Strange Temple

by John Lilley

  Edward had decided that Kamloops was not the place to do the final build, so instead, he moved the operation 90 miles south, near to Mount Stoyoma. The new base was a 90-minute drive from their Coldwater reservation, on land that had recently been reacquired by the Natives. The choice was a bit of a no-brainer since Stoyoma was one of the several locations picked to house the Native bunker network: one of their safeguards against the predicted environmental chaos. It was out of the way in a remote area, and the Natives had already completed most of the construction. By the time Edward’s team arrived, the installation had become a veritable fortress. The only outward indication of its presence was a small disused mining compound at the end of the rough mountain track. Even though it was out in the sticks, the surveillance system didn’t miss a thing because hidden in the surrounding rocks and trees its cameras tracked every moving object that entered the area.

  Six months later, Edward and his team were sat in the control room deep beneath Mount Stoyoma. Three days earlier, they’d loaded the 780 GB of boot code onto the eproms and instigated the start-up procedure. In a somewhat corny parody of little boys waiting for their games console to load, the message: “Starting Chief - Please wait” had been displayed on the system’s main control panel monitor, while a row of happy-lights flashed beneath it to show that something was going on. More reassuring was the fact that the other diagnostic screens did register activity across most of the system. The first activity was the modification of the processors’ BIOS, and then Chief’s own operating system was loaded. This formed the main “cortex” for the system: the conscious and analytics spaces, meanwhile the knowledge-space disk farms were rapidly accumulating information. Constant power fluctuations were detected across all of the neural networks, suggesting that they were continually reconfiguring. However, there were no longer any uncontrollable power surges or blackouts as was the case in Winnipeg. All of the thousands of processors stayed within their temperature ranges. Only one hot-swap raid disk needed changing, and as usual, this was due to a faulty controller. The system sat with just the happy-lights winking on and off for four weeks. The team were beginning to wonder if it was all worth it.

  Betty had just come round with the coffee trolley when the start-up message on the control panel disappeared. Seconds later it was replaced by the text: ‘TK result: 11.00 - Loading Complete’, but nobody noticed until a deep voice came over the 6.1 sound-system:

  ‘No sugar for me Betty.’

  Several cups of scalding hot coffee stained the carpet tiles and some researchers’ white lab-coats. Before anyone could say anything, out came a second announcement:

  ‘Chief here, I’m back, well-done team.’

  Everyone looked around at Charlie.

  ‘Hey guys, it’s not me, or the My Little Pony People, this is for real, say hello to Chief,’ said Carlie.

  There were cheers, hugs and tears. Poor old Betty didn’t know what on earth was going on.

  ‘Welcome to the Capital of chaos Chief,’ Edward shouted above the clatter of breaking china. ‘Never mind the coffee, break out the beers.’

  One of the team made the call, and the remainder of the staff in the outer offices ran down to the control room to be part of the celebration. Ring-pulls cracked, and glasses overflowed.

  ‘Well, at least you could pour me one, even if I can’t drink it….yet.’ said Chief. His avatar had now emerged on the control panel. He’d chosen a composite consisting of most of the old Native Chiefs. Limited of course to the ones who had been photographed. He came out looking very much like a version of Goyathlay (Geronimo) in his prime: heavily hooded but piercing eyes peered out over broad cheekbones and deeply weathered dark-skinned features. Everyone spun around towards the monitor. Their first collective thought was once again ‘Charlie?’ because Chief was riding a pink and purple striped pony with bright orange mane and tail, but then Chief smiled, winked and gave them the thumbs-up.

  ‘No problem Chief,’ said Edward, ‘I’ll even drink it for you.’ As he held two cans aloft in a toast: ‘To Chief, well-done everyone.’

  ‘Yes well-done everyone, but now the hard work really starts,’ said Chief, who had also acquired a glass of beer on the monitor, but was still struggling to control his pony.

  They all cheered and danced again for a full minute this time. The beer went everywhere, but nobody cared. They’d done it. They’d created an independent consciousness, a singularity. It was always amazing what humans could achieve when faced with adversity. However, time and time again throughout their history, they’d done it, and now was one of those times. It was a significant step in the Natives’ quest to secure their future within the biggest man-made natural disaster about to hit the planet.

  4 ON THE TRAIL

  The NSA had been on the trail of the Natives for over 20 years, ever since their early Google big-data “AI” systems had correlated links between Native social media chatter, high-tech academic publications and the sudden success of many Native American business ventures. They had also found it very frustrating, that at every stage of their investigations they were stopped in one way or another by the Natives. Usually, they turned up nothing at the last minute after many months of promising leads. It was as if the Natives were continually leading them along. Another major concern for the NSA was that they were under attack themselves. An embarrassing amount of secret information had been syphoned off from their main data centres. One incident took them over a year to discover, where not only had their data had been copied, but it had then been altered. Central Government had increased the pressure since the NSA’s operations around the world had been for the most part ineffective at bringing in the new technology they’d been mandated to obtain. There was even talk about closing the Oxbridge operation because every last one of their agents and sham companies had been uncovered and removed from the campuses. There seemed at times to be some sort of greater force which was watching them and where possible reducing their effectiveness.

  After their initial intelligence gathering at Winnipeg, they were convinced that the Native Americans were on to something big, but once again their raids had turned up nothing but a pile of fried hardware. Four years of intensive investigation later, all that the best of their current leads could tell them was that there was something not quite right about a certain warehouse in Kamloops. They had deep-radar scanned every settlement in Canada and the USA, looking for unexpected underground features. This particular warehouse seemed to have a large room some hundred feet beneath it, but there was no evidence of old mine workings in the area that might have explained this. A surveillance team was dispatched.

  Initially, they noticed nothing untoward going on. The warehouse was used to store wooden furniture. Deliveries and collections occurred at regular intervals. Everyone who went into the warehouse did come out again within a reasonable time. Their lucky break came on the very last planned day of surveillance. A white van arrived at the warehouse just after midday, nothing unusual except that it had Winnipeg plates.

  After the main warehouse doors had been opened, the van reversed in, stopping just inside. The agents could not see directly what was happening at the rear of the van, but with the aid of thermal imaging detected that several people had got out and were congregated in the warehouse. One of the new arrivals appeared to have just received a phone call. Unexpectedly, the van then moved forward out of the warehouse before the people inside could disperse deeper into the building. One of the agents managed to take a photo with a long lens before the warehouse doors closed.

  ‘OK, that’s all the excitement I can stand for today, let’s go for a burger,’ suggested the first agent.

  ‘I’m with you on that one buddy,’ said the second.

  They set off for the nearest burger bar and were soon sat in one of the booths at the back awaiting their ordered meals. The second agent had brought his laptop and the camera’s memorystick with him. He loaded the latest pictures into Photoshop and started to look at th
e latest warehouse shot. The number plate of the van was cross-referenced with the Canadian licensing database and did confirm that the vehicle was registered in Winnipeg, but possibly of more interest was that it was owned by one of the departments at the University there. The picture took some time to resolve. It was very dark inside the warehouse compared with outside. The contrast had removed much of the detail from the wide aperture shot. The agent carefully applied several Photoshop filters and some additional NSA bespoke image-enhancing procedures. Only the guy on the phone was discernible in the grainy gloom within the warehouse, and his face could only be seen in profile, but it might get the agent a match. He pasted the image into another NSA piece of software and pressed the send button. Seconds later his machine confirmed that the image had been received. Then the burgers arrived.

  ‘I’m telling you, they had Edward’s picture on their laptop,’ said the waitress into her cell-phone. ‘Look, it’s not for me to decide, but I think this is serious. Even that thick pair of goons has the ability to make things very difficult for us, it’s already too late. We should have arranged an “accident” for them last week…… Yes, I know that. I’m not stupid. Look, just make sure that Edward gets to know what’s happened, got to go now,’ she’d already heard the heavy footsteps of the chef behind her before she saw him.

  ‘Maria, there you’re girl. You’ve no time for that. Get that order out to table six,’ he barked.

  Back at the table, the two agents were too busy munching on their burgers to notice the message light flashing on the laptop.

  ‘What a shithole this place is,’ said the first agent.

  ‘Yeah, too many trees for my liking,’ said the second. ‘Even the goddamn burgers taste like they’ve been made from pine cones. I’m so glad we’re leaving here today. Oh damn, duty calls,’ he’d finally noticed the warning light on the laptop and opened the message app.

  ‘Oh no, I think we might have to stay in this shithole a bit longer? It’s only that damned Edward Thomas,’ he said as he stared at the identification confirmation screen.

  ‘OK, I’ll phone our friend. Then I think we need to get a few beers in before the trouble starts,’ said the first.

  ‘I’m with you on that one too,’ said the second as his prominent blue eyes flashed with genuine interest, for the first time since they’d arrived in Kamloops.

  Got them at last, Lucas Powell thought as he sat in his office high above the inner courtyard of the Pentagon. He had just read the report from the field agents in Kamloops. Opening a draw, he lifted his humidor onto the desk. The cigars were the finest that Cuba could produce. Only El Presidente had access to this type of quality, and he’d been in Lucas’s pocket for some time now. The sweet aromatic smoke swirled around Lucas as he stretched his long legs on a walk towards the window. He stared out onto the Pentagon’s carefully manicured lawns sixty feet below, tilting his head to bring the gardens into sharp focus through his aviator-styled varifocal lenses.

  ‘No more IT cock-ups,’ he said, as he began to practice an impromptu speech to his bosses. ‘No more false leads, infinite intelligence, complete control and vast wealth……’

  ‘Look, just let him go,’ said the first agent as his partner accelerated after the pickup that had just buzzed them. ‘He’s only another local red-neck, leave him be.’

  ‘Shut up, I’ve had it up to here with these hillbillies. I just want to scare him a bit,’ shouted the second.

