Guy put the finishing touches to three portions of beef short ribs from the kamado in the garden. The meat was blackened with smoky char and filled the kitchen with a mouth-watering aroma. From the fridge he pulled a bottle of cheap champagne.
“The elixir of life, remember? It’s not about the telomeres. I keep telling them, but they don’t listen.” He smiled as he popped the bottle’s cork and carefully poured the elixir into their glasses.
“So what are you thinking about how to use it all?” said Anna.
“It’s complicated, but it’s just baby step after baby step.” Guy sighed. There was nothing small about the program. “Epimetheus is like Guy Fawkes on crack with a lithium battery jammed up his arse.” He served them their plates piled with ribs, toasted their arrival and sat down at the kitchen counter opposite them. They could tell from his look he had more to say. “Awareness is building out there but there’s a huge amount to do on the information front. That’s all part of Prometheus. Epimetheus is about large scale action for the masses who are always permanently behind the curve. They need structure, procedures, training, gear, command, to develop capability. Average Joes with practically no serious and prolonged training are cowardly, headless chickens. Aspis is protection for that bit of the mob pushed to the edge or just brave enough to act. We reduce their fear with anonymity, unity, and armour. Phalanx builds structure, procedures and command. We need them to follow simple orders. It’s not complicated. Ambuscade is where we augment that simple capability with more than just drones.”
“So, what do you want us to do first?” said Anna.
“Tell me how good these ribs are, then get up to speed with Aulos and Epimetheus. Spot weaknesses, make improvements. Em gets to go home but you’re with me through thick and thin.”
Anna’s eyebrows rose to cast a quizzical innuendo back as she ate. Emile accepted his orders with a nod. With a full mouth he said, “I’d stay longer for the cooking and champagne, dude, but Carolina would hunt me down and kill me. When do we get to see the Harpy?”
“You can’t just see it. You have to fly it. Maybe in a week’s time if you work hard enough.”
After his guests had retired, Guy blew a deep breath of smoke up into the night. The patio was wet and he squeezed and wriggled his bare toes, enjoying the coldness. He felt his heat dwindling from feet up. He took another drag and willed himself to soak up the cold.
She’s a problem. They did this deliberately. If they wanted her working through this they could have kept her in Mexico or the US and she could be doing her thing there. It’s all a fucking test. Now I have to manage her and myself.
His mind flashed between his endless task list, memories of how they had been and his forecasts of how she would be. His test was to find an imbalance where he achieved everything and she never became unmanageable.
He blew out and then did what he knew he had to do; he tried to think about another angle.
How do they feel? What do they expect? They want to see how we each deal with everything, all the time. What’s different this time around? She’s not different. None of that stuff gets changed.
But how does she feel? She might feel just like I do; apprehensive, putting on a front, being polite. Suppressing feelings.
He was giving her too much credit, like he thought they did. He wondered how long it would take before her nature became a problem.
“Breakfast’s in the oven, mate.” Guy had been busy catering for his guests and was heading out of the kitchen as Emile wandered in. “I’ve gotta crack on. I’ve got another start-up to implement and a conference in an hour to get shit done.” Guy left Emile in the kitchen to decide which bits of the excessive English breakfast in the oven didn’t fit with Emile’s new nutrition system. He bounded up the stairs, balancing his coffee in one hand and clamping a thick bacon sandwich in the other. At the landing, Anna came out of her room. She was in fine, sheer nightwear, but looked almost immaculate. Guy gave her a beaming smile while looking her straight in the eyes, made a bee-line to her and kissed her on the cheek.
“Mornin’. I’d give you these but I’ve already spat on them. There’s loadsa stuff downstairs. I’ll catch you in a bit. Em’s there.” He kept going to the second floor without a look back, as though he was possessed by his mission.
