The Vanguard

by SJ Griffin

Chapter Nine

  Much like the time we made a killing on a set of synthetic retinas that would open a digital vault in a Ministry deposit house, we were back in business. The incident room may have been one of Minos’s more outlandish ideas, but with that, Casino back on form and Lola’s red rubber band working wonders it was almost like old times. I slept in, so we had to postpone Minos’s summit meeting until late afternoon, when I presented myself to an incident room buzzing with activity. Doodle was sitting at the end of a long table looking morose.

  ‘Have you had something to eat?’ I said to him.

  ‘Not hungry,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I am. Why don’t you come and keep me company?’

  ‘If you want,’ he said. ‘These people are all insane anyway.’

  ‘Where are you going? We need to...’ Minos trailed off after a significant look from Lola.

  I took Doodle to the kitchen where I put on some coffee. I did it all like a regular person so as not to push him over the edge. He looked like he was clinging on with his fingertips.

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ he said. ‘Black.’

  I put the mug down in front of him and sat opposite. ‘What’s the story, Doodle? What’s going on?’

  ‘Big trouble.’

  ‘How come? You gave them the cash, right?’

  ‘Oh yes, I give them all the cash but they’re not happy. They say that Doodle knows too much now and some people are looking for me.’

  ‘What people?’ I wanted to be wrong but I knew already.

  ‘This gang.’

  ‘Who?’ I knew that too.

  ‘The gang. There’s only one. They all look the same. Very tall with golden hair, like old coins.’

  Doodle was going to get his tongue cut out. And that was the best case scenario. ‘What did you do?’ I said.

  ‘I am not telling you that, Sorcha Blades. You do not need to know, it will be bad if you do.’

  ‘What about Rowling? I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The woman at the Detention Centre. The old one,’ I said.

  ‘So that’s her name. She knows them,’ he sipped at the hot coffee. It was good coffee from the Latin States. It even smelt like it was wide awake. ‘She says Doodle is going to die. I didn’t know she would turn up in Detention Centre.’

  ‘No, I guess you didn’t,’ I thought about Doodle stabbing an Enforce officer and just giving himself up. That was some length to go to.

  ‘How she does know Sorcha Blades?’ said Doodle.

  ‘That, Doodle, is a very good question.’

  ‘I must go,’ he said. ‘Doodle making things dangerous for you and you have been very kind.’

  ‘You can stay a while, you know, if you want,’ I said.

  There was a long pause. ‘I don’t want,’ he said. ‘I want to be alone.’

  I let him out the back way. He trudged down the path and climbed over the gate. I was almost glad he was gone, as bad as I felt for him. He was like a clock ticking down to the end of time. Doomsday Doodle.

  ‘Minos is going to have a conniption if you don’t come on,’ Casino said, poking his head round the door. ‘Or I’m going to kill him. One of the two.’

  We assembled in the incident room. Minos had put a big ball of string on the table and had already started winding bits of it round pins on the boards to show how things were connected.

  ‘Where’s Lola?’ I said.

  ‘She’s gone to see Stark,’ Roach said. ‘We figured that this started after that party and he give us the invitations. So she’s gone to get his confession.’

  ‘She’s not going to tell him about everything?’ I said.

  ‘No, she’s under strict instructions not to tell him anything and not to use anything other than her feminine wiles,’ Roach said. ‘So as not to cause suspicion. He’ll tell her everything in a second, you know what he’s like.’

  ‘I’ve called us all here today,’ Minos said, glaring at us. ‘To see what you found out, Sorcha, in the Detention Centre.’

  ‘Doodle just told me something interesting,’ I said.

  Minos sat down in defeat.

  ‘The gangsters with the golden hair that we saw at the black market,’ I said. ‘They’re the people Doodle owed the cash to. He wouldn’t tell me why, but there’s a woman at the Detention Centre, Rowling, who seems pretty tight with them.’

  ‘Rowling,’ Casino said, leaping up much to Minos’s delight and pointing at a picture on a monitor. ‘We found her earlier. She’s some kind of Enforce consultant, black coded.’

  Black coded meant she was authorised to operate off the grid, so Enforce would not know if she was working with the gangsters.

  ‘So, she’s pretty high up then,’ Roach said.

