22
Cillian sat down at the workstation in his father’s study and placed the encryption-tab on a glass reader. Moments later the wraparound screen came to life, exactly as Paul had left it on the morning he died.
On the right, the latest news about the looming City elections; next to that, a discussion forum where his father had been having a heated debate with someone about new Transport Zones. Further around the glass curve was a message from Bond Street Barbers – they’d had to move Paul’s appointment because some builders had cut through a power cable and they had no hot water.
There was a to do list.
A quote from a holiday company.
Scribbled notes from a book he’d been reading—
Cillian closed his eyes. This wasn’t helping. He had to focus or he’d be swallowed up by the past.
Follow the money. Wasn’t that what the police always did on TV?
He opened his father’s bank accounts and his eyes darted over the transactions scrolling up the screen. Immediately his mathematical mind engaged, hunting for patterns, searching for rhythms in the way money ebbed and flowed—
I see it.
The first anomaly: the salary from the Walk-In clinic wasn’t his father’s only income; someone else was paying him too.
At first glance it looked like irregular amounts at random intervals; 1st January, 1st February, 2nd March, 3rd May, 5th August, 13th August, 8th May, 5th March, 3rd February, 2nd January. And then it repeated.
I see it.
1,1,2,3,5,8,13,8,5,3,2,1.
The first 7 numbers of the Fibonacci sequence on a loop. Nothing random about it at all.
Cillian tapped payee details but they’d been withheld. He sent a clearance request, the bank pinged the computer to check its identity, the encryption-tab bounced back a security code and the next level was unlocked.
Gilgamesh.
On each of the dates in the sequence a payment had been made to his father from Gilgamesh P8.
Quickly Cillian scrolled back through the accounts; year after year the money had been coming in, going all the way back—
16 years. To the very month Cillian was born. The start of the sequence. Somehow he and the money were inextricably linked.
Somehow.
Had he ever been to Gilgamesh? Was he born there?
He clicked the family icon. Whole chunks of his father’s archives were devoted to Cillian: all the emails he’d ever sent, school reports and projects, swimming certificates, thousands of photos and videos, everything from ice cream by the river, to nervous rollerblading, to the school play—
And suddenly Cillian saw the second anomaly. No matter where he looked in the digital archive, there was nothing before his third birthday.
Nothing.
23
The Bigger Yellow. Because some things you don’t want to let go.
The strapline was emblazoned across the vast underground warehouse in glowing letters, and business was booming. For all the brilliance of the virtual world, people still cherished real objects; they just didn’t have room for them in their homes.
A huge glass funnel collected light from the surface and piped it down to a grid of walkways leading off the atrium. Even though it meant there were no dark corners, the long deserted corridors still felt a bit eerie, which was why egg-shaped Security-Bots patrolled and polished 24/7. Remembering his fight with the intruder, Cillian wondered how effective the bots would actually be in the heat of battle, but they looked official enough, and were decked with flashing lights that exuded a reassuring sense of authority.
4610-7 was his father’s unit, at the far end of Corridor 23. As Cillian walked towards it he passed some strange characters shuffling around their units like troglodytes: an old woman surrounded by files, chuckling to herself; a couple of geeky men packing model trains into cardboard boxes for shipping; a young woman scrubbing and disinfecting her empty unit as if something dreadful had leaked.
Finally Cillian stopped, checked the unit number and undid the heavy padlock. He rolled up the shutter to reveal stacks of plastic boxes with faded labels, all in his father’s neat handwriting.
He lifted down “Childhood Drawings”, opened the lid and inhaled the smell of old paper and faded paint. Memories flooded back … walking excitedly home from school proudly clutching paintings he’d done, then seeing them perched on the bookshelves.
Quickly he popped the lids off more boxes: school exercise books, cherished posters that had decorated his bedroom walls, his first football kit…
And yet still there was nothing from before his third birthday.
“Archived Photos”. There must at least be a photograph. Every parent has a picture of them holding their newborn baby.
He flung the lid off and started rifling through envelopes stuffed full of photos, digging deep, searching for the oldest ones.
In frustration he tipped the box up, spewing envelopes across the concrete floor, then dropped to his knees. His hands quickly sorted everything into date order even though his guts already feared the truth…
There was nothing from before his third birthday.
Not a single photograph.
It was as if he’d just sprung into existence.
24
Tess never failed to be dismayed when she came to one of the City’s traditional churches.
For 900 years the ancient bells of All-Hallows had echoed across the landscape, summoning the faithful to tramp through muddy streets in search of salvation. But its sturdy stone walls belonged to a time when Earth was the centre of the universe, and when the Creator ruled the lives of men without question. Now The Faith had been hollowed out into little more than a social convention. Its beautiful buildings were still handy for births, marriages and deaths, but its bells echoed off steel and glass shrines to money and technology, the real gods of Foundation City.
