Black Jack (20 page)

‘Mother,’ he said, and suddenly he was in a barren landscape with a stormy blue and black sky. He could hear the thud of feet behind him. He was being chased by an invisible enemy. He was in his mother’s nightmare. He saw her in the distance. She was running barefoot in the opposite direction and calling his name. He called to her and she stopped and turned around. When she saw him she did not run toward him but simply stared at him in an uncomprehending daze. He took one step and he was beside her.

‘I’m alive. Don’t worry about me. It’s hard to explain but I’m playing a game. And when the game is over I will be home. Remember this when you wake up, it’s very important - conspiracy theorists.’

And suddenly he was zapped awake. Searing pain in his brain. His first taste of pain.

Carter was standing over him with a sunny smile. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘but REM sleep is not allowed. And in case you didn’t know, REM stands for rapid eye movement.’

And Black knew that Carter was not such a friendly guy, after all.

The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.

 - Wayne Dyer

Bumi woke up with a start in the darkness of the boy’s bedroom. She had dreamed of him, but it had felt so incredibly real. Her heart was still thudding hard. She touched her hand - he had held it. It was four in the morning. The street outside was quiet. The loss of him engulfed her. She pushed her face into his pillow and breathed in the lingering smell of him. She had never stopped using baby shampoo on his hair. To her he was still her baby.

In the dark her head reared up suddenly, her eyes staring. He had said,
conspiracy theorists
. Whatever could that mean? He had said it was important. She turned on her side to face the window and heard the letter flap of the downstairs door lift and fall. At four a.m.! She slipped out of bed and ran to the window. A man in a long, dark coat was walking away. She hurried downstairs in her bare feet. The wooden floor was so cold she was covered in goose bumps.

There was a white envelope on the mat. With shaking hands she opened it. An A4 paper held an indecipherable string of letters. However, she knew www meant it was something to do with computers. Something she knew nothing about. She sprinted up the stairs, changed; then did a strange thing, one that she had never done before. She plugged in the microwave, put her coat into it, closed the door, and turned it on at full blast. Puzzled by her own actions, but unable to stop herself, she watched her coat turning through the glass door. Then she unplugged the oven, took the coat out of it, and pulling it on, ran out through the front door. She took the night bus into Shepherds Bush where the son of a Pakistani woman she knew ran an all-night Internet café.

Ashan looked up from his computer screen when she opened the door. ‘Oh, hello, Aunty,’ he greeted, clearly surprised to see her in his shop.

She was too wound up to smile. ‘Can you help me, please?’

‘If I can, I will.’

‘Can you tell me what this is?’ she asked, coming forward and holding out the A4 paper.

Ashan glanced at it. ‘That’s just an address for a website.’

‘Can I see it, please?’

‘Of course.’

She watched carefully as he keyed in the letters and punctuation marks. The screen became black. PLAY GOD appeared in bold flashing letters. An invitation to access the language of your choice appeared next. Ashan clicked on the box that said English, and up popped a computerized image of a man with platinum blond hair and blue eyes. He was dressed in a doctor’s overcoat. A folded stethoscope showed in his pocket. He was standing in a virtual doctor’s consulting room.

‘Wonderful. You found us.’ He smiled. “You better come with me, then,’ he said and walked into what looked like a hospital corridor. Blue doors led off from it. “Behind these doors are terminally ill people. All of them will die in the next few months. Today we are going to visit a youth paralyzed since birth. In the next few weeks he will be dead. By means of a computer he has communicated his desire to let you choose if he should live or die. You have exactly one minute to decide.’

Ashan’s face swung toward Bumi. Her hands were cupped over her mouth and her horrified eyes were transfixed by the screen.

‘But this is a very special decision,’ the virtual character explained. ‘If you decide he shouldn’t die, the boy will remain as a useless vegetable until he expires in the next few weeks, but if you decide to help by terminating his suffering, you will be prompted for your passport number and address, and one hundred US dollars will be posted to you. Nothing will be asked in return. The game allows one vote per person. Watch a live feed of the subject now.’

An oblong button began flashing.

