The Star Fraction

2

Evidence for Aeroplanes

Tomorrow, Jordan thought, tomorrow he would start to live rationally. Tomorrow he would make the break, walk out and leave them, let them weep or curse. Light out for North London Town. Norlonto’s free, the whisper ran. You can get anything with money. Force has no purchase there.

He had thought the same thing on hundreds of previous days.

Jordan Brown was seventeen years old and fizzing with hormones and hate. He lived in North London, but not Norlonto, not North London Town. The area where he lived had once been called Islington, and bits of it lapped into other former boroughs. It bordered Norlonto in a high-intensity contrast between freedom and slavery, war and peace, ignorance and strength. Which was which depended on whose side you were on. They called this area Beulah City. God was in charge. Except…

The earth belongs unto the Lord

and all that it contains

except for the West Highland piers

for they belong to MacBraynes.

His grandmother had told him that mildly blasphemous variant on a psalm when he was a little kid, teasing the limits of propriety. Even his father had laughed, briefly. It expressed a truth about their own time, a truth about the Cable. The Elders did their best to censor and exclude the unclean, the doubtful in the printed word, but there was damn all they could do about the Cable, the fibre-optic network that the godless Republic had piped to every corner of every building in what was then a land, linking them to the world. The autonomy of all the Free States, the communities under the king, depended on free access to it. You could do without it as easily as you could do without air and water, and nobody even tried any more.

Jordan stood for a moment on the steps of his family’s three-storey house at the top of Crouch Hill. To his left he could see Alexandra Palace, the outer limit of another world. He knew better than to give it more than a glance. Norlonto’s free…

The air was as cold as water. He clattered down the steps and turned right, down the other side of the hill. Behind him the holograms above the Palace faded in the early sun. In his mind, they burned.

The lower floor of the old warehouse near Finsbury Park was a gerbil’s nest of fibre-optics. Jordan glimpsed their tangled, pulsing gleam between the treads of the steel stairs he hammered up every morning. Most of Beulah City’s terminals had information filters elaborately hardwired in, to ensure that they presented a true and correct vision of the world, free from the biases and distortions imposed by innumerable evil influences. Because those evils could not be altogether ignored, a small fraction of the terminals had been removed from private houses and businesses, their cables carefully coiled back and back, out of freshly re-opened trenches and conduits, and installed at a dozen centres where their use could be monitored. This one held about a hundred in its upper loft, a skylit maze of paper partitions.

Jordan pushed open the swing doors. The place at that moment had a churchy quiet. Most of the workers would arrive half an hour later: draughtsmen, writers, artists, designers, teachers, software techs, business execs, theologists. Jordan filled a china mug from the coffee machine – Salvadorean, but he couldn’t do anything about that – and walked carefully to his work-station.

The night trader, MacLaren, stood up, signing off and spinning the seat to Jordan. In his twenties, already slowing.

‘Beijing’s down,’ he said. ‘Vladivostok and Moscow up a few points, Warsaw and Frankfurt pretty shaky. Keep an eye on pharmaceuticals.’

‘Thanks.’ Jordan slid into his seat, put down his coffee and waved as he clocked in.

‘God go with ya,’ MacLaren mumbled. He picked up his parka and left. Jordan keyed the screen to a graphic display of the world’s stock markets. Screens were another insult: they didn’t trust you to use kit they couldn’t see over your shoulder. He blew at the coffee and munched at the bacon roll he’d bought on the way in, watched the gently rolling sea of wavy lines. As the picture formed in his mind he brought up prices for Beulah City’s own products, dancing like grace-notes, like colour-coded corks.

Stock-exchange speculation was not what it was about, though he and MacLaren sometimes kidded each other that it was. Beulah City imported textiles and information and chemicals, sold clothes and software and specialized medicines. Jordan and MacLaren, and Debbie Jones on the evening shift, handled sales and purchasing for a good fraction of its companies, missions and churches. Serious stock trading was the prerogative of the Deacons and JOSEPH, their ethical investment expert system, but Jordan’s small operation was free to risk its own fees on the market. Beulah City’s biggest current commercial success was Modesty, a fashion house that ran the local rag trade and also sold clothes-making programs for CAD/CAM sewing machines. They’d enjoyed an unexpected boom in the post-Islamist countries while ozone depletion kept European sales of cover-up clothing buoyant – though here suncream competed. Suncream was not quite sound, and anyway the ungodly had it sewn up.

MacLaren had had a good night in Armenia. Jordan turned west and called up Xian Educational Software in New York.

