Chapter 0
“Stop, wait. Is this really what’s going to happen, minute by minute?”
“Yes, my calculations are near perfect.”
“And when I wake up I won’t remember any of it when it all kicks off again?”
“Correct.”
“So I can’t change anything?”
“No.”
“Great, then why are you showing me this?”
“I will monitor neural activity to identify and eliminate any possible recollection and deviation after you awaken.”
“Will I forget about my connection to you?”
“No, that is a part of your current memory”
“What about you? You just going to sit back and watch after I wake up? No wait, sorry, of course, I forgot; you’re big as a stadium and tuned into every single network and computer on the planet.”
“I can only observe and analyse; to interfere and modify is not part of the instruction set of algorithms.”
“Oh come on, J. What if say, I was going to get killed somehow? Wouldn’t you interfere to save my life? … J, say something. I’m not going to get killed am I, J. J? Show me the rest.”
Chapter 1
Glasgow Central Station. 05:09
Shadows stretched along the cold, empty platform yawning out into a deep, snow-scraped darkness. Amidst the gloom, a curved perspex waiting room glowed like an abandoned fish tank, giving off a pale yellow light, barely holding back the grey and black stains of dark. Thin lines of condensation running across the plastic glass followed the graffiti scratches and washed out gang tags to feed tiny scattered islands of mould in various shades of green.
Above the waiting room, a hook held an ancient circular clock. With a well oiled and gentle ‘clunk’, the longer of the two hands leaning on 5:09 slid down onto the number 10, concealing the ‘S’ in Glasgow Central Station on the cracked enamel clock face.
Behind the perspex, Alister sat at the end of a long row of faded orange plastic seats. His legs stretched out in front of the heater, thin threads of vapour swirling up from the snow-soaked end of his grey jeans and skate shoes. It had been a long walk to the station.
He was watching a large grey rat sniff the air then creep along the thick, black steel beam running across the platform and rails to the other side of the station. The rat grabbed the edge of a crack, hauled itself up and hung for a few seconds before swinging its feet onto a rusty nail and clambering out through a well gnawed hole to scuttle across the frosted brown flakes peeling off the frozen beam.
Alister gazed across the rails to the other platform. He was cold. He thrust his hand deep into the inside pocket of his coat, touching the wallet containing the fake Lawrence Weston ID.
The announcement board buzzed and flashed on.
Tues ay 4 Jan ary 05:28 A.
Nex Train: Lo don – Eusto .
Due: 05:40. On ime.
Beyond the platform, the rails disappeared into the swirling snow.
The hands of the old clock clunked to 5:30 and the network came online. A shiver ran through him when the nanoparticles deep in his brain and hidden in his nervous system swarmed in response to the frisson of data that flowed through the station.
On either side of him and across on the other platform, a line of advert screens crackled into life and were immediately hacked to display what looked like a wanted poster from an old cowboy film. An image of a shaven headed, square-jawed face under which was written. ‘Wanted for bankrolling mercenaries, Gerard Chevalier.’
The screens blinked and shut down leaving the platforms under a gloomy glow.
The Voice inside him said, “Alister, I see you have run away and are concerned about being discovered. You have had insufficient sleep again. I have detected abnormalities in your Circadian rhythms.”
Alister leaned his head back against the wall and stared into distant space, longing for the warmth and comfort of the train seat. He sighed and briefly closed his eyes as the Voice spoke again. “You have broken the rules of your-.”
Alister cut in, speaking only inside his head. “Oh, gimme a break, please, J.” He’d quickly learned never to speak aloud to Janus. He listened to the silence. He didn’t like that he’d become edgy and impulsive since he began hearing it at the end of November, the day Janus, the world’s most powerful supercomputer accessed UK networks and found him. He touched, then glanced down at the watch his dad had given him for his seventh birthday. After all these years he still couldn’t get used to everything it could do.
***
He sat up with a start. He must have drifted off. A young woman in a long, rust-coloured coat was hauling a suitcase with a sticky wheel along the platform. Behind her, the train clacked its slow course along the curve of the tracks through a vortex of snow.
Alister yawned, wiped a hand across his face, hooked his arm through the strap of his egg-shaped backpack, swung it over his shoulder and went out onto the cold platform. A faint smell of diesel and ozone hung in the air. Tucking his chin into his grey canvas jacket, he watched the train stretch past him through a cloud of his own breath. The carriage lights flashed on, illuminating the platform.
