Xenoform (14 page)

‘Is it safe to speak here?’

‘I try to keep it safe, yes. Due to the demographic of folk who comprise my regulars. If you see what I mean.’

‘Good. I have money.’

‘Then you will want a drink, I presume.’

This notion had been so far from the front of Debian’s mind that for a second or two he actually couldn’t understand what Jalan had said. Comprehension dawned and he shook his head, bewildered at himself. ‘Vodka, please.’

‘Very well.’ Jalan turned to the rows of bottles that lined the shelves behind him like guards. He did something unseen and turned back with a straight glass containing what looked like almost half a pint of vodka, neat. With one glowing hand he placed it before Debian. A drip of clear liquid traced a shaky line down the side of the glass and began to encircle its base. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘That is one necessity dealt with. What else can I get for you?’

‘I need to leave the city.’

‘With urgency, I take it, from your appearance.’

‘I need documents, physical and electronic. I need someone else to book flights or mono for me. I can’t connect to the net. They’ll find me.’

‘Oh? You are a wanted man, then.’

Debian realised uncomfortably that he could have brought trouble to Jalan just by being in his bar. He looked to the door. ‘Yes. Sorry. Look I probably shouldn’t have come here, and I realise you have no compulsion to help me. But I can pay you.’

Jalan considered this. ‘Stop looking at the door,’ he said. ‘I locked it after you came in. And my little pet will spot anyone who tries to enter before you or I see them.’

Debian took the vodka and drained half of it like water. He hardly drank at all usually, and the choking fit that doubled him over amused Jalan visibly. ‘Will you help me?’

Jalan smiled. ‘Come with me,’ he said.

The virtual being lifted up the flap in the ancient wooden bar and stepped through, closing it gently behind him. Debian had never seen him on this side of it before. Jalan led Debian off towards a back corner of the room. His hand felt cold and plastic on Debian’s back. He knew that the barman could potentially sell him back to his enemy. The enemy certainly knew that Debian came here sometimes. They could have contacted Jalan ahead of Debian’s arrival, made a deal with him. They would come eventually, whoever they really were. But what alternative remained? Debian had always made it his business to know as few people as possible. Perhaps this had been a mistake, for now he had nowhere to turn. If he wandered the streets alone he would be caught and killed. He needed medical attention, too – he was in no condition to evade more assassins.

Jalan led Debian through a discreet, unmarked door into a smaller room, decked out in the same decrepit style as the main bar. The music was playing in here, too, through a small but clear-toned wireless satellite speaker, which floated near the ceiling like a sheet of cellophane. The room was maybe a function room of some sort, though what sort of function a room in the Sunken Chest would be hired for, Debian could not guess. There was a computer terminal in one corner and Jalan headed towards this. He offered Debian a seat in an old woodwormed chair and bent over the terminal.

Jalan frowned at Debian and said, ‘You left your drink. You should go and get it.’

Ever the pusher, eh, Jalan?
t
hought Debian, but he said, ‘Maybe in a bit. I don’t think it was helping me, really. What are you doing?’

‘First I will get hold of a doctor I know – get you fixed up. Looks like you were shot with a solid round. They can be messy, but he’s pretty good. He’ll sort it out. While I get him, why don’t you get a bandage from the first-aid box behind the screen over there? It looks like you’re still bleeding a little. Lucky it was a small calibre.’

‘Okay, thanks,’ answered Debian and limped round the partition to a small booth where a first-aid kit hung on the wall. He tried to remember how long it had been since he had eaten anything.

Jalan was connected to the net. He didn’t need to plug in – being a computer program himself, he was one with the system of the Sunken Chest, and he connected through this. However, the terminal screens followed and logged his progress for Debian’s benefit.

