Reconfigure (13 page)

The ground floor pair, and the Commander, now with a pistol drawn, headed through the dining room. Crouched one opened the patio door whilst the other panned his rifle around, nearly using the gun sight, but not quite. They stepped outside covering left and right. The upstairs squad was now with them on the ground floor. Three broke to the front door and took up a defensive position. The others headed for the garden.

“We just experienced an anomaly.” Announced the Commander. This statement was for the benefit of those much further away at a command centre. “Confirmed.” Was the next thing he said after a short pause.

The Commander placed his handgun back in its holster. He reached for another sidearm. “Subjects need to be subdued.” He said.

“Confirmed.” Replied each armed man.

Roisin looked at her phone screen. She did a mass selection with her new tool set of all the bullets in the general vicinity. ‘ls Bullet*’ would have yielded a very long list. She didn’t need to see them to know there were a lot! She initiated a Translate. Every bullet in every magazine and chamber found itself strewn on the road and the front lawns across the street. Some were stacked in double width piles as they arrived into the fresh air. They clattered to the tarmac bouncing off one another like an avant-garde dance production. Others simply nestled into grass. The soldiers guarding the front and the driver were witness to the concerto of tinkling. The door guards pulled back the bolts on their guns ready for action. They felt the difference in the movement of the now empty guns. They each tilted and checked the small clear area of the magazine. It showed nothing but light through the clear panel on the other side. Instinct took them to their next clip. Empty!

“Sir! Out of ammo.” There was not really a military code for “All my bullets just disappeared.”

The garden troops checked theirs in a similar way and confirmed they were out of ammo. Each procedurally checked their magazines and side arms.

“I’m out too.” They each squawked, in a monotone voice on the radio.

Roisin stepped out from behind the wooden shed. She was acting impulsively. Her regulator voice was screaming at her to stay hidden, she ignored it. She needed to put this right. She took a deep breath and shouted.

“Leave them alone, they are nothing to do with this!"

The Commander looked at her stood there. The other soldiers raised their weapons towards her. She was feeling a rush, she was full of bravado.

“Did you fire six hundred shots or only five hundred and ninety-nine?” she said in an even louder voice. Behind her the blubbering continued near the shed. The Commander was unmoved by the statement simply saying firmly.

“You are under the protective custody of the CCSO, please come quietly.” He raised the gun towards her as he issued the chilling statement. She was intimidated by the tone, the gun less so. Though it did look a little old fashioned. More like a paintball pistol than some high tech weapon.

“You will leave these people alone!” She said just as he squeezed the trigger. Roisin felt the thud in her shoulder, as she did she hit the Apply button she was hovering over on her phone. She had planned to make some daring pose before beaming back home. Maybe some sort of Bruce Lee style Kung Fu pose. That was not going to be happening, It was a pure reflex action hitting Apply. She was lucky not to miss the button.

Roisin felt the temperature change, her office was warm, the light was way brighter than she remembered. She felt the dampness of her clothing but it was mixed with a different sensation, burning and nausea. She looked at the dart lodged in her shoulder and collapsed to the floor in a graceful heap.

The fraud case had been handed on and with his next shift he had gone back to the parked investigation. He re-checked, the records had come in from the ATM cameras and banking transaction list. Examining the camera output it looked as if each transaction had delivered the right amount of money each time. It was not worth chasing down the ATM users. A flag popped up indicating new facts and correlations pertaining to the case. The AI scanner had latched onto his interest and used that as a focal point in its continuous process. There were an awful lot of flagged items. Overnight a huge meme had erupted on social media, #joyhere. He picked at random one of the thousands of videos and saw a girl looking at her nails forlornly. Then a massive grin at the camera as she held her, now suddenly, ornately painted nails complete with stick on jewels to the camera. The mass use of the Internet for frivolous things such as this gave him a lot of false positives to sift through. The system was indicating that these were flagged due to lost frames and visual anomalies. Painted nails were not quite the same as a knife in an alley, he thought. He was here to provide context, his brain power and human creativity could act as a check and balance for machine efficiency.

He flicked back to review the original alley video again. He watched the knife jump position. This time he played the rest of the file. He had seen a lot of weird things before. His job was to examine anomalies and report. Seeing a young woman lift a completely rigid man by the blade of a knife and wave him around like candy floss, was not one of the most common things to have crossed his path. It looked like a video game glitch. This was confirmed CCTV, albeit a bit lower quality due to the nefarious intercept mechanism used.

