by Andy Briggs
Dev felt his cheeks burn. All his life he had been sworn to secrecy about the existence of the Inventory. It was something that had been drummed into him before he had even been able to spell his name, and this was the first time he had ever come remotely close to somebody asking suspicious questions.
“Yeah … well … I can be surprising like that.” It was a lame reply, but he didn’t trust himself not to reveal anything incriminating.
After several minutes of idle chit-chat they reached the gates of the farm. Lot took in the small cottage and the couple of barns visible from the road. A few sheep milled around in a pen and bleated when they saw her.
“Nice place,” she said approvingly. “Do you have many animals?”
Dev opened the gate just enough to roll his bike through and closed it before Lot had a chance to follow him.
“Oh, a few,” he said. “Well, it was great talking to you. I’m glad you’re not too angry about … y’know.”
“You could always invite me in.” Lot beamed her infectious smile, highlighting the freckles on her cheeks. For a fleeting instant, Dev thought she would look at home as a rock singer, always on tour, always having fun … he tore his mind away from that.
“My uncle doesn’t like surprise visitors … maybe another time.”
Her smile dropped. She stared at him for a long moment and even managed to look hurt. “Oh, OK. No problem.” She turned her bike around and began cycling away. “See you tomorrow.”
Dev waved. “See you tomorrow.”
It wasn’t until he had stowed his bike in the barn that he realized tomorrow was Saturday.
The convoy of four trucks trundled through the night. Powerful headlights illuminated the dark road ahead and nothing more. It was as if they were driving into an abyss. Windscreen wipers whacked back and forth, batting away the deluge that fell from the heavens.
In the cab of the lead truck, Lee was sandwiched in between a huge driver and one of the thuggish mercenaries whose name he had already forgotten. The truck rocked from side to side along the bumpy minor roads that they were taking so as not to draw attention to themselves. Lee had a computer tablet on his knee and was swiping through pages of technical information while the thug read a comic, laughing loudly at regular intervals. Every time he laughed his body would shake, squashing Lee further.
“Do you mind?” said Lee impatiently. They had been driving for four hours and already he wanted to throw the mercenary from the moving vehicle. “I need to concentrate.”
The big man glanced at the tablet screen and grunted dismissively. “You waste your time with all of this old stuff.”
Lee sighed. “Old stuff? This is the history of Iron Fist. You have read up, right? You know its importance?” He tapped the screen. “Iron Fist was a top-secret project, the ultimate defence system. That’s what it was designed for. But at the core is this— ” He held up the screen but the mercenary wasn’t listening; his attention was back on his comic. Lee shook his head in despair. “Idiot,” he muttered under his breath. He turned back to the tablet – before becoming aware that the big man had heard him and was glaring in his direction.
“What kind of name is Lee, anyway?” the mercenary asked suddenly.
“A code name. Like yours … whatever it is. I forget.”
“It is Volta. He invented … stuff.”
Lee sighed. “The light bulb, for example.”
“Si. Yes. Useful things. And Lee?”
Lee smirked and shook his head. “I’ll let you figure that out,” he muttered. He was thankful that the operation was about to begin.
The veins on Charles Parker’s temples pulsed so hard, Dev could only stare and wait to see if his uncle’s head would explode.
“It was completely unscheduled.” Despite the anger on his face, Charles’s voice was low and even.
“It was only a party. And not a very good one at that.”
Dev glanced around the kitchen to see if there was an obvious reason his uncle was behaving so oddly. As usual, there was no lovingly cooked meal lying cold on the table or surprise pizza delivery – deliveries to the house were forbidden on pain of constant moaning. There was no apparent reason for the outburst.
Charles opened his mouth, but stopped whatever it was he was about to say. After an awkward pause, he simply muttered, “You can’t just wander off.” He pointed to Dev’s watch. “And I think that needs repairing.”
“Can I go now? I have homework to do.”
Charles nodded and dismissed him with a wave of the hand. Dev quickly left the room. That brief exchange had told him all he needed to know. Dev had disabled the tracking abilities he had discovered buried in his watch so that he could wander around the Inventory without raising suspicion. But it was now apparent that he was under constant surveillance no matter where he was. The prison might have no walls, but Dev couldn’t shake the feeling that he was a prisoner in his own life.
“Yellow Zone. Authorization verified,” purred Eema’s smooth female voice.
Dev removed his hand from the scanner and the massive titanium door in front of him rolled open with the faintest of pneumatic hisses. The lights in the hangar flicked to life in a wave, revealing numerous aisles of metal racks that stretched from floor to ceiling.
Dev smiled. “Thank you, Eema.” Despite her calm tones, he knew she was still angry with him for bypassing the security systems so he could play with the HoverBoots.
He just wasn’t sure if Eema was angry that he had corrupted the security, or that a kid had outsmarted the supercomputer.
With a sigh, Dev stepped through the portal. A vacuum cleaner was strapped to his back. He switched the tiny motor on and made a pretence of sucking up a few atoms of dust. There was no dust, of course. Each zone was hermetically sealed, with the air pumped in through a series of advanced filters to ensure no chemical poisons could infiltrate the Inventory. The entire storage facility had been designed not just to withstand a nuclear attack, but a direct meteor impact. The idea that a few motes of dust could be an issue was laughable.
