by Jem Tugwell
Perfect, she thought. Now to get rid of the iTourist so she could win the game.
Holding the end of the shaft with the disc in her right hand, Tatsuko turned the power on again. She placed her left wrist onto the bench and breathed in. She willed her muscles to still and calm. The tremor in her hand stopped.
She moved the spinning cutting disc towards her wrist, adjusting the angle so that the disc would cut across the iTourist. The cutting disc touched the iTourist and flared red hot. Tatsuko wrinkled her nose at the acrid smell.
She lifted the cutting disc, but the iTourist was unmarked. She pressed the cutting disc down again harder. The smell got unbearable, but she kept the pressure on, even though she could see that the cutting disc had lost over half of its diameter and her wrist under the iTourist was burning.
She lifted the disc again to check the iTourist. Maybe there was a slight difference in the shine where the disc had been. Maybe not.
She glanced at the game controller.
00:27.
Tatsuko didn’t have time to keep trying the cutting disc. Not that it was working anyway.
She tore off the glasses and removed the gloves, throwing them with disgust onto the bench. Then she took a few seconds to calm herself.
00:18.
Unfortunately, it looked like Serge was right. There was only one way to get the iTourist off. Only one way to join the game.
She thought of her mother saying, work, work, lazy girl. Work was all she had ever done. The prize money would let her rest a little, and with a BST device she could do so much more. If she won, maybe her mother’s voice in her head would finally quieten.
Tatsuko gulped as the timer hit 00:05 and flashed red.
She put her left wrist back onto the bench and picked up the machete.
Chapter 32
Sully’s game controller hit 00:05 and he raised his right hand high into the air. Staring at a spot on his wrist above the iTourist.
‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Fuck.’
He flexed his shoulder and told his brain to send signals to his arm and shoulder to move. They obeyed, the hand moved, gathering momentum. The weight of the machete aiding the acceleration of the hand down towards his wrist.
He willed the blade down, trusting his aim, knowing one clean strike, delivered with all his weight would slice through bone and tendons. Serge had said the BST universal mount worked better with a clean cut.
His brain decided otherwise. Some deep subconscious survival instinct kicked in. Urgent, frantic messages were sent to muscles, and they obeyed.
The machete stopped millimetres above his wrist.
Sully sobbed, part relief, part frustration that his body had let him down. He was brave enough, he told himself. It was his body’s fault.
This wasn’t like Serge’s stupid test. He had heard the others being called before him. Why was he always the last?
Sully had sat in the chair and looked at Serge’s guillotine, listened to empty words about commitment. Did he think Sully was an idiot?
Had he heard screams as a hand was chopped off? No, and he would have heard.
Was there blood splattered around the room? No, and they couldn’t have cleaned it up so completely.
It was a hoax. A trick. Nothing.
Sully had watched the guillotine blade drop. Even though his brain told him that it would stop, he almost pulled it away. Sweat burst onto his brow, but he kept his hand still. His smile of triumph when the blade hit its stops was cracked and unconvincing.
Now he had to do it for real. Tears formed in his eyes. More weakness from his body. A couple of drops rolled down his cheeks and dropped onto the bench. They soaked into the wood, leaving little dark circles.
He sniffed and shoved a rough sleeve across his face to wipe the tears away.
‘This time,’ he said and raised the machete again.
His arm wouldn’t move. It had failed him.
‘No,’ he said, firmness filling his voice.
Everyone would laugh at him if he failed here. The whole online AR community would know his cowardice.
He couldn’t allow it. He thought of the money and what he could buy with it before he swung his arm hard and fast.
Chapter 33
Lilou’s game controller hit 00:00 and beeped. She felt calm. Certain. This was the level of challenge that had been missing from her life for so long.
She didn’t hesitate. Not even for a moment.
Her arm swung down and she arched her back to add to the force behind the blow, drawing on the strength of the muscles in her shoulders and back.
