by Jack Heath
‘Well, her name is Nai. She’s the new model. Project Falcon mark two.’
‘That’s great!’ Ace paused. ‘But you’re not talking like it’s great.’
‘No,’ Six said. ‘She’s only nine months old, but she was drugged to accelerate her growth into adolescence. She was raised by Retuni Lerke, the scientist responsible for my creation. As a result, she wants to kill me – but, ironically, he’s ordered her not to.’
‘You can explain later,’ Ace said. ‘Does this change our current situation?’
‘She’s unpredictable,’ Six said.
‘She might expose us?’
‘I can’t rule it out.’
Ace sighed. ‘If she does, what can –’
A chiming of glasses interrupted them. The burbling conversation around them trickled to whispery drips.
‘If I may have everyone’s attention,’ Chemal Allich said.
Allich was taller than all the women and most of the men in the room. Her square jaw was a masculine contrast to the scarlet mane that tumbled to her waist.
Despite this, she was not an imposing figure. Her shoulders were a little hunched. She gazed around the room with resolve rather than curiosity. She struck Six as a quiet person, stepping into the spotlight out of necessity.
This was not how she had appeared when he had studied her two years ago. She had been brazen and bold. Greed for knowledge had lit her face. Six wondered what had disillusioned her, given how successful she had been in the meantime.
‘Welcome to the launch of Project Tiresias,’ Allich said.
There was a brief round of applause. Six’s eyes widened. Project Tiresias was the code name of the teleportation technology he’d originally been sent to investigate. If this was the launch of that same technology, then he wouldn’t be able to get near the machine. It would be watched at all times, by the guests and the security team.
But if Allich had only just got the machine working, then the warhead couldn’t have come through two years ago. Perhaps he and Ace could abort the mission. He’d check the Geiger counter as soon as he got close to the WMTD.
‘Thank you all for coming,’ Allich was saying. ‘When I first started working on this project, I thought it would be hard to find support. I had no doubt that people would see the tremendous potential of this new technology, but I figured I would face severe scepticism as to ...’ She shrugged. ‘Well, basically, I thought no-one would believe I’d ever get it working.’
Polite laughter in the crowd. Six had to agree with Allich. Scientists had been experimenting with teleportation for decades, maybe centuries, with no success. Why would ChaoSonic throw money to researchers working in a field that had yielded so little fruit?
‘But I was wrong,’ Allich said. ‘There were people who believed in me. Some of the smartest, richest, most influential people in the whole company.’ She smiled. ‘You people. And it’s amazing to see you all in the one place. Imagine what we could get done tonight if we put our minds to it!’
Ace leaned over to Six. ‘She’s right,’ she whispered. ‘Why isn’t the Deck raiding this building right now and grabbing all the guests? ChaoSonic would be crippled. Maybe wiped out.’
‘Then what do we do with them?’ Six whispered back. ‘Lock them up? Kill them? Just for being useful to the company? We’d be just as bad as ChaoSonic. We’re not terrorists, we’re law enforcement.’
‘There are no laws to enforce, just our own code,’ Ace pointed out. ‘More lives would be saved in the long run.’
‘You don’t know that. Something would replace ChaoSonic, and it could be something worse.’
Ace nodded reluctantly.
‘Anyway,’ Allich was saying. ‘It’s time you finally saw your credits at work!’
There was a resounding clank, and the ballroom wall split down a seam in the centre. The two halves slowly rumbled apart, revealing nothing but a black void.
And then lights beyond clicked on, one by one. Six stared as the machine was revealed: a tubular tower made of colossal chrome plates, ringed by cooling pipes as fat as subway tunnels, with webs of power cables hanging as high and low as he could see.
It was nothing like the machine he’d seen two years ago. Allich had hollowed out the centre of the Tower and built a colossal metal tube in the empty space. A skyscraper within a skyscraper. What was it? Was this part of the same project at all?
