dotwav

by Mike A. Lancaster

  To the world.

  The crazy thing was: he wasn’t even doing this for himself. If only people could see that. Understand it.

  Catastrophic societal problems of the kind that had infected the UK required unprecedented actions, and it seemed that he was one of the few who saw the path that the nation was heading down.

  The tide of immigrants that was flooding into Britain—an island nation, with finite resources and a dwindling relevance on the world stage—was draining the country dry. It was basic mathematics. Every foreign mouth that was fed took food from the mouths of the people who really belonged here.

  And were they grateful? These interlopers?

  The lawlessness, permissiveness, secularization, and apathy of the country’s citizens were providing the perfect growing medium for the radicalization of religious ideologies. When the flame was applied to that particular fuse, the outcome would be explosive. His country, the land that he loved, would be forever changed.

  He simply could not allow that to happen.

  His long-term plan might have failed, the extreme measures that would have seen the UK rise again as a leading world power, but there was still a chance that he could at least make a statement.

  And it would be something that no one would be able to ignore.

  Something that would never be forgotten.

  But first he had a call to make.

  He picked up the cell phone that even his wife didn’t know he owned, and speed-dialed the only number it held.

  It was answered immediately.

  “Drummond.” A clipped, military voice with the faintest hint of East London about it. Along with a not-so-faint hint of fear.

  “Ah, Mr. Drummond. Just one quick question for you: how many times are you intending to fail me this week?”

  “Sir, I understand that you’re angry …”

  “Angry, Mr. Drummond? Have you added understatement to your rhetorical repertoire, or do you truly not know the intensity of my feelings at this moment in time?”

  “We tried …”

  “Everything you have tried, you have failed at, Mr. Drummond. You failed to catch either of the hackers who stole my file; your men bungled the interception of Joe Dyson, a seventeen-year-old boy who still managed to outsmart and outdrive a pair of supposedly combat-trained mercenaries; and you and your team secured YETI headquarters without finding a single member of the organization! These are not just failures, Mr. Drummond, these are total redefinitions of the word ‘incompetence.’ It’s over, bar the inevitable shouting. But I still want you to concentrate your efforts on tying up a few loose ends… .”

  When he had finished outlining Drummond’s last set of instructions, Victor Palgrave sat in silence.

  He had one last play open to him. Not what he’d planned, of course, but maybe it would be good enough.

  Finding out about the existence of the .wav file had been the result of a shot in the dark.

  Alien first-contact situations certainly weren’t in his brief within cabinet circles, and the discovery of a suspected signal from space should have gone straight through to the Post-Detection Task Group for verification.

  But Palgrave was nothing if not a forward thinker.

  His business interests lay in the gray world of secret wars and weapon procurement. It made sense both financially and ideologically: there was never a shortage of people willing to pay for the latest weapon technologies, and by deploying those technologies strategically, a person could gather together a lot of power and influence.

  His Research and Development had gone from strength to strength, and his R&D team made that of many nations look inadequate and outdated by comparison. And what he couldn’t develop through innovation, Palgrave was able to gather by industrial espionage. He had lines into computer systems the world over, a digital spiderweb constructed to detect any new scientific or technological breakthroughs that could be turned toward the construction of new weapons.

  After he’d heard about the Arecibo affair—the first time he had ever seriously considered that there might be other life out there in the depths of space—he had added SETI to his watch list, more in faint hope than in actual expectation. For Victor Palgrave, spaceships were the kind of thing his son Lennie read about in those stupid books of his. Still, he had seen no harm in monitoring SETI on the off chance.

  That it had actually borne fruit was nothing short of a miracle, but the moment his software had recognized the event and patched it through to his desk, he had known that the rules of the war games he played had changed forever.

  Space had come calling, and nothing was going to be the same again.

  It had taken months to even begin to understand the importance of what the Pabody/Reich Observatory had discovered, and the better part of two years to convert it into something that he could actually use.