  ‘She works for Imagination Industries,’ I said. ‘She’s not actually Enforce.’

  ‘How do you know she’s Imagination Industries?’ Casino said.

  ‘All the stuff in the warehouse, remember,’ I said. ‘It’s obvious.’

  ‘How is that obvious?’ Casino looked suspicious.

  ‘It’s not obvious,’ Roach said. ‘But if you’re sure?’

  ‘I am,’ I was not giving up my source.

  ‘OK, OK,’ Minos typed it up with two fingers. ‘We’ll get back to that. What did they want at the Detention Centre?’

  ‘This Rowling knew the prophecy and she wanted to know how I knew it. Her version was a little bit different though. Anyway, she seemed pretty certain that I knew it,’ I said. ‘Didn’t even bother with the if, just wanted the how.’

  ‘Did you tell them?’ Casino said.

  I gave him a look of disdain.

  ‘Of course, she didn’t,’ Minos said. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, that was all they wanted to know. I thought there must be a leak, but then Vermina said that they thought I was one of the five.’

  ‘Vermina said?’ Casino said.

  ‘Yes. Vermina said that they were starting to think that I was one of the five and that they were going to try and prove I had fire, or tongues or one of the others.’

  ‘She tipped you off?’ Casino said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When?’ Roach said.

  ‘She came into my cell to patch my head up and she told me then.’

  ‘We need to get Vermina connected up on the wall,’ Minos said.

  ‘There’s not much else,’ I said. ‘I don’t think they know very much but they’re trying to find the five.’

  ‘What did you tell Doodle?’ Roach said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I’ve had an interesting thought,’ Minos said, looking up from his computer. ‘Who did Yum say delivered the passes for the Detention Centre?’

  ‘He just said it was some woman,’ Casino said.

  ‘Was it this one, do you think?’ Minos moved aside. Vermina stared out from the screen.

  ‘Yes,’ Casino said. ‘I rather think it was. But you already guessed that, didn’t you?’

  I shrugged and then, for good measure, gave a small disinterested grunt. Even though I’d realised I could have told him what the package looked like because I’d seen it in her bag, a small padded envelope along with the first aid kit.

  We debated and ruminated all morning. We had more questions than answers. We tried to organise them into sensible enquires that we could take to Haggia and Marshall but it was like trying to unravel a ball of yarn while wearing woolly mittens. We were interrupted when all our wristsets went off at the same time. It was Lola. We had been summoned to Stark’s house.

  ‘Since when have we got a van,’ I said, climbing into the back of one in the garage under the hotel.

  ‘It came in on the boat a few Tuesdays ago,’ Minos said. ‘Took a while to fit up.’

  ‘A few Tuesdays?’ I said. ‘Come on, I think I would have noticed a van.’

  ‘You’ve been away for over a month,’ Casino said.

  ‘A month? What day is it today?’
/>
  ’Friday,’ Casino said.

  ‘I thought it was Monday,’ I said. ‘A couple of Mondays ago.’

  ‘Let’s not think about that now,’ Roach said. ‘We need to get down to Stark’s.’

  The van was a standard transit size. It was grey, with blacked-out windows and fake badges. It was hooked up to the hotel thanks to the equipment in the back. Minos had also installed a mini bar and a massive security system. Anyone so much as looking at the van funny wouldn’t walk straight for a week and would turn their back on a life of vehicle crime. Once the mobility in their hips returned. Stark lived in the Garden Suburbs like many of the Academy members, it was all achingly elegant and skirted the Academy Quarter so it was also achingly convenient. He had a very grand house hidden behind a minimalist facade of grey slate and smoked glass. We parked up and called Lola.

  ‘Can’t you just ring the doorbell like normal people?’ she said.

  ‘This is fair warning,’ Minos said. ‘We wouldn’t want to interrupt.’

  We rang the doorbell like normal people. Stark opened the door. He was wearing a silk robe held closed with a thick cord tied at the waist in a jaunty bow. He couldn’t have made it more obvious that he just got out of bed if he’d been attached to the pillow. Minos shuddered.

  ‘Hello, Stark,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Hello beautiful,’ he said, kissing me on both cheeks like a New Europan. ‘Nice to have you back.’

  ‘She’s filled you in then?’ Minos ducked behind me in case he got the New Europan greeting as well.

