The Book That THEY Do Not Want You To Read, Part 2

by Andy Ritchie

  After a few deep breaths and a couple of self-admonishments for being such a pussy, I nodded to Tukaal that I was all right.

  He patted me warmly on the shoulder and shot me an encouraging grin.

  Once again, we both looked up at the shaft, the ladder and the manhole, all illuminated by Tukaal’s torch. He had once more taken his SICPad out of his pocket and was working on it intently, nodding as he did so.

  Then, satisfied with what he had seen, he was about to put his hands on the bottom rung of the ladder when I found myself grabbing hold of his arm even before I realised why.

  ‘Something’s not right...something’s different,’ I whispered.

  He didn’t say anything, instead he looked quizzically at me.

  I took hold of his torch and pointed it up the shaft once again. As I did so, I sort of allowed the Researcher’s memory, its memory of the shaft, to super-impose itself upon what I could see...I know that sounds easy, but, believe me, it took an immense amount of effort and concentration, like mentally trying to hold two massive weights at precisely the same level.

  But it was worth it because, as I compared the past and present, I started to notice something...a wire, difficult to see because it only ran from the corner of the manhole cover to the top of the ladder, but there nonetheless.

  ‘That wire,’ I hissed, pointing. ‘It wasn’t there when the Researcher was here.’

  Tukaal examined his SICPad again, thumbs moving with amazing speed...and the silence in the tunnel was broken by Tukaal’s sharp intake of breath.

  ‘What have they done, electrified the ladder or something?’

  Tukaal shook his head.

  ‘Not exactly. The wire isn’t carrying electricity, it’s carrying Sclan Particles.’

  ‘Sclan Particles? What the hell are Sclan Particles?’

  ‘They are very, very nasty. Any metallic object can be laced with them and they are almost undetectable. And, when any organic matter comes into contact with them, this happens...’

  He lifted some of the green slime from my sodden trainers and tossed it at the first rung of the ladder. As soon as the slimy stuff touched the metal, it began to change. It was almost as if, in an instant, the green part of the slime simply disappeared, leaving only the water, which, after hanging in mid-air for a moment, simply dropped onto the culvert floor.

  ‘The Sclan Particles attack specific molecules at a sub-atomic level, breaking them down so that, in essence, they simply fall apart. In this case, it looks as though they are programmed to dismantle specific carbon molecules. That’s why the organic matter in the slime simply vanished, but the water was left unaffected. Interestingly, Sclan Particles were originally developed to as an ultra-effective means of purifying water, metals, etc.’

  I think I said ‘Shit’, but I’m not sure.

  ‘What can we do about it?’ I asked nervously.

  ‘Oh, that’s easy,’ Tukaal said, taking a nanite pod out of his pocket and breaking it on the wall. ‘Sclan Particles can be easily neutralised once you’ve spotted them. It’s spotting them that’s the hard part. Even my equipment isn’t 100% effective, as you have just seen. It’s a good job you were ‘on the balls’, as they say.’

  ‘It’s ‘on the ball’,’ I said absently.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The expression. It’s ‘on the ball’, not ‘on the balls’. It’s singular.’

  All he said was ‘Noted’ before he began to use his SICPad to direct the little blob of nanites up the shaft towards the ‘wire’ that was connected to the top of the ladder. As he did so, I found myself wondering about how he could remain so calm about the fact that he had come to within a whisker of death. So I asked him.

  ‘Doesn’t that scare you, the fact that you could have touched that ladder and been disintegrated?’

  As Tukaal guided the nanites, he turned to me and smiled.

  ‘Oh, the Sclan Particles wouldn’t have totally disintegrated me. True, most of the human flesh and muscle and suchlike would have gone, but the shell could still have been viable and the inner pod in which my real self is situated is fitted with Sclan Particle Neutralising Technology, so I would have been relatively safe, if not a little odd-looking. You, on the other hand, would have been dead before you knew what was happening.’

  With that, he touched the SICPad a few more times, looked up at the wire and said:

  ‘There, that should do the trick.’

  He put the SICPad back in his pocket.

  ‘It looks like there are two motion vibration detectors on the underside of the manhole. Once I’ve neutralised them, we should be able to get out into the fresh air. Just follow me up when you are ready.

  Just follow me up when you’re ready.

  I remember thinking to myself as I watched Tukaal place his hand upon the ladder:

  ‘Christ, I hope you know what you’re doing,’

  because the last thing I wanted to do was try to get back to the camper van with something that, I guess, would look a bit like a Terminator...not the Arnold Schwarzeneggar version of course, but the metal one we see at the end of the film when all of Arnie’s skin has been burnt off.

  Thankfully, all Tukaal’s flesh did not instantly turn to water, and he was able to make his way up the first few rungs of the ladder and start using his Swiss-Army Multi-Tool on the two pieces of electronic gadgetry stuck to the bottom of the manhole.

  Bizarrely, and, in spite of the fact that I had just seen Tukaal touch the metal of the ladder without any ill effects, I found myself incredibly reluctant to do the same.

  What if, I told myself, these Sclan Particles with which the ladder was laced only reacted to human carbon and not alien carbon? What if Tukaal’s skin was somehow immune to their effects, but mine was not?