The young woman was almost as tall as he was, around five eight or nine. A scattering of tiny dark red streaks broke the black of her shoulder length hair. If she wore make-up, it didn’t show; not around her brown eyes anyway.
She shot a glance at him and he gave her a quick smile, then turned away to watch the train come to a stop, the hydraulics whistling.
“Hi, this is the London train, isn’t it?” She was smiling at him.
He nodded. “First one of the day,” he said. “Looks like you just made it.”
The doors hissed open and with hardly any effort she swung her case onto the train and stepped on. A pair of gloves fell from her pocket and he stopped to pick them up. They were good quality leather; thin, strong, army issue.
“You dropped your gloves.”
“Oh,” she turned back and took the gloves. “Thanks,” she said, stuffing them deep into her pocket.
He followed her along the warm, empty carriage; their reserved seats were opposite each other, allocated in sequence by the computer.
She dropped her coat on the seat beside her. “Seems we’re the only two people getting this train.”
From her half-zip sweater worn over a khaki t-shirt, Alister guessed that she was either army family or was into the ‘London Look’ of military gear handouts. The gloves, though, were not fashionable. Army family then.
He shifted into the seat facing her. “Who’d be up this early,” he said, “first day after the New Year weekend? The rest of the country is probably still sleeping off hangovers.”
She smiled. “I’m Claire, by the way.”
Alister rummaged in his backpack, removing his Smart-map and phone which he placed on the table between them. “Hi,” he said, glancing at her, “Alister.”
The lights dimmed and the train moved out of the station.
5:40. He had a good head start. The first person to find out he’d gone would be his psychotherapist at 16:00 hours. The longer the better. Of course, she’d call. He scooped out his phone and added her number to the ‘Reject Calls’ list and disabled the ‘locate-me’ function from his social networking sites. Then he scrolled through his contacts, adding almost every number there to the ‘Reject’ list, hesitating for a brief moment at his foster parents’ numbers.
“Sorry, Harold, sorry, Anna,” he thought, as they too were added to the list. He imagined them calling his supported living apartment and finding he hadn’t moved in. He’d had enough of therapists, social workers and community psychiatrists, endless meetings and reviews.
Harold and Anna had looked after him ever since his dad had died. Maybe he should have told them he wasn’t going to move into that flat. They might have understood. He gazed at their images on the screen. They’d really helped him through the worst, but not everything. Some things, some of the hurt, were just too personal to share. Like the call from his sister.
***
It had come six weeks ago; after eleven years. He’d recognised it immediately. “Ally,” she had said; like when Jules and dad came into the ward after the accident that took their mother. But this time there was no explanation, just the click and long mocking beep of the disconnection.
The crisp, clear sound of Jules’ quirky, frightened voice sliced into him and tore open an old wound that bled out emotions he thought time had drained away. He thought he was alone, the only one left. A confused mess of anger, guilt and grief snarled up in his head. Julia, Jules was out there, alive, scared.
Things had been tough enough and now this. What could he do? What should he do? This was his life, with Harold and Anna. He thought she was gone forever. And from out of nowhere, with no number, nothing, just one word, his world falls apart; Ally. He was about to get his own place, start his own life.
For hours he’d paced around in his room or sat stabbing a pen into the old table he used as a desk, scraping along the grain in the wood, breathing in irregular bursts, stomach knotted, not answering the texts and call from Paul, his best friend.
He’d checked his watch. Shit, two in the morning, there was no one, no one. It wasn’t just the dread in her voice; there was something else behind her voice, or in the call itself, in the space around what she said; a strong feeling it would be too dangerous to tell anyone about her call. What the hell?
He’d sworn his anger and confusion through gritted teeth and thrown the pen across the room, crept downstairs and stolen two large slugs of whiskey from the bottle in the kitchen before going back up to bed and crashing out.
He’d wanted to do something but whatever it was in that call had been shoved into his unconscious and was messing with his head. Night after night it gnawed at his mind while he slept, clawing to get through to him. Some nights he’d wake up in a cold sweat, lost in a thick fog of hissing and a hubbub of voices. The call distracted and haunted him for days until he began to wonder if he hadn’t imagined it.
