by Jem Tugwell
Clive didn’t bother to click into it. He knew what it would show. They needed to get moving and they could call and message from the car.
He yanked the door back with enough force to thump the door into the wall. The handle sent a few pink flecks of plaster floating onto the floor.
Clive and Ava ran down the empty corridor, heading for the car.
‘I’ve got a really bad feeling about this,’ he said.
Chapter 35
Femi panted out short breaths as his BST universal mount constricted, connected and then rested. One, two, three, four more sharp breaths, and then he stopped and tried to tell himself that everything was normal. That everything was the same.
Why doesn’t my hand hurt? he thought.
A human hand for a BST bio-hand was an easy choice. Everyone wanted one, but few got the chance. The scarcity and massive upgrade over an organic ‘original equipment’ human hand fuelled the desirability to stellar levels.
But starting the process with a machete – that was hard-core.
The game couldn’t function with an iTourist telling the police where the contestants were all the time, allowing them to pay for transport, shelter and food. Way too easy. It was day-to-day life, not the game of the Forbidden Island.
Femi picked up the game controller, fitted it onto his universal mount and watched the ‘Welcome to Forbidden Island – the ultimate game’ message.
‘Bring on the challenge,’ he shouted to the empty room.
The palm display of the controller blanked.
Now what? Serge hadn’t said anything past this point other than that each of The Four had a different finishing point. The others could be anywhere.
Femi ran his right hand over the controller ‘hand’. No obvious sign of buttons or switches. The thing was heavy though. The fingers and thumb seemed to be flexible and hinge in the same directions as a human’s. Femi’s brain tried to clench his left hand.
‘Cool,’ he said as the game controller obeyed. It seemed a bit slow, like there was lag in the message or resistance in the joints. He experimented with more finger movements, hand rotations and grips. They all worked, but in a sedate fashion. Maybe it’s like being old, he thought.
Femi stared at the palm display. It was still blank.
He looked around the room, but other than the bench, he didn’t see anything else except neglect and decay.
And an arc of blood.
And his old, redundant hand.
It’s the ultimate game, he told himself. It was never going to be easy. The game’s designers weren’t going to feed him everything. No instructions. No cheat sheets or hacks.
Think like you’re in a game. Earn it.
The game controller was the place to start.
He brought it close to his face, twisting and turning it to scan the surface for anything that might help. Nothing but a skin like covering, and synthetic fingernails.
Femi grasped the controller’s thumb with the fingers of his right hand and twisted. Nothing. Same with all the other fingers.
He turned his game controller so that the palm was facing the floor and used the thumb and index finger of his right hand to hold the fingernail of the controller’s little finger. He pressed. Nothing.
Ring finger. Nothing. Middle finger. Nothing.
He pressed the fingernail of the controller’s index finger. In the darkening room, the controller’s palm display cast a white glow onto the floor. His brain told him that the finger was tingling, like severe pins and needles.
He let go of the finger and shot his wrist around to see the display.
‘Game Controller Active – Let the game begin.’
After a couple of seconds, the display blanked.
Now he was getting somewhere.
He grasped the controller’s index finger again and pressed.
He got the same tingling sensation, and the screen flashed white and redrew with the same ‘Game Controller Active – Let the game begin’ message before blanking again.
Not that simple, Femi thought, but maybe the screen going off could be to save power. The glare would also be obvious to other people at night.
He spent a few minutes trying all sorts of different grips and movements. Squeezing, pushing and pulling.
He was wasting precious time, but he still had no idea what else to do other than keep trying different actions.
When he pulled the controller’s little finger, like he was trying to crack a knuckle, his brain told him that something blunt had been pressed into his little finger. At the same time, the display came to life.
He looked at the display. The message ‘Game position – equal third’ showed before the display blanked.
Given that there were only four of them, ‘equal third’ meant that two were ahead of him and he and someone else were still standing at the start point fiddling with their controller. ‘Shit,’ he muttered, knowing that equal third meant equal last.
He tried to crack the knuckle of the game controller’s ring finger. The same sensation of pressure from a blunt object but now in the ring finger. The display’s message this time was ‘Distance to finish – 70 to 90 miles.’
That’s at least thirty hours of walking, he thought, but the range of distances in the message implied that there were multiple routes.
He still needed to work out where he was meant to go.
Cracking the middle finger gave Femi a display of the game’s elapsed time.
Shit, he needed to move, Serge had warned about the police getting disconnect messages and sending drones.
He could work the rest out later. After packing the lamp into his bag, Femi looked at the machete, not knowing why he might need it, but reluctant to leave it in case he did. He wrapped the towel around the blade and stuffed it into his bag.
Dabbing his finger into the pool of his blood and using it as ink, Femi scrawled a message onto the bench, then rushed to the door.
He pulled the creaking door open, smelling the freshness of the late afternoon air after the mustiness of the butcher’s shop. He had to make a choice, but didn’t know the correct direction. Fifty–fifty.
He turned left, and set off, head down, bag over one shoulder and his game controller stuffed into a pocket.
