The synapse sequence, p.10
The Synapse Sequence, page 10
‘Them? I don’t think there is a “them”,’ Fowler said. ‘Maybe a collection of people using the same logo. Some arranging pickets and protests, others organising more direct action against those employing bots and algorithms. Logos and symbols like that tend to attract a fair share of nut jobs.’
‘But don’t you think this would change the S&P score? Shouldn’t we report it?’
‘And get my client in danger for having “two illegal leaflets”, as you put it, in his house? No, absolutely not. Anyway, it wouldn’t affect the score. S&P wouldn’t see the connection.’
Anna let out a deep breath. The leaflet and the copy of Capital in N’Golo’s room were what had brought her to the synapse chamber again. It was worth exploring, at least. But whether or not it was worth the risk to Durrant, she couldn’t really answer. He wasn’t a saint, Cody had assured her. But that didn’t mean his life – no matter his current condition – was worthless.
Before they could debate the issue any further, the doors to the synapse chamber swung open and Cody hustled inside. His feet beat a hurried tap against the tiles as he headed for his workstation, which sat to one side of the wheel of synapse benches. Soon data was streaming across his display.
‘It’s a wonder you make sense of it all,’ Fowler said.
‘I’m good with numbers,’ Cody replied, not taking his concentration away from the screens.
‘I bet you’re brilliant at Sudoku.’
‘We’re getting the synapse data through,’ Cody said, a triumphant smile lighting up his face. ‘I think we’re ready.’
Ready, Anna thought. Ready and quite alone.
Only she and Fowler would be connected via the synapse chamber itself. N’Golo remained in his hospital bed: the machinery keeping him alive rather more immovable than the comms lines snaking their way back to the hub. All in all, it made the chamber appear far too big for its intended use; the synapse benches reduced to small islands amidst cold, empty space.
‘And how was he?’ Anna asked. ‘N’Golo.’
Cody stopped smiling. ‘He’s hooked up to more machines than I could count – most of them making weird bleeps – and his face is swollen like he’s lost a boxing match. Is that what you mean?’
In truth, she didn’t know. Still, it didn’t alter the fact she was going to risk N’Golo’s life because of a leaflet she’d found in a girl’s bedroom, and this when even the father had dismissed his daughter’s politics as being a silly teenage fad.
‘You had no problems positioning the synapse equipment?’
‘No,’ Cody replied. ‘The main issue was actually getting our people past hospital security.’
‘And you’ve discussed the key parameters with the health team?’
‘Of course. This is as safe as we can make it, Anna. We’re getting good data, both from his memory core and his main biorhythms. If we get any sort of spiking either here or at the hospital, we stop and flood him with neural sedative. That should minimise the risk of him bumping out completely. In that instance, we’ll hopefully just lose the feed…’
The health department’s experience had been with long-term coma patients – people for whom the lights had not burned for a very long time. N’Golo was different. He was still suffering from cranial bleeding. With or without his foster-parent’s permission, they weren’t getting him out of the hospital. Which meant he had doctors all around him, monitoring everything. And hopefully keeping him alive.
So it came down to a very simple question: did they want to take that small risk, on the basis that the girl was actually in danger? Anna had spent a long time thinking about it. Part of her still wanted to call it off, to stop the experiment that she’d instructed Cody to set up. But Jake was pressuring her too, as well as Cody and Fowler. There was an expectation that she’d go through with this, now that she’d been able to make some sort of connection between the two, however tenuous.
‘If we wait for a ransom demand,’ Fowler said softly, as if sensing her doubt, ‘then we may as well pull the trigger ourselves. We have to do this – and quickly.’
‘How are you going to prep him, Cody?’
Cody’s hands hovered atop his workstation. He leant forward and examined something on the screen.
‘Cody? How are you going to—’
‘I heard you.’ Cody looked a bit sheepish when he turned back to her. ‘I don’t think we can, Anna.’
They stared at each other in dismay until Fowler broke the silence.
‘What’s going on?’