  There had been many twists and turns, many sacrifices made and much money spent, people to be silenced and secrets to be hidden. Lennie finding a copy of the sound file while poking around on the Palgrave family server had at first been unfortunate, but later, having him as a guinea pig had turned out to be remarkably fortuitous. Imogen Bell, too, had been a great subject for experimentation; and all she had needed as an inducement to leave her old life behind was the promise of a chance to clear her name and work on the signal from space. She had gotten a chance to work on it, all right. Or, more accurately, Palgrave had given the signal the chance to work on her.

  The idea of embedding his project in music had been suggested by his work as culture secretary, and seemed an efficient way to disseminate the signal to those he would need if his dream of a new British Empire were to reach fruition. It had been surprisingly easy to start a new musical genre from scratch. He had just funneled some lottery funding into the hands of some early adopters of the .wav file—the Brewster boy and some of his friends—and let them spread it through what they laughingly thought of as “songs.” They hadn’t even realized that what they thought of as “rebellion” was actually orchestrated conformity to Palgrave’s plan. It had gained an impetus all on its own, and all he’d needed to do was wait in the background until a critical mass of youths were in the thrall of X-Core.

  But then, with only days to go from the implementation of the first phase of his plan, the walls had started coming down around him.

  Fools within the party had jumped the gun and started tipping him for prime minister. And although becoming PM had always been part of his overarching plan, the timing couldn’t have been more inconvenient. Suddenly, people were looking at him with rather keener eyes than he could withstand.

  When the MI5 vetting had uncovered Lennie’s involvement in X-Core, Palgrave’s life had become an exercise in damage control. He had been sure that he could deal with it, but then he’d learned of the hacked file—that the original, undoctored .wav file was out there in the world—and suddenly he was fighting a war on two fronts.

  Abernathy and Joe Dyson entering the fray had been the writing on the wall, writ large.

  Still, he wasn’t going down without a fight.

  It wasn’t the endgame he’d planned, but maybe it would be good enough.

  His party might be turning its back on him, but he would give them—and YETI—something to think about tomorrow.

  He’d give the world something to think about.

  Something it would never forget.

  Perched on the brink of disaster, his political career in tatters behind him, and with years of planning coming to so much less than they should have, Victor Palgrave looked up from his desk and smiled.

  PART 03:

  GOING VIRAL

  The machine is not your friend

  It sings on wires

  Its melodies are cold

  It wants to take your face.

  And when you dream in 1080p

  It is you.

  It always was.

  “Etude in Code”

  Precision Image

  CHAPTER SEV
ENTEEN: LENNIE

  Ani found it hard to get to sleep—too many thoughts floating around in her head—but when she finally did crash, it was more like a coma than sleep. Her brain played back the day’s events in garbled, exaggerated fashion in her dreams until she was awakened by Gretchen and a cup of tea.

  “Your new employer seems to be getting things in order,” Gretchen said. “He’s quite the gentleman. If I were in his shoes, I think I might just start to let my good humor slip, but he’s keeping a lid on it, playing things well.”

  “I’m so sorry about dragging you into this …” Ani began but Gretchen ssh-ed her.

  “It’s actually the most fun I’ve had in years. Now, why don’t we go downstairs and grab some breakfast? I have a feeling that today is going to be a lo-o-ong one.”

  Ani grabbed her clothes and followed Gretchen.

  Joe was sitting at the breakfast bar eating bagels. He nodded at Ani and then directed her attention over to where one of the Shuttleworth brothers, the taller one—she’d been introduced but she couldn’t remember which one was which, and had a secret theory that they were two halves of the same person, anyway—was in a heated discussion with another member of Abernathy’s team about whether Battlestar Galactica was better than Star Wars.

  “That’s Dr. Ghoti,” Joe whispered as she slid in next to him at the breakfast bar. “Going head-to-head in a nerd war.”

