Something Coming Through

13. Devil Squid

London | 8 July

The select committee reconvened in the same room, 10:00 a.m. Thursday. It was closed to journalists and members of the public because security was jittery after the assassination of the Jackaroo avatar, but Chloe and the rest of the Disruption Theory crew had to push through a gauntlet of reporters and cameras at the entrance of Freedom Tower. Chloe put her head down and stayed close to Daniel Rosenblaum’s broad back.

The committee chair, Robin Mountjoy, began by reading out a short formal statement thanking Chloe for her intervention two days ago. After that everything went quickly downhill.

Daniel was called to give evidence. Mountjoy peppered his interrogation with secondary questions and snappish asides, asking him to clarify what he meant by algorithms, eidolons, breakouts. When Daniel started to explain about memes, how ideas became infectious and spread from person to person like a catchy tune, Mountjoy looked at him over the top of his gold-rimmed bifocals and said, ‘And these so-called memes originate with the Jackaroo.’

‘Actually, we don’t have any evidence that they do. We know that some of the cults are inspired or driven by algorithms or fragments of intelligences, eidolons, embedded in certain Elder Culture artefacts. That’s a major facet of our work. But we are also interested in the ways in which the presence of the Jackaroo has affected every aspect of our society and culture. Thirteen years after first contact, we still know very little about them. In the absence of hard facts, all kinds of speculations flourish. Theories, rumours, ideas. And some ideas are more attractive than others. They spread quickly and they spread widely. That is what we are trying to map. Ideas which have cultural significance, cultural currency. If they don’t tell us anything about the Jackaroo, they certainly tell us something about ourselves.’

‘So if it wasn’t for the Jackaroo,’ Mountjoy said, ‘these memes wouldn’t exist.’

‘They are our ideas about the Jackaroo,’ Daniel said, with visible impatience. ‘Not their ideas implanted in us. It’s an important distinction. And not exactly hard to grasp, I think.’

‘By withholding information about themselves, the Jackaroo are manipulating us. So in a sense they are generating those ideas, are they not?’

Robin Mountjoy was making a point, trying to show that Daniel and the Disruption Theory crew were wilfully or carelessly ignoring the danger posed by the Jackaroo. Chloe was reminded of the way certain girls at school enjoyed maliciously twisting your words, tried to redefine their meaning, tried to use them against you. One of the other MPs, a slender white-haired woman in a navy-blue trouser suit, took up the theme. Daniel answered with a freezing politeness, insisting that there was no evidence that the Jackaroo were directly intervening in any way. Another MP asked about the value of tracking the popularity of different ideas.

‘Our work is far from theoretical,’ Daniel said. ‘If you care to examine the appendices of our formal report, there are detailed statistical analyses of the spread of selected memes. We have evidence—’

‘I’m sure it’s of interest to a few specialists,’ Mountjoy said. ‘But does it have any actual value in the real world?’

He was speaking for the cameras that were broadcasting the session on one of the parliamentary channels, turning the inquiry into an arena in which he, the plucky English terrier, was nipping at the ankles of the scientific status quo. Standing up for common sense and ordinary hard-working people, accusing Disruption Theory and Ada Morange of meddling in dangerous matters, things mankind was not meant to know kind of thing, of encouraging the delusion that the alien invaders had nothing but good intentions, of colluding with the UN and the EC and other bodies which imposed their laws and regulations on Parliament and the English people. Asking Daniel if he had ever carried out illegal experiments with alien artefacts, reading extracts from interviews that Daniel had given immediately after the appearance of the Jackaroo, questioning him about them, asking him if he still believed that they came in peace, and so on and so forth.

Daniel replied with pained dignity, keeping his answers short, trying his best to counter Mountjoy’s insinuations. But Mountjoy kept at him and at last wore down his patience.

‘Only a fool would try to ignore the Jackaroo,’ he said. ‘They aren’t going away, and people on the fifteen worlds aren’t going to stop discovering Elder Culture technology.’

‘But we can and will protect the British way of life,’ Mountjoy said. ‘Instead of trying to undermine it with airy-fairy nonsense.’

