‘Oh, but Vee,’ Sark protested, and Com sagged in his seat.
‘No, no.’ The Virus raised his hand. ‘Fair’s fair. This is good. It’ll keep us on our toes. And if you don’t like it, you know who to thank.’
Another tiresome giggle. As Cadel shuffled back to his desk, he intercepted a poisonous glance from Sark, and wondered if Thaddeus’s message had found its way back to the Virus’s students.
Did they know that Cadel was off limits?
Cadel profoundly hoped so.
SEVENTEEN
‘So how was it?’ Dr Darkkon wanted to know.
Cadel rubbed his eyes. He was very weary. After four hours in Hardware Heaven, he had rushed straight to Thaddeus’s office for his usual appointment. The Piggotts had given him money for a cab.
‘It was fine,’ he murmured. ‘The Virus was great.’
‘Ah yes.’ Dr Darkkon nodded, so that his face disappeared from the screen for an instant. ‘Vee’s a talented man. I thought you might find him interesting.’
‘Was he – did he have anything to do with my computer phone?’ Cadel asked, and his father grinned.
‘What do you think?’
‘I’m not sure. Maybe – the early stages?’
‘Maybe.’ Dr Darkkon didn’t seem eager to elaborate. He made a show of retching at the screen, which was floating in the bottom of his toilet bowl. His tongue looked like a blind, puffy, grey eel darting out of a hole. ‘What were the other students like?’
Cadel grimaced. Thaddeus leaned forward.
‘Surely Vee’s weren’t disappointing?’ he pressed. ‘I’ve heard some good things about them.’
‘Oh sure.’ Cadel shrugged. ‘They were all right.’
‘Some of the first-year intake is decidedly experimental,’ Thaddeus admitted. ‘Gazo Kovacs, the twins, Clive Slaughter – they’re a gamble, I must confess.’
‘They’re dumb,’ said Cadel, flatly.
‘Well, yes. But that doesn’t mean they won’t be useful.’
‘We can’t all be as clever as you, son,’ Dr Darkkon wheezed. ‘I hope you found it stimulating, though?’
Cadel nodded. He had found it stimulating. Almost too stimulating. He was exhausted – and confused. The Axis Institute, though interesting, had also been . . . odd. Skewed. Off-kilter. Cadel sensed that he was failing to grasp it, fully; it was like an alternative universe, constructed according to a different set of natural laws that he was unable to define.
‘What’s all that stuff in your bag?’ Thaddeus asked.
‘Embezzlement texts, mostly.’
‘What did you think of Brendan?’
‘I don’t know.’ Cadel tried to sort out his impressions. ‘We didn’t talk much.’
‘What about Deal?’
‘He was cross. Because of the sprinklers.’
‘Ah, yes.’ Thaddeus made a face. ‘It’s hard. We’ll have to fine-tune that emergency system.’
‘Uh, Dad?’ said Cadel. He didn’t know quite how to phrase his next question. ‘Do you – I mean, why do you think I should do Embezzlement?’
Dr Darkkon, who had been glancing over his shoulder, turned back to the screen and narrowed his pale froggy eyes.
‘Why?’ he echoed. ‘Why not? Do you have a problem with it, Cadel?’
‘Oh no.’ Cadel retreated. ‘Not really.’
‘Because if you have a problem with it, then perhaps that’s reason enough for you to be doing it. There’s no gain to be had from an easy ride.’
‘Cadel,’ said Thaddeus. He waited until Cadel was looking at him before continuing. ‘Brendan isn’t giving you any trouble, is he?’
Though the psychologist’s tone was casual, Cadel’s heart skipped a beat.
‘Oh, no!’ he exclaimed. ‘No, nothing like that!’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes!’ Cadel had the feeling that if Thaddeus got the wrong idea about Brendan, Luther Lasco might soon be recounting another case study to his first-year class. Brendan didn’t deserve anything so drastic. ‘I was just wondering why I’m doing Embezzlement instead of – I don’t know, Explosives, or something. That’s all.’
‘Explosives are for grunts,’ said Thaddeus. ‘You know what your father thinks about bombs, Cadel.’
