‘That is normal,’ Maria says. ‘The intrusion of chaos into the living space.’ She looks down over Tubman’s shoulder, and sighs. ‘Quite to be expected.’
NOT READY, Neith writes.
‘Delightful. I despise all things replica, as you know, authenticity being my watchword. I particularly hate the curtains. Did it come uninhabited, or is there some ghastly big-eyed nightmare baby that goes with it?’
WHAT I’D COUNT ON. POINT IS TO GET THE SECRET OUT, NOT TO PROVE IT. ONCE YOU’VE SAID IT, IT HAS TO BE INVESTIGATED.
She shakes her head. ‘Tub, it’s for kids.’
‘And yet you’ve got one and you’re making me play with it.’
I THINK THEY MAY BE READY FOR THAT. FOR ME.
Tubman’s hand nearly crunches the studio’s roof off. He stares at her.
She scowls at him. ‘Tub! It’s fragile!’
I NEED PROOF. SOMETHING THAT’S NOT ARGUABLE. CAN’T TRUST NEURAL – DON’T KNOW WHO MIGHT BE INVOLVED.
‘I’m sorry, Mielikki. I’m not a delicate sort of bloke, amazing as that may appear to you, who only see the external popinjay.’
‘Peacock,’ Maria suggests.
‘Mighty golden eagle,’ Tubman says firmly. ‘The Tubmans have Scots blood, you know.’
When he writes again, the thick fingers are clumsy.
GET PROOF. FAST. BETTER TO BE ALIVE THAN RIGHT.
‘I thought you had all those little boats in bottles,’ Neith objects.
HELP. HELP ME.
‘Ships,’ Tubman sniffs. ‘I build ships in bottles, and they are a work of craft and elegance not often seen in this day and age. Not tat like this.’
Maria rests her hands on his shoulders, then kisses the top of his head once. Tubman presses his fingers over hers, then looks back at Neith as if rebuked. ‘All right, all right, I love your little house-y thing. It’s very you.’
His writing hand moves again, a string of numbers and letters punctuated with full stops. For a moment, she sees nonsense: 9090AE11OE23. He’s doodling, or having a seizure. Then as he keeps going the mess resolves into the familiar format of a hexadecimal IPv6 number, the silicon equivalent of a street address. Below that, words.
SQUID, Tubman has written, BECAUSE KRAKEN IS ILLEGAL, ALL RIGHT? SO DO NOT DOWNLOAD THE KRAKEN ADD-ON IN CASE OF EMERGENCIES. THAT WOULD BE VERY WRONG AND I’D BE PERSONALLY DISAPPOINTED IN YOU.
‘You’re right,’ she says, ‘but I bet the sofa’s not black leather really because this thing was cheap as hell.’
THANK YOU.
‘So is late-night telly, darling,’ Tubman says.
CAN YOU SORT IT OUT?
Neith shrugs.
DO YOU KNOW HOW IT WAS DONE?
She writes: IS BEING DONE. And then: NO.
Tubman shuts his eyes for a moment.
TALK TO THE WAXMAN.
?!
TALK TO HIM. HE’S A WANKER, BUT HE KNOWS THE SYSTEM THE WAY A FOX KNOWS HENS.
HOW? Underlined.
But Tub just underlines TALK TO THE WAXMAN.
‘Now,’ Maria says. ‘Let’s have some breakfast, since we’re all here.’
Tubman nods agreement, and Neith watches the two of them move around one another in the small galley kitchen with the ease of long understanding. A short while later, she is eating again.
Between the second helping of bacon and the third, she looks around the room and then, looking back, realises that she is looking at love in its natural habitat, and that she hasn’t been in its company for years. Fernweh again, like the sudden recognition of an empty chair.
‘Thank you, Tub. Maria. Really.’
‘You’re welcome,’ Maria says, just as Tubman says firmly: ‘I din’t do nuffim.’
‘I’m sorry if I woke you. I should go.’
Maria looks as if she might object, but Tubman nods understanding and they show her to the door.
