He frowned. “But to do
what
?”
Monique shrugged. “Don’t ask me, Avi, I’m an amateur,” she said. But then an obvious and unsettling thought
did
pass through her mind. “Unless . . .”
“You have
another
unless?” Posner asked avidly.
“Unless the Marenkos were prompting Davinda for confirmation of something he’s
already
done,” Monique told him.
“Already done? Like what?”
“What’s all of this been leading up to?” Monique said. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“The demonstration of Davinda’s climate model. . . .”
Monique nodded.
“
There’s
your Siberian mole, Avi,” she said. “Not John Sri Davinda,
his climate model
.”
“Merde!” Posner exclaimed, whacking his forehead quite hard with the heel of his hand.
And then he actually reached across the table, grabbed her hand, and kissed it.
Eric Esterhazy had never pondered the technical prowess of his syndic beyond his appreciation of its manifestation in Ignatz, had never even imagined that Bad Boys maintained facilities like this or that there were citizen-shareholders who worked in white lab coats.
But when he had informed Eduardo Ramirez of what he had apparently
not
seen in the Davinda climate model computer, Eduardo had not been satisfied by his inexpert verbal report or even the confirmation by an experienced Mossad operative.
“It wouldn’t have been possible to slip inside with a camera,” Eric had pointed out.
“Yes and no,” Eduardo had replied enigmatically, and Eric had found himself being whisked out here into the suburbs northeast of Paris in Eduardo’s limo.
Here
being a little late-twentieth-century faux-Bauhaus factory building indistinguishable from the half-dozen other such rusty aluminum and faded glass boxes in a crumbling so-called industrial park inside the chain-link fence of which not so much as a blade of grass was evident.
The sign on the side of this “factory” read
BOUTIQUE SPECTRE, S.A.
, and it double-took Eric a few moments to get the joke, which, like the operation, was hidden in plain sight, “Boutique Spectre” being an awkward literal French translation of “Spook Shop,” the initials of which, appropriately enough, were generally understood to indicate “bullshit” in English.
Eduardo pressed a buzzer at the outer door. What had appeared to be a simple old digicode pad slid upward and a peeper extruded itself. Eduardo looked into the eyepieces for a moment. The peeper retreated, the panel slid shut, and a minute or two later the door
opened and they were met by a gray-haired black woman in a white lab coat.
“Monsieur Ramirez . . .”
“Dr. Duvond . . .”
No further greetings, no introduction, as Dr. Duvond led them down a series of climatized pastel-green corridors far cleaner than the grimy exterior past mostly closed and peeper-locked doors to one that seemed no different than the others.
If the inside of the Davinda climate model enclosure had disappointed Eric in terms of proper mad scientist decor, this room went a ways toward making up for it.
There was a wall of slick-looking computer equipment. There was a cabinet full of glass vials and syringes and an autoclave. There was what looked unsettlingly like an operating table surrounded by electroencephalography gear, gas tank with face mask, some kind of virtually helmet, a large video monitor, though at least no surgical instruments were in evidence.
There were two male technicians in the room—or doctors, or nurses, or whatever they were—and Dr. Duvond didn’t bother to introduce them to Eric either.
“You will now please lie down supine on the table, Prince Esterhazy,” she said instead. “No need to undress.”
“How kind of you,” Eric smarmed, then turned to Eduardo. “
Now
would you mind telling me what’s going on?”
“There’s a twentieth-century literary work called
I Am a Camera
,” Eduardo said. He laughed. “Well you have been.”
“We all are,” Duvond said. “Human visual memories, like all memories, are, after all, stored in the meatware of the brain. Much the same technology that allows us to use rat brains as processing and storage components allows us to read them.”
“But those are
polymerized
brains!” Eric protested. “You have to
kill
the animal to use them, don’t you?”
“Only to use a mammalian brain as a RAM chip,” Duvond told him. “But using it as ROM, as read-only memory, is a physiologically and psychologically nondestructive process. It’s not like using your brain as a processing unit. It’s simply the reverse of using computer
input to generate a virtual reality sensorium in the brain in question. No need to remove it from the body. No danger of cerebral overload because your brain isn’t installed as a circuit component. We’ve tested this device with living rats, even dogs, and the personalities of the animals survive with no significant observable deterioration. To the extent they may be said to have personalities.”
“
I
am not a rodent or a dog, Dr. Duvond, perhaps you’ve noticed?”
“But I do believe you are a mammal,” Duvond said, “and the operating system is not species-specific.”
If this was some sort of dim medical humor, Eric did not at all appreciate it.
“Lie down, please,” Duvond repeated impatiently. “I assure you, this will not be significantly unpleasant.”
“
Significantly
?” said Eric. But he bowed to the inevitable.
As one of the technicians went around turning things on, the other went to the medicine cabinet, extracted a vial of something, and, thankfully, loaded it into a pneumatic injector rather than some hideous old hypodermic needle, so that it was painless when he injected whatever it was into the pit of Eric’s left elbow.
Duvond then fitted the “virtuality helmet” over Eric’s head. But there were no visuals, 3D or otherwise, just complete blackness and the feeling of a wire mesh pressed close against his skull. Then another painless injection.
After a few moments, Eric felt his bodily sensations beginning to dwindle, a sense of his flesh dissolving. He tried to say something, but the muscles of his mouth and tongue didn’t seem to be working.
