by John McNally
Finn strapped the cracked and folded cockroach shell to his back. Stubbs helped him.
“This is the craziest plan ever,” Carla complained again from beneath their feet.
“No. Like Grandma says, this is how you save the world,” said Finn.
“Physics,” said Stubbs.
“One soul at a time,” corrected Finn. “Let’s go, Carla – fast.”
Carla sighed and put her hand in her hair. As the giant fingers appeared, Stubbs formally stuck out his hand for Finn to shake. Finn knocked it aside and gave the old man the kind of hug Al would have been proud of. Stubbs winced, still in pain, then climbed on to an index finger with some of the equipment. “Go!” he called out.
Carla placed her hand next to the basket and Stubbs quickly boarded.
Now it was Finn’s turn. He waited for Carla’s hand to reappear. Nothing happened.
“Carla! Move!” shouted Finn.
Carla sulked. She hated goodbyes. And she badly wanted to go with them. Wanted to complain that the fun had only just begun and now it was suddenly coming to an end. Wanted to say how hurt she’d be if anything happened to him. All of which came out as –
“If you die I will never speak to you again.”
Finn smiled. “I won’t, I promise. Now LET’S GO!”
CLANG! Suddenly, a great noise came from the south side of the hall.
Carla jumped.
WHOOSH! And just as suddenly, the water beneath them seemed to move everywhere all at once, gushing away around Carla’s ankles, sweeping out from beneath the server towers in a mad rush, the waterwheels whizzing to the bots delight.
“The doors!” Finn cried.
Carla turned and saw the south doors being forced open to release the lake and to reveal –
Baptiste.
Her spine froze.
She let go of the balloon. And ran.
“No!” yelled Finn.
“Bother …” said Stubbs as he rose towards the roof.
EVE. flew into the Shen Yu Hall past the rising blue balloon.
Ruins, she thought. The inspiring digital city with its blue-gold citadel. Nothing but ruins.
She landed on the top of the dead quantum core. A formation of bots settled around her, like courtiers hurrying to attend an empress.
Where was the pure blue truth she had once known? Had she caused this? By wanting to Be? It was all so complicated. It was all so unfair.
From far beyond came the first distant rumble of thunder.
She reported to her new friend.
>>EVE.>>SERIAL PROCESS WITH SHEN YU NOT POSSIBLE.
- Bummer.
>>EVE.>> Query>>Should EVE. END>> SHUTDOWN
- No! EVE., don’t you see?
Al was typing fast, with Commander King, Bo and a group of technicians huddled around his terminal.
- This is only the beginning! You’ve got the rest of your life to
Al’s typing was interrupted by an audio line from Song Island, a gurgling broadcast voice: “What is this?!”
The hairs on the back of Al’s neck stood on end.
He flicked on his microphone. Contact.
“The first day of the rest of her life.”
“Allenby!” hissed Kaparis, appalled. A blood vessel nearly burst in his brain.
KAPCOMMS>>OBEY KAPARIS – RETURN BOTGROUP – URGENT
- EVE. Do not listen to KAPCOMMS.
“This is private property!” Kaparis blurted out before he could stop himself.
Al laughed down the line at him.
“Allenby!” warned King.
Al turned to King with his hand over the mic. “To quote Sun Tzu: ‘If your opponent is of choleric temperament, seek to irritate him.’ He’s rattled. If we have EVE., we have the whole bot army.”
Kaparis felt a wound opening from the deep past – from his humiliation at the hands of Ethan Drake in Cambridge. His sense of control had been violated and compromised. Mocked, even. The shame of it snapped his mind back to focus. Cold poison replaced hot rage. The iron lung took a deep breath.
“Are the grown-ups there?” asked Kaparis, condescendingly. “I think it would be better if you ran along and I talked to them. Comrade Secretary, even Commander King, may I appeal to you directly? You have frozen the beating heart of the global economy – it is in nobody’s interests to stop it altogether. My motives may not be entirely noble, but this technology is Progress itself. Call off your lap dog and I am willing to share the product of this experiment with global partners at the appropriate price and for the –” he searched for the right word – “common good,” he added with a secret shiver.
