Band of Gypsys (6 page)

‘Sure thing.’

The Triumvirate resumed the quiet talks they’d begun before they left for Paris—with people in the Permanent Civil Service who’d served Ax’s cause for a long time, with Techno-Utopian campsite luminaries of the Permanent Festival; with a group of Countercultural MPs, known as “the Rebels”, who were openly at odds with NeoFeudal government policy. Meetings were hidden under the useful heading of Volunteer Initiative business, and most of the discussion genuinely was about how to feed the masses, without fossil fuel and preferably without slave labour—the same topic that was dreadfully occupying governments of good will everywhere. Much more quietly, Ax and Sage had resumed contact with the Pan-Asian Techno-Green-Utopians who’d once helped Ax to bust the Data Quarantine, on a secret remote-access trip to Hiroshima. As if overnight, the Chinese had a hugely expanded sphere of influence, known as the “Great Peace”. What was going on there? The great unknown of post-Crisis global politics, the story that Westminster didn’t seem to want the country to know, was puzzling work. Suddenly it’s brought home to you can’t take a plane-ride and find out. You have no idea what’s really out there, no idea what might be hidden. No idea, no matter how you safeguard yourselves, who that is, claiming to be an old friend, on the other end of the line.

Closer to home there was ominously named Neurobomb Working Party. The government wanted to know the truth about what had happened last summer, around the A Team event; and exactly what part the Triumvirate had played, the year before, in the assassination of the so-called “occult monster”, Rufus O’Niall. Their wish must be granted, they could not be put off forever.

The Working Party came to Buckingham Palace, and were escorted to the upper floor of the North Wing by a young man with floppy, paint-box crimson hair, wearing the dress uniform of the Barmy Army. Ax’s militarised hippies had been disbanded, but he was allowed, for the time being, to maintain a token, ceremonial force in the old Palace; otherwise known as “The Insanitude”. The ruling classes of Second Chamber England viewed the survival of the Barmy Army with horror, but in this case the visitors were relieved to see that their guide carried a holstered sidearm. The North Wing had served as emergency secure accommodation for the most dangerous ‘refugees’, in Boat People summer. The criminal refuse were still in occupation, like rats in a sewer.

The meeting room was not generously proportioned. It barely held an oval hardwood table, polished but shabby, a smart screen and a random assortment of chairs. The walls were hung in faded blue paper, with a narrow stripe; naked windows looked out on yellow coping stones and grey corners of roof slope. Oltech slates and earbeads were laid out at each place; water jugs and glasses arrayed down the centre, with small plates of macrobiotic oatcakes. Standalone imaging hardware stood beside the screen, on a trolley. Three people faced the Working Party: Fiorinda, and two of the most puzzling members of Ax’s inner circle: Chip Desmond in a crumpled metallic grey flying suit, cherub-cheeks glowing, nappy hair twisted into a golly-forest of little tails, a red silk scarf at his throat; and Kevin Hanlon, aka “Verlaine”, piratical in loose purple linen breeches, a ragged
My Favourite Molecule
tee, silky brown curls fringing a tight-wrapped skull and crossbones bandana. These were
The Adjuvants
, young “Indie” pop-stars from the original CounterCultural ThinkTank, swept into bizarre prominence beside their friend Ax Preston.

Verlaine got down from his perch on the table and took a seat, like a mildly naughty undergraduate at the start of a seminar. The visitors disposed themselves: the table was large enough, and there were sufficient chairs, for them to keep their distance. Silence prevailed. At last a voice rose from the government ranks.

‘Are the President and Mr Pender delayed?’

‘No,’ said Fiorinda. ‘They can’t make it, I’m sorry. Don’t worry, Chip and Verlaine are experts, and I’m well briefed. We’ll be able to answer your questions.’

She used no implants, no eye-socket tech, but she had a retentive memory, and could put the right names to all the faces. Wendy Carter, media-star neurologist: an obvious instant authority on the new science of “Mind/Matter Physics”. Ardhal Fitzgerald, expatriate Cambridge computer scientist, also a spy for Dublin. (
cead mile failte,
little brother, and you’re welcome to take good notes). Boris Anathaswamy, high energy physicist from Culham. Guilty by association presumably. Mairead Culper of Glastonbury Council; Official CounterCultural Party. Jack Vries, the Wiccan Scholar, vaguely titled Consultant to the Home Office. A Bishop, a Buddhist, and an Immam, all public figures, from the Standing Bio-Ethics Committee. Tony Burnside-Khan and Rasheeda Townsend, both from the weapons industry: and that’s a statement of intent.

