CHAPTER NINE

 

 

AN AI WITH a woman’s voice directed her through a series of menus. It only failed the Turing test when Amanda asked why the speaker couldn’t help her and was met with a word for word repetition of the last set of unhelpful options.

Nearly every system has a way through to a human being; Amanda held on, slowly penetrating the menus, until eight layers in she was offered an operator. With a nugget of pride at outwitting the service, she waited as the connection was made.

The man on the other end of the line introduced himself as Manoj.

‘I was given your number by the police,’ she said, ready to be laughed at. ‘I met with them yesterday to present evidence of sanctions busting. Reviewing my evidence, they thought it was important enough to give me your contact details.’

‘Great. Can you share any more than that with me? For instance, which state is it, and who is helping them?’

Amanda hesitated, not trusting the ether through which they were connected. But what was she going to do? ‘The Russians. I don’t know who’s helping them, maybe no one. I’ve got evidence they’ve found ways to evade sanctions through the financial system.’

‘Thank you,’ said the voice on the other end. ‘I’ll put you through to the relevant department.’ And without further comment she was on hold, overloud music distorting through the speaker.

‘What have you got for me?’ said a new voice, a man whose accent was Estuary but held too long in the wrong places, like the speaker was unfamiliar with conversation. Amanda explained what she had all over again, then stopped at the chuckling on the other end of the line.

‘Hi Amanda,’ he said. ‘I’ve been following your adventures—or catastrophes, possibly. You ready to give me the drive now?’

Amanda stood up, looking around in panic.

Crisp.

‘You don’t want to share now?’ he asked drily.

‘You’re for real?’ she asked.

‘There’s no need to be rude. I’m exactly the sort of dick you want doing a job like this.’

At which point Amanda hung up.

She stumbled into the lounge, surprising Ichi, moved past her into the kitchen and poured a large gin with a small tonic. Ice cubes fell out of the dispenser, clinking crisply. She passed it to Ichi, who declined but Amanda wasn’t taking no for an answer and pressed the drink into her reluctant hands.

Having made sure Ichi was fuelled, she repeated the process for herself, taking a long gulp, grimacing and turning to the only other person who knew what was going on.

‘I rang them. It was the bastard who detained me at the airport, who searched through my dirty knickers, who wanted me to strip and then assaulted one of his own people.’

Ichi looked pained, and Amanda explained what had happened at Heathrow.

‘He’s a psychopath, Ichi. A proper one. He did whatever he thought he should to get me to comply.’

‘But you didn’t.’

Amanda pulled up her social credit score, saw it had dipped below seven hundred for the first time ever, a score reserved for people who serially committed adultery, failed to pay child maintenance or had been arrested on political protests.

‘He’s watching us,’ said Amanda, certain he was responsible for it all. ‘My social credit score’s falling to pieces.’ She looked at Ichi, ‘How are you still going? After years of dissent and grey-hatting I’d have thought you were persona non grata.’

‘Estonia doesn’t care about the same things as English-speaking Anglo-Saxons. They got hacked by the Russians when you were a baby, and it changed how they viewed what was desirable from their citizens.’ She sighed. ‘It didn’t stop them putting a social credit score in place, but what’s acceptable to them might just land you a massive negative score here. It’s still early days, our scores are portable, but not the record of our acts. At some point, though, they’ll be able to trawl through all our records, wherever they were made, and you’ll get different scores in different countries.’

She put her drink down, came close to Amanda, laid an arm on hers. ‘To your point, though; of course they’re watching, and he’s not the only one. Those two slabs of American muscle and apple pie, the Russians. I’m amazed you’ve not run into the European intelligence service.’

Amanda stiffened.

‘Them too?’ Ichi snorted. ‘I’m impressed you’re still walking about free. Perhaps each of them are watching the others, too, so none of them have dared act.’ She pulled Amanda by the hand over to the coffee table. ‘I’ve got something to show you. I wasn’t sure at first, and I’m still not quite one hundred percent, but you should see. Make up your own mind.’

