Leila leaned back in one of Ambrose’s armchairs. Her black pendant rolled against her chest. Virtual leather creaked comfortingly. His office was heavily overlaid with weave content. She’d never seen the reality that lay beneath it. She stretched her feet out towards the simulated fire that burnt in his office grate. She’d arrived a little early and, to kill a few minutes, had asked him to talk her through the small print of her deal with the Rose.
‘You do realise you’re now fully responsible for the investigation into Dieter’s death?’ he said, sounding very unimpressed.
‘Well, InSec weren’t doing anything with it.’
‘Yes, but if anything kicks off, you’re on your own. Their duties are limited to making a final arrest of any demonstrably guilty parties. You should have just bought a majority share.’
‘Well, it’s done now. How soon till we can go and see what the search engine’s found?’
‘A few minutes.’ He was at his desk, punching invisible keyboards, peering at invisible screens. ‘Just activating my old digital exploration security systems. Setting up buffer selves for us.’
‘Seems a bit extreme.’
‘That box scared me, Leila,’ Ambrose told her. ‘If the search engines come back with any psychoactive malware piggybacking on them, I want to be ready. We’re not taking any risks.’
Leila nodded. A thought struck her. ‘Did Dieter build all this?’ she asked.
‘He fine-tuned it. Look, if we’re going to get set up for any exploring tonight, I need to concentrate.’ He focused intently for a minute or so, then sighed with satisfaction, reclined his chair and closed his eyes.
‘Taking a nap?’ asked Leila.
‘Making sure the meatware’s comfortable. You’ll see why when the buffer selves activate. You’re about to get queried, just say yes to everything, then we’ll be good to go.’
A tickle in her mind, and Ambrose’s systems were talking to her. Leila’s attention turned inwards as she gave them all the permissions they needed. A moment, then they pinged to let her know they were active. She looked back out at the room, where nothing seemed to have changed.
Then Ambrose stood up and there were two of him. His physical body lay unconscious on his chair.
‘Did Dieter ever show you any of this?’ Leila shook her head. The standing Ambrose tapped his virtual chest. ‘This is a buffer self. Runs at one remove from my core consciousness. So if anything psychoactive attacks, it hits this version of me and stops there.’ He nodded back at his physical body. ‘Keeps the real me safe. All my memory blocks, and the chains they form together. Oh, and look at this.’ He turned his head. A translucent silver cord stretched from the back of it down to the forehead of his physical self. ‘That’s the link between us. Turns red if there’s anything dodgy trying to force its way in. Stand up, you’ll see yours.’
Leila did so. Her cord also led back to a static version of herself, a photo-realistic statue frozen in time. Her second self faded into transparency, then vanished.
‘That’s my systems meshing with your home server, back at your flat. Pulling your core self back there.’
‘Weird,’ she breathed. ‘If something does attack us – what then?’
‘Just trigger an exit countdown, your buffer self crashes your consciousness back into your core self, and you’re home safe. You’ll end up back in your front room. The countdown takes about a minute, and crashing back leaves you with one hell of a hangover, but it’s much better than the alternative.’
Leila had to agree.
‘And now,’ Ambrose announced theatrically, ‘the back door!’ He clicked his fingers and a mahogany panelled door appeared on an empty patch of wall. ‘It’s a bit like jumping,’ he told Leila. ‘Only the buffer selves can’t experience any sort of nausea. This side of it, my office in Docklands. Through there – the firm’s offices in Homelands.’ He opened it and stepped into the bright light beyond. ‘Come on through,’ he called back.
Leila nerved herself and followed him. As Ambrose had promised, with the buffer self running the jump between his office in Docklands and his family firm’s Homelands space made hardly any impression on her at all. Leila felt discomfited by the seamless location change. It left her feeling that the physical world was suddenly a little less real. She looked around, wanting to both understand where she was and let its solid, physical presence wash over and reassure her. The room that housed the Vadenheim family’s search engines was large and dimly lit. Its far wall was glass, about twelve foot high and eighteen foot wide. It gave on to an ocean. Light rippled down from above. Fish drifted by, glitching the serenity with bright, jagged colours. An empty glass box, the size of a large coffin, sat on chrome legs in front of it.
‘More sea,’ she commented. ‘Is that a Taste Refresh Festival thing?’
‘Oh no,’ Ambrose replied. ‘It always looks like this. The sea’s a standard visual metaphor for all the data that floats around Station. That’s where our search engine’s been hunting.’
A dark creature sliced past the window, cutting through the peace of it all like a knife. There was a head that came to a single focused point, a mouth like a gash, jagged with hard white teeth, and blade-sharp triangular fins. Leila held her breath as it passed, then exhaled as it vanished from the window. Others glided to and fro in the distance.
‘Sharks,’ she breathed.
‘Apex datavores,’ said Ambrose. ‘I love seeing them up close.’
‘These are the search engines?’
‘The best there are!’
Leila glanced at the door. ‘What if someone catches us?’
Ambrose shrugged. ‘I’m synced with the usage schedules for these chaps. Nobody’s going to be in here for the next hour or so. We’ll be long gone by then. And if someone wanders in by accident – the buffer selves are pretty much invisible. Not quite ghost cloak standard, but we’re still hard to see.’ He moved over to the glass coffin and waved his hand. A line of numbered shark icons popped into existence. He scrolled through it. ‘And here’s our little hunter! Back with a full belly.’ His finger hovered over its icon. ‘I hope it’s just a location. Nothing more dangerous,’ he said nervously.
