Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘No, I – it’s just that I’ve had some bad news.’

‘If there’s anything that we can do—’

‘It’s a private matter.’

The man smiled with relief. It wasn’t about money. Someone had died, or had an accident.

‘As I say, if—’

‘Thank you.’

The staffer left. Vogelaar watched him go, then got up and left the lounge hurriedly.

‘Go on,’ he said into the phone.

‘Your sort of insurance rather depends on the idea that if anyone’s out to cause you harm, they’ll go after you ,’ Xin continued. ‘So you can warn them to keep their hands off. If I don’t turn up to take afternoon tea tomorrow at such and such a time and place, with all my bits and pieces intact, the bomb goes off somewhere. It’s a lone wolf strategy, because for most of your life you were a lone wolf. But you’re not any longer. Perhaps you should have changed your plans.’

‘I have.’

‘You haven’t. That bomb will only be detonated if it’s your life at stake.’

‘My life, and my wife’s.’

‘Not exactly. You’ve changed your mind but you haven’t changed your habits. Earlier you’d have said, get the hell back on the next plane out, Kenny, there’s nothing you can do. Or, kill me and see what happens. But now you’re telling me, leave Nyela alone or I’ll make things hot for you.’

‘You can be sure of that!’

‘Meaning that you could still set off the bomb.’ Xin paused. ‘But then what would we do with your poor innocent wife? Or to put it another way, how long would we do it to her for?’

Vogelaar had crossed the foyer, and went out into the crowds on Friedrichstrasse.

‘That’s enough, Kenny. I see what you mean.’

‘Really? Back when Vogelaar only cared about Vogelaar, life was hard for people like me. Back then you’d have said, go on, kill the woman, torture her to death, see where it gets you. We’d have played a little poker, and in the end you’d have won.’

‘I’m warning you. If you harm even a hair on Nyela’s head—’

‘Would you die for her?’

‘Just come out with it and tell me what you want.’

‘I want an answer.’

Vogelaar felt his mind soar, saw his whole life spread out beneath his wings. What he saw was a bug, biting, pinching, stinging, playing dead or scuttling lightning-fast into a crack. A drone, a programmed thing, but one whose armour had been corroded these past few years by regular doses of empathy. His instincts had been ruined once he realised that there was in fact a purpose to life, that there could even be a purpose to dying so that others might live. Xin was right. His plans were out of date. This bug was sick and tired of creeping into cracks, but right now the future held nothing else.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I would die for Nyela.’

‘Why?’

‘To save her.’

‘No, Jan. You’d die because altruism is an egotist’s crowning glory, and you’re a deeply egotistical man. Nothing appeals more to a man’s self-importance than martyrdom, and you’ve always had a very high sense of your own importance.’

‘Don’t speechify, Kenny.’

‘You have to know that you won’t save anyone with your death, not if you try to cheat. You’d be leaving Nyela on her own. There’d be no end to her suffering. You’d have achieved nothing.’

‘I understand.’

‘So what’s your escape hatch this time?’

‘A dossier.’

‘This is what Mayé wanted to blackmail us with?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘In the Crystal Brain. It’s on a memory crystal.’

‘Who knows about it?’

‘Only my lawyer, and my wife.’

‘Nyela knows what’s in the dossier?’

‘Yes.’

‘And your lawyer?’

‘He doesn’t know a thing. He just has instructions to retrieve the crystal if I should die a violent death, and upload the contents to a distributor feed.’

‘Why didn’t you tell him what was in the dossier?’

‘Because it’s nothing to do with him,’ Vogelaar snorted, growing angry. ‘The dossier only exists to protect Nyela’s life, and mine.’

‘That means that as soon as I have this crystal— Good, fetch it. How long do you need?’

‘An hour at most.’

‘Is there anyone coming by here before then we should know about? Cleaner, kitchen porter, postman?’

‘No one.’

‘Off you go then, old friend. Don’t dawdle now.’

Vogelaar was no tree-hugger. He drove a solar-powered Nissan because Nyela was concerned about the environment. He realised of course that more small cars meant less traffic in the city, but something in his genes cried out for a jeep. But now that he was crawling painfully through the government quarter, he cursed aloud every vehicle bigger than his own, and felt a sweeping rage against all the damned ignorant drivers hereabouts.

And in fact Germany was the country with the most innovative car technologies that had ever been left to slumber in a drawer. Hardly any market worldwide was fonder of petrol motors and speedsters. While in Asia and the USA the number of hybrid cars on the roads had been steadily dropping in favour of ever more sustainable designs, in Germany the hybrid itself had never even made a dent. Nowhere else were hydrogen, fuel cells and electric cars condemned to such a miserable waking death. And nowhere else in the world did men set such store by having a big, imposing car, and by driving it themselves – despite the availability of sophisticated and totally safe autopilots. It was as though whenever the Germanic national character set out to find itself, it always ended up, with tiresome predictability, behind the steering wheel. The only thing less popular hereabouts than the compact car was the future itself.

All of which explained why the Nissan crept along so slowly. Vogelaar swore, and slapped the wheel. When he finally turned into the car park at the Crystal Brain, he was bathed in sweat. He leapt from the cabin and strode hurriedly across to the main entrance.

Einstein looked him square in the face, briefly.

The building had been put up in 2020, not far from the government quarter, but it still looked as though it had just landed. It was a cubist glass UFO with dozens of perfectly faceted surfaces where the logo ‘Crystal Brain’ came and went, glowing like a passing thought. Worlds showed like ghosts in the façade as you approached, different from every angle: raptors loping across the Jurassic savannah, Stone Age hunters hurling their spears at mammoths, Assyrian kings holding court. He saw Greek hoplites, Roman emperors, Napoleon on horseback and Egyptian princesses, pyramids and Gothic cathedrals, the Kon-Tiki and the Titanic , satellites, space stations, moon bases, the stern face of Abraham Lincoln, Shakespeare’s bald head and smiling face, Bismarck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Konrad Adenauer, Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon, Mahatma Gandhi, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Helmut Kohl, Bill Gates, the Dalai Lama, Thomas Reiter, Julian Orley, geocentric, heliocentric and modern representations of the universe, abstract diagrams of quantum worlds on the Planck scale, molecules, atoms, quarks and superstrings like model building blocks, the invention of the wheel, of printing, of curried sausage. All this and infinitely more was there, holographically embedded in the huge walls; it came to life, breathed, pulsated; the figures turned their heads, winked, smiled, shook hands, walked, flew, swam and vanished again as the viewer moved around them. The exterior alone was a masterpiece, a wonder of the modern world, and yet it represented barely a fraction of what was hidden within.

When Vogelaar stepped inside the Crystal Brain, he was entering the world’s greatest concentration of knowledge in the smallest space.