“Oh yeah?” said Markov, pushing the point against her skin until a small crimson bead appeared at the end of the steel. The oriental man shifted uncomfortably, and Doug noticed a strange glaze in his eyes.
“Stop!” shouted Doug. “I'll give you the key. Just don't hurt her.”
Markov looked across at him slyly, then withdrew the knife and went back behind the desk. He hit a few buttons and looked up expectantly.
“The pass code is Kaileena!” said Doug, glancing back at Nadia who had shut her eyes and was nodding in silent recollection of the word. “K-A-I-L-E-E-N-A.”
Markov punched the letters into the keyboard and hit return. Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. The laptop's hard-drive and fan rattled and whirred. Seconds passed. Markov's face, tight with anticipation, finally relaxed. He tapped a few more buttons and the haunting sounds of the Dream-Zone audio filled the room. He watched the screen for a couple more seconds, blinked and then stopped it. “Good boy!” he said coldly, taking a mobile out of his pocket and dialling. He nestled the phone between neck and shoulder, sat down at the laptop and started typing, his expression turning to one of earnest concentration, his tongue protruding slightly. “Hello!” he said, “Wong please...yes...Sergei Markov... okay.” He finished typing, then took the phone in his hand. ”Mr. Wong...Yes I have... email... That's right! Yes I just tested. This time good...okay...okay.”
As Markov hung up, the laptop's drive spun up again and started to rattle vigorously, as though something was writing to the disk. It drew Markov's attention also, an expression of confused horror falling across his face. It was obviously no backup. He punched angrily at the escape key several times, releasing a torrent of what Doug assumed to be Russian swear words. He tried Control-Alt-Delete, then swore again. “You!” he said suddenly, raising the shotgun from the desk and pointing it once more at Doug. “Whatever you've done, stop it now!”
Doug moved over to the desk and looked at the laptop. The screen had gone blank, but the disk was still working away like mad. He pressed a few function buttons in an attempt to restore video and then tried Control-Alt-Delete again. “It's locked. We need to switch it off and on,” he said depressing the power button to no avail. He unplugged the power lead and flipped the machine over.
“What you doing?” said Markov pressing the barrel to his temple.
“It won't turn off, the only way to stop it is to disconnect the battery.”
“Okay, do it!” he grunted.
The four waited in silence while the laptop started up again and ran through its system diagnostics. “That's not right!” said Markov sounding more desperate. “It's taking too long!”
Eventually the tests stopped and Doug examined the screen. “It can't find the operating system,” he reported, knowing this was not going to be taken well.
“What's that mean?” asked Markov, looking worried.
Doug took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “It means your laptop is screwed.”
At that moment Markov's mobile started ringing. He looked at the display. “Wong,” he said, cursing again in Russian, but ignoring the call. Suddenly the barrel of the gun was in Doug's chest again and forcing him backwards towards Nadia.
“You bastard! You did this!” shouted Markov, trembling with rage, the shotgun waving precariously in his hands.
“Dmitri gave you this file.” stammered Doug quickly, “If it contains anything other than Dream-Zone, it was Dmitri put it there, not me!”
“But you knew! You knew it contained virus. That's why you try rescue instead of sending key. You knew file was bad,” he shouted, sweat beading from his forehead as he threw nervous glances at the other man.
“I swear on my life, I didn't know,” pleaded Doug, wondering at the same time if that life was about to end.
“What about her life?” said Markov, swinging the front sight of the gun to within a few inches of Nadia's nose. “Would you swear on the beautiful Nadia's life?” His voice had risen to a demented shriek. His fingers whitened around the trigger and fore-end, his whole body wound like a tightly coiled spring. He was losing it, thought Doug. In a blur of impossibly fast motion, a deafening shot rang out, plaster was falling from a large hole in the ceiling at which the barrel was now pointing, the oriental man's hand clenched tightly around it.
