The black-clad funeral procession wending its way through Peterborough's rain-slicked streets occluded his vision.
"You're dead," he told the image.
"Gone but not forgotten."
That malicious chuckle. Perfect. Him.
"Sorry to give you a shock, m'boy, but I'd never have called unless it was absolutely vital. Can you come out to Wilholm? I really can't discuss too much over the phone. I'm sure you appreciate that."
The tone mocked.
Greg's skittish nerves began to flutter down towards some kind of equilibrium. Shock numbness, probably. "I . . . I think I can manage that. When?"
"Soon as possible, Greg, please."
The image wasn't perfect, he realised. This was a Philip Evans he hadn't seen before, flesh firmer, skin-colour salubrious. Stronger. Younger by about a decade.
"OK. Are you in any danger right now?" At some aloof level, he marvelled at his own reaction. Treating it as just another prosaic problem. Spoke volumes for Army training.
"Not from anything physical. The manor is well protected."
Physical. So what was a ghost afraid of anyway, being exorcised? Should he stop off to buy a clove of garlic, a crucifix, a grimoire? "I'm on my way."
He pulled on his one decent suit, barking a shin on that idiotically oversized bed in the scramble to shove his feet into a pair of black leather shoes. Thought about taking the Walther, and decided against.
The Duo bounced along the estate's gravel track and lurched on to the road. He set off towards Wilholm Manor coaxing a full fifty-five kilometres per hour from the engine, rocking slowly in the seat. The Duo had thick balloon-type tyres, made out of a hard-wearing silicon rubber. They were designed to cope with the country's shambolic road surfaces without being torn to ribbons. A typical PSP fix, he thought, adapting the cars to cope with their failure to maintain the roads.
There was a white watchman pillar standing outside Wilholm's odd cattle grid. He wound the side window down, and showed his card to it.
"Your visit has been authorised, Mr. Mandel," a construct voice said. "Please do not deviate from the road. Thank you."
The manor's spread of ornate flora was in full bloom, a spectacular moiré patchwork of sharp, primary colours. Big jets of water were spurting across the parched lawns. He could see the two gardeners working away amongst the rose beds. They leant on their hoes to watch him walk up to the front doors. However did that idle pair manage to keep the grounds in such a trim condition?
The butler opened the door. Morgan Walshaw stood behind him, his face drawn. A quick check of his mind showed Greg he was labouring under a prodigious quantity of anxiety.
"Mandel." Morgan Walshaw greeted him with a curt nod. "This way." A stiff finger beckoned. Greg followed him up the big curving staircase. The butler shut the doors silently behind them as they ascended.
"What the fuck is going on?" he asked the security chief in a low tone. "Did he fake his death, or what?"
Walshaw's face twisted into a grimace. "Explanations in a moment. Just ride it out, OK?"
They arrived at the study and Walshaw opened the door, giving Greg a semi-apologetic shrug as they went in.
The interior was almost the same as it had been on his last visit. Big table running down the middle, stone fireplace, dark panelling, warm sunlight streaming through small lead-lined panes of glass, dust motes sparkling in the beams.
In the middle of the table was a circular black column: seamless, a metre tall, seventy-five centimetres wide. It rested on a narrow plinth which radiated bundles of fibre-optic cables like wheel spokes. They fell over the edge of the table and snaked en masse across the Persian carpet to a compact bank of communication consoles standing by the wall.
Julia was seated at the head of the table where her grandfather used to sit, wearing a rusty-orange-coloured cotton summer dress, with a slim red leather band around her brow holding back her long hair. One of the two gear cubes in front of her was showing tiny editions of himself and Walshaw walking up the stairs together; the other had his Duo driving up to the manor.
Her mind was beautifully composed. Greg recognised the state; the kind of tranquillity which follows a severe emotional jolt.
His skin crawled with rigor, an animal caution awoken. There was something deeply unsettling about walking into the study.
Her tawny eyes never left him.
