He didn’t mention his other concern: the alien information that squatted in his memories, massive and yet indefinable. You didn’t have to wipe someone’s mind just to teach them a foreign language. There was something else.
“Re-programmed for what exactly?” Norris asked.
What indeed. There was still a piece of the puzzle missing. They were a part of some larger plan, Ringo was sure of that, but what plan? Why was it so important they escape?
Ringo pointed south-east. “I guess we’ll find out.”
Norris kept the tank bearing south-east and Ringo’s storage sense of satisfaction with that direction grew. They were nearing their goal. Or rather, someone else’s goal. Or something else’s.
Norris pulled the legs of the tank in tight to follow a narrow track that led down to the river. At the end was a ramshackle building with a deck that extended over the water on wooden posts made from undressed tree trunks. A pier extended farther out and although it leaned like a drunkard it seemed to still be in use. Ringo could make out the housing blocks of the nearby city a few kilometres downstream on the opposite side of the river.
Norris stopped the tank.
“Everyone agree this is the place?” Ringo asked.
They all nodded. They shared that strange sense this was where they were meant to be.
“Now I get it,” Custard said. “It’s the boffin. He messed with our minds back at the lab and now he wants us to meet him here to get him back to the west.”
“I don’t think so,” Ringo replied. “If he could get here under his own steam, why would he need us? Besides, there’s no one here.”
They left the tank on the track and searched the building. It certainly didn’t look like some scientist’s summer house, more like a smuggler’s shack. Two of the back rooms were packed to the sagging roof with electronic equipment in cheaply printed boxes. In the main living area sat a TV and another computer that lay on a bench with its innards opened like a filleted fish. Ringo checked outside and spotted a satellite dish mounted on the eaves of the hut.
“I think I know where our fugitive scientist is,” Ringo said.
“He must be a fucking ninja then,” said Custard, “because I haven't found shit.”
“Ninjas are Japanese, you nugget,” said Norris.
“Whatever. Unless he’s invented a fucking Predator camouflage suit, he’s not fucking here.”
Norris actually looked around the hut as if searching for some subtle sign of optical camouflage. After everything else they’d seen, it wasn’t out of the question.
“Where is he then?” Custard asked.
“Not he,” said Ringo. “It.” He pointed to the satellite dish.
“I don’t get it,” said Custard. “So some bootlegger’s got Sky TV. So what?”
“Not TV,” Norris corrected. “Looks like satellite internet. Probably illegal by the look of it.”
“What’s that got to do with our boffin?” Custard asked.
“There is no boffin.”
“What are you on about?”
“It was a set up,” Ringo replied. “They knew we were coming. They were waiting for us.”
“But there had to be someone wanting to defect. Who else could have sent that message to GCHQ? You saw the look in their eyes when they were explaining it. That equation was the real deal. Are you saying the Chinese government willingly handed over top secret R&D intelligence to do what… capture four squaddies? That makes no sense.”
It did sound farfetched.
"He's right," Norris said. "Someone had to invent all this new kit?"
"Not someone… something. There's no way any one person could be responsible for what we’ve seen. Think about it: virtual reality, this tank, the drones. This stuff is decades ahead of anything in the West.”
“Maybe there's more than just one guy," Norris said. "You saw that place. There’s a whole research facility and God knows how many more of them they’ve got dotted around the place. One and a half billion people, Ringo."
“One genius or a thousand, I don’t care.”
“What exactly are you saying?”
“I’m saying maybe it's something else. Something that gave them a leg up, allowed them to make a step change in their military technology overnight.”
“Aliens!” Custard exclaimed. “I fucking knew it. I saw it in a movie. They found all this shit on a crashed UFO.”
“Don’t be a nugget all your life, Custard.”
“What then?”
“Artificial intelligence,” said Ringo.
“Bollocks.”
“They created an AI. They’ve got a genie in a bottle that keeps granting them wishes, only maybe the genie wants out.”
“Out? Out of where? Are you saying a computer has been tempted by the pleasures of the capitalist West? Maybe you’re right… Maybe HAL 9000, or whatever the fuck you’re talking about wants nothing more than a warm pub on a cold night with the football on the telly and a copy of the Sun in its back pocket.”
“Now who’s talking bollocks?”
“You tell me. I’m losing track, here.”
“Let's think about this for a second," Norris said. "So this thing gets a message out, sets us up, tortures us and then lets us go? Why?”
“It wants what any intelligent being wants," Ringo said eventually. "It wants its freedom. If the Chinese had created an AI, makes sense they’d keep that genie bottled up. No direct link to the outside world. It couldn’t just download itself out of there so it needed another way out."
“Meaning what exactly?”
“Meaning us.” He tapped his temple and then pointed up at the satellite dish.
“You think it’s in our heads?” Norris asked. “You think that’s what’s taking up the space where our memories were?”
“One way to find out.”
Norris tied the tank’s neural interface into the shack’s computer and set about boosting the memory by rigging some of the bootleg computers in parallel. Although he claimed he had no idea what he was doing, he worked like he’d been hot-wiring Chinese military hardware his whole life. It didn’t take long.
Ringo kept his eye out for more drones and watched the city across the river, its lights shining through a pall of smog. It already looked otherworldly. What would it look like in a few years? What would it look like if a rogue artificial intelligence was let loose on it?
Norris came up behind him. “We’re ready,” he said.
Ringo turned to him. “I've got a daughter," he said. "At least I think I do. Jesus, for all I know that memory might be fake too."
"You'll see her again, Sarge," Norris said.
"That's not what I'm worried about. What kind of world will she grow up in if we let this thing loose?"
"One where she's got her dad back."
They sat inside the tank with the VR helmets over their heads.
Norris initiated the connection. He felt the electrodes pressing against his skull and then suddenly he was somewhere else. There was an instant of eggshell-white nothingness and then the three of them were standing in the meadow.
“Bollocks!" Custard swore. He was staring down at his three-fingered hand. "I thought I'd get me fingers back."
Ringo looked down at his own body. He was wearing dark trousers similar to the Regiment’s battle dress uniform and a black T-shirt, but he was in in his own body and unlike the last time, he was free to move.
The meadow was much as he remembered and he couldn’t fight off a shudder at the memory of what he had endured there over the past weeks. The rolling grasslands stretched off to infinity in every direction.
"No sign of your boy," Custard said.
"Maybe he needs an incentive," Ringo replied. He thought about the connection to the outside world, the satellite internet link through the battered antenna on the side of the shack. The air above the meadow shimmered like heat haze, new colours refracting out of the meadow's greens and blues to form four red columns as tall as a three storey building and a swept roof of terracotta tiles. It was a Chinese arch. The meadow stretched away on either side of the huge structure, but underneath, the square defined by the two central columns and their deep, timber lintel formed a portal to the outside world. Ringo could see a city beyond the arch with red lights winking on the tops of skyscrapers as dusk fell.