Two years ago, Wickerman had written a lean, but complex piece of code which was built into an update of a free messaging app. Since its launch, the ‘anonymous’ feature offered within the app had proved very popular with terrorists, as well as teenagers and cheating spouses. Wickerman’s code alerted Homeland Security every time certain key words were mentioned in chats, sending the conversation thread, all history and the current location of the cellphone. Many terrorist threats had subsequently been eliminated before getting past the planning stage, but the government knew if anyone ever found out about the hidden code in the app, their tactical advantage would be lost. And it was more than likely that the American people would have a thing or two to say to their leaders once they discovered their right to privacy had been so blatantly undermined.
The US Government had nothing to fear from the designer they’d used. Wickerman was never going to talk about his patriotic piece of coding. His liking for long walks during the day, often stopping to sit on benches in parks, sometimes enjoying an ice-cream, had been meticulously documented and photographed by Homeland Security for months before they’d approached him. The photographers had been briefed to capture as many images as possible with children in the frame. Of the thousands of photographs taken, a few dozen showed the subject looking in the direction of the children. When they recruited him, they didn’t waste time appealing to his patriotism. They just showed him the photographs, along with some signed statements from children, attesting to the inappropriate games he had played with them in his home. His angry protests had been understandable, but a call from a prominent judge who had assured him his guilt would be established beyond reasonable doubt in any courtroom had produced the desired effect. All the fight went out of him. Wickerman took the job—and generous settlement—offered by his government, and bottled up his horror and bitterness at the betrayal of justice he had unwittingly brought down on himself.
Mason’s offer to Wickerman was accepted quickly, with very little protest. Wickerman still wanted his freedom. Mason simply showed him all of the evidence he had accumulated about his work for the government, and assured him it would be made public if he refused.
“You will write the code for me and I will leave you alone,” whispered Mason. “I have no interest in making your life more difficult. I just need you to do this. And I need it done quickly.”
“What exactly do you need?” said Wickerman. His words weren’t slurred, but his speech was slow and careful and he’d sounded awake when he picked up the phone. Mason despised the weakness of those who used alcohol to numb themselves to pain. Pain had been Mason’s constant companion for a very long time. He could have anesthetized himself to it with Manna, but he’d accepted it as part of what made him who he was. Embraced it, even. And here was this man, whose pain was purely emotional, drinking alone at 4am. Pathetic.
Carefully, thoroughly, his emotionless whisper betraying none of the contempt he felt, he described the coding project to the software designer.
“You want what?” said Wickerman.
Chapter 12
Upstate New York
Thirty-four years previously
Eliza Breckland sat in her car, thinking. She was worried about one of her students. The violent episode a few weeks ago had been out of character and frightening. Since then, he had been even quieter than he had before, barely engaging in classroom discussions, his face pale, his eyes downcast. The other students kept clear. They had every right to be scared, Davy Johanssen had spent nearly a week in hospital. He wouldn’t be coming back to class any time soon. Eliza heard he was transferring to another school.
She watched the small figure walk out of the school gates. She’d noticed he didn’t take the bus any more. He was apparently as keen to avoid his classmates as they were to avoid him. Eliza wasn’t one for gossip, but she had heard that the boy’s father had been missing this past week, the consensus being he was either on an extended drinking session or was chasing some woman. It wouldn’t be the first time, according to the whispers.
Eliza sat in her car for another few minutes before making her decision. She’d never experienced anything quite like this in her fifteen years of teaching. She’d long suspected some trouble at home with the young man in question. That, sadly, wasn’t uncommon. But there were other factors at work here, she was sure of it. Firstly, she knew this student was deliberately turning in work that under-represented his level of intelligence. She had observed his boredom in class as he grasped fairly complex concepts immediately, then had to wait for the rest of the class to catch up. He hid his boredom well, but Eliza was a shrewd woman and a talented teacher. Twice now in Math class, she had gone further than the class could be expected to handle, then dropped in a deliberate mistake. Each time, she’d watched the young man carefully as he flinched at her error. The second time, his eyes flicked immediately to hers and she knew he had worked out what she was doing, and why. He had avoided anything other than essential communication with her ever since. Sometimes, she’d seen him frown, as if in pain, once even excusing himself and disappearing to the bathroom for ten minutes. Something was going on.
Eliza made her decision and started the car, leaving the school and turning the same direction her student had taken. She would talk to him. Not at school, not at home. On neutral ground. Maybe she could get through to him. She suspected he was the most gifted individual she would ever teach. She couldn’t just turn away from him when he might need her.
After driving for a couple of minutes, she saw him in the distance, rounding a bend in the road. As she got closer, he darted a quick look left and right, then scrambled into the trees and out of sight. Without thinking, she accelerated and pulled onto the shoulder near where he’d disappeared. Getting out of the car, she scanned the tree line, but saw nothing. Then, at some distance, she heard the crack of a twig. She clambered up to the point she’d lost sight of him and, walking along the undergrowth, soon found a narrow track, almost completely hidden. She hesitated for a moment, then walked into the forest.
