Free Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) by Richard Farr Page A

Chairs overturned. Every cupboard and cabinet flung open. Bedrooms, attic, garage. Back to the kitchen. The words were an unintelligible mix of fragments, in both English and the “language” of the Architects:
     
    “They will know it.”
    “Ol-CHI-ma, dem-UK-tel—”
    “The river into the cave—”
    “Calculating, calculating—”
    “So long ago—”
    “The volcano is a computer, a trap.”
     
    You frightened me: you seemed to be approaching some psychological cliff edge. But I didn’t interfere, perhaps because I’d not seen you so purposeful, so motivated, and there was a sliver of hope in motivated . But eventually you’d looked everywhere, it seemed, and you had such a wild look that I tried to urge you to give it up and leave. You shook me off and went back to the basement.
    It was on the floor, what you were looking for. It was leaning up against the baseboard at an odd angle as if thrown there, only three feet from the bottom of the basement stairs. An expensive old camera, big and clunky, the black metal casing scuffed from use. Iona’s old Nikon. “She had this one when she came to us in New Guinea,” I said. “It used to have a wide bright-orange strap. That flash of color through the trees was the first thing I saw when she arrived in our encampment.”
    “Iona,” you said, nodding furiously. You held up the camera. “The I’iwa. The I’iwa were there. At the beginning.”

    The I’iwa were there. At the beginning. I knew what you were talking about. Or did I?
    It was that summer of your first trip to Crete. You and Bill were in Heraklion, discovering that the Phaistos Disks were several thousand years older than they were supposed to be. Meanwhile Iona was globetrotting, because she was still building her company and hadn’t yet made out like a bandit. But even then—so typical!—en route between important meetings in Oz and important meetings in China, she decided to take a week off and drop in on us. Because Lorna had a bee in her bonnet about the evolution of tool use, the family Chen were living in a bug-infested hut with a roof made of pandanus leaves, deep in the mountains, on the border between Indonesian West Papua and Papua New Guinea.
    “Iona, pet,” my mother said by shortwave radio, from a dripping front porch the size of a closet. “Ye’re entirely welcome here, an’ entirely mad. We’re on a river that has nae even a name. It’s a tributary o’ the August, which is a tributary o’ the Sepik. We’re at least a twenty-mile hike from the nearest airstrip. An’ the trails? Frankly, gurrl, even wi’out the leeches, an’ the snakes, an’ the certifiably insane wild pigs, the trails round here are an unmitigated feck’n bastard.”
    She must have known that news of danger, difficulty, or discomfort would only be an incentive. Sure enough: a few days later I was playing in a mud hole with some Tainu kids when I heard voices and saw a flash of orange through the trees, and the president and CEO of IONA Bioencryption Systems—Mom, to you—walked into camp with a big smile on her face. Two exhausted local boys, Willem and Yosep, were bobbing erratically in her wake, looking glassy-eyed, bewildered, shocked. No doubt they’d taken her for a typical wait meri —one of the feeble creatures who came in hordes, looking for the Garden of Eden, and discovered instead a kind of vertical tropical hell through which they needed to be carried after the first hundred yards. They probably took bets on how quickly Iona would pass out, then found themselves struggling to keep up. No one warned them they were guiding a world-class fitness nut who’d recently pioneered a new route on the south face of Aconcagua.
    “That wasn’t bad,” she said in greeting, like someone returning to the house after a jog in the park. A camera— that camera, on the orange strap—was around her neck. She swung down her pack and handed me a mildly crushed packet of McVitie’s dark chocolate