by Tara Basi
Quattro smiled and sensually licked her lips. “Peter, this is your VR. You’re in control. Aren’t you?”
He couldn’t look, and he couldn’t not look. Her silky gloved hand was sliding down to caress her golden thighs.
“Yes. Yes, I’m in control. Stop it! Stop!”
“This is what it’s like for me, Peter. I didn’t ask to be brought back. How does it feel not to be in control of anything?” Quattro whispered, moaned and closed her eyes as her fingers started to play with the hem of her flimsy dress.
He had to stop this. “Please, I have news, about Zip.”
“Good, tell me. We can do all the other stuff later,” Quattro said, released her hem, straightened her dress and winked.
Peter had to focus and get the degenerate girl out of his head. He dug his fingernails into his palms. “She’s incommunicado in a psychiatric hospital. I always thought that woman was crazy.”
“Get her out. Zip’s the key, the un-zipper of everything,” Quattro said, with a husky laugh, as she played with the golden zipper on the side of her figure-hugging dress.
Peter coughed and tried looking anywhere but at Quattro. “She’s not contactable for another twenty-four hours; they’re running some kind of tests. I’ll see what I can do after that.”
“What about Kiki’s financial transactions with Mathew?”
Peter didn’t want to talk about Mathew. “Why is Zip so important?”
Quattro smiled at Peter as she sashayed over to where he’d backed himself into a corner of the cellar. Quattro brought her mouth close to his, and her powerful perfume hit him like a narcotic. One satin-gloved hand caressed the back of his neck while the gloved fingers of her other hand drew wicked circles around his left nipple. Firm breasts and a warm thigh pressed against his flesh.
“The Whisperer tells me Zip must remember what happened when she almost died. Then this world will start to slide into a new oblivion, or maybe it’ll be saved.”
Peter cried out and pushed Quattro away. “You’re making no sense. Stop it! You’re my daughter, were my daughter. Please don’t do this.”
Quattro pointed and laughed. “But the flesh is weak.”
Peter groaned, turned away and faced the cellar wall. There was a momentary hesitation, then he banged his head against the stone. The blow almost made him retch. He reached up and felt a warm, reassuring trickle of blood. Without turning back to face Quattro, he focused on why he was doing all this. “Kiki’s financial transactions with Mathew are almost exactly as they should be, if she’d hired him to kill her.”
Peter couldn’t risk looking, but he knew, with relief, that Quattro wasn’t standing quite so close when he heard her ask, “Almost?”
“The transaction’s origin data has been falsified. I’m tracing the real source. It’ll take time,” Peter explained, still nervously facing the wall with blood dripping from the end of his nose.
“Mathew was right about that as well. Keep digging. You’ll find a pit of grief waiting for you.”
Peter turned to face Quattro. “As well? What grief?”
“He’s coming to get me, before you and your Orb Industries’ friends can kill me. Sorry, I mean before Orb Industries turns me off.”
Peter flinched. How could she possibly know that and have changed so much since their last session? She should have been dormant. Had Zip somehow corrupted his Quattro? The simulation must be slipping into psychosis, like the others. It wasn’t her fault. She was sick. Nothing else could explain her imaginary discussions with Mathew. Peter wondered if he should tell her what the lawyer had told him, that Mathew was brain dead; or would it drive her completely insane? He’d tell her another time.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. How is Mathew coming to get you? He’s buried in the Thermal Mines. And what does that even mean? ‘Get’ you?”
“You’d prefer Orb Industries pull the plug?” Quattro asked. She wiggled in the dress that was no more than a cobweb sprayed over her body and pouted. “Wouldn’t you miss this?”
A bell sounded in his Headgear. Someone was at the garden gate.
“That’ll be Mathew. I wouldn’t keep him waiting.” Quattro blew Peter a kiss and disappeared.
Peter was baffled. He was out of VR and back on his couch. His simulation shouldn’t be able to manipulate the VR, and yet it had happened again. What was going on? Instinctively, he touched his forehead; there was no blood, only the memory of the pain. The bell in his Headgear sounded again and then again in quick succession. Peter nervously headed upstairs and checked the security console. It was only a delivery man with a tall wooden crate. Peter let out a long breath and relaxed. He wasn’t expecting anything, though. He opened the gate intercom. “Yes?”
