“No? House, outer door open.”
She looked like she wanted to say something more, but the door hissed behind her, cutting her off.
“Three hours,” he said again. “Unless I call. Then we can talk about it over the file on Lindsay.”
Marylin turned on her heel and stepped out into the heat. She didn't look back, but Fassini did. His expression was disappointed. Jonah wondered what she might be saying to him via prevocals.
“House? Close outer door. Maintain full security and privacy until otherwise instructed.”
“Yes, Jonah.”
He wheeled himself back into the lounge and confronted the d-mat booth, daring another memory to surface while it had the chance. He was alone at last. He had time to think. Now would be the perfect opportunity to experience some sort of revelation.
But it didn't come—and as the satisfaction at ousting Marylin began to ebb, anger and regret rose to take its place.
No, he told himself. I can do this on my own. I don't need them. I don't need her.
With his hands planted firmly on the arms of the wheelchair, he rose slowly to his feet. The muscles in his thighs quivered at the sudden exertion, and he had to grit his teeth to stop himself from gasping when he pulled his hands away, but he did it. He stood, unaided in the full gravity of Earth, for almost twenty seconds.
Then something seemed to give between his eyes. He swayed forwards, arms pinwheeling to keep him upright. His balance went entirely and he pitched forward onto the floor, striking his forehead a glancing blow on the bamboo coffee table.
His world went black for an instant before dissolving into stars. He rolled onto his back and clutched his temple, groaning with pain.
You stupid sonofabitch, he told himself. What the hell do you think you're doing?
The half-remembered voice of the man who had stood in his lounge room, three years earlier, replied: Killing yourself, of course.
And with the memory came a name: Herold Verstegen.
“He did what?”
With those words, Odi Whitesmith's mask disappeared and was replaced by his real face. His expression was one of mixed anger and disbelief.
“He kicked us out of the unit for three hours. Threatened to call security if we didn't leave,” Marylin said, not quite believing it herself but feeling more irritated than genuinely angry. “He's going to make life difficult until you give him the file on his father.”
“You tried to talk him out of it?”
“Of course. The problem is, he's making more sense than me.”
“Fuck.” Whitesmith's gaze wandered and he scratched his head. “Where are you now?”
“Still in Faux Sydney. I don't mind waiting here for the time being. Local security can assign us somewhere to work from. Just because Jonah's not with us doesn't mean we have to sit on our thumbs. I want to start looking at the housekeeper, if that's okay with you.”
“Yes, do that. I'll talk to Trevaskis, get him to okay the transfer. Verstegen will shit if he finds out about this.”
As he should, Marylin thought. “I told you what might happen if you pushed him too hard,” she said.
“Yeah, you did. Consider it noted. In fact, you can tell Trevaskis yourself, if you like.”
“Pass.”
The line to Whitesmith died while he went to reason with the Director of the MIU. Marylin paced the length of the glass-windowed shelter to take a mouthful of water from a basic refreshment dispenser in one corner. Then she called the nearest security outpost and, using her EJC powers, arranged transport to collect them.
“I can't work out whether you're pissed at him or what,” said Fassini.
“Who?”
“McEwen.”
“I'm annoyed because he's making me look bad,” she explained as honestly as she could. If she was truly annoyed with anyone it was Trevaskis, for letting politics get in the way of an investigation. “I sympathise too much at the moment to take sides against Jonah. I'd probably be doing the same or worse in his shoes.”
Fassini smiled at that. “True. So what will he be doing in there?”
“Good question. QUALIA?”
The reply from Artsutanov Station came with faint distortion caused by congestion in the Pool.
“Yes, Marylin?”
“Have you been following this?”
“Yes.”
“I'd like you to access Jonah's housekeeping program without him knowing. Can you do that for me?”
“That would be illegal,” e argued.
“Not really. He's given us access to the unit's maintenance records for the last three years plus permission to seek any other data we need to verify those records. The housekeeper knows me by name. And we have his UGI. All that should be enough to get us in.”
“May I ask why you wish to do this, Marylin?”
“I want—” She stopped, not entirely certain how best to phrase her request. Part of it was simple enough, if surprising. Jonah wasn't in the best position to do anything too drastic, but she wouldn't put it past him to try. “I want to make sure he's okay.”
“Very well. I will begin negotiations.” QUALIA was silent for a moment, during which time Marylin paced the enclosure again.
“The housekeeper will grant us vision but no sound,” QUALIA eventually said. “That will be enough to allow us to ascertain that Jonah McEwen has not left the premises. You will have access to all records. If you wish, I can ask the housekeeper to communicate with him, and relay his answers on, if they are not already known.”
“That's great, QUALIA. Thanks. Let's have a look at what he's up to.”
The image came through one eye only, recorded from a single camera high in the corner of the lounge. At first she failed to see him. The wheelchair was half-visible behind one of the expansive sofa chairs Lindsay had liked, but it was empty. A flutter of apprehension made her heart race as she considered the possibility that he had been faking all along, that his health was much more improved than he looked, that he had somehow escaped—
Then he moved. He was lying face-up on the floor, camouflaged against a dark-coloured hessian rug that dominated the space in front of the d-mat booth. He moved feebly, like a turtle trying to right itself. She knew immediately that he had fallen.
