The Star Fraction

10

The Transitional Programmer

Moh woke with a jump from a dream of shouting, a dream of fighting, a dream of falling.

Janis stirred and mumbled beside him, then pulled the quilt even more firmly around her, leaving only a tuft of red hair on the pillow like a squirrel’s tail to indicate her presence. Moh let his shoulders adapt to the chill as he lay back with his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling.

Cautiously, as if tonguing a loose tooth, he turned his attention to the back of his mind. The new thing was still there, the sense of lines where there had been tangles, of sky where there had been floor. He could still lean over that cliff and look out at the bottomless chasm of his past. But it no longer sent him whirling with dizziness, hurtling with fear. He could turn away from it, he could walk confidently along its edge.

He had the feeling that he had forgotten something. He smiled at the thought, and continued to lie and think. Whatever was going on in his head, whether it was an effect of the drugs or of the entity he’d encountered or of their interaction, it was real and it had not gone away. He was awed by it, and annoyed. It had always been a matter of pride if not of principle that he didn’t have any fixes, any patches; that he never touched smart drugs. (Only stupid ones, he reflected ruefully. Whatever else might be going on in his head, it ached.)

There was the problem of what to tell Jordan, and what not to tell the others. A shadow of guilt crossed his mind, about not taking Stone into his confidence: good comrade, best mate, years together…but all that still seemed like a good reason for keeping him out of it. If something should go drastically wrong (death, madness, things like that) the Collective would need someone uncontaminated by whatever had happened.

Not that he had a clear view of what it would mean for things to go right. Despite the inscrutable download to the gun, he wasn’t certain that whatever he’d encountered had an objective existence anything like what it had seemed. The net had spawned a whole subculture of people who claimed that free and conscious AIS spoke to them, gave them messages of profound import for humanity, incited them to perform violent or bizarre acts…a dream meme of AIS, successors to the angels and aliens of former times. Meanwhile the real breakthrough, the indubitable emergence of genuinely other minds, remained on a receding horizon – whether because of the intrinsic difficulty of the endeavour; the restrictions imposed by Stasis and by the cruder, more hardware-oriented interventions of Space Defense; or the ceaseless sabotage of the cranks.

The cranks – Christ, that was what he’d forgotten! He had to contact Cat, tell her he was coming to see her, ask her to stay put or arrange a meeting. Last night he’d been too high on alcohol and hash and adrenaline and on whatever-it-was to think straight. He should have done it then. The drugs were no excuse. What had he been thinking of—?

The major distraction, the prime reason why he hadn’t thought straight last night chose that moment to roll over and wake up. She looked at him, momentary bewilderment giving way to a distractingly self-satisfied smile.

‘Hi.’

‘Good morning.’

‘You must be freezing. Come in here.’ She flipped the quilt over him and pulled him in, kissed and cuddled and nuzzled him and just when he was warming up again said, ‘God, I could do with a coffee.’

Moh disengaged reluctantly. ‘With you in a minute.’ He rolled out of bed and wrapped himself in the warmest towelling robe he had. He crept downstairs and started up the coffee. Jordan was still fast asleep on the couch. Moh went to the comms room and called up Hillingdon Hospital.

The account for Catherin Duvalier, charged to the Collective, was closed. After a few minutes of brushing through the layers of answer-fetches Moh reached an administrator who confirmed that, yes, the patient was gone. Hours earlier, without any forwarding trace.

Moh broke the connection and stared at the vacant screen, feeling like banging his head against it. There was no way to get back to Cat. He didn’t know what faction she was in. Not that it would help: after her unconditional release they wouldn’t want to know her. If he couldn’t meet Donovan’s challenge, he and maybe the whole Collective could end up with an indictment against them in the so-called Geneva courts, the ones that handled intercommunal and intermovement disputes. No self-respecting defence agency in Norlonto ever appealed to them, not when there were reputable court companies vying for customers. The Geneva Convention courts were for terrorists and states to squabble in with their extorted money. Even if Donovan’s case wouldn’t stand up for five minutes, that five minutes and however many months it took to get there could cost the Collective a fortune and a reputation.

He had to find Cat. He had to fix things with Donovan, or just hope the revolution came before they lost too much business. If the ANR won they would sweep the Geneva courts away. Some chance.

There were other slim chances. He sent out a general message to the Collective’s entire mailing list, asking urgently for information about Catherin Duvalier’s present location. Then he sent a personal, encrypted message, explaining the problem and asking for some grace on the deadline, to the only publicly known address for Donovan: bdonovan@cla.org.ter.

Giving himself a hard time, he made the coffee and went upstairs. Explaining this whole mess to Janis wouldn’t be easy, but it would be a fine warm-up for explaining it to the comrades.

