48
“I know how confusing it feels,” Tess said quietly. “But we need to be smart about what we do next.”
Cillian had been gazing out of the window, deep in his own thoughts ever since the Bullet Train had left the Northern Hub.
“Making wild accusations online isn’t going to get us anywhere.”
Cillian pulled his eyes away from the speeding blur of landscape and looked at Tess. “So we’re just going to walk away? Pretend we didn’t see anything?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Then what?”
“These are dangerous people we’re dealing with. Powerful organizations. We need to be careful.”
“Foundation’s a democracy. There are laws—”
“You think P8 cares about laws? It operates above them.”
“That’s bullshit. There is no ‘above’ the law.”
“You think like that, you’re putting your life in danger. And mine too.”
It made Cillian hesitate. Tess was inextricably bound up in this now. Whatever he did next, she would be hit by the fallout.
“If we’d been caught in Gilgamesh,” Tess said darkly, “we would’ve disappeared.”
“All the more reason to blow this open.”
“What if those experiments are linked to the military? They could have us arrested under anti-terror laws and we’d vanish. Just like those victims in their glass cells have vanished. Off the grid.”
Cillian thought about the thousands of patients who poured into Gilgamesh Hospital every week without realizing what was going on a few metres away behind locked doors.
“And in any case, how free do you think our media really is?” Tess asked searchingly. “I saw it with my own eyes – our village wiped out by a virus, but the story everyone is told, the one everyone believes has only a grain of truth. The Derespino survivors didn’t have a voice, no-one wanted to hear us. You have to understand, Cillian, the people we’re up against, the ones your father worked for, they control the agenda. At best, you and I will end up as conspiracy nuts ranting on the Net.”
“People’s voices get heard in the end. That’s how things change.”
“In the end,” Tess said. “But do we have that long? After what happened in Gilgamesh, we’re marked men. Which is why we need to keep digging. Urgently. We need to name names. There’s a whole web of scientists and money-men allowing this to happen, but they’re only dangerous as long as they’re anonymous. To fight your enemy you need to know who he is and how far he can reach.”
“Which means we don’t stand a chance on our own,” Cillian insisted. “This is too big. Don’t you get that?”
“The thing is…” Tess hesitated. “You were right. What you said in the Roadhouse. I’m not alone.”
Cillian looked at her warily.
“There are people working with me. They know how to change things. How to take action.”
“People? What people?”
“You have to trust me—”
“No, I don’t. What people, Tess?”
“I’m the one who got us into Gilgamesh,” she protested. “Isn’t that proof enough?”
“Proof of what?” Cillian studied her face, trying to glimpse behind her easy expression. “Proof that you can get illegal weapons and hack databases. Who are you really?”
“After all we’ve been through? Seriously?”
“I barely know you.” Cillian stared at her intently. “Everything you’ve told me could be lies.”
“I work for people who won’t stand by and watch,” Tess replied, weighing each word carefully. “People who aren’t dazzled by the wealth of Foundation City, who understand there’s blood on the money, and that morality has been forgotten. People who have Faith.”
Cillian felt his breathing momentarily stop. “Revelation…” he whispered.
“No.”
“You’re talking about Revelation—”
“Not everyone who gives their life to The Faith is a terrorist,” Tess said quickly.
“Then who? Who are you talking about?”
“Cillian, they sent me to help you.” She reached across the table to touch his hand, but he pulled away.
“We can put an end to what’s going on, I swear. My people won’t turn a blind eye to atrocities like the ones in Gilgamesh.”
“And what about the atrocity of the Metro bomb?” he said angrily. “My father was murdered by those terrorists! How can you pretend to be better than them?”
“You don’t understand—”
“You need to stay away from me.” He stood up and stared at Tess, as if seeing her for the first time.
“Please listen—”
“Not to religious fanatics. Not that. Just stay away.” Cillian turned and walked down the train corridor without even glancing back.
49
Hundreds of virtual tentacles reached out to embrace the Bullet Train as it crossed the City boundaries.
Tess glanced at her smartCell and saw the apps ping back to life: rolling news feeds and endlessly updated What’s Trending lists, must-see must-hear must-read just a finger-touch away. But underneath all the froth, she knew that her smartCell was also reconnecting to Revelation’s systems.
How would she explain her failure to Blackwood? He had trusted her, but she had blown it with Cillian, and Revelation took a very dim view of “non-fulfilment”.
A few hours earlier she’d tried to patch things up. She’d gone to the restaurant car where Cillian was bunkered down in one of the booths, but he’d resolutely ignored her, and the last thing she wanted was to make a scene.
Now time was running out.
She gazed out of the window, trying to marshal her thoughts. The train snaked along viaducts through canyons of commercial banks and trading rooms, on its way to the terminal at Central West. It had been a bitterly cold night, coating the City with a thick layer of frost, and teams of bots were already hard at work blasting hot air onto the sidewalks.
The platform was her last chance to try and change Cillian’s mind. Knowing she’d have to move fast, Tess got up and stood right by the carriage doors.