He saw the girl pickup a bag from the floor and then disappear out of shot. The bag had looked like a cell shaded video game prop. The knife man suddenly relaxed before picking himself and the knife up and running in the opposite direction. The overnight meme now looked more relevant to him. Whilst the AI wasn’t trained to deal with humour it did spot things that were odd and related. The meme’s origin led back to a very convincing toy boat moving a considerable distance in a frame, way more than the knife did. The to and fro animation of the highlight box around the boat made it very obvious it had travelled seven metres in a single frame. At fifty frames a second, that meant in one frame it was travelling at three hundred and fifty meters per second, one thousand two hundred and sixty kilometres per hour, from a standing start and stopped straight away. The AI analysis showed no other artefacts to indicate that any editing had occurred. A ninety-nine percent original certainty had been applied by the algorithm. The nail painting video was showing a two percent certainty of being unedited. He requested a track down of the poster of the boat video. Her home location came back. She was in an acceptable range of the cash machine and the knife alley, the boating lake and park being very close to both. The hotspots on his overview report map showed just how close. The poster of the video lived in a town house on a nearby estate. The address and the full details of its inhabitants, their social media accounts, emails, bank accounts, TV viewing habits, police records, health records were all flagged and attached to his anomaly report.

He attempted to describe the reason for this gathering of information adding. “…waving him around like candy floss.” It was not the best use of words but anomalies sometimes needed a bit of artistic licence. He was sure anyone up the line viewing it would agree with his description.

The workflow system routed the high priority problem past his supervisor to a much higher level official. Her security clearance meant she could peruse all the attached records that he had only been able to bookmark. She took one look at the knife video, then the boat video (which she had already seen on Facebook at home). She saw the ATM loss of money and picked up the phone. “Tactical extraction required details to follow - Target one Faith Ruby Devonshire."

The unit was scrambled and the operations room started to track their location. Radio chatter en route informed the Commander of some very sensitive details and indicated a high level of risk. Apparently not only a breach of criminal law but also physical law had occurred. The Commander was sent a heads up display, for his eyes only, video of the knife attack and of the yacht jump. He had not seen the yacht video. Social media was not in his daily routine. It surprised him so many people bothered, but he could almost feel himself cracking a smile at the young lads thrill of getting his yacht back. The knife video was no laughing matter. He watched it several times on the journey. That was incredible strength or a powerful weapon at play lifting a grown man that way. It certainly shouldn’t be in the hands of the young woman he saw in the grainy footage.

He checked the dosage setting on the tranquilliser darts in his second side arm. It was a simple bolt action weapon, smooth bore. A spring launched the dart forward at short range. He was carrying a human sedative at reduced dosage. After all this thing could down a Rhino.

“Ammo Check.” He barked over his shoulder. Each of the equally dressed and equipped tactical ops men behind him performed routine clicks and clunks of their equipment.

“1 OK.”

“2 OK.” They each sounded off their number and status.

They approached the address to see a large collection of journalists and photographers.

“Control, press blackout required." He received the reply “Confirmed."

He saw each of the crowd individually look at their own mobile phones and glance at one another. The frenzy of voices and clicking stopped and was replaced by a murmur. They had each received the very clear message “CCSO - Desist.” No matter how much they wanted to, none of them could do anything. To ignore that was a career limiting, and if rumour was correct, a life limiting move.

The truck pulled up by the kerbside, the back doors flew open, the team decanted and the Commander stepped out of the passenger side.

He turned to the driver and said, “Keep it hot.”

“Sir!” came the reply.

Body cam feeds from each of the deploying heavily armed units appeared on the tactical operations screen deep in the CCSO bunker. It was only for the most highly security cleared individuals to see. This was a very serious operation. The evidence had correlated so clearly that this set of anomalies indicated their worst fears. They were no longer in control of almost everything on the planet. The major shareholders in all the multinational corporations that made up the cartel that had created the CCSO would be blissfully unaware of the problem. This was a corporate military operation and they had long washed their hands of any involvement. They had outsourced all such action to the CCSO. It was just considered another holding company, where results were achieved.

The report from analyst G38813 had been both detailed and slightly oddly worded, mentioning candy floss did get the attention up the chain. The automated workflow system had decided the collection of anomalies and the interest of G38813, or any human in the chain, meant it needed to hit the priority queue. Bypassing supervisors and sub officers on the way to the special investigations unit. A covert group inside an already covert operation.

