The London Project (Portal Book 1)

by Mark J Maxwell

  Abracadabra.

  A fluorescent light blinked on and off a few times before staying lit. A lift was in front of her and beside it a door with an icon of stairs stencilled in red. She struggled to her feet, groaning like an old woman.

  The door opened into a stairwell heading down. When she leaned out over the railing she counted fifteen flights before the stairs faded into darkness.

  Stairs or lift?

  What if the lift opened out into a lobby swarming with security guards? She was depending on the facility being quiet this late in the evening but security would be present 24/7. Then she thought of her hip and all those flights of stairs.

  The lift it is, then.

  Louisa pressed the call button and the door slid open with a ping. Inside there were only two floor options: G and L. She was already at G so she selected L, praying it stood for something like Lower Ground and not Lobby.

  After a few floors the lift accelerated rapidly until Louisa’s stomach began to complain about the G-forces.

  How fast is this thing going? It was actually vibrating. Then Louisa felt herself being pressed into the floor as it slowed, until, with a shudder and a stomach-churning lurch, it stopped and the door slid open.

  Louisa stuck her head out. Beside the lift was the stairwell exit. Directly ahead stood another door, this time with a glass panel. She pushed it open and a series of fluorescent ceiling lights blinked on one by one along a long corridor.

  When the door swung closed Louisa was frozen in place by a powerful sense of déjà vu. The white-walled corridor with its concrete floor and fluorescent lighting—it was all so familiar. She’d been here before. But when?

  Then it hit her. She hadn’t been here before, but she’d seen this place through the eyes of someone who had. Louisa spun around.

  A green emergency exit sign above the door. A face reflected in the glass. But not the face of a terrified teenage girl this time; this face was older, framed by dark hair, confident, determined.

  ‘I’m getting closer, Claire,’ Louisa whispered.

  The door at the end was unadorned, with no handle, and didn’t move when she gave it a shove. She flicked across Dietrich’s ID and it opened with a click.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Louisa trailed her fingertips across the wall’s smooth surface, finding it warm to the touch. There was no seam, or join, or anything which gave a clue as to how it had been constructed. She was inside the research lab proper now, of that she had no doubt. Not only the walls but the floor and ceiling of the corridor were made of the same glowing translucent material she’d seen in the Adam Walsh Centre. The only difference was that here it emitted a subdued light. A nighttime setting, perhaps.

  Where the walls met the ceiling and floor, they merged in a seamless curve that made the corridor appear almost organic, like a tunnel hollowed out of the bones of some vast creature. Across from her was a set of wide doors, but they were made of opaque white glass and Louisa couldn’t see inside. The door behind her with its emergency exit sign was the only mundane feature in sight, and was strangely out of place amid the pristine unmarked Portal decor.

  Now what?

  She hadn’t formulated any sort of plan on the drive back. Dietrich hadn’t provided any more details on the facility. His visits had been limited to product demos and tours of new laboratories. Of course, the fact he was plastered couldn’t have helped his recollections either. A random search of the rooms might provide access to a Portal console, but what if she came across someone working late, or a security guard?

  How does anyone find their way around this place, anyway? The answer came to her immediately. She’d asked Fern in the Adam Walsh Centre the very same question.

  She activated Dietrich’s AR extension and held up the device. Sure enough, the walls came alive with signage. An identifier on the sliding doors: L–32. On the floor was the same set of coloured lines she saw in the Adam Walsh Centre; blue, red, green, and yellow. One of the blue lines split off from the rest and led up to the L–32 room.

  There was a white spot on the floor before her. She lowered the terminal, but it didn’t disappear. The spot slowly glided away and stopped after a few feet. Like the guide light in the hospital it wanted her to follow. But where?

  She was using Dietrich’s profile. It could be delivering her back to reception on some long-standing pre-programmed arrangement in case Dietrich got lost on his tour. The alternate theory, Louisa was almost reluctant to consider, was that the guide light was intended for her.

