Troll Page 21

  He turned on the taps and washed his face, cleaning himself up as well as he could. It would have to do. He had a fresh shirt in the car. He needed to get to east London and find Hector Emmerson. He tried not to think about the time remaining, the fact that he was almost certainly too late already. Three days. It wasn’t long enough. There was no way it was long enough. It had to be long enough.

  Fortune hadn’t known what to expect of AIX Industries, but in his head he had imagined some kind of lab, a clean and brightly lit modern building full of gently humming machines, buzzing fluorescent tubes and quiet efficiency, a plate-glass building on some sterile industrial estate. What he found was an old brick warehouse on the edge of the Olympic Park, on a street that had just missed out on regeneration, sandwiched between a garage advertising cheap MOTs and a Chinese supermarket whole-saler. He parked up the street and walked back down. It was raining gently and there was a smell of petrol and something else in the air, some non-specific odour of urban decay.

  There was a buzzer next to the door and Fortune pressed it, but before he got an answer, the door opened and a young man with a large beard backed out of it, carrying a computer tower. He looked at Fortune and said, ‘Help you?’

  ‘I’m looking for AIX Industries.’

  ‘You found it.’ The man sounded hostile, pissed off. ‘Who’re you looking for?’

  ‘Hector Emmerson.’

  ‘You’re shitting me.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  The man hesitated, glancing up and down the street, for what, Fortune couldn’t guess. He looked back at Fortune, studied him carefully. ‘God,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You … you look like him.’

  ‘Like Hector Emmerson?’

  ‘What are you, his father?’

  ‘No,’ Fortune lied. There was no way he was going to admit to something like that. ‘You know him?’

  The man smiled, a smile as lacking in humour as Fortune’s had been at the service station. ‘Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know him.’ He paused. ‘Kind of.’

  ‘Well?’ said Fortune.

  ‘Well, if I ever see him again, I’ll tear his head off,’ the man said. ‘I shit you not.’

  ‘Care to expand on that?’ said Fortune.

  ‘Not really,’ said the man, then sighed. ‘Okay. Okay. You’d better come in. But hear me, you haven’t picked the best time. Just a friendly warning. Sure you want to come in?’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Fortune. What choice did he have? The man hesitated, then said, ‘Open that door for me,’ and when Fortune did, he walked in and Fortune followed, wondering just what the hell AIX Industries was.

  Inside, there was a stairwell with stone steps leading up to the first floor, but the man passed them and pushed through another door into a warehouse space. It was large and half empty, trestle tables set up with computers, monitors, wires trailing across the floor. There was a pinball machine in the corner, though it wasn’t on. In the centre of the space was a table with people standing around it. There was food on the table, and bottles of wine; it looked like some kind of party. In the far corner of the room was a huge server stack, green and red lights flashing on it, a tangle of wires covering it. However decrepit the building looked from the outside, inside was some serious tech, Fortune could recognize that. A significant amount of processing power. The man put his machine down on a table, turned and said, ‘Name’s Eddie.’

  ‘Fortune,’ said Fortune.

  Eddie didn’t offer to shake hands and they stood looking at each other awkwardly before a woman holding a glass of white wine called over, ‘Ed? Who’s the visitor?’

  ‘He’s looking for Hector,’ said Eddie.

  Everybody standing around the table turned at this, staring at Fortune in silence. It seemed that Hector Emmerson had left some kind of mess behind him. The silence was broken by the woman, who walked over to Fortune, still holding her glass. She stopped, slopping some wine onto the concrete floor.

  ‘Nic Strensky,’ she said. ‘I’m the founder of AIX.’ She had an American accent.

  ‘I’m Fortune. I’m looking for Hector Emmerson.’

  ‘Who isn’t?’ said Nic. ‘Hey?’ This was directed at the group standing around the table of food, canapés and sausages on sticks. They all nodded in agreement, resigned, and Nic turned back to Fortune. It occurred to him that she was quite drunk. ‘Why d’you want to find him?’

  ‘He’s … he’s been doing things. To me, to people I know.’

