CHAPTER FIVE | NEO BRITANNIA

  40 hours until Contact, 27 days until Convergence

  ‘There were those who had sensed it, long before it arrived. The rest were like children, fumbling through a darkness they had yet to give a name.’

  – from ‘Humanity Before Convergence’ by Laithan Shah

  ‘What d’ya mean... “maintenance”?’

  The witness, Declan Carmack, last night’s rostered security guard, shuffled beneath the detective’s lanky-brown scrutiny. ‘I’ve been tellin’ up top to pimp the ‘veillance system for years, but... you know how it is with these ol’ buildings—all the ched goes toward keepin’ it standin’.’

  ‘You really expect us to believe that a man died on your watch and that neither you nor the cameras saw any of it?’

  ‘We’re runnin’ fumes on a pre-Wall system. What else do you want me to say?’

  Seeming to sense the tension, the shorter, apple-shaped investigator moved forward. ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Carmack.’ She fired up her contact information, his retrofitted smartie buzzing with the request to “bluespoon” her access slate. ‘Please contact us if you remember anything.’

  ‘Voids in the blood pool,’ Laithan murmured as the witness made his exit, ‘yet no CCTV. Any of this stinkin’ for you yet?’

  ‘It does seem a tad convenient,’ Uainin said. ‘But, other than some self-inflicted wounds to the face and upper portion, the body shows no sign of a struggle. Regardless of whether someone had been present at the time of death, all evidence still points to suicide by overdose.’

  Laithan grumbled something unintelligible as he pulled out his hip flask. Sensing the hopelessness... the despair, Uainin gunned for the softer approach.

  ‘Laithan—’

  But Laithan didn’t let her finish.

  ‘Let’s say we’re both right.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Let’s say that the victim took his own life, but that someone was with him, recordin’ for’—he scrounged for the appropriate word—‘posterity. What kind’ve person would’ve helped with that—standin’ behind a tripod while a man shroomed so hard he skullfucked his own glazzies?’

  Uainin sighed. Endemic to the Fringee mentality, the detective had always possessed a near-Shakespearean way with words. ‘I’d assume someone who shared his conviction,’ she said. ‘His beliefs.’ She lifted her access slate, the holograms stuttering as they fought to re-sync. ‘Designated next of kin... a Brother Donati and Sister Campion. Looks like they run a foundling institute down in Sutton.’

  ‘Dammit. Why is it always kidowers?’

  Uainin watched him snatch a second mouthful of vodka as they stepped out of the museum’s dedicated Control Room. She remembered the last night they had spent together, the night before everything went to shit, the way he had looked so striking atop her, panting strings of pharyngealised sweet nothings until she could do nought but wail from the bliss.

  ‘Laithan?’

  The museum’s director was approaching them, looking understandably unsettled at the news of a suicide staining his marble floors.

  ‘Sir,’ Laithan grunted, fleecing his flask with practised proficiency.

  ‘Good God, man! How are you?’

  The question was stupid. So idiotically smooth-brained that Uainin wanted nothing more than to throttle him.

  But Laithan shrugged it off. ‘Can’t complain. You?’

  ‘These bloody Neo-Gnostics! I swear to God—why couldn’t he just’ve quietly huffed some Nox like everybody else?’

  Nox, the city’s leading dark web asphyxiant. Uainin kept herself from saying a word. But the silence? Nuclear.

  ‘Too quick,’ Laithan said. ‘Transcendence is in the process.’

  With that, the director remembered to whom he was talking. ‘I was... sorry to hear about your father. A truly terrible loss. He had such a... astounding knack for history.’

  Laithan’s eyes narrowed. ‘“Astounding”. Was that what you called it?’

  Uainin relished the way the director squirmed.

  ‘Yes, well... I shan’t keep you any longer. We’ll be able to open as normal, I hope?’

  Laithan gave a noncommittal shrug. ‘There’re a few loose ends I’d like to tie up, but I s’pose forensics has all they need.’ He looked at Uainin. ‘What say you, boss?’

  ‘My boys can start mopping up,’ Uainin said, levelling her eyes toward the director. ‘Assuming you’ll remain close by for questioning.’

  The director blanched.

  ‘Questioning?’

  ‘Well, you know... “loose ends”, and all.’

