by Carl Neville
They’ve discovered, you see, there are much more effective ways to get inside people’s heads than the mere telling of stories or writing of tracts.
Archive footage of bunkers, tunnels, requisitioned stately homes of the Contested Territories, running battles on the streets of Sheffield and Leicester, African Freedom Delegations arriving at the Freeport of Liverpool to rapturous applause from local dock workers.
Farloni (V.O., as montage continues)
Still others claim in this bewildering back and forth between a number of opaque, transatlantic actors that Everlasting Yeah is the same, notorious FR4 virus, extracted from infected expatriates and monetized by Spoonbill.
Lewis
D7 yaps, he has come out of the hotel at last. She stands, a little stiff, scanning the street, the patch pumping, takes a long drink of water from the bottle at her side and without time to have formulated any coherent thoughts she is up and following the suspect as he wanders down the road a little and stands waiting for the bus, looking agitated.
As Lewis crosses the road, she can sense him staring at her and keeps her eyes down, fiddling with her ROD. She leans back against the wall behind the stop, D7 sniffing around a bin a few metres down. The bus arrives and she gets on through the back door, takes the first available seat, D7 going under it and lying flat. She sends a message out to Abhi asking him to track her in case she needs back-up. She will try and get a tag on him.
They seem to be heading back to where she first spotted him the day before, going to use the hacked mast again, perhaps. That in itself is against PRB directives and so they have a case for bringing him in for an interview, perhaps find out what other activities he may be involved in.
Bus stops and he exits, goes across the road and into one of the blocks. After a few moments he appears on the balcony on the third floor, enters a flat about halfway along. Seven minutes later he leaves, goes into another flat for a minute or two then emerges and comes out to sit opposite the building, watching the entrance. She decides to go into the block and take a walk along the third floor, see if she can pick up any information about the flat he has just entered. She instructs D7 to keep an eye on him, hops down off the low wall she is sitting on.
She has an electronic fob in her pocket that will open any door, but the main entrance is unlocked. A bulky middle-aged man enters slightly ahead of her, holds the door open with a nod. She follows him up the stairs, his back broad and muscular, no sense of him being out of breath in any way with the climb. He goes through the doorway at the landing on the third floor, she pauses slightly before she comes through it too, slows her pace. He stops outside the door of number thirty-two, pushes it open, pauses then steps quickly to one side, alerted to something, crouches as Lewis crouches instinctively in turn.
Barrow 12/04/2018 18:37
As the car moves toward the stadium Barrow tries not to let images of the impending horror overwhelm him — a mass triggering not just of those in the stadium but everyone watching around the country, around the world, suddenly attacking each other, themselves. Perhaps that is too apocalyptic, perhaps unnoticed they will be primed for later localised triggering, flaring up into violence from nowhere. A man in a square is suddenly playing a simple three-note sequence, an old record is reissued, a woman shouts out a word at just such a volume with a certain inflection and then…
The lights blur by the car’s tinted windows as they hit the tunnel. He has the ROD up to his mouth: pull everybody up to the stadium, code one, he says and receives a positive acknowledgement back from the Stadium team, all emergency services on standby.
The taste in his mouth has deepened now to dread. Katja is on the ROD next to him as they pull into the lower-level booths. Out of the car, heart hammering, and into a vast stroboscopic domain, he realises that what he had thought was the flashing past of lights in the tunnel and its after effects isn’t coming from outside him, remembers his patch is set to the lowest level, he’s blacking out and being revived so quickly that his momentum is maintained somehow, wobbling, almost collapsing, but still going. He black steps black now black the opening black throughblackwhichblackhecanblackhearblackthesoundblackofblacktheblackgamesblackandblackcomesblackupblackthroughblacktheblackentranceblackwhereblacktheblacksecurityblackareblackstandingblackwaitingblackandblackshoutsblackoutblacktoblackthemblack
incomprehensible words swallowed into the stuttering dark flashing through him
Wetotoconboothshutthesicalforusenecary
Theirblackconfusedblackfacesblackandblackheblacktriesblackagain
Needgetthetrolandoffmuspermanceanycessforce
as Katja shouts over and over into the ROD: stop the sound, shut off the sound.