One of Charles Parker’s few rules was that his nephew carry out a few housekeeping chores at the weekend, despite the fact the entire facility was automated and there were gadgets on the shelves that were so advanced, they could make housework a thing of the past. Charles Parker claimed it bred character, but all Dev thought it did was encourage boredom.
Today, however, it allowed him to do a little investigation.
Dev walked down the towering aisles, reaching the occasional junction that stretched away in a perfectly straight line or ended in another door leading to a further secure section. He knew the layout off by heart so didn’t rely on the coloured lines that ran along each aisle. Occasionally they would run in parallel, like a subway train map, before branching off to their own designated section. He was in the Yellow Zone right now. He suspected that there had once been a logical colour-coordinated method of storing the gadgets and gizmos, but his uncle has long since abandoned any obvious way of cataloguing them, as the rate of invention had been too much to keep up with.
Only the Red Zone was special. This housed what his uncle termed “discoveries” rather than inventions. Dev wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, other than that it was one of several zones he was never allowed access to.
Without thinking, Dev navigated to the shelf he had nearly cracked his head open on while riding the HoverBoots. Charles Parker had placed everything back with obsessive precision. Some items, such as the Higgs-Bos-Bomb, now lay behind a shimmering energy shield, to ensure curious hands couldn’t touch them again. Others sat behind plain mesh cages, while further items were loose on the shelves.
Dev quickly found one such item, packaged in a pale blue cardboard box that had faded over the years. The illustration showed a grinning kid reaching out, a shimmering apparition next to him mimicking his movement. The text PRISM-BUDDY was printed across it. From the design, Dev guessed it must have been made in the 1950s.
DROP INTO WATER TO CREATE YOUR OWN PRISM-BUDDY – AN EXACT WATERY REPLICA OF YOU. H2O-H WHAT FUN!
Dev held up his watch to a small QR code on the shelf. It connected wirelessly to the Inventory’s archive, and the relevant holographic documents floated over his watch’s screen. Not everything was properly catalogued in the Inventory. There were many items his uncle had puzzled over the use of for years – but not the Prism-Buddy, clearly. The small ads section of an old comic book immediately appeared on his screen, showing the Prism-Buddy along with magic kits, camouflage gear and anything else a growing kid might want to spend their cash on. Charles Parker had explained that a lot of revolutionary gadgets were sold in the backs of comic books before the authorities had a chance to clamp down and prohibit the items.
It had taken Dev a while to understand that a pair of X-ray specs was not just harmless fun. In the wrong hands they could be used to see into bank vaults, discover military or state secrets and turn the clumsiest person into an astute thief. The most innocent gadget could be used for terrible purposes in the wrong hands.
The Inventory had been created to ban such items and store them away until the world was ready to use them – which Dev assumed would be never.
He carefully placed the Prism-Buddy box back on the shelf and resumed pretending to clean. His thoughts drifted back to what Lot had told him about not responding to invites. What had she meant? Had his uncle hidden them from him? Why would he do that?
He was so lost in thought that he jumped in shock as a whooping alarm suddenly echoed through the hangar. It wasn’t the two-tone fire alarm though; it was something he had never heard before.
Dev’s watch vibrated, the screen indicating a call from his uncle. He tapped the screen to answer and a small hologram of his uncle’s head appeared.
“What’s the matter?”
Charles Parker’s voice sounded strained. “Devon, come up to the house immediately. We have a problem. Somebody has tripped the intruder alarm.”
Doors thundered closed behind Dev as he raced back through the aisles and out of the hangar. For years he had begged his uncle to activate the Vacuum-Pods that ran around the complex. These small spherical pods were designed to take people rapidly over huge distances to the furthest reaches of the building. Tunnels up to two miles long separated some of the hangars. Charles Parker had refused, saying they were a security hazard – although Dev suspected it was really to stop him snooping around. On a good day, his uncle had allowed him a Segway, but that had been confiscated when he’d used it to reach a far-flung storage unit and sneak an invisibility gun outside, where he’d zapped a few sheep. It had taken days to find them all.
Dev was out of breath when he reached the express elevator. In this one, the compartment was small, but some of the Inventory’s freight elevators were so big a lorry could be parked inside. On the other side of the complex, a hangar roof opened up to the size of a football stadium to allow even larger objects to be lowered in. Dev had watched in awe the time an advanced aircraft carrier had been lowered down and taken to a dry dock deep within the Blue Zone.
Several years ago, Dev had watched a fleet of World Consortium military helicopters lowering something else into the distant hangar. He had never discovered what it was exactly, but it was one of the few times that teams of research scientists had flocked to the Inventory. They had stayed on the farm for several weeks and for once Dev could recall a family atmosphere in his home. Some of the scientists had even played baseball with him. But they, like everybody else in his life, had upped and left one day without any warning.
The express elevator shot up the ten floors to ground level. The doors opened to a windowless room filled with screens mounted around a central command console. This command bunker was located in a barn opposite the farmhouse. Surveillance cameras combed every angle of the property above, and the Inventory’s corridors below. An array of sensors monitored every approach – they could even sense the heartbeat of the occasional jogger who ran down the country lane beside the house.
