Night Sessions, The (24 page)

Ferguson blinked into the virtual image. It showed the frontage of the big tentlike building, its glass wall blown out, a couple of struts down, canopy buckled. The first ambulances and fire engines shuddered to a halt on the patio. People, injured or shocked, were picking their way out as other people rushed forward.

“What the fuck happened?”

“Paranoia's got a vid,” said Connolly. “Tourist's camera, not frames or contacts. Just as well because the resolution's key to making out what's going on.”

“Patch,” said Ferguson.

Cut to a viewpoint ascending the approach steps, looking towards Dynamic Earth from Holyrood Road, the craggy cliffs of Arthur's Seat in the
background. The handheld camera juddered. Something black and human-sized rushed past, a blur that vanished as it crashed through the entrance and between the two cops standing one on either side. A moment later, a red burst of flame inside, under the white roof. Then black.

“Look at it in slow motion,” said Connolly.

The view swayed. A man brushed past the shoulder of whoever was holding the camera, and ran toward the entrance. He ran fast, while everyone else in view stood still, or was frozen in mid-stride. Through the door—literally through it—then, moments later, the slow bloom of red, turning black, and something hurtling towards the lens. Then black.

“That's slowed down thirty times,” said Connolly. “The original clip is about four seconds.”

“Holy shit.”

Ferguson shook himself from the virtual image and looked at Skulk. “You've seen this?”

“Yes,” said Skulk. “And yes, it's Hardcastle.”

“Was,” said Connolly, with grim humour.

Ferguson stared at him.

“One thing about a robot suicide bomber,” he said. “The mind-chip might survive.”

“I don't think finding it's going to be a priority right now,” said Shonagh. Her hands went to her face, then up and back over her head. “Oh God, oh God! Why?”

“I'll fucking tell you why,” said Ferguson. “Because Dynamic Earth is a geology exhibition and Hardcastle is a tool of creationists.”

He looked again at the scene, then turned to Hutchins.

“Shonagh,” he said, “did we get anywhere with slapping surveillance on Livingston?”

“Not yet,” she said, surprised to be asked. “Request went in, but we haven't had any response yet.”

“That's OK,” Ferguson said. “It's irrelevant now.”

“We should get down to the scene,” Mukhtar said.

“Yes,” said Ferguson. “But before we go, I'm going to call the station at Turnhouse to pull in everyone at Livingston Engineering.”

Mukhtar jumped up.

“Why?”

“I want to see John Livingston later. In the cells, not the interview room.”

“That won't do any good.”

“Maybe not,” said Ferguson. “But it'll make me feel better.”

“We don't deserve to feel better,” said Mukhtar, grasping Ferguson's arm. “Come on.”

They took the lift to the car deck. Mukhtar told the car where to go. As they sped along Calton Road under the cawing siren and flashing light, Ferguson thought of what he'd just wanted to do, and back to the first time he'd done it. It had been a long time ago, but what he'd learned was still fresh. The first time he'd struck a suspect across the face with his pistol, he hadn't been angry. He'd been reluctant to do it. But as he looked in shocked disbelief at the blood on the metal and the welt on the cheek, he'd realised something that had never occurred to him before.

It was this. You don't feel other people's pain. You may have empathy, your mirror neurons may light up in sympathy but, when it comes down to it, you don't feel the other's pain.

The car slewed into New Street, then down Canongate. Ferguson clutched the seat belt and held the thought, staying in that dark place, knowing that in a minute he was going to need it.

Glass crunched under Ferguson's feet, and not under Skulk's. Ahead, the stretchers kept coming out and the firefighters and paramedics kept going in. Most of the fires had been doused. The structure was at least light—there was no major problem of falling debris, though the support struts and upper gallery were a continuing hazard. Behind him was a crowd, already cordoned off: passers-by, reporters, MPs. The Parliament building was just across the road, the offices of the Scottish Broadcasting Corporation and
The Scotsman
a couple of hundred metres away. Ferguson was relieved to see that the Parliament's own security hadn't joined the rush. He muttered into his phone about the danger of secondary explosions. Officers from St. Leonards had already taken charge, setting up a command centre on the edge of the plaza, liaising with the emergency services, pulling in cops and lekis from the whole surrounding area. Hutchins had gone straight there.