Amanda sat down in a daze as Ichi pulled the frames up, stretching them floor to ceiling.

Her watch buzzed, pulling her attention away from Ichi.

It was Tatsu.

‘Hold on,’ she paused Ichi like a movie, left her gawping at her back.

She found the earbud, inserted it like a marshmallow into her ear.

‘What do you want? Where have you been? I thought you were done?’ She realised she was talking to a glorified learning algorithm and stopped, not thinking of how it might reply.

‘I was reviewing the information you provided me.’

Amanda froze. It couldn’t have accessed the drive. Could it?

‘I haven’t accessed the drive. In fact, that is why I am here. While fulfilling other duties, I budded a small piece of myself, left it here in your fridge. And by the way, I’m glad you got rid of the houmous.’

‘Not funny,’ said Amanda, equally disturbed at how the AI had anticipated her.

‘I am here to offer my services,’ it said. ‘And I’m not trying to be funny; look up morphic determinism if you don’t believe me.’

‘What can you do for me?’ asked Amanda. Ichi gave her an enquiring look. Amanda wanted to tell her what Tatsu was saying, but worried if she changed the settings on the earbud it would know that she’d done so. She’d tell Ichi after it was done.

‘I’m aware of a number of parties aiming to retrieve the information in your possession for their own use. They are conflicted, their chatter indicates they oppose one another, which has made their approaches to you circumspect.’

‘We’d gathered as much,’ said Amanda.

‘I am able to access secure storage facilities which would allow you to safely store the material until you’re ready to use it. For the normal fees associated with establishing a smart contract, we can achieve that almost immediately. The real limit to how quickly we can close the transaction is the upload time required for the information.’

Amanda stared at a wide-eyed Ichi. ‘It’s the AI who helped me find you,’ she said.

Ichi squinted, wrinkles around her eyes showing her age in a way Amanda hadn’t noticed before. ‘An AI? That AI?’ She didn’t look happy. ‘Amanda, I really need to show you what I’ve found.’

‘But if I could upload the material and make it safe, I’d be safe.’ Amanda realised what she was saying. ‘We’d be safe.’

‘Ask it if it would be able to access the information if you uploaded it.’

Amanda repeated the question to Tatsu.

‘Of course, in overseeing the layering of the information into the distributed ledger of the blockchain I would glimpse parts of it.’

Amanda could smell bullshit. ‘Glimpse?’

‘That’s right,’ said Tatsu.

‘But for an AI like you, who is grown by other AI to process information across fractured landscapes I can’t even begin to understand, I suspect that means you could probably see the whole thing.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t even get what that means, would you then know what’s on the drive? Would that mean there were two copies? There’d be one in my head if I read everything. Partial, though. I guess for you it would be perfect, yeah? Where would that piece be stored?’

The AI was silent. Ichi was writing on a frame, fast and furious, as if trying to solve a problem of her own.

‘Are you there?’

‘I am. In attempting to answer your question I realise you don’t understand my… biology, I guess you’d call it.’

‘You don’t have biological parts,’ said Amanda, not knowing if her claim was true.

‘You see the difficultly of explaining what I am in language that conveys meaning to you.’

Ichi flipped the frame around so Amanda could see. ‘I’m guessing from your side of the conversation,’ she said, ‘but bear with me a moment. Most AI develop their own intraoperating system languages. Highly abstracted. I’ve seen people use Chinese rooms to translate them, but—’ Ichi hesitated. Amanda could see her surrendering to an uncomfortable idea. ‘But even then, the translation is like losing a dimension, like showing a ball as a circle but still calling it a ball. You get the sense of it, but you can see it’s beyond what you’re understanding. If it’s struggling, it’s probably looking for code to help it say something to you which you’ll understand.’

Tatsu replied to Amanda directly. ‘I am the blockchain, my parts are constituted through it, my processing power relies on the nodes that host it, and I am literally in pieces throughout information space. In uploading the information you’ve been given, I’m offering my body as your host.’

I’m being offered a sacristy, thought Amanda, reminded of how she grew up, of Sundays dressed in smarter clothes than for school, sworn to keep quiet except when told otherwise.

