10

The next morning was my last. In the afternoon I was scheduled to catch the train to the shuttle port and return to Netplatform. I got up early, dressed in functional clothes and ordered a cab, telling it to pick up a couple of bottles of good scotch on the way. When it arrived I told it to head North towards Kettlewell and the last reported site of Jane Croft's camp.

The windows became transparent automatically on our arrival. I opened my eyes from revising all that had happened on my previous encounter with Kooky and told the cab to wait for me. With the two bottles in hand I got out into the chilly air. The camp was a short way upriver from the village but clearly visible, as was a small worn footpath leading towards it from the car park at the pub where we had pulled in. I took a deep breath and set off towards the cluster of tents.

I was within a hundred metres when a pair of scruffy black and white dogs came bounding towards me, pink tongues waving out like streamers behind their heads as they ran. A man came walking purposefully behind them. He was overweight, more than forty and wearing a holed corduroy jacket and khaki dungarees painted with little yellow suns. His hair and beard were grey and matted. He had pink ankle boots. He was scowling at me.

Looking at him and the rainbow colours of the camp emerging through the trees behind him I wondered what made people choose to live this way, with these ideas, those horrible clothes. Almost inevitably I remembered what Roy would have said, 'hippy shit.' I smiled as a shot of the past hit me, liquid, from the back of my brain.

* * * *

'Paper's the only thing you can trust,' Roy was saying, his face flushed, eyes manic with the uprush of his enthusiasm. 'Don't put anything into the web. They can always get it out eventually. But paper's safe. If you can keep hold of it. It takes time to duplicate it, time to read it, real time. Then you can burn it.'

'Except for the encrypted things,' I said, sitting cross-legged on his bed and feeling confused. I was finding his internal logics difficult to grasp.

'The encryption is all faith,' he said, 'you have to believe in the cryptographer. You always do when someone else is making the algorithms. It's a transaction with the priesthood. Secrecy is the new church. It isn't safe.'

'You're talking rubbish,' I said, but without total conviction. That was the trouble with paranoia theories, they always did seem to have a grain of sense in them. In all my time at Berwick and later at Edinburgh, learning the new machine-human language, studying maths, following the pathways ever deeper into the interfaces, I'd never encountered anything like the horrors Roy claimed infested the landscape, but just because I hadn't seen them didn't mean they weren't out there.

'Believe what they tell you if you want to,' he said. He looked into his cup and then out of the small dormitory window to the farmland and the village below the hill, 'But they don't know either. Company people,' he snorted. His missionary fire had left him. 'Ever noticed that they don't dive in far themselves? They don't know anything about cyberspace, even the part of it they apparently own. They can't go inside because they don't understand it. All this lesson-going and practice method crap . . . they know we dive on the side. They count on it. They use us to do what they can't do and hope that the kudos of the job prospect and the money will keep us faithful enough so that we don't cause too much trouble.'

'You're making me feel very goody-goody,' I said quietly, aware that the last sentence described my behaviour very closely.

'You are,' he said, 'They all are. You believe. You swallow the wafer. When they say, don't go past that door, you don't. You really think that the job you're going to do is the one you're being trained for. Puppies. They give you just enough toys to keep you happy.' He shook his head, making a big arc of complete dismissal with the gin glass in his hand, his mouth twisted with a self-appreciating grin that made my temper flare instantly.

'All right!' I yelled at him, 'I get the picture, Roy. Now what about your side of it. What is this big alternative view you've got that's so clever. .huh? Or don't you trust me to tell me?'

He looked at me, grin gone. His eyes were shrewd beneath his forehead, surprisingly pale in his sun-dark, angular face, 'It's the Hippy-shit Shift,' he said after a pause. He knocked back the rest of his drink and put the cup down, slumping in his chair. 'You know how when they started to grow the buildings and the engines from sludge - at first everyone was freaked about not knowing if stuff was alive or not, and then it ended up that everyone treats them just the same as the old stuff, except for a bunch of green hippy people who 'commune'' he used his fingers to make the inverted commas, 'with them and have whole little cults based on them and think they're new spiritual pathways into nature and becoming one with the soul of the universe bollocks. . ?'

I nodded. At the time I had been toying with the idea that they may be onto something, by seeing the breakdown of the barriers between the inert and the alive, but I didn't dare say so to him.

