by Andrew Ives
Dreamland would suspect he had inflicted the virus on them deliberately and would view this in a very dim light; something like one nanolux.
Anybody Home?
The elevator doors parted and Karen walked out into the gloomy corridor, lit only by the dull, green-white light* provided by the ceiling panel.
[*The ceiling panel was charged only by light from the sky outside. Two whole walls were entirely plexiglass, the other two were painted white and the floor was always kept as shiny and reflective as possible to maximise the energy absorption. This light was then captured by the ceiling material's internal reflection and channelled towards solar panels based around the perimeter.
As night falls, this energy is liberated by hi-efficiency fluorescent tubes above the polymer causing the whole surface area to glow a luminous green-white colour. This light is again taken in by the solar panels until the stored energy dwindles away through imperfections in the system. This decay is intended to last long enough until recharging takes place at daybreak. This system avoids the need for costly lighting bills in thousands of rarely-occupied corridors and halls.
The obvious downfall is when the sky remains overcast; very little light makes its way to the solar panels and only feeble light is emitted before the charge decays altogether, plunging occupants into darkness. Today had been cloudy and drizzly throughout so the ceiling's light metering system had called the automatic cleaning carts to polish the floor to optimise intake. Even so, light levels were low even this early in the evening.]
Harry guided Winky towards his house by pressing the brake on the retractable lead, while Karen fumbled in her pocket for her door key. Karen told Harry to keep her dog for the moment while she went indoors to find the video Harry wanted to borrow. She owned a movie card and she repaid him in kind for his dog-walking in films.
Harry lived with just his mother next door, in an apartment the mirror-image of Karen's. Harry wanted a dog which his mother never allowed and they couldn't afford satellite subscriptions, so this arrangement suited both he and Karen amicably. (Karen acquired her cracked card from Eric because she too couldn't afford subscriptions but she never said so.)
This most-recent version of War Of The Worlds was an old rerun on satellite but Harry had still never seen it and was eager to see the much-vaunted special effects. Harry took Winky indoors for a moment to tell his mother he had returned safely and use his inhaler, but when Karen had taken a while too long he decided to call on her, wondering if she might have other films laying idle he could borrow.
Karen was otherwise occupied.
* * *
Look Around
Karen scoured through her unsteady pile of video minidisks. It had always been her intention to ultimately record over everything she ever recorded, and as such, in order to avoid later tearing off of fiddly labels, she never properly labelled anything.
Now that she found herself crouching, pressing against her sore leg by the living room window, squinting in the inadequate light offered by the gloomy dusk outside, she began to rue this laziness.
She once had the bright idea of writing in pencil on the actual plastic casing where the labels are supposed to be affixed. The pencil tended to get smudged off and you couldn't read it anyway unless you were in absolutely perfect white light. It was at times like this, when she was in a hurry, she wished she had put herself out and stuck the labels on. If she didn't buy packets of twenty identical 180s, that might be a good idea too. Now that videodisks had become so small and cheap, there was hardly any need to ever record over them, let alone arrange them. They just piled up - everyone had stacks of them.
She squinted up at each minidisk, holding it towards the window's light, sliding the sleeve back on and eventually guessing whether the disk stored the right film or not through a combination of the disk's apparent age and its height in the pile. She reminisced over the days when you could at least base your guess on how far the tape was rewound.
She used to like tapes; sure they crackled, even chewed up and snapped occasionally but the films at least had proper covers, covers you could tell apart without a magnifying glass; when the writing on them was more than a dozen atoms high and they didn't easily get lost. Video recording quality and access times may have improved, but the medium itself was certainly less user-friendly than it used to be.
Other things had just got worse too.
"Get up."
A painful prod to the spine immediately followed.
Revelation
"Slowly. Do as I say and I might let you live. If and only if I get what I've come for." The voice seemed unknown to her, but in some ways it sounded familiar.
Sedgwick did sound different - his voice sounded croaky, strained even; reduced to a whisper as it had been by smoke inhalation.
Karen stood up and began to turn.
"DON'T... turn around. Face forward and keep your hands where I can see them. You're stretching my patience." Sedgwick put his right hand around the back of Karen's neck and squeezed gently. This action caused Karen to wince with a surprising amount of pain and he eased off, instead prodding the silencer into her lower back to maintain his forcefulness.
"Go in there, with the computer. The other room... slowly."
Karen led the intruder out of her living room into her spare room, to her computer set-up, realising en route he had to be the intruder who earlier stole her hard disk.
"Find your copy of the PsiNapse software. I know you must have more code. Find it and give it to me." growled the intruder. Karen still could not place where she had heard his voice before, but she didn't really have time to ponder on it.
On the desk there stood two tall piles of floptical disks. One was a pile of old-but-frequently-used software and the other was a pile of currently-used and blank disks. She wondered whether she might be able to palm him off with some blank disks: after all, she hadn't labelled any and he was unlikely to be able to tell. He was taking her word for it.
