Idolon (22 page)

"I need some coffee," Thabile LaComb said. "Especially if you expect me to think on such short notice this late in the afternoon."

"I suppose I'm buying," van Dijk said.

The noetics professor pushed her chair back from her desk and stood up. "Damn right you're paying. You want an education, it's going to cost." But she smiled as she said it.

Van Dijk returned the smile. "I've been hearing that a lot lately." He had worked with the noetician a couple of times before. Online. This was the first time they'd met in person.

She lifted a hand-knitted sweater from the back of her chair. The sweater was the color of daffodils and complemented the purple beads threaded through her hair. "Come on, Detective. Let's go for a walk. It can get kind of stuffy in here—if you know what I mean."

From her Cognitive Sciences office in Campbell Hall she took him across campus, in the direction of Berkeley and Telegraph Avenue. As far as van Dijk could tell, Thabile LaComb didn't ware 'skin. She wasn't philmed... not even her nails. If she belonged to a cast, it wasn't advertised. She wore a batik blouse, and jeans nanoembroidered with fine titanium thread that shimmered in the patchy afternoon light. Her hair gave off the faint scent of crushed cloves.

"First of all," she said, as they passed Sather Tower, "before we get into the inner workings of sageware and daticians, I want some context."

Van Dijk took a moment to compose his response. "I'm looking for someone," he said.

LaComb arched one brow. "Aren't we all?"

"A young girl is missing." Van Dijk flashed her a picture of Lisette, taken by the uniformed officers when they first questioned the girl.

LaComb's expression sobered as she studied the picture over an eyefeed d-splay. "Runaway?"

" 'Running.' That seems to be the operative word."

"From what?"

"Something, or someone, she saw."

"And wasn't supposed to see, I take it." A chill breeze off the San Francisco Bay ruffled the trees around them, scattering a flock of starlings and loose bits of debris.

"A young woman was found dead in the apartment just down from the girl's," he said. "I'm afraid that's all I can tell you."

"Is this young girl in danger?"

"If she's running, I have to assume it's for a reason."

LaComb glanced at the side of his face. "You're worried about her."

"She's on her own. She doesn't have anyone to turn to, or to go back to. Mom's not in the picture."

"So someone's got to look after her," LaComb said.

They walked in silence for a few minutes. LaComb spent the time staring down at the pavement, lost in a frown. But the walking was pleasant. Van Dijk was in no hurry to press her or cut the stroll short.

"Distributed processing," LaComb finally said. They were nearing the intersection of Bancroft and Telegraph, with its bustling crowd of street vendors and buskers. Spicy incense and cooking oil drifted on the air.

"Meaning... ?"

"Sageware doesn't reside on any single node. It resides on many nodes in a shared processing environment."

"So if a node goes down," van Dijk said, "the sageware can still function. It keeps ticking."

"Correct. It also makes it possible to control user access to a particular datician or specific functionality."

"Control how?"

"Through what are called run options. Users are given permission to run specific agents, make certain queries, d-splay certain data."

"Or not," van Dijk said.

"Right. Most of the time it depends on what you pay for. The more you pay, the more functionality you get."

"So who controls the sageware?"

"Manage, or administer, would be more accurate. 'Control' implies an absolute top-down mechanism for enforcement that doesn't really exist. In practice, the system is more flexible. All sageware is heuristic."

"It has the ability to learn," van Dijk said.

LaComb nodded, softly rattling the beads in her hair. "And adapt. Up to a point, anyway."

"And then what?"

"It gets upgraded. Here." LaComb turned into a corner coffee shop that sold bagels and spreads: cream cheese, hummus, baba ganoush. "I'll have a Turkisha. With cocoa nibs."

Van Dijk ordered her coffee and a latte for himself, then joined her at a cozy, sun-warmed table next to the window. "So, what do daticians do during off-peak hours," he asked, "when demand is low?"

