John McNally - The Forbidden City

From the nDen it looked like nothing Finn had ever seen. A piece of magnified metal plankton. A black shell, some kind of square eye, a whip-like antenna, an ugly open hole (a mouth?) with a protruding rail and dangling beneath: spilled steel guts, tentacles, tools and connectors. A sharp squid of a thing.

“A robot?” Finn wondered aloud.

Al took off his glasses and gave them a clean.

“Whatever it is,” said Al, “it’s been shrunk.”

There was an awful silence.

“Are you sure?” asked the Prime Minister, appalled.

“Well, I can’t see exactly, but it looks like an incredibly sophisticated machine. The only way, in my opinion, to engineer something like that would be to build it at full size and subject it to the Boldklub shrinking process. Kaparis escaped Scarlatti with a chunk of my crucial Boldklub sequencing code fn2. We always suspected he had an accelerator, maybe he’s figured out enough to take it this far. He won’t have cracked the key fractal equations, and I doubt he’s anywhere near shrinking living things, but crude, rude, oily machines he may have mastered.”

Everyone but Bo Zhang knew who he was talking about.

“You have a suspect?” Bo asked.

King called up an image of a young, able bodied, jackal-handsome Kaparis trying to avoid a camera flash in Basel, Switzerland in 1994. Jet black eyes, jaw taut with suppressed anger.

“David Anthony Pytor Kaparis,” said King. “Born 1965. A brilliant young scientist brought low by a nervous breakdown following the collapse of a crackpot theory of super-organisms. Went into banking and finance for a decade till he was paralysed as the result of some kind of accident circa 2000 and confined to an iron lung. He disappeared into the criminal underworld from where he rigged the markets and caused the financial crash of 2008, making himself the world’s first trillionaire in the process. Bent on world domination. He was the man behind the Scarlatti emergency and is the global public enemy par excellence .”

“You think Kaparis would attack again so soon?” said the Prime Minister.

“Who else?” said Al as he studied the photograph. “Who else would have the audacity to imagine it, let alone the resources to pull it off?”

“Can we take another look at the killer?” asked Finn.

A copy of a false Belgian passport flashed up. A bearded face, hard and determined.

“Check his eyes,” said Finn, sitting forward.

The shot zoomed in. Up close the iris was pure photo-shop blue.

“The iris in this shot has been erased and retouched,” said Finn. “He’s one of Them.”

“The two Kaparis field agents we recovered during Operation Scarlatti showed severe damage to the cornea,” Commander King explained to Bo, “with scar tissue running through the optic nerve into the brain, consistent with the insertion of some kind of probe. We suspect some kind of brain conditioning. Here the scarring has been disguised.”

“What’s Kaparis doing in China? What’s he after?” asked Kelly.

“Industrial espionage?” the Head of Intelligence suggested.

“But only the tech is built in Shanghai. The design work goes on in Silicon Valley – that’s where a spy would be,” said General Mount.

Commander King turned and addressed Bo Zhang again. “Not to be indelicate, but is it true there’s a new supercomputer at Qin Research at the heart of the Forbidden City? The ‘Shen Yu’? A quantum computer that’s being tested as we speak?”

Bo Zhang said nothing, but there was thunder behind his eyes. Someone would suffer for this.

The Chinese President simply nodded. “A perfectly legitimate research project.”

“A what computer?” asked Finn.

“A quantum computer,” said Commander King, “designed to take advantage of the strange behaviour of matter at the quantum level – super-positioning, or the ability to be in two states at once. A single ‘bit’ of conventional computer memory either holds a 0 or a 1. A single ‘qubit’ in a quantum dot can be both 1 and 0 at the same time. In theory that makes it capable of processing contradictory information and thinking for itself – at 4000 times the speed of conventional computers.”

“Thinking for itself? As if it were alive? ” said Finn.

“Correct,” said Commander King.

“Governments and companies waste buckets of money on them so that clever young researchers can ask them ‘what’s the meaning of life?’ and so on. They have had no useful application thus far,” said the Head of Intelligence with contempt.

“Only because at the moment so much conventional computing is needed to figure out what they’re saying,” said Al.

“We don’t want Dr Kaparis anywhere near this technology,” insisted King.

“ If that’s what he’s after. We know nothing for certain,” insisted General Mount.

“True,” agreed Al. “It’s speculation at this stage.”

“So what’s the next stage?” asked the Prime Minister.

Al pondered a moment.

“This kid has made six visits, so we have to assume he’s released six nano-bots of the kind pictured here. Only one of them has to get inside your quantum computer and at the very least Kaparis will have stolen its design. And that’s probably only the start of it. We have to stop him.”

“But how?” asked Bo Zhang.

Then Al said the words Finn was virtually bursting for him to say.

“If there are half a dozen nano-bots flying about, they’ll show up plain as day on our nano-radar rigs fn3. I say we go out there. We find them, then we destroy them.”

“We can hunt them down in the new nCraft …” said Delta, almost breathless.

“YES!” said Finn.

Tap tap tap! came a knocking from the main door. Tap tap tap!

One by one, committee members turned to see what was happening. There, pressed up against the blacked-out 20mm-thick bulletproof glass was a face. The peering, distinctive, concerned face of a woman in an overcoat and slippers.

Grandma.

She was rapping on the glass with the handle of her umbrella and saying quite distinctly – “NO!”

XE.CUTE.BOT52:GO

The colossal black concrete barn that housed the Shen Yu quantum computer lay at the very heart of the Forbidden City.

After tunnelling out of the dead policeman’s brain, the XE. bot had flown through the Forbidden City and located the barn, entered its air-conditioning system, then spent many hours eating through layers of dust-filter membrane.

Once through the filters, the XE. bot flew along through six metres of aluminium ducting finally to emerge inside the Shen Yu Hall itself.

XE.CUTE.BOT52:STOP

Ranks of hyper-servers were arranged like city blocks over an area the size of a football pitch.