The grey skies outside had been replaced by the beginnings of a bright afternoon. The sun shone down wanly on the landscape of the city. Kendrick wondered how long he'd been lying unconscious on the floor, and decided that he didn't want to know.
Now he lifted Caroline up by the arms and manhandled her into her bed. Her head lolling, she made a guttural grunting sound, her eyes rolling wildly under their lids. As he pulled the duvet over her she twisted into it. She mumbled something incomprehensible, but as far as he could tell she was out of the bizarre fugue state that he'd found her in. Now she appeared to be sleeping naturally.
Kendrick shook his head numbly, and followed after McCowan. He found him in the kitchen.
'Two sugars, right?' Peter banged cupboard doors open and shut until he found the tin marked Sugar. Kendrick watched as the ghost poured hot water into two mugs before sinking into one of the chairs by the kitchen table. The ghost reached for an open carton of milk and dribbled it into each of the mugs, spilling almost as much on the table.
McCowan pushed one across the table towards Kendrick, slopping even more tea out of the mug. The hot liquid began to soak into a small pile of paper magazines and an eepsheet. Kendrick sat down opposite, gingerly sliding the magazines and 'sheet away from the growing pool.
Then he stopped and stared at the two mugs. Ghosts just didn't make cups of tea. If he picked up his own tea, that would make the thing sitting across the table from him objectively real. He made no move to pick up the mug.
Kendrick licked his lips. 'Who are you?'
'Peter McCowan. Probably.' Kendrick started to say something, but the other man held his hands out in a stop gesture. 'I'll qualify that. I'm Peter McCowan. I am also, to a lesser extent, you, and also Caroline, and anyone else I ever knew who was also involved in Ward Seventeen back in the Maze. So, to rephrase things, I'm Peter McCowan – but that's not necessarily the same thing as the Peter McCowan.'
Kendrick remembered the Peter McCowan he'd known: a charming rogue whose apparent ability to talk his way out of almost any bad situation had deserted him the day he arrived at the Maze.
Kendrick shook his head. 'I keep thinking that Caroline is going to walk in here and see me talking to a blank wall. I thought you were some kind of hallucination, but I'm not sure anyone can have this kind of conversation with a hallucination. In which case, I don't know what you are.'
'It's a good question. Let's just say the augment technology they put in me in the Maze had the unexpected side-benefit of preserving the memories and thoughts from a dead mind. As to why it should do so, well, it constitutes a self-evolving cybernetic organism in its own right. Maybe preserving such things increases its ability to survive. Maybe Draeger intended that. Or maybe I'm just a cooperative community of nanites, several tens of thousands of generations beyond the ones that first inhabited my body, which only thinks it's me. Either way, my advice to you remains the same. Don't go back to Hardenbrooke.'
Kendrick's lips felt heavy and numb. To his surprise, he began to feel anger. Just then, just for an instant, he hated McCowan in a way he couldn't previously have imagined. Here was a literal ghost from his past, demanding his attention, his active participation in schemes born of madness.
'Do you know what the alternative is?' Kendrick asked. 'How could you be Peter and have been there in the Maze, and yet not know what happens to people like us when our augments turn rogue and we leave them untreated?'
'Kendrick-'
'You know what I heard happens in those secure wards that the Legislate operate? They open you up and try and cut the things directly out of you. But they can never get all of them, so they start to grow back again. Yet they still do it anyway.'
Kendrick shook his head. 'And sometimes when the augmentations grow back in, they develop in new and even more unexpected ways.' He stared at the ghost with fervent eyes. 'I need Hardenbrooke. With his help I can stay free, and maybe then find a way not just to stay alive but to stay at least remotely human for as long as I can before these fucking things inside me finally kill me!'
He was hyperventilating, dizzy with the effort of coping with this so soon after his latest seizure, furious but feeling desperately frail.
'Kendrick. This is why…' Peter's shape twisted, disappeared, reappeared again, his features marginally distorted. '… rdenbrooke has set you up. I swear this is true. The nanotech tracers he's put in you do more than restructure the core algorithms of your augmentations. They act like a Trojan horse, analysing you from the inside out, practically reading your fucking thoughts. Remember what happened in the Maze, Kendrick. Remember the four of us – you, me, Buddy and Robert.'
'I remember.'
'What's inside you is based on Max Draeger's research. He… he…'
As Kendrick watched, McCowan became more like a two-dimensional image, or a badly tuned signal. 'Listen, Kendrick, I've got to go. I'll see you soon. For Christ's sake, think about what I'm saying.' He flickered again, his voice turning scratchy, giving the lie to any notion of his being a genuine physical manifestation.
A product of technology, then, not a ghost – or at any rate not the kind that haunted empty houses and lonely castles. McCowan's image flickered once more, then finally disappeared. Kendrick felt a touch of vertigo as he realized that the tea, the spreading puddle of it, had vanished. The table was bare of any sign of Peter McCowan's presence.
For a few minutes, Kendrick stared at the empty seat in front of him, filled with an overwhelming sensation of unreality.
16 October 2096 Uisghe Beatha bar, Leith
'Vasilevich?'
Hardenbrooke's face still stung from the freezing rain blowing off the sea. The bar was tucked away in an obscure side road not far from the docks at Leith. Malky glanced up in response, and Hardenbrooke thought the little man couldn't have looked more furtive if he'd tried.
'There are other people here,' Hardenbrooke stated flatly.
Malky made an exaggerated show of looking to either side at the meagre clientele, most of them huddled together in a deep, muttered conversation with the barman. 'Nobody either of us knows. And if there's any surveillance dust, I'd know about it.' Malky raised one arm above the table so that Hardenbrooke could see the databand fixed around his wrist.
Hardenbrooke grimaced and sat down opposite him. Meeting in such a public place was a bad idea. Vasilevich sometimes put too much faith in modern technology, forgetting that there were simpler ways of finding out information. Seeing two people together, for instance, and drawing conclusions – what could be easier?
'We could have met at my clinic. My security there is excellent.'
Malky shook his head. 'Look, you can be as careful as you like, but if you're going to get caught out, then you're going to get caught out, right?'
Hardenbrooke said nothing, reflecting inwardly on why he disliked the other man so much.
'Let's get this over with. I just had a surprise visit from one of Draeger's representatives. He was looking for information about Gallmon.'
Malky shrugged, his gaze darting away from Hardenbrooke's. 'What's it got to do with me?'
'The man who visited me is called Marlin Smeby. He turned up unannounced and did everything but roast me over an open pit to extract answers. I can't think of any reason for that, except maybe he smells a rat.'
Malky laughed at this, and Hardenbrooke gave him a cold glare that could have frozen a volcano. 'If something happens to me, Vasilevich, it happens to you too. Remember that.'
'I hadn't forgotten. Can you deal with this guy Smeby?'
'Not in the way I think you mean. If anything happens to Smeby, Draeger won't be fooled.'
Malky nodded. Their business relationship spanned a few years now, and Malky had long been a distributor for Hardenbrooke's seemingly endless supply of smuggled-in illegal bioware. That relationship had even blossomed for a while, until it had occurred to Hardenbrooke that blackmailing his best customer might be both profitable and
