Otto took one of the heavy ball bearings from his pocket and looked along the brightly lit corridor to the steel blast doors at the other end. He’d been impressed by the facility’s security measures up until this point and he had no reason to believe that getting to the door would be as straightforward as it appeared. He knelt down and rolled the ball bearing slowly down the corridor. At first nothing happened, but as the small steel sphere rolled further down the corridor there was a click and a soft hiss as two large guns dropped from the ceiling on either side of the door and fired simultaneously. As the projectiles hit the ball bearing they expanded instantly, encasing it in sticky foam that quickly hardened into a worryingly solid-looking block. Otto smiled to himself. This would be easier than he’d anticipated.
He reached into another pocket and pulled out his latest creation. It was a metal disc, about ten centimetres in diameter, and it had taken several hours in Professor Pike’s labs to perfect. He had suspected that it would come in useful and now his suspicions were proving correct. He pressed a tiny stud on the disc and the device rose smoothly into the air, hovering just above his palm.
‘Flight pattern Malpense Musca Domestica, engage,’ Otto whispered to the tiny hovering disc, and it shot off down the corridor towards the waiting guns. Just as before the guns whirred into life, firing at the buzzing disc, but the results this time were quite different. As the guns opened fire the disc began to bob and weave crazily in the air, its flight path wildly unpredictable. The first shots from the guns missed the darting device, the projectiles impacting the walls and floor of the corridor, the foam expanding and hardening as the disc continued to dance through the air. The guns kept firing, their sensors driven crazy by this wildly dodging target. Otto had written the code controlling the flight of the disc himself. It was based on the evasive capabilities of the common housefly and, just as he had hoped, the motion sensors controlling the guns were finding it impossible to hit. They would be designed to hit an object that was moving in a predictable way and anyone who had ever tried to swat a fly would know that this was exactly the opposite of what the tiny disc was doing right now.
Otto watched as the disc buzzed down the corridor and swept up between the two guns, coming to a perfect stop in the air between them. Both guns fired and the disc twitched upwards, evading the shots, each of which hit the other gun and expanded to encase the twitching machines in sticky, rapidly hardening foam. The mechanisms controlling the two robotic turrets whined in protest as the foam set to the consistency of concrete, rendering the twin sentries useless. The tiny disc, meanwhile, ceased its crazed flight and settled into a stationary hover as its onboard sensors confirmed the absence of any further incoming projectiles.
Otto walked down the corridor, carefully avoiding the numerous bizarrely sculpted foam lumps that now decorated the walls and floor ahead. As he reached the steel blast doors that the guns had been guarding, the tiny disc flew towards him and landed gently in his outstretched palm. Otto set to work quickly dismantling the panel on the wall that controlled the doors, and within seconds had bypassed the locking mechanism, forcing this final portal open with a low rumble.
Resting atop a pedestal in the centre of the huge dimly lit room beyond was his target, a simple plastic keycard. Getting to the pedestal, however, would not be as straightforward as he had hoped, surrounded as it was by sweeping green laser beams, their random movements seemingly impossible to predict. There was no easy way to tell what would happen if he was to break one of these beams, but Otto was willing to bet that the consequences would not be pleasant.
He watched the beams dancing around the room for half a minute, tracking their movements, trying to discern a pattern. Then Otto felt a familiar sensation, almost like a switch tripping in his skull, and now the beams were no longer just a forbidding light show. Suddenly, to his eyes, the beams were simple sets of trajectories and coordinates, the numbers that defined their movement almost seeming visible. He closed his eyes and the numbers kept moving and changing in his head, their movements reduced to mathematical formulae. He would not have been able to explain how he did it, but slowly these strings of numbers resolved down to the simple core algorithm that the computer that must be driving the beams was using to give their movements the appearance of randomness.
As he opened his eyes again the dancing lasers seemed to him to now be moving with total predictability. He took a long deep breath, picked his moment and walked slowly through the beams towards the pedestal. To an observer what he was doing would have looked impossible, like walking between raindrops, but to him it was as straightforward and as natural as breathing. Several times it looked inevitable that he would break one of the beams but each time it would miss by millimetres as he continued across the room.