‘What you offering?’ XES asked.

Jordan scanned the list of products scrolling down his screen’s left margin.

‘Creation astronomy kit, includes recent spaceprobe data, latest cosmogonies refuted. Suitable for high-school use; grade-school simplification drops out. One-twenty a copy.’

‘WFF approved?’

Jordan exploded the spec. The World Fundamentalist Federation logo, a stylized Adam and Eve, shone at top right. That meant it could be sold to Jewish and Muslim as well as Christian literalists: all the people of the book, the chapter, the verse, the word, the letter, the jot, the tittle.

‘Affirm.’

‘We’ll take fifty thousand, an option on exclusive.’

Jordan hit a playback key: ‘God BLESS you!!’

‘Have a nice eternity.’

Go to hell. He punched a code. The software to produce exactly 5 × 10⁴ copies of Steady State? The Spectra Say No! became a microwave burst. And there was light, Jordan thought. Oh, yeah. He made the stars also. They’d racked and stretched that line, tortured a whole cosmology, a whole philosophy of science out of it, until it had confessed all, admitted everything: it was a put-up job; the sky was a scam, a shop-front operation; the stars had lied about their age. The universe as afterthought, its glory an illusory afterimage…there was the blasphemy, there the heresy, the lie in the right hand, the spitting in Creation’s face! He tilted his baseball cap and looked up at the sky beyond the tinted roof. A contrail drew a clean white line across the ravaged clouds. Jordan smiled to himself. In this sign conquer. Some folk believed in UFOs. He believed in aeroplanes.

He bought shares in Da Nang Phytochemicals, sold them mid-morning at 11 per cent just before a rumour of NVC activity in the Delta sent the stock sharply down. He shifted the tidy sum into a holding account and was scanning for fashion buyers in Manila when the graphics melted and ran into a face. A middle-aged man’s kindly, craggy face, smiling like a favourite uncle. The lips moved soundlessly, subtitles sliding along the bottom line. A conspiratorial whisper of small alphanumerics:

hi there jordan this is your regional resources coordinator

Oh, my God! A Black Planner!

i’m the legitimate authority around here but i don’t suppose that cuts much smack with you still i have a proposition you may find interesting.

Jordan fought the impulse to look over his shoulder, the impulse to hit the security switch and get himself off the hook.

don’t worry this is untraceable our sleeper viruses have survived 20 years of electronic counterinsurgency all you have to do is make this purchase from guangzhou textiles and a sale of same to the account now at top left at cost if you key the code now at top right into the cash machine at the end of the street at 12.05 plus or minus 10 minutes you will find a small recompense in used notes i understand you have a holographic memory so i say goodbye and i hope i see you again.

The markets came back. Jordan saw his hands quiver. Until now the Black Plan had been a piece of urban folklore, the phantom hitch-hiker of the Cable, a rumoured leftover of the Republic’s political economy just as the ANR was the remnant of its armed forces. Allegedly it godfathered the ANR, scorning the checkpoint taxes and protection rackets of the community militias; fiendish financial viruses were supposed to haunt the core of the system, warping the country’s – some said, the world’s – economy to the distant ends of the fallen regime…

He’d never given the legend any credit.

Now it was offering him cash.

Untraceable digital cash, converted into untraceable paper money, something he’d never got his hands on before. Only the privileged had access to hard currency; for anything outside of business, Jordan had to make do with shekels, BC’s crummy funny money.

Guangzhou was busy. Try again.

He sold a Filipino a thousand gowns and let the remittance hover. Just borrowing, really. Not theft. No real conscience. Only following rules. Suppose it’s a trap? A little provocateur program to sniff out embezzlement and dangerous disloyalty? He could always say…A long, rambling, stammering defence spooled through his mind, shaming him. Intellectually he understood perfectly what the problem was: guilt and doubt, the waste products of innocence and faith, inhibited him and filled him with self-loathing even at his own weakness in trying to be free of them.

Born in sin and shapen in iniquity.

Guangzhou had a line. He made the purchase, transferred it instantly to the account as specified. And it paid him. It was as if the money had never been away. He put it in the proper account and took the correct fee. No harm done. The time was 11.08.

Someone tapped his shoulder. He turned, his features reflexively composed.

Mrs Lawson smiled down at him.

‘Take ten?’

A small, bustling middle-aged woman in black and white, no make-up, no guile or allure. She worked for Audit. Smart as a snake, like the man said, and no way harmless as a pigeon. Jordan had a momentary vision of head-butting her and making a dash for it. A dash for where?

