The synapse sequence, p.24
The Synapse Sequence, page 24
‘Class used to be the main way we identified ourselves.’ Connolly was warming to his theme. ‘Somewhere along the line, the richest in society persuaded us class didn’t matter. Take another one of your heroes, for instance: Ada Lovelace. She went to the mills of Lancashire and saw how punch-cards were being used to control industrial looms. Tell me, why do you think the title of the world’s first computer programmer didn’t go to a mill owner and instead went to a countess?’
Because she wrote it down, you jackass. ‘I don’t know.’
Connolly laughed. ‘It’s all about perception. What we’re told is what we think. To that end the news you get to see is personalised, to corral you into behaving as the government wants. Start expressing sympathy for certain views? Then they’ll feed you stories to make you think along their lines. Of course, some stories are too big to be drowned out, but then they can usually find some angle or other to divert some of your anger.’
Someone – had it been Kate? – had said something like this to her before, and she’d dismissed it. She still thought it unlikely. But then a horrible thought struck her: she knew the government allowed street protests simply to relieve some of the bubbling tension. But the ‘angle’ deliberately included to divert some of your anger? Could that mean news stories about Tanzania focused on her kept on cropping up just to distract people’s attention? Was the government deliberately keeping people angry with her to distract them from the real issues behind the war?
Before she could respond, Connolly stood up from the bar table. ‘Don’t look so shocked. The government has always manipulated our news. The real question is, why do you think they would have ever stopped? So we’re going to join the same game. Make those at the top dance to our tune, and do what we want. Let’s talk again soon.’
He was leaving. Anna opened her mouth to try to call him back, but it was too late. Connolly was leaving – and N’Golo wouldn’t respond to her.
* * *
ANNA OPENED HER eyes. She was back on the synapse bench. Cody was already checking her airway was clear. Some movement flickered into her lips and the back of her throat. She was going to vomit, but she swallowed hard. ‘Push me under,’ she said. ‘Hold me down.’
* * *
SHE WAS IN a basement lit by a single light bulb that hung by a short cord from the damp plaster ceiling. The fitting hadn’t been secured properly, which meant the bulb left shadows on one side of the basement while the other was doused in bright light. A set of block concrete steps led upwards towards a door that had been left open. Anna couldn’t see anything beyond it.
N’Golo stared back at her. He looked angry. It took a few moments for her to realise the memory wasn’t in motion. She called into the air; ‘Cody?’
‘Yeah – sorry, I had to jump tracks.’
‘I’m in some sort of basement.’
‘We’re holding steady-state until we get the feed stabilised.’
‘How’s it looking?’
No answer.
‘Cody?’
‘Are you in something that looks… right?’
Anna looked about her. The basement looked anything but all right, but it was a tangible memory. ‘Yes. Why?’
‘Then we’re running it.’
N’Golo moved. ‘This isn’t what we agreed,’ he said. His breathing was heavy, his voice pushed through bared teeth.
Anna remained mute. Her conversation with Cody had distracted her from a pertinent fact. She and N’Golo were the only ones in the room. She scrambled for words, and then remembered she just needed to move the conversation along.
‘What is it you think we agreed?’
She kept her voice emotionless, hoping the plain question would elicit a useful answer. For the time being, she had to guess she was playing the role of Connolly – and that was unfortunate, given she very much wanted to hear what he had to say. But she did have one advantage: without a third person, she could now talk to N’Golo without having to worry about fitting her words into a set conversation. Just as long as she didn’t wander too far away from what he was expecting her to say…
‘Not this,’ N’Golo said. ‘I didn’t agree to this.’
This. Anna took another look around the basement. Looked again at the concrete block stairs leading upwards towards the thick door. A few cables trailed around the edges of the ceiling, attaching to a small box in one corner. It looked like dampening field tech. Something to stop the life-logging apps feeding out, prior to making the detachment permanent. So this was where they were keeping Beth.
