The coast road curved and rose slightly as it passed a village stepping down the hillside towards the sea. It was one of the few old fishing ports on the island which hadn’t yet succumbed to the influx of foreign money, but it wouldn’t be long. Less than a kilometre back down the road, there were garish, stylised hoardings advertising the construction of another new resort complex on what was now parched scrubland.

The car was a vintage Mercedes-Benz, immaculate in piano-black like a patent leather shoe. The boss had imported it from an elite restorer in Germany as a birthday present for his wife, a decade previously. It had been maintained at vast expense ever since as her personal transport.

She sat in the back seat, gazing into the distance, hearing only the car’s refined drone and the gentle breath of its air conditioning. She had told the chauffeur that she preferred not to have any music on this occasion.

He drove calmly and efficiently as always, a practised eye aiming for the smoothest progress. The surface quality of the roads was a barometer of the investment status of each area. As the dollars and roubles spread further away from the town, more and more stretches of road would be closed and resurfaced overnight with glassy, black asphalt, further extending the sprawl of new money.

The car swept through the final bends before slowing and pulling onto an unmarked dirt road. The chauffeur pressed a button under the dash, and tall metal gates began sliding open. The car bumped down the track towards the villa, the tyres kicking up brown dust. He watched the gate close again in the rear-view mirror.

The chauffeur brought the car to a halt in the shade of the building. He got out, opened the rear door, and went through the motions of helping his passenger out of the car. They both knew it was a ritual that her husband insisted on for the sake of appearances, and that she would refuse his hand as always. It was hardly like she needed the help at her age.

The chauffeur unlocked the villa and disabled the intruder alarm, standing aside to allow his passenger into the hallway. She clicked across the tiled floor towards the main living area. The villa was at the very peak of the headland. Floor to ceiling sliding windows onto the veranda presented a panorama of blue-silver sea and deeper blue sky, framed at the periphery by rocky, ochre coastline.

She put down her handbag and walked towards the kitchen area. She took two glasses from the shelf, placed them on the counter, and pulled an icy bottle of Finnish vodka from the freezer compartment. She poured a generous measure into both glasses.

The chauffeur stood impassive near the counter. She handed him one of the glasses, then took her own and drank it down in one. Following her lead, he did the same.

She reached out towards him, taking hold of the peak of his chauffeur’s cap, gently removing it from his head and laying it on the counter. Her own ritual this time, now established as their tradition. They locked eyes, and the ghost of a smile played across her lips.

She walked away, across towards the bedroom. After a moment, he followed.

They took coffee on the veranda afterwards. The heat had mellowed to a tolerable level and the sea-salt breeze was sharp and refreshing. She had busied herself in the kitchen with the chrome espresso machine, enjoying the brief subservient role. As she brought him a second cup, she took a moment to compose herself, and told him her news.

“Look, I’m sorry but I’m afraid this has to end. Us, that is. I’m leaving the island.”

No reaction. Eye contact, but his face was blank and unreadable.

“Our time together has been lovely, and I’ll always remember it. But I just cannot bear to stay here with Charles any longer. You know how unhappy I’ve been.”

He turned his head to look out to sea, but stayed silent.

“I know you’re hurt, and I really am sorry. Please say something.”

He looked back at her.

“Where will you go?”, he asked.

“Back to the mainland. We have an apartment there. I’ll get things in order, then fly home. I have friends I can stay with for a while.”

“Why now?”

“I had to stay until Charles signed the deal with the Russians. They would only negotiate if I was involved. They’re vain, nouveau riche types. They probably thought I was authentic Old Money or something. A fading English rose with the expensive accent and manners. It took years, but they finally agreed to invest last week, so I feel free to leave now. I’m sure Charles will be happy with his projects and his millions”.

“What happens to me?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know. There will be other work for Charles, I’d imagine. Or if you decided to move on, I’m sure there will be a generous severance payment. But all this sounds so cold. You know this has never just been a physical thing for me. I care for you a great deal”.

A silence fell and lingered. After an uncomfortable moment, she sighed and began clearing the table.

She returned the tray of coffee cups to the kitchen counter, and began placing them in the dishwasher. She was surprised to feel his hands on her hips and his hardness against her. She turned around and they kissed deeply. He lifted her onto the kitchen counter, knocking his chauffeur’s cap to the floor. As he unbuckled his belt, she hitched up her dress and reached inside for the waistband of her underwear.

Preparing to close up the villa, he locked all the doors and windows, while she fixed her hair and reapplied lipstick in the hallway mirror. He retrieved the chauffeur’s cap and put it back on. They drove away into the late-afternoon sunlight, turning onto the coast road, back towards the town.

She knew that today’s long absence wouldn’t be remarked upon by her husband. His preoccupation with business, his general air of emotional detachment, had left him apparently unaware of her secret assignations over these three years.

But now that those clandestine meetings had come to an end, she felt lost and diminished. The chauffeur’s vigour and attention had reawakened her as a person and as a woman. As they had become closer and learned each others’ bodies and desires, she had found that her resurgent lust had brought along with it the unwelcome beginnings of a deeper connection. But, with effort and with some regret, she had been able to close the door on that emotion, for the first time in her life.

The chauffeur stole an occasional look at her in the rear-view mirror. He’d always known objectively that the arrangement was never destined to last. But head and heart can so often take different roads. She was older, but youthful. Demure, but imaginative. His, but not his. He too had begun to feel a profound intimacy when they were together, despite the circumstances. And now, she would be gone from his life within days.

The sordid truth of the situation hit him. He would phone the boss later to confirm that the mission had been achieved. Paid handsomely to drive a rich, bored woman around a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, with free rein to discreetly bed her whenever required. Just until she had helped get the boss’s huge property deal across the line, and wasn’t needed any longer.

It had felt like a dream job for a while, but the reality had become complicated, as it often does. His guilt and his sense of loss stretched out like the lanes of an infinite highway before him.

THE END

Photo by Ruth D on Unsplash

by Chris Bardell

Time 03:58 / Arrays 98%

Ryzhkov’s car was maybe fifty meters ahead of mine, its headlight beams playing across the still-damp road surface as he threw the steering wheel left and right, trying to coax some heat into the tyres.

We were both in RESTRICTED mode, rolling along and waiting for our dash panels to warn us to pull level with one another and match speeds. The GPS would sense that we had done so, and few seconds after that our panels would scream and flash RACE, and we’d stomp on our accelerators.

As usual, the precise time and venue had been kept secret until as late as possible. Ours had been called for just before 4 AM. We’d been there since mid-evening, working on some tweaks before the config lock-down at midnight. I was about to tell Marli that I’d grab some sleep in the van when one of the Race Control guys wandered over with the start ticket. No nap, then. Just the regulation 10 minutes to get ready, take a piss, meditate, pray, or whatever.

This time of night wasn’t bad for limiting interference. Most of the cops would still be dealing with drunk tourists and burnout artists on the harbour front. And anyway, Race Control had plenty of ways of knowing if any units were headed anywhere near our route.

Now and again, Ryzhkov and I passed a working streetlight in a halo of thin mist. Not too much moisture in the air tonight, no risk of fog screwing up the race for us or the viewers. The car’s cockpit was snug around my shoulders, with just a vestigial band of raked plexi above the wheel, to deflect the wind. A hydration pack was clipped on the right-hand side of the cockpit, above the emergency flashlight and crowbar. Claustrophobic, but escapable if the unthinkable happened. The jemmy had been standard equipment since that French guy had had to lever his way out of a crash last season, just before his car’s cells caught light.

The car’s panel was third generation, but still based on a mundane tablet device like your kids would watch cartoons on. The left-hand side of the screen showed a combined speedo and battery meter. On the right was a scrolling map view with my car represented as a blue dot crawling along in the centre, and Ryzhkov’s a green dot just ahead. No red dots yet. And at the top corner, the heartbeat symbol, indicating my radio comms link with base was online. At the bottom, the status was shown in large characters – RESTRICTED right now.

The road continued ahead of us, bullet-straight until vanishingly far away in the distance, where I knew it turned right and fanned out into the first split-point of our route. Between here and there was a series of disused warehouses, welded-shut gates, and garbage-strewn empty lots where other structures had once stood.

I was two seasons into my drive for the team, but this was the first time the race had come to my hometown.

Time 04:01 / Arrays 97%

The earbuds pinged, and Marli’s voice came in.

“Driver? Confirm comms OK?”

She always called me that. Some formal German thing, I figured.

“Yeah, loud and clear.”

The radio comms were fully encrypted. Usually worked fine, but tended to choke and splutter with long sentences. We’d adopted a terse, clipped style to our conversations. And besides, any of our radio traffic might end up in that week’s show. Soundbites rule.

Marli would be sitting with the other engineers in the makeshift control room, the rest of her team nearby, sipping on whatever tepid coffee they could find. She continued the run-through.

“Telemetry is up. Both battery arrays 97%. Tyre pressures good but too cold. Needs more heat.”

I started throwing the car from side to side to light up the tyres, enjoying the G-force pressing my body against the sides of the moulded seat. It was debatable if the move really did heat up the tyres all that much, but it was still useful to get a feel for the car. Tonight it was as responsive as ever.

“How is the handling?”, Marli asked. The tyres were standard, legal road spec as usual, but we’d switched to a different brand to shave off some weight.

“Feels good. Front end grip’s not there yet, will monitor as they heat up. Did you get the new MAX POWER dialled in?”

“Latest configuration from Race Control is downloaded to your panel.”

“Thanks.”

“Race Control also confirm class 3 extraction available if required”.

They were being careful on this one. Class 3 was the fast in/out specialist crew, ex-Services guys mainly. Expensive.

“Let’s not even go there, Marli.”

“Race Control have given ten second warning, radio silence until started. Good race, driver!”

The hang-up ping sounded. I brought the car level with Ryzhkov’s, and took a few deep breaths.

The panel screamed and flashed RACE. My heart slammed, and I brought my foot down hard on the accelerator.

I’d raced those two seasons in this formula, but the car’s acceleration still knocked the breath out of me. It’s not like an internal combustion car, with its flat spots and powerbands. It’s more like riding an endless wave of torque. No gears in this formula, just a simple step-down transmission. No lurching upshifts, just ceaseless acceleration, pinning you into the seat. You learn to hang on and ignore any self-preservation instinct. Finally, the acceleration slackens off when you’re screaming down the backstreets at near-autobahn speeds.

Ryzhkov was maybe caught unawares by the start. I certainly hadn’t jumped it. That’s why they don’t have a countdown, so that the start tests the drivers’ reflexes. But when I nailed the accelerator, he didn’t keep up.

I didn’t know much about Ryzhkov. It was his rookie season, but we hadn’t been drawn to race together before. I had seen him on my way into the makeshift pits. We shook hands, his grip cool and inert. His face had the blank Slavic look, so that you weren’t sure if he was vacant or if he was trying to psych you out. He was young, or maybe just looked it.

The panel pinged, and its display changed to STANDBY FOR RE-ROUTE. Probably just a chance encounter with some random cop on the outer fringes of wherever Race Control were sending us. The panel showed no red dots. Its status changed to RE-ROUTE and it instructed us to hang right a couple of hundred metres ahead. I nailed the brakes late and kept it on the limit, feeling the lateral forces. Ryzhkov would take any advantage he could, and look for the inside line. I would.

Time 04:04 / Arrays 92%

The formula was fairly cheap to enter, but that didn’t make it amateur hour. The organisers had taken advantage of the open source movement. Nowadays you could build any technology for not much more than the cost of parts. Combined with a standard design for the cars, it meant that the well-financed big boys and the small fry like us could compete on even terms. Little deviation from the standard spec was allowed, but there was enough leeway for innovation and midnight-oil ingenuity.

Startup costs were so reasonable that a skilled enough group of fans could put together a team themselves, and get involved at Qualifier level. That’s how Ryzhkov’s team had started out. Three years ago, they were just a bunch of enthusiasts, watching at home with dreams in their eyes.

The battery arrays in the car’s floor were efficient and powerful, and the design had proven mostly fire-proof so far. The rest of the drive-train was just as advanced. The huge power of the motor would normally have destroyed the rear tyres in seconds, but the community-developed traction control kept it efficient and burnout-free. Regenerative brakes fed power back into the arrays. Standard sat-nav software had been finessed into the panel’s dynamic map. Race Control’s master version had been further tweaked to constantly recalculate alternative routes. More options for escape if the cops showed up, with each possible route ranked by algorithm as the most likely to succeed.

Time 04:07 / Arrays 86%

The tyres had reached working temperature and were feeling grippy and eager. The ultra-stiff suspension and spaceframe chassis fed back every detail from the road, through the steering wheel and the ergonomic seat. Each type of road surface felt distinct, every corner had its own unique set of sensations.

Ryzhkov was good, a constant presence in the mirrors, picked out in the red glare from my rear LEDs. He had hung back after I passed him but was now creeping up, taking good lines, learning my style. He was using my slipstream well, keeping close in my wind-shadow, reducing his car’s drag and saving power. That could count if it went the distance and was close. Lot of maturity for a young guy. But did he have the balls to handle a pursuit if the police disrupted the scene?

Oh, yeah – the cops. The organisers had crowd-sourced that little problem. In the lead-up to the first season, they had recruited groups in every city where a race was scheduled. They became known as the Fixers. Their job was to disrupt anything that would help the cops locate or break up the races. They were paid modestly, but most of them would have done it for free if you’d asked. They carried out the orders from the organisers quietly, without drawing attention. Maybe knocking out an inconvenient surveillance camera, or working their bolt-cutters on a locked access gate. Their audacity grew. Before the first season was over, they’d perfected the art of bugging cop-cars. Waiting, sometimes for hours, until a cruiser was left unattended, then clipping a tiny tracking beacon somewhere discreet on the car’s underside.

