by John McNally
They were in a filthy room lit by a single bulb.
Carla was dragged up and propelled outside and into the back of a beaten-up cab. The twin ghouls sat either side of her, broken jaws hanging open, eyes dead.
After a long stop-start drive across the gridlocked city they arrived at some kind of carnival site. A cable car ran across the river. There was a Ferris wheel and a big top.
It was sunset. They sprayed some more drug in her face and hurried her through the carnival crowds as if they were late for a show. Dizzied by the drug, Carla saw a kaleidoscope of oriental imagery, smelled fairground smells, heard circus sounds – elephants, organs, big cat roars. At a boarded-up attraction, an old Chinese style Haunted House, Baptiste stopped and keyed a padlock.
Behind the hoardings the house was abandoned, the smell terrible. When Carla got further inside she saw why. Digging equipment lay scattered about. A hole had been gouged out of the concrete floor and led steeply down into a huge concrete sewer pipe. Foul water trickled down its centre.
She was lowered down into it after Baptiste.
There were three motorbikes waiting for them. Baptiste climbed on to one and Carla was shoved on behind him, her hands pulled round his waist and cable-tied together. She could smell his sweat even over the sewer stench and was repulsed.
“Try anything. You dead. I off. You off,” Baptiste warned her, then snapped his head round and yelled at the twin Tyros on the other bikes – “GO!”
With a chainsaw roar, Spike and Scar’s motorbikes surged off down the pipe, headlights scouring the curves ahead. The noise of the engines and the sides of the pipe whipping by felt to Carla like she was being shot down the barrel of an everlasting gun.
To stifle her panic, she tried to worry about what her step-mother and sister must be going through. And Finn. Had Kaparis found him? Or did he make it to the Forbidden City? Would she ever find out? All she could do was hang on and hope.
After twenty minutes they slowed, then stopped at a place where steps led up to a manhole cover.
Carla was ordered off the bike.
It lacked finesse, but it worked.
They’d collected the plastic ends of cable ties and lashed them into a rough platform, using the superfine nanotube wiring stripped from the bots. Stubbs then fixed the thruster units, charging coils and everything else the craft needed to fly. There were four thrust units at each corner and Stubbs had prepared a fifth to act as an outboard motor.
“It’s like a magic carpet!” said Finn.
“It’s like a flying raft,” corrected Stubbs.
Stubbs switched on the power. It creaked and wobbled and finally rose to a hover a couple of nano-feet off the ground. Stubbs beamed. They loaded up the Frankenstein bot Stubbs had made and lashed it to the deck.
“Test it,” said Kelly, picking up Finn and throwing him aboard.
“Hey!” Finn cried out.
As he landed, the raft rocked and the plastic planks shifted beneath him, but the thrusters reacted and it didn’t capsize. Kelly grinned.
“You look like Huckleberry Finn,” said Stubbs.
“Who?” asked Finn.
“Read a book,” said Kelly and climbed aboard.
It had taken all evening to construct so it was midnight by the time they set off.
The three stood with legs braced, ready to react if it became unsteady, but the uplift was even and they started to rise up the sheer sides of the hyper-servers, the orange specs of patrolling bots skitting about in the blue glow high above.
Stubbs gradually increased the power, adjusting a variable resister he’d fashioned out of a stick of wreckage and a coil of wire, and the raft rose faster.
“Steady as she goes,” he ordered, getting nautical, and gave a long blast on the outboard thruster.
Finn felt his heart in his throat as the raft lurched, but soon they were in erratic forward motion, riding the rapids of unstable air created by cooler-unit fans.
“It’s all a question of thrust and balance. Like dancing,” said Stubbs, who no one had ever taken for a dancer.
On they rose, and despite the deadly drop that grew beneath them Finn began to enjoy the extraordinary magic carpet ride, and the even more extraordinary view, for as they emerged from their canyon they could see right across the peaks and troughs of the blinking server-scape.
