Contents
PROLOGUE
PRELUDES
1
2
part one
IN THE BEGINNING
1 THE BEGINNING
2 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
3 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
4 JOSH HOBERMAN. VIRGINIA
5 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
6 JOSH HOBERMAN. VIRGINIA
7 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
8 JOSH HOBERMAN. MARYLAND
9 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
10 JOSH HOBERMAN. MARYLAND
11 MARY. VERMONT
12 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
13 GEORG POULSEN. COPENHAGEN
14 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
15 KAREN. BOSTON
16 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
17 FABIAN. FRIESLAND
18 JOSH HOBERMAN. MARYLAND
19 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
20 GEORG POULSEN. COPENHAGEN
21 JOSH HOBERMAN. MARYLAND
22 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
23 ETHAN BUNDY. MARYLAND
part two
A TIME OF VISIONS
24 FABIAN. FRIESLAND
25 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
26 KAREN. BOSTON
27 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
28 FABIAN. FRIESLAND
29 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
30 ZHANG. GANSU PROVINCE
31 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
32 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
33 ZHANG. GANSU PROVINCE
34 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
35 JACK HUDSON. NEW YORK
36 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
37 JACK HUDSON. NEW YORK
38 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
39 MARKUS. GERMANY
40 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
41 MARKUS. GERMANY
42 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
43 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
44 ARI. ISRAEL
45 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
46 ARI. ISRAEL
47 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
48 JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
49 GEORG POULSEN. COPENHAGEN
50 CASEY. OXFORD
part three
REVELATIONS
51 ONE YEAR LATER. JOHN MACBETH. COPENHAGEN
52 PROJECT ONE. COPENHAGEN
53 JOHN MACBETH. COPENHAGEN
54 PROJECT ONE
55 JOHN MACBETH. COPENHAGEN
56 JOHN MACBETH. COPENHAGEN
57 JOHN MACBETH. COPENHAGEN
58 JOHN MACBETH. COPENHAGEN
59 EVERYWHERE, EVERYONE
60 JOHN MACBETH. COPENHAGEN
61 JOHN MACBETH. COPENHAGEN
62 JOHN MACBETH. COPENHAGEN
63 JOHN MACBETH. COPENHAGEN
64 JOHN MACBETH. COPENHAGEN
65 JOHN MACBETH. COPENHAGEN
EPILOGUE
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Quercus Editions Ltd.
55 Baker Street
7th Floor, South Block
London
W1U 8EW
Copyright © 2014 Christopher Galt
The moral right of Christopher Galt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
HB ISBN 978 1 78087 480 7
TPB ISBN 978 1 78087 481 4
EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78087 482 1
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
You can find this and many other great books at:
www.quercusbooks.co.uk
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christopher Galt does not, in any real sense of the word, exist.
It is a pseudonym for an award-winning writer already translated into 24 languages.
For E.W.R.
WHETHER it was in the name of God or Science that you devoted yourself to seeking out the Truth, the danger always was that you would find it.
I am so very, very sorry. You have just found it. That which waited to be known.
From Phantoms of Our Own Making by John Astor
“What if I’m just in your head?” She looked at him earnestly, for the first time something breaking through into her expression. “Haven’t you ever wondered that? Haven’t you ever considered that all this – everything and everybody around you – is all just in your head? How do you know I was here before you walked into the room?”
PROLOGUE
The air in the Mainframe Hall felt artificial: cleanroom-filtered, its temperature constant within the smallest fraction of a degree; seemingly immobile, breezeless. Everyone gathered in front of the Project Director gazed up at the virtual displays.
“What you are seeing is a representation of neural activity. It is identical to that of a normal human brain. Your brain, my brain. Except this, for the first time, is a complete computer-generated simulation. Capable of thoughts, maybe even dreams, exactly like any of us experience.”
“But it has no body to feel,” said one of the journalists. “Eyes to see. Won’t it go mad without sensory input?”
The Project Director smiled. “We have restricted neural activity to specific clusters. Nothing here is a complete mind. But, if it were, there has been a lot of research into the psychotomimetic effects of sensory deprivation—”
“Psychotomimetic?”
“Mimicking psychoses … causing hallucinations,” explained the Project Director. “This research suggests that in such cases where subjects are deprived of genuine sensory stimuli, they hallucinate false ones. See people and environments that aren’t there.”
“So if there isn’t a world around us, we invent one?” asked another of the journalists.
“Effectively, yes. But this won’t happen with these simulations – they’re restricted to specific functions and neural clusters, allowing us to simulate specific psychiatric disorders and see, for the very first time, exactly how they tick. It will have a massive benefit for mankind.”
“And beyond that … how far could a synthetic mind – an artificial intelligence like this – go?”
“Theoretically, it would allow us to understand the human condition like never before. It could even be turned onto answering questions about the universe and give us insights into the true nature of reality.”