  ‘So mean,’ Laithan applauded as they exited via the museum’s forecourt, heading for the awaiting rank of autonomous taxis. ‘He’s gonna be sweatin’ all day.’

  Uainin contemplated the smile he had flashed her then, contemplated it all through the long drive south as he slipped into an alcohol-induced stupor. It was not the smile she knew, the smile she had fallen in love with.

  It was a smile of fraudulence, of strain.

  A smile that did not reach the eyes.

  —Viotto. Report.

  Checking to see if Laithan was fully unconscious, Uainin opened the notification.

  —Site cleared as requested. Witness tagged for mop.

  —You’re sure they’ll run?

  —They always run.

  —Roger. Keep tabs. Await further orders.

  Uainin studied Laithan one last time, so heart-wrenchingly miserable.

  So vulnerable.

  —Additional resources required at mop. Potential bait-and-trap in progress.

  —Explain.

  —Suspected cat-two in tow. Ability class: claircognisance.

  * * *

  Koenig Tower was a structural behemoth, a vertical megacity spearing through the financial heart of Neo Britannia. Floodlit by the neon of newscasts and commercial holographs, the megastructure was sleek and monochrome, a conical shard of light tapering to a point over a mile above the surrounding urban chaos. Powered by a sophisticated webwork of nuclear power generators, wind turbines and air-scrubbing electrochemical fuel cells, the tower was a sky-high microcosm for the super-rich, sustained by a self-contained infrastructure of hospitals, schools, retail outlets and leisure centres. A citizen could spend their whole life within the skyscraper and want for nothing, a privilege for which a million cloistered residents were happy to pay a monthly tenancy fee, some equal to the average citizen’s yearly salary. Bolstered by such astronomical rental yields, Koenig Tower was obscene in its decadence, an ever-present reminder of Koenig Corp’s supremacy.

  Standing within an air-conditioned lobby adjacent to the helipads, the tower’s Herculean base distending into the surrounding pollutant soup, Dr Penelope Song nodded greetings to passing tower-dwellers as the city entered its morning peak. As Koenig Corp’s leading scientist, she was used to their unfriendly stares. Since the tainting of the Earth’s atmosphere thirty years ago, the city’s corporate elite had done well to paint the scientific community as a bunch of interfering fools. But, in truth, stratospheric aerosol injection had never been intended as a long-term solution to the global climate emergency of the early twenty-first century.

  Its purpose had been to buy time.

  After centuries spent “symbiosing” themselves to infrastructures dependent on fossil fuels, the logistics of transitioning human civilisation to nuclear or renewables was a turn-of-the-century watershed of monumental proportions. To add a little breathing room, aeronautic agencies, inspired by the instances of atmospheric cooling following volcanic eruption, suggested the introduction of sulphuric aerosols in the stratosphere, a way to simultaneously increase the Earth’s albedo and lower temperatures whilst the world shifted to a more sustainable way of living. But unbeknownst to the public, those with the power to exert change dragged their feet, interpreting the second chance science had given them as an excuse to cash in on the monetary comfort only fossil fuels could provide.

  Their short-sightedness proved devastating. Following the 2047 Financial Crisis, it became necessary for all publicly funded agencies to cease their involvement with the project. With a failed reduction of carbon dioxide, this immediate cessation triggered a termination shock response, rapidly warming the planet at a rate more severe than if the scientists had never intervened at all. With the Earth wilting upon the edge of total biospherical collapse, the world’s governments ordered the learned communities to devise a solution: something quick, efficient and—most importantly—cheap.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  And just like that, SADM, the Stratospheric Aerosol Dissemination Missile, was launched into the sky.

  Leaning closer to the lobby’s encircling windows, Penelope stared up towards the patches of atmosphere visible between the surrounding megastructures. Armed with a fourteen-kiloton, chain-reactive payload, SADM had been intended to permanently cool the Earth while ridding it of its pesky over-saturation of carbon dioxide. Now, like countless others, a planet being choked toward a slow but frozen oblivion had been her inheritance. She had never felt the warmth of a sunbeam on her cheek, the caress of a sulphur-free breeze. It was only the roiling murk of an atmosphere in torment that she knew, yellow-brown and septic, the all-embracing brand of humanity’s negligence.

  Exhaling a breath of recycled air, it seemed to Penelope that Earth had always been doomed, assured from the first moment Man had struck fire from wood.

