The synapse sequence, p.7
The Synapse Sequence, page 7
A call interrupted her chain of thought. Cody. He’d left the hub about an hour ahead of her, and had probably been stewing for all that time. She already knew what he was going to say; she just thought he’d have waited until later in the evening, or perhaps done the decent thing and talked to her about it when they’d both returned to the office. Still, she connected the call, checking around her as she did so to make sure the pavements were empty. She was quite alone. ‘Hi.’
‘Look, I’ve been thinking,’ Cody said without greeting and above the background wail of his new baby.
‘About N’Golo Durrant?’
‘Yeah.’
‘We’re not risking it, Cody.’
‘Hear me out. Jake—’
‘No,’ Anna replied, the sharpness of her voice cutting off her technician. As she spoke, a skinny man ambling past stopped and looked at her, then moved on few paces.
‘I think the health techs were being over-cautious,’ Cody continued in her ear. ‘They’ve worked with a dozen or so coma patients. They only lost three—’
‘Only, Cody? Do you hear yourself?’
‘But they had multiple interactions with them before their patients experienced synapse shock. We could go in seven times, Anna. Five to be safe; that’s what they’re telling me.’
‘From what Fowler told us, N’Golo could still recover.’
‘Unlikely.’
‘Possible.’
‘The risk of action then, against the risk of inaction?’
Her words. He’d just used her words. Some unadvised utterance she’d once said and that was now constantly recycled and reused, washed out of any meaning she’d originally intended. Back home, Kate’s systems would be going nuts. Heart rate: raised. Anomalies: seriously pissed off.
‘Hey! I know you, don’t I?’
Anna twisted back to the street. The skinny man was back and edging into the light of the gym, probably trying to take her out of silhouette. If he came any closer, then the rotating doors of the gym weren’t too far away. ‘No,’ she said, tilting her head away while keeping him in view. ‘And I’m speaking with someone.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Cody continued. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. All I’m saying is that I think we could safely try this out. This Durrant kid isn’t a saint, you know. He’s got previous himself for assault…’
Anna glanced to the side. The man was still standing there. Staring at her. He would make the connection soon enough, if he hadn’t already. She needed to get inside.
‘Anna – are you still there?’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘Okay, let’s talk tomorrow, right?’
As we should have done anyway, Anna thought bitterly. The call disconnected. She made for the gym doors, but the skinny man stepped out in front of her. Between the bright lights inside and the darkness beyond its glass, it was unlikely anyone inside would see her. Perhaps the cameras monitoring this spot wouldn’t either.
‘I thought it was you,’ the skinny man said.
She could head back to the street, but that would hardly help now she’d been recognised. And, even if she called one now, another pod would take time to arrive. So instead she remained standing close to the door, waiting for a gap large enough to slip past this idiot and get inside.
‘You’re her, aren’t you? Emma something.’
Anna, you stupid prick.
He took a couple of steps closer, then pushed his torso forward and let his arms fly back. Anna flinched, but all of his motion was used to propel a ball of spit and snot. It hit the dead centre of her chest, the glob clinging to her jacket. Anna looked at it, then tried to wipe it clear with her sleeve, smearing it deeper into the material.
Making it worse.
‘You should be in jail, you bitch. All those innocent kiddies died because of you!’
She’d been given self-defence training. Something the Home Office had once pushed to all women, but now just gave to individuals likely to be targeted by spontaneous attacks.
Spontaneous attacks. The words of her instructor pinged to the front of her brain as he came closer. Fighting the impulse to run, she braced, ready to deflect any blow and trying to judge a kick to his knees. In the end the skinny man stopped short; then he looked about him as if unsure.
He knew he was making a mistake.
Maybe the shot of phlegm had taken away enough of his anger. Perhaps he’d remembered that he was still attached to the network, that all she’d need to do was make a complaint and his records would be accessed and he’d be busted. Maybe even dumped off the UI, with all that entailed.
‘Bitch,’ he said again. Then he turned and half-scurried back to the pavement. Still shaking, Anna watched him go. Her breathing slowly fell back into a normal rhythm. The message from Kate came moments later: You okay?
‘I’m fine,’ she whispered. ‘I’m coming home.’
11
‘THEY WARNED ME, but I didn’t listen.’
Sean’s pen didn’t move. The care home management would have warned him, of course. ‘Our Anna is a bit difficult to keep on track,’ they’d have said. ‘Her memory is going. She fades in and out.’ And he’d have ignored them. Because a chance to talk to Anna Glover about what had happened in Tanzania would have been too good to pass up, especially when so many others had failed to get me to talk. And so he’d just have to sit through the rest, whether he liked it or not.
I found some amusement in the thought. A young man trapped and forced to listen to me. After all those years of finding it so difficult to be heard.
‘They called it a bio-audit,’ I said. ‘Do they still do it?’
