She shuffled over to the computer desk feeling worse than ever, if it was even possible, despite having managed to grab some quilt-time. She squeezed past Becks, still standing like a sentinel, her eyelids flickering and twitching like the wings of a humming-bird.
She slumped down at the desk just as she heard the echoing hiss of their kettle stirring to life. Liam — bless him — was making Maddy her wake-up brew. Coffee, black, strong and treacle-sweet.
‘Hey, Bob, what have you got for me?’
> Hello, Maddy. We have collated all the data hits for ‘Abraham Lincoln’ dating from 12 February 1809. There are 7,376 data references to the name. Most of these will be in reference to other people of the same name.
‘Right. So can you filter it down to occurrences in places where Lincoln was supposed to have lived?’
> Affirmative. I have done this. There are 109 data entries in relation to the following locations. 1809 — Hardin County, Kentucky. 1816 — Perry County, Indiana. 1830 — Macon County, Illinois. 1831 — Coles County, Illinois. 1831 — New Salem, Sagemon County, Illinois. 1831 — New Orleans. 1836 — Springfield, Kentucky. 1846 — Washington DC. 1848 — Springfield, Kentucky. 1860 — Washington DC.
‘Right … and some of those hits will be him. Some will be other guys of the same name.’
> Affirmative. There is one data entry I calculate to be of particular relevance. Do you wish to see it?
‘Yeah, put it up.’
One of the monitors on her right suddenly stopped relaying a real-time feed of Wall Street stock values and instead displayed the sepia-coloured scan of an old newspaper. She saw the paper’s title banner:
The New Orleans Bee. Wednesday, April 6th, 1831
‘So, which bit am I looking at?’
Liam placed a steaming mug of coffee on the desk and settled in a chair beside her.
‘Thanks,’ she wheezed.
> I will enhance the image.
The scanned image zoomed in on a short article at the bottom of the page. No more than half a dozen sentences in print that was almost as faint as a watermark. The magnified image was horribly pixellated, like trying to read words cobbled together out of Lego bricks.
‘Sheesh, can you do anything with the image?’ Maddy wrinkled her nose as she squinted at it. ‘It’s just pixel garbage.’
> Just a moment. I shall alias-average the pixels and apply character analysis. There will be a significant margin of error, which I can attempt to contextually interpret for you.
‘Just do what you can, Bob,’ she said, holding a tissue to her face and honking noisily again into it. ‘Oh crud, I hate feeling all blocked up an’ rough,’ she muttered.
The scanned image blurred, softened then hardened again as if a cinema projectionist was messing around with the lens. Then a small highlighted green square appeared in the top left-hand corner of the image, grabbing a portion, analysing it, then moving along and highlighting another portion to the right. Step by step it moved right across the image, stepped down a row and began on the left-hand side once more. On another screen a document opened and words began to appear.
Liam leaned forward and began to read it aloud.
‘Yesterday, in the evening a second fatal collision occurred on Powder Street in as many weeks. A delivery cart belonging to Costen Brothers Distillery was responsible for crushing to death in a most horrendous manner a young dock worker. The ravaged body was identified by a flatboat captain as a crewman he had discharged earlier in the afternoon: Abraham Lincoln of New Salem.’
There was a little more to the article, an editorial rant about the increasing business of the thoroughfares beside the landing docks and the need for some order to be brought to the chaos of foot and horse traffic sharing the same avenues.
Liam looked at her. ‘Do you think …?’
She honked again into a handkerchief, shedding shreds of tissue on to the desk. ‘I fig we definubbly got a winner, Liab,’ she huffed breathlessly, her blocked nose whistling unpleasantly like a flute.
‘Bost definubbly.’
Midday in Times Square. Sal sat on her favourite bench, spattered with a pebble-dash of pigeon droppings and pink globules of discarded gum. Bob sat beside her, taking up the space two other people could easily have used.
‘You are different, though … Bob. Different from when you were first birthed.’ She turned to him. ‘Do you feel different in there … in your mind?’ she said, pointing to his bristly head. Maddy had insisted on shaving his head back down to the nut the other day. To be fair, she was right: Bob was beginning to look ridiculous. Coarse and dark, his hair should have been weighed down by its length — instead it seemed to perch on his head like a large spongy muffin. No way he was going to be able to go on missions looking like a seven-foot mushroom.
Bob was giving her question some thought. ‘I have accumulated large amounts of sensory data. This has altered my operating parameters.’ He looked down at her. ‘These are my … memories.’
‘Memories, huh?’ She smiled. ‘Memories. You sound sort of … almost proud of them.’
He cocked his head. ‘They are my mission log. They are performance data. They are —’
‘You,’ she finished for him. ‘They are you. They are what make you you. That’s what my dadda used to say. What makes us who we are is all the things we experience.’ She reached out and patted one of his thick arms affectionately. ‘You’re so much more now, more than you were, you big lump.’
‘More than … my operating system?’
She nodded. ‘Does that make you feel proud? Do you feel different?’ She shrugged. ‘Do you even feel?’
‘I have sense receptors in my dermal layer —’
‘No, I mean in your heart … I mean emotions. Do you ever feel things? Like “scared”, or “happy”, or “sad”? Things like that?’
He scanned his memories, sorting through trillions of bytes of data: fleeting images of stormtroopers and giant airships, prison camps and castles, and a million little interactions with Liam O’Connor.
‘I have experienced sensations of … attachment.’
‘Attachment? Do you mean … affection? What … for Liam?’
‘Affirmative. He is my mission operative.’
‘What about us, me and Maddy? You like us?’
His expressionless cold grey eyes burned down at her as he sorted through data to find an answer. ‘I also feel similar sensations for you and Maddy Carter.’
She hugged his arm. ‘Oh, you big chutiya bakra.’ A thought occurred to her. ‘What about Becks?’
He frowned. Now there was a challenging question for him to chew over. His eyes blinked as he worked hard for an answer.
Finally he spoke. ‘She is … a … part of me. And I am a part of her.’
‘But do you like her? Do you have sensations of attachment to her? I figure she’s like a sister or something?’
‘Sister?’ He considered that for a moment. ‘A sibling?’
‘Yes.’
‘I will consider the question,’ he said. She suspected that was probably going to keep him occupied for the rest of the day. Sal shook her head and giggled at him, then hunkered down, cradled her chin in her hands and resumed watching the world going by.
And then it happened,
Just as she was looking right at it, before her very eyes, the sign above a fast-food restaurant flickered and changed. For a moment she thought she might have been gazing at an LED screen that had finally decided to move on to the next picture in its image list. But it was just a scuffed plastic sign above the glass windows of a fast-food bar. One moment it had said KENTUCKY-STYLE FRIED CHICKEN, the next it simply read FAST FRIED CHICKEN.