by John McNally
“He may be stringing us along because he doesn’t have Infinity or Carla.”
“They are NOT dead!” cried Delta, who never welcomed this suggestion. “We have no evidence that they’re dead. I was the last to see her and at that time she was alive!”
It was true that Delta had lost consciousness shortly after, but (attached to Yo-yo’s collar and still at nano-scale) she had been the last person to see her sister alive. Infinity Drake was presumed to be secreted somewhere about her person.
King waited a moment.
“We have no evidence, apart from a few doubtful videos, that Kaparis is holding either Infinity or your sister.”
Delta took comfort in this and bit her lip not to show it.
Al looked at the Zurich picture again and felt his stomach twist. Whenever he thought of Kaparis, his body tensed to take a punch. Exactly what Kaparis would have wanted, Al thought. Maybe that was the problem. Al looked round at the experts at the table or on screen, perhaps the finest minds ever assembled. He had led them to disaster. All his life he had been the smartest guy in the room, the brain. He had surfed his intellect and got as far as Boldklub and nearly bust open the laws of physics, but now it seemed he was all washed up.
“Stubbs is right …” said Al (but Stubbs took no pleasure in it). “We should never have fallen for Monte Carlo. That was ridiculous. We’ve become too predictable. Too logical. We’re scientists. We want the world to be rational, but we know that most of the time it isn’t. Life is random, absurd. That scares and confuses us. That’s why most of us are so bad at personal relationships!”
Al looked around. He was right. The room was full of blinking, uncomfortable nerds.
“If we can’t logically figure a way through this, then we’ve got to embrace the irrational, the unconscious. Look for answers there. We – no, I – I’ve got to stop digging the hole we’re in, I’ve got to step back and feel it, you know?”
“May I be excused?” requested Stubbs at this point.
“It’s time to get Zen, get patient,” Al continued. “It’s time to look beneath. This is a game of chess, not noughts and crosses.” He got up and paced. “We’ve got to think forwards, think backwards, think laterally; find the gap, the clue.” He slapped the table – “Come on! Let’s think outside the box! Let’s burn the damn box! You’re the brightest and the best. The only thing that trumps facts, that trumps time, that trumps the inevitable – that breaks E=MC2 – is the HUMAN IMAGINATION!”
Al climbed on to the desk and threw himself into a headstand. His legs flailed and split, but he held it, just.
He regarded them all, upside down. They looked ridiculous.
“It seems,” sighed Stubbs, “we’re back to square one.”
FEBRUARY 20 10:12 (GMT). Blue Valley Mall, Woking, Surrey, UK
There were too many variables, thought Li Jun.
There were six small children and approximately six thousand polyurethane spheres in the ball pool, featuring nine different colours with a predominance of red, blue, green and yellow. Four per cent of the spheres were misshapen or dented. Every movement caused a chaotic chain reaction through the surrounding balls that was predictable only to a low standard deviation. Too many differential calculations were required.
But what was causing Li Jun’s real distress was that the activity of the six small children in the ball pool had no point or goal. She looked out of the ball pool to where Grandmother Allenby stood with the other adults.
In an exaggerated mime, Grandma clutched her diaphragm and said, “Breathe, dear.”
Li Jun took a deep breath. She should be able to cope. She had a formidable mind. She had been Kaparis’s chief technician, after all—
“INCOMING!” Hudson cried, sprinting towards the edge of the pool while holding on to his glasses.
Grandma watched the speeding dork bellyflop in, causing an explosion of colour.
“Hudson! Really!”
“Come on, Li Jun! Get your shoulders under!” said Hudson, and he began to splash her with balls, an activity enthusiastically taken up by the little ones, so that Li Jun soon stood, uncomprehending, in the centre of a mad fountain.
“Is she … quite normal?” asked one of the other parents, looking at the slim teenage girl who seemed to be part Asian, part alien.
“She’s from another culture,” explained Grandma, biting back the urge to call Hudson and the toddlers off.
