‘Deaths in custody do happen. A statistical inevitability.’
‘I was referring to an interrogation of this intensity. It may have killed her. No, actually, that’s too soft. I am increasingly confident that my final report will conclude that it did kill her. Among the questions under examination now are whether anyone could have known in advance that it might kill her, and whether the evidence in hand justified the risk.’
Her answer seems to conclude a section. Keene moves on.
‘Do you feel you may be experiencing any ill effects, personally, from exposure to so much material taken from another living identity?’
The Inspector imagines Hunter pursing her lips, awaiting an answer.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I’m tired and I’m annoyed. What happened here was grossly negligent at best. It should never have been possible. My report will make better safeguards a primary requirement, and I anticipate several changes in personnel. Beyond that, in terms of my personal experience, there’s more than the usual disorientation shifting from the recording to the real world – I’m told that’s just because there’s so bloody much of it. It’s not pleasant, but that’s the job. I don’t mean to sound pompous, but it is. We go into people’s heads and we find what we need, because that’s where the truth is. I’ve checked the neuromedical question because the same thought has occurred to me, intellectually. I’m told it’s not a problem. I don’t have any internal’ – she emphasises the next word because it’s an unusual one – ‘feeling which contradicts that. I’m taking care because we’re in uncharted territory. But so far it’s just another bloody awful thing in a world that still has more of them than we like to pretend, and my job is to sort them out one by one. That’s what I’m doing: one foot in front of the other.’
The journey of a thousand miles does not begin with a single step; it is one step.
She dismisses the reminder, briefly unsure whether it was her own or an interjection from the Witness, and puffs her cheeks as she exhales.
‘And I’m still annoyed about the bloody Monitoring Bill,’ she adds, surprising herself. ‘People aren’t taking it seriously.’
She hopes this comes across as a kind of exasperated irrelevance, suitably haggard and professional. A deliberate change of subject would score poorly.
Keene seems to have no problem with it. ‘You think it’ll go wrong?’
‘No. But you said it the other day, this is a common-sense issue and you’d expect it to be uncontentious. Yes, obviously, there are benefits to the technology. Yes, obviously, there are possible problems. Trust but verify. Test and evaluate. But that’s not the mood. It’s too frothy. It should be pretty straightforward, but it isn’t.’
‘People can surprise you,’ Keene murmurs. ‘There’s always that shift, to a greater or lesser degree, when it comes to the real moment. A given fraction of the polis gets the urge to research, or stands a little taller by doing its civic duty.’
Neith snorts. ‘You’d bloody hope.’
Keene’s eyebrows flick to her face, not without humour. ‘Inspector Neith, I do believe you’re personally engaged.’
‘Yes. I always am. It’s why I’m effective. Wrongdoing offends me.’
‘Yes. But this time you’re a little bit emotional. About the voting, too.’ She smiles, teasing.
Mielikki Neith considers her dog-walker. That’s the kind of emotional engagement she wants. She really should call him, when this is over. Or sooner. They’re entering that obscure window in which such a thing is possible, and then very quickly it will be too late, too awkwardly attenuated from that first odd encounter outside Hunter’s house.
She rubs her hands down from forehead to chin, suddenly tired. ‘Is that a problem?’
Keene shakes her head. ‘No, Mielikki. It’s not. It’s what I’d expect from you, under the circumstances, and it’s also just a little bit encouraging to those of us who’d like to see you relax in post.’ She raises a finger, as if owning up. ‘Of whom I am one, by the way.’
‘I know.’
‘Do you want me to stand you down?’
The question comes naturally. No blame attaches, and no suggestion one way or the other. It is just a question.
Almost, the Inspector says no without thinking. Then she wonders whether she does. She could take a holiday, leave the whole mess behind. Let it be someone else’s problem.
‘No,’ she says at last, and Keene nods again at her duly considered answer, and puts away her pen.
