Resistance is Futile
Page 1
Jenny T. Colgan is a pseudonymn for Jenny Colgan, the author of numerous bestselling novels, including Christmas at the Cupcake Café and Little Beach Street Bakery. Meet Me at the Cupcake Café won the 2012 Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance and was a Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller, as was Welcome to Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop of Dreams, which won the RNA Romantic Novel of the Year Award 2013. Under the J. T. Colgan pen name, Jenny has also written the Doctor Who tie-in novel Dark Horizons and the Doctor Who short story Into the Nowhere. Jenny is married with three children and lives in London and France. For more about Jenny, visit her website and her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter: @jennycolgan.
Find out more about Jenny T. Colgan and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at www.orbitbooks.net.
BY JENNY T. COLGAN
Resistance Is Futile
Doctor Who: Dark Horizons
BY JENNY COLGAN
Amanda’s Wedding
Talking to Addison
Looking for Andrew McCarthy
Working Wonders
Do You Remember the First Time?
Where Have All the Boys Gone?
West End Girls
Operation Sunshine
Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend
The Good, the Bad and the Dumped
Meet Me at the Cupcake Café
Welcome to Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop of Dreams
Christmas at the Cupcake Café
The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris
Christmas at Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop
Little Beach Street Bakery
The Christmas Surprise
Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery
Polly and the Puffin
COPYRIGHT
Published by Orbit
978-0-3565-0539-8
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Jenny Colgan
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Spiral image copyright © 2015 by
Edmund Harriss (maxwelldemon.com)
Map copyright © 2015 by Little, Brown Book Group
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
ORBIT
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DZ
www.littlebrown.co.uk
www.hachette.co.uk
Resistance is Futile
Table of Contents
About the Author
By Jenny T. Colgan
COPYRIGHT
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Acknowledgements
This book is dedicated to my wonderful father, who introduced me to Isaac Asimov, Close Encounters, Robert Fisk and all the rest. Although don’t read Chapter 18 (just Dad – the rest of you can). Erm or, actually, Chapter 19. But apart from that, enjoy.
I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
At first glance, the dead hand looked almost beautiful. Outstretched, thrown open and perfectly clear. Transparent, as if made of resin or glass or ice: a piece of sculpture.
If you weren’t heading that way – and only six people on the planet were authorised to be heading that way – you could have missed it entirely.
Missed the soft, puffy, empty flesh behind the lip of the spotless desk, in the room with no wastepaper bins; no dust, no papers or bags or mess: nothing at all. Apart from the completely drained, clear, plasticised, beautiful corpse.
It would start to break down soon, and then the sensors which detected movement and dirt and scents would all spring into action. But for now, all was quiet. The CCTVs scanned over the area again, then stopped, whizzed, burred and back, again and again. But their eyes were as sightless as the colourless man who lay, bloodless, vacant, on a spotless floor, underneath the spotless desk in the pure, white room.
Chapter One
Mrs Harmon wasn’t particularly pleased to be forced out of her cosy caretaker’s cubby-hole to show yet another newbie around, and she wasn’t afraid to show it.
‘Here’s the main office,’ she said with bad grace. So far this week it had been generally polite young men with shy smiles or clever, blinking eyes.
This lanky girl with bright red hair didn’t fit the pattern at all, so she wasn’t going to waste half her morning in the freezing corridors pointing out toilets.
She sniffed, regretting as she did so eating her lunchtime KitKat at 9 a.m. again. At least when she worked in a prison there had been a bit of banter from time to time. But academics – bloody hell.
How was it a job anyway? Sitting around, drinking coffee and leaving their cups unwashed for her to collect like some kind of cup fairy. And they got paid way more than her, she was sure of it. For scribbling their funny signs everywhere. Sometimes Mrs Harmon wasn’t entirely sure academics weren’t just all pretending, like a very elaborate form of benefit fraud.
