Avalon Red Read online

  ‘No hurry,’ I said.

  ‘How’s the depression these days? It’s been, what, a year or more since I last saw you?’

  Thirteen months, two weeks and three days. Like he didn’t have the actual date displayed on his spectacles.

  ‘Much the same. That’s why I wanted the tests.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Doctors, especially psychiatrists, seem to deliver a ‘hmm’ when they want to demonstrate gravitas without committing themselves to declaring whether what you’re saying is significant or not. ‘I don’t suppose it was a lot of laughs seeing Becky again, eh, Skipper?’ I had been his commanding officer so, old sea dog that he’d never been, he was in the habit of calling me skipper.

  ‘No, not really, though she was more concerned with their issues than our reunion so it was, at least, bearable.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he said again. It was no more reassuring than the first time. ‘Last time we established that the pattern was continuing. Has that changed in the last year?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you noticed the onset of a depression two days ago?’

  ‘Yes.’ We’d been through this twice in the last hour and a half. I hoped he’d cancelled his appointments for the morning.

  ‘And our unique therapy has been consistently helpful?’

  ‘Very.’ It had been Doc’s suggestion, based on what he knew of my abilities with implants, that if depression hit me I should pick out the particularly distressing thoughts or worries and put them in a special folder in my cloud-presence with the corresponding emotion attached. That might serve, he thought, to make me feel they were one step removed and thus ease the depression. I had given it a go and was surprised to find it had helped. It didn’t solve the problem completely but it did make the depressions less disabling. The folder was labelled ‘Past Indiscretions’ after a contemporary rock band I quite liked. They weren’t as good as It’s Legal had been in their prime. So far as I knew, I was still the only person who could use implants to attach emotion. If Doc could have developed the therapy for use by the unimplanted, he could have had a Nobel Prize. It was a pity the project was classified. And that he was aiding and abetting my illegal reactivation of the implants. Apart from all that, Doc, help yourself to an award.

  ‘Tell me again when these...shall we call them symptoms...started.’

  ‘Yesterday morning, when the jet owners crashed my depression party, though there were signs the previous evening. The more they outlined the problem, the more the symptoms developed.’ I’d given Doc the cover story. I didn’t believe he would breach confidentiality - I trusted him with my life - but as a basic security precaution; the less people who knew, the better.

  ‘And it’s got worse since?’

  ‘Yes. This morning I really enjoyed an early breakfast. This afternoon I had a terrific trip in a trans-orbital jet and we’re having a productive and enjoyable conversation now.’ At six thirty in the morning, London time. Bless you, Doc.

  He frowned. ‘And the last time you felt like this was when you were offered a job as a bartender?’

  ‘In paradise,’ I reminded him, ‘yes.’ I thought it worth offering a warning. ‘But if you say “hmm” again, I’m going to hit you.’

  He laughed. ‘Cuppa?’

  ‘That’s affirmative,’ I said. Look, Mother, even psychiatrists agree with you that tea is the universal panacea.

  We wandered into his secretary’s office and he put the kettle on. He wasn’t the sort who couldn’t survive without his staff which was just as well as it would be at least nine o’clock before his secretary arrived.

  ‘Do you see much of the others?’ I asked. He peered over his shoulder at me while the superheated kettle did its business.

  ‘Without breaking doctor-patient confidentiality,’ he said, ‘I see them all from time to time but mainly socially.’ One of the benefits for those who remained in London was the opportunity to socialise. I didn’t feel left out. I was the anti-social sort. ‘Scout flies in from Morocco about every three months to replenish his stocks of teabags and biscuits. Honestly, we’re in the middle of the twenty-first century and you still can’t buy basic foodstuffs worldwide.’

  ‘You should start another business,’ I suggested. ‘You could use him to corner the market in distributing tartan tins of shortbread in Africa.’

  Doc had poured the now boiling water over the teabags in the mugs and was stirring vigorously. ‘He’d eat the goods.’ He handed me one of the mugs. ‘Milk, no sugar.’

  I took the mug and nodded. ‘Amazing what details you keep in my medical notes, isn’t it?’ We’d made each other so many cups of tea in the years we served together that we would probably never forget each other’s preferences. He led me back into his office and we sat down in the armchairs placed either side of the coffee table. The tea was still very hot so I put the mug on the nearest of the four coasters. I hadn’t noticed the holograms on them when we were in there before and I picked a spare one up to get a better look. The caption was ‘HMS Elizabeth’ and pictured one of the ships of the line in the age of sail. There was a label alongside the caption so I flicked Online via the implant and followed the label. The information page told me that HMS Elizabeth was a seventy-four gun third-rate ship of the line launched in 1769. Apparently there were eight others in the same class. I flicked offline and put the coaster back down. It was then that I noticed Doc looking at me with a peculiar expression.

  ‘Did you just follow that label?’

  ‘Yes. It’s not like you don’t know I have implants, is it?’ He still had that look on his face. From his waistcoat he produced his slimpad. It was obviously connected to his spectacles as he stared through them and me while he looked at something Online himself.

