Torchwood: Exodus Code Read online

  Within fifteen minutes of the fishing boat docking with the Ice Maiden, Jack was the last one remaining on the platform. Rhys remained as close to the edge of the fishing boat’s bow as he could without tipping into the sea. His rain slicker was soaked and his face was wet with tears. The gulf between him and Jack and Gwen had never seemed so wide as it did at that moment.

  ‘I wish I could come with you. I could help,’ said Rhys, his voice choked with emotion.

  ‘I know you could, Rhys, but you need to stay in Wales for Anwen’s sake. Mary isn’t up to it on her own, you know that, and if I need something done from this end I need to know I have you and Andy here to take care of it.’

  Rhys nodded. When Jack had told him about the Ice Maiden, its mission and its crew, and how he thought it’d be safer if Gwen was with him on the ship rather than at the house, where she’d have to be under constant watch, Rhys had reluctantly agreed. In the middle of the night, they’d hustled Gwen to a Penarth hotel, not revealing to Mary that her daughter had been found and certainly not telling her she’d tried to commit suicide.

  That morning, while they were transporting Gwen to the fishing boat they’d borrowed from one of Rhys’s mates, they’d listened to reports on the radio of four women suffering from the same madness as Gwen having taken overdoses and being found by loved ones too late to do anything but bury them.

  ‘Rhys, you have my word, she’ll come back to you whole. I promise.’ Jack smiled, slowly saluted Rhys, then climbed up the ladder to the deck of the Ice Maiden.

  Drenched and despairing, Rhys clutched the stern of the bouncing fishing boat all the way back to the dock, watching bleary-eyed as the ship’s engines roared to life and the Ice Maiden glided across the darkening horizon back out into the Atlantic.

  47

  BELOW DECK THAT night the rest of the crew and its passengers – with the exception of Gwen, who remained sedated and strapped to a bunk in Dana’s cabin – sat around the table in the mess for a meal of shrimp étouffée, bottles of Jax beer from Hollis’s private stash, and, at Eva’s request, a fresh fruit salad. The food had kept them in small talk, their taste buds trumping the crew’s curiosity about their passengers. The dishes had yet to be cleared, but Cash insisted that Hollis remain at the table with them for a little longer. Finn took charge in the wheelhouse.

  ‘More drinks all round,’ said Cash, who, like Jack, was nursing the beer with which he’d begun the meal.

  Sliding his chair closer to Jack’s, Hollis said, ‘don’t mind if I do, boss.’

  ‘That was one of the best meals I’ve eaten in a long time,’ admitted Jack. The music in his head from the meal was, thankfully, soft and sultry. Since his conversation with Olivia Steele, and his understanding of what might be happening to him and the world, Jack had been doing his best to embrace his synaesthesia rather than fighting the intensity of his multiple perceptions. He had noted that, since he’d boarded the Ice Maiden, the synaesthesia had lessened. He’d also not seen the vision of the woman’s face since he’d left the Coopers’ house and travelled further from the geyser.

  ‘You could do with a little more flesh on your bones,’ said Hollis, who had used his Creole grandmother’s recipe for the étouffée in hopes of impressing this mysterious handsome stranger. Hollis hadn’t felt this giddy after meeting someone for the first time since he’d seduced the chef at the Mardi Gras ball after only two mouthfuls of his gumbo.

  Sam laughed. ‘Who’re you kidding, Hollis? You’d like your flesh to be on his bones.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind that either,’ said Eva, who’d been drinking red wine steadily through dinner.

  Everyone was suddenly silent. Vlad’s eyes widened in astonishment. Jack bit his tongue. Then Hollis snorted, Sam grinned, Cash guffawed and the table erupted in laughter.

  Eva blushed bright red. ‘Did I say that out loud?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ laughed Vlad, ‘very out loud. Maybe you should switch to water if we’re going to get any work done at all tonight.’

  Jack put his hand on Eva’s. ‘Your flesh on mine will be a pleasure I’ll look forward to.’ Then he turned and put his hand on Hollis’s arm. ‘Yours too.’

  ‘Well, now that we’ve got all the important stuff out of the way,’ said Cash, shaking his head, ‘and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but can we get down to some business of the non-sexual kind?’ He rolled his eyes at Eva, who shrank into her seat.

