Fractions (8 page)

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):

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.'

The armoured car was smaller than Janis had expected, low and angular, its black so matte that it was difficult to get an idea of its exact shape: a Stealth vehicle, she thought. Inside, it looked old. Cables joined with insulating tape hung in multicoloured loops under the instrument casings. The two leather seats at the front were frayed. Two even more worn seats faced each other in the back. What appeared to be windows were wrapped around at head-level in the front, but showed nothing.

Kohn demonstrated how to strap in, and then leaned back in his seat. He reached up and flicked a switch. Nothing happened. He cursed and flicked it again. The wrap-around screens came to life as the car began to move: the effect, uncanny, vulnerable-feeling, was of riding in the open.

The vehicle was waved through the exit gate. The traffic was heavier now on the main road, and as the car slipped through it there were moments when Janis thought it was actually invisible to other drivers. Kohn seemed unperturbed.

They stopped at her flat long enough for Janis to pack a few bags, shake her head sadly over the mess, and leave a note and a credit line for Sonya. Kohn fumed and fidgeted, making a big thing of checking every room and watching from windows. Back in the car, his choice of route baffled her.

‘Why are we stopping?' Janis felt irritated that she sounded so anxious.

‘Won't be a minute,' Kohn said.

He jumped out, leaving the engine running and the gun on the seat with its muzzle pointing out of the door. Janis kept looking around. Gutted houses, boarded shopfronts, incredible numbers of people swarming along the whole street. Braziers glowed; weapons and teeth glinted in the shadows of weird crystalline buildings among ruins.

Kohn returned and dropped a package by her feet. The armoured car moved slowly down the street, avoiding children and animals. Janis looked at the package: white paper, blue lettering.

‘You stopped there to buy a kilo of sugar?'

Kohn glanced at her. ‘Don't put it in your coffee.'

They passed through a checkpoint (Kohn paid the tax in ammo clips, which struck Janis as entirely apt) and then they were out of Ruislip and back on the
A
410.

‘Afghans,' Kohn said, relaxing. ‘Don't want to sound racist or anything, but you let them move in and bang goes the neighbourhood.'

Janis looked at the soaring towers of Southall away to their right.

‘It's hardly their fault that the Indians had better antimissile systems. I saw it on the tel, back home. Manchester. It looked like a horrible firework show.'

Kohn switched to auto and leaned back, hands behind his head. Janis tried to ignore the road-tanker wheels rolling beside them.

‘Never happened,' Kohn said flatly. ‘There was no missile exchange between the Afghans and the Indians. It wasn't even the Hanoverians did that damage, another version I've heard, including from locals. No, it was the fuckinyouenn, man.'

‘The fucking you…? Oh, the
UN
! The Yanks.'

‘Yeah, the great Space Defense force, the peacekeepers. Hit them from orbit, not a damn' thing they could do.'

‘And it got covered up?'

‘Nah! They announced it! Your local tel station must've had reasons of its own for lying about it.' He shrugged. ‘There's no conspiracy.'

Janis fought down a helpless sense of chaos, a reverse paranoia.

‘How did things get this way? Don't you people have theories about history, about why things happen?' She looked at him sharply. ‘Or is your guess as good as mine? Was it all wrong what I learned in school about Marxism?'

Kohn fingered the controls unnecessarily, staring straight ahead.

‘I have my own ideas about the answer to the first question,' he said. ‘For the rest it's yes, yes, and probably. We're in the same ship as the rest of you, burning the same air. Burning it up.'

 

There was not enough violence on television, Kohn thought as he crouched behind rubble and waited for the order to attack. On television and in films the shots followed the shots, the picture gave you the picture. It was just not good enough, no preparation for the real thing. A bad influence on the young. Most of the time you never saw the enemy, even in house-to-house fighting. Most of the time you were lucky if you knew where your own side was.

