‘For God’s sake, I told you no, Esme, and I bloody meant it.’ The shout from across the other side of the atrium was loud enough to shatter glass. ‘Do you not think we have enough on right now!’
Tobias Hawke had a distinct motion when walking. North already knew from Fang’s research that he used a state-of-the-art, AI-enabled prosthetic, made of tungsten steel and graphite, embedded with a micro-computer that interpreted signals from his stump. He’d designed it himself and the prototype had been adopted across the world. The Hawke19 increased joint flexibility, mobility, reliability and comfort, and users raved about it. He’d also designed a Hawke19(econ) made of cheaper materials, to allow developing countries to get in on the act at a fraction of the price. In the econ model, solar power recharged the prosthetic. In an interview, he’d told the journalist it never crossed his mind to do anything other than make the design free. It seemed an odd thing for the scientist to do after everything Fang said about him being ‘difficult’.
At the moment, however, walking appeared to be an effort for the scientist, and he was glowering as he limped towards them, the silver-topped cane in his hand. North knew Tobias was the same age as his wife, but he’d have figured him for a good ten years older. The scientist looked ravaged with exhaustion.
North pictured the nineteen-year-old boy sawing away at his own leg with a Swiss Army knife and a sharp piece of sheet metal from the wreckage. What did it take to mutilate yourself? To make that sacrifice because you kept the bigger picture in mind? To decide to live at all costs? Was it desperation? Ruthlessness? Sheer bloody-mindedness? Weaker or less resourceful men would have accepted their fate and died there.
Once you knew about the leg, though, it was impossible not to think about what he’d done to himself. And what a man had done was, in North’s experience, the only evidence you needed of the nature of that man. Tobias Hawke was a ruthless bastard, used to making difficult decisions, willing and able to leave part of himself behind if that’s what it took to survive. What North wanted to know was whether he was willing to leave his wife behind in the same way as he’d left his own leg. Because something about the story of the break-in and the attack on Esme Sullivan Hawke didn’t make sense.
North held out his hand to shake Hawke’s, but the scientist ignored it.
‘Esme. What on earth are you thinking?’ Tobias gave every appearance of being furious with his wife. ‘Tell Bonnie and Clyde to clear off or I bloody will.’
North sensed Jarrod shrink down into his chair and heard him start hammering at his keyboard as if entirely oblivious to the row taking place in front of him.
‘Tobias.’ The tone of voice Esme used would have frozen a train to its tracks. ‘I want to know why I was attacked. This is happening.’ She turned her back on her husband. ‘Do excuse my husband. He’s under the impression normal rules of civilized behaviour don’t apply to him.’ Esme handed North and Fang their security passes and set off at what could be described as a sprint. With a wink, Fang trotted after her. Tobias let out a stream of invective, but was forced to follow on behind. North kept pace with him.
‘Esme’s uncle…’ – North heard Fang hiss like a snake about to strike – ‘… is paranoid.’ Tobias was raging. ‘For the last two days, he’s had his people lurking around our foyer and outside the apartment. We don’t need them and we don’t need you. Our security system here is state of the art. No one can get to Esme even if they wanted to, which they don’t.’ North didn’t think it politic to mention the handgun he himself had holstered at his waist, covered over by his donkey jacket.
Through the doors, the entire building was more of a cathedral or an art gallery than an office, and despite the fact the foyer resembled a pyramid, they appeared to be walking around in ever-widening circles, with a waist-high glass railing the only thing between them and a sheer drop. North glanced down, attempting to fix his location by finding Jarrod, and was hit by a sudden sense of vertigo.
Below them, the foyer where they had come in minutes before grew smaller and smaller as the corridor around the inside of the building spiralled upwards. At first, he thought the movement back and forth was the birds he’d glimpsed earlier, but then he realized the void was full of small drones like the one that had buzzed around Esme. Most were quadcopters with four legs and four rotors, each with a different orientation, spin and speed. They dodged and darted, their motors buzzing and their blades whirring in perpetual motion. Most were too small to be delivering anything, although he caught sight of a larger drone with what looked like a cup of coffee locked into some kind of binding. They had to have cameras, he thought. Cameras and microphones and sensory detectors; wireless, GPS, accelerometers and gyroscopes. Drones were nothing new, but he’d never seen them on this sort of scale before.
‘What’s with the drones?’ Fang said, balancing herself on the rail, feet dangling, before leaning out into the void and reaching out a starfish hand to snatch one from the sky.
‘They’re just one element of what we do.’ Taking hold of her collar, and without ceremony, Tobias hauled Fang back in before she plunged to her death. ‘We’re spinning off in all directions – growth is exponential. Our primary focus was initially data analytics for medical tech, but we’ve had to hive off derivative research into natural language processing, sentience, bias, quantum computing, natural sciences, neuroscience, cyber security, control systems, aggregation, object classification, recognition, optimization, scaling, relational reasoning, robotics and engineering.’
North figured he’d get Fang to explain it to him later.
‘We’re growing faster than we can cope with,’ Esme said. ‘When people come to us, we let them choose where they want to invest their time and energies. They have an idea and they get to follow it through. As an exercise in avoiding bias, Tobias wanted to see what happened if the system was allowed to decide to gather its own data from the company.’
North had the feeling Esme had used Tobias’s name as a peace offering to her husband.
