The museum had signed over one of the galleries to act as a green room for the gala. A pair of uniformed police officers guarded the door; a bearded bear of a man in a white oversuit, overshoes and gloves waited for them, a facemask around his neck.
‘National security or not. You do this fast,’ he said to Hone. ‘And you touch nothing.’ North didn’t think he was happy about it, but he gestured for the officers to let them through.
Plastic plates had already been laid across the floor like stepping stones, and North sensed Esme hesitate. Hone placed his hand on the small of her back and encouraged her forward. At Postman’s Park, she had demanded to see Tobias’s body. Now she didn’t seem so keen and he didn’t blame her.
Tobias lay stretched out on the polished marble floor close to the desk, his sightless eyes still open. Under the blood, the wound appeared blackened and gunpowder stippled the dress shirt – Tobias had taken a point-blank shot to the stomach.
If North had to guess, he’d have presumed Tobias was sitting at the nearby desk when he was shot, before toppling to the floor. Drones of different sizes each sat on top of their own packing cases alongside a 3D printer, with huge banks of computing power ranged alongside the far wall. Tobias had planned quite a show, North thought. He must have been ready to set the drones swooping and swirling over the guests. Maybe he’d even planned to spell out his own name in lights with the small ones, while entering stage right on one of those he could ride. Play footage of cute kiddies with cancer still alive thanks to his AI. Bring on some veterans marching in step, all rigged out with his wonder prosthetics. A final reveal as the great inventor and Syd engaged together on stage. Welcome to the universe’s brand-new consciousness.
Regardless of the blood on the floor, Esme dropped to her knees, her hand on her dead husband’s snowy mane, her head bent. Plug’s overcoat looked huge on her, but she had refused to change out of her soaking dress until she’d seen Tobias. Edmund Hone stared at North hard enough to burn a hole straight through him. No one needed a bullet in his head to know what the one-eyed man was thinking. This was on North. He should have been able to stop it.
Esme was shaking so hard it looked like she might fall apart. She let out a small sound of primal anguish. She was desolate, desperate, disbelieving, but even so, North knew that shock was keeping her from the worst of it. He felt his body go rigid with shame at the sight of her grief. This hurting was down to his negligence. He’d missed something – he just didn’t know what – and it had cost Esme the man she loved. Her arms wrapped themselves around her body and North thought they were all that kept her from flying apart. Tears rolled down the perfect cheeks as if they would never stop as she took her dead husband’s head between her hands and brought her lips down to meet his, the brunette waves falling like a veil between her and the rest of the world.
Hone gripped Esme’s shoulder.
At his touch, she raised her head again, shaking it back and forth as if denying where she was. As if she could change everything if only she didn’t have to witness the wreckage of the man who had been her husband. Standing, she raised her right hand, palm upward, and it was bloodstained. Her other hand held what looked like a toy. ‘Oh my God!’ She held it away from her body as if it might explode. It was a blocky, snub-nosed handgun.
Hone turned to the door, gesturing over a technician hovering at the doorway. North saw the guy’s eyes widen behind his facemask as he approached Esme with an open evidence box. North wondered if he was thinking about what his boss would say. The technician checked the barrel and then wired the gun into the box, as Esme attempted to wipe her husband’s blood off her own skin and on to her dress.
‘That’s a 3D gun – known as a Sammy 817. I’ve seen one before.’ Hone said. ‘Is it possible that Tobias had the time to print out a gun when he heard the shooters, Esme?’ Something about the gun bothered North, but he couldn’t think what it was.
No. ‘He made it earlier today. He’d been so dismissive about me wanting North around.’ Her gaze flicked to him but North thought she wasn’t really seeing him. ‘But after the car crash, he downloaded a blueprint from the US and printed the gun. He said we just needed to get through the gala and launch Syd and we’d be…’ – she placed her hand over her mouth and squeezed her eyes tight shut – ‘… safe.’
