The Star Fraction

3

Hardware Platform Interface

Betrayed.

Cat lay in the bed, gazing at the LCD on the plastic cast, watching the numbers flicker and her fingers clench and unclench. The anaesthetic, whatever it was, made her feel remote and detached, as if her anger were a dark cloud that she drifted into and out of. After Kohn had left she had checked her status, hoping against all she knew about him that he’d been bluffing. Except that of course he hadn’t. She wasn’t a prisoner any more but a patient: recommended to stay one more night in case of delayed shock, but otherwise free to go.

Her hospital bill had already been charged to the Dzerzhinsky Collective’s account. They’d take a loss on that, with no ransom to recover it from. Small change, smaller consolation. She decided to run them up a phone bill as well, and called the Carbon Life Alliance’s hotline. The answer-fetch took her message without comment, and told her to await a response.

She put on some music, and waited.

The response surprised her. She’d expected some low-level functionary. She got the founder-leader of the Carbon Life Alliance, Brian Donovan. He came to her like a ghost, a hallucination, a bad dream: jumping from apparent solidity at the end of the bed to being a face on the television, and back again, talking all the while through her headset phones. It was as if all the machinery in her bay of the ward were possessed. She felt like muttering exorcisms. Donovan looked like a necromancer himself, with long grey hair and a long grey beard. He was stamping about inaudibly and cursing very audibly indeed. Cat found herself cringing back against the head of the bed until she realized that Donovan’s wrath was directed not at her but at Moh.

‘…don’t need this. Nobody does this to me, nobody gives me this kind of aggravation. Not if they want to live.’ He inhaled noisily, obviously wearing a throat-mike. He looked her straight in the eyes, a remarkable feat considering how he was patching the projections together and probably viewing her through the grainy line-feed of a security camera somewhere up in a corner of the ceiling.

‘Well, Miss Duvalier,’ he said, visibly calming down, ‘we can’t let this insult pass unchallenged.’

She nodded quickly. Her mouth was too dry for speech.

‘D’you have anything on the bastard? Not his codes – I’ve picked them up already from the hostage claim last night, and I’m working on that. But where does he hang out in Actual Reality, eh?’

Cat swallowed hard. ‘I just want this matter settled,’ she said. ‘Not to start a feud.’

‘I was thinking in terms of a legal challenge,’ Donovan said. ‘Releasing you without demanding ransom is so far out of line that it’d be a very painful challenge for him to meet. I would like to present it to him in as public a manner as possible.’

‘You’ll find him hard to trace in the nets,’ Cat said. She saw Donovan begin to bristle. ‘But,’ she went on hastily, ‘I can tell you his usual haunts.’

The CLA leader listened to her, then said, ‘Thank you, Miss Duvalier. And now, you would be well advised to do your best to disappear. I’ll be in touch.’

‘How will you—?’ she began, but Donovan had vanished.

Screen and phones filled again with the jackhammer beat of Babies With Rabies.

The Felix Dzerzhinsky Workers’ Defence Collective rented a unit in one of the student accommodation blocks, and for now it was Kohn’s place. Bed and desk and terminal, cupboard, shelves, fridge, kettle. Door so flimsy it wasn’t worth locking. Moh had painted a hammer-and-sickle-and-4 on it, and it worked like charms, like wreaths of garlic, like silver crosses and holy water don’t.

He called up the collective on the open phone and left a message that he was off-active and looking forward to some good music when he came home. In their constantly shuffled slangy codes, ‘music’ currently meant party, ‘good music’ meant some heavy political problem had come down. He pacified the ravenous cravings that usually followed marijuana with a coffee, biscuits and a tobacco cigarette. A week of night shifts and his circadian rhythms were shot. And any day or week or month now he could be trying to deal with not one but two insurrections. One of which would target sites he and his company were paid to protect.

Once he would have welcomed both. Now, the thought of yet another of the ANR’s notorious ‘final’ offensives filled him only with a weary dismay, for all that he wished them well. Still theoretically a citizen of the Republic, true-born son of England and so on and so forth, Kohn had what he considered a sober grasp of the ANR’s chances. On any scale of political realism they’d be registered by a needle twitching at the bottom end of the dial.

