by Ian Williams
He could do nothing about that for now. Once he finished setting his things out in the way he wanted, he would see to putting his foot down. Hoping that the relay could hold on long enough for him to do something about it, led him to quickly focus on the job in hand. First he needed to make absolutely sure that those inside knew he was in charge. They would have to deal with him now.
Chapter 12
The Beacon Code
Craig and Saul had been left to fix the problem with the relay, after multiple reminders that everything depended on them doing so. Thankfully, there had been no repeat of the same disastrous outcome as earlier. So, on the whole, things were going much better this time.
“Is it working yet?” Phoenix asked, like someone impatiently checking on a repair man.
“Just hold on a minute,” Anthony replied. “I want an update. Craig, what’s your progress?” he said into his wrist screen.
Since the first attempt had gone slightly wrong they had moved back to the ground floor to allow the work to continue uninterrupted. They stood only metres away from the collection of hostages, none of who had the remotest clue about what the terrorists were up to. To a degree neither did Phoenix as she angled her head to see the screen. All she knew was that Anthony’s constant presence was causing her a major headache. She planned on slipping away unnoticed by now. That was never going to happen with him constantly by her side.
“We’re holding steady at 92%. That’s just above what we need,” Craig said through the screen, with a satisfied look to the power relay behind him. His eyes were surrounded by beads of sweat that traced the tattooed skull design on his face. Even through the small screen, Phoenix thought he looked evil.
A small amount of smoke escaped the base of the relay, but no-one reacted to it at all. Everything was evidently going to plan this time. If she had heard it right earlier then things were in fact going better than planned. So with the technology playing along nicely, it was time to enact the next phase.
Anthony nodded his approval to Craig and Saul. “Excellent work. Are we ready to send out the Beacon Code?”
“Yes sir. We should have the power to send it right across the entire city. We should see something happen pretty quickly afterwards. So everyone needs to be ready down there,” Craig said, with a look to Saul to make absolutely sure. “Just say the word.” Evidently Saul had agreed.
“You have it. Keep everything running smoothly up there. I want it held at 92% for as long as possible. If it drops below 89% then the Beacon Code may fail. Any problems, you give me a shout.” Anthony ended the call and began to wander away. “With me please, Phoenix,” he said.
“Oh, OK,” Phoenix replied nervously. She was confused by the sudden demand for her presence. If she knew any better she could swear he kept her close out of paranoia. Did he know what she was planning? No, that was impossible. She had not told anyone.
Anthony stopped and gave the hostages a sudden sideways glance. She was then called to heel with one click of his finger, which stopped and pointed to the floor beside his feet. Her obedience was required like never before. It was no coincidence that he did this so obviously in front of the others. He meant to crush her authority altogether.
Nothing suggested things had drastically changed between them. The argument from earlier felt like a distant memory, one forcibly pushed down deep. It was one she kept stored away for the moment she would choose to vanish. Still, without knowing why, she was keenly aware that he had chosen to keep her close.
“Follow me,” he said, before heading off in the direction of a nearby shop.
She was led into the middle of a comfy sofa store, selling ugly yet colourful furniture for those with too much money to know good taste. Their odd colour mixtures were indicative of the strange and garish tastes of city dwellers, of people she could never understand. She would not look twice at such designs.
A few of Anthony’s men leapt up out of their chosen resting places as soon as they spotted him and Phoenix enter. No breaks had been approved. Certainly none would be allowed in such a comfortable place such as that. They quickly moved their commandeered sofas out of the way and stood to attention. Behind them was a large hole in the roof of the small shop and rubble all about the surrounding floor. A thick cable, fed down from above, hung down through the almost perfectly circular cut-out. Its translucent casing allowed its internal wiring to be seen, like veins through skin.
Anthony ignored his men and stopped directly underneath the large hole. He pulled on the cable a few times, checking its tension, and then followed it down and along the floor. At the end it connected to a small cabinet on wheels, which housed the technological brains of the operation: a computing behemoth with a purpose Phoenix was not entirely privy to. Connected to this was a holographic projector that sat on top and awaited its time to shine.
Still by the large hole, she peered up to see the cable running all the way through the exact same shape cut out of the floors above. The last went through the roof of the building. Beyond that was the sky. If she shouted up through it, Craig and Saul would probably have heard her. “You made these with shaped charges?” she asked, pretending to be interested.
“Hmm, oh, no,” Anthony answered without as much as a glance in her direction. He spoke while kneeling by the box and tinkering with the flashing buttons inside. “The device we used scanned the density of the material underneath and sent vibrating pulses down through it to break it apart. The strength of the vibrations is automatically set by the device. Easy really.”
“Another new toy?”
“Not really. I’ve had it for a while. It’s been used before.”
“Cool, cool.” It was all she could think of in reply. The nonchalant way he acted had the side-effect of making her thoroughly anxious. “So, what’s this Beacon Code thing do?”