And their geek wing had learned and progressed, too. They’d worked out how to tap into security systems, traffic controls, and surveillance camera networks. The organisers could now use the authorities’ own technology against them. Every backdoor they closed was countered by the hack team within days.

We flew through the linear stretches around the Old Port and were routed south. The landscape changed from utilitarian to industrial, and the lighting from bright white to a dirty sodium orange. An overpass road ran parallel above us on concrete stilts, before veering away. The view ahead opened up on the ragged arterial road heading inland. We passed humming industrial plants, their heavy, chemical stink hanging in the air. Empty freight yards, derelict railway viaducts. Occasionally the terrain would rise, and we’d catch a glimpse of the city’s tallest skyscrapers in the distance. We buzzed past a couple of lumbering trucks and night buses. I thumped the hydration pack, and a splash of weak isotonic drink came down the tube plumbed into my helmet.

The panel screamed and displayed STANDBY FOR RE-ROUTE. My pulse sped up a click. Marli was straight in my ear.

“Driver, no concern. Scanner monitors say one police unit near Fishmarket. Race Control precaution, taking you towards Empty Interchange. Expect another re-route there. Repeat no concern.”

Time 04:09 / Arrays 82%

The organisers’ trio of follower drones caught us up at this point, to provide multiple angles for the coverage. They flew in the usual pattern, just behind the second-placed car. Their cameras were tricked out, with sensitivity going past the visible spectrum and into infra-red, to give a nice edge of heat detection to the footage. Useful when the races are held at night, and the cars’ bodyshells are bare, black carbon fibre.

The drones began their automated firefly dance, dipping almost to ground level to illustrate the speed, then panning around to show how close the gap was between the cars, then rising up to give an overview shot. The producers preferred to have a decent amount of source material to stitch together into the show. They’d also be able to fold in any good action from the camera pods on the nosecones and rear spoilers of the cars.

After the race, the coverage would be edited and uploaded within hours. There had been talk of doing the whole thing live – the technology was already there. But that would be an easy bullseye for the cops to home in on. Delayed transmission also kept gambling and corruption out.

The race coverage was getting online views well into seven figures, worldwide. The old track formulae had become dull and remote, despite all the rule changes. Urban Formula was edgier and more aspirational. The routes used the kind of streets that everyone had in their hometowns.

We stole all the eye-candy tricks from the big formulae and improved them. Telemetry beamed back in real time to Race Control, for cutting into the race coverage. Unedited, uncensored cockpit radio comms. Raw, visceral.

The online views generated huge revenue. The teams got a bigger slice of the pie based on their placings, which kept it competitive. Driver contracts were limited to one season, to keep everyone on their toes. Audience feedback confirmed they liked the drivers singing for their supper at every race.

Up ahead, the larger lookahead drone also established contact, then flew ahead of us and out of sight in the night sky. Its job was to provide a hi-res feed of the terrain ahead for Race Control, so they could spot any cops or other problems along the route. It also had a loudhailer so they could warn any bystanders that the race was coming through. That was pretty rare, though. The time of day and the deserted locations usually meant a balls-to-the-wall clear run.

We were almost at the Empty Interchange, a junction of motorways, expressways and distributor roads, most of which were never built. It formed an inter-meshing set of cloverleafs with no apparent purpose. Except maybe for racing ultra-lightweight electric single-seaters in the middle of the night.

Marli’s voice cut in.

“Driver! Opponent too close, faster!”

I flicked a look left into the mirror. Empty expanse of road. I looked right, and my heart lurched as I saw Ryzhkov’s car charging out of my slipstream, attempting a pass on the inside of the bend.

I floored it, felt the rear end try to step out, caught the slide, heard the tyres sing. The helmet blocked my peripheral vision, but I knew Ryzhkov’s nosecone would be alongside my side-vents about now. Too late to close the door. Stay focused.

We flew out of the bend onto the wide highway and I stole a quick look. Ryzhkov’s car was still large in the mirror, but falling back. I felt the adrenaline kick dropping off, my breathing still quick and shallow, hot sweat under my arms and across my chest. My heart rate began to slow down, but it jumped again as the panel screamed and flashed up STANDBY FOR RE-ROUTE.

“Driver, Race Control taking you down next off-ramp. New heading. Stand by… Painted Quarter.”

Time 04:14 / Arrays 76%

I was heading into familiar territory. The Painted Quarter was its official name, but the locals just called it the Clouds. An idealistic town planner’s wet dream from two generations ago, it was a collection of a dozen or so residential Project towers. Curved, naturalistic shapes, no hard edges or straight lines. Some apartments’ windows were shaped like fat aerofoils, some like teardrops, some oval. The towers were painted in muted colours – abstract patterns, some resembling clouds, some looking more aquatic. It was intended as an antidote to all those old social housing projects with their serried rows of decaying balconies.

And in the tallest of those towers, almost at the top, I knew there was a tiny, one-bedroomed apartment. It was where my parents had taken me home to, from the maternity ward, thirty-two years ago.

We barrelled down the clearway, the Clouds moments ahead of us. We passed more signs of human presence, or its remnants. Boarded-up or burned-out retail units, a disused bowling alley, a long-derelict row of fast food joints. And then the first people we’d seen since before the race started. Pockets of the homeless and the hopeless, huddled in old blankets in shop doorways. An occasional group clustered around a trash fire in a burning garbage can. I’d been one paycheck away from joining them for years, and I still felt like it was only dumb luck that meant I wasn’t –

Shit! Ryzhkov’s car slid past on the left and took advantage of the gradual, sweeping bend to power ahead. I reacted instantly, pressing the throttle to the floor, but he had the jump and the momentum. The camera drones fizzed down, their operators keen for dogfight footage. I could only close to within a couple of car-lengths. Ryzhkov’s rear flasher glared and pulsed at me, revealing the road grime on my visor.

Inside my helmet, I flushed with embarrassment. How could I have let my concentration lapse like that? Years of experience boy-racing, of watching instructional videos, not to mention two seasons in this formula. But I’d been caught rubber-necking, and allowed a rookie twelve or fourteen years my junior to make me look an idiot. And right on my home turf. The millions out there would see it, within hours. I’d underestimated him, again.

Worse still, we were heading into a complex of tight, zigzagging backstreets around the Clouds, specifically intended to stop cars coming through at speed. No way at all of getting back in front through that.

As we entered the section, Ryzhkov kicked it again. He looked to have overcooked it for the sharp left up ahead, but slammed on the brakes, kept the rear in shape, and slipped round the corner like he was on rails. The kid was hot, inexperienced in years, but clearly hyper-aware even on unfamiliar roads, and with the skills to fully own his machine. I was falling behind, and felt the first hint of panic.

Time 04:17 / Arrays 73%

Ryzhkov was still ahead of me, but I’d limited the deficit. We’d just rounded the right-hand sweeper to go across the open area between the central Clouds towers, when the panel screamed and flashed, lighting up the visor and cowl of my helmet.

The real-time map showed a handful of red dots. Two of them were flashing. Race Control’s computer projection had assessed them as the ones likely to catch us first. The status indicator was strobing PURSUIT.

“Marli! Cruisers or interceptors?”.

If we’d chanced across some souped up cop-rockets, we had a problem. Even if a cruiser got near enough, we’d be vulnerable. They would have no hesitation in clipping us off the road. No bystanders to worry about at this time of night.

“Driver, consulting Race Control. Stand by.”

Ryzhkov’s car wobbled slightly, up ahead. He’d be having a similar conversation with his own engineer. No telling how he’d react. His races earlier in the season had gone off without interruption, from what I remembered. I wondered what the word ‘PURSUIT’ looked like in Cyrillic characters.

Marli was back.

“Driver, both are cruisers. Re-route coming up. No concern on power, cell array at 73%, temperature good.”

The panel’s status changed to RACE NEUTRALISED. A temporary truce, so we could concentrate on getting our asses out of there.

Race Control’s servers would be measuring the trajectory and speed of the cops, recalculating endlessly, comparing against thousands of scenarios they had modelled. The next re-routes would be abrupt and brutal, needing lightning reflexes. My mouth was dry, and I whacked the pouch for another sip of drink.

Now I was relieved we were on narrow roads with switchbacks and sharp bends. Standard-issue cop-cars had decent gas-guzzling power when pushed, but were sloppy-handling whales, laden down with equipment and often lard-assed officers. If Race Control could throw us into a twisty, slalom course through the backstreets, the cops would have trouble keeping up. We’d light it up through every corner, and the cruisers would lumber behind like blimps. I tried not to think about them calling for backup.

Blue light flashed off a nearby building. Close. Immediately, the panel screamed RE-ROUTE, arrow pointing moderate left. Ryzhkov’s car nosed off and I followed, metres behind.

Time 04:20 / Arrays 69%

We were bombing past a pizza delivery scooter, on a shallow curve down into the older part of the housing project when the panel shrieked and flashed MAX POWER 10…9…8…

Marli’s voice stepped in.

“Driver, police close, Race Control enabling MAX POWER, prepare.”

They were giving us the full hit from the cells, to shake off the cops. I gripped the wheel tight and braced against the seat. 3…2…1…

The power surge hit hard, catapulting both cars forward. Race Control had upped the power from 80% to 100%. The car felt alive and wild, like shackles had been thrown off, or like a stifled fire which had breathed in fresh oxygen. I could hear my pulse thumping in my eardrums.

“OK, Ryzhkov,” I mumbled to myself. “Let’s get rid of the bastards”.

We threw the cars through the estate, following every re-route that Race Control fed us. Whoever was running the route tonight must have been a native. They sent us on a crazy zigzag around the towers, through parking areas, past garage blocks and the garbage-blown disused community shops. One of the drones had been taken up, to get some overview footage. The other two remained low, shadowing us as we chucked the cars around. Ryzhkov again handled it like a pro. He took lines like he could see round corners, aiming perfectly at the apexes of blind, compound curves and keeping the car on its limit but composed.

I occasionally caught a flash of blue light in the mirrors or reflected off the chrome of a parked car. But the cops were losing ground, making lumpen, flabby progress way behind us, suffering on the tight turns. But they’d be on the radio right now, requesting backup further down the road. The night wasn’t over yet.

We finally emerged from the far side of the housing estate and accelerated away. The panel changed status to PURSUIT TERMINATED.

Time 04:23 / Arrays 67%

Some of the talented drivers had gone on to greater things since the formula started. We were all racing under assumed names, and were never seen in the footage with our helmets off. But if you knew the right people (and tipped big), it wasn’t too hard to find out who a driver was, and make an approach. Some got TV work, some were rumoured to have gone into getaway driving. Some of the more physical guys got work as combined chauffeur/security goons to high-rollers with a price on their head.

The minor track formulae were no longer much of a dream ticket, or even a stepping stone. Only the upper echelons had professional status, and the whole thing was rigged to favour the big boys, anyway. You could spend years on end, financing your own way up through the formulae, schlepping around looking for sponsorship, getting used to the taste of corporate ass on your lips.

Urban Formula was the mainline to getting out there and racing, on a level field with established players. Some new teams would arrive on the scene, lighting up the season instantly, their revenue stepping them straight up into the richer strata. Some newcomers would labour for seasons on end, only to suddenly hit on form or technology which pushed them up. Veteran teams sometimes became complacent, sliding down the cut scale as the glory days faded. It was anyone’s race.

Time 04:24 / Arrays 64%

The panel wailed and flashed PURSUIT again. I threw a look at the map. Again two dots, but even on the tiny map, I could see these were rolling much faster than the cruisers we’d escaped earlier. Interceptors. Highly-tuned Japanese machines, unrecognisable from the family jalopies they were based on. Turbocharged, intercooled, all-wheel drive. Powerful in standard trim, and that’s before the cops’ engineering geeks applied their own special sauce.

The two interceptors were coming from different directions, converging on the road some way behind us. As soon as they hit the straightaway, they’d nail the gas, rocking three-figure speeds within seconds to out-drag us.

I saw the blue/red flash of distant cop-lights in my mirrors as the interceptors slid onto the road, way off behind.

“Marli!”

“Driver, again pursuit. Race Control maintain MAX POWER, advise monitor battery array depletion.”

“Understood”.

I looked at the charge meter. 64%. Enough, for the moment.

The panel switched to STANDBY FOR RE-ROUTE. I waited. Seconds ticked by. I knew the flashing lights would be bigger in my mirror, but I didn’t dare look. The panel cleared for a moment, then flashed up STANDBY FOR RE-ROUTE again.

“Marli, what the fuck? Where’s the re-route? Come on!”

A moment’s silence.

“Driver, Race Control confirm algorithm unable to re-route currently. Not enough options while you are on the straight road.”

“Shit!”

We were sitting ducks.

“Driver, Race Control switching to manual routing.”

“What?!”.

First time in over two seasons. But they’d only ever done it a couple of times, and that was when the systems had gone down mid-race, before the backroom boys had gotten the software reliable. Never when the racers were staring down the barrel of two interceptors.

“Driver, verbal instruction! Take next left, then take first right. Finish parallel to current road.”

Ryzhkov was already reacting to his identical instructions up ahead, scrubbing off some speed, moving to the right to throw his car into a sweeping line through the intersection. I was carrying too much speed, and nailed the brakes too hard, losing momentum and taking a lousy line. The drones overshot my car in a formation of banking turns, their camera gimbals spinning round to shoot footage of me floundering.

Ryzhkov was already halfway round the following right turn by the time I got my position in order. I prepared and took that turn much better, emerging a couple of hundred metres behind.

“Driver, concentrate. You were close to lock-up on front left.”

My breathing was ragged and stressed. Sweat was soaking the sides of my race suit.

“Where are they taking us?”

Pause.

“Driver, route will take you across Alpha Park.”

“That’s crazy! Barriers and bollards and stuff. We’ll never make it!”

