by Jack Heath
‘Have I met Becky?’
‘Uh, don’t think so,’ I say. ‘She’s a school friend.’
‘What’s her last name?’
‘Lieu. L-I-E-U.’
‘What’s her phone number?’
‘Relax, Dad.’
‘I’m relaxed. I just want you to be safe.’
‘I’ll text it to you,’ I say. ‘OK?’
‘OK. See you tonight, honey.’
‘See you.’ I hang up.
‘Was that your dad?’
I turn around to see Becky hovering behind me, her bag slung over one shoulder.
‘Technically,’ I say, ‘no.’
She doesn’t laugh. ‘Oh, right. Sorry.’ She walks towards one of the school buses, which trembles as the waiting engine purrs.
‘Not that one.’ I point to a different bus. ‘We’re going this way.’
She nods, and follows me. We join the line of students, shuffling towards the passenger door.
‘What are you going to do?’ she asks. ‘Long term?’
No one seems to be listening, but I try to keep my answer non-specific. It’s not hard. ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure there is a long term.’
We both tap our passes against the sensor, trudge to the back of the bus, and sit side by side. It’s awkward, somehow, sitting this close to Becky while wearing her girlfriend’s face.
‘Because you think it’ll end?’ she says. ‘Soon?’
It sounds like we’re talking about a relationship, rather than my eventual discovery and subsequent death. ‘It can’t last for ever.’
‘That sucks. I’m really sorry.’
‘Yeah.’ I say. ‘Me too.’
We fall silent. The unavoidable truth—that some day I will be in pieces while Graeme and Kylie weep for their daughter—is hard to face.
‘Maybe I can help.’
‘How?’ The word sounds more desperate than I intended.
‘The things you can’t do,’ Becky says. ‘I’ll tell people I saw you doing them. Like, spitting, or whatever.’
I smile. ‘I can spit. But thank you. That’s a good idea.’
She’s adjusted to the situation with impressive speed. Earlier today she thought she was being given the cold shoulder by her girlfriend. Now she’s already started to feel sympathy for Chloe’s mechanical ghost—a sympathy Chloe herself said no one would feel.
‘I see why she liked you,’ I say.
Becky looks down at her hands, squeezed between her knees, and says nothing.
~
The buildings get taller and the entrances grander as the bus weaves towards the town centre. When we pass the thick walls of the old prison, I hit the stop button. ‘We’re close,’ I tell Becky.
The bus stops and we clamber off. The crowd of pedestrians flows around us like river water around stones.
‘Which way?’ Becky asks.
I point. ‘Hera Global owns Ares Security. Their headquarters are around that corner.’
We thread a path through the horde of shoppers and businesspeople. I’m not as nervous as I was at the school, but it’s still hard to shake off the feeling that someone is about to stare at me, point a finger, and scream.
No one does. We turn the corner and find ourselves looking at the head office of Hera Global—a shimmering glass spike, windows polished so highly that I can only see reflections of the other buildings around it. One side of the building is slightly sloped, making a sharp wedge at the distant summit. The only sign is the street number, eleven. Nothing indicates who works there or what they do.
I start to cross the road, hoping for a closer look, but Becky grabs my upper arm. ‘Above the doorway,’ she says.
It takes me a moment to see the door—a pair of recessed glass panels which presumably slide aside when approached. Two CCTV cameras wait above it in tinted plastic bubbles.
‘Anyone who walks past gets recorded,’ says Becky. ‘They could recognize you.’
I nod. ‘That café over there could give us a better angle when the doors open.’
‘Let’s go.’
We walk into the café, and approach the counter. The walls, scratched and brown, are decorated with ‘coffee facts’ of dubious validity. Fact: toffee is made by mixing tea with coffee!
We buy two hot chocolates from a sullen barista and sit at a table outside. My chair wobbles on a leg which is slightly too short.
‘Can you drink?’ Becky asks.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘But I can’t taste it.’
‘Do you remember how it’s supposed to taste?’