  She took a step towards the spot and it jumped with an almost happy bounce before settling down to a walking pace. She briefly considered her options and, not coming up with any better ideas, set off after it.

  She passed more of the misted doors, always on her right, with ever-decrementing designations: L–31, L–30, L–29.

  After a few minutes she regretted not trying a few of the doors to see what was inside. She hadn’t seen a soul so far. Surely everyone must have gone home?

  Then, after L–11, the spot ceased moving. Louisa looked around in confusion. They hadn’t stopped at a door. She was standing in a section of bare corridor.

  There was a faint sound. Tip-tap, tip-tap, tip-tap. Louisa cocked her head. It was getting louder.

  Footsteps! Just as the realisation hit the white spot shot back towards her and disappeared under the last set of doors. She hurried after it and flicked Dietrich’s ID at the doors. They slid silently apart.

  She caught a brief glimpse of a Portal console before the doors shut and the room plunged into darkness. The white spot was still there, casting a soft glow. Louisa eyed it suspiciously. It had reacted in an almost human way to the approaching footsteps. Then it winked out.

  Louisa spun around. The person came closer and closer—tip-tap, tip-tap—until they were just outside the room. They stopped. Louisa slowly backed up. She looked around for somewhere to hide but it was too dark to make anything out. She took another step. Something hit her in the rear. She jerked forward and slapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a yelp just as she realised she must have walked into the console.

  Louisa heard a footstep, then another. She let out a slow, strained breath as the person continued up the corridor.

  The white spot reappeared on the floor in front of her. It drifted towards the doors and then slid underneath. She moved to follow and then hesitated. The Portal console in the room might have the floor schematics. Or it could have a record of Claire when she was here.

  Louisa activated Dietrich’s terminal and when she flicked across his ID the console’s screen lit up. She scanned through the available extensions but didn’t recognise any of them. They might as well have been words written in a foreign language. She resisted the urge to try a few to see if they threw up a search query interface, wary of inadvertently setting off an alarm. Instead she waved her hand in front of the screen and another set appeared. She spotted one she knew this time from the MET Subnet—an environmental control interface. She accessed it and increased the room’s ambient lighting. A circle of light formed on the floor around the console’s pedestal. It expanded rapidly, growing steadily brighter and filling the room like an accelerated sunrise.

  The room was bigger than she’d originally thought. Much bigger. More like a warehouse or exhibition hall. Directly ahead a series of white boxes had been revealed, replicated in rows of four. They were the size of small rooms themselves. There had to be at least a hundred of them.

  Curious now, Louisa approached the box closest to the console. They reminded her of the meeting rooms in the Portal HQ foyer once Simon had turned the walls translucent. She couldn’t tell if the cubes were solid or if there was something inside. When she held up the terminal a cluster of icons appeared on the cube’s wall. She recognised the one Simon had used to de-mist the meeting room and tapped it.

  The walls cleared. Inside was a bed. No, a hospital cot. Like the one Jess had been lying in. The safety bars were raised alon
g the sides and a Portal screen was affixed to a metal rail at the head of the bed. A girl lay on the cot, with long black hair spread across her pillow. She was ventilated and attached to an IV. Just like Jess. This girl was a few years older, but likely still only a teenager. Something dangled under the cot. Louisa crouched. It was a cable, half an inch in diameter that ran from the bed, directly under the girls’ head, to the Portal console.

  She knew then with absolute certainty what it was. The girl has an implant in her neck and they’ve hooked it to the console. Claire must have been here, in this room, before she escaped. But apart from the implant this girl didn’t appear to be mistreated in any way. There were no cuts or bruising to the skin and the girl’s chest was slowly rising and falling so Louisa knew she was still alive.

  She took a step back from the glass. Did each of the cubes in the room have someone inside?

  ‘Excuse me, can I help you?’

  Louisa whirled around. A tiny, portly woman was standing in the doorway.

  Those damn silent doors.

