"After all, who wants to live in a world that's going down the tubes? No one benefits from that scenario—you, me or the CEO of ParaDim," Howard added.
Graham shook his head. It all sounded so reasonable—even Annalise believed it—but Kevin said that all ParaDim boards were affected by resonance. Why should this one be different? Was there a boardroom coup just around the corner?
Gary placed his palm on the entry panel to Room G and stared into the retinal camera.
"Where is everybody?" asked Graham, looking up and down the corridor. It all looked so deserted. He hadn't seen anyone else since he'd entered the building.
"It is quiet, isn't it?" said Howard. "But you get used to it. Most of the building is filled with computers and equipment. Everything's automated. I doubt there's more than twenty people in the entire building."
The door slid open. Gary stood back to let Annalise enter first. A giant dimpled sphere dominated the room. It was like a matte black golf ball twelve feet in diameter sitting on a similarly colored plinth.
"And this is where it all begins," said Gary, waving a hand in the sphere's direction. "There are only twenty of these on the planet at the moment. This is the heart of ParaDim."
Graham half expected to see it pumping. He walked around it, wondering if he was allowed to touch, wondering what it was. It was so black and strange-looking—light seemed to slide off it, there was hardly any reflection from the overhead lights or from the windows. He let his hand hover near the surface, as far as he dare go; any closer and he was sure his hand would be sucked into some deep, cloying void.
At the back of the plinth an array of pipes—ten of them, each about a hand in circumference—ran along the floor before disappearing into the wall.
"Cabling to the front-end computers," explained Gary. "Imagine this black beauty as a giant sausage machine—raw data from parallel worlds being sucked in at one end and distributed about the building in neat packages for us to translate and analyze."
"This can access parallel worlds?" Graham continued his slow circumnavigation. There were no features on the sphere at all—other than the dimpling. There were no lights or dials or switches or even a line showing where two pieces had been joined together. Had the sphere been cast in one piece? And one piece of what? Metal? Plastic? Something else?
"Isn't it just the most mind-blowing thing you ever saw?" said Annalise, joining him on the far side.
"The technology underlying this machine is phenomenal," said Gary, his hand lightly brushing the sphere's side. Graham held his breath and peered at Gary's fingers, expecting them to come away stained black.
"It's a century beyond anything we should be able to produce," continued Gary. "We're only now adapting some of this technology for use elsewhere—New Tech computers, New Tech data storage. Another year and we'll be able to speed up the process a millionfold."
"But at the moment," said Howard, "we've a bottleneck at the processing end. We're sucking down data far faster than we can process it. Most of this building is filled with mainframes and disk drives trying to keep up."
"Isn't it neat?" Annalise said to Graham. "You can see which world's being accessed from that terminal over there."
"Which world is this one?" Howard asked Gary, who was standing by the terminal.
Gary leaned over and read from the screen. "024 544 691 337."
"Which means like less than nothing to everyone on this side of the room," said Annalise, smiling. "What kind of world is it?"
Gary tapped at the keyboard and a new screen came up.
"One of the more advanced ones," he said.
"According to Gary," Annalise inclined her head towards Graham, "most worlds are more advanced than us. We're an average, could-do-better world."
"Which is what you'd expect," said Howard. "The sample will always be skewed in favor of the more advanced worlds because they're the ones with data. What are you going to find on a less-developed world? Without the technology to broadcast or store data electronically all you'll get is static."
"This one's not much better," said Gary, peering at the screen. "It's one of the Chinese worlds. Most of the interesting files are in a distant variant of Mandarin. They take ages to translate and even then I'm sure we miss many of the inflections."
"Do you get many different languages?" asked Graham.
"Do they ever," said Annalise. "Tell him about the code freaks."
"Code freaks?" asked Graham.
"There's several worlds who encrypt everything," said Gary. "Even their radio broadcasts. We're not sure if it's a commercial consideration to make their customers buy decoders or a security matter."