The door to his suite was a huge floor to ceiling mirror set at a slight downwards tilt in a heavy frame whose carvings were reminiscent of the Gates of Hell, but less horrific and pained. Closer inspection revealed that from bottom to top the carvings depicted a redemptive rise from a hellish base, through some kind of evolution and enlightenment, to a scene of woods and animals, with no people anywhere in the top section of the frame. In low security mode, Guy stood in front of the mirror, made a sucking face and the door silently unlatched and opened outwards an inch. It was enough for him to get his toe behind the edge of the frame and swing the door ajar to slip inside then pull it closed behind him with his foot. He walked through the 6 foot wide hall-like wardrobe lined with smooth, mid oak cupboards and wardrobes. Ten feet ahead, through an open, floor-to-ceiling door padded with dark leather, was his suite. He traipsed in, placed his breakfast on the desk beside a laptop and plonked himself down in the plush office seat. There was a paper list of things waiting for him on the desk. He worked his way, one call at a time, through his list. At first, he lined up trades and services to keep on top of things. Later, he confirmed a final order of airsoft and paintball equipment and weapons, arranged payment terms and confirmed details. Then he called a recruitment agent to catch up on staffing, then a bank then the local council.
He looked across at the cold coffee and sandwich. As he munched his overdue breakfast, he lost himself in his inner musings.
Being open is easy when it’s mates and professionals and acquaintances. She’s not that and they all know it. Trusting us to find out what works for us is a get out clause. They know what she’s like. It must have all been seen. I need her to get the tasks done without drama or distractions or arguments. Strangers, loose behaviour… nothing to do with me. I’m on this stuff, I’m on my thing. It’d be easier if I had a missus. Or would it? Would she affect that?
He showered and made a promise to himself to take it day-by-day, task-by-task and try to eat his many feelings and concerns. In the mirror, he swore. He’d have to get a trim otherwise those targets wouldn’t buy he was from the Home Office.
When he got back from town, his shoulder length hair had risen to just on the collar and been styled as a wealthy, entrepreneurial mid-manager with a touch of Patrick Bateman. That ticked more than the Home Office, public schoolboy box. He tracked through the building to the wing of office rooms and knocked on their study door. Emile answered and brought him in.
“Having fun?” Guy asked.
“Barely scratched the surface,” said Emile. “Anna’s been swiping on Tinder. Have you found her a date yet?”
“I’ve got a list of candidates. We can start screening them any time from this afternoon if you like?”
“Sure thing, I’m well on track with my Alke work,” she said.
Guy moved beside her to look at the generative interface running on the laptop. “Effective use of trauma treatment tools, techniques and lifecycle in modern disaster management and warzones… That’s nice innit? Do you actually know about that shit or does Cassandra just pick stuff to create at random?”
“Of course I fuckin’ know!” She laughed and hit his thigh with the back of her hand. “And when I’ve read that paper that I apparently wrote, I’ll know what I consulted Alke about.”
Cassandra took care of Anna’s Alke Foundation appointment and freed her of any actual work. Under that cover she was free to do whatever the program required and as she felt. The generative interface produced evidence of commercial or professional activity that was sent through necessary systems to create a paper trail and chargeable activity that would serve as proof of that she had rendered legitimate services. For Anna’s initial period in the UK, Cassandra had created a consultative paper with her name on it that tied into her medical, research and management background. She owned a general practise in Mexico City with numerous branches, where she could practise and remain a legitimate MD. Anna’s medical career was unusual in that she was not a deep specialist but had proven aptitude in trauma surgery and had done intense rotational placements in immunology, cardiovascular medicine and neurology under solid figures in each field. The placements had originated through Alke, which ran a program of sponsored learning in medicine to help medics and scientists move through fields and cross boundaries. Her time in Médecins Sans Frontières had given her an interest in helping people in extreme circumstances like wars and disasters, but she had not pursued that exclusively. Her skillset and experience blended practical and theoretical knowledge in a broader and pragmatic mix that was useful for her within the program. In some senses, she looked like a somewhat political medic who could move from practise to policy at any time. This was the basis for her appointments with Alke, which had fingers in global and regional development of policy and practise.
“Right,” said Guy as he contemplated the paper’s title, “maybe you can give me your insight into my last relationship. That was a disaster that became a fuckin’ warzone.”
“Cassandra’s got a node for that. Just dial in and cry down the line. My advice? Try harder to avoid nutters.”
“Speaking of nutters, there’s a profile I want to try an approach with later.”
Alex Bukowski relayed the Aulos and Epimetheus projects’ practical aspects from Centre through mindspace to Anna and Emile, and they were brought up to speed on both. Alex acted via mindspace as a human relay to the air gapped program systems. The benefits were higher bandwidth and lower time to absorb the information, but learning was not necessarily improved by mindspace relay. STOCALL was the program’s experimental system that moved human learning capability beyond this but it was complex and proceeded on a careful iteration that would have been constrained by conventional ethics. The program’s older members were directly involved in STOCALL testing, which required that they volunteer as the trial and test subjects, at their risk. The results seen so far had been more than promising and very enigmatic.
