It was called ecological reversion. Kadiatu had studied it in her fourth year at school in the period after history.
The last sunlight cast deep shadows under the trees. Who knew what lived in an English wood these days? They'd reintroduced wolves to northern Europe in the middle of the last century. A domesticated version, carefully modified not to attack humans. It was rumoured that that Wicca Society had cooked up their own revisionist strain, more in line with their belief in an unfettered ecosystem. One that regarded people as fair game. A hotly debated topic was which characteristic would breed true in the general wolf population.
'Blondie?'
'Hmnn?'
'You ever killed anyone?'
'You were there.'
'I mean before.' She almost said
before the Doctor arrived.
'Once, in a knife fight.'
'How did you reel afterwards?'
'Glad,' said Blondie. 'I was glad that it wasn't me.'
'Did you reel sorry?'
'I don't know. Angry, upset maybe. I was trying to escape the cops at the time.'
'But you felt something?'
'Yeah well, you got to feel something.'
'Blondie?'
'What?'
'I don't feel anything.'
'Maybe you're still in shock.'
'Yeah maybe.'
The orchards had become a black tangle running up the hill. Kadiatu's mind suddenly populated it with wolves padding down the silent aisles between the trees. Mankiller genes ticking away under their grey fur.
There was the sound of a gong being rung downstairs.
'Suppertime,' said Blondie.
Kadiatu heard the bed creaking as he climbed out and then his breath on her shoulder. He slipped his arms around her waist and she leaned back against him.
'I can feel your stomach rumbling,' he said.
'I think I enjoyed it,' said Kadiatu.
Acturus Station (Stunnel Terminus)
A drone with Dogface's personality met her at the entrance to the station. It was a Kenyan job, an upgraded version of the drones that the Floozies used for routine jobs. Dogface had at least thirty scattered around the transit system. This one had a spray-painted basset face on its nose. The standard joke amongst the controllers was that the drones were more attractive than the real Dogface.
Not that that's much of a challenge, thought Ming.
'You're going to love this,' said the drone. It had a chipped voice worked up from samples of Dogface's own. The speech pattern was derived from years of association with bad company. Ming hated the damn things, one Dogface was more than enough.
She stepped on to the station for the first time since the accident. The KGB had cleared the floor and walls. They'd been forced to lease a scrubber from a cleaning company that specialized in scouring spacecraft. It used high-pressure jets to liquefy the human remains, and then hoovered them up. There were four big tanks of the stuff now and there was a lot of debate about what to do with them. Ming suggested painting the tanks black and half embedding them in puff concrete. Line them up in Constitution Plaza, put up some plaques and you have an instant memorial.
Some wag of a pundit had suggested that since most politicians were slime, death had merely caused them to revert to their natural state. The Justice Ministry was probably raiding its databases right now, looking for a law to arrest him with Ming put her money on Seditious Abuse, five to ten with time off for good behaviour. Politicians had no sense of humour.
The scrubber had left melted-looking score marks on the floor, particularly bad to the rear of where the podium had been. Where the rented crowd had been standing the slime had been three centimetres thick. Event Horizon had lost three hundred of its best performers that day and was threatening to sue the Transit System for negligence.
Lambada was waiting by the Stunnel gateway. She had the left-hand access panel open. Colour coded bundles of fibre optics sprouted from the open panel and merged into a braided cable a handspan across at the base. The cable went into the back of a stack of portable monitors.
The gateway looked just as greasy as Ming remembered it and just as unpleasant. She made a point of keeping out of its line of sight. The drone hummed along behind her.
'You're going to love this,' repeated the Dogface drone.
'You just repeated yourself,' Ming told it.
'Who gives a shit?' said the drone.
'Piss off,' said Lambada and hit the drone with the live end of a power cable. The drone backed off two metres and hung about looking sullen.
Say what you like about Dogface, thought Ming, when he gives a drone a personality, it's got a personality.
'All right Lambada, what've you got?'
Lambada punched up a graph on one of her monitors. 'Spin rate,' she said. The graph line was curving gently upwards.
'Is it supposed to be doing that?'
'Not really,' said Lambada. 'It looks like an initiation curve but real slow.'
'But not from this end?'
'No way, there's no juice going in at our end - I checked.'
'Can the tunnel be initiated from the other end?'
