Pain rotated inside his forehead.
"You all right, Richie?"
"Sorry, yeah." Richard rubbed his forehead. "No problem."
"OK, good. See, that control web is the kind of thing NAers don't get. Actually, just the fastenings on your clothes need a technical civilisation, stuff dug out of the ground with machinery, trucks for transport, factories, and shops, right? They don't get how complicated it all is."
Richard looked around the workshop, remembering the redwood-panelled rooms at home, clean and elegant but never welcoming, not comfortable like here.
"You're not rich, though. You, Opal, Jayce, and all the-"
"Him."Brian's expression closed down. "You want to stay with us, you do not nick from your friends."
"I wouldn't-Oh. Is that what Jayce did?"
"Uh-huh. Now, you know the first rule of hacking, right?"
"Er…"
"You start with a cup of coffee, refill every twenty minutes, repeat until task finished. I'll put the kettle on while you crank up the display. Give us a shout if nothing's in English."
Richard popped the service interface onto the wallscreen – the text was Korean – but he found a ReadMe and babelled the contents. By the time Brian put coffee down beside him, he was already deep in the code, sketching diagrams in the side panes as Mr Stanier had taught at school. When he surfaced back into day-to-day reality, his coffee was cold. He sipped from it anyway.
Mr Keele periodically said that optimum cognition requires frequent breaks, so Richard flipped open another pane to browse the news. Unable to help himself, he murmured a query into a bead microphone, and watched as the results blossomed inside the new pane, with FRIENDLY ENEMIES? as the headline, a picture of Father and someone else – someone familiar – dressed in tuxedos, and the caption: Philip Broomhall greets Zebediah Tyndall at City dinner.
He thumbed on the audio…
"Despite the hard-fought takeover battle between Tyndall Industries and BroomCon regarding Hixon Media, the corporate rivals appeared to put aside their differences before the Lady Mayor of London. However, appearances can be deceptive, since both men-"
…then silenced it.
Hands shaking, he made the pane disappear, then continued to stare at the screen where it had been. After some time, his attention drifted as if on gentle currents into the coding panes, and then he was back at work, forgetting everything, at home with himself once more.
[THIRTEEN]
Josh walked along the Embankment south of the river, watching the solar barges drift past. There was no reason to be in this part of London particularly – there were other places that Richard Broomhall could be – but this was central, with hostels and more: an entire ecology of homelessness, a bleak, pervasive undersea of living that was easy to fall into and hard to escape. Every few minutes, he checked his phone display. At 10:01am, finally, output appeared: Entry OK. Thirty seconds later, an appended message brightened: 1st gen replication successful, 53 processes spawned.
Although Petra had slipped the querybot inside the net's defences, she did not know how subtle and pervasive it could be, and he had not told her. Most of his spawned code would suicide quietly in a kind of controlled apoptosis, deliberate suicide just like human cells, for the sake of the body's health. The risk of being traced back to Petra was low. He would have liked more detailed progress reports from the burrowing code, but more traffic meant greater likelihood of monitors noticing and His phone buzzed, and for a moment was too blurred to make out. They've found me. But he blinked and refocused, to identify the caller as Kath Gleason, from Sophie's school.
"Hello, Josh."
"Miss Gleason."
"Kath, please. I just thought I should check in with you."
"There's no news."
"I didn't think there was." In the phone image, she shook her head. "Your, er, Mrs Cumberland came in to see Eileen. Asked for Sophie to be taken off the school roll."
Eileen was the headmistress.
"The school roll…?"
"Mrs Cumberland said that regardless of the outcome, Sophie would never return."
Josh rubbed his face. There's only one outcome.
"I'm sure Maria's right."
"Probably. It's just- We asked about you, for confirmation, and she said you're out of the picture."
"Out of the picture."
"That's what she said."
He looked up at the rotating wind-turbines, the long row stretching past the Houses of Parliament, and said again, without knowing why: "I'm sure she's right."
"Oh, then… Are you in Swindon at the moment?"
"Nowhere near."
"I just wondered if you were going to be around."
Josh stared at her in the phone.
Christ, she's hitting on me.
Sometimes a woman was interested and he didn't get it – in fact, he still didn't believe that Petra could fancy him – but this was blatant. With Sophie worse than comatose – persistent vegetative state meant there was nothing left to awaken – and Maria filled with confusion, hating him… How did that equate with him being available?
"The Brezhinskis aren't doing too well," Kath went on. "The father's still bottling things up inside, the mother's still drinking, and Marek… We'd like to see him back in school."
"It sounds as if the family needs help. Would the school pay for counselling?"
"I… don't know."
"There's someone who could help, so long as she does get paid. I can put her in touch with the family directly. You can vouch for her, if Mr Brezhinski asks you."
"Vouch for whom, exactly?"
"Dr Suzanne Duchesne. I'll send you her details."
"Well, I-"
"Thank you, Kath. It's good to meet a teacher who really cares."
"Oh. Thanks."
He killed the call.
Christ, what a bitch.
After some ten seconds, the phone buzzed again – She's calling back, for God's sake – but it was his querybot, returning initial results. Only one instance showed an above-fifty-percent match: some three seconds of unfocused footage, a youth in white shirt and veil-cap ascending a staircase. The location was a college, so it should be filled with young people, and for a moment Josh did not understand how the probability rating could be so high – it was his own algorithm, after all. But the timestamp was 19.57, far too late for normal classes.
Two nights ago. Even if it's him, he could be dead.
Bad thinking. Useless pessimism.
The college was within walking distance – another reason for the high probability – and at close range he could redfang querybots into the building system without going through the Web. And the physical movement would help him forget about Kath Gleason, and the images she invoked in his mind, with a montage backdrop of Sophie-memories: playing in school, playing in the garden, giggling at a worm, lying in a bed surrounded by monitors.
He walked fast.
Perhaps it looked better at night, but in daylight the college exterior showed cracked paintwork and dull windows. Someone had smeared black goo over the spycams, which did not bode well for trawling through the surveillance logs. Josh decided to make the college's problems worse, just for the time being, by slipping interference bots into the building system and blanking out recordings for the yard and corridors he passed through. Once inside, a garish display screen showed adverts – salsa classes every Wednesday, homemade cakes for sale tomorrow lunchtime – and a searchable timetable.
In the brief footage of Richard Broomhall, this noticeboard appeared in the background, so the staircase over there must be where he ascended. But where had he been going? Josh flicked through the timetable. If Richard went up a floor, there would have been just one class about to start: Intermediate Mandarin, room 17, instructor T. Maxwell. A trivial hack popped up a fragment of low-level data: