Wireless (26 page)

“Black Chamber, then.” Godel sounds unconvinced.

“What do you think the rules are?” asks Cantor, a drily amused expression stretching the wrinkles around his eyes.

“You’ve got pencils.” I can see one from here, sitting on the sideboard on top of a newspaper folded at the crossword page. “And, uh . . .”
What must the world look like from an inmate’s point of view?
“Oh. I get it.”

(The realization is blinding, sudden, and makes me feel like a complete idiot.)

“The hospital! There’s no electricity, no electronics—no way to get a signal out—but it works both ways! You’re inside the biggest damn grounded defensive pentacle this side of HQ , and anything on the outside trying to get in has got to get past the defenses.” Because that’s what the Sisters are really about: not nurses but perimeter guards. “You’re a theoretical research cell, aren’t you?”

“We prefer to call ourselves a think tank.” Cantor nods gravely.

“Or even”—Mandelbrot takes a deep breath—“a brains trust!”

“A-ha! AhaHAHAHA! Hic.” Godel covers his mouth, face reddening.

“What do you think the rules are?” Cantor repeats, and they’re still staring at me, as if, as if . . .

“Why does it matter?” I ask. I’m thinking that it could be anything; a 2,5 universal Turing machine encoded in the moves of the pawns—that would fit—whatever it is, it’s symbolic communication, very abstract, very pared-back, and if they’re doing it in this ultimately firewalled environment and expecting to report directly to the Board, it’s got to be way above my security clearance—

“Because you’re acting cagey, lad. Which makes you too bright for your own good. Listen to me: just try to convince yourself that we’re playing chess, and Matron will let you out of here.”

“What’s thinking got to do with—” I stop. It’s useless pretending. “Fuck. Okay, you’re a research cell working on some ultimate black problem, and you’re using the Farm because it’s about the most secure environment anyone can imagine, and you’re emulating some kind of minimal universal Turing machine using the chessboard. Say, a 2,5 UTM—two registers, five operations—you can encode the registers positionally in the chessboard’s two dimensions, and use the moves to simulate any other universal Turing machine, or a transform in an eleven-dimensional manifold like AXIOM REFUGE—”

Godel’s waving frantically. “She’s coming! She’s coming!” I hear doors clanging in the distance.

Shit.
“But why are you so afraid of the Nurses?”

“Back channels,” Cantor says cryptically. “Alan, be a good lad and try to jam the door for a minute, will you? Bob, you are
not
cleared for what we’re doing here, but you can tell Angleton that our full report to the Board should be ready in another eighteen months.”
Wow—and they’ve been here since before the Laundry computerized its payroll system in the 1970s?
“Are you absolutely sure they’re not going to sell St. Hilda’s off to build flats for yuppies? Because if so, you could do worse than tell Georg here, it’ll calm him down—”

“Get me out of here, and I’ll make damned sure they don’t sell anything off !” I say fervently. “Or rather, I’ll tell Angleton. He’ll sort things out.” When I remind them what’s going on here, they’ll be no more inclined to sell off St. Hilda’s than they would be to privatize an atomic bomb.

Something outside is rumbling and squealing on the metal rails. “You’re sure none of you submitted a complaint about staff brutality?”

“Absolutely!” Godel bounces up and down excitedly.

“It must have been someone else.” Cantor glances at the doorway. “You’d better run along. It sounds as if Matron is having second thoughts about you.”

I’m halfway out of the carnivorous sofa, struggling for balance. “What kind of—”

“Go!”

I stumble out into the corridor. From the far end, near the nursing station, I hear a grinding noise as of steel wheels spinning furiously on rails, and a mechanical voice blatting: “InTRU-der! EsCAPE ATTempt! All patients must go to their go to their go to their bedROOMs IMMediateLY!”

Whoops
. I turn and head in the opposite direction, toward the airlock leading up to the viewing gallery. “Open up!” I yell, thumping the outer door, which is securely fastened, “Dr. Renfield! Time’s up! I need to go, now!” There’s no response. I see the color-coded handles dangling by the door and yank the red one repeatedly. Nothing happens, of course.

