Inkers (18 page)

Amber ran back to the stairwell. The last she saw of General Dryer was the huge man aiming what looked like a portable cruise missile launcher down out of the window and firing it in a blaze of light and smoke. She sprinted up four flights of stairs, pausing to steady herself as the whole building shook. She ran on. “Stop! This door!” Emily shouted, and Amber turned and ran through into another office, this one empty with some windows still intact. It looked older and there were several desktop computers around. “Any online and unlocked?” Amber said.

“One at the back,” Emily said.

She ran to it. It had a webpage open. Amber went on a news site, created a public topic. There were two large explosions below that rocked the whole building, dust falling everywhere, glass shattering, computer screens toppling over. Amber grabbed onto hers to hold it steady. It felt like the whole building was going to collapse.

She typed as fast as she could, her fingers slow and awkward —she had hardly typed a word since her implants had been put in.
ITSA under attack, the GSE is coming back, look at Jupiter for proof, it’s moving towards Earth. The source of the signal was in Scotland, it’s not the Chinese. There’s a girl, somewhere in Europe, she’s got an ink baby inside her, the Mutant Mary, find her.
Finally she pressed
take a photo
, and the small camera in the top of the screen blinked and took a photo of her grey face and her black eyes and attached it to the message. There was a burst of gunfire that sounded close. She pressed
submit
.

“OK – that’s done it,” Emily said. “Back to the stairwell as fast as you can, I might be able to find us something on the roof.”

“You
might?
” Amber said, but she was already running as fast as she could, and the administrator did not answer.

She threw herself up the stairs, booted footsteps thundering in the stairwell not far below, the crunchy noises of soldiers running with machine–guns and body armour, and she sprinted, slammed down the bar and burst out through the fire exit into the bright Kathmandu morning. Smoke billowed up from the street. There was a drone pad on the roof. It was empty.

“Emily!” Amber said. Footsteps were getting louder in the stairwell. She slammed the door shut.

“
Emily!
”

“Jump off!” Emily said.

“Where?” Amber shouted.

“Anywhere!” Emily shouted, and Amber ran for the nearest edge and slowed a little instinctively but went off anyway, and there was a blast of automatic gunfire behind her. She was in the air, Kathmandu yawning below her, the bullets flying around her, knowing that her life was over. She hit something incredibly hard, felt her limbs gripping on, and opened her eyes – she was on something black and flat, the sky wheeling above. She was flying, on top of one of the big, high–altitude drones. Her left arm hurt terribly. She turned her head slowly and looked at it. It was pouring blood. The drone spun and accelerated and she was pressed into its cold black metal. She could hear bullets pinging off the other side of it.

“Christ,” Amber said, holding on for her life.

“We’re welcome,” Emily said.

Amber breathed in silence for a moment. It was cold. The noise of gunfire was receding.

“Are you getting a connection?” she said, after a while.

“I’m not being blocked any more, but it’s patchy,” she said. “What do you need?”

“Did the message make it?”

“Yep. It’s starting to trend, it won’t disappear now. People will see it.”

There was another silence.

“Get me Rob,” Amber said. “I don’t care how, just do it.”

Emily didn’t answer, but Amber knew she would be doing everything she could to comply, and she would probably pull it off, and felt something like love for the disembodied administrative script that lived somewhere in the computers implanted in Amber’s spine and brain. So when the sky disappeared and she was standing uninjured on her beach, and he was there, she wasn’t surprised. She ran forward and kissed him on the mouth. They hadn’t spoken for over three months.

“Are you out?” was the first thing he said.

“On the way, yeah,” she replied. “Might not have signal for much longer.”

“OK, uh, it’s everywhere. At least half our operatives are dead or missing, most offices in Asia are gone, there were bombs in the US and Europe. We’re regrouping. But we’ve been looking into the signal more, a lot of it, there seems to be something like a massive simulation in it, the whole universe encoded in it. We don’t understand why, or how, I– I’m trying to find out more.”

“I got a message out–” Amber said.

“Signal going,” interrupted Emily, and then Robert disappeared, and Amber was back in the air, bleeding on top of the drone. She rested her face on the cold black metal. The pain in her arms grew.

“I listened in,” Emily said, eventually. “Sorry.”

“It’s OK,” Amber said.

“Have you heard the theory that the universe itself is a simulation?” Emily said.

“Yes,” Amber said. Since the advent of convincing VR it was one of the basic paranoias.

“The simulation inside the girl,” continued Emily, “It’s a singularity. It’s why the GSE is coming. It might be very important. I think it would be very bad if it was destroyed. I think we might have made a mistake.”

“I’m starting to feel the same way,” Amber said, quietly.

They rose higher and Amber grew colder. Now the message was out, half the world would be searching for the girl. They would want to destroy her. They would believe that the GSE might stop coming if they did.

“How far is it to Scotland?” Amber said.

“You do not want to know,” Emily replied.

The Lwazi Centre was complete, clean and
white and modern, four storeys dominating the local landscape. Hardwick and Lwazi stood on the roof as the little white car approached slowly up the road, trailing a cloud of dust behind it. A couple of kids ran after the car, half–heartedly, but they had become jaded by the stream of trucks coming through while the Lwazi Centre was being built and gave up after a few metres. They returned to their football.

It was the end of April and the temperatures at night were dropping fast as winter approached. Nevertheless, it was still a hot and sunny day to be standing outside. Hardwick had taken to wearing a wide–brimmed leather hat to protect his scalp from burning, as his thinning white hair now provided little protection. He pushed the hat back on his head and wiped the thin layer of sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief.

“They say he is good,” Lwazi said, as the car slowed and halted outside the big gate to the compound.

