Greg Egan - Quarantine

Okay, I'm stuck here. So who am I dealing with?

It's still possible that BDI are exactly what they claim to be: contract biomedical researchers. Who happen to have no qualms about kidnapping. Hired by the drug company whose product damaged Laura, in utero, thirty-three years ago. Company X would be taking a risk by involving outsiders, but maybe less of a risk than trying to deal with Laura in-house. Company X may have plenty of loyal staff, but presumably only a few of them are criminals — whereas BDI might specialize in just this kind of thing.

It all sounds as plausible as ever, even if the list of facts it fails to explain is growing longer. Casey's testimony. The architecture of the basement room. Laura roaming the gap between the walls of her custom-made prison. All of which suggest an alternative which might explain everything — and which doesn't sound plausible at all:

Laura really did escape from the Hilgemann. Unaided. Twice. That was why she was abducted; somebody found out, somebody who believed they could make good use of her talents. That was what the double-walled room was all about; a test for an idiot escapologist. And when I ran into her, she was half-way through passing that test.

What brought the guards down on us last night? Obviously, I triggered some kind of alarm — but unless the chameleons screwed up, the room wasn't under surveillance by any device linked to the building's security station. If Laura was being treated, not as a routine security problem, but as the subject of an experiment, it wouldn't be surprising if she was being monitored by a different system entirely.

Why are BDI making neural maps? It has nothing to do with disputing liability for congenital brain damage; they're trying to identify the pathways that make Laura the greatest thing since Houdini, in the hope of encoding her talents in a mod. Why did they smuggle her out as a corpse, not a passenger with a puppet mod? Because they didn't want to screw around with her brain, and risk destroying the very thing that made her worth abducting.

It all fits together perfectly.

The only trouble is, I just can't swallow it.

What hypothetical talent could Laura possess that would enable her to break out of locked rooms, without tools of any kind? Postulating an intuitive grasp of security devices is dubious enough — but what could anyone, however gifted, do to a lock, or a surveillance camera, with their bare hands? Two hundred years of research says telekinesis does not exist. The human body's minute electromagnetic fields — even if they were controllable — are about a million times too weak to be of the slightest use in picking an electronic lock. No amount of fortuitous brain damage could change that — any more than reprogramming a computer in some novel way could give it the power to levitate. So how did she get out?

I'm still pondering this when the door opens. A young man tosses a bundle of clothes onto the floor beside me, then draws a gun and a remote control, and aims the latter at the handcuffs. I quickly activate RedNet, in the hope of capturing the exchange. The cuffs fall open, but I pick up nothing; the frequency used must be outside the range of my transceiver cells.

The man stands in the doorway with the gun trained on me. 'Please get dressed.' I recognize the voice from last night. The expression on his face is matter-of-fact, with no trace of smugness or belligerence; no doubt he has behavioural optimization mods of his own.

The clothes are brand new, and fit perfectly. P3vetoes anything but stoicism at the loss of all the equipment I had stashed in hidden pockets; even so, for a moment after I'm dressed, some part of my brain flashes redundant warnings at the absence of the usual inventory of reassuring lumps.

'Put on one pair of handcuffs. Behind your back.'

When I've done this, he blindfolds me. Then he guides me out of the room, walking beside me, gripping the chain of the cuffs with one hand, holding the gun to the side of my chest with the other.

I hear little along the way; snatches of conversation in Cantonese and English, passing footsteps on the carpet, equipment humming softly in the distance. I catch a faint scent of organic solvents. P5tracks my location precisely, for what that's worth. When we come to a halt, I'm pushed down into an armchair, and the gun is shifted to my temple.

Without any preliminaries, a woman says, 'Who hired you?' She's a couple of metres away, facing me directly. 'I don't know.'

She sighs. 'What exactly are you hoping for? Do you think we're going to jump through all the technological hoops for you? Truth drugs, truth mods, neural maps — all in pursuit of memories that may or may not have been falsified, or erased? If you think you're buying time, you're wrong. I have no interest in spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, pissing around with your brain. If you tell us the truth, and your story checks out, we'll be lenient. But if you don't cooperate, here and now, we'll kill you, here and now.'

She's calm, but not mod calm; her tone of pained condescension sounds like a failed attempt to be coolly intimidating. Which doesn't necessarily mean that she's bluffing.

'I'm telling you the truth. I don't know who my client is; I was hired anonymously.'

'And you couldn't penetrate that anonymity?'

'It wasn't my job to try.'

'All right. But you must have formed some kind of working hypothesis. Who do you suspect?'

'Someone who believed that Laura was taken by mistake. Someone who was afraid that their own relative in the Hilgemann was the real target.'

'Who, specifically?'

'I never came up with a likely candidate. Whoever it was, they would have done their best to hide the family connection. The whole idea that the kidnappers might have taken the wrong person would only make sense to someone who'd gone to great lengths to conceal their relative's identity. I didn't pursue it; I had better things to do.'

She hesitates, then lets that pass. 'How did you trace Laura to us?'

I explain at length about the cargo X-rays, and the drug suppliers' records. 'And who else knows all this?'

Any invented confidant would easily be revealed as fictitious. I could claim to have software, running on a public network, camouflaged and invulnerable, ready to tell all to the NHK police in the event of my disappearance — but that wouldn't be much of a threat. If I'd had enough evidence to convince the cops, I would have taken it to them in the first place, instead of breaking in.

'Nobody.'

'How did you get into the building?'

Again, I have nothing to gain by lying. They must have pieced together most of the details by now; confirming what they already know can only make me seem more credible.

'What do you know about the work we do here?'

'Only what's advertised. Contract biological research.'

'So why do you think we're interested in Laura Andrews?'

'I haven't been able to work that out.'

'You must have a theory,'

'Not any more.' There are specialist mods for lying convincingly — for responding like a normal human being confidently telling the truth, in terms of voice-stress patterns, skin temperature, heart rate, etcetera — but I have no need of one; P3alone makes all such variables utterly opaque. 'Nothing that stands up to the facts.'

'No?'

I have no shortage of unlikely explanations to offer in support of my ignorance; I recount every hypothesis that's passed through my head in the last eight days, however lame — save Company X and its birth-defects suit, and Laura the escapologist. I almost go so far as to mention my fear of the Children's involvement, but I stop myself; it seems so ridiculous now that I'm sure it would sound like an obvious lie.