Zero Dark: The Novel 1 - 3

'Did you get what you were looking for?' asked Charterhouse. He was an emaciated-looking Siamese cat, black, almost five feet tall at the shoulder, and wearing a pair of brass-rimmed spectacles and an elaborate matching necklace. He lounged at the bar and peered closely into Jaq's face, his gold-yellow eyes looming and strange through the lenses of the spectacles.

'What?' muttered Jaq, still dazed from the experience. 'I - what? No.'

He shook his head and looked around the bar. It was a dark, low-ceiling dive, all chrome and organic-looking concrete. At a table not far away, a carbon-black blob the shape of a peanut with a softly-defined face was slowly absorbing its companion - a pale green mobius strip - through one ear. The other patrons were scarcely less diverse. Jaq had drawn attention since he'd walked in wearing the shape of a bio-standard human.

Charterhouse gestured for a drink with one paw and turned back to Jaq.

'But it felt like you were there, right?' he asked. 'The simulation is very convincing. A full mnemonic rendering.'

'Yes,' Jaq agreed. He had seen the Ammit impact. It had been two hundred years ago, but he had seen it, alongside Colyn Gryre, watching from the Caroline, and at Don Carter's shoulder on the upper levels of San Diego. He had seen it and felt the same horrified confusion they had felt. It was raw.

'It's all pieced together from fragments of recordings - video, audio - plus a lot of work from some volunteers to fill in the gaps intelligently,' Charterhouse confirmed. 'To be quite frank, we didn't think anyone would ever use it.'

'What?' gasped Jaq, standing up, one hand firmly clasped on the bar to keep himself steady. 'Why not?'

'Ancient history,' Charterhouse shrugged as only a Siamese cat can shrug. 'Who cares?'

'Why does it even exist?' Jaq was feeling re-oriented, now. He checked the time and his smarto informed him that it was fifteen minutes past two and simultaneously reminded him what that meant for the purposes of a ring station orbiting Saturn.

'We all pass the time in our own way, dear boy,' mused the cat, eyebrows rising suggestively. 'I could equally ask why you care. And why in heaven's name you're wandering around wearing that godawful thing.'

'The coat?' he replied, running one hand down his lapels. He rather liked it. Classic tailoring.

'The body!' scoffed Charterhouse. 'I haven't seen a biostandard human for... well, fuck, it's been a long time.'

'I'm a historian, Mr Charterhouse,' huffed Jaq, 'I'm allowed to be a little eccentric.  What do you want for access to the rest of the material?'

The cat gave him a long, hard look.  It was a good shape for long, hard looks.

'Who says I want anything, Mr Moog?' replied Charterhouse, dipping his neck to suck at the straw of his drink.  'What could you possibly offer me?  You're quite the dullest human I've ever met.  Nearly fifty and what have you done?  Poked around old ships and stations and plodded around libraries and talked to people.  Like a caveman.'

Jaq shrugged.  It was nothing he hadn't heard before.  At a time when the definition of "human" had never been more flexible and organic and artificial minds co-existed indistinguishably, slipping from corpus to corpus in pursuit of ever more extreme and original sensations, he knew he was an anachronism.  Still wearing the corpus he'd been born in, more or less, he had always found books more compelling than senso - staring at dots on paper and hallucinating vividly, as he'd seen it described.  He was no Luddite.  There were communities of recidivists on Earth, here and there, scraping food out of the soil and shitting in holes.  Jaq was quite happy to still enjoy the physique of a young man and the smarto weaved into his brain tissue, along with all the other enhancements that made his solo adventures into humanity's history relatively danger-free.

Money was a thing that had fascinated him all his life.  A mechanism to account for scarce resources was obsolete, but economics didn't stop just because money did.  And by understanding how humans centuries before had thought about money had taught Jaq a surprising amount about his own world.  It was like there was a money-shaped hole in the human psyche - however you defined "human" - that would get filled up by something if you didn't fill it with money.

