The back of the building opened out onto a large concrete area—obviously a loading dock. There were a couple of freight entrances, raised to allow the trucks’ containers to pull right up to them. One door was open. Joe peered through, but could see no one on the other side, so he hopped up and through and he was inside the building, easy as that.
Now he was standing in a loading bay, but there was no loading taking place. There weren’t any people to do any loading, either. The place was empty. Which saved him a lie. Off to the side was a forklift and dotted around were some hand-operated pump trucks, stacks of wooden pallets, and piles of boxes with the Dorian logo emblazoned on them.
Joe had been expecting to have to talk his way past a couple of surly dispatchers, who would probably have been surprised by his unorthodox entrance into the building, but it felt weirder that the space looked deserted. Still, there weren’t any trucks pulled up, either, so perhaps this area was only staffed when there was actual loading to be done.
He made his way quickly but quietly across the loading bay, toward a door on the far wall. Turning the handle, he opened the door a crack, leaning in to peek through to the room on the other side.
There was a vast open-plan factory and warehouse with boxes and shelving and workstations, but no one was working at any of them. He opened the door and slipped through into the factory proper.
His senses were on full alert as he moved through the area, but the place looked totally deserted.
Which was very weird.
The workstations were divided off from the factory with suspended walls that gave the suggestion of rooms. He looked up and saw the system of cables that held the walls in place, and at the anchors in the floor that completed the job. It was a practical solution, a balance sheet fix, but Joe guessed that was true of a lot of modern design: cheap and functional, giving the illusion of worker comfort, but nothing more.
He stopped at one of the workstations, which was prepped with tools and electrical components, circuit boards, and a soldering iron. A full coffee cup sat to the right of a computer that seemed set up for some kind of electrical testing. Joe picked up the cup and tested the liquid with his little finger. It was lukewarm. Definitely not room temperature.
Which meant someone had been there pretty recently.
He put the cup back on the ring it had formed on the desk, and moved on.
More workstations, more signs that people had here recently been there. A sweater slung over the back of a chair, a jacket over the back of another, a soldering iron left switched on, a computer running its testing procedures.
Just no actual people.
It made Joe feel uneasy and unsure as to how to proceed.
Still, an abandoned jacket was a good start. He rifled through the pockets, but there was nothing useful. At least, not what he’d been hoping for: an ID badge or maybe a key card. The kind of thing that YETI had been unable to provide him on such short notice. Biometric data. Site-specific ID. Stuff that would grant him passage beyond the plant’s security doors and into the executive areas behind them. Instead, there was a wishbone-shaped piece of metal that looked like some kind of tool, a pen, and … that was it. No candy wrappers, chip bags, cough drops, tissues …
And the vast area was still devoid of people. There was something unsettling about being alone in a building like this. It felt wrong. First there was the obvious primal dread of being somewhere you really shouldn’t be. And then there was the fact that the place was like a ghost ship—the Mary Celeste—that Abernathy had told him about after YETI HQ was compromised. Together, they made Joe painfully aware of how exposed he was here: not just in the factory, but the country, too. He was rolling with no plan, and had no tech support, no back up, and no Plan B.
He set out to find the storage area where they kept the Dorian chips that had set this particular mission in motion, leaving the workstations behind him and heading toward the towering shelves of what had to be the fulfillment department.
Every sound he made seemed amplified by the stillness, echoing around the empty building as if inviting discovery.
Why was the place empty?
Was there some kind of national holiday that meant everyone had stayed home? The security guard hadn’t mentioned anything like that and, anyway, that hardly explained the lukewarm coffee and the abandoned clothing. So was the workforce simply on a break, or meeting up in an executive office for a training session? All possible, and all would mean that people would be returning soon.
Joe thought about what the cabbie had said, about no locals being employed at Dorian Europe. That was a little weird, but perhaps the man was exaggerating, or repeating a half-baked rumor. He thought about the remoteness of the location and how he hadn’t seen any other buildings for miles, but that wasn’t helping his general sense of ill-ease, so tried concentrating on the here and now.
It was ironic, he thought, that the bug in his head that allowed Abernathy to listen in, and even comment upon, his actions had always been slightly irritating, always feeling like his privacy was being invaded. But now, when he’d gladly welcome input from Abernathy, he tried to establish contact and had failed. Joe had never tried connecting from abroad before—he hadn’t needed to in the USA since Abernathy had been right there. Maybe the chip didn’t work outside of the UK, but it ran on Wi-Fi, so surely it should be working. Maybe Abernathy wasn’t back in the office yet, and he was the only person who used the communication method, or maybe it was that there was simply no Wi-Fi signal here. Joe took out his phone: there was a symbol for no connections possible, not even a voice call.
Well, if his phone couldn’t get a signal, the chip in his head probably couldn’t, either.
The warehouse was bounded on three sides by high shelves stacked with cardboard boxes, and plastic bins containing components. Everything was marked with location codes, to tell workers where to find the parts stored on the shelves. There were some four-wheeled carts with plastic bins incorporated into them that Joe figured were for picking components from the warehouse for delivery to the assemblers’ workstations.
