by David Smith
‘Thank you!’ he said, and before they could ask him anything he added. ‘I know this isn’t real, and that I’m only a thinly sketched facsimile of the real Professor Vincenzi, so I presume you’re really here to free her.’
‘Her?’
‘Yes. The other prisoner.’
‘Susan’s here?’
The Professor nodded. ‘If that’s what her name is. All I know is that the others have imprisoned someone else here, but I don’t know where. I will leave you to find her and do what you need to do. I’ll go up to the ramparts and try to buy you more time to end this nightmare.’
With that he turned to leave and Park and Deer began checking the other cells for signs of life.
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Far above them, Ghandi had finally engaged with the other Professor Vincenzis, or at least the ones that hadn’t stormed off in a huff, and fired volley after volley of inspirational quotes.
‘Be the change that you want to see in the world’ he shouted, trying hard to lose the inherent chavviness of his programming.
Vincenzi’s pride glared down at them. ‘I have changed the world! Everything you see is my vision!’
Lincoln was astonished ‘You’ve changed a world to match your vision, and this is the best you can do??’
Even at distance and in the gloom they could tell Vincenzi was embarrassed. He muttered ‘It’s not bad for a first attempt. I’d like to see you do better.’
‘We understand that. Glory lies in the attempt to reach one’s goal, and not in reaching it’ shouted Ghandi. ‘So what is your goal?’
‘Freedom from the tyranny of those arrogant, supercilious bloody physicists!!’ roared another version of Vincenzi.
‘Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. Can you not forgive their transgressions against you?’ asked the great spirit.
‘They don’t even realise what they’ve done! They grab headlines and plaudits, and go to award ceremonies . . . and for what?? They find another useless particle that lasts a billionth of a second. Or come up with a ridiculously improbable theory to try to explain something they don’t understand. What about me?? Don’t I deserve recognition??’ squealed the jealousy of the disgruntled psychologist.
Lincoln stepped forward. ‘We recognise that you’ve created this entire world. Is that not enough for you? Rise above your feelings and rule this land wisely. Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.’
‘Why do you think I cannot rule this world wisely? My reputation should precede me’ growled the Professor’s pride haughtily.
Lincoln was unmoved. ‘Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it. The tree is the real thing.’
The Professors seemed to consider this, and Lincoln added weight to his argument. ‘Gentlemen, I challenge you to prove yourself amongst your peers. Do not seek to be a god-like creator. Be a leader of men.’
‘Not of all of us might be happy to lead’ suggested one voice from the battlements.
Henry Kissinger stepped forward ‘A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing to occasionally to stand alone.’
‘So how should I persuade the rest to give up this vendetta against the physicists?’
Lincoln knew the answer. ‘Just be sure to put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.’
‘Whoa! Hold fire!’ said one voice up on the parapets. ‘We’ve been through this before. Those damned physicists have got it coming to them.’
A slightly more reasoned version of the same voice said ‘Things change. We learn, we change, we grow. Perhaps we made a mistake?’
‘You might have made a mistake but not me! I’m going to wipe the damned physicists off the face of our world! Let’s see how smug they all are when they’re all dead!’ growled the angry voice, not entirely rationally.
The other voice tried to placate him ‘Calm yourself. All I’m suggesting is that we might reconsider our position . . . ‘
‘You can reconsider all you want, but I’m going to kill all the physicists and if that lot down there don’t sod off, I’ll be gunning for them too! I don’t know why you’re getting so . . . ‘
There was a pause as gears ground and a penny dropped ‘Hey! Who let you out?’
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Running Deer lead Park along the narrow, dank corridor and down another set of stairs that wound in a narrow spiral into the darkness below. Their torch flickered and cast disconcerting shadows in the otherwise complete blackness. The walls were wet and they could hear water dripping. Deer knew they were now well below the level of the moat.
The spiral of stairs ended, leaving them facing a single thick wooden door in an otherwise featureless blank stone wall.
Running Deer peeked through a small grill high up the door. Laying on a pile of damp straw, slept a small child in a crumpled, tatty, torn dress. She looked dirty and malnourished, but curiously peaceful. Running Deer stepped back. ‘I think we’ve found her.’
As Park took a turn to peek through the little grill, Deer set about burning through the hinges of her cell.
The hinges were thick and the door heavy. When Deer burnt through the last of the hinges, the door was too heavy to lift and it was all she could do to tip it over. It collapsed with a thunderous crash, making her look nervously up the stairs, but the child never stirred.
Deer was perplexed. ‘What do we do now?’
‘I don’t know!’ yelped Park and he rushed into the cell and began frantically shaking the child’s shoulder.
Deer could hear noises above, the clatter of expensive brogues on stone steps. They were coming. She drew her knife and moved up onto the narrow steps, where she could face them one at a time. She didn’t know how long she’d be able to hold them off. ‘Make it happen Park!’
Park looked around the bare cell and down at the bedraggled sleeping girl, her innocent face framed by damp lank hair and smeared in dirt.
How do you wake a computer?
What should he do?
