'You can't empty hotels any place you want to stay,' she
said. 'Just because you feel like it.'
'You want to bet on that, Agent Simons?'
'All right, but under McStephens you've got to serve notice. Seven days. What's it with Valencia?'
'You're sharp, aren't you? The same. Eight days, in actual fact.'
He was putting away the licence, more slowly than he had produced it. Teresa watched the precise way in which he folded it, before slipping the slim leather wallet into his rear pocket.
He reminded her of an agent she had known in Richmond, a friend of Andy's. Calvin Devore, his name was. Cal. Amusing guy was Cal, with a big face and big hands, but astonishingly dainty movements. What had become of Cal? Nice guy.
'OK, then,' she said. 'I'll work the eight days' notice. Back off me, you hear?'
But she was looking past Mitchell towards the light at the end of the corridor, thinking maybe she would call up Cal when she was home.
'Give me a break, Mrs Simons,' Mitchell said. 'Eight days'
'I might leave before, anyway. just lay off me until then. OK?'
'All right.' He glanced away with an irritated expression, but Teresa knew she had scored the point.
'What's the big deal?' she said. 'Why does it matter so much?'
'We don't need to use exclusion powers every place we go, but crossover doesn't occur in most places. You've got an interest in the Grove scenario that conflicts with ours. You're into reactional crossover, and we're into provemential integrity and linear coherence. The bottom line is, we're licensed to be here and you're not.'
'What's reactional crossover?' Teresa said, having re
focused on what he was saying, but struggling to keep up with his flow of jargon.
'It's the way you trained. What the Bureau uses ExEx for. They operate interdiction training scenarios. You go in there repeatedly, entering the scenarios from different points of view, and that introduces neural crossover. Successive experiences of the scenario alter your perception next time you go in. To us that means crossover, and if it happens while we're programming it screws the code. What people like you do after we've compiled doesn't matter a damn to us, because that's what ExEx is all about, but while we're coding the regressions and memorative accounts we don't want crossover. lt corrupts linear coherence.'
'What was the other thing you said you were into?'
'Provemential integrity. Provenience is'
'I know. Or I thought 1 did.'
'OK, but when we first build the parameters of a scenario, what we seek is a recreation of the integral whole. We're talking iterative purity here. We want the past event as it really was, or as it is remembered by the main players. It's the same thing, in algorithmic terms, as your basic whatthehell symbolic adumbration. We can fasttrack the code from either point, but until then we keep the provenience integral, and at the waterline. You got that? We don't want false memory syndromics, we don't want anecdotal reportage, we don't want post hoc invention or narration, and we sure as hell don't want people like you coming in and trying to put an interpretive spin on the events.'
'You're incredible,' Teresa said. 'You know that?'
'Yeah,' Mitchell said. 'I'm paid for incredible.'
'Did that actually mean something to you? What you just said?'
' It's the thing we do.'
He had barely shifted position while they spoke, and he
still bore the same expression of neutral stubbornness, but his undercurrent of menace was dispersing. Teresa thought how young he looked, and tried to estimate his age: he could be what? twenty or more years younger than she was? Is this what young people do now? she wondered. In her day if you got an education you left college and went into business, or law, or you Joined a government agency, but now you learnt to speak code-babble, relocated to Taiwan, changed your nationality and wrote software for virtualreality providers. What would she think of him if she were twenty years younger?
'All right,' she said. 'But 1 don't see how my staying in the same place as you'
'Have you been talking to the manager while you've been here? Or that woman who works for him?'
'Amy? Yes, of course.'
'And you've been asking them about Grove.'
'I don't see what's wrong with that,' Teresa said. 'It's what people think about in this town, because they lived it.'
'That's what you talk about in this town, Mrs Simons. And it's why we don't want you here.
We know you ' ve been talking with Steve Ripon's mother, the police, the newspapers, the Mercer family, and God knows who else. Also, you've been up at our facility running shareware. To build this scenario we need these people's memories of what happened, and we want them uncontaminated. And everyone else's too. What you're doing is all fastlane crossover, lady, and we don't want you in town even, until we've finished.'
'You've made a contract with the town? You going to sue them as well if 1 don't leave?'
He stared at her with his unchanged level expression, but moments later he actually smiled, though briefly. His face was transformed when he smiled. She wondered what he would do if she asked to see his licence a second
