The Forbidden City

by John McNally

  “Shh!” whispered Finn, back in her hair by her ear. “Remember they’re everywhere. They have eyes. Keep your voice low and your lips still and everything will be cool.”

  “I’m surrounded by killer fleas and now a tiny little guy is talking in my hair. Nothing is cool. Everything’s crazy. No one’s going to blame me for talking to myself.”

  She felt him wriggle closer towards her ear, the movement provoking an intense reflexive urge to—

  “Don’t scratch!” yelled Finn.

  “Don’t say that! It makes it worse!” she hissed.

  Finn emerged over her ear and anchored himself in her curls. It reminded him of clinging to Yo-yo’s fur – just much, much cleaner.

  He took an energy bar out of Kelly’s pack, then tied it up in some curls. There were three ration packs left. Who knew how long he’d have to make them last?

  “You shouldn’t have done this. It’s a trap. They’re not interested in me,” Carla murmured. “They’ll see I’m free and come and get me.”

  “They’ll figure you’re trapped in here anyway,” said Finn. “What happened to you? I thought you’d got away.”

  “They got me in the mall, then brought me here through a carnival sewer.”

  “A what?”

  “This theme park place on the river – Ferris wheel, cable car, rides and shows – they’d dug under a haunted house down into the sewers. The sewers led here.”

  “Some back door. How many Tyros are there?”

  “Three. The freaky twins and the leader.”

  “You OK?” asked Finn.

  She fell silent a moment.

  “I’m thinking of giving up the cello. Orchestra practice just won’t be the same after this. What about you?”

  “I made it in here, hooked up with Kelly and Stubbs, but then the bots swarmed. Kelly just got captured, and Stubbs …”

  It was his turn to go silent.

  “The girl has freed herself in the Shen Yu Hall,” reported Li Jun.

  Kaparis switched to bot-feeds from the great, dead quantum computer and watched Carla staggering around in the flood.

  “Mmm. Resourceful. But she’s not going anywhere and she may even do a better job attracting Drake if she’s on the move.”

  Should he leave her in there, or send in Baptiste to bring her out as an insurance policy? There was little time left and—

  Baptiste interrupted the thought. “Exodus Hive 1 and 2 complete,” said the voice.

  Kaparis switched video feeds and took in Spike and Scar.

  Both had a fever and a desperate mottled rash that blackened their shaking extremities. But both had stopped bleeding.

  Kaparis allowed himself a smile. Even if, regrettably, it seemed unlikely they’d capture Drake immediately, the sight of the twins about to start the exodus warmed him.

  “Good,” said Kaparis. “Let’s paint the town red.”

  DAY FIVE 10:41 (Local GMT+8). The Forbidden City, Shanghai.

  Thud. Thud.

  Spike and Scar dropped down into the sewer.

  Both were shaking. Swollen. Dying.

  Thud.

  Baptiste dropped into the tunnel beside them, alive with the fire of a demon. He started a motorbike for each of them and helped them to climb on. “Go!” he ordered.

  Scar nodded through her fever and was the first to turn the throttle. Spike followed suit.

  Then the two bikes took off, swaying as they sped up, the tunnel scrolling into being in the bright headlights ahead of them.

  The twins clung to their handlebars as they clung to life.

  Baptiste climbed back out of the sewer without a second look.

  Carla stood back and kicked.

  BANG.

  The doors on the north side of the hall, just like those on the south, showed no sign of giving way.

  Water was gushing from the open valve of a fire hydrant and the gaps around both sets of doors let just enough out to keep the hall under a constant ten macro-centimetres or so of water.

  “Unless we find something more useful – a key, say – we are not getting through this door,” concluded Carla.

  “We’ve got to get out before noon,” said Finn. He’d told her about the release of the Frankenstein bot. With Kelly in the clutches of the botmass his greatest hope now matched his greatest fear: hope that Frankenstein had passed on the virus and not just drifted off untouched; fear that Kelly would die in the ensuing fireball.

  They had to get help; they had to get word to Al.

