A Quantum Mythology

by Gavin G. Smith

  ‘He had a prodigious imagination?’ du Bois asked.

  ‘Dear old Dennis had a pot of boiling snakes where most people keep their reason. This guy was a serial-killer-in-waiting. I don’t know how he was functional day-to-day.’

  ‘And Silas wanted his thoughts,’ du Bois said. He could hear sirens in the distance.

  ‘His imagination. The odd thing is that serial killers and spree murderers have different pathologies. Whatever happened knocked him off course.’

  The sirens were getting louder.

  ‘Well, from what he was saying, I guess he met Silas,’ du Bois said. Grace didn’t answer. She’d hacked Letchford’s records a while back and sent the police to the wrong address. Presumably they’d managed to speak to someone who knew where he actually lived. ‘I think we should leave, give our Home Office influence some time to smooth ruffled police feathers over corpse mutilations.’

  If Grace felt repentant, she didn’t show it.

  ‘Silas strike you as the kind of guy who’d run out of ideas?’ Grace asked as they climbed the steps towards the Malmaison’s reception.

  ‘He really didn’t,’ du Bois replied.

  ‘C’mon, we’ve had a hard day. I got shot and everything. Let’s have a drink.’ Du Bois couldn’t think of a good reason not to agree so they made their way to the hotel’s bar. It was comfortable, illuminated with subdued lighting, mood music playing softly in the background and stocked with overpriced drinks. Grace got carded and had to show fake ID to prove she was over eighteen.

  ‘Hello, Malcolm.’ The voice was feminine and sensuous.

  He’d just taken the first sip of his Glenmorangie. The whisky turned sour in his mouth. He turned around to look at his brother.

  Alex was now a female-identifying hermaphrodite. She went by the name Alexia and looked like a stunning, dark-haired, statuesque woman. She was wearing a pair of black jeans, a suit jacket and a fitted T-shirt advertising some kind of heavy-metal band. Du Bois was vaguely aware that his brother/sister had been involved with the music scene, in one way or another, since the late sixties.

  ‘Whatever it is, I don’t have time for it. I’m working,’ du Bois told her, his face set in an angry expression.

  ‘Nice way to greet your sister,’ Alexia said. She tried to take his rejection lightly, but du Bois could tell she was hurt.

  Grace looked up at du Bois. ‘You monster,’ Grace admonished. ‘I invited her here. She can help us.’ Then she went and hugged Alexia.

  ‘Seventy-seven? Was that when Malcolm had to stop you assassinating the Queen?’ Alexia asked. They were sitting at a table next to the window looking out over the busy Suffolk Street Queensway. It was a grey day outside, raining, but the bar felt warm and cosy.

  Alexia and Grace had been talking so quickly as they attempted to catch up that Malcolm had struggled to follow their conversation. Though if he was being honest, he was sulking a little bit. He did not like the easy way his strange and unnatural brother had always got along with everyone else but still managed to be nothing but trouble and pain for him.

  ‘The Queen?’ Grace said. ‘The whole lot of them. I was convinced there were hidden messages in “God Save the Queen”, and that the whole family were baby-eating Naga infiltrators.’

  ‘What on earth made you think that?’ Alexia asked.

  ‘Well, I’d reprogrammed my filters so I could better enjoy the jubilee and then went and got ergot poisoning from some dodgy amphetamines.’

  Alexia sat back in her chair, a look of comical confusion on her face. ‘How the hell did you manage that?’

  ‘The dirty hippy I bought them from had smuggled them in some of his organic bread dough,’ Grace said. Alexia laughed, her hand shooting to her mouth. ‘I was roaming Buckingham Palace wearing a tutu, fishnets, a Sex Pistols T-Shirt and a tiara and carrying a Thompson sub-machine gun when Malcolm caught up with me.’

  Du Bois watched as Alexia took another sip from her champagne cocktail and then glanced over at him. He was less than happy, and doing his best to ignore the conversation.

  ‘I would imagine that “dad” was less than pleased,’ Alexia said, a wry smile curving her lips. Grace giggled in a way that further irritated du Bois.

