A Quantum Mythology

by Gavin G. Smith

  He could hear the disquiet of the patients. Whether his presence played into their own illnesses – it was, after all, a secure unit for privileged schizophrenics – or some preternatural sense, they were certainly reacting to him. A few screamed or shouted, mainly the ones in restraints. Many muttered to themselves, or talked in glossolalia that Silas was half-convinced he understood. Others hurt themselves or ran at the doors to their rooms. Most just cowered as far away from him as they could manage. He made sure he looked in every window he passed.

  Finally he came to the room he wanted. Their security was as nothing to him. The blood seeped into the lock and the door opened.

  He was little more than a boy. His head had been shaved for his own safety. He had a number of self-inflicted wounds and was strapped to his bed with padded leather restraints. That will make things easier, Silas thought.

  ‘No … please,’ the boy begged.

  Silas stepped into the room and opened the leather doctor’s bag he was carrying. He pulled the glass slides out of the bag. The last time had been humiliating, and he was determined that wouldn’t happen again. Next came the stainless-steel clamps. The boy wasn’t even begging now. The forceps, the long knife, scalpels. Everything he’d fabricated himself and stylised slightly.

  ‘P-please, it hurts so much – can you make it stop?’

  Silas regarded the boy thoughtfully. ‘Will you lie to me?’ More than two hundred years might have passed, but Silas still retained the trace of his Swiss accent.

  The boy stared up at him through a fog of pain. He appeared to understand what was happening to him.

  ‘Then I won’t lie to you. This will hurt. What will come after will hurt more. It doesn’t matter.’

  Silas walked over to the bed and the boy started to scream.

  Du Bois picked Grace up from Broad Street. She left a drunken thug lying in his own blood on the street as she climbed into the Range Rover, her body converting the alcohol into something useful.

  They assimilated what information was available before they arrived at the resentful cordon of police surrounding the private residential mental health facility. The victim’s name was Alan Songhurst, a nineteen year old from a reasonably wealthy middle-class family in Warwickshire.

  ‘What does “non-traditional schizophrenia” mean?’ du Bois mused.

  Grace looked at him as if he was a moron. ‘Maybe there’s a clue in the words used?’ she suggested. Du Bois sighed and concentrated some more. A police officer waved them through the cordon and into the car park of the wood-panelled building. Flashing blue lights illuminated the entire area. Despite the attempt to make the facility look homely and pleasant, there was still no mistaking its institutional purpose.

  ‘The disorder presented unconventionally,’ du Bois mused, mostly to himself.

  ‘You think that’s significant?’ Grace asked, sober now, as they both climbed out of the Range Rover. She was also reviewing Songhurst’s medical files, downloaded from the facility’s secure systems directly into her head.

  As they pushed the door open and walked into the private facility, Grace reached under her leather jacket and drew one of her fighting knives from its upside-down sheath.

  ‘My turn to self-harm, then?’ She ran the sharp blade down her palm and released her blood-screen into the facility’s interior.

  ‘Nothing,’ Grace said. ‘Just junked fragments of DNA and carbon – everything’s been broken down by a blood-screen programmed to remove evidence.’ They were walking along the corridor towards Songhurst’s room.

  ‘Same with the security,’ du Bois said grimly. ‘Something went in there and spoofed it, but I can find no trace. The blood tests on the sleeping personnel will come back with nothing as well.’ He had called the chief superintendent, whose name he was determined not to remember, to order the forensics team to start taking blood samples from the staff.

  ‘So clearly he understands the modern world and how to circumvent it,’ Grace pointed out.

  ‘Though I suspect his approach to it will be coloured by his eighteenth-century upbringing—’

  ‘And the fact that he’s a screaming nut job?’

  ‘Well, yes, but if we can find out how that manifests within in him, it will provide some insight.’

  ‘I don’t want to understand him, I just want to find him. What about the inmates?’ Grace asked.

  ‘I imagine we’ll get some quite prosaic descriptions and interesting insights, but I suspect it won’t bring us any closer to finding out where he is. I’ll task the police to sit in on interviews with the staff psychologists.’

