Something Coming Through

33. Anomalous Patterns Of Brain Activity

France | 12–18 July

‘I can’t tell you where I’m going or what I need to do,’ Chloe said. ‘But I promise that you’ll be the first to hear everything when I come back. Swear you won’t write it up until then. Until this is finished, one way or another.’

‘I’m already writing it up,’ Gail Ann said. ‘But if you think it’ll put you in danger, I won’t show it to anyone just yet.’

‘I was thinking of Fahad and Rana,’ Chloe said. ‘And you, too.’

She was using a throwaway phone that one of Ada Morange’s people had given her. Standing amongst gnarled apple trees in the old orchard, looking south. The meadow with its mown airstrip, a file of poplars marking the course of a small river, a patchwork of fields and woods stretching away towards the Mangala shuttle. A huge alien spaceship thumbprinted against the blue summer sky.

She’d already had a painful conversation with Neil, telling him that she had to go away for a while, promising that she would explain everything as soon as she could. She’d also had a brief chat with Rosa Jenners, who said that one of her regulars had told her a story about a scout, based in Rome, who was pointed towards breakouts by pictures of nearby churches sent via an anonymising network, and like Eddie Ackroyd was paid for his work in shellcoin.

‘Although it might just be a story,’ Rosa said. ‘You know how it is in the trade. Someone tells you a story that a friend of a friend heard from someone they met in a pub…’

And now Chloe was saying goodbye to Gail Ann for the second time — the first had been when they’d parted at the Burger King after Sandra Hamilton had caught up with them — and trying to explain why she had to do what she was going to do without giving too much away. Not because she didn’t trust her friend, but because she didn’t know who might be listening in at Gail Ann’s end.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ Gail Ann said. ‘One of Ada Morange’s lawyers emailed a phone number I can call if I get into trouble with the police.’

‘A freebie from my sponsor,’ Chloe said. ‘I’m told it doesn’t have an expiry date. If you don’t need it for this thing we fell into, you can use it later.’

‘Actually,’ Gail Ann said, ‘I’ve just had an off-the-record chat, so-called, with this very intense chief inspector who came to my flat this morning.’

‘Adam Nevers,’ Chloe said, with a feeling of falling.

‘He told me you were old acquaintances.’

‘I bet. Did he threaten you? If he did, call that number.’

Gail Ann said, ‘Oh, he wasn’t really interested in me. He told me that he knows where you are, and what you’re planning to do.’

‘Did he go into details? No, don’t tell me,’ Chloe said. ‘I don’t want to have to lie about it.’

‘He wouldn’t tell me. He did say that you were putting yourself and the Chauhans in direct danger. And that you were putting national security at risk. I guess he’s pissed off because he can’t reach out to you.’

‘He just did. I’m sorry you got dragged into this mess.’

‘Oh, a person could get a taste for this kind of front-line gonzo journalism. And Chief Inspector Nevers isn’t half as fearsome as some of the creatures I’ve run into during London Fashion Week. I suppose I should wish you bon voyage.’

‘We’re going to find something. Something wonderful.’

‘I hope so. I need a good capper for my story. Take care, sweetie.’

‘You too,’ Chloe said, and prised out the phone’s card and snapped it in two, dropped the fragments in the long grass, and walked up through the trees towards the farmhouse.

It was her last full day on Earth. She seemed to be saying goodbye to everything.

Over the past week, she and Fahad and Rana had been subjected to batteries of tests that attempted to quantify the influence of Ugly Chicken. EEG, MEG, a trip to the hospital in Caen, where they’d put on plastic helmets and been fed into the rumbling, beeping doughnut of a scanner that produced high-resolution atlases of the neurological highways in their brains. There’d also been visual-perception tests, a session with a psychologist who’d questioned Chloe about her childhood and showed her those inkblot patterns. An extrasensory perception test where she had to guess whether the symbols on a series of playing cards were circles, squares, crosses, wave lines or stars; a questionnaire in which she had to agree or disagree with a long series of statements.

I have to shut my mouth when I am in trouble.

Evil spirits possess me at times.

The tests showed that both Fahad and Rana exhibited anomalous patterns of brain activity, presumably due to the influence of Ugly Chicken. Odd spikes in the visual dorsal stream and between the temporal lobe and Broca’s area, the region responsible for language processing and control of speech; periodic slow waves across the entire cerebral cortex, too, the kind normally associated with deep sleep. Chloe was relieved to learn that she hadn’t been affected. At least, not in any way that the scientists could detect.