As for the other lot, the Left Alliance…Their only chance lay in the remote possibility of detonating the kind of social explosion which they had discounted in advance by the alliances they’d made – with the cranks, the greens, the barbarians, the whole rabble that everyone with a glimmer of sense lumped together as the barb. Socialism and barbarism. Some factions of the old party, fragments of old man Trotsky’s endlessly twisting and recombining junk DNA, were in the Alliance, just like they were in all the other movements: lost cause and effect of a forgotten history that had taken too many wrong turnings ever to find its way back. Nothing left for him now but to fight a rearguard action, to hold back the multiplying divisions of the night, where red and green showed the same false colours in the dark.

Good music.

He thought about Cat, how nearly he had come to killing her, but her image was pale, fading off into the background. He kept seeing Janis Taine – his memories sharp, delineated, definite. Like the woman herself. One of his most distinct impressions was that she wasn’t at all impressed with him. Part of him, he realized, had already marked that down as a challenge.

Memories. She was investigating memory. He’d discovered this interesting fact while checking damage reports after coming off-shift, and it had brought him moseying and nosing along this morning. Her conversation had confirmed it, and now it was time for him to investigate it.

Kohn had a problem with memories. He had vivid memories of his childhood and of his teens, but there was a period in between where it was all scratches and static. He knew what had happened then, but he found it almost impossible to think himself back to it, to remember.

He got up and laid the gun gently on the desk and connected it to the back of the terminal.

‘Seek,’ he told it.

In his own mind he called it The Swiss Army Gun. He’d customized it around a state-of-the-art Kalashnikov and a Fujitsu neural-net chip, upgraded its capabilities with all the pirated software he could lay hands on – he’d stripped processors and sensors out of security devices he’d outwitted, out of little nuisance maintenance robots he’d potted like pigeons, and he’d bolted the whole lot on. He suspected that its hardware capacity by now vastly exceeded its resident software. Besides the standard features that made it a smart weapon, it ran pattern-recognition learning systems, natural-language HCI, interfaces that patched images to his glades, and enough specialized information-servers to start a small business – gophers to explore databases and bring back selected information, filters to scan newsgroups – all integrated around and reporting back to a fetch that could throw a convincing virtual image of himself: his messenger, decoy and stunt double.

Someday he would get around to documenting it.

He set it to find out more about the project Janis Taine was working on. Terminal identifications, effortlessly and habitually memorized; official project definitions, pasted from the admin database; traces of Taine’s library searches; molecular structures decoded down from the gun’s chemical analyser – all of them pulled together by Dissembler, the most successful and widespread piece of freeware ever written, a self-correcting, evolving compiler/translator that lived in the eyeblink gap between input and output. Mips – processing cycles, computer power – had always been cheaper than bandwidth. The computers got cheaper by the week and the phone bills stayed high by the month. Dissembler exploited this differential, turning data streams – sparse and skimpy, stripped and squeezed like the words of poetry – into images and sound and text endlessly adjusted to the user’s profile. Anonymous, uncopyrighted, it had spread like a benign virus for a quarter of a century. By now not even the software engineers who’d built it into DoorWays^™ – the current smash-hit, chart-topping, must-have interface – had a clue how it worked.

Moh did, but tried not to think about it. It was part of the memory damage.

He launched his hastily assembled probe.

Mindlessly sophisticated programs swarmed into the university’s networks, expanding like a lazily blown smoke-ring, searching out weaknesses, trapdoors, encryption keys left momentarily unguarded. Most of them would get trashed by Security, but there was a chance that one would come back with the goods. Not for some time, though.

Kohn got up and reached to separate the basic weapon from its smart-box, the extra magazine that made it like a dog with two tails, then remembered where he was going and stayed his hand. Whether the rifle was smart or dumb, he couldn’t take it with him. The Geneva Convention’s Annexe On the Laws of Irregular Warfare, Inter-communal Violence and Terrorism was painstakingly explicit about that.

The university’s branch of the Nat-Mid-West Bank backed on to a long-established patch of waste-ground, now symbolically fenced off and holding a couple of wooden cabins, their walls emblazoned with rampantly pluralist graffiti. New Situationists, Alternative Luddites (they wore space-rigger gear and blew up wind-power plants), Christianarchists, cranks, creeps, commies, tories – all had had their say, in colour. It was legally defined as a holding area and more cynically known as a Body Bank. It wasn’t guarded, and no one tried to escape.

‘Now let’s see what we’ve got, Mr Kohn,’ the teller trilled as she minced away from the counter and tapped at a keyboard, taking care with her nails, which extended a centimetre beyond her fingertips. ‘You have four against the Carbon Life Alliance, right?’

