The London Project (Portal Book 1)

by Mark J Maxwell

‘Yeah?’

  ‘I don’t think this is from your victim.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s a personal sense feed.’

  ‘Yeah, so?’

  ‘I don’t know how, but it’s coming directly from someone’s profile. Since your victim didn’t have a profile it can’t be her.’ Ed looked confident enough that what he was telling her was correct.

  ‘Keep looking at the screen.’ The door at the end of the corridor was close. ‘Pause it…now.’

  Claire’s face appeared in freeze-frame reflected in the door’s panel.

  ‘Oh,’ Ed said, clearly confused. ‘This doesn’t make any sense. Firstly, Claire Harris didn’t have a Portal profile. Secondly, it shouldn’t be possible for the feed to be streamed directly from her profile to yours. It’s not the way Portal works. Every feed originates from a Portal server farm.’

  ‘This is good news, though, isn’t it? We can add this to the case file now and see if it leads anywhere.’

  ‘I don’t think we can,’ Ed said. Louisa opened her mouth to protest but he held up a hand. ‘Louisa, I don’t know how this ended up being patched into your profile’s feeds but it wasn’t done legally.’

  Louisa thought about it for a second. Her heart sank. Ed was right; a good defence barrister would rip the case to shreds in court if there was even an inkling that evidence had been illegally obtained from private Portal data. ‘How do you think we should proceed?’

  ‘Officially, we can’t use this as the basis for any further investigation. Anything obtained as a result would itself be inadmissible in court. However, if we keep this under wraps then maybe I can check it out off the books.’

  Louisa supposed that it was better than nothing. ‘Thanks, Ed.’

  Ed turned to look at the output from the profile virtualisation. ‘This is really fascinating.’

  Louisa’s gaze lingered on the freeze-framed image of Claire. She couldn’t meet the girl’s terrified stare for long. She shuddered. ‘Yeah…fascinating.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Rick was waiting for Louisa outside Camden’s Adam Walsh Community Centre. The Camden Centre was one of the first the former Portal CTO established. By the time he passed away there were dozens strewn throughout the UK, with fifteen in London alone. Adam Walsh formed Portal Services with his business partner, Dietrich Frey, ten years before the London Project got the green light. They met as students at Cambridge University but dropped out before finishing their degrees to form the startup that eventually became known as Portal.

  The non-profit foundation in charge of the centres was created by Adam with the aim of combating poverty. Some of the more cynical media commentators pointed out that the resulting positive press helped quell the London Project’s naysayers in its early stages, but they were quickly shouted down by Portal advocates. The foundation was one of the many philanthropic acts which endeared Adam to the nation and eventually earned him a knighthood. In London alone two schools bore his name and several of the major hospitals had wings built using the foundation’s funding. When Adam died four years after the London Project’s centralised network first spun up, media outlets noted the collective outpouring of grief on the public feeds and duly treated his death as a national catastrophe.

  ‘Who got in touch with you?’ Louisa asked.

  ‘One of the centre’s staff,’ Rick said. ‘A kid saw the posters and was asking after Claire by name.’

  Louisa nodded, leaving his previous skepticism of her idea to canvas the homeless shelters unmentioned. In her experience men Rick’s age didn’t respond well to a woman highlighting their mistakes, whether she was his senior or not. At least he had the decency to look somewhat chagrined.

  The centre had originally been in an old Anglican church. Its outbuildings were renovated to provide emergency accommodation, segregated into male, female, and family units. The church itself served up meals for the area’s homeless and needy. A long queue wound its way from the main entrance, down the steps and along the pavement. Both genders and all ages were represented, from children to the elderly. They waited patiently, clutching bags filled with their meagre possessions and occasionally with bedrolls tucked under an arm.

  The queue moved quickly, but Louisa noticed a few in the line who had to be prodded forward. They appeared dazed and stared blankly into the distance, their faces slack. They were high on something. Trance most likely, in an early stage of the addiction path. Towards the end addicts zoned out so much they forgot to eat, inevitably dying of starvation if they weren’t hospitalised in time.

