Tony Ballantyne - Recursion

“Oh, Nicolas. Have some tact!”

“No,” said the voice. “He’s right. Ghost is a good description. I’m not the man I used to be.”

Katie was grinning. “This is excellent. This is better than we could have hoped for.”

Eva turned to her in disgust. “Why?”

“Because this is something that the Watcher can’t measure. It may even be something that the Watcher doesn’t even know about. This can only aid us.”

Eva lost her temper. “No. I’m fed up with this. I’ve heard enough. I’m not playing along anymore. There is no Watcher, and if there were, there would be no way of escaping it. How would we do that? Four poor loonies, all trapped in a mental hospital in Wales, without a penny to their names.”

Her voice faltered as she saw Nicolas and Alison begin to smile at her.

“What? What’s the matter?”

Nicolas was looking at Alison and smiling, waiting for her to tell Eva the big joke.

“Speak to me. What’s the matter?” said Eva. She was becoming angrier. Katie was blushing with embarrassment. She seemed to be retreating back inside herself, the real Katie withdrawing from the room and leaving nothing but the body behind.

“Tell me what you’re laughing at!” demanded Eva.

Alison spoke first. She pointed at her friend.

“You don’t recognize her, do you? You don’t know who she is! That’s Katie Kirkham!”

“Katie Kirkham?” said Eva weakly. “It can’t be.”

But it was. No wonder Eva had thought she recognized her. No wonder they were laughing at her.

“Katie Kirkham.” Nicolas laughed. “The Poor Little Rich Girl.”

Katie Kirkham’s mother had written the Console Operating System. Practically every mobile phone in the world now used it. She had made her fortune by giving it away for free. All those useful functions: from health monitoring and global positioning, down to the address book and calculator, were available to users for nothing. The only charge she made was a fraction of a credit for interfacing the phone to the COSnet, a charge that was minuscule compared to the cost of the call itself. Virtually nothing. It was a good deal for everyone. Good for the customers, who got the COS for nothing, good for the telecom companies, who were saved the expense of development, and good for Henrietta Kirkham, who just sat back and waited for all those fractions of a credit to come rolling in.

Eva had seen Henrietta Kirkham many times on the viewing screen in the past. That was how she had recognized Katie. Katie had her mother’s features, but twisted and exaggerated. Henrietta was an attractive woman, in an unusual sort of way. DeForest had thought so; Eva had teased him about it.

“So you fancy her more than me?” she would press, watching DeForest twist uncomfortably on the sofa. But Henrietta was attractive; she had a calm poise and confidence that stood her in good stead when interviewed. You didn’t become one of the richest and most powerful people in the world and expect people not to feel jealous. And yet, with her tiny, delicate frame, her shy smile, and her little-girl-lost eyes, people were almost sympathetic to her. Almost. Nobody could feel real sympathy for the woman who had it all.

Then there was poor Katie: the manufactured child. Henrietta was supposed to have written an algorithm that scoured the world’s sperm banks looking for the perfect genetic material that would match her own and produce the perfect child. And if anyone had told her that there were too many variables to be sure of the result, she had ignored them just as surely as she ignored the messages she got from the fanatics telling her that she was meddling with forces she didn’t understand.

Henrietta had been determined to have a child that inherited all her best features, and that child was Katie. And Katie had indeed inherited all her mother’s best features, but exaggerated and magnified to the point of the grotesque. She was more intelligent than her mother, but also more obsessive, more nervous, more shy. Her mother’s natural caution had been replaced by paranoia, her analytic nature by something that divided the world into pieces so small that its soul was lost on the way.

Even her physical body was an exaggeration: she was thinner, her eyes smaller, her skin paler.

As Katie had grown up, the media had followed her, revealing each new character flaw to the world, and the child who had once been the golden girl, the symbol of the new technological age, had become a symbol of the perils of meddling with nature.

Then, one day, Katie had disappeared from public view, as only the very rich or very poor can manage. Henrietta had faded back into the foreground, drawing the camera onto herself and her latest ventures and very firmly away from her daughter.

No one discussed Katie now, only the occasional story of doubtful provenance leaking into the news of how she had gone mad, or back into therapy, or how her twisted genius had invented a box and they had put a cat inside it and then opened it up and the cat was gone and then they closed it again and when they reopened it the cat had come back but it was dead, twisted inside out…

Katie had become a legend in her own lifetime. A poor little rich girl who allowed the real poor and unfortunate to draw a little comfort from their sad, lonely lives.

And now, here she was, standing face-to-face with Eva. A slightly shabby, smaller-than-life woman in a rain-washed mental hospital, trapped in the middle of a grey Sunday afternoon.

Alison shrugged at Eva.

“I know. It’s the last place you’d expect to find her. But that’s sort of the point, isn’t it?”

Outside the window, the rain had finally stopped. The room was still dull and grey, the outside world sodden and empty. They sat in silence for some time, saying nothing. Eventually it was Alison who spoke.

“You’re the last piece, Eva. The Watcher may have sent you, but we could spend the rest of our lives turning down opportunities on that basis. You complement us; you give us the chance to do the unexpected. We’re going to move fast and try to second-guess the Watcher. We leave tomorrow, four o’clock in the morning. That’s when people are at their lowest ebb. We will walk out of the gate and then toss a coin to see which way to go. Heads we go left, tails right. We have supplies from Katie: stealth phones and untraceable credit. The sort of thing that only the army is capable of getting hold of.”

“Or the Watcher. Be careful, Eva, something doesn’t seem right here.”

Alison looked hard at Eva as the voice spoke.

“What did it say?” she asked.

“Say nothing,” said the voice. “I don’t like this. You’re going to leave me behind. I’m trapped in these limes. The moment you’ve found me, you’re walking away.”

Eva looked around the room in confusion. “You’re saying I should stay?” she whispered.

Alison reached out and took hold of her hand. “What’s the matter, Eva? Are you all right?”

Eva nodded dumbly. She was waiting for her brother’s answer. The one person she could really trust.

He spoke slowly, haltingly. “No…No. I think you should go with them. Yes. They’re right. I’m an unexpected ally. It may help fool the Watcher. But Eva, be careful. There is something not right here. I can’t see it.”

Alison could hear none of this; she was speaking quickly, eagerly.

“Are you sure, Eva? Will you be ready tonight? We can’t afford to delay. We’ve waited too long already. The Watcher may already be suspicious.”

“We could wait,” Nicolas said uncertainly.

“No. It’s okay. I’m ready,” said Eva. “You’re right. We can’t delay.”