Artificial Wisdom, page 20
Tully nodded. “We have the footage from the apartment.”
“You gave me permission to access the day of the party,” October said, “but we need the day before too.”
He thought back to their arrival the evening before the dinner party, after Solomon’s speech. Tully had pressed Martha to help with his story. There’d been nothing particularly bad there, but she’d still overhear it, and he didn’t love sharing what he was working on with strangers. Even partners.
“Okay,” he said.
She nodded. “But we also need to figure out how the vodka was poisoned.”
“I’m on it,” he told her.
Livia sat at the desk in her room and picked up one of her father’s old smoke-tinged books. She rubbed a thumb against the soft pages, sighed and brought up Martha’s digital vault. One file listed Martha’s financial assets. She’d need help with that, and made a note to herself to speak to Martha’s lawyer. She scanned through the rest of the content. A file labelled Panopticon had been accessed recently, presumably by Tully. Surely a security system, like the watchtower. Classic Martha. Was it for the apartment? She shivered and looked around and up. There, nestled in the corner of the ceiling, was a tiny black dot. She got up and inspected it. It was a lens, no bigger than the head of a pin. Halfway down, there was another one, and a third on the floor. She walked over to another corner and saw the same.
Martha had done this. What had she been afraid of, to put something so intrusive in place? Lockwood and his cronies? Not the kind of people you wanted to cross, and it seemed Martha kinda had. What kind of enemies had she made? Had Tully wondered the same thing?
Heat rose to her cheeks: she’d given Tully access to the vault. In theory, he could even have come virtually into her room. What had he seen? She was tempted to cover up the lenses, even rip them out. But perhaps there were some black spots, or a way of wiping footage. She needed to learn how it all worked. Maybe take it all apart and put it back together again.
She tapped the Panopticon file but got an error chime and a notification that the file type wouldn’t run on her earset.
This was going to require coffee, and lots of it.
INSPIRATION HAD STRUCK a hole through a fog of melancholy tiredness, and Tully was desperate to know whether he was right. He stood in Panopticon, at the bar in Martha’s apartment, on the evening of the dinner party. He twirled the pocket watch dial to set the timing for ten past seven, when all the guests had arrived.
The vodka and six shot glasses were already set up on a small tray that sat at the side of the bar, perhaps to discourage guests from helping themselves. Tully wasn’t a vodka drinker, and was used to seeing it in plain litre-sized bottles. This one, however, was smaller, glass-frosted, like a potion. Likely expensive.
The question was, had anyone tampered with it at the party? He watched the replay on ten-times speed. There was plenty of back and forth to the small bar, and every time someone approached he slowed the footage down. No one touched the tray until Flora came to get it. Her hand didn’t go near the bottle itself until she’d returned to them, when she grasped it to pour the shots. He rewound and watched her pour the shots again, slowing the footage down even further to see if anything had been slipped into a glass.
Nothing. Well, that was stage one of the process of elimination. He checked his notes for the arrival times of the guests.
Livia, 16:32.
Danberg, 17:55.
Pedersen, 19:04.
Jiang and Flora, 19:06.
He rewound the footage to 17:55 and checked the vodka trolley. No vodka.
This was stage two. Where had the bottle come from? Either Martha had taken it out or Danberg had put it out after arriving.
Still focused on the trolley, he fast-forwarded through the video to 19:00, the time he’d come out of his bedroom.
Nothing.
No vodka, but Martha was giving Danberg instructions. “You bought the Siberian?”
“Got it right here,” Danberg said.
“Good, Flora will be pleased. We’ll do a toast at the end of the night.”
Danberg took a small crystalline bottle of Siberian out of a bag and put it on the trolley. Danberg watched Martha walk away. He watched her greet Tully. He watched her peck him on both cheeks. Danberg watched, and as he watched, there was only bitterness in his tight face.
October had been right. It had been Danberg all along.
OCTOBER TOUCHED THE watchtower icon tagged PANOPTICON and closed her eyes as it shrank her down to the steel door. She pulled out the key and thrust it into the ornate lock in the middle. As she turned it, all the cogs surrounding the lock moved too and a click echoed around her. Then she was through, with a wobble, into the menu room.
Two new windows appeared on the right. The nearest represented yesterday, the day of the funeral and wake. The furthest represented the current day. If she went through it, she could walk around the apartment in real time, unseen, a ghost in the machine. The temptation to do so was overwhelming. Yet why was she even interested in the minutiae of whatever was going on in there right now? Everyone was probably asleep. She pictured Tully lying on his bed and shook her head. She’d given her word, and the whole notion was ridiculous.
Instead, she chose the day before the drinks party, and swallowed as she was sucked into the visualization. She steadied herself and looked down for the pocket watch. She skimmed through hour after hour, checking that no one had entered before Martha had come back that evening. No one had. It was past ten in the evening when the door opened and Martha entered the apartment, Tully and Livia following, their mouths agape. They moved through into the living room, and October selected a marker and followed.
