Alien Disaster (8 page)

But why was this on here? Brandon’s mother wasn’t a historian. Her specialty was genetics.

Of course! Brandon knew of another Book of the Dead that was more relevant to his mother’s line of expertise:
The Genetic Book of the Dead
. Not an actual book as such, but more the idea that a living being’s DNA was a record of the entire history of its evolution; the history of its dead ancestors.

Maybe this ebook was not all that it seemed. He renamed the file from bookofthedead.epub to bookofthedead.zip and extracted the contents.

Sure enough, there was an extra folder inside that had nothing to do with the picture book. Brandon found three text files, each around three gigabytes in size, that just seemed to contain a solid chunk of random letters:

He had half an idea what they might mean. There was also a video file: brandon.avi.

Brandon smiled to himself, and double-clicked it.

Sarah Walker was sitting on a black leather sofa with the laptop beside her, open in its case. On the screen, some video recording software was running. A smaller version of the same scene could be seen in the program’s window, and a smaller version again within that, receding to infinity.

Sarah looked back and forth between the screen and the camera in front of her to check that the set-up was working. She scraped back her long blonde ponytail and took a deep breath.

‘So, Brandon,’ she began. ‘It’s time to come clean. I have so many secrets that I hardly know where to begin. I’m at a secret lab here in … well, if you’re watching this then you probably already know where. But the secret might have come out, and now with these meteorites on their way I’ve started to get worried. So in case anything happens, Brandon, I just wanted you to be able to see me.’

She waved her hand dismissively. ‘Let’s just start at the beginning, shall we?

‘Twenty two years ago, I met an alien in a pub in Oxford.

‘Well, I didn’t realise at first that he was an alien: it wasn’t as if I walked in and there was a little green man propped up at the bar. This one looked almost human, like David Bowie perhaps in
The Man Who Fell to Earth
, although maybe not as handsome.’

She laughed. ‘Anyway, I was a post-grad student, at Oxford working on my second degree. I was out drinking with Amrit Kang—or AK as we used to call him. The pub was The Jericho Tavern. We’d gone to see our friend Thom playing in his band. The place was packed out, standing room only. I found myself squeezed next to this tall guy who leaned in and told me that the band was going to be the next big thing.

‘I just laughed and said that they’d be lucky to get a gig outside of Oxford. He offered to get me a drink and bet me another that the band would be a success.

‘He introduced himself as Talem Tarsus.’ Sarah shook her head. ‘I still owe him that drink.

‘Well, Amrit had got lost down the front near the stage, so I ended up going home with the tall guy. No, it wasn’t like
that
; in fact it never got like that. It was funny: Talem and I started seeing each other every day; he was interested in my work in physics and medicine, in visiting art galleries and reading and talking politics; but he never responded to any of my less-than-subtle drunken advances. He often seemed distant, a little detached. He was the perfect student, soaking up the lectures—in both arts and sciences—but ignoring all the fun extra-curricular activities.

‘It turned out that Talem wasn’t even registered at the university anyway. But he did have an impressive laboratory set up in old converted brewery by the river where he lived and worked. And he had lots of other student friends—including Amrit eventually—who were always coming and going. He made his living experimenting and improving on medicine and medical technology. He’d have us testing out hundreds of new variations of whatever the latest wonder drug was, and when he hit on a superior version he’d sell the formula to the original manufacturer. He paid his student helpers generously, and always let them keep the data for their own university papers.

‘We certainly wouldn’t have the nice house and lifestyle that we do now without Talem’s help. He was more helpful than my own university tutor when it came to my PhD in nanotechnology and its application in medicine. But it was only after I achieved my doctorate that he showed me his
secret project
.’

Sarah took a deep breath, as if to say,
Here’s where the story gets interesting.

‘Well, first he offered me a job. He’d somehow wangled a position at the hospital in London, and he asked me to join him, as his partner, on an amazing salary and all the benefits. How could I refuse? I went from being a poor student to a successful London-based research analyst almost overnight.

‘And Talem’s project itself—it was amazing.
Nanomedicine
, but on a level of sophistication never before imagined, where cures, antidotes and vaccines—and possibly even surgery—could be targeted and delivered on a massive scale. Imagine treating thousands of Africans for malaria in minutes no matter how far they were from the hospital. That was the potential of the project. It would change the world.

‘I met your father in London too, at an exhibition that he had curated. Now there were two men in my life, but they got on well and were so different that there was never any conflict. Gem came along, work continued, life went on … and then I fell pregnant: with you, Brandon.

‘Then things got complicated. The birth was difficult. A terrible and random blood haemorrhage. In normal circumstances, Brandon, you would have died. We both might have died. But Talem believed that the nanotechnology, though still untested and unpredictable, could help. And it did: it was a triumph for both of us. Talem’s years of work and research were finally justified, and you were the proof.

‘And that was when Talem finally told me that he was an alien.

‘He said I probably wouldn’t believe it, and I didn’t, even when he took off his contact lenses and make-up. I had met funnier-looking people! He insisted I perform medical tests on him. I discovered then that he wasn’t lying. It wasn’t as if he had two hearts like Doctor Who, or anything: rather that his whole genetic sequence was different, not just to humans, but to anything that has ever evolved on this planet.’