Aulos was a fearsome means by which to affect society that was born out of a key tenet of the program, namely the importance and sanctity of children and family for the future of the human race. Not just in their need to simply exist, but in the basic fundamentals of nature and nurture. For mankind to move forward it had to deal with the individual, sociological and systemic failings of parents, communities and societies when it came to raising children. Every known and suspected problem around fertility, childrearing, socialisation, education and maturity existed in every society on earth to the point that deciding which to address was a hard choice. Despite its large financial resources, the means to act secretively were always a fundamental limitation that the program had to weigh and overcome.
One problem above all else stood out as time went on. The growing phenomenon of child abuse, the recursive and regressive loops it created and its persistent damage could not be ignored. In comparison to all other problems, the dark desire in humans for their young, be they their own or others, struck everyone as the most stark example of the inhumanity and evil that sullied the human mind, body and spirit.
The issue straddled the animal and the super animal view of humans. If one were to say that a species’ sexual maturity was the marker of “adulthood” and that point therefore gave rise to “normal” sexual relations, then humans might be judged in that light if one viewed them as another species of animal. Of course, while something in mankind had come to psychologically and sociologically move away from the notion that humans were just evolved animals, age of consent contradicted this. The truth was that ages of consent still ranged from 11 in Nigeria to 21 in Bahrain. Several countries simply specified “must be married”, most of which were in the developed Middle East. A deeper look at the marriageable age with or without parental consent, revealed that child marriage was legal and possible in many countries. Within this view, it could be argued that even in the 21st Century many nations accepted that childhood unsullied by sexualisation was not sacrosanct.
What the program referred loosely to as the super animal view was the theory that human evolution, howsoever caused, set mankind apart from the animal kingdom in many ways, and in that the transition from child to adult in society was not demarcated purely by nominal sexual maturity. At the same time, the program’s work combined with existing science to undeniably prove the truth of the saying “we are all made of stars”, which tethered humans to all other forms of life in material and metaphysical ways hence the term super animal. In that view, what set mankind apart and back from other Earthly species was its utterly brutal abuse of and predation on the weakest and most vulnerable in its own societies, for reasons that were nothing to do with the evolution of the species.
A cyclical view of human history suggested that mankind was almost locked in long loops of behaviour that played out in roughly similar ways through the rise and fall of civilisations and societies. Although technology seemed to buck aspects of the cyclical view and trended upwards by many measures, base behaviour at large and small scale often did not, even though it could be influenced directly and indirectly through constantly advancing technology. Knowledge too did not necessarily affect some fundamental aspects of human behaviour for the better. In fact, “knowledge” insofar as it could mean awareness and exposure, could be shown to drive human behaviour down into the blackest of holes.
As the internet had grown, the program had come to the realisation that it was a technology that was simultaneously elevating aspects of humanity while also driving it off a cliff. Extensive monitoring and research had demonstrated the phenomena of child abuse in its many forms was increasing partly as a result of the internet’s ability to make people more aware of and increase their exposure to it. In doing so, the darkest of mankind’s desires were being awakened, fed and spread at a rate that literally no nation could claim to have full understanding of or adequate control over. Gone were the days of finding and accessing limited and highly illicit sources of paedophile material through the post and on cumbersome media. The internet had opened the floodgates and connected dark corners of millions of minds at the speed of light. Now the means to make and send a planet’s worth of abuse resided in every single device.
In this context, there was a dichotomy between improving and protecting childhood. Affecting widespread, beneficial change to childhood in order to effectively produce generally better humans was fraught with the challenges of policy at every level. The program addressed this where it calculated it could have tangible positive outcomes that could serve and link to its wider view of mankind, the Earth and the universe. But this was all largely conventional and subject to the grinding limitations of the governance systems that cordoned off the minds and consciousness of people across the planet. The program’s farms and orphanages in Mexico that spun ill-gotten money off into its beneficial programs was one such example of a largely conventional effort to affect change on a long term basis. It had many such projects around the world wrapped up as charities and NGOs. Its direct covert actions against human trafficking like the raid led by Philipe were another way to pointedly intervene, but reach and scale were limited.