Martha sent Tully off for drinks. Suspicious, October followed him and watched him at the bar, but there was no vodka bottle in evidence and he did nothing untoward except choose an artisan rum. He moved back into the living room, and she teleported back too as Martha caught sight of him and shushed Livia.
Curious, she rewound a couple of minutes, listened to Martha’s hurried conversation with Livia, then replayed it a couple more times to make sure she had it straight. Tully left the bar, joined them on the sofas and launched straight into his request for help.
“A source told me that the tabkhir was meant to hit the US, not the Gulf. That Lockwood and his team did something. Something to … shift it. That they had some tech.”
Shit. It seemed beyond belief. She listened closely to Martha’s reply. It seemed carefully parsed, neither a confirmation nor a denial.
Martha Chandra had been on Lockwood’s team. Did Tully believe she’d built some tech that had led to the tabkhir? She recalled him standing before his wife’s statue, saying how Zainab had died. That was certainly motive. Perhaps the purest of motives. Should she break off working with him, maybe even investigate him? Or keep her options open and do both in parallel?
She went back to the conversation between Livia and Martha and listened once more.
36
Tully was in his bedroom study when the door chimed, making him jump and glance at the time. It was early for visitors. He heard Haymaker answer it. Livia appeared to have locked herself in her room. It was unlikely either of them had a visitor, which meant …
There was a knock at his door.
Which meant October. He stood up and opened it.
“Sorry for coming so early,” October said. “But I saw something last night and it’s been bothering me. I wanted to show you as soon as I could.”
“Of course,” Tully said. “Let’s go to the kitchen.”
“You’ll need your Mindscape.”
“Okay, let’s make that Martha’s study.” He nodded towards the room, led her through and shut the door behind them. He gestured for her to take the chair behind Martha’s desk while he took another in the corner. They both looked at each other and waited, and eventually he sighed. “I’ll invite you to my egospace again?”
She nodded and they donned their headsets. Tully glanced at Zainab, then invited October in. Her eyes flicked to Zainab too, but he had already pulled up the watchtower and they entered the navigation room.
“What day?” he said.
She stepped forward to the day before the dinner party and put her palm against the window. As they landed, she was dialing the pocket watch. The light around them flickered.
Tully raised his eyebrows. “You’ve had practice.”
“Follow me,” she replied, and teleported to the living room, where Martha was holding court just after Tully and Martha had arrived for the first time. Tully was already at the bar, making drinks, but they stayed by Martha and Livia.
“Please tell me,” Martha said to Livia, “that you didn’t tell Tully about the help I gave you on Cavanagh. Tell me that’s not why you’re here.”
“No,” Livia said, indignant. “You think I want him to know I needed Solomon’s help? I’m trying to earn some respect here. In fact, I wanted to ask you to not mention it.”
“It’s critical that a journalist like Tully doesn’t start to build a narrative that Solomon is unduly interfering in his own election. I should never have helped you.”
“But you did, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the election! Just because Cavanagh used to work for the guy running against Solomon—”
“Grow up, Olive. Everything’s connected when it comes to these guys, and if you take one step across their path they’ll know about it. Just make sure you keep your mouth shut, okay?”
Tully watched himself re-enter, and October paused the footage with her finger on the crown. He scratched at his jaw, uncomfortable under October’s gaze. “I had no idea.”
“If that got out,” October said in a voice so quiet he had to lean in to hear it, “it would raise a lot of questions about Solomon. Everyone assumed you’d got Cavanagh’s emails from a whistleblower. If Solomon hacked them … It’s not a good look for a global dictatorship candidate.”
“So what are you saying?” he said.
October examined her nails. “I’m saying that perhaps it does need to come out. Perhaps this is the sort of thing a journalist needs to expose. Perhaps this is the sort of thing the world needs to know about Solomon.”
“I suppose you also listened to the next bit, when I arrived,” he said.
She nodded, still engrossed in her hands.
“And so you know why I’m here, in New Carthage.”
“I know. Although I don’t know what to believe.”
“Well, believe Martha. She confirmed it.”
October frowned. “When?”
“Right there and then. She admitted it had happened, even if she wouldn’t give me specifics or the evidence.”
October didn’t respond, just played the footage.
“A source told me,” he watched himself say, “that the tabkhir was meant to hit the US, not the Gulf. That Lockwood and his team did something … something to shift it. That they had some tech.”
Martha played with her drink. “I can’t talk about any of this. Do you know what they’ll do to me, to this project?”
Tully paused the footage. “You see? There you have it.”
“See what? She said she couldn’t talk about it.”
“It’s what she didn’t say. She didn’t say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Which means there was something she wasn’t allowed to talk about.”
“But you don’t know for sure.”
“If it wasn’t off-the-scale huge, she wouldn’t have been NDA-ed to the hilt and worried about the impact on her work with Solomon.”
“Let’s step out,” she said, and vanished.
Tully pulled up his own exit and took off his headset.
“You know, if this is true it could cause a war,” October said.