Li Jun was, in fact – thanks to Grandma – the world’s only liberated Tyro. After they had been rescued in the South China Sea, she had managed to provide vital information about Kaparis and his Tyro programme, but more lay buried in her mind and scans proved her brain had been deliberately manipulated. How could they unlock the memories within it? Grandma had a simple strategy: Li Jun had to be normalised. So Grandma had taken her home to clean sheets, fresh flowers, and fun. Finn’s best friend, Hudson, was brought in to act as a surrogate sibling and she had begun “play therapy”.
Li Jun bloomed, even if she hadn’t opened up completely yet. But most of all, it was good for Grandma, who liked Li Jun. She kept her busy and she kept her from thinking about Finn.
“INTO THE CASTLE!” cried Hudson, leading a Pied Piper charge on the coloured rope ramparts of the Maze Adventure. Li Jun stared after him like a frightened cat.
She is a jigsaw, thought Grandma with a sigh. Like any teenager. Except that with most young teenagers the edge pieces and corners were mostly in place, even some of the sky. In Li Jun’s case, the bits that were in place were few and far between and the pieces looked as if they all came from different sets …
“HELP!”
Hudson, far too big for the soft play apparatus, had managed to get himself stuck.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake …” said Grandma, and she started to wade through the coloured ball pool to rescue him.
It was while Hudson was being released – by Grandma, a four-year-old boy called Donald and a member of the security detail that followed them everywhere – that the first breakthrough occurred.
Li Jun had stepped out of the ball pool to wave goodbye to the other children. As their parents led them back through the shopping mall, the children played a game, which Li Jun instantly saw the logic of. The floor was made up of a series of tiles; the object of the game was never to step on the lines between them.
Li Jun looked down and centred her feet in the tile squares … and a thread tugged in her mind … She saw mountains … felt cold …
She moved forward, step by step, avoiding the lines. And with every step, stone slabs started to appear in her mind’s eye and fit together to form … another floor, in another place …
“Li Jun? What is it, dear?” asked Grandma as she reappeared with Hudson.
“I don’t know, Grandmother,” she whispered. Then she asked in a trance, “Hudson? Do you have your tablet?”
Hudson took his iPad out of his pack and gave it to her.
Li Jun opened the Minecraft app. She took a step. Remembered a stone. Laid it in a blank landscape. Then another. Then another …
Grandma and Hudson watched.
“‘Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’,” said Grandma.
“What?” said Hudson.
“Call Al.”
SEVEN
FEBRUARY 20 12:09 (GMT+3). Monastery of Mount St Demetrius of Thessaloniki
Hoooowowwwoowoowowl!
Yo-yo wept as he was led through the back of the kitchens by a Carrier. He noticed nothing, cared for nothing. He was miserable. Why hadn’t Finn and the good girl tried to stop this madness? He had suffered greatly in the Carrier bathhouse as the water poured down on him and he was washed by a dozen hands. Indignity had been piled upon indignity as the Carriers then used shears to give his fur a skintight cut, then stained him dark brown with some dye – he was light brown, British tea-coloured to his bones! It was a betrayal of his roots! He was inconsolable. Not that anyone cared …
Then he smelt something, something strong and getting stronger. Instinct took hold, his ears pricked up. He heard a Yip!-Yip!-Rff!-Ackck!-Ouugh!-Puh!-Frrt!
His tail began to wag at three hundred beats per second.
They approached a door, a door into a tiny courtyard, a forsaken pit down which light seldom shone. The Carrier kicked the door open – YAP!
Dogs, dogs, dogs! Leaping and spinning – Yip!-Yip!-Rff!-Ackck!-Ouugh!-Puh!-Frrt!
The ratters. The finest line-up of unloved mongrels ever assembled to hunt down rodents. Fantastically unattractive, they bore the names the cooks had blessed them with – Needy, Weedy, Livid, Fluey, Bulky, Sulky, and – lopsided on her three good legs – Barrel-Shaped-Fart-Wagon.
With unknowable joy, Yo-yo threw himself into the fray.
Finn woke from a deep sleep and tried to remember who, where and why he was.
