Chris, for all his heroics, sensed the car were annoyed with him. After mere seconds for nerves to die down, these feelings emerged,
‘You made us all go back there,’ chided Victor, looking over his shoulder for police lights. ‘We could all have been caught. And we couldn’t even call you back with a better plan – your phone was already dead.’
Ellie took over the talking spoon, ‘And did you know that there were pedestrians about? Why didn’t you say? We nearly knocked someone over, driving with the lights off.’
‘I’m sorry. I worked it out the best I could.’
The only one who hadn’t spoken was Anna; and as the car settled down so the remaining members of the group could appreciate what they were seeing, with their own eyes, or in the driving mirror – Anna, pressed up against the shell of a brother not seen in eight years.
‘Anna?’ asked Ellie, multitasking like a pro.
Anna raised her arms and hugged Danny for all her life.
Chapter 112 – By the Lake
Forrest watched the scene with disbelief. He had been talking with the engineers unloading the perimeter fencing, when his attention had been drawn by the sudden sound of a loud engine and screeching tyres. It seemed to come from the neighbouring farm. However, from behind the luminous wall of halogen lamps that were being erected around him, he had only seen the briefest glint of chrome and glass snaking off along the very road his van had arrived on minutes earlier.
Leaving Nell and her apprentice in charge, he had followed the local Police Chief running to the scene, where they found a woman in distress and keen to make a statement.
‘They sped in with no lights,’ she declared. ‘Then a man got in carrying a body! They nearly killed me.’
‘Christ,’ said Forrest, visibly agitated.
‘You’re not wrong,’ said the Chief. He asked Forrest, ‘So, this is a murder? No wonder you’ve called in half the force.’
‘It wasn’t a body,’ said Forrest quickly to reassure both listeners. ‘This wasn’t a murder. Trust me on that.’
‘Well, anyway,’ said the woman, relieved nonetheless, ‘it was a funny how-do-you-do.’
As Forrest and the Chief left a junior officer to take the details, Forrest asked himself: how had they taken Danny from under his nose? And how was he going to tell Eris?
‘She didn’t take the registration number,’ said the Chief, resplendent in his black uniform beneath fluorescent tabard. ‘That often happens when they’re shocked.’
Forrest had to get back to Nell – and tell her there was nothing left to find.
And the Police Chief went back to his junior officer, when the latter had finished the interview, whispering in his ear,
‘A body that wasn’t a body? A murder that wasn’t a murder? People driving at night with no lights...?’ He pointed to the headline of a newspaper sitting on the dashboard of a nearby squad car, ‘And we all know who can see at night.’
Twenty minutes later and the lake was being dredged. After all, about the only thing they knew for certain was that the dashing man and the ‘body’ had been ‘sopping wet’, as the woman in the Barbour jacket had told them in her statement. Sitting by the large black lake was Forrest, who suddenly had a thought; and he wondered if his new idea might just have been enough to save his bacon.
In the back of the Jaguar, Beck said little. He looked around as Eris’s phone gave the subtlest of beeps. She answered the call, hardly talking, mostly listening. What Beck missed was:
‘Boss, it’s Forrest. Did you get him?’
‘Uh huh.’
‘And is he in the car with you?’
‘Uh huh.’
‘Then listen, I’ve got some good news and some bad. Try not to let on to him in the car; and you can skin me alive when you see me...’
‘Oh, no,’ she said as flatly as could be, as if told a cafeteria was out of Diet Coke and she would have to have regular. He explained,
‘Yes, we lost Danny. And we lost the others as they got away with him.’
Eris seethed inside, but could betray none of it to Beck. She said to the phone,
‘Oh, yes?’
Forrest smiled at her discomfort, continuing,
‘But it made me think. Well, why aren’t you here managing things yourself? Answer: because of Beck. He called you just as the latest signal finished.’
She pondered, then answered, ‘Yes, yes, I see. Thank you,’ and rung off. She paused a moment, then turned to Beck, and said quite calmly,
‘You’ve bloody bitched me.’
Chapter 113 – Sirens
Within a minute the group were a mile away from the site; within twenty they were in another county. Ellie parked up beside a fence, as a siren faded into the distance. It had been the only one they’d heard all journey, and surely couldn’t be for them.
The road ahead was quiet and dusty in the night, and that calm was a welcome relief. The chaos of the scene seemed to have baffled the authorities, and the group hadn’t been followed.
In the back, Chris was offering words in honour of his brother,
‘The brave boy, letting himself slip away without marker or ceremony, and all to save us.’
The man in question was still in his sister’s arms, moving with her heartbeat and with his eyes left wide open.
In the back of the Jaguar, Eris and Beck were silent again. Occasionally she would break the mood to offer the odd barb – ‘Well, you won’t be seeing your wife and children, if that’s what you were hoping. They’re in France, and we won’t hurry to let them back,’ or, ‘How long might a person be on remand for multiple car theft?’
She also wrote a series of texts, carefully shielding the screen from view. Her phone beeped with replies.
