The Star Fraction

4

Not Unacquainted with the More Obvious Laws of Electricity

The representatives of Janis’s sponsors seemed shy of meeting any of the other academic staff, so she treated them to lunch in the Student’s Union cafeteria: the Heroes of Freedom and/or Democracy Memorial Bar. There, she hoped, they might be mistaken for musicians. None of the students paid her guests much attention, except when they ignored the wide range of English ales and insisted on German lager.

After the sponsors had gone she sat drinking black coffee to clear her head. The lunchtime crowd was so noisy she no longer noticed it, nor the wall-covering black-and-white portraits of Lech Walesa and Nelson Mandela and Winston Churchill and Bobby Sands and Wei Jingshen and others to whose memory various factions had successively dedicated the place.

Psylocibins and cannabinoids…the combination’s potency seemed likely enough; a newly discovered effect less so. Most of the useful research had been done decades ago, in a flurry of interest after the end of prohibition, and of course most of the trial-and-error empirical investigation had been done during prohibition. It seemed implausible that an actual enhancement of cognitive processing could have been missed, with so many experimenters so keen to come up with justifications for their professional or recreational activities; with all those interested parties. But the molecules she was using were new combinations, in an area where the realignment of a few atomic bonds could be significant.

Finding a drug that could reliably enhance memory retrieval…

She wanted to shout about it. No, she wanted to get back to work. Get it nailed down, then shout about it.

Hemp cigarettes, that was what she had to get, made with Russian cannabis. Now where—? Laughing at herself, she got up and bought a pack from the vending machine that she’d been gazing at for five minutes.

Back at the lab, she set the rack of test-tubes on a bench and began systematically checking them against her notes of the dosages she’d given the mice. She called up images of the molecules, of a THC molecule, of probably receptor sites on the neuron surface, and turned them this way and that. She didn’t consciously hear the footsteps coming along the corridor until they stopped, just outside the doorway.

She took off her VR glasses and looked up as two men stepped into the lab. For a moment, a moment in which her mouth began to open, her lips to smile, she thought her sponsors’ agents had come back. In another moment she recognized these were strangers, and everything – the breath in her throat, the heart in her breast – stopped. And then began again, in a gasp and a racing pace, running away from her.

There was the stupid reassurance that the bench was between her and them.

The two men who stood looking impassively at her were dressed identically in black suits, white shirts, dark ties. The clothes didn’t hang right, as if badly cut (but they were not badly cut); the material was frayed in unexpected places (but the material looked new, expensive). One of the men had black skin, the other white: it was as if a child had taken the imprecise terms for skin-colour and rendered them almost literally.

They walked – and even their walk looked awkward, stilted – right up to the far edge of the bench and looked down at her. She looked up at them. She knew who they were.

The room began to spin, and centrifugal force pulled at her. Her forearms pressed against the benchtop; she dug her nails into the impervious white surface to stop herself from falling away.

‘We are here in a purely advisory capacity,’ the white man said.

‘You would not wish us to be here in an executive capacity,’ said the other.

Janis shook her head in emphatic agreement. No, she would not wish that. She would not wish that at all.

‘We advise you to abort your current line of investigation,’ the white man continued. ‘There are other promising and productive and valid approaches which will give your sponsors satisfaction. They need not know about’ – he paused, frowning, head cocked slightly as if listening to something inaudible – ‘what you have come close to. You are approaching a proscribed area. If you enter it, neither your sponsors nor yourself will be happy with the consequences.’

‘We assure you of that,’ said the black man.

‘Consider our advice,’ said the white man.

Janis responded with a frantic nod. Yes, she would consider their advice. She would definitely consider it.

They both smiled, setting a prickle of hairs down her back, and turned and went out. She heard them walking in perfect step along the corridor, then a rapid clatter from the stairwell. She rose, with difficulty, still hanging on to the bench, then straightened up and went over to the window. The two men emerged from the exit below and stroke briskly to a bright yellow Miata parked in the centre of the nearest plaza. Their gait was now quite different: entirely normal, perfectly natural; they seemed to be in animated conversation, their hand gestures just what you’d expect from a couple of students strolling out from an interesting seminar and arguing about its implications.

The car nosed through a gap between buildings and tailed out of sight.

