Quarantine

1

Only the most paranoid clients phone me in my sleep.

Of course, nobody wants a sensitive call electronically decoded and flashed up on the screen of an ordinary videophone; even if the room isn’t bugged, radio-frequency spillage from the unscrambled signal can be picked up a block away. Most people, though, are content with the usual solution: a neural modification enabling the brain to perform the decoding itself, passing the results directly to the visual and auditory centres. The mod I use, CypherClerk (NeuroComm, $5,999), also provides a virtual larynx option, for complete two-way security.

However. Even the brain leaks faint electric and magnetic fields. A superconducting detector planted on the scalp, no bigger than a flake of dandruff, can eavesdrop on the neural data flow involved in an act of ersatz perception, and translate it almost instantaneously into the corresponding images and sounds.

Hence The Night Switchboard (Axon, $17,999). The nano-machines which carry out this modification can take up to six weeks to map the user’s idiosyncratic schemata—the rules by which meanings are encoded in neural connections—but once that’s done, the intermediary language of the senses can be bypassed completely. What the caller wants you to know, you know, without any need to hallucinate a talking head spelling it out, and the electromagnetic signature at skull level is, for all practical purposes, inscrutable. The only catch is, in the conscious state, most people find it disorienting—and at worst traumatic—to have information crystallizing in their heads without the conventional preliminaries. So, you have to be asleep to take the call.

No dreams; I simply wake, knowing:

Laura Andrews is thirty-two years old, one hundred and fifty-six centimetres tall, and weighs forty-five kilograms. Short, straight brown hair; pale blue eyes; a long, thin nose. Anglo-Irish features and deep black skin; like most Australians, born with insufficient UV protection, she’s been retrofitted with genes for boosted melanin production and a thicker epidermis.

Laura Andrews has severe congenital brain damage; she can walk and eat, clumsily, but she can’t communicate in any fashion, and the experts say that she understands the world little better than a six-month-old child. Since the age of five, she’s been an in-patient at the local Hilgemann Institute.

Four weeks ago, when an orderly unlocked her room to serve breakfast, she was gone. After a search of the building and grounds, the police were called in. They repeated and extended the search, and conducted a doorknock of the surrounding area, to no avail. Laura’s room bore no signs of forced entry, and recordings from security cameras proved unenlightening. The police interviewed the staff at length, but nobody broke down and owned up to spiriting the woman away.

Four weeks later, nothing. No sightings. No corpse. No ransom demands. The police have not officially abandoned the case—merely deprioritized it, pending further developments.

Further developments are not anticipated.

My task is to find Laura Andrews and return her safely to the Hilgemann—or locate her remains, if she’s dead—and to gather sufficient evidence to ensure that those responsible for her abduction can be prosecuted.

My anonymous client presumes that Laura was kidnapped, but declines to suggest a motive. Right now, my judgement is suspended. I’m in no state to hold an opinion on the matter; I have a head full of received knowledge, coloured by my client’s perspective, possibly even tainted with lies.

I open my eyes, then drag myself out of bed and over to the terminal in the corner of the room; I make it a policy never to deal with financial matters in my head. A few keystrokes confirm that my account has been provisionally credited with a satisfactory down payment; accepting the deposit will signal to the client that I’ve taken the case. I pause for a moment to think back over the details of the assignment, trying to reassure myself that I really do understand it—there’s always a hint of dream-logic to these calls, a faint but implacable suspicion that by morning none of what I’ve learnt will even make sense—then I authorize the transaction.

It’s a hot night. I step out on to the balcony and look down towards the river. Even at three in the morning, the water is crowded with pleasure craft of every size, from luminescent sailboards, softly glowing orange or lime green, to twelve-metre yachts, crisscrossed with spotlight beams brighter than daylight. The three main bridges are thick with cyclists and pedestrians. To the east, giant holograms of cards, dice and champagne glasses strobe and pirouette above the casino. Doesn’t anyone sleep any more?

I glance up at the empty black sky, and find myself, inexplicably, entranced. There’s no moon tonight, no clouds, no planets, and the featureless darkness refuses to sustain any comforting illusion of scale; I might be staring at infinity, or the backs of my own eyelids. A wave of nausea passes through me, a contradictory mixture of claustrophobia and a dizzying sense of The Bubble’s inhuman dimensions. I shudder-a single, violent twitch-then the feeling is gone.

A mod-generated hallucination of my dead wife Karen, standing on the balcony beside me, slips an arm around my waist and says, ‘Nick? What is it?’ Her touch is cool, and she spreads her fingers wide across my abdomen, like antennae. I’m on the verge of asking her, by way of explanation, if she ever misses the stars, when I realize how ludicrously sentimental that would sound, and I stop myself in time.

I shake my head. ‘Nothing.’

The grounds of the Hilgemann Institute are as lushly green as genetic engineering—and brute-force reticulation—can make them, in the middle of a summer when they ought to be dead and brown. The lawn glistens in the midmorning heat as if fresh with dew, no doubt constantly irrigated from just beneath the surface, and I trudge down the main access road in the shade of what looks like a kind of maple. An expensive image to maintain; the rates for frivolous water use, already punitive, are tipped to double in the next few months. The third Kimberley pipeline, bringing water from dams twenty-five hundred kilometres to the north, is four hundred per cent over budget so far, and plans for a desalination plant have been shelved, yet again—apparently, a glut on the ocean minerals market has undermined the project’s viability.

The road ends in a circular driveway, enclosing a lavish flower bed in spectacular polychromatic bloom. The trademark IS gene-tailored hummingbirds hover and dart above the flowers; I pause for a moment to watch them, hoping—in vain—to witness just one contravene its programming by straying from the circle.

The building itself is all mock-timber; the layout suggests a motel. There are Hilgemann Institutes around the world, through no fault of anyone called Hilgemann; it’s widely known that International Services paid their marketing consultants a small fortune to come up with the ‘optimal’ name for their psychiatric hospital division. (Whether public knowledge of the name’s origin spoils the optimization, or is in fact the strongest basis for it, I’m not sure.) IS also runs medical hospitals, child-care centres, schools, universities, prisons and, recently, several monasteries and convents. They all look like motels to me.

I head for the reception desk, but there’s no need.

‘Mr Stavrianos?’

Dr Cheng—the Deputy Medical Director, whom I spoke with briefly on the phone—is already waiting in the lobby, an unusual courtesy, which, politely, deprives me of any chance to poke my unsupervised head around corners. No white coats here; her dress bears an intricate, Escher-like design of interlocking flowers and birds. She guides me through a staff only door and a tight maze of corridors to her office. We sit in padded armchairs, away from her spartan desk.

‘Thank you for seeing me at such short notice.’

‘Not at all. We’re more than happy to cooperate; we’re as anxious to find Laura as anyone. But I must say I have no idea what her sister is hoping to achieve by suing us. It’s not going to help Laura, is it?’

I make a sympathetic but non-committal noise. Perhaps the sister, or her law firm, is my client—but if so, why all the pointless secrecy? Even if I hadn’t barged in here and announced myself to the opposition—and I received no instructions not to—the Hilgemann’s lawyers would have taken it for granted that she’d hire an investigator, sooner or later. They would have hired their own, long ago.

‘Tell me what you think happened to Laura.’

Dr Cheng frowns. ‘I’m sure of one thing: she can’t have escaped by herself. Laura couldn’t even turn a door handle. Someone took her. Now, we don’t run a prison here, but we do take security very seriously. Only a highly skilled, highly resourced professional could have removed her—but on whose behalf, and to what end, I can’t imagine. It’s getting a bit late for ransom demands, and in any case, her sister isn’t well off.’

‘Could they have taken the wrong person? Maybe they intended to kidnap another patient—someone whose relatives could raise a worthwhile ransom—and only realized their mistake when it was too late to do anything about it.’

‘I suppose that’s possible.’

‘Any obvious targets? Any patients with particularly wealthy—’

‘I really can’t—’

‘No, of course not. Forgive me.’ From the look on her face, I’d say she has several candidates in mind—and the last thing in the world she wants is for me to approach their families. I take it you’ve stepped up security?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t discuss that either.’

‘No. Tell me about Laura, then. Why was she born brain-damaged? What was the cause?’

‘We can’t be sure.’

‘No, but you must have some idea. What are the possibilities? Rubella? Syphilis? AIDS? Maternal drug abuse? Side-effects from a pharmaceutical, or a pesticide, or a food additive…?’

She shakes her head dismissively. ‘Almost certainly none of those. Her mother went through standard prenatal health care; she had no major illness, and she wasn’t using drugs. And a chemical teratogen or mutagen doesn’t really fit in with Laura’s condition. Laura has no malformation, no biochemical imbalance, no defective proteins, no histological abnormalities—’

‘Then why is she massively retarded?’

‘It looks as if certain crucial pathways in the brain, certain systems of neural connections which should have formed at a very early age, failed to appear in Laura’s case—and their absence made subsequent normal development impossible. The question is why those early pathways didn’t form. As I’ve said, we can’t be sure—but I suspect it was a complex genetic effect, something quite subtle involving the interaction of a number of separate genes, in utero.’

‘Couldn’t you tell, though, if it was genetic? Couldn’t you test her DNA?’

‘She has no recognized, catalogued genetic defects, if that’s what you mean—which only proves that there are genes crucial to brain development yet to be located.’

‘Any family history of the same thing?’

‘No, but if several genes are involved, that’s not necessarily surprising—the chance of a relative sharing the condition could be quite small.’ She frowns. ‘I’m sorry, but how is any of this going to help you find her?’

‘Well, if a pharmaceutical or a consumer product were the cause, the manufacturers might be safeguarding their interests. It’s a long time after the event, I know, but maybe some obscure birth-defects research team is on the verge of publishing the claim that wonder drug X, the miracle antidepressant of the thirties, makes one foetus per hundred thousand turn out like Laura. You must have heard about Holistic Health Products, in the States; six hundred people suffered kidney failure from taking their “energy supplement”, so they hired a dozen hit men to start wiping out the victims, faking accidental deaths. Corpses attract much smaller damages verdicts. Okay, kidnapping doesn’t seem to make much sense, but who knows? Maybe they needed to study Laura, to extract some kind of information that might eventually help them in court.’

‘It all sounds rather paranoid to me.’ I shrug. Occupational hazard.’

She laughs. ‘Yours, or mine? Anyway, I’ve told you, I think the cause was inherited.’

‘But you can’t be positive.’

‘No.’

I ask the usual questions about the staff: anyone hired or fired in the last few months, anyone known to have debts or problems, anyone with a grudge? The cops would have been through all of this, but after four weeks of brooding on the disappearance, some trivial matter, not worth mentioning at first, may have come to assume greater significance.

No such luck.

‘Can I see her room?’

‘Certainly.’

The corridors we pass through have cameras mounted on the ceiling, at ten-metre intervals; I’d guess that any approach to Laura’s room is covered by at least seven. Seven data chameleons, though, would not have been beyond the budget of a serious kidnapper; each pinhead-sized robot would have tapped into one camera’s signal, memorized the sequence of bits for a single frame while the corridor was empty, then spat it out repeatedly, replacing the real image. There may have been faint patches of high-frequency noise when the fake data was switched in and out—but not enough to leave tell-tale imperfections on a noise-tolerant digital recording. Short of subjecting every last metre of optical fibre to electron microscopy, hunting for the tiny scars where the chameleons intervened, it’s impossible to know whether or not such tampering ever took place.

The door—remotely locked and unlocked—would have been just as easy to interfere with.

The room itself is small and sparsely furnished. One wall is painted with a cheerful, glossy mural of flowers and birds; not something I’d care to wake up to, personally, but I can hardly judge how Laura would have felt. There’s a single large window by the bed, set solidly into the wall, with no pretence that it was ever designed to be opened. The pane is high-impact plastic; even a bullet wouldn’t shatter it, but with the right equipment it could be cut and resealed, leaving no visible seam. I draw my pocket camera and take a snapshot of the window in the polarized light of a laser flash, then I process the image into a false-colour stress map, but the contours are smooth and orderly, betraying no flaws.

The truth is, there’s nothing I can do here that the police forensic team would not have done first, and better. The carpet would have been holographed for footprint impressions, then vacuumed for fibres and biological detritus; the bed sheets taken away for analysis; the ground outside the window scoured for microscopic clues. But at least I have the room itself fixed in my mind now; a solid backdrop for any speculations about the night’s events.

Dr Cheng escorts me back to the lobby.

‘Can I ask you something that has nothing to do with Laura?’

‘What?’

‘Do you have many patients here with Bubble Fever?’ She laughs and shakes her head. ‘Not one. Bubble Fever has gone right out of fashion.’

Because I am in business, and because I might—in theory—give credit, there’s a certain amount I can find out about anyone, with no effort at all.

Martha Andrews is thirty-nine years old, and works as a systems analyst for WestRail. She is divorced, with custody of her two sons. She has an average income and average debts, and forty-two per cent equity in a cheap two-bedroom flat. She’s been paying the Hilgemann out of a trust fund left by her parents; her father died three years ago, her mother the year after. She is not worth extorting.

At this stage, the most plausible hypothesis seems to be one of mistaken identity; it doesn’t fit well with the professionalism of the kidnapping, but nobody’s perfect. What I need, to take the idea any further, is a list of the Hilgemann’s patients. Details of the staff might also come in handy.

I call my usual hacking service.

The ringing tone seems to reverberate deep within my skull. There’s no doubt that NeuroComm’s product psychologists chose these bizarre acoustics to give a strong impression of privacy, but I’m not impressed; it just makes me feel claustrophobic. At the same time, my external vision fades to black-and-white—supposedly to lessen the distraction, but in fact it’s just one more tedious gimmick.

Bella answers on the fourth ring, as always. Her face seems to hover about a metre away, vivid against reality’s greys, vanishing at the neck as if revealed by some magical spotlight. She smiles coolly. ‘Andrew, it’s good to see you. What can I do for you?’

‘Andrew’ is the name I use for one of my CypherClerk masks. Her own synthetic human visage might also be nothing but a mask, repeating word for word the speech intentions of an actual person—or it might be a pure artifact, the interface to anything from a glorified answering machine to a system that actually does ninety-nine per cent of the hacking itself. I really don’t care who or what Bella is; she/he/it/they get results, and that’s all that matters to me.

‘The Hilgemann Institute, Perth branch. I want all their patient records, and all their staff records.’

‘Back how far?’

‘Well… thirty years, if it’s on line. If the old stuff is archived, and it’s going to cost a fortune to get your hands on it, forget it.’

She nods. ‘Two thousand dollars.’

I know better than to try to haggle. ‘Fine.’

‘Call back in four hours. Your password is “paradigm”.’

