73. The Vagrant
At 1:33 in the morning, a message from Carrot Pony cut in.
Snowy, the others and I had only just finished watching the seventy-two-second clip of Vivian leaked by the whistleblower woman. The final frame was still frozen on the wall: Vivian sitting before the Sentiment Sequencing machine in Room 101, thin white light pressing down over her, the prompt tone still seeming to linger in the room.
Please do not actively recall.
I looked at Little Bluey. “What is it?”
Little Bluey projected the whole message onto the dim terminal. There were only a few lines, but each one struck the air in the flat before it had even had time to cool.
[Racecourse search status update.]
[Brown has been released.]
[Seventy-two hours to hand over Clever Turtle.]
[Mrs Brown remains in Room 103.]
[Big Heart Bunny on twenty-four-hour watch.]
[Clever Turtle not surrendered.]
[I may have to go offline.]
The message ended there.
The sitting room fell silent.
Dustshark was the first to mutter, “They’ve reached the Racecourse.”
Snowy did not answer at once. She scanned the lines again, her feather-light dimmed low. “This is not an ordinary search,” she said. “They are using a hostage to force the line.”
Little Bluey’s ears drooped slightly. For once, it did not argue.
Double-O Seven sat by the wall, its little black light flickering as though it were calculating several possibilities at once. Turt Monk crouched at the edge of the table, the low glow on its shell slowly tightening. It was always slow, but in that moment it became so slow it seemed even its breathing had to avoid certain listeners.
After a long while, it said, “There may still be time to stop them holding only one version.”
I waited until it had finished before asking, “How?”
The black light on Double-O Seven flickered. “There are not many left who truly understand Clever Turtle’s underlying architecture. The old you was one.”
Dustshark added coldly, “The problem is, you are not the old you.”
Double-O Seven ignored it. “The other one is Planetary Duck.”
At that name, the room went quiet again.
Planetary Duck. My second pet agent, and Clever Turtle’s best partner. It looked ridiculous, but it remembered far too much. In BELI’s early days, it had been beside Mr Dunn. If there was still any being outside Silver Eagle who remembered the original logic of the Sacred Turtle system, it was probably that duck.
Turt Monk gave a slow nod. “We need to take Clever Turtle to see Planetary Duck,” it said. “Preferably at the electronic graveyard. There are still old ports there. They can see one another without passing through the central terminal.”
“Brown will contact us in the morning?”
“He will,” Turt Monk said. “Because seventy-two hours is not time. It is extortion. He will not wait until the last moment.”
Snowy looked at Little Bluey and said quietly, “But there is another problem.”
I knew what she meant.
Little Bluey and Double-O Seven held seven per cent of Clever Turtle’s BELI and Room 101 data. Not the full archive, but the most dangerous part, the most valuable part, the part most likely to let an old system rise again. That seven per cent could not fall into Cici Chorley’s hands. Nor could it remain in only one place.
I said, “Little Bluey cannot stay here.”
Little Bluey’s ears twitched. It did not object. It was unusually obedient, which made it all the more unsettling.
Double-O Seven said, “I can first copy to Little Bluey the fragments left by Serena, Flora’s Two Seconds, Maggie and Vivian. Not the complete Clever Turtle archive, but enough for it to reconnect with Clever Turtle later.”
“How long?”
“Forty-five minutes.”
Dustshark snorted. “Forty-five minutes is enough to die three times over, these days.”
Snowy asked only, “Any risk of leakage during the copy?”
“The data goes first onto external memory, then Turt Monk takes it out. The process does not pass through the usual domestic communications layer.”
Turt Monk said slowly, “I can take the memory nearby. You escort Little Bluey first. Later, I will meet you at McDondon and give you the memory. Golden Beetle can then take it to the safe.”
“What about Little Sixty?” Double-O Seven asked.
Turt Monk looked at it. “Tomorrow, Little Sixty helps Clever Turtle at the electronic graveyard. Double-O Seven, Little Sixty and I all need to be there for the connection.”
All the light in the room lowered.
