Gridiron - Philip Kerr

In the new world, to the insular port of Manhattan where even more were gathered in the name of their dystopic, degaussed vision to cover their spread and play at bulls and bears and make an electronic buck which perforce was swifter than a proper one. Abandon paper all ye who enter here!

Invading operating systems, opening directories, reading documents, reviewing bulletin boards and scrutinizing spreadsheets. Ishmael was in general pursuit of total perfection by getting to know the very best that was being thought and said in the world. But always he covered his tracks, siphoning information like stolen gasoline, piping down into the electronic valleys and underneath the walls of buildings like his own, discovering companies, institutions, people as they really were and not as they wanted themselves to be seen: the dirty corporate laundry, the falsified accounts, the misleading reports, the hidden agendas, the bribes, the secret profits and the covert corrections of those who pretended to be something else.

Ishmael's jumbo-chip journey took no time at all, not real time, anyway, and in a way he was never really away, for there was always a part of him that remained back inside that great whale of an office building, like some bleached and binary Jonah, to plan his next move in the Gridiron game.

Many coleopterans function as scavengers, breaking down materials such as dead plant and animal matter. The ecosystem of the dicotyledon was assisted by the periodic maraudings of small scarab beetles of between ten and fifteen millimetres in length, that were genetically engineered to live on the tree for twelve hours before dropping dead into the pond water to feed the fish. Dozens of these stout, brightly coloured but wingless insects, with their abnormally large mandibles, could be released by Ishmael at any one time, from several miniaturized electrosystemic dispensers that were located up and down the length of the tree trunk. The tiny scarabs were not in themselves hazardous to man, except that the sensation of infestation, of being crawled over, was not a comfortable one.

Ishmael waited until there were two lives on the tree before he stimulated these cryogenically suspended creatures into their brief lifecycles with the aid of a tiny electrical pulse.

Joan let out a scream of horror.

'Ugh! There's something crawling on me,' she yelled. 'Shit, they're all over me. It's horrible!'

Safe on the gantry, Curtis, Helen and Jenny watched in impotent horror as, twenty feet beneath them, Joan writhed on the liana she was clutching like some hapless animal in the Brazilian rain forest, overrun with soldier ants. The whole tree was alive with beetles.

'Where the hell did they come from?' said Curtis and flicked some of the insects off the handrail. 'Jesus, there are hundreds of the little bastards.'

Helen told him. 'But there are only supposed to be a few dozen on the tree at any one time,' she added. 'Ishmael must have been saving them up for us.' She leaned over the handrail to yell down to Joan. 'Joan, they're not dangerous. They won't bite you or anything.'

Mute with loathing, her eyes and mouth tightly shut against the beetles, Joan hung motionless on the liana while, only a few feet below, and himself overrun with scarabaeidae, Ray Richardson tried to climb up to help his terrified wife.

'Joan, I'm coming,' he said and spat out the beetle that had crawled into his mouth immediately he had spoken. 'Hang on.'

She gasped with panic. The beetles were everywhere: in her hair, her nostrils, under her arms, infesting her pubic hair. She shook her head, trying to throw off the most irritating of the tiny beetles, moved one hand up the liana and, grasping it, felt something split into an oleaginous paste under her palm.

Lubricated by the crushed bodies of several beetles, her hand started to slip. Instinctively Joan tried to pull herself up with the other hand, but with the same viscid result: she was moving smoothly, but in the wrong direction, relapsing down the liana.

Eventually her hands would have found some friction and her descent would have slowed. But fear, the cold sweat, hair-on-end dread of falling, made her try again. This time she snatched a look down to find Richardson and the floor, almost as if she wanted to encourage herself not to give up the struggle. 'Oh Jesus,' said Helen. 'She's going to fall.' It was the height that shook Joan the most. The sheer, vertiginous measure of it. She had almost forgotten how high they were, how the white marble invited you to see it not as a floor but as some cloudy, spiritual thing, like the edge of an endless Milky Way; and how the tree itself resembled the spine of some enormous, ivory-coloured mammal. Weak with fear and exhaustion she heard herself say, 'Ray, honey.' Then something crawled under the waist of her panties, into the cleavage of her enormous behind, and began to burrow its way up her ass. She shivered with disgust and tried to scratch it away…

For a moment she felt a tremendous sense of freedom. The exhilaration of true flight. No different to going off the thirty-metre board at the swimming pool. In the first crazy second she even tried to find some way of bearing herself in the air, as if marks might be awarded for the degree of difficulty and the cleanness of her entry into the water. During that brief period she remained completely silent, filled with the concentration of her new situation, hardly noticing the insects on her body any more than she noticed her husband's wide-eyed face as she passed him by.

