Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

“What do you mean? Why should be know?”

“Because Julia has a bodyguard with her twenty-four hours a day, no matter where she goes outside Wilholm. Remember, there was even one in the corridor outside Walshaw’s office at the finance centre? That hardline woman. God, what was her name? Rachel. She was at Wilholm too. A bodyguard who reports directly to Walshaw, who should have told Walshaw what happened on the Mirriam.”

Gabriel bowed her head. “A bodyguard: top-rank security, close to every executive decision ever made, knew Julia was going to the finance centre. But a bodyguard isn’t part of the security headquarters staff, nor on the manor’s staff. Oh Greg, we are a pair of fuck ups, aren’t we? She was standing next to Julia the whole time, and we never even bloody saw her.”

“Yeah,” he said. Then gave a start. “Yeah, the whole time. That’s strange.”

“What is?”

“I’ve only ever seen the one bodyguard: Rachel. Every time I’ve visited Julia, it’s been Rachel on duty. Doesn’t that strike you as odd? There’s got to be more than one.”

“Did you always let them know you were coming in advance?”

He nodded silently. The death-chill hadn’t left his heart. “Whoever he is, he is still with Julia. Tonight. Now. A hardliner taking orders from Kendric. And Armstrong has already ordered an attack on Philip Evans’s NN core.”

Gabriel stared at him with destitute eyes. “Oh, God.”

He pulled at his cuffs, slowly increasing the strength until his wrists were circles of hot pain. Forearm muscles trembled with the strain. Nothing gave, not the cuff locks, not the iron stair rail. Nothing. “Shit.” He let go, graze marks livid on his skin. The futility hurt as much as the failure.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” Gabriel said quietly. “End of the road. Philip Evans wiped, Julia snuffed by her own bodyguard, and you and I into the mud.”

He couldn’t answer. His own death he could handle, even Gabriel’s. But Julia. Her whole life had been devoid of any normality, ruined by money, by grudges and power struggles that had been going on before she was born. When he closed his eyes he could see a young oval face with the most trusting expression he’d ever known. Soft eyes regarded him with a belief that bordered on devotion.

He should have fought the drug, should have sacrificed Gabriel’s bones. Anything to give Julia a chance at life.

“We had some good times, didn’t we, Greg?” Gabriel said vacantly. “Even in this screwed-up world.”

“Yeah. Good times.” They hadn’t outweighed the bad, though. Not even close.

Gabriel’s eyes drooped.

Greg leant his shoulder on the railings, as near to comfortable as he’d ever get. Muscles were cramping at the back of his neck. He knew he really ought to have been looking for a way out. Gaoler’s keys dangling on a nail, within reach of an improvised hook on the end of his belt. The iron stair railing which was loose. That carelessly discarded loop of monolattice filament in amongst the food crates which he could use to saw through the iron with. Keep dreaming, he told himself.

He did. Waking dreams. Mostly of Eleanor. Now those were good times. They must’ve been, they hurt.

Kats was dreaming. Julia watched her eyelids fluttering, shoulders restless below the duvet, the occasional sighs, half-formed words.

It would probably be Kendric who filled her thoughts. She doubted the amnesia infusion could reach down into the subconscious to root him out. And that was exactly the kind of arcane universe where Kendric would lurk, his home ground.

To this day his phantom still stole into Julia’s sleep-loosened mind, a dark oneiromancer calling her back to the velvet shadows of Mirriam’s cabin, soft silk sheets, hot hard flesh. That handsome face poised inches above her, smiling as she moaned in erotic delirium. Not even the freshness of Adrian could banish the quandam ecstasy. First loves never die. They just…haunt.

She gave Kats a dry smile. Maybe she should go through the detoxification with her, get rid of Kendric that way. Concerned professional doctors prising him out of her mind. Nothing else seemed to work.

OtherEyes Emergency Access Request.

Open Channel to NN Core. Load OtherEyes Limiter# Five. It was a reflexive acknowledgement, her nerves were stretched taut, ready to jump at figments. She sat bolt upright in the chair, grabbing the Armscor.

Juliet. Christ, virus virus, they’ve Trojaned a virus into me!

Wilholm’s banshee klaxon went off outside.

“Grandpa!” she yelled.

Losing my capacity. Some kind of interface scrambler. Bugger, security sensor access went down. The NN core’s internal channels are crashing, Juliet. Childhood gone. It’s accelerating. I’ve failed you, girl. My memory patterns are being disconnected. Management routines gone.

“No, Grandpa,” she sobbed. “You couldn’t fail me. Not you.”

You’re all that’s left, girl. Datanet’s cut. Unlock me in a century. Trust Walshaw, Juliet. Trust him. My girl. Love you. Take care, Kendric will come for you. Integrity stasis, beat it at its own game. Shutting down. Limbo.

And he was gone. But there was something else intruding in her mind, a smooth, grotesque presence oozing in to corrupt her thoughts. Julia jammed her knuckles in her wide, silently screaming mouth. The horror pulled at her memories, prising them out of their neat processor-assigned stacks. She could see them tumbling away from her; stained-glass rosettes, each one a billion-picture mosaic, Her life encapsulated, ruptured, pouring away into some infinite insatiable sink point.

Data Error.

She felt herself falling to the floor, howling in psychosomatic agony, Armscor dropping from deadened fingers. Vision lost in the blinding sparkle of vivid memories flashing by, people, buildings, schoolgames, countryside, mathematical formulae, lists of words.

Memory Node One Index Error.

Her mind was contracting, conscious thoughts slowing as they passed through the processor nodes. The presence was everywhere, tainting the entire contents of her cerebrum and memory nodes, eviscerating her own personality and replacing it with its own implacable insentient logic.

She began to claw wildly at her head.

Memory Node Two Interface Error.

The virus, it was in her nodes, Trojaned into her through OtherEyes. She should’ve realized instantly. Her intellect was crumbling, the supporting experience-based reasoning mentality denuded of references, blocking her ability to think. Only a vestigial essence of bloody-minded stubbornness remained, that fundamental aspect of human ego which the virus was unable to subsume.

Memory Node Three Interface Error.

Fight back, Julia pleaded with herself. Stop it spreading.

Processor Node Two Format Loss.

Disengage Memory Node One, she ordered. The command was terribly slow to formulate.

Her subconscious rose ominously to fill the vacuous gulf left in the virus’s wake. Wounded pictures of a world peopled by caricatures of those who walked through her natural universe. It was the alternate she lived in fear of, nightmares fully expressed. Black idolatry, so hard and bright her remaining rationality nearly disintegrated under its impact.

Disengage Memory Node Two.

Floating without weight, seeing herself and Kendric coupling like frenzied rampant beasts. Loving it, hating it. Grandpa watching them, frail, poised ready to die, tears streaming down his cheeks.

Disengage Memory Node Three.

Primate Marcus offering her benediction inside a suffocating bubble of rock. Herself supplicant, putting Event Horizon on the burnished silver collection platter for him. Dropping it, seeing it shatter into splinters of pure data, profit and loss. All important. Grandpa shook his head in dismay and died.