by Andy Briggs
Dev had expected to receive the riot act from his uncle and Sergeant Wade the moment they landed. In Dev’s view, a failed mission was worse than demolishing a city block in order to successfully retrieve an Inventory artefact, but he was surprised that Charles only said something about chalking it up to experience.
Eema had escorted Mason away to the medical bay, where some experimental acoustic surgery would knit his bones together. Eema had warned him it would be a painful experience, but Mason laughed it off as a bad joke. Dev gave him a slow wave as he was taken away. He’d had his bones fused back together several times, and he knew the pain was almost unbearable. Still, he reasoned, no point in getting Mason more stressed than he was.
They sat on equipment boxes in the hangar, watching technicians comb the Avro for any further signs of damage, despite Dev’s insistence that they had, for once, been careful.
Wade was impressed as they retold the story. Everybody complimented Wan-Soo on his amazing skills in tackling the guard and Lot and Riya’s quick thinking in subduing the thief.
Dev tactfully tried to indicate that Aaron was a waste of space on the mission, but didn’t have time to push his point before the American placed the Helix shoulder patch on the table.
“I took this from one of our attackers.”
“Nice souvenir,” quipped Lot.
“Yeah, but a bit shabby for a uniform, isn’t it? It was held on by Velcro and was covering another logo underneath.”
“Did you see what the logo was?” Wade asked, exchanging a look with Charles.
Aaron shook his head. “But it feels like somebody was trying to pretend they were somebody they were not. A classic fraudster move, believe me.”
“You think they were after the thief?” asked Wade.
Dev nodded. “I think they would have killed him if they’d had the chance.”
The conversation pushed on to the thief and his patchy knowledge of the Inventory. Dev decided not to mention how familiar the German had looked. He couldn’t think how the man could possibly be connected to Liu’s memories, so he dismissed the thought.
“He said he bought the gadgets on the dark web,” said Dev slowly as he recalled the conversation. “He suspected they were stored in an underground hideout. How would he know that?”
“There are all kinds of conspiracy theorists out there,” Wade said thoughtfully.
Riya shrugged. “What’s a conspiracy theorist?”
Aaron spoke up. “They’re nutters who believe in, well, anything. From aliens crashing at Roswell to thinking the moon landings were faked.”
Riya blinked. “And did they? The aliens, I mean?”
Wade laughed. “Are you going to tell me you’re a conspiracy nut yourself? My point is there are lots of people out there who would easily believe a place like this is real. Have you ever heard of the Illuminati? A shadowy government that supposedly runs the world? Well this is the sort of place they would have.”
“Well, they’d be right, wouldn’t they? Isn’t that what the World Consortium does?” Riya’s earnest expression bored into Wade. “You told us it was a secret part of the United Nations.”
Lot spoke up. “Yeah, but that’s different. The Illuminati are supposed to be bad guys. We’re the good guys.”
Riya tilted her head. “Surely that depends on your point of view?” Everybody looked at her. “Street kids back home often are forced to steal food. Does that make them bad?”
“Well, no … but of course we’re the good guys!” exclaimed Lot. “Isn’t that obvious?”
Before Riya could press her point, Charles Parker stood and began pacing. “Enough! This thief was probably just at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Dev nodded in agreement. “I want to know what was so special about the piece of junk he stole.” He noticed Wade and Charles exchange a look from the corner of their eyes, before his uncle put on his best lecture voice.
“The Antikythera Mechanism is not a piece of junk. It was discovered in a shipwreck off the coast of Antikythera, in Greece. Even the divers who found it assumed it was nothing more than a lump of corroded bronze. It languished for two years in the museum before staff finally saw it for what it was.” Charles lapsed into thoughtful silence.
“Which is… ?” urged Dev.
“Which is a very intricate piece of machinery. A series of thirty meshing gears, all intricately made from bronze.”
Riya glanced at the others, who all seemed equally puzzled. “So?”