As the room regains its normal hues, it strikes me that two thousand dollars would be a lot of money to Martha Andrews—not to mention the fifteen thousand I’ve already received in advance. Of course, if her lawyers were confident of a large settlement and a fat contingency fee, fifteen thousand would be nothing to them. Their wish to be anonymous might be no more sinister than my own use of a pseudonym with Bella; when laws are being broken, it’s nice to have bulkheads against the risk of a conspiracy charge.

Do I talk to Martha? I can’t see how it could upset her lawyers, and even if she hired me herself (which can’t yet be ruled out completely; her finances may have hidden depths) then she chose anonymity over the alternative of explicitly instructing me to keep my distance.

I have no real choice but to act as if I hadn’t given a moment’s thought to the question of my client’s identity—even if the truth is that, so far, nothing about the case fascinates me more.

Martha looks very much like her sister, with a little more flesh and a lot more worries. On the phone she asked, ‘Who are you working for? The hospital?’ When I told her that I wasn’t free to disclose my client’s name, she seemed to take that to mean yes. (In fact, it’s inconceivable; IS owns a great slab of shares in Pinkerton’s Investigations, so the Hilgemann would never hire a freelance.) Now, face to face, I’m almost certain that she wasn’t dissembling.

‘Really, I’m the last person to help you find Laura. She was in their care, not mine. I can’t imagine how they could have let something like this happen.’

‘No—but forget their incompetence, just for a moment. Do you have any idea why someone might want to kidnap Laura?’

She shakes her head. ‘What use would she be to anyone?’ The kitchen, where we’re sitting, is tiny and spotless. In the room next door, her boys are playing this summer’s craze, Tibetan Zen Demons on Acid vs Haitian Voodoo Gods on Ice—and not in their heads like the rich kids; she winces at the sound of a theatrically bloodcurdling scream, followed by a loud, wet explosion, and live cheers. ‘I’ve told you, I’m in no better position to answer that than anyone else. Maybe she wasn’t kidnapped. Maybe the Hilgemann harmed her somehow—mistreated her, or tried out a new kind of drug that went wrong—and their whole story about her disappearance is a cover-up. I’m only guessing, of course, but you ought to keep the possibility in mind. Assuming that you are interested in finding out the truth.’

‘Were you close to Laura?’

She frowns. ‘Close? Haven’t they told you? What she’s like?’

‘Attached to her, then? Did you visit her often?’

‘No. Never. There was no point visiting her—she wouldn’t have known what it meant. She wouldn’t have known it was happening.’

‘Did your parents feel the same way?’

She shrugs. ‘My mother used to see her, about once a month. She wasn’t fooling herself—she knew it made no difference to Laura—but she thought it was the right thing to do, regardless. I mean, she knew she’d feel guilty if she stayed away, and by the time they had mods that could fix that, she was too set in her ways to want to change. But I’ve never had any problem, myself; Laura’s not a person, so far as I’m concerned, and I’d only feel like a hypocrite if I tried pretending otherwise.’

‘I take it you’re planning to be a bit more sentimental in court?’

She laughs, unoffended. ‘No. We’re suing for punitive damages, not compensation for “emotional suffering”.

The issue will be the hospital’s negligence, not my feelings. I may be an opportunist, but I’m not going to perjure myself.’

On the train back into the city, I wonder: would Martha have arranged her sister’s abduction, for the sake of punitive damages? Her unwillingness to milk the suit for all it’s worth might be a calculated ploy, a way to ensure a jury’s sympathy by seeming to forgo exploitation. There’s at least one flaw in this theory, though: why not demand a ransom—which could be recovered, through the courts, from the Hilgemann? Why leave the motive for the kidnapping a mystery crying out for an explanation, inviting suspicions of fraud?

I emerge from the airless crush of the underground to find the streets almost as crowded, with evening shoppers lugging post-Christmas bargains, and buskers so devoid of talent—natural or otherwise—that I feel like stooping down and switching their credit machines into refund mode.

‘You’re a mean-spirited bastard,’ says Karen. I nod agreement.

As I approach the sandwich-board man, I tell myself I’m going to walk by as if I hadn’t even noticed him, but a few steps later, I stop and turn to stare. His meekly downturned face is as pale as a slug—God doesn’t want us messing with our pigmentation! — and he wears a black suit that must be purgatory in this heat. Amongst the brightly clad, bare-limbed crowd, he looks like a nineteenth-century missionary stranded in an African marketplace. I’ve seen the same man before, wearing the same imaginative message, repeated front and back:

Nigh! After thirty-three years, nigh! No wonder he stares at the ground. What the fuck has been going on in his brain for the last three decades? Does he wake every morning, thinking—for the ten-thousandth time—‘Today’s the day’? That’s not faith, it’s paralysis.

I stand awhile, just watching him. He paces slowly back and forth along a fixed path, halting when the flow of shoppers is too heavily against him. Most people are ignoring him, but I notice a teenage boy collide with him intentionally and roughly shoulder him aside, and I feel a shameful surge of delight.

I have no good reason to hate this man. There are millenarians of every kind, from docile idiots to cunning profiteers, from blissed-out Aquarians to genocidal terrorists. Members of the Children of the Abyss don’t wander the streets with sandwich boards; blaming this pathetic wind-up toy for Karen’s death makes no sense at all.

As I walk on, though, I can’t help indulging a sweet vision of his face as a bloody red pulp.

I was eight years old when the stars went out.

I didn’t witness the circle of darkness, growing from the antisolar point like the mouth of a coal-black cosmic worm, gaping to swallow the world. On TV, yes, a hundred times, from a dozen locations—but on TV it looked like nothing but the cheapest of special effects (the satellite views all the more so; in glare-filtered shots, the ‘mouth’ could be seen closing precisely behind the sun, an implausible symmetry, smacking of human contrivance).

I couldn’t have seen it live; it was late afternoon in Perth—but the news reached us before sunset, and I stood on the balcony with my parents, in the dusk, waiting. When Venus appeared, and I pointed it out, my father lost his temper and sent me inside. I don’t recall exactly what I said; I’m sure I knew the difference between stars and planets, but perhaps I made some childish joke. When I looked through my bedroom window—with a choice of smeared glass or dusty flyscreen—and saw, well, nothing, it was hard to be impressed. Later, when I finally caught an unimpeded view of the empty sky, I dutifully tried to feel awestruck, but failed. The sight was as unspectacular as an overcast night. It was only years later that I understood how terrified my parents must have been.

There were riots on Bubble Day across the planet, but the worst of the violence took place where people had seen the event with their own eyes—and that depended on a combination of longitude and weather. Night stretched from the western Pacific to Brazil, but cloud covered much of the Americas. There were clear skies over Peru, Colombia, Mexico and southern California—so Lima, Bogota, Mexico City and Los Angeles suffered accordingly. In New York, at eleven past three in the morning, it was bitterly cold and overcast—and the city was all but spared. Brasilia and Sao Paulo were saved by the light of dawn.

Disturbances in this country were minor; even on the east coast, sunset came too late, and apparently most Australians sat glued to their TVs all night, watching other people do the looting and burning. The End of the World was far too important to be happening anywhere but overseas. There were fewer deaths in Sydney than on the previous New Year’s Eve.

In my memory, there is no gap at all between the event itself and the announcement of an explanation (of sorts). Analysis of the timing of the occultations had revealed, almost at once, the geometry of what had happened; perhaps I considered that enough of an answer. It was nearly six months later that the first probes encountered The Bubble, but the name had been in use, from the start, for whatever it was they would find.

The Bubble is a perfect sphere, twelve billion kilometres in radius (about twice as wide as the orbit of Pluto), and centred on the sun. It came into being as a whole, in an instant—but because the Earth was eight light-minutes from its centre, the time-lag before the last starlight reached us varied across the sky, giving rise to the growing circle of darkness. Stars vanished first from the direction in which The Bubble was closest, and last where it was furthest away—precisely behind the sun.

The Bubble presents an immaterial surface which behaves, in many ways, like a concave version of a black hole’s event horizon. It absorbs sunlight perfectly, and emits nothing but a featureless trickle of thermal radiation (far colder than the cosmic microwave background, which no longer reaches us). Probes which approach the surface undergo red shift and time dilation—but experience no measurable gravitational force to explain these effects. Those on orbits which intersect the sphere appear to crawl to an asymptotic halt and fade to black; most physicists believe that in the probe’s local time, it swiftly passes through The Bubble, unimpeded—but they’re equally sure that it does so in our infinitely distant future. Whether or not there are further barriers beyond is unknown—and even if there are not, whether an astronaut who took the one-way voyage would find the universe outside unaged, or would emerge just in time to witness the moment of its extinction, remains an open question.

Upon hearing reports containing only a single familiar phrase, the media (who’d been fobbed off for six months with theories even wilder than the truth) promptly declared that the solar system had ‘fallen into’ a large black hole, triggering a resurgence of global panic before the story could be set straight. The event horizon surrounded us, therefore we had to be inside it—a perfectly reasonable mistake. The truth, though, is the exact opposite: the event horizon does not enclose us; it ‘encloses’ everything else.

Although a handful of theoreticians valiantly struggled to concoct a model for The Bubble as a spontaneous natural phenomenon, there was always really only one plausible explanation: a vastly superior alien race had constructed a barrier to isolate the solar system from the rest of the universe.

The question was: why?

If the aim was to discourage us from charging out and conquering the galaxy, they needn’t have bothered. In 2034, no human had travelled further than Mars. The US base on the moon had been shut down six years before, after eighteen months’ occupation. The only spacecraft to have left the solar system were probes sent to the outer planets in the late twentieth century, crawling away from the sun along their now purposeless trajectories. Plans to launch an unmanned mission to Alpha Centauri in 20S0 had just been rescheduled to 2069, in the hope that the Apollo XI centenary would make fundraising easier.

Of course, a space-faring alien civilization might have taken a long-term view. The thousand years or so before humans were likely to embark on anything remotely like interstellar conquest might have seemed no more to them than a judicious safety margin. Nevertheless, the idea that a culture able to engineer space-time in ways we could scarcely comprehend could fear us was ludicrous.

Maybe the Bubble Makers were our benefactors, saving us from a fate infinitely worse than being confined to a region of space where we could—with care—prosper for hundreds of millions of years. Maybe the galactic core was exploding, and The Bubble was the only possible shield against the radiation. Maybe other, hostile aliens were running amok in the region, and The Bubble was the only way to keep them at bay. Less dramatic variations on this theme abounded. Maybe The Bubble was there to protect our fragile, primitive culture from the harsh realities of interstellar commerce. Maybe the solar system had been declared a Galactic Heritage Zone.

A few intellectually rigorous killjoys argued that any explanation to which humans could relate was probably anthropomorphic nonsense, but nobody invited them onto talk shows.

At the other extreme, most religious sects had no trouble plucking glib answers from their own ludicrous mythology. Fundamentalists of several faiths refused to acknowledge that The Bubble even existed; all proclaimed that the vanished stars were a sign of divine disfavour, foretold—with varying degrees of prophetic licence—in their own sacred writings.

My parents were resolute atheists, my education was secular, my childhood friends were either irreligious, or the marginally Buddhist grandchildren of Indochinese refugees—but the English-language media, worldwide, was swamped with the views of Christian fundamentalists, so theirs was the lunacy I grew up knowing the best, and despising the most. The stars had gone out! If that didn’t spell Apocalypse, what did? (In fact, Revelations has stars falling to the earth—but one musn’t be too literal-minded.) Even those fanatics with small-M millennial fetishes could take heart; the years 2000 and 2001 might have been frustratingly devoid of cosmic portents, but, given the uncertainties of the historical record, 2034 (it was claimed) could easily be exactly the two-thousandth anniversary, not of Christ’s birth, but of his death and resurrection. (November 15th as Easter? Obscure explanations were concocted for this—including something called ‘Passover Drift’—but I was never quite masochistic enough to try to follow them.)

It was Judgement Day rewritten by some Bible Belt Chamber of Commerce. TV still worked, and nobody needed the mark of the beast to buy and sell, let alone to give and receive tax-deductible donations. Mainstream churches issued cautious statements which said, in so many words, that the scientists were probably right, but their pews emptied, and the salvation-for-money trade boomed.

Apart from post-Bubble splinter groups of established religions, thousands of brand-new cults appeared—most of them organized on the sound commercial lines pioneered by twentieth-century religious entrepreneurs. But while the opportunists prospered, the real psychotics were festering. It took twenty years for the Children of the Abyss to make themselves known, but then, being born of the Abyss—on or after Bubble Day—was a prerequisite of membership. They started out, in 2054, by poisoning the water supply of a small town in Maine, killing more than three thousand people. Today, they’re active in forty-seven countries, and they’ve claimed almost a hundred thousand lives. Marcus Duprey, their founder and chief self-fulfilling prophet, spews out an incoherent stream of half-digested cabbalistic gibberish and comic-book eschatology, but there are, apparently, thousands of people brain-fucked in just the right way to find his every word resonant with truth.

It was bad enough when they blew up buildings at random, because ‘this is the Age of Mayhem’, but since Duprey and seventeen other Children have been in prison, many of his followers have come to see his release as their ultimate purpose—and with a tangible (if unattainable) goal to focus their efforts, everything has escalated. It makes no difference what I think, but some nights the question spins in my head for hours. I don’t wish they’d set him free. I do wish they’d never caught him.

Mental illness wasn’t confined to the millenarians; for the secular, there was Bubble Fever, an hysterical, disabling, ‘claustrophobic’ reaction to the thought of being ‘trapped’ in a volume eight trillion times that of the Earth. These days, it seems almost laughable—as quaint as some spurious nineteenth-century upper-class affliction—but millions of people succumbed in the first year. It struck in almost every country, and health officials predicted it would cost the world economy more than AIDS. Within five years, though, the number of cases had plummeted.

Wars and revolutions around the globe have been blamed on The Bubble—although I wonder how anyone can claim to be able to untangle its destabilizing effects from those of poverty, debt, climate change, famine and pollution—and the religious fanaticism that would have been present, regardless. I’ve read that in the early days, people spoke seriously of civilization ‘crumbling’, of the coming of a new Dark Age. Such talk soon died away—but even now, I can never quite decide whether I find it miraculous, or inevitable, that the cultural shock waves have been so mild. The Bubble changes everything: it proves the existence of aliens with God-like powers, aliens who have imprisoned us without warning or explanation—and cheated us of our destiny in the universe. The Bubble changes nothing: the aliens are aloof and inconsequential, the stars are irrelevant to human needs; the sun still shines, crops still grow, the life of this planet goes on as ever—and there are worlds within our reach to be explored for millennia.

In the early fifties, it was ‘common knowledge’—for no obvious reason—that the Bubble Makers were about to introduce themselves and justify everything; alien-contact cults flourished, UFO hoaxes reached absurd levels, but as the years wore on in silence, hopes of so much as a curt explanation for our state of quarantine faded away.