‘You,’ she told him when he’d finished, ‘are a fucking idiot.’

Yes, he agreed silently. And clinically insane as well, probably. At least in Norlonto that’s a victimless crime.

Another thought came to him as he watched genuine anger fighting against a sort of stoical, appalled amusement for possession of her face: And obsessed with you.

He saw the anger win.

‘Is this how you guys function?’ she asked. ‘Drink and dope and drop-dancing and goddess knows what else shit in your head?’

‘Not when I’m on active,’ Kohn said. ‘Bear that in mind.’

‘You were on active, dammit,’ she said. ‘We got a contract, remember?’

‘Yeah, OK, OK.’

Her anger subsided. ‘Couldn’t you sort of…hack into the hospital’s records, see if they’ve got anything that might give us a clue, trace her agency?’

‘We’re talking about a hospital, Janis,’ he reminded her gently. ‘Not a university or some kinda secret research establishment. Same goes for the Body Bank.’

She didn’t get it. ‘I thought the university had good security. They use our own crypto and AI, state-of-the-art.’

He rolled on the bed, caught her and made her laugh. ‘If you ever come across a bank that guards its vaults with a crowd of recidivist safe-crackers and apprentice locksmiths, supervised by guys who can’t remember ten digits without writing them down somewhere – just let me know and I’ll cut you in on it, yeah?’

Jordan woke up on the long couch to find the long room full of people either coming in and removing kit or tooling up and going out. He saw a dark-haired woman put on camouflage like make-up, select weapons like accessories, smile at him and at herself in a wall mirror, and leave. He saw a tired and dirty man grilling bacon. The man saw him and brought over a roll and a huge mug of black coffee. Jordan accepted them gratefully and, when he had finished eating, gathered the blanket around him and dug clothes and a towel out of his rucksack.

‘Bathroom?’

‘Second left down the corridor.’

He stepped through a half-open door to find a room full of not enough steam to conceal two women and a small boy in a bath and a man sitting naked on a lavatory reading a newspaper. He nearly backed out, then remembered that he’d come here to live rationally.

Closing the shower curtain was just to avoid splashing the floor.

He found Moh and Janis sitting at the table in the main room, eating cereals while giving their attention to newspapers. Janis was tearing them off as they printed out and passing them to Kohn to read. Kohn always had one in his hand; Janis had a growing stack beside her.

If he was reading them it was fast.

Jordan joined them.

‘What’s the news?’

Janis looked at him.

‘Oh, good morning. Don’t mind Moh. He gets like this sometimes. Now,’ she added oddly, vaguely. She passed a sheet into Moh’s outstretched hand. ‘News is nothing – well, what you’d expect. Russland–Turkey, everybody. London Sun–Times thinks second big story is Yanks hit Kyoto suburbs – lasers, precision. Nihon Keizai Shimbun, on the other hand, reports loss of Army convoy in Inverness-shire. Lhasa Rimbao prays for peace. No surprises.’

‘Looking for surprises,’ Moh said around a mouthful of muesli. ‘Shoosh.’

A little later he stopped and became civil. ‘How are you this morning?’ He crunched up a page of hard copy and chucked it into a trash can on the other side of the room.

‘Fine. Well, I will be. Maybe another coffee…You know, I think hash really does make holes in your brain.’

‘Nah, that’s the drink,’ Kohn said. ‘Proven fact. Brains of rats and that.’ He grinned at Janis, apparently unaware that he’d binned a dozen balls of paper, one by one, without looking. ‘Anyway, Jordan, time to fill you in.’ He glanced at a whiteboard markered with scrawled words and snarled-up arrows. ‘Comms room is clear. Talk about it there.’

‘That’s some story,’ Jordan said when they’d finished. Moh and Janis looked back at him hopefully, like clients. ‘Sounds like a load of serdar argic.’ (He’d picked up the net-slang unconsciously, used it self-consciously; it referred to the lowest layer of paranoid drivel that infested the Cable, spun out by degenerate, bug-ridden knee-jerk auto-post programs. Kill-file clutter.) He looked down at the workbench, picked at a solder globule. ‘But I believe it.’ He laughed. ‘Well, I believe you.’

‘Can you do it?’

They wanted him to hack-and-track for them, follow lines back, be their eyes on the net. He ached to get on with it, but was uncertain if he had the skill to match.

‘Sure,’ he said.

‘That’s OK,’ Moh said. ‘You’ll pick it up.’

‘So what’s the plan for today?’ Janis asked. She sounded edgy.

‘Find Bernstein,’ Moh said. ‘Take it from there.’

‘Bernstein!’ Jordan said. ‘The booklegger?’

Moh nodded, turned to smirk at Janis. ‘Told you,’ he said. ‘Everybody knows Bernstein.’

