The Enhanced Series Boxset

by T. C. Edge

  She turns back down to her duties and starts tapping again. I don’t move.

  “Yes, Mrs Shaw? Anything else?” she asks, staring at her screens.

  “Um…no, nothing major. Just wondering – what time is the ceremony tomorrow to honour the City Guard?”

  “3PM,” she says immediately.”

  “And is it open for all residents?”

  “The front sections are reserved for members of the City Guard. Rear sections may be taken up by other officials. However, if you wish to watch, you can do so from the streets further back, although I wouldn’t advise it.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Well, it’s going to be televised, so you’ll be quite able to watch it from your apartment via hologram. Depending on the location of your residence, you may also be able to watch from the windows.” She looks up at me again, very briefly. “You’re in apartment 51-35, so will have a decent view from up there.”

  “You remember where I live? Do you have a photographic memory or something?”

  “I have an eidetic memory, and recall all details of all residents that cross my path.”

  I guess that’s why her duty is here at the front desk, organising things.

  “So, you remember everything?”

  “With a little time to recall, yes, everything.”

  Her words come at me abruptly and her tapping grows ever more furious. It’s the call for me to go, my request to discover the truth about my test denied. Then again, I hardly expected it to be accepted. It was worth a punt, though.

  With little to do but wait for Adryan to finish work, I take another quick tour of the communal levels, studying the Savants with a more academic eye. Like the way Adryan tends to study me to improve his ability to emote, I look upon these people in much the same way.

  Only, instead of learning how to display emotion, I spend my time learning how to suppress it.

  I spend a large part of that afternoon watching, learning, and putting into practice what I see. There’s a real skill to it – emptying your face of any sort of expression – that I find quite difficult at first. Mostly, that’s because, despite everything, I’m starting to find it quite amusing how these people look at each other.

  They don’t greet each other with a smile. Their eyes don’t light up. There’s no joy, feigned or otherwise, upon their blank visages.

  In fact, every meeting merely begins with the traditional bow and nod, before any information that requires sharing is passed on. It’s so odd to look at, and I begin to wonder just what on earth is going on inside their heads.

  I mean, my thoughts are always based upon some emotion. I’ll think about my friends because I worry about them. I’ll recollect happier times with Tess or Drum because I wish to feel a bit of past joy. I’ll think of Cromwell and the Consortium with hate. I’ll occasionally let Adryan enter my thoughts with a note of desire.

  But mostly, it’s fear that drives me, that directs my thoughts and actions. Fear for myself, partially, but also for everyone else in this city. Most of the time, I’m purely thinking about my mission, both in grander terms and the smaller elements that go into it.

  What’s the next thing I have to do?

  Who’s the next person I have to manipulate?

  Everything I do, everything I am, is all based upon my emotions. They drive me to act, recklessly at times, but always for the good of those I care about, and the wider city in general.

  Without my emotions, what am I? Just an empty shell, carrying out a function.

  Nothing but a mechanical part of a large machine, doing the same thing day after day until I’m all used up and obsolete. And when that happens, I’ll be chucked out and replaced by a newer part, a brand new cog.

  And the machine just keeps on running.

  That’s all life is here for these people. And the purpose of the Consortium, and Director Cromwell, is merely to ensure that that machine grows larger, spreading its robotic arms wider and wider until the entire planet falls under its grip.

  So as I begin to creep into people’s minds that afternoon, I see exactly that. An emptiness. Deep and dark caverns filled with no joy or love or hate or excitement or fear or anything else.

  Only rarely do such things bloom, like little lights in the dark, oases in the arid desert. But mostly, it’s a coldness that inhabits the minds of the residents of this building, their entire consciousness dominated by their duty and function and little more.

  In the end, the line between man and machine is starting to meld together. And if goes on, the future is going to be a very cold place indeed.

  89

  “OK then, let’s see what we’ve got here, shall we?”

  I’m waiting on tenterhooks to find out exactly what Brian’s delivered us. For the last ten or so minutes, Adryan has been configuring some security encryptions to ensure that opening up this particular file won’t lead to a sudden band of Stalkers or City Guards pouring through our door.

  In fact, come to think of it, one of the only benefits of living here is that there are so few of them around. Stalkers make no appearance whatsoever, the special forces of the High Tower no doubt out there causing havoc for my brother and his soldiers as we speak.

  Con-Cops, too, aren’t allowed in the building, and it’s certainly been a great relief for me not having to duck and weave around their patrols. Given how they’re all actually Unenhanced, albeit modified to the Consortium’s designs, they have no position here at the home of the Savants.

  Only the few members of the City Guard who provide security are allowed in. And, in my experience, the Brutes and Dashers and Hawks, and all the rest who make up their number, are far nicer than their Con-Cop counterparts. So I don’t much mind seeing a few of them around.

  In fact, living among so many Savants, it’s actually quite refreshing.