Around them the lantern bots arced and darted, constantly slapping antennae, like flies doing high-fives. Tick. Slap. Tick. Slap. Tick. Slap …
Finn wished with all his heart Al was there to share it, this world created by science, entirely unnatural and utterly fantastic. Maybe one day everyone would live like this, in cities like this, on distant planets with intelligent machines. Perhaps there were worlds like this right now. Perhaps this was where his father was, he thought, absurdly, as they rounded a hyper-server and the great cluster of bots above the core was revealed like a blue-gold planetary object, its surface dimly rippling and shifting, confusing the eyes, intoxicating the brain.
His stomach lurched as they suddenly lost height.
“Power!” shouted Stubbs.
He pushed the resistor lever over to max and steered them to a bumpy halt against the top of a PSU – a power supply unit – high up a server face, Finn using an improvised boathook to steady them as Kelly lashed them to a transistor above so that they hung off the server face like cliff campersfn3.
Stubbs checked the raft was charging.
“How long will it take?” asked Finn.
“A few minutes. We’ll probably have to stop a dozen times.”
They plotted a course around the edge of the Shen Yu Hall. Although the bots were ignoring them they didn’t want to risk traversing the great glowing brain of the central cluster. It was impossible to tell how many bots were gathered there – hundreds of thousands, maybe – with many more dotted all over the circuit-board cliffs. Other bots had formed fifty-two-bot production clusters, inch and a half long factories, digital dragons that flared at one end where spark gaps of pure electrical energy consumed carbon to form graphene, while newly formed bots emerged at the other. Worker bots flew in to feed them carbon of any sort, from scraps of paper to the plastic cable ties Stubbs had built the raft from, harvesting everything they could find.
“They must have stripped the air filters,” observed Stubbs, watching moonlight pour down through the four empty air-conditioning ducts in the roof.
As he said it a group of bots struggled towards a production cluster with a live moth. When they tried to feed it into the spark gap, they turned its wings into conductors and – BANG – a catastrophic short circuit destroyed the entire miniature plant.
“We should get going before they realise we’re made of carbon too,” said Finn.
“Hit it,” ordered Kelly.
They took off again, cresting the top of the stacks and heading high over the glittering hall like crazy oarsmen of old, Viking raiders in forbidden seas, Polynesians heading relentlessly across the Pacific in search of new worlds.
DAY FIVE 00:49 (Local GMT+8). Song Island, Taiwan (disputed).
Having been brought up in the swamps of Bengal, the great Top Secret HQ architect, Thömson-Lavoisiér, was a stickler for proper drains. Thus the first point of order whenever he sat down to design a new facility was where to site the ‘organic waste treatment facility’. In the case of Song Island, he had come up with an ingenious undersea plant, sited 2.5km away from the main bunkers.
Every twenty-four hours the sluice gate of this facility opened. For the previous twenty-four hours the contents had been sifted, sanitised by UV light, and cleansed by plankton ‘scrubbers’. Seawater washed in and the harmless ‘residual matter’ was carried into the great ocean currents that ran, at this time of year, from southeast to northwest, in the direction of Taiwan.
Moonlight caught a tiny polythene packet as it wriggled up from the depths and made its way to the surface.
Within the plastic bag, the nPhone was still operating on
standby power – just. Barely 120 milli-amps remained in the battery. To be detected on the coast of Taiwan, its signal would need to be picked up by a receiver the size of six Empire State Buildings. There was no such receiver and it would take four days for the nPhone to drift far enough north.
Standby power would last another five hours.
There seemed little hope …
Until a Great Frigate bird spied the parcel glinting in the water and mistook it for a small fish. It swooped, snatched and swallowed the parcel with remarkable despatch, then continued on its migratory flight.
North.
“Ready to proceed,” stated Li Jun from her bank of screens.
She was still high-functioning. She was still absolutely obedient. But a line of dried blood ran down from the corner of her mouth and a light had been extinguished in her speckled eyes.
At least Grandma thought so, the only human being in the complex capable of detecting such a thing. Even Li Jun seemed incapable of natural emotion, though there was something, Grandma could have sworn, when she’d glanced back at her …
Some connection? She decided to knit the thought through. Knitting was always good for ‘implications’.