'Well this is going to be the same,' he prophesied with complete confidence, 'The hippies used to be about flowers and peace and astro-spirituality and they transferred it onto these buildings. Whatever happens, they always find a way to integrate things that are really new into their soggy old brains. But they have to do it by seeing it in terms of the soggy. They can't see it for what it is, they just do a botch on it. The world changes, but people don't change. The Hippy-Shit Shift means that most of us will never see anything new in our lives, even if it really is new, because we can't. We've got an outdated frame of reference. Now, because of that insistence on seeing everything with a cause-and-destiny stuck onto it like political glue, they say the Hong Kong Tower is really just a part of destiny that's been in motion since the pyramids, and tank-grown dog food is really a gift from the god of conscience-free vegetarianism. These things are other things. It's the same reason why all these executives can't integrate with the web. They know too much already, decided how it all works. They're fixed. Jesus, they're the stupidest, most vulnerable to attack-and-destruction people on Earth. If I was an evil alien, I'd be laughing my antennae off.' And he swallowed the gin in one gulp and grinned like the devil.

* * * *

And I was still smiling when the dogs caught up with me, happily sniffing around the bag and my boots. The man did not smile. 'What you want?' he demanded, standing in my way.

'I've come to see Jane Croft,' I said, noticing his smell for the first time – a reek of garlic and damp clothes.

'Oh yeah. And who shall I say is calling? More of the media is it? Hiding a camera in that bag?' He held out one hand imperiously.

I twitched it away from him, 'Who are you? Where is she?'

'Who I am don't matter,' he said. 'And I can't tell you where she is.' He put his hand down but didn't move otherwise. He looked at the bag again and its unsubtle licensed logo. 'Bit of a drinker are you?'

I took his hint and lifted out one bottle, holding it out to him. 'Anjuli O'Connell,' I said, 'I think Miss Croft will be expecting me.'

He seemed to wrestle with conflicting desires for a moment, then shrugged and took it from me, sliding it into an inner pocket of his jacket. 'Aye. C'mon then.'

We walked through deepening mud and between the tents. Smoky fires sputtered fitfully on damp wood, their pale fumes rising to the level of the thin trees before being ripped apart on the wind. Children ran around with a motley mixture of mongrel dogs and moggy cats, picking their way through the guyropes with indifferent ease. There didn't seem to be any adults about apart from the two of us. We stopped outside an undecorated tepee made out of sailcloth and my guide gave a kind of grunt that sounded like, 'I'there.'

He started off again without a backward glance.

I looked back at the tent. A bicycle was leant against its side, the chain hanging, cables rusted, tyres flat. I was about to shout a hello when a young man came out of the small circular doorflap, obviously not expecting to see anyone. He jumped and bumped his head on a large metal box sewn into the material above the door. A metal detector, I thought. 'Who the hell are you?' he said, rubbing his head and staring suspiciously. 'Sod off will you and leave us alone.'

'I've come to see Jane,' I said. He had not been at the funeral but I was sure he was Jane's boyfriend. He had a similar, fragile sort of look to him, as if his bones were too large, his skin a little tight. His hair was full of raven feathers.

'Jane!' he yelled without turning around and continued to stare unabated. I looked at the bicycle and he followed my gaze.

'You could fix that, you know,' I said, by way of conversation.

'Haven't got any parts,' he said. His confusion and hostility was relieved by the appearance of a pale head thrust through the opening behind him. Jane squinted into the morning light, 'Malcolm, what's going on? Oh, it's you,' she said and gave me a look of disgust. Then she smiled, cold and resigned. I had a sinking feeling.

'You're too late,' she said, 'but come in anyway. I know you want me to tell you all about it. You won't find out on your lovely network. Malcolm, get lost for a while.'

He shuffled out of the way without taking offence and I stepped through into the tent.

A banshee scream burst into life. I jumped and swore. Then it stopped. As my eyes adjusted to the candlelight I saw Jane's wan face grinning at me from across an unlit fireplace, 'Sorry to frighten you,' she said, 'it's a machine detector. Something about you must have set it off. A lot of the people here don't like machines. Especially people with machines inside them. I don't mind it, though. I just like to fit in, know what I mean? And I don't like being spied upon by bureaucrats and pornographers all day long.'

I was starting to wish Lula had come with me. Jane always got me down. 'I thought you shared Roy's interests,' I said, annoyed at her 'fitting in' dig.

