It took nearly a minute to walk the full length of Level-D’s western corridor. When they reached the door to D-12, MaryBeth crouched for her retina to be scanned a second time and the mirror door whispered to one side. As they stepped inside, Jack was greeted cheerfully by all six of the Research and Development Departmental Heads. Five remained seated at separate control terminals, their heads instantly lowered again as they double-checked data and monitored progress charts. They wanted everything to be perfect and it seemed that only Geoff Hoyle could spare the time to walk across and vigorously shake Jack’s hand.
“Hello, Jack. Glad you could come,” he said.
“I wasn’t given the impression that I had a choice,” he replied, glancing chastisingly at MaryBeth as she smiled proudly back. “I don’t have a clue what it is I’m here to see.” Five lowered heads sniggered in unison.
“Good,” Geoff said wryly, “because you’re not supposed to.”
“Everyone has worked really hard on this, Jack,” MaryBeth said. “We thought it was about time that you saw it.”
Jack pursed his lips, recognising her insinuation that he needed something to lift his spirits. He did not think for one second that anything could. “Okay, let’s have it,” he said. His voice was weary.
MaryBeth looked to Geoff who nodded. Everything was ready.
She led Jack through to the second of five rooms which, in order for the ‘ReelRooms’ suite to be properly installed, had been partitioned from the main area. All were sealed by an IntelliSoft-corporate chromium door. MaryBeth nodded to Geoff and he punched an access code into a remote terminal, but he paused before pressing the enter button which would release the door lock. His eyes were almost as wide as his knowing smile.
MaryBeth turned to face Jack with a crooked smile of excitement and trepidation. “Are you ready for this?” she asked.
Jack, with intrigue balancing expectancy, nodded. “As I’ll ever be,” he said, still unsure as to exactly what it was that he needed to be ready for.
MaryBeth playfully bit her lip. “You’re either going to love me or hate me for this,” she said. She nodded to Geoff again who purposefully hit ‘enter’. The door slid open.
They stepped inside.
at the set time
Genesis 21:2
The Abraham was meditating, praying before a purple candle mounted on an ornate blackened-iron holder, when the digitised tones carved into his silence. He did not like to be disturbed when his mind was in another place, he did not like it at all, but nevertheless a call on his mobile phone needed to be answered. The few who possessed the number knew that it was for use only to disclose or discuss matters that required his immediate attention.
Save for the thin shafts which cut through side of a makeshift curtain, the candle was the only light within the rented room, conveniently located at the end of a secluded back street. The only furniture in the room was a rusting bedstead, probably used by a river of two-dollar hookers whose half-hour tricks had no desire to pay the rates of better hotels, a battered wooden drawer unit, a desperately old portable television with no plug and a green corduroy chair, stained and fraying at the seams. The dull beige carpet was similarly threadbare and stained, rat droppings littered the corners of the room and cobwebs hung like veiled shrouds from the ceiling.
As ever, The Abraham had knelt peacefully in the glow of the flame and completely ignored his squalid surroundings. It was not about where he was in the physical sense, but where he was in his mind. His body was illuminated yellow-orange and he was naked save for a purple velvet sheet draped around his waist. Concealed within his long history, this was who he really was; how he felt most comfortable. He was born a Magi and, as long as he lived, he would remain a Magi. As the designated leader of his sect, purple was his colour.
He flipped open the phone, its high technology starkly contrasting his surroundings, and listened without saying a word. The caller breathlessly explained the problem.
“When” he asked, and listened again.
Without the need to think he said, “Stall him.”
A complaint on the other end of the line.
“I do not care what he wants,” he said coldly. “Just stall him. Hold the information until you are instructed and the rest will be taken care of.”
He clicked the phone closed without awaiting further response and resumed his meditation. His eyes closed and he allowed the light from the candle to take him back toward the warmth of his people. He was a man again. A man without a gift. Occupation and oppression from those who did not follow the teachings of Moses was ravaging his homeland. Heathens were coming in well co-ordinated waves; slaughtering his people. He saw death every day. He felt pain.
It had been a dark time and he visited it now to remind him how swiftly the world was slipping back into the darkness that stemmed from below. He was a righteous man and he had accepted the gift so that he might stem the flow of corruption and restore truth across the face of the earth.
It was his destiny.
It had always been.
But it would be no easy task. It had to be planned; controlled and timed to perfection. As one time leader of the West Mannaseh Magi; a magician, timing was imperative. As such he delivered clear and precise instructions with good reason. There must be no deviation from his words.
He was pleased that he had chosen Bernstein. Pleased that it was his daughter he had lured. Now, everything was going to plan and it had only taken one man. Of course it had always needed to be a certain man; very specific. A man whose daughter could be used to bear the child that would convince his followers that the time was at hand, and a man who had the ability to unlock the secrets of God himself.
Soon the Abraham would awaken the world and reap the benefits of a two-thousand year dream. Which was why his settlement in Turkey would be raided and his disciples turned over to the authorities only when he decided.
