Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2)

by Richard Farr

  Natazscha peered at it. “Yes. This looks like a calculation of the Bekenstein bound. A measure of information density.”

  “Information can have a density?” Kit said. I was thinking the same thing, but being distracted by a bell going off deep in my memory.

  “It’s a kind of absolute limit on how complex something can be. Which apparently is a big thing in artificial intelligence.”

  “Now I remember why that sounds so familiar,” I said. “Iona. Back when she was a lowly math student, before she set up her data-encryption company, the title of her thesis was ‘Minds, Machines, and the Information-Density Limit.’ Lorna told me she’d been working on how much information you could possibly store in one place—and how excited she was when she met an Australian bloke who was trying to calculate the information capacity of a human brain. According to Lorna they spent their first date talking about whether space-time is ten- or eleven-dimensional.”

  Natazscha pointed to a door in the middle of the opposite wall. The sign said, “David Maynard Jones, Director.” It led to a space that was almost empty, with cleaned-out bookshelves, no extra furniture except a big metal cabinet full of office supplies, and a bare metal slab for a desk. On the desk there was a single unused yellow pad, aligned with the desk’s corner, and one of those old-fashioned multiline desk phones. I opened the desk drawers (empty), opened the cabinet (boxes of Post-it notes and pens, Scotch tape, more yellow pads), then closed the cabinet and walked slowly around the whole space.

  When I turned back to you, you’d opened the cabinet again and you were rocking on your heels in front of it. You waved your hands, groaned, and lunged in with both arms, raking out the contents onto the floor. At the back of one shelf, at head height, there was a stack of half a dozen small cardboard boxes. You reached in and tugged out the lowest one. The boxes on top spilled sideways, then out, sending paper, toner cartridges, and paper clips all over the floor.

  The box you were holding was the size of a large book. It had “Amazon Prime” on the side. You took it to Mayo’s desk, ripped off the strip of packing tape that was holding it closed, and slid it over to me.

  “What is it, D?” I said, but you just looked at me, so I unfolded the cardboard flaps. And the first item I saw, lying on top, was instantly familiar: Iona’s orange camera strap. The color had faded from neon to pastel, and up close the webbing was frayed and thin. It was like a memory of the real thing: a signal from a past that I knew was real but couldn’t quite believe. Beneath it was Iona’s Anabasis, with her handwriting in pencil on almost every page. Beneath that, a sheaf of handwritten notes. Several old envelopes that had once contained handwritten letters, all empty. A few printed-out emails. Web clippings about the original disappearances.

  “This is what you were looking for in Iona’s study,” I said to you. “Mayo, or someone working for him, must have taken them.”

  “Oh my goodness,” Natazscha said. “This was hidden in plain sight. I’d already looked through that stuff.”

  You picked up the camera strap by one end, and it unfolded. A transparent pouch with six square pockets was clipped to one side of it. Each of the pockets contained a square blue memory card. You picked one of them out and held it up between your thumb and forefinger, nodding. You spoke quietly, as if to yourself, but I heard: “I’iwa. I’iwa.”

  “So this is good, yah?” Kit said. She was sitting cross-legged in the middle of Mayo’s desk. “We have what Daniel is looking for, maybe. He needs to get home and look at this. You need to get home and look at Disks. Also is after midnight, and we need to leave, because this place giving me bad feeling.”

  She jumped down and went back out to the main lab area. I passed my eyes over Mayo’s office and the lab area one more time, willing them to yield up some new fragment of information, but there was nothing. By the time I came out, Rosko and Natazscha were already at the top of the stairs. But you’d stopped, clutching the box in front of a door I hadn’t paid any attention to, and you were shaking.

  “What is m-e-c-h—metch?” Kit said.

  “Mech”: that’s what the sign said. Natazscha sounded impatient and barely glanced back in her direction. “It’s short for mechanical. Air-conditioning, plumbing, that sort of thing. Come on. I want us out of here.”

  “Strange though, yes?” Kit said, rattling the handle. “Big fancy computer is locked up, maybe I understand. But why plumbing door is only other one locked?”

