A Dream Of Locomotives

I didn't put it on that first day. Nor the second, despite what Ballinger had said. Mostly I wandered around the flat looking at it and trying to remember all the rumours I'd ever heard about US Special Forces telepaths. A lot of bollocks, when it came down to it. The only real thing I had was the burner sitting on the living room coffee table.

Finally I sat down on the sofa and put the headset on, settled the contacts against my temples and put the tip of my index finger on the power stud.

Then I took it off and stood up and paced about the room. Stood at the window a while and watched the traffic and the people go up and down Green Lanes. I'd used burners before, but they had been like the ones Rixi made, custom jobs put together as tinker projects by people who wanted to see if and how they worked. This was different. This would make me a man.

I went back to the sofa. Pick your brains...? Put the headset on again and drove the stud home with my thumb.

I kept shouting that the afterburn was totally unmanageable. Ballinger kept repeating that he couldn't understand a word I was saying. It took all my concentration to stop myself yelling down the phone at him in Armenian.

It had not been like other times. Then, I had had a sense of eavesdropping, of looking over someone's shoulder. This had been like stepping entirely out of my body, struggling up the road with a bag of shopping that seemed too heavy for what it contained.

I still had her arthritis pain, the intermittent flutter in her chest, the all-over ache that comes from being too old, bearing too many children, seeing too many homes lost, too many friends and family fall by the wayside and die over the years.

Ballinger laughed. He didn't even sound annoyed that I'd taken so long to use the thing. Stick with it, he said. Sounds like it's working.

As I hung up, I heard an ambulance coming down the street. Afterburn works both ways. For a little while, the old Armenian lady had thought she was me. I hope she survived it.

Ballinger came round the next morning. Tonight, he said. Hope you're ready.

It was raining as the bus pulled slowly up Muswell Hill from Hornsey. A couple of kids were sharing a spliff and listening to a boombox the size of a speaker trunk on the top deck, to the silent discomfort of the other passengers.

I got off near the top of the hill and walked back down. It had taken me all afternoon and the early part of the evening to get here, going halfway across London by Tube, changing lines and trains a dozen times to make sure I wasn't being followed, before heading back to Finsbury Park to catch the bus. Ballinger had insisted I do it this way; in a straight line, I could have walked here from home in under an hour.

I counted door numbers until I found the house I was looking for, a big old place dripping in the rain, all its windows dark. I walked up the steps to the front door and rang the bell.

The place was full of Muscle. Not Muscle like the Baron's bodyguard, not actual physical mass, but calm, slight men who seemed capable of quite appalling acceleration if the need arose. They were all wearing Uzi flechette pistols plugged into upside-down rigs under their armpits, and some of them were also wearing body armour. None of them said a word, and I had the feeling that if my face hadn't fitted tonight's scenario B if, say, I had been a canvasser for the local Labour Party ringing the doorbell, or a Jehovah's Witness B then I would simply have disappeared.

The one who had opened the door beckoned me down a hallway dimly-lit by bioluminescent tubes stuck to the flock wallpaper. My wet feet scuffed up the newspaper covering the floor. I smelled dust, old furniture polish, a faint ghost of cat urine.

Down at the end of the hallway was another door. The guard opened it and motioned me through into a large room at the back of the house, illuminated by four powerful battery-operated lamps. There was more newspaper on the floor, scattered with bright curls of wire and discarded components and spirals of insulation from the installation of the Cray mini-supercomputer which stood in one corner in a nest of liquid nitrogen cylinders for its supercooling system.

Beside the Cray on an upright kitchen chair sat a small plump Scandinavian-looking kid with spots, a white teeshirt with Fuck You, I Was Here First picked out across the chest in carmine lettering, and his blond hair in dreadlocks.

The guard closed the door behind me. I heard a key turn in the lock. The kid and I looked at each other, but he didn't say anything. He became agitated when I moved towards the Cray, so I backed away and sat in the opposite corner of the room.

We waited a long time, the blond boy and I. I dozed for a while in the corner. It was nearly one o'clock in the morning when I heard quiet voices in the hall, heard the door being unlocked.

Ballinger, of course, smiling, well, are we all right, boys? I sat where I was.

He went over to the Cray, ignoring the kid's silent protests, and started to fiddle with something at the back of the computer. Then he turned and smiled, winked at me and jerked his head towards the door.

The kid saw it first, and I saw his eyes light up. He jumped out of the chair and started to assemble some complicated-looking optical connections beside the computer. Then the door swung wide open and one of the guards wheeled in the thing I was supposed to pick. I stood up slowly.

They say true machine-intelligence will be forever beyond our ingenuity. They say it is impossible to build a machine with the soul of a man. But there are terrible stories, rumours from higher strata, that the search for artificial intelligence has led researchers into areas that would have been more familiar to Mary Shelley than Alan Turing.

Ballinger had lied to me, of course. There was no corporate defector. He had brought me a man with the soul of a machine.

Or rather a little girl, not more than six years old, sitting comfortably in a heavily-customised wheelchair with what looked like a complete life-support system attached to the back.

She looked Latin-American. Dark skin, black hair. Her eyes were closed, her arms and legs bound to the chair with soft cloth restraints. A breather.

The stories say that, failing to duplicate human neural pathways within a computer, scientists have started to take unwanted children and augment their brains with implanted components, hardwired architectures, neural amplifiers. Thinking machines in human bodies. They don't live long, I'm told.

The thing Ballinger had brought me was called MALLARD, and the people who were financing this operation needed access to its mind. There were any number of hardwired impediments to this, so they needed someone who could actually read its mind. There was a satellite tile set into the roof, and a quintuple-blind channel through the Bell-Telecommunications European comsat so that Ballinger's masters could watch, and at that point I told Ballinger to fuck right off.

He sighed and put a hand in his pocket and produced a large wad of paper currency. I told him I didn't know what reading the breather's mind would do to me and I wasn't in any kind of a hurry to find out. I was shouting by this time.

He just shrugged and stuffed the money into my jacket pocket. It's been done in China, he told me. Go on; it's only a person, after all.

I told him to go and fuck China, unlocked the door, and opened it. Three of the calm, quiet men were standing outside and I made the mistake of trying to go through them.

I found myself sitting on the chair, two of the guards holding me down. The third was standing to one side pointing a riot gun at me with a muzzle so wide I could have put my hand down it. Ballinger was rooting through my pockets. The blond kid bobbed up from behind the Cray with an optical lead in his hand. He went over to the wheelchair and lifted the girl's black hair away from her neck; I saw, nested within a deep ring of scar tissue, a flash of interface pins at the back of her head, watched the boy lift the connecter towards her, and I shrieked.

Ballinger found the burner, took it out of my pocket and untangled the lead. I yelled at him that there was no way he could make me do this if I didn't want to, but he just pursed his lips and put the headset on me. Then he pressed the power button and I catapulted straight off the chair.

Half of London was inside my head, laughing, crying, hating, loving, hurting, dying, dreaming, fucking. Ballinger that turned the burner's sensitivity all the way up. He was trying to drive me insane, or kill me, or both.

Instincts I never knew I had forced me to concentrate through the unbelievable volume of sensation, narrow down the focus to something I could handle, cutting out the input bit by bit.

Convulsing on the shredded newspaper on the floor, I looked up, and I saw the girl open her eyes. But they weren't eyes. They were cameras. Tiny little cameras.

The sheer weight of sensory impression washed over me, a great wing of shadow like the moon eclipsing the sun.

And then there was a huge darkness, and far away at the calm heart of it all there was a bright cool fountain whose waters made the sound of a diesel locomotive.