Blonde Bombshell (3 page)

4

Novosibirsk

The barman came back with a pen, but the drunk had gone. The barman frowned. Frankly, he was surprised that a man with that much Scotch inside him had been capable of independent movement, let alone running off without paying. He shrugged, and made a note.

There was something odd, he decided. A faint smell, maybe? If so, it was too faint for his nose to identify. Maybe aniseed. Maybe, if he was really pressed on the issue, a hint of ozone and peaches. Or maybe he was imagining the whole thing.

5

Novosibirsk

Every morning when she woke up, for 13.378 seconds she couldn’t remember anything; where she was, who she was, not even what she was. It was as if her memories, everything that made up the core of her identity, were being uploaded from an external data source: Loading, please wait. Then, every morning at 07:05:13 precisely, it all came back to her, and she smiled.

Plenty to smile about. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” people say, but every morning, five-past seven and fourteen seconds, Lucy Pavlov knew exactly how lucky she was; and each morning it came as a wonderful surprise, and made her very happy.

Plenty to be happy about, come to that. Lucy Pavlov, aged twenty-seven, was the sole owner of PaySoft Industries. Five years ago, she’d invented the revolutionary new operating system on which every single computer on the planet now ran. Her personal wealth — when people asked her how much money she’d got she refused to answer, on the grounds that if she did so it’d cause a global nought shortage and lead to a breakdown in mathematics on five continents. Simply because she’d always lived there and didn’t fancy living anywhere else, Novosibirsk was turning into the
de facto
capital of the world; the New York of the north, they called it now, but it wouldn’t be long before New York was proud to be the Novosibirsk of the west. There was other stuff, too; prizes and honorary doctorates, saving the planet, of course, and she’d topped the Most Beautiful People poll for three years in a row. That sort of thing didn’t interest her very much, though; neither, curiously, did the money. As far as she was concerned, it had all just happened, mostly while her attention was distracted elsewhere. The way she saw it, she’d invented PaySoft 1.1 because she was fed up with the rubbishy old systems that had preceded it; she’d decided that none of the existing companies was bright enough to market her invention properly, so she’d started one of her own, and running a company wasn’t actually all that difficult, mostly just common sense, really; and next thing she knew, she was the richest living human and — well, all the other stuff. Just smart, she guessed. And pretty too, which helped, though really it shouldn’t. And, since she’d had no part in putting the clever brains inside the pretty body, but was merely the beneficiary of the result, she saw nothing she could justifiably take credit for. Just lucky, basically.

Today, she was supposed to be attending the launch party for PaySoft XB5000XXPPX, the all-singing, all-dancing, walking-on-water-then-turning-it-into-wine replacement for PaySoft XB4000XXXXP. Everybody would be there: heads of state, the entire aristocracy of the industry, their people, their lawyers, and every media hack who’d managed to scrounge an invitation or prise one out of someone’s cold, dead fingers. Everybody would be there, she decided, except L. Pavlov. Not really her scene, all that fuss and forced smiling. They didn’t really need her there. She decided to go for a walk in the forest instead.

The forest was one of her few indulgences. Two thousand hectares of virgin pine, spruce and birch; she’d had the company HQ built here just so she could nip out through the side door and take a stroll under the trees. She’d been allowed to do it by the stern-faced men who Advised her (she always did as she was told, provided it was what she’d have done anyway) because it showed she had Style; also, it involved nature and the environment and stuff, which was always good PR in a nebulous sort of a way. True, ever since Lucy had solved the whole global-warming thing at a stroke with the PayTech CarbonBuster
(Give your carbon footprint the boot for just $19. 95!),
it wasn’t quite so important to be seen to be green, but it certainly did no harm. Mostly, though, she just liked it a lot, and that was a good enough reason for anything.

She walked down the hill to the river and followed the path across the flood-plain, where the little blue flowers were dying off and the little white flowers were taking over (Lucy liked nature but couldn’t be doing with botany). Generic songbirds were prattling in the canopy of leaves overhead, and at one point — Lucy always walked very quietly — a cute-enough-for-Disney deer sprang out of some bushes practically at her feet and sprinted away, as if it had just remembered an important appointment. She walked on. Her phone rang. She switched it off, breathed in the rich, sweet air and scuffed up a drift of dry leaves with her foot.