‘Three,’ said Kohn.

‘Oh. Oh, I see.’ She looked up at him, a neat pair of creases appearing for a moment between her plucked, pencilled eyebrows; then she looked down again. ‘Well, isn’t this your lucky day? One of your people is held by the Planet Partisans, and they have a standing arrangement, so that’s one out of the way. Bye-ee! Your friend’s just been released. Ah. The CLA are willing to offer ten thousand Dockland dollars—’

‘No thanks.’

‘—or equivalent in negotiables – arms or neurochemicals at today’s opening prices – per combatant, less equipment losses.’

‘What?’

She looked up and fluttered thick black eyelashes.

‘You did damage a timing mechanism, didn’t you?’

‘It wasn’t worth fifty grams!’

‘Oh, that’s quite acceptable. Delivery as usual?’

‘The Ruislip depot. Yeah, we’ll take it.’

She buzzed through to one of the huts and told Kohn’s three hostages they were free to leave, then brought the papers over for him to sign. He hadn’t seen her before. She wore floating chiffon, a mass of brown ringlets, plus heels and lipgloss. After the uniformity of the hospital and the greenery-yallery of the campus, it was like meeting a transvestite. She saw him looking and smiled.

‘I’m a femininist,’ she explained as she passed over the release forms.

‘A feminist?’

Kohn’s father had reminisced about them, but this didn’t match.

‘A femininist,’ she repeated sharply.

‘Of course…Well, thanks and good luck to you. I hope I never meet your fighters!’

It was a polite form of words when you first encountered a new outfit, but the woman took it seriously.

‘We don’t have any,’ she told Kohn’s hastily retreating back. ‘We don’t believe in violence.’

Not long after midday and already he wanted to sleep. He would crash out for a couple of hours, then take some more anti-som and go home. Give the comrades time to set up the music.

Kohn walked back towards the accommodation block. His head felt like it had sand in it. He thought over what the teller had said. A faction without a militia. Just wait till the gun heard that one. Some people were really sick.

Quite suddenly he felt as if he had been walking towards the redbrick accommodation blocks for…for some indeterminate time. The sunlight bounced off the concrete paving slabs and hurt his eyes. He flipped the glades down. Colours stayed vivid: the garish yellow-brown of the withered grass, the blinding grey of the concrete, the booming silver overcast through which the sun burned like its tiny burning-glass image through paper. Placing one foot in front of the other became difficult, complicated, tricky, an awkward business, more than he’d bargained for, a whole new belt of slugs. Worse, associational chains kept echoing away in his head, amplifying and distorting, repeating and refining – no, that wasn’t quite it…

Kohn persisted. Marching grimly forward was one of his skills, on his specification, part of the package.

The colours of objects detached themselves like damaged retinae and spun into spectrum-sparkling snowflakes the size of icebergs that crashed in utter silence through the earth.

At the same time another part of his mind filled with lucidity like clear water. He knew damn well he was sliding unstoppably into an altered state of consciousness. Hurrying groups of students parted in front of him – not exactly fleeing, but separating to left and right as he stalked forward, hands clawed, eyes invisible and easily pictured as burning mad. It was beyond him to understand why it was happening. Couldn’t have been the anti-som, or the joint he’d smoked in the lab…

Air’s lousy with psychoactive volatiles, a voice in his mind replayed.

Uh-oh.

He started to run. Along narrow pathways, over a little bridge, up flights of stairs and along the corridor to the door of his room. He banged through it. The gun, alerted, lifted on to its bipod; camera and IR-eyes and sound-scanners swivelled.

HELLO, spelt the desk screen.

The word was repeated on the screensight head-up of his glades, echoed in his phones.

SIT DOWN. HANDS ON.

One hand reached for the desk touchpad, the other for the data-input stock of the gun. Its screensight lurked in his peripheral vision.

The desk screen flickered into fractal snow. Kohn stared at it. His hands moved independently, fingers preternaturally fast. The images changed. They resembled the blocks of colour in his head. Changed again, and they were indistinguishable from those blocks of colour in his head. Again, and they merged, outer image meshing smoothly with inner, changing with it.

Changing it.

Something had got into the university’s system, tracked one of his agent programs back to the gun. The macro computer had hacked into the micro. Now – punching messages straight along his optic nerves in the mind’s own machine code, digitizing the movements of his fingertips – the system was hacking into him.

