*
The embassy occupies six dismal rooms and its own separate entrance. The stairs are threadbare and the whole place smells very faintly of damp, some whisper of the Thames in the foundations. The brass-buttoned lift creaks and clatters as it rises to the third floor, and the bombproof door squeaks as another uniformed soldier, this one a dark-haired man with shocking blue eyes, ushers her into a chamber that is, she realises, a species of interior barbican, bulletproof in all directions and probably airtight as well. If she were to kill this man – if she were a terrorist – they’d likely just let the door swing shut and wait for her to suffocate.
Politely but not gently, the guard demands to know her business.
She says she has an appointment, and writes the name Diana Hunter down for him.
‘Wait, please.’
She expects him to ask for some form of identification, and then she will have to explain and negotiate, but he doesn’t. They must know who she is – her face is everywhere these days – but the discrepancy either doesn’t bother them or is too interesting to ignore. Once inside, she will be free of the System’s observation: the embassy is foreign soil. That does not mean, of course, that she will not be surveilled by the embassy itself.
She wonders for a moment at the transition in her thinking that finds freedom, rather than risk and discomfort, in being outside the compass of the Witness.
A moment later she is walking through the embassy, one chamber after another, all lit by uncompromising strip lighting and all overfull with files and staff crowded into odd corners by their long-term guest. The Waxman, Neith realises, has the only room with a view of the river. She wonders whether he holds something over them all, or whether it is a gesture of humanity towards a man who will probably never leave this flat except to go to jail.
They take the doll’s house away from her very politely.
‘I will put it in a cupboard,’ a steel-haired woman with reading glasses says. ‘It will be safe there. But you understand, to us it is a notional compromise of security.’
Neith realises the woman has mistaken it for an emotional support object. She starts to demur, and then lets it go. Explanation would entail – well, too much explanation.
The woman smiles. ‘This way.’
It does not occur to Neith, until just as they are parting on the threshold of the Waxman’s apartment, that this is the ambassador. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you.’ Some part of her bobs a curtsey, as if to royalty.
The ambassador bows back, bemused. ‘And you too, Inspector. You are always welcome here – whether Dr Wachsmann will see you or not.’
*
‘Good morning, Miss Hunter,’ the Waxman says, ‘you look surprisingly well. A positive miracle of modern medicine, is it?’
He is small and hearty, like the impresario of a particularly energetic Soho eatery. She pictures something in obscure fusion food: peacock and tilapia dumplings. Just looking at him makes her feel tired. He’s so clean and unrumpled. He’s just got out of bed.
‘Good morning,’ Neith replies.
The Waxman gestures to a chair.
She looks around, almost too tired to sit. If she sits, she might not get up. This is not a good place to sleep. The room seems almost monkishly tranquil. The large double-glazed picture window looks down into coastal gorge. When the storms come in it must be spectacular. A single chair faces outward, a side table stacked with books. For a moment she wonders whether she will see a copy of Mr Murder Investigates perched on top of the pile, but glancing at the spine finds a copy of the Thousand and One Nights. In fact, all the books are historical, and all are early editions. She tries to commit the names to memory, wondering if she can.
‘I know, of course, who you are. I should have recognised you immediately anyway, but your message came to me via the ambassador. She was kind enough to append footnotes.’
Yes. What is the rest of the world making of this odd moment? Nothing good, surely.
They sit.
‘Dr Wachsmann. I am investigating a compromise of the Witness and the System. If you assist me and I am successful in dealing with the problem I can confidently offer you release.’
‘I am not technically detained.’ A flash of teeth, needle-bright in the soft face.
‘Amnesty, then, conditional on your speedy departure and – forgive me – promise not to return.’
Wachsmann nods. ‘Let us say that would not be entirely against my inclination. I used to love London, but I think now the skyline will haunt me until I die. You have my word: if I leave here, I will not come back. But … what guarantee do I have?’
‘Mine.’