  You made a strange whimpering sound in the back of your throat and seemed to reach for the door and back away from it at the same time. The hairs on the back of my neck went all porcupine. Shoving Kit out of the way, I started pushing at the door. But there was nothing. It didn’t even rattle. It looked and sounded like I was pushing on a section of wall.

  “Useless,” Kit said. “Get out of way.”

  I did as I was told. Aye, I know. She looks like she never ate a diner breakfast in her life, but she’s also not a bad athlete. She backed up all the way to the wall, put her head down, and began to run as if launching off sprinters’ blocks. She only had room for four or five short, chopping steps, but she picked up an amazing amount of speed. Then she turned gracefully sideways, lifting her feet at the last moment, and allowed her entire body weight to collide with the door, right next to the handle.

  A section of the frame disintegrated, but she bounced off and landed sprawled on the floor.

  “Crapshit. I maybe break shoulder or something.”

  I was stepping forward to check on her when you walked over to the door. The indecision had broken—your movements had a fluidity and purpose to them. After examining the damaged frame, you stepped back a pace and stood upright with Iona’s cardboard box in one hand. You looked like a soldier on parade. And then you raised one knee, screamed “No!” at a deafening volume, and let fly with a precise, powerful kick. Your heel connected with the wood an inch above the handle. The door emitted a single yelp, as if you’d stepped on the paw of a dog, and exploded inward.

  Kit was fine. Rubbing her shoulder, she was the first to go through. I had a good view of her face, illuminated by a soft artificial glow, as she turned to her left.

  In the movie version of the moment she would have cried out. Or maybe gasped and made a melodramatic gesture of some kind. But real horror is different. For barely a heartbeat, nothing, and then she folded sharply at the waist, like someone who’d been punched. She collapsed forward onto her knees, face pointed at the tasteful, putty-colored, polished concrete floor, and threw up.

  Afterward, it was tempting to think I’d had a premonition about what Kit would find in that room. But when I stepped inside—one hand on her hair, trying to comfort her, and one hand flying to my nose and mouth against the twin stench of vomit and rot—the light was so low that I took longer than she had to make sense of the scene.

  My first impression: Room. Dark. Light at the other end.

  My second impression: There isn’t any mech in here.

  It was a small, plain room, maybe ten by twelve. A computer cart in one corner had an open laptop on it. There was a big main desk covered in books and papers.

  An office, then. A poky windowless side office, perfect for a lowly grad student. And behind the desk there was a person observing us—or not—from a chair.

  The chair was identical to the complicated, hi-tech number we’d used downstairs. The white helmet, ditto. A big monitor, on an armature at head height, was angled toward the helmet and was giving off enough cold blue light to pick out the claws clutching the arms of the chair, the big Velcro strap holding the chest in place across a yellow-on-purple Minnesota Vikings T-shirt, and the grotesque white Kabuki mask that had once been a face.

  Carl Bates.

  He was seated, or strapped in, under the scanner helmet. It was still poised over his head, but his body had twisted forward and sideways against the strap, so that his head was half out of the scanner, tilted awkwardly toward us, one ear visible. It looked as if he’d been
frozen solid while struggling to get up.

  His skin was stretched tight as a balloon across the bones of his skull. His lips, scored by deep vertical cracks, looked like segmented earthworms. The eyes stared at us, imploring, but they were as dry as dust-coated marbles and so prominent it seemed they might fall from their sockets and shatter.

  Kit staggered to her feet. Trying to get away from the sight, she more or less collided with her mother in the doorway. Natazscha pushed past me, threw the main light switch, and rushed to kneel beside the figure at the desk.

  “Oh God, no. Carl, Carl. Oh God, no.”

  She grabbed his wrist, checking for a pulse that she must have known wasn’t there. Then, with a delicate, tender gesture she pushed a strand of hair back from his forehead. It stayed put for a moment before falling again.

