by Carl Neville
That implies he’s got time.
Time? Sure, there’s never enough, just to sit down in front of his ex-wife his own kid and say: forgive me, let me…
Mr Franklin?
Love you.
He drifted there. Sure, he says, no idea what’s has just been said. What’s the question? Shit the drugs or the lack of drugs are making him sentimental.
First, we need to make sure he cannot enter the arena, second, we need to make sure he doesn’t have access to any vantage points, rooftops, etc. Third at street level we need people. We also need to find out who in the stadium might facilitate his access.
Or if there are spaces he could already be occupying, waiting, hiding in.
Sure. Franklin says. You could set that gun up, build it into a rig, largely concealed with facial recognition cues and leave, be a thousand miles away when the shot is taken. You don’t need to aim it, pull the trigger, you could have him in custody and he could still assassinate someone and if the gun’s well enough concealed you might never find it. I don’t know I am just telling you what your limited options are.
Shit, they have things, shit you wouldn’t believe, a little box about yay big, he holds his hands a few centimetres apart, that has a little printer inside and will print and assemble a weapon that can be remotely operated, imagine if you could just leave that little box sitting there, then at a prearranged time it prints up the little robotic arms and then the gun parts and starts to put them together. Maybe they have scattered those all over the stadium, I don’t know.
And it’s fast man, faster than you can imagine, like twenty seconds the gun’s up, the shot’s taken, then it’s self-disassembled back into this little cube of chemicals and circuits and nanobots man. Or it will self-disassemble back to a molecular level man, and just drifts off on the breeze, disperses then reintegrates at some distant point and blam! We have these weapons, undetectable just drifting through the world below the level of perception, appear, kill and suddenly they’re gone again, could be all around us now, he reaches out a hand and rubs the air between his fingers, feels its texture. Even the air can be hiding a weapon; death comes in like that…
Katja
This is PRB 975391.
The man from the bookshop. She experiences a small thrill, a shiver up the spine. Overlaps, cross currents. Lewis’s dimension of experience, tracking the fractures and faults, quilting points, margins and seams. She glances over at her then her mind wanders, she is only attending the meeting as a matter of formality, technically relived of her duties now the focus of the investigation has been shifted, a grace period to recuperate before she is redeployed, hopefully just relieved of her duties and she can go back up north to continue her course.
Which files went missing? Barrow again, his voice sharp, insistent, Katja flinches slightly, the voice of a man who has been served a humiliation and might now give free rein to impulses that, before, the minimal respect afforded to him had checked.
She tunes the rest of the meeting out and begins flicking through all the logs and documents in the ROD dump from the suspect on her Passocon. A folder marked “MAP” draws her attention immediately and she opens it, sees it is a series of photocopied pages from an old ring-bound book, dark and dense with detail. The same as the map in the bookshop. Wasn’t that CRANE’S A-Z? She seems to recall that up on the bookshop wall. Should she mention that to Barrow, funny she never made the connection at the time. She brings up the Geolocation data and dates from the RODs and overlays the two. Yes, that makes sense, they have been arranging meetings and moving on the basis of a different map, one that exists in a parallel topography. London/ “London”.
Location 1 “London” Warriors Close
Well. Will that be useful? Meaningful in any way? Should she send a message to someone, Barrow? She’s reluctant. Squires? It will get sent back and asked to be re-routed through some intermediaries. And besides, it’s probably just her being whimsical anyway, but interesting that they have been using that map to rendezvous.
Location 2/4“London” The Meeting House
Location 3 “London” Artillery Place
She notes that down, sees on the next page of the map there is a large circle drawn over the South East taking in a couple of parks and the area where the Enthusiasm is taking place, the numbers four and five written above it with a question mark. Perhaps meetings they had arranged but had yet to fulfil, chapters in whatever narrative they were sculpting out of these imaginary maps, from books that have yet to be written. She should mention it to Barrow perhaps, a last interaction.
Location 5? / Location 6?
Well, she mustn’t get too engrossed in her maps, she still has some work, duties to attend to, even if she has remitted most of them now. Checks the feed on the Passocon, sees that Tereza isn’t responding to the action needed request for PRB 2003701. She contemplates sending a message to explain that she has been relieved of some of her pastoral responsibilities after last night’s incident at the stadium, as reflected by her status update Pastoral 0.5, but Tereza looks harassed and frankly a little combative and so she is sure that she is aware of the situation and will get round to it when necessary.
And the 0.5 of her remaining pastoral allocation is Julia Verona, who it’s time for her to check in on.
There are so many people I would like to talk to, Julia says. If I had anything to do with this, with Alan Bewes’s death. I want Dominic and Jennifer to know how sorry I am.
They understand that you’re a victim here too, she says. What do you need? How can we make you more comfortable?
I’d like some news.
That’s coming, she says.
I was supposed to be at the conference today. Win Patnaik is speaking. I always liked him, she says, when I was a teenager I was, I was so geeky she says, I had A Young Person’s Guide to the PRB and I used to underline passages from his essays, I could quote them to you now, in fact I could quote the whole thing.
