Dav.

What secret is the raven-haired woman keeping? Furthermore, what is the mysterious secret which surrounds her? A PI in a rebuilt world must find out.

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1: Burminum

The smoke rose from the grates in the ground like snakes curling around the branches of an acacia, disturbed and destroyed by the furious march of the nocturnal population, hurriedly travelling to and fro, to and fro, repetitive and predictable, entirely in contrast with the random motion of the grey fronds. I watched from the doorway of the old, boarded up store, my hat tilted to cover my eyes and my gloved hands plunged deep into the pockets of my trench coat, protecting my knuckles from the frigid wind. I observed, carefully and meticulously, the passers by and their assorted personal traits: the fashionable young dandy, his coiffed hair brushing against his neckline and his tailored kilt brushing against the lip of his knees, creating a sequencing effect not unlike a child’s drawing of a Christmas tree, with a chain hanging around his neck with a memory stick at the end of it, daubed with the word ‘ENCRYPTED’, the letters of which were inscribed in various colours of marker pen; the elderly lady in an oversized overcoat pushing a small, gingham trolley filled with shopping and, her unlikely ally in this evening’s darkness, the clear outline of an EMP rifle within (I imagined that the trolley helped her to remain stable on her slowly decaying joints, more than she’d be willing to admit, and the gun gave her a little more external security, both offering a little more of a feeling she’ll make it home unscathed); the digital pimp, draped top to toe in crushed purple velvet, offering euphemistic “experiences in processed reality” with anyone – “Literally anyone, I tell ya! No limits to your pleasure! Nothing is illegal in PR!” – quietening that last part of his crowing when a small, but noticeable, Watcher patrol car hums past, blackened windows impenetrable and inscrutable, it’s occupants obviously monitoring his clientele and corporate responsibility. I shuddered; this place was despicable, a hole of sin and decrepitude, a stain on our civilised society; laws came here to be tested and, subsequently, to die. Where the cops, the non-tech part of the Watcher force, the legworkers, couldn’t manage here, their corruptible natures standing in the way of crime solving, people like me stepped in. Natives to the zone, aware of its foibles and fears, able to navigate its ferociousness and fights, we formed a secret force, the private investigators of Burminum.

We felt like fucking superheroes.

It was no accident my being here. I found myself observing the mundanity of the moonlit boulevard because I was looking for someone specific. This particular investigation was an old one, commissioned by a shadowy and ancient consortium – it had been exchanged between us, each finding another breadcrumb in the forest, each eventually coming to a dead-end and passing it on to the next, our contact with the contract changing each time one of us gave up and moved it on. The last detective who had it had finally made a breakthrough before their dead-end: the person who knew what had happened (or, certainly, the documents hinted at that). It had then been passed to me to dig a bit deeper; I’d used my connections to find out where they’d be going and when – and was pleased to learn that, unlike the others, I’d been able to identify their movements today. I wasn’t able to pinpoint an exact destination, but I did have a window of time in which they’d be present here. I’d arrived well within that, to ensure I wasn’t mistaken.

It took about half-an-hour of searching from my vantage point to spot their confident progress; when I did, I could see her with crystal clarity: her wide-brimmed charcoal-coloured hat almost covered her face, with the shimmering, midnight dress casually defying the brisk breeze and hugging her figure tightly. She seemed unperturbed at the cold, marching purposefully along the pavement, pedestrians in her way parting to the side of her path as she relentlessly, ruthlessly pursued a straight line. I needed to intercept her before she got to her destination; the success of my current investigation depended on it. I gave a cursory glance either side of me before discreetly stepping out to follow her. I couldn’t pursue with the same knife-sharpness as her motion, the wake she left behind Brownian, chaotic, with people falling back into their own motion without plan, without focus. I found myself constantly dodging the erratic footfall of the mass as I tried to keep up with her.

Eventually, she took a sharp left turn into a passage which seemed camouflaged by shadow, appearing almost invisible between the cracks of the ochre and obsidian bricks in the buildings either side. A few steps behind, I almost missed it – it looked as if she’d simply been swallowed by the wall – and had to take an even sharper turn to avoid being slammed into by the inattentive pedestrians locked with laser precision on their semi-transparent com-pads behind me and creating a scene which would make her very aware of my presence far earlier than I needed; there was a thin window between ‘too early’ and ‘too late’ in this particular pursuit, given that she was very important, very astute and very hard to track down. I couldn’t risk losing her – it could take months to plot her movements again. So, I kept to the sides of the passage, trying to remain as inconspicuous and hidden as possible, for as long as possible.