He'd fought before, but that had been scuffles, rumbles. This was a real war, even if a tiny one. Somewhere in those burnt-out houses two hundred and fifty metres away were men who wanted him dead. His first fight was against unreality, the what-am-I-doing-here feeling. There was some sound political reason for it, he knew: the Indians were being backed by the government in their dispute with the Afghans, and several leftist militias were fighting on the Muslim side out of conviction. The Cats had joined in for the money.

Johnny Smith, the young Hizbollah cadre beside him, looked up from his computer, poked his Kalashnikov over the rubble and let loose a five-second burst.

‘OK, guys,' he said quietly over everyone's phones. ‘Last one dead's a sissy!'

He jumped up and over the wall, waving Kohn to follow, and sprinted up the street. Kohn found himself, without conscious decision, running after him. The gun was making a hell of a noise. Then he hit dirt behind an overturned car and glanced around to see what the rest were doing. Oh Gaia! They were running on
past
him! A mortar round crumped into where they'd been seconds earlier. Rubble thudded around him. He changed magazines and ran forward again, firing. This time he ended up slammed into a gutted shop doorway. Another figure hurtled in almost on top of him. Their armour clashed together. They fell apart. The other flipped up a visor to wipe sweat away from her face.

Her face. It was an amazing face and it was grinning like a maniac's. Kohn suddenly realized that he was too. His cheeks ached. The visor came down.

‘Come on,' she said.

Kohn saw out of the corner of his eye the corkscrew contrails spiralling lazily in—

‘
NO
!' he roared. He caught her arm and pulled, then ran straight out to the middle of the street. The ground bounced under their feet and the building came down like a curtain. A couple of klicks to the north Ruislip was going the same way.

They stuck around long enough to cover the retreat. Later Kohn remembered lugging about two-thirds of Johnny Smith towards a Red Crescent chopper and then looking down at what he carried and just dropping it, just stopping. It wasn't that there was nothing left of the man's face except the eyes – maxilla, mandible, nares blasted clean away – but that those eyes were open, unblinking, pupils not responding to the searing flashes overhead. Blood still bubbled, but Johnny Smith had been brainstem-dead for minutes. Anything worth saving had gone to his God. The organ-bankers could have the rest.

The woman had been with him when they were airlifted out through the dense smoke. And there had been another mercenary in the Mil Mi-34, one who chewed coca leaves and held on to his shattered right arm as if waiting for glue to set and kept saying, ‘Hey Moh, why do they call us Kelly girls?'

 

They swung on to the A40. Troubled by his sudden silence, Janis glanced at Kohn sidelong, and saw his face had taken on again that look – of inhuman acceptance of some deeply fallen knowledge – which had startled her when he'd come out of the trance back in his room. It passed, and the harder lines of his features returned. He was still looking at the traffic.

‘How do you feel now?' she asked.

He shivered. ‘It's like…I might have changed the world forever today, and there's this thing like – oh, hell.' He lit a cigarette, closed his eyes and sighed away the smoke. ‘You ever try to imagine seeing nothing, maybe when you were little? Not darkness: nothing. To see what it is that you don't see out of the back of your head.'

‘You mean, visualize the boundary of your visual field.'

‘There you go. Science. I knew there'd be a way to make sense of it. Anyway. If I do that now, Janis, there's
something there.
Something like' – he cat's-cradled his fingers, moved them flickering like fluent Sign – ‘that isn't like light, same as it used to be not like dark. And – you know when you wake up, and you know you've had a dream and you can't remember it?'

She felt a chill at the reminder.
Everything gets everywhere.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘I know just what you mean.'

‘Well it's like, if I try to remember, I
remember
, but I never know what it is until—'

He stopped. ‘They hit me like flashbacks. At first it was' – he struck his forehead repeatedly – ‘bang bang bang. Now I can consciously not do it. Most of the time.' He looked at her with disconcerting intentness. ‘Was that what you were aiming at? Everybody remembering everything?'

‘I never thought about it like that.'

‘Makes me ask myself, who did? Who would want people to remember?'

‘That's too…general,' she said. ‘It could have all sorts of applications – enhanced learning, delayed senility, that kind of thing.'