Charles gave a snort of incredulity. “The mechanism was dated to 205 BC. The rest of the world didn’t see anything close to such mechanical wonders until almost six hundred years later. It’s very existence hints at a technology that was lost in time.”
Aaron gave a low whistle. “Six hundred years? That’s quite a gap.”
Wan-Soo’s soft voice made them all turn to look at him. “Six hundred years ago we didn’t have cars, computers, airplanes, wristwatches, nylon, radio, Velcro, electricity, vaccines … or even understand Newtonian mechanics. Look how far we have come since then. Yet between this mechanism and the first clock … very little happened.”
Wade folded her arms and nodded. “Exactly. Could you imagine where we’ll be six hundred years from now? All of this stuff,” she gestured around the Inventory, “would it still be as amazing? Or would it be as antique as a fax machine?”
“The point is,” said Charles loudly to bring them back on topic, “he used a piece of our equipment to steal it. He could have stolen money or even the Mona Lisa, but instead he took the mechanism. Why?”
“Maybe he’s a collector?” Riya said. “It’d be easier to sell that than something everybody knows, like the Mona Lisa.”
Nobody had any answers, just more questions, so Charles Parker decided to call it a night. Until they identified the thief or his attackers, there was nothing more to be done.
Dev was relieved to step out into the cold night air of the farm. He took in the peaceful fields and the recently rebuilt barns. In moments like this it was easy to imagine that the sprawling underground labyrinth beneath his feet was nothing more than a figment of his imagination.
He glanced up. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and, as his eyes adjusted, he could see thousands of stars sprinkled across the heavens.
“Nice night, isn’t it?” said Lot, following his gaze.
A minibus was waiting to take the team to their respective homes, the driver stood impatiently at the door. The new members had been relocated with their families or guardians once they had been recruited. Their adults thought they had relocated to pursue their own careers; little did they know it was solely because of their children. A shooting star suddenly blazed across the sky, causing them both to say “Wow!” at the same time.
“That piece of rock was trailing through the universe for probably millions of years before burning up in the atmosphere just like that.” Lot snapped her fingers.
“Yeah. Amazing, isn’t it? I didn’t know you were into astronomy.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.” Lot tried to hide her smile and checked her phone.
Dev shifted nervously from one foot to another as an idea struck him. “Hey, next week there’s going to be an eclipse. But you can only really see it from the equator.” She grunted an acknowledgement, but her phone was obviously more fascinating. Dev pressed on. “Maybe we can take the Avro out to go and see it?”
Dev wasn’t sure Lot had heard him. He was about to repeat himself when she held up her phone. “Sorry, have to go. I’m … meeting somebody.”
Dev felt hollow as she ran for the minibus that would deposit them in the village. He became aware that Riya was standing next to him.
“Don’t beat yourself up,” she said.
“What do you mean? Lot? I don’t… I was just…” Dev was thankful it was dark so she couldn’t see his cheeks burn.
Riya glanced over as the bus driver impatiently honked his horn, still oblivious to
the display. “It’s amazing, isn’t it? Something so incredible can be right there … yet people never take the time to look carefully at what’s in front of them.”
They looked up again. The aurora had disappeared.
“And then it’s gone.” Riya started walking towards the bus then stopped. “Look, Devon—”
“Dev.”
“Uh-huh. Dev. I know Parker’s your uncle and all, but I have eyes. Just as I can see things with some people…” Her gaze darted to the bus. “I can also see that you and your uncle don’t quite hit it off.”
“Is it that obvious?” said Dev dryly. “I don’t know about your family, but mine is complicated at best.”
Riya studied him thoughtfully. “You’re not the only one without a family, Dev.” She jerked her thumb towards the town. “They even gave me one here.”
Dev’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “You have foster parents?”
Riya nodded, then smiled. “It’s good to know somebody else around here isn’t buying all the sales spin they put on this place. Asking questions is a good thing. And knowing who to trust is another.”
She tossed something towards him. Dev caught it on instinct. It was a small black leather wallet. Opening it up, he saw a German driver’s licence inside, with a familiar-looking face. He looked up at Riya in surprise.
“How… ?”
She wiggled her fingers. “We all have our secret skills, don’t we?” She winked at him. “I know I shouldn’t have lifted it, so I didn’t want to tell Parker. And I thought there might be some cash in there.”
Dev couldn’t stop himself from checking. There were still several hundred euros stuffed in there. Riya looked guilty.
“What can I say? Old habits die hard. Anyway, lucky for us, since we need to know who that guy was. I reckon you can level things with your uncle.”
She turned and ran for the bus. Dev stood silently in the yard, watching it pull away until the red tail lights vanished around a bend. Then he looked at the wallet in his hand and knew he wouldn’t be getting any sleep tonight.
Sergeant Wade and Charles Parker had both left the Inventory the moment the scavenger team had been debriefed. This meant that Dev pretty much had free reign around the complex, as nobody would dare stop to question his right to be there.
Anybody, that is, except Eema.
Over the years Dev had perfected various hacks and techniques that allowed him to bypass the security measures designed to stop him from snooping around. But Eema had wised up to his schemes, and Dev had noticed how restricted his movements had become within the Inventory. He would have to be especially careful if he was going to explore the hidden Black Zone.
Entering the control bunker, Dev studied the bank of security monitors. The twenty-four-hour staff rotation had switched to the night shift, so there were fewer people walking around the colossal hangars. Try as he might, he couldn’t spot Eema rolling around the complex. She was able to upload her artificial intelligence into the main computer systems, leaving the empty body – or husk – behind and enabling her to download herself into another husk. That meant he could never be sure where she was.
The corridors were long, circular affairs, connecting various storage rooms, sleeping quarters, the canteen and other rooms essential for the running of such a large organization. Then the massive storage areas were colour coded depending on what was being stored in them, with different-coloured lines on the floor designed to help people navigate quickly to each section. From the Green Zone, where, if they hadn’t been stolen, general gadgets were housed – from Hyper-Balls to Hover-Tanks – to the Blue Zone, the home of water-based inventions, through to the Red Zone, the restricted area that stored the deadliest technology ever created.
It was also in Red Zone that Dev had discovered the cloning lab and learned a hurtful truth. He hadn’t been born, he had been constructed. Built by design, courtesy of his uncle. Not only that, he was only one in a chain of inventions that had been created, each supposedly better than the last.
To discover that his whole life, in which he had pined for his missing parents, had been nothing more than an illusion had shaken Dev to the core. He didn’t feel like a teenager any more; he barely felt human, although his uncle had assured him he was.
Dwelling on these thoughts, Dev made it to the Blue Zone, passing only a handful of technicians huddled together discussing the reallocation of the shelving spaces.
He reached the same wall he had experienced the memory leak of a doorway and moved close to study it. He ran his hands over the cool concrete. There was no indication that a door had ever been here, and he began to doubt he was in the same place.
“Come on, Professor,” Dev thought in a voice that he hoped was shouting inside his skull. “Time to wake up and make me remember.”
He clipped the TelePath behind his ear, closed his eyes and tried to recall the vision he’d had days ago. He strained, scrunching his eyes in concentration – but nothing came.
“Show me!” he said out loud, his voice echoing between the mostly empty shelves. Nothing came to mind, and when he opened his eyes there was still just a blank wall before him.
He sighed deeply. Perhaps this was all a wild goose chase and the “memory” was nothing more than a digitally stored fantasy of an old man? Perhaps there was no Black Zone and the Collector had sent Dev along a path that he knew would drive Dev to distraction.
Dev opened his eyes, inhaled deeply and relaxed. He turned from the wall and, as he did so, a wave of dizziness swept over him. The shelves around him were suddenly filled with artefacts – from sleek one-person submersibles through to huge 175-metre-long stealth submarines balanced on enormous cradles in the dry dock.
