The woman walked down the gravel path that cut through the centre of the trimmed quad in front of the university science park.
She was tall, with long chestnut hair drawn into a ponytail. Pods of bearded students looked up from plastic tables to watch her as she passed by.
Her beauty had been an uncomfortable fact that had settled on her in her late teenage years, like a deformity she could not remove. She had no time or inclination for romantic attention, so the ubiquitous male stares were not part of a reality she wished to share. She wore no make-up and did as little as possible to enhance her genetics. A blank mien was the only thing she painted on before she left the house each morning.
As she walked, she pulled the pill bottle from her bag and shook it into her cupped palm. The feeble rattle from the container indicated she needed to find a way to refill it again. She would worry about that later. She popped two tablets into her mouth and swallowed with a practised flick of her head.
The voices in her head had been hissing all morning.
During childhood, those voices had ruled her, making her doubt her sanity, separating her from the pack, isolating her. But leaving school had not denied her an education. She had seen to that. The Handbook of Clinical Psychopharmacology was a fixture in most public libraries and had become her most trusted counsellor. It advised, among other things, that antipsychotics were the main medicine used to treat schizoid voices.
It turned out Risperidone and Olanzapine could be found in most high-street chemists, where security is low at night and break-ins infrequent and rarely investigated. A carton of orange juice was the accompanying ingredient, Vitamin C being an effective delivery agent, guiding drugs immediately into the bloodstream. She had become a chemist in her late teenage years.
The effect of the drugs was pleasing to her, making her feel snug, insulated. Her mind, continually pressed against the windows of her eyes like a child watching a street parade from a bedroom window, now sat back in a place deep inside her skull. It was like an overstuffed chair had been built deep inside her head for her to sink into and watch the world go by.
Her hyper-alertness, the sense that she was connected to everything and everything was connected to her, had dampened. The memory of her teenage years – the psychotic breaks, the isolation, the paranoia – all felt distant now, a lawless border town that had been one stop in her long journey.
She kept walking at the same pace to the marble front stairs of the university science buildings. The front door was locked through an automatic key swipe system. She pulled out an electromagnet the size of a snail’s shell and placed it on the white box housing the swipe system. She flipped a switch on the top, and the device magnetized with an audible hum, suctioning itself to the white casing of the key card system. After a few seconds, the locking system shut down, and the heavy front double door popped and drifted open.
She pushed through the doors and walked through the ornate, cavernous entrance hall and up the second set of stairs leading to the second floor.
At the top of the stairs, the corridor stretched out in both directions, and in front of her was a glass case containing a list of offices and their occupants. She pulled out her phone and checked a name against the list and then turned and walked down the left-hand corridor, the heels of her boots striking the marble floor and echoing off the walls.
She stopped in front of an office, which had the name ‘Doctor Oliver Seers’ stencilled on to the crenellated glass. She knocked on the door three times with the heel of her hand rather than her knuckles, a confident knock.
‘Yeh!’
The voice from within was young, and the accent mid-Atlantic.
She opened the door and walked inside. The interior of the room was as far away from an academic’s room as you could possibly imagine. The room was large and dominated by three long lab benches piled high with computer equipment and monitors: enormous stacks of self-assembled hardware, wires springing out at all angles. Almost every square inch of the floor was covered with servers and memory stacks, other than a trail that led from the door to where he sat. The hum of the computers was matched only by the chilly buzz of the air-conditioning units perched on tables. Crumpled cans of energy drinks littered the floor.
The man sat on a high stool, his fingers clattering on the keyboard in front of him. In scruffy trainers, ripped jeans and baggy t-shirt, he looked more like a young offender than an academic.
‘Oliver Seers?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he replied, looking at her absent-mindedly.
‘I hear you’ve just made a breakthrough on a next-gen FRS.’
‘Sorry, who are you?’
Sara Eden closed the door behind her and then locked it.
A look of apprehension passed over Seers’ face.
‘This is a restricted-access building. You’re not allowed …’
Sara walked through the stacks of equipment towards his desk. She then reached into her pocket, slowly enough that it caused him to flinch, and pulled out a thick stack of £50 notes.
‘Your department just experienced thirty per cent cuts: a tough time for researchers. All I want is one search.’
Seers looked at her for a second, wavering, then reached out and put his hand over the stack.
‘The AI in typical facial recognition software is pretty low-level,’ said Seers, his demeanour visibly more relaxed, ‘other than small variations, it’s usually matching like-for-like. We put in an additional AI layer that uses data forecast models that take into account the effects of ageing.’
‘A short way of saying that would be, if I had a picture from twenty-five years ago, you could match that with a picture of the same man today,’ said Sara.
‘Yes, I mean, the software isn’t complete yet, there’s still some bugs, but essentially …’
Sara nodded and pulled the dog-eared photograph from her pocket.
‘OK, so we need to digitize it first, with this scanner.’
He lifted the lid of a portable scanner nearby, placed the photograph face down and then closed the lid. A border of bright light ringed the scanner and a second later he flipped open the lid and handed the photo back to Sara.
‘OK, now we just run the picture through all open databases on the web.’
‘When shall I come back?’ she asked.
‘No need, it’s done. There was only one hit …’
Sara could not see the screen from where she was standing, but she noticed that Seers had gone quiet. He then turned around and looked at her in confusion.
‘Looks like that guy is now the head of military intelligence in the UK.’
Seers shifted uneasily as he looked at the picture in Sara’s hand.
‘I should probably log this search and get your name.’
Sara took a step towards him, and Seers instinctively took a step back. He was taller than her, but there was something in her demeanour that made him anxious.
‘What’s his name?’ she asked.
‘I’m going to have to ask you to leave now,’ stammered Seers.
Sara leaned over him and looked at the screen.
‘Charles Salt,’ she read, ‘thank you.’