Beth flung herself towards the gun. Meda jumped on her back, and Beth’s legs buckled. She crumbled under the weight. Meda flipped her over then straddled her, flat on the floor. Her hands gripped Beth’s neck, crushing her wind pipe.
With her rib-cage jammed under Meda’s body, she gasped for breath, managing only shallow clutches. Sparks scattered across Meda’s possessed eyes. The pressure inside Beth’s skull felt close to bursting.
The gasping sounds that had spluttered desperately from Beth’s throat stopped.
Three minutes without oxygen.
Meda’s face became light. Beth’s five children ran to her laughing, skipping, calling her Mummy. She ran to them. If she lived, she might never know their names. To die now or live life with five holes in her heart. She knew which was worse. She stopped her fight.
The clutch around Beth’s neck suddenly released. Beth inhaled. Desperately, she gulped oxygen.
Meda was a dead weight on top of her, twitching and spasming uncontrollably.
Clayton pushed Meda from Beth.
With the weight removed, Beth could haul air deep into her lungs. Her throat was painfully sore. Coughing and choking, she rolled onto her side.
“I heard the shot. I thought you might need help. Were you running a test again?”
Clayton picked the gun from the floor.
Unmoved, Beth continued gulping air.
“Firearms are prohibited,” Clayton said.
“Meda had a gun.” The words croaked and cracked from Beth’s sore, strangled throat.
Clayton turned the gun around in his hand.
Beth checked the world map on the screen. The dots were still red. She dragged herself along the floor towards the trolley, and at the control panel on her knees she entered the series of commands that would cause each implant to stop the scene rewrites and apply the restore file it collected during its calibration phase.
She willed the red dots on the screen to change. Turn green! Turn green! She checked to see if the message response had come back. It had. The delay had to be latency in the network. Turn green. Turn green.
One red dot turned green. Then another. And another. A sea of green, glorious green, spread across the screen.
Having recovered from her stun, Meda was sitting up and watching Beth.
“This is a Top Secret facility. Everything we do in here is classified,” Meda said.
Beth pointed at Clayton’s stun gun. “Can I borrow that?”
Beth got to her feet, and Clayton passed her the stun gun.
“Classify this, bitch.” Beth shot Meda, and she fell down again, twitching.
Clayton bent over Meda and clunked handcuffs on her wrists.
Beth followed Clayton and Meda down the staircase.
“Do you know who I am?” Meda asked him, tugging her arm from his grip.
Clayton maintained his hold. “Someone with an illegal firearm.”
At the foot of the stairs, in front of the guards’ station, a confused Callum was sitting on the floor, touching the cuts on his face and lip. His shirt was untucked and ripped open. Beth was thankful he was okay.
Howard and the three guards who had restrained Callum were tidying themselves up, tucking their shirts back inside their pants and smoothing down their hair. One guard picked up his baseball cap from the floor.
Lana cautiously approached them. Her eyes were red and swollen. She was obviously still distraught.
Clayton led Meda through a door behind the guards’ station. Meda glanced back at Beth. What a fucking psycho. That bitch would be in prison for a very long time.
“Clayton asked me to help restrain Callum,” Howard said to Beth. “Amy is dead. We found her.” Howard nodded in Damian’s direction. Damian sat staring at the floor. “She was in a bad state.”
Beth would never forget Amy, distraught and hitting her fists on the pod window. That image would stay with her forever. It was the most horrific thing she’d experienced.
Beth sighed and looked at Damian. “Alex killed Amy—”
“What happened?” Callum was sitting on the floor, wiping blood from his nose with the back of his hand.
“Your neural networks were temporarily re-configured,” Beth said.
Callum edged up onto his legs, wincing and clutching his ribs. “My brain?”
“Do you remember me telling you about the project I worked on at ImReal?”
“The one that was cancelled?” Lana asked.
Beth was mortified she was responsible for all this. “That was why it was cancelled. I saw Callum scratching his arm. I should have realised you’d had the thought-text upgrade. If you’d declared it when you came in, they would have removed it. It’s not allowed in here.”
Callum rubbed his arm. “They never asked me if I had it.”
“They asked me. You distracted the woman on the front desk, remember,” Lana said quietly.
“I didn’t know you could configure my brain with it,” Callum said.
“How do you think the update to thought-text creates the air-screen?” Beth asked.
“I don’t know. I’m only a fertility expert.”
“When the brain thinks it creates electrical signals. The scalp spiders receive the signals, and pattern recognition matches them to text then thought-text is transmitted. But receiving thought-text without a screen involves pushing signals inside the brain. When the particles are released from the implant, they temporarily activate the visual cortex so you see the air-screen projected in your field of view, and then they return to the implant and the image vanishes.”
“That’s not what happened to me.”
“No, you’re right, that was something else. The images were written into the wrong parts of the brain. The particles need to know where they’re going, and mapping had failed in that version of code.”
“If the guards and Howard had not pinned me down, who knows what I would have done.”
“I’m sorry,” Beth said.
“What happened to your neck?” Howard asked Beth.
Beth touched it and winced. “Meda strangled me.”
“I told you she was crazy!”