The Inspector leaves, lugging the doll’s house. In the street, she sees a man standing, smoking. He is too broad to be Lönnrot, too solid. But she wonders, all the same, whether he is following her, or just taking the air.
Keep moving. Use your time.
*
In a sandwich shop on the Fulham Palace Road, the Inspector erects the doll’s house and justifies her presence by ordering executive fish fingers on sourdough toast. She does not expect, having just eaten once at Tubman’s, to be hungry, but finds herself grazing all the same. Between mouthfuls she opens a direct connection to the address Tubman gave her and downloads the Squid. The software is represented by a cute, wide-eyed sea-creature juggling data. Behind it in the false 3D of the display is Kraken, in a biker jacket and Wayfarer sunglasses: the badass elder sibling, a beer bottle held loosely in one suckered pad. She remembers, irrelevantly, that members of the order Teuthida have only two true tentacles. The shorter gripping appendages are arms.
She waits until the download is finished and closes the link, then clears her terminal’s cache by hand and restarts before initiating the Squid and flicking through the documentation. Immediately, her terminal informs her of a security risk: the application wants access to the outgoing feed from the camera and microphone on her glasses. She grants permission, and watches as the display begins to loop unobtrusively. She can still use her equipment, but her own POV has just dropped out of the network.
The Squid is liminally legal: where on the margin it falls depends on how it is deployed. Its ostensible use is to shield citizens from the unwanted attentions of unrestrained American and Asian robot advertisers, which would otherwise harvest data from their personal lives through every available aperture and then deluge them with information about alternative products every time they view or purchase anything on the international network. For this reason, most people now use a System filter portal to access the rest of the world, but a robust minority like their access to reflect the external experience, the better to understand the people of foreign lands – hence the Squid.
This kind of occlusion works only moderately well against the polystrate surveillance of the System, but that moderate dividend is potentially sufficient to make such use a minor criminal act. Unlike Kraken, which is to all intents and purposes a digital commando unit in a bottle, prone to hostage-taking and property damage, the Squid does not actually try to control anything. It’s more like a very rowdy and very antisocial street party than a strike team. It will not block anyone who is looking from seeing the direction of her inquiry, but it will diminish the chance of her setting off any narrowly defined alarms scripted around her in person or looking out for any directed scrutiny of her targets. The Inspector believes that any official query over a low-level bad act here will either readily be dispelled when she has built her case, or utterly negligible when set against the size of the boot that will fall on her if she fails to do so and is noticed trying. If she wants to hide herself more completely, she could theoretically download Kraken through the Squid, but it would be considerably more atomic if she were discovered – and very much more likely to be a problem later. The Squid is a compromise: probably less than half-permitted, barely better than one-quarter effective.
Through the Squid she connects to the Public Records Office and requests tax and location data for Oliver Smith going back twenty years, and for good measure Diana Hunter as well, wincing as the software automatically also searches for 35,000 similar records – no doubt resulting in a measurable drag on legitimate requests and a slight blip in the department’s processing bill – and upon receipt dumps them into a trash folder. Without looking at the Hunter data, she logs off and brings up the National Health database, checking the DNA from Hunter’s autopsy against the statutory samples which have since the middle part of the century been kept of all hair and nail clippings from salons and beauty parlours for the early detection of disease and addiction, then brings in blood samples from standard tests and inoculations, hospital and dental visits. The Squid checks with its server hub for proximate areas of public concern and
initiates a baseless scare into the possible carcinogenic effects of an urban pesticide. Whoever wrote this thing, the Inspector realises, had absolutely no sense of civic or personal responsibility at all. The Squid grabs her data and runs, leaving administrative chaos in its wake.
She makes a more detailed general wishlist: Oliver Smith, biography, detailed, with reference to expertise. Close acquaintances, professional and otherwise. Addresses and appointments, cross-referenced with anything known about Diana Hunter. Cross-referenced with Fire Judges and all the rest, too, just for good measure. She half expects the Witness to murmur into her ear, chide her, but for the moment her good angel is only vaguely aware of what she’s doing, as if she’s holding a conversation two tables over in a crowded room.
Hunter remains a cipher. Time to do something about that, too, and if she’s correct in her assumption that they knew one another and that that relationship is at the heart of all this, then it’s just as well she use the Squid for this part too.
She calls up the inventory file from the Hunter house, and drops the brands, styles, shoe sizes and colour combinations into a commercial customer profiling program, then uses a cranky but effective trend-reversing algorithm from the Victoria & Albert Museum, which reliably tells you, based on a sample of your life now, what clothes you would have been wearing in any given decade. She instructs the Squid to log on to the central bank records server and look for purchasing patterns which would indicate Diana Hunter thirty years ago. Results to file and cross-reference. She watches a blizzard of similar requests go out, and twitches a little as the bank server actually stutters as it hits.
Taking Hunter’s age as approximately what it appears to be, she also tasks the Squid to gather information on all post-graduate degrees awarded in disciplines that cover or are related to cryptography, neurophysiology, semiotics and narrative behavioural psychology. She rummages through Trisa Hinde’s autopsy report on the dead woman and tags evidence of fractures to one arm, some ceramic fillings and laser surgery to correct myopia, then dumps all these into a comparison tray and goes back to the Health database under a new connection. The Squid holds execution of her search to assess its line of attack, then looses a salvo of queries over purchasing costs of high grade splints and dental clay against non-branded local alternatives. A moment later it comes in from another angle and spits a furious allegation of improper maintenance of laser optics during the relevant period. When the hospital trust – startled, she thinks, and plaintively asking where this is coming from – issues a firm denial, the Squid demands access to outcome data and looks for matches, again shooting everything it finds to the growing Hunter file. The Inspector feels a guilty grin building behind her lips: this is strictly speaking all very wrong, but in a necessary way.
Her case has grown from its small if serious beginning into something very much graver. Neith is almost certain that this investigation is what Hunter wanted – she did as much as she could to provoke it, even unto death, and surely if she had not entered the interrogation chamber the whole sequence would never have begun – and so the dilemma becomes whether Hunter can be trusted. Certainly, there is more in her memories, much more. But is it the truth?
Who was she? What did they want from her, and what did she want that they could not supply?
Neith can’t find a clear and recent audio recording of Hunter on any public platform, and tersely requests some from the Witness without explanation, trusting that it will blend into the wash of her ongoing investigation. When it arrives, she calls up another Witness protocol intended to isolate and trace pet noise across London and backdates the search as far as she can, not daring to check what creative anarchy this inspires in the Squid. Fifteen hits. Thirty, fifty, two hundred, two thousand, four, nine, fifty-eight thousand. She kills the request and refiles with a duplication filter, knowing already what the scale of the bloat must mean: at some stage or other, Diana Hunter appeared in public and spoke, and her words were relayed and replayed in a large number of places. Well, of course, she was a little bit famous. Omit identical utterances, compensating for room tone. Filter and cross-reference, send to file.
As a last set of inputs, she checks high-profile women who have stepped away from the Public Sphere, noted reclusives, then plugs the whole collection of queries into an offshore AI company’s adducive-iterative analysis intake and asks for patterns and related questions to be fed back to the Squid for automated retrieval, with the high-correlation ones to be reinserted into the AI for three generations: in other words, the questions she has already asked will now spawn further questions, the best ones will make more and better questions. The data triage would be almost instantaneous if she were to run it through the Witness. Instead, she labels it a hobby project, paying for the processing time from her personal account. The actual work will take seventeen hours, but the likely elapsed time until completion will be more like twenty-four because the service will occasionally clock off to handle higher-priority jobs.
Last, she invokes the Squid’s most anarchic protections and sends a request to an open day-book held on a server in Finland. The day-book form requires a name, and she’s not about to give her own, not even or particularly for this. In her mind, she tries on Stella Kyriakos and Annabel Bekele, then Athenais Karthagonensis, though she isn’t sure that one would fit. She discards Regno Lönnrot with the haste of biting into a rotten fruit, and finally – not without misgivings – enters ‘Diana Hunter’ in the box.
The day-book accepts the alias without comment.
Breathing a silent apology to the owner for whatever scrutiny may come his way as a result of her digital vandalism, she pays for her executive fish fingers and ducks out of the shop, her terminal chiming against her jawbone every time it scores a high-likelihood match between her sets. And then, a moment later, a different alert, very familiar and comforting until she remembers that it isn’t anymore. The Witness is paging her.
– Are you all right, Inspector?
‘Yes, I’m fine.’
– You are not working according to your usual pattern. You were very upset by the loss of the suspect in the public transport system.
‘The case requires unusual strategies to bring it to a useful conclusion. I’m working out how to proceed.’
– It might be helpful if you discussed that with me.
‘I need more information first. There are significant areas of this case we don’t yet understand properly.’
– Please clarify.
‘Hunter evidently believed she had a method for subverting the interrogation process, and possibly more. I need to rule that out as a matter of urgency.’
– The System can assess any specific threat.
‘But you cannot, by definition, hypothesise an attack that would circumvent your own safeguards. Otherwise you would already have blocked it.’
– That is true.
‘Do you have any further information on my outstanding searches?’
– Unfortunately, Witness efforts have not yet been able to locate the suspect Regno Lönnrot. It is probably time to consider taking an image directly from your recollection of events. It will require perhaps half a day, including recovery time.
She thinks of Gnomon: inrushing on the gusts of a storm come grit and birdshit … No. Hunter’s message there, at least, is relatively clear.
‘Keep looking. And please set a meeting for me with Pippa Keene tomorrow at midday. I will want her to monitor my function personally, for the avoidance of doubt.’
– Yes, Inspector. Of course.
Talking to the machine is disturbing because everything is exactly the same. If she asks for something, it will happen seamlessly. If she does not ask but does need, it will happen anyway. She is carried along on the wave of the System – and yet now she knows the security of it is an illusion. There are gaps in its knowledge and capability, even in its willingness. Has it just lied to her? How would she know?
Someone has beaten the System. Someone who is
not Hunter.
No one beats the machine, not in the end. The only person who came close was a madwoman. Poor pale Anna.
Maria Tubman is still in her head: I am Maria, like the Magdalene. Maria gave the word its Latinate form, not the more English ‘maudlin’.
One wouldn’t want to be maudlin: it’s graceless.
Anna, from the Hebrew, meaning ‘grace’.
Lönnrot, again, telling her something – perhaps everything – in ways she wouldn’t understand until she found them out all over again. But telling her what? Whatever truth Hunter knew? Or a signpost to Lönnrot’s own secrets? No. Lönnrot, surely, gives up nothing by choice. This prodding and poking is to achieve an end.
More and more, Neith believes the answers to this case are in Hunter’s head, not the real world. And there, at last and infuriatingly, she has something in common with Oliver Smith.
Damn it.
And now she has arrived. She gets off her bus and looks up at the mansion block in front of her, at the astoundingly expensive yet remarkably nasty properties all around. Just exactly what is it that draws people of wealth and power to this area of London, still? Is it proximity to empty Buckingham Palace? To the old high commercial power of Harrods and Harvey Nichols and the implication of luxury; the park and the Albert Hall? Or is it a kind of recollected habit?
She presses the brass buzzer, and waits for the soldier to open the door. They stare at each other through the glass: a woman out of uniform, one knee spattered with what might be oil or viscera, hair matted at one temple with oil or soot from the deep underground and carrying a vandalised plastic doll’s house; opposite her, an impeccable armoured matriarch of some Arctic military service, permitted but not obviously carrying a firearm in the London area.
Firearm. Firespine? No. No. The ripples of wind on water, not a shark.
Neith’s counterpart gives her a wintery smile and opens the door.
‘Everyone has these days,’ she murmurs.
‘I hope not,’ Neith returns, but the woman has already turned away.