by Lee Isserow
They were going to whistleblow on their employers, take the stash of documents stolen from the company and hand them over to WikiLeaks. There was proof of hidden accounts, illegal experiments, arms deals, black budgets and more. She had thought about just sending the data off and wrapping up their mission, but it was all at least a decade old, and would likely be shrugged off by the multinational demon. Blamed on former executives and disgraced employees. This trial, however, might make that data worth something. She'd be in the belly of the beast. A testing facility probably had records of patients past, and if the current experiment wasn't above board, it might implicate the company with recent proof that would only emphasise the content in the archive her parents had amassed.
She wished she had been more industrious ten years ago. That would have been the perfect time to strike, but now she had a chance to finish what her parents started. Sarah thought again of Whark's question about “putting her affairs in order”, and recalled an experiment in which the paperwork declared all the subjects were deemed 'unsuitable for return to society'. The account of the trial continued to talk about the results of the experiment itself, with no explanation of what happened to the subjects, and they weren't spoken of in any of the other documentation. She tried to put it out of her mind. Concentrating on her task ahead and the day, three months and two weeks away, when she would emerge from their testing facility with a smoking gun, completing the mission her parents didn't have a chance to see through before their unceremonious 'departure' from the company.
Sarah tried to shrug off the fact that she didn't have a plan beyond sending the documents to WikiLeaks. She knew her quest for vengeance was a tall order, and possibly out of a sense of psychedelically enhanced Batman-style justice, but she had literally nothing else to dedicate her life to, so why not this.
3
Putting her life on hold was tragically easy. Sarah had expected as much, but still felt disheartened that all she had going on in her life were two volunteering gigs and NA. She was secretly glad to have an out from the homeless shelter and asylum seekers support. At first, helping out at the homeless shelter was a ruse. Whilst trying to track down one of her parents' former colleagues, she discovered that was where he had ended up. She spent weeks surreptitiously gaining his trust whilst fleecing him for information to corroborate the evidence she already had. Having lost his job only a few years after her parents death, he wasn't an awful lot of use, but she managed to get confirmation of a few scant details from the files. Sarah ended up continuing to help out at the shelter despite getting all she could from him. It felt like it was the least she could do.
She knew how easily she could have ended up homeless if she didn't have the insurance money to keep her going, and had friends on the party circuit that were trapped in that lifestyle, squatting buildings and begging. They were perfectly lovely, joyous people, but she didn't want to become like that. Her colleagues at asylum seekers support were sad to find out she would be leaving them soon, but as with the homeless shelter, it was a means to an end. She had heard about refugees being helped at the support centre and knew it was her only chance to have direct contact with people who had experienced the brutality of APEX's military wing. She befriended women and children who had seen what the company's weapons had done to their friends and families, been told tales of contaminated water and plagues wiping out crops and livestock. It hadn't provided any evidence, but it had put a fire in her belly, given her memories she could draw on if she ever felt like giving up.
With little to do before the next NA session, she decided to return to Shadwell. The posters for the clinical trial had stopped appearing on the tube, so either they had slashed their advertising budget, or hit their quota of potential subjects.
Sarah wasn't surprised when she followed the route to the business park and discovered that the unit previously taken up by the testing facility was vacant. The gleaming new signage gone, through the window it looked like no one had ever been there, and a 'for rent' sign sat in the window. She was amazed that they had literally dragged an MRI machine into a building for a day or two of appointments, but reasoned that when money was no object, why would a thing like that even matter.
Arriving late to NA after her deviation on the DLR, she walked in just in time to hear the culmination of one of Charlotte's awful stories about her dalliances in prostitution. This was a new one to Sarah, but they all had the same swift descent.
“So this new pimp drove me to the man's hotel, he was Eastern European or Middle Eastern or somthin'. Nice and all, but then he started gettin' rough, wouldn't let me go, an' I slap him, so he hits me back and keeps hittin' me, fucks me bareback even though he knows that ain't what I do, an then 'fore I know it, he ain't payin' and kicks me out! My man's waitin' in the car an' I get in, he don't care that I covered in blood an' shit, he rags on me for not havin' the cash, then goes back at the hotel, an' gets kicked out by security. He was real mad, made me do two jobs for free t'make it up t'him.”
