Standing Wave Read online

  Unreadable glances passed around the room among the others.

  “Might you elaborate on that?” Mulla asked, glancing carefully at her.

  “All right,” Mei-Ling said, breaking eye contact, staring down at her hand on the table. “If it is this sort of dimensional effect, might it be some heretofore undiscovered natural force—as spontaneous combustion was once thought to be? Certainly it’s awesome enough, in terms of pure power, to fall into that category. The fact that the camera seems to chronicle it so carefully, though—that tends to indicate a consciousness behind the process. A ritualistic voyeurism perverse enough to be human. Have you tried tracing where the initial databurst comes in from, and where the final imagery goes?”

  Sullivan shook his head.

  “It’s routed and rerouted through the infosphere a finite but practically uncountable number of times,” he said, clearly stymied by the fact. “Untraceable.”

  “Ah,” Mei-Ling said, nodding. “That, along with the amount of data manipulation and pure computational power—that all indicates a machine intelligence, or a human consciousness almost perfectly interfaced with a machine system.”

  Landau nodded carefully.

  “You’re up to speed very quickly, Mei-Ling,” he said approvingly. “Assuming there is a consciousness of some sort behind the process—which we also do, since in every case there is that careful recording of the entire scene—is there any further speculation that comes to your mind about the nature of that consciousness or intelligence?”

  Mei-Ling stared down at the black glass of the desktop. She knew what they were after: SCANCI, scan key, “skanky” time again, with its reductive, machine-feedable criteria.

  “Voyeuristic, as I said. Ritualistic. Detail obsessed. Fascinated or obsessed with distinctions between outward appearance and inward realities, or with other, larger topological concerns. Control-fixated, too. Why else go to the trouble of killing people in that manner?”

  “Not just people,” Sullivan interjected. “So far one machine-interfaced chimpanzee and two webbed-in dolphins have also been killed in the same fashion. They were among the first.”

  “Very well, then—higher animals too,” Mei-Ling said with a nod. “In the context of animal sacrifice, the splayed bowels and exposed internal organs of all the victims might have ritual significance. I’d have to see more examples.”

  “We have quite a few of them,” Lanier said.

  “I’m sure you—”

  “What sort of ritual significance?” Landau asked, interrupting, his left hand clenching around a pen on the table top.

  “Maybe the perpetrator,” Mei-Ling speculated, “if there is one, or only one, is familiar with traditional divination practices. ‘Reading the entrails’ for clues about the future, that sort of thing.”

  “You said one or only one,” Mulla suggested, then seemed to ask the next question as if he were trying to get it out before Landau asked it. “Are you suggesting the possibility of a conspiracy?”

  Mei-Ling shrugged and drummed the fingers of her right hand absently on the table.

  “Hard to say,” she said, glancing up at the faces of those around the table, all peering intently at her. “You said the deaths were spaced throughout the world. That might indicate multiple participants in some type of network. Then again, the fact that it’s all apparently mediated through the infosphere might mean it’s just someone or something very obsessed, capable of processing fast or with a lot of machine time on hand. I’d have to know more about the victims. Have you uncovered any patterns? Victim scan keys?”

  “Several had plausible links to Tetragrammaton,” Landau said confidently, then grew less confident as he went down the list. “A number were connected with Ka Vang’s major holding, ParaLogics, or its Crystal Memory Dynamics subsidiary. Some seem to have merely been investigating that Light phenomenon when they were attacked. Several seem to have been in contact with that underground virtual mail service—the pirate postal system called SubTerPost. Some fit no pattern at all, as yet.”

  “Puzzle-solvers, maze-makers, clandestine message-senders,” Mei-Ling said quietly, almost to herself, though apparently Landau heard her.

