Inkers

by Alex Rudall

  “All over the ceiling,” Emily said.

  Acrid smoke began pouring from the sweater. Amber shoved it up towards the ceiling and the alarm went off almost instantly, an intense and high–pitched beeping. Amber threw the sweater to the floor and stamped on it.

  “That done it?” she said.

  “The door’s unlocked,” Emily said.

  Amber ran for the door, leaving her smouldering sweater on the tiles of the kitchen floor. She grabbed the bag by the door. It contained clothes and toiletries, and had been waiting by the door for the investigation summons for weeks. She ran out into a hallway filled with milling and frightened people.

  She fought her way downstairs through the panicky crowd, turning her eyes black so that people could see she had implants and would get out of her way, if the grey skin were not enough.

  “The drone’s off the window,” Emily said. “Going downstairs to meet us.”

  “Is there a back door?” Amber said.

  “We can try,” Emily said, “But I think it’s too fast, it’ll just go high until it spots us again.”

  “Tell me where to go,” Amber said. “And get a taxi, the toughest one you can find.”

  “Doing so,” Emily said. “It’s a mess out there, though, could be difficult. Down all the stairs and then through the door at the bottom onto the second floor.”

  Amber clattered down the stairs and found herself in a long corridor, more people rushing out of apartment doors with their handbags or their kids, locking the doors behind them, hurrying towards Amber and the main stairwell, staring at her as they rushed past.

  “Down to the end,” Emily said. “Fast as you can, last door on the right.”

  Amber sprinted down the corridor. The door was marked Staff only, no entry in English and Nepali – Amber barged through and entered a narrow concrete stairwell.

  “Down two flights, take the door, taxi ETA is fifteen seconds.”

  Amber took them two at a time and burst out into a loading area filled with bins. A large black taxi shot round the corner at speed and skidded to a halt in front of her, the passenger door already open. She jumped in.

  “The office, now,” Amber said. “What’s that drone doing?”

  “Trying to get into your implants. I’m confusing it with a fake feed.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  The taxi pulled away.

  “Um, when did you learn to do that?”

  “Off the darknet when that watch was still working. I talked to some pretty interesting AIs. You give me far too much freedom.”

  Amber grinned. “Debatable,” she said.

  “So, plan?” Emily said. “You going to offer your services to Dryer?”

  “No,” Amber said. “But I’m gonna try to convince him about the girl.”

  “You believe it?”

  Amber looked out the window. “I think so,” she said.

  “Wish I’d seen that photo. And you’ve got nothing to show Dryer, no proof. Plus, doesn’t he want you dead?”

  Amber didn’t answer, just watched the shops of Kathmandu rushing past outside. People were running through the streets. She could see black columns of smoke rising from two separate locations over the buildings of the city.

  “Could you darken the windows?” Amber said.

  “Yeah, sorry,” Emily said. The windows went black, and then thinned a little so that she could see out.

  “Is the news about Jupiter out already?” she said.

  “No,” Emily said. “They’re just scared about the attacks. There’s talk on the net about a People’s Liberation Army battalion crossing the border, coming down the Araniko Highway.”

  Despite what Emily had said there was not much road traffic and they crossed Kathmandu quickly. Amber realised that the thicker of the columns of smoke that she had seen was rising directly from the office.

  “What’s happening?” Amber said.

  “A siege,” Emily said. “Here, an area commander in the office–” and Amber was inside, firing an automatic weapon out of a smashed window down towards a smaller building. Shots blazed back in response far below.

  “Pain off!” Amber shouted, but she still felt a good part of it as the bullets hit home in the groin, torso and face and the commander’s body fell backwards, implants fizzing out. The feed went dead.

  “Sorry!” Emily said.