Fascinated by the search engines, Leila didn’t really hear him. ‘Why sharks?’ she wondered.
‘InSec wanted to track down weaveselves bleeding a few bytes of data into an ocean of information. They needed to home in on individual weave caches and pick up the subtlest changes in them. Sharks are amazing hunters. They can detect one drop of blood in a million drops of water. They’re profoundly sensitive to electrical impulses. So we built our search engines around their neural structures. And we gave them bodies they recognised to minimise any consciousness displacement shock.’
‘CDS? Fetches have problems with that.’ She remembered a Coffin Drives acquaintance trying to live as a dog. He’d lasted for a few days until the nightmares became too much to deal with and he’d had to return to human form.
‘Yes. You can transplant a mind into anything, but unless you do some heavy rewiring to help it deal with its new body it’ll freak out.’
‘So has our shark found anything?’
‘Er. Yes. It has.’
Leila saw how nervous Ambrose was. ‘Is there any risk?’ she asked.
‘Not really. But still…’ Ambrose sighed. ‘It really shouldn’t scare me anymore.’ An embarrassed laugh.
‘The Coffin Drives still freak me out.’ Leila put her hand on his shoulder. ‘I know what it’s like.’
He smiled weakly. ‘Well, here goes.’ He closed his eyes, held his breath and stabbed down on the shark icon.
His nerves were infectious. Leila found herself wondering what she’d do if some broken, ancient piece of code lanced out of the shark and into her mind, and started rewriting it. Memories of the Blood and Flesh plague shook through her. Something close to panic rose up. She forced the past back down again, but still started as the shark lanced into being in the glass coffin. Its eyes were misted with weaveware. The rest was hard and sharp, distilled by aeons into lethal perfection.
She looked to Ambrose. ‘All right?’ Fear scratched at her. She hoped his silver shields wouldn’t leap up around him.
A moment, then Ambrose breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Yes. Thank the gods.’
Leila relaxed. ‘Thank you. I really appreciate this. Dieter will too.’
‘I’d hate to lose him like we lost Cormac.’ Figures danced in the air between Ambrose and the shark. Leila moved round the tank, fascinated by the creature. ‘And to be honest it’s about time I faced up to it all,’ continued Ambrose. A nervous smile. ‘Can’t hide from the past. That’s not the Lazarus Crew way.’ The figures stilled, catching his attention. ‘Ah, great. It’s found traces of his passage through the weave. Regular stopping points. They moved him back into the Totality, then on from there.’ He peered at them. ‘Hmm, interesting – you said your Totality friend couldn’t find anything out about Deodatus?’
‘Cassiel? No. It’s driving her nuts.’
‘The trail leads back to an old Kingdom satellite. High Earth orbit. Vintage stuff, looks like it’s been unused for quite a while. Deodatus must be using it as an off-Station base. Should have been easy enough for her to track down, it’s not too deeply hidden. I wonder why she couldn’t see it?’
‘Holt tried to stop me from digging too deep,’ mused Leila. ‘Maybe they’ve been a bit more efficient with her. Hamstrung her without her even realising it.’
‘So the Totality isn’t as all-powerful as you’d think. That’s almost reassuring.’
A thought struck Leila. ‘This satellite. It’s the kind of place you used to explore with Dieter?’
‘Abandoned for centuries, weave content not fired up since who knows when, probably first built by one of the lost gods of the Pantheon? Yes, absolutely.’
‘Can we go there now? I mean – we’ve found him, and that’s great. But Dieter might not have much time left. Deodatus could be running him as a partial fetch. Breaking his memory structures. Or just deleting the bits of him it doesn’t need.’
Ambrose went pale. ‘That’s a lot to ask, Leila.’ His flask was in his hand again. The shark hung between them, radiating danger.
‘I know. I’m scared too. But I don’t want to lose Dieter.’
Ambrose put his face in his hand, hiding his eyes from her. ‘I can’t, Leila.’
‘You’ve got so much experience. Much more than Cassiel. We’re even wearing your old exploration gear. We can jump right there. I’m sure we’d be safe. If we can find out where Deodatus is holding him – it’d be such a big step.’
‘But Cormac…’
‘That was terrible,’ agreed Leila. ‘But the psychoactive tech hurt his family, not him. His defences worked.’
Ambrose didn’t reply.
‘I’ve seen broken people, Ambrose. I’ve been broken myself. I know how bad it is. I don’t want Dieter to end up like that. We’ve got to find him and bring him back.’
‘We should wait. Do some research. See what we can find out about this satellite.’
‘We don’t have time. Please.’ Ambrose turned away. ‘You said it was time to move on from the past. You were right.’ She thought of the Coffin Drives and the Fetch Counsellor, both asking for and offering help. ‘Perhaps it’s something we both need to do. For Dieter’s sake. Neither of us want to lose him.’
Ambrose gave a heavy sigh. ‘Oh, Leila. All right, I’ll take you there. And when we find Dieter I’m going to give him the most almighty bollocking for getting us into this.’
Leila smiled. ‘Yeah. Me too.’