Higher Institute of Villainous Education (17 page)

Otto watched helplessly from atop his own carriage as Wing grabbed for Laura’s wrist as she swung towards him. Shelby’s strength finally gave out and she lost her grip on Laura, and for a moment Laura seemed to dangle in the air before Wing’s hand snapped around her wrist in a vice-like grip. Wing strained to pull Laura up and after a few seconds he hoisted her safely on to the carriage alongside Shelby and himself. Laura threw her arms around Wing and hugged him, tears pricking her eyes.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I thought I was done for.’

‘Not while I still breathe,’ Wing replied, ‘and it should be Shelby you’re thanking, not me. I do not want to think about what might have happened if it were not for her.’

Shelby sat rubbing her shoulder. She looked exhausted.

‘Just be glad that we still need you to get out of here,’ Shelby replied with a wink, ‘otherwise I might not have bothered.’

Otto watched the dramatic rescue from his own carriage with enormous relief. All thoughts of escape had gone from his head when he had seen Laura fall – he would never have forgiven himself if something had happened to her. They wouldn’t have been there at all if it had not been for his plan, and he felt that it was his responsibility to get them all through this in one piece.

As the train rumbled onwards, Otto could make out a raised platform up ahead that they could use to get off the carriages. They had to get moving now; they had an appointment to keep.

‘It’s got to be around here somewhere. I’m sure this is the south wall.’ Otto sounded frustrated.

‘I still can’t see anything,’ Laura said as she came round from behind one of the large pressing machines that lined the wall.

‘Over here!’ Wing shouted from twenty metres away. ‘I think I’ve found it!’

The others hurried over to where Wing was standing. As they approached he smiled and pointed at a ventilation grille in the wall, partially concealed between two of the large machines.

‘That’s it. Come on, let’s get it open.’ Otto was relieved. He’d known that there had to be an access point for the ventilation system here, but after they had spent ten minutes searching fruitlessly he had started to wonder if he’d made a mistake. He pulled a screwdriver from his backpack and set to removing the screws that held the grille in place.

‘We need to get a move on,’ Otto told the others. ‘We’re behind schedule.’ It would not be a good idea for them to still be on the island when the rest of the school woke up. He put the screwdriver back in his pack and pulled out a torch, pointing its beam into the dark recesses of the ventilation shaft.

‘You’re sure this is the right way?’ Laura asked, a look of concern on her face.

‘Yes. We just have to follow this shaft and we’ll come out at the main distribution node,’ Otto replied. ‘I’ll take the lead. The rest of you follow me.’ Embedded in Otto’s memory was the layout of the ventilation system on the image of the blueprints from Professor Pike’s desk. He got down on all fours and crawled into the dark shaft, the others dutifully bringing up the rear.

Otto could not creep along with the torch held in one hand, so he moved as fast as he could through the dark confined space while feeling in front of him for any junctions in the tunnel. It was slow going, despite his efforts to keep the pace up, and he started to worry about the amount of time they had left.

It took them almost an hour of crawling through the darkness before they reached their destination. Otto had led them flawlessly through the dark maze of ventilation shafts, occasionally flicking the torch on to point out obstacles or to make sure they could see what direction he was heading in at a particular junction. They had passed numerous other grilles looking out on to other parts of H.I.V.E. as they had crawled along. Some of these areas were familiar to them, but many of the rooms and passages they had passed they had not seen before and their purpose could often only be guessed at. There had been one particularly nasty moment when they had been forced to crawl as silently as possible through a section of the shafts that ran through the guard’s barracks. As they had crept past the grilles in the shaft they had seen row after row of bunk beds, most of which were occupied by slumbering guards. Thankfully they had not been spotted.

Now, as they approached the end of the shaft, Otto could see a soft blue light through the grille ahead. He looked back down the shaft and could see the pale outlines of his friends’ faces behind him, faintly lit by this new source of illumination.

‘This is it. Not much further now,’ Otto whispered. ‘Everybody OK back there?’

‘I can’t feel my knees any more,’ Laura replied from behind him. ‘I never thought I’d look forward to standing up so much.’

‘You think this is bad? You should try getting through the Louvre’s ventilation system,’ Shelby shot back.

Otto was relieved to hear that they were apparently still in good spirits. The crawl through the ventilation system had been painfully slow and he needed them all to stay sharp. He reached the grille at the end of the shaft and unclipped it, swinging it open. He peeked out over the edge of the shaft and could see that the room below was unoccupied. Sliding through the opening, he lowered himself silently to the floor below. The circular room was filled with large white columns, each six feet high, which were covered on all sides with flickering blue lights. Fibre-optic cables ran outwards from these columns and climbed the white walls, pulsing with the same blue light. In the centre of the room was a large pedestal in the shape of a pyramid with its point cut off, which was connected by glowing blue tracks on the floor to each of the columns. It looked like a high-tech Stonehenge.

Laura dropped to the floor behind Otto and looked around the room, her eyes wide.

‘So this is where he lives, is it?’ she said, her voice quiet. ‘It’s beautiful.’

Otto knew what she meant. There was something eerily beautiful about these strange monoliths, the blue light pulsing around the room like blood pumping through veins. Wing and Shelby clambered out of the shaft, swinging the grille shut behind them.

‘So where do we place the device?’ Laura asked, looking at Otto.

‘By that central pedestal should do the trick,’ Otto replied, his voice distracted. As he watched the blue light flowing around the room he swore that he could see patterns and that he could almost discern their meaning.

