Doctor Who (24 page)

They watched as the program refined itself. ‘It's using a sort of evolution,' said the Doctor. ‘Inputting its best guesses, then running them through ‘natural' selection to refine them. Each generation of the program is a little better than the last.'

‘There's no way the Apple has enough oomph to do that,'
said Bob. ‘The actual program that's doing this must be running on Swan's mini.'

‘Using the Apple as its testing ground.'

‘Well, what's it trying to accomplish?' said Peri.

‘A good question,' said the Doctor. He reached over and plucked the cord out of the modem. Instantly, the characters on the screen of the Apple froze.

Bob picked up a diskette and fed it into the slot. ‘Let's do a core dump,' he said. ‘Find out what Swan was trying to do to my machine.'

The big fear about the people who break into computers is that they could bring civilisation tumbling down. They're forces of chaos, pulling the rug out from under the order we've created with our machines. Trust me, the hackers aren't going to trigger World War III. They just don't think that big, even when their philosophy tells them to screw the system before it screws them. No, what they cause are little miseries. Dumb pranks, mostly against one another. A few thousand dollars bilked from Ma Bell or the credit card companies isn't enough to blow the walls down. Oh, in theory they might be able to kill a few people by blowing away 911 or messing up a hospital's records, but even that's not enough to end life as we know it.

I couldn't believe that Swan was as dangerous as the Doctor was making out. I could see her growing fat and ugly on petty thefts, petty revenge. But she'd always be a parasite, living around the edges instead of pulling strings from the centre. Let her keep the little monster; if the Ruskies really wanted it back, or the CIA really wanted to get their paws on it, Swan would just turn up missing one day, simple as that.

That's what I was thinking on my way to the mall.

I met Swan at a coffee and pastries shop. She had a junk look about her, a pale twitch. The thing that was scraping at her mind would soon be flaking away the health of her body.

‘Tell me where the Doctor is,' she said.

‘Hold on!' I said. ‘What makes you think I know where he is?'

‘I practically walked into you when you were with his pals.'

‘But I was only interviewing them,' I bullshitted.

‘Mr Peters,' she said, ‘if you're not with me, you're against me. Is that clear?'

‘Miss Swan,' I said, ‘what's clear to me is that you're sick. I do want to help you. Let me take you to your doctor.'

Then Swan called me a name which made up my mind about her. ‘You dumb faggot,' she said. ‘Do you know how much trouble I'm going to get you in?'

I sat back in my little plastic chair and stared at her.

‘This is the biggest opportunity I've ever had,' she told me. I wasn't sure if she thought I knew everything, or if she just didn't care to explain it to me. ‘I'm sorry, but I'll break anybody to make the most of that windfall. Does your editor know the LAPD still want you for bashing your editor there?'

‘Lady,' I said, ‘I didn't bash anybody. Someone throws a punch at me, I throw it right back at them. Seem fair to you?'

‘You won't be throwing any punches at me.'

‘I won't be throwing any crumbs your way, either.'

‘Can't you guys understand?' Swan's voice was creaking. ‘I'm going to wreck you. I'm going to crush you. Anybody you like, anybody you love, I'm going to take them down too.'

‘You'll try. And we'll push back three times as hard as you push us. You don't know when you're outclassed.' I stood up. ‘'Scuse me. I've got some shopping to do.'

* * *

It only took three tries with the air gun to shoot out the
camera above Swan's doorway. I managed it easily from the sidewalk. From our little expedition into Swan's security set-up, I knew I was invisible where I stood. Through the curtains of the house next door, I could see a family eating miniature chocolate bars from a bowl and playing with a new chess machine. They took no notice of me. It gave me the creeps to be standing by their front yard with a toy gun, and them all unawares.

Swan was back at the office; I'd phoned before I'd driven out to McLean, hanging up when I heard her voice. The broken camera would warn her anyway: I didn't have long to take the obvious step of busting a window and making off with her prize.

Swan had absolutely isolated herself. She never spoke to her neighbours, she was friends with no-one at her office. She had bullied every hacker and phreak in the greater DC area, but now she couldn't trust any of them, even her old pal Luis. She couldn't even use social engineering to rustle up some support from unsuspecting technicians; Swan's style was strictly antisocial. She was on her own. That made her very safe in one way, and incredibly vulnerable in another way: she couldn't even have someone guard her house. I wrapped my hand in my pocket, and busted the window on the porch.

I had a rough map of Swan's house in my head built out of glimpses. I only wish I'd had a genie, like the Doctor's guide in the mud, to carry me straight to my goal. There wasn't a lot of light inside, but I knew the areas she was watching had to have their bulbs lit. I crept up the stairs – not an easy thing to do, when you're in a blazing hurry – and located the bathroom where Swan was keeping her prisoner.

The air gun claimed another camera as its victim. The shape in the tub didn't even flinch when I shot the lens out. It wasn't
easy to see in the dim yellowish light and behind the grubby shower curtain, but then, I wasn't looking at it too closely.

There was no putting it off. I held my breath and ripped back the slimy plastic barrier between me and the monster.

It didn't look at me, too busy with the guts of a pushbutton phone and a hand-held football video game to care. I could see its fur rippling with tiny appendages, like the legs of a caterpillar or a wormy slice of meat, keeping a firm and elegant grip on the components it was toying with.

It never looked up, but I still had an intense feeling of being watched, of being looked back at. The longer I stood there, the more intense that feeling got, as though I was the most important thing in its little echoing bath-tubby world. It was the kind of warm and important feeling you get as a kid when you're the centre of everybody's attention. All that, and it never so much as glanced at me.