‘It will be fine,’ Anna heard herself say, trying to find a route between what she now knew and what N’Golo could remember. ‘We bring the girl here, and we keep her here.’
N’Golo’s head was turned away, as if denying himself to the situation. And then she saw it: the moment he understood. That same terrible moment she’d detected so often in the voices of pilots about to crash – and in the face of the guy who’d shot up the entertainment plaza. It was too late. The mistake had been made. Anna immediately felt sorry for him. But she had to remember, at some point he had rebelled. He’d at least tried to stop it. And then the Workers’ League – or whoever they wanted to be – had beaten him into a coma for it.
‘Hey,’ Anna said, snapping the boy’s attention back to her. ‘Hey, listen to me. Do you remember the way here?’
N’Golo shrugged, suddenly looking like a sullen teenager again.
‘You know the way here, N’Golo. I need to know that you can bring her here, yes?’
N’Golo muttered something. Not quite a ‘yes’ but most certainly not a ‘no’. How would Connolly have handled the situation?
‘Tell me,’ Anna said. ‘Tell me where we are.’
N’Golo finally looked up and into her eyes. The conflict was clear in his face. And the walls of the basement melted. They shook, and slid away.
‘Anna – fuck, Anna – we’re losing him!’
‘Where are we N’Golo?’
They were no longer in the basement. Not quite. The floor and first foot or so of crumbling plaster provided a square frame around them, but everything beyond had been replaced by the country lane at the back of the Haydens’ home, from which a thin, straight arrow-like line of dazzling green light pointed – not at Beth’s brightly lit window, but at the darkened room next to it.
‘N’Golo! Look at me! Where are you taking the girl?’
No answer.
‘Where did you take Beth?’
A man stepped from the shadows. Connolly. He strode up behind N’Golo and took him by the collar. Pushed him down. Kicked him in the ribs. Rained punches down on him.
‘Anna, I’m pulling you out.’
Anna moved quickly. She moved through the image of Connolly, and the fists that kept on coming. She took hold of N’Golo’s face as gently as she could.
‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘Listen. We’ll only keep her a short while; her father will pay. But you have to tell me: where are we keeping her?’
The figure of Connolly evaporated. He took with him the memory of the country lane, and the last fragments of the basement. For perhaps the last time, N’Golo looked at her; confusion written deep into his face.
‘Her father isn’t going to pay,’ he said. ‘But her mother will.’
39
Hunter Bot 28.637f – 47637946376gh476r74r64 – Action Log
Objective: Find Target (Priority, Medium)
Background Data: Downloaded from S&P. Receiving continual updates.
Geographical Sweeps: 78 addresses visited. Unable to access 4 (return visits scheduled). Infrared cams: Within parameters. Recognition cams: Negative. Behavioural Cams: Negative.
ANNA WOKE, TRIED to move, but couldn’t. Above her, Cody was going through the normal post-submersion routine. Only when he’d finished did he notice the rapid shifting of her eyes.
‘What is it?’
Anna couldn’t answer. Not yet. Her mouth remained a numb chasm, and each segment of movement was taking an age to come back. Instead, she tried to focus. Tried to ignore the slow accumulation of sensation that was spreading throughout her face, and thought about N’Golo’s final words.
Her mother will.
She made a noise. Something vocalised, but it was not properly formed by her nose or lips. More like a judder of sound. She could have been trying to say anything, but Cody at least appeared to understand the urgency.
‘You saw something?’ he said. ‘You know where she is?’
Anna blinked. Once. She started to feel sensation in her cheeks and forehead. But nothing in her tongue, which remained limp and stodgy.
‘Durrant looks okay,’ Cody continued, misunderstanding her. ‘His neural activity is spiking but we think he’s okay…’
Anna blinked. Still, she couldn’t speak.
‘Take your time. Just take your time. I’ll get Fowler.’
Fuck Fowler, get Mitchell!