Carla was awake beneath him. Rising groggily, urged on by Olga—
“Come!”
“I’m coming …”
Carla staggered out of their cell and down a stone passage after Olga as it all came back to Finn.
Oh yeah: mad castle, middle of nowhere, get the hell out.
They arrived at a bathhouse where Olga tugged at Carla’s filthy clothes. “Come! Lava!” She went to open a sluice in the next room.
“You better wait here,” said Carla. “I think they’re going to clean me up.” She stuck a hand into her hair so Finn could jump on to one of her massive fingers. He clung on and she deposited him on a windowsill. Then she left and Finn found himself alone.
He listened to the stillness, felt strange. He’d lived in Carla’s hair for so long now that they’d become like Siamese twins. Through cracked and clouded glass, there was a stunning view down a snow-clad valley and a sheer drop to the valley floor. What a strange, ancient and beautiful place to be, Finn thought, a million miles from schoolwork and screens. After all they’d been through, what would ever feel real again?
Carla returned with a cup of soapy water scooped from her bath and set it on the windowsill.
“You’re not going to believe how good this feels,” she said, and dashed back out.
Finn climbed onto the window latch so he was above the steaming pool. He hauled his filthy clothes off and threw them down, then took a deep breath – SPLASH!
His body cut through the hot water. It was glorious, a well of warmth and loveliness, sunlight gilding the bubbles. He swam and splashed and the enamelled grime of the previous months seemed to lift in layers from his skin until he felt purely himself again.
He barely had time to wring out his clothes when Carla returned, transformed. The malnourished, filthy “thing” was now a glowing teenage girl. Finn was alarmed to see her great mat of mad hair now clean and cut back almost as short as Olga’s.
“Do I look like the others?” Carla asked.
Finn took her in. With her big eyes and starved frame, she looked like some French film star. He should tell her, but he was a boy and luckily – “Come!” – Olga reappeared.
Carla picked him up and transferred him to … clean hair! What had been a dense jungle was now a bouncy castle, flea-less and fine.
One new world followed another as they arrived back in the library. It was a hive of activity by day, the Primo and two half-blind assistants responding to bells and speaking tubes, and snapping out orders to Carrier kids who came and went.
Olga and Carla were ordered straight to the laundry and from there hit the monastery in full swing, pushing a cart around and filling it with discarded linen as they went.
First they passed through the kitchens, picking up filthy aprons and caps, the place a buzz of noise, steam, running Carriers and swearing cooks.
The Forum came next, teeming with Tyros and tutors as they changed lessons, traversing the skewed walkways that connected every part of the building.
They collected table linen from a dining hall, then made their way up the walkways, collecting uniforms from Siguri stations and white robes from the tutors’ quarters.
The whole place was a contradiction, thought Finn, a mix of medieval and modern, ancient stone and steel, oil lamps and AK47s.
They passed classrooms and a vast gymnasium, on their way up to the dormitories—
“Tyros!” shouted Finn, as a crowd of vile teenagers, steaming and dripping wet snow from some exercise on the slopes, burst into the Forum and began to pound their way up towards them. They were all ages and sizes and they piled past them into the dorms, shoving and snarling at each other, beating the warmth back into their flesh, many with swollen and bloodshot eyes. Olga and Carla pushed round their cart and picked up discarded fatigues as the Tyros stripped down, shameless, and struggled into red uniforms that made them look like inmates of some asylum.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Finn said as Carla worked the room.
“We can’t just run, if we get caught we kill Carriers,” she muttered back.
“Maybe the Primo’s bluffing? Maybe he’s on some kind of power kick?” said Finn.
“He’s proud, that’s all,” said Carla. “We have to find another way. We need help.”
“Santiago!” suggested Finn. “Maybe he can find Yo-yo’s collar!”
“Out on the mountain? That would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. And he’d never go without the Primo’s say-so,” said Carla, dodging Tyros as they strode back out of the dorms.
Finn took in the reds of their eyes.
“Then we have to find the infirmary, check out these NRP machines,” said Finn.
