‘We can’t stay here, you know that. If we do we’ll just destroy everything you have here.’
‘Perhaps, but everything is about to change and you have nothing to lose.’ He had a point. I had nothing else to do.
‘What’s this got to do with the alien?’ A horrific-sounding gravelly voice asked. It sounded like someone was trying to speak and chew glass at the same time. My response was embarrassing. The hardcore special forces veteran jumped. Thus probably disgracing three hundred and fifty years of regimental history. What made it worse was that the mannequin was so primitive there was actually a delay between my urge to jump and the mannequin obeying me.
Pagan was looking past me and smiling. I turned to see who was making that horrible sound. The icon looked as bad as it sounded. It was just about identifiable as human. It had a stooped back, a long face with a long sharp tongue and a mouth of squint and irregular but vicious-looking teeth. There were elements of it that looked like a stereotypical witch icon of the type popular in the net at Halloween, for those who could afford it, but there was something about its deathly pale-blue skin, wiry musculature and nasty-looking claws that gave this icon a much more primal and sinister aspect to it. It wore what looked like a simple, ragged black sackcloth dress tied at the waist with a rope.
‘Have you decided how you want to be addressed?’ Pagan asked.
‘Black Annis,’ the hag said.
‘Well I’m sure Jakob will disapprove because of its religious connotations.’
‘That’s religious?’ I managed, pointing at the grotesque thing in front of me. ‘What kind of religion do you follow?’ Everyone ignored me.
‘No,’ the hag-like figure said. ‘For me, it’s a fairy tale. This is what I almost had to become. It could’ve been the other way around.’ It was then I realised.
‘Morag?’ I asked. The Hag nodded. If she’d had to make herself ugly to become a hacker then her icon would’ve been beautiful. To her this was the payment of a karmic debt.
‘Not the Maiden of the Flowers then?’ Pagan said, sounding both amused and pleased. Annis shook her head, almost shyly, I thought. ‘Religious or not, it has resonance with me. I congratulate you. It is a very sophisticated avatar,’ he said. Annis seemed to beam with pride.
‘The hardware helped a lot,’ came that horrible voice again. The hag was looking around the chamber, its face a picture of grotesque wonder.
‘First time?’ Pagan asked.
‘First time jacked in, first time feeling,’ Morag said.
‘That was quick,’ I said, both impressed and suspicious of Morag’s presence in the net.
‘Clearly there is a degree of natural talent,’ Pagan said. With the arrival of Morag I’d suddenly started to feel weary. I realised that Pagan had been sucking me into his insane plan; now his spell was broken.
‘What about the alien?’ I said, repeating Morag the Hag’s question. ‘You said it was key.’ Pagan was suddenly serious again, speaking to both of us.
‘Along with the information form, Vicar also put the result of the tests he’d run on the alien in the memory cube. What he found was that Their physiology is all integrated; there are no separate organs. The brain runs throughout and is compatible with the rest of Them when they rejoin each other to form one consensual hive mind,’ he said. Again this was something that had been theorised before.
‘Then it’s a biological machine?’ I said somewhat patronisingly, probably more for Morag’s benefit than mine.
‘Yes,’ Pagan said. ‘In the same way humans are, but they do not differentiate between what we would see as technology and themselves.’
‘Bioborgs. So?’ I said. This was actually nothing new.
‘Pagan said they were like a biological liquid equivalent of nanites,’ Morag said. Pagan nodded.
‘That’s right, but the important thing is that Ambassador’s processing power is remarkable, and it seems able to learn as instantaneously as we can manage to measure it.’
‘So?’ I said.
‘So it would be able to manage information on the scale required for Pagan and his friends’ plan,’ Morag said.
‘You heard?’ I asked appalled.
‘I sent her the files of our discussion when she entered the library,’ Pagan said.
‘Jakob, you’ve no idea. The hardware enables me to process and understand so quickly. I know so much; I can learn so quickly,’ she said. Her enthusiasm would’ve been more infectious if I could stop thinking about the metal and plastic that seemed to infect us all these days. I’d had enough of this.
‘Okay great, you’ve got your pet alien. Best of luck. This has nothing to do with us,’ I said, not even thinking. Black Annis turned to look at me. Was that amusement I saw in the black orbs that passed for eyes? ‘Me,’ I said pathetically.
There was the sound of breaking glass as the alien burst through its containment program. Black tendrils exploded out through the roof of Dinas Emrys, through the cracks in the ceiling. I could only see more blackness, which meant we were in an unpopular part of the net, the virtual middle of nowhere. The main body of the alien information form seemed to remain within the circle. I instinctively ducked down but Pagan was already working. Scrolls appeared and disappeared in front of him as streams of translucent blue light issued from his hands forming coronas of energy around Ambassador’s black tendrils but seeming to have very little other effect.
‘Out now!’ Pagan shouted in a commanding voice at odds with his normal gentleness. Not being used to the environment, I began looking for an actual exit before I remembered the escape function. The tendrils began to convulse like a snake swallowing a meal, the convulsions becoming more and more rapid.
‘Yes,’ I heard Morag all but whisper. I turned round to see who she was talking to, as did Pagan, his eyes widening in shock. The Black Annis icon’s face was a picture of strangely grotesque wonder. A thin black tendril shot out from Ambassador and pierced the head of the hag-like icon.
‘No!’ I was vaguely aware of myself shouting as I moved towards her, before I realised that here I had no way to help whatsoever. The Black Annis icon was lying on its arched back, shaking as if it/she was experiencing a powerful seizure. The black tendril had pierced the virtual skull and was also convulsing rapidly.
‘Out! Now!’ Pagan shouted again. Years of military conditioning compelled me to obey. I knew I was becoming part of the problem. I spared one more glance at Black Annis and then felt the disorienting pull of reality.
11
It seemed to take a long time for the information I was receiving to make any kind of sense. Though it was probably no time at all. The world glowed a flickering red. There was a keening noise, but that was cut off suddenly. I eventually recognised the sound as some kind of old klaxon. Then came the seemingly constant soundtrack of my life, gunfire and the screams that always seemed to accompany gunfire. My guns were in my hands. I was not aware of having drawn them.
Pagan was still sitting on his tatty couch, still in his jacked-in trance, his face a mask of effort and concentration. More worrying was the newly skinhead Morag lying on the couch next to where I’d been sitting, jerking and twitching but on her face a strange look of contentment.
I wanted to help but there was nothing I could do. Morag was jacked over a wireless link, she wasn’t plugged in, and I couldn’t disconnect her. I could feel a strange sense of panic building in me. Later I would think that I didn’t cope well with being responsible for non-combatants. I had to put that aside and focus. Begin processing the information I was receiving.
I could hear a mixture of weapons being fired, everything from pistols and shotguns to old-sounding automatic weapons. These were being answered by the unmistakeable sound of the Vickers advanced combat rifle. A weapon I had intimate knowledge of, as it was standard issue in the British army. I could also hear the sound of 30-millimetre grenades being fired from underslung launchers and then exploding.