by Nik Abnett
The work surface still felt oddly tacky under Henderson’s hands, but he managed to ignore the flecks of green and orange matter that had wormed their way into the mount that held the rubberpro sphere in place on the surface of the counter. Under almost any other circumstances, the whole incident would have been vile to Henderson. In the middle of a crisis, he was unflappable.
The ramp-up was happening again. The claxons and light pulses told everyone on the Service Floor that the system was approaching critical mass. Code Red was imminent.
If Code Red was reached, the Shield would no longer be impenetrable. The Earth would be visible to the Universe, and would, almost certainly, be destroyed. The planet would, at the very least, have to ‘Go Dark’.
There were protocols in place for practising ‘Darkness’. For four days a year, everything was switched off. In a new ‘Dark Age’, anything that required power would be disengaged from the source of that power. The World would be rendered dark and quiet. Manufacturing would cease. Travel by any method other than human or animal energy would end. The lights would go out. The only source of heat would be fire. Communications between nations, towns, and even people, would cease. Food would have to be grown locally, pipelines would stop pumping, turbines would stop turning. Survival at an individual level would become paramount, and there would never be an opportunity to return to a world of light.
Even in a new Dark Age, the Earth would be visible. It would not sparkle like a rich gem in the heavens, as it would, now, without the Shield, but it would not be hidden behind the magical cloud of synaptic energy that had been harnessed to render the Earth safe from prying eyes.
METOO FLINCHED, AND twisted in her chair.
“What’s that?” she asked. “Is Tobe safe?” She could sense the faint wail of the claxons, beyond the near-soundproof walls of the interview room, and registered the ebb and flow of light at the edges of her vision.
Police Operator Strauss reached out and touched the back of Metoo’s hand.
“I don’t know,” she said. “If it’s important, Service will inform us.”
Branting’s face appeared on Metoo’s vid-con screen. He had opened channels to all four of the interview rooms he was communicating with globally, and gave them all the same information.
“Okay,” said Branting, “you might be experiencing some minor audio and/or visual disturbances. There is no need for immediate alarm.
“However, it is my duty to inform you that, without a resolution to the current global problem, the Earth will ‘Go Dark’ in approximately six hours. Time is of the essence. Good luck.”
THE SCREENS IN the interview rooms went black. The interviewees stayed in their chairs, but Marquez was sweating and fidgeting in his seat, and Perrett was chewing her left thumbnail. Goodman was looking at McColl.
“This is it, then, is it?” he asked.
“Let’s hope not,” said McColl. “What can you give them? Can you give Service any hope at all?”
“Hope of what?” asked Goodman, his tone resigned. “They’re not listening to me.”
“Explain.”
“They think this entire crisis has been caused by Master Tobe, right?”
“I suppose so. That certainly seems to be the assumption.”
“Well, they’re wrong. I’d stake my life on it.”
“Go on, then.”
“Go on, what?”
“Stake your life on it.”
“Maybe I would, if I knew how the hell I could get them to listen.”
McColl rose from his chair. He looked at Goodman, and then stepped, with one foot, onto the chair he had vacated, and, with the other, got himself onto the table they’d been sitting at. He raised his arms in the air and started shouting, and jumping up and down on the table.
“Aaaaaarghhhhhhh!” he screamed.
Goodman looked up at him. McColl seemed not to be breathing, and the scream sounded like it would never end. Then, as abruptly as he’d begun, McColl stopped screaming, and leaned over, bracing his hands against his knees. He smiled down at Goodman.
“What the hell was that about?” asked Goodman.
“I wondered if I could get them to listen,” said McColl, stepping off the table. “Seems not.”
METOO GOT UP and began to pace up and down the little room, her eyes never leaving the vid-con screen.
“You need to remain calm,” said Strauss. “We all need your help, and you won’t be able to give of your best if you’re in a state.”
