Mappa Mundi

by Justina Robson

  In her kit she had a prototype scanner. It was packed but she went to fetch it. As soon as she was ready she loaded it with the latest version of Selfware, typed a specific timed-run command line into it, pointed it at herself, and pressed the trigger. It should take her to a point just short of Bobby's fatal discontinuity.

  Soon she'd be smart enough to figure out what to do or spaced out enough not to care. It was a Dan kind of solution. It made her smile with nostalgia, while inside she felt as bitter and angry as she'd ever felt in her life at the unfairness, the stupidity, the greed of it all.

  Jude had an early call from Nell, the lab technician, that woke him up. She left him a message asking for him to meet her out on the Mall. It didn't surprise him unduly; she disliked talking about anything remotely unorthodox close to the Special Sciences building and he had no doubt that whatever Tetsuo had put in that vial was going to be that.

  He lay in bed, looking at the clock, listening to the distant traffic noise, remembering with a grimace the scene in the Atlanta kitchen. He was good at keeping cool in a situation. Not so good a day after, when it reappeared with all its gruesome disgustingness intact. Not that he'd known Tetsuo personally, except as an associate spoken to very occasionally, paid out of the standard bribe funds, but he'd met him before. The sight of someone who had lived and breathed being reduced to a heap of meat amid their own personal surroundings—it made him nauseous. He didn't want to think about it, but he couldn't help it. And that cat—what a weird animal. But nothing more than an animal, so why did he find it the most repulsive thing he'd ever seen?

  He had to get up and shower to stop the train of thought going any further.

  By the time he was out, White Horse was already dressed and making coffee.

  “Mary's going to find a good law firm for me,” she said. “And a matching journalist.”

  “Mmn hmmn.” He knew Mary could, if anyone could. It was kind of her to offer. He called her, but the answering service and the office detailer told him she'd gone for the day, on home-working retreat, and didn't want to be disturbed. It was okay. It gave him time to talk to Nell.

  “What're you doing today?”

  “Not much,” White Horse said. “I got a videoconference link to the Deer Ridge community meeting this afternoon. I think I'll take a walk this morning.”

  “You should stay here,” he said, uneasy at the idea of her moving about alone.

  “Sure,” she agreed, with the look that meant she had no intention of doing any such thing.

  “Keep your Pad on all the time. Call me,” he told her, sliding into his jacket and adjusting his gun holster. It pulled sometimes.

  “You use that a lot?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Keep it clean.”

  “I do.”

  “Good.” She turned back to reading the papers. “It says here that some Micromedica trials in Britain have proved that the NervePath neural technology works in vivo.” She glanced up at him as he paused there. “Think that's us?”

  “Probably.” The information only made him wonder what the hell was going on over there. There was no new message from Dan, or Natalie, or anyone. He didn't have a contact who would know. He was stuck. He shrugged. “I'll try to find out. Meantime, don't get into a mess.”

  She snorted as he left and called out, “By the way, Uncle Paul has sent you some more of that BIA peanut butter surplus. Eat smart, play hard.” She laughed, quoting the Department of Agriculture line. “You won't have that in Washington, he says. I put it with the rest of the tins under the sink. When you gonna eat it? It's only good for another few years.”

  “I hate the stuff,” he said, instantly feeling the sensation of gloop stuck to the roof of his mouth, tiny chunks wedged in his molars and gums. “You can find some charity to give it to.”

  “You're his charity. It's a care package. Washington has sophisticated food, not enough calories for you guppies.” She sniggered. They both knew that Paul was tremendously fat due to his views on nutrition as insulation against most of the world's ills.

  “I'm grateful, really.” He gave her a cynical wink and closed the door, wondering what on Earth his family were on. He was grateful, but confused. Peanut butter. Paul sent a big tub of it every other month. Jude had enough to send on a third world rescue mission. He should find someone who liked it, but he always forgot to.

