Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (14 page)

“I wanted him to join us,” she said as Brunhilde’s brake lights receded into the rain. “What I’ve been doing in the lab, he—” Then she gave up again, her shoulders slumped. I wondered when she’d last slept. Not for a long time.

“You have not been home since get here yesterday?” Kit asked.

She didn’t so much shake her head as twitch it sideways, as if she was being bothered by a wasp. “I was working. I raised the alarm and got out of the Institute as soon as the fire started, but it was already going hard before the firefighters arrived. The police questioned me for a long time, but I didn’t see anything. When they let me go, I went back to my office.”

“Went back into the Institute?” Kit asked. “You crazy?”

“Some of our windows cracked in the heat. Then the fire became so intense that it created an up-current between the buildings. It sucked the broken glass right out of the frames. The firefighters were overwhelmed at that point, so I took a couple of fire extinguishers and went over everything from the inside. Around dawn I was worried that they’d turn their hoses in through the gaps just in case and get water everywhere. So I ripped out some paneling and boarded up the damaged windows myself.”

She showed us a purple thumbnail. “Hammer.”

“Where’s Ella?” I asked Rosko.

He looked at his toes. “Dropped me off,” he said tersely, then raised his eyes and gave me a look that said
don’t ask
.

Kit asked. Or rather, guessed. “Argument, yes?”

“Sort of.”

“She is so frustrated with you for not getting message, lots of hints and no response, so pretty much puts tongue in your ear. And you tell her you’re not interested. Which hurts her feelings, sure.”

He didn’t say anything, and he didn’t have to. “Yekaterina,” Natazscha said. “This is not the time. Come on. Let’s get this done.”

Police were stationed by a barrier at the north entrance, waving people away. But it was hard to seal the campus thoroughly; only twenty yards farther on, under the cover of an illegally parked truck, we dodged through a hedge and were in. We skirted the edge of a parking lot opposite the Burke Museum and followed the avenue of maples that runs downhill toward the war memorial. The big trees loomed and billowed above us like the ruined umbrellas of giants. Patches of gravel-colored sky showed through the branches. No light here except some old ornamental fixtures, hexagonal glass crowns throwing down feeble rings of bile-colored light. Even so, we stuck to the dark gulfs in between. There was a strange peacefulness there: no one around, and little sound except the wind, the distant traffic, and the muffled, too-distant-to-catch sound of an amplified voice.

About halfway to the Institute we crossed a driveway near the great prow of the law school. Natazscha was leading, with you and me next, and Rosko and Kit behind us. There was no one else around. But, as you stepped up onto the curb on that side, you flinched violently and darted a look to your right.

It was as if you’d been startled by a noise—and there, a full second after you reacted, it was. Rustling. Like someone trying to extract a sandwich from a paper bag. Then silence. And then a deafening, ragged, multipitch squeal, like tearing sheet metal.

The squeal froze us all to the spot. It was so shocking, so out of place, for a moment I thought I’d imagined it.

After a second squeal, even more piercing than the first, two fat raccoons fell squabbling from a branch. They landed ten feet away and stared back at us as if amazed, rigid on the tips of their toes. They shifted their heads slightly, in unison: left, right, down, up. Sniffing, thinking, sampling the wind. When they’d seen enough, smelled enough, they wailed at each other again, turned their backs, and lumbered away under the cover of a rhododendron.

“Scheisse,” Rosko said, and blew out a long breath. “Now I have to get online and order a new set of heart valves.”

The timing of your reaction, which I’d thrust out of my mind for a second, came back to me then in all its oddness. What was going on with you? Way better hearing, all of a sudden? That would be a nice simple theory, wouldn’t it, and Bill always said you should go for the simple theory first. But after some of the things you’d said, and what Partridge had said about seers, I’d become tempted by the nutty theory, the impossible theory, which was that you’d known the sound was going to happen before it happened.