Janis levered her weight on to the stool and felt herself sag to the bench as if it were a bar she’d been drinking at far too long. She’d never been so frightened since…

She pushed away the thought of the last time she’d been so frightened, so frightened like that. She listened to her harsh dry whispering, taking a sample of it; oh jesus of god oh gaia no this is shit oh. On and on like that. Not getting anywhere. She shut her mouth and breathed deeply, calming herself down. She shook to a sudden fit of the giggles. It was all so crude, so brazen, so heavy-handed. What did they take her for? Men In Black, indeed. Fucking Men In Black.

She’d heard the second-hand stories, the recycled theories, seen the funny looks in the staffroom when she’d wondered what had happened to so-and-so, promising paper last year, no follow-up. She knew there were areas of research and lines of inquiry that were simply forbidden under the US/UN’s deep-technology guidelines, one of which prohibited trying to find out what those areas were. Paradoxical, like repression. You don’t know what it is you’re not supposed to know. It still was hard to believe it really happened like that.

Perhaps in most cases it didn’t – a subtler manipulation of research committees and pressure on commercial backers was all it took. But sometimes (say) the research was backed by an organization that was hard to trace, impossible to get a handle on – then the handlers would go out, the heavies, the dark-suited enforcers of the officially non-existent guidelines. The US/UN technology police. Stasis. The mythical, the uneasily-laughed-about Men In Black.

It all went back to the war, like everything else.

The thought that really terrified her was that they didn’t know. They didn’t know that she’d actually got results. Her sponsors did, and she had no way of knowing if they could keep that a secret from the secret police.

So they might be back. In an executive capacity.

Janis knew there was only one place to run to, and that, to get there safely, what she needed on her case was a committed defender, not the state cops or the Campus Security or Office Security Systems…Kelly girls, all of them.

She found the card Kohn had left. She looked at it and smiled to herself. When the card was held at certain angles to the light, centimetre-high figures sprang into view around its edges: little toy combatants, in watchful pose. She tried the first number on Kohn’s card. Was that a holo of Kohn himself, at the lower-left corner? ‘Pose’ was the word.

‘—insky Workers’ Defence Collective, how can I help you?’ a man’s voice sing-songed.

‘Oh. Thank you. Uh, is this a secure line?’

‘Sure is. It’s illegal. Would you like to switch to an open one?’

‘No! Uh, look. My name’s Janis Taine, I’m a researcher at Brunel University’ – at the other end somebody began tapping a keyboard with painful lack of skill – ‘and I’ve just been leaned on by a couple of guys who are probably, that is I think they were from…’

‘Stasis?’

‘Yes. Can you help?’

‘Hmm…We can get you to Norlonto. That’s out of their jurisdiction. Can’t say beyond that.’

‘That’s just what I want. So what do I do?’

‘We got a guy on site right now, Moh Kohn…’

‘I’ve got his card.’

‘Good, OK, call him up. If you can’t raise him, he’s probably crashed out, but you can go and bang on his door. Accommodation Block, one-one-five cee. You got that?’

‘One-one-five cee.’

‘Right. Any problem, call us back.’

‘OK. Thanks.’

She tried Kohn’s personal number. A holo of Kohn appeared, squatting on her phone like a heavily armed sprite.

‘I’m busy at the moment,’ it said. ‘If you would like to leave a message, please speak clearly after the tone.’

After a second there was a sound like a very small incoming shell, followed by a faint pop and an expectant silence.

‘Damn,’ Janis said, and cut the call.

She marched out of the lab and hurried down the stairs and stalked out across the campus, glancing sidelong at the far corners of buildings, half-expecting to see an infiltrator coming for her: crank or creep or…no, don’t think about that.

She thought about it. It was possible. They could be coming for her right now. She didn’t want to think about it – if you thought about it you’d just stop: the fear would fell you where you stood. She stopped thinking about what she might be getting away from and concentrated on where she had to go, the one place that might be safe from them, and within reach. She began to walk faster, then broke into a run.

She sprinted across grass and paving, splashed through a little stream and glanced into five identical stairwells with different numbers at their foot before she reached 110–115. At the top of the stairs she forced herself to slow down, back off from the adrenaline high. Picking out Kohn’s door was easy: it faced her at the end of the corridor, with that annoyingly congregational variant of the commie symbol scrawled on it in what looked like dripping fresh blood.

After a moment’s hesitation she pushed the door open. Kohn sat with his back to her, one hand resting on the desk, the other on the gun. The screen was blank. Kohn turned and looked at her. His glades were on, and behind them she saw bony orbits, empty sockets. She stood frozen. Kohn rose and reached towards her.

