The Coincidence Engine Read online

  ‘I put it another way,’ he says one evening, apropos of nothing, and in the middle of what has so far seemed to be a conversation about the virtues of eating raw vegetables (he says he lived happily through one summer eating cow parsley and soaked nettles). ‘If everything is perfect – if our measurements add up, if we can measure that, and that, and that -’ he points with sudden violence to the verticals on the wall of the shack, just in the shadow of the hissing hurricane lamp – ‘and that angle is so, and that line is so, and that force is so… we can build a house. Yes? So when the winds blow, when the hurricane comes, we will be safe. You see?’

  Isla learns simply to ignore this sort of thing, not to startle, to go with the sudden shifts in his conversation. His speech is like the patchwork prose of his letters. She had assumed they were written discontinuously, at different times of day and in different moods, as the storms of his madness blew themselves out, as signals swept from nerve to nerve in his brain and clarity came and went. It seems, though, that the shifts are almost instant. It is as if he is participating in half a dozen conversations, and simply tunes in and out of them – sometimes responding to her, sometimes to some cue elsewhere.

  ‘Now in here -’ He points to her head. ‘Now out here -’ He waves at the air. ‘A pretty fantasy. You can measure nearly. Very, very nearly. But you can’t measure precisely. True knowledge is impossible. I measure this once, then twice. Which is right? Then a third time. This is – what is the word? An analogy.’

  Isla asks, is he talking about subatomic particles?

  ‘Not that – yes, that is part of it, but I mean something bigger than that. I mean that everything we are is a mistake in the measurement. Everything. This mistake – this is the devil’s gift to us. The devil broke the clockwork. Now…’ He looks at her, suddenly exultant, and raises his hands, palms outwards by the side of his face. ‘… CUCKOO! CUCKOO!’

  Late another night, they are talking about time. It is something that Banacharski seems agitated by, a subject he returns to.

  ‘Imagine, see. Time is not a thing, not a thing that flows from one thing to another thing to another. It is a direction – a dimension. Does north flow? Does sideways flow? No. You can’t measure time because what do you measure it with?’

  At another point he draws a circle on one of the sheets of paper and shows her. ‘Here and gone do not mean anything,’ he says. ‘Look. Make this axis time. This axis space. Here -’ he marks a sort of triangle inside the circle, shades it roughly in – ‘is the map of Alexander the Great in the world. And here. He is not “gone”: look. He is here: on the map between such a place and such a place and so-and-so BC and so-and-so BC.’

  He draws another blob on another part of the circle. ‘And here is the map of Nicolas Banacharski in the world. In this world. And here -’ he draws another blob, this one overlapping the last – ‘is the map of Miss Isla Holderness in the world.’

  That night he becomes a little tearful. ‘You have to understand, Isla,’ he says. ‘When I was a child I was a displaced person. Whenever you have a war, you have displaced persons, shifting from place to place. They are victims of chance. For me, there was the chance of where I was born and when I was born, and the chance that I was born at all. Everything was chance. What my mother saw. Where my father died. It was chance. One lived, one died. Chance that I was born, and not somebody else. I am trying to repair that. Do you understand? Think, like a play on words, perhaps – another chance.’

  She touches his arm, and she sees wetness on his lips. ‘I am an old man, Isla Holderness. I am an old man.’

  Later, he mumbles something she doesn’t think about until much, much later.

  ‘Nobody wants me,’ he says. ‘Nobody is coming for me. I promised nobody anything…’ he says at one point. He seems distressed. Isla takes a risk, and puts an arm awkwardly around his shoulder, and a charge seems to go through him. The yellowy whites of his eyes roll sharply towards her. He seems not just self-pitying, but scared.

  Chapter 13

  Alex sat up in the bed under the thin motel sheet. He reached over to the little MDF unit screwed to the wall by the side of the bed and found his mobile phone in the half-light. It was the small hours of the morning, though he didn’t bother to check the display on the big digital alarm clock. The answer to the crossword game.