"Very difficult to decrypt," said Howard. "But, with help from other worlds, we did it."
"Then there are the worlds with languages we've never met before or ones that have diverged radically from our own. Some use character sets we're not familiar with. Some use octal or duodecimal numbering systems. We even have worlds where all we can access is a white noise. It's not static but we can't tell if it's data, interference or something else. There's something there but we can't even begin to ascertain what it might be."
Annalise moved away from Graham and ran an absent-minded finger along a bank of screens on the wall behind her.
"What's this?" she said, turning to Gary. "Your name's all over this screen."
Gary walked over and peered over her shoulder. "Is that still there?"
"What's still there?" asked Howard.
"I was doing a 109 search over breakfast."
"What's a 109?" asked Annalise.
"Something we do more often than we should," explained Gary. "It's fun to see if any of your counterparts are famous. One of mine won a golf tournament in Ohio last month. Made me think I should take up the game."
"It does have more serious applications," added Howard. "It's part of the general name search against the other worlds. Developed for the Census project, though some of us"—he looked at Gary "—have found other uses for it."
"You're familiar with the Internet?" Gary asked Annalise.
"Duh!" she said, raising her eyes.
"Well, imagine the dross you pick up on an Internet query and multiply it by a thousand billion. You have to apply filters to the search to make them manageable. So we have preprogrammed filters. And Type 109 checks the media files. If any of your counterparts made the papers, a 109 scan will find them."
"Can I have a go?" asked Annalise, pulling the chair out and sitting herself down in front of the screen. "Where do I type my name?"
Gary took Annalise through the procedure.
"You can select name and date of birth, place of birth, country of birth, age range, parents. The tighter the search criteria, the tighter the match."
"I'll do it for all the girls. There can't be too many Annalise Mercados in the universe."
"I'd enter as much as you can. Some of the worlds out there have records going back several millennia."
Annalise selected U.S.A. and entered a one-week range for date of birth. The machine hung for ten seconds, twenty.
"You realize I can check how accurate this is?" she said. "If Annalise One's name doesn't come up for solving the De Santos kidnapping, you're busted."
"It'll come up," said Gary. "Don't worry."
A new screen came up. Slowly, names appeared. Several entries appeared for Annalise One—Psychic Saves Kimberly, Kimberly Psychic Questioned, Kimberly Psychic Gets Own Show, Psychic's Show Cancelled.
But it wasn't one of those headlines that drew Annalise's attention.
It was the one below.
Telepathy Project Ends In Failure.
"How do I get more information? Can I click on that?" Annalise said, pointing at the entry on the screen.
Gary leaned over and clicked on the link for her. An article appeared. An extract from the
New York Times
dated fifteen years ago. There was a picture of a baby—Annalise Mercado—the first human to be born with the experimental telepathy gene.
Graham looked at the picture. Was it really Annalise? All babies looked the same to him, but was there something about the eyes?
He read on. She'd been the center of an experiment into telepathy. An attempt to access underutilized portions of the brain by a mixture of gene and drug therapy. One of the last projects before the global moratorium on human genetic engineering. But it had failed. Repeated tests on the infant Annalise failed to show any sign of telepathic ability and yesterday, on her fourth birthday, the last funding for the project had been withdrawn.
"Where is this?" said Annalise, grabbing Gary by the sleeve. "Which world? Can you find out? Is it one of the girls?"
Gary clicked and tapped, lists unfurled in windows on the screen, lists of names and numbers.
"It's not one of the two hundred," said Gary after about a minute. Everyone looked at Annalise. She stared blankly at the screen.
"Annalise Two," she said, her voice low and drained of all emotion.
"No," said Gary. "Annalise Two's address is . . ."
"Not that Annalise Two. The original."
"There was another Annalise?"
"Yeah, but I never talked to her." She continued to stare straight ahead. "No one did but Annalise One. She was Annalise One's big friend. From the age of five through to . . ." She stopped and shook her head. "Sorry, I can't remember—ten, eleven, twelve, something like that. I'll find out from Annalise One. But I remember they used to tell each other stories. The girl said she was dead. She kept repeating it.
