Dead Letters Anthology

by Conrad Williams

  ‘So who’s left?’

  ‘Just me, bro.’

  ‘That’s crazy. What do you do when your shift ends?’

  ‘The program takes over. It even kicks in when I go for a piss. There’ll come a point when I’m not needed here at all.’

  Except in situations like this, Roy thought. ‘You get any problems with the separator? We’re still trying to figure out why we had raw sewage hitting the ocean. Kids are going to be swimming in a lot of dead fish tomorrow.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ said Raj. ‘I ran diagnostics on every square centimetre of the thing and found nothing. Actually, that’s not true. I found this.’ He extricated himself from his mesh chair and shook out a plastic envelope. ‘Any guesses?’

  On the table lay a small irregular sphere of pocked beige material, aerated like a solidified chunk of latte foam.

  ‘Igneous rock,’ said Roy. ‘Cooled lava. Except this isn’t a volcanic area. Can’t imagine what else it would be. Maybe an old meteorite. This whole coastline is littered with them.’

  ‘Could be the problem.’

  ‘There’s no way that could have beaten the filtration system and split a pipe.’

  Raj set down his taco and wiped his fingers on his T-shirt. ‘True, unless it was organic and flexible and sentient. Touch it.’

  Roy reached out his index finger, expecting to encounter the rock’s hard surface. His nail sank in up to the cuticle. He hastily withdrew his hand. ‘What the fuck?’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine. It smells of ammonia, but that may just be absorption. It’s not the only one. They’re all over the place, immediately beneath the Atlantica’s pipework. First time the mappers picked them up I thought I was just seeing gravel. Then I ran an expanded view and found millions of them. I mean, millions.’

  ‘They couldn’t have been there before.’

  ‘What I said.’

  ‘What do they do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nothing. If they can move I’ve missed it. All I know is they’re wet to the touch, they stink and a few hours after you leave them out from the ground they go hard. I posted a sample to Liz Peabody at the Marine Biology and Ecology Research Centre, Plymouth University, but I haven’t heard anything back.’

  ‘Tell me you didn’t use Royal Mail.’

  ‘I know, I’m a douche. It was late.’

  ‘Two billion euros’ worth of tech here and you used a Victorian postal service.’

  ‘What else was I gonna do? It had to physically get there. She’s the only person I know who could tell us if it’s natural or man-made.’

  ‘What do you mean, man-made?’

  ‘I thought maybe a leaked by-product.’

  ‘You didn’t say anything to the Guangzhou team about this, did you?’

  ‘No, man. I want to keep my job for as long as possible.’

  ‘Did you see the pipe fracture happen?’

  ‘No, I told you, I was sitting right here in front of the screens, and nothing. If it had been something as simple as a sticky valve it would have shown on this.’ He tapped the monitor. ‘Then it would have rerouted itself. But it didn’t, so there must have been two errors.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘A physical issue with one of the outfall pipes, and a simultaneous glitch that prevented it from showing in the diagnostic.’

  ‘That’s kind of unlikely, isn’t it?’

  ‘Unless there’s a problem with the program that we’re not picking up on, so when a malfunction actually does occur we’re not seeing it. Because of that thing.’

  ‘You mean some fucking Quatermass-style piece of space rock that can get itself inside a hair crack and simultaneously interfere with the electronic output? Jesus, Raj, can we go back to the real world? The whole system could go down without you seeing it. Have you talked to anyone internally?’

  ‘They say they’re going to put someone on it, but no sign yet. I thought it was weird that nothing – and I mean nothing – showed up as a fault, but this is beyond my field.’

  Considering the hotel was primarily controlled by a complex web of overlapping computer programs, Roy had always been surprised by how few technicians they had on hand. The company’s faith in technology was touching but, in his opinion, hardly deserved.

  ‘If a foreign object gets into the soil pipe – and it happens if there’s a temperature fail, because this stuff starts to solidify if it falls a few degrees – it should show up on here, but yesterday…’ Raj faltered, suddenly aware that he was speaking to someone in a different department.