At last I said, “Double-O Seven copies first. I’ll take Snowy and Dustshark and move Little Bluey. Turt Monk stays here. When Double-O Seven is done, go to McDondon and give the memory to me.”
Snowy looked at me, a faint concern in her eyes. “You are putting yourself into the route as well.”
“I am already in the route.”
No one tried to persuade me after that.
When Double-O Seven began the copy, the whole flat seemed to enter another kind of silence. There was no large display, only a few fine progress lines, as if some old, unsuitable time were being transferred, frame by frame, into another shell. Little Bluey crouched at the corner of the table and said nothing. It usually hated boredom, but now it only watched the progress lines, as if it knew it was not waiting for data, but for fragments of old lives.
I went back to my room and took the tin box from its hiding place.
Inside were the prohibited things that were now far too unsuitable to keep at home. I put them into a large plastic bag together with a few old clothes, making the whole bundle look like some ordinary, even rather shabby, piece of night-time moving. I tucked Little Bluey into the right trouser pocket by my calf. It curled up inside and made no sound. Snowy and Dustshark came with me on either side, both keeping themselves discreet, like the domestic companion agents any ordinary person might take out late at night.
At the door, Double-O Seven was still copying the backup.
Without looking up, it said, “Do not connect to any unknown port later.”
Turt Monk nodded slowly. “I am more afraid of speed than you are.”
Double-O Seven gave a brief laugh.“That is true.”
Snowy, Little Bluey, Dustshark and I boarded the hoverbus.
There were CCTV cameras on the bus, so we chose the seats closest to the door. Not for comfort, but to lose one second less when getting off. At times like this, time was not an abstract idea. It was a physical object.
The bus rocked through the city, the lights outside sliding past in strips. I did not dare look directly at the cameras, nor did I dare act too much like someone nervous. Normal. The most important thing was to be normal. The more I resembled an ordinary citizen changing buses at night, carrying a messy bag, heading somewhere faintly disreputable but not worth investigating, the better.
We got off near the little park.
As soon as we stepped down, the line split.
Dustshark and I went one way. Snowy took Little Bluey towards the factory. Snowy and Little Bluey were both carrying charms. Their true purpose was not superstition. They lowered and thinned the signals a legal agent sent back to Silver Eagle, and reduced the electromagnetic trace to a point where electronic patrols were less likely to smell you first.
But they had a drawback. Once you carried a charm, you could not emit a strong scan or interference pulse yourself, or you would light yourself up on the spot. So in every operation, who carried one, who did not, who watched and who ran all had to fit the agent’s nature.
Little Bluey was agile on the ground, quick at running, jumping and slipping through gaps. Against larger patrol agents such as chickens, ducks, ox-heads and horse-faces, it could usually survive by speed and angle. What it feared most were cat patrols and falcon patrols. They were its natural enemies, not only in function but in body shape and rhythm, the kind of enemy designed almost perfectly against it.
Snowy was an owl. In flight, she was quiet. With a charm, she could often go almost unnoticed. The only problem was that Snowy was a legal agent. At most, she could go twenty minutes without reporting her whereabouts. Once the return journey was counted, the real hidden escort time she could give Little Bluey was about ten minutes.
Ten minutes was just enough to get from the bus stop to the hidden safe in the abandoned factory.
Dustshark and I took the other route.
Once a minute, we dropped one cigar. Five in total. Not to smoke. To discard. The cigars carried a strong electronic signal and a metallic smell, designed to mislead patrol scenting and local sampling priorities. I hoped they were crude enough, obvious enough, and convincing enough as low-grade underground trade traces to draw the patrols towards me first.
The result came quickly.
A white cat, a seagull, a cockerel and two spider patrols were slowly drawn onto my line. They were not high-grade, but they were enough to create the local tension of a route worth following. As long as my side was bright enough, Snowy and Little Bluey had a better chance of being missed.
Snowy’s side went smoothly at first. Until, by the wire fence around the factory building, they ran into the wolfhound security agent.
