Alex Scarrow - City of Shadows

Faith had an alluring way about her. An innocence and beauty that drew men like bees to honey, like moths to candlelight. So distracted were they with trying to chat her up, it was like stealing pennies from a blind man’s cap.

What a splendid pair we are.

Although Faith was a little peculiar. There was an almost doll-like manner to her expressionless face. As if her features were as rigid as porcelain. And an almost mannequin stiffness to her, as if she was always on guard. Like one of them redcoat-’n’-bearskins standing to attention outside Buckingham Palace.

Mary wondered about her. She was such a puzzle.

She turned left off Dorset Street into the dark alleyway that led into Miller’s Court, a cul-de-sac of dosshouses around a small cobblestoned courtyard that always seemed to reek of human faeces.

She staggered in the dark, steadying herself against one greasy brick wall.

‘Blimey,’ she muttered. ‘Bit too much of the blimmin’ laughing juice.’

Faith was probably already back in their room. Tucked up in the one bed they shared, toe to head. Mary did actually wonder if Faith ever slept. She always seemed to be wide awake, staring up at the cracked plaster of the low ceiling. She wondered what thoughts passed through that mind of hers. What wishes and dreams, wants and needs. She seemed to give so little away.

What a pretty puzzle she is.

Mary was in fact so puzzled by her friend that she failed to notice the shadow of a man entering the alleyway behind her, casting a long veil from the faint amber glow of a gas lamp on Dorset Street, all the way down the dark little alleyway into Miller’s Court. Like some impossibly stretched, impossibly tall being. The shadow fell across her back, marking her with darkness… like the ghostly touch of the Grim Reaper, marking her soul for imminent collection as she entered the last few minutes of her life.

15 December 1888, Holborn Viaduct, London

‘What we’ve got on the Ripper murders isn’t a lot,’ said Maddy. She’d grabbed the information and dumped it into Bob’s head from Wikipedia back in 2001. Which, given that the site had only been running since January, wasn’t a hugely detailed article.

‘The night of the eighth of November… the early hours of the ninth of November is when the last victim, Mary Kelly, gets murdered. There’s no precise time, just that she was supposedly last seen at midnight and was discovered dead by a neighbour at eight thirty in the morning.’

Maddy pulled up two grisly black-and-white photographs on one of the monitors. ‘These were both taken by the Metropolitan Police.’

‘Jay-zus,’ whispered Liam.

‘Yeah, not very nice I’m afraid.’

He looked at Sal queasily. ‘I feel sick.’

‘Well, you need to get over it, Liam,’ said Maddy. ‘You’re gonna see this for real very soon.’

‘Is that her face?’ asked Rashim.

Maddy nodded. ‘What’s left of it. The Ripper seemed quite keen for some reason to completely disfigure her face.’

Rashim leaned closer. ‘My God, it looks like he was trying to remove it.’

‘So, now that’s how the crime scene is supposed to look. In correct history, her body is found in her room, lying diagonally across her bed, her lower torso opened up and the contents, her organs, placed on the bed beside her.’ Maddy reached across the desk and picked up a pad with notes on it. ‘But this is the description I’ve summed up from the recent newspaper articles.’

She looked down at her notes. ‘So, this bit I’m about to read to you is the contamination bit, what shouldn’t have been found at the scene of the murder…’ She began to read.

‘… on the floor beside Kelly’s bed in her small rented room off Miller’s Court was found the body of her attacker. At first glance a wealthy gentleman in his middle years, wearing an evening suit and thick coat, his top hat placed on a small table beside the bed. His manner of death — a crushing of the cranium — was believed to have been caused by the swinging of a coal shovel or similar device. Although Kelly claimed she had no memory of the struggle with Lord Cathcart-Hyde, it is clear she must have struck him once to the side of his head to render him unconscious, and then repeatedly as he lay on the floor, until his head was completely stoved in as if some workshop vice or similar device had been applied to the skull and wound tight until it was crushed out of all recognition… ’

‘Good God,’ whispered Rashim.

‘A crushed head.’ Liam had once seen Bob do that. A German guard in one of those concentration camps back in America. Bob had squeezed the poor man’s head in one of his big hands: squeezed like it was nothing more than a ripe tomato. ‘Bob? Could Becks do that?’

‘Affirmative. Even partially grown she has enough physical strength to deploy that kind of damage to a human skull.’

‘Then it really is Becks!’ said Liam.

‘If that is Becks then she may have flipped out,’ said Maddy cautiously.

‘May have? Jeez…’ Liam all of sudden wasn’t quite so keen on the idea of a reunion with their lost team member, even if she supposedly had some sort of weird, twisted digital version of a schoolgirl crush on him.

‘Her AI must have been unstable,’ said Maddy. ‘I’m sorry, it’s my fault. We shouldn’t have tried loading her up with the stuff from the hard drive.’

‘We’re going to need to kill her, aren’t we?’ said Sal.

Maddy nodded. ‘We can’t leave her running around out there.’

‘We could attempt to incapacitate her,’ said Rashim. ‘We may even be able to reset her.’

Maddy looked at him. ‘How?’

‘Your support units are older-generation units,’ said Rashim. He pursed his lips thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps twenty-year-old technology. I would say engineered around about the 2050s. Not like the support units you encountered in Rome. The ones procured for Project Exodus.’

Bob nodded. ‘This is correct.’

‘OK, so Bob and Becks are older models,’ said Maddy. ‘So what does that mean?’

‘The computers are dense silicon wafers. The circuitry is mainly a graphene construct with some conventional silicon that is tightly meshed. Very tightly meshed. It is those small silicon portions which are vulnerable to power surges that can cause instances of micro-welding.’

Maddy noted Liam’s eyes already beginning to glaze over. Mind you, she wasn’t actually any the wiser herself. ‘So? What are you getting at?’

‘The older wafers in your units have a built-in trip switch to hard-set the chip into an “off” state to protect these weaker silicon parts from that kind of surge damage. During the Russian-Chinese conflict over the Caspian oilfields, it was a common insurgency tactic by the Chinese to stun or incapacitate Russian hunt-and-kill squads with taser darts, and then later reprogram and reboot them with trojan viruses that made them turn on their own side after some trigger event — a word, a noise. There was a very famous incident of one squad that returned from a mission behind Chinese lines, passed through the sentry posts into the camp and nearly wiped out an entire regiment of Russian conscripts as they slept in their beds.’

‘So, what are you saying… we taser Becks?’

‘Well… yes.’

‘That’ll turn her computer off without, you know, completely trashing it?’

‘Yes, that’s exactly right. You see, the later-generation military units, the ones we had for the Exodus Project, designs from 2069, had chips made entirely of graphene circuitry. Those are completely resistant to that kind of surge-welding.’

‘So we taser her. That means she’s switched off? I mean properly off. She’s not going to reboot, wake up, or anything like that, then, is she?’