  Trance was a recent addition to an ever-expanding range of designer drugs originating from the Far East. This one was particularly popular with students and artsy-types. Trance induced a meditative state often described as a ‘waking dream’ by its users. One of the big pharma companies had originally developed it as a way of treating depression. The initial trials were positive, producing a marked improvement in the subjects’ emotional state. After a few months they exhibited an increasing dependency on the drug but it wasn’t a deal-breaker for the company and they persisted in the trials. The plug was only pulled when they realised their long-term users were finding it harder and harder to distinguish between reality and the trance-like stupor the drug induced. Eventually their subjects slipped into a final trance they never came out of. The research was terminated but a few months later the formula was leaked onto the global web. The drug was replicated in East-Asian bio-labs and was available on the streets in the West in a matter of weeks.

  ‘They serve over five thousand meals a day here,’ Rick said. ‘It was busier when I came down yesterday. Apparently it’s more popular on Sundays. I guess because it used to be a church.’

  Rick led her around the side to a narrow door and pressed an old-fashioned doorbell. A few seconds later a buzzer sounded and the door clicked open.

  Inside it was clean and functional, with some chairs and a counter, like a doctor’s waiting room. A woman was leaning on the counter and she straightened and greeted Rick with a broad smile. ‘Detective Drachman, you got my message.’ She was in her mid-twenties, petite, and rake-thin with shoulder length straight blonde hair.

  Rick returned her smile. ‘Hi Fern. This is Detective Sergeant Bennett.’ The girl nodded at Louisa, giving her a quick appraisal, then turned her attention back to Rick. ‘You mentioned someone asked about the poster I left with you?’

  ‘Yeah, a young guy saw it as he queued up. He asked one of the volunteers about it and I sent you a message straight away, like you said to do.’

  ‘That’s great, Fern. Is he still here?’

  She nodded. ‘I’ve been keeping an eye on him. I’ll take you through now if you want.’

  Another buzzer sounded and a door next to the hatch opened. Louisa followed Rick and Fern, pausing before another door on the other side Fern opened with a flick from her terminal.

  White light poured from the open doorway, momentarily blinding Louisa. Inside, the room was around twenty feet square. The walls, ceiling, and floor were covered by a porcelaneous material that emitted a soft white glow. Five Portal consoles were spaced throughout the room, three of which were manned by young women around Fern’s age. They stood in front of the semi-circular screens, operating them using hand gestures and occasionally tapping on a terminal mounted on an extensible arm.

  Rick let out a low whistle. ‘This is quite a set-up you’ve got here, Fern.’

  I’ll say. The room reminded Louisa of the Portal advertorials that always peaked on the feeds when a new terminal version was about to be released—all shiny and white and high-tech. It made their incident room in Scotland Yard look like a dump, and it was upgraded barely a year ago.

  ‘Yeah?’ Fern sounded surprised. ‘It’s a fairly standard Portal admin set-up.’

  ‘You worked for Portal before you came here?’ Louisa asked.

  ‘Oh, we still work for Portal,’ Fern replied in a bright and breezy tone. ‘We opted for a year�
�s secondment to an AWCC. Lots of Portal staff spend time helping the unfortunate. It’s for the good of mankind, you know?’

  Ricked nodded and smiled. Fern beamed back. It was hard not to be buoyed by the woman’s enthusiasm, but for some reason she bugged the hell out of Louisa. There was something about her manner. Then Louisa realised why—she reminded her of Abigail—deliriously happy and seemingly unburdened by any of life’s troubles. Is it a generational thing with these women, this extreme positivity? It’s like they’re all high on something.

  As Louisa passed by one of the consoles she paused to look at the screen. A mesh riddled with holes of varying shapes rose into a three-dimensional cube as the console tight-beamed the display to her.

  The operator plucked various shapes out of the air before deftly flinging them into the holes in the mesh. She then added gear pieces, connecting them up one by one until they were all spinning around the cube. It seemed like more of a game than work. If the woman was indeed performing a task for the centre then it was abstracted to such a high level Louisa found it impossible to figure out its true underlying purpose.

