Dead Letters Anthology (7 page)

Karla, strapping herself into her seat on the plane, recalled hearing someone say on the radio that most people, if they could travel back in time, would want to go and kill Hitler. She pictured Lukas, with his trilby and his walking stick, leaving the Hotel Schlüssel, looking precisely like the man in the photograph. She wondered whether she would ever see Lukas again and it occurred to her that she would not.

Alison Moore’s short fiction has been included in various anthologies including
Best British Short Stories, Best British Horror
and
The Spectral Book of Horror Stories
. A selection from her debut collection,
The Pre-War House and Other Stories
, has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra, and the title story won the New Writer Novella Prize. Her first novel,
The Lighth
ouse, was published in 2012 and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Awards, winning the McKitterick Prize. Her second novel,
He Wants
, was published in 2014. Both
The Lighthouse
and
He Wants
were
Observer
Books of the Year. Her third novel,
Death and the Seaside
, will be published in August 2016.
www.alison-moore.com

Roy Brook spent his life in meetings.

For this one he sat in the seventeenth-floor boardroom of the Atlantica Hotel and shook with air-conditioned cold. With him were five senior engineers, seated around the walnut conference table, clutching dead Starbucks cups. The session had been called to determine why the hotel construction had missed its deadline. A Skype link had been set up with the consortium heads in Guangzhou.

‘Let’s put this problem in perspective,’ said McEvoy, a soft-featured engineer from Leicester whose soporific tone slowed any urgent meeting to a crawl. ‘In the past three months we’ve had over thirteen hundred fails. Mostly circuit breaks, burn-outs, shorts and blown transformers. Our margin for error is set at four hundred a month. I’m trying to explain the shortfall, and the best I can come up with is human error.’

‘It’s an electrical problem, pure and simple,’ said Jim Davenport, one of the hotel’s most senior engineers. ‘Something big is shorting. That means it’s either in the main substation, which is unlikely, or wrongly installed wiring below ground level.’

It was the worst news he could possibly have delivered; close to a million pounds’ worth of marble flooring had been laid over the electrical circuits and fibre-optic lines, which had been buried deep on the supposition that no one would have to touch them for at least a decade.

The arguments ran back and forth for over an hour. Roy rarely spoke, but when he did everyone listened. ‘You aren’t going to increase staff and you won’t delay the launch, so we have to take everything up, and that’ll mean imposing longer working periods. Do you think you can drive that through?’

McEvoy looked at the calculations on his tablet. ‘It’ll play right into the hands of the unions.’

Finally it was suggested that they break for more coffee. His back aching with cold from the air-con units, Roy rose and walked over to the vast windows that looked onto the site. He thought about the resort’s launch tomorrow night, and how much they could hide from public view. The smaller cosmetic elements like the exterior lights and the planting could be carried out hours before the opening, even though the big stuff would have to wait. The innovative wall-wash techniques involved geo-mapping the buildings, and the arboculturalists would require notice to airlift fully mature date palms into the humidity-controlled plant beds.

Yet he could still imagine these events roughly dovetailing. There would be further panics and slipped deadlines, but it was feasible that they might get everything locked down a week after the launch, providing there were no more outages.

‘Hey, Roy,’ Davenport called from the doorway. His grey, cadaverous appearance made him the living embodiment of deadline-stress. ‘The boys ran a pressure test on a section of pipe three millimetres thicker than the ones we’ve installed,’ he said, ‘blasted it the whole weekend and nothing, not so much as a hairline fracture. The trouble has to be somewhere else.’

‘Suppose it’s not a pipe at all?’ said Roy.

‘Then how would the sewage have reached the outfall?’

‘The tests showed it was untreated, right? That means it hadn’t passed through the primary or secondary clarifiers, the aeration tanks or the dryers, so the fault has to be way back, before contaminant removal even starts. The only junction there is the separator between the runoff and domestic channels.’

The Atlantica’s sewage control system was designed to be one of the most efficient in the world, with eight separate treatment processes in place, including solar-powered microfiltration and aerobic procedures in which bacteria and protozoa consumed biodegradable material. Ultimately, they would use an ultraviolet peroxide process to break down organic contaminants and destroy microbes. It meant that the hotel would be able to recycle previously used water with virtually no wastage. A model for all resorts to follow, not that the guests would ever know. When you sell people a dream, he thought, they don’t want to know how the dream works.

