Silver Screen Page 5

  “Elanor,” he said to his HughIe, “will you answer?”

  “I did set off the alarm as soon as I realized the situation,” she said, speaking as what she was, a figment of 901, but keeping in character and turning immediately to him. Her light voice sounded childlike. “And I called Anjuli because she was the one with medical experience and knew him better. Ms. Kipkete and Ms. White were engaged in work I thought it unwise to interrupt at that stage. I would have called them if I thought it would be of any help. But they would not have been able to assist.”

  Vaughn nodded. He looked long at me and I saw that he was uncertain about 901 and how much he could trust it. I saw that he also wanted to hide this from the HughIe, as if the knowledge would hurt its feelings. He cared for Elanor—it was touching, if schizoid.

  “And have you thought about what I asked you before?” he said, turning back to me, his eyebrows raised.

  “The evidence in the factory incident with regard to 899 is circumstantial at best,” I said, “and the suggestion that the workers involved were subjected to hypnotic conditioning by hostile agents is completely unproven. The only material lost went missing during the investigation. Manda Klein's suggestion that the workers involved experienced mass hysteria due to the high levels of fungal biotoxins in some of their bread supplies is more plausible than the grand-conspiracy theories I've heard.” I watched his face grow stony. “So if you're looking for a rogue AI connection or something like that, I think this is far too tenuous.”

  Vaughn was silent for a moment. “Very well,” he said at last. “That will do for now. I imagine you would like to get some rest or be alone, see some friends perhaps? I am sorry about Roy. He was—” he struggled for some noncontentious word “—useful.”

  “Mr. Vaughn.” I fought my way out of the sofa and shook his hand. Maria I left there. She and he had much to talk about if they were going to come out of this smelling of roses, and no doubt she'd be on my back later, when it was time to give account of Roy's mental health. Feeling heavy and sad, I wandered on foot down the levels until I reached ground, and then walked home along the meandering stream of Orion Parkway to my apartment on the high curve of the ring wall.

  The Parkway was the only strip of grass on Netplatform. It ran a quarter of the distance around the circumference of the outer ring in a narrow band of green crisscrossed by the blue of a stream and several winding sandy tracks where you could walk. It was nothing like Earth or anywhere else, and a great waste of space and money since there was clear air above it instead of yet more apartments. At one edge of it, the administration blocks rose pale and angular in an irregular tumble to the roof. On the other edge the paths wound away into little canyons between apartment blocks and the accommodation leapt up like a pink cliff in many terraces and patios. I lived high up, on the Earth-facing wall, with a window into space instead of down into the Parkway. I liked to watch the planet turn beneath us in its vast arena.

  Now I lingered on the green strip, walking on the turf. “Call Lula,” I asked 901, speaking only in my thought and not aloud, but Lula was in an interview and not able to reply. This small effort cost me all my motivation at the time. Roy dead. It was strange, still shocking, and I felt distant from myself. I trudged up the stairwells of my area and along the winding grey lanes to my own door, which opened as I reached it.

  There was a carton of Dales’ Delight vanilla ice cream in the freezer, but when I put a spoonful in my mouth it made no difference. Things are bad when the power of Dales’ Delight can do nothing. I put the spoon in the sink, the carton back into the freezer, and opened a pouch of Calvados from my drinks box. There was enough for four glasses. I put half into a tumbler and moved around the narrow strip of the breakfast bar and onto my couch to sit for a while. I wondered what to make for dinner. Spaghetti Bolognese or chicken tikka masala, or maybe I'd just rehydrate a packet of mushy peas and stir some mint sauce into them. No. Lula wouldn't eat that. She was a bit of a food snob. Where was the damn woman? I noticed my tumbler was empty but couldn't be bothered to move.

  Lula arrived two hours—and some—later.

  I was chopping an onion and crying. When the door chime sounded I was so grateful for company that I looked up and smiled beautifully through the tears and snot.