Tully shut his eyes, recalling Bolivar’s words: The consequences, Marcus! If we write this, it could be world-shattering. It’ll be World War Three. A wave of grief crested and broke, but it left anger in his chest. “My job is to report the truth.” His own words sounded hollow, like they had been repeated by rote. “That’s the thing about the truth—” he started.
“I’m not saying otherwise, Tully, I’m just saying you’re going to need to be very, very sure, because this affects an historic election.”
“You were just suggesting I write about Solomon. Surely that affects the election too?”
She didn’t reply, just looked at him, mouth tight.
After a moment, he continued. “You don’t think it’s a good time for Solomon to close some distance in the polls?”
“What makes you think I’d vote for Solomon?”
That surprised him. “You live on New Carthage and wouldn’t vote for Solomon, your own boss? Why?”
She looked irritated, now. “Let’s not discuss this.”
“No, come on, I’d really like to know.”
“I don’t discuss politics with friends.”
He tilted his head. “So, I’m a friend?”
Something like suspicion flashed in her eyes, but then she softened. “You’re okay.”
“Look,” he said, “I found something too. I was looking at the footage of the day of the party, and it looks like Danberg brought the vodka with him, at Martha’s behest. He took it out of his bag.”
October raised an eyebrow. “You couldn’t have told me that straight away?”
“It doesn’t look good for him. I think we should speak to him as soon as possible.”
“Yeah, I agree. We’ll get him set up in NR and we can do it straight away.”
Tully grimaced. “The NR holding cell you interviewed me in? Absolutely not.”
October’s eyes flashed and her chin lifted. “It’s standard practice, and the most convenient way to interview anyone regardless of where we are. And, right now, we’re here in Martha’s apartment and he’s across town.”
“It’s inhumane.”
“It’s not like we’re torturing him, Tully.”
“You think jailing someone in a jail in their own mind isn’t torture?” He stood, walked behind his chair and planted his hands on the back of it.
“It’s for a short period. And if I was putting someone in a real interview room, they’d damn well be there until I say they can leave. There’s no difference.”
“The difference is that there are checks and balances in play when you’re doing something in a physical space that don’t exist in neurospace. The difference is that in the wrong hands this could be severely abused.”
She stood up too. “It’s not in the wrong hands.”
“I’m not saying it is, but what if your successor’s on the sadistic side and decides to leave someone there, in the dark, for days at a time? We’re not even close to having conventions on this kind of thing. It’s just morally wrong, and that’s exactly the kind of thing I write about.” His voice was raised now and his hands were shaking. He crossed his arms, trying to hide the tremble.
October planted her hands on her hips. “Morally wrong? Coming from the man who tried to turn a source to squeak on his former boss?”
“That’s whataboutism, and you know it.”
“That’s hypocrisy, and you know it.”
“Nothing I find is made up. It’s all one hundred percent the truth. It’s not my fault people put themselves in compromising positions. And yes, I sometimes use those compromising positions to get to a bigger truth because it’s the lies and misinformation from politicians from back when I was a kid that have almost destroyed our society, polarized us, stopped us addressing the biggest issue of our time because people simply didn’t believe in it, like the climate was some kind of fucking religion. The truth is not a luxury. It’s not disposable. It’s the bedrock of a civilized society.”
“That’s all very lovely, but you’ve basically just endorsed blackmail. I used to arrest criminals who extorted people based on compromising truths.”
“For money, though.”
“Sometimes for power, and that’s precisely what you’re doing. You decide what the most important truth to tell is and then you sell it to the public, and in doing so elevate your status.”
It was as if she’d slapped him. It was exactly the opposite of that, couldn’t she see? He tried to steer back to safer ground, modulated his tone and uncrossed his arms. “The NR interviews are a slippery slope, October. No one wants to see what’s at the bottom of that slope. I’m not trying to get at you, please don’t think that. I just think we have to be very careful that the technology we use as a tool to help humanity communicate better isn’t used as a weapon against us, to control us or spy on us.”
“And you asked me why I wouldn’t vote for Solomon.”
“What?”
“You think he hasn’t got the potential to be a weapon against humanity? To control us?”
“That’s different.”
“I don’t see how.”
He was suddenly exhausted and held up his hands. “Please, let’s just go see Danberg. In person.”
She rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Okay. Okay.”
HAYMAKER WAS STANDING by the cluster of window seats, staring out at the beautiful scene below with his arms folded. Livia could see a frown in his reflection. He must have heard her coming, as he turned when she got close.
“Haymaker,” she said, “Tully pays you to be my security, right?”
He nodded, his expression wary. “Sure.”
“Would you mind if I asked him if I can pay you myself? That you come and properly work for me, rather than for Tully?”
“S’up to Mr. Tully. I’ll go where he points. I owe him, you see.”
“I’m sure he’ll be okay with it. I can be very persuasive.”
Haymaker glanced back out the window. “So, we’d be living here in New Carthage?”
“I suppose so. I haven’t really thought it through yet.” She hesitated. “Do you like it here?”
“It disgusts me.”
She hadn’t seen that coming. “What do you mean?”
