by JT Lawrence
Gaelyn sticks a small green dot on each of them, then takes them past the front desk, past a watercooler, the door to the emergency fire stairwell, and through to the exhibition hall. The second she steps away from the reception desk, a carbon copy replaces her.
Suddenly a deafening siren rings through the air. It fills the space with red zigzags. Kate and Seth both flinch at the sudden noise, but Gaelyn remains completely unperturbed. There is chatter at the front entrance. Men in kevlarskin onesies appear, holding long, smooth weapons with two handles that look like they’re straight out of a space opera film. Where did they come from? It’s like they jumped out of the walls.
“Stay where you are,” says the SkyRest announcer. “Stay where you are.”
Two of the guards jog towards Kate and Seth. Apart from the bulletproof suits, they wear graphene face armour with moving parts that agitate when they talk.
“Come with us,” they say.
Chapter 66
Kill Switch
“No,” says Kate.
The SkyRest guard looks at her. “It’s for your own safety.”
“I’ve heard that before,” says Seth.
“What is the situation?” Gaelyn’s smile is as wide as ever.
“We have a TX599. All visitors are to come with us.”
Seth looks around. As expected, there are no other visitors.
Gaelyn takes a step forward. “I’m afraid we’ll have to continue this tour another time. We have an unusual situation.”
“What’s happening?”
“We’ve never had a situation like this before, but don’t worry. If we all just follow the protocol, everything will be fine.”
Kate doesn’t know what to do. There’s no way she’s going with the thugs. No way she’s being trawled into another dark van, not without kicking and screaming.
Gaelyn shakes her head in what looks like a nervous tic. “Will be fine,” she says. “Will be fine.”
“Reset,” says one of the guards.
“Reset,” says Gaelyn. “Affirmative.” She cocks her head and looks at Kate. “If we all just follow the protocol everything will be fine.” The receptionist tries to take a step forward, but her body arrests in that awkward position, and she can’t seem to get out of it. “Will be fine.”
The guard picks her up and throws her over his shoulder. The other motions with a nod to take her away.
“Come with me,” says the remaining guard.
The twins stand their ground.
“I’m not offering you a choice,” he says. “You have to come with me right now. We’re about to have a serious security breach, and it’s not safe to be in here.”
“What do you mean,” says Seth, “that you’re about to have a security breach. What does that mean?”
“You don’t need to know the details. You need to—”
“We do if you want us to move,” says Kate.
The guard looks at the green sticker with annoyance. He would have carried them away just like Gaelyn if he was allowed to. Something about the sticker is putting him off.
“Due to a situation that is out of our control, we need to shut down the building.”
“What situation?” asks Kate. “Do you mean the rebellion?”
“Shut it down? What?” says Seth, “The whole building? You can’t.”
That would be a disaster. Or would it?
The guard bites down and his jaw muscles ripple. He’s clearly annoyed to be wasting time with stubborn civilians, but he can’t touch them, and he can’t leave them here. The siren is ringing and the red zigzags are still scraping Kate’s eyeballs. Seth checks his newstream.
International Texpert in India Confirms ‘Malfunction’ is a Virus
V1R1S Spreading with Deadly Consequences
Switch Off, Unplug, You Can Stop the V1R1S
V1R1S Reaches Cape Republic, Thousands Dead
Prepare for National Shutdown
Call for the KILL SWITCH Now
Roguebots Not Rebels: Meet the V1R1S that’s spreading at the speed of light
“They’ve confirmed it’s a virus,” says Seth. “They’re going to be shutting down the city one band at a time.”
“Shutting down?”
“Cutting the power.”
“The government? They can’t do that. This place is solar.”
“It’s not the government. It’s everyone, everywhere. Doesn’t matter if they’re on the grid or not. Doesn’t matter where the power comes from. Everyone’s responsible for shutting their own power off over the next few hours by staggered deadlines, north to south, or face the consequences of the V1R1S spreading.”
“Why staggered?”
“I don’t know. To give them time to loot the national treasury before it goes offline forever?”
“But don’t the roguebots have back-up battery packs?”
“They won’t last forever. And, combined with the Kill Switch, it’ll stop most of the AI from icing any more people.”
“They’re going to trigger the Kill Switch?”
“It looks like it.”
It’s a three-signature government decision. Not only will the Kill Switch terminate all robot consciousness, including surgeons and nurses and teachers, it’ll kill every iteration of artificial intelligence in the country, from smart fridges to traffic lights to artificial hearts. Activating the Switch will cause planes to drop out of the sky. It’ll break the country in half, wipe out trillions on the Cryptox Exchange, and take out thousands of civilians. Would Mashini Wam really have the ovaries to do that? Do they want her to? Kate pictures the premature babies in their smart incubators and wants to cry. Then she thinks of her own baby, Silver, and can feel the blood drain out of her face.
“Silver,” she says. “She won’t be able to get back.”
Seth’s mouth is a hard line. In a low voice he says “We need to get Zack and get back to her before the Lipworth shuts down.”
Kate looks around for evidence of the blackout, and, as if by magical thinking, things start fading. First it’s the display LEDs lighting up the products at the back of the exhibition hall, then the darkness bangs towards them and mechanisms all around are frozen in time. Seth and Kate stand in the dark, momentarily lost in space.