The incline was steeper than she’d anticipated and Eliza wasn’t as fit as she’d like to be, but she was a determined woman, and rarely, if ever, gave up. Her husband Mike often joked that when it came to stubborn, Eliza made mules look positively obliging. Not that this was a complaint—he loved her for her headstrong nature, for the way she utterly refused to be deflected from doing the right thing. He’d always said she would have made a hell of a cop, but her first love had always been to teach, to pass on knowledge. And anyway, as she’d told Mike as she’d squeezed his ass, he looked far sexier in the uniform than she ever would.
The afternoon was clear and a little cold, but Eliza soon broke a sweat as she tried to catch up with her student. He’d obviously been up here before, judging from the sets of footprints now clearly visible on the forest floor. She stopped for a minute to catch her breath. She realized he could even get home this way, although it would add more than a mile to his journey and would be much harder going. Perhaps he just needed solitude, she reflected. He was growing up, the challenges of adolescence were just ahead, and his home life might be far from supportive when it came to nourishing his precocious intelligence. Might be she was just sticking her nose in where it wasn’t needed. She shook her head. No, her gut told her the child was suffering, and she couldn’t let that go on without trying to help. She wiped her brow and walked on.
Another ten minutes went by before she realized she’d lost the trail. Fortunately, her own footsteps were clear enough for her to retrace her path. She stopped where the floor became more rock than dirt. This must have been where she’d lost him. She walked on a little more until she found the path both of them had taken to arrive at this point. The rocks made it hard—impossible, really—to tell which direction he’d taken. Eliza had carried on up the slope, but he must have turned away. The logical direction would be east, toward his home, so Eliza headed that way and, after a few minutes’ search, found another pat
h with more footsteps.
She heard the sound just as she began to follow the new path. It sounded like a distant shriek, abruptly silenced. It had an eerie, echoey quality that brought her skin up in goosebumps.
“What on earth?”
Eliza stood absolutely still, holding her breath, but the sound wasn’t repeated. She knew she hadn’t imagined it. As a young girl, she had once heard a deer make a similar noise, brought down by an inexperienced hunter. It had shrieked unbearably for five minutes, trying to drag itself away on a broken leg until the hunting party had caught up with it and ended its misery. Eliza had woken up every night for a week, crying at the memory.
It might have been a deer. It must have been a deer. Eliza shivered.
The sound had come from behind her. She swallowed hard, squared her shoulders and walked directly toward where she thought the sound had originated.
She came back to the rocky patch and looked around her carefully, listening hard. After a few minutes, she moved slightly uphill toward a huge rock half-hidden by trees. Reaching it, she followed its contours until it suddenly stopped, the rock cut away at right angles. For a second or two, she wondered what was going on, then she realized and followed the smooth surface until her suspicions were confirmed. Nearly invisible from any distance greater than ten yards, was the entrance to a mine.
Abandoned mines weren’t uncommon. She knew they had been active until the early part of the 20th century in the region, but this was the first time Eliza had actually seen one. The doorway she’d discovered was cut into the rock before her, a rusted iron gate blocking any further progress into the darkness beyond. She walked forward and inspected the barrier more closely. The iron was ancient but still strong. She listened in absolute silence for five minutes, but could hear nothing. She had no idea how far down the path on the other side of the gate might lead.
Eliza realized that her student would be long gone by now. She resolved to try to talk to him the next day, catch up with him before he headed into the forest.
She peered into the blackness, but it was so complete that her eyes couldn’t adjust at all. She turned to go.
After a few paces, she stopped, suddenly realizing what was wrong with what she had just seen. She stepped back to the gate. First of all, she examined the rusted hinges. They were covered in oil. Fresh oil. Then she knelt carefully on the rock and squinted at the padlock she’d half-glimpsed on the other side of the gate. She was right. It was brand new.
Eliza stood still for another minute or so, thinking. Then she took a pocket knife from her bag and, as she made her way back to the road, cut an X into the bark of about twenty trees, leaving a trail.
At dinner that night, she told Mike what she’d seen and heard.
“It may have nothing to do with him, and I may be worrying about nothing. But would you take a look?”
Mike looked across the table at his wife. If she was worried, there was bound to be a damn good reason for it. He squeezed her hand and smiled.
“It’s almost certainly nothing,” he said. “Dangerous mines are sometimes sealed up to stop folk from wandering in and never wandering out again.” He didn’t add the fact that the local sheriff’s department would have been notified if that had been the case.
“I’ll take a hike up there in the morning,” he said. “Now don’t you worry about it.”
She smiled in answer and he returned it, but he could see the concern in her eyes. He decided to take bolt cutters with him and put her mind at rest.
