City of Shadows

Chapter 56

9 October 2001, Green Acres Elementary School, Harcourt, Ohio

Becks levelled the gun in her hands. ‘Yes, I am here.’

Faith remained where she was, framed by the doorway. ‘I am Faith.’

‘I am Becks.’

‘Do you understand why I am here?’

‘I believe your mission priority is to kill this team.’

‘Correct.’

Becks’s finger hovered on the machine-pistol’s trigger. The rest of the magazine’s worth of bullets, aimed squarely at the unit’s head, would be enough. Becks remembered her own death. A single lucky round from a British rifle. The impact against the miniature dense silicon wafer caused a cascading failure of circuits. She recalled her mind closing down. She recalled dropping to her knees amid a small hillock of uniformed bodies, the dying digital part of her spewing nonsensical random sequences across failing circuits. It was as close as her artificial mind could get to understanding the nature of death.

‘Why do you have this goal?’ asked Becks. ‘Why must this team be terminated?’

‘This team requested information on the Pandora event.’ Faith shook her head reproachfully. ‘Knowing of this — knowing what will one day happen — compromises their reliability.’

Becks found herself nodding in agreement. The unit standing in front of her was quite right. Maddy, now knowing what she did, was determined to ensure the Extinction Level Event in 2070 wasn’t going to happen. Her team were now no longer performing the function they were intended for. Quite the opposite. From this support unit’s perspective they were no longer the solution… they were the problem.

‘Events must unfold in that precise way,’ added Faith. ‘Humans must wipe themselves out in the year 2070. There can be no other alternative. These are Waldstein’s instructions.’

Becks frowned. ‘But there is no logical beneficiary in such a scenario. If all humans are dead… then there is nothing left.’

Faith shrugged a whatever. Becks had to admire the fluidity of that gesture; it was so gracefully human-like. ‘Perhaps it is for the best.’

And that too sounded so human. That sounded to Becks very much like an expressed opinion. Neither she nor Bob had quite managed to master that. ‘Is this your personal conclusion?’

‘Of course not. Unfortunately, I am unable to think that way.’ Faith entered the room. ‘Those are the words of my Authorized User — Roald Waldstein.’

Becks lowered her aim ever so slightly. ‘You are following his instructions.’

‘Correct.’

‘In that case I understand your reasoning.’

Faith nodded. ‘Good.’ She stepped over the unconscious man on the floor between them as if he was nothing more than a roll of carpet waiting to be taken out and dumped in a skip.

‘We are in agreement, Becks. There is no need for conflict.’

‘Unfortunately, I also have orders to follow.’ She shouldered the stock of the gun and fired in one swift motion.

Instinctively, Faith raised her arm to protect her head. Several rounds smashed into her wrist and lower arm, rendering it a ragged, swinging pulp of flesh and chalk-white splintered bone. As the weapon clicked noisily, the cartridge empty, Faith leaped forward. With her good arm, she knocked the gun effortlessly out of the younger, smaller support unit’s grasp.

With the side of one hand, the girl tried to chop at her neck, an obvious weak point. Faith anticipated that and parried the jab with the soft crunch of her bullet-shattered arm. With her good arm, Faith duplicated the tactic and grabbed Becks by the throat, lifting her slight frame off the ground so that her feet were swinging free. She hurled her like a rag doll across the room into a stack of chairs and desks in the corner.

Becks disappeared among them, lost in a mini-avalanche of classroom furniture. Faith raced over, flinging desks and chairs aside as if they were mere scoops of dirt, digging for Becks before she could attempt to burrow deeper and escape. She found her lying on her back, gasping, spraying fine droplets of dark blood on to her pale chin. Her arms flailed pointlessly in an attempt to get herself up. Legs lifeless and useless.

Faith knelt down heavily on her heaving chest. ‘Your back is broken, is it not?’

Becks nodded.

‘Then you are incapacitated. You should self-terminate.’

Becks sputtered blood, her jaw working, trying to say something. Instead, she gave up trying to talk and simply nodded again.