The thought screamed inside Anna’s skull, but she couldn’t articulate it. Not yet. Again, she tried to relax. Her brain was firing hard. Too much adrenaline.
‘Mith-thell,’ she mouthed, almost entirely on an outward breath. Not quite right, but her technician seemed to hear.
‘Mitchell?’
Anna blinked. Once. Yes.
‘I’ll get them both… you want me to get them both?’
She blinked again. Hard. Providing just enough meaning to put the technician to work. It took another few minutes, though, before her jaw loosened sufficiently to flex at her command. ‘Mil-lie Hay-den,’ she said. ‘We need to find Millie Hayden!’
* * *
‘I THOUGHT I was clear,’ Mitchell said. ‘Jake told me the equipment would be removed.’
Anna ignored the stupidity of what was being said to her. The S&P analyst had arrived at the hub quickly, but the main thrust of what N’Golo had revealed within the sequencer had already been conveyed. Mitchell could have just messaged them from the police headquarters – or en route to the Hayden house. Instead, she’d come personally to the hub, and Anna had intercepted her in the entrance lobby. She’d not expected the first exchange to be about what had been agreed with Jake, though.
‘Did you get to Millie Hayden?’
‘Millie Hayden is missing.’
Anna didn’t say anything. Fowler was now rushing towards them from the direction of a newly arrived pod, his arm still bound in its sling. The two investigators looked grim, but also embarrassed. They’d all missed it. A key factor had been overlooked.
‘What do we know about Millie?’
‘I told you before, she’s a vet,’ Fowler said. ‘Works for the Department of Agriculture and Environment.’
An agricultural vet – that was another oddity. Like humans, almost all animals had implants that continually monitored their physical health. If anything was wrong – if the first triggers of the immune system were detected – then both diagnosis and dispatch of treatment was immediate. The number of vets – just like the number of doctors – had plummeted. ‘Presumably this information was fed into S&P?’
Anna’s question prompted two completely disparate responses: Mitchell flinched; Fowler gave a silent smile of resignation.
‘Did it register as unusual?’
‘It was always fucking unusual,’ Fowler said, ‘that the Haydens had two bread winners in the household.’
‘That’s not what I—’
‘I don’t think you’ll be surprised to learn,’ Mitchell interrupted, ‘that I haven’t told you all the ways we’ve been trying to find Beth. Her father is a banker, so of course we’ve been following him, tracing his contacts, monitoring his accounts for signs of any secret pay-offs. The S&P analysis was clear: concentrate on the father.’
‘So you weren’t allocated any resources to do the same for Millie Hayden?’
‘No.’
‘Figures,’ Fowler said.
‘You did the same,’ Mitchell responded, barely disguising her annoyance. ‘Your human gut instinct did the exact same. Banker equals money equals ransom.’
‘My gut instinct is not held up as infallible, though, is it?’
‘And neither is S&P… it is simply right much more often than it is wrong.’
‘And this debate is no help to the Haydens,’ Anna said flatly. She could kick herself for her own mistakes, her own prejudices. She’d not yet admitted to anyone her confusion about Durrant’s ethnicity. The same errors were built into all of them. The selective blind spot. For a few moments she felt some of the frustration bubbling under the surface of her skin. If she’d been alone, then she might have tried to let some of it out. The temptation caused everything inside her to knot up.
‘So what do we know about what she actually does?’ she asked eventually. ‘For the Department of Agriculture?’
‘We’re trying to find that out now,’ Mitchell said.
‘You don’t know already?’
‘As I said, the focus was on Roger Hayden, not his wife. We’re making enquiries. I can’t think what would be on a farm that the Workers’ League couldn’t just go out and steal. Farm depots aren’t exactly well secured – normally just a couple of drones to provide early warning. Our response times are pretty awful – nothing our tech can do about that – and that would give the Workers’ League more than enough time to get away.’ Mitchell took a breath. ‘You mentioned in your last submersion there was a basement… Did you see anything in it that would give us a location?’
