The factory workforce’s wills had been, too.
That was all for later, though. Right now, he needed to get some more information about what was happening here, and then he needed to get the hell out of the factory, back to Braşov, and then back to England.
And from where he was standing, none of that looked easy.
He tried the first door along the walkway, but it didn’t open. There was a handle, but no visible locking mechanism. No card reader or keypad, either. He examined the handle, but could see no mechanism built into it. Maybe it only opened from within, but there was no buzzer, and surely it wouldn’t rely on someone knocking on the door to get it open—that seemed archaic and unworkable. He checked the way the door sat in the frame. At least it opened inward. If it was outward-opening, there would have been little chance of him breaking through it.
He put his shoulder to the door and rammed it. The door didn’t give even an inch, but Joe’s shoulder certainly felt the impact. He retreated until his back was against the walkway’s safety guard, then took a flying kick at the door just by the handle. There was a splintering sound, but the door held. Another kick yielded the same result: a sound, but no give.
Still, the splintering sounds gave him hope, so he smashed at it again and again, and on the sixth try, the door opened a couple of inches.
On the eighth, he was through.
He looked down over the walkway to the people below. Their faces were still upturned, but it looked for all the world like someone had thrown a switch and turned them all off for the rest of the day. The sight was eerie, unnatural, and it helped hurry Joe through the door.
The room on the other side was cold and semi-dark and smelled of burnt ozone. It was also long and wide and full of computers, with maybe a hundred racks of pretty hardcore processors all lined up in tight rows taking up most of the square footage. You could walk between the rows—just—but it looked like that would have only been for maintenance. An open toolbox on the floor seemed to confirm that, and Joe thought he caught sight of another of those wishbone things inside, which seemed to confirm it was some kind of tool.
He’d seen enough photos of supercomputers to recognize that that was exactly what he was looking at. The racks were all linked together with glowing cables, and the processors were all glowing, too, giving the room an unearthly, science fiction ambience. There was an air-conditioning unit in the walls, keeping the temperature the computers generated down.
There were no people here, just some unimaginably powerful processing power: surely far too much for the day-to-day running of a factory, no matter how high-tech its commercial output was. The hum of the processors was a deep vibrato that Joe felt as much as heard. He wandered among the racks, filming them with his phone’s camera, with no real idea what he was looking at. He found himself wishing that Ani were there, or the Shuttleworth brothers, just so they could explain what this number of computers were capable of doing.
At the end of one of the rows of racks was a door.
NO ENTRY, some stern black writing on a yellow warning sign ordered.
An open invitation.
He tried the door and it, too, refused to open. Again, he could see no evidence of a handle or a lock, but this time there was a symbol engraved into the surface of the door, a kind of Y-shape, but with the diagonal arms becoming parallel and extending upward.
The shape was familiar, somehow, and he was about to use his chip to try to decode it when he realized that it was familiar for a more basic reason than it being some kind of symbol from a secret language. It was a picture of something he’d seen very recently. The wishbone tool in the pocket of the jacket he’d rifled through downstairs. And hadn’t he seen one even more recently?
He backtracked through the room until he found the toolbox, and there, sure enough, was one of the strange-shaped tools. He picked it up, examined it for clues or operating instructions, and then took it over to the locked door. He placed the tool within the shape engraved upon the door, but it didn’t trigger any magnetic locks, and the door remained resolutely shut. Joe groaned, wondering what he’d really been expecting. A symbol on a door that reminded him of a tool he’d seen downstairs. Had he really thought that was how this door was going to open? That sounded more like a door-puzzle in a Resident Evil game than an actual solution to a real-world problem.
Except, of course, the symbol on the door was an exact match—size and shape—for the wishbone tool. So maybe it was the way through.
Maybe he just wasn’t using it correctly.
He studied the tool, turned it over in his hands, feeling its weight. He scratched it with his thumbnail, to see whether it was a soft metal or hard, and then his mind made a connection and he almost kicked himself. The answer was so obvious. Just because it was a slightly different shape and size to an object he knew and it was supposed to open the door, he’d completely overlooked what the object actually was.
He shook his head, and then held the tool by the upright of the Y and tapped the two tines on the door frame. There was a musical note, probably an A, concert pitch, because what he had in his hand was a tuning fork. He held the upright to the outline on the door, allowing the note to vibrate through its surface, and there was a definite click from within. He tried the handle and it opened without any security cards or violence.
A tuning fork door key.
Total Resident Evil logic, but utter madness for a real door in a real factory.
He made his way into the next room and weirdness piled itself upon more weirdness. He moved from the atmospheric semi-dark of the supercomputer room into the brightness of a science-fiction movie set, and the ozone smell changed to something harder to identify. Something cloying. Something coppery.
His first visual impression was of the stark, eye-assaulting, fluorescent lights in numbers surely too numerous for the space they lit. It was an impression probably heightened by moving from a dark room to one filled with light, but it stopped Joe in his tracks, and made his next discovery seem even stranger.
The booths.
