2184: Beneath the Steel City: Book 1

by Ben Lovejoy

  “Lima Oscar Charlie Alpha Tango India Oscar November 1,” I stated. As I said, my memory is nothing special – I’d picked a code it was impossible to forget.

  “Acknowledged.” A countdown timer appeared on the screen above my head: 07 minutes 06 seconds.

  Unless instructed to use a particular type of transponder code, the Skycar interrogated the traffic database and identified all Skycars of the same make and model as mine appeared to be, found one that was currently on the ground and had no police interest flagged and set that as our transponder. My Skycar was rather non-standard, but there was nothing visible or detectable to suggest as much.

  I hadn’t yet decided to complete the journey there – it still felt like a trap – but I wanted to be en-route, so that I had options.

  “Saira, take a seat, this needs two brains.”

  Saira sat opposite me, saying nothing in response.

  “Analysis,” I told her.

  “Assumed facts,” she said, “locations 3 and 2 have been breached. Strong hypothesis: as the robot knew of both locations, and had the means to access them, it must inevitably be concluded that it knows of location 1.”

  “Agreed,” I replied, unhappily.

  “It now possesses the key required to unlock location 1, and therefore has the means to gain possession of the contents. It is an equally inevitable conclusion that it intends to do so.”

  Her usual calm and measured tones sounded almost cheerful. I scowled at her.

  “Options,” I demanded.

  “We can be at location 1 before the robot arrives, but we do not possess the key and therefore cannot gain access.”

  Damn my paranoid precautions. I’d thought I was playing it smart, ensuring that even if someone somehow learned of what I had stored there, and forced me to accompany them, I would be completely unable to gain access. The watch stored in location 3 was needed to access the key stored in location 2, and the key stored in location 2 was needed to unlock location 1. Now my own precautions were rendering me helpless to intervene.

  It was crazy, I thought. I lived in a time in which most wealth is stored as nothing more than ones and zeroes. In the age of replicators, most art had lost its value. Ok, only one would be the original, but the result would be indistinguishable from the real thing. But there were a few things that retained their value because replication would only be possible from the very material you were trying to copy. My chosen one, a metal discovered centuries ago and which retained its value today.

  That was my emergency escape plan for the day it all went horribly wrong.

  I liked Earth, and given the choice would spend the rest of my life here. I liked to think I was a pretty smart guy. I thought things through. I made careful plans. I came up with backup plans and bail-outs.

  But I’d always known I was playing the odds. There were other smart people out there, some of them paid to defeat people like me. Some day, one of them would succeed.

  But my privileged access gave me the ability to tap into any of the government’s systems. I had alerts configured for both my real identity and the main aliases I used. If any of them made it onto any one of a few dozen different databases, I’d know about it instantly.

  Plan A, suitable for smaller misdemeanours, would be to edit those databases, making my names disappear. If that weren’t possible, Plan B was to create a fictitious arrest, conviction and off-world exile. I would officially cease to be a problem for planet Earth.

  That was the reason I tried to avoid doing anything too high-profile. I didn’t want anything that would make the news, have the news crews at the courts seeking holo footage of my trial. That would make it impossible to edit myself out of existence. I aimed to stay below the radar.

  But just sometimes, an opportunity comes along that’s too good to resist. A plan so devious that it would almost be a crime not to carry it out. There had been a couple of those, over the years.

  Plan C, then, was to get the hell out of Dodge. Were that necessary, I’d have to assume that my electronic credits would be worthless. My accounts frozen, my lines of credit cancelled. The only form of wealth I could retain would be that I could carry with me in the form of cold, hard metal. Platinum. Two million credits worth, to be exact.

  In – I glanced up at the countdown timer – four-and-a-half minutes, I would be outside the location in which it was, for now, safely stored. Completely unable to gain access. Nine minutes after that, the robot would arrive. The robot that did have the means of access. Unless I could think of a plan before then, my two million credits would be gone.

  I mentally slapped myself. This was no time for feeling sorry for myself, this was a time for thought. Quick thought. I looked across at Saira.

  “Theorise identity of robot.”

  This was tricky. I could not share with Saira my somewhat extra-legal status. She would therefore not know that the robot could be working for the police, cutting off my means of escape before they moved in to arrest me. She would be theorising with incomplete data. But she could at least work on the alternate theory: that this was a thief rather than a thief-catcher.

  “Query,” she said. “Have you ever revealed to anyone, however indirectly, your possession of the platinum?”

  “Never,” I said.

  “Or provided any hint or clue that could possibly be extrapolated?”

  I was about to answer with an equally firm denial, then stopped. There had been one diversion from my determination to maintain a solo existence, confiding in no-one, trusting no-one. But that had been a long time ago. Besides, I’d never told her anything. Just that one conversation when–

  But no. There had been no specifics, just a hint that if she really wanted to leave Earth and settle elsewhere, that credits needn’t necessarily prove an insurmountable barrier. She knew nothing. And that was years ago now.

  “No,” I lied, to avoid a detour down a fruitless path.