“It’s a memory,” Dev reminded himself as he fought a bout of sickness. “It’s not real.”
But it looked real, although there were subtle differences. The shelves were not as packed as they had been just before the heist, and the paintwork looked brighter and fresher. He turned back around and, sure enough, there was a door in the wall right in front of him.
Dev’s heart hammered in his chest as he took a step closer. A RESTRICTED AREA sign above the door was held in place by shiny new screws, and a hand-scanner was fixed to the wall on one side. As Dev gently ran his fingers around the edge of the scanner, the image faded, and he was looking at nothing but a blank wall once again. The door, sign and scanner had vanished.
Or had they?
Dev looked around for any tools he could use, but found only a length of metal about half his height, a shelving offcut that had been placed to one side. It would do.
With a grunt, Dev smashed the pole against the wall where he had seen the scanner. Chips of concrete dropped to the floor as he repeatedly bludgeoned the wall, until his arms ached. He stopped to catch his breath – and saw it.
He had succeeded in chipping a dent in the wall some four centimetres in diameter and about two deep. Inside he could just make out a pair of wires. The scanner had been removed, but the wiring was in place. And if that hadn’t been removed, then perhaps the door and the mechanism to open it was still there, hidden just beneath the surface.
Dev slowly reached for the wires, priming his synaesthesia to explore what lay beyond—
A metallic rolling noise just on the edge of hearing got his attention. The unmistakable sound of Eema heading his way at speed. While he had done his best to mask his presence on the security cameras, Eema knew his tricks, so there was every chance she had either seen him snooping around the Blue Zone or had heard his act of vandalism.
Dev quickly sprinted away from the wall. He had just reached a small submarine, no bigger than a family car, when Eema rolled through the doorway and stopped in front of him. Her emoji head projected over her body, narrow eyes darting around suspiciously.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“Just out for a walk. Thinking about what happened in the Louvre.” Even though it was a mere animation, Eema’s
face had been designed to accurately reflect the artificial emotions she was experiencing – and there was no mistaking the frowning eyebrows that formed in an intense V-shape. She clearly didn’t believe him. “Why, is that a problem?”
“Your uncle doesn’t want you wandering around on your own. Especially when he’s not here.”
Eema’s head began to turn as she studied their surroundings. Dev had managed to cover a dozen metres from the wall, and shelving units restricted any direct view of the damage he’d caused, but still he didn’t want Eema to look too hard. He decided the best form of defence was attack.
“Where is my uncle?”
“He got called off site.”
“To where, exactly?” When Eema didn’t respond, Dev made a guess. “He’s gone to the World Consortium headquarters, hasn’t he?” That got a response from the machine. Her gaze shot back to Dev. He snapped his fingers and laughed. “A-ha! I’m right! Oh, Eema, you really need to learn how to bluff. You’d be rubbish in a card game. So where is it?”
“That information is classified.”
“How come we’ve never been? Me, Mason, Lot … we saved this place. We stopped Shadow Helix, and yet we haven’t been invited to meet the people who run all of this. Why is that?”
Eema hesitated. Dev assumed that even artificial intelligence needed a moment to think up a lie. “Because it’s nothing special. Just an office where dull decisions are made.”
“Decisions such as which technology the world is or isn’t ready for? I would say that is a pretty important decision. If people were deciding what the rest of the world could see, then maybe that explains the six-hundred-year gap with the Antikythera Mechanism? Imagine what could have been accomplished without anybody interfering.”
“You are at the spearhead of the operation, Devon. Why are you not happy with that?” Her emoji changed to its default smiling face. “And you wouldn’t still be here if they didn’t think highly of you.”
“Really? Where would I be? What do they do with people who can’t keep secrets?”
“Secrets are the currency with which we work, Dev. Not money or gold or diamonds. Secrets are the most powerful things we have. Secrets can change the world.”