by Toby Weston
Keith was pulled from speculation when he became aware of a familiar harmonic thrumming. It was the tell-tale acoustic signature of a winged drone; a large one.
His spontaneous reaction was fear. He threw himself down from the flat rock until he was lying, flat on his stomach, facing the cliff. His inadequate human eyes attempted to scan the air for drones and the cliff path for Razzia oids, but the noise was approaching from behind, from the sea. He flipped up again so that he was facing the waves. There was nothing discernible, but sound betrayed something invisible approaching.
Then, the thumping, liquid, buzzing thrum was all around, surrounding him with a sudden wind. He was on his back, looking up, when a glowing orange streak wrote itself across the sky. Focusing, Keith realised it was, in fact, only a metre above his supine body; a line of orange terminated by a chunky zip pull; a succession of faint concentric circles expanding out across the unseen surface of whatever was hovering above him. He propped himself on one elbow and reached up his hand to tug the zipper back. He could feel rubbery dreadlocks fringing the faintly luminous gash which had opened in the night sky. From the sound of its wings and the glow of its active camouflage dreadlocks, he imagined a larger version of the familiar furry Quetzalcoatl drone.
With some apprehension, he pushed an arm inside the drone’s belly. It was like reaching through a rip in reality. His hand rummaged blindly, encountered big bottles of water in a mesh bag at the front and several smaller bags, which turned out to be full of protein bars. A flashlight on a cord was attached by velcro where his questing fingers would quickly find it. Taking care not to let the light shine outside the hovering cavity, he set his flashlight on a low setting and peered into a space which was like the interior of a tactical sleeping bag; all webbing and pockets. Apart from the water and snacks, it was empty. Keith had been expecting to find an inflatable speedboat or scuba gear.
A hand-scrawled note was duct-taped significantly above him: ‘GET IN’.
Keith stared at the simple, unambiguous instructions for several seconds, then shrugged and considered the logistics. The zip only ran two thirds of the length. If he went in head first, he would get stuck—blind, unable to turn around without wriggling all the way out again—so he decided his feet would have to lead. One foot at a time, he lifted his legs and inserted them into the caesarean incision in the cybernetic flying snake’s belly. Shuffling down, walking on his hands and knees, he squirmed in until his feet reached the end of the bag. Then, he reached under himself and tugged the zip closed until only a foot or so remained open to frame his face. Somehow sensing he was ‘aboard’, the drone twisted on its three pairs of wings and, flying startlingly close to the water—so close that Keith’s face was actually getting flecked with spray from the breaking waves—it headed back out to sea.
Keith wondered if the thing would have enough batteries to take him out into international waters, or if the National Statistics Office had managed to slip a small craft through the pervasive Forward listening network closer to the coast. He tried to keep himself focused, but he was utterly exhausted. He had mostly walked two hundred miles in less than a week, sleeping in hedges and drainage culverts; and all that, after being nuked nearly to death. The invisible-flying-sleeping-bag was by far the most comfortable place he had lain in what suddenly felt like an eternity. He barely managed to close the zipper, leaving a couple of inches open for fresh air, before he collapsed into a deep sleep.
***
Keith woke to confused panic, finding himself thrashing around in a constricted womb-like prison. His ear and one side of his head were cold and his jaw stiff where his head had been pressed up against the partially open zipper. This realisation cemented him back into reality. The monotonous thrum was the drone’s wings. The undulating vertical rocking indicated that they were still moving. A warbling light was visible through three centimetres of open zip. Keith tugged it back another thirty centimetres and confirmed that the variable flashes were sunlight reflecting off waves. A glassy, undulating sea was hurtling by beneath. They were less than a metre above the surface. Their angle and proximity made the water appear black, the sea only acquiring its familiar marine blue if one looked left or right.
Peering out through the face-sized slot in the partly open zip—like a reveller in butterfly fancy dress—Keith realised he couldn’t see the sun. It must be above, and it must, therefore, already be late morning or early afternoon. That implied that he had slept for at least ten hours—which, in turn, explained his full bladder.
If he unzipped down to his waist, he could simply urinate straight down; but that suddenly struck him as very precarious. He could imagine tumbling out mid-piss. Now that he considered it, relying on a zipper—however robust—as the only thing stopping an awkward high-speed exit, seemed a little reckless. After some fumbling, he found webbing attached to the bag’s lining. The fastenings were probably intended for securing cargo. He guessed its current mission was improvised; as a means of human transportation, the drone lacked many features which, under normal circumstances, would have been considered mandatory. He tugged and tested the straps; satisfying himself that they were sufficiently strong, he began looping and clipping them together under his thighs, hips and chest. Suitably reassured, he flawlessly executed the planned high-speed urination manoeuvre.
