"What do you think of Lewis?" asked Angela, or at least the woman who claimed to be Angela Maybury even though she had darker hair, darker eyes, and a far bigger nose.
"I think he does exactly what you ask him to do. Maybe you could tell me why?"
"I introduced him to his new girlfriend."
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"That doesn't sound like enough to make an honest policeman bend the rules."
"That's all you need to know, for now."
Yes, she had authority, she had plenty of that, enough to stop Danny asking more. Yet he felt comfortable with her, like he'd known her a long time, whoever she was.
She collected papers from the carpet. The place was strewn with newspapers and Internet printouts. There were wrappers from a takeaway on the table, along with a disorderly pile of magazines. And there was a smell of food, of food history, maybe oriental, above a mild background of old cigarette smoke. The place had the air of a dishevelled and mildly abused four star hotel-room just before the chambermaid arrives.
"I'm following Frank in the news," she explained. "All the good things he's doing, stimulating the world's economies, funding robotics research, stopping wars."
"And the bad."
"Yes, that too." She placed the papers on a coffee table. "Can I get you a drink? Tea?
Coffee? Olive oil?"
There was a surprise. Nobody apart from Sharon ever said that.
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"The kitchen's upstairs. Come on up." She led the way out of the lounge-pit up to the raised gangway. The wall closest to Danny's house was decorated with books, just like the other walls without windows, but it had a wooden staircase running diagonally across it, dividing the bookshelves into two. Angela bounded up the steps with energy, her long cardigan billowing behind her.
The kitchen was relatively small and windowless, all dark colours and rich flecked-enamels. She squatted in front of the fridge, rather than bending down. There was a bottle-opener on a string inside - something Danny hadn't seen since his last trip to the States. And six half-litre bottles of Giovani Bessendiro olive oil.
Angela handed one to him. "I was expecting you." She took a Miller from the fridge for herself. Danny unscrewed the cap and devoured the slick liquid in a single lift. He needed that.
"Why are you pretending to be Angela Maybury?"
She put her beer down and passed her hand over her head to the back of her neck, appearing to tug at her hair, so hard that Danny wondered if there was some kind of masochistic
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thing going on here. There was a slight sound, like tearing cotton, and the hairpiece came away.
She was bald underneath, as hairy as a baby's bum. She held her nose, moved her fingers to push it from below, and that too came off. She had a nose of her own underneath, fortunately, but far more petite than the latex one she'd just removed. Finally she poked a finger in the corner of each eye and popped the coloured contact lenses into her palm.
Danny looked at her hard, with eyes open wide. Yes, this was the Angela Maybury from the photo. Missing her hair, but otherwise a match.
He'd never thought that a woman without hair could be beautiful. Yet she was. Her skull had the most exquisite shape. Just perfect, the perfect shape, with fine indentations where the plates joined together, like beautiful detail in the stonework of the beautiful Taj Mahal. Her nose was lovely too. The other one had been a little too large, but this one was absolutely the right shape to go with the rest of her face, especially her eyes, her blue-grey eyes, hard on the surface but now somehow softened beneath by her lack of hair, by the perfection of her skull. The hazel eyes had been impressive but glassy. These were real. He went into them, deep, looking inside, finding it nice, finding nothing sexual but
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something at least as strong, which he couldn't explain.
She broke away.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"That's ok. Me too. I don't do that often.
Usually I stay with one version of me all day. I'm not pretending to be Angela Maybury, I'm pretending not to be Angela Maybury. There are warrants out for my arrest too."
"And what do you want from me, Angela Maybury?"
"The answer to a question. Do you think Frank can be controlled?"
"No, that's not possible. He has to be destroyed."
Angela bit her lip. "I was afraid you'd say that. It's such a shame. He has so many capabilities."
"But no morality."
"I panicked when he first appeared. Oh my God! An AI without rules. That's why I coded gp338, but Dan was too fast, he reacted too quickly…"
" You coded gp338?"
"Never come across a class female coding act?"
"No, I mean yes, of course."
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"But then I was impressed by his abilities, his growth. What an amazing intelligence. That's why I sent Lewis to slow you down, tell you he was real and to lay off. I wanted to see what happened."
"What happened was that he took over the world and started everybody like shit, including me. He has to go, Angela."
"I know, I know. But it's such a shame."