A nurse pushed a wheelchair towards them.
Callum waved her away. “I’m okay.”
The nurse stood on her tiptoes and peered at his forehead. “You’ll need that cut stitched.”
Callum reluctantly dropped in the wheel chair. “Can you remove this too?” Callum pulled up his shirt sleeve and showed the nurse the implant site on his bicep.
The nurse nodded. “Follow me.”
Lana pushed him away.
Outside in the parking lot, Beth and Howard approached the abandoned pickup truck. The engine was still running.
Howard climbed into the driver’s side and turned the engine off while Beth dropped the back door and hauled herself in the cargo area.
She crouched down next to the wooden crates, hoping her embryos were inside them. Even though Alex said he had them on board, he couldn’t be that callous.
“What’s in the crates?” Howard asked.
“Embryos.”
“Ours?” Howard asked.
“I hope so.”
Howard waited near the back of the truck and watched Beth prize off a crate lid. Beth glanced at him, forcing a smile. Howard raised his eyebrows. She took a deep breath then waded through the heaps of shredded paper inside. As she frantically searched, the paper strips spilled over the crate’s edge.
Desperately, she lifted the lid from the next crate and then the next.
“Champagne!”
The contents were all the same. Identical green bottles of vintage champagne.
Howard kicked the piles of shredded paper that had landed at his feet, and she looked towards the launch site and screamed.
Beth’s strangled voice box finally gave up and with a voice hoarse from screaming and strangulation she said, “It’s champagne. They’re all champagne. How could Alex do that?”
Howard was
silent; he just shook his head. Beth climbed out of the cargo area and collapsed on the ground in tears. Howard sat next to her, put his arm around her and pulled her close to him.
“I lost them. I let our babies go,” she said.
“It could have been worse.”
She turned to him, incredulous. “How could it possibly be worse? We could have lost ten embryos instead of five!” She cried.
“It’s hot out here, let’s go inside,” Howard said.
“Amy is dead and our embryos are gone. It couldn’t get any worse.”
He pulled her up, put his arm around her and they headed inside.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Back in Zone 0 Damian was unmoved and staring at the floor. Even after Beth sat down next to him he didn’t react.
She put her hand on his arm. “Damian.”
Damian’s glazed eyes focussed on her; his face was ghostly white. “Amy,” he spluttered.
He was close to breaking down. It was unlikely Lana’s fake identity was on his mind.
She thought about hugging him. What had happened between them was trivial compared to Amy’s horrific death. Lost for words, she stared at the floor.
“Did you see her?” he asked.
Beth nodded solemnly.
“Who would do that?”
“Alex.”
“Alex?”
“He left Earth.”
Saying the words out loud made the horror more real. But Alex never lied about his intentions, not like Meda. Everyone knew he wanted to start over with a human colony on another planet. He’d left Earth, stolen the embryos, murdered Amy, and no one saw it coming.
Damian stared straight ahead.
“Let Alex be our enemy, not each other,” she said.
Damian turned to her and nodded.
After a moment he said, “So what do we do?”
“I don’t know yet, but I will know. Alex will pay for this.”
Beth and Howard watched Lana push Callum in a wheelchair along the walkway towards them. Callum was touching his newly stitched forehead tentatively.
“The embryos are gone. Alex took them all,” Beth announced as Lana parked the wheelchair next to their seats.
Howard said nothing; he just rubbed his jaw.
“Governments donated the embryos for a free tech upgrade. He took millions,” Lana said with disdain.
“Governments donated the embryos because of the infertility crisis,” Beth said. “The tech upgrade had nothing to do with it. They had no idea Alex would steal them.”
“The government had no right to make the embryos legal assets and transfer them here,” Lana said.
“I agree,” Beth said. “What do you think?” Beth asked Howard.
“I understand why they did it. It makes sense to me.”
Howard nodded at Callum, asking him for his opinion.
“I can understand it too. There’s a global infertility crisis.”
It made sense to Beth now too. A chain of men or worse, misogynistic queen bees, had declared the embryos legal assets with a nod and a wink, knowing it would be controversial. They told themselves they were doing it for humanity’s sake and in their best interests. But they didn’t know Alex would take them with his team of merry men and women on a spaceship. What promise would make people leave their lives on Earth—a planet and two thousand embryos each? To be a ruler in their own lands? That must have been Alex’s wet dream.
Beth thought she knew what was best for the human race once too. But she couldn’t help thinking they’d all helped to create the first interplanetary dictator. Because without the fertility crisis the embryos would not have been transferred to RI for ambiguous research purposes, legally or not.
Could it be?
Could Alex’s companies have engineered the infertility crisis? When did an infertility problem ever impact an entire population before? At any cost, he’d said. He owned companies in most sectors: statistics, pharmaceuticals, engineering. He must have planned this for years. Alex knew exactly what the problem was with his plan. Some women might have thought it was a good idea to populate other planets, but if you asked them to donate their eggs, would they? No, it would have to be another woman’s and preferably a woman who didn’t understand what she’d given away until it was too late.
