The Overlord Protocol

by Mark Walden

  ‘This is operative nine. Accommodation area seven is secure, moving on to area eight.’

  As he walked through the main doorway the blast doors lowered, sealing the room and trapping the students inside once again. There was no talk amongst them now, just frightened faces and the occasional muffled sob. There was nowhere to run.

  Nigel watched as Colonel Francisco, Block and Tackle headed through the large door at the end of the corridor. He had never been into this area of the school before – it was normally strictly off-limits, but he guessed that under the circumstances no one would mind. The sign next to the heavy door read ‘Geo-Thermal Power Control Room’ and Nigel assumed that must explain how a facility the size of H.I.V.E., with its somewhat unique power requirements, was kept running.

  ‘Where are we?’ Franz whispered beside him.

  ‘I think this is the power core for the school,’ Nigel replied.

  ‘And what is this “geo-thermal”?’ Franz asked curiously.

  ‘Well, normally it means generating power from natural heat sources deep underground, but I’ve never heard of it being used for a facility this size before,’ Nigel explained.

  ‘Well, now we are knowing where they have gone, can we find a security patrol?’ Franz asked hopefully.

  ‘Let’s just see if we can find out what they’re up to first,’ Nigel replied. ‘Then we can go get help.’

  ‘I am being afraid that you were going to say that,’ Franz moaned.

  ‘Come on,’ Nigel said and crept off down the corridor towards the open door.

  ‘This is not a good idea,’ Franz said plaintively, creeping after Nigel.

  ‘So you keep saying,’ Nigel whispered as they reached the door.

  Suddenly from somewhere inside they heard the unmistakeable zapping sound of multiple Sleeper shots.

  ‘This is really not a good idea,’ Franz whispered urgently.

  ‘Listen,’ Nigel whispered, ‘I’m just going to have a quick look inside and see what they’re up to, but why don’t you stay here and keep watch?’

  ‘That is being the much better idea,’ Franz replied happily, ‘in case of sneak attack from behind.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Nigel whispered. ‘Let me know if there’s anyone else coming.’

  ‘Ja, understood,’ Franz replied.

  Nigel stepped through the doorway and headed down a short flight of metal stairs that ended in a T-junction. Just as he was about to step round the corner he heard Francisco’s voice.

  ‘Position the charge exactly as the Contessa instructed.’ The Colonel’s voice was a flat monotone, oddly different to the barking snarl with which Nigel had become unfortunately familiar during tactical operations training.

  Suddenly, he heard footsteps on the metal floor heading in his direction. He flattened himself against the wall, praying that they would not look down the corridor as they passed. Block and Tackle walked slowly past, only a few feet from him, carrying a large crate between them that was plastered with high explosive warning symbols. They headed towards a door at the end of the adjoining corridor and opened it. There was a low rumbling sound from inside the room they entered that was almost immediately cut off as the door closed behind them.

  Meanwhile, at the top of the stairs, Franz was trying very hard to make himself as small and inconspicuous as possible. He looked through the doorway. He could no longer see Nigel, who had crept further inside, and he suddenly felt very alone.

  .

  Chapter Seventeen

  Professor Pike punched his entry code into the door of H.I.V.E.mind’s central data hub, grateful that the school still had enough power to keep the doors working.

  ‘Come on,’ he hissed as the door opened and he went inside.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ Raven said quietly. ‘Only one exit.’

  ‘Think of it as only one entrance,’ Otto replied and followed the Professor inside.

  Raven looked back down the empty corridor that led to the door and sighed before stepping inside too.

  Otto had never seen anything quite like the room he had just entered. It was fifty metres from wall to wall, perfectly circular and flooded with a harsh white light. A gantry crossed the room to a huge central node that had dozens of thick cables connected to it from the ceiling high above, each pulsing with blue light. The cables dropped away beneath the central node, fanning out across the ground far below to an array of black monoliths. Otto stepped out on to the gantry from the walkway that ran around the circumference of the room. It was so cold that he could see his breath as tiny puffs of mist. It was a long drop to the floor below; falling would mean death at worst and multiple broken bones at best.