  ‘On a need to know basis I expect,’ Stark smiled. ‘You know Lola.’

  We all agreed that we did know Lola as we were led to his studio. Stark’s house was very secretive. All the cupboards were hidden and Stark would walk round pressing random walls in growing irritation whenever he was looking for something. Lola assured me there weren’t any secret passages, which was disappointing. The whole place was open plan, with artful columns placed for occasional privacy, except for the bathroom and the studio which was shut away at the back. Stark’s studio was a large glass box. You could see right across the northern side of the city from there.

  ‘Take your time, people, do,’ Lola said. She was sitting in a deck chair wearing the hers part of Stark’s robe set.

  ‘Let me look at your head, Sorcha,’ Stark said.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said, lifting up my hair so he could see.

  ‘Stark has left the Academy,’ Lola said, bursting to drop the bombshell.

  We all looked at him in stunned silence. This was news indeed.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Stark. ‘Me and almost everyone else.’

  ‘How come?’ Roach said.

  ‘Oh, it’s been a long time coming. Rhone’s announcement was the death knell if you ask me but we’d all seen it coming,’ said Stark.

  Chichester Rhone was the Prime Minister, the sixth in five years. People weren’t voted into that particular office anymore, they were pushed through the door holding a short straw.

  ‘What announcement?’ I was out of the loop and not alone it seemed.

  ‘The Arts Academy is closing. Well, not closing exactly but changing. This group have taken over the committee and brought in all these new regulations. And frankly some of them are just not on.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, some of them are a little, I don’t know, religious.’

  ‘Religious?’ I said.

  ‘Religious,’ Lola said. ‘Isn’t that odd?’

  Religious faith was not banned in any official sense, but it was acknowledged as a universal truth that there was no place for it in our forward thinking and modern society. It caused too many problems. The mass practising of religion was forbidden. You could pray in your own home, you could wear robes, symbols or anything you may deem necessary, but the moment there was anything organised about it, it was crushed. And the funny thing was that was how people seemed to want it, more people informed on organised faith practise violations than any other crime.

  ‘Iconography synonymous with faith, they would say,’ said Stark. ‘But ultimately, it’s religious.’

  ‘Which one?’ Roach said.

  ‘A new one,’ said Stark. ‘It has overtones gathered from the old ones but it’s new. But don’t call it a cult whatever you do.’

  Stark had grey hair cropped very close to his head. He was in his fifties but he looked lean and fit and like he hadn’t had much work done. Maybe just an eye lift. I could see why Lola liked him. He projected an aura of security and confidence. He made you feel like nothing was going to go wrong and even if it did he would be able to handle it just fine. He looked quite baffled at that moment though.

  ‘A new one?’ Minos said. ‘They can’t just invent a religion.’

  ‘Why not?’ I said.

  ‘Because it’s...no, you’re right, of course they can,’ he said. ‘Silly me.’

  ‘So, you’re now supposed to make art based on these new regulations?’ Casino said.

  ‘Yes, but they’re so rigid. Art shouldn’t be a mechanism for wielding power. It’s horrible. There are a set number of narrative forms and people have to have certain physical characteristics.’

  ‘Like what?’ I said.

  ‘Let me show you,’ Stark said. ‘Lola thought you might be interested in seeing this.’

  As Stark went into the other room, I caught Lola’s eye and looked at her wrist band. She didn’t catch on straight away but we got there in the end.

  ‘Does he know about what we can do?’ I thought over and over.

  Lola shook her head.

  ‘Put that back on your wrist,’ I said in a strict tone of thought.

  She smiled and put it back on.

  ‘Look at this,’ Stark held up a painting. It was about a metre and a half wide and a metre tall in its gilded frame. It looked old and expensive. It showed a group of people at a kind of garden party in some symbolic, heavenly realm. There was an altar and some statues stood around, everything was laden with flowers. People lounged about, fleshy and nude, swigging from goblets and dropping grapes into their mouths. Despite this decadent and hedonistic setting the painting managed to be quite austere and threatening. This was perhaps because around the edge of the central group were six slim figures with golden hair.

  ‘Who are they?’ Roach said.