One of these texts was obviously to the car’s driver, or even to the vehicle’s dashboard itself – Beck had given up keeping up with the latest technology. Either way, soon after the message they had taken a sharp turn. Where they were headed had become a mystery.
Nell read the screen of the phone that Forrest had passed to her. On it was a message to him from Eris. They were standing beside the tech truck on the uneven ground by the farm houses and the lake. The halogen lights were still up, casting lurid shadows over every interruption of their beam. From what she understood, there was still hope of a trace being left, either from the fallen artif or the one who had taken him away. Nell wasn’t sure that she didn’t wish them well.
Forrest, referring to the screen, asked her,
‘Can you do it?’
She looked back apprehensively. He rephrased,
‘I don't mean, “Do you want to do it?” I mean, “Is it possible?”’
She nodded.
‘And will you?’
As quiet as a mouse, she answered, ‘We’ll need to write some code.’ (Her assistant instantly clattered to the keyboard next to her.) ‘And I’ll need a radio transmitter.’
And the next half-hour of Forrest’s life was spent acquiring just that.
After a comfort break for Victor, the renegades were back on the move. Just to keep going, no plan in mind, other than to rove vaguely south for the hoped-for call from the Professor and a meeting with Silicon Sands...
The car nearly went off the road. It took all Ellie’s concentration to defeat the instinct to open the driver’s door at whatever speed they were travelling and just flop out onto the hard tarmac.
This had been fearful enough for Victor to watch at the cottages, beside other humans who had seen it all before. But now he was the only one there not affected. He had been horrified a few weeks earlier to read a news report, telling of how many fatal road accidents might have been caused by anything from the driver having a heart attack to a spider falling from a sun visor into their lap – but because the driver died there was no way of knowing...
This was what Victor thought of as he saw his three companions suddenly fall into their tapping seizures, with the car lurching to an awkward halt. And h
e was just the passenger! The only witness, and the artifs weren’t speaking. Except for three gargled, blurted words from Chris,
‘Morse! Make notes!’
Forrest stood for a minute, disappointed.
‘What’s up?’ asked Nell, downcast.
‘It’s been a minute, and nothing.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, confused. ‘We’re broadcasting across the whole region on their damage signal frequency. They’ll be tapping away like mad – you’ve just got to go and find them and scoop them up.’ Though even as she said this, Nell realised that she didn’t want that to happen.
But it was Forrest’s response that would throw her,
‘Yes, and not one return signal as a result!’
It took her several seconds to work it out; and then she did so, shouting,
‘You were hoping they’d be driving when they got the signal. You were hoping they’d crash!’
He came back meanly,
‘And how else did you think we’d ever find them? As it stands, they’re out there somewhere in the night, anywhere within an hour’s driving radius.’ He gestured with his arm across the darkened lands outside the truck’s windows. ‘Signalling them was only the half of it – we needed them to signal us back.’
‘Well, you can tell the boss it failed!’ snapped Nell, hating every bit of her work.
‘It wasn’t like this in the Ministry of Agriculture,’ murmured her assistant. And Forrest wondered where the hell Eris had turned the pair up from. He stormed,
‘Well, don’t worry. You might be back there soon,’ and left the truck.
Nell was wondering how quickly she could get back to her laptop in London to tender her resignation. When her apprentice, who was something of a lateral thinker, asked the question,
‘Is there anyone but the robots listening to what we’re sending?’
Chapter 114 – Digital
Victor may not have been at artif intellectual level, but neither was he without good sense. The car was sprawled across a road that would have been quiet at any time of day, but especially so at night. There were no roadblocks in either direction, and no sirens chasing for them. Therefore, his colleagues could be left to do their thing for a while. And he could afford to concentrate on jotting down the signal they relayed.
Ellie had eventually obeyed her impulse to throw herself out onto the tarmac, leaving her car door open. As had Chris, who had fallen out onto the grass verge, so had shuffled behind the car to find a surface with some purchase.
Yet Anna, from her position leaning across the back seat hugging Danny, had a solid piece of structure available, a bulkhead running beneath that seat – unlike so much of a modern car, which showed so little interior sheet metal. And this she now tapped against, making the car ring like the world’s smallest bell.
Being alone in the car with a tapper was a unique experience for Victor. The sounds were not entirely metallic, instead mixed with panelling and muffled insulation. Chris, perhaps unhappy with the road surface, then changed his tapping position to the bodywork panel beneath the car’s rear bumper. Suddenly, with two resounding signals, Victor felt as if he were inside a packing crate full of wind-up toys.
Chris had told him, ‘Make notes!’ and so he was doing. Victor may not have been a Morse reader, but he had spotted the point where this new signal had begun repeating, and so ran over his biro-notes to double check he had them right. He could also tell it was a very short message, a few characters at most – perhaps a code the artifs knew?
Just as a foreign listener can tell a change of tone in a native tongue, so Victor sensed that this signal sounded different to that which he had heard at The Universalist. It had a different rhythm, different falls and starts.
After many minutes of the current signal though, something happened, and it changed. He quickly took up his pen, and recognised that he was writing down a second dot-dash sequence. This one was much longer though, and he judged that something important was happening.