‘That kind of thing. Sure. But memory's more than that. Memory's everything. It's what we are.'

‘Speaking of memory—' She hesitated. ‘This is – there's something I just thought of that I want to ask you.'

‘Ask me anything you like,' he said.

She paused, then said in a rush, ‘You know what you said about the Star Fraction, about the code being something your father wrote, when you were a kid. Uh, is there a reason you can't just
ask
him—?'

She stopped again.

‘Yeah,' Kohn said flatly. ‘They got killed. My father and my mother.'

‘I'm sorry.'

He made a chopping motion with his hand. ‘Happens.'

‘Was it in the war?'

‘No,' he said. ‘It was afterwards. In the Peace Process.'

He fell into another introverted silence, his cigarette smouldering to ash that dropped off, centimetre by centimetre. Suddenly he stirred himself, stubbed out the cigarette and reached up for another switch.

‘See if we're on the news,' he said.

The windshield screen went wild and then stabilized to rapidly changing images as Kohn scanned the news channels. Every few seconds he'd mark an item; after a minute he stopped and pulled them all together.

‘Look,' he said.

Janis stared at the multiple patches of flitting pictures and sliding subtitles. After some silence she said, ‘Oh, Gaia.'

Hundreds of system crashes, all around the world. None, in themselves, terribly serious, but together they amounted to the software equivalent of a minor earth tremor set off by a nuclear detonation, ringing the globe like a bell. Detecting the source involved microsecond discriminations. Wherever anyone had bothered to do that, all the arrows pointed to London.

The Carbon Life Alliance had denied responsibility, but said they'd like to contact anyone who could plausibly claim it.

‘Think we should take them up on it?' Janis teased.

Kohn flicked the screen back to clear.

‘No doubt they'll be in touch,' he said. He turned to her. ‘Still think it was all in my head?'

‘No, but that doesn't mean your experience was what you think it was.' She felt that she had to be stubborn on this point. ‘And remember, there really are
AIS
on the nets. Nothing conscious, I'm convinced of that, but perfectly capable of fooling you. Some of them designed by highly mischievous mind-fuckers.'

‘I know that,' Kohn said. He sounded tired again. ‘Gopher-golems and such. Try to get you into
arguments.
I keep telling you, I done all that. You want me to show you my kill-files?'

‘OK, Kohn, OK.' She smiled uncertainly. ‘I'm only saying you should keep an open mind…'

Kohn laughed so loud and long that she had to join in.

‘“Keep an open mind.”'

‘You know what I
meant.
'

 

The car passed under a great concrete arch alive with lights.

‘Welcome to space,' Kohn said.

‘Oh. Yeah, I've heard of that. Extraterrestriality.'

‘A concept of dubious provenance, but it puts this place on the map.'

She laughed. ‘A five-colour map!'

‘Damn' right. We live in the fifth-colour country, the one that has no borders. The next America.'

‘I thought it was the present America that really ran things up there.'

‘“You – you are only the
present
”,' Kohn said obscurely. ‘In theory their writ runs down here too: Stasis can't get in, but Space Defense can zap us any time they want. America, huh. The
US/UN
ain't America. More like the England that tried to own the New World. More like bloody
Portugal
for all the chance it's got of succeeding. Look at these: I'll bet on them against any battlesats ever built.'

She followed his pointing finger and saw a sight she seldom bothered to notice, a flight of re-entry gliders descending from the south, black arrowheads against the sky.

‘“Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales.”' This time she knew he was quoting. ‘Costly bales, Janis, costly bales. That's where it's at. That's where I'll put my money.'

 

‘Hi, mum!'

No answer. Jordan let the door close behind him and bounded cheerfully up the stairs. The house's familiar smells of cooking and cleaning, furniture polish, soap, stew in the pot, obscurely reassured. Sometimes they made him feel as if he were suffocating, and he had to stick his head out of the skylight window, get a good breath of industrial rather than domestic air. As his two elder brothers and his sister had left home he'd inherited more and more space, and now had the entire attic to himself.