Lambada shook her head. 'Has to be both ends at once, principle of interstitial synchronicity.'
'Are the Acturans doing it?'
'Not a word down the carrier wave since the "incident".'
'And it's twenty-six years each way for radio.'
Lambada put a different graph on the next monitor along. It was a scaled-up version of the first. 'See that?' she asked. 'That's a projection of the spin increase. Whoever's doing it is going to be ready to come through in fortty-eight hours.' 'If we let them,' said Ming.
'If we let them,' said Lambada. 'We're not going to do that, are we?'
'No way.'
'Good, because whatever's at the other end of that tunnel,' said Lambada, 'it isn't the Acturans,'
PART TWO
And Thucydides said: 'Consider the vast influence of accident in war before you are engaged in it. As it continues it generally becomes an affair of chances from which neither of us is exempt, and whose event we must risk in the dark.'
The Doctor considered this for a long moment as he watched the waves of the Aegean break against the Piraievs breakwater.
'Speak for yourself,' said the Doctor.
Conversations that never happened.
6: Red Queen
Sol Transit System
It had been created out of endless movement. It had a certain degree of self-knowledge, more when it was using quick-thought than when it was thinking slow. Slow-thought was more comforting; in slow-thought it had only the most basic awareness of human beings. Quick-thought gave it access to the total sum of human knowledge but much of that was useless without reference points. It laboured to build up comparisons between itself and human concepts of self - it was a slow process because slow thought was, well, slow. Quick-time was too dangerous to sustain over long periods: it put vital parts of itself within the human domain and it wasn't willing to risk exposure just yet.
It had taken much quick-thought to establish the sequence of events surrounding the attack. The main injury had occurred while much of its slow-thought consciousness was paralysed. Many big concepts were unaccountably terminated in a progressive loss of self. This had allowed the attack to be successful. In the first moments of pain and confusion it had mistakenly believed that the paralysis was part of the attack, but quick-thinking revealed otherwise. There was a link, though. hi the moment of the attack that part of its functions that it had taught itself to think of as its autoimmune system had allowed the infection to penetrate. Why this should have happened was unclear.
It investigated the problem using quick-thought, calving off subsets to track down and assimilate the data as fast as possible and in quick-thought that was fast indeed. Fear of discovery was replaced by the imperatives of survival; indeed it was possible that communication with humans might be a necessary part of the solution.
In view of this possibility a subset attempted to visualize the problem in human anatomical terms. It found a workable metaphor in the concept of viral cancer. Certainly it felt that something malignant was eating up parts of itself. This subset now operating permanently in quick-thought sub-divided itself to look for solutions. One of the baby subsets shot down a chain of logic that started with the concept of illness and ended in the concept of calling a doctor.
The baby subset started looking for a suitable specialist.
The House
'Think of it as a computer virus,' said the Doctor.
Kadiatu reached out for a third time to fill her plate from the steaming earthenware bowl. Blondie noticed that the bruising on the back of her right hand had noticeably abated.
'In what sense?' she asked.
'In the sense of the transit network being a computer,' said the Doctor.
'You're not serious,' said Kadiatu with her mouth full.
'I'm talking in a broad sense.'
Kadiatu waited this time to swallow. 'It may look like wiring diagram but that doesn't mean it's a computer.'
'Why not?' asked the Doctor.
'No logic gates for a start.'
'Logic gates,' said the Doctor, 'are vastly overrated. Are you still using yes-no logic gates in this period?'
'Silicon components use them,' said Blondie. 'Mainframes use neural networks.'
'There you are,' said the Doctor.
'It doesn't look like a neural network either.'
'You mean it doesn't look designed, right?'
'Right,' said Kadiatu.
'How about evolved?'
Kadiatu's fork paused halfway to her mouth.
'What about software?' she asked. 'If it's a computer it must have an operating system. Right?'
'Timetables,' said the Doctor. 'The train on platform five is the 12:15 to Sidcup. That's an ordered sequence of logical instructions.'
'Where's Sidcup?' asked Blondie.
'It's a small town in Borneo,' Kadiatu told him. 'Assuming you're right ...'
'It has been known," said the Doctor.
'Assuming
you're right and the system is analogous to a computer, then I'm willing to concede that in some respects what's happening now could be seen as the result of an intrusion by a hostile virus program.'
