by Rod Rees
‘Then there may be a way. In a former life I was the Grigori’s most formidable enemy so I’m guessing that they’ve got a few scores to settle. Sure as eggs are eggs, they’ll be out there searching for me.’ Ella gave a mirthless chuckle. ‘Maybe I won’t have to find them … maybe I’ll let them find me.’
2:10
The ParaDigm Research Facility, Nevada
The Real World: 16 April 2019
The 12/12 dirty nuke attack on Edinburgh marked a substantial shift in the British public’s attitude to PINC. Before the attack public opinion was largely negative, there being widespread suspicion that the wholesale PINCing of the population would lead to an unacceptable infringement of privacy and personal liberty. After the attack national security became the pre-eminent concern of British citizens, and the arguments that PINC would ensure their safety and their e-identity had greater resonance. A referendum was called in May 2015 to decide the matter and almost 60 per cent of the electorate voted in favour of the compulsory and universal adoption of PINC within the British Empire. It is anticipated that this policy will be executed in May 2019.
Modern British History: eSuccess in GCSE-Dip Revision Guide, ParaDigm ePress
Dong E and Rivets had Ella drop them off at a gas station a mile or so from the ParaDigm facility. It was viciously hot outside the air-conditioned oasis of the car, and after they’d waved Ella goodbye, they took shelter in the shade of an awning and waited for the arrival of the ParaDigm limo Madden was sending to pick them up.
So much had happened in the few hours since they had arrived in the States that for a couple of minutes they simply stood in silence, lost in their thoughts, this awkward silence finally broken by Rivets. ‘So, what do you think?’ he asked.
‘Well, what I think is that Norma Williams is an enormously driven and charismatic young lady and if anyone can lead a remodelled humanity into a bright new tomorrow, it’s her. Like Ella, I’m not totally sold on this InfoCialism of hers but really I don’t think we’ve much of a choice. The alternative is to have the Boles regroup and come back at us. We’ve got to finish them now.’
‘Agreed. And Ella Thomas?’
‘Determined and very courageous. Going after the Grigori will be, I suspect, a dangerous occupation. I think Ella knows she won’t be coming out of this alive, and there aren’t many people who would willingly sacrifice their lives to preserve the lives of others.’
‘It’s one life to save billions.’
‘It’s still a ballsy thing to do.’
Rivets shuffled nervously on his feet and then glanced at Dong E. ‘What if it was three lives that had to be sacrificed to save billions?’
Dong E turned to Rivets, gimleting him with a hard stare. ‘I think we both know how important it is to stop the Boles, so don’t ever doubt me, Rivets: I’ll do anything and everything necessary to defeat them. I’ll be with you to the end.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Never more so in my life.’
‘Okay … then we’ve got to get a Message Sphere that carries the instructions necessary to reprogram noöPINC into the TiME facility. That, I think, will be down to you … and your jewellery. The fact that Madden’s got the hots for you is our ace in the hole. I’m expecting security around the TiME machine to be super-tight and the only way of getting our gizmo past that security will be if Madden is thinking with his dick rather than his brain. If you were to flirt with the man a little, to get him not seeing straight …’
Dong E giggled. ‘Short skirt time, eh?’
‘Very short skirt time.’ Rivets smiled but there wasn’t much warmth in it.
Dong E kissed him on the cheek. ‘Don’t worry, Rivets, I love you, so don’t think I’m going to enjoy getting it on with Madden. But if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.’ She gave Rivets a crooked smile. ‘So, if you don’t mind, I’ll just spend a few minutes in the washroom fixing my make-up and getting ready to play the femme fatale.’ Another smile. ‘When I’m finished, Madden’s not going to stand a chance.’
*
An hour later the limo sent by Madden trundled them up to the enormous antiAttack gates that gave access to ParaDigm’s Nevada facility. Waiting while the Intelligence Bureau agents completed the protracted identification process and their bags were examined for explosives, Dong E found herself relaxing. Her fate – and that of the world – was now in the lap of the gods. The die was cast, there could be no going back now.