‘So now we can either have a conversation about overly narrow focus for a few hours, which I think will be quite unproductive, or you can go out and play with the other children some night this week and pretend to have fun so I don’t have to come down there and drag you to a bar full of people who score highly on your personal compatibility index.’
‘There is no such bar.’ She has cause to know this.
Keene looks at her, owl-eyed and only half joking. ‘There is if I bloody well say there is.’
Yes. If she recommended it and the System judged it expedient, it could happen tomorrow. Neith would almost certainly never get over the embarrassment. Unless it worked, of course. She wonders whether she should call the other woman’s bluff, and decides: no. Nor will she point out her nascent encounter with Jonathan Jones. Keene must know it’s there, must therefore be taking her cue to ignore it from their own pacing, their shared stateliness.
‘All right,’ Neith agrees. ‘I will have fun.’
‘You will go out on the town.’
‘I will.’
‘To a disreputable bar?’
‘Yes.’
‘This very evening?’
‘I have a meeting this afternoon’ – which Keene must know, of course. Just as she knows Neith has nothing in the evening and nothing tomorrow morning, so she can sleep in if the evening becomes raucous. Keene would, in fact, consider that ideal. The Witness Welfare Officer, without the benefit of a live internal monitor, clearly has no difficulty in following her thoughts.
Neith considers. If she says it, she can’t renege. Keene will check. She takes a deep breath. ‘Yes!’
Keene makes a glad noise, like the cork coming out of a bottle. ‘Ah! Good. My work here is done. Carry on, Inspector Neith.’
Keene bows herself out, and the Inspector thinks, as she always does, that it is quite unclear whether Keene would be upset if she suddenly died, or just perplexed.
The alarm bell that rings in her head twenty minutes later is surely nothing more than an echo of Diana Hunter’s paranoia. All the same, she cannot quite let go of the idea, as unsettling as it is absurd, that the visit of Pippa Keene creates a paper trail of official concern that might, down the line, be used to displace or discredit her.
*
‘Never mind the length,’ Tubman says, ‘feel the quality. Right?’ He has a paper mask around the back of his neck which makes him look like a doctor. When she doesn’t laugh, he sighs and says something about young people. Tubman is a decade older than she is, if that.
The Witness correctly judges that she’s querying the age difference between them, and the answer appears in the corner of her eye: NINE YEARS AND FOUR MONTHS.
‘Neuroplastic false body syndrome,’ Tubman says.
‘I don’t know what that means.’
‘The balls. Scratching. Neuroplastic body syndrome. You might be a bit clumsy from time to time as well. Bad handwriting, that sort of thing.’ Tubman shrugs. ‘It’s what happens when you spend too much time being someone else. Proprioception gets all botched up. Three someone elses, I gather, plus the victim. Yes?’
‘Four.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ Hands in the air: why do you bring me things that are already broken? When she still doesn’t understand, he snorts at her. ‘Your brain responds physically to what’s going on. It adjusts to new input. Normally that’s not an issue because it takes days. And frankly most people don’t have an awful lot going on up here.’ Tapping the side of hi
s head. ‘You know what the most alarming thing is about working my job? It’s seeing how small the files are. A living self should be all huge and shiny. Nope. Small enough to fit in a jamjar, mostly. Couple of fireflies going round and round each other, that’s all. Sometimes you get, you know, a disco ball. Not a lot. So then you start looking at people in the street: are you real? Are you a jamjar or a proper lightbulb? And then you ask the same thing about yourself.’
Neith holds up a hand. ‘Tub. Please. I thought this was okay.’
Tubman gestures vaguely at the machines behind him. ‘It is okay. But you must have noticed the quality of the impression, surely. The reality? It’s crystal clear – very nuanced, very detailed. There are deep colours in this, proper textures. Most times with an interview tape, if you freeze the frame and look around, you can see where the brain’s cobbling perception together around the blind spot over the optic nerve, painting in the hues at the edges, all that. Everything not dead centre in your field of vision loses colour. You know that? The corner of your eye sees basically in greyscale. What you see is a composite. Are we following?’
She nods again. Yes. ‘Persistence of vision.’