It would have surprised her to know that Dr Connie MacAdair, PhD in probability algebras, Glasgow, post-doctoral scholar in probabilistic number theory, MIT, tipped as a possible future Fields medallist and with an Erdös number of 3, sometimes felt exactly the same way.
Connie blinked.
‘Sorry, did you say this was the main office?’
If asked to describe what she was looking at, the first phrase that would have occurred to her would probably have been ‘bunker, following a nuclear attack’.
‘Open plan,’ sniffed Mrs Harmon, as if this were an excuse.
The grey room was beneath ground level in the ugly modern block; its few bolted windows showed people’s feet tramping to and fro in the rain. It was large and dark and square, very gloomy, lined with tables like a primary-school classroom.
There were no computers, just rows of empty plug points. The most overwhelming impression was of balled-up paper and wadded, overflowing bins. Blackboards and whiteboards lined the walls. Several of the latter had print-out facilities, and great curls of paper rolled across the floor like unfurled tongues. Connie has seen pictures of the maths department: it was beautiful. This was clearly some overflow holding area.
&n
bsp; There were paper cups and paper plates, often holding the traces of previous meals. It smelled of mathematics, which felt comfortingly familiar to Connie: a mixture of dusty, crumbed calculators; hastily applied deodorant; old coffee with, underneath it, an unlikely yet undeniable whiff of Banda paper ink.
It was currently empty. And not at all what Connie had expected after the flattering interview, the amazing offer of a post-doc fellowship in her very own specialty, in one of the most beautiful academic cities on Earth, digs included, no teaching, just pure freedom to work for the next two years.
This, she reminded herself, was a dream job, an unexpectedly amazing opportunity in these days of cut research budgets and straitened universities. She’d been on cloud nine since she got the letter.
‘So, here you are,’ said Mrs Harmon, pointedly looking at her watch.
‘Oh yes,’ said Connie, her heart suddenly beating a little faster. She’d thought this job was too good to be true. Maybe she’d been right. ‘Um, yes, I suppose… is there a desk for me?’
Over in the far corner was a small cleared space, with one dead pot plant sitting in the middle of it.
‘Okay,’ said Connie, turning round, perplexed. ‘I just have a few more questions…’
But Mrs Harmon was gone. She moved, Connie noticed, surprisingly fast for someone with such a low centre of gravity.
Connie glanced around, just in case her new colleagues had decided to hide under their desks and jump out and throw a surprise welcome party for her that would then go awkwardly shy and wrong. It had happened before.
But the room was deathly silent. She crossed it and looked up at a window and the grey paving stones. Then she pulled up a little chair and hauled herself onto it. Well, that was better, if still not the beautiful book-lined office in an ancient sun-dappled tower that she’d allowed herself to imagine.
Just beyond the pathway that bounded this big, ugly building was straight countryside: they were on the very verge of the campus. In the distance, nearly hidden by the drizzling rain, were the rolling gentle fens that surrounded the college town; closer in, a patch of grass criss-crossed with muddy paths gave way to fields – real live fields with sheep in them.
After three years in a grey, sooty, vibrant Glasgow faculty, it was a revelation. Connie looked for a window to open. They didn’t.
The rain was coming down stronger and stronger, although through the distant low hills, the occasional slant of sunshine was visible. Suddenly, at the end of the far field, she made out something through the rain. It was moving very slowly. Very slowly indeed. At first it looked like some kind of odd, slow-moving square robot, lumbering under its own steam, but she realised it couldn’t possibly be. For starters, it was brown. Who would ever make a brown robot? Eventually the visual clues coalesced: what she was in fact looking at was a piano. A piano moving across a field. In the rain.
Was this rag week? Had they motorised the piano? Was this some kind of ridiculous stunt? Connie had been in academia long enough to have seen them all and wasn’t really in the mood. She was about to turn away when the piano trundled forwards a little more and she realised that there was somebody out there. Someone – a slim figure, tall and lanky as a Giacometti – was pushing the piano. He – it appeared to be a he – was absolutely soaking wet. His white shirt clung to his back and he was wearing a pair of thick-rimmed glasses which were dripping.
