She took off her VR glasses and looked up as two men stepped into the lab. For a moment, a moment in which her mouth began to open, her lips to smile, she thought her sponsors’ agents had come back. In another moment she recognized these were strangers, and everything – the breath in her throat, the heart in her breast – stopped. And then began again, in a gasp and a racing pace, running away from her.
There was the stupid reassurance that the bench was between her and them.
The two men who stood looking impassively at her were dressed identically in black suits, white shirts, dark ties. The clothes didn’t hang right, as if badly cut (but they were not badly cut); the material was frayed in unexpected places (but the material looked new, expensive). One of the men had black skin, the other white: it was as if a child had taken the imprecise terms for skin-colour and rendered them almost literally.
They walked – and even their walk looked awkward, stilted – right up to the far edge of the bench and looked down at her. She looked up at them. She knew who they were.
The room began to spin, and centrifugal force pulled at her. Her forearms pressed against the benchtop; she dug her nails into the impervious white surface to stop herself from falling away.
‘We are here in a purely advisory capacity,’ the white man said.
‘You would not wish us to be here in an executive capacity,’ said the other.
Janis shook her head in emphatic agreement. No, she would not wish that. She would not wish that at all.
‘We advise you to abort your current line of investigation,’ the white man continued. ‘There are other promising and productive and valid approaches which will give your sponsors satisfaction. They need not know about’ – he paused, frowning, head cocked slightly as if listening to something inaudible – ‘what you have come close to. You are approaching a proscribed area. If you enter it, neither your sponsors nor yourself will be happy with the consequences.’
‘We assure you of that,’ said the black man.
‘Consider our advice,’ said the white man.
Janis responded with a frantic nod. Yes, she would consider their advice. She would definitely consider it.
They both smiled, setting a prickle of hairs down her back, and turned and went out. She heard them walking in perfect step along the corridor, then a rapid clatter from the stairwell. She rose, with difficulty, still hanging on to the bench, then straightened up and went over to the window. The two men emerged from the exit below and stroke briskly to a bright yellow Miata parked in the centre of the nearest plaza. Their gait was now quite different: entirely normal, perfectly natural; they seemed to be in animated conversation, their hand gestures just what you’d expect from a couple of students strolling out from an interesting seminar and arguing about its implications.
The car nosed through a gap between buildings and tailed out of sight.
Janis levered her weight on to the stool and felt herself sag to the bench as if it were a bar she’d been drinking at far too long. She’d never been so frightened since…
She pushed away the thought of the last time she’d been so frightened, so frightened like that. She listened to her harsh dry whispering, taking a sample of it; oh jesus of god oh gaia no this is shit oh. On and on like that. Not getting anywhere. She shut her mouth and breathed deeply, calming herself down. She shook to a sudden fit of the giggles. It was all so crude, so brazen, so heavy-handed. What did they take her for? Men In Black, indeed. Fucking Men In Black.
She’d heard the second-hand stories, the recycled theories, seen the funny looks in the staffroom when she’d wondered what had happened to so-and-so, promising paper last year, no follow-up. She knew there were areas of research and lines of inquiry that were simply forbidden under the US/UN’s deep-technology guidelines, one of which prohibited trying to find out what those areas were. Paradoxical, like repression. You don’t know what it is you’re not supposed to know. It still was hard to believe it really happened like that.
Perhaps in most cases it didn’t – a subtler manipulation of research committees and pressure on commercial backers was all it took. But sometimes (say) the research was backed by an organization that was hard to trace, impossible to get a handle on – then the handlers would go out, the heavies, the dark-suited enforcers of the officially non-existent guidelines. The US/UN technology police. Stasis. The mythical, the uneasily-laughed-about Men In Black.
It all went back to the war, like everything else.
The thought that really terrified her was that they didn’t know. They didn’t know that she’d actually got results. Her sponsors did, and she had no way of knowing if they could keep that a secret from the secret police.
So they might be back. In an executive capacity.
Janis knew there was only one place to run to, and that, to get there safely, what she needed on her case was a committed defender, not the state cops or the Campus Security or Office Security Systems…Kelly girls, all of them.
She found the card Kohn had left. She looked at it and smiled to herself. When the card was held at certain angles to the light, centimetre-high figures sprang into view around its edges: little toy combatants, in watchful pose. She tried the first number on Kohn’s card. Was that a holo of Kohn himself, at the lower-left corner? ‘Pose’ was the word.
‘—insky Workers’ Defence Collective, how can I help you?’ a man’s voice sing-songed.
‘Oh. Thank you. Uh, is this a secure line?’
‘Sure is. It’s illegal. Would you like to switch to an open one?’
‘No! Uh, look. My name’s Janis Taine, I’m a researcher at Brunel University’ – at the other end somebody began tapping a keyboard with painful lack of skill – ‘and I’ve just been leaned on by a couple of guys who are probably, that is I think they were from…’
‘Stasis?’
‘Yes. Can you help?’
‘Hmm…We can get you to Norlonto. That’s out of their jurisdiction. Can’t say beyond that.’
‘That’s just what I want. So what do I do?’
‘We got a guy on site right now, Moh Kohn…’
‘I’ve got his card.’
‘Good, OK, call him up. If you can’t raise him, he’s probably crashed out, but you can go and bang on his door. Accommodation Block, one-one-five cee. You got that?’
‘One-one-five cee.’
‘Right. Any problem, call us back.’
‘OK. Thanks.’
She tried Kohn’s personal number. A holo of Kohn appeared, squatting on her phone like a heavily armed sprite.
‘I’m busy at the moment,’ it said. ‘If you would like to leave a message, please speak clearly after the tone.’
After a second there was a sound like a very small incoming shell, followed by a faint pop and an expectant silence.
‘Damn,’ Janis said, and cut the call.
She marched out of the lab and hurried down the stairs and stalked out across the campus, glancing sidelong at the far corners of buildings, half-expecting to see an infiltrator coming for her: crank or creep or…no, don’t think about that.
She thought about it. It was possible. They could be coming for her right now. She didn’t want to think about it – if you thought about it you’d just stop: the fear would fell you where you stood. She stopped thinking about what she might be getting away from and concentrated on where she had to go, the one place that might be safe from them, and within reach. She began to walk faster, then broke into a run.
She sprinted across grass and paving, splashed through a little stream and glanced into five identical stairwells with different numbers at their foot before she reached 110–115. At the top of the stairs she forced herself to slow down, back off from the adrenaline high. Picking out Kohn’s door was easy: it faced her at the end of the corridor, with that annoyingly congregational variant of the commie symbol scrawled on it in what looked like dripping fresh blood.