All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘You’ll see.’

  The second clip showed the same chamber, a new, intact dummy in position, but this time no table. When Ross entered the arena he was carrying what looked like a shrink-wrapped clear-plastic parcel, which he placed on the floor at roughly the spot where the table had stood. This time he appeared to be working alone as there was a pause after he withdrew, and, a few seconds later, footsteps could be heard in the observation room. The camera then zoomed in on the parcel, which revealed itself to be a bomb: a nailbomb, to be precise. Plastic explosive, detonators, a receiver and several pounds of the local ironmonger’s finest, all tightly wrapped in thick transparent film for purposes of demonstration.

  Ross’s hand pushed the big lever. Again, the keening noise grew, and again the picture shuddered as it reached its plateau. Meanwhile, Ross dollied out on the camera to show as wide a shot as the observation window allowed.

  A few more seconds passed, then his voice sounded out a countdown from five.

  He went right on zero. There was a dampened bang and a flash, followed by surprisingly little smoke – certainly not enough to obscure the view of the dummy, which remained upright and undamaged. The sight of it was less surprising in light of what they had already witnessed, and certainly less visually impressive than the picture painted by the nails. There were thousands of them, gathered against the walls and spread around the floor. However, there were none – absolutely none – inside a three-metre radius of the disc, the thousands of little black sticks denoting a shape like a keyhole on the floor. It was a perfect circle of exclusion, with a further corridor of safety extending from it, through where the dummy stood, to the rear wall behind it.

  The clip ended, reverting the image on the wall to a projection of Lex’s desktop. She switched the data-projector off, the absence of its hum accentuating the silence around the table.

  Bett’s response, when at last it came, was prefaced by a long sigh, after which he stated simply: ‘Oh dear.’

  He then turned to Som. ‘Not a fair question, I appreciate, given the time you’ve had, but your thoughts anyway.’

  ‘My first thought is wow. You know, not like wow, as in wow, check out the new Ferrari, but wow as in, like, WOW! Somebody just invented time travel or Wow!—’

  ‘Som? Coherent thoughts, please: relevant, concise, minus the wigging?’

  ‘Shit, sorry. Yeah. But we are talking serious—’

  ‘Som!’ Bett warned.

  ‘Yes, sir. Okay, there’s a lot of literature here, most of it informal, memos, lots of notes to self kinda stuff. This thing’s in early Alpha, still barely off the drawing board, really. He calls it a Gravity Well. Lots of extremely heavy physics and electromagnetics stuff in here, equations, proofs, theoretical models – way, way over my head, man.’

  ‘So it’s essentially like some giant, super-duper magnet?’ asked Mrs Fleming.

  ‘No,’ said Rebekah, before Som could respond, clearly thinking out loud. ‘That would be impossible.’

  ‘Why?’

  Bett’s features broke into a tiny, proud little smile as he looked to Rebekah for her answer, one which Lex suspected he already knew.

  ‘Because lead is not magnetically susceptible,’ Rebekah explained. ‘Well, it’s not zero per cent, but it’s close. Bullets are made of lead,’ she added, to further clarify. Lex knew this latter part, but would have to confess ignorance to the first, and had made the same assumption as Mrs Fleming about the nature of the device.

  ‘So how the hell does it work?’ Lex was therefore moved to enquire.

  ‘As far as I can understand,’ responded Som, ‘it does generate electromagnetic forces – huge electromagnetic forces – but after that it gets, well, complicated, if not to say weird. The documents talk about creating a field of hyper-gravity that … hang on until I find this here, oh yeah, got it: “exerts correspondingly greater forces upon objects with greater velocity”. And again, here: “The Gravity Well harnesses and diverts the kinetic energy of subjects entering its field of influence …”‘

  ‘Which means what, in English?’ Lex asked.

  ‘It means the faster something is going when it enters the Gravity Well, the more it’ll be affected. The docs say the ideal is that you’d be able to walk right across the thing carrying a steel tray, but if you tried throwing it … That’s a long way off, however. Right now, in Fleming’s words, “if you stood too close wearing a wristwatch, you’d end up minus a hand”.’