“How could I not be in a state?” asked Metoo, dropping back down onto her chair, ringing her hands together on the table-top in front of her. “Tobe has changed. I’ve noticed the changes, of course, but I’ve tried to ignore them. I only want him to be the person he was born to be, but that doesn’t seem possible any more. He was Active, wasn’t he?”
“I’m not privy to that information,” said Strauss, “not many of us are.”
“He was Active. I know that he was, and I’ve done something wrong. I’ve ironed out his specialness. I’ve made him ordinary. God forgive me, what have I done?”
BRANTING CAME BACK on-line on Perrett’, Goodman’ and Marquez’s vid-con screens.
“Time is of the essence, Operators,” he said. “You are one of three Service personnel that have been tracked down for their skills in reading screens, and people. We cannot verify that these skills are genuine, but early tests suggest that they might be useful, and, frankly, we have to try everything and anything we can to get through this crisis.”
“I’ve got something to say,” said Goodman. Perrett and Marquez couldn’t hear him, but he managed to stop Branting in his tracks.
“You’ve got two minutes,” said Branting.
“Master Tobe is not the perpetrator of this... whatever it is.” said Goodman. “I have worked on his screen, and there is nothing wrong with him. His mental state is not deteriorating, if anything, it is stable and possibly even expanding.
“Whoever or whatever is causing the ramp-up, it isn’t Master Tobe. You’ve made a terrible mistake.”
“How sure are you of that?” asked Branting.
“As sure as I can be,” said Goodman. “I just don’t know if I can prove it.”
Branting’s vid-con screen went black. He stared at it, bewildered. The screen fizzed to life with drifting snow, and then blinked before recovering to show a small, elegant man in a very sharp suit sitting in front of him. Branting did not need an introduction. The man on the screen in front of him was responsible for the Earth’s safety. He was the Minister for Global Security, and, possibly, the most important non-Active on the planet.
“Branting,” said Special Operator Tibbets, “we need to consolidate, and we need to do it fast. Your department is the only one that seems to be making any kind of headway, so we are increasing your resources. We are also monitoring all of your activity, minutely. Be aware that you can be removed from your post without notice.”
The screen fizzed again, and the Minister’s face disappeared.
The wall adjacent to Branting’s seat slid slowly back to reveal a bank of vid-con screens, arranged four high and six wide. Branting leaned to his left and hit a button on the wall. The screens fizzed to life to reveal swirling snow; slowly, one by one, Branting assigned them.
“Qa in one,” he instructed, “Goodman in three. Then Service screen-feeds in seven and thirteen, Wooh’s feed in eight, and Perret in nine. Finally, let’s have Assistant-Companion Metoo’s live-feed on fourteen, and put Marquez on screen fifteen.”
Branting had organised a square of three screens, with Wooh’s feed of Saintout and Master Tobe in the middle. Metoo’s feed was directly below Tobe’s, and the three screen Operators had the column of screens to the right of Tobe’ and Metoo’s. The two screens on the left were Service screens.
“Cross feed all screens,” said Branting. “I want to make sure that anyone I choose has access to anything I choose.
“Qa, I need you to feed images to vario
us vid-cons, as and when I tell you, okay?”
“OK,” said Qa. “This is going to take a few minutes to set up. Do I have clearance?”
“This is all on me, but, if I get this wrong, none of that will matter any more.”
“Yes, sir. What’s first?”
“Put me through on Assistant-Companion Metoo’s screen,” he said, “and line up Master Tobe’s feed.”
Metoo watched the screen as Branting spoke to her.
“I know this is very hard for you,” he said, “and I’m sorry that I have to keep you here, but, I am going to show you live feed of Master Tobe, during the time when I cannot be talking to you directly. I hope that it will help.”
“Thank you,” said Metoo, but she was not sure that Branting heard her; the screen had already switched to footage of Tobe.
Branting switched back to Qa.
