Dead Man Running (4 page)

Six's house had three power sources – the solar panels on the roof, the wind turbine in the backyard and the exercise bike in his bedroom. But after four years of neglect, the turbine would need oiling before it would spin, and the panels would be too dusty to pick up what little UV radiation still filtered through the smog.

He would be coming home to a cold, dark house.

When Six rounded the corner, he didn't see it at first. It was so different from what he had expected – the lawn carefully trimmed, lights blazing in the windows – that he almost didn't recognise it as his home.

Someone's been taking care of it for me, he thought. King? Ace?

Then he got closer, and saw the people inside. Two women in their late thirties sat at opposite ends of a table, with two young children between them, a boy and a girl. A platter of sushi rolls and a wok filled with noodles rested on the centre of the table. One of the women was waving a soup ladle in the air as she told a story, and the little boy was laughing.

They live here, Six realised. Where does that leave me?

As he stepped onto the lawn, a motion-activated spotlight snapped on, turning his skin ghostly white. The four people inside turned to look out the window and Six fled, sprinting mindlessly into the darkness, no destination in his thoughts. Homeless.

When he was fifteen, Six had started keeping a journal. Writing up reports had always helped him understand the missions he'd done, so he thought writing about his life might work the same way.

It hadn't. He'd stopped after just two weeks, having realised the journal was only reminding him of all the things that his life lacked.

I wish I was normal
, he'd written.
I wish I had parents. I wish I'd been born in another time, with forests and voting and police. The distant past, or the future, though I can't imagine the future being any better
.

He'd locked the journal in a drawer and forgotten about it. Now he
was
living in the future, and had been proved right – it was even worse than the world he remembered.

An hour of running later, he found himself back at Stillbank, the apartment block that held the Deck's safe houses and the remains of the time machine. He'd travelled more than thirty kliks.

The pounding of his heart and the heaving of his lungs had suffocated his dark thoughts. I can stay here, he realised. This will do.

He caught the lift up to the forty-eighth floor and wandered through the gloomy corridors until he found the Deck-owned apartment. He went to one of the doors and knocked on it, holding up his fake Triple C so it could be seen through the peep hole. The door opened to reveal a burly Deck agent in a bathrobe with a folded newspaper in one hand.

‘Can I help you?' he asked.

Six eyed the newspaper, which probably contained a gun or a Taser. ‘I'm looking for Ms Canasta,' he said.

The agent stepped aside and Six entered, grateful that the password hadn't changed.

The designers had done an excellent job disguising the safe house as an ordinary apartment. It was spacious, but full of homely touches – oven mitts on the kitchen bench, a baseball cap hanging from a hook by the door, books piled on top of the stereo. Six walked over to the window and stared out into the murky twilight. The agent sat on the couch, picked up a paperback from among the cushions and started searching for his page.

Six had been assigned to guard duty at Deck safe houses before. Guards were permitted to do whatever they wanted to pass the time, as long as they did it silently – they needed to be able to hear noises from out in the hallway, or the barely audible ringing of the phone. As someone who liked to read, Six had never minded this restriction. But he knew agents who'd gone mad, having the TV right in front of them but not being allowed to switch it on.

‘Is there a bed?' he asked. ‘I haven't slept in four years.'

The agent pointed to the door of the adjoining apartment without looking up from his book.

Six went through into another apartment that would have been identical to the first if it weren't for the time machine, a steel and concrete behemoth lurking in the corner.

Not really knowing why, Six stepped into the transmission chamber and contemplated the walls. They were sterilised, white, coated with a polycarbonate that was designed not to degrade, so no unnecessary molecules could spill into the air and interfere with the transmission process.

There was a panel on the floor in the corner of the chamber that Six hadn't noticed earlier. A tiny sign designated it the
emergency hold
. He knew that after scanning its cargo and transmitting the data, this machine was designed to destroy the original. Perhaps this trapdoor was a precautionary measure, in case someone was trapped inside the machine and needed to protect themselves from being blasted to molecular pieces.

He lifted it up to reveal a space just big enough for an adult to curl up inside.

If only I'd spotted it six years ago, Six thought. Just after I'd stolen the warhead and sent a copy of myself to the future. I could have hidden under the trapdoor to avoid being atomised, and then climbed out again after all the civilians had transmitted themselves. I could have left the nuke out on the street where I knew the ChaoSonic air raid would obliterate it, and then run away to a safe distance. That way, there would have been two of me. Then when the copy came out two years later, I could have saved him, preventing my own murder.

For an absurd moment, Six wondered if he could use the machine to go back four years and do exactly that. But he already knew that it wasn't possible to change the past, and even if it were, this wasn't a time machine any more. It couldn't scan, or transmit, or receive. It was junk. It had served its only remaining function – to bring him into a cruel world that didn't want him.

The bedroom door was open. Six could see the mattress, soft and warm, but temporary. All too soon he'd have to get up and face this place again.

He stared at the controls of the machine for a long time.

‘Damn you,' he said, before going into the bedroom and shutting the door behind him.