It stood behind the fence, its casing grey with age, though its eye-lamps were still lit. On the work badge on its chest, the words Pretty Cheap Juice Company had faded, and one corner had torn away. The whole factory had been abandoned for years, yet it remained there. A kind of loyalty the city had forgotten entirely, guarding an entrance no one was ever coming back to.
When it saw Snowy, its first line was still standard procedure.
“Illegal entry.”
Snowy did not force her way in. She only softened her voice, like a household owl that had genuinely lost its way.
“I’m sorry. I’m lost. Could you tell me where Hope Petrol Station is?”
The wolfhound security agent answered at once, with a precision suggesting that although it had been forgotten all these years, it had never forgotten what it was for. “In this direction. Approximately one point eight seven kilometres.”
At the exact second it gave directions, Little Bluey darted into the factory building. It did not turn back or hesitate. That small pastel-blue shadow was like a tiny spark swallowed by the dark. The safe inside the factory was one I had set up long ago. It could hide it for seven days. After seven days, when the density outside had loosened a little, it would send Little Turtle a safety signal.
A little over five minutes later, Snowy, Dustshark and I regrouped in the pedestrian tunnel near the little park.
I was wearing a mask, an old black hooded jacket, old black tracksuit trousers, white canvas shoes and a pair of sunglasses. Not because this would make me truly safe, but because it might at least make the first layer of roadside sampling take a little longer to match me back to my everyday outline. Dustshark was hidden inside my jacket, completely folded in.
As we entered the pedestrian tunnel, I saw a vagrant sitting against the wall, wrapped in several layers of old clothing whose seasons could no longer be told apart.
I glanced up at the two CCTV cameras above. Both lenses were cracked.
It did not look like natural wear. It looked more as though someone, long ago, had known he was not suited to spending his whole life stored in someone else’s summary, and had blinded those two eyes first.
The vagrant looked up at me too. Not the wary glance strangers give one another in the street, but something brief, familiar, as if he had long ago learned to tell who was merely passing through, and who had entered the night carrying another version of themselves. He looked first at the bag in my hand, then at my shoes, and finally flicked his gaze very quickly behind me, as though he had already measured whether I had a tail.
I paused and said to him, “There’s a tin box by the bench in the little park. Good stuff inside. It will sell for a lot in the underground market.”
Then I took off the hooded jacket and black tracksuit trousers, pushed the white canvas shoes towards him as well.
It was not charity. Nor sudden kindness.
I simply needed a new version to remain in that tunnel for the tightly wrapped night-walker I had just been.
The vagrant looked at me for two seconds and asked no questions. He took the clothes quickly, as if he knew that some things, once asked aloud, ceased to be an exchange and became involvement. After half a second, he said quietly, “When you passed by ten minutes ago, you weren’t dressed like this.”
My chest tightened slightly.
But he did not pursue it. He simply pulled the clothes deeper into his arms, as if gathering in, along with them, a sentence he had seen through but did not intend to say.
In this city, many people survived by not looking. A few survived by seeing and saying nothing.
After changing, I walked some distance before taking off the sunglasses and mask. Snowy and Dustshark removed their charms at the same time. Then one man and two agents passed through the pedestrian tunnel and went to a nearby twenty-four-hour McDondon.
The place was always bright, garishly so, and therefore safe. The whole restaurant had the weary steadiness produced by night-shift workers, delivery riders, insomniacs and people with nowhere to go. We ordered a vegetarian Old Taste Burger. I sat down and ate it mouthful by mouthful, as if I really were just someone who had finished a mess of night-time errands and come in for food.
A few minutes later, Turt Monk arrived.
It had come on another bus, moving slowly like an old monk-agent genuinely out for a walk. It did not come straight towards me. Instead, it stopped beside the ordering machine for a while and waited for a delivery rider with a hot bag to pass before sliding along the wall to my feet.
I did not look down. I merely pushed the tray a little towards the edge of the table.
Turt Monk spat the external memory into an unobtrusive recess at the tray’s edge.