Debian returned with the roll of bandage in a sterile plastic wrapper and a small pair of scissors and stood behind Jalan opening the packet. He struggled to roll up his trousers while standing on one leg and pulled the chair over instead. He sat and began to inspect the wound. It was an inflamed, grisly puncture that appeared to go right through his thigh, its edges blackened and puckered. A nauseating feeling of unreality washed over him as he gently turned the leg this way and that to look at it. He really had been shot. He really had. It looked as though the bullet had passed right through and out, probably narrowly missing a major blood vessel. The exit wound was big enough to put three fingers in. Blood, thick and dark, was oozing gelatinously from both sides of the hole. Looking at it, Debian felt as if the vodka he had downed was about to put in a re-appearance on the floor. He had to lower the leg and focus on something else, so he looked up at the screens instead.

There was clearly something wrong with the data-stream. Jalan’s attempts at communication were not connecting. He was getting standard error messages back: THE REQUESTED ADDRESS CANNOT BE CONTACTED. Jalan was frowning into the screen in consternation. The data there showed a clear lack of cohesion, as if there was interference somewhere in the line. Packets of data were simply failing to send, or sending in part, and failing checksums filled the screens. Debian found himself fixated by it. He had never seen anything quite like it. There must be something wrong with Jalan’s system, possibly a router error.

‘Damn,’ said Jalan to himself. ‘I’m getting nothing. Connection’s fucked. In my expert opinion. I know where he lives but he doesn’t really like unsolicited visitors. Also, I’m afraid I can’t leave the bar, due to my
disability
.’ He meant being the projected simulation of a deceased man, Debian assumed.
‘Let me take a look,’ suggested Debian, his aching, injured leg forgotten. He came closer to the console and peered into the screens, his attention flickering from one to the other. He wished he could have plugged in, or connected wireless – he was sure that he could get the matter sorted had he been able to. ‘Are the diagnostics auto-running already?’

‘Yeah, as soon as the problem came up. I just don’t…’
‘Did it start as soon as you connected?’

‘Not until I tried to dial out. Booted up just fine. It’s been fine all day. See what comes back on the diagnostics.’

‘This is typical of my luck, lately,’ said Debian, aware that he was close to falling into a state of despair that would dull his mind, sap his strength and possibly make him a dead man. He willed himself to consider the problem logically. A terrible idea dawned on him then, and he found that he could not dispute the reasoning behind it. Dark shadows swam around his head. The dizziness was returning.

Jalan was saying, ‘It’s as if there’s something in the system. Some virus, or something. It isn’t attacking me, but just… I don’t know. It cleans itself constantly, though – I don’t get it – usually it’s fine. I’m not getting anything back on the diags.’

These words fell around Debian like bombs.
Something in the system
. It couldn’t be, could it? Logic said it could. It could. Was the beast following him, tracing him? Maybe trying to thwart his escape? If so, there would be no hiding. The net had eyes everywhere. But if the AI was looking for him, then how had he survived the night? Perhaps there really was just a glitch in Jalan’s computer. Or perhaps the beast was loose in the net, causing general mayhem, not specifically directed at him. What was the connection to Hex’s people? And who
were
Hex’s people, this chain of connections leading back to Alcubierre? Who or what was Alcubierre, that formless name behind the scenes? And why their enthusiasm for killing him? Presumably they, whoever
they
were,
wanted to keep him from releasing information about this new AI. He
must
have been supposed to find it, surely he must have been
.
What had it done to him? And perhaps the beast, if it was in league with Hex and Alcubierre, was trying to hinder his escape. Debian’s heart was beating so hard and fast in his chest that it seemed to rattle against his ribs. He couldn’t make sense of it all. The feeling of power he had experienced while interrogating Hex seemed a distant dream – now he just felt small and injured and confused.

‘Get off the net,’ he said in a thin voice, interrupting Jalan in the midst of some unheard diatribe.

Jalan fell silent. ‘What?’ he said.

‘Get off the net! Kill the router! Do it now!’

With an expression of mild annoyance, Jalan informed Debian that he had done so. His expression said that he was only humouring the bleeding young man who had wandered into his establishment, but Debian didn’t care as long as he was disconnected. ‘Why? We need to sort this out. I need to get you the doctor, get you the papers, book you the flight. I thought you were desperate to be gone. I can’t take you anywhere you know – I can’t leave the radius of the holo-projectors here. If I don’t manage to call out then I can’t help you.’