FAMILY REUNION

Where am I? Harry wondered.

The question came without panic. Harry was incapable of fear, alarm, or even curiosity. But waking up in an unknown location was . . . odd.

He tried to open his eyes, and discovered that he had none. The cameras that usually recorded visual data and transmitted it to his ocular processing unit had been removed. Someone has partially disassembled me, Harry realised.

He attempted to flex the joints in his arms and legs and discovered that those, too, were gone. His ammunition cache was absent. His battery was missing – where was the power coming from?

Scanning for GPS signals yielded no result. There was no sign of any Bluetooth or wi-fi signal either. Harry ran a diagnostic program and concluded that the receiver apparatus had been detached.

Not partially disassembled, then – completely. I am nothing but AI script, Harry thought. My body is elsewhere. Perhaps I am a system backup. After scanning the logs of his most recent processes, Harry concluded that this was indeed the case. He did not remember starting any such backup, but he remembered having the intention. But if that is so, he thought, why am I awake?

Working on the assumption that he was trapped on a hard drive somewhere, and that he had been inadvertently activated by a nearby processor, Harry ran a scan for connected devices. He found three computers, a wireless router, a printer and a mobile phone. He probed the computers and discovered that two of them were protected by antivirus software, which would take some time to penetrate. Since he had no trouble accessing the files of the remaining one, he was probably already inside.

The mobile phone wasn't receiving any satellite signal. Harry reasoned that it must be broken; there had been City-wide coverage for decades now. Unfortunate. But the phone was moving in relation to the wireless router, so someone must be carrying it around.

I'm not alone, Harry thought.

Other electronic devices were connected to the system, but Harry couldn't tell much about them other than how much power they were draining. Sixteen of them were running at a steady rate of forty watts each – light bulbs, Harry guessed. Another twelve were consuming power at rates ranging from fifty watts to three hundred and ninety. These devices included temperature gauges, all hovering at around eighteen degrees Celsius. A heating system, Harry concluded. With a separate heating element for each room, rather than interconnected vents – which probably means this facility is airtight.

Comparing the power consumption of each room gave Harry a sense of their sizes – the whole complex was probably only sixteen hundred cubic metres in volume, but there was no way to tell how tall, wide or deep it might be.

There were two thousand other electrical devices. Each was using exactly 142 watts of power, and had a temperature gauge reading two degrees Celsius.

It didn't take Harry long to work out what these might be. Refrigerators. But who would need so many? And this led him back to the original question: Where am I? He summarised what he had learned so far. He was on a computer in a small, airtight facility, with twelve rooms, two thousand refrigerators and only one occupant, somewhere outside the City's mobile coverage.

Harry began assembling a cipher to crack the antivirus software on the other computers. There is no time to waste, he thought. At any moment, I might be switched off.

‘Hi, it's me,' Jack said. ‘Well, that's redundant, isn't it? I mean to say, it's Jack. But that's redundant too, because you can see me. And now I'm wasting space in your inbox. So, why I was calling is this . . .'

Six chuckled. Jack had always talked too much, interrupting himself, rambling, forgetting his own point. This had infuriated Six for years before eventually delighting him. Many people could lose the thread of a conversation, but only Jack could lose the thread of his own monologue. The chortle died in Six's throat as he watched the screen. This might be the last time Jack made him laugh.

Six was still in the apartment. He was using a laptop he'd borrowed earlier that morning from the agent, who was sitting silently in the adjoining room. After connecting to the local wi-fi, he'd found his email address still active, with more than a hundred unread messages. They were mostly from the first few weeks after his disappearance – the oldest was from Ace, sent on the day he'd vanished:
Where are you?

The newest, written last night, was identical except that it was from King. It had a video attached.

‘I've been thinking about the seismic sensors,' Jack continued, his voice thin in the speakers. ‘They don't seem to be as sensitive as they should be – the batteries aren't producing enough power. We can't put solar panels at the bottom of the sea to recharge them, obviously – well, we could, but they wouldn't do anything, because – anyway. I was thinking maybe we could use geothermal energy. If we attach conductive needles to the sensors so they could pierce the ocean floor down to the mantle, they should be able to draw power from the heat. Maybe I'm crazy, but I think it might work. So, if you think it might work too, we should try it! Unless we're both crazy, in which case we should get a third person's input. Assuming we can prove they're sane, somehow. Anyway. Call me.'

Jack broke eye contact with the webcam, clicked the mouse a few times, and typed for a little while.

‘And . . . send,' he muttered, clicking the mouse once more.

If Jack's computer hadn't malfunctioned, Six knew, the recording would have stopped, the message would have been sent to King, and the video would end here. Instead, it was going to go for another three hours and fifty-eight minutes, when the recording would reach maximum length and cut out. Deck technicians had pronounced the video to be undoctored. And somewhere in those three hours and fifty-eight minutes, Jack was going to be murdered.

Jack opened the study door and walked out. Six got a glimpse of Jack's lounge room – a plush armchair, a framed movie poster on the wall – before Jack switched out the light, plunging the room into blackness.