The story didn't seem to have a point other than to let Charlotte remind herself that she's better off sober, and to perhaps discourage the others from entering prostitution.
Sarah hated the stories because Charlotte had got clean so many times only to fall back down the rabbit hole. It felt like watching a cautionary tale on repeat, and she knew that deep down she had the same weakness, a trigger somewhere inside that might get pulled at any moment and put her back on the psychedelic party train. The mission gave her focus, but she feared it might not be enough. She sat through the rest of the session, saying nothing, despite Bobby's glances of encouragement. There was nothing to say. Even after the session, she couldn't find words to tell him what she was going to do.
“What's goin' on, kid?” he asked.
“I...” Sarah tried to think of a lie, but it wasn't coming. “You know how you said I should get a job?” she said, stalling.
“Yeah, how's that goin'?”
“Really well.” she said. “I think I got one. But it's up in Scotland and starts in a week and a bit.”
“Yeah? That's great! What kinda work y'be doing?” he asked, leading her into another quandary.
She thought about the actual 'job' and her mission. Neither could be discussed, but she intended to take a lot of books with her, and that could form the basis of a mostly-truthful lie.
“Research, I guess you'd call it? I don't really know too much about it yet, still waiting on all the information.”
“Research sounds good. You been sayin' you wanted t'do some readin', right?”
“Yeah, it's pretty perfect, hopefully. Change of scenery will be nice, maybe.” Sarah stifled a smile at her own comment, knowing that the scenery would most likely be the concrete walls of a medical facility somewhere in the middle of a dull, grey industrial estate.
She continued to throw vague details at him, trying to pepper lies with truth so she'd have some chance of remembering them should he ask for more information in future. Three more sessions until she left. Three more times she'd have to lie to her sponsor's face. She didn't like having to do it, but after what happened to her parents and their colleague, didn't want to involve anyone else.
The rest of the two weeks before her departure were spent packing and repacking her case. The single change of clothes for her return was mostly acting as ballast for a grand stack of books, the selection of which she couldn't decide upon. In the end, she opted for a good mix of political philosophy and existentialism. Mill, Marx, Locke, Hume, Sartre, Berlin, Nietzsche, Kafka and Rousseau. The books had felt intimidating in the past, but now she believed she could turn their thick hardback covers without anxiety. On top of those lay lighter reading, in the form of classics she knew she should have read by now. Dickens, Bronte, Hemingway, some of the shorter Tolstoys, Twain, Cervantes, Swift, Carroll, Stevenson, and a giant tome of the complete works of Wilde. The sides of the case were buffered with more recent fiction, and finally a copy of Dianetics and The Book Of Morm
on, which Sarah figured might both be good for a laugh.
The train to Perth, which Sarah learned was adjacent to Dundee, was just shy of seven hours with a change at Haymarket. Whilst she waited impatiently to board, Sarah decided to check out the actual cost of the ticket and was blown away when the National Rail app told her it was £175. Glad she wasn't paying for it, Sarah wondered if there wasn't a plane to Scotland that was significantly cheaper. The paranoid whispers returned, reminding her that a plane would have a manifest or list of passengers, a ticket that would have to be in her name, she'd have to show identification. There would be a record of her journey, should she not return, whilst a train required none of that. As the doors finally opened for her, and the scant few other passengers to board, she hushed the paranoia and took a seat. It would be four and a half hours until she had to change, and she decided to spend the time getting stuck in to one of the many heavy books she was now regretting taking.
Despite her case having wheels, it was still an uncomfortable weight to pull, let alone drag up the stairs at Euston. Sitting in her reserved seat, Sarah dug deep into the bag, picking a hardback at random, letting fate decide her literary companion for the journey. Destiny chose John Stuart Mill, and as she leafed through the pages whilst the train rolled out of London, the rhetoric and occasional famous quote was already weighing heavily on her eyelids.