  ‘I’m not going to say anything, Raj. It stays in this room, okay? I’m assuming it hasn’t escaped your attention that the launch is less than twenty-four hours away. You have to call Elizabeth right now and get a diagnostic, assuming she got the package.’

  ‘I tried calling but it went to voicemail, so in the meantime I looked at the regulators in the primary sedimentation treatment tanks. If one of those fails the entire resort will be ankle-deep in shit. The point is that it won’t show up here. If there is a problem, it’s invisible. The screens show everything clear and normal. So I ran a deliberate fail I could pinpoint.’ He tapped the corresponding monitor. ‘Nothing. Now, that’s not right.’

  Roy studied the diagrammatic representation of pipework and cabling, laid in a 3D matrix of blues, greens and yellows, but he couldn’t see what Raj saw. ‘Nothing unusual came up here at all?’

  ‘If I had to take a guess,’ said Raj, ‘I’d say that thing managed to freeze the program and overwrite it, but I can’t see how. It’s a fucking rock.’

  ‘All right, all right, let’s try to look at it logically.’ Roy breathed out slowly, pressing his hand against his chest, and started again. ‘For the three years that this hotel complex was being constructed, nobody came across anything geologically unusual.’

  ‘No, that’s the point,’ said Raj. ‘I don’t think they were there.’

  ‘Then where the hell did they come from?’

  Raj raised a hesitant index finger at the ceiling, then lowered it to the ground.

  ‘Great, so we have a lump of lava with bio-electrical sentience burrowing under the biggest hotel resort ever to open in this country. It’s got good timing, I’ll give it that.’ He looked back at the spongiform rock doubtfully. ‘I’ll get someone to come and take a look, off the record. That way nobody gets in trouble. But really? I mean, really? If you’re fucking with me and that turns out to be a dried mushroom from your pizza, you’re a dead man.’

  ‘I’m not, Roy, and I’d appreciate it. But you’d better make it soon because I can’t tell what’s going on out there. Everything looks straight.’

  Roy left Raj staring at the immobile screen, a lone figure in charge of the biggest waste management resort project in the country, and its most lethal potential hazard.

  * * *

  The red chrysanthemums were already beginning to wilt in the early evening heat. The main stage of the Atlantica had been sewn with sixty thousand of them, imported from Amsterdam and arranged in an immense ziggurat by a florist from London. Ice-water misters sprayed the seated guests every twenty seconds. The Minister of Culture’s speech had been followed by a few mystifying English phrases learned by rote from the Chairman, Mr Lau. The Sheikh’s representative for business development talked about Middle Eastern finance leading the way in eco-tourism, and the Russian head of the International Finance Group for Advanced Technology spoke about an epoch-defining moment for computer-designed architecture. The Russian delegation vigorously applauded as instructed.

  The international press were impatient for the spectacle to begin. Waiting in the wings were the evening’s hosts, two fading Hollywood stars who had been lured to the event with the promise of support for their favourite pet charities. The line-up of acts had not been confirmed until the day before, when the level of security risk surrounding the opening could be officially confirmed and communicated to the PR chiefs who controlled their stars’ m
ovements. The actors and singers who had got cold feet and pulled out were said to have undergone scheduling clashes.

  Roy was anxious for the event to be over. As he waited in one of the many hospitality suites with the other engineers and architects he forced himself not to think about what could be going wrong just beneath the surface of the resort.

  The geologist had duly appeared and registered mystification. If the igneous particle had once been alive, it was not now, and had hardened solid in the temperature-controlled air. Raj chose not to come up to the hospitality suite. Someone else had smoothly slipped into his empty space. No gaps could be allowed to show in the organisational structure.

  An Arabic singer had taken centre stage in a flowing silver diamanté dress and hijab, and had just started miming to her most popular hit when the power went out.

  At first Roy thought that the outage had only affected the stage, but when he looked around he realised that the entire resort was in darkness. The crowds remained silent, expecting some grand display, fireworks or computer-choreographed fountains, but as the seconds passed it grew incrementally warmer and quieter. The ice-mists were no longer working. Somebody tapped him on the back.

  ‘Roy, come with me.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘It’s better we talk where we can’t be overheard.’

  Raj Jayaraman led the way back into a makeshift service corridor that connected with the side of the hotel. ‘The power is out through the entire fucking complex. I mean everywhere. You understand what this means?’

  Roy realised the implication at once. Different sectors within the resort had their own generators in case the main power grid should fail, so it was impossible for two areas to lose power at the same time. There was only one thing that united them: they shared the same computer operating system. The network was still being patched after a number of security flaws had been discovered, and the upgrade wouldn’t be finished until several hours after the opening.

  ‘It feels like the OS has been attacked, and the power killed from a point inside the resort,’ said Raj.

  ‘Has anyone been out to Unit Two?’ asked Roy. The Atlantica’s secondary IT resources were handled from a secure unit further along the coastal highway.

  ‘There’s a team on its way there right now, but I don’t think they’ll find anything. The problem’s here.’

  Raj ushered Roy into a bare-walled concrete operations office and closed the door. ‘This is not just electricity,’ he said. ‘All of the resort’s utilities have been shut down.’

  ‘How is that possible? I thought the system was foolproof.’

  ‘There’ll be time to discover how this happened later. Right now we have a serious problem developing. There are two hundred VIP guests inside the hotel on the mid-level viewing floor. The lights are still on inside because there’s an emergency generator on the roof.’

  ‘I didn’t think they were opening that viewing floor to anyone,’ said Roy. ‘There are still some windows missing. H&S must have had a shit-fit.’

  ‘The guest invitations were increased at the last minute. They had nowhere else to put them.’ He indicated the blank closed-circuit screens. ‘The atrium doors have sealed and the air-conditioning has shut down.’

  ‘The air-con was never designed to be turned off, only to go down to its lowest setting,’ said Roy. ‘You know the ground-floor windows can’t be opened. Anyone left in there will run out of air.’ The hotel atrium was hermetically sealed to prevent cold air from escaping. All the floors were sealed off from one another, except for a series of service airlocks.’

  ‘How long do they have?’

  ‘I can give you a rough estimate. Have the emergency services been called?’

  ‘Mr Lau is anxious to avoid creating a public disturbance. He has all of the directors here from Guangzhou, and can’t lose face in front of them.’

  ‘He’ll lose more than face when those people start passing out. You need to call in the fire service now. You don’t have to tell them everything.’

  ‘You know I can’t do that without Mr Lau’s approval.’

  ‘Then you need to call him, Raj.’

  ‘There must be something you can do.’ Raj was sweating pints. ‘I cannot trust anyone else to handle this problem.’

  ‘Let me go over there,’ said Roy. ‘If the OS is down I can only do the same as anyone else – try and break the doors in.’

  ‘Yes, but you need to do this without—’

  ‘Without any fuss? I don’t know, Raj. Somebody has to keep the crowd from suspecting anything. There’s a very expensive PR team out there waiting to be told what to do.’ He called Davenport.

  ‘What can we say?’ asked Davenport when Roy had finished explaining the problem.

  ‘Get them to make an announcement. Use an American, they always sound more formal. Don’t try to make light of it, but don’t tell them any more than they need to know. There are candles – get every performer to carry two each on stage and continue the show acoustically. Make it look like a deliberate fallback plan.’

  ‘We can’t do that. The whole thing’s on playback. They can’t sing.’

  ‘Jesus, they must be able to do something – what the fuck were they employed for? You have a lot of people out there standing in the dark and any minute now they’re going to start getting antsy.’

  Roy left the office and headed for the Atlantica. He could see dark figures moving behind the smoked glass of the hotel’s upper windows, but had no way of getting to them. He rang Davenport back. ‘Who do we know who’s on the viewing platform? I need a list of mobile numbers.’

  Although the ground-floor doors could be released from outside, the fail-safe system relied on swipe-cards that needed to be reset, and the screens were still a scramble of static. An engineer called Darroll Jones was working inside the only IT suite that remained on-site. Roy called him.

  ‘Darroll, why isn’t the override generator program responding? Is it just a crash and reboot?’ He was waiting for Davenport to contact those employees trapped inside the building, and felt powerless to take action.

  ‘The attack isn’t on any single part of the resort’s access protocols,’ the stocky Welsh IT engineer explained. ‘It’s on the system as a whole.’

  ‘That’s not possible, is it? There must be hundreds of separate components.’ He knew it would take a small army to sabotage the mainframe, all armed with the right codes. A single mistake anywhere would trigger warnings.

  ‘This hasn’t been carried out by a single person,’ Jones replied. ‘It’s the work of a very large group with a lot of inside knowledge. Has to be. But that doesn’t make sense. The information is way too protected for any outsider to get hold of it.’

  The words ‘large group’ triggered a response. He thought of the Atlantica built on a bedrock of stone that somehow wasn’t stone at all, that could liquefy and become something else, all the while emitting electrical pulses.

  ‘How much air do they have in there?’ He looked up at the darkened windows.

  ‘I’d have to work out the building’s cubic capacity but—’

  ‘Take a guess.’

  ‘With so many people inside, maybe two hours. The heat will make a difference.’

  One of the senior engineers had found him. ‘Roy, there’s a flaw in the glass near the ground-floor reception area,’ he explained. ‘One of the seals came down a couple of nights ago and we replaced it with a temporary plastic resin. There’s about three metres of it.’

  ‘Are any of the JCBs still on-site?’

  ‘There’s a loader and a couple of speed tractors nearby.’

  ‘Can you get someone to bring over whatever’s the heaviest?’

  The yellow steel tractor had trouble making it through the milling crowds. With the exit signs no longer illuminated, some spectators were starting to search for ways out of the grounds. A swell of raised voices was washing through the site now.

  ‘Come with me,’
Roy told the engineer, hopping into the tractor cab and throwing its lights on high-beam. ‘Can I see the replacement resin?’

  ‘No, it’s the same colour as the normal seals.’

  ‘Then I need you to point it out to me.’

  The glass angles of the Atlantica’s grand lobby were picked up by the tractor beams. People moved out of the way, puzzled by the appearance of the tractor. ‘There,’ said the engineer, ‘to your right.’

  Roy could make out a thin grey strip connecting the panels. He pumped the tractor into high gear.

  ‘You’re just going to ram it?’ asked the engineer, disturbed.

  ‘Only to push the plates far enough apart to admit air. There’ll be bigger problems starting in a few minutes if this place doesn’t get back online fast.’

  They buckled up as the tractor shot forward, slamming into the join. The plastic strip gave slightly but refused to break. He put the tractor in reverse and tried again. He could feel the crowd shifting apprehensively behind him. This time, the tractor punched the seal out. Roy looked up and saw that one of the glass panels had been separated from its surround.

  He span the tractor and raced it back as the sheet fell, exploding around him in a million iridescent shards, like crystal rainfall. The spectators at his back were agitated now and seeking to move away, animals sensing their journey to the abattoir. There were shouts. Hundreds of mobile phone screens wavered in the dark, like the audience at a rock concert. Roy parked the tractor and ran back to the security stand, where he found Raj.

  ‘We have to evacuate the entire park right now,’ Raj warned.

  ‘We can’t do that. You won’t be able to get the gates open.’

  ‘Then we’ll need to find a way. What about manual overrides?’

  Roy shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. Could the aquarium blow out?’ A vast marineland of sharks, rays and thousands of tropical fish ran along the rear wall of the viewing deck, extending three floors up.

  ‘The glass will hold. It’s a foot thick. But the tank doors aren’t up to spec. They’ll punch out first and the cubic capacity of that thing – without operational limiters, the water pressure will just keep building. By now it will already be way into red. And the gardens—’