75

Ten minutes after they’d all assembled in the meeting room on the ground floor, Forester noticed that she was struggling to breathe. The temperature, she told herself.

On the wall in front of them the big flatscreen TV set was on, spreading both heat and light. It was connected to the laptop in the middle of the table, a battered, cracked old thing that looked ready for some museum of technology, and which in turn was connected to a series of humming hard discs and other units that were all combining to raise the temperature in here by at least a couple of degrees. Plus, there were six of them in a room where you couldn’t open the windows.

The real reason, though, had nothing to do with a lack of oxygen. The cause was stress, a feeling of detachment from reality, an unwillingness to digest everything that the strange bearded man had just shown her.

‘I don’t understand.’

It was a pretty accurate summary of all the things whirling in her head at that point. Like how on earth could a living caricature of a trawlerman, this ham radio enthusiast, be sitting in a room inside the Swedish Armed Forces’ headquarters giving her information? Lists of dates. Sound recordings he’d made of the shortwave band. Long strings of digits that had suddenly been recited on frequencies that had been dormant for years, six, nine, two, two, a ghostly, lifeless voice that had then been replaced by wild trumpet blasts of data. Blasts that had been answered by transmitters around the world, at the same places and on the same dates as the attacks, and which–and this was the worst of it–had since moved up a gear and become long, uninterrupted data streams on hundreds of different channels.

She was sweating, she was struggling for air, and all of it was his fault.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said again. ‘All these transmissions… you claim that they’re coming from London?’

‘Not all of them. The number sequences, yes. But the data blasts are like a dialogue. As though London is calling and then getting replies.’

‘From New York, Rio de Janeiro, Lisbon,’ she said.

‘Amongst other places. Marseille, Yokohama, Los Angeles. Everywhere, across the globe.’

For a second Forester caught herself wanting to just scream out loud–Trottier! Explain for Christ’s sake–but Trottier was no longer around, and out of nowhere came that feeling of inadequacy again, the feeling that she’d been given a task she wasn’t capable of completing. Or, worse still, that they had chosen her specifically because they didn’t think she was up to it, so that they deliberately and purposefully could control her and keep her in the dark—

That thought made her look around the room, back and forth between all the eyes in there, all of them waiting for her to say something. What if it wasn’t just a feeling?

‘I do apologise,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s a bit much to take in.’

‘I’m the one who should be apologising,’ Christina said. ‘We haven’t even started.’

Returning to the glass building was like coming back to a place after many years away, and yet it had actually been only a single, long, eventful day.

As they approached, William leaned towards the window, watching the luminescent silver cigar get closer and closer. The fog was gone now, and the building stood there in the middle of the wounded landscape as though dumped at random into the fields that were waiting to be developed, from the outside apparently completely untouched by last night’s events.

They swung into the car park and he noticed a handful of cars parked on the large expanse of tarmac–one of which featured the logo of what was surely a security firm, while others were probably tradesmen or repairmen–and he thanked the driver and stepped out into the rain without answering the question of what he was planning to do out here in the middle of the night. He walked up to the entrance, and waited for the doors to slide open by themselves.

In the middle of the round reception area he saw two security guards get to their feet.

‘I’m here to meet someone,’ he said, in English, before they’d had the chance to ask.

‘It is closed,’ came the reply. They stayed standing, with wide stances and body language that eloquently told him that he could have whatever reason he liked for coming there, he was still not welcome.

William kept walking. In front of each of the three lift shafts, tall scaffolding had already been erected, with thick poles and plywood sheets replacing the missing joists and glass panes. Much of the floor was cordoned off with black and yellow tape, but apart from that as much of yesterday’s debris as possible had already been removed. Only if you knew what had happened would it be possible to imagine that the pattern of tiny scratches on the stone floor had come from the enormous volume of shattered glass that had very recently tried to kill him.

‘The building is sealed off,’ said the other guard, as though he had his doubts about his colleague’s command of English. And when William still failed to stop he flung his arm out towards the scaffolding, as though that would cover it. ‘And it’s past midnight, there’s nobody here.’

‘I think they’re expecting me,’ William said, without breaking eye contact. He stopped at the desk with a polite smile, as though he himself considered it perfectly normal to turn up at a foreign office block for a twelve thirty a.m. meeting.

‘I don’t think they are,’ said the first one. ‘We have had an incident with the technology. Most of the offices haven’t even been open today.’

‘I have a meeting on the top floor. A project called Rosetta. I’m pretty sure that I should be on the list.’

For the second time he strained to maintain eye contact, then saw the guards roll their eyes at him before turning towards one of the computers on the desk to type something in.

In the second-long silence that resulted, William noted once again how the situation hung in the balance. Imagine if his name wasn’t there at all. Or if what appeared on the screen now were CCTV images from last night? A wanted list, maybe, that someone–something–had put on their system? For a moment he could feel the sweat gathering on his back, the fear that he had been led right into a dead end that he wasn’t going to get out of.

Eventually one of the guards looked up.

‘We didn’t think anyone was still here at this hour,’ he said, in a tone halfway between apology and admonishment. ‘Your name?’

William hesitated. ‘Söderbladh,’ he said. ‘Karl Axel,’ forcing himself to not make it sound like a question. Should he have said Sandberg? On the other side of the desk, the two guards expertly refrained from moving a facial muscle. ‘I’m from a company called Amberlangs,’ he added, and after that the silence continued for another couple of seconds, William thinking fuck, it’s all over now.

One of the guards turned the screen around to show him. William peered over.

