Singularity's Children Box Set

by Toby Weston

  Mostly, he was travelling on foot, although a horse had allowed him to ride it twenty kilometres across fields, and another time an autotrailer carrying branches had been waiting at a crossroads. Keith had squirmed in, not even sure it had anything to do with his covert logistics support, but not caring. It had taken him as far as Amesbury, where he had spent the night on the edge of a small copse of woods in view of the stones.

  The British countryside was deserted. Very rarely he would see a mechOid or human working in the fields, but otherwise the landscape was pastoral and empty; only the roar of autobahns broke the spell. His autotrailer was still there the next day and so, after eating three packets of crisps and a cheese roll left during the night by more mysterious anonymous helpers, he climbed back in. The trailer covered another twenty miles; then, west of Taunton, a disconcerting, discordant vibration in its motor had roused Keith from his semi-slumber. The intensity built and waned deliberately; it was clearly an alarm. He clambered out in panic as they passed under some overhanging trees in the dip of a narrow lane.

  Technology was the enemy. Sages would be able to examine in petty detail any digital ripple Keith left in his wake: camera feeds, auto telemetry, financial transactions, medical records, electronic communications. All could be laid out for scrutiny by swarms of non-human intellects: an autotrailer drawing more power than anticipated, hinting at an anomalous load, might signal a stowaway hitching a free ride.

  Twenty minutes after he had scrambled over a hedge and into a picturesque wood of mossy trees, a Razzia auto passed overhead. The trailer had trundled on without stopping and would be a few kilometres away already. He hoped he hadn’t forgotten any food wrappers amongst the branches.

  Keith’s body was not faring well. He was rapidly becoming a physical wreck; muddy and stinking. He was glad there were no human beings to witness his descent into shambling zombiism. He necessarily avoided habitation and automation; he rarely saw others. He did, however, suspect that he was following well-trodden routes, established by exiles and desperate fugitives trying to avoid their abusive protectors. There was often evidence that others had slept in the derelict structures or natural hollows where Keith sheltered. Under a tarpaulin stuffed beneath a ewe tree, Keith found a pair of lady’s trainers. Pink in colour, they were four sizes too small, but he ripped the front ends off and accepted the discomfort of protruding toes; it was an improvement on the rapidly decaying, flapping, leaking shoes that Kenneth Poins’ flat loafers had become during the flight and journey. He flung the wrecked shoes over a hedge and, while he laced on his pink, toeless replacements, wondered at the story of the abandoned shoes and the plight of the girl who had left them.

  The last thirty miles he did in a single, delirious push. By the time he arrived at Morwenstow, it was late afternoon. For the first time, there were other people to avoid—ramblers, following the coastal footpaths. Keith suspected he would be safe, left alone, perceived as one of Forward Britain’s many marginalised outcasts. He certainly looked as if he had been living on the streets for a hundred years: hoodie up; hat pulled down to partially obscure his eyes; plastic bags protruding from the gaping ends of his shoes, keeping his toes dry now that it was drizzling; ashen complexion; green and yellow bruising across his face and dark bags under his eyes.

  He ignored an abandoned airfield and pushed on towards the clifftops, taking a winding cliff path down to a stony beach.

  It was cold, windy and grey. The waves slamming the sloping pebbles crashed and hissed. Keith folded his arms across his chest to add some insulation against the wind and spray. This was it, end of journey. He had been expecting a ship anchored offshore, but there was nothing. He folded his legs and flopped down onto a large, flat, mostly dry, stone. He took out a bag of crisps and, from it, a single salt and vinegar slice of potato, which he placed into his mouth.

  Ben watched their herd of luggage descend the escalator like an aluminium avalanche. The cases balanced on chunky hub-less wheels, dropping and skipping precariously from step to step, always appearing just one tumble away from disaster. The escalator was wide enough for three people to stand abreast. It gracefully circled the perimeter of the hundred-metre Sea Tower, forming a double helix around a hollow centre with its complementary ascending strand.