  Carla looked up at the roof. “I could try higher. Climb the towers, try and reach the vents?”

  “How?” said Finn, exasperated.

  “Levitate?” suggested Carla.

  Down on the water, the blue plastic bag they’d used as a parachute for the raft earlier drifted past. Finn imagined Stubbs’s floating corpse and couldn’t stop emotion welling up for the old man.

  “We could try and start a fire,” suggested Carla. “Then, if they saw the smoke …”

  BANG!

  “Ow!” Carla jumped and Finn had to hang on.

  “What was that?!” said Finn.

  “Something just bit me!” said Carla, rubbing her butt.

  “What?”

  Finn looked down. The bag … There was a splashing by it, a tiny splashing …

  “CARLA! THE BAG! Pick up that plastic bag!” shouted Finn.

  “What?”

  “I think Stubbs just shot you in the butt!”

  Carla reached down.

  “CAREFUL! Lift it up really gently …”

  Please, please, be Stubbs, Finn prayed to himself.

  Gently, Carla lifted the crumpled bag out of the water and brought it closer to her face.

  Desperately trying to swim in some water trapped in the folds, like a drowning maggot, was a half-naked old man.

  “Oh my God …” Carla gasped.

  “STUBBS!” yelled Finn out of sheer joy.

  Stubbs was too concentrated on staying afloat to reply. Carla stuck her thumb in the water and Stubbs beached himself against it.

  “Drop the bag! Remember they can see you! Put your head in your hands like you’re upset,” said Finn.

  Like an actress responding to a director, Carla obeyed, hair flopping over her face as she slid her great hands through it, her fingers appearing around Finn like a pod of dolphins.

  “That’s great. You’re doing great.”

  “Don’t patronise me,” muttered Carla.

  Finn climbed up on to the giant thumb and ran along, pushing aside the tresses of hair to find Stubbs flat out.

  “M-m-m-my-b-boy …” he chattered.

  On the roof of the Greenharbour Inc. building in Sector 2, Baptiste pushed open an access hatch.

  The bots had formed a cluster like a snow drift, a dozen metres away across the slope of glassy, photovoltaic tiles. When they saw Baptiste, many swirled around checking him out, then flew back to the cluster.

  Baptiste pulled himself out of the hatch and stood up on the roof itself.

  Then he took a hammer from his jacket and brought it down – SMASH! – on the tiles.

  SMASH! SMASH! SMASH!

  tubbs was shivering and short of breath, his left shoulder and collarbone still strapped up in the bandage Kelly had made. He’d lost everything except his trousers and the Magnum pistol, and he looked even older than normal. But there was life in the old dog yet and only one thing on his mind. “Did you catch one? Did you plant the brain?”

  “Yes, but it floated off like a zombie,” said Finn, lashing Stubbs in place next to him in Carla’s hair.

  “But did it slap its antennae against the others?” asked Stubbs.

  “I don’t know, that’s when we came under attack,” Finn said.

  “Are you all set? Can I move now?” asked Carla.

  “All set,” said Finn, and Carla started her slosh through the server aisles looking for a place to climb.

  Stubbs looked concerned. “It flew? So
it was operational?” he said.

  “Yes, but I didn’t see it touch any of the others …”

  “It must have. They’re constantly exchanging power and stopping to recharge. They’re desperate for power.”

  “How do you know?” asked Finn.

  “Stop, miss – look down at the waterline, look at that cooler unit …”

  Carla stopped and they looked. The water was flowing past a half-submerged cooler unit on the face of a server. The flow was spinning the blades of the fan, turning the motor and creating electricity. A gang of bots had clustered to it to feed on the power being generated.

  “The fan is acting as a hydro-electric waterwheel, a dynamo producing a trickle of powerfn1. My guess is they have just enough energy to operate, but not enough to reproduce themselves.”

  “Wow,” said Carla, impressed.

  “You wouldn’t believe the stuff he knows,” said Finn.

  “Does he know how we’re going to get out of here?” asked Carla.