  “Right, here we go,” says Adryan, tapping at the touchscreen interface a couple more times. “I think I’ve got it…”

  With a final dance of his fingers, he steps back, and from a little projector built into the top of the interface, a holographic representation of the High Tower appears, filling the space in front of it.

  I let off a barely audible ‘wow’ and stare at it in wonder, the image strangely beautiful and mesmerising. Its entire structure is laid out before us, the building I’ve looked upon so many times from the outside now suddenly laid bare, all its internal workings clear to see.

  I see the main doors at the front leading into the atrium, rising several floors up. I see the many dozens of lifts around the foyer’s perimeter, moving up through the core of the building and right towards the summit. I see the layout of each individual floor: the communal floors from levels 6-10; the working and operations floors from level 11-49; the primary residential floors from levels 50-89; and those reserved for the high ranking officials from levels 90-99.

  Then, my eyes turn right to the summit, the 100th floor of the building far larger and more grand than the others. It appears to rise several levels up itself in sheer scope, fitted with a high domed glass roof that catches the sun on clear days, and broken down into 13 very clear sections.

  As I look upon it all, Adryan steps in, using his hands to manipulate the hologram. Reaching forward to the summit, he pulls his hands in towards himself and the image zooms forwards, giving us a better look at the top. Then, slowly, he begins rotating it clockwise, working it around into the right position so that the western side of the building, where we live, is right before us.

  Then he starts speaking, analysing what he’s seeing as he sees it.

  “The summit is broken into 12 residences,” he says. “There’s one each for every member of the Consortium, all of them around the perimeter of the building.” He turns to me with a little wink. “I bet you’d love the view from up there.”

  I sure would. Although, if I do ever get up there, I doubt I’m going to have time to admire it…

  “The central core of the summit,” Adryan c
ontinues, “is utilised for meetings and operations. It’s basically where the Consortium work, figuring out all their directives and orders and running the whole show.”

  “OK, there’s nothing new here yet, Adryan,” I say. “We know all of this already, don’t we?”

  “We do. But there are plenty of things we don’t. For example,” he says, pulling the summit even closer so the details become more clear. “Look at the 12 residences closely. Spot anything unusual?”

  I scan them all, one by one, and note that they’re all identical. All have the same structure, with a bedroom, living space, bathroom, and various other rooms used for whatever purpose their occupants see fit.

  Yet there is one single difference between them, one thing that sticks out: all are the same structurally, but one is larger than the rest.

  “That one,” I say, pointing towards the residence in the due north position. “It’s bigger than the others.”

  Adryan nods and smiles.

  “It must be the Director’s residence,” I continue, feeling some swell of energy. “Of course he’d be at the north end, right on top of everyone else…”

  Adryan doesn’t fully grasp my sarcasm.

  “It can only be his,” he says. “And that means that, if he has any meetings with officials outside of the Consortium, he’ll have them here.”

  He points to the level beneath the summit, level 99. Its structure is almost exactly the same as the penthouse above it, with a core area used for large meetings and smaller sections around the boundary. There are 12 of them, each directly beneath each residence at the summit.

  “Anyone meeting a member of the Consortium will do so on this floor,” says Adryan. “It acts as a go-between, some sort of middle ground between the summit where the Consortium live, and the floors below where the other high ranking officials reside.”

  I step in and take a closer look, thinking out loud.

  “So…we need to find out who meets Cromwell on level 99, right underneath his residence? If we can find out who, and when they’re meeting, at least I’ll have someone to work on.”

  Noticing something, I reach forward and manipulate the image myself, pushing it back to give us a better view of the whole thing once more. Around the perimeter, there appears to be small ducts leading up from level 90 and straight into the 12 residences around the summit.

  “What are these?” I ask. “They look like mini-lifts.”

  Adryan conducts a closer inspection, his eyes narrowing.

  “Hmmmm, I think that’s more or less what they are,” he says. “They look to be dumbwaiters…”

  “Dumbwaiters?” I ask.

  “They’re basically little freight elevators used for transporting food and other essential items. I guess that’s how the Consortium have their food delivered, seeing as they venture down so rarely.”

  “Well, could we use it? I could get inside and come straight out in Cromwell’s home! That would make things a lot easier…”

  Adryan silently examines the schematics a little more closely. Then, as he does with so many of my bright ideas, shakes his head.

  “That won’t work. For two reasons.” Two? Great. “First, it looks to be too small for you to fit in.”

  “Hey, are you saying I’m fat?” I joke.

  He still isn’t getting my humour.

  “No…not at all. It would be too small for any human…”

  “Adryan, I’m kidding. So, what’s the other reason?”

  “Oh right, sorry. Um, well there’s a scanner. It would pick you up.”

  “OK, fair enough. How about poison then? We could poison his food.”

  Again, I’m knocked back. This isn’t doing my confidence any good.

  “No. The scanner would pick that up as well I’d imagine. We need something guaranteed. We need to know, for sure, that he’ll be killed.”

  “You mean that I’ll kill him,” I correct him.

