to get pregnant without the world and his wife being in on the secret.
‘There’s a community medical scanner downtown,’ Jitendra said. ‘It’s very old – a museum piece, really. We all get our turn in it. They’ll scan anything if it’s a slow day, but if we put the glove through it everyone will want to know why, and that’ll be the end of our mysterious little secret. Fortunately, there’s a better option right here.’
‘There is?’ Geoffrey asked innocently.
‘Follow me.’
Jitendra’s den was set up in what had been the pantry and broom cupboard. Decently screened off behind beaded curtains, it was even more of a mechanical charnel house than the rest of the apartment. Generally speaking, Sunday didn’t go near it unless there was no other option.
Clamped to the edge of his workbench were adjustable arms, magnifying lenses, precision manipulators and drills. On either side of the workbench, plastic tubs brimmed with wires and connectors, homemade circuits and gel-grown nervous systems. Mounted centrally on the bench was an elderly Hitachi desktop scanner the size of a small sewing machine: a heavy chassis supporting two upright moving scanning rings on tracks. It would have been laughed at in the Surveilled World – this machine had approximately the same resolution and penetrating power as a pillowcase or T-shirt – but in the Zone one took what one could get. Secretly, as Sunday had long since realised, Jitendra derived immense delight from working around arbitrary constraints and limitations.
The scanner currently held the torso and head assembly of a doll, with two- and three-dimensional magnified images pasted up on the walls around the bench, and what looked like acupuncture needles pin-cushioning the doll’s plastic scalp. His den gave every impression of being the epicentre of some obscure Voodoo death cult.
He pulled the pincushioned doll out of the scanner, fixed the glove in place instead, then set the scanner to work. The rings whirred up to speed and jerked back and forth along their tracks while images of the glove, colour- coded in blues and pinks, graphed onto the walls.
Jitendra tapped a finger against his teeth. ‘You’re right.’
‘About what?’ Sunday asked.
‘Definitely something blocking those three fingers. Soft packing around hard contents. Like little stones, or something.’
‘But not bombs,’ Geoffrey said.
‘Nope. There’s no machinery in there, no triggering mechanisms.’
‘Think you can get them out?’ Sunday asked. ‘I mean non-destructively.’ She looked at Geoffrey. ‘Why on Earth would she put stones in a glove?’
Her brother had no answer.
‘I think I can get the packages out,’ Jitendra said, rummaging through his workbench tools. ‘Give me a few minutes here. Any loud bangs, you can revise your bomb theory.’
Sunday had decided, provisionally, that she would forgive her brother. She had not arrived at this decision lightly, being very much of the opinion that forgiveness was a non-renewable resource, like petroleum or uranium. The world should not depend on its easy dispensation, nor should hers ever be counted upon.
Yet since Geoffrey was her brother, and since he was also not a true bloodsucking Akinya, she was inclined to generosity. As much as she detested lies and concealment, she accepted that the cousins had been playing on Geoffrey’s attachment to the elephants. Her brother had faults, as did she, but greed was not among them. She could also see how troubled he had been, and how relieved he was when at last he felt able to speak about the vault and the glove. And so she decided to make no more of the matter, even though she was still hurt that he had not confided in her immediately, from the very moment the cousins tabled their proposition. But the hurt would heal, and provided Geoffrey did not lie to her again, she would forget this blemish on his character.
She led him back into the living room and drew him down next to her on the couch.
‘I think it’s time you met the construct. In for a yuan, et cetera. Remember when I showed you the face, back at the scattering?’
‘Yes,’ he said cautiously.
‘That’s only part of it. A tiny part.’ She paused, assailed by last-minute doubts, before crushing them. ‘For the last couple of years I’ve been working on something big, all of it done in my spare time. I’m building Eunice.’
‘Right . . .’ Geoffrey said, on a falling note.
‘A fully interactive construct, loaded with every scrap of information anyone has on her. So far, so unexceptional.’
‘I’ll take your word on that.’
‘Please do. This may be a back-room project but it’s still a level above any other construct currently in existence . . . or at least any I know about. The routines she’s built on aren’t proprietary. They’re highly experimental Bayesian algorithms, based on the free-energy mini-malisation paradigm. Jitendra calls her a fembot. That makes her as close to Turing-compliant as anything out there, and if the Gearheads knew they’d probably be knocking holes in the cavern about now. That’s not the main thing I want you to keep in mind, though. This is a
‘What makes you think she knows anything at all?’
‘I’m not certain that she does, but it’s still possible that she might. I’ve been studying her life and . . .’ She held up her hands as if she was trying to bend a long piece of wood between them. ‘It’s like measuring a coastline. From a distance, it looks simple enough. But if I wanted to make a thorough study of her life, down to the last detail, it would cost me more than