‘Do you want to watch?’ Ashan asked her.

She could not speak, only nod.

The screen opened up to a boy. A real boy. Black lying in a white room, surrounded by sophisticated machinery. He appeared to be hooked up to some of it.

‘Whoa! What the fuck?’ swore Ashan.

‘That’s a lie,’ Bumi shouted, her face contorted with fury. ‘He doesn’t need those machines.’

‘You have one minute to decide,’ a computerized female voice chimed in, and the clock began a countdown. Fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-seven, fifty-six, fifty-five…

‘Quick, quick, press the no button,’ Bumi cried in a panic. Unbelievably, there were already more than two hundred yes votes.

‘Please enter your country of origin and your passport number now,’ the voice instructed.

Ashan looked enquiringly up at Bumi. She covered her face with both hands and tried to remember. ‘One. No, no, six. No, wait.’ And suddenly the numbers that she had not looked at for years, in a passport that had long expired, arrived in an unexpected rush in her head. She snatched her hands away from her face and said them clearly.

With lightning-quick strokes - Bumi did not think human fingers were capable of moving that fast - Ashan typed the numbers in and pressed the enter key on the keypad. The number ‘1’ appeared inside the no box. The first no.

‘Thank you and have a nice day,’ said the voice. The screen became a purple wall with a rotating black cube in the middle of it.

Bumi’s heart was beating so loudly she could hear it. She felt her knees give way and her hand grasped Ashan’s shoulder. His reaction was fast. He shot out of his chair, grabbed her by the waist, and gently guided her to the chair he had vacated.

‘Sit, Aunty,’ he advised.

She sank slowly into the chair.

‘Shall I get you some water?’

Bumi shook her head slowly.

‘What’s going on, Aunty? And who’s the boy?’

‘I don’t know what is going on, but that boy is my son,’ she said slowly. The words were strange and bitter in her mouth. She shouldn’t have had to hide the fact before, when she had had him.

‘Oh! I didn’t know you had a son. My mother never mentioned it.’

‘He is adopted. The issue never came up in conversation with your mother. ‘

‘Look, shouldn’t you go to the police? This is well illegal.’

‘I can’t. If I do they will kill him instantly.’

‘But you can’t let them play with his life like that. There are a lot of sick people on the net. Hardly has the game started and already there are two hundred yes votes. At this rate they’ll end up killing him.’

‘Will you vote no for me?’

‘Of course,’ he said.

She looked at him. ‘Now. Please.’

‘Err…can’t remember my passport number off the top of my head. But I’ll do it as soon as I get home, OK?’

‘Thank you, Ashan. You are a good boy. God will be kind to you.’

‘Glad to help, Aunty.’

‘Will you ask your mother to vote too?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

‘Listen, if I say conspiracy theorists to you, what comes to your mind?’

‘Kook, nut, lunatic, tinfoil hat, a bit strange…’ He stopped when he saw Bumi frowning worriedly and realized it was something important, possibly connected to the boy. ‘You want me to Google it for you?’

‘Google it?’

‘Er… You want me to type it into the search engine and see what comes up?’

Bumi was lost even with ‘search engine’. She had no idea, but she quickly agreed with this suggestion. ‘Yes, yes, do that.’

He typed the words in and reams of stuff appeared on the screen. At that moment the door opened and a lanky youth with a backpack entered.

‘Wait one moment, Aunty,’ Ashan said, and went to serve his customer.

Bumi cast her eyes down the page and a name jumped out at her. She pulled the cursor the way she had seen Ashan do, clicked on it, and found herself on a green and black page. They seemed to her magical colors, why, she couldn’t say. There was a photograph of a blond man; attractive, possibly in his late fifties. There was something wrong with one of his hands. Bumi had seen that type of deformity in the first Lady Carrington - arthritis. She peered closer. Courage. He had courageous eyes.

Ashan came back.

She pointed to the picture of the man. ‘Will you help me write to him?’

‘David Icke?’

Bumi nodded.

Ashan shook his head. ‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea, Aunty. This man is like a broken record, banging on about pedophiles in high places.’

