Hashtag

by David Wake

  No–one had seen Stenson in months.

  No–one had seen Mithering.

  No–one had seen Westbourne.

  No–one was seeing Oliver.

  Oliver’s own current thoughts were explaining this to Jasmine. The phrasing was very similar, but then how many ways could you say ‘sorry I can’t make it’?

  There was a modus operandi here.

  Braddon checked the notebook again, but apart from a bad cartoon image of his face, there was nothing else that sprang to his attention.

  Time to call it a night.

  He went into the lounge carrying his glass. He’d have to put one of these on his bedside cabinet for the morning. He sat down anyway. The sofas were arranged to face an empty corner of the room rather than the old fireplace. It made no sense. Probably some eccentricity of the older generation. The carpet had a swirling pattern, going round and round and not actually resolving into a straight path.

  Braddon slumped back in the chair with his eyes closed. He pinched the bridge of his nose and looked up: the masks on Jellicoe’s wall stared down at him. These thoughtless faces mocked him.

  “Mithering… Westbourne,” he whispered, pointing to a random mask in turn. “Stenson… Oliver Braddon.”

  And behind these killings?

  The killers, obviously.

  Braddon had met two of them when they’d burst into Jane Deacon’s apartment. Or was it Jade Petoas’s?

  One he’d not recognised because he’d been thoughtless, but the other he had. That flash hadn’t registered on Braddon’s iBrow or the Taser had scrambled it. Whatever the reason, the man’s identity wasn’t in Braddon’s thought feed. He noodled and remembered that it wasn’t in his old thought feed either. Not that he’d gained anything useful from the man’s thoughts in that split second because he’d been playing some cerebral, which was stupid because his concentration would have been split between shooting Braddon and the game.

  It’s a game.

  Jellicoe had said that.

  People played cerebrals to add excitement to their lives. It gave meaning to the everyday humdrum. Why be bored doing the shopping when you can do the shopping and escape from zombies, vampires or killer robots? You could pretend to be a celebrity, or a hero, or a vampire, and the game would give you all the appropriate thought feeds. Or a criminal. Or a detective.

  And, if everyone’s thoughts agreed, how long before you started believing it? If you filtered everything else out as if it were just spam, then there would be nothing to contradict that.

  You couldn’t walk around planning a real crime, because your thoughts would simply leak out and be detected, but you could think almost anything in the confines of a game and everyone would ignore it. Indeed, Braddon’s filters had been set to weed out such thoughts.

  The man who attacked him had been playing a ‘shoot X with a Taser’ game, but for real.

  But he’d realised this before.

  What sort of detective was he, if he was going round and round in circles looking for the entry to the next level?

  Perhaps he wasn’t a detective?

  Perhaps he was only playing at being a detective and had done so for so long that he believed it.

  He had, after all, just been released from a Psychiatric Hospital.

  Special thoughts for special people.

  And surely being a detective was preferable to sitting at home staring at the corner of the room for no good reason.

  Playing cerebrals was a way of making friends.

  Braddon didn’t have any, so therefore… he was alone and thus, sadly, real.

  THURSDAY

  Braddon awoke with a start.

  He fumbled for the glass on his bedside cabinet as his thoughts talked about the glorious French countryside and the marvellous cheese on baguette he’d had for le déjeuner. He wasn’t in bed. The glass was already in his hand. He’d fallen asleep in the arm chair.

  It took him two attempts to get out of the chair and stand. He eased his left shoulder around painfully to get it to work.

  The kitchen didn’t offer any help as to where the whiskey and eggs were, but, finally, befuddled, Braddon found them just as he was thinking about having an afternoon siesta. Didn’t his alter ego realise that siestas were Spanish?

  What time was it?

  Bollocks… at least I’m suspended.

  Don’t worry about it, Mithering thought.

  He practically gargled the whiskey. There had to be a better way. His investigations were taking twice as long now that he was permanently drunk. His thoughts would give him away… but only if the conspiracy, these people who met in the Chinese Room, actually followed him. They hadn’t come bursting in with Tasers again yet, so perhaps they didn’t.

  Perhaps I’ll be diagnosed with multiple personality disorder?

  Oliver Braddon dead, tick off task on the Noodle list, therefore unfollow? Surely?

  He was dying here, slowly, liver cell by liver cell, suspended from work and suspended in life. Everything was falling apart. Perhaps I should find those tablets he’d seen Jellicoe taking? Head off the heart attack. Jasmine was gone, Jasmine’s friends were gone; how many followers did he have? He noodled: six. Doctor Trantor, Moosher, Mithering, Chen, Mox, Freya. And one of those was dead.

  It was pathetic.

  The number had gone down since yesterday. He didn’t have a job as he was suspended. Everyone thought he’d moved to France. Jellicoe was sedated, probably dying. There were no thoughts from the Inspector in the Thinkersphere, but then Braddon had never followed him, and couldn’t now he was beyond recognition range without noodling an ID. He’d discouraged followers, so he was effectively friendless. The old man might even be dead already, dead on arrival, and who would know.

  Braddon didn’t want to die alone.

