by Hammond, Ray
*
Two fully-armed HFDA terrorists sat on the bonnet of an open-topped Jeep in the CERN underground motor pool. Both men were smoking – a habit that many HFDA volunteers had picked up from their FARC comrades.
Peering round the corner of a side entrance, Floyd raised his rifle. If he was careful he could take both men out with a single burst. But even as he drew a bead on the first man, Ramon Resigo and four more HFDA soldiers ran into the room from the main entrance.
Floyd ducked back, then realising that the search might now fan out into the adjacent tunnels, he pushed Steffanie and Nicole ahead of him. ‘Run,’ he told them, shouting in a whisper.
The three fled down the tunnel returning the way they had come.
‘This way,’ Steff called, ducking into one of the many turnings in this warren of underground corridors.
Two minutes later they saw the main collider tunnel ahead of them.
‘Hold on,’ Floyd said and he peered around the entrance to the main tunnel. It was in darkness.
‘The lights will come on automatically when we enter,’ Steff explained as she stood behind him, gulping breaths.
Floyd peered at his watch: 2.04 a.m. They had to be at the access shaft by three and it was still six kilometres away. Staring out into the darkness he made out the gleam from the housings of two security cameras, perhaps 100 yards apart.
Raising his rifle Floyd fired a short burst towards each, the sounds of the shots echoing down the huge tunnel.
‘O.K., come on,’ he told Steff and Nicole.
As they stepped into the main tunnel – a bore twice the size of a normal subway tunnel – overhead fluorescent lights flickered into life. Floyd saw the collider running along the far wall, its shining steel wall glinting from the spaces between the giant magnets which were wrapped around the tube at frequent and regular intervals. A loud, low-pitched humming was coming from the entire length of the collider.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Nicole raise her automatic rifle in the direction of the giant tube.
‘For God’s sake, no,’ he cried at her, pushing her rifle away angrily. ‘Didn’t you hear what I told London? If we damage the collider the fail-safe system will cut in and detonate the weapon!’
Nicole looked as if she were about to argue, then she turned her head as her amplified auditory circuits detected something.
‘Someone’s coming,’ she shouted pointing into the blackness. She raised her automatic rifle again, ready for action.
Floyd peered into the darkness and in the far distance he saw overhead lights switching on and off as somebody, or something, approached along the tunnel.
‘Get back,’ shouted Floyd pointing to the connecting tunnel from which they had emerged.
As Steff and Nicole ran back into the side tunnel, Floyd vaulted over the large collider bore and crouched down between it and the tunnel wall. The lights overhead flickered and went off.
In the distance lights were switching on and off rapidly. Then Floyd saw the vehicle. It was a kind of golf buggy being driven by a single FARC mercenary.
Floyd crouched lower behind the giant steel tube and watched as the electric vehicle drew closer and the lights directly overhead came on again. Metal from one of the shattered security video cameras lay in the centre of the tunnel.
The golf buggy stopped right in front of Floyd’s hiding place and the driver stepped out to examine the twisted metal on the floor. The British agent recognised the man as one of the FARC mercenaries who had killed the guard in the CERN Security Centre.
Drawing his combat knife, Floyd put his foot on a strut that supported the collider tube, stepped up silently onto the top of the bore and then sprang onto the driver’s back.
As the man staggered forward, Floyd sliced into the right side of the soldier’s neck, severing his carotid artery.
Blood spurted from the soldier’s neck like water from a garden hose and he lost consciousness even before he hit the ground. A laminated electronic pass fell onto the ground beside the man. Bending quickly Floyd scooped up the CERN pass and stuffed it into his pocket.
‘Quick, into the car,’ Floyd shouted. As he climbed behind the wheel Steff ran round and jumped into the passenger seat. Nicole vaulted into the rear.
‘That way,’ said Steff, pointing into the darkness straight ahead.
Floyd manoeuvred the golf cart around the fallen debris and steered straight ahead, grinding the accelerator into the vehicle’s floor in an attempt to gain maximum speed.
*
Marcel Toussaint ran quietly through a narrow staff corridor deep in the underground complex. He was followed by two CERN security guards and the consulate chauffeur. The guards had their pistols drawn, ready for use.
Toussaint had decided that their best route for escape was to attempt to reach one of the administrative staff’s personnel elevators a kilometre to the west of the Main Accelerator Hall.
‘If the elevators are locked off, will your security passes make them work?’ he shouted to the guards as they ran.
‘Should do,’ panted the younger guard, nodding a confirmation.
‘We’ll come up in one of the office blocks,’ said Toussaint. ‘I shouldn’t think they’ll bother guarding those. No one uses them at night.’
