“All the same, the crime happened. I think I have enough to be going on with for now, Delphine. Thank you for your time.”
“What’s your next move?”
“One of my deputies—you met her—is working on backtracking the incoming call to your habitat. When I have a result from her, I’ll see where it leads.”
“I’m curious to know the outcome.”
“I’ll make sure you hear about it.”
“Prefect, before you turn me off again—would you reconsider my earlier request? I’d like to be able to talk to Vernon.”
“I can’t risk cross-contamination.”
“Neither of us has anything to hide from you. I’ve told you everything I know.”
“I’m sorry, but I just can’t take the risk.”
“Prefect, there’s something you need to understand about us. When you turn me off, I don’t have any existence.”
“That’s because your simulation undergoes no state changes between episodes of invocation.”
“I know—when you switch me back on again, I remember nothing except our last meeting. But I can tell you this: I still feel as if I’ve been somewhere else.” She looked him hard in the eyes, daring him to look away.
“And wherever it is, it’s a cold and lonely place.” A message from Thalia awaited him when he turned his bracelet on again. He called her back.
“I see you’re en route. How are things going?” Her response returned with no detectable timelag.
“Well enough, sir. I’ve finished the first installation.”
“All went smoothly?”
“Couple of hiccups, but they’re up and running now.”
“In other words, one hole closed, three to go. You’re ahead of schedule, I see.”
“In all honesty, sir, I don’t expect any of these upgrades to need all the time I allocated. But I thought it was better to be safe than sorry.”
“Very wise of you.”
After a pause, Thalia said, “I guess you’re wondering about the network analysis, sir?”
“I don’t suppose you’ve made any progress?” he asked, his tone hopeful.
“The snapshots you sent through were all I needed. I might even have a lead for you. Assuming that the stated time for the incoming transmission to the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble was correct to within twenty minutes, I see only one likely candidate for the network router that would have handled that data traffic.”
“Which would be?”
“It’s nowhere you’re likely to have heard of, sir. Just a free-floating network router named Vanguard Six. Basically it’s nothing more than a boulder floating in the Glitter Band, with an automated signal-forwarding station built into it.” He made a mental note of the name.
“And you think this router will have kept a record of traffic it handled?”
“Enough to tell you where the message originated, sir. Even if that point of origin turns out to be another router, you should still be able to keep backtracking it until you reach the original sender. It would be unusual for a message to pass through more than two or three relay stages.”
“Sparver should be able to handle the technical issues. It can’t be done remotely, can it?”
“No, sir. Someone needs to be physically present. But you’re right—Sparver will know exactly what to do.”
“I’m sure he will,” Dreyfus said. Without another word he closed the connection and prepared to rouse his other deputy.
CHAPTER 10
They did not look like people at all, but rather luminous pink branching coral formations, vast, dendritic and mysteriously chambered. For many seconds, Gaffney stared in mesmerised fascination at the three-dimensional patterns, awed at what he was seeing. If human souls could be frozen and captured in light, they would look something like this. Now that the flesh-and-blood individuals were deceased, and since none of the three had subjected themselves to alpha-level scanning, these beta-levels represented the last link with the living as far as Vernon Tregent, Anthony Theobald and Delphine Ruskin-Sartorious were concerned. Panoply might not regard beta-levels as anything other than forensic information, akin to photographs or bloodstains, but Gaffney was more open-minded. He didn’t hold with the orthodox view that only alpha-level simulations were to be accorded full human rights. The exterior effect was the only thing that mattered, not what was going on behind the mask. That was why it did not unduly concern him that he did not know exactly what Aurora was. So she might be a machine, rather than a living person. So what? What mattered was her compassion, her evident concern for the well-being of the hundred million souls orbiting Yellowstone. He’d had his doubts at first, of course. She had come to him five years earlier, four years after he’d been promoted to head of Panoply’s Internal Security division. He’d been a senior for years before that, and an outstanding field for as long again. He’d given his life to Panoply, and asked for nothing in return except the assurance that his colleagues cared about their duties as much as he did. He had invested his own identity in the idea of service, eschewing marriage and social relationships in preference to a life of disciplinary self-control. He lived and breathed the ideals of Panoply, the martial life of a career prefect. He didn’t just accept the sacrifices of his profession, he welcomed them.
But then something had happened that caused Gaffney to question the worth of Panoply, and by inference his own fitness as a human being. He had been sent to investigate possible voting anomalies in a habitat known as Hell-Five. It was a strange world, built around a perfect hemisphere of rock, as if a round asteroid had been sliced in two. Airtight structures rose up from both the flat face and the underlying pole, densely packed skyscrapers wrapped in coiling pressurised passageways. Once, Hell-Five had been a gambler’s paradise, before the fashion for such things waned. It had moved through several social models after that, each less remunerative than the last, before settling on the one Gaffney had witnessed during his visit. Within months of assuming its new identity, Hell-Five had become a dazzling success, with other habitats paying handsomely to access its lucrative new export.
That export was human misery.
Once a month, one of the habitat’s extremely wealthy citizens was selected at random. That unfortunate individual would be tortured, their excruciation prolonged via medical intervention until they eventually succumbed to death. Money flowed into Hell-Five’s coffers via the sale of viewing rights and the fact that the citizens of other habitats could sponsor a particular mode of torture, often after a series of escalating auctions.
The system sickened Gaffney to the marrow. He’d observed many extremes of human society in his tours of the Glitter Band, but nothing to compare with the depravities of Hell-Five. One glimpse of one of the victims-in-progress had sent him reeling. He had experienced a deep-seated conviction that Hell-Five was simply wrong; a social abomination that needed to be corrected, if not wiped out of existence.
But Panoply—and therefore Gaffney himself—could do nothing to curtail it. Panoply was concerned only with matters of security and voting rights as they pertained to the Glitter Band as a whole. What went on inside a given habitat—provided those activities did not contravene technological or weapons moratoriums, or deny citizens free voting rights—was entirely outside Panoply’s jurisdiction; a matter for local constabulary alone.
By these criteria, Hell-Five had done nothing wrong.
Gaffney found himself unable to accept this state of affairs. The phenomenon of the torture states, and the citizens’ collective refusal to see them ended, showed that the people could not be trusted with absolute freedom. Nor could Panoply be trusted to step in when a moral cancer began to spread through the Glitter Band.