Lambda Page 3
‘The number of known terrorist entities has quadrupled over the last decade,’ her new supervisor said to the group. ‘A lot of the really critical work is handled by Intelligence Services, but they’re permanently at capacity. There’s enough overspill to fully occupy legions of rookies like you—in case you hadn’t noticed, it’s the reason your course took six weeks, not three months. You all know about the fundamentalist outfits, and all those far-right militias. That’s enough for several departments already. But the extreme left is more active now than it’s been since the 1970s. Nothing has really surfaced yet, but some of you will be living and breathing the People’s Republic of Violent Revolution for the foreseeable future. And we have new, non-traditionally aligned groups coalescing monthly. They might side with any of the traditional interests, or none. Surveilling them is like watching a time-lapse movie, only you don’t know if you’re watching cell division or osmosis.’
Cara made contemporaneous notes on her phone about the briefing and the officers around her. Seventeen of the twenty-five had been fellow students on her course.
‘There’s an octopus of organised crime whose brain nestles in those server farms under Severax. An unrecognised state, as you well know, but one with extraordinary technical resources. We’ve recorded at least one major cyberattack per week out of Severax since January. The forces behind these attacks may not be strictly terrorist organisations; their modus operandi is more like a business plan that leverages the threat of mass murder. But however you deign to describe them, the fact is Intelligence Services can’t shovel fast enough. Expect to see them on your worksheets too. Good luck.’
Cara was given 82 trails to monitor on her own. Most of her work involved tracking internet use and bank accounts, and she applied strategies from her recent training to real-life data that differed from the dummy material only in volume. Information scrolled without cease through the basic GUI she watched throughout her contracted hours of 08.30 to 17.30 weekdays. Her interactions with the others at her desk were minimal.
One of Cara’s tasks was to manage lists of scare words that the Patternizer software would identify and aggregate into daily usage reports.
Footballers for National Defence
action 16,540
non-nationals 9771
blood 9039
control 5990
great + replacement 4518
purity 1782
homeland 1442
equipment 700
aim 351
meeting 122
Without contextual information, these numerical lists were of limited value. They served to flag regions where further investigation might be warranted, and with their aid Cara turned up a message thread that thwarted a far-right assassination attempt on only her sixth day of employment. A statistical overview suggested that her terminal was overdue a successful outcome, but her conscientious data management was acknowledged as a contributing factor.
On day twelve Cara heard a rumour in the coffee room.
‘I give us a year,’ said Claudine. She behaves as though she knows the content of the briefings already, Cara had previously observed. Claudine was talking to an officer called Gary Ruff who sat at an adjacent desk. He was 24 years old, and his OCEAN Personality Test Score was 40 75 55 60 62. His forehead and temples were more reflective than the rest of his face.
‘Only a year?’
‘Might even be less. The tech is getting there, with those qubit stability advances. It can easily deal with the volume, even generate novel speculation. Trust me. They won’t need us at all.’
‘Are you talking about full automation?’ said Cara.
Claudine stared at her. ‘Yes I am. You are among the last of our kind, my dear. We’re just assisting the machine, in more ways than you realise.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We’re all surveilled here too, you know. Keystrokes. What we’re saying right now. Recorded in perfect detail. They must have a pretty solid picture of how we do this work, as humans. Once the data is robust enough—no more humans.’ Claudine winked.
‘But it’s too complex for a machine,’ said Cara. ‘Machines can’t understand the context of what we do.’
Claudine closed her eyes for longer than a typical blink. ‘Machines are the context. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed already.’
*
On day 38 of Cara’s employment the supervisor said, ‘All of you, save what you’re doing and come into the briefing room. I’ve had a new tip-off from Intelligence Services. There will be a special briefing about the lambdas.’
Cara’s heart rate rose from 76 to 90 bpm.
The briefing started with a 21-year-old video documentary called The Lambdas and Their World.
‘Lambdas are as human as you and me,’ the video’s narrator said. ‘They’re not fully aquatic—just like the rest of us they’re air-breathing mammals, only ones who have adapted to long periods under water.’
A diagram showed the additional respiratory system at the end of a lambda’s digestive tract.
‘Physiologically, they’re not very different to a human baby,’ the voice continued. ‘They’re roughly the same size as a newborn, except that their eyes are considerably larger, and their shoulders more rounded and streamlined. Their arms are more squat too, consisting largely of oversized hands that are essentially flippers. What were once separate legs are now a single continuous tail. Land-human feet are strikingly visible, but a different evolutionary path to ours has fused and flattened them.’
A computer-generated film showed lambdas undulating through jellyfish swarms, then bolting out of the reach of a Greenland shark.
‘Direct footage of lambdas in the wild doesn’t exist,’ the narrator said. ‘Every lambda arrives in the UK after a perilous migration across the Atlantic, one that begins at the spawning zone in the Labrador Sea. Remains of the unlucky ones disgorged by the thawing ice of the Greenland coast have shown that they mature en route. They’re still embryonic as they round the Greenland coast, but fully formed by the time they clear its southern tip. At a split point in the ocean they make the choice to take a longer journey to the British Isles, or to settle in coastal Iceland.’