‘Money,’ Dr Darkkon added, ‘is important. If you don’t understand money, Cadel, you’re at the mercy of your accountants. And they’ll either rip you off or you’ll have to hire other accountants to keep them honest. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.’
‘Money can be very interesting,’ Thaddeus concluded, watching Cadel closely. ‘Some people find it the most fascinating thing in the world: the ebb and flow, the ups and downs. It’s a system like any other.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Cadel.
‘He’s tired,’ Thaddeus informed Dr Darkkon. ‘It’s been a big day.’
Dr Darkkon agreed. It was time for the boy to go home, he said. ‘You’ll be fine, Cadel. As soon as you get the hang of it, you’ll be disembowelling banks and hijacking the International Monetary Fund like there was no tomorrow. You’ll see.’
Cadel smiled, in a half-hearted fashion. For once, he didn’t think his father was right. But he nodded and changed the subject, and was finally allowed to go home. Again, he used a taxi.
Upon reaching his bedroom, he immediately sat down in front of his computer.
Then realised that he didn’t know what to say.
He was too tired to pretend that he was Eiran Dempster. In fact, Eiran was beginning to annoy him. The guy was useless – a lazy slob. Why did Kay-Lee like him so much? It occurred to Cadel that he was actually becoming jealous of Eiran, and he groaned.
What kind of idiot becomes jealous of one of his own fictional creations?
Hey Primo, he typed in code, and stopped. He wanted to ask advice without revealing too much. How could it be done? He thought a bit more before continuing. Hard day at the office, he wrote. I’m whacked. That campus is a madhouse, I swear. Some of the students are so stupid I can’t believe they’re allowed through the gates. What do I do with a couple of blonde bimbos who are all over me because they think it’s good politics? I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could spit, either – they make me nervous – so I can’t exactly boot them up the ass. They might get their own back some other way. You’re a young, good-looking blonde, Primo – are there any tips you can give me?
On the subject of tips, I’m wondering what you think about money. You know I’m not good with money. It doesn’t interest me, for some reason. But I’m informed that I’d better get interested – fast – or I’ll end up a tramp when I retire. What’s your take on this? How come a guy who teaches number theory can’t seem to budget his expenses? Or balance his chequebook? What is it that I’m missing, here?
If there’s some way that you could open up a door for me, and show me a whole, new, wonderful world of funds management, I’ll be forever in your debt.
By the way, I’ve met a great new guy from the computer department. He’s into designing hardware and software implementations of neural networks, and it’s been fantastic talking to him. Have you ever applied things like Gaussian random variables to the calculation of how many fixed vectors a neural network might have? It’s all to do with storing patterns so that they’re stable, and establishing stability conditions for each bit on a chip. We spent several hours today proving that a pattern will be stable with probability 1 for a Hopfield network with sum-of-outer product weights, if and the number of patterns obeys the condition . Wish you’d been there.
Love from Stormer.
Having sent off this message, Cadel spent half an hour waiting impatiently for a reply. He wandered out to the kitchen and made himself a banana smoothie. He flicked glumly through his Embezzlement texts. He checked his Partner Post mailbox, which was brimming with anxious emails that he didn’t feel energetic enough to answer.
At last, after repeatedly checking, he received Kay-Lee’s reply.
&nb
sp; Darling Stormer, she wrote, what the hell is a Hopfield network? Never heard of it – though I’m not surprised about the Gaussian random variables. Gauss pops up pretty much everywhere anyway, and it’s only to be expected that he makes an appearance in the field of neural networks, since he was a scientist as well as a mathematician. (Did you know that he and Weber designed an electric telegraph? Bet you didn’t.) You’ll have to give me a bit more information, though, if you want me to appreciate the beauty of your equation.
As far as money goes, you’re asking the wrong person. I wouldn’t be working as a nurse if my share portfolio was behaving itself. However, I did once see a lovely piece of calculation in an annual report – something about a financial option called a perpetual floating rate note. It was a whole new take on transcendental numbers, as far as I could see. Very amusing.
But maybe we should both put our minds to finding the fun in money – especially superannuation funds. Glancing through the prospectus in front of me, I can see that fees are calculated as a percentage of the amount invested, depending on the risk factors involved. I’m sure we could find some entertainment in running checks on this stuff.