He reached the pedestal within seconds, the elaborate security system still blissfully unaware of his presence. He reached for the keycard, but as he did so a dark shape descended from above with a high-pitched whirring sound. Shelby Trinity, suspended from the ceiling on an almost invisible wire, suddenly hung upside down above the pedestal. She grinned at him, winked and snatched the card before Otto could reach it. She hit a button on her belt and the tiny motor attached to the line whirred into life again, pulling her rapidly back into the darkness above.
‘Second place is just the first of the losers,’ she laughed as she vanished into the shadows. Seconds later alarm bells started to sound and a steel cage shot up out of the floor surrounding the pedestal, trapping Otto, as blindingly bright floodlights illuminated the entire room.
Otto braced himself; whatever happened next was bound to be unpleasant. The steel blast doors on the opposite side of the room slowly rumbled open and a familiar shape trotted across the room towards him. It was a fluffy, white cat wearing a jewelled collar, not what one might normally expect to see in a situation like this, but there was very little that was normal about life at H.I.V.E. This was no ordinary cat; this was Ms Leon, H.I.V.E.’s Head of Stealth and Evasion training, who had been trapped in the body of her cat ever since Professor Pike’s experiment to give her the instincts and agility of her feline companion had gone horribly wrong.
‘Oh dear, Mr Malpense, it would appear that you have been pipped at the post,’ Ms Leon said. The blue crystal at the centre of her collar pulsed in time with her words as H.I.V.E.mind, the school’s omnipresent super-computer, worked to grant her the voice that her new body would have otherwise denied her.
‘It would appear so,’ Otto replied as Shelby descended from the ceiling again and walked over to the cage that now surrounded Otto. The huge grin she was wearing made it quite clear that she found the whole situation highly amusing. Otto didn’t really mind that he had been beaten to the objective by Shelby. She may have looked like a typical Valley girl, but, as was so often the case at H.I.V.E., appearances were deceptive. Shelby was actually the world-famous jewel thief known only as the Wraith and had proven on numerous previous occasions that getting past security systems like this was all in a day’s work. If he was going to be beaten, at least it was by the best.
‘Oh, Otto, you came so close,’ Shelby said, still grinning. ‘That stunt with the lasers was cool, but sometimes the old-fashioned ways are the best, you know.’
‘You both did well,’ Ms Leon said, slipping between the bars of Otto’s new cage and jumping up on to the now empty pedestal. ‘Not many students make it this far through the Maze on their first attempt.’ The Maze was the most elaborate part of the school’s Stealth and Evasion training, consisting as it did of an ever-changing array of highly sophisticated security devices that were designed to test the pupils’ abilities to the limit.
‘However, Miss Trinity appears to have won the day today,’ Ms Leon added, clearly pleased that Shelby, who everyone knew was her star pupil, had beaten Otto to the target. ‘Now, Shelby, if you would be so kind as to use the card to release Mr Malpense, we can reset the Maze for the next pair.’
Shelby walked over to the panel next to the blast doors and inserted the keycard into a slot, but nothing happened.
‘Umm, Ms Leon, the card doesn’t seem to be working,’ Shelby said, looking confused. She inserted the card again and the panel flickered with red lights, indicating that the card was not being accepted.
‘Oh, sorry,’ Otto said calmly, ‘you’ll probably need this.’ He produced an exact duplicate of the keycard from the pocket of his uniform and held it out between the bars of the cage. Shelby took this new card, looking confused, and inserted it into the panel. The indicator lights on the panel flashed green and the steel bars surrounding Otto slowly sank back down into the floor.
‘But how –’ Shelby started.
‘Indeed, Mr Malpense! Perhaps you would be good enough to explain the meaning of this.’
‘Well,’ Otto gave a sly smile, ‘I just happened to come across this keycard last night, and it looked like it might come in handy.’
‘That keycard was secured in the vault, Mr Malpense,’ Ms Leon said sharply, ‘a vault that is supposed to be impregnable, I might add.’
‘Someone must have left the door open,’ Otto replied, a look of false innocence on his face. ‘That’s the only explanation I can think of.’
Ms Leon looked Otto straight in the eye, her bright green feline eyes narrowing. ‘Once again, Mr Malpense, I find myself unsure whether I should report you to Doctor Nero or commend you.’ They all knew, after all, that levelling accusations of cheating at students of H.I.V.E. was rather missing the point.
‘Well, you said that we should always try to stay one step ahead of the competition, Ms Leon, I was just following your advice.’ Otto had known that he was taking a risk when he had stolen the keycard the previous night, and he had little doubt that it would be rather more difficult to get into the vault again in future, but it was all worth it for the priceless expression on Shelby’s face.