  ‘Hacking.’ A statement, not a question. Fortune nodded. ‘It’s what he does,’ Nic said. ‘Hacks people’s lives. Destroys them. Plays games.’

  ‘He’s done it to you?’

  Nic nodded. ‘What you’re looking at right now is the final desperate breaths of AIX Industries before it flatlines for good, which’ll be in …’ she looked at her watch, ‘a couple of hours, when our equipment is taken away.’

  ‘Because of him? Hector?’

  Nic nodded, sighed. ‘You got it. All down to him. Goddamn guy, turns out he’s pure evil. Pure evil incarnate.’

  ‘What’d he do?’

  ‘Listen, I’d love to talk, but we’re kind of in the middle of something here.’

  ‘I see. Sorry. It’s just, I do need to find him. It’s important.’

  ‘So’s this. My co-founder, he’s dead. This is his send-off, from what’s left of AIX.’

  ‘Please,’ said Fortune. ‘Just a few minutes of your time.’

  Nic sighed, looked at Fortune, then at the group of people. At last she nodded. ‘Come back in an hour. I’ll talk to you. But I warn you, I doubt it’ll help. It turns out I know less than nothing.’

  An hour later, Nic Strensky seemed to have sobered up slightly. They were sitting in an office, the walls made up of windows in wooden frames: an old foreman’s station, or where they used to do the books for the warehouse. They were opposite each other, on two sides of a desk that was covered in paper, a monitor on it, a computer tower underneath. Nic had made coffee and had offered Fortune a cup, which he’d accepted. She had short hair and a strong face, intelligent eyes, perfect skin. She looked like the kind of person who did yoga while eating pulses. In fact, Fortune thought, she looked about as healthy as he looked sick. Which was very.

  ‘You know him?’ said Nic.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You his father?’

  Fortune hesitated at this, looked at Nic’s open gaze and said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you don’t know him.’

  ‘No. No, I’ve never met him. I didn’t know he existed until a couple of days ago.’

  Nic nodded, lifted her cup and smiled at its rim. ‘I warn you, I don’t think you’re going to be a proud father.’

  Fortune nodded back. ‘I figured.’ He paused and looked behind him, at the now-empty office. ‘So what happened? What do you do here?’

  ‘Did,’ said Nic. ‘What did we do.’ She paused, drank more coffee. ‘We did great things, is what we did. Important things. World-changing things.’

  ‘Here?’ said Fortune, his tone surprised, as if to say, what could possibly happen of importance in a place like this? He regretted it immediately, seeing Nic’s face harden.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘We were running an AI project. Artificial intelligence. We had investment, like, seriously, we couldn’t turn the VCs away. They were throwing money at us; everybody, like, everybody in the tech community was talking about us.’

  ‘What kind of project?’

  Nic shrugged. ‘You wouldn’t understand, but it was around logic, decision-making. It was brilliant. Peter, that’s my co-founder, he was this genius and he’d found just this most incredible algorithm, this …’ She paused and leant back in her chair, her coffee cup in both hands. ‘This thing of beauty, elegance. It was a masterpiece.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Fortune, nodding but none the wiser. ‘So what happened?’

  ‘What happened? Hector Emmerson happened. We brought him in, he was good, very good
, we needed …’ She stopped. ‘Listen, it’s technical. You really wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘The problem we had, with AI, is we can do the algorithm but it’s about processing, about speed. It’s so sophisticated, so many computations simultaneously … We can get robots to make decisions, incredibly complex decisions involving millions, billions of variables and considerations. Better than a human could, more rational, more sensible. But every decision was taking too long. We’re talking seconds, rather than microseconds. It was too slow, it wasn’t working.’

  ‘Right,’ said Fortune, nodding, half understanding. Decisions. Speed. It sounded plausible.

  ‘Anyway, we needed to make it faster. And Hector, he could speed things up, had this magic way with code. He was getting five, six hundred per cent increases. Decision time was coming down to acceptable tolerances. He wasn’t cheap, and he was, like, really weird, but he was worth it. At least, we thought he was.’ Nic laughed. ‘Turns out he wasn’t. He really wasn’t.’