  ‘The Galearii, I think they’re called, here hold this,’ Stark almost gave the painting to Minos but remembered just in time what a bad idea that would be and gave it to Roach instead. He found a hidden bookcase and pulled out a heavy tome. He leafed through it. ‘Yes, here. Galearii. Army servants.’

  ‘We’ve seen some of these Galearii,’ Roach said.

  ‘What?’ Stark said.

  ‘We’ve seen them,’ Lola said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At the OP,’ Roach said.

  ‘Are you sure it’s them?’ Minos said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I think we should get a copy of this picture so that we can make sure, don’t you?’ he said.

  ‘Good idea,’ Roach said.

  ‘Yes,’ I caught on. ‘We might be mistaken. Best to be sure.’

  ‘Are they in the group that’s taken over?’ Lola said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Stark said. ‘I haven’t seen them. Come to think of it, I don’t think anyone actually has.’

  Stark helped Minos capture the relevant pages in the book then insisted on making us lunch, which is to say that he insisted on his assistant making us lunch. The poor boy looked furious about it but Stark told him it would make a change from cleaning paint brushes. Stark worked in oils so didn’t use paint brushes but we got our lunch and that was the main thing. Stark sold his work to the Ministry of the Environs and Conurbations. They were in charge of cleaning up the environmental mess we found ourselves in, and also housing but their first responsibility took up so much time they didn’t bother with anything else. Hence a
ll the squatting. Besides there wasn’t any way to get any credit from housing, so why bother? The person who eased our environmental woes would be minted.

  ‘Now what happens?’ Minos said through a mouthful of food. ‘Without the Academy?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Stark passed him a napkin. ‘They’re all going the same way though. Whoever bought up the Arts one has also got the Education Academy and the Academy of Medicine and the Sciences. I dread to think what they’ll do to them. At least most of our stuff is just to hang on the wall and look pretty, no matter what Tourniquet and his lot might say.’

  ‘Tourniquet?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, we went to his show a while back,’ Lola said. ‘It was enormous fun. With all the teeth.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry about that,’ said Stark. ‘I was told it would be good.’

  ‘Hang on, hang on,’ Minos pointed at me. ‘Track back here. You said that in a weird way.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, you did,’ Minos said. ‘Tourniquet, you said. In that way you do.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘In that way you do when you are preparing to tell a lie,’ Minos said.

  ‘All right, I give up,’ I said. ‘I met him in Greasy Clive’s the other day. He was looking for me and got Clive to tip him off when I got there. It was all very annoying.’

  ‘And you thought it would be all right if you didn’t mention this?’ there went Lola’s temper.

  ‘I’ve been in the Detention Centre ever since,’ I said.

  ‘And I suppose that’s a coincidence,’ Minos said. ‘What does he look like anyway? I can’t remember seeing him at the party.’

  ‘I can,’ Lola said.

  ‘Me too,’ Casino said. ‘Beautiful.’

  ‘Wait, a minute,’ said Stark. ‘Let me get his picture.’

  ‘You should have said something,’ Casino said. ‘I could have come along.’

  ‘This might have been important,’ Minos said. ‘We went to his party and then we had the...’

  ‘Never mind that now,’ Lola said to shut up him before Stark came back and heard something he shouldn’t.

  ‘If it had been important then I would have mentioned it. He just went on about this game he was playing.’ I would have to tell them about that later. I realised I had been keeping my mouth shut, they were right.

  ‘Look, here he is,’ said Stark, holding up a picture on his tablet. ‘Handsome fellow, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s him,’ I said.

  ‘You do pick them, Sorcha,’ Lola said.

  It was a very good picture. He looked like some kind of idol.

  ‘I didn’t pick him.’

  ‘Well, I can’t say I’m surprised you’ve caught his eye,’ Stark said. ‘He has an eye for the unusual yet beautiful.’

  ‘Our Sorcha is a bit of magnet for those with unusual tastes,’ Casino laughed.

  ‘Oh, don’t be cross, darling,’ Stark said. ‘I think it’s a good thing.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ I felt my face was burning with embarrassment. ‘Besides, he’s a gamer, I don’t like those.’

  Even Roach and Minos, from whom I expected better were laughing.

  ‘Now, leave her alone,’ said Stark. ‘It’s only funny because you’re so horrified.’