  “Hi,” she said. Between the door and the oven she put down her toolbag, ripped a tissue from the overhead dispenser, and took two packets of Devon Custard out of her pockets. She put the custard on the counter and wiped my face carefully with the tissue. “Hey,” she said, and hugged me.

  “What's going on?” I said, feeling her solid, square little body prop me up. Lula was shorter than me, ginger-haired, with brown eyes and a relentless practicality which always made me feel I could relax and let her take care of whatever was going on. She was in her work overalls and wiped her own nose on the cuff. Her eyes were red-rimmed.

  “I don't know,” she said. “What're you making?”

  “Spaghetti. When did you find out?”

  “When Vaughn's lot opened my door. I was just doing some admin. I didn't even hear the klaxon. Roy must have jinxed the system…Where's the garlic?”

  “What? It's here.” I pointed at four cloves lying on the chopping board.

  “Ah.” Lula pushed her way past me and picked up my knife. She placed the cloves under the flat of the blade one by one and then smashed them with great blows of her hand that made all the pots and cupboards rattle.

  “Better?” I said, removing my hands from my ears.

  She picked out the skins and put them in the disposal unit. “Not really.” She paused and looked up. It was a tiny galley so we were eye-to-eye. “You know this whole thing doesn't make any sense. You, me, Peaches, and Roy agreed we would never take the case out.”

  “What?”

  “They didn't tell you?” She put her hands on her hips. “Maybe they didn't find out until you'd gone home. When I was in Vaughn's office word came through: Roy's filed against OptiNet with the World Court of Human Rights.”

  “What?” I said again.

  “Yeah. And even he knew what trouble that would start. But he's dead, so what the hell?” As she was talking she turned to the counter and had picked up the knife. With rapid strokes she collected the garlic, poured some salt on, and began to grind it to a pulp. “Filed it yesterday, through some lawyer in Geneva apparently.”

  Many times in secret our team had discussed The Case. As a natural consequence of our work in analysing and managing the AI 901 we had long since considered that it was a being in its own right, certainly conscious, emotional apparently (although not predictably or for certain), and probably deserved formal recognition, not least to protect its existence should the Company choose to do something ill-advised. Not doing what Roy had done was a unanimous choice we had voted on, since once we had looked into the legalities it seemed probable that we could not succeed with it under current law, and almost certain given the tide of popular opinion flowing strongly against AIs. Now it seemed that our little democracy had been rudely brought to an end.

  “We can't let the Company know we ever thought about it,” I said. “He's on his own.”

  “Damn straight.” Lula took down the frying pan and scraped the garlic in, then poured olive oil on.

  “You should let the oil warm first,” I said without thinking. She made a face and picked up my Calvados tumbler, sniffing it.

  “Where's the wine?”

  “In the bottom of the air conditioner.”

  I let her lever the cover off with a wooden spatula and pull out a wobbling sack of Cabernet Sauvignon. Beneath the outlet vent the temperature was perfect for reds. “We won't win it,” I said.

  “No, the Company will. And then they can do what they like with 901. It goes against everything he wanted. And what the hell are we supposed to do about it? I just don't get it. Ugh.” She shook her head and unclipped the wine seal, poured two cups out, sealed it, threw the onions in the pan, tossed them rapidly until th
ey were all coated. “Are the meat and liver in the mixer?”

  “Yes.”

  We stood contemplatively as the blades whined, and cut the steak and chicken livers together. Fresh food is heavy freight on the shuttle to Netplatform, but I had little else to spend my pay on and so every week I had to go to the docking bay and haul a box of gold-dust groceries to my apartment. You have to get what pleasure you can. When they were ready, I put them into the pan. Lu tossed them. She never spills. She's bossy, too, but I was so glad she was there, even though none of the news was good.

  “I keep thinking I should have noticed something,” I said as a delicious smell filled the room and the happy hiss of sizzling momentarily overtook the irregular mutter, clank, and clang of the station structure.

