The Raw Shark Texts (18 page)

By the 1950s there were six bodies, by the 1970s, sixteen; by the 1980s, thirty-four. The irresistible urge to survive led to an equally irresistible urge to grow. As a result, the system received constant modification, incorporating new technologies to make the standardising process quicker and more effective, absorbing anything beneficial to the spread of the thing that had once been Mycroft Ward. It applied ‘the arrangement’ to bankers, heads of corporations and politicians, incorporating the useful parts of their minds and knowledge into its increasingly massive self. With thirty-four bodies, it gathered over a month’s experience each day. It learned about stock markets, bought oilfields, developed psychological techniques
and drugs, invested in new technologies and sciences. Every passing hour gave it three days’ research time, and always it researched new ways to spread. What had once been a single human personality became a vastly intelligent mind-machine focused only on survival, on growing bigger and bigger and bigger with no regard for anything else at all.

By the late 1990s the Ward-thing had become a huge online database of self with dozens of permanently connected node bodies protecting against system damage and outside attack. The mind itself was now a gigantic over-thing, too massive for any one head to contain, managing its various bodies online with standardising downloads and information gathering uploads. One of the Ward-thing’s thousands of research projects developed software capable of targeting suitable individuals and imposing ‘the arrangement’ via the internet.

Four years ago it had over six hundred bodies gathering more than two years’ experience every day. This was around the time it found Scout.

The new stick of pallet wood leaked a fine cotton of smoke, black burn growing up around its edges. All three of us watched the fire, Ian’s sleepy half-closed eyes going into wide open pull-focus as the new wood popped with a little starburst of embers then he settled back down into a fullbellied dreamy stare.

“How did it happen?”

Scout stayed tuned to the flames. “One night I was at home, my parents’ home, playing around on the internet. It was at the start of that summer between college and university and I was scanning around for something to do. I found this site – some sort of IQ test. I must have decided to take a look at it and the next thing I remember it’s five minutes later and I’m sick, dizzy and staring at the
SIGNAL LOST
message onscreen.”

“Just like that?”

She nodded. “I ran into the bathroom and threw up. Turned out Polly,
my little sister, had pulled the cable to use the phone and interrupted ‘the arrangement’ programme.”

“Wow.”

“I know. She was always doing it. We used to fight about it.”

“Did you know something was wrong?”

“Oh yeah. You can feel it. I can think my way around it now,” she looked up, concentrating on something internal, “this dead area in my mind where
its
information’s stored, but at the time, they thought I’d had some kind of seizure or stroke or something. There were doctors, the whole works.”

“What did the doctors think?”

“I got passed around, sent to a specialist. Only, the person they sent me to turned out not to be the specialist, or at least it wasn’t the specialist by the time I got there.”

“Ward?”

“Yeah. The last thing it wanted was me walking around only
half processed
. I think it pumped some heavy resources into finishing what it started. It’s still looking for me now, probably always will be. So here I am.”

“What happened with the specialist?”

“I ran away. I’ve never been one of those people who can just accept what they’re being told –” a sad-happy smile, “it’s a fault. Anyway, I didn’t like the sound of his assessment techniques,” she tapped Nobody’s computer still strapped to her backpack, “but I did get his laptop.”

“You stole a doctor’s laptop, what, out of a
hospital
?”

“Yeah, well. It’s easy when you know how.”

“Scout,” I said, trying not to sound too impressed, “what exactly did Ward want you for?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Good looks? Personality? Quick wit?” – cough – “Oxford entrance exam results” – cough.

“Yeah,” I said. “I thought it might be something like that. Or maybe because you’d had some sort of MI5 training.”

“I wasn’t going. Oxford, not MI5.I just wanted to see if I could get in.”

“You got a place at Oxford, but you weren’t going?”

“I told you, it’s a fault. Look, anyway, I was going to university, I just decided not to go
there
. Can we get off my rash decision-making now please?”

“Sorry. We were up to you running away?”

She nodded. “I spent the summer travelling around, trying to keep my head down. The specialist’s laptop came with me and it told me some of what I needed to know, but I didn’t understand the software. All the poking around triggered a lock-off and the whole thing shut down for good, but it did give me a start. I spent a lot of time in libraries, looking into Mycroft Ward and piecing together the story I just told you. My money was running out fast, but then this nice but kind of odd librarian gave me a few hours’ work a day down in the archives. And that’s how I found my way into un-space.”