I no longer even wonder, why? After thirty-three years of listening to people rant their unlikely hypotheses, nothing could matter to me less. (Granted, the thing killed my wife, indirectly—but then, indirectly, so did I.)

As for the stars, they were never ours to lose; the truth is, we’ve lost nothing but the illusion of their proximity.

Bella, as always, delivers on time. I download the records into CypherClerk’s generous intracranial buffers, and I’m on the verge of transferring them to my desktop terminal when, in a moment of caution, or paranoia, I change my mind and decide to keep the data in my skull, for now.

I’m tired, but it’s barely after nine. I don’t want to sleep, but the prospect of ploughing through the Hilgemann’s records strikes me as unbearably tedious.

I invoke Backroom Worker (Axon, $499) and guide it through what I want done with each name: first, check my own natural memory for any associations (after all, the chances are that the next of kin of anyone worth kidnapping will be a public figure to some degree); then contact the Credit Reference System, obtain current financial details, and append them to the record. I think of triggering notification if the assets cross a threshold value, but I can’t be bothered deciding on a figure, and in any case, when the whole thing is done, I can rank everyone by net worth. I instruct the mod to interrupt me only if it comes across a name I know.

I flop onto my bed, and switch on the room’s audio system. The controlling ROM I’ve been playing lately, ‘Paradise’ by Angela Renfield, is one of hundreds of thousands of identical copies, but each piece it creates is guaranteed unique. Renfield has set certain parameters for the music, but others are provided by pseudorandom functions, seeded with the date, the time and the audio system’s serial number.

Tonight, I seem to have chanced upon an excessive weighting for minimalist influence. After several minutes of nothing but the same (admittedly, impressively resonant) chord, repeated at five-second intervals, I hit the recompose button. The music stops, there’s a brief pause, then a new variation begins, a distinct improvement.

I’ve run ‘Paradise’ about a hundred times. At first, I could hardly believe that the separate performances had anything in common, but over the months I’ve begun to apprehend the underlying structure. I see it as resembling a family tree, or a phylogenetic classification of species. The metaphor is imprecise, though; one piece can be judged to be a near or a distant cousin of another, but the concept of ancestry doesn’t really translate. I think of the simplest pieces as being primordial, as ‘giving rise to’ more complex variations, but beyond a certain point it’s an arbitrary decision as to who begat, or evolved into, whom.

I’ve heard some reviewers assert that, after a dozen playings, anyone who is musically literate should fully understand the rules that Renfield has chosen, making further actual performances unbearably redundant. If that’s the case, I’m glad of my ignorance. Tonight’s second piece is like a brilliant scalpel blade, prising away layer after layer of dead skin. I close my eyes as a trumpet line builds, rising in pitch, then mutates, impossibly, effortlessly, into the liquid sound of metaharps. Flutes join in, with an ornate, mannered theme—but already I think I can discern in it, hidden beneath the fussiness and decoration, hints of a perfect silver needle which will recur in a hundred guises; which will be honed, muted, then honed again; which will be held up for my admiration, one last time, then plunged into my heart.

Suddenly, four lines of glowing text appear at the bottom of my visual field:

I’d forgotten that I’d asked for staff records, too—or I would have excluded them. I think about waiting for the music to finish, but there’s no point; I know full well that I’d be unable to enjoy it. I hit the stop button, and one more unique incarnation of ‘Paradise’ disappears forever.

Casey is five years older than me, so his retirement, shortly after mine, was not so premature. He’s sitting in a corner of the crowded bar, drinking beer, and I join him in the ritual. I suppose it’s a strange way to pass the time, when not a microgram of ethanol will make it into either of our bloodstreams—while mods compute our consumption and deliver a purely neural buzz in lieu of the (insanely toxic) real thing—but then, if this cultural fossil lasted a thousand years and endured beyond all memory of its origins, it would hardly be unique in doing so.

‘We never see you, Nick. Where have you been hiding?’

We? It takes me a moment to register that he means, not himself and his absent wife, but the bar full of cops and ex-cops; the ‘law-enforcement community’, as the politicians would say—the way they used to talk about the Chinese or Italian or Greek community—as if the neural and physical modifications we share made us into some kind of homogeneous demographic target. I glance around the room and find, mercifully, that I recognize almost nobody.

‘You know how it is.’

‘Business is good?’

‘I’m making a living. You were with RehabCorp, last I heard. What happened?’

‘IS bought them out.’

‘Yeah, I remember that. Lots of retrenchments.’

‘I was lucky. I had connections, I got myself moved sideways. There were people who’d been with RehabCorp for thirty years who got dumped.’

‘So what’s it like at the Hilgemann?’

He laughs. ‘What do you think? Anyone who ends up in a place like that—anyone they can’t fix with a mod, these days—has to be a complete fucking zombie. Security is not a problem.’

‘No? What about Laura Andrews?’

‘You’re in on that?’ He’s no more surprised than politeness requires; Cheng would have had him clear me, before she even returned my call.

‘Yeah.’

‘Who for?’

‘Who do you think?’

‘Fucked if I know. Not for the sister; Winters is working for the sister. Mind you, Winters’ job isn’t finding Laura Andrews; her job is to make me look like shit. That bitch is probably spending all her time sitting at a computer somewhere, fabricating evidence.’

‘Probably.’ Not for the sister. Who, then? A relative of another patient? Someone who believes they’d be shelling out ransom money right now, if the kidnapping hadn’t been botched—and who wants to make sure that there isn’t a second, successful attempt?

‘The case is a joke, you know. We weren’t negligent. Remember that guy who sued the owners of the Sydney Hilton when his daughter got kidnapped from one of their rooms? He was pulverized. The same thing will happen here.’

‘Maybe.’

He laughs sourly. ‘You don’t give a shit either way, do you?’

‘No. And neither should you. IS won’t sack you, even if they lose the case. They’re not idiots; they allocate a certain budget for security, enough to keep the patients in. If they wanted some kind of fortress, they know they’d have to pay for it. They’ve been running prisons long enough to understand the costs.’

He hesitates, then says, ‘“Enough to keep the patients in?” Yeah? Laura Andrews got out twice before.’ He glares at me. ‘And if that ever reaches the sister, I’ll break your fucking neck.’

I stare at him, grinning sceptically, waiting for the joke to be made clear. He just stares back glumly. I say, ‘What do you mean, she “got out”? How?’

How? Shit! I don’t know how. If I knew how, then she wouldn’t have been allowed to do it again, would she?’

‘But… I thought she couldn’t even turn a door handle.’

‘That’s what the doctors say. Well, nobody’s seen her turn a fucking door handle. Nobody’s seen her do anything smart enough to shame a cockroach. But anyone who can get past locked doors, and cameras, and movement sensors, three times, isn’t what she appears to be, is she?’

I snort. ‘What are you getting at? You think she’s been shamming total imbecility for more than thirty years? She never even learnt to speak! You think she started faking brain damage when she was twelve months old?’

He shrugs. ‘Who knows about thirty years ago? The records say one thing, but I wasn’t there. All I know is what she’s done in the last eighteen months. How would you explain it?’

‘Maybe she’s an idiote savante. Or an idiot escapologist.’ Casey rolls his eyes. ‘Okay. I have no idea. But… what happened? The first two times? How far did she get?’

‘Into the grounds, the first time. A couple of kilometres away, the second. We found her in the morning, just wandering about, with the same bland dumb innocent expression on her face as always. I wanted to put a camera inside her room, but the Hilgemann wasn’t having that—some UN convention on the Rights of the Mentally III. IS got enough flak over that Texan prison thing that they’re ultra-careful now.’ He laughs. ‘And how could I argue that I needed more hardware? The patients are vegetables. The rooms have one door and one window; both are monitored twenty-four hours—how could I justify anything more? I mean, I couldn’t say to the fucking Director, “If you’re such a genius, you tell me how she does it. You tell me how to stop her.”’

I shake my head. ‘She didn’t do any of this. She can’t have. Somebody took her. All three times.’

‘Yeah? Who? Why? What do you call the first two times—dry runs?’

I hesitate. ‘Disinformation? Someone trying to convince you that she could break out on her own, so that when they finally took her, you’d think—’ Casey is miming severe incredulity, verging on physical pain. I say, ‘Okay. It sounds like a load of crap to me, too. But I can’t believe she just walked out of there, alone.’

It takes me forever to get to sleep. Boss (Human Dignity, $999) may have rendered it a matter of conscious choice, but somehow I still manage to be an insomniac; I always have some reason to delay the decision, I always have some problem I want to think through—as if every last nagging question which once might have kept me awake had to be dealt with in the old way, regardless.

Or maybe I’m just developing what they call Zeno’s Lethargy. Now that so many aspects of life are subject to nothing but choice, people’s brains are seizing up. Now that there’s so much to be had, literally merely by wanting it, people are building new layers into their thought processes, to protect them from all this power and freedom; near-endless regressions of wanting to decide to want to decide to want to decide what the fuck it is they really do want.

What I want, right now, is to understand the Andrews case, but there’s no mod in my head which can grant me that.

Karen says, ‘Okay. So you have no idea why Laura was kidnapped. Fine. Stick to the facts. Wherever she’s been taken, someone must have seen her along the way. Forget about motives for now—just find out where she is.’

I nod. ‘You’re right. As always. I’ll put an ad in the news systems—’

‘In the morning.’

I laugh. ‘Yes, okay, in the morning.’

With her familiar warmth beside me, I close my eyes.

‘Nick?’

‘Yes?’

She kisses me lightly. ‘Dream about me.’ I do.

2

‘Hallelujah! I can see them! I can see the stars!

I turn, startled, to see a young woman on her knees in the middle of the crowded street, arms outstretched, gazing ecstatically into the dazzling blue sky. For a moment, she seems to be frozen—transfixed, enraptured—then she screams again, ‘I can see them! I can see them!’ and starts pounding her ribs, rocking back and forth on her knees, gasping and sobbing.

But that cult died out twenty years ago.

The woman shrieks and twitches. Two embarrassed friends stand beside her, while the traffic smoothly detours around the scene. I watch with mounting dismay, as childhood memories of ranting, convulsing street mystics start flooding back.

‘All the beautiful stars! AH the glorious constellations! Scorpius! Libra! Centaurus!’ Tears stream down her face.

I fight down a sense of panic and revulsion that’s growing out of all proportion. This is just one woman, just one freak. The very fact that she’s such a spectacle only proves what a rarity this is, proves that most people have adapted, have accepted The Bubble and moved on. What am I afraid of? That every last form of Bubble hysteria, every last obscure religious sect, every last bizarre mass psychosis, is destined to be revived?

As I turn away, the woman’s companions suddenly burst out laughing. A moment later, she joins them—and belatedly, I think I understand. Astral Sphere is back in fashion, that’s all. A planetarium in the skull. A gimmick, not an epiphany. I’ve read the reviews; the mod offers a variety of settings, ranging from a realistic view of the stars ‘exactly as they would be’—complete with accurate diurnal and seasonal motions, masking by clouds and buildings, and convincing fade-ins at dusk and fade-outs at dawn—through to the dissolution of all obstacles (the sunlit atmosphere and the Earth beneath your feet included), and the option of moving the point of view millennia into the past or the future, or half-way across the galaxy.

The trio are falling in and out of each other’s arms now, laughing. The cult is being mocked, not revived; these teenagers must have seen it portrayed in some old documentary. I walk on, feeling slightly foolish—and greatly relieved.

When I reach my building, I take the stairs slowly, reluctant to face an empty calls log, again. I’ve had ads in all the news systems for four days running, and they’ve yet to attract even a hoax call. The New Year should have helped; news-system readership increases on public holidays, when people have nothing better to do. Maybe ten thousand dollars isn’t a large enough reward, but I doubt that my client would appreciate me doubling it. Not that I’m any closer to knowing who my client is. The Hilgemann’s patient records listed no one with family ties to spectacular wealth or fame—and in retrospect, I’m not surprised. The very rich would, at the very least, take care that the records were meticulously falsified, and the obscenely wealthy would keep their demented relatives right out of harm’s way, in soundproof wings of their own impenetrable mansions. I’m tempted to dig deeper, but I won’t. I may suffer the (purely aesthetic) urge to incorporate my client into the Big Picture, but as yet I have no good reason to believe that it would help me find Laura.

No calls.

I resist punching the sofa; the upholstery has already split to the point where further damage yields diminishing satisfaction. It’s getting close to the deadline for lodging the ad for one more day; I display the copy on my terminal and stare at it glumly, wondering if there’s anything I could change that would make a difference, short of adding a zero or two to the reward. I’ve used a picture of Laura straight from the Hilgemann’s patient records; it closely matches my own received mental image, suggesting that my client’s knowledge of Laura’s appearance was based on the very same shot. Her face is distinctive, but who knows what she looks like by now? No need for plastic surgery; a good synthetic-skin mask is all that’s required.

I lodge the ad again, for what it’s worth. If Laura was taken by accident, she’d be long dead by now—and I doubt that I’d ever find the body, let alone the people responsible. My only real hope is that, not only did her kidnappers have some obscure reason for deliberately abducting her, but whatever it was, it required them to do something riskier than merely locking her up, or slaughtering her.

Like smuggling her out of the country.

Getting Laura onto a plane would not be difficult. Her imbecility would be almost as easy to conceal as her face; there are dozens of illegal mods which could transform her into the walking puppet of a travelling companion, or even a semi-autonomous ‘robot’, capable of such rudimentary tasks as laughing and crying at all the right moments during the in-flight movie.

Faking an exit-visa record in the Foreign Affairs database is no big deal. It would vanish an hour or two later, and the airline’s files would also be appropriately amended. Foreign Affairs, Customs and the airlines are all being screwed blind, twenty-four hours a day, by a hundred different hackers—and, ironically, that’s what makes it possible, if you’re lucky, to trace an illegal traveller. Hackers may run rings around the target systems’ own archaic security, but they can’t avoid making their presence known to each other. In the process of capturing data essential for their own work, they can’t help capturing details of other violations in progress. Like all information, this is for sale.

Bella is acting as a broker for me, as well as providing some data of her own. I call her and download another batch. The relevance of any one heap of raw data is a matter of luck; the more you buy, the better the odds, but there’s no guarantee of success when the event you’re trying to trace took place (if at all) at an unknown airport, at an unknown time in the last five weeks.

