Bob Smith gestured languidly, its body language a precise simulation of a person in command of their facts, relaxed and happy to cooperate. Answering, in a mellow, agreeable baritone, questions from the four MPs about the latest discoveries of ancient alien technology on the various new worlds. Stuff excavated from ruins and tomb cities, found in forests and deserts, fished from alien seas. Agreeing that these things could be dangerous, ‘But only if used in the right way.’ Claiming to know very little about Elder Culture artefacts. Saying, after being challenged about this, ‘We do not spy on our clients. We try to minimise contact. We try not to influence them. We let them find their own way. So we do not know what our previous clients left behind. By now, in fact, you probably know more about that than we do. You are a clever and versatile species. Very adaptable. Very plastic. We are sure that you will discover interesting new uses for everything you find.’
The Jackaroo were masters of flattery and misdirection, deflecting hard questions with humour, salting their sweet talk with a smattering of obscure cultural references to flatter the cognoscenti. With their outsider’s perspective and millions of years of experience in dealing with no one knew how many intelligent species, they understood people better than they understood themselves. Bob Smith’s imitation of a human was somehow more than human: a behavioural superstimulus like the red ball a male robin, believing it to be a rival, would exhaust itself attacking.
Chloe definitely felt the avatar’s film-star allure, its fairyland glamour. Glancing around, she saw that almost everyone else in the room — witnesses, advisers, journalists and members of the public packing the rows of seats, even the security guards standing at the door — had a kind of avid shine to their gaze. They felt it too.
She was dressed in a black Jaeger trouser suit which Helena Nichols had lent her. It wasn’t a bad fit, but it felt like a costume for a play. Her palms were sweating. Stray lines from yesterday’s rehearsals kept running through her head. She hoped that the avatar’s appearance would deflect attention from Disruption Theory, from herself, but she also knew that people all over the world would be watching it, that specialists would be analysing every word, every gesture, and pretty soon they would be watching her, too. Trying not to think about that invisible audience, as per Helena Nichols’s advice, was kind of like not thinking about a white rhinoceros while you tried to turn boiling water into gold.
Robin Mountjoy was making a decent attempt to appear to be unaffected by the avatar’s charm. He was in his mid-fifties, a burly man with thinning blond hair and a florid complexion, dressed in an off-the-peg suit. Although he was a multimillionaire, having made his fortune constructing and servicing displaced-persons camps, his PR painted him as a bluff, no-nonsense man of the people whose common sense cut through the incestuous old boys’ networks of the Westminster village.
He put on his gold-rimmed glasses to read something on his tablet, took them off again and leaned forward, blunt fingers laced together. ‘It seems to me that after thirteen years you have nothing new to say to us, sir. You offer only the same platitudes, the same empty reassurances.’
‘You ask why we do not change,’ Bob Smith said. ‘We are as we always have been because that is how we are. The question should be: have you changed?’
‘Voters elected thirty-six MPs in my party,’ Robin Mountjoy said. ‘We represent change. A change in attitude to your kind. We are challenging you. We intend to see through you.’
‘Everyone can see through us,’ Bob Smith said, with that very human shrug.
Robin Mountjoy waited out the laughter. ‘We see your avatars, but we do not see you. If you truly have nothing to hide, why don’t you show yourselves?’
‘When you have a telephone conversation with someone, do you treat them differently? Do you trust them less?’
‘You answer my questions with more questions. But our business is to get some answers.’
‘Perhaps you are not asking the right questions.’
More laughter.
‘There’s only one question,’ Robin Mountjoy said. ‘Why are you really here? You say you want to help. What do you expect in return?’
‘We hope that you will discover your better natures.’
It was a statement that the Jackaroo had made a million times. Chloe realised that Robin Mountjoy wasn’t interested in digging out anything new. He was not vain enough, not foolish enough, to think that he could succeed where thousands of politicians, scientists, philosophers and journalists had failed. Even the infamous Reddit AMA had failed to get inside the Jackaroo’s mischievous sophistry. No, he was grandstanding, playing the role of a fearless interrogator armed with what he would no doubt call good old-fashioned English common sense. The appearance of the avatar had put him in the spotlight, and he was milking the opportunity for all it was worth.
He said, ‘The business of the committee, sir, is not airy-fairy speculation about human nature. It’s the important and immediate question of dangerous and out-of-control technology.’
‘Ah! The best kind of technology.’
And so it went, back and forth. Despite the presence of an actual fucking alien right in front of her, Chloe’s attention drifted. The seats facing the committee were set out in a horseshoe; although she was seated in the front row, she could watch part of the audience. Some were taking notes, some looked as bored as she was beginning to feel, a few watched with the avid rapture of true fans. A woman clutching a copy of the order papers to her chest. A man with a stony intent expression, sitting as still as a statue. Another man sketching on a pad, shooting quick sharp glances at the avatar.
At last, the committee ran out of questions and Robin Mountjoy thanked the avatar for taking the trouble to attend. Bob Smith smiled and said that it was always a pleasure to serve. ‘And let me reassure you that I do not allude to the culinary sense of the verb.’
Two security guards moved forward as the avatar stood, and someone else was moving too. A man rushing forward, a pen flashing in his hand.
No. It was a knife.
Chloe saw everything clearly. The man’s blank expression as he sidestepped one of the guards, the avatar turning towards him. It was still smiling. Its hands spread as if greeting an old acquaintance. She saw the man raise the knife. Saw that its fat handle was wrapped in black tape. Saw that it had a double blade, two finger-length spikes. Saw fat blue sparks snapping in the narrow gap between them as the man stabbed the avatar in the chest. There was a pungent smell of burning plastic, the avatar shuddered and collapsed against the man, and Chloe shot to her feet and grabbed one of the jugs of water from the table and swept it up and around, intending to hit the man. He ducked away, but water cascaded over his chest and arms. The knife exploded in his hands, and then both he and the avatar were down on the floor, jerking and flailing like landed fish, and a security guard caught Chloe around the waist and hauled her backwards. She was breathing as hard as if she’d just run a ten-kilometre race. Her heart jackhammering. She was shocked and amazed by what she’d done, wondered if the guard thought that she was an accomplice of the assassin, wondered if she was going to be arrested.
Robin Mountjoy was shouting something, but no one in the room was paying any attention to him. The security guards roughly lifted the man, the assassin, to his feet. The avatar was face down on the navy-blue carpet, twitching and shuddering, a crown of white smoke burning off its head, white threads rising from the wrist and ankle cuffs of its tracksuit, its golden skin turning black, splitting, flaking, disintegrating.