Morhaim knows that his precious CID is a fraction of the manpower it was a few decades before. Most coppers now serve as muscle to implement the decisions of the courts, or the social services, or – most commonly – the recommendations of the smart systems. Yes: even now, on the brink of the Digital Millennium, there is still need for a poor bloody infantry to ‘meet the meat’, as the plods call it.
In the meantime, we do the real work.
Thus, you let us guard you, and watch you.
You even trust us to judge you.
Desargues stumbled forward, as if she had been punched in the back.
She actually fell into Seebeck’s arms, Morhaim saw; but before she got there the Virtual imagery turned her into a stick figure, with a neat hole drilled in her torso.
The Angel knew Morhaim didn’t need to be shown the details of Desargues’ injury. And so it filtered, replacing Desargues with a bloodless Pinocchio. He was silently grateful.
Seebeck clumsily tried to catch her, but she slid down his body and landed at his feet with a wooden clatter. People started to react, turning to the noise of the shot – it came from the Bridge’s nearest tower – or to the fallen woman.
‘Freeze.’
The Virtual turned into a tableau, the sound ceasing, devoid of human emotion – blessedly, thought Morhaim. He studied faces: bewilderment, curiosity, shock, distorted faces orbiting the dead woman like Seebeck’s circling satellites.
The ballistic analysis was clear. There was a single shot. There is no doubt it killed her, and no doubt where it came from.
‘The Bridge tower.’
From a disused winch room. The bullet was soft-nosed. It passed through her body and took out the front of her chest cavity before –
‘Enough. Leave it to the coroner.’
He was studying Seebeck. He saw shock and fear written on the Holmium man’s face. And his suit was – marred somehow, the image blurred.
Covered with pieces of Cecilia Desargues.
In the winch room was found a high-velocity rifle, which had fired a single shot –
‘Which matched the bullet that killed Desargues.’
Yes. And a card, bearing the phrase –
An image, hovering in the Virtual, a grubby card:
THE MACHINE STOPS
‘What was it Seebeck said at the start? Something about a Machine?’
Yes. The winch room also contained a directional mike. The phrase was evidently a verbal trigger, a recognition signal …
And so, Morhaim thought, it comes together. Nestling like the cogs of a machine.
The Homeless are a new cult group among your young, a strange mixture of scientific and Zen influences. Popular, despite the protestations of the Reunified Christian Church.
It is a cult of non-existence of the self, thought to be a consequence of the way you explain ourselves and your world to your young. Science and economics: science, which teaches that you come from nothing and return to nothing; economics, which teaches you that you are all mere units, interchangeable and discardable. Science is already a cult of non-existence, in a sense. Homelessness is simply a logical evolution of that position.
They aren’t literally homeless, of course. The most extreme adherents coat their bodies in image tattoos, hiding themselves utterly …
They are a puzzle. But they are your young, not ours.
‘So,’ Morhaim said to his Angel, ‘you think Holmium were responsible.’
Cecilia Desargues’ company is small and entrepreneurial, still heavily dependent on her personality. Her elimination immediately wiped much value from the company’s stock. The involvement of a Holmium employee in such an unambiguous role at this critical moment –
‘Yeah. It all points that way.’
… But in slomo, the shock and horror spreading across Seebeck’s moonlike face seemed unmistakeable. The rest of the brief conversation, when he’d heard it all unscrambled, had been odd, too.
The Machine Stops … Pardon? Well. I’m intrigued you asked to see me, Mr Seebeck … I’m sorry?
After the code phrase, it looked for all the world like the interchange of two people who didn’t know why they were meeting. As if Seebeck thought Desargues had asked to meet him – for some odd reason in RL, in this public place – but Desargues thought the opposite, that Seebeck had asked to meet her …
As if some third party had set them up, to come together. Was it possible Seebeck was some kind of patsy? – set up to repeat a phrase whose significance he didn’t understand?
It was Morhaim’s job to approve what he’d seen, and the conclusions the Angels had drawn, and pass it up the line. And he ought to sign this off and move on.
The evidence against Holmium was circumstantial. But what the smart systems had turned up here was surely enough for a court order to start digging into Holmium, and it was a good bet that before long more substantial evidence of a conspiracy to murder would come to light.
And yet …
And yet, he liked to think he had retained something of the instincts of the coppers of London past.
Something didn’t smell right.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘that somebody’s lying here.’
He told the Angel to put him through to Asaph Seebeck, who was being held at Westminster Police Station.
When Morhaim came to haunt Seebeck, the cell’s softwalls carried only images from a movie – the centenary remake of Casablanca, with a coloured, hologram Bogart growling through his modernized lines to a sulky Pamela Anderson. Morhaim knew that the cell’s electronic confinement, hemmed around by software firewalls, would be far more enclosing, to a man like Seebeck, than the physical cage.
In his disposable paper coveralls, Seebeck looked young and scared.
Morhaim questioned Seebeck, aware that the man’s Angel was also being pumped for data by intelligent search agents in a ghostly parallel of this interrogation.
Seebeck denied any involvement with the murder of Desargues, over and over.
‘But you must see the motive that can be imputed,’ said Morhaim. ‘Desargues said she had a key competitive edge over you guys. She was planning a global comms network which wouldn’t suffer from the transmission
