355 500 произведений, 25 200 авторов.

Электронная библиотека книг » Jonathan Swords-Holdsworth » Stories Of An Awkward Size. A Slipstream And Hard SF Anthology » Текст книги (страница 1)
Stories Of An Awkward Size. A Slipstream And Hard SF Anthology
  • Текст добавлен: 9 октября 2016, 11:15

Текст книги "Stories Of An Awkward Size. A Slipstream And Hard SF Anthology"


Автор книги: Jonathan Swords-Holdsworth



сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 1 (всего у книги 3 страниц)

Jonathan Swords-Holdsworth. Stories Of An Awkward Size

To Jo, to my family and to my friends, to the memories of Johannes Kepler, John R. Boyd, Carl Sagan, Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick, and to all the insane lunatics ever who were completely right …


Black Prince

Henri Roseboro looked up from his computer, and realised the day was ending. The clouds were salmon, seen through the garland of plastic fruit hanging from the window. He rubbed his eyes.

The fruit were a reminder of Jena, his ex. She had hung them in the first month after they moved in, and then she had left him at the end of that same month. They had rented the house – intended to be their long-term home – three months ago.

Three months.

Henri couldn’t believe it.

The breakup had happened – the rent subsequently doubling – and then he had discovered that there had been, less than a year before, the violent and unsolved rape of a tourist in the back alley.

Altogether his feelings for the house, indeed for the whole neighbourhood, were now utterly soured – he wanted to leave it all and move on. But he kept procrastinating.

Concentrating on work was almost impossible, but on stopping his mind filled with thoughts of Jena, and what might have been. He really needed a third option now: something he could feel passionate about – or that could just distract him.

Henri gazed out at the sky, admiring it. Global Warming was far from under control; the city’s cloudscapes were becoming wilder, especially near dusk. He loved them, really. One day, he thought, when responsible governments finally appeared and repaired the atmosphere, he would miss these shapes. Perhaps by that time he would be living somewhere else, even under a different sky altogether.

He stood up and stretched, pushing his chair aside. Figuring contractual obligations could go on hold, he decided to enjoy something of the outside spectacle. He headed through the kitchen, out the back door, and across the rental’s tiny courtyard.

There were reminders of Jena here, too. The hanging pot-plants and huge ceramic bowls, rain filled, had been part of her grander plan. For the hundredth time he thought he should get rid of them, but he feared the stirring of feelings the task would provoke – he hadn’t quite crossed his mental and emotional Rubicon; not yet.

He paused and unlocked the alley gate, stepped down onto the cobblestones, and felt better. This alley was his, her memory was banished from it. He visited it at many a failing light; he had since moving in.

The alley commanded a view of fences, trees and vines, and above them all a jumbled skyline, now soaked in the deep, pastel onset of dusk. He scanned up and down the lane, enraptured with the way the streetlight advanced as the sky dimmed. It pushed and manipulated the creeping shadows, obliterating some, darkening others.

Not a decade before, the done thing in such a repose would have been to light a cigarette, but this was a somewhat rarer phenomenon these days. For Henri, just the alley and the light was stimulation enough. He waited now, as always, until the surrounding darkness deepened. For this was when the real show started – when the sky brought up its bloody reds, intense blues and subtle greys.

Opposite his alley door was a white wall, on the back of something brick that once might have been a garage. This had amazed him since he had moved in – how on earth had it remained unsullied, in this age of scribble? Henri was grateful for this clean white wall’s existence: in the dusk, it made a perfect colour canvas. Beyond the wall, in the distance, was a two storey house, a glow of fluorescent tubes illuminating its windows. Henri thought it was all art.

He noticed a movement out of the corner of his eye. He looked down and beheld the shadow of a cat, moving on the white of the wall.

“Heh, Kitty,” he said aloud, turning and searching for the original. He scanned along the top of his fence.

There was no cat.

Damn things move too fast, he thought, and looked back at the wall.

The shadow was still there.

He looked back at the fence, then again at the wall in a double-take. Still there was no cat, anywhere. And now he realised – there was no angle that could have put a cat’s shadow on the wall. Not in that way.

Fear. A pulse of it hit him, surprising him and leaving him breathless. An icy chill had crept down his back and he felt his hair standing up, his heart pounding. In the back-room of his mind a voice had whispered. Ghost.

He took a step back from the wall. The cat shadow paced, then doubled back and stopped, its tail swishing above it.

Ok … he thought, it’s just a … cat. It’s not something to run screaming from? Right?

