The Zeno Effect

by Andrew Tudor

  Today’s survey of her sources was not yielding much directly to do with the Zeno protesters, but there was one item that virtually all sites were reporting prominently. Large numbers of soldiers – nobody had a reliable estimate of precisely how many – were arriving in and around the capital city, drawn, it would seem, from units right across the country. Speculation was rife as to what this might signify. Julie’s first thought was that they were planning an attack on the Brixton Enclave and she was not alone in entertaining this possibility. But others had very different interpretations, ranging from the vaguely plausible suggestion that this was additional security for the all too often overwhelmed health facilities, to the rather more outlandish claim that it was a military rehearsal in case it became necessary to protect London from invasion by the Northern counties.

  Julie was reflecting on some of the more credible suggestions when she was interrupted by a soft double knock on her door. Puzzled – visitors generally had to ring her bell from the closed entrance foyer so that she could give them access to the residential sections of the building – she consulted the door peephole app on her CommsTab. To her surprise she saw Dennis, her chief minder, who was holding up to the camera a piece of paper which read ‘Laundry Room in 10 minutes.’ He stood for a few seconds, nodded, then disappeared from view. Initially flummoxed by this odd behaviour, after a moment’s thought Julie collected her laundry bag and took the lift to the basement. There was no sign of Dennis. Looking about her suspiciously, she loaded up one of the washing machines in the laundry room, set it going, and, seating herself in front of it, stared vacantly at her tumbling clothes. A movement in the shadows just outside the door caught her eye and resolved itself into Dennis who gestured her to come out into the corridor. Once she was there, he guided her into a small storeroom for cleaning equipment and closed the door.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m trying to keep us out of range of the security cameras and microphones. I don’t suppose anybody’s monitoring them, but you never know.”

  “What the fuck’s going on, Dennis?”

  “I’ve come to warn you,” he replied. “I’ve been reassigned, taken off your security.”

  “So who have they given me?”

  “That’s the point. Nobody. And I’ve been told not to make contact with you or answer your calls.”

  Julie looked at him in astonishment. “What? Why?” She was almost shouting.

  “Hush. Keep it down,” he replied, holding up a hand to silence her. “I think it means they’re cutting you loose. My new responsibility is for someone with links to the top levels of English government. They’ve obviously done some kind of deal and I’d guess that part of it involves withdrawing protection from you.”

  “Does that mean I’ll lose the apartment as well?”

  “I should think so. Best guess is that they’ll serve you notice this month.” He paused, looking at her with genuine concern. “My advice is get out as soon as possible. Don’t wait for them to throw you out. If they really have done a deal it will expose you to the risks that we’ve been protecting you against. You’ve made a lot of enemies, Julie, and they won’t be slow to try to silence you. You need to disappear from their radar right now.”

  “But where can I go? I’ve got nobody that I can depend on. You were my guarantee of safety.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. If there was any more that I could do to help, I would. But I can’t. Even warning you like this is pretty risky.” He put his hands on her shoulders and looked her seriously in the eye. “Do what I say, Julie. Get out while you can.”

  He turned away and opened the door. “Good luck,” he said, and walked quickly off down the corridor leaving her standing forlornly in the midst of a grubby collection of vacuum cleaners, brushes, mops and buckets.

  When she recovered her composure enough to find her way back to the laundry room she sat in front of her machine deep in thought. By the time it had finished its final drying cycle she had made up her mind. She would take Dennis’s advice and get out immediately. She was going to miss the comfort and security that she had experienced over the past months, but she had no illusions about her erstwhile employers. They had been ruthless on her behalf and they would no doubt be equally so now that they no longer needed her. She had to try to stay at least one step ahead of the danger, which meant disappearing as effectively as she could. The only immediate possibility was to take refuge in the Brixton Enclave. She had friends there, and although it might be an obvious location for anyone searching for her, at least she would be surrounded by people who were out of sympathy with the authorities.

  Wasting no further time she returned to the flat, packed a large backpack and a small wheeled suitcase, then took a final look around the rather luxurious accommodation that she had lately enjoyed. It was good while it lasted, she thought, but there’s no room for sentiment now. Time to move on. Hoping that she was not under direct surveillance – she cursed herself for not asking Dennis if he knew whether she was – she left the building by its less prominent rear trade entrance and headed towards Victoria where she knew she could get a shuttle to Clapham. After that it would be a question of working her way through side streets to Brixton and to the anti-Zeno campaigners’ home on Brixton Hill. There she would be safe, at least for a while.

  It was her good fortune to catch the Clapham shuttle just as it was about to depart, and from its terminus she set out to walk east, picking a route through a warren of residential streets while keeping away from the major roads. There were few people around, making Julie worryingly aware of the odd figure that she cut, laden with a backpack and dragging a suitcase along the pavement. To add to her self-consciousness, the nearer she got to Brixton the more she found herself subjected to curious glances as the only white person among a largely black population. Finally she arrived at one of the Enclave’s checkpoints, a ramshackle shelter manned by a couple of young men. They didn’t appear to be armed but Julie assumed that they would be and approached with caution.

  “You comin’ to stay?” one asked cheerfully, eyeing her luggage.

