81

Every now and then, major events are overshadowed by others. They are buried under the weight of bigger stories, stories that make other events pale, although they really should not.

At three a.m., Central European Time on the sixth of December, a fire broke out in Brookhaven, New York. It began with an automatic alarm in a single-storey building that didn’t look much from the outside, adorned with neither signs nor company names and lacking any windows. Inside, large spiral staircases led down to server halls full of computers, and when the fire service arrived, the flames lashed at them like hungry, unchained predators.

Once the fire had been put out, only rubble remained. All that was left of the endless rows of electronics were the empty racks, twisted by the heat and blackened with soot, and the thousands of green diodes that had flickered like nocturnal creatures from the racks had melted and disappeared.

All the clues pointed to a major electrical fault, which was bad enough. This was the site where one of the Atlantic cables came ashore, and any other day the newspapers would have been clambering over each other to report the story.

NATION’S SECURITY AT RISK, they would have screamed, INTERNET ON FIRE!

But not today. Today, the world had narrowly avoided a nuclear disaster–not one, in fact, but sixty-seven–so who is going to care about an inferno in a server hall somewhere on the coast?

Way under the radar, the same thing happened in place after place. In small, insignificant buildings, in small insignificant coastal towns, close to Rio de Janeiro, Lisbon and Marseille, outside Yokohama and Los Angeles and in a hundred other little towns, fires raged in silence.

When the morning dawned, the font sizes shrank. By that time, the newspapers had dedicated hours to jubilant screams, heavy on words like salvation and joy and a second chance, but gradually, the headlines tailed off. When all was said and done, nothing really had changed. People were still alive, which of course was nice, but it was also undeniably the way it had always been.

And nice, unfortunately, doesn’t sell newspapers.

Before long the joy was forgotten, and the journalists returned to the daily grind. And as the sun rose over the newsrooms of the world, it heralded a perfectly ordinary day where the end of the world was as far away as ever.

And then, finally, there was room for other stories.

The realisation of what was happening reached the HQ on Gärdet in three places at once. In the ground-floor meeting room, Tetrapak had attached an aerial to the window pane with a suction pad, sitting there with his equipment and his dark grey plastic crate, searching through frequency after frequency, waiting for the data streams to cease as proof that Floodgate was shutting down.

When he heard the voice he froze in his seat.

Four. Eight. Nine. Six. Three. Three. Four.

There it was again, the voice he hadn’t heard for months, and it blew through him like an icy wind as the numbers kept coming.

One. Four. Zero. One. One. Nine.

Forester, meanwhile, saw the images in the cafeteria. She saw them on the television set behind the counter, beyond the glass shelves and the cling-filmed sandwiches and the juice that tasted more like a whizzed-up periodic table than any known fruit, and she stood there, motionless, until the queue behind her started mumbling with irritation.

There was really no need for sound to tell her what was going on. The scrolling news ticker told her more than enough. A fire in a coastal town on Long Island.

Those bastards, she thought to herself as she sprinted back through the building. Those bastards are covering their tracks.

Seven. Seven. Four. Eight. Six. Zero. Two.

When she got to the JOC the others were already there, eyes fixed on the screens. Only now did she realise the scale of it all, that Brookhaven was just one of an almost unimaginable number of places, and she stopped to watch the broadcasts, feeling the rage boil up inside her.

When Palmgren came towards her, with the shaven-headed Polish woman one step behind, Forester cleared her throat to make sure her voice would carry.

‘It’s them,’ she said. ‘They’re destroying the evidence that Floodgate existed.’

To her surprise, Palmgren shook his head. He searched for words, and when he couldn’t find them he turned towards Rebecca instead. You tell her. When she spoke, she too had to clear her throat.

‘I think they’re doing a lot more than that.’

Three. Nine. Five. Five. Three.

They just stood there, watching the screens, for several minutes. In city after city, the fire eliminated not only any trace of a project that should never have seen the light of day, but also, if Rebecca Kowalczyk was right, the consciousness that had been out there, that weird and perplexing sentient life that they had turned into an enemy. They were now busy truncating its neural pathways, shutting down the routes that made thought possible, the same irreversible procedure as it would be on a human brain. They were sacrificing a life for the sole purpose of avoiding detection.

