Fractions (3 page)

‘
NC
?'

‘Natural Computing. Some of the big companies and armies are trying to get a handle on ways to enhance human intelligence, connect it directly with large-scale integration on the machine side. Sinister stuff like that.'

‘“Sinister stuff”? I can't believe I'm
hearing
this shit. Christ, woman! I've just been in one these mad-evil-scientist laboratories, and they're still trying things out on mice! The cranks are out to wreck the datasphere, and one day they might just do it. There's just no way the Left should do deals with those shitwits. It's madness.'

‘They've no chance of shutting down the whole thing, and you know it,' Cat said. ‘But they're damn' good at sabbing, they're brave and resourceful, and we need those skills to hit the state.'

Kohn jumped to his feet.

‘Yeah, right, and they need you to give them hardware support. Who's using who in this campaign? Greens onside too, huh? Got the comrades helping to take out some of that evil technology? Know their way round the factories – yeah, fucking great.'

‘We've all fought alongside people we didn't exactly see eye to eye with.' She smiled, almost tenderly, almost conspiratorially. ‘“There is only one party, the Party of God”, remember?'

Kohn struggled momentarily with the politics of that particular past conflict and found it was all either too simple or too complicated.

‘The Muslims are civilized,' he said. ‘The gang you were with are enemies of humanity.'

Catherin shrugged, with one shoulder. ‘At the moment they're the enemies of our enemies, and that's what counts. That's what's always counted.'

There were times when Kohn loathed the Left, when some monstrous stupidity almost, but never quite, outweighed the viciousness and venality of the system they opposed. Ally with the barbarians against the patricians and praetorians…think again, proletarians!

‘What does the
ANR
think of this brilliant tactic?'

Catherin's face warped into scorn.

‘They're being macho and sectarian and elitist as usual. Anyone who wants to fight the Hanoverian state should go through the proper channels – them!'

That was a relief. The Army of the New Republic had an almost mythical status on the Left. Claiming the legitimacy of the final emergency session of the Federal Assembly (held in an abandoned factory in Dagenham while the
US/UN
teletroopers closed in), it fought the Hanoverians and, it sometimes seemed, everybody else.

‘They're history,' Catherin said. ‘And if your little gang of mercenaries can't get it together to stop defending legitimate targets, you are too.'

Kohn felt old. She was just a kid, that was what it was. Too young to remember the United Republic, hating the Hanoverian regime so much that any alliance against it seemed only common sense…There had to be more, you had to hold on to some sense of direction, even if it was only a thread. Growing up in the Greenbelt shanty-towns, Moh had learned that from his father. A fifth-generation Fourth Internationalist, paying out the thread, the thin line of words that connected past to future.
The Party is the memory of the class
, he used to say; meanwhile, the workers of the world did anything and everything except unite. Now he, Gaia shield his soul, had thought the Republic a rotten unstable compromise, but that didn't stop him fighting to save it when the
US/UN
came in…welcomed, of course, by cheering crowds.

Kohn had no illusions. Most of the opposition would welcome the broadening of the Alliance, even if they saw it as only tactical and technical – a joint action here, a bit of covering fire there. The price would be that the list of legitimate targets would become a good deal longer. His co-op had lived by defending what he still saw as the seeds of progress – the workers' organizations and the scientists and, if necessary, the capitalists – against the enemies of that modern industry on which all their conflicting hopes relied. The delicate balance, the ecological niche for the Cats, would be gone. For the first time he understood all that his father had meant by
betrayal.

His rage focused on the wounded woman.

‘You're free to go,' he told her. ‘I'm not claiming ransom. I'm not hostage-swapping. Not pressing charges in any currency. I'll clear you from our account.'

She sank back into the pillow.

‘You can't
do
this to me!'

‘Watch my legs.'

He stalked out, leaving her free. Unemployed and unemployable. Only burned-out, squeezed-dry traitors, double and triple agents several times over, were ever released unconditionally.

At the time he thought it just.

