by Andy Ritchie
So I just sat there, feeling sorry for myself, trying not to think about where I was and what I was doing; trying not to think about where the Researcher had been and what it had been doing. Simply trying to clear it all away, wipe the mental slate clean, so that when I did eventually open my eyes again and look at the scene before me, any memories that had so far been unable, or unwilling, to surface, had the best possible chance of doing so.
Fortunately, however, the next link in the mental chain of the Researcher’s odyssey came courtesy of Tukaal’s next words:
‘There’s something not quite right over in the far left corner.’
I opened my eyes and looked over to the far left corner of the room.
‘What do you mean, ‘not quite right’?’
Tukaal’s response was unhelpfully vague.
‘Like I said, it’s not quite right.’
I looked hard at the offending corner to see what was ‘not quite right’ about it, but, strangely, I found myself struggling to really concentrate on whatever was in the corner, let alone identify something that appeared, on the face of it at least, to be ‘wrong’.
I was probably at it for over a couple of minutes, casting my gaze carefully over the concrete floor, the six particularly large and impressive transformer-type things that sat between the roller-shutter door and the far corner, the fencing that surrounded them, the yellow signs hung on the fencing which warned of ‘Danger of Death’ and had a dramatic picture of a prone human form being stabbed by a piece of lightning...
But it was strangely difficult because every time I managed to focus my attention on something specific, my mind immediately started to wander onto something else, be that what I had for breakfast, what the weather was like, what my favourite film of all time was, absolutely anything.
Eventually, I gave up, putting my inability to concentrate down to a combination of general tiredness and the memory-juggling efforts of the last thirty minutes or so.
‘Go on, tell me what’s not quite right because it all looks pretty normal to me.’
‘Exactly,’ Tukaal replied, continuing in the annoying vein of providing cryptic and un-enlightening responses.
‘So...?’
‘None of it is real.’
I know I shot him a quizzical look.
‘What do you mean, ‘none of it is real’?’
His face wore the expression of someone who knows the answer to a question they’ve asked but wants to make you suffer just a little bit longer before they give you the answer.
I think my face wore the expression of someone who was already pretty pissed off with life in general and wasn’t in the mood to fuck about with some sort of childish guessing game.
My expression triumphed.
‘If you follow the line of the fencing around those six transformers, from just next to the roller-shutter door, out about forty feet or so, then all the way to the far wall...’
I could see the area he meant.
‘...then everything that is inside that area, and maybe the fence as well, is not real. It’s all a carefully crafted illusion to hide what is really there.’
‘And what is really there?’
It seemed the obvious question to ask...
...but I already knew the answer. The link in the chain of the Researcher’s memories of this place had suddenly been re-formed.
‘There’s a ramp,’ I said, ‘going down, down to another level, below this one. There’s some redundant equipment, but not like this electrical stuff here, alien equipment, all stored to one side, but at the other end, at the foot of the ramp, there’s a tunnel, a big tunnel, about twenty-five feet high, about the same across, heading down, down towards...’
My voice tailed off because I didn’t know where the tunnel went. In the memories of the Researcher, it was just a tunnel.
‘We need to go and take a closer look,’ Tukaal said excitedly, popping his SICPad into his pocket, taking a precautionary look around for any guards or technicians who may have turned up unannounced, and then setting off towards the ramp that could not be seen.
With a deep sigh, I followed him.
‘So how does this work?’ I asked as we made our way towards the fence. ‘Is it some sort of holographic projection, or some kind of cloaking device, like the Romulans use in Star Trek?’
Tukaal’s eyes narrowed.
‘I’m afraid I’m not entirely up to speed with Romulan technology in Star Trek, but if the purpose of that technology is to keep something hidden from view by making it blend seamlessly into its surroundings, then I guess the answer would have to be yes.’
We had almost reached the fence and, as we approached it, a really weird thing started to happen.
I found myself unable...no, that’s the wrong word...I was unwilling to approach the fence...
‘It’s a strange sensation, isn’t it?’ Tukaal said as he moved to within a foot or so of the fence. ‘It’s as if whatever is in this area is actually trying to persuade you not to take an interest in it, to think about something else instead, anything else, just not about the fence or the transformers, not about anything. Except, of course, for these ‘Danger of Death’ signs, they work the opposite way, they tend to leap out at you, don’t they, not just warning you about the danger, but screaming it at you, making you want to move away from here, to go elsewhere, anywhere.’
It was true.
It was as if two sets of invisible voices were at work inside my head, the first set whispering to me whenever I tried to focus my thoughts on something beyond the fence, distracting me, encouraging me to forget what it was I was trying to look at, to think of something else instead; and then there was the second set, whose shouts just seemed to appear in the centre of my thoughts at the merest glimpse of one of the yellow warning signs, urging caution, suggesting I move away, suggesting I go somewhere else, go to...no, just to go away, away from the building, outside, away from the danger...
