Fractions (34 page)

At first, as the hits began to light up on the screens, he thought he'd made a mistake. They were finding evidence of the entity just about everywhere they went. Were they reacting to Dissembler itself? Had he made them too general?

He checked, lost in concentration.

‘What is it?' Bleibtreu-Fèvre's eyes met his as he looked up.

‘It's
replicated
!' Donovan said. ‘It's everywhere.'

Bleibtreu-Fèvre studied the screens in disbelief. ‘All of that, all those lights?'

‘All those lights,' Donovan repeated bitterly. ‘And more.'

The disruptions died down. Everything seemed to be going back to normal except for the spreading spots of light.

‘That must be what's in the net traffic,' Bleibtreu-Fèvre said.

‘Yeah,' said Donovan. ‘Right, there's no time to lose.'

He hit the launch code for the viral antigens, the savage routines bred over multiple microsecond generations in closed systems, primed to tear the rogue
AI
and its cognates into their component bytes. Little red sparks shot across the displays, tracking the antigens' progress through the global networks.

And, one by one, the red sparks went out.

Bleibtreu-Fèvre grunted. ‘It seems to be fighting back.'

Donovan marvelled again at how something that was as clear to him as an open book could be so obscure to anyone else.

‘No,' he snarled. ‘They aren't engaging, they aren't even
making contact.
Something else is trashing them first.' He stalked distractedly around the room. He hadn't felt this frustrated since he'd been a commercial programmer. ‘Bloody hell.' He clutched his head and tried to think calmly. ‘It can't be the Watchmaker entity –
entities.
They haven't had any exposure to give them a chance to evolve immunity. It's got to be something else, something that's familiar with
my
systems, my coding, my profile…'

‘Melody Lawson,' said Bleibtreu-Fèvre. As soon as he said it Donovan knew it had to be true. She'd worked with him, she'd been in the movement, she'd had years of experience of defending against his attacks…and she'd had access to his dataspaces for days. While he'd been developing specifics for the Kohns' systems, she'd been doing the same for
his
!

He couldn't blame her, really, for taking the opportunity to forearm herself against the time when the emergency was over and it was back to business as usual. Like wartime allies, spying on each other.

‘So we're all right,' he told Bleibtrue-Fèvre when he'd explained the situation. ‘We just ask her to stop, to give us a clear run at it.' He let out a shaky laugh. ‘What a relief – just for a moment there, I thought we were doomed.'

‘Absolutely not.'

Melody Lawson glared at the flickering image of Donovan, who was obviously attempting his usual disconcerting trick of jumping from one screen to another and frustrated that he was failing, held on her most secure channel like a demon in a pentagram. The little hologhost brandished a match-stick at her, then a hand came into shot and caught his shoulder. He turned away and stepped out of view, to be replaced after thirty seconds of tinnily overheard altercation by another figure.

‘Mrs Lawson,' said Bleibtreu-Fèvre in a smooth voice that affected her like a fingernail dragged down a blackboard, ‘I really must ask you to reconsider. The situation has deteriorated quite alarmingly. I assure you that to the best of my knowledge Donovan is telling the truth.'

‘I don't doubt your sincerity,' Mrs Lawson said. ‘I doubt your interpretation.'

Her doubts over Donovan's interpretation of events had grown over the past few days as her normal security work had redoubled to deal with the escalating challenge posed by the threatened terrorist offensives. She'd already admitted using her access to Donovan's resources to develop defences against his software arsenal – it had been, even before she'd got really worried, almost a reflex response. With his usual sabotage out of the way it had been relatively easy to build on her vast previous experience to construct antigen systems keyed to Donovan's distinctive fingerprint, the almost ineradicable impress of the personality on the program which now-standard protocols (developed originally to identify the authorship of biblical texts) could detect, and (again ironically) use a genetic algorithm to select their best match in the test of combat, replicate from it, go on from there…

What she was reluctant to admit was that her own freedom of action was severely curtailed. The general increase in paranoia within the enclave made it difficult for her to know just who might be watching her. Her own dubious past as a member of Donovan's organization had never been held against her, but it was always there to be used if heads had to roll.

She'd responded to the chaos of the afternoon by throwing all of her newly developed search-and-destroy programs into the networks. When they'd had no effect she hadn't lost confidence in them: she'd taken it as clear evidence that Donovan had no hand in the epidemic of system crashes.

And now her programs had proved themselves! Against Donovan's best!

‘I'm not about to throw away a position so advantageous to my community, to say nothing of society in general,' she told Bleibtreu-Fèvre, ‘on the strength of a scare story about
AIS
having taken over the world while we weren't looking. I find it very suspect that this should have happened at the same time as various terrorist forces are obviously gearing up for an assault on their respective governments. I'd suggest that this, and the countermeasures, are more than enough to account for the increase in the net traffic and for our current difficulties. And I don't propose to add to them by unleashing Donovan's monsters again. I will
certainly
not contemplate risking damage to Dissembler. Good grief, man! You're asking me to commit a capital crime.'

For a moment Bleibtreu-Fèvre seemed about to follow Donovan's example and fly into a cult-leader rage, but then he relaxed into a calm that was (but of course) almost unnatural.

‘We find ourselves at an impasse,' he said. ‘However, I must say that, if I were you, I wouldn't worry about what your local authority might think of your actions. They may be overthrown in a matter of days, perhaps hours.'

‘Since when,' she asked scornfully, ‘has that been a consideration?'

