‘And you couldn’t penetrate that anonymity?’
‘It wasn’t my job to try.’
‘All right. But you must have formed some kind of working hypothesis. Who do you suspect?’
‘Someone who believed that Laura was taken by mistake. Someone who was afraid that their own relative in the Hilgemann was the real target.’
‘Who, specifically?’
‘I never came up with a likely candidate. Whoever it was, they would have done their best to hide the family connection. The whole idea that the kidnappers might have taken the wrong person would only make sense to someone who’d gone to great lengths to conceal their relative’s identity. I didn’t pursue it; I had better things to do.’
She hesitates, then lets that pass. ‘How did you trace Laura to us?’
I explain at length about the cargo X-rays, and the drug suppliers’ records. ‘And who else knows all this?’
Any invented confidant would easily be revealed as fictitious. I could claim to have software, running on a public network, camouflaged and invulnerable, ready to tell all to the NHK police in the event of my disappearance—but that wouldn’t be much of a threat. If I’d had enough evidence to convince the cops, I would have taken it to them in the first place, instead of breaking in.
‘Nobody.’
‘How did you get into the building?’
Again, I have nothing to gain by lying. They must have pieced together most of the details by now; confirming what they already know can only make me seem more credible.
‘What do you know about the work we do here?’
‘Only what’s advertised. Contract biological research.’
‘So why do you think we’re interested in Laura Andrews?’
‘I haven’t been able to work that out.’
‘You must have a theory,’
‘Not any more.’ There are specialist mods for lying convincingly—for responding like a normal human being confidently telling the truth, in terms of voice-stress patterns, skin temperature, heart rate, etcetera—but I have no need of one; P3 alone makes all such variables utterly opaque. ‘Nothing that stands up to the facts.’
‘No?’
I have no shortage of unlikely explanations to offer in support of my ignorance; I recount every hypothesis that’s passed through my head in the last eight days, however lame—save Company X and its birth-defects suit, and Laura the escapologist. I almost go so far as to mention my fear of the Children’s involvement, but I stop myself; it seems so ridiculous now that I’m sure it would sound like an obvious lie.
When I finally shut up, the woman says, ‘Okay’—but not to me. My guard takes the gun away from my head, but doesn’t move me from the chair, and I suddenly realize what’s about to happen. I suffer a brief moment of pure frustration—unconscious most of the time, blindfolded the rest; how am I ever going to find out anything? — before P3 smothers this unproductive sentiment. The needle goes into the vein, the drug flows into my bloodstream. I don’t fight it; there’s no point.
I wake on a bed, not even handcuffed. I glance around; I’m in a small, almost empty flat. A man I haven’t seen before is sitting on a chair in a corner of the room, watching me expressionlessly, resting a gun on his knee. I can hear street sounds from below, maybe fifteen or twenty storeys down. It’s seven forty-seven, January 6th.
I rise, and head for the bathroom; the guard makes no move to stop me. There’s a toilet, a shower, a sink; a non-opening window about thirty centimetres square, the pane dimpled so that it passes no clear image; a ventilation grille in the ceiling, half the size of the window. I urinate, then wash my hands and face. With the water still running, I quickly search the room, but there’s nothing that could be remotely useful as a weapon.
The rest of the flat is a single room, with a kitchen in one corner; a small refrigerator, unplugged, with the door ajar; a microwave and hotplates built into the counter top. There’s a window above the sink, covered by closed Venetian blinds. I start towards this area, but the guard says, ‘There’s nothing there you need. Breakfast is on its way.’ I nod and turn back. I pace beside the bed, stretching cramped muscles.
Shortly afterwards, another man brings in a carton packed with assorted fast food, and coffee. I eat sitting on the bed. The guard doesn’t join in, and ignores my attempts at conversation. His eyes move only to follow me, so at times he appears almost as if he’s in a kind of stupor, but I know precisely how alert he really is; I’ve spent enough twelve-hour stake-outs in a similar condition. When a mod grants you vigilance, you’re literally incapable of anything less; boredom, distraction and impatience have simply become inaccessible modes of thought. Unprimed, I may joke about zombies—but primed, I have no doubt that this is where the real strength of neurotechnology lies: not in the creation of exotic new mental states, but in the conscious, deliberate restriction of possibilities, in focusing, and empowering, the act of choice.
I half expect to be drugged yet again, as soon as I’ve finished eating, but this doesn’t happen. I don’t push my luck; I lie on the bed and gaze at the ceiling like a model prisoner, obviating any need for restraint. I have no intention of causing my captors the slightest difficulty, until the odds are a great deal better that it would do me some good.
And if no such opportunity arises?
What happens if I can’t escape?
Killing me would be the simplest choice in most respects. But what are the alternatives? What could my interrogator’s promise of leniency entail—assuming, for the sake of speculation, that it meant anything at all?
A memory wipe, perhaps. A crude one. If BDI aren’t willing to spend a fortune mapping my brain to extract information for their own benefit, they’re hardly going to do so out of concern for the integrity of my personality. Natural human memory didn’t evolve with any reason to be easily reversible; eliminating a given piece of knowledge, while leaving everything else intact, is a massive computational task. The only way to be cheap and thorough is to cut a wide swath.
Dead, brain-wiped, or free. In order of decreasing probability. So how do I change the odds? How can I hope to discover—or invent—a reason for my captors to keep me alive and intact, when I still don’t know who they are and what they’re doing? And how can I hope to find that out, when I have no means of gathering data?
I still have Cufct’s snapshots in my head. I go through them again, one by one, on the chance that I might have missed something crucial. All the shots of workstation screens are packed with information—but DNA sequences, protein models and neural maps don’t mean a lot to me. I can ‘read’ them—in the sense that a child can spell out the individual letters of even the most difficult piece of text—but I don’t stand a chance of recognizing any of the structures portrayed, let alone deducing anything about their function or context.
I’m fed again. The guard is changed. I shuffle the facts for hours, but nothing new crystallizes out of the contradictions. Escape remains as unlikely as ever. Rushing the guard would be suicide; crashing through the window and falling to the street would be marginally less likely to kill me—except that I’d probably be shot half-way across the room.
As the possibilities thin out, P3 seems to be dragging me further and further into a state of detachment. It wants me to gather more data—but it knows that I can’t. It wants me to concentrate on plausible strategies for survival—but acknowledges that there are none. What’s it going to do when all of its goals have been ruled out, when all of its elaborate optimization criteria have been rendered meaningless? Shut down? Bow out? Leave me to make my own choice between equally futile options?