PROTEROZOIC
May 19th
Ministry of State Security, Beijing
“The reception committee for Divine Skein is prepared?”
“Yes, General Xian. We should have the merchandise in five days’ time.”
“Excellent. The arrangements for testing it are in place?”
“Yes, General. They are.”
“And the courier?”
“As agreed, will not be returning home.”
May 23rd
Pasadena, California
Professor Rhodes…
Alice rolled the words around her mouth, relishing the hard-won title. Her Humboldt swished out of South Wilson with no noise but the susurration of its tyres on the tarmac, onto Del Mar, past the lights at South Lake, past the faux Gothic of the McKinley School and out towards 210.
Professor Rhodes!
She was on the freeway in three minutes, heading north, then east. The mountains towered to her left. The endlessness of Los Angeles rolled off to her right. The breeze whipped through her hair. Bliss. Dawn. Alive. Young. Heaven. Today, anything was possible. Today, she would do it. Today, she would smash her record.
Past South Hills Park and off the freeway. Up Glendora Mountain Road to the junction with Big Dalton Canyon. Stop. Start the clock. Go.
The Humboldt took the hairpins effortlessly.
Sixty.
Seventy.
Then a jolt as the brakes applied themselves unbidden – and a calm and sexy female voice…
“Truck ahead.”
Dumbass electronic nanny. She should have killed it before she set off. Still, no stopping now.
A truck on a country road? Memories flashed through her mind. An Art House her parents would not have approved. The innocence of Disney dying within her, she was seeking darker fare. She’d been thirteen. Fourteen, maybe? Duel. That nightmare’s guileless start, when Mann first meets the tanker whose driver, never seen, is trying to kill him. She bit her lip, tucked in behind it, and waited for the straight. Then she hit the floor. Eat my dust, sucker. You’ll not catch me guard-down in a gas-station phone booth.
They say everyone dreams of being in the movies. Not she. That was far too small a role for her ambition. No, she would be the movies. She would take the studios by the scruffs of their necks and give them a disrupting they’d never forget. The play, the play. That was the thing. But the actors? They had got above themselves. Solipsistic strolling players turned by technology from penniless vagabonds into pompous, pampered popinjays. Well, what technology gives, technology takes away. She would make of film stars what steam power had made of handloom weavers. Virtual thespians, ego-lite and manager-free, that was what her project promised. The day would come, she knew, when the Academy would have no choice but to award ‘Best Actor’ to a computer program. Her program.
On she drove, through the pines of the Angeles National Forest. Seven minutes to Ridge Road. Yes! Now she was sure. This was the day her record really would get broken. In the distance, Mount Baldy reared its head. The sphendone. The turning post of her personal hippodrome.
She’d known, hadn’t she, that the job was hers? Appointment committees don’t turn you down when you have $20m in your back pocket. And that she did, signed and sealed in the Mondrian five days earlier. The Rhodes lab. It had a nice ring to it. A little celebration was surely in order. And here it was, a wild electric beast that existed to please only her.
Around the hairpin at the end of Glendora Ridge and down Mount Baldy for the return. A glance at the clock. No stopping now. She pressed the pedal to the metal…
…and the pedal went limp. The throttle was stuck, full open.
Shit. She had read about such things – but on Japcrap, not serious sports cars. Shit. Shit. Shit. You don’t pay $150,000 for a Humboldt to have it go to hell on you.
She hit the brake. The game was over for today. She would have to try another time.
Lost in the disappointment of that thought, she took a moment to realise nothing had happened. She pushed the brake harder. The car careered on.
Try the handbrake? No. Hopeless against that torque. She would have to shut the whole thing down.
She tapped the control screen into life, selected ‘Emergency’ and touched the ‘off’ button.
Nothing happened.
What now? Her mind was racing. Crash down through the gears. At least that will slow the thing down. No. Impossible. An e-car has no gear-box. What was going on? The whole machine seemed to have turned against her. Thank God the steering wheel was still connected to something mechanical.
She sped past San Antonio Creek, not quite yet panicking. Here, the road was still straight. And mercifully empty.
Eighty.
Ninety.
Even the gentle bends were taking on a racetrack quality.
A hundred and ten.
A hundred and twenty.
Now there was traffic. Nothing from the radar, though. She pulled out to overtake a dawdling SUV. A pack of cyclists sweating up the hill barely had time to scatter as they saw her coming. Then another truck. No choice but to pass that, too. Ready… Go! Fingers crossed nothing’s travelling the other way.
