by John McNally
DAY FOUR 07:48 (Local GMT+8). Roof of the World, Shanghai.
By the time dawn was breaking, Al and Stubbs had it figured out. The power system, the modular and component structures, the nervous system, the resourcing, everything.
“Mr President … Monsieur le President … Frau Chancellor … Premier … Comrade President …”
Commander King welcomed the various global leaders and their advisors – members of the full G&T committee – many of whom had been shaken awake to attend the briefing.
The mission was now a global concern and the threat level had risen to a straight RED.
Al twitched, impatient to get on.
Delta had worked with him through the night. She was wired but held it together, breaking occasionally to cross-examine Bo Zhang on the search for Carla, or repeating with Al their chief reassurance – Finn and Carla were smart and tough and resourceful and they were together.
A small camera was set on the table, pointing at Stubbs, who stood before a charred array of evidence, Kelly hanging back in his role as ‘lab assistant’.
“If everybody has settled in …?” King prompted.
“Righty ho,” said the UK Prime Minister, befuddled by sleep (it was nearly 1am in England).
“Alors,” said the French Conseiller Scientifique, tipsy after dinner.
“Go!” barked the chronically impatient US military chief, General Jackman, from Washington, who was standing beside his President, both at the end of a long day.
“Ja,” said Berlin.
“Da,” said Moscow.
King turned to the Chinese President, who gave a tiny nod of assent. Then he started.
“So, to recap …”
Lights dimmed and screens lit up with technical close-ups of charred engineering remains.
“We suspected some kind of miniaturised flying weapon, or spy-bot, had been released into the Forbidden City. We have now caught more than one example and the picture is more complicated than first thought. Dr Allenby?”
He turned to Al.
“Kelly – bring up the first slide,” said Al.
It was a picture of two lines of charred robot remains. They looked like smashed-up old TV sets.
“Stubbsy, tell ’em how it is,” said Al, switching on his microphone
“These are the remains of the nano-bots we’ve found, nineteen in all. We have identified twelve different forms. There are similarities between them all. They’re made up of the same simple component groups and materials …”
Kelly clicked through a series of images, threaded engineering rods, layered honeycombed sheets of carbon, crude turbines, and knots of wiring.
“They share a central hull which acts like a motherboard, and they all have a simple rail gun and propulsion turbine. But apart from that, they seem entirely different, with different functions …”
“Woah – they have a rail gun?” interrupted General Jackman.
“An electromagnetic rail along which a bolt can be fired at extraordinary speed,” Al explained to those politicians who hadn’t yet gone to the huge expense of trying to develop one. “Far easier to engineer at this scale – but that’s not the most interesting thing. The most interesting thing is these interface panels …”
Kelly clicked up another charred feature.
“Which is where I think they join together.”
“Join together? To form what?” asked the German Chancellor.
“A plant,” said Al.
“A flower? Is this some kind of joke?” asked General Jackman.
“A manufacturing plant. What I think we have here is not just a series of flying weapons – but a factory.”
“Making what?”
“Itself.”
There were quizzical looks from around the world.
“That’s an extraordinary claim,” said the US Chief Scientist, leaning into shot.
“More Stubbsy,” prompted Al.
Stubbs crouched beside the bot remains, the biggest of which only came up to his knees, and beckoned the camera in after him, pointing out what looked like a charred rib cage.
“Right. Well. There’s a pair of bots here that feature these ribs – I think these are spark gaps, I’ll come back to them in a moment. And over here –” he pointed to bots that shared a cluster of tentacles with various shapes on the end – “all of these limbs could be simple tool arms, cutters, welders, clamps and so on. Other units seem to be all computer power with multiple conductor hook-ups and little else.”
“The thing is – none of them make sense until you consider where they fit in a series,” said Al.
A technician pressed a button and up came a rough drawing of what a set of interconnected bots might look like: a high-tech assembly line, a strung-out industrial plant.
“We know that one Tyro courier, our murderer, made six trips to the Forbidden City,” said Al. “But CCTV analysis tells us there may have been multiple couriers making multiple trips. Let’s suppose we’re talking forty bots. Put together, they’d form a plant little more than an inch long that could fit almost anywhere.”
“What are they running on? Air?” asked the German Chancellor.
“Electricity,” answered Stubbs. “See this layering of the body work on the central hull? That’s alternate layers of conducting and insulating material. The structure itself is a super-capacitor – a power store capable of delivering a significant load. This makes them very delicate, very vulnerable to catastrophic short-circuit – hence they explode on contact with a plastic comb – but with an inexhaustible supply of them, who cares? They just have to site themselves near a power cable and they can charge-up through inductive coils. I’ve done the maths and they could fire up their spark gaps from any 240-volt power source.”
“Nanotubes …” muttered the French Conseiller Scientifique.
“Exactly! Power up these spark gaps, feed in any carbon-based material you like and you create carbon nanotubes,” confirmed Al.
“Whoopie-doo,” deadpanned General Jackman. “What the heck are they?”
