Against Gravity

"It might be." Kendrick nodded. "I need you to help me find him."

A little while later, Kendrick returned again to Hardenbrooke's clinic, finding that its upper windows had now been boarded up. He climbed over the railings that surrounded the building, dropped down and kicked in an uncovered basement window before climbing inside. He carried a golf club that he'd decided would be a handy way to deal with the spider robots he'd encountered last time around.

But this time there were no automatic surveillance systems – or at least none that prevented Kendrick exploring. It came as no surprise to find that the building was completely deserted and empty, top to bottom.

Except for one unpleasant item.

He found Malky in the basement, wedged into a corner of the office where Kendrick had discovered the names and details of so many Labrats. Malky's eyes gazed sightlessly outward, under a neat hole drilled in the centre of his forehead.

The back of his head – what was left of it – rested on a pile of eepsheets sticky with blood. Kendrick noticed a spray of red a little higher up on the wall behind the body, where the bullet had embedded itself after passing through Malky's brain.

Grimacing, Kendrick managed to prise a sole remaining eepsheet from behind the dead man but found that it contained nothing of significance.

Malky had betrayed him, but Kendrick felt grief flooding through him nonetheless. In a way this surprised him, that he should feel such a loss. Perhaps, betrayal or not, he simply couldn't find it in himself to believe that Malky's friendship had been anything but genuine.

Then he continued his search, even though he realized that Hardenbrooke would have left nothing for him to find.

19 October 2096 Arlington Hotel, Edinburgh

Kendrick blinked in the sharp morning light, glancing down at his arms that were now concealed by a charcoal-grey suit jacket. He'd taken the bandages off that morning to find that the flesh underneath was already almost healed. Breaking free of Hardenbrooke's restraints would have broken the bones of any normal man, yet after little more than a day the damage had faded into irregular dark patches on his arms and legs.

But along with such a vastly increased capacity for self-repair came accelerated carcinomas, irreversible nervous-system damage, and the risk of total breakdown of the auto-immune system.

Smeby's aide, Candice, was already waiting for Kendrick outside the hotel as he arrived, standing next to a long and elegant-looking car.

"You should be aware," she told him, "that Mr Draeger is currently at his base of operations in the Far East. I hope that doesn't present a major problem for you."

The Far East? "No, it doesn't." Why hadn't he realized this? He'd been assuming that he'd meet Draeger somewhere more neutral – perhaps here in Edinburgh, or in London. So much had been happening around him recently that he wasn't thinking straight. Instead, he was now flying straight into the dragon's lair. He began to have second thoughts.

Candice smiled. "It's not really going to put you to that much trouble. Mr Draeger provides extremely fast transport for his employees."

Kendrick studied her. "That's a long way to go just to have a talk with someone."

In answer she pulled open the door of the limousine. "I'm not allowed access to any details of your conversation with Mr Smeby. My instructions are simply to deliver you to him. You're not here under any coercion, so if you've changed your mind it's up to you."

It's up to me? But until Kendrick could track down Buddy, there was really nowhere else he could go if he was to have any chance of figuring out what in hell was going on around him. And so, despite a definite sense of foreboding, Kendrick bent and climbed into the limousine.

A sheet of smoked glass that doubled as a gridscreen separated Candice, sitting in the front, from him. Kendrick couldn't even see if there was a flesh-and-blood driver, or whether the car drove itself.

Half an hour later they arrived at a private airfield on the outskirts of the city. A snub-nosed passenger VTOL aircraft stood on the wide strip of tarmac, its stubby wings rotated so that the engines pointed at the ground. Candice guided Kendrick on board and took the seat opposite him.

The opulence of the aircraft's decor seemed almost shocking: Kendrick's scuffed leather shoes rested on luxurious thick carpet. An antique-looking table nestled between two comfortable couches that faced each other. He had barely sat down before he heard the whine of engines powering up somewhere beneath his feet.

"Shouldn't we have gone through Customs or something?" he asked. But the only building he'd noticed on their arrival had been a small comms tower.

Candice smiled. "That's nothing you need to worry about. These are minor details, and there's always the danger of random security checks raising problems related to your bodily augmentations." She smiled. "I'm sure you yourself appreciate the importance of being able to move around relatively incognito."

Kendrick nodded, and sighed. He couldn't turn back now. The sound of the engine had built up from a faint rumble to a steady, escalating roar. A few minutes later he saw the sun flash outside a window; they were now airborne, and he could see wisps of cloud through the glass near his shoulder.

Once the plane had levelled off, Candice unbuckled and stood up. "I'm sure you'd like some privacy," she said. "I have some work to attend to before our arrival."

"Where are you going?" Kendrick asked, puzzled.

"There's a working office next door. If there's anything you need, just let me know."

Candice left through a door which clicked shut behind her. Kendrick was now alone. He wondered if the VTOL might perhaps be more than just a mode of transport: it was comfortable enough to double as somebody's home. He imagined Smeby and Candice jetting constantly across the world at Draeger's bidding.

He soon found that the gridscreen responded to his vocal commands, so at least boredom wouldn't become a problem during the flight.

After stumbling across Malky's corpse, Kendrick had spent several hours browsing through the Grid, digging up public archives relating to both Draeger and the Wilber Trials. What he found dragged up unpleasant memories.

Draeger had been born in England in the third decade of the twenty-first century and had established himself early as a scientific prodigy. He had already earned his Nobel Prize for physics by the time he was twenty-one. His lifelong interest had been artificial intelligence, and this led to pioneering work with "distributed machine intelligence" – networks of tiny independent machines that worked together in colonies, highly adaptive, self-learning.

Then came the public crack-up when Draeger hit thirty, entailing a few years of psychiatric evaluation and treatment. That had been many people's first point of contact with the name Max Draeger.

Kendrick had gone on to scan through the more recent decades to remind himself exactly who he was dealing with. Draeger believed that the rules that allowed the universe to operate could be whittled down to a few simple lines of computer code. Certain of his theories had an almost religious quality to them.

None of this might have mattered too much had it not been that Draeger seemed to be almost equally skilled at making himself rich. The approaches to information processing that he had developed had revolutionized computing over the last half-century, and Draeger had since accumulated untold billions. Kendrick's researches reminded him how much more famous Draeger was now as a successful investor, entrepreneur and one of the richest men alive than for his earlier scientific achievements.