Tag

by Simon Royle

  The rubberized walkway was mostly deserted as I walked along. A jogger in UNPOL tracksuit outers jogged past me and gave me a smile. I controlled my paranoia and smiled back. Discreet directional arrows set into the walkway beat a time with the directional arrow in the map on my Devstick and led me around a par three.

  I heard a golfer exclaim, “Shit,” as his ball hit the water in the pond between him and the green. His companions laughed. A mother pushing her child along in a stroller also smiled at me and I felt the paranoia increase. This is ridiculous, Jonah, I thought. Calm down. I decided to change the route I was on and turned left onto a path running between the golf course and a park. For a sec or two my Devstick squawked at me as the directional arrow on it blinked red. I ignored it and kept walking.

  I couldn’t smile just in case I’d been tagged and they were tracking my every image whether digital or physical. I just had to act normally. That way no one would suspect anything. Breaking with routine should be OK, but I had to do something natural. Having a strong alky and needing somewhere to reflect is natural behavior after what I had been through, and then I’d head straight back to my Envplex where I would simply wait. I took another look at my Devstick. It had responded to my change in course and provided a new route based upon my current direction. I took another turn, right this time, and checked the Devstick again. About another fifteen hundred meters to go.

  The sun and breeze on my face felt great and in the time it took me to reach Polar Nights, I had come to the conclusion that everything Gabriel had said was true. The entrance to Polar Nights at my back, I took in the view from Sky Level over to the mainland, resting my arms on the safety rail that ran along the edge of the walkway. Fifteen hundred meters below me, the surface looked green and tranquil, the Travways cleverly hidden from the view from above by the designers of New Singapore.

  I thought about Gabriel's claim that what I did would have significance for the future of the planet and help prevent a conspiracy that could send us back to the Dark Ages. The Charter came to mind. The revised Charter of the United Nation, wherein individual nations were all consolidated, first published in 2063, seven years after the last Great War. The preamble says: to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which is potentially catastrophic and devastating to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of all humans, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of Global Law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, and to promote the spread of humankind through the universe.

  I had learnt this Preamble as a student, as we all do, and then again with all the treaties, laws, and codicils therein when I had decided on being an arbitrator as an element of my purpose. And now, according to Gabriel, this preamble, this premise that every human capable of reasoned thought takes for granted, was in my hands.

  Gabriel’s conversation in my mind was clear now, but like a memory from a dream I could also recall our words spoken for the benefit of those monitoring our interview. I had no doubt that by this time, those images and sounds as well as all the other data attached to that interview would have been dissected and analyzed thousands of times over by many pairs of eyes, but it seemed as if we had pulled off our private chat without any suspicion falling on us.

  In less than eight hours Gabriel would disappear from the interview room. I had no idea what he meant by disappear. Escape or vaporize, I simply could not imagine how one could do either. The Deep was approximately two thousand meters down from surface and no one had ever escaped. Gabriel’s level one status meant he was under constant monitoring. Even if his Tag had disappeared off the Grid his physical presence was under containment. Somehow I had no doubt that what Gabriel had said he would do would happen.

  I noticed that a rather wet looking cloud was about to envelop the walkway I was on and headed into the Polar Nights, which the Dev by the door advertised as a little piece of heaven designed primarily for hetros but welcome to all, and ambled my way over to the ‘Males’ entrance. A young couple came out of the Unisex entrance and kissed as I walked through into the lowly lit interior. As advertised the emphasis was on hetro and a young woman wearing a beautiful smile and not much else came up to me.

  “Hi, welcome to Polar Nights. Are you meeting anyone in particular or can I just help you find a seat?”

  “Uhm… I’d like to have a seat and just relax by myself for a while, thanks,” I said and smiled back at her.

  “Sure, please come this way, we’ve just upgraded our Siteazys and the Aurora section of the lounge is empty right now. How does that sound?” she asked as she led me through the dark lounge to a huge Siteazy with a Dev beside it. I looked at the Aurora Borealis cast massive on the floor-to-ceiling Devscreen. Perfect, I thought, and sat down in the Siteazy.