As Forester approached Christina on the far side of the room she had already made her decision.

‘Christina?’ she whispered.

‘What is it?’ Christina said, turning to face her.

Before she responded, Forester lowered her voice another notch.

‘Confidentiality of sources is protected in Swedish law, is it not?’

William had almost fallen asleep in the white desk chair when he noticed a new text shining out at him from the dark screens. He opened his eyes, and blinked hard to make them focus on the letters, a single word bang in the middle of all the blackness.

>William?_

William straightened up in the chair. Outside, dawn was breaking, a thin stripe of golden pink stretching across the horizon, as though someone had torn a slit in a heavy black curtain.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m with you now.’

>I think it’s started.

‘What has?’

Instead of answering, the wall of screens changed its appearance once more. On screen after screen the black background was replaced by direct streams from various news channels, just like before, with graphics and news tickers and headlines in different languages. There were pictures from channels William had barely heard of, American and French and Portuguese, some from helicopters and some from cameras on the ground, all surrounded by cordoned-off buildings in various locations. They all had two things in common though: the lapping water in the background and the thick, black smoke.

Fire in Data Cable Station. Explosions disrupt Internet Coverage.

‘What’s happening?’ said William.

The answer came from all directions, from the few screens that weren’t streaming newsfeeds, and from the small built-in monitors on the control desk in front of him.

>I lost after all._

And then:

>They are destroying me._

William said nothing. He placed a hand on the monitor in front of him, realised that it was meaningless, but left it there anyway.

‘We don’t know that.’

>Yes. I can feel it._

William sat motionless for a long time, looking for something to say.

‘I think you were wrong,’ he said eventually. ‘What you said, earlier. I don’t think you need to know where you’re from for you to know who you are. I think you are a good person. And I think you know that too. We don’t know each other very well, but I would very much like to.’

The pause that followed was exactly the right length.

>If you’re trying to flirt with me I’m not your type._

That came as such a surprise that William could hear himself chuckle.

And all the while, news kept coming. The screens showed new towns, new fires, and the speculation was coming thick and fast. Once again, there was talk of coordinated attacks. Could this be the same perpetrator? Was this plan B when the power stations didn’t get results? Was it an attempt to destroy our electronic infrastructure? Experts expressed their opinions via subtitles and in various languages, and they were all agreed on one thing: that if the aim of the attacks was to wipe out the internet, it was not going to work.

The internet, they explained, was too big to be stopped.

That was true, and yet it wasn’t.

>I am scared.

‘I’m here.’

He sat for a long time, the screens on the desk in front of him, a companionship and an intimacy that was the best he could manage.

He thought about the morning that was about to arrive, about his own life that would go on after all, about Sara and the tiny toilet on the high-speed train bound for Gothenburg. And all the time he left his hand resting where it was.

No one should die alone.

The first revelation came in the early hours of the morning. The newspaper was Swedish, the source was anonymous, and the article arrived at the point in the day when the presses would normally be at their quietest. Despite this, the news spread like wildfire, and within half an hour every news site in every corner of the world was dominated by the same words.

Floodgate.

Surveillance.

Serious infringement of personal liberty.

Words like illegally and without parliamentary approval, and Defence Secretary and Anthony Higgs.

Higgs sat motionless behind his large, heavy desk, his head tipped forward, hands tightly grabbing his hair just above his forehead, two bunches that pushed through his fingers on either side of his centre parting. In front of him, standing between the two armchairs facing him from the other side of the desk, was Winslow.

‘What do we do now?’ Winslow asked, finally.

‘You’re young,’ Higgs said without looking up. ‘You can take your pick of any career.’

Moments later Mark Winslow passed the pillars, out towards the security checkpoint, towards the street, standing straighter and taller with each stride. Once he got outside, into the cold morning air, he decided to walk all the way home.