The Forbidden City

by John McNally

  Finn took comfort as he watched him go. His uncle might wear glasses held together with tape, but he was reassuringly massive, in brain as well as bulk.

  Everything was dark and Finn supposed the others had already gone to bed.

  Then he heard a voice.

  “Feeling any better, Noob?” Delta asked, using her nickname for Finn.

  Suddenly – POP! – all the lights came on at once, dazzling him.

  “What the …?!”

  As Finn’s eyes adjusted to the light, he could make out three figures, some balloons, and … a Thing.

  “Surprise!”

  September 29 22:58 (GMT+1). Hook Hall, Surrey, UK.

  Delta slapped Finn on the back.

  “Happy nearly-birthday!” grinned Kelly.

  “Thought we’d cheer you up,” said Stubbs, deadpan.

  They stood back and let Finn take in the Thing.

  The others had been testing it for the last month. He’d glimpsed parts of it before, designs on-screen, but he’d never seen the whole thing.

  “The nCraft?” said Finn.

  “I see you’ve been paying attention,” said Kelly.

  “Say hello to the X1 Experimental Nano-thruster,” murmured Stubbs, reverentially.

  Delta bit her lip excitedly, like they had pulled off the best birthday surprise ever.

  “Guy’s a genius,” said Kelly, roughing Stubbs’s remaining hair.

  “It’s fast as a whip and can turn on a pin!” said Delta.

  “It’s –” Finn tried to put it into words – “a little ugly.”

  Three faces fell at once. He thought Kelly would cry or hit him. “This isn’t a beauty contest!” he yelled.

  It was, thought Finn, like one of those weird deep-sea fish that had evolved in the perpetual gloom of an ocean trench. Roughly the size of a limousine at their scale, it had a gawping front grill like a great mouth and two headlamp eyes. It had multiple stubby wings and rudders that looked like fins, and a tail section with a scorched and nasty-looking exhaust, and its underside was regularly pockmarked with clusters of small thruster units.

  “I’m not being mean,” said Finn, apologetically. “I’m just saying it looks like an ugly bug and when you go into production—”

  “It’s the prototype!” shouted Kelly. “You think we’d let you near one of the new X2 models?”

  “So shallow,” sighed Delta.

  “Hey, I’m still twelve –” Finn checked his watch – “just. I’m meant to be shallow!”

  “Well then I don’t suppose for one moment,” said Stubbs, “you’ll be wanting a go.”

  And with that he flicked a switch on the outside of the craft. Computers and gyroscopes woke within, turbines turned over and the Bug came alive. Lights blazed all over its body and it floated off the ground, suspended on a cushion of air, flexing its tail and wings to keep absolutely steady.

  “Wow,” said Finn, gobsmacked.

  “We’ve ‘borrowed’ it for one night only. Not a word to anyone, especially not to Al,” warned Kelly.

  “Note the extraordinary stability,” Stubbs began, gearing up to explain the technicalities. “A central jet runs a compressor that feeds cold gas rockets all over the body controlled by an intelligent thrust-vectoring syst—”

  “OK, OK, I want a go!” said Finn.

  With a high-pitched hum from the jet engine beneath them and the hiss of collective thrusters, they rose steadily towards the roof of the Central Field Analysis Chamber. On top of the Bug was an open cab with four seats, a roll cage, a windscreen and some crude controls. It was like sitting in a fat flying sports car, thought Finn, yet with a ride so gentle they might have been in a bubble. There was also a mount for an M249 Minimi light machine gun, to defend themselves against insects and any other threat they might face in the outside world.

  They had to be careful, the craft was supposedly strictly out of bounds in Lab Three, but the Duty Techs were in Lab Two and Stubbs and Kelly had nobbled some of their monitoring equipment, smuggling the Bug out through the model rail network, first to the nano-compound in Lab One, then into the vast, empty spaces of the CFAC.

  Finn was just admiring the view as they rose above the stone circle of particle accelerators when Delta said, “OK, brace,” and punched her arms forward against the dual joysticks.