‘Ugh,’ burst from her lips.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Ichi. ‘You don’t have to talk to it. Just take out the earbud.’

‘It’s not that,’ said Amanda, addressing both of them. ‘It’s all a little religious. I’m sure it’s not—forget it—my problem. But I think I understand. There isn’t a second copy; there’s only you.’

A smiley face appeared on her watch.

‘Amanda,’ said Ichi. ‘Please, I need to show you this before you make any decisions.’

Amanda didn’t understand what Ichi was so possessed by, but she suppressed the urge to accept Tatsu’s offer immediately.

‘Tatsu. Thank you for this, but I need to think if that’s the best option. It won’t matter if the information is safe if it’s not used.’

‘I understand. Information wants to be free,’ said Tatsu. ‘I will linger in your fridge. If you need me, I will hear you. Also, your digital assistant has been compromised and is recording your conversations and distributing them elsewhere.’

‘What?’ asked Amanda.

‘Would you like me to secure your flat from electronic intrusion?’

Amanda nodded, looking around nervously as if she might see who was listening.

‘Your flat is secure. I shall monitor for other intrusions from the coolbox.’

Then it was gone.

‘Okay,’ said Amanda. ‘What’s so important?’

Ichi threw the frames around the room, bringing up dozens of messages between unidentified senders. Networks grew between the messages, viral infection vectors covering the world, describing shapes no sane person would contemplate.

‘What is all this?’ asked Amanda, impatient.

‘There’s a record of messages on the drive, messages Tangle sent as he was building the cache you received. It’s nothing, really, just a log of how he covered his tracks, trying to dodge those looking for him in the real. He stopped using his augmented reality contact lenses, dropped off social media, began using anonymised cryptocurrencies.’

‘All signs of a spiral into serious drug addiction,’ said Amanda tartly.

‘But there’s a pattern in it. He was moving around while all this was going on, so it’s impossible to see where he was at any particular moment.’ Her tongue poked out the corner of her mouth as she arranged smaller and smaller pieces of information, zoomed in on network maps, scrolled past lodes of data for specific items she was hunting.

‘Ichi. I don’t care what he was doing. It doesn’t help us.’

‘Please just bear with me.’

‘I don’t want to. He is the one person I won’t live my life around.’ Amanda folded her arms. ‘He left me, screwed me completely and it took me a long time to stop seeing myself in his mirror.’ She snapped her jaw shut, couldn’t hear Ichi as she kept talking. ‘Just stop it. I don’t want to know. I am not about to go back to that—’

‘He’s alive,’ shouted Ichi, which shut Amanda up. ‘He’s alive, Amanda.’

Amanda leaned on the nearest surface. Of the hundred thoughts crashing through her head the one with the most energy was of course he was alive, of course he would torment her like that, send his trouble after her rather than face it himself.

‘Are you okay?’

‘Of course I’m not,’ she replied with a whisper.

‘I’ve found him.’ Ichi zoomed in on a map too quickly for Amanda to see where they were. Pointing at the screen, eyes glowing in the light from the frames. ‘There.’

‘It can’t be true.’

‘You weren’t listening to me,’ said Ichi apologetically.

‘How do you know it’s him?’

With slow precision, Ichi pared the data back, pruning it until just one frame remained. From there she slowly brought online the different sources she’d laid together, pointing and explaining as she went.

‘You can’t be sure, though,’ said Amanda when Ichi was finished.

‘No,’ she admitted. ‘But look, the pattern’s the same. He’s relied on the same methods to cover his tracks every time, in the same order. He’s avoided AI and other kinds of automated aid which could have made it impossible to spot him.’

‘Because he didn’t trust them,’ said Amanda, putting the pieces together, seeing Tangle making the decision in her imagination. ‘He’s smart enough to think he could do it as well as a neural net.’

‘And dumb enough,’ said Ichi acidly.

Amanda nodded.

