Paradigm (24 page)

“You’re lucky I agreed to see you,” snarled Matheson. “This is hardly business hours.”

“Well, my dear doctor, if you actually conducted yourselves like a business, it wouldn’t have been necessary,” cooed Bast.

“What do you mean by that?”

“It is very difficult to embark on negotiations with a company that isn’t even connected to Mutha. So here I am. I’m rather busy at the moment, I’m afraid. This was the only time I could squeeze you in.”

“Negotiations? What dealings could we possibly have with…with a
mercenary
?” Matheson spat out the word like it was the worst kind of obscenity.

Sam couldn’t see Bast’s face, but he knew she’d be smiling. It would take more than some suit behind a desk to faze her.

“I’m here to discuss the Paradigm Device.”

The words seemed to suck all the air out of the room. It was as if the whole scene were frozen in aspic, a recreation of something for a museum some time in the distant future when “offices” had long since ceased to exist.

“I said—”

“I heard you!” snapped Matheson. “It was destroyed.”

“Destroyed?”

“Yes. There. That’s an end to it. You can go back to your little war now.”

Sam felt almost sorry for Matheson. The doctor might be the biggest wig in his world, but he had almost certainly never had to deal with anyone quite as reptilian as Carolyn Bast.

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken, doctor. It was not destroyed. It was hidden, and now it is found.”

“What?”

“I have the Paradigm Device.”

Sam was almost as stunned as Matheson. How could she have it? It was in the trunk of the GTO!

“But…How do you know about it?” Matheson was genuinely shocked. “The whole project was—”

“Secret. Yes, I am aware of that,” said Bast, in a tone most people would use for discussing dinner plans. “As you pointed out so…energetically, my company is in the business of providing services for money. The box was acquired for a client.”

“Who?”

“I am not at liberty to say.”

Matheson stared at her for a moment, then leaned back in his chair and chuckled. Sam could almost feel the smirk as the doctor spoke.

“Well, Commander, I’m afraid your client will be disappointed. The Paradigm Device doesn’t work. Never did.”

“On the contrary. It does work. Well, to a point. I’d like you to meet my associate, Mr. Hamut.”

“
Watch this, Sam,”
whispered the voice in his head, gleefully.
“It’s going to be good.”

“Hello, Robert,” said Hamut. “Long time no see.”

Sam’s mouth fell open. It was the same voice! The voice in his head belonged to the man in the room.

“Long time? I’ve never met you before in my life!” Matheson sat up and stared at Hamut. “Is this some kind of joke?”

“Not at all,” said Hamut. “You were a little young when we last met, though. It was your father I had dealings with.”

“My…father? But you’re not old enough to…to…Oh, my God.”

Hamut looked up at the grate in the ceiling and smiled at Sam.

“You flatter me,” he said, turning back to Matheson. But this time his voice sounded odd, as if he’d suddenly developed a sore throat.

“See you soon, Sam!”
said the voice.

“How did you—” began Matheson, but before he could complete his sentence, Hamut made a gurgling sound and crumpled to the floor, his body racked with seizures.

Sam watched with horror as the man’s eyes rolled back into his head and bloody foam bubbled out of his mouth, ears and nose. In a few moments he was dead, and the buzzing and headache were gone.

“Sorry about the mess,” said Bast, calmly. “But you understand that I had to make a point. I know exactly what you were doing and I have the ability to replicate your work precisely.”

“But…but…you can see. It didn’t work.” Matheson’s voice sounded suddenly hollow.

“Yes. It seems it’s too much for the human brain to take,” said Bast. “They generally last about thirty-six hours. But you didn’t leave it at that, did you?”

“I don’t know what you—”

“Doctor Matheson,” said Bast, leaning forward. She was clearly beginning to lose patience with the blustering fool. “This is the sixth man I have tested your little device on. Thirty-six hours may not be long, but it is more than enough time to discover
exactly
what your company was up to, and to learn that you found a solution. I want a locule.”

Alma glanced sharply at Sam.

“We don’t have one,” said Matheson.

“I know HIR made it its business to catch the strays,” said Bast. “And that you brought them back here and removed the offending chunks of neural matter.”

“But that was years ago. The last one was…I don’t know, two years ago.”