She awoke almost two hours later to green rolling hills passing by. Not wanting to waste her journey or pull out of her promise to herself, she looked in the bag and found the copy of William Gibson's Neuromancer that Bobby had given to her at the last NA meeting, hoping it wouldn't have the same narcoleptic effect as On Liberty. It came with his staunch recommendation, and although she wasn't convinced that she was the target audience for a lauded work of science fiction, Bobby's description caught her attention.
“It's about this guy who lives outside the system, right? Had everythin' taken from him, who he was, or who he thought it was. An' then he gets the chance to get it back, by doin' this sort-of heist, goin' to a space station or somethin' and getting this data that'll change the world.”
It sounded like the perfect subject matter to be reading whilst preparing herself for the mammoth task ahead of her, scamming the DemonCorp to let her walk straight in through their doors and come out with their most precious and implicating of information.
Sarah was already half-way through it when the train pulled in to Haymarket. Having twenty minutes before the train to Perth, she decided to waste time exploring the station and grab herself a coffee. Walking out onto the concourse, she was surrounded by a hundred dialects of Scottish that she instantly fell in love with. Each had their own nuance, and Sarah had no idea which part of the country they originated from, but they could at least be determined as 'of Scotland', whereas in London she could rarely tell where anyone hailed from.
The next train took her an hour across Scotland, the accents following her through the country. She smiled at their idioms and occasional incomprehensibilities, whilst keeping her nose deep in the book. As they pulled into the station, she discovered that the coffee was mostly still full, and despite it being luke warm, took it with her to the meeting point. A giant bald man in a suit was waiting with her name on a sign, standing in front of a matte black Bentley. She smiled politely as she approached him, he was standing steadfast in a tailored suit that accentuated the curves of his over-worked musculature. He looked like a wrestler who had chosen the unintimidating moniker of 'The Chauffeur'. As he drove her out of the station, she wondered what his walk-on music might be. Gary Neuman's Cars was probably a little too new-wave or synthy to be a tune for a wrestler. Perhaps, she mused, there was a dubstep remix of Iggy Pop's The Passenger that could suffice.
The Chauffeur didn't say anything as they left the city, winding through the countryside towards their destination – wherever that might be – and Sarah didn't feel the need to initiate conversation with the hulking giant. After forty minutes of yet more reading, which Sarah was proud of herself for, they pulled up to an entrance surrounded by a tall metal fence. Giant metal gates were dragged open by black-clad guards and the driver continued onwards past a series of cylindrical buildings that looked like oversized tin cans half-buried on their sides. It wasn't anything like Sarah imagined a clinical or medical facility might look like, it seemed almost military. She checked APEXMaps, and discovered that their location was Cultybraggan, a former POW camp that was occupied by the military until 2004, at which point it was abandoned and went up for sale. She continued to scan through the Wikipedia article and went through photos of the place as they pulled up to a hill that seemed innocuous enough, if it wasn't for the six other matte black Bentleys outside. They parked up in line with the other cars, and the illusion of the hill being just a hill was truly broken. The centre carved out, stone walls on either side, a halogen-lit tunnel at the centre leading to a large door going directly into the hillside. Sarah reached for the door handle and discovered that she was locked in.
“S'not time yet, Miss.” said the Giant from his seat at the front. He didn't bother explaining further, and Sarah didn't imagine he'd answer any questions she might have.
She opened her book and tried to read, but the words weren't sticking in her head, anxiety and paranoia nagging at her that she had made a huge mistake.
Ten minutes passed – feeling like ten hours – and finally a seventh car pulled up in line with the rest of them. With a ubiquitous click, all the doors unlocked, and one by one the passengers emerged and looked around their surroundings.
“May I have your attention?”
They all turned to see Whark making her way out of the tunnel, silhouetted by halogen glow until she emerged into the remnants of daylight. “We're so very glad to have you here” she said, her lips in an upward lilt, but eyes betraying her lack of emotion. “If you'll follow me through, we'll get you settled in.”
