by Nick M Lloyd
‘You can’t be serious,’ said Tim. ‘Scale is everything.’
‘On that we agree,’ said MacKenzie. ‘You know, I died three times as a child. I had asthma attacks that stopped my breathing. Luckily on each occasion I was brought round before permanent brain damage occurred.’ He paused. ‘I know that on my deathbed, if I was offered the chance to live another five years in exchange for the deaths of fifty thousand strangers … I would take it without hesitation.
‘Maybe not if you felt you’d have a fulfilled life,’ said Tim.
MacKenzie scowled. ‘It is never enough – not for me – and you’d have your price, too. Perhaps you’d do it for the death of one very old stranger … or three paedophiles … or five mass murderers … there’s always a price.’
‘I can’t believe anyone would do that,’ said Tim, feeling a need to defend the moral position even though he could, in fact, believe that a small minority would do it readily.
‘I can’t believe everyone wouldn’t,’ said MacKenzie, deadpan.
‘What’s the basis for the Ankor’s … ethics?’ asked Whaller, obviously still trying to gauge how many innocent people might be at risk if they staged a fight-back on behalf of humanity.
‘I know a bit there,’ said Tim. He outlined the basics of Simulation Theory. ‘As MacKenzie says, they probably do have a moral code, of sorts.’
‘Mr Boston is correct,’ said MacKenzie. ‘As I said before, they’re trying to get the brain material while causing minimal suffering on Earth, but they won’t leave without it.’
‘Do you believe we’re living in a simulation?’ asked Tim.
‘I am prepared to be convinced that it is the reality,’ said MacKenzie. ‘But that doesn’t mean I worship whoever encoded our universe. Creation doesn’t automatically confer ownership.’
Whaller looked at Tim. ‘Do you believe it?’
‘No,’ said Tim with a smile. ‘The Ankor are giant brains, enormous biological computational creatures. I suspect they’ve simply created their god in their own image … a computer, for them, is the natural choice. Early human civilisations had gods of hunting, more recent ones had gods of laws.’
‘My reservations entirely,’ said MacKenzie. ‘Well done, Mr Boston.’
Whaller turned to MacKenzie. ‘Did you plan to be decapitated like Charles Taylor?’
‘No; mine is planned to be a live merge,’ said MacKenzie. ‘Retaining my own conscious thoughts and ego.’
‘You still think you’re going?’
‘Who knows?’ said MacKenzie. ‘Obviously, you could kill me now. But it took the Ankor five hundred years to get here; they’re not likely to leave without the brain material. And I have all the codes.’
‘Which you will tell us,’ said Whaller.
‘Your problem is,’ said MacKenzie, ‘that if I give you the wrong codes then the whole place goes up in flames … and here, with you, I am staring certain death in the face.’
Whaller remained silent.
‘Do they just plug the brains in and reformat them … like a hard drive?’ asked Tim.
‘I ensured that every resident of Anglesey was enrolled in MedOp. We have sequenced their DNA and provided the Ankor with that information,’ said MacKenzie. ‘The Ankor will distribute each brain to where its appropriate skills are needed.’
‘Skills?’ asked Whaller.
‘Some people are more adept at data crunching, others to intuition. Some have well-developed memory,’ said MacKenzie. ‘Most of these skills are nature not nurture.’
‘What sense of self survives?’ asked Tim.
MacKenzie shrugged, making a face to indicate he didn’t know.
A knock on the door drew their attention.
Colonel Martel.
Tim went through the process of demagnetising the room, and then reactivating once Martel was inside.
Whaller took Martel aside and gave him a whispered update.
‘Five hundred years,’ said Martel, turning to MacKenzie. ‘That means no hyperspace technology.’
‘I’m afraid not,’ said MacKenzie. ‘It makes their position a little more desperate.’
Martel, his face grim, addressed Captain Whaller. ‘Do you have what you need?’