A thick red band divided in a graphic simulation of the Atlantic. One part went up to Reykjavik, the other dipped down to the United Kingdom.
‘The Icelandic community offers a more limited and isolated existence, largely separate from land-human contact. It isn’t clear how the decision to take one route or the other is made, whether information about differing prospects can filter back to lambdas who have yet to set out. There is no known case of a lambda returning to its place of origin, or even retracing part of the journey.
‘While all the lambdas in terrestrial zones are infertile,’ the narrator continued, ‘the population is stable. Juveniles continually arrive to replace the senescent, who die around the age of twenty. There are breeders somewhere, but where the data tails away there is only myth. There appears to be a general belief among lambdas that there exists a small group, the Four Fertile Pairs, who are the parents of every one of them, but evidence is currently lacking. Nor does anyone know why the lambdas started to beach. For decades now there has been a small but steady stream of lambdas arriving at the same spot in Portsmouth.’
Busy land-humans with pixelated faces appeared on the screen. They were part of a ‘feeder line’, a chain of volunteer carriers and owners of flooded basements whose work helped the new arrivals progress to the capital. ‘The lambdas pick up English quickly from terrestrials who coach them,’ the narrator said. A series of rapidly cut scenes showed what could have been the same lambda at three stages of language learning. In the first shot it quietly hissed from a terrestrial bathtub, in the second said ‘bababa’ from a glass bowl, and in the third spoke the words ‘thank you for your assistance, Melanie,’ in a rapid, high-pitched
voice. ‘They also develop contacts with other lambdas, and learn practical information that will help them navigate land-human life. The feeder line ends at the capital, and after passing a special citizenship exam lambdas move into study and employment. They blend swiftly into the community. They are a quiet but vital contribution to the British workforce.’
The supervisor stopped the video. ‘You’ve probably had little to do with lambdas,’ he said. ‘There hasn’t been much to report. The population here is as much as one hundred thousand, which might surprise you. They keep a very low profile, living in flooded basements in a few pockets of the city, studying, working in low-income occupations. Many lambdas are in telesales. Some work as support staff in schools and colleges. The tech industry is currently a big employer—they cope easily with high-volume image labelling, and they’re willing to work for far less than a terrestrial. The carriers who take them to work, school or college are trained to be discreet. You will be wondering by now why you’re having this briefing. Well, Intelligence Services have a lead on a group calling themselves the Army of Lambda Ascension. We don’t have much more than the name at this point. Nevertheless, Intelligence has made a request that we put the community under surveillance. No special directions. It could all be a hoax, but we need to be thorough. You should all keep a weather eye out, but it’s you, Cara, I’m going to task with monitoring them directly. Does that sound okay?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said instantly.
‘Good,’ said the supervisor. ‘You can all go back to work.’
7.
Hello. How are you? I am fine, thank you for asking. Isn’t this a lovely day, perhaps the loveliest of the spring so far? While I find something to enjoy in all the seasons, the contrast of spring and winter lends the former a charm which is impossible to reproduce at any other time of year. Yes, please take a seat. I see you’ve chosen the Prouvé chair. What an excellent choice! I was lucky enough to acquire it at a sparsely attended auction.
Would you like some tea or coffee, or perhaps some orange juice? You might find that more refreshing on a day like today than something hot. No? You would simply like me to begin? Of course, that would be perfectly acceptable.
In the first days of the establishment of the Republic of Severax it was unclear what sort of threat, if any, would be posed by the so-called state and its inhabitants. The early missions were more or less straightforward reconnaissance. Access was not particularly difficult, and it wasn’t yet necessary to rely on drones. We would arrive in a civilian all-terrain vehicle, and our driver would be allowed through the chain-link fence that marked its western boundary with little conversation. No, I do not recall anything of the detail of these conversations, which were conducted outside the car while I remained inside, with the doors and windows closed to maintain the effectiveness of the air conditioning. On one such occasion I do remember a border guard talking at greater length than usual with my colleague, Captain ––––– (I believe it was she that time), before walking over to the car and looking through the window at me. It was very bright outside, and I remember being unconvinced that he could see anything other than his own reflection. I recall the guard’s face well. He had scraps of black beard through which his tanned Caucasian skin was visible, and his eyes were unusually blue. He stared in my direction for some time but his expression revealed no subjective response to my presence. In any case he moved away from the window of the car, apparently satisfied, and waved Captain –––––, if I am correct in saying so, back to the seat beside me.