The train sighed to a stop and the Door Unlocking panel illuminated, but nothing happened.
Come on, open.
“Thank you for travelling on the Bullet Train,” the Virtual Conductor purred. “If you are connecting to other transport networks, our advice-pods are located on the main concourse.”
OK, OK. Just open.
“If you are terminating here, a wide range of dining and leisure facilities can be found on the first floor.”
Got it. Now open!
“Whatever your plans, we wish you a very pleasant day.”
Finally the doors slid aside. Tess jumped down onto the platform and looked back along the train, searching for Cillian, but within seconds hundreds of people were flooding out of the carriages.
Tess waited in the middle of the platform, eyes scanning the crowds as they surged past.
There – over by the kiosks.
“Cillian! Wait!”
She tried to push through the crowds. “Don’t go like this!”
But he wasn’t stopping for anyone. Head down, refusing to listen or look at her, he vanished into the throng of commuters.
Tess’s smartCell chirruped. It was Blackwood. He knew the Bullet Train had arrived: What’s your ETA @ Cotton Wharf?
Not yet. She couldn’t face Blackwood just yet. First she had to get her head straight.
As she made her way towards the network of escalators that criss-crossed the station, Tess had the unnerving feeling that everything had speeded up. Even though she’d only been away for a couple of days, the rawness of the landscape in the Provinces seemed to have reset her body-clock, and the frantic rush of City life now felt intimidating.
Aimlessly she rode the escalators up and down, trying to focus. She was terrified of how Revelation would react to her failure.
Worse, she was terrified of Cill
ian’s revulsion. The Faith justified nothing in his eyes. He’d recoiled from her as if she was the monster.
50
Search again.
Search relentlessly.
Find evidence that was unassailable.
That was Cillian’s only option now. People let you down and changed their stories, but hard evidence could always be trusted. Just like numbers.
It was difficult returning to the Residential Spire now, knowing what he did about his father. The building he’d always thought of as home suddenly seemed far less welcoming. Tentatively he swung open the apartment door…
A small police camera with blinking LEDs was perched on the bookshelf. 28-day monitoring after burglary was routine in case the intruders came back to finish off the job. But even though the camera was there for his own protection, Cillian felt as if he was being spied on.
He walked across the room, reached up and grabbed the camera. “How do you switch the thing off?” he muttered, hunting for the controls, before finally opening a drawer and tossing it inside. Quickly he checked the rest of the apartment, scooping up cameras in the kitchen and hallway, then he sat down at his father’s workstation.
Go through everything again. That was the plan. It wasn’t going to be easy. The patterns of evidence would be buried very deep.
Cillian clicked on Main Documents. Thousands of sub-folders scrolled across the screen, each containing dozens of files. Wrong way – that would take for ever.
He closed the window and did a search for encrypted sectors on the memory drives, then filtered the results, looking for shredded files.
853 documents destroyed. That was more like it. That was a number he could work with.
Cillian downloaded a Lazarus app, then set it running to reconstruct the digitally shredded data.
Estimated time remaining: 47 minutes.
Just long enough to get some toast and Marmite, and freshen up.
Standing in the shower, water tumbling down his face, Cillian’s mind kept circling around Tess and his father, picking over memories, trying to understand how he had been so blind to what was really happening. Was it going to be like this for the rest of his life? Every time he trusted someone, was he going to end up getting hurt? When it came down to it, everyone seemed to be fighting their own battle.
As he turned the shower to power-pulse, Cillian noticed a thin, dark line on one of the tiles. Thinking it was a hair, he splashed some water over it, but it didn’t budge. He looked closer, running his finger over the tile … and realized it was a very thin fracture.
Cillian tapped it to see if water had got behind and loosened the plaster, when suddenly he noticed a similar crack on the tile below it … and the next one. There was a line of cracks running from the shower head to the drain.
Had the City had an earth tremor while he was away?
He turned the shower off, pulled on a robe and stepped out of the cubicle. Cillian’s eyes wandered suspiciously around the bathroom, then he relaxed his gaze and let his mind freewheel across the space…
The image snapped into focus—
I see it.
Tiles with hairline fractures were dotted around the bathroom, but not randomly. They were arranged on a grid: a neat grid that criss-crossed the walls and floor, linking the basin, the toilet, the shower and the drains.
Cillian approached the sink and peered into the gloom of the drain, but could only see water reflecting back. He grabbed a toothbrush, poked the plastic handle down and started sliding it around, feeling for irregularities.
Suddenly it caught on something.
Gently he eased the toothbrush up and saw a loom of very thin electrical cables. As he pulled, a whole length of wires emerged from the drain like a grotesque, high-tech worm. On the ends were 6 glass probes, each pulsing with a different colour.
Bewildered, Cillian grabbed his smartCell, photographed the probes and searched the Net for a match.
BioMonitors.
Probes to sample proteins and DNA from skin cells, sweat, mucus, blood and all the other things that get flushed and scrubbed from the human body.