  Jack explained what he’d learned from Dr Steele about synaesthesia and how he thought something was heightening it.

  ‘The medical community’s response,’ said Jack, ‘has so far been to keep these women sedated, like Gwen. The problem is that when they have any moments of lucidity, some of them are aware of what’s happening and have already tried to kill themselves. Some of them have succeeded.’

  ‘Synaesthesia is a pretty cool thing,’ said Vlad. ‘I mean when it’s not out of control. I know a few gamers who can see their compositions and their coding in colours and shapes.’ He popped the top off another Jax. ‘If you think about it, it’s almost like their brains are able to construct meaning from downloading multiple codes all at the same time, like a synaesthete’s hard drive is way more sophisticated than the rest of us.’

  ‘Are you a synaesthete, Vlad?’ asked Jack.

  Vlad shook his head, tilting his beer bottle. ‘Only shapes and colours dancing in front of my eyes are drug- or alcohol-induced, sorry to say.’

  ‘I am,’ said Eva. ‘Well, mildly anyway. And I never knew what it was called until I took a psych class in university and my professor was one. It would really disturb her if we came to class wearing too much perfume. She could hear the smells. Created too much noise in her head. She said she couldn’t concentrate.’

  ‘Which is part of the problem with whatever’s happening to these women,’ said Jack, accepting a slice of pecan pie from Hollis. ‘The numbers that are being officially tracked could be much lower than the reality. It’s difficult to know how many women are simply dismissing their symptoms and trying to carry on as usual.’

  ‘That’s really horrible,’ said Vlad, pulling another chair over and stretching his legs across it. Jack noticed how intently Eva was watching Vlad. Jack checked Vlad out, approving of what he was seeing but he thought Eva might have to make the moves. Vlad was either oblivious to Eva’s longing or he was consciously ignoring her. Jack thought he could smell her desire from across the table.

  ‘To lose control of your mind,’ said Sam, ‘that’s… that’s crazy.’

  Hollis leaned across the table and slapped Sam upside the head. ‘Mr Understatement, thank you.’

  ‘Hell of a thing,’ said Cash, ‘if your wife comes after you with the cleaver when it’s her time of the month.’

  Jack stared at Cash for a beat, then grinned and got up from the table. ‘Know what, Cash? I think you might have hit on something. I should have thought of that.’ Jack went over to the chalk board where Hollis, in an effort to give the ship’s meals a little flair, wrote a daily menu. Jack looked at Hollis. ‘May I?’

  ‘Course, darlin’.’

  Jack wiped his sleeve across the board, erasing most of the menu. He picked up the chalk, addressing all of them. ‘I’ve been assuming that all of these women with heightened synaesthesia are reacting to something in their surroundings, and according to Dr Steele who’s treating a number of the cases in Wales, there must be some kind of external trigger.’

  Jack wrote Gwen’s name at the top. ‘Gwen has the chromosome for synaesthesia.’ Jack noted this under Gwen’s name. ‘But what if because she had a baby recently she also has a particular combination of chemicals in her body that have been triggered along with her synaesthesia.’

  ‘If that’s true,’ said Vlad, ‘then it would also explain why not every woman who is a synaesthete is experiencing this heightening, because it’s not just the synaesthesia – it’s their hormones, too.’

  ‘I think so,’ said Jack. ‘But there’s still a p
iece missing.’

  Jack drew a circle round Gwen’s name and the word synaesthesia, then an overlapping circling with the word hormones in the centre. Then he drew a third and put a question mark in it. ‘If we’re going to help these women, we need to find what’s in this third… circle.’

  Jack stared at the image he’d drawn on the board, a Venn diagram. He didn’t know if it was coincidence or not but it looked weirdly like the symbol Gwen had carved on her forearm.

  Eva, who had been silent throughout the conversation, spoke up. ‘I think Vlad and I may have discovered the third trigger.’

  48

  EVA UNROLLED A thick sheaf of printouts in front of Jack.

  Cash rolled his eyes. ‘Nothing fancy, lass, keep it simple tonight. He can see the numbers and all the data tomorrow.’