  “A boy from Minnesota who was homesick for flat land and bright winters,” she said, talking quickly, as if only words could protect her from the full power of what she was seeing. “Good at his work. A magician with code. He was supposed to be doing his doctorate in computer science, but he helped me out with a project and then started following Maynard Jones around like a puppy hoping for a treat. The last few months, he was spending nearly all his time here at ISOC. Look at the face. Dehydration. And the way his back is arched. That’s renal failure.”

  A big, empty IV bag hung from a metal stand next to the chair. She looked around on the floor and picked up the loose end of a transparent tube. A curl of medical tape was attached to it.

  “See how there are two bags? This one was a cocktail of anesthetics. Propofol and pentobarbital, I expect. Perhaps alfentanil. Those drugs are lethal if the dose isn’t right. The large bag was probably saline, but it looks like it wasn’t connected properly. As if he tried to set this whole thing up himself.”

  Behind him there was another, smaller glass board, blank except for two lines written in black marker near the middle:

  THERE IS NO GHOST: THEREFORE √1 = θ

  THE MACHINE IS THE GHOST: THEREFORE √2 = ∞

  Kit was outside, spitting into one of the lab sinks. When she came back she stood on the threshold amid the splinters of wood, dabbing absently at her lips with her sleeve, her eyes wide and her face the color of a bleached sheet. Then she reached out and touched my shoulder.

  “Sorry for puke.”

  I put my arm around her and glanced behind her to a window. “I don’t get what this means, but we need to get out of here.”

  “I get it, Majka,” she said. She pointed to the board. “Is obvious now, yah?”

  “It is?”

  “Sure it is. Root symbol was on Bill’s hard drive, and root symbol is again here. But root is a pun, like Rosko said. Wortspiel, yah?”

  Rosko was standing just an arm’s length from Bates, fingering the keys on the laptop. “We already got that far,” he said dismissively. His tone annoyed me—partly because he was saying that Kit couldn’t possibly have thought of anything he and I hadn’t already thought of, and partly because I was uncomfortable with the fact that I kind of thought that too.

  “Yah,” she said coolly. “You already got that far. But maybe fantastic Eisler brain have not got far enough.”

  That made him look up.

  “Pun is not like you are saying. Not like root of a number is one thing, and root of plant is another. What this means is the line on a map that tells you where to go. R-o-u-t-e. How to get someplace.”

  He must have known she was right, but he still sounded grudging. “If it means ‘second route’—alternative way—then route to where?”

  She rolled her eyes and tapped at her forehead. “You guys is supposed to be the smart ones, yes? With me is always like, nice girl, blond hair, nice face: obvious not much happening up the stairs.”

  I wanted to protest, but she was on a roll. “What is it Seraphim are offering people? What they give that is so popular? Same thing what religions always offer. Power? No. Money? No. Extra serving of ice cream? I don’t think. They are offering the one thing everyone wants even more than power and money and ice cream. Not to die.”

  “Heaven,” I said. “The infinite.”

  “Yah. Join Seraphim. Believe everything Quinn says. Learn language of Architects. Then, boom. Leave body behind, and become like a god, blah blah. Well, so that is Route One to immortality. That is what Seraphim is selling. Actually, if Professor Partridge not crazy, that is what Architects is selling, through the Seraphim. And Mayo doesn’t believe in it, because he is like Bill. He think supernatural is all flip-flap.”

  “Flimflam.”

  “The word he used was ‘bollocks,’” Rosko said, not looking up from the laptop.

  “That is for sure correct. Religion, he say, it is total, one hundred percent bollockses. Science is only true knowledge and such. And that is what this means. ‘√1’ means the old route to immortality, through religion and God. Or through the Seraphim and their Architects, which is like new version of old story. Is all Route One.”

  “But,” Rosko said, “the circle with the line through it is the Greek letter theta. What does that have to do with anything? It means half a dozen different things in math and physics, but—”

  “People write theta as shorthand for theory,” Natazscha said.

  “You guys,” Kit said. “I think sometimes you know everything, sometimes maybe nothing. We do class on ancient Greeks. Teacher goes on about Plato, trial of Socrates, blah blah. Theta is shorthand there too, but not for theory. Athenians, they used it for verdict in a trial. Is first letter of the word thanatos. Thanatos means ‘death.’”