  ‘Which is why the shells are being drawn in too,’ Lex suggested. ‘They leave the ejection port at speed.’

  ‘So it is still magnetic,’ Rebekah observed. ‘Why isn’t lead immune?’

  ‘Let’s see, I read something about this back a page or so. Yeah. “Forces can only be exerted upon metals and certain ferr magnetic minerals, though in extreme low-temperature tests …” yadda yadda yadda, nah, that’s a blind alley. No, here it is: “Resistance Paradox Effect”. This phrase comes up a lot. My particle physics isn’t really up to speed for this shit, so I’m only getting a broad-brush impression, which is that it’s kind of similar to the earlier principle of greater kinetic energy being turned back upon itself. He’s found a way to exert magnetic forces that make lead respond in a certain way because of its insusceptibility.’

  ‘How?’ Rebekah demanded.

  ‘Fuck, man, don’t ask me. You take a look at this shit. He’s got correspondence and consultation papers from superbrains in electromagnetism here, these guys got more letters after their names than in them. But I don’t think anything in this file would constitute a blueprint, or anything close. Not surprising. If I had something as big as this, I wouldn’t keep copies of the secret formula on a PC in my apartment.’

  Nor indeed, Lex thought, on his PC at Marledoq either.

  ‘All this stuff,’ Som went on, ‘is kinda like the separate sheet of paper you do your working on. The exam answer must be written down elsewhere.’

  ‘If it’s written down at all,’ mused Bett. ‘If the key, the secret, is in the mind of the inventor, then that would explain why there is so much interest in acquiring him personally, rather than merely the data.’

  ‘You certainly wouldn’t be able to follow his work from this stuff,’ Som observed. ‘It’s a scrapbook. Notes, theories, ideas, a lot of projections, too. Scale, for one thing. He talks about the ratio of energy to influence, size to effect. You notice both those tests we saw were filmed after midnight? That’s because it took all the juice in Marledoq to operate it. He had to do it late at night while nobody else in the building needed any power. In developing any technology, the size-to-effect proportions always start at one extreme but, given enough time, they’ll balance out and eventually invert. Thirty years ago, to generate the computing power in Lex’s laptop would have taken enough hardware to fill this entire room. If the Gravity Well followed the same curve …’ Som tailed off, letting their imaginations finish the thought individually.

  Dad got up and walked to the wall, gazing out through the square porthole at blackness. There was nothing to see, but he needed somewhere to look. He was dazed, reeling.

  ‘Bit of an ice-cream headache, isn’t it?’ Ross said.

  ‘Bloody hell, you’re not kiddin’. It’s … amazing. It’s astonishing. It could change the world, son. It’s, it’s …’

  ‘It’s early, Dad. Very early. We’d be talking decades of development. You’ve heard the phrase “Standing on the shoulders of giants”? Well, I’m no giant. I’m just … I’m just a wee guy who’s waiting to give the first giant a leg-up, if and when he comes along.’

  ‘Don’t sell yourself short, Ross. What you’ve achieved … and on your own.’ His eyes were beginning to well up. ‘I’m so proud of you.’

  Ross swallowed. He couldn’t afford to succumb to the same.

  ‘The Gravity Well,’ his dad repeated. ‘The Fleming Gravity Well. I like the sound of that.’

  ‘I never thought of my name being on it, I just tend to thi
nk of it as Project F.’

  ‘F for Fleming.’

  ‘F for Fuckwit.’

  ‘What, is that supposed to keep you modest or something?’

  ‘No, it was a personal code, so that it wasn’t so on-the-nose. Project Gravity Well became Project Fuckwit.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The initials. GW.’

  ‘The ini …’ Dad smiled, then they both laughed, a moment of blessed relief from the pressure of burgeoning emotion in the cabin. But, when the moment was over, Ross knew he had to crank it back up a few atmospheres.

  ‘I haven’t told you everything,’ he said. ‘I’ve left one small technical detail out.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can’t tell you. That’s why I left it out. This really is for your protection, and for mine, and for the project’s.’

  ‘So why are you mentioning it?’

