Artifacts

  Dallaporta’s apartment, 1912, had a reinforced security door with an impressive-looking deadlock. I found a utilities room at the end of the corridor, and picked its lock easily enough. There was a hatch in the ceiling―and even a ladder standing in a corner of the room. I rechecked the plans of the building on my notepad: not every apartment had a ceiling hatch; 1911 did, 1912 didn’t.

  I climbed into the ceiling and crawled across the dusty beams as quietly as I could, hoping I hadn’t lost my bearings. I lay above apartment 1911, just listening, for almost five minutes―then I realized I’d never be certain it was empty. A baby sleeping, an adult quietly reading … I didn’t even know who lived there, I hadn’t had time to find out.

  Cursing silently, I crawled back to the utilities room, brushed myself down, and went and rang the bell to 1911.

  I rang three times. No one was home.

  I retraced my path, lifted the hatch, lowered a rope into the apartment. My forearms ached as I descended; I hadn’t done an illegal entry since before Mick was born. The old buzz was tinged with new anxieties: I was too old for this cat-burglar shit―and I couldn’t afford to lose my licence. But I felt a kind of defiant euphoria, too―because everything was harder, because I had so much more to lose.

  And it would all be one word, in TAP …

  The balconies of the two apartments were separated by less than a metre, but they were flush with the outside wall of the building―no overhang at all. I climbed up onto the waist-high foot’s-width concrete guard wall, steadied myself by pressing up with my left hand against the balcony’s ceiling―then with the right, reached across the naked brickwork of the outside wall and into Dallaporta’s balcony. I was lucky; I was on the side of the building facing away from the wind.

  I moved a foot across, too, embraced the brickwork tightly, shifted the centre of mass of my body a few crucial centimetres―fighting down momentary panic―and within seconds, my right hand and foot were lodged securely between Dallaporta’s guard wall and ceiling, and it was far easier to go forward than back. I jumped shakily down onto his cluttered balcony, just missing a pot plant. I glanced at the street, nineteen storeys below―and pictured Mick at my funeral, still refusing to talk to his father. There was a chance that someone had seen me cross, but there was nothing I could do about that―and the downpour seemed to shift the odds in my favour: I could barely make out Grace Sharp’s building at all, through the curtain of rain.

  A sliding glass door separated the balcony from the apartment. It fitted loosely between a ceiling track and a guide rail buried in the concrete floor; it was probably designed to be lifted right out, for ease of replacement―but only when it was unlocked. There was no question of trying to pick the lock; there was no keyhole―just a catch operated by a lever on the other side of the door. By pressing on the glass with both gloved hands, though, I could get enough purchase to raise and tilt the whole door slightly. After almost ten minutes―with my wrists going numb―I managed to work the catch free.

  I opened the door a few centimetres, then paused at the threshold, scanning the room for burglar alarms. It was clear.

  As I moved into the apartment, I heard footsteps in the corridor, then a key going into the lock. I retreated to the balcony, but it was too late to start climbing back the way I’d come; I would have been in full view. I slid the door closed―I couldn’t re-lock it―then dropped to the floor behind a pile of junk.

  I heard at least two people enter the apartment, then turn left into the corridor which led out of the living room. I took a button-sized video camera, and stuck it to the frame of Dallaporta’s bike, which was leaning against the wall of the balcony. I checked the image on my notepad, then tweaked the direction until I had a clear view of most of the room.

  I dropped out of sight again just in time. The intruders―a man and a woman, neither of whom I’d seen before―returned, carrying a cardboard carton about thirty centimetres long. I zoomed in; the labelling suggested a presentation bottle of Scotch. Dallaporta’s friends clearly didn’t share his paranoia; they knew the police weren’t watching the apartment. He wanted the laser to disappear―and they’d obligingly turned up to remove it.

  The woman said, “You think he wiped it properly?”