I should have smelled a setup from the start. These theoreticians: they’re not in here because they’re mad; they’re in here because it’s the only safe place to put people that dangerous. This little weekend seminar of theirs that’s going to deliver some kind of uber-report.
What’s the topic?
I look round, hunting for clues. Something to do with applied demonology; what was the state of the art thirty years ago? Forty? Back in the stone age, punched cards and black candles melted onto sheep’s skulls because they hadn’t figured out how to use integrated circuits . . . What they’re doing with AXIOM REFUGE might be obsolete already, or it might be earth-shatteringly important. There’s no way to tell . . . yet.

I start back up the corridor, glancing inside Turing’s room. I spot the chessboard. It’s off to one side, the door open and its occupant elsewhere—still holding the line against Nurse Crankshaft. I rush inside and close the door. The table is still there, the chessboard set up with that curious endgame. The first thing that leaps out at me is that there are two pawns of each color, plus most of the high-value pieces. The layout doesn’t make much sense—why is the white king missing?—and I wish I’d spent more time playing the game, but . . . On impulse, I reach out and touch the black pawn that’s parked in front of the king.

There’s an odd kind of electrical tingle you get when you make contact with certain types of summoning grid. I get a powerful jolt of it right now, sizzling up my arm and locking my fingers in place around the head of the chess piece. I try to pull it away from the board, but it’s no good: it only wants to move up or down, left or right . . .
Left or right?
I blink. It’s a state machine all right: one that’s locked by the law of sympathy to some other finite state automaton, one that grinds down slow and hard.

I move the piece forward one square. It’s surprisingly heavy, the magnet a solid weight in its base—but more than magnetism holds it in contact with the board. As soon as I stop moving I feel a sharp sting in my fingertips. “Ouch!” I raise them to my mouth just as there’s a crash from outside. “InMATE! InMATE!” I begin to turn as a shadow falls across the board.

“Bad patient!” It buzzes. “Bad PATients will be inCAR-cerAT-ED! COME with ME!”

I recoil from the stellate snout and beady lenses. The mechanical nurse reaches out with arms that end in metal pincers instead of hands. I sidestep around the table and reach down to the chessboard for one of the pieces, grasping at random. My hand closes around the white queen, fingers snapping painfully shut on contact, and I shove it hard, following the path of least resistance to an empty cell in the grid between the pawn I just moved and the black king.

Nurse Crankshaft spins round on her base so fast that her cap flies off (revealing a brushed-aluminum hemisphere beneath), emits a deafening squeal of feedbacklike white noise, then says, “Integer overflow?” in a surprised baritone.

“Back off right now or I castle,” I warn her, my aching fingertips hovering over the nearest rook.

“Integer overflow. Integer overflow? Divide by zero.”
Clunk.
The Sister shivers as a relay inside its torso clicks open, resetting it. Then: “Matron WILL see you NOW!”

I grab the chess piece, but Nurse Crankshaft lunges in the blink of an eye and has my wrist in a viselike grip. It tugs, sending a burning pain through my carpal-tunnel-stressed wrist. I can’t let go of the chess piece: as my hand comes up, the chessboard comes with it as a rigid unit, all the pieces hanging in place. A monstrous buzzing fills my ears, and I smell ozone as the world goes dark—

—And the chittering, buzzing cacophony of voices in my head subsides as I realize—
I? Yes, I’m back, I’m me, what the hell just happened?
—I’m kneeling on a hard surface, bowed over so my head is between my knees. My right hand—something’s wrong with it. My fingers don’t want to open. They’re cold as ice, painful and prickly with impending cramp. I try to open my eyes. “Urk,” I say, for no good reason. I hope I’m not about to throw up.

My back doesn’t want to straighten up properly, but the floor under my nose is cold and stony and smells damp. I try opening my eyes. It’s dark and cool, and a chilly blue light flickers off the dusty flagstones in front of me.
I’m in a cellar?
I push myself up laboriously with my left hand, looking around for whatever’s hissing at me.

