dotmeme

by Mike A. Lancaster

  “And the name was … ?”

  Abernathy shuffled some papers on his desk, but Joe knew that he had the name memorized.

  “Emmett. The kid didn’t even know if that was a first name or a surname. Whichever it is, it rings exactly zero bells with any law enforcement or security services databases. Around the world. And as I said, it’s either an alias or a red herring. In lieu of Emmett, this is our leader.”

  Abernathy waved his arm and the briefing room screen lit up to display a picture of 666 smirking at the camera. His dreadlocks framed his bony face, looking like the legs of a crab.

  “666,” Abernathy said. “Or Gordon Clarke, as he was christened. A habitual crook with a string of arrests that all fall under the heading ‘petty’ and a life plan that seems to stretch no farther than an eventual extended incarceration in one of Her Majesty’s prisons.”

  “Bad childhood?”

  “No, as far as I can tell, he’s just a bad person. He had a loving family, plenty of opportunities, and a whole load of second chances, but he turned his back on them all. I guess he decided a life of crime was better than a nine to five, and that his fellow lowlifes cared for him more. Or feared him. Some people will take power over love every time.”

  Abernathy gave Joe a knowing look. Joe supposed it was a sideways reference to Victor Palgrave and how he’d treated his son, Lenny. The whole dotwav affair still gave Joe nightmares, how close YETI had come to a major disaster in Hyde Park. Joe had expected YETI to be exposed in the aftermath of that disaster, and for humanity’s outlook to change in the light of their exposure to what had visited earth on that weird, terrifying day. But to his shock, nothing really changed.

  The organism that had descended over London had taken all traces of its existence with it when it took off back into the voids of space, including all digital data on cameras and phones, leaving just a load of conflicting testimonies without documentary evidence to back anything up. No video clips hit YouTube, because there were no videos to post. No photographs went viral because there were no photos to share.

  And the testimonies that were recorded were so wildly different that they could have been referring to different events altogether.

  No one, it seemed, could agree on just what they had seen that day. Indeed, it was as if the creature had appeared as different things to different people. So when the government issued its cover story—that Victor Palgrave had been a terrorist, and that he had unleashed an experimental toxin at an open air concert in the center of London, one that had been dispersed, causing mass hallucinations—it seemed to fit the facts better than any other explanations and had been accepted by all but the conspiracy theorists. And no one listened to them, except other conspiracy nuts.

  As it turned out, for once, the conspiracy theorists were right: a vast cover-up clicked effortlessly into place. Strings were pulled on a global scale to mask all satellite and telescope data. Reports were redacted until they were just files of pages full of black marks. A campaign of disinformation buried a truth that sounded crazier than the lies.

  The world spun, the people on its surface got on with their lives, and few knew that a strange part of the universe had come down to earth, leaving behind more questions than answers.

  “But there’s something odd about this Luton affair,” Abernathy said, pulling Joe out of his reverie. “First, let’s detail what we know about this enterprise. Gordon and his crew abducted kids off the streets and forced them to assemble computers. Hundreds of computers, maybe thousands for all we know. What shipping manifests we found—and it should be no surprise that this gang was anything but diligent about keeping exhaustive records—tell us that the computers were then sent all over the country, and to locations all over the world.”

  An almost dismissive wave of Abernathy’s hand caused the image on the screen to change. A photo of one of the computers, disassembled, replaced the one of 666.

  “Ordinary computers,” Abernathy continued. “Not even particularly good ones. Pay your workforce peanuts and you get monkeys. Grab that workforce off the street and keep them locked up, you get grudging work. And none of the kids that assembled these machines were computer technicians. If they were, they probably wouldn’t have been homeless in the first place. So the computers are no better than something a novice hobbyist would throw together quickly at home.”

  “Even so, it must have taken a chunk of change to get this operation started,” Joe observed.

  “You are very right, Joe. And that’s the first worrying thing we have to confront. It’s not the strangest, though.”

  “What is?”