  ‘Don’t tell Vermina,’ Casino said. ‘She’ll be furious.’

  ‘Vermina?’ Lola said.

  I pushed Casino off his chair to save him from killing himself laughing, but it felt pretty good for us all to be laughing, even if it was at my expense.

  ‘Well, I don’t suppose next time you see him you could ask him where he gets his body parts from,’ said Stark. ‘I’m very curious.’

  ‘I’m not going to see him again,’ I said. ‘And he probably gets them in the Project or from Harlestone.’

  ‘Do you know anything else about him, Stark?’ Minos said.

  ‘He sells to the cabinet so he’s black coded,’ Stark said. ‘I don’t really know him. He’s very mysterious, he’s supposed to be friends with Chichester Rhone though. That’s how he’s got to the top, it’s certainly not because he makes good work.’

  ‘Is Tourniquet an advisor to the cabinet?’ I said. That would put him on the payroll and therefore in someone’s pocket.

  ‘No, he’s new on the scene, he just appeared out of nowhere,’ Stark said. ‘It would be very suspicious if that happened.’

  ‘Well,’ Minos said. ‘It’s good to know that the government are involved in this somehow.’

  ‘My dear boy,’ Stark said. ‘They’re always involved somehow.’

  While Lola went to get dressed, Roach, Minos and Casino made a serious dent in Stark’s supply of expensive brandy. He had sent his assistant off on some errand so enlisted me to help him clear the table. It was a pretext.

  ‘I didn’t mean to embarrass you earlier,’ he said as we piled dirty plates up in the kitchen for his beleaguered assistant.

  ‘It’s OK, I wasn’t embarrassed,’ I felt myself going red again.

  ‘I taught your Vermina, you know. It’s the same woman, she was in her first year at the University. I don’t know why she joined Enforce, she was always so....’

  ‘Always so what?’

  ‘There isn’t a word for her,’ he smiled. ‘Nor for you.’

  ‘Is there a word for Lola?’

  ‘There’s a whole volume of dictionaries for that one,’ his smiled broadened. ‘Ah, she’s going to make a terrible fool of me one day.’

  ‘Well, we’re all rooting for you,’ I wondered how he’d respond to hearing all about how she could read his mind.

  ‘And I’m rooting for you, in whatever you do,’ his smile disappeared. ‘I spoke to Agent Tourniquet the other day.’

  ‘Stark, I’m not...’

  He held his hand up as an interruption. ‘I know, I know, you think you’re not interested. Not much anyway. He was talking about someone he had his eye on, and he was definitely talking about you, even though he didn’t seem to know your name then. I didn’t tell him what it was, by the way.’

  ‘How come he was talking about me?’ I said. ‘How did I come up in conversation?’

  ‘He was thanking me for inviting you to his party,’ Stark said. ‘I don’t know how he knew I had, but he didn’t seem to mind.’

  ‘I think I’ll stay away from Agent Tourniquet,’ I said. ‘He seems to have hidden depths and I don’t like that in a person.’

  ‘Yes, do stay away from him,’ Stark said. ‘Try and be sensible.’

  ‘I am sensible,’ I thought of sensible me, bless her.

  ‘You are many things, but sensible is not one of them,’ Stark tossed some cutlery into the sink, splashing water up the tiles behind. ‘Try using that head you’ve got instead of your heart. It’s smarter.’

  ‘It’s not,’ I said. ‘You’d be surprised.’

  Stark laughed and I was saved from hearing why that might be amusing by Lola arriving, fully-clothed.

  ‘Shall we make a move?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, have another drink,’ said Stark. ‘They may as well finish the bottle.

  They already had but Stark, keen to settle into his life of leisure, opened another one. It was very good brandy, a gift from the Ministry of Culture and Endeavour. They’d even given him a set of six brandy glasses to drink it from. Even I could hold my drink better than Stark and he was soon pontificating at length about politics and his woes.

  ‘I blame the Ministry of Security,’ he said. ‘And that Tulan Haq. He’s not a minister. He’s a menace.’

  ‘He is,’ Minos said. ‘A menace, isn’t he?’

  ‘A menace,’ Casino said.

  ‘Why?’ Roach said. ‘Why blame him?’

  ‘You know what he ought to do?’ Stark said.

  ‘What?’ Lola said.