  He needed a bigger total than five.

  Jessica and Cheryl had over five hundred.

  He needed his life back.

  Fine, Braddon thought. He took a drink: fine, fine, fine…

  His iBrow shut off.

  Jellicoe didn’t seem to have another hip flask, so Braddon emptied a coke bottle and filled it with neat scotch. He got the car started at the third attempt and eased himself into the lunchtime traffic.

  God, he was pleased he’d given up police work and moved to France.

  Is that a resignation, Freya thought, or are you trying for medical leave on psychiatric grounds?

  I guess, Oliver thought back.

  Braddon pulled up in a side street and parked on a double yellow line. Jellicoe would get the ticket or he might wrangle mitigation for police work. Why was he worried? Civil enforcement was done by noodling the Thinkersphere and he was too drunk to think about parking.

  Along Old Tollgate towards Chedding, there was a makeshift shrine. Bunches of flowers piled high like a wave breaking against the tired concrete walls, boarded windows and ‘Keep Out – Demolition’. Braddon stopped to examine them, thinking there was an awful lot for a traffic accident. The signs explained: ‘the Chedding Martyr’, ‘the innocent victim of police brutality’, ‘you will never be forgotten’ and, disturbingly, ‘you will be avenged’. But the flowers were past their best, the ink on the cards smeared and run like tears. This was old news now. Some other indignation dominated the zeitgeist. You could, as the saying went, survive any scandal if you could sit out the initial outrage.

  Chedding Shopping Centre was closed, due for demolition. Part of it had already gone, most of the multi–storey car park. Long before the shops had gone, they’d removed it and laid foundations for another brighter, better shopping centre. It was the death knell for Chedding: not enough footfall to justify the car park, but no car park meant no footfall. It was a scam, a way of brushing this all aside to make way for new construction work with all the associated jobs, opportunities, back–handers and rich people getting richer. If the economy hadn’t collapsed yet again, then a gleaming new edifice would look out over the city to suck business
from the other shopping areas and so allowing the cycle to continue.

  Braddon moved on.

  He reached the entrance to the absent multi–storey. This was the first section of parking, an area directly under the shopping centre and the only one that still survived. There was nothing now to show that the body in the car had ever been there. Even Unknown 271’s shrine was in the wrong place.

  You take the body down there, Braddon thought, and then you are only a few hundred yards from the new concrete. Park and wait for the next columns or beams or floor or whatever was laid and then nip down at night, a quick lift and splot! Disappeared for good.

  But the concrete laying had stopped and so the disposal plan had simply stalled.

  How could you forget that you had a body to dispose of?

  Because, and the idea came to him unbidden, you couldn’t think about it.

  That’s why it’s not in Noodle.

  He’d sobered up: it took more and more booze now.

  Don’t drink too much, Mithering thought, otherwise I can’t follow your thoughts.

  Further along, Braddon found a gap in the plywood boarding and squinted at the construction site. It was stark, grey and the lumps of concrete jutted up ready for the upper storeys. It was like some post–apocalyptic vision, the slabs of stone like strange gravestones. It was somehow suitable as a resting place for an unknown martyr.

  No, she wasn’t a martyr.

  Who wasn’t?

  Unknown 271.

  You think I’m her.

  Mithering… Jane, I know you’re not her.

  So you don’t think I’m dead?

  I’m–

  Someone moved at the far side.

  Braddon jumped back, afraid he’d been seen, but then realised that it would be impossible to see him obscured as he was outside the site. The man was too far away to recognise, so Braddon was safe from being noticed that way too.

  On the plywood boarding was a sign warning the non–existent workers to wear their hard hats, hi–vis jackets and steel toe caps at all times.

  Braddon looked back: the man he’d seen was wearing a dark suit, silver scarf, his hair thinning and, although he couldn’t see his feet, his stride suggested shoes rather than heavy boots.

  The gap was too small to fit through, so Braddon went along the side until he came to the corner. There was a heavy–duty plastic bin for road grit and this served as a suitable stepping stone to reach the top of the boarding. Up Braddon went, grasping the top that was too thin to grip properly and it furrowed into the flesh on his palm, but he was on top and then over.

  He landed awkwardly and had to put his hand down to stop himself rolling on the ground. Automatically he clapped his hands together to get rid of the grey dust, and then realised how much noise this made. He must be as quiet as possible.

  He left shoulder throbbed: God, I’m having a heart attack!

  It took Braddon several deep breaths to get over that thought. It was only the knife injury. Only!

  So, by the time he moved over to where he’d seen the figure, and keeping low as if he was in a cerebral, the man was nowhere to be seen.

  Damn.

  Now what?

  There were footprints on the floor: small perfectly formed heels and toes that betrayed an expensive shoe with a distinctive point. They went along the side of a fence of steel rods that rose vertically ready to reinforce a concrete wall. They’d rusted. Braddon followed the prints, and noticed that there were others, a veritable trail that had been trodden for… Braddon had no idea how to judge numbers or the passage of time from an examination. He noodled the location and remembered nothing. No–one had come here since it was closed.

  But that man had.