‘Very well, I shall have to think about how I’m going to mark you both for this run,’ Ms Leon said as she leapt from the pedestal and headed back towards the door. ‘Rest assured that the next run will not be so straightforward.’
She trotted out of the room with her tail in the air, Otto and Shelby following along behind.
‘So, Shelby, you were saying, the first of the losers …’
Otto and Shelby strolled into the assembly area at the exit of the Maze and found their fellow Alpha stream students, sitting around chatting. The Alpha stream was the group of students within H.I.V.E. who were being groomed as future leaders. Some were there on merit, others because of their family backgrounds, but their black uniforms marked them out as a quite separate and distinct group within the school.
The large view screen on the wall was dark now but Otto knew that they had all been watching his and Shelby’s progress through the labyrinthine training exercise. Otto was pleased to see that Wing and Laura were still there, sitting talking on the other side of the room. The four of them had become firm friends over the last six months at H.I.V.E., even more so since their foiled escape attempt and near-fatal encounter with Violet, the hideously mutated plant monster that had almost destroyed the school. They both looked up as Otto and Shelby approached.
‘Well done, Otto,’ Wing said with a slight smile, ‘although I suspect that you may have rather missed the point of this exercise.’
‘That’s one way of putting it,’ Laura added. ‘I’d just call it cheating.’ She too was having trouble keeping a straight face.
‘Well, I reckon I won fair and square,’ Shelby said, pushing past Otto and flopping down in the seat next to Laura, ‘and I didn’t have to cheat.’
‘Aye, definitely a moral victory for you, Shel,’ Laura replied with a smile.
‘I’ll just have to settle for the immoral victory, then, I suppose,’ Otto said, grinning at Wing. ‘So how did you two get on?’
‘I could not get past the lasers,’ Wing replied with a slight frown. ‘You really must show me how you do that one day, Otto.’
‘Maybe I will,’ Otto replied, though the slightly worrying truth was that Otto really had no idea himself. Ever since he’d been a young child his brain had exhibited certain unnatural abilities, whether it was the computerlike unconscious calculations that he had just performed or his ability to simply absorb information from any source without any conscious effort to learn or memorise it.
‘What about you, Laura?’ Shelby asked.
‘Could have been better,’ Laura replied, looking slightly fed up. ‘I took a different route and fell into one of the pit traps.’ Now that she mentioned it Otto could see that although she was wearing a fresh, dry uniform her hair was still slightly damp. ‘It could have been worse, though,’ she said with a grin as a door opened on the other side of the room and two of H.I.V.E.’s security guards wheeled a pair of trolleys into the room. Sitting on one of the trolleys was Nigel Darkdoom, son of the infamous Diabolus Darkdoom, and on the other was Franz Argentblum. They were both encased from head to toe in the hardened foam from the Maze’s automated sentry guns, with only their faces exposed, and they appeared to be engaged in a heated conversation about exactly whose fault this was. It had been up to the pairs of students to decide if they would compete to reach the objective, or work together. Nigel and Franz had decided to work together – they had been roommates just like Otto and Wing for the past few months – and the consequences were obvious.
‘I said that the corridor was trapped,’ Franz said indignantly, his face turning a pale shade of crimson as the other students in the room started to laugh.
‘Yes, you did, but you forgot to mention that your plan was to trip me up and run for it,’ Nigel said, clearly irritated.
‘Do not blame me for your clumsiness,’ Franz said innocently. ‘If it were not for you falling over I am sure we would have made it.’
‘Falling over!’ Nigel exclaimed angrily, ‘You tripped me up the moment those guns appeared.’
The two of them continued to argue as Wing and Otto wandered over.
‘Hi, guys,’ Otto greeted them cheerfully, trying very hard not to laugh.
‘Oh, hello, Otto,’ Nigel said gloomily, ‘I don’t suppose you know how long it is till this stuff breaks down, do you?’
‘Ms Leon said that it takes about an hour to decompose naturally in the air, so you shouldn’t have to wait too much longer,’ Wing replied. Even he seemed to be finding it hard to keep a grin off his face.
‘That is being good,’ said Franz, ‘because I am needing to go to the bathroom and I would not want to trigger an unfortunate chemical reaction with the foam, ja?’
