Utopia: A Dark Thriller: Complete Edition

by Adam Steel

  ‘I don’t understand. What people?’

  ‘Anyone who gets too close.’

  ‘Close to what?’

  ‘The truth.’

  ‘What truth?’

  The blonde woman paused: checking the other passengers. They didn’t appear to be listening in.

  ‘Do you still have your Info-Pad? Anything that links to Fin-Sen?’ she asked.

  Aya nodded briefly. She was still focused on her floor point.

  ‘Leave it on the train. They will track you through it. They will know where you’re going.’

  Aya tried not to panic. It wasn’t working. Aya swallowed hard.

  ‘Will I make it off the train?’ she whispered.

  The woman preened her nails.

  ‘Yes. Do exactly what I say. Leave your phone on the seat. They are waiting to see who you turn too. They want to see who you’re going to talk too. I came here to see you at great risk.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Aya whispered.

  The blonde woman didn’t respond.

  ‘How did you know where to find me?’ Aya persisted.

  The woman began filing her longest nail.

  ‘My name is Abigail. Let’s just say I’m in a position to know quite a lot of things. Enough to know you’re in terrible danger. You must leave the city.’

  Aya shook her head, ‘I can’t…At least, not yet. I have to meet someone.’

  Abigail tried to disguise her worried expression.

  ‘I hope it’s worth it. I have something for you - something you need to see.’

  She plucked an Info-Pad from her pocket and laid it casually next to Aya. Aya’s eyes fluttered across to it and focused back on the floor again. She found it difficult to hold down the conversation and pretend that she wasn’t having one. She was sure that people were watching them.

  ‘Why do you want to help me?’ Aya asked in a whisper.

  ‘Because you have something I want,’ Abigail replied. ‘Tell me why Aarif is here. We need to know what he’s doing with the Masons. Many lives could depend on it. You must tell me,’ she said, her voice pleading and urgent.

  Aya shook her head. Her face sharpened with concern even further at the thought of Aarif.

  ‘I don’t know. He hasn’t told me.’

  Abigail sighed: she looked deeply troubled.

  Aya shook her head again.

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know. Really. I-I…No…I just don’t know.’

  Abigail started to get up.

  ‘I’m sorry too. Take the device. Everything you need to know is on that. I…’ she paused, and fleetingly looked into Aya’s eyes.

  Aya’s irises were the colour of emeralds. Aya knew that Abigail had guessed what Jack had done to her eyes.

  ‘Good luck,’ she said, and added, ‘the eyes won’t be enough.’

  Aya trembled as she watched Abigail get up and leave.

  The rest of the journey blurred past.

  Aya’s mind raced. This business, it’s not all about a jailbreak. The killings? The Masons? Why did she want to know about Aarif. Aarif, he’s going to kill me when he finds out what I’ve done. She looked down at the new Info-Pad in her hands and wondered why this device was ‘safe’ and hers was not. She was terrified at what dark secrets it might contain.

  She would soon know.

  Aya had left the train without incident; slipping away across the platform. As instructed, she had left her Info-Pad underneath her seat on the train. Her heart thumped as she fled the station. The Unicorn Hotel was only a short walk from the station, but it seemed longer. She felt that every person she passed was watching her and had to remind herself not to give way to paranoia. Abigail’s speech on the train had certainly not helped. Inside she was shaking. She avoided the Info-Coms as she hurried past. The almost, unnoticeable flashes of light, as they ‘eye-scanned’ the people using them, were noticeable to her now.

  The Info-Coms were the eyes of Fin-Sen and so were the phones. It seemed to her that everything was being watched. She had never given it any attention before now. Those same electronic eyes were now looking for her. They were silent: waiting only as patiently as something electronic could: waiting for her fateful human mistake: a mistake they could never make. Jack hadn’t been specific about how long her ‘new’ eyes would last. She knew that she couldn’t afford to take any chances. She replayed the sinister message that Abigail had given her, over and over, in her mind.

  “When they find you, they are going to kill you.”