‘I’ve got his phone number,’ Jordan said. ‘Somewhere.’ He searched his memory, then dived into the main room and ran back with the small book he’d stuck in his jacket pocket. He flipped it open to look at the purple ink of the seller’s rubber-stamped logo on the inserted bookmark. It opened at the frontispiece.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he swore, for the first time in his life. ‘Will you look at that.’

He held the book forward for them to see: the old photogravure of a statue of a man in a hooded robe or cloak, hands outspread, eyes faint white marks in the cowled shadow.

Kohn looked up, puzzled. ‘Who is it?’

Jordan screwed up his eyes and shook his head.

‘Giordano Bruno. He was burned at the stake in 1600 for saying the planets might be inhabited, among other things. First space-movement martyr.’ He gave an imitation of a hollow, echoing laugh. ‘I just realized what his name would be in English. “Jordan Brown”!’

He looked at it again, hairs prickling on his neck. Moh clapped his shoulder.

‘Bernstein’s way of saying hello, Jordan,’ he said. ‘So give the man a call, already.’

After a few rings a reply came on the line, from not an answer-fetch but a flat tape. ‘Hello,’ said a thick-tongued voice. ‘Thank you for calling. Solly Bernstein isn’t in at the moment, but you can find him at’ – pause, clunk – ‘Brent Cross Shopping Centre. Usual place. Look for the revisionist rally.’

Moh refused to explain what was funny about that.

They took the monorail north. Moh had insisted they all brought some gear, on the assumption they might not be coming back. He’d pulled a couple of JDF-surplus backpacks from under a bench, packed his in moments and gone into a huddle with Jordan over the household computer, filling him in on the tasks rota.

Janis had looked at her pack as its solar-powered flexor frame made random movements in a patch of sunlight. ‘This,’ she’d announced in an aggrieved tone to the world in general, ‘is what I call a make-up bag.’

Now it sat in her lap like a small fat animal with bulging cheek-pouches, its phototropics hopelessly confused by the flicker of stanchion shadows. Janis had a seat by the window. She couldn’t look away from the view.

‘I always knew it was there,’ she said. ‘It’s just…’

‘Yeah, isn’t it just?’ Moh grinned at her from the opposite seat, the gun between his knees.

The Greenbelt. Ahead of them it sprawled to left and right, all along the horizon. A whole new London of shanties and skyscrapers, streets, factories, nuclear power plants; the sky alive with light aircraft, airships, aerostats – a chaos that even as she watched resolved itself into complexity, a pattern of differences like small fields seen from a great height. She looked at it through Moh’s binoculars, scanning slowly, lost in the endlessly deepening detail of it all. She remembered Darwin: It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank…

‘It’s like an ecosystem,’ she said at last.

‘That’s the real Norlonto,’ Moh said. ‘The core, except it isn’t central. The leading edge.’

‘Pity it doesn’t stretch all the way round.’

She thought of what lay beyond Uxbridge, out to the west. Badlands all the way to Wales, a firebreak between that ineradicable hostility and London. A lot of people would privately admit they’d prefer the Welsh marching to the endless trickle of saboteurs from these new Marches.

‘Or all the way in,’ Jordan said.

‘Yeah, the movement only got a slice of the pie. But look what they did with it!’

‘You sound proud of this place.’ Janis couldn’t square Moh’s enthusiasm for Norlonto with his stubborn insistence that he was some kind of socialist.

‘We want to go beyond this, do better than it. Not go back from it.’

After a minute she stopped trying to figure it out.

The mall had been hit in the war and never reclaimed, due to an obscure dispute about property rights. Norlonto being nothing if not an enormous tangle of private properties, the shopping centre and its surroundings had come to suffer what in a different society would be called planning blight. By default it could be considered part of the Kingdom, although the state had so far shown not the slightest interest in it. The whole area had been squatted and homesteaded until it was like a carcase occupied by an entire colony of ants, a shipwreck crusted with coral.

They pushed past stalls and shops selling microwaves, cast-iron cooking pots, light machine-guns, heavy-metal records, spacesuits, wedding-dresses, holodisks, oil paintings, Afro-Pak takeaways, VR snuff tapes. They emerged from the concentric rings and radial passages of the market into the concourse. Bernstein’s regular pitch occupied a small arc of a circle around what must once have been a fountain pond underneath a central skylight, forty-odd metres above, of now broken coloured glass.

It was unattended and bare. A skinny girl in a tool harness and little else affected a low-g loll behind the space-movement table in the adjacent quadrant.

‘Seen Bernstein?’ Moh asked.

She shifted an earpiece and gave her head a languid shake. ‘Booked it,’ she said. ‘If he don’t take it, is ’is agreno, jes?’