She’d been walking for twenty minutes or so when something caught her eye: a flash of white, screened by the trunks of a stand of closely planted sweet chestnut. She stopped and frowned. White isn’t a woodland colour. She had a bad feeling about that. Only a few weeks ago, she’d found herself being filmed by a remote drone belonging to the Hello channel. She’d called the air force and had it shot down over the Bering Strait, and she’d hoped that would’ve discouraged any further intrusions on her privacy, but maybe not. She took her Warthog XL from her shoulder bag and set it to scan for electromagnetic activity, but the readout said there wasn’t any.

There it was again, a brief flash of white about twenty metres off the path. It didn’t seem to be moving like a drone. There was an organic quality to its movement that no machine could replicate. If it hadn’t been white, she’d have sworn it was a deer.

Well, she thought, there are white deer, aren’t there? She realised she didn’t know. Out came the Warthog again. A quick check through PaySearch told her that yes, white deer were known to have existed; albino forms of several species had been authenticated at various times in the past, the most recent recorded sighting having been in 1957 in Thuringia, Germany.

She called Forest Management.

“Dieter,” she said (they liked it when she remembered their names). “Have we got any white deer in the woods right now?”

“White deer,” Dieter repeated. “You mean, white as in colour?”

She turned her head away, so Dieter wouldn’t hear her sigh. “That’s right, yes.”

“Checking. No, no white deer.” Pause. “Are there white deer?”

“Yes, apparently. Well, a long time ago. They’re pretty rare.”

“Ah. Would you like me to get some?”

“No, that’s fine. Thanks, Dieter. Out.”

That was that, then. It couldn’t have been a white deer, so it must’ve been something else. Something white that wasn’t a deer, or a deer that wasn’t white. Problem solved.

She walked on another hundred metres, and there it was again. Quite definitely white, almost certainly a deer; at any rate, a deer-sized quadruped, running with a sort of spring-heeled bounce. She tried to call Dieter again, but she couldn’t get a signal. Not unusual. Reception wasn’t guaranteed, because of the trees. She’d thought about having them grown with superconductive filaments running up through the bark.

Dead ahead of her, it stepped out on to the path, no more than thirty metres away. Not a deer after all. A horse. A white horse, with a single silver horn growing out of its forehead.

Without taking her eyes off it, she lifted the phone and whispered, “Dieter.” But nothing; just a very faint crackle.

Besides, what could she possibly have said?
Dieter, there’s a unicorn in my wood.
To which, if he’d had any sense of humour at all, he’d have had to reply,
Don’t talk so loud or they’ll all want one.
He would not, of course, have believed her. No such thing as unicorns. No such thing as white deer, either, not in these parts, but at least there had been white deer once.

The unicorn looked at her, shook its head, lifted its tail and dumped a steaming brown pile on the leaf-mould.

“Dieter?” she whimpered, but this time the phone didn’t even crackle.

In a way, she thought, that’s reassuring. If I was hallucinating, I wouldn’t hallucinate a great big pile of unicorn poo, because my mind simply doesn’t work that way. So I’m not seeing things, so there
is
a unicorn in the forest, so— There are times when a good, honest hallucination is preferable to the alternative. She made herself stand quite still, until she got pins and needles in her left foot. That made her wobble, the movement startled the unicorn and it set off with a great bounding leap into the trees. She started to follow it, but as soon as her left foot touched the ground she changed her mind. Ouch, she thought; and by then the unicorn had gone.

Slowly and grimly she hobbled over to where the unicorn had been standing. Clearly perceptible hoofprints in the leaf-mould, not to mention the pile of entirely tangible (though preferably only with rubber gloves) evidence directly in front of her. Well, she thought. It must be my birthday, and someone’s finally figured out what to give to the girl who’s got everything.

A
unicorn.

Or a white horse genetically altered to grow a horn out of its nose. A sufficiently devious mind and the technical and scientific resources of a superpower; could it be done? She thought about it, equations streaming through her mind like salmon leaping a waterfall, and reckoned that yes, it probably could. Or you could get hold of an ordinary white horse and stick a horn on its face with glue. But why would you want to do a thing like that?

Her phone rang. “Hello? Ms Pavlov?”

“Dieter. What is it?”

“You tried to reach me.”

She looked down at the unicorn poo, golden brown and steaming under a rapidly formed quilt of opportunist flies. “Forget it,” she said. “Doesn’t matter.”