He was about to investigate one of the bins when there was a sudden high pitched noise—an abrupt pattern of bleeps that sounded like the world’s loudest alarm clock. It only lasted a few seconds, but by the end of it, Joe heard people moving, en masse, toward him. For a moment, he worried that the bleeps had been a security alarm and the people he heard moving toward him were coming to intercept him, but then he saw workers heading back to their designated stations, so he relaxed.
A little.
Of course, now he’d have to explain his presence if anyone asked.
But the people just passed him, even the ones working in the area he was standing in. It wasn’t just that they passed by though; they totally ignored him, returning to the tasks they’d recently left. Within minutes, the factory was back to what was probably its normal pace, and the contrast with the empty space just moments before was surreal.
It was made more surreal by the fact that people still didn’t so much as acknowledge his presence. Even among themselves, there was no communication at all: no laughing or joking, no conversations, nothing.
The way these people were acting just wasn’t natural. Maybe it made him uneasy because the behavior of the workforce reminded him a little too much of the cult-like spaced-out emptiness of the .wav people from the Palgrave Affair. Of course, the connection there was spurious: the creature … whatever the hell that had been in the sky over Hyde Park … had departed, taking with it every vestige of its influence. None of Palgrave’s altered sound file remained on earth. Everyone affected by the sound had gotten better. Whatever this was had nothing to do Victor Palgrave and his crazed delusions of grandeur for a new British Empire.
But.
Palgrave’s name had come up again very recently. What was it Abernathy had said about hackers using masks of his face to hide behind? Could there be some connection?
Joe shook the thought a
way. It was nothing but a dumb coincidence. Palgrave was in prison, his organization was in tatters, and his great weapon was out in space somewhere, living happily, if that’s what sound creatures from space did.
This had absolutely, categorically, nothing to do with that.
Maybe this was just how people in Eastern Europe worked. They’d had their downtime—that’s why they’d been absent, it had been a break—and they’d done all their chatting and messing around, and now it was back to work.
Except.
Except the cabbie had said the workforce wasn’t local, and the guard at security had had an American accent. And now that he thought about it …
Joe looked around the factory at all the signage that was meant to inform, educate, or just show people where things were or where things went. It was all in English, with no Romanian translation for those not one hundred percent up to speed on every nuance of the English language.
Did “no locals employed here” actually mean “no Romanians employed here”?
That seemed a little unlikely. The entire management team might not be local, but surely it wouldn’t be cost-effective to fly in a whole workforce for your factory. You’d use the local skilled workforce. You’d have dual-language signs. Wouldn’t you?
Unless the level of technical ability was so high that Dorian couldn’t source local talent to do the work, but then why set up shop in Romania in the first place? It seemed to Joe that you’d build your factory somewhere you could have access to workers with the right skill sets. And the warehouse guys? The guys in dispatch? Job agencies would be full of people with the right training and knowledge to fulfill those not so technical positions.
His mind suddenly flipped back to the thought he’d had in the cab about Willy Wonka from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and a line from the Gene Wilder film version of the book popped into his head, the one about how nobody ever went into the factory, and how nobody ever came out.
That led straight to another thought about something he hadn’t seen since arriving at Dorian Europe.
Cars.
He hadn’t seen a single car on the premises.
Now, maybe there was a staff parking lot on the left-hand side of the building, but he was pretty sure he’d have noticed it. There certainly hadn’t been any cars parked by the freight entrances.
So? So what? Maybe the staff came in on company-financed buses.
If that was the case, buses from where? They didn’t employ locals, so how far away did you have to live to be “not a local”? Braşov was ten miles away, minimum. So this entire workforce came in on buses from, what? Twenty miles away? Twenty-five? Thirty?
Joe did a quick headcount and came up with a couple of hundred. Minimum. What was that? Five buses? Six? It seemed like a whole lot of trouble to staff your factory.
Joe realized his heart was pounding in his chest. He stared at the workers. Rows of assemblers. Warehousemen moving boxes, shuffling paperwork. Pickers at work collecting components from the shelves, working from iPad-like devices as if they were checking high-tech shopping lists and filling their carts.
Everyone was dressed in the same outfit: blue coveralls or jumpsuits. Everyone was working without speaking. Everyone was focused only on the job at hand. No goofing off. No one even taking a quick rest. Or a yawn. Or a cough.
And they …
And they all …
And they all looked …
And they all looked the same.
They had the same general build, the same haircuts, the same facial features. There were slight variations, sure, a longer face here, a fatter face there; a stockier build here; longer hair there; but they all looked far too similar for it to be a coincidence.
And they were all men.
There was not a single woman in the place.
Joe couldn’t process the information. Unless they company was drawing their workforce from a single family, the composition of this workforce was impossible.
It was impossible.
Joe took a step backward and knocked into a cart that had been wheeled to rest behind him. A bin containing components spilled from its frame, clanging to the floor.