As one passes through the desert that makes up a large part of the Republic of Severax, it is impossible to ignore the consequences of the unlicensed use of Personal Fabrication Devices. I remember in particular a huge and solitary artificial cake, very dark in colour with signs of cherry jam or similar oozing between the layers, towering over a dead-end road that trailed off into the sand. The cake was collapsing under its own weight and showed signs of interference from, one presumes, nocturnal desert animals, creatures who had perhaps begun to use the cake as a dwelling place. One can only image the quantity of formation resin wasted in its construction, or the context wherein the presence of such an object could have meaning. As one approaches the capital city more and more of these abandoned follies become visible. Oversized transitional objects abound, stuffed dogs and bears being particularly common, also missiles, spacecraft, toy trucks enlarged to absurd proportions, hyperrealistic replica pets, and any number of malformed blobs that could be the result of infantile sculptures being processed into monuments, or perhaps failures of the fabrication process itself. This part of the journey reminded me time and again that I was part of the world of sense, and that anything that could be done to reign in this profligate activity would be to the benefit of all.
Posing as representatives of a major arms manufacturer, our ostensible aim was to establish trade with the government of Severax. This had the useful ramification that it enabled us to assess the financial situation of the new state in fairly detailed terms. The government’s control of five extensive solar fields on the southern border ensured that it was able to meet its own energy needs, and to sell the surplus to countries less ethically scrupulous than our own—it was the particular success of this revenue stream which had recently made it viable for the state to order twelve Scorpion fighter jets.
The Minister for Defence was a very friendly and articulate woman. She greeted me and Captain –––––, if I am correct, in a quite irreproachably proper manner. We were offered tea and coffee, and also a warm honey-and-rose-flavoured drink typical of this region. I declined both, of course, and requested only a glass of water from the tap.
If I might break off here for a moment—what does one do with all these days? Not, I must stress, the days I bring to mind as result of your stimulating questions. These remembered days have a clear meaning and function, I’m sure, in whatever report or analysis you are likely conducting. I mean the days as I continue to experience them. There is a distinct difference to a day without any clear purpose, I find (and most of my days fall under this heading, at least until that regular hour at which you arrive), and the days that you are asking me to recollect. If you were to ask me to describe a typical recent morning, I would say it is a kind of open secret. Sunlight grants the features of my bedroom a level of presentness they do not attain again for the rest of the day, and they wear their apparent potential with an almost smiling brightness. As the morning continues a certain hesitancy sinks in, by which I mean it sinks into the objects, the fabric of this apartment, and these objects begin to seem almost sheepish about the promise they made at the day’s outset. Noon arrives. I must make plans of the usual sort, such as what to have for lunch. This is not an unpleasant duty, but it is quotidian, non-transcendental. There is no infinity in it and no, how can I put it . . . vista. I have items in my cupboards. The concrete elements of my experience obey the usual physical laws. None is in danger of transforming, even for a moment, into a highway to a distant world. The afternoon itself, and by this I mean the depths of the afternoon (to be absolutely specific, half past three) is unimaginable at seven in the morning. What could half past three possibly mean except the utter redundancy of everything?
Does this make any sense to you? Oh dear. I have the feeling that you are somewhat frustrated that I have broken off my previous narrative. Let me resume.
On this sortie with Captain –––––, the last occasion on which I have had reason to be in Severax, the Minister for Defence sat to our right at a dinner which achieved a balance of formality and levity which I appreciated greatly. She had an extremely light and airy manner, one which was not, however, excessively familiar, a common error amongst those in positions of real power who wish to make a benign impression. The actual impression made through such an attempt to project an easy-going bonhomie is generally that the person in question is monstrously overbearing, controlling, and in essence a bully. While th
e Minister for Defence did not make this mistake, you can imagine, I’m sure, how difficult it was for me to maintain a calm and cogent bearing, when I was fully cognisant that the real reason for my visit was the assassination of the Minister for Defence and her family. One can undergo the most exacting preparation for a situation such as this and still find that one comes up short. It was, of course, extremely important that the Minister for Defence was not aware of the actual reason for our visit, and I am happy to say that my underlying perturbation did not surface and give the game away.
Incidentally, I can never smell a rose or a product derived from one without being mentally transported to the end of the meal at the governmental palace of Severax. The scent of that traditional drink, whose name continues to escape me, infused the air and formed a sort of gentle sign of approval for all that was going to transpire.
We were shown to our rooms in the eastern wing of the governmental palace. The apertures of the staircase were star-shaped. I drew my hand along the stone blocks from which these shapes had been cut, one assumes by some sort of automated process, and they were finely grained, a little like hot-pressed paper. It was almost midnight, but the sun was still illuminating, as it were lingeringly, a tiny portion of the sky, as though it hadn’t quite finished with the day. But here I am projecting meaning where there was none. Certainly Captain ––––– and I were not yet finished. No, I had a certain other task to perform that day, so it was not really possible for me to think about sleep.
I find I cannot bring to mind anything else about this occasion just now and I would like to say goodbye. Goodbye.
8.
The supervisor required Cara to create a detailed weekly report on the ALA. It was a task she undertook with diligence: she began surveilling the lambdas as soon she was back at her terminal. They didn’t carry phones, she learned, and refused the telecoms implants that were becoming the norm in low age and income demographics. This made the data patchy. However, by the end of the shift she had a rudimentary database of emails, SMS exchanges, rental agreements, shopping records, school and college information, and the ranked content of their photo shares.