Fahad was scornful. He said that he didn’t need a bunch of machines to tell him that he and his sister had been chosen by the eidolon, said that it would communicate with them and no one else. He had endured the tests with thinly stretched patience. He wanted to prove himself but was wary of the scientists, seemed to think that they were trying to trick him, find an excuse that Ada Morange could use to row back on the deal they’d made.

Rana basked in the attention, ordering the scientists about, explaining what they were doing wrong, borrowing bits and pieces of equipment to do her own tests on Chloe and Fahad. She especially liked a little camera linked by a fibre-optic cable to a flatscreen. Liked to point it at her eye and study the close-up on the screen. Liked to point it at her brother’s eye, at Chloe’s. Chloe asked her if she was looking for Ugly Chicken; Rana laughed and said he didn’t live in people’s heads.

‘Is he here now?’

‘He’s always here,’ Rana said, folding her fingers around the bracelet on her wrist.

‘I mean is he awake or asleep?’

A crease dented Rana’s forehead while she gave that some serious thought. She said, ‘He was asleep a long, long time. Like Snow White. He’s happy to be awake.’

She was comically bossy and forthright. The scientists treated her with a respectful deference, and terminated the tests as soon as she showed signs of becoming tired or fractious. Not only because of her age; they didn’t want to inadvertently trigger Ugly Chicken’s defences.

The tests were carried out in an ancient barn that contained a laboratory with a black resin floor, gleaming workstations, and racks of equipment. The farm was Ada Morange’s country retreat, and it was also a research lab. The shuttle was very old, haunted by the imprints of a hundred Elder Cultures that manifested as visions, highly localised aberrant weather patterns, ‘transitory events’, and abnormal behaviour in people and animals in the countryside around the port. One of the ongoing projects was analysis of the behaviour of a supercolony of red ants that extended across several square kilometres and appeared to be developing a kind of symbolic language.

One of the scientists, Fatou Ndoye, told Chloe that analysis of the bead in Rana’s bracelet showed that it was a form of cat’s-eye apatite.

‘So it’s an alien crystal?’ Chloe said, thinking of cheesy old sci-fi programmes. ‘A sentient alien crystal?’

‘We don’t yet know if it’s truly self-aware or a sophisticated computer emulating a degree of self-awareness,’ Fatou Ndoye said. ‘But it is a marvellously strange artefact.’

She was about Chloe’s age, elegant and scary-smart. She had been seconded to the Ugly Chicken project from research into organic photon-plasmon emitters, something to do with quantum-information processing in the nervous systems of a clade of biochines. She explained that, like cat’s-eye apatites on Earth, Rana’s bead contained parallel fibres that produced a chatoyance, a luminous streak of reflected light like the pupil in a cat’s eye.

‘It is possible that information is stored in the quantum fields of those fibres,’ Fatou said. ‘Several of the Elder Cultures were able to pack vast amounts of data into small ordered matrices — quantum dust, minerals, even biological materials. There has been some interesting work on this in CERN and the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing, but there is much we do not yet know.’

There were briefing sessions on the clandestine accommodation in which they would ride to Mangala, from the shuttle’s flight profile to the operation of the high-tech toilet. They couldn’t travel up and out on tickets bought on the free market because the British government had issued a stop notice to the UN Commission on Planetary Settlement, so they were being smuggled aboard. It wasn’t the first time Karyotech Pharma had done this, according to Henry. Back in the early days, before controls had been applied to the market in tickets sold to third parties by lottery winners, companies in the Elder Culture biz had resorted to all kinds of tactics to undercut or outwit their competitors.

The British government had also issued an Interpol Red Notice for the arrest of Chloe, Fahad and Henry but, because the French government had yet to forgive the ‘English perfidy’ that had almost caused the collapse of the EU, its police were reluctant to cooperate. ‘For once, the intransigence of French bureaucracy will work in our favour,’ Henry said. ‘And our own lawyers are throwing tons of sand into the gears of justice too. By the time Adam Nevers turns up with a warrant, we’ll have been to Mangala and back.’

There were briefings given by Michel Charpentier, a raffish archaeologist who had worked on Mangala eight years ago. He was coming with them, travelling in what he called cattle class rather than their clandestine accommodation. He told them about his work on Mangala, about its Elder Culture sites and its capital city, Petra, and gave them a brief lesson about walking surveys and shovel test pits. ‘If we are fortunate, we should not have to sift a gram of dirt,’ he said. ‘We are only looking for one thing at this time: whether or not the site interests the eidolon.’

