dEaDINBURGH: Origins (Din Eidyn Corpus Book 3) (3 page)

Chapter 3

Spring

2027

“What the hell is the purpose of having so many mobile cameras roaming the bastard place if we’re not catching everything these people do and say?”

The man in the very expensive grey suit banged his fist petulantly on the large mahogany table. Scanning the other faces in the room, he smiled at the nods he was receiving in response and turned to face the youngest man in the lavishly appointed boardroom.

“Mr Donnelly, sir.” Addressing his one-time protégé in this manner grated but he hid it well from their relatively new Chair of the board. “Sir, it’s time to utilise our full resources. Let’s get the cameras into every dwelling, into every life. We’re missing out on some truly special moments here between the characters, and whilst they are
alone
. We have more than enough resources at our disposal and we can bring in a whole new team of people for editing.”

The man in the grey suit lifted his eyebrows in the direction of the executive in charge of editing the show, prompting his support.

The editor nodded his agreement at Mr Donnelly.

“Sir, we can easily accommodate a new wing off the main building. In the meantime, whilst construction takes place, we can occupy the former BBC building. We can have the new feeds in place in two weeks, and the staff to monitor the footage in six weeks.”

Grey Suit winked his thanks to his colleague and picked up the thread once more.

“Mr Donnelly.” He paused for effect and offered a smug grin. “The audience will lap this up. They’re so invested in these
characters
at this point that a move like this would give us viewers for life.”

A very loud and very derisive snort came from a young lady seated at the opposite end of the expansive table from Grey Suit. Face instantly red, he rounded on her.

“You have something to offer, Miss?” He left his final word hanging. He damned well knew her name – they all did – but she needed put in her place.

Unimpressed, she rose from her seat, smoothing down her skirt. Smiling pleasantly at Grey Suit, she said one word: “
Ms.”

“Pardon me?” Grey Suit asked sarcastically. He threw her a threatening glare.

“My title. It’s
Ms
, Mr Solveson,” she replied, smiling warmly.

Solveson unbuttoned his expensive suit jacket, keeping his arms tight to his body, certain that the underarms were growing slightly darker grey than the rest of the material, and leaned onto the table-top.

Cocking his head to one side like he was addressing a toddler, he asked, “And we have something to offer, do we,
Ms
MacLeod?”

Michelle supressed her anger and replied simply once again.

“Yes I do, Mr Solveson.”

She shoved her chair with the back of her legs and opened her palms outward in an open gesture intended to convey the exact opposite demeanour of her superior across and along the table.

“I believe that this is simply a step too far. We film and broadcast almost every aspect of these people’s existence. We market their struggles, their images and their pain. We merchandise their humiliation and their battle to simply survive the rotted, putrid streets we’ve abandoned them to.” Michelle’s smile vanished. Turning to address Donnelly directly, she noted that his PA was whispering into his ear. Probably telling the chairman who Michelle was and which department she worked for. She ignored the exchange and continued.

 
“We do these things, these acts of betrayal and voyeuristic contempt so casually, without their knowledge and without attempting in any way to assist them or even improve their circumstances. We use them to entertain. This,” Michelle placed her hands on the table, imitating Martin Solveson’s posture, mocking it, “this is obscene. What you want is to take even the illusion of privacy from them. To rape their most private moments in order to titillate and emotionally engage the masses. Haven’t we done enough to these people?”

“Get the hell out of this boardroom,” Solveson roared across and along the table.

Michelle merely raised her eyebrows in amusement.

“Sit down, Martin.” Mr Donnelly spoke quietly, but firmly.

Michelle watched Solveson’s face turn from red to purple, as he fought the urge to argue. After three long seconds he decided to sit down. Michelle laughed outright, causing the purple to deepen.

Mr Donnelly surprised her by smiling warmly at her before speaking.

“You’re covering for Simpson today, is that right?”

Michelle nodded. Simpson was her department head. She was a junior producer, which essentially meant that she did most of Simpson’s work for him whist he schmoozed new sponsors and investors on the golf courses and yachts.