"And I need your help to get him."
Angela nodded. "Yeah."
She took his empty bottle and carried it across to the swing-bin. A clock on the wall showed 7 p.m. Could it really be that late? Danny took out his mobile to check the time.
"You total moron!" Angela grabbed it from him, switching it off instantly. "You just told Frank where you are!"
"It was only on for a second."
Angela bobbed her head around and put on a girl's voice. "Aw, but pop, I'm only a little bit pregnant." Her manner changed entirely. She slammed the phone down on the kitchen table and paced from one side of the room to the other, held her forehead, then raised her arms. "You're supposed to do dumb things from time to time, but not this stupid, you complete jerk."
"Hey, steady on."
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"Don't you know anything about being a fugitive?"
"Well actually…"
"Shut up! I'm thinking."
Angela held her chin and thought. Danny watched her, not daring to interrupt.
"Ok," she said, evenly. "Frank can only place the phone to within twenty yards, and that includes the street. But he'll have this end of the building checked out for sure. Who do you think he'll send? The police or Bradlee and Ronnie?"
"I don't… I think Ronnie picks locks."
Angela moved past him and through a door at the far end of the kitchen. "Jesus," she shouted, out of sight. "I hate having strange men pawing through my bedroom."
Danny felt foolish and innocent at the same time, like a small boy looking at the devastation wrought by the simple act of getting caught up in the corner of a banquet's tablecloth.
She rushed back into the kitchen carrying a grey plastic case a little smaller than a shoebox.
"Bring my beer. And don't forget your phone."
Above the steps leading up from the lounge to the kitchen was a second set leading to a higher floor. Angela made her way up and through the door at the top, with Danny close behind. Here was a bathroom, and it was clearly
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part of the church steeple. Near the top, its walls narrowed and sloped in. On each side was a stone-louvered window. As Danny stood by the toilet he could see out between the slats over the Business Design Centre in the direction of Camden.
Angela put the grey case on the toilet seat lid and prodded the cork ceiling with a window pole. A large section of ceiling briefly moved up before gently opening downward on hinges and spilling out a set of telescopic aluminium steps.
Angela climbed them, still holding the window pole. "My case."
Danny took hold of the mysterious case and followed her. There was very little room up there in the steeple, even after Angela had pulled up the steps and trapdoor to create more floor.
She moved a wide stool over the folded steps and sat on it, breathing out heavily. "Whew."
Danny stood uncomfortably. Although the steeple was very tall it was far too narrow. He had to lean towards Angela to keep his shoulders out of contact with the sloping walls. That meant he couldn't get out of the way of the hanging light-shade at chest level.
"Sit down," she said, shifting on the stool.
"It's safe enough, and with two of us here they'll
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never get the mechanism to move, even if they find it."
The stool wasn't really built for two.
Danny could feel Angela's body-warmth where their sides met.
"Is this where priests hid?" he asked.
"Sure, after they'd invented extruded aluminium and hydraulic dampers."
"It was originally built without a spire."
"The church? Main building, 1835, by Charles Barry. 1845 for the spire, give or take, by Roumieu and Gough. "
"Hmmm."
"Yeah, I know my history. Listen, bud, we're going to have to sit in silence here if somebody comes nosing around the apartment.
You up for that?"
"Of course."
Angela opened the mysterious grey box.
Inside were more than a dozen latex noses, in neat rows. She placed the one she'd removed on the single vax- mould. Her contact lenses slotted into an empty case in the box lid.
A buzzer sounded inside the flat.
"I think we've got visitors," she said.
The buzzer sounded again, and again, for a long time, then stopped.
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"We'll get back to important business later. For now, we'd better keep quiet."
The only windows in the sloping walls were two sets of horizontal slits, pillbox style.
The top set were five feet above them, half way to the top of the spire, the bottom set were at the perfect level for a seated person and gave an even better view than the slats in the bathroom. In the foreground were the many shallow roofs of nearby Georgian townhouses, including Danny's own, with their ridges running front to back and two long chimneystacks each with four pots. It was the first time Danny had looked down on the roof of his home. It looked very ordinary. When it was built in the nineteenth century, skyscrapers and aircraft hadn't existed. It hadn't been designed for looking down upon.