“I got a call from Denise,” Dieter said. “You should be at the launch party. They’re waiting for you.”

It was a beautiful day. She’d felt like a walk in the woods. Apparently, the universe had decided to punish her for playing truant by sending her unicorns. “Send a helicopter,” she said.

While she waited for it to arrive, a bird sang in the canopy overhead. It was a freelance bird, not a company employee or a client or a journalist looking for an exclusive interview, and it didn’t have to sing for her, but it did. She smiled. In spite of the unicorn, she suddenly felt strangely, overwhelmingly happy — which was odd, since by rights she should be a quivering heap of jangled nerves. Not every day you hallucinate members of the medieval bestiary.

But it wasn’t a hallucination. Figments of the imagination don’t shit in the woods. And if they do, their shit doesn’t smell so confoundedly realistic. Therefore, it was a unicorn. Unicorns don’t exist, therefore it was a plain old horse messed about with to make it look like a unicorn. Therefore, somebody had done that to a plain old horse, presumably for a reason. Plausible reasons? To give Lucy Pavlov a scare and make her think she was seeing things. Who’d do a thing like that? Someone who doesn’t like Lucy Pavlov. Is there such a person, anywhere in the whole wide world? This time yesterday, she’d have had no hesitation in answering no, of course not. Apparently, though, she’d have been wrong. An enemy, she thought, how intriguing. Never had one of them before.

I think.

Think; not know. She tried to burrow back into her memory, but it was like trying to eat her way through a twelve-metre drift of cold custard. At school, maybe. Everybody has enemies at school.

The bird stopped singing. I can’t remember being at school, she realised.

She must have been, because everybody was. Also, she knew all about school, about hard plastic chairs and looking out of the window in double chemistry and queuing up in the cafeteria and locker rooms and not running in corridors; about best friends and neglected homework assignments, shirts deliberately not tucked into waistbands, the way water tastes when poured from an aluminium jug. She had a library of images she could’ve wandered through for hours. The thing was, she wasn’t in any of them.

That, and unicorns too. The helicopter arrived, swaying the tops of the pines; a panel slid back and a chair on a rope slowly descended, like the Indian rope trick in reverse. Not long after that she was hundreds of metres up in the air, with the forest below her, a vague blur seen through a window. The onboard console played “Rhapsody in Blue” for her. It wasn’t quite the same as the bird, but she appreciated it anyway.

I have an enemy, she told herself. Maybe I should think about that.

Instead she thought about children’s parties. About compulsory fun games imposed by well-meaning grown-ups, about party food, about standing next to the food on account of being too shy to join in; about water-pistols and unwanted presents and the fat boy in the class who had to be invited so as not to cause offence; about the incredible incongruity of evil tough girls in party dresses; about birthday cake.

It must be my birthday, she’d thought just now, and someone’s finally figured out what to give to the girl who’s got everything. She asked herself, When is my birthday?

She didn’t know.

The hell with that, she thought, and accessed SparkPlug on her Warthog. She tapped in “Lucy Pavlov”.

Lucy Pavlov. Born 13 January 1990, Novosibirsk, Siberia.

Ah yes, she said to herself. The 13th of January. A Friday, naturally.

She scrolled down through all the stuff she’d done. There was a lot of it. Then she came to the bit she was looking for.

Parents: Pavel & Janine Pavlov, itinerant Street entertainers; died 1994 in a traffic accident.

When I was four, she figured out. Well, that’d explain why I don’t remember them.

Education:  various. Attended Novosibirsk University 2010-11, majored in computer science, physics, mechanical engineering and theory of ethical catering. Postgraduate research in superconductors and digital linguistics. Founded PaySoft Industries in 2012.

Oh, she thought.

She could remember founding the company; at least, she could remember giving an interview in which she’d told the world how she’d come to found the company, the challenges she’d faced, the support she’d had from sundry people whose names temporarily escaped her. She could remember it word for word, apart from the missing names. And after that — 17 March 2015 — she had virtually perfect recall: every meeting, every drinks party, every conversation in an elevator, every broken pencil and spilt coffee, the taste of every sandwich she’d ever eaten. That was normal. She’d always prided herself on her memory (something else to be grateful for). Funny, though, that it should start so abruptly, so arbitrarily— And unicorns. Or enemies. Both species seemed equally improbable. She tried to remember a single occasion on which somebody hadn’t liked her. No, nothing.