  The woman approached. She was in her late forties and wearing a white lab coat much too big for her. It cleared the floor by a scant inch. Beneath it an oversized royal-blue blouse was stuffed into cream slacks. The woman had an affronted look on her face, as if Louisa had committed a cardinal sin by being in her lab. ‘Are you looking for someone?’

  Louisa wracked her brains for a plausible response. She really should have thought of a reason for being inside the facility if she was confronted. The woman’s annoyance morphed into suspicion. The woman held her terminal before her, a hand hovering over the screen as if preparing to set off every intrusion alarm in the facility. Who was she here to see? Apart from Simon and Dietrich Louisa knew of no-one else who worked for Portal.

  You do know someone; they’re just not alive.

  ‘Professor Keenan,’ Louisa blurted. ‘I’m a…relative. I’m here to collect his things.’

  ‘Oh,’ the woman said, ‘oh dear’. Her eyes darted left and right, as if looking for someone to come to her aid. ‘But no-one told me you were coming.’

  ‘I spoke to someone at HQ and they said I could come down out of office hours.’ Louisa gestured towards the unconscious girl. ‘I was curious about his research. He was always talking about it so…I wanted to have a look while I was here.’

  ‘Of course,’ the woman nodded, ‘of course.’ Then she looked up at the stitches on Louisa’s forehead, her eyes widening. ‘Were you in the accident as well?’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Of course you were. What a stupid thing to ask. I mean, just look at the state of you!’ The woman paused, a stricken look on her face. ‘I’m sorry. I babble when I get nervous. Please, follow me. I’ll take you to the Professor’s office.’

  The woman waddled out of the room as quickly as her diminutive stature would allow, which turned out to be as fast as Louisa could manage with her aching hip. Luckily the professor’s office was only one door away.

  The room was small, but had the same cookie-cutter features Louisa was fast realising were emulated throughout every Portal building. The professor had done his best to try and make it more homely for himself. A wide desk of dark wood took up practically a quarter of the room, with a comfortable looking black padded leather chair behind it. A bookcase, with some authentic-looking dead-tree books, rested against the opposite wall. Louisa didn’t think the professor had managed to imprint his personality onto the room in any substantive fashion. The minimalist Portal design rebelled against any such intrusion. Instead of the additions becoming one with the room, they were isolated and highlighted, like exhibits in an art gallery.

  ‘Please, take as long as you want,’ the woman said. ‘I’ll see you’re not disturbed.’ She backed out of the room and the doors slid shut behind her.

  There was a Portal console on the desk. Louisa sat down and activated it. The UI layout was familiar. It was similar to the one the MET used for managing case files on the MET Subnet. She wasted no time in querying for Claire Harris.

  Her heart leapt when a match came back and expanded into a history graph-style layout. Louisa scrolled through hundreds of entries. She selected one of the earliest, from November the previous year. Not long after Ben said Claire went missing.

  She recognised the extension which opened. Ed had shown it to her in the Cave. It was the emulator he’d used to display her profile state. But unlike her own profile, Claire’s was sharing out a huge amount of data via feeds. Claire’s first-person, geo-location, perception and activity feeds were all visible in separate windows. A sense feed attached to her profile showed an overhead view of Claire lying face down on a steel operating table, her face resting on a padded ring. She was wearing a white gown, laced up the back.

  Claire’s perception feed was represented in the standard format by an eight-spoked wheel, with each spoke covering a basic emotion. The intensity of each emotion increased as it approached the centre of the wheel and varying degrees of joy, sadness, trust, disgust, fear, anger, surprise, and anticipation were all reflected. Claire was in a state of mild apprehension according to the low level reading on the fear-spoke. Louisa started the simulation and all the windows came to life, streaming in real time.

  A woman entered the room. She was dressed in an aquamarine surgical gown, cap and mask. Only her eyes were uncovered. She proceeded to lay out instruments onto a metal tray beside the table. On Claire’s first-person view, the woman’s shoes came into view, a pair of yellow Crocs wrapped in sheer blue plastic. The woman bent to look up at Claire from under the table. ‘How are we doing down there, Claire?’

