Having fallen in love with her, he set to the task of winning her over. It just so happened that things kept going wrong with his computer, and Jennifer’s attention would be required. She would diagnose the problem—user error, invariably—and would show George how to avoid making the same mistake again, and after a while it became a standing joke between them, the number of mysterious mishaps he kept having, and George’s fellow writers would groan every time he raised a hand and pleaded with Jennifer for help, because they could see what was going on, and some were jealous and others were amused, but all of them were growing tired of George’s transparent shenanigans. Why didn’t he just stop faffing around and ask her out on a date?
Finally he did. Jennifer was guarded at first. It wasn’t against regulations to fraternize with coworkers, but it was frowned on. The powers-that-be at Chilton Mead didn’t want employees forming attachments in a place where highly classified scientific experimentation was being carried out. Relationships complicated things. Love and cutting-edge research did not go well together, each liable to upset the delicate balance of the other.
Love would not be denied, however. George and Jennifer became an item. Not every night, but most nights she would stay over at his hotel room or he would stay over at her tiny cottage in the village of Thurston Mondicorum. In the workplace they kept a discreet, gentle rapport going: a private semaphore of glances and smiles, occasionally a few cryptically coded phrases, and when the opportunity presented itself, when no one else was looking, the Morse dot-dash of a wink and a blown kiss. At weekends they were left to their own devices, entirely at liberty to loll in bed from dawn till dusk or roam the rolling Wiltshire hills or nip into Salisbury for shopping, lunch, and a trip to the cinema.
It was wonderful, rapturous, and George found something opening up inside him, a door, the key to which was his feelings for Jennifer. Out through this door flowed a whole new level of subject matter and artistry. His stories took on greater substance and meaning. He wrote about emotions with a delicacy and sensitivity he would hardly have believed himself capable of before now. His characters grew richer and rounder, and the situations he put them in became correspondingly more complex and intriguing and above all truer. At times his tales made his heart ache; at other times they made his heart break. George knew, with a confidence that bordered on but stayed just short of arrogance, that he was developing into an author of considerable powers. And it was all thanks to Jennifer.
So when, over dinner one evening at her cottage, she burst into tears for no apparent reason, George was terrified. Was she about to break up with him? If so, what would that mean for his writing? That was his principal concern: his writing. Jennifer’s wellbeing came second. And George was aware what this said about him, the kind of person it demonstrated he was, but so be it. He knew a writer needed the grit of selfishness around which to build pearls of art.
He asked what the matter was, tenderly, not giving away a hint of the existential dread that was churning his guts. Jennifer had been on edge all evening. Now he knew the cause. Now the hammer blow was going to fall.
Her first words seemed to confirm his fears. “I can’t go on like this,” she said between sobs.
“Like what?” George asked, jaw quivering.
“Lying to you. Living a lie with you. I love you so much, and I can’t bear knowing what I do and not sharing it with you.”
“Knowing what?”
“George,” Jennifer said, and she fixed him across the table with her brimming gaze, “aren’t you ever curious about what you’re doing at Chilton Mead? What all the stories you and the others write are for? Doesn’t it bother you in the least?”
George looked at her askance. “We’re not supposed to talk about this outside the facility. We’re not supposed to talk about it in there either, in fact.”
“Fuck that,” Jennifer said sharply. “Fuck Chilton Mead. Fuck rules and regulations and the Official Secrets Act. Fuck it all. There are some things more important than national security.”
Her words filled George with elation and apprehension. He sensed he was about to be led onto forbidden territory. A revelation was coming, and his world was about to change, drastically, and not necessarily for the better.
“I’m not sure you should—”
“Weapons,” Jennifer said. “That’s what we make at Chilton Mead. That’s all we make at Chilton Mead. Things that destroy and kill and bring misery and ruin lives. That’s the place’s sole reason for being.”
“Well, yeah,” said George, “I realized as much. Hence the barbed wire and the soldiers with dogs and guns and the biometric pass cards and the half-hour queue to get through the main entrance every morning. But, look, neither of us has anything to do with that. I write stories, and you fix the computers I write them on. How can we conceivably be involved in making weapons?”
Jennifer laughed then, a brittle sound that seemed to set the cutlery on the table rattling.
“You understand so little,” she said. “So little.” She took a deep breath, reached out to clasp George’s hand, and proceeded to draw him into the forbidden territory, out of innocence, past the point of no return.
“You see,” Jennifer said, “wars aren’t being conducted just on land and sea and in the air any more. There’s a whole new battlefront opening up—cyberspace. That’s where the terrorists carry out their communication and recruitment. They’re the enemy now, and if they’re doing much of their fighting online, then we have to too. We have to devise weapons—cyberspace weapons—that can eliminate their ability to spread propaganda and organize atrocities, and not just that but eliminate them as well.”
“But how can . . . ?”
“Just let me speak, George. No interruptions. At Chilton Mead there are scientists who’ve been working for years on the next generation of a computer virus. I’m not talking about a worm or a Trojan horse, nothing as crude as that. I’m talking about a piece of code that has autonomic, heuristic responses.”