Anna shook her head. ‘No, it could have been anywhere.’
‘But not at the bar?’
‘I couldn’t tell. It might have been.’
‘It would be worth a punt,’ Fowler said. He lifted his broken arm slightly. ‘Given what happened to me.’
‘S&P doesn’t work on punts,’ Mitchell replied. ‘I need to feed it something substantive. Facts, not theories. This has to be authorised.’
‘The only other fact we have is this man called Connolly,’ Anna said.
‘And as I told you, “Connolly” is a probably a made-up name.’
‘He’s middle class – not one of your usual Workers’ League types. Maybe he’s not on the UI yet.’ Anna swallowed, thinking about her own precipitous employment situation. ‘Maybe he just feels sufficiently threatened to get involved in something like this. I’d recognise him again if I saw him.’
‘Nice,’ Mitchell replied. ‘But doesn’t help. If he has no previous history, then we need specific approvals to push into higher-end social-class data. And Deng simply isn’t going to allow it – it’s illegal to do it without those.’
Anna knew that, of course – the debate on S&P powers kept being bounced back into Parliament; it was reported daily on the boards. And, up until this moment, she’d always been against it. ‘Who’s Deng?’ she asked.
‘Mitchell’s right,’ Fowler said. He didn’t sound happy about the statement he’d just uttered. ‘All we’ve got is Millie Hayden. We need to know why they took her.’
40
Hunter Bot 28.637f – 47637946376gh476r74r64 – Action Log
Objective: Find Target (Priority, Medium)
Background Data: Downloaded from S&P. Receiving continual updates.
Geographical Sweeps: 256 addresses visited. Unable to access 23 (return visits scheduled). Infrared cams: Within parameters. Recognition cams: Negative. Behavioural Cams: Negative.
S&P Update: Downgrade Priority to Low (Reason, priority timeout. Authorisation, Deng)
ANNA ARRIVED HOME expecting to find her apartment devoid of life, but instead found it bustling with cops and bots. She watched them from the doorway, trying to detect any hint of who was actually in charge. In the end, a short man wearing a suit that didn’t quite fit handed her a glossy search warrant.
‘What are you hoping to find?’ Anna’s voice carried into the hallway, but no one answered. If she’d read the details, no doubt the warrant would also confirm her digital archive had also been unlocked. If so, that would be more useful to them than the collection of mementos and papers in the apartment.
Stepping into the lounge, Anna found Kate reclining on the sofa. Her former spoof looked at her blankly. ‘I had to let them in,’ she said. ‘The security on the front desk said I had no choice.’
‘I—’ Anna felt a surge of guilt. For the first time in months the regret wasn’t routed via the young woman sitting in front of her. ‘I wasn’t expecting you back,’ she said finally. ‘They wouldn’t say where they’d taken you. Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ Kate replied. ‘Don’t sweat it. It was just a bit of a shock to find a police bot at the door.’
From elsewhere, the noise of possessions being boxed and confiscated continued. Anna wondered how much they would leave her. She hoped they wouldn’t take her collection of records. ‘How long have they been here?’
‘Maybe thirty minutes? I made them wait as long as I could… claimed I was just out of the shower and only wearing a towel. But they just sent the bot in to check. They’re scanning the walls and under the floorboards.’
‘There’s nothing there,’ Anna replied.
‘Huh, well, I thought you’d want to know, just in case. They’re saying on the boards there’s going to be an inquiry into Tanzania?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You going to be okay?’
Anna almost laughed. The girl speaking to her had been arrested for spoofing, and she was still acting like her physiological nurse. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘And what about you? Have they set a court date?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘They haven’t asked me to attend,’ Anna said.
‘I was caught subbing my biodata in place of yours. They don’t really need anything else.’
‘And have they said what you’re likely to get?’
‘Five months, plus complete access to bio and digital for the next twenty. I guess my chances of getting a proper job are now pretty much zilch.’