He looked at the column, ghoulish images creeping into his mind. Frankenstein, zombies, the undead, brains in glass tanks . . .
"Thank you for coming," said Philip Evans's voice, all around, directionless.
Greg's eyes remained fixed on the column. "Stop fucking about, where are you?"
"Good question. Unfortunately philosophy was never my strong point. I've thrown off my mortal coil sure enough; but my mind has been saved. You're looking right at me, boy. It's a neural-network bioware core. A real special one, custom-grown, you might say. The lab team spliced my sequencing RNA into the ferredoxin nodes, replicating my neuronic structure. Then when I was dying they used a neuro-coupling to translocate my memories. Not a copy, not some clever Turing personality-responses program, but my actual thought processes. Axon stimulators literally squeezed me out of my skull and into the NN core. Continuity was unbroken, my faculties are intact—enhanced if anything. Memory retrieval is instantaneous, there's none of that scratching around forgetting people's names and faces. I have access to all Event Horizon's data too. Locating that memox-crystal skim took me four days when I was flesh and blood. It wouldn't take me ten seconds now. And there's no pain, Greg. I'm free of it. Not just death illness, but all those aches which mount up over the years, the ones you learn to ignore, only you never can of course. They've gone."
Greg pulled out one of the solid wooden chairs and sat heavily. "Jesus Christ." The column must be solid bioware. He tried to work out how much that would cost. Fifteen, twenty million? Bioware was horrifically expensive. Immortality for billionaires. He wasn't sure whether he was fascinated or utterly disgusted. The concept didn't sink in readily.
"I can create the image of myself in a cube again, if that would be easier for you to talk to, boy."
Greg shuddered. "No, thank you."
Morgan Walshaw sat next to him, resting his hands on the table, face blank.
"Why am I here?" Greg asked stoically.
"Because we have a problem," said Julia. "Someone is trying to wreck Event Horizon's future."
He received the distinct impression she was enjoying his discomfiture.
"You see, Greg," she said, "Dr. Ranasfari has succeeded in developing a viable room-temperature giga-conductor for us."
Greg looked at her sharply. "You're kidding!"
He remembered some Royal Engineering Corps officers he'd been stationed with once had talked about the stuff. A panacea, they'd called it. The answer to the energy shortage, to carbon dioxide pollution. Every university and kombinate in the world had its own research team working on giga-conductors before the Credit Crash. Then there were innumerable mega-budget military programmes; a giga-conductor would have produced a whole new generation of weapons.
"Told you he was a genius, boy. Edison of the age. Dedicated, too; it took him over a decade of solid grind to crack."
"Quiet, please, Grandpa. It's a tremendous breakthrough, Greg, its energy storage density is phenomenal. It will replace every other form of power-storage system in existence; gear, cars, ships, planes, airships, spaceplanes, they'll all use it. And it's cheap, clean, and relatively easy to produce. Our whole way of life will be altered, it's a revolution equal to the introduction of the steam engine."
"And Event Horizon holds the patent," Philip chuckled savagely. "We're going to wipe the floor with the opposition. A Custer and the Indians massacre. I'll make damn sure of that when I introduce the stuff on the market."
Greg took another look at the mass of fibre-optic cables leading out of the plinth, trying to work out the NN core's bit rate. "You're still running
Event Horizon," he said. All Philip Evans's talk about arranging for trustees he had confidence in, and the flash of cunning at the time, came flooding back to him.
"Damn right I am, boy. There are no trustees, never were, the nominees are all Zurich fronts. Event Horizon is my life. No individual in the world can run a company better than me. I'm talking fifty years' worth of accumulated experience. There's no substitute for that. It's the efficiency of dictatorship. A group of trustees would be worse than useless, lawyers and airhead accountants; they'd never push the giga-conductor with the kind of vigour necessary to effect a complete domination of the market. Discussion groups, reports, delays for consultation. What a load of crap. Event Horizon run by a committee would shrivel up and die an ignominious death. This is the perfect solution."
