By the Pricking of Her Thumb

by Adam Roberts

Genres: Science Fiction

Synopsis

Private Investigator Alma is caught up in another impossible murder. One of the world's four richest people may be dead - but nobody is sure which one. Hired to discover the truth behind the increasingly bizarre behaviour of the ultra-rich, Alma must juggle treating her terminally ill lover with a case which may not have a victim. Inspired by the films of Kubrick, this stand-alone novel returns to the near-future of THE REAL-TOWN MURDERS, and puts Alma on a path to a world she can barely understand. Witty, moving and with a mystery deep at its heart, this novel again shows Adam Roberts' mastery of the form.

Release date: August 23, 2018

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 253

Sample

1: The Thumb Itself

Alma couldn’t make sense of it until she met the monkeys. Don’t blame her for that. It wasn’t a simple business – first the Howdunnit, then the Whodunnit-to, and both together a real tangle, inhospitable to solution. A darker time for Alma than any she had previously known. A confounding puzzle.

Until, that is, she met the monkeys and was finally able to piece the whole thing together.

Well, I say ‘met’. It wasn’t what you’d call a conventional meeting.

Well, I say ‘monkeys’.

At any rate, first there was the Howdunnit. That was the one with the needle. Then afterwards, as a quite separate matter, was the Whodunnit-to. But first things first. How is always primary. Who-to has to be a secondary consideration.

It proved easy to be mistaken about such things as who actually was employing her, and to solve which crime. There was a howdunnit in place of the whodunnit, and then a whodunnit-to in place of the same thing.

‘Take me through it one more time,’ said Alma.

‘As many times as you like, sweetheart,’ said Officer Maupo.

‘The woman is dead?’

‘Dead as dial-up,’ the officer confirmed.

Maupo was not physically present in the room with Alma, of course, but the latest iteration telephonics were so realistic it would have been easy to think she was. Fact of the matter: Alma was beginning to feel old. They hadn’t had this new hyperreal hologrammer, all these creepily precise visualisations of people hundreds of miles away, when she was a girl. Back then a hologram looked like a hologram, scratches and blips and all.

Alma cleared her throat. ‘And she has a needle in her thumb. Like Aurora.’

Maupo hesitated. ‘Aurora? My feed is giving me a disambiguation list as long as my overtime claim sheet on that one.’

‘Sleeping Beauty,’ Alma said.

‘I see what you— No, though. Because, you see, Aurora got a needle in her thumb and fell asleep, where Alexa Lund got a needle in her thumb and fell dead.’ Out of nowhere, Maupo grinned. ‘Less Aurora, more Aurigormortis.’

Oh, she was a sparky one, this Officer Maupo.

‘You are sure the needle in the thumb killed her?’ Alma asked.

‘Indeed we’re not,’ said Maupo. ‘We’re not sure of anything. Which is why Pu Sto has sent me to ask you to assist.’

‘Being,’ Alma said, ‘too busy to come herself.’

‘Ah,’ said the officer. ‘About that. Pu Sto herself asked me to say—’

Alma put her hand up like she was directing traffic in antique times.

‘It doesn’t matter. Really it doesn’t. I’m assuming there’s a reason you mention the needle in the thumb? You would hardly bring it up if it were wholly unrelated.’

‘We’ve honestly no idea. No needle’s-eye, dear.’

Maupo gave Alma the benefit of her loopy grin a second time. It crossed Alma’s mind that the policewoman might be flirting with her. She put the notion to one side.

‘Let me summarise what you’re telling me,’ Alma said. ‘Just so I’m clear. Ms Lund, a thirty-nine-year-old woman in good health, was found dead in her apartment, and the only thing out of the ordinary about her condition – apart, of course, from the fact that she was dead – is that she had a six-centimetre-long sewing needle stuck in her thumb.’

‘That’s the nub of it.’

‘Is there,’ Alma prompted, ‘anything else I ought to know?’

‘That I get off duty at ten?’ Maupo offered.