“Driver, Race Control advise hack team have compromised the sector. Will use obstacles against pursuit. Stand by.”

Time 04:27 / Arrays 61%

We raced on towards the industrial park, blowing past a slow-moving garbage truck. The operatives must have spotted the blue lights in the middle distance behind us. The vehicle stopped and I saw the guys in the mirrors, scooping shit out of the back and dumping it on the road, to slow the cops down. I guessed they were fans, excited to play a small part in this week’s race. They’d watch the coverage, and try to spot their fleeting appearance. The producers would pixellate out anything identifiable from the drone footage.

Even at night, you could see Alpha Park was still in good shape. The discreet, downward streetlights picked out well-tended grass verges and managed trees. By day, this would be a scene of quiet activity, transit buses ferrying the staff in and out. Mostly technology companies, a few huge logistics places. But aside from the odd security guard on the front desks of the buildings, Ryzhkov and I were the only ones here. And the two interceptors were now only seconds behind.

It felt like a dead end. The park had several exits, but was laid out in a set of jagged, concentric rectangles, precisely to stop boy-racers using it as a track. And the series of barriers and bollards could win or lose it for us, right here. I was muttering and swearing to myself when Marli broke in.

“Driver, lookahead drone reports fence at back of section K for Kilo, breached by Fixers, wide enough for car.”

Ah, now we’re talking. If we could get into K, we could scream across the overflow car parks to the rear perimeter road and get out that way. Smart guys doing this part of the re-route, maybe former street-racers themselves.

“OK, but how will we get out of the car park?”

“Driver, Race Control are working on this. Stand by.”

They were only just working on it?

“Driver, cars will take road towards Leadmill area, then turn left through cut fence into parking.”

“How will we know where the break in the fence is?”

“Driver, lookahead drone will hover and show.”

Ryzhkov had already taken the dog-leg bend to realign with the road out to the old Leadmill district. I came out barely fifty metres behind him. Marli had been right. Up ahead the lookahead drone was hovering in place with its strobe lights flashing. Ryzhkov nailed the brakes and aimed his car into the darkness underneath the drone. I could now see where the chain-link fence had been pulled back and rolled up into a loose cylinder to the right of the gap. Ryzhkov’s rear wheel brushed it as he went through, no harm. I followed his line and was through the gap seconds after. Blue lights behind, much closer now. And the missing section of fence was wide enough for the interceptors, too.

“Driver, fast now, go straight to car park interchange on far side”

“We can’t see shit, all the floodlights are off!”

“Driver, standby.”

We plunged on into the near-darkness, our headlights only showing the immediate way ahead. After a few seconds, the car park lights fired up and the whole interchange section was bathed in white light.

“Driver, hack team have compromised lighting. Fast now, we need gap to pursuers”.

Ryzhkov and I realigned towards the interchange plaza, with its dozens of entrances to the huge car parks. Barriers, bollards. Jesus, I hoped Race Control had an ace up their sleeve, or this would be over in seconds.

“Driver, aim for left-hand exit barrier, then go left on road.”

Ryzhkov had responded to his instruction already, and had adjusted his line. One of the camera drones flew up alongside him. We pushed on towards the barrier. The cop cars were visible across the deserted car park, a hundred or so metres behind us.

Ahead of us, the barrier began to rise. The geeks again, roaming all around Alpha Park’s security systems. We flew under the raised barrier and hooked it hard left onto the exit road. In my mirrors, I saw both interceptors follow us, fishtailing as they took the turn.

“Now what, Marli?! They’re right on us!”

“Driver, go across intersection, straight onto service road.”

“No way, it’s closed off! The bollards only drop for the buses!”

“Driver, hack team have compromised. Say immediately when you are past obstacle.”

Oh, you sly bastards.

Ahead of me, Ryzhkov corrected his angle and headed straight towards the service road. In front of him, I saw the reflective detailing on the two steel bollard columns blocking the road. They started dropping into the ground. Ryzhkov’s car backed off and adjusted speed. The bollards continued dropping. I lost sight of them in front of Ryzhkov’s car as the road straightened. I was shaking.

And then he was over the bollards, with only their top faces glinting off my headlights, flush with the road surface. I stomped on the loud pedal and flew through the gap.

“Now, Marli!”, I screamed.

“Now!”, I heard her repeat.

In the mirrors, the interceptors approached, flat-out. And the bollards started rising slowly out of the ground. My heart was racing. Rising too slowly?

The front of the first interceptor cleared the rising bollards. And then it all happened in an instant. Huge crash of metal on metal. The car’s rear end flew up, slamming it to a halt, pitching it nose-down at a crazy angle, blocking the road. The bollard must have just made contact with the car’s rear end in time.

“Yes!”, I shouted into the comms, jubilant.

Marli’s voice was its usual calm monotone.

“Driver, Race Control confirm pursuit terminated.”

Yep, damn right. And I’d noticed two of the follower drones turning round to film just before the lead interceptor hit the bollards. Spliced in with footage from the rear-facing camera on my car, it would make ratings gold. The viewers would fucking love it.

Time 04:33 / Arrays 56%

“Marli, can you check with Ryzhkov’s crew if he still wants to race?”

The drivers weren’t allowed to communicate directly, to stop intimidation and trolling.

“Driver, standby.”

It was a fair question to ask, but how would it come across? I was winding down from the adrenaline overload of the interceptor chase, and every muscle in my body felt shaky and unreliable. The car’s ergonomics were perfect – the whole cockpit had been built to my body shape. But my arms and shoulders were sagging, my wrists stiff and aching. Was it more myself who wanted to call the race off?

Marli clicked in.

“Driver, consulted opponent’s engineer. They patched in their audio so I could hear confirmation. Ryzhkov response is yes yes yes, continue with race. And something about your mother, but my Russian wasn’t good enough to understand that. His engineer found it funny.”

I grinned inside the tight helmet.

“Understood, confirm to Ryzhkov that the race continues”.

Time 04:34 / Arrays 55%

We were skirting the Leadmill complex when the panel came alive: PURSUIT. And then a tiny pause before it changed to PURSUIT – AERIAL.

Chopper! Oh, shit. On the map, a large red blob was pulsing, east of us but gaining, unhindered by the zigzagging, indirect roads.

“Marli!”

“Driver, Race Control confirm patrol helicopter in pursuit. Standby.”

“Don’t tell me to stand by! We got big problems, here!”

“Driver, Race Control withdrawing drones to avoid notifying location.”

In the mirrors, the follower drones peeled away to the north, cutting their floodlights a moment later and disappearing into the dark.

“Have they called the race off?”

“Driver, Race Control notify split route in next 30 seconds. Still intention to re-group after pursuit, and conclude race.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Driver, re-routes as follows. Ryzhkov to turn left bearing south, towards Old Market district.”

Lucky bastard. Low-lying, dense, plenty of cover, lots of ways in and out. Ryzhkov’s car slowed and swung hard left down a sidestreet.

“Driver, proceed north-east on current road towards Citadel. Topography will assist to escape pursuit.”

Great. The badlands. But I’d take whatever I could get, right now. And maybe the lie of the land was OK. A maze of residential towers of varying heights and sizes, landscaped over multiple levels, connected by ramps, overpasses and car parks. And a lot of darkness, both literal and otherwise.

“Driver, Race Control advise decoy units being deployed on intercept course to draw helicopter away.”

Nice work. A couple of the boy-racers that the organisation retained on standby, ready to fire up their modified hot-hatches and distract the chopper crew.

“And driver, Race Control also advise of welcome party at Citadel for helicopter.”

What?

Time 04:36 / Arrays 53%

Here we go, right into the city’s asshole. If the Clouds were a Utopian vision of social housing, then the Citadel was its malignant opposite. Eight blocky, slab-sided towers, all at least ten storeys high. Cheap decaying concrete, rusting balconies, and stairways you knew would reek of stale piss. Grimy, under-maintained roads and service yards, dark corners and shadows. They’d had those riots a few years back, and the police didn’t go out of their way to visit. The black economy of dealers and pimps had the free run of the estate after nightfall.

Would it work for or against me? I’d normally avoid this area like ebola, but maybe the no-go zone aspect might do me a favour. The chopper could blaze through unhindered, but the cops would think twice about sending in any interceptors. Too easy for someone to drop a concrete block off one of the walkways. Or for a crew to emerge like wraiths from an alleyway with Molotovs lit and cop-hatred blazing in their eyes. Was something like that the ‘welcome party’ Marli had mentioned?

The car still felt good and tight as I bombed down the approach road with the Citadel looming up ahead. As soon as I passed the gap between the nearest towers, I’d follow the route which Race Control had highlighted on the panel’s map, skirting around the inner car parks, throwing a couple of deception turns to kid the cops I was heading straight back out. I then had to scream flat-out across the open central area. Race Control’s route went no further than that. I guessed they were waiting to see what the chopper did.

The scrolling map showed the chopper was closer, but was maybe hanging back, without the drones’ lights to give away my location. They had infra-red, but I was darting in and out of electricity substations and plant buildings, all glowing white or yellow on their thermal screens. Maybe they couldn’t get a coherent fix on me.

I reached one of the bullet-straight roads pizza-cutting across the heart of the Citadel, swung right as instructed, and was about to plant the pedal to the floor when Marli cut in.

“Driver, Race Control advise continue current route, but slow to 40 kilometres per hour. Repeat four-zero-kay-emm-aitch. Confirm?”

“What? That’s barely 25 in old money. The chopper’ll be straight on me!”

“Driver, speed four-zero-kay required to synchronise with local assistance.”

Ah, dangling me as the bait while they set something up with sympatico elements nearby.

“Marli, confirm holding at four-zero-kay until new instruction”. It wasn’t like I had much say in it.

I crawled along at what felt like walking pace. Seconds later, the chopper rose over the block ahead, its cone of floodlight sweeping the area in front of it. It looked like it was going to cross over the road well ahead and miss me. But the chopper’s engine note and attitude changed, and it started banking towards me. Busted.

“Marli, chopper’s on me. I’m fucked!”

“Driver, stay with four-zero-kay”

Jesus.

The helicopter came straight at me, its searchlight pointed directly at the car. I tilted my head down to shade my eyes. But then the chopper’s engine note altered again, and the spotlight beam moved away. I looked up.

The chopper had risen slightly, and was now a vivid neon against the dark sky, illuminated by a chaos of dancing, flickering beams of light. Mostly green, some blue and red. A wall of dizzying flashes picked out its underside, windows, and the slashing rotor blades above.

Laser pointers. Hundreds of them, aimed from all around at the hapless chopper, dazzling and night-blinding its crew. Race Control must have called in some favours and gotten the word out across the Citadel. Every crim, boot-boy, or cop-hater had been mobilised. The welcome party.

The height of the surrounding towers meant that some of the lasers were pointing down into the cockpit. It must have been a maelstrom of light and disorientation inside, but from down here, it looked almost beautiful. Drone footage would have been great, and I figured the producers were regretting that they’d called them off. But you could bet that phone video was being filmed right now by the locals, and would make its way to the organisers. They’d cut it into the show. More ratings gold.

Marli’s voice broke through the chopper’s abrasive noise.

“Driver, helicopter delayed, accelerate, take next left onto radial road, leave Citadel heading south-west.”

I wanted to chance a final look at the light show, but I couldn’t risk a second’s delay. I threw the car left & stomped the accelerator down.

Time 04:41 / Arrays 52%

I was on edge, and knew I had to watch out for inattention and stupid mistakes. Too much adrenaline, clouding the rational mind. My breath was stale and foul inside the helmet, and my racing suit felt like a tight cocoon of filthy, rank dishrag. I needed to focus and concentrate.

“Marli, talk to me. Have the boy-racers drawn the chopper away?”

“Driver, Race Control confirm decoy unsuccessful. Helicopter continues pursuit.”

Shit. They were no more than a minute or two behind, and they would be calling ahead for backup units on the ground, now we had left enemy territory. I was on borrowed time.

I was heading past the old retail district, deserted for a decade. The entrance ramp to its multi-storey car park was coming up on the right, its barrier a splintered stump.

Let’s hide out in there.

“Marli, give me a minute. Got an idea.”

I trod on the brakes, swung in, and accelerated up the ramp. At the top, the battery arrays in the car’s floor scraped, sending out a shower of orange sparks behind me. Damn, didn’t want to ground this thing out and beach it like a whale.

My lights revealed years of dense graffiti on the walls of the deserted car park, piles of garbage and debris, remnants of trash fires. I figured I’d go up a couple of floors, find a discreet spot towards the centre of the building, lie low and call Marli to get me the hell out of here. Maybe get some Fixers over here, get them to pop a flare gun near the chopper and frighten the pilot off. It had worked before.

I’d just turned off the ramp on the second floor, when the chopper reared up outside the building, spearing me with its searchlight.
I whipped the car around and powered across the floor towards the central stairs, avoiding rubbish and concrete debris, dimly aware of the chopper matching my move, circling around the building.

To the right of the pedestrian stairway doors was a small nook for parking motorcycles. The cover was good, concrete walls on two sides, a pillar on the other, enough overhang to cut down the other angles. I eased to a halt in the space and killed the lights.

I’d be safe here, but only for moments. The chopper would keep circling, probing with its thermal cameras. And the car’s battery arrays would still be pumping out heat for at least half an hour.
I lowered my voice as I hit the talk button.

“Marli, I’m in the car park of the old shopping place on Grantland. Chopper has me pinned down. Need help, now!”

Silence.

“Marli!”

The panel’s heartbeat symbol was black. Comms were down. Had the cops tracked down the base that Race Control were using? I tried again several times, almost doing that cliche thing of pounding the panel.

If all else fails, switch it off and back on again. I tapped in the reboot sequence, watched the countdown, then saw the screen go blank. Only at that point did I wonder if it would come back up again, and bring the car back to life.