  “There’s really no debate here,” the Shuttleworth brother said, exasperated. “Star Wars is fantasy, dressed up in science fiction clothes. BSG, on the other hand, is pure science fiction …”

  “With roots in fantasy,” Dr. Ghoti, a dark-haired woman with Southeast Asian skin tones, said dismissively. “Has happened, will happen, blah blah blah. Predestination. A series that takes the journey from pantheism to monotheism as one of its strengths? I mean, really? It’s a heavy-handed Christian allegory at best. Gaius Baltar is Jesus, the twelve Cylon models are the twelve apostles; Starbuck even becomes an angel … hello?”

  “That’s only one way of looking at it,” the Shuttleworth said defensively.

  “I’m waiting for another, better one,” Dr. Ghoti replied.

  Joe gestured for Ani to move closer and when she leaned in he whispered, “I genuinely never thought I’d see it happen. Geoff Shuttleworth being out-nerded.”

  Geoff Shuttleworth suddenly decided that it was high time to go back to work, leaving Dr. Ghoti looking smug.

  When he was gone, she turned to Gretchen and gave her a high five.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’ve been wanting to do something like that for a long, long time.”

  “It was a pleasure. He’ll think about it for a while, and then come back with something he thinks will confuse you.”

  “And that’s when I come back at him with Babylon 5 and Firefly, right?”

  Gretchen nodded. “He doesn’t stand a chance.”

  When Dr. Ghoti was gone, Gretchen asked, “So what are you kids up to today?”

  Joe shrugged. “I guess we need to keep busy until we meet up with Ani’s mysterious hacker friend later on. It would really help if we had some goal to head toward.”

  “Something will turn up,” Gretchen said, and at that very moment Joe’s phone started to ring.

  He held up a finger as if to say “one minute” and then answered it. “Hello?”

  His brow furrowed, and then his whole face brightened.

  “Ellie. Ellie Butcher, of course I remember you. What’s up?”

  Gretchen gave him a look that said See, I told you so, and then Joe was grabbing a memo pad off the breakfast bar and scribbling down an address.

  “That was some really good thinking,” he said into the phone. “I can’t thank you enough.”

  He listened for a few more seconds then said, “Yeah, that sounds good. I’ll give you a call and we’ll set something up. Brilliant. See you soon then.”

  When he hung up he said, “That was Ellie. She lives in the same house as Lennie Palgrave. Seems he turned up early this morning, and picked up some of his stuff. So Ellie, knowing that I was trying to locate him, followed him to an address in Camden and reported back to me.”

  “Got your own little network of operatives?” Ani said. “What’s it costing you?”

  “A meal,” Joe said, then very quickly changed the subject. “I’ll get the okay from Abernathy, and then we’ll head out.”

  “I’ll freshen up,” Ani said.

  Abernathy sprang for a taxi that took them to an address in Camden Town, and they stepped out onto a street that looked like it had been frozen in amber sometime about 1990. The place seemed to be stubbornly resisting the tide of boutique shops and restaurants that were hoisting property values, preferring instead to rot in peace.

  Joe watched the cab pull away and then approached the door that matched the address Ellie Butcher had provided him. A three-story townhouse that looked more like a derelict building than somewhere you’d find the son of an MP. Crumbling brickwork, flaking woodwork, and a front door that looked like it would cave in under a decent knock. Luckily, a doorbell provided an alternative to punching a hole in wood, but its bare wires and lack of attachment to the door frame didn’t exactly inspire confidence.

  He had gleaned from Ellie’s call that she’d tried to talk to Lennie when he came back to her place, but he’d been distant and evasive and she hadn’t managed to get through to him at all. He’d left with a bag of his belongings and Ellie had felt both angry and frustrated and had decided to follow him. She’d stayed out of sight—which Ellie had admitted hadn’t been that difficult, because Lennie seemed not to be seeing the world around him, paying little attention to anything except his destination—and she’d even gotten on a bus when Lennie did.