The artifs would be translating it at that moment, ready to burst into life the moment that the signal stopped, with full knowledge of what had been transmitted. How sad it was, though, that he couldn’t read it.
And how daft, in the age when every phone had access to the Infinite Library...
Victor got out of the car and felt in Chris’s pocked, and fished out his next mobile, yet to be fired up. It was important enough to risk though, and so he switched it on. He quickly found the Internet browser, and searched for ‘Morse code’.
A translator website popped up, and he keyed in the first sequence of dots and dashes.
At first he thought he must have been doing something wrong, as it reported the message as being merely the letters z x z x z x z x repeated for as often as he tapped the sequence in.
Victor remembered, at a childhood friend’s house, playing Daley Thompson’s Olympiad on the family’s ancient Sinclair computer. Was it those two keys he pressed in quick succession to get Daley’s legs moving in the run-up of the long jump?
Either way, it hardly mattered. Either he had got it wrong or... or this was someone not offering a message but simply jamming the signal, and using whatever dumbest combination of keys came to hand. Who knew, maybe they had played Daley Thompson’s Olympiad too?
Victor switched to keying in the second signal, and here turned up gold:
u i f y o u d o n t t r a n s m i t d o n o t d r i v e a n d c r a s h t h e y c a n n o t f i n d y o
He found a word in there – transmit – and worked forwards. He had begun imputing mid-way through the loop, and there was no punctuation. But the message seemed to be:
they cannot find you if you don’t transmit
do not drive and crash
Victor was amazed. They had a friend in the Secret Service, that much was clear – Britain loved the Robots, just as all the newspaper writers had already realised, just as the crowd at Marsham had showed.
And for this fact, Victor felt immense joy.
Chapter 115– Switch it Off
‘Switch it off,’ said Eris into her phone in the back of the Jaguar. She was too disappointed even to bother hiding her activities from Beck. ‘Maybe try again in half an hour, let them relax and repeat the trick.’
She rang off without a goodbye, and fumed.
‘Forrest having a bad day?’ risked Beck.
‘It wouldn’t be half as bad if you hadn’t built them so tricksy.’
He smirked, ‘But then you wouldn’t want them half as badly.’
She exhaled, ‘The things I’m going to do to you...’ and shook her head.
But Beck only became more smug. Where once he’d felt his life in her hands, now he didn’t care. What’s more, he sensed something more behind her anger – fear. Fear of what the Philosopher General would make of a continued lack of results.
And he also felt pleasure, as every minute that she was frustrated was another minute that his artifs were free.
Victor checked and re-checked the message he was hearing – if it had changed once, it could change again. But he had noted it correctly, and there was nothing new. A minute later, and it stopped. Chris jumped up from his trance, suddenly appearing in the car’s rear window. Meanwhile, Ellie stood and held the driver’s door, though she wouldn’t get in. She looked to Victor as if she was about to dash off to be sick.
But Victor quickly clocked, asking,
‘You want me to drive?’
She smiled, ‘You figured out the message? Well done.’
Victor jumped across the console and took the driver’s position, while Ellie ran around to the passenger side. Once in, they shared the briefest hug, and a whisper in each other’s ear, ‘It will be okay.’
Once all were back inside, Victor fired up the car and got them back on their way.
‘Keep south,’ advised Chris. And Victor did so, asking,
‘So why ask me to take notes, when you have the message yourself?’
&nbs
p; Chris answered, ‘Because I knew it wasn’t Danny transmitting any more, nor any of us three.’ He gave Anna then Ellie a smile. ‘So it must have been an outside agency. It wouldn’t be a standard message, so I wanted double-checking.’
‘You worked all that out in those split-seconds?’ asked Victor.
‘Well, not perfectly,’ answered the artif. ‘My first thought was: Doctor Beck, somehow. Though it’s rather odder that that, don’t you think?’
Victor was thrilled to be asked, and answered,
‘It has to be someone within Eris’s network, but switching sides...’
‘...or an extraordinary bluff,’ the artif speculated. ‘Though one I can’t deduce. Maybe another message will make sense of it?’
‘You’re expecting more tapping?’
‘After that warning? I’m certain of it.’
Chapter 116 – Go Quick, Go Quick
Beck was beginning to feel as though he’d spent more time in the back of the Jaguar with Eris than he had in the interview room four days before.
For her part, Beck’s genie was out of the bottle. With it clear that he was a decoy to a situation occurring elsewhere, then she was free to plan her operations openly.
As she spoke into her phone, Beck tried to remember all that she was saying, as he felt it could be important:
‘Roadblocks, roadblocks, all through the county...
‘Twenty minute breaks, then thirty-second jabs. Don’t let them get comfortable...
‘Everything they know is in the South. They’re lost in the North. They were only there for Danny. Focus on the roads they’ll travel back by...’
Beck would also risk the odd question, and get equally sharp retort:
‘So, where am I?’
‘The last stop before prison.’
‘And the artifs?’
‘The last stop before the scrapyard.’
She didn’t mean that, he knew. They were to be her prize, just as he was, once she stopped being angry with him. And that would happen when all of them were in her hands.