"Before now, when a family company grew too big for one person to pay attention to every detail it used to stall. It was inevitable. Responsibilities had to be delegated, the initial individual-led drive was diluted. But the NN core solves even that. I can devote myself one hundred per cent to each problem, no matter the size; co-ordinate every policy; supervise every division. No kombinate will be able to match a company run along these lines."
"You were doing pretty well before," Julia said acidly. "One ordinary person, and an ill one at that. With the right people in key posts Event Horizon will prosper. All that's needed is direction, a firmness of purpose, the big decisions made quickly and implemented without delay."
"And you can do that, Juliet, can you?"
"Yah."
"Rubbish. You don't have anything like the experience."
She was angry now, straight-backed rigid, gripping the arms of her seat. "I do."
"Node implants don't give you experience, girl, just theory. All that money you spent getting rid of Kendric, pure bloody folly."
Greg flicked a glance at Julia, intrigued. Her cheeks were burning red, embarrassed rather than angered. Implanted nodes had been banned in England by the PSP, for the usual heinous crime of elitism. The New Conservatives had yet to repeal the Act. But at least he could finally explain away her remarkably smooth thought currents, and that marvellous ability to fish obscure data out of memory cores.
"It's like chess," Philip Evans explained gently. "You know how each piece should move, but you don't know the rules, the strategy. You'll learn, Juliet, really you will. It just takes time. And I'm here to bridge the gap for you."
"But the NN core is untried," she said, fighting to keep her voice level. "How do we know all your memories translocated? Suppose these miraculous thought processes of yours are incorrect? And you're basing judgements about the company's entire future on them."
Finally Greg understood her terror. She was afraid of losing everything; that wonderful edifice which was Event Horizon collapsing to rubble because it was balanced on a single assumption. And she had no way of checking the NN core's integrity. No control.
"If I could bring us back to our current problem," said Morgan Walshaw. "Unless something is done to solve it we may lose the core anyway."
"You told me someone tried to kill you," Greg said.
"Damn right, boy. Yesterday evening the NN core's inputs were blitzed, saturated with override-priority data squirts. Every channel simultaneously; ground links and satellite circuits. It was clever, the attacker was attempting to force me out of the NN core with the sheer quantity of input. With all the data being given a priority code the core-function management program would have to assign it storage space, eventually displacing my memories. I would've been erased, for God's sake! That's attempted murder in my book."
"So what went wrong?"
"I'm not a rational, neatly mathematical program. I fought back, began wiping their data as it came in, changed the priority codes, shut down the Event Horizon datanet—and you wouldn't believe how much that's going to cost us. They bloody nearly succeeded, though. If I'd been a Turing personality-responses program it would've been all over."
Greg was fast getting out of his depth. He remembered questioning a legion cleric his squad had captured in Turkey, a fanatical fundamentalist, so devout he didn't even acknowledge the infidel's existence: his associative-word trick had been useless. The sense of displacement was familiar. He tried to sort out some sort of priority list in his mind.
"Have you safeguarded yourself from that attack method being employed again?"
"Yes. It's a question of code encryption, I've altered my acceptance filters so that only half of my input circuits will accept priority squirts. Of course, there's nothing to stop them from thinking up new methods."
"So the problem is now centred around tracking down the source of the attack, right?"
"And eliminating it," said Walshaw.
Greg opened his eyes. "Your department."
Walshaw gave him a brief nod.
"So where did the data squirt originate from?" Greg asked.
Walshaw ran his hand through what was left of his hair. "We've no leads on that, I'm afraid. There were at least eight separate hotrods who hacked into the Event Horizon datanet, probably more, but with the shutdown we lost a lot of data. The blitz was well organised. All eight violators used multiple cut-outs to prevent us from tracing them."
"I'm surprised they got in so easily."
