Downtime - Marc Platt [87]
‘Nothing, Flight Sergeant. I just walked over someone’s grave.’
The answer seemed to satisfy the tramp, who scratched at his fingers and peered at the floor-indicator.
The lift stopped with a clunk, but the doors stayed resolutely stuck.
After a moment, the Brigadier struck at the door with his fist and complained, ‘Come on Hinton!’, as if the boy was late for class.
28
Something in the System
ate chained her bike to the rack outside the administration Kblock. Some of the other bikes had strands of web attached to them.
Overhead, the web canopy caught and reflected the flaring lights back down onto the angular buildings. The deserted campus was like Docklands at weekends. A film set waiting for the action to start.
Kate felt the dead weight of the gun inside her coat. She pushed her way warily into the reception area. The swathes of web inside intensified the gloom. They rippled like living things in the draught she had created. She wanted to run straight out again, but a sudden movement attracted her attention.
A figure was seated behind the reception desk. The pale glow from the terminal screen gave him the eerie appearance of a ghost. He looked up at her and the blank screen appeared as two white squares in his glasses.
Kate was incredulous. ‘I thought you were...’ She couldn’t say the word.
‘Maybe.’ Danny’s face was flattened by the glow. ‘I need your help, Kate. And so does your dad. You’d better come and sit down.’
She didn’t argue, but by the time she had edged round the desk, the apparition had vanished from the chair.
‘Go on, sit down,’ he said, suddenly emerging from the shadows behind her.
‘What do I do?’ she asked.
‘Sit.’
She did as she was told and faced the blank screen.
He was no more than a face at her shoulder, lit by the glow.
‘This whole place is part of the computer. The machines and the buildings too. That’s what’s causing all this.’
‘The virus in the computer. That’s what you said before.’
‘It’s alive inside the computer. It’s extending its web outwards. Beyond the buildings here, right across the world.
That’s why your dad’s here. He’s in terrible danger inside the building.’
‘I’ve got to reach him. That’s why I came.’ She started to stand again.
Not that way. You can help him better here.’
‘How?’
‘By accessing the database. That way you let him through.’
‘But I don’t know how. What about you? What was that thing, that monster that you..
There was a pause. ‘I got absorbed,’ said Danny coldly.
‘I’m in here too.’
‘ You are in the computer?’
The head gave a disembodied nod. ‘But I’m still me. Kate, please just follow my commands. I can find my way round in here, but I can’t control it.’
She sighed. ‘I don’t know. I’m not even used to this system.’
‘But I am,’ said the boy’s ghost. ‘Ever heard of automatic writing? Put your fingers on the keys.’
She obeyed and watched, startled, as her fingers started to move independently of her own will.
The screen darkened and started to scroll with a rush of data.
Harrods stood back from the lift doors, his fingers aching from trying to force them apart.
‘It’s no good, sir. I reckon something’s jamming them.’
The indicator above the door was lit only on the number three.
‘Typical,’ complained the Brigadier. ‘Blasted boy always disappears when you want him.’
As if in answer, the lift doors clanked and ground slowly open. The two passengers stepped out into the hallway relieved to be out of the cage.
The corridor outside was equally unwelcoming. With all the gloom, they might have been in a basement or crypt. The air was muggy. The web-shrouded walls creaked and rumbled like sleepy beasts shifting restlessly in their stalls.
The Brigadier hefted a fire-extinguisher from its place on the wall. ‘Better than nothing,’ he said and set off slowly along the passage.
A worrying thought had just occurred to him: if Daniel Hinton now existed only in the systems of the New World computer, what would happen to the boy if the computer was switched off?