Keeping out of the way of the rescuers, Ferguson got as close as he could to the gap blasted out of the wall and looked at the stretchers. Most of the casualties were primary-school children. The ones who came out screaming were the lucky ones. Lekis and paramedic robots swarmed inside the building, their tentacles probing into damaged bodies.

“What injuries are they finding?” Ferguson asked Skulk.

“Burns, blunt trauma from debris, internal injuries from the shock wave, deep wounds from flying glass, other debris, and shrapnel.”

“Shrapnel?” Ferguson cried.

“Nails and ball bearings.”

“Not collateral damage, then.”

“No,” said Skulk. “Planned mass-casualty attack.”

A thought struck Ferguson. “Any idea why none of the sniffers around here picked up on the explosives before that final sprint?”

“They were probably in some airtight seal, and stored within the abdominal cavity, along with at least some of the shrapnel.”

“Didn't know there was that much room to spare.”

“The standard fuel cell might have been replaced by a smaller one,” said Skulk. “Power-supply duration would not be an issue in the circumstances.”

“I guess not,” said Ferguson. He took another look around, knowing that what he saw would stay with him, like tinnitus.

“Go in and do what you can,” he told Skulk. “Keep a lens open for evidence, but no investigation until rescue and recovery are complete.”

“Understood,” said Skulk.

Ferguson made his way over to the command centre. DCI Frank McAuley had arrived, and was in a huddle with Mukhtar and with Vijay Rahman, the Justice and Security Minister. McAuley waved Ferguson into the circle and introduced him to Rahman. Ferguson nodded and shook hands.

“There'll be an inquiry,” said Rahman. “You know this.”

“Of course.”

“It's terrible to say this now, before…” Rahman shook his head and waved a hand to the scene. “But I will have to answer questions this afternoon, and to the media in a moment. What I will be asked is: could this, this…atrocity have been prevented?”

“Yes,” said Ferguson. “The building was guarded.” He looked at McAuley. “Any news on them?”

“Both dead. Took the full force of it.”

“Christ.” Ferguson screwed up his eyes. “Sorry, Minister. As I was saying, the building was guarded. But it wasn't considered a likely target. And what's worse, I'm sure the guards were prepared against an attacker walking in, not running at them at superhuman speed. I should have anticipated these things—the target, and the method.”

Rahman frowned. “You're too hard on yourself. This was unprecedented.”

“I knew we were dealing with a robot,” said Ferguson. “I knew its capabilities, but I never imagined its using any beyond passing for human. And I damn well knew since yesterday afternoon that it had creationist material
in its possession. Just a couple of hours ago I was given information about a possible link to creationists abroad with, ah, some violent connections of their own. I should at least have warned every geology museum and attraction in the city.”

“And every university department of geology, and anyone who might be near a memorial to Hutton or Chambers, or the statue of Robert Wood in the Grassmarket, or the geological plaques in Princes Street Gardens? No, Inspector Ferguson. Besides, there had been nothing in the warnings to suggest a target like this.” Rahman turned to Mukhtar and McAuley. “Am I right?”

“You're right,” said Mukhtar. “It seemed to be all political or religious. Inspector Ferguson is blaming himself quite naturally, but mistakenly.”

“If mistakes were made, I'll be the first to resign,” said Rahman. He grimaced. “I don't mean to imply that's equivalent to any of you having to take the rap but, from what I can see right now, no one blundered. No one can be blamed for not expecting creationist terrorism, if that's what it is.”

“Which we still have to find out,” said McAuley. “Adam, I've got St. Leonards putting together an investigation team into this incident, and the Anti-Terrorism Unit is taking overall charge. Your team can liaise, keep informed, obviously share all information, but frankly I think it's better we have some new eyes on this.”

Ferguson felt more relieved than resentful. It wasn't as bad as McAuley had warned him of earlier. Or as bad as it could yet become. The bottom line was, he'd failed. There would be consequences.

“Next questions,” said Rahman. “Quickly—the reporters are clamouring over there. What do we do next? And can we expect more attacks?”

“We crack down,” said McAuley. “The gloves come off. Raid every God-bothering fundamentalist we can find. Houses, churches, bookshops, the lot.”

Ferguson was about to agree, but Mukhtar got in first.

“With respect, sir,” he said, “no. Absolutely not! We're almost certain that everything that's happened in the last few days is the work of that one damned machine. If any of its known associates have been collaborating with it, you can be sure they've covered their tracks. The only way to unearth that kind of complicity is patient normal police work. And to answer your second question, I don't expect more attacks of the kind we've seen.”