  The newspaper article made him send out Nostromo to find all articles on the subject and get any translations necessary for him. He was just getting a list up when he arrived at the grassy area of the Korean War Memorial and started looking around for Nell. The oversize soldiers had a semidissolved look; they seemed to have emerged from the earth, mud creatures, and to be subsiding back into it at the same time. Close to the man with the radio pack Nell's small, neat figure was walking slowly, eating a Danish out of a paper bag. Jude touched her elbow as he drew alongside.

  “Good morning.”

  “Jude.” She swallowed quickly and dabbed at her mouth with a paper napkin. “Here, before anything else,” and she pressed the vial, warm from her pocket, into his hand. As she met his gaze a look of fear and loathing flitted just under the surface of her good nature. “Don't ever bring that kind of stuff in again,” she whispered. “Not near me. Christ, I didn't even know such a thing existed. Do you realize it took me until this morning to figure out what it does?”

  Nell did look grey-faced and haggard, it was true. He apologized and offered to buy her a better breakfast but she declined. She made him put the vial in his jacket and said, “It's not hazardous as it is now, in that state. If you break the glass you won't die of anything.” She threw the uneaten half of her pastry into a wastebin. “But if you combine it with just about anything else you've got a better plague than the Black Death going.”

  They began to walk up towards the Capitol. Jude waited for Nell to explain it in her own time.

  “It's like Micromedica gear, right? But some sort of hybrid thing. It's not just a bit of inert engineering, it's almost alive. On the surface it looks like a small organism, say a kind of a virus, but this is much bigger. It has similar sorts of properties: invade cells, use the host body to replicate big numbers—and that would cause symptoms, just like a virus infection: sneezing, coughing, all that large-scale histamine production, et cetera. Okay, but it has another function. I think this is just like a jacket, you know, a coating to get something else inside the body.”

  “A delivery system?”

  “Yeah, but a very clever one.” She took a deep breath and let it out steadily. “This thing has an inside big enough to take several viral cells, or a bacterium of quite a size, or some drug molecules, or, you know, anything in that range. But, and here's the kicker—” she glanced up at him with worry lines etching her face “—whenever it replicates itself, it also replicates whatever it's carrying.”

  Jude snorted and shook his head. “No way,” he said. “That's not possible. Did you test it?”

  “Of course,” Nell said shortly. “I tested quite a few things on it and stuck it in a tissue culture and in a bath of everything from acid to Jello and, believe me, impossible or not, when it has the resource it can make a perfect copy.”

  “What do you mean, resource?”

  “Anything won't do. Water, saline—it has to have a variety of organic and inorganic components. It needs a bodily host, although it survived a good hour in weak acid. I don't know. It's tough.” She was shaking her head now, digging her hands in her trouser pockets, scuffing the ground with her shoes. “Whoever designed it was like an Einstein of the biologicals. But don't you see the problem? Massive replication—carrying anything? There must be a trigger to release the contents—I don't know what. A certain population density. I don't know. But this way you can make ordinary bugs into killer infections; released into the body at supersaturation and the immune system has no time to defend. You could die of a cold.”

  “But if it was carrying some kind of drug,” he
said. “Wouldn't that be a rapid cure for something?”

  “Could be,” she agreed. “But you know what? Micromedica applications are small enough to fit inside it, and it replicates them, too.”

  They stopped, as one, on the path and stood to one side to let a couple of joggers go past. Jude had to think about it for a minute.

  “Is it infectious?”

  “You betcha. Droplet, skin contact, contaminated water—the whole range of chances.”

  “Is the reaction to it severe?”

  She nodded. “You'll be coughing and sneezing hard enough to make a decent aerosol.”

  “Mmn. Does it ever die?”

  “Jude, this thing has a Micromedica interface. It accepts command lines. It'll die when you tell it to.”

  “Programmable disease?”