It didn’t take long, however, to develop the feeling that she was faintly aware of my presence behind her. Her movements, previously controlled, acute and confident, became erratic and inelegant. I knew where she was going – I’d had prior intelligence passed on by a federal agent who owed me significantly more than this seemingly inconsequential snippet of information from the bottom of the pile of ‘things to watch’ – and we weren’t close enough to the destination I’d anticipated (based on the movements I had calculated based on the information I had extracted from multiple sources, I expected her to be heading for her current home, a very carefully hidden piece of information and one which changed almost every time somebody had found her, it seemed) for her to be thinking of moving beyond the path she’d chosen.

At the next seemingly random and rapid turn, I figured I’d been made. This was not ideal – I’d needed her to be about three or four streets further down, to avoid the cameras that still watched and listened to everything within this particular sector of the city (even though almost all of it was ignored; however, treason, treachery and sedition was not something one participated in the observed zones, and the story I sought is forbidden knowledge), before I could intercept and have her lead me to her data storage location. Still, better to interject and coerce her calmly away from the observed zone than allow her to bolt uncontrolled and indicate to the Watchers to alert the cops that something is going down in an alleyway. I sped up to intercept; she, too, started to walk faster, her amber hair darting from side to side as her casual gait lost its natural momentum, alerting me to her awareness. I wouldn’t be able to hang around with this – I needed to catch her quickly – so I leaned into my stride and reached out to touch her on the shoulder. As if she’d somehow anticipated this, she stopped suddenly, spun on her heel, pivoting away from the hand I’d outstretched, and aimed a now clenched fist at my jaw, allowing my own motion to bring them into contact. I recoiled, the bloom of hot and stabbing pain tickling the edges of my functioning consciousness, and fell to the ground, bodily, backwards. She, of course, span back on her heel and sprinted away, with the agility of an antelope; I watched her disappear behind a plume of backlit murky-grey steam rising from a grate fixed securely over the cacophony of the dive bar beneath it, providing them with free ventilation and her with near-total camouflage in her departure, both from my eyes and from the Watchers – and provided me with the rising realisation and sense of dread that I’d lost her. In the background, I could hear the dive bar’s jazz band trilling the final bars of ‘Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall’.

2: The Case

I’d made my way back to my tiny beige office – nothing more than a hole with a door and a desk, a sofa and coffee table for those waiting, and little else within. I’d leased it because it was short term, remarkably cheap, and the Eastern Fusion restaurant downstairs had the cutest waiter, who would happily run my late-placed order for dinner up to me for nothing more than the price of the meal and a promise of future interest. The bolt on the door was tight, rusty and uncared for by multiple owners prior to and including myself; it took a few precious minutes to get into my sanctuary.

As I careened through the suddenly open door, tripping over my own feet in the process, I was confronted by a vision in deep purple. She sat, cross-legged; the hanging Manolo was gently rocking sympathetically with the beat of the background music, the bassy thrum of electronica cascading around the table on which relaxed her drink, a glowing plant, and a huge silver Siberian cat (which lazily looked at me through glassy eyes before returning to its prostrate position). She’d positioned a sizeable handbag next to the sofa, silver-trimmed against the plum leather. Acutely focussed, I wondered: how had she broken into my office? I couldn’t even break into my office.

“You took your time.” The gentle curl of a smile appeared on the left of her lips.

“How did you get in here, Maya?” I was irritated by her presence – she always seemed to show up right after I’d messed up.

“You know, the usual way I get in, Alaister, darling: secretly.” A devilish smile, irritating as hell, crossed her face. Guaranteed, she had a key cut somehow – maybe from a previous resident or maybe she’s got something on the landlord; at some point, I thought, I need to get that lock replaced – both for my sanity and for my privacy.

“One of these days, you’re going to get a surprise trying to get in here.”

“I’m sure. Now, down to business: I’m here…”

I cut her off. “No, you’ve encroached on my space without permission – I’ll decide when we talk business. I need a coffee before we discuss anything, and you are taking up more of my time and energy than I have capacity for.”