We can get a feed through on my Passocon I am sure, she says.
It’s South Academy.
Anything else? Here you are, we have got a live feed, swivels the Passocon toward her.
ROD GUIDE TO THE PRB
INSTITUTE: INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION
CATEGORY: THE ACADEMIES
SUBCATEGORY: SOUTH ACADEMY (LONDON)
History and Development of the Academy System
In common with many of the democratic or “people’s” institutions that have become central to social organization in the Co-Sphere, the Academies developed out of both the alternate schooling networks, heavily influenced by the Praxis-Pedagogy and comunidades de aprendizaje of South America, and the occupation and “commoning” of many schools, colleges and universities within the existing educational system of the former UK.
As the integration of the Co-Sphere began to consolidate, the interrelation of numerous alternate and occupied educational establishments took place, along with widespread dissemination of educational theories drawn from Co-Sphere and True Commonwealth educationalists opening the possibilities for a genuinely pluralist educational process. An intensive circulation of teaching staff, administrators and students across the Co-Sphere and the allied or intermediate states has meant that numerous educational approaches both within and outside traditional educational establishments have been incorporated. Education is free at the point of use across the Co-Sphere as a semi-optional aspect to Universal Basic Provision (the education/skills and attainment minimum criteria to remain in full access of UBP are listed here, but there is a minimum expectation of two additional languages [one European/one non-European] over the course of a lifetime).
South Academy (London)
South Academy London developed out of the Long Occupation (here) from 1972 to 1988 of the School of Music and Drama, which was instrumental in providing conceptual and cultural support for the movements in the PRB. It focused largely on political education and facilitated many of the early exchange visits across t
he Co-Sphere and beyond, linking up with other key institutions in discursive and political propaganda production. Its theatre became a key institution, staging works by radical playwrights and premiers, from Sweeney’s What They Meant When They Said “The Others” through to McFarlane’s Safety for the Apes, as well as staging many of the “people’s events” (People’s Concerts, People’s Comintern, People’s Forum, etc.).
Current Role
The current director, the youngest the Academy has appointed, is Landau, one of the first prodigies to emerge from the Academy system itself, gaining a PhD in Medieval History at the age of eighteen. During his tenure the role of the South Academy has become more contentious, increasingly critiquing the assumptions under which the Co-Sphere and the PRB operate. Landau’s main claim is that the role of the South Academy is not to support the status quo but always to radically critique it, “identifying the new hegemony, the new reality and problematizing it from both the left and the right, from pasts both realized and unrealized and fantasies of futures shaped by the desires the current system forecloses.” (Landau. Inaugural address, South Academy, 2015 here)
Rose
She checks the time. Gillespie should have finished by now, perhaps there are questions, the room looked full, unlike her talk with its smattering of expressionless faces and the sense that everyone was desperate to return to their RODS, and then the attentive silence in the question phase as everyone looked around, no, no, no one, nothing, then, thank you, and a ripple of polite applause, no one even approaching to ask a question one-to-one that they had been too shy to voice publicly.
Well, she has been examining the same concerns from slightly different angles for so long. Is she stuck in a rut? Every year taking her shop-worn treasure trove of participant-observer insights out of her briefcase and spreading them out on the table for the increasingly disinterested Academicians to poke through. She lights a cigarette. The twentieth anniversary is hard to ignore, but after this, what? The twenty-fifth? They are bored of the settled histories, the storied past, bored by it, and yet they had expected that no one would ever be bored again.
She is bored of it herself, and here comes Gillespie with Goodridge puffing along in his wake. Goodridge has a copy of Resolution Way in his hand, torn bits of paper sticking up here and there, marking the pages he has been reading from to illustrate whatever talk he has been giving. More on his single theme too, no doubt, the long drawn out Ontological Tectonics: the impossibility of Crane escaping fully into one world or another, endless oscillation. Appropriate enough given that Goodridge has spent twenty years going over this single thesis. A few years ago she would have commented on it, no doubt, something acerbic, but this endless talk, all this clever talk, she would like to be done with it, perhaps that’s why she chose Barrow, a man of few words, mostly monosyllables.
Here we are again then, been quite a while since the three of us were in a room together. I have just been discussing your role in the book, Goodridge says to her.
Mine? Oh, I don’t think I’m in there, she says.
At least, Gillepsie says gesturing for a pint, he had the decency to use the name your parents gave you, offered you a minimal bit of cover, whereas I am straight Robert Gillespie.
And I am not in it at all.
Gillespie does a double take. I think I know who you are, suddenly grows serious.
The bookshop proprietor? Simply because, well, I am one in real life?
Aye. Perhaps
It’s strange, eerie perhaps, Goodridge says, you know, I am sure I have mentioned this before. One day he was looking at me and he said suddenly, why did you kill me? And I had no idea what he meant so I asked him and he stared at me intently and then an unspeakable horror crawled over him and he said, over there, you are a murderer. And I said, Christ Vernon, that’s a terrible thing to say and he said, what if that other self gets through somehow Goodridge? What if the murderer in you gets loose and decides to track you down? And I had to remind him, Vernon, I am the one who rescued you!
