Recursion (21 page)

Eva had seen Henrietta Kirkham many times on the viewing screen in the past. That was how she had recognized Katie. Katie had her mother’s features, but twisted and exaggerated. Henrietta was an attractive woman, in an unusual sort of way. DeForest had thought so; Eva had teased him about it.

“So you fancy her more than me?” she would press, watching DeForest twist uncomfortably on the sofa. But Henrietta was attractive; she had a calm poise and confidence that stood her in good stead when interviewed. You didn’t become one of the richest and most powerful people in the world and expect people not to feel jealous. And yet, with her tiny, delicate frame, her shy smile, and her little-girl-lost eyes, people were almost sympathetic to her. Almost. Nobody could feel real sympathy for the woman who had it all.

Then there was poor Katie: the manufactured child. Henrietta was supposed to have written an algorithm that scoured the world’s sperm banks looking for the perfect genetic material that would match her own and produce the perfect child. And if anyone had told her that there were too many variables to be sure of the result, she had ignored them just as surely as she ignored the messages she got from the fanatics telling her that she was meddling with forces she didn’t understand.

Henrietta had been determined to have a child that inherited all her best features, and that child was Katie. And Katie had indeed inherited all her mother’s best features, but exaggerated and magnified to the point of the grotesque. She was more intelligent than her mother, but also more obsessive, more nervous, more shy. Her mother’s natural caution had been replaced by paranoia, her analytic nature by something that divided the world into pieces so small that its soul was lost on the way.

Even her physical body was an exaggeration: she was thinner, her eyes smaller, her skin paler.

As Katie had grown up, the media had followed her, revealing each new character flaw to the world, and the child who had once been the golden girl, the symbol of the new technological age, had become a symbol of the perils of meddling with nature.

Then, one day, Katie had disappeared from public view, as only the very rich or very poor can manage. Henrietta had faded back into the foreground, drawing the camera onto herself and her latest ventures and very firmly away from her daughter.

No one discussed Katie now, only the occasional story of doubtful provenance leaking into the news of how she had gone mad, or back into therapy, or how her twisted genius had invented a box and they had put a cat inside it and then opened it up and the cat was gone and then they closed it again and when they reopened it the cat had come back but it was dead, twisted inside out…

Katie had become a legend in her own lifetime. A poor little rich girl who allowed the real poor and unfortunate to draw a little comfort from their sad, lonely lives.

And now, here she was, standing face-to-face with Eva. A slightly shabby, smaller-than-life woman in a rain-washed mental hospital, trapped in the middle of a grey Sunday afternoon.

Alison shrugged at Eva.

“I know. It’s the last place you’d expect to find her. But that’s sort of the point, isn’t it?”

Outside the window, the rain had finally stopped. The room was still dull and grey, the outside world sodden and empty. They sat in silence for some time, saying nothing. Eventually it was Alison who spoke.

“You’re the last piece, Eva. The Watcher may have sent you, but we could spend the rest of our lives turning down opportunities on that basis. You complement us; you give us the chance to do the unexpected. We’re going to move fast and try to second-guess the Watcher. We leave tomorrow, four o’clock in the morning. That’s when people are at their lowest ebb. We will walk out of the gate and then toss a coin to see which way to go. Heads we go left, tails right. We have supplies from Katie: stealth phones and untraceable credit. The sort of thing that only the army is capable of getting hold of.”

“Or the Watcher. Be careful, Eva, something doesn’t seem right here.”

Alison looked hard at Eva as the voice spoke.

“What did it say?” she asked.

“Say nothing,” said the voice. “I don’t like this. You’re going to leave me behind. I’m trapped in these limes. The moment you’ve found me, you’re walking away.”

Eva looked around the room in confusion. “You’re saying I should stay?” she whispered.

Alison reached out and took hold of her hand. “What’s the matter, Eva? Are you all right?”

Eva nodded dumbly. She was waiting for her brother’s answer. The one person she could really trust.

He spoke slowly, haltingly. “No…No. I think you should go with them. Yes. They’re right. I’m an unexpected ally. It may help fool the Watcher. But Eva, be careful. There is something not right here. I can’t see it.”

Alison could hear none of this; she was speaking quickly, eagerly.

“Are you sure, Eva? Will you be ready tonight? We can’t afford to delay. We’ve waited too long already. The Watcher may already be suspicious.”

“We could wait,” Nicolas said uncertainly.

“No. It’s okay. I’m ready,” said Eva. “You’re right. We can’t delay.”

“Think of me,” said the voice.

“I am. I will. Maybe I don’t actually need to see the trees now I know you’re there.”

She looked up at Katie.

“What do you think, Katie?” she asked.

Katie had been watching her; she knew what she was thinking, why she had said what she just said. She looked thoughtful for a moment, then nodded. “I don’t know,” she said. “It might work.”

Alison nodded vigorously. “Yes. It might work. We have to take the chance. We can’t remain here for much longer. Are you with us, Eva?”

Eva looked around to them all in turn and slowly nodded her head.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m with you. We leave tonight.”

constantine 3: 2119

Three o’clock in the morning
and Constantine lay awake in bed, one of the night’s forgotten insomniacs. Red, Blue, and White were sleeping; Grey had lapsed into its habitual silence, ignoring any of Constantine’s attempts to question it about what had happened the day before.

Constantine was trying to see through the haze that surrounded his memories of the meeting. Grey had done something in order to prevent him revealing…what? The memories were second-hand: a little gift-wrapped parcel waiting for him to open once Grey had handed control of the body back over to him. Had they set the project in motion? He couldn’t remember. He could still see the vague shape of the meeting room, but as if it were encased in thick ice. Blurred shapes moved within, but he could not see what they were doing or hear what they said.