After a nervous moment, the boot sequence started. Another few seconds, and the panel lit up with the usual speedo/map combination. Come on, baby. Give me comms.

The status indicator flashed up STATUS UNKNOWN, NO COMMS TO BASE.

Time 04:42 / Arrays 48%

The dead comms meant no cop-tracking on the map, but the backup units could only be moments away. They’d be pissed off too. We’d made fools of them tonight, trashing one of their interceptors on camera, and endangering their prize toy, the chopper. Any security cameras in this decrepit car park would have been stolen or smashed years ago. And I had an idea the cops’ body-cams would all develop unexplained problems, right about the time they closed in on me.

I decided to ditch the car and make a run for it. I released the harness and hauled myself out, grabbing the flashlight from its clip. I tried the pedestrian doors to the stairwell, but they were locked. I turned around and looked through the gloom. The sky had a hint of pre-sunrise, and I could just make out the edges of the building. I started out on a shambling run towards the exit ramp, my muscles and joints creaking after being hemmed into the cramped driving position. I hadn’t taken my helmet off; keeping my face covered might be the difference between getting away with it or not.

I ran towards the edge of the building facing out onto the street I’d come from, looking for some sort of fire escape or emergency ladder. I’d just leaned over the edge to look down when the chopper rounded the corner, its searchlight pointing straight at me.

I reflex-dived onto the concrete floor, and winced as the helmet impacted and jarred my neck. I scooted my legs around and pressed my body up under the parapet, trying to stay out of view. Had they spotted me already? I waited for the loud-hailer to scream, but it never came. The chopper continued along the side of the building and away around the corner. I exhaled.

Trying to cut and run wasn’t going to happen. They would be on me in seconds, whichever direction I went. The area outside was largely open ground. Without any cover, I’d be a bright yellow target for their thermal cameras. My only option was to drive the car back out of here and take my chances on the roads, rather than waiting to be flushed out.

I got to my feet, and shuffled to the other side, keeping my head low. The pre-dawn sky lit the exit ramp ahead. The chopper was some way off, so I chanced a look around the corner. The ramp led down the rear of the parking garage, with the lower floor feeding into it halfway down. Towards the bottom of the ramp was a black mass which I couldn’t make out in the dull light. I clicked on the flashlight. The beam picked out the wreck of an old car facing towards the exit, its windows smashed or missing, surrounded by garbage and debris, blocking the exit ramp.
Shit. The only way out was the entrance ramp I’d come up through. I knew the barrier at the bottom was gone. But once the chopper crew spotted that the exit ramp was blocked, they would surely sit tight outside the entrance ramp, knowing they had me cornered.

I needed a diversion to keep them away from the entrance for long enough for me to escape. But I had nothing to work with. No massed laser pointers here, no collaborators sent by Race Control to act as decoys. Just me and an electric racing car.

Hold on. The battery arrays. The car’s floor held nearly two thousand lithium-ion cells. Treat them wrong and they turn into tiny incendiary bombs. Everyone has seen clips of phones or laptops spontaneously bursting into flames, or of some poor bastard getting his nuts torched when an e-cigarette in his pocket destroys itself in a blaze of sparks and fire. I’d seen footage of idiots smashing the things up with hammers, and running away as the cells flared up into pillars of flame.

Could I set a fire, and draw the chopper’s attention away? But that would destroy the car, and I’d still have to make a run for it on foot, still alone and with the cop-heat being turned up moment by moment. Could I partially cripple the car, but still leave it drivable? I knew there were two battery arrays, for easy maintenance and swap-out. But were they wired in series or parallel?

I ran back to the car, knelt down and pointed the flashlight into the cockpit. The two arrays formed the floor of the car, and were the size of large concrete slabs, but much thicker and heavier. The rear one was obscured by the frame of the racing seat, but I could see the four release handles for the front array, flush with the sides of the cockpit.

I’d seen the arrays being installed and removed dozens of times. They had recessed casters built in at the corners. The techs would roll the arrays into position under the car, and use a low-profile floor jack to lift them up into the car’s floor. Turn the four handles to lock the array in place, then connect its stub cable to the power distribution rig, on the left-hand side of the cockpit. It was the reverse procedure when removing an array.

I reached into the car and tugged the front array’s stub cable out of its socket. And then swore as I realised I hadn’t shut the car down before pulling the plug. I looked at the panel. Dead black. Had I power-spiked the whole thing and turned the car’s central system back into a kid’s toy?

I hit the start button. And exhaled with relief as the boot sequence began. It seemed to drag on, but I couldn’t tell if I was imagining it or not. Finally, the panel came up. It showed the expected dead comms heartbeat from Marli, but all else looked OK. All except the power meter, which was now reading just 24%. The arrays must be wired in parallel. So it’s a crippled car with only half power, but it’s drivable.

The chopper was still circling the building, but I had enough cover. I removed my helmet and balaclava facemask, and put them down on the seat. Holding the torch in my teeth, I dived into the cockpit and located the release handles. The first turned easily, but the rest became progressively harder as more of the array’s weight was hanging off fewer mountings. No luxury of a floor jack to take the weight here. The last handle was a bitch and I had to take off a glove to get enough purchase to inch it round. With a huge effort, the handle reached the end of its travel and the array slammed out the car onto the concrete floor. Were the casters still OK? I needed it to roll.

I got down on the ground and pushed the array out with my foot. It slid across the concrete, the casters squeaking as they rolled.

The array’s aluminium lid was easy to remove, just a couple of catches on either side. I lifted it away. The wave of heat hit me like opening an oven, and fresh sweat broke out on my forehead. Nine hundred and sixty cylindrical cells looked up at me, neatly interconnected with hand-soldered busbars across the terminals, all cradled in their air-cooling matrix. Our techs took huge pride in the workmanship, packing the cells tightly into the array, modelling the airflow in CAD software. But now I was about to smash the shit out of their masterpiece in the hope it would destroy itself and win me some time.

I grabbed the crowbar from its clip in the cockpit, hooked it onto the tool loop on the suit’s waistband, and pocketed the flashlight.

I pushed the array with my foot towards the exit ramp. The casters grated and dragged on the pitted concrete floor. The chopper was a distant presence, some way around the building from me. I stopped just shy of the ramp, hanging back in the shadows. I laid the flashlight on the floor, pointing at the array.

I knelt down, the crowbar held two-handed above my head, its sharp end pointing down like a spear. I brought it down with all my strength. Nothing happened, just the sound of plastic shattering. I’d missed the cells and hit one of the sections of matrix between them.

I raised the bar again and smashed it down. I felt it contact against something hard. Still no reaction. I grabbed the flashlight off the floor and leaned down over the array to see what had happened. At that moment, a shower of red-hot sparks shot out of the cell that I must have hit, barely missing my face. I felt its heat against my cheek, jerked back, and smelt the stink of singed hair.

The damaged cell continued spitting and fizzling. OK, we’re on our way. I nailed the array again with the jemmy, puncturing another cell towards the front-left corner, but wise to the blow-back. One more for luck. I slammed the jemmy in again, towards the rear corner. A third jet of flame and sparks spewed out.

The whole surface of the array was now a sea of crazy flame, pumping out a pall of dense smoke. I stood up and pushed it with my foot to the lip of the exit ramp, aligned it towards the abandoned car, and then kicked it hard down the ramp.

The array gained speed as it rolled down, trailing its angry smoke column, fresh flames spurting out as more cells caught fire. It skittered on the rough surface, dragging to the right, bouncing off the kerb, then back towards the centre. It rolled under the wrecked car, banging as it came to a halt against some obstruction underneath.

The flames caught on the garbage and detritus, spreading across the underside of the wreck and crawling up the sides. A tongue of flame slipped through a broken window, and the car’s interior lit up as the headlining started burning. A fresh burst of black smoke belched out of the car, and I could now smell the acrid stench of burning upholstery.

The heat and the smoke would show on the chopper’s thermal rig, as soon as they came round the corner of the building.

I ran back to the car, jumped in, and almost broke my tailbone on the helmet I’d left in the seat. No time for that. I threw it away into the shadows. They’d find it, but the DNA was no problem – I wasn’t on the database. The chopper’s beam come round in my peripheral vision as I buckled up the harness, then heard its sound change. They’d spotted the blaze, and were homing in. I reversed out of the spot, leaving the headlights off, and drove towards the entrance ramp.

I inched the car around the corner onto the ramp. The sky was lighter, with the sunrise closer, and I was able to crawl down the ramp without needing to hit the headlights. I swung off the ramp at the bottom. I’d already decided to head back the way I came – not back to the Citadel, but skirting it, taking the old dock road back towards where the race had started. I was following the old rule of thumb; if you’re in deep shit, try to get back towards friendly territory.

I floored the pedal. And it was only then that I realised what a gutless, underpowered turd I was now driving.

Time 04:55 / Arrays 21%

The car felt alien, nothing like the body-extension it had been just a while back. The missing section of floor was playing hell with the airflow, sucking all sorts of dust and street debris into the cockpit. Grit was being driven into my eyes, and I regretted throwing the helmet away.

The car’s dynamics were horrible. Running on half-power, the throttle response was distant and insipid. When I took the first corner I came to, the handling was leaden and the steering barely responded. Dropping 90+ kilos out of the car had totally screwed the weight distribution. Every nuance of suspension tuning, every hour of tweaking, were now rendered useless. At the next bend, I needed to scrub some speed. I dabbed the brakes, but the car oversteered abruptly as its mass moved forwards, the back end stepping out and the rear tyres screaming. I caught the slide just before it turned into a full-on spin. The car had gone from a perfectly balanced racing machine to a skittish basket case.

“Driver, confirm comms!”

Marli! My earbuds were still in, but I could barely make out her voice over the roar of the wind.

“Where you been? What happened?”

“Driver, Race Control believed base location was compromised, ordered evacuation. Lost comms, but now mobile in truck”.

“I need help here. Car is dying, need immediate bug-out.”

“Driver, repeat please, unclear.”

The wind was screwing up my throat-mic. I cupped my hand in front of my mouth.

“Marli, the car is fucked! I need extraction. Now!”

“Driver, telemetry reports only 21% power, with array one non-functional. Is this correct?”

“I had to ditch the array. Long story. Just get me out of here, OK? I’ll explain later. Did Ryzhkov make it?”

“Driver, confirmation race abandoned 11 minutes ago. Opponent already extracted. Continue on current route, heading towards start area. Requesting extraction. Standby.”

Time 04:57 / Arrays 15%

I was still waiting on Marli’s response when the car juddered and slowed. The panel’s status changed to LIMP HOME.

Oh, now this. The car had sensed we’d dipped under 15% charge and had cut its power back, to squeeze out as much range as possible. Not what I needed.

“Marli! Car has gone into limp-home. Dropped me to fifty kays. I’m dead meat, here! Where’s the extraction?”

“Driver, no ETA for extraction yet. Proceed.”

“Fuck that, they’ll be on me any second. Can the techs re-map the powertrain? I need speed, not range.”

“Driver, standby.”

If they could just switch off the get-you-home mode, I’d have that little bit more power to put distance between me and the cops. Might give me the crucial seconds to hook up with the extraction boys.

“Driver, technicians have downloaded new power mapping to the car. No safeguards, repeat no safeguards. Needs reboot.”

“OK Marli, rebooting in 10 seconds.”

I aimed the car straight along the middle of the street and hit the reboot sequence. The power stopped, and I coasted along. The only sounds were the tyres’ contact on the road surface and my stuttering breaths. The car’s momentum ran out, and we eased to a halt.

The panel’s boot sequence started. 10…9…8… Come on, come on, come on.

Booted! Yes! The panel’s status read SHIT OR BUST. I smiled. Nice touch of gallows humour from the techs. I pressed the accelerator. The car felt a little more responsive.

“Marli, car rebooted, proceeding towards docks. Where’s that extraction?”

Time 04:59 / Arrays 4%

I was juggling speed and range. After the re-map, I’d stomped it straight up to 120 kays, but the charge plummeted alarmingly and scared the piss out of me. I’d slowed back down to 70, but had no idea how much longer I had left. I was on the ragged end of panic, my stomach churning and my mouth parched.

Marli pinged in.

“Driver, extraction details. Continue to Redwater Road, two kilometres from current location. Extraction via motorcycle.”

“Oh, thank fuck! How will I know them?”

“Driver, evac and assistance both black sports bikes. Evac rider’s challenge word is the city where you spent your twenty-eighth birthday. Your response word is the island where I met my wife. Understood?”

Clever girl. We’d never seen the need to set proper security questions. But Marli had come up with two that only she and I could know, buried deep in conversations we’d had while working on the car, months ago. Smart – not even trusting the encryption on the comms link.

“Confirmed, understand OK.”

I took the bend onto Redwater. Nothing ahead, just the scruffy industrial street revealing itself in the pre-dawn. I drove on, but felt panic rising as I approached the intersection at the end. Where were the extraction guys?

The car cut out. No warning, the re-map having taken out all the safeguards. The panel was dead. No lights or any indication of power in the cockpit. A hundred or so meters later, the car ground to a halt.

I heard the roar of engines being gunned behind me, and clawed frantically at the race harness, making a pitiful sound and feeling tears prickling in my eyes. The engine sound was right on top of me as I climbed out to run for it. A hand grabbed my shoulder and flung me around. I tensed, ready to lash out.

Big guy in motorcycle leathers, visor flipped up, intense eyes, serious demeanour. He spoke.

“Prague.”

What? Oh, yeah.

“Corfu,” I replied.

No change at all in his expression, eyes drilling holes in me. Then I realised.

“No, wait it was Cyprus! Cyprus!”

His face relaxed, and he extended a gloved hand. We shook, and he passed me a helmet, which I started strapping on.