Some people chased extreme sensations - ecstasy was popular, but not as popular as fear.  Some pursued the pinnacles of skill, like shipbuilders and duellists.  Novelty was a big one.  Lots of people would give a great deal for a novel experience.  It was like the opposite of history, in its way.  It explained why his was such an uncrowded field.  And those who did share that space tended to look further back than was Jaq's inclination.  Ancient China was the current flavour of the month.  But, in an age when information was essentially free and available to everyone, there was a small and elite group who could reasonably call themselves "information brokers": people who sequestered rare gems of information that were, for whatever reason, not openly available.  Or, if it was, then in such an out-of-the-way corner of the infosphere that just to know where it could be found was, itself, valuable information.

Charterhouse was such a one.  He was the sort of dealer for whom the first fix was always free.  But there was always a price for the next hit, and Jaq had known it, coming in.

'Let's take a walk, Charterhouse,' said Jaq, buttoning his coat and picking up his hat from where it had fallen to the floor during his mnemonic trance.

Unlike Jaq, Charterhouse had been born in a digital creche.  Jaq didn't really understand the process - he was an historian, after all - but he gathered it was like a sort of randomizer.  Digital personalities coalesced and grew and died at a dizzying rate.  Only once in a billion billion interactions did one emerge that was strong and coherent enough to be "born" into what was usually called Primary by the artilects.

Charterhouse followed him out into the wide thoroughfare beyond.  This side of the ring habitat was in its night cycle.  The other side was visible between the soaring walls of the city around them, just turning a rosey glow at the start of its dawn cycle.  Saturn and its rings lay off to the other side of the habitat at this time.

'I am willing to trade you something of immense value for full access to the Zero Dark records,' he said quietly as they strolled.  'It's so valuable that, just me putting it into words will make you consider killing me so that only you can know this thing, except...'

Charterhouse strolled beside him on silent paws.  He made no immediate response, and Jaq wondered if he would bite.  Jaq let him dangle, until -

Charterhouse sighed, dramatically.

'Except what, Jaq?' he asked, in a tone so exaggeratedly bored that Jaq knew immediately that the cat was on the hook.

'Except what I have to share is only a hypothesis,' he admitted.  'It's an exciting one.  Possibly the most exciting one ever.  But it's not really what you'd call information.  But if you'll give me full access to the archive, I can turn my hypothesis into a theory.'

'If it's right,' Charterhouse caveated.

'If I can prove it's right,' agreed Jaq. 'But trust me on this: you'll think even the hypothesis is worth it.  I know what you like.  Even the existence of the hypothesis is worth it.'

'But if you're right, it'll be worthless to me,' complained Charterhouse.  'You'll publish.  And then everyone will know.'

They came to the broadwalk, as close to the ring's edge as an unprotected human - or cat - could reasonably stray.  Technically, the ring's rotation and the perimeter wall were enough to retain the atmosphere, but redundancy was a thing so there was a row of field generators a hundred kilometres long.  They messed with digital reception enough that this was as private a conversation as Jaq could be sure to have.

'Not this,' he replied.  'If I'm right, I won't publish.  I can't.  It would be far, far too dangerous.  You'll understand when I've told you.'

'But if you can't publish, what's the point?' demanded Charterhouse, rising up on his back paws in front of Jaq, forcing him to stop as the cat peered at him through those weird spectacles.

'You would ask me that?' chuckled Jaq, meeting the cat's disturbing stare without flinching.  'The point is to know.  Or, at least, to reasonably suspect.'

Charterhouse settled back down onto all fours and turned away from Jaq.

'I'll let you have access to the archive anyway, you know,' he said, tail waving as he displayed his arsehole and Jaq felt profoundly thankful for the darkness.  'You don't have to tell me anything.'

Jaq grinned.

'So you're doing me two favours?' he asked.  'Access to the archive, and you're letting me unburden myself of the secret burning a way out of my brain?'

Charterhouse turned and smiled.  It was disconcerting on a cat.

'You'd be amazed how much of my stock comes to me for nothing more.'