“That may be true. However, you offered a very large bounty indeed just a few weeks ago. So where is he?”

“You’re insane, you know that?” Matheson’s irritation had given way to incredulity. “You think you can stroll into a Hermes facility and just make demands? One call, that’s all I have to do. One call to head office in Seattle and you’ll have a company gunship raining down hellfire on you and your whole sorry organization.”

“Really? It was my understanding that this project was exclusive to the research wing. Did you ever tell Seattle about it?”

Matheson stared at her. Sam couldn’t see her face, but he was sure Bast was smiling her lizard smile.

“Right. So I’ll say it again: give me the locule.”

“We don’t…” Matheson sat back in his chair and threw up his hands. “He got away. Just before surgery was scheduled. We’ve got no idea where he is.”

“Then I suggest you offer another bounty. Hermes Industries has been collecting fees on something over which it has had no control for nearly fifty years. Your bank balance must be quite something to behold.”

She stood up and pulled on a pair of red leather gloves.

“But my colleagues won’t…”

“I have no pretension to be other than what I am,” she said, briskly. “Hermes, on the other hand, has been living a very public lie for a considerable number of years. Now, I am more than willing to keep that information confidential, in return for a small monthly retainer and a locule.” She stepped forward and leaned across the desk, her voice suddenly cold, and sharp as steel. “Because make no mistake, Dr. Matheson, I am more than capable of making sure that everyone on the planet knows
exactly
what your company has been up to. Do we understand each other?”

“I…yes. Yes, we understand each other.”

“Good. Let’s stay in touch. Ciao!”

She straightened up and swept out of the office. Matheson pressed a button on his desk and Dr. Wilson came through the door.

“What did she want? Oh,
shit
! What’s that?”

Wilson recoiled at the sight of Hamut’s body slowly seeping blood and brain matter into the carpet.

“It’s the remains of a shell. Bast’s got hold of the box and she’s made it work. She’s been experimenting with her men, but, of course, it always ends up like that.”

“How long did it last?”

“Thirty-six hours, but this was the sixth attempt.”

“More than enough time to find out what she needs,” sighed Wilson. “Hell and damnation! I thought we had a lid on this.”

“Yeah. But we don’t, and now she’s looking for the locule.”

Dr. Wilson sat down with a thump.

“Crap.”

“We knew this day would come.”

“The hell we did! Where did she get it from?”

“She wouldn’t tell me who her client is, but I can guess.”

Wilson looked at him and shook his head.

“What d’you want to do?”

“We have to tell them.”

“You’re not serious?”

“Better they hear it directly from us. The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.”

“What d’you think they’ll do?”

“I think they’ll send a gunship after her and wipe her whole operation off the face of the earth. As for us…we might survive, if we play it right.”

Wilson didn’t say anything for a few moments, then he stood up.

“I don’t know about you,” he said. “But I need a drink.”

Chapter 23

T
hey stayed in the heating duct
until the building throbbed with the whap-whap-whap of Bast’s departing helicopter, then inched their way along until they reached an empty room.

Alma dropped down first, silent as a cat, with Sam and Rob clunking after her. She glared at them, then crept to the door, eased it open a crack and led the way back to the elevator.

Sam and Alma were silent on the way down, but Rob was bubbling with excitement.

“Did you hear what she said?” he asked. “Fifty years! She said it’s been sentient for fifty fucking years!”

“Quiet,” whispered Alma. “We’re not out yet.”

“Right,” said Rob, lowering his voice and waving his haul of folders. “Sorry. But, don’t you get it? With that and all this…now they’ll
have
to believe me! It means we have proof! Solid proof in their own words! Oh, man, this changes everything!”

He practically bounded out of the elevator and off toward the stairwell, but Sam hung back.

“Come on!” urged Rob. “We have to get back to the house! I can’t wait to tell everyone.”

“Not yet,” said Sam. “We have to find Bethany.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I’m not leaving her here again.”

Rob glanced back at the door, then nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. She should be here.”

“And if she’s not?” asked Sam.

“Fourth floor’d be my guess, but…”

“But what?”

“I have a bad feeling. You’re right. We need to get her away.”

“No,” said Alma. “You guys ever hear of mission creep? We can’t risk running around looking for her. It’ll be dawn soon and they’ll start waking up.”

