Will saw himself and Emily in their tatty rags…then the flat was empty…then there he was again, poking around just before Stein died…then empty again…and then it was the clean-up squad, stripping off the wallpaper, painting the walls with blood. Then Brian Alexander and his Network team dropped the chunks of dead body back where they’d found them. And finally the victims came back to life, made whole by the assault rifle in Kevin McEwen’s hands.
Ken twisted the control back to ‘PLAY’.
Kevin raised the gun and blew his wife and children apart.
Ken hit pause. ‘By the time the response team got up there it was too late. We’re still trying to find out how he got his hands on an MZ-90. I mean, Jesus: the damn thing’s an antique.’
He waved his hand over the plinth again and the screens flickered back to real time views of the different flats. Then Ken ushered Will and Emily back out into the corridor.
‘Primarily we’re trying to find out what really triggered the VRs,’ he said as they followed a green line in the floor. ‘Eleven years on and we still can’t pinpoint an exact cause. Compressed urban habitation is obviously a key factor, but if we can find out what’s actually causing their brain chemistry to change, making them go off the rails, do terrible things…Well, we could make a huge difference to these people’s lives.’
A pair of technicians came out of a door marked ‘AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY!’, nodding a greeting at Ken as they wheeled a trolley away down the corridor.
Will watched them go. ‘Any success?’
Their guide gave Will a lopsided smile. ‘Not as much as I’d like. But we’ll get there.’ He pushed through the door the technicians had come from, leading Will and Emily into a medium-sized laboratory, lined with expensive-looking bits of equipment. The walls in here were the same happy yellow as the corridor, but the paintings had all been replaced by digiboards and cell diagrams.
A handful of serious-looking men and women were dressed in light-blue lab coats, bent over scopes, scanners, gene sequencers, and test tubes.
Ken pointed at a woman manipulating a big computer-generated holo of a human brain, the familiar red and yellow bands clearly visible in the frontal lobes. ‘We’re also working on methods to reverse the changes VR syndrome causes. I figure that if we can make a cure airborne and combine it with a heavy-duty sedative, we can just flood an infected building through the ventilation system. Knock ‘em out and fix ‘em up at the same time, before they can hurt themselves or anybody else.’
Ken clapped one of the scientists on the shoulder. ‘It’s a tough job, but if anyone can do it, it’s these guys.’
The man in the white lab coat grinned.
Will waited until they were back out in the corridor. ‘Why didn’t you inform us you were running trials down here?’
‘Ah.’ Ken shrugged. ‘You’d have to ask my boss that one. Me? I think the fewer people know half of Glasgow’s probably still got VR syndrome, the better. That gets out there’s going to be panic, hoarding, mass hysteria, civil unrest…’
Will had to admit he had a point.
They followed a blue line in the floor, Ken going on and on about psychological empowerment and how it was still possible for the people crammed into Glasgow’s connurb blocks to have a better quality of life.
But Will wasn’t really paying attention. He had his mind firmly fixed on a long shower, a carry-out, a bottle of wine, and a change of clothes. His gaily-coloured tatters were beginning to smell. He’d had enough of feeling, and looking, like an idiot for one day.
They’d reached a pair of frosted-glass doors marked, ‘SHUTTLE STATION’.
Ken ushered them through to an unassuming platform, the concrete tunnel stretching off into darkness on either side. ‘Well, this is where I have to leave you folks. I gotta re-home about three dozen families before the end of the day. Fight broke out in the lobby this morning. Starts out as a tiny scuffle-some kid gets his testicles mashed-and next thing youknow, boom: six dead, twenty seriously injured. If we hadn’t got a team in there pronto God knows how many more would’ve been hurt.’
He called for a private car, then offered Will his hand.
‘Nice to meet you Mr Hunter; sorry we had to zap you back there.’ They shook. ‘Give me a shout next time you’re coming down: we’ll have lunch and I’ll introduce you to some of the guys.’
‘I’d like that.’
Emily didn’t offer to shake Ken’s hand, but he didn’t seem too put out, just waved goodbye and left them alone on the deserted platform.
She scowled at the closed doors. ‘You buy all that horseshit?’
‘I’ve heard dafter things. And if they can come up with a cure for VR: can you imagine it?’
‘That wee shite is up to something.’
Will shrugged. ‘Everyone’s up to something.’
He could hear muffled voices in the corridor behind them: a man and a woman. Gossiping, discussing their caseloads, telling dirty jokes. He couldn’t really see them through the frosted glass, just two blobs of light and darkness going about their day.
Will turned his back on the doors. ‘Have I told you the one about the two nuns in a hydroponics garden-’ The growing roar and buffeting wind of an approaching shuttle drowned out the rest.
Emily stepped back from the platform’s edge. ‘SO THAT’S WHY THE CUCUMBER SANDWICHES ALWAYS TASTE FUNNY?’
‘YOU’VE HEARD IT?’
The tunnel was growing lighter, the stanchion lights flickering on as the shuttle car decelerated out of the gloom. Green and shiny, like an exotic beetle. It came to a halt right in front of them.
‘I told it to you in the first place.’
The shuttle’s door popped open and slid back on its runners, exposing a clean, well-appointed interior. Not like the shabby ones the Network always used. They climbed onboard. ‘NETWORK HEADQUARTERS’ was already programmed into the destinator.
With a gentle hiss the door slipped back into place and the shuttle began to move, pulling away from the station.
Will settled back in his plush seat, taking one last look at the entrance to Ken Peitai’s little subterranean kingdom. It was amazing the things that could go on right under your…
He froze.
Just coming through the frosted doors was someone he recognized. Her wild ginger hair was now tied back in a neat ponytail and she was laughing, her green eyes twinkling in the strip-lights. The tribal scars were gone, only a faint trace of puffiness remaining where she’d peeled them off. The woman from Sherman House-the one he’d zapped.
He didn’t get much of a look at her companion, just a flash of a tall man in a long black cloat, its straps fluttering in the wake of the departing shuttle.
The car accelerated to cruising speed, leaving the platform far behind.
Oh shit.
If Ken’s little social engineering project was so damn altruistic, how come his agents were running around stirring things up? When Stein died, the ginger-haired woman hadn’t been trying to ‘keep a lid on things’, she’d been running at the front of the pack, with a projectile weapon in her hand and a crazy glint in her eye. She’d tried to kill his team for God’s sake!
Then there was the rest of them-the ones who’d chased Will and Emily through the corridors…How the hell did Ken Peitai get away with running his private militia in a building full of VR syndrome? It was like sticking a firecracker in a wasps’ byke.
Emily was right not to trust the little git.
Will scowled, watching the lights vwip past.
Out of the frying pan.
13
The rains arrived that evening, right on schedule. A flash. A single peal of thunder. The first drop spattered against the hot concrete, evaporating almost immediately. And then another drop. And another. Growing faster, thicker, heavier, until it was bouncing back from the pavement.