Watching the water flashing by in a blur was a soothing experience. Keith estimated that they were travelling at fifty to a hundred knots. It was warm and so he shrugged out of his rain jacket. His musty body, released from isolation, immediately reminded him of its unhygienic state. Walking and sleeping in the same damp clothes for the past week had marinated him nicely in his own juices—if he fell asleep again, he would have to take care not to Dutch-oven himself to death with his own stink.
Such thoughts were a pleasant distraction, but there was little else to occupy his mind. However much he tried to remain nonchalant, the question of where the hell they were going persistently resubmitted itself for consideration. The drone must be getting pretty low on its batteries by now; they usually had enough juice for a couple of hours tops. Keith had expected to quickly rendezvous with a vessel, or perhaps a Xepplin; but, if they had been flying at this speed all night, then they must already be a thousand miles into the Atlantic.
Chapter 19 – Bad Faith Actors
An analysis of conversations within N indicated the existence of information firewalls. Zaki and Segi had noted that, below the rank of Hacker, the N-Kin continued to speculate wildly on the recent terrorist event, whereas the Hackers—and those imputed to belong to the mysterious ranks above—were significantly silent. Recently promoted to Phreaker—noteworthy in that they were both newish recruits—the two brothers should have been happy to speculate about the London attack; however, woken by their proximity to authority, they were only comfortable doing so in private, amongst themselves.
“It was definitely a nuke, right?” Segi said, leaning back in a canvas chair, his feet up on a plastic cool box filled with iced tea and chilled melon.
“Definitely,” Zaki replied, upright on his wooden stool.
“But the blast was too small, and there was not enough fallout for it to have been a nuke,” Segi stated.
“Also true.”
“So it must have been some new sort of nuke?”
“Yep… although, just for the record, not that I think it’s likely, it could have been antimatter.”
“Ha! Right, an antimatter bomb, or some new kind of nuke. Both well beyond most Klans...”
“Most being the operative word.”
“You think it was us?”
“I am trying not to think anything, to be honest! But yes, I think it was us.” Zaki threw his hand up. “Or New Atlantis—which, to be honest, I’m starting to think is also us. Nobody else has the tech… Çin or Hind perhaps, but I can’t see why they would do something like this… I suppose they might just blame it on New Atlantis. But if we are talking false flag, then it’s much more like
ly that the Forwards would nuke themselves and use it as an excuse to shut Niato down...”
“I can’t believe that… even for them.”
“Or…” Zaki continued, looking at his brother intently. “It could have been an accident. Like some malfunctioning pocket-sized micro-fusion ignitor…”
There was a pause, which extended until, with a flash of comprehension, Segi replied. “You mean the Torch? No way! Not possible. They are saying the blast was five kilotons!”
“It’s fusion, Segi. Do the math. You don’t need much hydrogen. There would be more than enough in the feed lines. I guess we’re lucky the tanks didn’t go up, too!”
“Shit!”
They both turned towards the barn. Ten metres below ground, the torch Keith had left a few weeks ago still occupied just one of the hull’s 128 empty ignitor slots. Zaki was suggesting that an identical sibling might have committed harakiri and taken several thousand square metres of London with it.
“That would explain why we need to keep it feeling safe!” said Segi.
“Too right!” Zaki replied and then stood awkwardly. “Anyway, the session’s kicking off soon. Let’s see if we get any answers from our wizards.”
They continued talking as they walked. When they reached the barn, Segi lifted the ancient, bleached wooden bar and tugged open the creaking door. Zaki limped inside and, while Segi was bolting the door, fumbled with the trap-door mechanism. Segi dropped quickly, hand over hand, and then waited at the first landing in case his brother slipped. The difference between the two brothers was ever more apparent; while Segi had bulked out into a young man, Zaki’s twisted body had withered into apparent dotage, seemingly skipping over youth and middle-age to directly enter geriatric senescence.
They walked claustrophobic tunnels and passed the black-tented chamber. The printhead was silent and motionless now that the bulk of the work was done. A few systems were still being fabricated in smaller printers upstairs or at other Kin Fabs. These were periodically delivered ready to be mounted, mating automatically with waiting sockets, plugs and valves. There was no user manual, no instructions, other than labels that must be matched: A to A; plug to socket. But Zaki’s engineering mind was unable to avoid putting together a picture of how the whole would function.
The last few months of printing had closed off the hull, hiding the fractal patterns inside a smooth shell of charcoal-grey diamond. In time lapse, this last phase had looked like a potter closing the rim of a bowl, bringing the edges up and together to make a sphere and smoothing over the seams to create a solid, blended whole.
Moving parts were few. There were no control surfaces that Zaki could identify. All but the most heavy-duty hinges were formed from graphene doped with crystalline polymers, the printing and subsequent baking process determining their flexibility and axis of movement. The few proper, full-scale, mechanical parts—like hatches and the crab-like undercarriage—had been printed together with the contiguous hull; then, a misting of acid—to which the diamond hull was impervious—had dissolved preprinted seams and voids, erasing acid soluble strata, to form independently articulating sections.