Charles Parker spun around in the control seat and glared disapprovingly. He stabbed a finger at the screen. “What is that?”
Dev followed the finger and replied on autopilot. “That is a girl.”
He did a double-take at the screen.
That was Lot, sitting on the farm gate.
“The female is identified as Devon’s girlfriend,” said Eema, almost smugly.
“She is not!” said Dev in a voice that was a little too high-pitched. He lowered it. “She is not my girlfriend.”
“She is a girl. She is your friend,” said Eema. “It doesn’t take Fermat’s last theorem to work out that puzzle.”
“What is she doing here?” Charles Parker asked, his gaze flicking back to the screen. “You know the rules. No visitors.”
Dev knew the rules all right. He’d argued that even prisoners had visitors, but his uncle had been unwavering. No visitors. No parties … and no friends.
“I didn’t invite her.”
“You brought her here yesterday,” Eema chimed in with increasing smugness.
“She followed me!”
“Shall I prime the laser defence system?” asked Eema.
“No!” shouted Dev. He was angry that both his uncle and an overgrown computer were blaming him for Lot’s appearance. And he was angry at Lot for just turning up. Well, a little bit angry but mostly curious.
“I’ll go and talk to her,” he said hastily as he saw her clamber over the gate.
Dev hurried from the barn and sprinted around the back of the farmhouse before Lot had a chance to reach the front door.
“Lot?” he said, trying to sound surprised.
She grinned at him. “Morning.”
He drew level with her, subtly positioning himself so that her attention was drawn away from the house and back towards the front gate.
“I didn’t expect to see you here.”
Lot looked surprised. “Really? I did say I’d see you tomorrow.”
“Ah, I assumed you’d gotten confused and thought it was a school day.”
Lot shook her head and began walking over to a barn. “Nah. I don’t get confused that easily.”
Dev quickly blocked her path. “You can’t go in there.”
“Why not?”
“It’s dangerous. The whole farm is … dangerous,” he said lamely.
“Dangerous? What’s in there?” She smirked and slipped past him before he could do anything to stop her.
Several sheep peered out of the barn from behind a gate. They bleated at her, then continued eating from a trough.
“Ooh, dangerous,” teased Lot. “I’ve never been on a farm before,” she added. “Can you believe that?”
“Look, my uncle really doesn’t like people—” Dev began, but Lot wasn’t listening. Her attention was back on the sheep.
“My dad’s a pilot for the air force. He let me go up with him a few times in his jet. That’s more what I’d call dangerous.”
“Wait, your dad took you up in a jet?” Dev couldn’t mask his jealousy. Lot nodded. “That sounds amazing.”
Lot was already walking towards the next barn. “First few times it is. But then you get used to it. Like I bet you’re used to the farm. What’s in this one? Killer chickens?”
Dev blocked her path. “There’s nothing in there. Please, my uncle isn’t the most fun person in the world. He’ll go bonkers.” He could imagine Charles Parker shouting angrily at the security screens. Secrecy was more important than fun or family, his uncle had made that abundantly clear. Dev had seen the effects of the array of memory-wiping devices stored under their feet, which his uncle had not hesitated to use on trespassers.
“I thought we could hang out.”
“Why would you want to do that?
”
“I felt bad for what happened at my party.”
“That wasn’t your fault.”
“And I thought you could show me how you did that magic trick.” Lot smiled at Dev’s confused expression; it was a smile that said gotcha. “You know, the impossible one you did at my party.”
Dev mentally kicked himself for being slow on the uptake. “Sorry. A magician never reveals his tricks.”
Lot shrugged, then abruptly stepped around him and ran into the barn.
Dev darted after her. “Hey! I said you couldn’t go in there!”
But he was too late; she was already inside. Shafts of sunlight speared through the barn’s broken roof slats, seeming to form a cage of light around the car-sized object covered by a tarpaulin. It was one of the latest additions to the Inventory. Dev and his uncle were going to categorize it later that afternoon. Teasing glimpses of dangling pipework hung below the reach of the canvas. An old crate had been upended and an open toolbox lay on top. It looked just like a car was being repaired – although Dev knew what lay under the sheet was anything but.
Lot slowly reached out her hand to pull the sheet back.
Dev gripped her wrist and sharply pulled her hand away. “Really, you can’t touch that.”
She shot him a puzzled look – but before she could protest, a clatter of collapsing wood made them both spin around.
Dev’s reactions kicked in and he pulled Lot aside as an old wooden hayloft above them crashed down, whipping up a cloud of mouldy straw. A heavy wooden spar slammed down next to Lot – a centimetre closer and it would have cracked her head open.
A figure rolled out of the hay, coughing and choking. Dev snatched a wrench from the toolbox and raised it threateningly as the figure stood, swaying slightly.
“Mason?” exclaimed Dev in astonishment. Dressed in a khaki jacket and black jeans, Mason was doubled over, spitting dust and straw from his mouth. He held up one hand to fend off the wrench. “You’re trespassing, which means I have every right to whack your brains out.”