Sarah paused and looked anxiously at her watch.

‘It turned out that the reason Talem was telling me all this was that there was some kind of emergency back on—I still can’t believe I’m saying this sometimes—on his home planet. He assured me that he’d be back, and that he’d even keep in touch if he could. He left me money to continue our work; we still needed to test everything thoroughly in secret before revealing it to the world.

‘And then he left. I didn’t see him blast off in his spaceship. Two days after you were born he just disappeared out of my life, and that was that. I haven’t seen him now for almost fourteen years.

‘The money that he left was quite a substantial amount. Enough to expand the lab at the hospital. Enough to hire my own team. Amrit Kang wanted to be a part of it, but he was perhaps a bit too eager and I worried that he knew too much, so I did what Talem had done before: picking promising students from those who were on placements at the hospital.

‘Without Talem around, the development slowed, but we made progress. Keeping the project a secret was hard, but no one could ever know that this technology was of alien origin. The only person on the team who had complete knowledge of every aspect of the project was myself. And so to make it that much harder for anyone who might be interested, we split the research between three labs: London, this one, and another in … well, let’s just say, Brandon, that it’s about two hundred kilometres east of your favourite place.

‘The hardware, software and control mechanism are worked on separately at the three labs. I am the only person who knows about the existence of all three. Not even Talem knows about the third lab, and
that
one I built specially for him for when he returns. His area of expertise was the control and deployment of the nanotechnology. No matter how advanced the medical and technical sides of the project became in all those years, Talem had made me promise never to reveal the technology to the world before he had a chance to return and prove that he could control it fully.

‘He feared that, ironically, people would be prepared to kill for this life-saving technology if they ever knew where to find it … and not just people from our own planet either.

‘And just yesterday he finally got back in touch to say that he was on his way back to Earth to complete the project. But he warned me that he wouldn’t be alone. I just hope he gets here before—’

Sarah’s phone beeped. She picked it up and pressed a button.

‘You found it.’

A pause.

‘Good grief! Brandon, get out of there! The place won’t withstand more than two direct strikes.’

Sarah stood up and quickly closed the lid down on her laptop and shut the case. She made to leave the room, phone in one hand, laptop case in the other. The recording software was still running as she moved away from the camera.

‘Go, Brandon,’ she pleaded into her phone, ‘but don’t go home. Bring the cylinder to—’

The video was now a black screen.

She was dead then. Brandon had feared as much.

With a heavy heart he transferred the ebook and all its hidden extras to the memory card that he still had from his mother’s safe. He took the laptop out of the case and removed its hard drive. The case, which was obviously bomb-proof, was too useful to leave behind, so he put the cylinder, his phone, the memory card and the hard drive all in the case. Then he shut the lid.

He had second thoughts, and removed the memory card and hid it in his sock.

Kat came out of the kitchen and presented Brandon with a plate of fish: two not quite completely defrosted battered-cod fillets, one smothered in Heinz tomato ketchup, the other with Helman’s mayonnaise. ‘Enjoy!’ she insisted.

‘Thanks, Kat.’ Brandon said, tucking in.

Kat took a seat opposite him and attempted to bite into a messy triple beef burger that was almost as big as her head. ‘So?’ she asked. ‘What did you find out?’

‘I know what the cylinder thing is. It’s not a weapon, or a bomb, or an ancient relic or anything we ever guessed that it might be. It
is
alien though. It’s a cure.’

Kat looked puzzled. ‘A cure for what?’

‘Anything! I mean, it’s nanomedicine—tiny robots I think, that are only a few nanometres big, entering your body and fixing things: destroying pathogens, even rewriting DNA; and not just to cure one person: millions of nanobots could cure thousands of epidemic victims.’

Kat considered this. ‘But it’s just a bit of metal pipe,’ she said. ‘Where are the tinybots? Inside?’

‘Probably,’ Brandon said. ‘It’s not like you would ever hear them rattling about. This cylinder could have layers and layers of protection and padding for just one tiny prototype robot. Who knows? But I do know there’s one more lab that’s got the information that we need to control it all. And I think I know where it is!’

Kat smiled. ‘So what are we waiting for? Hurry up and finish your fish!’ She reached across the table and clutched Brandon’s hand excitedly.

Jason reappeared. ‘We might have a problem,’ he informed them.

Kat withdrew her hand swiftly. ‘I made you a burger,’ she told her brother.

‘Great! Thanks.’

‘Jason,’ Brandon said. ‘What’s going on?’

‘I found us a boat,’ he said between mouthfuls. ‘But you might want to come and check out what you can see from the top of the dome. There’s a war going on out there, and both sides are closing in on our position.’

The top of the dome!
Brandon and Kat followed Jason as he led them through the maze of fruit machines, coin waterfalls and zombie-shooting games until they came to a back door. Outside again, but in an area not accessible to the public, they found a narrow metal ladder that ran up the side of the dome to the top, forty metres up. Another ladder led down to a jetty under the pier.