  “Your hesitation suggests otherwise.” Saira had the programming to be tactful, but I’d instructed her not to use it with me. I needed her honest analysis. It was frustrating that I couldn’t provide her with the full facts, so that her analysis could be properly informed, but there were limits to the reprogramming that could be done. The core programming that required her to report criminal activity was locked into her read-only firmware.

  “Disregard possibility,” I said.

  “Same query with regard to any of the three locations.”

  “Negative,” I replied.

  “That leaves two possibilities,” she said. “One, some form of surveillance. Since you have visited location 1 only once, that surveillance must have been in place at the time of that visit.”

  That one made no sense to me. That had been a long time ago. If it had been a thief, why wait so long to steal the platinum? And if it had been the authorities, why not arrest me there and then?

  “Seems unlikely,” I said, sharing only the thought about a thief moving in without delay. “And possibility two?”

  “Assumed facts are in error and no real breach has occurred. For this to be true, one of two systems has been compromised. Your main computer, at home. Or me.”

  I didn’t like either of those possibilities.

  I glanced up at the countdown timer. Just under two minutes.

  “Skycar, maintain a holding position as far out as possible while maintaining long-range visual surveillance of location one.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  The Skycar continued its journey for a further sixty seconds that felt more like minutes, then rapidly decelerated. It set itself into a hover, and switched on the holo projector to display an image of the exterior of location 1.

  Location 1 appeared to be a large and perfectly uninteresting boulder in a long-abandoned quarry. I had gone to a great deal of trouble and a not insignificant expense to ensure that it appeared that way – not just to human eyes but to all forms of electromagnetic scans. You could even chisel a piece of it off, and any
lab test you cared to run would report it as solid rock.

  Most of it was. But apply the key at just the right angle in just the right place for just the right length of time and a completely undetectable join would make itself visible. A narrow tunnel into the rock would appear, just large enough for a man and an empty bag to enter, and the same man and a full bag to exit.

  I glanced up at the countdown timer, indicating the time it should take to get from location 2 to location 1. It was reading 1m 46s.

  “Traffic?” I asked the Skycar.

  “33 Skycars and 319 ground vehicles are within a five-mile range. None are headed directly toward location 1.”

  It was possible, I supposed, that the robot could take an indirect route, but there would be no reason for it to do so.

  I alternated my gaze between the holo view of the boulder and the countdown timer. 1m 32s.

  “Traffic heading directly towards us,” reported the Skycar.

  “Identify,” I said.

  “Transponder and markings both indicate a Police patrol vehicle.”

  This was not good. This was very not good.

  “Just one?” I asked. If the police were onto me, there ought to be a lot more than a single patrol vehicle.

  “Affirmative.”

  1m 21s.

  “Incoming radio transmission from patrol car,” announced the Skycar.

  “Display our identity and accept,” I said.

  The instruction told her to display on the screen in front of me the details of the owner of the transponder code we had identified. I was William Francis, a 51 year old artist with a wife and two children. Further biographical details were displayed below.

  “Identify yourself and state the reason for pausing your journey at this point,” the radio instructed.

  “I’m William Francis,” I said. “I’m just looking at the sky, the cloud patterns. I might use them in a piece I’m working on. I’m an artist.”

  There was a pause.

  “Very well,” came the terse reply.

  “The patrol car has left,” reported the Skycar.

  I looked again at the holo image of the boulder. Nothing and nobody was anywhere close to it. I switched my gaze to the timer. 0m 51s.

  “Any sign of incoming traffic?” I asked the Skycar. It was a pointless query: if anything had been approaching the boulder, it would have told me.

  “Negative.”

  0m 20s.

  I sat and waited.

  0m 10s.

  Still nothing.

  I watched as the timer switched into single digits. 9 … 8 … 7 … 6 … 5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … 1 … 0.

  I looked at the holo projection of the boulder.

  I had set the timer based on the fastest possible journey using the fastest-available Skycars. It was possible the robot was using a slower Skycar, or that it was making a more law-abiding journey than the one on which my timings were based. The fact that it hadn’t arrived yet didn’t mean that it wasn’t going to. There was nothing to do but wait.

  Five minutes later, still nothing. By this time, a powerful Skycar on a law-abiding trip should be here.

  “Put us in a traffic pattern that keeps us within range,” I told the Skycar. I didn’t want to attract further police attention by sitting in one place for too long.

  Ten minutes later, nothing. Even an ordinary Skycar making a leisurely trip should have reached there by now.

  A further fifteen minutes passed as we made leisurely circuits of the area. Nothing had approached the boulder.

  I made an executive decision.

  “Switch to remote monitoring and take us home,” I told the Skycar.

  The direct holo display flicked off and was replaced by one from three cameras embedded in the side of the quarry, each disguised as a rock.

  “Theorise,” I instructed Saira.

  “Disregarding extremely low-probability events, such as the robot being involved in a mishap during the journey to location 1–“

  I smiled. That was another thing I’d had to teach her. Give a robot full reign to theorise about something, and it will do so fully – including all possibilities, however unlikely. I’d had to make it clear to her that I wanted to hear only reasonable possibilities. I hadn’t quite managed to persuade her to always skip the disclaimer.

