by Carl Neville
LEAD COMPOSITOR: DOMINIC BEWES
COUNTRY: USA
SUBJECT: Viral Technologies as Foreign Policy Instrument in the Context of President Connaught’s America! Accelerate! Programme
Summary:
This report assesses the strategies that the Connaught government has implemented in the first six months of its term, reversing the prevailing two spheres detente that had defined relations between the PRB, the wider Co-Sphere and the USA from the 1980s onward. While the governmental and regulatory systems, as well as the increased integration of production and distribution across the Co-Sphere, have come under repeated attack by official, quasi-official and private American security operatives for decades, the previous twelve months have seen a sustained increase in both quantity and type of attack. We focus on the development and deployment of increasingly sophisticated biotechnological weaponry that exploits the expansion of integrated and augmented technologies within the Co-Sphere in contravention of global agreements (Tashkent accords 1 and 2) regarding the non-proliferation of invasive wetware and cy/psy-bacterial technologies.
Lewis
Stockholm 07/04/18 06:45
You only have a week, the voice says to her.
A week? she asks, pauses suddenly, all her senses heightened, what can that mean? The gym is empty, nothing but the odour of recently mopped floors and the low hum of the LED lighting slowly adjusting as the sun rises over the city, still dark enough for her to see her reflection in the floor-to-ceiling windows. She is wearing training clothes Katja left behind, too big for her. She crouches then jumps back across the mat, rippling up, seeming to pause there at the top of the arc, the thumping of her heart sharp enough to pin her for a second at its apex. As she lands, a thin, blue-white tine of pain digs into her damaged ankle. Still, much better than a few weeks ago when she injured it. As she was coming into Hötorget Square with her canine support unit D7 the word home suddenly flashed into her mind, distracting her so much that she lost their connection for a moment, and as D7 cut round to the left she was sent tumbling.
It’s her inability still to fully filter out messages, insights, that has meant she has never joined higher programmes, and contented herself instead with this training, deeper involvement with the dogs. That moment was the first notification, perhaps, now this, only a week. She sits cross-legged and pulls her CS-ROD out of her bag. She should have accompanied them to the PRB after Stockholm, and would have but for her training commitments here. With those done she has some flexibility now and was due to depart for Tashkent in a few hours but instead finds she is checking to see if Abhi or Katja are on the grid.
She has a strong impulse to go there, feels she is needed, and if her training has taught her anything it is to trust and follow her impulses. The PRB is the place of her birth and yet she has never visited it. There it has sat the last few years since she returned to the Nordic Belt from the Winter Academy, just across the water and yet… Yes, perhaps she has resisted, perhaps her not accompanying them was deliberate. It was the most natural thing after all that they stay together.
What are you circling around, Lewis? What centre can you not arrive at? What door do you fear stepping through?
She showered, searched for space on any flights that might be going out to the rigs and then across to the PRB but found they were all full. Any cargo flights that might be able to accommodate D7? Nothing. She looked instead for seats on passenger trains until finally she found a cabin space on an automated underground goods train direct from Bergen to London.
She goes from Stockholm to Bergen on the NCS Maglev then takes the Softrail out to the northern hub of the Pro/Diss system. In through the surprisingly small office and entryway, hood up against the rain, with D7 trotting at her heels. The man who leads her to the lift says, try not to panic, some people just freeze or don’t get any further than the viewing platform, just follow the route. Down in the lift to the vast cavern where the trains are being unloaded. The dull gleam and blur of the immense forests of towering metal arms moving with incredible speed and precision; the huge containers swinging and circling; clouds of UAVs coalescing and scattering as they monitor and direct the distribution; boxes stacked in gridded walls as tall and thick as buildings moving around the arena; smaller, regional distribution trains arriving and departing through side tunnels. An oddly prehistoric spectacle — the great bones on display in the museums she will visit across in the PRB somehow foreshadowing through the millennia these massive beasts that will outlive them all and pursue their own purposes. She goes down the metal staircase to ground level, glances up through the thinning bands of the sodium lights to the raw granite dome momentarily visible above her head as two massive containers wheel above her, criss-crossing within millimetres of each other. A surge of insight, it’s almost as though there were some profound circular patterning of matter so deep it induced a kind of vertigo, an agoraphobia of deep-time, and she keeps her eyes down, follows the illuminated lines on the corridors between the un/loading and distribution bays, plugs in earphones to listen to the audio guide relate the development of the project from the Seventies onward, from the Myrdal Belt, the dedicated railroad serving as a distribution system across to the former USSR, the years it took to carve out the space and the tunnels, through to the automation of the whole system. The number flickering on the display on her ROD tells her it is two kilometres to her train and she has seventeen minutes to get there. She starts to jog.
Wagon 112 Pro/Diss Ber/Lon S. East Depot 3.