There it was: neither William Sandberg nor Karl Axel Söderbladh, just Amberlangs, on the list for a 00:30 visit, however bizarre that seemed. But everything a computer tells you is true, and now that William Sandberg’s credentials had been confirmed, one of the guards waited for the computer to spit out a visitor’s badge which was to be visible at all times and surrendered before leaving the site.

‘It’s the top floor,’ he said when it had finished. ‘I’m afraid the lifts are out of service.’

William nodded. ‘Actually, I prefer stairs.’

As soon as the bearded man had finished giving his account, Christina Sandberg introduced the bald woman who had been sitting in silence alongside them. Her name was Rebecca Kowalczyk.

‘I don’t know whether you know of a man named Michal Piotrowski.’ She spoke in exceptionally good English, perhaps with just a hint of a Polish accent. Forester, at her end of the table, shook her head. ‘He’s the founder of a Warsaw-based project called Rosetta.’

‘Rosetta?’ said Forester, feeling the ground shake under her. Only after she’d said it did she realise it had sounded like someone had just stabbed her with a pin. ‘As in ROSETTA1998?’

‘Yes,’ said the woman. ‘As I understand it that was the email address he used to contact Sandberg.’

To Forester, it was as though someone had filled the entire room with people who not only knew more than she did, but also seemed to be sitting on precisely the pieces of the puzzle she had been looking for, and happened to casually mention them in passing. She clutched at the first question that popped up.

‘What do you know about William Sandberg?’

‘I know that he is innocent of what you are accusing him of. I know that my fiancé–Michal Piotrowski–contacted him because of… a discovery.’ She went quiet for a moment, as though she didn’t really like the word. ‘That discovery is what I want to share with you now.’

A quarter of an hour later, when Rebecca Kowalczyk had finished saying what she had to say, no one else spoke for several minutes.

‘I know the thoughts that are running through your heads right now,’ Rebecca said after quite some time. ‘I am a qualified neurobiologist myself–every protest, every objection, every question you have in your heads right now, I have been through myself, just in more scientifically correct terminology.’

What’s the scientific term for bullshit? thought Forester. What the bald woman was standing there spouting could not be true. A cable is a cable is a fucking cable, don’t come telling me it isn’t.

If what Rebecca Kowalczyk said was true, it meant that every single judgement call they’d made had sent them running in precisely the wrong direction. There was no terrorist organisation, no foreign power, not even a network of spotty programmers sitting in basements playing at being kings. However much they looked, however many doors they kicked down, they would never find their enemy anywhere.

Instead, they were fighting a Consciousness: a living self without a body. How do you combat something like that? How do you defeat an enemy that doesn’t even have a physical form?

Palmgren stood up. ‘How could it even be possible?’ he asked. ‘What you are describing–alleging–how could it even exist?’

‘How can we exist?’ Rebecca said with an understated shrug. ‘Design. Evolution. Chance. All of the above. I don’t know exactly, no one knows exactly. I am pretty sure, though, that if you had described our world to a single-cell organism a few billion years ago, then it would also have thought it was pretty far-fetched.’

‘Christina used my phone!’ He looked desperate now, as if he just couldn’t let her be right. ‘She called Sara’s voicemail, published a column–if this consciousness of yours extends to every little copper wire on the planet, how was she able to do that without being discovered?’

‘How is it that we can let a tick go undetected on our skin for days? How can we discover a mosquito bite afterwards, without knowing how it got there?’

Palmgren scoffed, and now Rebecca raised her voice. There were no answers, she told him. Consciousness is a strange thing. Some actions provoke an instant reaction–pain and sound and sudden changes. Others do not. We are constantly bombarded with information that we filter out, like the pressure of our clothes on our skin, the smell of our own washing powder, the sound of the wind and whirring computers and cars driving past.

And sometimes we do miss things that we ought to have noticed–someone shouting after us, the sound when the microwave is done–because we happen to be busy elsewhere. So why would the internet’s consciousness be any different? Given the stimuli streaming through its nerves every single second, would it be that surprising if the odd thing slipped through without being registered?

‘I don’t know,’ she finished. ‘That’s all I’m saying. Maybe it wasn’t immediately obvious if someone else was using your phone? If you’ve just hijacked nearly seventy nuclear power stations, perhaps you’ve got a lot going on?’ She shook her head. ‘All we can be sure of,’ she said, ‘is that these attacks you have seen in New York, Frankfurt, Amsterdam… we don’t think they are attacks. We believe that they are reactions.’

Silence filled the void of her speech. Eventually Palmgren sat down again.

‘In that case,’ he said wearily, ‘why would such a consciousness do… this?’ He flung his arms out towards nothing, yet there was no doubt in anyone’s mind what he was referring to. ‘To scare us? To destroy us? If the internet has a consciousness–why would it bear us any malice?’

‘You are asking the wrong question,’ said Forester at the far end of the table, turning all heads towards her. They’d almost forgotten she was there. ‘The question isn’t why. The question is how we stop it.’

‘How are we going to be able to stop it,’ said Palmgren, ‘without asking ourselves why it’s happening?’

‘If a car comes hurtling towards you at full speed,’ she said, ‘do you jump out of the way? Or do you politely ask the driver what his intentions are?’

‘Personally,’ said Palmgren, ‘I think that if I don’t find out why he’s doing it then he’s probably going to do it again.’

‘I appreciate that you want to see the good in everyone,’ she said, dry, clear, and concise. ‘But we don’t negotiate with terrorists. Whether they actually exist, or…’ She looked around the room. A searching glare, as though they were to blame for her being unable to finish the sentence without sounding insane. ‘… or whether they are some kind of electronic ghost that nobody has ever seen.’

‘Do you know what?’ said Palmgren with a smile. ‘I think it might be a bit too late.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I think the negotiations are already under way.’