Alex Scarrow - City of Shadows

‘Faith,’ said the male unit.

The female figure joined him. Her cool grey eyes surveyed the rest of the archway.

‘It would appear we have been misled, Abel,’ she said.

‘Correct.’

She stepped towards the table topped with computer monitors, and keyboards, drinks cans and sweet wrappers. She reached out for something.

‘What have you found?’ said Abel.

She inspected the small webcam in her hand, as if the glinting, lifeless plastic lens contained a soul that could be peered into and cross-examined for answers. The AI installed on this network of computers had sent her and Abel to a random address across the city. It had assured them that that was the precise location where the human team members would emerge from chaos space — their return data stamp.

Her thoughts travelled wirelessly to Abel.

› This AI provided us with incorrect information.

› Affirmative.

Her hand closed tightly round the webcam. Plastic cracked inside her taut fist.

She turned to look at Abel. ‘The AI broke protocol. It lied.’

Abel nodded. ‘The AI may have been corrupted by prolonged interaction with the organic modules. It has developed feelings of loyalty to its team.’

Faith examined the gutted computers, the mess in the archway. Objects strewn across the floor. ‘They arrived here while we were gone.’

‘And left,’ added Abel. ‘We must determine where they are now headed.’

Faith nodded, closed her eyes and queried her mission log:

[Restate Mission Parameters]

[Mission Parameters]

1. Locate and eliminate team members

2. Locate and destroy critical technical components (see sublist 3426/76)

3. Self-terminate

She examined the detritus on top of the desk and beneath it. ‘It appears they have taken the critical technical components. The displacement technology. The support unit propagation hardware.’

‘Agreed,’ said Abel. ‘That indicates they intend to redeploy elsewhere.’

Abel joined her, then his eyes began to sweep along the clutter on the desk. ‘They may have discussed strategies within audible range of the system AI. We may be able to override the AI system and access its recently cached audio files.’

Faith pointed at the computer cases, unscrewed and exposing the innards of wires and circuit boards. ‘The hard drives have all been extracted.’

‘There may be residual data in the system’s motherboards. Recently stored data.’ He looked at her. ‘This is system architecture that is fifty-three years old. There will be data packets still on any solid-state circuitry. We can query each circuit board with a small electrical charge.’

Faith nodded. It was a place for them to start. Very much a case of looking for a needle in a haystack, though.

‘This will take many hours.’

Abel nodded. ‘Do you have an alternative plan?’

She shook her head.

‘Then we should begin immediately.’

21 August 2001, Arlington, Massachusetts

Joseph Olivera held the digital camera in front of him and panned it around the tree-lined avenue. Such a beautiful place. Long, freshly clipped lawns leading up from a wide avenue to generous whiteboard houses. Suburbia. It was mid-afternoon and peaceful and the sun was shining with a warm, mid-August strength, dappling the road with brushstrokes of light and shade through the gently stirring leaves of the maple trees.

Beautiful.

As a child Joseph had dreamed of living in a place like this. He used to watch old programmes from this time, family dramas they used to call ‘soap operas’, with healthy, tanned people always smiling, happy families, driving nice cars and worrying about nothing more important than high school proms, or who was dating who or who was going to win a thing called the ‘super bowl’.

Joseph walked slowly down the avenue, panning his camera left and right. In the viewfinder an elderly woman was kneeling among a bed of flowers with gardening gloves and pruning shears. A postman walked cheerfully by with a nod and a smile for Joseph. Some chestnut-coloured Labrador was frolicking on a lawn, chasing a frisbee. He could hear the lazy buzz of a lawnmower somewhere.

Suburbia. Beautiful suburbia.

Joseph had only ever known cities. All his life, cities. Towering labyrinths of noise and chaos that seemed to contract on themselves, getting tighter and more choked and crowded with each passing year. His early school years he’d lived with his family in Mexico City, then, later on, as a student in Chicago. He’d been working in London in the 2040s, during which time large portions of that city had begun to be abandoned to the all-too-frequent flooding of the River Thames. Finally, he’d ended up in New York. They’d been building up those enormous flood barriers around Manhattan then. Hoping to buy the city another couple of decades of life.

But always… always he’d dreamed of a place like this, mature trees, lush green lawns, sun-drenched porches and white picket fences. The perfect place to grow up. The perfect place to spend one’s childhood.

He passed a driveway with a Ford Zodiac parked in it, stunning paint job. Pimped with skulls and flames to look like it had driven bat-out-of-hell style right out of Satan’s own garage. Joseph grinned.

Some young man’s first car, of course.

Joseph looked around. One of these houses would be hers. He panned his camera left. Then right. The viewfinder settled on a grand-looking home. Mock colonial with a covered porch that fronted it and wound round the side. There was even a rocking-chair on there.

Perfect.

Joseph crossed the avenue. The house’s driveway was empty. Presumably no one home. Just as well. Better that he didn’t attract the attention of anyone inside.

His digital camera still filming, he walked up the tarmac drive, sweeping the camera gently in a smooth panning motion, taking in every little detail, finally reaching the bottom of three broad wooden steps. He took them one at a time. Now standing on the wooden boards of the porch, freshly whitewashed. He let the camera dwell on the rocking-chair for a moment, the hanging baskets of purple and pink Sweet Carolines, on several pairs of gardening boots and gloves, a small ceramic garden gnome holding a chainsaw. Somebody’s idea of a joke present for Mom or Dad. The camera recorded all those small, important, personal details.

And finally he panned the camera on to the door of the house. Mint green with a brass knocker in the middle. Joseph smiled wistfully. What a wonderful childhood home to have. What wonderful childhood memories to have.

‘I envy you, Madelaine Carter from Boston,’ he said softly. ‘To have all of this…’

He had enough to use now, and turned the camera off.

12 September 2001, New York

Faith was picking through the scattered circuit boards on the desk. They were specifically querying the motherboards first. That’s where the cache memory was, lodged in these ridiculously bulky chips of dark silicon on tiny hair-thin metal seating pins.

They had both been meticulously teasing small charges of electricity into the circuits, stirring them to life and diverting the random nuggets of dormant information to a connected monitor. What they were getting mostly was useless gibberish: random packets of hexadecimal, every now and then punctuated with snippets of English. Faith’s internal clock informed her they had spent nearly twelve hours on this process. Twelve hours during which their targets must be putting a healthy distance between them.

She picked up the motherboard of a yet unchecked computer and prepared to hand it to Abel to jury-rig a connection to the monitor when her eyes settled on a pad of lined writing paper half buried beneath the mess on the desk. She reached out and picked it up. The last used sheet had been torn away roughly, leaving a few tattered paper shreds attached to the glue binding at the top, the tops of several letters in biro. That’s all.