  What if I were to touch the ladder and simply die?

  Would Tukaal simply go ‘Oops’? as he looked down the ladder and saw what was left of me splash into the stinking mud of the culvert floor.

  What would it say about my life that it ended in such an ignominious fashion as a small puddle of water in what amounted to a sewer?

  I decided it wasn’t really worth worrying about.

  I didn’t even hold my breath as I grabbed hold of the cold, rusty metal.

  ‘I was wondering how long it would take you to touch it,’ Tukaal said from above.

  I don’t think he was mocking me or taking the piss for my hesitation, especially when he said:

  ‘The fact you hesitated is good. It means that you still value your life.’

  I was hoping to reply with something equally profound, but I didn’t get the chance.

  Instead, I heard Tukaal give a grunt of satisfaction and then another grunt of exertion as he gently lifted the heavy manhole with just one arm whilst he pulled himself up with the other just high enough so he could peer out into the brightness that now flooded into the shaft.

  ‘We’ve come out quite near to the north end of the main building,’ he said. ‘I can see a smaller building to my right, along with some electrical transmission equipment.’

  ‘From what I can remember,’ I replied, ‘we need to cross the site road and go to the corner of the building. There’s a door there, immediately under the surveillance camera we were looking at earlier.’

  Tukaal had put the manhole to one side, allowing the dull and watery, but nonetheless most welcome light of the late afternoon into what had been for too long a dark and oppressive world.

  ‘I can see both the cameras,’ Tukaal said. ‘I’m assuming the Researcher set them up on a simple loop so that they kept replaying the same images time after time after time, but I’m a bit loathed to do that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well,’ Tukaal replied as he worked on his SICPad, ‘There’s the possibility that they may have introduced a sub-routine into their security software which would flag up a loop. So what I’m going to do is change the software in the camera itself so that instead of creating a loop, I create
a timed window. What that means, in simple terms, is that we now have one minute to get from here to the doorway and inside the building. Shall we go?’

  Tukaal was the first to clamber out of the shaft, immediately crouching down and looking all around for any signs of guards or technicians. Fortunately, no-one seemed to be around.

  As quickly as I could, I scrambled up the ladder and out of the manhole, joining him in a crouched position as he slid the manhole back into place.

  Then, having checked once more that we were in the clear, we began running across the road and then across a stretch of gravel chippings before we eventually reached the door.

  I reckon it only took us twenty seconds or so to get there and press ourselves back against the wall.

  I was surprised about how difficult it was to run after having spent so long crawling on my hands and knees. I guess if someone had been watching me, they’d have had something of a giggle at the way I tried to simultaneously sprint and walk.

  Tukaal, on the other hand, had no such trouble.

  Bastard!

  Anyway, inside my head, I could see the Researcher, standing precisely where we had stood, working on a piece of equipment very similar to Tukaal’s SICPad...and I remember thinking about cameras, and the door next to us being alarmed, and the need to deactivate it, and the need to look out for guards or technicians...it was like inhabiting two parallel universes, only in one I was doing the doing whilst in the other I was simply watching Tukaal do exactly what the Researcher had done.

  ‘There, that’s everything ready. Cameras, motion detectors, alarm on the door, all taken care of.’

  And with that, we opened the door, went inside and closed it soundlessly behind us.

  Both of us held our breaths, waiting to see if anyone had been alerted to our presence.

  Thankfully, there were no wailing alarms, there were no angry men with guns. Instead, there was just the steady hum of high-voltage electricity emanating from various pieces of serious-looking electrical equipment, gleaming bars of copper and thick metal wires.

  Tukaal took the goggles from the duffel bag and put them on.

  ‘Both of these transformers are covered in this strange black substance,’ he said, pointing at the two large pieces of equipment to our right. Each stood maybe ten feet tall, each was painted a dull grey, the sides of each were covered in fins. Both of them had a metal barrel on top which Tukaal later informed me contained a reservoir of oil which helped keep the transformer cool.

  ‘We need to go through the door in the opposite corner, to the bigger part of the sub-station,’ I said, pointing at a distant doorway towards which, in my mind’s eye, the Researcher was already heading.

  Tukaal, having removed the goggles and then satisfied himself that there were no surveillance devices in this particular part of the building, dashed off across the concrete floor and was at the door just a dozen or so seconds later. A further few seconds passed before I, breathing heavily and feeling suddenly very unfit, joined him.

  ‘This internal door isn’t alarmed,’ he said as he eased it gently open, ‘and I’m not detecting any cameras inside...wait a minute...that’s odd.'

  ‘What is?’

  Tukaal didn’t answer.

  Instead, he opened the door fully and scuttled through. I followed him...

  ...and we found ourselves in the big brother of the room we had just been in. It was a huge room with a high ceiling, probably 100 yards square and forty feet high, and full of even more big pieces of electrical equipment, wires and bits of metal that stretched right up to the ceiling. Along two sides were high opaque windows that allowed some natural light into the place, and to our left was a large roller-shutter door, no doubt used to move the heavy equipment in and out of the building.