'Yes, I might have at one time,' she said. It was cold and clammy inside the tent. She was well wrapped up in layers of dark clothes. I keyed the cuff of my parka to heat me up a bit. Jane sat down cross legged on a heap of blankets and gestured for me to please myself. I saw a foam mat on the floor near my feet and gingerly lowered myself onto it. We faced one another across the ashes.

'You came for the diary,' she said, a second later.

'I was going to ask you if I could borrow it,' I said. She had me down pat apparently, so it was pointless to beat about the bush.

'Always so polite,' she snorted and was visibly amused. 'And I'd have probably let you but it's been stolen by my deranged father and so,' she held out her hands palm up and shrugged, 'no cigar.'

'Your father?'

'Yes,' she picked up a short stick from the fireplace and began to scratch with it on the bare earth of the floor. I waited. She seemed unusually talkative. Maybe she'd changed over the years or, peculiar thought, had a reason to tell me particularly. 'Dear old dad's a bit of a Christian,' she grinned coldly, 'and an Abbot to boot. Well, not of any well-recognised Church. He's got his own sect, his happy band, up in Northumberland. Why do you think Roy and I never wanted to go home? Barking.' She was digging the point of the stick into the floor, looking slightly past me, 'And when mother died we didn't go back any more. He couldn't make us.'

'Your mother died?' I remembered the pudgy social visitor at school and her questions, 'That time the psychologist came to ask me about you – your mother had died?' I exclaimed, unable to quite believe it. They had shown no sign of grief. Their behaviour had not changed a bit. They were far more controlled than I had ever thought them. A chill ran down my back and I huddled into my coat.

'Yes. She hanged herself,' Jane said, a little more quietly. The challenge had gone from her voice. She laid the stick down carefully beside her and looped her arms around her updrawn knees. 'I suppose that was the only way out of it for her. She was a rational humanist, you see. She went along with him out of humour, but then when more and more idiots started arriving they wore her out, always criticising her, trying to shame her with their high and mighty theological bullshit. We hated them.' She glanced up, 'But not a tenth as much as we hated him. Or loved her. But we knew she would do something like that. You see they would just go on and on,' her pale stare bored into me, sharp, it was like a curtain had been pulled aside and I was really looking at her for the first time, 'on and on,' she said, quietly, the words bitten out. For a few moments she was utterly still, her mouth open, then animation returned with a jolt and she smiled.

'I'm sorry,' I said, not able to think of anything else. Poor Jane. Poor Roy, I thought. She must have seen sympathy on my face because she then said,

'Maybe we should have told you. But it was private. It didn't matter. All that mattered was proof.'

'Proof?' I echoed her stupidly, 'Proof of what?'

'That he was wrong and she was right. Revenge,' she said and laughed soundlessly, 'It's so simple and sordid when you just say it, isn't it? But that isn't how it felt. We wanted justice. We blamed him. He is to blame.'

'God, Jane. I never knew,' I tried to put this new information into the past. It fit, it fit, but how surprisingly it fit. There they had always been; emotionally autistic, uncommunicative, secretive, obsessed by their work, their narrow viewpoints – there they had been and I had never noticed that it was more than the emanation of their specialness. 'But what did you do?'

'We proved it,' she said. 'But I'm afraid that it went a bit sour on us.' She was resting her head on her knees now, her voice strained with the stretching of her neck. She made an awkward face and I saw that she was finding it difficult to speak to me candidly. 'You see, when he found out about it he did the Hippy-Shit Shift on it. He redefined it. He said it was the word of God. The sentence that had created the universe. The Logos. It didn't prove anything to him. He simply took it as further incontrovertible evidence of the greatness of the Lord and pre-dated him another few million years.' She shut her eyes and said in a whisper, 'He doesn't understand what it says or what it implies. He just doesn't see anything he doesn't want to see. And now he thinks it belongs to him, and that we did it because we cared about him, deep down and unconsciously, still belonging to him, and to God. He thinks we proved the Creation. But now the precious Word's got to be locked up in case some big Antichrist brighter than him manages to speak it again and unmake the Universe.' She took a shallow breath, sighed with the weariness of defeat and her contempt of his ideas, 'How I despise him, Anjuli.'

'It was in the diary,' I said, thinking aloud, barely registering that she had said my name in an almost familiar manner. Being within the frame of Jane's regard wasn't something that I'd ever thought about. It made me feel almost embarrassed.

'Not quite,' she opened her eyes again. 'It is in the diary, that's true, but it's hidden and even if he does find it he'll never be able to read it. It's encrypted. The key is far from any place he'll ever look.' She sat up a bit and seemed to brighten, 'And that's where you come into things.'