He stopped, swapped knees and then stared past her. It was not a look of anger, just more straight faced than usual. Considering the unexpected excitement he had shown when the relay blew, she worried his mood had suddenly shifted again. He definitely had something on his mind, she was sure of that. “We should talk, while things are quiet,” he said.
“Sure, what’s up?” Phoenix replied, expecting something bad.
For a short while he concentrated only on her, until his eyes quickly fell away again. “I need to ask you a question, and your answer has to be the truth.”
“OK, what is it?”
“Will you join us?”
The question made little sense. It still threw her off on a paranoid tangent that consumed her mind, before she thought to try and answer. She was one of them, but only to a degree. That much had been made clear on a few occasions already. Things had gone so well in the past hour. Now the time to make up her mind once and for all had finally arrived. If he did not suspect she was looking for a way out before, he could do after this. If she could not lie convincingly to him, her own plan would fail miserably.
“Well?” he asked her again.
“I’m here with you now, aren’t I? What more proof do you need?”
“Forgive me if I don’t yet believe you. When we succeed here today there won’t be room for doubt. You need to be with us completely or you won’t last the next stage. No-one that stands against us will after this.” While looking directly at her, he continued. This time he was unlikely to look away again, he was judging her every movement. “Perhaps if I reword the question. Will you kill again for us?” He focused on her eyes in particular as he spoke. He was looking for something in her reaction, either a twitch or a furrowed brow or two. Anything that gave her real feelings away.
“Kill again? If needed, sure,” she said without even a hint of guilt.
The truth was the polar opposite of her masterfully fabricated answer. Her insides twisted and shook with a violent force as she fought off the hidden emotions for control. Not one movement out of place was allowed. It took all of her strength to keep her face from showing any anguish or hurt from his
question. But she was on top of it. She knew it would be worth the effort in the end. With Anthony off her back she would then be free. It was only a matter of time before a chance arrived to leave.
“Good. Well, there are more ways for you to really prove it. When the time comes you will have to choose a side. I only hope you stick close to those who have kept you safe for these last few years. The other side will be a lonely one after Isaac returns. And as for your brothers. I want you to forget about them for now.”
She nodded in agreement. By now her outside and inside were acting as separate representations of the same being. One said yes, while the other told Anthony to go fuck himself – repeatedly. Her brothers were her only family. She was intelligent enough to have seen the trap well before it had been laid out in front of her though. It was her outside self that had answered, after having seen the only way out ahead of her. She would have to believe wholeheartedly in her own lie now. Almost as much as Anthony’s followers believed in Isaac.
She had heard all she needed from him. The decision to leave had been made already, this only removed the sense of guilt she had been feeling. “Are you going to tell me about this Beacon Code thing then?” she asked, moving the conversation swiftly away from her desire to throttle him on the spot, or maybe stamp on his windpipe a couple of times.
“I’m glad we can move on.” Anthony stood – removing her chance of squeezing the life out of him – and returned to the cable hanging through the floor. He yanked on it once more. Something about the way he kept on checking the cable told her he was slightly worried about its effectiveness. Of course she still did not know what it was for, only a loose idea. “What we call the Beacon Code is exactly that, a beacon,” he said, resting his hand on the cable at his side. “Each of the pieces of code we need, which are flying freely about the entire Simova network as MARCs, has a shared segment. We found out what these shared parts are for. They’re for when each is recalled. When the right signal is sent out they will follow it to the source. In this case, us.”
“So these things will come here?”
“Yes, seemingly plucked out of the air. We’re sending out the signal through the relay on the roof. It will call the MARCs to us. This cable is where we feed them to the computer over there.” He pointed to the wheeled computer at the end of the thick cable.
“What are they exactly?”
“Isaac, that’s what they are. I’ve told you before what we’re trying to bring back. He was the first and most powerful artificial life-form humanity has created. What Simova control today is nothing more than a servant system for lazy people too stupid to tie their own shoelaces. Isaac represented so much more than that. He was a God in comparison to us and we his worshipping flock.”
Shit! Phoenix thought, he actually believes this bullshit. Again she only allowed the totally-detached-from-emotion outside self to answer. “What are we doing with these entities when they turn up? We can’t store them.”
“You’re mistaken,” Anthony said, stepping over to the inactive holographic projector on top of the wheeled computer. He flicked a switch and a hovering display appeared in the air. It showed a complex code running at a blistering speed. “We will recombine what we catch here today. There are segments hiding throughout the UK’s whole network. Remember, Simova runs everything. Every single device we use today operates by receiving its power from the relays. They also get their data at the same time, hidden in the gaps between the power supply. It’s the same principle we used in Fibre Optic cables in the past, only this is wireless. They could be in every corner of the country.”