Ada Morange’s agent on Mangala had discovered that a company formerly owned by Cal McBride had taken out licences to excavate several Elder Culture sites. According to Michel, one of them, Site 326, was especially promising. The company hadn’t yet filed a detailed report of its finds, but Michel had worked up a 3D topographical model from the contour map of the initial landscape survey. A cluster of mounds each about thirty metres across, low truncated cones with flat tops and sloping sides. He rotated the model, tipped it up and down, then brought up an overlay of spires rising from the footprints of the mounds and asked Fahad if it looked familiar.

‘Of course it looks familiar. You used my pictures.’

‘What about the relationship of the spires to each other? Take your time.’

Fahad bent over the tablet, used his forefinger to spin the image around. He said, ‘Is that a river?’

‘Along the eastern edge? Yes, a big one.’

‘There shouldn’t be a river.’

‘The mounds are many thousands of years old. The river probably changed its course several times. And your spires collapsed, left these mounds of rubble. We tried to match them with your drawings, but you drew different numbers of spires, sometimes standing close to each other, sometimes not. We’d like to know if you think that seems to be the right number of spires, in the right pattern.’

Michel was languidly patient, but Fahad refused to commit to a definite answer. He didn’t know the exact number of spires, or their size. He drew whatever was in his head at the time. It flowed down his arm onto the paper. The reconstruction looked familiar, but he wasn’t sure if it was where Ugly Chicken had come from.

‘I’ll know when I get there,’ he said at last. ‘Ugly Chicken will lead me to the right place.’

Later, Henry said to Chloe, ‘I can’t figure out if he’s hiding something because he doesn’t trust us, or he really doesn’t know.’

‘If he didn’t trust you, he wouldn’t be here,’ Chloe said. ‘Where is that site?’

‘A big valley about a thousand kilometres south and west of Petra. There are more than four hundred known Elder Culture sites on Mangala, but I have a good feeling about this one. Those mounds look right, and the licence was issued three years ago, which fits with the time frame.’

‘His father stole artefacts from the site, his boss found out…’

‘Our person on the ground gave us some info on the boss. Cal McBride. Soon after the excavation licence was issued, he went to prison over some smuggling scam. He lost control of his company while he was inside, came out about six months ago, maybe looking for people to blame. Or maybe the new boss of the company found out about Sahar Chauhan’s little sideline in purloined artefacts. Like the kid said, we’ll know when we get there.’

Ada Morange was absent during the days of lab tests and briefing sessions. She returned on the last afternoon, the afternoon when Chloe said her farewells to Neil and Gail Ann, bringing with her the!Cha, Unlikely Worlds, and Daniel Rosenblaum, freshly sprung from detention along with the rest of Disruption Theory’s crew. They dined together that evening on the terrace of the farmhouse, under the grape arbour. The old woman sat at the head of the long table; Chloe on her left, Daniel on her right, the tank of Unlikely Worlds standing next to her wheelchair, its black cylinder balanced on a tripod of three skeletal legs like a miniature Martian fighting machine. A shot glass of apple brandy sat on its flat top. Unlikely Worlds explained that a demon ‘smaller than one of your bacteria’ was inflating the vanishingly small chance that certain molecules would be somewhere other than inside the glass. Not molecules of alcohol, but the congeners that gave the apple brandy its unique flavour.

‘It’s my only vice.’

According to the!Cha, their tanks each contained a school of tiny shrimp-like creatures that housed various aspects of their personalities. In the oceans of their home world, they said, males of their ancestral species had constructed elaborate nests decorated with weed and shells to attract a mate. The strongest, those most likely to produce the fittest offspring, made the biggest and most elaborate nests, and attracted the strongest, most fertile females. Although they had left their home world a long time ago, male!Cha still advertised their sexual prowess by collecting Elder Culture artefacts, ghosts and eidolons, and stories. Stories most of all. That was why they followed the Jackaroo, they said. The Jackaroo’s interactions with other species created all kinds of deep, rich tales.

Some people believed that the!Cha were the power behind the Jackaroo. Others that the!Cha were another kind of Jackaroo avatar. Their tanks were sealed, impervious to X-rays, microwaves, radar, and ultrasound. Anything might be inside, or nothing at all. Schools of shrimp, monstrous nightmares, machine intelligences, magic crystals inhabited by ghosts or eidolons, like Rana’s cat’s-eye bead.

