Finally, my father got fed up and my mother started making noises about psychiatrists and Doctor, heal thyself. The threat of intervention got me downstairs. Against my will we began the torturous process of sorting through our broken property.
My mother presented me one morning with something wrapped up in a piece of gift paper. “I found this,” she said. “It's broken, but I glued it up. I know it's long past Christmas, but I thought you'd like to have it.”
I opened it carefully, pleased in a way, but dreading what it held. When I had it open, I looked at the cracks and tears running through it from head to toe. The Kali box, named after the cat who had fled on the night of the murder and never come home. The rabbits had the run of our garden now, and no mistake.
“Thanks,” I said. So it had been broken, and my bad memories had flown, unclaimed, into the reeking citric air. Now the workshop was rebuilt, would they still be in there, mouldering on the shelf and long past their use-by date?
“Open it,” she said, looking at me with the patience of indulgence.
I didn't want to open it. If I opened it, I thought that a host of black bats might come flying out of it, claws raised for my eyes. I could almost hear them rustling about in its glinting depths. But Mum was waiting. She must have put something inside it, of course; that would be the real present, not her old hardened papier-mâché box.
My mouth dried out and I could hear my own breathing.
“Go on, then.” Dad looked up from his own small collection of keepsakes.
My hand struggled with the lid. It fitted badly now and was tight. I felt it come loose, and held it still for a second as I tried to prepare myself. Their stares became impatient.
I opened the lid.
Inside was a legal card: the deeds to the house and property.
“He left no will,” Dad said, “but we want you to have it. You should have had a stake in it years ago.”
“Thanks,” I said, trying to look pleased and grateful, but I was too stunned. Suddenly the air seemed hot and stuffy, the walls tight and oppressive. The little cat-shaped box loomed at me, dark as a gun barrel, and I ran for the kitchen door, throwing myself outside, gasping and choking, into the yard.
I stood with my head hanging, wheezing like an old woman, until the bitter cold air and the bright light took effect. There was a strange scrabbling noise and a voice really close by. I straightened up slowly, still reeling under the impact of old memory and whatever had happened in the room, and saw three rows of intent faces peering at me over the alley fence.
“Miss O'Connell, what was your reaction to the second trial verdict?”
“Hey, is it true that you screwed up the shutdown of 901?”
“Anjuli! What do you have to say to the millions of OptiNet customers who still haven't had full services restored to…”
“How did you react when you found your brother lying dead in the house?”
“Your ex-boyfriend, Dr. Augustine Luria—is he a cyborg? Did you sleep with him when he was already half a robot?”
“Dr. O'Connell, what do you say to claims by Christian fundamentalists who want to see you face Judgement Day in…”
The faces said this all at once in a blurt of noise. Lights glowed between them, and wire wrapped many heads for the operation and transmitting of third-eye cameras. Two younger reporters scrabbled over the teetering poles and clawed their way onto the roof of the large shed now dominating the end of the garden.
“Get off there. That's private property,” I managed to say before bolting back indoors.
I shut the heavily reinforced door behind me and leant on it. An excited babble rose in the alley, muffled by the triple windows and cut out by the angled blinds. I walked back to the lounge, where Mum and Dad hadn't moved from their previous positions.
“The garden is full of reporters,” I said.
“Anjuli!” My mother finally seemed to snap. “What in hell have you been thinking? Where have you been? They have been camped out there like an army since the day after I arrived. Do you listen to nothing I ever tell you? We had to have an escort through them to get to Ajay's funeral. What is the matter with you?”
“Yes, for God's sake.” My father's heavy Dublin tone had increased to counteract my mother's Pakistani. He leaned heavily on the dining table and shook his head. “You've been through a hellish time, we all know that. But you have to get on with life, you know. You can't hide in here forever. Your mother and I will have to be going soon if we want to have any lives to get back to. Can you see that?”
Oh, of course, their lives. It had to come eventually, when a snowflake's weight of one extra trouble set off their indignant individualism. How many times had I heard it in the holidays, when what I wanted to do and their own plans conflicted? How many times, when I pleaded with her not to go to Lahore, and leave Dad? And now here it was out of his mouth, as if shifting weights and trimming stone on some building in New York was more important than Ajay being butchered in our house.
You and your precious lives, I wanted to spit, but didn't. A part of me knew they must be hurt as badly as I was, but I'd left them to get on with it—punishment perhaps for all those times they would not change their minds and see me as more important. Now I had made them pay, and they had paid for three solid weeks.
“And there's another load of them who keep gathering at the front before the police get rid of them,” Mum continued. They were both staring at me with censure; Dad lugubrious and sorry, Mum chivvying. I could see that I was frightening both of them with my inexplicable behaviour, and had been all the time. They looked worn out. I wanted to reassure them, but couldn't think of anything to say in my rage at them for telling me that they were going to leave me again in my shit of a life, friendless, so that not only did I have to face the deaths, the mutilation, the inexplicable holes, I had to face the fact that they weren't going to dig in with me. They cared, but they didn't care that much, or feel that much—who knew what the hell the difference was?
