A Second Chance at Eden (10 page)

‘Who are the trustees?’

Shannon’s fingernail tapped the wafer. ‘There are three. Pieter Zernov, Antony Harwood, and Bob Parkinson. Maowkavitz also lists another eight people should any of her initial choices die.’

I studied the list of names. ‘I know all of these.’ I pushed the wafer over to Rolf who scanned it quickly, and gave me a reluctant nod.

‘Boston’s leadership,’ I mused.

Shannon’s grin was pure wickedness. ‘Prove it. There’s no such thing as Boston. It isn’t entered in any databank; there are no records, no listings of any kind. Technically, it doesn’t exist. Even Eden’s surveillance can only turn up bar talk.’

I toyed with the wafer on my desk. ‘What do they want the money for? Harwood and Parkinson are both rich in their own right. In fact I think Harwood is actually richer than Maowkavitz.’

‘They’re going to buy guns,’ Shannon said. ‘Arm the peasants so they can storm the Winter Palace.’

I gave her a censorious stare. ‘This is a murder inquiry, Shannon. Contribute, or keep silent, please.’

She gave an unrepentant shrug. ‘The modern equivalent of guns. However they figure on bringing off their coup, it won’t be cheap.’

‘Good point. OK, I want to speak to these three trustees. We won’t bring them in for questioning, not yet. But I do want to interview them today, ask them what they’re planning on doing with the money. Rolf, set it up, please.’ I fished my own PNC wafer from my jacket pocket, and summoned up a file I’d made the previous evening. ‘And Shannon, I want you to access the wills of everyone on this list, please. I’d like to see if they’ve made similar arrangements to hand over their wealth after they die.’

She read the names as I downloaded the file into her wafer, then let out a low whistle. ‘You’re well informed, boss.’

‘For someone who told me Boston doesn’t exist, so are you.’

She sauntered back to her desk.

‘Hoi Yin examined the servitor chimp yesterday,’ Rolf said. ‘She hasn’t had any luck recovering the memory of who gave it the order to shoot Penny.’

‘Bugger. Does she think she’ll ever be able to get at the memory?’

‘I don’t think so, from what she told me. But she said she’d come in again this morning, after the funeral. You could ask her.’

‘I’ll do that; I need the background information anyway. What have we assembled on Penny Maowkavitz’s last few days?’

‘Purely routine stuff, I’m afraid. She wasn’t letting her illness interfere with her work. The JSKP Biotechnology Division has been busy preparing for Ararat’s arrival, which she was supervising. And Davis Caldarola says she was still performing design work for Pacific Nugene. She was working ten-, twelve-hour days. Nothing out of the ordinary for her. She never did a lot of socializing, and she’d been cutting back on that recently anyway. According to the people we’ve interviewed so far she didn’t have any really big rows with anybody, certainly not in the last few weeks. They were all treating her with kid gloves because of the cancer.’

It sounded to me like Penny Maowkavitz was someone who had come to terms with her fate, and was trying to get as much done as possible in what time she had remaining. ‘That’s her work. What about her Boston meetings?’

‘Sir?’

‘She must have had them, Rolf. She was supposed to be their leader. Were they argumentative? I can’t imagine them being particularly smooth, not when you’re discussing how to take over an entire city-state.’

‘There’s no way of knowing. You see, Shannon was right about not having any evidence against Boston, their leadership would never have met in the flesh, not for that. All their discussions would have taken place using affinity. Nobody can intercept them.’

‘I thought affinity up here was communal.’

‘It is, but we have what we call singular engagement mode. It means you can hold private conversations with anyone inside a fifteen-kilometre radius.’

‘Oh, wonderful. OK, what about these genetic designs she was working on when she died? What were they? Anything a rival company would kill to prevent her from finishing?’

‘I don’t know. The Pacific Nugene laboratory up here wasn’t working on anything radical; mostly transgenic crops for Eden’s Agronomy Division, and some sort of servitor which could operate effectively in free fall. If she was working on anything else, we haven’t uncovered it yet. She did a lot of the initial softsplice work on her home computer, then turned it over to a lab team to refine and develop up to commercial standard. We haven’t been able to access many of her files so far. She used some very complex entry guard codes. It’ll take time to crack them. I’ll give it to Shannon when she’s finished with the wills, it’s her field.’