  ‘It’s kind of an insurance policy, or more like an “in case of emergency, break glass” deal.’

  Ross went to the wardrobe where his jacket was hanging and retrieved one of the small, innocuous-looking tubes from a pocket.

  ‘I want you to take this,’ he said.

  His dad held out a hand and examined what he’d been given.

  ‘Lip balm?’

  ‘Don’t ask, just keep it safe.’

  ‘What is it, Ross?’

  ‘It’s a key, of sorts.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘Dad, I told you: you can’t know. You’re safer … everything I care about is safer. Just keep it secure and don’t let anyone know you’ve got it, unless … Unless things get out of control.’

  ‘You don’t think this qualifies as out of control?’

  ‘This is nothing, Dad. This is retrievable. That’s for when it’s not.’

  ‘And how will I know that?’

  ‘Because at that point you won’t have any choice.’

  ‘There could be one in every home, every building,’ Mrs Fleming said, her voice breathy, like she was almost afraid to speak this aloud.

  ‘It’s goddamn bullet repellent,’ suggested Rebekah.

  ‘More like a force-field,’ Som observed. ‘One that can draw projectiles into its pull or deflect them around its sphere of influence.’

  ‘Now I know what that asshole in my car meant the other day,’ Lex said. ‘We were talking about the video clips, and he made some crack about why he was carrying a knife and not a gun. This thing could make them obsolete.’

  ‘More pressingly,’ said Bett, ‘I would remind you also of Mr Willis’s analogy regarding the pharmaceutical industry. What would the other drug companies do if they knew you were developing a cure to an ailment for which they sold remedies?’

  ‘Guns aren’t a remedy,’ Mrs Fleming argued. ‘I’d say they were the disease.’

  ‘Yes, and tonight we may have been looking at the first clinical trials of a vaccine. Mrs Fleming, I must congratulate you. Your son has conceived a device of unprecedented humanitarian benefit, something that could save millions of innocent lives. Unfortunately, there are a lot of very wealthy and influential individuals out there who are not going to tolerate that, and therefore he couldn’t have picked a more effective way of jeopardising his own.’

  ‘No wonder he ran,’ Mrs Fleming said, tears forming. ‘He could be making some of the world’s most amoral businessmen redundant.’

  ‘Believe me, arms firms wanting to stop him developing this device are just the beginning of his troubles. Those who’d want it for themselves will be just as desperate, and just as ruthless. What lengths wouldn’t any government go to in order to have this technology before their enemies? And that could yet be what gives us our chance.’

  Mrs Fleming’s bloodshot eyes regained sharp focus, her body stiffening to attention like a parade-ground recruit.

  ‘If the man who’s got him, this Felipe, or whoever he is, has any idea what he’s really holding, he’s not going to play first come, first served. Even if he’s working for someone specific, he’s going to want to renegotiate his price to reflect market value.’

  ‘And how does that help us?’ she asked.

  ‘Serendipity,’ Bett replied.

  Mrs Fleming wrinkled her brow in puzzlement. Lex had no idea what he meant, either, but he said it with a thin, nasty little smile she had long since learned to interpret as ‘Fasten your seatbelts.’

  The perfect apprentice

  In retrospect, Jane interpreted it as a subconscious sign of security that when she woke up on that third morning away from home, she was thoroughly woolly-headed and had, for several seconds, no idea where she was or what she could possibly be doing there. No bouncing straight into her stride, as had happened in the motel, no instant recognition of her surroundings and what that context signified, like how yesterday morning had greeted her, but a churning, disorientated, reluctant dragging herself to consciousness and a hazy coalescence of details and memories.

  The need to get up was significantly less imperative than before. Her body was making a strong case for remaining where she was, warm and comfortable, relaxed and regenerating after sustained ill-use. Don’t go out there, it was saying. Things will get no better than this today.

  Her first lucid, motivated thought was of Ross. It tugged at her inside, but it didn’t grasp and twist like before. She knew he was safe, for now at least. Well, secure was maybe the word, but either way it was a lull she had to take advantage of now that she understood it was a long game they were playing.