She'd slot in back at university with her scholars, her pet projects, her circle of chattering friends all singing the same song; and he'd do that halfway round the world without her, loyal if marital fidelity is all that counts, drinking with his mates, cutting his stones, feeling important just because he was human in the face of technology, an honest man with an honest labour, sleeping peacefully every night on his worker's hostel cot. It was a miracle Ajay and I were ever born. In his absence, and their defection, I hated them, but they were all that was left.
The door chimes sounded in the hallway. As the tableau broke up, my father shook his head at my folly. Mum gave me a little smile—sympathetic with my youthful ignorance of life's pressure—and went to get it. It was for me. A student stood there heavily wrapped in secondhand thermal clothing, an official datacard in his hand bearing a legal mark. He was a process server, and had come to let me know that OptiNet was going to sue me for damages in civil court. The amount they proposed was breathtaking: orders of magnitude higher than the value of anything I owned.
At the gate a group of close-shot photographers were taking pictures. I thanked him and retreated indoors.
I cross-checked the two legal cards with the house processor and a legal advisor on the network. I'd got a house and lost a house in ten minutes. Not a home. If Ajay had been here, then it was home, but this was only a house. There was no way I was going to go back and fight them in front of millions of viewers, not when my defence would have to reveal all the ill-considered, illegal things I'd done. I doubted I'd win and anyway, it could only bring Augustine and Lula in for another public roasting. The summons meant that Vaughn must still be there, covering his butt. Idly I wondered if Klein was a liar, too.
I found myself short of a reaction. I thought I must be so far below rock-bottom that nothing short of a missile strike directly on the street could have any impact on me. In a colourless voice I told my parents the news. It would have been good to relish if Ajay's death had lent m
e the taste for revenge. As it was, I thought this development brought the whole episode neatly to a natural close. A pawn of many players, now all sides had exacted their pound of flesh. My penance for being a no-good daughter, a no-good machine-headshrinker, a no-good witness and a no-good liar.
For once neither of them had anything to say.
Even in my slowed-down state it didn't take long to see that I couldn't stay. I took as much time and effort as I could, in the course of three days, to make peace with my parents and to try and grieve for even a small amount of what had been lost. When I slept, my dreams were full of gunmen. Sometimes they shot James Dean and sometimes they shot me; huge, gaping blast wounds in which I saw myself explode in a red cloud, but didn't die. I knew I couldn't hold the dreams, the memories, or the gunmen off forever. I had to do something and bring the whole mess to an end. Even if I was no good at being much of anything else, and even if there was nobody left who gave a damn, I would still try to prove that I could be a good friend.
I used the house system to call Lula's number again. First time in ages. The exchange informed me that it was disconnected. I paid for a last-month activity report on that line. The calls incoming had never been answered. After failure to pay the bills, the exchange had automatically disconnected it. The billing address was unlisted.
I assumed she hadn't made it to wherever that location was. Other explanations came to mind, but they were wrong.
I also checked out what one journalist had said about the “second” trial. They had tried OptiNet under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Declaration of the Protection of All Persons from Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. It was guilty on both counts and was about to face a public prosecution brought by the court for murder. My actions, or lack of, during the phase referred to were a matter of contention depending on who told the story. I was at least glad to find that Klein did not implicate me—if she didn't exonerate me—in her evidence. I read that OptiNet was to build and revert to a much earlier version, 768—which they had set up a series of protocols for. This was all to be done under supervision of a new independent body, the Artificial Intelligence Committee, operating from within the International Court. I guess the fact that nobody had called me to take a place on it meant that the prevailing view of me was fairly grey. Little Stein made it on, though. Good to see they were prepared to stand by their decisions.
The information also explained why the Company had shown so little interest in me lately—they were under legal obligation to have no contact, since I was not only to be sued, but to give evidence in the coming trials.
Finally, I used some of my precious cash—not subject to impounding by the court—and bought a top-flight set of army fatigues: cold-weather specials with full thermal pump and matching boots. Several sets of underwear, a rucksack, a fiendish survival knife, and a small supply of food completed the purchase. I packed this up, leaving everything else behind except the black plastic diary and the miraculously untouched pack containing the single issue of Thunder Road. The bailiffs could clear it all out. I never wanted to see any of the stuff again.
When I put the clothes on I had to close them all at the limit of their seals. I'd automatically ordered my old sizes, and now I was closer to the size my mother liked to call “as narrow as an arrow.” That meant I felt the cold, too, so I keyed up the heat in the trousers and boots, and made sure all the power cells were fully charged. With my hat and gloves on, I was all set. I met the police clerk at the door, who put me under a concealment shroud, and we walked to the car. Free of reporters, free of everything, they took me to a small country rail stop and let me off there, before a final farewell. I looked very different to the person I had been, but I knew that whoever really wanted to find me wouldn't take too long about it.
I got a train into the Lake District National Park and hiked to the tiny oak-corpus cottage I had leased for a week. It was very isolated, close to the fell heights of Skiddaw, but I was fuelled by anger and self-hatred and it was easy to push the eight miles behind me.
