I lifted the receiver and held it to my ear and I heard her voice in the earpiece saying, “This is a mobile phone, Rupe, and that’s impossible for two reasons. The first is that you don’t have mobile phones, and the second is that you don’t have a mobile phone network. Except you do.”
I stared at her. She was holding the
mobile phone
to her ear.
“I know, I know,” she said. “This proves nothing. The Science Faculty have been conspiring against you and hiding stuff from you and they have some hidden agenda you don’t know anything about, blah blah, blah.”
I put the receiver back on its cradle. “May I see that, please?”
She handed over the
mobile phone
. I turned it over in my hands. I touched the glass part and the picture changed. I shook it and she laughed. “Give it back, Rupe, before you start sniffing it.”
“Hm.” I handed it back and she tapped the glass face of the phone again.
“You also,” she said, “have the internet. Or
an
internet, anyway. The phone says there’s a connection available.”
I shook my head.
“Doesn’t matter right now.” She poked the phone and it went dark and she put it back in her pocket. “The Science Faculty
have
been conspiring against you and hiding stuff from you and they
do
have a hidden agenda. They’ve been developing all kinds of technologies they haven’t bothered to tell you about.” She saw the look on my face. “And before you march out and arrest Callum again, it’s not just him. It’s been going on for years. Centuries. The Whitton-Whytes genuinely intended this place to be a seat of learning, a great University. But they died out, their maps were lost, and someone else took over. They made a deal with the Science Faculty and they’ve been using the Campus to hothouse new stuff, stuff we’re banned from experimenting on where I’m from.”
I looked at her for quite a long time, wondering whether or not to go along with this lunacy. On the other hand, the
mobile phone
was an interesting development. I said, “How do you know all this?”
“Because there are people in London who know about the Campus, and I’ve been talking to them.”
“London.”
She shrugged and nodded.
“Where you’re from.”
I was starting to regard her rucksack as a bottomless pit of madness. She reached into it again and brought out a book. It was small, and had soft, floppy covers. On the front was a stylised silhouette of a man in a deerstalker hat, under the words
The Hound Of The Baskervilles
. Under the silhouette was Conan Doyle’s name. I turned the book over in my hands with the same bafflement I’d accorded the
mobile phone
.
“In the Conan Doyle books published here, Holmes lives on Baker Street in Lady’s Law,” she said. “That’s because, in all your books and maps and stories, my world has been edited out. If you look at that, Holmes lives in London.” She nodded at the book and sat back in her chair. “If I was crazy, would I go to the trouble of
rewriting
the whole of
The Hound Of The Baskervilles
and getting it published?”
Somebody might. If they were crazy enough. I looked at her for a few more moments, then I unlocked my desk drawer and took out the little glass jar Harry Pool had given me. I held it out to her. “Do you know what these are?”
She held the jar up to the light, shook it. It rattled. She squinted at the contents. “They look like microchips,” she said finally.
“What?”
She looked at me. “Rupe, where did you get these?”
“What are they?” I asked again.
“I used to work in a vet’s,” she said. “We used to microchip cats and dogs. Implant these little... devices under the skin. They’ve got information on them – name, address, owner, stuff like that – and you can read them with another device, in case the cat or dog gets lost. Where did you get them?”
“One of them came out of my arm,” I said, a cold and quite rational anger growing within me. “Harry Pool thinks we all have them.”
She blinked at me, and for a moment I had the gratifying sense that I had managed to wrongfoot her. “Jesus, Rupe, they
chipped
the entire population.”
“There was a big tuberculosis outbreak about fifty years ago,” I said. “The Old Board started a programme of mass inoculation that’s been going on ever since. Harry thinks that’s how these things are
implanted.
” I took the jar from her. “Could they be used to tell someone where we all are?”
She shrugged. “They could be, I suppose. Depends how sophisticated they are.”
Sciency stuff.
I put the jar in my jacket pocket. “Come with me.”
“T
HEY’RE
WHAT
?”
SAID
Harry.
