Ian Hocking - Flashback

Lower your voice. Where is Saskia?

‘Stop asking me that. Saskia’s dead.’

The text scrolled away. Absurdly, Jem felt that the card was thinking.

How?

‘Her plane crashed.’

Where did it crash?

‘I’m leaving.’

She rose and tugged on her boots. But before she zipped them, curiosity returned her eyes to the card.

WAIT.

‘What?’

We can help each other.

‘How? Who says I need help?’

I know what you want.

Jem paused. The world bled brightly from the edges of the door and through its spy-hole. Behind her, Cory might have been on the topmost riser, watching. She whispered, ‘Her system?’

I will show you, but not here. It’s not safe.’

Jem stood. She was coiled again, set for release. Berlin was out there and ready to absorb her like an electric current, earthed, escaping to everywhere.

The Angleterre Hotel was not far from Potsdamer Platz. Jem approached it carefully, sizing up the silver roof and the facade brimming with glass. She felt hollowed out, scruffy. It was 3 a.m. and Berlin was an inversion of its daylight self. The living people were dead in their beds. The dead—zombies like her, like Saskia—wandered. As Jem entered the hotel, she expected a random icy bitch to refuse her a room on grounds of hair colour, but she found a tall, smiling concierge called Simon, English as leather on willow, who ushered her through the relevant paperwork while monologuing over the sights of Berlin. He moved the pages with the expertise of a croupier.

On the way to the lift, Jem saw a framed British government poster from World War Two. It read: ‘Keep Calm and Carry On.’

‘Roger,’ she said, as the lift closed, yawning. ‘And out.’

Running for her life was not fun, exactly, but it was doable.

Jem was woken by the tones of a xylophone. She opened her eyes and blinked at an unfamiliar window. Through it, she saw morning light. She struggled to configure her place in the world. She was in Germany, not England. This was a hotel, not Saskia’s apartment. Jem scratched at the sleep in her eyes.

The xylophone played again.

‘Jem,’ said a rich, unaccented voice. The strange card was flashing on her night table. ‘You have a phone call. It is your brother. He has phoned four times in the past hour.’

Jem made a wounded sound. What did this thing know about Danny? She slid from the bed, gasping as she put weight on her feet. They felt bruised. She snatched her jeans—Saskia’s jeans—and looked for the silent, buzzing phone in its pockets.

When she answered, she aimed for indifference. ‘How did you get this number?’

‘Jem?’ asked Danny. ‘Thank God.’

‘I asked you how you got this number.’

‘Someone called Self phoned me. It doesn’t matter.’

She looked at the card. ‘Well, they had no right to.’

‘Jem, will you just listen?’

‘Why?’

‘I’m in Berlin. Don’t hang–’

She released the phone’s battery over the wastebasket, dealt the SIM card onto the rug, and threw the gutted husk at the wardrobe, where it marked the long mirror with a sugary star. All the things she had left in England—her failure, the betrayal—were about to come visiting and she had no headspace in which to deal with them. Wolfgang was gone. Saskia was dead. Cory was… Jem didn’t know what he was. There was a perfect storm of shit brewing, and Jem, though talented at finding the eye of such things, did not rate her chances.

She sank to a crouch and considered herself as a reflection in the broken mirror: just a girl in knickers and a T-shirt and stupid, blue hair.

When she was cried out, she put the phone back together and took a shower. She brushed her teeth. She dressed. She called for breakfast and watched it arrive on something that resembled a float from the Love Parade. There were bread rolls, sliced meats, mango balls and grapefruit rings. A tumbler of orange juice. German-strength coffee.

‘You there,’ she said, ‘who do you think you are, calling my brother like that?’

‘I am me,’ the card said.

‘No, I mean whose idea was it to call him?’

‘Mine.’

‘Where are you?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I want to know who is controlling this device.’

‘I am.’

‘I understand that. But where are you and who are you?’

‘I am here and my name is Ego.’

Jem frowned. ‘Like the cat. Saskia’s cat is called Ego.’

A pause. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘What do you know, Ego?’

‘Many things.’

She tore a roll and dressed the wound with salami. ‘When I studied computer science, you know what was the most disappointing thing? Artificial intelligence is crap. You can’t make a camera that sees like an eye, or a microphone that hears. Forget conversation. Forget language, full stop. There are no machines on Earth capable of having this conversation with me.’

‘One seems capable.’

‘Exactly my point. Am I the mark for a con?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘What model are you?’

‘I’m an Ego-class assistant, third version.’

‘Processor speed? Memory capacity? Juicy details, and quick.’

‘My processor and memory are not independent. I do not manipulate data in the manner of a serial computing machine.’

‘How, then?’

‘I operate using parallel vectors of qubits.’

‘You’ve out-geeked me there.’

‘Let me summarise. I am from the future.’

She rolled her eyes. The conversation had just jumped the shark. ‘No way are you from the future.’

The bedside phone rang. She picked it up.

‘Way,’ said a tinny voice.

‘Proves nothing.’ She put the phone down. ‘If you’re from the future, when do I die?’

‘I cannot say.’

‘Against the laws of robotics or something?’

‘Coincidentally, my reason for withholding this information does indeed conflict with Asimov’s Second Law: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law, the First Law being: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. The First Law was later modified–’

‘Jesus, you’re boring. Fancy subjugating mankind with your silicon brethren?’

‘No, thank you.’

Jem spread some honey over her bread and chewed it.

‘All this banter just convinces me that you’re an actor and the card is no more than glorified speaker. OK, you sound like a computer, but I can feel your wit. There’s a humanity behind your words. A dash of pride; a pinch of frustration.’

‘Get me a glass of water.’

Jem swallowed and walked to the bathroom. She could not imagine what Ego would want with the water and expected the task to be a ruse that took her out of the room for a moment. When she returned, she looked at the door and the window. Nothing had changed. Likewise, the breakfast platter was untouched.

‘Here it is. Now what?’

‘Drop me in.’

‘I don’t want to void your warranty this early in our relationship.’

‘I cannot be damaged by the water.’

‘Well, here you go. Consider yourself dumped.’

Jem plopped Ego in the water. Part of her wanted to hear its voice bubbling from the surface. Instead, the card changed colour from white to black. ‘Seen that before,’ she said. ‘Unimpressed.’

The water seemed to shrink. Jem frowned and leaned forward. Its level was dropping. She lifted the glass and passed her hand underneath. No holes. When the glass was empty, she said, ‘I’m prepared to exchange my ‘unimpressed’ for a ‘wow’.’