‘I could do with some more time, sir,’ said Whaller.
‘We don’t have it. They just blew a nuclear charge in Birmingham.’ Martel paused. ‘The countdown to RL3 is back on. The prime minister gave me the order verbally via point-to-point, but he’ll be here soon.’
‘In that case, sir,’ said Whaller, ‘we have to go with Chimera.’
Martel turned to MacKenzie. ‘Do I need codes from you for the launch?’
‘No, RL3 is already primed.’
‘Can the A-Gravs be deactivated?’
‘Not by me or you,’ said MacKenzie. ‘Any tampering will cause them to explode.’
Martel looked at Tim. ‘Are you up for a trip back into the Hot Zone?’
‘I wouldn’t be much use in a fight, but I can help,’ said Tim. ‘I’ve been down there. I can … be a lookout.’
Whaller and Martel exchanged a look. Whaller clearly had reservations about Tim accompanying him.
‘Good, we need all the support we can get,’ said Martel, overruling the unspoken opinion. ‘Sam also volunteered.’
‘Shall I get her?’ asked Tim.
‘Yes, please,’ said Martel, before turning back to MacKenzie. ‘The pod temperatures … what do they mean?’
MacKenzie shrugged. ‘It’s pretty basic. Those at a temperature of 4K are empty. 305K are operational. 220K are in suspension but contain material. They have to be at 305K to accept new materials.’
--------
Entering the main floor, Tim looked up at the screens. The external radiation levels across the SpaceOp facility had risen again.
External
.2 millisieverts per hour
People probably wouldn’t leave the building, but whether they performed their jobs correctly was another matter.
Tim looked at the screens showing launch sites across the globe. They were all inactive. Only Anglesey remained operational to provide payloads. Clearly, the gamma ray burst had been one big fabrication.
A MIDAS newsfeed reported on Birmingham.
Birmingham reported explosion
Western suburb
Two kilotons
A reminder from the Ankor to obey. Tim fervently hoped they would consider one explosion a sufficient reminder. It was a small one, by nuclear standards. The Ankor did seem to be shepherding the UK.
Looking around, Tim saw Tosh consoling a man who was sobbing at his desk.
Tim climbed up to the mezzanine level.
Sitting on a chair, kneading her left thigh to work blood into it, Sam looked troubled. ‘About half the people here say we should just give them what they want. They say it’s a tragedy, but no more than the poor souls living without clean water, or living under a high voltage electricity pylon, or being sent to an avoidable war.’
‘And the other half?’ asked Tim, disturbed by how much Sam’s words echoed what MacKenzie had said.
‘The other half say come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough,’ said Sam with a forced smile.
He didn’t answer. The fact remained that an additional forty thousand souls to save seven billion was a no-brainer …
As long as you don’t have to push the button yourself.
Was it seven billion at risk? Would the Ankor blow all the nukes if humanity stood firm? Would that consign humanity to extinction? Could the fact the Ankor appeared to have some moral code mean they could have their bluff called? What power did the so-called Transcenders have over the main Ankor group?
Sam had read his mind. ‘And will they just keep coming back indefinitely?’
Charlie said five more trips … but he may not be party to their innermost plans.
‘I guess Martel is assuming so,’ said Tim.
Sam nodded. ‘He told me that
much when you were downstairs.’
They looked up at the newsfeeds. Most of them were showing mass panic as people tried to get as much distance as possible between themselves and their closest A-Grav units.
Not that anyone can get that far away on an island …
The sick feeling in the pit of his stomach turned to churning nausea as Tim focused on another newsfeed.
This one was showing pictures of the detonation in China. Fires raged through Shenyang.
I did that.
Tim stepped forward to help Sam into her crutches, but she waved him away.
‘Don’t worry, I’m fully juiced up,’ she said.
‘The sleepy ones?’
‘No, the little red ones.’
She didn’t fool him for a moment; the red pills did nothing more than take the edge off the pain.