By now Phoenix struggled with a mind filled with techno-babble and iconoclastic gibberish. A God? This Isaac being was no such thing. Yet it had been confirmed that Anthony and his followers were a higher level of nutcase than she originally believed. If he was using his Isaac theology to control them all, then he was evil. But if he truly believed in it himself, then he could be orders of magnitude more dangerous to the world.
She saw it all as one ongoing test after his previous question of her loyalty had put her on edge. Her best chance of surviving was to go along with his crazy-talk. “That’s fascinating. So this plan of yours will gather all of these things together from around the country?”
“Not quite,” he said.
The highly excited scrolling code flashed across Anthony’s eyes as he stared deep into it. The look on his face was of a calm understanding: he saw order in the chaos. Both were also working much faster than they were letting on. His intelligence was not the only thing that made him dangerous though, his ruthlessness did too. She could not quite estimate just how much of a threat he posed to her and the rest of the population. At least she was now getting a better idea than she had before.
Before he chose his next words he let out a laugh; the kind that made it clear when someone was withholding something. “We’re the first, and we will catch what’s hidden within this city. This is just the beginning. The others are waiting.”
“And this Sentient Collector guy? Where does he fit in to all of this?”
“He’s nothing of consequence really. If he posed a threat before, he won’t do after today. Have we heard anything from the people we sent to locate him?”
“Nothing yet.”
“Shame. I’d rather have dealt with him by now. Never mind, they’ll run out of time soon enough. The problem will sort itself out.”
“Sir, they’re calling in,” one of his men called from just outside the small store. He waited for the two of them to respond.
Anthony had seen the man’s eagerness and was immediately overcome with joy. Something was beginning. “Come,” he said, waving her onwards. They left the wheeled computer cabinet behind and headed for the main shopping floor. Just before they exited the small store, Anthony turned back to the men caught taking a break earlier. “This will be the last time I find you all with your feet up. Do you understand?”
Each nodded. The warning was clear; the punishment too. If caught again, they would lose more than his respect. They would lose their lives. Anthony had become far too comfortable with handing out such threats. He had given her a couple already. They, on the other hand, would only get one.
The silence that had suddenly befallen them was only made worse by her new measure of Anthony’s superhuman ego. She saw him in a new and more cautious light as he walked ahead of her. Before her was a man who excreted confidence from his very pores. He quite possibly had become the most menacing thing facing her world. Had she been working for the wrong side all this time? Was he about to bring the city to its knees?
There had been a time when she would have supported that. Now her bitterness toward those with a carefree life had waned over the last few years. She only concerned herself with protecting her family now. Without knowing it at the time she had succeeded in the very opposite. Her brothers were locked away somewhere and she was stuck acting like a terrorist. She had failed her parents and the promise she made. They would hardly recognise her at all if they could see her. Perhaps they would disown her entirely for what she was doing.
She could feel her eyes become slightly damp at the thought of having broken the promise made to her parents, just before they were killed. This was not the time to face such a test of her emotions. She had a job to do. Once she found the escape she waited for, she would take it and forget ever being involved at all. Only then could she really atone for the things she was quickly coming to regret.
A face flashed into her mind as she followed Anthony back to the shopping floor. For a second or two she could not place it until the face began to howl in pain. It was the same bloodied face she had stared at from down the barrel of her pistol. It was destined to be her lasting memory of this day, she knew that now. It did not matter what she did after this, she had murdered someone. Anthony was only partly to blame for that. Still, it was enough for her to again picture ending him in some way.
When they arrived toward the front of the bu
ilding, where the hostages were still on display to the police beyond the laser grid, they met curious faces all looking to Anthony. A ringing noise was attracting the attention of those closest to the device, calling to them like an old telephone. Someone from outside seemed interested in talking again. And it appeared Anthony was looking to respond this time.
Phoenix immediately wiped away her feelings of utter demoralisation and hardened up again. She could now deal with whatever came along, as long as it did not involve killing. With the outside world about to communicate with them, she only hoped the person on the other end of the call was not about to upset Anthony. He was in a position to make them pay if they did.
One of the hostages began to cry, to the annoyance of the nearest armed man. He made his point by kicking the woman to be quiet.
“Shut her up. Don’t make me do it for you,” Anthony shouted. He picked up a gun from the table he had set up and shoved it in their direction. The threat did nothing to allay the woman’s sobbing, it only angered those around her. “I need quiet.”
Staying deliberately close to the front to hear the conversation, Phoenix watched as Anthony first tampered with the tablet that was still waiting to be answered. After activating the scrambler and deactivating the video feed to keep their anonymity intact, he answered.
“Speak,” he said casually.
“My name is Kristof Rajco. I am the Simova representative in charge here. To whom am I speaking?”
Phoenix could not see the face on the small handheld display, only hear his voice and the authority he tried to push through the screen. Whoever this man was he was another just like Anthony, with all the brains and all of the brawn in one megalomaniacal package.
“My name is not important,” Anthony began in an identical tone to the man calling in. “What I do here today is, however. I wish to set out some ground rules before we continue.”