Suddenly in the stillness of the room he felt a slight tremor under his bare feet, and it grew rapidly until the Biosense chair, which he quickly rose from, was visibly shaking. Standing upright, Gabriel took a deep breath and held it. Placing his hands over his ears he looked straight ahead to where he felt the direction of the shaking was coming from. A faint noise to accompany the shaking began and increased rapidly until it was a roar, and the room partition shattered with the movement into an opaque glazed mess. A large black circle appeared in the wall in front of him, cut by the teeth of a revolving blade. Twenty panels opened in the lower part of white wall and nozzles spraying a mustard-colored gas poked out as a bone-wrenching cacophony of sound assaulted Gabriel’s eardrums through his hands.
The circular piece of wall crashed forward into the room revealing a large machine. In the middle of the hub that held the cutting blade, a small door opened and two figures wearing bright red ear protectors and body armor stepped quickly out of the door and rushed over to Gabriel. In the face mask he made out Maloo’s flat nose wrinkled with his laughter as, grasping Gabriel’s arm, they moved quickly to the door of the giant boring machine, the ‘Mole’. Maloo pushed Gabriel through first into the tiny airlock and then climbed in after with the other member of the extraction team. The door’s bolts slid home with a pneumatic swoosh and the air in the air lock was filtered with the giant extractor pulling the tight bodysuits in its direction with its force.
The ‘clean air’ light went on and Maloo leaned over Gabriel and hit the button to open the door to the main capsule. The Mole disengaged from the White Room with a jolt and began its journey back up the tunnel it had created getting here.
Cochran and her partner Sunita Shido had just finished their appetizers, when Cochran’s Devstick screen flashed red. She picked it up and held it to her ear, glancing around at the other people seated near her in La Maison.
Her mouth open, she gasped, and exclaimed, “What!” Cochran’s eyes flitted around at the people near her again to see if they had noticed. No one had heard her except Sunita, who laid her knife and fork down on her plate and placed her hands on the table beside it. Sunita swallowed the oyster that was on her tongue and reached for her glass of red wine.
“When did this happen?” she heard Cochran rasp in a harsh whisper into her Devstick. “Ten minutes! Why have you taken this long to notify me? Never mind, there is no excuse. All right, lock down the area and no news of his escape is to be broadcast, not until I’m there, do you understand?”
She put the Devstick back on the table in front of her and picking up her wine glass, swallowed its contents. Sunita said, “Trouble at UNPOL?”
“The runner I was telling you about just escaped. I’ve got to go,” Cochran said, and stood, picking up her Chanel purse. “Don’t wait for me — this could take some time.”
Sunita nodded and took another sip of wine. “Go, Sharon, go, stay safe,” and tilting her head towards the French doors behind Cochran, she smiled.
Cochran gave her a small tight smile back and, with a slight shrug of her shoulders, turned on her heel, head down, and strode out of the restaurant, leaving through the sliding glass French doors, her Devstick to her mouth as she walked. They had chosen La Maison, the intimate Topside French restaurant of the Hyatt Hotel. Just off to the right of the restaurant was its tropical Balinese garden with a large area of green lawn framed by shallow swimming lanes stepped at different levels. As she walked over the patio, a Helium Copter glided down, its electrically driven propellers turning silently in the dark cool of the evening. It was twenty-one degrees cel, a cool night for New Singapore.
The reflection of the flashing blue light slowly shrank in size on the green lawn as the Heliocopter came in to land. The door slid open to receive Cochran as, Devstick still held to her mouth, she gave instructions, speaking urgently. “Place immediate satimage coverage of Jurong. If we don’t get him within the next five minutes, expand that coverage to New Singapore and the equivalent ocean area. I assume that you have locked down all transit points. Please confirm.”
She climbed into the Heliocopter, and the door clunked shut. Already in the air, the craft dipped its nose slightly and headed for Jurong Island eight kiloms to the south-west. The craft quickly picked up height and speed and soon the chop whir of the propellers was audible in the cabin. Cochran sat listening to and watching the different voice and image channels coming in over her Devstick, her thumb frantically scrolling the images.
She flicked from the image of the Lev and airship ports of Changi. He wouldn’t be crazy enough to try to get through there, she thought. He’s got to be somewhere close and he’ll try to get out by sea. That’s what I would do. Again she held the Devstick to her mouth. “Make sure all ocean and port areas are covered. Get all UNPOL marine vessels on high alert. Anything that has moved from port to ocean in the last five minutes, board and search. Use UNPOL Blue Notice as required, upon my authority.”
She listened and watched as the activity driven by her commands picked up pace. He couldn’t have gone far. She checked the time on the Devstick: 8:45pm. She realized she was seriously panicked. How could this have happened on her watch?
Sitting on the hard metal seats that ran along the cabin, she didn’t bother with the safety webbing, couldn’t waste the time to put it on as she was focused on the action on the screen of the Devstick. The Heliocopter came in fast, landing with a thump, a bounce and slight grind of a skid on the roof of the UNPOL Executive Club. She disembarked, one hand heaving her out of the cabin, and ran in a crouch towards the stairs leading to the Lev port that would take her down to the command center. She had to catch him: this couldn’t happen, not on her watch.
The Mole shot out of the hole it had first made six days ago in the floor of the warehouse in Jurong Port, and skidded to a stop just before hitting the wall. Gabriel glanced at the time on the Dev screen hanging from the ceiling of the mole, 8:40pm, and hit the open door release. The door hissed open and swung free. He jumped up from his crouched position and, one hand on the circular titanium frame of the door, jumped to the floor of the warehouse. Maloo and Isaac quickly followed and the three of them walked over to a large plastic sheet laid on the floor of the warehouse. No one spoke. They knew what they had to do and they had already agreed on the best way to do it. Maloo and Isaac stripped off everything they were wearing, dropping it to the plastic sheet. Gabriel, already naked, walked over to a shelf with three deep-sided trays stacked one on top of the other. He picked the stack up and walked back to Maloo and Isaac who had finished stripping and were folding the plastic sheet into a small block.
Gabriel laid out the three trays side by side with a meter in between and the three men each sat in front of a tray. Inside was the identity, the person they would become to enable their escape. Running. An identity designed to be anonymous, to fit in with the masses, to not be an anomaly, and therefore to pass under the radar to the other side. In the single nation an individual can travel anywhere provided he acknowledges the right of the nation to know who he is and what he is doing at any time.
As individuals travel through security zones, PUIs, or Tags as they are called, are activated and visually compared to known statistics and image. Everywhere on the Earth, the Moon and Mars, the three 'worlds' human beings occupy, this invasion of privacy is accepted for the right to travel anywhere freely. Every day in New Singapore, half a million people travel through the city and its surrounding area. To run, you need an identity that will appear in its movements and digital actions not to be suspicious, but to be normal. And they each had a tray of normality.