The Jackaroo, of course, had only ever made vague, enigmatic comments about their fellow travellers.

‘We are friends with all we find,’ they said.

Unlikely Worlds told Chloe that human stories were especially fine — their effect on female!Cha was rather like the buzz he got from the congeners in his glass of apple brandy.

‘Your own story is not without interest,’ he said. His voice, a mellow baritone, was modelled on an old movie star who’d several times played God. Richly paternal and reassuring, it hummed in the air somewhere above the table. ‘I took the liberty of studying your entries on the Last Five Minutes wiki. A tragedy rooted in the foolishness of your species.’

Chloe, unsettled and provoked, said, ‘I would have thought you would be more interested in Fahad and Rana. Their story is way weirder than mine.’

‘I prefer to work in miniature,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘And besides, yours is more purely human.’

This was after dessert and coffee. Rana had been excused from the table, and she and her brother were chasing fireflies on the lawn. She ran through the little constellations of green and red and blue flashes, laughing with innocent delight. Before dinner, she had given her bracelet to her brother in a touchingly simple ceremony. She didn’t seem at all upset to part with the bead and her imaginary friend. She was happy that Ugly Chicken was going home. Happy because Ugly Chicken was happy.

Now Unlikely Worlds said that the LFM wiki was an interesting attempt to overcome the shortcomings of human memory.

‘Perhaps you excel at storytelling because your memories are stories you tell yourselves. The truth recedes into the past and becomes a different truth. You select some facts and discard others. You exaggerate certain things, make up other things out of whole cloth, and from this patchwork create glorious fabrications.’

‘Are we really so interesting to you?’ Chloe said.

Ada Morange said, ‘They are interested in certain people, most definitely. We have had many discussions about history, he and I.’

‘The concept of hero is very interesting to us,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘We are composites. No one component is worth more than any other. Your minds are in some ways similar. Your so-called “self” is a composite superimposed on the activity of many competing subpersonalities or agents. What you perceive as your consciousness is a string of temporary heroes rising above those they have defeated. And so you seek out heroes in the common story of your race.’

‘Heroes are mostly fiction,’ Daniel Rosenblaum said. ‘The idea that certain men or women have a disproportionate effect on history has been largely discredited.’

He’d been subdued all through the evening, greeting Chloe with an unsettling formality and showing no interest in her adventures, most of his attention on the alien in their midst.

‘Yet Dr Morange thinks herself one such,’ Unlikely Worlds said.

‘Is that not why you are here?’ Ada Morange said. She appeared to be amused.

‘Interesting things happen around you,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘You attract stories. I wonder, Chloe, if Ada is using you, or if you are using her. Who is the hero, and who the shield-carrier? I cannot say. Not yet. It is all so delightfully entangled.’

‘Perhaps the bead in Rana’s bracelet is the hero,’ Chloe said.

Later, she had a brief reconciliation with Daniel.

‘I was angry with you,’ he said. He was a little drunk, sipping a glass of brandy and smoking a cigar. She’d never seen him smoke before. ‘I’m still angry, just a little. You blundered into something you didn’t understand, and I was caught in the blowback. Everyone was. First everyone was arrested. And then the office was firebombed. And now, I’ve just been told, Ada Morange is going to shut down Disruption Theory.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Daniel shrugged.

‘How are Jen and the others?’

‘As if you really care.’

‘Self-pity doesn’t suit you, Daniel.’

‘I have a lot to feel sorry about,’ he said, but relented a little. ‘Actually, I want to give you a bit of advice, if you’ll let me. Ada has rebuilt her company to a certain point, but now she needs to find something game-changing that will take her to the next level. That’s why she bought into Disruption Theory, and I took her shilling with the full knowledge that she would exploit anything we found. And now, well, she hopes that this thing of yours, this Ugly Chicken, is the game-changer. And if it is, she’ll do everything in her power to keep hold of it. So what I’m trying to say, Chloe, is be careful. Don’t get caught in any crossfire.’

‘I can’t let this go,’ Chloe said.

‘That’s my girl. That’s what makes you such a good scout.’

‘What about you? What will you do now?’

‘Ada has offered positions elsewhere to everyone who works — who used to work — for Disruption Theory. She offered me a position, too. Here, as a matter of fact. That’s partly why I came. Mostly.’