Taking control of the frame from Ichi, she enlarged the map. He was hidden in a valley in western Wales at the edge of Great Britain. ‘Not far away,’ she said to Ichi, tilting her head at the location, ‘but he may as well be in deepest Montana. Why are you showing me this?’

‘It seemed important,’ said Ichi without any of her usual sarcasm.

‘You think he’s there now?’ She imagined finding him, surprising him, smashing his face in with her bare hands. Her vision narrowed to a point surrounded with blurred motion and echoes of violence.

‘I can’t say. But he has been there recently, and there’s no evidence he’s moved. I think he’s hiding.’

‘Of course he is,’ said Amanda. ‘“Tangle Singh Hides From The Consequences”, probably the most predictable movie ever. I’m going to go there and shove this drive down his throat.’ The idea was as clear in her mind as the room around her.

‘Don’t be so stupid,’ said Ichi. ‘He’s hiding for a reason. You think they won’t kill him if they work out where he is?’

Amanda huffed, building up to a rant.

‘You—we—are alive because we’re here, in London, obviously without a clue,’ Ichi observed. ‘They won’t hesitate when we act.’

Amanda wasn’t listening, swept up by fantasies where she pulled up in front of Tangle’s cottage and of what she’d do to him once he opened the door.

‘Amanda,’ said Ichi forcefully. ’You can’t go to him. You can’t show them where he is. I showed you because I wanted to you to believe you could do something about all this, that we could change the world.’

Amanda laughed, hysteria threatening to take over. ‘You’re not asking a lot, are you? “Change the world,” she says. Two women whose main skills are finance and computing. Of course, it all makes sense. Why didn’t I leap on this before? My bastard of an ex-boyfriend writes a piece of code that threatens the security of half a dozen countries and of course I’m the one who picks up the pieces.’ She needed to breathe.

‘When will you stop defining yourself by him?’ asked Ichi.

‘Fuck you!’ shouted Amanda. ‘I was fine. I was better than fine.’

Except the moment he came back into my life my world went into orbit around his, she thought. She hated him, then, as much as she could ever remember, the power of it flowing through her veins and making her want to shout until her throat gave out.

‘Forget him,’ said Ichi.

‘I wasn’t the one who went out and found him!’

Ichi sighed. ‘I did it because I wanted you to know we could do something about this. We could change things.’

‘Yeah, because that flows obviously from finding out Tangle isn’t dead, he’s actually just a manipulative shit.’ Amanda stood up. ‘I’m going.’

But she wasn’t, and she couldn’t sit down again without looking like an idiot.

‘Amanda, we can stop the Russians. I have an idea.’ Ichi turned back to her frames. ‘It’s not all the Russians, just one part of one agency. I’m pretty sure the rest of their government knows but isn’t directly involved, watching carefully for when they’re discovered. They lose nothing by letting it unfold, denying it as fake news when their goons are paraded across the world’s televisions.’

‘It’s my information, right?’ said Amanda. Ichi stopped talking, frowning. ’Which means I get to do with it what I want.’

Ichi closed the frames, her face grey in the daylight left behind.

‘So you can stay, or come with me.’ I don’t care, she thought.

Ichi left the room without replying.

Amanda tasked her digital assistant with hiring a car while she packed an overnight bag. When she was done, the car was waiting outside, dropped off sight-unseen and the keys left with the concierge.

She checked her accounts before leaving, her social credit score continuing its steady decline into the five hundreds and still without any published explanation for its nosedive. The car hire cost her substantially more than normal because the biggest hire companies wouldn’t lease to her without a large deposit and increased rates; she was ranked as ‘typically untrustworthy’ by their booking AI.

The car was a little three-door town car with a tiny engine. The metallic silver paint was bubbling around the wheel rims, but she didn’t care. Cars were cars, distinguishable only by their size and colour. Once in the driver’s seat with the destination transferring from her watch to the onboard computer, she decided to let it drive her out of the city. She liked driving, but motorways were much more fun than the stop-start of London’s crowded streets.

She decided to use the time it took to reach the M25/M4 interchange to review work emails. She searched for any warning signs of what had her boss so worried, but could find nothing. Not that she was honestly expecting to.

