the Noise Within (2010) (42 page)

"Holt, that's what I'm talking about. I know you tried to sabotage the mission, warned them we were coming."

"What? That's crazy. Why would you think that?"

Leyton moved the blade a fraction closer. "Don't lie to me, Beck, I'm trained to spot such things, remember?"

"I'm not lying, you have to... Ah!"

The involuntary yelp of pain came as Leyton touched the blade to his ear, slicing into skin and cartilage, drawing blood.

"Last chance. The next cut takes your ear off."

"All right, you sick bastard. Lose the sodding blade and I'll tell you. Can't think straight with that thing humming in my ear."

Leyton complied, but had no intention of moving it far. Yet as he lifted the blade away, Beck seized his chance, elbowing the eyegee with his free arm, ducking away from the knife and twisting around, trying to break Leyton's grip on his arm. The move was quick and expertly performed. He nearly got away with it, but not quite. Leyton still held his wrist and as Beck tried to contort his body to negate his grip, the eyegee lifted and twisted. There was a sickening crack and Beck screamed.

Leyton did let go then, allowing the man to slump to the ground, where he sat, groaning and nursing his broken arm.

"You stupid fucker, you're going to pay for this!"

Leyton squatted down, blade held casually before him, and said, very calmly, "Now, let's start again. Who are you really working for?"

"You have no idea what you're dealing with." Ah, that sounded like progress. "These people don't play around. You think you're tough? Trust me, you don't know the meaning of the word. Do yourself a favour and walk away now. We'll forget all about this. Say I hurt myself in a fall or something." Of course he would. Leyton could just imagine Beck forgetting about the man who threatened him with a knife and then broke his arm.

"Here's how this is going to play out," the eyegee said calmly. "Either you tell me what I need to know, in which case I'll happily walk away right now, or you keep issuing ominous threats, in which case I start slicing bits of you off with ol' sonic here, until you do start talking. Your choice."

"Look, I can't give you what you want because I don't
know
! I've never met them, never seen their faces. They're a powerful faction within the upper echelons of ULAW, powerful enough to get me assigned to ride shotgun on Benson for this Byrzaen situation. When they say jump, I jump. That's
all
I know."

Unfortunately, Leyton had a feeling the man was telling the truth, but there had to be more details he could share - the little, seemingly inconsequential things which might yet provide a clue.

"If they're within ULAW, why warn Holt we were coming?"

"I've no idea. I didn't ask, and if you've any sense nor will you."

Beck's second attempt to take Leyton by surprise didn't, though it did force him to act decisively. Beck's good hand pulled swiftly away from the sleeve of his injured one holding something - a gun. Leyton reacted even as the move began, striking out back-handed with the knife, slicing off the hand holding the gun at the wrist, and continuing on to plunge into Beck's chest, piercing his heart.

With a grunt of apparent surprise, Beck fell backwards from his sitting position; dead before he hit the floor.

Leyton shook his head. He really was going to have to get a grip on this temper of his. First Julia, now Beck - two leads today which were well and truly dead, as far as any future investigation went. He walked away, brooding on what Beck had said.
A conspiracy within ULAW
? It sounded absurd, but perhaps not. The War had caused many political parties and interests to band together, and there had been signs on the odd occasion since that ULAW was not the unified body it tried to portray. He was going to have to tread very carefully if he pursued this any further.

As he walked, he dropped the sonic knife into a bag, already planning an acid bath for the weapon. He very much doubted it could be traced to Julia Cirese, let alone him, but no point in taking any chances. He then peeled away the transparent film of 'no print' gloves from each hand and added them.

As an afterthought, he took out a piece of folded paper from his pocket and put it into the bag after the gloves. The note bore a single hand-scrawled word: 'Beck'.

While still a boy, Philip had been taken to an exhibition, one designed to trace the history of technology. Intended to be educational, this had been a physical display requiring a visit rather than a virtual one enjoyed from an armchair, and it provided a distinctly 'hands-on' experience of many antique but still ingenious machines. Philip loved every minute of it.

One of the exhibits, presumably relating to printing, had featured a vintage glossy magazine open at a page containing a photograph of an exquisitely beautiful model or celebrity of the time. To the pre-adolescent Philip, this woman was an object of instant adoration. He thought her face the most perfect, the most bewitching he had ever seen and subsequently put considerable effort into tracking down a copy of the image, which he kept for many years afterwards.

As a slightly older youth, he could still recognise in the image the beauty his younger self had drooled over, but could also see that the perceived perfection was due to artifice as much as nature; the picture had been skilfully tampered with to remove all blemishes and imperfections, to present an idealised version of the woman in question. As such, the older Philip felt betrayed and now saw this as an image artificially enhanced to be something more than reality, which at the same time made it less.

The park where he met Mal/Malcolm struck him in much the same way. The sky was clear blue, the bushes were bristling with blossom and the grass was greener than any grass had a right to be, while the bench he sat on was the epitome of what every park bench ought to aspire to; yet none of this had any substance in the physical world, the one he had always accepted as 'reality'. Better than the real thing in some ways but at the same time a great deal less.

Mal/Malcolm appeared suddenly. One moment Philip was alone, the next he turned around to find the old man sitting on the bench beside him.