She scans her pass, takes a seat in the cramped engineer’s cabin between two of the huge wagons. There’s a small window in the door, a console with a screen and lights blinking, a ladder up to the bubble of plastic that serves as a viewing point. A slight, almost imperceptible tremor as the train begins to move. Fourteen hours in which to try and understand where this sudden urge had come from, what is calling her, allow the future she is rushing into to start to form. Confused thoughts surfacing, is it the person who gave birth to her? Is there a pulse, almost like an alarm, a distress signal that she has felt somewhere beyond her all through her life that is strengthening now, becoming impossible to ignore?
She drifts, pulls deeper inside herself, the dim hum and glow of the console, sublime solitude, she and D7 the only life for miles, the blind, soundless power of the engine, the weight of the North Sea above her, until suddenly she feels other minds flare in the darkness ahead, pulls herself up to look out of the observation dome as suddenly the tunnel opens, routes converge, an intersection and six tracks heading in all directions, the tops of other trains flashing past noiselessly in the cavernous dark.
Here are the other lives she has sensed, in the vast automated hub at the centre of the North European Pro/Diss network, fellow passengers of a kind, strapped to the roofs of the trains. She has heard of them but had supposed they were a myth, these riders in their endless circuits, traversing half the world without ever coming up above ground, and she feels a sudden, sharp kinship. Time slows momentarily and she sees a face, flashing past at incredible speed — a gaunt, grey, emaciated frame, eyes wide and bulging in their sockets, mouth open in a long ecstatic cry, the teeth almost rotted away. It turns toward her as she goes past, sensing her too.
If you die in this world you die in all worlds, the voice says.
And she wakes, reaches out to touch D7’s flank, hears her soft panting in the semi-dark, feels her own heart beating hard. A dream. How long has she slept? How many more hours does she have left?
Barrow
Maggots, parasites, thought worms viruses, switches, ducts, remes, infolepts.
He closes his eyes, standing at the window waiting for the SSF4 tech department to arrive and set up his office for him, his mind still digesting the report.
Mantis virus. Möbius virus. Import universe.
Why have they brought him in, specifically? There are other retirees and ex-SSF scattered about. Can it really be that they are simply pushed for resources in
light of the Games, or is there some deeper pattern here, some understanding on Waterston’s part that he can’t quite grasp?
Infection level approaching 100% in south east PRB.
A knock at the door.
Subversive groups clustered around the South Academy.
A knock again.
Visual and sonic triggers.
Come, he shouts, distracted processing the enormity of the report, and this the redacted version.
A young woman in an anonymous SSF4 boiler suit enters and starts busying herself with some sockets at the wall as a couple of citizens in Giveback uniforms bring in the furniture.
Anything more we can help you with?
Apologies. Yes. Can I get a link to a remote server across in the hotel?
No, she says that’s why we have set up a bed for you here, I am afraid all sensitive material is site specific.
Meaning? Barrow asks.
Meaning you will have to be in the building to get it. Your ROD will pick it up once you arrive.
I can’t take it away with me?
She turns toward him, looking faintly surprised that he is not more familiar with the protocols. No, the messages only exist in this room, your ROD reveals them. Too much information was leaking out, being lost, too easy to copy, pass around. Do you have any other questions?
Things seem slower. Why does it take so long to get a door unlocked for instance?
Multiple levels of decrypting and checking. We are under constant attack, it’s very, very power absorbing.
Very well. He sits at his newly arrived desk, gazes out across the city, dusk settling in soft, sooty layers, blunting the edges of the vast concrete bunkers across the river. The window is open and from the street gardens, rooftop farms and re-wilded parks the scent of flowers and fruits, vegetables, spices, grasses, herbs, comes swelling through the room. He takes a deep breath, sap-rich, pollen-heavy. Is Rose waiting for him back at the hotel? He imagines her reclining on the bed, grey skirt tight, a stark white blouse, smoking, eyes crinkled at the edge as she scans another manuscript. He has invited her to stay there and now will not be able to spend time with her.
Well, he should concentrate on the job at hand. He glances through the file on the team that has been hastily assembled, all from the Stockholm B-team. Another coincidence? Names and faces: Katja, called in from vacation; Abhishek, brought across from internal investigations in SSF2; Tereza from SSF3; Lewis, unusual name, coming in from the Co-Sphere division in Stockholm. A Winter Academy graduate. Interesting.
Profile CS 97-04-23 “Lewis”
Education/Training:
• Nordic Academy PRB branch/Winter Academy.
• General programme
• Specialization: Canine/remote viewing temporal mapping (2-degree accuracy)
Personality/Para/Psychological Traits:
• High levels of extrospection
• High levels of independent problem solving
• Low linguistic register
• High introspection
• Communicative mode para
• High extra linguistic E.S.P. quotient
• High cognitive frame rate
• High prospection
Winter Academy Assessment Overall: 12.25
Service:
• Continuous training
• Other Minds programme
• Zoloff Centre Winter Academy
• Stockholm B team programme (full year)
• Canine Training programme/human-non-human interface trainer Tashkent (pending)
An assessment of 12.25, if Barrow understands things correctly, is exceptionally high. Strange that such a gifted student should have devoted their time to training canine units. He notes that she has already set off to join the team, early this morning, prior to its being formed and before the break-in had even been discovered. He smiles to himself. Perhaps there is something to the claims they make for these savants after all.
