For a long time nothing meaningful happened. Columns of electric-blue numbers and letters dropped like waterfalls on the screen, cursors blinked and darted, rows of nonsense swelled in ranks, halted, vanished. Bevan quickly grew rapt in his task, studying the screen with the earnest fascination of someone faced with a thorny but ultimately tractable problem. If it was a performance for my benefit, an attempt to display his competence, then it was a convincing one.
After a while he became aware of my presence at his shoulder.
‘Chance of a cup of tea, is there?’
I went to the kitchen and brewed a pot of Earl Grey. When Bevan took a sip of it, he grimaced and set the cup down in its saucer.
I returned to the garden, walking to the balcony’s edge through grass that gleamed in the light of the generators. They topped the subsidiary pyramids like stylized suns, circular crystals surrounded by florets of concentrators, all now awash with light. The Aztecs, loving display, were profligate with their energy sources, illuminating not only their buildings but also their craft with excess energy from the sun crystals, adding spectacle and drama to their technological accomplishments. An Aztec ship in flight never looked more fearsome than when it shone.
Below me, the gardens were spread out, tier upon tier, planted with all kinds of shrubs and flowers, a plethora of shadowy foliage holding all the fruits of Aztec bioengineering. Across the river, the city slept, wrapped in its threads of sodium street-lamps, neon signs flickering messages for Cola Cacao and the latest Corona Sola saloon.
Returning inside, I found Bevan swivelled away from the screen. He was sipping dark brown tea from a mug in which the teabag still floated. It was obvious he had been waiting for me.
The screen highlighted his face. It was flashing a sequence of characters as foreign to me as Swahili. The Aztec rock group Itzpapalotl were thrashing out their savage version of ‘Darkness At Noon’ in the background. Bevan was tapping his foot to the music.
‘I think we’ve got something,’ Bevan said to me.
I drew up a chair beside him as he tapped out a sequence on the keyboard.
To my amazement, a picture of Alex appeared.
He was framed like a newsreader on the screen, only his head visible, a matt grey background behind him. The picture was simulated, but it was a convincing likeness. And the head moved.
‘My God,’ I said softly.
‘That’s nothing,’ Bevan said. He had switched on the microphone, and now he spoke into it: ‘Identify yourself.’
‘I’m an Advanced Learning and Evaluative Matrix,’ came the reply. ‘You can call me ALEX for short.’
The lips moved, the eyes blinked, and there was even a hint of the real Alex’s teasing smile. Of course, the movements were imperfect, a little staccato, while the voice had an electronic tinge and an uneven emphasis which made me think of his name as capitalized; but the verisimilitude was remarkable.
‘Describe your function,’ Bevan said.
‘I’m an interactive simulacrum,’ ALEX replied. ‘I’m designed to respond to written or oral input, to engage my own knowledge and intelligence with whatever outside agency has access to me, subject to certain provisos. What’s your name?’
‘Bevan.’
‘Are you a real or virtual entity?’
‘Real.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Bevan.’
Bevan turned to me. ‘Want me to introduce you?’
I was still a little shocked. I nodded numbly.
‘I’ve got someone here I want you to meet,’ Bevan said into the microphone. ‘It’s your wife.’
Very gingerly, I leaned forward to speak into the microphone. But before I could utter a word, ALEX said, ‘Kate? Are you there?’
I swallowed, amazed that he had called me ‘Kate’.
‘Yes,’ I managed to say. ‘How are you?’
It was a perfectly stupid question, and it seemed to me that he smiled in acknowledgement of this.
‘I’m functioning normally,’ he replied. ‘How are you?’
There was a knot in my stomach, and my heart was racing. I turned to Bevan. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Just speak as you find,’ he told me.
I put my mouth close to the microphone.
‘It’s strange for me,’ I said. ‘Talking to you like this.’
‘I understand that. The real Alex had as much of himself incorporated into me as he could. He’s well, I hope?’
Again I swallowed. ‘I hope so, too,’ I said.
‘Where are you located?’
I deliberated, then said, ‘In London. In enemy hands.’
There was a pause of a few seconds between each of his replies which created the impression that he was contemplating everything that was said to him.
‘I presume you mean the Aztecs?’
‘Yes.’
His head moved slightly, as though he were thinking.
‘Is Bevan a friend?’
I hesitated, then said, ‘Yes.’
I felt a great tension – a tension which arose from the conflict between my delight at having ‘Alex’ alive before me again, and the simultaneous awareness that it was not really him at all. But the substance was so accurate in many subtle respects, it was far more than mere illusion.
‘I wish you could see us,’ I said on impulse.
He smiled. ‘So do I. But it’s good to be responding to you.’
I had to make an effort to resist any sentiment.
‘How do you know it’s really me?’ I said.
‘I recognize your voice. Its pattern was encoded in my matrix during its development.’
I frowned at Bevan, wondering how this had been possible. He merely shrugged.
‘It might be a tape recording,’ I said. ‘Or another matrix just like you.’
‘No. The rhythm of your tones and the randomness of your responses are those of a real person. You are who you say you are.’
I was positively touched by his faith in me. If he had been there in person, I would have hugged him. For the first time, I smiled.
At this point, the swingeing guitars and relentless drums of Itzpapalotl began to diminish into silence.
‘Put something else on the player,’ I whispered to Bevan.
‘It’s late,’ he said softly. ‘We ought to knock it on the head for the night.’
I didn’t want this. ‘We’ve only just started.’
‘No sense in rushing things and risking everything, is there?’
‘But it was so hard to summon him up in the first place.’
‘Keep your voice down. I know the routine now. It’ll be a piece of cake.’
The clock on the mantelpiece said five forty. I knew his caution made sense, but I didn’t want Alex snatched away from me again.
‘I’ve been at this two hours or more,’ Bevan murmured. ‘I’ve had enough for tonight.’
He moved to switch off the terminal.
‘ALEX,’ I said quietly into the microphone, ‘we’ve got to go.’
‘It was a pleasure talking to you, Kate.’
Bevan flicked a switch. The image on the screen died in an instant.
Four
Our father’s coffin, drawn by four black horses, rested on the same black-and-gold carriage that had been used for the funeral of every monarch since the assassination of Queen Victoria in 1893, exactly a century before. It was flanked by household cavalry whose ceremonial swords seemed to me only to emphasize how powerless we had become as a nation.