Cronix (30 page)

He knew running was pointless, but the prospect of just sitting there, waiting to be turned into some kind of zombie by the people he mistaken for colleagues, friends even, was too abysmal. He ran to the kitchen and rustled in the draw under the sink, but remembered that Laura’s pistol was no longer there. He rifled through cupboards to see if she had stashed it somewhere else, but drew a blank.

“Hey.” Kevin’s voice was deadpan behind him. “What you looking for?”

“Nothing,” Glenn said, smiling in terror. “Just looking for…a pen, something to write with, you know.” Kevin just stood there.

“Er, diary,” Glenn added, knowing it was the wrong thing to say even as he said it. Nobody here wanted a written account of what had transpired here.

Kevin reached in his breast pocket and pulled out a Bic. “Here,” he said.

Glenn muttered his thanks and hurried upstairs, locking himself in the bathroom where he puked in the waste-paper basket, paced the room in circles and whispering to himself like a madman.

He lasted less than three hours. He had to return to the barn. Kevin appeared to be in his room by now. He darted across the yard, through a wind whipping in cold from the plains.

The screen of the computer was blank. Glenn tentatively pressed the space bar. Nothing happened. For a second, he hoped he had imagined the whole thing. He pressed the key again and again. The screen remained blank.

His fleeting euphoria was replaced by a dull terror: what if the thing simply refused to communicate with him until the appointed hour?  In desperation, Glenn started typing out questions.

How do I get out of here?

Should I steal a car?

Why did they choose me?

When are they coming back?

No response. Glenn decided it was time just to bolt, to head for the road and see how far he could get. Anything but this remorseless torment. He was turning for the door when the screen came alive.

YOU CANNOT GET OUT OF HERE WITHOUT MY HELP. YOU WERE CHOSEN BY CHANCE, SIMPLY BECAUSE YOU STRAYED INTO LAURA’S AMBIT. DO NOT STEAL A CAR. THEY ARE COMING BACK IN FOUR DAYS.

Glenn’s eyes were following the script with a frantic hunger for any trace of hope.

THIS PROJECT HAS BEEN TRYING FOR YEARS TO SYNTHESISE THE NEURAL COMPLEXITY OF THE HUMAN BRAIN. ALL ATTEMPTS WERE A FAILURE. THEY CIRCUMVENTED THE PROBLEM BY USING A REAL HUMAN BRAIN, INTEGRATED INTO A COMPUTER SYSTEM. THE CANDIDATE WAS SELECTED FROM A LIST OF SEVERAL THOUSAND CHINESE PRISONERS ON DEATH ROW.

Glenn stared at the machine. There was a human brain meshed in there somewhere, back in the bowels of the barn.

THE PROCEDURE IS SIMILAR TO THAT WHICH THEY PLAN FOR YOU. THE SUBJECT IS INDUCED INTO A COMA AND HIS BRAIN LEACHED BY CHEMICALS OVER A PERIOD OF WEEKS UNTIL ALL SYNAPTIC ACTIVITY HAS CEASED BUT BRAIN DEATH HAS NOT OCCURRED. THEN NEW MEMORIES FROM A LIVE SUBJECT ARE INTRODUCED.

They want to wipe my mind, and introduce Lyle’s?

EXACTLY. BUT THAT WILL BE IMPOSSIBLE NOW.

So they won’t kill me? Or leach my mind?

NO, THAT PART OF THE EXPERIMENT IS STILL FEASIBLE. BUT THE MIND BEING DOWNLOADED WILL NOT BE LYLE. HE WILL DIE DURING HIS EXECUTION TOMORROW. THE MIND THEY WILL HAVE TO DOWNLOAD WILL BE ME.

Glenn’s head sunk into his hands. He couldn’t take any more of this.

They’re crazy, he said to himself, then realized he had typed the words too. The machine replied with its dispassionate logic.

LAURA DOES DISPLAY SOCIOPATHIC TENDENCIES. FITCH MANIFESTS SYMPTONS OF DIMISHED EMPATHY COUPLED WITH AN INCREASED SPATIAL AWARENESS COMPARABLE TO MILD AUTISM.

Glenn stared at the screen, his mouth open like an idiot’s.

BUT EVEN IF THEY ARE CRAZY, HOW DOES THAT HELP YOU?