Moh checked his watch. 11.30. Not like Bernstein to miss several hours’ worth of sales. He turned to Jordan. ‘Anything going on?’

Jordan put his glades on with a flourish, tuned the downlink to his computer. ‘Damn’ right there is,’ he said. ‘Bomb scare in Camden High Street. Area’s sealed off. Traffic reports are frantic.’

‘Oh, shit. Well, that could account for it.’ Moh gazed around, willing Bernstein to appear. It didn’t work.

‘I’ll wait here and see if he turns up,’ he told Jordan and Janis. ‘You guys want to wander around?’

Jordan looked at the conference area of the mall, the revisionist rally. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘This is just incredible.’ Janis smiled and shrugged and nodded in the direction of the surrounding markets. They wandered off in separate orbits.

Moh stood by the Movement stall and watched the old soldiers, their uniforms and medals mingling with the streetfighting clothes and antique badges of the young enthusiasts. Battle standards hung reverently across the area taken over for the occasion. Ostensibly a conference of dissentient historians, it was becoming a blatantly political event. Even some of the academic intellectuals, recognizable in their own uniforms of jeans and leather-patched tweed jackets, averted their eyes from the more sinister faces on the posters that were being indiscreetly hawked.

‘Hey, man!’

The stall had a customer, a kid who picked up a tee-shirt in its polythene wrap and gazed at it. He was obviously a Neo, a hero-worshipper, one of those who’d grown up after the defeat and in adolescent rebellion had turned to what he’d always been told were the bad guys. Who just didn’t believe they could’ve been that bad, and had found an identity and a pride in identifying with those terrifying folk who’d posed perhaps the most radical threat the world had ever faced…but who had at the same time built a society that appealed to the conservative values of order and discipline and patriotism that most people assimilated like the isotopes in their mothers’ milk.

‘The man who designed the rockets…’ the kid breathed. Cropped hair, Europawehr combat jacket, ripped denim, knee-boots; scars on his smiling face and the faintest film of tear-flow in his eyes. The girl behind the stall looked back at him blankly.

‘It’s good to meet someone who knows their heritage,’ Kohn said. ‘Most people don’t even know who he was.’ He included the stall’s oblivious minder in his disapproval.

‘Yeah, well, they’ve got us two ways, haven’t they?’ the kid said. ‘Yanks up there holdin us down, greens down here draggin us down.’

Kohn nodded. ‘Exactly.’ He scanned the stall for recruitment material. ‘Well, some of us want to do something about it. Some of us believe in space, in the future. Look, mate, tell you what. Usually that’s ten marks, but I can see you’re keen, so I’ll knock it down to eight-fifty and throw in a card and a badge for another one-twenty…Here’s a pen.’

He tore off the card’s counterfoil, checking to make sure the kid had written his name and address.

‘Thanks…Greg.’ Kohn stuck out his hand. The kid looked up from pinning the blue enamel star to his lapel, grinned and clasped the hand.

‘See you again, mate.’ They slapped shoulders. The kid carried the tee-shirt away like a trophy.

‘That’s the way to do it,’ Kohn told the girl. He put the counterfoil carefully into the empty recruitment box. ‘Eble vi farus same.’ She still looked blank: her Esperanto smatter evidently as phony as her gravity-gets-me-down slouch.

An arm slipped between his elbow and his side.

‘Making new friends?’ Janis’s voice was dry, amused.

‘You know how it is,’ Kohn said, turning. ‘All those fine young bodies.’

‘Hah!’

Janis frowned, suddenly serious.

‘Gives me the chills a bit, this whole show,’ she said. ‘Nostalgia and militaristic kitsch and rewriting history: it’s all a lie – millions didn’t die, the soldiers were heroes even if they were misled by politicians, they were stabbed in the back…ugh! They’re not really your people, are they?’

‘No, my love, they ain’t.’ He felt as if the sun had gone behind a cloud, for a moment. Then he thought of the lad with the bright eyes. ‘But some of them are on our side even if they don’t know it. Real keen technological expansionists, hate the greens and the Yanks. Some of them’re basically sound.’

Janis sighed and shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

Jordan came back with armfuls of literature and a newly bought ancient leather jacket. ‘I still don’t believe this,’ he said. ‘Free speech, sure, but talk about taking it to extremes.’ He flipped his glades down. ‘Traffic’s clearing,’ he added. ‘ANR seems to be taking the flak for this one.’

The girl lifted herself out of her spacer pose and made some effort at salesmanship as Jordan leaned over the stall. It wasn’t necessary: he stocked up with mission badges, NASA and Tass posters, tee-shirts with pictures of the rocket pioneer Korolev, of Gagarin and Titov and Valentina Tereshkova, and a space-movement card and star.

Kohn again shoved the counterfoil in the box, this time checking that Jordan hadn’t given his address. The smells of frying and grilling had been tormenting him for half an hour.

