Reconfigure (18 page)

“At her home she disabled a Type 29 suppression drone.” He added.

The central screen showed a point of view into her office at home that only her window cleaner would have seen. She saw herself dive to the right of the drone view. Shattering glass and wall dust filled the view. Then nothing, a black screen. The left hand screen showed a picture of the 10p drone at the scene.

“Our initial investigation indicates the drone is now totally fused with Copper and Nickel throughout. Every part is now made of a compound we have yet to ever manufacture. It is being sent to our research colleagues for a more detailed examination shortly.”

All three screens showed pictures of Roisin. Her passport photo, the garden body cam shot and the drone, pre window breaking, view of her.

“This target is the focus of all our efforts as of this moment. She has in her possession a valuable and dangerous asset. The anomalies that led us to her fit the profile of predictions into the potential of the research by the other two suspects. We have combat scenario AI’s working on permutations to counteract this weapon. Our clients require the technology. They do not require this terrorist. Report to your squad leaders for your assignments.”

Another loud command was barked out ending in “YUN!” They all stood and snapped a salute again. The presenter turned and strode off with the same determination and pace as he had arrived with. The rest of the room was ordered to break off. The tightly organised collection dispersed with a more relaxed flowing approach. Roisin mingled with them. Occasionally nodding along with some to the bravado inducing chatter. The group split at the doorway, some went right, some left and started to populate the offices along the way. Doors swung open, several soldiers entered and doors closed. She continued on back towards the stair well. As she opened the door she turned to see that she was the only one heading to the stairs. She closed the door purposefully and headed down to her previous changing place. FMM was showing activity in the garage now. Several humans were present. She pulled up the bookmark for her video recording phone, that she had left in the garage and dragged it to her location. The camera was still running as it filmed the change from desk to the concrete floor in front of her. It took a while for the camera application to tidy itself up and stop filming. The video player showed nothing for most of the recording. Then she watched as four men, in the standard issue gear she was wearing, approach the 10p drone and lift it around and into the back of the dark black armoured van. She could hear voices but not make out anything other than ‘Research lab alpha’. She made sure the 10p drone was bookmarked and tagged in FMM.

She hit the FMM Home button and the shadowy stairwell was replaced by the bright white of the lab again. She typed to Unmeld Doctor Henry, unfrozen he turned to look at her, jumping at the complete overhaul in image. She had got used to the uniform, but for him just a few seconds ago she was in typical street gear, bang on trend, a slightly geek chic young lady. Gathering from his shock he said.

“It suits you!”

Roisin described her sneaky infiltration of the briefing session. Dr Henry was both relieved and shocked with concern in equal measure that Alex was alive. Catatonic is a shade better than dead. He had hope. She then explained.

“The 10p Drone is our tracking device now, surely they want to gather all the research into one place, so where it goes?”

He finished her sentence.

“Is where Alex will be! We’ve got no time to lose!”

Roisin put her hand up calmly.

“We need to let it get where it is going first. It sounds like they are trying to revive Alex not kill her, so for now she is in the best place. Let’s give it a few hours then you can do your Meld thing and I can check from here where it is. Yes?"

Dr Henry agreed. For him time was not flowing in the same way, it seemed like minutes, not months since Alex had left, now several Melds later he was dealing with a completely new person in Roisin. That and the sheer neural effort to deal with all that metadata was making him feel quite unwell.

“Food and rest, that’s what you need.” She said. “Though you do need to just help me call the takeaway."

He nodded, knowing what she had in mind, and Melded once more.

She had not had a chance to ask him what he wanted, she took pot luck. Scanning their nearby town, she spotted a small cube marked Scooter, with a Human cube moving along with it. In the view she had several stacked cubes too. The scooter rider did not notice the change in weight as several pizza boxes stacked themselves on the desk next to Roisin. She used the map to Zone to her previous Marmite store and liberated several cans of fluid. She did not bother examining them, but they ended up arriving as a mix of diet and regular Coke. She brought David back to normal and his tired expression changed to a look of delight like a kid at Christmas. She didn’t care what pizza it was, they usually all tasted pretty similar. Even the ridiculous stuffed crusts oozing hot cheese and burning her face a little did not bother her.

“These are good pizza’s, I use these guys all the time. My house is, or was, I should say, just in the delivery range. I doubt you are here being a few more kilometres out of town?” She made small talk as she chomped.

“You would be surprised how far deliveries can come.” He added between mouthfuls, “We may be a little out of town, but most of this equipment comes from all over the World." He smiled.

“Ironic that now it is here and working, we can get anything from anywhere anyway.” She quipped back.

Pizzas done, David opened the large cupboard next to the burner filled phone one and produced two roll up mattresses and sleeping bags. They each unrolled their set either end of the lab. The adrenalin high crashed for Roisin, her pizza filled stomach pulled her down onto the mattress on top of the sleeping bag and she dozed off, Dr Henry did the same. The lights stayed bright in the lab, the lasers remained constant.

