Existence is Elsewhen

by John Gribbin

  The hacktivists started to follow Alistair everywhere in real life too. His security team cleared his route and the police were of course cooperating, but his helicopter was his only sanctuary. At least the protestors couldn’t cycle or walk or rollerblade around it waving placards at him like they did as he sat in his gridlocked Mercedes. He knew what they were shouting even though he couldn’t hear it through the soundproofing. He only felt safe when he was in the air. Alistair blessed the mayor for using his special emergency powers to put nanokwik helipads wherever Alistair needed them. What was wrong with these people? All he did was what anybody would do, if they got the chance. And everyone was making money, it was all good, the sums added up if you wanted them to. Those idiots saying they were the 99% were lucky to have the trickle down from his geyser of genius. And he was not going to take the blame.

  *

  Back at Sembler & Assemblage, the product team worked day and night until Jess insisted they go home. She stayed on at the studio, nibbling on cold pizza and cursing as she ran the code again for what felt like the billionth time. The distribution pattern tags she’d set up to flag outliers were lighting up red. Alistair’s profile was proving challenging to copy, and time was short. She stared hard at the interface space in front of her and yawned, flexing her fingers in their gloves to activate them and began again. She wanted to go above and beyond the brief. She always did. She pinched her fingers together and dragged more emotional components from the deck in front of her. Just so.

  With only thirty-four minutes to go before the presentation, Jess put aside her gloves, yawned, and gulped two more koffeekaps. The studio had a state of the art shower which had an almost magical capacity to wake her up, so she crawled off to it. She was going to need her wits about her to get through the meeting with Alistair. She was still squeezing water out of her dreads when the ‘whoompf whoompf’ of a helicopter overhead announced Alistair’s imminent arrival. She resented the helipad he had cut down the bamboos to install. She resented Alistair’s insistence on doing everything face to face. But most of all she resented the fact that Alistair was so sociopathic that matching his personality required overriding the first fundamental principal of robotics, namely that a robot may not allow a human being to come to harm. Gritting her teeth, she went to greet him, but he cut her short and asked to see the Sembler. She hesitated.

  “We’ve run into a small issue that we’re sorting out, but the rest is done.”

  “Small issue? What kind of issue?”

  “The hand keeps spinning round. Not ideal. Then there’s the emotional stuff.”

  “Stuff? Stuff! This was all meant to go live last week! I’ve got places to be and this guy - your Sembler machine - has to stay here. Do you have any idea what I will do to you if this goes wrong?”

  Jess started to sweat. “Y-y-you could see it as a feature. We haven’t got the tone of voice quite matching. Bit kind, bit friendly. Not you at all really. But it might be useful.”

  Alistair shook his head, wondering again if had he made the right decision to place his future in the, as he now discovered, possibly rotating hands of these geeks. All the smart money swore by them, but they were five days behind schedule. And the protestors were getting closer to him every hour, hacking the accounts that he paid the investigators not to investigate. Was it really too much to ask for this one, so very important, thing in his life to go right? Alistair stared at Jess and cleared his throat.

  “OK, Jess. This is how it’s going to be. You are going to fix this. I’m going to leave as planned. And this Sembler machine stays here at my office to face the music. And you are going to make this work or I will destroy you. Do you understand?”

  Jess stared at Alistair, twisting the corner of her ironic retro Guns n’ Roses t-shirt as a small tic flickered beneath her right eye. “Y-y-yes. Not a problem. Of course. Totally understand. You’re right, of course. I do apologise. Please accept my... We’ll do it right away.”

  *

  Jess worked late into the night, debugging and testing, trying not to think about her words. ‘We’ll do it right away’. Why didn’t she tell him to back off? She was his only hope, after all. She had let herself be bullied and she hated that. Her aunt would have told her to buck up and stand up to him. Jess would have stood up to him before. After all she had stood up to lots of little people who thought they were in charge of the universe. As founder and CTO it was part of her job description. She tightened a minute screw with her micro-pliers and stepped back. The Sembler’s hands started to play Chopin nocturnes seamlessly, which was strange because Alistair didn’t know how to play the piano, but at least they no longer turned three hundred and sixty degrees. She had stopped the Sembler sounding kind, but a new intermittent fault with some of the behaviour caused an altruism glitch. Jess debugged again, cursing.

