2184: Beneath the Steel City: Book 1

by Ben Lovejoy

  “Building and area alarms triggered,” the Skycar told me in the sort of calm, melodious tone one might use to casually announce that the weather was unusually pleasant for the time of year. “Three patrol cars en-route, nearest one will be here in 11 seconds. Evasion plan activated.”

  I felt the harnesses bite hard into my shoulders as the Skycar came to a sudden halt in the air. A second later, the car was rocked by a massive explosion.

  In movies, evasion plans involve pointless zig-zags, darting behind convenient asteroids, lasers, explosions and the occasional cloaking device. My evasion plan had admittedly involved one explosion. But the second component was the mere switching of the supposedly tamper-proof transponder code from one number to another. The second number, rather handily, and not at all coincidentally, identified it belonging to a senior police officer.

  “Incoming radio transmission,” said the car, as if nothing had happened.

  “Accept.”

  “Silver commander, this is patrol Sierra Whisky 53.”

  “Go ahead, 53.”

  “You ok, sir? We saw an explosion on the roof just in front of you.”

  “All ok, 53 – the intruder opened fire so we destroyed it. Did you pick up its transponder code?”

  “Affirmative, Sir – came into range just before the explosion: Lima Delta 891623.”

  “Confirmed, 53, that’s what we got too.”

  “Silver commander, Sierra Whisky 14 – we picked up the same code, Sir.”

  “Good,” said Lafferty, rather enjoying his temporary role as a senior police commander. “53, I want the registered owner traced. Find out if they were in the destroyed Skycar or are still alive. If the latter, they are to be taken in for questioning immediately. 14, arrange access to the building and check for fingerprints. If they exited via the roof, they probably used the elevator.”

  “53 acknowledged.”

  “14, Sir.”

  “Carry on. Silver commander out.”

  The pack I’d tossed out onto the roof had been nothing more than a small block of Thermix attached to a five-second fuse and a transponder unit. Five seconds after it landed on the roof, it had exploded – but not before broadcasting the transponder code of a Skycar apparently registered to a particularly nasty criminal with a record of violence and a taste for witness intimidation which had seen him so far remain a free man.

  The gentleman in question would have rather a lot of explaining to do, especially as it was his fingerprints I’d been careful to leave in the elevator and the door to the roof.

  All that remained now was to take a leisurely indirect flight home, pausing in a few places to switch transponder code. By the time we arrived home, the Skycar would belong to the security company looking after an inconsequential and entirely uninteresting waste disposal plant a few miles to the east of the city.

  2

  We swooped over what looked like rusting fencing that was falling down in parts and whose most upright sections had definitely seen better days. In reality, the fencing was just a few years old and contained some very hi-tech circuitry.

  The five-high stacks of containers in the grounds of the plant looked equally unloved. Those were, in the main. Discounting the security sensors hidden in them, they were exactly what they seemed. The Skycar landed in the centre of them, now hidden from view on all sides.

  The Skycar’s landing point appeared random. There were no markings on the ground, and it was parked at an angle that looked careless. It was anything but. The precise location of the wheels of the Skycar placed them onto sensors embedded into the concrete surface. The Skycar automatically scanned for anything overhead before transmitting the unlock code.

  The view through the Skycar’s windows turned black as the vehicle sunk rapidly beneath the ground. Long before it reached the underground bunker 30 metres beneath the surface, a bunker which appeared on no building plans, the concrete at ground level had swung back into place.

  The door swung upward, and I exited the car, Saira following. A short corridor led to my apartment.

  Not that it would have been recognised as such by most people. It was mostly featureless oak floors, walls and ceilings. It was only as I walked purposefully toward one section of the wall that it unfolded, revealing a chair and a desk with keyboard, trackpad and a large, curved screen. Saira walked over to another section of wall which unfolded to reveal a docking station for her. She slotted herself in.

  Some considered keyboards a quaint anachronism from times gone by, but there were some tasks where I still favoured one over the usual voice or gesture control. I had work to do, number one on the agenda being to figure out why the exterior door had refused to let me out. It may have been academic at that point, but I didn’t like mysteries. Mysteries in the past had the potential to turn into surprises in the future. I disliked surprises even more. Besides, there were two other matters I needed to take care of whilst I was in the building’s security system.

  Accessing the system required a new code every ten seconds. That was no problem, of course: the circuitry to generate one – the predecessor to the circuit board that had been my prize for the day – was already hooked into my terminal. I connected to the security system and hit the Generate button when prompted for the code.

  ‘Code rejected.’

  What the–?

  That shouldn’t be possible. The building security system and my terminal were using exact copies of the same rolling code generators. There was no manual intervention here, nothing to go wrong.

  Nor should the system be refusing access on any other grounds. My IP address would show my location as inside the security control room of that very building.

  There was no reason for the system to be rejecting my connection. And yet there it was.

  Two rejections that couldn’t have happened – one at the exterior door, the second here. That wasn’t coincidence. There was one possibility I could think of, and that seemed a slim one, but … could it be? There was only one way to find out.

