by Andy Ritchie
‘That’s how the Researcher got in,’ I whispered hoarsely, ‘through a drainage culvert he found on the original station plans, through a manhole inside the perimeter. There’s bars at the entrance, and I can see beams in the darkness, and I can see flashing devices on the bottom of the manhole...’
I opened my eyes because it was all getting too much for me again, all the memories of what the Researcher had seen, what it had done, all insanely loud, filling my head.
I looked at Tukaal and I knew that my eyes were pleading with him to do something to help me. At the same time, I knew there was nothing he could do.
‘Where are we?’ I asked, deciding that the best thing I could do, for now at least, was to try to re-embrace my world and use that to push the Researcher’s memories to the back of my mind.
‘Look’s like we’ve found your McDonalds,’ Tukaal replied.
We were parked on the car park of a McDonalds that was next to a roundabout, about half a mile north of the power station. Further north I could see the town of Peterhead, whilst to my right I could see a road leading off from the roundabout to some large warehouse-type buildings and what looked to be some kind of harbour.
‘So, what’s the plan?’
Tukaal explained that there was a BandQ Warehouse just further long the road where it should be safe to leave the camper van. I did mention that the Researcher had parked the camper van in the lay-by just south of Stirling Village, but Tukaal indicated that he did not want to copy too prescriptively what the Researcher had done, just in case. I did not argue. From there, we would make our way back along the A90 towards the power station and would then start to rely on the Researcher’s memories to guide us towards the entrance to the culvert and, from there, inside the fence of the sub-station.
But, before we set off, Tukaal wanted to get organised.
Apparently, at the last stop, whilst I was having a bitch about my work colleagues and mastering how to use this dictaphone, Tukaal had been making a list of what we would need to take with us if we had to go inside the power station.
[Collator’s Note: Unfortunately, we don’t have that list, which is a shame because it would have been interesting to see what names Tukaal gave to the alien devices he took with him. As it is, we will need to make do with JP’s descriptions.]
At the top of his list was my duffel bag; after all, we had nothing else to carry the stuff in.
Into the duffel bag I saw him pack the following:
1. his SICPad thing that looks like a PSP
2. nanite pods
3. the Panasonic Lumix camera
4. his Swiss-Army URG Multi-Tool thing
Then he opened one of the cupboards and pulled out something very weird looking indeed. I recognised some parts of it — there was a USB connector, and what looked to be one of those strange spheres I’d taken out of Tukaal’s head, wrapped up in a load of copper wire.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘It’s part of my neural net, the part that was storing all the information from what I saw and did.’
‘What have you done with it?’
‘I’ve modified it so that, in essence, it acts as what you would recognise as a massive external hard-drive. There is the possibility that I may have to download a large amount of information and, although this (he held up the SICPad) is able to hold a lot, I just want to make sure I have enough memory available.’
‘But how will it work?’ I asked, ‘It won’t have a power source...’
Tukaal pointed to part of the makeshift design where there was space for something the size of a golf-ball to be embedded in it.
‘I’ll have to take one of the power cells from my neural net...’
I was about to protest, but Tukaal held up his hand.
‘I know there’s a risk that the power cell will be picked up once I connect it, but I think it is a risk worth taking if it means we get a complete picture of what the Researcher discovered.’
I wasn’t so sure.
‘Now, there is one more thing we need,’ Tukaal said, looking intently at me.
‘Which is?’ I asked, shrugging my shoulders and looking perplexed.
‘Goggles, Jeth. We need the Researcher’s goggles.’
I slapped myself on the forehead. Of course, the first time I’d recalled the scrambled memories of the Researcher’s incursion into the sub-station as I’d sat in Stella’s Volkswagen Passat, I’d remembered that I’d looked at the world through goggles, a world that had appeared blurred, out-of-phase...rather like...yes it was...it was like a 3D film without the glasses...the black tendrils...
Quite why we hadn’t looked for the goggles before that moment escapes me, but the fact was, we hadn’t.
So I needed to remember where the goggles were, needed to think, remember beyond the sub-station...I could see things, new images...Craighead...Cruden Bay...night-time...feeling excited...really excited...looking at the P.I.U....shutting it down...putting it away...picking up the goggles...putting them...
...in a ‘secret’ compartment at the back of the little cupboard underneath the oven, wrapped up in plastic...
And that was exactly where Tukaal found them.
My alien companion studied the goggles whilst I replaced the false back of the cupboard and the couple of pans that were stored in there. As he did so, his face betraying his bemusement.
‘Are they night vision goggles?’ I asked hopefully.
Tukaal shook his head.
‘No, but it looks like they’ve been based on that sort of technological frame. There’s a load of things that have been built into it, a phase inhibitor, a recording device, some sort of sensor for detecting...something, but all this together doesn’t really make much sense. I’m not sure what you would see if you looked through it...’
