Doomware (30 page)

When they reached Shanti Court there was no sign the offliners had been there. The main entrance was as they had left it: locked up tight. The Land Rover was still in the car park, untouched. It appeared they hadn’t been discovered after all. Even so, David didn’t breathe a sigh of relief until they were inside Apartment 28 and they could see that everything was untouched.

Shawn scooped up and hugged the cat, who mewed loudly, unimpressed by the disturbance to its usual afternoon nap. “You’re a good guard cat, Tom,” he told the feline squirming irritably in his arms. “You scared them all away.”

* * *

That evening the humidity was broken by a summer storm. Dark clouds rolled in from the ocean, whose white-tipped waves grew steadily taller, and there were flashes of forked lightning on the horizon accompanied by the attendant thunder. This only served to heighten David’s nervousness. The appearance of both the unidentified ship and the gang of offliners in so short a space of time had unnerved him, and the storm felt like an omen that something dreadful was about to happen.

By the time darkness started to close in the boy was already in bed. They made sure all the curtains and blinds were firmly closed and kept the overhead lights off, allowing only lamps on dim settings to glow here and there. Tarot hovered around the apartment, regularly alternating which window he chose to peer from with his glasses, as he’d been doing ever since they had gotten back from the Lookout. The height of the apartment made it ideal – second only to the Lookout itself – for keeping watch, negating the need to go outside. Earlier, Tarot had checked the local area and had found nothing except a couple of freshly slain zombies and a few windows that looked as if they had been smashed recently.

Before long it started raining. David was sipping on a glass of red wine as he parted the living room curtains a couple of inches at eye level and peered out. On the horizon nature was putting on a truly spectacular lightning show. David watched, enthralled and disquieted. He didn’t look at Tarot when he entered the room, but asked him if he thought there was any connection between the ship and the offliners.

“It’s possible, but I can’t see it myself,” Tarot replied. “Offliners aren’t known for being seafaring, are they? Um, David, what’s this?”

Reluctantly, David tore his eyes from the storm. Tarot was holding in his hand an object he recognised as being Shawn’s sketch pad. With a quizzical look on his face, David took the pad. On the page showing were ordinary examples of the boy’s scribbles, but amongst them, encircled by a wavy line, was a number he recognised straight away:
937
, the number the boy had seen the first day of the virus.

“Look at the next page,” Tarot said.

David stroked a finger across the pad’s screen and the next page appeared. The doodles were gone, replaced by a much bigger
937
surrounded by smaller versions of the same. He flicked to the next page. Here the number was repeated in a chain that almost filled the entire page.

David smiled at the pad like a proud parent. “I’ve never seen him do this before.”

“Why’s he doing it at all?”

“It’s the number he saw.”

“Where?”

“On the Cybernet, on TV … everywhere, he said.”

“When?”

It was only now that David registered the intensity in Tarot, the tension evident in his voice and his body language. Curious, he studied him as he said with a shrug, “The day of the virus.”

Tarot’s jaw dropped. His eyes glazed over and the colour drained from his face. For a second, David thought he might be about to collapse.

“Oh my God!” Tarot murmured under his breath.

“What is it?” David asked, his curiosity giving way to concern. “What’s wrong?”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me this before?”

David caught the mixture of incredulity and anger in Tarot’s voice. “It’s just a number! Telling you never even occurred to me.”

This assertion wasn’t exactly true: he’d toyed with the idea of disclosing the information when they had first discussed the boy’s immunity in any detail, back when they’d not long met, but something had caused him to hold his tongue. Maybe he hadn’t learned enough trust in Tarot at that point, or maybe it had simply been easier to pretend that the boy hadn’t noticed anything beyond the disappearance of everyday systems such as the Cybernet and television. Whatever the reason for his reticence, it was true that the subject hadn’t occurred to him in the months following that first conversation.

Tarot’s eyes were glassy and unfocused. “I don’t believe it!”

“Believe what? This number means something to you?”

“I don’t believe..!”

Starting to anger, David said, “What is it? Do I have to beat it out of you or what?”