  ‘Well, it’s good that we’ve caught up,’ du Bois said, sitting forwards, ‘but we really are working, and it’s reasonably serious.’

  ‘I told you I asked her here to help,’ Grace said.

  ‘With what?’ du Bois demanded, finally losing his patience.

  ‘I listened to the music,’ Alexia said.

  It took du Bois a moment to realise what she was talking about. ‘Nanette Hollis. The missing girl? You really think she’s connected?’ he asked Grace.

  ‘I was right about Letchford, and I was right because I’m involved, immersed in it.’

  ‘And what if you’re just seeing connections where none exist?’ du Bois asked.

  ‘I don’t think she is,’ Alexia said.

  Du Bois sighed in frustration. ‘By all means, I think the world’s only immortal playboy should share his ever-so-sensitive, artful insight with us,’ he spat.

  Alexia stared at him. Then she stood up and walked out of the bar.

  ‘Your body is full of nanites derived from alien technology probably thousands of years in advance of current human capabilities. How is it that you’re still not evolved enough to know that sometimes people are born with the wrong bodies?’ Grace demanded, before standing up. Du Bois opened his mouth to retort. Grace swung on him, pointing her finger at his face. ‘We can be whatever we want to be. You don’t get to choose for her, or anyone else. If I can talk her into coming back inside, you’re going to be nice to her, or I’m going to pistol-whip you, understand me?’ Du Bois just glared at his partner. Grace glared back. ‘Actually, I won’t,’ Grace said maliciously. ‘I’m going to sleep with her again.’ Then she turned and strode away from the appalled du Bois.

  Grace found Alexia outside the hotel, huddled under a denim jacket in the rain, smoking. Grace could see the tears in her eyes, the tears she’d managed to hide from du Bois.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Grace said awkwardly.

  ‘What are you sorry about? You’re not the one being a stubborn dickhead. I’m not sure he ever got over the “monk” part of being a so-called “warrior monk”,’ Alexia muttered.

  ‘Yeah, I take the piss about that,’ Grace said, grinning.

  Alexia didn’t smile back. ‘They put so much shit into his … our heads.’ Alexia looked lost in thought. ‘I suppose that still happens. Just different shit from different sources.’

  ‘The Empire never ended?’ Grace asked.

  Alexia looked down at the shorter woman. ‘I’m not still the mess he thinks I am. He’s just so …’

  ‘Prejudiced?’

  ‘I don’t even know it’s that. He risked so much for me. We both would have been burned at the stake, and he believed, he really believed, but his loyalty to me outweighed his fear of God. Can you imagine that?’

  ‘I can’t really imagine fearing god,’ Grace said. ‘He doesn’t hate you. He’s not disgusted by you. I just don’t think he understands you, and I suspect that makes him afraid—’

  ‘Which makes him act like a dickhead.’ Alexia flicked away the forgotten cigarette. ‘There are lots of things he doesn’t understand. Some of those he follows blindly.’

  ‘Are you coming back in?’

  Alexia thought for a moment and then nodded.

  ‘Be nice. Remember what I said,’ Grace told du Bois as she slid back into the booth. He looked less than pleased but nodded. He was sipping his second double Glenmorangie. Alexia sat down opposite him.

  ‘Well?’ he asked sharply. ‘Ow!’ Grace was glaring at him, having just kicked him under the table.

  ‘She knows something,’ Alexia said.

 
; ‘The missing girl? Nanette Hollis?’ du Bois asked.

  Alexia nodded. ‘There’s something about her recent music, particularly compared to the rest of her compositions. It … I don’t know, it implies that she’s aware of, or in contact with, something else.’

  ‘Something supernatural?’ du Bois asked sceptically.

  ‘Says the man who still prays,’ Grace muttered, earning herself an angry glare.

  ‘There’s an underlying theme to it,’ Alexa said, ‘a discordant counterpoint melody that’s strange to the point of being alien. There’s an insight there, one I couldn’t match even knowing what I know about our world. If she turns up I’ll be asking to sample some of her stuff, perhaps even get her in to do session work on our next album.’