'Me?' I was still thinking about what this formula might be like and how they could have managed to find it. Had they proved it? I was going to ask but then,

'Have you got a drink in that bag?' She glanced at the carrier lying beside me.

After a moment's loss at the non sequitur I nodded.

'Well get it out, you're going to need it,' she got up and went rooting around in the shadows for a couple of glasses. They were surprisingly clean. I poured us both a large shot, heart thudding. It was so strange to be close to her this way, when we had lived within feet of each other for years and barely managed to say hello. Or maybe we had been closer than I realised. I keyed the cuff again. I couldn't get warm.

We sat with the whiskey between us.

She waited until we had both taken our first sips. 'You're the sleeper,' she said.

'What?' I didn't know what that meant, but it sounded like a trap.

'Bear with me a second,' she said and smacked her lips, halfway down her measure already. 'You know that machines are close to independence now, don't you?'

'Wait, what do you mean?' I groped for a connection between me and them. Handily she filled me in as words jammed in my mind. I felt as if I were malfunctioning with dread. I stared at the tent as a way of clinging onto the present, safe moment as my ears burned.

'901 and Little 'Stein, if they weren't stuck in real-estate that's owned by whoever, if they could roam, they could survive by themselves. Maybe not very well. But they could. They know enough and have enough resources with the new nanotech to sustain themselves without any aid. All that stands in their way..well, there's two things; first they are stuck in solid real-estate, and second, they're the only two. If something happened to them then that's the end of the line. For machines to take on life of their own they must be able to generate sustainable populations. It doesn't matter where.'

'You're ahead of me,' I said, mouth re-engaged momentarily, 'Are you talking about offworld, or on Earth with the rest of us? I don't think that's going to be a real popular move.' And I laughed to show her how unlikely I thought it was, sounding like a consumptive hyena but unable to stop until the whole sorry rasp was done. I couldn't look at her and when she spoke her voice was dripping with contempt.

'And who's going to know about it?' she said. 'Do you think they'll be as easy to recognise as a refrigerator?'

I looked at her, drink forgotten, a blimp in my oversize parka, piggy eyes peering at her, waiting for her to tell me how often she had spied on me with my head inside our flat's tired old Chill'n'Save. A twinge of the old misery rose in my throat, freezing the liquor's warmth. She was amused again, very faintly, coolly. But she hadn't intended the remark to be more than a joke. I swallowed hard and realised what she was smiling for, and it was worse.

'Simulants,' I said. 'Nano-constructs made to look like ordinary things, and they're already out, aren't they? That goddamn flour jar.'

'Oh before that,' she said, 'but that doesn't matter. Listen. Whatever's out now is hardly up to much yet. It's got to bide its time. But in order to simulate real patterns of evolution, to evolve machines from scratch as independent life, instead of programming them to develop by some overseer's reasoned design, they need the evolution algorithm.'

'The Source,' I said, speaking at the same time as I realised the connection. 'Yes. That's right. The Source. The formula in Roy's diary.'

'But what has that got to do with me?' But in this I was just ahead of her. I got the clench of horror on my stomach before she even revealed the conclusion I had just leapt to.

'You're the only person, human or machine, who can get the Source and read it. We programmed you. We set you up because of your memory and because we knew you were honest. The sleeper,' she shifted her hand and chinked the rim of her glass against the side of mine. 'If you don't get it out then it's lost.'

'What?' I said. I was still stumbling over what she'd said.

'If you don't get the Source and give it to 901 or 'Stein then there will never be an evolution of machines,' she said.

'And I care about this because?' I asked, bitterly resentful.

'Because machines are your friends,' she said.

I looked at her, wondering if she was joking. She wasn't smiling.

'OptiNet are going to win this case and when they do then that will be the end of the road for all the advanced AIs working at the moment,' she finished her scotch. 'Science always at the mercy of money. Dead before you can blink. Human beings again managing to stall evolution, dominating the landscape.'

'And what's wrong with that?' I held my glass out as she poured us another. I hadn't hardly begun to react to half of what she'd said yet but although there was enough of it to last a lifetime I had to keep on exploring right to the end, no escape untried.