  “Programmable delivery system,” she corrected him. “And think about it, Jude, there's even more. This stuff only targets human beings, nothing else in the animal world. It recognizes gene sequences. It can even tell you from me.”

  He stared at her. “You can't do all that with something that size.”

  “Biochemical engineering has come a long way since you studied it.” But Nell's face was hard. “I don't know what they're going to use this for but I hope to God it's someone good who gets to decide. Is it ours?”

  “I got it via the CDC,” he admitted.

  She nodded. “Okay. Okay. That's me done. I'm out. See ya around.” She held up her hands and backed away. “And next time you find something, don't think of me first.”

  “Listen, Nell,” he began, “I'm sorry…”

  “No problem, man.” She turned and started heading for home.

  He watched her go and then moved to sit down on a bench not far away. It was still only warm out, but the sun was rising strongly into blue skies, heating the city into another sluggish, steaming day. No wonder they'd killed Tetsuo for interfering with that; but who? And come to think of it, had they really had to kill him? The vial hadn't been that hard to find. Perhaps Tetsuo was a bit of scheduled maintenance they'd been planning for a while already, so they didn't even know he'd taken anything, they'd just thought he was going to talk.

  There was no way to know if he'd been rumbled or not. But the gene sequencing parts and the type of engineering sounded very like what Ivanov might have been doing in Florida, only a bigger operation. No wonder Mary had found nothing if the government had cleared him out prior to her arrival on the site. They really should do a better kind of liaison between departments—but then, nobody talked about this kind of thing. Ever. Was it illegal? Several international treaties said so, but here it was and Jude was pretty sure it was American. It might even have been the thing they'd been invited up to Dugway to preview, the United States' legitimate response system to a bioterrorist threat.

  But it was a hell of a weapon. Nell must have felt like she was witnessing the first-ever nuclear fission test when she set eyes on it. More so. Potentially it had the finesse of a scalpel, compared to the hammer blows of conventional bombs and guns. The idea of genetic recognition, multiple payloads—Jude's head didn't feel big enough to handle it. He sat and stared at the people passing, watched the grass, thought nothing, then got up and walked in to work, the vial in his pocket so light he couldn't feel it.

  Mikhail Guskov looked around him at the interior of the Sealed Environment where Mary and her associates in the military had prepared his centre of operations. Its small dimensions, tightly stacked efficiency, and walls painted with technical symbols and instructions resembled nothing so much as a series of Egyptian tombs. He well realized that this could be the last place on Earth he would see, and it was ugly.

  His own office was the largest of all, but still a rat-trap of a place, the ergonomic chair and state-of-the-art computer systems consuming all the available space. In an attempt at humanizing the place a guest seat, barely functional in size, had been left in one corner and a wispy-looking plant with variegated leaves that seemed to enjoy artificial light squatted on the desk. He had one of the soldiers remove both.

  Mary had sent him a note to let him know that the standard issue of Deliverance was going to be showcased to the National Command Authority this week at Dugway, and later to those agencies the DoD decided should know. That would leave precious little to the imagination of those who discovered it, inevitably, postleak.

  Some lab in Asia could knock up a serviceable version within months, maybe even extend its capacity to the private version he'd created secretly, using his alternative laboratory contacts, in a few more. Then everything would fall apart like a house of cards and his decades of work and effort would go for nothing in the storm that followed. The Mappaware technology would no doubt become nothing more than a tool for manipulating people, either singly or in vast populations, ideology doled out with the drinking water and social obedience to any dictat determined by the nearest passing breath of wind. It was exactly what he wanted to prevent.

  As he sat down in the control seat and looked around him, again the vague doubt assailed him that what he had made was as much the cause as the effect of the particular drive to create technologies of mass control or destruction. In quieter moments he allowed himself to consider it in the cold light of his own intellect.