LaComb rested her forearms on the table in front of her. She'd pulled her hands into the sleeves of her sweater. Only the delicate tips of her fingers peeked out. "There aren't any spare CPU cycles, per se."

"At all?"

"The load is fairly constant. If one datician gets overloaded, its processing tasks xfer to another datician. That keeps the system balanced and access times to a minimum."

"Do daticians ever act independently?"

"In what way?"

"When they do something, is it always in response to a request? Or do they ever operate on their own?"

"Free will, you mean?" LaComb's brow furrowed.

"I guess."

LaComb picked at a scratch in the table. "Technically," she said, "the answer to your question is no."

"But?"

She looked up and eased her hands from her loose sleeves, clasping both wrists. "Requests and instructions are often open to interpretation. You see that with people all the time. Different people hear and act on things differently. Likewise, not all daticians process requests in exactly the same way. They should, but they don't. Does that mean one or more of those daticians is acting independently? I don't know."

Their coffees arrived. LaComb wrapped her fingers around the warm cup. She leaned forward to inhale the aroma, then straightened. "Brain-computer interfaces add another level of complexity. BCI interpreters are accurate 99 percent of the time. But there are well-documented cases where someone issues a mental command, or believes they're issuing a certain command, and the BCI carries out a completely different command. Most of the time the neuron pattern that's executed is similar to the one the person wanted, within the BCI's margin for error. But every now and then it's not even close."

"Do you have any idea what causes the discrepancy?" he said.

LaComb blew on her coffee, then took a sip. "There's a theory that the shared processing environment that balances load also creates transients. Temporary overlaps where things get jumbled. Misinterpreted."

"But it hasn't been proven?"

"Or observed. When we try to look at one of these transient waveforms, it goes away. So we can't actually
see
what's going on. We can observe the effects but not the cause."

"Sounds like it's hiding from you," van Dijk said. The same way the damselfly seemed to be hiding from him.

_______

"The shards are authentic," Seoul Man told van Dijk when he went back for the jewelry. "The barium, lead, and iron isotope concentrations are consistent with Roman glass made in western Germany during the late fourth century."

"You're sure?"

"Positive. There's also a high concentration of strontium, pointing to the use of marine mollusk shells as carbonate."

"What about the silver?"

The antiquarian gave a dismissive wave as he handed van Dijk the plastine bag. "Cheap. Probably melted down and reused from another piece of jewelry."

Van Dijk took the evidence bag. He ran his fingers over the earrings, along the delicate chain of the necklace. Were they a gift? Had the young woman bought them herself? "Any idea where they came from?"

Seoul Man shook his head. "Any one of a thousand artisans or craft shops, all around the world."

"You're saying there's no way to run down the manufacturer? Or backtrack to whoever sold it?"

The antiquarian shrugged. "This stuff is available everywhere, on the street and online. It shows up for sale all the time."

Van Dijk nodded and put the bag into his jacket pocket. "What's the damage?"

Seoul Man's smile was a slice of Nirvana.

Fifteen minutes later van Dijk left the pawnshop, bearing not just the weight of the Roman glass jewelry but eight misshapen bullets.

As if he didn't already have enough death on his hands.

It was all about timing, Pelayo thought. Being in the right place at the right time. This was not the right time. Something was happening at the TV center. There was a lot of activity in the front lobby. People kept stepping in and out of the main elevators. Instead of two security guards, there were three. He'd been watching the convention center for a couple of hours now, scoping the lay of the land from the roof of a parking garage across the street. He thought he'd gotten a pretty good idea of how things worked, and was waiting for full-on night, when the helicopter appeared, materializing out of the bright solder of glare where the sea met the sky.

Pelayo shivered against the swirling chill of the fog. "Any idea what's going on?" he said to Atossa.

The mask bobbed unsteadily. Metallic gold tracery on the mask gleamed, suture bright. "Someone's arriving," she said over his earfeed. "Or else getting ready to leave."