He stared at the patient shadow, then checked one more time that he wasn’t being fooled by the streetlight and a furry … it was a cat’s shadow, all by itself.

The rushing of blood in his ears quietened, and he felt common sense returning. With it came the pull of curiosity.

He took a conscious breath, then paced slowly over to the fence, just to the right of the wall. He got in close to it and looked down. The cat shadow was vertically compressed from this angle, but he could see it looking “up” at him. Expectantly? he thought.

Henri knelt by the edge of the white, and looked the phantom in the eyes. Except there were no eyes – it was a solid, black silhouette. He leaned in and squinted at the shadow’s outline. The apparition made this difficult by shifting about like … like a cat – the creature’s body-language was uncannily accurate. Organic.

It took a few moments of careful inspection, before he finally saw the prank that had been visited upon him. He breathed deeply, surprised at how tense he was from the encounter. The cat shadow’s edge was furry, complex – detailed, he thought – but even so, he now made out a fine grid of blacks, greys and whites.

It was pixelated. He was looking at a screen.

He took a few steps back and gazed at the wall. Then he swore.

“You gotta be kidding me …”

Over the last decade or so, city councils and district governments, the world over, had gained a new plague to do battle with.

Graffiti.

But this was not the spray-paint and stucco of old, it was the thing in its newest incarnation. The technology of surfaces had come a very long way, and like all technologies it had rapidly spread from the lab to the street.

A war of escalation had broken out across a battlefield of walls, leaving applied-science fallout in its wake – locked surfaces that couldn’t be painted on (except with chemically keyed dyes), images that were invisible (except in the correct light), animations (one of the new technology’s earliest tricks) …

And the most interesting and powerful innovation of all: active surfaces – the spray-on device. Utilising special application-equipment and self organising materials, there were now spray-on cameras, sensors, speakers – even computers. You could have anything you wanted, overlaid on any facade – as long as you were prepared to pay for it, of course.

Henri whistled to himself. The stuff was called Graf, and this had to be two or three thousand dollars worth of it, perhaps more.

On a dead garage wall, in a back alley.

Henri got in close again, but this time near the centre of the wall. The sky was now dark enough that his own streetlight-shadow was nearly solid on the white. It wasn’t aligned the same way as the cat’s, but flat silhouettes without defining cues (like eyes) are forgiving of errors of perspective: to Henri it seemed, convincingly, like the cat and he were sharing the same two-dimensional plane.

He crouched down level with the apparition again, bringing his own shadow down with him. The cat wandered aside and back again, getting clear of Henri’s outline – almost, he noted, as though the creature found it to be a physical obstruction.

“Flat Cat?”

He saw that his shadow was still fainter than the cat’s, which by contrast – literally – was jet black. Experimentally he reached out with his shadow hand, and was jolted again: the cat shrank from his shadow’s appendage, then came back, sniffing at it. Henri had met enough cats to recognise the protocol. He shadow-reached behind the cat’s ears, to scratch. The cat arched, and Henri could see his phantom finger-tips flattening and releasing its ears. There was no sound, but in his mind he imagined purring.

“Well, Flat Cat,” said Henri, both amused and astonished, “I wonder who made you?”

He had an idea and stood up, the cat recoiling at the movement.

“Ok, you’re a shadow cat. So, do you eat shadow food I wonder …?”

As he backed away and turned toward his gate, the cat’s head followed his shadow across the wall; its tail flicked.

He raided his courtyard and retrieved a flower-pot base, brushing it off. He brought it back to the alley, expecting the cat to be gone. But it was still there, patiently waiting.

Henri noticed something. With his own shadow now off the wall entirely, the cat appeared to be looking directly at him. He remembered too how it had behaved when it first appeared; now he realised what it meant.

It can see, he thought, it can actually see.

He placed the bowl on the ground against the wall, noting that it cast a strong shadow. The base of the wall had a broad, raised lip, and because of it the new object ended up neatly placed inside the cat’s planar realm. That, Henri thought, had to be deliberate.

The cat padded over, looked at the bowl and pawed it. The bowl’s shadow shifted, and Henri felt another jab. He leaned down and kept his eyes on the bowl, until they grasped how the wall had tricked them. The surface had filled in the bowl’s shadow, with the same jet black as the cat. He pondered on it, that the bowl had … passed into the Graf. It had been recorded.

The cat was not impressed with an empty bowl, and assumed a quizzical pose. Henri leant further, and picked the pot base up again. As he lifted it, the Graf shadow followed the bowl’s real one, barely a centimetre behind. He was hypnotised.