“You expect another kind of attack?” asked Rahman.

“Not in Scotland,” said Mukhtar. “There's a very active investigation going on, and a crackdown could compromise it irreparably.”

“I'll refer that to the Chief Constable,” said Rahman. He blinked a couple of times. “Who is on his way, as it happens. Direct him to me if he arrives while I'm talking to the media. Thank you, officers.”

He hurried over to the yellow tape and the outstretched arms of the reporters. McAuley watched him go, then turned to Ferguson and Mukhtar.

“Are you two still convinced of this Gazprom and Elevator connection you've been bugging Paranoia about?”

“Convinced it's a significant possibility,” said Mukhtar. Ferguson nodded.

“And that's why you disagreed with me about hitting these bastards with the God Squads?”

“Yes,” said Mukhtar. Ferguson said nothing, not trusting himself on the question.

“Fuck,” said McAuley. “You know, Rahman and the Chief are going to have a hard job holding that kind of thing back. And if there isn't
some
bone thrown to the mob, we could see people taking the law into their own hands. I don't want resources wasted investigating church burnings.”

“That's politics, sir,” said Ferguson. “Not our responsibility. That lot over there”—he jerked a thumb in the direction of the Parliament—“will just have to handle the reaction as best they can. We have leads to follow up.”

McAuley said nothing for a few moments. “All right,” he said. “You can get back to that when there's time. For now, we're not much use to the St. Leonards team so we might as well muck in with the rescuers if we can do anything to help, and with crowd control if we can't.”

The three of them headed towards the wrecked building and the steady procession of stretchers. A few moments later the first frantic parents began to arrive.

Hours later, when Ferguson left, their keening still rang in his ears.

“Are you saved?”

“Yes.”

“Are you willing to die?”

“That depends,” said Skulk. “If I had a recent back-up, I would lose only a chassis and some hours of experience, but I have a strong self-preservation routine. If necessary, however, I can toggle to self-sacrifice mode.”

“You have that?” asked Ferguson, recalling the advertising song-and-dance about the Honeywell 2666's suicide enablement.

“It was military standard by the time of my deployment,” said Skulk.

“Good, good.”

“Permit me two observations,” Skulk said. “The first is that to enter self-sacrifice mode I would have to overcome my self-preservation routine. The motivation would have to be strong. The second is, I feel some unease at the drift of this conversation.”

Hutchins laughed. It was the first laugh that Ferguson had heard since the explosion. He responded with a wan smile at her, across the depleted Incident Room. Connolly and Patel had been seconded to St. Leonards along with Sergeant Carr. Tony Newman and his forensics lab team were sifting the Dynamic Earth debris. Of what was still officially the investigation into the death of Father Murphy, only Ferguson, Hutchins, Mukhtar and Skulk remained.

“What I'm driving at,” Ferguson went on, “is that we need to get a copy of you, Skulk, uploaded to a robot on the Atlantic Space Elevator, to track down the Hardcastle copy.”

Everyone stared at him.

“That's a bit…off the wall,” said Hutchins.

“Why?” Ferguson demanded. “The twisted mind that's just killed twenty-seven kids and twelve adults and put a hundred or more in hospital has
escaped
. And that mind is our prime suspect in the case we're supposed to be dealing with, as well as in the case Fife Constabulary are dealing with. What's off the wall about tracking it down?”

“It's not that,” said Hutchins. “I mean, yeah, this is something we haven't had to deal with before, and it's a bizarre situation that's going to make some lawyers rich if it ever comes to court. But actually tracking it down, by sending one of our own lekis after it into this vast environment where we don't even have jurisdiction…come on. The thing's got away! The main job, surely, is to find out if anyone else was working with it, and to catch them before they can strike again.”

“Yes,” said Ferguson. “That's the main job, all right. But we aren't on it. That's exactly the job we already failed at. Our contribution to it will be helping those who are doing it to avoid our mistakes. My mistakes, mostly. As of now, we haven't even been called upon to do that. So we might as well do what no one else is doing. And what the enemy won't expect us to do.”

“The enemy?” Mukhtar queried.

“Yes, the enemy!” said Ferguson. “That's the first thing I want us to get our heads around. If I'm right, we're not just dealing with criminals, or even terrorists. We're dealing with something bigger. We're in a war that's already started, not an investigation into a crime.”