He snorts delicately. ‘My dear Inspector, with the greatest of respect: your bare word is a little tenuous.’
‘But you have nothing to lose.’
‘That is true.’ He ponders, eyes roaming a little too widely in the room, dwelling too long on her body, her face. He’s not used to company, has forgotten the polite regulation of gaze. ‘Do you know, for the first few months I actively loathed you. And then after that I became a little enamoured. Stockholm syndrome, or some such. Then you … faded. Now I find you here, in my very holdfast, and you’re almost like a friend. A very old, very bad friend. An estranged sibling who took the family home. It does occur to me, though, that if the System is compromised and you are arrayed against the villain – and you are here – then there’s every chance you may be on the wrong side of history. What will they do to you, do you think, if you oppose them and fail?’
‘They’ll destroy me,’ she says, wondering what form it will take. Death, like Smith? Or something more subtle?
‘You’re quite right, I have nothing to lose. I stay or I go. I like it here, in a way. Seclusion. The emptiness of this space and the babble of work next door. No demands upon my time – just me and my books.’
His free hand waves broadly at the room, flicking lightly to the mantle, a line of particularly old and pretty volumes in the same binding as the book by the window: Falconry in the Valley of the Indus, Stone Talk and The Perfumed Garden of the Shaykh Nefzawi.
‘Quite a collection.’
‘Small but perfectly formed.’ His face is abruptly childlike. She remembers that security intrusion is not only about code. It’s also about people. So, yes, of course: he is charming. Except now also not, because something is off in his timing, the exaggerated gestures of the mouth. Out of practice, working his wiles only on his mirror.
‘If I wanted to break into the System, how would I do it?’
The Waxman’s eyes open a little. ‘I am the last person who can tell you that.’
‘I thought you were the best.’
He gestures at his surroundings. ‘I was. Now … not only did my approach not work, but if it ever could have the matter has no doubt been addressed.’
‘Where did you begin?’
‘A previous contract. A corporate client asked me to influence the outcome of a minor vote. A planning application. That was doable without direct intrusion, of course. I only needed to work around the System’s own rather stunted sense of privacy and influence the quorum indirectly or directly. But then I got interested and I started wondering what else might be possible. The Cartier gang found me and – here we are.’
‘So?’
‘So … it turns out that whoever designed your System is cleverer than I am – or at least, their tactical and strategic implementation of security predicted and prepared for my best approach. Although these days I suppose the System designs itself. But even the basic paradigm is excellent. My compliments.’ Is that a trace of an accent? European? Or further east? But perhaps he’s doing it on purpose. Not her problem, anyway.
‘How did it work? Your approach.’
‘Granting that it didn’t … In the simplest terms, your architecture is protected by a five-part lock. It’s not like a safe, but let us pretend that it is. To get access to the contents, one must have a physical key ??
? in this case that is a terminal hard-wired to a closed network. There is a list of registered and authorised persons who may act on that network, and each of them has a complex and unique passphrase. One, two, three. So far, not unassailable, though also not comfortable. Then you have your biological identity – not only your DNA but the mix of microbial organisms living on and in your body.’ He smiles. ‘I beat that one, you know.’
She does know. The air conditioning is blowing itchingly across her face and making her shiver, cold air on her neck. Goose bumps. But it would feel good to rest her eyes, just for a moment. She fights her body’s instinct to curl up in a ball. ‘How?’
‘I took an aggressive regimen of antibiotic, antiviral and anti-fungal drugs for one week in a clean room, and then cultivated the biome of a senior academic researcher in security at one of your universities on and in my body. I ate what he ate, drank what he drank. I stole water from his bath. It was fascinating, actually. I noticed a tangible alteration in my perceptions. We really are a composite organism inhabiting our entire bodies, not just a single homunculus seated in the skull.’ He makes a face. ‘But that is the point. The connectome requirement – that is not surmountable. I think it may be the perfect lock. It is not merely behavioural. That was my mistake. I had simulated my target from thousands of hours of recordings. By the time I attempted my operation, the simulation was word-perfect. The effect was uncanny. But the connectome analysis revealed me immediately. The quality of my thought was not the same. I was no more persuasive to your machine than I would have been seeking to evade facial recognition in a carnival mask. It sees the thought and the affect, and it knew me for a completely other individual. To beat the connectome lock, you must become the target – and if you do that, you will no longer want to beat the lock. It is circular. Brilliant.’