Nobody else.
if he have no daughter
Numbers 27:9
“Good morning, Jack. Good morning, MaryBeth. How are you today?”
Jack was lost for words, almost unable to believe what he was seeing. It was undoubtedly computer generated, and the voice possessed a subtle but noticeable sine-wave hum, but it was a remarkable achievement all the same.
“It’s....its...” was all he could attempt to say.
“No, it’s not,” MaryBeth corrected, knowing what he was going to suggest. “Yes, we made it look and sound like her, but it’s not. Of course it’s not. That said, it is still a Quotient and they’re just as much your children as she was.”
The room they had entered was a ReelRooms Projection Suite, similar to the one that John Case had managed to fool Jack with in London. The virtual decoration in this one, however, was neither Victorian nor black ash. It had been designed to look just like every other IntelliSoft office on the campus. The walls and furniture were corporate yellow and everything was enhanced with chrome features. Jack could also see that a super-thin LCD screen had been positioned on the furthest wall and linked to a camera which was continuously overlooking the campus. A virtual window in a vista-less room.
In the centre of the room was an elliptical yellow desk supported by chrome legs; a shaped chrome inlay set into its surface. Resting and reflecting in the centre of the inlay was one item; a chrome and gold chess set with matching pieces to denote white and black.
The room also contained two yellow leather chairs. If Jack had looked a little closer he might have noticed that one of these chairs, and indeed each of the chrome chess pieces, was almost imperceptibly transparent. Unlike the desk itself, they were being projected by the room.
But he did not bother to look. He was too busy looking at the occupant of the chair.
His daughter.
And she was looking back at him, smiling.
“How have you done this?” he asked. “When have you done this?”
“Team effort, last few months,” MaryBeth replied, look
ing to Geoff who was waiting just outside the doorway, “of which I was only a minor member. Initially it was going to be two-dimensional; delivered on-screen, so most was in place well before you went to see John Case. After that it was just a matter of integrating his system as well. She’s the combined total of our virtual research running on a Quotient that’s almost as powerful as the FireNet, to which she is linked by 1200-Base-T ethernet I hasten to add. We’ve got the standard Virtuosity sensor pads on the floor for positioning, plus three camera systems; one on each of three walls.”
Jack walked toward his virtual daughter and looked as closely at her features as possible. The harder he looked, the more he could detect minor ripples in her image as the air stream altered around her and the more he could see that she, like the ‘waiter’ at virtuosity, possessed a very subtle transparency. What surprised him, even more than the quality of the computer-rendered image, was the fact that her eyes had followed him so perfectly as he had approached.
He smiled at those eyes. They watched, but they did not look, and he was strangely pleased that he had uncovered a weakness. It was the only thing that let the image down; they had been unable to reproduce the look of Elizabeth that had been inherent in Lara’s eyes.
As if anybody ever could. There was probably only one thing left on the planet that possessed eyes as beautiful as hers.
And he had yet to find it.
“This isn’t Lara,” he said. He was in no way annoyed, just concerned at what MaryBeth’s intentions might have been. Was she so foolish as to attempt to create a replacement for his daughter?
She couldn’t possibly be.
“I know it’s not,” MaryBeth replied, gesturing around to the others before stepping forward and resting both her hands on his shoulders. “We all do, but we needed an interface. It could have been anyone, you perhaps, or it could have been completely computer generated. It’s not supposed to be Lara, it’s just supposed to be something a little special for you. Something you could perhaps have an occasional game of chess with. I see it more of a tribute to Lara. An homage. I… well we… just thought it might be nicer for you this way.”
“No,” he said with a slight smile. He understood. “I like it.” He nodded his head. “Really I do.”
“Why don’t you ask her,” MaryBeth said. “how she knew it was you and I when we walked in?”
“Because you programmed it in?” Jack said patronisingly.
MaryBeth shook her head. He would see.
Jack turned to the digital representation of his daughter, placed his palms on the table and posed the question. Her expression remained impassive throughout. When she spoke, though her voice still sounded digital in origin and suffered slight mispronunciation, it was so very close to that of his daughter that Jack could feel himself smiling.
“When my processing unit detected pressure on the floor sensors I commenced an analysis of images received from the camera system. They confirmed that two human figures had entered the room and had activated the sensors. I compared the images I received against matrices already contained in my databank. It offered two distinct matches. Jack Bernstein was one and MaryBeth DeLaine was the other. You looked shocked and MaryBeth was smiling. As both parties had just entered the room I chose to welcome you both.”
Jack turned to MaryBeth. “Chose to welcome us?”
She’s a Quotient, Jack. She thinks. Granted she does it from set parameters but we’re increasing her library of options all the time. ”
More than anyone else in the room, Geoff Hoyle understood what this moment might mean to Jack. Ten years ago, whilst still heading Gambit Software, he too had lost his daughter; Kirsten. Like Lara, Kirsten had also ‘found religion’ and had left the family home; eventually joining a group in Ohio. She had been gone for three months before he had opened the door one night to find her sitting like a stray dog at the other side of the road; her head down in the rain. She had been too scared to come inside; worried about the response from her parents after she had seemingly deserted them. She was cold, wet and hungry having hitched her way home penniless. It had taken nearly two weeks to get her to speak.