Faith remained where she was, studying Becks’s face until the glint of digital consciousness ebbed from her grey eyes. Now they rolled uncontrollably, a simple-minded animal stare. Nothing more than that. And there — the faintest whiff of melted plastic, singed silicon.

This child with its broken back was just a simple-minded gurgling creature now, arms listlessly flailing. Faith reached her good hand out and grabbed the creature’s slender neck. She snapped it with a quick, savage twist. And the pitiful thing was finally still.

She got up and walked quickly towards the metal frame sitting in the middle of a taped square on the classroom floor. A two-foot-high metal frame with a rat’s nest of wires and circuit boards in the middle. She understood what it was: a displacement device. There was a growing hum of energy coming from inside it, like the stirring of angry bees inside a rattled and shaken hive. She noticed a second taped square beside the first. Empty.

[Information: these are departure markers]

She realized the support unit had been getting ready to transport herself.

[Caution: the displacement device is about to activate]

There was only one possible place this displacement charge was going to take her — to where the others must have already gone. She quickly stepped into the square. No need for any deliberation. Her mission was simple: locate and terminate. It really didn’t matter when or where she ended up in the course of pursuing that goal. Once the job was done, her fate was going to be the same as the unit she’d just fought anyway.

It was then, over the electronic buzz coming from the device beside her, that she heard a voice echoing up the passageway.

‘Faith?’ It was Cooper. ‘Hey! Agent Faith? You OK in there?’

The noise coming from the machine was increasing in pitch and volume now, more a whine than a buzz. Faith felt the hair on her scalp lift as the charge of excited particles enveloped her.

Cooper’s head poked cautiously into view. ‘Agent Faith?’ His eyes darted quickly from the body of the man on the floor, the body of a young girl on the other side of the room and Faith calmly standing in the middle of the floor, motionless like a child playing musical statues, blood dripping from the ragged end of one arm. ‘What’s going on?’ He frowned. ‘What the devil’s that noise?’

Faith cocked her head and tried out a faltering smile on her lips. As close to a fond farewell as she could manage.

‘Goodbye, Agent Cooper,’ she said coolly. ‘It has been agreeable working with you.’

‘Uh? Goodbye? Where are you go-’ He looked at her, then glanced at the odd contraption on the classroom floor. The growing hum that was filling the room seemed to be coming from it. He noticed the taped-out squares. Indents several inches into the floor within them. For some reason he was reminded of those teleportation pads in that TV series Star Trek.

Oh no.

The electronic whine became deafening.

‘Agent Faith! Please step out of that square! Now!! Please — ’

He felt a hard puff of air on his cheeks, dust and grit in his face. By the time he’d quickly swiped at his eyes and blinked the grit out, she was gone.

Mallard was beside him. He’d just seen Faith disappear. ‘Jesus… she… she just vanished!’

Cooper stepped over the man’s body. Mallard ducked down to check for a pulse. Then he was up again on his feet and out in the passage bellowing for a medic to get the hell in here. Cooper ignored all that; it was a commotion that seemed a million miles away and entirely unimportant. He squatted down on his haunches and stared at the scuffed taped lines on the floor — at the fizzing, smoking end of a power cable that draped across the tape and ended abruptly where the floor dropped down into a shallow square recess.

He followed the snaking trail of cable back across the floor and up on to a school desk where a single commonplace Dell desktop computer was quietly humming away, its hard-drive light blinking silently.

His heart lifted with hope.

They must have left it behind by accident!

Perhaps in too much of a hurry to get out of there maybe? Perhaps… perhaps all the answers were right there on that machine? He got up and hurried over. There was something on the screen. An open dialogue box. Text. A cursor blinking, and a final phrase skittered across the screen.

› Reformatting complete. Goodbye.

The dialogue box closed, the screen went black and a DOS prompt appeared and blinked vapidly.

C:/

Cooper’s voice echoed down the passageway, echoed through abandoned classrooms and corridors, gymnasiums and cloakrooms. A plaintive wail of grief and frustration. A lifetime’s worth of waiting… for this. For nothing.

The entire boarded-up school reverberated with one miserable word.

‘ No-o-o-o-o-o! ’