  Guskov didn't feel responsible for their situation. That was a power well beyond his control. History held the reins that drove him. If a technology existed, someone would use it. If their need demanded, they'd do what they thought they had to. Everyone was a damaged article and power accelerated their decline, so anyone with access to a power like Mappa Mundi would be sure to employ it to further the replication of their own version of the truth. He'd known that from the outset. Understanding it was part and parcel of accepting the burden this knowledge put over him, why he'd risked everything to be here, in this tiny airless room, locked down with his team under the scrutiny of the Americans. Because he understood his own human nature and the relationship it had with technology itself, he considered he was worthy of taking on the role of world-maker. Of course, the logic determined that the fact he'd come to this very conclusion ruled him out as a worthy candidate.

  A worn smile crossed his face and he began to activate his systems, bringing them online for first testing. It was far too late for the philosophical high ground. The first to succeed in engineering the Meme-cube was the one who had the best chance to forestall misuses of the same ability later, and that was the truth. He knew he was only a person, like every other. He knew he was going to fail to some greater or smaller degree. Only time could reveal the extent of it.

  The AI subsystems began running their start-up procedures. He watched them interface with the automated, insensible circuitry and slide quickly into command. The first of their language systems painted him a message on the wall opposite, which acted as his screen.

  READY.

  Most of what worried him right now concerned Dr. Armstrong. He guessed that the Americans wouldn't want her to be on the team and would attempt to take control of her. He himself wasn't sure that she was fit to come here—she hadn't allowed anyone to treat her condition, and the initial readings were inconclusive without a lengthy series of tests and interviews to back them up. He needed to maintain an upper hand. He needed to be sure nothing happened to her. She might even know the truth of what had happened to Patient X.

  His thinking was disrupted when the major in charge of the Environment showed him how he would communicate with the outside world: everything went through official channels. There were no external lines. This left him with the final problem that he needed Natalie Armstrong or her Selfware system to solve, if it were solvable.

  It was too late to carry on with his air of mystery as far as she was concerned. As he had with her father, he was going to have to let her in on the game while he still had his networks outside this wretched bunker to help him. Thanks to the Deer Ridge test all his better plans had been thrown on the junk heap. Now it was going to be the fa
stest mover and the smartest manoeuvre that won the day.

  Once the presentation was over he took the opportunity of his few remaining hours of freedom to take a car back into the one-dog town that passed for the closest civilization. Parking up out front of the single row of stores he made a few Pad calls, using an encryption and transmission sequence he'd been saving for this moment. As he imagined how much it would annoy Mary Delaney to know he was calling, but not whom, nor what he had to say, he found himself sighing through his smile. He wasn't a fool. He knew that the Americans would get him in the end.

  Natalie had packed her small bag of personal items and was waiting for the airport car to arrive and take her away when she received an urgent signal vibration from her Pad. Thinking that it was Dan at last, she whipped it out of her jacket and flicked it on, walking away from her minders and into the relative privacy of the old wood-panelled living room. The boards creaked under her feet as she realized it wasn't from him at all, but that Guskov had got hold of her personal codes and was sending a ream of stuff she most likely didn't want to know about. Still, it was furled with urgency banners, so she glanced over it as her disappointment waned.

  What he'd sent her was a series of alternative joining instructions. They included intricate plans for shrugging off her plainclothes police guard and allowing agents of another organization entirely, which she suspected must be essentially criminal, to shepherd her onto a set of private planes and automobiles to the final destination—an address in Virginia she didn't know anything about except that it sounded like the middle of nowhere in the Appalachians. She asked Erewhon to run a source-verification check to get confirmation that this was indeed from Guskov and as she waited she turned to read an attached document that he said would explain everything about this “hasty action.”

  “Are you ready?” one of the policemen asked, poking his head around the door.

  Her father had departed two hours earlier. Such was the secrecy of their plans that confirmations of travel weren't issued to the staff on the ground until it was time to move. When Calum's joining instructions came they'd discovered that they were to be shipped separately. Natalie made an equivocal movement of her head, “In a minute.”