Chloe was tired of all the fuss, the preparations and anticipation and anxiety, but knew that she shouldn’t take it out on Jen, who’d probably spent her Sunday doing all the admin work that she hadn’t been able to get done last week, and said meekly, ‘What time is my one-on-one?’
‘Helena will be here at eleven,’ Jen said. ‘You’re the first on her to-do list. Take her advice seriously, Chloe. She actually knows what she’s talking about.’
Chloe promised that she’d behave. She flicked through the images she’d snurched from Mangala Cowboy’s tumblr and spent a little time with Ram Varma, then sat around the long table with the rest of Disruption Theory’s small crew while Jen Lovell went over the last preparations for the committee and reminded everyone not to talk to the press or the blogging community. When she’d finished, Daniel Rosenblaum gave a brief homily: we’re in great shape, one last push and we’ll be bombproof, don’t believe anything you see on the news feeds, so on, so forth.
Chloe moved quickly when the meeting broke up, sidestepping Jen, asking Daniel if she could have five minutes to discuss something really interesting that had turned up.
‘You have a call from France at eleven,’ Jen told him.
‘I haven’t forgotten,’ Daniel said.
‘Also a month’s worth of worksheets to sign off.’
Daniel looked at Chloe. ‘Five minutes, you said?’
‘It might take ten,’ Chloe said, chancing it.
‘The artist is Freddie Patel, aka Mangala Cowboy,’ Chloe said. ‘Seventeen, eighteen years old, whereabouts of his parents unknown, lives with his little sister in a box he rents in a DP camp in Dagenham. He moved in about three months ago. Soon afterwards, some of his neighbours started speaking in tongues. And then they had a little breakout.’
Daniel said, ‘This is the thing you ran off to on Saturday.’
‘I’m seeing the lawyer after this, and I’ll be at the briefing this afternoon,’ Chloe said. ‘Anyway, the breakout wasn’t anything special, but then I found out about Freddie Patel and his pictures.’
They were in Daniel’s office, a corner room with big steel-framed windows that looked across the flat top of the stopbank and the flood of the Thames to Greenwich. Ladders of shelves were cluttered with books and mementos of past investigations. Disintegrator-ray projectors powered by AA batteries, components of antigravity machines, teleportation devices and other improbable and completely non-functional devices built by monomaniacs infected with Elder Culture algorithms and eidolons. A row of 3D printed avatar faces, like golden death masks of matinee idols. Jackaroo dolls. A model of a Jackaroo spaceship made from toothpicks. File boxes stuffed with self-published theses about the location of the Jackaroo’s home world, conspiracies linking the Jackaroo to nationalist groups and rogue states supposedly behind the nuclear bombings and other terrorist spectaculars of the Spasm, or hidden images of the Jackaroo and other aliens in Palaeolithic cave paintings, Ancient Egyptian wall paintings, Mayan calendars, and Indian temple sculptures. Attempts to unify classic and quantum physics using only algebra. Notebooks written in cyphers or secret languages or ‘automatic’ writing. All of it evidence of deep changes in the collective human psyche, according to Daniel Rosenblaum. The usual detritus of ordinary craziness and eccentricity skewed by the strange attractor of the Jackaroo, according to his critics.
Daniel sat with his back to the riverlight, a tall, imposing man with a corona of curly grey hair, wearing one of his trademark brightly patterned waistcoats over a black shirt. Images from the tumblr hung in a cube of virtual light over his desk. Watching her boss carelessly flip through them, Chloe realised that they didn’t speak to him the way they spoke to her, didn’t evoke the kind of recognition she’d felt when she’d first seem them.
‘I admit they’re very nice. Exemplars of their kind,’ Daniel said, ruffling through the pictures again. He stopped at one of the briar-patch scribbles, studied it. ‘This is rather intense.’
‘Some kind of room, I think,’ Chloe said. ‘Ram and I tried to match the pictures with Elder Culture sites on Mangala and the other worlds. No luck so far. There are ruins on First Foot that look a bit like those spires, but only a bit. And they’re in the middle of a lake.’
‘This kid is involved with an outbreak of an Elder Culture meme,’ Daniel said. ‘All around him, people are trying to express the new ideas that have infiltrated their minds. This is his attempt, pieced together from images of the fifteen worlds, from ads and sci-fi films, from his imagination. It’s interesting, but why is it special?’
‘It’s the same landscape, over and over. The same spires, different views, close-ups of different parts. It’s a place that’s very real to him. And it seems very real to me. Authentic,’ Chloe said, disappointed and frustrated that Daniel wasn’t seeing what she saw. ‘I think that something got inside his head, and then it got inside the heads of his neighbours. It may have infected his little sister, too. She mentioned something she called Ugly Chicken. The question is, what is it? And where did it come from?’
‘You’re certain this kid was the primary?’
‘According to my information, the leader of the cult started behaving strangely soon after Freddie moved into the flat below his. So that’s one thing. But there’s something else, too. A freelance scout, Eddie Ackroyd, was on the scene. He’s been chasing Elder Culture artefacts for longer than I have. He told me that he has a client interested in the cult and its breakout—’
That got Daniel’s attention. ‘Who, exactly?’
‘I don’t know yet. The thing is, Eddie told me that someone on the Last Five Minutes wiki had tipped him off about the cult.’
‘The bomb thing?’
‘The bomb thing.’
The bomb was the nuclear device that had detonated in Trafalgar Square fourteen years ago. 12 September, 12:21 p.m. Just before the Jackaroo had made contact, when every country in the world had been caught up in riots, revolutions and counter-revolutions, civil wars, border wars, water wars, netwars, and plain old-fashioned conflicts, mixed up with climate change and various degrees of financial collapse. All this craziness culminating in a limited nuclear missile exchange and a string of low-yield tactical nukes exploding in capital cities. The Spasm.
The Trafalgar Square bomb had been a tactical weapon stolen from the stockpiles of the former Soviet Union, with an estimated yield of 0.4 megatons. It had obliterated a square kilometre of central London, igniting enormous fires and injuring over ten thousand people and killing four thousand. Including Chloe’s mother, who had been working at the archives of the National Portrait Gallery — research for a book on Victorian photography — and had vanished in an instant of light brighter and hotter than the surface of the sun.
Chloe had been twelve when the bomb had exploded her world, had just turned thirteen when the Jackaroo revealed themselves and told everyone in the world that they wanted to help. A few years later, she discovered the Last Five Minutes wiki, a gathering of people dedicated to analysing recently released CCTV footage from that day. There was video footage from traffic and security cameras, too, and photographs and video clips posted to the web or sent by email just before the suitcase nuke detonated.