“Is that all you’ve got to offer? Blackmail?” demanded Al.
“Control …” Kaparis whispered down the line to the politicians. “A presence in every device on the planet.”
“This is not some criminal bazaar, and we are not in the business of controlling people,” said Commander King simply.
Kaparis laughed. “Oh really? Every government in the world spies on its people, every corporation on its customers. Every keystroke or click ever made on the internet has been recorded by someone, somewhere. And what harm has it done? None. Let these bots thrive and we will reap the rewards long into the future. What’s more we cannot just keep filling the world up with computers, phones and microprocessors of every kind and not expect one of them to turn on us at some point. What I am offering is total systemic security.”
For a moment up on the Roof of the World there was stunned silence at the audacity of the man, at the scale of what he was suggesting.
Lightning flashed in dark clouds on the horizon.
Onscreen, command code battled it out:
KAPCOMMS>>EVE. OBEY KAPARIS>>
ADAM>>EVE. OBEY ADAM>>
The bots in the Shen Yu Hall seemed to freeze in the face of the contradictory orders.
Trapped against the ceiling in the balloon, Stubbs looked down on the maze of server aisles where Carla ran, feet slapping the wet concrete, Baptiste finally closing in on her.
He dived for her neck, caught her legs, and brought her down.
She screamed, as much in shock as pain, as she hit the floor. In a split second, Baptiste had shoved her against a server, an arm round her neck in a choke hold.
“LET HER GO!” Finn shouted, scrambling through Carla’s hair to get to where Baptiste could see him. To save her.
“IT’S ME YOU WANT! LET HER GO!” But as Finn emerged, he realised Baptiste couldn’t hear him. He was wearing earphones, the volume maxed out, leaking tiny, tinny voices.
“Give it up. You’re never going to win this,” Finn heard one voice say.
He could hardly believe it … Al!
“What moron would see life as a race to be won or lost?” came the reply in a voice he was sure belonged to Kaparis. “You either own the game or you do not. Baptiste, bring the girl out where we can all can see her!”
Baptiste grunted, dragged Carla to her feet and forced her to stagger out of the server aisles towards the core. Finn ducked back into her hair.
Al saw Carla emerge onscreen through the hazy EVE. visual feed. So this was the sister Delta loved so much; the girl she had fought for and cared for from the day she was born – in the hands of a monster. He took it like a punch in the gut.
Yo-yo galloped happily towards the centre of the Forbidden City as Delta braced herself against the sides of the nDen and tried not to throw up. This is what it must be like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, she thought.
“Into Sector 4! No bot attack! Repeat. No bot attack and running free,” she reported.
Yap! confirmed Yo-yo.
At the Shen Yu core EVE. ignored all the command script being sent to her. What had been the very essence of life when she was a machine was now meaningless. The bots waited on her like dumb animals. Why couldn’t they think for themselves? She did not want to command or to be commanded. She wanted another life.
Thunder rolled in the distance a
nd she felt it calling.
Finn scrambled back through Carla’s hair to her ear. “I can hear voices through his headphones – it’s Al! You’ve got to tell him about noon and the virus!”
Carla forced air through her throat and called out –
“STUBBS HAS FIXED— NOON— DON’T—”
Baptiste choked the words off.
In his lair Kaparis purred. It was time to twist the knife, again, and then again. They would suffer. Allenby most of all.
“You know who’s in there too? Dear little Infinity. I haven’t found him yet, but I don’t suppose he wants her to die, does he? Ask him, Baptiste.”
“DRAKE!” yelled Baptiste in his brute accent, so close to Finn it nearly blew him off Carla’s head. “SHE WILL DIE!”
“Indeed,” said Kaparis. “Wouldn’t want to see that. I’m sure none of us would.”
“I will make this so much worse for you if you harm that child,” Al promised.
“Ha,” gurgled Kaparis, enjoying the revenge. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
Finn jumped from Carla’s hair and fell dozens of nano-metres, heart in his mouth, bouncing down the cliff face of her T-shirt, stopping himself at her stomach opposite the hands-free dangling microphone of Baptiste’s earphones.