“The dream material of nano-technologists,” said Al. “Atom-thick tubes of graphene – the ultimate carbon nanomaterial. Twist them one way you make a metal, twist another, they become semi-conductors. They can be conductors or insulators, construction materials, bullets, literally whatever you want. Think modular, think—”
“Lego,” said Stubbs. “Carbon Lego.”
“Where are the bots getting the carbon from to feed the spark gaps?” asked the US Chief Scientist.
“Anywhere and everywhere – plastic, paper, organic matter. My guess is some part of this cluster is harvesting it and feeding it into the spark gaps to create the nanotubes,” said Al. “What I think we have here are nano-scale assemblers that can replicate themselves – the dream of nanotech since Drexlerfn1. We’ve been fools—”
“I could have told you that,” muttered General Jackman.
“What we’ve been considering ever since we built Boldklub is what we could do with macro technology once we’d shrunk it. They have done the opposite. They have looked at what nano-machines could make macro-scale molecules do. They have kick-started the nano-tech revolution.”
Scientific advisors all over the world knotted their brows, trying to chew through the implications.
“The Boldklub process was only needed to create the first assembly line, the first set of, say, forty bots. Once you can engineer at that level, carbon will do the rest,” said Stubbs.
“That’s why nothing has been showing up on nano-radar,” said Kelly. “It’s just light carbon, not anywhere near as dense as the Boldklub material we’ve been looking for. One of these carbon bots would have the same radar signature as a fruit fly. We need to realign the entire nano-radar network.”
“All very clever, but I suspect you’re letting your imagination run away with you,” said General Jackman. “What’s the point? I mean, what problems would these nano-bots actually create?”
Al f
illed him in.
“Imagine if there’s a cluster of these things in every machine that gets shipped out of the Forbidden City. A kid in, I don’t know, Australia, opens his new iPad, switches it on and you’ve got a new breed centre. It sends out scouts to find other devices in the home and you’ve got half a dozen more. Once inside a phone, suddenly they’re being walked from place to place spreading the infection. Within a few weeks, Kaparis has bots in every computer and device on the planet. Not a software virus, a hardware virus. If he wants, he can send them out to kill their users, to bore into their brains. But I don’t think that’s what he wants.”
“He wants control,” said King. “He wants power and the display of power.”
“Total control over data, information,” agreed Al. “He’ll be inside every search, every server, he’ll change what he doesn’t like. Culture? Politics? He will determine what questions are asked and what answers are given. Or he can just push a button and destroy every processor on the planet. What would function then? What would matter?”
Silence.
“If there are a gazillion of these things,” said General Jackman, “then where the hell are they?”
“Well, some of them are in people’s hair,” said Al. “That we do know.”
“I have ordered security to start checking for lice,” said Bo Zhang, “with extreme caution.”
“And how many have you found?”
“The process has only just started and is meeting some resistance. People want to know why.”
“Huh,” said Jackman, dismissive. “Who’s to say this hair-on-fire woman isn’t a one-off, some kind of spy and bringing in new bugs to plant in specific machines?”
“At the moment we can’t be certain, because we haven’t had time to find the rest, or they’re deliberately concealing themselves, which is scary enough,” admitted Al. “But you want to know the really scary thing? Why are they here? Why now? Kaparis could have released them any time, any place, anywhere …”
“The Shen Yu computer …” murmered US Chief Scientist.
“Bingo,” replied Al. “I think Kaparis wants to make them independently intelligent. He wants quantum processing. I have no idea how, but I think he’s tapping into the Shen Yu somehow, and the only way to find out for sure is to halt production, conduct a proper search and to destroy everything made in the Forbidden City in the last forty-eight hours.”
“Impossible!” said the Chinese President.
“Have we got any direct evidence to support any of this theory?” asked the UK Prime Minister.
“What about signals intel?” asked General Mount from London. “How are these things communicating, coordinating?”
“We’ve got nothing on the radio spectrum,” reported a technician.
“Kaparis has always evaded signal detection, we don’t know how,” Al explained.
“This man is telling us his nightmare. Not facts,” the Conseiller Scientifique informed the French President with suitable contempt.
A babble of confused discussion rose, over which Al, exhausted and stressed, momentarily lost patience. “We have to shut down the Forbidden City! We might have to wipe it from the face of the earth!”
A great wave of indignation seemed to break over his head. A member of the Chinese delegation actually squawked.
“Now that’s getting way ahead of ourselves …” said the US President.
“Can you imagine what that would do to stock markets?” asked the British PM.
The babble grew and grew and Al realised he’d lost control of the meeting altogether.
DAY FOUR 08:56 (Local GMT+1). Hong Kong-Shanghai Sleeper Express.
They woke early, Carla starving, and took their chances in the restaurant car.
The train was traversing an endless plain and rural China was rushing past – willow trees, paddy fields, shack settlements rich with colour and barns with roofs like shrines.
“So?” Carla muttered into her juice. “What do we do now?”
Finn chewed through his own rations in the bouncing nest of her hair.
“We get a message to the G&T as fast as we can – or rather you can.”
“I ran out of a psychiatric hospital. If we contact the police they’re going to think – oh hey, here’s that crazy girl who ran away from Hong Kong talking about little people.”