"Entry is no problem," said Philip Evans. "it's when you try to get our main account to transfer a million Eurofrancs to your Zurich bank or peek into research-team memory files that you run into trouble. Nobody has ever had a requirement to fend off this type of infiltration before. Its own crudity was what made it so successful."
"Crude?"
"Well, relatively."
"I'm trying to eliminate possibilities," Greg said. "It wasn't a blanket attack, was it? What I mean is, it was purposefully directed at you. They knew you were here?"
"Yes. I would say it's got to be one of those bastard kombinates. They've discovered Ranasfari cracked the giga-conductor, and they're badly worried. Anyone with a gram of sense can see the upheaval it's going to cause. Trouble is, they can't destroy it, there's no turning the clock back. Instead they've settled for the next best thing, which is yours truly. Without me Event Horizon won't be nearly as successful in marketing the stuff. They'd only have Julia and the non-existent trustees to deal with."
"So that rules out joyburners," Greg said. "They don't work in packs, anyway. How well guarded is the knowledge of your continued existence?"
"Only twelve people in the world knew," said Morgan Walshaw. "Thirteen counting yourself. That's myself, Julia, Ranasfari, and the team which grew the NN core."
"Just nine of them?" Greg asked incredulously.
"There's nothing complicated about the process," said Philip. "We've had neuro-coupling for eight years now, and the RNA splice is a standard procedure. It's only the cost of this much bioware which prevents it from becoming widespread."
"OK, next question. Would the hotrod team which launched the blitz have to be told you were here, or could they find out by analysing the data flow through Event Horizon's network?"
"They'd know the NN core was an important part of the network from observing the data flow, but that's all. Unless they were specifically told what the NN core was, the best they could guess is that it was an ordinary bioware number-cruncher loaded with a Turing personality-responses program."
"In other words, they know about you."
"Looks that way, boy."
"With only twelve people knowing about the core, I can pin down that mole for you, no messing," Greg said. "So where is the other leak liable to have come from?"
"Ministry of Defence, I hope," said Walshaw.
"Most likely," Philip Evans admitted. "Morgan here kept a tight security cordon around the giga-conductor project, but we had to co-operate with the MOD. It was on a confidential basis, of course, but leaks are inevitable on a project this big. You just have to balance the risk against the payoff."
"Two separate leaks," Morgan said. "It's an appalling lapse.
One I could accept, but compromising the NN core and the giga-conductor as well, that hurts."
Greg paused, worried about what Walshaw had said, his intuition producing that annoying tingle again. Two separate, simultaneous, high-level leaks was stretching coincidence a long way. "Did you ever find out how Kendric's tekmerc team acquired their data on Zanthus's security monitor parameters in the first place? They must have had copies to work out that destreaming manoeuvre."
Walshaw frowned, glancing at the black column. "We are still tracking down the actual tekmercs. They've taken a lot of trouble to cover their tracks."
"So nobody I found passed the data over?"
"No."
"Could it have been a hotrod burn which pulled the data?"
Julia cleared her throat, giving Walshaw an enquiring look. The security chief nodded reluctantly.
"To get at the monitor programs you would have to either burn straight into the security division's data core or copy the programs direct from Zanthus's 'ware," she said. "Zanthus would probably be the easiest option, but you would need to be up there to do it."
"If it was a hotrod burn," Greg mused.
"Bloody hell, boy; you're not telling me we've still got a Judas in the company?"
"There is no such thing as coincidence," Greg said soberly. "Two leaks on the two greatest ultra-hush projects Event Horizon is running, plus a loose end over the security monitor programs. Make up your own mind."
"I said that it had to be someone familiar with our security data procedures," Julia said.
"So you did, Juliet, so you did."
Walshaw shook his head in dismay, lips drawn taut. "This means we're going to have to open the field of enquiry to include the whole security division headquarters staff, two hundred and eighty personnel." He cocked an eyebrow at Greg. "Exactly how many interviews can you handle?"