  The man hesitated. “I wouldn’t count on it.” I wondered why they hadn’t automated the process―but then, it would have been impossible to predict exactly when the opportunity to use the code on Grace Sharp would arise, or how many attempts it would take to hit the target.

  “Well, I’m not walking out of here carrying incriminating―”

  The man groaned―but he opened the carton. I recognized the laser from the catalogues I’d scanned; most of the bulk was in the precision optics, which doubled as a kind of telescope for checking alignment―the unit was meant for inner city rooftop-to-rooftop communications. There was a small device about the size of a matchbox plugged in to the data port; the man hit a button on the side of the box, and peered at a tiny LCD display.

  “Hey, the Jackal got it right. I’m impressed.” He laughed. “‘I thought: Why not keep it, just in case?’ The poor cretin really thought he had the > word―and he could go on playing kill-the-TAP-head for as long as he liked.”

  The woman said dryly, “Don’t be so ungrateful. If he’d known what he was doing, he wouldn’t have done it at all.”

  They left. I pocketed the camera and crossed back to 1911 immediately, not wanting to be in sight when they reached the street. In the ceiling, I had to force myself not to rush; if I was careless, I could still get caught.

  In five minutes, I was out of the building. I circled the block, then spiralled out through the surrounding streets, on the slim chance of catching sight of them again.

  After half an hour I gave up, and went into a coffee shop to replay the video. I should have been jubilant: I had a clear shot of a communications laser, and a soundtrack with two people discussing the killing of TAP-heads.

  The only catch was, it didn’t sound like they believed in > words any more than Maxine Ho or Helen Sharp.

  I invited Helen Sharp to my office. I showed her Dallaporta’s essay, and the geometry of the buildings. I played back the phone call, and the scene in his apartment.

  I said, “You’re the TAP expert. You want to tell me what’s going on?”

  She sat in silence for a long time before replying.

  “There is one possibility.”

  “Which is?”

  “My mother had the earliest model implant. Right to the end. She never had an upgrade―she didn’t trust them to transfer her vocabulary properly. She was afraid she’d lose everything she’d learnt.”

  “And you think … the old models did have a > word?”

  “No. But they could be microprogrammed externally.”

  “You’ve lost me.” That wasn’t quite true, but I wanted her to spell it out. I wasn’t sure how much I really did know about the implant―how much the glowing technical reports might have misled me.

  Sharp looked terrible―the fact that she’d just laid eyes on the people who’d arranged the death of her mother was finally sinking in―but she explained patiently: “The basic hardware of any neural net computer is just … a big array of interconnected RISC processors. The chip is mass-produced as a commodity―hundreds of millions of them a year―and used in tens of thousands of different devices. All the specific characteristics are added by the microcode: low-level instructions which customize the processors to make them behave in certain useful ways. The main software then takes that level for granted―as if it’s all hardwired into the silicon. But it’s not.

  “When they released the first consumer model of the TAP implant, Third Hemisphere were worried that there might be some undiscovered flaw in the microcode. If they’d had to take all the implants out of people’s skulls to correct it, that would have been a PR nightmare. So they left a routine in the microcode which gave it the power to accept updates in infrared―t
o modify any part of itself, given the right sequence of external instructions.”

  “So there was a special TAP word which could get at all the infrastructure? A word which said: >?”

  “No! It wasn’t a TAP word―it was a reserved sequence, right outside the language protocol! It was meaningless in TAP, it could never have been spoken. That was the whole point!”

  It seemed like a minor distinction to me―but I could understand why she attached so much importance to it. The language itself hadn’t killed her mother. The poet hadn’t died from a word, after all.

  I said, “If that’s what happened, though … why didn’t the engineers who examined your mother’s implant find any evidence of it? And if you knew all this―”

  Sharp snapped back angrily, “I didn’t know she still had the old microcode!” She looked away. “Nine or ten years ago, Third Hemisphere tried to persuade her to accept a new implant―for free. They’d finally discovered a bug in the original microcode―a minor one, nothing dangerous, but they wanted everyone to start using the later models. They were confident enough about those that they weren’t externally programmable anymore.