“Micro...” I said.
“Chips,” said Araminta. “Microchips.”
“We’ve been bloody tagged like cattle for years,” I told him. “By the Science Faculty and the Medical Faculty and the Old Board.”
He looked at the jar. “Fucking hell,” he said. “How do they work?”
“Radio,” said Araminta.
Harry raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”
“That’s not important right now,” I told him.
“It’s not? Am I going to need a drink?”
“You might. So might I. Could we look at the man with the wings, please?”
“The –? Yes, of course. If you say so.” He added to Araminta, “It’s not very pretty.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t imagine it is.”
We went over to the wall of cabinet doors. Harry opened one and slid out the tray inside. He looked at us for a moment, then turned down the sheet covering the body underneath.
“Fuck
me
,” said Araminta.
The man with wings was actually a boy. He didn’t look much more than twelve. He lay on his side because the great white-feathered wings on his back would have made it impossible to lie flat. His arms and legs were stick-thin and overlong, and there were three closely-grouped bullet-holes in the great bulging prow of his chest.
“Oh, you poor bastard,” Araminta murmured, leaning down close to the body to examine the roots of the wings. She stroked the feathers gently. “But I bet you looked
fantastic
in the air, didn’t you.”
“Have you ever seen anything like this?” I asked.
“No, but I know what it is.” She looked at Harry. “No signs of surgery?”
He shook his head.
“My best guess is that this is genetic engineering,” she said to me. “Someone custom-built this poor boy before he was even born. We don’t have anything like this. We have rules against it.”
Harry was looking from her to me and back again. “Could someone explain what you’re talking about, please?” he said.
“Tell him,” I said to her. “Tell him about the flu.”
It was obvious that Harry was rapidly approaching the point where he would be unable to cope with any more of this madness. He said, “What about the flu?”
Araminta looked sadly at me. She said to Harry, “A few years ago there was a flu epidemic in my... world. Tens of millions of people died, but Europe was hit hardest. There were rumours that the virus wasn’t natural, that it was deliberately engineered.”
Harry looked at her, at me, back at her. “Are you trying to tell me,” he said carefully, “that it was made
here
?”
She rubbed her eyes and looked at the boy on the tray. “This all starts with my brother,” she said.
“R
AFE’S THE SMART
one in the family,” she told us. “Double First at Oxford, good job with a biotech startup.”
“In English, please,” I said gently.
She smiled. She looked worn out and she kept glancing across the room to the wall of freezers. “He’s very clever. Let’s leave it at that. A year ago, he disappeared. Just vanished. The police couldn’t find him, the private investigator we hired couldn’t find him. We put out appeals on the tele – we put out appeals. But he was gone. No note, no clue, no nothing.
“About eight months ago his girlfriend got in touch with my parents. She’d been going through some stuff Rafe had left at her flat and she found a hard dr –” She stopped and looked at me. “It’s not easy telling you this stuff; half of it, you haven’t the faintest idea what I’m talking about.”
“You’re doing all right,” I told her. “I’m getting the gist.”
“Emily found this folder,” she said. “Tucked away under the flap at the bottom of a cardboard box full of bits and pieces. The folder was full of documents. Rafe had met these people in London and they’d told him about this place and Ernshire. There were photographs of maps, drawings of paths into here and Ernshire from England,” she went on. “There’s an old abandoned railway line out of Paddington that leads to Stanhurst. Here, you can get in and out on the River.”
I said, “And you think your brother is here.”
“Or in Ernshire. I had to start somewhere.”
Harry came back with our drinks, and he and I exchanged glances. He said to her, “If he went missing a year ago, you’d better hope he didn’t come here.”
Araminta looked at us. “Rafe works with viruses,” she said.
Harry sat down and nodded at the
mobile phone
on his desktop. “May I look at that again, please?”
She got up and took the little device over to him, showed him how to make the front light up and where to touch it. A few moments later, the phone on the desk in front of him started to ring. Harry looked at it, then at the
mobile phone
, then at his desk phone. He sucked his teeth and looked at me.