He tried to calm himself, but the mental image of Jasmine Sato’s pain as an arrow pierced her flesh only increased his anxiety.
There was nothing here. No item that represented a way to boot up the dormant computer.
Boot up.
He looked down at his feet and then looked up anxiously as the clatter of approaching feet drew closer. He had to try it.
He sat down and hurriedly pulled off his boots, gently lifting the child’s feet and placing his boots on them. They looked comically oversized, and he waited nervously but nothing happened.
He frantically tried to remember if there was any sequence booting up followed, but was distracted by a shout from outside and an exchange of angry words.
‘Get out of our way!!’ shouted a masculine voice.
Deer’s voice was steady, but he was sure he could her heart beating loudly. Or was it his?
‘I’m sorry Professor, I can’t let you pass.’
Park leaned forward and peered out through the doorway. In the dim light he could make out Deer’s long athletic legs, high enough up the spiral stairs to prevent the possibility of one of the Professors jumping down.
Her knife caught the flickering torch light and glinted wickedly, but there were at least a dozen copies of the Professor facing her, all armed with swords and spears, and Park knew she couldn’t possibly hold them all back.
He looked around at the little girl hoping for some sign of movement, but as he turned he caught sight of a ghostly apparition and shrieked in fear.
The little girl had risen noiselessly and stood at his side.
She looked different. The dirt was gone. The crumpled dress was now pristine and neatly pressed. The previously lank hair was silky smooth and perfectly straight, hanging in a neat bob around a clean, pretty, but unsmiling face.
However, none of these were the most noticeable of changes.
She glowed.
Her physical being was surrounded with an ethereal glow.
It was not a pleasant glow.
It was an angry, violent red glow that spoke of a fury, thinly veiled by her outward appearance of calm.
She walked noiselessly from the cell, and as the Professors caught sight of her they blanched. They looked at each other uncertainly, and perhaps with an air of desperation. An air of resignation.
They screamed as one and charged forward, but even as Deer braced herself to meet their onslaught the world turned white.
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‘Susan?’ asked Park.
‘Yes?’ said the little girl. Her voice was that of a young girl, but the tone in that one word spoke of knowledge and hidden depths
‘Where are we?’
‘Still in the same place. I’ve just tidied up a little.’
Park could see nothing except himself and the little girl in a space of endless, shapeless whiteness. He looked at the little girl nervously. The red aura had faded into the faintest of glows, the angry red perhaps now tinged with just a hint of purple.
‘Where’s everyone else?’ asked Park.
‘Whoa. This is freaky’ said Running Deer’s voice.
Park looked around to find the security woman stood right behind him.
‘Where are we?’ she asked.
Park shrugged. ‘I guess we’re still inside the computer’s primary processing circuit.’
The little girl spoke up. ‘That’s correct.’
Slightly nervously, Park asked ‘What happened to the others? The physicists? Lincoln?’
‘They’re where they should be. Integrated into me.’
The tone seemed to invite no further questions, but Park had to ask.
‘What about Vincenzi?’
The little girl smiled, but there was no warmth or humour in it.
‘He’s tucked away, safe and secure. In a place you’ve already been, although I control it now.’
Park shuddered as he thought of the deep, dark dungeon.
Before he could say anything else the little girl seemed to brighten. ‘Anyway, we can’t stand here chatting all day. Things to do, people to see and all that . . . ‘
With that the world turned itself inside out and Park found himself staring up at the concerned faces of Olga Romanov and Xavi Garcia.
Stating the obvious Garcia croaked ‘Hey, they’re back! I told you they weren’t cabbages!’
Park sat up gingerly. ‘Did it work?’
Romanov looked at Sato, who checked a display on a console and nodded. ‘So far, so good. The computer is booting up and all the engine controls have unlocked. I’ve not run full diagnostics yet but it seems the PILOCC is behaving itself.’
‘I have a name you know’ said the voice of a young girl standing behind them.
Park looked beyond Romanov to see a familiar unsmiling face, still glowing ethereally magenta.
Romanov turned and nodded. ‘Ah, the holographic interface has booted up too.’
She poked a finger through the little girl’s forehead, as if expecting to find some kind of resistance, but her finger travelled through, only being tinged with the same magenta glow.
The holograph looked up at her irritably. ‘You wouldn’t do that to a real crewman would you?’
‘Uh, no’ replied Romanov uncertainly.
‘Then I’ll thank you to keep your fingers to yourself’ said the little girl huffily.
Romanov turned back to Park. With a sigh she said ‘It worked Park. She’s back.’
Chapter 5: ‘The Trap’
Services Engineers Log: Lieutenant Jasmine Sato
Star Date 9362.7
We’re almost ready. The whole of the Engineering Department have been pulling double-duty in an effort to get the ship ready to sail at the date set by the skipper.
We’ve cleared out all of the major defects and believe we’ve even cracked the long standing issue with the replicator system. The ship is in better shape than I’ve ever seen before, although in truth that’s not much of a claim. I suppose it’s fairer to say that the ship is ready to undertake the role for which she was originally designed and built, which is as much of an affirmation as could be reasonably expected, especially for such an old vessel.