  ‘Doomologist!’

  ‘White coat frink!’

  By the time Penelope had turned round, the two troublemakers were already gone, melting into the Tower’s morning stream of commuters as if they had never existed. ‘Stand down,’ she snipped to her cluster of guards, whirling toward the threat like dogs to the scent.

  Grizzled and pockmarked, Gasper—a veteran of the Border Wars and the Tower’s long-standing chief of security—promptly grumbled his disapproval. ‘A slight against you is a slight against Koenig, ma’am.’

  Penelope rolled her eyes. Though she knew nothing would please Koenig more than watching her desiccate a pair of bo-hippie skid marks, frankly, she couldn’t be arsed—more of a reminder as to why she rarely left Upper Research.

  Beyond hermetically sealed windows, Neo Britannia was exhausting, the prop-rotor systems of aerodynes and autonomous utility drones thrumming through the glass as they serviced the Tower’s protruding helipads like bees to a hive. Beneath that was the ever-persistent white noise of the masses, their infernal chatter punctuated every couple of seconds by the blare of a nearby commercial or fudmongering newscast. Lining every surface, garish holofronts flaunted the latest moneymaking fad to a society clinging on until the next brain-numbing distraction, their neon glare often the only reliable light source in the gloom of an inhibited sun.

  Amid the chaos, Penelope focused on settling her nerves. Whilst life within Koenig Tower—and wider Neo Britannia—was far from easy, it was better than subsisting in the frigid wastes beyond the Wall.

  Though not necessarily the death sentence presented by the media, reconnaissance data obtained from surrounding relict habitats suggested living conditions far removed from the societal comforts Britannian citizens had grown accustomed to. Between the seasonal bouts of freezing supercells, abrasive dust storms and bleaching rains, Earth was no longer the environmental paradise it had once been. Over the years, Koenig Corp had mastered shielding Neo Britannia from that bitter reality, its technology supplying the masses with an Oppidan oasis within the cold-cankered rot. Naturally, it was far from perfect, but Koenig Corp’s message to those who ever yearned for something more was simple: “Better the devil you know”.

  One only had to glance at the omnipresent newscasts to sense it. Following the death of Sioned Hines—a much-needed Parliamentary pruning—Koenig-backed media outlets had been flawless in steering the public towards the condemnation of Al-Qabda and the political irritants that led them. With racial dissent already saturating the Interior, success had been more or less assured. Crippled by decades of corporate-backed malarkygarchies and xenophobic agendas, the remaining insurgents stood little chance against the influence of Koenig Corp aspiration.

  None of it, of course, ultimately mattered in the end. Humanity’s salvation did not reside within the crooked halls of Parliament or in the secret meeting places of the oppressed. According to Wilfred Koenig, it was nothing more than a necessary discomfort before the bliss of deliverance.

  Penelope wouldn’t have described herself as much of a believer at the start of her career. Before now, she had never seen much point in exercising her spiritual needs. The pre-Wall religions had contained too many contrivances for her young mind to appreciate, and—in her eyes—they had no place alongside the rationalities of science. During her first years at Koenig Tower, Wilfred’s philosophies had appeared farcical at best, the absurd eccentricities of a man seemingly determined to shoulder humanity’s future. However, despite her misgivings, she was content to engage in nonsensical pseudo-science if it meant bread and board. She had never expected her research to bear fruit or, at the least, prove Wilfred right.

  ‘My god,’ he had announced with a rapturous murmur, his insatiable hunger briefly assuaged for one perfect moment. ‘You’ve done it.’

  The months that followed were the most thrilling of Penelope’s life. Suddenly, she was the head of an entire department, gifted with a research team and a state-of-the-art laboratory, the best that money and Underbelly favours could buy. By day, she continued to peel back Creation’s face, discovering the answers to questions she hadn’t even known existed. By night, she was at Wilfred’s side, his new favourite, treated to all the pleasures that the attention of a trillionaire entailed.

  But Penelope was no “oxytocined” twit; the truth behind his attentiveness was plain: nothing more than a perverted form of inducement built upon the expectation that her research continued to produce results.