Darling Stormer, if you really want to get rich, let’s get rich. I’m up for it. But remember that wealth always comes with strings attached. You think you’ve got problems with ruthless blonde bimbos now? Wait till you’ve got more money than you know what to do with! You won’t be able to move for ruthless blonde bimbos!
I’m not ruthless, and I’m not a bimbo. I don’t care how much money you have. If you were a septingentillionaire I wouldn’t love you any more than I do now.
Your own
Primo
P.S. I’m glad you’ve found a kindred spirit at work. I worry about you. If only there was an equation that would solve all your problems once and for all!
Reading this email, Cadel wondered why it made him feel even worse than he had before. Because it contained so much genuine affection, which was being lavished on someone who didn’t exist? He was sometimes overcome by a strange sense of discomfort (guilt, even?) when he considered Kay-Lee.
But that didn’t stop him from talking to her. In fact as soon as he’d finished reading her message, he launched into a full explanation of J. Hopfield’s recipe for the synaptic matrix T.
With Kay-Lee, he could lose himself in a world of enjoyment that was utterly, refreshingly pure.
EIGHTEEN
The first semester at Axis was ten weeks long. By the end of the third week, Cadel had drawn several important conclusions.
To begin with, he had come to realise that Embezzlement was never going to be his favourite subject. While his interest was sometimes sparked by things like corporate money-laundering trees, he couldn’t always follow Brendan’s way of thinking. Their minds seemed to work in different ways. What’s more, Brendan’s manner often disconcerted him. It was becoming clear to Cadel that Brendan didn’t recognise him when they passed each other in the corridors – that Brendan didn’t even acknowledge his separate existence, most of the time. To Brendan, Cadel appeared to be part of a subset, the different components of which were interchangeable. If Cadel had started calling himself Douglas, Brendan wouldn’t have been surprised.
So while Cadel admired Brendan, he couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for Brendan’s subject. Hence his performance in Brendan’s class. Though technically accomplished, it was less than inspired. He wasn’t a very creative embezzler. He could follow models, and juggle uncleared funds, and competently disguise bad loans as good ones (on paper), but he never surprised Brendan with new ideas for siphoning off profits, or falsifying net interest income. Only with credit cards did he display any real flair – and that was mostly in the area of computer processing.
Oddly enough, despite the fact that he displayed even less natural flair in his Forgery class, he enjoyed it far more than he enjoyed Embezzlement. Never having devoted much time to building model aeroplanes or wiring up remote-control toy cars, Cadel’s fine motor skills weren’t very well developed. He didn’t have the sort of coordination required by a really good forger, let alone the necessary eye for colour and detail. He hadn’t even liked studying art at school. Yet he threw himself into his Forgery course with great enthusiasm, perhaps because, with Forgery, he could see a point to it all. Drawing pictures of fruit in a bowl had always seemed a futile exercise, in his opinion. Why do it, when you could take a photograph? Reproducing a bank cheque, on the other hand, was a challenge. You had to get it right, or it wouldn’t work. Cadel didn’t always get it right. His fake university degrees and drivers licences rarely passed inspection. But as his teacher pointed out, forgery wasn’t just about ink on paper.
‘It’s about expertise,’ Art often said, ‘and expertise can be slow to acquire. It’s not just about forgery; it’s about knowing what to forge. A good forger has an interest in historic documents, for example. A good forger knows that the only money worth forging is antique. A good forger spends a lot of time, not just poring over encoded deposit slips or international drafts, but also looking at stamp catalogues and visiting museums.’
Cadel took this advice very much to heart. Therefore, while some of his practical work needed improvement, his theoretical work was superb. He began to demonstrate a genuine understanding of the trade in rare documents, and the procedures for processing cheques. (His Embezzlement course proved most useful in the area of bank documentation.) When he finally received an ‘A’ for a birth certificate, he couldn’t bring himself to destroy it, as his teacher had recommended. Instead, he took it home and hid it in the lining of a winter jacket.
His first successful passport received the same treatment. As did many of the forged documents that came after it.