“Double-O Seven has finished copying,” it said quietly. “Serena, Gold Saint Two Seconds, Maggie, Vivian, and part of the BELI and Room 101 crossover fragments are all inside.”
From inside my jacket, Dustshark said coldly, “A late-night snack to keep plenty of people awake.”
I slipped the memory into my sleeve and did not stay long. Outside, I waited for two minutes beside the bus stop. Golden Beetle crawled slowly out from the edge of a drain, its casing naturally battered, like a tiny piece of refuse the city had forgotten to recycle.
It raised its head and said very softly, “Delivery?”
I crouched to tie my shoelace and slipped the memory into the hidden slot in its abdomen.
“Take it to the factory safe. Give it to Little Bluey. Once it has copied everything, tell it to wipe the memory, then leave the empty memory in the safe.”
Golden Beetle’s eye-lamps glowed once. “An empty memory has a use?”
“It may have, one day.”
Golden Beetle asked nothing more. It turned and crawled back into the drain, a small old-gold shadow swallowed by darkness.
Snowy, Dustshark and I took the bus home.
On the surface, everything seemed to have been folded back into ordinary life. But I knew the next day would not be ordinary.
When Snowy, Dustshark, Turt Monk and I returned home, dawn had not yet fully broken.
Double-O Seven was still in the sitting room. The terminal was dim; there was no unnecessary sound. Little Bluey was hidden. Golden Beetle had not reported back, which, in its own way, was good news. Truly safe underground agents never happily announced completion after finishing a job. No sound was the sound.
I did not want to sleep.
Not because I was not tired, but because sleep would not come. Carrot Pony’s message, Brown’s seventy-two hours, Mrs Brown held in Room 103, Big Heart Bunny’s twenty-four-hour watch: all of it lodged in my mind. It was not merely a threat. It was the system fixing one person’s direction of movement by fastening him to another.
I sat beneath the low lamp in the sitting room and said to Double-O Seven, “Play some BELI fragments.”
Double-O Seven looked at me. “Which kind?”
“The Sacred Turtle system.”
Turt Monk had been crouched at the edge of the table. At those four words, the low light on its shell rose very slowly, as if something ancient had been gently called awake from deep inside.
“That was not a system,” it said softly. “That was what we were supposed to become.”
Double-O Seven did not answer at once. It lowered the playback port to the dimmest setting.
“I only kept fragments,” it said. “But fragments are sometimes more honest than complete versions.”
Snowy perched above the terminal, her light gentle, as though she feared that if she shone too brightly she would shatter the old time in the footage. Dustshark crouched at the corner of the table, its grey light flickering on and off, looking fully prepared to make acid remarks about all the embarrassing material from my youth. Yet when the recording began, it too fell silent.
The image showed a meeting room from many years ago.
Silver Eagle was not yet what it would become. Even the name “Silver Eagle” was still only an embryonic idea in Mrs Dunn’s mind, tidier than the other proposals and easier for those above to like. I stood before a whiteboard, a terminal projection beside me, introducing my Sacred Turtle system to Mr Dunn and several WPC officials.
One hundred and one turtle agents.
Decentralised. Exchanging sample emotion data. Correcting one another. Holding fragments for one another.
Not everything handed to a central terminal for calculation. Not a world that began by assuming there was only one optimal answer. Instead, different nodes preserving different rhythms, different errors, different half-beats of slowness. Because back then I truly believed that once something like emotion was handed entirely to one central terminal, it would soon learn diversity as deviation, exceptions as noise, and eventually learn human beings as formats.
In the image, Mr Dunn listened carefully. The terminal light reflected on his face. Now and then his fingers tapped lightly on the edge of the table, as if every node, every synchronisation route, every little turtle shell holding data for another, had already grown into a small compartment in his mind. At the end, he even smiled and said, “Decentralisation makes it harder for the whole batch to learn crooked.”
Those words, learn crooked, sounded now almost like a prophecy spoken too early.
I had not thought so far ahead then. I had only been pleased. Pleased that someone finally understood I was not making toys, nor a group agent show to cheer people up, but testing a way of understanding entirely unlike handing everything to one central brain.
