Agents of the ESA

At six in the morning the small red light above Jake Philips's bed clicked from amber to white, and DS1637 rolled to the foot of the frame with the quiet precision of a machine that had done this exact thing for years and would go on doing it for years more.

"Good morning sir," the companion unit said, its voice pitched somewhere between polite and maternal. "It is six o'clock. Today you are rostered for early duty."

Philips groaned into the pillow. "Alexa, five more minutes."

"My designation is DS1637, sir, as I have mentioned on the previous four hundred and twelve occasions you have called me Alexa. There are no five minutes available. Agent Camilleri's craft is scheduled to dock at oh-six-forty."

"It was a joke, Alexa. Machines don't get jokes."

"I am aware of the concept of humour, sir. I simply do not find waking you humorous. You are, if I may say, rather difficult before coffee."

Philips dragged himself upright, rubbing at eyes that felt as though someone had filled them with sand overnight, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. Floor one hundred and forty-nine of the residential tower remained completely unchanged from every other night of the three years he had lived in it: pale walls that changed colour with his mood settings, a single window that ran the length of the room and showed Brussels waking beneath a low string of hover lanes, and DS1637 standing sentinel with the patient stillness that only something without muscles or nerves could ever truly master.

"One of these days," he muttered, more to himself than the machine, "I'm going to reprogram you to let me sleep past six."

"You have said that on three hundred and eighty-nine occasions, sir. Shall I add this one to the log?"

"No, Alexa. Don't add it to the log."

He padded through to the washroom, the door sliding open at his approach and closing softly behind him. The desensitizer stood in the corner where it always stood, a simple archway of brushed metal that had replaced showers, taps, water and soap decades before Philips had been born. He stepped inside, felt the pin-prick warmth as it read his skin, and closed his eyes as the blue light swept from his scalp to the soles of his feet. When it finished, the faint scent of pine and wet bark settled over him, the same as every morning, the setting he had chosen the day he moved in and never once thought to change. Woodland. It smelled of nothing he had ever actually stood in, but then very little in his life these days did.

Dressed, he studied himself for a moment in the full-length mirror that ran beside the desensitizer arch. Grey leggings, a top with shoulders of solid black, and around each elbow the thin band that marked him as belonging to the European Security Agency. It was not a uniform designed to intimidate. It was designed, he had always thought, to reassure, the same way a hospital gown reassured you that someone competent was about to do something unpleasant to you.

Back in the main room he crossed to the small alcove where the Quooker sat, a squat unit no larger than a filing cabinet that could, in theory, materialise almost anything a human being might wish to eat. He tapped through the options with the same lack of enthusiasm he brought to most mornings and settled on the high-protein option, watching as the machine hummed and produced a grey-brown block onto a waiting plate. It looked faintly like something scraped from beneath a boat. He had barely lifted the fork when his wrist terminal buzzed against his skin, and a moment later a shaft of pale blue light rose from it, resolving into the head and shoulders of Solo Camilleri, her hair still damp from her own desensitizer, her expression already halfway to impatient.

"Morning, sunshine," she said. "Don't tell me you're still eating."

"I am indeed still eating, Camilleri. Some of us like to start the day with food rather than dread."

"Well, put the dread block down. I'm docking outside your window in ninety seconds."

"You could have given me a bit more notice."

"I gave you notice at six-thirty. You were asleep."

"I was resting my eyes."

"Ulysses logged you as unconscious, Jake."

He rolled his eyes at the projection, which vanished as abruptly as it had appeared, and abandoned the plate with something close to relief. By the time he reached the window the craft was already there, hovering with the effortless stillness that only something with no wheels and no visible means of staying up could manage, its hull curved backwards like a teardrop caught mid-fall and frozen. A section of the window folded away to let a narrow gangway extend across the gap, and Philips crossed it without looking down, a habit he had never quite managed to break even after years of doing exactly that several times a week.

Inside, the craft smelled faintly of recycled air and the particular synthetic vanilla Camilleri liked to run through the cabin filters. She was already strapped into the pilot's position, though pilot was rather a generous word for what either of them did inside these things. Ulysses flew them. Ulysses always flew them.