  Stubbs, lashed in place, looked puzzled.

  “Get out? We’re safer in here. The bots will blow up at noon.”

  “What about Kelly?” said Finn. “He’s probably in the middle of the cluster. We’ve got to get him out of there!”

  Stubbs looked grave.

  “He would never want us to risk your life,” said Stubbs.

  “I’m not going to let him die with those things!”

  “How are you even going to find him?” asked Stubbs, puzzled.

  “I don’t know!” yelled Finn.

  Stubbs gave him a look.

  “Sorry …” said Finn. “I could go fishing again. Let them capture me this time?”

  Stubbs thought it through for him.

  “The bots capture you, take you back to the cluster, we were kept together last time so it may be you’d be held with or near Kelly …”

  “Right!”

  “Then you both die at noon,” said Stubbs.

  “But there’s still five shots in the Magnum,” said Finn. “We could escape, shoot our way out.”

  “You shoot a handful, then the rest catch you. Then you both die,” repeated Stubbs.

  “I have a cockroach disguise! And it works!” said Finn.

  “Then you die in fancy dress,” Carla chipped in. “Stubbs is right. There’s no point in a suicide mission.”

  “Hey! Kelly’s our friend. There’s no way he’d leave any of us behind!” said Finn.

  “Even supposing your costume works,” said Stubbs, “do you really think you’ll have time to scramble unnoticed from the centre of a cluster without some form of …”

  Stubbs froze mid-sentence. There was a sudden half turn of his old head and he seemed to slip into a trance. Finn could sense the old cogs turning as he repeated to himself, “… some form of …”

  “Yes?!”

  “… escape mechanism. Something with speed, surprise, lift …”

  Finn’s heart beat faster. “And where could I find something like that?”

  “We could build a Zeplin …” Stubbs whispered in engineering ecstasy.

  “A Zeplin?” said Finn.

  “I think they might spot a Zeplin,” Carla observed.

  But Stubbs was not to be denied. He was untying himself from Carla’s hair, his mind spinning.

  “We could use the dynamos … make a hydrogen balloon … I could pilot … Miss! Don’t lose that plastic bag!”

  “Hydrogen? Where are we going to get hydrogen from?” asked Finn.

  Stubbs looked at him as if he was a complete idiot.

  DAY FIVE 10:52 (Local GMT+8). Roof of the World, Shanghai.

  A police team on Penghu Island found the source of the nPhone signal at 10:48.

  It was located on a rock in a phosphate-rich dollop of bird excrement. Under orders from Shanghai, the nPhone was sifted from the excrement (identified as that of a Great Frigate Bird by a local ornithologist), cleaned, inductively charged and finally switched on.

  Under a magnifying glass the screen of the nPhone was found to contain the unsent text:

  here 3island juSt rcks weRe in bigmiddle weatherlovly

  This information, when put together with the known migratory path of the Great Frigate Bird, led to an area of the South China Sea being examined for a group of three small islands. Four candidates were identified, quickly whittled down to one following the discovery of an email detailing concerns about Song Island from a Taiwanese coastguard official who had since disappeared without trace.

  Commander King asked the formal permission of the President of France to prepare the Commando Hubert waiting on the special operations vessel A645 Alizé. The President informed him the Commandos were already – “In theatre, on message, and enchanté”.

  The breakthrough had been trumped, however, by the arrival of the first drone images of a possible cluster on a roof of the Forbidden City. Al and Bo rushed to the monitors to study them. Only a few frames of video had been recorded before the bots took out the overflying drone, but there it was – a dark blot on the roof of the Greenharbour Inc. building. Plain as day. Beside it was a figure, one of the Tyros, smashing up the roof around it.

  “What is he doing?” asked Commander King.

  “I don’t know, but the sooner we get in there and take a look, the better,” said Al.

  “What’s your status, Delta?”

  Delta had been helicoptered directly into Sector 9 of the Forbidden City. From her command position in the nDen, with a Yo-yo’s-eye view of a line of soldiers’ legs, she reported back, “He’s just waking up. Give him one minute to stretch, but it’s looking good.”