“But—”

“We came to get the files. We got them. If you want to get Bethany, that’s a new plan. And it should be just that—a
plan
.”

Sam sighed and nodded.

“Okay,” said Rob, reluctantly. “But maybe we should check the rooms here in the clinic. Just in case.”

“Sure,” said Alma. “Split up. Make it quick.”

They each headed in different directions to search the various rooms and corridors, though Sam knew she wouldn’t be there. If she had been she would have bounced out to say hello when they first arrived. He poked his head into what had been his room. Everything was the same, except that the bed had been stripped and the mattress rolled and tied. It looked cold now, and empty, which it had always been…but for a while it was home.

“
Samsamsamsamsamsamsamsam!”

He spun around. Rob had gone down the Sam corridor and left the door open. He moved across the hall and gently closed it. When he turned around, Alma was watching.

“What do they say?”

“Nothing. Their name. Over and over.”

Rob emerged from the corridor and shook his head.

“Not there,” he said, but he seemed suddenly more subdued.

They turned and headed for the stairwell. Nothing was said. They just made their way down and out through the tunnels. By the time they reached ground level it was starting to get light and the route back along the garbage riddled streets was more clear.

The house was quiet, with sleeping bodies curled up in every warm corner. Alma managed to dissuade Rob from waking everyone up, on the basis that most of them would have hangovers and not be particularly receptive to his good news, and then the two of them disappeared upstairs. Sam poured himself a mug of the hooch, retrieved his coat from Alma’s saddlebag and settled down on the back porch to read his haul of papers.

He wasn’t sure what he’d expected. Now that he knew, it was difficult to imagine that it could have been anything else. When he had finished, all he could think of was that Robinson had been right.

He didn’t want to believe it, but she was right.

The people inside the house were starting to stir, but he didn’t want to be there and have to talk to them. He went back inside, filled a plastic bottle with the booze, shoved it in his pocket and set off for the ruined tower.

He’d never been much of a drinker. Not like some of the people he’d met since he’d been on the road. Partly it was because he didn’t like to feel out of control, and partly because he couldn’t handle it very well. But right now he wanted oblivion and alcohol seemed the quickest way there.

The path of crushed and broken bushes and vines he’d made struggling up the hill the day before made the climb a lot easier, and he was soon hunkered down between some of the huge fallen concrete walls, his coat pulled close, collar up and bottle open.

When he woke up, he had a headache. A new headache to keep the old one company. Alma was sitting a few feet away and he felt like shit.

“Feel better?” she asked, in a tone far more cheery than anyone had a right to be.

“No.”

“Good.” She held up the sheaf of papers. “What does this mean?”

“That’s…you stole that!”

“Get a grip.”

Sam sighed and pulled himself to his feet. It was late afternoon and the fog was starting to roll back in, and with it the icy ocean air.

“I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Yeah? Well, do it over there. And make sure you clean yourself up. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s the smell of puke.”

“You’re all heart.”

He walked to the other side of the tower and brought back what surely had to be the entire contents of his stomach.

“You look like crap,” said Alma, as he made his way gingerly back.

“What a coincidence,” he muttered, sitting on the nearest fluted slab.

They sat in silence for a while, watching the fog curl itself around the last remaining piece of the Golden Gate Bridge before surging into the bay and concealing the city beneath a grey veil.

“So did Rob tell everyone about his great discovery?”

“Did he ever. Half of them are out looking for booze for tonight’s celebration. Their own mysteriously vanished in the early hours.”

“Oh, come on. One lousy bottle.”

Alma shrugged and held up the papers again.

“Spill.”

“It’s to do with…” began Sam, then stopped. He needed to organize his thoughts. It was important to tell it right. “Hermes Industries created Mutha.”

“Right,” said Alma. “We all know that much. Governments could see the writing on the wall and decided to explore space. But the distances were so great they would have made communication with any settlements all but impossible.”

“Okay,” said Sam. “So they decided to create a computer in hyperspace. Distance wouldn’t matter—it could be everywhere at once. But it took longer than expected. They’d had to make it organic to get it to work and by the time of the first collapse when any faint hope of space travel was nothing but a dream, the thing had started to become sentient.”

“I still don’t see what that has to do with you. Or this.”