“No!” said the man firmly, but calmly. “I cannot let you do that.”
“You're right!” said Markov, appearing to relax, but fixing the man with a frigid stare. “We should not do it here.” He yanked the gun free and turned back towards the desk. Then in one fluid movement, he spun around, the shotgun following in a wide arc. There was a flash, another explosion of sound, and Markov flying backwards, spinning to one side as he crashed into the table and collapsed onto the floor.
The stocky man looked on, a thin wisp of smoke hovering at the end of the pistol, still aimed at the crumpled heap across the room. On his face was a look of surprise, as though he had expected a different outcome. He then turned to Nadia pointing the gun towards her. “You!”
Suddenly Nadia's hands were inexplicably free, one gently guiding the weapon out of harm’s way and the other on the man's shoulder.
“You had no choice,” she said in an unfamiliarly soothing and authoritative tone, “He would have killed us all if you hadn't acted with such speed and bravery.”
Doug watched in open-mouthed awe as the man appeared to glaze over once again. “But don't worry,” she continued, “the heaviness you now feel in your legs and feet will eventually pass. Even though now and for the next twenty minutes you will find yourself rooted to this spot and unable to move, as though your ankles are set in concrete. Just let the heaviness envelope your whole body and sink deeper into relaxation.”
She pulled gently at the firearm. “That's right, let me take this burden from you, so you can relax properly.” The man calmly passed it to her with a distant smile. She then placed a hand on his forehead. “Now sleep!” she said.
“Quick!” she whispered to Doug with a wink. “Time to go!”
He started to mouth the first 'W' of 'What the fuck?' and then decided explanations could wait. They made their way past the stocky, slumbering statue out to the back terrace where the sledgehammer still lay on the concrete. “Wait a minute!” said Doug, “I need to get my phone back from Markov!”
“Leave it – Let's go!” said Nadia, pulling at his arm.
“We need it to call the police - I'll just be a second.” He re-entered the cottage and went over to where the Russian lay face down on the floor. A dark red stain was spreading out on the carpet from under his shoulder. He had seen the man slip the phone into the left inside pocket of his leather jacket. He rolled the body over onto its back and reached under the lapel feeling the mobile that had almost cost him his life. As he pulled it free, Markov suddenly grasped him by the wrist, his eyes and mouth springing open with a gasp. With all his strength, Doug smashed his free fist into the Russian's nose. He felt and heard the crunching of bone and cartilage. The hand that had gripped him loosened and fell to the floor with a thud. Doug sprang up and ran from the room.
Nadia was waiting at the door, the pistol still in her hand. “Now can we go?” she asked.
Doug nodded. “He's still alive, but unconscious I think.”
They ran back across the terrace towards the wooden shed. Doug had just reached the end of the wall as another shot rang out. From the corner of his eye he saw Nadia's body jerk forward as she fell, face down, the back of her blouse peppered with tiny holes. He threw himself down next to her, rolling her over and cradling her head in his hands. She was still breathing. The bloody figure of Markov was staggering towards them, the breech of the shotgun broken over his forearm as he fumbled in his pocket and withdrew two new cartridges. Doug looked for the pistol he had seen flying out sideways as she had fallen. It had skidded across the concrete and now lay a good thirty feet away under a tree. Markov followed his gaze across the terrace, and hastily inserted the first c
artridge. Not enough time! Dragging her around the corner, Doug picked up the garden fork. He heard the breech close just as the barrel appeared and started to swing towards him. He thrust the fork forwards and upwards as the Russian came into view. The two centre tines disappeared into the man's throat with surprisingly little resistance, his eyes bulging wide in disbelief. For a while he just seemed to stand there, mouthing silently like an ugly goldfish, then the shotgun fell from his hands and he toppled over backwards onto the concrete, two symmetrical jets springing from the puncture wounds like an ornate but macabre crimson fountain. Doug stood over him, clutching the fork and shaking uncontrollably. “I warned you!” he said in a trembling voice, as the pulsating jets lost pressure, and the last signs of life ebbed from the man's face.