I think about it. ‘Yeah. Chloe must have put that memory in. Or the Open AI contributors did. There’s a lot in my head, but I don’t know where most of it came from.’
‘That’s called source amnesia,’ Becky says. ‘Your brain considers the information itself more important than where you got it, so the recollection of learning it just disappears. It happens to everyone.’
That actually makes me feel better. ‘Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome.’
We stare across the street at the glass tower, waiting for the doors to open.
‘Do you have a plan?’ Becky asks.
‘Sort of,’ I say. ‘Chloe’s murderer was at the school—I recognized his tattoos. If I can get a picture of him entering or leaving the building, then I can take it to the police. I’ll say I recognized him on the street and followed him here.’
‘But he saw you inside the school, somehow breathing the toxic gas,’ Becky says. ‘If he’s caught, won’t he expose you to the cops?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I hope not.’
‘Maybe there’s another way. If we can get access to their email records, we could send all the data we find to the police anonymously.’
‘We’d need someone’s password, wouldn’t we?’
Someone is approaching the front door of the building. A middle-aged woman with red hair, pulling a roller-suitcase behind her. Becky whips out her phone and takes a picture.
‘Evidence,’ she says.
She takes another picture as the automatic doors open, revealing a receptionist behind a desk and two broad-shouldered security guards with guns holstered on their hips. They nod to the woman as she walks in. The doors slide shut behind her.
‘Cameras and guards,’ I say. ‘Even if we got that email password, we couldn’t get inside to use it.’
‘Maybe we wouldn’t have to. Most companies have off-site backup servers and password recovery tools.’
I raise my eyebrows. ‘You think you can break into their systems?’
‘I think we can. You were—Chloe was teaching me programming. That’s how we first got to know one another.’ She looks like she might cry, but just as I’m about to try to distract her, she takes a deep breath and keeps talking. ‘Did you inherit her IT skills?’
‘I’m not sure.’ I can picture myself using a command prompt, but I don’t know if this is knowledge or imagination. ‘Either way, we’d need to find the backup servers, somehow.’
‘Any ideas?’
‘No.’
We stare into our hot chocolates for a moment. I haven’t touched mine. Becky’s is still three-quarters full.
‘We could hire a private investigator,’ she says. ‘Tell them we know Ares Security is responsible for the attack on the school, and get them to find the proof.’
I shake my head. ‘They wouldn’t take a pair of teenage girls seriously. Even if they did, they might find out that Chloe is dead.’
‘Chloe is dead,’ Becky repeats. Her voice wobbles.
‘Sorry,’ I say. I’ve had three days to get used to this, but she’s had only a few hours. I place my hand over hers. Her skin is warm.
She shuts her eyes. ‘I can’t believe she’s gone.’
‘I know. I wish things were different.’
‘If things were different,’ she says, ‘you wouldn’t exist.’
Can I be glad that I’m alive and at the same ti
me wish Chloe was? I can’t change the situation, so it doesn’t seem to matter.
The strangest thing is how stern and cold Chloe seemed when I met her. What did Becky see in her?
‘I don’t know you,’ I say, ‘and you only know a version of me. But if you want to talk about Chloe, I’ll listen.’
‘Talking won’t do any good,’ she sniffles.
‘It can’t hurt,’ I say. ‘We can help each other. You need to tell someone how you feel, and I need …’ I hesitate. What do I need? ‘… to understand who I was supposed to be.’
Becky looks up at the sky, tears brimming in her eyes. Then she frowns.
‘The top of the building isn’t flat,’ she says.
It slopes up to a long edge, like the blade of a chisel. ‘So?’
She wipes her cheeks with a napkin. ‘So where’s the helicopter they attacked the school with?’
‘It had wheels,’ I say. ‘They must have landed it somewhere before they came back.’
‘And just left it in a car park somewhere? With all the cops looking for it?’
‘No, they would have …’ Finally it hits me. ‘There’s another way in. For cars.’