‘The world has changed, is changing, will continue to change. You can’t stop it.’

‘Is that a scientific assessment, Dr Rosenblaum? Or simply your opinion?’

‘It is a plain fact.’

‘It sounds to me like a council of despair,’ Mountjoy said, with a jovial smile, and cut off Daniel’s reply, thanking him for his time, saying they had to move on.

The clerk called out Chloe’s name. As she took her place behind the table, next to Daniel and Helena, she saw that there was a rectangle of slightly brighter blue in the carpet nearby, about the shape and size of a grave. She supposed that the portion where the avatar had fallen and disintegrated had been taken away for trace analysis.

She was sworn in, and the woman MP prompted her to give a brief description of her work. She told the committee that she had been working for Disruption Theory for three years, gave anodyne examples of her work, answered several harmless-seeming questions.

Then Robin Mountjoy said, ‘Perhaps you could tell us about the New Galactic Navy.’

She met his watery blue gaze. ‘It was an unusual case. Quite outside the ordinary work we do.’

Mountjoy led her through it. How the cult had contacted Disruption Theory and Chloe had been sent to give a preliminary interview with its leader, a former accountant and self-styled Grand Admiral who shared a shabby terraced house in Tooting with fifteen followers. The longer interview that Chloe and Frances Colley had conducted, unpicking the cult’s belief that its members had been selected to join a space navy opposed to the Jackaroo, who were suppressing the true ascension of humankind to its rightful place amongst the stars: a blend of sci-fi and occult beliefs involving cosmic minds and a revolutionary leap upwards in the evolution of human consciousness. Their costumes of robes and sashes laden with 3D-printed medals. Their psychic maps of the universe. The rooms painted black, with constellations of glow-in-the-dark stars glued to the ceilings. Glossy printouts from astronomy sites. The bunk beds crowding the bedrooms of the little house, where six weeks later the members of the New Galactic Navy had been found dead, all of them having ingested fatal doses of cyanide-laced orange juice. The message that they had left behind their flesh envelopes to go voyaging as spirits amongst the stars.

Robin Mountjoy said, ‘Is it not true that you were the trigger for these unfortunate deaths?’

Helena objected, pointing out that the cult’s leader had also contacted national newspapers, the BBC, Sky News, and other prominent news outlets, and the police investigation had concluded that Chloe, Frances Colley and Disruption Theory hadn’t had anything to do with the mass suicide, which had been planned long before their interviews. Robin Mountjoy politely accepted that fact. He had made his point, associating the work of Disruption Theory with the deaths of a dozen disturbed and deluded individuals. One of the other MPs, a balding pink-faced man, delivered the coup de grâce. He asked Chloe several questions about her sources of information. She mentioned freelance scouts. She mentioned people who trawled the internet and sent in tips. She mentioned visiting schools to check out the artwork of school children.

He said, ‘I believe you also visit mental institutions.’

Chloe felt a freezing caution. Beside her, Helena wrote two words on her yellow legal pad. Be polite.

‘Very rarely,’ Chloe said.

‘Five times since you began employment with Disruption Theory. Several times before that, when you were working as a freelance scout.’

‘I followed leads to wherever they led. That’s my job.’

The pink-faced MP tilted his head, as if accepting that. Chloe wanted to say more, wanted to qualify her answers, but Robin Mountjoy banged his gavel and called for a two-hour recess, said that he would complete questioning of the rest of Disruption Theory’s staff after lunch.

Outside, in the corridor, the others congratulated Chloe on her performance. Daniel said, ‘That wasn’t so bad.’

‘I’m trying to think how it could have been worse,’ Chloe said. She had sweated through the silk blouse Helena had lent her, was shaking slightly from adrenalin.

‘You did good. And there’ll be a chance for rebuttal later. I’m on the BBC evening news. We’ll line up some longer pieces too. We’ll get through this, Chloe. Mountjoy is a gadfly. Tomorrow he’ll be attacking someone else, and we’ll be forgotten…’

He was still talking, but Chloe wasn’t listening. Chief Inspector Adam Nevers was coming towards them, patting his hands together in mock applause, saying, ‘I’m impressed. Coolness under fire and all that.’