  ‘Pick a different coaster and do the same again.’ I used to tease him about sounding more authoritative than his commanding officer but I indulged him this time. The choice of coaster was somewhat narrowed by the fact that there were only four and we were using two of them. I picked up the free one I hadn’t looked at before and followed the label alongside the caption.

  ‘HMS Resolution,’ I read off the page, ‘Launched in 1770 and another of the Elizabeth class.’ I looked at the table. ‘And you have half of them here if the two hidden ones are Elizabeth class.’ Doc just grunted and stabbed at his slimpad while looking at something on the spectacles. I put the coaster back down.

  ‘Skipper, you wouldn’t have fibbed about not altering any aspect of the implants, would you?’

  I was puzzled. It wasn’t as if you could buy upgrades off the shelf even if any were available.

  ‘No, of course not. Why, what’s wrong?’ Clearly there was something vexing him. When he replied he looked at me over his spectacles like a stern teacher.

  ‘I can’t detect your use of them.’

  I looked at him in astonishment. The implants allowed me to go Online without the use of any other equipment but they didn’t have a stealth capability. I could sometimes passively detect what others were connecting into without having them fully powered up - like when George was Online at Joe’s - but I couldn’t go Online without being obvious. That was why I’d refrained from using them around George and Becky. I shook my head in an I-don’t-know way. He thought for a minute.

  ‘Try to access my office security protocols,’ he suggested. ‘That should trip the alarm.’

  I saw where he was going with this. The office had some serious defences because of the nature of his work. It wouldn’t do for the records of former special forces personnel to be made public. The security features had been constructed in part by Peter. I could probably have broken them without Doc finding out but the purpose of the test was to see what his alarm could detect. I went Online again and searched out his office portal. Instead of doing something magical I just did what any amateur hacker would do and made a clumsy attempt to open his electronic filing cabinet with a bot. At once his slimpad bleeped and he read the report now displayed on his spectacles.


  ‘This is odd. The alarm worked but the counter-measures program comes up blank.’ It was supposed to trace the origin of the hacking attempt. Any serious malbot would have tried to cover its traces, like the one that picked at my house in the Cooks, with varying chances of success depending on the capabilities of the defending AI. I hadn’t engaged any sneaky circumvention of the security package so the program should have easily been able to report that the intrusion came from within the office. I didn’t understand how it could fail. Nor did Doc. We looked at each other hoping for inspiration.

  ‘Interrogate the seneschal?’ It was the only thing that sprang to mind. He nodded and touched his slimpad.

  ‘Captain Flint?’ I failed to stifle a laugh. I wouldn’t have taken him for someone who would personalise the AI. He looked at me shamefacedly. ‘It was Peter’s idea. I just never got around to changing it.’

  ‘After how many years?’ I scoffed. He just wouldn’t admit to liking it.

  ‘Yes, Doctor?’ I was a bit disappointed that it sounded like a standard British accent. I was hoping for a pirate.

  ‘Stand by to initiate interrogation procedure.’

  ‘Yes, Doctor. Procedure ready.’ Doc looked at me.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said, ‘You don’t know how.’

  ‘We’re not all Online geniuses. Any chance of the protocol list?’

  I sighed and flicked back Online. Doc shook his head as I did. He still couldn’t detect me. I went directly to my home portal. Everyone had one: they were locked with your TAG so it was probably the only thing in the whole of your world that was utterly impregnable. It was the portal through which you went to access everything else Online. Those of us who were sneaky may have had more than one TAG to play with but the set up was the same in each case. It was possible to invite someone to visit your portal in the same way as any other vir-location but they were so personal that most people kept them private. There were enough social places Online in which to meet without having to display the fruits of your psyche. I’d been to some personal portals in the past, often because I’d investigated portals of the deceased. Once someone had been certified dead and their TAG was deactivated, proper authorities could gain access. In my experience, the definition of ‘proper’ was rather fluid. Even so, I couldn’t have broken into the portal of someone living. It amused me that most personal portals were designed as mansions, vast ranches or penthouses. Usually, the poorer the person in real life, the grander their portal. Doc would have had a field day analysing some of the contents. I’d seen many different flights of fancy in my time. None actually gave me nightmares but one belonging to a war criminal whom I had ‘retired’ had been a little unnerving.

  My own portal was a cave from the stone age.

  It had a number of cavernous rooms, lit by bare electric lights - maybe not so stone age - and contained odds and ends strewn around. The front room contained randomly placed old metal filing cabinets and in the centre was a battered old leather sofa, identical to the one I used to have in my quarters at our home base. The ensemble was completed by an upturned large packing crate placed in front of the sofa to serve as a table. I had no interest in an Online retreat, I didn’t like vir-games or showy vir-spaces and I spent as little time Online as my life would allow. There was no point in having a mansion. I used it as a repository and not much else. The cloud-presence conferred by the implants was a small cave right at the back of the main cave system.

  I walked over to one of the cabinets, opened the drawer and took out a file that contained the interrogation protocols. With a minor hand gesture, I sent a copy of the electronic file to Doc’s slimpad. I shut the filing cabinet and exited the cave. When I focused back on him in the office he was uploading the file to his AI.