  ‘The set of all sets,’ Alex typed into his mobile phone, and pressed ‘send’.

  ‘In your face, Mr Rob,’ he said aloud, even though he was alone. He felt immensely comforted. Rob would be on his way to work, he thought. He pictured Rob, on the Noddy Train, as he without fail called the Docklands Light Railway, heading in to the job he boasted about but hated at PricewaterhouseCoopers or DeloitteDeLaZouch or whatever the company was called.

  Rob had made such a noise, when they’d been together as students, about not becoming what he called a ‘spamhat’, his blanket term for anyone richer and older than himself whom he suspected of having taken a lucrative job because they had been – deservedly – bullied at school. Rob had been – deservedly – bullied at school.

  Alex imagined – no, knew for a certainty – that his text would ping, or zoing, or chirp onto Rob’s BlackBerry or iPhone or whatever he now had as he swayed along on the train, and that Rob would be excited by it, and affect to have had his day ruined.

  Alex, even though it was late, waited five minutes before sending his next text. It was as well to affect not having been saving it up – but at the same time taking a few minutes to imply a plausible albeit startling facility of mind.

  ‘Inexperienced butler? Sounds like an old film. (3, 5, 3, 2, 5).’

  He was woken fifteen minutes later by his phone – on silent – burring against the hard surface of the bedside unit. He reached for it, bleary now, and thumbed the unlock sequence. The little square screen was fish-green. New message.

  ‘Cnut,’ said Rob’s message.

  Alex smiled and sighed, replaced the phone on the bedside table and settled back into a happy sleep.

  Red Queen’s encryption team worked on the hard drive they’d recovered from MIC – the drive the boy had couriered across the Atlantic for them and dropped off in Atlanta. The drive was exceptionally hard to crack, but – the cryptologists reported – not impossible. Progress was being made by brute-force computing. Red Queen regarded that as somewhat suspicious. So did Porlock. Still, they persevered. Resources were diverted. Compartment by compartment, data started to come off the disk.

  It bugged Red Queen, though, that the casino metrics suggested the device itself was still on the move. The data coming off the hard drive didn’t make much sense, as yet – it certainly didn’t resemble, as Red Queen had initially dared to hope, backup blueprints for the machine. So what did it have to do with anything?

  Ellis, MIC’s head of security, had been working on the hard drive too, or rather working on its absence. MIC couriered several items of varying sensitivity between its offices in London, Washington and Atlanta every day; to say nothing of the material it moved between narco states in South America and AK-infested government buildings in Lagos, Freetown, Mogadishu and Khartoum. If any of those packages went missing, Ellis was informed.

  Commercial competitors – as senior management insisted on calling the private interests, most of them governments rather than companies, and most of them clients rather than competitors, that tended to be interested in ripping MIC off – needed to be discouraged from obtaining sensitive data.

  Ellis’s anti-theft policy was twofold. The first side of it was straightforward. They used a dozen or more different courier companies in each country, randomising each job and booking them independently and at late notice. All electronic data that they couriered was encrypted and tagged; and all disappearances were investigated.

  The second part of the anti-theft policy was slightly more complicated. In the first place, MIC couriered something in the order of five or six times as many packages as it needed to. Only very select personn
el knew which contained the important data and which were heavily encrypted dummies. These were what Ellis liked to call ‘Barium Meal Experiments’: they’d tie up a lot of time and expertise, and once broken would yield complex, useless or deliberately misleading information. Their chief purpose was to cause their interceptors to give themselves away by acting on a red herring – a piece of bogus market-sensitive information that might cause a greedy dictator to tilt at a stock, or a hint that the opposition had bought a surface-to-air missile package for which MIC sold the only effective countermeasure. Sometimes it was more important and more profitable to know who was ripping you off than to prevent them doing so.

  They were also, most of them, laden with the sort of high-end Trojan viruses that would install a nice back door, for MIC, in their hosts’ computer systems.

