Quarantine

Culex explorator is purely organic, but heavily modified, both genetically and post-developmentally; most of the genetic tampering is simply to give the mature insect enough neurons for the nanomachines to rewire—plus its own IR transceivers, of course. I select the behavioural parameters I want from the menus in my head, wait five minutes while the program encodes them into the language of the mosquito’s neural schemata, then cup my hand over the box for maximum signal strength and ram my decisions into the insect’s tiny brain. There are endless layers of error checking in the RedNet protocol, but I run a full read-back of the data anyway, which confirms success.

On my way to the underground, the streets are already far from empty. Food vendors stand by steaming barrows, and customers flock to them, ignoring the seductively photographed—but olfactorily barren—holographic temptations of dispensing machines. I buy a bag of noodles and eat as I walk. Sharply dressed executives, bankers and databrokers stride past me; people who could easily work from their homes, who could operate entirely within their own skulls—and even, with the help of mods, choose to enjoy it. It’s hard to admit that the sight of these umbrella-wielding infocrats hurrying by, radiating self-importance, strikes me as some kind of affirmation of the human spirit. The light suddenly dims, and I look up to see two layers of churning grey cloud racing each other across the sky. Seconds later, I’m drenched.

The R&D heart of New Hong Kong lies twenty kilometres to the west of the city centre. I emerge from the underground into an almost deserted world of sprawling concrete buildings set in lawns so perfect that if they’re real, they might as well not be. The sense of space here seems almost scandalous after the city’s crowds and towers; many of the labs and factories are fifteen or twenty storeys high, but the streets are wide enough, the grounds sufficiently spacious, to keep the architecture from crowding out the sky—mercurially, already blue again from horizon to horizon.

I pause to shake Culex out of its box onto my palm; it clings to the skin. I hold it up to my eyes; I can just make out the tiny specks of the twelve data chameleons adhering to the sides of the thorax. I curl my fingers into a loose fist before setting off again. It takes a certain effort to adopt a casual gait with twenty thousand dollars’ worth of counter-security equipment in the palm of your hand.

The maze-like region to the north of the underground bears all the hallmarks of having once consisted of a number of distinct, self-consciously constructed ‘science parks’, which have since overflowed into the space between. Each must have had its own orderly—if bizarre—avant-garde street plan, with its own peculiar symmetries and hierarchies, and each has had some degree of success in propagating the pattern beyond its original boundaries, but where two or more incompatible designs have come into conflict, the result can only be described as pathological. BDI itself lies at the end of a cul-de-sac—which precludes a nonchalant stroll past the front entrance—but the whole area is such a capillaceous mass of tiny streets on disconnected branches that I should be able to get close enough to the rear of the building while seeming to be headed somewhere else entirely.

The streets are quiet; I can even hear birdsong. One passing cyclist gives me a puzzled second glance; there seem to be no other pedestrians about, and I feel, prematurely, like a trespasser. These may be public streets, but they all lead to a small number of private destinations. In the unhkely event that someone stops to offer me directions, I’ll just have to do my best lost-idiot-tourist act.

Finally, I catch sight of what I hope is BDI, an off-white concrete shoe box a hundred metres away, visible through the gap between Transgenic Ecocontrol and Industrial Morphogenesis. I can’t actually see any identifying sign or logo from this angle, but I double-check against the street map in my head, and there’s no doubt that I have the right building.

I catch myself thinking: an unlikely front for the Children of the Abyss… and I laugh aloud at this ‘reassuring’ observation. The Children are not involved—and I don’t need to look for excuses to believe that. The biggest ‘risk’ I face from BDI is that they’ll turn out to have nothing to do with the kidnapping at all.

I paste a copy of my visual field into the image buffer of the Culex program. I mark the building clearly, and then pulse this final message to the insect itself. I raise my hand and open my palm; the mosquito rises at once, circles above me a couple of times, and then vanishes.

I spend most of the day examining the information that’s publicly available about BDI’s owner, Wei Pailing. I dutifully plough through twenty-five years of news-system coverage—he averages about six articles a year—but I find nothing remarkable. The only report that’s not strictly business news is the opening of a new wing of the NHKScienceMuseum; Wei led the consortium which raised the funds, and the article quotes from his platitudinous speech: Our children’s future relies on stimulating their intellects and imaginations from the earliest age…’

It strikes me that Wei has no visible interest in any company old enough to be the cause of Laura’s condition; he’s only in his early fifties, and he seems to have preferred founding new businesses to indulging in takeovers. Of course, that proves nothing about BDI’s clients.

By late afternoon, I’m growing short of productive distractions. My irrational fears about the Children keep resurfacing; I know exactly how to banish them, but I don’t want to do that. Not yet.

I flick on the HV, in the middle of an advertisement; I flip channels, to no avail. Panverts don’t involve active collusion between rival broadcasters (perish the thought); all stations just happen to have introduced the practice of allowing advertisers to specify the timeslots they want to the nearest hundredth of a second. I could switch right out of real-time, and search for something to download, but it doesn’t seem worth the effort when all I want to do is kill time.

A young man is saying,’—lack purpose and direction? Axon has the answer! Now, you can buy the goals you need! Family life… career success… material wealth… sexual fulfilment… artistic expression… spiritual enlightenment.’ As he speaks each phrase, a cube containing an appropriate scene materializes in his right hand, and he tosses it into the air to make room for the next, until he’s effortlessly juggling all six. ‘For more than twenty years, Axon has been helping you to attain life’s riches. Now, we can help you to want them!’

After catching the last half of an incomprehensible—but visually stunning—surrealist thriller, I switch the HV off and pace the room, growing steadily more apprehensive. My rendezvous with Culex is still four hours away. Why put up with four more hours of boredom and anxiety? For the masochistic thrill of enduring real human emotions? Fuck that; I had my dose of that this morning, and nearly walked away from the case. I invoke P3.

Sometimes the feel-good subtext is more blatant than usual. Primed is the right way to be: quick-thinking, rational, efficient, free of distractions. It’s all perfectly true, although, ironically, the analytic frame of mind that P3 encourages makes it hard for me to gloss over the fact that this attitude is imposed arbitrarily. Just about every mod which alters the personality comes with an axiomatic assertion that using this mod is good. Critics of the technology call this self-serving propaganda; proponents say that it’s simply an essential measure to prevent potentially disabling conflict—a kind of safeguard against a (metaphorical) mental immune response. Unprimed, I tend to accept the cynical position. Primed, I acknowledge that I lack the data and expertise to evaluate these arguments decisively.

I spend ten minutes reviewing all that I know about the case so far. I’m struck with no new insights, which is no great surprise; P3 eliminates distractions and makes it easier to focus the attention—and thus to reason more swiftly—but it doesn’t grant any magical increase in intelligence. The other priming mods all provide various facilities: PI can manipulate the user’s biochemistry, P2 augments sensory processing, P4 is a collection of physical reflexes, P5 enhances temporal and spatial judgement, P6 is responsible for coding and communications… but P3’s role is largely that of a filter, selecting out the optimal mental state from all of the brain’s natural possibilities, and inhibiting the intrusion of modes of thought which it judges inappropriate.

There’s nothing to do now but wait—so, incapable of boredom, untroubled by pointless fears, I wait.

I return as near as I can to the point of release, but there’s no need for precision; the mosquito finds me by scent, and would have shunned a stranger standing on the very same spot. It lands on my palm for an infrared debriefing.

The mission has been successful. For a start, Culex found its own route in and out of the building—no need to ride in on a human back, and no problem returning now. Inside, it located the security