‘It’s my pleasure to present to you,’ Allich was saying, ‘Tiresias! Please, follow me to the auditorium.’
As the crowd started to move towards the gap between the walls, and take their seats on the other side, Six took the Geiger counter out of his pocket and checked the display.
It read .815 mSv of radiation. There was no doubt – the warhead had been here.
The air bubbled with excited conversation as the security guards ushered the guests through the gap in the ballroom wall. Six couldn’t take his eyes off the metal tower. What was it for?
As he crossed the threshold into the darkness, he saw hundreds of seats installed in semicircular rows around the giant tube. Between the front row of seats and the tube there was a safety rail and then an impressive trench – Allich had drilled a giant hole in the ground, hundreds of metres deep, maybe even kilometres, and then built the foundations of the tube at the bottom. The tube must be taller than any skyscraper in the City.
On the other side of the trench there was a small stage, with a large metal table and a big screen on the wall. The screen was currently blank.
The room was like a cross between a cinema and a missile silo.
‘Is this what you saw last time?’ Ace asked, staring at the tube.
‘No,’ Six said.
There was a chamber embedded in the wall behind the stage, with a tinted window so the audience could see in. It was connected to the stage by an imposing airlock. The chamber was about 8 metres wide, high and deep. The walls on the inside bristled with obsidian needles, and a line of grey rings were clamped to the ceiling. Those were the magnets for the MRI, Six knew, for scanning the cargo. Nine white pods surrounded the box at varying heights. The CT scanners, he thought.
He pointed. ‘That’s what I saw last time.’
‘Okay. Back then, she was only dematerialising things and then recreating them, right?’ Ace asked. ‘No transmission, just poof, it’s gone, poof, it’s back?’
‘Yes,’ Six said.
‘Then what’s the tower tube thing for? Transmission should be the simplest part of the process – it could be done with a phone, a modem, or anything. If that chamber handles the dematerialisation and the recreation, then what does the rest of it do?’
‘I don’t know,’ Six said quietly.
‘Please take your seats,’ Chemal Allich boomed, as she appeared on the stage. ‘The demonstration begins in three minutes.’
The screen flickered to life above her head. It showed live footage of the stage, magnified so everyone could see what was happening clearly. Her eyes sparkled in the lights.
Demonstration? Six took a seat next to Ace. Allich was going to use the machine, tonight?
Six now had three problems. One: the transmission chamber looked tightly sealed. He had no way of getting in there to plant the beacon. Two: the window. Even if he could get inside, he would be spotted immediately. Allich’s view of the window was obscured by the airlock, but everyone in the audience could see inside the chamber. And three: if Allich was demonstrating it now, it might not be used again for months, or even years. When selling a new technology, demonstration was usually the last step before the long and messy contract negotiations. And Six didn’t have months or years to wait. He needed to find that warhead as soon as possible.
Half the guests were now seated. The others milled around slowly towards the back rows. A cooling pipe vented a blast of steam up above.
‘Have you noticed how much this place looks like a missile silo?’ Ace asked Six.
‘So?’
‘So, what if the
launch is an actual launch?’
Six turned to look at her.
‘Doesn’t that look like a rocket to you?’ she asked, pointing at the giant tube.
She was right. Six stared at the tube. It did look alarmingly like a rocket preparing to blast off into space.
He shook his head. ‘It can’t be. We’d be fried as the thrusters passed us, along with all the other guests.’
‘That’s not as reassuring as you might think.’
Someone sat down on Six’s other side – a middle-aged man who looked like he’d spent his whole life on a tanning bed. Six fell silent for a moment. Behind the constant chatter, he could hear a rich humming coming from the tube.
‘Has everyone signed the card?’ Allich was saying.
Ace chuckled.
‘What?’ Six said.
‘Nothing,’ Ace whispered. ‘It’s just, you know. An evil launch of an evil technology, ChaoSonic’s deadliest minds bent on world domination – and there’s a card for everyone to sign!’
‘Focus on the job,’ Six said. His mind was racing.
