Dark Matter Read Online Free PDF Page A

last.
    “None of them.”
    “Which is closest? Give me your first
guess, then we’ll hone and home.”
    Rasputin stabbed a finger at a faceless
head that looked no worse than any other. Bert clicked on it and another batch
of heads appeared, all more or less patterned on the one he had chosen.
    “And now?”
    Rasputin picked again, with equal
ambivalence.
    The hour wore on and the pattern became
entrenched. They progressed from heads to eyes, noses and lips, and even skin.
With each iteration the computer appeared to draw a tighter rein around the
features of subsequent candidates.
    At 3.43PM Bert wiped a sheen of sweat from
his brow and clicked a button. Faraday failed to stifle a yawn. Nothing happened
for the time it took him to stretch as far as his starched shirt would allow.
Then alone, framed within the laptop’s screen, appeared a face. It was not a
human face yet—it appeared hewn from orange stone. Then its angles disappeared,
blurred into softer lines, and over its surface various shades pulsed and
wriggled as though it were a worm-eaten apple in time-lapse. Stubble dotted the
skin, lifting the face to photo-realistic detail, and finally it became still.
    The face had become a person. A boy in his
late teens. He stared with dead eyes at Rasputin.
    Bert paused, breath held, then said, “Is
this our man? The one who pushed you in front of the car?”
    Rasputin stared back at the face.
    “It can be an emotional time,” said
Faraday, without lifting his gaze from his phone.
    Rasputin said at last, “Looks nothing like
him.”
    Jordy laughed. Faraday excused himself to
use the toilet. Bert deflated beneath his crinkling brow.
    Rasputin tilted his head and squinted. “It’s
okay,” he said, in a salvage attempt.
    It rekindled a spark in Bert’s eye, and he
said, “What would you rate it out of ten?”
    “A four—” he began, but saw the spark die
again. “Make that a five,” he amended. “His chin wasn’t like that, and—” He
cast about with his right hand clutching at the air, groping for a way to
communicate the missing five.
    His gaze happened upon a pen left by a
nurse on the bedside table. He picked it up along with a clean serviette
leftover from lunch. He put the serviette on the trolley table over his midriff
and began to sketch the boy’s face.
    He merely meant to give Bert an idea, a
nudge in the right direction. Anything to get the wreck back on the rails. But
when he brought the pen into contact with the serviette’s shallow weave and
conjured the boy’s face to see its contours, a strange thing happened.
    For an instant a single eye, the boy’s
left, flared in the vault of his mind. It cast everything else into darkness.
The intensity of its gaze pierced him with an almost physical pain.
    He began to draw it.
    After the initial shock, his
flare-blindness died, allowing all of the boy’s face and what surrounded it to
seep back into view. But Rasputin’s inner eye remained riveted to that eye.
    As he left the first strokes of black on
the serviette, he began to catalogue the eye’s features, iris, pupil, white,
veins. But no sooner had he brought them to mind as precursor to sketching
them, than the ties between word and thing, abstract and concrete, evanesced,
faded and disappeared. Lost too was his perception of where he was and who he was
with. Even the ticking of the clock vanished from his consciousness, although
this realisation came later.
    He was aware only of face and pen, and the
flesh that connected them, aware of it as never before, at a creaturely,
instinctual level. He felt the bundles of nerve-lines, infinitesimally small,
that fed circuits of motor cells driving the brute pack of muscle that encased
his shoulder, driving it in concert with bicep and triceps, and finer muscles
that worked tendons like puppet strings to grasp the pen and nuance its stroke.
    Stroke by stroke, ink left the nib, stained
the paper, and began to mirror an eye.
    As he began to sketch the