Pelayo looked back to the hotel. He watched a group of people come out of the parking garage onto the street below. Tourists, off to visit the Boardwalk or the surf museum farther up the hill on West Cliff. There was a bronze statue of a surfer there, a gift shop that sold wet suits, boogie boards, and other surf memorabilia. He'd gone there with Atossa once, on a calm, clear afternoon, to watch the waves pummel the rocks below the seawall.

One of the tourists on the sidewalk below him tossed a green nanoFX wrapper into the gutter, where the leaf-textured cellophane was nudged along by the steady onshore breeze. Pelayo turned to the mask. "What do you think?"

"The wind is too strong, and it's coming from the wrong direction."

"Try. While they're busy."

All she had to do was get the mask close to the building. Once she was next to a wall, the building would block most of the wind and she could maneuver the mask to check the roof and look in windows.

"What if they catch me?" she said.

"An accident. You got blown off course."

"I'll still get reported."

"We don't have much time," Pelayo said.

The mask circled him a few times, then bumped him in the head and dove off the parking garage and up the street.

It was slow going. The mask dipped and rose like a kite, gaining ground, then losing it.

"I'm not going to make it," Atossa said.

"You're almost there."

Pelayo watched a second chopper drop out of the foggy sky above the bay. This one was larger. It droned loudly as it touched down on the roof, ponderous as a bumblebee. Below him a muscle-bound crunkhead hurried across the street, toward the parking garage. The 'skin the crunkhead was waring was cheap. It had the waxy, secondhand look of paraffin, glossy-smooth and stiff.

What if Marta really had decided to convert? What if he was off base about her, and this was what she really wanted? Maybe she had reached a crisis point, felt trapped, and this was the only door that led out.

Especially if she'd gotten pregnant.

If that was the case, he wasn't going to stand in her way. Her life was her business. Maybe this was what she needed right now. If so, Nguyet would just have to deal with it. It might be nice, not having to think about the pressures of everyday life. No more worries about the rent, food, or medical care. It might be restful, even liberating. He could see the allure.

He felt the pressure, too. It got to him after a while. It got to everyone. Each day, reality became a little less familiar... a little more uncertain. Maybe that was why so many people cast themselves in the past. It wasn't real, but it had
been
real. Which was more than anyone could say for the future.

"It's not going to happen," Atossa said. "I'm coming back."

Pelayo looked up. The mask was no closer to the building. She wasn't making any progress. Too many eddies and currents. She was coming at it from the wrong direction. Yet every time she tried a different angle, a fresh gust pushed her back or off to the side.

Pelayo swore under his breath. It would be dark soon. Lights had come on in the conference center windows. That would make it easy for Atossa to see in. All they had to do was get close.

At some point, the lights had winked on at the Boardwalk. Red, blue, yellow, and green sketched the outlines of rides. Here the merry-go-round, there the Big Dipper and the Sky Tram.

The mask tumbled out of a tendril of fog and settled to the weathered concrete at his feet. Pelayo picked it up and hurried to the stairs.

"Where are you going?" Atossa said.

"I have an idea."

She sighed. "I was afraid of that."

In the stairwell, Pelayo ran headlong into the crunkhead, who was taking the steps two at a time.

"Move yo ass, muhfucker, before I get off in yo shit."

Pelayo's jaw tensed. He tightened his grip on the mask and stared into the crunk's nicotine-yellow eyes.

"Don't," Tossa whispered. "It's not worth it."

"Yeah." Pelayo gritted his teeth. "I hear ya."

He stepped aside, knocking the crunk's hand away when the dude brought it up to shove him in the chest.

"Leave it," Tossa said. "Just let it go."

"Right." Pelayo put on the mask, jammed his hands into his pockets, and continued down to ground level. On the street, he turned down the hill to the Boardwalk, glancing back every couple of steps to check on the helicopters. They seemed to have settled, but for how long?