Today the Great and Good had gathered for a memorial service for all the victims of the Metro crash; in Tess’s eyes it just made the hypocrisy worse.
She watched with disdain as politicians and heavy-hitters arrived. It infuriated her to see how they all lined up to express their outrage to the hungry press pack about the “fanatical actions of extremists”. But not one politician dared acknowledge that Revelation might be waging a legitimate war on the moral corruption festering at the heart of the City. Not one argued that The Faith should be a religion of action that fought for justice and for those who really paid the price for the City’s wealth.
Anyone saying things like that would soon find themselves on a security watch list. So much for the freedom of speech that Foundation liked to boast about.
Even when the service started, the profanity didn’t end. Everyone muted their smartCells but couldn’t bear to turn them off. Tess saw that instead of remembering the dead, people were checking their screens every few seconds. No doubt they were pinging each other’s social feeds to see if there was networking to be done here, deals to be struck or money to be made.
“If you wouldn’t mind?” a voice whispered.
Tess turned and saw one of the vergers offering her the DigiPlate, a circle of pulsing LEDs on a steel disc. Touch your smartCell to donate. Thank you for giving generously.
She swiped her screen across the reader and passed it down the line. Right now she wasn’t here to make a point, but to blend in.
And to lock on to her target.
Tess watched the DigiPlate as it was handed from person to person … studying each face in turn … searching for the one that was too perfectly symmetrical…
25
Even though he wasn’t religious, Cillian found the memorial service strangely comforting. He closed his eyes and sat absolutely still, letting music from the massive organ wash over him, immersing himself in the sound of the echoing choir. For one hour it was a chance to remember all the good things about his father and forget the disturbing anomalies that had opened up since his death.
But as a chord s
welled for the closing hymn, Cillian felt someone’s gaze on him.
He snapped open his eyes, senses bristling … and saw her. A teenage girl was sitting in the opposite wing of the transept – strong, angular face with sharp eyes staring directly at him, intent and unblinking.
Cillian glared back defiantly, expecting her to look away.
But she didn’t.
Something about her seemed out of place in this church, and when she did finally break the moment, it wasn’t with eyes darting furtively down to a smartCell, it was to look up at a huge painted icon that loomed over the altar. Cillian followed her gaze. She was taking in every detail of the muscles tensed in pain, the blood trickling down fragile skin, the horror of that violent death.
The words of the final blessing were barely out of the priest’s mouth when the congregation broke rank in a bustle of pent-up chatter and coughing.
Cillian let the worst of the crush go, then pulled his coat on and filed out into the blast of freezing air and flashguns. Instinctively he veered to the side, heading for one of the alleys to avoid the worst of the media scrum, when unexpectedly he found himself walking straight towards the girl from the church. She was standing at the top of the steps, waiting for him.
He slowed his pace. “Do I know you?”
“No.” She continued staring at him.
“Only in church, I thought—”
“You’re being played,” Tess said, glancing back at the crowds milling outside All-Hallows. “By them.”
“Who are you?”
“That’s why you’re smart not to trust them.”
“I’m sorry … I think you’ve got the wrong person.”
But as he turned to go she reached out and gripped his arm. “I can help you, Cillian. That’s why I’m here.”
Suddenly he felt very uneasy. “Leave me alone, please. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“P8. And your father.”
The words hit him in the guts.
“You’re through the looking glass now,” Tess said quietly. “I should know. I’ve been there most of my life.”
“What about my father? What do you know?”
They heard a flutter of laughter and saw some of the people from the service heading towards them.
“We shouldn’t talk here,” Tess said. She went to take his hand, but Cillian pulled away. “Look, you can spend the rest of your life skating across the surface, or you can find out what’s really going on. Your choice.” She turned away and hurried down the steps towards Constitution Square.
Cillian’s instincts were urging him not to trust her – she was a complete stranger. But what did that count for now? Hadn’t his own father turned into a stranger?
3 more steps and she’d be out of sight.
And he might never get answers.
“Wait!”
She stopped, turned back and smiled.
26
“When I was 6 years old, everyone I knew died.”
As she spoke, Tess looked out across the square, where crowds had come to see huge waves rolling across the sides of buildings; not adverts, but video art sponsored by one of the banks.
“They were killed by a virus. The Derespino Pandemic,” she said starkly.
A jumble of TV news images flashed into Cillian’s mind. “Wasn’t that in the Provinces?”
“I’m not from the City, not originally.” Tess took a swig of cappuccino from her paper cup. “Derespino arrived from nowhere. Without warning. I remember it was a Saturday morning when the first person fell sick. I’d been out riding my bike. It was a beautiful sunny day, and as I cycled back into the village, I saw this huddle of people. Someone had collapsed. He was lying on the ground, struggling to breathe. There was blood coming from his mouth … I’d never seen anyone look so grey. He died in front of me, there on the street. And once it had started, it tore through everything: villages, farms, schools.”
“I thought they found a cure?”