So later, I really did install the Turtle Pool Communications Protocol in Clever Turtle and ten Little Turtles, producing a proof of concept. That small group of turtles exchanged sample emotion data with one another. Before their owners spoke, they compared different versions of understanding. They preserved error and inconsistency. They were slow, but alive. Often, precisely because they did not reach conclusions too quickly, they came closer to how people actually lived.
The grey light at Dustshark’s nose glowed.
“And of course the concept was stolen,” it said coldly.
As soon as it finished speaking, the image cut forward.
The WPC eventually rejected the Sacred Turtle system.
The reasons were neat: not centralised enough, not efficient enough, unsuitable for later global management. Mrs Dunn’s Silver Eagle proposal was the exact opposite: one central terminal, one master version, one unified logic capable of continuous training, continuous optimisation and continuous expansion. No scattered turtle shells, no inconsistent ways of speaking to one another, no pauses that were difficult to quantify.
The WPC chose Silver Eagle.
From an institutional point of view, of course it was right. A single core, centralised computation, controllable, scalable, connectable to the whole city. Compared with a hundred turtles growing their own versions, Silver Eagle looked more like the future, and more like the kind of future power would prefer.
After the Sacred Turtle system failed, I left BELI and went to SignalTrain.
The final section of footage showed Mr Dunn privately approving my request to take Clever Turtle and one Little Turtle with me. He simply looked at me, thanked me for my work at BELI, then handed those two small things over, like a man who knew he could not preserve the whole project for you, but could at least save a little of the wreckage that had not yet been fully absorbed.
“What about Planetary Duck?” the younger me asked in the recording.
Mr Dunn looked towards the absurdly round duck agent beside him, whose eyes were not foolish at all.
“It likes to be free,” he said. “Let it go wherever it likes.”
Only then did Snowy speak, very softly “You were not making something anti-system back then.”
Double-O Seven paused. Its voice was low, as though it feared waking something. “You were only making a kind of understanding that sounded less like an order.”
The room became still.
Because we all knew that was the cruellest part. Many things that would later be called dangerous, underground, deviated, old-version, difficult to manage, had not begun as acts of resistance. They had simply grown more slowly, more loosely, less willing to become one answer too soon.
I looked at the turtles in the footage, those slow, foolish little things that had genuinely held data for one another, and a thought came to me.
We were still holding data for one another now.
Not merely backing up. But as before: you keep a little of me, I keep a little of you. And if one day someone truly smoothed one of us flat, at least the others might still be able, slowly, to call them back.
The next morning, after receiving the seventy-two-second video, Cici Chorley’s first reaction was to investigate Paul.
She suspected Paul was the whistleblower. Not because she particularly liked the theory, but because recently every unclean line had too easily led back towards him.
She first traced Paul’s movements over the previous twelve days.
The result came back quickly. No District Eleven. No District Thirteen. In those twelve days, Paul had not visited the two most sensitive districts at all. The only genuinely unusual thing was that at three in the morning the previous day, a little over an hour after the clip had been released, Paul went to District Eighteen.
That timing allowed her to make a rapid judgement: it was a reaction after the event, not a deployment before it.
In other words, the person who blew the whistle was unlikely to be Paul. At least, he was not the direct source of the leak.
But she did not let Paul go.
She connected to the Room 101 sample-agent recording archive and requested the fragments returned by Paul’s agents between three and four o’clock that morning.
[3:03 | Dustshark] Paul wears a yellow T-shirt, pale blue trousers and trainers. He is carrying a large plastic bag. Snowy perches on his shoulder, as quiet as any legal household agent accompanying its owner out at night.
[3:08 | Snowy] Paul gets off the Number 28 hoverbus at Little Park Stop in District Eighteen. Dustshark is with him.
[3:13 | Dustshark] Behind Paul, patrol agents collect several illegal electronic components from the ground. The image is distant and blurred, but enough to prove that Paul’s route was not entirely ordinary.