  “Oh, I don't think he went nuts,” Lula said, fixing me with an arrow-sharp glance, “unless you count him always being nuts. There wasn't anything to notice. Just Roy. As usual. This is par for the course. Herbs?”

  I snipped open fresh-frozen vacu-sealed packets of oregano, basil, and bay leaves. “I wish he hadn't.”

  Lula flipped the contents of the pan, shook them. “I don't know.” She sounded weary. “Maybe it will turn out for the best.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Blast him, do you think he did kill himself, or was he done in by someone else? One of his deals went wrong and he was escaping?”

  “Don't know.” She bit her lip and picked up her glass. Her pixie face was solemn, and the lines around her mouth deepened. There was no hint of a smile. “Here's to the storm, then.”

  I picked up mine. “To Roy,” I said. “Rest in peace.”

  “Peace.”

  We drank. We finished that pouch, and after the Bolognese we finished another. We slumped on the couch against the wall, put the screen on, and watched The Maltese Falcon because it reminded us of Roy, and in the semidarkness you could pull any expression you wanted and not be seen.

  Peaches arrived shortly after the film had started. She looked haggard. Her round face seemed to be cut by verticals of worry, darker black than her Kenyan skin. She didn't say anything, just sat down and watched the monochrome flickering shapes for a minute. Then she said, “What is this?”

  “It's The Maltese Falcon,” I said, “1941. Thriller. We were watching it as a kind of nondirect way of thinking about Roy.”

  “Why?” She was carrying a bag, which she opened and took out an airtight box full of pecan cookies and a packet of ground coffee.

  “There's a bit in it…they're looking for this treasure, in the shape of a bird,” I said, “only when it appears at last, when all these guys have died for it, it turns out to be made of lead.”

  “Ah.” She nodded, understanding. “Do you have a coffee pot?”

  “I have an attachment on the steam faucet for espresso,” I said and showed her where it was. She sighed a few times as she busied her hands with making lattes. “Cinnamon or chocolate sprinkles?” she called through.

  Lula laughed.

  “What's funny?” Peaches hurried around the bar and looked at the screen.

  “You,” Lula said. “I've never heard anyone say ‘chocolate sprinkles’ with such gloom.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Peaches smiled, but it was fleeting. She put two cups down and went back for her own. We helped ourselves to the cookies. “Well,” she said after a sip and a thought, “I've been asked so many questions…”

  “About Roy?”

  “About all of us. They got Blue Team in next, Orange after that. I think they're looking for a conspiracy. Red Team is tracing all Roy's call catalogues right now, looking for suspects from elsewhere or outside the Company.”

  I took my eyes off the picture. “Did they ask you anything about nanytes?”

  Lula sat up. Peaches put her cup down with a rattle on the low table. “Oh yeah. And about the Shoal. I thought they were reading out questions from the exam book.”

  “Anything about 899?”

  “No.” Peaches looked at me as if I was crazy. Lula shook her head.

  I sat up. “Go on.”

  “Apparently Roy's bank account emptied at 10:15,” she said. “Vanished into the Swiss Banking Pool and from there into an unidentifiable account.”

  “So, they think it all went to the Shoal,” Lula said. “It's likely. But so what?”

  Peaches swirled her coffee around in the cup. “They don't know. But they've always been jumpy about 901 and the Shoal getting together somehow. “That's why I always have to do all that exhaustive checking through the TX records to see if they've been talking. Shows you how much they know about the technology. But now they're wondering what Roy's money bought and who else knows what he was doing.” She shook her head. “I don't think we're going to have jobs once this is done and I don't think 901 will have a place to stay. Whether they find anything or not.”

  We huddled next to one another into the depths of the couch and watched the projection on the wall. For a long time nothing more was said. Although Lula had only become interested in old films after she met me, I had been an avid watcher as a child. They were on the only channel I could hack into, through the ban my parents had imposed on the televideo. My ubiquitous memory had nagged me to play the Falcon all evening. I wasn't sure which parts of it I needed to set my thinking straight until I saw them. When they came, we all—Peaches, Lula, and I—glanced at one another. We may not have been thinking identical thoughts, but they were surely similar.

