Zero Dark - The Novel - Ch 4

The first time Jaq had taken a trip into Charterhouse's simulation archive, it had been a straightforward datadump from Charterhouse - or, more properly, from his data account in the orbital's synaptic framework - to Jaq's personal smartie.  This time, things were a little more convoluted, he realized, as he sank into a haptic trance.

He used this function in his smartie only rarely and it was always disconcerting to experience the illusion of sensory input from another place.  Strictly, he supposed - and was sure that Charterhouse would argue - all sensory input was an illusion: just the brain's interpretation of incoming signals.  Did it matter whether the signals were from his skin and eyes and gut or from the more disciplined and predictable local framework?  Logic insisted that it didn't, but instinct told logic to take a hike - for Jaq, at least.  He was uncomfortable, but he was comfortable feeling uncomfortable.

His first experience, therefore, was of darkness and warmth, like being suspended in a warm, breatheable fluid.  He could sense haptic nudges all around him: invitations from various sources to open his smartie to their input that would unlock a sensation or experience.  The nudges themselves weren't unpleasant.  They felt like eddies in the fluid, gentle caressing his skin as if a friendly swimmer had passed him close by - unseen, but unthreatening.

Although the immediate haptic sensation was one of touch and temperature, Jaq subliminally noted a wealth of extra data from each nudge.  That was one was a trailer for a documentary.  That one was an invitation to a party in the block where he and Charterhouse were staying.  This one was a more intimate invitation from someone who had spotted him on his way to the block, earlier, and left a quick nudge in his periphery for Jaq's future attention.

There was no need for him to reject them all.  His smartie was quite smart enough to let them swim away of its own accord and, instead, pull him towards the hotter and more urgent nudge that Charterhouse had left for him.  Jaq ignored the subliminals and instead simply stepped into the nudge, which opened up in a vaguely disturbing curling back of the darkness and welcomed him across the threshold into what turned out to be a light, bright space lined with bookcases.  Charterhouse - or, rather, a small avatar of Charterhouse, identical but much smaller - appeared from behind one of the stacks and jumped up onto a low desk nearby.

'I like what you've done with the place,' said Jaq, gesturing at the bookcases.  He was wearing a pale linen suit that he guessed his smartie had pulled out of his subconscious from somewhere.  'Just for me?'

'Just for you,' agreed the avatar.  'Mainly because no one outside the project has shown any interest in accessing its work until now.  But it works.  We might keep it.'

He jumped from the desk onto one of the shelves and strolled along it, away from Jaq.

'The books represent access points,' Charterhouse explained.  'Touch one and you'll get a sense of where and when the simulation is located.  They run broadly in chronological order from left to right and roughly geographically from top to bottom.  Northern hemisphere locations are mostly in the top two-thirds.  Southern hemisphere locations are mostly in the bottom third.  There's some inevitable bleed where we have a lot of key events occurring in close proximity.

'Not every event is covered, because we don't have data from any source to assemble a simulation.  So, for example, you'll find nothing from Tokyo, because it was pretty much vaporized by the heatwave from the impact.  There are brief snippets from locations further away, but even with guesswork there's not much we can do to stitch together anything resembling a narrative.  They are all here.

'You'll find the records of the Martian landing at Macapa here.'

Jaq wandered over to the section of the shelf the cat had indicated and raised one hand.  Even without touching the books he was getting an intuitive sense of time and space emanating from them and, as he rested one finger on a spine, the sensation intensified to the point that he could pinpoint not only the date and time he would access in this record, but also how it related to the records on either side.

'Once you're in a record, you can navigate by time or by space - moving to records of immediately adjacent times in the same place, or to a different place at the same time.  If the jumps you want to make aren't too big, they'll be largely instant.  If you want to make a significant jump in time or space, you'll be better off coming back here to do it.  Otherwise, we have to route you between widely-separated frameworks and it could take a while.  Coming back here means the connection is already established.'

'Got it,' Jaq agreed.  He could already feel the place he wanted to go into and his hand hovered above it.  'I'll be entirely dissociated when I'm there?'

'It'll feel that way at first, but in fact you're still conscious,' said the cat, turning to rub his cheek against Jaq's raised hand.  'The more you assert your consciousness, the more you will feel physically present.  So if you want to step out of the immediate perspective and look around, you can.  You can pause events, rewind them or fast forward, just like any other immersion.'

'And how can I assess the accuracy of what I'm seeing?'