Nearly everyone was seated. Six got the packet of cigarettes out of his jacket. There might be a way to pull this off. If he could get close enough to Allich, he could shoot the beacon onto whatever she was planning to put in the chamber.
But he didn’t know what it was yet. And he might have only seconds between figuring it out and the transmission.
‘One minute,’ Allich said.
The humming from the tube was getting louder. The air was starting to smell slightly burnt. The crowd had fallen completely silent.
Six jammed the hollow cigarette between his lips, and thumbed a beacon into the end. He didn’t light it yet. He figured that Allich would produce whatever she was planning on transmitting any second now.
Unless it was already inside the transmission chamber.
If that’s the case, Six thought, we’re screwed. The mission falls flat on its face. But he couldn’t see anything inside that didn’t look like part of the machine.
‘Thirty seconds,’ Allich yelled over the rising hum. Six thought he could hear a muffled crackling, like the fizzling out of a firework.
‘Where’s the cargo?’ Ace hissed.
‘I don’t know.’ Six gripped the arms of his chair tightly. The mission was in jeopardy – and there was nothing he could do.
The needles inside the tube were quivering, faster and faster, until they were blurred into a grey paste. The floor was vibrating under Six’s feet. The air in the auditorium was getting sucked towards the tube, and the burning smell was almost overpowering.
There was an explosion of lightning inside the chamber, still blinding through the tinted glass. A nightmarish roar boomed from the lower regions of the rocket, the parts that were kilometres below the ground. Six barely felt Ace grab his arm, as though she might lose him in the cacophony.
Everything shook and squealed and for a second it felt like the universe itself was alive, and squealing with pain as something twisted it inside out ...
And then there was silence.
The change came instantly, like waking up from a dream, or like a scene change in a movie. Or like sudden death in a plane crash, after a long, tumbling descent. The silence was so immediate that the ringing in Six’s ears took a moment to catch up.
Sight and sound returned. The auditorium was the same as it had been. The guests were unharmed, though many of them looked a little shaken. Allich herself didn’t have a hair out of place. She was staring at the glass chamber.
Six followed her gaze. Inside the tube, there was a girl in a white hospital gown, scraggly red hair smothering her eyes. She was on the floor, slumped against the wall. As Six watched, she slowly raised her head. After a second, she clambered to her feet groggily.
‘No way,’ Ace whispered.
Six nodded grimly. Allich had worked out how to transmit people.
It took Six a minute to notice that there was something wrong with the girl’s eyes. Her gaze was tilted up and to her right, like she was trying to look at someone without them noticing – a constant sidelong glance.
‘This is TM4,’ she said, in Allich’s voice.
Six was stunned. What was going on?
‘She was scanned two weeks ago,’ Allich said, but Six saw that the girl was mouthing the words as Allich said them, eyes still turned aside. Six felt a chill run up his spine.
‘Or, rather,’ Allich continued, ‘her original form was. She has no memory of that, of course. But physically, she is indistinguishable, and completely healthy.’
She held up a syringe. ‘To transmit live subjects, I’ve used a cocktail of drugs and radioactive isotopes. Mostly technetium-99m, so the circulatory system can be mapped by the scanners, and cadamine to stop the subject going into shock.’
As Six stared around at the other faces in the audience, he caught Nai’s eye. She smiled, and then dragged one finger slowly across her throat. Six looked away.
Allich was attaching electrodes to the girl’s back. The picture on the screen changed, displaying a complex EKG. Heart rhythm, respiratory rate, and a whole series of other charts Six didn’t recognise. He nudged Ace.
She nodded. ‘Standard readings. Heart rate up a little, but otherwise completely normal.’
The girl, ‘TM4’, walked to the back of the stage. She took a yellow envelope out from under the folds of her gown, and put it down on the bench. Then she walked back to Allich. There was no fear in her face, but Six thought he saw thinly veiled despair. He had the sudden impression that this was not a willing volunteer.
