Something Coming Through

3. Disruption Theory

London | 4 July

Disruption Theory’s office was near Bow Creek, the top floor of a Victorian warehouse protected from the extended reach of the Thames by a construction-coral stopbank. Chloe commuted to work by ferry, across the river from Greenwich. The first to arrive on Monday morning, she disarmed the security system and primed the industrial coffee machine; after a sequence of thumps, rattles and jets of steam the earthy scent of its brew began to permeate the quiet still air of the open-plan workspace. Sunlight fell through the glass wall that fronted the conference room and Daniel Rosenblaum’s corner office, glowed on the workstations and tables under the oak beams and dusty skylights of the high ceiling.

When Jen Lovell came in, Chloe was reviewing the cut she’d made from footage of the breakout meeting and the brief interview with Freddie Patel. Jen clattered about her office for a couple of minutes before pouring herself a cup of coffee and carrying it across the room to the table where Chloe sat.

‘How did your lead pan out?’

‘Better than expected,’ Chloe said. ‘It definitely wasn’t your average snake cult. In fact, I’m hoping to follow up on it.’

Jen didn’t rise to that. A calm, chunky woman who favoured business suits and amber jewellery, she took a careful sip from her cup of coffee and said, ‘There’s a meeting in an hour, to go over today’s schedule and raise any snags. After that you have a one-on-one with Helena to fine-tune your preparations. And then there’s the group briefing this afternoon.’

‘I don’t know why we’re making such a big deal of the New Galactic Navy thing. Even the tabloids said we had nothing to do with it.’

Jen took another sip of coffee. ‘I don’t blame you for being nervous. We all are.’

Disruption Theory was in the gunsights of Robin Mountjoy, one of the leading lights of the Human Decency League. His party campaigned on a single issue: the removal of all traces of the Jackaroo and their fellow travellers from Great Britain. It had made big advances in the last general election; although the minority Conservative government hadn’t entered into a formal alliance with it, there had been several major concessions. Which was why Robin Mountjoy was chairing the Alien Technology Committee. He wasn’t about to take on the multinationals, so he was going after small companies like Disruption Theory instead. And Disruption Theory was an especially tempting target because of Daniel Rosenblaum’s high-profile promotion of its work, and because it was bankrolled by Ada Morange, the controversial French entrepreneur. Her company, Karyotech Pharma, had been a leading contender in the early days of exploitation of Elder Culture tech and alien biota, with a presence on ten of the fifteen worlds. At one point, after Karyotech Pharma’s initial public offering of shares on Euronext, she’d been a paper billionaire, but much of her fortune had dissipated in a long battle against a hostile takeover and a series of lawsuits over patents and prior art. So Disruption Theory was squarely in the sights of the select committee, but lacked the defensive firepower of the big players. Robin Mountjoy was boasting about taking a tough line with what he called fellow travellers of the Jackaroo; Ada Morange was threatening to shut down Disruption Theory or move it to France, absorb it into one of her companies; everything was up in the air.

Chloe was tired of all the fuss, the preparations and anticipation and anxiety, but knew that she shouldn’t take it out on Jen, who’d probably spent her Sunday doing all the admin work that she hadn’t been able to get done last week, and said meekly, ‘What time is my one-on-one?’

‘Helena will be here at eleven,’ Jen said. ‘You’re the first on her to-do list. Take her advice seriously, Chloe. She actually knows what she’s talking about.’

Chloe promised that she’d behave. She flicked through the images she’d snurched from Mangala Cowboy’s tumblr and spent a little time with Ram Varma, then sat around the long table with the rest of Disruption Theory’s small crew while Jen Lovell went over the last preparations for the committee and reminded everyone not to talk to the press or the blogging community. When she’d finished, Daniel Rosenblaum gave a brief homily: we’re in great shape, one last push and we’ll be bombproof, don’t believe anything you see on the news feeds, so on, so forth.

Chloe moved quickly when the meeting broke up, sidestepping Jen, asking Daniel if she could have five minutes to discuss something really interesting that had turned up.

‘You have a call from France at eleven,’ Jen told him.

‘I haven’t forgotten,’ Daniel said.

‘Also a month’s worth of worksheets to sign off.’

Daniel looked at Chloe. ‘Five minutes, you said?’

‘It might take ten,’ Chloe said, chancing it.

‘The artist is Freddie Patel, aka Mangala Cowboy,’ Chloe said. ‘Seventeen, eighteen years old, whereabouts of his parents unknown, lives with his little sister in a box he rents in a DP camp in Dagenham. He moved in about three months ago. Soon afterwards, some of his neighbours started speaking in tongues. And then they had a little breakout.’

Daniel said, ‘This is the thing you ran off to on Saturday.’