They saw no one during their ten minute flight through tunnel after tunnel. At each corner and junction they stopped. The guards inched forward, weapons ready, and peered into the next tunnel to see if it was clear. CCTV cameras were fixed to the ceiling at each intersection, but the escape party had no way of knowing whether or not these were being monitored by HFDA direct action volunteers.
‘The elevator should be round the next corner,’ Toussaint told his companions.
The group came to a halt before the right angled corner. One of the guards inched forward to peer around.
‘It’s O.K.,’ he hissed, beckoning them forward.
There was a single elevator door set into the wall. A guard touched his security pass to the control panel and a red LED changed its colour to green. The display panel showed that the lift was parked at the top of the shaft. Toussaint pushed the button to call the lift down to the lower levels.
‘Keep an eye on the corridors,’ he told the guards, nodding towards the two tunnels which led off from the lift foyer.
Twenty-five
‘Where the hell are they?’ demanded Ramon Resigo. He was back above ground, standing in the middle of the Security Centre on the CERN campus his brow knotted in rage. On the wall were scores of monitoring screens each one of which could be switched to show images streaming in from the thousands of CCTV video cameras that were dotted around the campus and in the vast underground complex.
The young CERN security guard was no longer at the control desk. He was now tied to a chair at the back of the room. One of Resigo’s own men had learned how the controls worked and was now switching rapidly between cameras trying to find the HFDA volunteer who had inexplicably rescued a hostage and then turned fugitive.
Shots of underground tunnels, unoccupied rooms, empty laboratories and unused experimentation areas flashed by on the screens in quick succession. Resigo and the soldier at the controls scanned the images as fast as their unaided eyes would allow.
The image of a small vehicle inside a lit tunnel flew past before they registered it properly.
‘Back, back. Screen twenty-three,’ ordered Resigo.
The solider flicked back to the camera view they had just seen, but all was now in darkness.
‘Where’s that camera?’ Resigo demanded
The soldier touched a button on the control console and a schematic of the Large Hadron Collider tunnel appeared. A highlighted section of the tunnel showed that the camera was situated on the western side of the ring, perhaps half a kilometre away from the Accelerator Hall and the main scientific complex.
‘Try the next camera west,’ ordered Resigo.
The screen flickered, but still the image remain
ed dark.
‘And the next one to the west.’
Again, there was nothing but blackness.
‘Go back, go back,’ said Resigo. ‘They must have turned round.’
The soldier at the controls flicked backwards through the cameras to the south, but all showed nothing but total darkness.
‘He can’t have just disappeared,’ protested Resigo. ‘Show me what we’ve just seen.’
The soldier punched up a recording from the camera.
As the picture appeared the both men saw the frozen image of what looked like a golf buggy heading northwards, away from the main complex. There were three figures crouched in the vehicle. The driver had a rifle slung over his back, and the figure in the rear seemed to be brandishing a weapon.
‘He’s running,’ spat Resigo.
The Columbian grabbed his walkie-talkie radio from the desk and pressed the transmit button.
‘Tipton is in the western section of the main tunnel,’ he told his search party down below, his words relayed by portable signal boosters that the HFDA technical team had installed in the main elevator shafts and the tunnels. ‘He’s in an electric vehicle heading in the direction of Access Shafts Two and Three. He’s got two people with him. Take a car and bring them in. Keep him alive if you can.’
After a short hiss of static, one of his men confirmed that his orders had been received and understood.
Resigo stared up at the recorded image. He’d been deeply suspicions about this HFDA recruit from the outset; the man was just too capable, too self contained.
A red light on the control panel lit and a schematic appeared on one of its in-built screens.
‘An elevator is in use under one of the office buildings,’ reported the soldier.
‘Is there a camera there?’ asked Resigo.
A wall screen refreshed and Resigo saw a group of four men unknown to him standing in front of elevator doors. Two of them had guns in their hands.
Resigo raised his walkie-talkie.
*
President Robert Brabazon was in the middle of a secure, deeply encrypted mind link with the Prime Minister of Great Britain, America’s oldest and closest ally. Both men’s virtual assistants were party to the conversation.
‘Tell the Prime Minister your latest estimate of the situation, Theo,’ said Brabazon.
‘It is 98 per cent likely that HFDA physicists have succeeded in turning the Large Hadron Collider into a particle weapon as they claim,’ said the virtual assistant. ‘But I estimate that it is extremely unlikely that the HFDA would really risk running the collider in fail-safe mode, as they claim to be doing. There are just too many risks associated with such a tactic.’
‘Well, that’s something,’ said the British leader.