  Finn’s head snapped back and the roof rushed by, his insides galloping hopelessly to catch up with his skeleton, as Delta turned hard to avoid hitting the far wall of the hangar. They shot back across the CFAC at roof level, then dived and … SLAM! Halfway to the ground Delta made the Bug turn 90 degrees without bothering to slow down, the nCraft morphing to deliver thrust at all the right angles at once. Finn was left gasping.

  Delta then plunged towards the rows of benches crammed with computers surrounding the accelerator array. Down they went, skimming along the desks, slaloming the accelerators and monitors, whipping up paperwork, then down again to rollercoaster beneath benches and between chair legs, then up again into empty space.

  Finn’s mind was spinning. They were not flying: they were motion itself. Pure euphoria battled memories of his terror-flight, trapped on the back of the Scarlatti wasp the previous spring, till – SLAM! – Delta opened up the reverse thrusters and stopped the Bug dead. Finn was thrown forward so hard he thought he was going to bring up his lungs, never mind his dinner.

  In sudden stillness, he took a gulp of air and looked at the clock on the lab wall. It was midnight, his birthday: his turn. He grinned.

  Finn climbed across and took the controls, and for one minute and forty-nine seconds he had the best birthday ever.

  Delta ordered him not to think too much. “Just point and shoot.”

  He took hold of the twin sticks, looked at the far wall of the CFAC and pushed them forward.

  The Bug shot forward, so he eased back, getting a feel for the power as he coasted the entire length of the building, rising all the time. He felt a surging joy and remembered sitting on his mother’s knee steering her old Citroën 2CV around a beach car park in the rain.

  He accelerated and made a turn, arcing back around, just below the roof, then more turns.

  Then he began to throw the Bug around like rodeo horse. It was easy. The speed and distance you could cover was awesome and the handling was amazing – it felt as though you had thrust from a thousand places at once.

  It felt alive. This was almost better than being big.

  He flew up towards the Control Gallery that overlooked the CFAC, then dived and curled to fly around the circle of accelerators like Ben Hur around the circus maximus, laughing and loving it, until …

  POP! POP! POP!

  For the second time that night he was dazzled by sudden bright lights.

  Delta leapt across and snatched the controls from him, pulling the Bug to a halt and leaving them hanging in mid-air, staring down at a group of incoming officials, hurrying across the CFAC towards the gantry steps of the Control Gallery.

  “What’s happening?” asked Finn.

  “Oh no …” said Stubbs. “King.”

  Finn looked over. The great hanger doors of the CFAC were whirring open and Commander King was crossing the chamber, trailing aides and flanked by General Mount of the British High Command on one side and the head of British Intelligence on the other. Then, even more remarkably – VROOOOM! SCREEEEECH! – in roared a 1969 De Tomaso Mangusta, and out hopped Al.

  “Good evening, Dr Allenby,” uttered King, trying to ignore the showy entrance.

  “Peter. Wendy. Tink,” Al said to the trio. All three, used to his odd sense of humour, ignored it and carried on up the steps.

  Finn’s heart was in his mouth, he looked at the others and they were already grinning.

  “It’s the G&T. It’s meeting.”

  They should have been afraid, they were absent without leave in the Bug. But suddenly the normal rules didn’t seem to apply any more.

  After the months of tedium and frustration somethi
ng was happening.

  Nine miles away, Grandma was finding it difficult to sleep. She had been on her way to bed with her cocoa when she’d heard Al’s car pull up in front of the house, only to take off again immediately. Perhaps he’d forgotten something and gone back for it? Perhaps he’d decided to go back to his bed in London for the night? Perhaps anything, really. She’d got into bed and tried to put it out of her mind, but the moment she closed her eyes a maternal sixth sense had kicked in. What if something was wrong?

  She called Al. Straight to voicemail. She called Commander King. Straight to voicemail.

  She smelt a rat.

  DAY ONEfn1 00:03 (GMT+1), September 30. Hook Hall, Surrey, UK.

  “HEY!” Kelly called out as they descended. “WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL?”

  Al’s head snapped up. Did he hear something? A high-pitched whining? A wasp? No … it was a nano-jet.

  “HERE!” came the shout again and Al saw a lit-up fat bumblebee- sized Thing dropping towards him.