Doug returned his attention to Nadia, who appeared to be having difficulty breathing. He switched on the apparently jinxed mobile and dialled 999. “Stay with me!” he said, reaching down and feeling her pulse. He rolled her onto her side where breathing seemed easier. Lifting the blood specked blouse, he examined her back. There were maybe two dozen small holes where the shot had punctured her skin. He covered her with his own jacket and lay down in front of her, gently caressing her hair. She let out a small noise somewhere between a grunt and a sigh, opened her eyes and curled her lips into a faint smile. “Are you going to kiss me or what?” she murmured.
CHAPTER 23
Peter was frustrated. The process of publishing an academic paper seemed to be all but closed to outsiders. During his tenure as a post graduate research fellow at Cambridge, he had co-authored a handful of interesting, but ultimately inconsequential papers at the periphery of string theory. With the backing of his professor, at the time a renowned theorist in the field, and their provenance from such a prestigious academic institution, all but one of the manuscripts had found print in reputable publications. Sadly, the professor had since passed away, and none of Peter's former peers appeared to carry any sway with the editorial review boards of today's leading theoretical physics journals, of which Peter had identified ten.
The first hurdle in the process was to satisfy an editor chosen by the journal's editor-in-chief. Two submissions had already fallen here, rejected out of hand by editors refusing to accept that an unknown name could succeed where so many before had failed. Peter doubted they had even taken the time to read it through, let alone try to verify his findings. The next obstacle was that of peer review, at which two or three scientists were chosen from a suggested list of peers. Peter had known none of the names so had simply picked those whose areas of research seemed most closely aligned to his own. Today he had just received a particularly vitriolic attack from one such unidentified peer. The major complaint seemed to be that he had provided insufficient justification for the intermediate conclusions presented in his construction of the ultimate theory. It was true that he had not shown every step of the process from ideation through to final hypothesis, but this was largely because such explanations seemed trivial and superfluous to Peter. Evidently, when it came to such things, one man's triviality was another's travail. On reflection, many of the recently published papers in the field dealt solely and extensively with matters which, to Peter, now seemed equally redundant. Whether the academic world's failure to appreciate his discovery was purely attributable to an inability to comprehend it, or whether there was an element of protectionism, was hard to say. There had always existed a keen sense of rivalry among scientists of every discipline. In the absence of large salaries – at least compared to industry – prestige and reputation counted for everything, and one of the surest ways of augmenting these was through publication of influential work.
Peter's hopes of attaining international acclaim as a theoretical physicist were slowly eroding. He found it baffling that such a potentially important hypothesis would not be afforded greater due diligence. Its radical nature had at least ensured a quick response, with just a couple of weeks having passed since its initial submission, but this was also undoubtedly part of the problem. With still a few more journals to try, his road to publication was not yet closed, but he was beginning to resign himself to the seemingly inevitable rejections that would follow. Only one set of feedback, though highly critical and, it had to be said, a little cynical in tone, had invited a revision of the manuscript, “fleshing out”, as they put it, the reasons for his selection of the initial geometry of space-time, as well as some of the subsequent assumptions. Making such a re-submission however would be tricky. He could not very well explain that these insights had come to him from exposure to a mind-altering video sequence, created by two people who were now dead. Such an admission would ensure that nobody in the scientific community ever took him seriously again - although he wasn't entirely sure that anyone had in the first place.