  The white unicorns were nothing like their advert and neither was the hotel. The unicorn statues were peeling and definitely not white; more a nasty shade of grey. The horn was missing from one of them. They looked sad and tired, like the area they lived in. Inside the hotel things were worse than on the outside. It was gloomy and smelled of decay. There was an Info-Com screen mounted on the wall in the reception. It was sited opposite the reception desk. Behind the desk was a middle-aged woman dressed in shabby clothes. She had her feet up and was watching an old television set on which was playing a game show.

  Aya felt the blink of light as the Info-Com scanned her eyes. She hoped they were still ‘different.’ The Info-Com seemed out of place and its adverts out of reach of the general population of the area. The shabby woman remained glued to the television programme she was watching. The volume was up loud and the sounds of an audience ‘clapping’ drowned out Aya’s voice.

  ‘Yeh, what do you want?’ the woman asked, her eyes still glued to the screen.

  Normally, Aya would have found her behaviour insulting, but this time, she was glad.

  ‘Can I have a room for tonight? Aya asked and thought, How long would it take Max to get here? “Early afternoon,” Jack had said. A few hours away.

  ‘Sure,’ the woman answered rudely, still without looking away from the television.

  Aya presumed that she was a reformer – an obnoxious one at that.

  ‘How much is that?’

  ‘Ten Creds. Room 11. Up the stairs, first on the right. Toilets down the hall,’ she replied, glancing only briefly at Aya.

  The woman paused momentarily. Her piggy eyes scanned Aya’s CURE uniform.

  ‘Wait a minute. There ain’t gonna be no trouble here. Is there?’ she snorted suspiciously. ‘My business is legit. You got no business poking your snout in round here…’

  Aya quickly assured her that there would be no trouble what-so-ever – that she was just tired. Very tired in fact and that she would just like to lie down.

  ‘Sign here – and print your name,’ the woman demanded rudely, shoving a filthy desk book along the counter, and pointing at the line of mostly empty rooms.

  Aya was relieved it was a paper ledger and not a fingerprint one. At least Jack had done his homework on their rendezvous point: something backward, and as far removed as was possible from technology. Aya carefully wrote her name in the register in handwriting as far removed from her own as possible:

  Satisfied at her handiwork, she handed the money across to the shabby woman.

  ‘Umm…I’m also expecting someone this afternoon…’ Aya stammered, ‘if a man with ginger hair comes asking for me, will you please tell him what room I’m in?’ she said in her politest voice.

  The fat woman snatched the notes and shoved them into her pocket. Aya noticed that the shabby woman’s nails were black underneath and that her fingers were stained yellow with nicotine.

  ‘Do I look like I run an escort service?’ she spat, and gave her a look of utter disgust.

  Aya shrank back. She could read her thoughts as if they were printed across her forehead. Whore, they echoed.

  ‘Thanks,’ Aya said taking the key.

  She made no attempt to correct the woman, to do so, would have brought unwanted attention. The shabby woman didn’t bother to reply, but returned to her business of watching television. Aya could hear her laughing raucously at the programme as she made her way up the stairs to the first floor. She hurried along the lan
ding, past the stinking, communal bathroom, and on to room eleven. Aya was glad to get into the room and shut the door, even if it was a dingy hovel. The dirty sink in the corner stunk of urine. She dropped her bag on the floor next to the unmade bed. It made a loud ‘clunk’ on the bare floor-boards. She suddenly had the urge to laugh and cry at the same time, at the thought of the gun in her bag going off accidentally.

  Aya sat down on the bed; relieved to be away from the prying eyes of the city. She reached down, gingerly took the device that Abigail’s had given her from her bag and looked it over. It seemed innocent enough. She powered up the device. She had an awful sensation, that this moment would change everything. Some sixth sense told her that the device held secrets that were not meant to be seen: secrets that could change a life forever. Dark, impossible secrets.

  She started the device. The familiar Info Pad splash screen that she was expecting never appeared, instead, a wall of computer text materialised that she didn’t understand.

