Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘—rich,’ completed Yoyo.

‘I was rich already. Of course I liked the fact that Tian was looking for a challenge, that he was achieving success after success. But when it comes down to it there’s nothing he can do that Owen wouldn’t be able to do too. Except that Tian’s existence is shaped by an almost unshakable belief in himself. He thinks he’s beautiful and that makes him beautiful. That’s why I love him.’

Joanna’s story had begun to have a pleasantly numbing effect on Yoyo. She suddenly realised that she could breathe more easily when other people’s problems were the topic of conversation. At the very least it was good to know that other people had problems. Even if they could have done with being just a little bit bigger to fully distract her from the morning’s events.

‘And what happened with Owen after that?’ she asked.

Joanna turned her attentions to the oily strand on her palette and stirred it into a crème with a pointed paintbrush.

‘Ask him,’ she said, without looking up. ‘I’ve told my story. I’m not responsible for his.’

Yoyo slid indecisively back and forth in her seat. She didn’t like Joanna’s unexpected uncommunicativeness. She decided to press her, but just at that moment Tu came into the studio.

‘There you are!’ he said to Yoyo, as if she were obliged to let him know where she was at all times.

‘Has something happened?’ she asked.

‘Yes. Owen’s been working hard. Come with me to the office – it looks like he’s found out a whole load of stuff.’

Yoyo got up and looked over to Joanna. ‘Are you coming?’

Joanna smiled. Vermilion dripped down from the tip of her paintbrush like old, noble blood. ‘No, sweetheart, you go ahead. I’d only ask stupid questions.’

At 19.20 hours, Tu, Jericho and Yoyo immersed themselves in the beauty of the Swiss Alps. A 3D film was playing in large format on Tu’s multimedia wall. It showed a cable car rising up from a picturesque little town and heading towards a neat alpine pasture, over ravines and forests of fir trees. A low, classic-looking building came into view. The Spanish commentator lauded it as one of the first designer hotels in the Alps, praising the rooms for their comfort and the kitchen for its dumplings, before heading off to accompany a group of hikers across a meadow. Cows plodded over curiously. A pretty city girl watched them approach with scepticism, started walking quickly then broke into a run towards the valley, where two donkeys came shuffling out of their shed, grey and tired, and herded her back towards the cows. Some of the hikers laughed. The next scene showed a farmer kicking one of the cows up the backside.

‘Up here, traditions are still quite coarse and primordial,’ explained the Spanish commentator in the tone of some behavioural scientist who has just discovered that chimpanzees aren’t that intelligent after all.

‘Well, this is great,’ said Yoyo.

Neither she nor Tu spoke Spanish, but that didn’t matter. Jericho stubbornly let the film play on, champing at the bit for his big moment.

‘I don’t need to explain to either of you how a film like this is developed,’ he said. ‘And you both know about watermarks too. So—’

‘Excuse me,’ said someone from the door.

They turned round. Chen Hongbing had come in. He paused, hesitantly took a step towards them and straightened himself up.

‘I don’t want to interrupt. I just wanted to—’

‘Hongbing,’ Tu hurried over to his friend and put his arm around his shoulder. ‘How lovely that you’re here.’

‘Well.’ Hongbing cleared his throat. ‘I thought, we should make them smart, shouldn’t we? Not for my sake, but—’ He went over to Yoyo, looked at her and then away again, looked around at the others, massaged the tip of his chin and waved his hands around indecisively. Yoyo stared up at him, confused. ‘So, the thing is, I’m afraid I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know what, may I ask?’ Jericho asked cautiously. Chen gestured vaguely towards the film playing on the screen.

‘How something like that is developed. A, erm – watermark.’ He cleared his throat again. ‘But I don’t want to hold you up, don’t worry. I just wanted to be here too.’

‘You’re not holding us up, Father,’ said Yoyo softly.

Chen snuffled, let out a whole cascade of throat-clearing noises, and mumbled something incomprehensible. Then he took Yoyo’s hand, gave it a brief, firm squeeze and let it go again.

Yoyo’s eyes started to shine.

‘No problem, honourable Chen,’ said Jericho. ‘Have the others brought you up to date with what we know?’

‘Chen, just call me Chen. Yes, I know about the – the garbled report.’

‘Good. We didn’t have much more than that until just now. Just a hunch that there must be something else in the films.’ He wondered how he could make all of this comprehensible to Chen. When it came to technology, the man was endearingly clueless. ‘You see, it’s like this: every data stream is made up of data packages. Try imagining a swarm of bees, several million bees of different colours, who keep rearranging themselves in new ways so that your eyes see moving pictures. And now imagine that some of these bees are encoded. In a way that isn’t visible to the viewer. But if you have a special algorithm—’

‘Algorithm?’

‘A mask, a decoding process. It lets you block out all of the non-encoded bees. Only the encoded ones stay. And suddenly you realise that they represent something too. You see a film within a film. That’s called an electronic watermark. It’s not a new process: at the beginning of the millennium it was used to encode films and songs when the entertainment industry was fighting against pirate copiers. It was enough to make just a small adjustment in the frequency spectrum of a song. The human ear can’t tell the difference, but it enabled the computer to investigate the origin of the CD.’ He paused. ‘Today, the difference is this: the old internet mapped the data streams two-dimensionally, whereas nowadays the internet is construed for three-dimensional content. These kinds, of data streams have to be pictured cubically, which offers much better opportunities for hosting complex watermarks. Although, admittedly, decoding has become equally complex.’

‘And you’ve decoded one of these watermarks?’ asked Chen, awestruck.

‘Yes. That is, Diane – erm, my computer – found a way to make it visible.’

By now, the group of hikers had valiantly climbed to a high plateau. The pretty city girl was approaching a sheep. The sheep didn’t budge, and stared at the woman, who took this as encouragement to circle round, giving it a wide berth.

‘Don’t keep us in suspense,’ said Yoyo.

‘Okay.’ Jericho looked back at the wall. ‘Diane, start the film again. Decoded and compressed, high resolution.’

The alpine world disappeared. In its place appeared a recording of a car journey, filmed from inside the vehicle. It made its way along a bumpy street. Hilly farmland stretched out on both sides, broken up now and then by bushes and the occasional tree. There were a few huts here and there, most of them very run down. The sky was swollen with rainclouds. As the landscape steepened and became more densely populated with trees, the grey cross-hatchings of downpours stopped.

A truck was being driven a fair way ahead of the car, whirling up dust. There were a number of black men sitting in the back, most clad only in shorts. They looked lethargic, at least as far as you could tell from this distance and through the dirt from the road. Then the camera swung round to the driver, a man with ash-blond hair, a moustache and a strong jawline, wearing sunglasses.