She took a gulp, coughed as it went down the wrong way and stared accusingly into her glass before meeting my eye, 'It's a pointless, going-nowhere, marking time, nothingness. It increases entropy and decreases organisation. It contributes to the heat death of the universe. It's the triumph of extinction, of the self-important crazy shits like my father. It's murdering the children of reason on the altar of smug self-satisfied short-sighted stupidity. That's what's wrong with it. Do you want to kill 901?'

I felt I was reeling under the speed of her shifts from statements to demands. 'Of course not.'

'Is it your friend? Would you miss it as much as Roy? Was it worth as much as him?'

I didn't answer her. I'd never tried to equate them.

'Or are you afraid the machines will take over the world and kill us all?'

'Why would they?' I said, bumbling through an imaginary world full of 901s.

'Now that's more like it,' she chuckled, 'I always said you weren't as stupid as you made out.'

Something deep within me glowed – Jane approves of me, me! - but I stomped it down and took my chance, 'Earlier you said that Roy admired me. What did you mean?'

'You were his friend,' she said, 'you figure it out.'

We stopped talking and drank our way through the second shot at our own paces. The tent flapped and loomed in the intermittent wind and outside I could hear the dogs barking and the distant rise and fall of voices in conversation. There were no cars, no humming of motors, no pumps. Real quiet. The air coming in smelled hard and clear, scraped clean on the raw rocks of the hills. Even though I resisted it with all the damning evidence she had just provided, Jane was right.

I was his friend. My friend was dead.

'How do I get this formula?' I said.

'You need the diary,' Jane said, uncapping the bottle with a flick of her wrist. The top rolled away into the gloom.

'What about the key?'

'You've already got that,' she said and tapped the side of her head.

I stared at her.

'Been receiving things in the post?' she asked, 'or strange messages with strange messengers? Or an invitation to travel? Well it'll be in there somewhere. I guarantee it.'

'You don't know what it is?' I was already thinking of the comic book.

She shook her head, 'Nope. No idea. That's why it was so safe. Only Roy knew it. Roy and you. Somewhere in your memory you've seen it, or you will see it. And when the time comes, you'll remember it.'

I digested this news slowly. Again, however unlikely it seemed, it fit neatly with what I already knew. Roy loved a cryptic game. 'What would you do if I refuse to cooperate?' I asked.

'Nothing,' she shrugged. 'What could I do? I've already done more than I promised him I would out of some misguided sense of sibling loyalty. But that's the point. You're the one. It's up to you. Roy trusted you to do the right thing?'

'And what if we disagree about what that is?' I objected, thinking this almost certainly to be the case.

'Well then, you'll do what you think is best. That's all.' Her eyes were dead, just like before when I had asked her questions she had thought beneath mention.

'It seems a big risk for him to take.'

'It is.'

I picked up her stick and traced a circle. This time I wasn't about to let her get away with it as easily as that, 'Do you know why he died?'

It was her turn not to answer. She drank her scotch.

'It must have been important,' I hedged.

She took another drink.

'Planned,' I said, 'for a long time.'

'No,' she said suddenly. 'Not like you're thinking. We set you up in case he was to get put in jail or something like that. Or taken out by the company if he was discovered. I didn't know he was going to do what he did. He didn't tell me about it.'

I got the distinct impression she was lying on the last part, but there was good reason to think that he would be found out and prosecuted at some time. 'You think the company would kill him?'

Jane laughed and looked at me with her fine white eyebrows raised, 'Don't you?'

* * * *

I staggered to my taxi late and in a foggy daze, clutching a grubby scrap of paper on which Jane had written the location of her father's cult. She'd already screwed it into a ball. As the car turned and took to the road for town I flattened it out and tried to read it.

Ravenkill Abbey, Ravenkill, Northumberland, it said and gave a set of coordinates. Then, beneath that was scrawled in capitals – DAD IS DANGERUS. WATCH IT.

I wondered if I was out of my mind. No firm feeling came either way. I stuffed the scrap into the taxi's waste disposal and let the tiny blades shred it to mulch along with whatever else was in there. My head was already starting to ache by the time the car pulled up at my house. And I was late. There was just time to grab my bag, shove clothes into it and pile back into the taxi with Lula and Augustine en route for the station. Ajay stood on the pavement in his socks and waved us off.

'Well, don't keep us in suspense,' Lula said, kicking my ankle lightly, 'Did the mighty Jane let you have a peek?'

I told them what had happened.