  The bottom line caught her eye:

  “Cracked by Sparkst3r”

  She wasn’t sure what cracked meant. Hacked possibly? She didn’t know computer jargon. The screen fired up, landing her on a barren desktop. The interface was basic. She noticed the time on the device was completely wrong. Time was synchronised through Fin-Sen but this device had been reverse engineered to be divorced from its host. It made it impossible for anyone at Fin-Sen to track what it did.

  That made her uncomfortable.

  The device held directories of unfamiliar data. Some were video files; others documents images, others sound bytes. There were hundreds of them and they took up almost all the space on the device. None of the files were named. Aya dismissed them, and checked the phone directory. There was one, single number with no name. She stared at it for a long time. Finally she gave in and hit ‘dial.’ She brought the device to the side of her head. Her hand shook. It was taking a long time to connect and the familiar call-connection noises were not present. The noises she was hearing sounded distant, tinny, like an old fax call. She was about to hang up, when it connected. A rough voice crackled down the line. It sounded distorted, and very far away.

  ‘Yes,’ it said.

  Aya stammered, ‘I uh- Well I…’ she couldn’t think of what to say to the distant voice.

  It seemed stupid to ask who it was, when she didn’t even know why she was calling.

  ‘Get out of the city,’ the voice said.

  A burst of static went down the line and the voice faded. When it came back it was stronger.

  ‘They will find you.’

  Aya gripped the device tightly and gasped.

  ‘They will kill you.’

  The line began to break up and hissing tones of static sporadically, interrupted the message.

  ‘Head north. Straight north. Come and find us.’

  Aya could take no more and screamed at the device.

  ‘I can’t! It’s not real. I have to meet someone!’

  There was a silence on the line. Aya was about to say something else, when the voice came back again.

  ‘You will die. They’ll kill anyone. Take a look at the phone.’

  The line went dead and Aya sat staring at the blank screen.

  The number had erased itself.

  Chapter 25: Clarke sees Red

  CURE Prison North: Wastelands

  Tuesday 24th July

  The early morning sun blazed down on Vigilance. The morning was turning out to be a glorious one: weather-wise. A plume of black smoke, drifted lazily up from the shattered hole in the prisons outer wall. The remains of the gate-crashing truck had gone. In its place was a hastily erected, steel fence, which sealed the gap where it had smashed through the wall.

  TALOS had come. They had arrived within an hour of the desperate jailbreak to secure the facility. None of the surviving staff had been allowed to leave and the staff for the shift change-over had been prevented from coming in. The remaining on-site staff had been called into the administration block to receive their instructions. They had been told that when they were given permission to leave the facility, there was to be absolutely no discussion of the events that had taken place.

  “It was a national security breach,” TALOS had said, and they had also insisted on total secrecy until the events could be properly investigated.

  The bodies from the breakout had been cleared away and the rogue truck had been pulled out from the wall. It had been towed away from the site. TALOS had then disappeared inside the Beta Block to begin their operations, they had informed the staff.

  That had been almost 12 hours ago.

  Two prison guards were stationed on the entrance gate, on the outside perimeter fence to the prison complex. They were struggling to stay upright. They had been on duty for more than twenty four hours. TALOS’s orders were that nobody could leave the site and the relief staff had all been cancelled. Both men were exhausted. They had bags under their eyes. They had been fortunate enough not to have been involved in the deadly shoot out that had taken place in the recreation grounds. The two guards had done little else but discuss the shoot out since it had happened – much like everyone else stationed in the prison. Everyone who worked in the prison believed that what had happened was just too unbelievable. As the hours wore on, the two guards’ discussions had turned from the jailbreak itself, to when they would finally be allowed to leave the crippled facility.

  ‘I just can’t believe it. How can they just expect us to stay on duty this long? I’m shattered,’ Tibbs, the first guard grumbled.

  Saxby, the second guard, gestured towards the imposing, chain-link gates, behind him and said, ‘Could have been worse. They coulda broke in the front. Don’t fancy a truck in my face.’

  Saxby gave a wide yawn, and let out a loud, ‘Huuuuuhhhh.’

  Tibbs nodded in agreement, before continuing, ‘I mean especially after this,’ he said pointing to the smoke in the distance.

  Tibbs prodded Saxby (whose eyes were starting to close).