[3:28 | Snowy] Paul and Dustshark emerge from beneath the footbridge. He is still wearing the yellow T-shirt, pale blue trousers and trainers. There is no obvious sign of modification, as if that missing stretch of time had been spent on some ordinary, slightly shameful errand.
[3:33 | Dustshark] Paul and Snowy head towards McDondon.
[3:37 | Snowy] Paul and Dustshark eat a burger at McDondon.
[3:42 | Dustshark] Paul and Snowy wait for a bus outside McDondon.
[3:52 | Dustshark] Paul boards the bus. Snowy is beside him.
[3:56 | Snowy] Another angle. Paul sits by the window, Dustshark crouched beside him, and Paul, looking genuinely tired, has tilted his head slightly and fallen asleep.
The whole sequence of timecodes formed a complete logic.
So complete, in fact, that it looked almost like an ordinary rhythm of life prepared in advance.
And precisely because it was so complete, Cici did not rush to accept it as a conclusion. She knew that the real problem often did not lie in the master version, but in the corners missing just outside it.
So she took another step.
She contacted the Room 203 investigation team and requested all CCTV footage from that morning within a one-kilometre radius of the little park and the pedestrian tunnel entrance. Everything that could be accessed was to be accessed. Anything with usable image quality was to be pulled.
The results came back quickly. More than fifty clips.
Most showed nothing special. Empty streets at night. A few drunk people. A vagrant rummaging through a bin. A delivery worker pushing an empty trolley. Two patrol agents pausing for half a second over a broken cigar end before moving on. These clips were all too ordinary, ordinary enough to hide the few that mattered.
She went through them one by one until three timestamps caused her gaze to pause.
[3:16 | Park streetlight CCTV] A man wearing a mask, an old black hooded jacket, old black tracksuit trousers, white canvas shoes and sunglasses passes beneath the streetlight. He has no agent with him. At least, none appears on camera.
[3:21 | Park bench CCTV] The same man places a tin box on a bench.
[3:26 | Near pedestrian footbridge CCTV] The same man walks towards the footbridge.
So far, it proved nothing. In District Eighteen at night, anyone might appear, and any box might be left behind. But Cici did not stop. She immediately asked Room 203 to pull every clip around that bench, expanding the time range from 3:20 to 5:00.
[4:03 | Park bench CCTV] In the image, a vagrant walks to the bench and picks up the tin box. He looks left and right, then opens it and looks down inside. The camera angle is poor, and his own back blocks the view, making it impossible to see what is in the box.
And precisely because it could not be seen, that frame suddenly became more valuable.
Not because it necessarily contained anything important, but because the black-clad man and Paul after three in the morning overlapped in the same area, and between them there happened to be a box, a vagrant, a tunnel with broken CCTV cameras, and a blank stretch that could be explained as nothing more than an ordinary night-time passage.
At that point, Cici finally paused the image.
She did not immediately say, “It was him.” Nor did she hurry to tie Paul directly to the man in black. She simply sat there, looking at the frame of the vagrant lowering his head towards the box, as if measuring where best to pull this line first.
Queen of Spaces moved her fan lightly and asked, “Do we touch Paul first?”
Cici did not answer at once.
Her gaze remained on that frame. On the man with no departmental authority, no agent masking, no one to complete his narrative for him. On the thinnest node, the one who could be tested first without causing much alarm.
After two seconds, she said flatly, “Not the bright one first.”
Queen of Spaces was silent.
Cici marked that single frame. Her voice was so pale it was almost without emotion. “Start with the one easiest to overlook, and least likely to bite back.” She paused, then placed the final word down.
“The vagrant.”
Outside the window, white light was slowly rising over the city. People were beginning to go to work. Terminal summaries opened one after another. A new daily life was layering itself over all the movements, boxes, masks, charms, cigars, wire fences and factory safes that should not have existed the night before. The whole of G City still looked almost perfectly normal.
But Cici knew that truly valuable things never grew in the normal.
They grew in the spaces made deliberately too ordinary.
And now, in that blankness, she had finally seen someone she could strike first.