The overwhelming joy that Geoff had felt for his daughter’s return had been short lived. A month and a half after he found her in the street she was knocked from her cycle in a hit-and-run accident and killed outright. Police suspected that she had been the victim of a drunk driver. She was seventeen years old.
What Geoff did not know, and what he would never know, was that Kirsten had been murdered. And, because of the horse riding story, he would never be privy to the knowledge that Lara had been murdered as well. Both girls had been lured because both had been useful. Their fathers had been even more useful. Kirsten had made it home before they caught her. Lara had not. It had been one of The Abraham’s very rare failures, but also one that he believed had been pre-destined. It had led him to a much better chain of events.
A much better daughter.
“So how extensive is her database?” Jack asked.
“Her own is not that great to be honest,” MaryBeth answered. “Most of her hard disk is dedicated to banks of phonemes and waveforms for speech; software and images for recognition; a bank of pre-programmed moves which we hope she will start to use when she understands their context and... well, chess.” She smiled. “We had to... for bench testing.”
“Is she better than me?” Jack asked suspiciously.
“She’s better than Sorkasnov,” MaryBeth laughed. “She has the full program, but she’ll let you win if you ask her nicely. Most of her knowledge of the world at large is stored on the terrabyte system in Technical. We’ve also added a feature that once a week, during our 3am backup slot, she automatically does a complete system search and adds any new information she finds to the terrabyte for us. She will analyse the information, study the sentences contained and place any gleaned knowledge within the relevant file area.”
“So she studies everything she finds?”
“Studies it and acts on it.” MaryBeth said. “She’s very clever.”
Jack looked again as the image smiled back at him. It was a fake smile, no doubt about that, but it was close. Even the hair was well rendered, a notoriously difficult element to simulate. Every few seconds Lara performed a ‘pre-programmed’ random movement. She blinked, or shuffled her arm. At one point she even ruffled up her nose as though she had an itch. Jack smiled at Geoff when he saw that. Somebody had programmed in one of Lara’s most common traits.
It was the closest approximation of his memory of Lara that he had been presented with in a long time, capturing her in that all-important third dimension that even the most cherished photograph or movie file had lacked. The inability for the graphics system to capture those eyes aside, there was only one other noticeable difference between the virtual system and the Lara of his memories.
This one was smiling.
a company of nations
Genesis 35:11
When he returned for his second meeting, everything was the same as Jack remembered. The church was the same, the vagrants were the same and the lousy London weather was the same. He was even sitting in exactly the same place on exactly the same pew.
The only thing that had changed was the way he was feeling.
When he had visited the church the previous week, he had done so out of choice; a sense of intrigue. He had even been wondering as he entered whether he was the victim of some sort of joke. A sick joke, perhaps, but a joke all the same.
Now he knew that a joke was the one thing this whole situation was most definitely not. So far, everything that Simon had offered to him had seemed to possess an element of truth. The file he had highlighted had seemed to hint at Mil’el’s innocence - insofar as Mil’el could ever be classed as ‘innocent’ - and his insinuation that Lara had given birth had subsequently been borne out by the forensic teams working in Germany.
Now, in amongst the things Jack had gained, things that he had lacked before, was one
thing that he no longer possessed - a choice. He had to be here, and he guessed that that was what Simon had planned for. He had tested Jack’s ability to follow the initial clues whilst at the same time testing whether or not he might involve the authorities. He would never have given him everything in the first meeting. Not until he was assured that he was worthy.
But no matter what the outcome might prove to be, Jack would never accept the one thing that Simon accepted; that this was a ‘game’. It was not a fucking game. It was a mission; a quest. Now, even he could not escape Simon’s deliberate irony that he had been handed the quest on ground associated with the Knight’s Templar, or that Simon’s ‘Holy Grail’ was steadily paling into insignificance alongside his own.
It had, quite literally, become a crusade.
He checked his watch. Ten past one. The bastard was late.
He had better have something good when he arrived.
Time passed. Then it dragged. It seemed like hours. He checked his watch again. Twelve minutes past. Where the hell was he? It was the right day at the right time and place, there was no doubt about that. If you want to accept my terms you will meet me here in exactly two weeks’ time. That was what he had said. And that was what Jack had done. It was way past one o’clock now and Simon did not possess the air of a man who was likely to arrive late.
So where the hell was he?
He gently lowered his head into his sweating palms and allowed the moisture to cool his face for a few moments, wishing that he had the strength to walk away. He wished that his desire to know where Lara had been prior to her death had not been so easily accentuated and that there had never even been the suggestion of a child planted in his mind. Then he could have done what the other ‘Families of 320’ were doing; starting to grieve. Instead he was forced to wait impatiently for answers as though attending some second-rate job interview. Just to find the child.
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