“It’s OK, man. She said you’d probably get it wrong first time. Name’s Ronnie. You don’t need to know that guy’s name.”

He was gesturing across to the rider of the other bike, who had turned the dead car’s steering wheel, and was now pushing it towards one of the buildings across a narrow section of sidewalk. The car bumped to a halt against the kerb, and he beckoned us over to help. The three of us shoved the car over the kerbstones and let it roll into the building’s front door alcove.

The guy had now retrieved a jerrycan of gasoline from his bike and was emptying it into the car’s cockpit. I could see what was coming next. They’d torch it to make it look like I’d crashed. The remaining battery array would join the pyrotechnic party. By the time the firefighters had it under control and realised no-one was inside, we’d be miles away.

Ronnie and I ran back to his bike. He fired it up, and I jumped on the tiny pillion seat. He double-tapped my leg to warn me, clicked into gear and gunned it.

I glanced over my shoulder as we pulled away, just in time to see the car flare up in a ball of flame. The other rider was running back to his machine. I noticed for the first time that he had a body-cam strapped across his chest. Even more ratings gold. I hoped the producers would remember to pixellate my face, if they’d caught me in shot.

In the distance, blue lights turned onto the road behind us, quickly obscured by the thick smoke billowing from the flaming car. I guess Ronnie saw them in his mirrors, too. The bike’s engine note climbed abruptly and we surged forwards. The other rider drew near us, then peeled off down a sidestreet. I clung on hard as Ronnie powered the bike through the gears, towards the sunrise.

THE END

(c) copyright Chris Bardell 2017

Image (c) Can Stock Photo / ArtImages

He shared it with others. The simple pleasure of listening to nothing at all had a wider appeal than he expected. Soon thousands of people from all walks of life were tuning in. Many contacted him to share how Radio Silence calmed them, comforted them, graced them with an interval of solace in their hectic, modern lives.

But after a while, he started hearing fragments of foreign material in the silence. Echoes of love, pain, loss, desire, longing, boredom, conflict, passion, death. Aspects of life which he had hoped the silence would drown out.

Others began to hear these sounds, too. Some found the experience unpleasant, and accused him of inserting disturbing material into the silence to intrude on their peace. Some claimed he had an ulterior motive – commercial, religious, or something sinister involving the government. This stress only made the intrusive sounds louder, more shrill, more persistent.

Eventually, the deafening sounds in the silence became too much. He stopped listening to Radio Silence. Across the planet, he and thousands of others opted instead to listen to loud music, to banal chatter, or to any random noise available. Anything at all, just to drown out the noise in their own heads.

cb/2015

The social media element took a good chunk of time to put together. Natural-language analysis was an arcane field, which he had only touched on before. But with the help of various slang and idiom lookups, he was able to make his code parse the social net for explicit or hidden meanings, opinions, semantics. At first, he included routines to filter out obvious drivel and inconsequential babble. But soon he realised that the banal, the trivial, the dross was the very essence of what he was looking for. He quickly built it back into the code.

Developing something which approaches sentience is never a finished business, more a case of an ongoing work-in-progress. An eternal beta release, much like life itself. But time was pressing. He made one last push at refining the code’s linguistic analysis, matching up geo-location against regional dialect data, to further home in.

Next up was crafting the database. A home for every item of information the code discovered, every insight deduced, every notion gleaned. He built it methodically, with an eye for scalability and expansion. After all, he hoped it would be around a while. Maybe indefinitely.

Finally, the whole shebang was ready to roll. But just before he hit the button, he realised he had limited the code’s potential. Why analyse only social media? It was just a fraction of everything out there. A high-profile one, yes. But merely scratching the surface.

He quickly revised the code, changing its sweep to the entire internet. He’d need to up his game on crack tools to get access to anyone’s private emails, but that could wait for version 2.0, and he had colleagues who could help. Everything else was fair game, as of right now. Newsgroups, forums, photo and video sharing, newspaper websites, special interests, pornography. Everything out there had comments. The great quasi-democratisation of the internet made for plenty of easy meat.

Once he’d written a couple of tools to trawl the dark web in the same way, it was ready for primetime.

He set it running on the most powerful server he had access to. A few performance adjustments, and it was firing on all cylinders, reaching out across the internet at lightning speed. Seeking out data, interpreting it, establishing meaning and consensus, boiling it all down into zeroes and ones. And making that distillation available for use.

After leaving it to harvest for a few days, he tapped in some policy details from an early draft of a whitepaper doing the approval rounds. Seconds later, the code reported back its suggestions. Approval for this, needs work on that, scrap that bit altogether. Change the wording here, introduce emotive terms there, establish audience surrogacy here, reinforce commonsense there.

As he read the annotated text on screen, he allowed himself a smile. He didn’t have any kids, but becoming a parent probably felt like this. Unleashing something of your own creation on the world, and knowing that things would change because of it. And this baby had been born fully formed, fully grown.

The code was working perfectly. It was the ultimate ready-reckoner in predicting and gauging public opinion. It could sound out policy ideas before they were even gestated, by analysing the public mood of the moment. No more unpopular announcements, no more lead-balloon misjudgments, no gaffes or mis-steps or ballot-box disasters.

The thinking was simple and complex at the same time. Find out what the public wants – even if they don’t really know what they want, or how to articulate it. Factor in their preferences, foibles, hunches, suspicions, prejudices. Bring it all together, and analyse. Then give them what they want. Rinse, and repeat as required. Every decision and its reception by the public fed back into the loop. It just kept on learning; learning was all it could do.

He left the code running, swallowing up the world’s zeitgeist and repeatedly modelling it for easy analysis. He’d need to write the project up fully before his meeting with the Cabinet, the next week.

THE END

A man entered the periphery of her vision, ear-bud headphones in his ears, tapping away on his phone, oblivious to the dense crowd around him. He walked nearer Eve, eyes glued to his phone, continuing some game or online chat.

The man smiled to himself, clearly enjoying whatever he was doing, but didn’t notice that he’d slightly changed direction, veering towards the platform’s edge. He’d come to his senses any second now and realise the danger, thought Eve. Wouldn’t he?

He kept going, closer and closer to the yellow line and the platform edge beyond. Eve registered the change in air pressure as the tube approached the station. The man was going to fall in front of the train. Panic rose up in Eve’s throat, but the shout from her mouth was swept away by the noise of the train entering the far end of the station. The man took another step forwards.

At that moment another commuter grabbed at the man and pulled him back to safety. The younger man whirled around, startled, almost lashing out. He then realised what had nearly happened, and offered profuse thanks and a handshake to his saviour. Those nearby breathed a sigh of relief.

Except Eve. She was rooted to the spot, eyes wide open but unseeing, her mind ablaze with visions. She saw scenes flashing across her mind like a sped-up, clumsily edited movie. Establishing shot of a mundane terraced house. Knock at the door, heard from the inside, the callers indistinct through the patterned glass. Cut to an exterior shot: a middle-aged woman opening the door, her neutral expression turning to concern when she sees the two callers are police officers. “Can we come in?” Jump-cut to the living room – cosy, slightly twee. The woman seated on the sofa, leaning forward with her head in her hands, wailing pitifully, a framed picture of her dead son laid flat on the coffee table in front of her. Cut again to one of the police officers, now in the cramped kitchen, making tea in three mismatched mugs. Then fade to black.

Eve drew breath with a start, and was back in her own corner of reality, heart pounding. Only seconds must have passed. The train was still in the station, its influx of new passengers having boarded. She saw the young man who had nearly fallen on the tracks. He was standing in the carriage directly in front of her, once again tapping away on his phone. She caught a glimpse of his face, and recognised it from the photograph on the weeping woman’s coffee table. The train’s doors closed.

It took her another moment to try to make sense of what had happened. Some hallucination or other, some electrical misfire in the brain, some divine projection from an entity she didn’t believe in? Eve rationalised it as much as she could, but could only come up with something nonsensical: she had seen what would have happened. Fate’s own intention, thwarted at the last minute by circumstance or pure chance.

The train left the station. Eve didn’t move a muscle. Her heart rate and breathing finally began to slow, and the vision’s lingering feeling of loss and longing started to fade. Some moments later, a uniformed member of staff walked by. Seeing the thousand-yard stare on her face, he spoke.

“You alright, love? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

********

A week or so later, Eve took the last bus home after an impromptu Friday night get-together with some friends. The single-decker was about a quarter full, and she took a window seat towards the back. She stared out aimlessly as the bus wound through residential suburbs, industrial areas, past grey municipal buildings.

The bus emerged into the glare of shop-fronts, fast food joints, and bars, picking up the last of the evening’s revellers. Several passengers entered, bought tickets, and sat down. The doors hissed shut and the bus lurched slightly as the driver shifted it into gear.

Out of the corner of her eye, Eve saw a couple running hand-in-hand down the pavement, trying to catch the bus. A guy and a girl, both mid-twenties, smartly dressed. The young man was edging slightly ahead of the woman, who Eve could see was wearing heels and having trouble running. The man waved towards the bus, but it accelerated away. Eve looked back and saw the couple come to a halt, red-faced and breathing heavily from the exertion. They both looked disappointed, the man verging on heartbroken.

Then it happened again. Eve’s surroundings fell away and she was once again the passive audience for a fly-on-the-wall documentary that would never take place.

She saw the couple catching the bus after all, sitting down together, giggling, flirting. The scene cut to the “come in for coffee?” moment at the woman’s front door. Jump to the couple kissing in the kitchen while a boiling kettle steamed on the worktop behind them, the coffee forgotten. Cut to the pair falling into bed, the woman wide-eyed with anticipation, the man’s face keen with desire and arousal. Fade to black.

Eve was back on the bus, staring into her lap, short of breath, reeling and giddy from the intensity of the vision. Just like in the tube station, she’d felt – almost witnessed – how things would have turned out, if something hadn’t intervened. She knew that the couple would have felt the moment had gone when they missed the last bus. A stultifying – and sobering – twenty-minute wait for a taxi on a busy Friday night would have dampened what remained of their ardour and spontaneity. No, their night had ended all too soon. But Eve had seen what would have happened, but didn’t. Not so disturbing, this time. But what was going on?

********

The visions happened sporadically over the next few weeks, not appearing to follow any pattern.

The woman dressed in a suit slowing down her stride momentarily to check her watch, at the exact moment a passing van hit a puddle, showering the pavement just ahead of her with filthy water. Eve’s mind cut to the woman arriving late for the job interview, looking stressed and bedraggled. The apologetic man – corporate, middle-aged – summoned to reception, saying “We assumed you’d decided not to attend. I’m afraid we’ve appointed someone else”.

The cyclist deciding at the last moment to slam on the brakes and respect the traffic light that had just changed to red. Cut to a vision of the truck driver’s tearful pleas. “I went through on green. He just shot straight across in front of me. There was no way I could stop in time”.

There was sometimes joy and beauty in the visions, too. But it was always tempered by Eve’s knowledge that those events wouldn’t happen.

The man in front of her at the newsagent, looking at the lottery machine, then deciding against it. Vision of the man, this time dressed more smartly, smiling broadly with his overwhelmed wife beside him, popping open a foaming bottle of champagne while a dozen flashguns illuminated them. “The first thing we’re doing to do is take nice, long holiday”.

Eve’s vision of an elderly couple enjoying their afternoon tea-dance at the day-centre, rather than waiting outside for an ambulance after the gentleman tripped on a loose paving slab.

The visions continued, each leaving Eve feeling more helpless and bewildered. A crazed projectionist was screening films in her head, without her permission or control. She knew that none of her friends or family would understand, and she flinched at the very idea of trying to explain it to a professional. So she continued as best she could, trying to keep the scenes from movies that would never be made out of her head.

********

Eve finished work and walked down to the tube station again. Same crowd, same smells, same feeling as always. She went through the barriers, along the halls and down the stairs. At one point, her shoulder bag’s strap caught on another commuter’s backpack. She reached down to untangle it, but her hand made contact with the hand of the backpack’s owner, already trying to unravel things. She looked up. Early thirties guy, OK looking.

The vision hit her instantly and intensely.

Her mind saw the man in front of her smiling, saying something about having seen Eve lots of times. Saying something about wanting to ask her what she was so deep in thought about. Saying something about about trying to work it out for himself.

The scene cut to the two of them in a cafe, chatting and smiling, empty cups and plates speckled with cake crumbs on the table in front of them.

Cut to their first kiss.

Cut to the two of them walking out of the plane’s door onto the clanking stairway, sunglasses on, smiling as they felt the heat and humidity hit them, seeing the palm trees and the unfamiliar tint to the sky.

Cut to Eve in a hospital gown, hair damp with sweat, face reddened and stressed, the man gently caressing her swollen belly.

Cut to a child’s messy crayon drawing – two figures, with ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’ scrawled at the bottom.

Cut to the proud graduation ceremony, a striking young woman not unlike Eve in looks, posing in the gown, throwing the mortar-board in the air.

Cut to a shot of Eve and her fellow commuter, middle-aged now, but their eyes still sparkling, relaxing in a sunlit garden. Fade to black.

Eve returned to reality, the feeling of belonging from the vision staying with her. Only a second or two must have passed. She found herself looking into the eyes of the man who had just untangled their bags. The same one she had spent a lifetime with in the blink of an eye, just seconds ago. He had a nervous smile on his face.

He said, “We got tangled up a couple of weeks back, too. I’ve seen you getting the tube lots of times, but I’ve never had a chance to say hi properly.”

Eve was silent, but could feel something slipping into place in her mind.

He continued. “You always look so deep in thought. I wondered what you were thinking about, all that time. I used to try to read your face & work out what you were thinking.” His smile wider now, his eyes joining in, emboldened.

Eve stayed silent again. But she sensed how the present and the future were coming into alignment. Her heart skipped a beat.