Unless he could establish how Dream-Zone was having the effect it had, he could hardly put it forward as an explanation for his insight - and quite frankly, he would much rather take the full credit himself anyway. His first assumption had been that it was enhancing the neural circuitry responsible for perception. In the same way that the separate audio and visual stimuli had somehow strengthened the pathways forged by past memory and experience, perhaps the combination video was working on higher cognitive functions within the brain. He had initially discounted the incident of the plasterer's bill as a lucky guess – perhaps aided by snippets of conversation overheard and registered in his subconscious, while the men had been working. However, the subsequent and astonishing experience of receiving thoughts and feelings apparently directly from the mind of a woman he had never even met, defied such an explanation. Instead, he had begun to examine ways of linking this new phenomenon to his discovery of the ultimate theory. If every point in the universe was effectively connected to every other through the higher dimensions of space-time, then could it be that human consciousness could also make use of these connections? Maybe human consciousness even relied on these higher dimensions. But if so, why did we not observe such things all the time? Of course, over the years, there had been many claims of so-called telepathy or extrasensory perception, especially during the drug-fuelled sixties and seventies, but none had ever been satisfactorily verified under laboratory conditions, and for this reason all but a handful of crackpots at the fringes of modern science had rightfully disregarded them. But on hearing from Doug how every one of the previous week's intuitions had been born out, leading directly to Nadia's recovery, here was surely incontrovertible evidence of the transmission of thought at a distance - in a word - telepathy. He had even tried to communicate ideas back to her, but for some reason this had proven more difficult. On “seeing” the cable ties around her feet and hands, he had tried to transmit to her, how such things could be unfastened using a sharp object pushed into the ratchet. Experience of electronic wiring systems over the years had made Peter quite familiar with this simple yet effective restraint, and he had been desperate to share this particular trick with the unfortunate young lady who, at the time, had been trussed up with them. Eventually, she had claimed to receive some such murky images in a dream, but with none of the clarity with which Peter had somehow tuned into her own thoughts.
The other thing that was puzzling him was why, out of all the billions of people in the world had it been Nadia's mind to which he had connected. Following the incident, he had tried reading others - Abigail's and then Isabelle's - but for some reason, these had remained curiously off-limits. In fact, since the kidnapping, he could no longer even make contact with Nadia's thoughts. If indeed our brains did connect through these higher dimensions, there were clearly barriers preventing crosstalk except under specific, and as yet unknown, circumstances, which appeared beyond his control. He had hoped that by sharing the Dream-Zone video with Doug, they would be able to experiment with these effects and determine more of the underlying rules and parameters under which they operated, but Doug was now claiming not to be affected. It was all very frustrating, and the only relief from all th
is confusion and uncertainty came during his increasingly frequent trips to the Zone. Whilst there, everything made sense. It was familiar, comforting and profoundly satisfying. In fact, such was the richness and intensity of experience that regular life had started to pale in comparison. He began to wish he could leave behind his drab, mundane earthly existence and retire permanently to this other place.
He gazed dejectedly through the study window at his neighbour's compost bins. The lid of one had been left off and flies were circling around the rotting scrapings of a recent meal. He turned to his computer and logged onto Twitter. In spite of earlier misgivings, he had become drawn to the service for reasons he still didn't entirely understand. In particular, he had become fascinated by some of the associated aggregation tools available on the web. Taking as input, the millions of random tweets from across the globe, these tools provided snapshots of distributed human consciousness, giving a certain level of insight into some of the shifting trends and attitudes of the times. Individually, the contributions were mostly banal and unstructured, but collectively, they hinted of something more recondite. In a way, the dissociated postings seemed analogous to the spurious thoughts and memories from which consciousness might emerge within the human brain. With this in mind, he had started working on his own aggregation tool based on the assumption that if the brains of all sentient beings (including – perhaps debatably - users of Twitter) were connected, then possibly one could tap into some kind of collective consciousness.
The phone was ringing. It was Isabelle. “Hi Peter, how are you?” she said, sounding cheerful, but a little apprehensive.
“Great!” he replied. “I've been taking a break from work to get back into some theoretical physics, and I think I've made just made a huge discovery. Just seem to be having difficulty convincing others at the moment.”
There was a pause and then, “Great – sounds – very interesting. How are Abigail and the kids?”
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