None of this is as it appears.
Once you know that in your bones, once you live it, not as an amusing conceit but as a truth as self-evident as the wood of your floor or the taste of your own spit, no mechanical lie detector will ever fault you. It can’t, because you are not lying. Lying is impossible if nothing is real.
Seven of us couldn’t cope, and were hospitalised. Out of a group of twelve, this was an exemplary success rate.
We progressed beyond numbers to alphabets and then to symbols, learning how to hold information without consciously knowing it. We built memory palaces and tore them down, used the rubble to frame encrypted messages. At the same time we progressed through a radical physical indoctrination, discovered how one person can fight six and hurt them, wear them out and beat them; how three people can work together against someone who is better trained and equipped. While we fought, we must also work our minds, process combat and information simultaneously. Our instructors asked questions and we shouted back responses, quotations, coded messages we made up on the spot which the next recruit would have to unscramble on the fly. If they failed, both would suffer. If they succeeded, the reward was another problem, a harder one, and more physical tasks, more involved weapons forms. And all the while you had to maintain not one but three cover stories, never mix them, never let one single true statement about yourself pass your lips, not even things that were self-evident such as eye colour or skin tone or how many people were in the room or how many fingers an instructor was holding up.
Of three hundred students and twenty staff, by the end of the year I was the very best. There is nothing I cannot beat. I can push my brain to places no one else can go, even – as I learned – to my own destruction.
Oh, Robert. I was so angry with you, and you with me, and now here we are and everything is bad.
FA LA JO RI JI JO JA.
FA LA.
FA.
A.
A.
A.
A.
The Inspector has dropped the terminals and is lying on the floor. They hang from their own cords, dangling over her face. She can taste the stroke, still, feel the lurch of it, the dissolution of self as her brain misfired, as parts of it died. As first the story and then the overflowing of her senses swallowed her.
Swallowed Hunter.
‘Fuck,’ she whispers, and then nearly weeps in relief as it comes out in English.
She recalls what it was to feel her brain shut down, to lose not only sensation but cognition, to see text become nonsense between one breath and the next. To dissolve in a flare of erasure like vomiting or orgasm redesigned by a monster. She can still feel it.
The exam recording and playback system was not intended for this level of extremity. Never tested for it.
She wonders if she has been impaired.
Reshaped.
Burned.
She keys a basic neural test, works through it in five minutes with the System invigilating, waits for the results. A moment later the System tells her she’s clear. She doesn’t feel clear. She feels addled, or perhaps scrambled, like an egg, with everything topsy-turvy in her head. The test will be on her file for ever. Well: due diligence, due care to her own mental wellbeing in the course of an investigation. That is entirely consonant with who she is. She wonders, recursively, whether the fact that she even registered the idea of that notation is a little trace of Hunter.
But the footprint of the other woman’s stroke is fading, her sense of brokenness lifting, and in its place a sense of gratitude and, perversely, betrayal. Hunter is going on down that road, that utterly terrifying, appalling passage, and the Inspector has abandoned her and is drawing back, letting her face the darkness alone.
She stays very still, trying to work out if she can walk. If she can speak. Has she lost something undetectable? Or will it be like Hunter, something obvious? Her name, her deductive ability. What is worse, she feels she knows Diana Hunter now, not things about her but her, the woman herself, the way she knew her own body and her own head. She knows Hunter like an old friend or an old chair, the impression of her marked as if by long acquaintance. Borrowed understanding. Stolen. Does that sort of thing have to go somewhere when it is torn away? Was it ripped away from its owner and somehow stored, mitochondrial metadata riding the signal, baked into her by the trauma of a witnessed stroke?
Witnessed. Too many layers in that to unpack now.
Witnessed at first hand, from within. Is that witness, truly, or experience?
But we are all changed, all the time, by each passing instant of our days. The woman who wakes tomorrow is not the woman who woke yesterday, for all that there is a line of consequence between them. They are separated from one another by event.