She began to walk back down the tunnel, whilst Sarah and her six fellow subjects grabbed their cases and bags, attempting to keep up with the swift strut of the woman ahead of them.
The long, dark hallway was illuminated by more halogen, with a gleaming red LED beaming from every corner and doorway at the base of a camera. Sarah tried to build a mental map of their placements along the corridor, but there were so many, she wondered if she'd ever be able to keep track of them.
'Then again', she thought, 'There are so many of them, maybe they're duds, or perhaps monitored by a sleepy fat guard like in the movies, rather than an A-Eye system that never took breaks, never slept or ate or had one (or both) eyes on a football match...'
They turned a corner to a door with a gleaming silver APEXecurity pad built in to the handle. Whark placed her hand at the pad and it recognised her instantly, unlocking. She held the door open for the subjects. Inside was a recreation room, bare concrete walls offset by a matte black vinyl floor. A giant television at the centre flanked on either side by shelves of game consoles from the last two decades, beneath them was physical media for the older consoles, whilst the newer ones were plugged in to external hard drives. VHS, DVD and DVR boxes sat below, underneath them were cabinets full of tapes and discs, more than enough media to keep them occupied for three months. Around the room were foosball, pool and ping pong tables, and couches with matching coffee tables lined the walls, interspersed with cabinets of art supplies, CDs, records and books. Sarah felt a little foolish for taking so many books, assuming many of the classics she was weighed down with were probably lining the shelves. Sitting on the pool table were seven piles of papers, which Whark instructed them to read and sign, additional terms and conditions and NDAs that needed to be addressed before they could continue. As Sarah leafed through them she wondered what would happen if she didn't sign, the legal wording was making her lids heavier than reading Mill on the train.
'Would they send me back? Would they pay for my travel, drive me to the station, or would I be made to make my own way?'
It wasn
't an option. She had come too far, but she let her mind wander as the overcomplicated language washed straight over her head. She glanced at the others and watched as a tall, scrawny blonde man leafed through the pages, signing and initialling without reading. She envied how cavalier he was about it, but one by one their other companions followed suit, more concerned with getting inducted than being cautious. Sarah realised she was way behind the others, still reading rather than signing, and gave in, signing everything rather than dredging through the purposefully archaic and elongated linguistic choices of the A-Pharma lawyers. Whark collected the papers and held them under her arm as she took the group on a tour of the facility. Showing them the mess hall where they'd have all their meals, a long, thin room with twelve metal tables lined up in a grid, as if prepared to feed an army. Next she took them to the door to the testing area which was off-limits without an escort, and finally the living quarters. Contrary to the name, the room did not look suitable for the living. Metal bunks lined one wall, hues of gleaming aluminium surrounded by yet more concrete. The floors were shiny, smooth, warm to the touch, but the whole room gave Sarah the impression that whoever decorated it had a sideline in furnishing morgues. Sterile looking shower cubicles lay beyond the bunks, lined with octagonal tiles of the same personality-devoid grey as the walls.
“Dinner will be in half an hour. Unpack your belongings, relax and enjoy your night. I'll see you in the morning.”
She walked off with a smile that wasn't a smile, leaving Sarah to wonder where she would be having dinner, assuming she was living on-site.
The others had packed a lot less than Sarah, and the tall blonde man, who introduced himself as Micah, ribbed her for her massive collection of books which would have all fit on a Kindle with room to spare. She smiled and gave him a generic response about liking the texture and smell of musty old paper rather than a little book-robot, but felt a little dumb for not having thought of it. Micah's luggage consisted of laptops and tablets, all self-built, which Sarah found impressive for a guy just a few years older than herself. She assumed that, like the guy who made her laptop, those who could custom build and 3D-print computer parts lived in some far corner of the internet, rather than being real people that were thin enough to fit through the door to leave their house. He told her his plan was to spend the next three months taking apart an APEX operating system on what he called an 'air gapped' laptop, and see just how much data they were still gleaming from their users. He had been a part of Anonymous since he was eleven, and she didn't really have a response to that, other than a polite smile and expression of “Wow, pretty young.”.