In the rest of his subjects, Cadel excelled. None of them – except Infiltration – was especially demanding. The Case Studies course required little more than dutiful attention. In Dr Deal’s class, there was a huge amount of rote learning, and Thaddeus’s Basic Lying unit consisted largely of role-playing scenarios and ‘bluffing’ games, all of which Cadel won with ease. As Doris complained, he had the face for it.
‘This isn’t fair,’ she pointed out on one occasion. ‘He’s got an advantage over the rest of us. He’s really young. He looks innocent. Of course he’s going to do better.’
‘Even if he’s asked to impersonate an airline pilot?’ Thaddeus raised an eyebrow. ‘We all have our strengths and weaknesses, Doris.’
‘I still don’t think it’s fair,’ Doris grumbled, and Thaddeus spread his hands.
‘Life isn’t fair, Doris. We wouldn’t be here if it was, would we?’
His tone was slightly impatient because Doris often whined about things. In fact she was disliked by pretty much everyone at the Axis Institute, with the possible exception of Luther Lasco. The twins, who were in Doris’s poisoning class, maintained that he was in love with Doris, because he treated her with such respect. But the twins, as Clive had repeatedly pointed out, were ‘full of crap’. They couldn’t be trusted. More than once they had given rashes to their fellow students by applying poisons to their stick-on fashion nails, and dragging those nails seductively across bare arms or necks. It was a trick they had learned in their poisoning class, so they didn’t try it on Doris. Nor did they touch Cadel, after Thaddeus’s warning. And Gazo, of course, was never out of his suit. Clive, Kunio and Abraham were the twins’ main targets. During the first three weeks of the semester, Abraham showed up twice with puffy red weals on his pale skin.
The twins also began to play around with knockout sprays in perfume bottles. They seemed to be throwing themselves into their poisoning studies with far too much enthusiasm. ‘Production, application, detection,’ they would chant, and collapse into giggles. It was hard to know what the joke might be. Cadel did wonder, sometimes, if they were actually reading each other’s thoughts.
Increasingly, he tried to keep out of their way. He also avoided Doris. Clive was irritating, but he did provide
Cadel with important information about the Yarramundi campus, which Cadel hadn’t visited. Clive would talk about Adolf – ‘the Fuhrer’ – who taught guerilla studies and was in charge of campus security. He would describe Adolf’s private little regiment of security guards, which was used sometimes to help with military training. These fifteen or so mercenary types were known as ‘the Grunts’. They tended to hang out at Yarramundi.
According to Gazo, Yarramundi was not a safe place to be.
‘It’s real weird,’ he told Cadel. ‘The security’s worse than it is here. They have clampdowns all the time. Random checks, and stuff. They make us lie on the floor, and search us for concealed weapons. Sometimes they seal you off in a room for hours – I dunno why.’
‘Radiation leaks, perhaps?’ Cadel suggested. ‘Radiation Studies is located out there, isn’t it?’
‘I fink so. I never saw it. I don’t do Mutation.’ Gazo sighed and changed the subject. ‘What did you get in Dr Deal’s test?’
‘An “A”,’ Cadel replied.
‘I got a “D”. I didn’t pass. What will happen if I fail the year? Do you know?’
‘You won’t fail the year,’ said Cadel. He didn’t mean it, but had got into the habit of being polite to his fellow students. He’d discovered that it threw many of them off balance; they had forgotten how to deal with sympathy. Most were perpetually on the defensive because they never knew what to expect. They would turn up to class with broken bones from their guerilla training classes, or inflamed membranes from poison gas. Carla was famous for her screaming rages, and the Fuhrer was always assaulting people. Hot-wired technology might give you an electric shock when you tried to make a telephone call; other common tricks included concealed razor blades and tainted food. Students ended up with radiation burns, mysterious rashes, breathing problems.
Little wonder that people soon became surly and aggressive. Doris had always been like that, but Cadel noticed the others growing less sociable too. Even the twins stopped chattering to Clive and Abraham. They spent more and more time whispering to each other. Clive, who had once been a big-mouth, talked less and less about possible aliases. (Cosmos? Photonus? Magog?) Kunio’s English hadn’t improved, and as for Abraham Coggins – half the time, he was barely able to talk. His gums would be swollen, or his voice would be hoarse. In fact he appeared to be disintegrating before their eyes.