Irun was on a call with marketing when the message pinged her phone. Forty-five minutes spent explaining why it would be at least six months of work to create and integrate the function some salesperson just promised was already part of the system.
'Time for a drink,' she muttered, and toggled the 'Away From Desk' message.
Standing up was enough to make Lady Margaret de Bohun stretch and yawn, then look over from her spot on the window sill.
'Yes, you've been hard at sleep, Lady. Do you want some tuna?' The brindle tabby continued her isometric workout, but by the time Irun was at the door of the small room used for an office, the cat was running ahead to the kitchen.
It wasn't until the cat had been offered her tuna, and the kettle was on, that Irun remembered the message ping. The message was from the Director in charge of her division of the company. Irun sighed.
Marketing must have been on to their Director even while the phone call was happening. Her Director would be apologetic, but suggest that the feature needed to be prioritised but no, there was no budget for any extra staff, she was salaried so overtime wasn't applicable, and yes all the other priorities still needed to be managed at the same time because they were too important to get behind schedule on. Had he been as obstinate while working as a civil servant?
Maybe this would be the day to hot quit. There were other jobs.
She finished making her cup of tea, grabbed a couple of digestive biscuits, and headed back to her office. With tea and biscuits almost anything could be endured.
--
The journey took three separate flights and for the whole trip she worried about Lady de Behun. Sure, she stayed with Frank and Eleanor when Irun was away on holiday, but that was always well planned, and for a defined period.
This was different.
'I can't tell you more, Irun, because I don't know more,' her Director had said. 'It's big and it's improtant, and you can be part of it. If I had any technical proficiency I'd have recommended myself, but you know what my computer skills are like.'
That he called them 'computer skills' was bad enough. He wasn't so bad that he had his secretary print out emails, but anything which hinted at code was beyond his skillset, and he kept it that way.
What swung it for Irun was the location. Menlo Park was as close to a nerve centre for technological developments as possible. Even if this mysterious assignment was a bust, there'd be the opportunity to meet people and, while networking wasn't a forte, Irun had developed enough skills to not pass up the chances it could bring.
In the Uber to the hotel she looked through the slim document file on her tablet, again. A muti-national, multi-agency, multi-government and private initiative to create protocols for emerging technologies... she zoned out, again. It went on for pages, and had the feel of having been put together by an intern who'd used an algorithm to generate the text.
The only really interesting thing was the list of companies involved. She'd surely be able to swing an interview with one of them. Though, looking at the list of other people who would be on the project, she wondered how and why she'd been suggested.
--
The woman's name badge said Alysson, and she'd made a bee-line for Irun after the first session. There'd been about three-hundred or so in the auditorium where the reveal of a trans-dimensional link to The Pixelverse was revealed. Irun was sipping coffee when Alysson stuck a hand out and introduced herself before saying, 'We wondered who MI5 would send, you must be new to the service.'
'Sorry,' Irun said.
'Dominic let us know he was sending someone, but not specifically who. How is he?' Dominic was her Director, if she meant Dominic Chatreaux. Irun knew he'd come from government work but surely not intelligence. 'I bet he never even told you who to look out for. Anyway, the intelligence group is meeting in a secure room away from the contact site. We need to work out a strategy to counteract whatever the other side tries to do, and while we're at it you can read me in to what you guys have on your European neighbors. We're full of keeping an eye on the Chinese and Russians, though you'll know all about that I suppose.' She reached gently manicured fingers into an inside pocket of her jacket and held a card to Irun. 'Here, my cell and office contact are on there. We're both in the same hotel, so let's do breakfast, or a cocktail. I've just spotted Helio and I must chat with him about Brazil's intentions before Ivan sweeps him up. See you in the secure room.'
Irun checked her itinerary and saw her next session was at a different site, she hadn't spotted that before having assumed they'd stay in the same locale. Details for transport were linked.
She made her way to the entrance and stepped out into California springtime which would have been high summer in her Yorkshire home. The dial tone of Dominick's direct line sounded like it was trying to connect half a world away, but it suddenly made sense why he'd given her it on top of his company numbers.
'Irun, is everything okay?'