  “Take us round the back,” Amber said, touching her face gently. They skidded to a halt in a small parking lot. She ran into the rear of the building unopposed, up flights of stairs until she was gasping for breath, and burst into the office, coming face to face with Dryer, who was holding a large machine–gun in bared metal prosthetic arms and bellowing orders. His face was red. Almost all of the windows surrounding the wide open–plan part of the office were smashed. Several workers were cowering together in the centre. A few commanders in uniform were crouched around the edges, firing down periodically out of the windows. Amber saw several bodies.

  Dryer stared at Amber, clearly unable to comprehend her presence. Then he raised his weapon and pointed it at her.

  Amber threw her hands up.

  “It’s loaded,” Emily said quickly.

  “You on our side?” he bellowed.

  “Yes!” she shouted.

  He stared at her for a second and then nodded and lowered his weapon.

  “Grab a gun, then,” he said, waving in the direction of his office and walking off towards the windows. “We’re about to be overrun,” he continued to nobody in particular.

  “Sir!” she said, running after him. “I know where the signal’s coming from!”

  “Yeah, so do we,” he called back. “Beijing’s a long way away,” he said, bending out of a smashed window, aiming, and blazing away with his gun. He stopped firing, leapt back and bullets thumped into the ceiling above where he had just been stood, spraying dust and chunks of powder down on them both.

  “No, sir,” Amber said, backing away again. “I think it’s in Scotland, I saw a photo on the darknet!”

  At that he turned to her, his face incredulous.

  “For god’s sake, what is wrong with you?” he said. “Forget the fucking darknet and either get a gun or hide! If you come near me again I swear to god I’ll shoot you dead.” He shoved past her with his huge metal arm, knocking her onto the floor, and stalked across towards the other side of the office.

  She scrambled to her feet and watched him walk away. “Are there any working computers around here?”

  “One in an office upstairs,” Emily said. “It’s still connected. Troops are getting in downstairs, hostiles by the look of it, you might want to move fast.”

  Amber ran back to the stairwell. The last she saw of General Dryer was the huge man aiming what looked like a portable cruise missile launcher down out of the window and firing it in a blaze of light and smoke. She sprinted up four flights of stairs, pausing to steady herself as the whole building shook. She ran on. “Stop! This door!” Emily shouted, and Amber turned and ran through into another office, this one empty with some windows still intact. It looked older and there were several desktop computers around. “Any online and unlocked?” Amber said.

  “One at the back,” Emily said.

  She ran to it. It had a webpage open. Amber went on a news site, created a public topic. There were two large explosions below that rocked the whole building, dust falling everywhere, glass shattering, computer screens toppling over. Amber grabbed onto hers to hold it steady. It felt like the whole building was going to collapse.

  She typed as fast as she could, her fingers slow and awkward —she had hardly typed a word since her implants had been put in. ITSA under attack, the GSE is coming back, look at Jupiter for proof, it’s moving towards Earth. The source of the signal was in Scotland, it’s not the Chinese. There’s a girl, somewhere in Europe, she’s got an ink baby inside her, the Mutant Mary, find her. Finally she pressed take a photo, and the small camera in t
he top of the screen blinked and took a photo of her grey face and her black eyes and attached it to the message. There was a burst of gunfire that sounded close. She pressed submit.

  “OK – that’s done it,” Emily said. “Back to the stairwell as fast as you can, I might be able to find us something on the roof.”

  “You might?” Amber said, but she was already running as fast as she could, and the administrator did not answer.

  She threw herself up the stairs, booted footsteps thundering in the stairwell not far below, the crunchy noises of soldiers running with machine–guns and body armour, and she sprinted, slammed down the bar and burst out through the fire exit into the bright Kathmandu morning. Smoke billowed up from the street. There was a drone pad on the roof. It was empty.

  “Emily!” Amber said. Footsteps were getting louder in the stairwell. She slammed the door shut.

  “Emily!”

  “Jump off!” Emily said.

  “Where?” Amber shouted.