  ‘He ought to stop interfering with Academies and stop telling us what we can and can’t do with our oils and our clay and our stolen body parts. He ought to sort
out that Imagination Industries mob. They’re the real issue here.’

  ‘Why are they?’ I said, finding myself the most sober for perhaps the first time ever.

  ‘For a start they’re into everything, Ministries, Enforce, they’re supplying them with information and equipment and worst of all funding.’

  ‘Funding for what?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Stark said. ‘They’re the only people with any financial muscle though. And where did they get it from?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Where did they get it from?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Stark said. ‘Where did they get it from?’

  Casino giggled.

  ‘But what I do know,’ Stark said, rallying. ‘Is that this gaming racket they’ve got going on is going to end in disaster. All this recruitment and surveillance, it’s creepy is what it is. Delving around in people’s unconscious minds like that, it’s not right.’

  ‘Why is everyone going on about games?’ I said, more to myself than anyone else.

  ‘Are they?’ Roach said.

  ‘Yes, Tourniquet was talking about them, Ginger Yates was in the Detention Centre and he was going on about them.’

  ‘He would be,’ Minos said.

  ‘Yeah but...’ I said.

  ‘But what?’ Roach said. Everyone seemed to have sobered up, except Stark who was shaking his head at his glass.

  ‘There’s a game,’ I said. ‘With a prophecy and I’ve got a cheat code.’

  ‘My goodness,’ Lola said as everyone leapt to their feet, except Stark who was out of the loop again. ‘Is that the time?’

  ‘Yes, we have to go and do that thing,’ Minos said.

  ‘Very important thing,’ Roach said.

  ‘Bye,’ Casino said, giving Stark a fond New Europan farewell on either cheek. ‘Thanks for lunch.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch, gorgeous,’ Lola said.

  ‘Imagination Industries,’ Stark said as we ran out the door. ‘It’s like calling an abattoir a zoo.’

  The Entertainment Centre and the Detention Centre both had the same purpose, to act as a sedative on a restless population. The fear of the Detention Centre was supposed to keep everyone from committing crimes and the delights of the Entertainment Centre were meant to occupy everyone’s minds to keep them from noticing that the deterrent didn’t really work. The plastic dolls that is. They called it the Ents and outside the main shifts of the sixty hour working week the Ents was packed. The rest of the time it was just very, very busy. The gaming house was huge, taking up almost all of a building that used to be a huge shopping centre, the flagship kind.

  We knew a woman on the inside, of course, that was how we got the programmes to Massey. I wondered if she was the source of Étienne’s data, Clara Ten Below was into everything. Except human contact of any kind, hence the name. The woman was cold as ice.

  ‘You do the talking,’ Minos said. ‘She likes you.’

  ‘Don’t start that again,’ I said.

  Clara was arguing with a man in a cheap suit about how many minutes there were in an hour and how many hours there were in twenty credits. Not as many as there were last week it seemed.

  ‘Problem?’ Roach said, rubbing the knuckles of one fist with the palm of his other hand as the man looked up at him and then backed off.

  ‘I was handling that,’ Clara Ten Below said.

  ‘No doubt,’ Roach said. ‘But we don’t like to queue.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing for you,’ Clara said to me.

  ‘You might have,’ I said. ‘I need to look at some live code.’

  ‘I can’t do that,’ Clara said.’

  ‘Yeah, you can,‘ Minos said. ‘We won’t leave any trace, we just need access to one server.’

  ‘It’s protected,’ Clara said.

  ‘By what?’ Casino said.

  ‘Sentinel Five,’ Clara sounded embarrassed, and so she should.

  ‘For a moment there I thought we were going to have trouble getting in,’ I said. ‘It’s like system administration have written us an invitation.’

