“Is it much farther?”
“We’re nearly halfway.” Which is a little white lie, but with her phone turned off, she’s capable of being deceived—she’d actually be lost, without your local knowledge. And hopefully so will be anyone who’s tracking her location, or your location. You can discount face recognition, despite all those cameras surreptitiously filing away your misdemeanours for later (like back when you were fifteen and stupid) because it’s CPU-intensive as hell, but your mobie is a tracking device par excellence, and you’ve got to assume that Team Red know who you both are, by now. “Let’s stay off-line until we get to the hotel.” By which point, Team Red won’t have a fucking clue where you are, which is exactly how you want things to be.
“I hate being lost,” she mutters.
“Really?” You’re taken aback. “It used to be normal.”
“Lots of things used to be normal. No indoor plumbing and dying in child-birth used to be normal. Where are we?”
“We’re on, um, the road that leads from the Grassmarket to Lothian Road, dammit. I can’t remember.” It’s an itch you can’t scratch, like not being able to check a watch or pull up the news headlines. “Just think, it used to be like this for everybody, just twenty years ago!”
“I suppose.”
“Imagine you were a time-traveller from the 1980s, say 1984, and you stepped out of your TARDIS right here, outside, uh, West Port Books.” (Which tells you where you are.) “Looking around, what would you see that tells you you’re not in Thatcherland anymore?”
“You’re playing a game, right?”
“If you want it to be a game, it’s a game.” Actually it’s not a game, it’s a stratagem, but let’s hope she doesn’t spot it.
“Okay.” She points at the office building opposite. “But that…okay, the lights are modern, and there are the flat screens inside the window. Does that help?”
“A little.” Traffic lights change: Cars drive past. “Look at the cars. They’re a little bit different, more melted-looking, and some of them don’t have drivers. But most of the buildings—they’re the same as they’ve ever been. The people, they’re the same. Okay, so fashions change a little. But how’d you tell you weren’t in 1988? As opposed to ’98? Or ’08? Or today?”
“I don’t—” She blinks rapidly, then something clicks: “The mobile phones! Everyone’s got them, and they’re a lot smaller, right?”
“I picked 1984 for a reason. They didn’t have mobies then—they were just coming in. No Internet, except a few university research departments. No cable TV, no laptops, no websites, no games—”
“Didn’t they have Space Invaders?”
You feel like kicking yourself. “I guess. But apart from that…everything out here on the street looks the same, near enough, but it doesn’t work the same. They had pocket calculators back then, and I remember my dad showing me what they used before that—books of tables, and a thing like a ruler with a log scale on it, a slide-rule. Do you have a pocket calculator? Do you use one to do your job, your old job?”
“No, of course I—” She waves at the book-shop opposite. “I’m a forensic accountant! What use is a pocket calculator?”
“Well, that’s my point in a nutshell. We used to have slide-rules and log tables, then calculators made them obsolete. Even though old folks can still do division and multiplication in their heads, we don’t use that. We used to have maps, on paper. But these are all small things.” The traffic lights sense your presence and trigger the pedestrian crossing: You pause while she catches up with you. “The city looks the same, but underneath its stony hide, nothing is quite the way it used to be. Somewhere along the line we ripped its nervous systems and muscles out and replaced them with a different architecture. In a few years it’ll all run on quantum key-exchange magic, and everything will have changed again. But our time-traveller—they won’t know that. It looks like the twentieth century.” (Bits of it look like the eighteenth century, for that matter: This is Edinburgh, and you’re deep in the World Heritage Conservation Zone.) “Nothing works the way it used to, exactly. And knowing how it works now is the edge we’ve got over Michaels.”
You lead her up through the pubic triangle (which is not a patch on Amsterdam’s famous red light district, but sleazy enough for a cheap shiver if you’re so inclined) and onto Lothian Road (tame by daylight, wild West End by night). “We can catch a bus from here,” you suggest, and she looks slightly pained, but nods. And so you do, taking the hit for paying cash: And ten minutes later you step off the bus nearly opposite the West End Malmaison hotel. “Do you know where you are now?” you ask her, trying not to pay too much attention to the police vans parked outside.
“How the hell should I—” She catches your expression. “Oh. Right.”
“They don’t know either, because we’ve been off-line for over an hour,” you point out. “So let’s grab the laptops and go to work where they won’t be expecting us!”
“Do you have somewhere in mind?” She raises an eyebrow.
And now you feel yourself smiling. “Right here. Why do you think we’ve been off-line for half an hour?”
The hotel is surrounded by cops. It’s not an obvious cordon, there are no crowds of uniforms with riot shields drawn up—but as you cross the road you notice a couple of police motor-bikes drawn up outside the power tool emporium opposite the hotel car-park. And there’s a van parked up a side street. A couple of officers are standing at the corner by the hotel entrance, looking around, their eyes invisible behind heavy goggles and their jaws working as they subvocalize. If you weren’t actively looking, you might not notice more than a couple at any one time, but when you add it all up, there’s a heavy presence on the street. You squirm as you open the heavy glass door for Elaine: It’s the same reflex you get when walking past guard dogs—they’re unpredictable, capable of attacking. You can cope with them in ones or twos—a homeopathic dose of policing, so to speak—but this heavy cordon sanitaire is awakening the old phobia, even before you take into account your current state of unease.
“Come on!” Elaine nudges you impatiently. “What are you waiting for?” She heads towards the lifts.
“A pony.” You follow her—this is her territory, you don’t generally do plush hotels—up to the second floor, then into a conference room that opens to her thumbprint. “Laptops?” You raise an eyebrow.
“Go on.” At least they’re still here, and so are the cheap backpacks you stuck on top of the purchase nearly three infinite days ago. “Where are we going to go?”
“Nowhere, yet.” You sit down at the desk and unfold your machine’s display. It’s chunky and old-fashioned but vastly faster than your phone and glasses: You log on to the hotel’s network, bounce into Zonespace using the passwords Russell gave you, and proceed to take your bear for a romp around the tourist sites. “I suggest…go get your stuff from your room, anything you may want later, as if you’re checking out: I’m going to make damn sure Team Red know where I am. Alright?”
“Got it.” She studies your screen, which is repeating the display on your glasses. “That’s not Avalon Four. Where are you?”
“On the high plateau of Leng. That’s where the Pabodie expedition came adrift: There should be some Old Ones hereabouts if the rampaging hordes of Antarctic explorers haven’t been through since they last reset the shard. They’re guarding some loot I need to get my hands on.” About a quarter of a million lines of source code, squirreled away among the skeletons and treasures guarded by a fearsomely large shoggoth; if you want to keep some data secure, there’s nothing quite like sticking it in a record in a holographic distributed database that’s guarded by Lovecraftian horrors. And it’s not as if you took the intellectual property with you when you left LupuSoft, is it? This is just a backup copy, buried in one of their own databases. One that it’s just possible for a random stranger to get his hands on if he knows exactly where the body’s buried and the correct ritual for digging it up.