‘Have you got time to come down to the treatment station?’ Roy asked.

Davenport looked reluctant. ‘You know I mostly firefight PR these days, Roy. I’m not even cleared for that part of the installation.’ Davenport had trained as a structural engineer, but had found the job’s responsibilities too much to bear. ‘I could get into trouble just being there.’

‘I didn’t think of that. I guess I’ll have to figure this out for myself.’ Roy watched as Davenport loped off along the breezeblock service corridor, then aimed for the basement control room, descending the fire stairs and pushing open a steel door in the building’s first icy sub-level.

Raj Jayaraman was sitting alone in the gloom with a leaky taco in his left hand, tapping out code with his right. His plaited pigtail hung down over the back of his chair, and ended in a cluster of coloured wooden beads. ‘Hey, Roy. Pull up a chair if you can find one. Welcome to the downsized unit.’

‘Where is everyone?’

‘They were let go.’ The heavyset young environmentalist had trained in ecological resource management at Bangkok University, but now found himself staring at computer screens monitoring hotel waste all day. ‘You missed a couple of our friends from Guangzhou. They brought an efficiency team with them and decided we were overstaffed.’

‘So who’s left?’

‘Just me, bro.’

‘That’s crazy. What do you do when your shift ends?’

‘The program takes over. It even kicks in when I go for a piss. There’ll come a point when I’m not needed here at all.’

Except in situations like this
, Roy thought. ‘You get any problems with the separator? We’re still trying to figure out why we had raw sewage hitting the ocean. Kids are going to be swimming in a lot of dead fish tomorrow.’

‘Tell me about it,’ said Raj. ‘I ran diagnostics on every square centimetre of the thing and found nothing. Actually, that’s not true. I found this.’ He extricated himself from his mesh chair and shook out a plastic envelope. ‘Any guesses?’

On the table lay a small irregular sphere of pocked beige material, aerated like a solidified chunk of latte foam.

‘Igneous rock,’ said Roy. ‘Cooled lava. Except this isn’t a volcanic area. Can’t imagine what else it would be. Maybe an old meteorite. This whole coastline is littered with them.’

‘Could be the problem.’

‘There’s no way that could have beaten the filtration system and split a pipe.’

Raj set down his taco and wiped his fingers on his T-shirt. ‘True, unless it was organic and flexible and sentient. Touch it.’

Roy reached out his index finger, expecting to encounter the rock’s hard surface. His nail sank in up to the cuticle. He hastily withdrew his hand. ‘What the fuck?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine. It smells of ammonia, but that may just be absorption. It’s not the only one. They’re all over the place, immediately beneath the Atlantica’s pipework. First time the mappers picked them up I thought I was just seeing gravel. Then I ran an expanded view and found millions of them. I mean, millions.’

‘They couldn’t have been there before.’

‘What I said.’

‘What do they do?’

‘I don’t know. Nothing. If they can move I’ve missed it. All I know is they’re wet to the touch, they stink and a few hours after you leave them out from the ground they go hard. I posted a sample to Liz Peabody at the Marine Biology and Ecology Research Centre, Plymouth University, but I haven’t heard anything back.’

‘Tell me you didn’t use Royal Mail.’

‘I know, I’m a douche. It was late.’

‘Two billion euros’ worth of tech here and you used a Victorian postal service.’

‘What else was I gonna do? It had to physically get there. She’s the only person I know who could tell us if it’s natural or man-made.’

‘What do you mean, man-made?’

‘I thought maybe a leaked by-product.’

‘You didn’t say anything to the Guangzhou team about this, did you?’

‘No, man. I want to keep my job for as long as possible.’

‘Did you see the pipe fracture happen?’

‘No, I told you, I was sitting right here in front of the screens, and nothing. If it had been something as simple as a sticky valve it would have shown on this.’ He tapped the monitor. ‘Then it would have rerouted itself. But it didn’t, so there must have been two errors.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘A physical issue with one of the outfall pipes, and a simultaneous glitch that prevented it from showing in the diagnostic.’