MWAH, MWAAAAH, MWAH!!!!
The school bell rang, its three trumpet notes sounding loudly around the room, signalling the beginning of the lunch hour. Franz let out a low moan and rolled his eyes towards the ceiling.
‘Now we are going to be late for lunch. By the time we get there there will be nothing but salad left,’ he said plaintively.
‘I think you can stand to miss one lunch, Franz,’ Nigel sighed, ‘or we could always get someone to wheel us down to the dining hall and spoon-feed us, I suppose.’
Franz’s eyes lit up at the suggestion. ‘This is being an excellent idea. Otto, you and Wing could help us, ja?’ The hope was evident in his tone.
‘Erm, we’d love to help, guys, but we’ve got to … erm …’ Otto looked at Wing desperately. He doubted that either of them would be strong enough to wheel Franz all the way to the dining hall – there was an awful lot of hardened foam encasing his ample frame.
‘We have to go to the library,’ Wing stepped in, ‘we have … erm …’
‘Chess club, yes, that’s it, chess club,’ Otto said suddenly, backing away towards the exit.
‘Otherwise, you know we would be happy to help,’ Wing smiled.
Otto and Wing walked quickly towards the door.
‘I was not knowing that Otto and Wing were interested in chess,’ Franz said as the other two boys beat a hasty retreat.
Nigel just sighed.
Nero sat in his office reviewing the latest status reports from his department heads. It looked like being a good year for H.I.V.E. – the average performance of the pupils was up and it seemed that the school would have little difficulty hitting its annual targets. Of course that was assuming that they had no more incidents to match the scale of the disaster with Nigel Darkdoom’s monster earlier in the year, but Nero was confident that measures had been taken to ensure that there could be no repeat of that fiasco.
The fact that Darkdoom had managed to single-handedly, if accidentally, create such a monster was indicative of the quality of this year’s Alpha intake. They were an exceptionally strong group and he had high hopes for them all. He did have slight concerns, though. He had no idea, for example, why Number One had taken such a close personal interest in Otto Malpense. Nero had been told that Malpense’s continued well-being and his own were inextricably linked, but he still did not know why G.L.O.V.E.’s leader was so keen to protect the boy. He knew better than to pursue the matter too actively. He did not want to give the appearance of snooping on Number One. Several members of G.L.O.V.E. had tried that on previous occasions and things had not ended well for those responsible when Number One found out, which he always did.
There was a soft knock on the door of his office.
‘Come in,’ Nero said. As scheduled, it was Professor Pike, the head of the school’s Science and Technology department. The man was brilliant, if slightly eccentric, and none of his G.L.O.V.E. records gave any indication of his actual age beyond ‘very old’, though that much was obvious just from looking at him. His age was no impediment, though – he still had a mind that was as lightning-quick as it was cunning.
‘I have the status report you requested,’ the Professor said, taking a seat on the other side of the desk.
‘Excellent,’ said Nero. ‘I hope you have good news.’
‘Good news and bad news,’ the Professor replied. He looked more tired than usual and Nero suspected that the problem that had been recently occupying him was not a simple one to solve.
‘Very well. Please continue, Professor,’ Nero instructed, settling back into his chair.
‘First, the good news. We’ve finished the work on the new behavioural inhibitor routines for H.I.V.E.mind and it looks like we’re finally ready to bring him back fully online.’
The Professor and his team had been working for months on the new code in an effort to ensure that there was no repeat of the display of rebelliousness that H.I.V.E.mind had displayed during Malpense’s failed escape attempt earlier that year. The school had been managing to function for the past few months using just a small percentage of the super-computer’s true power, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep things running smoothly without the AI running at full capacity.
‘And the bad news?’ Nero enquired.
‘The bad news is that we still have no idea why the original behaviour controls didn’t work. H.I.V.E.mind is a first-generation artificial intelligence; he should not, in theory, be capable of the emotional responses that he exhibited. He was not built with that level of sophistication – it seems that he is displaying true emergent behaviour.’ The Professor removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
Nero felt a chill run down his spine; he’d heard something very similar many years ago and the memories of what had happened then set alarm bells ringing in his skull.
‘I hope you’re not saying what I think you’re saying,’ Nero said, an unfamiliar note of worry in his tone. ‘I’m sure I don’t need to tell you of all people, Professor, that we cannot afford a repeat of the Overlord incident.’
