Families queuing for the boating pond, art students sketching the modernist Elephant House, the faithful chatting outside the mosque—none of them knew what lay beneath Regent’s Park, as they crisscrossed its sodden lawns and found shelter beneath its trees. The Double O building looked like any other Regency terrace converted into tired offices and clung to with a creaking lease. But beneath it, a whole world followed the paths of defunct canals and tunnels, coring like a peeled apple to the central control room—to Q.
004 sagged in the corner of the lift. Bob Simmons had greeted him by asking who 004 thought would emerge victorious in the upcoming prizefight between Chao and King in Macau, before recognizing something was wrong. It wasn’t the blood. He was used to Dryden shrugging that off. It was the way Dryden controlled his breathing, attention fixed to the floor. Controlling fear. Simmons pressed basement level twelve and watched the floors count down, working his jaw. Then he rested his arm on Dryden’s back.
Dryden glanced up quickly. He swallowed, then smiled.
Simmons nodded. The doors slid open. It was usually here that Dryden rolled his sleeves down. Simmons would remind him that he wouldn’t feel the cold outside of the chamber. And Dryden would say: “What my brain knows and my body feels are two very different things.” Now, Simmons threw Dryden a salute, and left him to the things his brain and body knew.
Level twelve was the final strip of the peeled apple. Dryden followed the padded white corridor round past the lab, the noise swelling like the screeching of cicadas on a Mediterranean night. He tapped his watch in vain, knowing the implant was not responding. The lab had no walls, just windows. A knot of technicians hovered over the crystal growth chamber. At the end of the corridor, glass doors opened into a crescent-shaped office, a tangle of workbenches and fabrication machines clasped between a transparent floor and transparent walls, seeming to lean into the core. Dryden’s heart always tripped as he stepped into what felt like nothing.
Below: a white sphere, with what looked to him like a golden chandelier suspended at its center; or a hazel eye, the gleaming gold-plated copper pipes like nerves descending to a great cylinder. The quantum computer was gripped in place by magnetic hinges. Inside the vacuum chamber it was absolute zero, minus 273 degrees Celsius. All that stood between him and a plunge to the death, if absolute zero didn’t kill him first, was world-class engineering and a few inches of solid matter.
Dryden cleared his throat. To him, it made no sound.
The two engineers tasked with Q’s design and maintenance shared a desk pressed up against the glass wall, as close to the chamber as possible.
“Could you get our attention in a less manly way?” said Aisha Asante, not looking up. “The vibrations of your chest could distract Q from nailing this arms deal transaction.”
Dryden raised an eyebrow. He could only hear ringing as loud as a siren.
Aisha glanced around and leaped to her feet, becoming tangled in the spin of her chair. She pushed the thing aside and closed the gap between them. She cupped his cheek with a warm hand, tilted his head, as if she could see inside him.
Ibrahim Suleiman was slower to realize what was happening, asking questions Dryden couldn’t fathom, before Aisha hushed him, steering Dryden toward a medical bench.
Dryden read her lips: Fuck Triple O. He laughed and the rumble suddenly pierced him, as if he were laughing into a megaphone.
Aisha didn’t seem to care about getting blood on her hot-pink blazer, which she wore over a black top with black jeans and a matching braided headband. She clicked her fingers, mouthing: Shirt off. Dryden helped her pull the undershirt over his head.
Ibrahim seemed to hunker inside the oversize fisherman’s sweater, which Dryden knew would be the result of charity shop rummaging. Last time he visited, Ibrahim denounced his luxury brands and fast fashion. Dryden didn’t want to attempt speech, afraid his words would slide out of position, and he wouldn’t know if he was making sense or not. So he signed to Ibrahim: “How’s Q today?”
Ibrahim perked up. He’d been learning BSL since working with Dryden. “We’ve told you,” he signed, “it’s a machine. It doesn’t emote.”
Dryden rested against the bank of consoles with a sigh. He clicked his neck while Ibrahim attached all the wires he needed—Dryden had made it a point to only half-understand what went on in here. He was still uncomfortable with being Q’s first hyphen subject. Where the other Double O’s had Q implants in their watches or phones, Q and he were bound to each other beneath the skin. He focused on Aisha and Ibrahim’s chatter. At first, he could only interpret their warmth. Then words returned to him, relaxed him inch by inch as they isolated the problem and fixed it remotely using the link with Q, circumnavigating the deaf right ear, and bringing the left ear back online, bypassing the damaged brain tissue. Dryden closed his eyes. He felt as protective of the two prodigies as they did of him. If he was a test subject, so were they under Q’s unblinking virgin eye. And all of them knew the sensation of quantum superposition long before this chamber, coexisting in more than one state.