The Inspector gets to her feet, very slowly, expecting a numb muscle or a weird, acquired labyrinthitis setting everything at an angle. Instead, she feels nothing. Or rather, nothing wrong. Just an overwhelming sense of having stepped at the last minute from a whirlpool in which she was drowning.
She walks a slow circuit around her home, naming each object in turn. When she comes to the kitchen, she names the contents of each cupboard from memory before opening it, then checks the reality against the System’s record of her speech. She makes mistakes. That is normal. The point is that the words match the objects and are not slurred or jagged. The point is that her arms, legs, spine remember how to move, her lungs inflate and her eyes track. She can read.
When she has finished the loop and named her favourite, scuffed chair and the stack of unread magazines on the side table, she allows herself to consider what has passed, and to work on it. There was gold amongst the dirt, the truth of Hunter and her training. Truth, or a lie more like it.
‘Burton,’ she says, aloud. ‘Precis.’
– A town on the river Trent noted for beer. A hoist. Richard Francis Burton, explorer, translator. Richard Walter Jenkins alias Burton, actor. To go for a burton, meaning to die or disappear.
‘Burton as a place of training for special operations, insurgency. Possibly a nickname.’
– No matches.
She gestures to the crime wall. ‘Cross-reference.’
The wall shifts and flows, connections spiralling and grasping. She has set it to display a random selection of the Witness’s activities at a humanly comprehensible speed. The effect is attractive, sometimes revealing, but not representative. After a moment, the motion slows.
– A shark was once reported in the Trent. Contemporary news coverage was enthusiastic, but biology argues that the sighting is unlikely to be genuine. There are no significant connections found beyond those you already know.
She snorts. ‘Fine. What about spurious connections?’
There is a brief pause – again, she wonders if the Witness can be offended, or something like it – but when the voice resumes, nothing about its intonation has changed.
– Karl Ladbroke, actor, 1983 to 2040, took the role of Elias Lönnrot in the biographical film of his life (English title: Epic, produced by Boxlight Malibu in 2039). He had previously portrayed Pythagoras in the romantic comedy Earth Goes Round the Sun (Kino–Enlai 2022). The case name assigned to your investigation of Hunter’s death is GNOMON. In one scene of the film the angle of Ladbroke’s arousal is compared unfavourably to a geometer’s angle or gnomon by the heroine, played by Sarah Ndibe, born in Burton upon Trent in 1999. The critical reception was poor but the film did well at the Brazilian and Chinese box offices, making it a financial success. Do you wish to explore this pathway?
No. It isn’t what she’s looking for. But she will swear that Diana Hunter trained herself or was trained in something like the way she described, pushed her mind and its function into dangerous shapes on her way to beating the machine.
Say it. Hunter beat the machine.
She doesn’t say it, and a moment later the Witness determines that her thoughts have wandered.
– Do you wish to explore this pathway?
??
?No,’ she says, because it is absurd. And then almost ‘yes’.
Instead, she puts on a coat and walks out of the door, leaving the machine to work out where she’s going and make arrangements.
Between Piccadilly and Gower Street, with nothing else to do in the back of a slow double-decker bus – Oliver Smith is having an only moderate day at best – she makes the call she is afraid of.
‘Tubman?’
‘It’s my number, love, and we’re not allowed to just pass them around, are we?’
‘It’s me.’
Tubman doesn’t respond. Perhaps he can’t think of anything that isn’t even more inane than the identification itself.
‘Have you ever heard of anyone being injured by a recording?’
‘What, a physical injury? Definitely not. People have wobbles, if they get too muddled up in records from the dark side. There are a few idiots every year we have to untangle from trying to take on viewings of patients in deep psychotic trauma. Four years back there was a fad for a blind man who’d worked out a kind of sonar. Some of the young bloods thought it would give them superpowers. They really liked the sexy parts, too; apparently his physical whatnot was pretty intense. Arseholes,’ Tubman adds, giving his general opinion of universities.
‘What happens to them?’
