Филип Керр - The Second Angel

‘Everything okay?’ asked Gates.

‘Of course,’ said Dallas. Seeing Gates glance in the direction of the foreign exchange desk on Mercury, Dallas guessed what was on the big man’s mind. ‘Oh, and you’d better charge some currency to that account while we’re here,’ he told the attendant. ‘Say, ten thousand selenes, in cash. New bills. It’s a long time since I’ve been here, but I can’t imagine much has changed.’

‘Cash is still king on the Moon,’ confirmed the attendant, and entered the transaction on his computer. ‘Always was, always will be. Yes sir, you carry the Moon in your pocket.’ Finishing up, he smiled a broad smile, the way he had been trained to, making a white crescent of his teeth. A real honey of a Moon welcome, they called it back on his Galileo Hotel-keeping course. With as much sincerity as he could muster, and completely unaware of their provenance, he added the words of hospitality and liberality that, he had learned, were the correct way to welcome a guest:

He smiled again, and added, ‘Enjoy your stay.’

‘Answer, answer, answer...’

A still, small intonation rang out in the darkness of Rimmer’s austere apartment, interrupting the sado-erotic musings that habitually preceded his falling asleep. At first he thought it was the dull articulation of his own conscience, some stern daughter of the voice of God — for the vocalization was female — calling him to account for his wickedness and blasphemy.

‘Answer, answer...’

But what kind of sin? Surely not the sin of Onan. That was just a way of relieving tension, of aiding sleep. No, to warrant such a peremptory demand, this had to be something far more serious than merely spilling life’s beans on the bottom sheet.

‘Answer...’

Rimmer sighed and rolled onto his hairy back. He was still not yet completely awake — he had drunk too much before going to bed. The last of the genuine Napoleon brandy. Rimmer dragged himself up and snorted some oxygen into his sleep-befuddled brain. The voice was still repeating itself in the cold tones of some holy inquisitor. It could be nothing so morally scrupulous as a conscience. The only categorical imperative Rimmer was aware of was the inner voice that told him to please himself whenever the opportunity presented itself. No, the voice in his apartment belonged to his computer.

Shaking his head and yawning cheesily, Rimmer rolled out of bed and padded into the smallish lounge and flopped down in front of the sixty-two-inch blue screen that dominated one wall of the room. It was an old-fashioned way of interacting with the computer, but he preferred it to the more anthropic Motion Parallax. Somehow, with a screen, you never lost sight of the fact you were dealing with a computer. Motion Parallaxes were for people who didn’t much like the company of a machine. Rimmer had no problem with machines. As a matter of fact he liked them better than he liked most people.

‘Answer, answer, answer...’

‘Remind me what the question was,’ he said, gouging the sleep from his encrusted eyes.

‘First choose a persona,’ said the disembodied female voice. Pictures of a number of famous historical personalities now appeared on the screen: Albert Einstein, Orson Welles, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon, Salman Rushdie, Tom Ray, Marina Maguire, Jonas Ndebele, and Cameron Caine. Rimmer’s computer system had Microsoft version 45.1, and a persona was the personality the computer assumed on-screen when dealing with the program user. Compared to the Motion Parallax system on Microsoft 50, version 45.1 was positively antediluvian.

‘Einstein,’ yawned Rimmer, hardly caring what social facade or public image the computer might use. ‘Just get on with it. I haven’t got all night.’ Frankly, he’d have preferred Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Nesib el Bekri, Sol Chong, or some other great tyrant, but, in Rimmer’s opinion, Microsoft was too squeamish to cater to anyone whose favorite historical figures were just a little offbeat.

A life-size picture of Albert Einstein, white-haired, wearing a thick beige pullover, and smoking a pipe while seated in an armchair, appeared on-screen. To Rimmer, Einstein looked larger and more heavily muscled than the way he usually imagined him. Or maybe it was just the sweater.

‘Hey, Albert, what’s happening?’

‘You asked me a question,’ the facsimile of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist replied in his own, digitally reproduced comic German accent. ‘About several key numbers, did you not?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And asked me to conduct a search for exact number matches, across all financial categories, with no time restrictions, and using Conspectus, Argus, Gimlet, Gorgon, and Panorama search engines. Is that right?’

‘That’s right, Albert,’ said Rimmer, yawning once more. ‘Only speed it up, okay? I happened to be asleep.’

Rimmer’s idea had been a simple one. Dallas had thirteen different bank accounts, and soon after disappearing from his own apartment, he’d changed all the account numbers and encryption codes, thus covering his electronic tracks. Or so he must have thought. Dallas could hardly have expected Rimmer to concentrate his computer search on a different, albeit related, set of numbers — the bank balances themselves. Rimmer had reasoned that with thirteen accounts, Dallas might draw on only one account at a time, until he had used up the balance. In this way, Rimmer’s computer might have a sufficient interval in which to trace one of as many as twelve other account balances. Of course, this was no small task. Several of the accounts ran to eight or nine figures. For example, according to the records on the computer in Dallas’s office at Terotechnology, one account showed a balance of 112,462,239 credits. And this was one of the numbers for which Rimmer had programmed his computer to search. In an effort to improve the odds of a successful search, he had also broken eight numbers into four numbers, and nine numbers into six numbers so that, for example, 112,462,239 became 1, 12, 4, 62, 23, and 9.

‘Wait a minute,’ said Rimmer, standing up slowly. ‘You don’t mean you’ve found one?’

It was several weeks since Rimmer had instigated the search — not long after the director had downgraded him to the status of a lowly security guard — and the truth was that he had more or less forgotten about it, having come to the conclusion that the magnitude of the search was too great.

Einstein puffed his pipe and then removed it from his mouth. ‘Yes. Eureka, to speak as Archimedes.’

At the bottom of the screen there appeared a small window containing a brief career resume for the Greek-Sicilian mathematician and inventor. Rimmer ignored it. The trouble with 45.1 was that so much of what you were told was simply irrelevant — an interesting waste of time.

‘I have found one such number,’ continued Einstein. ‘Against all the odds, may I say. Merely to find these six numbers, the odds are quite large enough. To be precise, thirteen million, nine hundred and eighty-three thousand, eight hundred and sixteen to one. But to find all six of these numbers in the specified search order?’ Einstein chuckled. ‘Why the odds are almost incalculable. Nevertheless, I calculated them. One in ten billion, sixty-eight million, three hundred and forty-seven thousand, five hundred and twenty. Yes, I think even God would think twice about playing against odds like that.’