Tomorrow, Jordan thought, tomorrow he would start to live rationally. Tomorrow he would make the break, walk out and leave them, let them weep or curse. Light out for North London Town.
Norlonto's free
, the whisper ran.
You can get anything with money. Force has no purchase there.

He had thought the same thing on hundreds of previous days.

Jordan Brown was seventeen years old and fizzing with hormones and hate. He lived in North London, but not Norlonto, not North London Town. The area where he lived had once been called Islington, and bits of it lapped into other former boroughs. It bordered Norlonto in a high-intensity contrast between freedom and slavery, war and peace, ignorance and strength. Which was which depended on whose side you were on. They called this area Beulah City. God was in charge. Except…

His grandmother had told him that mildly blasphemous variant on a psalm when he was a little kid, teasing the limits of propriety. Even his father had laughed, briefly. It expressed a truth about their own time, a truth about the Cable. The Elders did their best to censor and exclude the unclean, the doubtful in the printed word, but there was damn all they could do about the Cable, the fibre-optic network that the godless Republic had piped to every corner of every building in what was then a land, linking them to the world. The autonomy of all the Free States, the
communities under the king
, depended on free access to it. You could do without it as easily as you could do without air and water, and nobody even tried any more.

Jordan stood for a moment on the steps of his family's three-storey house at the top of Crouch Hill. To his left he could see Alexandra Palace, the outer limit of another world. He knew better than to give it more than a glance.
Norlonto's free
…

The air was as cold as water. He clattered down the steps and turned right, down the other side of the hill. Behind him the holograms above the Palace faded in the early sun. In his mind, they burned.

 

The lower floor of the old warehouse near Finsbury Park was a gerbil's nest of fibre-optics. Jordan glimpsed their tangled, pulsing gleam between the treads of the steel stairs he hammered up every morning. Most of Beulah City's terminals had information filters elaborately hardwired in, to ensure that they presented a true and correct vision of the world, free from the biases and distortions imposed by innumerable evil influences. Because those evils could not be altogether ignored, a small fraction of the terminals had been removed from private houses and businesses, their cables carefully coiled back and back, out of freshly re-opened trenches and conduits, and installed at a dozen centres where their use could be monitored. This one held about a hundred in its upper loft, a skylit maze of paper partitions.

Jordan pushed open the swing doors. The place at that moment had a churchy quiet. Most of the workers would arrive half an hour later: draughtsmen, writers, artists, designers, teachers, software techs, business execs, theologists. Jordan filled a china mug from the coffee machine – Salvadorean, but he couldn't do anything about that – and walked carefully to his work-station.

The night trader, MacLaren, stood up, signing off and spinning the seat to Jordan. In his twenties, already slowing.

‘Beijing's down,' he said. ‘Vladivostok and Moscow up a few points, Warsaw and Frankfurt pretty shaky. Keep an eye on pharmaceuticals.'

‘Thanks.' Jordan slid into his seat, put down his coffee and waved as he clocked in.

‘God go with ya,' MacLaren mumbled. He picked up his parka and left. Jordan keyed the screen to a graphic display of the world's stock markets. Screens were another insult: they didn't trust you to use kit they couldn't see over your shoulder. He blew at the coffee and munched at the bacon roll he'd bought on the way in, watched the gently rolling sea of wavy lines. As the picture formed in his mind he brought up prices for Beulah City's own products, dancing like grace-notes, like colour-coded corks.

Stock-exchange speculation was not what it was about, though he and MacLaren sometimes kidded each other that it was. Beulah City imported textiles and information and chemicals, sold clothes and software and specialized medicines. Jordan and MacLaren, and Debbie Jones on the evening shift, handled sales and purchasing for a good fraction of its companies, missions and churches. Serious stock trading was the prerogative of the Deacons and
JOSEPH
, their ethical investment expert system, but Jordan's small operation was free to risk its own fees on the market. Beulah City's biggest current commercial success was Modesty, a fashion house that ran the local rag trade and also sold clothes-making programs for
CAD/CAM
sewing machines. They'd enjoyed an unexpected boom in the post-Islamist countries while ozone depletion kept European sales of cover-up clothing buoyant – though here suncream competed. Suncream was not quite sound, and anyway the ungodly had it sewn up.