  “Woah!” Al shouted. “We’ve got the nano-crew in the house! Nobody move!”

  Everybody in the CFAC, from Commander King down, froze. This shouldn’t be happening. The nano-crew was supposed to be tracked at all times.

  Al held out his hand and the Bug landed on it. Four tiny figures disembarked and were quickly surrounded by angry giants.

  “I can explain …” Kelly started.

  “What the hell?!” Al said. “I was about to come and wake you all. And you, young man,” he said to Finn, “aren’t supposed to know this vehicle even exists!”

  “It’s his birthday present! We were just taking the kid for a ride!” said Kelly.

  “I’m telling my mum!” Al said.

  This sent a bolt of fear through Finn.

  “That’s a top-secret, prototype nano-vehicle of incalculable value and you have just put all your lives in danger,” Commander King hissed from on high.

  “Ah, nuts. He’s thirteen years old. What were you doing at thirteen?” said Delta.

  “I was at Eton,” said Commander King.

  “This country needs a revolution,” said Kelly.

  “We don’t have the time,” said Commander King, turning smartly to lead the way up the gantry. “Come.”

  They entered the Control Gallery as it was blinking to life, the place crammed with computers and control systems. Various members of the Global Non-governmental Threat Response Committee were already settling themselves around a giant horseshoe-shaped table.

  As Al sat, he placed the Bug on the table in front of him then carefully transferred all four of the crew to the Sony Walkman nDen, which he hooked to his top pocket and tapped to switch on the loudspeaker.

  Commander King called the meeting to order with the words: “Lock us down”.

  Doors locked and blinds whirred down across the long gallery windows. Numerous screens switched on, showing live feed images of the UK Prime Minister and the other world leaders who sat on the G&T. For the first time in ages, Finn tasted danger and, with only a hint of guilt, felt a growing excitement.

  Commander King turned to the main screen. On it appeared the two most powerful men in China: the President of the People’s Republic and his security chief, Bo Zhang.

  “Zaoshang hao daren.” Commander King addressed the President with courtly authority.

  “Good morning from Beijing,” replied the President in perfect English.

  “Mr President,” King began, “on behalf of the Global Non-govern—”

  “Yeah, it’s late here,” Al interrupted. “Let’s skip the diplomatics and catch up at Christmas instead. What have we got?”

  “Thank you, Dr Allenby,” sighed King, and ordered: “Slide.”

  A picture appeared on the central screen.

  It was of a Chinese police officer inside his car.

  Dead.

  “Shanghai, China, twenty-four hours ago. A dead police officer with no obvious sign of injury. He’d been running a simple ID and security check on a young foreigner.”

  Blurred CCTV footage appeared on-screen.

  “White Caucasian male, false Belgian passport, no fingerprints, nothing to trace. We think late teens. He popped up enough times on both the Airport and Forbidden City CCTV systems to provoke a routine stop-and-search enquiry.”

  “The Forbidden City? I’ve been there with Her Majesty the Queen and it is most certainly not in Shanghai,” asserted the Prime Minister with idiotic certainty. “It’s in Beijing – look it up.”

  “Correct, the Forbidden City was the Imperial Palace of Chinese emperors for centuries, but it’s also the name of the 23rd Industrial Progress Zone of Shanghai, a massive purpose-built, high-tech hub to the South of the city.”

  Pictures flashed up on-screen of a factory complex, miles of production lines, thousands of masked workers in shiny white facilities; then of the whole huge industrial area from the air – laid out like a complex crop circle. A diagram was then overlaid, illustrating the layout and adding numbers.

  “Genius!” said Al.

  “It’s a picture of Pi!” Finn called out, delighted.

  “Correct,” King said. “The city is laid out as a circle divided into tenths. The ratcheting out of each arc, or sector, expresses the number Pi in multiples of one tenths of a rotation, thus – 3.141592654 recurring – the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.”

  “You worked that out?” said Al, amazed at Finn’s insight.

  “We got shown it once in class,” Finn admitted.