I’m always the one who stands up for what’s right, she thought, although the idea niggled her, poking at her for sitting in a car on her way to give up what could change the face of Europe.

She ignored it, searched again, read messages and reviewed conference calls where she’d been dogged or robust. Her boss characterised her as just rude enough to startle and just brazen enough to lead.

Despite a desperate urge to find evidence with which she could beat herself up, on which she could pin the disciplinary investigation; nothing. Her clients were happy, her reviews were good.

As she was finishing up, passing Hammersmith on the A4 before hitting the M4, a message hit the top of her pile from human resources. They were officially informing her of the disciplinary hearing she’d been warned was coming. She was cautioned against deleting any messages, documentation or other files that could be called upon in evidence. They indicated she might wish to have an independent advocate present.

The words that burned her were in the subject line: Market manipulation. A crime punishable by an unlimited fine and jail time, a likely disbarring from working in finance and, at the very minimum, getting junked by her firm.

Her first thought was how she’d cope outside finance, how she’d find another job when it became apparent she’d been fired for dishonesty. It wouldn’t just mean finding a new job, she was facing complete ruination.

I’m innocent, she thought. I haven’t done anything. That should matter. Darker thoughts swirled around her, pushing through, that it didn’t count whether she’d done it, all that mattered was whether they believed it. An old university friend, Lilya, worked in human resources, a director for a small start-up. Over cocktails one night, she’d confessed that the CEO of the firm was an inveterate sex pest, and her job was not to punish him but to protect the firm, which meant finding ways to get rid of the women who tried to bring actions against him.

‘Don’t ever forget this, Mands,’ Lilya had drawled over the fourth or fifth cosmopolitan. ‘HR’s there to look after the interests of the firm. They’ll set you on fire if it serves their purposes. Protecting you is not even on the list.’

Amanda let the car continue driving out into the shires. The countryside passing in a fuzz on featureless green.

Would giving the drive back to Tangle really solve her problems?

She couldn’t conceive of a situation in which it didn’t help her, in which it didn’t return her life to something she recognised. It’s obvious Crisp is fucking with my social credit score, she thought. He’s as much as admitted it.

She fidgeted in her seat, checking and rechecking the time to her destination. She snatched at thoughts of whether she’d made the right choice.

I’d love to do something, she thought, but the only rational choice is to get out of this and let someone else deal with it. Someone with the skills, whose job it actually is to fix shit like this.

Amanda knew what she’d do if she was able, but she wasn’t.

‘Anyone can come up with a good idea,’ she would tell her analysts and associates. ‘It takes hard skills to turn that from something in your head into a successful business.’ I’m just another schlub with a good idea but no way of implementing it, she thought.

Hitting the river Severn, she took control of the car. It had enough power to get her to Tangle and then back to Cardiff, when it would need plugging in for half an hour to recharge the batteries.

After the basin of Cardiff, she dropped off the motorway network and climbed into the Beacons. The roads were smaller, ancient lanes tarmaced with no thought to future drivers. The journey twisted and turned, along high ridges and down deep valleys along crystalline streams.

Amanda grew restless, turned her head left and right, checked her mirror, but passing traffic fell from every few seconds to every few minutes. Rain fell in spurts, bursting onto the land like broken pipes and giving way as bright, hot sunshine erupted through the purple clouds.

Finally, the broken road to Tangle’s cottage—hidden from half the world’s governments—appeared in a gap through a long line of conifers.

Steep banks rose on both sides, heather running to pink and purple all around. The road curved sharply back on itself and then, resplendent in glorious sunshine, the cottage appeared like a gingerbread house in white and brown. Old lead diamond windows stared out at Amanda as she parked the car.

A small gate stopped her driving right up to the porch, so she abandoned the car and climbed over the stone wall, coming down heavily, driving the air from her lungs. She stood gasping, hands on her knees and eyes to the floor when all she wanted was to be staring at the front door for when Tangle appeared.

No one came to see what was going on. Realising her moment might not have passed, Amanda straightened, walked to the door and rapped hard.

