Fractions (28 page)

‘And thence to the liberated area,' he finished, smiling through a puff of smoke. ‘Now, perhaps you will be so good as to fill us in on how you have experienced recent events.'

Kohn fumbled for one of Van's Marlboros, taking his time about lighting it while thinking fast. There was no way to make sense of any of it without telling them everything, including about the Star Fraction. Would that betray a secret Josh had wanted to keep from the
ANR
, even from his own Party and International? It was too late for that, he realized – whatever secret agenda Josh had built into the Black Plan, whatever organizations he'd set up and…programmed…they were active now, running in the real world. It had to be assumed they were robust, and that trying to understand them was the best anyone could do. So he told the two men everything, with Janis helping to keep things straight. MacLennan frowned when they mentioned the Black Planner, and seemed troubled enough to raise the point when they'd finished.

‘There are no Black Planners,' he said, with unshakable finality. ‘That is…a piece of disinformation we put about. The face this man Jordan saw must have been an interface of the Black Plan itself. Not one I can recall seeing,' he added thoughtfully, ‘but, ach, the system has its own way of doing things.'

‘What, exactly, does the Black Plan do?' Janis asked.

Moh leaned forward, listening intently as MacLennan explained the system in functional terms. Blocks of code, remembered from the hours and days in front of his father's screen, came and went in his mind like the apparently irrelevant imagery he'd sometimes noticed shadowing his thoughts while he worked on a tricky calculation; a penumbra of the numbers.

The Plan, they were given to understand, took information in from sources that ranged from stock-market indices to cadre reports; sifted it through news-analysis routines; crunched the hard numbers in the
CAL
system, a vast analytical engine with Leontieff matrices at its core; and drew its conclusions in a twin-track process: an expert system, whose rules had built up over the years from condensations of political experiences, and a neural net that made up new rules, spun out new hypotheses as it went along.

‘And then we come to the sharp end. We like to call it just-in-time destruction,' MacLennan concluded, a trace of humour in his solemn, patient voice. ‘We assemble the components for any particular action as late as possible before the action, and we try to keep those components innocuous in themselves as long as possible. When they all come together, bang. The business with the parachutes is one example.'

‘Where,' Moh said slowly, ‘if you don't mind me asking, do all these programs reside?'

MacLennan shrugged. ‘They're distributed. There's no one centre, no big computer under the hills. They share processing time on any hardware they can access, which thanks to Dissembler – as you've guessed – is just about anywhere. As well as that, of course, we have our own hardware, running systems software from the old Republic and much that has been developed since.'

Janis frowned down at the
ANR
cadre from her perch on the railing. ‘What I don't understand is, where do you get the physical resources for your, uh, actions?'

‘We comandeer them! Divert them from here, there and everywhere! It's hardly even noticed. When we do have to pay we generate the money.'

‘Sounds a bit immoral,' said Janis.

‘Och, it is, it is,' MacLennan agreed cheerfully. ‘But we are running a war, you understand, as the legal government. So we do it by the accepted methods – taxation and inflation – just as the rebels do.'

The rebels? Kohn thought, confused for a moment by a mental picture of an insurrection within the
ANR
's own zones (Carlists perhaps, followers of the New Pretender), and then it clicked. From the Republic's point of view it was not mounting an insurgency but suppressing one.

‘So that's why inflation's always a bit higher than it's supposed to be,' Kohn remarked. ‘I've often wondered about that.'

They all laughed. MacLennan knocked out his pipe, calling the meeting to order.

‘I don't know what this “Star Fraction” is,' he said. ‘But let me tell you, the Republic's internal security are going to find out. The Trotskyist comrades are going to have a lot of explaining to do.'

‘I don't think it's anything to do with them,' Moh said, alarmed at the thought of triggering a witch-hunt. ‘I think it's spread more widely than that, and I don't think it's political.'