She has heard that anecdote a hundred times before, glances at the ROD. The message has come back from Firetrace.
I had a visit from your Mr Barrow, Goodridge says. Rose, a very, he searches for a word, provocative choice of partner.
She won’t open the message here. What? She asks, distracted. Barrow?
Goodridge lowers his voice. I shall contact him I think, these old double agents often have divided loyalties, often have questions, lapses in…
Rose stands, arranges her things. Where are you going? Gillespie asks.
Sorry, she says. I only have a certain amount of time.
Tereza
PRB 2003701 ACTION NEEDED. Her Passocon buzzes a second time, exasperated she jabs at the screen to turn the notification off and tries to finish the briefing notes, she has no time to run them through the IQC department to check she is not revealing information she shouldn’t be at this level, and if she gets in trouble for it later well, she will be very direct in her final appraisal of her time with PRB SSF2.
She prints off the profile list then reads it as she takes the short walk down the corridor to the conference room. There are thirty people in there who have been recruited from the Giveback programme, none of whom appear to have any prior experience with SSF. She scans the list, almost all of them have reached cut-off point on the compulsory credits for workhours they need to work off and so have been told to report in under threat of sanctions. She scrolls her eyes down the list of “occupations” and sees the role student/artist/ explorer/practitioner is rather over-represented. Twenty-two of them have voted in the recent SSF referendum to fully democratize the institution.
Tereza goes up two steps to the little elevated section at the front of the room, looks out at them. Some are lounging, she might even say slouching, in their chairs. She doesn’t know how much she can rely on any of these people to do what is required; the last group was difficult enough and this looks even less promising.
Thank you everybody for coming, she says.
We had no choice, one of them says, a low murmur of agreement around the room.
Very well, she says. Let’s do this in groups of four.
Rose
Distracted thoughts on the tube back to the flat, the ROD sitting heavy with answers in her bag, pregnant with them, perhaps, thoughts about her own mother and how could she blame her for anything after all, arrested and tortured, one of the first to be rounded up, though she was returned to them eventually. She went on almost as before but a child, sensitive as they are, unformed and open as they are, knows when something is wrong, different, the catch in the voice, the slight shakiness in the hand, the reverberations of a trauma still echoing through her flesh. Strange to think that her mother could go through all that but still find it impossible to accept Rose’s decision with regard to her own child.
Perhaps she should visit them. They are strangers to each other now, though she took her mother’s surname as an act of solidarity. Reject the patronymic, though of course it was merely swapping one more recent for one older. Her father, a kind man, really, if stubborn. He was as lost after the Breach as anyone, she supposes, couldn’t understand, perhaps didn’t even want the freedoms they had been granted, still living in the red-brick semi in south-west London, nurturing a quiet, shamed sense of loss he could never really give voice to.
No need to work anymore! And yet his work had been necessary, he hated it of course, but it was a burden whose weight and compulsion had bent and compressed his life into a form, crooked as it was, something he could react against, resent, succumb to. Take it away and his inner emptiness was revealed. She remembers him saying one evening, not long after the Breach, before they drifted definitively apart, furious and despairing, I don’t want to be a bloody poet, I don’t want to travel or paint. Not everyone’s an artist deep down, no matter what you say!
Barrow/Abhishek
Barrow looks up from the report he is reading.
Help me thrash this out, he says. Let me see if I am getting this straight.
The American, “Franklin”. His testimony exonerates Verona, he brought the XV2 in, used her as a mule to get through security. She had an out. Pre-arranged that he piggybacked in on.
Yes.
Why?
Why?
Why did she have an out in the first place? What was she bringing in that meant they didn’t want her scanned?
Well that doesn’t seem to be the immediate concern. We have someone running around with a gun and possibly the plans to the stadium.
Immediate concerns, certainly, Barrow says, keep us busy, stop us from asking other questions.
A pause. But you have been asking the wrong questions, Abhishek wants to say. Instead he nods and looks down. So?
So, I am a little unclear as to the sequence here. He left the XV2 with Verona and PRB 2003701 picked it up from her? Barrow turns over the page and scans the transcript of the interview with Franklin that Squires has undertaken.
No, he used her to get through the scanners then he picked it back up from her himself.
He met up with 2003701 at some later point?
No, he dropped it in a locker at the central interchange.
Where two-zero picked it up?
We assume.
Do we have any record of 2003701 going back to the airport? If not, then, Barrow says, this is the question: How did it get in his bag? Who had the capability to get someone through security at the airport, and visited the house that night? My questioning leads me to believe he had no idea about the poisoning, well, we understand he may have been directed to do that, viralled, but then where is the evidence? The scan results show nothing.
This kind of talk is making Abhishek nervous, he was fine doing interdepartmental and internal affairs works, neutrally tracking breaches in the Partition, Cat-site activity and data transfers from within the SSF information architecture, but this is starting to feel a little too personal, something between Barrow and Squires, and he is not sure that Barrow’s judgment isn’t already clouded or directed away from the real concrete concerns.