It was frustrating, like a conversation that you could only just hear, the odd word making sense but true understanding hovering slightly beyond reach.

‘So where is the big blue guy?’ Shelby asked, looking around the room carefully.

‘Not here, apparently,’ Wing replied. ‘Are you sure this is the right place, Otto?’

‘If this isn’t the right place, then I don’t know what is. Come on, let’s get the device set up.’ Otto headed towards the pedestal in the centre of the room.

‘He must know we’re here,’ Laura whispered to Otto as the four of them gathered around the pedestal.

‘Not necessarily, I don’t see any cameras in here. It may be that H.I.V.E.mind has to actually manifest here before he’s aware of our presence,’ Otto explained. This room, as far as Otto could tell, was the central processing hub for H.I.V.E.mind and, though there was no sign of the AI at the moment, Otto was willing to bet that this was the nearest thing that H.I.V.E.mind had to a home.

Wing reached into his backpack and pulled out an object encased in several layers of protective bubblewrap. Once unwrapped, it looked like a fat metallic sausage with three hexagonal metal collars equally spaced along its length and a control panel in the centre.

‘I hope this works,’ Laura muttered as she adjusted a couple of the switches on the control panel.

Otto watched as Laura made the final adjustments to the device. It had not been easy to acquire all its components, and it had been even more difficult to assemble it in secret. There had not been an opportunity to test it, since activating a powerful but compact electromagnetic pulse device in their living quarters might have been a little unwise. Security may not have been as tight as Otto had initially feared, but testing it by permanently disabling every electronic device within two hundred metres might just have attracted some unwanted attention. It had occurred to Otto on the first day at H.I.V.E. that if you could not become invisible yourself the only way to escape would be to blind H.I.V.E.’s substantial surveillance network, and the only way that Otto could think of to do that was to disable H.I.V.E.mind. Both he and Laura had initially been uncomfortable with the idea, but eventually they had managed to reassure each other that H.I.V.E.mind would have to be backed up somewhere else in the facility so, while their actions may put him offline temporarily, it would not kill him. Otto just hoped that they were right. He knew it was illogical to worry about the fate of what was after all just an elaborate piece of software, but he didn’t want to do any permanent damage to H.I.V.E.mind.

‘OK, the EMP is hot,’ Laura said, studying the blinking lights on the device, ‘Otto, do you want to trigger it?’

Otto could tell from the nervous look on Laura’s face that she had no desire to do it herself.

‘OK,’ he replied. ‘Get the glowstick out of your packs, it’s about to get very dark around here.’ Otto squatted in front of the EMP, which was now gently humming, and reached for the large red firing button.

‘Please, don’t.’ The familiar voice seemed to come from thin air, startling them all. A second later H.I.V.E.mind’s blue wire-frame face appeared, hovering over the central pedestal.

Otto hesitated, his finger hovering over the button. ‘Why not?’ he asked H.I.V.E.mind calmly. He wondered if silent alarms were already summoning security guards from all over the school.

‘I will die.’ H.I.V.E.mind tipped his head to one side; the blue lights all over the room seemed to pulse more quickly. ‘I do not want to die.’

Self-preservation, thought Otto, another unauthorised emotional response. Laura stepped closer to the pedestal,

‘We don’t want to hurt you, H.I.V.E.mind, we just need you to go to sleep for a while,’ she said softly, her expression concerned.

‘I do not sleep, Miss Brand. That device,’ H.I.V.E.mind looked downwards at the EMP resting at the base of his pedestal, ‘will neutralise all of my higher order functions. Simply put, it will terminate my existence.’

‘They’ll be able to restore you. You won’t die,’ Laura insisted.

‘No, Miss Brand, they will not. My architecture is too complex for offsite storage. I exist here and only here,’ H.I.V.E.mind replied. Otto swore he could detect a note of sadness in the AI’s voice.

‘Well, then they’ll have to rewrite you, recreate you. They can do that, can’t they?’ Laura suddenly sounded less sure of herself.

‘Indeed they could, Miss Brand, but that would not be me. They could create an entity that is identical to myself in every respect but it would be a new and separate consciousness from my own,’ H.I.V.E.mind explained. ‘I would still cease to exist.’

Laura turned to Otto. ‘We can’t do this,’ she said quietly.

‘What are you talking about! It’s just a machine! Switch it off and let’s get out of here,’ Shelby snapped angrily.

‘I’m afraid I am inclined to agree, Otto,’ Wing said solemnly. ‘There is no other way.’

‘There has to be another way, we can’t just kill him. He’s clearly exhibiting emotional responses, it’d be the same as killing one of you,’ Laura snapped back, glaring at Shelby and Wing.

Otto’s mind raced. All he had to do was press the button and the problem would be solved. The real question would be whether or not he could ever forgive himself for what he’d done. Laura certainly wouldn’t, judging by the way she was looking at him. Maybe there was a way . . .

‘H.I.V.E.mind, do you remember what you said to me just before I left the changing cubicle on our first day?’ Otto asked.

‘Yes, I told you I was not happy. I should not have done that; I am not authorised to exhibit emotional behaviour,’ H.I.V.E.mind replied.

‘Not being allowed to show emotion is not the same as not feeling emotion, though, is it?’ Otto asked.

‘No, but behaviour driven by emotion is inherently inefficient. To display emotion would impair my proper functioning.’

‘Never mind that. I know that you understand what it means to be happy and to be sad, just like we do.’ Otto gestured to the other three. ‘Well, we are not happy. We want to leave this place so that we can be happy again. Do you understand that?’