‘Spot on. Well, so. Your subject here has done a better job with the visualisation. I mean much better, like a stage set rather than a photograph. The simulation is crazy real. It’s actually more real than real things are when you experience them because it’s all there, waiting for you to see it. She must have done a lot of preparation and concentration, except that she wasn’t concentrating while she was under, was she? Because we don’t do volition when we’re in the throes.’ Tubman shrugs. The Inspector can almost imagine the Witness tagging his observation: anomalous.
‘Not normally,’ the Inspector says.
‘We do not,’ Tubman avers, with magisterial certainty, ‘but this recording is what you call informationally dense.’
She thinks of the shark swimming in a sea of green numbers. ‘So, what? A hidden message?’
Tubman shrugs. ‘Millions of them, in theory. Or one enormous one. Or one small one and a lot of places to hide it. But as I understand it, she wasn’t about hiding the message, was she? “Bugger you” would appear to be her drift. I saw a picture of her house, though. Very nice. All dishevelled and folksy, Greenham Common as styled by Margaret Hamilton. Just how I like my girls.’
Tubman is married, to a stern and fashionable Venezuelan doctor whom he adores. The Inspector rolls her eyes at him: get on with it.
‘No, all right. It could be something like that, steganography, cryptography, all the naughty toys. I’d have said not. I mean, what’s the point? If you really want something secure, this isn’t the way. You want to lock something down, you do it with multiple keys, layers of security, not this peekaboo. This is … it’s what you call lingerie encryption. Looks sexy, doesn’t conceal anything at all. Think about what we do with access to critical infrastructure. Biometric’s barely the beginning of it, and then there’s next-gen connectome stuff just to get you in the door. Someone else’s department, thank God. Obfuscation like you’re asking about … hiding in plain sight, breaking up the message – well, I suppose you could call it artisanal. You can do it, but you need to be brilliant and dedicated. And a bit mad, maybe.’
Three words which summarise what you don’t want in an adversary, if that’s what Hunter is.
‘Describe it to me. Obfuscation.’ She knows, but that’s not the point. The point is Tubman’s brain and the way he sees things, not as abstracts but as tools.
‘All forms of clouding the issue, if you like. In the first instance by just being bloody awkward. There was a school of thought about twenty years back that instruction manuals should be hard to read so that users were forced to learn the instruction set rather than refer to the readme. Bloody annoying, but it’s a fair point, you do use your head. Then there’s jumbling, which you do with code. The machine doesn’t care what order things are in, it’s only people who read things in a straight line. Machine sees instructions, human sees noise. Obliquity: hiding intent by approaching from an unusual angle. Occultation: concealment by blocking the view, like an eclipse. Steganography: concealing a signal in noise. Encryption: rendering something incomprehensible unless you have the key. All possible, but at this level you’d be hard pressed to know.’
‘The System should know.’
‘Mm. That would depend how much whoever was trying to hide whatever it is knew about the System in the first place. It’s an amazing bit of kit, but it’s not God. It’s just as bad at looking at two black faces and seeing a white candlestick – in its own terms – as anyone else.’
Well, if detection was easy, everyone would be doing it.
‘Everyone’ being Smith, say, watching over her shoulder, or Keene.
‘Mielikki? About this other stuff.’
The texture of Tubman’s voice has changed. In all her encounters with him, he has always been robust, most especially when he is worried. He is one of those who hides uncertainty in jovial humour: Gordon’s alive!
But now he could almost be standing on one leg, wringing his cap in his hands like a first-year schoolchild afraid of the cold water, or the dark.
She does not press. Information is something that comes to you, if you let it. Reach out, and often the reflection is disturbed, the fish bolts.
‘I knew a wire cutter once called Carrington. Worked the cable, same as me, but a proper oily rag, right? No bloated sense of importance like yours truly, didn’t bother to remember the technical stuff. Carrington was strictly diggers and clippers. Dog-end in the mouth, always. We used to drink together, and that was not a good thing the following day. It was always the full monty: drink, smoke, dance on the table, girls in feathers. Get thrown out at five a.m. and plenty of donnybrook with the bouncers. He loved affray.’