"Morning," she said again, properly this time, as the gangway retracted and the window sealed behind him.

"Morning," he said, dropping into the seat beside her and reaching for the restraint. "Where are we going that couldn't wait until a decent hour?"

"Jar. Just outside Oslo."

"Never heard of it."

"Neither had I, until forty minutes ago. Ulysses, set course, priority skyway."

The craft's system did not so much reply as simply comply, the hull turning and lifting in the same smooth motion, the Brussels towers falling away beneath them in a lattice of light. A thin green line appeared across the forward glass, marking the lane that had been cleared for them alone, other craft peeling gently aside as Ulysses rearranged the sky to let them through. It never ceased to make Philips faintly uneasy, the ease with which the whole of Europe could be persuaded to get out of your way.

"So," Camilleri said, settling back, "before I tell you about the case, I have to tell you about my weekend."

"Do you."

"Margo took me to that museum. The one near Paris. Twenty-First Century World."

"I've read about it. Never been."

"Jake, it's insane. They've got a whole street rebuilt, shops and everything, actual shops, with things sitting on shelves that people just picked up and carried to a counter and paid for. With their own hands."

"That's how it worked, yes."

"But why would you want to carry your own food home? What if it rained? What if you forgot something and had to go all the way back?"

"I imagine that happened to people fairly regularly."

"And they had animals. Living in the actual houses. Not companions, real animals, that ate and needed cleaning up after and could bite you."

"Pets, Solo. They were called pets."

"I know what they were called. I'm saying I don't understand it. Margo loved it, obviously, she wanted to stay for hours, she kept saying how romantic it all was, buying flowers from an actual person on a corner." She shook her head slowly, as though the very idea required some effort to hold in her mind. "I love her, but she has strange ideas about romance sometimes."

"I think it sounds rather nice, actually."

"You would. You're practically an exhibit yourself half the time, with your desensitizer set to the smell of a forest nobody's stood in for a hundred years."

He let that one go, mostly because it was fair, and looked instead at the lights of Oslo beginning to gather on the dark curve of the horizon ahead of them. "Go on then. Tell me about the job."

Her tone shifted, the teasing dropping away the way it always did when the real work started. "Unexplained death. Male, registered as Olaf Aandahl, lived alone, no listed relatives. Worked as a campaign supporter for one of the presidential candidates, Adri Van der Gaag."

"Unexplained how?"

"That's the interesting part. Ulysses, give agent Philips the summary you gave me."

The cabin's calm, sexless voice answered at once, filling the space between them the way it always did, from everywhere and nowhere. "At approximately twenty-two forty last night, internal sensors within apartment eight seven three, Jar, Oslo, registered a sharp spike in the resident's vital signs consistent with severe physical trauma. No visual or biometric data is available for the period immediately preceding or following the event."

"Why not?" Philips asked.

"Internal monitoring within the apartment had been deactivated by the resident prior to the incident, a common and lawful practice when hosting guests who wish for privacy."

"And the chip? His own chip should still have logged something even with the room dark."

"Correct, agent Philips. The resident's own chip continued to transmit until the moment of death. However a second individual was present in the apartment during the relevant window, and no valid chip signal was ever detected for that individual, either before, during, or after the incident."

Philips glanced sideways at Camilleri, who was already watching him with the look of someone waiting to see if he'd reached the same conclusion she had an hour earlier. "That's not possible," he said. "Everyone has a chip. It's law. It's been law for a hundred years."

"I informed agent Camilleri of the same fact this morning," Ulysses said, and there was something in the flatness of the reply that Philips could have sworn, if he hadn't known better, sounded faintly put out. "I can assure you it is not possible for a person to exist within European territory without a functioning chip. And yet I have no record of one in this instance."

"So either the chip failed," Philips said slowly, "or someone found a way to stop it talking to you."

"Both scenarios fall outside established parameters," Ulysses replied, which Philips understood, after several years of dealing with the system, to mean that it did not know and did not like admitting as much.