“Touchy touchy. I brought you one.” Out of her bag, she produced a plastic-capped paper cup; she placed it delicately on the coffee table. I reached out and took it, removing the cap and swigging deeply. The coffee was not as hot as it had been served, but was at least decent – I was impressed, she hadn’t skimped on the quality. She clearly wanted something.

Maya was… predictably unpredictable. The doyenne of the investigative world, she was capable of finding threads to follow when the rest of us proved unable. Her time working for the cops in a middle management role gave her access to the sorts of favours the rest of us could only dream of; her past as a native of the darkest districts meant she had connections that ran deeper than passing friendships and casual chats over cold beers; her perfectly curated look (and lifestyle – the actually quite remarkable coffee was a sign of that) meant that the loose-lipped of society filled in the gaps the professional and personal contacts couldn’t provide. She turned up when you least expected her, already knowing more than you did – including your not knowing she was working the same case. A great many of my successes would have been unachieved if it wasn’t for Maya’s intervention; however, her support always came at a price. Maya knew exactly how to extract information she wanted for lucrative cases she was pursuing uniquely by trading knowledge she had of others.

When I’d first got into this business, I’d been warned about her. ‘Avoid making deals with that one’, they’d said, ‘she’ll shaft you as soon as look at you.’ I’d managed it, so far, even when she’d come up as the only person who could help figure out something crucial in a case; “Oh darling,” she’d crow, “one of these days, you’ll actually have to work with me, you know!” I’d chuckle, magnanimously, and we’d go back to the small talk or the criticism of our ‘peerless’ peers, then she’d depart for another few months.

I placed the cup, now drained, back onto the table.

“Thanks. That actually hit the spot.”

“You’re very welcome. Down to business, Al: you lost her, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.” I wasn’t about to give away all the secrets I had.

“Don’t talk shit. I know you were following her because I watched you fail fucking miserably to avoid detection. So, let’s cut through your strange need to obfuscate and get to the point.”

Castigated, chastised and chided in two sentences, I felt like a child again, being told off by a teacher for lying after having been seen doing something wrong. “Alright, fine. Yes, I was following her and, yes, I lost her. Have you got anything you can add to alleviate my shame or are you just here to point out how badly I managed that?”

“Well,” she said, her tone lifted and her eyes appearing to glow with intelligence, “I think we’re actually going to need each other this time.”

Maya never worked with anyone else. She traded knowledge for cases she didn’t care about or she beat you to it on the cases she did. She was a lone wolf who knew how to barter. That was it. To request a collaboration was… unheard of.

“Together?”

“Yes, I know it might come as a surprise to you that I give a shit about your plodding case, but I think this one could be quite the payday, and there’ll be enough to share.”

This was a bigger surprise. I had anticipated a decent payday at the end of this one, given the consortium which had approached me for the information I sought – but not one so sizeable that millionaire Maya would be willing to cut and still make the profit she was known to catch – those Manolos weren’t cheap given that the company went out of existence three hundred years ago. Was she working for a different group? Who else was looking for the Raven Woman?

“Okay. I’m game; what do you know?”

“Doesn’t play like that, Al – you know how I work. You first, then I’ll fill in your gaps. I might even give you some context. If I think what you’ve got is useful – and by that, I mean at least a third of the way to where I am – we can discuss who is paying each of us and see if we can combine contracts. If that works out, then we’ve got an alliance.”

I couldn’t refuse this – she was right, it was pretty inevitable that she was a few steps ahead of me, so I was going to have to go with her plan. I didn’t like it, but I had little choice. “Go for gold, Sister. What do you want to know?”

“Start with your employer – why are you chasing this case?”

3: Arden

It had been a crisp afternoon. The carbon stacks were working this week, so the air was relatively clean and the autumnal air had been able to naturally develop, free from the Warming. Earlier that day, I’d bumped into Arden, an investigator from the east side of town; it was rare for him to venture so far into the west, his Covuntri accent betraying that he was out of his zone and out of his depth. Ostensibly, he’d been looking for me, apparently the only investigator he trusted this side of Lake Bruton. I reflected even then that it was more I was the first he found outside of the Watchers’ gaze.