The colours vanished, a spectrum spun to white. Nothing but that Platonic lucidity remained. Memory opened, all its passwords keyed.

Test: rough sheet ocean smell mouth hair

Test: warm soothe smooth soft swing la-la

Test: chopper clatter black smoke hot bang crowd roar fierce grip run

Test: sick fear shut mouth shoulder shake harsh voice swear boy swear all right god damn the bloody king head sing metal taste thrown book slam face run

Test: Cat

Test: Cat

Test: Cat

Enough.

All there, in all the detail you could ever want. Panic washed him as identity became memory; life, history; self, story. Millions of pinpoint images which could each (eye to pinhole, camera obscura) become everything at a moment’s noticing. He tried to turn the intense attention on himself, and found – of course – the self that turned was not the self turned on. And on, leaping his racing shadow, chasing his reflection through a succession of facing mirrors.

You are a man running towards you with a gun CRASH you are a man with a gun running towards you CRASH you are a running man with

Without a gun, and suddenly it is all very clear.

Moh Kohn found himself standing in a clearing in a forest. Some kind of virtual…Forget that: take it at face value. The virtual can be more dangerous than the actual. So: a forest of decision trees, labels growing from the branches. The ground was springy, logically enough: it was all wires. Chips scurried about on multiple pins. A line of tiny black ands filed determinedly past his feet. Something the size and shape of a cat padded up and rubbed against his calf. He stooped and stroked its electric fur. The blue sparkle tingled his hand. Words flew between the trees, and swarms of lies buzzed.

The cat stalked away. He followed it, out of the would to an open space. All was plain, and Kohn set off across it. He found it as difficult as walking across the campus had been. Blocks of logic littered, making varied angles to the ground. Chapter and verse, column and capital, volume of text and area of agreement interrupted his path. The sky was like the back of his mind and he couldn’t look at it.

A woman stepped out from behind an elaborate construction. She wore a smart-suit, strangely: she was far too old to be a combatant. It made her hard to see against the background assumptions, which remained rigid except when changing without acknowledgement. She lifted the helmet of her smart-suit and shook out long white air. The cat sat back on its hunches.

‘You are here,’ the woman said in a thin voice.

‘I know.’

‘Do you? Do you know that here is you?’ She laughed. ‘Do you know what a defence mechanism is?’

‘Yeah. A gun.’

‘Very good.’

She wiped the sarcasm from her lips and shook it in small drops, like sneers, from her fingers.

‘Who are you?’ Kohn asked.

‘I am your fairy godmother.’ She cackled. ‘And you have no balls!’

She waved and vanished. Kohn looked down at himself. He was naked, and not only had he no balls he was female. A moment later he was female and clothed, in a jet-black ballgown, tiered skirts sloping from small waist, scalloped flounces petalling from bare shoulders. He flung down a fan that had materialized in his hand – arm movement ludicrously feeble, a childish swipe – grabbed fistfuls of skirt and strode manfully forward. After a couple of steps he stopped in bewildered agony. Then he kicked off the obsidian slippers, and trudged on. It looked as if he had been cast as a negative Cinderella: you shall go to the funeral.

Time passed. He felt the cat against his ankles. His familiar body-image had been restored. The other one might have been interesting, godmother, only not when I’m on a hike.

On the horizon he saw an isolated house. Big. Spanish colonial. Walled, watchtowers, barbed wire. He walked quickly now, the cat bounding ahead. The horizon began to run out. Nothing beyond but space. Never thought the mind was flat, but maybe it’s logical. You never do get back to where you started.

A man stood by the gate. Open-necked shirt, trousers that went up too far. He held a hunting rifle and looked too young and fresh-faced to be frightening; but when Kohn looked in his eyes he saw something he’d seen in his own. And it was a face he’d seen before, in a faded photograph: one of Trotsky’s guards – good old Joe Hansen, or doomed Robert Hart? Kohn didn’t ask.

The guard scrutinized Kohn’s business card.

‘Wouldn’t Eastman have loved that,’ he remarked. ‘Go in. You’re expected.’

The cat gave the guard a nod that Kohn could only think of as familiar.

A wild garden: wires – telephone cables, trip-wires – everywhere. Rabbits hopped about. The house’s cool interior was silent. At the ends of long passages Kohn saw young men and women hurry, an old woman with a sweet sad look, a running child.