“How long do we have?” she asks.
“Not long enough.”
Chapter 67
Ghost Cutlasses
If the mission to find Zack seemed difficult before, it seems impossible now. Yes, Kate had wished for SkyRest’s power to be cut to disable the security system, but she hadn’t thought further than that. She hadn’t thought of standing here in the dark, in a building that goes up eleven storeys and down—who knows how many?—She hadn’t thought of being marooned here surrounded by thick black unfiltered air with no clue how to find Zack. She also hadn’t thought of how the disabled security system wouldn’t just let Zack out, but the rest of the dangerous crims too. Without wanting to, she imagines being stuck down in the bowels of this building, being stuck with murderers and rapists and never getting out again. Silver fading away in her hospital bed, Mally being killed in his sleep by his Stepford girlfriend. Sudden bright yellow panic squeezes her lungs, imaginary voices shout at her, and Seth hears her breathing become ragged and holds her arm.
“Don’t panic,” he says, as if it’s that easy to avoid a panic attack.
Kate tries to keep her heart from climbing into her throat. She thinks of other situations more dangerous than this that she’s survived, and not only survived, but dominated, and slowly this thought, the memories, take the fright out of her adrenaline, and replace it with energy. Her chest is still galloping, but her mind is clear.
One by one, individual torches come on, like white sabres in the dark (Ghost Cutlasses). They’re coming from the guards’ heads; their face armour has some kind of built-in headlamp.
“We don’t have much time,” says the guard. “Come with me.”
“Give us your head lamp,” says Ka
te.
He hesitates.
“Give us your headlamp, and we’ll go with you.”
The guard shakes his head then unbuttons something on his utility belt. He swivels the head to turn it on, and hands it to Kate. She’s never been so happy to see a penlight in her life. It’s the new tech one, the glow-worm, that you can break in half. She does so, and hands the other half to Seth. As agreed, they follow the guard out of the product display room, and as they get near the front entrance, Kate grabs Seth’s arm, and they peel away into the emergency stairwell.
They run down the stairs as fast as they can without falling. Kate has that familiar burnt-orange feeling again, deja vu, and remembers being in The Office stairway with Seth on the day they found each other again, discussing The Genesis Project and Non-Lizards. They climb down, down, down, and the air gets cooler. Space opens up around them: the stairs are designed in a wentletrap. Winding green, bruise-blue, iced magenta, dry khaki, lemon zest, until they hit fresh pomegranate and can hear voices. They leave the spiral stairwell and run along a stone hewn passage, pushing open a disabled securodoor. This darkness is different: it’s redolent of yeasty dough and hand sanitiser and sore throats. Despite the lack of light, Kate’s vision is shot through with soft, wobbling blox of colour: Jailhouse Nutrijelly.
“Who’s there?” says a man, making Kate almost drop her torch in fright. She shines it in the direction of the voice. A monochrome face appears. He shields his eyes and squints, trying to see who’s holding the light.
“What’s going on?” asks someone else. “Why are the lights off?”
“Has something happened?”
“Are we being punished?”
Kate surveys the room. There must be fifty of them. Why are they gathered here? Why haven’t they bolted for the open door, to escape?
“When will it come back on?”
“The water dispenser isn’t working.”
“It’s getting difficult to breathe.”
The men, faces shining, begin squirming in agitation. Sweat slick.
Seth tests the waters. “Gaelyn sent us.”
“Ah,” some of them say. There is audible relief. Gaelyn knows about their situation. It will be fixed soon.
“You’re not being punished,” says Kate.
The mood changes; everything is going to be okay.
“It’s a scheduled break in supply for maintenance reasons. Gaelyn apologises for not warning you in advance.”
“Ah,” they say. Gaelyn’s the best. Everyone loves Gaelyn.
The door is standing wide open. Kate knows the lights are off, but … surely with no guards in the immediate vicinity at least a few of them would have tried to escape?
Irrationally, the fact that the men are so meek in the face of what is probably their one and only chance of ever escaping, makes Kate more uncomfortable than the fact that she’s surrounded by dangerous crims. Something about this setup feels very wrong.
Seth grabs her arm and it jolts her out of her anxious thoughtloop. “Listen,” he says.
Far above them there is the sound of metallic thunder, and it’s getting louder.
“Where is Zack?” Kate says.
“Zack?” they say. Zack zack zack? What has this to do with Zack?
“He’s gone,” says a man towards the front of the group. The light hits his shiny scalp.
“What do you mean, ‘gone’?”
“He’s been elevated,” says the man. The others murmur.
“Elevated?” asks Kate. Seth is pulling Kate away.
“Promoted!” he shouts. “He was promoted last night.”
Seth pulls Kate away from the clammy residence, out into the stone passage where the emergency staircase is, and a breath of cooler air. They race down the steps, but only get down one flight when they hear the thunder coming towards them again, hard boots on metal stairs, and see the urgent beams of torches above them, and have to jump off the iron spiral and crouch in the dark corner behind it.