MacLaren had had a good night in Armenia. Jordan turned west and called up Xian Educational Software in New York.

‘What you offering?'
XES
asked.

Jordan scanned the list of products scrolling down his screen's left margin.

‘Creation astronomy kit, includes recent spaceprobe data, latest cosmogonies refuted. Suitable for high-school use; grade-school simplification drops out. One-twenty a copy.'

‘
WFF
approved?'

Jordan exploded the spec. The World Fundamentalist Federation logo, a stylized Adam and Eve, shone at top right. That meant it could be sold to Jewish and Muslim as well as Christian literalists: all the people of the book, the chapter, the verse, the word, the letter, the jot, the tittle.

‘Affirm.'

‘We'll take fifty thousand, an option on exclusive.'

Jordan hit a playback key: ‘God BLESS you!!'

‘Have a nice eternity.'

Go to hell. He punched a code. The software to produce exactly 5 × 10
⁴
copies of
Steady State? The Spectra Say No!
became a microwave burst. And there
was
light, Jordan thought. Oh, yeah.
He made the stars also.
They'd racked and stretched that line, tortured a whole cosmology, a whole philosophy of science out of it, until it had confessed all, admitted everything: it was a put-up job; the sky was a scam, a shop-front operation; the stars had lied about their age. The universe as afterthought, its glory an illusory afterimage…
there
was the blasphemy, there the heresy, the lie in the right hand, the spitting in Creation's face! He tilted his baseball cap and looked up at the sky beyond the tinted roof. A contrail drew a clean white line across the ravaged clouds. Jordan smiled to himself.
In this sign conquer.
Some folk believed in
UFO
s. He believed in aeroplanes.

 

He bought shares in Da Nang Phytochemicals, sold them mid-morning at 11 per cent just before a rumour of
NVC
activity in the Delta sent the stock sharply down. He shifted the tidy sum into a holding account and was scanning for fashion buyers in Manila when the graphics melted and ran into a face. A middle-aged man's kindly, craggy face, smiling like a favourite uncle. The lips moved soundlessly, subtitles sliding along the bottom line. A conspiratorial whisper of small alphanumerics:

hi there jordan this is your regional resources coordinator

Oh, my God! A Black Planner!

i'm the legitimate authority around here but i don't suppose that cuts much smack with you still i have a proposition you may find interesting.

Jordan fought the impulse to look over his shoulder, the impulse to hit the security switch and get himself off the hook.

don't worry this is untraceable our sleeper viruses have survived 20 years of electronic counterinsurgency all you have to do is make this purchase from guangzhou textiles and a sale of same to the account now at top left at cost if you key the code now at top right into the cash machine at the end of the street at 12.05 plus or minus 10 minutes you will find a small recompense in used notes i understand you have a holographic memory so i say goodbye and i hope i see you again.

The markets came back. Jordan saw his hands quiver. Until now the Black Plan had been a piece of urban folklore, the phantom hitch-hiker of the Cable, a rumoured leftover of the Republic's political economy just as the
ANR
was the remnant of its armed forces. Allegedly it godfathered the
ANR
, scorning the checkpoint taxes and protection rackets of the community militias; fiendish financial viruses were supposed to haunt the core of the system, warping the country's – some said, the world's – economy to the distant ends of the fallen regime…

He'd never given the legend any credit.

Now it was offering him cash.

Untraceable digital cash, converted into untraceable paper money, something he'd never got his hands on before. Only the privileged had access to hard currency; for anything outside of business, Jordan had to make do with shekels,
BC
's crummy funny money.

Guangzhou was busy. Try again.

He sold a Filipino a thousand gowns and let the remittance hover. Just borrowing, really. Not theft. No real conscience. Only following rules. Suppose it's a trap? A little provocateur program to sniff out embezzlement and dangerous disloyalty? He could always say…A long, rambling, stammering defence spooled through his mind, shaming him. Intellectually he understood perfectly what the problem was: guilt and doubt, the waste products of innocence and faith, inhibited him and filled him with self-loathing even at his own weakness in trying to be free of them.