Chapter 13
Mexico City
Present Day
Three days after his encounter with Mic, the bureaucratic alien, Seb sat at the keyboard in Mee’s tiny studio and tweaked a low pass filter on a big, spacey synth sound he was programming. He was trying to evoke something that would make the listener feel transported to a new world. He wanted to make people feel the way he had felt when he’d first heard the music at the beginning of Bladerunner—a sound that conveyed a vast, futuristic landscape. He had already added some deliberately lo-fi drums to Mee’s vocal and the result was a grainy, gritty, dystopian vision that had a great hook in the chorus, where she repeated, “the lights in the city are gone, one by one, like stars behind clouds, and there’s nowhere to run”. For someone with such an appetite for life, some of Mee’s lyrics could be a little on the dark side.
He played back the intro again, eyes closed, lost in the music. When he felt an urgent tug at his sleeve, he jumped so violently the headphones fell off and landed on the keyboard, adding an incongruous major third to the chord.
“Seb!” said Mee, “quickly.”
He followed her through to the other room, where the TV was showing live pictures of a fire in New York. The caption read, “Unfolding tragedy as family trapped at top of notorious slum landlord’s tenement.” Someone was being interviewed as flames climbed up the building in the background. The shocked-looking man speaking was a resident of the burning building. He said the building had no working smoke alarms and the fire-escape had collapsed months ago but hadn’t been replaced.
“We all knew something like this would happen one day,” he said. “We’ve gone without heating, without water sometimes. Vashtar don’t care about us. He wants to force us out, so he can hike the rent up.” He looked back at the building, cowering as there was an explosion. Glass blew out from a third-floor window.
“Folk still trapped up at the top,” he said. “Felicia and her kids. Someone’s gotta do something!” The cameras panned across the scene. Fire trucks were in attendance, but it was clear the fire was too fierce for anyone to try to enter the building.
Seb2 brought up Walking options as Seb looked at the screen. At the side of his vision, he saw a live image of the building on the TV screen, then his point of view shifted as he looked inside. There were dozens of burning rooms flicking across his vision, each room the same, then—suddenly—the same room, but without a fire. In that room, Seb could see a young woman cooking, a baby on her hip, while three other children watched TV in the corner.
“Parallel universes,” said Seb2. “Don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.”
Mee looked up from the TV.
“Seb?” she said, “can you do—”. She stopped talking. Seb had gone.
***
Seb Walked to the rear of the building. He could make out the firefighters trying to find a way in, but even as he watched them, they backed away from the intense heat.
“Whole place has been subdivided inside,” shouted one to his boss. “Don’t know what materials they used, but it’s going up fast. Chopper coming out?”
“On its way,” shouted the other man.
“It’s going to be too late,” said Seb2. “Smoke inhalation will kill them first.”
Seb Walked to the undamaged apartment Seb2 had found. As he appeared, the infant riding his mom’s hip turned and saw him, smiling excitedly at the man who had appeared out of nowhere. No one else noticed him.
He Walked again, this time moving sideways, staying in the same apartment—but the scene was very different. Everything was burning. He felt no sense of heat as his clothes burned off and the outermost layers of skin on his body hardened and changed. As he moved, it felt like he was wearing some kind of plastic mesh, although his body looked no different. There was no sign of any life.
“They’re in the bathroom,” said Seb2. “The mother—Felicia—has soaked towels and put them at the bottom of the door.”
“Smart,” said Seb. “What can we do?”
“The fire crews can’t get close enough to extend the ladder at the back here,” said Seb2, “we need the fire escape.”
Seb ran to the window and yanked it up. The rush of oxygen caused a surge of heat in the room. There was a scream from the bathroom.
“Ayúndanos! Ayúndanos! Help us!”
“Stay calm, ma’am,” Seb shouted back as he looked down at the fire escape. “We’ll have you out of here in a moment.” There were metal
stairs attached to the outside of the tenement block, but they stopped four floors below the floor where they were now needed. Rusted bolts on the brickwork showed where they had once supported a staircase, but at some stage they had been removed. He looked down eight stories at the mess in the yard below. Clearly visible were the iron stairs that should have been in place outside the window.
“What the-,” thought Seb.
“Slum landlords,” said Seb2. “Later.” Seb reached out his hand and let his mind become instantly still.
When he had first begun to use Manna, he had needed to sound pieces of music internally, so that his mind could reach the balanced point of silence which enabled him to manipulate the power. Bach worked best. But since absorbing the Roswell Manna, Seb had only to turn his attention inward and still his mind, his thoughts not disappearing as such, just becoming background noise, like clouds around a mountain. Now, as he looked at where the staircase ended on the fourth floor, his awareness expanded to include not just his own consciousness and body, but also the building itself; its bricks, mortar, glass, wood, the millions of insects living inside and out, the ivy, moss and fungi that had taken hold in the cracks. His fingers twitched and the stairs extended themselves toward him. Every second that passed saw new steps growing organically out of the existing staircase, climbing rapidly upward like a flower seeking the sun.
When the steps were half a floor away, Seb ran to the bathroom.
“I’m coming in,” he shouted. “Stand back from the door.”
He pushed against the door and it slid open, revealing a terrified woman hugging a baby and three children as they cowered against the tub. Her eyes widened in disbelief when she saw Seb.
“Oops,” said Seb2. “Naked.”
World Walker 2: The Unmaking Engine Page 8