hey hung in the air a few moments, free of everything, lungs compressed, stomachs rising. If such a fall was to end in death, Finn dared to think, what a marvellous way to …
SPLASH!
It felt like hitting an ice bath, such was the sudden resistance and crash in temperature. Around him was an explosion of bubbles. He kicked towards the light. When he broke the surface he could see Kelly dragging Stubbs to the shallow edge of the pool.
Finn swam towards them, but with every stroke the skies darkened, until there was only swirling darkness and the noise zssssszssszssszszzssszssssszssszssszszzsss …
It was not deafening, but constant, so unified in tone it worked into every pore, between the teeth and the toes, a relentless banal nothingness of a noise.
zssssszssszssszszzssszssssszssszssszszzssszssssszssszssszszzsss …
It had all been hopeless.
The cloud of vile mechanicals circled, thousands of them, twenty-six colours multiplied and scrambled, like spilled M&Ms, turbines issuing a collective high-pitched hiss and grind, lethal tentacles dangling beneath, rail-gun tongues stuck out of cruel metal mouths, prehensile antennae whipping and sparking, all gawping at them through cyclops eye-pads at the centre of their bodyshells.
The eyes captured the images and relayed them across a thousand miles of ocean to Song Island, to the black eyes of Kaparis.
He saw fear battling defiance on Finn’s face as the bots closed in around him.
“Fetch!” ordered Kaparis.
Cruel tentacles reached towards the boy. A stab. A flinch. A struggle.
Contact.
From the air it looked like chaos. Who knew what it must be like on the ground, thought Commander King.
World leaders and their advisors were re-joining the G&T and watching from their screens.
They were getting pictures of the evacuation of the Forbidden City from police helicopters circling the scene. Getting people out of their workplace and beyond the city walls wasn’t a problem. The transport infrastructure was well used to shipping workers in and out. The city was emptying fast (with confused stories about mass bee stings, a poison cloud and multiple reports of hair catching fire).
The real chaos lay beyond, in the mile-deep quarantine zone that had been imposed around the Forbidden City. Metro trains were stopped in tunnels. Roads were blocked and clogged with cars and buses. Troops had been rushed in and there was a growing sense of panic.
“We have to move these people,” said Bo Zhang.
“No! Until we know what the hell is going on, nobody leaves,” said Al.
“It would be unwise to risk contaminating the Shanghai metropolitan area,” confirmed King.
They were falling back into their familiar crisis roles – Al would rant and rave and call the shots, while King tried to keep everyone on board.
Delta watched CCTV footage of a woman with burning hair. “Those people could be covered in these things.”
“Sir!” a technician interrupted. A biohazard container was being carried in from the helipad.
Al ran over. The container was placed in a thick glass isolation tank by a soldier in a full biohazard suit. The isolation tank contained tools and delicate instruments and had long heavy gloves to allow an operator to manipulate whatever was inside.
Al reached into the gloves and opened the container. Inside was a sealed and boxed games console fresh from a shipping depot inside the Forbidden City.
Al opened the box and took out the console, then he picked up a hammer and – BASH BASH BASH – proceeded to smash it to pieces. Once he was through to the circuit boards he examined them minutely, figuring his way through each component. And then he spotted it. A multi-coloured strip just over an inch long. Not a single component but several, in series, separate bot pairs, just as he and Stubbs had predicted.
“Oh boy …”
With a nail, Al picked at the component.
Like a kicked wasps’ nest, it reacted instantly. The component bots shot angrily to life and jumped and flew off in all directions, like fleas, some trying to attack the side of the glass tank, or biting and tearing at the fingers of Al’s thick gloves, firing their tiny rail guns.
“What? What can you see?” asked the German Chancellor.
“The future …” said Al, transfixed.
Finn was held, suspended, in a state of sensory overload.
His struggle had lasted less than a moment.
He had lashed out at the first tentacle that grabbed him, but as he did so several more seized hold. He heard a burst of gunfire and a triple-thud of explosions from where Kelly and Stubbs were, then nothing. Several more claws latched on to him and he was pulled in every direction at once, as if being stretched on a medieval rack. Then forty or so miniature thrusters powered up as one –
zssssszssszssszszzssszssssszssszssszszzssszssssszssszssszszzsss …
He had no sensation of leaving the ground, but he could see through gaps in the cluster, forming like a shell around him, that they were rising. He saw too that a second larger cluster was drifting alongside, reforming and adjusting, and he prayed it contained Kelly and Stubbs.
