The Departure (2 page)

Saul slipped the ionic stunner back into his pocket and sat down in King’s chair even as the man shuddered into unconsciousness. Quickly keying in a code gave him access to Janus. The screen blanked for a moment, then opened a display signifying that Janus was ready. He sat back, breathed in through his nostrils, out through his mouth, slow, calming, then coldly studied the graphic of a slowly turning ammonite shell.

“Any problems?” he enquired, picking up King’s sandwich and taking a bite. It tasted relatively good, and actually contained thin slivers of bacon far too salty to have been Food Agency approved, so obviously it hadn’t come from the vending machine behind him.

“Simple systems,” Janus replied flatly. “Easily acquired.”

“So no Inspectorate interference?”

“None—they expect no problems here. Only the relocation order has been sent.”

“Any idea yet where the stuff here is going?”

“The data is presently going to distributed terabyte storage, to be copied and consolidated at multiple locations. I’ve yet to ascertain where it is being sent from there.”

The data consisted of thousands of terabytes of DNA maps, even though compressed and with interconnecting hyperlinks where code repeated in different samples. Some 20 per cent of all the species of Earth had been mapped—mainly the larger fauna and flora. Experts here and at other banks calculated that samples of another 60 per cent of the total awaited, unmapped, in storage, whilst a further 20 per cent remained to be either collected or discovered.

But knowing the destination of that data was a sideshow. Saul had only discovered that it was being rerouted whilst researching Avram Coran, who was his main reason for being here. Coran ranked high in the mainland European Inspectorate Executive, but had never been to Inspectorate HQ London, so wasn’t personally known there. Upon discovering he was coming here, to such a low-security operation, Saul had felt this an opportunity he could not afford to miss. Coran, though disappointingly not the interrogator Saul was
most
anxious to meet, was perfect nevertheless for his purposes. If it had been
him
, the man who haunted Saul’s nightmares, that would have made the operation here even more satisfying, but again, a sideshow.

“What about the physical samples?”

“Nothing on Govnet. I’ve tried searching Subnet in the hope that someone involved in the physical transportation has mentioned the relocation, but nothing yet.”

“The likelihood of transvan drivers getting loose at the mouth is remote, don’t you think?” said Saul. “Showing too much curiosity about government orders usually results in a little
inducement
in a white-tiled cell.”

Saul was very sure that the human mind could not quite process the effect of the pain inducer, which was useful for the Inspectorate because it made sensory reprogramming easier. After some months of such treatment, dissidents were either returned to society as terrified and obedient robots, or became too damaged to function at all. The latter, if they were lucky, ended up paying a visit to a “Safe Departure” clinic, after which they went through the mulchers feeding community composting tanks. The unlucky were sent to trash incinerators and, as Saul was well aware, were often still alive when thrown in.

“The white tiles are a human affectation,” Janus noted. “And the inducers will soon no longer be required.”

Saul stared at that revolving ammonite. Thousands of dissidents had been euthanized after the failed experiments, but now the technology was nearly ready. Soon the Inspectorate would be able to edit, copy and cut-and-paste a human mind like a computer file. Hannah Neumann was the name connected to all this—another individual he was anxious to meet. After cracking a supposedly secure database to find the most likely candidate responsible for having installed the hardware inside Saul’s skull, Janus had found her, and found out how the Inspectorate was using her work. But what got him just now was Janus saying “a human affectation.”

What is an artificial intelligence? Janus, a mass of synaptically formatted software, mimicked a near-copy of a human mind but with sensory inputs adjusted to allow it to exist on Govnet, distributed and hidden. Janus’s memories were only those it had acquired since it initiated two years previously, but the AI was constantly growing, its vocabulary and reactions changing. Saul believed he himself must have created Janus, because what expertise he possessed seemed to lie in the realm of computer systems. He also surmised that Janus was a risky option, but nevertheless had a head start. The Inspectorate were almost certainly putting together comlife just like it, which would eventually track it down. Saul had limited time to find out who he was, to hunt down his interrogator, and then to exact his vengeance on the Committee.