She tried to back through the closed door. His hands grasped her upper arms. The skull half-face loomed down at her.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

She just stared, her mouth working.

‘Damn,’ Kohn said.

She saw his cheek muscles twitch, first the right, then the left. He had flesh and eyes again. He pulled the glades forward, lifted them up on to the front of his helmet, and then slumped back into the chair.

‘Sorry about that, Janis.’

‘Wuhuhu…’ She let out a shuddering breath and shook her head. ‘Is that a bug or a feature?’

‘You want bug features?’ Kohn made as if to pull the glades down again. Janis caught his wrist.

‘No, thanks.’

She was looking at his eyes, and what she saw shocked her almost as much as the holograms had. But this time it wasn’t incomprehensible. The shock came from comprehending. Still holding his wrist, she leaned over and grasped his forehead gently in her fingertips and turned his head so that she could see his eyes more clearly. The irises were faint coronae around the eclipsing black of the dilated pupils.

Everything gets everywhere…

‘You’re tripping,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid…it’s something you picked up in the lab, that and the smoke. Do you understand?’

‘I understand.’ There was an odd tone to the statement, as if were in answer to a different question. Janis frowned. What mazes had he been running? The black pits looked back at her.

‘How do you feel?’

‘Heavy,’ Moh said. ‘Sand in my veins.’

‘D’you have any vitamin-C here?’ she asked, looking around. ‘That might help bring you down more gently.’

Before she could remonstrate, Kohn rose to his feet and walked with elaborate caution to a small fridge in the corner of the room. He bit open a litre carton of orange juice and gulped it down. He dropped to the bed and lay back and closed his eyes.

‘Ah, shit,’ he said. ‘Thanks, but it’s not gonna make any difference. I am down. I been there and come back, Janis. This ain’t tripping. This is reality.’

Goddess, she thought, he must be tripping real bad.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘What’s it like?’

‘Everything,’ he said.

Everything: Fugues of memory took him; any momentary slip, any lapse of attention on what was going on right now sent him slipping and sliding, sidestepping away, while in the slow now the sounds went on forming, the photons came in and made up the pictures, one movement completed itself and the next began. Volition became suspect as act preceded decision, millennia of philosophy falling down that millisecond gap. He’d just have to live with it, he decided, realizing that he already did.

Everything: The bright world the banner bright the symbol plain the greenbelt fields the greenfield streets the geodesic housing the crowds the quiet dark moments.

Everything: The plastic model spaceships hanging from black threads the old Warsaw Pact poster of a little girl cradling the earth DEFEND PEACE the stacked clutter of toys and books and tapes the VR space-helmet.

Everything: Creeping into the room at the centre of the house to watch his father working on the CAL project no sound but the click of a mouse the hardware fixes the earwax smell of solder.

Everything: The blue roundel the sectioned globe the white leaves the lenses and the muzzle swivelling.

Everything: OK YOU CAN TAKE THEM OUT NOW.

Everything.

He opened his mouth and a sound came out: a sob and a snarl, human pain and animal rage. He pushed the helmet off, and it rolled over the side of the bed and bounced once on the floor. Kohn kept his hands at his head, fingers clawing into his scalp. Tears leaked from under the heels of his hands and trickled with burning slowness down his cheek.

He sat and brought his head, hands clasped over it, down between his knees, and for several minutes rocked back and forth. Time was running almost normally now. Those roaring gusts were his breath, that distant booming surf his heart. This giddying black vault of luminous pictures, of echoing whispers from tiny minds locked in repetitive reminiscences, nattering conversations, clattering calculations – this was what his head looked like from the inside. This was himself.

He made a frantic effort to control it, to keep tabs on what was going on. Then he saw the rushing, whirling, snatching self as from the outside, and turned to see from whence he saw, and saw (of course):

nothing

a light on no sight

a void with the echo of a laugh, like the 2.726K background

a moment of amused illumination

nothing

everything

O

I

So it was you, all the time.

He smiled and opened his eyes, and saw Janis. She sat leaning forward on the chair by the desk, her green eyes hooded, brows drawn together, her hands on her knees. Her look held puzzlement and concern, and behind these emotions a detached, observing interest. He could smell her sweat under her scent, see where it made her blouse stick to her skin. He could see the blood behind the artificial pallor on her face.