As a conversation opener, Mal/Malcolm raised a subject which Philip/Phil had been pondering since he awoke to this new existence. His greatest surprise was the realisation that he felt no different. Which was a ridiculous way of expressing it; with no physical body and every familiar sense either gone or altered beyond recognition, of course he felt different. He could absorb input from a hundred varied locations simultaneously and process it at speeds far beyond the human, and he could flit from point to point in the blink of an eye... But these were all peripheral concerns, things that had always been conducted at the fringes of 'him', relating to his interaction with the world rather than who he actually was; and at his core, at that central essence which dictated his sense of 'self', he felt no different at all.

Logically, he knew full well that not everything had been saved, that he was an incomplete representation of the man who had been Philip Kaufman, and had spent considerable effort trying to identify what was missing, searching his memory and making comparisons, but he failed.

One resolution he did make now related to how he perceived himself: Philip. He refused to think of himself as merely 'Phil'. At the same time, he realised this meant acknowledging that it really was his father, Malcolm, sitting beside him.

"Is this what you expected?" Malcolm asked.

"No," he admitted.

"Far be it for me to gloat, but..."

"If the rest of that sentence contains any of the words 'told', 'you', and 'so', I don't want to hear it."

"Fair enough."

This was unlike the process of conversation as Philip knew it, being more akin to the never-realised dream of telepathy: mind to mind communication in its purest form. There was no hearing of sounds followed by the processing of meaning, but rather near-instant assimilation of what Malcolm wanted to convey; a lightning-quick transfer of data. Yet this was all new to him and his mind still insisted on interpreting things in physical human terms, so he perceived such interchanges as conversations, albeit incredibly fast ones.

"One thing still bothers me," he told his father.

"What?"

Doubtless Malcolm expected him to ask something about this new state of being, but instead Philip said, "The assassin, Julia Cirese, why was she still after me? Presumably she must have known by now that the Death Wish had been lifted."

"Not necessarily; depends on how often she checks in at the place. Even if she did know, maybe professional pride insisted she saw the job through once she'd taken it on, or..."

"Or what?"

"Maybe she simply didn't like you."

"Thank you so much." Even humour came through as clearly as before. An inflection of thought rather than voice perhaps, but equally as effective.

"Look, Philip, let it go. Whatever her motives might have been, she's dead and she's carried them with her to the grave. Accept the fact and move on. That's all part of the life you've left behind, and you need to stop looking back and start concentrating on what lies ahead of you." This was the Malcolm Philip remembered - the pragmatic, eminently sensible man who never entertained any doubts, who always knew the right thing to do and was never shy of imparting that knowledge. "There's going to be plenty here to occupy your thoughts, trust me."

The annoying thing was that Philip knew Malcolm was right.

Yet he also knew his father too well and realised that he was hiding something. "There's more, isn't there?" he said.

"Perhaps."

"Go on."

"They're not telling us everything."

"In what way?"

"Not entirely sure, but when I was in contact with the mind operating
The Noise Within
I received a great deal of data, more than I could assimilate straight away and, I'm sure, more than the ship's brain intended me to see. While I was isolated, I had a lot of time to study that data. I still don't understand all of it, but I'm sure that what I saw was more complex than simply an AI/organic mind interface. Something else was happening."

"Alien mind," Phil said, "not surprising if it wasn't entirely what you were expecting."

"No, it wasn't that, I'm certain. And there was something else. The official line is that
The Noise Within's
mind was unhinged due to the instabilities still present in the human-built AI element; instabilities which caused a sort of resonance loop between the two component intelligences, right?"

"Right."

"So if the ship's mission was intended to be a peaceful one, why did the Byrzaens send it back to us packed to the gills with high-tech weaponry?"

"That's a question the media have asked more than once."

"I know, and no one has yet come back with a satisfactory answer. 'They're aliens, how are we supposed to understand them?' seems to about cover it. The point is that the official account does
not
tally with what I found on that ship, nor with what I've been able to extrapolate since. Everything I saw when I was in contact with
The Noise Within
suggested that the human-built AI part of the ship's mind was the sanest element involved.

"Trust me, there's a lot more to our new friends the Byrzaens than they're letting on."

Philip had a feeling he knew where this was leading. "And I suppose you intend to find out what."

"Well... I've nothing better to do, and I thought it might be fun."

"Uh-huh."

"So, are you in?"

"Of course."

Leyton was happy to be out of it. Benson had reacted with predictable anger at news of Beck's death, coming as it did so soon after the loss of Philip Kaufman, and security had been cranked up significantly, though no culprit or even serious suspect had yet emerged. Julia Cirese being responsible for Kaufman's murder gave Benson all the excuse he needed to throw most of the reporters out of New Paris, despite their bleating. Only a carefully vetted representative pool was allowed to remain.

Leyton seemed less in demand than he had been - doubtless Benson's way of expressing his displeasure at his failure to take Cirese alive - which enabled him to slip away, and he had every intention of making the most of this precious downtime, determined not to speculate as to what his lords and masters had lined up for him next. Benson might be preoccupied with all this Byrzaen business for now, but that wouldn't last. He'd soon remember that he had an idle eyegee to assign.

Leyton clocked the girl as soon as she came in. In theory he was hunched over a drink while perched on a stool towards the far left side of the bar and ensconced in a world of his own. All that was missing was a sign slung around his back saying 'do not disturb' for the image to have been complete. In practice old habits die hard, and while he
was
seeking some privacy, he still checked the long mirror behind the bar every time the door opened and a new customer walked through. In her case, he checked twice.

She was tall and slender - an athlete's frame, he thought, or perhaps a dancer's. The latter, judging by the way her hips moved as she walked; nothing exaggerated or over-pronounced, but mesmerising all the same - a seemingly unconscious and understated sway.