‘I’m seeing the lawyer after this, and I’ll be at the briefing this afternoon,’ Chloe said. ‘Anyway, the breakout wasn’t anything special, but then I found out about Freddie Patel and his pictures.’

They were in Daniel’s office, a corner room with big steel-framed windows that looked across the flat top of the stopbank and the flood of the Thames to Greenwich. Ladders of shelves were cluttered with books and mementos of past investigations. Disintegrator-ray projectors powered by AA batteries, components of antigravity machines, teleportation devices and other improbable and completely non-functional devices built by monomaniacs infected with Elder Culture algorithms and eidolons. A row of 3D printed avatar faces, like golden death masks of matinee idols. Jackaroo dolls. A model of a Jackaroo spaceship made from toothpicks. File boxes stuffed with self-published theses about the location of the Jackaroo’s home world, conspiracies linking the Jackaroo to nationalist groups and rogue states supposedly behind the nuclear bombings and other terrorist spectaculars of the Spasm, or hidden images of the Jackaroo and other aliens in Palaeolithic cave paintings, Ancient Egyptian wall paintings, Mayan calendars, and Indian temple sculptures. Attempts to unify classic and quantum physics using only algebra. Notebooks written in cyphers or secret languages or ‘automatic’ writing. All of it evidence of deep changes in the collective human psyche, according to Daniel Rosenblaum. The usual detritus of ordinary craziness and eccentricity skewed by the strange attractor of the Jackaroo, according to his critics.

Daniel sat with his back to the riverlight, a tall, imposing man with a corona of curly grey hair, wearing one of his trademark brightly patterned waistcoats over a black shirt. Images from the tumblr hung in a cube of virtual light over his desk. Watching her boss carelessly flip through them, Chloe realised that they didn’t speak to him the way they spoke to her, didn’t evoke the kind of recognition she’d felt when she’d first seem them.

‘I admit they’re very nice. Exemplars of their kind,’ Daniel said, ruffling through the pictures again. He stopped at one of the briar-patch scribbles, studied it. ‘This is rather intense.’

‘Some kind of room, I think,’ Chloe said. ‘Ram and I tried to match the pictures with Elder Culture sites on Mangala and the other worlds. No luck so far. There are ruins on First Foot that look a bit like those spires, but only a bit. And they’re in the middle of a lake.’

‘This kid is involved with an outbreak of an Elder Culture meme,’ Daniel said. ‘All around him, people are trying to express the new ideas that have infiltrated their minds. This is his attempt, pieced together from images of the fifteen worlds, from ads and sci-fi films, from his imagination. It’s interesting, but why is it special?’

‘It’s the same landscape, over and over. The same spires, different views, close-ups of different parts. It’s a place that’s very real to him. And it seems very real to me. Authentic,’ Chloe said, disappointed and frustrated that Daniel wasn’t seeing what she saw. ‘I think that something got inside his head, and then it got inside the heads of his neighbours. It may have infected his little sister, too. She mentioned something she called Ugly Chicken. The question is, what is it? And where did it come from?’

‘You’re certain this kid was the primary?’

‘According to my information, the leader of the cult started behaving strangely soon after Freddie moved into the flat below his. So that’s one thing. But there’s something else, too. A freelance scout, Eddie Ackroyd, was on the scene. He’s been chasing Elder Culture artefacts for longer than I have. He told me that he has a client interested in the cult and its breakout—’

That got Daniel’s attention. ‘Who, exactly?’

‘I don’t know yet. The thing is, Eddie told me that someone on the Last Five Minutes wiki had tipped him off about the cult.’

‘The bomb thing?’

‘The bomb thing.’

The bomb was the nuclear device that had detonated in Trafalgar Square fourteen years ago. 12 September, 12:21 p.m. Just before the Jackaroo had made contact, when every country in the world had been caught up in riots, revolutions and counter-revolutions, civil wars, border wars, water wars, netwars, and plain old-fashioned conflicts, mixed up with climate change and various degrees of financial collapse. All this craziness culminating in a limited nuclear missile exchange and a string of low-yield tactical nukes exploding in capital cities. The Spasm.

The Trafalgar Square bomb had been a tactical weapon stolen from the stockpiles of the former Soviet Union, with an estimated yield of 0.4 megatons. It had obliterated a square kilometre of central London, igniting enormous fires and injuring over ten thousand people and killing four thousand. Including Chloe’s mother, who had been working at the archives of the National Portrait Gallery — research for a book on Victorian photography — and had vanished in an instant of light brighter and hotter than the surface of the sun.