And suddenly, in what seemed to be just the briefest of moments, I found myself thinking about the sausage and egg roll with tomato ketchup that I had got from the Ladybower Café. I also found myself walking back towards the door through which I had entered the room.
The spell was only broken when Tukaal pulled me back by the arm.
‘Quite persuasive, isn’t it?’
‘What is?’
My mind was drifting again. Shit, it was hard to even remember what Tukaal had just said!
Why the hell were we there?
‘It’s called an Alternate Reality Creator...’
ARC — neat acronym, I thought to myself.
‘...designed and manufactured by URG...
Them again.
‘...and it’s primary function is to mask the presence of something by creating an alternate reality within the same defined space. But it’s not only a visual alternative, you understand, it’s a full sensory one, including sounds and smells and sensations. The key is to make the alternative seem completely real.’
‘So what’s with the...you know...this fucking mind-not-concentrating-interest-deflection-shit?’
I was clearly at my most eloquent at that moment.
‘It’s interesting, isn’t it? This particular ARC has been enhanced with an Ultra High Frequency Persuasion Resonator, which uses a similar concept to my SVPT, to subliminally implant in the mind the two parallel messages of ‘There’s nothing to see here’ and ‘Best move away from here, it’s dangerous’. They’re doubling up on their protection. I think the expression you would use is ‘bolts and braces’.
‘It’s belts and braces,’ I corrected absently, trying once again to focus my thoughts on the grey metal casing of the transformer and some letters which I knew were there...Christ, it was so difficult!
Tukaal, meanwhile, just frowned at my correction, and seemed to make a mental note of it.
‘So how do we disable it?’ I asked.
‘We don’t,’ Tukaal replied. ‘Actually, we can’t. If we did
, I suspect we’d give some bored security guards a heart attack when all the alarms started going off.’
‘So how do we...’
My voice tailed off as I realised what I was about to ask. How do we get down a ramp that’s not there?
‘...get down to the next level?’
Tukaal completed my question for me. He then proceeded to answer it.
‘Well, we will clearly need to breach the cloak, but doing that is likely to set the alarm bells ringing as much as de-activating it, so I’ll need to do something about that...’
He worked furiously on his SICPad as he spoke.
‘...but once we’ve made sure that going through the cloak won’t be noticed, we simply walk.’
‘What? How? There’s a fence in the way...’
‘No, there isn’t.’
‘But there is! I can see it.’
‘No, that’s the Persuasion Resonator, telling your brain that there’s a fence there. It’s not real.’
‘But it is real, I can see it!’
‘Reach out to it, touch it...go on!’
You have absolutely no idea how difficult it was to do what Tukaal had suggested. It was like someone telling you to put your hand in a fire because it isn’t real and it won’t burn you. Every fibre of your being, based on forty-two years of response conditioning, tells you otherwise, tells you that that is fire and that it’s going to hurt like hell if you shove your hand in there.
I know it was just a fence, but when I got within a few inches of touching it, it may just as well have been fire, because there was any almost irresistible urge to pull my hand back...why? Fucked if I know, after all, it’s only a fence, and not even an electrified one at that. Nonetheless, the closer the proximity, the greater the compunction to withdraw. Eventually, after what seemed like an eternity, my fingers were less than an inch away...and yet, I simply couldn’t do it. It was as if my body had over-ridden my brain and had unilaterally decided that touching the fence was not such a good idea and that I should, instead, snatch my hand back and slowly but surely withdraw to a safe distance.
And so, there I stood, motionless, fingers almost touching, body and mind seemingly trapped in a titanic battle, cold reason versus gut feel, logic versus emotion...
And that was when Tukaal shoved me.
Git.
I didn’t scream, mind, not on this occasion.
I think I simply whimpered.
Whatever I did, it coincided with my hand simply passing through the ‘fence’ and disappearing from sight, followed by my wrist, forearm and everything up to just above my elbow. That was as far as I went before I managed to regain my balance.
‘Sorry, Jeth, but we don’t have all day.’
That was all Tukaal said before he simply walked into the fence and disappeared completely from view.
As for me, I just stood there, looking at the point where my arm seemed to pass into another dimension, disappearing through a fence that I could see, that I would swear was as real as...well, as real as I was...
Until, that is, Tukaal simply dragged me through the fence and into...
Well, the first sensation that hit me was the slope of the ground changing. As a result, I stumbled forward a few steps before I managed to gather my wits and once more regain my balance.
Once I had, I turned and looked around to see where I was...only to find that, with regard to the rest of the huge room, nothing had changed. I could still see the door halfway down the wall where we had entered. I could still see the roller-shutter door, now close by to my right. I could still see the bus bars and circuit breakers and all the other techno-gubbins that had been there before. All of that was the same.
I didn’t even find that I was looking at it all through some shimmering force-field or something like that.
The only difference I could discern was that I could now see a ramp, a large ramp, big enough to get a lorry down, and it went down into a basement whose footprint exactly matched that of the large sub-station room above.