The program had created an entire neural cluster to analyse and identify the areas of action it could take within its means and scope to combat the rise of child sexual abuse and paedophilia. Every item on the list was unreliable. They were known to largely fail through the incapability of those who tried to implement them at scale or wilful obstruction or corruption somewhere along the way. In simple terms, societal prevention of paedophilia was shown to not work because it continued to increase. At the same time, punishment was simply ineffective on a net basis because of the lack of will and capacity to deal with the volume of the crimes, and inadequate allocation of global resources. Another major problem was the effect that exposure to abuse material and the crimes involved in it had on those who sought to fight it. It corrupted or damaged everyone to some degree. All of this spoke of an underlying will to allow and enable the situation to worsen despite most developed and many developing societies’ recognition of the problem as the scourge it was.
“If we as a species want to become better, to be more, and to go farther, we must be able to make consistently good and better versions of ourselves,” said Sal as they had discussed the problem in yet another gathering of program minds. “If the biology and the physical resources to improve are roughly in place, but we keep eating our own like this, what the hell will we have achieved? We’ll still be fucking cannibals wearing spacesuits and wiping our bloody mouths with napkins.”
So it was that the program took two decades to assess and eventually decide on a policy that it could implement on a unilateral basis. The pandemic was the watershed moment that tipped the scales from analysis to action.
“We’ve just crossed the Rubicon,” wept James as he emoted his view of the pandemic and its toxic, flawed and widespread gene therapies. “This is utter madness. We cannot be certain of all the effects until time moves on but if we’re right and mankind is indeed set to contract, there’s every need to increase the literal quality of humans and the human experience in any respect. For me, that greenlights Aulos. The fucking idiots running this meltdown have even given us part of the tech platform we need and full cover under which to implement it.”
“If no one is using sufficient means to do as much as they can to stop this now,” Sal had said, “and it’s racing away from us, then the hope that in enough time humanity will discover a humane counter to paedophilia and child abuse will be moot. It’s already too late for the growing number of victims and they serve to grow the positive feedback loop. There are cycles here like there are in much of human behaviour. The worst aspects of human nature are being nurtured more and more.”
“We can comfortably say we know part of why this is so,” said Harriet. “It’s being industrialised and commercialised into a kind of profit centre, and it’s being weaponised into a means of subversive control over the human mind. It’s way beyond a sick honey pot trap used by the unscrupulous against the corrupt. It’s making the masses corrupt for purposes that we partly know.”
It wasn’t the technology or need for secrecy that made the program’s decision take so long. It took time to sufficiently prove then accept that once certain boundaries had been crossed by someone, they became a predictable risk who would become a danger to the sanctity of childhood. Then it was clearly beyond the program and the world at large to rehabilitate those who transgressed, so strong was the effect of sexual desire on the human psyche. These apparent facts suggested only one option that the program could implement alone, at a scale that could combat the problem: the use of Aulos to unilaterally hunt, trap and kill paedophiles in order to arrest the most damaging of mankind’s base and destructive proclivities, in lieu of any other significantly effective actions. It was the gravity of whether to attempt correction using mass lethal means that took so long for the program to decide. Aulos’ means were in direct contradiction to the program’s tenet to help humanity evolve beyond violence and inhumanity, even though Aulos’ objectives embodied the very same tenet.
In 2020, the signals on the program’s dashboards were all red; paedophilia continued to be detected at increasing rates and forecasts for collapsing lifespan and fertility accelerated in the opposite direction. The pandemic had unleashed a hellish tragedy on a new scale and in doing so had perversely created opportunities for the program and humanity at large.
“This one’s immediately interesting,” said Guy as he opened the Aulos profiles in Fetch. “Police technical administrator. Not a copper but has systems access to investigations, databases and comms. Won’t be up on the law too much. Lives in a flat. Chat logs are there. Audit’s unpleasant. Keeps a clean machine and phone, but there’s another of each in the flat that’s got dirt on them.”
“I’ll scope the block’s water,” said Emile. “You two run your double act.”
“Do you want me to be English or Interpol? I’ll take a device as well. I might as well practise if we go inside.” Anna said.
“Try Interpol. Let’s do a manual scope on this one so we get a feel for how things’ll work for Alphas. After that, let’s try two installs. One in the road and one on a property. Late night jobs.”