The desk for analyst G38813 was cleared, a team of tactically suited officers removed everything from the standard office cube. His former colleagues looked up occasionally. It was not uncommon for someone to get fired and not be seen in the office again. The psychometric tests, and the huge salaries, generally meant people played by the rules but there was no accounting for someone going ‘Snowden’, after seeing or hearing something that pricked their conscience. Each other operative in the large well lit space gave themselves a little talking to. Focus and get back to tracking things for the organisation. Keep your head down.

G38813 was no longer part of the CCSO. The CCSO was also very certain he would not be telling any tales about candy floss to friends, family or on Wikileaks. The organisation was also happy that he would not be telling any tales to the pathologist who was writing a report on his car crash. G38813 worked hard, late nights, it was no wonder he fell asleep at the wheel? The coroner did her duty, she fully believed the clean toxicology report. The pathologist had run the right tests, in the right order. Test results are just numbers on sets of computers and super computers. None of them even knew the CCSO existed, let alone its affiliation to the providers of all the networked systems. The information was altered, it was just given a little massage. A few bytes of data swapped to show everything was under control, all clean and green on the deceased’s autopsy report.

Roisin started with a slow, lethargic blink. The haze of confusion over what had just happened melted away. She blinked some more, then turned her neck left and right with a slight nodding motion as if checking it was still properly attached to her body. Roisin looked down to her left shoulder. She was now wearing a rather pronounced piece of jewellery. As she came around a bit more she studied the adornment. It looked like a bright yellow fluffy brush. The bristles of the brush fanned out in all directions. The elements looked very soft and delicate. The precisely sheared length looked like a high top hairdo on a Blood Bowl Elf. Pristine, standing upright, yet almost ready to flop and collapse. It was attached to a dull metal tube. Her faculties were coming back thick and fast. She pattern matched with nature documentaries she had seen, a picture formed in her head of a rhino splayed over on the floor as a team worked around them, with a fluffy yellow dart sticking out of its hind quarters. It was a tranquilliser dart! It was also penetrating her body. She moved to reach and pull the dart straight up and out of her shoulder, flinging it to the side. It was like flicking an unwanted garden insect from her arm. It bounced off the bookshelf and rolled back towards her on the floor as if trying to reacquaint itself with her. It should have hurt more than it did, she thought. She could not really feel very much at all, only a rapid tingling of pins and needles across her whole body, her pain centres were otherwise engaged.

She checked her iPhone for the time. The last she had looked it had been when she glanced at it before performing the bullet moving trick, that was about twenty minutes ago. She cursed herself for not considering all sorts of damaging projectiles. Just like code, there was a missing edge condition. She had not thought of it, not allowed for it and got hit with a dart. She looked at her refreshed virtual view of the World and sure enough in the office with her was a Dart. As she struggled to her feet she picked up the dart and placed it on the desk next door to her test coin and printer ink cap.

Roisin knew the human body and brain were not really computers, but it did feel like her reboot was taking a while. Various systems were coming online. She felt like crap, hungover without the fun of a night on the town. She started to focus and re-live the standoff with those scary army types. The completely unimpressed, dispassionate look in the leader's eyes as he ordered her to surrender, hung in her memory. Roisin knew she was now in big trouble. The police, or whoever they were, must have had a reason to arrive at Faith’s place. She did not have to do too much deductive reasoning to consider it was because they found the whole yacht, no yacht, oh there it is, scenario actually believable. On its own it must have not been anything, just another jovial Internet meme. She had visited Faith’s house to remove any evidence of her being in the area, just in case. That had clearly been justified. All the little actions she had taken must have drawn some sort of attention. Roisin considered that she had borrowed some Marmite and liberated some money to the homeless. The would-be mugger had threatened her, she had assaulted him in an extremely unusual and possibly disproportionate way. She was a litter bug too, throwing that Costa cup on the floor. The last memory made her smirk a little. She was in a bad situation, but her sense of humour thread would still flag up the absurd. They had sent a special ops unit to capture the infamous Costa coffee cup chucker.