  The minimalist UI design was typical of an Adam Walsh supervised Portal product. When the first terminal revisions were released to tech reviewers there was a lot of negative feedback around their ease of use. ‘They’re thinking too hard,’ Adam responded to the criticism with a laugh. ‘The terminals are designed to be intuitive. You should operate on instinct when using one, like a child would do.’ When they scoffed at his response Adam countered with a marketing campaign centred around a three-year-old girl who’d never seen a terminal before. When she was handed one, she proceeded to operate the device without any apparent instruction, tapping and swiping away on the terminal screen, much to the delight of a grinning Adam Walsh sitting beside her.

  From then on Adam released new terminal revisions without any obvious operating instructions. It became something of a trademark bolstering the mystique of each new release. Soon the same reviewers who criticised the original terminal rushed to get hold of each subsequent revision to try and discover what new features were contained within. One even boasted that much of the material for his article came from giving the terminal to his toddler, then sitting back and watching to see what the child would discover.

  Were the centre staff shifting blocks around oblivious to the resultant effects? Portal had a habit of trialing new extensions and nanoware upgrades in-house before rolling them out to the public. It might not be too long before the MET solves cases by moving around brightly coloured blocks. Louisa grinned at the thought. A red-triangle-suspect here, a blue-square-dead-body there, until everything fits together and the killer’s profile pops up.

  Fern led them through adjacent rooms and more sliding doors, each opened with her terminal. The corridors twisted and turned, each one identical and lacking any sort of indicators that could aid someone in trying to find their way around.

  ‘Don’t you ever get lost in here?’ Louisa asked Fern, who seemed to be navigating the maze with no difficulty.

  ‘No way!’ Fern laughed. ‘You can’t get lost in a Portal office. The whole place is hooked into the augmented reality extension. New-starts and interns usually wear lenses until they get used to the place. You can see the overlays for yourself if you activate the extension on your terminal.’

  Louisa did so, remembering to keep a solid grip on the device as it turned completely transparent apart from a thin black outline around the edge. She held it up before her and the unblemished white walls came alive with colourful signs and symbols. Arrows indicated fire exits and stairwells. Doors had identifying markers. Even the floor had a series of coloured lines that bunched in the middle before branching off down intersecting corridors and into rooms.

  ‘Why would you want all those ugly signs around the place when no-one needs them?’ Fern wrinkled her nose. ‘They’d give me a headache if I had to look at them all day.’

  Louisa wondered if it explained the extreme positivity. The constant unadulterated white light blasting into their skulls all day blisses them into a state of euphoria.

  Eventually they passed out of the pristine Portal office environs into the older, original church building, where the walls were constructed of large blocks hewn from grey stone and the floors were polished hardwood. Fern led them towards a heavy wooden door and Louisa could hear the din of a large number of people coming from the other side.

  The door opened into the Eastern transept of the church’s main body. In front of them a row of hot food counters was attended by a squad of kitchen staff furiously ladling out soups and stews. The counters formed a barrier sectioning off the nave and transepts from the aisle, which was filled with long rows of tables and chairs in place of the pews. The queue of people from outside flowed along the aisle right up to the counters. The tables were densely packed with diners but there appeared to be a steady turnover of people leaving as others sat down.

  ‘He’s over in there, in a green fleece and blue baseball cap.’ Fern pointed towards the end of a table halfway down the aisle. ‘The girl he talked to said his name was Ben.’

  Louisa couldn’t see over the top of the queue of people but Rick nodded. ‘I see him. Thanks for your help, Fern.’

  ‘Any time, Rick,’ Fern said as she sidled up close. Louisa supposed Fern was trying to be circumspect but she had to raise her voice to be heard over the cacophony reverberating around the church and Louisa heard her clearly. ‘My shift finishes at five.’

  A pinging sound came from Rick’s suit jacket pocket. Fern headed back the way they came. He took out his terminal and smiled at the screen.