We sat in silence for a little while.

“Something I don’t get. I can see why he would want you, but why does Ward want me?”

“It, say
it
. It doesn’t really want you at all. It wants the shark.”

“Nobody said that, but I wasn’t sure –”

“The big limiting factor on Ward’s spreading is the standardising process. Even now there’s a pretty severe cap on how many bodies it can standardise as the same self; there’s just too much information and the system is imperfect so it’s stuck around the thousand mark. Ward thinks understanding the different fish, especially the Ludovician, could be the key to a perfect standardising process, where any number of bodies could be updated with new knowledge instantaneously.” Scout thought. “Not that it’d ever risk coming near a loose shark itself.”

“Ah.”

“You know,” she said, giving the fire a poke, “you’re sort of taking all of this in your stride.”

“All what?”

She looked at me and I smiled.

“It is a big deal,” she said. “It’s a really big fucking deal.”

“I know. It’s just – maybe it’s like you said,
I am
in a constant collapse. Maybe this is as bad as I get with things. Even really big things.”

“I’m sorry I said that.”

“It’s okay, you were right. Anyway, I’m the last person who’s going to be bothered by what you have or haven’t got in your head.”

“Hmmm…”

“Ah. Cross that off my list of chat-up lines?”

She laughed. “I know what you meant, and thank you. I really mean that. Thank you.”

“I just love it that you’re around,” I said poking the fire with my own poking stick.

“Yeah,” she said, poking her side. “Me too.”

“Erm,” I said after a couple of big fat seconds.

Scout giggled. “Erm.”

We both poked at the fire.

Some time passed.

“So. How long have you been down here?”

“Four years.”

“God, that’s a long time.”

“Nah. Not when you think about how long I
will
be down here.”

“You must really miss them.”

“Who? My family? Yeah, I do, I miss everything – friends, secrets, gossip, all that stuff, the really cool bars; the ones where you know everybody. I had a university place,
music
, clothes – I had some really nice clothes by the way – and, God, hair-care products. I had a favourite drink and a favourite meal, a favourite TV programme. All of that stuff, just normal
person
stuff, you know? A Dad who used to make me see ageing rock bands with him and a mascara and White Lightning little sister who annoyed the shit out of me. It’s all gone.” She thought for a moment. “Only, it’s not all gone, is it? I’m the one who’s gone. The rest of it, it just all carries on up there without me.”

I turned to check on Ian. He was asleep on my rucksack, chin tucked into his paws.

“I feel like I fell off the world,” Scout said. “You ever get that?”

I shook my head. “For me, it’s more like everyone else fell and left me and Ian on our own.”

Scout nodded gently, looking into the fire without saying anything back. I imagined six billion people slowly pinwheeling through space, all those little stars in the wake of an almost empty planet. A vapour trail of ghosts.

I lay on my back, looking up.

The night sky drifted cloudy above the film reel windows in the roof. The fire had burned down to a bright orange heap and I pulled the sleeping bag up under my nose.

According to Scout’s predictions, tomorrow would be my last day of grace. By the day after, the Ludovician would have had enough time to find its way back from the stream-tangling smash of her letter bomb. Then, I’d have to retreat behind the Mark Richardson personality, set up the Dictaphones again. Today Eric Sanderson had broken the reservoir surface like the rooftops and spires of an old sunken village in a midsummer drought, but after tomorrow, there could only be the flatline of undisturbed waters. I didn’t want to be that again, the empty horizon. I thought about what Nobody had said –
Just let go, let yourself sink down with the crabs.
Was that what I’d been doing? Had I been sinking away behind my clever mask without even realising it? Tomorrow, Scout said, we’d find Dr Fidorous. Watching the clouds, I hoped finding him might bring something, some way of changing things for good.

“Hey.”

“Hey?” I said.

A shadowy Scout stepped around the remains of the fire, bundled sleeping bag under her arm. She cleared a space to lie down next to me.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m freezing,” she said. “Do you mind?”

“Sure, no. I’m freezing too.”