He raced the bowl back into his yard, and searched again. Squatting down, he picked up a handful of mulch and carefully sprinkled it into the vessel. The mulch made a small pyramid in the centre of the dish, projecting an inch or so above the rim.

He returned and placed the bowl where he had before, satisfied to see the mulch become clearly visible as a black peak in the Graf. The cat walked up to the bowl, sniffed it, and at once began eating.

Henri squatted down and watched, slack-jawed. As the cat took bites, the Graf shadow of the “food” began to disobey its physical counterpart. The peak disappeared, bite by bite. The mulch pile’s real shadow remained, but the deep, deep black of its mirror image outranked it. In a few bites the cat had finished, and the peak was gone from the bowl’s shadow. The cat retreated a metre or so away and sat down, then began grooming itself.

Henri had not dared disturb the scene while the shadow was eating, for fear of what it might do to the simulation, but now he grabbed the bowl. He carefully straightened up, holding it before him and keeping his eyes on the Graf. The empty bowl tracked the full one, as perfectly as before, yet the mulch peak remained invisible to it. He turned the bowl upside-down, emptying the mulch onto the cobblestones. The falling material’s fainter shadow didn’t seem to matter: the Graf bowl remained empty, and there was no falling Graf copy of the shower of woody material. Henri stood with the empty bowl by his side, staring at the preening shadow.

Suddenly the cat perked up and froze, looking to stage-right, with its ears vertical. Henri instinctively looked in the same direction, and squinted.

He could see distant human figures in the gloom, coming towards him up the alley. A moment later he could hear their faint voices.

He looked at the silhouette.

“My gods, you can hear like a cat too …”

The shadow bolted, running to the right and … off the wall: a cartoon, thought Henri, defying the edge of the film. He beat a retreat back into his yard, then hid near the fence and listened. If the cat decided to appear for these gate-crashers, he would wander out and introduce himself. Heck, he might even make some new friends.

But as he waited the next minutes out, the intruders – it sounded like three – wandered past and kept going, laughing and chatting among themselves. Henri was fairly certain that if a shadowy cat had manifested, it would have been a talking point.

When the voices had faded to nothing, he ventured out into the alley again.

“Puss puss?”

But the cat did not reappear.

He was disappointed, but he decided it was time to return to the warmth and comfort of the interior anyway. As he locked the gate and turned away he was feeling a smugness, thinking about the tale he would tell.

It lead him to an epiphany, arresting him in mid-stride.

He reflected: his must be the same cycle of thoughts that everyone who had seen the cat had orbited through.

No. There was no way – he wasn’t going to be telling anyone. If others had told of this in the past, surely he wouldn’t have been surprised by the cat – it would have been in the real estate brochure.

“To hell with them. They can find it themselves,” he muttered, making his way back across the courtyard and inside.

* * *

The next day was Saturday. Henri returned from shopping, unamused to find he had forgotten several of the important items off his list. He had been dwelling on other, less three-dimensional things.

It can’t just be a good Graf installation, he told himself. Why – why would somebody put something so … intelligent on a wall? A wall that was nowhere in particular?

After a minute, he became aware that he was staring into space.

He dropped the cans he was stashing, grabbed a marker pen from the kitchen bench, and marched out through the bright afternoon. Impatiently he unlocked the gate, hurling it aside as he stepped out.

The wall was brilliant in its immaculate whiteness, reflecting the early afternoon sunlight.

I’ll just bet, Henri thought, you are solar-charging.

He stood front and centre to the wall, surveying it. It truly was pristine. There was only a coating of dust, not even bird droppings defiled it. No cat appeared, but Henri was not surprised.

I’m sure, he thought, you never show your black, furry image by day. He was also sure the wall was gazing back, assessing him.

He walked over to its left boundary. With his thumbnail, he tried scratching a tiny area on the very edge of the white. It ground collagen off the end of his nail. He knelt and picked up a stone. Scratching with it powdered the rock, and when he blew the chalky dust away the Graf was utterly undamaged. His third and final test was with the marker. He carefully drew a vertical line, right on the white border. Even as he took the marker away the ink beaded, then the drops began to fall under their own weight. He nodded.

The wall – like his marker – was indelible.

Henri heard a sound to his left, and turned to see a roller-door in the act of violently raising. A few seconds later an older man backed into the alley, pulling something with his hands. Henri pretended he couldn’t see the man, but after a moment he realised the possible serendipity.

What the hell, he thought.

