56

The Fiat was a car, but only just. It struggled as best it could through the pouring rain, stick-thin wipers flailing and engine screaming, despite them doing only doing eighty kilometres per hour. William peered out from the driver’s seat into the morning gloom, teeth clenched and not saying a word.

In the passenger seat sat Rebecca, eyes closed, shivering in the whining draught, feeling each vibration as the tyres ploughed through another waterlogged trench in the road. The car was a banger that should have been scrapped long ago, a rattling pile of rust that had once been assembled into a vehicle, with a heater that blasted out cold air and windows that steamed up at the same time. Not only that, but despite William’s wiring, the engine had refused to start. In the end they’d found themselves pushing it all the way across the yard to get it to bump-start, both of them all too aware that if the motor stopped along their journey they would have to repeat the whole process. That wasn’t ideal either.

On the other hand though, they had no choice: the Fiat was what was there. And the truth was that it did have its advantages. First of all, they’d been able to get it moving armed with little more than duct tape and a bit of common sense. Also, its complete lack of computerised systems made it immune to the threat of electronic hijacking.

And if what William had told her was true, then that was an absolute necessity for them to get away.

‘What,’ he’d said. ‘It isn’t who, it’s what.’

Two hours earlier, William and Rebecca had sat in the filthy kitchen behind the workshop, a feverish sense of unreality hanging over them.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I should’ve seen it earlier. I should have seen how it all comes together.’

He’d grabbed her hands, held her gaze with his own.

‘I know this is going to take a while to sink in,’ he said. And then: ‘I really ought to have understood when we were in your lab. But I was too busy resisting: you were talking about thoughts, the involuntary thoughts on one hand and the deliberate ones on the other, and that scared me. It scared me so much that I didn’t see what I was looking at.’

‘Which was?’

‘The same thing as I saw in Stockholm.’

Rebecca shook her head to signal that she didn’t understand what he was saying, so slowly, methodically, he told her about the maps at HQ. The steady stream of internet traffic, the explosions of colour, the data peaks.

‘When I saw the images in your lab,’ he said. ‘The cross-sections of brains lighting up your screens. Areas flaring up with impulses, dark blue where there was least activity, deep pink were there was most.’ He chose his words carefully. ‘I saw it, but it took me until now to understand it.’

They sat for several seconds with their eyes locked.

‘You can’t be saying what I think you’re saying,’ Rebecca protested.

William nodded.

‘You mean that all the attacks… the peaks in data they showed you at Swedish Armed Forces HQ… the traffic that knocked out the power supply to half of Sweden…’

She didn’t say any more. William finished the sentence for her.

‘It wasn’t traffic. They weren’t attacks. They were thoughts.’

It was still dark outside. The morning rush hadn’t started. Every now and then they passed another car in the downpour, curious glances through the side windows–who the hell drives around in an old bucket like that? In this weather?

The distance signs along the roadside were ticking down far too slowly, but there was no option other than to just keep going. William had to get in touch with Sweden. He needed to warn his colleagues at HQ–Palmgren, Velander, even Forester, if she was prepared to listen. They needed to know what they were up against, and they needed to know now, if it wasn’t already too late.

What worried him was the plan. This vague acquaintance of Rebecca’s, who she hadn’t seen for years. How were they to know whether they were welcome? How would they find out if he was even still alive?

But if he was right, they had no other choice. They wouldn’t have anywhere to hide. Wherever they went it would be no time before the police learned where they were, or worse still, before some inanimate object came to life and did its utmost to end theirs.

The way he was thinking was crazy. The trouble was, he was right. Of that he was now absolutely certain.

William had caught up with her out on the gravel yard, where she stood methodically filling her lungs with the damp mist, as though the cold might wake her from an awful, incomprehensible dream.

‘I don’t know what you’re trying to say,’ she said. ‘But I know that you’re wrong. If you’re trying to tell me that someone has…’ She turned to face him, searching for words, but the only ones she found sounded unreal, concocted, even silly. ‘If what you’re telling me is that someone has created an intelligence and let it loose on the internet… If that’s what you’re telling me, you’re way off. You’re wrong, because that is impossible.’

He said nothing.

‘This is my field,’ she pressed. ‘This is the sort of thing we’ve been researching for decades, stuff I’ve been reading about in journals and periodicals and God knows what. Expensive fucking journals with shiny covers. If one of us knows what is possible, it’s me.’

The words poured out of her, more in fear than anger, and more in denial than conviction. It was not possible, simply because it couldn’t be allowed to be. She spread out her hands, and shouted in a tone that was both plea and admonition in tandem. Ten years ago, she explained, Artificial Intelligence had been the new black in the world of computing. Everyone wanted to be first out with the perfect program, software that couldn’t be distinguished from conscious thought, that communicated like a human. But imitation was and remained just that. And before long, interest in all things artificial had waned.

‘Suddenly,’ she said, ‘everyone wanted to be the ones to recreate thought. Not just imitating thought through a load of advanced algorithms that can play chess and answer questions, but real, living thought. Independent decisions, feeling and reacting, conceiving abstract thoughts.’

With the help of vast computer networks, she went on, project after project had been started in the hope of being the first to achieve a single aim–to build a real, man-made consciousness. Billions were ploughed into recreating the human mind, only with cables and circuit boards and electronics. In several locations around the world, enormous sites were given imaginative names: the Blue Brain Project in Lausanne, the B.R.A.I.N. Initiative in the US, the Human Brain Project in Geneva, and all comprised enormous data halls, their capacity and content almost unimaginable, specially constructed to emulate the human brain. Not one of them had succeeded.

‘You can’t create thought,’ she said, and stood suspended for a moment, until out of nowhere a sad smile found its way into her eyes.

‘I can’t say why,’ she said slowly. ‘But that’s the way it is. However brilliantly we might program, we do not create life.’

She looked up at the stars.

‘Maybe it is the way I like it after all. Maybe there is something special about life, about love, everything. Divine, if you like, it doesn’t matter what you call it.’ She tipped her head. ‘Anyway, you can’t create consciousness from nothing. No matter how big a data hall you build, however many thousands of machines you connect to each other.’

William smiled back at her. His smile, though, was apologetic, commiserating, as though none of what she’d said had factored in.

‘That’s not really what I’m saying,’ he told her.

Rebecca’s smile sank away.

‘Well, then I don’t understand.’

‘You may very well be right,’ he said. ‘You cannot program minds, can’t produce intelligence to order. But that is not what’s happened here.’

He took a deep breath.

‘I should have listened to you sooner. Life occurs where the prerequisites exist.’

That was what he’d said to her on the gravel yard outside the garage, and then he’d taken her by the shoulders, locking her eyes:

‘Your friend with the plane. How quickly can we get to him?’

‘If we leave now we could arrive before it gets light.’

‘Good. I need to get to Sweden. They don’t know what they’re fighting against.’

Then he took her hand again, and pulled her with him back towards the building, as if to remind them both that the sands were running out for them, that they’d already stood there for too long.

‘Right now, he said without turning around, ‘the whole planet is searching for a terror cell that’s behind all this. A group of people–hackers, activists, possibly even a country–using the internet to wreak havoc. The problem is that they’ve got it wrong. The terrorist cell isn’t using the internet.’

He glanced over his shoulder.

‘It is the internet.’