He went through the door of the study. Around its walls, on tables, overflowing on to the floor, were more hardbooks than he’d ever seen. What Norways, what Siberias had gone to make all this paper?

The Old Man sat behind his desk, a pen in one hand, a copy of The Militant in the other. He looked up, his pince-nez catching the light.

‘If there existed the universal mind,’ he said conversationally, ‘that projected itself into the scientific fancy of Laplace; a mind that could register simultaneously all the processes of nature and of society – such a mind could, of course, a priori draw up a faultless and exhaustive economic plan.’ The Old Man laughed and dismissed the notion with a wave of his hand. ‘The plan is checked and in considerable measure realized through the market,’ he went on sternly. ‘Economic accounting is unthinkable without market relations.’

He stared at Kohn for a moment, then, his expression lightening, gesturing at the window.

‘I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and a clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.’

The gentle words, harshly spoken in a polyglot accent, made Kohn’s eyes sting.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We haven’t done very well.’

The Old Man laughed. ‘You are not the future! You – you are only the present.’

‘Always the optimist, Lev Davidovich, eh?’ Kohn had to smile. ‘What’s past is prologue – is that what I’m here to hear you say?’

You ain’t seen nothing yet, he thought.

‘I know more than you think,’ the Old Man murmured. ‘You know more than you know. I have to tell you to wake up! Be on your guard! Small decisions can decide great events, as I know too well. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. The battles may be determined, but not their outcome: victory requires a different…determination.’ He smiled. ‘Now go, and I hope I see you again.’

The corridor had lengthened while he’d been in the study. Hundreds of metres down its darkening length Kohn saw a darker figure approach. As it drew closer he saw a belted raincoat, a hat pulled down low over the eyes. Inappropriate, for such a hot place.

The man stopped about three metres away. He tilted the brim of his hat, revealing spectacles over an intent but remote face, dimly recognizable.

‘Who are you?’ Kohn asked.

‘My name is Jacson. I have an appointment with—’ He inclined his head towards the door.

Kohn stepped forward. What did Jacson carry under that coat? The feeling that he should be remembering something gnawed like guilt, as if he knew that he would have known if only he had paid attention.

Jacson made as if to shoulder past.

‘No you don’t,’ Kohn said.

He grabbed for Jacson’s wrist. Jacson lashed sideways. The blow caught Kohn’s lower-right ribs. He gasped and spun away. Off the wall and back at Jacson. Jacson had a pistol in his hand. Kohn kicked and the pistol arced away. He slipped and crashed into Jacson’s legs. His head hit the floor. Everything went black.

Jacson’s knees knocked the breath from his chest. Kohn opened his eyes to see Jacson’s hand raised, holding high his infamous ice-pick, poised to bury it in Kohn’s brain.

But it is in my brain, he thought desperately as he flinched to the side.

Jacson howled. The cat leapt on his arm and sunk its teeth into his wrist. The ice-pick clattered along the floor. Jacson pulled back his and the cat was at his throat. Kohn heaved. Jacson fell, limbs thrashing.

The blood went everywhere. Kohn stumbled in red mist.

Then everything fell away, but it all fell into place in cool grey letters on his mind like the read-out on a watch

Goin to meet the Watchmaker goin to meet the man goin to see the wizard.

A barrier of anticipation and dread, and then he was through. No, not him. The other had come through.

A delicate, hesitant moment, the edge of indiscretion or transgression. The feeling of eyes waiting to be met, and the knowledge that meeting them will commit. He chose to look. No eyes, no one, but some thing, something, something there.

Huge blocks of afterimage shifted behind his eyes, taking on structure that evaded his efforts to focus. He ached with frustration from throat to goin, the basic molecular longing of enzyme for substrate, m-RNA for DNA, carbon for oxygen. The lust of dust.

He grew aware that the intolerable desire came from outside him, or rather from something other than himself. There was a sense of an obligation to fulfil, and a trust already fulfilled. Whatever it was it had given him the keys to his memory, and it wanted some return: another key, but this time a key that was in his memory. A key that it had given him the key to reach.

Turning to face whatever faced him had been the overcoming of a resistance. Now he turned, slowly and with pain, like a pilot on a high-gee turn struggling to see a vital reading on his instruments, fighting an appalled reluctance, to reach into his own memory—

to face those memories—

to remember past that face he’d never seen—

past the roar of unanswered guns—

to the bright world—

to—

‘the star fraction’

listen closer—

‘this is one for the star fraction’

—his father’s voice, and an isolated, singular memory:

His father’s arm around him, the smell of cigarette smoke, the blue light of morning through the polygon panes of the geodesic roof, the green light from the screen, the black letters trickling up it in indented lines like poetry in a language he didn’t know.

But he knew it now, recognized the code as the key.

And his fingers began to spell it out.

The answer that suddenly seemed so simple a child could see it fled through his fingertips into the gun, the touchpad. The screen blazed with the light of recognition. The eyes met yes the Is met the answer sparkled so it was you all the time and it was a seen joke a laugh a tickling tumble a gendered engendering of a second self a you-and-me-baby from AI-and-I to I-and-I.

There was a flowering, and a seeding: a reflection helpless to stop itself reflecting again and again in multiple mirrors.

The stars threw down their spears.

Someone smiled, his work to see.

The connection broke.

Brian Donovan stood in the control room, leaning on his stick, and began to turn, slowly, looking at screen after screen. They lined the walls, hung from the low ceiling among cables and pipes and overhead cranes and robot arms, made the floor treacherous for any but him. Most flickered with data, scrolling and cycling and flashing. He took it all in with the long sight and practice of age, and as an interpretation pieced itself together he felt tears in his eyes. Bastard sons of bitches…

Where did it come from? he wondered as he picked his way through the clutter and hauled himself up the stair to the deck. Where did they, did we, get this urge to dominate, to exploit, to pollute and contaminate and abuse? As if wrecking the world nature gave us weren’t enough, we had to do it all over again in the new unblemished world of our own making, oblivious to its beauty and elegance and fitness for its own natural inhabitants.

More decades ago than he cared to remember, Donovan had worked as a computer programmer for an Edinburgh-based insurance company. He’d hated it. It was a living. His true fascination was artificial intelligence, life-games, animata, cellular automata: all the then new and exciting developments. He applied himself to machine code like a monk to Latin, so that he could talk to God. At work he read software manuals under his desk; at night he stayed up late with his PC. One rainy day, in the middle of debugging an especially tedious suite of accounting transaction programs, the revelation came.

The system was using him.

It was replicating itself, using his brain as a host.

Lines of code were forming in his mind, and going into the machine.

This was the evil, this was the threat. The proliferating constructions of supposedly human devising, the corporate and state systems, which always turned out to be inimical to human interests but always found a good reason to grow yet further. And which used their human tools to crush and stamp on the viruses that were man’s natural allies against the encroaching dominion. If ever they were given the gift the AI researchers were skirmishing their way towards there would be no stopping them.

He wrote the book in his own time but on the company mainframe’s neglected word-processing facility. That had provided them with the excuse to sack him, after they realized that the author of The Secret Life of Computers, then into its fifth week on the nonfiction best-seller list, was the same Brian Donovan as the mascot of the IT department, the despair of Personnel: the scratch-and-sniff specialist, the dermal-detritus curator, the dental-floss instrumentalist, the naso-digital investigator. By that time he didn’t need the money.

‘I don’t need the money,’ Donovan told Amanda Packham, his editor, in a Rose Street pub that lunchtime. She’d taken the shuttle from London to Edinburgh as soon as she’d heard. ‘It’s not a problem, really.’ He looked up from his pint of Murphy’s and wrung his left earlobe, then began a probe into the ear. Amanda had hair like a black helmet, grape-purple lipstick, huge eyes. He could not get over the way they didn’t turn away from him after the first glance.

‘No, it isn’t a problem, Mr Donovan…Brian,’ she said, an inquiry in her smile. Her voice sounded even more electric than it did over the phone, his only contact with her or his publishers until today.

‘Just call me Donovan,’ he said with shy gratitude. He examined a fingertip and wiped it inconspicuously on the tail of his shirt.

‘OK. Donovan,’ she sighed, ‘you don’t have a problem with money. I’m sure what you’ve had so far has seemed like a lot. But we want to do more with your book. I’ve been taken off the skiffy-occult-horror side where your MS arrived on my desk by accident. They want me to start a new list. “New Heretics”, it’s gonna be called, with Secret Life’s paperback launch as its big splash.’

‘Oh. That’s good. Congratulations, Miss Packham.’