Finding the fake exit visas is easy; the very fact that they have to be wiped to avoid (sluggish) official scrutiny betrays their existence in any time series of illicit snapshots of the database. The problem is finding Laura in the crowd; there are over one hundred illegal exits per week, nationwide. From the Hilgemann, I have her DNA signature, fingerprints, retinal patterns and skeletal measurements. DNA isn’t used by Customs (there are too many complications, legal and cultural, in sampling international travellers en masse), but the other three are always checked, and must match for pre-departure clearance. After that, though, the common practice is to change these details in the fake visa record, precisely to make things harder for people like me. Although the record itself must persist for the duration of the flight, with the name and photo unchanged (to avoid triggering various anti-terrorist checks carried out by the airlines), the biological ID data isn’t accessed again until the passenger goes through Customs at their destination. So, there are only two brief periods when the visa record needs to contain anything truthful; in theory, these times could be measured in milliseconds, but in practice things can’t be tuned that finely, and the windows have to be several minutes long. However, fingerprints and retinal patterns are relatively easy to alter by nanosurgery, leaving only the bone lengths to be trusted. They can be modified too, if you’re desperate, but nobody walks onto a plane straight after that kind of reconstruction, puppet or not—and travelling as an obvious invalid would be like carrying a sign around your neck.

I analyse the latest series of snapshots; in no time at all they prove as worthless as the rest.

I flip idly through the gigabytes of junk that I’ve accumulated, flight after flight from the country’s ten international airports, everything from menus to seating plans to… cargo manifests. Of course, Laura could have been sent as cargo, but it wouldn’t have been a very smart choice. All cargo is either X-rayed or manually inspected, so there’s only one kind of cargo that a human being can mimic: a human corpse. Achieving the resemblance would be no problem; drugs which shut down the metabolism for a couple of hours, without damage to the brain or any other organ, have been available for decades. What makes the method unattractive is the signal-to-noise ratio; the sheer number of illegal live passengers is itself a kind of camouflage, but only one or two corpses are flown out of the country each week.

Still, I have nothing better to do, so I search through the cargo records in the data I’ve collected so far, and come up with seven corpses.

The routine security X-rays taken of every passenger also provide the basis for computing the set of skeletal measurements used as an ID check. Corpses, though, aren’t checked for ID; as with any other cargo, the X-ray images (a stereoscopic pair) are simply inspected by eye, then stored in the manifest. It takes me half an hour to track down a copy of the algorithm used by the airports to compute bone lengths; it’s part of the X-ray machines’ firmware, separate from the main passenger systems, so it isn’t present in any of my stolen memory dumps. I wouldn’t have wanted to cobble together a version of my own; the mathematics for converting data from stereo pairs to three-dimensional coordinates may be trivial, but automating the identification of the various bones is not.

I run the program on my seven corpses, checking for a match to Laura’s data… and get seven consecutive negatives—perversely, just as I’m struck by a reason why the kidnappers might have chosen this path, after all. It’s conceivable that Laura’s brain damage prevented them from using a puppet mod; many off-the-shelf mods rely explicitly on the existence of certain neural structures which ‘everyone’ supposedly has in common, but which Laura might be lacking. No doubt any such problems could be circumvented, given time—but mapping Laura’s non-standard brain, and reprogramming the nanomachines accordingly, would be no trivial matter. Other solutions would have looked tempting.

The lack of a positive result rules out nothing; the X-rays in the cargo record could have been fudged, a few minutes after they were taken. Computerized information is as evanescent as the quantum vacuum, with virtual truths and falsehoods endlessly popping in and out of existence. Deceptions of any magnitude are possible, on a short enough time scale; laws only apply to data that sits still long enough to be caught out.

I skim through the X-ray analysis program, curious to see how it works, but the code for anatomical-feature recognition is pretty dull stuff, an interminable list of rules and exceptions, and the rest is a few lines of formulae. I had a faint, nagging doubt that differences in geometry between the cargo and passenger X-ray systems might have been giving me garbage results, but in fact all the relevant dimensions are stored along with the image pairs themselves, neatly tagged with standard descriptors, and the program takes nothing for granted.

Once the bone lengths have been computed, a match is declared if any discrepancies fall within an age-dependent tolerance limit, which makes allowance for the possibility of small changes since the visa was issued. This tolerance is highest, of course, for children and adolescents, and not much leeway is granted at Laura’s age—perhaps I should increase it? Customs may prefer to err on the side of false negatives, but I’d rather make the opposite mistake.

I realize my stupidity with a jolt: I’m still thinking in terms of passengers. A fake corpse doesn’t need to be ambulatory. No skeletal reconstruction, however crippling, can be ruled out—which leaves me without a single piece of data I can trust.

That’s not quite true. Most bones can be altered—if a period of convalescence is acceptable—but it’s next to impossible to mess with certain parts of the skull, without the tampering being both dangerous and obvious.

I modify the match criteria, stripping away all the other comparisons. When I run this new version, a matching record appears at once:

A match on the basis of five skull measurements could be a coincidence. It could be deliberate misinformation. Why wouldn’t the kidnappers have altered the X-rays, wiping out even this hint of the truth?

I check the time the snapshot was taken. Twelve fifty-three. The cargo would have been X-rayed just two or three minutes before; you don’t risk changing data when a Customs officer might be staring right at it. Ten minutes later, though, and every trace of Laura Andrews would have been gone.

I shake my head, still suspicious. I don’t often get this lucky.

Karen leans over my shoulder and says, “That’s the definition of luck, you moron. Hurry up and pack.’

New Hong Kong was founded on January 1st, 2029. Eighteen months before—on the thirtieth anniversary of Hong Kong’s absorption into the People’s Republic of China—demonstrations against the suspension of the Basic Law had ended in violent repression, a crackdown on dissent, and a massive increase in the rate of illegal emigration. While everyone else in the region offered the emigrants squalid refugee camps ringed with barbed wire, and the prospect of spending half their lives in a stateless limbo, the Tribal Confederation of Arnhem Land offered two thousand square kilometres on a mangrove-infested peninsula in northern Australia. No ninety-nine-year lease this time; sovereignty in perpetuity, in exchange for a piece of the action Arnhem Land, where the remnants of half a dozen Aboriginal tribes were trying to re-establish their near-obliterated culture, had been independent itself only since 2026, and there was talk in Australia of cutting off the aid that kept it afloat—partly in response to Chinese threats of trade sanctions, but also out of sheer childish resentment that the fledgling nation had dared to take its autonomy seriously. (The Australian government’s own stunningly creative proposal had been to house sixty thousand refugees in a disused leper colony on the northwest coast, for however many decades it took to farm them out around the world at a politically acceptable rate.) The aid survived, but the project was widely ridiculed by the Australian media and their pet economists, who referred to it as ‘subletting the nation’, and predicted a social and financial disaster.

International investors thought otherwise; money flooded in. There was nothing humanitarian about this; it simply reflected the global economic situation at the time. The Koreans, especially, had been going crazy trying to find projects to soak up all their excess wealth. Creating the infrastructure from scratch must have been daunting, but the site was reasonably close to the booming industrial centres of south-east Asia, where there was engineering expertise and manufacturing capacity to spare. Making full use of new construction techniques, the core of the city was functional, and occupied, within seven years. Not a moment too soon: in 2036, the PRC invaded Taiwan, giving rise to a new wave of refugees.

In the decades that followed, cycles of political and economic reform came and went in Beijing, each one ending in an outflux of disillusioned members of the skilled middle class, with only one place to go. While China grew more impoverished and insular, New Hong Kong prospered. By 2056, its GDP had outstripped Australia’s.

At Mach 2 plus, three thousand kilometres takes a little more than an hour. I’m far from any window, but I switch my entertainment screen to the scenic channel and watch the desert go by. I leave the headphones off, to avoid the fatuous audio commentary, but I can’t work out how to make the distracting text and graphics overlays vanish. Eventually, I give up, and tell Boss to put me out of it until we arrive.

Monsoon rain pounds the runway as the plane touches down, but five minutes later I step out of the airport into dazzling sunshine and—after an hour of artificial, twenty-degree blandness—heat and humidity as palpable as a slap in the face.

To the north, I can glimpse the cranes of the harbour between the skyscrapers; to the east, a patch of blue, the Gulf of Carpentaria. I’m right beside an entrance to the underground, but since the rain has stopped, I decide to walk to my hotel. This is my first time in NHK, but I’ve loaded Deja Vu (Global Visage, $750) with an up-to-date street map and information package.

Sleek black towers from the early days alternate with the modern style: ornamental facades in imitation jade and gold, carved with ingenious fractal reliefs that catch the eye on a dozen different scales. Every building is topped with the giant logo of some major financial or information service. It always seems absurd to me that money or data should need a flag of convenience, but laws change slowly, and the laissez-faire regulations here have apparently tempted hundreds of transnationals to shift their head offices to this jurisdiction—if only to await the day when they can incorporate incorporeally, as waves of tax-free data flowing between orbiting supercomputers.

At street level, the towers are all but hidden by the undergrowth of small traders. Daylight holograms in pai-hua and English crowd the air, each with a stream of flashing darts pointing out a narrow entrance or a tiny cubicle that might otherwise easily be missed. Processors, neural mods and entertainment ROMs are on sale within metres of junk jewellery, fast food, and nanoware cosmetics.

The crowd I move through looks prosperous: executives, traders, students, and plenty of the right kind of tourists. Twelve degrees south of the equator is about as far as most northern tourists will go; they want a winter tan, not the promise of a melanoma. Decades after the phasing out of the last ozone-depleting pollutants, the stratosphere remains contaminated—and the ‘hole’ which spreads out from Antarctica each spring is still severe enough to turn the latitude/cancer-risk equations upside down: sunlight is far more dangerous in the southern temperate zone than it is in the tropics. I’d better rapidly switch off my parochial UV-belt prejudice, and stop thinking of pale skin as marking out religious fanatics and genetic-purity freaks. Not many people born here (or in old Hong Kong) would have bothered with the melanin boost, but there’s a visible component of black-skinned ‘southerners’—Australian-born immigrants—of both Asian and European descent, so I may not be quite as conspicuously foreign as I feel.

The Renaissance Hotel was the least expensive I could find, but it’s still disconcertingly luxurious, all red and gold carpet and giant murals of da Vinci sketches. NHK has no cheap accommodation; penniless backpackers simply don’t get visas. I hate having my luggage carried, but I’d hate the fuss of refusing it even more. Several discreet signs advise against tipping; Deja Vu advises otherwise, and lets me know the going rate.

My room itself is small enough to make me feel slightly less profligate, and the view consists of nothing but a portion of the Axon building—the façade of which is tastefully adorned with the names of all their best-selling neural mods, spelt out in a dozen languages and repeated in all directions, like some abstract geometric tiling pattern. Letters cut into imitation black marble don’t exactly catch the eye, but perhaps that’s intentional; after all, Axon grew out of a company which peddled ‘subliminal learning tools’—audio and video tapes bearing inaudible or invisible messages, supposedly perceived ‘directly’ by the subconscious. Like all the other self-improvement snake oil of the time, this did more than provide placebo effects for the gullible and megabucks for the rip-off merchants; it also helped create the market for a technology that did work, once such a thing was actually invented.

I unpack, shower, belatedly put all the clocks in my head forward one-and-a-half hours, then sit on the bed and try to decide exactly how I’m going to And Laura in a city of twelve million people.

The funeral notices say that Han Hsiu-lien was cremated on December 24th, and no doubt the body that went into the furnace looked just like her—although presumably the real Han Hsiu-lien never left Perth. All this corpse shuffling is fascinating, but it doesn’t get me very far. If I talk to anyone at the funeral company, I risk tipping off the kidnappers. Ditto for the airline’s cargo handlers. All the people most likely to have seen something useful are also the most likely to have been involved in the swap themselves.

So where does that leave me? I still know nothing about the kidnappers, nothing about their motives, nothing about their plans. Apart from having narrowed the search geographically, I’m back to square one. All I have to go on is Laura herself, brain-damaged and immobile. I might as well be hunting for an inanimate object.

But she’s not an inanimate object, she’s a human being convalescing from skeletal reconstruction. Convalescing—what does that entail? Highly skilled nursing and physiotherapy—assuming that her kidnappers care whether or not she ends up permanently crippled. Medication, certainly—if she’s worth keeping alive at all, they can’t be disregarding her health entirely. But what medication, what particular drugs? I have no idea. So I’d better find out.

Doctor Pangloss is my favourite knowledge miner. Unlike Bella, who steals data which is supposed to be secure, Pangloss legally digs up facts which are—laughably—supposed to be easily accessible to anyone, for a few dollars, at the touch of a few keys. His mask, with powdered wig and beauty spot, always makes me think of Moliere rather than Voltaire, and his accent is pure RSC, but there’s no quibbling about his mining skills; he answers my question in thirty seconds flat. I could have consulted the same expert systems, databases and libraries myself, but it would have taken me hours.

A patient in Laura’s condition would have several pharmacological requirements, each of which could be met by a variety of substances, each in turn marketed under several different trade names, and each available from a choice of local suppliers. Pangloss arranges all of this for me in a neat tree diagram in midair, then sends a copy down the data channel.

I call Bella, pass her the list of pharmaceutical suppliers, and ask for their delivery records for the last three months. ‘Five hours,’ she says. ‘Your password is “nocturne”.’

Five hours. I spend ten minutes staring out the window, trying to think of something useful to do in the meantime. Nothing comes to mind, so I decide to eat.

The hotel’s ground-floor restaurant looks stuffy and expensive, so I wander out in search of fast food. NHK has its own distinctive cuisine, mainly Cantonese in ancestry, but full of local quirks—like crocodile meat from Arnhem Land; delicious, according to Deja Vu, so long as you’re not put off by the possibility of secondary cannibalism. I settle for fried rice.

I still have hours to kill, so I walk on, aimlessly. I tell myself I’m going to think about the case, but the truth is I’m sick of chasing the same details in the same endless circles, and I let my mind go blank. The rush-hour crowd presses around me, full of tense and anxious faces—which usually makes me tense and anxious myself, but right now I seem to be immune, as if I haven’t yet tuned in to this city and can’t yet be touched by its moods.

I step into a false dusk, the shadow of the PanPacific Bank tower, a hundred-storey cylinder sheathed in corroded gold. Deja Vu gives me the tourist spiel: Hsu Chao-chung’s most famous and controversial work, completed in 2063. The metallic-looking cladding is in fact a polymer; the fractal dimension of the surface is an unsurpassed 2.7.. The commentary is more abstract than an auditory hallucination—more like vividly imagined or remembered speech; a documentary soundtrack effortlessly recalled. The catch is, the mod also pumps out a deliberate subtext: a sense of growing familiarity, a sense that you’re gaining the most profound and intimate knowledge, a sense that with each piece of predigested trivia you swallow, you’re fast approaching an understanding of the place to rival that of any lifelong citizen. This is precisely the delusion that every tourist wants, but personally I’d rather stay slightly less complacent.

The sky grows dark quickly once the sun truly sets. Karen walks beside me, silent at first, but I only need the sight of her in the corner of my eye, and the faint scent of her skin, to take the edge off my loneliness.