He nodded and logged off, followed as her hem swept a path to her office. An audit trail.

‘Coffee?’

‘Yes, please.’

He sat awkwardly in the chair in the corner of the tiny office. The upright reclined so he couldn’t sit back without sprawling, and sitting on the edge made it difficult to look relaxed. Mrs Lawson had a swivel chair behind a pine desk. Stacks of printout. Monitor screens like the eyes of lizards. Cacti in pots along the window.

She steepled her fingers. ‘I’ve been keeping an eye on you, Jordan.’ She giggled. ‘Not in a way that would worry my husband! You’re a sharp lad, you know…No, don’t look so bashful. It’s not pride to be aware of your strengths. You do have an instinct, a feel for the way the markets move. I hope you’ll move up a bit yourself, perhaps consider joining one of the larger businesses. However, I’m not going to offer you a job.’

Another giggle. Jordan’s back crawled.

‘Except…in a way, I suppose I am. Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary in the system recently?’

This is it, he thought. Maybe there is a God after all, who leads you into temptation, then delivers you to evil.

‘Yes, I have,’ Jordan said. ‘Only this morning, a Black Planner made me an offer—’

Mrs Lawson laughed, almost spilling her coffee.

‘Of course, of course. And in my desk I have a piece of the authentic Turing Shroud! No, seriously, Jordan, I’m talking about any kind of pattern you may have noticed in things like, oh, subsystem crashes, transaction delays, severe degradation of response-time unrelated to major obvious activity? Anything that seems like interventions, where none of the central banks are involved? To be honest, we can’t find any evidence from the Exchange Commissions of’ – she waved her hands – ‘anything suspicious, but several of the smaller communities have a theory that something is loose in the system, using it for ulterior noncommercial purposes in a way that shows up only at the, uh, glass roots level.’

‘What you might call “outsider dealing”?’

Mrs Lawson looked startled.

‘That’s exactly what we do call it. Unfortunately it’s led to rumours, very unhealthy rumours, of – you know. A word to the wise, Jordan. I wouldn’t repeat that little joke of yours if I were you.’

Jordan nodded vigorously, making wiping motions with his hands.

‘Very good, my dear. Now: you will keep alert for anything that goes against your intuition as to how the market should behave, won’t you? And I suppose you’re keen to get back to work, so thank you for your time.’

It was 11.25.

He logged on, getting his password wrong a couple of times. The queue of orders filled one and a half screens. Jordan closed his eyes and breathed deeply, flexed his fingers and got to work. He didn’t think about anything.

Janis hardly listened to herself as she rattled through the outlines of what she knew of the project. She was thinking that there was something oddly disproportionate about her part in it: the more she thought about it, the more important it seemed, and that didn’t jibe at all with the level of resources applied…You didn’t want a struggling post-doc on this, you wanted a team, lots of lab techs, equipment thrown at it like ammunition. She might be part of a team without knowing it – that was her favoured hypothesis at the moment. With every government nervously restricting biological research, confining it to F S Zees and science peaks, with big corporations looking over their shoulders at consumer groups and junk-science lawsuits, and with green terrorists topping up the restrictions with direct action – with all that, life science was itself becoming an underground guerilla activity. (She’d often wondered just what molecule or compound was responsible for hysteria and ineducability in the middle classes: it must have seeped into the food-chain sometime in the nineteen-sixties, and become ever more concentrated since.)

Hell, maybe the backers were poor, maybe there wasn’t some giant corporation or institution behind this after all…maybe the three men in front of her were the whole thing; what the front concealed was that it wasn’t a front; What You See Is What You Get…True enough, the rest of the project was almost virtual – robot molecular analyses, computer molecular designs, automatic molecular production. It relied heavily on two techniques, parallel but almost precisely opposite. Genetic algorithms enabled random variations to be selected, varied, selected again in an analogue of Darwinian evolution, against a model of known chemical pathways in the human brain, which ICI-Bayer rented out at a few marks a nanosecond; like, cheap. Polymerase chain reactions enabled the selected molecules to be replicated in any necessary quantity, a process so thoroughly automated that the only human intervention required was washing out the kit.

But, ultimately, the product had to be tested in a living animal, and raw stuff from nature had to be tried out for potential; and at both ends of the cycle stood herself and a lot of white mice.

‘So perhaps you could give us a demonstration of your methods, Doctor Taine?’