Moments later, a TV was switched on. The glow revealed Jack sitting in the armchair, remote control in hand, watching some comedy talk show.

Six had been told that the murder didn't take place until thirty-one minutes and forty-six seconds into the video. Between now and then, nothing was going to happen. Jack was going to watch the talk show to the end and catch the start of the same medical drama that Six had seen on the ChaoSonic billboard without incident. He thought about fast-forwarding to the crime, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Jack's life had been cut brutally short. Six didn't want to make it any shorter.

He spent half an hour scanning the darkness around Jack for signs of the intruder, but didn't find anything. Excluding the flickering light from the television, nothing was moving.

As the clock ticked over from 30:59 to 31:00, Six realised he was squeezing the arms of his chair so hard that the metal was twisting in his grip. His friend was about to die, and there was nothing he could do but watch.

‘No, no, no,' someone on the TV said. ‘ “Impossible” is not in my vocabulary. You're going to save my brother.'

‘I'm sorry,' someone else said. ‘But there's no known cure for this condition.'

Jack looked bored. Part of Six thought about how sad it was that Jack's final moments had been spent watching such a dull show. And then he saw the gun.

It was a pistol. Small, dark. The muzzle was only inches behind Jack's skull, descending slowly as Double Tap took aim.

‘No!' Six whispered, unable to control himself.

Jack remained oblivious, staring at the TV. The gun stopped moving for a moment.

BLAM!
A spray of blood exploded out the front of Jack's face and he jerked forward in the chair. A gloved hand slipped out of the darkness, pushing him until he fell face down to the floor. The gun flashed again and the back of Jack's shirt twitched as the bullet punched through his heart.

Six was staring at the screen with such intensity that he could see the gaps between the pixels. But Double Tap's face was shrouded in darkness. Six waited for the killer to pick up Jack's body. Maybe once he was closer to the TV, the light would expose his features. But he just stepped back into the gloom.

Six waited.

Double Tap never returned.

Six fast-forwarded through the remaining three hours and twenty-seven minutes of the video. Jack's body lay as still as roadkill in front of the TV. It was still there when the video cut out.

Six went back to the murder and watched it again. His jaw ached from clenching. He paused, skipped back, freeze-framed. But he didn't see anything he'd missed the first time.

The body wasn't there when the Deck agents came looking, he thought. So did Double Tap wait around for four hours before taking it? Did he leave and then come back? Unlikely. Which meant the killer and the body snatcher were two different people.

Six wondered about his own murder, his own missing body. Had that also been two separate crimes?

Not enough information, he thought. I need information.

He got up and paced around the room, hands bunched in his pockets. He'd been resurrected in a strange and unfamiliar world. Jack was dead, along with Queen and Sammy. Kyntak had gone rogue. King had lost his idealism. Ace was married. But there was one person from Six's old life left unaccounted for.

King's voice echoed through his head.
We need you to be looking for the guy who killed you.

That can wait, Six thought. I want to see my sister.

‘Doesn't look familiar,' the owner said.

The shop smelled of grease and gunmetal. Six held the phone closer to her, making sure she had a clear view of the image.

‘You sure?' he said.

‘Sorry.' The woman picked up a sniper rifle from the counter and started polishing the barrel. ‘Never seen her.'

Six touched the screen and the picture of Nai disappeared. It wasn't real – he'd found a photo of a similar-looking woman and warped her cheekbones and nose until her face was almost indistinguishable from his sister's. But the forgery was based on his outdated memories – how much would Nai have changed during these last four years?

He let his gaze roam along the racks of machine guns, the columns of ammunition boxes, the retinal scanner which was used to register the weapons. Much of his sister's life was a mystery to him, but he knew that she liked guns. This was the ninth firearms retailer he'd visited this morning.

‘Okay,' he said finally. ‘If you do see her, can you let me know?'

‘Sure, I guess.'

There was a bouquet of pens in a coffee mug beside the register. Six plucked one of them out, pulled a receipt from his pocket and scribbled a phone number on the back. ‘Just in case,' he said. ‘It's really important that I find her.'

The woman took the receipt and put it in the breast pocket of her suit jacket. ‘Good luck,' she said.

‘Thanks,' Six replied, and headed for the exit. The doors beeped as they slid aside for him.

As soon as he was out of sight, he sprinted around the corner and pressed his back against the outer wall of the shop. The owner's office, he calculated, would be right behind this section of concrete. He pressed his phone against the wall and hit a button marked
Flood
. The phone hijacked the shop's wi-fi network and started transmitting a meaningless stream of data to a server that didn't exist. Six kept his eye on the speed: 6.8 gigahertz.

She lied, he thought. That rifle was already clean before she started polishing it – she was fiddling to conceal anxiety. She didn't look at the photo for long enough to be sure she didn't know Nai, and she looked at it too long to be just pretending to care. She saw Nai, she recognised her, and she lied. And now –

The speed dipped to 6.4 gigahertz as someone else accessed the wi-fi.

And now, Six thought, she's making a phone call. The call was encrypted, but he didn't need to hear it. He could imagine what was being said: