Beautiful Intelligence (11 page)

“So, what you going to do now we’re here?” Rosalind asked.

Tsuneko sighed. Rosalind was an old family friend who deserved the truth. “I don’t know,” she said. “If Aritomo Ichikawa finds me, my life is in danger... though, more likely, he’d just enslave me in Japan.”

Rosalind nodded. “Got to find you first. What about work? The biograins?”

“The moment I reveal myself through biograins I’ll be caught. I suppose my best plan would be to sell what I know, create a fake data incarnation and live a life of leisure until I pop off. Biograins will be public knowledge in a decade. If I don’t sell up soon I’ll miss my chance.”

“Popping off could be sixty years away.”

Tsuneko nodded. “What I would really like to do is find the AIteam, but that must be impossible now. In Malta there were traces, but Aritomo’s team never caught the signals they were looking for.”

“Or so they told you.”

“True... I am a fool if I trust him, or anybody from Ichikawa labs. That’s why I came here free of the nexus. Solo. So they couldn’t follow me.”

“Why do you want to find the AIteam?” Rosalind asked.

“I was sporadically in touch with their interface man, who I’d worked with at Bell labs. He and his security man had me for a mole, but it was more complex than that. Even at the time Manfred bought my services there was something about his plan I did not like. Well...
not
is too strong. He was following the wrong path, playing with toys. Something about the quantum computer intrigues me. So much possibility in one brain...”

“Where might the AIteam be now?”

“Anywhere,” Tsuneko replied. “I have no idea. They were hiding out in Malta, so it could be Europe, Africa, the Near East...”

“So you would join them?”

“Maybe. The irony is, Dirk – their interface man – was leaning towards Manfred’s interpretation of artificial intelligence. Perhaps we were both on the wrong team.”

“Perhaps he’s as unhappy as you are,” Rosalind prompted.

“Yeah. Perhaps.”

Quiet for a few minutes: surf pounding the shore, distant shrieking kids, the creak of dilapidated wooden huts. Bicycle bells, no sound of vehicles.

Then Rosalind said, “Ever heard of Mr Bloodhound?”

“No.”

“Let me take you to him.”

Tsuneko turned to face her friend. “Who is he?”

“The name says it all.”

~

Travel in Britain was difficult. Only Germany had been worse hit by the Depression. Overcrowded, importing too much of its food, urbanised to the max and riven with strife, it declined like America: violently. With fuel impossible to obtain and a poor energy infrastructure it descended into semi-chaos, voyeuristically staring at its own demise through countless sensational nexus broadcasts. These days, half the country was owned by China and Korea. The other half wasn’t worth owning.

But Rosalind was lucky. In 2092 she had been rich. At the first hint of an economic slide she sold her wine business for a tenth of its value and moved to a five acre plot in Wiltshire with her boyfriend. They began growing their own food at once. They bought bicycles. They saw which way the wind was blowing.

But now Rosalind and Tsuneko stood sea-side, one hundred and thirty kilometres from safety.

“It’s not so bad,” Rosalind said. “We could probably make it along the coast to Southampton. Then we’d have to strike out inland for Salisbury.”

“You lead and I will follow,” Tsuneko replied.

Half dead Britain. With nothing to export except services and knowledge – qualities the rising Pacific Rim had little need of – the British government had been forced to restrict solbuses to the major urban centres, leaving rural communities to fend for themselves. Only one in five families used a solcar; there was simply no way to pay for them. One in five thousand retained a petrol fuelled vehicle.

Rosalind transferred cash from her Shanghai account to her britcard, paying for two seats on the only bus of the day heading west. Info in her spex told her the solbus would terminate at Havant, but in fact it never reached Havant, breaking down twenty kilometres out of Brighton. They managed to find a room in a one star dive, which, miserably, they shared. Next day another solbus from Brighton took them to Havant, from where a third took them to Southampton.

Roads north were pot-holed, where they were not vandalised; solbus services nonexistent. With no other options Rosalind paid the 2092 equivalent of a month’s wages to hire a solvan to Salisbury, where she and Tsuneko were dumped.

“We walk from here,” Rosalind announced.

The five acre plot lay a day’s walk north of Salisbury. They rested overnight in a barn stinking of cow dung, rain pattering on the corrugated metal roof; sleep impossible. As grey clouds cleared and the sun rose they trudged on, arriving after noon. But Rosalind’s house was comfortable. That evening, bathed, rested and fed, Rosalind and Tsuneko planned their visit to Mr Bloodhound.

“He lives by Avebury,” Rosalind said. “D’you remember how to ride a bike?”

So quiet was the Wiltshire countryside, so free of the noise of cars, that in the sun the following day Tsuneko relaxed, almost enjoying the bicycle ride. Overgrown verges squeezed navigable roads to a central channel. Contrails in the sky were a rarity, to be pointed out and laughed at: military jets from Chinese bases, EU officials, African test-planes. Alive with the sound of bees, the air smelled of flower perfumes.

Local communities tilled fields, kept sheep. Few now could afford to live as a single family. The community was king, sharing unavoidable.

“Before, we lived on borrowed time,” Rosalind remarked. “
This
time.”

Mr Bloodhound lived in a community of twenty based in a huge farmhouse set amidst fifty acres of prime arable land. A community elder, he resided in a two-storey straw house filled with electronic gear salvaged from military bases on Salisbury Plain, powered by the latest Algerian solar panels. He was quite the local celebrity.

He was small, pale, white-haired and hunched, and he smelled of beer. “Rosalind!” he said, his eyes bright with pleasure as they entered his parlour.

“Mr B,” she replied. “This is Tsuneko June.”

He stared. “Tsuneko
June?
Good... heavens. But yes, I recognise you now.”

“You’ve heard of me?” Tsuneko said.

Rosalind pushed Tsuneko into a chair. “For goodness sake! Lots of people know who you are, we do watch the news.”

“I am sorry,” Tsuneko told Mr Bloodhound, “I haven’t been in Britain for fifteen years.”

“Well, you haven’t been on the news for a while,” he replied, “but nobody with my interests forgets the word
biograin.
”

Uncomfortable, Tsuneko tried to smile.

“Mr B,” Rosalind said, “Tsuneko has a favour to ask you. Paid, of course.”

“Excellent, excellent. What’s the deal?”

“Tracing some people,” said Rosalind. “They could be anywhere. It’s just your sort of thing. Tell her.”

Mr Bloodhound turned to Tsuneko. “You know what I do?” he asked.

“I... can guess,” Tsuneko replied.

He grinned. “You see, in the old days, when the Japanese were rolling out the nexus, we all realised the benefits. But we didn’t notice the drawbacks. We should have though – seventy years of social networking on the internet to use as evidence. An inexorable erosion of the concept of privacy, of a person’s private life. Everything shared regardless... ugh!” He shivered. “Eastern peoples don’t have the same view of individuality that we Westerners have, you know, but we ignored the dangers all the same.”

“Tell her about the tracing,” Rosalind said.

Mr Bloodhound frowned at her, then smiled at Tsuneko. “The key difference between the internet and the nexus is location. In the nexus, realtime location is everything, it’s how the nexus knows where everybody in the world is, all the time. Everybody with a proper data incarnation, that is. And so we all live under the weight of the thing, observed twenty four hours a day so that this tide of
tremendously
useful info can be pushed our way. I’m being ironic.”

“So how do you track an individual with a fake data incarnation, or none at all?” Tsuneko asked.

“Ha ha! That’s my art. I won’t be telling you any of my tricks. But you see, the nexus is a near-perfect copy of the real world, and as such it uses certain procedures.”

“What like?”

“Well, for instance the dating of timelines. Everybody’s life is recorded in the nexus, manipulated for convenience into a data incarnation – a copy of themselves, continuously updated. Timeline orders can be altered, yes, but if that happens certain inevitable errors are left. Minuscule, but visible to a man with patience and a beady eye. Fake timelines are even easier to spot if you know what you’re looking for.”

“And you do.”

“Oh, I do. Then there are contextual clues. I might look for inconsistencies in a person’s life story and their recorded history, that kind of thing. It’s no science, it really is an art. But they don’t call me Mr Bloodhound for nothing.”

Tsuneko nodded. “Then you have a choice of people to trace,” she said. “Leonora Klee. Dirk Ngma. Yuri Ichikawa.”

He laughed. “Good heavens! You’re
serious?
”

Tsuneko replied, “I used to work for a team opposing them.”

“Paralleling them?” Rosalind said. “Not opposing exactly.”

Tsuneko shrugged. “You might be right, Ros... though Manfred was always badmouthing her.” To Mr Bloodhound she added, “Leonora’s ex Manfred is the leader of the team I used to work for.”

“The Ichikawa breakout. Then this scene would be artificial intelligence research?”

Tsuneko nodded.

“I see. You do realise Leonora Klee will buy
the
single most talented security man on the entire planet?”

“He is called Hound.” She smiled. “Not his real name.”

Mr Bloodhound nodded. “I believe I will trace Leonora Klee. As she is the leader of her team the others, if they still work for her, will be alongside. I accept your challenge! But it will be expensive.”

“Money is no object,” Tsuneko replied with a sigh and a glum face.

Silence fell for a few moments, leaving just an old-style clock ticking.

“You know,” Mr Bloodhound said, “I can see now you’ve had a bad time of it lately. Why not stay with us here until I’m done? Maybe a week... a fortnight. You’d have to help out on the farm, but, well, exercise releases happy chemicals, or so I’m told by my biochemist grandson.”

Tsuneko nodded, but Rosalind said, “I’ll have to cycle back home a few times... partner to help, land to work, fish to catch. You don’t mind, Tsuneko?”

Tsuneko shrugged, feeling she had little choice. An overwhelming sense of isolation grew inside her as tears ran down her cheeks.

~

Mr Bloodhound’s study was extraordinary. A bank of ten real-rez monitors fed into various computers, most of them anonymous lumps of silico-drive lacking any corporate sigil. He wore spex, but also used a parallel display due to long sight caused by age, a display that occasionally he would consult, squinting at it as if into the sun.

Days passed. Tsuneko met the Avebury community, made a few friends, and, with little else to do, threw herself into the challenge of working the land. Evenings she slept, exhausted: not used to manual labour. She worried at her blisters and began biting her nails. Then, ten days later, Mr Bloodhound called her into his study.

“I have news for you,” he said.

Tsuneko felt her heart begin to pound.

“This Hound is a clever,
clever
man. I believe I know who he really is, you know.”

“Have you found Leonora?”

“Yes... and no.”

“How do you mean?”

He sat down, and Tsuneko wondered if he might be embarrassed, for he had yet to look her in the eye. Then he said, “You must’ve realised that Mr Bloodhound is not my real name.”

Tsuneko nodded.

“I support a number of almost identical fake data incarnations, twenty eight at the last count. It is one way of confusing nosy people, albeit a rather complex way. But Hound has managed to perfect a method of fading data incarnations in and out of the nexus over time. You see, researchers like me rely on sudden data transitions – gaps, alterations and so forth, for which there is no rational explanation. So Hound has bypassed me.”

“Then, you know where Leonora is or not?”

“I know where she
should
be. You see, there is only one man who I know for sure has done such a thing. Goodman Awuku.”

“The firewall buster? He died.”

Mr Bloodhound clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Nobody uses firewalls these days, they’re rather an outdated mechanism. Everything is smoke and mirrors. And nobody in my line of work believes Goodman Awuku died on that boat. But, you see, I can’t locate Leonora, Yuri or Dirk. I believe I have located Hound, however.”

“How come? He should be the hardest to spot.”

“Correct. But there is a fifth member, and indeed a sixth in Leonora’s team. Did you know?”

Tsuneko shook her head.

“The fifth is a Tunisian spoon bender. But the sixth... the sixth is a mystery.”

“How so?”

“I do not believe the sixth is human. And it, my dear, is watching Hound
very
carefully, and thus is leaving the shallowest of wakes in the nexus. If you follow that wake to its source I think you’ll find Leonora and her team.”

Tsuneko took a deep breath, sat back. “Where are they?”

“Algeria.”

Tsuneko sat back. “Go to Africa? I’d have to go solo, else Aritomo would spot me. But in theory it could be done.”

Mr Bloodhound smiled. “I have various old travel guides – paper, believe it or not. Likely you’ll need them.”

Joanna saw horror in Manfred’s face. “You crate the bis,” he shouted at her. “I’ll collect the computers and things. And get my pistol. Defend the bis!” He stamped on the glitched fly with a groan of frustration.

They leaped into action. In less than five minutes they stood ready at the apartment front door. Manfred listened, his ear on the wood. Nothing. He opened the door, hustled Joanna and the crates out. No sign of anybody on the stairs.