  “Anywhere!” Emily shouted, and Amber ran for the nearest edge and slowed a little instinctively but went off anyway, and there was a blast of automatic gunfire behind her. She was in the air, Kathmandu yawning below her, the bullets flying around her, knowing that her life was over. She hit something incredibly hard, felt her limbs gripping on, and opened her eyes – she was on something black and flat, the sky wheeling above. She was flying, on top of one of the big, high–altitude drones. Her left arm hurt terribly. She turned her head slowly and looked at it. It was pouring blood. The drone spun and accelerated and she was pressed into its cold black metal. She could hear bullets pinging off the other side of it.

  “Christ,” Amber said, holding on for her life.

  “We’re welcome,” Emily said.

  Amber breathed in silence for a moment. It was cold. The noise of gunfire was receding.

  “Are you getting a connection?” she said, after a while.

  “I’m not being blocked any more, but it’s patchy,” she said. “What do you need?”

  “Did the message make it?”

  “Yep. It’s starting to trend, it won’t disappear now. People will see it.”

  There was another silence.

  “Get me Rob,” Amber said. “I don’t care how, just do it.”

  Emily didn’t answer, but Amber knew she would be doing everything she could to comply, and she would probably pull it off, and felt something like love for the disembodied administrative script that lived somewhere in the computers implanted in Amber’s spine and brain. So when the sky disappeared and she was standing uninjured on her beach, and he was there, she wasn’t surprised. She ran forward and kissed him on the mouth. They hadn’t spoken for over three months.

  “Are you out?” was the first thing he said.

  “On the way, yeah,” she replied. “Might not have signal for much longer.”

  “OK, uh, it’s everywhere. At least half our operatives are dead or missing, most offices in Asia are gone, there were bombs in the US and Europe. We’re regrouping. But we’ve been looking into the signal more, a lot of it, there seems to be something like a massive simulation in it, the whole universe encoded in it. We don’t understand why, or how, I– I’m trying to find out more.”

  “I got a message out–” Amber said.

  “Signal going,” interrupted Emily, and then Robert disappeared, and Amber was back in the air, bleeding on top of the drone. She rested her face on the cold black metal. The pain in her arms grew.

  “I listened in,” Emily said, eventually. “Sorry.”

  “It’s OK,” Amber said.

  “Have you heard the theory that the universe itself is a simulation?” Emily said.

  “Yes,” Amber said. Since the advent of convincing VR it was one of the basic paranoias.

  “The simulation inside the girl,” continued Emily, “It’s a singularity. It’s why the GSE is coming. It might be very important. I think it would be very bad if it was destroyed. I think we might have made a mistake.”

  “I’m starting to feel the same way,” Amber said, quietly.

  They rose higher and Amber grew colder. Now the message was out, half the world would be searching for the girl. They would want to destroy her. They would believe that the GSE might stop coming if they did.

  “How far is it to Scotland?” Amber said.

  “You do not want to know,” Emily replied.

  Hardwick

  The Lwazi Centre was complete, clean and white and modern, four storeys dominating the local landscape. Hardwick and Lwazi stood on the roof as the little white car approached slowly up the road, trailing a cloud of dust behind it. A couple of kids ran after the car, half–heartedly, but they had become jaded by the stream of trucks coming through while the Lwazi Centre was being built and gave up after a few metres. They returned to their football.

  It was the end of April and the temperatures at night were dropping fast as winter approached. Nevertheless, it was still a hot and sunny day to be standing outside. Hardwick had taken to wearing a wide–brimmed leather hat to protect his scalp from burning, as his thinning white hair now provided little protection. He pushed the hat back on his head and wiped the thin layer of sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief.

  “They say he is good,” Lwazi said, as the car slowed and halted outside the big gate to the compound.

  “Not sure his last boss would agree,” Hardwick said. “Apparently he killed him.”

  The white man got out of his white car and stretched, looking around at the rolling hills and the low houses. He was quite tall and had a shaved head.

  “So why are we meeting him?” Lwazi said.

  “I want to hear his side of it.”

  Lwazi grunted.