  She spotted something over Fortune’s shoulder, stopped talking and stood up. As she passed Fortune on her way out of the office she said, ‘Wait there. Time to administer the coup de grâce.’

  Fortune turned to see her talking to a man holding a clipboard. He said something to her and she rubbed her hand in her hair, ground the heel of her hand into an eye, then took a pen and scribbled something on the clipboard. Two more men appeared and started unplugging machines, carrying them out of the office, taking everything that AIX Industries had, all they had left, while Nic stood and watched them, looking as bereft as anyone Fortune had ever seen.

  forty-two

  I AM SURROUNDED BY GHOSTS AND THEY ARE TRYING TO TELL me things, terrible things. Things that I don’t want to hear, that I don’t want to think about, because what happened to them is going to happen to me, I’m now sure of it. Whatever they went through is waiting for me in two days’ time, some horror that I don’t want to imagine, that I can’t imagine. There’s a history here in this cell, I can feel it breathing, feel it watching me, waiting.

  The walls talk to me. They talk to me all the time and I can no longer ignore them. At first I could, I could pretend that it didn’t mean anything and that it was okay, just normal kids, writing graffiti like they always have. But there’s so much pain and suffering and horror living behind those words. I can’t pretend any more. This place is full of evil and it’s waiting for me too, grinning and licking its lips.

  I haven’t lost my mind. I’m not mad (she says, again). I’m not I’m not I’m not. But still. I know all the voices. I’ve even given them names. I hear them talk to me, hear them suffer and plead and beg for me to help, but I’m too late, years, decades too late. And anyway, what can I do? It’s not like I’m in a better position than they were. The poor things. I think they were children. I think they were children and I think they were killed here, in the Games Room. I don’t know why I think that; perhaps they steal in when I’m asleep, small shadows whispering their fates into my ear. Okay, maybe I have lost my mind.

  There’s Matthew. I call him Matthew. He thinks he deserves it, what’s happening to him. I am a bad person. It’s written on the wall above where I sleep, scratched into the brick. I am a bad person. And below that, I think bad thoughts. And underneath, I can’t help it. I hope that it was enough, his repentance, enough to get him out of here. But I worry for Matthew. I don’t think it was enough.

  Frank’s different. Whatever happened to him, he would have faced it with indifference, with a fuck you look. I think this chiefly because everything he wrote on the wall involved the word fuck, pretty much. Fuck St Basil’s. Burridge go fuck yourself. Never break me. Okay, that last one doesn’t have a fuck in it. But hey, it’s a total fuck you anyway. I like Frank. Frank’s my kind of guy. God only knows what they did to him.

  Then there’s Hugo. Hugo is small and frail and very, very scared. He has none of Frank’s defiance. He doesn’t understand what’s happening to him or why. I’m sorry. That’s what he writes. He writes it again and again and again. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. He never says what he is sorry for, because he doesn’t know. He just knows that he is being punished. I imagine his tears, alone in the dark. Trying to stop but unable, helpless. All he can do is say that he is sorry. How long was he down here for? He has scratched out I’m sorry ninety-five times, at least that I can find. It might be more. Please, come on. Come on, show some pity for the poor child. Hasn’t he apologized enough?

  Evil happened here and evil is still happening. The Games Room has rings bolted to the walls and a hook in the ceiling and blood on the floor. The world doesn’t know, and the world doesn’t care. It’s just me and the troll, and soon I’ll be gone, just like Matthew and Frank and Hugo and God knows how many other poor souls. I’ll be with you all soon, I tell them at night, before I sleep and they come to me to whisper their ghastly secrets. I’ll be with you soon, and I promise you all, I’ll do my best to give you the comfort you needed when you were alive.

  Two days. Two days left. I wish I was like Frank, full of fuck you courage. But I feel more like Hugo. Small, scared and helpless. If you’re out there, Frank, would you mind giving me a bit of what you had? I could really use it right now.

  forty-three

  ‘HE KILLED HIMSELF,’ NIC TOLD FORTUNE AS SHE SAT BACK down, the men behind him taking the last of AIX Industries away, the warehouse space all but empty.