  Shaun stood two steps in front. He was not talking; and doing it in a way which made clear that Ben shouldn’t, either. Shaun, it seemed, was convinced that every Atlantean was secretly a deep cover special forces operative, and he was still annoyed that Ben had borrowed the barman’s Companion and paired it with his Spex. He kept insisting that their kit—possibly including BHJ’s server farms, and probably the entire Western hemisphere—would now be pwned BotNet zombies, requiring a purge back to factory settings before they could be trusted again.

  They stepped out of the crumbling concrete terminal of St Michael’s airport. It was an ancient 1950s building, a protected exemplar of architectural heritage. It was not faring well, however. Its skin was marred with green algae and streaked with ochre rust from exposed rebar showing through its dusty and abraded concrete pellicle. Signage, poles, legacy cabling, defunct cameras and ad hoc scaffolding marred its already rather ugly façade; while, from its roof, growing like a grafted unicorn horn, sprouted the elegant Sea Tower, a shard of Atlantean utopia intruding on local reality. From its tip, tethered by its nose, the 300-metre Sky Whale hung absurdly, is tail hanging down, seemingly brushing the pavement—although there was, in fact, at least ten metres of clearance.

  Shaun and Ben bowed and waved a business-like goodbye to their Waladli guests. There was no need for ceremony, as they would be catching up again at the conference in a few days, anyway.

  Safely outside the terminal, and no longer surrounded by hostile Atlantean æther, Ben told his Companion to reconnect. Messages began arriving in floods. Their two minders scanned the sea of autos and, aided by Spex, picked their rides out from the chaos of vehicles. Luggage was loaded into the back, and doors were politely held open for Ben and Shaun.

  By the time the small convoy of black vehicles was pulling out of the airport, avatars of Ben and Shaun were sitting at a thirty-person round table, where a discussion was already underway. Ben had been out of the loop since his brief peek at the world through the borrowed Companion, as presumably had Shaun, who nervously glanced around the improbably hovering obsidian table, taking in all those present, their faces and their body language. There was tension—and fear. However, Ben began to feel something else—the electricity of anticipation; the intoxicating scent of victory. He located his father and then immediately found Lawrence Pritchard, emperor of the Forward Reich, sitting next to him.

  George was looking fresh as ever—though Ben knew, in reality, that his father was little more than a huge tumour with vestigial arms and legs, floating in a synthetic zero-g scrotum, like a giant cancerous bollock.

  Ben had been expecting biblical levels of anger, but his father looked happy and calm. Pritchard looked incongruously laid back, too. There was something childlike about both of them, as if they were barely suppressing a snigger at some mischievous joke that only they were in on.

  Ben picked out the heads of a dozen other major Forward franchises sitting close to their alpha-dogs. This was not the BHJ shareholder meeting he had been expecting.

  “…opportunity,” George finished. Then he turned to his son and the head of Persuasive Technologies, who had just materialised. “Shaun, Ben, sorry we have started. I hope you had a pleasant journey? We will be voting soon.”

  “Very nice, thank you,” Shaun replied. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

  “Not at all, we had a lot to discuss…” George reassured him.

  “Hi,” Ben said. He felt sidelined by all the attention focused on Shaun, but he realised that now was not the time for a tantrum. He turned to a sharply dressed man next to him. “Did we miss something? Why’s everybody so calm? We’ve just been nuked, right?”

  The man looked at him for a seco
nd. “Yes. Attacked.” Then he leant in a few inches. “So we take action, no?”

  ***

  An hour and a half later, Ben slipped off his Spex and glanced across the limo to where Shaun was also emerging.

  “Well, fuck me sideways!” Ben said.

  “What?”

  “What? What do you mean, fucking WHAT?” Ben exploded, poking Shaun in the chest to punctuate every syllable.

  “I mean, what are you talking about?” replied Shaun. “What’s the big deal? What don’t you understand?”

