Fall

by Rod Rees

  ‘What … they sent a bus?’

  ‘I believe a limousine has been allocated for your use.’

  ‘A limo?’ Rivets couldn’t believe it: petrol rationing being as severe as it was, the use of company cars was heavily proscribed and lowly Grade Twos like him never, ever travelled in such luxury.

  With a disbelieving shake of his head Rivets threw back the duvet, tossed a protesting Jasper off his bed and tiptoed across the cold lino floor to the window. Sure enough, there, seven floors below, standing glinting under the streetlight was a long black Humber Sentinel with a ParaDigm pennant fluttering on its bonnet. What the hell was going on that would persuade Bole to send a limo to bring him to his office?

  ‘If I might suggest, Robert,’ continued Marilyn amiably, ‘that you recognise the urgency of the summons from Professor Bole and minimise the amount of time you invest in your toilette.’

  Rivets’ instinct was to tell his Polly to fuck off but it was difficult telling someone as pleasant and as uncomplaining as Marilyn Monroe to do that. Instead he dutifully crossed the room to the shower cubicle, wondering as he went whether it had been a mistake to have programmed his Polly to use the actress’ voice, but he was such an admirer of the woman – especially her work in the Ealing comedies of the 1950s after she’d defected to the UK – that to have her as his Polly voice had been an irresistible temptation.

  He stripped off his pyjamas and stumbled into the shower, his mind racing, trying to work out why Bole – demigod Bole – would want to see him. If he had been ordered to attend a meeting during normal working hours then he would have bet good money that he was being summoned to receive a bollocking, but even then Bole would have just done the deed over the Polly. According to ParaDigm’s grapevine, no one under Grade Seven (Seven!) ever saw Bole in the flesh. Apparently he did everything – setting assignments, holding meetings, giving out bollockings for substandard work … firing people – over the Polly.

  Yeah, maybe Bole was going to fire him.

  But even then Bole would have used the Polly. He’d have just sent a message along the lines of ‘Thank you, Dr Vetsch, for your valuable contribution to the work of ParaDigm CyberResearch over the past four years, now fuck off; I never want to see you again.’ Or maybe Bole was going to tell him he was about to be transferred to Bujumbura or some similar shithole lost deep up the Empire’s anal channel. That, Rivets decided, would be a real bummer.

  But if that was the case, why had Bole sent a limo? Curious … He turned on the shower, flinching back as the scalding hot water needled him fully awake. No, Bole wouldn’t be going to all this trouble just to fire him. Maybe now was the moment when he would cast off the image of being the ugly, awkward duckling of ParaDigm CyberResearch and emerge as a swan. Maybe, at long last, Bole had forgiven him?

  Rivets towelled himself dry, treated himself to an absent-minded shave, checked that he hadn’t cut himself, raked a comb through his blond hair, squirted a cheap and noxious deodorant under his armpits and turned his attention towards what he should wear for the meeting. A meeting with Bole warranted the wearing of his best suit. The problem was he didn’t have a best suit. What he had was his workaday cream two-piece with the unfortunate stain decorating the crotch. He wondered for a moment whether he should iron the suit, but decided against it: the suit was beyond ironing.

  Disheartened by the paucity of his wardrobe, Rivets hauled on the suit and a beat-up pair of black Doc Martens and then examined himself in the mirror on the back of the monopad’s door. His heart sank. Not only was he a Grade Two but he looked like a Grade Two: nondescript and careworn. Disposable. A nothing. At the ripe old age of twenty-one he had managed to achieve … anonymity. Below-average height, below-average build, good-looking in a below-average sort of way … totally anonymous. Okay, so his hair was long and his IQ enormous but other than that …

  Bollocks.

  His had been a career filled with so much hope. He had been touted as a prodigy … a wunderkind … he had been the one who had made the breakthrough that had led to quantum bridging … but what had that brought him? A nothing job and a nothing life. What was the adage? I do not live, my Lord, I merely linger. He couldn’t even remember who to attribute the quote to. Fuck; now his memory was failing. He just wished for a moment he wasn’t plagued by a world-class ability to piss off people in authority.