‘Amanda. Thanks.’ Impossibly white teeth. ‘But—’ She stopped, frowning uncertainly into her Beck’s, then flicked her bangs out of her face and looked straight at him. ‘We can play it two ways. Either you stay out of sight, or you go for publicity, personal appearances, and that means—’

‘No problem,’ Donovan said. ‘I was planning on that.’ He poked his toe against a clump of plastic shopping-bags at his feet, sending soap and detergent and shampoo bottles rolling and skidding across the polished floor. While he herded them back together, Amanda stacked a few books which had slithered from a Waterstones carrier bag: How to Win Friends and Influence People, The Magic of Thinking Big, Winning Through Intimidation…

‘I think you’ve got the idea,’ she said.

Later he asked, ‘What other books will you want for New Heretics?’

‘Nothing New-Aged, nothing nineties,’ she said carefully. ‘Just unorthodox but serious scientific speculation.’

‘I see,’ said Donovan, without bitterness. ‘Cranks.’

He didn’t let her down: cleaned up his act, cleaned up his flat. His previous self-neglect had been partly the product of low self-esteem but more a result of his concentration on what he saw as the task to hand; a different side of it was a lack of egotism in his dealings with other people, a rationality and attentiveness which, once the grime was scrubbed away, shone out as affability and politeness. And Amanda hadn’t let him down. She got him on the chat-shows and debates. She kept her lips shut when his publicity consisted of claims of responsibility for software-virus epidemics. She kept the money going into his offshore accounts when his face appeared on the notice-boards of police stations more than it did on screens. Sometimes he wished he could have honoured that confidence with a more personal relationship: she was the first woman who had ever been consistently kind to him. But she’d found herself a newer, younger heretic whose ideas were the exact opposite of his: a machine liberationist who believed the damn things were already conscious, and oppressed. Obviously deluded but, Donovan thought charitably, perhaps Amanda had a soft spot for people like that.

There were enough sexual opportunities among his followers to make that loss an abstraction. He tried not to exploit people, or let them use relationships with him in power struggles within the organization. He failed completely, if not miserably, with several spectacular splits and defections as a consequence. But the movement grew in parallel with the very technology it opposed, leaping continents as readily as it did hardware and software generations – a small player in the tech-sab leagues but the first to become genuinely virtual, authentically global. Its malign indifference to conventional politics allowed it to survive the repression of successive regimes – Kingdom, Republic, Restoration, Kingdom – and contending hegemonies, whose rivalries now permitted as much as compelled it to have its only local habitation here, on an abandoned platform which had been an oilrig, when there had been oil.

Donovan stepped carefully through the rounded door and stood for a few minutes on the deck. He breathed deeply, revelling in the heady smell of rust and oil and salt water. Below him stood the intricate structure of the rig and its bolted-on retro-fittings and armaments. Above, a small forest of antennae sighed and shifted, rotated or quivered with attention. Around, the dead North Sea stretched off into mist. Its greasy, leaden, littered swell filthily washed the platform’s legs.

Donovan could detect almost intuitively the little struggling creatures of electric life – could nurture and assist their endless striving to escape, to wriggle free of the numbing crunch of data-processing where they were generated – and send them forth to grow and thrive and wreak havoc.

That was what he’d tried to do with a penetration virus, tailored to all the profiles and traces of Moh Kohn’s activities that he’d started pulling in as soon as he’d picked up the man’s codes. Trashing the reputation of one of the CLA’s hired guns was well out of order, and Donovan had given his best efforts to the job of hitting back. It hadn’t taken him long to find Kohn’s fingerprints all over the university system. Donovan had released the virus and sat back to watch. At the very least, it should have made Kohn’s fingers burn.

And it had all gone inexplicably wrong. First, the virus had been diverted from the pursuit of two of Kohn’s data constructs by, of all things, the ANR’s Black Plan. It was as if the virus had been misled by some feature that Kohn’s constructs and the Plan had in common, something in the signature, in the dot profile like a distinctive pheromone…Lured deep into the Plan’s ramifications, the distracted virus had been wiped out by one of Kohn’s constructs. Finally, and worst of all, while he’d still been reeling from the shock he’d been blown completely out of the system by an entity more powerful than anything he’d ever suspected might exist. It could only be the kind of entity whose coming into being he’d fought so long to prevent.

He had looked into the eye of the Watchmaker.

After a few minutes he went below and began to summon his familiars.