We find ourselves in an open-air market, an endless expanse of stalls and tables piled with souvenirs, trinkets and high-tech consumer junk. Clashing multicoloured light, spilling from the holograms jostling above the stalls like demon spruikers, renders everything in the strangest hues.

‘Do we want an intelligent salad-maker? “Faster and more dextrous than any mere human with a chef mod”.’ She shakes her head.

‘What about this? A key eliminator. “Memorizes and mimics the geometric, electrical, magnetic and optical properties of up to one thousand different keys, active or passive”.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Come on. My hotel bill’s under the quota; I have to buy something, or they’ll never let me in again. The Chamber of Commerce computer will veto my visa application.’

‘How about a horoscope?’ She nods towards a nearby astrologer’s booth.

My stomach tightens. ‘Since when did you believe in that shit?’ A young boy turns to stare at me addressing empty space, but his friend grabs his elbow and drags him on, whispering an explanation.

‘I don’t. Just humour me.’

I glance at the booth, and force out a laugh. ‘Astrology… without any fucking stars. That says it all.’ Her face is unreadable. ‘Humour me.’

My guts are squirming, but I say, almost calmly, ‘Okay. If you want a horoscope, I’ll buy you a horoscope. April 10th.’ She shakes her head. ‘Not mine, you idiot. Laura’s.’

I stare at her, then shrug. There’s no point arguing. I still have all the Hilgemann patient records in my head. Laura was born on August 3rd, 2035.

The astrologer is a shaven-headed girl, four or five years old, dressed in fake silk and dripping glass jewellery. I give her Laura’s details. She sits cross-legged on a cushion and writes with a bamboo pen on ersatz parchment. Her calligraphy is rapid, but undeniably elegant; the mod for it must have cost a fortune—manual skills never come cheap. When she’s covered the sheet, she turns it over and writes an English version on the back. I hand her my credit card, and put my thumb to the scanner. When I take the parchment, she clasps her hands together and bows.

Karen has vanished. I read the prediction, which boils down to success in business and happiness in love (after many tribulations). I crumple the sheet and toss it in a bin, then head back for the hotel.

I ring Bella, download the pharmaceutical suppliers’ records, and start hunting for patterns. I don’t feel much like trusting the hotel room’s terminal, so I do the analysis in my head; CypherClerk has a virtual workstation, with all the usual data-shuffling facilities.

Pangloss specified five categories of drugs. One hundred and nine different businesses score five out of five. I start wading through their animated presentations in the phone directory; not surprisingly, it looks as if they’re all going to turn out to be either major hospitals, where orthopaedic reconstruction is carried out, or cosmetic surgery clinics, specializing in much the kind of thing that Laura must have been through. Nose jobs, cheek jobs, rib removals, hand reshaping, vertebrae adjustments, limb reductions and extensions; I can never quite believe that anyone would undergo this kind of mutilation for the sake of fashion, but dozens of smiling customers testify to their satisfaction, right before my eyes.

Laura could be hidden in any one of these places; a big enough bribe would silence any awkward questions. But every outsider brought in on the kidnapping is one more unreliable amateur, one more potential informant. Better to be self-contained.

The ninety-third entry on the list, Biomedical Development International, displays nothing but an animated logo as unenlightening as its name—the letters BDI rendered in shiny chromed tubing, constantly rotating and endlessly sparkling with implausible-looking highlights—and a single line of text: Contract research in biotechnology, neurotechnology and pharmaceuticals.

I plough through the rest, but apart from the Osteoplasty Research Group of New Hong Kong, every other entry is some kind of hospital or clinic, seeking out customers. This proves nothing—but I’d certainly like to know what kind of contract research BDI has been doing lately.

I almost call Bella, then I change my mind. If I am getting close, I’d better start taking more care. Bella is good, but no hacker can guarantee that they won’t be detected, and the last thing I want to do is panic the kidnappers into moving Laura again.

I find BDI in a business directory. Because they’re not listed on the stock exchange, disclosure requirements are minimal. Founded in 2065. Wholly owned by an NHK citizen, Wei Pai-ling. I’ve heard of him; a moderately wealthy entrepreneur with a wide range of profitable but unspectacular technological interests.

It’s half past two. I shut down CypherClerk and slump into bed. Biomedical Development International. Maybe I was right first time; maybe some pharmaceutical company whose product screwed up Laura’s brain is preparing for a future lawsuit. Everything would make perfect sense. Well… almost. Why would BDI—or whoever they hired to collect Laura—break into the Hilgemann only to let her out of her room, twice, before the actual kidnapping? Why would anyone? It’s bizarre. If the point was to create the impression that Laura could escape on her own, who did they think they were kidding?

As I stare at the ceiling, trying to choose sleep, the incident with the astrologer keeps running through my head. Karen is not compelled to behave in character; sometimes she’s true to my memories, sometimes she’s pure wish-fulfilment, sometimes her actions are as cryptic as the plot of a dream. But why should I ‘dream’ her asking for Laura’s horoscope, of all things? Sheer perversity? Karen would never have done such a thing in a million years.

I try to relax, to forget it, but I can’t. The irony doesn’t escape me: nothing offends me more than the pathological assignment of meaning—religion, astrology, superstitions of every kind—and here I am, hunting for meaning in the actions of a subconsciously controlled hallucination of my dead wife. What kind of ludicrous necromancy is that?

Horoscopes. Propitious birthdays. My skin crawls. I summon up the pilfered Hilgemann data again. Laura was born on August 3rd, 2035. The birth was slightly premature; her medical records state that the gestation period was thirty-seven to thirty-eight weeks. That puts the date of conception within a week of November 15th, 2034; perhaps even on Bubble Day itself.

Of itself, this means nothing to me. It would have meant nothing to Karen. There are probably ten billion people on the planet who wouldn’t give a shit if the stars went out the very moment Laura’s father came.

None of which matters, none of which counts, none of which renders the coincidence meaningless and safe.

The question is: what does it signify to the Children of the Abyss?

Marcus Duprey was born on Bubble Day, in the small town of Hartshaw, Maine, sometime during the Earth’s last sixteen minutes of starlight. At what age he began to attach significance to this fact is anybody’s guess; Duprey himself isn’t telling, and his parents, his grandparents, his aunts, his uncles, his cousins, most of his teachers, and most of his peers, all died together on his twentieth birthday, which he celebrated by introducing toxic bacteria into the Hartshaw water supply. His third-grade and seventh-grade teachers, lucky enough to have moved out of town, could scarcely remember him. Surviving ex-classmates described him as quiet and slightly aloof, but not studious, and not introverted enough to have attracted ridicule. Charismatic? Influential? A born leader? A prophet? No.

Computer files had little to add. His parents were not religious. His academic record was mediocre, his classroom behaviour unremarkable, or at least unremarked upon. After finishing high school, he worked for the local water utility, performing what was described as ‘unskilled and semi-skilled maintenance’. No doubt he accessed online libraries extensively in his youth, but only a few months of data is retained in most systems, and by the time anyone went looking for Duprey’s formative reading, the details had been purged long ago. If he ever bought books or ROMs, he took them with him when he fled; his rented room was found empty of all possessions. (What would have explained away three thousand corpses? Books on Charles Manson and Jim Jones? A diary full of teenage alienation? A tarot pack, a zodiac chart? Pentagrams in blood on the floor?)

Duprey was captured more than six years later, hiding out in rural Quebec. By this time, he had followers worldwide, blowing up trains and buildings, poisoning canned food, gunning down crowds of shoppers. Most of the killings were random, but one group of Children had murdered six members of a European Bubble-research team, and many more such assassinations were to follow. Bubble science, to the Children, is the ultimate blasphemy; after all, any detailed understanding of The Bubble’s true nature could only undermine their vision of the empty sky as a cosmic portent of the ‘Age of Mayhem’ which they believe they’re ushering in.

Duprey was found to be sane enough to stand trial. He was no paranoid schizophrenic—he heard no voices, saw no visions, suffered no more delusions than any other religious leader. I saw the leaked transcripts of one of his psychiatric evaluations; when asked bluntly whether he thought the genocide in Hartshaw was right or wrong, he said that he understood the concepts, but believed they were no longer applicable. ‘That symmetry was broken in the early universe, but now it has been restored. The two forces have become unified again—good and evil are indistinguishable.’ Most of his answers were in this style: metaphors from science and religion dragged out of context and hybridized at random into eclectic non sequiturs and hollow aphorisms. Quantum mysticism, pop cosmology, radical Gaiaist eco-babble, Eastern transcendentalism, Western eschatology—Duprey, omnivorous, had swallowed it all, and had managed to unify the jargon, if not the ideas. The psychiatrists never put a name to this condition, but apparently it didn’t constitute a defence of criminal insanity.

Karen and I watched the live broadcasts of the trial in the early hours of the morning; we’d finally synchronized shifts. I was trying to get promoted into a counter-terrorist unit, so I wanted to learn all I could about the Children. Karen was working as a registrar in the Casualty Department of the new Northern Suburbs Hospital—a job which often sounded more like police work than my own. Both our careers were stagnating; she was ten years out of medical school, I’d spent fourteen years in uniform. We both felt our chances were slipping away.

Neither the prosecution nor the defence wanted speeches from Duprey, or anything else which might inflame his disciples, so he was never put on the stand, and the question of motive was scarcely raised. The evidence linking him to the weapons dealer (turned prosecution witness) who’d supplied the engineered bacteria he’d used was complex and tedious, but ultimately watertight; the trial dragged on for months, but the outcome was never in doubt.

Halley’s comet was no spectacle in 2061—as seen from the Earth. The geometry was unfavourable; at its closest approach it was swamped in sunlight, leaving it barely visible to the naked eye anywhere on the planet. A dozen probes pursued it, though; fusion-powered craft able to match its difficult orbit, and even a couple of vintage spaceborne telescopes, commissioned prior to The Bubble, were reactivated for the occasion. The pictures from these sources were breathtaking, and throughout June and July there were two stories on the HV news almost every night, two images almost guaranteed to be shown one after the other: the comet, streaming tails of yellow-white dust and vivid blue plasma, travelling out of the darkness, out of the Abyss, towards the sun—and Marcus Duprey, sitting impassively in a courtroom in Maine.

On August 4th, Duprey was sentenced to sixty thousand, eight hundred and forty years’ imprisonment. He had been tried alone for the Hartshaw massacre, but throughout 2060 and 2061, the Children had been infiltrated successfully in many cities, and a total of seventeen other key members had been imprisoned, the end of the age of mayhem! proclaimed NewsLink, beneath a picture of a voodoo doll in the image of Duprey, pierced by seventeen needles and oozing blood from every wound.

On September 4th, three ex-jurors were murdered. (The rest were immediately taken into protective custody, and subsequently given lifelong police protection; to date, though, two more have been assassinated.)

On October 4th, the trial judge survived the bombing of her home. The district attorney, and his bodyguard, were fatally shot in an elevator.

On November 4th, the courtroom where Duprey had been tried was destroyed by an explosion. Sixteen people died.

Why were so many people willing to follow Duprey, to avenge his imprisonment? Of those arrested, some were congenital psychotics who would have killed anyway; the Children had merely provided a pretext—and access to weapons and explosives. Most, though, showed a different profile: they had joined the Children because they simply couldn’t accept that the stars had gone out and it meant nothing, changed nothing. Duprey had proclaimed that the Abyss marked the end of all moral order—and you can’t ask for greater human relevance than that. For the sake of making sense of the world—to preserve themselves from The Bubble’s indifference—they swallowed his bleak conclusions. But you can’t confirm the end of all moral order by pointing a telescope at the Abyss; you can’t measure it with apparatus of any kind. If you want—if you need—to believe in it, you have to go out and make it happen. You have to make it real.

As the twenty-seventh anniversary of Bubble Day approached, not a city in the world was entirely immune from the tension. Those who had imprisoned Duprey had been singled out for punishment, but in the past—and especially on November 15th—the Children had killed at random, and nobody believed that they’d abandoned that practice. Department stores X-rayed and strip-searched their customers (and home-shopping suddenly turned fashionable again). Train schedules fell apart under the burden of endless security checks (and telecommuting underwent a revival).

On November 9th, Duprey held a media conference in prison; he answered no questions, but read out a statement denouncing all acts of violence and calling on his followers to do the same. I took it for granted that he had been bribed or coerced somehow, and I doubted that anyone was in a position to know how many of the Children were likely to obey him—but the media pushed the line that the statement amounted to some kind of miraculous reprieve, and the public hysteria certainly diminished. I just hoped that Duprey’s followers were as easily manipulated as the rest of us.

Four days later, the story broke: Duprey’s words had not been his own; the whole thing had been staged with a puppet mod. Illegally: the US Supreme Court had reaffirmed, only months before, that the enforced application of a neural mod was unconstitutional, whatever the circumstances—and in any case, Maine had never even tried to pass a law allowing it. The prison governor resigned. The state’s most senior FBI bureaucrat blew his brains out. More to the point, it was hard to imagine anything which could have enraged the Children more.

It was just after two a.m. on November 15th, when Vincent Lo and I responded to an alarm from a dockside container warehouse. People later asked us how we could have been ‘foolhardy’ enough to walk ‘alone’ into such ‘obvious’ peril. What did they think? That the day’s eighty thousand burglaries, worldwide, could all be treated as potential terrorist atrocities, at a cost of about one-and-a-half million dollars each? Maine was on the other side of the planet. The Children had struck in Australia only once—in a bungled attempted bombing which had killed only the bomber himself. Of course we walked right in.

We accessed the warehouse security system first, though. The surveillance cameras showed nothing amiss, but something had tripped a motion detector. (A passing train? It wouldn’t have been the first time.) The containers were laid out in rows; I moved down one aisle, Vincent another, while P2 let us see, simultaneously, through our own eyes and any (or all) of the sixteen ceiling-mounted cameras. I set off a small pyrotechnic device which sent thin streams of coloured smoke wafting at random across our entire, expanded field of view—a trick which betrays even the most sophisticated data chameleon. The cameras were clean. We were alone in the building.

A few seconds later, we both felt the floor vibrating, very slightly. We shared sensory data to get a better parallax, and P2 pinned down the source of the vibrations to one container, in the second row from the left. I was about to switch the camera above to infrared—for what little that might have revealed—when suddenly there was no need: a pale, transparent-blue plasma jet punched through the steel of one of the walls of the container, close to an upper corner, and began smoothly slicing its way down.

Vincent queried the main warehouse system, and said, ‘One Hitachi MA52 mining robot, on its way to the goldfields.’