  Abernathy waved again and a picture of a heavily-filled circuit board appeared on screen.

  “What we’re looking at here is a motherboard,” Abernathy said. “The main printed circuit board for these computers. It’s pretty ordinary, at first glance at least. A lot of generic parts—mostly Chinese and Korean—but there’re some American components, too. It has a reasonably fast processor, and a fair amount of RAM. The Shuttleworth brothers will have to tell you more about it. I think I’ve just exhausted my knowledge. Except about this …”

  Abernathy moved his arm again and the image zoomed in on a part of the circuit board occupied by what looked to Joe like a large, black microchip. Although his computer expertise was probably as slight as Abernathy’s, he could tell by scorch marks and cracks on the surface of the chip that it had burned out somehow.

  “That doesn’t look good,” Joe said. “A faulty chip? Or was it badly placed on the circuit board?”

  Abernathy inhaled a deep breath through his nose and then let it out so it was part exhale, part sigh.

  “This is where it gets weird. We cataloged all the evidence at the scene, the bowling alley/slave cube, you know what I mean. We cataloged these computers. I’ve got a photograph of this very motherboard. Look, here it is.”

  Another image appeared next to the first. The evidence document number was the same. The motherboard was the same. Everything was the same.

  Except the black chip was intact.

  No scorch marks.

  No cracks.

  “Did we test this computer? Burn out the chip?”

  Abernathy shook his head. Then his arm. Dozens of images filled the screen. Dozens of motherboards. Dozens of the same chip.

  All scorched.

  All cracked.

  “It’s the same with every computer we seized,” Abernathy continued. His face had settled into a scowl. “The way we figure it—and by ‘we’ I mean the Shuttleworths—these chips were destroyed remotely. Someone realized we’d seized them and sent a kill signal that burned them out.”

  Joe whistled.

  “So what are they?” Joe asked. “Why would someone burn out those chips?”

  “Whoever burned them, really burned them,” Abernathy said. “We have no idea what they were. The Shuttleworths are running all sorts of tests that I neither understand nor hold out much hope for. But Joe, this puts a whole new complexion on our case. A bunch of computers assembled by a slave workforce is one thing. Opportunistic and cold, but comprehensible. But add these chips into the mix—chips that the Shuttleworths don’t recognize, that burned themselves to avoid closer inspection—and it pushes us into a whole new realm of criminal enterprise. Whatever those chips are, I think it’s safe to say that someone doesn’t want us to get a good look at them.”

  “So what are self-destructing chips doing in slave-assembled computers in a bowling alley in Luton?” Joe asked.

  “Shall we go and ask our resident geniuses?” Abernathy asked, brightly.

  In the R&D lab of YETI headquarters, the Shuttleworth brothers were absorbed in working their singular form of technological magic on the computers from the bowling alley. When Joe walked in, they both turned from what they were doing, stood to attention, and said, “Sir!” to Abernathy. Then they grinned from ear-to-ear, and said, “Joe. Good to see you.”

  In unison.

 
Sometimes, it was easy to imagine that the Shuttleworths were simply two halves of the same person. They often finished each other’s sentences, laid out their workspaces as a mirror image of the other’s, and they were both bona fide geniuses who excelled in kitting out YETI operatives with innovative equipment that made Benji Dunn’s gear from the Mission: Impossible movies look like Tinkertoys.

  There was, of course, a major difference between them: Geoff Shuttleworth was tall and lanky and gave no more shape to the lab coat he wore than it got from the hanger, while Greg Shuttleworth was short, squat, and tested the breaking strain of the buttons on his own coat.

  “Hi, guys,” Joe said. “Geoff, there’s something different about you today.”

  Geoff gave an awkward shrug.

  “I have been working out …” he said in a deep voice.

  “He’s keeping fit,” Greg said in an altogether higher pitched voice.

  Joe narrowed his eyes and looked at Geoff head-to-toe. There was no sign that working out had had any effect upon his body at all.

  “I was thinking of the ‘no glasses’ thing.” Joe laughed.