Down the slope from the law school, George Washington stood high on his plinth at the university’s west entrance. He was directly between us and the fire scene at the library: silhouetted against a flood of yellow emergency lights, he looked like a miserable commuter waiting for the last bus home. To his left, the gray outline of the Institute hid all but a corner of the library.

There were police cars and fire trucks everywhere, and a truck from a TV station, and a line of people holding up their phones. Half a dozen officers were manhandling railings and herding the gawkers back toward the street.

When the library came into view, I was amazed that so much damage could have been done. I mean, a four-story 1960s brick-and-concrete book-fortress: somehow you didn’t imagine it could burn at all, but it had been reduced to an eyeless, soot-blackened skull. At one end, where a wall had collapsed, a hook-and-ladder crew was playing a hose over a bird’s nest of steel beams. An ambulance crew lounged and waited. Yellow crime scene tape was wrapped around the whole area, including the Institute.

“This way,” Natazscha said, but you contradicted her sharply—“No!”—and led us back around the other side, toward the university’s brick central square.

“Seraphim.”

And sure enough, there was a crowd the police seemed to be watching but dared not disperse. Five or six hundred people were ranged across the square in neat rows, like toy soldiers, facing the burned shell. Heads uncovered and oblivious to the rain, they each wore the thin white scarf. And every one of them held their hands up in front, as you had on Ararat, as if raising an invisible offering.

And they chanted together:

Op-JOL-ye

Xum-IL-bek

Dal-PA-min

Voh-CHAL-voh

Rem-YE-lut

Kee-HAN-dja

You began to nod and join in. With Kit’s help I started to drag you away, back toward the Institute, hoping we’d be out of earshot there, but you held back, looking over your shoulder, not wanting to leave. Following your gaze, I saw that a solitary man with a megaphone standing on a wall was directing the chant from one side. He raised his arm, and they pivoted as one to face the other way—southeast, down the slope, toward where the outline of Mount Rainier was supposed to make the campus picture perfect on a clear enough day.

“Tahoma,” you said.

“Tahoma, Daniel, yes,” Natazscha said. “That’s the original Native American name. You climbed it with Rosko. And Iona.”

Even though it was invisible under a sixty-mile blanket of darkness and rain, you stared as if you could see it and made the gesture you’d made after Ararat: reaching out with your palm stretched wide, as if trying to pick it up off the sky.

Over the crackle of a police radio we heard the man with the megaphone speaking. It was the voice we’d heard before, still distorted, and we leaned forward, held ourselves tense, trying to make out the words.

“The world must burn,” he said. “All the languages and cultures of the world must burn in order for us to be cleansed. Only then will we know the true fire. Only then will we be ready.
Aka-PEL-ten, jat-AM-rok, or-OM-aku.
”

Six hundred voices answered him. It was only a drone, really, like a church service heard from outside the building, but they were repeating it: “Only then will we know the true fire.
Aka-PEL-ten, jat-AM-rok, or-OM-aku
.”

A deep voice behind us made me jump. “Campus is closed. I need you to leave the area, please.”

Two police officers, a man and a woman. I wanted to start an argument and point out that they didn’t seem to need the Seraphim to leave. Luckily Natazscha had more sense. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, the picture of meekness. “I work here, you see, and I was talking to one of your colleagues. My daughter and her friends came to pick me up. We were just leaving.”

It wasn’t a very good lie, but if either of them wondered how the daughter and friends had got onto campus, they didn’t say so. “Go on, then,” the woman said in a kindly voice.

Natazscha led us back in the direction of the car, then took a detour into a stand of dripping trees. We waited there until the officers had moved on.

“Let’s try that again,” she said.

C
HAPTER
9

FOXQ3

“Quickly,” Natazscha said.