Lying on her side, she hooked an arm over me, dragging her unzipped
sleeping bag up over us both like a duvet. She shuffled up some more, tucked herself into me, head on my chest.

“It’s standard un-space procedure.”

“Right.” With her ear against my ribcage, I felt sure she’d be able to hear my heart as loudly as I could.

“It is.”

“Not arguing.” I untangled an arm from my own sleeping bag, putting it around her shoulders. “There. Am I getting it now?”

I felt the little shudder of a laugh through her body. “Yeah, I think so.”

After a few seconds of warming up clothes, sharing breath and finger-tip-and-ear-drum-heartbeat she said, quietly: “Can I tell you something?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“It’s advice really. It’s embarrassing so I’m going to whisper it.” Scout stretched and shifted, taking the hem of the sleeping bag up to my ear with her. “Right.” The tiny micro sounds of her mouth, pops and ticks around little whispered words. “You should know that when a girl takes her clothes off in front of a guy, it usually means something.”

Somebody let off a box of fireworks in my stomach. I was winded; they went up like a million-coloured bomb.

“Yeah?”

“Yep.”

Her lips, gentle, insubstantial and full of a million volts, pressed against my ear in the lightest of kisses.

I tucked down my chin. Scout looked up at me.

“Erm…” she whispered.

I kissed her.

I opened my eyes to see sunlight beaming down through the warehouse ceiling. The air stung cold but the sky was a pure pure blue.

Scout was resurrecting the fire, dressed in her combats and my big blue jumper.

I thought about her skin under my fingers, her ribs and her hips. I thought of her wet black hair fallen over her eyes and cheeks and nose and her breath and the sounds she made blowing it, moving it. The thoughts spiked in me, hot needles.

“It’s almost midday,” she said, seeing me shift around.

Under both our sleeping bags, I shuffled up into a sitting position. “Thanks for the lie-in.”

“Well, I think it was needed.” Having constructed her new paper and wood wigwam, Scout blew into the dusty white ashes at its core. I watched her for a little while.

“So,” I said, “what next?”

“Well, that depends what you’re talking about. If you’re asking about the journey, we’re a good four hours behind, but we should still make it today if we push on hard enough.”

“What if I’m talking about. About.” I let myself slump backwards onto the floor. “I’m not too good at this.”

“You mean what’s happening with you and me?”

“Yes.”

“Because we had sex?”

“Yeah.”

“Hmmm.”

“Yeah.”

What the hell does ‘Hmmm’ mean?

Scout messed around with her fire for a while like some kind of surveyor. I was trying to work out how to restart the conversation when I noticed she was blushing. Scout was actually
blushing
.

“When I was little –”

I looked up.

Scout made a big blow at the ashes, a poke at the fledgling fire with a stick. “When I was little, about seven or eight or something, there was a toy I really wanted. It was more like a science game actually –”

“A science game?”

“Leave it, Sanderson.” Another poke. “Anyway, I’d worked it all out and if I could save up all my pocket money for six weeks I’d be able to afford it. But when you’re a kid and you really want something, really really want it so you can’t sleep or eat properly, six weeks is forever. So I stole it.”

“Did you get caught?”

“Nope, but I was so ashamed of stealing the thing that it was completely ruined for me. I didn’t get a second’s fun from it, just guilt. In the end, I threw it off a bridge.”

I smiled. “This from the girl who collects laptops?”

“The point is – you have to pretend I’m Jesus and this is like a parable, okay? I’m trying to say I don’t do things if I’m just going to feel like shit the next day.”

I thought about it. “You’re saying I’m not going off the bridge?”

“You’re not going off the bridge.” Scout gave me a smile about things intimate and shared, a newly hatched sort of a smile, cautiously stretching its wings. “Providing I’m not going off?”

“Scout, you were
never
going off.”

Something in the way I said it made her leave the fire alone altogether and turn around to look at me properly. It made me feel like looking at me properly too.

“No?”

“No.”

“How would you know that?”

A nonsense in the back of my head said –
tell her. Tell her how you felt when you first saw her, about the tattoo on her toe, how your hands knew just when and where to touch her, how you could both be so in synch the very first time. She’s got to be thinking the same thing. Right now, she’ll be thinking: It’s as if you’d
– ‘Don’t say it,’ I told the nonsense, ‘I know what you are and I’m not buying, not today.’