  The first woman left and a second arrived. “Hi, my name’s Sahara.” She flashed me another beautiful smile. She was about the same height as me, about one hundred and eighty-six cent, with the blondest hair I had ever seen. “Can I get you any refreshment and would you like a leg massage while relaxing?”

  “Yes to the refreshment and no to the massage, thanks, Sahara. I’d like a very strong alky, but not paralytic if you know what I mean.”

  “Sure. We have a cocktail called the Endorpho 80, which is really great. It’ll put your mind into a semi-meditative state within thirty secs and complete muscle relaxation within forty-five,” she rattled this off and finished with another of those brilliant smiles and I just nodded, lying back in the Siteazy. I thought the day had definitely taken a turn for the better.

  The alky arrived borne by the radiant and young Sahara who left me with a charming, “If you need absolutely anything, I am here to serve you,” and swished away with an alluring little sway of her buttocks. I smiled to myself and took a long draught of this Endorpho. It had a slight minty flavor but wasn’t too sweet and slipped down nicely.

  I felt the drink hit, as promised. I’d forgotten to ask how long I would stay in this most pleasantly aware but relaxed state, but with these kind of loaded alkys the hit usually lasted at least an hour so I just laid back and enjoyed it. Before I relaxed too completely I punched out a quick command on my Devstick to send me fresh clothes, both inners and outers, from my Envplex to the Polar Nights and told the Dev at the side of Siteazy to have Sahara deliver these once the effects of the Endorpho 80 wore off. With a slight chuckle to myself I wondered if they had an Endorpho 100 and decided not to go there. I would need my wits about me for whatever was to come.

  The tension in my body flowed out as the drink hit my nervous system, and my thoughts turned once again to Gabriel and his final words.

  Gabriel was my brother, and my uncle was not my uncle, but he was the man who had killed my father. Not only killed, but tortured as well. My uncle, if this was true, was the personification of what our Charter purported to protect us from.

  Despite the Endorpho, I tensed, a quiet rage surfacing, but with purpose I pushed that rage aside and turned my thoughts to planning my action ahead. We cannot know the future, but we can plan based upon likely scenarios, and it was these scenarios that I started running through my head like a data stream on free flow.

  Chapter 6

  A Boring Machine

  UNPOL Headquarters, The Deep, Level 1 °Corridor, White Room

  Thursday 5 December 2109, 8:08pm +8 UTC

  Gabriel sat in exactly the same position as when Jonah had left the interview room over seven hours and thirty-four minutes ago. The fact that Gabriel knew to the second when Jonah had left the room was a testament to his mental strength and his prowess in matters of mind control. Gabriel had been counting since his capture in Bangkok, which had happened two hundred and twenty-eight thousand, eight hundred and forty seconds ago. Or to be less precise, sixty-three and a half hours ago.

  So
me time in the next twenty-five minutes or so he would be rescued. That is what they had calculated when profiling the capture and containment. That they had been correct up to this point was due to their research into the methods of UNPOL.

  Gabriel stopped counting now that the time was so close and instead prepared his breathing for what was coming. Once the room was breached, it and the attached corridor tube would be flooded with paralyzing nerve gas and paralyzing sound. Anyone taking but a single breath or exposing their eardrums to the sound would be instantly immobilized.

  Suddenly in the stillness of the room he felt a slight tremor under his bare feet, and it grew rapidly until the Biosense chair, which he quickly rose from, was visibly shaking. Standing upright, Gabriel took a deep breath and held it. Placing his hands over his ears he looked straight ahead to where he felt the direction of the shaking was coming from. A faint noise to accompany the shaking began and increased rapidly until it was a roar, and the room partition shattered with the movement into an opaque glazed mess. A large black circle appeared in the wall in front of him, cut by the teeth of a revolving blade. Twenty panels opened in the lower part of white wall and nozzles spraying a mustard-colored gas poked out as a bone-wrenching cacophony of sound assaulted Gabriel’s eardrums through his hands.

