Some newly awoken memory tells me this stands for System Robot. From it comes the sound of synthesised speech: ‘Apologies for waking you so suddenly, Crewman Iota, but we need you reactivated for an immediate mission.’
I rub my eyes and as I do I notice marks in my arms that look like scars left by recently removed intravenous drips and equally recent injections by hypodermic needles. Wherever I am, they’ve made sure I’ve taken my meds. ‘Why do you call me Iota?’ I ask. ‘Who are you? Why am I here?’
‘We call you Iota because that is your designation. You know who we are. We are the Agency. You volunteered to work for us. You are one of the crew. You are being reactivated.’
‘Being reactivated?’ I ask. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Reactivation follows a sustained period of deactivation and storage in suspended animation. It is to be expected you will initially be confused. It always takes time to recover. That is why you have been woken now so you will have at least 48 hours to recover before your mission commences.’
Strangely, this information does not distress me. Instead, somewhere deep in my mind, another memory cog falls into place. I recall an operational ratio. A ratio of one hour of recovery time for every, for every 10 years of suspended animation . . .
As my brain starts to clear, more questions begin to formulate. ‘What is my mission? Why have you reactivated me now?’
‘You have been reactivated now in readiness for your mission in the future,’ says sybot#29. ‘When you are ready, you will be briefed on your mission.’
Impasse. I try a different tack although I realise trying to argue logic with a computer, when my brain is still befuddled, will be an uphill battle. ‘Why have I been reactivated? Why not another member of the crew?’
‘Because you are the only appropriately-trained crew member remaining,’ says sybot#29.
This is not the reply I was expecting. I look around the ward again. There are 12 pods. I take a guess that means a total complement of 12 crew. If the remaining two closed pods are also occupied, then that means nine members of the crew are unaccounted for. ‘Where are the other members of the crew?’ I ask.
‘When you volunteered, you were told there was only a 50 percent chance of success. The crewing ratios allow for this redundancy,’ comes the reply.
‘If the success rate is 50 percent, how come 75 percent of the crew appear to be missing?’
‘We told you there was a 50 percent chance of success. We did not say this figure was accurate.’
Another impasse. ‘What is the accurate figure for the success rate? No, stop. Let me rephrase that question. What is the expected attrition rate for members of this crew?’
‘Between 60 percent and 100 percent of the total crew, male and female.’
‘What happened to the missing members of the crew?’ I ask.
‘That information is only available on a need-to-know basis and you do not need to know the full details of how and why they died.’
‘Give me the executive summary for mortality causality.’
sybot#29 pauses and then replies. ‘Designatees Beta, Gamma, Epsilon, Zeta, Theta and Lambda, the human males you called Nick, Mikey, Little Dave, Mark, Jez and Welsh Dave, died during the course of their missions. Designatees Mu, the human male you called The Count, and Kappa, the human female you called Jody, died as a result of previously undiagnosed medical conditions while still deactivated. Designatee Eta, the human female you called Kat, died as a result of life support unit malfunction.’
To my surprise sybot#29 remains hovering next to me. At the risk of anthropomorphising a machine, my guess is it’s feeling awkward and still has something it wants to tell to me. ‘Go on,’ I prompt. ‘Out with it.’
‘Because of the unanticipated wastage, you must select one of the two other remaining crew members for immediate reactivation to assist you on your mission.’
‘Can’t I pick both?’ I ask.
‘No,’ sybot#29 replies. ‘The mission module can only accommodate two members of crew.’
‘What happens if we do not return from our mission?’
‘Then the Project will be terminated immediately.’
‘And the remaining members of the crew? Would they be reactivated or terminated?’ I ask.
sybot#29 opts to not answer this question, confirming my suspicion that nothing will survive the mission termination sequence. Instead, sybot#29 explains who the remaining crew members are. They are Delta and Alpha. Two more cogs shift into place in my brain. ‘Uh, oh,’ I think to myself, ‘this means just Diane and Kerri are still left alive.’