There were ten of them arranged in two lines of five spread out along the walls of the room. They stood there, highlighted by the fluorescent strip lights above, just slightly larger than telephone kiosks, albeit telephone kiosks designed by someone from the future. Made predominately of molded plastic, curved glass, and polished steel, each kiosk had its own separate control unit and computer terminal attached to it by multicolored cables. The booths were big enough to fit a person inside, although not particularly comfortably, because much of their interior was taken up with even more banks of technology that Joe found incomprehensible.
He shot more photos on his phone and wished that he knew tech as well as some people at YETI did.
Whatever these booths were, it seemed likely that they were connected to the supercomputer in the previous room, but what could their function be? He was sure that people were supposed to stand inside them—thus the size, shape, and human ergonomics—but just what a person did inside a device like that Joe neither knew nor could attempt to guess …
He stopped, mid-thought. Maybe that wasn’t the right way to be approaching this. Thinking about everything he’d seen since he’d gotten there, and especially the weirdly robotic behavior of the workers, maybe he should be thinking about what a device like that could do to people who got into it.
Could the booths make the staff act the way they had?
Some kind of mind control?
He’d started out looking for a security hole through which Dorian chips were being taken from the factory and finding their way onto the technological black market. He’d expected to find a couple of corrupt workers.
What he’d found, instead, at Dorian Europe (and to be honest, he still wasn’t sure what he had found), was something far more puzzling, with a deeper reach and a hint of dark secrets that seemed to directly implicate the company.
He took more photos and video footage of the room with the booths,
zooming in on panels and screens to capture any information that the Shuttleworths would be able to use to identify the devices. He walked the length of the room, filming everything.
And that’s how he saw it.
The final booth.
It wasn’t empty. There was something hunched over inside.
He stared through the glass at the thing on the floor.
The thing looked up at him.
Joe felt equally sick and scared.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I ACCIDENTLY THE WHOLE INTERNET, IS THIS DANGEROUS?
Dr. Ghoti pulled the car into a parking space in front of a three-story townhouse in Greenwich. She said, “We’re here,” and shut off the engine. It had been a pretty uneventful drive, unless one counted going south of the Thames as a noteworthy event, which Ani was still new enough to the whole London thing that she kind of did.
Ani had heard that one of Abernathy’s first actions in the wake of the dotwav affair and the seizing of YETI HQ by armed mercenaries, had been to set up a network of safe houses and alternative command centers, but this was her first time visiting one of those new facilities. Her first impression was … well, impressed, but that was just for the parking space being next to the building. Otherwise, the place was as nondescript as you’d expect of a secret facility; a building that blended in with the others around it so well that you’d hardly give it a second glance.
Dr. Ghoti got out of the car and went to the front door, leaving Ani to wrangle Brian out of the back seat.
Ani had tried to soothe Brian on the trip over, but things were spinning so far out of the orbit that her cover story had even started sounding hollow to her ears.
He’d been suspicious as hell when Ani made the call to YETI. It kind of expanded the range of their newly formed cooperation to something that to Brian must seem like an amorphous conspiracy. Ani phoned someone and suddenly a “memory expert” was on the way over, she tried to imagine how she would be feeling in Brian’s position.
The problem was he was now an asset. Even more so than he had been when she’d talked about him to Abernathy. Now Brian wasn’t just a person with access, he was someone who had intelligence, albeit intelligence he couldn’t remember. And that meant that, as much as she liked Brian or thought he could be a help, now his role was different.
And so was hers.
She had to know what Brian had seen, and it no longer mattered if he thought of her as a friend or an ally. All that mattered was him recovering as much of his memory of the victorious data as possible.
After the phone call, Ani realized that she had become something close to Brian’s handler. So she reassured him, lied to him, was evasive where necessary, but she tried to maintain an atmosphere of trust, even as he must have felt such an atmosphere was rapidly dissipating.
Dr. Ghoti had said she’d be there in twenty minutes, but arrived in ten, which—with a few awkward silences and some heavy reinforcement of trust—was just about as long as Ani could have carried off the charade. Because she still couldn’t admit to being a member of YETI, or of anything, and that meant that the “someone coming over to help” only added to Brian’s anxiety.
The biggest aid to getting Brian back on board was the disarming nature of Dr. Ghoti herself. From the moment Ani had buzzed the doctor in, she’d played it perfectly, pitching her performance with precision and authenticity. Within a minute, Dr. Ghoti had Brian convinced that she was “Anya,” a friend of Ani’s mum, that it was a complete coincidence that she was doing a PhD thesis on memory recovery, and that an opportunity to put her theories into practice was something so rare and exciting that she would be forever in Brian’s debt for his help.
Of course, getting three people into Brian’s tiny room was something even a Tetris master would struggle with, so when the doctor suggested they swap venues, it seemed like the natural solution to the problem. They’d copied data over from Brian’s computer to Ani’s tablet, and got moving.
Brian had become less confident about the course of action in direct proportion to the number of minutes they drove. By the time they were parking, he was quiet, internalizing his feelings so efficiently that he was actually hard to coax out of the car. In the end, Ani had grabbed him by the arm and pretty much lifted him out of his seat. By then he was moving on his own, following her to the house’s door.
