Keene, sitting uninvited now on her sofa, has brought blandly well-chosen chocolates in medium quantity, and fruit juice to drink while she makes sure the Inspector isn’t returning to the job before she should.
‘I’m fine, Pippa,’ Neith says.
‘I know you are,’ Keene replies, before running through the checklist, as Neith had known she would. No flashbacks? No tremors? No hallucinations? No confusion, no sudden sorrows, no fear? No passionate and overwhelming desire for revenge?
No, no, no, and on we go.
Keene watches her face while Neith gives honest answers to boring questions, and then, deciding that’s enough, rubber-stamps the Inspector’s readiness and makes unrelated chitchat about the front pages. Given that Neith is on the front page of several media sites, that actually meant discussing the only subject competing with her: the minutiae of the Monitoring Bill. Keene, like Neith herself, is in favour of a cautious approach, but unsettled. There’s too much thrashing about, she says. Too much shouting and not enough thinking. An angry young woman in Lothian has penned a frankly scintillating denouncement of the whole idea, a short viral opinion which became news currency late last night, only to be met this morning by a sequence of responses from around the country putting weight behind the immediate roll-out option as a question of equal and equitable access to the developing societal future. Keene sends the original piece to Neith’s terminal, but the document is so oversubscribed the private server hosting it is down, the woman a victim of her own unanticipated celebrity. Perhaps, Keene suggests, the bill should be kicked into the long grass until there’s an actual device and a concrete use-case. Not even the System, after all, can make people more rational. The Inspector demurs. This is the way it’s done, even when we don’t like it.
This unstructured but unmistakable check of the Inspector’s ability to concentrate, reason and articulate being concluded, Keene blandly takes her leave. She shakes Neith’s hand at the door, and as always Neith remembers the card trick, feeling the dry texture of the other woman’s skin.
Neith only realises afterwards that she has lied, or lied a little, inadvertently. The burst of Bekele’s memory at Hunter’s house was not quite a hallucination. It hardly counts as a flashback, either, just a sudden and powerful recurrence of implanted memory. Scent is the sense most closely associated with recall.
Over four days, she has reviewed nearly thirty hours of the Gnomon examination. Her body feels odd; pinched in some places and loose in others. Her clothes itch. She needs to rest, properly, then carry on. Exhaustion cannot be allowed to interrupt her work.
She sighs for a moment, thinking of the dog-walker. Of all the dog-walkers.
Nothing interrupts her work.
*
In that same antediluvian period which gave the Inspector’s building its wakeful neon ornamentation, police investigators had pinboards on to which they would physically fix pieces of paper to assist in visualising the flow of cause and effect and the interactions of persons of interest. It seems to Neith to propose a very linear perception of motive, and to make heavy work of the layered and often conflicting patterns of human deceit. Modern methods, of course, have improved it: she still has her crime wall, but it is projected on to the sheer plaster of her home, the information itself held in the System. Any individual document on it may be searched or tagged, so that she can at will select any part of the wall and make that part the top of the tree, watching all the others fall into strands and tangles of bad action. ‘Turn the case on its head’ is an old standby for a copper in a jammed investigation, but only recently has it been an option to be selected from a drop-down menu.
At the moment, as well as Hunter’s death in custody and the official documentation, the Inspector’s wall features Lönnrot, bordered in red and marked as dangerous. Now she adds in no particular order some new terms: FIRE JUDGES and FIRESPINE, WALK THROUGH WALLS, CHAMBER OF ISIS and UNIVERSAL SOLVENT (ALKAHEST). Let the Witness connect them how it can.
It does, of course, with scrupulous completeness. References drown the left half of the wall, tiny superscripted text. She brushes all these to one side with a vague gesture, then calls it all back again as something in the flicker of pseudomotion catches in the corner of her eye. She enlarges the text, flings notes away. Seen that, seen that, don’t care don’t care seen that.
There.
and in the end she was wide open to the machine, as if it had sliced her head into pages and turned the leaves on her spine
‘What’s that?’
– A speech from the Hunter recording, the Witness answers primly.
‘Just because it has the word spine in it?’
– Relevance is elastic.
How very true. Neith waits patiently for any elucidation, but the machine has finished. She peers at the text a little longer, then sweeps it to one side again, and enters the names of the cardinal protagonists in Hunter’s mind: Kyriakos, Athenais, Berihun Bekele.
After a moment, she enters STEGANOGRAPHY, CRYPTOGRAPHY, APOCATASTASIS and CATABASIS into the mix. The overall picture shifts a little as if shrugging, but does not change. She shrugs back, almost irritated: No, I don’t know what to do with those either. Don’t look at me like that.
The Witness reminds her that she made notes during her hospital time, and she winces. Like the lucid inspirations of midnight, moments of genius blurted to the System in the recovery room are of variable quality.
She mutters: ‘Playback,’ and hears her own voice, muzzy and determined, telling her that Hunter’s table was the one in Cosmatos’s kitchen in the Kyriakos timeline. For that matter, Bekele painted the shark that Kyriakos then bought – another Gnomon connection between narratives. The shark that ate the stock exchange. It occurs to her to wonder whether Bekele, at least, was historically real.