Echoing my thoughts, the sybot#29 speaks again ‘Designatee Delta, the human female you call Diane, is the member of the crew with whom you engaged in recreational sex on a regular basis during the pre-deactivation phase. Designatee Alpha, the human female you call Kerri, is the member of the crew with whom you had commenced recreational sex on an irregular basis during the last week of the pre-deactivation phase.’
‘Thank you for reminding me,’ I reply, even though I know sarcasm is wasted on a machine.
Decisions. The fate of the entire project depends on the success of my mission. To help me do it, I must pick a partner from a choice of two candidates. There’s a good chance I’m going to condemn both of them to death. And both are women who have been my lovers - although that was now over 400 years ago.
I need a clear head before I can make this decision. ‘SYBOT#29,’ I call out. ‘I need coffee.’
‘Immediately, Crewman Iota,’ comes the reply. ‘According to our records, that would be a mocha, with an additional shot of espresso, but strictly no extra cream. We still have the recipe. We still have your personal coffee mug.’
AGENCY-PROJECT-SYBOT#29-SIMULATION-ENTERING-FINAL-PHASE-
By the Steps of Villefranche Station
THEN ONE DAY people suddenly started dying. Naturally there were rumours and plenty of explanations in the air. It was a biological or chemical attack by terrorists. It was some kind of a bio or genetic engineering experiment that had mutated and gone bad. There were suggestions it was the prelude to an alien invasion. There were even claims it was the start of the Biblical apocalypse and that at any moment we would hear the Last Trump sound.
But it soon became apparent the deaths were far too widespread, randomly distributed and mundane to be attributable to any of these causes.
Sure, we were dying in New York, London, Paris, LA, Berlin, Moscow, Delhi, Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Sydney. But people were also dying in the African rainforest, up the Amazon basin, on remote islands in the South Pacific and on the frozen tundra of Siberia. There were Aborigines dying in Australia. There were Arabs dying in the Gulf states. The Sami were dying in the Arctic north of Lapland. And the Inuit were dying across Alaska, Canada and Greenland.
Then the autopsy results started coming in. People were just dying of natural causes. It was a global pandemic alright, but a pandemic of plain-vanilla mortality. As if nature, or something, had called time on the entire human race. Well, almost the entire human race.
I kept in touch with as many of my contacts as I could and for as long as I could by phone, email, online networking sites, blogs and just about every other communications channel at my disposal. But, after a while, it became depressing.
All the people I knew either disappeared - died, I guess - or else were leaving increasingly desperate messages begging their friends, families and loved ones to get in touch to say they were OK and still alive. Then the power grids started failing and the internet and phone links began to shut down.
Once communications had gone, so did the population. An exodus began as people started to move, either away from places that now only held bad memories or else back to places where they had once known happiness.
I weighed up my options. I could stay in the grey cold and wet of an English spring waiting for death, or I could head for the sun.
I drove down to the Channel ports in Kent and blagge
d my way aboard a yacht heading for France. From Boulogne it was a case of moving on from one abandoned vehicle to another as each car’s fuel ran out.
Heading further and further down through France I eventually hit Provence, then along the Route Nationale N98 and the abandoned resorts of the Côte D’Azur. Just past Nice I cut out onto the Basse Corniche and into Villefranche-sur-Mer. It was a town I knew from a long, long time ago. A place with some good memories, where I’d once been happy.
I drove through the winding streets of the old town, past Jean Cocteau’s old chapel and onto the Promenade des Mariniéres, a wharf that runs from out of the harbour and along the beach-front.
After miles of driving along almost deserted roads, it was good to see there were still people about. Alive and moving people, rather than lying stiff and mouldering on the tarmac people. Although, looking more closely, many of them were clearly drifters and refugees like me.
In the old days the promenade had been lined with small cafés and bars serving American tourists off the visiting cruise ships and European sun-worshippers straight off the beach. A popular café, La Civette, was still open for business, so I drew up nearby and walked in.