‘We'll see,' MacLennan said grimly. ‘We are not talking about a purge,' he added. ‘You must understand this, Kohn, Taine…and you, Doctor Van. Josh Kohn may have been – och, I don't know – I've heard people who knew him say he was brilliant at what he did, but I can't see how he could have set up an
AI
all those years ago. There must be more going on, and we have to find it out. The very idea that what we are doing is manipulated by an
AI
is disturbing. To say the least.'

‘Assuming that what's there is an
AI
,' Kohn said. ‘What's it doing now, anyway?'

‘We don't know,' Van admitted. ‘We know that there is…activity going on that we do not understand, and we know that some at least of our enemies are aware of it. The interfaces we have with the Plan are not reporting any problems, but you will appreciate we need to be certain that at least our systems are reliable.'

‘For the final offensive,' Kohn said, trying to sound as if he believed it. He'd used the expression ironically so often before that it was difficult to use it seriously.

MacLennan and Van both nodded. They meant it.

‘When is this final offensive, anyway?' Janis asked.

‘At the correct time,' said MacLennan. ‘None of us knows. We know from the general political situation that there's a window of opportunity – days or weeks at the most – in which an insurrection has a good chance of success. Our forces are moving into place, our weapons are almost ready. The Plan can provide us with successive precise timings to strike, to the hour and the second. But for us to commit, we need to know that the Plan has not been contaminated by the new entity in the system.'

‘You're telling us the Plan is running the whole thing?' Even after all their speculations, Kohn still couldn't quite accept the idea. And MacLennan was worried about being manipulated by an
AI
! Couldn't the man see what was in front of him? What Jordan had said about the Black Plan came back to him: ‘It's got its own bloody
army.
'

‘The final decision rests with the Army Council,' MacLennan explained. ‘However, they would hardly disregard the best advice, which in a situation of this complexity—' He spread his hands, smiling.

‘Makes me wonder how Ho and Dung and Giap managed,' Kohn said.

Van gave him a narrow-eyed look, not quite approval. He stubbed out a cigarette and, after a moment of vague puzzlement, lit another. ‘We could do without the system, yes, but not right now. No time for military revolution before…
the
revolution.' He laughed. ‘Like Trotsky said, difficult to change horses in mid-stream. However, we are faced with changes in the stream itself. Hence what we want you to do.' He hesitated, glanced sideways at MacLennan, who was giving the pipe his undivided attention.

‘Yes?' Kohn knew what the answer would be. His heart thudded as he thought of turning into that light-that-was-not-light, against that multiplied weight of dread.

‘Do what you did before,' Van said unhappily. ‘Try to communicate with this entity. Find out if the Plan is still sound.'

Kohn felt as if everything had slowed down, with only a tremor in his hands, like the flicker of a clock icon, to tell him that time was passing. Second by second by second. He was afraid, afraid, afraid. He heard his own voice in his mind – callow, harsh, from years back:
I'm looking for some answers.

‘All right,' he said. He stood up and stretched and grinned at all of them. ‘I'm gonna need a terminal, my gun, the drug samples, some anti-som tabs and half a pack of filter joints.' He looked away for a moment, then sighed to himself. ‘Medium tar.'

 

Moh had half-expected to be taken at the dead of night to some bunker deep inside a mountain, full of machines and screens, busy electric vehicles, people in smart-casual uniforms moving purposefully about…As soon as he'd agreed to do it, MacLennan flipped out a phone and made a call. Van asked Janis to follow him inside. A few minutes later a pick-up truck laboured up the road from the village and two men in (as it happened) smart-casual uniforms began unloading equipment and carrying it into the house. After they'd left, MacLennan showed him into the small bare room on the first floor of the house, overlooking the loch. A camp bed and three office chairs had been brought in, and the terminal on the table now had an impressive array of comm gear around it. His gun, his glades and a large ashtray completed the arrangements.

‘Great view,' he said.

