by Jones, Raya
When I didn’t say anything, Fred pressed, ‘What is it? Is it something you can tell me over a bottle of wine?’
‘It’s about Mandy. Wine will be nice.’
‘Go fetch it.’
He went to change into his house clothes. I fetched us a bottle. ‘Isn’t it a dance night tonight?’ I asked when we went to sit on the sofa.
‘It’s a bloody dance night every single night in this goddamn godforsaken place. I’m fed up being treated like a toy boy,’ he grumbled, pouring the wine. He was the youngest in the resort’s community of retired chiefs and the only exec-born. He was fed up about that too. ‘Bloody upstart citizens. Sorry, Luigi, what is it about Mandy? I thought you’ve solved the Mystery of the Mad Maiden who was a Machine.’
‘No, she wasn’t.’
‘Now you tell me!’
I showed him her never-sent letter. It was not addressed to anyone. It started: Where are you? I need you. Can you help me with this? Fairweather used to insert such pleas in her schoolwork drafts when she wanted my help.
‘Where does she write, “I am not an android”?’ enquired Fred.
I scrolled to the text: There was something very dark and powerful about him. His eyes narrowed like slanted slits and his glance pierced right through me like a blinding flash.
‘You have that effect on people.’
‘Would a nonhuman know?’
‘Your Fairweather put the dark sun story next to the ronin image. An artificial intelligence can put two and two together. Even a pocket calculator can do that.’
‘But they don’t come up with five. Maybe it’s not what she wrote but what I remember,’ I admitted. When our eyes met by the bric-a-brac stall, it really felt like eye contact. There was a spark of humanness that android eyes can’t imitate.
My new theory was that an android-Mandy replaced human-Mandy after she ran away from us at the visitor centre. Later the android was eliminated in the Emporium. A real human had to collect memories of her travel from Tao Ceti, because their authenticity could be checked. I went into technical detail.
Fred heard me out. Then he shook his head. ‘You’re coming along in leaps and bounds on a wing and a prayer. You desperately want an android story. Al oh Al, you have an answer for everything, but you’re so wrong.’
‘I don’t have an answer for everything. Why let human-Mandy come to Ground Zero in the first place? Why not switch her with the android in Sol Gate? Why…’ I listed several more questions.
Fred heard me out, and then said smugly, refilling my glass, ‘Makes perfect sense to me. It’s a case of too many agendas at cross-purposes. A CEO with a vision sets separate teams to work on different parts of his or her project, and gives them each a different briefing. Like the proverbial blind men trying to figure out the elephant. They imagine different animals. But they’re highly motivated on pain of death to see this project through. That’s corporate reality. It’s a herd of elephants dreamt up by blind men.’ He sipped his wine smirking like a man with something up his sleeve. When I stayed silent, he said, ‘So the maiden is alive and the machine is destroyed. Cosmic Order is restored. Cheers!’ He raised his glass, drank up chuckling to himself, and went to fix us supper.
I set the table, insisting, ‘It doesn’t make sense to destroy the android. Too much would have been invested in it. It could be reprogrammed.’
‘What would make sense to you?’
‘It committed suicide.’
Fred stopped keying his choices into the auto-chef, and turned to look at me. I wasn’t joking. If android-Mandy was controlled by a sprite, the sprite could anticipate that Cyboratics would dismantle it when reprogramming the body. So the sprite eliminated the body whilst it was still in control.
‘You are implying that a sprite knows what it is.’
‘They have a sort of self-awareness. Sprite-Mandy can think about itself only as Fairweather-aged-nineteen because that’s the only data it has with which to refer to itself. But on some level it knows that it’s a cyber-entity.’
‘This takes the biscuit, cyber entities with a subconscious. Do they dream?’
‘No.’
‘It was a joke.’ He finished setting the auto-chef. We sat down to wait. A moment later he said, ‘How do you know that sprites don’t dream?’
‘I see into their mind and there’s nothing like dream algorithms.’
That amused him greatly. ‘Answer me this, O Reader of Cyber-minds. Are we sprites dreaming that we are men or are we men dreaming that we are sprites?’