  Penelope peeked at the holos orbiting the access cuff clipped around her wrist. The two close protection officers selected by Koenig himself were progressing without incident along the skylanes back to Koenig Tower, the tracking device she had implanted within the arm of their charge performing well in transmitting their ETA. Penelope had objected to transporting the asset in something as glaringly obvious as a Koenig Corp aerodyne, but Olek Barnes, the senior of the two guards, had been insistent.

  ‘What we lose in subtlety, we gain in speed.’ He head-gestured to the glow-glinting glare of the rookie opposite the table, the latest success along Koenig’s career-long march toward “cyborgic liberation”. ‘Besides, with Bixby’s eyes, we’ll be able to see an incoming hack or RPG before an insurgent even dreams it.’

  Wilfred’s eyes were equally startling against the bird’s eye projection of the Royal Albert Hall, a short wavelength scatter of glacial blue. ‘Very well. Proceed at once.’

  ‘Apologies, Mr Koenig, but shouldn’t we wait? Our operatives within the CTC are still securing the site. Immediate Koenig Corp presence will undoubtedly—’

  Wilfred stopped him with a look.

  ‘Yes, Mr Koenig.’

  The city’s corporate overlord trailed a finger down the freshly wounded arm of the young woman standing beside him, enjoying the way the protection officer stiffened at her petrified shivers.

  ‘She doesn’t leave your sight, Barnes.’

  Wilfred was right to be protective. Able to access the void space permeating reality as if it were a mere extension of herself, Helena Koenig possessed talents rarely seen within the limited population that shared her exceptional genealogy. Cycling another inhale of bleach-scented air, Penelope continued to study the pings of the girl’s tracking device as it inched its way back to Koenig Tower.

  As far as she could tell, the operation had been successful. That fact alone permitted her a small smile of relief. Wilfred never seemed to query the details when things ran smoothly, and what Wilfred didn’t question... wouldn’t hurt them.

  * * *

  Sensing the eyes of Koenig Tower upon him, Nicholas “Nicks” Bixby landed the aerodyne with all the clawing pretence of an up-market chain-chow.

  ‘Subtle,’ Olek muttered, flicking free his restraints.

  Dr Penelope Song and an armed escort were already waiting, watching from the lobby adjacent to the skyscraper’s protruding flight deck. Olek shielded Helena from the brunt of the wind as he led the way to the climate-controlled vestibule, the screeching squalls cut short by the perfunctory slide of an automatic door.

  ‘Bixby, you’re dismissed.’

  Barely inside, Nicks drew up at the doctor’s greeting, scalpel-sharp. ‘Ma’am—?’

  ‘Get. Barnes?’

  Security snapped into a box formation, civilians scuttling to the walls. Olek nodded, following as the doctor turned for the elevators, shoring Helena’s steps as she clung on beside him.

  ‘Well?’ Penelope Song pressed.

  ‘I... I recovered it,’ Helena said, soft but steeled. ‘“Descendant... is in danger. Threat level: certain. Forty hours until Contact. Twenty-seven days until Convergence”.’

  Penelope’s eyes made a lazy orbit, their dark gleam weighted by the heavy pull of disdain. ‘How predictably vague.’

  She stepped into the next arriving elevator, her presence, buttoned within clinical white and soulless authority, swallowing space. Commuters decamped without protest, regardless of their destination. Olek fired a silent enquiry Baen Gasper’s way, the security chief’s answer conspiratorially quick, a note beneath the table.

  They were going “up top”.

  Magnet-locked to a cushion of hum, the elevator moved sideways first, sliding them from Tower’s periphery to a central spine of climb-lines. With a loosening whoosh, tunnel-tightness surrendered to open air, the windowed cabin beelining to the access core via the skyscraper’s faux-hypaethral hub. Helena quailed, her gaze momentarily snagged by a bottomless floor, the clear throat of air yawning below them. Beyond the sight of present company, Olek dropped his hand to thread with hers.

  Approximately ninety thousand square meters in size, Koenig’s Tower’s central atrium was Neo Britannia’s hidden pearl—a man-made cave of wonders. The perfect fusion of architecture and ecology, those with the time could promenade through manicured arboretums or admire the verdancy of soaring green walls. Citizens could run the athletic track, cycle the open-top velodrome, or swim within the accompanying lake, complete with a two-hundred-metre waterfall. By eventide, the flat-white light of the scattered UV spheres would deepen to a mellow orange, encouraging citizens to bask upon the sundecks arranged beneath them. In a world lacking natural sunlight, it provided tower-folk with a much-needed source of vitamin D. Olek did his best not to look upon the scenes too enviously.