  ‘I’m not hearing anything that would suggest there’s more to this than Miss Hollis writing odd music.’

  ‘Have you listened to it?’ Grace asked.

  ‘No,’ du Bois admitted.

  ‘What about Jaggard’s work?’ Grace asked.

  ‘The artist? What about it?’

  ‘Are you telling me you didn’t find it at all disconcerting?’

  ‘That just means it’s disconcerting,’ du Bois said. Grace sighed and slumped back in her seat. ‘Look, I can see where this has come from but frankly we’re clutching at straws—’

  ‘Because we’ve got fucking nothing,’ Grace pointed out in exasperation. ‘Except a possible connection between the victims. At the very least he appears to think the same thing I do – he kills the first one because she claims to be a psychic but he discovers she’s lying. Then—’

  ‘What? He starts killing the real deal?’

  ‘I’m not sure why you’re so quick to discount it, knowing what you do,’ Alexia said.

  ‘Other than what he put in Letchford, there’s no tech in any of the victims,’ du Bois pointed out.

  ‘No tech that we found,’ Grace said. ‘He’s taken the brains.’

  ‘There still would have been some trace,’ du Bois insisted stubbornly.

  Alexia sighed. ‘What if it’s an ancient piece of S-tech spliced into an ancestor thousands of generations ago?’ Alexia asked. ‘Something that’s been diluted down until it’s just a sensitivity. Do you understand all the tech?’

  ‘None of that matters. What matters is whether Silas believes it,’ Grace pointed out.

  ‘What about Letchford?’ du Bois asked.

  ‘Silas didn’t kill him, you did,’ Grace observed. She took a sip from her beer and then belched loud enough to make du Bois cringe. Alexia giggled as the other people in the bar turned and glared at the punk girl.

  ‘But we know Silas did something to Letchford,’ du Bois said.

  ‘Then it must have been for a different reason,’ Grace replied.

  ‘Which leaves us where?’ du Bois asked.

  ‘There can’t be that many possible victims for him to choose from,’ Grace said.

  Du Bois received a text message from Control. He read it as Grace did the same in her head. He ordered his body to break down the alcohol in his system and slid out of the booth. ‘We have to go,’ he told Alexia. Grace was following him, an apologetic expression on her face.

  ‘Wait!’ Alexia said. The pair of them stopped. Alexia stood up and hugged Grace. The smaller woman hugged her back fiercely. ‘Come down and see me in London once this is over.’ Grace nodded. Alexia turned to du Bois. ‘Do we really have to shake hands?’ she asked. Du Bois looked at her for a moment, obviously uncomfortable. Then he hugged her. ‘Be safe,’ Alexia whispered. ‘I worry about you.’

  ‘Please get out of the city,’ he whispered to her. She nodded.

  The gala pool – which had once been the first-class pool – of the Edwardian Moseley Road Swimming Baths had been closed and drained for renovation.

  ‘This takes me back,’ Grace muttered as they walked into the building. ‘Not that I would have been allowed in this bit,’ she said, taking in the arched ceiling supported by white-painted iron beams. Spectator seating, balconettes and scaffolding installed for the renovation work surrounded the empty pool.

  Nanette Hollis was lying in the middle of the drained pool, her eyes glassy and unseeing as she stared up at the ceiling. Her legs were together and her arms outstretched. Du Bois didn’t need to use the forensic application of his blood-screen to know that her brain was missing.

  Grace turned away from the body in a cold fury.

  29

  A Long Time After the Loss

  It was the contempt that did it, his utter and total contempt for nearly everything and everyone. Mish Tullar had always known he was inadequate. It didn’t matter how much time he spent in counselling immersions; his parents had made that clear to him when they gave him to the Church. They hadn’t even bothered to sell him. They must have known they wouldn’t get much. Perhaps if he could afford neurosurgery he might feel better about himself, but most of his money went on items of worship.

  Realising he was a piece of shit, Mish started looking for someone – or something – better than himself to cling to. What he’d found hadn’t been terribly inspiring. They were people every bit as weak and unpleasant as he was, just too lacking in self-awareness to realise it. Even his so-called ‘betters’ appeared petty, venal and despotic in his eyes.