The rain hadn’t let up, and the wind had risen to a roar. ISOC’s blank rear wall gave us some protection, plus it was in shadow. But as soon as we followed her around the corner of the building, we were hit in the face by a huge wet squall—and the firefighters’ lights. She scurried along with her shoulder almost touching the wet brick and stopped at a side door. The whole building had been encircled in yellow tape, like a gift; where the tape ran across the door, she seized it angrily and pulled with both hands until the plastic stretched and separated.

“I feel as if I’m breaking into my own lab,” she said.

“You are,” Rosko offered helpfully, detaching one end of the broken tape from where the wind had blown it across his shoulder.

She took out an ID card and waved it in front of a black plastic scanner. Nothing happened. She wiped the card on her dress and tried again. Nothing.

Where we stood, we were completely exposed. Down toward the library, or what was left of it, I could see a line of four backhoes parked at the edge of a collapsed wall. They looked like a line of dead bees, pinned to a board in a museum collection. Two figures were standing by one of them. Ants. It was impossible to tell if they were looking our way.

Natazscha tried the card reader a third time, and a fourth. “Maybe the university security already resets the locks?” Kit said. My thought exactly, and I spared a split second to savor how wonderful it felt that Kit sometimes had my thoughts exactly. But we were wrong. Fifth time lucky: when Natazscha held the card steady for a few seconds, a green light winked and the latch clacked. When she’d opened the door, I took your hand and steered you inside.

“He’s here,” you said. “He’s here.”

“Who’s here, D?” But you shook your head and frowned, like a swimmer with water in your ears. Like you were picking up a faint signal but couldn’t hear the message.

Rosko turned to close the door behind us. He didn’t need to: with a sound like a plane coming in to land, a strong gust came along the outside wall and almost ripped the handle from his grip. The metal door was sucked back into its frame by the negative pressure.

With the noise abruptly turned off, the silence inside was oppressive. I had a feeling of being sealed in, as if we were a rescue team in a sci-fi movie, closing the air lock after arriving at a mysteriously abandoned moon base. Deep synthesizer music would have been appropriate. Maybe with a tremor in it, and a tinkling four-note piano line in the background, to foreshadow the creepy surprise lying in wait.

“Don’t turn any lights on,” Natazscha said. We didn’t need to: ISOC’s thoughtful, limitless-budget designers had installed soft green emergency lighting at floor level; it made the place seem like an underwater cave, but it was plenty to see by. As my eyes adjusted, I also became aware of a gauzy bride’s veil of white light in the direction of the main entrance. Silently we moved toward it. When we emerged into the big polished foyer, we saw that the light was coming from the hundreds of tiny LEDs they’d used to tastefully backlight Charlie Balakrishnan’s famous founding quotation:

INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS

B
ACTERIA ARE NOT CONSCIOUS
. B
UT WE ARE, AND WE EVOLVED FROM THEM
. S
O WHEN
 . . . ? W
HERE
 . . . ? W
HAT
 . . . ?

Et cetera.

“Excellent questions,” Rosko said. “Charlie B’s a deep thinker. What’s the relationship between the lurching heap of stuff we call a body and the mystery spark that makes it lurch? Soul, psyche. Mind, spirit. Geist, atman. What is it?”

“I think that was the issue until Darwin,” Natazscha said. “Since 1859, the question has been different. Not what the mind is, but when did it show up? Hence the name.”

It was a funny moment. I’d always thought that unraveling the mystery of consciousness by unraveling
where it came from
was a super-cool project, ever since your dad first told me about it, and I didn’t mind which version of the question people asked so long as they were asking it. Plus, Darwin was one of my heroes. But a seed of doubt that I couldn’t quite name had taken root in me. Perhaps it was reading Shul-hura. Perhaps it was seeing the Architects and having to live with the brute fact of their existence. But something had shifted in me. We’d had a century and a half of like-wowsa, OMG progress in evolutionary theory, genetics, molecular bio, cell bio, computational modeling, and cognitive psych. We knew about protein folding, glial cells, and mirror neurons. We had CAT and PET and fMRI. And how much better did we understand
consciousness
? Roll the drums! Crank up the spotlights! Whisk the magician’s handkerchief off the top hat, and look—it’s a stone-dead bunny rabbit.
The science blogs are full to choking with smiley, clueless, upbeat crap about Vast Strides in Neuroscience. Meanwhile the truth, which no one wants to admit, is that when it comes to the mind, we don’t have a single effing ghost of a freaking clue.