'Just ask for sources.  The simulation will pause and you'll be able to see the data sources for the scene and which have been patched with guesswork and which are just plain invented to fill a gap between two sources.  There aren't many of those.  There were a lot of sources.'

'How do I know the sources are real?'

'How do you know any sources are real, Jaq?  How do you know your daily life is real?  It all comes down to how much you trust the motivations of the people who created them.  Isn't that what history's basically all about?'

Jaq nodded, as much to himself as to Charterhouse's diminutive avatar.  That was true and fair.  You always had to question the sources and work out to what extent they could be trusted.  But usually he worked with the raw data rather than information deliberately manipulated by someone else.

Actually, that wasn't true, was it?  He had read countless papers by other academics, dead and alive.  He had usually been happy to take their word for it when it came to the sources they had used to reach their conclusions unless he had disagreed with them on some point.  The only difference was that, then, history had been an absorbing hobby, not a matter of real importance.  When you were pondering the construction of London's Victorian sewer system, there wasn't a lot riding on whether it truly solved the cholera problem or simply moved it elsewhere.  But this...

'Fair enough,' he agreed.  'Anything else you need to tell me?'

'Have fun,' purred the cat, and dissimulated into an unnecessary but attractive cloud of multicoloured dust.

Jaq reached out for the book.

*

'Well, this is bullshit,' grunted Leandro, hands on his hips.  'What the hell are the melds playing at?'

He was glaring at the control readings from the central generator that had flatlined that morning and refused to shift.  Dips in supply were routine, and failures were rare but not unheard-of.  But to have a failure last two hours without having a representative of one of the South American melds turn up to get it fixed was definitely a first.

He showed no reaction at all to the slow appearance from nowhere, beside him, of a young man with a beard and a white linen suit as he pulled a slim device from his pocket and stabbed at it.  With a mental effort, Jaq paused the scene and Leandro froze mid-step.  The Macapan systems engineer stomped backwards to where he had started.

'Well, this is bullshit,' he said again and then froze.  Then the whole place shattered apart, leaving Jaq surrounded by document thumbnails.  He flicked through them, opened one and scanned its metadata carefully.

Leandro was speaking Portugese, which Jaq didn't understand, but he was hearing the engineer's words in English.  When he dissociated, he was also aware of Leandro's fear, bubbling beneath the anger, the fact that he had skipped breakfast and was grumpy as a result, and of the faintly pleasurable pain he was feeling across his shoulders from the workout he did the night before.

As he pondered these details, documents highlighted themselves, spitting out the calculations that the researchers had run to establish Leandro's probable state of mind from his body language and what they could gather of his prior movements (he had defintely been to the community gym the night before and his programme showed that he was working on a pretty decent shoulder press, but no one had bothered to look at image data from the gym itself, even if it existed).  Jaq could see where the speculation was contibuting to the scene where the hard data couldn't.  It was possible that Leandro had been delighted with events, but nothing in the data suggested that this was the case and everything pointed towards him being angry and fearful and hungry.  So that was how the simulation presented him.

Jaq nodded, dismissed the sources and, as they flew away, the scene re-asserted itself.  Jaq wound it back to the start and released.

'Well, this is bullshit,' grunted Leandro for a third time, hands on his hips.  'What the hell are the melds playing at?'

He was glaring at the control readings from the central generator that had flatlined that morning and refused to shift.  Dips in supply were routine, and failures were rare but not unheard-of.  But to have a failure last two hours without having a representative of one of the South American melds turn up to get it fixed was definitely a first.

Jaq followed him across the small room as the engineer stabbed at the device he had pulled from his pocket.  The pebble-smooth glass wafer was an early version of Jaq's smartie: a primitive AI in a handheld form, compared to the one Jaq had implanted behind his left ear, its monomolecular tendrils threaded throughout his brain, spinal cord and gut.

'No, it's definitely dead,' said Leandro, holding the device to the side of his head.  After a pause he went on: 'Look, you know what this stuff is like.  But as far as I can tell, the power supply from Rio has failed.'

He stomped back and forth, tension curling his shoulders into his thick neck.

'Yeah, it needs power to make power.  Not much.  It's like a trickle feed they set up years ago.  If the feed shuts down, the system runs for about a day then powers down, just like it did yesterday.'  He tapped his fingers on a steel control panel, staring through the glass into the generator bay's darkness.  'Yeah, it's happened loads of times, but the melds are on it so quick you'd never notice.  Less than two hours and the breach is fixed.  I heard the plan was to replace the whole thing with a geothermal drive, but they kept putting it off until we had a local meld.'