  The one bright spark in his life was Dong E. If it wasn’t for Dong E, he’d have gone to the top of his monopad block and jumped a long time ago. She was the only one who had never doubted him … never doubted that Robert Ian Vetsch was destined for great things.

  With a despairing shake of his head Rivets plucked his Polly from its holster on the bookcase, slipped it into his jacket pocket and shoved the In/Out into his ear. You couldn’t go anywhere without Polly. Without Polly you weren’t connected to the world. Without Polly you were in the world but not of it.

  As he undid the two locks guarding the door to his monopad, Marilyn crooned, ‘Have a nice day.’

  Somehow Rivets doubted that he would.

  *

  After traversing the vast lobby of ParaDigm House and having cleared the formidable security checks, Rivets presented his ID docket to the luscious blonde receptionist who had been so expertly ignoring him for the four years he’d been working there. She confirmed his identity with retinal and DNA scans and then delegated an Intelligence Bureau agent to escort him to Bole’s office on the twentieth floor. Rivets had never been above the tenth floor before and as the lift purred upwards he wondered if he should check for nosebleeds. The lift docked, opening out on a spectacular expanse of marble and chrome emptiness which announced in a silent but very, very articulate way the power of both ParaDigm and Professor Septimus Bole.

  Once he had passed through Tertiary-Level security, Rivets was ushered into the grim presence of Bole’s PA. The girl, all big hair and over-red lipstick, could barely raise the energy to nod Rivets towards a seat: she’d obviously Pollyed his job grade and was intent on treating him with all the contempt a lowly Deuce deserved. Rivets sat down and did what Grade Twos were expected to do: he waited.

  He waited for ten minutes, then there was a chirp from the PA’s Polly and the girl rose from her seat and gestured to Rivets to follow her. Dutifully he trotted along behind her – admiring her splendidly pneumatic arse as he went – into Bole’s large, opulent and very empty office.

  ‘Sit and wait,’ she instructed, waving him into the chair stationed in front of Bole’s airfield of a desk, and like the dutiful Grade Two he was, Rivets did just that.

  *

  In retrospect, that Septimus Bole arrived for the meeting carrying a briefcase should have signalled to Rivets that something unusual was happening. Scratch ‘unusual’ and substitute ‘bloody worrying’. No one in Britain – well, no one important, anyway – carried briefcases any more for the simple reason that they didn’t have a use for paper any more. Not since PINC. Those equipped with Personal Implanted nanoComputers could interrogate ABBA by just thinking their question, they could send TELEpath messages to other PINCies, they could … well, they could do all kinds of cool things. But the problem was that only Very Important People were PINC-equipped. Not people like Rivets, of course: you had to be Grade Ten to warrant the expense of being chipped.

  As Septimus Bole settled himself behind his desk, Rivets had a chance to study the man. Rivets had got up close to Bole only once before when the man had toured the Quantum Bridging Laboratory, and on that occasion Rivets had been struck by how inhumanly perfect he had been. His black suit had been perfectly tailored, his black hair had been perfectly groomed and his face had been perfectly expressionless … so wholly perfect that now the deviations from this perfection were glaringly obvious. There were shadows under his eyes that even his shaded glasses couldn’t hide and, if Rivets wasn’t mistaken, there were one or two grey hairs marring the man’s sleek black mane. And the way he was drumming the fingers of his left hand on the desk i
ndicated that his famous imperturbability was decidedly perturbed. If Rivets hadn’t known better, he would have suspected that Bole was stressed. But Bole couldn’t be stressed: stress was a human failing and the rumour on the Polly was that Bole wasn’t a member of the human race and hence wasn’t susceptible to the same foibles as the rest of humanity.

  Stressed or not, Bole still looked pretty scary as he sat there behind his huge desk staring at Rivets through the dark glasses he always wore. Yeah … that’s what really put the shits up Rivets: Bole’s stare had an intensity that could split rock. The guy might be looking a mite mussed but it wouldn’t do to forget what a powerful bastard he was … bastard being the operative word. With this thought in mind he gave Bole his best smile: he might think the man was an alien from the Planet Zorg but he was, after all, Head of ParaDigm CyberResearch and the ABBA Development Project and hence someone who could consign him, at the press of a Polly button, to deepest, darkest Bujumbura.