‘Let’s get some lunch before the rush,’ he said. ‘Good place across the way – we can keep an eye out from there.’

‘Second you on that,’ Janis said. Jordan straightened up from decorating his biker jacket with enamel shuttles and stars, looking less like a refugee from Beulah City if a bit self-conscious in his glade-masked cool. He nodded at Moh.

They walked through the crowd of aging veterans, the Afghantsi and Angolanos, and tough kids with their hammer-and-sickles and red stars (with a sprinkle of the movement’s blue ones among them, as Moh indicated to Janis, who returned him a sceptical smile). They strolled past posters of Lenin and Stalin, Mao and Castro, Honneker and Ceaucescu and the rest, and over crumpled leaflets advertising lectures with titles like ‘The Great Leap Reconsidered’ and ‘Croatia: The West’s Killing Fields’. Moh led them to a first-floor Indian café overlooking the concourse, well away from the bars whose main feature for the day would be rip-off prices and drunk neo-Communists.

Chicken roti and a tall glass of vanilla lassi were what hit the spot for Moh. He ate in a corner seat, leaning against the window while Janis nibbled tikka and Jordan chomped through some kind of potato-in-pastry arrangement, turning over the pages of a prewar Khazakh cosmodrome brochure.

‘You really a communist, Moh?’ he asked. ‘After all that’s happened?’

Moh grunted, still watching out for Bernstein. ‘What’s past is prologue,’ he said. ‘The future is a long time. We ain’t seen nothing yet.’

‘When have we seen enough?’ Janis’s voice had an edge to it. A double edge, Moh guessed: getting uneasy about hanging around here, getting dubious about the connections with the past which had seemed so obvious before.

‘I remember things,’ he said, for her benefit as much as Jordan’s. ‘I’ve seen the working class making days into history, and that’s not something you forget.’ The lost revolution grieved him like a phantom limb. ‘The thing to forget about is the communistans and the states these guys down there think weren’t so bad after all. That ain’t where it’s at.’

Jordan was saying, ‘OK, but that’s where it ended up—’ when Moh raised a hand. He’d spotted a battery-powered vehicle hauling a tiny and overloaded trailer through the crowd.

‘There he is,’ he said. ‘Hey,’ he added as the others moved to rise. ‘Take it easy. Give the man time to catch a breath.’

He sucked up the last of the lassi noisily and, just to rub it in, lit a cigarette.

Kohn sometimes wondered idly if Bernstein were the actual genuine Wandering Jew. He wasn’t young, but damned if he ever got any older. When he looked up with a snaggle-toothed grin of recognition he appeared exactly the same as when Moh had first stood alongside impatiently while his father haggled over some new acquisition (Lenin and the End of Politics, Lenin and the Vanguard Party, Lenin as Election-Campaign Manager, Lenin as Philosopher, Lenin’s Childhood, Lenin’s Fight Against Stalinism, Lenin’s Political Thought, Lenin’s Trousers…)

Bernstein clapped Moh’s shoulder and shook hands with Janis and Jordan while Moh introduced them. He chatted with Jordan for a few minutes about the underground book-trade in Beulah City, then turned to Moh.

‘You got through the bomb scare all right, then,’ Moh said.

‘Bomb scare?’ Bernstein sounded startled. ‘All I saw was sodding Kingdom cops doing a sweep in Kentish Town. Had to take the long way round. Didn’t fancy explaining where I got all those old CC minutes.’

Central Committee minutes. That could be revealing.

‘From before –?’ Moh tried to keep the eagerness out of his voice.

Bernstein shook his head. ‘Post-war stuff. Split documents.’

Moh shrugged one shoulder.

‘What are you looking for this time, Moh?’

‘Not history,’ Moh said wryly. ‘Politics.’ But he couldn’t resist looking over the stall, just once. He picked up a pamphlet, a nice edition that he didn’t have, and in mint condition. The Transitional Programme, by Leon Trotsky. Introduction by Harry Wicks.

‘Good bloke,’ Bernstein said. ‘Heard him speak, once.’

‘You heard Trotsky?’ Jordan asked.

Bernstein gave him a forgiving grin. ‘I was talking about Wicks,’ he said.

‘How much?’ Moh asked.

‘Sixty million quid, in whatever you’ve got.’

‘Yeah, I’ll take it,’ Moh said, counting out twenty marks. ‘That really is a bit of history.’ He was a sucker for this kind of thing.

‘It’s not what you came for,’ Bernstein remarked.

‘Not exactly,’ Moh said. ‘What I wanted to ask you was – you don’t happen to know where Logan is these days?’

