Someday he would get around to documenting it.
He set it to find out more about the project Janis Taine was working on. Terminal identifications, effortlessly and habitually memorized; official project definitions, pasted from the admin database; traces of Taine’s library searches; molecular structures decoded down from the gun’s chemical analyser – all of them pulled together by Dissembler, the most successful and widespread piece of freeware ever written, a self-correcting, evolving compiler/translator that lived in the eyeblink gap between input and output. Mips – processing cycles, computer power – had always been cheaper than bandwidth. The computers got cheaper by the week and the phone bills stayed high by the month. Dissembler exploited this differential, turning data streams – sparse and skimpy, stripped and squeezed like the words of poetry – into images and sound and text endlessly adjusted to the user’s profile. Anonymous, uncopyrighted, it had spread like a benign virus for a quarter of a century. By now not even the software engineers who’d built it into DoorWays™ – the current smash-hit, chart-topping, must-have interface – had a clue how it worked.
Moh did, but tried not to think about it. It was part of the memory damage.
He launched his hastily assembled probe.
Mindlessly sophisticated programs swarmed into the university’s networks, expanding like a lazily blown smoke-ring, searching out weaknesses, trapdoors, encryption keys left momentarily unguarded. Most of them would get trashed by Security, but there was a chance that one would come back with the goods. Not for some time, though.
Kohn got up and reached to separate the basic weapon from its smart-box, the extra magazine that made it like a dog with two tails, then remembered where he was going and stayed his hand. Whether the rifle was smart or dumb, he couldn’t take it with him. The Geneva Convention’s Annexe On the Laws of Irregular Warfare, Inter-communal Violence and Terrorism was painstakingly explicit about that.
The university’s branch of the Nat-Mid-West Bank backed on to a long-established patch of waste-ground, now symbolically fenced off and holding a couple of wooden cabins, their walls emblazoned with rampantly pluralist graffiti. New Situationists, Alternative Luddites (they wore space-rigger gear and blew up wind-power plants), Christianarchists, cranks, creeps, commies, tories – all had had their say, in colour. It was legally defined as a holding area and more cynically known as a Body Bank. It wasn’t guarded, and no one tried to escape.
‘Now let’s see what we’ve got, Mr Kohn,’ the teller trilled as she minced away from the counter and tapped at a keyboard, taking care with her nails, which extended a centimetre beyond her fingertips. ‘You have four against the Carbon Life Alliance, right?’
‘Three,’ said Kohn.
‘Oh. Oh, I see.’ She looked up at him, a neat pair of creases appearing for a moment between her plucked, pencilled eyebrows; then she looked down again. ‘Well, isn’t this your lucky day? One of your people is held by the Planet Partisans, and they have a standing arrangement, so that’s one out of the way. Bye-ee! Your friend’s just been released. Ah. The CLA are willing to offer ten thousand Dockland dollars—’
‘No thanks.’
‘—or equivalent in negotiables – arms or neurochemicals at today’s opening prices – per combatant, less equipment losses.’
‘What?’
She looked up and fluttered thick black eyelashes.
‘You did damage a timing mechanism, didn’t you?’
‘It wasn’t worth fifty grams!’
‘Oh, that’s quite acceptable. Delivery as usual?’
‘The Ruislip depot. Yeah, we’ll take it.’
She buzzed through to one of the huts and told Kohn’s three hostages they were free to leave, then brought the papers over for him to sign. He hadn’t seen her before. She wore floating chiffon, a mass of brown ringlets, plus heels and lipgloss. After the uniformity of the hospital and the greenery-yallery of the campus, it was like meeting a transvestite. She saw him looking and smiled.
‘I’m a femininist,’ she explained as she passed over the release forms.
‘A feminist?’
Kohn’s father had reminisced about them, but this didn’t match.
‘A femininist,’ she repeated sharply.
‘Of course…Well, thanks and good luck to you. I hope I never meet your fighters!’
It was a polite form of words when you first encountered a new outfit, but the woman took it seriously.
‘We don’t have any,’ she told Kohn’s hastily retreating back. ‘We don’t believe in violence.’
Not long after midday and already he wanted to sleep. He would crash out for a couple of hours, then take some more anti-som and go home. Give the comrades time to set up the music.
Kohn walked back towards the accommodation block. His head felt like it had sand in it. He thought over what the teller had said. A faction without a militia. Just wait till the gun heard that one. Some people were really sick.
Quite suddenly he felt as if he had been walking towards the redbrick accommodation blocks for…for some indeterminate time. The sunlight bounced off the concrete paving slabs and hurt his eyes. He flipped the glades down. Colours stayed vivid: the garish yellow-brown of the withered grass, the blinding grey of the concrete, the booming silver overcast through which the sun burned like its tiny burning-glass image through paper. Placing one foot in front of the other became difficult, complicated, tricky, an awkward business, more than he’d bargained for, a whole new belt of slugs. Worse, associational chains kept echoing away in his head, amplifying and distorting, repeating and refining – no, that wasn’t quite it…
Kohn persisted. Marching grimly forward was one of his skills, on his specification, part of the package.
The colours of objects detached themselves like damaged retinae and spun into spectrum-sparkling snowflakes the size of icebergs that crashed in utter silence through the earth.
At the same time another part of his mind filled with lucidity like clear water. He knew damn well he was sliding unstoppably into an altered state of consciousness. Hurrying groups of students parted in front of him – not exactly fleeing, but separating to left and right as he stalked forward, hands clawed, eyes invisible and easily pictured as burning mad. It was beyond him to understand why it was happening. Couldn’t have been the anti-som, or the joint he’d smoked in the lab…
Air’s lousy with psychoactive volatiles, a voice in his mind replayed.
Uh-oh.
He started to run. Along narrow pathways, over a little bridge, up flights of stairs and along the corridor to the door of his room. He banged through it. The gun, alerted, lifted on to its bipod; camera and IR-eyes and sound-scanners swivelled.
HELLO, spelt the desk screen.
The word was repeated on the screensight head-up of his glades, echoed in his phones.
SIT DOWN. HANDS ON.
One hand reached for the desk touchpad, the other for the data-input stock of the gun. Its screensight lurked in his peripheral vision.
The desk screen flickered into fractal snow. Kohn stared at it. His hands moved independently, fingers preternaturally fast. The images changed. They resembled the blocks of colour in his head. Changed again, and they were indistinguishable from those blocks of colour in his head. Again, and they merged, outer image meshing smoothly with inner, changing with it.