‘I didn’t see you in the committee room,’ Chloe said.

‘I watched it on the CCTV feed.’ Nevers was wearing a shark-grey suit today, a blue tie. He was a head taller than Daniel. He said, ‘We need to talk.’

Daniel said, ‘If you want to interview my employee, Chief Inspector, you should talk to our lawyer first.’

‘Interview her? No, it isn’t anything like that. More in the nature of a friendly chat. Let me show you something,’ Nevers said, and took Chloe’s arm and guided her to the bank of lifts at the end of the corridor.

As they rode down, Chloe said, ‘Are you trying to intimidate me, Chief Inspector?’

Because she definitely felt intimidated, wondering where he was taking her, wondering if he knew about her plans.

‘I really liked how you handled the questions about the New Galactic Navy,’ Nevers said. ‘You stood up for yourself, but you didn’t blame them. Even though they had obviously been driven crazy by alien ghosts.’

‘It was the ordinary kind of crazy, nothing to do with algorithms or eidolons. There were plenty of cults like theirs before the Jackaroo came.’

‘But there are a lot more now, aren’t there? And many new kinds of craziness. Some of it harmless, some of it dangerous. People meddle with alien technology, and it fucks them up. It’s like giving plutonium to a bunch of savages. Shiny stuff that’s warm to the touch, glows in the dark. Magic. But then your hair and teeth start falling out, your women give birth to monsters, and if you put too much of it together…This way.’

Chloe followed him out of the lift, along service corridors painted institutional green, through a fire door. Warm air, the slap of waves beneath a mesh platform elevated over a cluster of fat pipes, a workman in a high-vis jacket at the far end lowering something, a square mesh cage, over the rail.

Nevers introduced Chloe and said that she wanted to look at the day’s catch, and the workman lifted the lid off an ordinary black plastic dustbin. There were monsters inside. Fist-sized knots of pale threads, dozens of them, writhing around each other in a caul of slimy foam. A strong odour like stagnant water in a vase of long-dead flowers, with overtones of burnt plastic. Chloe felt an instant, atavistic revulsion. It was like some parasite found in the bowels of an animal. A nest of corpse worms. A horror-movie special effect.

The workman explained that they were devil squid. Native to Hydrot, brought here as sporelings in bubbleweed, now securely established in the ecosystem of the Thames. The building used river water to cool the heat exchangers of its air-conditioning system, and the devil squid crawled into the pipes, causing blockages and fouling the pumps.

‘We put up mesh, but they can squeeze through it,’ the man said. ‘So now we use traps baited with a pheromone.’

‘And you have to clean the traps every day,’ Nevers said.

‘They keep coming,’ the man said. ‘Reckon they like it here.’

‘If that’s some sort of lesson,’ Chloe said as she followed Nevers to the other end of the platform, ‘I don’t quite get the point.’

Nevers leaned against the rail, presenting her with his keen profile as he gazed out across the river. ‘People like your boss think they can quantify the influence of the Jackaroo and all the rest, but they really don’t have clue one about it. None of us do. That old line about not meddling in things we don’t understand — a funny old cliché, right? An awful warning about mad scientists and such. But some of us have realised that it has an urgent truth. We brought back bubbleweed from Hydrot, fast-growing stuff that was supposed to help with the carbon-sequestration effort. And devil squids hitched a ride in it, and they grew and multiplied, and now we can’t get rid of them. Just one example of many problems large and small, caused by misplaced arrogance. By people thinking that they can use alien stuff without any blowback. Can I give you a little advice, Chloe?’

‘Why not?’ Because like she had a choice.

‘When Disruption Theory stuck to documenting cults and crazies, all well and good. We didn’t have a problem with that. But now it’s started to deal in actual alien artefacts, and that’s another game entirely. That’s our game. Do you follow me?’

‘This sounds more like a threat than advice.’

‘The advice part’s coming up. Don’t put your trust in Dr Morange or any of her people. She’s brilliant, true. But she’s also ruthless. If she thinks you’re causing her a problem, she will drop you like this.’