Ignoring that, I reminded him how Mandy described him in Version 7’s hall. She told in the letter: No picture came to me, so I told him about a place that’s been on my mind a lot lately. ‘Fred, she knew his room because she was there when we were in Cy City.’
The auto-chef rang that the food was ready, but neither of us moved to get it.
Fred studied my face with interest. ‘What’s bothering you really?’
‘Surtr. I can’t figure out his involvement in all this.’
He nodded. ‘You’re right to wonder about him. But you’re wrong about Mandy. The woman who came to my apartment was human. And I’ll tell you another thing that Swift has discovered. Mandy has the same DNA as Wye Stan 8’s unofficial sister. Which reopens the question, how did she get out of the Emporium?’
‘1Step pulled her out and erased the signal afterwards,’ I conjectured.
‘Technically simple, but this is where it gets complicated. Why should they do that?’
‘It could be Hans doing a favour for Surtr who wanted her retrieved,’ I suggested, wondering why Surtr should want that. She wasn’t Fairweather, DNA or not. I went to fetch the food.
When I returned to the table, Fred said, ‘Hans is making moves to enter the Council of Nine. There’s a vacancy since Calvin Cray is dead,’ he announced like bringing good news. ‘The bad news is that no-one will pay you. Nanotronics fired him as soon as it was leaked that he had masterminded the skiz side-line. He was spiked with his own virus. Don’t give me that look. I didn’t do it. You shouted “I’ve got spiked” at top of your voice in front of chiefs from a dozen corporations. Nanotronics couldn’t ignore that kind of negative publicity. Their internal inquiry exposed him so rapidly that you might well wonder whether they’d known all along. Anyway, his side-line wasn’t his crime. That’s the kind of evildoing we expect from an up-and-coming member of a sinister secret alliance. His real crime was failing to watch his back. He lived on borrowed time. If he didn’t slip up, someone else would have had to go to create the vacancy.’
‘For Hans?’
‘No, for you, sunshine. The vacancy has been created for you.’
‘Yeah, right, Fred. Why should I want to be in your fantasy council?’
‘To get near him, your mission.’
‘What mission? Oh, yes, I forget. Fighting evil. Is the Game Master, sorry, Grand Mage going to invite me to join the Council?’
‘I just did.’
In the days, weeks, and months that followed, neither of us mentioned that invitation again.
Sometimes we strolled along the coast, sometimes hiked the high moors. We didn’t go within three hundred miles of Cy City. My bank links were fully restored, but Fred insisted on paying for everything. He insisted on teaching me to swim, then taught me to play tennis, and racked his brains what else he could teach me. ‘Hey, how about going to Inverness? We’ll find women your age in town and I’ll teach you better come-on lines than “You can be in our tribe”. How about that?’ he suggested one morning when we strolled along the rugged shoreline to Torquay Bay. ‘What’s the matter? You’ve been sullen ever since we left the house.’
‘I’m not sullen.’
‘We saw a bird and you didn’t tell me what it’s called.’
‘A crow.’
After the next uphill climb, when I caught up with him and caught my breath, I said that I was his keeper now.
‘I’m still paying the bills, son.’
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‘Not that. There are cracks in your invisible wall. I’ve created beavers to patch them but the cracks keep appearing. He’s letting you go, Fred.’
‘No, he’s bringing you in. We like your beavers. Neat work.’
I glanced at him sideways. His face gave nothing away.
The keeper of the invisible wall sees everything. I now had access to Fred’s hidden activities going back several years, and finally discovered how he had manipulated the CSG. In his carefully studied ‘careless’ manner, Fred blurted to a CSG agent, who happened to be in his circle of antiques enthusiasts, how much he feared that the investigation into OK would be assigned to the infamous Jexu Jiu. So she wanted to make sure I was assigned to it. She wasn’t in a position to know anything about me. Her anonymous tip has got me hired to check out corruption in the CSG. ‘There was misconduct on her part but no deliberate collusion with you. That’s the report I gave them,’ I told Fred.