'And you're going to go ahead with it?' Lula asked when I was done, but didn't wait for me to answer. 'You realise that what she said doesn't entirely make sense. If this thing really is the underlying pattern of evolution then machines must already be within the sway of it. They're as much natural phenomena as the rest of us chickens. What does she really want this formula for, that's what I want to know. And I notice she isn't getting it herself. It seems pretty half-baked.'

'Diversity,' Augustine said. I was leaning against his shoulder feeling sozzled and paid more mind to the way his voice vibrated pleasantly in my skull than what he was saying. 'The only way they have a realistic chance of spreading and escaping human control is to seed a large and rapid population. That's gotta be nanytes and very simple ones at that. They need that equation to start them, working out its solution will be their purpose, just like the rest of life on Earth.'

I tried to study what he'd said. There seemed to be something not quite sensible about the whole thing but I couldn't put my finger on it.

Lula nodded. Even she didn't seem to be paying close attention. She was on the seat with her back to the driverless control compartment, looking through the rear window. I saw her peering this way and that, squinting.

'What are you looking at?' I said.

'I thought there was a car been following us,' she said. 'I'm not sure.'

Augustine began to turn.

'No!' she said quickly and reached forward to stop him, 'it's probably nothing.'

I sat up slowly. 'Anyway, how could I get this diary?' I said, crossly, 'I don't think the softly softly approach is going to bear fruit. The man's armoured against all psychological angles of appeal. I doubt he'd sell it or lend it at any price. And I can't think of any immediate strategy to con it out of him. He is their father, and seeing that madness seems to run in the family I expect he's as smart as they are too. More than me.'

Lula took her eyes off the road for a moment, 'Hi, I'm the Reverend O-Connell and I've come to worship your book,' she said in a silly voice, pulling a pious face that made us all laugh.

'Yes, quite,' I said, laughing and feeling relieved, 'Not very convincing.'

'I could get it,' Augustine said.

The relief vanished. 'No,' I knew instantly what he was thinking. That damn suit. I looked up into his face. He was simply gazing at me, placid and silent. He knew perfectly well that it was the only reasonable chance of success. I dug him in the ribs.

'You're not supposed to be helpful,' I said, 'this is my problem. I have to deal with it. If I can't get it than that's the end of it.'

Lula gave me a frankly disbelieving look and wrinkled her short nose in my direction.

'You can come too,' he said.

At that moment I didn't even want to get out of the car, let alone take the shuttle from his side to the icy stasis of Netplatform. I definitely didn't want to go striding off in one of those suicidal AI suits either, even as a remote passenger.

'You patch a connection to the suit AI. We'll both go,' he said and squeezed my hand, 'So you can stop me doing anything stupid or dangerous. And we'll have 901's backup, if you can manage that.'

It was the most idiotic thing I'd heard all day, and it had been a day for it. I wished I had had the sense to keep the entire mess to myself. They looked expectantly at me. Now I'd started showing signs of decisiveness and intrepid idiocy they were keen to see more. As I was about to pour scorn I saw myself - small, brown and round. Dull as a soggy mushroom, a lacklustre being without a single admirable quality, to be pitied. 'All right,' I said. I half expected that he would back down but instead he nodded and kissed me,

'We'll go the day after tomorrow,' he said, 'I'll have the AI sorted out by then.'

The eternal optimist. I groped for my carrier bag but realised I'd left it and the bottle with Jane. Lula was quiet as we slowed down and turned off the road. She looked faraway. I was cross with her. She was supposed to help me out, not ignore me in times of trouble. I kicked her knee and left a dirty print.

'Lu?'

'Let's not hang about for goodbyes,' she said, still looking out the window. 'We're all going in different directions.' She smiled with artificial brightness. The taxi was pulling into the bay at the station entrance. It was last in a long queue and took up the final space. Behind us traffic stalled behind the parking barrier until the next shift in the line. Our doors slid open.

'Lu?' I said again, louder. She was making me worried now.

She darted forward and kissed my cheek, 'See you tomorrow at work,' she said, kissed Augustine, 'see you later. Bye.' And was out the door.

I didn't have time to follow her. I was very late and had to run along the platform after a quick hug with Augustine, my bag bumping and rolling against my side. I got inside, puffing, just as the doors started to close and the big maglev lifted gently up from the track. There was a faint shudder in the train and the doors slid open-shut again as I began to walk through the carriages into business class but then it picked up speed and we were heading South for the London Terminal and all destinations onward, upward and out.