He put the goggles on and flicked a switch on the side. Spookily, the two binocular type eyes of the goggles glowed an eerie blue.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, offering the goggles to me, ‘All it seems to do is put certain spectral elements slightly out of phase. Nothing more than that.’
Now, I have no idea what spectral elements are and what they look like when they are in phase, let alone slightly out of phase, but what I do know is how a 3D film looks when you watch it without the glasses. It looks like the image these goggles provided...and that was the image I kept seeing in the Researcher’s memories.
I took them off and flicked the switch on the side.
‘Well,’ I said, handing them to Tukaal, ‘The Researcher had them for a reason, so we should take them with us.’
He put them in the duffel bag with all the other equipment.
‘Right,’ he said, ‘I think we are just about ready.’
His eyes twinkled with boyish anticipation as he got to his feet and put the duffel bag over his shoulder.
I’m afraid I did not share his enthusiasm.
*
It was like following a mental map.
As soon as we reached a specific point on the A90 heading south towards the power station, a new memory would push its way to the fore, like a cork bobbing to the surface of the water.
Firstly, we walked back to the roundabout where we found the McDonalds, and then south along some kind of track that ran alongside the A90.
After about half a mile, and just as the road began to curve to the left, we turned right up a minor road that led to some large farm buildings. This was where a Researcher’s memory decided to surface, guiding us past the buildings and then left along another track that stretched off into the fields behind the sub-station. The moment I looked down the track, the memory was there. It was so fucking weird because it was like standing at a single point and experiencing two different days simultaneously, easily differentiated between because the day I was experiencing was dull and overcast with the distant sea and horizon shrouded in mist, whilst the day the Researcher had witnessed was bright and sunny.
As we moved past the buildings and int
o the open fields, I recalled a small depression in the ground, about two hundred yards down the track, midway between the track and the metal fence surrounding the sub-station, which hid the entrance to the culvert. In my memory, I could see the swaying reeds at the culvert’s boggy entrance.
Before we made our way along the track towards the culvert, Tukaal stopped and took from the duffel bag his SICPad. We stood for about a minute whilst he checked the immediate area for cameras, microphones, movement sensors or anything else that could alert those inside the sub-station of our presence and our purpose.
Thankfully, it appeared as though we had reached this point without incident and, we hoped, without being noticed, and Tukaal put the SICPad into his pocket with a relieved grin.
‘I suspect there may be cameras monitoring the area around the culvert entrance...’
‘There is,’ I confirmed as a memory of the Researcher looking at the sub-station through a pair of binoculars exploded into my mind. ‘There are two cameras, one on the nearest corner of the building, one about half-way down; both of them can look out beyond the fence-line...but...’
In the memory, the Researcher seemed to watch them for a long time, perhaps trying to discern a pattern to their movements. I could feel its anxiousness...and its disappointment...when it realised the cameras did not seem to move in any sort of pattern. Perhaps they were moving on the whim of a bored operator, housed in some darkened security office either in the sub-station, or in the power station across the road.
‘Looks like we’ll have to take our chances,’ Tukaal said as he began to walk hurriedly along the track, his eyes fixed on the sub-station building
Now, I think my eyesight is pretty good, but the distance we were away from the sub-station meant that I couldn’t say with any certainty whether the two cameras were pointing in our direction or not.
Even when we had reached the point on the track where the hollow which housed the culvert entrance was directly between us and the sub-station perimeter fence, I couldn’t be absolutely sure.
But Tukaal was.
Without a word he grabbed my arm and dragged me at speed across the field and into the hollow where we quickly dropped down into the reeds and the mud so that we were out of sight from the cameras.
Almost immediately, I was aware of the uncomfortable sensation of water inside my Converse trainers, and I cursed under my breath. I was also aware of the equally uncomfortable sensation of stinging nettles on the back of my hand. I cursed under my breath for a second time. I don’t like stinging nettles.
The culvert was exactly as I (as the Researcher) remembered it, a round tunnel only about three feet in diameter. The bottom two or three inches of the tunnel was full of a thick, malodorous mud that was awash with green slime. It looked, and smelt, particularly unpleasant.
Unfortunately, to get into the tunnel, it was necessary to get past five slightly rusted but nonetheless solid-looking metal bars, which Tukaal was currently inspecting intently.
‘This is definitely where the Researcher got in,’ he whispered excitedly. ‘There’s evidence that he cut through these two bars...’
‘...with some kind of...’ I could see it in my head, but I couldn’t explain it and the name of it wouldn’t come to me.
‘Was it one of these?’
Tukaal was holding up a stubby, shiny pen-like thing that he had detached from his Swiss-Army knife thing.
‘Yes, it was one of those,’ I confirmed.
Tukaal nodded knowingly.
‘It’s a more powerful version of the one you used to open the skin on my head,’ he said as he turned and aimed the pen at the metal bar. Normally (if anything about this life can be called normal anymore!), I’d have expected there to be sparks and stuff, just the sort of thing you’d associate with an oxy-acetylene torch. But, because I already had a memory of the way in which the pen simply seemed to melt the metal, without fuss, without sparks, even without heat, the ease with which Tukaal removed two of the bars did not surprise me at all.