Her first impression, which she spoke aloud, was that he needed help.
“The housekeeper insists that he does not,” QUALIA argued.
“What would it know?”
“It has his interests at heart.”
“This from a machine that would've let him rot forever if we hadn't found him when we did?”
“He has instructed it not to call for assistance under any but extreme circumstances, and it is required to obey him. Presumably he did the same when he entered the hibernation state three years ago.”
She conceded the point. Meanwhile, the feed from the unit revealed that Jonah had stopped moving. His eyes were closed; he seemed to be concentrating, “What's he doing now? Can you tell?”
“He is attempting to place a call to a citizen by the name of Molybdenum Ilaria Bache.”
She recognised the name; “Mollie” Bache had been one of Jonah's prime contacts in the old days.
“‘Attempting’?” asked Fassini.
“She died in ’68,” Marylin informed him. “Her estate let the number go.”
“He is trying another number,” QUALIA said. “Ehren Patrizio Smith.”
Another contact. This one had been in a correctional institution for over a year and had had his communication privileges curtailed.
She could guess who would be the next half dozen or so on his list, and all of them were incommunicado for various reasons. The ones he could contact would be of little use to him. Absence meant nothing where fondness was concerned in the shadowy world most of these people inhabited.
But that wasn't the point. Jonah was trying. He was calling for help, fighting to the last. She didn't know what he would do when he realised that he truly was trap
ped, cut off from the past by three years of lost time.
She felt uncomfortable. “I can't watch this.”
“You don't have to,” Fassini said, nudging her. “The transport's arrived.”
She directed her attention outwards, through the eye not filled with the black-and-white image. Sure enough, an automated vehicle resembling a golf cart (which it may in fact have been, given the all-pervasive lawn of Faux Sydney) had pulled up outside the shelter and idled patiently, waiting for them. She was grateful for the distraction and dropped the feed from the unit into a drawer for later perusal.
As they entered the heat of the outside world and moved closer to the cart, she heard a tiny voice issuing from the dash.
“Officer Blaylock? Please provide thumbprint ID. This vehicle will take you to your destination.”
She and Fassini climbed aboard. A thin but effective shade spread out to protect them from the sun. “QUALIA? Keep an eye on Jonah while we start looking at the data; make sure he doesn't hurt himself.”
“If anything happens, Marylin, I will let you know immediately.”
She touched her right thumb to the dash of the vehicle and, with a slight jerk, it moved off.
The cart took them to the nearest security station, visible from some distance away due to the black spike protruding through the hill that covered it. The more she saw of Faux Sydney, the more it reminded her of an ant hill: a bizarre, subterranean world with only the occasional, alien protrusion reaching the surface.
There was an officer present to meet them, one she recognised from the night they had discovered the body in Jonah's unit. He nodded cordially and showed them to a vacant office. Apart from that room and two others, and a row of three d-mat booths, the security station consisted of empty space.
“Sorry about treating you like this,” he said, indicating the sparse quarters. “We had another bomb scare this morning. Things are still a little messy.”
“Oh?” Marylin didn't mind where she was, as long as she could work. “You see a lot of that around here?”
“Constantly. Usually we manage to catch anything serious in time. It's mostly for the publicity, which is one reason why we downplay it.”
“I thought there were safeguards against this sort of thing.”
The guard laughed dryly. “There are ways to smuggle prohibited materials through d-mat, and they know most of them.”
“Sounds like a job for the MIU,” Fassini commented. “Who're ‘they’?”
“WHOLE,” the officer replied. “Who else?”
As Marylin settled into the seat behind the tiny room's sole desk, she pondered the officer's question. Who else indeed? Faux Sydney existed solely because of d-mat; it would have been an absurd proposition to build suburbs in such a remote location even a decade before, and the demand to live there would not have existed. The pseudocity was therefore both a symbol and a symptom of the technology WHOLE hated so passionately. It was a perfect example of the way humanity distorted its environment purely for the sake of convenience. And as the self-appointed defender of all things “natural,” WHOLE would find it an irresistible target, not necessarily to cause actual damage, but to inconvenience those who sought convenience this way.
It was strange. The organisation had innocent enough beginnings. Following the turn of the millennium, the level of interest in New Age philosophy and fringe religious groups had fallen steadily. Several of the more predominant organisations had overcome their differences in 2010 to form an alliance with just two very clear priorities: the preservation of the terrestrial biosphere and the betterment of the human soul. The name chosen for the organisation reflected the unity of purpose felt by the members of the alliance, even if it didn't actually reveal anything about their underlying beliefs or the way in which they intended to go about meeting their goals. Exactly what the acronym “WHOLE” stood for—if anything—remained a mystery, sixty years later.
Its first leader, Manuel MacPhedron, had been a charismatic man in his fifties and WHOLE remained a nonconfrontational entity until his death in 2022. Since then, however, a succession of mergers with other ailing groups such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the World Wide Fund For Nature, and others had brought an influx of more aggressive members that had gradually eased the focus of the group away from passive protest. The first major work undertaken by the revitalised WHOLE had been the nanoware “picketing” of a dam in India, followed by sabotage in a dozen other places. The aim of the organisation was always to obstruct the development and application of radical, new technology—flying in the face of the trends of the previous century.
