Beautiful Intelligence (22 page)

Dirk shrugged. No small number of women had left him over the years.

When they reached Genoa they found a confused situation. A small number of enlightened authorities had tried to reboot the city from one of its coastside suburbs, but they were fighting a losing battle. People wanted the old world back, but they were too traumatised to realise it had gone forever, so talk of new dreams and new principles fell on deaf ears.

The two men took a pair of rooms in the barn of a local wine merchant. It was quite cosy. A local prostitute and two peripatetic tech-dealers occupied the other rooms. Dirk ignored the pro and refused to deal with the metal merchants.

Luigi took his leave next morning. The pair shook hands English style. Luigi gave Dirk a bottle of mezcal, con gusano, while in return Dirk gave Luigi a book about gardening with herbs.

The coastal towns to the west of Genoa were in a comparatively good state; little looting, few private domains, a modicum of gunfire after dusk. Savona had even managed to sustain a small police force.

In San Remo the pleasures of the flesh became too tempting. In a local hostelry, with a dark-eyed local pro, he shared the bottle of mezcal, handing over half her fee with a grin. “Other half after I test da quality of da goods,” he said.

The pro shrugged, then smiled.

As dawn broke, Dirk woke up. The pro lay at his side, drool escaping from the side of her mouth. He tapped her chin so her mouth closed, then got up to make coffee and think about breakfast calories; he felt sure he wasn’t eating enough. The pro woke up a few minutes later.

They smiled at one another. Dirk felt he had a hint now of what life might be like for solos. Carefree, albeit dark and dangerous.

The pro clasped her head between her delicate hands.

“Hangover?” Dirk asked.

She nodded, then glanced at the empty bottle. Then she pointed at it. “Where’s the worm?”

Dirk looked. The bottle was empty. No moth larva.

At once his skin went cold. He stared, then leaped over to the table on which the bottle stood. No worm!

The pro stared at him. “What’s the matter?”

Dirk raised the bottle. “Dis a gift from... aagh! Who?”

The pro frowned. “A friend?”

Dirk ignored her. He might have only seconds remaining. He dropped to his knees and scoured the floor around the table; then, seeing nothing, he took a mirror, in order to shine orange sunlight over the dusty floorboards. There – a hint of a trail, like those made by slugs. That larva had not been dead. It had not been
organic.

He followed the trail. It led to a cobweb-strewn corner. Beneath dusty old webs and clumps of human hair he found the larva.

With expert care he lifted it on a sheet of paper, then carried it to the window sill. The pro, scared, sat beside him, stroking his arm and saying, “Mezcal make you paranoid?”

He shook his head. “I not nobody,” he said. “Luigi not Italian.”

“Who’s Luigi?”

“Scum liar from Japan.”

The pro yawned. “Ooh, baby. You’ve got a bad head on you this morning.”

Dirk grimaced. “On contrary,” he said. “I got lucky. Thank
you
.”

From his pack he took out a stereoscopic magnifying glass, that he used for large scale interface analysis. At once he saw that the larva was a dense polymer sheath for the real mezcal worm, which was some kind of nexus bug. That bug was gone: sheath empty. It would be tiny: it could be anywhere on him.

“See you,” he said, handing over the second half of the payment. “Nice time.”

“Tonight, yes?”

“Off to Monaco. Got to hurry.”

The pro shrugged, smiled, then blew him a kiss. “Bye.”

Dirk returned to surveying his room. With the exception of his duocard, metal coins and anything else that could not be burrowed into, every single item he owned would now have to be jettisoned. He glanced outside. It was warm already. In his pack there lay a pair of sterilised swimming trunks sealed in a heavy duty plastic vac-pack. The worm could not be in there.

But first he had to shower. Thank goodness he’d shaved off the Afro! That would have been destination number one for the nexus bug. They loved big hair – they were the e-lice of the modern world, very hard to spot.

He showered, cleaned every orifice, shaved off his pubes and armpit hair, then hurried out into the room again. On an empty sideboard lay his duocard and coins. He took them in one hand. In the other hand he picked up the vac-pack, which he washed, just in case the bug was super-disguised on its surface. He took a deep breath. Everything else was potentially a bug carrier, not least his clothes. But all being well he could now certify himself and everything he carried bug-free. But he was naked. Could be tricky.