What if that’s because we’re on completely the wrong track?

What if Mayo knew that?

My train of thought was interrupted by a squall hitting the glass front doors, sending rivulets of water scurrying down the panes, and we heard the wind again, barely, like someone moving wooden barrels in the distance.

“Is it right that Balakrishnan builds this place after he comes to Seattle to do business with Iona?” Kit asked.

Natazscha nodded. “Daniel’s mother’s company had a data-encryption contract with BalakInd in Delhi. But they discovered all sorts of mutual interests in mathematics, information theory, that kind of thing. Come on. This way.”

Two flights up, we emerged directly into the second-floor lab, though
lab
didn’t seem the right word—it felt more like the break room at a nerdboy start-up. Dartboard, game controllers. A discarded transparent snack wrapper that probably once contained a vending-machine Danish. On the floor, the bleached, crushed shells of long-dead lattes.

“Mathematicians,” Natazscha said apologetically, as if that explained the trash. “Maynard Jones called them Iona’s Boys. Because they’re all boys, and half of them used to work for her.”

Behind the big glass security door at the north end was ISOC’s malfunctioning brain—sixteen matte-black monoliths arranged in two rows. Each unit was two feet thick by four wide by eight tall. They didn’t look like machines. They looked like something carved from blocks of obsidian eons ago to impress or appease the inscrutable silent gods. Some wit had taped up a sign next to the door: “Office of Mr. Turing.”

“It’s named after the British guy who came up with the idea that fundamentally, everything is computable,” Rosko said to Kit.

Kit rolled her eyes. “I know who is this Alan Turing. I am B-plus student, Rosko Eisler, but this is not implying I am total know-nothing, yes? We do about him in history class. Super-amazing Second World War code breaker, defeats Nazis single-handed, blah blah. Then commits suicide when they find out he is picking up men in the pub.”

“It’s an incredible machine,” he said. “One of the fastest in the world. Isn’t that right, Natazscha?”

“Oo-oh,” Kit said, peering in through the glass and drawing out her lack of enthusiasm into two long syllables. “Big black boxes. Possibly I faint with excitement. But is not so powerful right now?”

“No,” Natazscha said “Rosko’s right, in theory. But it’s been acting up for two weeks, and now it’s completely out.”

The “Mr. Turing” label seemed all wrong to me. He’d been an übermisfit, a passionate, quirky human genius, and his disciples here, with their bright ideas and bad diets, had made the mistake of memorializing him in this silent, soulless reasoning machine—the thing he’d predicted, not the thing he’d been. Natazscha had said that with Mayo’s eager involvement, they were working on brain-body interaction and “virtual awareness.” Were they trying to make computational systems that came ever closer to the quirks and capabilities of a funny, passionate, awkward human genius? Or did they, like some of the Extenders, think that human beings—Turing and themselves included—were a kludge? A halfway house? A wet computer, slapped together badly by brute Darwinian forces and, like a leaky old house, ripe for improvement?

“You said this was mainly for Mayo’s benefit?” Rosko asked.

“David’s blue-sky project was using it, along with the muon scanner upstairs, to create a full digital model of at least some parts of the brain. He said he wanted to capture consciousness ‘like a mouse in a trap.’ Which struck me as a rather unpleasant way of putting it.”

He pawed the glass. “Can you get me in?”

The answer was no. Even after repeated polishing and swiping on the polyester house dress, her card wouldn’t open Mr. Turing’s door.