She stopped relaxing immediately they were through the gates; that was the moment she fully appreciated just how powerful an enemy they were taking on in ParaDigm. Sure, she had seen Polly footage describing the factories and installations the company had around the world and ParaDigm House in London was a pretty impressive place, but it was the Nevada site that brought home to her the sheer scale of the resources controlled by the Boles. The site was huge, a vast circular compound which, according to PINC, stretched thirty miles across, but it wasn’t simply the size of the place that was so daunting. Here, in the middle of the desert, the Boles had created a little piece of England: ParaDigm’s Nevada research facility was set in seven hundred square miles of verdant and very lush parkland. She hardly dared estimate the amount of water needed to keep grass growing in a desert.
Their approach to the manor house standing in the middle of the park had obviously been observed: a butler resplendent in a morning suit opened the huge front doors ready to greet them. ‘Good afternoon. Welcome to Bole Manor,’ he intoned and then ushered them inside, along a corridor and into an opulent room lined from floor to ceiling with leather-bound books. ‘If you would make yourselves comfortable, I will advise Dr Madden of your arrival.’ And with that he oozed out of the room.
Madden put in an appearance five minutes later. In many ways he was the epitome of a modern scientist, a man as much at home in the boardroom as he was in the laboratory. He was elegant, perfectly groomed – a little too perfectly groomed in Dong E’s opinion: there was something almost oleaginous about him – and quite handsome in a nondescript sort of way. She could understand why he was so successful with women – very successful, if the ParaDigm scuttlebutt was to be believed – but he was just not Dong E’s type of guy.
‘My dear Robert,’ he smarmed, ‘I am so very pleased to meet you again, and may I congratulate you on your appointment to the ABBA Containment Project.’ Madden tried to sound sincere but he couldn’t hide his annoyance at Rivets’ promotion. ‘But I am forgetting my manners.’ He bowed towards Dong E. ‘I am also delighted to welcome the talented and beautiful Dr Dong E to Bole Manor.’
Seduction starts here, decided Dong E and she ignored the outstretched hand and instead kissed the man on the cheek. ‘Sam! It’s so good to see you again. My, you’re looking quite raffish. The desert sunshine obviously agrees with you.’
Madden preened as he waved his two guests back into their chairs. ‘And you, Dong E, are looking, as ever, glorious.’
It might have been an automatic compliment on Madden’s part, but Dong E suspected it was the truth. During her ten minutes in the garage’s washroom she’d taken a lot of care over what she would wear for her first meeting with Madden, and the choice of a short leather skirt had obviously been a right one: like most men, Madden was a sucker for leather.
‘I am delighted to welcome you both to the Nevada TiME facility and I think you’ll be amazed at the research we’ve been conducting here.’ Madden paused as another man, older and dressed in a white lab coat, entered the library. ‘May I introduce the facility’s Chief Scientific Officer, Pierre Boitard. Pierre will be your host, Robert, and will be responsible for answering any questions you may have regarding our work.’
When the introduction had been made, Boitard turned to Rivets. ‘Do you have any idea when you’ll be ready to make your Temporal Modulation, Dr Vetsch?’
‘I am intending to make two Temporal Modulations …’
‘Two!’ Boitard glanced towards Madden. ‘But we only ha
ve one Compression Sphere ready. The cost of preparing a second will be enormous.’
Rivets gave a careless shrug. ‘The impression I got from Thaddeus Bole …’
A great piece of name-dropping that, decided Dong E.
‘… is that the ABBA project has top priority. If you need me to contact him to authorise the need for two Modulations …?’
A potent threat, and Madden didn’t seem to relish being on the wrong end of a tongue-lashing administered by Thaddeus Bole. ‘No, no. That won’t be necessary. The message I got was to provide you with all the assistance you might need. But may I ask why two Modulations will be necessary?’
‘To prevent ABBA twigging what we’re trying to do and protecting itself from these changes, I intend to divide the programming instructions into two parts. Each half of the retro-program will appear utterly benign, but when they are united, they will initiate changes which will bring ABBA to heel.’
