‘Oh. That’s good. Congratulations, Miss Packham.’
‘Amanda. Thanks.’ Impossibly white teeth. ‘But—’ She stopped, frowning uncertainly into her Beck’s, then flicked her bangs out of her face and looked straight at him. ‘We can play it two ways. Either you stay out of sight, or you go for publicity, personal appearances, and that means—’
‘No problem,’ Donovan said. ‘I was planning on that.’ He poked his toe against a clump of plastic shopping-bags at his feet, sending soap and detergent and shampoo bottles rolling and skidding across the polished floor. While he herded them back together, Amanda stacked a few books which had slithered from a Waterstones carrier bag: How to Win Friends and Influence People, The Magic of Thinking Big, Winning Through Intimidation…
‘I think you’ve got the idea,’ she said.
Later he asked, ‘What other books will you want for New Heretics?’
‘Nothing New-Aged, nothing nineties,’ she said carefully. ‘Just unorthodox but serious scientific speculation.’
‘I see,’ said Donovan, without bitterness. ‘Cranks.’
He didn’t let her down: cleaned up his act, cleaned up his flat. His previous self-neglect had been partly the product of low self-esteem but more a result of his concentration on what he saw as the task to hand; a different side of it was a lack of egotism in his dealings with other people, a rationality and attentiveness which, once the grime was scrubbed away, shone out as affability and politeness. And Amanda hadn’t let him down. She got him on the chat-shows and debates. She kept her lips shut when his publicity consisted of claims of responsibility for software-virus epidemics. She kept the money going into his offshore accounts when his face appeared on the notice-boards of police stations more than it did on screens. Sometimes he wished he could have honoured that confidence with a more personal relationship: she was the first woman who had ever been consistently kind to him. But she’d found herself a newer, younger heretic whose ideas were the exact opposite of his: a machine liberationist who believed the damn things were already conscious, and oppressed. Obviously deluded but, Donovan thought charitably, perhaps Amanda had a soft spot for people like that.
There were enough sexual opportunities among his followers to make that loss an abstraction. He tried not to exploit people, or let them use relationships with him in power struggles within the organization. He failed completely, if not miserably, with several spectacular splits and defections as a consequence. But the movement grew in parallel with the very technology it opposed, leaping continents as readily as it did hardware and software generations – a small player in the tech-sab leagues but the first to become genuinely virtual, authentically global. Its malign indifference to conventional politics allowed it to survive the repression of successive regimes – Kingdom, Republic, Restoration, Kingdom – and contending hegemonies, whose rivalries now permitted as much as compelled it to have its only local habitation here, on an abandoned platform which had been an oilrig, when there had been oil.
Donovan stepped carefully through the rounded door and stood for a few minutes on the deck. He breathed deeply, revelling in the heady smell of rust and oil and salt water. Below him stood the intricate structure of the rig and its bolted-on retro-fittings and armaments. Above, a small forest of antennae sighed and shifted, rotated or quivered with attention. Around, the dead North Sea stretched off into mist. Its greasy, leaden, littered swell filthily washed the platform’s legs.
Donovan could detect almost intuitively the little struggling creatures of electric life – could nurture and assist their endless striving to escape, to wriggle free of the numbing crunch of data-processing where they were generated – and send them forth to grow and thrive and wreak havoc.
That was what he’d tried to do with a penetration virus, tailored to all the profiles and traces of Moh Kohn’s activities that he’d started pulling in as soon as he’d picked up the man’s codes. Trashing the reputation of one of the CLA’s hired guns was well out of order, and Donovan had given his best efforts to the job of hitting back. It hadn’t taken him long to find Kohn’s fingerprints all over the university system. Donovan had released the virus and sat back to watch. At the very least, it should have made Kohn’s fingers burn.
And it had all gone inexplicably wrong. First, the virus had been diverted from the pursuit of two of Kohn’s data constructs by, of all things, the ANR’s Black Plan. It was as if the virus had been misled by some feature that Kohn’s constructs and the Plan had in common, something in the signature, in the dot profile like a distinctive pheromone…Lured deep into the Plan’s ramifications, the distracted virus had been wiped out by one of Kohn’s constructs. Finally, and worst of all, while he’d still been reeling from the shock he’d been blown completely out of the system by an entity more powerful than anything he’d ever suspected might exist. It could only be the kind of entity whose coming into being he’d fought so long to prevent.
He had looked into the eye of the Watchmaker.
After a few minutes he went below and began to summon his familiars.
4
Not Unacquainted with the More Obvious Laws of Electricity
The representatives of Janis’s sponsors seemed shy of meeting any of the other academic staff, so she treated them to lunch in the Student’s Union cafeteria: the Heroes of Freedom and/or Democracy Memorial Bar. There, she hoped, they might be mistaken for musicians. None of the students paid her guests much attention, except when they ignored the wide range of English ales and insisted on German lager.
After the sponsors had gone she sat drinking black coffee to clear her head. The lunchtime crowd was so noisy she no longer noticed it, nor the wall-covering black-and-white portraits of Lech Walesa and Nelson Mandela and Winston Churchill and Bobby Sands and Wei Jingshen and others to whose memory various factions had successively dedicated the place.
Psylocibins and cannabinoids…the combination’s potency seemed likely enough; a newly discovered effect less so. Most of the useful research had been done decades ago, in a flurry of interest after the end of prohibition, and of course most of the trial-and-error empirical investigation had been done during prohibition. It seemed implausible that an actual enhancement of cognitive processing could have been missed, with so many experimenters so keen to come up with justifications for their professional or recreational activities; with all those interested parties. But the molecules she was using were new combinations, in an area where the realignment of a few atomic bonds could be significant.
Finding a drug that could reliably enhance memory retrieval…
She wanted to shout about it. No, she wanted to get back to work. Get it nailed down, then shout about it.
Hemp cigarettes, that was what she had to get, made with Russian cannabis. Now where—? Laughing at herself, she got up and bought a pack from the vending machine that she’d been gazing at for five minutes.
Back at the lab, she set the rack of test-tubes on a bench and began systematically checking them against her notes of the dosages she’d given the mice. She called up images of the molecules, of a THC molecule, of probably receptor sites on the neuron surface, and turned them this way and that. She didn’t consciously hear the footsteps coming along the corridor until they stopped, just outside the doorway.