The men stood back. Six of them in all. The eyes of strangers watched him without emotion through plastic eye shields as a seventh man walked in and closed the bedroom door behind him. He was shorter than the rest, thin and wiry, his features hidden behind a black balaclava. He reached up to a small panel on the wall and swept one gloved finger across it. The digital display lit up and in an instant the windows turned opaque, blocking out the view from beyond. The man then turned on the bedroom lights and walked slowly toward Alexei’s bed.
The man dragged a chair from a desk nearby and set it alongside the bed. He sat down, his squinting eyes never shifting from Alexei’s.
‘This will not hurt for very long,’ the man said in a soft voice.
Alexei began trying to shout for help through his gag, but his cries were weak and his breathing laboured as he tried to get more air into his lungs.
‘There is no sense in struggling,’ the man said. ‘This will all be over shortly.’
The man reached into a pocket and produced two strips of what looked like chewing gum, each a different colour and packaged in slim polythene bags. He examined the bags with interest as he spoke.
‘Remarkable, the inventiveness of mankind,’ the man said conversationally. ‘Inert plastic when sealed within these small bags, but a lethal source of ignition when bound together.’ He looked at Alexei. ‘I doubt that anybody would be surprised that now, in the twilight of your life, you have chosen to end this existence and move on to greater things?’
Alexei glared at the man, radiated fury, but his anger was hopelessly futile.
‘I can assure you, Alexei,’ he said, ‘that despite what you may think, this if for the best. It is for a better future, for all of us. It is time we shook off these puny, vulnerable shells and become what we should have long ago been: Gods, in all but name.’
The man reached out a hand behind him. One of the armed soldiers produced a long, thin plastic case not much longer than Alexei’s finger. The man opened the case and produced a syringe filled with an amber fluid.
Alexei’s eyes widened and he tried to scream again through his gag. The man took his time, not reacting to Alexei’s muffled protests as he leaned forward and wrenched one of Alexei’s sleeves up to reveal a thick vein. Moments later, the needle slipped in and the man slowly injected the fluid into Alexei’s arm.
‘Alcohol,’ the man said as he slipped the needle out, ‘just in case the coroner bothers with an autopsy, and a mild paralysis agent called Pancuronium bromide.’
Alexei felt the alcohol hit his system almost immediately, felt as though he had been drinking all day even though he hadn’t touched a drop in twenty years. Nausea poisoned his guts and sent hot flushes through his body as his limbs fell still.
The man stood up from the bed and opened the two packs of plastic. Alexei felt tears stream from his eyes as he looked up imploringly at the man, unable now even to move his head.
‘Don’t worry,’ his attacker said softly as he wound the two pieces of plastic together and tossed them underneath the bed. ‘You’ll thank me for this, before long.’
The six armed men turned and left the room. Their leader waited in silence for several long seconds, looking down at Alexei’s body before he then removed the restraints from his wrists and ankles. He turned off the bedroom lights and the privacy fogging on the windows and moved to look out over the city. Although he could not hear sirens he could see them flashing through London’s murky streets as emergency vehicles and law enforcement rushed to the nearby explosion.
He checked his watch and nodded in satisfaction as tendrils of smoke coiled from beneath the bed and crept like snakes across the bed sheets.
Alexei tried to scream through his gag but he could barely breath as the sheets burst into flame.
The man turned and strode from the bedroom, disappeared down the stairs and left Alexei alone and immobilised on the bed. The smell of smoke, the heat of flames and a strange chemical taint hit his senses. And then white pain touched his body.
He squeezed his eyes tight shut as his late father’s words drifted through his mind.
‘What is interminable now will be but a short memory, for all things good and bad eventually come to an end.’
Alexei felt tears of raw fear spill down his cheeks as the mattress beneath him burst into flames that spat thick smoke billowing up toward the ceiling. The heat and the pain roared upward and he screamed and tried to move as it seared his body like a furnace, but not a single muscle would respond. Through his agony he felt his skin slough from his body and glimpsed his flesh bubbling on his chest as his shirt ignited.