The man looked away from Eve, eyes darting around the crowded tube station, betraying his nerves. He drew breath, and almost said something, but the words seemed to catch in his throat.

Eve silently willed him on.

He gave it another try. “Do you… Do you fancy a coffee? There’s a little French place round the corner. Fantastic cakes, too. My treat?”

Eve smiled at the man, her destiny finally clicking into place.

THE END

[ezcc]

Thinking there was a fire taking hold, I rushed up the driveway and yanked the door fully open. I was just about to bellow something about the fire, when I heard a muffled curse, and caught a glimpse through the gloom of a blue flame being extinguished. The garage’s occupant, an elderly man in blue overalls, was standing and turning to face me. He was removing an old-style pair of welding goggles, and didn’t look too happy.

“Bloody hell, you scared the life out of me! What do you want?” he said.

“Sorry mate, I saw smoke and thought something was burning in here.”

“Just doing a bit of welding, you fool! Nothing to worry about.”

I was suppressing a giggle. The welding had grimed up his face, but the goggles he’d taken off had revealed ovals of clean skin around his eyes. At that moment, it was as funny a sight-gag as I’d ever seen.

“Something funny?”

“No, no.” I half-snorted a chuckle. “Sorry, it’s just that you look a bit like a panda now you’ve taken the glasses off.”

There was a little pause while he twigged what the strange man was talking about.

“Oh, I see. The eyes. I get it.” A little smile played at the corners of his mouth. Maybe now he wouldn’t hit me round the head with the nasty-looking welding implement he still held.

“Anyway, like I said, I thought something was on fire. I’m sorry I made you jump.”

The smoke was clearing now, and I could see more of the inside of the garage. It wasn’t a garage at all, more an immaculate workshop. Workbenches, vices, a big circular saw, a shadow-board on the wall, with every hand-tool in its place. A metal framework, looking a bit like the prow of a small boat, sat on the floor, with the welding gear next to it.

“Great workshop you’ve got here. My grandad used to have one like this in his shed.” I gestured at the frame. “What are you making, a boat?”

“No, it’s a flying machine. For the Birdman. I was just welding on the wheel-mounts.”

The penny dropped. The town was holding its first ever Birdman event on August Bank Holiday. I’d seen it in the local paper. Dozens of charity fund-raisers and traditional Brit-eccentrics would leap off the pier in their home-made, unpowered flying machines. Prizes were on offer – longest distance covered, longest time in the air, cleverest machine, silliest machine. The town’s council had realised how much trade similar events brought to other seaside resorts, and had decided to take a leaf out of their book.

“Oh yeah, I read about it. So that part is -”

“Fuselage. She’s nowhere near ready, of course. But I’ve got a couple of months yet, and I reckon she’ll be a beauty by then.”

We seemed to have reached the end of the conversation.

“Right, well I’d better leave you to it, then. Very nice meeting you. And sorry again for startling you”. I told him my name, he told me his – Bert. A quick, stilted handshake, and I was on my way. Turning left at the end of his driveway, I saw him retreat back into the shadows of the workshop.

I took on as many shifts as possible at the leisure complex, which meant I walked past Bert’s place almost every day. I would go past at all hours, and every time I did, he seemed to be working away on his flying machine. Daytimes, I’d see one of the doors propped open. Nights, the doors would be closed, but tiny chinks of light would shine out through the gaps in the wooden panels.

I would sometimes knock on the door, shout a hello, and crane my head around to look inside. Bert would always be working away on some part of the contraption, whether planing a length of balsa wood, nailing down a piece of canvas, or bolting on a wheel. We would chat. His demeanour was always friendly, but slightly reserved. I learned about his Army life, his subsequent career on civvy street, his retirement. But there always seemed to be something missing, something he wouldn’t mention.

One evening I suggested we go for a quick pint at the pub at the end of the road.

“Oh, thanks but I’d better not.” And saying that, he seemed to make one of those barely-perceptible sideways nods, in the direction of the main part of the house. Or did I imagine it?

I figured it out in an instant. He must be married to some domineering woman, who kept him on a tight rein, and wouldn’t take kindly to his disappearing down the pub. The poor sod had probably been unhappy for years, hen-pecked and marginalised, his only pleasure building strange stuff in his workshop-sanctuary. I understood now why he hadn’t mentioned her in our conversations.

“Well, I know you’re a busy man. But if you do fancy a beer sometime, just collar me when I’m walking past. I’m buying.”

The weeks wore on. I served meals to the tourists, cleaned their toilets, changed the linen on their beds, broke up their fights in the bar, sold them sunburn remedies in the shop, and saved their kids from drowning in the pool. I was exhausted. The end of the summer couldn’t come soon enough – not only so I could leave the place behind, but because I wanted to see Bert’s machine in action.

I dropped in on Bert the night before the competition. He was putting the final touches to the machine, which was looking fantastic. The colour scheme was gunmetal grey, giving it a militaristic look. Every part showed little touches of individualism and loving attention to detail. He had stencilled tiny, pretend rivet-heads along the wing surfaces and fuselage. RAF roundels and USAF stars-and-bars insignia adorned the wings. Fake exhaust outlets belched orange flame either side of the machine’s nose. On one side of the cockpit was a drawing of Betty Boop. On the other, a stylised, head-and-shoulders sketch of a cheesecake movie belle.

“It looks terrific! You’ve put so much work in, you deserve to win something.”

“Well, it’s not really about winning anything, is it? It’s the taking part, and all that.”

“What’s with the American references?”

“Knew some good Yanks when I was stationed in Germany.”

“Oh, I see. Have you given it a name yet?”

Bert looked away, his eyes skirting around the workshop.

“Of course she has a name. Always has, just haven’t painted it on yet. You’ll see, tomorrow. You are still coming, aren’t you?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world. Swapped my shifts and everything.”

August Bank Holiday dawned bright, with moderate winds and warm temperatures forecast. I wandered down to the seafront around noon, to give me time to grab some fish and chips, and check out the flying machines in the roped-off area at the foot of the pier.

I found Bert standing alongside his machine. He was peeling off his jog pants to reveal swimming trunks underneath.

“Nice day for it,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

“Looking forward to it.”

“Do you think she’ll fly?” I asked.

“Of course not, don’t be daft!” He smiled. “But I think she’ll swoop into the sea very nicely, though.”

“Need any help with anything?”

“No, that’s fine thanks, son. All going according to plan. I’m due on in about 10 minutes.”

“Great. I’ll go and get a good vantage point. Best of luck, Bert.”

I shook his hand and turned to leave. But then I remembered what I’d meant to ask. Turning back, I peered over his shoulder at the machine.

“What did you call it in the end? Spruce Goose, Enola Gay, Spirit of St. Louis? Something like that?”

“Gladys.”

“Gladys? What kind of name is that?”

Bert hesitated, then did that thing where his eyes look downwards and away.

“Gladys was my wife’s name. Passed away a year or so ago. Lovely lass, miss her like mad. Truth is, I’d been moping about a bit, sitting in the house, feeling sorry for myself. Then I heard about the Birdman, and thought I’d pull myself together a bit, and have a go.”

I managed to make it to a clear spot on the pier without crying my eyes out too obviously. I’d stammered and babbled away at Bert, saying how I wasn’t aware of his loss, how sorry I was, apologising in case I’d ever said anything to upset him without realising. But he dismissed me with a wave and a smile, telling me I’d best get a move on and find somewhere to watch from.

Under my breath, I cursed my insensitivity and my heartless assumptions. I had thought Bert was building his machine as an escape from an unseen, uninterested wife. But now I understood. She was gone, and Bert had built the machine as a tribute to her, lavishing his time and love on something carrying her name.

I’d dried my eyes by the time Bert stepped up. The loudspeakers announced his name, and that of the machine. The onlookers cheered, none louder than me. From the open cockpit, his legs dangled down to the surface of the pier. He shuffled the machine forward, shifting her axis round a little, pointing her directly off the launch ramp. Then he paced the machine backwards, giving room for a good run-up. At the sound of the announcer’s klaxon, he grasped the machine’s handles, and ran flat out with the contraption, before disappearing over the edge.

I’d love to tell you that Gladys defied the laws of physics, that she soared over this little English seaside town. But she ended up in the drink just like all the others.

But there was a moment, just one tiny instant, which would always stick in my mind. As Bert and his machine went off the side of the pier, I swear I felt little puff of wind blow through. I might have imagined it, but the wind seemed to catch Gladys’s wings, and keep her and Bert aloft for a tiny fraction of a second.

One thing I know I did see was the look on Bert’s face at that moment. A huge, ecstatic smile, his eyes full of joy.

I rushed down to the shoreline underneath the pier. The organiser’s people were helping a grinning Bert ashore, along with what remained of Gladys.

“I think she held up pretty well,” he said. “The starboard wing has had a knock, but the fuselage looks right as rain.”

I held a bath-towel around Bert while he changed out of his swimming gear. The organisers would take Gladys back to Bert’s garage in their van after the event had finished. We were free to go.

“Fancy a pint, Bert?”

He paused. And then smiled.

“Do you know, I think I do.”

THE END

cb2010

[ezcc]

Vague dream-imprints lingered. Something about beauty, arousal, joy. Jody’s face flashed across my mind’s eye, along with a stab of guilt, quickly suppressed. But the memories faded away as my concious mind grasped for them. I would have to ask the Doc what his team had been up to.

I pulled off the inducer hairnet and cast it aside. The standard morning routine followed, starting in the adjoining bathroom. I’d become accustomed to the idea that my 07:00 bowel movement would be whisked away unseen, and pored over by a dozen eager white-coaters. Modesty and embarrassment were the first casualties here.

Showered, shaved, teeth fizzing with herbal mint and fluoride, I dressed in the standard garb and wandered through to the living area. The wall panels displayed still images of sunsets, waterfalls, dune ranges across a desert. A couple of them were new – the Ambience techs must have had some time on their hands. Even the piped birdsong had a new lilt to it.

The coffee machine in the corner kitchenette had been primed and fired up while I was showering. Fine aroma. One thing I will credit this place for is the coffee – the choicest, pesticide-free arabica, probably hand-picked at twilight by irradiated Peruvian virgins, then roasted and air-freighted here within hours. I helped myself to a cup and sat on one of the breakfast-bar stools. The daily ration of five organic cigarettes was waiting on the counter. I took one, lit it with the supplied lighter and drew heavily. Good coffee and a smoke – the day truly begins. The silent air-conditioning drew the smoke upwards and away.

As usual, breakfast waited behind a recessed hatch. Macrobiotic oatmeal porridge, freshly squeezed orange juice, protein smoothie, and three vitamin pills. No prizes for originality, but I was hungry.

Some time later, a gentle ring announced the Doc’s arrival. Coming in with his clipboard held like a shield, he made eye contact and beamed me a friendly-but-professional smile. He was the only person I had seen or spoken to for the last three months.

“Good morning, Michael.”

“Morning, Doc.” He was always “Doc” – I had been told at the outset that I didn’t need to know his name or anything about him.

“Big day coming up. Sleep well?”

“I think so”, I said. “Strange dreams. Half-remembered stuff after I woke up. You guys been mixing some weird stuff into my bedtime cocoa?”

Huge grin. “Not exactly”. A little pause, then back into the consummate professional persona. “You were a due for your periodic… emission. And I also had the boys over at Nocturnal lay on some additional stimulation during your third REM sleep last night. We needed to make sure all your endorphin receptors were fully functional. The traces suggest you’re in fine shape. Enjoy yourself?” The grin returned.

“Guess so. I’m remembering a bit more. I think there were three of them. Different races, all cute, all imaginative. Apologise to whoever washes the sheets.”

“Never mind that.” He moved on, eyes flicking across the clipboard. “Now, as you know the procedure is scheduled for 16:00, so we have eight hours to play with. I think you should do some gym work for an hour or so, then re-hydrate and rest for another hour. Following that, an hour of reading, an hour of cerebral training, a light lunch, then some time with Celia. Perhaps some quiet music, and then we’ll induce a couple more hours of sleep. Then wake up, final prep, showtime.”

I groaned. [br] [br]

Summertime, six months ago. Jody and I had lain there for what seemed like hours, her head on my shoulder, while shafts of sunlight coming through the blind had slid along and up the opposite wall of my bedroom, mellowing from white to gold. Our afternoon had been a stolen one – long anticipated, meticulously planned. A battery of corresponding alibis and excuses had been prepared and rehearsed – unnecessarily, as it turned out. Jody’s relaxed breathing rustled the hair on my chest.

Some time later, she had to leave to catch her usual train back to the ‘burbs. She tilted her head and looked up at me with that lovely open face, those liquid eyes.

“I’ll leave him. If that’s what you want.” [br] [br]

Huge plasma screens were mounted flush into the walls of the adjoining gym. My daily exercise routines offered me pre-recorded views of the outside world, presumably to guard against stir-craziness. The screens near the rowing machine showed a pretty but unidentifiable river. The reeds and grass banks slid by according to how fast I rowed. My rides on the static bike were accompanied by rolling vistas of what might have been the Pyrenees in the springtime, the wheel resistance increasing to mimic the uphill stretches and slackening off for the occasional freewheel descent. The ski machine offered a snow-blanketed trudge through unspoilt woodland somewhere apparently Scandinavian. Eye-candy, but ultimately a placebo. The novelty had worn off some time ago.

Sure, the exercise program was dull as hell, but it had been made perfectly clear right from the start that my physical condition had to be optimal for the procedure to stand any chance of working. I did manage to negotiate the cigarettes, though. Threw the Doc some half-truth about nicotine enhancing the synapses, which I’d read in a newspaper many months back, on the outside.