  ‘Okay, I guess,’ Claire said.

  ‘The local anaesthetic will have taken effect by now. You won’t feel a thing. I promise.’

  Another gowned-up person approached the table. A man this time. ‘All right then. Who do we have here?’

  ‘Claire Harris, Professor,’ the woman who had been talking to Claire replied.

  ‘Yes, very good,’ the professor said.

  Louisa sat up straighter. Professor Keenan?

  Claire’s hair was tied up and a cap covered her head, leaving the back of her neck exposed. The nurse laid a square of light-green cloth over the top of Claire’s neck and affixed it to each side of the table with some tape. A piece had been cut out, exposing a three-inch-wide circle of Claire’s pale skin. She applied a brown antiseptic wash to the area. The professor took a steel rod from the trolley. It was sharpened to a point at one end. He touched it to the back of Claire’s neck. ‘Do you feel anything, Claire?’

  Claire’s perception feed slipped a little closer to the centre of the fear spoke. ‘Eh…no?’

  The professor pressed harder with the rod. A drop of blood welled up at its tip. ‘How about now?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘Good, good. All right, Nurse, let’s make a start.’

  She handed the professor a scalpel and he deftly made a two-inch long vertical incision in the exposed skin.

  ‘Retractor, please,’ the professor said.

  The nurse handed him the retractor, which had the appearance of a deformed pair of scissors where the blades arced out from the pivot point and came together at the tips. Four small hooks descended from the end of each blade. The professor gently inserted the hooks into the incision and as he squeezed the retractor’s handles, the skin stretched apart to leave a gaping wound that immediately filled with blood. The nurse dabbed at the area with a swab. He pressed a small lever on the retractor with his thumb and set the instrument down on the cloth. The blades remained splayed apart, locked in place.

  The nurse dabbed at the wound again and when the blood was soaked up Louisa briefly saw the white of Claire’s skull. The nurse tore open a plastic packet and tipped the contents into a kidney-shaped steel bowl. A dark brown liquid spilled out. The nurse felt around with her fingers and picked out a small rounded black disc about the size of an old pound coin. The professor took it and inserted it
into the open wound, pressing firmly against the base of Claire’s skull. He then unclamped the retractor and teased the loose flaps of skin over the disc with his fingers. The nurse held up a tray with a suturing kit and the professor proceeded to close the wound, leaving a raised lump on the back of Claire’s neck once he was finished.

  The feed ceased playing. The whole procedure had lasted only a few minutes. Louisa had been expecting the terminal to be bigger based on the size of the wound Claire had sustained. Whoever ripped the thing out had been none too gentle.

  Louisa wanted to run all of the snapshots, but she was worried the woman would come to check up on her again. She scrolled to the most recent entry in the history graph. It was extracted in February, a full two months before Claire died.

  Claire was sitting on a bed when it started, her legs dangling over the side. She was in one of the same cubes Louisa had seen in the lab. She was looking around but the walls of the cube were misted so she couldn’t see out.

  There were many more feeds attached to this profile snapshot. Claire’s heart rate, blood pressure and a wealth of other diagnostic feeds were displayed. The perception feed indicated Claire was upset. The levels on the spokes flickered and changed, never staying still for more than a split second.

  A woman entered the cube. She was wearing a white lab coat; her blonde hair tied up in a way that made her head look vaguely like a pineapple. She looked to be in her early thirties and was pretty in a geeky sort of way, with a pair of thick dark-rimmed glasses Louisa thought did nothing for her. She walked straight over to the console above Claire’s bed and studied the diagnostic readout.

  ‘Can I leave now?’ Claire asked.

  ‘You can leave any time you want, Claire.’ The woman peered over her spectacles. She smiled, but it lacked any real warmth. ‘But you can only receive the remuneration for the trial if you complete it. That’s the agreement you signed up to. One more round of tests and then you’re finished. You don’t want to leave with nothing, after all you’ve been through, do you?’