Then her image seemed to twitch back a couple of seconds and she answered his question again with exactly the same words and inflection: ‘You think it might.’
‘Is something the matter?’ Dreyfus asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Delphine. Look at me. Are you all right?’
Her image twitched back again. Rather than answering the question, she fixed Dreyfus with fearful eyes. ‘I feel strange.’
‘Something’s wrong with you.’
Her voice came through too quickly, speeded up as if on helium. ‘I feel strange. Something’s wrong with me.’
‘I think you’re corrupted,’ Dreyfus said. ‘It could be related to the problems we’ve had with the Search Turbines. I’m going to freeze your invocation and run a consistency check.’
‘I feel strange. I feel strange.’ Her voice accelerated, the words piling up on top of each other. ‘I feel strange I feel strange Ifeel-strangeIfeelstrange…’ Then she found a moment of lucidity, her voice and the speed of her speech returning to normal. ‘Help me. I don’t think this is… normal.’
Dreyfus raised his sleeve, tugging down his cuff. His lips shaped the beginning of the word ‘freeze’.
‘No,’ Delphine said. ‘Don’t freeze me. I’m frightened.’
‘I’ll retrieve you as soon as I’ve run a consistency check.’
‘I think I’m dying. I think something’s eating me. Help me, Prefect!’
‘Delphine, what’s happening?’
Her image simplified, losing detail. Her voice came through slow, sexless and bass-heavy. ‘Diagnostic traceback indicates that this beta-level is self-erasing. Progressive block overwipe is now in progress in partitions one through fifty.’
‘Delphine!’ he shouted.
Her voice was treacle-slow, almost subsonically deep. ‘Help me, Tom Dreyfus.’
‘Delphine, listen to me. The only way I can help you is by bringing your murderer to justice. But for that to happen you have to answer one last question.’
‘Help me, Tom.’
‘You mentioned people who came to visit Anthony Theobald. Who were these people?’
‘Help me, Tom.’
‘Who were the people? Why did they come to visit?’
‘Anthony Theobald said…’
She stalled.
‘Talk to me, Delphine.’
‘Anthony Theobald said… we had a guest. A guest that lived downstairs. And that I wasn’t to ask questions.’
He spoke into his bracelet. ‘Freeze invocation.’
‘Help, Tom.’
What was left of her became motionless and silent.
Dreyfus called Trajanova. She was flustered, not happy to be distracted from the work at hand. She appeared to be squeezed into the shaft of one of her Turbines, suspended in a weightless sling with her back against the curved glass tube that encased the machinery.
‘It’s important,’ Dreyfus said. ‘I just invoked one of my beta-levels. She crashed on me halfway through the interview.’
Trajanova transferred a tool from one hand to the other, via her mouth. ‘Did you re-invoke?’
‘I tried, but nothing happened. The system said the beta-level image was irrevocably corrupted.’
Trajanova grunted and eased sideways to find a more comfortable position. ‘That isn’t possible. You got a stable invocation until halfway through your interview?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then the base image can’t have been damaged.’
‘My subject appeared to be aware that something was corrupting her. She said she felt as if she was being eaten. It was as if she could feel her core personality being erased segment by segment.’
‘That isn’t possible either.’ Then a troubling thought made her frown. ‘Unless, of course—’
‘Unless what?’
‘Could someone have introduced some kind of data weapon into your beta-level?’
‘Hypothetically, I suppose so. But when we pulled those recoverables out of Ruskin-Sartorious, they were subjected to all the usual tests and filters we normally run before invocation. They were badly damaged as well. I had Thalia working overtime just to stitch the pieces back together. If there’d been a data weapon — or any kind of self-destruct function — Thalia would’ve seen it.’
‘And she reported nothing unusual to you?’
‘She told me she’d only been able to get three clean recoveries. That was all.’
‘And we can trust Thalia not to have missed anything?’
‘I’d swear on it.’
‘Then there’s only one answer: someone must have got to the beta-level after it entered Panoply. From a technical standpoint, it wouldn’t have been all that difficult. All they’d have needed to do was find some data weapon in the archives and embed it in the beta-level. It could have been programmed to start eating the recoverable as soon as you invoked, or maybe it was keyed to a phrase or gesture.’
‘My God,’ Dreyfus said. ‘Then the others… I want to talk to them as well.’
‘It could be too dangerous if the same code has been embedded. You’ll lose your other two witnesses.’
‘What do you mean, lose? Don’t I get a back-up?’
‘There is no back-up, Tom. We lost all duplicate images when the Turb blew.’
‘This was all engineered.’
‘Listen,’ Trajanova said, with sudden intensity, ‘I’m going to be stuck in here for a few more hours. I have to get this Turb back up to speed before I do anything else. But as soon as I’m done I’ll look at the recoverables. I’ll see if I can salvage anything from the one that crashed, and look for a data weapon embedded in the other two. Until then, whatever you do, don’t invoke them.’
‘I won’t,’ Dreyfus said.
‘I’ll call you when I’m done.’
It was only when he had finished speaking with Trajanova that Dreyfus paused to examine his state of mind. What he found was both unexpected and shocking. Only a few days ago, he would have regarded the loss of a beta-level witness as akin to the destruction of some potentially incriminating forensic evidence. He would have been irritated, even angered, but his feelings would have arisen solely because an investigation had been hampered. He would have felt no emotional sentimentality concerning the loss of the artefact itself, because an artefact was all that it was.
That wasn’t how he felt now. He kept seeing Delphine’s face in those final moments, when she had still retained enough sentience to recognise the inevitability of her own death.
But if beta-levels were never alive, how could they ever die?
Gaffney’s first thought was that Clepsydra was dead, or at least comatose. He experienced a moment of relief, thinking that he would be spared the burden of another death, before the truth revealed itself. The Conjoiner woman was still breathing; her deathlike composure was merely her natural state of repose when no one was in attendance. Her sharp-boned face was already turning towards him, moving with the smoothness of a missile launcher locking on to a target, her eyes widening from drowsy slits.
‘I was not expecting you to come back so quickly,’ she said, ‘but perhaps the timing is fortuitous. I’ve been thinking about our previous conversation—’
‘Good,’ Gaffney said.
There was a measurable pause before she spoke again. ‘I was expecting Dreyfus.’
‘Dreyfus couldn’t make it. Otherwise detained.’ Gaffney came to rest in the bubble, having judged his momentum with expert precision. ‘That’s not a problem, is it?’
He felt Clepsydra’s attention pierce the skin of his face, mapping the bones under the skin. His skull itched. He had never felt so intensely looked at in all his life.