The thing was about the size of a six-year-old, and as light as though it really was just a stuffed animal. When I bent and scooped it up out of the tub, it just kept right on playing with its new toys. I had expected it to be warm, but its fur was as cool as the tub it was sitting in.

I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror, holding the thing, and almost dropped it. It looked so bloody
wrong
. There isn't anything on Earth that's shaped like a Y with banana-yellow fur for fingers. If it had been a trained monkey or a mutant crocodile or even a disfigured human child it wouldn't have been so disgusting. If you've ever got a big spider, like a huntsman, on the end of a broom, only to have it run right down the handle into your hands, you know the feeling I had at that moment. I wanted to throw the thing away from me while my whole body shrugged back in the opposite direction. But that nauseating flinch was overridden by a new and
different feeling: I wanted to hold onto the thing, grip it tightly, keep it as close to me as possible.

I snuck out of the bathroom and headed for the dark stairs. Was this how Luis had felt about the monster? And now Swan? Was the monster clouding up the air around me with irresistible pheromones? Or was it doing something directly to my grey matter? The urge to toss it away rose up in me again, like the first thump in your stomach when you know you're going to chunder and nothing can stop it. But something did stop it. The ugly fear that I was being reprogrammed faded into the background, beaten by my need to get the monster somewhere safe and start feeding it breakfast cereal.

Swan met me at the bottom of the steps. I was so wrapped up in my furry armful that she just stepped out of nowhere and hit me across the back of the shoulders with a baseball bat. All my muscles stopped working for long enough that she could take hold of her alien baby and shove me back onto the uncarpeted stairs.

The thump of wooden angles into my spine seemed to break the monster's spell. Swan gripped the thing tight against her winter coat, and I had no jealousy, no urge to take it back from her. I could have got the baseball bat out of her awkward grip in a moment, but instead I just lay there, propped up on my elbows, waiting to see what she'd do next.

Swan cussed me out in no uncertain terms and added, ‘I'm going to ruin you, freak. Just ruin you.'

‘Screw you, lady.'

‘You must've realised the call at the office would warn me.'

‘I can't believe you just left it there. Not with everybody that wants it.'

‘You'd never have got it out of the house,' snorted Swan.

‘Is that right,' I said, hauling myself to my feet. I was in her
face, but she didn't so much as take a step back.

I landed back in the present again, sitting on my ass at the bottom of the stairs. Swan and her baby were gone. Every inch of me was soaked, as though I had been covered in snow and thawed out. For a paranoid moment I was sniffing my own sleeves, nervous that Swan had doused me with petrol. After a moment I realised I was covered in sweat, my hair heavy with it and glued to my face.

I had never, never been able to remember that shit before. People had told me a little about it, looking at the floor while they hinted at what had happened that afternoon. Now I had all the details in hi-fi stereo Technicolor.

I could hear Swan upstairs, cooing to her little mutant baby
in the bathtub. I disappeared out the front door, not giving a damn about cameras, and shot through.

THE DOCTOR BIT
my head off when I confessed. ‘The Savant could have done irreparable damage to your brain!' So could the angel dust, I thought, but I kept that to myself. ‘It's obviously bonded deeply with Swan. It was just beginning that process with Luis when she stole it away from him. Threatened with being snatched from her side, it responded with a mental attack. A very low-level one, happily, for your peace of mind.' That was low-level? I was there, absolutely there, as though every molecule of the event had been recorded somewhere in my body and played back like a tape. ‘Why do you imagine we simply didn't knock the door down and purloin the component? Why do you think the Eridani haven't done it themselves? No, now that the Savant has fallen into the proverbial wrong hands, we've got to handle this with the proverbial kid gloves.'

He seemed to have run out of steam. I had been sitting on the arm of my sofa through the whole speech. Now I slid down onto the cushions. My head was freezing cold after walking through the winter air with my hair full of sweat. In a few minutes I'd take a hot bath and try to forget about the whole thing.

I said, ‘I still don't get your angle, Doc.'

‘What?' he huffed.

‘What's in it for you? Besides whatever the Eridani are paying.' He sniffed at that, like it was an insult. ‘I could really
believe you'd do this even if they didn't have a red cent. For a good cause. Or just to put Swan in her place.'

‘That certainly needs doing,' he said archly. I thought of Swan's speech about the food chain. The Doctor was making a mess of the whole concept of stronger beats weaker, winner takes all. I wondered what kind of card player he was. ‘Peri was right,' sighed the Doctor. ‘In the end, this is about taking a lost child home. An enormously dangerous child.'

‘I gotta tell you – the thing looked perfectly happy with Swan to me.'

‘She simply cannot care for it,' said the Doctor. ‘No matter how slavishly devoted she may become to its needs, only the Eridani have that expertise. There may be nutrients it requires that aren't even available on Earth – it could be starving slowly to death for want of them. Its neurological development will already have been stunted by lack of contact with the rest of the components, particularly the control unit.' By now he was talking more to himself than to me. ‘No. We must restore it to the Eridani, whatever their purpose for it.'

‘Couldn't we get them to hand over the manual or something?'

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. ‘And do you fancy raising the Savant to maturity?'

I hauled myself up off the sofa. ‘The only thing I want in my bathtub right now is me.'

Swan was as good as her word. She phoned my editor at home, where he was relaxing with his wife and three kids, and told him all about my adventures in LA. She convinced him to check the news archives over his modern. He spent half an hour digging up the little news item about how I'd slugged the editor of a well-known west-coast newspaper.