‘You tell him,’ Anna said. ‘You’re the tech.’
Cody grimaced. ‘Accessing memories first requires those memories to be stimulated,’ he said. ‘Otherwise you just drop straight into a barrage of noise. When we work with witnesses, it’s relatively easy. We just talk to them as they’re going under. Remind them of the place. When they were there, what happened, all the rest of it. At its most basic, we read their S&P statements back to them to make them remember.’
‘But N’Golo’s in a coma,’ Fowler said.
‘We were going to do the same thing,’ Cody explained, shrinking in his seat. ‘And hope he heard us. The health techs told me it won’t really work like that. He’s too far gone.’
‘So we’re just going to dive in?’
‘Yep. Right into the noise.’
Anna weighed the risks, and once more dismissed them. That fucking leaflet. If she’d not seen it, then she might have thought differently. ‘Fine,’ she said, moving towards her preferred bench.
‘There’s a good chance we’ll be able to guide the next encounter from inside the memory,’ Cody continued. ‘Once the first memory is in motion – say something to him to pull him to a particular place and time.’
‘Okay,’ Anna said, clambering up and onto the steel bed. The coldness of the steel came through her overalls and sapped the warmth from her body. It wouldn’t be long before her muscles would start to stiffen. But that was all part of the process. A low-tech way of numbing the body prior to the synapse drug being administered. She rolled onto her side, and lifted her hair away from the base of her neck.
On the slab beside her she heard a few grunts as Fowler hoisted himself up. And then the sudden pressure release of a hypo-spray. Cody had taken care of Fowler first, delivering drugs into the base of his neck and then rolling him flat. Next he came across to her.
‘Failure begets failure, Anna,’ he said quietly.
‘I know,’ she whispered, feeling the hypo-spray push against her neck. ‘Beth could still be just another teen runaway.’
‘But let’s hope not,’ replied Cody. ‘Let’s hope she’s in trouble, and we’re the only ones looking for her. And let’s hope we find her, Anna. Or whatever’s left of her.’
A hiss burst against her neck, and Anna sensed herself slipping away. She felt Cody’s final touch as he took hold of her shoulder and rolled her back onto the table.
It was time to meet N’Golo Durrant.
* * *
A COUNTRY LANE.
They were in a country lane, sometime close to dusk. But the image was rippling and warping like a reflection from a pond. And someone had just thrown in a very large stone. Anna took a deep breath, and tried to cling on. If she couldn’t ground herself she would be thrown back out of the sequencer. Her own brain was struggling to adjust – rejecting the construct. She closed her eyes, let the ground settle as the background image of the lane twisted around her. Shit.
‘Hey!’
Anna continued to wait. She let her feet feel they were grounded before concentrating back on the lane. Fowler was somewhere close: stumbling around like he’d just spent too long propped up against a bar. There was no sign of Durrant.
‘What the fuck is going on?’ Fowler shouted. ‘I thought you said this got easier!’
Anna took a step forward, felt the ground lurch and roll – and then saw the strangest thing. A bird, caught in mid-flight – just a few metres ahead of her. Its wings were folded inwards as it zipped towards a nearby hedge: a little streamlined ball of feathers and beak. Which meant the memory wasn’t in motion. Back at the hub, Cody was holding things steady. Or at least trying to.
Anna opened her mouth wide. ‘We have line distortion!’
Something screeched in her ear. Fowler’s head snapped back in surprise and he fell, his limbs flailing as he struggled to find a purchase on the unmade surface of the lane.
‘We’re working to improve the hospital feed,’ Cody said directly into her ear. ‘Keep with it.’
Around her, the foreground pixelated then filled with more detail. She took a step forward. Then a step to the right. Then a step back. She moved her neck round, registered each movement, and then smiled. She was fully immersed. Fully inside a construct of N’Golo Durrant’s last memory.
‘I can’t see anything…’
Fowler was back on his feet, but he had his hands outstretched as if he was trying to walk through a pitch-black room. He took a few steps, then sank to his knees. ‘I can’t see! I can’t fucking see anything!’