‘Anything else I need to know about the case. Surveillance footage?’

‘Not that we can find. Normally the apartment would have footage, of course, but it just so happens the program was offline for fifteen minutes, on a diagnostic and rebooting protocol. It doesn’t know who ordered the diagnostic and reboot, although whoever it was had good enough bona fides to convince a level-7 AI.’

‘Those can be forged,’ Alma said. ‘Though it isn’t cheap.’

‘This implies that somebody with a lot of money wanted Lund dead, and was able to sideline the apartment for long enough to make that happen.’

‘Or perhaps Lund herself ordered the diagnosis and reboot?’

‘Unlikely,’ said the officer. ‘Why wouldn’t she just tell her apartment to undertake the diagnostic? I mean, if it was her, then why hide the fact? All we know is that the program recognised valid command codes, and switched itself to diagnostic mode. When it switched back to its regular duties, fifteen minutes later, Lund was dead on the floor.’

‘With a needle in her thumb.’

‘Through her thumb. Pushed in through the back of the thumbnail, right through the joint and out the other side.’

‘Painful sounding,’ said Alma. ‘But not in itself fatal. And there was no poison, or nanotech, on the tip of this needle?’

‘Nothing. Nothing on the needle, nothing in Lund’s system.’

‘What does your coroner say about cause of death?’

‘She says circulatory shock.’

‘Having a needle pushed through your thumb would certainly be a shock.’

‘No,’ said Maupo. ‘Not that. Circulatory shock is medical terminology. It has nothing to do with common or garden shock. There are four main types of it, each one defined by the underlying cause. It might be, for instance, that your body goes into shock because of a large-scale haemorrhage. Or because the heart stops. Or there’s some blockage in the circulation. Or it might be that a massive infection simply overloads your body, or trauma of some kind, allergy – you’ve heard of anaphylactic shock, I guess. Lots of possible causes, but the same result. The body, in effect, shuts off.’

‘Death.’

‘Death.’

‘Maybe,’ said Alma, ‘she died of fright. That’s a thing, isn’t it?’

Maupo shook her head. ‘No, not really. Not a thing, generally speaking. And that’s super unlikely to have been what happened here, because her adrenaline and cortisol levels would have been way higher. There was evidence of adrenaline residue, so something startled her. But whatever it was had time to settle down, physiologically, before she died.’

‘Died,’ Alma prompted, once more, ‘of?’

‘Her circulation went into a specific, medically defined form of shock. Oxygen was not being delivered to her organs. It was probably the cerebral hypoxia that actually killed her.’

‘But circulatory shock can’t be caused by getting jabbed in the thumb with a needle,’ said Alma, who was checking her own feed on the condition. ‘Or people would be dropping dead at sewing classes and acupuncturists and tattoo studios in their thousands daily.’

‘That is a perfectly accurate summary of the state of play.’

‘Why would somebody want to kill her?’ Alma asked.

‘Why,’ Maupo countered, ‘does anybody want to kill anyone?’

‘You ask that like it’s a rhetorical question. Actually, it’s not. It admits of quite a straightforward answer. Most people don’t want to kill other people. When murder happens it’s almost always either hot or cold, and if it’s cold then the reason is almost always one of two things.’

‘Speaking as a police officer,’ said Maupo, arching a simulated eyebrow, ‘I feel it would be in my professional interest to know what those two things are.’

‘Money,’ said Alma, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, ‘or psychopathy. Including genocide in the latter category. If it’s psychopathy, individual or collective, then the death of Ms Lund will already be, or will soon prove to be, part of a larger pattern of murder.’

‘And what about the hot murders?’

‘Passion, sex, drunkenness, a flare-up of rage or resentment – all those. Whoever did this took pains to close down surveillance, and left no other clues or pointers. They were meticulous. They knew what they were doing, and planned it carefully. So this one was cold.’

‘Money, then.’

‘Was Ms Lund wealthy?’