'Want to hear it then?' Jaq asked, stopping at a viewing point.  There was no one else around.  And even if there had been, hardly anyone paid much attention to the stars any more. Jaq sat down in one of the form-responsive benches and Charterhouse approached.  But for his ridiculous glasses and necklace he would have looked like the night taken shape.  The cat sat down at Jaq's feet, curled his tail around his ankles and rested his front half in his lap.

'Speak,' said Charterhouse.

'Over two hundred years ago, Earth committed an elaborate suicide,' said Jaq.  He was lecturing, but that was just his natural style, even when he had an audience of one.  'Mars and Venus had a fight over her corpse.  Mars won - sort of - and then here we are.  But hardly anyone ever asks why ninety percent of the Earth's population vanished or where they went.  This is, surely, one of history's greatest mysteries and yet we have pretty much ignored it for two centuries.  Why do you think that is?'

'I assume that's a rhetorical question?'

'Obviously.  People have learned to reel off standard answers about mass hysteria or cultism, but none of them stack up and we know it.  It's a painful hole in our collective memory and, for some reason, instead of trying to fill it, we have learned, instead to just forget about it.

'I have a strong suspicion - and at least some evidence to support that suspicion - that the reason is because of two things: first, the people of Earth didn't kill themselves, they were murdered.  And, second, the murderers are still around and they are deliberately manipulating us to stop us asking questions.'

'Ooh, I love a good conspiracy theory,' chuckled Charterhouse, not lifting his chin.  'But you said "proof".'

'Not proof that I'm right,' Jaq acknowledged, idly stroking Charterhouse's head.  'But there's proof that I might be on the right track, and you can see it more easily than I can, I suspect.'

'Oh yes?'

'Biological intelligences, like me, are hugely influenced by digital minds like you,' said Jaq.  'We trust you.  We like you.  One of the conditions of your gestation, incidentally, is that you should be likeable and trustworthy, at least within certain boundaries.'

'Are you saying you don't like me?'

'I'm saying that I don't automatically trust you,' replied Jaq.  'I have little choice but to tell you what I am.  If I kept it to myself and accepted your offer of free access, I would be suspicious of the content.  But I trust you enough to give it to me straight if I do the same for you.  How's that?'

'Adequate,' agreed Charterhouse, a little grumpily.

'I'm no artilect,' said Jaq, 'but I am prepared to bet that, if you looked into the subtleties of the gestation parameters on your creche, you'd discover that only intelligences able and willing to block out that historical gap are allowed out.'

'You bet?'

'I bet.'

Charterhouse unwounded himself.

'Your hunch hardly counts as evidence,' he snapped angrily snapping his tail.  'And your paranoid conspiracy theory is worth nothing to me.'

Charterhouse flounced away into the darkness, disappearing almost immediately.

'Go and look!' called out Jaq after him, leaping to his feet.  'Just go and look, Charterhouse!  You'll see I'm right!'

*

Jaq tried to wipe his sweating forehead again and immediately felt stupid - again.  The area around the Northwest Pacific crater was still mildly more radioactive than the rest of the planet and, although his body would probably not suffer any serious side effects there was no point letting his brain degrade between back-ups.  It had been over fifty years.  He rather hoped he could see it to a natural conclusion before he'd have to re-skin in something new.  Maybe he'd try a dolphin.  There were some amazing ruins still buried in the mid-Atlantic, or so he'd heard.  In any case, for now his old body was in a radiation suit and he just had to lump the sweat as he laboriously extracted himself from the excavation of Ulaanbaatar.

Archaeology was not his strongest field and it wasn't where he felt comfortable.  Documentary sources on Zero Dark, though, were hard to come by and he had little option but to go old school.  Ulaanbaatar, in what had once been Mongolia, was close enough to the impact site to have been left mostly alone by the Second Colonial War, but far enough away that he had thought at least one of the target sites might have been preserved intact.  But it had taken three weeks of exploratory mining - with only his robot workforce for company - to even triangulate where they were on the map and it would be weeks more before he would be in reach of any of the possible target sites.