She had been attacked in her own home and had her car sabotaged. North had no doubt that Esme was supposed to die alongside Tobias. He wondered if she’d figured out that she still wasn’t safe, and that perhaps she never would be.
‘Where’s Syd?’ As the thought appeared to come to her, Esme’s gaze raked the room. ‘Did they get Syd? Please tell me Syd’s here.’
She crossed the room to lift up the crumpled ventriloquist puppet, and the shattered plastic of the bulging eyes dropped from its face. Tobias must have been planning to work the puppet into the launch. To make his audience laugh, or perhaps cry, before they gasped and wondered at his brilliance.
‘The tablet’s gone,’ she said, and if it was possible for her to turn paler, she did. ‘The tablet Tobias loaded with Syd is gone.’ She was blaming herself, North knew. For abandoning Tobias, but if she’d stayed she’d have been lying there dead alongside him. She could never have saved him. ‘They’ve taken Syd. And if we don’t get Tobias’s program back very soon, we have a bigger problem…’ – North could hear the fear in her voice – ‘… than any of this.’
North guessed that the Thinkers had gunned Tobias down when he came between them and their prize. Or maybe they were always going to kill him? The bodies of four Thinkers had been recovered – the three from inside the museum and Plato hauled up from the sewers. But there was no sign of Nietzsche down there. Nietzsche must have the tablet. God is dead. Long live God.
‘Earlier tonight, Tobias told me that the Doomsday Clock was already running. Five years ago, Atticus died at 10.14 a.m. Tobias said he was unboxing Syd at 10.14 tomorrow morning. Until he told me, I absolutely had no idea what he was planning. I told him I wanted no part of it and left him to it. That’s why I wasn’t…’ – she looked back at her husband’s corpse and shivered – ‘… with him.’
‘Why didn’t you say anything in the sewers?’ Esme had carried that burden of knowledge and he’d had no idea. No wonder she had wanted to get back to Tobias.
Esme looked at North as if she had only just remembered he existed. ‘And what could you have done, North? You were doing your best to keep us alive down there. I had to hope they wouldn’t get Syd. I had to hope Tobias would survive and he’d see sense and stop it in its tracks. I didn’t think further than that.’
‘Why was he willing to wait? Why not unbox Syd at the gala itself?’ Hone asked.
‘Tobias…’ – she turned her head slightly, as if in acknowledgement of the dead man behind her – ‘… said he wouldn’t do that to me. He always maintained that the human race would prevaricate endlessly about machine intelligence without firm action. He said the countdown was the only way to concentrate everybody’s minds on the future and, of course, he did so relish being the centre of attention.’
Hone held out his hands in an ‘all right, so what?’ gesture. If they didn’t find Syd, then Syd was released into the wild. Esme shook her head. She was getting angry, North thought, because Hone wasn’t thinking of the bigger picture. ‘You don’t understand – unboxing Syd is a complete disaster!’
Exasperated, she put her hands through her hair and for a second she held her head as if it was too heavy for her shoulders. The butterfly stitches had come loose, North realized. She would have a scar there.
‘At the moment, Syd is contained.’ She spoke slowly, as if she needed them to understand. ‘But its algorithmic functionality has the capacity to join the dots between computer systems.’
Esme moved away from her husband’s body and Hone and North went with her. She paced back and forth, talking half to herself and half to them. ‘Originally, Tobias and some of his people translated our values into algorithmic code. It was laborious and ineffective. But at the same time, I’d been guiding the machine learning and three weeks ago, we had a breakthrough. Syd appeared to “get” it. The machine’s own learning reached an understanding and acceptance of our language, and through that an understanding of our value system. Tobias trusted that – trusted Syd to put humanity first.’
Hone frowned. ‘You disagreed with what Tobias was doing? You thought he shouldn’t unbox Syd?’ Esme stopped pacing and faced him. ‘That’s why he didn’t tell you before.’
She was nodding furiously at her uncle. ‘Tobias was taking a terrible risk. We had to tell the world how far we had come with Syd. That’s what tonight was supposed to be about. And once we’d done that, the AI community and indeed governments could decide how to go forward.’ She counted the options out on her fingers. ‘Number one. We go ahead and unbox Syd and see what happens. Number two. We delay things to make sure our safeguards are secure and that we have a proper defence system in place. Or number three. We lock Syd away and bury the key.’
‘Which option did you think the AI community would go for?’ her uncle asked.
‘I had no idea. Tobias’s work was decades ahead of anyone else. Some thought this day would never come, and in my opinion, as a species we aren’t ready for autonomous and conscious technology. Syd will eat us alive. When Syd goes live, we have no protection against it acquiring the wrong kind of data. No guarantee against it acquiring a stranglehold. No protection that it won’t breach and indeed control any and all security systems – financial, military, governmental. Even ones that believe themselves to be safe from all incursion.’
‘Is there anything we can do to stop it?’ North said.
‘He kept saying he could install a fail-safe code – a kill switch to stop everything in its tracks. But with Tobias dead, I have no idea…’ – she used the side of her hand to slash through the air – ‘… I mean, none – how to turn Syd off. We have just over twelve hours to find that tablet and enter the code – a code I don’t know – because otherwise… this is the end of days for all of us.’
According to the watch he’d almost lost in a game of chance, it was 10.04 p.m. and they had twelve hours and ten minutes to find Syd and enter a kill switch they didn’t yet know. He and Esme had spent time they didn’t have finding a way out of the museum and escaping killers in London’s sewers. His watch went to 10.05 p.m. Now they had twelve hours and nine minutes before the end of days for humanity. No time at all.
Esme was bone-white and trembling, and a light sweat had broken out on her forehead. Hone gestured for a dark-suited woman to take Esme away. North knew that a team of medics were themselves en route to St Barts Hospital with more injections than he wanted to think about. As she was guided out of the door, Hone walked back to Tobias’s body. He stared down at it as if willing it to sit up and tell him who took the precious machine and where.
‘He leaked his own medical data,’ North said.
Hone folded his arms, lifting his jaw to look at North with his one eye. ‘Tell me something I don’t know, Sherlock.’
North felt his own anger spark into life. ‘If you knew from the start, why bring me into this?’
‘You were supposed to keep them both safe. I said protect Esme. That didn’t mean leave Tobias to die at the hands of those murderous scum.’ Hone kept his voice low, but he was incandescent with rage as he met North’s gaze. He placed an unlit cigarette in his mouth and spoke anyway. The cigarette stayed where it was. ‘This is a clusterfuck of monumental proportions and you are officially fired. I should have known better than to bring in an amateur – I’m warning you, stay out of it and stay away from Esme. You’ve done enough damage.’ If Hone had been able to do as he pleased, North had the distinct impression he would have shot him where he stood. As it was, the one-eyed man turned on his heel, lighting the cigarette, his riding coat swirling around the long legs as he made for the exit.
North glanced down at Tobias’s handsome face, the shock of white hair and the dull eyes. His bow tie was still loose around his neck as if he had been caught unprepared. The best part of twenty years ago, Tobias had hacked off his own foot because he was so determined to stay alive. Now, if Esme had it right, Tobias had brought something into the world that humanity wasn’t ready for. And Hone wanted North gone, but the simple fact was he was going nowhere.
North refused to be defined by his past any more. He might not be ready for the future but he was living in the present and that was progress. He remembered Esme holding on to him in the darkness. That electric attraction that he was sure she’d felt as much as he did. Tobias was probably among the first to die, but North had at least saved Esme. He couldn’t save everyone, he reminded himself, however much he wanted to, so why, then, did he feel so guilty? He bent down and, with his thumb and middle finger, eased the eyelids down over Tobias’s eyes.
She’d already lost a son and a husband. If they didn’t find Syd, according to Esme the human race was doomed. Saving the world seemed the least North could do. However dangerous that proved to be.