disconnected from it.’
‘That’s a novel twist: a cyber-afterlife.’
‘Afterlife is the key word. At least as far as the BfV Bureau of Constitutional Security is concerned. You upload your consciousness and then what? Where are you really? You’re mind is in two places at the one time — in the real world and in the virtual one. So as far as you’re concerned after the event, nothing has changed. Unless…’
‘Unless you cease to exist in the real world.’ Susanne put her wineglass down and shook her head slowly. ‘Mass suicide.’
‘Mass murder-suicide, more like. Let’s face it, it’s the staple of all of these cults. Jonestown, Order of the Solar Temple, Heaven’s Gate, Branch Davidians… And despite the hi-tech dress-up that the Pharos Project has given it, it’s the same old promise of transition to a higher plane. All you need to do is die.’
They were interrupted by the phone ringing. Fabel was surprised to hear that it was Astrid Bremer from the forensics squad; Holger Brauner’s deputy.
‘You’re working late,’ said Fabel.
‘Yeah, third week solid backshift,’ said Astrid. ‘My social life is to die for. You want some good news?’
‘Oh yes, please,’ said Fabel.
‘I thought I would let you know that we have done a full fingerprint and trace analysis on the sculpture used to kill Muller-Voigt. Like you guessed, yours and Muller-Voigt’s are the only fingerprints on it and there’s no trace of any third-party DNA.’
‘Brilliant,’ sighed Fabel. ‘You’ve got an odd sense of good news.’
‘Well, actually it is. There are no other fingerprints because whoever hit Muller-Voigt with it wore gloves. There is evidence of smudging and smearing, including of your prints. It proves that you weren’t the last person to handle the sculpture. Of course, it doesn’t mean that you didn’t pull on gloves afterwards, but you know what I mean.’
‘Thanks, Astrid. It’s something, anyway.’
‘There’s one more thing…’
‘Yeah?’
‘We found some extraneous fibres at the scene. Grey fabric. My guess is from a man’s suit jacket. Were you wearing a grey jacket?’
‘No. Nor was Muller-Voigt.’
‘We know that. We couldn’t find anything in his wardrobe that would match.’
‘You can tell already?’
‘Yes…’ said Astrid. ‘This fibre is highly unusual insofar as it seems to have an incredibly high polyester content. What isn’t polyester is some other kind of synthetic fibre. It’s the weirdest thing I’ve seen. I mean, I know in the seventies people went mad for synthetic materials, but nowadays… Anyway, I’m going to send it off to a specialist lab to get a better breakdown of its composition.’
‘Thanks, Astrid,’ Fabel said, and put the phone down, trying to work out why he felt what Astrid had told him was significant.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The next morning, before making his first call, Fabel dropped by the Jensen Buchhandlung, down in the Arkaden by the Alster. Otto Jensen was Fabel’s closest friend, closer even than Werner. It was a friendship unsullied by professional interests. Fabel had been at university with Otto and they had remained close, even if Otto had not, to start with, approved of Fabel’s becoming a police officer. ‘A waste of a fine mind,’ he had said. Repeatedly. Fabel had known since he had been a boy that he was smart; that he had a good brain. But when he had met Otto Jensen at university, he had recognised a mind that worked on a completely different level. Otto was the person to whom Fabel would go to discuss anything he found confusing or arcane. Whatever it was, Otto would know something about it. But Fabel also knew that Otto was completely, spectacularly devoid of the kind of common sense needed to conduct a normal day-to-day life. The success of his bookshop was entirely due to Otto’s wife, Else.
Fabel waited while Otto served a customer. From a distance, Fabel suddenly saw a middle-aged balding man with tired eyes. It saddened Fabel, who every time he thought of his friend had the image of a tall, gangly, clumsy youth with long, lank blond hair. It was, Fabel realised, exactly the same mental mechanism that had temporarily wiped out the fact of Dirk Stellamanns’s death: you kept a concept of a person in your head that never seemed to age; that was fixed at the time you first really got to know them.
‘What’s this?’ asked Otto when Fabel came up to the counter. ‘A raid?’
‘Don’t sweat,’ said Fabel. ‘There isn’t a law against being a smart-arse. Yet. As soon as there is, I’ll put you at the top of the most-wanted list. Actually, I wondered if you had time for a coffee? I wanted to pick your brains.’
Otto asked one of his staff to take over and led Fabel to an area set out with sofas. There was a coffee machine in the corner and, surrounded by books, the two old friends sat down and engaged in the obligatory introductory small talk. Then Fabel ran through all he knew about the Pharos Project and their ideas of Consolidation, simulated realities and the removal of mankind from the biosphere.
‘I just don’t get it,’ said Fabel when he had finished. ‘The Pharos Project is supposed to be an environmental group, yet they are obsessed with the idea of simulated reality. Other than this bizarre claim that simulated reality allows mankind to take itself out of the environment and therefore save it… which, by the way, I don’t get: why save something that you want to escape from? Anyway, apart from that, I just don’t understand the connection.’
‘Well, you’re wrong, Jan. The two ideas have always sort of gone together. Way back at the end of the nineteenth century, some of the world’s leading geologists — Eduard Suess, Nikolai Fyodorov, Vladimir Vernadsky and a host of others — came up with both ideas and saw them as inextricably linked. A couple of them actually posited that the biosphere was itself nothing but a simulation.’
‘Yeah…’ Fabel made a sceptical face. ‘Those crazy Russians…’
‘No, Jan, you shouldn’t be so dismissive. There were some ideas in there that are now part of mainstream thinking. Way back then, Vernadsky believed that the greatest force in shaping the geology of the Earth was the human intellect. Some geologists today think we should be calling this age the Anthropocene instead of the Holocene, because we have changed the planet so much.’
‘And what about this idea of simulated reality that the Pharos Project bangs on about so much?’
‘Well, going back a little further, Fyodorov, who had influenced Vernadsky, actually believed that in the distant future mankind would develop a “prosthetic society”. No more ageing or death. He also thought we’d go on to achieve some kind of super-singularity — and bear in mind that he came up with this stuff in the 1890s — where we would be able to replicate absolutely any quantum brain state, meaning everybody who has ever lived would be brought back to life. The quantum Resurrection. All of a sudden atheist science becomes religious prophesy.’
‘But it’s mad,’ protested Fabel. ‘How could you simulate an entire world?’
‘You’re an old technophobe, Jan. It would scare the pants off you if you saw what games designers can do now. Hyperreal simulated worlds. And anyway, don’t you realise that creating a simulated reality is the easiest thing in the world? We all do it… every time we dream. When we’re dreaming, we think we’re experiencing reality. How often have you had a dream and, after you’ve woken up, you’ve had to work hard at remembering what really happened and what happened in the dream?’
Fabel thought about how vivid his dreams had been over the years, when the dead would walk again and point accusing fingers at him for not catching their killers; or the nights when he sat in his father’s study talking to Paul Lindemann, the young police officer who had been shot dead while on an operation organised and run by Fabel.
‘Do you know that there really are quite a few respected scientists who believe that it is actually unlikely that any of this
…’ Otto indicated their surroundings with a sweep of his arms ‘… is real? That everything we experience is a highly sophisticated simulation.’
