The Circus of Machinations

by Chris Ward

  Kurou switched off the radio and leaned back, nodding thoughtfully. How interesting. A new form of warfare was being ushered in, it seemed. A war of information. If you couldn’t trust what you heard, how could you wage a war? It had become foot soldiers and trenches all over again. When you couldn’t trust a simple radio, how could you believe anything you read on the internet? How could you believe a phone call was from your superior when voice manipulation software was so powerful?

  In peace times, of course, it didn’t matter. But in times of war, the armies of hackers were more important than the men with guns.

  For the first time in years, Kurou felt a stirring of his old desires, as if he had woken up from a long hibernation. Perhaps it was just the euphoria of the antibiotics fighting off the infection in his knife wound, but he felt the urge to find a way back online and create some chaos. He could hack with the best of them, and had once found great joy in manipulating the cyber world from his own computer screen.

  Perhaps it was safe now. Perhaps that man who had hunted him was dead, or had found a more exciting target to hunt.

  It paid to be cautious. There were programs that could track user activity and hunt out old habits and familiar patterns with more accuracy than people might once have thought possible. Everything from the kind of sites he used, to the frequency, to the times of day and length of time he spent online. Everything he did would be lined up against an immense database of statistics, and he would leave a footprint, however faint, however distorted. It was a risk, but one he felt ready to take.

  He contacted the surveillance robot.

  ‘Has he come back yet?’

  9

  Plans to escape

  Victor was about to leave for work the next morning when he was snapped out of a grogginess caused by a lack of sleep by his old dial phone ringing from the hallway.

  As he picked it up, he eyed the clock on the wall warily. More than five minutes and he risked being late.

  ‘Victor? Oh, thank God!’

  ‘Isabella? What’s the matter?’

  He wasted nearly a minute of his leeway listening to her sob into the phone. He was starting to wonder whether he should hang up and have her call him back when she suddenly blurted: ‘I’m worried about Father! He’s gone off with some of his friends to start a protest against the council!’

  Having met Isabella’s bullish, bullying father, it was the city council Victor was most worried about. The man was as dangerous and unstoppable as one of the huge dump trucks that loaded and shifted the mined rock between the towers and the pits to the north of Brevik, his forehead wide and jutting like a bulldozer blade. It was easy to see where Esel got his aggression; Victor could only assume Isabella got her emotion and her sister her coquettishness from their absent mother.

  ‘You have to come to me now, Victor,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure I can go through this alone.’

  ‘I have to work.’

  ‘No!’ A heavy knocking sound came from the other end of the line, like a phone being hit against wood. ‘This is one of those times where you have to put everything else aside to be with those you love! Please, Victor! I’m terrified!’

  Victor frowned. He wondered if he could get away with going in late. The factory’s management was unlikely to fire him because there was no one else in the town who could work with computers and electronics like he could.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m at home, you idiot.’

  ‘No, I meant where will you be while these protests are going on? Is it safe to stay in your house?’

  ‘Father said not to go outside, but I don’t know. Do you think I should? I mean, where is safe, Victor?’

  It was becoming obvious to Victor that Isabella was on the verge of losing her mind. The girl made little sense at the best of times, and her words were now descending into incoherence. It was possible she had been at some of the other pills he had seen in her father’s medicine drawer, antidepressants and painkillers that only wealth could procure. He had considered taking a few for the stranger but he couldn’t be sure whether they were safe or not. It wasn’t uncommon in days gone by for richer landowners to maintain a stash of quick-acting poison in the event that the secret police came knocking. Death by one’s own hand had long been preferable to death at a plethora of others.

  ‘Look, just stay where you are,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll be over there as quickly as I can. Don’t do anything, just lock yourself in your room until you hear me arrive.’

  ‘Okay. I love you, Victor.’

  Knowing she would instinctively notice a hesitation, Victor blurted, ‘I love you too,’ and then allowed himself a few moments of delayed reflection after he had put down the phone. He was never quite sure if he did love her or whether her bullheadedness had pushed him into thinking that he did, but if there really was a war heading their way, it wouldn’t matter much.

  He called the factory and told them he had been struck down with a sudden malady that required a visit to the doctor. The foreman he spoke to wasn’t best pleased, but there was nothing he could do. Victor promised to be there by lunchtime unless he was officially confirmed as on his deathbed.

  Before fulfilling his promise to Isabella, he headed out to the old café and delivered the needle and thread the stranger had asked for. He wanted to wait for the robot to come and take it, but a creeping guilt that he was breaking his promise to his girlfriend turned him away, so he headed off back into town while throwing occasional reluctant glances over his shoulder.

  Outside City Hall, a mob had appeared, many perhaps spurred on by the day’s temperature; at a degree or two below zero it was as warm as it had been since the first snow fell.

  There were a couple of television crews set up outside the doors, while a handful of policemen were making half-hearted attempts to keep order. Perhaps sensing an impending slaughter, a couple of crows had appeared out of nowhere and were perched on the ornate balconies of the building’s second floor windows.