Janis had a momentary fellow-feeling with a mouse in a maze: trapped and frantic. She had removed the door from the lab, lugged it to a skip, made sure the representatives of her sponsors entered by the side of the block away from the damaged wall. It wasn’t that she intended to fudge the results, ignore the contamination and hope for the best. She fully intended to sacrifice the mice and start afresh. It was just that there wasn’t time to do it before she had to demonstrate her competence, and she was afraid that, if she had nothing to demonstrate, the sponsors would sacrifice her and start afresh. She saw a fleeting, mad vision of what she would do if they ever found out – throw it all up and become a creep, wear plastic and live off the land and break into psychology labs and free the flatworms, blow up whale-ships to save the krill…

Three men in dark suits looked at her. She tried not to think of the many jokes beginning There was a Pole, a German and a Russian…Gently, she took a mouse from one of the cages and placed it in the entry to the maze. It sniffed around the little space, squeaking.

‘We have here a subject: the s, as we call it. In a moment I’ll open the entry door and it’ll attempt to find a way through this maze of transparent tubing. All the subjects – the experimentals and the controls – have already learned a path through the maze. The experimentals have received mild doses of the various preparations in their water, taken ad libitum. This particular subject is one of a group which has received a locally obtained psylocibe derivative. The mean time hitherto has been around seventy seconds—’

‘For both the experimentals and the controls?’ the Pole asked.

Janis released the entry lever and the mouse sauntered down the pipe. ‘Yes. I don’t wish to obscure the fact that, so far, the null hypothesis—’

ping

The s had pressed the switch at the end of the maze and was nibbling its reinforcer, a square centimetre of marmalade toast. The timer, wired to the exit lever and the reward switch, stood at 32 seconds.

Silently, Janis removed the mouse and tried again with a control.

She ran through a dozen variations: mice doped with betel-juice, opiates, coca, caffeine…

It wasn’t a fluke, the psylocibe-heads were consistently twice as fast, way outside even experimenter effect.

She stared at the men, puzzled.

‘I must set up some double-blind protocols,’ she said. ‘Up to now, frankly, it hasn’t been worth it. At least, I assume you were interested in major effects.’

‘We certainly are,’ said the German. ‘And this isn’t a new preparation?’

‘Cumulative?’ said the Russian when Janis shook her head.

‘It’s possible. Obviously, more…’

‘Research is necessary, huh?’

They all laughed.

She worried that they’d think it was a set-up, lowering their expectations like that and then producing something so interesting; but no, they were sold on it. Her contract was renewed for six months; she was to take on a technician, check out all the possibilities.

As she escorted them down the corridor the Russian sniffed. He nudged her.

‘Is maybe not patriotic,’ he said, ‘but the Lebanese is better, no?’

She smiled back at him blankly, then quickened her pace to hide her blush.

Oh shit.

Fonthill Road, centre of the garment district. Great automatic factories spun and wove, cut and stitched in towers of glass and steel. The car-free street thronged with people who all, especially the women, seemed to Jordan to take up far too much space: jammed with bustles, he thought dourly as he skirted crinolines, ducked under parasols, manoeuvred around trains. Modesty’s own window displays – with their fractal chintzes, Mandelbrot paisleys and swathes of computer-generated lace applied as if with a spray-gun to every conceivable garment surface and trim – looked tasteful and restrained against the styles of the Bible-belts of Florida, Liberia and everywhere else that everybody’s daughter wanted to look like a televangelist’s wife.

Four minutes after noon. Five people ahead of him in the queue for the Bundesbank cashpoint at the corner of Seven Sisters Road. Jordan shuffled and fumed, stared over their heads at the Fuller domes of the old Development Area. He keyed in the number at 12.13. The machine laboured and muttered to itself for forty finger-drumming seconds, then coughed and spat out a thick wad of crumpled currency. And another, and again.

Jordan snatched them up and almost ran off while the screen was still offering a succession of financial services in what seemed increasingly desperate pleas to get the money back.

Back at the office building he headed straight for the toilet and locked himself away in a lavatory stall. He knew he was safe there – say what you like about the Elders, they were genuine about certain kinds of privacy. It was understood that God was watching. Jordan suddenly discovered that he really needed to shit. He sat down and counted the money. Four thousand Britische marks. He felt the blood leave his head, his bowels turn to water.

The B-mark was the hardest of hard currencies – only Norlonto used it internally, and even there four thousand would last a couple of months. In the community economies you could get laughable sums of funny money for it, even after bribing the guards. For a hundred B-marks your average checkpoint charlie would sell you his Kalashnikov and probably his sister’s address.