‘Not rich-rich. She was well-to-do, I suppose. Worked for a private company, spent most of her time in-Shine, liked classic culture, drank only twentieth-century wine. That level of rich.’

‘What was her job?’

‘Details are hard to get – it’s a privately owned company, and not under obligation to post anything publicly. Owned by a firm that’s owned by a firm that’s owned by one of the ultra-rich. You know how it is. Best as we can tell she was working on consciousness. Modelling human consciousness.’

‘Full AI?’

‘That’s our assumption. One of those people who hadn’t given up on that dream – actual artificial consciousness, the real-deal AI.’

‘Maybe she had got close, and was killed to stop the research going any further?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Or maybe she had broken through, and was tortured to obtain her work, and then killed to cover traces? Either way, actual AI has the potential to generate prodigious amounts of money, and money is a very solid reason to kill.’

‘Not much of a torture, though, is it? One pinprick in the thumb?’

‘Maybe she had a phobia about such things. Maybe a childhood viewing of the fate of Princess Aurora in Sleeping Beauty traumatised her.’

‘At any rate, if we get any more details on her employment,’ said Maupo, ‘I’ll let you know.’

‘Can I see the body?’

‘Pu Sto said you’d ask that. I’ll have to get clearance. This is an official police investigation, you know, and however tight you are with Pu, you are not actually police. But I dare say it can be arranged. Maybe tomorrow. Until then, I’m authorised to share all official files and data with you, and any assistance you can render will be—’ She broke off. ‘There are rules, you know,’ she went on, in a different tone of voice, ‘rules against police officers entering into relationships with the members of the public with whom they come into contact during the course of their investigations. But you’re not strictly speaking a member of the public, are you?’

’I’m not, strictly speaking,’ Alma replied, ‘single.’

‘Oh,’ said Maupo. ‘I mean, of course.’

‘Of course in the sense of OK? Or in the sense that you had previously checked my confidential files and already knew that? And that, given the state of health of my partner, you figured you might have a shot?’

For the first time in their encounter Maupo looked actually uncomfortable.

‘You know very well that it’s against police rules to go poking around files not immediately relevant to the investigation. Against the rules means against the law. And— Look – this specific thing. This dead person, Lund. I’m police and we have instincts, and my instinct tells me this whole thumb thing is surely, surely irrelevant.’

‘Either the needle in the thumb is related, in some way, to Lund’s death, however hard it is to see how, or it is unrelated. If it is the latter, the needle is either purely adventitious, which seems unlikely, or else is part of some red herring game, some attempt at distraction. And if that’s what we’re dealing with, then there must be something the killer is trying to distract us from. Or I should say, something from which the killer is trying,’ Alma smiled one of her rare smiles, ‘to distract us.’

‘And what are you trying to distract me from, Ms Alma,’ said Maupo, recovering her composure with another of her weird off-kilter grins, and essaying, Alma suddenly heart-sinkingly understood, a waggishly direct form of flirtation. ‘Might you be a tiny bit more single than you said? A little tiny bit more open to going on a date with an interested, attentive and, if I may say so without sounding vainglorious, attractive police officer who—’

‘No,’ said Alma.

Maupo waited for more.

There was no more.

‘Goodbye,’ said Alma.

‘That’s … That’s abrupt.’

‘Very much the kind of person I am,’ agreed Alma. ‘Not just abrupt. The brupt.’

Maupo looked blank for a moment, but then, in a manner evidently unconnected with any notion of mirth, moved her facial muscles into a smile. Joining the game was joining the game, after all.

‘OK then,’ she said, heartily. ‘Oh jay, oh kay and oh ell – I shall take that,’ and she paused, and bowed with old-school courtesy, ‘as a definite no-no-maybe. À tout à l’heure, Ms Alma.’

She ended the call, and the sim vanished.



It was time for Marguerite’s next bout of treatment. Alma went through to the bedroom and settled to the business of determining which fractal iteration her lover’s polyform pathology was taking this time. Every four hours and four minutes, without fail. Never quite the same from one appearance to the next, never predictable – designed that way by persons unknown, to torment and likely to kill.