Anna moved over to him – at first easily, and then finding her steps slightly out of sync with the ground, as if she was walking on a travelator. She took Fowler’s hand and guided him back to his feet. ‘You’re okay,’ she said. ‘Close your eyes…’
‘They are fucking closed!’
Anna kept holding Fowler until he started to calm. ‘You’re not fully submerged,’ she said. She called upwards, ‘We’re still having problems.’
‘Uh, yeah,’ came Cody’s response. The sound of his voice made Fowler flinch again. ‘We’ve got feedback coming from the beds – one of you is fighting it.’
‘Can you bring him out?’ Anna asked.
‘I’d prefer not to,’ Cody replied. ‘It might snap the line. Can he just hunker?’
Anna waited as Fowler continued to turn his head blindly. ‘We’ve got data problems,’ she whispered to him. ‘Or patient problems. One or the other. Are you going to be okay in here?’
Fowler remained unsteady. He gave a nervous laugh. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘How dangerous can it be lying on a table? Because that’s where I am, right?’
Anna let go of him. Despite his show of confidence, Fowler scrabbled after her touch, but then let his arms drop.
‘That’s right,’ Anna reassured him. ‘You’re in the synapse chamber. Cody is with you, and he’s monitoring your vital signs. And we’ll both be pulled out when we’ve finished here.’
‘At least this justifies giving you access to my biodata.’
Interference like Fowler was experiencing was very rare, and something she hadn’t gone through herself. But if she had? In that scenario, the only information Cody would be receiving would be being sent from her spoof. And what good would that do her?
‘So where is he, then?’
‘Who?’
‘Durrant. If this is his memory, where is he?’
She didn’t know. The construct was small. Only the immediate vicinity of the lane was visible. They’d appeared inside a very small pocket of memory. The country lane would have been fully grassed over had it not been for a set of tyre tracks rutting the surface. So wherever they were, it had regular use by a tractor. It was also starting to get dark. With the memory in motion, it wouldn’t be long before she’d be able to see only a fraction more than Fowler.
So she needed to absorb everything she could, and quickly. Anna immediately started to pick out aspects she could use for a post-submersion validation. On one side of the lane was a hedgerow. The other side was cut into a high bank that ran up towards a small wooded area. Anna concentrated on it. The shape of the copse was familiar.
They were in the fields behind the Hayden home.
The construct didn’t extend far up or down the lane – most of the detail was lost in darkness – but through the hedge the Hayden house was clearly visible a few hundred metres distant. Its lights were already burning in anticipation of night. A little off-centre perhaps, but clearly the focus of attention amongst its line of nondescript companions.
Anna continued to search the edges of the construct, trying to find where N’Golo’s memory faded into either darkness or a generic jumble as his brain tried to fill in the blanks.
A relative newbie like Fowler might have struggled, but she quickly found three potential boundary points. Triangulating between them, she had him. N’Golo was on the ground. And then she realised there was another shape with him. It was phased, partially transparent. More a shadow – or a smudge – than anything else. But as she walked round the patch of dark, it took on the shape of something like a man.
Anna looked back at Fowler. The bird that was frozen between them remained in place. There was no risk to N’Golo. But some feeling of doubt had kicked inside her. Anna pushed away the feeling, examining the boy.
He was just as she expected. Black, full in the shoulder for a youth. Tall maybe, when he was upright. But at the moment he was lying crumpled beneath her, still very much conscious. Watching. Maybe hiding. Fresh bruises covered his face.
‘Anna…’
‘What?’
‘I can feel something…’
Anna twisted back to Fowler. The bird was gone, flying off into the distance. Which meant the memory was in motion, and a strong breeze had started to whistle down the lane.
‘I’m starting to see…’
Fowler looked confused and more than a little relieved. His first steps were hesitant – but he finally made his way over. Beneath her, N’Golo was also moving – his lips in continual movement as he tried to crawl away.