She kept her eyes on the prize, the spot on her wrist above her iTourist. The machete’s handle was big in her hand, but her parkour had built strong muscles in her fingers and wrist. The machete didn’t waver from its course.
Lilou heard a crack as the machete hit her wrist, right on target, and then a deeper thud as the blade sliced through her wrist and hit the bench. The force of her swing buried the machete into the wooden countertop.
The blade’s singing vibration was drowned by Lilou’s scream.
Her brain exploded with thousands of nerves all lighting up at the same time. All screaming for her attention. Her vision flashed white and she staggered, almost falling.
Her brain was in shutdown. She couldn’t see it, but her blood jetted out of her severed wrist, bouncing red splatters off the machete’s blade and sending them flying onto the bench and floor.
From somewhere inside her, she forced a message into her chaotic brain.
‘Act or bleed out.’
Nothing.
‘Act or die.’
Her brain wasted another second in chaos before rationalising the situation, then her vision snapped back on like a display wall coming to life.
She tried to distance herself from the scene. The blade. The blood everywhere – her blood.
Her hand and part of her wrist on the floor. The iTourist flashed red all over, still attached to her now departed limb.
‘Act,’ she screamed at herself.
Time slowed and she spun back to the bench. The BST universal mount waited for her. A few drops of blood had landed on it, but it didn’t ruin her grip.
She rotated her left elbow to bring her damaged arm across her, keeping it pointed away from her face to avoid the jetting blood. She twisted the BST universal mount so that the top of it aligned with the top of her wrist.
Twisting it left and right to overcome the resistance, she pushed the mount over her left wrist. Pushing harder and gasping from the effort, she got it all the way on, then stopped to suck in some deep breaths.
Lilou could feel the pressure of her pulse against the end of the mount.
Leaning against the bench, she grasped the end of the mount as Serge had shown her. She pushed and rotated the end, hoping to hear a click as it fastened itself in place.
‘You need the click,’ Serge had said. ‘If you don’t, you have to pull it off and try again. Trust me that will really hurt.’
Lilou sobbed. There was no click. Her brain was letting the panic, the shock and the noise of her severed nerves take over again.
She pushed and twisted harder.
Click. The mount slotted into place.
Her brain blanked again at the sensation, and then seemed to reboot into a calmer mode.
The click had released a cocktail of painkillers and clotting agents into her bloodstream.
She stared at the mount and the blood smears along its length. It seemed to be constricting around her arm. The colour of it matching her skin tone almost perfectly.
The nerves in her wrist calmed, some weird movement in the inside end of the mount felt like rubbing the ends of a bristle nail brush against the back of her hand.
One by one, the nerve endings stilled, seeming to connect to a receptor in the mount. The rubbing sensation stopped, and her wrist felt normal.
Lilou stared again at the mount, almost not believing what had happened.
Her brain told her that she still had a hand. She could tell it to move her fingers, but obviously, her hand lay still on the floor.
Now that her brain had been fooled into thinking that nothing had happened to her wrist, she was aware of her pulse hammering in her ears.
She doubled over and retched.
When she stood again, she felt better.
Lilou took in the scene, again feeling distant from it. The blood and hand on the floor couldn’t be hers. She was fine.
She turned to the bench and looked at the display on her game controller.
‘Attach game controller to universal mount to begin,’ it pulsed.
Lilou picked the game controller up, twisting it so that its fake thumb was upright. She pushed the controller onto the connector that protruded from the end of the mount and twisted. The controller rotated into the normal position of a hand and clicked on.
Lilou twisted her arm to see the controller’s ‘palm’ and the display.
‘Welcome to Forbidden Island – the ultimate game,’ it said.
Chapter 34
The day had scraped by, each dull minute dragged its heels, seeming reluctant to leave. Clive could have run through waist-deep thick treacle faster.
The grimy window of the PCU office hadn’t been able to mask the sunshine outside, and Clive’s gaze had flicked from the clock on the display wall to the window and back again. Willing time to go faster, like he was a bored school kid waiting for the release of the final bell of the day.