  Saira continued: “There are two main possibilities. The robot is, despite its knowledge of locations 3 and 2, unaware of location 1.”

  “That too seems unlikely,” I said.

  “Agreed,” said Saira. “I simply categorise it as less unlikely than an exceptional event of some kind.”

  “Go on.”

  “The remaining possibility is that the robot knows of the location and is for some reason deliberately not accessing it at this stage.”

  “Possible reasons?” I demanded. I could think of only one, and it wasn’t a pleasant one, but I wanted to see what Saira came up with. Again, she had incomplete information, knowing only that there was something of material value stored there.

  “One possibility is that the robot’s owner does not have immediate use for the contents, but simply wishes to be able to access them quickly on demand.”

  I nodded, but that one didn’t strike me as likely. If you had access to two million credits, you wouldn’t leave them sitting around.

  “The second possibility is that the intention is not to access the contents, but instead to communicate to you that person or persons unknown have the ability to do so in order to encourage your cooperation in some matter,”

  “Blackmail,” I said. It was the unpleasant possibility that had immediately occurred to me.

  “Yes,” said Saira. “In which case, we can expect contact soon, advising us of the service or services the blackmailer wishes you to provide.”

  I again cursed my paranoia. There was no way to recreate the key: it used a one-time code which could never be regenerated. The credits were lost to me. I wouldn’t make that mistake again, that was for sure.

  The journey home was uneventful. No contact had been made en-route, and there were no messages waiting for me. There was nothing do be done at this stage.

  I never was much good at waiting. One thing was certain: there was nothing to be gained from just sitting on my tush worrying about it. And if the two million credits were lost, then I’d better set about replacing them. That was going to require something big.

  I kept an encrypted file of plans in various states of readiness, from a few lines of notes about very rough-and-ready ideas I had no idea how to execute through to detailed plans that were more or less ready to implement and just needed a few minor details filled in.

  My plans were constrained by something I considered a bit of a nuisance, but I hadn’t ever managed to ditch: a conscience. I’d happily help myself to anyone else’s ill-gotten gains; would delight in stealing from the rich to give to the poorer, which is to say, me; and I had no compunctions at stealing from corporations, banks or governments, where the impact on any one individual would be too small to even calculate. But I drew the line at anything which would cause significant harm or pain to my fellow citizens.

  I wasn’t a greedy man. My nest-egg aside, I merely aimed to help myself to enough credits to keep myself in what I considered a modestly comfortable lifestyle and, equally importantly, keep myself amused.

  But I did like having a nest-egg. I had a number of smaller plans that were more-or-less ready to roll, but none of them were going to supply me with two million credits in one hit. Coming up with a way to do that was going to take some time.

  4

  Or not.

  It was while rolling my eyes at an item on the holovision news that the idea first struck me. England was an improbable mix of modern and antiquated. It was home to some of the top computer scientists in the world, for example, yet still had a monarch. Granted the King had only a ceremonial role these days, but he did still get all the pomp and ceremony of a bygone age.

  Includi
ng the Gold State Coach. Or horse-drawn carriage, to you or I. Built in 1792, it was as tastelessly garish as only something belonging to a monarch can be. Four tonnes of solid gold. Four tonnes of gold that would, according to the news report, be going on display at the Tower of London in five days’ time as part of special exhibition.

  “As a matter of interest, approximately how much is four tonnes of gold worth?” I asked Saira. Where credits were concerned, I sometimes liked to be precise, so the prefix would stop her giving me a tediously exact answer.

  “At today’s mid-market rate, approximately two hundred and six million credits,” she replied. So comfortably more than two million credits, then.

  “Sounds like it might be interesting to see. Find out the exact arrangements of this state coach display for me,” I told her. “Where it is now, exactly where at the Tower it is being displayed, when and how it is being moved. I may take a look."

  Rather a close look, ideally. Now all I had to do was figure out a plan for helping myself to one of the most precious, heavily-protected and instantly recognisable items in the country. I do enjoy a challenge.

  Which was just as well, as the project would involve one or two of them. I didn’t yet know the security arrangements for the carriage, but as a priceless heirloom of the state, used to ferry monarchs back and forth on grand occasions, one had to imagine that they might be reasonably robust.

  There was also the small matter of disposing of it afterwards. I liked to keep my emergency wealth in easily-carried, easily-converted form. Something seven metres long, four metres high and weighing more than four tonnes didn’t quite qualify. And finding a buyer for one of the most instantly-recognisable objects in the country wouldn’t be easy.

  But the idea’s the thing. Everything else is just a matter of sufficient thought and preparation.

  “I have the details you requested,” said Saira.

  “Thanks – send them to my jotter and then you can recharge and shut down,” I told her. “I won’t be needing you for a while.”

  More accurately, I needed to work without being observed by a companion whose view of the law was somewhat more pedantic than my own.