‘Disappointing, N’Golo. We thought you had it in you…’
The voice – a growling sound – had come from the shadow. It morphed between them, taking on more of a human form. Becoming solid. Two black pits for eyes, and a stretched gash of a mouth.
‘What the fuck is that?’
‘Whoever beat the kid up,’ Anna said calmly. The shadow hadn’t formed into a recognisable figure yet, almost as if it was waiting for something.
‘But we can’t see him!’
Anna shook her head, continuing to examine the scene around her. There was a patch of discarded cigarette butts where the hedge met the verge. Fowler stumbled between her and the shape. ‘Don’t get in their way,’ she said. ‘It might cause a bump-out…’
Fowler didn’t seem to hear her, or else he was deliberately ignoring her. Stepping between the boy and the shadow, he peered into the void. ‘It’s getting clearer…’
‘Out of the way, Fowler!’
Anna got to her feet as the shape finally became something close to a recognisable figure.
‘Stop,’ Fowler shouted. ‘Weaver, put the damn thing on freeze! We got him! We got him!’
* * *
ANNA PULLED HERSELF from the metal bench before she was fully back in her body. She had to force her legs to shift and move – her feet filling uncertain spaces beneath her – but she still managed to stagger the few steps across to Fowler. She took a tight hold of the edge of his bench to stop herself falling. Somewhere in the background, Cody was scrambling at his station, caught between his duty to revive the pair and working to control the submersion. ‘Anna! Wait!’
She wasn’t going to wait. Fowler continued to lie disabled, his eyes open but his brain struggling to reconnect with his body’s own sensory inputs. It wouldn’t take him as long to recover his limb-positional sense as his first time in the sequencer, but it wasn’t going to be an easy swim to the surface.
Anna glared down at him, watching him flounder. Instructions from his brain were only translating into brief twitches in his cheeks and shoulders, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he couldn’t help but panic.
‘Idiot! Fucking idiot! What did you think you were doing?’
Anna wobbled. The effort of moving the few metres that separated their benches had already sapped most of her energy. She’d come to the surface far too quickly.
Cody’s breath flooded into her right ear. And then a deluge of sweat brought her fully round. Her technician had caught her – his arm now wrapped around her midriff after she’d slumped backwards into him. Sensation rippled from her calves into her toes.
‘You okay?’
‘Yeah.’ Anna pushed herself out of Cody’s grip, pulling and flattening her overalls back into place. She gulped a few deep breaths. ‘Thank you.’
Cody looked deeply concerned. ‘What happened?’
Anna allowed herself a moment to think. Back home, Kate would be dealing with a flood of emotional alarm calls. Probably logging into Elsy and going through the post-crisis routine. But here and now, none of that was important. She could deal with it later. Looking down at Fowler she said, ‘He messed things up.’
‘Bullshit!’ Fowler responded. The single expression made him breathless, and he looked confused by it. His head came up slightly, then fell back onto the metallic pillow. Cody immediately moved to ease his body straight and check his airway. As he did so, he gently pushed Anna away from Fowler’s bed. The additional space provided a little more calm.
‘We had an agreed plan,’ Anna said, trying to be patient. ‘All we needed to do during that submersion was move him to a point of safety.’
‘But he was right there,’ Fowler replied. ‘Right there. We nearly had a face!’
‘And you know all the suspects, do you? You’d have been able to ID him?’
Fowler didn’t reply.
‘We take him back to the point when he arrived with the Hayden family,’ Anna said, repeating the presubmersion agreement, ‘and then we run things forward to find out who he was meeting.’
‘Fine,’ Fowler said, a little bit too quietly.
‘Pardon?’
‘Fine,’ Fowler repeated, this time louder. ‘I said “fine”. As in, okay, I agree with you. But if we risk losing Durrant each time we plug him into your machine, then we can’t spend too long smelling the fucking flowers either. And if we’re right about Beth…’
Anna turned away, signalling for Cody to follow. She knew the risks, and didn’t need Fowler using them to justify his approach. ‘Have we heard anything from the hospital?’