Entrance to the target’s four storey, modern flat block was with a call system that dialled a flat number. Anna pulled the car door shut behind her and leaned forwards between the front seats.
“Ericsson FE door control. Embedded camera in the panel,” said Anna. “One external camera looking at the door, high up. Car park coverage as well. Car’s there, empty space beside. Let’s see if he’ll come out. Em, if you wait till he leaves, you can slip in, or jump the door panel’s relay with a magnet. Profile says the service area should be on the lower ground, but there’s three doors on the plans. Two are gonna be electrics. The far one should be a boiler room with water.”
Emile pulled his mask over his head, seated it and pulled on a cap, then got out of the car. Anna drove into the car park and parked beside a red Seat Leon. With their COVID masks on and in the dark, they were hard to make out in the partial light. Guy rolled his window down and banged the bottom of his gloved fist against the Seat’s passenger window to trigger the alarm. It took another two hits before they got what they wanted. A mid height, slightly podgy male with a shaved head came out of the block, scanned the car park and headed for the Seat. He was dressed in black office trousers and a light blueish shirt, as though he worked in a retail store. From shadows, Anna and Guy knew he hadn’t seen them. As he stepped up to the Seat’s bonnet and bleeped off the alarm, Guy dropped his window.
“Good evening,” Guy said through his mask. He spoke in a non-descript, RP accent that couldn’t be geographically pinned anywhere other than upper middle class. “Don’t worry, it’s fine. We kept our eye on it.”
“Eh? What? Was that you dickin’ wi’ my car?” The man was in his late twenties and spoke with a Bristolian twang.
“Sorry to bother. May I just have a chat for a sec? It’s ever so important. Worthwhile as well.” The man stepped back gingerly in suspicion. “Name’s Armitage, Neil Armitage. I’m from the government. Home Office. Here…” He held out an ID card through the window. “Please, take a look. My friend here is Katya Drasz from the police. Please…” Guy waved his ID to entice him. “We need to speak to you but we didn’t want to bother you inside. Sit in your car and we can talk.” Guy pulled down his mask to reveal a sincere smile that could’ve meant anything.
“What you want?”
“Honestly, best if you listen comfortably. Sit in your car, put the window down and we can talk.”
Guy passed both ID cards across once the man was sat in his car. “Armitage, Drasz. We’re a sort of pro-Remain team, what with Katya being from Poland. She’s with Interpol, as you can see.”
The man looked scared and unable to hide it. “What do you need to talk to me for? I… I’m no one. I haven’t done anything.”
“Relax, Connor…” Guy said, waving to get the cards back. “We’d like you to help us so we can help you. Bit of a quid pro quo.” Guy spoke in a slightly lingering tone that made him sound like an annoying, deliberately enigmatic know-it-all. “Katya and I do fairly… specialist work. I investigate internally, she works cross border. You can help us with our work and we can help you with your problems. We don’t have a warrant, we aren’t baddies, we’re here to be friends.”
“I haven’t got any problems. Whatcha mean, problems? I work for the police.”
“We know, we know, Connor. I work with the police too. Or rather, they work for me when I need them to. Sometimes, I work on the police, like I am at the moment. We’re here as friends and friends speak truthfully don’t they, Katya?” She nodded slowly. “Truth is, if the police knew what we knew, you wouldn’t be working for them anymore, would you? Now, now…” Connor stirred and made a noise to interject, “if we had a warrant and we came inside, we’d find your problem straight away and that’d be a dog’s dinner for all of us, wouldn’t it? I mean… we’d lose all your help because you’d be in trouble and you’d… well… you’d be in trouble!” Guy laughed gently. “In this day and age, you can like boys, you just can’t chat up actual boys or any kids. People don’t like it. The kids don’t really like it, do they, Connor?”
“Eh? Whaa…”
“That’s why they look all sad in the pictures, isn’t it?” Guy pulled a weird sad face and wriggled his fingers to symbolise crying. “That’s your problem, Connor. You like sad kids. Or maybe you like making kids sad. Which is it? Is there a difference, Katya?”
“There’s no difference when you’re inside prison,” she said.
“Yeeees. Quite. You should listen to Katya, she knows a lot about prison. So, do we agree, Connor, you’ve got a little problem?”
He said nothing.