  Geoff put a spidery hand up to his eyes, then nodded furiously. “Of course, of course,” he said. “I’m breaking in a pair of contact lenses …”

  “… to varying degrees of success,” his brother finished. “Although, what’s wrong with glasses, I honestly don’t know.” He pushed his thick-lensed glasses up the slope of his nose to emphasize the point.

  The brothers exchanged a glance that told Joe that the contact lens issue was far from settled, before snapping back to the matter at hand.

  “The burnt-out chips are a secondary processor,” Geoff told Abernathy and Joe. “At least, that’s what we think. It’s tech we haven’t seen before …”

  “… and the computers we … impounded … work just fine without them,” Greg added.

  “We have tried to determine their purpose,” Geoff said.

  “But they were destroyed to prevent us from doing that very thing,” Greg said. “The remote signal detonated the very heart of those components. Someone really didn’t want us to examine them.”

  “So how can you tell it’s tech you haven’t seen before, then?” Joe asked.

  “Because the remote signal detonated the very heart of those components,” Geoff explained, and Joe wondered if he’d deliberately copied his brother’s exact words, or if it was just part of their unique double act. “You have to ask yourself why someone would go to all the trouble of killing each one of those chips if they didn’t contain something that someone didn’t want anyone else to see.”

  “Are there any identifying marks on these chips?” Abernathy asked. “So we can ask the manufacturer directly?”

  “We’ve got good news and bad news on that front,” Greg said. “Which would you like first?”

  “Say ‘the bad news.’” Geoff advised. “It’s a better story that way.”

  “The bad news, please,” Abernathy said, but his face told the true story of the way he wanted the information relayed.

  “Well, the chips burned out, did we mention that?” Greg asked. “And that was obviously part of the function of the remote destruction. So any maker’s mark was destroyed, too …”

  “Although, why there would be a maker’s mark on such secret chips is a question I can’t answer,” Geoff said.

  “But,” Greg said.

  “But,” Geoff echoed.

  “We did find a partial mark. So small, we needed a microscope to make it out on one of the chips that didn’t quite burn the same way as all of the others.”

  “Have a look.” Geoff waved to a microscope on his desk.

  Abernathy bent down, spinning the focus wheel to the disapproval of the Shuttleworths.

  Then it was Joe’s turn. He put his eye to the eyepiece and saw the surface of a chip magnified into a textured landscape of anthracite black, with a design printed on it in white ink, split down the middle by a crack, but still readable for all that.

  It was a stylized letter D in the middle of a triangle with its points rounded off.

  “Can we trace the mark?” Abernathy asked.

  The Shuttleworths looked at him oddly.

  “You don’t recognize it, sir?” Geoff asked.

  “Should I?”

  “It’s the logo of Dorian Systems.” Greg said.

  “Dorian … ?

  “C’mon,” Joe said. “Even I’ve heard of Dorian Systems, and they were before my time. You must have heard of Space Dementia? Centipeter? Missile Storm? Echelon Warriors? Grathna’s Revenge?”

  “I’m assuming that those are the names of video games,” Abernathy said. “I can’t think of anything else that would parade under such juvenile labels. Or get two nerds and a kid so excited.”

  “That’s like saying ‘I’m assuming this Mona Lisa you’re talking about is some kind of doodle,’” Geoff Shuttleworth said. “Dorian games are high art, the kind of games you’d get if Bach and Da Vinci and Shakespeare coded.”

  “I thought you said one of them was called Centipeter,” Abernathy said, sounding like the word, itself, was distasteful to his delicate sensibilities. “That hardly sounds like high art to me.”

  “That’s because you’re not a gamer,” Joe said exasperatedly. “We’re talking some way retro gaming here. I’ve played all the Dorian classics. And not just for some kind of ironic laugh-at-how-bad-this-game-is reason. They are unlike anything else out there. Dorian is the Orson Welles of gaming, and Centipeter is his Citizen Kane …”

  “Grathna’s Revenge was his Kane,” Greg objected. “It has a strong environmental message that came at a time when the Green Party had only just started gaining any kind of traction, and it played like an RPG …”

  “Rocket propelled grenade?” Abernathy asked.