“OK. Funny.”
“I’m not being funny. This is panic,” said Carla.
“Definitely don’t panic. First we’ve got to stay on the train without getting arrested,” said Finn. The restaurant car was starting to fill with breakfast diners. “If we can make it to Shanghai, we can get to an embassy or find Al in this Forbidden City place. They’ll be on alert. All you have to do is walk in and say the word ‘Scarlatti’ and they’ll flip. The trouble is, Kaparis knows we’re on this train. He’ll have Tyros waiting for us and he’s likely to have someone undercover inside the Shanghai police, maybe even the government. He can buy anybody he likes. We have to make one simple phone call to someone we trust – Al or Delta – before the train stops. But as you know so well, we have no phone …” Finn complained.
“That was your fault for freaking me out!” Carla hissed, but then quickly covered it with a cough as the Swedish family walked in. Mum, dad, teenage girl and the little brother with the …
“Steal the Batman phone,” ordered Finn.
“I can’t do things like that!” she whispered.
“Say hi! Invite them over here to join you! Now!”
“Never!”
The two kids recognised her and smiled.
“SAY HI NOW!” yelled Finn at the top of her head.
“HI!” she blurted.
His name was Tomas, hers was Katerina, and they were travelling with their parents who asked Carla far too many questions. Carla told them she was travelling with her mother who had a migraine and would be staying in her cabin. This had provoked a wave of concern that ended with her being sent back to the cabin with a herbal tea made up by the restaurant car manager. As they headed at speed past the city of Jinhua, Carla walked into a bathroom and poured it down the sink. She looked at herself in the mirror and wanted to throw up.
“I hate myself,” she said.
“Well done,” said Finn. “It’s in a good cause.”
Carla reached under her top and pulled out Tomas’s phone.
“Who shall I call first?” said Carla.
“Delta!” said Finn.
“Delta …” Carla looked suddenly at a loss. “Who remembers cell-phone numbers?”
This momentarily stumped Finn, who barely knew his own.
“Hudson! I know his landline.”
He rattled off the number and reminded her to put the international code in first. She punched it all in.
“Say, ‘Hello Mrs Hudson, I’m calling on behalf of Finn. It’s an emergency.’”
“Wait!” Carla listened to an automated message. “There is an international call bar on this number!”
“Crud!”
“Next?”
“Nine nine nine?” Finn suggested.
“You mean nine one one?” said Carla.
“Try both.”
She tried. Nothing on either. “Arrrgh!” she shouted in frustration, wanting to smash the phone.
“Who do you call when there’s nobody to call? When you don’t even know a number or speak a language!” asked Carla.
Finn looked out. Advertising hoardings flashed by: a giant Lego girl advertised Legoland Shanghai.
“Dial 0800 Legoland!” said Finn. “They’re bound to speak English! It’s alphanumeric, use the letters on the number pad like—”
“I know how to do it!”
The Swedish family were with the attendant.
“I’m sure it will turn up. Now, where did you last have it?”
Tomas was anxious.
“At breakfast. The American girl was by me, she might have picked it up – maybe she thought it was hers – but we knocked
on her cabin and she didn’t answer.”
“Which cabin is that?” asked the attendant. “I’ll go and check.”
“Cabin Two, Car Two,” said Tomas.
The attendant frowned.
A Chinese operator transferred them to a call handler in India. He spoke perfect English. He just didn’t understand.
“No, Raj, ‘Bo Zhang’. His name is ‘Bo Zhang’ and he’s like the security chief, and I know this sounds crazy, but please, you have to help us! You will win a medal if you just call the Chinese authorities for me …”
“Yahhhhhh,” said Raj. “I don’t actually know anyone in the Chinese security apparatus.”
“Call the embassy then! The British Embassy! The American Embassy! Any embassy!”
“Yahhhhhh, maybe I need to have a word with my supervisor.”
“Look, Raj! Do you think I’m in the habit of calling random phone numbers and asking for help in an emergency? I mean, how often does this happen?” she squealed.
“Quite a lot actually.”
“Quite a lot?!”
“There are a lot of lonely people in the world,” said Raj. “They see these numbers and just want to talk – we call them ‘burners’ because they eat up so much time.”
“I’m not a burner! I am not lonely! I am Carla Salazar! And I am stuck on a train in China being pursued by …”
“Agents of a transnational terror organisation,” supplied Finn, and Carla repeated.
“We’re not allowed to make personal calls out,” said Raj. “I can only take bookings for Legoland and …”
“Get him to look up the number!” yelled Finn in her hair.
“Google ‘US Embassy, Shanghai’, please, Raj! We need that number!”
BANG BANG BANG! – a fist hammered on the bathroom door.
“Raj!” shrieked Carla.
“Miss! Open the door!” boomed the voice of the attendant.
“There’s a US consulate in the Westgate Mall,” said Raj. “West Nanjing Road and the number is—”
CLATCH – the door was opened by an emergency key and there stood the attendant and the Swedish couple.
Carla froze, Tomas’s Batman phone in her hand.