He pocketed the marker, turned and walked towards the individual, seeing now that he was fiddling with the back of a trailer. Beyond the trailer, through the opened roller-door, lay a half-maintained, green garden behind a stylish brick house.

“Ah … g’day,” said Henri.

The man turned around, surprised but not startled. Henri saw he had gloves on.

“Hello there,” he replied, pleasantly.

“I’m Henri … Roseboro, I live over there.” Henri pointed at his open gate.

“Erik’s mates been too loud?”

“Erik?”

“My eldest, he’s seventeen.” The man smiled, looked down and peeled off his right glove.

“Viktor Jorgensson,” he said. They shook hands.

“I’ve been here about three months,” said Henri, “I was wondering if I could ask you a few things about the … neighbourhood. If you don’t mind?”

Viktor leaned back on the trailer, facing away from the direction of the white wall.

“Fifteen years we’ve been here,” he said, and raised his eyebrows as though surprised himself. He removed his other glove and folded his arms. “What would you like to know?” His smile was warm, but Henri thought his eyes held a twinkle of caution.

They conversed, exchanging small-talk about the suburb for several minutes. Eventually Henri couldn’t stand it any more –

“Um, that white wall there …” He pointed.

“Yeah?” said Viktor, his face curious.

“Have you ever seen a figure … a cat’s shadow … on it?”

Viktor’s reaction took Henri aback. The man looked around, almost melodramatically, to see if anyone was listening. Then he leaned in towards Henri.

“Ah, I see you’ve met Rufus,” said Viktor, quietly, “you’re very privileged.”

Henri felt his mood rise – despite Viktor having made him a little nervous.

“Ah thank the frigging gods, somebody knows why it’s there …”

Viktor cocked his head.

“Well … that’s an intriguing little story in itself, if you’ve got a few more minutes? If you’re interested, of course?”

Henri nodded his assurance. Viktor paused in thought, then continued.

“Ok. Well – Rufus was a real cat. He was this big black thing.” Viktor measured a substantial feline with his hands. “Great big, yellow eyes! Very friendly though. But this —” He indicated the alley with his head. “– was his territory, and his alone. He was a cheeky bugger, too.” He chuckled. “I reckon he must’ve been getting fed by about ten households.”

“Who owned him?” Henri interjected.

Viktor pointed behind himself. “The Georges, ‘bout three doors up, but they moved out a while back.” Viktor scratched his head. “Yeah it’s quite a twisted little tale. Sad, actually.”

His tone suddenly made Henri wonder. Was this something intimate, or personal? Was he further privileged by Viktor talking to him, a stranger, about this?

“Poor old Rufus, he got ill,” said Viktor, looking serious, “kidneys failed, as they often do with cats. And back then the cost of printing up a new pair was just prohibitive. About twelve grand.”

“Aw no.” Henri nodded. “But right, so somebody … commemorated him?”

“I’ll get to that,” said Viktor, waving his hand. “We all – us and a couple of the neighbours – we had a bit of a half-hearted rally round, to try and raise some cash. But in the end the Georges pulled the plug on it themselves. Said they just couldn’t justify asking it of people.” Viktor shrugged. “So, poor Rufus was put on palliative care, and eventually he departed the scene. Peacefully though, he wasn’t in any distress.”

“That’s something. I guess.”

“Worse ways to go, for sure. But that’s also when the story starts to get weird.”

Viktor marshalled his recollections, not looking at Henri – who felt that the world had just gone rather quiet.

“Not long after that – well nearly half a year, actually – that wall appeared.” He thumbed over his shoulder. “And not long after that, we started meeting the new Rufus! Or his shadow, anyway. But – see one thing is, he won’t show himself to just anybody. He has to know you. And even if it’s during the day it seems he can still see you – believe it or not. But he only comes out at night …”

“‘Know’ you?”

“If he’s seen you around enough … you spend much time in the alley here?”

Henri smiled. “I’m out here nearly every second night, or thereabouts.” He pointed up the alley. “Pretty much since I moved in. I love the view.”

Viktor nodded. “Bloody beautiful skyline – but there you go, that’s how he knows you. And your back gate is right opposite his wall.”

Henri was collecting his own thoughts.

“About that wall,” he said. “That stuff, it’s called Graf. That’s got to be at least two or three grand’s worth on it.”

Viktor smiled the smile again. Impish, thought Henri, that was the polite word.

“And the rest,” he said. “Erik knows all about that, he’s right into the graffiti thing. Which is pretty ironic, actually …”

“How so?”