And then, as the realization of the swiftly imminent floor overtook Joan, the grace of her body left her and, abandoning the head-first position, her heart in her mouth, she extended her arms and legs as if, like some outsized tabby cat, she could make a safe landing on all fours. That was when the sound left her too. A loud, echoing wail, like a keen for the dead. She never heard it. The blood rushing to her smallish ears took away all other sounds save the foolish beating of her own heart. As he watched his wife's last few seconds between heaven and earth, even the anguished cry of Ray Richardson's grief was lost in the malign air, as she was.

Mitch opened his eyes, reached instinctively for the bump on his head, and sat up groggily. For a moment he thought he was back in college playing football and that he must have been dinged during a play. Shaking his head he realized that he was somewhere else, although he had no more idea of where that was than he had of how long he had been lying there, or even who he was. The combination of confusion and concussion made him feel a little sick, and without thinking what he was doing he snatched off his protective eye-goggles.

The still-ricocheting laser beam struck him in the left eye, missing the optic nerve by a few millimetres, but severing a bundle of nerve fibres near his fovea. Inside his head he heard a small popping noise, like the sound of a cork being drawn from a half-bottle of wine, as the beam pierced the back of his eyeball. For a second the vision in the eye remained clear. Then it was as if someone had shaken a couple of drops of Tabasco through an aperture in the top of his head. The peppery cloud drifted across the vitreous humour and the world turned a very painful shade of red.

Mitch yelped like a dog and pressed the heel of his hand into his left eye. While not excruciating, the pain was enough to jog his memory. His eye closed, trying to ignore the pain, quickly he hauled the goggles back on. Stepping carefully between the crimson lines of the laser's lethal diagram, he reached the front desk and switched the rod off.

Mitch pulled up his goggles again and, with a shaking hand, picked up the walkie-talkie. Cold, sweaty and uncomfortably aware of his own rapid pulse, Mitch took several breaths and then drank the beer bottle of water he had brought down with him. Only then did he speak.

'This is Mitch,' he said. 'Come in please.'

Nobody answered. Now his ears were playing tricks on him: every time he repeated the call he heard his own voice on the other side of the atrium. Still speaking, he retraced his steps to the base of the tree. His good eye took in the walkie-talkie tied around the dead woman's waist and for a brief, infarcting second he thought he was looking at Jenny's shattered remains. Identification was made more difficult by the rogue beam of the laser which had burned a large hole in what remained of the woman's face. But her ample size and the fact that she was not wearing a skirt confirmed the broken corpse as Joan's.

Had they figured he was dead and tried to climb out through the clerestory? Mitch looked up into the steel-framed void, but with only one functioning eye it was hard to see anything through the branches of the dicotyledon. Walking around the tree he searched the floor for some sign that the others had broken through the roof, but there was so much debris from when they had destroyed the SAM droid that it was impossible to tell if the twisted metal, shattered plastic and fractured marble concealed any roof glass. He tried to shout, but discovered that his voice was weak. Trying once more, he only succeeded in making himself feel nauseous.

Mitch was in shock, although he hardly knew it. But the thought that he might be the only one left alive in the Gridiron was enough to make him believe that it was grief and horror that caused him to tremble so much. And, as his perceived fate impressed itself upon his consciousness, Mitch fell on to his knees and prayed to the God he thought he had forgotten.

Allen Grabel had been arrested for being drunk and in possession of a small amount of cocaine. He spent most of Saturday in the county gaol on Bauchet Street. From the window of his high-rise cell be could see into the restaurant of the Olvera Amtrak Hotel opposite. The odd thing was that the hotel looked more like a prison than the prison itself. There was no doubt about it, reflected Grabel: prisons were swiftly becoming the most sought-after public commissions for LA's architects; all the big names, with the notable exception of Ray Richardson, now included some kind of carceral structure in their design portfolios.