‘I bet Chloe’s killer didn’t use the front door,’ Becky says. ‘Let’s go look.’
We leave the café, cross the street and skirt around the building. It’s wide, but not so deep. It doesn’t take us long to walk the perimeter. An alleyway is concealed behind, shaded by the towers on either side. It’s only just broad enough for a rubbish truck to drive in and empty the skip bins.
When Becky and I walk through the alley, no cameras are visible. I suppose they could be hacked, or recordings stolen. If company operatives come here after illegal jobs like the one at the school, it makes sense for them not to create more evidence than they have to.
A heavy roller door looms behind the bins about halfway up the alley. Big enough for the helicopter to drive through. No keyhole, but an intercom is bolted into the wall. This probably means company cars don’t have remote controls to open it. Bad luck for us.
The door for pedestrians has no handle. It looks like it only opens from the inside. A fire door, perhaps.
‘Not a good stake-out spot,’ Becky says. ‘We’d have to wait at one end of the alley. And at that distance a phone camera won’t do any good. We’ll need something with a telephoto lens.’
‘Plus, we don’t know which way the tattooed guy will come in.’ I watch the distant traffic whirring past on the main street. ‘If we choose the wrong end, we’ll only get photos of the back of his head.’
‘So we’d need two cameras. One at either end.’
The thought of cradling a camera alone on the street for hours and hours, waiting for the tattooed man, gives me a sinking feeling.
‘Kylie has a pretty decent camera,’ I say. ‘She …’
A black sedan enters the far end of the alley.
I drag Becky behind the skip bins and listen to the approaching tyres, my scalp tingling with fear. The alley has no other entrances, so the roller door is the car’s only possible destination. The driver must be an employee of Ares Security.
The car cruises past and turns. Suddenly Becky and I are sandwiched between the skip bins and the passenger-side door of the sedan. The glossy paint reflects our terrified faces back at us. I press my back against the bin, trying to stay out of the wing mirror.
The intercom beeps as the driver pushes the button. ‘Powdered wood,’ it crackles.
‘Stitches new,’ the driver replies.
His voice is familiar. Very, very slowly, I raise my head to peer in the window. It’s one of the operatives who attacked the school, but not the one who shot Chloe. The bruises under his chin probably came from hitting the floor after I shot him with a beanbag round.
He’s alone in the car. Perhaps the other three guys are already inside. Or perhaps they’re out on other missions. Attacking other schools, perhaps.
Becky looks questioningly at me. I drop back down and nod, confirming her suspicions.
She gets out her phone, opens the camera app, and hands it over. I raise it above my head, hoping she’s turned off the sound, and push the button.
The phone silently takes a picture. I hit the button twice more, in case the first photo is too blurry, and then snatch my hand out of view.
‘Status?’ says the intercom.
‘Successful.’
‘Passengers?’
‘One.’
I didn’t see any passengers. He must mean himself.
The roller door clanks and starts sliding upwards. The driver revs the engine a few times as he waits.
Thump.
I look at Becky. Her eyes are wide. She heard it too.
Thump, thump. A groan.
I look at the boot of the car. I can’t see it rattling, but that’s definitely where the noise is coming from. Ares already has their next victim.
The wheels crunch against the asphalt as the car starts to move.
Becky can see what I’m thinking. She shakes her head wildly.
Ignoring her, I crawl out from behind the bins and fall into step behind the car, crouching as I run. The sedan rolls through the door into the darkness and I slip in behind it.
I glance back in time to glimpse Becky’s horrified face before the roller door slams shut again, sealing me inside the headquarters of Ares Security.
INCURSION
The car park is surprisingly cavernous, with what looks like too few pillars to support the massive weight of the building above. The sedan rolls down a ramp with me scampering behind it before bouncing over a speed bump and cruising past a mostly empty row of parking spaces.