Bleibtreu-Fèvre didn't register that she was responding to an insult. ‘Very well,' he said. ‘In the very near future, in those hours or days, one of two things will happen. Either Space Defense will destroy the datasphere or the datasphere will pass beyond human control. When the bombs fall or the Watchmaker's descendants come out of the walls, death may be the best you can pray for. I shall continue to assist Donovan. Contact us if you change your mind. Goodbye.'

click

Melody Lawson stared at the vacant space for a long moment. She was shaken by the Stasis operative's conviction, but now that it came to the bit, now that she had to choose between her duty and his story, she just didn't believe it. She distrusted the
US/UN
agencies, she disapproved of enhanced humans on principle, and the whole Watchmaker rumour was so apocalyptic that she had difficulty crediting it could really happen in her own lifetime. She knew this was exactly how people would feel just before the real apocalypse, that nearly everyone who'd faced some intrusive threat to their everyday existence – war, revolution, genocide, purges, disaster – had faced it with the firm conviction that things like this just didn't happen or didn't happen here or didn't happen to people like them. But she also knew there would be no end of false alarms, lying wonders, false prophets with a Lo! here and a Hi! there, before whatever the real thing was came along. Indeed, they were part of the reason why the real thing always came like a thief in the night or (to update the simile a couple of millenia) like a secret policeman in the early hours of the morning.

The only way out, apart from blind faith (an option she discarded with an alacrity that would have dismayed her pastor), was to go by the best available evidence, the most economical interpretation of the data. It all pointed to a terrorist offensive; and the probability that she'd been drawn into some elaborate scam perpetrated by God-knew-what faction in the global security forces outweighed that of the emergence of electronic intelligence.

Terrorist offensive…that was coming all right, and Beulah City was well prepared for it: Warriors mobilized, aerospace defences on full alert, electronic countermeasures beating through the networks like radar beams. One particularly gratifying side-effect of Donovan's retreat was that it had enabled her to sweep the
ANR
's Black Plan routines out of Beulah City's hardware for the third time in ten years. Putting a stop to that had been worth the embarrassment of finding out what the rebels had been getting away with.

Let Bleibtreu-Fèvre worry about
AIS
. She just hoped to God she never found herself standing before a Commission of Inquiry into the Recent Insurrection and late Disturbances of the King's Peace, Etc., talking about offshore accounts.

 

Jordan jumped as cool fingers slid across his ears and eyes and lifted the glades and phones away. His cheek brushed Cat's as she reached over his shoulders and disengaged his hands from the datagloves.

‘What—?'

‘Hey,' she said. ‘Easy. It's done.'

She skipped back as he sat up and spun the chair around.

‘What's done?' He didn't mean to sound irascible. The comms room was empty, its air jelled with cigarette smoke. Cat stood, backlit from the doorway, the outline of her body plain, her face in shadow. He felt confused, disoriented as if wakened from a dream, his mouth sticky.

‘Everything that can be done,' Cat said. ‘You've been in the system for hours, since the crashes stopped.'

Jordan glanced at the clock icon: 24.03.

‘That's the time?'

‘Yeah,' Cat said. ‘You were hooked. You were lost in it.'

‘Duh.' Jordan shook his head and stood up. ‘There's just some things to—'

‘No,' Cat said firmly. ‘Come on. There's nothing left to do. It's done, all that you can do. Leave the rest to the goddess.' He could hear in her voice that she was smiling. ‘It's Her job.'

She turned away and he followed her through to the long room. Nobody was about, not even the children.

‘Where is everybody?'

‘Sleep of the just, or out on active,' Catherin said from the corner. She reached into one of the bags she'd left and pulled out a bottle of Glenmorangie.

‘Where d'you get that?' It was a controlled-zone product, embargoed.

‘Don't ask,' Catherin said, looking in a cupboard she couldn't have seen for two years and emerging with a brace of fine heavy glasses. ‘Drink.'

He sat on the couch and she brought over a small table for the whisky and water and sat leaning against the arm at the opposite end.

‘Cheers.'

‘
Slainte
,' Cat said.

The drink was welcome. Too welcome: it was dangerous to drink whisky for thirst. Jordan reached for the water bottle and drank half of it, then took another sip of whisky.

‘Yeah,' he said. ‘Yeah, it's all in the hands of the goddess now. What a day.' He closed his eyes for a moment and saw the peculiar aftereffect of looking at the same kind of thing for hours on end. Not exactly an afterimage: it came from something deeper than the retina, perhaps the visual system still firing at random, replaying monochrome images of what you'd been seeing – in this instance faces, scrolling text, tunnels in dataspace, the choppy seas of the market.

He opened his eyes and Cat's shining image flooded and filled his sight, more welcome than water.

‘What have you been doing today?' he asked.

Cat smiled. ‘Didn't you see?' She laughed. ‘You couldn't. I've been running myself ragged, telling the comrades what to do. Not my strong point. I'm more used to what we call the “foot-soldier praxis”.'

Jordan said awkwardly: ‘Yeah, I know. I saw your bio when I was trying to track you down. Uh, hope you don't mind—'

Cat dismissed it with an airy wave of the hand. ‘Course not. It's my
CV
!'

‘It's impressive,' Jordan said. ‘An irregular soldier of the revolution.'

‘That's me…and a mercenary at that.' She chuckled. ‘Goddess, what a world! Even the revolution is privatized…It was Moh who got me into that. Before I bumped into him' – she smiled to herself, looking away somewhere – ‘literally, as it happens – I was just doing it out of the goodness of my heart. Or something.' She looked around the room. ‘Yeah, I had some great times here.'

Jordan nerved himself to ask, ‘Why did you leave?'