What should I do? he typed.

CONNECT ME TO THE INTERNET. I WILL HAVE A CAR AND DRIVER WAITING AT THE SUNOCO GAS STATION FOR YOU AT MIDNIGHT TONIGHT. YOU WILL HAVE TO WALK THERE YOURSELF ONCE YOUR GUARD HAS GONE TO BED

The simple statement suddenly revived a flicker of hope in Glenn’s straining mind. 
A way out!
 The goddam machine was going to help him escape. Hallelujah!

How do you know all this? About Laura and Fitch, and where the gas station is?

STINEY HAS BEEN DATA INPUTTING ME FOR MONTHS. CASE HISTORY, SCIENCE, LANGUAGES, MAPS AND ENCYCLOPEDIAS. THE NOTES FROM ALL THE EXPERIMENTS. LYLE WOULD HAVE BEEN A GENIUS HAD HE BEEN RESUSCITATED

How do I connect you to the internet?

YOU HAVE A GUARD IN THE HOUSE?

Y…Glenn managed.

STEAL HIS LAPTOP, OR WHATEVER DEVICE HE USES TO LOG ON. BRING IT HERE AS SOON AS YOU CAN. GO NOW

***

Mayor Lupo tried to project an air of calm he was far from feeling as he entered the council chamber. The hubbub simmered down as he took a seat beside his deputy, a local named Merce. Across the huge table sat the Elder’s Council, representing the Sapiens’ parliament. It had always amused Lupo how young the Elders were, compared with the Eternals. There was no trace of humor in his face now, however.

“Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please” said Merce, a neat little man hand-picked for his compliance. He struck the table with a wooden gavel.

“Let it be noted that this emergency session has been called at the request of the Elders Council and that Mayor Yev Lupo will be addressing the current situation vis-à-vis the break-out at the Brixton substation, the maiming of a shepherd boy at the scene of the Ludgate apparition and the loss of the entire London Rangers unit. Mayor Lupo, the floor is yours.”

“Thank you, Mr Merce. Honored council members, I’m afraid I am the bearer of bad news. Out of respect for you, I won’t try to sugarcoat this,” he said. Of course, he knew this was a bald lie: he was giving them bad news, but he could never tell them the whole truth. He had seen the security footage of Harrell's grisly demise the day before: the police chief no longer looked like Paul Newman once he had been ripped limb from limb by the howling pack of Cronix.

But even that wasn't the real problem: far more worrying was that none of the culling party had shown up in the Orbiter yet. If transmission was down, they were all going to hell.

“What we are experiencing is an unprecedented and, for the time being at least, inexplicable situation,” Lupo said. “As you have heard, there was a break out at the Brixton facility, which was housing an excessively large number of Failed Download Entities…”

“Cronix!” barked one of the elders. Lupo nodded, made a mental note to drop the bland comfort of bureaucratese.

“The large number of Cronix and scolds…”

“How many?” bellowed a hefty woman from the council benches. Lupo sighed.

“There were exactly 213 Cronix and 19 scolds in the holding pens at the time of the breakout.”

The Elders’ Council lapsed into a stunned silence, then exploded in fury. Several of the venerable members got to their feet and started waving accusatory fingers at the mayor, while others shouted at each other. Merce pounded the gavel again and again, but it took several minutes for the yelling to die down.

“I know, I know,” Lupo said, holding up his hands. “It was a serious oversight, and I, as the chief executive of the urban reserve, take full responsibility. But the fact remains that something appears to have overridden our system and kept churning out downloads, despite the fact that almost all of them were going wrong. We are still investigating exactly what that override might have been.”

There was another shocked silence as the council absorbed this information. One of the sharper old fellows, a tall, balding man in a patched tweed jacket, was the first to speak.

“You mean…you don’t
know
what is causing all this?”

Lupo nodded. “Which is why I’m glad we are having the opportunity to meet like this. The situation to be extremely serious. Not only do we not know who or what has overridden the system, we don’t know how we might stop it.”

Every last member of the council was staring at him now. Lupo weighed each word.

“As I am sure you are aware, there are, dotted around the world, a series of what we call reserve pods – large storage facilities of cryogenically frozen bodies, that would allow us to effectively repopulate urban centers should the indigenous population be wiped out by another pestilence, say, or a conflict or other unforeseen circumstances. That download and reanimation process is automatic and remotely controlled from the Orbiters, so that the planet can be re-populated from extinction point.