Luckily his room was on the ground floor of the hostelry. He jumped out through a window, landing in a border of rosemary and wild flowers. Unpacking the trunks, he put them on, then ran around to the hostelry owner’s chalet, hammering on the door.

The old man frowned at him, half asleep. “Swimming?” he asked.

Dirk handed over the night’s fee. “In a hurry,” he said. “Low tide.”

“Foreign psycho! Get outa my place!”

Dirk ran off, the path behind him hung heavy with dust his feet kicked up. Then he was on the main road: safe, much poorer, barefoot and in his trunks. But safe.

Monaco called. He would need
proper
security while he attended to his goal.

~

Monte Carlo was a fairground of hallucination. There were no borders – Dirk walked into Monaco unmolested, dressed in the simple cloth suit and leather loafers he bought at a fishing village back along the main road. The place was alive with cams however, because the pseudo-Grimaldi family that owned the principality were obsessed with keeping the past as the past had been. Monaco was both cash machine and open-air museum.

Dirk checked his funds. It was deemed unwise to amalgamate accounts – nexus hackers were ten a euro – but he was tempted. He had kept his Tokyo and Singapore accounts hack free over the years, but his other thirteen accounts were less secure. Now he was back in the semi-civilised world again he needed to plug all loopholes, all hack points, all weaknesses. If he wanted to get in with a new crowd he had to take security seriously.

In the end he amalgamated ten of the accounts into one new Japanese account, that he paid cyber-security to protect. The account contained half his savings, and would act as funds for a rainy day.

But now he needed time and space to research. In a back alley he found a cheap boarding house. He checked it out through the nexus. The resident reports were genuine, the reviews modest, some good, some bad, but there was no hint of criminality. The owner had pets – always a bonus. Nobody could afford to bother with fripperies like pets if they were bent or in hock to organised crims. Least of all in Monaco.

He used cash to pay for a week’s lodging. He took the time and trouble to befriend the Senegalese owner, discovering a shared love of soca music and the mellifluous ripple of the Malian kora. He relaxed. The place was okay. Genuine. A bug-run around his room showed only the standard corridor cam running anthropo-software and a kid’s long-distance spy microphone, that, judging by its condition, had been accidentally left behind in the shower cubicle years ago. He stamped it beneath his shoe heel anyway, just in case.

His significance level was down to p. He grinned. He was getting less important by the day.

All the new tech he had bought since running in his swimming trunks from the Italian hostelry was certified glitch-free. That had cost him, but it was essential security. One night he fired the whole lot up: spex, wristbands, back-up mem and all.

It worked. He could be a navigator of the nexus now, in as much safety as was possible for a semi-secure interface specialist.

Aritomo was never far from his thoughts, though. Aritomo would want Manfred and Leonora back
bad.
He, the famous Dirk Ngma, was now in all probability a known associate of Leonora; that must be the message of the appearance of Tsuneko June in Malta. But Dirk did not operate at the level of Hound, so he was limited to his true identity and a sheaf of virtual tricks he’d picked up over the years.

Yet there was one massive ace he carried up his sleeve. He grasped the difference between the AIteam and the BIteam.
He
knew what to look for amidst the vast, interminable, perpetual roil of the nexus. Aritomo might not know.

He took a deep breath. Manfred Klee was mega-intelligent and would employ the best he could get in security. The BIteam would be concealed with genius level skill...

So the week passed. Nothing. He designed software programs made to seek certain patterns, but they crashed and burned.

He paid for a second week at the boarding house. After a couple of days suffering from stress headaches he took a day out to play volleyball on the nearest beach, then go to a Senegalese night club to watch a scion of Diabaté play the kora. He ate Rajastan curry and drank real French mineral water. He relaxed again.

The problem was the sheer scale of the nexus. There were ten billion people in the world, a huge proportion of them children. It was children who stuffed the nexus with activity, their whole lives from dawn to dusk to dawn lived referring to the nexus. It was the internet’s “social media” taken to its logical extreme. You did not interact with the nexus if you were fourteen or less – you drowned in it, yet somehow remained alive.