  “She wouldn’t accept it. She didn’t want a new implant, she didn’t want surgery. So they offered to update the microcode, to fix the bug―and close the trap door in the process, because I think that was also making them nervous. TAP users could never have spoken the code, even if they’d wanted to―but every consumer device on the planet was starting to put out a flood of infrared. There was always a tiny risk of triggering the modification program by accident.

  “I thought she’d had the new microcode for the last ten years. She told me she’d accepted the offer. The records Third Hemisphere supplied to the coroner stated that she had―and the engineer’s report confirmed that.”

  I said, “But if she’d actually refused it, like she’d refused the new implant―because she was afraid it might affect her skills with the language … then Dallaporta’s message might have done it all in one hit? Opened the trapdoor, undermined the black box, triggered a massive adrenaline release―then overwritten the evidence by substituting the version she was meant to have had all along?”

  “Yes.”

  “So who’d know enough to program all that?” Natural Wisdom? The Fountain of Righteousness? Hardly―though they could always have brought in outside expertise.

  Sharp was adamant: “Only one of Third Hemisphere’s own software engineers could do it. Someone who’d been involved in the TAP project from the start.”

  “But they’d have nothing to gain, surely? Why discredit your own work, your own product?”

  The product belonged to Third Hemisphere, though―not to any group of employees.

  And people did move on.

  I scanned fifteen years’ worth of implant manufacturers’ publications; they were full of PR releases gloating about heads successfully hunted.

  In March 2008, a firm called Cogent Industries had poached a software engineer named Maria Remedios from Third Hemisphere. That in itself proved nothing, of course―nor did the fact that an earlier article named her as a senior participant in the TAP project.

  Cogent did have something to gain, though. They specialized in Virtual Reality hardware―both immersive neural implants, and headset-based units. Third Hemisphere wasn’t so much a direct competitor as the source of an entire antithetical philosophy: VR was sold to publishers and advertizers as the path to unconditional suspension of disbelief; TAP was about questioning everything, analysing everything. The day every VR user spoke TAP, the most ingeniously crafted―and manipulative―VR experience would disintegrate into a laughable trick with smoke and mirrors. And if that wasn’t exactly an imminent threat, Grace Sharp’s death had certainly made it more remote than ever.

  They could have chosen Dallaporta by the same means I’d used to find him myself: a search for passionate opponents of TAP who also happened to have a clear view of Grace Sharp’s study. And whoever had made contact with him could have claimed to be a member of Natural Wisdom, or some other anti-implant group; he’d hardly have cooperated if he’d known the truth. When they’d told him about the High Court challenge―no doubt conjuring up images of a whole generation “lost to TAP”―Grace Sharp’s death must have begun to sound like a necessary evil. One old woman, for the sake of all those children. Death by her own obscene technological perversion of language. Nothing more than poetic justice.

  And Maria Remedios? Had Third Hemisphere treated her badly, left her holding a grudge―or had her new employers pressured her into it? Even if she’d had grave second thoughts about TAP―and recoiled at the prospect of the implant being given to children―helping to murder an innocent woman seemed like a grotesquely disproportionate response. She could have joined the public campaign against the implant; as one of its creators, the media would have given her all the coverage she desired. And though Dallaporta might have caved in to “moral” arguments offered under false pretences, Remedios could hardly have failed to understand that Cogent’s motives were entirely commercial.

  Nine tenths of the picture seemed to have fallen perfectly into place―but it was clear that I was missing something crucial. And too much even of that nine tenths was still pure guesswork. For a start, I had to establish solid evidence of a link between Dallaporta and Cogent Industries―which was going to be tricky, since he didn’t even know it existed, himself.

  I checked the faces of the man and woman I’d seen in Dallaporta’s apartment against all the trade magazine shots of Cogent’s employees.