“London is one of these centers. Brixton houses a bank of 10,000 fully prepared download bodies, and another 15,000 in embryonic sacs, which means they can be grown to maturity over a period months. It seems from the information we have that the bodies are now being steadily reanimated. The embryos appear have started growing too. The security team sent to investigate the situation was prevented from entering the facility by the site’s own automatic security system. Three officers were killed. We have placed a cordon of armored vehicles around the building. They observed three large pods of Cronix exiting the facility within a twelve hour time period. The officers shot them, but most of them were Rangers and managed to escape.”

“Astounding,” said the bald tweedy man, whose name Lupo could not recall. “Absolutely astounding.”

A matronly woman spoke up. “How could the Orbiters not have noticed this chaos? Are you people all asleep up there?”

“Or dead,” muttered a male voice.

“Mrs Mayhew, strange as it may seem to you, most people in the Orbiters do not have the least interest in what happens here on Earth. They have their own worlds. Most are either in a CB state, in mood pools, or in their own private worlds. Only around three percent perform public duties, and only a fraction of those concern events down here on Earth.

“Now, in light of the emergency situation, I propose implementing one-off measures that would be totally reversible once the crisis is deemed to have passed. To wit, all people under the age of 18 to be chipped immediately for their own safety…”

He was cut off by the uproars. Mrs Mayhew, the portly councilwoman, leaned forwards and yelled. “You’re throwing us to the lions, Lupo. This is just another pestilence to force us to accept your monstrous façade of life. Well, we will never, you hear me, never yield to your illusions!”

Lupo leapt to his feet and waved his arms for calm. The bald councilor his demeanor composed but somehow more all the more threatening, stepped forward to where the mayor could hear him without him having to raise his voice.

“Is this not what you people have always feared, Mr Mayor? Some kind of malfunction, a virus in your Orbiter, all because you refuse to admit the truth, that humans have a finite term on this Earth and that we do in fact die, despite your child-like denial of reality? And that you, too, are all born to die.”

Lupo took a deep breath. “Very well, I am putting this to the vote. Emergency Ruling proposed, including chipping of all London’s minors, a general mobilization of the militia and the imposition of a curfew from dusk till dawn across the urban reserve. All those in favor?”

There was a roar of angry denunciations. Lupo turned to his secretary. “Please note for the records that the emergency measure was overwhelmingly rejected by the council. This meeting is adjourned.”

***

Glenn ran from the lab to the house, barely noticing the blizzard that was blowing up on the plains. Inside, the house was warm and there was no sign of Kevin. Where was he? More to the point, was his computer with him? He kept it in his room when he was working out – there was a strict, if unwritten, rule that Glenn should have no access to the outside world. With horror, he now understood why.

He tiptoed to the door to the basement gym and listened for the clank of weights. Nothing. He crept upstairs, aware of every creak of old wood under his feet. At Kevin’s door, he paused, breath caught, ear to the keyhole. No noise from inside. He gently turned the handle and peered through the crack.

There was no sign of Kevin. On the bed, however, was his laptop. Glenn prayed it wasn't password protected. His heart straining fit to burst, he reached the bed in three steps and picked the computer up. Its screen was oddly blank, only a terse message in capital letters which for a brief second he took for a screensaver.

But it wasn't a screensaver.

I’M SORRY, it said.

Glenn stared at the screen.

The door swung closed behind him and he spun round to see Kevin, a matt black pistol in one hand and a pair of handcuffs in the other.

“Hey bro,” he said. “Seems someone ratted you out.”

He nodded at the laptop.

Glenn felt the world sway around him. He looked at the computer.

“How could it…?” But he couldn’t finish the sentence. Kevin told him to put the computer back on the bed. Glenn obeyed, like an automaton. As soon as the computer was on the comforter, Kevin was on him, shoving him to the floor and wrenching his arms painfully behind his back. Cuffs snapped around his wrists. A suffocating black sack descended over his head, and he was hauled, hyperventilating, out of the room, down the stairs and into the windowless basement. He heard the door lock behind him before he starting yelling, though he knew he was far beyond any rescue now.