  ‘Who did?’ asked Fortune, thinking of Claudia, hanged, and of his daughter’s belongings found in a hut next to a river.

  ‘Peter,’ said Nic. ‘My co-founder. This was kind of like a goodbye to him. A wake, I guess.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Fortune said. ‘I intruded.’

  ‘Yeah, well …’ She trailed off, ran out of things to say.

  ‘You knew him well?’ said Fortune.

  ‘Yes,’ said Nic. ‘Yes, I knew him well. We were a team, a good, no, a great team. I was the business head, he was the genius. What we had …’ She zoned out again, lost in the what-might-have-beens, the glittering future that AIX Industries had once looked forward to. ‘We were going to change the face of artificial intelligence. We’re talking about genuinely intelligent machines. Driving cars, operating on patients, totally autonomous. Making better decisions than people could.’

  ‘So what happened?’ asked Fortune. If the investors had been pouring that much money into AIX Industries, it must have been dramatic.

  ‘Like I said, Hector Emmerson happened. He came in and he was strange but effective, his work was excellent, brilliant. But there was something about him … He wasn’t quite right.’ She laughed, a hollow sound. ‘Course, the company was full of geeks. Software engineers, the good ones, they’re all on the spectrum. But Hector, he was … unnerving. The way he’d look at you. Like he was evaluating, calculating. Like you were a problem, a challenge.’

  Fortune nodded. ‘He likes playing games with people,’ he said. ‘You’re right about that.’

  ‘He hit on someone who worked here. A girl, woman, whatever. Asked her out to dinner and she said yes, don’t ask me why. Desperation, maybe. So he picks her up and they park outside a building and she says, this isn’t a restaurant, and he says, no, it’s my flat. Smiling, like he was being all smooth, like this was how it was done, this was the way to seduce somebody. And this girl, she says, uh-uh, no way, and she tries to get out but she can’t open the door, and he gets angry, asks her what’s wrong. She’s pulling at the door and he’s screaming, asking her what did I do wrong, what’s the matter, like he just doesn’t get it, doesn’t get it at all.’

  ‘Did he let her out?’

  Nic nodded. ‘In the end. She told me about it, and I had him in here the next day, told him that he was lucky we weren’t pressing charges. He stood there with this smile on his face, like I was being ridiculous – no, like I didn’t get it, didn’t understand. This supercilious smile. I had to get Peter, get him to explain to Hector th
at he was out of here, there was no more work for him, he was done. He never lost the smile, as if he held some secret knowledge we couldn’t even guess at.’ She shivered. ‘The guy was so creepy.’

  ‘I imagine he didn’t take it well,’ said Fortune.

  ‘No,’ said Nic. ‘No, you could say that.’ She stood up. ‘Listen, that goddamn pinball machine’s being picked up in like twenty minutes. Never did find enough time to play on it. You mind?’

  ‘No.’

  She paused at the door. ‘We can talk while we play,’ she said. ‘Come on.’

  Fortune followed her across the empty warehouse floor, cavernous now that the desks and equipment were gone, Nic’s footsteps echoing around the space. He watched her as she bent to turn the machine on at the wall, imagining what it must have been like when the building was full of the youngest and brightest, queuing to play, taking time between coding the future. It was an old Terminator model, the first one, that came out in … Fortune tried to remember. Must have been the eighties. God, but he was old. Back then, he’d had it all in front of him. Don’t think about that, he told himself. Don’t even go there. You need to find Sophie, not feel sorry for your own serial shortcomings.

  ‘You okay?’ Nic was watching him with concern. ‘You’re not looking so good.’

  ‘I’m okay,’ Fortune said. ‘All this …’ He shook his head. ‘You can’t imagine.’

  Nic looked at him curiously for a moment but couldn’t get a read. She turned back to the machine, pulled the handle back and launched a ball. The screen went crazy, lights, sounds, Arnold Schwarzenegger scowling at them through shades. Fortune remembered the film, vaguely. A robot, a motorbike, sunglasses. A ludicrous plot that he had enjoyed despite himself. Nic played the flippers and spoke without looking at him.