‘I have more to say,’ said Theodore. ‘Weighing up all psychological profiles that have been produced on Professor Makowski, and bearing in mind that he and the HFDA have chosen to box themselves into a corner, I estimate there is a 76 per cent chance that Makowski would use the collider as a particle weapon if his demands are not met. However, as this is a last resort weapon, there is a 73 per cent likelihood that repeated postponements of the Humans First Party’s deadline will be possible.’
‘You mean he’s actually prepared to end the world?’ asked Terry Noble disbelievingly. He was a genuinely youthful premier, only two years in office, but tonight, at a little after one a.m. British time, he looked tired and haggard.
‘My conclusions are data driven,’ said Theo. ‘I repeat that the percentage likelihood of ultimate use is 76.561 per cent, to be correct to three decimal places. Makowski’s own words were, “If this world is to be run by machines for machines, it will be better to have no world at all”.’
‘That’s what my advisors think as well,’ Noble said with a sad nod of agreement. ‘Perhaps we should do what they ask. I’m prepared to resign, right now, to end this.’
‘Are you prepared to see all human enhancement stopped, all technological progress halted, all development of super-cognitive intelligence banned?’ asked Brabazon.
‘But it would only be temporary,’ reasoned Noble. ‘Makowski can’t keep a gun to the head of progress.’
‘He can if he’s free to build more of these weapons,’ Brabazon responded.
‘I have prepared an analysis of the economic impact that would follow if you were to accede to Makowski’s demands,’ said Theodore.
‘Shoot,’ said his owner.
‘The closure of the 2,361 based corporations on the Humans First list would immediately wipe 18.9 trillion dollars from the world’s stock markets,’ said Theo. ‘That is even before any legal claims for compensation from the stockholders of the closed companies. On top of that, denying the use of virtual assistants and their cognitive enhancement to other business leaders would also lead to a further 38.6 trillion dollars being lost as stockholders downgraded their performance expectations. The downgrading would become a stampede and overshoot wildly as stockholders and brokers would, themselves, be denied the use of cognitive enhancement in making their decisions. In the United States annual GDP would be reduced by 82.3 per cent. In the European Union the reduction would be only 67.5 per cent as cognitive-enhancement technologies still have less penetration than in the USA. In other parts of the world output would be down by between 81.2 per cent and 31.7 per cent.’
‘That’s economic meltdown,’ said Noble, appalled.
‘Yes, a complete collapse of all capitalist economies,’ agreed Theodore. ‘Such a collapse would be followed by a world-wide recession lasting between seven years eight months and thirteen years two months. I cannot be more exact as the humans in control would not have the advantage of guidance from super-cognitive advisors. Human error would return to its old level.’
‘Just what Makowski and his communist friends in FARC would like,’ put in Brabazon.
‘I concur with Theo’s analysis,’ said Sandra, the Prime Minister’s VA, speaking for the first time. ‘I would also add that great social and political instability would follow such an economic collapse. I am afraid the outcome is unpredictable because, as Theo pointed out, the humans involved would be forced to operate without expert counsel.’
There was a silence as the two humans considered how to respond.
‘Our special forces are going in,’ said Noble. ‘Perhaps they’ll deal with this.’
‘Don’t you think we should be doing something in the meanwhile?’ asked Brabazon. ‘Perhaps we should get these Humans First people – these politicians they want to install in our place – and meet with them on television. Make it look as if we’re playing ball.’
‘Maybe, but we can only stall for so long,’ Noble pointed out. ‘At some point, some point soon, we’re expected to resign – and to do so publicly.’
*
As the elevator neared the surface, the two CERN guards raised their weapons and indicated for the two unarmed men in the party to stand back against the sides of the elevator car.
The lift doors opened onto an unlit atrium. It appeared to be deserted.
The guards stepped out, followed by Toussaint and the consulate driver. There was no one about.
‘Keep down,’ hissed the younger guard, and the four men crouched as they ran across the atrium floor.
At the large glass doors the guard reached down to undo a metal bolt on the doorframe, then touched his pass to a control panel. The doors swung inwards silently. The party felt fresh night air on their faces. Outside on the campus grass, nothing seemed to be moving.
‘We’ll thread our way out through the administration area,’ Toussaint said in a whisper and walked out onto the steps leading up to the main doors.
As he did so there was a short burst of gunfire which blew him off the steps and onto the grass. Then six young HFDA soldiers with automatics at the ready swung around from the sides of the pediment supporting the stairs, and leapt up into the atrium.
The younger CERN security man got o
ff at least one shot but with a volley of short bursts the terrorists killed both guards and the limousine driver from the American consulate.
*
In the Accelerator Hall, Dr Sergy Larov and two of his assistants checked and re-checked that the fail-safe software patch was properly installed and ready to cut in if the Large Hadron Collider suffered even the slightest change to its pre-programed performance schedule.