Madden nodded his begrudging understanding. ‘Interesting … I see now. But surely even this won’t be enough to fox ABBA.’
‘We’ve run tests, Sam,’ Rivets lied. ‘ABBA won’t spot a thing.’
Rivets sounded so confident that Madden simply shrugged his acceptance. ‘Very well, but you must appreciate that we won’t be able to get two Compression Spheres ready before the end of the month.’
‘The end of the month will be perfect,’ said Rivets. ‘It will give Dong E the time she needs to put some finishing touches to the retro-programming we’re planning to use.’
Madden gave Dong E a broad smile. ‘Then might I suggest, Dong E, that while Robert is involved in his preliminary discussions with Pierre, I give you a tour of the facility? I’ll show you things secret even from PINC.’
‘That would be wonderful, Sam, but I know how busy you must be …’
‘Don’t give it a second’s thought.’
*
‘Perhaps we might start your tour in my office,’ said Madden as he guided Dong E into the lift. ‘I’ve put together quite a collection of memorabilia relating to the Cavors – the family of scientists whose work made Temporal Modulation possible – which you might find of interest.’
‘Oh, I’m sure it will be fascinating,’ purred Dong E, standing a little closer to Madden than was required by the confines of the lift as they were sighed up to the manor’s second floor. ‘The whole concept of Temporal Modulation is intriguing. I’m so looking forward to seeing TiME itself.’
‘Unfortunately, Dong E, that won’t be possible,’ admitted an awkward-sounding Madden as the doors of the lift opened. ‘Only those of Grade Ten or above can enter TiME, and unfortunately you are only Grade Nine.’
Dong E made a moue of disappointment. ‘That’s such a shame, Sam.’
‘I’m sorry,’ murmured Madden, ushering Dong E into his office, ‘but there’s really nothing I can do. Rules, as they say, are rules.’
As she crossed the carpeted floor of the enormous office to sit down in the chair stationed in front of her host’s oversized desk, Dong E knew that this was her moment of truth. If Rivets was to succeed, if they were to defeat the Boles, then she had to persuade Madden to let her enter TiME. And that would require her to seduce the man.
So to begin.
As Madden served them coffee, Dong E shucked off her jacket to reveal the white shirt she was wearing beneath, then crossed her legs as artfully as she could. Being of a scientific bent, Dong E had long ago come to the conclusion that seduction wasn’t an art, rather it was an empirically based science, so much so that she was able to apply a mathematical precision to her technique that would have astonished her lovers. By her reckoning, her remarkable success in seducing men could be reduced to a simple numerical sequence.
4/117/21/30/10/2
4: the number of lovers she’d had. Practice made perfect.
117 pounds: her ideal weight. Any less and she appeared gaunt, any more and she traded trimness for roundness.
21 years: her age, which was perfect for a woman, combining as it did experience with youth.
30 inches: the distance she was sitting away from Madden’s desk, affording him an uninterrupted view of her excellent figure.
10 inches: the amount of thigh she was displaying.
2: the two big, bright, brown and unblinking eyes which she focused so appealingly on the man … and, of course, the two nipples that announced their dusty-pink presence under her shirt. She’d lost her bra back in the washroom.
Of course, this mathematical maxim wasn’t so much a sequence as a compound equation, with each facet of Dong E’s disturbing femininity applying a multiplier effect to the others. The aim was to give the men she aimed to seduce an unmistakable signal that she was ready, willing and able – very able – to provide them with maximum sexual satisfaction.
Dong E smiled sweetly towards Madden and was delighted to see, as a consequence of the application of her Formula for Fornication, that she had secured his undivided and very appreciative attention. But never one to rest on her laurels, she shimmied her bottom on the seat of her chair, allowing Madden a better view of the shadowed secrets that lay beneath her skirt. Her efforts were rewarded: Madden had to squirm on his chair, presumably better to accommodate his burgeoning lust.
Distracted as he was, Madden struggled with what to say next, so much so that Dong E felt obliged to fill in the space: seduction, after all, required encouragement. ‘This must be a wonderful place to live and work, Sam.’