That’s when I felt about as much of a frisson as P3 permitted. The container was fifteen metres high. I’d seen the MA52s on HV: they looked like a cross between a tank and a bulldozer, scaled up considerably, sprouting a dozen steel appendages, each of which terminated in an assortment of wicked-looking tools. The things carried out self-maintenance, which explained the plasma torch. Needless to say, any mining robot was supposed to be shipped unpowered—and, powered or not, should not have been able to wake spontaneously in transit and decide to cut itself free. At the very least, it had been completely reprogrammed, and it had probably been tampered with mechanically as well. All rules governing the behaviour of the standard model could safely be considered void; there was no point tracking down the documentation for emergency de-activation codes.

We were armed, of course. Our weapons could have melted through the robot’s outer plate, in about a decade.

I notified the station of developments, and put in a call for reinforcements. The plasma jet reached the bottom of its path, and made a neat horizontal turn.

There were six massive cranes fitted to the warehouse ceiling, one for each row of containers. By the time I’d given them a second glance, Vincent already had them under his control. The one we needed, though, was parked at the end of the building furthest from where we needed it, and it crawled along its track with unbelievable lassitude. I invoked PS’s judgement of distances and velocities, then did the same for the plasma jet’s progress; the container would be open at least fifteen seconds before we could start to raise it. But it was one row in from the edge of the grid, and the aisles were barely three metres wide—the MA52 wouldn’t have room to charge right out; it would have to clear a path first. That would buy us far more than fifteen seconds.

The rectangle of steel came free—then skidded down the aisle with a deafening screech, still balanced on its edge until it hit the far wall. As the robot, propelled by banks of manoeuvrable treads, rolled out as far as it could, the container slipped a short distance in the opposite direction. Ten or twenty centimetres, no more.

Vincent cursed softly: ‘Suboptimal!’

The crane lowered its grappling claw on to the container’s misaligned roof. Locking pins—as thick as my arm—shot out in search of target holes, retracted in surprise, then cycled idiotically through the same action four more times, before giving up. A red light on the claw started flashing, an ear-splitting siren shrieked twice, then everything on the crane shut down.

We’d kept our distance; it took me twenty seconds to reach the action—on the robot’s blind side—by which time it had started ramming the container that blocked its path. Each time it backed away, its own container slid forward slightly; each time it advanced, the opposite happened—but the net motion was backwards. The robot was going to be hemmed in for several minutes, but any prospect of aligning the grappling claw was vanishing rapidly.

Each container had a ladder welded to its side; as it happened, that was the side that had been cut away and discarded, so I climbed the container across the aisle and jumped the gap. Starting the claw swinging was much harder than I’d expected; it hung from six cables, arranged as three pairs, and the pairing complicated and damped the motion. Gradually, I built up the oscillations, until the claw was sweeping far enough to compensate for the container’s displacement.

Now it was just a matter of timing.

There was no need for me to cue Vincent; the closest ceiling camera gave him a perfect view. P5 had no trouble extrapolating the motion of the swinging claw, but the lurching of the container was unpredictable. The crane’s firmware didn’t make things any easier—each time Vincent commanded it to try to grab the container, it went through a hard-wired cycle of five attempts, and then shut down; the only freedom he had was to choose the moment he started the sequence. Three times, the container shifted, throwing out all his calculations. The fourth time, I knew it was our last chance. I could make the claw swing further horizontally, but the arc of its motion would lift it too high for the locking pins to engage.

When it happened, it looked as miraculous, as improbable, as something from a time-reversed movie: everything magically fitting together, like the fragments of a broken vase. Everything except one locking pin, out by some ludicrous fraction of a millimetre, stuck against the side of its hole while all the others continued to slide home. I could picture them all retracting again, the instant some idiot microprocessor gave up hope on that one jammed pin.

I kicked it as hard as I could. It slipped into place. Primed or not, I felt a moment of dizzy jubilation. I ducked between the cables and jumped back across the aisle as the crane’s lifting motors burst noisily into life. Then I clambered down the ladder and ran.

The container rose smoothly; the MA52, still two-thirds inside, had no choice but to rise with it. As its treads approached the height of the roof of the container which had blocked its way, I could almost imagine it making a leap for freedom—but the gap was too wide. The robot ascended helplessly to the ceiling, fifty metres above.

I could hear sirens approaching; our reinforcements were about to arrive. I met up with Vincent at the warehouse entrance.

I said, ‘Now we wait for the army to come and blast the fucker into shrapnel.’ Vincent shook his head. ‘No need.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The safety features of this system,’ he said, ‘leave a lot to be desired.’ He dropped it.

Later, weapons were found in the debris which could have demolished a suburb or two—and it was only the Children’s incompetence which had kept that from happening: it turned out that they’d corrupted the security system of the wrong warehouse. If there’d been no early warning, the whole thing would have ended with the army having to take on the MA52 in the streets. In three African cities, that was exactly what had happened, with heavy loss of life. Elsewhere, of course, there’d been the usual bombings: everything from incendiary devices to chemical shells spreading neurotoxins. I didn’t want to know about it; I glanced at the headlines then flipped screens, unwilling to swallow so soon the truth of how microscopic our victory had been.

Despite having been merely lucky, Vincent and I were, predictably, portrayed as heroes. I didn’t mind—it meant that I was now virtually guaranteed promotion to the counter-terrorist unit. The media attention was tiresome, but I gritted my teeth and waited for it to pass. Karen resented the whole thing, and I couldn’t blame her; none of our friends seemed to want to talk about anything else, and she must have been as sick of hearing the story as I was of telling it.

Still worse, Karen’s well-meaning brother dropped in one Sunday afternoon with recordings of every interview I’d given—primed, as the Department insisted—which we’d taken great pains to avoid when they’d been broadcast. We had to sit through them all. Karen loathed seeing me primed, almost as much as I did myself. ‘The zombie boy scout’ she called me, and I couldn’t disagree; the cop with my face on the HV was so bland, so earnest, so blinkered, so fucking sensible, it made me want to gag. (There may be people born that way, but not many, and you pity them.)

Every cop has no less than six standard ‘priming mods’, PI to P6, but it’s P3 which imposes the mental state appropriate for active duty, it’s P3 which really makes you primed. It had always been clear to me that what P3 did was cripple the brain—efficiently, reversibly, and to great advantage, but there was no point being squeamish or euphemistic about it. The priming mods made better cops, the priming mods saved lives—and the priming mods made us, temporarily, less than human. I could live with that, so long as I didn’t have my nose rubbed in it too often. The ‘priming drugs’ of the bad old days—a crude, purely pharmaceutical attempt to suppress emotional responses, heighten sensory awareness and minimize reaction times—had caused a number of side-effects, including unpredictable transitions between the primed and unprimed states, but the arrival of neural mods had banished all such complications. The partitioning of my life was simple, clear-cut, absolute: on duty, I was primed; off duty, I wasn’t.

There was no possibility of ambiguity, no question of one side contaminating the other.

Karen had no professional mods; doctors, the eternal conservatives, still frowned upon the technology—but differential malpractice insurance premiums, amongst other things, were gradually eroding their resistance.

On December 2nd, I learnt that my promotion had come through—a few hours before I read about it in the evening news. That was a Friday; on the Saturday, Karen and I, and Vincent and his wife Maria, went out to dinner together to celebrate. Vincent had also been offered a position in the unit, but he’d declined.

‘Bad career move,’ I said, only half teasing. We’d scarcely had a chance to discuss it before; primed, such topics were unmentionable. ‘Counter-terrorism is a growth sector. Ten years in this unit, and I can quit the force and become an obscenely overpaid consultant to multinationals.’

He gave me an odd look, and said, ‘I guess I’m just not that ambitious.’ And then he took Maria’s hand, and squeezed it. It was hardly an extravagant gesture, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

I woke in the early hours of Sunday morning, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I climbed out of bed; Karen could always sense my wakefulness, and it always seemed to disturb her far more than my absence. I sat in the kitchen, trying to come to a decision, but only growing more angry and confused. I hated myself, because I hadn’t once stopped to think that I might be putting her at risk. We should have talked it through, before I’d accepted the promotion—and yet the very idea of any such discussion seemed obscene. How could I ask her? How could I acknowledge the slightest real danger and admit in the same breath that, with her permission, yes, I’d still go ahead and take the job? And if, instead, I simply changed my mind and turned it down without consulting her, in the end she’d drag the reason out of me—and she’d never forgive me for having excluded her from the decision.

I walked over to a window and looked out at the brightly lit street; ever since The Bubble, it seemed to me, streetlights had been growing more powerful year by year. Two cyclists rode by. The window pane shattered outwards, and I followed the shards through the empty frame.

Unbidden, the priming mods snapped into life. I curled up and rolled as I hit the ground; P4 saw to that. I lay on the grass for a second or two, bleeding and winded. I could hear the flames behind me, I could feel my heart accelerate and my skin grow cold as PI shut down peripheral circulation—a controlled version of the natural adrenalin response—but I was insulated from my body’s agitation, I had no choice but to remain calmly analytic. I got to my feet and turned around to assess the situation. Tiles from the roof were scattered on the lawn; the bomb must have been in the ceiling, close to the back of the house, probably right above the bedroom. I could see patches of a bubbling, gelatinous substance sliding down the remnants of the inside walls, carrying with it sheets of blue flame.

I knew that Karen was dead. Not injured, not in danger. With nothing to shield her from the blast, she would have died instantly.

I’ve thought about it a great deal since, and I always reach the same conclusion: any ordinary person in the same situation would have run back in, would have risked their life—in shock, confused, disbelieving, would have done the most dangerous and futile thing imaginable.

But the zombie boy scout knew there was nothing he could do, so he just turned and walked away. And, knowing the dead were beyond his help, he turned his attention to the needs of the survivor.

3

I try, and fail, to think of a single, compelling reason why the Children can’t be involved. Abducting braindamaged mental patients conceived on Bubble Day may not be something they’ve done before, but no doubt there’s a dearth of suitable candidates—and, short of an actual precedent, the whole absurd crime does have an undeniable Child-like ring to it. It’s also true that the Children aren’t known to have been active in New Hong Kong, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have a cell here, a safe house somewhere in the city. As few as four or five people could have smuggled Laura in.

I pace the room, trying to stay calm. I feel more indignation than fear—as if my client should have known about this and warned me from the start. That’s absurd, but the fact remains: I’m not being paid enough to fuck with terrorists, least of all the Children. They may not have deigned to make a second attempt on my life—a policy they seem to apply to all chance survivors, as if refusing to acknowledge failure—but I have no intention of reminding them of my existence, let alone providing them with a whole new reason to put me back on their hit list.

I call the airport; there’s a flight out at six. I book a seat. I pack. It all takes a matter of minutes. Then I sit on the bed, staring at my suitcase—and gradually I start to regain a sense of perspective.

So, Laura was conceived on—or close to—Bubble Day. But is that information, or noise? Law enforcement bodies around the world have programmed computers to tirelessly pursue the Children’s obsessions—dates, numerology, heavenly conjunctions, ad nauseam—and the results have always been the same: overflowing files full of spurious correlations and meaningless coincidences; terabytes of junk. One way or another, about twenty per cent of everything can be made to look potentially significant to the Children. The fraction of this that’s genuine is infinitesimal; in practice, the method is about as useful as considering everyone with eyes the same colour as Marcus Duprey’s to be a suspected terrorist.

No doubt any member of the Children, if told of Laura’s date of conception, would ascribe a great significance to her abduction—but to treat that as proof of their involvement is ludicrous. The question is not: what does this signify to the Children? For the Children to have played a part in every single crime, worldwide, in which they would discern some cosmic portent, Duprey’s following would need to have been underestimated by a factor of about a million.

Running away would be pathetic.

Still. I have nothing to lose but money. I could err on the side of caution, I could drop the case, regardless. Yeah, and I could join the ranks of people so cowed by the Children’s atrocities that they hunt obsessively through the patterns of their lives in search of danger signs, and lock themselves in their homes on every anniversary of every petty stage of Duprey’s lukewarm bloodless martyrdom, observing the holy days of their own religion of fear.

I unpack.

It’s almost sunrise. Lack of sleep, as it often does, has left me with a peculiar feeling of clarity, a sense of having broken free of the mind’s ordinary cycle, of having reached a profound new relationship with the world. I invoke Boss to force my endocrine system back into phase, and the delusion soon evaporates.

Compared to lightning-bolt revelations of terrorist involvement, the information I’ve assembled so far looks hopelessly ambiguous. But I have to start somewhere—and Biomedical Development International is the only company on the list without a blatantly innocent reason to be buying the cluster of drugs that Laura needs. And if BDI has no shareholders to impress, and hacking is too risky, I’m going to have to use more direct means to find out exactly what it is that they’re researching.

I take a small box from my suitcase, and open it gently. Nestled in tissue paper, a mosquito is sleeping.

I lack the specialist mod used to program the insect, but a second compartment of the box contains a ROM, bearing old-style sequential software which will let me do the job, albeit more slowly. I lift out the chip, and switch it on. It glows invisibly in modulated infrared, and the bioengineered IR transceiver cells, scattered throughout the skin of my hands and face, collect and demodulate the signal. RedNet (NeuroComm, $1,499) receives the nerve impulses from these cells, and decodes and buffers the data.

I pass the program to von Neumann (Continental BioLogic, $3,150). Simulating a general-purpose computer isn’t something a neural network does with great efficiency—hence the need for specialized mods, physically optimized for their tasks, instead of a single, programmable ‘computer-in-the-skull’. But nobody can afford to buy every mod on the market—and you’d probably impair normal brain function if you commandeered that many neurons. So, quaint as it may be, sometimes loading a ROM full of sequential software is the only practical solution.

Culex explorator is purely organic, but heavily modified, both genetically and post-developmentally; most of the genetic tampering is simply to give the mature insect enough neurons for the nanomachines to rewire—plus its own IR transceivers, of course. I select the behavioural parameters I want from the menus in my head, wait five minutes while the program encodes them into the language of the mosquito’s neural schemata, then cup my hand over the box for maximum signal strength and ram my decisions into the insect’s tiny brain. There are endless layers of error checking in the RedNet protocol, but I run a full read-back of the data anyway, which confirms success.

On my way to the underground, the streets are already far from empty. Food vendors stand by steaming barrows, and customers flock to them, ignoring the seductively photographed—but olfactorily barren—holographic temptations of dispensing machines. I buy a bag of noodles and eat as I walk. Sharply dressed executives, bankers and databrokers stride past me; people who could easily work from their homes, who could operate entirely within their own skulls—and even, with the help of mods, choose to enjoy it. It’s hard to admit that the sight of these umbrella-wielding infocrats hurrying by, radiating self-importance, strikes me as some kind of affirmation of the human spirit. The light suddenly dims, and I look up to see two layers of churning grey cloud racing each other across the sky. Seconds later, I’m drenched.