Not a single actual fusion consciousness specialist, but you couldn’t blame them for that. There weren’t many experts in what Sage had done in the entire world, and none at all in England, except for a tiny handful of dilettante rockstars and lowly Welsh postdocs. Olwen Devi, genius of the Zen Self project in Reading Arena, had returned to Caer Siddi, the Company headquarters; her best people with her.

‘We can reschedule, if you wish, but it’s going to mean some delay. There are the preparations for Mayday at Reading, and then almost immediately they have several important early summer events—’

It was Jack Vries who answered, betraying himself as the leader of the group (on paper that was Mairead Culper, sharing power with the Bishop of Oxford)

‘I’m afraid some of our questions will be very sensitive for you, Fiorinda, but by all means, let’s go ahead. We can make a start at least.’

The extremist junta is cast out by force of arms. The smoke clears, you look around, and several of the worst bastards have sneaked right back into office. The last time Fiorinda had seen Jack Vries, pastel-blond dandy with the colourless, secretive eyes, he’d been a guest at Rivermead when Rufus O’Niall was reigning there, in the body of a dead man. Fiorinda, on display as “Fergal Kearney’s whore”, had found out plenty, while the bad guys let their hair down. She had saved a few lives, and she’d known which of the insiders were secretly, fearfully, friends to her cause. Jack Vries had not been among them… But a lot of people had been forced to accept invitations to Rivermead that winter; most of them ignorant of the full horrific truth. She had no
damning
evidence against Vries, though she was damn’ sure it existed. It’s the way of the world, there are always villains who can’t be rooted out, and at least he was being kept out of office. So far. (Though what was he doing here?)

There’d been nasty cans of worms the Rock and Roll Reich had never dared to open, in their day. Live with it.

‘Good. So, let’s begin at the beginning.’

The smartboard was suddenly flooded with colour and movement: psychedelic roses blooming. The same images repeated, in smaller scale, on the slates.

‘These are cognitive brainscans. There’s a brief annotation on your earbeads. I’ll give you a moment, for those who need to listen.’

The party apparently didn’t need notes. Green hardliners frowned in distaste.

‘Magic is a real force,’ began Fiorinda coolly. ‘Or rather, there is a real force, of which we’ve been dimly aware as long as there’ve been modern humans around, a leakage through the barrier between mind and matter. It’s been called by various names:
magic
will do for our purposes. In the last decade before Dissolution new theories were being matched by new technology, allowing lab scientists to approach the threshold where the barrier can be broken. It was believed, by some, that under certain conditions this breakthrough, also known as “fusion” might unleash extraordinarily powerful “occult” powers—’

She paused. The false-coloured scans disappeared. An equation (not yet condensed into anything as recognisable as e=mc2) Powerpointed sedately into place, line by line. ‘I’m sure you’ve all seen that before. We won’t trouble to decipher it in detail. As you know, science currently favours a model of the universe as being “made of information”. Anything you care to mention can be expressed in binary code. Zebras, genes, neutrinos, hatred, can all be seen, equally, as objects in information space. This implies a fundamental level where the material 0s and 1s “outside our heads” are continuous with the immaterial 0s and 1s “in our minds”. When we speak of “breaking the barrier”, we mean finding a means to access this continuity, and to manipulate the material world as if it were a set of ideas. The theory of Mind/Matter physics states that all
mind/brains
—a poor description, suggesting dualism where actually we’re supposing an integrated system, but it seems to have taken root—have a vestigial, infinitesimal interaction with the code “outside our heads”, and therefore an infinitesimal abilty to affect the arrangement of this vast body of information: not only our perception of
the world out there
, but the material universe itself. That’s been the implicit desire of all magical practice, in every occult tradition.’

‘To shift the whole fifteen dimensional kaleidoscope,’ put in Chip, gravely.

Some faces betrayed confusion.
Kaleidoscope
? What kaleidoscope?

Most remained attentively blank, waiting for the keywords.