  Close to the end of the movie the heroine, Brigid, begs Spade not to turn her over to the police. They both know she is guilty. After she makes her big appeal Spade denies her; he sits and stares at the floor and says, “Listen, this won't do any good. You'll never understand me, but I'll try once and then give it up. When a man's partner's killed he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it.”

  We looked at one another a while.

  “If you think I'm going to lose my job twice over that fruitcake, you've got another think coming,” Peaches said, chin low with defiance.

  “Lu?” I asked for her vote.

  “We don't know much right now,” Lula said slowly. “But I don't see why Roy would kill himself. Especially that way. And then there's all this nanyte stuff. And he does it right in the middle of the nanyte project. And he gives his money to the Shoal.” She shrugged. “I don't know, but I bet his last call was into the black market, and whatever zapped him came out of there.”

  “And he left some kind of message,” I said.

  They stared at me like nonplussed goldfish. “Huh?” Peaches said.

  “With his sister.” I had been going to mention the hologram, but suddenly didn't.

  “Jane Croft?” Peaches’ eyes became circles. “Kooky Croft? I thought she lived in a tent without any electricity. How the hell did he send her any messages from here?”

  “He planned it, that's the point,” I said. It was late and getting difficult to think straight with all the wine in my blood. “There are any number of ways. He could have done it ages ago.”

  “And lying to us the whole damn time,” Peaches snorted. “Good God…” She trailed off, shaking her head. “Do you think this is connected to all that other stuff we talked about?”

  She meant during the meetings we had had as a team. Closed meetings in which we had sometimes discussed our misgivings about certain situations at OptiNet. The Company structure and practice was federal in nature, aimed to give the individual as much authority and responsibility at the local level as they could stand. Even at national and international levels the decisions reached on items of strategic importance were consensus decisions and open to change. It allowed us to react very quickly. It weakened us in as much as there was no single head to control the whole. In our work with the AI systems, however, the Teams were granted access to a great deal of information which other employees could not see. At first, rooting around was a little pas
time. We did not expect to find anything untoward except maybe the odd bit of porn or light fraud. But we did. Over the years we found minutes for nonexistent committees. We found room bookings and travel details bringing together people who had nothing to do with each other, at infrequent but regular intervals. We called it the New Masons. However, since this was all material which was supposedly encrypted or out of bounds, we only speculated darkly and did nothing about it. We said we would if it looked like it was getting out of hand. But the sense of threat from it had worn off with time and we had come to think of the New Masons as a kind of fringe fruitcakes’ club, all talk and scaremongering and squiffy handshakes. Just the kind of people to try to make the 899 connection, in fact.

  “That's a bit paranoid,” I said. “There's no reason to think so. Although…”

  “Although what?” Lula said. The film was over and we were sitting in near darkness.

  “Plague memes are on an upward curve at the moment,” I said. “Dangerous ideas. Irrational ideas. It's something I track a statistic for when I analyse the appraisals for the Mental Health Officer. People in OptiNet are starting to look for the enemy. They're looking for power-wells and trying to form hierarchies. A bit imperialist. Nothing out of the ordinary when the market is jumpy.”

  “Why?” Peaches was puzzled. She had no patience with fools or weaklings of any kind. Not the most secure mental immune system in the world, but it worked pretty well for her.

  “They're afraid.” I could not yet prove this theory, but it felt right. “They don't like what they hear about the AIs. They think they could all lose their jobs and end up leisured.”

  “And there isn't much of a counterbalance,” Lula said. “Ma Enterprises in China has just brought another big AI online to oversee all the national administration.”

  “I wonder if that Mason lot is connected with any of the antitechnology activists,” Peaches said. “If they are, it might explain what the hell Roy is trying to do. Or that he's doing something. But why wouldn't he tell us?”