I brought him to the office for a chat; he regaled me with tales of old times, before the Deformation of the Met, when Watchers were incorruptible and cases were solved by well-trained, well-paid forces, rather than banjo amateurs who thought the badge made them the law, or us lot, the very professional but previously underpaid ex-cops and the semi-professional jigsaw-puzzlers who’d fallen in love with the idea of private investigation as a consequence of too many books as a kid. We laughed over hot brown water and dry biscuits about the old days and the older cases. The tail end of this was when Arden piped up about this case.

“Look, Al – I’ve been treading this board for about a year, since JayVee from Rugbee got bored of chasing sprites and passed on the contract. From what I can tell, this thing has been on the desk of over a dozen of us so far and it’s like a labyrinth – we keep coming up against dead ends and having to retrace our steps to move forward again. I can’t lose time, sleep and money to it anymore, so it’s yours now. If you can finish this one, the contract fee is sizeable – until then, all you’ll get is meagre expenses paid out of the interest on the escrow.”

I’d frowned at that. “Do I have to pick it up?”

“Yeah,” he signed and nodded, slowly, “it’s one of the conditions of the contract – we have to pass it on, it can’t be dropped until it’s solved. We have to nominate someone and – once given the case – it becomes binding until you pass it on. It’s a weird clause, I know, but as soon as I hand it over, it’s yours. Sorry.”

“Sounds fucked up.”

“Yep, but it’s how these bullshit blockchain contracts work, remnants of nonsense tech that some corps still use to hold future employees to account.”

I’d heard of these before – turn of the millennium tech still being used to keep contracts open until they were properly finished, all details down, kids being held accountable for shit deals via inheritance; payment was withheld automatically until the contract was completed and it was infinitely transferable until it was done. “I’m not gonna thank you for this one, am I, Ard?”

“Probably not, Al – but you owe me. Call this quits on the favours you called in on the Met job.”

I’d winced, noticeably. Of course Arden remembered the time I’d tried to engage the Met in helping to solve a missing person case and they’d just assumed I was the one who’d snatched the kid – no smoke without fire, one had said; whoever smelt it, said another. I’d spent three nights in a little concrete box until Arden had pulled some strings with the Chief (apparently, he’d done some good work on a case eastward which had held him in good stead with the commander), and I’d become indebted on a buy now pay later deal.

“Alright, give me the lowdown.”

Arden pile drove through the case as he knew it. JayVee had inherited the case from someone north; though she hadn’t told Arden exactly who, you hear rumours of investigators going off piste for a while, so he’d assumed that the prior owner was Poseidon, who lurked around the coastal towns near Stoke looking for whitebait. Pos had pretty famously hired a boat and gone sailing for a year, coming back with a beard, an attitude, and a suitcase full of secrets. He’d gone nuts, for sure, but had clearly learned enough to know he’d had enough. It felt like JayVee and Ard had got off lightly by comparison – all they’d lost is time.

The trail led back as far as before the Warming: whispers about an underground group, hearsay about leaders in all levels of society being in on the secret, sotto voce conversations suggesting that the revelation could break society. Nothing hugely concrete except the odd document which wasn’t incinerated, a strange shell company or two dissolved too slowly to prevent it being noticed, a rare email sometimes sent to the wrong person. But, over the decades, investigators had pieced together a lot of the tale – the myth of Eden, of the underground society manipulating the world, of the group to leaders who, if exposed, would bring down the largest corps and help the world to finally recover, free of the tyranny and shackles of the Market. Wishful fucking thinking. We chased it not because we believed in this airy hope but because the contract had a notional payout on it of five mill. Given it was held in one of the ancient banks, the interest alone would buy an island in the African Sea (yeah, I said it – break capitalism to be paid enough to use capitalism to our advantage; I didn’t say we weren’t hypocrites). JayVee had brought the trail way further along, digging up some pretty interesting docs from an old archive she’d found, shitloads of disposed Solid States from an old Government data farm, hidden in polycarb crates under the turfed surface of a now-covered landfill. She’d then tried to find out more by pressing her contacts in HomeSec, but had been pushed back just as hard; that’s when Ard had inherited.