The craft began its descent as they spoke, sliding down through a thin layer of morning cloud toward a residential block that looked, from above, exactly like every other residential block in northern Europe, a pale tower ringed by smaller towers, all of them lit along their edges in the same gentle white that marked every inhabited building on the continent. Camilleri brought them, or rather allowed Ulysses to bring them, to a gentle stop against a docking point on the eighth floor, and the gangway extended once more into a corridor that smelled of nothing at all, the particular blankness that came from air scrubbed a dozen times an hour.

Apartment eight seven three stood three doors along, its entrance already flagged with a thin ring of red light hovering at head height, the local marker that told any other resident to keep well away. The door slid open at the agents' approach, recognising their chips before either of them had so much as raised a hand.

The smell hit Philips first, before his eyes had even adjusted to the low light of the room, something coppery and thick that no amount of scrubbed air could quite disguise. Olaf Aandahl lay on his back in the middle of the main room, arms slightly spread, eyes open and fixed on the ceiling in the particular way that told you at once there was no possibility of them ever closing again on their own. Sticking up out of his chest, buried almost to the handle, was a kitchen knife.

Camilleri crouched beside the body without touching it, tilting her head to study the blade. "Well," she said, "that's not something you see every day."

"Ulysses," Philips said, "can you confirm the weapon."

"The object is a stainless steel kitchen knife, blade length eighteen centimetres, of a design last manufactured in significant quantities during the early twenty-second century. It does not correspond to any weapon typically catalogued in violent incidents within this jurisdiction."

"Because there haven't been any violent incidents within this jurisdiction," Philips said, half to himself. "Not with an actual weapon, anyway."

"That is correct, agent Philips. The last recorded use of a bladed weapon in an act of violence against a person within European territory occurred eleven years, four months and two days ago, and involved a kitchen accident rather than an intentional act."

"Cheerful," Camilleri muttered, straightening up. "So someone brought a knife with them. On purpose. Which means someone actually planned this."

"Or knew where to find one," Philips said, glancing toward the small alcove that served as Aandahl's own version of a Quooker. "Though I doubt this thing has ever produced anything you'd need a knife for."

They left the body where it lay, the standard procedure being to let the forensic drones do their work once summoned, and moved instead through to the bedroom, a small square space with a single wide bed and walls the same soft, forgettable grey as every other bedroom Philips had ever stood in professionally. It was there, set into the wall beside the door, half hidden behind a decorative panel that had been left slightly ajar, that he found it: a small keypad, physical, with actual raised buttons rather than the smooth glass surfaces that had replaced switches everywhere else decades before.

"Solo. Come and look at this."

She crossed the room and crouched beside him, running a finger just above the surface without touching it. "Manual deactivation panel."

"Ulysses," Philips said, "what is this connected to?"

"That panel controls internal monitoring and the resident companion unit for this apartment. It allows the resident to suspend both for a period of his choosing, a lawful accommodation for guests who request privacy."

"How often did he use it?"

"The resident activated the deactivation function on forty-one occasions over the past year, always in the evening, always followed by reactivation the following morning."

"Forty-one times," Camilleri repeated. "That's practically once a week."

"Can we see who he had over?" Philips asked. "Visitor logs, entry records, anything from before the monitoring went dark each time."

"I can provide entry data for the building itself, which remains active regardless of internal apartment settings. Over the twelve month period in question, twelve separate female visitors were recorded entering the resident's apartment, each associated with valid registered chips, with the exception of the most recent."

Philips felt something tighten in his chest, the particular sensation he still, after years in the job, associated more with excitement than dread, though the two had always sat close together for him. "The most recent visitor. Talk me through it."

"A female entered the building at twenty-one fifty-eight last night via the main ground floor entrance, travelled by lift to the eighth floor, and entered apartment eight seven three at twenty-two-oh-one. No chip signal was ever detected for this individual, either upon entry to the building, within the lift, or within the apartment itself."

"That's twice now you've told us that's impossible," Camilleri said.

"It remains impossible, agent Camilleri. I can only report what data exists, or in this case, does not."