Bernstein reached under the table and started flipping through a scuffed leather-bound book of pages held together by metal rings, some kind of hard-copy filing system. ‘Yeah, he’s on a free-wheel space colony. New View. Utopian and scientific, geddit? Ah, here it is. Still got PGP, I see.’

Moh scanned the characters laboriously into his smart box.

‘Remember him going on about the Star Fraction?’ he asked lightly. ‘Ever find out anything about it?’

‘Nah,’ Bernstein said. ‘Saw Logan a couple years back, says he still gets the odd message.’ He cackled. ‘An odd message, that’s what it is all right. I reckon it’s something Josh built into the Black Plan.’

Moh heard the sound of blood draining from his head, like a faraway waterfall. He watched Bernstein’s face, and the whole mall, go from colour to a grainy monochrome.

‘The Black Plan?’ he heard himself say.

‘Sure,’ Bernstein said. ‘Your old man wrote it. Thought you knew.’

Kohn fought the flashbacks.

To no avail.

Heavy metal industrial shelving, loaded with electronic equipment, tools, the guts of computers. Trotsky’s collected works. Hardware and software manuals. Glossy computer magazines (softporn, his mother called them). Moh was lost in one when he heard a cough.

He turned to the table in the middle of the room.

‘Morning, Josh,’ he said, smiling.

His father glanced up from the screen and nodded. ‘Hi, Moh.’ He reached out to one side, snapping his fingers. ‘Get us the Dissembler handbook. Third shelf from the top…thanks.’

The keyboard keys clattered for a few more minutes. Moh watched in silence, then levered himself up by his elbows on the table to take a closer look. He gazed at the screen, intent, fascinated, as indented lines of code trickled upward. He didn’t understand what the code was doing, but he had learned programming literally on his father’s knee and he could see the logic of it, could see that at some level it all made sense: he knew, just before it happened, when the next symbol would be the one for ENDMODULE. A keystroke later and the module dwindled into distance, becoming faint horizontal hatching on a box connected to other icons on the screen.

‘What you doing, dad?’

Josh frowned distantly at him for a moment, then smiled with resignation. He straightened up in his tall chair, bringing his shoulderblades together, sighed out his breath and reached for a packet of cigarettes. He lit one and leaned on the table, now and again remembering to blow his exhaled smoke the other way.

‘It’s part of a big project,’ he said. ‘Uh…I’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk about it to anyone.’ He gave Moh a quick co-conspiratorial smile. ‘It’s complicated…resource planning, logistics and financial genetic algorithms, with a bit of contingency planning hard-coded in.’

‘What’s “contingency planning”?’

‘It’s…the things you do just in case.’

‘Like burying guns!’ Moh aimed an imaginary rifle.

‘Yeah.’ Josh sighed again and looked once more at the screen. ‘This is one for the Star Fraction.’

‘What’s the “Star Fraction”?’

Josh looked at him, distant again, then shook his head as if coming out of a reverie.

‘Forget it,’ he said harshly. There was a tone in his voice that Moh had never heard before, and the dismay must have shown in his face because Josh suddenly smiled and put an arm around his shoulder, and laughed, and hummed: ‘Five for the years of the Soviet plan and four for the International…’

Moh joined in, continuing: ‘Three, three the Rights of Ma-an, two for the worker’s hands working for their living-oh, and one is workers’ unity which ever more shall be so!’

Josh drew a blue line of smoke under the question of the project. ‘Well…how’s workers’ unity coming along in the Young Rebels?’ he said.

‘We’re always arguing,’ Moh confided. ‘Some of the comrades think we should be more against the government and some of us say we should be more for it because the right are against it.’

‘What do you think?’

‘Uh, well, I was thinking – is the Republic a workers’ and peasants’ government?’

Josh coughed in a suspicously vocal way and said, ‘Hih-hihh-hmm, ah, even allowing for peasants being a bit thin on the ground in these parts, I think we’d have to say: “No”. But these categories (you know what that means? good) aren’t really useful here. We’re in a new situation. It’s a radical democratic government. It isn’t socialist but the capitalists don’t trust it. So things are a bit unstable.’

They talked about politics for a while. Eleven years old and having just joined the party’s youth group, Moh understood the politics he’d learned from his parents as an adventure that spanned generations like a space programme: behind them the pioneers who’d risen in Petrograd, fallen in Vorkuta; ahead the Alpha Centauri of workers’ power and human solidarity; beyond that the infinite universe of socialism – the bright world, a world without borders, without bosses and cops. He felt proud to be part of it, arguing at school with right-wing teachers, marching on demonstrations, reading up.

‘Well, Moh, these hands have gotta work for their living-oh, so you better—’

‘Split!’

Josh gave him five, gave him ten, laughing, and Moh left.