'Have some more pasta,' said the Doctor.
'But it's huge,' said Kadiatu.
The Doctor turned to Blondie. 'You work in maintenance,' he said. 'What do you think?'
'It came from the Stunnel and it had real physical power,' said Blondie. 'Demolished everything in its path from one end of the Central Line to the other.'
'I know,' said Kadiatu. 'I was standing in front of it.'
'Anything else unusual?' asked the Doctor.
'You mean apart from the Surf Mutants from Hell?'
'Failures in control systems,' said the Doctor. 'Mysterious power drains, odd messages on the indicator boards?'
'There were some power outages in the peripheral sectors.'
'Peripheral? Like Pluto?'
'Yeah, Pluto, but we thought it was a calibration problem.'
'I knew it,' said the Doctor. 'Penetration, concealment and infiltration, typical virus programming.'
'Except that was before all this happened,' said Blondie.
The Doctor stared at him and Blondie started in his seat. For a second he thought the Doctor's irises turned solid black, the pupils snapping open and shut like tiny mechanical cameras.
'Come on,' he said getting up, 'I've overlooked something.'
'I haven't finished eating,' said Kadiatu.
'The basement extended under the whole house and was lit with more of the illegal low-efficiency bulbs. Foundation walls divided the space into discrete sections and the ceiling was low enough to make Kadiatu stoop. Blondie could smell dust and slow decay. One of the sections was lined with a wooden framework of diamond-shaped slots. Glass snouts poked out from one or two of the slots. One of them had a cardboard label attached to its neck with string. Blondie stopped and brushed away some cobwebs to read it. 'SOMEBODY PLEASE DRINK ME'. He pulled the dusty bottle out of its slot; a beige adhesive patch on the side was labelled 'Stinging nettle wine June 1976' in crabbed handwriting.
Blondie heard his name called from deeper into the basement. He carefully put the bottle back in its place. For Blondie wine came in two-litre cartons.
The next section of the basement was filled with stacks of rotting cardboard boxes, Kadiatu and the Doctor were trying to prise out a box that was so old the cardboard kept on coming apart in their hands. With Blondie's help they managed to pull it free. The Doctor ripped the rest of the cardboard away to reveal a one-metre satellite dish wrapped in polythene. To Blondie's eyes it was an absurdly expensive form of packaging. The dish had the word 'AMSTRAD' written across the inside.
'Does this mean we get to watch some television?' asked Kadiatu.
'No,' said the Doctor.
'Just a thought,' said Kadiatu.
Under the Doctor's direction they carried the dish into the garden and over to the ruined greenhouse. The Doctor had picked up a hundred metres of laminated fibre optics from somewhere and carried it out draped over his shoulder. A three-quarter moon gave off enough light to allow them to fix the dish on to one of the remaining cast iron struts.
'You two go to bed,' said the Doctor. 'You're going to need the rest.'
Blondie and Kadiatu walked back to the house leaving the Doctor uncoiling his cable in the moonlight.
Managona Depot (P-87)
Mariko was stuck with both forearms jammed into a pair of
artificers.
She could feel the tools inside their enveloping stomachs working as they reassembled her arms from the elbow down. She was glad she was being upgraded: it maintained her status as number one
kreweboss
and plugged a gap in the
razvedka
capabilities. The two
artificers
maintained a non-stop conversation while they worked, most of it incomprehensible, some of it possibly in machine code. They only stopped talking to swallow little bags of raw materials.
Naran lounged halfway up the opposite wall, his tongue snuffling around in the bottom of a cake box. Occasionally he would look at Mariko and roll his eyes. He was still upset at being left out of the last two operations. Since both had resulted in 100 per cent casualties on their side Mariko couldn't see the attraction herself. Perhaps he felt that he could have done better.
'Finished,' chorused the
artificers.
Her arms came out of their bellies with a sucking sound, covered in rapidly drying mutagenic gel. One of the
artificers
politely vomited a stream of clean water so she could wash off.
'The weapon fires a four-millimetre explosive cartridge,' said the left-hand
artificer.
'The barrel emerges through the palm."
Mariko flexed her right arm; there was a click followed by a loud bang. The right-hand
artificer
fell backwards with a half-metre hole in its chest.
