Alex Scarrow - Gates of Rome

‘Right.’ Maddy nodded. ‘I suppose we could give her AI a go and if she’s, like, all flaky on us, then that’s what we’ll have to do.’

‘That’s taking a risk, though, isn’t it?’ said Sal. ‘I mean there are loads of those corrupted red blocks. What if she got funny with us?’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Maddy.

‘I dunno… jealous or something. Jealous of you or me?’

‘Sal is correct,’ said Bob.

Maddy stroked her lip thoughtfully. She’d seen Becks in action. Seen the bodies left behind in her wake. God help them if she took on the role of a lover scorned.

‘Her decision-making may be unpredictable,’ Bob added.

‘Aw, come on! When hasn’t she been unpredictable?’ said Liam.

Maddy nodded. ‘True.’

‘Could we not give her a chance?’

‘We’ll have to watch her very closely,’ said Maddy. ‘The slightest sign she’s going weird and we’ll have to reboot her. I mean it… she even looks at me or Sal in a funny way, we’re going to have to totally wipe her, Liam.’

Sal bit her lip. ‘I don’t want her tearing off my head.’

Liam nodded slowly. ‘She’ll be right as rain, so she will.’ He didn’t sound entirely convincing.

‘OK, right,’ said Maddy, ‘that’s that, then.’ She turned to head for the sliding door leading back out into the main archway. ‘Come on, guys, there’s something else we need to talk about.’

Liam slid the door aside. It rattled noisily and clattered against its runners. ‘What?’

‘This agency of ours… the Pandora stuff?’

Sal and Liam looked at each other.

‘Did Foster tell you something?’ asked Sal.

Maddy nodded. ‘Oh yeah.’

2070, Project Exodus, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs

Rashim stared, goggle-eyed, at Dr Yatsushita. ‘ What? ’

‘I said we may have to consider advancing the T-Day deadline.’

‘But… but… we’re still only at the primary testing stage!’

Rashim’s team had run several simulated tests on the transmission process and each time the simulation software had assured them that it had overshot or undershot the receiver station beacon’s snap range. Or, on the one occasion they’d landed right on the money, half the candidates would have been lost or turned into quivering mush.

‘Dr Anwar,’ Yatsushita started. He looked harried. Tired. A sleepless night or several by the look of him. His usually carefully combed silver hair was uncharacteristically dishevelled. ‘You must have been following the news-streams?’

Rashim hadn’t, or not closely anyway. He had no time for that. Every day, it seemed, one or more of the transmission candidates had been replaced with someone else, requiring him to chase up the data on their replacements, plug in the information and recalculate the total mass index.

‘You have heard about the Kosong-ni virus?’

A couple of days ago, he’d watched a few minutes of news. The last city in Bangladesh had been abandoned to floodwater. The algal blooms in the Indian Ocean were now calculated to be covering thirty-six per cent of the surface area, poisoning, completely annihilating the ecosystem beneath. The North American Federation were enforcing border restrictions on east and west state migrants. A corps of Japanese combat droids had successfully made an amphibious assault on the North Korean city of Hyesan. A lot of dead people. But then when did the news these days not feature a high body count?

And yes, there’d been something about a virus. The news-streams had speculated it might have been a chemical weapon of some kind dropped on a North Korean city by the Japanese. Or worse still, some kind of wild-card bioweapon developed by the North Koreans and accidentally exposed as a result of some missile strike.

‘Kosong-ni virus?’ So it had a name now.

Yatsushita shook his head. He pushed his way through the warren of desks towards Rashim’s. ‘You fool. You should be watching instead of… of…’ He looked at SpongeBubba squatting beside the desk and grinning with goofy teeth. ‘Instead of making your foolish toys!’

‘I haven’t got time to watch a holo-vid, Dr Yatsushita!’ Rashim replied, irritated with the project leader. ‘I’ve got — ’

‘It’s airborne! There are reports of the virus in Beijing!’

Airborne certainly wasn’t so good.

‘Our… sponsors are worried by this. They want T-Day advanced.’

Sponsors — Yatsushita’s carefully chosen word. It was transparently obvious to Rashim that Project Exodus was being funded by what was left of America’s defence budget, most probably funds topped up by a few billionaires who wanted in on it.

‘Advanced by how much?’

Dr Yatsushita hesitated. ‘They want it ready to go for the thirtieth of May.’

‘But that’s five weeks away! We need at least another six months to be sure — ’

‘We have no choice in this matter! It must be ready by then!’

Rashim pushed his round glasses up on to his forehead where they held his draping dark locks back like a hairband. ‘Did you tell them the risks involved? Did you tell them that we get this the slightest bit wrong and we’re all dead? Or worse…?’

‘I have explained all of this. Nonetheless, they insist.’

Rashim stared at his project leader. ‘Is it that bad?’

Yatsushita pulled a seat up, looked across the maze of desks and cubicles at the dozen other technicians working late. He sat down and lowered his voice. ‘It is much, much worse than the news media are reporting. They have been kept in the dark. There is an embargo on the worst of it.’

‘Worst of it? What do you mean?’

‘A smart-virus, Rashim. It is an advanced smart-virus! A Von Neumann!’

Rashim nodded slowly. Von Neumann — a hypothetical premise imagined by a Hungarian theorist, John von Neumann, over a hundred and fifty years ago. Machines capable of harvesting their own resources for infinite self-replication. Nanotechnologists had tried experimenting with that concept at the beginning of the twenty-first century with little success. Little robots the size of blood cells. But robotically there were too many practical problems to overcome. However, biologically — a very different story. After all, bacteria were biological Von Neumann machines of a sort. But the Holy Grail — certainly in terms of weapons use — was a bacterium that could be smart, could be given genetic instructions, an objective, a specified goal. Could be given a target.

‘A sample has been isolated and analysed by a team in Tokyo,’ said Dr Yatsushita. Rashim could see the man was clearly shaken.

‘And?’

‘It is designed to depopulate. Designed to target humans only.’

‘It’s engineered?’

‘Of course it is! On contact with any human cells, it activates, breaks down the cell structures into acids, proteins.’ He ran a hand through his silver hair. ‘It completely liquidizes the infected within hours!’

‘My God!’

‘The liquid solution is used by the bacteria to make copies of themselves, to grow spores — like feathers, like pollen — that can be carried by the wind.’

‘Are there any cases of immunity yet? Ethnic-specific resistance?’

Yatsushita shook his head. ‘No. Not yet. So far it seems no one is immune. Whoever made this did not care that it would kill the whole world.’

Rashim looked at the holo-screen shimmering in the air above his desk. Endless columns of data that needed collating and processing.

‘Now do you see why they want T-Day advanced?’ said Dr Yatsushita. ‘Something like Kosong-ni is what leaders have feared for decades. A perfect bioweapon.’

Rashim rubbed his temple. ‘Jesus.’