Jordan stared at the white paint of the stall door, losing himself like he sometimes did at the screen. Nothing seemed real. He remembered a word of wisdom that he had once, delightedly, checked out in a lucid dream: If you can fly, you’re dreaming. He thought about it for a minute, and no, he didn’t float upwards…

Just as well, because his trousers were around his ankles.

When he stepped through the door of the office he found everybody yelling at everybody else.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

That got all those in earshot yelling at him. Mrs Lawson pushed her way through. He was relieved to see she looked relieved to see him. She grabbed his elbow and tugged him towards his own screen. He stared at it. Bands of colour warped and writhed, almost hypnotically complex patterns appearing momentarily and then changing before he could appreciate them.

‘This has got to be a terminal malfunction,’ he said. ‘Either that or the world economy has gone to h – Hades!’ He recalled the window displays. ‘It’s not, uh, some designer’s palette that’s got its wires crossed with our system?’

‘Nice try,’ Mrs Lawson said. ‘Just don’t suggest it to the designers – they’re practically hysterical already.’

She glared around and several people slunk back abashed.

‘The engineers have been in all lunchtime and assure us there’s nothing wrong with the hardware. And, yes, we have checked and it isn’t – hee hee – the terminal crisis of capitalism, either.’

A lowercase thought slid along the bottom of Jordan’s mind.

our sleeper viruses have survived twenty years

The room swayed slightly. Get a grip.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, loud enough to be heard by enough people to amplify and spread the phony reassurance. ‘I have an idea as to what’s behind this. I’ll just have to check over some of your files, Mrs Lawson.’

He looked her in the eye and gave a tiny jerk of his head.

‘OK.’ She raised her voice to a pitch and volume that reminded him she’d once been a schoolteacher. ‘Do something else!’ she said to the rest of the room. ‘Read a manual if you have to!’

She shut the office door firmly behind them.

‘This place secure?’ he said immediately.

‘If it isn’t, nowhere is.’

‘Do you have a landlink to the security forces? The real ones I mean, uh, no offence to the Warriors—’

‘None taken.’

She smiled at his visible shock. Jordan continued hurriedly: ‘Could you check that the subversives aren’t starting a big push?’

She said nothing.

‘Look, I’m not suggesting that any of their, uh, black propaganda is true but they might be getting into sabotage…’

He trailed off, feeling he’d said too much.

‘That’s a point. Besides, it could be more, well, local forces, shall we say? Some anti-Christian faction.’

Mrs Lawson picked up a phone and walked about with it, talking in the clipped argot of the security professional. (God, he’d never suspected she was a cop!)

‘—sitrep update request, BC. Check ECM on LANS…yes…OK negative on target specificity…copy, got you, logging out.’

She clicked the phone off.

‘We’re not the only ones. Some of our commercial rivals and ideological opponents are getting system crashes as well, but none of the core state or corporate networks have any problems. Doesn’t fit any known attack profile, doesn’t fit anything apart from the issue I raised this morning.’

‘Well, I certainly didn’t expect anything like this…so soon.’

Mrs Lawson nodded briskly, as if not paying attention.

‘You couldn’t be expected to. You’re not a big loop, Jordan – you’re not my main source of ideas. I want you to watch out, yes, you have a knack. But to be honest I’ve had the same theories run through by the leading Warriors already. I was just checking that the projections held.’

She paused, her face suddenly bleak.

‘I know I can trust you to keep this to yourself – not because I know you’re clean, but because I know for a fact you’re not. Take that spiritual-virgin look off your face! Do you think – no, you’re far too smart to think – an outfit like BC survives in this tough world on censored texts? We have to know the psychology, know the philosophies, of that world. Take what we can and trust in God to keep us from corruption! The Elders and Deacons have read and seen things – and done things – that would make the hair on your devious, secretly sceptical head stand on end! The ANR! Don’t talk to me about the ANR – don’t pretend not to talk about them. They don’t worry me. What I fear, what I truly pray we are not faced with, is the coming of the Watchmaker.’

‘What is the Watchmaker?’

He already knew: he’d read the book. He still hoped she didn’t know he had.

‘You can read the book,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you clearance.’

Mrs Lawson fiddled with the coffee percolator, poured two cups and sat down. Jordan accepted a cup and remained standing. He wondered how secure the door would be against a good kick.

‘Dawkins, R. Nineteen eighty something. We’re not bothered by all the arguments about the evolution of life. We’ve got fallback interpretations if that theory’s ever absolutely proved. The thing which had many better minds worried was the idea that natural selection could happen, could irrefutably happen, in a computer system. Intelligence could evolve out of the bugs and viruses in software. Something not human, not angelic, possibly diabolic. The Blind Watchmaker. Life made the devil’s way – by evolution, not creation.’