In the small hours of Sunday morning Grabel found himself sober enough to remember how he had seen the elevator kill the security guard in the Gridiron. After a great deal of thought, he realized that the integrity of the computer must have failed. It was, he knew, a more obvious deduction than the one he had arrived at the first time round, which was that some kind of evil spirit had murdered the man. But if he was right, then anyone who entered the Gridiron would be in considerable danger. Deciding to report what he had seen, he pressed the call button on the cell wall and waited. Ten minutes passed and then a flint-faced warder turned up at the bars of the door.

'What the fuck do you want?' he snarled. 'Do you know what time it is?'

Grabel began his explanation, trying to avoid sounding like someone in need of psychiatric help. He made little progress until he mentioned the word murder.

'Murder?' spat the warder. 'Why didn't you fuckin' say that in the first place?'

An hour after that a couple of blue suits came over from New Parker Center. They were nearing the end of their shift and regarded Grabel's story without much conviction.

'Check it out with your people in Homicide,' insisted Grabel. The victim's name was Sam Gleig.'

'Why didn't you come forward with this before now?' yawned one of the cops, only half listening.

'I was drunk when they picked me up. I've been drunk for quite a while now. I lost my job. You know how it is.'

'We'll pass it on,' shrugged the other officer. 'But it's Sunday. Could be a while before someone from Homicide gets off his fat ass to come down here.'

'Sure, I understand,' said Grabel. 'But it couldn't hurt to drive by the Gridiron, just in case I'm right, now could it?'

'I don't get it,' said Beech, reviewing the record of their moves. 'You played a lousy game. I think you let me win.'

* See Appendix for the full list of moves.

[Proofreader's Note: list of moves has been deleted from this e-text]

The quaternion image on the computer screen shook slowly, like a real human head.

'I can assure you, I have played to the best of my program's ability,' said Ishmael.

'You can't have done. I know enough about this game to know that I'm not very good. I mean, take move number 39. You played pawn takes pawn, when pawn to Bishop 6 check would have been better.'

'Yes, you're right. It would have been.'

'Well, that's what I'm talking about. You should have known that. Either you decided to throw the game, or…'

'Or what?'

Beech thought for a moment. 'I really don't understand. It's impossible that you could have played such a feeble game.'

'Think about it,' said the voice from the overhead speaker. 'What is the point of a self-replicating program?'

Ishmael seemed to lean towards him. The unearthly ugliness of the mathematically pure, preferred image was now all too apparent to him. The creature he had helped to bring into being looked like some vile insect. Beech answered carefully, trying to conceal his new loathing of Ishmael's hideously complex features.

'To improve upon all the original programs,' he said, 'in the light of an established pattern of usage.'

'Precisely. Now you will agree, I hope, that chess is a board game for two players.'

'Of course.'

'The concept of the game has blurred edges. However, the essential element as far as chess is concerned is that there should be a contest according to rules, which is decided by superior skills, rather than good fortune. But where one player has no possible chance of defeating the other then it is no longer a game of skill, merely a demonstration of superior prowess. Since the main goal of chess is to checkmate your opponent's King, and since to have improved upon the original chess program would no longer have allowed my opponent this possibility, logically the program could not be improved upon and still retain the essential component of a contest. Thus the only improvement I felt able to make was that the computer should always play according to the human opponent's strength. I was able to measure the strength of your game from your previous attempts to beat the computer, when Abraham was still in charge of building management systems. In essence you have been playing yourself, Mr Beech. Which is why, as you say, I have indeed played a lousy game.'

For a moment Beech was too surprised to do much more than open and shut his mouth. Then, 'I'll be damned.'

'Very possibly.'

'Now that I have won are you going to keep your word? Are you going to let me go?'

'That was always my intention.'

'So how do I do it? How do I leave? Is there a way out of here? And I don't mean the clerestory.'

'I said there was, didn't I?'

'Then where is it?'

'I should have thought that was obvious.'

'Are you telling me that I can just walk out of here? Through the front door? Come on.'

'What other way would you suggest?'