  Victor hung back, not willing to be associated with such unrest, even though it was obvious that there would be little comeback on it. He sensed that everything he took for granted about law and order was about to be turned on its head.

  The main doors opened and the mayor stepped out, flanked by two huge bodyguards on either side. He started to talk, but the mob—which probably numbered fifty or so—started to shout and argue before he’d finished his first sentence. His words were immediately lost in the din, and as he got increasingly more frustrated he managed only to inadvertently create some excellent photograph poses for magazines and newspapers that might or might not still be publishing in a few days’ time.

  Then someone threw an egg.

  That it struck the mayor square between the eyes was only slightly more of a surprise than that someone had intentionally wasted a rare commodity. Indeed, the sudden flurry of commotion from the middle of the mob suggested several of the assembled people felt the same thing.

  It was enough for the mayor. He brushed the already-freezing gunge off his face and marched back inside, the doors slamming behind him as a flurry of rocks and lumps of ice　beat out a harsh rhythm on the heavy wood.

  As the police backed away against the doors, radios held to their ears as if to threaten calling reinforcements, Victor headed back into the quieter streets surrounding the town square, skirting back up to the north towards where Isabella lived.

  The door was flung open before he had even turned on to her path, and the insults that greeted him were softened only by the volume of her sobbing.

  ‘Father says we are to leave,’ she cried into his chest, pulling him inside and closing the door with one arm flapping gracelessly around behind his back. ‘On the train. Come with us, Victor.’

  Again, he felt that hesitation would betray his true feelings, but it was too late. The request was so unexpected that he was momentarily rendered speechless.

  ‘Isabella, I … I don’t know if—’
r />   ‘Do you love me or not?’

  ‘Of course, I love you!’

  ‘Then come!’

  ‘Isabella, this is a knee jerk reaction to a lot of hearsay. There’s no evidence—’

  ‘A destroyed munitions factory, a group of soldiers warning us of coming danger, the trains filling up with refugees … what more evidence do you want?’

  An enemy, was what he wanted to say, but he decided to give a noncommittal shrug instead.

  ‘You’re not taking this seriously, are you, Victor?’

  ‘I’ve just been busy.’

  ‘Not too busy for your silly machines, I doubt.’

  Victor was just opening his mouth to answer when a car pulled up outside and Isabella’s father came stomping up the path. Wrapped up in a huge fur coat he looked like a yeti come stalking out of the forest.

  When he pulled back his hood Victor saw a vicious, bloody bruise on the side of his right eye.

  Isabella screamed. ‘What happened, Father?’

  Robert Mortin ignored his daughter and looked straight at Victor. ‘We got in a fight with the guards.’ He turned back to Isabella. ‘Why is he here?’

  ‘He’s looking after me.’

  As if a switch had been tripped to turn off the conversation, Mortin stalked through into the kitchen, throwing his massive jacket over the back of a chair that rocked with the weight, and turned around to face them.

  ‘The northern highway has been road-blocked.’

  ‘What?’ Isabella shrieked, as if hearing her entire extended family had just been slaughtered.

  ‘Trucks returned last night. About eighty miles east there’s been no ploughing. The snow was over a metre deep.’

  ‘Can’t they drive through it?’

  ‘They tried. We lost four trucks.’

  ‘But we’re going west, right? That’s the safe way.’

  ‘Forty miles west they found it blocked with old military vehicles. Cowards trying to slow the flow of something they don’t want to catch them.’

  Isabella began to cry. Victor reached out to pat her shoulder but at a glare from Mortin he dropped his hand back to his side.

  ‘There’ll be one more train out. A snow-clearer kept in sidings here in the town. There are some carriages we’ll get fixed up to it, but it’ll be the last one.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Three days from now. That’s the earliest we can get it prepared.’

  Isabella gasped again. Mortin stared at his daughter, his eyes as motionless as if he was staring at a seam of rock.

  ‘What’s out there, Father?’

  Mortin sighed and shrugged. ‘I have no idea. But whatever it is, it’s coming our way.’

  Victor had been slowly plucking up the courage to speak. He lifted a tentative hand like a shy child offering to answer a question and said, ‘There’s no reason to believe they would attack us. The munitions factory was the only thing of value to the military in the town.’

  Mortin swung his huge head around. His eyes were like lasers, making Victor flinch. ‘Where do you think all our ore has been going for the last few months, boy? No one’s building roads in the west, they’re repairing the ones that have been destroyed.’ He turned back to Isabella. ‘Don’t keep idiots for friends, daughter.’

  ‘Victor isn’t an idiot!’

  ‘Why is he even still here? We have preparations to make. Where are your brother and sister?’

  ‘They went to school.’

  Mortin scoffed as if the idea was more ridiculous than the thought of evacuating the town under the threat of an unknown enemy.

  ‘If you say so. Start getting your things together.’ He turned towards the door and stalked out of the room, pausing in the doorway to look back at Victor. ‘You can leave now. Haven’t you got somewhere to be?’