A walk in the late afternoon sun would be a nice end to a crappy day.
The clock on the display wall turned over. 16:00. One hour to go.
Ava sat opposite Clive in Zoe’s old seat. He replayed her handling of Brett in his head. Her self-confidence was surging, feeding itself. She’s going to fly, he thought.
Ava looked up, seeming to sense that Clive was watching her.
‘OK, Boss?’
‘Yes. Thinking about home time.’
In reality, Clive was now thinking about calling Sophia again. Their relationship had locked into a hard frost since the meeting at the church. Every one of his unanswered messages and calls seemed to drop the temperature a degree.
He didn’t want to call with Ava hearing his side of the conversation, so he decided to try messaging again.
‘Hi, darling. I don’t want to lose what we have. Can we meet? I really want to change.’
His HUD remained blank, then he smiled, and his heart quickened as he saw ‘Sophia is typing’ appear at the bottom of his TrueMe window. He waited. Hoping.
Sophia’s response cut through him and forced tears into his eyes. He read it again through blurry vision. Rubbing the tears away with a savage swipe of his hands didn’t change the message: ‘Sorry, Clive, but we need to take a break. After all my care and love, you go to the church because of her.’
Clive tried to type some words, but it was all inadequate. He’d have to leave the office and try to find a quiet spot that he could call her from. He needed to explain.
He needed her.
Then he realised the truth.
He loved her.
His thoughts were brought to an abrupt halt by his Buddy sprinting onto his HUD. The banner he trailed said ‘Urgent: iTourist unauthorised disconnect – Lilou Boudin – location: Worcester.’
Clive snapped upright. He glanced at Ava, seeing from her face that her Buddy had dragged the same banner onto her HUD.
Her fingers were already up and typing. Always so fast. If this was a gunfight, Clive would have already been bleeding in the dust, holding his chest, with Ava blowing smoke from her gun barrel.
He knew he was beaten, and she flashed a triumphant smile.
‘Shall I say it for you?’ she said.
Clive shook his head. He tried to steady himself from the shock of the message and the realisation of his love for Sophia. ‘Share,’ he said.
The PCU office display wall froze, then redrew to show Ava’s HUD. She already had the report open and a map of Worcester showing. A small red dot pulsed in the centre of the map. As Ava pinched her fingers together, the map zoomed in until the scale was large enough to show a couple of buildings. The iTourist signal was stationary in the centre of a disused butcher’s shop.
Why would an iTourist fail? It couldn’t. No more than iMe could.
Then the pain of losing Sophia swamped him.
He blinked hard twice, trying to force some clarity into the jumble of thoughts thrashing around. He needed to focus on work. His mouth was dry, his pulse rising in anticipation. Could it be?
This was the first hint of an issue with iMe since Karina Morgan’s disappearance over a year ago. This could be the same. It could be the beginning of some real police work.
He tried to think logically, but he couldn’t think about anything other than Sophia. Never any work and now this comes up just as I’m losing Sophia, he thought. He didn’t have time for a call, but typed out a simple message: ‘I love you. Wanted to call but work urgent’ and pressed ‘Send’.
Now he had to clear his mind and focus.
‘It’ll take us three hours to get there,’ he said. ‘See if Control can tear some Uniforms away from the eco-protests to go there now.’
Ava nodded and started to type out the request message.
‘Send a forensic drone as well,’ Clive said.
‘Really?’ Ava queried. ‘It won’t be anything serious.’
‘You remember Karina. That started in the same way.’
Ava had been part of Zoe’s ‘crew’ of trainees working on the case. She had seen the images and her eyes changed as she remembered, showing the same determination that Clive had seen when she dealt with Brett.
Ava finished typing and pressed ‘Send’. Clive watched Ava’s Buddy on the display wall, she was halfway through the familiar animation of folding the message into a paper aeroplane and throwing it, when her Buddy froze and sprinted back across the display wall dragging another banner.