  “It’s the densest area of computer manufacturing in the world and the site of several advanced research plants,” King continued. “A newspaper dubbed it the Forbidden City when it was being built and the name stuck. Nearly every piece of technology we’re using and communicating on now was produced in China, much of it here –” he pointed to the screen – “in the world’s hardware hub.”

  King returned to the picture of the dead policeman, then turned to the video feed from China.

  “Secretary Zhang?”

  Bo Zhang rose, poised, proud and perfect, mind as sharp as the creases in his uniform – the most powerful man in the world under forty, with some 10 million security personnel under his command. He was uncomfortable having to defer to a foreigner, but his President was a founding signatory of the G&T (which Bo had only that morning learned the existence of).

  “Commander,” he began, in perfect English, “Officer Ju intercepted the suspect in a food hall in sector 9 of the Forbidden City at 7:22am yesterday morning. CCTV analysis shows he’d travelled directly into the Forbidden City from Shanghai Airport six times over the previous five weeks. When questioned, the suspect contradicted this surveillance information and Officer Ju made a decision to bring him in. Last contact by radio was at 7:24am. An assault of some kind then took place. There were no marks on the body apart from a pinprick wound on the right temple. When the cranium was opened, massive nerve damage was observed in a clear path from the wound.”

  An animation flashed up, a revolving 3D CAT scan of a human head, with broad red lines marking the projectile’s devastating progress through the brain.

  It was like a child’s scribble inside someone’s head, thought Finn, and it reminded him of something …

  “No weapon known to our analysts could have caused such damage. Given the global strategic importance of the Forbidden City complex, this committee was informed.”

  “Weird …” Al said, and got up to look more closely.

  “What could have done this?” asked the UK Prime Minister.

  “The most extraordinary bullet in history …” Al muttered as he studied the diagram. “How big was the projectile?”

  “One point five millimetres square,” Bo Zhang replied.

  Then Finn remembered. “It’s like what a grub would do to an apple! Or if a human botfly gets trapped in a human skull and eats and eats through the brain till the person goes mad and eventually dies.”

  “A what?” ask
ed the Head of British Security in disgust.

  “A human botfly,” came the voice from the box on Al’s top pocket. “I’ve always wanted one. How long was he under attack?”

  “Less than two minutes. Who am I addressing?” asked Bo, confused.

  “One of the nano subjects,” explained King.

  Al popped open the Sony Walkman before a camera to reveal the four tiny people ranged across the sofa. They waved. Bo, who had been frankly disbelieving of their existence to this point, gave the tiniest nod back.

  “But an insect didn’t do this,” said King, returning to task. “This is the suspect arriving on a flight from Macau.” He called up an image of a man in an airport security line. “And this is his hand luggage.”

  An X-Ray image of his bag appeared. King zoomed in on a bright but tiny dot that seemed to be inside the top of a pen. Al went right up close and screwed up his eyes.

  From the nDen it looked like nothing Finn had ever seen. A piece of magnified metal plankton. A black shell, some kind of square eye, a whip-like antenna, an ugly open hole (a mouth?) with a protruding rail and dangling beneath: spilled steel guts, tentacles, tools and connectors. A sharp squid of a thing.

  “A robot?” Finn wondered aloud.

  Al took off his glasses and gave them a clean.

  “Whatever it is,” said Al, “it’s been shrunk.”

  There was an awful silence.

  “Are you sure?” asked the Prime Minister, appalled.

  “Well, I can’t see exactly, but it looks like an incredibly sophisticated machine. The only way, in my opinion, to engineer something like that would be to build it at full size and subject it to the Boldklub shrinking process. Kaparis escaped Scarlatti with a chunk of my crucial Boldklub sequencing codefn2. We always suspected he had an accelerator, maybe he’s figured out enough to take it this far. He won’t have cracked the key fractal equations, and I doubt he’s anywhere near shrinking living things, but crude, rude, oily machines he may have mastered.”

  Everyone but Bo Zhang knew who he was talking about.

  “You have a suspect?” Bo asked.

  King called up an image of a young, able bodied, jackal-handsome Kaparis trying to avoid a camera flash in Basel, Switzerland in 1994. Jet black eyes, jaw taut with suppressed anger.