Neith nods: mostly a vanished breed, thank God.
‘Well, Carrington and some of that lot, they said sometimes when they were running tests, they’d find things. Bits of extra cable that shouldn’t be there. Redundancies, probably, like if there was a terror strike and everything had to keep working. But sometimes they’d have to chop around those bits and bobs, and sometimes they even had to splice them, and when they did of course they had a little look, because, well: you would, wouldn’t you? The way they had it, you’d think it was the System talking to itself, like you do when you look in the mirror and you find a stranger looking back. I mean, everyone has that, right? We all have little moments of madness. But the System shouldn’t. Shouldn’t be looking in the mirror at all.’
‘What did they think it was?’
‘They mostly didn’t. Like I said: no delusions of adequacy. But one of them, she was different. Tin foil hatter, if you get me. She said it was the System changing its mind. Waking up, maybe, or tossing in its sleep.’
Another lurid favourite of entertainment programming: suppose the System were alive, and fell in love with a soft-focus librarian who underestimated her own physical attractiveness? Would it become demented in its jealous rage and murder every man who came close to her?
The Inspector tries a smile, leans forward and juts out her chin, essays an accent. ‘Eleven hundred men went in the water. Three hundred and sixteen men come out. Sharks took the rest.’ It hangs in the air, much less funny than she wanted. Sharks. Shit. ‘Did you ever see it? Even the cable?’
‘No. They always promised they’d call me, next time it happened, but it was bollocks, wasn’t it? Pub talk. Ghosts in the wires. Ragging on the new fellow.’
‘Is he still around?’
Tubman shakes his head. ‘Near on the whole team got it ten years ago. Sink hole. It was in the news. They went through the ceiling of a bubble out by Crystal Palace. Drowned in the mud.’
Neith stares at him. ‘Jesus, Tub.’
‘Sorry.’
‘That’s the most ghastly thing I’ve ever heard.’
‘Yeah, it is a bit. Still. Beats testicular cancer, I suppose.??
?
‘Jesus, Tub.’
‘I never really liked him, if I’m honest.’
She glowers at him. Tubman peers back, clears his throat. ‘You say this is in your head? Full install and unspool?’
‘Yes. Is that a problem?’
Tubman sucks air, then shakes his head. ‘No. It’s fine – but do your exercises, right? This level of fidelity, you might have more trouble with overspill. Like software. Exceed the field, maybe get into the command line.’
‘I don’t know what that means,’ she says, conscious of repetition.
‘Bad dreams. If you really went for it, and viewed the whole thing in real time, I suppose you might be a bit malcoordinated afterwards. Forty-eight hours you’d feel wonky. Two weeks of headaches and irritability, like a concussion. Although with the shifts from one person to another, it ought to be limited.’
She hesitates, thinking of Lönnrot. ‘Tub?’
‘Mielikki?’
‘How long did the interview take?’
Frowning makes him look fatter, flesh piling over pale brows. ‘Don’t know, can’t guess. Longer than average. A lot longer. Why don’t you look it up?’ He nods at the ceiling.
She wants it from a person, she realises. She doesn’t want the answer on a screen. She wants to hear it said.
‘Shit,’ she mutters. She’d been sure Lönnrot was wrong. Well, no, she hadn’t. But she had hoped anyway.
‘That’s not what you should be asking, though.’
‘So what should I be asking?’
‘How did she possibly load up her brain with false memories on this level? Who can do that?’
‘Who can?’
‘Well, until this, I would have said no one.’
For a moment, she doesn’t want to leave. Tubman is safe, reliable. But that’s the point.
‘You don’t look happy,’ he says.
‘I’m doing the same things over and over. It’s not working.’
As if we are the ones who are trapped on a flat surface.
‘I understand that’s detective work. Or growing up. Or the definition of madness. Opinions differ.’