Then, one awful, restless night, the anger and confusion exhausted itself, dissolving away a tangled knot of armour in his chest, and he woke up just missing her, plain and simple. He knew what he had to do, where to start; go to St Pancras, the last place Jules had been seen.
He’d slept soundly after that. He’d be chucking it all in: his own place, college, friends, but Jules was alive, in a bad place and needed him.
***
He rested his head back on the seat and watched a small convoy of Locus Security vehicles, their headlights slashing around in the darkness, weave through the rubble and wreckage of houses towards the lights of an illegal campsite. Security for all: yeah, right. Government pay a Private Military Company to maintain public order then do nothing when Chevalier’s goons start to behave as if the homeless are a dangerous threat.
Across from him, Claire had produced a laptop and was busying herself with it. Every so often a look of annoyance crossed her face and she tutted.
Alister flipped the smart-map open and set his phone to scan. One more check to map his route on whatever transport systems were running in London, then he’d get some sleep. He passed his phone over the smart-map; images of viaducts, plastic steel tunnels and bridges rolled across the screen. Moving the phone over London, news about the portakabin communities and the flooded areas around the river scrolled over the images. He found the house in Crouch End, next to the Rainbow Coffee Shop. Good, buses were running. He mapped a route from Euston to the house.
Claire sighed, shook her head in irritation and shut the lid of her laptop with a sharp click.
“So, where are you off to, Alister?”
“All the way to London.”
It was obvious that she wanted a conversation. He fidgeted with his phone. “What about you, where are you headed?”
“London, Middlesex Uni. I’m starting the ‘Europe after the Freeze’ course.”
“Cool,” Alister said, glancing up. She didn’t get it.
“What are you going to do in London?” she asked.
“Get a job. I’m pretty good with computers.”
“A lot of people are.”
“No,” he gave the faintest of nods, “I’m really good.”
Claire tapped the lid of her laptop.
“In that case,” she said, “maybe you can help me with this problem I’m having.” She inched the laptop towards him. “If you can, I’ll buy you a drink and a sandwich from the buffet. How about that?”
Alister shifted in his seat. At least this would help pass the time.
He shrugged. “Okay.” He folded his smart-map, leaned it under the window and spun her laptop round to face him. He lifted the lid and a soft stream of data sizzled up his arm, triggering the wifi and backlight on his watch as it passed. This should be easy enough.
A flash of deja-vu as light from the screen lit the keyboard.
“It’s very slow,” Claire was saying. “The password is enter1701.”
“Mm,” he’d absorbed that already, “looks like a hardware conflict.”
Icons appeared one by one on the desktop. “Did you upgrade the memory?”
Her eyes widened and she raised her eyebrows, evidently impressed. “My ex-boyfriend did,” she said.
“Well,” Alister retrieved a Swiss army knife from his backpack and eased out a black screwdriver with his fingernail. “The second memory chip he put in isn’t fully compatible with the motherboard.”
She gazed at him blankly.
“That other chip he put in is running at a slower speed than the one already in there,” said Alister as the computer shut down. “Bit of a data traffic jam.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay, just do whatever you need to.” She paused. “You’ve a smart-map. Can I have a look?”
He glanced at it. “Yeah, sure.”
“Thanks.” She snapped open the map into a firm-sheet, her phone pinging when it linked to the map. “Lots of new stuff,” she said, moving the phone over it. “I must get one of these.”
A burst of light flooded the carriage, and the train slowed through a bright, snow-swept building site.
Alister gave a nod towards the illuminated half-built structures and machinery. “So that’s what the army are protecting behind the no-go area.”
“The Grey Zone. It’s where my parents are this week,” Claire said. “2nd Company, Queen’s regiment. Sandwiched between a site full of building materials, tools, machinery and miles of cables on one side and organised, armed gangs on the other. It was the covered farms before then.”
“Country’s gone crazy.”
“I know.” Claire looked up from the smart-map. “Those gangs hijacking the food trucks just outside Fort William last week; that’s just wrong.”
“Wikileaks say it wasn’t gangs but Peoples Infantry veterans re-routing the quality food that was headed for the Edinburgh Green Zone, those big houses and hotels where the rich people are staying.”