“The Inspectorate Assessor has just arrived,” Janus informed him, opening up a frame on the main screen so as to display this gene bank’s roofport.

Coran had arrived in an aircar—only government departments sent their officials around in these aerofan-driven creations of orbitally manufactured high-tensile bubblemetals and ceramofacture hydrogen engines. The dwindling supply of such high-tech materials made vehicles like this an expensive option. Janus focused up close as the vehicle settled in a cloud of dust and its passengers disembarked. An Inspectorate enforcer, who was both Coran’s driver and bodyguard, accompanied him.

Saul still possessed enough knowledge of world history to know that the Inspectorate had its near equivalents in the past. It had started out as something like the Gestapo combined with the Waffen SS—secret police, interrogators, the enforcers of politically correct thought. In the beginning it had kept to its home territory—the government offices, the prisons and the adjustment complexes—then, like Himmler’s black-uniformed force, its territory had expanded. However, unlike Himmler’s force, it had been allowed time to take over and absorb the police forces, armies, navies and air forces of the world, so that now its purpose included security, law enforcement and police actions up to and including the use of tactical atomics. But for most civilians the Inspectorate would ever be associated with that sudden hammering on the door in the middle of the night, and the subsequent disappearance of relatives and friends.

Clad in the kind of expensive-looking grey suit those in the Inspectorate Executive favoured, Coran of course sported state-of-the-art comware: fones in each ear engaging via optic to temple plugs, palmtop at his hip and doubtless cameras and retinal projectors actually in his eyes. He was short and stocky, and Saul suspected he ran muscle-tone programmes during the night, complemented by the kinds of steroids banned from public consumption. He looked to be about thirty but, since cosmetic surgery and the new anti-ageing drugs were also available to his kind, he might have been older. Studying the man, Saul felt a clench of disappointment in his stomach. Coran certainly wasn’t Saul’s interrogator, but nor was his face that of any of those others who had made guest appearances out of Saul’s subconscious over the last two years—the total span of his remembered life. No matter, Coran was obviously one of the same kind. Such an official would be precisely the sort Saul needed to help him gain access to the cells of the British Inspectorate headquarters over in London.

Saul hopped out of the seat, stooped to hoist King up by his shoulders, removed and donned the man’s lab coat, then dragged him backwards through into the toilet. He lifted King up on the toilet seat, leaning his head against the hygienic-wipe feeder, locked the door from the inside then climbed up out of the booth. He was stepping out, buttoning up the coat, which was fortunately loose enough to give him freedom of movement, just as Janus announced, “Contact from Sharon Thader. I am running an overlay on you of Aiden King’s face.”

Saul quickly dropped into the seat as a frame opened on the screen before him, to give a vid feed from the upper office of Thader, the manager of this place—a swarthy, tired-looking woman with badly applied make-up.

“Aiden,” she began, “Assessor Coran is on his way down to see you, and you are to offer him every assistance.” She now glanced warily to one side. Coran obviously having just departed her office, she now spoke in a desperate rush. “Do what he says or we’re in trouble. Margot Le Blanc’s Assessment Group is reviewing my appeal and we can hope that at worst we’ll just lose some of the data and samples before this is stopped.”

“Let’s hope so,” he replied.

All they had here was hope, vain hope. The French Region Delegate, Margot Le Blanc, one of the five hundred and sixty Committee delegates, was a career politician favoured by Chairman Messina. She would do nothing to jeopardize her position.

Thader gazed at him oddly, before closing down the communication. Obviously he had not given the expected response, but she didn’t continue the exchange. It was always best not to say too much over vidphone.

Reaching down to his holdall, Saul took out various items and secured them about his person. He left the surgical saw inside, however, and kicked the bag underneath the console just as the door began to open.

Preceded by his bodyguard, Avram Coran entered, and Saul turned, assuming a politely helpful expression.

