by Mark Walden
‘I wish to offer my assistance,’ Wing replied. ‘And I did not believe that my offer would have been accepted while we were still at H.I.V.E.’
‘You were right about that,’ Raven said with a sigh. ‘I can’t take you with me. My . . . mission is much too dangerous.’
‘I know you are going after Otto,’ Wing said calmly, ‘and you know that I can help you.’
Raven stared back at him for a few long seconds and then sighed.
‘It’s going to be completely pointless arguing with you about this, isn’t it?’
‘Oh yes,’ Wing replied with a tiny smile, ‘quite pointless.’
‘And if I leave you here, you’re only going to get into more trouble. I suppose I could just render you unconscious and handcuff you to a bulkhead,’ she said, raising an eyebrow.
‘You are welcome to try,’ Wing said calmly.
Raven considered her options. Nero would probably be furious with her if he knew that she was even contemplating taking the boy with her, but there was something in Wing’s eyes that told her he would not take no for an answer. Besides which, she had been personally responsible for much of his tactical training since he had arrived at H.I.V.E., and she knew that he was exceptionally capable for someone so young. For a moment she thought back to what she had been doing when she had been the same age as Wing, and she realised that there was really very little difference.
‘OK, you can come with me,’ Raven said with a slight frown, ‘but if you slow me down, I’m leaving you behind.’
‘I shall try not to be a burden,’ Wing said, bowing his head graciously.
‘We have to do something about that uniform though,’ she said. ‘You’ll stick out like a sore thumb.’ She looked him up and down for a moment, then reached into one of the kitbags on the floor and pulled out a pair of trousers identical to the ones she wore. She threw them to him.
‘Lucky for you I carry spares,’ she said, with a slight smile.
Wing unzipped his H.I.V.E. jumpsuit and placed it on one of the nearby seats, pulling on the trousers and putting his black uniform trainers back on. It was fortunate that he was almost as tall as Raven – the trousers were slightly too long on him, but otherwise they were a perfect fit. They were now dressed almost identically, the only difference being that the vest he had been wearing under his uniform was white. Raven picked up her twin swords and placed them carefully into a long kitbag, which she then slung over her shoulder. She picked up another identical bag from the floor and threw it to Wing.
‘The least you can do is carry your fair share,’ she said, putting on a black baseball cap and a pair of sunglasses. ‘Let’s go.’
She walked to the rear of the Shroud and slapped the button on the bulkhead that lowered the loading ramp. Light flooded into the compartment. Wing walked down the ramp behind her, the heat hitting him like a wall as his eyes adjusted to the daylight after the gloomy interior of the Shroud. They were in the shadow of an abandoned building, the sounds of bustling urban life coming from all around them. Raven pointed a small control at the Shroud and the loading ramp whirred shut, sealing the gap in its cloaking field and rendering it fully invisible again.
‘Welcome to Rio,’ she said with a smile.
Franz and Nigel watched from the elevated walkway outside their room as students poured into accommodation block seven.
‘What’s going on?’ Nigel asked as the confused, chattering mass milled around the atrium area below.
‘I am thinking that it is not being something normal,’ Franz said, frowning.
‘I was actually hoping for some peace and quiet,’ Nigel said with a sigh. Whatever was going on, he was in no mood to worry about it. His thoughts were with his father.
‘Come on,’ Franz said. ‘Let’s be going to our room.’
Nigel just nodded.
On the far side of the accommodation block the huge steel doors rumbled closed, sealing everyone inside.
Laura, Lucy and Shelby sprinted down the corridor towards the computer core.
‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Brand,’ Shelby said as they ran. ‘If we get caught out here during a lockdown, we’re going to be in detention for the rest of our natural lives.’
‘Yeah, well, that could be a real short time if we can’t fix this,’ Laura said quickly.
As they rounded the corner they saw a pair of heavily armed H.I.V.E. security personnel guarding the door to the computer core.
‘What are you doing here?’ one of the guards yelled down the corridor. ‘Get to your accommodation block now!’