“I believe her,” he said.
“You’re joking,” I said.
He waved the
mobile phone
at me. “This is real. How do I stop it? Oh, right.” His desk phone stopped ringing. “It works on some kind of system that only the Science Faculty could have developed, and which they’ve never told us about.
Radio
, did you say?”
Araminta nodded.
Harry said, “
Radio
,” again, as if tasting the word. “Extraordinary. And this
internet
thing?”
“It’s complicated, Harry.”
“I’m not a stupid man, Araminta. Please credit me with that at least.”
She thought for a moment. “Computers,” she said. “They’re... they’re sort of like calculating machines, but they carry out thousands of calculations a second. You can make them do all kinds of stuff, and they can be linked together by radio so they can talk to each other.”
Harry looked at me. “
Computers
,” he said, “
radio. Mobile phones
. What did you call it?
Genetic engineering
?”
“That’s
really
complicated, Harry,” she said. “I can’t explain it to you.”
“How do you know all that stuff about the Science Faculty?” he asked her.
“I don’t,” she said. “Not for certain. But it’s obvious.” She looked at me and said, “It’s
obvious
, Rupe. All your technology comes from the Science Faculty and they’ve been keeping most of it from you. There’s a mobile network here and you didn’t know about it. Your population’s been microchipped.” She looked at Harry. “It’s just obvious.”
For a long time, the only sound in the room was the quiet hum of the freezers, preserving the Medical Faculty’s experiments.
Harry said, “What are we going to do?”
N
IGHT HAD FALLEN
while we were with Harry. I paused outside his building and closed my eyes and just tried to concentrate on breathing. Everything seemed very still, very peaceful, as if I hadn’t just been told that my entire world was a fantasy.
I opened my eyes. It was a clear night and the sky was full of stars. I said, “What about the stars? Did the Whitton-Whytes create them too?”
“I don’t know, Rupe,” Araminta said beside me. “I don’t know how they did it. Nobody does. I’m sorry.”
I said, “Do you –” and there was a sudden sound in the sky like steam escaping from a small locomotive. I’d heard it before, and so apparently had Araminta, because we both started to run. The sound rushed towards us and I threw Araminta into the ditch at the side of the road and threw myself after her. A moment later there was a huge noise behind us, the air itself seemed to thicken and pulse, and a wave of heat and heavy things passed over us, followed a moment later by the pattering of smaller things falling out of the sky.
“Are you all right?” I shouted, and realised I could barely hear my own voice for the mushy roaring in my ears. I turned and shook Araminta and she looked up groggily and blinked at me.
I sat up. Harry’s building was gone. It looked as if it had shrugged itself to pieces and then burst into flames. Bits of flying glass and masonry had chopped twigs and branches off the trees all around us.
I got up and started to stagger back towards the building, but Araminta held me back. “We have to go!” she yelled.
“Harry –!”
She shook her head and tugged me away from the burning building. “We have to go, Rupe!”
I turned to run, but she went in the opposite direction. I stopped, saw her run close to the ruins, and throw something into the flames, then she trotted back to me.
“What was that?”
“Phone.”
“
What
? What did you do that for?”
“Tell you later. Let’s go; they’ll be coming.”
B
Y THE TIME
we got back to my Residence, my ears had recovered enough for me to be able to hear the commotion outside the building. Araminta and I struck off from the road and approached from the other side until I could see in the moonlight a large group of armed people standing outside. Residents in various states of night dress were being brought outside and forced to sit on the pavement. I couldn’t see properly from this distance, but the guns carried by the armed people looked wrong, too short and stubby.
We made a big loop through the grounds and around to Admin, where it was the same story. People with guns everywhere, members of Security rounded up and held captive. Every window in the building was lit up, and I could see people moving about inside. Someone was standing at the window of my office, looking out.
“It’s a coup,” Araminta said softly beside me. “A counter-revolution. By the time everybody wakes up in the morning the New Board won’t be in charge anymore.”