Alma watched the antibodies spread, like smoke through the blood, watched the little spikes run up and down on the toximeter. As with chess, no combination of moves was ever precisely like any previous pattern, but sometimes fell into more broadly recognisable strategies. So absorbed was she in constellating the dosage trifecta and inspraying the antipyre in the right places that she barely noticed how uncharacteristically withdrawn Marguerite was being.

‘What’s up with you?’ she asked, washing her hands afterwards.

Marguerite was staring at a point on the ceiling.

‘That young police officer,’ she said, in a haughty voice, ‘seemed unusually interested in you.’

‘And why wouldn’t she be?’ Alma said, coming to the bedside and kissing Marguerite’s cliff face cheek. ‘I’m hot.’

‘You are so attentive to my physical hurt,’ Marguerite replied, affecting a tragic-heroine voice, ‘yet so careless of my emotional suffering.’

‘Don’t be a bloke about this, Rita. If you don’t trust me by now then you’re being seriously stubborn in your insecurity. I’m quite tempted to tell you to get over yourself.’

‘Have you seen myself?’ Marguerite returned. ‘You realise what manner of Alpine Hannibal I’d have to be to traverse that?’

Alma kissed her again. ‘That’s better. And you have nothing to worry about, you know. The flirty copper … That was just her manner, I think. I don’t think it was anything personal. More to the point, she was bringing me a case – a paying gig, from Pu Sto herself. You were eavesdropping, so you know all about it.’

‘A ridiculous case,’ said Marguerite, taking a long sip from her straw. ‘A trivial case. A waste of your time and my genius.’

‘You’ve solved it then?’

‘There was something on the needle, of course.’

‘Flirty copper says not.’

‘The police officer in question,’ said Marguerite, her left eyebrow arching like a willow branch, ‘clearly knows nothing, and cares not that this is so. A human being doesn’t die of being pricked in the thumb – doesn’t die, that is, on account of the prick itself. Ergo there was something on the needle. It injected some lethal toxin into the body. If the toxin hasn’t shown up on their post-mortem scans, that means it erased itself, or metabolised into something inert. It means they’re looking for the wrong thing. Which means it’s not a conventional toxin, or an easily identifiable nanotech agent – so, they need to look again. They need to look harder and look smarter.’

‘I shall go see the body, its needle still in situ. Perhaps you could give me some pointers on what this super-subtle, so-hard-to-detect toxin might be.’

‘I was adored once too,’ said Marguerite, suddenly. ‘And more than once, you know? There are plenty of people mooning about the world nursing broken hearts on my account, you know.’

Alma waited a moment, to give her a space to expand on this observation. When nothing more emerged, she prompted her, gently enough. ‘I don’t doubt it for a moment.’

‘Maybe you are the one who should be touched by insecurity,’ Marguerite said, turning her huge face towards the window. ‘Is all I’m saying.’

‘My love,’ said Alma, kissing her, ‘is made perfect in jealousy. There’s nobody else in the whole wide web of the world for me except you, dear.’

And, after a short and sulky pause, Marguerite said, ‘I do know it,’ in a small voice. ‘Ignore me.’

‘Ignore you? Easier said than done. Have you seen you?’

‘I should tell you more often that I love you. And say how much I— Oh, appreciate is a wormy and underpowered word, a nothing sort of word. But what else can I say? How much I appreciate what you do for me. Why is speech so under-adequate to these things?’

‘You don’t need to say what I already know.’ Alma kissed her again, and went through to the front room for a nap.

2: The Whodunnit-To

Alma slept for three full hours, and woke feeling slightly less bone-deep exhausted than she usually did. She washed, settled down to a cup of coffee, and reviewed the files Officer Maupo had sent through on the murder of Ms Alexa Lund. There was a lot of irrelevant quotidiana, and a lack of useful specific detail: her actual line of work, for instance.