  ‘I mean we’ve got a lot of dead here. People we know and work with. It’s traumatic. We need time off to recover. Therapy. Relaxation. When are they going to let the relief staff in?’ Tibbs whined.

  Saxby responded sleepily.

  ‘Can’t. Security.’

  Tibbs gave Saxby a look of contempt.

  ‘Security my arse. Dangers gone now. We should get relief. When I do get out of here I’ve got a mind to go to the papers. I hear the Informer pays well to hear about cock ups like this,’ Tibbs complained.

  Saxby raised a disapproving eyebrow at his surly work colleague.

  ‘You’ll get fired. Don’t you remember the debriefing? “Not a word to anyone.” That’s what they said,’ Saxby smacked his chops together, and slouched back against the gate.

  Tibbs ground his boot in the gravel and snorted.

  ‘So what? Story like this must be worth a small fortune. Beats standing here for a whole day and night with no relief. What was with those trucks last night? I bet they’d like to hear about that too. It’s fucking weird,’ Tibbs protested.

  A convoy of trucks with blacked-out windows had arrived late the night before. They had gone in and out of the arrivals gate, passing Tibbs and Saxby each time. For hours, they had moved in and out of the facility. Tibbs and Saxby had known better than to question TALOS over their activities.

  No explanation was offered or requested. They had been fully aware that it was TALOS business and that it was part of their ‘special operation.’

  ‘Fucking things kept me up all night. What the hell are they moving in there? Couldn’t even get any rest with all the racket,’ Tibbs moaned.

  Saxby was getting tired of listening to Tibbs complain. He yawned lazily, shrugged and mopped his brow with one hand.

  ‘Repair materials? Inflatable women? Crates of booze? Who knows? It’s part of TALOS’s Beta Operation. Hell they could convert the block into a swimming pool for all I care, so long as we get o
ur pay rises and don’t have to deal with those Beta psychos anymore. It’s none of our business and you’re not supposed to resting anyway. We’re supposed to be on duty in case you forgot,’ Saxby said, with some resentment.

  ‘Pay rises? Don’t make me laugh. I wouldn’t be surprised if TALOS don’t take over the whole damned facility after this fiasco. We’ll be lucky to even keep our jobs,’ Tibbs argued.

  ‘Funny, I thought you didn’t want it anymore?’ Saxby said in a voice that sounded tired.

  Tibbs scowled at him, but Saxby hadn’t seen it, because his eyes were starting to close again. Neither of them noticed the old white transit van that was travelling up the road towards them. They were in the midst of arguing about their miserable situation.

  As the van approached the gates, it gathered speed steadily, before accelerating full throttle. The roar of the van’s engine overtook their career discussion, and the two men realised their mistake of talking about their jobs, rather than doing them. Oh terrific – death by transit van, Tibbs thought. But the van was not heading towards them, or the gates. It was still on course up the road to by-pass the prison. It went roaring past them as both men went for their weapons. The van’s back doors flung open as it hurtled past the gates. Tibbs and Saxby got a quick glimpse inside of the van. They saw number of black men inside it, brandishing automatic weapons. They appeared to be shoving a bulky, clothed, object out the back of the van as they sped past. One of van’s occupants injected the contents of a huge hypo-dermic needle into the bundle, just before they pushed it out of the back. The massive object ‘thudded’ onto the tarmac and rolled to a stop a short distance from the startled, Tibbs and Saxby.

  ‘Call it in! NOW!’ yelled Saxby. Where was TALOS when you needed them? he thought, as he ducked to take cover from the expected hail of bullets.

  It never came.

  ''EY - 'APPY BIRTHDAY MON!' one of the black men inside the van cheered.

  He tossed a stun-baton out towards them and heaved the van doors shut. The van screeched off down the road zig-zagging crazily as the driver wrestled against the speed. Tibbs and Saxby blinked in shock as the dust settled, trying to regain their senses. It had all happened so fast. Saxby went for his radio (struggling with the clasps) when he noticed that the ragged bundle on the road was moving. He paused, squinting at the object. It took him a few seconds to realise what it was.