Seconds later the kevlar-skinned guards smash past them and stream into the passage and whatever room is on the other side of it. Kate waits a moment, then they go for the stairs again. Seth is first up, and just as Kate puts her foot on the first step, a large body grabs her from behind and smacks a meaty hand over her mouth. Kate shouts, but Seth doesn’t hear her, and keeps going. Kate struggles and tries to throw the person off, but all she manages to do is drop her torch, and it goes skittering off the edge of the step and falls down into the black vortex, smashing on the stone floor far below.
Chapter 68
Rocky Rabbit Hole
Kate elbows the attacker in the kevlar-padded ribs and yells for Seth, but the hand over her mouth is firm and hardly a sound escapes.
“Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh,” is the hissing, too close to her ear, and the sensation makes her shout louder. She imagines a giant hissing cockroach scuttling next to her head, and she wants to faint with the creepiness, the crackliness of it. She half expects the insect’s scratchy leg to brush her face but the thing that caresses her ear is not carapace but soft cheek skin, female, and smells of tsatsiki.
The woman slams Kate sideways, and in the dark Kate expects her head to be smashed against the rocky wall. She’s surprised when the wall is missing and she falls hard into a room, cracking her elbow on the stone floor. She gasps in pain, but keeps quiet when she hears the guards running again.
“Don’t make a sound,” whispers the woman. Is it a Gaelyn? No, she’s far too substantial for that. Too strong. Her white sabre cuts through the air, illuminating another door on the opposite side of the narrow room—or is it a passage?—they’re in. She offers Kate a hand up.
“Who are you?”
The woman doesn’t answer. Kate gets up on her own.
Kate holds her elbow while the electric blue current buzzes inside the bone. “What do you want from me?”
“Come,” she says.
“No,” says Kate, and starts walking back towards the staircase, towards Seth.
“We’ve been waiting for you for twelve years,” the woman says, and Kate’s legs stop working.
“What?”
“We don’t have much time.”
The torch is again throwing light on the doorway where the woman wants her to go.
I’d be mad to trust this woman, Kate thinks, but then she remembers Betty/Barbara in the basement with the warning and the key, and the message that had led her back to Seth and saved her life. She’d also thought B/B was crackers, with her barbecue sauce BO and dog-hair jersey, spouting about assassins and Doomsday, but she’d been right, and Kate wouldn’t be here without her.
With a deep breath to steady her nerves, Kate follows the woman through the doorway, and they hurry down a hall then another passage that snakes its way around one way and then another so that Kate loses her sense of direction. Just as she starts second-guessing her decision to follow the woman, they reach a door with an antique padlock which the woman unlocks with a small silver key attached to a lanyard around her neck. Seeing the key makes Kate’s thoughts tumble down around her—is she dreaming? When the lights come back on will this woman have Betty/Barbara’s face and start babbling about hit lists and seed banks? But it’s just Kate’s panic murmuring. She knows that B/B is dead, has been dead for almost two decades, and that this woman is another brand of insanity altogether, and she is just as crazy for having followed her so deep into this godforsaken rocky rabbit hole.
The woman opens the door and pushes Kate inside. The sound of the lock clicking closed behind her sends ice into her veins. No more passages, no more doors, just a small blank room crowded with claustrophobia. The cell is just concrete and dripping water, and a thin, dirty mattress, grey and blue stripes, and Kate’s sudden panic makes her want to fling her whole body at the door, break through it, fractured elbow be damned, and run away as fast as she can. She’ll die down here if she doesn’t fight her way back up to the light and the air. Kate feels the weight of all the people who
have beaten her to it, leaden on her chest. Who knew souls could be so heavy?
Kate turns to the woman and braces herself, ready to fight with everything she’s got, when a familiar voice comes from the corner behind her. Kate spins around.
There is a grey mask at the end of the beam of light.
“You’ve come,” says Zack, and there is a look of wonder on his face.
Chapter 69
Dead Men Don't Care
Seth ascends the stairs, boots hitting the metal steps, but something immediately feels wrong. He stops and turns around, and Kate is gone.
“Kate?” he whispers urgently. “Kate?”
Now the panic claws at him. He doesn’t want to go back down. He doesn’t want to die down here. It shouldn’t make a difference, really. Dead men don’t care, but he can’t help feeling that he’d rather die somewhere in the open, where he can see the sky or the faces of the people he loves, instead of having this great hulking weight over him.
“Kate?”
Dread and terror roil in his stomach. His body is warning him to get out while he can. Each step down ramps his anxiety higher. When he reaches the platform it feels as if the coolness of the rock face is seeping into the marrow of his bones. Where could she have gone?
Seth moves as quietly as he can, back towards the warm core of the building. How would he possibly be able to find Kate in this lightless labyrinth? Already he’s made his way through passages and openings that all look identical. Empty black barns and doorways to nowhere. His foreboding sits high in his chest.
Eventually there’s a room that’s not empty. There’s no one in it, as far as he can see, but there are pallets in the centre, with some kind of high-tech cooler boxes stacked on top. What could be on those pallets? He shouldn’t look. He really shouldn’t look. He has to find Kate and get out of this sour netherworld as soon as he can.