The mouth of the tunnel came rushing up to swallow her.
A hundred and fifty.
The headlamps had failed, as well. Darkness engulfed her, but a semicircle of illumination beckoned from afar. The light at the end of the tunnel. Hold a straight line. Hold it…
A hundred and sixty.
She shot out into the daylight. Less than half a mile to the next entrance. In an eye-blink she was in it.
Think. A longer tunnel, but still straight. Steer towards the light. Remember the right-hand bend as soon as you leave. Yes. She was going to make it. She was. Then she looked again at the tunnel’s exit. This time the semicircle had a ragged chunk bitten out of it. An eighteen wheeler, lumbering towards her. And suddenly the steering had a life of its own. She was on the wrong side of the road, watching the bite grow wider, taller.
A hundred and eighty.
“Truck ahead.” The voice was calm and sexy…
May 24th
Luanda
Night fell like a shutter. He had forgotten how short the tropical evenings were. Forty years. No... More. Still, forgive and forget. If the Angolans did know who he was – or had been, all those decades ago – they showed little sign of caring.
This place, though. Then, it had been a shithole. Now look at it. The Dubai of Africa, someone had called it. It sure had the glitz. The lights were coming on in the apartment blocks and offices and hotels along the waterfront. Out in the bay was a yacht, glinting like a starlet’s tiara. A stray line from a play he’d seen in London came bubbling into his mind – “I think it belongs to the Duke of Westminster.”
Well, the days were long gone when the Duke of Westminster’s yacht was the epitome of wealth. The tables were well and truly turned on the old European powers. Some had departed with a fig leaf of honour. National anthems played. Flags lowered. New flags raised. Some had merely scuttled, leaving the locals to fight it out.
He cared little about that. But now the tables were turning on the New World, too. The sun that was sinking in the west was rising in the east, and he did not like the feeling.
Enough of such musings. He tidied the room. No sense in leaving a mess for the maid. Then he walked out, closed the door, strolled to the elevator and pressed the call button.
Should he resent it, that his ancestors had made the trip to America from Angola, or Nigeria, or who-knew-where, packed in a ship’s hold like anchovies in a can? No. They might have had worse lives as Virginia slaves than as African peasants, but his own life, had he been born here, would surely have been nasty, brutish and short compared with the easy plenty that America had become. Those ancestors, though, meant that when his section chief had shipped him off to Luanda so many years ago, he had blended in. They had been crazy days. He had only just got out alive. And now he was back to do one more duty, for his country and for an old friend.
“Boa noite, o senhor,” said the concierge, as he walked into the lobby. “Boa noite,” he replied.
The lobby was covered with brass and marble, and hung with paintings of questionable taste but unquestioned expense. Chandeliers of Venetian glass refracted myriad colours. A myriapod slipped surreptitiously behind a sofa. The door began to revolve as he approached it. Magic! A week ago, he would hardly have noticed, but now every moment, every perception, seemed precious.
The tropical air hit him, like wading into treacle. He turned along the front.
They had agreed the meeting point long ago – a mile or so from the hotel, away from the razzamatazz but in the open. He wasn’t fooled by that. From habit, he started scanning passers-by, wondering which, if any, were watching him. Not that it mattered much now.
He arrived at the landmark: a sleek obsidian statue of Jemmy Cato, leader of the Stono slave rebellion, newly erected by the government. Irony piled on irony, he thought, that it should end here. He stood motionless by the motionless figure’s plinth, waiting.
Such a little thing, a prostate. You never notice until it’s too late. What was an extra six months of life, if you could go out in a blaze of glory? He lifted his wrist to look at the watch, a ghastly piece of bling that disguised the crucial memory cube. He glanced around, wondering where the sniper was hiding. Through the corner of his eye he saw movement on a roof-top a hundred yards or so away. He braced himself for the thump. There would be no getting out alive this time.
May 26th
Ministry of State Security, Beijing
“Good news, General Xian. Project Divine Skein. The merchandise has arrived.”
“That is indeed excellent news. The merchandise has been tested?”
“Yes General. It is giving us exactly the sort of access we were hoping for.”
May 26th
Arlington County, Virginia
“Good news, Mr Vane. Janus has arrived. The steganography has worked. It is giving us exactly the sort of access we were hoping for.”