She was absolutely beautiful. She was unbelievable. The light from the window shone in her eyes and sparkled on the tiny hairs on the backs of her hands. He could have drawn every line of her limbs under her too-formal clothes; he wanted to free her cinched waist and hold it in his own hands. Her shape, her real shape, her voice and scent – there was a place for all of them, a place in his mind pre-adapted for her. It was difficult to believe she had looked like this earlier, in the morning; but the images were there, sharp, and he hadn’t noticed.

He saw her expression change, startled, a second after his eyes opened – her lips part as if about to speak, and the unconscious shake of the head, the swift glance away and back; and her face recompose itself, the blink and check again that said, ‘No, I couldn’t possibly have seen that.’ She smiled with relief and straightened, shaking back her hair.

‘You’re down,’ she said.

Kohn nodded. He found he had come out of his foetal huddle and was sitting on the side of the bed. The comms helmet lay at his feet.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I really am back now. I thought I was, earlier, but I was still away. The juice helped. Thanks.’ He could see the reassurance, the normality, return to her expression. The hope that it was just an accidental exposure, nothing permanent…

‘How do you feel now?’ She said it with a voice that just edged over into the wrong side of casualness.

‘I’m OK,’ he said, ‘except that it wasn’t just a trip. It’s changed me. Something has changed in my mind. In my brain.’

He stood up and stalked to the window. A strip of green grass, a wall, another strip of green grass, another accommodation block. It was obvious from the shadows of the buildings that the time was about 14.30.

He turned back to her.

‘I remember everything,’ he said, watching for her reaction. There it was: the little start, the drawing back, the oh shit look. Got you, lady. You know what this is about. ‘Memory drugs, right?’

‘That might be what they’ve turned out to be,’ she said. She spread her hands. ‘I didn’t even suspect they’d affect you. Honest.’

‘So why did you come here?’

She told him. He sat down again, with his head in his hands. After a minute he looked up.

‘Fucking great,’ he said. ‘You’ve put something in my head whose military applications alone are to die for.’ He grimaced. ‘So to speak. We are both in deep shit, lady. Deep-technology shit.’

‘You don’t need to tell me that! So let’s get out of here, get to Norlonto. We’ll be safe there—’

‘Safe from Stasis, sure.’ Kohn licked his dry lips, shivered. ‘Listen to me. Something I do need to tell you. It gets worse.’

‘How?’ She sounded like she was daring him.

‘You thought I was tripping. Hah. That’s what it felt like. Then I started mainframing as well.’

‘Why?’

‘It wanted—’ he stopped. ‘I wanted – oh, shit. First there was these, you know, patterns. They came in my head, then they came on this screen. And the gun. I’d left it in intrusion mode, looking for traces of your project.’

He smiled at the annoyance on her lips.

‘SOP, I’m afraid. You’re dealin’ with a ruthless mercenary here! Anyway. Then there was a trip. Weird stuff, but what d’you expect? A virtual environment. An electric animal. A sinister old woman, who turned me into a sinister young woman, for a while. Meeting the Old Man. In my case the figure of ancient wisdom happens to be Trotsky. A life-and-death struggle with a figure of evil, which the animal helped me to win.

‘After that it wasn’t normal at all. It was like I was communicating with another awareness. In the system, in the nets.’ He jerked his head to indicate the terminal.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Janis said in a jaded tone. ‘And then you talked to Gawd. Big white light, was it?’

He didn’t have to close his eyes, now, to see inside himself. He could hold it, just there, on the edge, watch all that furious activity and hold back from the urge to rush and push. Right now he could see the anger coming, like vats of molten lead being winched to a battlement. It was all right, it was all right.

‘Don’t patronize me,’ he said. ‘I know exactly the experience you’re talking about. I’ve had that. This was another trip entirely. Something different. I talked to an AI, and I woke it up. Something in the nets that wanted a piece of information from my memory. Wanted it bad. And because of your drugs, found it. It was like it knew about me. Knew me.’

He thought of what Catherin had said about computers that’ll remember us, and shivered again.

‘Why do you think it knew you?’

‘Something I remembered,’ he said. ‘I could remember everything then, but I can’t now. Not without—’ He realized he had everything still to learn about how to track down the memories he now knew were there. ‘There was something – just before. A memory from way back. From when I was a kid. The information it wanted was a piece of code that I saw on the screen of my father’s terminal. And there was a memory just before that. It came to me like being reminded of a phrase I’d overheard: the “star fraction.”’