Lewis
The blast is funnelled through the doorway, a flash and roar of flame, the dust comes billowing thickly around her, its gentle swirl and settle so at odds with the violence of the detonation.
When it clears the man has gone, like magic, must have taken the stairwell at the opposite end. She looks over the balcony, the suspect has come forward now off the wall and is scanning the area looking repeatedly at his ROD, takes a bike leaning against the wall and sets off toward the estate. Should she wait for some kind of backup? Perhaps, yet instead she pushes through the doors at the end of the corridor and begins to descend, ROD up to her ringing ear, calling in the emergency crew, alerting the team back at HQ to the explosion.
D7 is circling at the entrance, Lewis tells her Go! Go!, jumps the low wall at the bottom of the flats as D7 races ahead and sets off up the road, pushing past the stalled passers-by gazing upward at what they must assume for the moment is some kind of accident, a gas pipe or a boiler that has somehow blown up. She glances back as she heads across the grass verge, a long, serrated plume of smoke unspooling through the gridded windows.
Barrow
Fucking patch, he pulls it off and the day zooms in, vertiginous clarity as he jogs out into the stadium, there at its centre the teams are drilling, the Union bands marching around the outside, a tremendous surge of sound enfolds him, swerves over his head, coming in from all angles at once, minutely detailed, a vast in-folding mosaic. The UAVs are tiny, but in such numbers…
He has come out near the control booth and can see some security operatives gathered around the locked door, running down the stairs, is there no other way to shut the performance off?
He instinctively ducks as the UAVs come round again, glances around at his fellow citizens, standing entranced or cheering up on tiptoes, faces ecstatic, waiting for the UAVs to lunge back across the space and engulf them. He scans the crowd for signs of agitation, as the cloud goes over, circles the edge of the stadium then plunges and scatters over everyone’s head and disperses sizzling and scintillating in the sunlight like a stream of water hitting hot stone.
What can he do? Swivels to watch them as they suddenly coalesce in the middle of the field into a series of greenish three-dimensional shards that rotate then slowly expand, still for the moment holding their form, as all Barrow can hear is his own breath and his heart pounding in his ears. A ripple of panic goes through the crowd, the music having shifted from a thrill ride to an assault. He knows suddenly what this is, though he has never heard it before; it is Vernon Crane’s Field Recording #4.
The UAVs shatter, strafe in over the crowd with a wave of concussive sub bass followed by a vast roll of percussion and a shrieking drone, then freeze there hovering.
The crowd uncertain, the UAVs jammed and repeating a single note at an ear-splitting pitch as security begins bundling people out of the booth.
Barrow feels his legs give and he sits down on the grass. Too little sleep, too much fear. His head is swimming, where is the patch? He has thrown it away somewhere. Katja is down next to him, you OK? she asks, have you checked your ROD?
He is having difficulty focusing. But still, stopped it, it’s over, the mass triggering averted.
Redeemed.
Give me a moment, he says, looks at the message.
&nbs
p; There has been an explosion in south London out on the edge of the Enthusiasm.
4
Franklin
Long story short, he is sitting around in Paulo flats, nice little condo he has out there, has a trip upcoming and so he’s looking on a standard Cat-site for trades, anything that needs bringing in or out of the Co-Sphere, across/around/under/over the Partition, illegal products within the PRB; information, weapons, tech, intelligence, hitting up his usual contacts and leads, giving his flight dates. It’s all looking pretty routine and he’s bored of the same old faces, same old errands, bring in Russian Dev for the rich Commies up in north LA, take out E.Y. for the hippy freaks in south London, when he suddenly gets a request for some XV2. Now who would be asking him for that? Maybe his expertise as a trafficker of over-the-counter pills back and forth has flagged him up somehow.
XV2 is not available to just anyone and he wouldn’t even know what it was but for the fact he has literally just two days before, hooked up with Prentiss, a compadre from the Bleekhour Academy training course, at one of the Commie parties out in Silverlake that Franklin’s supplying to and Prentiss is keeping an eye on for internal Security. Prentiss has mentioned that, among other delights, he can supply him with some.