Tarot’s eyes started darting to and fro, losing some of their glassiness; his mind was obviously racing. It took more prodding from David before it stopped racing enough for him to say, “I’ve seen this number before. It’s a sort of code.”

“For what?”

“What’s the sum of nine, three and seven?”

“Nineteen.”

“One and nine. What are the first and ninth letters of the alphabet?”

“A and…” – he counted through them in his head – “I. AI. Artificial intelligence?”

“No, the Acybernetic Initiative.”

Tarot said the words as if they alone provided the answer to a great mystery, but this only served to confuse David even more. He shook his head, trying to shake loose any recognition of the name, but there was none. “The Acybernetic
Initiative
? I’ve never heard of it.”

When Tarot spoke next, and for the first time that David could remember, his voice had completely lost its customary slow, steady rhythm. “It was started a long time ago by a group of acy’s out to show that we were just as good as everyone else, that we were just as valid, that we weren’t lacking as human beings because we didn’t have technology inside our bodies. The basic goal of the Initiative was to provide acy’s with a united voice to lobby for equality.” As he said this, Tarot paced to and fro and shook a clenched fist like a politician delivering an address. “Then about two and a half centuries ago a man named Gaetan Lorch joined the AI. Even from the start, his views were way out there: extremist, fundamentalist, combined with a mania that stemmed from the worst kind of perverted religion. He was the most single-minded man I’d ever met. He talked about martyrs and supremacy and how the natural order of things had been usurped by cyberneticism. He gave speeches telling members that they weren’t only equal to cybernetics, but
better
than them.
More
human. More …
genuine
. He called them true people, or real people, or Homo verus – he had a whole plethora of names. And people who’d been persecuted and maligned for so long were ready to believe him.

“I wanted to expel Lorch, but I was outvoted. The Initiative was unwilling to disregard the views of any acy’, no matter how extreme those views were. It was inclusion of the excluded at any cost. They thought they could control Lorch’s influence, but they were wrong. He turned the AI from a respected political force – a democracy – into a militant dictatorship. Its positions and demands became so outrageous there was no alternative but for it to be excluded – effectively if not officially – from all legitimate debate.

“It was a disaster for ordinary people like you and me, but I never thought that Lorch – even him, by God! – would be crazy enough... I mean, he talked up a storm. He was a brilliant speaker. He mixed truth and rhetoric and lies to the point where you started to doubt yourself, to doubt your own opinions. But God! He would’ve needed a whole roll-call of supporters just as crazy as himself to pull off all this.”

While he paced, Tarot swept an arm as if to encompass the great breadth of catastrophe surrounding them. Thunder rolled as if on cue. David had been listening with a mounting sense of unease; Tarot was clearly suggesting that fellow acybernetics had been responsible for the massacre of mankind.

“How do you know all this?” David asked. “How do you know so much about the Initiative?”

Tarot kept pacing and wringing his hands, two things made all the more unsettling because David had never seen him do them before. “I was one of its founding members,” he said, his voice raw with barely contained emotion. “I left by the time Lorch had decimated everything it had stood for. I walked away, gave up … I should never have done that.”

“There’s no way you could’ve known,” David said, but Tarot wasn’t listening.

“Do you know what this means? Do you know? It means I played a part in all this. If it hadn’t been for me and my stupid ideals this might never have happened.” Tarot was becoming increasingly agitated. “Oh God! My wife … my boy … I betrayed them!”

Tarot’s voiced cracked; his breathing was rapid and he was on the verge of tears. David laid down the pad and interrupted Tarot mid-pace, unceremoniously guiding him to a sofa and sitting him down. Tarot immediately buried his ashen face into his hands, prompting David to kneel in front of him and pull his hands away.

“I’m not having this,” David snapped. “First of all, we don’t know for sure that this Initiative had anything to do with it. The only hard fact we know is that Shawn saw the number nine three seven.”

“Which was used by the Initiative.”

“So you said.”

“On the day of the virus.”

“I admit it’s hard to understand.”

