The Noise Revealed (37 page)

"Oh, come on," Tanya said. "Black is evil. We get it. At least be original"

They weren't trying to be original. If Malcolm's theory was right and all this was primarily to make a point, overt symbology was hardly a surprise.

"Nice shooting," Philip observed, "but I'm not exactly convinced it's worked in our favour."

"Thanks for the constructive criticism. All I'm trying to do is hold this thing at bay long enough for the AIs to do their stuff."

Part of Malcolm was elsewhere, trying to attract the attention of human, AI or whoever was monitoring Virtuality. He might not entirely trust them, but a drowning man clutches at anything. Mind you, it seemed unlikely that anyone paying attention could possibly not be aware of such massive disruption. Malcolm was also searching for some form of countermeasure they could employ in their own defence.

Tanya still held her gun and now fired into the seething mass of black. Perhaps this had some effect. Perhaps it destroyed some small segment of darkness. It was difficult to tell with there being so much of the stuff.

"Shit!" Tanya exclaimed. "How do I fight shadows?"

There was a defence against this, there was always a defence.

Malcolm had to find some way of stopping this. He scoured every circuit and memory storage he could access, determined to copy, clone and grab any defensive mechanism he found and drag it back to their besieged refuge. Yet almost all those he encountered were passive defences - barriers, buffers, firewalls - programmes designed to repel intrusion, and he Philip and Tanya were way beyond that. The virus was already inside. What he really needed were aggressors, hounds and hunters, programs that would relentlessly seek and destroy; but they proved to be more sophisticated, less easily reached and hacked. He found only one, a generic countermeasure, which he brought back with him, knowing even as he did so that it would never be enough.

Tanya fired again, with similarly ambiguous results. The black smoke had them surrounded and proceeded to close in. It did so slowly, as if to prolong their suffering. Malcolm couldn't help but wonder whether this was co-ordinated with the virus's attack on the files storing their actual essence. Did the proximity of the smoke signal the imminent destruction of those precious files?

Tendrils of darkness suddenly reached forward, wrapping around Tanya. She waved her arms, as if attempting to beat it away, and kicked her legs, but to no avail.

"Hell!" was all she said as the blackness rolled over her. The single useful program Malcolm had found manifested as a compact, transparent gun. It looked to be made of plastic. A child's toy, a water pistol to combat a forest fire.

Philip had joined in, cursing and trying to pull Tanya out of the gathering black cloud, but there was nowhere to go. As yet, the smoke had ignored Malcolm. He didn't know whether to feel relieved or guilty. It seemed to validate the theory that he wasn't in any real danger this time around.

As the blackness reached her neck and left only her face visible, Tanya's legs stopped kicking and her arms ceased their frantic jerking. She gave up, or perhaps her limbs no longer responded, Malcolm couldn't be sure.

She looked at Philip, her face a caricature of anguish. "I'm sorry," she said.

Philip bent down to kiss her lips.

"Philip!" Malcolm warned

Philip looked across at him as his face lifted from Tanya's. "What does it matter, Dad? What does anything matter anymore?"

The 'Dad' mattered. That sort of thing always mattered. Tanya's blonde hair began to darken as the black coating closed about her head and finally her face. It seemed to have gained substance, losing much of its ethereal nature. Something about the way it flowed reminded Malcolm of mercury: negative mercury, black instead of silver. For an instant Tanya stood there, a glistening ebony version of the person they'd come to know, and then she disappeared, imploding as her avatar died, the blackness losing concentration and reverting to thick, oily smoke.

Malcolm raised his pistol, the only frail defence they had, but as he was about to shoot, he realised that he cared far less about his own survival than his son's. "Here." He called. "You have this," and he tossed the gun across to Philip.

He watched as Philip caught the gun, turned it towards the floor in front of him and squeezed the trigger.

"You don't seriously think this is going to work, do you?"

"No," Malcolm admitted, "but I've been wrong before."

Philip raised the gun and squeezed. A jet of liquid squirted out, bubbling and steaming like acid where it struck the smoke. It didn't matter. They were surrounded by far too much of the stuff for the token attempt at retaliation to make any difference.