“I want Metoo’s wafers on screen thirteen, and Tobe’s live screen-feed on seven,” he said. “Then split feed them to Perrett, Marquez and Goodman, prioritising Goodman. I’ll need to speak to them, so put me on their audio.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
“TOBE KNOWS MATHS,” said Tobe. “Metoo knows some maths, too, but Metoo knows everything else.”
“Okay,” said Saintout, “I can buy that, from your point of view, at least.”
Master Tobe was sitting on his stool, on his side of the counter in the kitchen, looking up at Saintout. Saintout stood with his back leaning against the kitchen door, his feet crossed on the floor in front of him. He held the print-out, from the slot in Tobe’s room, in his hands.
Doctor Wooh couldn’t see Saintout, but he sounded far too relaxed for her comfort. On the other hand, she was relieved that Tobe seemed settled, and not at all bothered by the conversation that Saintout had foisted upon him. She just wondered whether the Tech team could get into and out of Tobe’s room without Tobe realising it, either now, or later; later mattered less, since no one knew how much time was left to them.
“It’s the same, every day,” said Tobe. “I wanted to know how it could be the same. Nothing is the same.”
“What?” asked Saintout. “What is the same every day?”
“Eggpro,” said Tobe.
“And that’s bad? I had some of Metoo’s eggpro, and I thought it was brilliant.”
“Not bad,” said Tobe, “impossible.”
“I DON’T GET it,” said Branting to himself. “What the hell is he going on about?” Once Qa was established on screen one, he had tuned in to screen eight, to see Master Tobe, live. Screen seven then blinked into life, streaming Tobe’s Service screen. Screens three, nine and fifteen all came to life at the same time, showing the Operators in their interview rooms, and, finally, Branting cued screens seven and thirteen.
SPLIT SCREENS APPEARED on the vid-cons in the Operators’ interview rooms. The left hand screen started to fill with wafers that made Perrett and Marquez sit up and take notice. Chandar put down what he was doing, and looked up, too, when he heard Perrett’s gasp. None of them had ever seen anything like it.
“That’s got to be her,” said Marquez, staring at the screen.
“Who?” asked Burgess. “No, don’t tell me; that’s ‘the Mother of all things’, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes,” said Marquez, staring intently at the screen.
“That’s her,” said Goodman. “I never thought I’d see her screen twice.”
“Wow!” said McColl. “You didn’t tell me about this!”
“It’s the girl,” said Goodman.
“The girl?” asked McColl.
“The beautiful girl we were looking at when they showed us all that footage.”
“This is her? How do you know?”
“I just know. Frankly, it comes as a surprise that other people don’t know.”
The right hand screens in the interview rooms fizzed into life, but instead of wafers blending from one to the next, this looked like a live Service screen.
“And we’ve all seen that,” said Goodman.
“The Master,” said McColl.
“I think we can probably cut the crap, now, can’t we? And call him the Active.”
“When did you know?” asked McColl.
“I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter, it’s not him that’s causing this bloody crisis.”
Goodman looked again at the screens, his eyes flitting from one to the other.
“I need a line-check,” said Goodman. He looked up slightly and said more loudly, “I need simultaneous line-checks on these two subjects, now!”
Branting’s voice was calm, as he spoke to Qa. He left Goodman’s audio channel open.
“Request concurrent line-checks on Master Tobe, and Assistant-Companion Metoo, Agent Operator Henderson,” he said.
“Prep station 7,” said Goodman, getting out of his seat. He left the room without further ceremony, and ran back onto the Service Floor as quickly as he could. He was a big man, but fit, and Chen barely had time to reset the switch on the facing edge of the counter-top, and vacate the seat, before Goodman was striding towards Workstation 7, the first place where he had seen Metoo’s mind at work.
“He’s right,” said Perrett, from her interview room in Mumbai. “Look in the 60 to 80 range. There’ll be an anomaly, on both sides. You’ll see something in both subjects.”
Marquez joined in. He was peering, intently, at the split screen vid-con in front of him.