The personable young man smiled broadly into the camera. “Peter Morris? I have a special delivery from Kiki Morris. I’ll need a brainwave signature, sir.”
Peter blinked. Had he heard correctly? “Did you say Kiki Morris?”
The young man grinned, looked down at a handheld terminal, rolled his eyes to check his Headgear and then returned Peter’s gaze. “That’s correct, sir. Kiki Morris. Appears to have been in storage for a while pending a specific delivery date. Is it your birthday?”
Had his beautiful daughter sent him answers from beyond the grave? Had she known her life was threatened? Why hadn’t she told him? Peter bypassed all the usual security checks, opened the gate in the garden wall and ran to the front door. As he opened it, the delivery man was already coming down the garden, pushing the coffin-sized crate ahead of him on a trolley.
“Please, just leave it inside the door,” Peter said, anxious to open the crate in private.
The delivery man nodded, and he carefully manoeuvred the crate up the steps of the front door. Peter was impatient to be alone.
“Please, take my brainwave confirmation. I’m very busy today.”
The man didn’t respond. He turned away from Peter and closed the front door.
“I’m really very—” Peter started to say and stopped.
As the man turned around, he shimmered and began to change. An instant later, Peter was looking at a reflection of himself in a fairground mirror. When the shimmering stopped, the friendly delivery man had been replaced by Mathew’s shiny humanoid machine body. How was it here, for real? An avatar? His cameras couldn’t be fooled by holographic cloaks. It was all impossible. The machine looked just as dangerous and powerful as it had in the cellar VR.
Before he could react, the machine had hoisted the coffin-sized crate onto its shoulder and was heading for the open cellar door at an incredible speed. Peter chased after, but it had already vanished down the stairs.
By the time Peter caught up, out of breath and sweating, the crate was in splinters. The machine was running a pair of hyper-cables from Peter’s VR system to another humanoid machine that looked the same. No, not exactly: the other shiny humanoid had female curves and was inert.
“Stop! What are you doing? Who, what are you? Are you Mathew?” Peter frantically asked.
“Yes.”
Peter stared, shaking his head. It sounded exactly like Mathew’s avatar. “How did you escape? You’re supposed to be brain dead.”
Mathew ignored Peter and moved to face his lifeless companion. Both were now as still and silent as polished silver sculptures, reflecting each other’s image over and over. Peter threw himself across the floor to grab at the cables. In a blur of shiny motion, he was lifted, carried up the cellar stairs and gently pushed through the door. Before he could turn around, the bunker’s great double doors clunked into place and locked. The cellar was sealed, with Mathew and all his secrets inside.
Peter panicked. He had to get help.
Intruder alarm! Hostile presence! Intruder alarm!
In his confusion, he hadn’t noticed his Headgear was already shrieking for help and Orb Industries was coming. ETA five minutes. If Mathew really was alive, inside that body, he was only going back to the Thermal
Mines. He wasn’t taking Quattro. She was his, for ever.
The house security systems initiated a lockdown. Hyper-tensile steel bars rose from the floor, barring the bunker entrance. A super-strong metal mesh shutter fell from the ceiling to settle between the bars and the cellar door. Mathew was trapped in the bunker, no matter how strong he was.
Peter stumbled to the drawing room at the back of the house and splashed a large measure of brandy into a glass, spilling more than he captured. He took a gulp, choked and coughed, before pouring himself another. Clutching the tumbler, his hands a little steadier, he ran through the house and out into the walled front garden. Where was security? Headgear said they were two minutes out. He couldn’t lose Quattro, not this way.
It was a miserable day outside. Suffocating, low, grey clouds drizzled feebly, like the last drops of an old man’s pee; more fell just when it seemed to have stopped. Peter felt the clammy air vibrate all around him before he was aware of anything else. A low buzz drew his gaze upwards to see the underside of a Vertibird dropping slowly out of the cloud, then another, and others, circling about thirty metres above the house as though they were sniffing out carrion. Peter counted five in all. A voice in his Headgear said he’d been spotted and to remain where he was.
