had banished all such complications. The partitioning of my life was simple, clear-cut, absolute: on duty, I was primed; off duty, I wasn’t.
There was no possibility of ambiguity, no question of one side contaminating the other.
Karen had no professional mods; doctors, the eternal conservatives, still frowned upon the technology—but differential malpractice insurance premiums, amongst other things, were gradually eroding their resistance.
On December 2nd, I learnt that my promotion had come through—a few hours before I read about it in the evening news. That was a Friday; on the Saturday, Karen and I, and Vincent and his wife Maria, went out to dinner together to celebrate. Vincent had also been offered a position in the unit, but he’d declined.
‘Bad career move,’ I said, only half teasing. We’d scarcely had a chance to discuss it before; primed, such topics were unmentionable. ‘Counter-terrorism is a growth sector. Ten years in this unit, and I can quit the force and become an obscenely overpaid consultant to multinationals.’
He gave me an odd look, and said, ‘I guess I’m just not that ambitious.’ And then he took Maria’s hand, and squeezed it. It was hardly an extravagant gesture, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind.
I woke in the early hours of Sunday morning, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I climbed out of bed; Karen could always sense my wakefulness, and it always seemed to disturb her far more than my absence. I sat in the kitchen, trying to come to a decision, but only growing more angry and confused. I hated myself, because I hadn’t once stopped to think that I might be putting her at risk. We should have talked it through, before I’d accepted the promotion—and yet the very idea of any such discussion seemed obscene. How could I
I walked over to a window and looked out at the brightly lit street; ever since The Bubble, it seemed to me, streetlights had been growing more powerful year by year. Two cyclists rode by. The window pane shattered outwards, and I followed the shards through the empty frame.
Unbidden, the priming mods snapped into life. I curled up and rolled as I hit the ground; P4 saw to that. I lay on the grass for a second or two, bleeding and winded. I could hear the flames behind me, I could feel my heart accelerate and my skin grow cold as PI shut down peripheral circulation—a controlled version of the natural adrenalin response—but I was insulated from my body’s agitation, I had no choice but to remain calmly analytic. I got to my feet and turned around to assess the situation. Tiles from the roof were scattered on the lawn; the bomb must have been in the ceiling, close to the back of the house, probably right above the bedroom. I could see patches of a bubbling, gelatinous substance sliding down the remnants of the inside walls, carrying with it sheets of blue flame.
I knew that Karen was dead. Not injured, not in danger. With nothing to shield her from the blast, she would have died instantly.
I’ve thought about it a great deal since, and I always reach the same conclusion: any ordinary person in the same situation would have run back in, would have risked their life—in shock, confused, disbelieving, would have done the most dangerous and futile thing imaginable.
But the zombie boy scout knew there was nothing he could do, so he just turned and walked away. And, knowing the dead were beyond his help, he turned his attention to the needs of the survivor.
3
I try, and fail, to think of a single, compelling reason why the Children can’t be involved. Abducting braindamaged mental patients conceived on Bubble Day may not be something they’ve done before, but no doubt there’s a dearth of suitable candidates—and, short of an actual precedent, the whole absurd crime does have an undeniable Child-like ring to it. It’s also true that the Children aren’t known to have been active in New Hong Kong, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have a cell here, a safe house somewhere in the city. As few as four or five people could have smuggled Laura in.
I pace the room, trying to stay calm. I feel more indignation than fear—as if my client should have known about this and warned me from the start. That’s absurd, but the fact remains: I’m not being paid enough to fuck with terrorists, least of all the Children. They may not have deigned to make a second attempt on my life—a policy they seem to apply to all chance survivors, as if refusing to acknowledge failure—but I have no intention of reminding them of my existence, let alone providing them with a whole new reason to put me back on their hit list.
I call the airport; there’s a flight out at six. I book a seat. I pack. It all takes a matter of minutes. Then I sit on the bed, staring at my suitcase—and gradually I start to regain a sense of perspective.
So, Laura was conceived on—or close to—Bubble Day. But is that information, or noise? Law enforcement bodies around the world have programmed computers to tirelessly pursue the Children’s obsessions—dates, numerology, heavenly conjunctions,
No doubt any member of the Children, if told of Laura’s date of conception, would ascribe a great significance to her abduction—but to treat that as proof of their involvement is ludicrous. The question is
Running away would be pathetic.
Still. I have nothing to lose but money. I could err on the side of caution, I could drop the case, regardless. Yeah, and I could join the ranks of people so cowed by the Children’s atrocities that they hunt obsessively through the patterns of their lives in search of danger signs, and lock themselves in their homes on every anniversary of every petty stage of Duprey’s lukewarm bloodless martyrdom, observing the holy days of their own religion of fear.
I unpack.
It’s almost sunrise. Lack of sleep, as it often does, has left me with a peculiar feeling of clarity, a sense of having broken free of the mind’s ordinary cycle, of having reached a profound new relationship with the world. I invoke Boss to force my endocrine system back into phase, and the delusion soon evaporates.
Compared to lightning-bolt revelations of terrorist involvement, the information I’ve assembled so far looks hopelessly ambiguous. But I have to start somewhere—and Biomedical Development International is the only company on the list without a blatantly innocent reason to be buying the cluster of drugs that Laura needs. And if BDI has no shareholders to impress, and hacking is too risky, I’m going to have to use more direct means to find out exactly what it is that they’re researching.
I take a small box from my suitcase, and open it gently. Nestled in tissue paper, a mosquito is sleeping.
I lack the specialist mod used to program the insect, but a second compartment of the box contains a ROM, bearing old-style sequential software which will let me do the job, albeit more slowly. I lift out the chip, and switch it on. It glows invisibly in modulated infrared, and the bioengineered IR transceiver cells, scattered throughout the skin of my hands and face, collect and demodulate the signal. RedNet (NeuroComm, $1,499) receives the nerve impulses from these cells, and decodes and buffers the data.
I pass the program to von Neumann (Continental BioLogic, $3,150). Simulating a general-purpose computer isn’t something a neural network does with great efficiency—hence the need for specialized mods, physically optimized for their tasks, instead of a single, programmable ‘computer-in-the-skull’. But nobody can afford to buy every mod on the market—and you’d probably impair normal brain function if you commandeered that many neurons. So, quaint as it may be, sometimes loading a ROM full of sequential software is the only practical solution.