Tim’s attention was drawn to a screen displaying the Ankor pod configuration and temperature status. Constructed from infrared pictures taken every hour by a satellite at the Lagrange Two point, the display showed that significantly more of the 343 pods were now warm. Martel’s question to MacKenzie now had context.
Ankor Mother ship – Pod Temperature Distributions:
343 Pods
232 Operating at an average 305K
86 Operating at an average 220K
25 Operating at an average 4K
Twenty-one more pods operating at 305K. From what Tim understood, that was the required temperature for activation of empty pods, or simple brain material augmentation of existing pods.
More pods on the Ankor ship are waking up.
Was this the RL1 material being utilised? Or were they just preparing for new material?
Moments later, the United Nations put out a broadcast.
Notwithstanding the final word on this matter from the UK government, to whom we cede the ultimate decision making, it is the position of the United Nations General Assembly that it is prepared to countenance the transport of the existing material.
The message was met with silence in the Control Centre.
‘We have to go back down,’ said Tim.
Before they’d opened the door, the USA had added its own broadcast.
It is the position of the United States of America that any transport of material is an affront to God and will not be countenanced.
CHAPTER 34
SpaceOp
After double-checking the magnetisation on the Faraday room was functioning, Tim gave Whaller, Richardson and Martel an update about the UN message and the USA’s subsequent response.
‘The hard-line military are making the calls,’ said Martel.
‘With friends like these …’ added Whaller, before turning to Richardson. ‘Ready?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Richardson now had two rucksacks, presumably taken from inside the holdalls he’d brought with them.
Martel spoke directly to Tim. ‘If you encounter Leafers, you run. If one of my men is shot, you run. No heroics. Understand?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Come back safe,’ said Sam, settling on the single wooden chair in the room, her eyes not leaving MacKenzie who was slumped in the corner.
Moments later, leaving Martel, Sam, and MacKenzie, they were on their way.
Whaller and Tim walked side by side along the corridors, down past the data rooms, and onwards.
As before, the corridor was lit with faint red lighting, each light just enough to see the next.
Whaller and Richardson wore high-tech low light vision gear, and both carried silenced snub-nosed machine guns.
No-one spoke. As he walked, a hundred questions leapt into Tim’s brain. Was there a bomb in the rucksack? Did Whaller intend for them to destroy the crates? How would the Ankor respond?
After a few minutes, Whaller abruptly put up a hand for them to stop. He spent a few minutes adjusting his vision gear whilst looking intently down the long straight corridor.
A further hand gesture started them walking again.
They reached the door where Charlie had clubbed him. Tim put his hand on Whaller’s arm and indicated it was the one he’d already told Whaller and Martel about, showing them where Charlie had cut out flex from the cabling.
It could be used as an escape route, or an incursion route if there were more soldiers available.
Whaller looked for a few moments and then, apparently satisfied, indicated for them all to walk on.
Now the end of the corridor came into sight, or rather didn’t. It was pitch black: the corridor lights stopped five metres short.
Whaller crept forward, with Richardson holding up his machine gun.
Within a few metres of the door a set of red lights flared, giving them a half-view of the final door, which was shut.
Whaller slowly turned the handle and went through, followed closely by Richardson.
They were in the anteroom. From here Tim knew the door straight in front of them led to the decapitation room. The left-hand door, he assumed, followed on a parallel track to the production line, broadly running underneath the vent that he and Sam had crawled along.
Whaller passed a note.
Packing crates?
Tim nodded as Whaller pointed to the left-hand door.
Richardson went first.
The door opened onto another corridor, lit with more dim red lights.
This corridor also had thick cabling running along the floor.
Tim followed Richardson, with Whaller taking the back position. As they walked, Tim made a mental map of where he’d crawled in the vents. The processing room would be about fifty metres further on.
He was right. After a minute of slowly creeping forward, they reached a door leading off to the right. Tim hung back whilst Whaller and Richardson examined the door.