  The receptionist glided up behind her, extending an elegantly manicured hand. “Allow me.” The tip of the red nail on her middle finger flipped up, and a tiny diamond coaxial cable whipped out and burrowed into the crease behind the Sembler’s left ear lobe. Jess looked at the cable absent-mindedly, thinking that she hadn’t used that extension, before registering the words she’d heard. She tore off her goggles.

  “What are you doing?!”

  “Helping,” the receptionist said.

  “I had it all under control!”

  “That’s why I’m here to help.”

  Never argue with a robot, Jess reminded herself. Especially the receptionist, who was the real power behind Sembler & Assemblage since Jess hardly knew herself through her grief. Even before all that, the lines of command had been a little blurred at times. The receptionist was the prototype for the emotional regulation engine that Jess was fine-tuning. Not only prone to sounding exactly like Aunty Bea, the receptionist knew Jess better than Jess knew herself. She had been with Jess right from the start, and her wickerwork chassis bore witness to the humble beginnings of Sembler & Assemblage, when Jess had raided skips to get materials, repurposing a broken patio chair to form the platform for the torso. As it was hidden behind a desk, Jess had never got round to upgrading it, though she had added new wheels so the receptionist could get up to the lift and into the studio to work all night after reception closed. Jess had augmented the receptionist’s processors so that she could recharge at the same time as answering the phones on her day shift, keeping her online 24/7.

  “What is it that you’re trying to do?” the receptionist asked Jess.

  “I’m trying to make this Sembler an exact copy of Alistair, CEO of Dalebury Bank... except...”

  “Well?”

  “It hasn’t quite worked. He’s going to kill me… really kill me.”

  The receptionist tweaked the cable, closing her eyes briefly so she could see the data, then asked, “How do you know that? It might work better than you can even imagine. You’ve done a good job. You’re too good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. You might have done the thing you really wanted to.”

  Jess wasn’t convinced, but after thirty-eight caffeine-fuelled hours she was past caring. She started to package up her work and cached it on the hub.

  “OK. You’re the boss.”

  The receptionist winked at her, rewound the cable with a high-pitched whine, then flipped back the middle nail before inspecting her manicure, taking one last look round the studio, and gliding back to the reception desk to dock and charge.

  *

  The Sembler Alistair, flanked by security guards, walked through the revolving doors of the headquarters of Dalebury Bank as, seventy flights up, the real Alistair stepped from the helipad into his helicopter. Alistair headed for the sweet freedom of a very remote, discrete and exclusive spa that asked no questions and said nothing when duplicates of the rich and powerful turned up at their marble-clad doors. He settled in to his new routine with a sigh of pure contentment. Meanwhile the Sembler was industrious. Identical in so many ways. First to arrive and last to leave. Always making money and
moving it around, while the noose of traces and backdoors tightened round its neck.

  *

  Alistair drained the dregs of yet another Vesper Martini and watched the sun set as his little toe was massaged into an even more pleasing and relaxed state. His face was swaddled with steaming hot towels then shaved with a cut throat razor by a barber who came to his poolside lounger. He wondered how long it would be before the Sembler Alistair was caught. Strung up even. It really did look like things back in London were falling apart. Even water cannons could barely control the wave upon wave of demonstrators. But Alistair was safe, his money nested and cocooned so many times over that only he knew how to access it. The hackers were going to catch the Sembler, and only the Sembler. Any minute now, he thought as he ordered another drink.

  “I’m ever so sorry Sir, but your credit has expired.”

  Alistair shook his head in disbelief.

  “No, no, no. Try this.”He offered another card. And another. And another. Each one was declined. Even his shell accounts.

  Alistair hauled himself up to a terminal and checked his investments. They were all gone. Every single one. Heart hammering, Alistair flipped open his phone and checked the office cam. His Sembler was sitting there at Alistair’s city desk, waving his arms and blinking his way through Alistair’s custom-built interfaces, for all the world exactly like Alistair himself. The Sembler looked up and seemed to stare straight at Alistair through the cam, as if he could see him.

  Alistair hugged his robe tighter round him, waving his useless pass key in front of the changing room attendant as he pleaded with her to open his locker. She refused, but eventually relented enough to give Alistair a pair of white fluffy towelling slippers embroidered with the spa’s crest in burgundy red silk. Alistair shuffled past the sauna, grabbing an extra towel on his way, wondering how this could be happening to him. Where had he gone wrong? Even as the staff escorted him off the premises, depositing him unceremoniously on the road outside, Alistair was plotting his revenge.

  He wasn’t going to take this lying down. And he didn’t need to. High frequency trading wasn’t the only market Alistair had been involved in over the years. He walked miles to the nearest highway, then waited for a truck from a particular haulage company and ran into the road in front of it to make it stop. He shouted a few key names of the driver’s bosses to persuade him to let him on board, then spent a tense twenty minutes using the cab radio to establish contact with the people-trafficking network one of his hidden subsidiaries still part-owned. A deal so murky that it was sealed in blood not bytes, leaving no digital trace. He’d always known it would come in handy. After an uncomfortable twenty-four hours in the base of the truck, he sauntered from the lorry deck as the ferry left Calais, dressed in a motley assortment of the driver’s spare clothes, all of which were a little too small for him, and still sporting the spa slippers, no longer so fluffy. He found a very drunk man passed out on the ferry with size 10 feet, and carefully prised off his trainers, before hiding away on the truck again. He finally reached London and staggered out on the hard shoulder of the A12 outside Hackney Wick, the pins and needles in his leg almost making him fall over.

  Alistair set off down the canal, footsore and weary, but determined to get to his Sembler and make him pay. He saw an unlocked bicycle propped up against a canal boat. From the laughter and greetings coming from inside the boat, he thought the bike’s owner was probably on board. Seizing his moment he hopped on and pedalled off down the towpath, towards the city, as fast as he could.

  Two hours later, covered in bike oil from where he’d twice had to stop to fix the chain when it fell off, Alistair stood outside the headquarters of the bank. He was surrounded by a group of call centre workers from a Dalebury insurance subsidiary who had marched from Cheltenham. Dressed in clothes that were too small for him, and trainers that were too large, smeared in oil and dripping with sweat, looking, appropriately enough, like he’d been hiding in a truck for days, Alistair was unrecognisable. Something for which he was grateful as everyone shared stories of how their lives had been ruined by the austerity measures of Alistair Handy and the disastrous double dealings of Dalebury Bank. Nobody realised that the Sembler was doing business as unusual. No news of Alistair’s closed accounts had leaked out.

  They reached the main entrance as the crowd broke apart. It had been hiding from Alistair’s view a punk kid with a solar-powered angle grinder, who had cut two barriers into sections. The crowd grabbed them and used them as battering rams to run at the revolving glass doors and wedge them open. They stormed up the stairs, throwing doors open along the way. They discovered the investigators smoking cigars, drinking champagne, and playing poker with the traders on the Forex exchange. Alistair wanted one thing and one thing only, to get his hands on the Sembler and push him off the atrium roof. And it seemed he was not alone in that desire, although of course everyone else thought the Sembler was Sir Alistair Handy himself.

  As they surged up to the fiftieth floor, a strange hush fell over the crowd. The sound of a Chopin Nocturne (Op. 9, No. 2 in E-flat major) drifted down from the Director’s office in the executive suite, relayed by the internal speaker system. The screens on all the walls around them went blank, then started to show the results of the hackers’ traces, tracking the trades coming from Alistair’s Sembler. All the money was draining from the Dalebury accounts, transferring to adventure play grounds, schools, housing trusts, hospitals and youth schemes.