  I scooted my chair a short distance to the right. Another panel in the wall opened up, this one containing a worktop with a replicator on it. I pulled out my portable scanner and docked it with the replicator. The replicator was already loaded with the necessary materials, and would take around ten minutes to turn the schematic stored in the scanner into a physical circuit board – an exact copy of the one I’d temporarily purloined.

  Those ten minutes would give me time to take care of something else of rather greater urgency: the unfinished conversation with Saira.

  It was ironic, I thought. Saira belonged to me. Well, the previous owner might not be entirely in agreement with that statement, but let’s not quibble over details. So far as the records, and Saira, were concerned, she was my property. Her job was to be my assistant, to do my bidding. In her limited fashion, she was loyal to me. She would obey my commands and ignore those of others unless I okayed them. Yet at the same time, she wouldn’t hesitate to report me to the authorities if she thought I was breaking the law.

  “Saira,” I said. She undocked herself and walked over to me. As she did so, another wall panel slid open and a chair appeared. She sat.

  Robots, naturally, have no need of chairs, but they know it makes people uncomfortable to be looking up at them, so when we sit, they do too.

  “You asked the basis for my good-faith belief that the owner of the circuit board would approve my temporary possession of it.”

  She didn’t need the reminder. I could resume a conversation right where we left off after a pause of twenty minutes or twenty years, it would all be the same to her. But, like I say, I think of her as a person.

  Saira nodded.

  “Now that we are back here, there is no need for me to persuade you of such, I can simply obtain the necessary authorisation retrospectively. I assume that will satisfy you?”

  “Naturally,” she replied.

  “Good,” I said. “There is a slight delay in accessing t
he system, so I’ll need a few extra minutes to obtain that authorisation – acceptable?”

  “Define ‘few,’ please.”

  Let’s see, I thought. Ten minutes to replicate the circuit, a minute or two to hook it into my computer, a few minutes to remove all record of my entry to the building and to generate an authorisation before also removing all trace of that.

  “Well, let’s say twenty.”

  “Agreed,” she replied.

  Which was plenty of time if my theory was right. Then again, if my theory was wrong, I was sunk anyway.

  Ten minutes later, the replicator had done its job. You could put the circuit board under a molecular microscope and it would still be completely indistinguishable from the original. I carried it over to the terminal, opened a slot, unhooked the existing circuit and replaced it with the new one.

  I connected to the building's security system, waited for the code prompt and once again hit the Generate button.

  'Central security control, status green.'

  My theory was correct. The reason my earlier code had been rejected was the same reason my exit code for the exterior door of the building had ceased to work: the changeover from old to new circuits had, for some reason, happened a day early. The switch had happened while I was inside the building.

  Did I mention that I don't like mysteries? But that was a question for later: right now, there was urgent work to be done. I pulled up the entry/exit logs for the three doors through which we'd passed, generated an admin code and erased each of the entries.

  I then locked out the system from the time-server that kept the date and time synchronised to an atomic clock, and set the date to yesterday. I accessed the security passes module and generated a pass for my visit tomorrow, which was to say today, complete with credentials authorising me to scan the circuit board in the laboratory. I transmitted the pass to my pocket terminal, reset the date, re-enabled the time-server and logged off.

  I pulled out my pocket terminal, touched the Accept button for the incoming pass and showed it to Saira.

  "There," I said. "It was in the system, someone just forgot to send it to me."

  Saira impassively viewed the pass, and nodded. The human-like gesture the difference between reporting me to the authorities as a criminal and leaving me a free man. A free man who was, thanks to that new circuit board, very much back in business!

  What business, I wasn't yet sure. My transformation from that boringly law-abiding IT tech I now scarcely remember had been a gradual one. From a little small-scale mischief-making for no better reason than the fact that I'd been bored and could see no justification for the billion petty rules under which we all lived these days to some rather more ambitious escapades.

  I certainly hadn't consciously modelled myself after that loveable rogue from the antique books I prized so highly. As a kid, they'd merely been fun adventures. But re-reading them as an adult, they’d struck a chord at a deeper level. I found myself envying him his freedom from the drudgery of an existence as tedious as it was meaningless. I developed a longing to find my own way out of the maze, create my own cracks in the tightly-regimented stainless steel world the author had so long ago predicted.

  I'd never imagined it could be possible, of course. The government monitored every move its citizens made, logged every action, noted every visit, supervised every communication, penalised the slightest transgression with all the warmth and sympathy of a hungry piranha. I saw no gaps into which anyone might hide even for a moment, let alone for a lifetime.

  Then, too, I was no bold and maverick adventurer. I was no revolutionary, seeking to overturn the system. No people's hero. No leader of men. I was merely a man tired of a life lived by the numbers, wishing for–

  "I have information."