She pushes her tone into the vocative. ‘Berihun Bekele, life and work as compared with the Hunter narrative sequence.’
The wall refreshes, showing her a picture of a dignified black man in age working at a canvas. Inset, in grainy celluloid colour – and yes, his skin vanishes into a kind of uniform absence – is his beautiful younger self wearing a shirt made of preposterous orange silk.
– The Hunter narrative is consonant with what is known, the Witness replies. Berihun Bekele lived before the creation of the System and record-keeping was haphazard. There are non-verifiable details. The game, Witnessed, appears to be a later addition intended to represent the modern System in an unfavourable light. Do you wish me to examine the fine detail?
‘No.’ She senses a rabbithole, imagines Hunter’s delight at the notion of her falling down into it. On the other hand – ‘Yes, but not now. Add it to the file. Alert me if it becomes relevant. Is there a picture of a shark?’
– There was. It appears in the catalogue listings of his work. No digital image is available.
But that part at least is true – or rather, the more surgical aspect of her mind insists, a piece of work is recorded and attributed to a man by that name. Is there such a thing as ghost art?
‘Try to find one.’
The machine does not respond. As she often does when implicitly criticising its function, she wonders if it is huffing.
Instead of apologising, she writes SHARK on the empty space of the crime wall. A connection appears to the word ‘cryptography’, with a historical interest tag. Then the pattern of dotted lines twitches and wavers, and for a moment she imagines that she will see the outline of a great white drifting lazily across the illuminated wall, her local network crashing and all the files vanishing away.
The Inspector grimaces to herself. Will she also refuse to get in the bath, for fear of seeing that upright triangular fin slicing between the taps to devour her? No.
She begins quite deliberately to formulate ideas as words in her head, the welcome objectivity of text pressing her mind into familiar shapes, dragging a stylus through the air and letting the System turn her scrawl into a neat rendering of her own w
riting. The text is beautiful, a perfected alphabet drawn from every document she has ever written by hand.
Lönnrot and Hunter are connected by Firespine, by the Fire Judges. The real and unreal worlds are not entirely separate. Is that the point? Or is the overlap evidence of collaboration? Is Lönnrot merely Hunter’s messenger – or is it the other way around? Yet Lönnrot professed to be as bewildered by Hunter as Neith herself, to be pursuing an inquiry.
Secondary connections and references slither out from the text box, indexed and enticing. No. Not yet.
Hunter, undeniably now, was possessed of a striking and unusual expertise. Her defence against interrogation is alarming of its own efficacy – even or especially if it contributed to her death – but also as evidence of a training she should not have. Either she got it in secret – which is terrifying – or her record is incomplete – which is moreso.
The appearance of the name, Gnomon, still troubles her. It is a feature of Hunter’s narratives. It is – apparently by coincidence – the name of the case examining her death.
The Perfumed Smith proposes that the narratives in Hunter’s head are aspects of her life in one way or another. Oblique and obfuscated though they may be, they are still about her. Perhaps that partial revelation also accounts for the success of her strategy of concealment: she was not resisting the urge to tell her interviewer everything. She was instead complying in a way that was impossible to understand. And
Mielikki Neith still has no answer to the original question she has been tasked to resolve – whether Diana Hunter was wrongfully killed – but that question has broken into three subsidiary ones: was Hunter’s death part of an action against the state; if so, did that action end with her life or does it persist; and in either case, how did the situation degenerate to the point of her dying?
She unlocks the wall and lets her eyes roam, seeking unheralded connections. It is a peculiar skill of interface, teasing the machine to unlock a cloud of possible conjunctions, focusing on a given object for just long enough to trigger a deeper evaluation, then skating away along a connection so that it, too, unfolds to reveal its extension in the conceptual space behind the wall. For a moment she holds her breath, watching a single triangle form at the bottom and rove left and up – shark! – then snorts at herself as the lines spiral and twist into a new configuration. Pattern recognition is a liar. No watery god-monster is going to consume her case today.
Gods and monsters. Her gaze drifts to the Roman syncretist bubbles in that portion of the wall given over to Hunter’s narratives. Athenais dreamed a room of lies which came true, and a man died. Was sacrificed. Death setting everything in motion. She lingers, and the constant pressure of her eyes on the topic loosens the bonds between items, each becoming its own centre of annotated, projected meaning and possible subtext. Dislocated words drift on the plaster like dandelion seeds. Not sacrificed: torn. Everything is torn.
Poor pale Anna was ripped apart.
Is that it? The first principle of that recurring theme? Wrong question. Nothing here is only one thing. Is it a principle?