  Bole coughed and then began speaking. ‘Good morning, Dr Vetsch, and may I thank you for attending this meeting at such short notice.’

  ‘Thank you’, now that’s a good start, decided Rivets, his spirits rising a notch. He’d never heard of Bole thanking anyone for anything.

  ‘I have asked you here to discuss a matter of national security, therefore you will excuse me while I take certain precautions to ensure the confidentiality of our discussions.’ And then the strangeness of what was going on became bizarre. Bole deployed two SecuriBots!

  As the midge-sized robots began to flit around the room emitting the static screen designed to prevent eavesdropping, Rivets tried to remember when he had last heard of them being used in Britain. The use of the bloody things was illegal inside the British Empire … but then anything that compromised the efficiency of ABBA’s PanOptika surveillance system was illegal in the Empire.

  Once he was satisfied that the SecuriBots were properly deployed, Bole took a deep breath and began. ‘Dr Vetsch, you have been working with us for how long?’

  An odd question, especially as he judged that Bole already knew the answer, after all the man was PINC-equipped. ‘Four years. I joined ParaDigm immediately I completed my thesis on quantum bridging at Oxford.’

  ‘And how old were you then?’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘So young, but then you always were something of a prodigy in the field of quantum manipulation.’

  Rivets bit back the temptation to dispute the tense used in that statement. As far as he was concerned he was still a prodigy. Twenty-one wasn’t that old.

  ‘The contributions you have made regarding the expansion of ABBA’s capabilities have been … significant. Indeed, your talent is such that when you were recruited you were identified as one of those rare individuals who would one day grace the upper echelons of our great company.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Rivets as he waited for the inevitable ‘but’.

  ‘But, your progress has been hampered by your indiscipline and your inability to follow the instructions of your superiors. You are, in the words of your manager, “brilliant but ungovernable”. This came to a head two years ago, did it not, when the report you wrote regarding the equivalency of Soviet technology with that of Britain’s was leaked over Polly?’

  Oh, here it comes. And he hadn’t even been offered the comfort of a blindfold and a last cigarette. ‘Look … Professor Bole … sir … as I have already tried on several occasions to explain, I am positive I classified that report as “Confidential”. I just don’t know how the reclassification could have happened but I know it wasn’t my fault.’

  A waste of breath. No one believed him for the simple reason that if he hadn’t made the mistake then ABBA had to have made it … and ABBA didn’t make mistakes.

  ‘Indeed, but as a consequence of this security lapse you were downgraded to a Grade Two. It was only through the intervention of ParaDigm that you avoided incarceration for a breach of the Official Secrets Act.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘I am here, Dr Vetsch, to offer you a chance to rehabilitate yourself. I need someone to work on a special project and your name has been proposed.’

  Fuck, miracles do happen!

  ‘I wish to employ your brilliance, Dr Vetsch, but I have no use for your ungovernability.’ Bole paused to take a sip of water, his hand trembling as he held the glass. The guy was falling apart! ‘The task we would set you is a challenging one which will necessitate your being made privy to ParaDigm’s innermost secrets. Such is their sensitivity that these secrets are known only to a handful of people … to ParaDigm’s elite. You are being invited to join this elite, Dr Vetsch.’ Here Bole nodded to the wall covered with portraits of ParaDigm dignitaries. ‘The roll-call of the luminaries who have worked for ParaDigm is a Who’s Who of twentieth-century innovation and genius: ParaDigm has been honoured to number such people as Alan Turing, Ted Hoff and Federico Faggin, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, Paul Baran, Steve Jobs and, of course, Bill Gates in our ranks, many of them finding sanctuary in ParaDigm in order to escape religious persecution in the USA.’

  Rivets couldn’t believe what was happening. Not only was he being offered salvation from the penury and obscurity of Deuceism but was also being tempted by thoughts of a life of mansions, fast cars and fast women … though Dong E might have something to say about that last bit.

  Bole interrupted these reveries. ‘However, with great rewards come great responsibilities. I must warn you that ParaDigm regards maintaining the confidentiality of its secrets to be a matter of the utmost importance: anyone flouting this confidentiality will be most robustly dealt with. Do you understand?’

