Читать книгу 2089 - Группа авторов - Страница 10

Jack Smith hefted his rucksack of ‘dummy bombs’ to set off for the trial run. Leaving a sack of river cobbles in the basement of the Doughnut could be explained away if anyone found them. If nobody found them during today’s work shift, then next time they’d be real bombs, not just stones. Jack expected that, on 10 September 2089, he was going to cause the biggest act of terrorism for fifty years.

Jack did not lock his front door. There would be no burglary; he closed it to keep out animals and bad weather. Because of his work as a sifter, nobody could ever get away with a crime, so people simply didn’t bother to try.

He flicked a switch to connect the roof solar panels to charge the battery collection under the stairs inside. The old electricity storage units were more than sixty years old and no longer held charge very well. As with most technology, they needed careful nurturing.

The house was on the outskirts of old Cheltenham, a nice residence that had suffered little from its abandonment in the Times of Malthus. It had originally been in the last street before the countryside, both a city house and a rural house. Now that nature was reclaiming much of the urban areas, this borderline was blurred.

Jack liked his home; the proximity to fields and woods was settling. Grannie Ellie’s farm was in the midst of similar woods and fields. A few other farmhouses had been visible as Jack grew up, but he and his grandmother had had a swathe of countryside to themselves. At his garden gate, he wondered if animals and vegetation, or indeed people, had taken back his childhood home in the year since her passing. At the memory that Ellie was gone, the weight of the rucksack made his legs wobble, and he had to steady himself with a hand on the gatepost.

Jack’s walk to the Doughnut was mostly through derelict streets, the houses dark and mouldering, long abandoned. He crossed the old railway. The metal tracks still lay in perfect straight lines, red-brown stripes running along a grass corridor through semi-ghost town. The route was easy walking in any weather — the roads were fine for pedestrians. Flooding and winter snow and ice had combined to ruffle and pit the asphalt surface. Had any of the rusting cars been started up and driven around the empty streets, it would have been rough going for them, impassable in places.

‘Morning, son.’

Jack leapt away from the sound of the voice and hit his thigh against a front garden wall. In the doorway of a house across the road, an old man smiled and gave a brief wave. Jack looked up and down the street. He stuttered back, ‘Goo-good morning.’

Jack kept his back to the wall and sidled away, the rucksack’s base scraping on the top of the crumbling bricks. The old man said nothing further, and stared.

Here and there, houses were occupied and Jack would normally wave or greet people he saw on his route. He knew them all by sight, but rarely held any long conversations with anyone. With daily twelve-hour working shifts, and over an hour’s walking commute each day, Jack did not have much time for chit-chat. Today, he was carrying twenty kilograms of dummy bombs. Chit-chat was definitely not going to happen.

Across the cricket pitch, still well maintained and in regular use, and a footbridge over Hatherley Brook, the route led him onto the tarmac fields surrounding the Doughnut.

All the sifters for southwest England, and the whole of Wales, worked in the Doughnut. The old government had established the ring-shaped building for its spies and information thieves to work in. After the signing of the Covenants of Jerusalem, numerous communities had repurposed bits of its computing power for their own surveillance sifters.

The glass and steel torus was enormous, and each sifter had a significant space in which to work undisturbed. With the global population crashed to less than 100 million, England as a whole had only eighty–three Kangaroos — the remaining population groupings. The number of sifters at the Doughnut was far fewer than it could have held, and there was little interaction between them. Most of the roof of the building was now covered in solar panels — the electricity grid had long since been abandoned in favour of small, local, renewable generation.

Jack had a second floor workspace entirely to himself. The Doughnut was constructed in thirds, and his area covered a chunk of the Western Third. Whilst the Northeastern and Southeastern Thirds overlooked parts of Cheltenham, he had panoramic windows that looked out in the direction of Wales. Eventually, although obscured by mountains, the view faced the Irish Sea.

Each sifter could arrange their own workspace as they wanted to, but Jack had followed the example of his mentor and developed a horseshoe of display screens on three levels. These twelve screens half enclosed him when he sat in the black swivel chair, which had moulded over fourteen years to fit his exact body shape. He put his lunchbox on his desk and headed downstairs.

The basement of the Doughnut housed all of the computers that ran the infonetwork and digital records, including all audiopt feeds, for the same region of southwest England and Wales. Although these were all housed in the same building, each village population — or Kangaroo — had a separate computer server for its local infonetwork. The individual systems were each maintained by a pair of engineers, the infotechs. The Fifth Covenant of Jerusalem meant that although the region’s various Kangaroos all had their sifters working in the Doughnut, the operations of each were totally separate. No organisation was permitted influence over too many people.

Jack had only been to the basement a few times; he would look out of place if anyone saw him down there. The audiopt surveillance would see his every move, but he knew to avoid looking at anything that might give away his secret purpose.

He had an idea where to place his bombs – around the main server area – but needed to get there without meeting anyone. His rucksack only held imitation explosives this time round. If nobody came down and found them in a day, then he could be confident the real explosions would not hurt anyone, but just destroy the infonetwork, and hence the audiopt surveillance.

Jack placed four packages in the corners of the server hall, hid the rucksack under the stairs and stole back up them to head to work as normal.

As he came up towards the first floor, Jack saw a dark ponytail. Its owner was leaning on the tall window’s shiny handrail staring out at the scrubby brown landscape. He had tried to be quiet on the stairs and she didn’t appear to have heard him. However, there was no way he could get past without her seeing him. Jack decided quickly that to descend again and cross the basement to the other staircase would look very suspicious, should anyone watch his audiopt feeds.

