• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1136 0

of swimming and twisting like a shark, was all the more exciting for being – even for her – a rarely exercised, dangerous privilege. A quick scan of Jordan’s company records revealed an odd hiatus in the placing of a remittance – ah ha! She studied the traces, fragments of entry code snagged on tortuous logic branches, undetectable without the correct keys. Forensic diagnostics stripped them, returning pointers. She lowered thresholds on associative criteria, letting suspicions harden into certainties; then unleashed the now almost paranoid detection protocols and hit fast-forward to follow them. They took her to a Black Plan locale vacated in recent seconds. After clocking confirmations they leapt from one conclusion to another, finally locking on to an undoubtedly criminal penetration virus. She rode its backwash as far as she dared, far enough to confirm that Black Plan purposes lay just a few implications down the line. Disengaging, she encountered some paramilitary construct; its routines and hers conducted a brief, hostile interchange at a level far too fast for her to follow. It turned away from her and tracked the penetration virus, on business of its own. Mrs Lawson followed a secure path home, then backed out, feeling slightly nauseous.

Oh Jordan, Jordan. You are a silly boy. You are going to catch it, and so am I for letting it happen.

Unless…

Unless…

She let her conscience have its say for a few moments, then set to work deleting and revising, editing reality. When she was satisfied she sat back and picked up a phone.

The system crashed again and again. The afternoon passed in a trance of work, to the sound of crying alarms. Melody Lawson fought a rising sense of panic, becoming increasingly convinced there was something new in the networks and that it might be, if not the Watchmaker itself, a rogue AI of unprecedented range. She didn’t know if anyone else of her credibility and experience would see it that way.

There was one man who would. Perhaps two.

Two would be best.

She waited until the day workers had left, called her family to say she was working late, then checked and rechecked the security of her office and its systems. As she did so she ran through the memory trick – one digit in this corner, another on that shelf – that recalled a number she’d never dared write down or even keep in her conscious memory. She used it to call the most secret and mistrusted and deniable of her contacts.

And all the time the question that bugged her, that stuck in and perplexed her mind, was what did the ANR want with all that silk?

3

Hardware Platform Interface

Betrayed.

Cat lay in the bed, gazing at the LCD on the plastic cast, watching the numbers flicker and her fingers clench and unclench. The anaesthetic, whatever it was, made her feel remote and detached, as if her anger were a dark cloud that she drifted into and out of. After Kohn had left she had checked her status, hoping against all she knew about him that he’d been bluffing. Except that of course he hadn’t. She wasn’t a prisoner any more but a patient: recommended to stay one more night in case of delayed shock, but otherwise free to go.

Her hospital bill had already been charged to the Dzerzhinsky Collective’s account. They’d take a loss on that, with no ransom to recover it from. Small change, smaller consolation. She decided to run them up a phone bill as well, and called the Carbon Life Alliance’s hotline. The answer-fetch took her message without comment, and told her to await a response.

She put on some music, and waited.

The response surprised her. She’d expected some low-level functionary. She got the founder-leader of the Carbon Life Alliance, Brian Donovan. He came to her like a ghost, a hallucination, a bad dream: jumping from apparent solidity at the end of the bed to being a face on the television, and back again, talking all the while through her headset phones. It was as if all the machinery in her bay of the ward were possessed. She felt like muttering exorcisms. Donovan looked like a necromancer himself, with long