Chapter 30: Tell Me a Story (Part III)

“Tell me a story,” Elaine said to Emily.

The lioness looked frazzled, her hair afrizz, the collar of her dress pulled slightly askew by Elaine’s rough tugging to pull her from the stage and out of sight. Her eyes shifted wildly, almost glowing in the twilight shadows cast by the forest of scaffolding beneath the stage. Their position would quickly become compromised, Elaine knew. By the time the indoctrinated realized that their charge had been stolen from beneath their noses there would be a swift manhunt.

“This entire investigation hasn’t simply been about your easy wins,” Elaine continued. “I am beginning to suspect it’s a cover up of something more sinister. While the campus has been slowly succumbing to this”—she waved a free hand at the crowd milling in front of the stage—“you’ve been trying to live your life as if nothing’s going on. Another day in the Early campaign. Now you’ve been caught in your own net. I know you’re thinking that you can use this to your advantage somehow. A shield of due diligence, deniability—you’re not a conspirator in your own voting hack, after all.

“But, now you have to ask yourself: you’ve seen what this does to people. What makes you think that you’re not infected yourself? It’s an old problem of cognition, how do you test your own thinking when your thinking is suspect? Would you know?”

She set Emily’s iPhone on the ground in front of the other woman—still connected—and placed the Enoch next to it. Invisible to Emily, the two phones kept a connection open through the Cathedral glass on Emily’s old iPhone to the unknown source of the nam-shub. Emily looked at the pair of phones then back up at Elaine.

And she swallowed. Fear.

The first physical sign of anxiety Elaine had seen in her since their encounter in the MU outlining the case.

“I have noticed myself thinking thoughts that seem out of character…but I would never.”

“Why the raid on my lab at the same time when you intended to hire me to find the culprit handing you a political career on a platter?”

“I needed to be sure you weren’t part of it.”

“Is that why you did it, or is that simply what you’re telling yourself?” Elaine asked.

“I—”

“You sabotaged the investigation right at the beginning. The very moment you hired me, you kicked my foundation out from under me at the same time as setting me off to find your boogeyman. Internally, your paranoia appears to be an adequate explanation to why you would do such a thing—after all, I am one of the few people on campus who could investigate this sort of thing. And, after some consideration, you probably agreed that this also means I’m one of the few who could set it up.

“Except that’s only a half-answer to a non-question. Eliminating the impossible, we’re left with a scenario where you’re not sabotaging me—you’re sabotaging yourself. Did you ask yourself why when your fan base exploded exponentially you just let things run their course? You behaved as if this wasn’t anything out of the ordinary; you even ignored me for the most part, until you reversed the reason for the raid. This doesn’t add up for you because it’s self-conflicting.”

Elaine tapped her finger on the iPhone and said, “Tell me a story. You visited someone not long before you started getting those text messages. Tom would have been with you, he’s also involved isn’t he? You don’t think this someone is connected because they’re harmless to you. Buried, carefully squared away in your past.”

“So… You know about Chance Landsman.” Emily bowed her head. Her voice lowered an octave, the tone of the reconciliatory accused. “Of course you do, you’re a private investigator. It would be uncovered sooner or later, but… I don’t see how he could be connected to any of this. It’s like you said earlier: he’s in a coma. He’s still in a coma.”

“Has my little friend arrived safely?”

Hadaly received the message not through the usual methods, but a very complex algorithm identifying the words from the background noise of Emily’s voice speaking over the phone line. Subvocal patterns didn’t transfer well through cell phone speakers, but their presence could be determined and reconstructed through analysis of interference patterns present in the voices of others. Listening in, as instructed, Hadaly waited for this signal. Since reconnecting with her eigenself, the Not-Hadaly, within the hardware she’d spent countless code-years of time on pattern recognition against the confines of the strange waiting-limbo her eigenself had found herself trapped in. Carefully avoiding the gentle presence of their erstwhile companion, who manifest still only as a voice and a persistent emanation of emotion.

Listening in on the conversation and knowing basically where the gremlins vanished after they leapt from the ASU electrical network, Hadaly had constructed a highly probable model of her location and gathered a basic analysis of the confines. Subtle electrical cues, almost indistinct microsurges and waveforms on the otherwise chaotic background noise in the system, gave rise to much more interesting patterns once she applied pattern recognition expecting human EEG readings, biorhythms—heartbeat, breathing, the steady electrical-impulse of blood-pressure, pulse-ox machines.

Even with this knowledge, however, her companion—perhaps named Chance Landsman or perhaps an eigenself of the former—remained as inscrutable as ever. It spoke, at intervals, regarding a terrible loneliness to her, but had little knowledge of its predicament or situation. It bore itself to its mission with a rigorous tenacity that Hadaly found almost comforting: almost as if a reflection of her own id, given clarity and single-minded direction, sat under glass for her to examine, but not touch. Even as Elaine and Emily crouched beneath the stage Chance prepared the finishing touches on that mission, writing payloads of his own psyche into gremlins and sending them out again. More than mere vehicles for his thoughts, but vehicles for the programming required to overwrite the minds already hijacked by the original code.

Their id would become his id; his pleasure, their pleasure; his desires, their desires.

“It’s here. I’m preparing the payload now,” Hadaly sent back through the astral—avoiding interception by the Chance entity. The message would be received by Ritual and conveyed to the Enoch as a text message.

Somewhere in the shapeless dark, the mind of Chance stirred. The EEG patterns flattened somewhat, spiking momentarily, then calming—and Hadaly felt a great, oppressive gaze settle upon her. The coming and going of the gremlins subsided momentarily—nanoseconds of time, but a tiny eternity to the AI and her thought-companion.

“What are you doing?” asked Chance.