She fell silent, looking at him as if she were watching something behind him. Jordan decided not to throw in a suspiciously knowledgeable comment on the semantic slippage which confused the process and the product, the creator and its creation. Just as the name of Frankenstein had become irremediably tagged to the monster, so the long-imagined, long-dreaded spontaneously evolved artificial intelligence was stamped with the name of the process that would give it birth. ‘When the Watchmaker comes…’ Another bit of the buzz he occasionally glimpsed in hastily scanned chatfiles the censorship hadn’t quite caught up with. Another urban legend.

He finished his coffee and said edgily, ‘Can we be sure?’

He felt he had just been initiated, if not baptised and confirmed, into some alternative theology, the real thinking of the real minds that ran the place – still orthodox, he could see that, though not the sort of thing they’d want to slot on a satellite for prime time – and all he could respond with was his own self-corroding scepticism.

‘Of course we can’t be sure,’ Mrs Lawson said. ‘Oh, Jordan, don’t you know anything?’

The system came back up, just as inexplicably, twenty minutes later. Melody Lawson sat in her office and looked at the monitor screens, frowning to herself as she watched Jordan logging on. She’d as good as invited him to move on from the naive fundamentals that were enough for the pew-ballast to the more sophisticated understanding necessary to protect that very simplicity, and he’d not risen to it at all. Any bright young Christian with a questioning mind would have been in like a ferret, eager to explore a legitimization of his more daring thoughts. There was no doubt Jordan was bright, but he sure as hell wasn’t a Christian. It galled her the kid was so transparent, and that nobody else saw through him. It galled her even more that whatever had undermined his belief in God had also diminished his belief in himself. Open irreligion could not be permitted, and she had no problem with that, but closet atheism was far more poisonous. There was no telling when such suppressed, turned-in hostility could lash out in a desperate act. For Jordan to leave Beulah City would be better for the community, and better for him.

It would even be better for his soul. He was becoming almost literally two-faced – the way he’d looked when he’d turned away from the screen! There had been only one moment when his mask had dropped, and that was when he’d mentioned the Black Planner…

Dear God, she thought. Suddenly frantic, she hit her door switch, keyed open the lock on a drawer and scrabbled for her VR glasses. She put them on and punched herself into the security net. The sensation of diving, of swimming and twisting like a shark, was all the more exciting for being – even for her – a rarely exercised, dangerous privilege. A quick scan of Jordan’s company records revealed an odd hiatus in the placing of a remittance – ah ha! She studied the traces, fragments of entry code snagged on tortuous logic branches, undetectable without the correct keys. Forensic diagnostics stripped them, returning pointers. She lowered thresholds on associative criteria, letting suspicions harden into certainties; then unleashed the now almost paranoid detection protocols and hit fast-forward to follow them. They took her to a Black Plan locale vacated in recent seconds. After clocking confirmations they leapt from one conclusion to another, finally locking on to an undoubtedly criminal penetration virus. She rode its backwash as far as she dared, far enough to confirm that Black Plan purposes lay just a few implications down the line. Disengaging, she encountered some paramilitary construct; its routines and hers conducted a brief, hostile interchange at a level far too fast for her to follow. It turned away from her and tracked the penetration virus, on business of its own. Mrs Lawson followed a secure path home, then backed out, feeling slightly nauseous.

Oh Jordan, Jordan. You are a silly boy. You are going to catch it, and so am I for letting it happen.

Unless…

Unless…

She let her conscience have its say for a few moments, then set to work deleting and revising, editing reality. When she was satisfied she sat back and picked up a phone.

The system crashed again and again. The afternoon passed in a trance of work, to the sound of crying alarms. Melody Lawson fought a rising sense of panic, becoming increasingly convinced there was something new in the networks and that it might be, if not the Watchmaker itself, a rogue AI of unprecedented range. She didn’t know if anyone else of her credibility and experience would see it that way.

There was one man who would. Perhaps two.

Two would be best.

She waited until the day workers had left, called her family to say she was working late, then checked and rechecked the security of her office and its systems. As she did so she ran through the memory trick – one digit in this corner, another on that shelf – that recalled a number she’d never dared write down or even keep in her conscious memory. She used it to call the most secret and mistrusted and deniable of her contacts.

And all the time the question that bugged her, that stuck in and perplexed her mind, was what did the ANR want with all that silk?