  ‘If you value seeing your kids more than once a fortnight, Detective,’ Louisa said, ‘I’d delete her ID.’

  Rick sniffed and put his terminal away. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Sarge.’

  Louisa let it go. Was this how it had started with John and Abigail—a casual flirtation from a younger woman offering a taste of something new and exciting? Did Fern even notice Rick’s wedding ring? She surely must have seen it. Maybe she didn’t care.

  The boy was sitting on his own at the end of the row of tables. She motioned Rick to walk along the back of the table while she came at the boy from the other side.

  ‘Hello,’ Louisa said. The boy looked up, startled. ‘It’s Ben, isn’t it?’

  Ben tensed. He looked like he was about to bolt. She glanced at Rick who laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder. He flinched, twisting around to look fearfully up at Rick.

  ‘It’s all right, Ben.’ Louisa nodded at Rick and he stepped back. ‘I’m Detective Bennett and this is Detective Drachman.’ She eyed his tray. They served a decent meal, Louisa had to give them their due. A full three courses and some fruit and chocolate bars to take home. ‘The food smells good.’

  Ben shrugged. ‘It’s okay. What do you want?’ He had recovered quickly from his initial fright and now he regarded her with suspicion. He looked to be around fifteen, of slight build, with an unkempt mane of brown hair sticking out from under his cap.

  Louisa took out her terminal and brought up the picture of Claire in her school uniform. ‘Do you know this girl, Ben?’

  ‘Yeah, I know her. That’s Claire.’ He looked back up at Louisa. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ The boy’s tone was flat, emotionless, more a statement than a question.

  ‘Why do you think she’s dead?’

  ‘Because I haven’t seen her in months, and now you’re here.’ The boy’s hands clenched into fists. ‘Well, is she?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry, Ben. How well did you know her?’

  Ben bit his lip and the tension drained out of him. He slumped back in his chair, deflated. ‘We hung out together. I knew something was wrong but I, I thought maybe she went home, back to her family.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw her?’

  ‘Last October, on Oxford Street. What happened to her?’

  ‘We’re still trying to figure tha
t out, but we could use your help. Can you come down to the station with us? It won’t take long and we’ll bring you right back here when you’re finished.’

  Ben thought about it for a moment, then nodded. ‘Sure. All right.’

  *

  ‘You said you saw Claire last October,’ Louisa said to Ben. They were sitting in the MIT incident room with Rick. ‘Can you narrow it down to a specific date?’

  ‘I don’t remember the exact day,’ Ben said.

  Rick had fetched him a coffee and the boy had proceeded to empty ten small packets of sugar into the cup. He gave it a stir and a sip, then added a final packet. ‘It was a Saturday, I think. The street was busy. The shop window displays were all done up for Halloween.’

  ‘Do you remember where it was on Oxford Street?’

  ‘I was waiting for her at a burger place near Tottenham Court tube. I was sitting out the front because they don’t like it when we eat inside. We hung around for a bit and then she left. She was heading towards Soho.’

  ‘Have you any idea where she was going?’

  ‘She’d heard about a medical trial. They’re easy money so everyone tries to get into them.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go with her?’ Rick asked.

  ‘I was sick. Just a bad cold but they don’t take you if you’re not well. Everyone knows that.’

  ‘Did she say who the trial was with or what it was for?’ Louisa asked.

  ‘No. Lots of places do the trials. They normally pick you up and bring you to the place. They never tell you what it’s for until you get there.’

  ‘Ben, have you ever had a profile, even a temporary one at some stage?’

  Ben shook his head.

  ‘How do you feel about us adding your biometrics to Claire’s case file?’

  Ben shrugged. ‘Sure. I don’t mind.’

  Louisa held up her terminal before Ben and moved it in an arc around his head until the extension reported it had a good capture. She ignored the twinge of guilt she felt as she added the scan to Claire’s case file. If Ben had refused she would have had no legal right to his private data. On the wall screen the CADET icon started spinning to indicate it was working with the scan. ‘Now we sit back and wait for an identity check.’