“It’s not the same, though,” he said. “The intellectual and emotional cortexes are... I don’t know... cross-pollinating, somehow. You won’t find the same data in both subjects. Think laterally.”
“Thank you, Operators,” said Branting. He could not keep up with what they were suggesting, and could not see what they could see on the feeds in front of him, but the tests, so far as they had gone, had convinced Branting that these three Operators were a rich seam when it came to interpreting Service screen data. He secretly promised himself that he would never allow any of them to read his own Service screen.
Goodman completed the change-over in thirty-five seconds, a record, even by his standards.
“Who’s doing the line-check?” he called over his shoulder.
“Who do you want?” asked Henderson.
“Mayer,” said Bob, rolling the rubberpro sphere around under his hand. “Is Mayer on the Floor?”
“Here,” said Mayer, bouncing out of the dicky seat at Station 9. “I’ve got the Active.”
The glistening figure of eight was swirling on Bob’s screen as he began the countdown for the simultaneous line-check.
“Line-check,” they said, together.
“Verify,” said the Operators in the dicky seats at Workstations 9 and 7, on cue.
“Verify line-check,” said Goodman and Mayer, together.
Chapter Forty-Nine
SCREEN 6 IN front of Branting fizzed into life. Snow drifted across the screen, and then it blacked out. There was no visual signal, but a jagged line crossed the screen, pulsing up and down, and back and forth to the sound of Qa’s voice.
“Patching through Doctor Wooh, redirected from Service Global,” said Qa. “Screen 6.”
“Okay,” said Branting. “Doctor Wooh, can you hear me? This is Control Operator Branting.”
“Sir,” said Wooh, breathily, the jagged line squeezing up with the frequency of her excited voice. “All of the maths is pouring out of the mini-print slot in Tobe’s room, here in the flat. Send in a Tech team, and get the information out into the World.”
“Done,” said Branting signing off. The maths had been sent around the World via the mini-print slot in Tobe’s office, without anybody knowing how the print-out related to the actual material in the office; perhaps sending the work out in its entirety would solve the problems that it had caused in its partial state. It had to be worth a try.
Wooh was able to relax, knowing that the Techs were in the flat, and that all possible information concerning Tobe’s maths was being disseminated.
>
Metoo watched the same pictures that Doctor Wooh was watching. She too felt more relaxed than she had since leaving the flat, but for different reasons. She could relax, because she could see Tobe; it only remained for her to be reassured that he was his old self, and not some shadow of his former Active self.
“I TELL YOU what,” said Saintout, “why don’t I make us some eggpro?”
“It’s not the same,” said Tobe.
“Okay, Buddy, so talk me through it.”
“Tobe gets up at the same time, every day. Tobe has a shower. Then Tobe comes here,” he said, patting the kitchen counter in front of his stool. “The eggpro waits for Tobe, and Tobe eats it.”
“So, every day, you come in here and eat the eggpro that Metoo makes for you. I don’t get it. Why is that impossible?”
“Probability.”
“You’ve lost me, Buddy.”
Tobe looked up at Saintout, and said, “Who’s Buddy?”
Metoo smiled at the screen. If it looked like her usual Tobe, and it talked like her usual Tobe, maybe it was her usual Tobe.
“What has breakfast got to do with probability?” asked Saintout.
“A coin,” said Tobe in teacher mode, “has an obverse and a reverse. How many elements are there in breakfast?”
“I don’t know,” said Saintout. “No, hang on, I do know. I’m pretty sure Metoo told me how she makes Eggpro... What was it, again?”
“Tobe doesn’t know,” said Tobe, answering Saintout’s rhetorical question. “There are more than two elements in breakfast. I know that. More than just obverse/reverse.”
“I suppose so,” said Saintout, but he wasn’t really listening; he was trying to remember Metoo’s eggpro recipe.
“Tobe doesn’t understand cooking,” said Tobe. “The more elements there are, the less likely something is to be the same.”
