Downtime - Marc Platt [53]
The robot dog retracted his aerial from the telephone. ‘No worries necessary, mistress. The call was re-routed through my personal transmitters and is therefore untraceable.’
She rubbed her hands across the back of her neck. ‘I only hope you’re right. Something was very wrong there. You don’t think, I mean it’s stupid but...’
‘Mistress?’
‘No. Well, I mean, I had this sudden thought. I mean supposing UNIT had been nobbled.’
The phone trilled. Sarah nearly choked on her tea.
12
Anthony
nthony, his temper up, emerged from the lift and aimed a Asavage kick at the doors as they snapped hungrily closed, just missing him. ‘Hah, better luck next time!’
He headed towards the Vice Chancellor’s office. The trouble was that all these corridors looked the same. All Sixties-style breezeblocks, which the architect obviously assumed gave the university a historic traditional feel. ‘ Very Malcolm Bradbury, Very Sanderson, ’ he complained on frequent occasions, but no one under twenty-five got the reference.
A couple of Chillys, plugged into their walkmans, approached. ‘Hi kids,’ he sneered. ‘Been in any good deprograms lately?’
They ignored him, drifting past like zombies.
‘Want any autographs?’ he called after them. ‘If you can read, that is,’ he muttered. He had deserted his post, leaving a syntho-pop medley playing on the grams. It was pumping out into the corridors all over the campus. Yet the Chillys weren’t even listening to it. Their headphones played a simplified version of the beat. He had tried it, but it literally gave him a bad head after only a few seconds.
He already hated the place. The students didn’t behave like students. No illegal parties. No oversleeping, not even oversleeping in each other’s rooms. No jailbait available. They were seriously dead, these Chillys. So chilled out that their minds and other faculties were frozen solid. Stepford Students.
I’ll just die if I don’t get that degree. I’ll just die if I don’t get that degree. Students should be radical and dishevelled and late for lectures – he had been. Gigs for students should be like playing to a load of Krypto-Metal fans.
He reached the entrance to a computer room and stopped to listen to the deep growling hum that came from inside. It sounded like the chanting of Tibetan monks.
He scooped up a mangled piece of paper from the floor and smoothed it out. It was covered in codes and numbers with a line drawing of a pyramid. It was the note Danny had shown him in the canteen.
Anthony had been sitting at a table, bemoaning the lack of a Union bar on the campus, when Danny had come up and spoken to him. The kid was unlike any other Chilly he had come across. He displayed emotion. In fact, he was very upset, even disturbed, but Anthony was glad to talk to anybody else, however deranged. The only other people he spoke to were the right-wing fascists and loonies who called on the daily chat show lines.
Compared with them, Danny seemed completely rational.
Danny was convinced that something was going on at New World University. It was all too easy. Everyone was too taken in. Danny wanted to know how the computer that seemed to control everything really worked. He had elaborate plans to hack his way into the secure areas of the mainframe and find out what was behind it.
Anthony wasn’t even sure he wanted to know. He just wanted to work out his short-term contract and go back to being unemployable. Even so, he liked the kid. There was no one else in the place to like. ‘Let me know what you dig up,’
he said to Danny, ‘and we’ll see what we can get out of it.’
The kid obviously thought this would make the Big Time, and he sidled off looking happier. Anthony had thought that this might have been his good deed for the decade.
Here and now, looking at the crumpled paper, he wasn’t so sure. He rubbed his fingers. There were strands of something resembling cobweb on them. He ducked back as the door opened and Christopher, resplendent in another new pullover, emerged.
‘Something you want, Anthony?’ he oozed.