Downtime - Marc Platt [43]
Danny tried the keys again, but they refused to punch down. They physically resisted. No exit. No escape from the file. He started to try other combinations, but the keyboard was jammed solid. He started to bite at his finger until the nail tore painfully.
The screen flickered into life.
Danny studied the new image for a second and gawped. It was a UNIT file and the ID photo was of Old Stewpot. Or, rather, Young Stewpot. Lethbridge-Stewart, the Brigadier, his old maths master at Brendon, but much younger. He was in full military uniform as he invariably was on School CCF
Inspection Day.
School was three years back for Danny, although it seemed about a century. Three years since he was expelled for dabbling in the occult – or was given what the headmaster called ‘early career benefit opportunities’. Danny’s father was more concise with his condemnation. The school did its damnedest to avoid the publicity. Even so, the Brigadier had argued strongly and surprisingly in Danny’s support. It had been of little avail, but in return, Danny had inwardly promised to be eternally grateful.
His parents had sent him here to New World as a last resort.
A course in Virtual Studies. His father thought the university sounded ‘just the job’. His mother didn’t have a say. Danny thought it was a right-wing holiday camp. It was the last place he expected to re-encounter the Brigadier.
The image on the screen had begun to flicker, forcing Danny to screw up his eyes against the glare. The screen suddenly flared to a blinding white – a white that crackled out at him like a bolt of indoor lightning. He tumbled back in his chair shielding his eyes.
The light was howling at him like a trapped beast. Behind it he could hear a shrill repetitive bleeping. Through the gaps between his fingers, he saw that the monitor screen was turning slowly back and forth on its pivot like a deadly eye searching for a victim. He began to edge the chair backwards as twice the ‘eye’ passed over him. It seemed to be blind.
Something clouded his vision. With a gasp of revulsion, he saw that the fingers on his left hand, the hand closer to the monitor, were covered in strands of sticky web.
He sent the chair clattering as he hurled himself across the room and out through the door.
9
Flight
arah sat in her chair bemused by the sudden effect of the Salarm on her interrogators. She seemed to have been all but forgotten. It might have been a good opportunity to escape, but she was fascinated and the cassette hidden in her briefcase still had twenty minutes’ record time left.
‘Someone in the secure system,’ muttered Christopher.
Miss Waterfield seemed to be staring into the middle distance, a look of rapt concentration on her face. ‘Daniel Hinton,’ she pronounced.
Christopher smirked. ‘That devious little...’ He reached down and reverently lifted the bleeping sphere from its box.
The Vice Chancellor watched him apprehensively as he started towards the door. ‘I don’t want him hurt, Christopher.’
‘Of course,’ he smiled, and went.
On the desk, the ivory pyramid was still pulsing with light.
Somewhere an alarm was sounding. Victoria Waterfield, now abandoned by her accomplice, sat staring at her monitor screen.
Sarah, determined not to waste this opportunity, moved quickly in on her subject. ‘What is New World University?’
she asked urgently. ‘You don’t have lectures. You don’t even have tutors.’
Miss Waterfield turned slowly and regarded her with a look that was defensive and surprisingly vulnerable. She looked very small in the huge winged chair. ‘All the tuition is conducted by the mainframe – a personalized syllabus for every student.’
‘Since when did computers get personal?’ complained Sarah. ‘Come on, what are the Chillys really for? Some sort of fascist hippy cult?’
Miss Waterfield shook her head gently. She began to remind Sarah more of a nun than a Vice Chancellor – all very laudable, but totally impractical. ‘The wicked world is full of lost children: the aimless, the lonely. We follow the Det-sen disciplines that our Chancellor