  “Kit, this is brilliant,” I said. “You’re saying that the Seraphim think Route One leads to infinity, but Carl thinks that’s all an illusion; trusting the Architects only leads to death. But, on the other hand—”

  “Maybe Mayo, he decides medical advances are not good enough for him,” Kit said. “You can clone new kidney. Fix brain damage maybe. Put new lenses in eye, new valves in heart. But that is like Professor Partridge replacing rusty exhaust pipe on his van. Mayo, he not wants only to keep his body going. He wants to do like religion—say good-bye to body, be free of it, and become mind only. So. He gets interested in mapping the brain, so he can upload it, and va-voom! Who needs religion if you can have immortality from science?”

  “Route Two,” Natazscha said, nodding approvingly. I got the impression she was making a parental note to stop radically underestimating her daughter. “Carl must have wanted to show that it was possible and decided to impress Maynard Jones by making himself the guinea pig.”

  “What pig?”

  “Guinea pig. It means he used himself as an experimental animal.”

  “Yah. Science not so nice to experiment animals.”

  Rosko was still at the laptop—looking at Kit, then at me, with a dark expression I couldn’t read. What was he thinking? Annoyed that Kit had beaten him to a puzzle’s solution—or only annoyed with himself for not handling the fact more gracefully? Jealous of her closeness to me—or of my closeness to her? I didn’t quite buy any of those. But there was something going on with him that I hadn’t worked out. When our eyes met, he quickly looked down at the screen again.

  “There’s a work log,” he said. “The mainframe shut down at 19:33 yesterday.”

  “But Carl did not die yesterday,” Natazscha said. “He must have been here like this, I don’t know. A week, at least.”

  “How long did it take to run that scan you did on Morag? Three minutes?”

  “That’s typical for a small area, if you don’t need the highest resolution. Why?”

  “What’s the longest single scan you’ve ever run?”

  “Forty or fifty minutes. That was to generate an overview of the whole neocortex. Maynard Jones did it on himself. He said he didn’t want anyone taking the risk.”

  “Which is silly,” I said. “The muon scanner’s not like an X-ray. It uses ambient radiation, right? So it’s no riskier than when you take a
photograph.”

  The screen in front of Rosko was dark, except for a few rows of data near the top in plain white Arial. He looked at Carl, at me, then at Natazscha.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Why would Carl strap himself into a chair, hook up a half gallon of happy drugs, and set up a scan of his own brain where the run parameter is”—he looked more closely at the readout—“ten days?”

  The question hung weightless for a second in the still, foul air of that little room. Then Natazscha said, with a sudden decisiveness, “I want you all out of here. Now. I’ll have to report this immediately, and I don’t want any of you involved. Come on.”

  We shut the splintered door behind us, even though it wouldn’t close all the way, and went back down the main stairs to the third floor, then the second. We had reached the messy domain of the mathematicians again when we heard a voice coming up from the lobby.

  “Hello. Hello? Is anyone in here?”

  “Politsiya,” she hissed. “Police.” Backing up, she put a finger to her lips and gestured for us to follow her across to the other side. Down a short side corridor, past Mr. Turing, there was a fire escape. A flashlight beam played up the stairwell behind us. I heard the crackle of a handheld radio and the words backup and Institute.

  I didn’t dare look back—it was the child’s instinct that if you can’t see, you can’t be seen. Seconds later we were in a concrete delivery bay at the rear of the building. There was a truck-sized roll-up metal door—locked, and in any case it would have made too much noise. Next to it, hidden behind a pile of empty boxes, there was a regular exit door—also closed. It was only a dead bolt, though, and it slid back with a single squeak.

  The rain had almost stopped, but the walkways were slick black leather. We were so busy working out how to get away from the building without being seen that we turned a corner and nearly ran straight into a dozen Seraphim.

  They were standing motionless, staring up through the veil of floodlit moisture toward the wreck of the library. The late-night shift? All of us had the same instinct, which was to put our heads down, ignore them, and keep moving. All of us except you.