‘You don’t have a two-way?’

‘A what?’

‘A radio.’

Jalan’s face wrinkled as if he had been asked for a pint of piss. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course I don’t.’

‘Damn. You mustn’t use the net. Man, I have to get out of here. They could find me.’ The panic was nibbling at the edge of Debian’s mind again. His injured leg was jittering madly, nervously – he had to still it with one hand.

‘What are you, really? What do you do?’

Debian exhaled heavily, suddenly weak with fear and exhaustion. ‘I’m a hacker. Or I was. I guess I was. There’s something in there, man.’ With a strengthless hand he indicated the terminal, the electronic world to which it led. ‘In the net. It might be after me. It might not. I don’t know. The net might not be safe for anyone. If the beast is against me as well as Hex’s people…Oh shit. Then I’m a dead man.’

‘Look, I can give you an address – a physical address – where the doctor can be reached. He won’t be happy but maybe it’ll be all right. He knows people who can help you with your other concerns, too – gophers, but good ones. You can trust him entirely.’

‘I don’t know…’ Debian held his head between his hands, squeezing his skull as if trying physically to get his brain back into shape.

‘What’s in the net? This sounds like bad trouble, young man.’

Debian was sat holding his head, rocking slowly back and forth. He looked to Jalan Frazer like a broken man. ‘It’s not a doctor I need, it’s a computer lab.’

‘But your leg–’

‘–Is fine. I mean, it hurts like hell but I can sterilise it and wrap it and I think it’ll be okay. It’s what’s in my head, what’s in the net. I have to know. I have to know if it’s dangerous to everyone, or just me. Someone has to stop it.’ This thought did not fill him with enthusiasm.

Jalan’s eyes widened. Debian’s fear was contagious. He looked around the silent room, seeing nothing, suspecting something bad. ‘What’s in the net?’ he repeated.

‘A monster, Jalan. There’s a monster in the net and I think it’s done something to me. It might escape. It would be bad if it escaped. They tricked me into it. Those liars, they tricked me into it...’ He knew that he was in danger of sounding like a whiny little boy but found he couldn’t help it – he
wanted
to whine, in truth.

‘A monster?’

‘Stay off the net, Jalan, that’s my advice.’

‘I can’t,’ said Jalan softly, his face a dead blank. ‘Not completely. My simulation is hosted remotely on a secure server. The computer here just does the number-crunching. All the data’s on the server. If I disconnect the computer that runs the simulation, it stops and resets. For this instance of me, it would be like death. Program terminated.’

Debian could think of nothing to say. He looked up into the force-field features of the barman, wondering what death could mean to a computer program. Unending suspense of calculation. Wasn’t that death for people, too? He felt responsible. Jalan swallowed hard and turned back to the monitor screens, where the last spatters of corrupted data were frozen in time – a snapshot of chaos.

‘Maybe it is watching me now,’ said Debian with dawning horror. ‘Watching me through your eyes.’ He stared aghast at Jalan, and one shaking finger rose to point in accusation.

‘I’m sorry, young man. I don’t know what’s happening here, but I think you may be right about needing a lab, from the sounds of it. I know someone who has one, someone safe.’ Jalan turned to the computer terminal and made it produce an actual paper printout. He handed the scrap to Debian, who took it in shaking fingers, searching for a way to express his regret and sorrow and gratitude to the synthetic man.

‘Thanks, Jalan.’ As Debian took the paper it seemed to have a calming effect on him at once. He turned it round to read the print: TEC, UNIT 13A MOLDER JACKSON COMPLEX, STEVENS STREET. 61619.9.87220.12.33T. ‘Who or what is Tec?’

‘He’s a friend of mine – good guy.’ He seemed to consider this. ‘Well – good enough, at least. You hungry?’

Debian considered this question. He wasn’t hungry, but he knew he should eat. ‘Yeah, I guess,’ he said.

‘Wait there, I’ll get you something,’ said Jalan, ‘and then we’ll clean that leg. I’m no doctor, but it don’t look too bad from here. Maybe I can fix it up myself.’