Philip looked frustrated, furious, and anguished. He stared at his father, imploring. "I've died once, isn't that enough for anyone? What more do they want from me?"

"Dissipate!" Malcolm urged, "flee to the farthest corners of Virtuality."

Philip shook his head. "No, the virus has found me. I can feel it breaking down my structure, attacking the files that define me. Dissipating won't help."

Malcolm heard the words but had no further answers, could offer no comfort. The last thing he wanted to do was witness his son die again. He couldn't face that. Almost he stepped forward, to throw himself from his rocky plinth and into the chasm that surrounded him. He had no idea how terminal such a step would be but couldn't quite bring himself do it in any case. At the end of the day, he wanted to live, even in the face of his son's demise. The fact shamed him, but it was true.

He turned away, refusing to look at Philip, refusing to look at anything.

Behind him, he could hear Philip cursing as if from a great distance, a dwindling voice that he shut out, not bearing to listen. "Hope you choke on me, you black scum, hope I corrupt you beyond..." And then it stopped.

The silence that followed lasted an eternity. Once time resumed its sluggish course, Malcolm turned his perceptions outward again, opened his eyes... and found himself standing in that same corner of Virtuality, alone. Around him, the ground remained shattered, like some vast limestone plain in which the passage of time and water had combined to produce a fractured pavement. Philip, the back smoke, even the melted avatar that had concealed it, were gone.

The virus had done its job, killed its target and then either withdrawn or disassembled. Malcolm had been spared - not a target, not a threat, a mere irrelevance. Not worth killing. Unlike his son.

Malcolm wanted to cry, wanted to rail against cruel fate that had done this to him again, but wasn't certain his transhuman emotions were capable of such depth. He searched inside himself for the despair he knew had to be there, but found only emptiness.

After a while the world began to heal. No cataclysmic shaking or rumblings; the vast cracks in the ground simply disappeared, to leave unblemished concrete. The landscape started to fill up again immediately, as Virtuality set about repairing itself. The process didn't take long. Malcolm watched entire buildings materialise out of thin air, as sections of the program rebooted, returning to an earlier, undamaged state. The world soon began to look whole again, ready to move on as if recent events had never happened and no one at all had died here today.

At any other time Malcolm would have been fascinated to watch this happening in front of him, but not today. It seemed as if Virtuality and the minds behind it were trying to deny that Philip had ever existed.

Procrastination had never been something Malcolm advocated. He knew what he had to do. He'd been putting this off, afraid of what he might find, but no longer. Quick as thought, he sped through Virtuality, sped through the network of systems supporting this ethereal world. He wasn't circumspect, no longer caring whether he left a back trail or not - far too late to worry about bolting that particular stable door. Now that he'd committed to looking, he had to
know
.

Cath was waiting for him, in the small sparse pocket of existence where he had taken Philip to be copied, where their clones were stored.

He stared at her, wanting to hope.

"I'm sorry, Malcolm," she said.

Not that he needed the words. He knew the answer as soon as he saw her face. He'd failed. For all his cunning and all his effort, the virus had found its way here too.

Philip was dead.

Lara came to with the memory of blackness still clinging to her skin - burning, suffocating - though the sensation vanished almost immediately. The knowledge that she'd failed didn't, though.
Shit!
Despite all her best efforts, Philip Kaufman was dead. She might not have actually seen him die, but the situation she'd left could only end one way.

She'd always had a bit of a crush on Philip, ever since she first joined the project and started working with him. She never said a word, of course, would never have done anything about it, especially not after she met Jenner and, besides, Philip hardly noticed her.

In Virtuality, though, it was different. There she could be everything she'd ever dreamed of being but wouldn't dare to be out here. She was going to miss Tanya; so confident, so brazen, so
sensual
. Dancing at Bubbles had been one of the most exhilarating moments of her life. She knew as soon as they hit the dance floor that Tanya had Philip Kaufman totally in her thrall, this man who barely even knew Lara Chinen existed. The sense of achievement, of power, had been intoxicating. Despite the frustrating way fate had cut that encounter short, she'd found the experience liberating, and afterwards had complete confidence in the Tanya persona, with no qualms about throwing herself into the role. Catherine subsequently assigning her to work beside Philip and Malcolm here in reality was a wonderful twist, while being entirely logical. She was the best at what she did and this ensured the cabal remained as tight as possible.