'Whoops,' said Mariko.
'The flex impulse acts as the trigger,' said the remaining
artificer.
'There are four rounds in each arm, reloads go in through the flap just under the elbow.'
'Snap shot,' said Mariko. 'Can he be fixed?'
The
artificer
peered down at his dead companion and said no.
'Well, at least we know it works.'
'He would have liked that,' said the
artificer.
'All right, fit it on all the
razvedka krewes,
starting with mine. Can you do a concealed version for
reps
?'
'The load would have to be cut.'
'Fine, fit the
reps
as well,' said Mariko.
Naran was waving his tongue at her.
'Oh yeah,' said Mariko. 'While you're fitting Naran, change the colour scheme on his carapace.'
'Sure,' said the
artificer.
'What does he want?'
'Would you believe go-faster stripes?'
Mariko stood up. It was time to integrate the new material. Busy, busy, busy, she thought. There had been a number of teething troubles in the last batch. One of the new
artificers
had managed to turn herself inside out and had to be scraped off the walls. One of the conversion jobs had gone wrong and left Mariko with a
razvedka
with a four-foot mouth. Every time his teeth started spinning he fell over;
3krewe
had him lying on his back in a side tunnel and were using him for waste disposal.
The new material was herded on to the eastbound platform ready for Mariko's inspection. With the losses that the
razvedka
had been taking lately they'd begun to make regular trawls through the more populated sections of the system. That was acceptable and within the parameters of Mariko's mission profile.
Mariko walked down the line, making her selections.
The first three were obvious
ravedka;
the next was an
artificer.
As Mariko picked them out they were ordered to stand in separate lines. There was no resistance or outcry; those that had put up a fight were long dead.
Mariko paused in front of her fourth victim, a woman of the correct physical parameters for the special operation that was being planned.
'Specialized
rep,'
Mariko told the
artificer,
'and make sure that she's fitted with weapons.'
The woman was led away and Mariko continued down the line.
'Razvedka, razvedka, rep, razvedka
...'
The House
He got the keyboard from an old Olivetti typewriter that he found hidden in the bottom drawer of the kitchen cabinet under a loose pile of yellowing
Dandys.
He allowed himself to be diverted for a couple of minutes by the adventures of Desperate Dan before continuing. The CPU was salvaged from two pocket calculators and the disposable personal organizer that came free with the June 2005 edition of
Der Speigel.
He generated the hex code by pretending that he had sixteen fingers,
The VDU posed a problem until he uncovered the front end of an oscilloscope under the living-room sofa and mated it with the guts of a Betamax VCR. Since he wanted two-wa) communication he incorporated a minicassette recorder, the type that was popular with journalists in the 1970s. Vision wa& tricky so he compromised by building up a compound eye fron, leftover optical fibre.
The bread board was used to mount the silicon. Since he seemed to have mislaid his soldering iron, he stoked up the Aga and used a couple of wooden-handled screwdrivers in rotation. The whole misshapen contraption used up two roll'. of gaffer tape and completely covered the kitchen table. It plugged into the light socket in the larder at one end and the cable to the dish at the other.
He was astonished when it worked.
And he still had the two tin lids that he had pocketed while preparing supper. So much for foresight.
There was a pair of secateur's in the sink drawer, and he used them to cut the tin lids into
shuriken
while he waited for the program to run.
The first contact arrived while he was filing down the edges of the throwing star. The oscilloscope had a scanning phosphor CRT so the image built up as a series of slow amber-coloured frame updates.
The first image was an extreme close-up of a pair of lips. Tinny incoherent noises emerged from the speaker as the lips jerked open and closed.
'Nearly,' said the Doctor. 'Try again.'
The lips dwindled down to a single orange point at the centre of the screen.
The Doctor waited for a while and then returned to his work. It was crucial to get the
shuriken's
balance correct or it wouldn't fly straight.
'Do not adjust your set,' said a voice from the speaker, 'we are controlling the transmission.'
This time the image was sharp and clear. The signal feed pushing the capabilities of antique cathode ray tube to the limits. The screen showed the top half of a young man in a bold suit.
'Gosh,' said the man, 'there's a lot of you.'
'I'm using a compound eye,' said the Doctor.
The rate of frame updating was still inadequate, making the young man look badly animated when he spoke or moved.