  My reverie was interrupted by Saira. That wasn't good. I'd instructed her to use the innocuous-sounding code phrase instead of 'Level 1 alert' so that she could use it freely wherever we might be without attracting the interest of any eavesdroppers. But a level 1 alert was bad news. Very bad news.

  "Go ahead," I told her.

  "Location 3 unlocked, five seconds ago."

  Make that terrible news. No-one knew that location 3 even existed. No-one but Saira and I knew what the room contained. There was only one person capable of entering the hidden vault, and that one person was very much here and not there.

  "By whom?" I demanded.

  "Keycard, passcode, fingerprint, voice and retina scans all indicate by you," said Saira.

  No-one had the capability to spoof all of that. No-one.

  "Display holo feed."

  "Holo feed offline," Saira replied.

  "Impossible!" When I'd created the security system, I'd done so in a way that not even I had the ability to switch off the live holographic imagery. I knew where the pickups were, of course, and could block their view, but the feed could not be interrupted. Not by me. Not by anyone.

  "Do they have it?" I asked, sounding very much calmer than I felt.

  "Motion sensor offline. Tracker offline."

  This was impossible! Beyond impossible.

  I needed to calm down. Think rationally. There were only two possibilities here. One, the information is incorrect, and the vault has not in fact been unlocked. That was, I told myself, the more likely of the two possibilities.

  The second was that the impossible is, in fact, possible. How many times had I demonstrated myself that no security system was ever impenetrable? If one human brain could invent it, another brain could defeat it. There is always a weakness, a vulnerability, a bug. Something forgotten, something mistaken.

  But there is a difference between possible and likely. At this stage, what was the evidence that the room had in fact been breached? A single report from Saira. No holo confirmation. No motion-tracking confirmation.

  Ok, logic, Lafferty, logic! How does entry get triggered, and how does it get notified? You built the system yourself, soldered every connection, wrote every line of the code. Think it through, one connection, one code module, at a time.

  Ten minutes later, I could think of no way the report could be false. And the only way to disrupt the feed and sensors would be to be physically present in the vault. There was no coding or electronic method possible, it had to be physical damage.

  Location 3 on its own was unimportant. It contained one thing and one thing alone: a tiny circuit and transmitter disguised as a watch. The device was worthless without knowing where to find location 2. And location 2 contained nothing more than an electronic key. A key that existed only to permit access to location 1.

  But if all of this was really happening, then someone had gone to a huge amount of trouble to access location 3. Nobody had done that on a whim. The only possible explanation that made any sense at all was that they are, even as I had the thought, on their way to location 2 – and then to location 1.

  I could go directly to location 1, but that would be even dumber. If whoever was behind this knew about it, they would be waiting for me. And if they weren’t, I would be unable to access the location anyway because the only means of access was the key stored in location 2.

  "Bring up the holo feed for location 2," I instructed Saira.

  “Where should I display it?”

  The question was a coded one: unless I gave the correct answer, Saira would instead display a recording of an entirely unrelated place.

  “In here, if you would.”

  The main holo projector flicked on, and I found myself looking at a convincing 3D replica of the interior of a small room, at around 1/10th scale. I could walk around it at will, and zoom in just by moving closer. I moved closer. In the centre was a featureless black box, with a red LED flashing regularly. It was safe.

  "Exterior view, quadrant," I told Saira.

  The view switched to a four-way split view. Each showed one exterior wall of the room that sat alone in the centre of the warehouse. Each wall had an identical door in the centre of it; one real one,
three dummies that were indistinguishable from the genuine item in their present state but would be noisily, brightly and fatally distinguishable if anyone attempted to open them.

  The three fake doors were closed. The real one was not. And standing in the doorway was the rear of a single figure. That, too, was impossible.

  “Elapsed time between breach of location 3 and now, Saira.”

  “12 minutes 19 seconds.”

  When I’d first taken ownership of Saira, I’d had to advise that she should round time down to the nearest second.

  Hell! It was possible – if you had a fast Skycar and were willing to treat half a dozen different laws as merely a list of gentle suggestions, you could do it in ten minutes. I knew; I’d tested it.

  I watched as the figure walked into the room. There had been no alarms because they had the watch needed to unlock it.

  “Switch to interior view, front view of figure,” I instructed Saira. There were holo cameras on all four walls. Saira selected the one opposite the open door.

  A robot! As we watched, the robot walked directly up to the key, picked it up, tucked it into a pouch and turned to walk out.

  “Is the tracker on?”

  “It went off when the robot put the key into its pouch,” said Saira.

  That was one mystery solved, anyway: a radio-blocking material. I suppose it’s academic, I thought – there wasn’t any doubt as to where the robot was headed next. And it could be there in just 16 minutes; I’d timed that too.

  I needed to think, but there was no reason to do that here. We could be there in 7 minutes.

  “Let’s go,” I told Saira.

  3

  Saira followed me as I ran down the corridor to the Skycar and the door opened as we approached.

  “Location 1,” I told the Skycar.

  “Unknown destination, please re-state,” it responded, just as I’d programmed it to.