‘Not really. Not since…’ Sean’s voice trailed off.
So they’d stopped; at least that was something. Perhaps the protests that had flared up around the world hadn’t been in vain, then. In the UK it had been bad enough – here, bio-audits had been used by companies to bully their workforces. In other parts of the world the reduction in jobs had caused more extreme swings. France and Spain had turned left; countries like Iceland and Greece had swung right. And governments who knew everything about everyone hadn’t needed an army of enforcers to create a police state. People had already supplied the data themselves, back when they thought they’d been free.
‘Huh,’ I said. ‘Well, companies used to harvest the biorhythmic data of their employees. They knew how we were sleeping, if we were stressed, that we were taking enough exercise. They could even track the biochemical surges associated with having too much – or too little – sex. One colleague of mine found out she was pregnant from HR, before she’d even had a chance to order a test. And no one stopped them – how could we? Everyone wanted a job. You signed away your data to make sure you got the next short-term contract. Not surprising then, really, that people started using spoofs. You could hire them for a few hours if you wanted to go off the grid. To get a little space.’
‘Criminals used them, mostly, didn’t they?’
‘I had a longer-term arrangement,’ I said, not stopping to acknowledge or confirm Sean’s comment. ‘A live-in spoof. Someone to plug more permanently into the system so they couldn’t tell.’
‘Couldn’t tell what?’ Sean still wasn’t recording what I was saying, but his grip on his writing implement noticeably tightened. I had his attention. He glanced at my arms. ‘That you were still self-harming?’
I didn’t say anything.
‘When you were working for Jake? With the sequencer?’
I tried my best to give a stilted smile. ‘Self-harm isn’t just some passing teenage fad,’ I said. ‘I did it for relief. I had all these damn torments building up inside me, and it just allowed me to drain them all away. To stop the storm.’
Sean made a few marks on his paper. As he did so, I watched Grace serving cups of tea to my fellow inmates.
‘Were you self-harming in Tanzania?’
‘Would it matter if I was?’
Sean stumbled. ‘I don’t… I don’t know.’
‘Then yes.’ My mouth had turned dry. I could use something to slake my thirst. ‘Yes, I cut myself in Tanzania.’
‘And when did you stop?’
‘What does it matter? You get this sense, you see: when you’re no longer a contender in the race. When younger men and women have already come and replaced you.’
Sean smiled. He’d perhaps not meant it to, but it revealed something within him. Some seed of ambition. Perhaps I was his route to something big. He was someone who was still very much in the running. Just out of the blocks, and accelerating hard. It reminded me of something, although I couldn’t quite tell what.
‘Have we met before?’ I asked him.
‘Yes… I mean, we’ve spoken before now a few times…’
‘That’s not what I meant.’ I peered at him, trying to cut through the misting inside my eyeballs. He seemed familiar.
‘Did they know?’ asked Sean, trying to return my attention to why he was with me. ‘The air crash unit?’
‘They knew long before I was selected for the investigation. It was irrelevant.’
‘So you weren’t using a spoof when you worked in that team?’
‘No. There was no need at that time.’
‘But there was with the sequencer?’
I smiled. ‘Jake told me. He warned me. And I didn’t listen.’
When I’d said Jake’s name before, Sean had begun acting cloak-and-dagger, but this time he didn’t even look around to see if we could be overheard. ‘I don’t think I quite follow?’
‘Jake wasn’t interested in our biometric data because he wanted to monitor our productivity,’ I said. ‘He had other motives. He wanted to make sure that it was safe to use the sequencer. He was trying to sell the device into a variety of end markets. He’d hidden a lot of dangers in the small print.’
Sean leant in closer. I could see a question forming on his face: Why did you take the risk? – but in the end he didn’t ask it. He probably understood I had no choice. ‘I’d like to talk more about Tanzania,’ he said.
Tanzania. I closed my eyes. So long ago, and all too clear. Unlike everything that had happened since. ‘Go on…’
‘I want to start with the background to the crash.’
‘You should have that from the files.’
‘I want to hear it from you.’
Calibration. ‘You want to know if I can remember things correctly,’ I said. ‘Before you put too much credence on what I have to say.’
Sean smiled. ‘Something like that. The nurse told me—’
‘The fat one?’
‘Yes… she told me your memory—’
‘I told you: it was fucked by the sequencer.’
I was pleased to see him jolt; and it was good to know there was still nothing more shocking than hearing an old person swear. But what I’d said was true. I’d not fully understood when I’d been using it: I thought the system simply allowed access to other people’s memories. What was really going on was somewhat different. More like a mixing of minds, the sequencer being no more than a thin membrane across which a memory could be shared. The learned responses of the brain filling in the background gaps. And, for me, something had gone wrong. I looked for the nurse. Instead, I saw a blurred shape rise to his feet from the corner and make his way over. His face was lost in static, but I recognised him. N’Golo Durrant.