Chloe had been twelve when the bomb had exploded her world, had just turned thirteen when the Jackaroo revealed themselves and told everyone in the world that they wanted to help. A few years later, she discovered the Last Five Minutes wiki, a gathering of people dedicated to analysing recently released CCTV footage from that day. There was video footage from traffic and security cameras, too, and photographs and video clips posted to the web or sent by email just before the suitcase nuke detonated.

One sequence was infamous even before the pixel wizards had started to work on it. It had been shot by a CCTV camera on the east side of Trafalgar Square, across the road from St Martin-in-the-Fields, and began forty-eight seconds before detonation.

A beautiful sunny September day. Traffic at a standstill along Charing Cross Road. Sun flashing off the roofs of cars and vans, people walking past, a young woman lighting a cigarette, another young woman gesturing animatedly as she talked into her phone, a living statue painted grey and standing on a plastic crate, a man photographing two women, the twinkle of a child’s balloon drifting in the middle air. And someone flings open the door of a white van and jumps out and runs. A man, white, young, blue jeans and a grey hoodie. Threading between two black cabs, elbowing past a knot of Chinese tourists, running across the square at a slant, past the plinth of one of Landseer’s bronze lions, startling pigeons into flight. A policeman in a yellow stab jacket chases after him, head dipped as he says something into the radio clipped to his vest, both of them passing out of the camera’s field of view, and the footage ends in blocks of frozen pixels at the instant of detonation.

The chase had been caught by other cameras, but this was the best view. Recovered from a hard drive in the CCTV centre in the ruins of Oxford Street, every millisecond and pixel of the sequence had been analysed by a small army of experts and amateurs looking for clues to the identity of the perpetrators, whose names and motives were still unknown after years of investigation by police and MI6 and MI5, government enquiries, and millions of words of speculation in newspapers and on the internet. Chloe had watched it hundreds of times, unsuccessfully searching its fringes and deep background for glimpses of her mother.

Records from her mother’s mobile phone put her in the blast zone. She had called a friend at the British Museum; they had arranged to have lunch together. The friend had survived, had told Chloe and her brother that their mother had called her a few minutes before the bomb detonated, saying that she was running a bit late. Chloe knew that her mother was dead, but didn’t know how she had died. Whether she had been mercifully close to ground zero and had died instantly, or whether she’d been at the edge of the nuclear fireball. Chloe, who’d seen the horrors of the bomb’s aftermath in documentary footage, wished and wished and wished that her mother had vanished in a bright instant, dead before she knew that she was dead.

She had spent a solid year working on the LFM wiki, studying footage, posting theories, chasing leads. LOSTGIRL_X. Up in her childhood bedroom, curtains drawn, eating random meals at random times. It was the only time she and her brother ever had any real stand-up fights. She’d thought then that he’d been conspiring to stop her finding out the truth; she knew now that he’d been worried that he’d lose her to her obsession.

Although she had failed to discover any trace of her mother, she had found a great deal of comfort in the community of like-minded people that had grown around the wiki. Her first real boyfriend had been one of its image-processing experts. Jack Dennis, a seventeen-year-old computer whizz who’d introduced her to another polder of obsessives: the scouts for Elder Culture artefacts and other alien stuff brought back on the great shuttles that travelled between Earth and the fifteen worlds gifted to humanity by the Jackaroo. Her thing with Jack hadn’t lasted long, but by the time she left school she already had a part-time job helping a woman who had a stall in the Sunday market in Spitalfields, selling alien fossils and polished slices of rock from half a dozen worlds. From there, she’d worked up a freelance career as a scout in the artefact trade, sourcing lucky stones from Spire Lake on First Foot, raptor teeth from Hydrot and fragments of so-called temple carvings and ‘heavenly beads’ from Naya Loka. She’d made and sold jewellery incorporating off-world gemstones or fragments of Boxbuilder polymer, had done some work for the University of Middlesex, chasing rumours of escaped alien animals and plants. Which was how she’d met Daniel Rosenblaum, and joined Disruption Theory.

Now, Daniel was giving her a look of tender concern. He knew about her mother, how she had died. He said, ‘I thought you’d given up on that.’

‘I had. I have.’

Over the years, the LFM wiki had been infiltrated by conspiracy geeks. They filled its bulletin board with their chatter, subverted every discussion thread with their crazy ideas. That humans controlled by the Jackaroo had planted the bombs. That the Jackaroo had been influencing human history for centuries. That they were actual devils, or the distant ancestors of humans, or godlike artificial intelligences playing an elaborate game for their amusement, on and on, an endless tide of stupidity and insanity. Chloe had more or less given up on it around the same time she’d joined Disruption Theory. Her brother had been pleased. He thought that she had grown up at last, was putting the past behind her.

She told Daniel, ‘The thing is, Eddie is one of the wiki’s editors, and he told me that someone was posting predictions of significant breakouts on it. So I had a look, and I found something interesting.’