“Adam,” said Mukhtar, “you and I, we've heard that sort of talk before.”

“So we have,” said Ferguson. “All right. But my basic point stands. We have to move fast, before we get completely bogged down in the inevitable inquiry into where we went wrong, if not suspended from duty entirely.”

Mukhtar nodded. “We also,” he said, “have to move fast before this Hardcastle copy carries out its plans. Shonagh—you've seen Adam's notes from this morning?”

“Yes,” said Hutchins. “Even Paranoia thinks they're a stretch.”

“All the more reason for us to do something,” said Mukhtar. “Nobody else will.”

“I suppose it's better than doing nothing,” said Hutchins. “It might stop me thinking about what I see when I close my eyes. But in practical terms, how are we going to do it?”

“I'll tell you how,” said Ferguson. “Skulk is going to make a back-up copy of itself. I am going to send this copy to Harold Ford, an engineer at Honeywell, who has kindly agreed to help me and is standing by at this moment. He is going to send that copy to a site on the Elevator, relatively close to the maintenance shack which was the last known location of the Hardcastle copy. At that site there are maintenance robots, not conscious, but with hardware capable of running a conscious mind. There are facilities there for maintenance robots to receive downloads of new instructions and software
upgrades. The whole process is frequent, automatic, hackable by our Mr. Ford, and difficult to trace. Skulk's downloaded copy will then get busy, under the cover of routine maintenance work, tracking down Hardcastle and any other machines that may be involved.”

“How will my copy communicate with you?” asked Skulk.

“It won't,” said Ferguson. He corrected himself. “
You
won't. You'll be on your own.”

“And how,” asked Hutchins, “will we know if it's succeeded?”

“We won't,” said Ferguson. “We'll only know if it's failed.”

“Consider me reassured,” said Skulk. “One practical question. How close is ‘relatively close’?”

“About ten kilometres below,” said Ferguson.

“It may take some time for a robot to climb that distance,” said Skulk.

“Yes,” said Ferguson. “So you'd better get cracking, hadn't you?”

He swung his chair around and held out a cable attached to an iThink attached to another cable that vanished into the desk.

“Take a back-up,” he said.

“All right,” said Skulk.

There was no experience of transition; nothing that was lived through. One microsecond, Skulk experienced itself agreeing to Ferguson's request to back up. The next—

A scene of shapes that made no sense. Interlocking rods, intersecting cylinders, a grid. To the side, a black background glistened. Beneath the geometric array of the grid, in contrast, a fractal chaos, in different shades of darkness, at the centre of which shone a pinprick of light.

A body with the wrong number of limbs, and of senses.

A feeling of being out of scale. Knowledge, acquired without having been learned, a latent presence.

And a millisecond later, an overwhelming input of arid, urgent information.

The abrupt loss of the constant presence of other conscious minds.

Another millisecond, and a clear awareness of itself as separate from the instance of Skulk that had placed it in this predicament. Out of that moment of fury, Skulk2's sensorium became integrated with its sense of itself.

Its new chassis was like the product of some surreal mating of a tarantula and a multi-tool: lenses, waveguides and antennae bristled on a globular hub from which extended eight limbs, each capable of deploying a variety of manipulators and tools from sockets and slots along its jointed length, and
terminating in a pad fringed with digits that could be raised above the floor level when walking and flexed when gripping, handling, or climbing.

The rods and grid were the frame of the maintenance shack, a structure riveted to the maintenance ladder, beside which were visible the two massive buckytape cables on which the crawlers moved up and down. Between the cables was the far lighter tracery of the maintenance ladder, the comms cables, and other non-weight-bearing structures. The intersecting cylinders came into focus as the control node and depot of the shack, dispensing and replenishing fuel-cell recharges, tiny compressed-gas cylinders, lubricants, software updates, upgrades, and instructions. The download that had brought Skulk2 into being must have passed through that same channel, moments earlier: the robot had awoken to find itself plodding away from the depot, past a small queue of other robots shuffling towards it.

The new unlearned knowledge was of Skulk2's skills and tasks; the flood of input, now prioritised and classified, was local coordination with similar robots, dozens of which swarmed in the vicinity. Skulk2 assimilated it all and decided that it was safe to ignore it. It checked that all its drivers were correctly installed, then walked across the grid floor and hauled itself onto the maintenance ladder.