Chloe managed not to flinch when Nevers snapped his fingers in her face.

He said, ‘Fahad Chauhan’s pictures have been thoroughly examined by our techs. Who have high-powered pattern-recognition systems, AI risk-assessment programmes…They say the pictures are topologically consistent, and contain signatures that suggest they could be the product of a powerful and single-minded eidolon. A type that hasn’t been encountered before. But you already knew that, didn’t you? I mean, that’s your thing. It’s what you do.’

‘I can tell real artefacts from fakes. Most of the time.’

‘And those pictures looked real to you.’

Chloe shrugged. She didn’t want to give anything away.

‘And you’ve had plenty of experience with Elder Culture shit,’ Adam Nevers said. ‘Algorithms and eidolons and all the rest. You know what they can do to people. How they can get inside their heads and mess up their minds. Our chief tech says that the maths packed into some of the algorithms can be very elegant. Simple and profound; beautiful, even. He’s used that very word more than once: beautiful. Is that how you see it?’

‘I’m not a mathematician.’

‘I like motorbikes. My idea of beauty is a Harley-Davidson Duo-Glide. That big, air-cooled V-twin engine, the curve of the fairings and the teardrop tank…Or if you’re into classics, the Vincent Black Shadow. But jet fighter planes are beautiful too. So are Great White sharks.’

‘Aren’t they extinct? Great Whites.’

But Nevers refused to be derailed. ‘The techs reckon your friend Fahad has been exposed to a seriously dangerous alien mind virus, and I have it on good authority that the kid’s father was into some seriously dangerous stuff too, working for some seriously dangerous people. I suggest you look back at the path you’ve taken so far, Chloe. Think very carefully about which direction you should go next. And any time you want to get in touch, here’s my card,’ he said, holding it out between two fingers. ‘Don’t take too long to think about it. Don’t leave it until you and your friends are deep in the shit before you call for help.’

Upstairs, outside the committee room, Chloe told Daniel it was nothing. ‘I’m not sure if it was a threat or a job offer,’ she said. ‘But screw it, I’m going to do this thing anyway. And then, maybe, we’ll know what happened to Fahad.’

Daniel moved forward unexpectedly and folded her into a bear hug. ‘Do good work,’ he said. It felt like a farewell.

She redeemed her message bag from the cloakroom. Jen had driven her to her flat early that morning so that she could pick up fresh clothes, a change of underwear, her washbag. It was a postage stamp of a studio flat and she was paying a stupid amount of rent for it, but it was the first time she’d had her own space, her own front door, her own mail box. Before that, she’d sofa-surfed, shared rooms with friends, even squatted one summer in a big decrepit house in Hackney. But as she’d packed, with Jen perched on the corner of her swing-down bed, Chloe had realised that after two years she was still living as if she expected to have to move out at a moment’s notice. The furniture was the landlord’s; she’d bought the cookware, crockery and bed linen in a mad dash through Ikea; her books, music and movies were in her tablet or the Cloud.

There had been no reporters waiting in ambush outside the block of flats: the news had rolled on past her. And although the little huddle outside the entrance to Kingdom Tower stirred when she appeared, calling to her as she climbed into the taxi that Jen had ordered, aiming phones and cameras at her through the windows as it moved off, none of them bothered to follow.

She asked the taxi to drop her off near Shepherd Market and threaded the back streets to Green Park Tube station, resisting the impulse to look over her shoulder, to look at CCTV cameras on high posts, the corners of buildings. She descended to the Piccadilly line and rode a westbound train one stop to Hyde Park Corner, crossed to the eastbound line and rode back through Green Park. Feeling less like a spy and more like a kid playing hide-and-seek. Because how would she know if anyone was following her, or watching her on security cameras? But it made her feel a little better, made her feel like she was doing something about Nevers’s scare tactics.

She stayed on the train to the end of the line. Cockfosters. A low brick-built station, an old-fashioned parade of dilapidated shops on the other side of the road, a battered black Range Rover parked outside a betting shop. The driver, Ada Morange’s man, started the motor when she climbed in.