  Sentinel Five was another wonder of bespoke programming commissioned by people who knew nothing about anything and couldn’t tell if something worked or not. The day Imagination Industries realised and fixed it would be a sad one. Clara Ten Below insisted that only Minos and I could go with her and that everyone else had to wait in reception, so the two of us followed her through the terminals. Unlike Massey’s set up where you lay down so he could pack more gamers into a small space, here people were hanging upright inside cylinders of pale green glass with the expiry dates of their slot counting down on the outside, along with a vital signs monitor so the technicians could check nobody was about to die. It had been known. The cases were clustered inside the shop units that had been stripped of shelves and stock. The further we got into the heart of the operation, the further off the expiry dates were and the more elaborate the equipment became. Massey had strict time limits on his games but we walked passed a man who would be in the game for another two years. He was fed through thin plastic tubes and inside his glass pod I could see his limbs cycling through some movements, prompted by the electromagnetic impulses being sent to his muscles through red and blue cables. There were thousands of them, just like him, all plugged straight into the hive mind of the Administration, a wealth of research evidence hanging there like fruit waiting to be picked.

  ‘Which game do you want?’ Clara punched in the security code next to an important looking door, hiding her fingers from us so we couldn’t see what she was doing.

  ‘The Vanguard,’ I said.

  Minos let out a long, low whistle.

  ‘You and the rest of the world. Down here,’ Clara led us through rows of banked servers. They gave off a quiet hum and a soft heat.

  Minos produced a cable from one of his many deep pockets and plugged his tablet into one of the ports Clara had pointed us to. She hovered around behind me making sure we didn’t break anything, as if we would.

  ‘Is that it?’ I said after a couple of minutes.

  ‘What?’ Clara said.

  ‘It’s not finished, it’s growing,’ Minos let out another one of his long whistles.

  ‘Yeah, it’s all open ended,’ Clara said. ‘It’s user shaped. The version control is insane. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  ‘Try the code,’ I said to Minos and, making a huge show of secrecy to little miss security pants, I whispered it in his ear.

  Nothing happened. We waited but still nothing happened.

  ‘Excellent,’ I said. ‘Thanks Clara.’

  ‘Find you own way back,’ Clara said. ‘I’ve got some diagnostics to run.’

  We left her in her lair to check up on us, no doubt. She wouldn’t find anything.

  ‘This place gives me the creeps,’ I said.

  ‘Me too,’ Minos said. ‘If I ever start playing the games I want you to tie me down and get Roach to hit me until I see the error of my ways.’

  ‘It might be fun for the government to see what goes on in your head,’ I said. ‘They’d pass laws and everything.’

  ‘It’s not the government I’m worried about, they wouldn’t know what to do with the contents of my brain. It’s Imagination Industries that worries me.’

  ‘Someone’s watching them,’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The same people that are watching us.’

  ‘Well. That is a comfort.’

  We walked passed a short cylinder with a few minutes left on its countdown display. I stopped and Minos bumped into me. Haggia’s fingers were twitching inside thin mesh gloves, her hands in overdrive.

  ‘Look,’ I said.

  ‘It’s the woman from the shop,’ Minos said. ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Haggia.’

  ‘That’s it. She seemed all right, what’s she doing in there?’

  ‘You two can’t loiter round here all day,’ Clara came up behind us.

  �
�Does she come here often?’ Minos tapped on Haggia’s pod.

  ‘This one?’ Clara looked disgusted. ‘Addict. Seriously, she’s on every day, sometimes twice.’

  ‘What’s she playing,’ I said. ‘The Vanguard?’

  ‘Yeah, but she’s playing the test version. The beta was out a year ago and she was in the test cohort but she won’t switch. She’s got some sort of dispensation to carry on playing it, some weird licence thing I’ve never seen before. Why she would want to, I don’t know. She’s not hooked into the master so she can’t do anything. Pointless.’

  ‘What’s she hooked up to then?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s not us, it’s outsourced, that’s why she needs a licence,’ Clara shrugged. ‘Now get out or I’ll have to call security.’

  Thunder crashed around us as we stood on the steps of the Entertainment Centre. The sky was a sulphurous yellow, like the rain.

  ‘Does this mean one of us is going to have to play the game?’ Casino said as we arrived at another dead end in our investigation.

  ‘I hope not,’ Minos said.

  ‘I think Haggia is playing it for us,’ I said.

  Across the square that stood between the Entertainment Centre and the mangled turmoil of the various roads that met in the junction opposite, I watched a familiar figure get out of a taxi. He opened a black umbrella, turned up his collar and hurried towards us. I ushered everyone down the steps away from him. Agent Tourniquet took the steps two at a time and went into the door we’d just been standing in front of. That liar. He said he didn’t play with the plastic dolls.