‘This place is definitely full of spooks and weirdness.’

‘I turned her down. I’m thinking,’ Daniel said, ‘of writing another book. I need to get Ada’s permission, confidentiality clause and all that, but I think she’ll like the idea.’

He paused, no doubt expecting Chloe to ask the obvious question. When she didn’t, he added, ‘You’ll be in it of course. We all will.’

Chloe said, ‘Good luck with it. But I already have someone covering that beat.’

Departure day dawned grey and cool, the sky sheeted edge to edge with cloud. One of the discreet, infallibly polite staff had laid out coveralls for Chloe. Thanks but no thanks: she pulled on zebra-striped leggings and a plain white oversized T-shirt and went out to find breakfast.

And discovered that Ada Morange, Unlikely Worlds and Daniel Rosenblaum had left in the night.

‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ Henry said.

‘Dr Morange has a hundred different affairs to attend to,’ Michel Charpentier said. He was wearing a blue shirt and had a pale yellow sweater draped over his shoulders in the way that only the French can pull off. ‘That she spent an entire evening with us last night is an enormous sign of her confidence.’

Fahad wouldn’t be reassured. He was growing jittery, wondering aloud if he was doing the right thing, fretting about Rana.

‘I wish I could trust that woman,’ he said, nodding towards Rimsha Bhatti, who sat at the far end of the table with several of the scientists.

‘If you want to do right by your father this is the right thing to do,’ Chloe said, and immediately realised she was being a bit harsh. She was on edge, humming with the unsettling mix of anticipation and mild dread that she remembered from childhood holidays. She said, ‘I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think we were doing the right thing.’

She tried her best to eat a bowl of granola while Henry ploughed through his usual Full English breakfast, Michel sipped from a bowl of coffee, and Fahad nibbled at a slice of toast and fed Rana with fruit and yogurt, making helicopter noises as he aimed each spoonful at her mouth. The bead gleamed greenly on his wrist. At last, Rana tired of the game and grabbed the spoon and said that she knew how to eat, thank you very much, and Fahad gave her a look that just about broke Chloe’s heart.

Rana told Chloe that she’d had a dream about Ugly Chicken.

‘What was he doing?’

‘He took me into the sky,’ Rana said. There was a dab of yogurt on her nose. Her glossy black hair was gathered into two short pigtails that stuck out from the back of her head.

‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ Fahad said. ‘She has dreams like that all the time.’

‘We flew past stars and planets and all kinds of things,’ Rana said.

‘And then what happened?’

Rana shrugged. ‘And then I woke up.’

She seemed to be unaffected by Fahad’s nervous impatience and the fuss of preparing for departure, listened with placid acceptance as Fahad explained that he’d soon be back. But when Chloe and Fahad and Henry were about to climb into the people carrier, she broke away from Rimsha Batti and ran towards her brother.

‘Take me, take me, take me!’

Fahad gathered up his sister and hugged her, then carried her back to their aunt and set her down and told her to be brave, said that she should be happy because their friend was going home. But Rana blubbered with inconsolable distress, and Chloe noticed Henry and the driver of the people carrier watching with narrow attention, as if, like her, they were half-expecting Ugly Chicken to show itself. When Fahad walked back to the people carrier he avoided everyone’s gaze because he was crying too.

Michel shook hands with them and said that he would see them on the other side, and they drove off, joined a thin but constant stream of traffic on the autoroute towards the port. The shuttle leaned into the sky, huge as a mountain. Fahad pressed against the passenger window, looking up at it and turning Rana’s bracelet around and around on his wrist. Chloe felt a flutter in her stomach. This was this. No turning back.

The people carrier left the autoroute at a slip road and drove past warehouses and an industrial estate and pulled up in a lay-by behind an articulated truck with a blue shipping container on its trailer. Chloe and the others got out and the driver of the truck swung down from his cab. It was the wiry ex-Foreign Legion guy. He climbed onto the trailer and cracked open the doors of the container, revealing a wall of cardboard cartons, said that as soon as they were inside he’d repack the cartons and they’d be on their way.

‘You will be on board in two, three hours. The last to go on, the first to be unloaded.’

Henry led Chloe and Fahad through the stacks of cartons to an oval hatch in a bulkhead. Chloe turned to catch a last sight of Earth, trees and cloudy sky framed by the open doors of the container, and then she ducked through the hatch and that was it: she was committed.