He shakes his head in rueful approval. ‘Five locks, Inspector. Five gates through which the pilgrim must pass to enter the Holy Land. But the last of them is truth, which by definition cannot be counterfeited.’
‘Do you care what happens?’
He nods again, alarmingly dog-like, and kisses her hand. ‘Yes. I hope you succeed because I don’t like it here. I hope you fail because some part of me hates you. When you came in, I wanted to hurt you. Now I think you seem very nice. You – you like my books. My little home. You don’t wish me ill as a person, but as an example of a type. I have no quarrel with you as a person, only as an officer of the law. Is it Stockholm syndrome, I wonder? Sudden onset, primed over … how many hundreds of days? Well. You have – you have changed my mind. I think quite deeply. Ironic, is it not? Exactly what I could not achieve on my own, to beat your System. Ah, well. And now I am torn.’
Stop. Stop. Her eyes open fast, hard, stare at him. Was she asleep? Did he say it?
‘You said you’re torn?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does that mean anything to you? That expression?’
He shakes his head.
‘What about Anna Magdalena? Or Firespine?’
Still no.
‘Fire Judges. Burton.’ His eyes flick to the bookshelf, then return. He has lost interest in her now. The conversation is over and he just wants her to go. She wonders how often he daydreams up here, by himself. She shakes his hand, feeling foolish.
‘Au revoir, Inspector. Let me know how it goes.’
But she doesn’t get up. She just pulls her knees up into the chair, and after a little while she realises he has put a blanket over her, and another, folded up for a pillow, under her cheek. She thinks she will rest for a while, but inside her head there is so much unwound Hunter that there’s almost no room for her at all.
what can have
IN MY STATE room on board the Rebus I have a small library. In among the books is a dictionary, and in the dictionary is an entry for the thing I am thinking about.
gnomon
noun
from the Greek, literally ‘one who knows’. That upright part of a sundial whose shadow is used to indicate the passage of time, or more accurately the rotation of the earth and the relative positions of the earth and the sun.
several related but distinct concepts in geometry. The ideal of the gnomon is unitary and absolute. It is the first brushstroke, the first chiselled line which records man’s entry to the world of abstracts. This clarity is so compelling to the mathematical mind that it has been invoked by different thinkers to different ends. Oenopides used ‘gnomon-wise’ to mean simply ‘perpendicular’, but Euclid extended this to denote a figure created by removing a small parallelogram from one corner of another to produce what might be called by an intellect less refined than his own an arrowhead or – in the Roman alphabet – an ‘L’.. Hero of Alexandria, not content with this pedestrian business of subtraction, conceived of a usage which would deal with addition: Hero’s gnomon is any thing which, when combined with another thing, yields a product similar in nature to the original entity. after Oenopides: an instrument commonly used to create right angles.
in literature: the term used by scholars of James Joyce to describe implicate absences in Dubliners and elsewhere.
in folklore: an angel or devil possessing hidden knowledge; a book or compendium of such knowledge, therefore also (obs.) a magic spell, specifically the one cast by the heralds of the Last Judgement and believed by the Sassanid heretics (see Burton, Fraser et al.) to result in the Apocatastasis. after 4.: in the Haslam variant of the many-worlds interpretation, an object or entity existing in a reality not contiguous with our own.
And now also, it seems:
the pattern of thought injected into my brain by a senior myrmidon of the Witness to put me back in my place.
They say ‘dysfunctional’, but all I hear is ‘uppity’.