That was when Joe realized the other odd thing about the factory.
It was utterly silent.
It took a loud noise to let that thought break through.
A loud noise, echoing around the factory.
Suddenly, every face was turned toward him.
Every face was looking right at him.
Joe felt fear like none he’d ever experienced before.
And then the horrible thing happened.
Looking at him obviously wasn’t enough, because every person in the factory started moving toward him.
Theresa Madoff-Wood
+ no2sjws
So, let me get this straight. You don’t believe in evolution because you 1) don’t understand it, and 2) think it sounds like unicorn magic?
no2sjws
+Theresa Madoff-Wood
Have you heard of the Turing test?
Theresa Madoff-Wood
+ no2sjws
Of course. It’s a test for Artificial Intelligence. If a computer passes, the computer apocalypse can begin.
no2sjws
+Theresa Madoff-Wood
2 things. 1. Computer apocalipse already begun. 2. Would U pass?
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CHAPTER ELEVEN
WHERE CAN I DOWNLOAD MORE RAM?
Abernathy looked at Ani over his desk and seemed to consider her words as if balancing them on an invisible scale. When he’d contemplated them for a full minute, he finally spoke. “You think this … Brian chap might be an asset?” he asked her.
Ani nodded. “He’s been there longer than I have,” she said. “He seems to know a lot more about the things going on there, and he’s worried, too.”
“Worried, how?”
“He sees the skull beneath the skin. The face behind the mask of victorious.”
Abernathy allowed a ghost of smile to haunt his face.
“Was that an Eliotic allusion?” he asked. “Of course, Eliot was talking about Webster’s Jacobean dramas …”
“I have no idea what you just said.” Ani confessed. “I just thought it was a pretty cool line.”
“It certainly is, Ms. Lee. And a good image to encapsulate our mission plan: to see the skull that victorious is hiding behind its skin. Or, indeed, its masks.”
He looked down at his desk, moved a sheet of paper a couple of inches to one side, and then looked up again. “So why him?”
Ani thought carefully about her next words. She could only try channeling Brian’s impressions and anxieties, but with little evidence to back up anything he’d had to say. It was sketchy at best, because Abernathy didn’t know the kid, hadn’t talked to him, and didn’t know how genuine his fears had sounded to her.
“I think that he could be an important ally,” she said. “He’s smart, suspicious of victorious’s motives, and he has some sweet hacking skills. I’m thinking that we work together, pool our resources, and try to get a look at the dark heart of their command structure. I won’t tell him anything about YETI. To him, I’m just another concerned hacker. We have nothing to lose, and everything to gain.”
“But can you trust him?” Abernathy asked, gravely.
Ani thought carefully about that, too.
“I don’t know,” she finally said. “It could be a test, for all I know, and showing my hand could severely jeopardize the mission. That’s why I won’t show it to him. And if it looks like I’m getting in too deep, I’ll just apologize, say I’ve gotten cold feet, and look for another way to see what victorious is hiding.”
“And you’re entirely sure there’s something to find? That victorious has a darker purpose?”
“I’m certain of it. And was that a Shakespearean allusion? Of course Lear was talking about dividing up his kingdom …”
“Touché, Ms. Lee. I knew there was a reason
I hired you. Okay. Brian … Touchshriek, was it, is your new best friend. Limit your exposure as best you can, but work with him. Do we have a last name for him? I’ll need to run some checks, just to be on the safe side.”
“Hoke,” Ani said. “Brian Hoke.”
“Well you and Mr. Hoke have work to do. Keep me in the loop. In the meantime, I’ll see what I can dig up about him.”
“Thanks, boss.” Ani said.
The house in Islington was empty when she got home, which was both weird—Gretchen was almost always home—and expected: Gretchen was away for a couple of days in Denmark as a special guest of the Danish royal family. It was just another detail in a long line about her landlady that blew Ani’s mind.
“It’s just a thank you for some consulting work I did a while back,” Gretchen had explained. “It’s no big deal. I’m really only going because I want to see if it looks anything like it does in those Nordic-noir shows you’ve got me hooked on.”
She’d also said some nonsense about canceling the trip if Ani thought she needed her here.
Ani had shaken her head firmly. “I’ll be fine,” she’d said. “And I do need to know why so many murders are being committed in Scandinavia, so go. It’s not as if this victorious thing is moving so fast that I need an extra brain on it.”
Ani made herself a cup of tea, sat down in the lounge, and tried to get her own brain to shut off for a moment. She called her dad, then her Uncle Alex, and let the simple pleasure of family conversation eat away at her worries and yes, frustrations. She didn’t say anything about her YETI life and how she felt like she was getting nowhere fast, instead just basking in the glow of normal conversation about people and places that weren’t covered by the Official Secrets Act.
When she was done, she ran herself a bath, and let some lavender and other botanicals ease the tension out of her body. Then she put on a dressing gown, wrapped her hair in a towel, and went down to the little office that Gretchen had named hers when she’d moved in.
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