Roisin’s eyes flicked open, then slammed shut again as the bright lights of the lab blasted onto her retina. She heard the familiar clickety click of typing.

“Good morning, or should I say good night?” He said not looking up from his screen.

She struggled up onto one elbow, surprised herself at her black pocketed combat clothing, and felt the weight of the sidearm on her hip.

“Ugh! What was I drinking last night!” She croaked in a joking fashion.

“Diet coke and Mexican pizza.” He replied.

“I really need to freshen up.” She said. Her bladder was full.

“Over there, third door on the right.” He pointed past the whiteboard wall and over to the other side of the lab.

She struggled to her feet, a crawl and a step and she was upright and stretching. The military baseball cap sat upturned on the floor. She remembered back to the old man by the cash machine begging for change. She walked over to the door panel. It required a push to unlatch it. She was half expecting a bucket and mop in a broom cupboard but it opened out into a reasonable sized bathroom. A mix of male and female grooming products lined the shelf near the mirror. She took a look at her now very messed up hair and tried to straighten herself. Seeing her reflection was like a fourth screen from the briefing she had attended.

“You are one tricky customer young lady.” She said to her reflection.

“When you are done come and take a look at this.” He yelled across his shoulder towards her.

“Can I flush?” She shouted back.

“Yes, just use the facilities as normal. We really need amendments to the Breathe routine, but not yet, the tank has plenty of capacity.” He said.

Lovely! She imagined a septic tank’s contents getting dumped in the wrong place, by a cron job, like a farmer protesting with silage at some government cuts. Not a great image, so she moved on. She flushed, washed her hands then wiping them on her uniform she squeezed some toothpaste on her finger and did the best she could to freshen her mouth.

“Right what have we got now then?” She said as she walked back allowing the door to click behind her.

“I realised that our logs were rotating too much. With me being out so long the timer had replaced the log files, or most of them, with fresh versions containing very little due to the inactivity. I was just resetting them when I noticed something in the file system. There is a directory with several save placeholders in it. The files are not really regular files, a sort of symbolic link. I can’t see the contents of the file, but the Load could work in the right context." Roisin looked at him.

“Some of those are my test ones, but that one." She pointed at a file that said, ‘saveme’.

“The time on it is over a month before your ones? It must have been Alex?” He looked at the words on the screen searching for inspiration. The wording sounded desperate and forlorn.

“If Alex saved a state, then I can just Load it and it will be back, just like time travel?” Roisin put the idea forward.

“The Load needs to be in the same Zone, centred on the same base. As I said it can’t just magic things up. The Save is designed to keep markers, the Fractal URL of elements, so that they can be searched and swapped back. Think of it in terms of Schrödinger's cat again. You remove a live cat from the box. You need the box to be there to put the cat back in order to remove a dead cat the next time. No box, no change.” Another awkward answer from Doc Henry she thought.

All this incredible power to move and change things and yet somethings are just as complicated as a Rubik’s cube with the colour stickers swapped around.

“Do you think Alex actually saved herself?” She said it out loud, any other time it would have sounded funny, but she was serious.

“It’s highly likely she gave herself some sort of backup. It could be anything though. Let’s find her first?"

Once again Roisin was the only breathing organism in the lab. She grabbed the debris from the night’s feast and Translated it to some bins she now knew just behind the Greggs in town. She then set the Zone and scanned for the tagged drone. It had come to rest. According to her GPS overlay it was about 40 km away from the HQ, in a small out of town area. Regular pitched roofs of industrial units were visible on the satellite view. It looked like it was at ground level too. No fancy high rise offices for the research guys then? She checked the time it was 3am. Surely there would not be too many guards or boffins to sneak around at this time of night? FMM showed two humans patrolling the estate.

She had already worked out that the CCSO was so arse kickingly influential no one was going to be raiding any R&D labs. There would be no industrial espionage between a cartel of corporates who control everything, even the government, and probably organised crime. The guards would be there to ward off any petty crime and vandals graffiti tagging the place. Watching the guards routine as a set of blocks on the screen was second nature to a gamer. Tactical espionage at this level was a question of timing. Observe, sneak, possibly disrupt. She was in a free roam mode here. She could do this however she wanted. What she wanted was to not get shot, for real.

She found her spot, the guards blind spot. She Translated between the unit that contained the tagged drone and its neighbouring warehouse. It was pitch black. She sneaked to the corner and checked across finding the patrolling guards rounding their own route corners. She couldn’t actually see them, but she had the better than night vision FMM to show her where everything was. Now she was closer to the drone’s hut she could more sensibly Zone around her and check for alarm units, cameras and anything else that might give the game away.