Not wishing to interrupt, George raised both eyebrows to indicate that she needed to explain what those terms meant. He tried to inject irony into the gesture: he, the wordsmith, baffled by her technological jargon.
“A piece of code that is intelligent,” Jennifer said, “that is self-aware. Software that can slip through the wires of the world under its own steam, seeking its target, choosing where to go and how best to get there. Fire-and-forget software. And once it reaches where it needs to be, it carries out its mission and then commits suicide, erasing itself so as not to leave a trace behind. The name they’re using for it is Kamikaze Code, and it isn’t designed to crash systems or wipe out hard drives or anything of that kind. It’s more dangerous than that. It’s code that generates psychotropic visuals and sonics, basically turning an ordinary PC into a generator of images and harmonic frequencies that interfere with human consciousness. It’s code designed to crash people, to wipe out the brain.”
She studied George’s face.
“Yes,” she said, nodding, “hard to believe, I know. I’d be sceptical if I were you. But that’s Chilton Mead in a nutshell: turning lunatic nightmares into reality. Thing is, the Kamikaze Code, it isn’t just some nightmare any more. They’ve succeeded in making it. It’s done. It works. They’ve—they’ve tested it. On living subjects. Guinea pigs.”
“People,” said George, needing absolute clarification.
“People,” Jennifer confirmed. “People they’ve kidnapped off the streets. Missing people. People who won’t be missed. People who get exposed to the code under laboratory conditions and . . . aren’t people afterward. Are blank, drooling nonpeople. Clean-slate people. Reset people. Factory-fresh people.”
She paused to let that sink in, then went on.
“But the code in its pure form is highly unstable. Mentally unbalanced, you might say. You construct something with intelligence and an inbuilt self-destruct mechanism, it’s hardly going to be the sanest of entities, now is it? Frankly, it�
��s going to be a total fruitcake. So what you need is a sturdy vector for the code, a vessel that will contain it and keep it insulated and cocooned, protect its fragile psyche right up until the moment it has to do its job and then kill itself. You need to embed it tightly into a framework where it will feel safe and secure, and you need to give it something to sustain itself with as well, nourishment. Like an egg: shell for structure, albumen for shock absorption, yolk for nutrition. Can you guess where I’m going here, George?”
George shook his head and then, slowly, dawningly nodded.
“Stories,” Jennifer said. “Short stories. All sorts of other media have been tried—pictures, music, poetry, nonfiction. Only short stories work. The Kamikaze Code, for reasons peculiar to it, likes them. It settles in and is right at home. The scientists reckon the size of a short story has something to do with it, the easily digestible length, the self-containment. Maybe the shape too, the organization of plot over a few thousand words, the formal pattern of beginning, middle and end. The code feels comfortable in that, whereas it doesn’t in, say, a novel. Or a poem. Poems—the code hates those. Give it a whiff of a stanza, and it implodes, apparently. The density of expression sends it shrieking into a corner to slash its wrists. And a novel’s too grand, too spacious. ‘A mansion,’ one professor told me, ‘when all the code is after is a nice cosy little apartment with an attractive view.’ An apartment that’s ideally about four thousand four hundred words big. Which is where you and your colleagues come in.”
“We’re making missiles,” George said, voice ghostly. “Bullet casings.”
“Precisely.” Jennifer stood and fetched some tissues from the kitchenette. She blew her nose and wiped her eyes. “So you see why I had to tell you, George. I couldn’t not. You’re a sweet man, you’re my lover, you mean the world to me, and I couldn’t stand it a minute longer, knowing the awful truth and keeping it from you. It was making me wretched. Chilton Mead’s been using you, exploiting your creativity for destructive purposes, and it’s just plain wrong. However much money you’re getting, surely it’s not worth it.”
George pondered this and finally acknowledged that she was right. “In fact, I can’t see why they need to pay anyone anything at all,” he said. “Can’t they use old stories, ones that are just lying around in books, ones that are out of copyright even? It’d be a whole lot cheaper.”
Jennifer shrugged. “They tried. The code is extraordinarily picky, in the way that all neurotic creatures are. It won’t accept any tales that have been published before. If we can go back to the egg analogy, it wants one that’s freshly laid, not one that’s been cracked open already. So each copy of the code has to be implanted into a completely new, unread story, and the copies are manufactured in batches of seventy-five per week. Your lot’s production target is eighty so that there’s a margin for error, in case somebody falls ill or the code doesn’t ‘take’ in a particular story.”
There was silence then, and it was a silence that continued for the rest of the night. George lay wide awake in bed, watching the moonglow that silvered the bedroom curtains and listening to the shiver of the trees outside and the distant, damned-soul cry of a fox. He felt Jennifer beside him, tense, sleepless too. She had hoped to purge herself with her confession but now feared that in easing her conscience, all she had done was shift the burden of shame.
The next few days at Chilton Mead passed in a haze for George. He went through the motions, writing, putting words on the screen, repeatedly hitting the 4,400-word bullseye with practised aim. He wrote of love and betrayal and anger and hope and dread, and he felt all of these things himself and yet felt none of them as real. He was overcome with bleakness, and whenever he glanced around at his fellow authors and observed them staring at their monitors and pounding away at the keys like flesh automatons, the bleakness deepened and threatened to turn into despair.