He could vaguely recall the end of the meeting, of being marched into the elevator that rode up through the deadly red sea of VNMs and out onto the duckboards. The memories gained more detail at this point, as if the ice was melting. He remembered how it had felt to stand in the hot sun for what seemed an eternity until he saw the faint speck of the approaching flier on the horizon, the definition of his memories increasing as he regained control of his life. Only when the flier dipped down to hover by him had Grey finally let go. Constantine’s life came back into sharp focus as he settled himself into the air-conditioned compartment of the flier, a cool glass of water awaiting him. Red, Blue, and White were clamoring for his attention.

It was Red who took control.—For Heaven’s sake, act naturally. The Grey personality must be some sort of failsafe system. We’ve always suspected as much.

Blue was incensed.—It took over control of the body. That’s impossible!

—Obviously not impossible, replied Red.—Now keep quiet.

Constantine had ignored them. He was too shaken by his recent possession. He felt both dizzy and incredibly tired. He fell asleep listening to the bickering of the other personalities.

Now that he wanted their company, they were sleeping. He sighed, rolled out of bed, and went to inspect the minibar.

The only whisky available was the flavored stuff they sold to teenagers. He selected a can of cola instead, popped the seal and, the container chilling in his hand, began to stroll around the room. The carpet felt soft beneath his feet, the air was hotel temperature. It was a cliché: Constantine had spent two years now traveling the world, staying in what might as well have been the same hotel room. It all added to the artificiality of his situation. He needed to step out of this stereotypical room and touch the real world, but what was the real world to someone like Constantine? To so many people alive at the start of the twenty-second century, the real world was a commodity like any other, sold shrink-wrapped, dated, and best befored. Whether it was freshly baked bread, imitation grit of the millstone baked inside it, or a weekend in a country house with a trout river running through the grounds, the real world had to have authenticity added before it could be sold. Constantine often suspected that the truth was that the real world in fact consisted of hotel rooms just like this one, and that everything else was just a 24-bit imitation of its former self.

He signaled for the window leading out onto the balcony to open. The floor-length vertical blinds parted for him, and he stepped out into the cold night. He shivered, wondering for a moment if he should go back inside to pull on a robe but rejected the idea. The cold night air felt real. He gripped the plasticized metal handrail and looked out over the city cascading down beneath him in a series of wide terraces, its lights strings of illuminated pearls criss-crossing the dark streets and buildings. Constantine’s thin body glowed palely in the moonlight. Looking down, his large stomach, overhanging his spindly legs, was glowing like a pale moon itself. He used to take time to keep himself in shape, but over the past five years the pressure of work had become too much. Blue veins shone along his white legs, the sparse hairs that had grown on his upper body through his teens and twenties had been joined over the past few years by a forest of others sprouting from his nipples or covering his sunken chest. Constantine began to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. He had stepped out here to try to regain his grip on reality. What could be more real than his joke of a body as it approached middle age? The laughter died on his lips as he looked out into the night.

A skyscraper was spinning across the sleeping city toward him.

He stared in disbelief.

It was coming closer: the tower he had seen yesterday morning, just before boarding the flier. The tower with no base, a long, thin needle formed of a structure with art deco steel walls twisting around rose-petal windows, spinning slowly on its axis as it moved toward him. It cast no shadow on the silent city below, Constantine noticed, watching as it passed over a cluster of lights at the heart of the second level. A late-night party. Could they see it? Would they believe their drunken eyes if they did?

It didn’t exist. That was the most likely answer. Constantine had finally cracked. A tiny orange flier skimming down from the center to the first level passed the tower without pause. That confirmed it: he must be imagining it.

He wished his sleeping personalities would wake up.

The tower’s spin seemed to be slowing as it approached him. Now Constantine could see inside, actually look through the windows of the mirage. It was a hotel: that seemed obvious. He could see bedrooms, beds covered with white linen, some of them holding sleeping guests. The tower was now only thirty meters away. It loomed up into the night above him, blocking the half moon. Below the tower he could quite clearly see the streets of the second level.

The tower’s rotation had slowed to a crawl. Something was sliding into view around the steel and rose curve of the walls. A balcony. On it stood a figure. It was looking straight at Constantine as it slowly rotated to meet him.

Twenty meters away, ten meters. Five, four, three, two…

The tower glided smoothly to a halt bringing the figure face-to-face with Constantine.

It was Jay Apple.

“Good morning, Constantine,” she said.

“Good morning. Have I gone mad?”

Jay just shrugged.

“Not yet,” she replied. “I’ve come to give you a warning. You are not currently standing on the balcony of a hotel in Stonebreak, as you may have been led to believe. In fact, you are a personality construct, running on a computer located in Germany. Your mindset has been captured by a rival corporation. They are running it in a simulation of the real world in the hope that you will reveal the details of the Mars project.”

Constantine frowned. He gazed at Jay’s pale hand on the balcony rail. He could see the short white nails, the tiny scratch on the first joint of the forefinger of her left hand. He looked at the balcony rail itself, noting how it was formed of intertwining strips of metal in shades of grey that curled off to form leaves and stylized representations of flowers. One of the leaves had been caught by something and bent out of shape.

It all seemed so real, so convincing. If it weren’t for the fact that the building itself was floating several hundred meters above the ground, he wouldn’t have believed Jay’s words.