Viktor chuckled. “My sister, Erik’s Aunt. She’s a senior copper. She’s quite a few years older than me though.” He chuckled again. “But this graffiti thing is all legal these days, right?”

Henri couldn’t help chuckling too.

But then Viktor raised his finger.

“The full tale doesn’t end there though. Now we get to the really strange part. This is good, actually, I haven’t had somebody to tell for ages. But … you know to keep quiet about Rufus, right?”

“Absolutely,” said Henri, nodding, “I came to the same conclusion last night. Some idiot might try to do something … well, really stupid.” Henri readjusted his position, leaning on the side of the roller-door.

“Good man … right, well. Erik says there was this German woman, from Berlin, some kind of graffiti goddess – full blown recluse too, as far as I can gather. But she was living around here about the same time Rufus passed away.”

“Aha … she’s our most likely candidate then?”

“Correct. But here’s the important bit. When Rufus – the new one – first appeared, he couldn’t actually do very much. He already had the thing of being picky about who he appeared for, that part worked. And he could do simple tricks, he had a few of them up his sleeve … paw? But he only had a limited repertoire. He’d jump around, chase your shadow, do some cat things. Then run off wherever he goes.” Viktor spread his hands in a shrug. “And that was it, right?”

“Okay …” If there had been a passing streaker in the alley just then, or smoke billowing out his rental’s gate, Henri would have ignored them.

“Then,” continued Viktor, “about two years ago, over the space of a weekend – I’m not joking, literally over a weekend – he suddenly got smart. It was like he’d been given his new soul. From that weekend on he was just like a real cat, and the freaky thing is …” Viktor scratched his neck. “It’s like having Rufus back. I swear that shadow thing has his exact personality.”

He spread his hands, raising his eyebrows again.

“And that’s it. That’s the whole story.”

Henri felt hypnotised.

“So, this woman,” he said, “the graffiti artist. She came back?”

“Or never left, or left later. Maybe something else – maybe it was a protegé of hers that did it? She is supposed to have gone back to Berlin, but Erik says she’s really hard to trace and a total eccentric. She’s one of those bohemian types who live in artist colonies, places like that.”

“So in truth … we are still none the wiser?”

“Nope.”

Something occurred to Henri. “Who owns that wall? What’s directly behind it?”

“There’s an Asian couple who run a shop in the house, but I’ve spoken to them – they don’t use the back bit of the yard at all. They don’t live in the house, they just leave the lights on at night for the burglars. And the garage the wall is on is chock full of vines, it’s completely overgrown.”

And with that, abruptly, Henri realised he had just run out of conversation. Though Viktor had generously enlightened him, now all he wanted to do was go home and meditate on the tale of Rufus.

He thanked Viktor profusely, then excused himself by having to “go and put shopping away, and do boring stuff”. Viktor nodded, and they shook hands again.

“A pleasure,” said Viktor.

Henri had one more question, and didn’t know how to couch it. So he just started speaking –

“Your son, Erik …”

“Yeah?” Viktor raised an eyebrow.

“Would you mind if I came and asked him about Rufus some time? I’m wondering if he could explain some stuff about the wall to me? Even just some technical info would be great.”

“Yeah, for sure. He’s away on camp this weekend but he’s back … Tuesday night I think?” Viktor pointed at the side of the roller-door, behind Henri. “There’s a door bell and an intercom there. It’s hidden behind the rail so idiots can’t see it. Just feel around and you’ll find it – watch out for spiders.”

Henri was touched.

“That’s very generous of you. I could be any kind of maniac or pervert, surely …?” He made certain to smile as he said it.

“Nah,” said Viktor, and winked at him, “something I share with my sister, we’re very good judges of character. I can tell you’ve got stuff on your mind, though.”

The comment caught Henri off guard, but then he felt a bloom of relief: it would be nice to not have to push through layers of protocol with Viktor, and his family. And, he suspected, he would want to ask Erik many questions.

“Split up a couple of months ago,” he said, “her decision.”

Viktor looked philosophical.

“Yeah, that’ll do it.”

* * *

Henri made himself put his groceries away and attempted to work for a couple of hours, then went and stood in the yard. It was chilly, but the sun was pleasant. Over the top of the fence he could just make out the top of the white wall. There was a rusty gutter behind it, and dead vines stuck out on either side.

Ok, he thought, I’m an eccentric graffiti artist, temporarily living in a foreign country. For whatever reason, I decide to blow a small fortune on a personal Graf installation. But I get interrupted, I can’t complete the job on the spot …

He began to pace in circles, staring at the ground.