On the other side of the front door was a pretty convincing hall, which led to a pretty convincing living room. If Ani hadn’t known better, she’d have thought it was really Dr. Ghoti’s house, and that it was really a home instead of a safe house.
The living room was about three times the size of Brian’s whole flat, and it was decorated and furnished so well that Ani suspected that it was an exact copy of a picture of an interior designer’s showroom from a brochure. Dr. Ghoti got Ani and Brian settled on a couch before bustling off to make them all a cup of tea.
“She seems nice,” Brian conceded. “And this place? Wow.”
Ani agreed, trying to keep things light and calm. She knew something that Brian didn’t, and that really helped her be reassuring. She wouldn’t need to keep up the façade for long.
The thing she knew was this: if a doctor from YETI was making a cup of tea, then there was going to be more than just tea, milk, and sugar in Brian’s cup.
When the drug kicked in, it was like someone had just switched Brian off. Dr. Ghoti helped settle him back in his seat before turning to Ani. “So what are we dealing with?” she asked.
“He saw lightning glimpses of data, too fast for him to remember any of it,” Ani told her. “I was hoping we had some kind of strategy for helping him recall just what it was he saw.”
Dr. Ghoti shrugged. “It’s a difficult one,” she said. “Human beings seem to think that the memory operates like a camera—that the brain takes pictures of the things it sees and can recall them clearly and without error. And that’s the problem. Our memories are nothing like photos, not really. They are subjective, easily fooled, and often wrong. We change memories, too. A recalled memory is as likely to mutate and distort as it is to provide us with more detail. So the bad news is that people searching for memories of the type you’re looking for will probably end up with nothing.”
“Oh,” Ani said, “I was hoping for … well, something.”
“I did say ‘probably,’” Dr. Ghoti said. “And ‘people.’ I’m not ‘people.’ One of the extra ingredients that young Brian here ingested along with his cup of Darjeeling was an experimental compound codenamed 4t32h, which was developed to help amnesiacs improve their short-term memories. It affects the hippocampus, the area of the brain most associated with the translation of memory from short-term to long-term, and strengthens the coding pathways for new memories held in flashbulb memory.”
Ani raised an eyebrow. “I thought flashbulb memories were memories connected to strong emotion,” she said. “Like the JFK assassination or the Twin Towers atrocity. People remember what they were doing when they hear about a tragedy because of the emotions they feel then.”
“Very good,” Dr. Ghoti said. “But it’s only part of the story. Flashbulb memory usually requires strong emotions to encode it into long-term memory, but not always. If we can get to a memory fast enough, before there’s enough new data to imprint over it, then there’s a chance that we can recover … something. 4t32h, named from its position on a strangely labeled laboratory shelf, can be seen as a biological filing manager, and it will give us our best shot at consolidating some of what Brian, here, saw into a more accessible memory form.”
“How much of a shot?”
“Let’s find out.”
Dr. Ghoti knelt down in front of Brian and gently maneuvered him onto his back. Brian offered no resistance and he even made a sleepy sound that suggested he was only too happy to lie down.
“The worst effects of the sedative should be wearing off very soon,” she said. “It should leave him relaxed, semi-conscious, and highly suggestible. We have to gauge
this just right, so I’m going to ask you to take over for now. I suspect he’ll find your voice more reassuring than that of a stranger.”
“I hope you’re right,” Ani said. “Now what do I do?”
“For now, the important bit: I need you to connect with him. We need him on our side a hundred percent. We need his trust. We need his belief. Say his name, tell him that everything is fine, and reinforce the idea that he’s safe, comfortable, and doing well.”
Dr. Ghoti took a device out of her pocket, switched it on, and placed it close to where Brian lay—a digital voice recorder with the recording light flashing.
Ani sat on the sofa next to Brian’s head. She stroked his brow and did exactly as she’d been instructed, repeating his name gently, reassuring him often, reinforcing her words all the time by stroking his face and hair.
Brian smiled and said, “Ani?” in sleep blurred syllables.
“Brian,” she said soothingly. “I’m here. Everything’s fine. You’re safe. I’m here and you’re safe.”
“I feel safe,” he sleep-muttered. “Safe and warm.”
“That’s good, Brian. Very good. You’re doing well. Very well.”
“Did I remember?” Still sleep-furred, but remarkably on message. “I know there’s something …”
Ani felt Dr. Ghoti kneeling down next to them.
“Okay,” She whispered into Ani’s ear. “He’s doing well. Despite the strangeness of his situation, he trusts you. But we need to get him to trust me now. We need him to trust my voice. I need you to sell it for me. Convince him that I can help him and that I won’t harm him.”
Ani nodded.
She moved her face closer to Brian’s so that her mouth was close to his ear.
“Brian?” she said. “I need your help. I know we only just met, but I really, really need you to trust me. I need you to trust me, and I need you to trust Anya.”
“Trust …” Brian murmured.
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