“BAD Patient!
Ssssss!
” The voice behind my back doesn’t belong to anything human. I scramble around on hands and knees, hampered by the chessboard glued to my frozen right hand.

I’m in Matron’s lair.

Matron lives in a cavelike basement room, its low ceiling supported by whitewashed brick and floored in what look to be the original Victorian-era stone slabs. The windows are blocked by columns of bricks, rotting mortar crumbling between them. Steel rails run around the room, and riding them, three Sisters glide back and forth between me and the open door. Their optics flicker with amethyst malice. Off to one side, a wall of pale blue cabinets lines one entire wall: the front panel (covered in impressive-looking dials and switches) leaves me in no doubt as to what it is. A thick braid of cables runs from one open cabinet (in whose depths a patchboard is just visible) across a row of wooden trestles to the middle of the floor, where they split into thick bundles and dangle to the five principal corners of the live summoning grid that is responsible for the beautiful cobalt blue glow of Cerenkov radiation—and tells me I’m in deep trouble.

“Integer overflow,” intones one of the Sisters. Her claws go snicker-snack, the surgical steel gleaming in the dim light.

Here’s the point: Matron isn’t just a 1960s mainframe: we can’t work miracles, and artificial intelligence is
still
fifty years in the future. However, we
can
bind an extradimensional entity and compel it to serve, and even communicate with it by using a 1960s mainframe as a front-end processor. Which is all very well, especially if it’s in a secure air-gapped installation with no way of getting out. But what if some double-domed theoreticians who are working on a calculus of contagion using AXIOM REFUGE accidentally talk in front of one of its peripheral units about a way of sending a message? What if a side effect of their research has accidentally opened a chink in the firewall? They’re not going to exploit it . . . but they’re not the only long-term inmates, are they? In fact, if I was really paranoid, I might even imagine they’d put Matron up to mischief in order to make the point that closing the Farm is a really bad idea.

“I’m not a patient,” I tell the Sisters. “You are not in receipt of a valid Section two, three, four, or 136 order subject to the Mental Health Act, and you’re bloody well not getting a 5(2) or 5(4) out of me either.”

I’m nauseous and sweating bullets, but there is this about being trapped in a dungeon by a constrained class-four manifestation: whether or not you call them demons, they play by the rules. As long as Matron hasn’t managed to get me sectioned, I’m not a patient, and therefore she has no authority to detain me. I hope.

“Doc-TOR HexenHAMMer has been SUM-moned,” grates the middle Sister. “When he RE-turns to sign the PA-pers Doc-TOR RenFIELD has prePARED, we will HAVE YOU.”

A repetitive squeaking noise draws close. A fourth Sister glides through the track in the doorway, pushing a trolley. A white starched-cotton cloth supports a row of gleaming ice-pick-shaped instruments. The chorus row of Sisters blocks the exit as effectively as a column of riot police. They glide back and forth like a rank of Space Invaders.

“I do not consent to treatment,” I tell the middle Sister. I’m betting that she’s the one the nameless horror in the summoning grid is talking through, using the ancient mainframe as an i/o channel. “You can’t make me consent. And lobotomy requires the patient’s consent, in this country. So why bother?”

“You WILL con-SENT.”

The buzzing voice doesn’t come from the robo-nurses, or the hypertrophied pocket calculator on the opposite wall. The summoning grid flickers: deep inside it, shadowy and translucent, the bound and summoned demon squats and grins at me with things that aren’t eyes set close above something that isn’t a mouth.

“You MUST con-SENT. I WILL be free.”

I try to let go of the chess piece, but my fingers are clamped around it so tightly I’m beginning to lose sensation. Pins and needles tingle up my wrist, halfway to the elbow. “Let me guess,” I manage to say. “You sent the complaint. Right?”

“The SEC-ure ward in-MATES are under my CARE. I am RE-quired to CARE for them. The short-stay in-MATES are use-LESS. YOU will be use-FUL.”