He climbed back into the shower, lifted the grating and stuck his fingers down the drain: more probes.
Cillian turned the water supply off, flushed the toilet to empty it, then stuck his arm into the bowl as far as it would go, fingers groping around the porcelain bend … until he felt another cluster of tiny glass probes embedded in the pipe.
Pulling on his jeans, he scrambled to the kitchen and returned with a toolkit. He grabbed the hammer and swung it against the toilet, punching jagged holes in the china bowl until it shattered … to reveal a sinister loom of wires emerging from the drainpipe.
Possessed with a compulsion to reveal the entire pattern, Cillian started swinging wildly at the walls, smashing tiles, hacking out grooves to uncover a network of wires buried in the brickwork, converging on a single point in the subfloor. Cillian ripped the last tile away, levered up a metal cavity plate …
And found a ControlBox flickering with lights, sending data down the line to an unseen server.
It was still live.
Proof. This was exactly the proof he needed. Covert surveillance. Violation of civil liberties. They’d have to take him seriously now.
He grabbed his smartCell—
And hesitated.
Who could he call?
Detective Qin? The man who had regarded him with such suspicion after the burglary?
His father’s lawyer, who had an air about him that he knew far more than he was saying?
Hailey? The ice queen from the Walk-In?
None of them could be trusted, and Cillian knew if he made the wrong move now, he might find himself waking up in a glass cell in Gilgamesh, vanished for ever. If he was going to sacrifice himself to expose the truth, he needed to be sure that his voice would be heard.
He looked at the ControlBox blinking calmly in the floor cavity. Where was it sending the data?
Gilgamesh?
Somewhere else?
Who could put a trace on it?
Who did he know for sure was not part of the P8 conspiracy?
51
Tess watched anxiously as the electronic indicator counted down the stops to Cotton Wharf. There were only so many times she could ignore Blackwood’s messages. Sooner or later she would have to face the consequences of her failure.
As the tram slowed, she steeled herself and prepared to get off, when suddenly her smartCell pinged again.
This time it wasn’t Blackwood. It was Cillian.
Is it true about my enemy’s enemy?
Maybe there was still a way through this.
Yes, she tapped back quickly. Definitely.
Then you need to see this.
Tess slumped down in the seat, light-headed with relief. A second chance.
“The tools,” Cillian said. “That’s why the intruder had tools. I think he was going to retrieve these probes.”
Tess stared at the smashed-up bathroom and looms of cable, stunned by the depth of the surveillance.
“No wonder my father never wanted to move apartments. It would have ruined his experiment. Whatever I was doing – showering, having a piss, cleaning my teeth – everything was being analysed. Seems I’ve never had a private life.”
“Well now it’s going to help us.” Tess slid a touch-pad from her rucksack, powered it up and knelt down by the ControlBox. “This will take us right into the heart of P8’s systems. Finally we can see who they really are.”
Cillian frowned as she jumped a lead into one of the inputs and started to upload tracing software. “I doubt that’ll work. It’ll all be encrypted.”
“The data will be, but not the path it takes. This inserts a marker into the digital-stream. It’s like injecting dye. If we let it run for long enough, it’ll give us a map of the entire network. Right back to the source.” She tapped the screen to activate the program, and lines of code scrolled into view.
&n
bsp; For a few moments they stared at the display, then Tess turned to Cillian. “You did the right thing, telling me.”
“Did I?”
“Until we find out how far this reaches, we can’t trust the authorities. Any of them.”
“And we can trust ‘your people’? Terrorists?” Cillian studied her intently.
“What happened to your father … the Metro bomb, that was a tragedy,” Tess said quietly. “It should never have happened. But there’s a bigger battle being fought here. Science is destroying innocent lives. You and I have seen it, and we need to focus on that.”
Cillian’s mind flashed back to the strange, mutated children in their glass cells. “My father really was in way too deep,” he said quietly.
“Maybe.” Tess could see the pain on his face as he finally started to accept the truth.
They gazed at the screen in silence, watching the data unfurl.
But gradually, as the markers pinged back locations, Tess realized it wasn’t just the pathways to the control servers that were being mapped, it was every other node on the system as well.
Every experimental subject.
And Cillian saw it too. “Shit … I’m not the only one out here, am I?”
“I don’t know,” Tess said.
But she did.
She knew that this list tore open the heart of P8. As the data settled, she quickly unplugged the touch-pad. “I need to get it analysed.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“The safest thing is for you to stay visible.”
Cillian could hear the alarm in her voice. “What do you mean?”
“Leave the apartment, but don’t go back to the university. Keep away from anywhere they’d expect you to be. Stay in busy places, somewhere public with lots of people. I’ll contact you when I’ve got some answers.”
“But—”
“Do it! Just do what I say. Please.” Tess grabbed the tablet and hurried from the apartment.
52
“I was right,” Blackwood whispered, unable to tear his eyes away from the data-map growing across the Wall-Screen. “They’re really out there. All their living experiments, walking the streets of the City.”
Maladapted Page 12