Tukaal reconnected the pen-thing to his Swiss-Army Multi-Tool and handed it to me. Then, from his jacket pocket he produced the SICPad and pointed it into the darkness of the tunnel, thumbs a blur of activity on the touch-screen.
‘Do you remember anything in the tunnel, Jeth?’
I did...or at least, the Researcher did.
‘I’m not sure how far along, but there’s a network of light beams across the tunnel. The Researcher de-activated it...’ the memory bubbled to the surface, ’...with something similar to your SICPad thing...only the one it had looks more like a Gameboy than a PSP.’
Tukaal nodded, his face serious.
‘Earlier model, I suspect,’ he said, taking back the Multi-Tool which he immediately turned into a powerful torch.
But then he hesitated, as if something had just occurred to him.
He reached into the duffel bag, brought out the Researcher’s goggles and handed them to me.
‘Put them on and take a look at one of the pylons and the transmission lines and tell me what you see.’
Even before I put them on I knew what would be revealed. After all, I’d seen that pylon before, not long ago, inside a memory, one of the Researcher’s memories from when it had been here, a week or so ago.
The power lines suspended from the pylon were covered in the strange, oily black tendrils that seemed to move as though they were alive, like the tentacles of a seaweed swaying in the ocean currents. It was the same with the power lines suspended from the other two sets of pylons I could see.
‘Just as the Researcher saw it?’ Tukaal asked.
I nodded as I removed the goggles and handed them back so he could put them in the duffel bag.
‘What the hell are those things?’ I asked absently.
‘I guess that’s what we’re here to find out,’ he said with a grin.
So we set off into the tunnel and, as we did so, a violent shiver ran up and down my spine.
*
I’m not sure my back will ever recover. My clothes certainly won’t, and they’re almost brand new!
At first, I tried to walk along the tunnel, hunched over, knees bent awkwardly. But the tunnel was just too small, so very soon I found that I was having to make my way through the shitty-smelling mud on my hands and knees.
And it was a long way.
After about fifty feet, the tunnel kinked left a little and also adopted a slight angle of descent. This meant that the comforting light of the tunnel end soon disappeared from view, and we found ourselves in a claustrophobic world where there was only the tunnel walls ahead of us, grey and dull in spite of the brightness of Tukaal’s torch, the impenetrable darkness behind us, and around us the repetitive sounds of squelching and the evil odour of whatever was in the mud.
We could have travelled anything between a twenty yards and a hundred when, suddenly, Tukaal stopped.
I have to admit, I almost crawled into the back of him.
‘I think we’ve found your security grid,’ he said, gesturing ahead.
At first, I could see nothing in the beam of the torch. But, as Tukaal slowly reduced the intensity of the beam, I started to see thin red beams of light ahead, forming a spider’s web across the tunnel. Only the bottom six inches or so were free of the beams, presumably so that any water that did flow down the culvert (or maybe rats) didn’t trigger the alarm. But the gap was far too small to get through.
I was preparing myself to delve once more into the myriad of images that I held inside my head and search for the one which showed the Researcher disarming the network of beams when, all of a sudden, the beams disappeared.
Tukaal turned towards me with a grin on his face, his features strangely ghoulish in the light of the torch.
‘It’s just a simple movement array, nothing special. I’ve disarmed the beams, but as far as anyone in the station is concerned, they’re still operational.’
He looked decidedly pleased with himself, and once again
I got that uncomfortable feeling that, in spite of the obvious dangers into which we were heading, Tukaal was having a hell of a good time!
With the light beams disarmed, we moved on along the still gradually descending tunnel, travelling maybe ten yards before, in the light ahead of us, the shape of the tunnel changed.
‘I think we are here,’ Tukaal whispered as we came upon a rusted ladder, bolted to the wall, and a shaft heading upwards for about eight feet to what looked like a manhole cover at the top.
‘There’s something attached to the bottom of the manhole cover that needs de-activating,’ I whispered as the Researcher’s memory of its own arrival at this place at first appeared and then, quite disconcertingly, seemed to meld into what I could see in my world.
For a frightening second, I couldn’t tell which was which because, unlike everything I’d seen outside, where there had been discernible differences (the weather, the temperature, the wind), in here, with so few points of reference, so few things to emphasise that difference, it all became a blur, and I found myself slumping against the side of the culvert as I threatened to lose control.
‘Hold it together, Jeth,’ I heard Tukaal whisper intensely into my ear. ‘Concentrate on me, on my voice.’
Almost as soon as I did, the two different worlds seemed to separate again, back into my world of the present and the Researcher’s world of the past.
The difference between the two, quite obviously, was Tukaal, present in one but absent from the other. He was the differentiator, that which told me what was now and what was before. If I could keep coming back to him, there should be no confusion.