  Victor did indeed have to get to the factory, so he bid farewell to a complaining Isabella and headed for the door. He was just pulling it open when her fingers closed over his arm, squeezing tight through his coat.

  ‘You will come with me, won’t you?’ she whispered. ‘You’ll come on the train with us?’

  He had other places to go and he needed to hurry. There was one answer that would pacify her, and in any case he had three days to think about it.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course I will.’

  ‘Oh, Victor! I love you!’ she screamed, pulling him close. Victor gave her a peck on the cheek just as her father’s voice boomed from the other room.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ he said.

  The quickest way to the factory was through the Lenin District. Victor pulled his jacket close and hurried through the freezing streets. He thought about Isabella’s request and Robert Mortin’s assertions.

  What to believe, that was the question. He had no doubt that Mortin was true to his word about the roadblocks and the last train, but Isabella was mistaken. There would be no place for the likes of Victor, or any of the other lowly underclasses. Those with wealth and contacts would leave, the rest would get gunned down by sentries if they tried to board. It was the way of wartime, the world over.

  The streets in the Lenin District were busier than usual. Roused from their slumber by the whispers of impending invasion, groups of hollow-cheeked wraiths stood around on street corners, eyeing everyone else with suspicion and more than a little contempt. Victor gave as many groups as he could a wide berth, but as he reached a junction with a larger street, four men moved out of the shadows of a doorway to intercept him.

  All four were taller than him, with the ghost of broad shoulders that had once worked mining machinery now slumped and emaciated. Their faces wore the chapping of too little heat, and the acne of too much narcotic.

  ‘Where you off to?’ one called to him. ‘You got a job or something?’

  Victor looked up before he could stop himself. He caught the eyes of the man, two sunken hollows containing a lifetime of failures. Victor looked quickly away again and ducked his head, but it was too late, the man was breaking out of the group to intercept him, moving across to cut Victor off in a way that he could only avoid by breaking into an open run. Even faced by the danger posed by the desperate, he found himself unable to break out of his social conditioning, to show unnecessary panic in public. Instead, he just quickened his pace, knowing that a confrontation was inevitable.

  ‘Hey!’ the man called. ‘Hey, you! I’m talking to you!’

  ‘I’m in a hurry,’ Victor muttered, but the man would not be denied. He reached the pavement in front of Victor and stopped there, leaving just a couple of metres between his shoulder and the snowdrift that was now the edge of the road. Victor didn’t fancy his chances of making a dart for it, and if he headed right out into the road he would meet the man’s friends, still idling in their loose group halfway across the street.

  He had no other choice. He stopped.

  ‘What do you want? I’m busy.’

  ‘What’s there to be busy about? Can’t you spare a little time to talk?’

  ‘Not right now,’ Victor said. Then, before he could stop himself, he blurted: ‘There’s an invasion coming. We have to get ready.’

  Victor wasn’t sure what reaction he had expected, but it wasn’t the sudden expulsion of laughter like a train breaking out of a tunnel in a puff of smoke. The man slapped his thigh with a hand that was skeletal, the skin chapped and blue. Victor had the urge to ask why he wasn’t wearing gloves.

  ‘An invasion, you say? You know nothing. The invasion started long ago. The enemy has been here for quite some time already.’

  There was little jollity in the man’s tone, and that set the prickles on the back of Victor’s neck rising. Delusional drug talk was to be expected, but something in the man’s tone told Victor he was deadly serious.

  ‘What do you mean, quite some time?’

  The man started to laugh again, cold and sinister. ‘You fools in your ivory towers. You’re expecting an enemy of flesh and bone you can cut up with your guns. You da
mn clowns. This is an enemy unlike any you have ever known. It walks among us at night, whispering to us in our sleep, feeding us its lies until on waking we remember them as truth. It stalks us, taking us out one by one, yet it is invisible and everywhere, unseen.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re mistaken—’

  The man reached out and gripped Victor’s wrist with a hand that was both icy hard and freezing cold. Victor tried to pull back but the old miner’s strength still remained.

  ‘I saw him,’ the man hissed into Victor’s ear, the stench of rotting teeth clawing its way around Victor’s face, making him cough. ‘I opened my eyes and he was there, I closed my eyes and he was gone. All he left behind was blood and death.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Where do you think?’

  Victor shrugged. The man was clearly crazy. ‘In your dreams?’

  The man’s cold, bony palm came up to slap Victor across the face. ‘Fool, you think I’m an idiot? What harm could he do there? I saw him in St Peter’s Place. At night. And I saw his marks in the body I found beneath the floorboards.’

  ‘What body?’

  The man shrugged. ‘I was hungry, I was desperate. I smelled something I thought might be food. It wasn’t … not for me, at any rate. I’d rather die.’

  Victor gave a slow nod and started to inch backwards. Perhaps if he could create enough of a gap between them he could make an attempt to escape. He was younger and healthier after all. All he’d need was a few metres head start.