He could see no sign that it meant anything to her – and his own mind slipped again and he remembered being asked what he remembered about the star fraction (no, it was a proper name, it was the ‘Star Fraction’), and he remembered that at the time he could remember nothing, tell nothing—

‘And then what happened?’ Janis asked. Kohn jolted back to the present.

If I could tell you, if I could make you see it.

‘Creation,’ he said.

She was facing away from him, looking at him sideways. His cheeks ached as if he’d been smiling for a long time.

‘As in “Let there be light”?’ she asked.

‘Yes!’

Janis took a deep breath. ‘Look, Moh, no offence, OK? You’re still telling me things that sound very like what would have happened if you’d just stuffed your face with magic mushrooms. We can find out if your memory’s been affected. I’m desperate to find out. Maybe you did fire up some wildcard AI. All the more reason to get the hell out of here. What I need to know right now is, are you fit to get us out?’

He thought about it. Strange things were still going on in his head, but the basic equipment was functioning as normal. He could tell; that was one of the things that was strange.

‘I’m OK,’ he said. ‘If that’s a contract, lady, you’re on.’

Janis nodded.

Kohn disconnected the gun from the terminal and put his gear back on.

‘For a start,’ he said, ‘let’s mosey over to your lab and get your magic molecules to a safe place.’

Janis felt as if part of her mind were still way behind her body, running to keep up and not at all convinced about the direction she was running in. They walked back to the biology block through a brief flurry of black snow. Janis tried to flick off every flake that landed on her blouse, and got only grey smudges for her trouble.

In the lab she found a polystyrene box, and started chipping ice from the freezer compartment. Kohn loitered suspiciously in the doorway.

‘Funny,’ Janis said. ‘The ice is melting in here really fast.’

Kohn looked at her, frowning. His eyes widened.

‘Stop!’

He lunged forward and hauled her back from the fridge, then pushed her to the floor. There was a hiss and flash from the freezer.

Kohn toed the fridge door open and snatched the rack of test-tubes. The terminals began to smoke. More sputtering flashes, flames.

‘Time to go,’ he said.

A smoke alarm sounded, a needling beep. Then it too shorted out. Smoke crowded down from ceiling level as they retreated. Kohn shut the door and hit a fire alarm.

He and Janis joined the general evacuation, ignoring the occasional queer look. The snow had stopped. A few dozen people milled around in slush, waiting to be checked off by their safety marshals. A siren dopplered, approaching.

This time Janis had her jacket. She pulled it around herself and shivered. Kohn was swearing to himself.

She dammed his flood of obscenity. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Demon attack,’ Kohn said. ‘A logic virus that gets at the firmware of the power supply, timed or triggered to produce a nasty electrical fire. Something’s fighting back through the system. Defence mechanisms, all right! Set up like antibodies for just this contingency. Damn. I should’ve thought.’

‘But that’s my work,’ Janis said. She felt she was about to cry. ‘Up in smoke. And all the poor little mice.’

‘Near enough painless,’ Kohn said. ‘And the project’s over, don’t you see? It’s worked. You’ve built the monster. It’s roaming the countryside. That fire probably came from the cranks. High-tech version of the crowd of peasants with torches. What we have to worry about is the mad scientist, whoever that is.’

Janis thought about it as insurance-company firefighters ran past.

‘I thought I was the mad scientist,’ she said.

‘Nah,’ Kohn said. ‘You’re just Ygor.’

She pulled a face, hunched a shoulder.

‘And the monster?’

‘Me,’ he said.

‘I thought you meant this AI of yours.’

‘That too,’ Kohn said. ‘By now it’s probably blundering around in the milieu, the nets, triggering alarms and generally raising hell.’

Janis found herself grinning. ‘I can believe that,’ she said, ‘if it’s picked up anything from your personality.’

‘Still want to go with me?’

‘If you’re going to Norlonto, yes.’

‘No problem,’ he said. ‘That’s where I’m going anyway. It’s where we live. I have our armoured car parked round the back.’

Janis laughed and caught his arm, started him walking.

‘An armoured car? That’s what I like to hear. I’ll stick with you.’

She laughed again, and let her whole weight swing for a second on his arm. It was as if he didn’t notice.

‘There are some men,’ she intoned, ‘that Things were not meant to know.’