“HEY!” Kelly called out as they descended. “WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL?”
Al’s head snapped up. Did he hear something? A high-pitched whining? A wasp? No … it was a nano-jet.
“HERE!” came the shout again and Al saw a lit-up fat bumblebee- sized Thing dropping towards him.
“Woah!” Al shouted. “We’ve got the nano-crew in the house! Nobody move!”
Everybody in the CFAC, from Commander King down, froze. This shouldn’t be happening. The nano-crew was supposed to be tracked at all times.
Al held out his hand and the Bug landed on it. Four tiny figures disembarked and were quickly surrounded by angry giants.
“I can explain …” Kelly started.
“What the hell?!” Al said. “I was about to come and wake you all. And you, young man,” he said to Finn, “aren’t supposed to know this vehicle even exists!”
“It’s his birthday present! We were just taking the kid for a ride!” said Kelly.
“I’m telling my mum!” Al said.
This sent a bolt of fear through Finn.
“That’s a top-secret, prototype nano-vehicle of incalculable value and you have just put all your lives in danger,” Commander King hissed from on high.
“Ah, nuts. He’s thirteen years old. What were you doing at thirteen?” said Delta.
“I was at Eton,” said Commander King.
“This country needs a revolution,” said Kelly.
“We don’t have the time,” said Commander King, turning smartly to lead the way up the gantry. “Come.”
They entered the Control Gallery as it was blinking to life, the place crammed with computers and control systems. Various members of the Global Non-governmental Threat Response Committee were already settling themselves around a giant horseshoe-shaped table.
As Al sat, he placed the Bug on the table in front of him then carefully transferred all four of the crew to the Sony Walkman nDen, which he hooked to his top pocket and tapped to switch on the loudspeaker.
Commander King called the meeting to order with the words: “Lock us down”.
Doors locked and blinds whirred down across the long gallery windows. Numerous screens switched on, showing live feed images of the UK Prime Minister and the other world leaders who sat on the G&T. For the first time in ages, Finn tasted danger and, with only a hint of guilt, felt a growing excitement.
Commander King turned to the main screen. On it appeared the two most powerful men in China: the President of the People’s Republic and his security chief, Bo Zhang.
“Zaoshang hao daren.” Commander King addressed the President with courtly authority.
“Good morning from Beijing,” replied the President in perfect English.
“Mr President,” King began, “on behalf of the Global Non-govern—”
“Yeah, it’s late here,” Al interrupted. “Let’s skip the diplomatics and catch up at Christmas instead. What have we got?”
“Thank you, Dr Allenby,” sighed King, and ordered: “Slide.”
A picture appeared on the central screen.
It was of a Chinese police officer inside his car.
Dead.
“Shanghai, China, twenty-four hours ago. A dead police officer with no obvious sign of injury. He’d been running a simple ID and security check on a young foreigner.”
Blurred CCTV footage appeared on-screen.
“White Caucasian male, false Belgian passport, no fingerprints, nothing to trace. We think late teens. He popped up enough times on both the Airport and Forbidden City CCTV systems to provoke a routine stop-and-search enquiry.”
“The Forbidden City? I’ve been there with Her Majesty the Queen and it is most certainly not in Shanghai,” asserted the Prime Minister with idiotic certainty. “It’s in Beijing – look it up.”
“Correct, the Forbidden City was the Imperial Palace of Chinese emperors for centuries, but it’s also the name of the 23rd Industrial Progress Zone of Shanghai, a massive purpose-built, high-tech hub to the South of the city.”
Pictures flashed up on-screen of a factory complex, miles of production lines, thousands of masked workers in shiny white facilities; then of the whole huge industrial area from the air – laid out like a complex crop circle. A diagram was then overlaid, illustrating the layout and adding numbers.
“Genius!” said Al.
“It’s a picture of Pi!” Finn called out, delighted.
“Correct,” King said. “The city is laid out as a circle divided into tenths. The ratcheting out of each arc, or sector, expresses the number Pi in multiples of one tenths of a rotation, thus – 3.141592654 recurring – the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.”
“You worked that out?” said Al, amazed at Finn’s insight.
“We got shown it once in class,” Finn admitted.
“It’s the densest area of computer manufacturing in the world and the site of several advanced research plants,” King continued. “A newspaper dubbed it the Forbidden City when it was being built and the name stuck. Nearly every piece of technology we’re using and communicating on now was produced in China, much of it here –” he pointed to the screen – “in the world’s hardware hub.”
King returned to the picture of the dead policeman, then turned to the video feed from China.
“Secretary Zhang?”
Bo Zhang rose, poised, proud and perfect, mind as sharp as the creases in his uniform – the most powerful man in the world under forty, with some 10 million security personnel under his command. He was uncomfortable having to defer to a foreigner, but his President was a founding signatory of the G&T (which Bo had only that morning learned the existence of).
“Commander,” he began, in perfect English, “Officer Ju intercepted the suspect in a food hall in sector 9 of the Forbidden City at 7:22am yesterday morning. CCTV analysis shows he’d travelled directly into the Forbidden City from Shanghai Airport six times over the previous five weeks. When questioned, the suspect contradicted this surveillance information and Officer Ju made a decision to bring him in. Last contact by radio was at 7:24am. An assault of some kind then took place. There were no marks on the body apart from a pinprick wound on the right temple. When the cranium was opened, massive nerve damage was observed in a clear path from the wound.”
An animation flashed up, a revolving 3D CAT scan of a human head, with broad red lines marking the projectile’s devastating progress through the brain.
It was like a child’s scribble inside someone’s head, thought Finn, and it reminded him of something …
“No weapon known to our analysts could have caused such damage. Given the global strategic importance of the Forbidden City complex, this committee was informed.”
“Weird …” Al said, and got up to look more closely.
“What could have done this?” asked the UK Prime Minister.
“The most extraordinary bullet in history …” Al muttered as he studied the diagram. “How big was the projectile?”
“One point five millimetres square,” Bo Zhang replied.
Then Finn remembered. “It’s like what a grub would do to an apple! Or if a human botfly gets trapped in a human skull and eats and eats through the brain till the person goes mad and eventually dies.”
“A what?” asked the Head of British Security in disgust.
“A human botfly,” came the voice from the box on Al’s top pocket. “I’ve always wanted one. How long was he under attack?”
“Less than two minutes. Who am I addressing?” asked Bo, confused.
“One of the nano subjects,” explained King.
Al popped open the Sony Walkman before a camera to reveal the four tiny people ranged across the sofa. They waved. Bo, who had been frankly disbelieving of their existence to this point, gave the tiniest nod back.
“But an insect didn’t do this,” said King, returning to task. “This is the suspect arriving on a flight from Macau.” He called up an image of a man in an airport security line. “And this is his hand luggage.”
An X-Ray image of his bag appeared. King zoomed in on a bright but tiny dot that seemed to be inside the top of a pen. Al went right up close and screwed up his eyes.
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 codefn2. 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 rigsfn3. 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!”