“So that’s the first bit of truth. The second bit of friendly truth is that we can help you with your problem if you’ll help us. There’s no need to feel… awkward. Your problem’s quite fashionable. I know loads of fashionable people like you in parliament and… the police!” Guy sounded like he just put two and two together. “Funny that! You working for the police and all. I say… now there’s a coincidence. Birds of a feather and all that. Anyway… If you help us, your problem just stays as your poor taste in fashion. If you don’t help us then you’ll find out no one cares about fashion in prison. How’d you like to help us, Connor?”
“Wha…” He swallowed hard. There was a glint of sweat on his face. “What do I have to do?”
Guy waved a brown envelope in front of his face. “In here’ s a USB key. You pop that in a machine on someone else’s desk for ten seconds then pull it out. That’s all for now. And you get to keep the £500 in the envelope as well. And we keep being your friends. That’s how the Home Office likes to help people with their fashion choices. Quid. Pro. Quo. You never know, it might actually be good for your career one day. How’s that sound?” He waved the enveloped again then threw it into Connor’s car. “If you’d like to help, please have it done in two days, my friend.”
“What if I get caught?”
“Be sensible and you won’t. Just be careful and they won’t know. We don’t give up our friends. Ta ta, Connor.”
They pulled out and turned into the road. 50 meters along, they collected Emile.
“How’d you get on?” Guy asked.
“Not bad. No security, just a shitty lock. Meters were all clear. I used that magnatec thing.”
“What are your thoughts?” Guy said to Anna.
“Annoying voice and a fucking punchable face.”
“I bet he’s lovely on a first date.”
“I wasn’t talking about that freak,” she shot back with a smile.
In the car, Emile programmed the software radio with jamming protocols for the signals he’d detected. Anna lowered the window and sent out the micro drones. The first automatically shot up then moved to overhead the detached house. She flew the second around the property.
“Ring doorbell on the front door. IP camera on the back garden. Assume camera down the side. Front is weakest.”
Emile handed her the software radio and she plugged it into the drone interface to upload the programming and initiate the jamming from the drones. Masked, Emile left the car and walked down street-lit, tree-lined residential street to the driveway of the next door property. He cut to the edge of the drive, against the high fence beneath the light canopy of the trees and moved down in line with the target property’s front wall. No camera was visible on the side of the building. He could hear a light buzz from the overhead drone, amplified by the still night air. He slowly and quietly lifted himself over the fence, hugged the target house’s front wall until he was within arm’s reach of the door. At full reach, he put black electrical tape over the lens of the Ring doorbell as an extra measure, then moved closer, looking for more cameras and a view into the hall through the windows surrounding the doorway. In front of the door, he pushed a gooseneck camera through the letterbox and looked at the connected phone display as he searched for signs of an activated intruder alarm. Satisfied, he withdrew and pocketed the camera, pulled out a Lishi tool and picked the lock. With the door open just a crack, he pushed the straw of a WD40 can into the door’s hinge line and sprayed it before easing the door open just enough to enter. He covered his shoes with plastic shoe guards then slid inside and eased the door to.
He listened without breathing and any advantages that Alphas did not possess. It was still. He took a small torch from his pocket and turned on its very dim light. He eased open the small cupboard beside the front door and checked for the water pipe, but no luck. He closed it and took three steps to the opposite door, sprayed the hinges with oil, then eased the handle down and gently opened it enough to peer through the gap. Finding the kitchen in darkness, Emile went through. He surveyed the L-shaped room. The sink was ahead, against the outside side wall. The kitchen opened out and turned right across the back of the house. Under the sink, he found the water inlet and gently lifted a few bottles of cleaning products out to get clear access to the pipe. He took the Anaideia device - a compact pressure gauge - from his jacket pocket, tested its fit in the space and around the pipe, then squeezed his grip around it to clamp it into place. As it penetrated then locked, there was a slight dunk noise that ran along the pipe. The gauge read 1.2 bar, indicating in was in place. He felt for the activation slider on the back face of the gauge and moved it across. He swiftly replaced the bottles, closed the cupboard and deftly returned to the hall, listening again for movement. In near silence, he slid out he front door and reversed all of his entry moves.
As he approached the car, Anna recalled the drones.
“Piece of cake. No pets, no alarm. Doorbell was creepable. Device went on fine. It could be trickier if the plumbing was crowded. As long as you’re carrying each device and the fitting tools, you select what’s best.”
“Next one?” asked Guy.
They aborted the third target.