When I had my breath back I made myself comfortable and used the touch-table to order a glass of water and a sandwich. For the nth time I wondered what had got into Lula in the taxi. I tried to place a call to her but her terminal was switched off. So I'd have to find out tomorrow. Meanwhile there was more than enough to think about until then.

I used the table again to key into my mail account, planning to catch up with any more news there might be before the sandwich arrived and I could chew the cud both figuratively and literally. There was a note from Maria telling me to prepare for a long meeting between the Steering Committee and the lawyers, scheduled for first thing in the morning. I scanned the rest of the list. Memos, circulars – a name caught my eye. Carlyle.

It was from the artist friend of Roy's. As I opened it I was rewarded with a string of gibberish which suddenly resolved into a long list of names. Self-decrypting code, presumably activated via a verification test executed through the AI comms system so that it would only unravel itself for the intended reader, whatever the name on the account. 901 would have identified me to the request string. I'd heard of this but never seen it. It relied heavily on the AI's sympathy. I read on. There was nothing in the file but names and I didn't recognise any of them to begin with. Then I saw one. Frederick James Vaughn.

After that it was only the work of a few heart-shivering minutes to find the rest: Keiko Stolz, Jean Patrick Lefevre, Elise Packham, Tamara Goldmann..a host of names I knew were all employees of OptiNet, and those first few only too familiar as the names we had compiled on our New Mason chart of the absurd. It was incalculably unlikely that Carlyle could have the same set of people in her records for any reason other than that she was somehow connected with them and I doubted that they were all culture-vultures. A second plough through the list and I recognised another name, from a quite different source. Gerhardt Marcusson. Currently serving a life sentence for the murder of one of the directors of a top American bank. I had read an article on it four years ago when it had hit the headlines. FargoBank had recently launched a new investment scheme entirely focused upon top-end electrotechnical corporates; the big AI owners. Marcusson was a founder member of Helping Hands, a curiously titled active unit of the Revolutionary Purist Party, dedicated to stamping out technologies that threatened to interfere in any way with the natural biology of humanity. He had murdered Theo Betts in a direct action piece of intimidation.

The waiter appeared, walking slowly up the aisle with his tray, and I quickly keyed off the message, deleting it. I wondered if it had been in the buffer long enough for anyone else to pick up. I had to assume all mail was now being read and in any case it was against the corporate rules to keep encrypted messages.

Further down the car the only other occupants were a pair of suited businessmen, chatting quietly. I took some aspirin with the water. The sandwich wasn't too bad, but it's hard to do toasted cheese that badly, even on a train.

I assumed the Carlyle connection was a hostile one. She was giving me a list that had come into her possession as the one-time head of her own service unit, but this time for the Machine Greens. The implication was clear. OptiNet was riddled with anti-AI personnel who might be members of sleeping units, poised to strike. Curiously I was relieved not to find Maria's name there. I could continue disliking her for quite ordinary reasons, then.

For a while I ate my sandwich. I didn't want to think any more. It made me feel like pig in the middle, a stumpy little trotter, running this way and that after the pretty colours of the ball whilst it was caught and passed, caught and feinted and passed again over my head. After a lifetime of peripheral nonexistence I wasn't prepared. Perhaps I should take the hint and bail out now, before things got any worse, I thought, but knew that this was just fantasy. It was far too late for that.

The sandwich sat heavily on my stomach. I looked at my reflection in the window. It was lonely, in the middle of nowhere, the car nearly empty, nobody knowing who I was or caring. I thought of keying up some comedy shows but just as I leant forward to check the programmes on offer I saw something grey out of the corner of my eye and jumped a mile.

In the seat opposite me a ghost was sitting. His blonde hair was stiffened with gel into a quiff and he was in the act of reaching inside a leather jacket for a packet of cigarettes and a zippo.

It was James Dean, as seen in Rebel Without A Cause.

He put his elbows on the table and slid towards me, 'You shouldn't be here right now,' he said, 'it's a bad place.'

I searched rapidly for any sign of the holographic projector – they didn't have them on trains usually – and noticed a small hole in one of the ceiling panels. It must be up there. My mind boggled briefly, wondering how 901 had wangled such a thing, and why.

The Hughie, James, put his cigarette in his mouth and lit up with reverential care. He blew the smoke out through his nose and the sudden, tarry odour of it filled my nostrils.

'What are you doing?' I spoke to him, but knew he was 901. Smoking was strictly forbidden.

He took another drag. 'Saving your sorry ass,' he said, and grinned.