But later that day he came back, and over the next weeks he and his father, almost without noticing it, fell into a way of working together: Moh fetching manuals and looking things up, helping with testing and debugging, watching the system grow. Josh talked and thought he was talking to himself, or over Moh’s head, and all the time the logic, but not the function, of the programs was becoming something that Moh grasped without knowing that he knew.

‘You OK, Moh?’

He blinked and shook his head. ‘Yeah, I’ll be…’

‘You using or what?’

‘No more than usual,’ Moh said. He forced a smile. ‘What did you say?’

‘Josh wrote it. The CAL system, remember?’

‘“CAL”?’ Janis frowned at them both. Jordan’s eyes widened.

‘Computer-aided logistics,’ Kohn said. ‘I remember.’

‘Never seen it documented,’ Bernstein said, ‘but it couldn’t have come from anywhere else. I’m not saying he did it all, but that was the core. Nobody else could’ve done it.’

‘Why not?’

‘’Cause nobody else wrote Dissembler.’

This time the shock was different. No memories, no flashbacks. Just a falling feeling.

‘You’re telling me,’ he said to Bernstein, ‘that my father wrote Dissembler?’ His voice creaked with disbelief. ‘How do you know?’

The lines on Bernstein’s face deepened, momentarily showing his true age. ‘It wasn’t talked about, back when you were a nipper. But –’ He gestured at his stock and smiled sourly. ‘I’ve met a lot of ex-members since. Some of ’em in the bottom of a bottle, if you catch my drift.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me before? About that and the Black Plan?’

‘Like I said. Thought you knew. Anyway, the Black Plan was a bit of a dodgy question, even in the Party. Not many people knew about it, I can tell you. Only the Central Committee and the fraction that was in the Labour Party and beavering away in the Republic’s Economic Commission. Your old man was the best software engineer they had. Course they used him. The man who wrote Dissembler!’ Bernstein laughed. ‘You know he released it as freeware? Could have been a millionaire, at least, but he didn’t hold with patents and intellectual property and all that. Talk about a good communist. The Yanks were well pissed off: it ate through their controls and escrows like acid.’

Moh remembered Bernstein, after the meeting all those years ago, talking about illegal software and what the Yanks did about it. He must have thought Moh would know exactly what he was hinting at.

‘So that was why—?’

‘That, and the Black Plan.’

Bernstein’s eyes held Moh’s gaze, as if his memories were as sharp and inescapable. ‘It means he’s still fighting them, Moh. “Wherever death may surprise us…” – remember?’

Only a sentimental affection restrained Kohn from punching him in the teeth.

‘Death is never welcome,’ he said after a moment.

Bernstein’s gaze inspected him, registered some shift in their relationship.

‘“Death is not lived through,”’ he said sadly.

Kohn thought about it and nodded.

‘I should know,’ he said.

He thanked Bernstein, said goodbye, and urged Janis and Jordan out of the mall, out into the sunlight. They walked to a ruined wall and sat on it, legs dangling, and talked. They were facing nothing but crumbling flyovers, sprawling squatter settlements: if they passed for anything it would have been backpacking students on a transport-archaeology trip. The ash of several cigarettes sifted to the ground as Moh told them what he’d remembered.

‘I still don’t see how this Black Plan is supposed to work,’ Janis said.

‘Nor me,’ Moh said. He’d never thought of the Black Plan as more than black propaganda until last night. Jordan grabbed his arm and Janis’s, almost making them topple backwards.

‘What—’

‘I know how it works,’ Jordan said, in a voice strained with trying not to shout. ‘He put trapdoors in Dissembler! That’s how it works! Because everybody uses Dissembler. Moh, man, your father was a hacker!’

‘What d’you mean, “trapdoors”?’ Janis asked.

‘Ways in,’ Moh said. ‘Trojan-horse stuff. Goes back a long way. The guys who wrote one of the first big operating systems planted some real subtle code in it that let them access anything it ran. If Josh pulled the same trick with Dissembler—’

The plan working through the market. He knew where that idea had come from.

‘Josh must have buried guns all right,’ Moh said. ‘Buried them in the Black Plan: sleepers, logic bombs. And one contingency was that the Republic would fall, that the revolution would be lost.’

‘And what do you think the first part of the contingency plan was?’ Jordan said. ‘I’ll tell you – set up something like the ANR!’

‘Well, it certainly enabled it,’ Moh said. ‘The story is that it siphons off money and supplies from all over the place. Computer-aided logistics, ha! But to actually build an organization?’ He held up the pamphlet he’d bought. ‘You’d need this kind of programme, not a fucking computer program!’ Jordan and Janis were looking at him as if he’d said something clever. He thought for a moment. ‘Oh, shit.’

‘Yes,’ Jordan said. ‘Look at it this way. It’s not just an analogy, it’s the same thing. It’s a selfish meme!’