But she knew for a fact that pianos were heavy instruments. They weighed a ton, there was nowhere to get a grip and they were resolutely unwieldy. Yet this big, scrawny drink of water out in the field by himself seemed to be hoofing it along absolutely fine.
Drama soc., she thought with a sigh. There was probably a drunk medical student inside shaking a bucket for rag week. The setting of her new university might be very different, but students didn’t change much.
She turned back round to the room. There was a large unsolved equation on the massive whiteboard at the far end, and a brand-new whiteboard pen laid out temptingly. Unable to help herself, Connie went forward and deftly and tidily solved it. Until it came to putting up the solution of 8.008135.
‘Ah,’ she said out loud. ‘Very funny.’
She re-solved it to 04.0404 just as the door creaked open tentatively.
Connie smiled patiently, although inside she still felt nervous. Since she was six years old, at the mathlete-for-tots conference, she was used to being the only girl, or thereabouts. It still boiled down to people at parties introducing her as some kind of perpetual student, or her freaking out men who, when she told them she was a mathematician, tended to stutter a lot and talk about their GCSEs as if her job was a direct challenge to their masculinity.
And here she was again, the new kid, in another classroom, in another town. It was meant to get easier, but it didn’t, particularly.
A large man entered. He had frizzy hair, glasses and a huge beard, and resembled a friendly bear. He glanced around nervously, then smiled as his eyes rested on her.
‘Whoa,’ he said. ‘You.’
‘Hello?’ said Connie. She didn’t recognise the man at all and wondered who he was looking for. ‘I’m Dr MacAdair.’
The man’s large brown eyes widened.
‘And they keep on coming. Nikoli puzzles, right?’
Connie stiffened.
‘Might be. Who are you?’
‘I’m Arnold,’ said the man, not at all put out by the brusqueness of her question. His accent was American. ‘Arnold Li Kierkan.’
‘Oh, I’ve heard of you!’ said Connie, relieved. They shook hands. ‘The cake cutter. BM Monthly.’
He beamed.
‘Oh great! Want me to autograph that for you sometime?’
‘Uh, I’m not… oh. Right. I got you. Very funny. But hang on.’ She paused. ‘We’re in the same field.’
‘Yeah, actually I’ve seen you at about nineteen conferences.’
Connie went a little pink. Being a female mathematician in an unusual field was a little like being famous, except without the money, adulation and free clothes.
‘Uh, yeah,’ said Connie. ‘But… I mean, I don’t understand… I mean, I thought this was a statistical analysis fellowship. Like, one fellowship.’
Her heart suddenly plummeted like a lift. She couldn’t have misunderstood, could she?
‘I mean… I thought I passed the interview. I mean, I’ve given up my car… I’ve moved out of my flat… I mean, if we’re in competition now —’
‘Uh, do you want to breathe into a paper bag?’
‘What? No! I want someone who can tell me what’s going on.’
‘Calm down,’ said Arnold. ‘It’s all right: we’re all here. Nobody knows. Evelyn Prowtheroe…’
‘You’re not serious?’
He had named the acknowledged leader of the field, whose last job as far as Connie was aware was Professor Emeritus at the University of Cairo.
‘Ranjit Dasgupta…’
‘Cor!’
Then it struck her.
Connie took a deep breath before she mentioned the next name herself. As it happened they both said it at the same time.
‘Sé Weerasinghe…’
‘Oh, you know him?’ said Arnold pleasantly.
Connie gave him a narrow look.
‘Well, so obviously, you, Complete Stranger, already know that I do.’
Arnold raised his large hands in a gesture of appeasement.
‘No, no, no.’
His round smiling cheeks went a little pink, and Connie looked around for something to else to do or, if all else failed, fiddle with.
It had been the pairs conference in Copenhagen. There had been something local and revolting called eau de vie. And dancing. Mathematicians dancing was rarely a good look, so there’d been more eau de vie to make the dancing better, which also somehow improved the taste of the eau de vie.