I run.
I run, until at last I find a taxi, and that taxi takes me to a tree, and from under the tree I retrieve $5,000 and with it I buy a room in a motel just off Route 101, El Camino Real, the Royal Road, once used by Spanish monks to connect missions and pueblos, now the road from California in the south to the Canadian border in the north, running along the West Coast for more than a thousand miles
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The owner of the motel, looking me over once, says carefully, “Cash first.”
I give him cash.
“You got ID?”
I do not have ID.
“You in trouble?”
I am not in trouble. He hears my British accent and wavers. Casual discrimination is all very well and good, but I’m a foreign woman, who knows what problems I might bring?
I put more cash on the table, and he says no more on the subject, except, “We only clean towels on Tuesdays.”
In my room, I discover my feet are blistered. Most are new; some are old. How far have I run? There’s a mobile phone in my pocket, but I’ve already pulled out the SIM card, damned if I’m making that mistake now.
I have a bath, examine my entire body, needle marks in my arms, in my ankles, my wrist, my neck, no memory of when they happened. I explore the top of my scalp with a mirror, feeling my way through the hairs like a gorilla seeking lice, and yes, there, and here also at the back, slight bumps where needles have gone in, someone has been injecting things into my brain and I thought I was so clever, so clever and in control, so fucking fuckety fuck fuck fucking clever FUCK
I look through the photos saved on my mobile phone, find the pictures of Byron’s coded diary, and go to work.
Chapter 70
Snatches of other people’s lives, in a motel off Route 101.
A family of three in one room next door. He’s a salesman, she serves fries at the drive-through. He says, Babe, babe, I promise, next week, next week I promise…
She says, You said that last week, and the week before that, and the week before that.
Honey, honey, I know, but I can do it, I can get the money together…
You always say that, she sobs, you always say the same thing.
They row into the small hours of the night, and I lie awake, listening through the cardboard wall.
A man in a cowboy hat on the TV, skinny as a stick, strong as a stone, moustache quivering on his top lip, sideburns to the jaw.
“Let’s talk reason; let’s make a little sense. Crime is committed by the blacks, that’s math, that’s statistics. So if the police want to use racial profiling I say, yeah, yeah that’s right, because they’re just using a truth we all know to help keep us safe.”
“The FBI say that nearly 70 per cent of crime in the USA is committed by whites.”
“No, I think you’ll find—”
“… but there is a higher percentage of blacks imprisoned for the same crimes…”
“I’m not racist, this is me, having a debate, I’m not racist, you call me racist and I’ll take you to court…”
Types of code: Caesar shift, monoalphabetic, polyalphabetic, single-key encryption, one-time pad, book code, prime number encryption, SSL, etc.
Of all the ciphers it seemed likely that Byron was using, the most obvious was polyalphabetic with a code word. Slow to write, slow to read, but speed could be acquired with practice and, if the code word were known, a computer could break it in a matter of seconds.
Without the code word, frequency analysis would take time, but Byron had written a great deal of material and, usefully, hadn’t bothered to break her words down into five- or six-letter groups, but left all the grammar and spacing in, as thus: bwuwm xi sw ehtjaur pjcfv xdlmcknbn sfvcey adbam.
There is no problem human ingenuity cannot solve.
I looked for repetition of word patterns: “xi” “sw” — It? Is? On? If? “imd” “wix” — The? She? Her? I looked for repetitions of four-letter words, seeking the word “Hope”, and in the end instead found a repetition of the same three-letter word, uxl, and decided it was Why. Crossing “Why” with “uxl” on an alphabetic square gave the letters “edo”. Another three-letter combination, glq, I tried crossing with “the” and found the letters “fre”. On the ancient PC in the foyer of the motel, I typed in a sample sentence from Byron’s diary with the keyword “freedom”, and watched the plaintext appear in an instant.
What I do is unethical, it said, and in the service of humanity.
“It’s two bucks an hour for the PC,” said the manager, mop over his shoulder, bucket in hand.
I left ten dollars under the keyboard, and kept on typing.
America doesn’t have enough public libraries. I end up using the printer at the local fixit store, which also doubles as a seller of beer, milk, toiletries, stuffed animals and guns. It’s a dollar a page, but who cares, the decrypted reams of Byron’s diary fall from the machine into my hands.
Alone in the motel, surrounded by paper, the news on low, the couple next door fighting, fighting, always fighting.
I can’t do this anymore, he screams, I can’t do it! I was meant to be a banker!
“There are cities in England now, whole cities, which are Islamic, where they have Sharia law,” explained an expert on the news, and the anchor looked shocked, aghast, how could this happen, how could Islam have spread so far?
“There are good Muslims, of course, but the faith itself, the religion…”
Change the channel.
My actions are monstrous, and I will not seek a moral justification. History is my guide, Byron wrote. Oliver Cromwell killed a king; the French revolution was led by terror. The serfs were freed and democracy was born; Lenin waged civil war and the Allies fire-bombed Dresden. History is full of vile acts and strange consequence.
I am afraid of Why. Hope — her name is Hope, but I remember her as Why. And why is that? I recall conversations carried out with a figure called Why, her gift, it seems, does not extend to computers, I have data which remembers her, where I cannot. Nor is it fair to say I am afraid of HER — I cannot remember her to be afraid. I am afraid of the concept of her. Of the woman I cannot remember. But that is foolish. My imagination runs wild with the question of the past and the possibilities of the future, but only now, only when I perceive her, is the question real. She is made real by perception, this world is made real by perception of now, of this instant, and that is all that I can permit to matter.
She is free, and does not know it. She is a god, looking at the world from outside the world. Her gift is beautiful. What I am doing to her is vile, but it is both of her own asking, and necessary. The basic structure has been superficially successful. If we can implant the trigger in Why, then we can implant it anywhere.
She is sublime; she is enlightenment.
I slept heavily one night, but my diary had not been disturbed, and you said you lost the phone I gave you.
In my nightmare, you are everyone, and I am alone in the world as you laugh at me.
Hope?
The word written, plaintext, embedded so far into the notebooks that I almost missed it.
Hope? If you read this — perhaps you have already — know that you wanted treatments. You agreed to all of it. I have stripped Filipa’s programming from the system. You will not desire to be beautiful, you will not be made ambitious, a drone, a doll, a perfect woman, I will not kill your soul. But every day you sit in that chair, we come closer to understanding Filipa’s work, and your mind.