‘Fine, keep me informed.’

*

Hoi Yin was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen – the most beautiful I imagine it’s possible to see. She came into my office half an hour after I finished in the incident room. I didn’t just stare, I gawped.

She was still in the demure black dress she had worn at the funeral. And that was the second surprise, she was the one I’d seen pushing Wing-Tsit Chong’s wheelchair.

Her figure was spectacular enough; but it was the combination of diverse racial traits which made her so mesmerizing. Fine Oriental features defined by avian bones, with dark African lips, and the fairest Nordic hair, tawny eyes which appeared almost golden. She had to be the greatest cosmetic gene-adaptation ever put together. She wasn’t genetic engineering, she was genetic artistry.

I guessed her age at around twenty-two – but with honey-brown skin that clear how can you tell?

She took off the black beret as she sat in front of my desk, letting her rope of hair hang down almost to the top of her hips. ‘Chief Parfitt?’ she said pleasantly; the tone was light enough, but there was a hint of weariness in it. Hoi Yin, I got the impression, looked down from a great height at common mortals.

I did my best to appear businesslike – waste of time really, she must have known what she did to men. ‘I understand you’ve had no success with the servitor chimp?’

‘Actually, it was a most enlightening session, I have learnt a considerable amount from the event, some of which I found disturbing. But unfortunately nothing which is immediately helpful to solving your case.’

‘Fine, so tell me what you have got.’

‘Whoever instructed the servitor chimp to shoot Penny Maowkavitz was almost my equal in neuropsychology. The method they employed was extremely sophisticated, and ingenious.’

‘Somebody in your department?’

‘I work as an independent consultant. But I believe most of the Servitor Division staff would have the ability, yes. If they had sufficient experience in instructing a chimp, they could probably determine how to circumvent the habitat’s safeguards. So too would most of the Biotechnology Division staff. However, I cannot provide you with any likely names, it would be your job to establish a motive.’

I made a note on my PNC wafer. ‘How many people work in the Servitor and Biotechnology Divisions?’

Hoi Yin closed her eyes to consult the habitat personality, assuming a fascinating dream-distant expression which would have left Mona Lisa floundering in envy.

‘There are a hundred and eighty people employed in the Servitor Division,’ she said. ‘With another eight hundred working in the Biotechnology Division. Plus a great many others in fringe professions, such as agronomy.’

‘Fine. And what are these safeguards?’

‘It is difficult to explain without using affinity to demonstrate the concept directly.’ She gave me a small apologetic moue. ‘Forgive me if the description is muddy. Although the servitors are nominally independent, any order given to one by a human is automatically reviewed by the habitat personality. It is a question of neural capacity and interpretation. A chimp’s brain has just enough intelligence to retain orders and perform them efficiently. For example, if you were to give one a general order to pick up litter along a certain road, it would be quite capable of doing so without further, more explicit, instruction. Also, if you tell one to put a plate into a dishwasher, there is no problem. It will pick up the object indicated and place it where instructed; even though it does not know the name for ‘plate’ or ‘dishwasher’, nor what they are for. The image in your mind contains sufficient information for it to recognize the plate. So as you can see, we had to protect them from deliberate abuse, and the kind of inevitable misuse which comes from children ordering them around.’

‘I think I understand. I couldn’t order a chimp to carry someone into an airlock and cycle it.’

‘Exactly. By itself the chimp wouldn’t know that what it was doing was wrong. It lacks discrimination, that ability we call sentience. So every order is reviewed by the personality to ensure it is not harmful or illegal. Therefore, although you could tell a chimp to pick up
this
particular object, and point it at
that
person’s head, then pull this small lever at the bottom, it would not perform the act. The chimp does not know the object is a pistol, or that pulling the trigger is going to fire it, nor even the consequences such an action would result in. But the habitat personality does, and its neural strata has the capacity to review every single order as it is issued. The order to murder would be erased, and the police would be informed immediately.’

‘So what went wrong this time?’