Serendipity. Prentiss enlarged on XV2’s qualities, lethal, undetectable, a non-poison until it’s triggered by the presence of some other chemical, a keyword, a sound, time-delayed, you can preload an entire population with the stuff via the water supply then selectively start wiping them out through exposure to certain triggers. Amazing, the shit they have come up with out in the Spoonbill Blacklabs, and Prentiss somehow seems to have access to it all.
He switches to his Bleekhour login to message Prentiss, see what’s going on there, glances at his Q-dos rating, currently a fat zero. Needs some of that, some of that will make things alright. Prentiss is deep in the Bleekhour payment matrix. Prentiss got taken into the inner sanctum. Franklin is still crowding around the entrance, jostling with all the other Certified Freelancers, still at least he’s registered, right? He’s heard stories of Freelancers who have pulled off jobs that wham! have got them suddenly to the top of the Q-dos leader board, made for life.
Surely that’s the way to do it, impact, velocity, those words of Prentiss’s have stayed with him. He has to look at the practicalities of getting some XV2 and a micro-drive through PRB security before he pursues things any further. Goes onto one of the sites to see if outages in the PRB’s security scanners are being traded, and there is one for the very flight he is on. Things are lining up nicely. Too nicely? Should he be suspicious? In retrospect hell yes, at the time he just feels like, well, this is meant to be.
He quarries out some background data on the passenger who has had a free pass through the scanners at Birmingham International illegally arranged and gets a picture of a youngish girl up. Julia Verona, good-looking, not a journalist as far as he can see, someone has got her on a press flight as a special favour, bending the rules a little there, still it happens. Has she arranged it herself? Seems unlikely, perhaps she is bringing something in covertly, just a dumb mule. He bids on the space, sees if he can also load her up with something, not cheap at 0.25 c-credits, going into a grey account somewhere. Doesn’t seem to be his usual contact for getting in through the scanners, must be yet another citizen of the PRB looking to defect.
He’s got an outage he can use and looks for what else he might take in. He has a couple of avatars on a few cat-sites and grey-markets that allow him to communicate with PRB domestic subversives, full fake backstory if they dig around, anti-Connaught, pro-Co-Sphere, long history of supporting the An(ti)-Am(erican)s over there. Sees one that has been around for a while requesting guns. They start a little correspondence: the usual anti-capitalistic losers still nursing their grievances, anti-American domestic PRB group from their affiliations and requests. Guns? He can do that; in fact, he has a file for a Tomahawk 62 on the complementary drive Prentiss passed on to him a few nights ago; that could be an option.
Guns, XV2 will pay well and that will keep Andrea off his back for maintenance and whatever else she’s hassling him for now for a while, and, OK, he’s taking a step up but, y’know, it’s still strictly c-credit stuff and he needs, something bigger, if he wants to have it all, wants to make it right. Needs those Q-dos points.
Say this about the Commie-Sphere they aren’t so hung up on family, not that he’s un-American sure but you slave away trying to make a living, devote all your time to raising a kid, your old lady doesn’t want to look at you anymore, getting nothing there and yet if you have a little hook up with someone else your whole world gets torn down, that’s it, kid taken away and you’re paying someone else’s rent for life. At least out there they are little bit more relaxed about people getting laid, you know? Maybe too relaxed, sure, but hell, he should make the most of that too, thoughts drift into a fantasy of peeling one of those frosty-but-hot little Marxist mamas out of her starchy Giveback boiler suit and having a real probe around behind the Partition. Better still, making it back out to Los Elijidos under his own steam this time.
It was Prentiss took him out there, last bit of downtime he had. That sweet five days falling on him like manna from heaven, Prentiss trading in some Q-dos to give him a taste of how good life can be if you are in the system. He needs to get himself an apartment out there, where the world-beaters are, where the elite of the elite, the crème de la crème lounge and deliberate, divide up and dispose of the universe. He sits back in his chair, lets his mind wander back to that sweet weekend, lost if not for the documented evidence of excess on his phone.