  Then Mish saw ‘him’ dealing with an unregistered media stalker and had gained an idea of the kind of contempt in which Woodbine Scab held everyone who wasn’t Woodbine Scab.

  Here was someone who saw people for what they were. Knew what he was, and was obviously better than the others Mish had latched on to because of the power he wielded. That was when Mish Tullar started drinking his own urine to debase himself.

  The Church had some old-fashioned ideas. Among its own people it did not practise the panopticon of total surveillance, but even so he decided it would be best to keep his worship (the immersion counsellors called it ‘obsession’, but he knew it was something purer and much less tawdry than simple obsession) to himself, particularly as some of the black immersions he owned, recorded from Scab’s point of view during a number of his bounty kills, were very illegal.

  He scoured the media, even saved up for Pythian search programs, to try and get hold of every piece of footage he could about Scab. He put himself on the very edge of his debt threshold purchasing immersions made about his hero. Many of the immersions had resulted in the ‘accidental’ deaths of those involved in their production, particularly those who played Scab. His pride and joy, however, was what purported to be a corrupted partial copy of Scab’s personality from a Psycho Bank. It had been recorded whilst Scab was fighting in the Art Wars with the Penal Legions. He’d only had the guts to upload it once. It nearly overwhelmed him and partially corrupted his neunonics before he managed to shut it down. As a coder and a system tech, he was able to isolate and repair the damage, but it had been touch and go for a while. He suffered residual spasms and twitches for several months after.

  When Mish heard he would be serving aboard the Templar with Woodbine Scab’s surviving son he had become very excited. He was more than a little disappointed when Benedict rebuffed his offers of oral pleasure to honour his father. Clearly the apple had dropped very far from the tree and Benedict was just another arsehole. That aside, what happened was still wrong.

  They downloaded an uncorrupted copy of Scab’s personality into his own son. They then removed Benedict’s neunonics, and his limbs, before sealing him in an airlock. Mish had done nothing with his worthless life. He decided that now was his time to do something. He needed to prove himself, beyond just drinking his own urine.

  He hacked one of the ship’s assemblers to make himself some weapons. He modelled them on those Scab used, but wasn’t sure if he’d got the template quite right. He spent some time stealing or requisitioning a few other bits and pieces. The neunonics he paid for
himself. They were top-of-the-line, and he added several quasi-legal combat routines as well. The cost of the neunonics put him well over his debt threshold, but it didn’t really matter.

  As he walked through the corridors of the Templar he found himself shaking. He released some chemicals into his bloodstream and ran calming routines through his neunonics as he went over his plan again and again. He even ran through the simulations he’d created. He paused and waited for the drugs to take effect. Then he took a few steadying breaths and turned the corner. The moment he did so, the two Church militia turned to face him, bringing their ACRs up to bear. Mish immediately raised his hands but kept walking towards them. He had an intelligent program overriding autonomic responses, forcing him to keep walking into the barrels of the two guns.

  ‘Whoa! Easy, I’m just here to run a systems check on the door mechanism, it’s been glitching!’ Again this was a pre-programmed response.

  ‘We’ve got no record of that. Turn around and go the other way or we will fire.’ It was impossible to tell which one of them was talking. Both had their visors down, the outer surfaces playing animatics of important events in Church history.

  ‘Could you just check? I don’t want to have to go all the way—’

  The rifles fired a short burst at Mish’s central mass, but he had seen their fingers tighten – or rather his newly programmed neunonic combat skills had. He spun out of the way, drawing both of his tumbler pistols. He moved forwards in a crouching position, firing the large revolvers. The targeting software in his neunonics guided his muscles to aim the pistols. Twelve bullets were in the air. He’d been hit, but drugs and intercepted nerve signals deadened the pain and kept him moving.

  The two Church militia shifted aim, but they’d not been expecting this level of violence. They had expected a clerical error, and that someone would get bawled out when the system tech had to be cloned, but their orders were to take absolutely no risks with the quadriplegic prisoner in the airlock.