Another slurp of the black stuff, and Alma dipped her toe into the online world of Actually Intelligent Artificial Intelligence – AIAI, as the movement had named itself. Supposedly, a step beyond the merely reactive AIs that ran mundane business in the Real and populated the Shine with such density. Impossible, said some. Not only possible but inevitable, said others.

Surveying the present state of debate was far from edifying: one influential sub-group within the AIAI movement were convinced genuine artificial intelligence would be more than a matter of consciousness – it would be the creation of new souls to glorify God’s creation. For a second, larger group, philosophy, or psychology, or programming logic, or theology, absolutely proved that AIAI was simply impossible, a non-thing, a contradiction in terms.

Was this the world Alexa Lund had inhabited? There was certainly enough animus swirling around to suggest a degree of murderousness. Then again, there was no proof this was even what Lund’s job entailed, let alone any indication she’d got close enough to the holy grail of a properly conscious AI to stir up the hornets.

Alma checked again: a flat fee for undertaking the case, a national minimum bonus if her advice led to an arrest and conviction. Chicken feed, really.

Alma put Alexa Lund to one side and sorted through her admin in-feed. The thing was: money. The thing was: their lack thereof. The need for unpredictable and often unusual medicines was a constant pressure making their joint supply of money lackier and lackier. The government-mandated flat fee for acting as an adviser to the police would make little dent in the debt. A trivial debt-dent.

Better than nothing, yes. Only a tiny bit better, though.

Money. The oldest problem.

And then, as if conjured into being by her need, an offer of work came through, slinking in wrapped firework sparkles of gold and silver and a muted jazz-bugle honk. Fireflies swirled like neon smoke and assembled themselves into the words ‘An unusual case!’

Alma waited.

Finally an avatar poked its golden head into her feed and shunted a permissions request to manifest in the flat. Alma, assuming that a troll with malicious intent would hardly announce themselves so flamboyantly, ran a basic scan and was about to OK the request when she had a second thought. Something tickling her suspicion gland. So she put up a smiling major-domo, cat’s-cradling his hands, and dug swiftly into the metadata of the request. Direct from the office of Jupita. Direct. She double-checked, and it was true. From her penthouse in the Blade Tower, Jupita herself was offering her work.

Alma needed money. If there was one thing Jupita had to a plethoric degree, it was money.

The avatar finally materialised: a slim young male, tightly but not extravagantly muscled, angelic-faced, naked, genital-less and with all-gold skin, like an actor auditioning for the role of Ariel in an especially kitsch production of The Tempest.

‘So,’ he said. ‘You’re Alma.’

‘And you’re Jupita?’

‘Me? Ho, no. Nono, she doesn’t venture this far out of the Shine. And you—’ (the avatar smiled an excessive and dazzlingly silver-toothy smile) ‘—never step into the Shine. Oh, your reputation precedes you.’

Alma said nothing.

‘No, I’m not Jupita, rising. I am but a messenger, come to invite you to the Blade Tower to meet my employer in person. She would like to offer you a case. She is, you know, very wealthy.’

‘Rumours are,’ Alma replied, ‘that she is absolutely wealthy.’

That smile again, like a headache in facial-expression-form. ‘We don’t comment on the rumours that absolute wealth has been achieved. But my employer is certainly wealthy enough to pay you handsomely – if you take her case.’

‘Shunt the details into my feed,’ said Alma, who didn’t like being bounced into things, ‘and I’ll consider whether it falls within my bailiwick. I don’t, as you say, go into the Shine, so if the case requires doing that you’d be better off hiring a different investigator.’

The avatar held up one golden finger. ‘We’ve been right through you, and your history. We have the resources to do a deep search on anyone at all, and we know what we’re getting. There’s a flitter outside and we’d very much appreciate it if you came with us.’

‘Came where?’

‘To meet my employer.’

‘You just said she never leaves the Shine.’

‘No more does she. But she wants to meet you in as close to the flesh as possible. Which means – and believe me, she wouldn’t do this for just anybody – she is willing to step into the antechamber, where her body is plugged, and you can meet the two of them, which is to say the one of them.’