This was abuse, George resolved. This was not good enough.
The next weekend, during lunch at a quiet village pub called, ironically, The George and Dragon, George finished his second pint of Courage bitter and told Jennifer it couldn’t go on.
“It mustn’t. We can’t have writers slogging away underground, pouring their guts into stories that are just used as—as stabilizing solutions for a software bioweapon. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as patriotic as the next fellow, and as pragmatic too, but art’s art and war’s war and the two should never be mixed up.”
“What are you saying?” said Jennifer.
“We need to tell the public what’s happening. We need to get word of this out there.”
Jennifer cast a wary glance round the pub. The landlord was busy polishing glasses behind the bar. The only other patrons in the dark, oak-beamed room were a pair of hairy-eared old-timers absorbed in a game of dominoes. Nobody appeared to be paying the young couple any attention.
Still, she kept her voice low as she said, “And how are we going to tell the public and not spend the rest of our lives in prison? Because you break the Official Secrets Act, George, and they’ll have you locked up quicker than you can say ‘human rights violation.’ ”
“A story,” George said simply. “I’ve thought about this. A short story. Fiction. Using Chilton Mead’s own methods against it.”
“A story? Spill the beans in a story? But nobody’ll believe it. If you claim it’s fiction, everyone will naturally dismiss it as something you made up.”
“Not,” said George, “if the story has the code inside it.”
Jennifer scowled. “What?”
“You could get hold of the code, couldn’t you, Jen? Hack into the computer at the lab where it’s kept and steal a copy.”
“No. Well, not easily.”
“But it’s possible.”
“Not impossible. The terminal in the lab has firewalls as thick as Bill Gates’s wallet, but then I installed them, so I know how to get around them. That’s not really the problem. The problem is that the system at Chilton Mead is hermetic. No external access. So I’d have to do the hacking from a terminal on-site, and even if I did manage to get hold of a copy of the code there’s no way I could get it off the premises.”
“I’ve thought about that too,” said George. “You could smuggle it out. What I’ll do is I’ll write the story on my laptop at the hotel, dump it onto a flash drive, then you take the flash drive to work with you . . .”
“Can’t do that. We’re not allowed to take equipment onto or off the premises. That’s one of the things we’re searched for every time we enter or leave.”
“I know, but a flash drive is very small. About the size of a marker pen. And they don’t do body cavity searches, do they?”
Jennifer caught his drift, and grimaced.
“It’ll work,” George insisted.
“Why not use your body cavity then, if you’re so confident?”
“Because you have a body cavity better suited to the task. Trust me, I know,” he added, with what he hoped was a safely salacious smile.
Her expression remained distasteful, but he could see she wasn’t wholly rejecting the idea.
“And then what?” she said. “Assuming any part of this crazy plan of yours succeeds.”
“Then,” he said, “we have the story published. I can do that. I have contacts. I know people, editors. The story will get into print, and maybe I’ll have to change the name of the research facility, and your name and mine, and maybe most of the people who read the story will treat it as fiction and not fact . . . but if even one reader glimpses the truth behind it, that taxpayers’ money is being used to turn authors into armorers and words into weapons, we’ll have done our job. We’ll have won.”
“But aren’t you forgetting?”
“Forgetting . . . ?”
“The code in the story. The Kamikaze Code. Whoever lays eyes on the story first will have their brains permanently scrambled. You want some poor editor to be left a gibbering, incontinent wreck?”
“No, of course not,”
said George. “That’s why I’ll read the story first. I’ll load the file back onto my laptop, open it up and . . .” He trailed off, leaving the unspeakable implications unspoken.
“No,” said Jennifer.
“Why not? Someone has to sacrifice themselves to get the truth out there, to prove beyond all doubt that the story is the truth. Might as well be me.”
“No. I won’t let you.”
“Try and stop me.”
“But—but you can’t. You mustn’t. I don’t want to lose you, George.”
“And I don’t want to lose you. But this is the only way.”
“Then,” Jennifer said adamantly, “I’ll do it too. I’ll read the story with you. We’ll open it up on your laptop and look at it together. That way we’ll both of us end up the same, and come to think of it, that’s probably just as well, because once the story’s published, it won’t take the bigwigs at Chilton Mead long to work out who George and Jennifer really are, and then our lives won’t be worth living anyway.”
They held each other’s gazes for a long time, and agreement was reached, the compact sealed.
And this is the 4,400-word story in which the Kamikaze Code was smuggled out and that was submitted to an editor as a time-delayed email attachment after it was first viewed by George and Jennifer. And if you’ve heard a news report about a young couple who were found in a Wiltshire hotel room staring at a laptop screen, inexplicably brain dead, then that’s us, that’s me and my girlfriend, the love of my life, and that was that thing we had to do in order to bring the truth to light, to expose Chilton Mead for the corrupt and corrupting place that it is . . .
And if there was no such news report, and Jennifer and I effectively vanished off the face of the earth, then it’s obvious that Chilton Mead caught up with us and “cleansed” the hotel room before anyone found our empty bodies.
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