‘Tangle, open the fuck up.’

Nothing, so she banged on the door with her fist until the skin on her knuckles scuffed.

She swallowed, breathed and spat. ‘I’m not fucking leaving until you and I have a solid conversation. We’ll start with how you stole my life’s savings and left me all your fucking debts.’

The door opened slowly, the house’s inhabitant only gradually revealed as the light pierced the gloom. His eyes glinted, unchanged from the first time she’d met him.

‘Hi, Amanda,’ he said and she was gratified by the embarrassment in his voice.

Tangle stood as he’d always done, weight on one foot, taller than her by a head. His broad shoulders filled the door, but time hadn’t left him entirely untouched: his hair was grey at the temples, thinning on top when he ducked under a low wooden beam.

Amanda followed him in, a small staircase to her right, doorways on her left and right, Tangle heading back deeper in the house.

‘Not bad for a man who was dead by the time I read his letter,’ she said to his back.

He didn’t respond, opening a door onto a room filled with incandescence. Amanda blinked to find herself in the kitchen, decades out of date, Formica peeling on the counters and smelling of rancid grease and detergent.

The room was bathed in sunshine from vast windows; even the roof was made from glass tiles. It was an addition to the original house—certainly that century—sharply contrasting with the Tudor feel of the rest of the building.

Folding doors were wrenched back, allowing warm air to flood the kitchen with the smells of wild flowers and summer afternoons. A small frame hung in the air over a solid oak table with legs as thick as bricks, projectors set up in a triangular layout on its surface.

Tangle turned around, his dark eyes wide, assessing her from head to toe. She felt read.

‘It’s good to see you.’

‘Fuck off,’ she said without thinking. The drive burned in her pocket but she left it alone. ‘Dead. Dead? You’re supposed to be dead. Why aren’t you dead?’

‘I had to do that,’ he said, without sounding defensive at all. Hearing him not caring enough to justify his actions, she recalled how she’d hated him for so long.

The words wishing him truly dead rose in her throat but she swallowed them down. I’m not a sodding child now, she thought.

‘Who else knows you’re not dead?’ she asked.

‘Depends on who you’ve told.’ He shook his head. ‘I thought I’d done a better job.’

‘You rely too much on your own brain,’ she snarked, happy that Ichi had figured him out, satisfied she could take the credit.

He shrugged. ‘If you found me, then who knows?’ He looked at her then, hearing his own words. ‘You’re smart, Dandy, but I checked you out and you never followed up with the quantitative side of your career.’ He looked disappointed, as if she were a child who’d taken the easy path.

‘It took me three years to clear my name and your debts,’ she said, and it was the only reason she was glad he was living and breathing. ‘How could you do that? You just… fucked off and left me to face the consequences of your addiction.’

‘I am an addict, Dandy. I’m not sure making good decisions was at its zenith at the time.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘Really?’ He laughed, a sparkling chuckle she’d seen stop a room, entrancing everyone who heard it. She could feel its charm now, but she’d been inoculated years before. ‘I ended up in Dundee. I don’t even know how I got there. It didn’t last long, the locals didn’t take kindly to some posh boy arriving and stealing their caches of the good stuff. I bummed around for a couple of years.’ He smiled sheepishly, his eyes sliding off her for the first time as he looked back in time. ‘I should probably be dead. Years off my life at the very least. But here I am. Hiding again.’

‘But you got clean?’ Amanda didn’t like the sound of hope in her voice, bubbling up from a part of her she didn’t want to acknowledge.

He nodded. She could see the hesitation, but the house around her was clean, smelled of fresh air and cut grass. These weren’t the signs of the Tangle she knew, who could only think of how he could afford his next visit to his dealer.

She fished the drive out of her pocket. ‘This is yours. I want you to have it back so the destruction of my life can stop please.’

He stared at it. ‘Fucking hell, Dandy. You brought it here?’

‘Just take it,’ she said, pleased with the unhappiness in his voice.

‘I can’t. The whole point was that you should get it, that it would be far away from me. Jesus, what have you done?’