“No way the meter’s coming off.” Guy had tried to switch out the target’s water meter at the access point just on the pavement in front of the house. “There’s no room to work in the hole, the nuts are too tight for the space and freezing the whole thing will make some of it tighter. It’d be better to fake a leak inspection and work in the day or just make another device to attach to ground pipes.”
At home in the small hours, they sat in the kitchen and compiled a list of what they’d learned and sent it back to Cassandra.
“Thanks for helping out. It’s more fun with friends,” said Guy. It was true. He’d spent long stretches of time working alone, developing plans and designing systems and tools. Although he ran a mixture of companies he had been somewhat reclusive for several months. Emile hugged him like a brother and gave him a kiss of affection on the top of his head.
“Don’t work too hard all alone, little brother. Good families help each other and so do good teams. We’re both. You know that. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Yeah, I just get sucked in and leave people behind. Sleep well.”
Anna went to the fridge and poured them the remainder of the previous night’s champagne. She took her glass across to the corner sofa and stretched out on the dark brown leather. It was 2AM but she was on Mexican time.
“Do you think this’ll work?” she said.
Guy leaned back in his chair at the kitchen table, keeping his eyes fixed on her. He sighed slowly, stretched up his arms, raised his eyebrows and widened his eyes as if contemplating magnitude and beginning to limber up for it at the same time. They both knew her question wasn’t about the technical aspects of the projects.
“Anaideia delivery’s pretty straightforward, but there’s a few issues yet to come. As for controlling targets, it depends. It’s easy to manipulate a Joe, isn’t it? They’ve got no power, no leverage, no resources, no knowledge. Tiny lives can be fucked with and kicked in by almost anyone. Just ask anyone who had a stalker, came from a shitty background or an abusive relationship.” He knew. So did she. “As we move up the food chain, it’ll get harder. As long as we don’t rely on a target too heavily, it doesn’t matter if it fails. How do you feel about Aulos?”
“It’s necessary. Overdue. I think it’s good. That cunt tonight was sweating after a minute. I was smiling under my mask.”
“Are you so… certain?” Guy softly asked.
“Of course!” she almost barked, her smile and warmth quickly draining to a certain edge of aggression. “Clean up and use them to help clean in the process.”
She lay on the sofa on her side, still in her waist length tan leather jacket and darker brown, block heeled knee boots that hugged over her tight, black jeans. Her clothes were quality but not showy and made her look like she could have been almost anyone, including an Interpol police officer or a well-off civilian anything. It wasn’t what she naturally chose when she didn’t have to play such a role, although she played many roles by choice. When he had last seen her, her hair was almost halfway down her back and dyed a variated dark brown, styled in soft curls. Now it was an angled, razored, long bob in varied shades of blonde. Mexico had darkened her olive skin into a rich, mid tan that matched her accent, which sounded Spanish to those who didn’t listen but betrayed Eastern European roots to those who did. Something about her nose and mouth reminded him of Penelope Cruz, with a slightly squared jaw, taught cheeks and dark, almond-shaped eyes. She had been cute in her youth and grown into a kind of lean, sultry attractiveness that developed as she had learned about and accepted herself.
“There’s a huge amount of targets. That’s a major challenge,” said Guy, his face turning into a scowl of deep contemplation. “But we’ve got no legal backstop. We should think about changing that. There’s a few benefits to doing that, although the way we do it is a bit tricky.”
“Automate as much as possible. Focus the manual approaches on the high value Joes. I’m up for making this work. It’s almost a proper intel job. This is what they do, just not on this scale or for such a good reason.”
She gives up her mechanistic way of thinking too easily. That means she still thinks I am what I was. That’s useful.
As they’d spoken, she’d rolled a joint from a supply in her handbag. Without asking, she sparked it. Guy sat quietly for a minute, watching and waiting. When she’d smoked enough to need an ashtray, she offered him the joint. That was her small but meaningful way of getting something she wanted.
“No, I’m good. There’s an ashtray under the sink.” He didn’t pander to her. He could see in the small clues in and around her eyes that there was an annoyance and a disappointment. As she rose to conform to his implied request, he rolled himself a cigarette. She came back to sit at the table and placed the ashtray down. Guy stood, opened the door to the veranda and smoked in the doorway.
