Paul McAuley - Something Coming Through

A beautiful sunny September day. Traffic at a standstill along Charing Cross Road. Sun flashing off the roofs of cars and vans, people walking past, a young woman lighting a cigarette, another young woman gesturing animatedly as she talked into her phone, a living statue painted grey and standing on a plastic crate, a man photographing two women, the twinkle of a child’s balloon drifting in the middle air. And someone flings open the door of a white van and jumps out and runs. A man, white, young, blue jeans and a grey hoodie. Threading between two black cabs, elbowing past a knot of Chinese tourists, running across the square at a slant, past the plinth of one of Landseer’s bronze lions, startling pigeons into flight. A policeman in a yellow stab jacket chases after him, head dipped as he says something into the radio clipped to his vest, both of them passing out of the camera’s field of view, and the footage ends in blocks of frozen pixels at the instant of detonation.

The chase had been caught by other cameras, but this was the best view. Recovered from a hard drive in the CCTV centre in the ruins of Oxford Street, every millisecond and pixel of the sequence had been analysed by a small army of experts and amateurs looking for clues to the identity of the perpetrators, whose names and motives were still unknown after years of investigation by police and MI6 and MI5, government enquiries, and millions of words of speculation in newspapers and on the internet. Chloe had watched it hundreds of times, unsuccessfully searching its fringes and deep background for glimpses of her mother.

Records from her mother’s mobile phone put her in the blast zone. She had called a friend at the British Museum; they had arranged to have lunch together. The friend had survived, had told Chloe and her brother that their mother had called her a few minutes before the bomb detonated, saying that she was running a bit late. Chloe knew that her mother was dead, but didn’t know how she had died. Whether she had been mercifully close to ground zero and had died instantly, or whether she’d been at the edge of the nuclear fireball. Chloe, who’d seen the horrors of the bomb’s aftermath in documentary footage, wished and wished and wished that her mother had vanished in a bright instant, dead before she knew that she was dead.

She had spent a solid year working on the LFM wiki, studying footage, posting theories, chasing leads. LOSTGIRL_X. Up in her childhood bedroom, curtains drawn, eating random meals at random times. It was the only time she and her brother ever had any real stand-up fights. She’d thought then that he’d been conspiring to stop her finding out the truth; she knew now that he’d been worried that he’d lose her to her obsession.

Although she had failed to discover any trace of her mother, she had found a great deal of comfort in the community of like-minded people that had grown around the wiki. Her first real boyfriend had been one of its image-processing experts. Jack Dennis, a seventeen-year-old computer whizz who’d introduced her to another polder of obsessives: the scouts for Elder Culture artefacts and other alien stuff brought back on the great shuttles that travelled between Earth and the fifteen worlds gifted to humanity by the Jackaroo. Her thing with Jack hadn’t lasted long, but by the time she left school she already had a part-time job helping a woman who had a stall in the Sunday market in Spitalfields, selling alien fossils and polished slices of rock from half a dozen worlds. From there, she’d worked up a freelance career as a scout in the artefact trade, sourcing lucky stones from Spire Lake on First Foot, raptor teeth from Hydrot and fragments of so-called temple carvings and ‘heavenly beads’ from Naya Loka. She’d made and sold jewellery incorporating off-world gemstones or fragments of Boxbuilder polymer, had done some work for the University of Middlesex, chasing rumours of escaped alien animals and plants. Which was how she’d met Daniel Rosenblaum, and joined Disruption Theory.

Now, Daniel was giving her a look of tender concern. He knew about her mother, how she had died. He said, ‘I thought you’d given up on that.’

‘I had. I have.’

Over the years, the LFM wiki had been infiltrated by conspiracy geeks. They filled its bulletin board with their chatter, subverted every discussion thread with their crazy ideas. That humans controlled by the Jackaroo had planted the bombs. That the Jackaroo had been influencing human history for centuries. That they were actual devils, or the distant ancestors of humans, or godlike artificial intelligences playing an elaborate game for their amusement, on and on, an endless tide of stupidity and insanity. Chloe had more or less given up on it around the same time she’d joined Disruption Theory. Her brother had been pleased. He thought that she had grown up at last, was putting the past behind her.

She told Daniel, ‘The thing is, Eddie is one of the wiki’s editors, and he told me that someone was posting predictions of significant breakouts on it. So I had a look, and I found something interesting.’

Actually, because she was slightly paranoid, because she believed that Eddie Ackroyd might be keeping watch and didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that he’d made her look, she’d asked another editor, her friend Gail Ann Jones, to check it out. Gail Ann had found a folder on the editor’s board that Eddie checked regularly. It seemed to be empty, but Gail Ann had been able to retrieve three erased postings.

‘None of them has any text,’ Chloe told Daniel. ‘Only headers. But all of them point towards places where breakouts have occurred. Godyere, the name of a landowner, which mutated into Golders Green. There was a breakout there a year ago, in one of those big gospel churches. Chilly Field, the original name of Chelsfield Village in Bromley, where patients in the hospital were affected by singing sickness. And Decca’s Homestead. The original name of Dagenham.’

She watched Daniel think about that. He said, ‘So these are hints about the general area. But how would Eddie Ackroyd pin them down to a specific place?’

‘The same way I work. Checking out blogs and the local media. Pounding the pavement. I’m wondering,’ Chloe said, ‘if the person sending these messages is Eddie’s client.’

‘But why all this cloak-and-dagger nonsense? And why doesn’t this client check out the breakouts himself?’

‘I don’t know, but I’d like to find out. The point is, someone seems to be able to predict breakouts. It would be pretty amazing if we could make use of that.’

‘You know what they say about Dagenham? It’s two stops past Barking,’ Daniel said.

‘I know it sounds like crazy shit—’

‘It could be a scam. The messages could have been sent after the breakouts, with false dates.’

‘That’s one thing I need to check out. The veracity of those messages, and who sent them. I’d also like to interview Freddie Patel again,’ Chloe said. ‘I left my card, but he hasn’t called. I thought I could go back and talk to him again. I’m pretty sure that he owns some kind of Elder Culture artefact. Something containing an active eidolon or some kind of bad algorithm. It would be a good idea to make an offer for it before Eddie Ackroyd does. It wouldn’t be much. A few hundred pounds—’

She’d gone too far. Daniel held up his hand like a traffic cop. ‘I don’t doubt your enthusiasm. And maybe there’s even something to these mysterious messages. But right now, Chloe, we have to put our work on hold. We have to focus all our energy into justifying ourselves to a committee of unfriendly politicians who have the power to cause us all kinds of trouble. Once we get past that, we can get back to work. Okay?’