  The Professor hurried across the gantry to the central node and folded down a keyboard. It suddenly dawned on Otto that H.I.V.E.mind was lot more sophisticated than he had previously imagined. He had seen the AI’s central core during his abortive escape attempt a few months earlier and he had, rather naively as it turned out, assumed that was all there was to H.I.V.E.mind’s physical systems. The gargantuan room that he now stood in suggested otherwise.

  ‘Otto, come here,’ the Professor said and Otto walked over to join him at the central node.

  ‘Right,’ the Professor said. ‘Turning H.I.V.E.mind off is straightforward enough, we just need to cut the power, but turning him back on is considerably more difficult. We will have to manage the dataflow to his core very carefully during the boot-up procedure to avoid any chance of a catastrophic storage failure.’

  ‘OK,’ Otto said. ‘What do you need me to do?’

  ‘This is the map of H.I.V.E.mind’s memory core,’ the Professor said, pointing to the screen mounted on the central node. The display was filled with a three-dimensional cube constructed from countless thousands of individual points of light.

  ‘As H.I.V.E.mind comes back online each of his memory modules must be assigned to a specific point on the grid. Each module has a unique tag that indicates its correct position within the grid. So all that you have to do is enter the correct three-dimensional coordinates for the module and lock it in position, like so.’

  The Professor called up one of the existing memory modules and slotted it into the correct position on the grid. It took a couple of seconds.

  Otto felt a sudden sinking feeling.

  ‘Professor, there must be tens of thousands of modules here. Manually reconnecting each one like that is going to take hours.’

  ‘Which is why I need your help. With both of us working on it we should be finished in half the time. I estimate it should be no longer than three hours.’

  ‘Professor, we don’t have three hours. For all we know we might not even have three minutes,’ Raven said with irritation.

  ‘Well, it’s the only way to bring H.I.V.E.mind back online from a cold start,’ the Professor said, ‘and since Mr Malpense thinks its so important that we get him back online I suggest we get started.’

  Raven gave Otto a look of disappointment, sighed and headed back towards the door. Otto knew how she felt. He’d really thought that this was their best chance, but Cypher had to be inside the school by now and there was next to no chance that they had enough time to do what the Professor described. The Professor moved over to a large red switch that was mounted on one side of the node.

  ‘OK, we’re ready for power down. Otto, get started on plugging in those modules as soon as the display comes back up . . . assuming that the display does come back up, of course.’

  ‘What do you mean –’ Otto started as the Professor reached for the switch.

  ‘Here we go,’ the Professor said as he threw the switch and everything went black.

  And stayed black.

  ‘I don’t suppose anyone brought a torch, did they?’ the Professor asked weakly.

  ‘Oh, this just gets better and better,’ Raven sighed somewhere in the darkness.

  Suddenly there was a series of loud clunking sounds and the room was again bathed in pure white light.
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  ‘Ah . . . yes . . . good, that’s exactly what I expected to happen,’ the Professor lied.

  The monitor on the central hub was displaying H.I.V.E.mind’s memory grid again and the tag of the first module to be placed was displaying as expected.

  ‘Let’s get cracking, then, shall we,’ the Professor said and began to tap away at his keyboard.

  Otto followed suit and began to enter the strings of coordinates that would plug in the first memory module. As he typed he felt himself focusing more and more intently on each module as it was displayed, the rest of the world becoming an inconsequential distraction. His fingers became a blur as they flew over the keyboard, each entry getting faster and faster as he felt the familiar, if slightly disconcerting, sensation of his brain switching to automatic.

  ‘Good God,’ the Professor said as he looked across at Otto and saw the speed at which he was plugging in the modules, but Otto didn’t hear him. His entire world at that precise moment was the floating blue grid in front of him that spun and danced as more and more modules were plugged in successfully. Otto appeared to be in a trance, the sound of his keystrokes now just an incessant high-speed clicking noise. After just a couple of minutes he had completed nearly a third of all the modules and his entry speed was still increasing.

