He listened with dismay to the silence that greeted his request.
Addie said, ‘I don’t understand. What’s going on?’
‘That video of me...’ Brodie waved his hand at the screen. ‘It’s not me. It’s a deepfake. What do they call it...?’ He searched for the term. ‘Neural masking.’ He slammed his fist down on the dashboard. ‘They’ve set me up for this.’
Eve interrupted. RANGE FIVE MINUTES. And an alarm began to sound. A piercing, repetitive wail that filled the aircraft. His video was replaced on-screen by a flashed warning: BATTERY LEVEL CRITICAL. The battery symbol was red.
They were over Mull now, and Brodie looked down in impotent frustration as they flew over the golf course above Tobermory, the land passing beneath them before giving way to the Atlantic Ocean sweeping in from the west in white-crested waves.
‘Why aren’t we landing?’ Addie asked, fear making her shrill.
And he realised now why it was that Brannan had let them go. ‘Because they’re going to drop us in the ocean,’ he said. ‘You, me, Cameron and all the evidence of government cover-up at the nuclear plant. We’re dangerous. And expendable.’
He stared out, wild-eyed, as they overflew the upper half of the island of Coll, and the vast expanse of the Atlantic ahead beckoned them to their final resting place. He had forgotten now about his wound. The survival instinct had kicked in, adrenaline overriding pain.
‘No! No! No!’ he bellowed. He stood up and swung a fist, feeling bones breaking in his hand as he struck the glass and smeared yet more blood on it. He turned to press his back to the windscreen, arms stretched out to either side like Christ on the cross. His mind was racing. Thoughts tumbling one over the other in blind panic. But he knew there was something he could do. Something just out of reach. If only he could remember.
He looked down at daughter and grandson staring up at him in sheer terror, and he could hardly breathe. He said, ‘Jesus Christ, Addie. I was in the delivery room when you were born. I watched you draw your first breath. I’m not going to watch you draw your last!’
He slumped into his seat, burying his face in his hands. Think! Think! Think! It was so hard above the wailing of the alarm and Eve’s constant prompting to buckle up again. And he knew at any moment that Eve was simply going to stop flying and drop them silently into the ocean. He tried to focus on the day he flew downriver to pick up his flight out to Mull. The technician in yellow oilskins who had run across the grass from the clubhouse at Helensburgh golf course. He had sat in beside Brodie and primed Eve for flight. Brodie screwed up his eyes. Tiny was so much better at this than him. He noticed things, remembered details that Brodie missed. A visual thing, he’d said it was. You could remember images better than words. And better still if you could link either to something personal. Something you could relate to.
Brodie tried to replay in his mind what it was that the technician had done. Of course! He’d tapped the screen simultaneously with his index and middle fingers. The image of him doing it returned from some deep memory recess that Brodie almost never visited. Twice. He’d tapped it twice. Brodie leaned forward to do the same, and the warning message was wiped away, to be replaced by the eVTOL’s original welcome page. A horribly incongruous photograph of the aircraft taken on a sunlit day, and set against the clearest of blue skies. Brodie could remember thinking how unlikely it was that this photo had been taken in Scotland.
Absurdly, Eve addressed them as if for the first time. Welcome to your Grogan Industries Mark Five eVTOL air taxi. How had the technician responded, sitting there dripping rain from his glistening oilskins? Something had chimed with Brodie at the time. Something almost subliminal. The technician had identified himself with what was certainly his own unique code. Three letters and a three-digit number. Brodie could very nearly hear his voice. And then it dawned on him why the numbers had registered. His birthday. It was his birthday! Year and month, 496. April, 1996.
‘Dad, we’re losing height!’ Addie’s voice beside him was brittle with panic.
But he figured that had to be illusory. When Eve ran out of battery, her rotors would simply stop, and they would drop from the sky. He resisted the temptation to look and forced himself to keep thinking, trying to recall the technician’s voice. But the warning siren was still filling his ears and it was difficult to think above it.
The man had used the NATO alphabet. Key words representing each letter for clarity. What were they? ‘Come on, come on,’ he urged himself, almost unaware that he was speaking out loud. And then he remembered how Eve had responded, calling him Zak. ‘Z-A-K,’ he said suddenly. ‘ZAK496.’
He caught his breath to try to steady his voice and speak clearly.
‘Zebra-Alpha-Kilo-496.’ And then Zak had issued an instruction. What exactly had he asked Eve to do? Activate remote. That was what he had said. Brodie was sure of it. Now he had to ask her to do the opposite. He said, ‘Eve, deactivate remote.’
And he was astonished to hear her respond immediately to the command. Remote deactivated. He breathed his relief, and heard the exhalation rattle in his lungs. Now Brodie had control. Not some bastard in a darkened room sending them to their deaths.
He said, ‘Eve, turn around and put us down at the nearest safe landing point.’
The sunny photograph of the eVTOL vanished from the screen, to be replaced by a map of the Inner Hebrides. Their route across Mull and Coll and out to sea was traced in red, concluding in flashing circles of orange. A return route in yellow retraced their flight to the nearest landfall. The island of Coll, the chosen landing spot pulsing in circles of green.
They felt Eve bank left and turn through one hundred and eighty degrees, and the distant outline of Coll swung back into view. At the same time the eVTOL began losing height. No question about it this time.
Brodie hardly recognised his own voice. ‘Eve, do we have sufficient battery?’
Battery life unknown. She sounded so calm. As if her programmers themselves had made no distinction between life and death.
Brodie felt Addie clutch his arm as Coll grew nearer. They were barely three metres above the waves now, fearing that at any moment they would fall into the brine. Salt spray blew back across the windscreen, blurring their vision. And still the alarm sounded.
They could see a beach, silver sands cleared of snow by an incoming tide. Beyond it, tufted machair land, sparsely covered by snow, was dotted with dozens of hardy, grazing, black-faced sheep. Beyond them, a road, a collection of huddled buildings, a farm.
And the rotors stopped turning, as silently as they had begun. The eVTOL dropped the final metre into snow and peat bog, landing heavily and turning on to its side, propelled forward by its own momentum.
It was chaos in the cabin, all three flung from their seats and sent sprawling as Eve slid across the snow on her side for another twenty metres, before coming to an abrupt halt against a line of broken fencing.
Cameron was wailing, in fear more than pain. Addie clambered over the upturned seats to grasp him to her, holding him close for just a moment before checking him for damage. But children are far less brittle than adults, and beyond a lump the size of an egg coming up on his temple, he seemed unhurt.
She turned around to see Brodie slumped at an awkward angle across the far door. He was looking at her across the space between as if it were some eternally unbridgeable gap. His breathing was laboured, and in his eyes she saw a look she had seen once before, when Robbie had taken her hunting and shot a deer. It had still been alive when they reached it, eyes full of incomprehension, but also accepting of death. And she had watched the light of its life die as Robbie pulled the trigger for a second time. She had never gone hunting with him again.