  Abernathy had looked like Joe had just brought him the Holy Grail when Joe told him about the address they now had for Victor Palgrave’s son.

  “Do you need backup?” he’d asked urgently, as if there were a chance of securing any from the thin air that the invasion of YETI had created. Abernathy was still avoiding calling someone and Joe secretly wondered if it was less to do with fear about talking to the wrong person—although that surely played no small part in his decision—and more to do with Abernathy wanting to see if they could still operate the task force out of a couple of suitcases. If there was one thing Abernathy liked, it was mixing things up, keeping people on their toes, and getting their best work out of them through adversity.

  Or maybe he really was scared that his contacts in all branches of law enforcement, and at every level of government, really could be in on some massive conspiracy. It seemed awfully unlikely, but then you were talking about a man with such paranoia that he’d hidden an escape hatch in the back of his office.

  And there was always the chance that Abernathy was suddenly playing his cards close to his chest and already had something in mind.

  Joe reached out his hand and pressed the doorbell.

  Lennie Palgrave opened the door, and Joe was sure that he wouldn’t have recognized his friend if he hadn’t known there was a chance he’d be the one to answer. If Joe had seen Lennie in the street he would have walked straight past him without giving him a second look.

  Sure, it had been over a year since they’d last seen each other, but even the passage of that amount of time seemed inadequate to explain the somewhat dramatic changes in Lennie’s appearance and demeanor. Gone was the confident, eager to please, rakishly charming kid who had been Joe’s first friend in his new life under Abernathy’s direction. He had been replaced with this sallow, nervous young man.

  Foppish brown hair was now a disorganized straggle of badly bleached straw, the boyish roundness of his face had been carved away and replaced with gaunt lines and sharp angles, his twinkling blue eyes now hid so deep in his sockets that they might as well have been a doll’s eyes for all the life they conveyed.

  Lennie frowned at Joe and Ani, didn’t pick the person he knew out of the meager lineup, an
d sniffed.

  “We’ve already got one,” he said in a monotonous drawl. “That’s if you’re selling something. Either that or ‘no, that’s okay, we’re renting the house and I don’t think the landlord will let us’ in case home improvements are what you’re pitching. I also have ‘while your beliefs are quaint and must bring you a lot of comfort, I myself find it difficult to subscribe to the notion of a benevolent sky-god who punishes the just and unjust alike’ in case you’re trying to convert me. That should just about cover all of the possible reasons you rang that bell, so if there’s nothing else, good-bye.”

  Joe forced his face closer to Lennie’s. “It’s me, Lennie. Joe. Joe Dyson.”

  Lennie just gave him a blank stare as a reply and Joe could smell stale sweat and hair grease emanating from him in waves.

  “You know, from Horace Walpole Secondary?” Joe persevered, trying to sound guileless, without an agenda, like this was just an ordinary visit to a long-lost friend. “I stopped by to see how you are.”

  “I’m fine, Joe Dyson from Horace Walpole Secondary,” Lennie said. “Let’s do this again sometime, huh?”

  He made to close the door, but Joe got a shoulder in the gap and used it to pry the door open again.

  Lennie just stood there, swaying slightly from side to side. He wasn’t angry that Joe had barged the door back open, or offended, or … anything, really. It was like he hadn’t even noticed.

  “Lennie?” Joe asked, acting offended. “Don’t you remember me?”

  “Sorry,” Lennie said, and it was clear that he just wanted to get rid of Joe and get back to doing whatever it was he’d been doing inside. “I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

  Then he seemed to notice Joe for the first time, and recognition dawned in those oddly sunken eyes of his. There was even the faintest hint of a smile threatening to spread across his lips. “Joe?” The monotone was gone, replaced with surprise. “Joe Dyson.”

  He even pointed at Joe with a finger as if Joe himself might not know his own name, even though he’d just reintroduced himself a few seconds before, and Lennie had repeated Joe’s name then.