  “Role-Playing Game.” Greg said. “Anyway, Centipeter is great, but less socially relevant, so it’s more like his Touch of Evil.”

  Abernathy made an exasperated sound. “If we could stop playing pop-culture-reference-tennis for a minute, could someone please tell me why Dorian chips are being used in these computers? And why someone felt the need to blow them up to prevent us identifying them?” He turned on his heel and headed for the door. “Briefing room, ten minutes,” he barked. “I need background info, and I reckon I know three fanboys who are just the people to give it to me.”

  As it turned out, it was mainly the Shuttleworth brothers that filled both Joe and Abernathy in on Dorian’s company background. Joe’s knowledge was limited to the games, themselves, and that kind of knowledge was composed of words like cool, amazing, and awesome, none of which provided the kind of detailed analysis that Abernathy expected at a briefing.

  Luckily, it didn’t matter.

  Dorian games seemed to be one of Greg and Geoff’s specialized subjects.

  “Richard Dorian was eighteen when he designed his first computer game,” Geoff told them. “It was 1983, and Dorian was starting his first term at Trinity College, Cambridge when he bought an Acorn computer with the last of his savings from two years of summer jobs, and a decent chunk of his first grant check.”

  “He said in an interview, years later, that he ran the numbers and decided that a computer was more important to him than food and drink,” Greg offered.

  “It was a BBC Micro Model B,” Geoff said, and Joe smiled at the ease with which each brother picked up the thread with scarcely a gap between the other’s sentences. “His lively, enquiring mind latched onto the possibilities that home computing offered, and before the end of his first year at college, he had already coded Missile Storm entirely in Assembly.”

  “Assembly?” Abernathy barked. “What are you talking about, man? Universities don’t have assemblies.”

  “Er, I think they mean the programming language,” Joe said. “They’re not suggesting that he was designing a bestselling video game while sitting on the floor in the school auditorium while a policeman or fireman visited.�
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  “Oh,” Abernathy said. “Carry on.”

  “A lot of people started programming in BASIC,” Greg explained.

  “BASIC is a language that makes programming easier, but it’s like coding through an extra layer between you and the computer,” Geoff further clarified.

  “And you have to remember that computer memory was incredibly limited back then,” Greg said. “BASIC took up working memory, and The Model B had just 32 kilobytes of user RAM. That’s 0.032 of a megabyte, a minuscule amount. To gain complete control over every last byte for game design, Dorian decided to forgo BASIC and learned Assembly, a symbolic representation of the binary commands that make up machine code. He effectively ditched the layer between the programmer and his computer, talking directly to the CPU.”

  “I weary of the nerdy delight in things I don’t need to know.” Abernathy cautioned. “Put it in words that a human being can understand.”

  “It gave him turbocharged games compared to those written in BASIC,” Geoff said. “As a result, Missile Storm was blisteringly fast.”

  “It also had great gameplay, and a clever story,” Greg said. “But there was one thing that set it apart from most games of the time. It didn’t just speed up to make the gameplay harder. It developed, it adapted, it grew as the gamer improved. The shift was fair. It was rewarding. And the reward was that you got to watch as the plot unfolded around you, complete with twists. Remember, this was long before the “Would You Kindly” twist of Bioshock, or the “one of the characters I was playing as was the killer all along” twist of Heavy Rain, but it’s probably safe to say that the developers of those games whet their storytelling appetites on Missile Storm.”

  “Which is why it sold by the truckload,” Geoff said. “Dorian raised his own capital by tapping the resources of his fellow undergraduates—or, more specifically, their dads—and set up his own software company, Dorian Systems. As a result, midway through his second year at Cambridge, Dorian was running a hugely successful company that made finishing his studies irrelevant. He left without graduating, and poured his energies into developing more and more elaborate, entertaining games.”