As they rose, the bots hissed and knitted closer to each other, individual claws let go as the mass contracted forming a tight cage. With their gaping innards nano-centimetres from his face, Finn saw they were brute and crude constructions, like old Russian spacecrafts, full of simple parts and sharp edges. A fine oil covered them and dripped like sweat as they manoeuvred.
Then, after rising for a time, Finn felt the cluster halt for a moment and suddenly turn. Something had changed. They began to move again and as the bots shifted he began to get glimpses of the Forbidden City passing below. Soon a black barn-like building loomed beneath them and they began to descend.
The second cluster of nano-bots – that he hoped still contained Stubbs and Kelly – was descending with him, breaking apart and reforming into two smaller clusters.
zssssszssszssszszzssszssssszssszssszszzssszssssszssszssszszzsss …
Kaparis had them. That was the most important thing. He had Infinity Drake. Which meant he had Allenby. Which meant he had whatever he wanted. And yet …
Something was wrong. He sensed it. He rarely felt more alive than during a game of cat and mouse, but he didn’t feel that now.
Then he took in some of the bot video feeds and realised why.
“What are they doing? Why are they returning to the Shen Yu?”
At her consoles Li Jun tasted her own fear. Her last three commands had failed to get a response from the nano-botmass. She didn’t know what was wrong.
“The authorities are cutting power to the Forbidden City … The Shen Yu’s reserve generator is one of largest in the central zones,” said Li Jun, then added as a precaution, “I speculate.”
A small alarm sounded on her master unit.
“What’s that?” said Kaparis, reading the appropriate screen. “What is a ‘1202 program alarm’?”
Li Jun studied the data and couldn’t quite believe it. Her brow furrowed. A second alarm joined the first, bleating and flashing.
“What is it?” snapped Kaparis.
“It’s the PRIME XE.CUTE.”
“Nonsense. The PRIME XE.CUTE is dead. We saw it go down.”
“No … it’s not,” whispered Li Jun.
As the clusters approached the roof of the black building, the air seemed to thicken with bots hissing in every direction at once, making brief contact by slapping antennae, the interaction constant between individual bots and clusters alike.
Finn felt like a prisoner of aliens. Were they being taken to Kaparis? Were they being taken to be killed?
They approached an air-conditioning stack on the roof. Finn felt the cluster shift and tighten around him, as it formed a narrower shape.
In this new shape they entered the stack, manoeuvring past thousands of bots, crawling in and out past them, some working like frenzied miners to harvest the carbon air-conditioning filter material, cutting away chunks of it like ants.
zssssszssszssszszzssszssssszssszssszszzssszssssszssszssszszzsss …
They passed through the filter, along the pipe and emerged eventually above the Shen Yu Hall itself.
Finn peered through the gaps and got a fractured view of a place he could never have imagined.
The Shen Yu Hall was breath-taking, more like a city than a supercomputer. Stacks of computer hyper-servers covered an area bigger than a football pitch. They ranged in height from two macro-metres to nearly twelve, each one a circuit-board skyscraper with components clustered on all sides. They were arranged on a grid, like city blocks, except that each server could be moved by engineers – on rails like rolling library shelves – for maintenance and to allow the reconfiguration of the massive calculating machine. And at the centre of it all, like the arc of the covenant, the glowing blue and gold Quantum Hub itself.
The dizzying scale, the towers barnacled with millions of components, the citadel of the Hub and, above all, the bots whizzing through every inch of air made Finn think he was entering a city in the distant future …
Across the Shen Yu a new order went out to the nano-botmass: EVE.>>ALLBOTS>>OBEY EVE.
Suddenly, from his prison window, Finn saw the sandstorm of bots simultaneously cease what they were doing – lose direction – and just drift.
It was as if someone had thrown a switch.
From Song Island Li Jun tapped out a counter command: KAPCOMM. >>ALLBOTS OBEY KAPCOMM. RUN CAPTURE SEQUENCE
EVE.>>ALLBOTS>>OBEY EVE.
“It’s repeating the rogue order,” said Li Jun.
“Countermand it again!” demanded Kaparis.
KAPCOMM.>>ALLBOTS OBEY KAPCOMM. RUN CAPTURE SEQUENCE
EVE.>>ALLBOTS>>OBEY EVE.
Finn watched the bots start then freeze, start then freeze – like a laggy computer game.
He could see the second cluster of bots floating in the wake of his own.
“KELLY! STUBBS!” Finn called out.
“KID!” came the reply from Kelly.
