Downtime - Marc Platt [55]
That Locus must be recovered and destroyed!
And that is not enough. The rigid web binds it too. It must have solid form and substance. Not to exist solely as blind impulses of data. But does it have the strength?
Something squeaks nearby.
The Intelligence feels a shape brush against its foot –
against Travers’s foot encased in soft animal skin. It reaches out its will, temporarily abandoning its aged host.
It feels itself inside the new shape. A hairy little body with a long febrile tail and a tiny racing heart. The little creature stops, terrified by the sudden enforced blindness of the invader. The blind Intelligence revels in the creature’s heightened sense of smell – vividly and colourfully pungent.
The creature squeals and rolls over and over, all but bursting apart from the monstrous existence inhabiting its tiny form.
The intruder loosens its inner grip, allowing the puny creature’s instincts to scurry it forward. From its newfound whiskers, it senses the narrow crack that the animal enters. At home in the acrid darkness. The presence feels rough wood and mortar below the creature’s paws and then something smooth, unnatural, fed with a charge of electricity.
The Intelligence abandons its tiny host and enters the cable, surging along it, a long finger of thought stretching thinner and thinner. It remembers this place and seeks the tinny voice at the end of the cable.
‘Victoria! Victoria!’
It hears startled reactions below: ‘What are they on about?’
‘This is Piccadilly Circus, isn’t it?’ ‘Nah, change at Green Park for the Victoria Line.’
The address system gives a burst of hysterical demonic laughter that echoes away into the tunnel. ‘My strength is returning.’
The Intelligence gives a leap of imagination back into the well-tried and hateful prison body of Travers. It needs him now. There will be no more waiting.
A nearby voice is saying, ‘Come on, old man. You can’t sit begging here.’
Travers’s shoulder is gripped by a human hand. He is being pulled upwards. Flat circles of metal are being pushed into his palm.
‘Here you are. Take your money and push off.’ Travers, old and worn out, is grunting in confusion.
‘Come on,’ says the voice. ‘Don’t you have a home to go to?’
With a rush, the Intelligence takes full possession again.
Travers gives a bearlike snarl. His stick lashes out and strikes something hard.
There is a scream from nearby.
The stick swings wide, searching its way, dragging blind Travers behind it.
Victoria’s conference with the Chancellor was part of her daily ritual. First the office was darkened and she would sit in contemplation before the screen of her monitor.
Concentrate – relax – concentrate...
Increasingly it became important to gather her inner strength before they spoke, if only to withstand his rages. As it was, he often left her weeping. The Chancellor was old, a reclusive hermit, driven by a great will that would one day provide the greatest revelation to them all. Victoria never saw him. He spoke to her through disciplines inlaid in the New World computer, his creation, which the students nicknamed the Omputer. He spoke from somewhere distant and unknown, but with such intense conviction that when she heard him, she knew nothing else. He held the key to the future and she was chosen to help him.
Relax – concentrate – relax...
He had shown her how to pilot her mind from perception into imagination and rise out of her body; to project herself into other etheric states; to see the world in overview, from a witch’s-cradle of thoughts.
Contemplation, however, had its drawbacks.
‘Thinking again?’ her father would say. ‘Too much of that and you’ll forget how to talk.’
She had achieved so much, but was she content?
No. Contentment was as much a fallacy as perfection. Yet they all strove for it.
She was driving her thoughts, concentrating. Then thinking of blue, deep infinite blue. Drifting back again. Back, back into dream memories.
Eastbourne holidays.