  “Don’t get arsey with me, you smear of rectal discharge!”

  “Ben, I’m your boss! You can’t talk to me like that!”

  “You’re not my fucking boss!”

  “Not directly…”

  “Not at all!”

  “Well, I’m a peer of your boss’ boss. So in a way…”

  “You’re not my fucking boss, Shaun—never going to happen. I own half the fucking company. If anything, you’re my employee.”

  “Your father owns half the company...”

  “Yeah, and he’s orbiting the Earth in a bag of snot, just one more tumour away from oblivion. And I’m his only son. So, do the fucking math!”

  Shaun sighed and looked out of the darkened windows. Eventually, Ben picked up the conversation in a less belligerent tone. “I don’t get it, that’s what I was trying to say. Did Atlantis attack us?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then why are we going to offer them Hawai’i?”

  “Because, maybe they didn’t,” Shaun replied. There was something in his tone that rattled Ben, as if there might be some formerly overlooked piece of backbone lurking beneath the layers of doughy submissiveness, which usually separated whatever ego Shaun Twefford might possess from the outside world.

  “He’s not going to listen. He’s not rational,” Ben said. “He’s a bohemian Trustafarian with a messiah complex on a crusade to punish all the bad men and build himself a hippy paradise.”

  “Well, Niato will just have to listen!” said Shaun. “Didn’t you hear Dr Pritchard? Non-cooperation will be taken as a signal of guilt, and the Forward Coalition is ready to treat that as a declaration of war.”

  “It’s a waste of time,” said Ben. “He’s a fanatic. He won’t be pushed around. Just leave him alone. He’s the type who will die young, anyway. He’ll probably be wiped out by some nasty antibiotic-resistant STD picked up from his harem of sycophantic nymphomaniacs.” He demonstrated a succession of hourglass shapes with his hands while he watched Shaun, patiently waiting for Shaun’s lips to begin forming a response. When they did, Ben butted back in with a final flourish. “Not a bad way to go! Right?!”

  “Yeah, great. Nice one, Ben. You really do just keep getting funnier as you get older. He won’t say no. The Sages have gamed it. He’ll take Hawai’i.”

  “And share his animal circus with us? Are you in there, Shaun?” Ben reached over and banged his knuckle several times in quick succession on Shaun’s skull, re-enacting an old favourite from their school years’ bully/prey relationship. “Can you turn the fucking oid commentary off for a minute and try and have a thought of your own?”

  Shaun rubbed his face and head with exasperation. “Ben, can we please keep this professional?” Shaun’s Sages were pointing out that Ben had never been able to effectively compartmentalise.

  “There is no way Niato will bring Atlantis in,” said Ben. “There is no way he will let Outreach within a thousand miles of his Pinko playground.”

  “Perhaps not.”

  “Then what’s the point?” Ben asked. Shaun continued to look out of the window in silence, keeping his face turned away from Ben.

  Eventually Ben spoke up. “Well, leave me in the dark then, you ungrateful prick!”

  The auto emerged from a tunnel. Above them hung the startling bulk of the Sky Whale.

  “Wrong way, you moron. We are supposed to be heading to the hotel,” Ben said. Shaun just looked at him coolly, not offering a response.

  Ben’s Spex chirped, breaking the protracted silence. Ben glared at Shaun and pulled his Spex from his pocket.

  ‘Ben, sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk. Things are rather complex as you can imagine. Great work on the Waladli deal, by the way; that’s a real feather in your cap. We all hope it will be the keystone contract and an example for the other holdout Caribbean nations! Look, I know you were probably looking forward to the Islander conference, but something’s come up…’

  Ben listened to the rest of the message from his father; elevated by the rare praise, then non-specifically peeved, and finally angry and sad. After the message finished, he slipped his Spex back into his shirt pocket.

  “I’ve got to fly back the way we’ve just come! There is a company sub on the way.”

  “Really?” Shaun replied smugly, not even bothering to put energy into the lie.