“How much did you already know about Aulos and Epimetheus?” he asked. There had been shared sessions and periodic updates. Things weren’t heavily compartmentalised but not everyone’s knowledge of everything was equal. Interest, time, security and relevance were all factors, even though they were all encouraged to be specialist generalists, as humans were built to be.
“Partial. I started learning when we were training Philipe. I figured you’d show me Epi. You know, fill me in.” To those who could discern, that was her unsubtle attempt to start setting a tone.
“Looks like Centre stole my thunder. I’m away for a couple of days so keep Em company, keep testing Aulos and Epimetheus. Use the field station, test the gear. I need you to learn all of the Ambuscade suite and deployment tactics. Whatever you feel about it all will be good to hear, OK?”
She nodded.
“So what's this warzone disaster you mentioned?” she said. It'd been just over a year since he'd last seen her. Hardly any time for anything other than work.
“I was just kidding. I haven't had a relationship, disaster or otherwise.” It was true. The disaster had happened long before.
He slung his cigarette, passed behind her and kissed her lightly on the top of her head. “See you when I get back.”
Guy arrived at the first Run & Gun Paintball and Airsoft site on the old farm in Denham, west of London, to find the car park completed and the place busy with the construction crew. The site was close to completion and the others would swiftly follow on a template. The central building was being fitted out and clad, and the joiners had built up each arena with structures. The critical ground work fell to him and the Alphas. He made for the centre to make his presence known. He played things on the site as a common, straight-talking but jovial sort which usually helped head off issues before they became problems. After he checked in with the foreman to run through his inspection, he found Jack at the practise range, on his way towards the arenas.
“Guns are alright, bud.” Jack gave him a nod as he fired off a load of airsoft BB rounds at a target. “Reckon we’ll need another two weeks before this lot finish and fuck off, then we’ll be left with the plant gear. Just gotta time the structural materials for the shed then we can get going. We can get the shed up and the banking around the urban arena done in three weeks if we smash it round the clock.” Jack played up his Mancunian roots and accent a lot to meld with the work crews. He gave off an air of someone who wouldn’t take any shit and said relatively little, but he was much more moderate and urbane in reality.
Once the main work on the paintball site had been completed by the contractors, Guy and the Alphas had to complete a 40 metre square cattle shed with concrete floor to house animals that would graze the surrounding fields. Then the last arena waiting to be built was a kind of urban set up with mock buildings. The plan was to construct a concealed concrete basement under the shed and use the spoil to make high, sloping banks around the urban arena by piling it over a hollow structure so they looked completely natural. They would be under pressure to complete the work quickly without drawing attention. Jack and the other Alphas were solid in skills and attitude and would become the lead Epimetheus team from this and future paintball sites around the country. The Alphas were the Ambuscade.
In his suite at the hotel, he knew he had to speak to Centre. It was what they expected, regardless of what was right or what he needed. He pinged Thomas, Harriet, James, Sal and Bart. They all joined. He knew better than to try and withhold from them. His feelings of exasperation, apprehension and potential intentions filled mindspace.
“I have so much critical work, and she's capable of helping but potentially hindering. What I think of her and feel towards her is a distraction in itself. The ways I could deal with that… some of the ways I think I might manage her are distracting as well. There could be blow back. Why did you send her? Is this a test?”
“Testing you isn't the point, it's an intrinsic part of this. The whole thing is a test of us all. How does she distract you?”
“It's conflict. She's a mirror to a part of me that… it’s her darkness. Parts of it are buried, parts of it she embraces. I went into it and I… I can empathise and sympathise with some of it. I'm afraid of facing the depth of her damage again.”
“She's the first Jersey girl. Part of this is the test of the program's effectiveness with her. What do you think is the biggest risk? What makes you most afraid?”
“Our natures are the biggest risk. It’s empathy that makes me most afraid. Don't you think so too?”
“Nothing and no one is perfect. These are the times that push us all and challenge the work we’ve done for ourselves and with each other. If we are transparent we can help each other. That goes for you and her together, and with us.”
“There might be limits to your ideas or to us. Control is necessary and if that’s lost, it could be difficult to recover.”
“Bryce can guide you. He’s decompressing now but he’ll call.”
Great, fascinating read. Due to the compressed complexity I had to take my time but it was well worth the effort. Thank you for the pleasure and enjoyment. And, ..."technology that was simultaneously elevating aspects of humanity
while driving it off the cliff." Yeah! Again, thank you!