The flames and the smoke consumed him in a crucible of pain worse than anything he could have imagined as he literally burned alive in a funeral pyre.
His last thought was of the peaceful wilds of the Kamchatka Peninsular he had left behind so long ago, and his kindly old parents waving him goodbye for the last time.
***
5
‘Can you see my hand?’
Flashing lights flared in Arianna’s field of vision, pulsing like nightclub strobes through the gloom. A star–shaped blur hovered before them and she blinked as she tried to focus. A palm and fingers swam into her vision in front of a concerned paramedic.
‘Yes,’ she replied.
Nausea bolted through her stomach and she coughed as she sat on the damp pavement. The paramedic sat down beside her and rested a comforting arm and a thermal blanket across her shoulders.
‘Easy now,’ he reassured her. ‘You’ll be fine in a few minutes.’
Arianna’s head ached and there was a painful ringing in her ears as she looked about her.
The street was full of fire trucks and ambulances. It had been a long time since she had seen so many motor vehicles all in one place: most ordinary citizens could not afford luxury items such as vehicles, the fuel to power them mainly reserved for emergency services and what was left of the military. A galaxy of emergency lights flashed through a fine drizzle of rain, some of it natural and some of it drifting from the fire hoses spraying into a writhing inferno of flame still consuming the lower floors of the Re–Volution building.
‘What happened?’ Arianna managed to ask as she spotted gurneys being manhandled through the foyer’s shattered windows.
‘Terrorist attack I think,’ the medic replied with a shake of his head. ‘Some of those religious warriors were seen fleeing the scene. They were trying to hit the company’s quantum storage units. You were lucky – your umbrella and that wall shielded you from the worst of the blast and debris.’
Arianna nodded absent–mindedly, her brain not yet fully engaged with the world around her. One of the greatest of the seismic cultural changes wrought by the arrival of the holosaps was the collapse of organised religion. Most had degenerated over the generations since into a scattered coalition of cults and inevitably there were those who were still willing to use violence to undertake God’s work. Most targeted Re–Volution in one way or another, under a banner of outrage at the abomination of the dead now walking amongst the living. Arianna had seen plenty of marches attended by people bearing banners that complained of the preference for “Death before Life”, espoused “Pro–Life” laws or simply threatened death to anybody who did not subscribe to their own archaic point of view.
‘Water,’ she rasped.
The medic turned and poured chilled water into a plastic cup for her. She sipped it gratefully as she watched police cordoning off the street nearby, hundreds of onlookers watching. Some of the more shabbily dressed were clapping and hooting.
‘You work here?’ the medic asked her as he gestured at the building and looked at her clerical collar.
Arianna glanced him over before she replied. Young, dark haired but pale skinned, likely poor much like herself. Nobody went abroad anymore for holidays in the sun, the risk of infection being too great and there being no aircraft available to fly them there.
‘Not really,’ she
replied, ‘I’m a bereavement counsellor.’
‘Must be weird,’ he said conversationally as he watched the nearby crowds, ‘counselling the already dead about the afterlife that we now control.’
‘It’s not an easy thing to do,’ she replied, ‘make the switch overnight from living being to hologram.’
‘They should try living in the real world for a while,’ the medic replied. ‘Poor things, years of living in luxury and then they get immortality tagged on while we all suffer down here until we just die.’ He closed a box containing basic medical supplies. ‘Personally I wish somebody would blow this whole damned building off the map for good.’
Arianna looked at him for a moment before she replied.
‘They’d build another. It’s equality you should seek, not revenge.’
‘Tell that to my deceased parents.’
‘Or mine?’ she challenged lightly.
The medic looked at her for a moment. ‘Are you on their side or ours?’
‘I’m on the side of life,’ she replied and gestured to the medical symbol on his shoulder insignia, ‘just like you should be.’