  “You knew about this before me!” Ben shouted, suddenly furious. “You stubborn sideways turd!”

  Shaun might have been about to say something in retort, but the door opened as the auto rolled to a standstill. The shaved, Spex’d head of a BHJ security goon leant into view.

  “Everything good, Mr Twefford?” he said.

  “Yes, fine,” said Shaun. “Mr Baphmet needs to catch his suborbital. Please make sure he has his bag.”

  Ben’s door was opened. The sun slanted in and the wind stirred the fabric of his trousers at his ankles. He sat fuming for a few seconds and then climbed out of the auto. His bag was waiting a few metres away, wobbling from one wheel to the other, expressing urgency.

  “Bye Ben, have a nice flight,” Shaun said cheerily. “Try and get some rest, you look tired.” Before Ben could reply, the auto’s heavy doors thunked shut.

  “Fucking Shaun!” Ben swore in disgust as he watched the black auto pull silently away.

  The tide had taken the sea back, exposing another twenty metres of pebbles and a line of tangled brown kelp. In the dusk, the mass suggested heaps of bones run through with questing worms; a nightmare of leathery palps fringed with gnarled pseudopodia.

  In a futile attempt to keep the wind from plundering his diminishing wealth of warmth, Keith zipped the neck tight and let the sleeves of his waterproof jacket drop to cover his hands. There were no lights beyond the waves to suggest that any sort of pickup was imminent.

  Shivering, and having no distraction, Keith’s mind wandered. The detonation—his preferred label, a word which was clean and abstract, descriptive yet managing to avoid semantic proximity to atrocity, murder and death—had happened five full days ago and, for all that time, he had been off-grid. It was like having amnesia of the present; things must be happening, but he had no access to them. He was numbly curious to know how the world was reacting. He’d seen ramblers on the cliff paths, so there must have been some sense of normalcy, but there were also many distant sirens and flashing lights screaming overhead. There had been no signs of military mobilisation, which was reassuring; but he had carefully avoided autobahns and roads, and it was possible that flatbeds of tanks might even now be shunting across the countryside in preparation. Not that tanks would be much good against Atlantis—which would, of course, be the target—

  —Çin and Hind were opponents, not enemies; valuing stability over naïve ideals of progress or fairness. Keeping the ball in the air and kicking the can down the road were shared priorities for the three major power blocs.

  The Caliph was a crackpot fanatic. At least, that’s how the Forward propaganda machine caricatured him. It might be possible to frame his government for the attack, but Keith couldn’t see an angle there.

  No, the tiny fringe state of New Atlantis was the Forward’s only real enemy. The King of the Sea was too dangerous and charismatic to be left to flourish unmolested. His grand gestures were simply too unreasonably effective at capturing the attention of cognitively bulimic citizens. The people were developing immunity to the anaphrodisiac cocktail of persuasive technologies that the
Forwards used to contain them. Keith knew from briefings that, every year, more and more effort was allocated to maintaining the status quo. The masses, having subsisted on fake hope and synthetic inspiration for so long, had developed an inconvenient sensitivity to reality. They were pigs raised on nothing but compressed protein pellets, while Niato brought with him the tantalising truffle of hope. The merest whiff dispelled the clouds of lethargy, which made the people manageable and energised them to a simply unacceptable level of incorrigible enthusiasm. Niato provided contrast; a clean radiance of optimism, piercing the pervasive gloom and showing the Forward’s flickering fluorescent hope for the thin sham that it was.

  Proof or not, Niato would be blamed, or framed, for Keith’s mistake.

  The many deaths, as well as the destruction, the detonation had wrought were still too vast and intimate for Keith to fully perceive. Sitting on his rock, shivering in the dark, it was far easier to recriminate himself for manufacturing exactly the catalysing event their enemies had been waiting for. Pritchard and his Forward vampires would be rubbing their hands together while plotting the best way to play the fantastic opportunity of the atrocity.