Alma reflexively checked her feed. ‘I need to be back here in fifty-nine minutes.’

‘I am placing a bond for a million euros in your porch,’ said the golden avatar, ‘redeemable if we don’t have you back here in forty minutes precisely.’

‘Well, that’s,’ said Alma, actually startled, ‘certainly an … an unusual … uh.’ A million would eliminate her debt with a healthy sum left over. The downside, of course, was that if she did not get back to the flat before Marguerite’s next treatment was due, her partner would die. But, Alma thought, even if the forty minutes expired, she would still have a further nineteen minutes to hurry home under her own power, and the Blade was not so very far away.

She looked in her feed’s porch. There was the package.

‘Well, all right, then.’

The golden avatar rode the elevator down with Alma, and ushered her with several elaborately florid bows towards the flitter – not, Alma was a little surprised to discover, a gold one, but a regular plasmetal model, though larger and more luxuriously appointed than the standard models. The inside smelled of elderberry.

The car rose so gently into the air she hardly felt the acceleration. The avatar, having vanished from Alma’s apartment, remanifested inside the car.

‘Have you ever been inside the Blade before?’

‘Stepped into the lobby once or twice.’

‘No higher than the ground floor?’

‘No.’

‘My employer doesn’t like the word penthouse,’ said the avatar, as the flitter sped up and Alma’s shoulders and head were pressed into the blue suede upholstery by the acceleration. ‘She insists she is in no sense pent. She is at liberty to travel anywhere, real or in-Shine. But what are the alternatives? Free-house has entirely the wrong connotations. Ah! We’re here!’

The flitter settled onto a landing pad, external to the building, and the passenger door swung up as if pointing the way towards the starry firmament itself. Or heiling a führer.

Alma stepped out. The platform was high above the city, which meant that the whole of R!-town was arranged below: its empty streets and voltaic roofs, its towers and arcades. Behind her the Kennet throw a trapezoid loop around King’s Island, and to the north the broader stripe of the Thames, grape-coloured and gleaming, eased its doubled U course. It was strange to look down upon the drones, small as hornets, as they drifted here and there. The air smelled fresh. The breeze, frisky, rubbed its fingers through Alma’s hair.

The golden avatar led Alma inside: a wide interior space oversupplied with cream sofas and red-and-gold wall patterns. There were low tables and a range of items that, her feed assured her as if nudged to do so by some exterior app, were all absurdly rare and expensive: vases and little sculptures; an actual skull blistered all over with diamonds; on the wall, a painting from the Dutch medieval period of a sombre-faced man in brown standing stiffly alongside his serenely bald-headed bride in green. The whole room was arrayed precisely according to the aesthetic logic of Plutocratic Chic.

There were two human beings in the space, neither of whose identities was openly available to Alma’s feed. There were also three private myrmidrones, one by the elevator and two more standing to attention beside a further, inner door. The two humans eyed her with unalarmed but attentive gazes. She cast a surreptitious line out from her feed, and was immediately, if politely, rebuffed. Identities not to be disclosed without a warrant; private security, licensed to carry firearms, legal and approved, please move on.

‘Through here,’ said the avatar, beckoning Alma in between the two myrmidrones and through the inner door.

Alma passed into a chamber narrower than the outer sitting room, but taller. And in the middle a triple-width bed, upon which, recumbent but floating, somehow, a centimetre or so above the actual mattress, was the ample corpus of Veronica von Polenz, known as Jupita. Why Jupita? Alma checked; the reference was, it seemed, to some antique movie about the acquisition of absolute wealth.

So, thought Alma. Here I am physically proximate to one of the richest people in Europe. That’s not something that happens every day.

Jupita’s body was wrapped in a silver onesie, leaving her hands, feet and face free. Alma checked the specs of this tech on her feed; induction loop-thread meant that the body could be massaged, moved, levitated, stretched and compressed more-or-less continually. . .