The development of d-mat in 2039, its initial use by the military and space services, and its commercial introduction fifteen years later gave WHOLE a perfect means by which to separate “them” from “us.” D-mat technology polluted the soul, according to WHOLE's pseudoscientists. Every trip through a KTI booth killed the original person (which was true, in a sense) and created an imperfect copy elsewhere. The human soul was not able to accommodate such a dislocation, so the use of d-mat therefore “polluted” or destroyed it entirely. Rumours of disfigurements and psychological upsets supposedly caused by d-mat began to circulate, assisted by WHOLE's propaganda machine. Enlisting the posthumous help of twentieth-century writer Daniel C. Dennet, who had coined the term “Murdering Twinmaker” for describing a then hypothetical d-mat device, WHOLE set about a campaign designed to deter KTI's small but growing market for near-instantaneous transportation.
WHOLE wasn't the only group to disapprove of KTI, of course. The independent state of Quebec remained staunchly opposed to d-mat. When the headquarters of WHOLE in Boston, USA, were raided and its then leader arrested, the organisation packed up and moved to a secret location deep in the heart of isolationist Quebec, crying harassment all the way. Although Quebecois leaders officially denied any involvement in WHOLE activities, it was an open suspicion that the two were inextricably linked. The current leader of WHOLE, Karoly Mancheff, had once held a seat in Quebec's local parliament.
Lindsay Carlaw had been just one of many scientifically qualified people who openly supported the organisation. In Carlaw's case, Marylin had often suspected that some sort of phobia rather than strong religious belief had brought him to the group. She found it hard to accept that a man at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence could believe the mumbo-jumbo about “soul pollution” WHOLE espoused. Some people found the idea of being taken apart and put back together too difficult to overcome and would go to extraordinary lengths to avoid it—much as other people in different times, she supposed, had avoided motor cars or aeroplanes. No matter how much the discontinuity between “departure” and “arrival” was carefully avoided by KTI spokespeople, WHOLE was there to not-so-gently remind the public, and since Lindsay Carlaw's death the reminders had become much more strident.
But the true enemy of WHOLE wasn't KTI at all, even though much of its propaganda was directed against the giant corporation. The movement on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum was RAFT, the “Radical Association of Free-Thinkers” that touted technology as a means to make humanity immortal and all-powerful. Where WHOLE officially concentrated on biosphere and soul, RAFT's more materialistic aims were outwards into space. And where WHOLE was increasingly a terrorist organisation, RAFT used more subtle means to gain what they wanted. The two groups were so antithetical that it had come as a surprise to her to learn that Lindsay Carlaw had been a member of both of them.
But, then, he had been a complex man, as evinced by the relationship he had had with Jonah. Sometimes she doubted she would ever fully understand either member of the Carlaw-McEwen household.
The thought lingered as she continued searching through the data Fassini had mined from the housekeeper's databanks. There was so much of it: incoming and outgoing calls, d-mat transmissions, power usage, data up and downloads (both heavy because of the Pool node in the study), financial transactions carried out automatically in Jonah'
s absence, and so on. She already knew her time with Jonah so well it hurt; every trivial detail had been dredged out of her memory by hypnosis or drugs, written down by interviewers and etched into her mind a second time on reading the interviews. This was new data to add to her collection. Something, somewhere, she hoped, would reveal a hidden pattern, illuminate a detail she had overlooked, piece more fragments into a larger, coherent whole.
At first she skimmed backwards from the present, looking for irregularities. There were few, if any, to be found. The housekeeper had handled Jonah's affairs with clockwork precision after April 19, 2066. There had been no outgoing calls. His message bank contained just five unviewed recordings: one from her, the rest of little or no relevance that she could ascertain. All five had been taken within two weeks of the last human interaction with the unit.
That last movement itself was fairly innocuous. On the 19th, at 2 p.m., the external door of the unit had opened and shut once, three hours after it had previously opened. The unit had been sealed and remained undisturbed for three years thereafter. Likewise, there were no d–mat transmissions recorded after that date. Judging by Jonah's movements, it was clear that someone else had been in the unit that afternoon. Who that person might have been, however, remained a mystery; his or her UGI had been erased from the record in accordance with Privacy laws. The only person known to have d-matted into the unit that day was Jonah himself.
She browsed through the last of the transmissions prior to then, noting when Jonah had left the unit and returned. His hours had been highly irregular, with very few periods longer than an hour or two actually spent in the unit. She recognised that behaviour from when she had known him: while on a promising trail, everything else came a distant second. Whatever he had been investigating had obviously captured his interest.
The destinations for each jump were not especially illuminating: various public locations around the world, from former Canada in the United States of America to post-fascist western Europe. As always he had been careful to prevent his route being traced through the system. When time permitted, he would use several jumps to reach a particular destination, or d-mat somewhere nearby and walk or drive the rest of the way. Nowhere in the in or out logs was there a name that looked potentially significant.
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