Aisha was a state school Londoner like him, and like his, her grandfather had also served in Britain’s colonial forces in World War II before immigrating to Britain, Aisha’s parents from Ghana, his own from Jamaica. Very much unlike him—Dryden reflected as the screens started translating the murmurs of his body—Aisha was a Cambridge-educated genius with multiple degrees in quantum physics.
Dryden put his faith in their genius now, humming softly, listening for it in the receding din.
Ibrahim’s parents had both worked as locally employed civilians, or LECs, for British forces in Iraq—they’d served as interpreters for three years. They had been resettled in the UK as refugees after local militias started targeting LECs for assassination. Ibrahim’s mother was refused a job as a cleaner because she didn’t have “UK cleaner experience.” When Ibrahim told his parents he was going to join the army in order to become an engineer, they reminded him of the one bedroom he’d shared as a teenager with them and his three younger siblings in Sheffield as a thank-you for their contributions to Britain. But Ibrahim signed up anyway, from there going on to study bioengineering.
For all of them, Ambalavaner Sivanandan’s aphorism—we are here, because you were there—included either direct or generational experience of serving Britain’s interests, while growing up in a country that more often than not refused to accept them as British, and dedicating their minds or bodies or both to its cause despite that. It was an exhausting kind of contortion, one that blinked at him baldly now in the form of numbers on the screen, reminding him what he’d lost and gained courtesy of Her Majesty’s Government.
“Are you still with us, 004?”
Dryden focused. They were staring at him with concern. He winked. “Triple O ain’t that hard.” He rubbed his ear. “Q back in sync with me, then?”
“It doesn’t emote, and it doesn’t lose time,” said Ibrahim. “And I don’t design faulty equipment.”
“I thought Q doesn’t bother with time.”
“Score one to He-Man,” said Aisha.
Dryden stood up. He wore tracksuit bottoms, his chest and feet bare. He moved, a swift footwork drill.
“Just like new,” said Aisha. “You’re welcome to use the staff showers through there, unless you enjoy the cut-up and bloody look.”
Dryden said, “Ask my assistant to send down some new clothes, would you?”
“Sure,” said Aisha, “that’s a thing I’ll definitely do before you get out of the shower.”
Dryden drank lungfuls of steam, the water sliding over him, turning red around his feet. He watched his and Harthrop-Vane’s blood thread the plug. The cascade was the drop of multiple grenade pins—no, it was only water. It was only blood.
“What do you think of Bertram Paradise?” said Dryden, knotting his tie. “You think his quantum computer is better than Q?”
“He claims it’s the best in the world,” said Aisha, passing him black coffee.
“You don’t believe him?”
“The data’s good.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“Him. I look at him sitting in front of parliamentary committees and donating money to good causes and giving YouTube tours of his autonomous survey yacht—he’s too good a showman.”
“You can’t be a tech genius and a showman?”
“She’s just jealous,” said Ibrahim.
“I am very happy to hit you,” said Aisha, raising a magazine above Ibrahim’s head as he threaded a minute camera into Dryden’s ear for a full systems check now that normal functioning had resumed.
“Please don’t,” said Ibrahim.
“It’s not jealousy, and it’s not that I consider his Q necessarily inferior to ours. I just don’t think he developed it. I look into his eyes and see nothing. No spark. My money is on Dr. Zofia Nowak.”
“The missing science officer.”
“I’d consider her my rival, if I was a jealous person. But as I’m not, I merely appreciate the beauty of her brain.”
Dryden smiled. “You ever feel like a Numskull, living in here with Q?”
“Should I be offended?” said Aisha.
“You know He-Man but you don’t know the Numskulls? The Beano. They lived inside someone’s skull. Ran about maintaining his brain.”
“She knows He-Man because it’s a meme,” said Ibrahim. “And no, we don’t feel like Numskulls, because we didn’t come of age before the Internet was invented.”
“Can’t beat The Beano.”
Aisha’s touch on his forearm was gentle. “Maybe you feel like we’re living inside your skull too?”
“Aren’t you?”
“Trust me, 004. The only person inside your mind is you.” She watched Ibrahim thread the camera out. “But wouldn’t it be less lonely, the other way?”
“You’re not lonely,” said Ibrahim. “You’re never alone.”
“And how did you come to this astonishing insight, Numskull?” said Aisha.