Actually, because she was slightly paranoid, because she believed that Eddie Ackroyd might be keeping watch and didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that he’d made her look, she’d asked another editor, her friend Gail Ann Jones, to check it out. Gail Ann had found a folder on the editor’s board that Eddie checked regularly. It seemed to be empty, but Gail Ann had been able to retrieve three erased postings.

‘None of them has any text,’ Chloe told Daniel. ‘Only headers. But all of them point towards places where breakouts have occurred. Godyere, the name of a landowner, which mutated into Golders Green. There was a breakout there a year ago, in one of those big gospel churches. Chilly Field, the original name of Chelsfield Village in Bromley, where patients in the hospital were affected by singing sickness. And Decca’s Homestead. The original name of Dagenham.’

She watched Daniel think about that. He said, ‘So these are hints about the general area. But how would Eddie Ackroyd pin them down to a specific place?’

‘The same way I work. Checking out blogs and the local media. Pounding the pavement. I’m wondering,’ Chloe said, ‘if the person sending these messages is Eddie’s client.’

‘But why all this cloak-and-dagger nonsense? And why doesn’t this client check out the breakouts himself?’

‘I don’t know, but I’d like to find out. The point is, someone seems to be able to predict breakouts. It would be pretty amazing if we could make use of that.’

‘You know what they say about Dagenham? It’s two stops past Barking,’ Daniel said.

‘I know it sounds like crazy shit—’

‘It could be a scam. The messages could have been sent after the breakouts, with false dates.’

‘That’s one thing I need to check out. The veracity of those messages, and who sent them. I’d also like to interview Freddie Patel again,’ Chloe said. ‘I left my card, but he hasn’t called. I thought I could go back and talk to him again. I’m pretty sure that he owns some kind of Elder Culture artefact. Something containing an active eidolon or some kind of bad algorithm. It would be a good idea to make an offer for it before Eddie Ackroyd does. It wouldn’t be much. A few hundred pounds—’

She’d gone too far. Daniel held up his hand like a traffic cop. ‘I don’t doubt your enthusiasm. And maybe there’s even something to these mysterious messages. But right now, Chloe, we have to put our work on hold. We have to focus all our energy into justifying ourselves to a committee of unfriendly politicians who have the power to cause us all kinds of trouble. Once we get past that, we can get back to work. Okay?’

He was staring intently at her.

She said, ‘Okay.’

Daniel sat back, steepling his long fingers across his waistcoat. He bought them from a little shop in Brixton Market. He said, ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, you seem a little agitated. Febrile, with a touch of monomania. You might have caught a touch of meme fever from this kid, or from the breakout. Perhaps that’s why these pictures seem so important.’

‘If I start speaking in tongues you’ll be the first to know,’ Chloe said, trying to turn it into a joke.

But Daniel wasn’t listening to her. ‘Ever since first contact, our minds have been altered by alien memes and ideations. Even the simple fact of the Jackaroo’s existence has changed our ideas about what we are, and our place in the universe. Before we can understand the Jackaroo and their gifts, we must understand what they are helping us become.’

He was treating her to the full wattage of the sincerity and charm that had served him so well when he’d helmed a popular TV series that had put a contemporary spin on Charles MacKay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. He’d been a professor of anthropology in Middlesex University then, a consultant on what he called peripheral phenomena for several financial companies, author of a bestseller about what he called human fallibility. After the Spasm, after the Jackaroo’s presence had begun to leak out on the internet, after their avatars had appeared at the UN General Assembly, he had immediately offered his services to the British government. And when he’d been rebuffed, he’d persuaded Ada Morange to bankroll his investigations of phenomena that were, according to him, manifestations of the ways in which the Jackaroo were, by design or by accident, altering human collective consciousness.

Chloe laughed. ‘Jesus, Daniel, you don’t have to make your pitch to me.’

He had the grace and self-knowledge to look embarrassed. ‘After the last couple of weeks it’s become force of habit. You should hear the lectures I give to the bathroom mirror every morning. Listen: I don’t want you to think I’m making light of your passion. I hired you because of your expertise in chasing down apparitions and artefacts. Because of your talent. You’re good at it. You see things that others don’t. But this isn’t the time to explain it to me. Right now, everything has to be put on hold until we get past the select committee. Promise me, no more bunking off. And I promise you that I’ll give this my full attention as soon as I can. Okay?’

Chloe promised she wouldn’t bunk off again. She sat through the briefing with Helena Nichols, Ada Morange’s lawyer. She attended the strategy meeting that stretched out all through the afternoon. She was on the ferry back to Greenwich when her phone rang. It was Niome. She said that she had some news about Freddie Patel.

‘He’s only gone and done a flit.’