“Don’t worry, Prince Esterhazy,” said a disembodied voice that began to fade away even as it spoke, “we’re merely putting your non-visual sensory and non-autonomic motor functions off-line the better to . . .”
Then silence.
Darkness.
Panic.
And not a damn thing he could do about it. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t feel. All he could do was think.
And what he was thinking was that this must be what it would
be like to be a disembodied human brain installed in a computer. This was what it would be like to be one of the rat brains in Ignatz if the polymerized brain of a rodent had sufficient consciousness to ponder its horrid condition.
Wrong.
Not quite.
That, he learned a few moments later, had been the
resting state
of computer brainware, for then he was “booted up.”
Suddenly the darkness was flooded with silent visual images. Flashing before him with unnatural washed-out brightness, faster than his consciousness could assimilate, in no coherent order, as if a lifetime of visual memories had been transferred to old-fashioned celluloid film, cut into individual frames, shuffled like a deck of cards, and then blasted into his eyeballs with a laser-driven stroboscope.
On and on and on it went until—
—he was looking through a ventilation grille at boards of solid-state circuitry—
The image froze.
It grew larger and larger, as if he were a zoom lens on a camera, until it faded away into an indistinctness the reverse of video pixelation—
—then the image-strobing began again and—
—froze on the interior of a green canvas enclosure lit by overhead halogens—
—became jerky slow motion as he moved into the enclosure, looking around, which—
—froze on the computer console, zoomed in—
—to a slow motion pan, which became normal motion, which became high-speed stop motion, as he scanned standard video screen, microphone, speakers, chairs—
—and froze on the “virtuality arcade lounger.” Zoomed in. Moved along it in extreme slow motion up its length to the helmet-hood on its flexible stalk—
—pulled back to a still image of the hood itself—
—zoomed in and in and in until the image lost detail and definition. Repeated the process from different angles on different parts
of the hood four times: the surface, the stalk, a part of the interior which seemed to be a mosaic of tiny blunt metal pins, another part of the surface—
—more speeded-up motion as he skittered randomly about the enclosure—
—freezing on an image of the rack of sat-link and assorted other electronic components—
—panning across it in the medium distance very slowly, freezing to zoom in on every component before continuing, pan, freeze, zoom, pan, freeze, zoom, pan, freeze, zoom . . .
—a sudden blindingly fast shuffle of the whole sequence backward to the virtuality lounger—
—the pan along it again, this time in agonizingly slow motion, seeming to stop every few centimeters for a zoom—
—the same tedious process applied to the hood alone—
—and reversed—
—and again—
—and reversed—
—and again—
—freezing on the interior of the hood. Zooming in on the field of blunt metal pins that seemed to line its interior. Zooming in further and further into a vista of dull gray dots dissolving into grayness itself . . .
Suddenly becoming blackness. Nothingness.
Into which faraway voices began to blissfully intrude . . .
“. . . to him now . . .”
“. . . not unlike this equipment . . .”
And slowly Eric felt bodily sensations returning . . .
The first of which were a pounding headache and a queasy greenness in his guts.
“It’s your theory, and you deserve to take the credit for it directly,” Avi Posner told Monique Calhoun. “But security must be maintained, and you have no need to know.”
Or desire, Monique Calhoun thought.
It was the most bizarre communications setup she had ever experienced. She and Posner sat side by side in the so-called living room
of his so-called apartment. Each of them had a voice-only telephone handset. The phones were plugged through the computer in some arcane manner which allowed Posner to speak and hear but Monique only to speak.
Monique would be able to speak directly to Posner’s nebulous contact with “the client” without hearing the “contact’s” voice even through a distortion algorithm.
Posner hit a function key on which a telephone number was stored. The phone apparently rang on the other end, but Monique couldn’t hear it. Someone had apparently picked up because Posner started speaking into his phone.
“Posner, Avi, shalom,” he said flatly, as if identifying himself to voice-recognition circuitry, which he probably was.
A long minute or two of silence as Posner listened to something obviously not to his liking.
“Yes, yes . . .”
Silence.
“Well Calhoun has come up with a theory that makes sense to me . . .”
A short beat of silence.
“Of course!”
More silence.
“You had better listen to what she has to say!”
A shorter silence.
“
Of course
send only! What kind of rank amateur do you think you’re dealing with?”
Silence.
“Then hire another syndic, damn it!”
A very short beat of silence.
“All right then . . .”
Posner glanced at Monique, nodded.
“What am I supposed to do?” Monique asked.
“Just speak into the phone. Tell . . . them what you told me.”
“I believe I’ve figured out the . . . ah general nature of the . . . operation against . . . you under the designation Lao . . . ” Monique said, and paused for the reaction, as she naturally would have at this point in any conversation she had ever had, live or electronic.
But of course there wasn’t any. Except for Avi Posner impatiently waving his hand for her to go on.
“Since there is . . . uh . . . strong reason to believe that it’s . . . uh . . . a Siberian operation targeting John Sri Davinda, and . . . er . . . or his climate model, and . . . ah . . . since . . . the climate model is already completed and in place in the computer . . .”
Monique paused, covered the mouthpiece with her hand. How was she supposed to do this without any feedback at all? How could she even know there was anyone on the other end of the phone?
“How am I doing, Avi?” she whispered.
“Go, go, go!”
Monique spit it out quickly, anything to get this over with. “So Davinda or his climate model or both can’t be the
targets
of the operation, they have to be
part
of it. He’s got to be, what do you call it . . . ?”