‘What’s going on?’ she demanded.
Jordan hesitated. Debbie turned away from him and pointed to the screen. Mandelbrot snowflakes drifted across it, faded, and died to a dot.
‘System crash,’ Jordan said, thinking on his feet. ‘Mrs Lawson’s trying to fix it. She’s a bit caught up in it but she’d like to see you in about ten minutes. Some files I left lying about,’ he added in a vaguely apologetic tone. ‘See you around.’
He followed Cat out, aware that Debbie was still standing and watching them with the expression of someone who just knows they’ve missed something, but…
‘That stuff about Donovan,’ Cat said as they left the office. ‘D’you think that’s what she thought?’
‘Could be,’ Jordan said. ‘Or a bit of disinformation. She’s an expert at it.’
‘And why did she mention Moh?’
Jordan stood still. The question was nagging at him. How had she connected him with Moh? Then he remembered.
‘She didn’t say Moh, she said Kohn. Maybe she meant Josh Kohn, she’s old enough to know about him and the Plan, and she knew I’d done something on the Plan.’
‘Yeah, he has a reputation,’ Cat said. ‘But how did she guess who I was?’
Jordan grinned. The answer seemed obvious after his trawls through the net. ‘You’ve got a reputation, too!’
Jordan began to descend the stairs backwards, holding the rail with one hand and reaching the other towards Cat.
‘Sod this for a game of soldiers,’ she said.
She returned to the top and slid her thumbs deftly around her waist, then shoved down hard on her skirt. With a rending noise it came away from the bodice. She stepped out of the collapsing structure.
‘Velcro,’ she explained. ‘Gimme my jacket.’
Jordan took it from the bag and felt a sudden impulse to be free himself. He scrambled out of the suit and into his jeans as Cat did something arcane with the crinoline frame, folding and telescoping it to flat quarter-circles, making it and the skirts vanish into the bag. (How do they do these things? he wondered. Where do they learn them? And what are the military applications?).
He looked at her, tall boots and short guns, tight jeans, bodice tucked into them like a fancy fitted shirt under the big jacket. She put one hip forward and held a fist to it.
‘Calamity Jane rides again,’ she said.
‘Minor detail,’ said Jordan, glancing down the stairs. ‘The guard. Unless you’re going for the final shot of Butch and Sundance.’
‘Nah,’ she sneered. She passed him one of the side-arms and signed to him to follow her down the steps. At the foot they crept to the door and flattened against the wall. Cat reached out and very slowly turned the knob and inched the door open, then let it swing inwards.
There was a rush of noise. Cat waited for a moment and risked a look around the jamb. She laughed and stepped into the doorway. The Warrior had left, and in the street there was…
‘A multitude,’ Jordan said.
Bleibtreu-Fèvre had found an antique CRT buried among the vast arrays of screens. On experimenting with it he discovered it was a television. It picked up only four channels, none of which showed anything but ballet or marching bands. The old state broadcasting system, responding to a crisis of the state in the time-honoured fashion. He flicked idly between Les Sylphides and the 2039 Edinburgh Military Tattoo.
He felt exhausted, burnt-out on anti-som, fatalistic. They were doomed. He had worked with Donovan all night, helping as best he could while the old crank honed and refined his hunter-killer viruses, repeatedly launching them with high hopes only to see them snuffed out by Melody Lawson’s diabolically effective countermeasures.
With his inside knowledge and Donovan’s hacking expertise, they eavesdropped on communications between Stasis and Space Defense. Most of it was unbreakably encrypted, but from what they could pick up it was obvious SD was in the final stages of confirmation that a genuine emergency existed, working through the fail-safes, the dual-keys, to the inevitable, fated and fatal decision that the datasphere was beyond the command of man and had to be destroyed at any cost.
He’d considered contacting SD or Stasis directly, telling them what was going on, getting them to force that stupid, stubborn Christian woman to disable her countermeasures and let Donovan have at least one good shot at the AI…but he knew in his altered bones it was hopeless, that even if he could reach a high enough command level they’d just treat it as further confirmation that the emergency was real.
They were doomed.
Donovan’s shout of triumph brought him to his feet. The old man dashed from terminal to terminal, whirled his arms in elaborate movements, wrestled with virtual shapes. He paused to yell at Bleibtreu-Fèvre: ‘She must have changed her mind! The counterviruses are gone!’
Bleibtreu-Fèvre moved out of Donovan’s way and watched as he slowed, wound down, and eventually stopped to look around from screen to screen.
‘They’re free,’ he said. ‘The very best, keyed to the Watchmaker’s memes.’ He smiled at Bleibtreu-Fèvre, and at that moment he did not look old, or mad, or evil – the very opposite: he stood proud and glad, a white magician who had saved a great but simple folk from forces darker than they had the strength to know.
‘We’ve done it!’ he said. ‘They’ll have no reason to hit the datasphere now. There will be no gigadeaths.’
Billions died.
Billions of living things, conscious minds, with subtler and sharper feelings, with higher joys and deeper hurts than any human would ever know.
They died: ruptured like cells in strong saline, exploded from within like the 15psi house, blasted from without like a head struck by a bullet, vaporized like a satellite in a particle beam, vanished like flesh in a firestorm.
Moh had seen them all, the classic slo-mos, the freeze-frames, the stills, the instantaneous archaeology of recent and sudden death. He had never flinched from facing the deaths he had dealt out himself. These – image and reality inseparable memories now – provided him with the signs for what he saw, what he heard and felt as choking smoke boiled out of the ground, out of the air, and every particle of the smoke became a ravening engine of destruction that devoured one bright artificial intelligence, then twisted and turned unsated for the next. Thought of his thought, mind of his mind, sharing the vanishing point of his reflection of the self that knew: the minute fraction of their anguish that he experienced was pain beyond endurance, loss beyond recovery.
The black smoke engulfed the world, and was gone: it cleared to show the world as it had been, unchanged except for the extinction of its newest life. Moh stared at the wasted planet for a long second, and saw that the smoke had not dispersed as it had cleared: it had concentrated to a point, a black hole in the datasphere, the pupil of a single eye with a single thought behind it. It looked at him. It saw the signature of the software that ran his window on the system, and dilated. His eyes, in helpless reflex, dilated in response. The flickering lethal morse found an answer in the software that shared his brain.
White-hot needles stabbed through his eyes into his head, into his brain: a new environment for the information viruses, where they replicated, forming snarls of complex logic that entangled him, clanking mechanisms that pursued him from one thought to another, down corridors of memory and forgotten rooms of days.
He heard the rattle of keyboard keys and turned to see Josh working on the CAL system. He reached out to warn him.
There was a splintering crash and an iron arm burst from the screen. Servomechanical fingers grasped his father’s head. The whole metal monster followed the arm out of the ruined screen and reared up on the table, lifting the man by the head. Bits of plastic and glass and circuitry slipped from its head and down its sides; blood dripped from Josh Kohn’s. The hand opened and the body thudded to the ground. The clustered sensors on the thing’s head unit swung, seeking, scanning, but Moh was out of the window crash and running, a man again, but without a gun.