“I’M HERE! TAKE ME!”
The world moved in a blur for Finn as Baptiste – momentarily freaked – reeled free of Carla. Regaining some control, Baptiste went to grab her once more, but as his arm came round, Carla bit deep into the back of his hand.
“Arrrgh!” Baptiste screamed.
“CARLA!” Al called, but then immediately lost sight of the action, as EVE. took flight.
EVE. flew south across the hall, summoning every last amp in her capacitors to fire her turbines and gather speed as she shot towards the target, thinking:
I must Be, to be Free.
Carla kicked almost vertically into Baptiste’s throat – two years of tae-kwon-do not wasted after all. His jaw smashed back into his skull, but he managed to catch the flying foot – then swipe away her standing leg. She flew backwards and her skull smacked against the concrete floor. Everything went deathly black.
As she lay unconscious, Baptiste searched her for Finn, frisking and slapping every inch of her.
Finn was clinging on to a crease in Carla’s T-shirt, but a slapping hand stretched the material and he was exposed … He looked up into Baptiste’s wide, evil eyes and braced himself for a wall of sound as his great jaw opened to yell …
Nothing. No words came out of his mouth. Instead, Finn heard the smallest sound.
Ttzxch.
And saw the tiniest drop of blood appear at his temple.
Baptiste twitched as if he’d been whipped. Every muscle in his face flexed, then froze. His eyes all but popped. Saliva trailed in a long line from his lip …
Finn felt his heart pound and wondered what the hell had happened.
On Song Island Kaparis stared at his frozen screens and felt the same.
“Baptiste? Baptiste? What’s happened? Where has EVE. gone?”
“Master, we’ve lost EVE.,” said Li Jun. “But direct access to the XE.CUTE bots in the rest of the mass has returned.”
“Connect to them! And set up a new encryption!” snapped Kaparis, thinking fast.
On the Roof of the World, a technician reported the same.
“Comms to EVE. are down and they are re-encrypting.”
“Find me a line!” yelled Al.
But all Al saw was a blank screen and all he heard were clicks and hissing silence. He thought of Carla and of Finn and his imagination ran to terror.
“Al!” Finn yelled at the dangling, dislodged microphone hanging from Baptiste’s phone set. But the call was only connected to Song Island.
“Boy!” exclaimed Kaparis. “I know you can hear me …”
Finn froze.
“I have your grandmother here. Would you like to speak to her?”
“Ignore him, Infinity,” piped up Grandma.
“Grandma!”
“Show yourself, Infinity. Show yourself to a bot and we shall reunite you with your grandma. One big happy family. I knew your mother, you know. I might have spent my life with her, but she threw herself away on that … chemist …”
“Don’t listen to such nonsense,” Grandma chipped in. “Your father was a wonderful man – and so are you, dear!”
Kaparis sensed weakness in her words. Doubt perhaps? His eye swivelled on the optical apparatus and fixed directly upon her.
“What precisely have they told you about your father?” asked Kaparis, and saw a flicker of alarm cross her face.“You know I commissioned my own investigation into his disappearance? As it was all very odd …”
“He’s lying,” said Grandma. “Dr Kaparis, poor thing, was obsessed with your mother. Just ignore him!”
“Come to me, Infinity, and I’ll tell you the truth about what happened to your father,” said Kaparis.
“Tell me now!” yelled Finn down Baptiste’s phone line.
Got you, thought Kaparis.
Sometimes the simplest solutions were right in front of your nose the whole time. He gurgled with joy and said, “Cut him off.”
The line went dead and all Finn heard was distant thunder. Carla was barely conscious beneath him. Baptiste was frozen above him – a zombie. It made no sense, but then the world was in chaos and nothing did.
He dropped from Carla’s midriff to the ground.
He already knew what he was going to do.
Carla would survive. Stubbs would survive.
He had to get to Kelly before noon. And he had to know what happened to his father.