  Eva gulped her water and stood up. She put on her glasses. ‘For the past week, Vlad and I have been monitoring a series of submerged tremors, eruptions in the deepest parts of the ocean floor. None of which have resulted in major tsunamis as you might expect, and none of them have impacted major land masses. They’ve hit mostly on the edges of shorelines. But they’ve resulted in underwater geysers like the one that broke through the surface in Wales.’

  ‘Which ones?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Coast of Vietnam. Off the far northern coast of Scotland—’

  ‘And,’ interrupted Vlad, ‘the islands south of New Zealand, and the southern coast of Peru.’

  ‘Peru?’ asked Jack.

  Vlad nodded. ‘Shelley’s running a program that’ll look for tick points, see what comes up.’

  ‘Shelley?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Tick points?’ asked Hollis.

  ‘When you’re comparing things in a paper chart the traditional way,’ said Jack to Hollis, ‘you’d give tick marks or check marks to elements of similar qualities, to situations or variables that overlap. Sort of like the centre of my Venn diagram.’

  Vlad nodded. ‘If those geographic areas have anything in common, Shelley will find them much faster than any of our brains.’ He looked at Jack. ‘Shelley’s the ship’s artificial intelligence. She also keeps the systems on the ship running, but I think you knew that since you gave her the virus that shut us down.’

  ‘I needed your attention.’ Jack sipped his beer, and looked across at Eva, who Jack decided was as adept with technology and probably as smart as Vlad, yet she kept deferring to him in the conversation. ‘So you named your AI after a Romantic poet?’

  Eva shook her head. ‘We named it after a Romantic poet’s wife.’

  ‘Go on, Eva,’ said Cash, smiling. ‘Finish your report.’

  ‘The final thing I’d add is… well… I haven’t really discussed it yet with anyone else,’ she paused, taking a sip of her wine and not her water before continuing, ‘but, well, I think there may be a way to connect the underwater eruptions with the cases of heightened synaesthesia.’

  Jack looked over the map that Eva had created. ‘Let me see this on your screen.’

  Eva gathered up her files and led Jack and Vlad across the passageway to the communication centre. Cash headed up to the wheelhouse with Sam, leaving Hollis to clean up in the mess.

  ‘I’ll check on Gwen,’ said Cash, on his way down the corridor.

  In the comms centre, things had been settled back in their place since the storm. The computer screens glowed in the dim light and an occasional beep from a monitor punctuated the silence. Vlad perched on the end of his desk, his hands in his pockets, while Eva picked up her iPad. The massive screen on the wall powered up, displaying a map of the world with the epicentre of each of the deep-water events flashing in red. Jack stepped in front of the map, folded his arms and stared at it in silence.

  On the flat screen on Eva’s desk, a young woman dressed in an off-shoulder black velvet gown, her hair pulled back from an intelligent pretty face appeared. She was sitting at an old-fashioned writing desk, a fountain pen in her hand. At first glance, Jack thought she looked like a woman from the nineteenth century, demure and modest. Looking closer, he noticed a nose piercing, a neck tattoo and more than a delicate amount of skin showing when the dress shifted from her shoulder.

  Jack laughed. ‘So this is what you think Mary Shelley would look like today?’

  ‘Shelley, meet Captain Jack Harkness,’ said Eva.

  A sultry woman’s voice with an English accent answered. ‘The pleasure is all mine, Captain. Welcome aboard the Ice Maiden.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Jack.

  ‘I believe I’ve corrected the glitch in my programs that allowed you to seduce me so spectacularly.’ Shelley’s voice was youthful and playful.

  ‘My apologies for that, Shelley.’

  ‘Apology accepted. May I ask… were you the creator of the program you used? It appeared so elegant, so graceful, and yet it was quite brutish in its approach. Its power took me quite by surprise.’

  ‘Let’s just say it’s not from around here,’ said Jack.

  Vlad and Eva glanced at each other, puzzled and slightly disconcerted by the nature of the exchange. Shelley was a powerful AI, but social conversation was not her strongest program. They’d never needed it to be.

  ‘May I show the others what I’ve learned?’

  ‘Be my guest,’ said Jack, setting a flat disc the size of a hockey puck on top of Vlad’s desk.