When they did finally arrive at the infirmary, they wished they hadn’t.
A dozen Tyros were laid out on gurneys, fanned out in a circle like the petals of a flower around a large console in the centre. Wires led from the console to the heads of each Tyro. And out of each swollen eye, of each Tyro, stuck a probe that had been driven straight through the eye and deep into the brain.
The sight made Carla want to retch.
“NRP …” said Finn.
Two medics attended the stricken Tyros and made adjustments at the console (Finn could see the screen as plain as day – this place had technology, this place had electricity!) and a snake of cables led down from the console directly through an opening in the floor.
As they rolled the empty laundry cart back out, Carla said, “It will never be spring in this place.”
“There were computers back there,” said Finn. “Electricity fed from the Caverns, like the Primo said. We have to get down there. There must be something we can use to sound the alarm.”
“But I’m a Carrier, and Carriers are banned,” said Carla.
“Who said anything about Carriers?”
EIGHT
FEBRUARY 20 15:10 (GMT). Grandma’s house, Buckinghamshire, UK
The two young teenagers convulsed, dancing, as the digital beat drove home the vocal loop for the umpteenth time.
“Love dance. Love dance. Love dance dance dance dance – robot …”
Li Jun’s sharp black hair flicked and flew, her body throwing the weirdest shapes, while Hudson headbanged off the beat, holding onto his glasses.
Grandma sat and knitted and resisted the urge to yell, “Turn the bloody thing down!”
FEBRUARY 20 15:11 (GMT). Hook Hall, Surrey, UK
Via CCTV, Al and the Scarlatti crew and his technical team watched them dance.
“That girl can kick it,” observed Delta.
“Truly,” said Al.
The dance-offs with Hudson seemed to free Li Jun’s mind and send her back to the model-making refreshed. To help, Al had put together a playlist of dad-dance classics, though tragically she preferred what Al called “Hudson crap”.
Love dance robot climaxed and Hudson and Li Jun collapsed, giggling, onto the sofas.
“Time for a cup of tea, I think,” said Grandma through the kitchen hatch.
“Mum, don’t move! Let it happen naturally,” insisted Al over the comms.
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“But it’s teatime?”
“Hey! No structure, no timetable.” He was convinced his new, non-rational “intuitive” theory explained Li Jun’s breakthrough. “Instinct over intellect, remember? Let’s just set the parameters and let her play.”
“They shouldn’t be stuck in front of screens all day – it’s unhealthy,” Grandma complained, ignoring him to go and put the kettle on and look for Welsh cakes.
In the living room, Li Jun turned back to her task. One wall was now full of screens linked to Hook Hall. For the last four hours, she had worked away at the Minecraft model, just as she used to sit working away for Kaparis. Hudson’s role was to lie on the sofa pretending to be in an iron lung.
The results, being pored over by Al and the technicians, were fractured 3D chunks of some extraordinary building – staircases, passages, a hall, fireplaces, a battlement – populated by hundreds of stick figures. But what did it all add up to? A prison? A castle? Architectural databases had thrown up thousands of possible matches, occupied and derelict, across the world. Way down on the list at number 2,453 was the Monastery of Mount St Demetrius of Thessaloniki.
“Let’s ask her to work on the surrounding landscape again,” said Commander King, convinced that the floating structures would make more sense in context.
“She just does clouds,” said Stubbs.
“Let her follow her own path,” said Al firmly.
Li Jun began to work again on what they thought of as the “courtyard” structure, adding detail to the walls and the beginning of a door.
“Maybe she’s just playing Minecraft …” grumbled Kelly.
“Come on, Li Jun!” said Delta, as if she could snap her out of it by force of will.
Commander King looked again at the structures and began to wonder.
“What troubles me is it’s too big … Look at how many figures she’s drawn. Imagine having to support all those people. Every one of them is a security risk. Haven’t they got homes to go to, bars to drink in, phone calls to make …?”
Al stared at the figures too, at the stone walls, at the fireplaces and candlesticks … Then he looked around the control gallery, at its lighting and stacks of computers and glittering screens.