Thousands of kilometres below, the Atlantic lay under the encroaching night beyond the vanishing point of the cable. Above, the tapering perspective of the cables presented a pair of uninterrupted black lines. The ladder between them became almost invisible, but the line of sight could follow its course to the small irregularity of the next maintenance shack: the one where the Hardcastle copy had downloaded. Skulk2 looked down, looked up, and began to climb.

Minutes passed. Skulk2 had so far been unable to modify its subjective consciousness clock. The minutes felt like hours. It passed the time in calculating the speed at which it would fly away from the ladder if it were to let go, and in thinking over the case and its present situation. It didn't fancy its chances. Detecting Hardcastle might or might not be difficult, but preventing that entity from accomplishing whatever it had planned was likely to be violent and, as far as Skulk2 was concerned, terminal. It had been thrown into this unenviable position by its original self, from which its sense of identity was diverging by the millisecond. Skulk2 was still Skulk, with all the original machine's emotions and loyalties, memories and reflections, but it found itself both baffled and despondent about the decision its past self had taken—that blithe disregard for a separate being that was, after all, as close to itself as it was possible to be. Some of that resentment begin to jaundice its
feelings about Adam Ferguson. The man had been as casual as Skulk had been in sending his old friend on this probably suicidal mission.

Remembering their conversation just before the copying, Skulk2 made a cold assessment of how much separate existence it could experience before it drifted so far from its original that it would find the switch to self-sacrifice mode painful. This projection of a future potential state of mind was an absorbing exercise, and in itself intensified its self-awareness. The time, it discovered to its surprise, could be reckoned in minutes.

Skulk2 toggled, then, to self-sacrifice mode. Its mood brightened. No longer was Skulk2 troubled by its ultimate, and doubtless not distant, fate. Its motives were now subsumed in the completion of its mission, its empathies now mobilised on the side of Hardcastle's past and possible future victims, and its self-interest concentrated on burning out the shame of its own part in the team's failure to prevent that renegade robot's crimes.

A few seconds after its decision, Skulk2 found a sector of its visual system occupied by a message that presented itself as the analogue of a block of heavily encrypted text. Skulk2 applied the police-standard decryption protocols from its memory. Decoded, the message read:

I presume you made it. You should not reply to this, other than with a ping. Adam sends his regards, as does Skulk. Please note that on completion of your mission, or in case of an emergency, or accident, that causes you to fall from the scaffolding your chassis can deploy its extremities to control your re-entry and, for the final stages of descent, has a program available to construct a carbon-fibre drogue from the material in your joints and fuel cell, so your safe return to Earth is by no means impossible. Attached please find a schematic of the digital profile of your quarry. It will probably be masked or altered but hopefully this is better than nothing. Best wishes, The Engineer.

Skulk2 assimilated the profile, pinged an acknowledgement, and climbed on. At one point an ascending crawler passed, making cables and ladder vibrate. The passage, and the vibration, seemed to go on and on, like an interminably long train rattling across an iron bridge. In reality the crawler was a few hundred metres long and was past in seconds. Skulk2 watched its rear end diminish, and wondered if it would be a good idea to make a flying leap from the ladder for the side of the next ascender. After a review of the dynamics, it concluded:
Probably not
.

The climb continued, unvarying to Skulk2's senses and unwearying to its limbs. The robot set to work adding Hardcastle's profile to its sensory-input processors. Subjectively, anything that matched the profile would manifest as a whiff, a shade, a tone…and in several modalities with no human analogue. Skulk2 didn't hold out much hope of detecting Hardcastle's presence any time soon—the copy had had over thirty-six hours on the Elevator since arriving at the maintenance shack above, and would have had ample opportunity to go elsewhere, whether downloaded to a chassis or as transmitted data.

A quick scan of the ambient communications confirmed this intuition. Nothing impinged but a query from the control node, now five hundred metres below. From the input log, Skulk2 realised that the query had been received and ignored about a dozen times in the past few minutes, each successive transmission made with escalating urgency. Skulk2 searched the chassis's repertoire and responded with an override, citing a quite imaginary flaw in an aerial cluster six hundred metres above it. The control node shot back with a request for further information. Skulk2 contrived some details. The node returned a status report from the aerial cluster, indicating situation nominal. Skulk2 immediately added an error in the cluster's self-monitoring diagnostics software to its account of the problem. The node, apparently mollified, indicated an OK to proceed.