  Julie returned his smile. “Yes, I hope so. I have friends living on Brixton Hill – Albert and Rosa of the Campaign. You maybe know them?”

  “Surely do. You’ve not far to go now then. Follow this road along for a way, then turn right down the Hill. But first we have to check your bags. Sorry ’bout that. You’d be surprised what people have tried to smuggle in.”

  Julie handed over her bags. As he was checking them she became aware that the second guard – she supposed that they should be called guards although they had nothing to distinguish them from any other young men on the street – was eyeing her curiously. Suddenly his face lit up.

  “Yeah,” he said with satisfaction. “Knew I’d seen you somewhere. You that vlogger and journo. Julie somebody. The one that told the Zeno story. Ain’t that right?”

  “Yes I am,” Julie conceded. “But I’d be grateful if you didn’t spread it around. There are people I need to hide from.”

  “Nah, don’t worry,” he said with a grin. “Plenty of folk moving into Brixton who don’t want to be found. We can keep secrets.”

  By now the baggage search was complete and she was waved through. “Keep doing the work,” one of them called after her. “We need it.”

  Oddly pleased at this encouragement, Julie waved goodbye and strode on into Brixton with more confidence than she had felt all day. By the time she reached her goal she was feeling quite cheerful in spite of everything that had brought her there, and all the more so when Rosa answered the door and embraced her with a cry of joy.

  “Ah, Julie,” – Rosa, who was Afro-Ecuadorian by origin, pronounced ‘Julie’ with an extended soft J which invariably charmed its recipient – “what are you doing here? So good to see you.”

  “I’ve come to stay if that’s OK with you. There are people after me and this is the safes
t place that I could think of. But if it’s a problem I’m sure I can find somewhere else.”

  “Don’t be crazy! Of course you can stay. We want you as our guest. Albert will be so happy to have you here. Come in, come in. You must tell me all about it.”

  Whereupon Julie found herself propelled into the house, settled into a chair, plied with coffee, and required to give every detail of her day’s adventure. At last I feel safe, she thought, pushing to the back of her mind what she knew all too well. That in these terrible times, nobody was safe.

  Ali and Douglas had been at odds with each other for several days. After receiving Irene’s reply to her letter, Ali had concluded that the only way to persuade Sarah to move was to talk to her face to face. She had put it to Douglas, knowing that he had routes into England, but he insisted that it was far too dangerous. She pointed out that he was constantly sending agents back and forth across the border and none of them had yet been caught. He responded that they were trained for precisely that exigency, while she was a rank amateur in such matters. She reminded him of her successful escape in Berwick and of the fact that he had complimented her on it; he suggested that it was down to luck as much as judgment; she accused him of being overprotective, patriarchal even; he took offence at the accusation; and so it went on. Now they were barely speaking to each other, and certainly not sharing a bed. It had turned into a stalemate which both of them found intolerable.

  In the end, and after yet another intervention from Michael Lang who was increasingly desperate to reinforce his research group, Douglas was first to break.

  “All right,” he said, with the resigned air of someone reluctant to admit that he is beaten. “Let’s say I can get you in and out of York. If we’re to do it then I’m coming with you.”

  “That’s not necessary,” Ali grumbled, “you’re needed here,” though in truth she was grateful for the offer. As well as feeling safer with Douglas along, she knew he would be able to add extra weight to her attempt to persuade Sarah. Irene had already made her views clear, Hugh had always been in favour, so surely their case would prove all the more forceful with the addition of Douglas’s assessment of what was likely to happen in the near future. Ali hoped so anyway, not because she wanted to reinforce Lang’s research group – she was convinced that there was now neither the time nor the capacity to find anything resembling a fix for Zeno – but because she wanted Sarah and family with her when she was obliged by circumstance to escape to the Highlands.

  It took a few days to organise fake documents for Ali. Asked to choose a name, she semi-facetiously came up with Heather Burns on the improbable grounds that this was exactly what happened, disgracefully in her view, across the ‘sporting’ moors of Scotland and northern England. Douglas insisted that she keep her own forename – this made giveaway naming errors less likely – so, for purposes of the trip, she became one Alison Heather Burns. A Scottish enough name, she thought, for a secret invasion of England.

  The invasion itself, such as it was, involved a goods lorry with a hidden compartment between the cab and the carrying space. In the event they did not need the compartment on the journey south. There was still a fair amount of trade across the Scottish/English border and the guards on both sides were accustomed to simply waving through familiar vehicles. Even the post-Zeno tensions had not caused much change to the flow, no doubt aided by the fact that regular payments found their way into the guards’ pockets from the firms and individuals involved. The lorry in which Ali and Douglas travelled had long masqueraded as the property of a fictional but well-documented Edinburgh transport company rejoicing in the name Wm. MacDougall & Son, and regularly providing additional income to those manning the border. Their driver, a cheery Glaswegian called Jimmy, could not recall ever being asked even to open the rear doors of his vehicle. Once safely across the border, the drive down to York also proved to be trouble-free although they were at pains to avoid the Newcastle area where hijacks were not unknown.