‘This is what I find most worrying about the incident. You understand that the habitat personality is what we call a homogenized presence?’

‘I crammed biotechnology for three months before I came here, but it was just basic stuff. I know Eden has a large neural strata. But that’s about all.’

Hoi Yin crossed her legs. Distracting, very distracting.

‘If you look at a cross-section of the habitat shell you will see it is layered like an onion,’ she said. ‘Each layer has a different function. On the outside we have dead polyp, several metres thick, protecting us from cosmic radiation, and gradually ablating away in the vacuum. Inside that is a layer of living polyp which gradually replaces it. Then there is a very complex mitosis layer. More polyp containing nutrient-fluid arteries. A layer for water passages. Another with waste-extraction tubules and toxin-filter glands. And so on. Until finally the innermost layer, landscaped, smeared with soil, and laced with sensitive cells. But the layer just below that surface one is what we call the neural strata. It is nearly a metre thick, and connected to the sensitive cell clusters via millions of nerve strands. Consider that, Chief Parfitt, a strata of neural cells, a brain, measuring one metre thick, and covering almost sixty-four square kilometres.’

I hadn’t though of it in quite those terms before. Too unnerving, I suppose. ‘It ought to be infallible.’

‘Yes. But Eden’s thoughts work on parallel-processing principles. A neural network this large could not function in any other fashion. There is only one personality, yet its mind is made up from millions of semi-autonomous subroutines. Think of it as analogous to a hologram; if you cut up a hologram each little piece still contains a copy of the original image; no matter how small the fragment, the whole pattern is always there. Well, that is how the personality works, complete homogeneity. It can conduct a thousand – ten thousand – conversations simultaneously, and the memory of each one is disseminated throughout its structure so that it is available as a reference everywhere in the habitat. Indeed, all its knowledge is disseminated in such a fashion. When I converse with it through affinity, I am actually talking to a subroutine operating in the neural strata more or less directly below my feet. The amount of the strata given over to running that subroutine is dependent purely on the complexity of the task it is performing. If I were to ask it an exceptionally difficult question, the subroutine would expand to utilize more and more cells until it reached a size appropriate to fulfil the request. Sometimes the subroutines are large and sophisticated enough to be considered sentient in their own right, sometimes they are little more than computer programs.’

‘The murderer got at the safeguard subroutine, not the chimp,’ I blurted.

Her eyebrows rose in what I hoped was admiration. ‘Precisely. Somehow the murderer used his or her affinity to suspend the subroutine responsible for monitoring the orders given to that particular chimp. Then while it was inactive, the order to collect the pistol and stalk Penny Maowkavitz was issued to the chimp. The monitoring subroutine was then brought back on-line. Eden was not aware of the rogue order in the chimp’s brain until it actually observed the chimp shooting the pistol. By then it was too late.’

‘Clever. Can you prevent it from happening again?’

She looked at the floor, her lips pulled together in a delicious pout. ‘I believe so. Eden and I have been considering the problem at some length. The servitor monitoring subroutines will have to be reconfigured to resist such tampering in future; indeed all of the simpler subroutines will have to be hardened. Although it is of no comfort to Penny Maowkavitz, we have gained considerable insight into a vulnerability which we never previously knew existed. As with all complex new systems, methods of abuse can never be fully anticipated; Eden is no exception. This has given us a lot to think about.’

‘Fine. What about extracting a memory of the murderer from the chimp? What he or she looks like, how big, anything at all we could work with.’

‘If there was a visual image, I expect I could retrieve it given time. But I do not believe there is one. In all probability the murderer was nowhere near the chimp when the order was loaded. Whoever they are, they have demonstrated a considerable level of understanding with regards to how the habitat servitors work; I don’t think they would make such an elementary mistake as allowing the chimp to see them. Even if they did need to be near the chimp in order to suppress the monitor subroutine, they only had to stay behind it.’

‘Yeah, I expect you’re right.’

Hoi Yin gave a small bow, and rose to her feet. ‘If there is nothing else, Chief Parfitt.’

‘There was one other thing. I noticed you were with Wing-Tsit Chong at the funeral.’