John McNally - The Forbidden City

What to do?

You make your own luck, ‘they’ say, but fate, according to Kaparis, was different. Fate you have to assault, coerce. Kaparis prided himself on being its master. One of the very few. Like a god on Mount Olympus.

He felt a delicious shiver.

“Play the ace.”

“Have you visited this restaurant before?” the cop asked.

“I do not remember,” said Baptiste.

The cop pulled up a grainy CCTV image on his palmtop screen of Baptiste at the Kung Fu Noodle counter.

“This is you last week. Six times in the last month. Come with me,” the cop said, leading him out of the food hall and into the back seat of an unmarked police car. Baptiste reached instinctively into his bag. He was not yet under arrest. The cop got in the front and picked up the radio, waiting for his orders.

But Baptiste received his first.

“Release it. Complete Vector at all costs.”

Baptiste relaxed. The point of action had arrived. He took a luxury Mont Blanc pen out of his bag and flipped off the top, as if he were about to make a note.

The Prime Executable Bot woke.

XE.CUTE. BOT52:BORN

An order came in from Kaparis Command on Song Island.

KAPCOMM>>XE.CUTE TERMINATE LIFE FORM LOCATION COORDINATES: 4578377/46294769

XE.CUTE. BOT52:KILL

The cop finished his radio message and turned his head to speak to Baptiste, but before the first word made it out of his mouth –

Ttzxch.

The smallest sound as it entered his brain.

The tiniest entry wound at the temple.

His face went into spasm, then froze.

The morning after the night before was 150 times more disappointing than any previous morning at nano-scale.

Finn, Delta, Kelly and Stubbs sat in silence at a tiny table that had been specially made for them and stared at nothing in particular for a good long while.

The Sons of Scarlatti (one technically a daughter) as they liked to call themselves, lived in an ‘apartment block’ fashioned from cellular seed trays that sat inside a biohazard bubble, which protected them from insects and other threats, inside Laboratory One. It was known as the nano-compound. First they were going to be there a week. Then they were told twelve days. Then three weeks “tops”.

So far, five months had passed.

On the upside, the longer they’d waited for the one thing they wanted most, the more they got of everything else. They could come and go as they pleased from the biosphere (as long as they followed elaborate safety procedures) and anything they wanted could be shrunk in the new accelerator array, so they enjoyed the finest foods, consumer goods and high-end leisure activities. Finn had his own private zoo full of his favourite insects, a laboratory and a skate park, and there was even a ski slope inside a macro freezer in Lab Two. Best of all a perspex-covered road and model rail network had been laid that allowed them safe access to the entire complex. Finn had been gifted a red Mini to drive around, which he adored (even though its speed had been restricted at Grandma’s insistence).

But right now none of that helped.

Various people had already called to reassure them: Grandma, Commander King and, over a video link, the Prime Minister. Even Hudson had been sent for. Not many kids could ruin the ‘jeans and hoodie’ look, but with his long hair, massive glasses and uncomfortable expression, Hudson was one of a kind. He was in on the Boldklub secret because he’d been dragged into the climax of operation Scarlatti and proved himself an unlikely hero.

“What a bummer … That’s so rubbish. Bet you were looking forward to being tall again?” said Hudson when he arrived.

“Mmmm,” said Kelly, looking round for a gun to shoot him with.

“It must really eat away at the back of your minds …” Hudson mused.

At which point Delta politely asked that they be left alone “to suck things up a while”.

“At least he didn’t offer to write one of his poems fn1,” said Finn when the nano-team were alone again.

Stubbs grunted. “We are at the very margins of human comprehension. We might be stuck here for years and years …”

“What do you know, old fool!” Delta said to Stubbs.

“Quite a lot, actually,” said Stubbs defensively.

Doubt stirred like a great black eel in the pit of Finn’s gut.

Be yourself. Trust yourself. Just keep going. These had been his mother’s Big Three rules. But how could you be yourself when you were stuck in the wrong-sized body? What was the use of trusting yourself when you were totally dependent on other people? And how could you just keep going when you were so obviously stuck? When he’d complained about this to Christabel, their local vicar and a good friend since his mother’s funeral, she’d said, “Use it. Just like your mum left you three lessons, see what lessons you can learn from what you’re going through.”

All he’d learned so far was that the more you wanted something, the further away it got .

“I expect you’ve had better birthdays, Finn,” said Stubbs, looking more than ever like a dejected tortoise.

Kelly gave a hollow laugh and slapped the old man on the back for being such a grouch. Stubbs could fix anything, but didn’t have much clue when it came to ‘being a human being’.

“Thanks – it’s not until tomorrow,” said Finn.

“Hey – a birthday is still a birthday. What do you want to do?” asked Delta, trying to brighten things up. She didn’t normally do ‘close’ but her younger sister Carla was the same age as Finn so he’d become a de facto younger brother.

Finn shrugged. What was there to celebrate at 9mm? He didn’t even get to skip school. Instead he was attending via Skype, Hudson dutifully carrying him around on a laptop (the official explanation for Finn’s absence being he had a highly-contagious skin disease). Grandma insisted on the arrangement. “So he can live a normal life, like any other boy,” she had said, to which Finn responded, “IN WHAT POSSIBLE WAY COULD MY LIFE BE CONSIDERED NORMAL! I’M NINE MILLIMETRES TALL!”