Phase Space. Stephen Baxter
fixed himself a coffee and a Coca-Dopa marijuana cigarette. ‘I know, I know. But where the hell are the Goodfellows when you need them? …’
He settled in his chair.
The Room, his home, was just a softwall box, with a single office chair, and a caffeine/Dopa vending machine. Its bio equipment – a bed, a kitchen, a bathroom – folded away when he didn’t need it. He was a cop in a box, one of thousands in New New Scotland Yard: a Virtual warren of Rooms, of cops in boxes, physically separated, their softwalls linking one to another.
Nobody travelled any more …
You want to take your ads?
‘Do it.’
Morhaim stared straight ahead as a melange of graphics, letters and smiling faces blizzarded over the wall in front of him.
Most of the ads that, for statutory reasons, survived the Angel’s filtering were dominated by the big companies – Microsoft-Disney, Coke-Boeing, IG Farben. Morhaim could never see why they couldn’t do a little pooling, thus reducing the quota for everyone. Some of the images were crudely three-dimensional, popping out of the softwall in front of him, though they still hadn’t got that stuff right and the images tended to break up into pixels, light-filled boxes, around the edges. More insidious were the you-ads, ads that were tailored to him – shouting his name, for instance, or Bobby, the name of his kid.
He let his eye follow the action – the in-wall retinal scanners could tell if you closed your eyes, or even if you let yourself glaze over – and, unless your attention was caught, you wouldn’t be allowed to tally to your quota.
At last the battering of light and noise died.
When he checked the time he found he’d got through the best part of his legal duty as a consumer in a half-hour, a good performance by any standard, even if it did leave his eyes feeling like poached eggs.
And all the time, somewhere in his head, he was thinking about The Case.
With relish, he said: ‘Time to go to work, Angel.’
The softwalls dissolved, even the Cinderella mirror, and Morhaim was suspended over Tower Bridge.
When they were proven to be alive, by legal definition anyhow, you granted viruses amnesty.
Manufacturers of virus killers were shut down; even virus check software is illegal. In fact it is part of the remit of Rob Morhaim’s unit of the CID to track down breaches of those laws.
But there are supposed to be two sides to the bargain: the Robin Goodfellows, the most human-like products of virus evolution, have committed to keep their more mischievous junior companions under control. Mostly they do just that …
Possibly.
But things seem to be sliding a little right now, as most of you realize. A lot of commentators blame the approach of the Digital Millennium – 2048, the year 100000000000 in binary, requiring a whole extra digit from 2047, which was 11111111111 – when, street scuttlebutt has it, the storage problems required by that extra digit will deliver the catastrophe we managed to avoid at the 2000 date change.
Perhaps you are right. Perhaps rogue viruses, or the approach of the Digital Millennium, are indeed at the root of everything that is going wrong for you.
Perhaps not.
… And now here was Morhaim at a pov that looked down over the crime scene: two days ago, Wednesday 13 June 2045, at 10.53 a.m., five minutes before the event. The sun was bright and high, the light dripping down from a sky that was whited-out and without a shred of ozone, and the twin towers of the Bridge sparkled like a fairy castle. Further down the river he could see the city’s newest bridge, a gaudy, over-familiar M-shape curve in bright corporate yellow: an eyesore for traditionalists, but welcomed by Londoners as a painless hit against the ad quota … The view was neutrally interpreted. Evidently he was seeing through a dumb camera, a simple imager with little more sentience than a cockroach.
Tower Bridge’s road span was lowered right now, and Morhaim was looking down at a ribbon of colourfully clad pedestrians and smart-trams, weaving their complex paths across the Thames. And among those crowds – gazing up, perhaps, at the big aerostats floating across London pumping out ozone, or down at what was left of the Thames, a sluggish, carefully managed trickle a quarter of its former size, or just staring at the people – was Cecilia Desargues, forty-three years old, entrepreneur, founder and chief executive of Glass Earth, Inc. – Cecilia Desargues, about to meet her death.
Subject is stepping onto the Bridge roadway. From the south side.
‘Let’s go see her.’
The pedestrians froze. His pov descended smoothly, like a swooping bird. The pov reached an adult’s eye level, and Morhaim was in the crowd.
People, their lives freezeframed in the sunshine like photographed billows of smoke: a family of fat Nigerians, a huddle of Asiatic businesswomen – Korean or Thai probably – against a background of evidently British faces, many of them bearing that odd blend of Asian and Anglo-Saxon that characterized so many Londoners now. No Europeans, of course, since the French had shut down the Chunnel following the prion plagues, and no Americans, scared away by the activities of the Wessex Liberation Front. All of them wore their sunhats and Angel headsets – smart glasses – mostly draped with corporate logos: everyone working to hit their one-hundred-thousand-a-day ad quota as painlessly as possible.
But this was sparse, compared to the crowds Morhaim remembered from his youth. And most of the tourists were old, with very few middle-aged – that generation would be watching from a Room somewhere, like himself – and, of course, hardly any kids. Nowadays, the dwindling numbers of young humans were too precious to be risked outdoors.
But there was, he noticed, a clutch of teenagers, leaning against the rail, peering out at what was left of the river – oddly hard to make out, just skinny outlines around blurred patches, coated by softscreen tattoos.
‘Play.’
The images came to life, and a bustle of voices washed over Morhaim.
The kids came out a little clearer; the softscreen tattoos that coated their flesh, turning them all but transparent, had some trouble processing their images when the kids moved, and every so often a softscreen would turn black, an ugly patch against young skin, an arm or leg or shoulder.
These were the Homeless.
The kids, without speaking, left the rail and walked away from the pov. They moved like ghosts, Morhaim thought.
‘Damnedest thing.’
Yes.
‘There but for the grace of God –’
– goes Bobby in a couple of years, the Angel completed for him. I understand.
Morhaim’s pov moved forward, through dissolving crowds. And there, in the middle of the tableau, was Cecilia Desargues herself: a compact, stocky Frenchwoman, her face broad, cheerful and competent, her hair uncompromisingly grey. On the breast of her jumpsuit she wore a Day-Glo flashing 1/24 symbol, the logo of her company, Glass Earth, Inc. One twenty-fourth of a second: the maximum signal time lag between any two points on the globe in the future, beating the pants off the satellite operators. So promised Glass Earth, Inc., anyhow.
Desargues was standing in the middle of the pavement, looking at the crowds. Evidently waiting.
‘She has an appointment.’
Yes.
‘With her killer?’
Not as it turned out. Do you want me to freezeframe?
‘Not this first time. Let’s just watch …’