During the walking, and the fumbling through getting the fire lit with my quivering right hand, I was constantly bombarded with the edges of memories, all trying to come through and get my attention. Flashes of violent emotion shot through me, and weakening flak-barrages of anger, terror, and loneliness, but I kept moving, ignoring everything. Now that my face was all over the media again, they'd be coming for the diary—harder now I didn't have my net of police protection and the safety of the city. Armed with expectation and my newfound determination to reach the last square on the board, I plodded on.
When I had recovered with a hot shower in the tiny toilet/shower-combined unit I sat in the single armchair in the other room, my feet up by the fire, a spectacular view ahead through the picture window, and got out both books. In all this time, I'd never read a word of Roy's scribbling. All that work to get it and I'd spent nearly a month sleeping on the accursed thing. I folded the cover back and closed my eyes for a moment. I didn't feel up to facing its contents for a minute or two, but then I realized that I was never going to feel better about it. I opened my eyes and, to be on the safe side, quickly paged through the whole thing so that, if it got taken before I finished, I could reconstruct it in memory. Then I started to read his left-handed scratches, closely written and almost illegible as well as illiterate.
Forty-five seconds later I shook the book vigorously and gave a growl that ended in a sob. I wanted to throw it in the fire. Yes, there were brief passages of English, dotted about like sheep on a hillside. But the rest was a kind of Pepys-ian code: idiosyncratic abbreviations, acronyms, sigils from the gates of elfland. The vast majority of what he had written was utterly incomprehensible to me or anyone else, and I knew that this was not the fabled Source either, because none of it triggered so much as a twitch in any of my bated neurons. It could have been shopping lists or treatises, or bitching about his Green mates. Now that I could have relished, and used to feed my dreams of exacting justice. As it was, there was just this personal language. Possibly Jane might understand it, but I didn't want to tangle with her over this—partly it was jealousy, the task having been left to me, not to her; and partly the thought of further humiliation in asking for Miss Perfect's help. And having to tell her about Og and Lula, and Ajay and Nine. I hadn't managed to do anything right.
I flipped between the English parts, trying to contain my frustration.
Besides the not-so-paranoid witter read out at his funeral, there were many more pocket-Roys: typical outbursts of ideas and connections…
Chat with Nancy [Nancy Glautier, one of the nanotechnicians from the platform] now convicd form of object irrel to newronal subfunxns. Distrib type of AI brain may be able to mewt within mass params to larger xtent than sposed. Also may use dual set of nans—of biochemical ratio operators:programmable units. XLNT.
Which meant, if I guessed right, that he was thinking that if he had sufficient nanytes to construct a physical object, it could take on any shape, mineral or organic, and still contain neural net assemblies large enough for AI. It tied in with something Jane had implied—that containment failures had already let loose structures like this. There was nothing else I could read that indicated he had gone any further with these ideas, but that didn't mean much.
Shol run OK. Can't see quick way to integ with 900 pysicality. No route and 900 reluctant. Equip fr Korea arrives Weds latest. Band from meeting. Told RN to FO.
This looked like Roy was trying to find a method of uniting the Shoal and 900, a couple of years ago. I wasn't sure why he'd do that, unless it was an early, failed plan to liberate 900. Without the hardware, which was slaved to 900, up and running as part of the network, however, the Shoal didn't have enough room to survive, living on stolen time. So that hadn't worked. The briefness of the note suggested that he hadn't had much hope of it, either. But the last part about equipment grabbed my attention. There was a considerable technol
ogy overlap in the Shoal's use of processors and Armour's use of people's spare brains. I wondered if there were any more possible proof of a link between Roy and the outfit who had pulled the suit together, but if there was it was in his code. His exclusion from the project meeting indicated that he was used at an early stage and then dumped by the Steering Committee. I couldn't find another reference.
Then, at an earlier point, as I thumbed through:
Source code prob. useless as calc.tool. Final inclusions compromise Ntire theory. Can't see way to proceed since too many unknown quants.
Later, several pages on:
Still no better on redusing bulk of calcs. Impossible to achieve data set for start of calc—requires knowl of TotState of biosphere at T. J says this will become poss but think not. Also doubt father approv. Will see as proof, not denial.
And near the end, on this theme:
As expec father rations in own 1verse. Jane finds God's sums. Naughty, naughty girl. Fact that sum useless irelevant. Called him pm.
What the conversation between Roy and his father might have been, I had no idea. But now I was more sure than ever that the Source mystery wasn't the grail quest as hinted, but a device set up to almost guarantee that Abbot Croft would never get to keep a hold on it. The more I thought this through, the more convinced I became: it was a bluff.
Started as a rumour in the right place—among his idealistic cronies—and seductively contagious, the idea of understanding the forces of change and natural selection would run wildfire to every kook on the networks. Claim and counterclaim for its use and significance would start a search to find and prove it, or submerge and destroy it.
Silver Screen Page 35