  Yaaaaaaaaaawww! yawned Yo-yo, intrigued to be waking up in the middle of a military formation.

  “And I’m still going to kill you when I get out of here,” finished Delta.

  “Copy that,” said Al.

  “Never mind that mutt!” said General Jackman on-screen from the US. “Let loose the dogs of war! There’s your target, plain as day, on that rooftop! Bomb it now!”

  The squadron of Flying Leopard fighter bombers remained fuelled and armed on the tarmac at Dachang airbase.

  “Negative. This may be one of many clusters and any kind of blast will leave them scattered to the wind,” King said.

  “If we can get the dog in—” Al started.

  “If we can get the dog in, it will probably waste a great deal of time and wind up dead – as will Salazar – your last little friend and my best pilot!” said Jackman. “If you see the whites of your enemy’s eyes – you fire. This may be our last chance.”

  “Move your family members in there, General, then you can bomb who you like!” Al snapped back.

  “Dang,” agreed Delta over the radio from Yo-yo.

  The British Prime Minister felt moved to intervene.

  “Dr Allenby, Flight Lieutenant Salazar, we are all very sorry about the youngsters. But this is war.”

  “The future cannot rest on sentiment,” agreed the US President.

  “Nor on emotional blackmail,” the Chinese Premier concluded.

  Al could already read the moves the committee and Commander King would soon be forced to make.

  “The future rests on science, on logic!” Al protested, feeling himself running out of ideas.

  The game he was playing with Kaparis was slipping beyond his control. He felt bullied. His opponent held all the cards and was openly cheating, and there was nothing that he could do about it but keep on going back for more. And there wasn’t just one enemy either, but millions of tiny enemies … Was he really going to send Delta in too?

  “Talk to us,” said King. “Convince us.”

  Talk, thought Al. If only he could talk to the bots …

  And in that moment a whole new thought struck him. Millions of tiny thoughts.

  He pushed back his glasses real slow. King, familiar with the gesture, raised an arm to indicate no one should interrupt at this point. Something was going on behind the spectacles.r />
  “How far did we get detecting any signals?” Al asked the technicians.

  “We’ve spent forty-eight hours tracing every point on the signals spectrum,” said one of them. “We occasionally come across single random letters or numbers, but nothing coherent. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. And this is the biggest city in the world, the radio spectrum here is packed full – radio, TV, Telecoms, Emergency, Digital – the signals volume is vast.”

  “What if … he’s splitting the signal up in to a million tiny pieces, scattering it across the spectrum of signals, then the bots put it back together again?”

  “Then … we’ll never find it,” said a technician. “It would be millions of parts of a single needle in thousands of haystacks. And how do you even start to look for that?”

  Al blinked. Stared. Shook his head. “You’re right, don’t waste any more time on—”

  “I know how to find a needle in a haystack,” said a voice.

  Al turned. “Hudson?”

  “You burn down the haystack. We did this question with a supply teacher once. If you burn down the haystack, you just have to sift the ash and you’ll find it much quicker.”

  “You burn down the haystack,” repeated Al.

  It was Hudson’s turn to push back his glasses. “And he showed us how to suck water up into a glass using three matchsticks too,” he continued, only to be interrupted by—

  “BURN THE HAYSTACKS!” cried Al, his mind racing. “If he’s fragmenting his signal and hiding it in a thousand haystacks – how do you find it? – get rid of the haystacks! The fragmented signal will have nowhere else to go.”

  He turned and ranted at the technicians and Chinese authorities.

  “Shut down TV stations, radio stations, mobile phone signals, wireless broadband, anything you can think of – the more we reduce the signals traffic, the more hidden signal we should find – if that’s true, then we’ve got him!”

  The technicians started to chatter among themselves as they ran with the idea.

  “Shut down all communications?” asked Commander King.

  “All but one – leave one signal on.”

  “Can we do any of that?” The Chinese President asked Bo and his staff.