Dirk began to freak out. He had banked a lot on his new goal. It was his new raison d’etre.

The Senegalese boarding house owner counselled calm. “What will be will be, Mr Ngma.”

“I need more!”

“Less is more. Seek wisdom, not intelligence.”

Dirk sighed, sipping at his smart Martini. “What
is
wisdom?”

“Information is to intelligence as intelligence is to wisdom.”

The remark, casually uttered, made Dirk think. Artificial intelligence was the game he was in. Should he in fact be looking for artificial wisdom?

He shook his head. “I need to look for kinda artificial naiveté,” he said. “You may be on to something. Yeah... da naïve view of da baby, da toddler.”

“Kids all love a good toy, a good game. They play a
lot.
”

Dirk nodded. So they did. He had no kids himself, but he’d encountered enough.

Yet the new ploy failed. The task was too big, like looking for a needle in a million haystacks. Too much nexus glare burned his eyes, too much noise deafened him. The truth was out there, but everyone around him was shouting nonsense.

The snow-muffled mountain slopes owned by Ichikawa Laboratories groaned and whistled in response to the wind that blew across them. Autumn arrived, and it was cold.

In his glass dome living quarters at the summit of the laboratory complex, Aritomo poured Scottish whisky: two glasses, one for him, one for his nexus manager Ikuo Amano.

“We must think like Westerners,” Aritomo said. “It is the only way to catch them.”

“Must we?” Ikuo replied.

Aritomo remained silent for a while. Thinking like a Westerner was difficult. In Japan,
to think
meant
to arrive at a solution which may be shared with others.

At length he said, “Despite the collapse of their economic culture, they remain individuals, with all an individual’s problems. They are almost incapable of banding together for the common good. Thus the nexus interacts with them as individuals, bound far more loosely than are we. They have little notion of conformity – it is, as they say, much like herding cats.”

“Then I must seek isolated pimples of suspicious behaviour.”

“You must first focus on the eastern coast of America. Philadelphia was where Manfred Klee lived.”

“Do you believe he lives there now?” Ikuo asked.

“No. But I believe he will wish to remain in America.”

“Then I must search both coasts of the continent.”

Aritomo hesitated again. “Our computers run proprietary software.”

“The best in the world, Mr Ichikawa!”

“It is not good enough now to be the best. Though it make us uneasy, we must introduce novelty into the situation.”

Ikuo did not look pleased. “How?”

“We will have to employ a foreigner.”

Now Ikuo appeared shocked. “An American?”

“There are no Americans worth dealing with. A Chinese or Korean will be pointless. No, it must be a European.”

“You have an individual in mind?”

Aritomo replied, “I had hoped eventually to utilise Tsuneko June, but she has vanished into the rot at the heart of England. No... there are other possibilities.”

“I do not like the path this conversation is taking.”

“Nor I. But giri
makes
me look outside of Japan for a solution. I did not found this laboratory for it to fail. The corporation will make us all great, then Japan also.”

“Tsuneko June retains the patent rights to biograins. We must have them.”

“Eventually we will. What is more important at the moment is that she alone retains them, not sells them to a corporation. But she is too young and naïve yet to grasp the commercial implications of her work, so she will hold on to what she has. We will obtain the biograin patents from her for our own exclusive use in due course.”

“You see all ends, Mr Ichikawa.”

“No. Neither does the nexus see all ends. That is why novelty is required.”

Ikuo said nothing.

“There is a man... a native of Italy... you will find him.”

“What is his name?” asked Ikuo.

“Soji Agata.”

“He is Japanese?”

“Half Japanese,” Aritomo replied, “though he looks less Italian. He lives in Genoa City with his twin brother. Find him, communicate with him, offer him the position we wish him to take up.”

“And if he says no?”

“The terms you will devise will ensure he says yes.”

“Indeed, Mr Ichikawa. Now, what of the AIteam?”

Aritomo pondered this question for some minutes. He poured more whisky, then thought further. As an antique French grandfather clock struck nine he said, “I do not doubt that you are correct to say they have left Malta for North Africa. This... unusual trace you describe in the Tunisian-area nexus is promising. But there is doubt about what they have created. Therefore, focus not on the individuals of the AIteam but on what they have built.”