The Memoirist by Neil Williamson

Author:Neil Williamson [Williamson, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910935354
Publisher: NewCon Press
Published: 2017-03-19T22:00:00+00:00

The city was gone, replaced by a forest of tall pine trees. The thick trunks trapped light and shadow like secrets. A soft, unfamiliar alert was sounding. It wasn’t my face, it was the car.

“Answer,” I mumbled and Pawel appeared on the windscreen. I sat up, awake enough to ask: “What the hell is going on?”

“You mean apart from being the most despised fugitive in Europe?” He shrugged. I normally found his flippancy impossibly charming; at that moment it had precisely the opposite effect.

“Don’t you do that.” Sleep it seemed had distilled my self-pity into rage. “Don’t make fun. I stood by you. I protected you. You do not get to take the piss out of me for that.”

He had the common sense at least to look contrite. “I’m sorry. You’re right, and thank you.”

I turned away and breathed my anger out, let it mist the window, obscure the trees like fog, then turned back to face him. “Okay, so…?”

“Okay. So?”

“Start with the bee.”

“Ah, the bee.” Pawel glanced down for a second, working out where to start. “Okay… Well the bee is pretty special.”

“You don’t say. Special, how?”

“Special in that it talks to other bees.”

“You mean it coordinates with WatchNet’s bees…?”

“You didn’t notice the lack of them when you came out of Templeton’s place? I blinked, realising that something had heard my faithless prayer after all. Pawel laughed. “And that’s nothing. It’s not just WatchNet’s bees. Any drones, anything with a quantum brain really, anywhere.”

“But there were no other bees in Templeton’s flat,” I said.

He couldn’t help himself. He grinned. And I knew he was going to take his time so that he could enjoy explaining his cleverness to me. “Templeton’s vamoosed, right?”

I nodded.

“But imagine –” I opened my mouth to object. “Just imagine, okay? Imagine… that he hasn’t.”

“But he has.”

“But imagine. If he’d lingered for a few more days while he made his plans, working out his route, maybe even agonising over whether to leave at all…”

“Okay, I’m imagining.” I scowled, still unable to see what he was driving at.

“It could have happened that way? In theory?”

“Sure, I suppose. My visit obviously spooked him, although…” Templeton had mentioned others had come asking about the gig before me. Who was to say there hadn’t been more afterwards?

“Exactly. So it’s reasonable to assume he got a visit from our friend Muldoon too and that was what spooked him? And if that happened a day or so later rather than sooner, he might not have left yet and, had a bee been present in his flat at the moment in time when you visited earlier it could have recorded his map.”

“Wait, what? No! There were no bees. Gordon was a nut for sparkwire…”

“But imagine if he hadn’t been quite so security conscious.”

“I don’t know, maybe? It’s possible. All of these things are possible, in theory, but they’re not what happened. Gordon is long gone. There was no map, and definitely no bees to film it, and yet I still saw it. How did that happen?”

“I’m telling you how.

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