  The way Bole said this left Rivets in no doubt as to what ‘robustly’ meant. For a second he wondered if he should just cut and run but his credit card balance kept him glued in his chair. He gave a nod.

  ‘Of course, the rewards will be profound.’

  ‘Very profound,’ came an observation from the side of the room.

  ‘Good morning, Father,’ said Septimus Bole.

  Rivets turned towards the voice and there, on the office’s hologram pad, was the image of Thaddeus Bole … the owner and CEO of ParaDigm Global … the most powerful man in the entire world … the richest man in the entire world … the lunatic hermit who never appeared in public … the most famous verminophobic since Howard Hughes. Despite speaking through a microphone clipped to the lapel of his overalls, his voice, though electronically amplified, was still reedy and weak. There was no emotion or charm in the voice, no sentiment or humanity; Thaddeus Bole spoke with all the warmth of an ice cube. An odd voice too: Bole sounded like he lived in a helium-rich atmosphere, but then, Rivets remembered, he did.

  In Thaddeus Bole’s defence, he had been hermetically sealed away from all contact with humanity for … well, who knew how many years, never daring to brave sunlight or to breathe air which hadn’t first been filtered and sterilised. Thaddeus Bole was the boffin in the bubble and to Rivets’ mind, so many years of solitary confinement would put a crimp on anybody’s appearance and social graces. Those poor bastards who suffered, as Bole did, with severe combined immune deficiency syndrome weren’t the sort of people you met down the pub.

  Rivets resisted the inclination to bow. He had never met Thaddeus Bole before – but then only a handful of people had – and now, looking at him, he was bloody glad he hadn’t. Thaddeus Bole was as forbidding in appearance as he was in reputation. Even seen imperfectly as a shimmering and shifting holographic image it was obvious he was a very strange-looking man, and with his shaven head, his black-lensed glasses and albino-pale skin he looked scarcely human. But he was human enough to have mated: he had, after all, spawned a son, Septimus.

  For an instant Rivets wondered if holograms did autographs but as he squirmed under Thaddeus Bole’s unflinching gaze he decided it was better not to ask.

  ‘It is a tremendous opportunity we are giving you, Dr Vetsch. Succeed and your future is very bright …
very bright indeed.’

  ‘I’ll do my best, sir,’ he answered, wondering what the flip side of success was. Bujumbura here I come, perhaps?

  ‘You should realise, though, that I have my doubts as to your suitability for the task we are intent on setting you … not, of course, your intellectual suitability but your emotional suitability. As we have seen since you joined ParaDigm, your personality demonstrates a degree of nonconformity that is somewhat unsettling. However, we have been advised that you are the man for this job …’ A sniff from Bole senior. ‘You are a gifted scientist, Dr Vetsch, and I trust that your reaction to the intelligence that my son will impart will not be contaminated by idealistic considerations.’

  Rivets kept his face bland. Coming from someone other than Thaddeus Bole, he would have been insulted. He had always thought of himself as an idealist, though recently these inclinations had been subsumed by the need to service his debts. If those advising Bole thought that he’d abandoned his radical beliefs then they had fucked up big time. But that was an oxymoron: ABBA advised Thaddeus Bole and ABBA never fucked up.

  Most odd.

  ‘So, Dr Vetsch,’ said Bole, ‘the question before you is are you willing to join the elite of ParaDigm, to become a shaper of history, or are you content to remain simply one of the shaped?’

  As Rivets understood it, no one – be they prime ministers or presidents – ever said no to Thaddeus Bole and he wasn’t about to start a new trend. ‘I will be pleased to help ParaDigm in any way I can.’

  ‘Very well. Perhaps then, Septimus, you would brief Dr Vetsch regarding our little dilemma.’

  Septimus Bole straightened himself in his chair and skewered Rivets with his unflinching gaze. ‘I must advise you, Dr Vetsch, that ABBA has gone rogue.’

  ‘What?’ For a moment Rivets thought that Bole was taking the piss but the expression on his long, thin and unsmiling face quickly disabused him of that idea.