‘Oh, nothing, in the end. They sleep it off. A few of them need a hug and an aspirin from matron. That’s me, by the way. Stop pissing about and tell me what’s going on.’
‘She had a stroke. I think. I was … I wasn’t ready.’
‘Oh, nasty. Yes. Well, I expect that was horrible. But it’s not going to mean you have a stroke or anything like that.’
‘It’s not.’
‘If you go to the theatre and Julius Caesar gets stabbed …’
‘I know. This seemed a bit more immediate than just sitting in the front row.’
‘First person, yes. Like one of those games where the aliens are coming and all you’ve got is a tin opener. But that’s all, Mielikki. You’re never going to feel quite the same way about someone having a stroke, because now you know a bit more what they’re going through, but even so, you’re just a watcher. All you really know is how it feels to be someone who isn’t having a stroke experiencing what it is to have a stroke. Nothing happened to your body. Nothing bled into your brain. It was horrible, but that’s all. Some people would get PTSD. That’s normal. You won’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’re not that kind. You’re the kind who rolls it off and worries about what that means about them.’
True.
‘What’s the best self-care?’
Tubman puffs air from his cheeks. ‘Get rat-arsed, would be my advice.’
‘Will it help?’
‘Not much. But by the time the hangover winds down, the memory’ll be faded and you won’t be able to tell which is which.’
‘I’ll pass.’
‘Suit yourself.’
‘I can go on using the recording? I don’t need to wait? This case is time-sensitive.’
‘It won’t be nice, but they’re your nightmares.’
‘I can handle that.’
‘Well, then.’
‘But there’s no danger. Not real danger.’
‘Not apart from the brain tumours, obviously.’
‘Piss off, Tubman.’
‘You’re welcome, Inspector.’
*
Thirty minutes later in King’s College, at the second landing of D staircase, the Inspector puts her back to the wall and slips her stun gun smoothly into her forward hand. A figure in black, white face with a shock of dark hair, rounds the turn of the stair, outlined in her glasses in luminously dangerous red and flagged POSSIBLE HOSTILE. Too short for Lönnrot, it somehow appears to be Adolf Hitler, only not quite. He stares at her over too-generous lips and too-wiry toothbrush moustache, the infamous mouth now dropping open as Adolf identifies the stun gun for what it is.
‘Fuck!’ says Adolf, covering his face. ‘Fuck, don’t shoot! Fuck!’
The Witness allows that the threat may be minimal after all. Neith irritably holsters the stun gun. ‘Students,’ she growls to the machine. ‘Don’t you have a context setting for students?’
‘Fuck,’ Adolf says again, this time more accusingly.
‘Language, Mr Dean,’ says a woman’s voice, deep and deeply amused. ‘I did tell you you’d taken it too far. Come in, Inspector, and leave Mr Dean to absorb this salutary lesson in the wages of idiocy. Marcus!’ This, evidently, being Adolf’s real first name, and yes, there it is now in her glasses: MARCUS JAMES DEAN, whose parents evidently failed on several counts, or perhaps he’ll come good in time. ‘Marcus, for God’s sake at least put the hat on; if you carry it you’ll get this all the time.’
Adolf defiantly lifts the object in his left hand – flagged a few seconds ago as POTENTIAL WEAPON and now revealed to be a dusty bowler – and puts it on his head. The Witness flickers in the corner of Neith’s eye before revising its opinion of his cultural referencing. CHAPLIN, CHARLES.
‘Really,’ Neith growls, though whether it’s to Marcus Dean or to the machine she really isn’t sure.
‘Come in,’ Chase Pakhet says again.
*
She’s a formidable person, wide and wise and getting on, with a thick, pneumatic body and powerful legs from midlife Alpine walking. There’s a picture of her just inside the door with an actual mountain goat.
‘Come in, it’s too cold to shake hands in the doorway, and my Russian colleagues would go mad if we did. It’s terribly bad luck in Russia – mind you, so’s everything else. Do you smoke? It drives them potty when I light my tobacco from a candle flame, which I do, because it pleases me.’