Unfortunately for her, pencil was slightly more visible on grey disk plastic than on black videodisk plastic and it was quite noticeable that the top eight disks were PsiNapse software by their complicated and descriptive names.
There was not much she could do other than reluctantly hand them over. She picked all eight from off the top of one pile and placed them down on the desk, curtly explaining each as she placed it down, making a new pile.
The intruder motioned for Karen to stack the remaining two large piles, one on top of the other. As she did so, she was pushed forward; falling onto the folding bed.
Before she could pick herself up, he held the gun up at arm's length, pointed the barrel downwards and fired two bullets through the pile of fifty or so disks, destroying any further PsiNapse copies that might have been hidden amongst them. Splinters of chipboard blew out from the underside of the desk, quashing all hopes that some disks might escape undamaged.
The shrill sound of the silenced bullet caused Karen to instinctively glance round, catching a glimpse of her assailant out of the corner of her eye. She was bewildered to see that it appeared to be Sedgwick.
That's who the voice sounded like! But he was dead, wasn't he? It was on the news and everything. Eric killed him... burned him in the fire.
But here he was, alive and well. It never made sense.
To Karen, right now, it only mattered that he had survived not how. She still had to find a way to get through this alive, she still had a mission to accomplish.
Realisation
Now Sedgwick had destroyed every other copy of the code, it seemed logical he should destroy the author too. By doing this, he would have the only copy of the code in existence and there would be no other way for anybody else to obtain or write another one. All the hardware plans were in his hands too, so it would be nigh impossible for any one programmer to write another version.
While Sedgwick clumsily fumbled the series of PsiNapse disks with his right hand, Karen contemplated diving into the various
boxes that were strewn across the floor, in the hope of somehow arming herself. Retrieving the gun from her clarinet box, assembling and loading it before Sedgwick shot her seemed an unlikely option, so she looked further for a slightly more feasible means of defence.
Her search was interrupted when behind her Sedgwick fired a sudden volley of shots at her monitor screen. The high-velocity bullets cracked open the large workstation screen, causing it to momentarily implode into its own vacuum before exploding in a shower of glass, scattering debris over the floor where he stood. Karen jumped onto the bed, shielding her eyes as fragments rained onto her back. When she looked up, Sedgwick had already gone.
That sought-after method of defence immediately presented itself to her, laying on the floor beside the bed. Now she was glad she had clung onto her outdated glass CRT monitor, rather than upgrading to a giant plastic roll-up screen. A piece of torn plastic fibre wouldn't have been nearly as menacing as that which lay on the floor below.
Picking up the most pointed, dangerous-looking shard of glass she could find, she somewhat foolishly gave chase.
Darting around the two blind corners of her hallway, she slashed wildly with the glass, as if to find Sedgwick lurking in every shadow. She soon found he was actually sprawled across the floor of the hall outside.
Chaos
The hall echoed to the sounds of frantic and aggressive barking. Karen's dog, who had just appeared with Harry, had evidently recognised his erstwhile attacker and was doing his utmost to seize his chance for revenge. Harry struggled with all his strength to hold back the crazed animal, but managed only to minimise the dog's effectiveness.
Sedgwick shouted in pain as the dog nipped at his ear; fully stretched and hell bent to get a more telling bite at his face, his feral traits instantly resurfaced.
Harry reeled in the lead from around Sedgwick's ankles, millimetre by millimetre against overwhelming tension. Inevitably, Harry's inclination for letting the dog wander on a slack lead had eventually tripped someone over.
Sedgwick landed awkwardly on top of his gun. Keeping a grip on it throughout his fall, he now kept it from sight so as not to frighten Harry into letting the maniacal dog loose again. He had dropped the disks again and they were now spread in a line across the shiny floor before him.
Unaware of the good he had unwittingly done, Harry pulled the dog back from around Sedgwick's face, apologised repeatedly and retreated into Karen's apartment as he pulled on the dog yet harder. The dog slid backwards with grimly determined feet.
Karen pushed past them both, closing her damaged door as she stepped outside, shutting Harry and her dog inside.
Sedgwick had scrambled to his feet by now, but was more occupied with nursing his profusely bleeding ear than picking up the disks. He still held the gun in his left hand and he reasoned that the disks weren't going to be taken from him while he had hold of it. He took a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped his ear with it. The sound of the door slamming caused him to stall for a moment longer. He turned around.
Karen lunged at him, thrusting the pointed shard towards his chest. He wearily waved the gun in a half-hearted defence action, hitting Karen's wrist with the long silencer. This sudden impact caused her to swing her arm outwards and smash the shard against the wall.
The point broke off, making the once-menacing weapon a useless blunt scrap. The fragments cut the palm of her hand as she did so.
As they broke off, her hopes fell with them to the floor.
Sedgwick trod on the broken pieces as if to laugh at her pathetic attempt to stop him. As he did so, she barged at him, turning him and effecting an escape by diving past him around the corner of the wall. As she did so, he involuntarily fired another round into the ceiling, piercing the plastic lighting panels directly above his head.