  They knew, for instance, that the Atlanta package had travelled by air to New York within a few hours of its disappearance from the courier company. But the signal from its tag had abruptly cut out on arrival. It had either been discovered or encased in concrete, or discovered and then encased in concrete.

  In New York, the tag had not been discovered, nor had it had been encased in concrete. But it was deep underground, with the DEI’s cryptographers. And it was nearly a day before those cryptographers fully cracked it. And a bit over a day when they realised what had happened.

  ‘Like something gift-wrapped in a cartoon,’ Porlock said without a trace of mirth when he made his report. ‘Black on face. Hair sticking up.’

  ‘Swine,’ said Red Queen.

  The quarantined network they’d been using to open the drive had quietly suffered the computer-virus equivalent of Ebola and would take more time and energy to cure than it had taken to break the encryption in the first place. Among the effects of the virus was that every computer in the network was quietly trying to get in contact with a remote ISP – almost certainly one of MIC’s secure nodes – four times per second. They were doing so in vain, since the network wasn’t wired to the outside world. But it made Red Queen think of the magic harp in the fairy story, screaming and screaming from under Jack’s coat that it had been stolen.

  The data on the drive had been mud. One programmer speculated irritably that the extensive personnel file for a company named ‘Herring Enterprises’ – they checked: it had no personnel; it was a Cayman Islands shell – was a private joke.

  The DEI’s programmer was right. It was a private joke. But it was not a private joke that Ellis was much laughing at. Ellis, too, had missed a trick. When he was first told about the missing package, he had given it little thought. Let his subordinates work it.

  He was more preoccupied with trying to find this probability machine, and the routine loss of a BME – as, on checking, he saw it was – was neither here nor there. It was only when it occurred to him that it was Atlanta and that it was about the same time this kid had given those idiotic thugs of his the slip there, that he went back and wondered about a connection.

  Could the boy have stolen the package? Could the machine have caused the package to be stolen?

  Ellis looked at the loss of the package. It had gone through the airport, routinely, with no problems. The representative of the courier company had picked up the briefcase with the hard drive. But the closure of the Atlanta offices after the incident with the frogs – another thing that had installed the flickering jelly bean of an incipient migraine in the corner of Ellis’s field of vision – had meant that he’d returned with the package to his own company’s offices with a view to putting it in the safe. Where he’d been mugged and relieved of the suitcase. Two muggers – he didn’t get much of a look at them. The loss had been reported to the police, but Ellis didn’t hold out much hope of recovering it. Not with someone flying it instantly to New York, which was not what normal muggers did.

  Ellis couldn’t see a way that the boy, even if he had had an accomplice, could have known about this package arriving at the same time as him; nor where it would be going; nor why he would be interested in it in any case.

  Ellis found out which courier company MIC had used, and telephoned their UK office. He was rude to a series of dispatchers until a senior manager looked it up on the computer.

  ‘His name was Alex Smart,’ said the manager. ‘Yup. First time we’ve used him, according to our records. The usual thing – student or something, no criminal record, answered one of our ads online. He got a short-notice flight to Atlanta. We got your parcel sent. Why? Is there a -’

  Ellis hung up. Well. That explained how the kid got to Atlanta. MIC bought him a ticket.

  If Ellis had been more puckish, he would have said ‘Swine’, but Ellis instead swore unimaginatively, hammered the phone cradle with two fingers and then started to dial again.

  ‘What I have been trying to do,’ says Banacharski later in the week. His sentences, still, are not always coming out entire. ‘To build a machine. To undo – these knots.’

  They have spent a long day together. As usual, Isla has been circumspect. She has tried to make herself useful – has cleaned, even, where the opportunity to do so without looking rude has presented itself. She has retreated when it seems right – particularly when he has insisted that it is time for him to meditate. It hasn’t been a problem for her. She has taken herself off on a walk.