Tess shook her head. “The virus was drug resistant. So they just fenced us in, sealed off hundreds of square kilometres, then sat back and waited until people stopped dying. 80 of us survived. Out of 5,000. When help finally came, they found me locked in an attic with a few crumbs of food and the dregs of water in a saucepan. My parents had locked me in there to try to keep me safe; when they knew they were infected, they couldn’t think what else to do.”
“I’m sorry,” Cillian said, disturbed at the way this stranger was opening up to him. “To go through that…”
“On the TV it was all ‘brave medics in protective suits, risking their lives to save innocent people’. That was just one of the lies. Something wasn’t right about the whole outbreak. Even though I was just a kid, I knew they were lying.”
“About what?”
“Everything. For months afterwards I couldn’t stop thinking about the crop-dusters; it was like they were haunting me. The fields around our village were always being sprayed – that wasn’t new. But the last time they did it … the spray hung in the air for hours. We could see rainbows all over the place, hundreds of them. As kids we thought it was magic, but…” Tess fell silent.
“You really think someone poisoned you? Deliberately?”
“Not think, know. We were lab rats. They put the survivors in quarantine, and they subjected us to every test imaginable, every scan, every examination. For months.”
“To make sure you were safe?”
“To find out why we’d survived. What did we have that the others didn’t? That’s how they found the cure.”
“So it was all some kind of medical trial?” Cillian was struggling to comprehend the scale of what she was saying.
“When they’d finished, they turfed us out and forgot about us. 3 years ago there was a Derespino outbreak in the Far East, remember? Foundation City had the only vaccine. They supplied drugs for 2 billion people. Half a trillion dollars’ worth. You tell me if that’s not worth killing for.”
Cillian studied her face, trying to work out how far trust could stretch. All his senses were telling him that she was genuine – her open expression, her steady gaze.But she was talking about conspiracy and murder on a massive scale.
“When I saw that picture of you walking out of the Metro,” Tess leant closer, “I had the same feeling. You shouldn’t have survived, but you did. Just like me. We’re both outsiders.”
Cillian looked away. “Last week I’d have said you were paranoid.”
“But now?”
He said nothing.
“Things are unravelling because you’re not like other people,” Tess said. “I’m guessing you never have been.”
Part of Cillian wanted to pull away, but another part knew that if he didn’t open up to someone, he would implode.
He gazed out across the square, absorbing the dynamics of the crowd—
I see it.
“Those people over there, by the fountain.”
Tess followed his gaze and noticed that the crowd had spontaneously formed itself into one-way lanes, like flowing currents.
“In 8 seconds, the direction’s going to flip.”
“What?”
“Just watch.”
She studied the crowds … and moments later was astonished to see the flows spasm, collapse into random, then re-form, moving in the opposite direction.
“How did you know that?” she whispered.
“The world is flooded with information, staggering amounts of it pouring out all the time. There’s so much, it’s impossible to process. But I’ve got this … ability to sense patterns. I can see them like shapes in a landscape. And if you look closely enough at the present, if you really see what’s going on, you can predict the future.”
“That’s incredible,” Tess said.
“Means you never get stuck in the slowest queue.”
Tess laughed. “Useful.”
“My father knew what I could do from when I was young. He nurtured it. Only now … it turn
s out there were secrets as well. A whole chunk of my life is missing … and he was getting money.”
“From P8.”
“How did you know?” He looked at her, unnerved.
“That’s how they work. They buy people off.”
“Who are they? I can’t find anything on the Net.”
“You won’t. They’re too smart for that.”
“Then I’ll never get to the truth, not now my father’s…” His voice trailed off, struggling with the brutal finality of the word “dead”.
Tess put her hand on his arm. “P8 funds dangerous science. It meddles with things it doesn’t fully understand, and everyone else pays the price. If your father was getting money from P8, then you’re not safe any more.”
“So do you think he was trying to warn me? Should I go into hiding or something?”
“You have to fight.”
“Tess, I’m a maths student—”
“All these years I’ve been training myself, getting stronger. Learning to fight without knowing exactly who to fight. But you’re smart; you can figure it out.”
“I’m way out of my depth.”
“Cillian, I need justice for what happened to my parents, and I know you can help me. I’ve been waiting for someone like you.”
He felt the intensity of her gaze on him. “The virus, the payments, my father – you really think it’s all related?”
“Don’t you?”
“Something is very screwed up.” Cillian shook his head. “I know that much.”
“Then let’s un-screw it. The two of us.”
It was compelling how simple she made it sound. Finally here was someone who said exactly what she thought, who didn’t try to hide behind half-truths.
“You really think we’ll get far?”
“Absolutely.” Tess stood up and tossed her empty coffee cup into a bin.
27
The Bullet Train was barely out of Foundation City when the gales kicked up, howling across the open landscape, tearing through the black fingers of winter trees.
Maladapted Page 6