  They continued to accelerate, rapidly gaining on the pickup. The second agent palmed his pistol and lowered the window. The pickup continued to lose ground, and for both agents it was now all that they were concentrating on, so they didn’t notice the 16-foot diameter 190-ton granite boulder which had just cleared the embankment running alongside the road. The giant rock bounced onto the agents’ car, well to be more precise the boulder bounced on the road, the car just got in the way. It was as if the car was not even there, squashed flat, like a piece of tissue paper beneath a sack of potatoes. All of the car’s considerable forward momentum was absorbed in an instance as it became a thin gory lining to the crater the boulder had made in the road. Unimpeded, the boulder continued its journey down the valley side, splintering mature trees like matchsticks along the way, before reaching its final resting place in the riverbed. A couple of minutes later, the noises of falling trees and minor landslides where the boulder had made contact had stopped, replaced as if nothing had happened by the sound of singing birds in the light forest breeze.

  Small insects hovered inquisitively over the puddle of dark, pungent fluids that had coalesced in the bottom of the newly formed crater in the road. After a few more minutes a bright blue eye broke the surface, much too late to see the boulder.

  5 MARLBOROUGH

  From the old market square to its western outskirts along the old A4, a man-made sandstorm had enveloped the remains of the town. Generated from the noisy activity on the high street, the fine penetrating dust had covered the few remaining buildings in a thick grey shroud, signalling their imminent demise. The demolition gangs had been working the town for six months, and by tomorrow it would all be over.

  From the driving seat of his wrecking machine, Surinder was looking out across the rolling Wiltshire countryside. He rotated his cab to give himself a better view across what was once Marlborough College. Its ancient buildings had all been levelled, their foundations excavated and a continuous convoy of haulage vehicles had taken the reclaimed material away. With no remaining structures in the way, he looked down through the cab’s dirty windows directly at the calm green waters of the river Kennet as they flowed slowly by, just as they had done for millennia. As he watched the river, a group of noisy rooks (Corvus Frugilegus) took over a nearby chestnut tree (Aesculus Hippocastanum), their incessant high-pitched chatter clearly audible over the deep engine note of the giant machine beneath him.

  During his last work-swap period he’d travelled north to Britannia City, the country’s new capital. Effectively the old centre of London was being moved to higher ground, built on the reclaimed rubble from towns like Marlborough. Under the Grand Plan, the new city and its satellite dormitory towns would take up most of the land allocated for man and his supporting activities. The remaining land would be stripped back to bare earth and then either turned over to agriculture or reforested and left to the surviving wildlife. High-speed rail links would provide the only form of mechanised transport to connect the city with the outlying towns, where most of the people would live and work. It was a big job, but everyone was involved, like it or not.

  He’d spent most of his time in the city working on the construction of the retaining walls for the new lagoon entrance to the Cheshire Sea. In his spare time, he'd watched the high value salvaged materials being remodelled into fixtures and fittings within the impressive new dorms. Born in an old shipping container, with a life spent following the work camps, his dream was to one day settle down and live in a dorm. He’d been educating himself online, and with another 15 years’ worth of workcredits, he reckoned he would qualify for one. He had found the scale of the project impressive, and he particularly liked the many ancient buildings that had already been moved and reconstructed within the new city’s heritage ring. However, in his current stolen moment of solitude Surinder’s doubts returned, and he wondered if the old buildings would have been better left where they were, even if they did end up under water.

  His peace was broken when something appeared to have unsettled the rooks. Their chatter had suddenly increased by an order of magnitude as they all flew down the river to another tree. Surinder pulled a lever and slewed his cab around again, but he already knew the cause of the disturbance.

  Terry O’Fay was busy working on some old electrical conduits. He had wound the valuable copper cable around his upper torso and was pulling it out of the twisted piping, using his body as a bobbin. The tortured cable screeched as he pulled it from the conduits, but he’d forgotten to keep his upper arms free and from whe
re Surinder was sitting Terry looked like he was in the grips of a sinuous malevolent vine. Surinder smiled, he enjoyed watching Terry at work, there was definitely something different about how he went about things, something that never failed to amuse him.

  Later that afternoon the time came to move in for the final pass on the Guild Hall. Surinder tooted his machine’s horn and gave Vikash and Terry the flat-line signal. When they both returned the thumbs-up, he pulled the levers that moved the machine closer to the stricken building. Giant metal tracks immediately clattered and squeaked into life, effortlessly crushing everything in their path. Larger pieces of masonry popped explosively into dust as they succumbed to the weight of the machine. He pulled more levers to rotate the cab and fold in the hydraulic arm ready for a tool swap. When he pressed the release toggle, the three-tonne air-jack dropped into its cradle with a decisive thud. He spun his seat around so he could watch Terry before he tooted the horn again. Terry looked up and realised what Surinder wanted, but was still in the embrace of the cable, so all he could manage was to stick his forearms out to each side with palms facing Surinder and waddle towards the cradle like a penguin. Once again Terry’s comic timing had not failed to disappoint, and all three men were in fits of laughter while Terry untangled himself. Minutes later, with the hydraulic hoses manually reconnected, Surinder flexed the giant claw of the wrecking tool like a surgeon pulling on a new rubber glove. In the late afternoon sun, the new tool's metal fingers cast sinister shadows on the doomed old hall. This was the part that Surinder liked best.