  She has started to get used to his moods. She doesn’t think that she’s going to learn from him what she’d hoped – still less, get him to come back to civilisation. This was the thing that, though she didn’t admit it fully, she’d fantasised about: she, as Perseus, with the gorgon’s head to show off. When she was little her dad taught her how to fish. She liked the idea, always, of the skill of bringing something in that was stronger than the line by which it was caught. She has an ego, Isla.

  So she doesn’t think she’s going to bring him in. But she has started to feel for him. She reproaches herself. She always felt for him – even when she’d only read about him she felt she understood him. But now, she feels like she has a responsibility. She sees his mind, like a boat straining at its moorings in a heavy tide, and she feels sorry for him. She wants to soothe it.

  ‘In the war. My father died. My mother lived. My little sister died. I lived. Chance. How do we live with that? How, Isla Holderness? How do we live with it? It is impossible. Nobody can. Nobody can do that.’ He seems half to be talking to himself.

  Then he changes tack again. ‘There are walls in the air.’ His hand, in a chopping motion, comes down between her face and his. ‘Everything is so close to us. These walls: a membrane’s distance. We think – our physics, already, almost shows it if you know how to look. Every moment spawns infinities – new universes. A sparrow falls, a sparrow doesn’t fall – you know that?’

  ‘The Bible,’ Isla says.

  ‘Yes. The Bible. Every sparrow, a new universe. Every feather, a new universe. Every wingbeat. What happens -’

  ‘This is the parallel universes idea you’re talking about?’

  Banacharski waves, impatiently. ‘Not parallel. No such thing as parallel. That’s what the devil, as I told you, made impossible -’

  ‘You’re talking metaphorically?’

  ‘Yes! Metaphorically. Yes, I am. Exactly that.’ He looks, riddlingly, pleased with her – but not as if she has said something he agrees with, she thinks, so much as that he knows she didn’t understand. ‘What he does to the measurements, the devil, that’s it. Everything curves. Not parallel. Like soap bubbles, these infinities. Everything touching everything else. You could just step through. If you could only see the walls. If you could hear what all those versions of you are saying, just on the other side. Think of what happens. How do you think of it? You go forward, yes?’

  ‘Ah. Yes?’

  ‘Look.’ He wiggles his hand like a fish. ‘Your choice, this or that. Your chance, this or that. You jump out of the trench and the precise angle of the bullet from a machine gun two hundred metres away -’ he dashes the tips of his fingers on his
temple ‘finished. You are hiding in a house, and your baby daughter then – just then, as the guard comes by – she hiccups or she starts to cry – finished.’

  Isla just looks, keeps looking at him.

  ‘You think this is a chance in a million. This: what kills you. What lets you live. But go back. How you got there. Every tiny chance builds on another tiny chance before it, and before that, to the beginning of the universe. Why are you there then? Why do your parents meet, and why do their parents meet, and how does that one sperm in each one meet that egg? If you look at it like that, look, it is impossible, no? Impossible. My speaking, like this, to you, how did we get here? Start back then. It is like a maze. Take any wrong turning of an infinite number and look: we are not here.’

  He rocks, now, back and forwards a little on his haunches. His right hand turns and turns in his beard. Isla sits on the chair. She catches sight of herself with her hands folded over each other in her lap, primly, like a figure in a medieval painting.

  ‘The only way that what we have here – something as improbable as you, and me, sitting in this room together – can take place is if everything that could have happened, somewhere else, already has. You follow me? So this is what I am working with. How do you solve a maze?’

  Isla feels the length of the pause. He is looking at her.

  ‘You follow the left-hand wall?’

  Banacharski wheezes with laughter.

  ‘Backwards! You start at the end. Then every fork, it is not a problem – it is not a thing that can go two ways. It is just a node that is leading you back home. I mean this -’ he waves his hands again – ‘metaphorically.’

  He stands up, now, and takes a step or two – agitating his hands.

  ‘I mean that chance is an illusion,’ he says. ‘We think one thing happens and not another. But really everything happens. No time passes and nothing is lost and nobody dies. They are living in an infinity of universes, at every moment, for all time…’