Her sensible inner voice kicked in, interrupting the less than helpful meanderings. “RUN!” it screamed at her. Her body chemistry burst into action. This was definitely a time for flight! They had seen her face now. They knew it was not the mum, Faith, doing whatever they thought was so terrible. They had tried to capture Roisin, put her to sleep. They hadn’t looked like a nice bunch either. The sleeping beauty option probably was something they had to suck up as an order, accepting through gritted teeth, “Understood Sir!” If the bobbies on the beat and traffic wardens wore body cams she was certain they would have been too. A flashback of Aliens and Ripley seeing the squad disappear one by one from the command screens drifted into her mind. Those images then replaced with an imagined ops room, large monitors all showing her stood there in that garden. A few close ups on her face, none able to see the damp patch on her backside. That’s one less thing to worry about she thought.

Roisin grabbed her laptop rucksack, no cartoon handbags this time. She unplugged the power cable from the socket and pulled it from her main laptop and shoved it in the bag. She ran FMM on the laptop, so she could work quicker on the keyboard and see a bit more on screen. She looked for her home NAS device. It was on the network but downstairs so she had to expand the Zone until the right StorageDevice cube appeared on screen. All her code was backed up onto that. She did not have time to faff around wondering what the best place for it was, but she didn’t want to destroy it. In the wrong hands, and there definitely some of those! It would be very dangerous. She expanded the Zone further. It got very busy on screen. Each house with assorted humans, pets, appliances, walls, windows, mugs and no Marmite flashed into view. She could see layers of cubes, many representing actual boxes, in neat lines above her sphere avatar. Her loft was full of her old things. She had kept mostly everything from her childhood. The containers were stacked neatly in her loft. She looked across, identifying the house two doors down. No one was in, except for a Feline cube. She dragged her StorageDevice cube across to the cubes, in slightly more disarray than her loft, but on the same z axis, at her neighbour’s location. She picked a spot that looked like it might be behind the collection of junk in her neighbour’s loft, and hit Apply on the Translate. She did not hear the gentle thud as the NAS dropped and nestled into some comfy fibre glass loft insulation. It was no longer a Network Attached Storage, she commended herself on her work.

Her neighbour’s were always strimming or cutting lawns. It felt like that anyway. Each of the manicured gardens got attention from various gardening companies. Roisin had almost tuned out the buzz of a strimmer. It sounded like someone had a new garden machine. It also sounded like it was getting closer. Looking out of the window she was expecting to see, lower down, a hedge being cut or a tree being pruned. The buzzing vibrations were coming from something much higher up. She saw the four disk structures supporting an insect like central body. It was heading towards her window, angled slightly to get some forward motion. Drones used to be fun things to play with. The quadcopter was an iconic shape. This one was starting to look slightly larger than your average snoopers camera platform, it was also looking a little more prickly. As it came closer over the tree line at the end of the garden it was more than clear to Roisin that it had some mods. She had seen a video a while back of a quadcopter with a semi-automatic pistol strapped to it. This was that, but without the Duck tape. If she could see it, it could definitely see her.

The two meters wide, ominously stable, hovering drone levelled out and just sat there, defying gravity. Tiny little tweaks in power and angle made it look like it was teetering on a high wire. Its rotors held out in all directions like a balancing pole. They had found her. It most certainly had a Firearm on it. The refreshed FMM scan showed that, and a CameraDevice and lots and lots of Bullets. Roisin could not see any sleep inducing Dart cubes onscreen.

Fractions of seconds stretched into what felt like minutes as she stared directly at the hovering menace outside her window. She slowly leaned a little in her chair to the right and the drone made similar adjustments to its left. She shifted left, the drone copied. She was hoping this two step was not going to become a Last Tango. She reached under the desk dragging her phone very slowly. Keeping her eyes locked on the drone. Looking down as part of her natural blink cycle. Each blink she lined things up on her phone’s FMM view and typed a few characters. The drone was a very obvious collection of many component cubes. She looked across her desk, the site of several test flights with RC and FMM. She pushed her chair back just a little, acting as nonchalantly as possible as if getting comfortable and compliant. The drone remained focused on her. Then she ducked, spinning the chair and heading for the ground to her left. In the same move she grabbed the open laptop and pulled it towards her with her right hand. Her left thumb hovering over a button on FMM. It all went very well, or it would have done if she had managed to keep her thumb in the right place as she hit the floor. The laptop bounced into her, but was protected by catching the chair arm on the way down, which helped fold it a little more shut.