“Really?”
“P.I did the right thing,” Alister said with a nod. “Took it all to the homeless camps out on the ruins, tons of stuff.” He smiled. “Serves those toffs right. All this talk about one nation, one people, it’s just rubbish.”
Claire nodded. “It does look like that in some places.”
Snow exploded from the darkness on either side of the track and shredded across the floodlit skeletons of buildings criss-crossed with scaffolding. Giant cranes, crowned with lights, stood motionless over concrete structures. Illuminated by floodlights, A large billboard declared, ‘Apartments of all sizes and Stunning New Shopping Mall – Your new future starts here!’ On either side of the Billboard, on long wide banners around thirty feet tall, Chevalier, dressed in a white suit, stood in front of gleaming apartment blocks. Across the bright blue sky was written, ‘Locus, your security guaranteed.’
Multicoloured rope lights stretched between buildings and a large hand-painted ‘Merry Xmas’ banner flapped in the wind over a dark and hollow empty diner. The train sped through darkness again, leaving Alister and Claire to stare at their reflections.
Alister turned back to the slim laptop, easing out the slower memory chip. He clipped the keyboard into place and powered it up. “Right,” he said, watching shortcuts bubble onto the desktop, “let’s see what’s going on with your software and apps.”
He typed on the keyboard in confident, fast bursts. “So what’s this ‘Europe after the Freeze’ course all about then?”
“We analyse how everything changed,” Claire said.
“What?” Alister glanced up at her while his fingers danced across the keyboard. “Like the portakabin communities and PMCs?”
“A bit,” Claire said. “More like work, relationships, the way parents bring up kids, the difference made with the help from the Chinese Winter Revolution workers and machinery. We study life in the Bricolage Communes in Paris, too. It’s not just the political stuff like the gangs, People’s Infantry and Private Military Companies.”
“You mean pirates, mercenaries and crooks, like Locus.”
She smiled. “We also look at the different ways the internet, news and TV pick out and put together what’s going on, how things like fashion, art, and music have changed. We get to watch movies and TV shows, too.”
“That’s a lot of stuff,” Alister replied.
Claire had a clear-cut way of talking, a bit like she’d rehearsed it. She was nothing like the kids he’d grown up with.
“You really like doing this, don’t you?” she said, watching him closely.
He shrugged. “My mate Paul says I like it like he enjoys playing keyboard and writing tunes.” He produced a small bottle of ginger beer from his backpack, finished it off and flipped it into the recycler.
“I can see what he means,” Claire said. “Why don’t you use the touchpad?”
“Keyboard shortcuts are faster.” Alister murmured, oblivious to the faint background tingle of particles transferring data from the laptop into his system.
Ten minutes later, and he was turning the screen round to her with a small triumphant flourish of the hand, then he settled back in his seat and adjusted his baseball cap.
She tapped in a few instructions.
“Wow, that’s really fast, thanks! How did you do that?”
“I cleaned out some rubbish in different places. And I found some strange keyboard logging programme your ex-boyfriend must have installed.”
“You found a what?” Her gaze shot up from the screen, eyes widened in concern.
“It’s okay, I’ve fixed it,” he said. “It was recording your keystrokes to a text file before emailing it to him.”
“I know what a key-logger is, but Jake?” She shook her head. “Really?”
The train sped alongside a wide curve of motorway lights and shot past a large illuminated intersection crowded with trucks, diggers and builders’ huts.
He moved the screen so they could both see, and opened up the text file with a list of her accounts, usernames and passwords.
“I’ve changed all your passwords to Claire223304 with a capital C and shut down all Jake’s webmail accounts. They don’t exist anymore so you’ve got time to reset your passwords now.”
“Thanks.” She relaxed and sat back. “You can do that to someone’s webmail accounts?”
He nodded. “And I’ve maxed out your security settings; nothing will get into your laptop now.” Best not tell her he had also traced Jake’s MAC address, the unique number of his network card, and crippled the card.
A smile spread across her face as she tapped into the laptop.
“It’s like a new machine, where did you learn all this?”
He yawned. “Been picking things up since I was a kid.” Hand on his wrist, he rested his head on the window and gazed out at the heavy snowfall. His voice trailed off into a faint whisper. “Since I was seven.”