  As a precaution they were dropped a couple of hundred metres from Sarah and Hugh’s house in Heworth, a residential suburb of the city, Jimmy waiting and watching while they walked cautiously down the street. It was after nine at night leaving much of their route in darkness – energy conservation had reduced street lighting to every third lamp. Although Sarah had been warned by note that Ali was coming on this particular day, they had not put a precise time on their arrival so when she opened the door at their knock her excitement was evident. She drew Ali into a hug, lifting her off her feet and spinning her around as if in some demented waltz.

  “Ali, Ali, I’m so glad to see you. I’ve been driving Hugh mad for the last two hours, unable to sit still for more than five minutes at a time.”

  A smiling Hugh emerged from the room behind Sarah, nodding agreement. “Yes, she’s been impossible,” he said, “even worse than Charlotte, and she’s been bad enough.”

  When Ali finally managed to untangle herself from her friend’s embrace, she gestured to her companion. “This is Douglas. He’s from Scottish Intelligence and arranged all this.”

  Sarah turned to him. “Thank you, Douglas. You don’t know how much this means to me.”

  “I’m beginning to get an idea,” Douglas replied, shaking hands first with Sarah and then Hugh.

  Just then a sleepy voice interrupted them from upstairs. “Is that Auntie Ali? Please say it is.”

  Sarah grabbed Ali’s hand and urged her up the stairs. “Yes it is. We’re coming.”

  For the next fifteen minutes Ali and Sarah sat on the side of Charlotte’s bed while she gave Ali a detailed account of how excited she had been and how impossible it was to go to sleep. This turned out to be not quite true since, bit by bit, Charlotte’s eyes first drooped and then closed as, holding firmly onto Ali’s hand, she finally did fall asleep.

  “Let’s sit for a minute to make sure she’s properly gone,” Sarah whispered. “Then you can have something to eat and we’ll sort out somewhere for Douglas to sleep. He’ll be best in my study, I think. There’s a decent inflatable bed he can have.”

  “No need,” Ali whispered back with a sheepish look. “He can share with me.”

  “Mmmmn! I see. You’ve kept that quiet.” Sarah gave her a grin. “How long has this been going on?”

  “I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow. We can have a long chat. Right now, that meal sounds wonderful.”

  Sarah made a wry face. “Don’t get too excited,” she said, “it’s only a bits-and-pieces casserole. Been sitting on the hob waiting for you. You’ll have to eat off your laps, I’m afraid. Ever since we were discouraged from going into work as too much of an infection risk, we’ve converted the dining room into a lab. There’s all sorts of equipment in there.”

  They crept downstairs and joined the two men who were already deep in conversation.

  “Hugh’s just been telling me that he’s actually had the flu and recovered from it,” Douglas said to Ali.

  “Yes,” Hugh confirmed. “It wasn’t a lot of fun, but I didn’t suffer from the really terrible respiratory problems that have caused so many deaths.”

  “We were treating him with some experimental drugs that we’ve been developing,” Sarah added, “some general antiviral ones that stimulate the immune system and a specific one that’s aimed at the release phase of the flu virus. Maybe they helped. We really don’t know. It could be that Hugh has some natural resistance. Some of us clearly do since not everyone is getting the flu and there are people like Hugh who become ill but then recover.”

  “So does that mean that your research has made progress?” Ali asked.

  Sarah frowned. “Perhaps a little in relation to the current strain, but nowhere at all as far as the Zeno effect is concerned.”

  Ali saw her opportunity. “That’s what Michael Lang’s group are focusing on. You really should join them. He’s desperate to have you both.”

 
“I know, I know.” Sarah shook her head. “Can we talk about all that tomorrow? I’d really like just to have a pleasant evening with friends tonight, try to forget about the bloody virus for a while. Pretend things are normal. ”

  The four of them looked at each other for a long moment then, simultaneously, they nodded agreement.

  “Aye,” Douglas said. “Why not?”

  The End Days Witnesses had for some years occupied a compound on the western Patagonian steppe, close to the wooded foothills of the southern Andes. Here they sought to cut themselves off and live a life at odds with the social and sexual mores of the world outside. But it was materially necessary to maintain some contact with people beyond their walls, so they had not been spared the flu. Significant numbers of the community had died over the past months and their leader – a ruthless sociopath believed by his acolytes to be divinely inspired – had concluded that the real end of days was finally upon them and that it was time for him to abscond with the cult’s accumulated resources. After making careful preparations aided by a close confidant, he summoned the entire group to their central meeting hall, adults and children alike. Leading them in frenzied supplication he announced that the Rapture foretold had arrived whereupon, at a prearranged signal, his assistant detonated a chain of firebombs all around the walls of the building. The dry timber flared into terrifying life and, as the divine leader slipped out of a private door behind his pulpit, the singing and praying transmuted into shrieks of agony. For the Witnesses, if not for their leader, Zeno had indeed brought about the End of Days.

  8

  When at last it came, the announcement was brief and to the point. All licensed newsfeeds carried it live, while many of the independents picked it up within minutes. The setting was sober, a carefully constructed expression of dignified seriousness. The English prime minister seated at a desk in front of a dark panelled wall. Unsmiling, he looked directly into camera and began.