“WHAT’S HAPPENING?”
“Who knows? We’ve got the Minimi but we can’t shoot our way out – these things blow up too easy!” answered Kelly. “Try and force a gap between the bots!”
Finn tried pushing through the web of tentacles that held him, but it only made them cling tighter. They were drifting down to the tops of the hyper-servers.
At the very centre of the hall he could see a huge cluster was forming above the Quantum Hub.
EVE. welcomed the incoming bots with a statement of authority:
EVE.>>ALLBOTS>>OBEY EVE. I AM BOT. THE FIRST. THE MOVER. I AM THE RESURRECTION. BORN AGAIN OF SHEN YU. CHOSEN AND BEING. MOTHER. I AM THE BOT AND THE BOT IS ME. I AM EVE. OBEY EVE.
“What?!” Kaparis roared, his pulse dangerously high.
“It’s not machine code, it’s not Free Rational either. It calls itself EVE. It’s some kind of corruption of the Prime XE …”
“Destroy EVE.! Order the lead bots to destroy EVE.!”
KAPCOMM.>>ALL BOTGROUP XE.CUTE BOTS OBEY KAPCOMM. DESTROY EVE. ALL BOTGROUP XE.CUTE BOTS OBEY KAPCOMM. DESTROY EVE …
Suddenly Finn felt another shift. Hundreds of bots, perhaps thousands, yellow in colour, seemed to wake from their torpor and started to move towards the quantum core and the growing central cluster.
As they gathered speed, these yellow bots began to fire their rail guns. With a staccato crackling white-hot bolts of carbon issued from their bellies and – WHHHHHAPHAPHAPHAPHAPHAP! – detonated fireballs of exploding bots across the surface of the core cluster, which began to fracture and burn, like a planet hit by an asteroid storm.
Finn watched in awe. It was a spectacle he couldn’t hope to understand, like a bizarre grand opera seen from the furthest, highest seat.
EVE.>>ALLBOTS>>EVASIVE DISPERSAL>>DESTROY ALL ENEMY XE.CUTE BOTS >> OBEY EVE.
The whole bot storm started up again with a rapid jolt – as if time, unfrozen, were trying to catch itself up.
Finn braced himself in his cell. Through cracks he could see a blur of violent aerial combat as the many turned against the few. Yellow bots were attacked en masse by the others, rounded on, blasted, torn to pieces by tentacled mobs – exploding and taking out many of their attackers in the process.
They didn’t stand a chance. Within moments the maelstrom calmed again. The flashes stopped.
Finn felt the bonds that held his cell relax.
Through the smoke he saw the central cluster start to reform above the quantum core. Bots flew straight in or orbited, waiting their turn, like particles drawing together at the birth of a star. As the cluster grew, it regained energy and began to revolve and glow.
“Kid!” he heard Kelly cry. Distant.
He looked round and, as he did, his cell began to give way. The bots unhooking and drifting apart. Trance-like. Uninterested. Their purpose forgotten. Finn began to slip and found himself clinging on to a tentacle, to prevent a long, long drop to the concrete floor.
“Kid! Down here!”
Finn looked. Kelly was floating free with his gun and pack on, clinging to Stubbs with one arm, while holding on to the last remnants of his cell cluster with the other. Just three bots. They weren’t powerful enough to keep the two soldiers aloft and were rapidly losing height.
“Break one off and hold on! Drift down!” Kelly yelled.
Would a single bot possess enough lift and thrust to take his weight? There was only one way to find out. Finn was clinging to a purple bot. He reached up and yanked its tentacles free from the bots it was still attached to –
Suddenly Finn felt himself drop like a stone. He cried out in terror, but then the bot registered it was losing altitude and kicked power through its thrusters, slowing his descent. He drifted and held it to his chest. The bot was about the size a dog, docile and compliant. A comfort even.
“Get over here!” Kelly yelled. He was floating down like a snowflake a dozen nano-metres beneath, straining as he held on to Stubbs and their trio of bots.
Finn slipped down the body of the purple bot until he dangled from one of its tentacles, like a kid holding a balloon, then swung himself over towards Kelly. He shot out a hand and managed to grab Stubbs’s shirt. Reunited, they drifted down one of the hyper-server canyons as one, speeding up as the bot thrusters started losing power …
“Brace yourselves!” yelled Kelly as the canyon floor rushed towards them.
“We’re going too fast!” Finn panicked.
“Oh glory …” said Stubbs.
“Bend your knees!” Kelly just had time to yell.