The R&D heart of New Hong Kong lies twenty kilometres to the west of the city centre. I emerge from the underground into an almost deserted world of sprawling concrete buildings set in lawns so perfect that if they’re real, they might as well not be. The sense of space here seems almost scandalous after the city’s crowds and towers; many of the labs and factories are fifteen or twenty storeys high, but the streets are wide enough, the grounds sufficiently spacious, to keep the architecture from crowding out the sky—mercurially, already blue again from horizon to horizon.

I pause to shake Culex out of its box onto my palm; it clings to the skin. I hold it up to my eyes; I can just make out the tiny specks of the twelve data chameleons adhering to the sides of the thorax. I curl my fingers into a loose fist before setting off again. It takes a certain effort to adopt a casual gait with twenty thousand dollars’ worth of counter-security equipment in the palm of your hand.

The maze-like region to the north of the underground bears all the hallmarks of having once consisted of a number of distinct, self-consciously constructed ‘science parks’, which have since overflowed into the space between. Each must have had its own orderly—if bizarre—avant-garde street plan, with its own peculiar symmetries and hierarchies, and each has had some degree of success in propagating the pattern beyond its original boundaries, but where two or more incompatible designs have come into conflict, the result can only be described as pathological. BDI itself lies at the end of a cul-de-sac—which precludes a nonchalant stroll past the front entrance—but the whole area is such a capillaceous mass of tiny streets on disconnected branches that I should be able to get close enough to the rear of the building while seeming to be headed somewhere else entirely.

The streets are quiet; I can even hear birdsong. One passing cyclist gives me a puzzled second glance; there seem to be no other pedestrians about, and I feel, prematurely, like a trespasser. These may be public streets, but they all lead to a small number of private destinations. In the unhkely event that someone stops to offer me directions, I’ll just have to do my best lost-idiot-tourist act.

Finally, I catch sight of what I hope is BDI, an off-white concrete shoe box a hundred metres away, visible through the gap between Transgenic Ecocontrol and Industrial Morphogenesis. I can’t actually see any identifying sign or logo from this angle, but I double-check against the street map in my head, and there’s no doubt that I have the right building.

I catch myself thinking: an unlikely front for the Children of the Abyss… and I laugh aloud at this ‘reassuring’ observation. The Children are not involved—and I don’t need to look for excuses to believe that. The biggest ‘risk’ I face from BDI is that they’ll turn out to have nothing to do with the kidnapping at all.

I paste a copy of my visual field into the image buffer of the Culex program. I mark the building clearly, and then pulse this final message to the insect itself. I raise my hand and open my palm; the mosquito rises at once, circles above me a couple of times, and then vanishes.

I spend most of the day examining the information that’s publicly available about BDI’s owner, Wei Pailing. I dutifully plough through twenty-five years of news-system coverage—he averages about six articles a year—but I find nothing remarkable. The only report that’s not strictly business news is the opening of a new wing of the NHKScienceMuseum; Wei led the consortium which raised the funds, and the article quotes from his platitudinous speech: Our children’s future relies on stimulating their intellects and imaginations from the earliest age…’

It strikes me that Wei has no visible interest in any company old enough to be the cause of Laura’s condition; he’s only in his early fifties, and he seems to have preferred founding new businesses to indulging in takeovers. Of course, that proves nothing about BDI’s clients.

By late afternoon, I’m growing short of productive distractions. My irrational fears about the Children keep resurfacing; I know exactly how to banish them, but I don’t want to do that. Not yet.

I flick on the HV, in the middle of an advertisement; I flip channels, to no avail. Panverts don’t involve active collusion between rival broadcasters (perish the thought); all stations just happen to have introduced the practice of allowing advertisers to specify the timeslots they want to the nearest hundredth of a second. I could switch right out of real-time, and search for something to download, but it doesn’t seem worth the effort when all I want to do is kill time.

A young man is saying,’—lack purpose and direction? Axon has the answer! Now, you can buy the goals you need! Family life… career success… material wealth… sexual fulfilment… artistic expression… spiritual enlightenment.’ As he speaks each phrase, a cube containing an appropriate scene materializes in his right hand, and he tosses it into the air to make room for the next, until he’s effortlessly juggling all six. ‘For more than twenty years, Axon has been helping you to attain life’s riches. Now, we can help you to want them!’

After catching the last half of an incomprehensible—but visually stunning—surrealist thriller, I switch the HV off and pace the room, growing steadily more apprehensive. My rendezvous with Culex is still four hours away. Why put up with four more hours of boredom and anxiety? For the masochistic thrill of enduring real human emotions? Fuck that; I had my dose of that this morning, and nearly walked away from the case. I invoke P3.

Sometimes the feel-good subtext is more blatant than usual. Primed is the right way to be: quick-thinking, rational, efficient, free of distractions. It’s all perfectly true, although, ironically, the analytic frame of mind that P3 encourages makes it hard for me to gloss over the fact that this attitude is imposed arbitrarily. Just about every mod which alters the personality comes with an axiomatic assertion that using this mod is good. Critics of the technology call this self-serving propaganda; proponents say that it’s simply an essential measure to prevent potentially disabling conflict—a kind of safeguard against a (metaphorical) mental immune response. Unprimed, I tend to accept the cynical position. Primed, I acknowledge that I lack the data and expertise to evaluate these arguments decisively.

I spend ten minutes reviewing all that I know about the case so far. I’m struck with no new insights, which is no great surprise; P3 eliminates distractions and makes it easier to focus the attention—and thus to reason more swiftly—but it doesn’t grant any magical increase in intelligence. The other priming mods all provide various facilities: PI can manipulate the user’s biochemistry, P2 augments sensory processing, P4 is a collection of physical reflexes, P5 enhances temporal and spatial judgement, P6 is responsible for coding and communications… but P3’s role is largely that of a filter, selecting out the optimal mental state from all of the brain’s natural possibilities, and inhibiting the intrusion of modes of thought which it judges inappropriate.

There’s nothing to do now but wait—so, incapable of boredom, untroubled by pointless fears, I wait.

I return as near as I can to the point of release, but there’s no need for precision; the mosquito finds me by scent, and would have shunned a stranger standing on the very same spot. It lands on my palm for an infrared debriefing.

The mission has been successful. For a start, Culex found its own route in and out of the building—no need to ride in on a human back, and no problem returning now. Inside, it located the security station, traced a bundle of cables to the ceiling, then found a way into the conduit and planted the twelve chameleons. Then, it went exploring more widely; the software is grinding away in the background right now, converting the data it gathered into a detailed layout of the building. Finally, it checked back with the chameleons, who’d cracked the security system’s signal validation protocol, and reported that, after sampling all thirty-five cables, they’d identified twelve by means of which a useful set of contiguous blind spots could be created.

I view eidetic snapshots extracted from the mosquito’s brain, processed into a form which betrays no hint of their origin in compound eyes. No big surprises. Technicians. Computers. Assorted equipment for biochemical analysis and synthesis. No sign of any bedridden patients—though by now, Laura might be on her feet, and I have no idea what she’d look like; the late Han Hsiu-lien, possibly, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Close-ups of workstation screens show flow diagrams of laboratory processes, schematics of protein molecules, DNA and amino acid sequence data… and several neural maps. But the maps aren’t labelled with anything enlightening—like Andrews, l. or congenital brain damage study #1. Just meaningless serial numbers.

The layout of the building is completed; I wander through it in my mind’s eye. Five storeys, two basements; offices, labs, storerooms; two elevators, two stairwells. There are several regions coded pale blue for no data, where Culex couldn’t penetrate unaided, and had no opportunity to hitch a ride; the largest by far, twenty metres square, lies in the middle of the second basement.

This could be some kind of special facility—a clean room, a cryogenic store, a radioisotopes lab, a biohazard area; people would enter such places rarely, with most of the work being done via remotes. But the snapshots show only a drab white wall and an unmarked door; no biohazard or radiation warnings, no signs of any kind.

The chameleons are pre-programmed for two a.m.—just in case the place turned out to be mosquito-proof after hours—but now there’s no need to stick to that schedule; I send Culex back in, to tell them to activate in seven minutes’ time, at eleven fifty-five. Chameleons are too small to receive radio signals—which is probably just as well; radio is bad security.

As I approach the building, I pass the layout to P2, which superimposes it over my real vision. Fields of view of surveillance cameras, and regions monitored by motion detectors, glow with faint red auras; it’s tempting to think of this as danger rendered visible—as if some mod in my head could magically ‘sense’ the action of each security device—but in truth it’s nothing but a theoretical map, which may or may not be complete and correct.

At 11:55:00, 1 switch twelve patches of red to black—purely as a matter of faith. I have no proof that these blind spots have actually come into existence. If not, though, I’ll soon find out.

The perimeter fence is barbed, and my field meter says that the top strands are electrified at sixty thousand volts-well within the threshold of the insulators in my gloves and shoes. The barbs look wickedly sharp, but they’d have to be studded with industrial diamonds—and spinning at a few thousand rpm—to make much impression on the composite fibres in my gloves. I swing myself over and clamber down, hitting the ground as softly as I can; there are adjacent motion detectors still active, and I don’t know their sensitivity.

I slice open a ground-floor window, and slip into an unlit room, a lab of some kind. P2 adapts my vision rapidly to maximum sensitivity, for what that’s worth, but it’s Culex’s map that helps me navigate past obstacles at a reasonable speed. Fixed obstacles, that is; whenever I see a chair or a stool outlined in my ghost vision, I slow down and reach out to ascertain its current position.

The corridor, too, is in darkness, but I see red not far to my left as I leave the lab, and a second region still under surveillance comes within a centimetre of the doorway to the stairs. I’m about to turn the handle, when I realize that the elbow-shaped door-closing mechanism is on the verge of poking into the danger zone; P5 makes it clear that I don’t stand a chance of squeezing through the permissible crack. I reach up and snap the device at the joint, then fold the two limp halves flush against the door.

I descend to the lower basement. The chameleons have done their best to give me the widest possible access to every floor, but this place seems to have been sparsely protected to start with. With no live cameras nearby to catch the spill, I risk using a flashlight, bringing detail to my ghost vision’s wireframe sketch. There are bulk containers of solvents and reagents; a row of horizontal freezers; a centrifuge sitting against the wall, opened up and spilling circuit boards, as if in mid-repair, or mid-cannibalization.

I reach the no data region. It’s a large, square room, oddly adrift in the middle of an area that’s otherwise undivided, and it looks—and smells—like a recent construction. But if Laura is in there, why would they have gone to so much trouble to house her? Not to keep her discreetly hidden, that’s for sure; this ad hoc prison, if that’s what it is, could hardly be more conspicuous.

I circle the room; there’s only one door in. The lock is no great challenge; a little probing, then one carefully directed magnetic pulse is all it takes, inducing a current in the circuit that operates the release mechanism. I draw my gun, pull the door open—and find myself staring at another wall, just two or three metres away.

I step through cautiously. The space between the walls is empty, but the second wall fails to join up with the first, on either side. Before going any further, I close the door behind me and plant a small alarm at the top of the frame.

When I reach the corner on my right, it’s clear that the two walls are concentric; I keep going, and round the next corner there’s a door in the inner wall. The lock is of the same cheap design as the first. I wish I knew the point of this bizarre setup, but I can worry about that later; what matters right now is whether or not Laura is buried in here, somewhere.

I open the second door, and the answer is no, but —

There’s a bed, unmade since it was last slept in, the bedclothes drawn back on one side where the occupant presumably slipped out. A toilet, a sink, a small table and chairs. On the far wall, there’s a mural of flowers and birds, just like the one in Laura’s room in the Hilgemann.

The bed is still faintly warm. So where have they taken her, in the middle of the night? Perhaps she’s suffered complications, and they’ve had to move her to a hospital. I spend thirty seconds exploring the room, but there’s nothing much to examine; the mural, though, says it all. Laura was here, just minutes ago, I’m sure of that; it’s pure bad timing that I’ve missed her.

And she may still be in the building. Upstairs, undergoing a midnight brain scan? BDI may be so eager to complete their contract—whatever that entails—that they’re working round the clock.

Leaving the inner room, I almost turn right, retracing my steps, taking the shortest route out—but then I change my mind and decide to complete my circumnavigation of the gap.

The woman standing just round the corner, leaning wearily on a walking frame, looks exactly like Han Hsiu-lien. She glances up at me, and bursts into tears. I step forward quickly, and administer a tranquillizing nasal spray. She goes limp; I catch her under the arms and put her over my shoulder. Not the smoothest ride, but I’m going to need my hands free. The walking frame is a good sign; she may not be entirely recovered, but no doubt she can be moved without too much harm. Once I’ve got her out of the building, I can call for an ambulance—while I’m cutting a hole in the fence.

I’m three paces out of the second doorway when a male voice behind me says calmly, ‘Don’t turn round. Drop the gun and the flashlight, and kick them away.’ As he speaks, I feel a small, sharply defined patch of warmth alight on the back of my skull—an infrared laser on minimum strength. This is more than a palpable warning that I’m targeted; if the weapon is on auto, the beam’s scatter is being monitored, and any sudden movement on my part would trigger a high-intensity pulse in a matter of microseconds.

I comply.

‘Now put her down, carefully, then put your hands on top of your head.’ I do it. The laser tracks me smoothly all the way.

The man says something in Cantonese; I invoke Deja Vu for a translation: ‘What do you want to do with him?’

A woman replies, ‘I’ll put him out of it.’

The man says, in English, ‘Please keep very still.’

The woman moves in front of me, holstering a gun. From a pouch on her belt beside the holster, she produces a small hypodermic capsule. Stepping over Laura, she takes hold of my jaw in one hand — I lower my heart rate—slides the needle into a vein in the side of my neck — I constrict blood flow to the area—then squeezes the capsule.

Reduced circulation will buy me a few seconds, at best, but that should be long enough for PI to make an assessment. If this is a substance that the mod can neutralize, then now is the time to move; unless the plan is to incinerate me when I slump under the drug’s effects, the laser must be off auto. If I feign loss of consciousness, stumble, swing the woman around as a shield, take her gun…

But PI gives no report. I try to twitch a finger, and fail. A moment later, I black out.

4

I wake, lying on my side on a concrete floor, naked. My arms are aching, but when I try to move them, cool metal presses against my wrists. I look around; I’m in a small, narrow storeroom lit by a single high window. My hands are cuffed behind me to a shelving rack, packed with laboratory glassware, which runs the length of the wall P5 has lost track of my location; it relies on a mixture of perceptual cues, balance sense and proprioception, which is accurate to the millimetre when you’re conscious and moving on foot, but totally useless when you’ve been knocked out and lugged somewhere. It does claim to have kept the time, though: 15:21, January 5th. The clocks in several other mods agree, and I doubt that a drug would have screwed them all up identically. In fifteen hours, I could have been moved anywhere on the planet… anywhere, that is, judging from the light, where’s it’s mid-afternoon or mid-morning at 15:21 Central Australian time. Belatedly, it occurs to me to scan the layout of the building in my head for any rooms with matching dimensions, and I find one on every floor. Culex saw nothing worth photographic snapshots in any of them, but the wireframe outlines it recorded indiscriminately are detailed enough to place me on the fourth floor.