For the next hour, I skied, pedalled, rowed, ran, stretched, lifted and tensed. My body was autonomous, handling the physical aspects unaided. My mind wandered. [br]

I had only taken a passing interest in Dust when the story first hit the media. My immediate reaction – everyone’s, I guess – was that the whole thing was a big joke or set-up. The story had all the hallmarks of an elaborate hoax – the drug-maimed latter-day hippie who claimed to have come across it, the hicksville locale, the sheer implausibility. But the story grew and grew – in every sense.

Rendell ‘Sensi’ Logan – an authentic Sixties refugee – enjoyed watching the night skies from his desert eyrie in Arizona. On a whim, he had started hooking up a bunch of ancient home computers to the motorised guidance mounts on his battery of second-hand telescopes. Photo-sensors removed from army-surplus night-vision goggles completed the rig. He fashioned some homebrew code to spot any movement in the night sky, and to direct the scopes to track it, panning and tilting as needed, recording video footage. The biographical details in later reports would variously suggest that he was looking for UFOs, falling meteors, or secret military aircraft based on alien technologies. What he found was much closer to home.

Logan set it all up, and enjoyed smoking some home-grown while watching his setup occasionally causing a telescope to track lazily across the sky, its gaze following a distant jet-liner or a bird in the middle distance.

A month or so later, he returned at night from a week away to find his telescopes flailing around in a mad dance. His first thought was that his tracking software had gone crazy and hit a huge system bug, but there was an intelligence and apparent purpose to the movement of the scope barrels.

Checking his systems, he found that they had increased their tracking ability a thousandfold over the previous four days. Every photo-sensor had gone up in efficiency by around the same factor. Now, his bank of junk hardware was spotting everything that moved in the night sky, no matter how infinitesimal. Those old time-exposure photos of the stars visible on a clear night give a clue – the earth rotates, everything in the sky appears to move. Logan’s systems spotted every tiny movement and commanded the scopes to follow. Thousands of times a second. Shortly after he arrived home, one of the telescope motors burned itself out through sheer overwork. Another scope’s main objective lens shattered from the stresses of being jerked back and forth, up and down, breathlessly.

He put it down to something accidental in his code. Poor mathematics, faulty logic, typed in under a cloud of dope-smoke. But he found no bugs, no screw-ups – his code was water-tight. Nothing explained the set-up’s exponential growth in capability and flat-out speed.

Eventually, suspecting a practical joke by one of his geek acquaintances, he took a screwdriver and removed the case from one of the computers for a look inside. That’s when it became interesting, when it became news. It also led indirectly to why I was here – sweating it out on a treadmill, watching canned footage of a summer meadow sweeping by. [br] [br]

The isotonic drink’s flavour was supposed to be ‘citrus buzz’, it but had a powdery consistency and a nasty, artificial after-taste. Precisely-measured dosages of salt, glucose, various vitamins and minerals, but it tasted like an early reject at a man-made flavours lab. No matter – it was the last of these drinks I would have to take prior to the procedure.

I laid down on the bed for the rest period the Doc had decreed. I was never forced to sleep during these rests, just encouraged to empty my mind, clear out any negativity, think through any issues I had. All the standard self-help crap. I always made a rule of ignoring the suggestions, and focusing on my own questions. Would the procedure work? Would it take me where I wanted to go? What would happen to me over the coming weeks and months? [br] [br]

In the desert, Logan had found what appeared to be a ordered structure of fine dirt inside his newly-gifted computers. Clusters of the material had accreted around the main chips and components. Tenuous, ethereal strands linked these areas together. Each computer’s motherboard looked like a obsessive spider had woven some sort of intricate web all over it, which had then been overlaid with a coating of fine, brown powder. Logan carefully brushed out the material and vacuumed it away, the better to work out what prank his techie friends had played. When the computers were powered up again, the telescopes resumed their original, laid-back progress in tracking objects across the night sky.

Within a week, the scopes’ spasmodic chorea had started once again. The systems were operating well beyond their normal capabilities. Logan opened up the system boxes again. The material was back – even more of it this time.

A time-line drawn up much later would show that Logan wasn’t in fact the first person to have encountered the material. The polar scientist in the Antarctic may have been the first, or possibly the aid co-ordinator in central Africa. But neither of them did anything with their findings.

Logan’s past experiences with law enforcement hadn’t instilled him with any trust in the government or any of its agencies. Rather that contact the Feds, NASA, or the CIA, he went straight out on the Net and published his account.

It became clear within hours that Logan’s machines weren’t the only ones augmented by the material. A city in Japan had wondered why its rail system had suddenly jumped in efficiency. A municipal authority in Canada found their increasing traffic problems were solved almost overnight. Police and civic surveillance systems throughout Europe began to recognise and track people’s movements, based on the merest, momentary glimpse of their faces.

The story was picked up by the mainstream media, and snowballed from there. In the face of growing public concern, the scientific community became involved. [br]

Today’s reading matter was a dull analysis of world events during the past century – no colour or texture. A couple of weeks into the programme, I had asked Doc if I could choose what to read. He refused outright.

“Our profiling has indicated areas of your knowledge which are lacking. We feel it’s best to try to supplement those deficiencies with a structured reading programme. You need to be as receptive as possible, which means a broad basis of knowledge. Sorry, but all reading materials must be managed by the team.”

The cerebral training was marginally more fun, or rather less tedious. There seemed to be some form of rota involved. One day, I would sit in front of the screen and be presented with puzzles to stimulate the short-term memory – how many dots in this diagram, spot the face, match the colour. Another day, it might be visual pattern recognition and progression. Very occasionally, I would be shown rapidly-changing scenes of late twentieth-century news footage, without audio. I figured that this was some sort of subliminal seeding of knowledge. Today’s task had a clear mathematical basis. Simple missing-number games, more complex calculation problems, geometrical and spatial puzzles. As usual, I had to work mentally – no pencils, paper, or calculator. [br] [br]

We met up in a city park, at lunchtime on that Friday. I brought take-out coffee. She sipped and looked at me through the thin steam rising out of her cup.

“This isn’t something that’s easy to do. I’ve been with him for four years.”

“Second thoughts?”

“No, no, it’s just… difficult. Big step to take.”

“Keep it simple, like we talked about.”

“Look, I have to get back to the office.”

“Are you going to tell him tonight?”

“I think so.”

“Call me after. Then grab some clothes and come to me.”

“OK, I’ll try.” [br] [br]

I was eating my lunch in the kitchen area when Doc’s voice crackled out from the speakers.

“Hello, Michael. How’s your food?”

“Edible. Promise me this is the last carrot and hummus sandwich I’ll ever have to eat? Can’t you guys put some mayo in it, or something?”

“Sorry, but you know all about the policy on superfluous fats and so on.”

“When this is over, I’m going out for the biggest steak there has ever been. Two side-orders of homefries, some onion rings and a bucket of ketchup”.

“You do that. Now, when you’ve finished your snack, I’d like you to spend an hour with Celia. I know you’re not a big fan anymore, but it’s time well spent as preparation.”

“I don’t get it. How do you expect Celia to benefit me, this late in the day?”

“As I’ve said before – it’s good preparation and grounding. There are still some rough edges in your psychological profile. I’d like you to continue working through those issues with Celia. If it’s any comfort, there won’t be any more sessions like that until well after the procedure.”

He knew he had me. There was no other choice. [br] [br]

Where wars, famine and environmental disaster had failed, the mystery material succeeded. The world’s scientific community had begun to co-operate on an unprecedented scale. Teams in Berne, Cambridge, Osaka, Hyderabad, Berkeley and countless others each took the lead on various aspects of the material – where it came from, what it did, how it formed on computer circuitry, whether it was “alive”.

Before long, the investigators had given the substance at least a dozen names, but the one that stuck was the most natural – Dust. At least it was universal – every language already had a word for it. Poussière, polvo, polvere, Staub, hokori.

Months of observation and analysis showed Dust to be silicon-based, cellular in structure, capable of growth and self-repair, and adaptable to environments of widely-differing temperatures and humidity levels.

Its origins remained a mystery. It just appeared, arbitrarily, without any common factors. An industrial junkyard in Brazil yielded up a Dust-enabled PC which hadn’t been switched on in years. But many modern systems across the world were unaffected, and just got on with their work as before.

Nanotechnologists and microbiologists remained puzzled. Creationists felt vindicated. Governments appealed for calm and rational thought in rising to meet mankind’s fresh challenges. Doomsday cultists prepared for humanity’s next transition – or its end. Survivalists stocked up on canned goods and armaments.

The world at large sat, watched, and listened. And the Dust bloomed.

When clusters of Dust were observed communicating across networks with other clusters, that’s when the alarm bells started ringing. Hyper-powerful computer systems, all beginning to act in unison, all learning exponentially, all taking more and more control. Reproducing, propagating, achieving sentience.

The United Nations rushed through the ratification of a plan proposed by a think-tank in Oslo. And so was born the Emissary Programme. [br] [br]

Celia communicated with me through the same terminal I had used for the cerebral exercises. We ‘talked’ as if on an internet chatroom. A little speech-bubble icon would indicate that Celia was composing an message. Moments later, the text would appear on the screen. Then I would type my response back.

To start with, I had enjoyed the Celia sessions. They were only contact I had with anyone else besides the Doc. A friendly patter began to emerge – perhaps some flirting and mild innuendo. Celia seemed to play along coquettishly. More than once, I finished a session wishing we had had more time, and that we’d get a chance to meet up on the outside.

After several conversations, I began to detect a certain repetition in Celia’s words. I tackled her on this, but she was evasive. When I pursued it further, she feigned hurt and clammed up entirely. After that session, I asked Doc whether Celia was a computer.

“Of course. Didn’t you realise?”

One day, I noticed a system message at the start of one of our sessions. Celia wasn’t a name. It was an acronym. Cognitive Evaluation – Live Interactive Assessment. Cue the sound of many pennies dropping.

The screen indicated that Celia was ready for me. I started typing.

M: hi celia
C: Hello, Michael.
M: what r we doing 2day?
C: I’d like us to begin by talking through the emotions you felt when you were selected for the Emissary Programme.
M: been thru this already – happiness, pride, touch of fear – remember?
C: Michael, I certainly do remember. But I wanted to explore whether any other emotions had presented themselves at the time, or in the period since your selection.
M: not rly
C: You have mentioned several times that you found your isolation challenging.
M: boring, same every day, no company except Doc
C: Michael, you understood the terms of the Programme when you signed up.
M: doesn’t stop a prsn getting sick of it, even the horny dreams you feed me get boring after a while
C: Michael, the periodic emissions are intended to mimic the median sexual life of a man of your age, to make the Programme’s isolation less of an issue.
M: when this thing’s over, I’m screwing anything that walks
C: Upon conclusion of the Programme, you may pursue any lifestyle you choose.
M: gr8
C: Michael, I sense a certain hostility in your tone today. May I ask if there is anything bothering you?
M: this place, u
C: Please understand, Michael, that I’m here to help you to help yourself.
M: best way would be 2 leave me alone
C: I’m very sorry, Michael, but we need to continue with this session
M: sick of talking 2 a machine. Ur just circuitry, bunch of electronics. Prob got some of that Dust inside u
C: Michael, I can confirm that my hardware does not contain any such materials
M: let’s finish this session here. Nice knowing u Celia.
C: Michael, I’m afraid this session is mandatory
M: forget it, tired of listening, tired of u starting all yr replies with my name 2 make it seem more prsnl
C: Michael, you understood the terms of the Programme when you signed up.
M: U repeating yrself, said same thing just now. Bye. [br] [br]

Celia was right about the Programme. The harsh conditions had been made perfectly clear to all prospective candidates at the outset.

The regional and national qualification heats had weeded out the obvious fame-hunters, freaks, nut-jobs, and other unsuitables. By the time we arrived at training camp, there were less than 400 of us remaining – all nationalities, creeds, races. We were segregated into solitary confinement. Medical evaluations, IQ tests, personality profiling – every head-shrinker trick was employed. By the end of the first week, a hundred dejected candidates were standing with their bags on the tarmac area in front of the main compound, waiting for transit buses to take them home.

When I made the last fifty, I started to feel things were going my way. It was no more than a hunch – with no contact with other prospectives, I had no yardstick to measure myself against. The testing moved up a gear – sleep deprivation, electro-shocks, days spent without food or light, total sensory lock-down. A battery of psych techniques were used to flag up any non-altruistic motivation – greed, hunger for recognition, desire for celebrity.

Occasionally at night, I would hear the howls of fellow prospectives, despite the soundproofing. They always sounded like dying animals – primal keening unlike any proper human cry. I would bury my head in my pillow and try to maintain some sort of focus. Keep my head together, and my eyes on the goal.

A month later, my senses and willpower stretched well beyond their elastic limit, two impassive goons escorted me to the Director’s office. Another man I hadn’t seen before was waiting there with him – balding, late thirties. The Director informed me that I had passed the selection process and was the Emissary. He introduced me to the other man and we shook hands. He told me that I would know him as ‘Doc’ and explained that we would be working together extensively over the coming months.

From there, I was taken by sealed truck to a military airfield. The plane flew me directly here. That was three months ago. I hadn’t seen daylight since. [br] [br]

I left work early that Friday afternoon, picking up fresh flowers for the bedroom from a street-corner vendor. In the apartment, I poured a large glass of red and sat staring at the phone for the next three hours, waiting to hear her voice telling me that it was done, that she was on her way.

By mid-evening, my mind was wandering and needed some input. I switched on the TV to catch the news. And there it was. The train’s twisted corpse, zigzagging across the tracks like a distended concertina, surrounded by a thousand tiny figures in high-vis clothing. Sirens, blue flashing lights. Fires still burning, hours after the event. Plumes of smoke rising up, billowing across the adjacent fields, with suburbia as the backdrop.

The TV coverage jumped back to the studio, where the newsreader summarised the incident for those late in joining the programme – the train’s departure time and destination.