Born in sin and shapen in iniquity.

Guangzhou had a line. He made the purchase, transferred it instantly to the account as specified. And it paid him. It was as if the money had never been away. He put it in the proper account and took the correct fee. No harm done. The time was 11.08.

Someone tapped his shoulder. He turned, his features reflexively composed.

Mrs Lawson smiled down at him.

‘Take ten?'

A small, bustling middle-aged woman in black and white, no make-up, no guile or allure. She worked for Audit. Smart as a snake, like the man said, and no way harmless as a pigeon. Jordan had a momentary vision of head-butting her and making a dash for it. A dash for where?

He nodded and logged off, followed as her hem swept a path to her office. An audit trail.

‘Coffee?'

‘Yes, please.'

He sat awkwardly in the chair in the corner of the tiny office. The upright reclined so he couldn't sit back without sprawling, and sitting on the edge made it difficult to look relaxed. Mrs Lawson had a swivel chair behind a pine desk. Stacks of printout. Monitor screens like the eyes of lizards. Cacti in pots along the window.

She steepled her fingers. ‘I've been keeping an eye on you, Jordan.' She giggled. ‘Not in a way that would worry my husband! You're a sharp lad, you know…No, don't look so bashful. It's not pride to be aware of your strengths. You do have an instinct, a feel for the way the markets move. I hope you'll move up a bit yourself, perhaps consider joining one of the larger businesses. However, I'm not going to offer you a job.'

Another giggle. Jordan's back crawled.

‘Except…in a way, I suppose I am. Have you noticed anything
out of the ordinary
in the system recently?'

This is it, he thought. Maybe there is a God after all, who leads you into temptation, then delivers you to evil.

‘Yes, I have,' Jordan said. ‘Only this morning, a Black Planner made me an offer—'

Mrs Lawson laughed, almost spilling her coffee.

‘Of course, of course. And in my desk I have a piece of the authentic Turing Shroud! No, seriously, Jordan, I'm talking about any kind of pattern you may have noticed in things like, oh, subsystem crashes, transaction delays, severe degradation of response-time unrelated to major obvious activity? Anything that seems like interventions, where none of the central banks are involved? To be honest, we can't find any evidence from the Exchange Commissions of' – she waved her hands – ‘anything suspicious, but several of the smaller communities have a theory that something is loose in the system, using it for ulterior noncommercial purposes in a way that shows up only at the, uh, glass roots level.'

‘What you might call “outsider dealing”?'

Mrs Lawson looked startled.

‘That's exactly what we do call it. Unfortunately it's led to rumours, very unhealthy rumours, of – you know. A word to the wise, Jordan. I wouldn't repeat that little joke of yours if I were you.'

Jordan nodded vigorously, making wiping motions with his hands.

‘Very good, my dear. Now: you will keep alert for anything that goes against your intuition as to how the market should behave, won't you? And I suppose you're keen to get back to work, so thank you for your time.'

It was 11.25.

He logged on, getting his password wrong a couple of times. The queue of orders filled one and a half screens. Jordan closed his eyes and breathed deeply, flexed his fingers and got to work. He didn't think about anything.

 

Janis hardly listened to herself as she rattled through the outlines of what she knew of the project. She was thinking that there was something oddly disproportionate about her part in it: the more she thought about it, the more important it seemed, and that didn't jibe at all with the level of resources applied…You didn't want a struggling post-doc on this, you wanted a team, lots of lab techs, equipment thrown at it like ammunition. She might be part of a team without knowing it – that was her favoured hypothesis at the moment. With every government nervously restricting biological research, confining it to F S Zees and science peaks, with big corporations looking over their shoulders at consumer groups and junk-science lawsuits, and with green terrorists topping up the restrictions with direct action – with all that, life science was itself becoming an underground guerilla activity. (She'd often wondered just what molecule or compound was responsible for hysteria and ineducability in the middle classes: it must have seeped into the food-chain sometime in the nineteen-sixties, and become ever more concentrated since.)