Barrow
He has a message from Rose telling him that she won’t be joining him in the Union Hotel, can’t make it up until tomorrow, and has instead taken a flat in the south of the city, where she used to live. She has been in an odd mood recently. A few days ago, waking up in the morning, she peered at him as though trying to make him out through some gauze that had fallen between them during the night.
Who are you in that world? she asked him.
He was unsure what to say in response. There are no other worlds, he said. Though he wasn’t sure he understood the question, he felt the answer to be true. Only dreams of them.
They say you are everyone in your dreams, everyone and no one. She rolled over and stretched, reached for her cigarettes.
Well, she should stop smoking, he hears her coughing in the morning, wracked by it in the bathroom. Perhaps the generation that grew up through the Autarchy will not be as long lived as the one before — excessive expenditure of energy, the fervour of youth drawn out in them too long by circumstances.
He pauses, reflects. And today’s date?
Of course, this is why your mood has shifted, why those thoughts are creeping in, why loss, pain and the cold, lapping edge of grief are at you, Barrow, old boy.
It was today they died.
And yet every year somehow it takes you by surprise.
He takes another deep breath, releases it slowly, the cracked leather chair creaking beneath him. Almost time. Barrow would rather not have his session today, he has had this hour, at Frith’s gentle but implacable insistence, once a week for twenty-plus years now, not a single one missed. What more can he have to say, to reflect on?
There’s the soft chime of an incoming video call, and then up on the screen the old man is smiling patiently. Good evening, Doctor, Barrow says
Well, I have been thinking — and he is suddenly aware of the dream he had the night before, as though Frith’s mere presence, the owlish, inquisitive gaze had summoned the memory — about my parents. Of course.
Tell me, Frith says.
Conference Room 32. Katja/Tereza
They haven’t seen each other since they were on the Stockholm B team together and all living in one of the big communal blocks by the river. Katja is surprised to find Tereza is involved with this case too, she had thought that she was rising through the ranks of SSF3 and assumes that Abhi has requested she join too, though she doesn’t recall she and Abhi being particularly close in their working relationship.
Good to see you again, Katja says. She wants to get things right and so she asks, Name or number?
Tereza smiles sardonically and she wonders if it’s a foolish question after all.
Nobody under thirty goes by a number, she says, and just so you know generally no one over fifty either.
Bad start. I didn’t expect you to be involved. She hopes her voice has stayed neutral, comradely, collegiate. A transfer, Tereza says a little brusquely. Short-term loan. Just a question of personnel allocation.
Katja nods.
You?
I am still on extended leave, she says, taking a course at the Cartography School up at Vashtov College, involved in a project there.
She pauses as Tereza looks down at the papers on her lap, says distractedly, oh what about?
Well, it’s to try and map the re-configuration of the area across from, well in city terms, from Glasgow across to Helsinki, a sort of greater Scandinavia, and I think, well what interests me, is maybe taking in Tallinn too.
Well I don’t think you have been called in for your skills any more than I have for mine, Tereza says. You have mandatory work detail to support your studies. Whereas I already have plenty of work to be doing.
What are you focusing on at the moment?
Analyzing the content of Connaught and Altborg’s speeches, mostly. How long have you been in London?
I just came down a few hours ago.
It might seem a little backward compared to the Belt.
Well one area where you are ahead is pi
ll bars. I have heard a lot of good reports on them.
Tereza wrinkles her nose, Ah that’s right, she doesn’t indulge, something about her background that Katja has forgotten, though she remembers she drinks, has a recollection of being in one of the beer halls in Stockholm, hearing an increasingly loud voice dominating the other end of the table and looking round to see that it was Tereza, bottle of vodka in hand, cheeks flushed, insisting to her reluctant colleagues that they have another.
She changes tack. Very green, she says. Feels a few degrees warmer.
There is that, she says. I like it here, but it is a little bit empty compared to the North.
Well the Games should help with that, at least temporarily. I guess the south of the PRB is becoming a sort of rural interzone between the Northern Belt and the Co-Sphere, although they are remapping a continuum all across from the south of the PRB along the edge of France and into the Basque speaking…
Tereza looks a little impatient and Katja reminds herself that of course not everyone shares her interest in these things.
…areas so, London yes, this Enthusiasm that you have going on here.
Tereza rolls her eyes and Katja moderates her own enthusiasm. Seems interesting. From a cartographical point of view, I mean. It would be interesting to see how they are thinking about the spatial elements of it.
Troublemakers, Tereza says and looks back down. It’s the same set of people, all the South Academy people who have set up the Vote against SSF, caused all this extra work. This is why we are so pushed for numbers. She lowers her voice. All the Co-Sphere partners are angry with the PRB, I mean angrier than usual. You notice how slow everything is, officially that’s because we are under attack from the Americans, draining our resources in firefighting, but some people think it’s the rest of the Co-Sphere reducing our data share and processing power.
My ROD seems OK.
Wait till you have to start using the SSF internal systems, she groans. I’m pretty sure it won’t be like this across in Oslo.