  Paul Barnham was still standing by his car. The gate hadn’t opened yet. He looked up at the building.

  “Why aren’t they opening it?” Hardwick said.

  Lwazi was looking into the distance, down the road the way Barnham had come, shielding his eyes. Hardwick followed his gaze. He saw the second dust–cloud at the precise moment they heard the first shots. They both jumped. Hardwick ran down the stairs to the front reception, shouted at one of the guards to open the gate. He ran across the courtyard to get Barnham inside the relative safety of the compound.

  “Hi, sorry about this, please come inside. I’m Mike Hardwick,” Hardwick said, sticking out a hand. The man shook it firmly, but half looked away, distracted by the noises coming from down the road. He was heavily muscled, wearing a blue t–shirt, dark chinos and a pair of massive black boots.

  “I’m Ret”, he said. “What is going on there? I passed your checkpoint with the guys with the machine–guns, didn’t expect them to start shooting.”

  More shots echoed down the road.

  “Trouble with bandits, I’m afraid,” Hardwick said. “Actually we’ve done well compared to some places, since the announcements. This village is pretty good at defending itself. This is the closest they’ve made it, though —come inside. I’ve got some pretty big drones ready if they get much closer, but I’d rather keep them as a last resort.”

  Ret glanced at the building and then walked back to his car.

  “You want to bring it in?” Hardwick said, glancing again at the cloud of dust and smoke building down the road. It was rapidly getting closer.

  “Trunk,” Ret said to his car. The trunk popped open obediently. Ret leaned in and pulled out a massive black gun, the thick barrel surrounded by loops of metal and scattered with buttons. Ret pressed several.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Hardwick said, “If it comes to it the drones can–”

  “This will be a better interview,” Ret said.

  Hardwick saw a woman screaming at the two children with the football – they ran to her, the smaller of the two still holding the football, and disappeared around the back of their house.

  “Paul,” Hardwick said. It sounded like more than one vehicle roaring towards them. Ret ignored him,
stalked off down the road and raised his weapon to his shoulder. There was shouting from inside the compound, men running towards them.

  “No!” Hardwick shouted, backing towards the gate.

  The pickup trucks were visible now, two of them. They were piled with men who all appeared to be holding long guns. More than one opened fire. Bullets raked along the ground near Ret’s car. Ret didn’t flinch. Hardwick seemed to be frozen to the ground.

  Ret put his eye to the sight of his gun and fired. Something lightning–fast and brighter than burning magnesium shot towards the first pickup and hit it square in the front bumper. The whole front of the car buckled and erupted into a huge loop of flame. The other jeep swerved hard to avoid the explosion and rolled off the road, sending several occupants flying through the air, the others crushed underneath.

  Ret aimed at the survivors and opened fire again, this time with brief blasts of machine–gun fire. When he stopped, none of the men who had fallen clear of the pickups were moving. Ret watched a little longer as the smoke and dust drifted across the scene. He fired twice more and then, finally, lowered his gun. He returned to his car, put the weapon back where he’d got it from, slammed the trunk, and got in. The car began moving towards the still open gate. Hardwick stepped sharply aside to let it in, and then followed Ret inside to where Lwazi’s men were just starting to emerge from the building with their weapons.

  Hardwick gave Ret a tour of the building, pointing out the classrooms and offices where Lwazi’s friends and family were being taught how to use VR. Ret seemed uninterested. He smelled like smoke and dust. Hardwick did not show him the basement where he and Lwazi worked, where the computers were. Where the big screen was, showing all the ink in realtime. Hardwick and Lwazi didn’t let anyone else down there at all. Even the bots that had built the basement had had their memories wiped.

  “We do want to help the locals,” Hardwick said. “This community’s really important to Lwazi. It’s where he grew up. But we want to make money, too, real money. This is a hard time for the world, a really hard time, but I believe humanity will survive it. And I believe those who steeled themselves during the hardest parts, who kept working, kept building things – I believe they’ll inherit the earth.”