‘Then why the long face? Would you rather uncover a corrupt agent?’
‘No. I’m happy with the result.’
‘Why the long face, then?’
‘My job with you is done.’
He stopped walking and faced me. ‘You need an excuse to be with me? Find some new excuse that makes you happy. I need you.’
‘What exactly do you need me for?’
‘Not for your lively conversation, that’s for sure,’ he laughed and ruffled my hair before I managed to step away. When we got to the village, I had my hair cut and have kept it short ever since.
In high summer, with the heather in bloom on the moors, I released little brown frogs to multiply in cyberspace wastelands, hoping that they’d lure the Mandy sprite out of its hiding. Months went by. The weather became stormier, then colder. With the first snow, one of my frogs returned. It did its animation. I watched it closely. Something has been altered. The frog carried an encrypted message. It was from Surtr. He was about to travel to Earth for a private meeting with the older one. He knew where I was. If I could be there in four months’ time he’d find a way to meet with me. I didn’t tell Fred.
Later the snow thawed. Little brown frogs of the biological kind came out of hibernation in ponds near the chalet. In cyberspace, I grew hypo-tentacles. I learned to spin-dive. Sometimes I had to dodge the shadow of Wye Stan 7, and sometimes our shadows sparred. By springtime it became obvious to me that he was training me in his techniques.
Meanwhile I studied crossover and teleport technologies, seeking clues about zapping pentagrams. I enrolled on courses in Ivory Towers, the university funded by Teletek. I didn’t tell Fred about it. Sometimes he stood at the doorway, sometimes he came in and sat on my mattress. I started to have a spooky feeling that—impossibly—he was watching me in cyberspace too, like an unseen sinister presence.
Offline I always felt safe and happy with him.
Once in early autumn, when I logged out and saw him sitting on my mattress, I knelt in front of him. The coldness of the floor penetrated the cotton trousers that I wore indoors. ‘Teach me. Be my sensei.’
‘Don’t turn Japanese on me, Luigi. C’mon, we’re having paella for lunch.’ He got up and left.
I didn’t move.
He returned after setting the auto-chef, grumbling that I could stay like that freezing my butt off for all he cared.
I didn’t move.
He sat down again. ‘What can I possibly teach you that you’re not learning in IT?’
I felt alarmed, and then felt foolish when he explained that he guessed from my movements that I was navigating menus. College courses are set up in menus, and IT is the best for the sciences he knew I was after. It doesn’t take a genius… But I too could put two and two together. Fred never went behind audio-visual façades. When he taught cyber archaeology, he used to delegate all the technical demonstrations to his assistants. He appeared inept. Yet he had to be highly skilled in order to set up an espionage firm. I told him, ‘You personally trained Swift and El Niño. And it wasn’t training them how to be good liars.’
‘The game’s up, eh? Can’t pull the wool over your eyes, no flies on you. Alright, no more clichés, I’ll hold my horses! But you are already so much better than they are. What can I possibly teach you?’
‘Teach me how you’ve fooled me for so long.’
‘You are good but I’m better.’
He jumped up to his feet a split second before the auto-chef rang. ‘C’mon, the paella is ready. I haven’t got all day. I’ve promised to help the amateur theatre.’ He strode to the kitchen, and this time I followed, trying to figure out what was he not telling me.
We ate in silence.
After I cleared the table, he said as if on impulse, ‘Let’s go out. Don’t get dressed.’
When I said that it was too chilly and damp for going out half-naked, he contrarily said that on the other hand the mosquitoes weren’t around anymore. In the end we both put on several layers of house clothes, and walked up the muddy creek in slippers, the only footwear we had other than biosuit boots. The slippers instantly got soaking wet. We carried nothing electronic.
When the chalet was out of sight, Fred remarked that it took a lot of trust on my part to leave all my gear behind. ‘I could have someone tampering with your equipment right now.’
‘It did occur to me.’
‘And still you came. Why?’
‘I’ve been wondering about that ever since leaving the house.’
‘And?’