“Yes, sir. Mr Simpson had to attend a client meeting today.” She returned his smile. “Three other people in my department called in sick today, so here I am... taking notes.”

Donnelly laughed loudly. “And a fine job you’re doing of it too, Ms MacLeod.” The smile vanished and was replaced by his usual poker-face. “So you decided this was your big moment, to tell us how horrible we all are and how much you detest our show, our network and us as people? Surely you haven’t worked here for…” he paused as his PA whispered once more, “for four years – and with an unbearable ass like Simpson as your department head – just to put us in our place for a few minutes on a rainy Tuesday afternoon?”

“Not at all,” she replied, instantly grateful that Donnelly was every bit as intelligent as his reputation indicated. Michelle put her own poker face in place and drilled her eyes into Donnelly’s. “This was my big chance to help you fix what you’ve done.” She let her words hang for a few seconds and scanned the face of the Chairman.

“You have a growing number of people outside your offices every day protesting against your show, demanding that your cameras are removed and the people inside the city are left in peace. Sure, the majority of people in the UK and beyond are buying what you’re selling, eagerly, but the minority outside are getting louder. They’re getting angrier and they’re demanding that change comes… soon. You need a human rights department that’ll monitor and regulate how the survivors are portrayed on camera and ensures that every effort is being made to reinvest the vast moneys being earned from these people’s misery into researching a cure and planning an exit strategy for any who remain. I’m going to head up that new department.”

Donnelly’s face was granite.

“You are?”

“Yes… I am.”

Donnelly stared at her silently for several very long minutes. Butts shifted, brows sweated, knuckles cracked. Michelle MacLeod simply stood, waiting for Donnelly to make up his mind. When he did, she knew before he spoke that her gamble had paid off.

“Everyone out,” he barked. “Ms MacLeod and I have a lot to talk about.”

Fraser Donnelly stood from his usual seat at the head of the table and walked with a lighter step than Michelle might have imagined around to where she still stood, poker face firmly in place. He indicated the seat next to hers, wry amusement dancing in his eyes.

 
“May I?”

She gave him a smile and nodded.

Despite herself she liked Donnelly. Having aided in the establishment of the UKBC and as a huge advocate of the dEaDINBURGH show, he was absolutely everything that she detested – the human representative of everything she was determined to change and eradicate in the organisation she’d so deliberately chosen to work against from within. Still, he was fairly likable… for a detestable parasite.

He unbuttoned his suit jacket. Removing the jacket, he swung it around the back of the plush chair then seated himself. Throwing a genuine smile at her, he indicated that she should sit also, and crossed his legs, reclining back into the soft leather.

“So, Ms MacLeod. Not a fan then?” Fraser motioned at a nearby Holo-screen that had a loop of the dEaDINBURGH intro playing.

Michelle’s smile vanished and she allowed the anger she felt to show in her eyes. It was a calculated risk. So far she’d kept it light, put Solveson in his box and maintained an air of detached amusement. It was time to do the same to the boss.

“On the contrary,” she said softly. “If you were to look at my holo-net log you’d have me down as an obsessive. Never miss an episode,” she said darkly.

Generally speaking, corporate executives weren’t the brightest of people. Oh, they were educated enough and certainly skilled in the niche to which they’d devoted themselves, but true sharpness of mind – or perhaps it was an openness of mind – generally escaped them in their bubble of superiority and absolute authority.

Fraser surprised her by absorbing her meaning and intention in an instant and brushing aside the small talk.

“Know your battleground, huh?” he said plainly.

Michelle hid her surprise quickly, but not quickly enough. She watched as the tug of a smile played at the edges of his mouth.

Fraser’s face suddenly lost all humour. He tapped the table hard with his knuckles. “You have ten minutes, Ms MacLeod. Start talking.”