‘It’s certainly different, Dong E. This house is a replica of Bole Manor, the family home of the Boles in a place called Wold Newton, in Yorkshire.’
‘I must say, the grounds and the manor came as something of a surprise. I’d expected the facility to be much more high-tech.’
Madden smiled. ‘Oh, appearances deceive, Dong E; the vast majority of the facility is underground. The Nevada site apes the iceberg, with what you see on the surface merely cosmetic dressing for the much larger functionality below. Quite deliberate, of course: it wouldn’t do for the Yanks to see what we were really up to. The manor serves as an administrative block and a museum celebrating the history of Temporal Modulation. Hence the collection of portraiture.’
Here Madden waved his hand to indicate the rather grim canvases decorating the walls of his office and then leant back in his chair and tapped a fingernail against the picture hanging behind him, a picture that showed a rather diffident-looking man, with curly blond hair and mutton-chop whiskers, dressed rather sombrely in Regency fashion. ‘This is the chap who started it all: the gentleman scientist and naturalist Percy Cavor. Cavor’s story began on the evening of 13th December 1795, when he was one of those attending a scientific soirée given by Sir Algernon Bole and his fiancée, Lady Maria Steele, in Bole Manor. Their discussions were interrupted by the arrival of a meteor which crashed in a field half a mile away from the manor. Naturally, this caused great excitement and Sir Algernon and his guests went to investigate. Approximately a hundred yards from the crater caused by the meteor’s impact Percy Cavor stumbled upon several small fragments of a rock that he first took to be Chondrite, but which on closer inspection proved to be rather more unworldly. Percy Cavor had discovered the element that we have come to know as Cavorite.’
Madden rose from his chair and walked over to a cabinet at the side of the office, removing a small box from one of the cabinet’s drawers. ‘This is Cavorite in its natural state,’ Madden said as he opened the box and unveiled three large pebbles which he placed on the desk in front of Dong E.
Dong E felt a little awestruck. Cavorite was one of the greatest discoveries of all time. Although there had been rumours that the original fragments of meteorite discovered by Percy Cavor still existed, most scientists accepted that he’d destroyed them in order to protect the secrets of Cavorite from rivals. But here they were.
‘These were stripped from the main body of the 1795 meteorite when it entered the Earth’s atmosphere,’ explained Madden. ‘The meteorite was the
only natural occurrence of Cavorite ever encountered, though being secretive by nature, Percy Cavor kept this discovery to himself. His initial intention seemed to have been to record it as a geological curiosity and it was only when he had taken his find back to his laboratory in London and made a more thorough examination that he came to realize that Cavorite possessed amazing properties, the most important of these being that if an electrical current is applied to the rock it repels gravity, the force of the repulsion directly proportional to the size of the current applied. Cavor also established that if the rock is rotated, this repulsive force is increased, again the faster the spin induced, the more forcefully gravity is repelled.’
‘An amazing discovery. He must have been an incredibly talented man.’
‘Lucky rather than talented. Prior to his discovery of Cavorite Percy Cavor was regarded as a very run-of-the-mill scientist, but after his close encounter with the meteor he seems to have been a man reborn, his mental faculties expanded to a level where he came to be seen as something of a genius.’
‘I’m not sure I follow,’ Dong E pantomimed, knowing that weak men like Madden always found stupidity – feigned though Dong E’s was – very appealing in their women.
‘Cavor speculated that his being bathed in the radiation generated by the meteor as it plunged to Earth provoked a metamorphosis in him. He even suggests in his diary that all those resident in Bole Manor at that time were physically, psychologically and taxonomically mutated by this radiation.’
‘Including Algernon Bole?’
‘Presumably. You know, I never thought of that! Anyway … whatever the cause of his new-found genius, Percy Cavor dedicated his life to identifying and extracting the active agent – Cavorite – from the rock. But despite his efforts he failed, and it was left to his grandson, the über-genius Henry, to finally isolate Cavorite.’ Here Madden nodded to a second portrait, this one placed at the far end of the office. ‘That is Henry Cavor, the father of Temporal Modulation.’