  ‘I can’t ask you to banish your fears, your anxiety or your anger,’ Bett had said to her. ‘But don’t let them use you up. In time you’re going to need to use them.’

  It had been his way of closing business for the day – a very long day, admittedly. His patronising sentiment had failed to disguise a utilitarian diktat intended to dismiss her and her inconvenient feelings, but, as Alexis had warned her, the bugger was usually right.

  Her second lucid, motivated thought was of coffee, the absence of which by the bed on this occasion probably accounted for many of the morning’s documented symptoms. She settled in the meantime for a shower, during which she discovered that her body had been laying it on a bit thick about the need for more recuperation. As the jets hit her and the events of the previous day became sharply focused, she realised she was feeling as robust as she could ever remember.

  She stepped out of the bathroom and saw the black dress draped across the chair where she had left it the night before. In her less awe-struck and disorientated condition, it occurred to her to wonder why this particular item had been selected for her. It had proven surprisingly practical for climbing in and out of cars and indeed helicopters, but no more so than the less figure-hugging combination of a pair of trousers and a blouse, and the only garb necessary to yesterday’s pursuits had been the chauffeur’s uniform. So what was with the little black number? Was it for his amusement, somehow? Or was she flattering herself to think so? Such questions, however, failed to alter the fact that it remained the only thing available to wear, so she donned it once again and ventured out of the self-importantly commodious room he had allocated her.

  In contrast to the previous day’s ferment, there seemed no evidence of activity, or even habitation, as she stalked the upstairs corridor. No rotor-blades, no tyres on gravel, not even any voices. She reached the landing above the entrance hall, intending to descend in search of company, or at least breakfast, but the stillness and silence caused her to consider other temptations. Dead ahead, another corridor beckoned, irresistibly as it turned out, because Alexis had warned her off it when she first showed Jane to her room. Nothing made a place more alluring than being told it was forbidden, as illustrated by the illicit draw of a long corridor ostensibly identical to the one she’d just left.

  Jane walked along slowly, her feet soft on the floor tiles, the quiet all around and the thought of Alexis’s concerned face making her even more aware of what sound she did make. She passed closed doors, a table
bearing dried flowers in a clay pot, landscape paintings along either wall: rural Van Gogh, maritime Turner, urban Ernst. Anger and turmoil, she thought, looking at the prints. Storm and stress. Beautiful chaos. Longing and loss. She felt suddenly most uncomfortable, like she had stepped into someone else’s uneasy dreams. The privacy of this place was unmistakable, something she was immediately concerned not to violate. She turned around again, intending to retreat, and was racked with a violent shudder as she found Bett standing in her path.

  ‘Exploring, are we?’ he asked, his voice low, the tone of accusation cutting through her.

  Our little crimes only seem wrong once we’ve been caught, Jane reflected, contrasting how guilty she felt with how lightly she had considered her actions only moments before. The corridor was dim, Bett’s shape somehow magnified by what illumination there was being behind him. She felt a second shudder, less jolting but just as involuntary, and realised that she was terrified. Here in the forbidden corridor, the light was poor but a veil had lifted from her vision. She had blinded herself to just how frightening she found this man because until then she hadn’t seen what he looked like through the eyes of someone who had crossed him.

  Fear helped her focus on the search for mitigation. As far as he knew, she might not be aware it was off-limits. He didn’t know what had or hadn’t been said by Alexis when she was showing Jane around, and the subject hadn’t been brought up voluntarily by the girl, only in response to Jane’s stare.

  Tell it to the judge. There was no point compounding the sin by playing daft. She imagined any defence invoking ignorance or personal stupidity would play particularly badly. Bett placed the initiative upon his charges; he expected them to know things without being told. By extension, there would be things he expected them to communicate too.

  Rather oddly, then, he proceeded to spell out the nature of her transgression.

  ‘This is my home, Mrs Fleming,’ he said. ‘A grand home, a privileged one, I would concede, but that grandeur does not render it an exhibit. I attempt to extend whatever hospitality makes my guests most comfortable, but I do ask that they respect my personal privacy.’