Shouts of, “Have you seen the news?” echoed up and down the walkway, and employees rushed back inside Zone 0. They congregated around the screens, scrabbling for a good view of the broadcasts from the UK.
Callum pushed himself out of his wheelchair, holding his ribs, and they fought for a space in the crowd.
“We are outside Downing Street in Area 1 where the Prime Minister Oliver Mason Brown is about to address the nation on this morning’s spate of suicides across the New Cities. Current estimates put the number at over one hundred thousand, and we have reports of suicides coming in from all over the world.”
Beth and Howard’s eyes locked. Sheer terror had taken over Beth. Her knees buckled. Howard rushed to her, grabbing her arm before she dropped to the floor.
A hundred thousand, a hundred thousand, maybe more. She hadn’t stopped it in time.
Behind the reporter the door to No.10 opened, and the Prime Minister stepped towards the podium. He wore a black suit, and a mass of grey hair sat like a dead furry animal on top of his head.
“Sadly, today, a number of suicides have taken place across the New Cities. We are urging citizens not to remove their implants as this will result in credit zeroing and possible expulsion from the New Cities.
“The devices were subject to a zero-day attack and Relative Industries, the suppliers of the device, have downloaded a patch to fix it.
“Paige Green, the leader of the Youth Party, is thought to be responsible for the cyber-attack, and we will take a strong approach to this despicable act. She has been charged and is awaiting trial. The YP’s deputy leader, Liam Brown, has taken over leadership of the party.
“In Paige Green’s court case, given the severity of the accusation, thought-history will be admissible as evidence. Our country has been through difficult times and is in a period of readjustment. We are positive that with RI’s help an answer to the infertility crisis, humanity’s greatest threat, is imminent. Please join me in a minute’s silence to remember those killed in this heinous crime.”
After a minute the PM turned and headed back inside No.10. Camera lights flashed. A reporter shouted, ‘How will this impact relations with the rest of the world?’
Bubbling with rage, Lana removed her shoe and threw it above heads at the screen. “Liars! They’ve taken the opportunity to screw us over again. I bet he doesn’t have an implant and neither does his useless fuckwit son Liam Brown.”
“Quiet!” someone shouted at Lana.
Distracted from her own situation by Lana, Beth yanked her away while everyone else continued watching the broadcast. Lana needed to keep her mouth shut for everyone’s sake.
Callum and Howard joined Beth and Lana away from the throng and continued watching the screens in the gaps between heads. Beth watched over Lana’s shoulder.
The camera swung back to the news reporter. ‘The PM is not answering any more questions, but yesterday he presented the latest technological innovations from RI to trade delegates around the world. Here’s a report from our New York correspondent on RI’s most recent offering.’
A reporter stood in the middle of the arrivals hall at JFK airport. ‘The deceleration pods fitted inside the passenger drone cut transatlantic journey times for the occupants to a few minutes by using a proprietary time manipulation.’ He pushed a microphone at a man in a suit and tie, carrying a briefcase. ‘How was your flight from Heathrow?’
‘I didn’t have time to read the reports I brought with me. The flight normally takes seven hours but only took minutes. Getting through passport control was the problem. That’s the only way I want to travel in the future. I saved seven hours of my life. It was like pressing fast-forward on a vide
o player. Everything went on around me in a blur while I was inside the deceleration pod.’
And less than an hour ago, Beth had watched Amy die inside a deceleration pod when a sadistic bastard turned it into a time acceleration pod. This had to be a joke. She examined the reactions of RI staff around her. No one cared that deceleration pods would be fitted inside jumbo jets, and no one cared a terrorist could transform them into time acceleration pods and a plane of decayed bodies might one day arrive at JFK.
“I need to free Paige. I knew they would do something like this. Paige told me the government exchanged the embryos for a free tech upgrade. She’s the only one who knows,” Lana whispered frantically.
“Who told Paige that?”
“Alex.”
“Alex Hamilton?”
“Yes!”
Paige had believed Alex’s lies, and Lana believed Paige. Lana’s face was red. Her body shook. She looked hysterical. Beth had no idea why the PM said that. Paige obviously wasn’t responsible.
“But everyone will know you didn’t die in the fire. You won’t be able to hide anymore,” Beth whispered.
“She doesn’t need to hide anymore. This was nothing to do with Lana,” Callum said.
“Did you find the piece of paper with the parents’ names on it, Callum?” Lana retorted.
Callum dropped his eyes.
“No? I didn’t think so,” Lana said.
“Believe what you want, Lana.” Callum strode to the chairs and sat down a few seats away from Damian.
Lana squared up to Beth. “I will not let the government blame my sister for global suicide when your code was responsible.”
“Shh,” Beth said, stepping away from her and taking the seat next to Callum.
The news report ended, and the crowd dwindled away. Howard sat next to Beth.
They watched Lana pace up and down in front of their seats.
“Now what?” Callum asked.
“I think Clayton should tell Houston we have a problem,” Beth said.
“What?” Callum asked.
Beth sighed. “Never mind; not the best idea, anyway.”
“Lana had her suitcases with her. She’s going back to the UK,” Howard said.
Started with Errors (Relative Industries Series Book 2) Page 17