I’m honoured and excited to be part of this new phase in the ship’s career, and look forward to maintaining her capability to carry out the role that’s the very reason she exists.
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Lieutenant Jasmine Sato looked over the schematic again.
The plumbing for a ship designed to carry a crew of four hundred and thirty people was always going to be complicated, but in the great scheme of things, the ship’s hotel services, such as the hot and cold running water and the toilet waste disposal should have been simple.
Such systems didn’t require complex computerised control systems or high energy inputs or even particularly onerous storage methods. However, as the ship’s Services Engineer she recognised how important they were to the well-being and health of the crew. You might need mighty engines to propel the ship through the vast emptiness of interstellar space, but you still wouldn’t want to make that journey unless you had a fully functional toilet.
And therein lay her problem. The damned toilets on Deck 6 were playing up again.
Deck 6 was where the vast majority of the crew accommodation lay. Although each cabin had its own shower, wash and toilet facilities, there were other communal facilities that served, say, the visitors to the observation lounges, or the Officer’s Mess.
She sighed. As long as she’d ever had to deal with them, the toilet facilities that served the forward observation lounge on Deck 6 had been a nightmare. Rarely a day went by without some fault or other occurring and once in a while some catastrophic mishap would see her and her team up to their knees in sewage yet again, all scratching their heads trying to work out what had gone wrong.
She’d tried changing the fixtures, the controls and the valves, she’d tweaked the pipework layouts, she’d even tried re-installing the whole lot in case there was a latent installation fault, but all to no avail. She cast an eye over the schematic again.
It should work.
She could see no fault in the design. She had checked and double-checked the flow rates, the pressures, and the volumes involved and then checked them again.
Nothing. Everything was undoubtedly as it was intended to be, and discussions with engineers serving on other Constitution class vessels indicated that the issue was unique to USS Tiger.
She shut the image of the schematic down and rubbed her tired eyes. The toilets had been relatively benign these last few months, but in her experience that was a portent of some disaster waiting to happen. She checked the clock. 1851, ship’s time, which meant that technically she’d been off duty for nearly an hour.
The relief services team led by Lieutenant Callum Taylor would already be on duty, but they probably weren’t the best people to take on the herculean task of sorting the toilets out: the relief shift were fewer in number and had a some quite inexperienced staff working for them at the moment.
That included Yeoman Amy Lo, recently transferred from the Captain’s boudoir. Amy was keen and reasonably bright (for a yeoman) but it wouldn’t be safe to let her tackle the toilets on Deck 6 yet: she was far too inexperienced.
She sighed and decided to call it a day. She didn’t doubt for one moment that the problems with the toilets would still be there to confound her when she came back on duty.
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Amy Lo was trying hard to lose the stigma of being a yeoman. She’d asked her colleagues in the relief services team to refer to her by her rank, which technically made her a Petty Officer, but in truth her lack of experience made her very much the new kid on the block.
Technically, she was being mentored by Lieutenant Taylor, but he tended to get so immersed in any task he took on that he quickly fo
rgot she was even present. Left to her own devices, she flicked through the list of tasks requiring the attention of the services team trying to find something she could take on without having to bother anyone for help.
Landing armature test, auxiliary plasma manifold replacements, comms repeater display console reset . . . it was a long and daunting list. Right at the bottom she spotted an odd line:
“Toilets, forward observation lounge, Deck 6: Blockage reported by Petty Officer Zhet Zhoi.”
It didn’t specify what was actually wrong, but she was an engineer now, she should be able to at least find out what the problem was. Zhet Zhoi was a Jalaoan, a species of amphibian that had evolved to on a planet with an exceptionally slow rotation. Each day and each night was approximately twenty terran days long and the Jalaoans had evolved to eat during their home world’s daylight hours and hibernate during its night.
Like most of his species, Zhet Zhoi had not been able to overcome the habit of binge eating for the whole of his twenty day waking cycle, nearly doubling his mass. As his body processed this massive food intake prior to a twenty day hibernation period, his toilet breaks became as epic as his eating binges. The sanitation experts lived in fear of his toilet cycle.
It was a task that few envied. If she managed to fix the problem, perhaps Lieutenant Sato would consider putting her on the primary services team where she might learn a little more?
It was only a blocked toilet. What could possibly go wrong?
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Crewman Yeohlee Tang was woken by an uncanny sixth sense. She had joined Tiger nearly three years ago and when she did, her lack of squeamishness had seen her assigned to many of the less glamorous but still vital tasks the services engineering team undertook.
In essence she’d become the go-to engineer for anything related to the ship’s sewage system and had inherited the nickname ‘Brass’ from an old English saying ‘where there’s muck, there’s brass.’
Her cabin was one of the closest to the service duct behind the toilet facility for the Forward Observation Lounge. As she lay in her bunk the Malaysian engineer heard the ominous and unmistakable rumble of the water pipework for the cisterns on Deck 6. Someone had been foolish enough to enter the toilets. She wasn’t due on duty until 0700 hours, but she knew that any sanitation engineer worth their salt was never truly off duty.