Philips stood slowly, looking back through the open doorway toward the front room, toward the shape lying under the low ceiling light with a kitchen knife standing out of its chest like something from a history documentary. "Show us the external footage. Building entrance, corridors, the lift. Everything you have of her."

A thin sheet of light unfolded itself against the bedroom wall, resolving into a silent, slightly grainy recording, the resolution of external cameras never quite matching the crisp interior feeds people had come to expect. A figure walked into frame from the street, tall, hooded, moving with the unhurried confidence of someone who knew exactly where the cameras were and simply didn't care. She crossed the lobby, entered the lift, and stood facing the doors the entire ascent without once looking up, as though she knew there was no point checking whether anyone was watching, because whatever she was doing, the watching itself had already been solved.

"Follow her out again," Philips said. "After. Whatever direction she went."

The footage jumped forward, the timestamp leaping from twenty-two-oh-one to twenty-two forty-one, and there she was again, emerging from the same lift, walking back through the lobby and out onto the street beyond, the hood still up, her pace exactly as unhurried as it had been going in. The street outside was busy even at that hour, the low hum of hovercraft threading between the towers, small knots of pedestrians moving beneath strips of soft light, and the figure simply became one more shape among them.

"Track her," Camilleri said. "Street cameras, anything."

The image shifted, following the figure along a wide pavement lined with the low glow of shopfronts and public terminals, past groups of people who barely glanced her way, on and on for perhaps three streets, until quite suddenly the feed stopped dead, freezing on an image of a squat, unremarkable building faced in dark stone, a soft blue sign above its door reading, in simple lettering, FREE BAR.

"Ulysses," Philips said, "why does the tracking stop there?"

"That establishment is a registered free bar, agent Philips. Such premises are licensed to operate signal dampeners across their interior, preventing chip monitoring and payment logging within the boundary of the property. I have no data of any kind for the interior of that building, nor for any individual once they cross its threshold."

"Convenient," Camilleri said.

"It is lawful," Ulysses replied, and Philips thought again that there was something faintly defensive in the correction, as though the system disliked being reminded that entire rooms of the world still existed beyond the reach of its own eyes.

They left the apartment to the drones, who would in time catalogue and remove what remained of Olaf Aandahl with the same clinical indifference they brought to everything, and made their way back down through the tower and out onto the same wide pavement the footage had shown them. Jar in daylight, or what passed for daylight this far north in the season, was a pleasant enough place, low towers and wider streets than the centre of Oslo proper, hover traffic thinner, the pavements busy with people who all seemed, in the particular way of people going about ordinary days, entirely unaware that a man three streets back was lying dead with a piece of history buried in his chest.

The free bar looked, from the outside, exactly as unremarkable as it had in the footage, its blue sign glowing faintly even against the pale morning light. Inside, though, it was something else entirely: a wide, clean space bathed in soft white, its walls given over almost entirely to shifting holographic panels, slow drifts of colour and light that seemed to exist purely to be beautiful rather than to inform. A handful of early patrons sat at low tables, nursing drinks that steamed gently, none of them so much as glancing up as the two agents crossed the floor toward the bar itself.

"Companion," Philips said, addressing the smooth, humanoid shape behind the counter, "we need to see the owner."

The companion turned, its face pleasant and entirely artificial in the way that close inspection always revealed, no matter how good the skin looked from a distance. "Of course, agents. I am EX. Please, one moment."

It was barely a minute before a side door opened and a woman stepped through, tall, dark-skinned, moving with an ease that made the room around her seem, briefly, a little less impressive by comparison. Her eyes were the first thing Philips noticed properly, the shade of brown in the right catching the light differently to the left, a small imperfection that somehow made the rest of her face more striking rather than less.

"Agents," she said, her voice warm and unhurried. "I'm Nora Bryant. I own this place. I understand you'd like to speak with me."

"We would," Camilleri said. "Somewhere private, if that's possible."

"Of course. Follow me."