Chapter 4

Early Spring

 
2032

Michelle woke to find herself laid face-down on a very cool-feeling, white-tiled floor. The cool sensation wasn’t entirely unwelcome and helped her focus on something and pull her tangled thoughts together into a semi-straight thought process. Her hand went immediately to her abdomen and lay there for a few seconds. Unsure what reassurance she gained from the gesture, she welcomed it, regardless of how superficial it was.

 
Rolling onto her back, her head swam and her neck ached with the effort. Opening her eyes seemed an insurmountable challenge, a mountain too steep to conquer. An image from her student days, waking on Darcie’s floor after a hard night’s drinking and dancing, came to mind but left as quickly as it came. Not many nuggets of information were presenting themselves to her increasingly alert mind regarding her current whereabouts or situation, but she knew for certain that alcohol hadn’t been a factor, having eliminated it from her life some fourteen weeks before.

She blinked hard six or seven times and finally managed to get her eyes in focus. Nothing she looked at made any kind of sense. Michelle sat up groggily and rubbed at her gluey eyes. She felt her pupils contract in response to the clinically harsh, xenon glare of the lights blasting the unfamiliar too-white room and laughed at the absurdity of the dream she was surely having.

Looking down at her own body, she found herself clothed in rags. A filthy sack-like canvas shirt covered her upper body loosely. Men’s trousers three sizes too big and rancid, really truly rancid, draped her lower half. She fought down a familiar nausea as the waft from them hit her senses. She wore no underwear and subconsciously pulled her arms around herself.
 

As the brightness became normal, she became aware that she wasn’t alone. Far from it. Moving her eyes was painful, so she rotated her pounding head on aching vertebrae and scanned the room. Perhaps ninety people lay in various states of consciousness. Men, boys, women and girls lay around her on the pristine, sterile floor of the very white room.

All were clothed as she was. Some looked at her for reassurance, like a child looks at a parent for answers, simply because she was the most alert-looking in the room. Many were too busy looking down at themselves or around the room, wondering at what they wore and where they were. Michelle’s eyes teared-up as they flitted from one face to another. Some were scared white. Others shook their heads, certain, as she herself was, that they’d awake somewhere warm and familiar at any moment. Most were starting to panic as they became fully awake. None of them looked to be anything other than very ordinary, very scared people.

One man started laughing loudly, causing Michelle to jump at the suddenness and intensity of his Sid James-esque bray. In other circumstances she’d have laughed along with the man and described his laugh as the dirtiest she’d ever heard. Today, in this place, the man’s laugh was the sound of his sanity rustling as it left him and broke against the white walls. Today the laugh was truly terrifying and corrupting to the tenuous grip on reason held by the room’s inhabitants.

Michelle shut the noise out and focused on a group of seven people who still lay prone near the only door visible to her. A few others had started to move towards them also, drawn by their relative stillness. As Michelle drew closer, she noticed that the members of the group of adults and children weren’t as still as they’d seemed from the other side of the room. They were twitching and jerking, although only slightly, like someone in the depths of a nightmare. Michelle felt a laugh of her own escape. Irony always had made her laugh.

Pushing her way gently past the little group of stunned observers gathered around the apparently sleeping people on the floor, she mentally swatted away the mist of a thought that was beginning to surface and placed a hand on the nearest boy’s forehead. The boy was burning up with fever. A quick glance at the other sweat-soaked faces in the group confirmed that they all were feverish. And then she saw the wounds.

Michelle’s eyes widened with horror as her subconscious pushed harder and filled her mind’s eye with thousands of images of people she’d seen in the same condition. People in the latter stages of infection. People who’d been bitten. Infected.

Without guile or embarrassment she pulled the filthy clothes from her body and searched every visible inch of herself for bite marks. She pulled a man who stood next to her close and asked him to look in all the places she couldn’t see. Without asking, she pulled his shirt and trousers from him. Too stunned to protest, he allowed her to check for bites. Word spread, quickly. Within minutes everyone in the room was naked and checking each other for any signs of broken skin.

Eventually each of the room’s occupants silently dressed once more, relief smashed aside with returning panic. Why? Why were they here? In the next five seconds three things happened to make their questions the last thing they needed to worry about.