The markets came back. Jordan saw his hands quiver. Until now the Black Plan had been a piece of urban folklore, the phantom hitch-hiker of the Cable, a rumoured leftover of the Republic’s political economy just as the ANR was the remnant of its armed forces. Allegedly it godfathered the ANR, scorning the checkpoint taxes and protection rackets of the community militias; fiendish financial viruses were supposed to haunt the core of the system, warping the country’s – some said, the world’s – economy to the distant ends of the fallen regime…
He’d never given the legend any credit.
Now it was offering him cash.
Untraceable digital cash, converted into untraceable paper money, something he’d never got his hands on before. Only the privileged had access to hard currency; for anything outside of business, Jordan had to make do with shekels, BC’s crummy funny money.
Guangzhou was busy. Try again.
He sold a Filipino a thousand gowns and let the remittance hover. Just borrowing, really. Not theft. No real conscience. Only following rules. Suppose it’s a trap? A little provocateur program to sniff out embezzlement and dangerous disloyalty? He could always say…A long, rambling, stammering defence spooled through his mind, shaming him. Intellectually he understood perfectly what the problem was: guilt and doubt, the waste products of innocence and faith, inhibited him and filled him with self-loathing even at his own weakness in trying to be free of them.
Born in sin and shapen in iniquity.
Guangzhou had a line. He made the purchase, transferred it instantly to the account as specified. And it paid him. It was as if the money had never been away. He put it in the proper account and took the correct fee. No harm done. The time was 11.08.
Someone tapped his shoulder. He turned, his features reflexively composed.
Mrs Lawson smiled down at him.
‘Take ten?’
A small, bustling middle-aged woman in black and white, no make-up, no guile or allure. She worked for Audit. Smart as a snake, like the man said, and no way harmless as a pigeon. Jordan had a momentary vision of head-butting her and making a dash for it. A dash for where?
He nodded and logged off, followed as her hem swept a path to her office. An audit trail.
‘Coffee?’
‘Yes, please.’
He sat awkwardly in the chair in the corner of the tiny office. The upright reclined so he couldn’t sit back without sprawling, and sitting on the edge made it difficult to look relaxed. Mrs Lawson had a swivel chair behind a pine desk. Stacks of printout. Monitor screens like the eyes of lizards. Cacti in pots along the window.
She steepled her fingers. ‘I’ve been keeping an eye on you, Jordan.’ She giggled. ‘Not in a way that would worry my husband! You’re a sharp lad, you know…No, don’t look so bashful. It’s not pride to be aware of your strengths. You do have an instinct, a feel for the way the markets move. I hope you’ll move up a bit yourself, perhaps consider joining one of the larger businesses. However, I’m not going to offer you a job.’
Another giggle. Jordan’s back crawled.
‘Except…in a way, I suppose I am. Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary in the system recently?’
This is it, he thought. Maybe there is a God after all, who leads you into temptation, then delivers you to evil.
‘Yes, I have,’ Jordan said. ‘Only this morning, a Black Planner made me an offer—’
Mrs Lawson laughed, almost spilling her coffee.
‘Of course, of course. And in my desk I have a piece of the authentic Turing Shroud! No, seriously, Jordan, I’m talking about any kind of pattern you may have noticed in things like, oh, subsystem crashes, transaction delays, severe degradation of response-time unrelated to major obvious activity? Anything that seems like interventions, where none of the central banks are involved? To be honest, we can’t find any evidence from the Exchange Commissions of’ – she waved her hands – ‘anything suspicious, but several of the smaller communities have a theory that something is loose in the system, using it for ulterior noncommercial purposes in a way that shows up only at the, uh, glass roots level.’
‘What you might call “outsider dealing”?’
Mrs Lawson looked startled.
‘That’s exactly what we do call it. Unfortunately it’s led to rumours, very unhealthy rumours, of – you know. A word to the wise, Jordan. I wouldn’t repeat that little joke of yours if I were you.’
Jordan nodded vigorously, making wiping motions with his hands.
‘Very good, my dear. Now: you will keep alert for anything that goes against your intuition as to how the market should behave, won’t you? And I suppose you’re keen to get back to work, so thank you for your time.’
It was 11.25.
He logged on, getting his password wrong a couple of times. The queue of orders filled one and a half screens. Jordan closed his eyes and breathed deeply, flexed his fingers and got to work. He didn’t think about anything.
Janis hardly listened to herself as she rattled through the outlines of what she knew of the project. She was thinking that there was something oddly disproportionate about her part in it: the more she thought about it, the more important it seemed, and that didn’t jibe at all with the level of resources applied…You didn’t want a struggling post-doc on this, you wanted a team, lots of lab techs, equipment thrown at it like ammunition. She might be part of a team without knowing it – that was her favoured hypothesis at the moment. With every government nervously restricting biological research, confining it to F S Zees and science peaks, with big corporations looking over their shoulders at consumer groups and junk-science lawsuits, and with green terrorists topping up the restrictions with direct action – with all that, life science was itself becoming an underground guerilla activity. (She’d often wondered just what molecule or compound was responsible for hysteria and ineducability in the middle classes: it must have seeped into the food-chain sometime in the nineteen-sixties, and become ever more concentrated since.)
Hell, maybe the backers were poor, maybe there wasn’t some giant corporation or institution behind this after all…maybe the three men in front of her were the whole thing; what the front concealed was that it wasn’t a front; What You See Is What You Get…True enough, the rest of the project was almost virtual – robot molecular analyses, computer molecular designs, automatic molecular production. It relied heavily on two techniques, parallel but almost precisely opposite. Genetic algorithms enabled random variations to be selected, varied, selected again in an analogue of Darwinian evolution, against a model of known chemical pathways in the human brain, which ICI-Bayer rented out at a few marks a nanosecond; like, cheap. Polymerase chain reactions enabled the selected molecules to be replicated in any necessary quantity, a process so thoroughly automated that the only human intervention required was washing out the kit.
But, ultimately, the product had to be tested in a living animal, and raw stuff from nature had to be tried out for potential; and at both ends of the cycle stood herself and a lot of white mice.
‘So perhaps you could give us a demonstration of your methods, Doctor Taine?’
Janis had a momentary fellow-feeling with a mouse in a maze: trapped and frantic. She had removed the door from the lab, lugged it to a skip, made sure the representatives of her sponsors entered by the side of the block away from the damaged wall. It wasn’t that she intended to fudge the results, ignore the contamination and hope for the best. She fully intended to sacrifice the mice and start afresh. It was just that there wasn’t time to do it before she had to demonstrate her competence, and she was afraid that, if she had nothing to demonstrate, the sponsors would sacrifice her and start afresh. She saw a fleeting, mad vision of what she would do if they ever found out – throw it all up and become a creep, wear plastic and live off the land and break into psychology labs and free the flatworms, blow up whale-ships to save the krill…