“Yes.”
“Do so.”
“Done.”
Nothing happened.
David said, “Aren’t we going to go after him?”
The English made sense. Saskia crouched to retrieve the gun and checked the magazine. Five bullets left. “Let’s go.”
As they made their way from the laboratory, she remembered the vision she had experienced before disengaging from the Asgard computer.
You will return, the witch had said, as you have returned before.
Hartfield, blank, walked quickly and silently, guided by his computer’s infra-red camera.
He was a clever man. Another person would have emptied the research centre with a fire, or a bomb hoax, or computer sabotage. Hartfield’s plan – like any Hartfield plan – was a lesson in parsimony. As a moderately-skilled computer programmer (combined with knowledge that only the owner of such a of facility might have the privilege to enjoy) he had simply instructed the main computer system to turn off the lights. The command was irreversible. There were no sources of light other than hand-held torches. Alas, the torches would fail rather quickly because of a malfunction in the recharging process – also under computer control, also under Harmon’s control, also part of the plan. Parsimony. Wheels within wheels.
Opening his eyes that day in 1999, he had known immediately that something was wrong. Orza had been at his bedside. His facial expression had seemed somehow alien. Hartfield could see which muscled moved and where; he could see how the skin stretched and sagged into shapes that were quite familiar. But the shapes meant nothing. He could remember smiles, but not happiness. It was, as he explained to his late wife, as if he had lost the ability to appreciate colour. The world was now black and white.
My God but it was clearer.
Over the months, Hartfield’s humanity eroded cell by cell as the nanobots completed their work. They would not respond to calls for their deactivation. They had been built to kill, and they continued as long as they had the energy to do so. They infested his brain and cut nerves in accord with some plan that their human creators could not begin to guess.
Hartfield felt the change deepen.
Humans became objects. The only object that was real was Hartfield. His acumen grew and transformed. It enjoyed new tools that were unchecked by morality. His first murder had been easy. To his dog, he had described it as prising jewels from the idol of a backward religion.
He limped down the blackened corridor until he reached the first set of stairs. A young guard stepped from nowhere. On the Ego computer screen, with its infra-red window, his irises were solid white. “Proceed to your evacuation station, sir,” he said.
Hartfield put the computer in his jacket. “Thank you. I am on my way,” he replied. The switchblade found his palm of its own accord. It gave him an idea. When the guard walked past, he jumped on his back. Hartfield heard laughter. Surely it was the guard. They fell to the ground. Hartfield wrenched his head back, the better to cut his pipes. He frowned like a cellist. When the man was butchered, he dragged him to one side.
Gently, to see how distant his emotions had gone, he touched the blade to his tongue. The blood tasted like soy sauce and copper, or jewels. He put the switchblade back in its holster and took the guard’s gun. If someone discovered the body it would scarcely change things.
There were twelve more flights of stairs. His ears clogged with air as he sank.
In the lull, he thought about Proctor and Brandt. It had been an interesting conversation. Advantageous. He had not planned to stop on his way down to the time machine, but he had wanted to check Frank Stone’s work. The man was an idiot. His failure was not unsurprising.
His prediction that David, Jennifer and Saskia would be in the computer had been a masterstroke. Hartfield’s face was blank. He did not smile without an audience. But he savoured the reasoning once more. He had been informed of a data-burst from the West Lothian Centre only seconds before it had been destroyed the previous Monday. The burst had been a simple text file containing about one-and-a-half times the amount of information required to build a human. The other half was some kind of compressed representation of human mind: fitted together, they had to be none other than Dr Bruce Shimoda making a clean getaway. It was a sensible conclusion. Hartfield knew a great deal about the New World computer from experimental reports. He knew that, once Bruce had transferred himself inside, he needed the physical body as much as a snake needs its old skin.
Hartfield tracked the data burst until it disappeared. A cold trail was no problem: there was only one place in the world where the digital Bruce could be reassembled. Hartfield owned it. And, by coincidence, Jennifer Proctor worked there too.
But Hartfield left nothing to chance. He had already honeyed the trap by warning Jennifer of her father’s activities. Next, he arranged for Jennifer to meet Mikey, the researcher in charge of Asgard. Mikey had been given clear instructions to ensure that Jennifer and Bruce met.
It was all for nothing. The whole plan. He almost smiled. Hartfield had orchestrated the situation for two reasons: to gather evidence of David Proctor’s complicity in the first bombing of the West Lothian Centre and to observe a digital human. The first was born of a petty revenge, the second as another solution to his illness and a means to immortality. Both had been superseded by the time machine. All bets were off.
He smiled.
Hartfield would return and cure himself. There would be no West Lothian Centre. He would never meet Proctor or any of the others. He would live a full life. For, while Hartfield could feel nothing towards others, he felt everything towards himself. He hastened towards his own death and the rebirth of something that he, even in his psychopathic world, held above anything else: the wish to be