‘Hi Aluen,’ he said brightly.

She turned. ‘Oh, Jack. Good to see you. Where have you been?’

She had immediately thwarted his plan to engage her in innocuous conversation. Without looking, he put out a hand to lean on the wall, misjudged the distance and toppled slightly.

‘Oh, um, trying to find my infotech. You haven’t seen her, have you? Nobody down in the basement at all.’

Aluen shook her head. ‘Sorry, no. But actually, glad I caught you.’

Jack leaned further against the wall for support. Was Aluen responsible for monitoring him, as well as her own village of Newnham? Had she come to the stairwell simply to intercept him?

She stared at him for a moment and then continued, ‘Have you got a minute to help me with a case?’ Jack didn’t reply but stared back. ‘I’m not at all sure what’s going on with it. A second pair of eyes would be really helpful.’ She smiled at him.

After a moment, Jack stood more upright and said, ‘You know I’m not allowed to decide on matters in another Kangaroo. I won’t know the current mores in your village.’ What was legal or not in Newnham could vary weekly, as the population decided.

‘Yes, yes, it’s not that. I don’t need an opinion on whether to send it. At least, not exactly. The feeds just have me really confused. Come and take a look.’ She grabbed his hand and pulled Jack up the last stair and into her huge workspace.

When her bank of screens had all come back on, they showed the audiopt feeds that his sifter colleague was following to produce her weekly KangaReview. The rolling timestamp on the screen told Jack that this event had happened the previous evening.

The infoservers pre-sifted all the audiopt feeds. Any events that the computer algorithms identified as potentially breaking the Second Covenant of Jerusalem — that ‘Everyone will act for the benefit of all’ — were fed to the sifters to be examined for confirmation, or denial, of the existence of a crime.

The screen Aluen pointed to showed an image of a child in a bedroom. There was scrolling text at the bottom of the screen to tell the sifter what the algorithms had concluded as the possible problem. In this case, the text was slightly larger than usual and in a shrieking blood red: ‘Potential child abuse,’ it warned.

The audiopt feed clip was seen through the eyes of the child’s father. He entered the room in which the boy was screaming in bed. Jack guessed at four years old and then Aluen clicked for the boy’s feeds to be shown on the adjacent screen. This confirmed the boy’s identity and that he was in fact five years and two months old.

The boy saw his father come in, and his crying caught in the boy’s throat for a second. His eyes were fixed on the approaching parent, and he started screaming again, a little louder and with genuine fear in the cries. It was a disturbing scene. Without a pause in his movements, the father struck the boy on the arm. It was a hard slap, after which he picked up his son, and they hugged each other. The boy continued to cry, but it subsided with each lungful of air until the boy was silent, and the father put him back down under the bed covers. Neither adult nor child said any coherent words during the brief clip.

Jack scowled. The conclusion to the clip was contradictory. The computer had suggested this father might be beating his child, and that was clearly what Jack had seen, but they hugged at the end as if nothing had happened between them. The final view through the father’s eyes saw his son contented and ready to sleep.

‘What do you think?’ she asked.

‘Yes, there is something not quite right. It looks obvious, but… that hug. The boy’s not subdued by his abuser, he seems genuinely thankful to have been hit.’

‘Exactly. Am I missing something?’

Jack leant over to the controller and moved the feeds backwards and forwards several times. The pre-sifting software was good, but it could not comprehend the nuances of human behaviour. A human sifter was always needed to give the final judgement about what should be included in the KangaReview.

There was one brief moment, lasting less than a fifth of a second, where the father’s eyes moved from the boy’s face to look at the arm he would then hit. The room was quite dark and, in slow motion, there were only three frames of the man’s vision that were looking at the arm. However, in those frames, it was absolutely clear that a large house spider was crawling on the son. Jack called up the boy’s feeds from the minutes before what the computer had supplied. Playing this through showed the youngster looking at his own forearm and seeing the creature there. It was clear that he then froze in fear, but called out the one word ‘spider’ loudly and repeatedly before breaking into the screams of terror. Aluen had initially only been supplied with the feeds from the moment the boy started screaming.

‘I remember something my mentor told me,’ Jack said. ‘We are the arbiters of history in this world. Others could also find out the truth, but nobody ever bothers to look. Right or wrong, our submissions to Kangaroo have become the origination upon which everybody’s worldview is formulated.’ He ran the fingers of both hands through his wiry black hair and looked at Aluen.

She turned her head and stared at him. ‘What?’

‘Do you really believe we have the right to spy on people all the time?’

Aluen scrunched her eyebrows. ‘It’s our job.’ Her tone became sardonic as she mimicked his language: ‘If “we are the arbiters of history in this world”, then we need to see everything, in order to make sure we tell the true story.’

Jack realised he had said too much. He took a half step backwards. Had he given himself away? Would she report him?

But Aluen had already turned back to her work. ‘Thanks for helping.’ She clicked on the button on the screen’s toolbar marked ‘Nothing to report’. Both screens changed image to show two new suggested issues with scrolling text explaining the algorithm’s thinking in each case.

Jack moved to go back to his workspace. As he looked out of the window on the staircase, he mouthed silently, ‘Soon, I’ll put a stop to all this.’ He thought about the homemade bombs hidden in the cellar of his house, waiting to be used, and felt a small surge of satisfaction. Soon.