Los Elijidos: Rebaja Beach
There he sits, at one of the beach-front cocktail bars, sipping on a Cuba Libre as Prentiss lays it all out for one of his fellow guests, ex-KGB, defected back in the early Eighties, used to run Intel for BlackDawn services.
You are also a member of the intelligence community? the ex-KGB asks.
Who isn’t these days? Prentiss says. Everyone, I mean everyone is trying to leverage specific Intel right now, the incentives are there.
Sudden, Prentiss said, mid-Atlantic accent, sip of his Daiquiri, sudden and dramatic change. There used to be regular contracts, clear aims, specific objectives, but not since Connaught, not since the Great Disruption, not since volatility became the key aim.
Where is he though, your new president Connaught? the Russian asked him, draining a Yerba Mate and Himalayan salt Caipirinha.
Well he isn’t in Washington DC, that’s for sure. If he’s anywhere he’s on his ranch in Texas, or in his tower in LA or orbiting the world on his private jet or floating on an airbed in his underwater theme park. That’s the point. That’s the genius. The flip. The inversion. Used to be you’d say, the president is there to find out what the people want, be the expression of their will, their desire, but with Connaught it’s the opposite, life is organized around trying to figure out what HE wants, how to anticipate and satisfy HIS desires, and the more silent or cryptic he is, or the more incoherent, the less visible, the more guessing we have to do.
He settled back. Let me give you an example. This last mission of mine, the one that got me enough Q-dos to get out here, give my friend Franklin here a little taste of the good life that could be his. Time was a contract would have come up, I would have pitched, got the job, now it’s the other way around. We dream up schemes, strategize, come up with events, scenarios, possible futures, act them out. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t, and let me tell you sometimes it’s the ways they go wrong that get rewarded. These days you don’t even submit a claim, they know somehow, either what you have done, or what you’re planning to do and they reward you accordingly, you never know if it’s in advance of or as a result of something. What does Connaught want, what kind of world does Connaught see, envision that I can help shape for him, what will please him? Let me try things out, see how the system responds. We have a word for it now, more than a word, a philosophy: Psy-kaledics.<
br />
But this is very bad for, very dangerous for world peace, for the balance of power. The Russian was looking at them intently. So you have how many operatives out there at the moment. How many, he paused, rogue…
No, rogue is good, rogue is positive, rogues have energy, rogues disrupt. The more rogue, the more reward.
But what are they rewarding, here?
Velocity. Impact. Volatility. Opening up new, unintended, unforeseen possibilities.
Impact, that’s the key.
At the airport he finally picks up a copy of Psy-kaledics: Blessed Rage for Chaos, the blurb on the front that says it is the Bible of the Connaught Administration from no less a big wheel than Johannes Altborg himself. He should have read it earlier, been more clued up on the whole approach, but he is intent on getting his life together by being less integrated and fixed, less coherent, less predictable.
He spots Julia Verona on the flight, gets in behind her in the line for customs once they land, does his whole respectable family man routine as he gets the package in her hand luggage. She sails right through passport control and the scans and he picks it all up on the way out, can’t help himself and finds he’s hitting on her to no avail and well, anyway, more importantly he drops the XV2 in one of the designated hand lockers at Birmingham International Airport, picks up his stash of useful files and gizmos from his own then heads for the crew coach up to London and a room in a hotel bang in the middle of one of the wilder and freakier stretches of the south side of the river. Flushed with success, he thinks he might go out, try and get laid.
Better freshen up first. While he is in the shower and crunching up a complimentary Dev he found in the care package on his pillow, he reminds himself that he’s here to make a big score. Psy-kaledics says, yes chaos/yes derangement/yes disconnection but also yes home/family/responsibility. Tough circle to square, man, but he will do it, with his newfound sense of ir/responsibility. Look after his kid, step up and be a dad, but with contacts and new opportunities for serious down time. CashMoney, C-credits, Q-dos, needs it all and with Connaught the opportunities are bigger than ever. He will get that Q-dos then he’ll take them both around the Co-Sphere, sure they are never going to be a family unit all under the same roof again but he can picture himself jetting in from a big apartment in Los Elijidos that overlooks Rebaja beach and Connaught’s private dome with his arms full of presents and whisking them all off on some big Euro cruise.