'GOOD DAY, BOSS?' asked one of the robots as he climbed out of the hole.  They weren't true intelligences.  Any conversation more complicated than basic pleasantries left them adrift.  But it was still good for him to hear a voice.

'Better than he thought it was a moment ago,' broke in another voice, and Jaq turned, lifting his helmet off as he did so.

'You went and looked?' Jaq asked Charterhouse, as the cat descended the slope into the crater where they were working.

'I went and looked,' he agreed.  The cat was wearing nothing against the radiation.  He had nothing to worry about.  'I did that the day after we last spoke.  It took me the last three months to cover my tracks, you bastard.'

'I was right, then?'

'You know you were right,' replied Charterhouse, entering the shade of the large tent that covered the whole dig.  'The question is, what do we do about it?  That archive was worked on by hundreds of volunteers - thousands, possibly.  They could have seeded the whole thing with flags and alerts to see if someone was poking around for answers.  Possibly worse: you could find your smarto punched full of holes and your brain boiling from the inside out if you open the wrong file.'

'Is there any way to access the raw footage instead?'

'Not unless you have a spare couple of decades,' admitted Charterhouse, inspecting an empty shipping container with interest.  'The whole point of the simulation was to piece together fragments into something coherent that the observer can explore at their leisure.  Doing the analysis and clean-up of every piece of data we put into it... Well, you'd be talking centuries for any normal mind.  There are artilects that could do it faster, but do you trust any of them?'

'No,' agreed Jaq stripping off his suit as he headed for the shower block.  'But maybe this is for the best.'

'Howso?' asked Charterhouse, climbing sinuously into the container and checking it for size.

'Heading into this looking for evidence for my hypothesis is begging for confirmation bias,' said Jaq, passing his suit to a bot for decontamination.  'I need to approach this like a historian.  I'll go back into the simulation and study it.  I'll be objective and curious and careful.  I won't ignore evidence, but I won't prioritise it.'

'Even at the same spin rate you used on the first two records, it'll take weeks to get through it all, Jaq,' Charterhouse warned him.  'Could be longer, depending on which rabbit holes you go down.  There's four years of data, spread across tens of thousands of event.  You can't see it all.'

'I only need to see enough.'

*

They took Charterhouse's airjammer back to Nairobi.  It was the closest thing Earth had to a capital city, its towering density had largely weathered the Fall and it had since been grown and improved and gave a home to forty million humans of every type.  Beyond its walls, the African plains flourished and bloomed, mostly unimpeded by human interference for the first time in, perhaps, a hundred millennia.

Jaq could, technically, tap into the simulation anywhere.  His smarto had more than enough processing power, as Charterhouse had demonstrated back on the Saturn orbital.  But it made sense to take precautions, for comfort as much as anything else.  So they secured an apartment - there were plenty available, as the city was kept at an even fifty percent of its total population capacity - and Jaq got himself fed and hydrated while Charterhouse authorised the access rights.

'You don't need to hang around,' Jaq told him.

'You prefer me not to hang around?'

'Actually,' Jaq admitted, 'I'd rather have you here.  If I can trust anyone, I can trust you.  Excited as I am to go digging into the past, I'm also aware that I'll be basically unconscious the whole time.  Better to have someone around to wipe the drool.'

'I'm not wiping you drool, Moog!' snorted Charterhouse.

'Metaphorically speaking.'

'Not sure I want to wipe your metaphorical drool, either,' grunted the cat.  'But I'll hang out here for a while.  I'll probably let you know if I decide to leave.'

Jaq finished his glass of water and shrugged.

'Best offer I've had,' he agreed.  'I'll take it.'

'Fine.  Where are you heading first?' asked Charterhouse, seeing Jaq making for the bed.

'First Martian landing, I think,' he replied.  'It seems like a logical starting point.  Can't see that I'd gain much from watching frightened people die and cities fall, otherwise.'

Charterhouse nodded, vaguely, and then looked away as Jaq lay down and engaged his access rights on the smarto.