My heart fell through the floor.

Jody’s train.

I called her mobile phone. After many rings, a man answered. He identified himself as a paramedic.

The following weeks were a blur of alcohol, drugs, and endless wandering around, alternating between excessive sleep and haunted insomnia. Feeling like my insides had been ripped out. I was fired after two weeks’ unexplained absence. My money & life-juices were running out. Jody’s funeral was held, but I wasn’t invited – none of her family knew about me. Grieving was impossible. Every day was 24 hours of despair.

Around this time, the media reported that Dust had begun linking up virtual worlds out on the net with real life. A wholesale blurring of boundaries between the imaginary and the concrete. Pranksters in Romania discovered they could hijack a municipal radio station through its virtual-world representation. Activists in Taiwan caused the self-destruction of a fleet of assembly robots in a Chinese car factory.

And something very strange was observed. All over every virtual world on the net, a clutch of new characters arrived each day, distinguishable by their startling, photorealistic appearance. Each wandered round aimlessly at first, uncommunicative and mute. But then they started interacting with their surroundings, with other people. Rumours began to spread of users having encountered dead relatives, friends, partners. Their avatar images looked just like they had when they were alive.

Dust. Mining the lives of deceased users of computers. We’ve never really worked out just how much data there is about every one of us out there. Our email and web traffic, our television and radio consumption, they all provide a key to who we actually are. What we like, what we dislike, who we care about, who we hate, who we love. Clever enough analysis could render a person in infinite detail, packaging it all up in a lifelike representation using photos of the deceased.

And Dust was clever. It was bringing the dead back to life in virtual worlds, using only the digital vestiges of their real lives as the building blocks.

I applied for the Emissary programme, which had just started recruiting candidates. While I waited for their reply, I seeded the net with Jody’s life. I broke into her house, her workplace, houses of her friends, of her family. I stole all their computers’ hard drives, and any CDs or memory sticks and cards that I could find. Hacked into her email accounts, her social networking profiles, the works – anything containing a whisper of Jody. Tons of data.

I put it all online, through a huge payment to a web hosting provider in Russia who didn’t bother too much about checking what their customers were up to. I paid for two years up-front, maxing out my only remaining credit card. Plenty of time for Dust to crawl through every part of Jody’s life, sort it, order it, interpret it. And to reinvent it.

The next day, my invitation arrived – to the first of the regional heats for the Programme. Things were coming together nicely, like a game of chess. And here I am now, almost at the end-game. [br] [br]

I was scheduled for three hours or so of sleep, following my truncated session with Celia. The Doc told me that, after I woke up, he would visit me to administer the pre-op shot, then leave me for a further twenty minutes before bringing in the portable anaesthetic rig.

The procedure would implant my body with Dust in seven locations. First via an intravenous drip, the Dust having been enhanced with some platelet-adherent. Next, both frontal lobes. Then, shortly after, the left hippocampus, the medulla oblongata, the amygdala, and finally the hypothalamus. Arcane terminology recalled verbatim from the diagrams the Doc had shown me when I got here.

The thinking was simple enough. Dust was so widespread, its progress and increasing power so obvious, that humankind needed to protect itself. But no line of defence could ever work against Dust – pervasive, ubiquitous, ever-growing. The Emissary Programme’s mission was to interface with the collective consciousness of Dust, to embed with it, to learn its motives. The method was implantation in the most significant areas of a receptive human brain, together with a slew of chemicals to promote absorption, interaction, merging. I was the Emissary – a human Petri dish.

None of the unsanctioned, amateur attempts at implantation had worked. All they achieved was turning a dozen or so people into corpses, basket cases, or babbling imbeciles. But the Programme was politically-supported and well-funded. The world’s finest neurosurgeons would carry out the procedure.

I had read the disclaimers about the dangers, and signed up to them all. Possible paraplegia, personality change, brain damage, nervous disorders, just plain death. I signed all my rights away, hardly wasting a moment thinking about it. The huge danger-money prize would have been a factor for most candidates, but not for me. I had my own motivation.

I was going out there, becoming part of it, spreading my own conciousness across the real and virtual worlds, because Jody would be out there somewhere. Everything that I could ever remember of her and more. Reanimated and given life again by Dust – using just the ashes of her real life. It’s a big virtual world out there, but I knew I would find her. [br] [br]

Chill-out music is playing through unseen speakers. I can feel the inducers in the hairnet tingling against my scalp. Tiny pulses of current, firing across neural pathways, beating out their own circadian rhythm, lulling me towards sleep. My mind clicks down a few levels of tension. Tiredness is washing over my body. Soon, sleep. After that, the pre-op shot.

Then the search begins. [br]

THE END
cb2009

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The a-boat was standard cop-issue, but I knew I’d make good time. Clamped on the blunt prow of the boat was my own mini-sonar rig. Not cheap, but squeezing all that technology into something the size of a tin can costs money, even from the duty-free at Narita. I often used it to guide me along the best channels out here, avoiding last century’s submerged dreck & debris. Strictly against procedure, of course, but no-one was going to object to unauthorised navigation tech out here. There was no way Central was going to pay for it themselves.

My bespoke touches weren’t just electronic; a splash of home-distilled methanol always peps up a tired war-surplus outboard. Well, you gotta get your kicks. The job was hardly fun and games; it paid to put a stupid smile on your face occasionally. Screw the throttle down for a while and forget the twenty-first century.

The early dayshift is usually a gig for the antisocial, the pathologically shy, or the occasional grey-featured insomniac. But sometimes the early start had its rewards, like today’s stunning sunrise. I made a mental note to apply sunblock every half-hour.

First order of business was a standard floater – a legitimate enough way of whiling away half a morning. Pulling a corpse out of the Basin no longer sent me into a horrible frenzy of vomiting and dread. The first couple of months had worked that out of me. Now, it was just another part of the job of Intra-Maritime Patrol Officer. Perfectly mundane, like an office-serf tackling a spreadsheet.

I knew as little about this body as I knew about any number of others I had recovered over the months. Earlier, Central had given me the outline after the two-way radio had crackled into life on my bedside junk table. The call had come in around 4AM from a New Texan touring party, who had just left Terre-Nouvelle after seventy-two hours of hedonism. They were en route to the heliport, probably in an unlicensed taxi-hover. The fact that they even picked up the phone gave them away as obvious T-N virgins; most visitors simply ignore the detritus – human or otherwise – on their way back to the Real World. But these good ol’ boys had called it in. Apparently male, twenties, Caucasian ethnicity, floating face-up somewhere just south of the navigation channel a couple of minutes out of T-N. That was it – they hung up. No caller ID, no time for triangulation on the cell. They probably had to bribe the cabbie for the vague location to tell the dispatcher. Not much for Central to go on, but I know these waters well, so I got the shout.

In many ways, Terre-Nouvelle had a lot to answer for – certainly for people in my profession. But it was so perfectly of its moment, that it almost had to come along at some point. Enough already that it was one of the largest man-made structures in New Europe, that it grew from literally nothing to a self-supporting entity within three years, that its black economy shamed prosperous traditional towns throughout what remained of the region. For all its ills, T-N was a monument to unrestrained ingenuity, perverse imagination, and free-rein commercialism. Marx, Keynes, or Darwin could have studied for a lifetime here, and would still not have grasped much of its complexity.

The Torrent had ripped through in ’29, forever changing the region’s landscape. When the Basin formed in the days after, the media focused on those forced to flee their homes, businesses, holiday bolt-holes. Three coastal towns, twenty-eight inland villages and countless acres of farmland were overwhelmed in a matter of days, the Torrent breaching the creaking sea defences in four places and sloshing unimpeded across the flatlands and saltmarsh. Shrill voices called for government assistance and intervention, but beyond the immediate emergency effort – and later financial recompense – there wasn’t anything which any government could have done. What’s to do when the sea has reclaimed something which we only had on loan anyway? The county redrew its borders, with Acle as the most easterly mainland point, and with the Basin as the geographical feature we would all need to get used to. The displaced population moved inland and onward…

The boat was making good speed. The waters stretched for several miles either side, featureless except for the odd reminder of what lay beneath – the odd church spire or the ventilation gear of some industrial building poking out above the surface like history’s own periscope. I killed the outboard on two occasions to slash away seaweed & garbage from the prop. Ahead, I could make out the first platform in silhouette.

Terre-Nouvelle started in ’32 with a scruffy mob of idealistic, post-ratrace engineers, latter-day hippies, and the odd wealthy patron with a sense of the bizarre. The catalyst was the Anglian Basin Regeneration Act 2031. Passed by a Parliament terminally mired in conflicts – military, ethnic, civil – the Act was a last-ditch attempt to restart the economy of the desolated area. An official hands-off policy, the Act provided the legal basis for any interested party to colonise and construct in the Basin. Near-sovereignty for anyone crazy or foolhardy enough to build a settlement in this inhospitable and isolated place. A handful of half-hearted attempts followed, then in ’32, the big boys moved in. With useful lines of credit from their backers and a highly-skilled crew, the first three barges laden with girders, ferro-concrete and pile-drivers inched through the Acle Gap at the highest spring-tide that year, weighing anchor just east of the central point of the Basin. Work began within hours, the first foundations of Terre-Nouvelle piercing the subsoil, eight meters down…

The body was bobbing gently, wedged up against a floating clump of kelp and what looked like a shard of an ancient Broads cruiser’s hull. I throttled the engine back, and killed it entirely as I came alongside. The description from the cowboys had been accurate enough. Bracing against the boat’s struts, I hefted the body on board. Obvious rigor mortis, but no odour – probably died sometime late last night. A wave of the detector around the body’s left shoulder area told me there was no sub-dermal ID implant. Not a Brit then – we were the only nation using them. No documents in the pockets, either – just another John Doe.

I turned the body over and lifted up the soaking shirt. The exit wound halfway down the back was about the size of a fist – a high-velocity fragmentation-slug. Kicks no worse than a regular hollow-point when it’s fired, but makes mincemeat out of internal organs and bone on impact. Still, at least his family could have an open casket at the funeral – if we were ever able to trace them. I hosed down the back of the body with embalming foam, waited a moment for it to harden, then turned it over and completed the sealing-up. The foam would make a hermetic sarcophagus around the body, keeping any evidence intact until the pathology boys back at Central cracked it open. I scribbled the time and GPS co-ordinates on a dog-tag and attached it to the corner of the foam.

“Gibson!”

The shout startled me. I spun around, tensed. Then relaxed when I saw one of the Terre-Nouvelle Security launches nearing. Electric prop – no sound.

“You shouldn’t shout at armed cops like that, Taylor. Anyway, it’s Officer Gibson.”

“Whatever. What you got there?” He nodded towards the body.

“Dead guy, probably last night. Mean anything to you?”

“Sorry, Officer.” The familiar mocking smirk. “We have no records of anyone currently missing from T-N, and this location is beyond T-N Security’s jurisdiction”.

I shrugged. “OK, you know the score. I need to have sight of your records for the last seven days, check your security logs, the usual.”

“Follow me back. Security docks, north side.”

As I followed the launch past the western tip of T-N, I was again struck by the progress made in such a short period of time. Beyond the first platform, the main drag stretched out south-east, each level of superstructure arranged in vast ziggurats, stepping upwards above the original base-level. Several more layers had been added since my last visit, and I glimpsed the skeletal beginnings of a new platform (the ninth?) in the middle-distance. The north side served as the more utilitarian part of Terre-Nouvelle; delivery docks, sewage processing plants, hydroponic biodomes, the new, third-generation desalination rig I’d read about. We turned into the Security dock and tied up.

The walk to Taylor’s office took no more than a few minutes, but threw in more sensory stimulus than a month in the Real World could do. I followed him past countless bars, cybersex booths, fast-food stands, arcades, drug lounges, fight clubs, and old-fashioned flesh parlours. Every step was another assault on the senses; the bass-throb of some wartime industrial techno; aromas of food, alcohol and weed; sickening thuds as two tourists punched it out in a submission bout; the retinal afterburn of a pole-dancer picked out in green laser…

I accepted the courtesy coffee from Taylor’s secretary while another underling worked a terminal and brought up the past week’s visitor manifests. As expected, the data was totally useless – Terre-Nouvelle’s commitment to the record-keeping specified in the Act was cursory at best. But after twenty-five years of government laissez-faire, both Taylor and I knew the routine and didn’t feel the need to bother with any procedural dance or wasted words. Today’s John Doe was just another casualty of T-N’s survival-of-the-least-dead ecosystem – probably another naive newcomer trying to muscle in on someone else’s established turf.

As I was finishing my coffee, Taylor came out with what I’d expected since I saw him earlier.

“The offer still stands, you know. This is a good gig here, man. Free studio apartment, full-on lifestyle, good shift pattern, no paperwork. The best girls, the best booze, the best dope. Only the finest stuff is shipped in for the customers – and we get our share. With your experience, I could get you a Lieutenant stripe to begin with, six guys in your team. What do you say?”

“Same as last time – forget it. I’m not going to waste my life playing rent-a-cop in this place.”

“C’mon, man – rumours reach here as soon as they break cover on the mainland. Everyone knows you got passed up for that Regeneration project of yours out at the old windfarm off Yarmouth Island. You’ve had my offer on the table for six months, and still you want to play the frontiersman, stringing up platforms between derelict windmills. What’s your problem?”

“The Ventura settlement was about real terra-forming, not hanging around beating up wasters and skimming the profits out of drunk tourists. You chose your path, Taylor. I’ll choose mine. Thanks for the coffee.” I got up to leave.

As I untied the boat, my belt-computer screeched. This morning’s next job was to take statements in the aftermath of a suspected piracy raid on a Gaian Truth settler community under the Haddiscoe Causeway. I fired up the outboard and pointed the boat south.

THE END

cb2007

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