  ‘How does he do that?’ Raven whispered to the Professor, who was no longer making any entries at all, Otto’s pace making it pointless.

  ‘I have no idea,’ the Professor replied honestly. All he did know was that there was a lot more to Otto Malpense than met the eye. The Professor suspected that Otto himself probably had no idea what he was truly capable of.

  Half of the memory modules were now plugged in and at current rates it would only take Otto a few more minutes to complete the task that just a few moments before they had feared would take hours.

  Otto was no longer there, though, he was lost in a world of whirling strings of coordinates and spinning blue cubes.

  ‘Erm, Professor, you might want to check that he’s actually doing this correctly,’ Raven said.

  ‘Why?’ the Professor said, looking at the status display on his own screen.

  ‘Because he’s got his eyes closed,’ Raven replied quietly.

  The Professor looked across at Otto and saw that Raven was quite right. Otto had his eyes closed – it would have almost looked as if he was meditating but for the fact that his fingers still danced over the keyboard impossibly quickly.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ the Professor whispered, not wanting to break Otto’s concentration. ‘He’d have to be performing the memory allocation algorithm in his head at the same time as plugging in the modules. It’s just not possible.’

  The Professor checked the last few allocations that Otto had made and was astonished to find that they were flawless. What Otto was doing may have been impossible but he was doing it with a mechanical perfection. It was nothing short of astonishing.

  Raven and the Professor watched the progress percentage on the second display creep higher and higher in silence. In just a couple more minutes the display flashed Allocation Complete and Otto gasped, staggering back from the keyboard, clutching at his forehead.

  ‘Ow,’ he moaned. ‘What happened?’

  ‘We’re finished,’ the Professor said, struggling to keep his voice even.

  Otto felt a twinge of panic and shame. He must have blacked out, hours had passed and he’d not helped the Professor at all.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Otto said. ‘I don’t know what happened. I just blacked out, I hadn’t realised how tired I was.’

  ‘Otto,’ the Professor said quietly, ‘you did it. You completed the entire memory allocation in four and a half minutes.’

  Otto looked stunned. That was impossible. His last memory was of starting to enter the memory coordinates more quickly, but after that it was just a blur.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Raven said as she took a couple of steps towards him and took his chin in her hand, watching his eyes as she gently turned his head from side to side.

  ‘I think so,’ Otto replied. ‘I have a headache that’s already fading and I feel exhausted but otherwise I’m fine. Apart from these, of course.’

  Otto held up his hands to reveal tiny blisters on each of his fingertips.

  ‘How did you do that?’ Raven asked gently.

  ‘I . . . I . . . have no idea,’ Otto replied honestly. Certainly he had always known that his brain was capable of things that weren’t normal, but this was the first time that he had ever zoned out like that. A little bit of him was suddenly frightened by the realisation that in some ways he hadn’t done anything – it was almost as if his intellect had suppressed his personality. Otto had not been there at all.

  Raven’s face was suddenly lit up by a soft blue light and she smiled at something behind him.

  ‘Hello, Otto. It is a pleasure to see you again.’

  Otto spun to face the instantly familiar voice, and hanging in the air in front of the hub was the blue wireframe face of H.I.V.E.mind.

  Better than that, Otto realised, the smiling face of H.I.V.E.mind.

  ‘Come on, Brand, we don’t have all day,’ Shelby said impatiently as Laura hacked away at the computer terminal.

  ‘Give me a break, Shel,’ Laura replied quickly without looking away from the screen. ‘If I get this wrong you get to start your new life as a cloud of vapour.’

  Shelby swallowed nervously and looked around the room. Numerous different shapes and sizes of missiles and other ordnance were resting on the racks around the room. Laura was right, a mistake here might be disastrous.