  “Yes,” he continued. “Still, we believe the Tetragrammaton link is most important. We know a major thrust of that program for many years has been work on a mathematical model for opening a gateway into the fabric of spacetime, potentially into higher dimensions. The program managers claim that since a singularity is almost a pure Platonic form—or formlessness—anyway, such a mathematical model would be indistinguishable from an actual gateway: the virtual and real would coincide. Simulated quantum information density structure, they call it. Given the infosphere-mediated distortions of local dimensions involved in these killings, such cases would seem to have a number of intersections with Tetragrammaton’s work.”

  Mei-Ling stared around the room again. Something about the space here was cold and distancing. They all might as well have been talking heads on a video conference call, she thought, but then quickly suppressed the image.

  “One or a conspiracy,” Mei-Ling said cautiously, staring again into the tabletop. “That was a big question in many killings during the twentieth century, especially serial murders. There’s a theory that the number of serial murders was so disproportionate in the old United States at that time because of an ideological rupture experienced by people living in a nation that simultaneously validated ‘rugged individualism’ on the one hand and ‘mass-mediated authentication’ on the other.”

  “How is that relevant?” Landau asked, growing impatient. “Serial killers murder individuals over time. These are waves of mass killing.”

  “Yes,” Mei-Ling continued, trying to bring her argument around. “That’s what would be so unprecedented about these killings. They’re mass and serial, simultaneously. According to the later trauma-control theories, serial murderers are the ultimate individualists, putting their own personal desires, their own individual freedom, above all social responsibilities or constraints. Control over others at all costs. Usually because they were traumatized by others when they were young. They seek control over their own lives through absolute domination and destruction of the lives of others. Physiologically, they also tend to have a heightened new brain/old brain split—”

  “Which means?” Landau asked, rather snappishly.

  “A heightened difference in operation between thalamocortical and limbic-brainstem areas,” Mei-Ling said, “even between individual conscious desire and unconscious social or ‘bicameral’ morality. As a result, many trauma-control or ‘serial’ killers have allowed themselves to be caught. Their need for the ‘approval’ of social recognition overcomes their desire to remain hidden and individual. Many of them have been media obsessed—films, television, holos, print. To the point that they didn’t see themselves as fully real unless they eventually saw their stories on page or screen.”

  “What you’re saying, then,” Gopal Mulla ventured, “is that that type of killer ultimately hates his individuality?”

  “More that he desperately desires to destroy his privacy,” Mei-Ling said. “In destroying his privacy he destroys the space for his individual consciousness and uniqueness—and hopes thereby to at last become a fully integrated member of the society that has never accepted him as a member. The serial killer, as a traumatized, dissociated, low self-esteem ‘conspiracy of one’, has tried to create a way to reconcile both sides of a conflicting social message: Mass recognition of individual desire—”

  “Please,” Gopal Mulla said, interrupting with a sigh, “don’t follow that line of thought any further. I can see the media coverage now: the TV Killer—only this time it’ll be Topological Voyeur instead of television!”

  More awkward smiles moved around the conference table.

  “From what I’ve seen so far this is more ‘parallel’ than ‘serial’,” Mei-Ling concluded, before Landau could interrupt. “Waves of mass killing over time, each w
ave occurring simultaneously, in rough parallel, throughout the infosphere. I don’t think it’s either a serial killer’s ‘conspiracy of one’, or the traditional conspiracy of many.”

  Mei-Ling paused at the sound of Landau shifting restlessly in his chair, but then continued.

  “I know that there’s a lot of evidence that Tetragrammaton has victimized quite a few people over the years,” Mei-Ling said, “but this time it sounds like that organization may be less ‘victimizer’ than ‘victimized.’ Their own people are being killed, right? Aside from a rather strange purge or very peculiar downsizing, it just doesn’t sound right.”

  She glanced up, relieved to see that Landau was not jumping down her throat yet.

  “If it is a human being,” Mei-Ling continued, “or a screwed-up machine intelligence that’s behind this—and not some obscure natural phenomenon—we might want to look into the possibility of these killings being motivated by revenge for some hurt, real or perceived. Disgruntled employees, someone or something angered by what Tetragrammaton has done, a suspect motivated by the actions of the companies and governments linked to that organization—”

  “That’s quite a broad range of suspects,” Wofford said quietly, removing her thumbs off her retro texting keypad and rolling its faux stylus absently between thumb and forefinger.