The medic got up from the pavement. ‘You’re all done here, have a nice day.’
Arianna took the hint and got up, her legs a little unsteady beneath her as she looked at small abrasions on her palms. The road was littered with a sparkling sheet of shattered glass and chunks of masonry where the blast had torn a jagged twenty metre hole in the building’s entrance. Smoke still writhed and coiled out of broken windows further up where the fire had spread to the second floor offices, but the fire hoses were playing water across them and killing the flames.
‘Arianna?’
A man hurried toward her, his grey suit stained with water and grime, his face twisted with concern. Larry Wilkes was an executive at Re–Volution and one of the few people that she could actually stand to be in the same room with. Twice her age and with a belly that sagged over his trousers, he had a buoyant attitude that more than made up for his haggard appearance.
‘You okay?’ he asked her.
‘I’ll live..,’ Arianna replied, using one of the company’s iconic catch phrases with a bitter tone attached.
Larry managed a grin beneath his stubble. ‘… another day. Is the word getting out about what happened?’
‘Antisaps,’ she replied, sheltering from the rain against a wall in a side street opposite the Re–Volution building, ‘some kind of terrorist hit. Are you all right?’
‘Second floor,’ Larry said. ‘Felt like the building was coming down there for a bit, but we all got out okay. The lobby’s a mess.’
‘Casualties?’ Arianna asked furtively.
‘Several fatalities,’ Larry informed her. ‘Revo’s security personnel are rushing a few of them down to the theatres right now before they fade out.’
Arianna nodded. There was usually a time window of about eight minutes after death that the human brain could be successfully wired for upload. Random electrical impulses, wayward neurons and cortex activity still occurred in the human body for a few minutes after clinical death, creating a brief period of opportunity before the brain began to decompose and the essential neural networks were lost forever. Long standing Re–Volution employees were able to forgo their pensions in exchange for a free upload to the “light colony”, a digital world entirely contained within Re–Volution’s data storage systems that was rumoured to be a place better than heaven, devoid of all ills. Few declined, mainly because few could afford either the upload or the alternative, the company’s new Futurance scheme, which for an exorbitant fee allowed a full brain back–up to be updated every six months. Die another day, was the catchphrase attached to that particular service.
‘But it’s not the human casualties that bother me,’ Larry added.
It took Arianna a few moments to realise what he meant. ‘Oh, no. They got through?’
‘The blast was a distraction,’ Larry said. ‘Two of the terrorists made it to the basement in the confusion and managed to hit the servers with a suicide belt.’
Arianna felt her shoulders sag. ‘How many?’
‘One hundred eighteen confirmed holosap casualties, maybe another forty to add if the techs can’t retrieve the data.’
Arianna slumped against the wall.
The servers was a generalised name for some of the world’s most remarkable computers. Quantum–storage systems had once been the preserve of the military and government, but now Re–Volution owned six of them, which were linked to each other via a vast supporting “cloud” system of ordinary processors. The quantum computers held the digitized lives of thousands of holosaps, preserving them for all eternity. Unless, of course, somebody destroyed the servers.
‘The press will have a field day with this,’ Larry went on. ‘As soon as they realise the scale of the hit it will be all over the glossies: the biggest mass murder of holo–history.’
Arianna nodded but she was not interested in the headlines that would flash up on electronic broadsheets in pockets all across the city. She felt weighed down by the knowledge that dozens, if not hundreds of grieving relatives would flock to her offices to receive support for their loss. Again. As if it were not enough that their relatives had died of old age or disease or accidents, now they would have lost them all over again along with their money. Re–Volution’s contract clauses ensured that it shared no liability for what the company termed “acts of Nature or third–party attacks on company property”.
Arianna sighed and pulled her raincoat closer about her. The damp air had matted her hair across her faced and she felt exhausted. Larry looked like he was about to say something when he was interrupted by the sound of footsteps through nearby puddles on the debris strewn street.