“Aren’t there dangers?” asked another journalist.
“What kind of dangers?” Still no impatience in the Project Director’s tone.
“People talk about the Singularity – about artificial intelligences overwhelming our own.”
“Trust me,” said the Project Director, “we are a long way from that. There is no whole mind here. No danger.”
PRELUDES
1
Marie Thoulouze felt the air cool suddenly, a seasonal change seeming to take place in the space of a second, but something more than the sudden drop in temperature caused her skin to prickle into gooseflesh. The sun was still bright, perhaps now even brighter, but the air had changed: not just temperature but pressure, humidity, consistency. She had an oddly intense feeling of déjà vu, that she had been here before and that she had felt exactly the same then, and countless times before that. Maybe it was the occasion: maybe you are aware of history being made.
Marie stood at the back of the crowd that had gathered in the Vieux-
Marché and the smell of so much humanity crowded together for such an inhuman purpose filled her nostrils. Pungent. Sour. Rank. The mob gathered in front of her jostled for a better view as a cart trundled over the dried mud of the square. Cheers and chants in a French that Marie found difficult to understand, a French very different from her own. She cast an eye across at the ranks of English and Burgundian soldiers, their glaives and halberds gleaming in the cold sun, who seemed to tense, to prepare, as the cart entered the square.
Marie edged round the crowd, keeping back from the increasingly dense, increasingly agitated throng. There was another, more intense explosion of jeers and catcalls from the Rouennais mob, loyal to the Duke of Burgundy, as a slender, pale girl – clothed in a simple dress of rough cloth, her hair bible-black and unevenly cut to expose a slender white neck, her hands bound behind her – was lifted down from the cart by two English soldiers.
Marie gasped. Her heart pounded. She knew what was about to happen and she muttered a prayer for the girl, her hand reaching up and grasping the crucifix at her neck.
Like a path scythed through wind-writhed corn, the way to the stone pillar at the center of the square was cleared through the crowd by two parallel ranks of breastplated and helmeted soldiers. An old bent-backed woman lunged forward between two of the restraining guards and thrust a wooden cross into the bound girl’s dress, lodging it in the neckline before being pushed roughly back into the rabble. The girl’s eyes were wild, confused, and she seemed not to have noticed the old woman’s act of pity and piety.
A circle had been cleared around the stone pillar, against which a wooden scaffold had been erected and heaped with tar-dipped faggots, logs and barrels of pitch. The only part left exposed of the scaffold was the rough-hewn timber steps that led to the platform at the top. Marie found her way to the cleared path and followed the sad procession to the empty space around the pyre, amazed that none of the English soldiers tried to stop her and afraid that she might be seized at any moment. The mob seemed too hysterical and frenzied even to notice her presence. She watched as the girl was brought to the clearing and made to stand before a seated group of silk-clad clerics. There was an exchange of words, the girl saying something and the clerics replying, nodding. Marie could not catch what was being said, but she knew. She knew exactly.
She watched as the girl was guided up to the platform by the hooded man Marie knew to be Geoffroy Therage. As a chain was fastened around the girl’s waist and further rope bonds fixed her to the pillar, two of the clergy stepped forward and raised a cross on a long pole so that it came up to the girl’s eye level and she locked her gaze upon it. They held it there while the executioner stabbed repeatedly into the pyre with a lit torch, while the kindling caught into crackling life and the flames began to spit and surge with an intensity that seemed to increase in parallel to the hysteria of the crowd.
Marie heard high-pitched screaming from the fire and thought for a moment it was the desperate sounds of the girl’s agony, but there was a chorus of other screeches and percussive snaps and pops, and she realized they were the sounds of combustion: the fire now a single, writhing, surging entity consuming everything in the execution pyre. But then Marie heard other screaming, and realized it was her own voice as she sank to her knees, the heat of the blaze almost unbearable even at this distance.
A Burgundian soldier stepped forward and Marie saw something dark writhing furiously in his gauntleted fist. He swung it with full force and she saw the black cat follow a twisting arc through the air and into the flames.
“She is not a witch!” Marie screamed, pleadingly, at the soldier who did not even turn in her direction. “She is NOT a witch!”
Marie sobbed. Great, wracking sobs as she gazed up at the burning girl. Marie, whose faith had always been deep and pure and complete, could not believe she was witnessing the death of her heroine. How had she come to be here, Rouen, on the thirtieth day of May, 1431, to witness this horror unfold? How could anyone ever believe she had seen this great evil with her own eyes? She needed proof. Positive proof.
Still sobbing, she reached into her pocket for something and held it at shaking arm’s length, pointing it at the girl who now burned like a torch atop the pyre.
*
Marie used her thumb to select the camera function of the cellphone she had taken from her jeans and pressed the button, in an attempt to capture the image that seared into her brain, the image that filled her universe.