She opens the medical case history from her in-tray, and begins to read. The patient’s name was Anna Magdalena, and she was a probability and risk analyst. She was ultimately diagnosed as suffering from a rare form of epilepsy, in which her everyday experience was aligned with – but not actually the same as – what anyone else in her position might have felt, but which occasionally and unpredictably produced seizures manifesting as transient delusional paranoia. She would go from utterly calm to terrified in a few seconds, and back again. The syndrome was not ameliorable by therapy or medication: it was a crudely physical dysfunction firing ineluctably in her brain and ruining her mind. Ultimately her physical health was affected, the sudden flooding of her endocrine system with stress hormones leading to a dangerous tachycardic exhaustion. The extent of the problem came to light when she submitted herself for neural interview during a paranoiac spasm, believing she had uncovered a criminal syndicate. The sudden change in the structure of her thoughts meant that a direct neural interview would work only during her lucid periods, when she had minimal recollection of her manic ones. During the manic ones, the flurry of signals in the brain overloaded the probes. There was simply too much going on. Doctors hypothesised that part of the issue was a kind of noise, like the roaring of a gale inside her head, which produced the negative emotional response that then became paranoia.
The System proposed and ultimately carried out a radical medical intervention in which her corpus callosum was partially severed. Counter-intuitively, the severing allowed her to recohere, to become singular, but this in turn triggered a shift in personality and almost total memory loss. Her atypical neural structure was more profound, as a consequence of her brain’s decades-long attempts to compensate for what was happening, than anyone had realised, and the operation was classed as a significant – if fascinating – failure. The patient neither technically survived nor entirely died, but was fundamentally changed without life ever departing her body. One person died and one person was born, and the new individual went on to work within the System as a productive member of society – but even so.
Neith catches her breath for a moment, wondering if she will see Diana Hunter’s face in the attached image file, but doesn’t. A narrow woman in recovery, painfully thin and with lank hair falling around her shoulders, glowers at her from the frame. Joan of Arc, Neith thinks, and wonders immediately if she has arrived at this comparison by ricochet, bouncing off the martyrdom of her victim and conflating Anna Magdalena with Mary Magdalene and then doubling down.
Poor pale Anna.
First name terms. ‘Did they know each other?’
– There is no record of their having met.
‘Check that, please. Find out where Anna is now.’
The Inspector hesitates a moment, and then wipes her hand across the whole question, bringing back the rest of the crime wall. The coincidence of names is so obvious that she does not consider it significant, but her mind follows the track all the same, and she is content to let it. Go where the case takes you, follow the information. The truth emerges from the world.
‘Tell me about the granddaughter.’
– Annabel Bekele was a software developer who produced a number of influential online environments. There is as noted no record of the game described in the Hunter narrative.
A pause.
– All the narratives are somewhat plausible within their own context. The limits of their historical accuracy cannot readily be established. By the same token, unless Hunter was in possession of a unique historical archive it must be assumed that the Athenais narrative is fictional. Certainly the memory cannot be a true one adapted and grafted from the original person into Hunter’s mind, for obvious reasons.
Because she’d have to be thousands of years old. But the recollection is immensely real. The Inspector winces to herself, tasting bile. She used to like honey.
Not any more.
Are these Hunter’s memories, then, through a distorting lens? Athenais the librarian, the free thinker, could certainly be a mask for her; Bekele, an old man looking back on an eventful life and now in crisis one more time; Kyriakos … something else. Singled out by a god. A vehicle for destruction. Are these clues? Or a false trail to send her into the maze?
Which – as advertised – has at least one monster in it.
Was Hunter some implausible foreign agent? Or do the narratives themselves contain something of value? What if Diana Hunter was set up, and this is the mode of communication between two inimical persons operating inside the System? Is Hunter’s death the informational equivalent of a drug mule in whose stomach a prophylactic full of heroin has abruptly ruptured? If so, what is the message? How is it hidden? How deep and complex is it – a page of text? If it is complex, she may find it; complexity is its own banner. If it’s nothing more than a value referring to one of a set collection of numbered instructions, it is invisibl
e without the key.
Steganography is all around you. You will go down where all the ladders start.
She says it aloud.
– Yeats, the Witness murmurs from the desktop terminal in the other room. ‘The foul rag and bone shop of the heart.’ Although the origin text uses the word ‘lie’ rather than ‘go’.
It pleases her to know that Lönnrot’s recollection of poetry is imperfect. Take that, felon! Your misquotation of historic poetry undoes all your fiendish plans! In exactly this much, our unrivalled detective engine has found you out.
The Inspector scowls at her translucent reflection in a window pane.
Regno Lönnrot, the first indication she had that this was not going to be a straightforward matter, who had the nerve to attack an Inspector of the Witness and who according to the footage neither enters nor leaves Hunter’s house, and yet was in it and now is not. Where does Lönnrot come in? Was her heightened attention the point of the exercise? What can Lönnrot possibly gain from greater scrutiny? The Witness is not like a human watcher. It is not distractible, not failing to look at one thing simply because it is looking at something else.
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, why, why, why would you want to be seen more clearly in this one?
On the peak of the same mountain there is another village, and the barber there shaves all the men in the village who do not shave themselves – and only them. Does he shave himself, or not?
She wants to say ‘You tell me’, but that’s the point. Hunter is silenced now, and yet somehow still maddeningly talkative.
*
The Inspector’s back is hurting again, the knot just under her offside shoulder blade like a needle of ice and grit. Her posture has deteriorated into a slump. She needs food and rest and wants neither.