“I just feel it,” I said.

She tried it for size. “You just feel it. Like,
you know in your heart
. That kind of thing?” She was trying to tease but there was too much curiosity behind it, a joke-spoiling flash of honest asking.

I could sense the nonsense still watching me from the back of my head.

“Yes, actually,” I said. “Pretty much just like that.”

Scout nodded the way chess players nod at each other. “Good answer.”

The nonsense smiled.
Go on then
.

“Look, I feel stupid asking but – have you been getting that feeling too?”

She’d gone back to poking the wigwam. “Oh God,” she said quietly into it. “He’s going to be another stalker.” She flashed me that flick-knife smile as the first threads of smoke started to unwind from the new fire.

Twenty minutes later, after black coffee and bread, and a tin of tuna for Ian, we’d almost packed up camp.

“Scout, you know what you were saying about going off the bridge?”

“Yeah?”

“Just this once, no tricks, that’s on the level, right?”

She looked at me before shouldering her backpack.

“Just this once.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s on the level.”

The day laid out another procession of tunnels and climb shafts, stairwells and big empty cavernous spaces. We took turns to carry Ian, bumped shoulders as we joked, accidentally-on-purpose touched knuckles in a way that led to an I-won’t-mention-it-if-you-don’t sort of hand holding, walking and talking the distance away under fizzing strip lights.

We stopped to fill our water bottles up from a huge gushing main supply pipe that churned and thundered into some sort of partly covered industrial collection tank. We kissed at the edge and Scout called it
the least romantic waterfall on the planet
.

The dark, when we encountered it, had swapped its universe-ending edge for something intimate and close and inevitable. In a deep storeroom stacked with inflatable beach toys and out-of-date travel brochures we turned our torches off and kissed and touched again in the blind absoluteness of it. Fabric, hair, skin, fingertips, hands and mouths. The invisible hard floor. Buttons and belts, breath and sound.

Somehow, even with all of this, we made progress.

We snuck through a
STAFF ONLY
corridor behind the changing rooms in a department store, through an underground car park and down into a sandwich chain store’s supply room to stock up on food.

“What I don’t get,” I said, as Scout loaded up with baguettes, viennas, ciabattas and various tubs and packets of filling, “is why we didn’t just come down into un-space later. Like here.”

“It’s just the way it works. You know like the London Underground map isn’t accurate to the streets above it?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it’s sort of like that. Anyway, you’re not saying you’d rather have skipped the last twenty-four hours are you?”

“No,” I smiled. “Definitely not.”

“Good.”

Early evening and we were taking a break, sitting on our rucksacks and passing a bottle of water between us. Ian thumped against the door of his carrier. He’d come around to thinking how he’d like to get out and explore whenever we stopped, the only problem was, Ian wasn’t remotely interested in us or our timetable and could happily saunter off for an hour or more at a time.

“No,” I told him, “we’re only having a quick break. But next time you can do whatever you like.”

Two big green eyes stared contempt up at me through the wire bars.

“How’re we doing?” I passed the water over to Scout.

She looked up from her red notebook, taking the bottle from me.

“Good. At the end of that passageway, there should be access to the basement of a library. That’s where we need to be next.”

“That passageway?” I looked across. The passage in question looked short and dingy and sort of like a dead end. “Are you sure?”

Scout smiled. “Have I been wrong yet?”

“I don’t know, do I? We haven’t got anywhere yet.”

She shook her head, getting to her feet. “Fine, I tell you what. I’ll go and check it out. You stay there – no, don’t trouble yourself – and I’ll go and make double, triple sure we’re going the right way. How does that sound?”

I raised my eyebrows in pretend surprise. “Wait. You mean, you’re not already triple-sure?”

Scout shrugged on her backpack with an I’m-not-smiling smile. “Listen to you. Don’t push it, Sanderson.”

“I’ll be right here.” I called after her as she headed down the passage. She turned around to flick me the finger and disappeared into the black.

I had another drink then put the water away, got to my feet and pulled on my backpack. I was checking my pockets to make sure I had everything I needed when I noticed Scout’s red notebook lying on the floor next to the wall. I bent over to pick it up. I was turning it over in my hands when she reappeared at the passageway’s entrance.