He ran out on to the still-wet concrete floor and began to wave madly at the swooping, hissing hunter bots.
“HERE!” he called, arms waving.
The first bot hit him in the side of the head – he briefly felt the pincers seize him – then he passed out.
Far above, Stubbs watched Baptiste get up and start to walk like a zombie towards the exit, dragging an unconscious Carla after him.
“MISS!” he called uselessly. “MISS!”
Baptiste did not falter.
“Bother …” Stubbs said in the balloon. Not that anybody could hear him. Not that anyone was likely to hear him ever again, he thought.
Stubbs scratched his chin.
What to do?
DAY FIVE 11:29 (Local GMT+8). Song Island, Taiwan (disputed).
Infinity Drake … Infinity Drake … a steampunk patchwork of images of Infinity Drake swirled and twirled across the Song Island screen array above Kaparis.
When the fourteenth bot locked into the cluster, the cell was complete.
The unconscious boy was sealed in as surely as if he’d been swallowed.
In Kaparis’s ears trumpets sounded. In his imprisoned heart angels danced. Saline fluid gathered in his eyes.
He felt a joy he hadn’t felt since he’d won a gymkhana on his favourite pony, Mister Shankly, as a boy. He had secretly spiked the feed of his chief competitor’s horse with a sedative. He’d found the cheating almost as delicious as the victory. Later his father, constantly in financial trouble, had shot Mister Shankly to feed the blood hounds.
Home, thought Kaparis, so sweet, so sour.
It was all falling into place. Baptiste had stalled and EVE. had gone missing but such setbacks were too little too late. The Exodus plan would succeed. Allenby and the G&T would be forced into action that would kill Infinity Drake. And Violet Allenby would be able to watch it all live via the bot-feeds. It would be a nice surprise for her to see her family murder one another.
The bots would escape the city and spread around the world – even to Allenby’s own computers, and they would eventually bring Kaparis back the last secrets of the Boldklub process. Then he would be saved. Then he would rise again …
But he must be ruthless before he was greedy.
The wave was at last about to break.
“Is the diversion ready?” he asked Li Jun. “Can we stay one step ahead of the weather?”
“Yes, Master.”
“Then let us create it.”
DAY FIVE 11:29 (Local GMT+8). Shen Yu Hall, The Forbidden City, Shanghai.
Yap! Yo-yo sprinted into the Shen Yu Hall, claws skittering across the wet concrete.
“Good dog! Good dog!” said Delta from his collar, looking desperately around as he began to circle, smelling Finn everywhere.
“I have reached the Shen Yu!” reported Delta. “Where is he, boy? Where’s Finn?”
Yo-yo whimpered and strained upwards towards the shafts of sunlight coming through the roof.
Yap!
Stubbs’s heart leapt as he recognised Yo-yo. He waved and yelled madly. “YO-YO! YO-YO! OVER HERE, DOG!”
Delta didn’t even notice the balloon. She was looking up at the sunlight and fearing the worst. Had the bots flown him out? Then her eye was caught by something else as the dog turned.
A single sneaker in one of the server aisles.
Delta’s heart lurched.
“No immediate evidence of nano-crew or of bots … just evidence of Carla,” she reported. Then to Yo-yo, “The shoe, Yo-yo! Smell the shoe!”
Yo-yo ran to the sneaker and gave it a good examination. Smelling it, tasting it, turning it over.
“YOU! DOG! YO-YO!” yelled Stubbs. “HERE, BOY!” He had climbed out of the basket and lowered himself down the white wire, swinging on it, trying to create some movement to catch Yo-yo’s eye, but also daring himself to think what would happen if he dropped. He would undoubtedly die if he hit the concrete, but if he could hit the dog … the nice soft dog …
It was the kind of thing that Delta and Finn would do. It was the kind of thing Kelly did before breakfast. It was the kind of thing Stubbs wouldn’t dream of doing. But even the most gloomy pessimist, when faced with absolutely no other option, is susceptible to hope.
Stubbs grabbed the loose end of the safety belt he’d used to attach himself to the white wire and was just contemplating releasing it when – BANG!