It was a technique borrowed from biology, where cells and tissues were grown bottom up, while groups of cells could be killed top down, in concert, to detach limbs and organs. It was how delicate fingers were cut from the blunt ends of embryonic stumps.
The last job of the print gantry employed the same misting head during a week-long controlled bake and baste. A shroud of super-thermal-insulator had been printed and the temperature inside kept at a steady, precise, 917 degrees kelvin. Every few minutes, the printhead had doused specific sections of hull with a solvent. The liquid worked its way into the graphene, crystallising and disrupting carbon bonds, changing the diamond from a dull, opaque grey to a polished, gem-like orange. The smoothed edges of the new transparent window panes faded organically into the hull. Just as dots added to a random doodle can turn meaningless squiggles into an unambiguous face, the transparent panels transformed the smooth, squashed ellipse into what was clearly an aircraft with a graceful, blended cockpit.
As they passed, they ogled at the beauty of the thing that they had built; this time, however, the brothers took the left-hand fork away from their mistress and into a small office. Here, unlike the rest of the tunnel network which was unadorned and brutally functional, the walls were panelled in plywood, and covered in printouts and screens.
Zaki immediately slumped down into his glove of a chair, while Segi sat facing him.
Focused by the earlier discussion upstairs, the first thing either of them did was check in with the Torch—all was green, fully integrated. With both the compromised ZKF security networks and the local BugNet feeding in reassuring information, it was able to satisfy itself that everything was copacetic and was not showing any indication of needing to create a paranoid nuclear fireball and kill everybody in a 500-metre radius.
They were still a few minutes early, so Segi took a disembodied flight around the Çiftlik. He noticed that more sand from a recent storm had settled on the racks of the bioreactor pipe that snaked around the farm. He dispatched a couple of drones to clean it off and to ensure the photosynthesis was proceeding optimally.
At 10 am, the Nebulous clubhouse Emoti became active and they entered its consensus.
N’s conceit for their inner sanctum was a vast hall walled with obsolete server racks and retro-futuristic mainframes. A doughnut-shaped table in the centre was apparently a megalith of ancient granite, its upper polished surface inlaid with metals: copper, silver, gold and titanium. It was surrounded by fifteen, as yet, unoccupied chairs. The vast expanse of floor around it, where Zaki and Segi had materialised, was quickly filling up with thousands of masked figures, who, like their own avatars, wore slightly too tight, black business suits and wore the vague pixelated masks, which were their Klan’s trademark.
After a few minutes, the MC began speaking and, through this act, became the first to be seated. After his short welcome—formality without content—everybody else was permitted to take their places.
The N-Kin were too numerous to sit at a single conference table; but, as long as they allowed some flexibility with consistency, the wonder of ‘multiple annealed subjective realities’ could seat a thousand Kin at just fifteen places, permitting each to enjoy the experience of sitting at the high table. For each participant, the consensus chose fourteen fellows from amongst all Kin present. Because N avatars were effectively interchangeable, and, as long as one didn’t pay too much attention to where anyone was sitting, places and people could be swapped in and out somewhat seamlessly.
Zaki and Segi found themselves separated by just one seat. Based on the amount of interaction they shared, it was a simple choice for the consensus to select Stella to seat between them.
The remaining twelve seats were filled using the same algorithms. The software evaluated point-to-point traffic between members, while also prioritising those most likely to contribute to the discussion. Some of those initially seated at the table would be common to both brothers—likely those expected to contribute the most to the discussion—but others were unique to each. The consensus management software would try to minimise the number of ‘swaps’ and maintain as consistent a reality as possible for the participants, but not at the expense of limiting participation. It was very good at sneaking in and swapping out. The algorithms had been developed for the Atlantis Online game to allow thousands of players to simultaneously crew popular pirate ships that would accommodate only fifty avatars.
Some disruption of local consensus was necessary, but people rarely noticed. The software used tricks like swapping new speakers for those who had been silent longest, while the anonymising masks made it easy to forget exactly who was sitting where.
In this consensus, there was no objective base reality. Two participants, carefully comparing notes, would find discrepancies—different participants and missing statements. To create some objectivity,
after the meeting, canonical minutes were released, containing all decisions and important information.
“Hi, Stella,” Segi said.
“How do you know it’s me with this mask on?”
“You’re a woman, for a start. You’re sitting next to Zaki for a second, and I don’t think he knows too many other females.” This was not fair and Segi knew it, but it had just popped out.
“Hi, Zaki,” Stella said, leaning over to give him a peck on the cheek.
“Hey, hi! How are you doing? And who’s that?” Zaki asked, recovering from the unexpected kiss and gesturing to a woolly feline creature crouching next to Stella’s chair.
“This is Kat.”
“Hi, Kat,” Zaki smiled, then recoiled slightly as the thing turned an intense gaze on him. It took some steady seconds to run its eyes from Zaki’s face to his feet and back again. Then it looked nonchalantly away.
“What on earth was that?”