None of which had prevented their ultimate failure. She didn't doubt that Philip was dead, and presumably Malcolm as well. She'd left a delayed message for Malcolm, set to be delivered while she was still beside him as Tanya - an additional layer of subterfuge that had amused her at the time. Now it seemed that the message was destined to never be delivered at all.

Lara sat up, the flexiseat responding to her movements by raising its back, converting from a couch into a chair.

She gazed out the window, still not quite able to believe that this really was
her
window. Ever since Catherine had plucked her from the obscurity of Susan Tan's team and fast-tracked her promotion, things had been happening so quickly she was still trying to get her head around it. Not that she was complaining, and she would never
ever
tire of the view from this window.

Enough navel gazing. Time to make a call she really wasn't looking forward to.

She spoke into the air. "Priority call to Catherine Chzyski."

Nothing happened.

She repeated the instruction and then tried to call up a screen; both requests met with the same lack of response.

Something was clearly up, but she had to let Catherine know about Philip and Malcolm, even if that meant delivering the tidings in person.

Her mouth was dry after the protracted period in Virtuality. She stopped to grab a bulb of ice-chill from her deliciously retro dispenser, sipping at the pure cold water as she rehearsed what she was going to say to Catherine. The direct approach seemed best. Deliver the news and then explain the circumstances. Satisfied, she dropped the empty bulb into the machine's recycling chute and headed for the door. The biscuit of the office carpet was annoying her; it was too bland, too neutral. She reset it to crimson on the way out, which was far more in keeping with her mood.

Lara was so preoccupied that at first she didn't notice anything amiss. Only when the unmistakable sound of gunfire penetrated her thoughts did she register the unusual stillness around her. Okay, the exec level was never a bustling thoroughfare, but right now there was nobody else in sight at all. Until, that is, she had nearly reached the end of the corridor, at which point a figure in full matt battledress stepped out immediately in front of her, gun levelled at her chest.

To her own considerable surprise, she didn't hesitate. In Virtuality, Tanya would have multiple countermeasures to call upon, but all Lara had was her training and her skill. Jahainô was a fighting style which had been practiced for centuries. Its roots lay in an amalgamation of various disciplines that had been prominent on old Earth. Lara knew herself to be pretty damned good at Jahainô, but she'd never used it in anger before, at least not in the real world.

So this was new territory. The rules were much the same though. She swivelled and kicked, evidently surprising the soldier as much as herself. The sole and heel of her boot slammed into his gun, jerking it from his hands without the trigger finger even twitching to fire off a round. He was bigger than her and armoured, so she followed with an upward blow to the soft tissue under his arm and a kick to the knee. The latter was a little off target as he rolled, landing on his thigh just above the knee, but it was enough to cause him to cry out and to send him crashing to the floor.

She was off, sprinting for the stairs that led to the floors above. In the corner of her eye she registered the arrival of more soldiers coming up the stairwell, and she strove all the harder. Nearly there. Two more steps and she would be on the stairs, with a wall between her and the guns.

A voice yelled out, "Halt!" It was immediately followed by the crack of a gunshot and something punched her in her right shoulder. The impact sent her sprawling, crashing into the wall. Agony coursed through her body.

She pulled herself up with her left hand and looked back to where the soldier stood. She found herself staring down the muzzle of his gun. Behind the soldier holding it, others moved, tending to the one she'd felled, but they were no more than dim shadows. The soldier's finger seemed to move in slow motion as it squeezed the trigger, giving Lara time for regret, time to mourn the future which was about to be cruelly snatched away. Her final thoughts before the bullet punched a hole through her skull and tore her life away were of Jenner, the man she loved; the man she would never be able to say that to again.