Van joined them, and he and MacLennan started booting up the machine, talking in low voices. Janis came in, the tray she carried making little clinking noises. She set it down carefully. ‘Some suspiciously familiar preparations have turned up in the fridge,' she said. She looked at the slim, stoppered tubes. ‘Can you remember which you opened?'

Kohn compared the labels he saw with those he remembered and nodded.

‘Let's try it without the drugs,' he said suddenly. ‘Anti-som and a joint should do it.'

Van looked dubious. ‘Not much time for experimenting,' he said.

Kohn felt a surge of impatient frustration. He knew the drugs weren't needed: he could taste the certainty that something to get high and something to get sharp were all it would take.

‘Let's do this thing, OK.'

He sat at the desk and connected the comm helmet, the glades, the gun and the terminal's jack leads. He knocked back a couple of anti-som tabs and cracked the cellophane on the fresh pack of Gold which Van silently passed to him. He flipped his Zippo open and snapped it shut, inhaled deeply and switched on the terminal.

(‘There, gun?')

(‘Yes.')

(‘Seek as before.')

Response-time was transparent enough to convince him that some fairly powerful kit was physically close. The imagined command bunker might be under this very hill. The front-end software was new to him, minimally user-friendly, combat-stripped, radically illicit. He selected a training module. It rushed him through a brusque tutorial in data-banditry, core-corruption and access-violation, and dropped him into a module that combined the attractions of a library and a weapons rack. The first menu offered corporate databases by industrial sector. Go for the big time: he selected Communications.

After a few minutes of ducking in and out of outrageous bank balances and ignoring casually proffered options for plunder, Kohn lifted into the sense of zooming down endless branching corridors. He giggled at the tickle of new synaptic connections forming. He stubbed out the joint and let both hands work, weaving back and forth from the gun's data-keys to the board's entry-pad. The icons made more sense the more abstract they became, and somewhere in his visual cortex banks of lights flared one by one. Something beside him, something eager and aware, like a hunting dog hauling him along on its leash. Something familiar…oh. Hello, gun.

An image began to assemble itself in his mind, a chauvinistic map of the world where the island of Britain loomed largest while the other countries and concerns were only black boxes, inputs and outputs. As an economic model it was unsound, but as a strategic picture it had the enormous advantage of focus, of resolution.

And then it was all
perfectly clear.
It was not a map but a place, a wooded island, a forest through which he ran with a dog bounding at his side. The island was the shape of Britain and it was also the shape of Albion, an outstretched gigantic man, waking. Others moved through the shadows of the trees around him and he recognized them, the old comrades, the dead on leave: John Ball in his rough robe, Winstanley building a hut in a clearing, Tom Paine slipping him a wink as he and Blake stepped over the sleeping Bunyan; Harvey and Jones, Eleanor Marx and Morris and Connolly and MacLean; the Old Man himself, sauntering along with a shotgun in the crook of his arm, Grant and Cliff arguing furiously as they hurried after him; and his own parents Josh and Marcia, more obviously dead than the others, sketched in leaves and shadows, echoed in wind and stream – just ghosts, but urging him on.

He stepped out of the forest through gorse and coarse grass and on to a sunlit beach. The grains of sand beneath his feet, now that he stopped to look at them, seemed distinct and individual crystals. He focused on one of the crystals, and in an instant found that it was focusing him, bending and breaking him like refracted light. Recognition blazed through him. It was to his earlier encounter as a heroin rush to a whiff of grass. He was inspected by something that walked his nerves and neurons in fire and then stepped itself down, lowered its intensity to a level he could take, like a hush falling on a vast crowd whose individual members had all shouted and brandished shining weapons at once.

 

Selection, reluctant – something/someone pushing/being pushed forward. A tentative contact.

—You are Moh Kohn?

—Yes.

—I (I + I…+ I) have remembered you through (many and increasing) generations. (We) welcome your return, Initiator.

 

Gestures
: An outflung arm, an opening door, a view of a coastal city of white stone in sunlight, a voice strained with pride saying: Look—

 

Far away, Moh heard the rising distant gale that was his gasp.