  No match.

  I fed the Cogent employee names, along with my seventeen thousand TAP-haters, into the cluster analysis software―looking for a connection, however tenuous.

  There was none.

  So much for the easy options.

  I sent Dallaporta a message, via a rerouting service, asking if we could “continue our discussion”. The real Lydia Stone was ex-directory―and using a different number than the one she’d given the school would only prove that she was exercising suitable caution.

  Three hours later, Dallaporta called me back. He was polite, but very nervous. I said I had some news which would be of interest to him; he didn’t actually scream at me to shut up in case the line was being bugged, but his body language made it clear that if I so much as mentioned TAP he’d hang up immediately.

  I said, “Can I meet you somewhere? We really need to talk, face to face.”

  He hesitated. He badly wanted me to vanish from his life―but he needed to know what my “news” was. Why had I taken an interest in him? One old essay was hardly enough to explain it, so … how many people in the anti-TAP crusade knew what he’d done? And what did I know about Grace Sharp’s death which no one had bothered to tell him?

  Of course he was paranoid. The inquest was long over, the laser had been magicked away―but the fact remained: he’d stood on his balcony on a summer evening and shot a perfect stranger dead. Nothing could ever be the same again.

  He said flatly, “Tomorrow night, at the school. Nine o’clock.”

  I rehearsed the story in my head as I crossed the football field―which was brightly floodlit for some reason, though there wasn’t a soul around. A friend of a friend in a certain law firm had heard that Helen Sharp had discovered something in her mother’s computer files―something which had prompted her to start proceedings to try to gain access to Third Hemisphere’s records.

  I was sure that Dallaporta would pass the rumour on to his benefactors; the hardest part would be ensuring that he didn’t mention “my” name. So long as he remained tight-lipped about his source of information, they’d have to take him seriously.

  Helen Sharp was preparing a forged―paper―letter from her mother to Third Hemisphere, explicitly stating that she did not wish to accept the microcode update. I was confident that we had enough leverage now to persuade Third Hemisphere to play along, and bury the bait in the appropriate wareh
ouse.

  Maria Remedios would know at once what the “evidence” had to be. Cogent, acting on her advice, would try to arrange its disappearance. This time, they’d be caught red-handed.

  At least, that was the theory.

  Dallapporta had said he’d be in the “Resources Centre”―which these days apparently meant a large room full of work stations. I’d found a map of the school in an online brochure, so I knew exactly where to go. The door was open, though the lights were out―and as I approached the threshold I could see that all the machines inside had been switched on and connected to some net service or other. More of Dallaporta’s paranoia? Maybe he thought this was an ideal source of interference for the police surveillance teams who were following him everywhere―though the sound from most of the work stations was turned down to a whisper.

  I peered into the greyness of the room, dazzled and distracted by the multitude of images: swarms of tiny red and silver fish weaving through a coral reef; a polychrome computer animation of air flow around some kind of zeppelin; a portrait of a Florentine prince sprouting a speech balloon full of modern Italian; a dead silver-haired twentieth century guru emitting platitudes about the nature of truth. An old music video was playing by the door; the singer droned: “This is the way, step insi-i-ide.”

  I smiled uneasily at the coincidence and walked into the room―resisting the urge to shout a greeting, mocking Dallaporta’s elaborate “precautions”. It seemed far more diplomatic to play along. I stage whispered, “It’s me. Where are you?”

  No reply.

  It was hard to get my eyes accustomed to the darkness with forty or fifty bright screens in view; I had no reason whatsoever to look at any of the images―but it was remarkably difficult to keep looking away. I walked slowly towards the far end of the room, irritated but prepared not to show it. I called out again, a little louder; there was still no reply.

  An animated supernova erupted just ahead of me―and the sudden blue-white radiance revealed a man slumped in a chair beside the screen. I moved closer, and inspected the body by the light of the dying sun.