I woke, disoriented, unsure why. I knew I was lying on the narrow, lumpy single bed in Room 22 of the Hotel Fleapit; after almost a month in Shanghai, the topography of the mattress was depressingly familiar. But there was something wrong with the way I was lying; every muscle in my neck and shoulders was protesting that nobody could end up in this position from natural causes, however badly they'd slept.
And I could smell blood.
I opened my eyes. A woman I'd never seen before was kneeling over me, slicing into my left triceps with a disposable scalpel. I was lying on my side, facing the wall, one hand and one ankle cuffed to the head and foot of the bed.
Something cut short the surge of visceral panic before I could start stupidly thrashing about, instinctively trying to break free. Maybe an even more ancient response--catatonia in the face of danger--took on the adrenaline and won. Or maybe I just decided that I had no right to panic when I'd been expecting something like this for weeks.
I spoke softly, in English. "What you're in the process of hacking out of me is a necrotrap. One heartbeat without oxygenated blood, and the cargo gets fried."
My amateur surgeon was compact, muscular, with short black hair. Not Chinese; Indonesian, maybe. If she was surprised that I'd woken prematurely, she didn't show it. The gene-tailored hepatocytes I'd acquired in Hanoi could degrade almost anything from morphine to curare; it was a good thing the local anesthetic was beyond their reach.
Without taking her eyes off her work, she said, "Look on the table next to the bed."
I twisted my head around. She'd set up a loop of plastic tubing full of blood--mine, presumably--circulated and aerated by a small pump. The stem of a large funnel fed into the loop, the intersection controlled by a valve of some kind. Wires trailed from the pump to a sensor taped to the inside of my elbow, synchronizing the artificial pulse with the real. I had no doubt that she could tear the trap from my vein and insert it into this substitute without missing a beat.
I cleared my throat and swallowed. "Not good enough. The trap knows my blood pressure profile exactly. A generic heartbeat won't fool it."
"You're bluffing." But she hesitated, scalpel raised. The hand-held MRI scanner she'd used to find the trap would have revealed its basic configuration, but few fine details of the engineering--and nothing at all about the software.
"I'm telling you the truth." I looked her squarely in the eye, which wasn't easy given our awkward geometry. "It's new, it's Swedish. You anchor it in a vein forty-eight hours in advance, put yourself through a range of typical activities so it can memorize the rhythms ... then you inject the cargo into the trap. Simple, foolproof, effective." Blood trickled down across my chest onto the sheet. I was suddenly very glad that I hadn't buried the thing deeper, after all.
"So how do you retrieve the cargo, yourself?"
"That would be telling."
"Then tell me now, and save yourself some trouble." She rotated the scalpel between thumb and forefinger impatiently. My skin did a cold burn all over, nerve ends jangling, capillaries closing down as blood dived for cover.
I said, "Trouble gives me hypertension."
She smiled down at me thinly, conceding the stalemate--then peeled off one stained surgical glove, took out her notepad, and made a call to a medical equipment supplier. She listed some devices which would get around the problem--a blood pressure probe, a more sophisticated pump, a suitable computerized interface--arguing heatedly in fluent Mandarin to extract a promise of a speedy delivery. Then she put down the notepad and placed her ungloved hand on my shoulder.
"You can relax now. We won't have long to wait."
I squirmed, as if angrily shrugging off her hand--and succeeded in getting some blood on her skin. She didn't say a word, but she must have realized at once how careless she'd been; she climbed off the bed and headed for the washbasin, and I heard the water running.
Then she started retching.
I called out cheerfully, "Let me know when you're ready for the antidote."
I heard her approach, and I turned to face her. She was ashen, her face contorted with nausea, eyes and nose streaming mucus and tears.
"Tell me where it is!"
"Uncuff me, and I'll get it for you."
"No! No deals!"
"Fine. Then you'd better start looking, yourself."
She picked up the scalpel and brandished it in my face. "Screw the cargo. I'll do it!" She was shivering like a feverish child, uselessly trying to stem the flood from her nostrils with the back of her hand.
I said coldly, "If you cut me again, you'll lose more than the cargo."
She turned away and vomited; it was thin and gray, blood-streaked. The toxin was persuading cells in her stomach lining to commit suicide en masse.
"Uncuff me. It'll kill you. It doesn't take long."
She wiped her mouth, steeled herself, made as if to speak--then started puking again. I knew, first-hand, exactly how bad she was feeling. Keeping it down was like trying to swallow a mixture of shit and sulphuric acid. Bringing it up was like evisceration.
I said, "In thirty seconds, you'll be too weak to help yourself--even if I told you where to look. So if I'm not free..."
She produced a gun and a set of keys, uncuffed me, then stood by the foot of the bed, shaking badly but keeping me targeted. I dressed quickly, ignoring her threats, bandaging my arm with a miraculously spare clean sock before putting on a T-shirt and a jacket. She sagged to her knees, still aiming the gun more or less in my direction--but her eyes were swollen half-shut, and brimming with yellow fluid. I thought about trying to disarm her, but it didn't seem worth the risk.
I packed my remaining clothes, then glanced around the room as if I might have left something behind. But everything that really mattered was in my veins; Alison had taught me that that was the only way to travel.
I turned to the burglar. "There is no antidote. But the toxin won't kill you. You'll just wish it would, for the next twelve hours. Goodbye."
As I headed for the door, hairs rose suddenly on the back of my neck. It occurred to me that she might not take me at my word--and might fire a parting shot, believing she had nothing to lose.
Turning the handle, without looking back, I said, "But if you come after me--next time, I'll kill you."
That was a lie, but it seemed to do the trick. As I pulled the door shut behind me, I heard her drop the gun and start vomiting again.
Halfway down the stairs, the euphoria of escape began to give way to a bleaker perspective. If one careless bounty hunter could find me, her more methodical colleagues couldn't be far behind. Industrial Algebra were closing in on us. If Alison didn't gain access to Luminous soon, we'd have no choice but to destroy the map. And even that would only be buying time.
I paid the desk clerk for the room until the next morning, stressing that my companion should not be disturbed, and added a suitable tip to compensate for the mess the cleaners would find. The toxin denatured in air; the bloodstains would be harmless in a matter of hours. The clerk eyed me suspiciously, but said nothing.
Outside, it was a mild, cloudless summer morning. It was barely six o'clock, but Kongjiang Lu was already crowded with pedestrians, cyclists, buses--and a few ostentatious chauffeured limousines, ploughing through the traffic at about ten kph. It looked like the night shift had just emerged from the Intel factory down the road; most of the passing cyclists were wearing the orange, logo-emblazoned overalls.
Two blocks from the hotel I stopped dead, my legs almost giving way beneath me. It wasn't just shock--a delayed reaction, a belated acceptance of how close I'd come to being slaughtered. The burglar's clinical violence was chilling enough--but what it implied was infinitely more disturbing.
Industrial Algebra were paying big money, violating international law, taking serious risks with their corporate and personal futures. The arcane abstraction of the defect was being dragged into the world of blood and dust, boardrooms and assassins, power and pragmatism.
And the closest thing to certainty humanity had ever known was in danger of dissolving into quicksand.
)
Two American mathematicians are in Shanghai to secretly run a controversial simulation on the laser computer known as Luminous, the only machine powerful enough to handle the large-number calculations they believe will expose a flaw in the basic rules of mathematics. When simulations are run using integers with values larger than the number of particles in the universe, the equivalent of 2 plus 2 does not equal 4, proving that the fundamental nature of our universe, and the universe represented by theoretical numbers, may be on a collision course for mathematical supremacy.