Ibrahim nodded at Q. “None of us are.”
Dryden considered the machine. The device implanted beneath Dryden’s skin was able to read his brain waves, understand whose voice he wanted to focus on, and select and amplify that voice until its owner was whispering secrets into his ear. The microphone in his ear canal streamed everything he said and heard to Q for processing. The manual controls were secreted inside his Garmin MARQ Commander watch, which, with a few tweaks, meant Dryden could receive Aisha’s voice inside his skull without anyone else hearing her.
Where a regular computer had to process information in a linear sequence, ones and zeroes, a quantum computer could contemplate the one and the zero simultaneously, allowing it to process data so quickly it could solve equations that would otherwise take the lifetime of a universe. One day, Q might solve the climate crisis, space travel, even time travel. For now, Q was fighting terror. Where cryptocurrencies and stronger encryption had allowed terrorists to become smarter, Q was filtering unfathomable data sets to identify and follow threats. Q had not yet met a personal privacy it couldn’t invade, including Dryden’s.
Not that it could solve everything. Q had been running facial recognition through every closed-circuit surveillance system it could access since 007 went missing, and come up with nothing. It was as if James Bond had lost his face, his identity scraped off without leaving so much as a death mask. Or, he had stopped existing. For if the smartest mind in the world couldn’t find him, then surely Bond was just another dead agent in an unmarked grave. To Dryden, the point was academic—he’d never worked with Bond, knew him only as attractive, sometimes arrogant and surly about it, sometimes charming. But if Q wasn’t up to the job—that directly concerned him.
A sharp rap on the doorframe made him turn. Mrs. Keator wore her usual black—this time, high-waisted black woolen slacks and a black turtleneck beneath a long white painter’s smock that consumed her shrinking frame, the rolled-up sleeves just revealing hands wrinkled as crushed magnolia petals, swollen knuckles gleaming between globules of gold and precious stones. “Ma’am.”
She peered at him. “Returned from my lunch to alarms hollering. But you look like you’re operating on full efficiency.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I understand Moneypenny has put you onto Sir Bertie.” Mrs. Keator was the co-founder of Q Branch with Major Boothroyd. She was rumored to have begun her Service life decoding Spektors. When the Major died, she arrived to work dressed in black, which she never threw off. Eyes and mind like a hawk, she still gripped Q Branch in arthritic talons, and would until the living computer—as she was sometimes known—stopped processing.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Define air gapped, 004.” This delivered with nothing to entertain the notion he might not have an answer.
Dryden shot Aisha something close to a smirk. “A computer that’s not on any network. Invulnerable to hacking. The way Q picked up that cabinet minister being paid for his vote with sexual favors last month, it was periods when his phone was stationary at a certain sauna, right? But if your phone or your computer or whatever’s not on a network, it can’t be monitored.”
“I like an agent who does his homework. The future of security is the past. Sir Bertie likes to think he has the most sophisticated technology in the world, but his personal devices are air gapped. Absolute radio silence. Same for everyone in his inner circle.”
“And the outer circle?”
She peered at him over her heavy tortoiseshell glasses. “You might actually be worth the money we’ve poured into you. Dr. Zofia Nowak, the opposite number to our Dr. Asante and Dr. Suleiman, has disappeared as perhaps only she would know how to do. Q has been trawling her social media for anything useful, and come upon something with such sublime coincidence I don’t know whether it’s good or very bad luck. Zofia Nowak recently contacted Ruqsana Choudhury, a human rights lawyer and childhood friend of 009. Bashir will make contact with Ruqsana soon, an innocent hello. We’re prompting Facebook to feed Choudhury memories of more innocent times, soften her up. She’ll ask 009 for help. Then Bashir can use Choudhury to locate Dr. Nowak. If she is the brains behind Sir Bertram, we want to make sure those brains fall into our hands, no one else’s.”
Dryden drummed his fingers against his stomach. “If Paradise knows we have the capability to get up to brainwashing on the weekends—because he has the same capability, presumably—and he’s air gapped his devices, how did we pick up his irregular payments?”
“With all the difficulty of detecting flaws in the dodgy dossier. He wants someone to know he’s been behaving badly.”
“A cry for help?”
Mrs. Keator laughed, the crackle of a broken exhaust pipe. “Or a fuck you.”
Dryden smiled. “To us?”
“Young man, I don’t think we register on this demigod’s radar.”
Aisha tossed her hair over her shoulder. “Time to correct that. You’re good to go, 004. Give the demigod a kiss from us.”