  The circular piece of wall crashed forward into the room revealing a large machine. In the middle of the hub that held the cutting blade, a small door opened and two figures wearing bright red ear protectors and body armor stepped quickly out of the door and rushed over to Gabriel. In the face mask he made out Maloo’s flat nose wrinkled with his laughter as, grasping Gabriel’s arm, they moved quickly to the door of the giant boring machine, the ‘Mole’. Maloo pushed Gabriel through first into the tiny airlock and then climbed in after with the other member of the extraction team. The door’s bolts slid home with a pneumatic swoosh and the air in the air lock was filtered with the giant extractor pulling the tight bodysuits in its direction with its force.

  The ‘clean air’ light went on and Maloo leaned over Gabriel and hit the button to open the door to the main capsule. The Mole disengaged from the White Room with a jolt and began its journey back up the tunnel it had created getting here.

  Cochran and her partner Sunita Shido had just finished their appetizers, when Cochran’s Devstick screen flashed red. She picked it up and held it to her ear, glancing around at the other people seated near her in La Maison.

  Her mouth open, she gasped, and exclaimed, “What!” Cochran’s eyes flitted around at the people near her again to see if they had noticed. No one had heard her except Sunita, who laid her knife and fork down on her plate and placed her hands on the table beside it. Sunita swallowed the oyster that was on her tongue and reached for her glass of red wine.

  “When did this happen?” she heard Cochran rasp in a harsh whisper into her Devstick. “Ten minutes! Why have you taken this long to notify me? Never mind, there is no excuse. All right, lock down the area and no news of his escape is to be broadcast, not until I’m there, do you understand?”

  She put the Devstick back on the table in front of her and picking up her wine glass, swallowed its contents. Sunita said, “Trouble at UNPOL?”

  “The runner I was telling you about just escaped. I’ve got to go,” Cochran said, and stood, picking up her Chanel purse. “Don’t wait for me — this could take some time.”

  Sunita nodded and took another sip of wine. “Go, Sharon, go, stay safe,” and tilting her head towards the French doors behind Cochran, she smiled.

  Cochran gave her a small tight smile back and, with a slight shrug of her shoulders, turned on her heel, head down, and strode out of the restaurant, leaving through the sliding glass French doors, her Devstick to her mouth as she walked. They had chosen La Maison, the intimate Topside French restaurant of the Hyatt Hotel. Just off to the right of the restaurant was its tropical Balinese garden with a large area of green lawn framed by shallow swimming lanes stepped at different levels. As she walked over the patio, a Helium Copter glided down, its electrically driven propellers turning silently in the dark cool of the evening. It was twenty-one degrees cel, a cool night for New Singapore.

  The reflection of the flashing blue light slowly shrank in size on the green lawn as the Heliocopter came in to land. The door slid open to receive Cochran as, Devstick still held to her mouth, she gave instructions, speaking urgently. “Place immediate satimage coverage of Jurong. If we don’t get him within the next five minutes, expand that coverage to New Singapore and the equivalent ocean area. I assume that you have locked down all transit points. Please confirm.”

  She climbed into the Heliocopter, and the door clunked shut. Already in the air, the craft dipped its nose slightly and headed for Jurong Island eight kiloms to the south-west. The craft quickly picked up height and speed and soon the chop whir of the propellers was audible in the cabin. Cochran sat listening to and watching the different voice and image channels coming in over her Devstick, her thumb frantically scrolling the images.

  She flicked from the image of the Lev and airship ports of Changi. He wouldn’t be crazy enough to try to get through there, she thought. He’s got to be somewhere close and he’ll try to get out by sea. That’s what I would do. Again she held the Devstick to her mouth. “Make sure all ocean and port areas are covered. Get all UNPOL marine vessels on high alert. Anything that has moved from port to ocean in the last five minutes, board and search. Use UNPOL Blue Notice as required, upon my authority.”