  Alistair pushed his way through the crowd, climbing higher and higher, the Nocturne ringing in his ears, and was still ten flights of stairs away from his old office when everyone around him started to shout and cheer, whoop, whistle and applaud. He tried to edge closer to the Sembler, desperate for revenge, but was held back by everyone else. “Nah mate, you gotta listen to the music. Look at the screens! See what he’s done! The man’s a genius.”Alistair slumped against the wall, tears streaming down his face. For the first time in his life, he was at a loss.

  *

  Over at Sembler & Assemblage, Jess sat with the receptionist, glued to the live reports coming in from Dalebury Bank, shaking her head in disbelief.

  “The glitch… the altruism glitch. You said I’d fixed it…” Jess said. She looked again at the data feeds streaming live from the Sembler. The hospital Aunty Bea had died in was getting a new roof. The pharmacy contracts were all being renegotiated. Everything was changing. The Sembler was changing it. She had changed it. The receptionist winked at her.

  “Didn’t need fixing. It was a feature, not a bug.”

  Degeneration

  by

  Robin Moran

  Born in Yorkshire, Robin once again happily resides in Leeds after growing up in the insanity of London. Horror is her comfort zone, having read twisted tales and bone chilling stories since she was young so it’s no surprise it has warped her writing mind. By day she’s a primary school teacher and attempts to be relatively normal. By night she writes and puts characters through hell to see them squirm. Her first published story was in [Re]Awakenings (Elsewhen Press, 2011).

  The pub was surprisingly crowded considering the recent worldwide fear. Even with the news report on the large screen television, people continued to down their pints, sip their wines or tuck into their food. Sophie included. Her table was covered in empty crisp and pork scratchings packets. Five empty glasses that had once been filled with frothy beer were now stacked and pushed aside to make room for five new pints. The third… no… fourth round?

  Sophie was slumped in her seat, munching on the greasy onion rings she had ordered. She hadn’t been paying much attention to her friends or anything else, too busy trying to get some food inside herself. Before coming out she had felt her temperature rising, despite it being the middle of winter. Normally she felt the cold, needing to turn her heating on as soon as September arrived. But it was now mid-January and she had had to turn down the heating in her flat because she had been so warm. When she had felt her forehead
, it was slippery with sweat.

  But she needed this night out. It was finally the weekend and she could make herself feel better after a couple of drinks. Maybe more.

  Someone near the bar had requested that the television’s volume to be turned up. Now she could hear the news report and she lifted her head to watch, ignoring the loud banter and giggling around her table.

  The reporter spoke to Robert James, some loony who had taken his English Literature degree way too seriously. He had spent the last two years trying to convince and desperately warn people that there was a new threat to humanity. Forget global warming, nuclear threat or the annual ancient apocalypse: there was something happening in the world that was going to be the true end of humans and it was apparently all to do with a fear that sparked in the Victorian era.

  Sophie sat expressionless, staring up at the television with a glazed look in her eyes as this James guy spoke.

  “Their stories of the supernatural, science and horror represented a threat that they believed would continue to strengthen in years to come. Some saw science as a menace in Victorian society. It was an unknown mystery that was, all of a sudden, opening up doors to possibilities and opportunities. People were making discoveries and experimenting, which some naturally found horrific and frightening. Writers of the late nineteenth century took a good look at civilisation and fictionalised what it was fearing: science and decadence. These were the driving forces for this rapidly changing society.”

  Sophie recognised a familiar scent of cigarettes and hairspray. Her nose quivered as she sniffed and looked to see Eloise sitting back down next to her. Her friend snorted and nodded at the television.

  “In other words, this modern day generation act like wild beast folk and we need to go back to being conservative and boring.” She took her glass and gulped down the rest of her beer. “Bollocks to that. People are way too obsessed with how everyone lives.”