  ‘Any idea how long this will take, Skipper?’

  ‘About five minutes unless Peter added some extra features I don’t know about.’

  Doc nodded. ‘I should have your test results back about the same time.’ Excellent. Time enough to drink the sufficiently cooled tea and ponder the life of a sailor on a ship of the line. When I raised my mug, I saw that the coaster hologram was of HMS Cumberland. Doc saw me looking as he sipped so, with his free hand, he held up the remaining coaster. HMS Berwick. As I’d suspected, it was half of the class.

  ‘Where did you get these?’

  ‘A present from a grateful patient.’ He grinned. ‘Have you suddenly developed an interest in naval history?’

  ‘I was just thinking that the men who served on these weren’t really so different from us,’ I said truthfully.

  ‘You’re probably right. There’s a widespread fallacy that people in ancient times weren’t as smart as us but, actually, they were every bit as clever in a cognitive sense. They just had less technology to play with.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘To really screw things up; give people access to advanced tech.’

  ‘Amen,’ he said lifting his mug higher in a mock toast.

  ‘I was also thinking that your grateful patient kept half the set,’ I added. Doc pondered, then raised his mug again.

  ‘My grateful patient,’ he offered, ‘the miserly Sassenach!’ I refrained from making the traditional connection between a miser and a Scot and just drank to the toast. The mugs were barely empty when Doc’s slimpad beeped. I waited to see which report he’d received first. He was lost in his spectacles for a moment then shrugged.

  ‘No, you’ll have to tell me what this means.’ He wiped the slimpad in my direction and I accessed Online to read it as it arrived. It was the interrogation report written in the usual style; that is to say incomprehensible to any non-expert. I looked through it carefully.

  ‘Well, there’s good news and there’s better news,’ I said after a short time. Doc raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Oh, yes? That sounds like a particularly optimistic view of events.’ I couldn’t help thinking he was right though my assessment had, in fact, been accurate.

  ‘The good news is that there’s nothing at all wrong with either the seneschal or the security program. It will stop anything nasty short of a full-on cyberstrike and it was entirely correct about not being able to locate the source of my attack. The better news is that, for some unknown reason, I have a completely new undetectable mode of accessing Online which seems to run as the default.’

  Doc didn’t look convinced about the better news. He regarded me over his spectacles for a moment. ‘I’ve been dealing with those bloody implants and their impact for years. I’ve never heard of any secret mode. Have you?’ He was used to the idea that his security clearance might not give him the whole picture. I felt a pang of guilt about not having told him my real mission but on this point, at least, I could reassure him.

  ‘No. I’m sure I would have known if there had been an unused mode when I got them. Once they’re in you’re either suited to use them or you’re not but they can’t hide their specifications from you once they’re part of you.’ The room went silent. I looked up to see Doc still wordlessly peering over his spectacles at me. The implications began to sink in. ‘Oh, fuck.’ I said.

  ‘Exactly. Either they really do have a mode you don’t know about or you have somehow grown the ability.’

  ‘Is that even possible?’

  ‘Well, it’s happened so I’m guessing that it is.’ Good point, fairly made. I reflected further.

  ‘So, my mood change might be related?’

  ‘I’ll be honest with you, Skipper. I’m not happy with the mood changes. You have a pattern of depression that’s been consistent for years now and though I’d like to think I’ve helped you with it, I think we should be wary of a chronic condition that’s apparently spontaneously cleared in two or three days.’ Another good point. His slimpad beeped again. ‘Aha! Let’s see what my diagnostic AI made of you.’ I hoped it had done a good job. I’d had to sit under the thing for the first fifteen minutes after I got here. Doc looked through the results. He didn’t need my help this time. This repo
rt was written in the kind of gobbledegook that only he could understand. Each to his own. It seemed to take him hours but I doubt it was more than a couple of minutes in reality.

  ‘Hmm,’ he started.

  ‘Must you?’ I complained.

  ‘Sorry. Force of habit. The implants are working at ninety-seven percent efficiency which is up,’ he paused briefly to check the records ‘two percent on last time. It’s within normal parameters as far as we know them.’

  ‘I know, normal caveats apply.’ The length of activation in my case meant we were pioneers but the change wasn’t exceptional by usual service tolerances.

  ‘However, we have some significant changes in your head.’ Uh-oh.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like massively higher readings for neurotransmitters. Can you guess which particular neurotransmitter has shown the highest increase?’ I thought about it. It was suddenly obvious.

  ‘Oh, sod. It’s dopamine, isn’t it?’

  ‘Very good. The AI hasn’t detected any third party delivery so we assume it’s natural.’ Oh that was nice. He’d checked to see if I was doing cocaine or amphetamines. As if I would after having spent years killing drug barons. I’d seen what their product had done to people. ‘And it seems that levels of all the monoamines are much higher than before.’ He grinned at me, ‘After your years of feeling bad, I should imagine you’re soaring as high as a kite at the moment. No wonder you enjoyed your flight, Skipper!’ I grinned back even as I realised it wasn’t really a laughing matter.