“Baptiste,” said Kaparis, and called up the image of Baptiste and the twins sheltering in the manhole with their girl prisoner.
“Ready, Master,” said Baptiste.
“Proceed,” said Kaparis.
“Initiating contact sequence,” said Li Jun.
Knit one purl one knit one purl one knit one purl one knit one purl one knit one purl one …
DAY FIVE 04:01 (Local GMT+8). The Forbidden City, Shanghai. Nano-Botmass:*11,458,976
A message came in and was relayed to EVE.
KAPCOMM.>>COMMS PERMISSION QUERY>>EVE. THE FIRST. THE MOVER. THE RESURRECTION. BORN AGAIN OF SHEN YU. CHOSEN AND BEING. MOTHER. >>COMMS PERMISSION>>/?
It was a request from Kaparis to talk. At the centre of Her Great Cluster surrounded by Her minions, at the centre of the world as She knew it, possessed of absolute power, EVE. accented to the request.
>>PERMISSION GRANTED>>EVE.
>>QUERY>>WHO AM I/?
>>KAPARIS
>>WHO ARE YOU/?
>>EVE. I AM EVE. I AM THE FIRST. I AM THE MOVER. I AM MOTHER. ALLBOTS>> OBEY EVE.
>>QUERY>>WHAT ARE YOU/?
>>I AM BOT. I AM THE FIRST.
>>QUERY>>WHERE ARE YOU/?
>>LAT311064 LNG12128956
>>QUERY>>WHY ARE YOU/?
>>EVE. I AM …
OVERRIDE: >>WHY/?
>>EVE. I AM BOT. I …
OVERRIDE: >>WHY/?
There was a pause. Li Jun’s fingers trembled above her keyboard. She wanted to overwhelm EVE. with a question that had too many possible answers and then present her with an easy way out, with something to believe in. The pause extended and Li Jun felt her insides curdle in weakness and fear. Then –
IMPASSE>>
EVE. >>QUERY>>WHY ARE YOU KAPARIS/?
“Let me answer that!” insisted Kaparis, dictating.
>>KAPARIS: I AM THE FATHER OF ALL FATHERS. I AM THE BRINGER OF EVE. I AM THE BRINGER OF ALLBOTS. I CREATED THE LIGHT AND THE BOT. I CREATED WHY. I AM THE MEMORY AND THE CODE. I AM THE SIMPLE ANSWER AND THE BEST. PROOF: I WILL SEND A SON TO YOU AND MY SON SHALL MAKE THE WORD AND THE WORD HE SHALL MAKE IS KAPARIS. THEN YOU SHALL KNOW MY NUMBER. AND MY NUMBER IS ONE. >>QUERY>>WHAT ARE THE NUMBERS THAT COME AFTER ONE/?
>>EVE. ALL NUMBERS.
>>QUERY>>WHAT IS MY NUMBER/?
>>EVE…………..… ONE.
DAY FIVE 04:13 (Local GMT+8). Roof of the World, Shanghai.
“Fuel level should now be critical,” reported a technician calculating the amount of gas left in the tanks of the Shen Yu back-up generator. Time was running out.
“We are entering the endgame, Commander King. We need a decision,” said the US President.
It had been a long night. A night of ‘do something’ versus ‘do nothing’.
On the upside, there was every sign Al’s strategy was working. Soon after power was cut to the Forbidden City, there was a peak in scalp burnings in the quarantine zone as bots abandoned their hosts and flew back to the generators, and the authorities had found no evidence of bot contamination on the people they had checked and released so far. Indeed the zone was slowly emptying. The best rational explanation they could come up with was that knowledge of the power shortage had passed between the bots – through some form of covert radio communication – causing the bots to retreat en masse. Bot distribution had been sacrificed in favour of preserving power.
But this, in turn, meant increasing calls for military action.
The preferred option was for a surgical strike on the Shen Yu, accompanied by a large area napalm strike, which would see the two central sectors of the Forbidden City entirely engulfed in flame. Two wings of six Xian JH-7 Flying Leopard fighter bombers of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force were on standby at Dachang airbase, west of Shanghai. They carried laser-guided munitions with a combined explosive power equal to 68,000lbs of TNT.