“Somehow, Mutha managed to convince everyone at Hermes that it could operate even better with a direct interface.”

“A direct interface?”

“Yeah. Like that guy in Matheson’s office.”

“Hamut? Hamut was actually Mutha?”

“Clever anagram, huh? Not.”

“So that’s what the box is for.”

“Right. The box was created to insert some of Mutha’s…I don’t know what you’d call it…source code, I guess…into the brain of a regular person.”

“But Bast said the people she uses it on only last a couple of days.”

“If that. It just blows their minds…literally.”

Alma looked at him. He couldn’t tell if it was because she’d guessed, or because she was hoping he wasn’t going to say what happened next.

“So then they had this brilliant idea,” he said. “They’d make a Series Alpha Molecular Human Encasement Locule. See what they did there?”

“Samuel,” said Alma slowly. “It’s not a name.”

“It’s a thing. A capsule inside something. Like the sections of a tomato. The idea was that Mutha could download into the locule, which would then protect the…you know…the basic functioning parts of the brain. Hey, presto—hybrid.”

“But, how could they…”

“Here,” said Sam, taking the papers and shuffling through them until he found what he was looking for. “See that picture, there? Tell me what it looks like to you.”

“It’s…um…” Alma squinted at the blurry photograph. “It looks like DNA.”

“What do you know about DNA?”

“Not very much, actually,” said Alma. “My education was big on killing and maiming, but kind of fell down on arts and sciences. Um…it’s a double spiral.”

“Right. One set of chromosomes from the father and one from the mother. So what does that picture look like?”

“Couldn’t you just tell me?”

“No. I want you to see it. Maybe I’m wrong.”

Alma leaned over the paper again and Sam saw her face fall, and with it his last faint hope that he’d made a mistake.

“It’s a triple spiral!”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “A triple helix of DNA, one third from my dad, one third from my mom, and one third from Mutha.”

“But…how?”

“It’s all in the files. Every last detail. And they used themselves. They couldn’t risk cloning, that technology was already throwing up duds every ten births or so. No, they did it the old fashioned way—in vitro. No one could know, so it had to be the top scientists. Everyone on the Hermes Research board.”

Alma looked up, her eyes full of sadness.

“Sam, I’m so sorry.”

“Hey, at least it means my mom and dad really are my mom and dad.”

They sat in silence for a moment, then Alma searched through the pages again.

“So…okay, so what happens here? The emails stop and everything’s either handwritten or typed.”

“Not sure. But it seems to have dawned on someone that the whole thing was a really bad idea. My guess is they realized that Mutha was way more powerful than it had been letting on.”

“But by that time you were born.”

“Yeah. Twelve of us. No, thirteen—apparently my parents had twins, but they kept that secret.”

“Thirteen? So what happened?”

“Dr. Matheson said they started to ‘go sour.’”

“Sour?”

“That was his word. Messing around with DNA…it was bound to happen, really. Some of them might have been born damaged, but then a decision was made to make sure none of them would be around for download.”

“Download?”

“That’s what they called it. Like we were just machines. But it seems like we had to be older, maybe the brain had to develop before Mutha could squirm its way in. Anyway, it was like Bast said last night, they decided to undo their work, make sure that the locules could never be occupied.”

“By removing it.”

“Or by removing enough of the brain so that it wouldn’t matter if the locule
was
occupied—the main device wouldn’t be going anywhere.”

“They did this to their own children?”

“Yeah, but some ran. I guess my mom and dad used the death of my twin as cover. Maybe they already smelled a rat. I don’t know. But they took off.”

“And Hermes has been looking for you ever since. So who hid the box?”

Sam shrugged. “No idea. But as long as that was missing, they felt safe. They
were
safe. And so was everyone else.”

“Sam, you have to get out of here. Go back to the Wilds. Anywhere.”

He stood up and stretched.

“That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Who knows? Maybe I will.”

“Sam…”

“I’m heading back to the house. Coming?”

He picked his way back down the hill without looking back. He could hear her behind him, but he didn’t want to talk any more. Saying everything out loud had made things clearer and he knew what he had to do. He also knew that Alma would think he was insane.

On the other hand, she had followed him all the way up the hill. Maybe that meant something. Maybe things weren’t so impossible after all.