see why when the buffer selves activate. You’re about to get queried, just say yes to everything, then we’ll be good to go.’
A tickle in her mind, and Ambrose’s systems were talking to her. Leila’s attention turned inwards as she gave them all the permissions they needed. A moment, then they pinged to let her know they were active. She looked back out at the room, where nothing seemed to have changed.
Then Ambrose stood up and there were two of him. His physical body lay unconscious on his chair.
‘Did Dieter ever show you any of this?’ Leila shook her head. The standing Ambrose tapped his virtual chest. ‘This is a buffer self. Runs at one remove from my core consciousness. So if anything psychoactive attacks, it hits this version of me and stops there.’ He nodded back at his physical body. ‘Keeps the real me safe. All my memory blocks, and the chains they form together. Oh, and look at this.’ He turned his head. A translucent silver cord stretched from the back of it down to the forehead of his physical self. ‘That’s the link between us. Turns red if there’s anything dodgy trying to force its way in. Stand up, you’ll see yours.’
Leila did so. Her cord also led back to a static version of herself, a photo-realistic statue frozen in time. Her second self faded into transparency, then vanished.
‘That’s my systems meshing with your home server, back at your flat. Pulling your core self back there.’
‘Weird,’ she breathed. ‘If something does attack us – what then?’
‘Just trigger an exit countdown, your buffer self crashes your consciousness back into your core self, and you’re home safe. You’ll end up back in your front room. The countdown takes about a minute, and crashing back leaves you with one hell of a hangover, but it’s much better than the alternative.’
Leila had to agree.
‘And now,’ Ambrose announced theatrically, ‘the back door!’ He clicked his fingers and a mahogany panelled door appeared on an empty patch of wall. ‘It’s a bit like jumping,’ he told Leila. ‘Only the buffer selves can’t experience any sort of nausea. This side of it, my office in Docklands. Through there – the firm’s offices in Homelands.’ He opened it and stepped into the bright light beyond. ‘Come on through,’ he called back.
Leila nerved herself and followed him. As Ambrose had promised, with the buffer self running the jump between his office in Docklands and his family firm’s Homelands space made hardly any impression on her at all. Leila felt discomfited by the seamless location change. It left her feeling that the physical world was suddenly a little less real. She looked around, wanting to both understand where she was and let its solid, physical presence wash over and reassure her. The room that housed the Vadenheim family’s search engines was large and dimly lit. Its far wall was glass, about twelve foot high and eighteen foot wide. It gave on to an ocean. Light rippled down from above. Fish drifted by, glitching the serenity with bright, jagged colours. An empty glass box, the size of a large coffin, sat on chrome legs in front of it.
‘More sea,’ she commented. ‘Is that a Taste Refresh Festival thing?’
‘Oh no,’ Ambrose replied. ‘It always looks like this. The sea’s a standard visual metaphor for all the data that floats around Station. That’s where our search engine’s been hunting.’
A dark creature sliced past the window, cutting through the peace of it all like a knife. There was a head that came to a single focused point, a mouth like a gash, jagged with hard white teeth, and blade-sharp triangular fins. Leila held her breath as it passed, then exhaled as it vanished from the window. Others glided to and fro in the distance.
‘Sharks,’ she breathed.
‘Apex datavores,’ said Ambrose. ‘I love seeing them up close.’
‘These are the search engines?’
‘The best there are!’
Leila
glanced at the door. ‘What if someone catches us?’
Ambrose shrugged. ‘I’m synced with the usage schedules for these chaps. Nobody’s going to be in here for the next hour or so. We’ll be long gone by then. And if someone wanders in by accident – the buffer selves are pretty much invisible. Not quite ghost cloak standard, but we’re still hard to see.’ He moved over to the glass coffin and waved his hand. A line of numbered shark icons popped into existence. He scrolled through it. ‘And here’s our little hunter! Back with a full belly.’ His finger hovered over its icon. ‘I hope it’s just a location. Nothing more dangerous,’ he said nervously.
Fascinated by the search engines, Leila didn’t really hear him. ‘Why sharks?’ she wondered.
‘InSec wanted to track down weaveselves bleeding a few bytes of data into an ocean of information. They needed to home in on individual weave caches and pick up the subtlest changes in them. Sharks are amazing hunters. They can detect one drop of blood in a million drops of water. They’re profoundly sensitive to electrical impulses. So we built our search engines around their neural structures. And we gave them bodies they recognised to minimise any consciousness displacement shock.’
‘CDS? Fetches have problems with that.’ She remembered a Coffin Drives acquaintance trying to live as a dog. He’d lasted for a few days until the nightmares became too much to deal with and he’d had to return to human form.
‘Yes. You can transplant a mind into anything, but unless you do some heavy rewiring to help it deal with its new body it’ll freak out.’
‘So has our shark found anything?’
‘Er. Yes. It has.’
Leila saw how nervous Ambrose was. ‘Is there any risk?’ she asked.
‘Not really. But still…’ Ambrose sighed. ‘It really shouldn’t scare me anymore.’ An embarrassed laugh.
‘The Coffin Drives still freak me out.’ Leila put her hand on his shoulder. ‘I know what it’s like.’