'No.'
The hum of vehicles filled the silence. A siren blipped somewhere not too close by. It came through her phone as well.
'DId you meet Alysson?' Dominick asked.
With the weariness it took Irun a moment to work things through. She asked, 'Are you here in California?'
'Yes.'
'Is that to be my handler? That's what you spies call it, right, handler?'
'Look, we need to have a chat, but you wont need to do anything you find distasteful.'
Jet lag, which had been held in abeyance by excitement, confusion, and caffeine, began to assert itself. Irun fought it with anger and frustration. Maybe she should have just taken on creating the software she'd been worrying about forty-eight hours ago. 'I'm going to this next meeting in thirty minutes, which is for all the folks who really are spies. Later you can tell me what's going on.'
Dominick had sent her an address and Irun booked an Uber. When it arrived Alysson appeared as if from nowhere and said, 'Let's go see Dominick together.'
Irun considered denying, but the weariness was increasing in waves and she didn't have the energy to play a game which increasingly felt like backgammon and not the checkers she'd expected. The pieces looked the same, but the rules were incomprehensible.
Alysson confirmed the address they were going to. Irun yawned, and rested her head. She tried to make sense of the idea of a trans-dimensional link to a world based on a life-form which could change, mutate, to make itself into something ever better to meet the needs of its situation. Atop this was the expectation that she would be part of an intelligence operation to spy on the dimension they were meant to be co-operating with. And she wasn't sure all the people she was meant to be working with had the same objective.
The apartment was a nineteen-eighties block in Redwood City. Dominick opened the door and greeted Alysson as if he'd been expecting her.
'You saw us arriving?' Alysson asked?
'Irun didn't call me from the Uber,' he said.
Alysson flicked a look at Irun. 'New, but not naive.' She looked back at Dominick. 'You going to let us in?'
While the two old friends, or at least acquaintances, made inconsequential small talk and fixed drinks Irun sat on a sofa and stared out the window, across at another apartment. She let herself drift between thoughts abought the Pixelverse, and wether she even believed it to be real, or an elaborate ruse to, well, she couldn't figure out a reason.
'You have someone on the inside,' Alysson said with confidence. 'Oh, not Irun, That's obvious. It's one of our people. That's going to cause some problems when it works its way through.'
'As bad as when you lot had us pegged in the nineties?' Dominick said. 'And do you think it'll really matter? The whole world's hearing about the Pixelverse now, all anyone wants to know is how, and what, and why.'
'And you think that's made for a suddenly harmonious human experience? You didn't get all dewy eyed in the private sector, did you?'
'Of course not. But no one will care about what happened to get us here, and if that means the junior partners knew a bit more than the big boys wanted us to know, that'll be fine. And you'll still have the only means of access.'
'Why'd you send Irun?'
Irun turned round. She said, 'Pixelverse is running like 8-bit code. That goes back fifty years. There'll be folks who can work with it, some pretty old by now, some younger geeks who like the retro thrill. But from what today suggested they're expected to progress faster than Moore's Law meant we have. We're at the start of quantum processing. It's taken us fifty years to get here from 8-bit. If they proceed at at twice our pace they overtake us in thirty years or so, but if we share with them it'll be quicker. Heck, not sharing with them makes it quicker because they'll see our stuff and extrapolate. So, we need to figure out how to keep an advantage as long as possible, and make sure we keep access to what they have when they move ahead.' She took a pull on her drink, letting the coolness refresh her throat. 'And I figure you'll want to do that while keeping some fellow human nations as in the dark as possible. Right?'
Dominick smiled, and nodded. 'Right. And you'll be here dealing with that for some time. So you should ask Alysson about bringing Lady Margaret de Bohun over.'
end
text by stuartcturnbull art by MintMusic via pixabay
I feel I should offer an explanation of the title for those not immersed in Cold War history.
In intelligence, to 'walk back the cat' was to trace a failed mission back the way to try and work out who was responsible for the failure, specifically it was to try and identify spies or traitors who had passed information to the opposing side.
Here, Irun walks the cat forward by working out the role which has been laid out for her to take in penetrating the Pixelverse.
S.