  Laura was trying very hard not to think about the quantity of high explosive that was surrounding them on all sides as she hacked her way into the missile launch controls. She knew exactly what she needed to do; all she had to do was find the correct command subsystem and they wouldn’t have to worry about this ship any more.

  Suddenly there was a bleep from the entrance and the door slid open.

  ‘Oh no,’ Shelby said quietly and Laura looked up from the workstation.

  Standing in the doorway was the Contessa, a pistol in her hand and a murderous look on her face.

  ‘I can’t take you two anywhere, can I?’ she said coldly.

  Shelby took a step towards her and the Contessa pointed the gun at her.

  ‘Now now, Miss Trinity, you can’t hope to disarm me especially when you can’t move,’ the Contessa said in a voice filled with a thousand whispers.

  Shelby froze, a look of shock spreading across her face as her own limbs rebelled against her. Try as she might to move she was frozen in place like a statue.

  ‘Let me go, you hag,’ Shelby said angrily.

  ‘I suggest you keep your mouth shut, or would you like me to tell you to stop your own heart beating?’ the Contessa replied with a thin, cruel smile.

  Shelby went pale, looking for a moment as if she might say something else but finally deciding against it.

  Laura took her opportunity while the Contessa was distracted and dived away from the terminal, scampering away into the gloom amongst the missile racks. She looked around desperately, trying to spot anything that she could use as a weapon. The irony of being defenceless when surrounded by so many weapons was not lost on her. Suddenly she spotted a row of three lockers along the wall, each labelled with ‘Missile Loader Equipment’ and she headed towards them.

  ‘Miss Brand,’ the Contessa said, ‘I have no desire to engage in a game of hide-and-seek with you, so I’m going to make this very simple. You have ten seconds to come back out here or I execute Miss Trinity.’

  The Contessa pressed the cold hard muzzle of the gun to Shelby’s temple.

  ‘Don’t listen to her, Laura. Get out of here,’ Shelby shouted.

  ‘Silence,’ the Contessa commanded and Shelby’s vocal cords simply ceased to function, her lips moving fruitlessly.

  Laura opened the first locker and dug frantically through its contents, trying to find
anything that might help. There was nothing, no weapons of any kind, just overalls and safety equipment.

  The Contessa cocked the hammer on the pistol, smiling at the fear in Shelby’s eyes.

  ‘Very well, Miss Brand, I hope you can live with this on your conscience,’ the Contessa said and began to squeeze the trigger.

  ‘Wait!’ Laura yelled, stepping out from behind one of the racks.

  ‘Come here,’ the Contessa commanded and Laura walked towards her.

  ‘You two have proven to be more trouble than you’re worth,’ the Contessa said coldly. ‘I only brought you here as insurance but I’m afraid that you’ve outworn your usefulness.’

  Laura stopped just a couple of paces from the Contessa.

  ‘Now, Miss Brand, I want you to take this pistol and kill Miss Trinity,’ the Contessa commanded, gesturing at Shelby with the gun, the sinister whispers twining through her voice, ‘then kill yourself.’

  The Contessa handed Laura the pistol, who took it with a look of utter horror on her face. She took a step towards Shelby, whose eyes widened in terror as Laura raised the pistol . . . and winked.

  Laura spun on the spot, pointing the pistol straight at the Contessa, who was just a couple of feet away.

  ‘What are you doing?’ the Contessa screeched, ‘Kill her!’

  ‘I think this twisted old witch just told me to kill you, Shel, but you know it’s hard to tell with these in,’ Laura said peculiarly loudly and pushed back the long red hair hanging over one of her ears. There, jammed into her ear was an ear plug, one of several that she had found amongst the safety equipment in the locker.

  The Contessa started to say something and Laura cocked the hammer of the pistol, placing a finger to her lips.

  ‘One word from you and I’ll shut you up for good,’ she said, pointing the pistol straight at the Contessa’s head.

  The Contessa stared at Laura, wondering if the girl had it in her to pull the trigger. Laura’s eyes narrowed, filled with anger, and the Contessa closed her mouth, clearly unwilling to take that chance.