‘I have to find out what you’re up to, I guess. I can’t let this go. Just because I haven’t taken advantage of the cracks in your wall doesn’t mean that my ethics will stop me forever.’
He burst out laughing. ‘Ethics my foot. I’m letting you see inside my wall. That’s why you don’t bother to look. You know me too well, Al.’
‘You know me too well too, Fred. You’re right. But there’s one thing you let me see.’
Guessing correctly that I meant his illegal server, he put his finger to his mouth. He didn’t trust the wildlife. He had a theory that Cyboratics created birds that were actually bugs.
We reached a very muddy stretch and concentrated on negotiating it. When we passed it, he asked whether I could carry on from there just as I was if for some reason I couldn’t return to the chalet. I replied that at a brisk pace I’d be in Inverness the next day. The people tribe who lived near town will help me.
Fred despaired. ‘Must you be so pragmatic? I didn’t mean it literally. I meant, if you’re ever in a situation when you have to give up cyberspace.’ He stopped walking. It was Fred without the masks. ‘I think you could. If you truly believe it’s the right thing to do, if you have faith in what’s right, you’ll do whatever it takes.’
It was several months before I’d realise what taught me on that walk.
By the time we returned to the chalet it was too late for the amateur theatre. Fred stayed home to make my life a misery. Annoying me was more fun and it’s what families are for, he said. He cajoled me into playing chess, and when it became too embarrassing for him to ‘let’ me win all the time, he had us plan ways of surviving any conceivable scenario from stealthy ninja sneaking upon us in our sleep to a full-scale infantry assault on the chalet. It was fun.
That night I informed my CSG contact, the old dean, that I won’t take any more jobs for them. There was a conflict of interests since I was adopted into the OK clan. He understood, adding, ‘Freedom Cordova is not what he seems.’
‘Tell me something I don’t know.’
‘I wish I could tell you what he is,’ said the dean, and told me instead what he wasn’t. The man I was going to call Father wasn’t a coldblooded killer. The dean had carried out his own investigation based on my reports, and dug up Cyboratics’ records of the attack on the lab. Fred shot those scientists in self-defence after they took down one of his men and then turned their guns on him.
The information didn’t make me feel any better about my own action. Not reporting the illega
l server was against the principles I’ve upheld ever since the academy. I’m not doing this to protect Fred, I kept telling myself. There’s a bigger picture. I remembered Fred telling Wye Stan that it was so much greater than the three of us trapped in that room. But I’m not trapped, I thought, echoing Wye Stan’s reply. It was my own decision not to report the server.
This server was essential for my mission.
I remembered how, when I first took on the mission but couldn’t think of an excuse to get close to Wye Stan Pan, Fred gave me the perfect reason. And then he gave me access to a hidden server, without which accomplishing my mission won’t stand a chance.
There were times, sometime whole days during those months, when I didn’t think about that mission at all. I didn’t want our stay by the sea to end. Fred was happy to stay, although every now and then he made what he called a ‘business trip’ to Pheonix-3. I was glad when he went, enjoying the solitude for a few days, and was glad when he returned, having missed his company. He came back with a bagsful of spy gismos. Soon nobody could come near the chalet without us knowing. Only occasional hikers passed nearby in all the time we were there. There were fewer of them as winter approached, and then there were none.
Fred practised his daily routine. During breakfast he read his mail. During lunch he watched the news. When the bulletin gave Cyboratics’ slant on things, he’d be infuriated: ‘Makers of androids and artificial pets, as if anyone needs those vile things, and this useless trade has made them the most powerful nation!’ When I suggested that he was sore because OK was the second most powerful, he burst, ‘Makers of make-believe, that’s even less useful than androids!’ He went on ranting about other corporations in rank order: ‘1Step, one step behind OK, what good is their product? Human beings have managed for millions of years without being converted into blips every time they needed to go to the gym to make up for lack of walking. Essential skills like riding a bicycle are completely lost!’
One day he said tersely, ‘Bloody Cyboratics. They’ve bought the news channel. Have you noticed how they report only disasters happening in other territories?’