Into Everywhere by Paul McAuley Page B

to do that tomorrow,’ Bria said. ‘The licence office will be closed now.’
    ‘Okay. But first thing. First thing tomorrow. The licence and the code.’
    ‘Are you sure,’ Bria said, ‘that this isn’t something to do with the ghost? That it isn’t driving you towards this place? The place it came from, where Willie and everyone else was killed.’
    Lisa realised that she was staring at the big ship hanging out there across acres of concrete. Had the Ghajar built those ships before their version of first contact with the Jackaroo, or had they found them afterwards, cast off by some previous client race? She deliberately turned her back on it and said, ‘This isn’t about helping it. It’s about understanding it. Finding out what it is so I can get rid of it.’
    ‘You just had a seizure,’ Bria said. ‘And then there was the bad news about Willie. Either one of those would have definitely put me in a spin.’
    ‘I’m chasing it
because
I had a seizure,’ Lisa said. ‘Because Willie found something that woke the ghost in my head.’
    ‘But first, maybe you should to take a step back and think this through. Think about what you really want. Think about the consequences of going up against the geek police. Not to mention the Jackaroo.’
    ‘I don’t want to get into a fight with anyone,’ Lisa said. ‘I just want to find out what it was Willie found. Find out exactly what it was that fucked us up.’
    After all these years she still didn’t have a coherent picture of what had happened to her and Willie during the Bad Trip. They had set out from Port of Plenty on one of their expeditions into the back country, and next thing she knew she woke up in the clinic in Joe’s Corner, battered and bruised and sick, no memory of how she got there. Apparently she and Willie had ditched their truck in the City of the Dead and had been found by a tomb raider, badly dehydrated and suffering from heatstroke and retrograde amnesia. She’d lost almost three weeks of her life. Wiped clean. Gone. Later, she was visited by little flashes of disconnected memory fragments – a sense of deep panic, as if she was struggling for her last breath deep underwater, dust whirling up around her, fighting with Willie over control of the truck as they fled helter-skelter from some vast black flapping doom – but neither she nor Willie could ever recall where they’d been, how they’d got there, what they had found.
    A couple of local tomb raiders had tried to follow their trail back into the Badlands, but the Badlands were big and empty, and the sandstorm season had arrived early and put an end to the search. A year later, Willie found that small excavation pit in what he claimed to be the right place, but although he dug all around it he hadn’t turned up anything.
    But something had happened. Something that had stimulated a flight reaction, forcing them to run mindlessly until they could run no more. Something that had wiped out their memories and left atypical neurological activity in the temporal lobes of their brains. An infection with some kind of algorithm. An eidolon. A ghost.
    Although actively malign artefacts were rare, all Elder Culture algorithms possessed some degree of toxicity. Despite using virtual sandboxes, Reynolds traps and other precautions, most coders and analysts suffered from headaches and transient visual or auditory hallucinations, while prospectors and tomb raiders, exposed to unshielded artefacts, risked all kinds of neurological damage, from hysterical blindness to pseudo-Parkinson’s and the zombie delusion. There was always some old-timer in the corner of a tomb raiders’ bar with the staggers and the jags, or an imaginary friend, or a demon on their back, or missing fingers or ears they’d cut off to prove that they were actually one of the walking dead. Lisa and Willie were haunted, but according to their neurology consultant their ghosts were mostly benign. They had been lucky to escape