  It appears that nothing I do will change the fact that it needs to be me to pull the trigger, literally or metaphorically speaking. I can’t manipulate someone to do it for me. I can’t poison him. I literally have to stand right in front of him, look him in the eye, and cut off his life right there and then.

  It’s as if they want me to properly execute him, make some sort of statement perhaps. You know, that’s probably what Lady Orlando is thinking…

  “Fine, forget the dumb…what was it?”

  “Dumbwaiter.”

  “Yeah, that. Forget that. Anything else?”

  We spend the next couple of hours examining every inch of the High Tower, learning all about its structure and security protocols. The latter, it seems, was provided by Brian in another part of the file, pages upon pages of electronic data about the running of the building.

  It’s a true treasure trove, and will take some time to get through completely. Yet what’s immediately clear is that the summit of the High Tower is going to be accessible by no other means than direct access through the main lifts.

  We know, now, that Director Cromwell, if he ever comes down from the summit, will do so either in the northernmost section of level 99, beneath his residence in the High Tower, or in the central core of level 99, where larger meetings are held between the Consortium and other high ranking officials.

  It’s safe to assume that the latter is more likely to be a rare affair, whilst the former will probably happen more regularly. All we have to do is find out who is going to report to him next, and when. Once we’ve done that, I need to find them, get them alone, manipulate them, and then have them ferry me right up to level 99, where I can assassinate Cromwell and be on my merry way.

  Sounds simple, right?

  The very thought, in actual fact, makes my brain hurt. Yet at least there’s some clarity to what we’re doing, and at least my efforts so far have yielded some significant results.

  Without these plans and protocols, we’d have no true idea as to where Director Cromwell lived in the summit, and where he set about meeting his officials. Brian’s service, albeit out of his control, has been invaluable.

  We stay up late that night, so late that I end up falling asleep on the sofa as Adryan continues to analyse the building and security protocols, searching endlessly for some weak link that we can use to our advantage.

  While I may have certain abilities that are essential to this mission, I certainly don’t have the same brainpower that he does when conducting such research.

  His working life, after all, is very much dependent on his ability to study and analyse things and then draw conclusions from what he’s found. OK, so most of that has been studying people and relationships, and not schematics and security systems, but still the same principles apply. I think.

  He’s certainly more suited to the work than me, anyway.

  So, I end up taking something of a backseat, getting some rest on the sofa as he works into the night. Occasionally, I wake up from my brief bouts of sleep to ask if he’s found anything. His answers are generally disappointing.

  Unfortunately, among the data supplied by Brian, there’s absolutely nothing about schedules and meetings. What we can assume, however, is that the members of the Consortium are likely to keep to some sort of rigid pattern. It would stand to reason, given the inflexibility of all of the rest of the inhabitants here with regards to their working patterns.

  Essentially, the High Tower is run like clockwork. Savants, with so little distractions to deal with, tend to follow the same formula each and every day. Their lives run on tracks, only very rarely sent slightly off course by ‘special’ events, such as the ceremony held to honour us after the attack on Culture Corner, or the one tomorrow afternoon to honour the City Guard.

  Naturally, the Consortium are likely to operate in a similar way, and each member will presumably hold meetings with their subordinates at the same time and same place each time they’re briefed. This could be once a week, once a month, once every ten days. Frankly, we don’t know, and that’s w
hat we need to find out.

  Another assumption we make – well, less an assumption and more a fact, according to Adryan – is that the various members of the Consortium are prone to liaise more commonly with specific officials within their personal sphere of expertise and influence. Essentially, each member is tasked with running a specific facet of the city, and will therefore be updated and briefed by their relevant subordinates.

  So, for example, Commander Fenby is the highest ranking official within the City Guard, and thus one of the 12 members of the Consortium. He will, therefore, be in close contact with Deputy Commander Burns, and perhaps other high ranking officials within different branches of the security force.

  So, that might be the man who commands the Stalkers, or the Con-Cops, for instance. I assume that such a person exists, with each different security force managed and run by some sort of overseer.

  The same will go for the other members of the Consortium. If Commander Fenby is the top defence official, then there are others with similarly important posts. Over in Outer Haven, we have the Council of the Unenhanced, and within their number are those who see to justice, education, healthcare, finance and the economy, and so on.

  I’ve always considered such people to be rather redundant, given how the Consortium are the ones who actually direct our course. But then again, it’s all about giving us some semblance of freedom. And, well, having our own council with all these phoney officials is part of that.

  However, I can’t imagine that any members of the Consortium worry about such concerns. Money, for example, isn’t an important part of life here in Inner Haven. Instead, they have a member who oversees the working requirements and duties, and makes sure they’re filled.

  The same goes for justice. Crime isn’t an issue here either, so I doubt it’s such a concern. Instead, they have a member who maintains the strictest of order, setting out the doctrines that all people live by with regards to lifestyle practices.

  Education, of course, is an important part of this world. One member of the Consortium, therefore, will be in charge of making sure the youth of the city are suitably managed and put into the right line of work.