Shaking with fear, Peter downed his brandy in one and waited. One of the crafts quietly descended further, until it was ten metres above the ground. The air tingled, and the buzz was a little louder, as though a beehive had been overturned, but nothing he would have noticed from inside the house.
Peter jumped, dropping the brandy glass, and nearly fell over when ten heavily armed and armoured figures, looking more machine than human, jumped down into his garden from the hovering assault ship. There were no ropes; they had literally leapt out. The security force landed without a sound. Five of the squad headed into the house, towards the cellar entrance, and positioned themselves along the hallway. Others crouched in the garden or made their way to the back of the house.
Peter watched, mute and disconnected. Everything was moving too quickly. The men were completely encased in coin-sized, jet-black, hexagonal tiles affixed to some equally black, stretchy material that clung to their bodies like skin. They looked less human than Mathew.
One of the intimidating black figures bundled Peter through the garden gate and out into the lane. There, he motioned Peter to sit with his back against the wall.
“Is it still in the cellar?” the figure grunted.
Peter was comforted that the soldier at least sounded human. “Yes, the cellar’s sealed. He can’t get out.”
“When I tell you, lift the lockdown.”
Peter started to worry. What would happen to Quattro?
“What are you going to do?”
“Nuke the house if we have to, but we’ll start with plasma and EMP grenades. We can’t let an AI escape.”
Quattro wouldn’t survive; he had to try and save her.
“I’ve got sensitive equipment in that cellar. It’s important, important to Orb Industries.”
“Yeah, we’re ordered to destroy that as well. Just lift the lockdown when I tell you,” the officer answered, and turned away to engage in some silent communication with his team.
Peter couldn’t suppress a terrified gasp. He leaned forward, grabbed the kneeling, dark figure by the shoulders and half yelled, “That can’t be right! I’ve got time! I was promised!”
The armoured man shrugged off Peter’s hand and turned away without answering. Frustrated by the lack of response, Peter grabbed the soldier’s arm.
“Didn’t you hear what I said? You have to protect the equipment in the cellar. Check with Orb Industries.”
The multifaceted head swivelled toward Peter. “I just did. The order stands.”
The emotionless grunt and his thugs were going to kill Quattro. Peter panicked. He had to do something.
“Look, Mathew can’t be an AI. He was a prisoner in the Thermal Mines. Somehow, his human brain is in that metal body. Can’t you disable him?”
“Look at this, afterwards,” the officer answered, handing Peter a small security console. “Now shut up and lift the lockdown.”
He had to buy some time. Maybe Kiki’s killer could save Quattro. “It’s complicated. It’ll take a few minutes.”
“You have ten seconds, then I’ll take over your Headgear and unlock the damn doors myself.”
Peter knew he was out of time. Reluctantly, he lifted the lockdown and crawled towards the opening in the wall, hoping he might be able to see something.
The officer roughly pushed him back. “We’re supposed to keep you safe.”
Peter strained to hear anything, but there was nothing to hear. Effective AI weapons were silent. The officer had one gloved hand on Peter’s chest, holding him down, and another against his ear, listening intently.
“It’s gone. There was a pre-dug escape route a metre under the cellar floor. My men are in pursuit. Your equipment is fried. We’ll take you to a hotel. You won’t be getting back into your house for a while. You finished with that terminal?”
Peter stared at his feet. Was Quattro dead? Maybe she wasn’t dead. Maybe Mathew had her.
“Sir, the terminal?”
Terminal? What terminal? He looked at where the officer was pointing. Peter was holding a military terminal in his lap showing deep sensor logs from the house. It said that Mathew’s brainwave signature was fake. He was all machine.
“My God, he’s an AI, a real AI,” Peter spluttered, and shivered.
An AI was loose in London.
Chapter Seven – Senior Administrator Bremer and Alice
“Follow the light. Left … right … up … down. Good. How do you feel, Zara?”