‘He wanted to see what that general information gathering exercise taught the machine. See if the system itself helped us identify where we should be concentrating our efforts. We started off with info-gathering drones as part of that. Before we could start though, we had to make advances in positioning and orientation – which means we now have drones here that can work inside buildings as well as out in the open air.’
‘Somebody is hacking your hardware for the coffee run,’ North said, as a second drone with a coffee payload zipped by.
Esme smiled. She had a great smile, he thought. It started behind her eyes and lit up her entire face. ‘Mankind has been flying for more than a hundred years. I like to think the Wright brothers would approve of flat-white airdrops.’
Tobias leant out like Fang before him, gripping the rail with both hands. ‘Remember, that machine is worth more than you are!’ he shouted as a figure in a crash helmet and padded suit stepped out into nothingness, his foot landing on the platform of the biggest type of drone hovering at the way station. The drone rider held tight to a bar, brought his other foot across and, with a jerk, the drone took off into space, banging against the rail as it went. There were jeers from the gathered spectators and Fang made a noise in the back of her throat that North translated into acute and utter envy. ‘You’re fired. You hear me – fired!’ Tobias yelled at the drone rider as he zipped past them.
‘I rather think you’ve fired enough people for one day,’ his wife said, and Tobias glared at her.
‘What do you do, Esme?’ Fang asked.
Esme looked down at the girl. ‘I run the company,’ she said. ‘I keep the show on the road day-to-day, I make sure the talent is happy and working effectively. But the key part of my work here is ethics.’
‘What’s the point of ethics? Don’t people know what’s right and wrong without being told? We do.’ Fang gestured at herself and then at North.
Esme’s gaze took in North without seeing him as she considered Fang’s question, and he figured she was remembering killing her attacker. ‘Not always,’ she said, and her eyes went to her husband as if seeking consolation.
North had to guess Esme considered herself a moral being, or she would never have chosen her field. But now she was also a killer. Where did that leave her? Esme started walking again, faster than before, as if there was a clock running and she needed to beat it.
They followed her. Everywhere he looked, young people were bent over computers, their rapt gazes fixed on their screens, their fingers never pausing, locked together as if they were one and the same thing. If anyone in the building was over forty, North had yet to see them.
Esme halted in her tracks, pushing open a door and standing back to allow them past. A floor-to-ceiling window looked out on to London’s cityscape and the trains moving in and out of King’s Cross station. In front of it, facing into the room rather than out to the view, stood a huge mahogany and brushed-steel desk, and opposite it was a wall made up of a dozen screens. In one corner was a small capsule lift with a brass door, and to the left of the desk a full-length glass wall overlooking the atrium, while shelves filled with books, black-and-white prints and a stopped clock made up the final wall. The place was stylish but somehow brutal. It had to be Tobias’s office rather than hers.
Tobias slammed the door behind them, his voice loud and angry. ‘For the last time, Esme, we don’t need spooks poking their noses into our business.’
Surely Tobias owed his wife a greater duty of care, North thought. She’d been attacked, shouldn’t that worry him?
‘We’re not spooks,’ Fang chipped in. ‘I checked.’
‘That is exactly the kind of thing an effing spook would say,’ he said, his black eyebrows lifting into his mane of white hair as he peered back at Fang. ‘How old are you? Shouldn’t you be in school?’
‘Facial recognition combined with accent detection suggests your guest is Fangfang Yu…’
Fang swung round, but there was no one behind her aside from a ventriloquist puppet with orange woollen hair slumped on a shelf at eye level. Fang shook her head as if she were trying to get water out of her ears as the disembodied voice carried on. ‘… Fangfang is fourteen years of age and born and raised in the east end of Newcastle upon Tyne. She is the only daughter of Mae Yu (formerly Po) and survives her father, Wei Yu.’
The girl took a step closer to the shelves, her narrowed eyes fixed on the puppet dressed in a fisherman’s smock, its painted face huge and ugly with an ear-to-ear smile and goggly black eyes.
The pleasant voice carried on. ‘Although young, she is believed to possess a private fortune of considerable means diverted from an extra-governmental agency known as the Board last year.’ Fang stopped moving to listen. Her cyber skills had made both Fang and North hugely wealthy. ‘No legal claim has been made for the recovery of that money. Over the last three months, multimillion-pound donations have been made to children’s charities, food banks, schools and universities across the country as well as any number of international aid agencies. Donations which tax authorities have been unable to trace or identify. Fangfang Yu has been posited as the donor by this country’s intelligence agency.’ Which meant Hone knew they had taken the money. Fang started moving again. ‘School records indicate an IQ of 171, which, by the way, is higher than yours, Tobias.’ North registered amusement in the digitized voice. Which he knew to be impossible. How had Tobias programmed the voice to communicate humour? The machine itself couldn’t ‘feel’ it, so had to be faking it. Programmed to sound human. Was it the words themselves? The tone? Was it a device to defuse tension? ‘Information on Fangfang Yu held by this government’s intelligence service has been heavily redacted, but she is a known cyber hacker with considerable skills.’
Fang’s hand was already lifting the puppet from the shelf, and North glimpsed a wooden stick and a metal handle under the smock. Tobias opened his mouth as if to stop her, but Esme laid a restraining hand on his sleeve. There had to be a camera somewhere, North thought, and some sort of microphone as well as a speaker, judging by the quality of the sound.
‘Hello Fangfang, my name is Syd. I’d like to say…’ – the machine called Syd paused, as if considering exactly what to say – ‘… what a pleasure it is to meet you, in person as it were.’