Some of the women dressed exactly like the men, others played with similar modes softened by decorative touches; most, however, seemed to be announcing that they came from peasant rather than proletarian stock, in ethnic skirts and dresses that no actual Bolivian or Bulgarian or Kurdish woman would be seen dead in nowadays. But, whatever they wore, they acted in a way that struck him as brash and bold and masculine: shouting and smoking and buying drinks. There was something exciting about it, exciting in a different way from what he’d seen on the streets.
He felt simultaneously conspicuous and invisible. This was no singles bar: everyone was in groups and/or couples. He was noticed as different, unknown to anyone, and then ignored. He scanned the crowd for anyone on their own or anyhow interested in meeting someone new.
His idle gaze stopped with a jolt at a woman who sat on the wall-seat behind a table at the window. There were others at the table, but there was space on either side of her, and she was looking around the pub with a curious, questioning eye. She certainly wasn’t waiting for her date to turn up. She looked relaxed and content, and out-of-place. Cascading red hair, just enough make-up, pale face and paler arms set off by a sleeveless black top. It all said class, and not working class.
She saw him looking, and made eye-contact for a fraction of a second, then glanced down at her drink. Her hair tumbled forward. She ran her hand over the glass, then picked it up and took a swallow. Jordan turned away before she looked at him again, but he felt her gaze like a long, cool finger.
Another place, a place unknown except as a rumour, like the Black Plan and the Last International and the Twilight of the Icons. The Clearing House: a hierarchical hotline, the secret soviet of the ruling class, a permanent party – in both senses, an occasion and an organization of the privileged – where everybody who was anybody could socialize in privacy. The place where the Protocols of the Elders of Babylon could be hammered out.
Donovan was the only participant who had never received the standing invitation that came in some form to almost everyone who became conspicuously successful, terrorist and trillionaire alike. He had hacked his way in. The feat was so unprecedented and alarming that it had caused a five-minute global financial crash and an immediate arrangement to the effect that his electronic warfare would not bring down the wrath of Space Defense. Handling more localized retaliation would remain his own business.
Tonight he received an urgent summons, his first in years. It flashed around his screens, interrupting his interrogations of the entities that slunk and prowled in forgotten reaches of the datasphere. He dismissed them and subvocalized the passwords, and in an instant he was there, out of it. He needed no VR gear to be there, to be out of it – he took it straight from the screens, his mind vaulting unaided into the lucid dream of mainframing.
Free fall in black space, faint fall of photons. Step up the magnification and resolution to:
A distant galaxy, a chalk thumbprint whorl, a cloud of points of light, a hovering firefly swarm, a crowded cloud of bright fantastic bodies, a multi-level masquerade where everyone was talking but no one could overhear. Donovan’s fetch – the body-construct that other users saw – was based on a younger self, not out of vanity but because he couldn’t be bothered to update it. Others inclined to the Masque of the Red Death approach. It looked like a heaven for the wicked.
‘Glad to see you, Donovan.’
The angel that spoke to him had chubby pink cheeks, iridescent feathered wings, a shining robe and an uncertain halo that wavered over her head like a smoke-ring.
‘I don’t think we’ve been introduced.’
The angel simpered, a visual effect so cloying that Donovan felt metaphysically sick.
‘My name is Melody Lawson. Do you remember me?’
Donovan struggled to sustain the illusion of telepresence as (‘back’ at the rig, as he couldn’t help thinking) he fumbled with a hot-key databoard. Melody Lawson’s details flickered past the corner of his eye.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘You and your husband left the movement – oh, it must be nearly twenty years ago. But I seem to recall a few very welcome sums of’ – he smiled – ‘angel money.’ Conscience money, more like. ‘What are you doing now, and why have you called me?’
‘I look after data security for Beulah City,’ Mrs Lawson said. ‘Cracker turned keeper, as they say. I must admit that what I learned in my young and foolish days has been enormously useful professionally. And I still share your concern about the dangers of AI, though some of your actions have been quite a nuisance to me in the past.’
‘And yours to me,’ Donovan said. It wasn’t entirely flattery: Beulah City’s censorship filters made it a tough one, although with its relatively backward systems it seldom deserved disruption anyway.
‘However,’ Mrs Lawson went on, ‘we should all be willing to let bygones be bygones when we find that we have a common interest, don’t you think?’
‘And what common interest is that?’ Donovan asked.
‘I think you know what I’m talking about,’ Mrs Lawson said.
Before Donovan could respond he heard a discreet murmur in his head informing him that somebody else in the Clearing House wanted to speak to him. It had to be someone high up in the informal hierarchy to get through at a time like this. Mrs Lawson, too, seemed to be getting paged. Donovan chinned the go-ahead, wondering if she had set him up for this. He remembered her, now, quite unassisted: she’d been devious even before she’d got religion.
A privacy bubble snapped into existence, enclosing them and two others: a man in black who looked like one of the Men In Black, the mythical enforcers of the mythical great UFO cover-up, his face a bloodless white, eyes sapphire-blue, forehead bulging in the wrong places, suit ill fitting; and a small man in what appeared to be a company fetch, blue overalls with a name-badge. Southeast Asian, probably Vietnamese.
The Man In Black spoke first. Even his voice sounded not quite right, a pirated copy of the human. Donovan wondered what irony underlay this simulation of a simulacrum, or whether it was a genuine attempt to intimidate.
‘Good evening. I am an agent of the Science, Technology and Software Investigation Service of the United Nations. You may refer to me as Bleibtreu-Fèvre.’
Donovan felt as if he were a cat watching a snake: he and Stasis had the same enemies and the same prey, but he regarded the agency, with its allegedly enhanced operatives and its undeniably advanced technology – more advanced than the technology which they existed to stamp out – as dangerously close to the kind of evils which for years he’d feared and fought. There had been occasions in the past when the Carbon Life Alliance had had to collaborate with Stasis, and they’d always left him with a crawling sensation on his skin.
‘Dr Nguyen Thanh Van, Research Director, Da Nang Phytochemicals,’ the Vietnamese man said. The voice and lip-synch had a thin quality that indicated either primitive kit or heavy crypto masking.
Donovan and Lawson introduced themselves for Van’s benefit, and Bleibtreu-Fèvre continued.
‘This afternoon,’ he said, ‘I personally intervened in an emerging situation involving some dangerous drug applications which were – inadvertently, I do not doubt – being developed by a, shall we say, subsidiary of Dr Van’s company. Earlier today, and unknown to me at the time, the security of that research was compromised by a swarm of information-seeking software constructs. Shortly thereafter, as I am sure you are well aware, a series of transient and potentially catastrophic events took place in the datasphere. One might be prepared to pass this off as coincidence were it not for two facts. One is that the focus of the disturbances has been traced to the facility in question. The second is that, while the disturbances have affected a wide range of services and enterprises, a statistically improbable number of them have centred on research programmes which in one way or another are associated with Da Nang Phytochemicals.’