“It’s no coincidence. Lorch himself came up with that damn number. He used to use the Greek letter tau as well.”

“But we don’t
know
anything for sure, do we? It’s still one helluva leap we’re making. Anything beyond a hard fact is just supposition. Besides, even if the Initiative was behind it, it doesn’t mean your intentions weren’t good.”

“Good intentions!” Tarot exclaimed bitterly. “Look what hell they paved the road to.”

“Listen to me,” David said, gripping Tarot’s hands tightly in his lap. “What I mean is you’re a good person. I know you are. You saved my life, for God’s sake, and probably Shawn’s in the process. If somebody took something good you’d started and turned it into something bad, then the fault lies with them. You’re not to blame for the actions of a madman. You didn’t betray anyone. You wouldn’t have it in you to betray me, or Shawn, let alone your own family.”

Hands still linked, David stared at his friend. There was a profusion of emotions reflected in Tarot’s eyes: fear, shame, self-doubt, a childlike yearning for absolution. David couldn’t bear to see him like this. He was always so calm and so unflappably strong; they were qualities he’d come to admire and count upon. But he saw that the possibility of being related, however tangentially, to mass murder was enough to induce a breakdown in anyone, even the stoical Tarot. It was probably the one thing in the world that
could
provoke this kind of reaction in him, the one thing that was capable of rendering him this shaken and vulnerable.

“I don’t wanna hear any more talk about betrayal,” David went on. “‘Cause I ain’t buying it, you hear me?”

Tarot nodded, his hunted and tearful gaze straying in every direction except David’s. Thunder crashed, much louder than before; the storm was bearing down on them.

“Now, we’re gonna find a decent boat,” David said, “sail it to this damn island, and raise the kid together. Okay? Just us. Just you and me and Shawn. Nothing else matters now.”

Out the corner of Tarot’s eye spilled a tear, which he snatched at as if ashamed of it. It was more than David could bear. He pulled him into the crook of his neck and kissed him on the temple.

“You’re okay,” David whispered to him. “You’ll be okay. I promise you. I know you ain’t exactly into promises, but I don’t really care right now.”

Maybe it was the storm’s static electricity in the air, or the feeling that something terrible was just around the corner, or David’s eagerness to console his friend, but the next moment their mouths were pressed together.

Thunder crashed outside, drowning out the noise they made. If only for the following few minutes, all thoughts of the number 937 and the Acybernetic Initiative and a man named Gaetan Lorch were utterly forgotten, expunged entirely from their minds.

Afterwards David couldn’t help thinking that this was the way human beings had always made love before the advent of brainware – the synergy born of biology rather than technology; the communication unspoken, as invisible as any data stream, yet no less real; the pleasure somehow augmented by a measure of pain – and he passed through a brief, rare period of complete and utter peace.

When David started to wake he could still feel the acidic water burning his skin where the mush of zombies’ bodies encased him. This time he had the feeling that Tarot and the boy were in the water too, zombified along with all the rest of them, although he couldn’t actually recall seeing them in the distorted, liquefied mess of the flood.

He could tell it was morning by the daylight percolating through his closed eyelids. For a long time he lay there listening to rain falling on the balcony outside, the storm having died away completely during the night. Tarot’s arm was wrapped around him. He’d been clinging to him all night, sleeping restlessly in fits and starts, no doubt thinking, both wide awake and dreaming, about the part he may have inadvertently played in the destruction of mankind.

They had talked at length last night about the Acybernetic Initiative and Lorch and the virus, and nothing Tarot had told him had changed his basic stance: that the hard facts in their possession were few, and that, even if the Initiative had been responsible for the virus, the founding members’ culpability in the scheme of it was virtually non-existent. Tarot had stated repeatedly that he’d been “supposed” to stop Lorch, and had therefore failed himself and his family and, indeed, the entire human race. David couldn’t understand this at all. The way he saw it, fate was the belief that whatever happened was predestined to happen; Tarot’s assertions that he’d acted in contradiction to fate didn’t make any sense, and the more he’d expounded on the notion the more confused David had become.