The drones mounted machine gun initiated a strike with the firing pin on a chambered round. The resulting reactive force sent a small pointed metal fragment directly at Roisin’s window, the return mechanism loaded another shell. The double glazing fractured on both panes as the bullet passed through almost uninterrupted, closely followed by nineteen of its friends. The drone successfully battled to maintain position, also managing to rotate and spray the nineteen rounds across in the direction Roisin had dived. Her office walls sent powder and flakes of plasterboard and paint into the air. The sound was ear splitting. The sheer power of the projectiles sent waves of pressure through and over Roisin.

The barrage did not last long. Roisin corrected her thumb position and pressed the confirmation button in FMM. The actual noise stopped instantly, the ringing continued in her ears. The drone’s appearance changed. Its matt black look was replaced with a more silvery metallic one. It, and all its components, made it look like a special edition collectors model version of itself. It was not quite a pewter drone, but close. Its new look also came with a complete inability to fly. It was now a replica of its former self. It dropped straight down, clanging loudly on the patio below, chipping the softer sandstone slabs. Roisin looked at her FMM. The Join command at Fractal Iteration Level <2710> had worked. She crawled up to a kneeling position, broken glass and dust filled the office. The desk had dark scorches and splinters all over it. She had survived something trying to kill her, AGAIN! It had cost her 10p this time. She had taken an instant decision to do to the drone what she had done to the cap in testing. The metal in the coin may have not gone quite as far as it did with the cap, given the relative size of the drone, but it worked much better than she had hoped. She was reminded of the old arcade game machines. The preserved cabinets still let you play with 10p. With each 10p you got some life, some time to play and battle against the odds. She wasn’t sure how long this 10p would last, so she best get moving.

Roisin crawled across to the rucksack and threw the MacBook Pro in, closing it completely first. She looked across to her Windows laptop. A melted hole had appeared in the middle of the casing. She looked under the desk, there was no exit hole. It would have been right where she had landed on the floor, nearly under that machine. It seemed that Windows, and the machine had taken a bullet for her!

There was a screech of tires out on the street and the distant sound of another hedge trimmer buzz, it forced her into action. They knew where she was, who she was and they seemed pretty intent on her not being here much longer. Her calculations were hasty. She wished she had done the GPS conversion coordinates. She picked a spot on the map, it was very green on the satellite view, about 120 km away. There was no point making a Translate to anywhere nearby. Whatever kit they had scrambled it was in the general vicinity. The target area was big enough, the fields wide open, she concluded, she could be off by a few km, just as long as she had the direction right. She was not there as the deafening flash of light and concussive wave of sound rippled through the air in her, open to the elements, office. The stun grenade created ripples in the dust and the glass shards.

Roisin did a complete three sixty scanning the area. Looking for anything that might pose a threat. A few classically black and white cows stared at her un-phased as they ruminated. She looked at her phone, she had just one faint dot of a signal briefly, then the words No Signal replaced it. She turned it off, she needed to make sure she had enough juice later. Not many charging points here! She reached into her bag and shut the laptop down properly for the same reason.

She was in the middle of a meadow, but on the edge, just about two hundred meters away were a very inviting collection of trees. She ran towards them, ankles occasionally buckling on the uneven ground where moles, rabbits and the sheer weight of cows had made their impression. She dodged and leapt past small dark mounds with flies circling and bouncing on and off them. She caught the edge of one with her foot and the dry surface shattered to the great excitement of its collection of buzzing winged guardians.

The trees were a mix of evergreen firs and much older traditional Oaks. She was no expert on varieties, but it looked like a full mix. Not a managed forest of pines just for farming set out in a regular grid. This was a proper wood, or a forest. It was dark compared to the field. The sunlight did not make it to the forest floor easily. There was a noticeable temperature drop and a slight dampness in the air. Roisin could see her breath form clouds as she exhaled. She was doing a lot of exhaling too as she slumped down, resting sat up against one of the larger specimens in the wood. There was no large hole to hide in like Robin Hood she thought with despair. She was starting to come down from it all. Even her sense of humour was not helping much. Roisin Kincade was in a really bad situation. She was hungry, thirsty as well as stressed to the max. She did go outdoors often, but not to the woods. No phone signal no comforts? It was not her scene. No phone signal meant no-one could find her though. She drifted and daydreamed, tuning into her thoughts to try and work the situation out.

The minutes slipped by as she thought back to everything that had just happened. Then her mind turned to something more pressing. Could they find her, with thermal imaging? How would they know where to look?