“Not sure his last boss would agree,” Hardwick said. “Apparently he killed him.”

The white man got out of his white car and stretched, looking around at the rolling hills and the low houses. He was quite tall and had a shaved head.

“So why are we meeting him?” Lwazi said.

“I want to hear his side of it.”

Lwazi grunted.

Paul Barnham was still standing by his car. The gate hadn’t opened yet. He looked up at the building.

“Why aren’t they opening it?” Hardwick said.

Lwazi was looking into the distance, down the road the way Barnham had come, shielding his eyes. Hardwick followed his gaze. He saw the second dust–cloud at the precise moment they heard the first shots. They both jumped. Hardwick ran down the stairs to the front reception, shouted at one of the guards to open the gate. He ran across the courtyard to get Barnham inside the relative safety of the compound.

“Hi, sorry about this, please come inside. I’m Mike Hardwick,” Hardwick said, sticking out a hand. The man shook it firmly, but half looked away, distracted by the noises coming from down the road. He was heavily muscled, wearing a blue t–shirt, dark chinos and a pair of massive black boots.

“I’m Ret”, he said. “What is going on there? I passed your checkpoint with the guys with the machine–guns, didn’t expect them to start shooting.”

More shots echoed down the road.

“Trouble with bandits, I’m afraid,” Hardwick said. “Actually we’ve done well compared to some places, since the announcements. This village is pretty good at defending itself. This is the closest they’ve made it, though —come inside. I’ve got some pretty big drones ready if they get much closer, but I’d rather keep them as a last resort.”

Ret glanced at the building and then walked back to his car.

“You want to bring it in?” Hardwick said, glancing again at the cloud of dust and smoke building down the road. It was rapidly getting closer.

“Trunk,” Ret said to his car. The trunk popped open obediently. Ret leaned in and pulled out a massive black gun, the thick barrel surrounded by loops of metal and scattered with buttons. Ret pressed several.

“That won’t be necessary,” Hardwick said, “If it comes to it the drones can–”

“This will be a better interview,” Ret said.

Hardwick saw a woman screaming at the two children with the football – they ran to her, the smaller of the two still holding the football, and disappeared around the back of their house.

“Paul,” Hardwick said. It sounded like more than one vehicle roaring towards them. Ret ignored him, stalked off down the road and raised his weapon to his shoulder. There was shouting from inside the compound, men running towards them.

“No!” Hardwick shouted, backing towards the gate.

The pickup trucks were visible now, two of them. They were piled with men who all appeared to be holding long guns. More than one opened fire. Bullets raked along the ground near Ret’s car. Ret didn’t flinch. Hardwick seemed to be frozen to the ground.

Ret put his eye to the sight of his gun and fired. Something lightning–fast and brighter than burning magnesium shot towards the first pickup and hit it square in the front bumper. The whole front of the car buckled and erupted into a huge loop of flame. The other jeep swerved hard to avoid the explosion and rolled off the road, sending several occupants flying through the air, the others crushed underneath.

Ret aimed at the survivors and opened fire again, this time with brief blasts of machine–gun fire. When he stopped, none of the men who had fallen clear of the pickups were moving. Ret watched a little longer as the smoke and dust drifted across the scene. He fired twice more and then, finally, lowered his gun. He returned to his car, put the weapon back where he’d got it from, slammed the trunk, and got in. The car began moving towards the still open gate. Hardwick stepped sharply aside to let it in, and then followed Ret inside to where Lwazi’s men were just starting to emerge from the building with their weapons.

Hardwick gave Ret a tour of the building, pointing out the classrooms and offices where Lwazi’s friends and family were being taught how to use VR. Ret seemed uninterested. He smelled like smoke and dust. Hardwick did not show him the basement where he and Lwazi worked, where the computers were. Where the big screen was, showing all the ink in realtime. Hardwick and Lwazi didn’t let anyone else down there at all. Even the bots that had built the basement had had their memories wiped.

“We do want to help the locals,” Hardwick said. “This community’s really important to Lwazi. It’s where he grew up. But we want to make money, too, real money. This is a hard time for the world, a really hard time, but I believe humanity will survive it. And I believe those who steeled themselves during the hardest parts, who kept working, kept building things – I believe they’ll inherit the earth.”

Ret nodded. “If we die, we die, until then I’d rather be working, providing for my family.”

“They’ve got a good attitude in the village here,” Hardwick said. “The world’s been ending for them every other year since the whites arrived. They think it’s the end times now, but they’re still the same, they just keep on working, in the fields or whatever they’ve got, and praying.”

Ret didn’t respond to that. They finished the tour by emerging on the roof. Hardwick pointed out his personal travel drone, a black jet several metres long, capable of going almost anywhere. They looked up together at Jupiter – the light from its insane burn across the solar system was visible by day now, clear to the naked eye, a new star.

“What’s it like in Joburg?” Hardwick said.

“Not good,” Ret said. “We’re outside the city. But inside is real bad. They’re animals, you know?”

They stood in silence for a while.

“From what I hear, it’s bad all over,” Hardwick said. “At least here we’re used to crime. The US is just falling apart.”

Ret grunted. “People are scared.”

“Yeah,” Hardwick said, looking up again. “Still, nothing like a crisis to get people busy. You married?”

“No. Girlfriend.”

“Kids?”

“She’s pregnant.”

“Well. Congratulations.” Hardwick said.

Ret grunted. “Not great timing,” he said, tilting his chin up at the bright dot in the sky.

Hardwick nodded.

“I reckon ITSA will take care of it,” Ret said. “They’ve got plenty of nukes up there.”

Hardwick thought about the mass of Jupiter, the scientific impossibility of human weaponry making even a dent in Jupiter’s cosmic fender. He decided against verbalising it.