  They arrived at Songhurst’s door. Du Bois reached for the handle but paused.

  ‘You ready?’

  Grace pushed past him into the room.

  Songhurst lay on the bed, still in the padded restraints. The top part of his head was missing, his skull a hollowed-out red bowl. Silas had laid a towel down on the desk in the room. The towel was red. The top part of Songhurst’s skull had been placed on it. Grace stared at it whilst du Bois examined the hollowed-out head.

  ‘Clamp marks, regular wounds – this was surgical. And the brain again.’

  ‘Look at his eyes,’ Grace said quietly. ‘He was terrified, in agony. He didn’t sedate him. He paralysed him, kept the nerve endings active. That poor bastard felt the whole thing. But there’s more to this than just causing pain.’

  Du Bois straightened. He didn’t like the way Grace was looking at the corpse.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Slowly, Grace turned to look at him. ‘You ask me that again, Malcolm, and you and I are going to fall out.’ Du Bois held his hand up in surrender. ‘Now, I wonder – did Songhurst lie?’ She started to concentrate. ‘Non-traditional schizophrenia. The patient claims that the auditory hallucinations he hears are the thoughts of other people around him,’ she recited from one of the medical reports she’d downloaded.

  ‘You think he was psychic?’ du Bois asked, somewhat sceptically. He reached down and dipped a finger into the residual blood around the bowl of Songhurst’s hollowed-out skull. Grace grimaced as he brought the finger to his mouth and tasted it. She took her phone out of her pocket, downloaded a number into it from her mind and dialled it with a thought. Du Bois appeared to be concentrating on the taste of the dead boy’s blood.

  ‘Doctor Agarwal? My name is Grace Soggin, I’m involved with the Songhurst investigation.’ She paused as she listened to the response. ‘I’m sure the chief superintendent will vouch for me. I have a bit of an odd question for you. In your case files you say that the presentation of the auditory hallucinations was non-traditional – that Alan thought he could hear others’ thoughts …’ Another pause while Grace listened. ‘I appreciate that, Doctor, and you’re absolutely correct, I’m not a mental-health professional, but did Alan ever correctly guess what you were thinking?’ There was a longer pause this time, and at one point she rolled her eyes. ‘Okay, Doctor, thank you.’

  ‘Thought he was faking the auditory hallucinations, and instead had a talent for cold reading?’ Du Bois asked.

  Grace nodded. ‘He was starting to come around to the idea that Alan was delusional, paranoid, but not schizophrenic,’ Grace told him. ‘Enjoy your taste?’

  ‘If there’s S-tech or anything else in his blood, it’s so diluted I can’t find it. You’re thinking he was a real psychic?’

  ‘According to the doctor, he was frequently frighteningly accurate in guessing what people were thinking. Do you know what the Ganzfeld experiment is?’

  Du Bois sighed. ‘Hold on.’ He concentrated for a moment, wishing he could use the comfort blanket of his phone to read/assimilate the information. ‘An experiment utilizing what is, effectively, sensory deprivation to test for extrasensory perception. It’s the closest thing to empirical evidence of psychic phenomenon.’ He sounded unconvinced.
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  Grace looked at the body. ‘We got everything we need here?’ she asked.

  ‘We can wait for the police forensic team to identify the tools he used.’

  ‘Then let’s get out of here,’ she said as she left the room, slamming the door behind her.

  Du Bois caught up with her in the corridor. ‘It’s different this time,’ he said quietly.

  She turned on him angrily. ‘Is it? I see some psycho hurting people again, and I tell you there’s something driving this, something we can’t see. Hawksmoor didn’t just go mad – something he found in the architecture, in the geometry, drove him that way.’

  Du Bois regarded her for a moment, worried. She had been a normal person when Hawksmoor started his Geometry of Violence experiments. She was caught up in the middle of it. A street-fighting hard girl, she’d been looking to protect her ‘family’ – the other gang members, beggars, thieves, prostitutes. She must have gone back and researched what happened. He wondered how she’d obtained clearance. Her dwelling on it made him uncomfortable, but on the other hand, he could understand why she’d want to know what had happened to her, and to those around her.

  ‘And you think something’s driving him?’

  ‘What’s he want a psychic’s brain for?’

  ‘If he was psychic. Or maybe Silas just thinks he was. Like—’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘That isn’t what I meant.’

  ‘Here’s the thing, though,’ Grace said. ‘Nobody, anywhere, has suggested that Songhurst was psychic. Galforg advertised in the newspaper, she had a website. Everybody just thought Songhurst was some mad kid.’

  ‘He’s widening his search parameters,’ du Bois said.

  Grace nodded. ‘And the closest thing to a connection we have is the psychic link, whether it’s real or not.’

  That, at least, du Bois had to agree with.

  They walked across the car park towards the Range Rover, bathed in the flashing blue lights, ignoring the unhappy looks of the local constabulary. Du Bois stopped.

  ‘What?’ Grace asked.

  Du Bois started heading back to the building. Grace followed, reluctantly.

  ‘He’s learned to circumvent our tech,’ he said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘We’re too hung up on it. Too used to everything being easy and convenient. We forgot to do something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look.’

  It was mid-morning. They had been searching for more than ten hours when they found it. It was just the two of them, moving out from the mental health facility in an ever-widening spiral. They’d used the police to form a cordon to try and minimise local residents fouling up any evidence.

  The River Rea passed close to the back of the facility and they had been searching the banks. Grace’s spike-heeled boots were hopelessly fouled, and not even augmented reactions had stopped her from toppling over more than once. She couldn’t shake the feeling that du Bois was enjoying her discomfort more than a little, particularly when he offered to help her up.

  ‘Over here,’ du Bois said quietly, kneeling down in the undergrowth close to the river’s muddy bank. Grace struggled through the mire towards him.

  ‘You know there’s not much opportunity to learn to hunt growing up in Spitalfields, Mr Lord-of-the-Manor, sir,’ Grace muttered. Du Bois just smiled. Grace crouched and du Bois pointed out the boot-print. ‘What makes you think it’s him?’

  ‘Right length of stride, anachronistic boots and they lead to the hospital.’

  Grace glared at him. ‘You mean you backtracked them here?’ she asked. He nodded. ‘So why have I been skating around in this fucking mud, risking falling into the fucking river?’ she demanded.

  ‘Mostly for my amusement,’ he told her. Grace opened her mouth with an angry retort. Du Bois cut her off. ‘That’s not the point. The point is that the tracks lead from – and to – the river.’

  ‘He’s moving around using the river?’

  ‘Well, he did this time. Birmingham has more miles of waterway than Venice. Pretty much the whole city is close to water, one way or another.’

  ‘If he was in the water he’d be soaked – we’d have seen his tracks in the hospital.’

  ‘What would happen if we fell in?’

  Grace knew that the intelligent clothing they wore would either repel or expel the water, wicking it away from the skin.

  ‘Where the fuck’s he getting this tech from?’ she muttered, but she knew the answer. From the same person who had helped him escape. ‘So we seed the fish?’

  ‘In that water? We’re better sticking with the rats, and you’re going to need a proper pair of walking shoes because we’ll have to keep looking the hard way.’

  ‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’

  Du Bois just smiled at her.

  He rose out of the clammy, oily water and pulled himself easily onto the muddy bank. The water practically fell off him and he was dry by the time he stood up. It was unpleasant and undignified travelling this way. He had reduced himself to the level of some river-dwelling bogeyman in a child’s fairy tale, but it served his purpose for the time being.

  The leather doctor’s bag hung across his back on a strap. He took it off and grasped the handle. As soon as he did so, he knew that the glass slides in the bag’s sealed interior were secure.

  He turned to walk towards his hideout and noticed the semicircle of dead rats surrounding a small tree growing out from the base of a graffiti-covered red-brick wall.

  ‘Hello, my darling boy.’ The woman who climbed down from the lower branches of the small tree was clad in layers of frayed and ragged cloth. Her hair was matted and filthy and she smelled horrible. She was leaning on a thick, staff-like stick.

  ‘You weren’t there a moment ago,’ Silas said. He didn’t like this at all. His left hand was already reaching inside his coat for one of his knives.

  ‘Oh, darling boy, believe me, I have always been here.’ She nodded towards the mud on the riverbank. ‘And you want to be careful about the tracks you leave.’

  Silas glanced down and saw his boot-prints, irritated that what she had said was correct.

  ‘What do you want? How did you find me?’ Silas demanded.

  ‘You’ve got a little cup, haven’t you – a horn, a trinket? It’s a toy, nothing more. I know what you really want.’

  ‘And what is that, hag?’ Silas demanded. Her filth offended him. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to soil his knife on her.

  She smiled at his words. ‘You think that’s an insult but I know where hags come from, and they’ll steal your breath and strip the flesh from your bones with their teeth. You’re the child of cannibals, little one, and I know what you tasted on the Hellaquin’s mind.’

  Suddenly Silas was more interested, and even more disturbed. His eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘And why would you tell me anything?’

  ‘Because them that’s got it have lost their way. Because a bad man wants it for no good.’

  ‘Some would say I’m a bad man.’

  ‘You’re just a warning. Besides, you’re blood.’

  17

  A Long Time After the Loss

  The Monk stared at the image projected onto the airlock wall.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s him, or Negrinotti. The rest fit his pattern of going for the most difficult jobs, the biggest pay-offs. Those two are the only ones with anything significantly different about them. It’s either that or he’ll try for a Citadel.’

  ‘Could he have the resources for it?’

  Benedict/Scab’s cold, dead eyes met hers. His head and torso were still hanging from the support sling. He didn’t dignify the question with an answer.

  ‘What about a cloner?’

  ‘For what? If you saw Vic with him then he’s already go
t access to cloning facilities.’

  ‘Would you clone the girl?’

  ‘Yes, if I thought it would benefit me, and if I could. In fact, what I don’t understand is why he didn’t clone her and sell you all copies.’

  ‘We would have checked, of course, but that does suggest he can’t clone her.’

  ‘Which takes us back to …’ Scab nodded at the image on the wall.

  ‘It doesn’t matter – the Consortium would never let us near him.’

  ‘If only you had access to an intrusion specialist like—’

  ‘Negrinotti, yes, but even so. There’s a reason that place is a prison.’ The Monk shivered slightly.

  Talia had almost crept into the yacht’s large, open-plan lounge area. It was bathed in the blood-coloured light of Red Space shining through the transparent hull. Scab was sitting in the centre of the lounge, slumped in an armchair, naked, sunglasses on, a smouldering cigarette between two fingers.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked, leaning against the wall. He didn’t answer. She suspected he might be on a heroin nod, or just ignoring her, again, but then the crimson glow of Red Space lessened as the hull became opaque and started to show what she assumed passed for news footage in this age. It displayed something that looked like a kind of slowly spinning, polygonal beehive made of what appeared to be plastic, inside a huge cavern that she guessed was a hollowed-out asteroid. Parts of it were burning, other parts had been destroyed. Heavily armed aircraft hovered around it. There were no captions to explain what was happening.

  Another image showed a number of figures in armour that resembled a high-tech version of what she thought knights used to wear. They were led by a human with two heads. One of the heads was that of an ugly, completely bald human. The other looked like an idealised machine version of the human head. The armoured figures were carrying a still-living torso and escorting a heavily restrained multi-limbed figure. The torso looked a little like Vic if Vic had been larger, more heavily armoured, more insectile, spikier and had his limbs removed. The other figure was female, Talia thought, but she had no idea where she got that idea. It was smaller and had eight limbs, like a spider rather than an insect. Both the ’sect and the arachnid didn’t so much look badly hurt as badly damaged, and both of them were more machine than biological.