He picked up a steaming mug and took a deep gulp.

'Well what have you heard from Rio?'

He listened for a moment.

'Whaddya mean "nothing"?  There can't be "nothing" coming from a city of fifty million people, Maria!'

Jaq gradually released his grip on his consciousness and gradually dissociated into the scene as Leandro put down the mug with a splash and stabbed angrily at his smartie.  He had been up too late and up again far too early when the call had come through.  That was a good point, he thought.  The back-up generators for the communication relay masts only had a day's juice in them at the best of times.  They'd been working for - he glanced at his watch - three hours without external power.  If people were panicking now, how much worse would it get when they realized that the comms grid was down?

Leandro went over to the safe in the corner of the office.  His job here wasn't much to talk about.  His doctorate in theoretical physics should have made him a plum shoo-in for a place in the local meld and he would've enjoyed a life of comfortable and well-compensated leisure punctured only by a few hours participation in the meld once a day.  Instead he was stuck in Macapa, the world's pointless umbilical to space, meld-less and perpetually on the edge of total breakdown.  It was a breakdown only prevented by the constant stream of diverting entertainment provided to the city's mass unemployed by a considerate if distant partnership of foreign melds who kept promising to install the framework for one in Macapa "as soon as the local situation calms down".  But there was always something going on.

Last week there had been riots again.  Leandro hadn't even be sure what they were rioting about.  Possibly the cancellation of some soap opera.  Or possibly suppression of the jungle communities.  Or both.  Either way, it put back the clock on his comfortable semi-retirement by another two years and left him stuck caretaking the city's primary generator: a job that mostly involved doing anything the melds couldn't, which wasn't much.  He swept and tidied and made sure the datalink to Rio was secure.  And then spent the rest of every day watching soaps and looking forward to the gym.

He punched the combination into the safe and yanked the door open.

He was a big guy.  He knew how to handle himself.  With the riots and other violence becoming more frequent, you had to be.  But he knew that when the comms went down the current fear and unrest was going to turn into something uglier by far.  And a man with a family to protect had to make sure he took precautions.

He pulled the old pistol out of the safe and hefted it carefully in his right hand.  It was a design from way back in the Burning Time.  He'd found it in one of the old service tunnels below the generator when he'd been checking the datalink, almost three years ago, wrapped in an oily rag and stuffed into a crevice.  He'd tried it a couple of times and knew the power core was still good for at least a thousand shots.  He was less sure about the solid mag - a chunk of graphite that the pistol converted into ammunition in a thousandth of a second when you pulled the trigger.  But based on what he'd read, he was pretty sure it was good for plenty of shots.  But he only had one mag.

With his other hand, he pulled his smartie out of his pocket, touched a single button and raised it to his ear again.

'Santiago?  Are you back from the store?  Did you do what I told you..?  Good boy.  Now lock and bar the door.  You look after your mama and your brother.  I'll be home as soon as I can.  You don't let anyone in but me, OK?  No one.  You understand..?  Good boy.'

He tightened his grip on the pistol.

'I love you, Santiago,' he said.  'You tell mama and Lucas that I said I love them too, OK?'

Leandro stabbed the smartie to silence again, took a deep breath, stuffed the pistol into a pocket and headed for the door.

As the door shut behind the engineer, Jaq found himself back in the Library.

'What happened?' he asked, not meaning to address it to Charterhouse, but the avatar was there anyway.

'We have no idea,' admitted the cat.  'Leandro made it to the street where things were already pretty bad.  Too many cameras were damaged and we couldn't follow him.  Maybe he made it home safe.  Maybe he didn't.  Maybe he killed a lot of people on the way, or no one at all.'

'Why am I back here?'

'Hm, not sure,' admitted the cat.  'You should have been able to navigate to an adjacent narrative without coming back here.  Let me have a look.'  There was the briefest of pauses.  'Oh, it seems that the next nearest Macapa narrative is just outside our time threshold.  Things were not good in Macapa after that for quite a few days.'

'Well, yeah,' agreed Jaq.  'That was the day Ammit struck.  They had no idea what was coming.  The streets would've been choked with ash and dust.  And with no power or communications it would've been a living hell!'

'We don't have much hard material for that time,' admitted Charterhouse.  'Not until the Martian landings.  We've got a bit of a prologue to that, though.  Colonel Gryre again.  Do you want to see that first?'

'Definitely,' agreed Jaq and didn't need to be told which book to touch.  He just reached out and plunged into the framework.