He knelt down beside me.
Of course, N’Golo wasn’t really there. Not in the room. Just in my mind. A large part of me wanted to find a razor blade. Because I’d been warned.
And after all these years, he was still here haunting me.
12
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ONE OF JAKE’S big things was allowing people to work when they were most productive, rather than while a clock was marking time. For Anna, that meant getting in early – Cody normally got there a couple of hours later than her – but today when she arrived she found the hub even quieter than normal. She progressed quickly through its glass-fronted façade, and barely acknowledged the security bots guarding almost every internal door.
She didn’t meet a soul on the way to her office. The emptiness was magnified by the fact that the hub had been built as a research and data centre for one of Jake’s old internet companies. Everything now was several sizes too big. The multiple racks of secure servers had long since been replaced by much smaller quantum machines; and the large canteen that had once fed Jake’s programming staff now lay empty. It was no surprise, therefore, that her little designated corner of the hub was deserted.
Which was how she normally preferred it. Sitting down at her desk, though, it didn’t take long for the pressure to build in her mind. With the plaza shooting looking like it wouldn’t lead anywhere, and the N’Golo Durrant thing being nothing more than a distraction, she was back to sifting through old police reports and looking for incidents where the sequencer could perhaps add some value. And it was becoming more and more apparent that such value was going to be hard to find.
Failure begets failure.
Anna shivered hard as Jake’s phrase came into her mind. The previous night had been tough: first Kate wanting to know why she’d diverted to the gym, and what had happened to her there, and then she’d had a call from her parents. Both her mother and her father had reminded her of how proud they’d been of her previous career, and wondered if she could find a way back to it. And each had also subtly enquired about any man she happened to mention, as if that would solve everything.
Failure begets failure.
Her desk was too neat. It should have been chaotic, like Cody’s. At some point soon, she was going to lose her job. Jake would finally tire of their experiment and end it. The news was already out that he was starting a new entertainment project, one that offered up more profit from the thousands of people seeking a new distraction from the boredom of unemployment. And she’d be joining them. Consigned to the UI, with all that entailed. A war criminal on state handouts, turfed out of her apartment with its thin shield of security and left to fend for herself.
She tried a breathing exercise to calm herself. Back at home it was relatively easy to exit the sudden downward spirals. Kate actually seemed to care about what was going on, rather than just going through the motions as her conditions of employment required. And then there was Elsy: the AI designed to break through the psychological maelstrom and pull her back to dry land.
But neither Kate nor Elsy was available in the hub. Not directly, anyhow. And so all she was left with was an old-fashioned response. She unbuttoned the cuff of her blouse and rolled back the sleeve: exposing the fleshy part of her left arm. Then she searched her desk, finally choosing a twelve-inch plastic ruler. A few fast swipes took away some of the doubt; the last sharp slice underlined that she wasn’t going to fail.
Failure begets failure.
And success begets success.
With a cold wash of relief, Anna refastened her sleeve, making sure the material didn’t catch on the raw skin. She needed to find crimes where the S&P scores had triggered investigations but where little progress had been made. There must be enough of them, she reminded herself, if Fowler could make a living. The key thing was to prioritise them and track down enough witnesses willing to take part in her next experiment.
Which was where she needed Cody – to work out which witnesses would be good subjects; to operate the sequencer. His desk was always a mess. A few sheets of A4 had fallen on to his swivel chair. Anna frowned when she picked them up. It was the report from the health team on the use of the synapse sequencer with coma patients. A scribbled note was attached to the top of the first page: With my comments. —B.
Sure enough, as Anna flicked through the pages she saw that several were marked with notes from the health team. Most were clarifying matters in the text, which was written formally, objectively and with little regard for readability. The message was the same one Cody had passed on to her the night before: the risk level of working with coma patients was related both to the number of times a patient was put into the sequencer, and to the types of memories that were stimulated.
Anna grimaced. Connecting witnesses to the synapse sequencer wasn’t just a case of lying them down on steel benches and flooding them with drugs. Each witness had to be interviewed before they went under. The moment to be invoked had to be primed and recollections prompted, so that each witness had the same memory in mind when the technician stitched them together in the same patchwork.
Cody was particularly good at it. He could pull out precise moments in a single session where others would need several attempts to get anywhere close. And yet how would he work with a coma patient with whom he couldn’t communicate?
Failure begets failure.
The skin on her forearms started to itch again.
Meanwhile the notes continued, so Anna kept reading. As Cody had said, risk rose roughly in line with exposure. Which meant they could risk killing Durrant on the first attempt, or he could pass through several submersions without any harm. But for family members, one interaction was never enough – they kept on wanting to come back: to see if they could prompt their loved one to wake. Even after the risks had been explained.
