THE UK IS a small country, but it has over two and a half million closed-circuit TV cameras – an estimated ten per cent of all such cameras in the world. Of these two and a half million, by far the biggest proportion are set up and focused on London: they’re used mainly for crime prevention, antiterrorism and enforcing the charge all motorists must pay for entering the city. Many of these cameras can focus in close enough to pick out individual licence plates, even the faces of people driving: sophisticated computer programs can cross-reference these details against databases such as police records, and armed response teams can be dispatched when appropriate within as little as four seconds. The population of Britain is under constant surveillance. These facts are matters of public record. What’s less known is that all the images, from every one of these cameras, are fed into a single room.
The room is in the bunker, deep under Westminster. From there, almost every street in London can be monitored and watched, around the clock if necessary.
Wythenshawe, watching the screens and what they were depicting, sighed.
‘What do we do, sir?’ asked his second in command.
‘Not much we can do,’ said Wythenshawe curtly. ‘It’s too risky to send anyone out to intercept them. All we can do really is watch and wait, and hope against hope that these fools don’t get their wish.’
They had heard the call and had come from all over the country. Most had been forced to abandon their cars or trains at the edge of the city, dodging what limited quarantine arrangements the government had set up and continuing their journey on foot. Most had been walking for a long time – days, in some cases. All were tired and sore and grubby. But as they neared their destination – as they sighted their goal at last and it loomed ever larger in their vision – all of them were also almost delirious with excitement.
There was nothing coordinated or organized about they way they came: they were arriving from all points of the compass. Their numbers weren’t vast, but they were growing all the time as more came out to join them. At that moment, perhaps six or seven thousand people were out on the streets, converging underneath the shadow that lay over London.
Not everyone was cowering in their homes, terrified of what Mallahide could offer them. Some had listened to his message. Some had welcomed it. Some were eager to leave their fleshly bodies behind and become something better. Some wanted the chance to become posthuman.
And they were coming.
Joe Bennett was nineteen years old. A year before, he had started to experience a lot of bad stomach aches: he had gone to his doctor, been referred to a hospital, and now, after a succession of painful and undignified treatments, all of which had failed, he’d been told he had something less than six months to live. Pancreatic cancer: a genetic predisposition. Those were the words that the doctors had used, but they weren’t Joe’s words. To Joe, it was much simpler.
His body was crap. It was as straightforward as that. His body – which had been supposed to last the length of a decent lifetime at least – had instead packed up and failed him. Now, Joe was a person with big plans for his life. He wasn’t prepared just to give those up simply because the useless lump of a body that fate had doled out to him wasn’t up to the job. He wanted more. He wanted something better. And when he’d heard Mallahide’s message, he’d set out from home straight away.
It had been a long journey. His treatments made him constantly tired anyway, but getting all the way to the centre of London on foot had completely exhausted him. He walked the last of the distance to the banks of the Thames almost on pure adrenaline alone. He was one of the first to arrive there, under the giant disc-shaped shadow that continued slowly to revolve over the London skyline. He stood there, breathing hard, clinging to a railing for support.
The crowd was full of people like Joe. Not just people who were sick or in pain – and not just people who saw what Mallahide offered as an easy way out of the problems in their lives, either. There were people there who believed. People who had longed for the day to come when human beings could reach out beyond the limits of their bodies and become something else, something beautiful and eternal.
But Joe was the first one that Mallahide spoke to.
‘Sir!’ said someone in the camera room warningly. ‘I’m reading some kind of increased activity in the swarm.’
‘I know,’ said Wythenshawe grimly – and shrugged. ‘Well . . . here we go again.’
On the north and south banks of the river, the crowd finally stopped. Their numbers carved in two by the swathe of the Thames – the gap between them rendered uncrossable by the shattered remains of the bridges – they faced each other, and waited.
The gigantic shadow reached down a hazy grey finger. A soft wind blew, and out in the centre of the river something a little like a column of ash whirled into being, shivering in the air like a small tornado. Then Professor Mallahide appeared.
He was standing there on the water, as if this was the most natural thing in the world. His rumpled tweed suit was exactly the same. His tie was skewed, and his cheeks were wet. He was crying.
‘H-hello,’ he said with a smile.
The crowd to either side didn’t answer. They just stood there watching, and a pregnant hush settled over the river.
‘You came,’ said Mallahide, looking around. His eye was caught briefly by a homemade banner that someone had brought with them: the banner showed an arrow pointing down at the person holding it with, above, the words GET ME OUT OF HERE in big red letters.
‘You heard me,’ he said almost to himself, as if he could hardly believe it. ‘You understood me, and now you’re here. I . . .’ He paused. ‘I can’t tell you how happy that makes me.’
With shining eyes, he glanced around the crowd again until they locked on something else.
With a shudder of joy in his heart, Joe realized that Mallahide was looking at him. And now he was coming towards him! Casually striding across the surface of the choppy grey water, Mallahide made his way to the north bank of the Thames. The professor floated up over the embankment, alighted on the tarmac, and walked slowly through the crowd towards Joe. The crowd reached out to touch Mallahide’s tweed suit as he passed as if he was some kind of god.
‘You,’ he said, standing in front of Joe and grinning hugely. ‘Hi! What’s your name?’
‘Joe,’ said Joe.
‘And you’ve also come to leave your body behind? You’ve come to join me on humanity’s greatest ever adventure?’
‘Well . . . yeah,’ said Joe.
‘You’re so young,’ said Mallahide, frowning. ‘What made you decide, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘Cancer,’ said Joe. He shrugged. ‘It’s inoperable.’
‘Oh, Joe.’ Mallahide looked sad. ‘My wife, Katherine – I lost her to cancer. As a matter of fact, that’s what set me on this path in the first place. Now that I’ve succeeded, I. . .’ He hesitated. ‘I hope she’d be proud.’
Joe had nothing to say to this, so there was a pause.
‘When you . . . change,’ Joe began, ‘what’s it like? Is it really as good as you say?’
‘Joe,’ said Mallahide, ‘believe me, it’s even better. You know what? Even with everything that’s happened, I wouldn’t go back to the way I was, never in a million years. In fact, Joe’ – he winked – ‘in a million years, you can ask me about it yourself! How about that? Now, are you ready?’
Joe smiled. His heart was pounding. ‘I’ve always been ready,’ he said.
‘Then you’ll be the first,’ said Mallahide, smiling back. ‘You!’ he added, addressing the crowd. ‘All of you! You’re a shining example to the rest of the human race. Where others cower in fear in the face of change, you people reach out and embrace it. You are pioneers,’ he added. ‘You’re an inspiration. And it’s people like you who will help me lead humanity out of the darkness, into the light of the future.’
The small crowd clapped and cheered, grinning at each other eagerly.
‘Now,’ said Mallahide. Overhead, the swarm began once more to reach down its gentle grey fingers to the waiting crowd below. ‘Close your eyes. This will only hurt for a moment . . .’