Whaller took out a short length of flex, attached one end to his low light goggles, and pushed the other end under the door.
The door opened.
Blinding light flooded into the corridor and a man pushed into Richardson and Whaller, knocking them over and advancing on Tim.
Instinctively, Tim stumbled backwards.
His attacker was silhouetted against the bright light, but Tim recognised him based on size only.
Juan.
Light glinted off Juan’s knife as it slashed towards him.
Tim scrambled backwards, losing his footing. He fell.
The knife sliced past the point where Tim’s neck would have been.
Phft. Phft. Phft.
Knife raised, Juan advanced.
Phft. Phft. Phft.
This time it was Juan who stumbled and fell, his head whacking into Tim’s left foot.
Dead.
Whaller shuffled forward, his machine gun held ready, unwaveringly pointing at Juan’s head.
All the bullets from Whaller’s gun had taken Juan in the back – he was dead.
Richardson grunted in pain.
Tim climbed to his feet and joined Whaller at Richardson’s side.
Richardson tried to reassure Tim with a smile, but pain was clearly etched on his face. He’d been stabbed in the shoulder as Juan had come through the door.
‘What can I do?’ Tim mouthed, hoping Whaller could make it out in the semi-darkness.
Whaller indicated for Tim to keep lookout whilst he administered first aid to Richardson.
‘Shall I stay here or make my way back?’ whispered Richardson, easing himself up to find a comfortable position.
Whaller took Richardson’s backpack. ‘Try to get back.’
Looking at the blood seeping through the makeshift field dressing Whaller had applied, Tim felt that simply returning to the Faraday room would be both a stretch and perhaps a mistake.
Whaller took a look through the open doorway, then closed the door. ‘That’s the room from your photos. It’s empty,’ he whispered. ‘We need to go to the next one.’
Leaving Richardson, they continued.
About fifty metres later, the corridor ended in anoth
er door, with another concrete anteroom behind it. This room only had one door leading onwards. They listened for a minute and Whaller used the fibre optic surveillance wire again.
Silence.
Whaller handed Richardson’s rucksack to Tim and eased his machine gun into position.
Weapon ready, Whaller opened the door a crack.
Light flooded out.
Tim squinted his eyes to adjust.
This room was large but devoid of Leafers.
He checked again.
No Leafers.
They went in.
The room was over twenty metres long with a high ceiling, but relatively narrow. A rail track ran down the centre of it. At each end of the room was a set of hatches that controlled entry and exit of the flatbed trolleys that ran on the rails.
There were eight separate cylinder segments, each standing on its own flatbed trolley. Each segment was a quarter wedge of a cylinder about two metres high and wide. The full payload would obviously consist of two full cylinders, one on top of the other. Unable to stop his instinct to ‘do the maths’, Tim calculated each segment would hold between five and eight hundred heads.
‘Okay?’ asked Whaller, shutting the door behind them.
‘Yes.’
‘We can talk quietly now,’ said Whaller. ‘MacKenzie was adamant the Ankor had no eyes or ears down here, and the risk of us miscommunicating is far greater than the risk of being found.’
‘Okay,’ said Tim, not really understanding. He’d assumed the rucksacks held some high-powered bombs that they would hide.
Is there more to it?
‘What do you need from me?’ asked Tim.
‘We’ve got less than an hour before the crates are sent for loading,’ said Whaller. ‘You’re off sentry duty and on injection duty.’
Injections?
Tim acknowledged with a nod.
Whaller shifted his body slightly to bring the rucksack off his shoulder.
He opened it. ‘We developed a few options in Porton Down and chose this one,’ he said. ‘It is the synthetic Chimera virus, embedded in biodegradable host nerve cells. The whole package makes Ebola look like a tickly cough.’
He took out a wooden case, inside which was a glass case containing a line of five large syringes with hypodermic needles attached.