Two streets away from the butcher’s shop, he heard a frantic buzzing, blending with a police siren behind him. He hurried on, looking for somewhere quiet to hide and work out how to get the game controller to tell him where he was meant to be going.
He turned into a small side road with terraced houses stretching away on both sides. He couldn’t see anyone, so he risked pulling out the controller from his pocket and cracked the knuckle of its ring finger.
The display showed: ‘Distance to finish – 71 to 91 miles.’
He was heading in the wrong direction.
He cracked the little finger: ‘Game position – fourth.’
***
After taking some random turns, Femi stumbled across a small open area. It looked uneven and rutted, with the grass growing in tufts interspersed with muddy tracks.
He found a bench underneath a blinking streetlight and sat. He’d bought an old map of Northern Ireland from an antique shop in Derry and flicked through the pages. The front section contained smaller scale road maps of different parts of the country. The back section had large scale maps of the major towns and cities.
Tracing a finger down the road index, he found the road the open area was on. Square ‘C4’. He moved his finger to the square on the map and tapped the small green shape drawn next to the road.
Some small progress but he needed to work out where the finish was.
He tried to think like a game programmer. What they used. What they might think. A double click. That was a common action when using a mouse.
He tried a double press on each fingernail, then double pulls on each finger. They all did nothing.
He looked down at his right hand, his real hand, resting on the map. His thumb w
as balanced against the tip of his index finger.
Worth a try, he thought and did a double-tap of the thumb against the index finger of the game controller.
The display on the controller’s palm flashed and drew a map with a little black and white chequered flag in the middle. It was too small for him to work out where it was. He didn’t know how to zoom the map out, but a second double-tap of thumb and index finger changed the display from a map to a street address.
‘Finally,’ he muttered, conscious of how slow he had been, and how much of a head start he had given the others.
Femi flicked through the map to the page showing the destination, then more slowly through several of the other pages, planning a rough route in his head.
He stuffed the map into his bag and started running.
Chapter 36
As the car trundled along the M3, skirting the edge of Winchester, Clive and Ava ignored everything except the display screen between them.
The screen resembled a low, glass-topped table sitting between two rows of armchairs that faced each other. Its display was split into four distinct images, but four very similar ones. The top of each quadrant had the location name: Southampton, Worcester, Derry, and Dumfries.
Each image was from a forensic drone showing the inside of a disused, shabby butcher’s shop. Some in better condition than others, but all with a large wooden chopping bench in the middle, signs of recent blood splatter and, most disturbingly for Clive, all with a human hand severed above the wrist. Each hand had an iTourist bracelet still firmly attached and broadcasting its position in complaint at being so rudely disconnected.
Clive hadn’t bothered to chase Rob at iMe Tech Support. This wasn’t a technical issue, or a programming error, or even a cyber hack. This was a human hack.
‘How did they stop the bleeding?’ Ava asked.
Fair point, Clive thought, wishing that Ava hadn’t zoomed the whole screen to show a close-up image of one of the hands and its cleanly severed stump. ‘Don’t know, but there’s not a lot of blood, so it must have been done quickly.’
‘Would a tourniquet work?’
‘Maybe temporarily, but they’d need medical treatment. Walking around with a belt on your wrist instead of a hand is pretty obvious.’
Clive paused to think.
‘The hospitals would have reported anyone without an iMe or iTourist who came in for treatment, so we need a list of doctors, both current and retired who are local to each site. We’ll need to see if they treated anyone.’
‘Surely, they’d report it too,’ Ava said.
‘Maybe, but four so close together in time must be connected. The similarities are too strong. There’s some cause or reason behind it, so there may be sympathisers loyal to the cause.’ Clive forced his eyes away from the image of the hand. ‘Add vets to the list of people who might have treated the injuries.’
Ava nodded and made some notes on her HUD. ‘What sort of cause requires you to chop your hand off?’ she said.
Proof of loyalty, proof of compliance…? Clive wondered. Proof of insanity?
‘There’s a shortage of organ donors,’ Ava said. ‘But that doesn’t work with hands. And even if it was donors, then you’d take the hand with you.’
‘There were cases years ago of people using power tools to cut off the hands off a family member, saying it was an accident, asking the insurance company to pay out in compensation while they claimed disability benefits.’
‘That couldn’t work here. No way you get four accidents this close together. No insurance company would pay out. And why would foreigners do it here?’
Clive had no idea, but clearly there must be a reason. ‘So, what could it be?’
‘I’ve run a search on why people might cut off their hand. The top answer was swapping for a bio-hand like this one,’ Ava said, sounding like she was testing the beginnings of an idea. She threw a web page at the car’s screen that showed an advert for one of the many companies feeding the growing trend of body augmentation. Ways of improving on nature. The bio-hands all looked impressive. Stronger and better than new.
At the bottom, there were comments from users around the world and Clive scanned the first few:
‘I’ll cut my arm off and my bionic arm will crush the skull of my enemies.’
‘That is freaking awesome.’
‘I wanna go modular.’
‘But can it play Minecraft?’
‘BRUH!!! I’M READY TO MOD MY BODY.’
