Quarantine

people spoke seriously of civilization ‘crumbling’, of the coming of a new Dark Age. Such talk soon died away—but even now, I can never quite decide whether I find it miraculous, or inevitable, that the cultural shock waves have been so mild. The Bubble changes everything: it proves the existence of aliens with God- like powers, aliens who have imprisoned us without warning or explanation—and cheated us of our destiny in the universe. The Bubble changes nothing: the aliens are aloof and inconsequential, the stars are irrelevant to human needs; the sun still shines, crops still grow, the life of this planet goes on as ever—and there are worlds within our reach to be explored for millennia.

In the early fifties, it was ‘common knowledge’—for no obvious reason—that the Bubble Makers were about to introduce themselves and justify everything; alien-contact cults flourished, UFO hoaxes reached absurd levels, but as the years wore on in silence, hopes of so much as a curt explanation for our state of quarantine faded away.

I no longer even wonder, why? After thirty-three years of listening to people rant their unlikely hypotheses, nothing could matter to me less. (Granted, the thing killed my wife, indirectly—but then, indirectly, so did I.)

As for the stars, they were never ours to lose; the truth is, we’ve lost nothing but the illusion of their proximity.

Bella, as always, delivers on time. I download the records into CypherClerk’s generous intracranial buffers, and I’m on the verge of transferring them to my desktop terminal when, in a moment of caution, or paranoia, I change my mind and decide to keep the data in my skull, for now.

I’m tired, but it’s barely after nine. I don’t want to sleep, but the prospect of ploughing through the Hilgemann’s records strikes me as unbearably tedious.

I invoke Backroom Worker (Axon, $499) and guide it through what I want done with each name: first, check my own natural memory for any associations (after all, the chances are that the next of kin of anyone worth kidnapping will be a public figure to some degree); then contact the Credit Reference System, obtain current financial details, and append them to the record. I think of triggering notification if the assets cross a threshold value, but I can’t be bothered deciding on a figure, and in any case, when the whole thing is done, I can rank everyone by net worth. I instruct the mod to interrupt me only if it comes across a name I know.

I flop onto my bed, and switch on the room’s audio system. The controlling ROM I’ve been playing lately, ‘Paradise’ by Angela Renfield, is one of hundreds of thousands of identical copies, but each piece it creates is guaranteed unique. Renfield has set certain parameters for the music, but others are provided by pseudorandom functions, seeded with the date, the time and the audio system’s serial number.

Tonight, I seem to have chanced upon an excessive weighting for minimalist influence. After several minutes of nothing but the same (admittedly, impressively resonant) chord, repeated at five-second intervals, I hit the recompose button. The music stops, there’s a brief pause, then a new variation begins, a distinct improvement.

I’ve run ‘Paradise’ about a hundred times. At first, I could hardly believe that the separate performances had anything in common, but over the months I’ve begun to apprehend the underlying structure. I see it as resembling a family tree, or a phylogenetic classification of species. The metaphor is imprecise, though; one piece can be judged to be a near or a distant cousin of another, but the concept of ancestry doesn’t really translate. I think of the simplest pieces as being primordial, as ‘giving rise to’ more complex variations, but beyond a certain point it’s an arbitrary decision as to who begat, or evolved into, whom.

I’ve heard some reviewers assert that, after a dozen playings, anyone who is musically literate should fully understand the rules that Renfield has chosen, making further actual performances unbearably redundant. If that’s the case, I’m glad of my ignorance. Tonight’s second piece is like a brilliant scalpel blade, prising away layer after layer of dead skin. I close my eyes as a trumpet line builds, rising in pitch, then mutates, impossibly, effortlessly, into the liquid sound of metaharps. Flutes join in, with an ornate, mannered theme—but already I think I can discern in it, hidden beneath the fussiness and decoration, hints of a perfect silver needle which will recur in a hundred guises; which will be honed, muted, then honed again; which will be held up for my admiration, one last time, then plunged into my heart.

Suddenly, four lines of glowing text appear at the bottom of my visual field:

[Backroom Worker:

Natural memory association.

Casey, Joseph Patrick.

Head of Security as of 12th June, 2066.]

I’d forgotten that I’d asked for staff records, too—or I would have excluded them. I think about waiting for the music to finish, but there’s no point; I know full well that I’d be unable to enjoy it. I hit the stop button, and one more unique incarnation of ‘Paradise’ disappears forever.

Casey is five years older than me, so his retirement, shortly after mine, was not so premature. He’s sitting in a corner of the crowded bar, drinking beer, and I join him in the ritual. I suppose it’s a strange way to pass the time, when not a microgram of ethanol will make it into either of our bloodstreams—while mods compute our consumption and deliver a purely neural buzz in lieu of the (insanely toxic) real thing—but then, if this cultural fossil lasted a thousand years and endured beyond all memory of its origins, it would hardly be unique in doing so.

‘We never see you, Nick. Where have you been hiding?’

We? It takes me a moment to register that he means, not himself and his absent wife, but the bar full of cops and ex-cops; the ‘law-enforcement community’, as the politicians would say—the way they used to talk about the Chinese or Italian or Greek community—as if the neural and physical modifications we share made us into some kind of homogeneous demographic target. I glance around the room and find, mercifully, that I recognize almost nobody.

‘You know how it is.’

‘Business is good?’

‘I’m making a living. You were with RehabCorp, last I heard. What happened?’

‘IS bought them out.’

‘Yeah, I remember that. Lots of retrenchments.’

‘I was lucky. I had connections, I got myself moved sideways. There were people who’d been with RehabCorp for thirty years who got dumped.’

‘So what’s it like at the Hilgemann?’

He laughs. ‘What do you think? Anyone who ends up in a place like that—anyone they can’t fix with a mod, these days—has to be a complete fucking zombie. Security is not a problem.’

‘No? What about Laura Andrews?’

‘You’re in on that?’ He’s no more surprised than politeness requires; Cheng would have had him clear me, before she even returned my call.

‘Yeah.’

‘Who for?’

‘Who do you think?’

‘Fucked if I know. Not for the sister; Winters is working for the sister. Mind you, Winters’ job isn’t finding Laura Andrews; her job is to make me look like shit. That bitch is probably spending all her time sitting at a computer somewhere, fabricating evidence.’

‘Probably.’ Not for the sister. Who, then? A relative of another patient? Someone who believes they’d be shelling out ransom money right now, if the kidnapping hadn’t been botched—and who wants to make sure that there isn’t a second, successful attempt?

‘The case is a joke, you know. We weren’t negligent. Remember that guy who sued the owners of the Sydney Hilton when his daughter got kidnapped from one of their rooms? He was pulverized. The same thing will happen here.’

‘Maybe.’

He laughs sourly. ‘You don’t give a shit either way, do you?’

‘No. And neither should you. IS won’t sack you, even if they lose the case. They’re not idiots; they allocate a certain budget for security, enough to keep the patients in. If they wanted some kind of