“I told you this is the right way,” she called over. There’s a gap in the
brickwork down here that leads through to the library stacks. We – Eric, stop.”

Scout was staring at me.

“No, sorry, I wasn’t –” I held up the red notebook. “You left it on the floor. I wasn’t going to read it or anything. I was just picking it up.“

“Eric.”

“Fine,” I pointed behind me with the book, holding it out at arm’s length. “I’ll even put it back over there and pretend I never –”

“Eric, for fuck’s sake shut up and keep still.”

And I saw the expression on her face.

My heart bumped, kicked out a
thud
of electrical panic. I stood shock-still, the arm with Scout’s little red book still stretched out behind me.

“Don’t turn around,” she said quietly. “Just bring your arm back in very, very slowly.”

I started to move my arm in a creeping centimetre but then there was something, a shadow of fast growing movement in the floor behind me and my eyes flicked across and down. And then:

I whipped my arm in, throwing myself forwards as the thought-funnel of teeth and blades blasted out of the floor and slammed together with a definitive clopping snap where my arm and shoulder and head had been half a second earlier.

“Ludovician” I shouted it out in gut-reaction horror, hitting the ground hard at the same time as the massive idea of breaching shark crashed back down and under the floor behind me, its splashdown throwing up an impact wave of meaning and thought which blasted and bundled me forwards across the concrete.

Scrambling up onto my feet, scrambling back and grabbing the handle of Ian’s carrier then running towards Scout.

Me and Scout running down the passageway.

“Through the wall,” Scout shouting, “through the hole in the wall.”

“Christ.” The idea of the floor rising up under our sprinting feet into a rolling bow wave. “It’s coming up, it’s coming up again.”

Scout throwing herself through a Tetris gap of missing bricks at the end of the corridor and me following, then being yanked back – Ian’s carrier wedged in masonry behind me. Me twisting my wrist around, yanking hard and then the box drag-scraping loose against the mortar and chipped brick, momentum sending me stumble-tripping backwards through the hole after Scout.

I landed in a heap on a tiled floor with Ian’s carrier on top of me.

“Move.”

I looked up to see a bookcase coming falling down towards me and I rolled, shoving Ian out of the way as the thing fell, tumbling hardbacks, breaking against the wall and burying the hole I’d come through in splintered wood and broken heaps of books.

A solid thump from the other side of the wall.

The pile of books rattled but didn’t move.

Then Scout jogging out from behind the fallen bookcase, standing over me white and sweating. “Jesus, I’m sorry, I had to – God, Eric, are you alright?”

But I was already scrambling up to my feet, grabbing up the carrier.

“Hey hey hey,” she said, stopping me, hands on my shoulders. “We’re safe, we’re safe. It can’t come in here. Look around you. Come on, Eric, come back to me.”

I stared around, vacant and shock-eyed.

We were on the edge of the shadowy stacks of a huge library. I looked back to Scout.

“See? It’s okay,” she said. “The books. All these books mean it can’t come in here, it can’t find its way through to us.” She hooked her arm around my waist, semi-supporting me. “Let’s get away from the edge, just to be sure.”

“Your notebook,” I said, still somewhere outside myself, “I lost your notebook.”

“That doesn’t matter, you idiot. We’re on the final leg anyway.”

“I thought we had until tomorrow before it could find us again.”

“So did I. Let’s find somewhere to collapse, get our heads together.”

“Fucking hell,” I said.

“Jesus, tell me about it. How’s the cat?”

We unloaded our stuff in a daze and sat in silence for a while, backs up against a shelf of fat geography books. Ian was okay, rattled, grumbly and angry but basically okay. After a few minutes growling he turned his back on us and pretended to be asleep.

“Fuck,” I said.

Scout nodded, eyes unfocused and looking straight ahead.

We sat quietly for three or four minutes.

“Scout?”

“Hmmm?”

“You said you had a sister. Would you talk to me about her?”

“Why?”

“Just so I can stop thinking about the shark.”

Scout looked at me.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to –”

“No, it’s okay. Talking’s probably a good idea. It’s Polly. My sister’s called Polly. What do you want me to tell you?”

“Just…anything. What’s she like?”