The third floor had all the lab gear you’d expect—sinks, emergency eyewash stations, fume hoods. Natazscha pointed out each piece of equipment as we passed like it was a member of her personal team. “Magnetometer. Atomic force microscope. Nano-balance. Gyroscope. Cesium-fountain atomic clock.”

The scanner stood in its own bay, next to Natazscha’s office door, on which an overburdened metal sign was etched with the words
“Professor Natazscha P. Cerenkov, Human Genetics & Epigenetics, Hominin Paleoanthropology, Paleolinguistics.”

“This way,” she said, hurrying us past. She sat down at a desk next to the scanner, motioned for me to sit in what looked like an upscale dentist’s chair, and clipped a heart-rate monitor to my finger.

“I can’t do much without the main computer,” she said. “But I can run enough of this off my local drive to show you how it works and what I discovered.”

“You are being like this is big secret,” Kit said.

Natazscha ignored her to focus on the machine, fiddling with the dials and muttering in Russian. Silent as a feather, a gleaming ceramic helmet on a telescopic arm descended from the ceiling above me.

“Looks like robot’s skull from a comic book, yah?” Kit said. She was right. It was head shaped, but the simple, slightly curved geometry made it look menacingly alien—like something that might be puzzled by its own awareness, puzzled by its own origin, and not sure whether it’s an organism or a machine. Rosko voiced my thoughts: “Balakrishnan’s rivet-jockeys thought they were just making a medical tool,” he said. “But you can kind of tell they were raised on
Star Wars
. Trust the Force, Luke.”

“Yah,” Kit said. “Or maybe just trust paycheck.”

“I don’t think an actor would be very happy wearing this,” Natazscha said. “The interior is tungsten, which has the same density as gold, and it weighs fifty kilos.” Her fingers attacked the keyboard. The sound was like rain on the fly of a tent. The helmet descended over my head and I heard, or felt, a low hum somewhere around my temples.

“Hold still, Morag. Your head is moving too much.”

“Sorry.”

“I have noticed, she does this head bobble thing when she is worrying,” Kit said. “Right now, she worrying all the time.” Kit had kicked off her bright-yellow running flats and was sitting with you on a small love seat, her long hair swept forward over one shoulder and her long legs tucked neatly beneath her. She’d hooked her arm through yours and put her head against your shoulder, which, ridiculously, I found annoying. But then she caught my eye, and something about her expression melted the emotion. It was like,
It’s OK. I’m here. You can rely on me.
She slowly pursed her lips into the most delicate suggestion of a kiss, and it was such a perfectly judged gesture that my heart started to thrash around like a fish on a hook.

“What was that, Morag?” Natazscha said, peering in surprise at a readout.

Emotions! So embarrassing!

Um, well, Natazscha, it’s like this. Your daughter showed me an intimate sign of affection, and I wasn’t expecting it, or not right at that moment, so I felt a rush of embarrassment, but also at the same time this intense, warm-as-a-bath, overwhelming happiness. And embarrassment that I could so easily be made so happy, along with annoyance at being so easily manipulated, and puzzlement because I wasn’t sure whether I was annoyed at being manipulated by Kit, or only annoyed at being manipulated by my own emotions about her, and oh, by the way, is that a clear distinction in the first place? And I felt a strong desire to reach out and touch her, but let’s not go there, because you’re her mother and this is embarrassing enough already. I was hesitant about returning Kit’s gesture, so I didn’t, which made me feel bad. And I could tell that I was blushing, and I was annoyed at being unable to control these unconscious somatic responses, which is stupid because, as you of all people must know, you can’t control a mechanism that was installed in the brain stem a hundred million years before the rest of the human cauliflower even evolved. I also thought—for a while, maybe an hour or two, or maybe seventeen thousandths of a second, it’s hard to say—about the strangeness of having all those good but confused feelings in the midst of all my other current feelings of anxiety, dislocation, stress, guilt, fear, and—