  Now, I have only a rudimentary knowledge about how power stations work (not nuclear ones, though). I know that, at one end, you put something in that burns (coal, gas, oil, for example) and that the heat from the burning of the fuel is used to boil water to make steam, which is then used to drive a turbine which, in turn, drives a generator which creates electricity.

  Unfortunately, I don’t have any idea whatsoever about what happens within a sub-station, so unfortunately I can’t say what it was I was stood beside or underneath or anything

  Bizarrely, when I happened to mention that...

  ‘I have no idea what all this shit does.’

  ...Tukaal decided, in spite of the fact that we were in the middle of breaking into a building as we followed the memory trail of a dead Researcher like Hansel and Gretal following breadcrumbs, that this was an opportune moment to give me a one minute engineering lesson on the workings of a sub-station.

  I include reference to this only to emphasise how incredibly anal Tukaal could be when faced with something mechanical or electrical. Clearly he is a closet engineer.

  So, according to the great electricity oracle that is Tukaal, there were probably seven electricity lines coming into the sub-station, and four going out. He suspected that the incoming lines were from the different generator sets down at the power station, whilst three of the outgoing lines connected to the national grid via the three sets of pylons we had seen at the back of the power station. The fourth outgoing line, he suggested, may be a local circuit for the Peterhead area.

  The incoming feed (a technical term, I think) from the power station came into the sub-station via underground cables which, according to Tukaal, would probably be filled with oil. He didn’t explain why this was so, and I didn’t have any inclination to ask.

  Once inside the sub-station, the generated electricity went through a whole host of gleaming equipment such as oil circuit breakers, air-break switches, voltage regulators and switchgear (the purpose of which still remains a mystery), all of which were connected by the bewildering maze of gleaming copper bars, thick electrical wires and those dish-shaped things which hang from the arms of pylons and carry the power lines (apparently these are called bushings and are made of porcelain...which is nice).

  At the right hand end of this part of the sub-station, where the electricity went out on to the pylons, there was a further four large transformers (now I did know what a transformer was for), similar in size and shape to the two we had seen in the smaller room next door.

  Worryingly, I can remember all that shit quite clearly, even though, both then and now, I couldn’t really care less about any of it.

  What I can say is that it was all very impressive, all very complicated and hummed with the sort of latent power that you would expect a place like that to hum with. There was even the occasional crackle, like you hear when you stand underneath electricity pylons.

  And that was as it had been for the Researcher who, almost a week previously, had been in precisely the same position, slightly breathless, inside a massive building, wondering just a little what to do next.

  Why?

  Because, having gotten its breath back, the Researcher had put the goggles on and looked for the tell-tale signs of the oily black tendrils...and it had seen them, wrapped in a writhing mass around the four transformers that dominated the right-hand side of the room.

  But that was it.

  Nothing more than that.

  And in the Researcher’s memory I sensed...confusion...disappointment...almost bewilderment...

  How can this be?

  The Researcher’s gaze panned across the room, from the right hand side to the left hand side and up to the ceiling.

  Nothing. Just a room full of impressive electrical equipment which all looked slightly blurred in the overlapping shades of green and red.

  The black tendrils were concentrated only around the four pieces of equipment to the right, and nowhere else.

  The Researcher removed its goggles and looked about it again.

  The sense of confusion and disappointment within it was almost palpable, like a weight in the pit of its stomach (though I wondered if it was the shell’s stomach or the Harkenbach’s s
tomach...assuming they have one!)

  Then the Researcher turned its attention to its SICPad and spent what seemed like hours studying the complex display of symbols and colours and fluctuating shapes, none of which meant anything to me...but one of which clearly meant something to the Researcher because I could feel, as it had felt, a sudden rush of excitement.

  ‘What do you see, Jeth?’ Tukaal asked, still working intently on his SICPad, a frown clearly evident on his face.

  ‘It’s not so much what I see, as what I feel,’ I replied hesitantly. ‘The Researcher was here, at this very spot, and it looked through the goggles and it saw those same black tendrils that we saw on the pylon outside on those transformers over there...’

  I pointed to the pieces of kit, at which point Tukaal frowned.

  ‘...but on nothing else, at all, and because of that it was disappointed...but then it looked at its SICPad and suddenly seemed excited again.’

  ‘And what did he do next?’ Tukaal asked, with ill-disguised eagerness.

  But I didn’t know.

  It had all gone blank, as if the link to the next step through the maze had been lost because I couldn’t fathom what the hell the Researcher had seen on his SICPad.

  All of a sudden, a wave of tiredness seemed to wash over me, tiredness laced with anger laced with desperation laced with fear.

  ‘I can’t see what it did next,’ I whispered miserably, slumping back against the wall and, yes, putting my head in my hands like a pathetic wimp.

  ‘Just take a minute, Jeth,’ Tukaal said, but his words were spoken distractedly and there was an impatience in his voice.

  But I was too tired to tell him to ‘Fuck Off’, too tired, in fact, to do anything.

  It’s so monumentally draining, you see, trying to juggle two worlds, two existences. You experience everything twice, twice the excitement, twice the fear, twice the confusion...and I struggle to deal with those things in relation to just my own life, let alone that of someone else’s.