Immediately Bumi recalled the sly references she had overheard Lady Carrington make about their important friends with their odd nicknames and their preference for ‘little people’. Unbidden, the memory of that one time many years back when she was still employed at Lord Carrington’s stately manor came back. She had opened the door of a guest bedroom that should have been empty and seen a naked boy lying on the rumpled bed. He had turned his small, white face in her direction and looked at her blankly, the way children sometimes do. He could not have been more than ten years old. His mouth was red and swollen. She had stood there staring, startled by the sight, when a man deeper in the room had drawled in a bored voice, ‘Shut that door. You’re letting the draft in.’

Shocked to her Indian core, but indoctrinated into her servile position by the fear of losing even that lowly position, she had immediately obeyed. Not my place, she had told herself, scuttling away as fast as she could. She had never told a soul. Even now the hot shame of having done nothing that morning was raw. She looked into Ashan’s dismissive eyes. ‘If that is what he does, then I admire him greatly. It takes a great deal of courage to stand up for what is right with no thought for one’s own safety.’

‘Well, that’s not the worse part,’ Ashan maintained, his eyebrows rising. ‘This is a guy who believes the world is run by reptilians!’

One week ago that would have caused her to think David Icke was more than a little mad, but she could not forget the eyes of the man who had offered her tea in her own house. It was like talking to a snake or a crocodile - there was nothing but the emotionless calculation of a cold-blooded predator. Or the strange cables that appeared to come out of his trouser legs. ‘How do you know it isn’t?’ she asked.

Ashan looked at her as if she had lost it, but saying nothing, he politely helped her write the letter and send it using his email address.

‘One last thing, Ashan.’

‘Yes, Aunty?’

‘Can you think of any reason why anyone would put their coat into a microwave oven and turn it on full blast?’

‘Well, if one was a spy, it would destroy any RFID chips hidden in it.’

‘RFID?’

‘They are tracking devices that can be so small they would fit into the dot on the top of the letter ‘i’. Often they are placed onto the labels of clothes.’

The explanation didn’t make any sense to her, but she put it at the back of her mind, thanked him profusely, and took the bus to work.

The milk and morning papers were sitting neatly by the side of the front door. She picked them up and quietly let herself into the darkened apartment. Both Lord and Lady Carrington were still asleep. During the time of the first Lady Carrington she had had to iron the newspapers, but the new Lady Carrington had declared such gestures exercises in ridiculous affectations. She put the papers and the milk on the table and sat in her coat on a chair. Soon she would make the one slice of nearly burnt toast with a scrape of butter and marmalade for Lady Carrington, and a couple of soft boiled eggs and soldiers for the Lord, but for now she stared at a spotless tile on the floor and thought of the unreal turn her life had taken.

If a man smite thee on one cheek, smash him on the other!

 - Motto of the Satanic Order

Shekina cleared a space in her mind and called them, first Teddy, then the biotech. Ten minutes later, Teddy opened the door to her quarters and came into the room, his face vacant.

She stood up. ‘Take me to an ops room. I need to do a session.’

Wordlessly, he turned around and led the way.

They met no one in the corridors, but if they had it would not have mattered. The biotech was already waiting inside the ops room. His state was such that he appeared to be in a trance. As if they were all parts of a well-oiled machine, unspeaking they strapped her securely into the chair, attached the EEG headband and the heart monitor wires, and administered the first dose of psychoactive drugs into the IV line. The lights were turned down and brainwave tones were sent through her headphones. Shekina focused her mind on the vector coordinates she had memorized. The image of the cabalistic tree of life was projected onto the screen. When the flower on the screen started to spin she concentrated on it until the vortex of its spinning absorbed her.

At precisely that moment Teddy launched the electric shock that coursed from the trip seat into her body, and she flew at incredible speed toward her vector intention. In seconds, she was very deep in the ground inside a DUMB (deep underground military base) corridor. She stood in front of a thick door. Experimentally, she put one leg through the door. Her foot disappeared through it, but did not land anywhere. She tried the wall and got the same reaction. She put an arm through and felt a sucking sensation. The room was a trap.