  He hadn’t registered because he’d been thinking about something else. This, all of it, was a hidden trail in a magical forest or a passageway on an alien planet or a red carpet or… whatever it was the man had been playing.

  Braddon reached a doorway with a metal gate, padlocked on the outside. He could reach through, but he had no key. He looked right and left, as much as he could, but the man had gone, disappearing down the High Street or Old Tollgate.

  There was nothing for it, but to find somewhere to climb over the boarding and see if he could intercept him. He could probably climb the gate, but there were spikes at the top. The construction site spread out behind him, so he started to follow his own trail back the way he had come.

  He reached the point where he had joined the path and his tread had overwritten the pointed toe shapes. These pointers created a path leading from the gate to… somewhere over there.

  Braddon followed it and presently came to a simple concrete blockhouse. The bricked–up windows either side of a door stared at him like empty eye sockets, and set in the grey shell, it looked like a giant, square skull.

  Why would anyone come to this hut?

  The room couldn’t have been more than a few metres square.

  Braddon tried the door: it was locked.

  He glanced around before he realised what he was looking for and found the steel reinforcement rods jutting upwards like filaments searching for brain tissue. One of the steel shafts had nearly rusted through at the base. Braddon waggled it back and forth, and eventually it began to move, twist and eventually it snapped.

  Back at the door, he poked it into the jamb by the lock and, after breaking the end off, he got enough purchase for the makeshift crowbar to split the wood. The lock failed, and the door opened.

  It was dark inside, but Braddon had a torch.

  It was empty.

  As empty as the Chinese Box.

  Why would anyone come to this empty hut?

  There was something on the floor, a dark, black rectangle that revealed itself to be a stairway leading down.

  Braddon went over and descended through the concrete crust and came out in a corridor full of pipes and cables. If the concrete ceiling was cranial bone, then these were the arteries, veins and nerves.

  Braddon shone his torch in each direction, one after the other, wondering which way to go, before he checked the floor. The footprints were now negative, grey prints on a dark surface rather than the dark depressions in the grey covering as had been the case outside. They only went one way, so Braddon did the same.

  Half way down the corridor he felt strange: sick.

  There was a growing sense of foreboding as if his blood was being chilled.

  Suddenly, he spun round, shone the torch back, but there was no–one there.

  Braddon had been sure there was someone breathing down his neck. He knew this sensation. It had been the same when he’d visited Doctor Ridge in the morgue. He shone his torch on the ceiling. It was covered in pipes and cabling: Copper! Of course, a Faraday cage.

  As if in confirmation Braddon realised that the thought had buffered.

  It was an underground… bunker, that was the word, cut off from the world, protected by all the copper that Stenson Supplies had delivered. It was a deliberate black spot and therefore just the place to do anything you wanted to keep from the Thinkersphere. Noodle could not see in here. If people came and went while playing a cerebral, then it was… what was that word – buffering again – school… ‘off–grid’.

  He went further, feeling that he was walking into the dark in more ways than one. No wonder black spots were illegal, they were frightening and here he didn’t even have the morose Doctor Ridge’s sarcasm for comfort. He’d never felt so alone or, he had to admit, as frightened.

  It was like he was stepping back in time, away from the bright thoughtful existence and into some subterranean reptile burrow.

  I’ll go… ow… back. No, don’t be a wuss.

  He went on.

  As Braddon’s main sense ceased, so his other senses came to the fore, heightened and extended by need. His eyesight sharpened, and in the dark he could make out faint shapes, darknesses in front of darknesses; his hearing amplified the slightest sound until he could almost h
ear the echoes of his own breathing; and his skin could feel the direction of temperature.

  His footsteps echoed and there were other noises. He stopped and concentrated on the bumps, whirrs and clunks. The air conditioning was active.

  Not under construction and unfinished, he thought, but new, new like… a Chinese Room.

  The thought didn’t go anywhere; it was just stored in his brow.

  He moved through a larger area with rooms on either side, some with machines installed ready to control the complex building above, if it ever came, and others were empty, cables dangling ready for something to be installed. As he went, he was conscious of losing himself. His ability to remember had gone; his train of thought as ephemeral a trail as the dust from his shoes. The footsteps he was following faded and then were gone, so he was wandering. He had no map. No–one in his head to direct him home. Without the constant reassurance of other people’s thoughts, he was mentally adrift – more alone than he had ever been.

  Did he still exist, he buffered the thought, if no–one thought about him? He certainly didn’t matter at all. As he was adding no thoughts anywhere, he was literally withering from memory.

  He’d been underground for hours or minutes. Without Noodle and thought, everything was becoming dislocated. The familiar feel of GPS and datetime stamp, so taken for granted, left a hole by its absence.

  Even his own footsteps on the floor left no trace now, the construction site dust having been shaken from the shoes.

  Deeper into the labyrinth, he heard breathing.

  He held his own breath.

  He listened: yes, breathing.

  Many, many people, all breathing at once.

  The noise, like the wind or waves continuously crashing, slowly became all–pervading, and ahead, twinkling, there were lights, tiny constellations of blue and red.