“I jumped in with both feet ‘cause I had little else to do at the time,” he reflected, earnestly, “work was drying up for the summer – no-one fucks their secretary during Home Worker season – so I wasn’t chasing adulterers or stroking the wife for an extra zero on the transfer.” Ard always had a delightful way with words. “I made contact with the link JayVee pointed me to; they passed me off onto some guy with a goatee – apparently, the link always changes when the investigator changes. Goatee was a total prick; other than confirming the pay arrangement, he never answered any questions, just smiled fucking subtly when you were on the right lines. But, a lot of perusing through paper and a few subtle smiles got me some distance.”

“Where’d it lead you?”

“A lot of digging – figuratively and literally. Finally came across a description of a woman who apparently is at the centre of all this. Goatee was strangely excited about this finding – he fully grinned, would you believe. But, I’ll be fucked if I can find her. She’s like a spectre – mentioned everywhere, but almost invisible in the real world. Apparently she’s the most recent coordinator of the conspiracy, the one who pulls the strings.”

“What’s the description?”

Ard paused for a moment before looking me straight in the eyes: “She wears black.”

“That’s when I met Goatee; Arden was right, he wasn’t likeable – but he passed me off onto Ginger, my link to the Consortium. She was more pleasant, more helpful. She confirmed that Raven was the call, helping with the rumours and location tracking, all that. The stuff you need someone on the inside of the Watchers for. I never asked how they got access to the cameras, I was just thankful for the boost.”

“And then you lost her.”

“Thanks for the reminder.”

“You know me, Al, always happy to stick the knife in!” Maya grinned gleefully at herself.

“Alright, alright. Point taken. Anyway, I still have a favour to call in which might get me a little closer to her again.”

“Who with?”

“Never you mind just yet, Maya – it’s definitely your turn to offer something up to this party.”

She looked at me, clearly narked that I’d called her out on her information gathering exercise. She put the Siberian on the floor and it flashed out of existence – of course she had a handbag holopet. “Alright, big man. Let me tell you what I’ve learned.”

4: Maya

I’d heard of the case on the grapevine and it had long intrigued me – it spoke to my curiosity in a way that little has in the past, beyond a decent payout and a passing fascination in solving what others appear unable to – but I recognised that it would be passed to me when the time was right for me to actually solve it.

That said, when the manila folder thumped on my desk, delivered by a courier with a motorcycle helmet covering their identification, a bad attitude and apparently no functional language, I was piqued. Firstly, why had my secretary let this guy in – by the build, I assumed male, how cisnormative of me! – because I had left strict instructions to ensure I wouldn’t be surprised by visitors without prior appointments (particularly as I was in the middle of a surprisingly lucrative embezzlement evidence hunt for a young man whose father, a multi-billionaire by all accounts, had left him virtually nothing by way of inheritance except a volcanic desire to find a suddenly-absent secretary). Secondly, because this file had the markers of your case without saying definitively that it was. The courier smelt faintly of industry – the blended fragrance of oil, smoke and labour – and was wearing leather and denim stained with brown grease and white paint. I combined that, mulled whilst observing his heading away from the office, my windows allowing quite the view of his direction of departure, with my knowledge of the limited range of the Kawasaki electric moped he (and most couriers around my end of town) rode, which ultimately led me to think he must have spent a significant amount of time in the factory district on the outskirts of the city. He’d not stuck around beyond barging in, grunting, dropping and departing, so I’d not had the chance to interrogate him further – but the post-it on the front of the folder was the clincher: it was charcoal black and had been written on with silver ink – a location code for the other side of the factory district, within the industrial complex which controls it.

“You sound really smug about working all that before the location code literally showed you where to go.”

“Are you afraid of actual detective work, Al?”

“No, I just don’t see why it was important that you wasted your time on the delivery guy.”

“Shush.”

I figured I would need to get there less overtly if I were on my way to investigate something that wasn’t otherwise accessible. I decided to take a more… circuitous route, to minimise my visibility. It took a couple of hours to get there, more than if I’d strolled down the main strip; hiding my movements was tricky, the location was in a heavily watched zone and there were few so easily bribed to help me to avoid the main highways and waterways. I travelled there mostly on foot, deftly dodging the Watchers and the denizens of these border zones outside our city, most of whom would slice me up without a second thought for the contents of my handbag.

“That’s a bit… prejudiced…”

“Did I interrupt your story with opinions? Now shush, listen.”

