The manager stood in the doorway while Vic and Skip pulled on gloves and checked the two bedrooms and the bathroom. There was nothing to identify the men or the nature of their work. No papers or tablets, no data sticks. Anonymous clothing from Matalan and Marks and Spencer. White shirts, grey and black slacks, grey jackets, black sweaters, black socks. New toiletries. One of them had used an electric razor, the other disposable Bics.
Vic and Skip stripped the beds, moved furniture, checked under drawers, lifted rugs. Nothing.
‘I’ll call in the CI techs, get them to take DNA from the razors and toothbrushes,’ Skip said. ‘I guess I should post uniforms, too. Although I reckon Mr Parsons won’t be coming back.’
‘No doubt. But the people who killed his friend might stop by,’ Vic said.
They came out of the dome’s soft warm dusk into harsh sunlight and a cold wind. The fat orange sun hung above the roofs of the city. It was a hair past eleven in the evening, and it was the long afternoon of the day-year. Thirty-one days of light; then thirty-one days of night. After thirteen years Vic still hadn’t accommodated to it. Most people hadn’t. Across the street, a strip of bars and restaurants was buzzing with Landing Day revellers.
Skip said, ‘I should check with the British consulate, see if they know anything about these two. Maybe this is some kind of corporate espionage caper.’
‘I’ll tell you exactly what it is,’ Vic said. ‘It’s the worst kind of case. The kind of case that’ll keep you awake at night, keep Sergeant Madsen breathing down your neck. I pity you, man, I really do. First time you answer the phone, you get a full-blown twenty-four-carat whodunnit.’
7. Bob Smith
London | 6 July
‘We came in peace,’ the alien said, ‘for all humankind. And I’ve come here today, Mr Chairman — and please forgive me if I’m being presumptuous — to remind you of that.’
Eleven o’clock on a drowsy summer morning in Committee Room No. 3, the fifteenth floor of Kingdom Tower. A chill edge in the air-conditioned space, tall windows polarised against blinding sunlight, dimming the view of the huge construction site where the half-completed reconstruction of the Palace of Westminster stood inside a cofferdam. The Jackaroo avatar had walked into the committee room during the chairman’s opening remarks, causing a major stir and forcing the chairman to wait a full five minutes, grim-faced, before the fuss had died down and he could resume his speech. Dressed like an old-school rap star in a brand-new black Adidas tracksuit and box-fresh sneakers, vintage Ray-Ban Aviators masking its blank eyes, the avatar sat behind a table cluttered with microphones and plastic-wrapped glasses and sweating jugs of ice-water, an unscheduled special witness facing the four members of the Alien Technology Committee.
In the early days of First Contact, the Jackaroo — or rather, their avatars — had been everywhere, from Antarctica to Zimbabwe, but in the years since they had pulled back, become more like ambassadors than tourists, appearing at government functions and ceremonies, occasionally interviewed on news or talk shows, but rarely seen at large, out in the world. Years ago Chloe had glimpsed, from the top deck of a bus, an avatar ambling up Walthamstow High Street in the middle of a scrum of officials and police. Bus passengers crowding to the windows, passers-by gawping, traffic slowing in a blare of horns as the avatar and its followers crossed the car park towards the town hall. That was the closest she’d been to one, before today. Now, sitting with the rest of Disruption Theory’s crew in the first row of chairs and waiting her turn to be questioned, she could almost reach out and touch it.
She supposed that its appearance was what Daniel had meant by ‘the best kind of support’, wondered if it had something to do with Ada Morange, who was being shadowed by a!Cha that was collecting her life story. The!Cha had arrived with the Jackaroo, although it still wasn’t clear if they were servants or hitchhikers, clients or secret masters, or something else. Insatiably curious, they travelled inside tough mobile aquaria that could, as several gangs of would-be kidnappers had discovered, shoot skywards at high velocities. There weren’t many of them: a hundred or so. Beautiful Sorrow. Brilliant Mistake. Strange Attraction. Useless Beauty. Actual aliens wandering the world, searching for wonders.
Yes, it was possible that Ada Morange’s!Cha — it called itself Unlikely Worlds, Chloe remembered — had reached out to the Jackaroo, had asked them to give its friend’s employees a little help. Or maybe Unlikely Worlds had heard a rumour on some kind of alien gossip node that the Jackaroo were planning to make an appearance before the select committee, and had given the entrepreneur a heads-up.
Daniel was at the far end of the row, tall and rumpled in an ancient Savile Row pinstripe suit and a silvery waistcoat decorated with bright green banana leaves. During the preliminary announcements and the beginning of the chairman’s opening remarks he had slouched in his seat, studying something on his phone, but like everyone else he’d turned his full attention to the Jackaroo avatar when it had arrived, watching now as it placed its hand on the copy of the Bible held by the clerk of the committee. It was rare to make witnesses to select committees swear to tell the truth, but the chair, Robin Mountjoy, had insisted on it.
The avatar recited the oath with apparent sincerity, but added, to general laughter, ‘You will note that neither I nor your sacred book have burst into flame.’
No one had ever seen one of the Jackaroo in the flesh. They could be devils with bright red skin and horns and hooves and barbed tails, or angels, or anything in between. Gas bags evolved to ride the frigid winds of an exoJupiter. Machine intelligences. Self-organising magnetic fields. No one knew. And no one knew whether or not the Jackaroo actually inhabited their floppy spaceships — the tangles of restless vanes that had somehow towed the mouths of fifteen wormholes, each mounted on the polished face of an asteroid fragment, into L5 orbit between the Earth and Moon. Soon after the Jackaroo had revealed themselves, one of their ships had been vaporised by a thirty-kiloton nuclear bomb delivered by a Chinese Long March rocket. The Chinese had immediately claimed that it had been the act of a rogue element in their army, and the whole world had held its breath, waiting for the Jackaroo’s response, but the other ships had simply absorbed the debris and the Jackaroo had never mentioned the incident, had deflected all questions about it. It was possible that the ships were no more than relays transmitting signals from elsewhere, although no such signals had been detected. Or that the Jackaroo were clones or machines who had no concept of individual death. Or that the ships weren’t really ships at all, but decoys to divert attention from the Jackaroo’s actual presence (whatever that was). Props to satisfy human tropes of alien invasion. In the end, the destruction of the ship and the lack of any acknowledgement or response proved only that nothing, really, was known about the Jackaroo.
This one called itself Bob Smith. Like all of its kind, it appeared to be male (‘We prefer not to challenge certain social norms,’ the Jackaroo said, when asked about this), had translucent golden skin and was blandly handsome, its features a composite of an international selection of film stars with just enough artful asymmetry to avoid the uncanny valley effect. A machine passing for human: an animated, remotely controlled showroom dummy as hollow as a balloon. X-ray spectrometry, multispectrum imaging and other forms of remote probing suggested that the musculature and circuitry of Jackaroo avatars were entirely contained within their skins, but no one had ever managed to analyse one directly. They evaporated if trapped or damaged, fizzing away into water, gases, and trace elements. The ultimate golden vapourware.