I'm dead. Mommy told the man from the papers. My real name's Annalise too but mommy gets angry when I use it. I'm Tammy now. Tammy Marchant.
"That's how she became known as Annalise Two—
my real name's Annalise too.
" Annalise smiled. "I used to think that was a real cool story."
Gary started tapping on the keyboard and a new screen appeared
. Census Project—Name Search
. He typed in Annalise Mercado, the twelve-digit world ID, took her date of birth from the newspaper article, ticked birth, marriages and death, and waited. The details came back. Just the one entry—the registration of her birth.
"She's still alive?" said Howard.
"Or changed her name." He transcribed Annalise's details into a search for Tammy Marchant. One entry. Her death at age twelve. A car crash.
"Do you think she changed her name again?" asked Howard.
Gary shook his head. "I don't even know why her mother changed names in the first place."
"To give her daughter a normal life," said Howard. "Away from the media spotlight."
"A bit late to think of that. She must have agreed to have the child modified in the first place."
"Have
we
been genetically engineered?" asked Annalise, looking up at Gary. "The girls, I mean? Is that why we can talk to each other?"
"I doubt it," said Gary, resting his hand on her shoulder. "I can only guess but I think that in an odd sort of way the experiment worked. But instead of bonding with someone on her own world, she found another version of herself—Annalise One. Maybe the rest came about by resonance. Maybe the ability to access greater portions of the brain is something that can be taught or triggered by extended use. Annalise Two teaches Annalise One who, in turn . . . who knows? Are the number of Annalises increasing faster than they used to?"
"Yeah," Annalise nodded, her face fixed on the screen. "I might have heard her, you know? In my head. I heard fragments of voices long before I learned how to reply. I might have heard Tammy Marchant calling to me."
She took a deep breath and turned to Gary. "I've got to contact the girls."
Annalise Fifteen was running out of money. She'd used most of her cash on the train fare to Brighton and a hotel room for herself and Graham. Yesterday, money had been the least of her worries. Now, it was moving towards the top.
She looked at herself in the wardrobe mirror. Her clothes were stained—a mixture of slate dust, attic grime and dirt from rolling in the road. Not to mention the gasoline. She could still smell it despite soaking her top in the sink overnight. But they were all the clothes she had. Everything else was back in London, sixty miles away.
She glanced over at Graham—the new Graham, the quiet one—sat by the window, playing Solitaire. He'd been playing for hours and would probably keep on playing for days—or until she told him to stop. He was the most malleable person she'd ever met.
But he wasn't company.
She wondered what the other Graham was doing. Had he really thought he'd abandoned her? She shook her head in disbelief. He'd tried to throw himself headfirst off a moving bus rather than leave her behind. He'd barely been able to move—she could tell he was in the throes of flipping worlds—but he'd never given up. Not once. When he couldn't crawl, he'd rolled. If the passengers on the bus hadn't pulled him back, he'd have succeeded.
She flicked on the TV. Something to take her mind off money and ParaDim death squads. A news program came on. She shuffled closer along the bed for a better view. Would setting a car alight and being shot at in a London street be considered newsworthy?
She watched for several minutes. No mention of shootouts in Knightsbridge but there was one story that made her sit up. A jewelry heist from a month ago. A little girl—Tracey Minton—had been killed as the gang made their getaway. A senseless murder. The girl had been walking by with her mother when the gang ran out of the jewelers. One of the raiders had turned and shot her. Panic, reflex action, for-the-hell-of-it thuggery—no one knew why. But people wanted little Tracey's killers caught. And newspapers were willing to pay for information. With the number of leads drying up, one of the papers—
The Sketch
—had just announced their reward was to be increased to £100,000.
Annalise sat bolt upright.
And thought of Annalise Six.
And the ParaDim computers.
"Are you coming?" asked Gary, holding the door to 3C open. "Annalise?"