‘What the fuck?’ Clive said as he read the banner: ‘Urgent: iTourist unauthorised disconnect – Olufemi Naidoo – location: Derry.’
He didn’t even try and compete with Ava this time. She clicked on the message and did the same pinching and zooming. Another unauthorised disconnected iTourist stationary in a disused butchers.
‘That’s quite a coincidence,’ Ava said. ‘Same approach, Boss? Uniform and drone?’
Clive nodded. He’d never trusted coincidences. They made him nervous.
Ava hadn’t even had time to press send before her Buddy unfurled the next banner: ‘Urgent: iTourist unauthorised disconnect – Tatsuko Ito – location: Southampton.’
Clive’s head rotated. ‘No, no, no.’
Ava pressed send on the message to Uniform in Derry before sending a nearly identical one to Southampton. ‘What’s going on, Boss?’
‘No idea.’
Could it be the start of a systemic failure? Surely not? A Cyber hack? Clive touched the back of his neck where his iMe was embedded. Was someone there?
‘We’d better check with iMe,’ Clive said. He touched his jaw to make a call and said, ‘Call iMe Tech Support.’ He heard the call ring and threw his HUD at the display wall. It blanked out the display of Ava’s HUD and redrew with Clive’s. Now she could hear the call through the speaker in the wall.
‘Tech Support, this is Rob,’ the voice said. He sounded flustered.
‘Hi, Rob, this is DI Clive Lussac at PCU. I’ve got three unauthorised iTourist disconnection messages. What’s going on?’
‘Hi, Clive. We’ve got them too. Everything seems OK our end, other than the three messages. We’re checking. Can’t tell you any more at the moment.’
‘Not a cyber hack?’
Rob snorted. ‘You watch too many films. It’s not that easy.’
‘Call me back when you can,’ Clive said.
‘Sure,’ Rob said. Clive could hear raised voices in the background at Rob’s end of t
he call. It sounded like panicked questions being thrown around. ‘Got to go,’ Rob said, and the call dropped.
In the silence, Clive and Ava looked at each other, not sure what to do next.
Clive decided. ‘Southampton’s closer than Worcester or Derry,’ he said. ‘Get a car here now. We need to see for ourselves.’
Ava nodded, fiddled on her HUD. ‘There’s one outside in two minutes.’
Clive was pushing his chair back in a loud scraping noise when ringing in his head stopped him. Ava stopped too. Clive’s HUD was still connected to the display wall and they could both hear the call and see the caller ID: DCS Bhatt.
Clive raised his eyebrows and said, ‘Prepare yourself, Ava.’
Clive touched his jaw to accept the call.
‘What’s going on, Clive?’ Bhatt shouted.
Clive could hear the urgency in her voice. It singed his ears like a fiery blast from a dragon.
‘Three unauthorised disconnected iTourists,’ Clive said. He knew this bland statement of fact would raise the temperature of the blast from Bhatt, so he added, ‘I’ve sent Uniform and drones to all three sites. iMe Tech Support is checking. They can’t see anything sinister. No system wide issues.’
‘What else,’ Bhatt demanded, sounding like she expected Clive to have solved it already.
‘Ava and I are about to go to the Southampton site. It’s the closest. Feels like we need to see it for ourselves.’
Bhatt hesitated. Clive could almost hear her thinking. The drones would scan each site and create a perfect 3D model that they could ‘walk’ around. They’d do a full forensic sweep and compile a detailed report. Did they need to go and incur both the cost of the journey and the overtime? Could the depleted PCU budget sustain it?
‘Go,’ Bhatt said. ‘You’ll get a better sense of the place if you’re there.’
‘On it,’ Clive said and dropped the call.
‘Car’s outside,’ Ava said.
‘Let’s go,’ Clive said, standing up straight and heading for the door.
As Clive’s hand hit the door handle, his Buddy sprinted across the bottom of his HUD with another message banner: ‘Urgent: iTourist unauthorised disconnect – Salvatore Rossi – location: Dumfries.’