Two police detectives strode up to them, badge–shields hanging round their necks and heavy looking pistols poking from shoulder holsters beneath their jackets.
‘Miss Volkov?’ the older of the two asked.
Arianna nodded. The older detective was probably not much more than thirty five but his features carried the lines of a man who had seen more than his fair share of murder and mayhem. Thick brown hair framed grey eyes, and the hard line of his lips above a tense jaw spoke of a daily battle for justice in a city that few believed would endure for much longer. He squinted as a flare of sunlight streamed briefly through the turbulent clouds above as the thunderstorm moved on.
The younger man, also dark haired but shorter and stockier, spoke quietly.
‘Detectives Myles Bourne and Han Reeves. Miss Volkov, can we ask you to come with us? There’s been a murder.’
Arianna stared at Bourne. ‘You boys sure have to work hard for those badges these days.’
Han Reeves’s jaw fractured into a brittle grin.
‘A hundred or more holosaps and several humans have died right here,’ Larry said, intervening, ‘and Arianna here has already had a hell of a day. Maybe this could wait until tomorrow?’
Han’s grin slipped away.
‘Maybe you could get lost,’ the detective replied to Larry, ‘before I arrest you for obstructing police business?’
Larry stood his ground. ‘She’s been through enough already.’
Han seemed to be deciding whether or not he could take Larry seriously. Arianna felt a rush of compassion toward her friend for his noble stance, but she had a voice of her own and the impression that Han Reeves would put Larry horizontal without breaking a sweat.
‘Detective Reeves,’ she said, pushing past Larry. ‘I’ll come with you. Can I clean up first at my place? I’ve narrowly avoided being blown up and its playing havoc with my hair.’
The glint of steel in Han’s eyes faded away. ‘Fine.’
‘Can I ask why I have to be there?’ Arianna asked. ‘What does the murder have to do with me?’
‘The victim is a man named Alexei Volkov,’ Han replied. ‘Your father.’
Arianna felt her breath catch in her throat. The world seemed to
tilt slightly beneath her feet.
‘Alexei is dead?’ she gasped. ‘When? How?’
Han glanced suspiciously at Larry. ‘We’ll talk in the car.’
The detectives turned away and marched toward a police cruiser parked further down the street. Larry grabbed Arianna’s arm and squeezed, his features taut with concern.
‘My God, Arianna, I’m so sorry.’
Arianna could not find her voice to reply. She felt as though she were occupying somebody else’s body, witnessing events that were not real.
‘Don’t trust them,’ Larry insisted. ‘The police are as corrupt as the criminals these days. God only knows what’s going on.’
Arianna managed a feeble nod and headed off in pursuit of the detectives. Han Reeves waited for her at the rear door of the cruiser and held it open for her as she climbed aboard. The interior smelled of plastic and of hot electronics. Two display screens dominated the centre of the dashboard, and a holographic map hovered in front of the passenger seat and displayed their location north west of the Thames.
Han Reeves climbed in as Myles started the engine and they pulled out of the street. Arianna felt the unfamiliar throb of the large engine under the hood as the car surged away.
‘Alexei Volkov was your adoptive father,’ Han said.
‘He was,’ Arianna replied, her voice robbed of emotion. ‘What happened?’
‘Suicide,’ Han replied. ‘Right now he’s not much more than ash and a bad smell.’
Arianna felt a twist of nausea in the back of her throat. ‘Thanks for the concern.’
Han did not look at her. ‘I have a job to do. Somebody else can send flowers.’
‘You’re sure it was a suicide?’
‘Very,’ Han confirmed. ‘Forensics teams are on site but we wanted you to come in and view the scene.’
‘Me?’
‘You,’ Myles said as he drove the cruiser, its lights flashing and reflecting off the damp tarmac, ‘because you’re one of the few people who actually knew the guy.’
After Life (Power Reads Book 2) Page 4