The image of Jeanne d’Arc as she passed from one world to the next.
2
The thing about the remarkable and the extraordinary is that, if they are part of your everyday life, they become by definition unremarkable and ordinary. That which awakens awe and wonder in others ceases to be noticed. For Walter Ramirez, the extraordinary that had become ordinary, the remarkable made unremarkable by daily exposure, was the Bridge.
The Bridge was known by millions. All around the world people could call the Bridge to mind, even if they had only ever seen its image. The Bridge was an icon, it was a symbol, it was a means of transit. For many, it was a destination.
But sometimes, when you have become accustomed to the uncustomary, there still comes the moment in which you see it as others see it. Ramirez experienced two such moments that Wednesday.
The first was when he drove his marked Explorer out of the Waldo Tunnel. Ramirez was on the early shift and the sun was just about to come up as he drove his prowler out into the infant day. Despite having seen it so many times, the scene that opened out at the tunnel mouth was one to send a small electric current running across the skin and raise the hairs on the nape of Ramirez’s neck. There were still lights on in the city, a cluster of bright white and yellow pinpricks in the purple velvet of the immediately pre-dawn sky, shimmering in reflection on the Bay; to his left was the Bay Bridge. But ahead was the Bridge. Ramirez’s beat.
The Golden Gate.
Walt Ramirez had been an officer of the California Highway Patrol for fifteen years, all with the San Francisco Bay Area Command, ten of which had been in the Golden Gate Division, seven of those working out of Marin County station on San Clemente, twelve minutes from the Bridge. The chevrons on his sleeve had been there for three years.
Walt Ramirez looked like a thug in a uniform: a big, broad-shouldered and hard-faced man of forty with huge hands that appeared out of proportion with even his massive build. It was a physical presence that had served him well. In fifteen years as a CHP officer and outside of the Patrol’s firing range, Ramirez had unholstered his firearm twelve times in total and had fired it only once, and that had been a warning shot. Generally, when Sergeant Walter Ramirez told someone to do something in his disconcertingly quiet, calm way, they tended to do it.
Although Walt Ramirez might have looked like a thug in uniform, he was anything but. Popular with everyone who got to know the modest, friendly man behind the intimidating presence, Ramirez’s senior, brother and junior officers all liked and respected him. He was one of those cops who were in the job for all the right reasons: he cared about people – perhaps even a little too much given the suffering he had had to encounter over the years – and he had become a policeman to help others, not through some need to exert authority over them. With the public he was consistently courteous and respectful, but firm whenever the need arose. His fellow officers knew that he was someone they could rely on in a tight spot, someone who would always have your back. In fact, Walt Ramirez was exactly the guy you wanted to have your back.
And Ramirez’s beat was a small but iconic one. Ramirez’s beat was the Bridge.
As well as being the shift supervisor on all patrols that covered the Bridge and its approaches on both sides, Ramirez provided liaison with the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Administration District, which had its own security force, Marin County Sheriff’s Department, the SFPD and the US Coast Guard station at Fort Baker, Sausalito, one thousand feet from the Bridge’s north tower.
The west side
walkway was permanently closed to pedestrians and Ramirez made the Bridge just after 5.30 a.m., when the automatic barrier on the east sidewalk opened. He noticed a group of about thirty people had just cleared the gates, and he guessed they had been waiting for them to open. Slowing down, he examined them across the safety barrier. They were all young people, no one much over thirty, and they were chatting to each other in a relaxed manner. That was something Ramirez, like all the cops who worked the Bridge, had learned a long time ago: to read body language. And to do the mental math of despair: where there were many, as now, there was no risk; where there was the individual, the solitary soul wrapped up in his or her own thoughts, you watched them. The Bridge authority watched them too, on CCTV. And counted lamp poles.
Ramirez called in on his radio and asked Vallejo to patch him through to Bridge security.
“What’s the deal with the early birds?” he asked.
“They’ve been waiting for about fifteen minutes for the gates to open,” the Bridge dispatcher explained. “Guess they’re just out for an early morning run.”
“They don’t look like joggers,” said Ramirez. “I’ll wheel round and take another look.”
Ramirez drove the length of the Golden Gate and then back, watching the group from across the carriageway. With the exception of a couple of semi-trailers up ahead, he had the Bridge to himself, so looped a U to come back alongside the group. By this time they were already past the first tower. They were walking together, not running nor stepping out with a particular sense of purpose, and again he noticed that they were all in good spirits, as if enjoying each other’s company as the sun came up over the Bay. But something still jarred. He pulled up, switching on his roof bar to alert other drivers. Some of the walkers spotted him and stopped, waiting for him to come over to the barrier.
“Morning …” Ramirez said cheerily and the walkers returned his smile.
“Morning officer,” an attractive woman in her mid-twenties, dark hair gathered up on her head, answered. “Beautiful morning, isn’t it?”
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