  Angling into ascension, reaching the Tower’s uppermost floors took less than two minutes, the elevator cabin accelerating to thirty metres per second before slowing to a halt at Wilfred Koenig’s private apartments. Forging the way down a brief, wainscotted hallway, Penelope wiggled her jaw to repressure her ears as she smoothed out the non-existent creases in her lab coat. At the end of the hallway, a butler stepped out to greet them.

  ‘Good morning, Dr Song—Miss Koenig. Mr Koenig is in his workshop.’

  The doors swung open to reveal a large, split-level reception area, dominated by a sunken conversation pit and fluted black columns; a room of old-world luxury and dogged persistence. Olek took a moment to appreciate the splendour. A pair of eighteenth-century embossed leather chairs from Venice, a Ming dynasty rosewood coffer with a hornless dragon design from Shanghai, and a mid-nineteenth-century Navajo blanket from Los Angeles—each a testament to the master craftsmen of bygone ages, enduring reminders of a time when life was defined by more than—well... what was left.

  ‘Wait here,’ Penelope said.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Gasper replied, offering a subtle nod before gesturing his men to take point around the room.

  Olek waited to be challenged next, but when no such command came, he aided Helena across soft cream carpets toward the door to her father’s private research area.

  ‘Wilfred,’ Penelope called out, hovering at the entrance.

  ‘Song,’ a voice answered, soft yet laden with a chill. ‘Come.’

  Wilfred’s workshop was dimly lit, a strange mix of cutting-edge machinery and half-finished projects illuminated only by the “holohedron” malfunctioning in the centre, sputtering erratically between jagged bursts of colour, desperate to hold form. Olek blinked hard, his eyes fighting to reset.

  ‘We’ve recovered the message left by that traitor Hines.’

  They found him lounged upon a multi-piece sofa, staring up at the stuttering metaform—a glass of wine in hand.

  ‘Daughter?’

  Helena stepped away—a ship beyond the harbour. ‘“Descendant is in danger. Threat level: certain. Forty hours until Contact. Twenty-seven days until Convergence”.’

  Olek felt it all—fear, paralysis... pride. She looked so fragile, so... shakingly frail, but beneath that fair-blonde ashenness—feeble and depleted—there was fire. Light.

  Wilfred performed a long, drawn-out sigh. ‘Then Ninanak has dealt her cards. They will come for her.’

  ‘Helena will be safe in the Tower,’ Olek blurted—knee-jerk, sharper than intended. ‘Al-Qabda won’t be able to—’

  A glare from Penelope silenced him.

  Wilfred took a slow sip of wine. ‘You’ll need more than glass and sentiment to stop what’s coming, boy.’

  His eyes slid to Helena—star-coals forged from the pale burn of permafrost.

  ‘Come. Sit, daughter. I also... have news.’

  Another glare from Penelope as Helena slipped further away. Every muscle in Olek clenched, pressure coiling in his chest, the silent urge to scream damn near suffocating. Smirking, Wilfred Koenig lifted a hand.

  The gram above them shifted—a chromatic, multifaceted shatter widening into an atom-thin screen.

  ‘STONE! SPIRE! SPIRE! SPIRE!’

  It took a second for Olek to register what he was looking at: a sickly figure convulsing on a marble-wrinkled floor—Neo-Gnostic, judging from the robes.

  ‘STONE! SPIRE! STONE! STONE!’

  Penelope nearly stumbled. ‘You... You used it on Laurits?’

  Wilfred didn’t flinch. If anything, his smirk widened—predatory, nothing but fang and frost. ‘What do you make of it?’

  ‘It... it could be a pattern,’ Penelope said, grasping for logic—those same two words, stone and spire, repeating like some broken prayer. ‘I would need time to—’

  The priest started to claw at his own face, his wails growing laboured, edging toward release.

  ‘—to... to know for sure.’

  ‘Who was he?’ Olek demanded; death be fucking damned.

  Glittered with tears, Helena dragged her eyes—her father’s eyes—from the recording, now silent, its wickedness complete.

  ‘Laurits. His name was Tiidrik Laurits.’

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