  “Better than none at all,” Landau remarked. “Still, none of this explains why these killings should have begun after the Light incident.”

  Looks of recognition and nods of agreement passed throughout the room.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Mei-Ling agreed. “It’s possible there may be no connection, you know—just our faulty post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning leading us to see a pattern that isn’t really there.”

  Gopal Mulla shifted uneasily in his chair and cleared his throat.

  “But what if the connection, the pattern, really is there?” Gopal Mulla asked, almost pensively. “What if that Light did have something to do with it?”

  “Then whoever or whatever caused the Light must also be suspect, I suppose,” Mei-Ling said, uncomfortable with the thought. “Even if that Light phenomenon just triggered off an unforeseen response in someone or something else.”

  On that note, the briefing drew quickly toward an end. After speaking with Mulla and Landau, Sullivan came forward to shake Mei-Ling’s hand and introduce himself.

  “Looks like the higher-ups have made me your designated driver,” he said affably, nodding at higher-ups Mulla and Landau where they stood talking to Lanier. “Any particular evidence you’d like to see? Place you’d like to go?”

  She stared at him a moment, for some thoughts had already occurred to her along the very same lines.

  “Yes,” she said, “I’d like to see your distribution graphics on the times, dates, and places of the death waves. I’d also like to visit the nearest crime scene that hasn’t yet been totally picked over by investigators. Also the best, most recent infosphere records for that deceased user, if possible.”

  “Don’t ask for much, do you?” Sullivan said with a wry smile. “We’ll give it a try. Would after lunch this afternoon be soon enough?”

  As she left the conference room with her “designated driver” Mei-Ling was sure that afternoon would be more than soon enough.

  * * * *

  Given Sam’s record for dropped follow-through in the past, Aleck had no reason to think that Sam would actually take him up on his offer of a chance to tap into “Hugh’s stuff”. Yet here Sam was, with his current femme and who knew who else, waiting at the freight entrance to bypass security and come on down.

  Aleck couldn’t very well just send them away, after they’d gone to the trouble of coming down from Clifton and Universityville. Wouldn’t do for his bosses to see that he was “entertaining,” either, however. They might not approve.

  He supposed he could get his guests in despite security. Aleck had learned to fool watchdog systems early, out-thinking his parents’ monitoring tech starting when he was eight years old. Every year during his teens they’d bought fancier and fancier security systems to keep an eye on him, but he’d just gotten better and better at fooling their tech. It was the sort of security-hack education that probably had somehow prepared him for a career in infosystems, and from there to medical computing, though he couldn’t quite say how.

  Security was minimal at this time of night—all electronic. He’d fooled these systems before, even managed to get his recently “exed”-girlfriend down here five or six weeks back, as a matter of fact. He could do it again: Just give the security system a pre-recorded reality to play with. Pay no attention to those intruders behind the curtain.

  He set quickly to work. When all was in readiness, he darted out of the lab and down the corridors, then took the elevator to where Sam and company were waiting.

  The elevator opened and he saw Sam and his emaciated blond spidergirl-clarinetist and keyboardist, Janika, as he’d expected. Also lounging about the loading dock, too, were the band’s friendly neighborhood percussionist, the thickset and vaguely thug-like Marco. Hari, the tall, thin African exchange student in theoretical physics, was waiting there as well. Hari played “things with strings”—from Chapman stick and guitars (acoustic, electric, ensembled) to pianos (prepared, unprepared, and electrified), as well as the violin-viola-cello-bass gang, “traditional” instruments from everywhere, and new instruments from nowhere, of his own idiosyncratic design.

  This was all much more than Aleck had expected. Worse, he noted, all of them had portable plug-in versions of their instruments with them.

  “—but love does not alter when it alteration finds,” Sam said, laughing and kissing Janika on top of her head, until he saw Aleck standing in the elevator. “Hey, our ride is here! Everybody, you know Aleck. Pile in.”