‘What does a guy have to do around here to get a drink? I asked, in my best fractured French.
‘That question,’ replied a waitress, whose command of English put my schoolboy-French to shame, ‘is best answered with another question: what do you have to buy a drink with?’
Good question. What do you use for currency in a post-apocalypse world?
There was no shortage of cash available. On my way through France I had driven through towns where high denomination Euro notes were blowing in the wind. But with no banks open to honour them, they were just pieces of useless paper. Gold is another favourite option in fiction, but in the real world you can’t eat gold coins. And for the time being at least, there was also no shortage of petroleum, even if you did have to syphon it from abandoned vehicles.
I turned to the waitress, her name was Monique, and played what I hoped was my ace. ‘I have morphine,’ I replied. No mystery, I ransacked every abandoned pharmacy I encountered on my drive through England.
‘How much?’ I heard a man’s voice ask.
‘Probably enough to kill off everyone still left alive on the Riviera,’ I answered.
‘That’s good enough for me,’ said the man, ‘I vote we grant him life membership of the Club Civette.’
‘Life membership!’ I said.
‘Mai, oui,’ said Monique. ‘It’s a risk we all must share. It could be a very bad deal for you. Or, a good deal for you and a very bad deal for us. It all depends on how long you manage to survive.’
‘Let me do some introductions,’ said the man who’d spoken earlier. ‘I’m Edouard and I represent what’s left of the medical profession here in the Villefranche area. The grumpy-looking old guy leaning against the bar is Philippe. He is one of our few remaining gendarmes. You have already met Monique and ah, here she is bringing you a bottle of our finest Provencal rosé. Over there is Olivier, le patron of this excellent establishment. And, working with him in the kitchen are Solange and Brigitte. And you are?’
‘My name is Alexis Byter - call me Lex. I’m an English journalist, but not working at the moment, what with there being no newspapers published or any audiences left to read them.’
And so my new life began.
I spent that first night sleeping in the back of the car. The next morning over petit déjeuner (ah, the French, there was still a baker working in the town) I asked Philippe what the deal was with regards finding somewhere to stay.
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Plenty of empty properties around here,’ he said. ‘Just find one that suits you and move in. That is if the previous occupants have checked out and aren’t decomposing on the bedroom floor. All I ask is you don’t trash the place. You might even try over there,’ he said, pointing in the direction of Cap Ferrat. ‘That is if you don’t mind rattling around a large empty villa.
‘Their owners won’t mind?’ I asked.
‘Their owners are either dead or stranded on the other side of the world. Mind you, the security on some of those places is so profonde that you’ll never find a way in. But,’ he paused, ‘please stay away from the Villa Nellcote.’
‘What, the old Keith Richards’ place where the Rolling Stones recorded Exile on Main Street. Why?’
‘Because Tina Turner, her family and some of her entourage have moved in there,’ replied Philippe. ‘She has a villa built up in the hills near to the Mount Gros Observatory, but after the start of La Peste - the Plague - she moved down here to be closer to what’s left of civilisation.’
‘She even comes in here sometimes,’ chimed in Monique, as she came over to pour us more coffee.
That afternoon I set off to explore the surrounding area and eventually found myself outside the walls of Villa La Leopolda - the Cap Ferrat home of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. I buzzed the entry phone to see if anyone was home, but there were no signs of life. Looking up, I saw there was an array of solar-panels on the roofs, so I guessed there might still be enough power to keep the place locked down and intruder-proof.
On a whim I typed the code 640K into the entry-pad by a side gate and was rewarded by the sound of the tumblers and bolt of a lock clicking open. I was into the grounds.
I’d once interviewed Bill Gates for the day-job years ago and he’d joked that, unlike the English queen who said she’d have the word ‘Calais’ engraved on her heart (Bill meant ‘Bloody’ Mary Tudor), he’d have the word ‘640K’ on his heart after once remarking that he thought ‘640K of RAM should be enough memory for anyone’ in a personal computer. Thank you Bill.