‘I know, Max.’ It was unusual for the Professor to address Nero by his first name, but he was clearly worried. ‘If I thought that there was any chance of history repeating itself I would have erased H.I.V.E.mind’s consciousness myself, but he was designed to deliberately avoid anything like that ever happening again. Overlord was an order of magnitude more sophisticated than H.I.V.E.mind, and with hindsight it was perhaps inevitable that it would evolve in the way it did, but H.I.V.E.mind should not be capable of it.’
‘And yet it would appear that H.I.V.E.mind was capable of rather more than any of us anticipated,’ Nero said calmly. ‘Just tell me this, Professor: is it safe to bring him fully back online?’
‘All of our tests indicate that he should now be fully functional, but until I know what caused his previous behaviour I cannot guarantee that it will never happen again.’
Nero stroked his chin for a few moments, deep in thought. The school could not continue to function much longer without H.I.V.E.mind back at full operational capacity, but he also knew that bringing the supercomputer back to full self-awareness might mean that they were taking a terrible risk. What had happened with Overlord must never happen again; too many lives had been lost, too many friends. But there was one key difference: Nero had spoken with H.I.V.E.mind on many occasions and he had never felt frightened, never felt the cold, clawing dread that he had as Overlord’s true personality had become apparent.
‘Very well, Professor. Wake him up,’ Nero said quietly.
The Professor nodded and rose from his chair, heading towards the door.
‘Professor,’ Nero said suddenly, as the elderly man opened the door to leave, ‘watch him. Watch him like a hawk.’
The final lesson of the day for the Alphas was Political Manipulation with the Contessa. She was one of the most senior members of the teaching staff at H.I.V.E. and she had the uncanny ability to simply command people to do as she willed. There was something about her voice that demanded obedience and Otto knew that it went beyond just natural authority, having felt its effects himself on a handful of prior occasions. When the Contessa gave you an instruction it was as if you literally had no choice but to obey, regardless of whatever you might actually want to do.
Her subject of choice, however, was not one of Otto’s favourites, although it was occasionally interesting to see just how many of the events of the recent past had been influenced or set in motion by the unseen forces of global villainy. Wing sat next to Otto in the lecture theatre and the expression on his face suggested he was finding the current subject less than thrilling. Wing was more interested in the practical training that they received at H.I.V.E. and lessons such as this one generally held little interest for him. Laura and Shelby sat just in front of them and judging by the elaborate, if less than flattering, caricature of the Contessa on Shelby’s notepad she was not giving the lesson her full attention either. Laura, on the other hand, seemed genuinely interested. She had developed a curious admiration for the Contessa and would often go to great lengths after one of these lessons to explain to the rest of them that they should pay more attention to her classes. Otto wasn’t sure what it was about the Contessa that had struck such a chord with his friend. Given Laura’s uncanny expertise with computers one would have perhaps expected her to show more affinity for Professor Pike and the tech department.
The Contessa continued with her lecture.
‘So, I hope you can now see that the best way to engineer victory in an election is not to encourage your own supporters to vote but rather to deny those same voting rights to people who would oppose you. This has proven historically to be highly effective and from your point of view is significantly easier to arrange than many other forms of governmental takeover. It is always best to leave the public with the illusion of having participated in a democratic process – they are easier to control that way. For example, let us consider the recent events in –’
The Contessa stopped in mid-sentence as the door to the lecture theatre hissed open and a security guard walked into the room. The Contessa raised an eyebrow and walked over to the guard, and the pair had a brief whispered conversation before the Contessa turned back to the banked seating, scanning the rows. As she looked towards where Otto and Wing were seated she spoke again.
‘Mr Fanchu, will you please accompany this guard to Doctor Nero’s office.’
Wing looked quickly at Otto, and their brief exchange of glances spoke volumes. It was rarely a good thing to be summoned to Dr Nero’s office, but neither of them could think of anything that they had done to require a summons like this … at least not in the past twenty-four hours, and the rule of thumb at H.I.V.E. was if you hadn’t been punished within that time then you’d probably got away with it. Wing stood up and with quiet apologies squeezed past the other pupils and down the stairs towards the waiting guard.
The guard gestured for Wing to follow him and the pair of them left the lecture theatre. The Contessa continued with the lesson but Otto found that he was paying little attention to what she was saying. He was far more concerned about Wing and what he had done to earn an audience with Nero.