‘Who has the card?’ Allich asked.
A guest held it up, and passed it to the front. Allich took it, and slipped it into an envelope identical to the one on the bench. Then she passed it to the girl, who put it inside her gown where the other one had been.
Six frowned. Why was the subject getting the card? Shouldn’t Allich keep it? Perhaps there was more than just congratulations scrawled in there – he should have looked closer.
‘Incredible, isn’t it?’ the tanned man sitting next to Six said.
It took Six a moment to realise that the man was talking to him. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Chemal has really excelled herself this time.’
The man smiled. ‘It’s strange – in a way, the rest of the demonstration is a formality. We already know she’ll succeed. But she has to do it anyway.’
The rest of the demonstration? Allich was going to send the girl back!
‘I left my brief at the office,’ Six said. ‘Where’s Port B again?’
The man frowned. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘The other end of the transmission,’ Six explained. ‘Where’s she being sent?’
‘Oh, right,’ the man said. ‘To 710. Not far.’
Six blinked. The address of the Tower was 792 Shuttle Way, South Coast. If Six had understood the man correctly, Port B was at 710 Shuttle Way – just down the street. But, he realised, that was just outside the zone that ChaoSonic had flattened looking for the warhead. It fit.
‘Uh, thanks,’ he said. That was way too easy.
The man shrugged. ‘No problem.’
Down on the stage, Allich was leading the girl back towards the glass chamber. The girl was staring at her bare feet.
Six leaned over to Ace. ‘I just found Port B.’
‘How?’
‘I asked the guy next to me.’
Ace stared. ‘You’re kidding.’
‘I don’t kid,’ Six said.
‘Do you still need to plant the tracker?’
Six felt a rush of pity for TM4, being sent back and forth down the same street, blasted to atoms and then fused back together, over and over, again and again. She’d done it so many times that she’d even learned all Allich’s lines – and she wasn’t resisting anymore. Six wondered how they’d forced her to submit. She was physically healthy, which meant either that she had been their captive for a very long time, long enough to heal all the
bones they had broken, or that they’d threatened someone close to her.
Six wished he could jump down to the stage, grab her, and carry her out of the building. She didn’t deserve to be torn apart and reassembled again. But there were too many guards, too many witnesses. He probably wouldn’t make it out of the building. And while he was willing to risk his own life to save her, he had other moral imperatives.
If he died, Ace would be unprotected. The Deck might never find the nuclear warhead. And the side of good would lose its best soldier.
Six put the hollow cigarette back in his mouth. He lit it, trying not to inhale the noxious fumes. Then he blew as hard as he could. The transmitter was visible only for a split second, a silver glimmer in the air, before it stuck to TM4’s hospital gown and turned white.
The girl looked up into the crowd. Not surprised, not hopeful, just like a reflex.
Now Six would be able to track her, and stage a rescue later. And the Deck would be able to find Port B, even if Six didn’t make it out to tell King what he had learned.
‘Excuse me.’
Six looked towards the aisle. One of the security guards was standing there, looking at him.
‘There’s no smoking in here,’ the guard said.
Six raised a haughty eyebrow and dropped the cigarette into his wineglass.
‘Thank you,’ the guard said. He moved on.
Down on the stage, Allich had stuck the syringe into the girl, depressed the plunger and given her a shove towards the chamber. The girl stumbled forwards into the airlock. Then she stepped into the centre of the chamber – willingly, but sadly. As though she’d long since accepted her fate. The CT scanners started popping and cracking, and the MRI magnets whirled around in their hinges.
Six didn’t want to watch, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the scene. His skin was stretched tight over his knuckles, and his toes were curled inside his shoes.
The rocket was starting to hum again; warming up, Six guessed. Inside the chamber, the X-rays had stopped shooting, and the MRI was slowing to a crawl.
‘Scan complete,’ an automated voice said.
The girl inside the chamber looked baffled for a moment. Then a smile crept across her lips.