A quick reconnoitre revealed the villa was deserted and apparently human remains-free, so I cracked open a kitchen window and let myself into the main house. From the pulled down shutters, empty cupboards and profusion of dust-sheet-covered furniture, it looked like the villa had been closed down for the winter and was unoccupied or else rapidly abandoned by any care-taking staff when the deaths had started.
As for Bill and Melinda Gates? I guessed they were now stranded in Seattle, hopefully still alive and pondering the irony of their situation. They had one of the biggest charitable trust funds on the planet at their disposal, all dedicated to easing sickness, suffering and disease in a world where sickness, suffering and disease had ceased to be of any concern. People no longer became sick. One day they were healthy, the next day they were dead.
I found myself a few rooms to camp out in. And I also found that while most of the technology in the villa was dead, there was a trickle of electricity coming from the solar-panels to power not only the security systems but a couple of wall-sockets in the house. Enough juice to keep a table lamp running for a few hours in the evening and enough power to keep my mobile phone battery fully charged.
I said most of the technology in the house was dead. That’s not quite correct. Among the various art treasures and curios Bill Gates had collected and now kept at the villa was a gold-plated Royal Quiet DeLuxe portable typewriter. Gold typewriter . . . that rang a bell somewhere in my memory. Ian Fleming, the James Bond creator, had commissioned one of those to be made for himself, to celebrate the success of his novel Goldfinger. And it had later sold at auction in 1995 for $90,000 to an anonymous American bidder. An anonymous American bidder acting on behalf of Bill Gates, it would seem. I found myself a sheaf of paper, rolled a sheet onto the platen and began to type: ‘By the steps of the Villefranche station . . .’
A few days later I turned up at the La Civette on Monday around noon only to find there was an unusually downbeat atmosphere in the café. Pretty much everyone - Olivier, the three girls and most of the customers - were watching the blaze from a bonfire over on the far side of the bay. It looked to be over by the yacht marina just off the Chemin du Lazaret.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked Monique before kicking myself for my insensitivity. There were
tears streaming down her face.
She smiled at my discomfort and shook her head. You were not to know, it happens every Monday. Les pompiers, the fire brigade, and the police supervise the cremation of all the bodies that have been found in the previous week.’
‘Philippe is over there now, it’s one of his few remaining civic duties,’ said Edouard, who was sitting at the back of the café. ‘Although the mass fatalities seem to have halted,’ he added, ‘possibly because most of humanity is already dead, each week there is still a steady stream of new bodies to burn, plus a few older corpses that may have been overlooked.’
‘Yes,’ said Monique, ‘and each week there are more of our friends and loved ones on that pyre. And each week those flames remind us that it will soon be our turn to feel their heat.’
‘Three months,’ said another voice. We all turned to look; it was Olivier who had spoken.
‘There was a woman I knew, a woman I met in Nice,’ he continued. ‘I’d gone there on business and had called in to see an elderly aunt who lived in an apartment block just off the Place Masséna and this woman lived next door. You know,’ he said looking in my direction, ‘the big square at the bottom of the Avenue Jean Médecin.’ I nodded. I knew that area of old.
‘This woman,’ said Olivier, ‘was way out of my league. She was stunningly beautiful, in a glossy-magazine kind of way. And she looked as if she had some cosmetic enhancements. I recognised her and she recognised me. I didn’t know or care what name she called herself now, but I knew her from school days when she had been plain Françoise-Hélène.
‘We got talking, she invited me into her flat and we agreed to meet the following week. We talked, we went out for a meal, we went back to her flat and then we went to bed and made love until the following morning. Each week we would meet, it was always on a Monday, and each week we would always spend the night together. I never asked her what she did and she never told me. But from her high maintenance surroundings I guessed she was either a very high-class call girl, or else some rich guy’s mistress.
The Hot Chick & Other Weird Tales Page 11