  She listened and watched as the activity driven by her commands picked up pace. He couldn’t have gone far. She checked the time on the Devstick: 8:45pm. She realized she was seriously panicked. How could this have happened on her watch?

  Sitting on the hard metal seats that ran along the cabin, she didn’t bother with the safety webbing, couldn’t waste the time to put it on as she was focused on the action on the screen of the Devstick. The Heliocopter came in fast, landing with a thump, a bounce and slight grind of a skid on the roof of the UNPOL Executive Club. She disembarked, one hand heaving her out of the cabin, and ran in a crouch towards the stairs leading to the Lev port that would take her down to the command center. She had to catch him: this couldn’t happen, not on her watch.

  The Mole shot out of the hole it had first made six days ago in the floor of the warehouse in Jurong Port, and skidded to a stop just before hitting the wall. Gabriel glanced at the time on the Dev screen hanging from the ceiling of the mole, 8:40pm, and hit the open door release. The door hissed open and swung free. He jumped up from his crouched position and, one hand on the circular titanium frame of the door, jumped to the floor of the warehouse. Maloo and Isaac quickly followed and the three of them walked over to a large plastic sheet laid on the floor of the warehouse. No one spoke. They knew what they had to do and they had already agreed on the best way to do it. Maloo and Isaac stripped off everything they were wearing, dropping it to the plastic sheet. Gabriel, already naked, walked over to a shelf with three deep-sided trays stacked one on top of the other. He picked the stack up and walked back to Maloo and Isaac who had finished stripping and were folding the plastic sheet into a small block.

  Gabriel laid out the three trays side by side with a meter in between and the three men each sat in front of a tray. Inside was the identity, the person they would become to enable their escape. Running. An identity designed to be anonymous, to fit in with the masses, to not be an anomaly, and therefore to pass under the radar to the other side. In the single nation an individual can travel anywhere provided he acknowledges the right of the nation to know who he is and what he is doing at any time.

  As individuals travel through security zones, PUIs, or Tags as they are called, are activated and visually compared to known statistics and image. Everywhere on the Earth, the Moon and Mars, the three 'worlds' human beings occupy, this invasion of privacy is accepted for the right to travel anywhere freely. Every day in New Singapore, half a million people travel through the city and i
ts surrounding area. To run, you need an identity that will appear in its movements and digital actions not to be suspicious, but to be normal. And they each had a tray of normality.

  Gabriel, on the far right of the others, glanced to his left. Maloo was struggling into the brown boots he’d selected. With a final tug he laid back his elbows on the cement floor and said, “Well brother, do we look like Haulers?”

  “You’ll do,” said Gabriel, and walked over to the wall of the warehouse. A section of the wall stood detached from its space that was just big enough for them to squeeze through. Gabriel went first and the others followed, each turning sideways through the narrow gap. Once on the other side, Gabriel and Maloo pulled the piece of the wall into place and Isaac picked up a tube of instant cement. As soon as the wall fit he pulled the trigger and the cement gun spurted a thin tube of expanding cement from its nozzle. Gabriel and Maloo quickly walked across the floor of the warehouse and went through the next space.

  Two warehouses over from the one the Mole had made its exit, a seventy-five meter articulated chrome-plated long-hauler stood waiting with all systems running. The last wall space closed and cemented, the three men headed for the entrance to the long hauler. The door was open and Gabriel made his way up the winding staircase until he reached the bridge. He sat down in the primary driver’s seat and pulled the View Devscreen closer to his eye position. Maloo climbed into the seat next to him and Isaac disappeared down the companionway stairs.

  “Activate mapped course to Jakarta, full autopilot on,” Gabriel said into the mic that distended from the edge of the Dev screens. It looked like a fly hovering just a cent from his mouth. Telemetric data from the vehicle flooded the Devscreen with numbers scrolling in a constant flow across images which showed the warehouse from the front, rear, side and top of the vehicle.