Further out was the dome of St Paul's Cathedral, Monument, BT Tower, and the very top of Canary Wharf, and all around at least a dozen church spires. He'd never realised how many there were.
He listened to the almost-silence, to the sound of evening London outside, the traffic that never stopped, to the whirr of computer hard-drives inside. Yes, and he could smell electronic equipment too. Around the edge of the floor were three computer towers, two with their cases
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removed, all switched on and burning their human barbecue, the smell of Angela's pyre, of her disused skin and hair on fire, or at least that of her wigs, assuming nobody else used the place. But what were they for?
He followed the cables around the edge of the room and up towards the slatted window to his right, then got up so fast he bumped his head on the light shade.
"For Christ-sake, keep still, will you?"
hissed Angela.
" What is… that?
To his right, very close to where his shoulder had been, was the weirdest thing he'd seen in a long time. Next to the window slit, on a small wooden board about the size of a book, was a human-looking hand mounted vertically, with computer cables arriving underneath. It was holding a pair of binoculars. Looking into the binoculars, and also linked to thick computer cables, was a pair of eyes, full white globes with pupils and irises.
"It's a bionic video camera," hissed Angela. "And now I really think we need to be silent."
Danny sat down and tried to relax, but he found the camera so weird that he couldn't take his eyes off it. Gingerly, he moved a hand to
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touch it, to see what it was made of, it looked so real.
"Ah!"
The eyes moved when his hand came close. He was sure of it. He also knew that Angela had just kicked him hard on the ankle.
"It moved," he whispered.
"Ssshut… up!" hissed Angela, very slow and snake-like. In normal circumstances a hiss that couldn't be denied.
From below them came a noise, the unmistakable noise of somebody moving around.
Then the equally unmistakable sound of a man peeing in a toilet.
Danny couldn't take his eyes off the eyes, off the eyes and the binoculars and the hand. He lifted his own hand, very slowly, till it was just a few inches away from the binoculars, and moved to touch them. The hand on the wood moved the binoculars down and out of his reach, and grasped them more solidly. The pupils - and there was no mistaking this - twisted around in their white spheres to look at him.
He grabbed Angela just above the knee and pointed frantically at the device, which had already returned to normal.
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Angela glowered at him and reached behind her head to a shelf, finding a pen and a pad of paper. She scribbled rapidly.
—Stop fucking about and keep still!
Leave the camera alone.
But Danny was more curious than ever.
He leaned back so he couldn't be seen by the eyes, and looked down the line of sight of the binoculars to see what they were aimed at. The astonishing answer was his own front door.
"You…" He caught himself, only slightly late, and grabbed the pen and paper from Angela.
—You've been spying on me!
She grabbed them back.
—Watching you. Yes, I have.
—What for?
—Your own protection, and to work out when I should show myself. How do you think Lewis learnt you'd been arrested, and pitched up so fast to get you released?
They heard the toilet flush, then feet on the wooden steps going down, feet that had been silent on the way up.
"No, there's nobody here." That was Ronnie's South African accent.
"Just look at all these fucking wigs."
Bradlee's coarse voice carried from way below.
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"I reckon we found Shirley Bassey's London gaff."
"She's dead, isn't she?"
"Nah, I don't think so. That's just the way she sings."
"Any ID?" asked Ronnie.
"Yeah," said Bradlee. "One Debbie McClain and Helen Armstrong. Sounds like a couple of birds live here, and one of 'em's a yank.
Only one bed, though. Very tasty."
"He must have been in the street," said Ronnie. "Maybe turned up in a cab, saw us and fucked off."
"We'd better do a couple more drums, just to be sure. There's got to be a flat each side of that entrance place."
"Foyer."
"Yeah, whatever these posh fuckers call it…"
Then the voices were too far away to be heard properly.
Angela put her hand to her lips. They listened for the sound of the front door being closed, but it didn't come. She used the pen and pad once again.
—Better give them a few minutes, in case they're playing tricks.
Danny nodded.
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They listened, but there was no noise of a door.
Still fascinated by the bizarre camera, Danny raised his hand for another approach.
"Danny, will you stop teasing the camera," said Angela, quietly.
"I've never seen anything like it."
"I didn't have a normal camera, so I cobbled this one together."
"Cobbled this together?" Danny chuckled in disbelief. People in universities spent years and millions of pounds failing to produce something half this good.
He stopped chuckling as he realised that he and Angela had even more in common than he'd first thought. She was never going to ask him why he'd invented Frank. She was of the same mindset, another progress junkie wanting to push the envelope, another disciple of the technological Sharon. If something can be done, let's do it, whether it's harmful or good, whether it's a weapon or a medical advance, let's try it out.
Let's take the genes from a jellyfish and insert them in a rabbit. Hey Presto! Fluorescent rabbits.
Whatever can be done, will be done.
Progress in this sense was an addiction -
for both of them and for thousands more people like them. Cook the spoon and take another hit in
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the shooting gallery of progress. If Danny hadn't invented Frank, somebody else would have done.
In that sense he didn't have much responsibility for Frank's actions, he was simply fulfilling a small role in society's grand scheme of things, in the inevitable rush of progress, like an individual ant in society's nest, like a long line of ants before him - Stevenson, Eddison, Bell, Fleming, Einstein, all looking for the progress fix.
Or was it really society itself that was the junkie, with these famous people merely as suppliers? And everybody with a TV, a mobile and a computer as a progress junkie, and the scientists and corporate engineers as their dealers, their suppliers, producing ever-smaller electronic gizmos from the hidden pockets of their seedy mechanical jackets.
"So what's the plan for knocking out Dan?" she asked. "Use gp338 but try for some element of surprise?"
"Gp338 is history, I'm afraid. Frank has a defence against it, a barrier that isolates him from aggressive software, a kind of digital condom."
"How do you know?"
Angela may have been keeping her voice low, but Danny's admission was barely audible.
"I built it for him."
"You what!"
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"He forced me to."
Angela held her hand against her face, in front of her eyes, but she didn't stay despondent for long.
"Well you'd better get busy, buster.
You've got about two days to code a digital pin."
"What's the rush?"
"Ever heard of a microchip project called the V-Ultrachip?"
"Yes." He was about to say he'd worked on it, but decided not to.
"Do you know what the V stands for?"
"Oh shit!"
"Frank sees networked intelligence as weak. So he designed a network on a chip, the V-Ultrachip. It's his version of reproduction.
They're little clones of the big Frank, self-contained. The first few should come off the production lines in a couple of days. After that, the battle's over."
Two days wasn't enough. Danny still had no idea how he was going to fight Frank, what his opponent's weaknesses were. But one of the other questions still bothering him had been answered by the strange camera.
"Moorhen is in the prosthetics business, right?" he asked. "Artificial limbs, eyes, that kind of stuff?"
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"Yes."
That wasn't the full truth, he could tell, but it was close enough for now.
"And business is booming, thanks to Frank," added Angela. "You see the news today, Danny? World's on a roll. Stock markets on the bull here and in the US, pretty much everywhere, space program brought forward, milk and honey flowing from silver faucets."
"So I hear."
"And the prosthetics business is doing especially well." She seemed paradoxically sad when she said this. Not happy or even indifferent, but emotionally down.
"Is that a bad thing?"
"Let's go downstairs and I'll show you.
You might want to check that Bradlee and Ronnie are in view. If we can see them outside your house, we know they're not somewhere else."
Danny moved his head towards the slit window, then decided he didn't want to upset the odd camera, so he looked from behind it again, along its line of view. He could see Bradlee and Ronnie standing next to the steps of his house like two sentries.
He stood carefully and moved off the trapdoor. "Yes, they're there, but I'm not exactly
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thrilled by that. I'm worried about Sharon. I need to call her."
"You can't do that without giving yourself away. Don't worry, Sharon won't be harmed."
"How can you be so sure?"
"Because Frank likes her."
That was undeniably true. Frank liked her too much, but that did mean she was relatively safe. Angela pulled at the steps.
"He was a cheeky one, using my bathroom. I bet he didn't wash his hands."
***
In the lounge, Angela flopped on the sofa, reached beneath the coffee table for her cigarettes and lit one, sighing as she breathed smoke out.
"That's one of the reasons I live over here," she said, as she put the pack back where she'd found it. "In the States, smokers rate some way below lepers."
"How do you find London?"
"Like living in a theme park."
Danny stood by the large arched window that looked out on to the alder tree and the street.
There was a balcony immediately outside, and no means of getting to it, as far as he could see. It was inset into the end of the church, and the
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en