‘I know about memes, ideas spreading; but why selfish?’

‘It’s – well, it’s a metaphor, right? For how ideas spread, replicate themselves. Like, ideas are exactly as interested in the brains they’re in as genes are in the bodies they’re in: just enough to get themselves copied.’

‘Like computer viruses,’ Janis added.

‘OK.’ Moh spread his hands. ‘And?’

‘If Josh built some political strategy into the Black Plan,’ Jordan continued, ‘where would he have got the ideas from? Where else but from his own Party’s programme, all his experience and reading about politics? The Plan is the programme – not the old pamphlet you got, not necessarily the ideas in any detail, but the set of practices that it codes for.’ He grinned knowingly. ‘Over the years it’s embodied itself in lots of organizations, isn’t that right?’

‘Well, yes,’ Moh said. It was a disconcerting view. ‘You’re saying the programme creates the Party, and not the other way round?’

‘Of course it does,’ Jordan said. ‘What do you think is going on in there?’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Just a different mutation of the ideas, infecting fresh minds. A selfish meme replicating across time. Your variant of it may be in scores of sects, the Left Alliance and so on, but the most successful species at the moment is in the Black Plan. It’s got its own bloody army.’

‘Now you’re the one talking serdar argic,’ Moh said. He punched Jordan lightly. ‘Come on. You’re talking like it’s some kinda electronic antichrist, taking over the world with—’

‘Barcodes containing 666!’ Jordan laughed. ‘No, it’s just a way of looking at it.’ He made an inverting gesture. ‘Mind you, you’ve just said there’s a connection between the Black Plan and the Fourth International…’

‘Well, maybe in the sense that you mean, that Josh wrote it. Beyond that…I don’t know. Not much sign of Trotskyist ideology in the ANR. Or any other, come to that. They’re pragmatic. Post-futurist.’

‘Exactly,’ Jordan said. ‘The political and military techniques work independently of the ideology.’

‘What would you know about that?’

Jordan shrugged. ‘I read books.’

‘What about the Star Fraction?’ Janis interrupted. ‘Bernstein said he thought that was in the Black Plan.’

‘Not the Fraction itself,’ Moh said, frowning. ‘Just instructions for it, for people like Logan.’

‘“Not the Fraction,”’ Jordan mimicked. ‘“Just instructions for it.” Get a clue, Moh. They’re the same thing.’

‘OK, you can look at it that way if you want.’ He felt stubborn about this, that Jordan and Janis between them were concocting a dubious metaphor for something plainly explicable in political terms. ‘What I think is that the Star Fraction was a real organization that Josh was involved in setting up. It was designed to exploit some kind of capability of the Black Plan but it never got activated.’

‘And what,’ Jordan asked triumphantly, ‘were you so damn’ insistent you’d done yesterday? You activated something!’

Moh stared at him, unable to speak as he experienced the mental flip into seeing things the way Jordan did: ideas as discrete entities – memes – leaping from mind to mind like programs indifferent to the hardware they ran on; language itself as a natural Dissembler, turning words into virtual realities in human brains; ideologies as meme machines, using all the parties and factions, armies and movements, faiths and reasons as their disposable bodies to reproduce another generation of gun-toting or Bible-thumping or programme-quoting or party-building meme-propagators.

He thought of Johnny Smith, the Hizbollah fighter who’d died in his arms (Och, Johnny, I hardly knew ye!) and whose heroic death had inspired a dozen others, which in their turn…now there was a Johnny Smith Martyr of the Southall Jihad Memorial Children’s Home.

He thought of Guevara, whose words Bernstein had quoted:

Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry, reach some receptive ear; that other hands reach out to wield our weapons and other men intone our funeral dirge with the staccato chant of the machine-guns and new battle cries of war and victory.

The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living…as Marx said. Yes, there were generations of the dead and they reproduced themselves…just as there were generations of the living and they reproduced themselves.

He thought of Josh and Marcia, how they had joined the generations of the dead. He looked down at his hands on the warm metal of the assault rifle across his knees. Some part of the weapon Josh had wielded was now buried in this gun, in its cryptic, encrypted memories.

And in his.

‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘I activated something. And I did it with a code I remembered from working with Josh on the Black Plan.’

‘Logan was part of the space fraction,’ Janis pointed out. ‘If this idea about the political programme having been sort of built into the computer program is right—’

‘Then it’s reaching into space,’ Moh said. ‘Oh, yeah, I get the point. It could just go on. Building parties, raising armies, raising hell. Forever.’

‘Centuries, anyway,’ Jordan said. ‘The future is a long time.’

Moh looked at the sky. Glades off, it hurt. Something to do with there not being enough air pollution to keep out the ultraviolet. Or something.

‘Time we called Logan,’ he said.