The ones that aren’t empty are occupied by military vehicles. A hulking armoured personnel carrier. A utility vehicle with a belt-fed machine gun mounted on the back. A collection of remote-controlled bomb-disposal robots and unmanned aerial drones. Weaponized noise cannons, like the one I saw in Detective Anders’ video, are stacked up against the wall.
Does this mean Anders already suspects Ares? I hope so. But there’s no time to think about that right now.
A helicopter with wheels is crouched at the far end of the car park, doors open. This is more than evidence. This is proof.
I keep running behind the car, head and shoulders down. I fumble with the boot, looking for a button or a latch.
There’s nothing. Just a keyhole.
More thumping and groaning from inside. It sounds like the prisoner is wide awake, but gagged.
I dig into my pocket, pull out the key to Graeme’s car and jam it into the lock. It won’t turn.
Desperate now, I twist as hard as I can, hoping to break the lock. But it’s hard to apply much pressure while the car is moving.
The car purrs up to a set of steel doors and stops. I brace myself and turn the key with even more force. The metal creaks, but doesn’t snap.
The doors slide open to reveal a giant lift, designed for heavy cargo. A CCTV camera hangs from the ceiling.
I can’t go in. The camera will see me, and then I’ll have to deal with a building full of well-armed soldiers who know exactly where I am.
The car eases towards the lift. Following behind it, I try to wrench the key out of the lock, but it’s stuck. At the last second, I give up and dive aside, leaving the car to roll into the lift with the key protruding from the boot, like part of a clockwork toy.
With my back pressed against the wall outside, I strain my ears for some indication that the driver saw me in his wing mirror. My counterfeit heartbeat thumps.
The car door opens. Footsteps clop towards the lift door.
I sprint over to the nearest pillar and stand behind it, listening.
The driver doesn’t follow. I hear him push a button and, as I peer around the edge of the pillar, he steps out from between the closing lift doors. The car, and its mysterious passenger, are going up unescorted.
Without looking around, the driver strolls through the gloom o
f the car park towards a door set in the far wall. He turns the handle, slips inside, and lets it fall shut behind him with a boom.
I’m alone.
I whip out Chloe’s phone to call the police. But there’s no reception down here. To save the person in the boot, I need to get out of this car park.
I run back to the roller door. There are no controls. It can only be opened from somewhere else in the building.
If I can’t get out that way, and I can’t go into the lift, my only option is to follow the driver. I creep up to the door he walked through and listen. Silence.
I try the handle. It won’t turn.
It worked for him—why not for me? I can’t see a keyhole, a button, a fingerprint, or retinal scanner.
A featureless square of plastic adorns the wall at about waist height. I prod it a couple of times and see no reaction.
Chloe once had a cat named Chimp, who slept in her bed and woke her by attacking her hair. A transmitter in his collar unlocked the electronic cat door as he approached, ensuring that he could come and go as he pleased.
Perhaps this plastic square is a sensor. The operative could have had an identity card in his wallet, which the sensor detected before unlocking the door for him. Whatever the explanation, I can’t open it. I’m trapped down here.
An air vent is recessed into the wall beside the lift. I press my face up against the grille to see an enormous iron block, suspended just above the floor by seven steel cables. I don’t know much about lifts, but I suppose the car must be at the top floor, since the counterweight is so close to the ground.
I could possibly break through the grille, but my shoulders and hips are too wide to fit through the vent. And I’m not sure what I’d do once I got in there.
An icy breeze sweeps up my back. The bomb-disposal robots stare at me with bulbous, glassy eyes. But they’re not switched on. Looking, but not seeing.
I have more in common with them than I do with Becky, Graeme, and Kylie. More mineral than animal, I too am nothing more than a means to an end. A puppet for human masters. Unlike them, I have control over my own movements, but the same could be said of an automatic vacuum cleaner.
A tide of bitterness rises up my throat. I don’t hate Chloe for making me—it’s good that I’m here for her parents, and for Becky—but I resent the Open AI Community. It’s bad enough being trapped in this position. I shouldn’t also have to feel, or think, or hurt.