‘That’s kind of unlikely, isn’t it?’

‘Unless there’s a problem with the program that we’re not picking up on, so when a malfunction actually does occur we’re not seeing it. Because of that thing.’

‘You mean some fucking Quatermass-style piece of space rock that can get itself inside a hair crack and simultaneously interfere with the electronic output? Jesus, Raj, can we go back to the real world? The whole system could go down without you seeing it. Have you talked to anyone internally?’

‘They say they’re going to put someone on it, but no sign yet. I thought it was weird that nothing – and I mean nothing – showed up as a fault, but this is beyond my field.’

Considering the hotel was primarily controlled by a complex web of overlapping computer programs, Roy had always been surprised by how few technicians they had on hand. The company’s faith in technology was touching but, in his opinion, hardly deserved.

‘If a foreign object gets into the soil pipe – and it happens if there’s a temperature fail, because this stuff starts to solidify if it falls a few degrees – it should show up on here, but yesterday…’ Raj faltered, suddenly aware that he was speaking to someone in a different department.

‘I’m not going to say anything, Raj. It stays in this room, okay? I’m assuming it hasn’t escaped your attention that the launch is less than twenty-four hours away. You have to call Elizabeth right now and get a diagnostic, assuming she got the package.’

‘I tried calling but it went to voicemail, so in the meantime I looked at the regulators in the primary sedimentation treatment tanks. If one of those fails the entire resort will be ankle-deep in shit. The point is that it won’t show up here. If there is a problem, it’s invisible. The screens show everything clear and normal. So I ran a deliberate fail I could pinpoint.’ He tapped the corresponding monitor. ‘Nothing. Now, that’s not right.’

Roy studied the diagrammatic representation of pipework and cabling, laid in a 3D matrix of blues, greens and yellows, but he couldn’t see what Raj saw. ‘Nothing unusual came up here at all?’

‘If I had to take a guess,’ said Raj, ‘I’d say that thing managed to freeze the program and overwrite it, but I can’t see how. It’s a fucking rock.’

‘All right, all right, let’s try to look at it logically.’ Roy breathed out slowly, pressing his hand against his chest, and started again. ‘For the three years that this hotel complex was being constructed, nobody came across anything geologically unusual.’

‘No, that’s the point,’ said Raj. ‘I don’t think they were there.’

‘Then where the hell did they come from?’

Raj raised a hesitant index finger at the ceiling, then lowered it to the ground.

‘Great, so we have a lump of lava with bio-electrical sentience burrowing under the biggest hotel resort ever to open in this country. It’s got good timing, I’ll give it that.’ He looked back at the spongiform rock doubtfully. ‘I’ll get someone to come and take a look, off the record. That way nobody gets in trouble. But really? I mean, really? If you’re fucking with me and that turns out to be a dried mushroom from your pizza, you’re a dead man.’

‘I’m not, Roy, and I’d appreciate it. But you’d better make it soon because I can’t tell what’s going on out there. Everything looks straight.’

Roy left Raj staring at the immobile screen, a lone figure in charge of the biggest waste management resort project in the country, and its most lethal potential hazard.

* * *

The red chrysanthemums were already beginning to wilt in the early evening heat. The main stage of the Atlantica had been sewn with sixty thousand of them, imported from Amsterdam and arranged in an immense ziggurat by a florist from London. Ice-water misters sprayed the seated guests every twenty seconds. The Minister of Culture’s speech had been followed by a few mystifying English phrases learned by rote from the Chairman, Mr Lau. The Sheikh’s representative for business development talked about Middle Eastern finance leading the way in eco-tourism, and the Russian head of the International Finance Group for Advanced Technology spoke about an epoch-defining moment for computer-designed architecture. The Russian delegation vigorously applauded as instructed.

The international press were impatient for the spectacle to begin. Waiting in the wings were the evening’s hosts, two fading Hollywood stars who had been lured to the event with the promise of support for their favourite pet charities. The line-up of acts had not been confirmed until the day before, when the level of security risk surrounding the opening could be officially confirmed and communicated to the PR chiefs who controlled their stars’ movements. The actors and singers who had got cold feet and pulled out were said to have undergone scheduling clashes.