*
By now, in the real world, I’m on a ventilator. At least, I’m guessing. When I used the crash dive technique with that much going on in my brain already, I basically had to have co-opted something you don’t want to be repurposing. Your brain isn’t some giant control surface, and you’re not some little creature with a big head sitting on a stool pushing buttons. The whole thing is infinitely more complicated, but I don’t really have a lot of time, so let’s just bite the bullet.
Imagine, then, that the brain is a big room full of machines and I’m a little creature with a big head sitting on a stool pushing buttons. I’ve been shutting down machines I don’t need, or largely retasking them, and wiring them to the central console with bits of splice cable, and then I’ve been running a drip feed into that central console so that it looks as if really important stuff is still in there. Or if you prefer: when Catherine the Great told her chancellor that she wanted to ride out in the great Empire of Russia and meet the happy peasants everyone kept telling her lived there, the chancellor – his name was Potemkin – understood immediately that shit-caked, disease-ridden serfs begging from frost-bitten lips and extending three-fingered hands to their absolute monarch would not entirely fill her with joy. So he grabbed a couple of hundred minor nobles and dressed them as peasants and paid them off. Then he built a bunch of fake villages and rode Catherine through them, and she was delighted to see that agricultural labour was surprisingly easy and the soil of Russia was amazingly fertile even without much assistance from mankind. She was thrilled at the beauty of her subjects and at their surprisingly educated voices as they sang and tilled the soil. She went back to the palace and eventually died at the age of sixty-seven, still at least notionally unaware that she ruled an impoverished, brutal nation ripening towards a staggering violence. (She died of a stroke. There was, contrary to the prurient slander, no horse penis involved.)
In short, I have been building Potemkin villages: faking it.
The trouble is that with Gnomon in my head, and now with the crash dive, I’ve run out of places to put myself that aren’t either my central console or my autonomous survival systems, like breathing and regulating body temperature and so on: all the gubbins that happens in the brain at
such a low level that we basically don’t really think about it. I’ve shunted myself into some part of the firmware, erasing what was there, and I honestly don’t know what it does.
Used to do.
Whatever eventually happens here, I won’t be the same person I was. I think I knew that. I must have done. It was always obvious. And I find I’m … at least relatively happy with it, compared with sitting still while this world is stolen from its people by a new variation on absolutism. Apparently I really, really don’t like hierarchies of power.
Which is weird, when you think about it, because I absolutely approve of them so long as I’m in charge. In my submarine, for example, I’m the absolute ruler. The crew does what I tell them, not least because I made them up.
In fact, I think I need a cup of tea. Oolong, by preference.
*
Kyriakos has been having sex (of course); Athenais is performing alchemy; and Berihun Bekele is returning to the root of his art (granted, he’s also been blown up a little bit, but he’s fine). And Gnomon … well. I’m not sure who Gnomon belongs to now. It was Oliver’s narrative at the beginning, of course, but now … he matched it so well to my way of thinking, to the stories I already had in place, that I couldn’t just shut it down. By the same token it blended into what I was doing quite perfectly, and he couldn’t keep control of it. We’ll just have to see.
The steward brings tea on a dark wooden tray with china cups, the very thing. If I hold them up to the light I will be able to see through the narrow imprints of three grains of rice just above each little handle. It’s the mark of real quality.
More than one cup, because in the real world I always assume someone else may drop in, and it weakens the structure to change that sort of thing. Essentially: if they served my tea in one cup, the cavitation noise of the Rebus would get that little bit louder for the ships up above. Everything, down here, is symbols and belief. It’s like dreaming: text will change from moment to moment and switches and buttons will not function properly unless you require them to do so. Nothing tastes the way it should until you define it. The laws of physics are what you make them. In theory I could fly this submarine to safety, or displace it, the way the USS Eldridge supposedly teleported to another world in 1943. But it’s like the cups: every flaw I write in the architecture can be exploited by an intruder.