The basement itself was about thirty feet high and had a number of interesting features:
1. at the foot of the ramp, to the left, was the entrance to the tunnel I had seen in the Researcher’s memory. Though the area around the tunnel entrance was reasonably well lit, the tunnel itself was not, and the darkness into which it descended looked intensely dark and strangely menacing. It left me feeling peculiarly cold...
2. to the right of the ramp, about halfway along the far wall, there was a large area of stored equipment, from racks of smaller items to a couple of pieces of kit which must have been twenty feet in height, all of which seemed to be covered in a layer of dust. Whilst some of the equipment looked, shall we say, of terrestrial origin, the two big bits certainly did not. This area had an air of some galactic engineer’s garage.
3. further right still, directly under where the four transformers were on the upper level, were three more massive pieces of kit, each of which had two big cables going into it and an even bigger big cable coming out of it. For the one to the left and the one to the centre, the two incoming cables dropped down from the ceiling, but for the one on the right, the incoming cables came through the right hand wall. I suspected they came from the two transformers in the smaller room.
4. the massive cables that came out of these three strange looking pieces of kit converged on the wall to the right of them and then proceeded along that wall towards the ramp. Just below where the ramp began to descend from the upper level, there was a conduit, like a small tunnel, that ran under the ramp, and it was through this conduit that the three cables disappeared, off in the same general direction as the road tunnel, somewhere towards the power station and the sea.
Whilst I had been familiarising myself with these new surroundings (and recovering from the ordeal of trying to get through the unreal fence!), Tukaal had been busy with his SICPad, checking for cameras and sensors and Christ-knows-what-else, his face awash with boyish excitement.
‘So what is this place?’ I asked, an involuntary shiver again going down my spine as I looked at the darkness of the tunnel.
‘I’m not entirely sure,’ he replied, moving over to the road tunnel entrance and peering into the gloom. ‘I mean, obviously it’s used for storage, and obviously the ramp is here to facilitate access from the upper level to whatever lies at the end of this tunnel.’
‘But why the ARC thing? Why go to all that trouble? Why not just make the place totally off limits?’
Tukaal seemed to give these questions some thought. Whether that was just out of politeness, I’m not sure.
‘ARC systems are incredibly effective, relatively simple to operate and cheap to install. What may seem complicated to you is actually a fairly standard approach for masking the presence of unwanted items right across the galaxy. Some planets even use them on a massive scale to mask waste dumps, energy generation stations, even entire industrial areas. But they aren’t just used to hide things. They can also be used to create an alternative world within the home, to present for example an image and project an aura which promotes a sense of peacefulness...I’ve got one in my home. I use it when I want to, as you would say, de-stress.’
I’d never really thought of Tukaal having to de-stress. But, I guess we all need to have the means to switch off from it all, even little aliens.
‘As to why not make the place totally off limits, I guess there has to be some access to the equipment above us for maintenance and such-like. It is, after all, still part of the electricity distribution system from the power station, whereas this...’
He pointed to the three major pieces of kit at the other end of the basement.
‘...I suspect, are not.’
We both began to wander over to the three units, each of which hummed angrily as if they contained a swarm of hungover wasps.
‘What are they?’
‘Well, assuming that the units on the level above are the step-up transformers, then this looks like a spur f
rom that system. But the design of the units doesn’t make any sense to me, and I can’t understand why the cables then go off back towards the power station. It doesn’t make sense.’
I have to admit that I was secretly delighted to hear him say that. At least I wasn’t the only one who didn’t have a clue as to what was going on!
‘If I was to put these on, Jeth, what would I see?’
As Tukaal held the goggles in his hands, it hit me like an express train, a sudden, unstoppable rush of memories.
I know I staggered.
I know I fell down on my arse.
I know I gasped at the sheer ferocity of the explosion of images and sounds and sensations and feelings.
Excitement.
Such excitement...and anticipation.
In my mind, I could see the basement, but it had the red-green blur of the view through the goggles.
And a thought kept recurring in my mind, over and over again:
‘I’ve never been this close to so many.’
I was reaching out...no, it was reaching out, out towards the swarming mass of tendrils that swirled and eddied over the three massive cables that ran along the wall towards the hole below the ramp.
‘Could I touch them...?’
My thought or the Reseacher's?
I’m not entirely sure.
I took (actually, I think I snatched) the goggles out of Tukaal’s hands and put them on.
What greeted my eyes was something truly, truly extraordinary.
They were everywhere. Hundreds of them, thousands of them, hundreds and thousands of them, stretched across every cable, every piece of equipment, across the floor, up the walls, even across the ceiling.
They were thin and black, glistening like wet leather, swaying rhythmically like a field of wheat in a gentle summer breeze...and, unlike everything else when viewed through the goggles, which appeared to be a split world of off-set green and red, these thin, black tendrils were absolutely crystal clear...as if, in the world viewed through the goggles, they belonged.
It was something I had not noticed when I had looked at them on the pylon before we entered the culvert. To be honest, it was something I hadn’t really noticed in the Researcher’s memories of them.