  Marco and Hari left their lounging positions and swagger-staggered into the elevator behind Sam and Janika. Judging by the olfactory aura of various chemicals floating about Sam and his friends, and by the degree of pupil dilation among them too, Aleck was pretty certain every one of them had found “alteration,” all right—and already.

  “Everything, uh, copasetic here?” Sam asked, paranoia-flashing for just an instant. “I mean, with security and everything?”

  “Should be,” Aleck said quietly, a bit peeved at the way Sam had expanded his solo invitation into a party of four. “I feedback-looped images and sounds of empty elevators and corridors into the security cams and sound pickups all along the paths I’m bringing you along. Mirror-phased all the motion detectors too. Stick tight and don’t stray, though, or the rest of the security system might pick you up.”

  “Okay,” Sam said slowly, orienting himself, “we’ll do that.”

  By the time they left the elevator and started through the corridors to the lab, Aleck’s guests had picked up again the spacey, laughing physics discussion with Hari that had apparently begun before they arrived.

  “No, no, mon,” Hari said as they walked along the hall. “The ten-dimensional plenum is all the sea. Space-time is all the surface of the sea. Matter-energy is all the waves on the surface of the sea. Consciousness is all the surfers on the waves on the surface of the sea.”

  “No, mon, that’s not right!” Sam said, doing a quite plausible imitation of Hari’s accent. “Conches-ness is all the fish in the veves of the surfers, don’t you see.”

  The others laughed and Hari good-naturedly threw up his hands. Letting them into his lab, Aleck didn’t see what was so funny. He guessed you had to be there—wherever “there” might be for his guests in their current mental state. He brought up the lights, including the service floods in the big tank.

  As he pulled the majority of the security cameras and sound pickups out of their false reality and brought them back on-line, he saw Marco, Janika and Hari heading straight toward the tank, oohing and ahhing. Sam, however, immediately got down to business, checking out the lab’s electronics suite.

  “This the brain-loaner?
” Marco asked, glancing from Hugh in his tank to Aleck behind his display console. Aleck nodded. Marco turned back toward Hugh. “Guy I knew back home, got in a bad wreck—they say he ended up movin’ datter with his gray matter, too.”

  Aleck glanced up from his console. What a strange rhyme. He wouldn’t have expected that from Marco. Maybe it wasn’t intentional.

  “Hey, you’ve got full sight/sound interface and recording capabilities!” Sam said excitedly, geeking his way through Aleck’s peripheral electronics. “Biological signal sensor hookups, thoughtwave recognition software—”

  Yeah, Aleck thought, nodding curtly. As if his roommate hadn’t already suspected as much—and had his friends bring their instruments along, “just in case.”

  “After we check out ol’ Hugh’s stuff,” Sam began, disingenuously, “you mind if we do a session? We sort of lost our rehearsal space for this evening.”

  ‘This evening’? Aleck wondered sourly. It was nearly three in the morning!

  “I guess I don’t mind,” Aleck began after a moment. He felt himself being sucked into enabling their performance shenanigans, despite his misgivings. “But you’ll have to be out of here before regular security makes its rounds down here at six A.M. I can keep all the local sound pickups fooled, but try to keep your playing this side of earthquake level, okay? The Subject there is supposed to be participating in a sensory deprivation experiment.”

  Sam glanced at the large form floating motionless in the tank, the object of such rapt attention from the rest of his band.

  “I think it would take a lot more than us to bother ol’ Hugh Manatee,” Sam said with a subtle smile, “but okay. We’ll keep our static out of his circuits.”

  Sam called Janika and Marco and Hari over to the electronics suite and tossed each of them a circlet for webbing into virtual surround, as well as a pair of ’trode armbands to read their muscle signals. Then he read off frequencies for each of them to interface their instruments into the suite computer. Aleck glanced up from time to time, relieved to see that at least they hadn’t brought an entire orchestra with them.