So I leave the system in a state where I can come back and finish working on it, or someone I know can. So … how did I talk to it?

He stopped and looked up at the trees, and had an inspiration.

Radio! Wi-Fi. It would be the easiest, safest way, surely?

He ran and grabbed his tablet, then returned to the alley. He noticed Viktor’s roller-door was shut again and was grateful, he didn’t want to restart a conversation he had recently exited.

The tablet’s radio software searched, and soon found several networks. He turned on the triangulation function, to see if he could narrow down their physical location – he was already excited to see there were two hidden networks, with no names.

The software required him to walk around for it to get a better fix, so he wandered a short way down the alley. Within a few minutes he had his answers, but they were no help. None of the networks were localised anywhere near the wall. In fact, just by looking, he could tell which houses and buildings most of them were emanating from. The only one coming from the shop beyond the wall’s garage said “ZhongGarden443”, which he already knew from a search was “Zhong Garden Supplies” and the street number of Rufus’s block.

If there was a way to talk to Rufus’s mind, it wasn’t via radio.

“Makes sense,” Henri muttered to nobody, bitterly, “why advertise?” Even a hidden network would have drawn attention, he thought.

He returned home and got on with his life, pushing Rufus to the back of his mind.

* * *

It didn’t work. Sunday night, just after dusk, Henri found himself standing before the wall again. Rufus – it was the shadow’s proper name, he had decided – appeared from the edge of it. Henri stepped up and shadow-patted him.

“There is a way to talk to your system, you black thing,” he said to the creature, “would you care to enlighten me?” But the cat did nothing unusual.

He backed up and scanned the sides of the wall. If he strained to look over the fence, he could see the overgrowth that Viktor had mentioned. The vine was everywhere, alive and dead, even poking out holes in the brick.

Henri walked up to the wall’s right edge, Rufus following his movements. He reached over the fence and ran his fingers along the side of the wall. Here it was red brick, with no Graf. To hell with spiders, he thought as he felt around, the hospital was just down the road anyway.

He grabbed the ends of the vines that he could reach, one by one, with his finger-tips. Dead wood, and if he pulled he could hear the familiar “shush” of shaken foliage.

On the fourth one, he was rewarded.

In the streetlight, it looked exactly the same as the other vine stalks. But the feel of it was utterly different. It had a familiar hard-and-soft give to it: the texture of vinyl.

He pulled the stalk out of the wall slightly. It was painted or printed to look exactly like wood, but it certainly was not. Feeling numb, he lifted the stalk and revealed a seam underneath. As he bent the stalk back the seam opened, only held together by the pressure of the moulding … and he felt like he was looking at the corner of the tomb, projecting from the desert sands.

Shiny metal – a data port.

He let go of the “vine”, ran back inside and frantically rummaged for the right cable. These were hardly ever used now, in a Wi-Fi era, and usually spent their lives in the equipment packaging, still wrapped in plastic bags until the day they were thrown out. His ransacking of the house was finally compensated – with a long, black cord, shiny and new. He grabbed his tablet and made himself briskly walk, not run, back to the wall.

The cable fitted, to his immense relief. He waited, the cord trailing over the fence, and held his breath as the tablet probed for a new device.

One duly appeared: a data storage system – a “drive”.

He opened the folder that had appeared on his tablet screen, and the mystery deepened. It was large, about 500 gigabytes, but one could buy portable memory sticks of that size from corner shops. What was significant was that it was nearly empty; there was only a handful of files, taking up hardly any space.

“Hidden volume?” Henri asked aloud, wondering if the vast, empty container did actually hold more data, just cunningly concealed. He started his tablet probing the storage device for deeper information, but after a few minutes he gave up. It was pure, there were no surprises.

Henri shook his head, exasperated, and copied the files to the tablet. Then he disconnected, hid the data vine, and went back inside.

* * *

The booty he had been rewarded with consisted of several picture files, a movie file and one tiny text file. He opened the text file first, his fingers tremoring slightly. It was disappointingly brief.

Rufus

2002–2018

Henri blinked. Oh well, he thought – now I know Rufus died a venerable sixteen; RIP kitty.

The picture files were not much more informative. There was a big, black cat with yellow eyes, looking smugly comfortable in various people’s arms. There were no human faces, though the disparate backgrounds suggested different houses. There was one picture that he found beautiful, of the cat silhouetted against bright light from a window. How appropriate, Henri thought.


    Ваша оценка произведения:

Популярные книги за неделю