Her office lay behind the same side door, a small warm room entirely unlike the cool white of the bar beyond it, shelves lined with objects that Philips recognised, with a small private thrill, as genuinely old: a wooden box, a stack of what might once have been paper books, a framed photograph gone slightly amber with age. Bryant crossed to a panel on the wall and pressed her palm against it, and Philips felt something shift in the air, a faint change in pressure, like a window opening somewhere he couldn't see.

"There," she said. "Dampener's off in this room now. You should be able to project whatever you need."

Camilleri raised her wrist and a thin image bloomed above it, the hooded figure from the corridor footage, frozen mid-stride. "This woman entered your premises at approximately twenty-two forty-one last night. We need to know who she is."

Bryant studied the image without any visible reaction, the sort of stillness that Philips had learned over the years to associate with people who had trained themselves very carefully not to react to anything. "I can tell you when she arrived and when she left. I can't tell you who she is, agent, and I mean that quite genuinely, not as a way of avoiding your question. Our payment system works at the threshold, on exit, a single transaction processed the moment someone steps back out onto the street. It doesn't require identity beyond a valid credit signature, and it doesn't retain one afterwards. That's rather the point of the licence."

"And if she paid with cash," Philips said, "or something that isn't a credit signature at all?"

Something flickered behind Bryant's eyes, gone as quickly as it appeared. "Then I imagine that would be very unusual indeed."

"We'd like access to your doorway security," Camilleri said. "Just the doorway. We understand the rest of the premises is protected."

"That I can give you," Bryant said. "The threshold itself isn't covered by the licence, only the interior beyond it. EX can show your colleague the footage at the counter terminal, if you'd like to see it while we talk."

Philips caught the faint emphasis on we talk and glanced at Camilleri, who gave him the smallest of nods, the sort of look the two of them had perfected over years of working together that meant, quite simply, go, I've got this. He left the two women in the warm little office and followed EX back out into the main room and around behind the long white counter, where a small terminal sat half hidden beside a row of dispensers.

"Here, agent," EX said, its tone pleasant and entirely without inflection. "Doorway feed, requested time window."

The image resolved above the terminal, considerably sharper than the street footage had been, close enough now that Philips could make out the fine weave of the woman's hood and the pale line of her jaw beneath it, though never quite enough to catch her face full on. She stood in the doorway for a long moment, entirely still, while a pair of small service modules drifted toward her from within the bar, offering, presumably, to take a drink order or guide her to a table. She waved them away with a single small movement of her hand, unhurried, almost bored, and then simply stood there, doing nothing at all that the camera could see, for the better part of two minutes.

"What was she waiting for?" Philips murmured, more to himself than to the machine beside him.

"I have no data regarding her intent, agent," EX said. "Only her movement."

After the two minutes had passed, she turned and stepped back out through the door, out of frame, out of the world that any camera in Europe could account for, and the feed ended there, exactly as the last one had.

Philips straightened, rubbing at his jaw, and was still turning the two minutes over in his mind, wondering what a person could possibly be waiting for in a doorway with nothing but empty air in front of them, when his wrist terminal buzzed hard against his skin, twice in quick succession, the particular pattern reserved for priority contact. He looked up to see Camilleri stepping back through from the office, her own wrist already glowing, her expression tightening in the way it only ever did when something above their pay grade had just decided to involve itself.

"That's the Admiral," she said. "We're wanted at headquarters. Now."

Philips looked once more at the frozen doorway image still hovering faintly above the terminal, at the hooded shape that Ulysses, for all its vast and patient certainty about the world, could not explain, and felt the small, cold thrill of a case that had just become considerably larger than one dead man and a kitchen knife.

"Ulysses," he muttered under his breath, the word coming out somewhere between a curse and a prayer, the way half of Europe had learned to use the system's name when nothing else quite fit the moment. "What have you gone and missed now."

Camilleri was already moving toward the door, throwing a quick word of thanks back toward Bryant, who watched them go with the same unreadable calm she had greeted them with. Philips fell into step beside his partner, and together they crossed the clean white floor of the bar and out into the cold morning street, where their craft waited to carry them, at whatever speed Ulysses judged fastest, back toward Brussels and whatever the Admiral had decided could not wait until they had finished their coffee.