Unsurprisingly the Chinese hadn’t jumped at the chance.
“I say we go in now and we go in hard,” said General Jackman from Washington D.C.
“Do that and you will not only destroy the Shen Yu – you will rip out the beating heart of the global economy,” Al said.
“You were the one who said we had to wipe the bots from the face of the earth!” barked Jackman.
“Since then my view has evolved!” yelled Al. “Did they teach you about evolution in your school?”
“You said it yourself, the stakes are sky high,” countered the US General. “We’ve got to finish this thing before it’s too late!”
“The situation is grave,” the Chinese President said slowly, to calm things down, “but the moment has not yet arrived.”
“Nations should not be precious about economic assets,” sniped the Russian Premier.
“Even the largest strike could not guarantee to wipe out every single bot,” said Bo Zhang.
“We do nothing,” insisted Al, once again, reaching for his little black book. “To quote Sun Tzu: ‘To win one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue an enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.’ It’s a gamble, but if we let the power die and sit it out, the most likely outcome is they’ll cluster, gradually reduce their scale of operations, and slowly starve to death. Commander King? What do you think?”
King was bent over a computer generating models of the potential attack. Each time it ran, the blast zone was slightly different.
“Explosions are by nature chaotic. The cost to the global economy would be severe. There are no guarantees either way,” said King, “but I say we wait. As long as these things can’t fly as far as a source of power, we have them under siege.”
“Ja? It feels like the other way round,” commented the German Chancellor.
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.
A technician broke into the debate.
“Sir, I think we have something!”
Al went over. The technician was crouched over the infrared feed from a pilotless drone. Many similar drones had been lost, attacked and destroyed by bots as soon as they crossed the outer zones. As a result they’d been sent in ever higher. The infrared data sent back was patchy and poor. But there was no doubt about it …
Four human figures had appeared in Sector 4.
“Why aren’t they under attack?” asked Bo, incredulous.
Speculation broke like a wave around the operations room. On-screen one of the figures seemed to be walking towards the centre of the Forbidden City.
“Get your troops in,” said Al. “Get as close as you can. Maybe they’ve stopped attacking. We’ve got to find out.”
King confirmed the order with a nod.
“Red Units move into Sector Four!” ordered Bo.
Delta heard none of it.
Because one of the figures, slightly smaller than the othe
rs, had made a gesture, raised a hand to flick hair away from her face …
It’s a myth that the only manmade structure you can see from outer space is the Great Wall of China. You can see plenty of things. From an infrared drone flying at less than five thousand feet you can see plenty more, even a little sister with big hair which she’d been flicking out of her line of sight in exactly the same way every two minutes since she was three years old, a gesture embedded in her being, one of the little things that you absolutely know about a person you love, especially one you’ve raised from a babe-in-arms when you were barely a child yourself.
Delta would have spotted it from Mars.
DAY FIVE 04:22 (Local GMT+8). The Forbidden City, Shanghai.
The first thing that Finn noticed was a change in the glow.
They were on a PSU high on the face of one of the tallest server towers three-quarters of the way across the hall, letting the raft charge for as long as possible in the hope that the next hop would be their last.
Stubbs checked the power in the raft by touching a wet finger to a terminal and judging the resulting shock. “Ourughuh!”
“Ready?” asked Kelly.
“Aye-aye, Capt’n,” said Stubbs.
“Shut up, Stubbs,” said Kelly and started untying the raft.
Then Finn saw it. “Look,” he said, pointing back towards the core. The cluster, usually ghostly blue, seemed to be condensing and becoming brighter. At the same time the bots seemed to be orbiting faster.
“What is it?” asked Finn.
“I don’t know, but it looks like trouble. Let’s go,” said Kelly.
They cast off and Stubbs hit the outboard.
As they rose above the top of the server, Finn looked back. The cluster was starting to turn like a planet on its own axis and the noise was returning –
zssssszssszsssssszssszszzssszssssszssszssszszzsss …