Weak and groggy. Through teary eyes, she could just make out the figure of the doctor leaning over her. Summoning all her strength, she reached up and slapped him as hard as she could, which wasn’t very hard at all.
“Zip, it’s Zip. What the fuck was that?”
The doctor didn’t seem overly bothered by her assault. “It was necessarily traumatic,” the doctor said, ignoring her attempt to strike him.
The doctor had sent her to a hell of terrible memories and somehow made them even more grotesque.
“It was horrible, worse than any nightmare.”
“The good news is that deprogramming is neither warranted nor required.”
She felt cheated and angry that all the horror she’d just experienced had been pointless. “And the bad news?”
“You are suffering from severe PTSD. I can recommend someone who specialises in God War veterans.”
Zip laughed. “So I’m as sane as any old soldier. Maybe another time, Doc.”
The doctor leant over and opened her cuff. “I suggest you rest for a while. The drugs will be out of your system in an hour.”
“Where’s my damn daughter?”
“I’m afraid she left. She was rather upset.”
“Alice is upset!” Zip was volcanic with rage.
“Is there anything else I can do for you?” the doctor asked.
“No thanks, Doc. Right now, I’ve got an urgent desire to kill my daughter and that interfering senior administrator, Bremer.”
At least she was back online, but her satisfaction was short lived. There was a tidal wave of messages from Peter. She blocked Peter’s increasingly frantic messages and VR calls and propelled herself out of the Richard Dawkins Psychiatric Hospital like a bullet. Fury drove her down empty, disinfected corridors towards the exit. The only thing on Zip’s mind was a showdown with the senior administrator who’d conspired with Alice to have her mother sectioned.
She stumbled when she burst outside; the sunlight hit her like a blow to the head. She fell back into the protective shadow of the doorway. The hospital was on the surface, and it was daylight. In an instant, her incandescent fury morphed into a cold terror. The sound of her rasping breath echoed in her ears like a fast-approaching storm. A debilitating panic attack ove
rwhelmed her senses. Zip could just about manage a surface trip under cover of nightfall, but the sun exposed the worst of her old fears, the naked terror of being pinned like a butterfly by a sniper’s sights or by some autonomous weapon sniffing out her blood and locking on for a kill. Zip was defenceless, and she was in a sunlit murder zone.
She cradled her head in her hands and whispered, “It’s safe. It’s safe. It’s safe.” Trembling and still slumped on her haunches in the shadow of the hospital doorway, Zip wrestled her mind out of the past and forced herself to focus on the now: Alice and the damned Senior Administrator Bremer and all the questions.
Who could afford to throw her in a surface hospital? Maybe Peter, but not Alice, not her daughter. So, the senior administrator must have paid. Why? Why were Peter and Quattro so important to the Church? Bremer was going to tell her. She was going to make him.
The returning anger steadied her limbs and pushed the panic back down where it belonged but wouldn’t always stay. She hauled herself to her feet. Keeping her eyes lowered, she relied on her Headgear to guide her to the nearest lift. Out in the sunlight, Zip remembered the other reason she hated the city’s surface. London had always had its own flavour. Under the sky it used to smell like cold, oily coffee and tasted of fear wreathed in cigarette smoke. After the God War, the city was flooded with the odour of eager Pilgrims, and the air savoured of nothing but salty adoration. Thirty million damp, naked Pilgrims a day converged on the Orb. They trekked in from Heathrow in the west or rode the train from the Channel Tunnel in the south. There was a regular trickle of Pilgrim coaches that dared the northern route. Very few came from the dead-lands in the east. The over-excited Pilgrims enveloped over-ground Orb London in a funk of rapturous sweat. It sickened Zip.
Underground was different: the air was thick and heavy. It hung like invisible, dusty curtains with a bouquet of iron wrapped in stone and only a hint of Pilgrim. There were Churches and Pilgrims on every level, but there wasn’t anything like thirty million, and for London’s native Pilgrims, their Orb excitement had waned. Familiarity and living in the crosshairs of the next great war would do that.