Geena had explained, and talked about her supervisor’s theory of them, and her own analogy with the City Burners, those terrifying folk who’d appeared out of nowhere and burned antiquity to the ground. All the cities and all the records, gone, and then the Burners gone, leaving no trace.
‘But how could anyone do that now?’ he’d asked. ‘Not much point burning books, now we have the net.’
Geena, or her virtual image in his glasses, relayed from the cameras in her front room in Uxbridge, where she sat up while her boyfriend snored in the bedroom behind her, had shrugged. ‘Bring down the net?’
‘You couldn’t do that,’ he’d pointed out, ‘without some kind of massive virus attack, or electromagnetic pulse bursts, and you’d need supercomputers for the viruses, or nukes for the EMP – all the advanced tech the Naxals don’t have and don’t want.’
Another shrug. ‘I’m sure they’re working on it.’ A wry smile. ‘A low-tech solution, to get us all back to low tech. Meaning millions of us would die without these bastards even having to kill us. God, it terrifies me just thinking about it. It’s like, hey guys, you’re terrorists, OK? Well, you’ve got me terrorised! You’ve made your point. Can you stop now? Maybe negotiate?’ She shook her head. ‘But that’s the thing. They don’t have demands. There’s nothing to negotiate. They just want us dead in the ruins. So I understand why, back home, I mean in the old country, India, the government just bombs them. I can even understand why the cops here…’
‘Do what they did to us?’
‘No, not that, but… the death-from-above stuff. The killer drones.’ She shuddered. ‘Though it’s not nice to be in the splatter radius. Ugh!’
And then their talk had moved on. It was odd what they talked about, and what they didn’t talk about. Now he came to think of it, even when she was enthusing about the tachyon project, he’d never spoken to her about what he’d seen in the tunnel. Maybe that was a result of the final warning he’d been given by the man. Like Hope, and Geena for that matter, Hugh had become much more reckless and unguarded in what he talked about – they all no longer cared who was watching or listening – but this was one live wire he dared not touch.
Live wire. Something in that thought niggled. The guys around him, by unspoken consensus, began to shift themselves, to splash away dregs of tea or coffee gone cold, to go back to work. We’d better get on with it, Hugh thought, the weather’s not going to hold, the wind’s picking up, carrying tiny stinging flecks of ice… be lucky to get a full day of it at this rate.
He bestirred himself, and as he got to his feet the generator powering the winch ran down, and coughed into silence. An overseer cursed, in loud and fluent Gaelic, and someone hastened to top up the generator’s fuel.
Live wire.
Hugh stared across at the cylinders of cable. If the generator had been connected to those reels, and the reels connected to each other, with an iron core through all of them, each cylinder thus connected would have become an enormous electromagnet. And when the generator’s fuel ran down, and it stopped, the magnetic field would collapse, resulting in…
An electromagnetic pulse.
And that was it, the low-tech solution.
It was so obvious, when you saw it, and its preparation so innocent-seeming and difficult to police or prevent, that Hugh felt sure the Naxals would come up with it sometime, if they hadn’t thought of it already. With something like this, they could bring down the net, and more than the net. Power systems, telecoms, machinery, traffic control… air-traffic control, too. And then what?
With a chill that ran down his chest like a cold shower, Hugh realised that he already knew what would come next. Collapse. And after collapse, barbarism. He had seen the distant consequence already, the barbarians with their gliders over the glens. If that was how the future could be, maybe these visions of his were a warning, of a world that his action or inaction could bring about, and him just the very man to stop it. Or maybe nothing could be done, if his father was right, and the sight never showed you a future you could change.
As Hugh went back to his work on the tower, he thought of shiploads and shiploads of coils and coils of cable, moving into or out of harbours all over the world. Or coils stacked up and generators chugging away, in empty office blocks undergoing renovation or demolition; in dusty warehouses in industrial suburbs; on building sites in central business districts. It would all be a matter of how powerful the electromagnets were, and how strategically they were placed. It would be an interesting exercise, he thought, for this evening, to pull down one of the old physics textbooks and fire up the calculator on his pad and figure out just how many it would take.
And then, and then… he could take the result to the police, and ask them to take it to the man at the base, to warn the authorities of the danger. That would put him in their good books, for sure.
And then again…
He thought about the base, and the man, and smiled. He thought about the danger they were in, all unknowing, and smiled.
They’d never see it coming.
He had to knock off work early that day, as the weather broke.
He was still smiling as he drove home, through the first snows of summer.
Acknowledgements
This book owes a good deal to my year as Writer in Residence at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum at Edinburgh University, whose academic and administrative staff are among the most intellectually stimulating, friendly and helpful people you could hope to meet. In view of this, it’s perhaps more than a formality to state that this book’s characters, their views and their actions are entirely fictitious, and bear no relation to any living person.
Thanks to Carol, Sharon and Michael for love and support throughout.
Thanks to Darren Nash for the initial brainstorming (and the beer); to Mic Cheetham, Sharon MacLeod, Mairi Ann Cullen, Steve Sturdy and Farah Mendlesohn for reading and commenting on the first draft.
About the Author
Ken MacLeod graduated with a BSc from Glasgow University in 1976. Following research at Brunel University, he worked in a variety of manual and clerical jobs whilst completing an MPhil thesis. He previously worked as a computer analyst/programmer in Edinburgh, but is now a full-time writer. He is the author of twelve previous novels, five of which have been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and two which have won the BSFA Award. Ken MacLeod is married with two grown-up children and lives in West Lothian.
BY KEN MACLEOD
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