‘The flame? Or driving them potty?’ the Inspector enquires.
‘Hah! Both. Good girl. I’m Chase. It’s from the French word for chair. Evidently at some point after we left the old home continent for Marseilles my family made its living from the cutting and shaping of wood into uncomfortable furniture. I know it was uncomfortable because I’ve sat on it: awkward in all the wrong places. I like to introduce myself that way, it lets people know what they’re in for.’
What they’re in for, the Inspector realises, is quite a lot. It is impossible in the presence of Chase Pakhet – who has so many learned qualifications that she has discarded all of them and just gives her name – to be anything but a student. Even her colleagues at high table no doubt fall into the role.
‘Quite a job you’ve got this month, I gather,’ Pakhet says, with a slantendicular glance to catch her response.
‘Yes. Quite a job.’
They have come now to the inner sanctum, a wood-panelled college room made dim by the sheer quantity of papers and books it contains – and, to be fair, an old but functional System terminal canted inward from one corner – and arranged not towards the fireplace as its architect no doubt intended, but in a kind of gladiatorial circle around an ancient rug.
‘Well, sit down and hit me with it,’ Pakhet says. ‘You’ve pre-empted all my classes and supervisions – for which relief much thanks – the faculty are all atwitter and imagine I’ve been brewing gin in my socks and will be summarily carted off, so I’ve outraged the bourgeoisie quite nicely for the day and now it’s all about the work.’
Neith sits, taking her time to find a comfortable position on a lumpy corduroy chair – the only one in the room apart from Pakhet’s which allows its occupant to sit tall. Pakhet nods.
‘Very good. No fear of delay and plenty of positional strength. Splendid. We shall get along.’
‘Who was that outside?’ With Pakhet, the Witness recommends obliquity. Not that the Inspector needed to be told. She can see Pakhet register the choice and decide not to comment. Everything is footnoted for her; if she remarked on all of it she’d never get anything done.
‘Marcus? Harmless idiot. Well, not entirely harmless: he’s trying to achieve alarm and affray. It’s a political
engagement, allegedly. The intention is to jolt you out of established patterns of thought, to change the way your mind processes information and force you to examine it more closely. Specifically to point up the differences between machine-based semiotic analysis and human parsing and responses.’ She snorts. ‘Which, I have to say, he definitely achieved on the stairs. In both your case and his – I doubt it’s ever occurred to him that his own thought is as circumscribed as anyone else’s. The proximate excuse at the moment is the Monitoring Bill – although I’ve noticed that dressing up seems to be the chosen answer to a lot of different questions.’
‘Is he in favour or against?’
‘Oh, nothing so binary. He’s concerned at the lack of critique among the proles. He doesn’t say proles, of course, but that’s what he means: the lumpen proletariat, bane of revolutionists. They are just not interested in what he thinks they should be. I can’t tell you how much that offends him – and for some reason which has to do with a rather tendentious reading of Erich Fromm, he thinks the way to deal with that inattention is to blow it up – semiotically, I hasten to add. Therefore: alarm and affray, as you see – though evidently somewhat less of both than he got this time. And to be honest, even I have to acknowledge that he’s not an idiot. It’s remarkably hard to do what he did.’
‘What did he do, exactly?’
‘Well, he fooled the System, didn’t he? It’s a fad among the young tearaways of the faculty at the moment – and I’d just like to take a moment to point out how remarkable it is that we have tearaways at all – where was I? Oh, yes: it’s a fad. They noticed that the System tags cultural references in your dress, and after they’d played with it for a while they discovered that there’s a narrow band of uncertainty where you can dress as – well, as Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator, for example – and the System will miss one tier of reference and draw the wrong conclusions. So what they do now is try to find enormously offensive things they can dress up as which they can then shade into something humans read as utterly benign but which still gets red-flagged by the System, demonstrating that machine parsing is imperfect. Well, everyone knows that, so it’s perhaps redundant, although the reminders can be somewhat spectacular. I encourage it, of course.’