‘The theory goes on to propose that tiny “fusion consciousness events” tunnelling through the barrier between mind and matter, happen all the time: often unnoticed, sometimes perceived as “psychic experiences”; or providing frustrating unrepeatable data in parapsychology experiments. It suggests that successful stage magicians, and powerful shamen, have always been people with a natural, slightly elevated interaction with information space. This advantage allows them to draw on the vestigal abilities of a group of believers; or even a group of passionate sceptics, and add to the their own power. Strong arousal is an adjuvant: and it’s a positive loop. The more the “magician” can steal, the more he can steal.

‘Yet magic is still a very weak force. A stage magician can “mess with our minds”. To rearrange a small set of actual events is a huge leap beyond: to make a global change, as the A team did, is a far greater leap beyond that. My father, Rufus O’Niall, seems to have been born with an astounding level of mind/matter interaction, which became dangerous when it was ramped-up by his success. There’s convincing evidence, however, that the neurological mechanism is always the same. Plenipotent natural magicians (my late father is the only known example), and phenomenally altered mind/matter agents like the “A team” work in the same way, and that’s what we need to talk about today.’

There had been a stir of recoil when Fiorinda said
my father
.

‘Bear with me,’ said the monster’s daughter, candidate for being burned at the stake, in the last mad phase of Green Nazi rule. ‘This is relevant. My father may have been the first and only creature of his kind, created by a historical situation—’

‘
Synchronicity
,’ exclaimed Verlaine. ‘The population explosion gave us mass-market entertainment idols,
and
drove the development of number crunching machines that could model cognition. Cognitive scanners powered the Zen Self quest. Consumer-slave mega-crowds powered Rufus O’Niall. We got the occult monster and the Neurobomb in the same frame. It seems like a weird coincidence but it isn’t.’

‘It’s two sides of the same coin!’ cried Chip.

Fiorinda smiled, apologetically. The scans returned to the whiteboard.

‘Now, these scans. To recap on the earbead notes, what you see on your slates is a time-lapse sequence for early-onset schizophrenia. In all adolescent brains there’s a sorting-out process, involving a net loss of tissue. In some young people, for reasons that aren’t yet entirely clear, this goes off the rails and they develop schizophrenic symptoms. Clinicians call what you see
the forest fire effect
. See how destruction starts in the parietal cortex, and speeds through the frontal lobes? Five years on, there’s a loss of up to 25% of the grey matter, crucially in areas called the
loci of convergence
, where the “binding” of consciousness is mainly handled.’

The Working Party went on waiting for words. Bomb. Weapon.

‘Classically, there’s an unmistakable breakdown in late adolescence, but by then, the damage is done. Once things have gone as far as you see in the last scan here, the subject will no longer feel in control of their own body; will have great difficulty construing a single reality; will have lost their sense of time, and may be experiencing unbroken, terrifying hallucinations. Even today, a one way ticket to Catatonia is probably the patient’s best hope.’

‘Extensive neuronal tissue seeding,’ murmured Wendy Carter, studying the forest fire with an experienced eye. ‘Might help her—’

‘I doubt if you’d have got close enough to try it on my father. But you’re thinking of normal schizophrenia, Wendy. In a “magical” brain, the carnage shows up in the material locii, but it’s the gushing leak, the open pipe to information space that does the mischief, and you can’t fix that by surgery. It’s not a material thing.’

Dr Carter nodded, cautiously.

‘Schizophrenia can have many causes. Infective disease, genetic accident, drug abuse, prolonged psychological stress; torture. I’ve shown you this version because it most closely resembles what we know happens in the brain of a natural magician, enhanced to plenipotence in human information space. There is the same pattern of destruction, only faster; in the same locii.’

They didn’t get it, not yet. One of the industry consultants found his voice. ‘I, thought Rufus O’Niall’s brain was never examined.’

The young lecturer nodded, approvingly. ‘You’re absolutely right. The way Rufus behaved, in the years of his fame, would’ve had him sectioned, if he’d been a homeless black man, as a danger to society. As he was a ruthless, powerful megastar, he passed for normal, and, as you say, we can’t be a hundred per cent sure about the state of his grey matter. But we have time-lapse scans of the A team’s brains, taken automatically until they were clinically dead. They show what was happening, how the “forest fire” damage erupted, and how swiftly it spread. There is no room for dispute. The team reached fusion, as a single entity, became plenipotent and, at the same time, irreversibly as crazy as a bedbug.’