“Citizen Aiden King,” Coran acknowledged, studying him for a short spell before turning to gaze at the big screen. Coran had never met King, as Saul knew, though there was always the danger that the man had studied the staff files before Janus started tampering with them. Coran’s present lack of reaction signified that he had not. “You understand why I am here?”

“To ensure that the data relocation and physical relocation of samples is under way, to make an assessment of resource usage here at this gene bank, then report back to the Committee,” Saul parroted. But, really, it wasn’t entirely clear why a man of Coran’s rank had been sent. It seemed the closing down of Gene Bank entire, of which this place was just one branch, and the relocation of its resources, database and stocks of genetic materials, possessed an importance Saul had yet to divine. Coran was here to start in the basement and work his way up, to shut it all down and individually deliver new orders to the staff. All staff had been instructed to remain at their stations; even Thader had probably been instructed to remain at her desk up in the penthouse offices.

Coran shook his head at Saul’s apparent naivety. “I rather think the Committee has more important things to do with its time, don’t you?”

“Certainly,” Saul agreed. “I meant report back to the Assessment Group. My apologies.”

“So, if you could explain this to me?” Coran gestured to the screen.

Since here was an important man and he was still sitting in his presence, Saul stood up, but he must have moved a little too quickly, because the bodyguard moved to interpose herself between him and her charge.

Even more visibly augmented than Coran, she towered over him with most of what was female about her buried inside muscle and subdermal armour. Pale cropped hair topped a high forehead over reptilian engraft eyes, and the metal struts of cyber assists ran down the backs of her hands. Saul had to wonder what drove someone to thus visibly augment themselves with so ugly a result. What kind of self-esteem did she possess before she had allowed this to be done to her? In what regard did she hold herself now?

She wore the usual pale-blue uniform, visored cap and bulletproof jacket, and around her belt hung the usual array of tools: the cylinder of a telescopic truncheon, an ion taser stun gun, a short machine pistol and a selection of gas grenades. However, one other item on her belt gave him pause. The fifteen-centimetre-long, square-sectioned device, with just a simple combined slide and press-button control inset below a small screen shaped like a segment of orange, was a disabler—a nicely portable version of the pain inducer they used in those Inspectorate white-tiled cells, or from trucks to quell riots. If he’d possessed reservations about what he now intended, the sight of that item would have dispelled them. Saul rarely entertained reservations.

“That’s okay, Sheila. Let the citizen show me what they have here.”

As the bodyguard stepped back, Saul turned to the console, incidentally noticing how Coran now moved himself out of his reach. Though, of course, very little about it appeared on the government-controlled news services of Govnet, plenty of gossip had spread on the Subnet during the increasingly few occasions when it managed to function. Attacks on officials like Coran were becoming more frequent, because people were desperate. Since the bloodless annexation of Australia forty years ago there was nowhere left to flee to—or even dream of fleeing to—and, directly after that, things had begun to go downhill rapidly. Especially when Earth’s government, the Committee, removed the right to anonymity from the electronic voting system, and democracy took its final asthmatic breath. But that was just politics and would have been ignored with usual civilian complacency, were it not for the fact that those same civilians were now starving in massive numbers, and also that the Committee had turned killer.

Saul called up the presentation that King had been working on, and expanded it to fill the entire screen. Here were scans of some newspaper articles from back in the nineteenth century. Speaking off the cuff, he said, “The first gene bank, as we know it, was set up in the twentieth century in reaction to the steady extinction of species, though of course seed banks had been around for a lot longer, and for entirely different reasons. But only in the last hundred years have we made a concerted effort to sample every surviving species. Our stated goal here is to compile a complete gene bank of all life on Earth.”

Coran held up a hand. “You may have noticed that I’m not a tourist and therefore not here on a guided tour. I understand you’ve been managing to extract samples from museum exhibits of extinct animals, and that further digs were financed to obtain samples from prehistoric species in the La Brea tar pits?”

“Yes,” Saul nodded. “We were also running wormbots down into the Antarctic and Arctic ice, and then there’s reverse chemical and pattern mapping.”