  Jack tapped the top of the disc and in an instant Mary Shelley was standing in front of Vlad’s desk, morphed from a talking head on the screen to a fully formed female, a hologram, but an incredibly sophisticated one. Nothing translucent or wavering about her. To the eye, she looked alive, standing before them clad in a body-hugging calf-length black velvet dress that looked like a character from one of Vlad’s steampunk stories. On her feet, Shelley was wearing a pair of shiny cowboy boots.

  ‘I must admit to always having had a silly fascination with the Wild West in America,’ she giggled, kicking up her heels. Her fountain pen remained firmly gripped in one hand and her black leather journal in the other.

  ‘Wow!’ exclaimed Eva, staring wide-eyed at their avatar.

  Shelley curtsied towards Eva.

  ‘Well, fuck me,’ grinned Vlad.

  ‘That function,’ said Shelley, pirouetting in front of Vlad, ‘is not yet operational.’

  ‘Well done, Shelley,’ said Jack. ‘You’ve adapted the software to your scaffolding quite quickly.’

  ‘Yes, Captain. It feels as if it has been an integral part of me all along. Although I’m still absorbing a few minor details, I predict I’ll be fully functioning for your needs in the next few days.’

  ‘I can’t wait,’ said Vlad, keying commands into his computer and staring in awe at what he was seeing. ‘Look at this, Eva. She’s synchronised with all the ship’s systems, including a mobility function.’

  ‘Yes, Vlad, I can be accessed in this form anywhere on the ship and off via the satellite.’

  ‘Bloody brilliant!’

  Jack laughed, pleased that his gift to the Ice Maiden was making Eva and Vlad happy. He knew Cash would approve and he certainly owed him a favour, more than one. It was also the least he could do given what he was coming to realise about the submarine tremors, the wide-spread synaesthesia and his own fragmented memories, Jack had a feeling that their pleasure may be short-lived.

  Eva leaned over Vlad’s shoulder, checked out his screen then stared back at Jack. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. You’ve multiplied her functionality, adapted her modalities, increased her scope and intelligence… It’s like you’ve…’

  ‘Made her bigger, better, smarter and sexier?’ said Jack, winking at Shelley who winked back.

  ‘All those things,’ said Eva. ‘But she still looks like our avatar.’

  ‘This design is amazing; I’m impressed. The algorithms are brilliant,’ said Vlad staring at the code, and every few beats glancing up at Shelley smiling next to him. ‘You’ve morphed her in a way that I didn’t think we – I mean our government
s – had the capability to do yet with artificial intelligence.’

  Eva had pulled her chair up next to Vlad. ‘This is some serious cutting-edge restructuring. I read about this code-layering in a paper once, but it was based on some sophisticated theories, pretty sci-fi level design.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Jack.

  They both paused in their analysis of the program. ‘Where did you get this? Are we going to have the men in black chasing us?’

  Jack shook his head. ‘The few people who know of its existence are gone or deeply sedated or no longer care. I needed a secure home for my program and your system, your Shelley, seemed as good a place as any to be that home. For now, anyway.’

  ‘I’m gratified and honoured, Captain,’ said Shelley. ‘Torchwood and I are enjoying each other immensely.’

  Vlad was taking furious notes, unable to draw his eyes from his computer screens. ‘This shit is amazing!’

  Jack put his hand on Vlad’s shoulder. ‘You’ll have plenty of time to enjoy Shelley to her fullest later. Right now, I need to have her do a little work.’

  49

  ‘SHELLEY,’ SAID VLAD, ‘show us what you’ve learned about the eruptions and the geysers from your analysis of our deep-water data, including their current activity and the order in which they occurred.’

  ‘It would be my pleasure, Vlad.’

  ‘What do you mean current activity?’ asked Cash, as he walked into the comms centre.

  ‘None of the underwater events are on expected plate boundaries, and none runs along traditional fault lines,’ explained Vlad. ‘But here’s the even stranger thing – each one is still active, low level right now, but active nonetheless.’

  ‘According to the data, Captain,’ said Shelley, ‘these tremors are not the result of earthquakes but of volcanic eruptions causing a number of hydrothermal vents to crack through the ocean floor.’ She was tapping her fountain pen on her journal. As she did so, aspects of the map were highlighted on the screen, red pulsing lights representing the epicentres. ‘These vents are similar to the one that has already risen through the surface in Wales and one or two other deep water sites’.’