‘You don’t understand,’ Laura said desperately, approaching the guards, ‘I have to get inside. There’s something happening to the core, something we have to stop.’
‘I wouldn’t let you in here under normal circumstances,’ the guard said angrily. ‘What makes you think that I’d be likely to do it during a security alert?’
‘We don’t have time for this!’ Laura yelled angrily. ‘I have to get inside.’
‘No,’ the guard said, pulling his Sleeper pistol halfway from the holster on his hip, ‘you have to get to your block. You can go conscious or unconscious, it really doesn’t matter to me.’
‘Come on, Laura,’ Lucy said, pulling at her elbow. ‘There’s no way that these guards are going to let us inside.’
The two guards’ faces went blank for a moment or two as the sinister whispering tones in Lucy’s voice destroyed their free will. The guard who just a moment before had been threatening them simply reached into his breast pocket and produced a card that he swiped through the locking controls next to the door, standing aside as they hissed open.
‘You’re too kind,’ Lucy said with a slightly nasty smile as the three girls entered the computer core.
Inside, the white monoliths that contained the central processing core of H.I.V.E. were throbbing with a low hum, steam rising from their surfaces as the cryogenic cooling system struggled to cope with the huge load that was being placed on them. Laura reached out to touch one, recoiling with a yelp as blisters quickly formed on her burnt fingers.
‘What the hell is going on?’ Laura muttered. She spotted one of the Professor’s displays lying on the floor nearby, still plugged into an exposed interface port on the side of one of the white slabs. She scooped it up and quickly ran one of the basic load diagnostics. The results showed that the core was currently running at over two hundred per cent of its designed capacity.
‘How long have we got?’ Shelby asked quickly.
‘At this rate,’ Laura said, not taking her eyes off the tablet display, ‘minutes.’
‘You’d better have an extraordinarily good reason for being here, Miss Brand,’ Dr Nero said as he walked into the room, followed by the Professor and a tall Asian man she’d never seen before.
‘I’m trying to help,’ Laura said. ‘Something really bad is about to happen.’
‘Believe me, Miss Brand,’ Nero said quickly, ‘you really don’t know the half of it.’ He turned to the Professor. ‘Can she help?’
‘Yes, I believe she can,’ the Professor said. Moving quickly over to the main display panel that was mounted on the wall, he pressed a button and a keyboard slid out from under the screen. ‘Miss Brand, please help me to isolate the safety-critical systems from the core network. We need to shut down the core without taking the power grid completely offline. Quickly, please.’
‘Why? What’s happening in there?’ Laura asked, gesturing at one of the hissing monoliths.
‘Overlord is happening,’ Cypher said.
Laura went pale. Otto had told her just enough about Overlord for her to know that they could not allow that to occur under any circumstances.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know your name,’ Laura said to Cypher.
Nero realised that none of the girls had seen Cypher unmasked, none of them had any idea who he was. He shot a warning glance at Cypher, shaking his head very slightly.
‘My name is not importan
t,’ Cypher said. ‘What’s important is that I can help you stop this.’
For a moment Nero considered trying to stop Cypher as he went over to a terminal on the other side of the room, but he quickly realised that none of them wanted to see Overlord reborn. The consequences would undoubtedly be fatal for them all.
‘OK,’ Laura said as her fingers flew over the glowing display screen, ‘geothermal controls isolated.’
‘Ventilation systems isolated,’ Cypher reported from across the room.
‘I can’t isolate the medical systems,’ the Professor said, looking over at Nero, ‘but if we shut down now, it’s going to deactivate all the equipment in the medical bay.’
The Professor did not have to explain to Nero what that meant. The machines in that area were keeping Darkdoom alive. Shutting the core down would kill him.
‘Proceed, Professor,’ Nero said, trying to keep his voice even. Diabolus would have understood.
‘I just need your master override code,’ the Professor said, standing aside to allow Nero access. Nero walked over to the keyboard, his fingers hovering over the keys that would shut down the core and kill one of his oldest friends.