I’m wearing two pairs of handcuffs; one pair has been threaded through a slot in one of the shelving rack’s vertical supports. The shelves aren’t anchored to the wall and just shifting my weight slightly sets the glassware rattling. I could try working the chain of the cuffs against the edge of the slot, but even if I’m not under surveillance, all that’s likely to achieve is an avalanche of glass.

Okay, I’m stuck here. So who am I dealing with?

It’s still possible that BDI are exactly what they claim to be: contract biomedical researchers. Who happen to have no qualms about kidnapping. Hired by the drug company whose product damaged Laura, in utero, thirty-three years ago. Company X would be taking a risk by involving outsiders, but maybe less of a risk than trying to deal with Laura in-house. Company X may have plenty of loyal staff, but presumably only a few of them are criminals—whereas BDI might specialize in just this kind of thing.

It all sounds as plausible as ever, even if the list of facts it fails to explain is growing longer. Casey’s testimony. The architecture of the basement room. Laura roaming the gap between the walls of her custom-made prison. All of which suggest an alternative which might explain everything—and which doesn’t sound plausible at all:

Laura really did escape from the Hilgemann. Unaided. Twice. That was why she was abducted; somebody found out, somebody who believed they could make good use of her talents. That was what the double-walled room was all about; a test for an idiot escapologist. And when I ran into her, she was half-way through passing that test.

What brought the guards down on us last night? Obviously, I triggered some kind of alarm—but unless the chameleons screwed up, the room wasn’t under surveillance by any device linked to the building’s security station. If Laura was being treated, not as a routine security problem, but as the subject of an experiment, it wouldn’t be surprising if she was being monitored by a different system entirely.

Why are BDI making neural maps? It has nothing to do with disputing liability for congenital brain damage; they’re trying to identify the pathways that make Laura the greatest thing since Houdini, in the hope of encoding her talents in a mod. Why did they smuggle her out as a corpse, not a passenger with a puppet mod? Because they didn’t want to screw around with her brain, and risk destroying the very thing that made her worth abducting.

It all fits together perfectly.

The only trouble is, I just can’t swallow it.

What hypothetical talent could Laura possess that would enable her to break out of locked rooms,without tools of any kind? Postulating an intuitive grasp of security devices is dubious enough—but what could anyone, however gifted, do to a lock, or a surveillance camera, with their bare hands? Two hundred years of research says telekinesis does not exist. The human body’s minute electromagnetic fields—even if they were controllable—are about a million times too weak to be of the slightest use in picking an electronic lock. No amount of fortuitous brain damage could change that—any more than reprogramming a computer in some novel way could give it the power to levitate. So how did she get out?

I’m still pondering this when the door opens. A young man tosses a bundle of clothes onto the floor beside me, then draws a gun and a remote control, and aims the latter at the handcuffs. I quickly activate RedNet, in the hope of capturing the exchange. The cuffs fall open, but I pick up nothing; the frequency used must be outside the range of my transceiver cells.

The man stands in the doorway with the gun trained on me. ‘Please get dressed.’ I recognize the voice from last night. The expression on his face is matter-of-fact, with no trace of smugness or belligerence; no doubt he has behavioural optimization mods of his own.

The clothes are brand new, and fit perfectly. P3 vetoes anything but stoicism at the loss of all the equipment I had stashed in hidden pockets; even so, for a moment after I’m dressed, some part of my brain flashes redundant warnings at the absence of the usual inventory of reassuring lumps.

‘Put on one pair of handcuffs. Behind your back.’

When I’ve done this, he blindfolds me. Then he guides me out of the room, walking beside me, gripping the chain of the cuffs with one hand, holding the gun to the side of my chest with the other.

I hear little along the way; snatches of conversation in Cantonese and English, passing footsteps on the carpet, equipment humming softly in the distance. I catch a faint scent of organic solvents. P5 tracks my location precisely, for what that’s worth. When we come to a halt, I’m pushed down into an armchair, and the gun is shifted to my temple.

Without any preliminaries, a woman says, ‘Who hired you?’ She’s a couple of metres away, facing me directly. ‘I don’t know.’

She sighs. ‘What exactly are you hoping for? Do you think we’re going to jump through all the technological hoops for you? Truth drugs, truth mods, neural maps—all in pursuit of memories that may or may not have been falsified, or erased? If you think you’re buying time, you’re wrong. I have no interest in spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, pissing around with your brain. If you tell us the truth, and your story checks out, we’ll be lenient. But if you don’t cooperate, here and now, we’ll kill you, here and now.’

She’s calm, but not mod calm; her tone of pained condescension sounds like a failed attempt to be coolly intimidating. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s bluffing.

‘I’m telling you the truth. I don’t know who my client is; I was hired anonymously.’

‘And you couldn’t penetrate that anonymity?’

‘It wasn’t my job to try.’

‘All right. But you must have formed some kind of working hypothesis. Who do you suspect?’

‘Someone who believed that Laura was taken by mistake. Someone who was afraid that their own relative in the Hilgemann was the real target.’

‘Who, specifically?’

‘I never came up with a likely candidate. Whoever it was, they would have done their best to hide the family connection. The whole idea that the kidnappers might have taken the wrong person would only make sense to someone who’d gone to great lengths to conceal their relative’s identity. I didn’t pursue it; I had better things to do.’

She hesitates, then lets that pass. ‘How did you trace Laura to us?’

I explain at length about the cargo X-rays, and the drug suppliers’ records. ‘And who else knows all this?’

Any invented confidant would easily be revealed as fictitious. I could claim to have software, running on a public network, camouflaged and invulnerable, ready to tell all to the NHK police in the event of my disappearance—but that wouldn’t be much of a threat. If I’d had enough evidence to convince the cops, I would have taken it to them in the first place, instead of breaking in.

‘Nobody.’

‘How did you get into the building?’

Again, I have nothing to gain by lying. They must have pieced together most of the details by now; confirming what they already know can only make me seem more credible.

‘What do you know about the work we do here?’

‘Only what’s advertised. Contract biological research.’

‘So why do you think we’re interested in Laura Andrews?’

‘I haven’t been able to work that out.’

‘You must have a theory,’

‘Not any more.’ There are specialist mods for lying convincingly—for responding like a normal human being confidently telling the truth, in terms of voice-stress patterns, skin temperature, heart rate, etcetera—but I have no need of one; P3 alone makes all such variables utterly opaque. ‘Nothing that stands up to the facts.’

‘No?’

I have no shortage of unlikely explanations to offer in support of my ignorance; I recount every hypothesis that’s passed through my head in the last eight days, however lame—save Company X and its birth-defects suit, and Laura the escapologist. I almost go so far as to mention my fear of the Children’s involvement, but I stop myself; it seems so ridiculous now that I’m sure it would sound like an obvious lie.

When I finally shut up, the woman says, ‘Okay’—but not to me. My guard takes the gun away from my head, but doesn’t move me from the chair, and I suddenly realize what’s about to happen. I suffer a brief moment of pure frustration—unconscious most of the time, blindfolded the rest; how am I ever going to find out anything? — before P3 smothers this unproductive sentiment. The needle goes into the vein, the drug flows into my bloodstream. I don’t fight it; there’s no point.

I wake on a bed, not even handcuffed. I glance around; I’m in a small, almost empty flat. A man I haven’t seen before is sitting on a chair in a corner of the room, watching me expressionlessly, resting a gun on his knee. I can hear street sounds from below, maybe fifteen or twenty storeys down. It’s seven forty-seven, January 6th.

I rise, and head for the bathroom; the guard makes no move to stop me. There’s a toilet, a shower, a sink; a non-opening window about thirty centimetres square, the pane dimpled so that it passes no clear image; a ventilation grille in the ceiling, half the size of the window. I urinate, then wash my hands and face. With the water still running, I quickly search the room, but there’s nothing that could be remotely useful as a weapon.

The rest of the flat is a single room, with a kitchen in one corner; a small refrigerator, unplugged, with the door ajar; a microwave and hotplates built into the counter top. There’s a window above the sink, covered by closed Venetian blinds. I start towards this area, but the guard says, ‘There’s nothing there you need. Breakfast is on its way.’ I nod and turn back. I pace beside the bed, stretching cramped muscles.

Shortly afterwards, another man brings in a carton packed with assorted fast food, and coffee. I eat sitting on the bed. The guard doesn’t join in, and ignores my attempts at conversation. His eyes move only to follow me, so at times he appears almost as if he’s in a kind of stupor, but I know precisely how alert he really is; I’ve spent enough twelve-hour stake-outs in a similar condition. When a mod grants you vigilance, you’re literally incapable of anything less; boredom, distraction and impatience have simply become inaccessible modes of thought. Unprimed, I may joke about zombies—but primed, I have no doubt that this is where the real strength of neurotechnology lies: not in the creation of exotic new mental states, but in the conscious, deliberate restriction of possibilities, in focusing, and empowering, the act of choice.

I half expect to be drugged yet again, as soon as I’ve finished eating, but this doesn’t happen. I don’t push my luck; I lie on the bed and gaze at the ceiling like a model prisoner, obviating any need for restraint. I have no intention of causing my captors the slightest difficulty, until the odds are a great deal better that it would do me some good.

And if no such opportunity arises?

What happens if I can’t escape?

Killing me would be the simplest choice in most respects. But what are the alternatives? What could my interrogator’s promise of leniency entail—assuming, for the sake of speculation, that it meant anything at all?

A memory wipe, perhaps. A crude one. If BDI aren’t willing to spend a fortune mapping my brain to extract information for their own benefit, they’re hardly going to do so out of concern for the integrity of my personality. Natural human memory didn’t evolve with any reason to be easily reversible; eliminating a given piece of knowledge, while leaving everything else intact, is a massive computational task. The only way to be cheap and thorough is to cut a wide swath.

Dead, brain-wiped, or free. In order of decreasing probability. So how do I change the odds? How can I hope to discover—or invent—a reason for my captors to keep me alive and intact, when I still don’t know who they are and what they’re doing? And how can I hope to find that out, when I have no means of gathering data?

I still have Cufct’s snapshots in my head. I go through them again, one by one, on the chance that I might have missed something crucial. All the shots of workstation screens are packed with information—but DNA sequences, protein models and neural maps don’t mean a lot to me. I can ‘read’ them—in the sense that a child can spell out the individual letters of even the most difficult piece of text—but I don’t stand a chance of recognizing any of the structures portrayed, let alone deducing anything about their function or context.

I’m fed again. The guard is changed. I shuffle the facts for hours, but nothing new crystallizes out of the contradictions. Escape remains as unlikely as ever. Rushing the guard would be suicide; crashing through the window and falling to the street would be marginally less likely to kill me—except that I’d probably be shot half-way across the room.

As the possibilities thin out, P3 seems to be dragging me further and further into a state of detachment. It wants me to gather more data—but it knows that I can’t. It wants me to concentrate on plausible strategies for survival—but acknowledges that there are none. What’s it going to do when all of its goals have been ruled out, when all of its elaborate optimization criteria have been rendered meaningless? Shut down? Bow out? Leave me to make my own choice between equally futile options?

Towards evening, the man who led me to the interrogation yesterday comes into the room. He tosses a pair of handcuffs onto the bed.

‘Put them on. Behind your back.’

What now? More questioning? I stand, pick up the cuffs. The other guard aims his weapon at my forehead, and flicks it onto auto.

‘Where are you taking me?’

Nobody replies. I hesitate, then snap on the cuffs. The first man approaches me, producing a hypodermic capsule. It all seems almost familiar by now.

Yeah. The same old routine. Nothing to fear. What better way to do it? The capsule is the same pale blue as before, but his grip conceals the markings.

‘Can’t you tell me where I’m going?’

He ignores me, unsheathes the capsule. He looks right at me—but his mods have pared him down until there’s nothing left for his eyes to betray.

‘I just—’

He places two fingers on my neck and stretches the skin. I say evenly, ‘I want to speak to your boss again. There’s something I didn’t tell her. Something important I have to explain.’

No reaction. The gun is still on auto; if I struggle, I’m dead for sure. The needle goes in. There’s nothing to do but wait. I open my eyes and blink at the bright ceiling, then look around. I haven’t even been moved. I am deprimed, though.

It’s 16:03, January 7th. The guard’s chair, still in place, is empty.

I lie perfectly still for a while, feeling numb and disoriented. When I try to get to my feet, I find that I’m weaker than I realized; I sit on the edge of the bed, with my head on my knees, trying to clear my thoughts.

A wave of pure, suffocating claustrophobia passes through me. I would have died like a good little robot. That’s the worst of it: the way I calmly accepted the loss of hope, the narrowing of the possibilities, every step of the way. I would have dug my own fucking grave, if they’d asked me.

But they didn’t. So why am I still alive? What was I sedated for? If my memory has been tampered with, they’ve done a seamless job—an unlikely feat in a day. (Then again, maybe they’ve spent a year on it, and everything that persuades me otherwise is a fabrication.)

I look up as the door opens. The guard who injected me yesterday comes in; he’s armed, but his weapon is holstered, as if he knows what state I’m in. Maybe they’ve dissolved my priming mods. I query P3; it still exists. I stop short of invoking it.

He tosses something at me. I don’t even try to catch it; it lands at my feet. A magnetic key.

‘That’s for the front door,’ he says. I stare at him. He seems almost embarrassed; whatever behavioural mods I’ve seen him with before, I’d say they’re shut down now. He grabs the chair from the corner of the room and puts it beside the bed, then sits facing me.

‘Take it easy, okay. My name’s Huang Qing. I’ve got something to tell you.’

‘What?’ I’m beginning to think I know the answer. And I think again about priming—to cushion the blow, to keep myself from going into shock—but then it occurs to me that there’s probably no need.

He says, warily, ‘You’ve been recruited. By the Ensemble.’

‘The Ensemble.’ The phrase dances through my head, pushing buttons and tripping switches. For an instant, all this sparkling new machinery is clearly visible to me: perfectly delineated, separate and comprehensible—although maybe this is just a delusion, a side-effect, a glitch. In any case, a moment later the insight (or mirage) is gone, and I could no more describe the minutiae of what’s been done to me than I could determine, by introspection, which neurons make my bowels move or my heart beat.

‘You okay?’

‘I’m fine.’ And it’s true, I am. I feel a kind of abstract horror, and a remote, almost dutiful, outrage—but the sheer relief of finally knowing my fate, and understanding the sense of it, outweighs both.

This is what they meant by leniency. I’m alive. My memory is intact. Nothing has been taken away from me—but something has been added.

I have no idea what the Ensemble is—except that it’s the most important thing in my life.