‘That thing must give the best handjobs.’
‘The usual intelligent input from around the world,’ Clive said, shaking his head.
Ava scrolled the display and Clive nearly choked when he saw the price.
‘But if you had that sort of money, you’d go to the factory and have it done by a surgeon in a sterile environment with aftercare. You wouldn’t chop your hand off in a grubby shop and run. Plus, the drones were at the site inside ten minutes,’ Ava said, dismissing her own theory.
‘Let’s run the signal traces at the sites to see who was there. Start with the one in Southampton as we’re heading there,’ Clive said.
Ava nodded and found the signal trace for Tatsuko Ito. She threw the trace onto the display, which redrew to show an architect’s drawing of the butcher’s shop and Tatsuko’s signal glowing green in the middle of it. ‘She was on her own, so she must have done it herself. This is when the iTourist generated the alert.’ The time display on the screen showed 16:02.
‘Run it backwards. Let’s see how she got there.’
Ava nodded and selected a fast rewind of the signal history. The display screen scrolled, keeping Tatsuko’s signal dot in the middle and showing the seemingly random route that Tatsuko had taken from her hotel through roads and parks.
‘She doesn’t seem to interact with anyone or do anything,’ Ava said.
The time on the display stepped backwards through the night, showing Tatsuko’s signal in the bed.
Ava skipped the display over the time Tatsuko was asleep. Ava then carried on replaying the trace, following Tatsuko backwards in time on a circular route around several shops.
‘What did she get in the shops?’ Clive asked.
Ava paused the display and brought up a list of transactions from Tatsuko’s iTourist. Ava clicked a button to filter the display to only show purchases.
‘A map of southern England and an A–Z of London. A raincoat and baseball hat. Food and water. And a specialist multitool, cutting discs and safety equipment,’ Ava read.
‘Safety gear didn’t seem to help her,’ Clive said, but Ava frowned at the inappropriateness of Clive’s joke.
***
Clive pushed the door of the butcher’s shop open and stepped inside, with Ava close behind.
He was thankful that the Uniform who had got to the scene first hadn’t trampled around inside. He had seen the hand and the blood through a window and waited outside for the forensic drones.
Now the drones had completed their sweep, Clive and Ava were free to explore, but they hesitated, trying to take in the scene that they already had seen on the car’s display screen. It was different in the flesh. More shocking. The smell of the room mixing with the metallic smell of the blood and the buzzing of the flies feeding greedily in it.
Clive approached the bench. ‘Have a look in the cupboards and anywhere the drones can’t get, Ava,’ Clive said, over his shoulder.
A machete was buried in one end of the bench. Clive snapped on a pair of forensics gloves and reached for the handle. He pulled up, but the machete stayed firm. He pulled harder but it had been driven in with real force and determination.
He looked down, careful to avoid stepping in the blood and looked at the hand. It lay palm up, fingers curling in a half grip. The iTourist status screen’s frantic red pulsing reflected along the concrete floor.
Clive put his thumb on one side of the wrist and his index finger on the other side and lifted the hand and placed it palm down on t
he bench. The red pulsing was brighter now. He pushed the hand against the blade of the machete so that the wrist touched the blade. The angle of the cut in the wrist matched the angle the blade was buried in the bench. Clive peered in to look at a faint mark on the iTourist.
‘Boss,’ Ava said. ‘Here’s some of her shopping.’
Clive turned and crossed to where Ava knelt. She had a cupboard door open and Clive could see a tangle of things stuffed randomly into the cupboard.
One was the multitool from Tatsuko’s purchase history, with a small, burnt cutting wheel on the end of a shaft.
‘No maps or raincoat,’ Ava said.
‘Can you bring that over to the bench,’ Clive said, pointing at the tool.
Ava did and placed the tool on the bench and untangled the flexible shaft.
Clive picked up the end with the cutting disc. ‘This has seen some abuse.’
He offered the disc up to a burnt gouge in the bench. The disc slotted in perfectly. Next, he offered it up to the mark going across the iTourist.
‘She tried to cut it off,’ he said, showing Ava that the faint mark was the same width as the disc. ‘Maybe she wasn’t as committed as the others. Or maybe she was more intelligent.’
Clive had been to some demonstrations of the destruction testing performed on the iTourist when the Off-Grid Crime Unit was first set-up. They had thrown everything at the iTourist and nothing made more than a tiny mark.
Clive was thinking about why you might not want an iTourist, and what the map of southern England and the A–Z meant, when Ava beat him to it.
‘Obviously they wanted to get off-grid, Boss. No tracking and no surveillance. We don’t know where all four are, but she’s heading to London.’
Chapter 37
Sully had worked out the destination double-tap on the game controller almost immediately. It simply seemed an obvious movement.
The display said ‘72–78 miles’, and he wondered if he had been given a longer route than the others. He pushed the thought aside. It didn’t matter. Winning was in the bag.
All those selection exercises involving walking and running. All to get them to play the game the way Serge wanted him too. Trudging alone in the rain. Well, he’d do a bit of that. But only at the beginning.