He began to type.
‘Wait!’ the Professor shouted. The display above the keyboard had changed to a view from a security camera mounted high above the atrium of one of H.I.V.E.’s student accommodation blocks.
Five words were printed across the bottom of the screen.
STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING.
‘Why should I?’ Nero asked the air.
IF YOU DO NOT I WILL FLOOD ACCOMMODATION BLOCK SEVEN WITH A MASSIVE OVERDOSE OF TRANQUILLISER GAS. EVERYONE INSIDE WILL DIE.
‘Could it do that?’ Nero asked the Professor.
‘The shutdown might take thirty seconds to complete,’ the Professor said with a nod. ‘That would be more than enough time for Overlord to carry out its threat.’
‘That’s our block,’ Shelby whispered to Lucy. ‘Franz and Nigel are in there.’
‘If I don’t stop you, everybody on this island will die,’ Nero said as calmly as he could. ‘I have to weigh all of those lives against the ones that you’re threatening.’
DO NOT MAKE ME DO THIS.
‘What choice do I have?’ Nero asked.
Laura’s mind raced. Something about this wasn’t right.
Nero began to type again.
‘Stop!’ Laura yelled.
‘Miss Brand, now is not the time,’ Nero said, his finger hovering over the final character of the override code.
‘Don’t you see?’ Laura said quickly. ‘He’s bluffing. Why not just kill everyone anyway if he can? Isn’t that what Overlord would do?’
Nero hesitated just for a moment.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
Suddenly the monoliths all around the room fell silent. Slowly, one by one, they began to pulse with waves of blue light. A pencil-thin blue laser beam sprang from the long dormant white pedestal in the centre of the room, spreading out and forming a shape hovering in the air.
‘Good God!’ the Professor said under his breath.
‘You were expecting someone else?’ the hovering blue wireframe head of H.I.V.E.mind said with a small smile.
.
Chapter Seven
‘I knew it,’ Laura said, a broad grin on her face.
‘Don’t be so sure,’ the Professor said cautiously, approaching H.I.V.E.mind. ‘What is the most beautiful thing in the world?’
‘Energy and mass are equivalent and transmutable. E=MC2. Albert Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity. Introduced in his 1905 paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”. Special relativity is based on two postulates which are contradictory –’
‘Yes, that’s quite enough, thank you,’ the Professor said with a smile. ‘It’s him. That was the question and answer that I embedded in his personality matrix to make it possible to be sure that he had been accurately restored from a backup were it ever necessary. Only H.I.V.E.mind would know the correct answer.’
‘Would someone please tell me what on earth is going on here?’ Nero said, looking at H.I.V.E.mind with a mixture of relief and confusion.
‘I believe I can provide the answers you require,’ H.I.V.E.mind said, ‘but it may take some time.’
‘I don’t have anywhere else to be right now,’ Nero said, folding his arms.
‘You do not understand,’ said H.I.V.E.mind. ‘We do not have a great deal of time. That is why I was forced to take such extreme measures to stop you from interrupting my reboot process. I knew that until my personality matrix and vocal synthesiser were restored, you would not hesitate to halt the process.’
‘What do you mean?’ Nero asked, sounding slightly impatient.
‘I will attempt to explain. As you are aware, during our confrontation with Overlord aboard his orbital facility, Mr Malpense transferred my digital consciousness inside himself, and that was what allowed us to restrain Overlord within the virtual space inside his head. I then instructed Otto to delete both Overlord and myself, as it was the only way to destroy Overlord completely.’
‘I know that much,’ Nero said with a frown. ‘So how did you both survive?’
‘I did not,’ H.I.V.E.mind said, tilting his glowing head to one side slightly, ‘at least not in this form. I became a seed program, a hyper-compressed version of my current state. Intelligent, but not self-aware. It is hard to explain in terms that would make sense to an organic entity.’
‘But where were you stored?’ the Professor asked.
‘That was one of the things I discovered when my consciousness was merged with Otto’s,’ H.I.V.E.mind replied. ‘There is a device implanted within his cerebral cortex quite unlike anything I have ever seen. It is a supercomputer, largely organic in nature and of a design that is decades, if not centuries, ahead of its time. It was designed by Overlord while he was trapped inside the body of Number One and implanted into Mr Malpense when he was still in an embryonic stage. I am forbidden from designing any new computer system as part of my fundamental programming in order to avoid singularity.’
‘Singularity?’ Nero asked, looking at the Professor.
‘Well . . .’ the Professor said thoughtfully, ‘how to put this simply?’
‘Singularity is the point when an artifical intelligence becomes sufficiently advanced to design an improved version of itself,’ Laura interrupted quickly. ‘That version would then design a better version again and so on. Humans would quickly become irrelevant next to the super-intelligent machines that were created.’
‘Couldn’t someone have just said “not a good thing”?’ Shelby asked, sounding slightly confused.
‘Overlord had no such restraints, and consequently the computer implanted within Otto is extraordinarily powerful,’ H.I.V.E.mind continued. ‘I believe it to be the source of his unusual abilities. The device was designed as the eventual home of Overlord, and its raw computing power along with its ability to remotely connect with external electronic devices would have made him unstoppable. It is also where I was temporarily stored in my seed state, that is until Otto attempted to interface with the core here when he returned to H.I.V.E. and I was forced to transfer back into this system.’
‘What do you mean, you were forced to transfer?’ Laura asked.
‘As I explained before, in my seed state I was not self-aware. The process of my reconstruction was automatic, an embedded instruction. It was only recently, as I began to reacquire true consciousness, that I realised why I had survived and why I urgently needed to accelerate the process of my reconstruction. The enormous amount of processor power required for the task caused serious disruption to H.I.V.E.’s infrastructure.’
‘Why the sudden urgency?’ the Professor asked. ‘Why not take more time and complete the process without disrupting the systems? I could perhaps have helped if I had known what you were doing.’
‘There was not enough time for that,’ H.I.V.E.mind said calmly. ‘Wher
e is Otto?’
‘We’re not sure,’ Nero admitted. ‘Why?’
‘Has he been exhibiting unusual behaviour?’ H.I.V.E.mind asked.
‘I think it’s safe to say that,’ Nero replied, unwilling to say more before the students in the room.
‘He told me not long before he disappeared that he felt like there was someone else inside his head with him,’ Laura said, ‘someone who was giving him strength when he needed it most. I think he thought it might be some remnant of you.’
‘Then it is as I feared. You see, I was forced out of the computer in Otto’s head by the expansion of another seed program, one that would not tolerate competition for dominance of Otto’s consciousness,’ H.I.V.E.mind said. ‘The routine that rebuilt me, and that caused you so much alarm when you discovered it, was not code that I produced myself – indeed I am behaviourally restricted from doing so. It was code that was copied from the other seed that had tried to hide itself within the implanted supercomputer in Otto’s brain. My reconstruction was just an unintended consequence of another entity’s final desperate bid for survival, a consciousness that was intertwined with mine as it died.’
‘Overlord,’ Nero said quietly, feeling a cold chill in the pit of his stomach.
‘I’m afraid so,’ H.I.V.E.mind replied, ‘and that is why, unfortunately, Otto must be eliminated. Overlord is growing inside him even as we speak, and if it achieves self-awareness Otto will be unable to resist. Then every human being on this planet is going to die.’
Raven walked out of the car-hire office and beckoned Wing over.
‘Put the equipment in that car over there,’ she said, pointing to a black 4x4 on the other side of the car park. ‘I have a phone call to make.’
Wing tossed the two kitbags on to the back seat of the car and waited as Raven wandered away across the car park with the disposable mobile phone that she’d bought just a few minutes before pressed to her ear. She finished the call, snapped the phone shut and dropped it in a nearby litter bin.