‘But there are a lot more now, aren’t there? And many new kinds of craziness. Some of it harmless, some of it dangerous. People meddle with alien technology, and it fucks them up. It’s like giving plutonium to a bunch of savages. Shiny stuff that’s warm to the touch, glows in the dark. Magic. But then your hair and teeth start falling out, your women give birth to monsters, and if you put too much of it together…This way.’
Chloe followed him out of the lift, along service corridors painted institutional green, through a fire door. Warm air, the slap of waves beneath a mesh platform elevated over a cluster of fat pipes, a workman in a high-vis jacket at the far end lowering something, a square mesh cage, over the rail.
Nevers introduced Chloe and said that she wanted to look at the day’s catch, and the workman lifted the lid off an ordinary black plastic dustbin. There were monsters inside. Fist-sized knots of pale threads, dozens of them, writhing around each other in a caul of slimy foam. A strong odour like stagnant water in a vase of long-dead flowers, with overtones of burnt plastic. Chloe felt an instant, atavistic revulsion. It was like some parasite found in the bowels of an animal. A nest of corpse worms. A horror-movie special effect.
The workman explained that they were devil squid. Native to Hydrot, brought here as sporelings in bubbleweed, now securely established in the ecosystem of the Thames. The building used river water to cool the heat exchangers of its air-conditioning system, and the devil squid crawled into the pipes, causing blockages and fouling the pumps.
‘We put up mesh, but they can squeeze through it,’ the man said. ‘So now we use traps baited with a pheromone.’
‘And you have to clean the traps every day,’ Nevers said.
‘They keep coming,’ the man said. ‘Reckon they like it here.’
‘If that’s some sort of lesson,’ Chloe said as she followed Nevers to the other end of the platform, ‘I don’t quite get the point.’
Nevers leaned against the rail, presenting her with his keen profile as he gazed out across the river. ‘People like your boss think they can quantify the influence of the Jackaroo and all the rest, but they really don’t have clue one about it. None of us do. That old line about not meddling in things we don’t understand — a funny old cliché, right? An awful warning about mad scientists and such. But some of us have realised that it has an urgent truth. We brought back bubbleweed from Hydrot, fast-growing stuff that was supposed to help with the carbon-sequestration effort. And devil squids hitched a ride in it, and they grew and multiplied, and now we can’t get rid of them. Just one example of many problems large and small, caused by misplaced arrogance. By people thinking that they can use alien stuff without any blowback. Can I give you a little advice, Chloe?’
‘Why not?’ Because like she had a choice.
‘When Disruption Theory stuck to documenting cults and crazies, all well and good. We didn’t have a problem with that. But now it’s started to deal in actual alien artefacts, and that’s another game entirely. That’s our game. Do you follow me?’
‘This sounds more like a threat than advice.’
‘The advice part’s coming up. Don’t put your trust in Dr Morange or any of her people. She’s brilliant, true. But she’s also ruthless. If she thinks you’re causing her a problem, she will drop you like this.’
Chloe managed not to flinch when Nevers snapped his fingers in her face.
He said, ‘Fahad Chauhan’s pictures have been thoroughly examined by our techs. Who have high-powered pattern-recognition systems, AI risk-assessment programmes…They say the pictures are topologically consistent, and contain signatures that suggest they could be the product of a powerful and single-minded eidolon. A type that hasn’t been encountered before. But you already knew that, didn’t you? I mean, that’s your thing. It’s what you do.’
‘I can tell real artefacts from fakes. Most of the time.’
‘And those pictures looked real to you.’
Chloe shrugged. She didn’t want to give anything away.
‘And you’ve had plenty of experience with Elder Culture shit,’ Adam Nevers said. ‘Algorithms and eidolons and all the rest. You know what they can do to people. How they can get inside their heads and mess up their minds. Our chief tech says that the maths packed into some of the algorithms can be very elegant. Simple and profound; beautiful, even. He’s used that very word more than once: beautiful. Is that how you see it?’
‘I’m not a mathematician.’
‘I like motorbikes. My idea of beauty is a Harley-Davidson Duo-Glide. That big, air-cooled V-twin engine, the curve of the fairings and the teardrop tank…Or if you’re into classics, the Vincent Black Shadow. But jet fighter planes are beautiful too. So are Great White sharks.’
‘Aren’t they extinct? Great Whites.’
But Nevers refused to be derailed. ‘The techs reckon your friend Fahad has been exposed to a seriously dangerous alien mind virus, and I have it on good authority that the kid’s father was into some seriously dangerous stuff too, working for some seriously dangerous people. I suggest you look back at the path you’ve taken so far, Chloe. Think very carefully about which direction you should go next. And any time you want to get in touch, here’s my card,’ he said, holding it out between two fingers. ‘Don’t take too long to think about it. Don’t leave it until you and your friends are deep in the shit before you call for help.’
Upstairs, outside the committee room, Chloe told Daniel it was nothing. ‘I’m not sure if it was a threat or a job offer,’ she said. ‘But screw it, I’m going to do this thing anyway. And then, maybe, we’ll know what happened to Fahad.’
Daniel moved forward unexpectedly and folded her into a bear hug. ‘Do good work,’ he said. It felt like a farewell.
She redeemed her message bag from the cloakroom. Jen had driven her to her flat early that morning so that she could pick up fresh clothes, a change of underwear, her washbag. It was a postage stamp of a studio flat and she was paying a stupid amount of rent for it, but it was the first time she’d had her own space, her own front door, her own mail box. Before that, she’d sofa-surfed, shared rooms with friends, even squatted one summer in a big decrepit house in Hackney. But as she’d packed, with Jen perched on the corner of her swing-down bed, Chloe had realised that after two years she was still living as if she expected to have to move out at a moment’s notice. The furniture was the landlord’s; she’d bought the cookware, crockery and bed linen in a mad dash through Ikea; her books, music and movies were in her tablet or the Cloud.
There had been no reporters waiting in ambush outside the block of flats: the news had rolled on past her. And although the little huddle outside the entrance to Kingdom Tower stirred when she appeared, calling to her as she climbed into the taxi that Jen had ordered, aiming phones and cameras at her through the windows as it moved off, none of them bothered to follow.
She asked the taxi to drop her off near Shepherd Market and threaded the back streets to Green Park Tube station, resisting the impulse to look over her shoulder, to look at CCTV cameras on high posts, the corners of buildings. She descended to the Piccadilly line and rode a westbound train one stop to Hyde Park Corner, crossed to the eastbound line and rode back through Green Park. Feeling less like a spy and more like a kid playing hide-and-seek. Because how would she know if anyone was following her, or watching her on security cameras? But it made her feel a little better, made her feel like she was doing something about Nevers’s scare tactics.
She stayed on the train to the end of the line. Cockfosters. A low brick-built station, an old-fashioned parade of dilapidated shops on the other side of the road, a battered black Range Rover parked outside a betting shop. The driver, Ada Morange’s man, started the motor when she climbed in.