Karen slid outwards and fell feet first on her side as the whole corridor was plunged into total darkness. Sedgwick had made an escape point for the ceiling light and it instantly poured out through the hole like a momentary moonbeam. Soon it had ebbed away and only the pinpoints of light from surrounding towerblocks were visible through the windowed walls.
Sedgwick slowly neared the corner, improving his angle with every step. He barely saw Karen laying down but instinctively raised the gun at her. Karen scrambled onto all fours and thrust herself towards the lift as he fired another muted round into a door frame.
She could see him as his silhouette moved against the spots of light.
He could only see in his close vicinity and around the lift's amber display.
Karen repeatedly pressed on the lift call button, but the lift was too many floors away. She soon gave up with the control panel as her stinging hand bled onto it, deciding that the lift was never going to appear in less than a few minutes. A few minutes too long while she stood in the amber glow.
She stood up in front of the closed lift doors, urging them to hurry and open, willing the floor number on the display to rise faster. It was no use - she had to find another means of escape.
Karen glanced around. All that lay around her for possible defence was the remainder of the bloodstained glass on the floor, a small Swiss cheese plant outside a neighbour's door, a screwed-up cloth doormat and a heavy, dirty yellow automatic cleaning cart which was whirring away by itself near the corner.
Not much.
Curtains
Sedgwick appeared from behind the wall, waving the gun barrel slightly as if to gloat over his supremacy while he remained unsure as to exactly where Karen was. As he emerged, Karen ran from the lift doorway and took cover behind the cleaning cart. Her hand dripped a trail on the floor, signposting the way.
Realising this, she crouched behind the cart and pulled her sleeve over her hand. It could bleed inside there without any further disclosures.
While she wrapped her cuff around her hand, Sedgwick unwittingly obscured some distant points of light on the cityscape, indicating his exact position.
Brushes whirred, edging closer to Karen's feet while she crouched there. Dust swirled up around her, making visibility even more difficult. A bristle touched her feet and sensing her presence, the cart backed up. It had been programmed to avoid obstacles, and changed direction so as not to run this obstacle over.
It reversed away, threatening to leave her exposed. She shuffled after it, poking at the touch 'sensitive' keypad (a misnomer if ever there was one). Thick with grime, the keypad needed to be hit with a knuckle to achieve any response.
She prodded at it as she and the cart neared Sedgwick, until it fortunately beeped in obedience. Its state had changed from Auto to Manual which was indicated on the 'niteglo' LCD display and Karen breathed a momentary sigh of relief. She could see the illuminated display, but the writing on the buttons below was a mystery.
The cart was stopping. The brushes ground to a halt and the cart quickly became stationary.
Sedgwick was warily picking up each disk, simultaneously trying to keep watch over Karen, making sure she never tried anything to hamper his escape. It did not matter to him whether she lived or died, but he guessed it would to her and that her aggression would be bolstered by this.
The amber number on the wall display increased as the lift ascended towards their floor. It would not be long before it reached them.
Sedgwick picked up the last remaining disks and finally held all eight in his right hand. He pointed the gun towards the top of the cart, intending to display his upper hand, intending to keep Karen under control long enough for the lift to arrive.
Karen squinted. Spying over the cart through the agitated dust, she noticed the gun trained upon her. She ducked back down again. It appeared to be curtains for Karen. She had no real means of defence. She crouched down further, fazed at the prospect of what was to come.
The cart was large and heavy. Wide too; wide enough for Karen to sit behind it without being seen. The handles were just above her forehead, and above them was a lid - the lid that covered the rubbish box inside.
She flicked up the rubbish lid, so that it stood upright on the far side of the cart. If she stooped behind this, Sedgwick couldn't be sure of exactly where she was. This would reduce her chances of being shot through it. It was something anyway.
Karen reasoned that if there was some way she could make the cart blow the rubbish back out, the dust had earlier made it difficult for her to see and maybe there was a chance that all the collected dirt would cause some distraction, some kind of smoke screen to hide in.
She poked further at the keypad causing the brushes to rise up from the floor. The cart had gone into 'Park' mode; the mode in which the user could wheel it around freely to park it. Disappointingly, not 'Blow' mode.
The lift reached their floor, floor 105, when Sedgwick called out: "Don't cross my path again. I won't be so forgiving next time."
Now Or Never
Karen wondered whether she could push the cart along the front of the lift doors, keeping Sedgwick out long enough for her to get in behind it. No... she would get shot. He would wait and shoot her when she became uncovered.
Could she push the cart hard enough to hit him far enough away from the lift while she ran inside? No... she would get shot. He would only be momentarily dazed and may even shoot her before it hit him.
She wondered whether she could push the cart hard enough, with no resistance from the polished floor, so that its momentum would carry Sedgwick towards the windows and crush him against the plexiglass; maybe even the protruding frame if she was really lucky. He should drop the disks again, maybe even the gun. She might get shot, but the odds at least seemed better.