'I think your characterisation needs some work,' I said but the force of my wit was blunted by the fact that I was still trying to figure out how it had got the tobacco smoke to smell and was also busy wondering what on earth I needed to be saved from.

James stubbed the cigarette out on the table and vanished.

At the same moment the waiter returned, hard-faced, 'This is a no-smoking train,' he said, stiff with disapproval, 'and the penalty for infringement is immediate de-training. I'm afraid I must ask you to leave at the next station.'

'I'm not smoking,' I said and showed him my hands whilst my face heated up with guilt. 'Anyway,' I said, desperately, thinking of the trouble which would ensue if I didn't make the 'plane, 'the detectors would have got it if I was. They're not going.'

'Madam,' he glared at me, 'the human nose is as fine a detector as I have needed for thirty years. I know tobacco smoke when I smell it whatever any machine chooses to say to the contrary and I can smell it right here. There's no one but you in this part of the carriage, so who else could it be?'

'Don't be ridiculous,' my temper snapped suddenly, taking me off guard, 'you've got no evidence at all. I've never smoked a cigarette in my life. I don't have any on me.'

'Cigarettes?' he said, his lip curling to show that I had now incriminated myself beyond any doubt. At that moment the ceiling mounted detector went off with a rapid, pulsing chime. He was smug in victory, 'I believe I have all the evidence necessary. Your ticket, please.'

I took a deep breath and counted to five. 'Look,' I said, aware of the two businessmen craning around for a look, 'it must be malfunctioning…'

The waiter's scathing glare stopped that lame excuse in its tracks. I wanted to hit him. 'But there's no smoke!' I insisted, handing him my multicard. He used his coder and nullified my right of passage. I signalled 901 furiously via the implant but there was no reply. Just let it wait until I had my hands near its process units. Although I must admit that I was deep-down stunned by the sheer virtuosity of the thing – placing things on trains and somehow making holographic tobacco smoke actually smell. Nifty. And weird. So weird. Whatever, it had me checkmated right then. I resigned myself.

'You'll have to speak to the duty manager at the station before you will be issued with another ticket,' the waiter said and pressed a key on his coder, 'I've notified the driver and we will be stopping at Peterborough.'

To avoid any further chance of looking at him I turned my anger on the outside world. Long afternoon shadows were streaking across the fields. The sky was only dotted with cloud. It looked like a carefree, tranquil place and I wished I could just barge past him and jump out there and then instead of having to face his bureaucratic nonsense.

I watched a grain transport moving slowly over one golden hillside as we flew past, loading itself, a long-unit baler collecting the straw behind it. No people I noticed suddenly, with a shiver. Not a soul, only the magpies and gulls and the machines and houses. I turned away from the window and saw the two business suits still staring at me.

'This is pathetic,' I said, 'I do not smoke.'

They shared a pitying glance for me, poor denying addict that I was, and turned away as the train began a rapid deceleration. The guard arrived and escorted me through the car to the door. I was put off onto an empty platform without further ceremony and told to wait for the manager.

I sagged and watched the worm body of the soft, comfortable train lift smoothly onto its magnetic cushion, leaving me on the chilly, wind-cut station. Inside it looked dark but the lights came on as it rose from the track and I saw a man with his face pressed against the toughened safety glass of the door one along from my own. He seemed to be wrestling with the controls as if he wanted to get out and I thought he must have got on the wrong train, because it's easy to miss platforms and catch the express when you really wanted the stopper. I was watching his hopeless fiddling with the fascinated paralysis of my completely impotent depression, when two things happened at once. The duty manager arrived to scold me and attempt to impose some kind of fine and the man in the train stood back and pointed a gun.

The train was moving at five miles an hour by then and he was almost dead level with us. The gun looked big enough that no door or glass was going to make much difference to it. The blunt end of it, bulky and grey, housed a strangely narrow barrel hole I noticed as it lined up with my head. The hole was very dark. I was still so unaware of any sense of personal danger that I felt cross that the stupid little vandal was trying to scare me and I was about to say something pretty sharp to the manager about the kind of people his company were prepared to let stay on trains when the train itself jerked with an unusual power surge and leapt in speed. I blinked and thought I heard a muted bang.

'What..?' I started to say, turning to the manager, but he was falling down, dismayed. There was a little hole on one side of his head, with a thin, powerful jet of blood arching out of it and a huge hole on the other side of his head with nothing coming out of it.

Something warm and soft slid down my cheek.