She could see a complex array of devices and numerous benches and partition walls on her FMM view, there were no other humans. There appeared to be a series of flat surfaces, labelled as beds. One of them had an oddly labelled OrganicShell on top of it. Her camera and alarm sweep found twenty-two different camera devices. Using her zoom view she investigated each one, breaking the view down to find which side of the cube was showing a Lens. Knowing the rotation of the objects would have helped a lot in this case, she would have to add that feature later. The Lens cubes gave her a good idea which was pointing where. She did have the ability to rotate objects, even if she didn’t really know what way they were facing. Armed with the Lens locations she made some subtle coverage adjustments. She used FMM to rotate a few of the cameras, just a little bit around from where they were, to give her some room to manoeuvre. Rather than risk any door alarms, it would probably be locked anyway, she Translated just through the wall into what she hoped would be a camera black spot. There were no obvious dramas. No alarms screeched. No guards came running.

The area was lit, but by very faint standby lights. As she moved slowly along the wall she could see the drone, resting on another worktop. Then there was a loud click, followed by an increasing range of clicks echoing into one another as the industrial unit woke up the lighting system. The lights rippled on. Roisin knew she had to turn the things off. She was sure the guards would have seen this much light leaking out for the doors and skylights. She shifted her Zone to include the roof of the unit. There was no time to work out where all the fluorescent tubes were in the ceiling. The boxes all mixed together with wires and tubes, ducting and fans. It was quicker to filter on the word Cathode than Fluorescent, not to mention easier to type. With all the roof Cathode cubes selected she mass translated them to thirty meters east of their current location. Most fell in to the neighbouring lorry yard. They made very little noise. The lorry yard guard dog, she heard in the distance, sounded more like he was unsure of why he was barking and very soon stopped. It was dark again, save for the low level LED lighting. Her eyes slowly adjusted after their bright surprise.

FMM indicated one of the guards was no longer on his patrol route but heading towards her warehouse. She scooted around her camera free zones towards the collection of beds in what looked like a set of a film representing a hospital. The medical equipment was singing to itself, recording a heartbeat. It was attached to a person laying on the bed, covered in hospital style sheets. A drip suspended on a metal hook above the bed delivered some sort of fluids directly into the patient’s arm. An oxygen mask covered the nose and mouth and a large mechanical accordion played air into the patient’s lungs.

Roisin checked her FMM up close, it said this was the OrganicShell. The Examine provided little more detail. No designation, no name or anything useful. Roisin did recognise the patient. This was clearly picture number one from the briefing. This was Alex!

If RK’s search only concluded this was an OrganicShell then she was not going to have much luck reviving Alex. David back at base was no medical doctor and the combined smarts of the lot that were after her had not revived Alex either.

A laptop was open on the desk near the body of Alex. Roisin moved the trackpad. The file on Dr Alexandra Wight was open. She clicked the pictures section. She scrolled back through several pictures of Dr Alex in her current repose. Tabs indicated test results by each picture.

Then she saw the body cam stills. The warped fisheye lens she had seen herself in at the briefing. It looked like a view in an open plan office. Alex was stood with her hands held up. She was not looking directly at the lens. She looked resolute, despite her submission to the gun pointed at her. Other guns were visible behind and to the side. The next picture showed a change in Alex’s face, completely blank and her hands blurred on the still as they started to drop. The final picture was of a rag doll version of Alex slumped in a heap on the floor as the body cam looked down at her. There were GPS coordinates imprinted on the picture. Like an old James Bond film she took one of her vanilla Android phones and started to quickly take photos of the laptop screen. She also took pictures of Alex and the equipment around her. Roisin Translated the phone back to base with a swipe. It was like delivering a message with a very exotic carrier pigeon technique she thought.

Roisin heard a large door slam. She could see torchlight dancing around outside in the main area. She looked at FMM. The guard, torch, uniform and firearm and another projectile launcher were all gathered together and were searching back and forth across the industrial unit.

She swiped to Translate back to base. Nothing happened. She tried again. She felt a wave of panic. She was just Roisin Kincade! Not Roisin Reconfigure Kincade! She checked the phone. No Signal! It had been there a moment ago?

“Suspect is locked in the cage Sir!” She heard from just outside the door.

It was a trap, they had let her in, Alex was obvious bait. She had paid attention to all the kit around the place, but some of it must be jamming her phone signal.

She heard a helicopter overhead and outside the screeching of multiple vehicles arriving. Orders were being shouted. She took each of her phones, that she had as a backup, laying them out on the floor. She unclipped the gun and fumbled around looking and feeling for something like a safety catch. The recoil was intense as she let loose a round into the first phone, then the second. The advance guard, that had radioed in, reacted to the gunfire taking cover. The third round sent pieces of phone in all directions and left a third scorch mark in the fractured tiles. She lay the gun down on the floor and sat cross legged with her hands held behind her head, waiting.

The door nearly ruptured with the impact of the kick, a bright torch burned into her eyes. She then felt an incredible wave of energy across her body. She was aware of two thin wires undulating from her chest whilst her muscles convulsed. The sparking noise crackled in laughter as it delivered the voltage across her body. She felt a thud as another projectile hit her. Even through the pain and the writhing she felt the warm glow, a familiar feeling. Then she passed out.