The factory district, as you know, is bordered by a three metre wall and the gates offering entry and exit are patrolled by very expensive security; the industrial complex a further mile into the district beyond that. Again, few bribery options for entry there, so I resolved to scale the wall. Obviously, though, this was going to take more effort than I had fully planned for. I hadn't packed my travel ladder or my climbing calipers – so it looked like I would have to use what was available to me in the vicinity. I reviewed the surroundings; there were some sensibly sized foot holes in the bricks, as well as some gaps in the lighting, both crucial to being able to get into the complex in one piece and undetected. So, with that in mind, I moved into an area where I could clearly see nobody would notice my motion and began the arduous ascent.

It was relatively easy at first, finding those footholds and launching myself skyward one brick at a time. From halfway up, however, I realised my predictable error: the lights, inside and outside combining to cover both aspects of the wall, which had seemed static on first review, were sweeping the height and length of it at long intervals; I wasn't likely to get away with this unless I could get up, over and back down again before the next crossover. Suddenly, this was more than just a quick ascent – it was preventative. If I was caught… well, as you know, the factory district administrators like to consider any incursion as an attempt at corporate espionage and take their ‘legal independence’ quite seriously when it comes to punishments to that effect. My feet grew wings, my hands became adhesive, taking firm movements upwards and determined adjustments sidewards as needed. The sweat though. Al, was disturbing. My eyes flooded with mascara, my palms dampened and became less grippy. As I reached the zenith, I had to body myself over just to get there without falling. Then, the descent. I didn’t have time to pause. Below, the ground loomed; a guard, looking away towards the complex, was less than a hundred metres away. The light, full of grace and mercy in the way of avenging angels, began its return sweep. Slow, but certain in its path. The way down had fewer gaps in the wall to grip delicately; I grazed much of my body on the way down. More than once, I had to hold my breath to allow the pain to dissipate as internal rage instead of audible anger. I kept as close to the wall as I could, but doing so meant less visibility. My feet the ground heavily as I jumped what I thought was thirty centimetres but turned out to be a full metre. I paused – looked around me, hoping beyond that the guard hadn't heard my landing. They stirred, beneath their full-coverage night-vision helmets, looking over at my location. I crouched in shadow, as low as possible, desperately hoping they'd think I was a rock, a cat, anything other than something to investigate. A day passed as I remained petrified in place.

The cold air passed over my eyes twice before I dared to look up.

They hadn’t moved.

Very, very slowly – as a newborn glacier curing through the landscape for the first time, the pace of the movement of the stars across the night sky over the course of a three-thousand year procession, the birth and death of a religion – I unfolded, crabwise, in the opposite direction, away from the path of the light and away from the visibility of my stoic, static friend.

I found, with a minimum of handle rattling, a shed on the outskirts which was capable of hiding me whilst I reformulated my plans. It was a bare old thing, no furniture – no space for it – and little in the way of things being stored. It looked like it was a remnant of something long since repurposed elsewhere, left because it was more of a pain in the arse to move it than to just leave it sitting here. It was the sort of hidey-hole that, in the past, security would have used for a crafty nap on-shift. Not anymore – not since charter zones and corporate “states” came into existence; any security caught asleep on the job could be subject to whatever legal arrangements the company had built into the contract.

“I know this, why are you reminding me?”

“It’s fucking important you remember for later on, Al. Will you stop interrupting me?”

I managed to catch my breath and checked the map against my current position. The little blue dot pulsed less than three hundred metres from where I sat. The public maps that my phone uses didn’t import corporate zones, as they are considered ‘secret’, so I would have to leverage a contact. Before I left on this jolly, I emailed an old friend of mine at the Met who owed me a favour for passing them a juicy investigation into a corrupt politician; in my inbox, waiting patiently for me, was a digital overlay of the site, accurate up to last month, taken from a now ‘disused’ Watcher satellite, reappropriated for use by the highest bidder. That little blue dot was now in the middle of a large building; potentially the headquarters of this affair. I was going to have to play this one carefully; I had limited additional equipment, but I did have my phone and a decent dark outfit on. Scanning the hut, I also spotted an old night viz visor – in this light, it may look like the newer models the security appear to be kitted out with. I slipped it on, flicking the power switch and waiting for it to boot up. Moments later, an ethereal blue glow emanated from everything, lighting it up and outlining everything. I pocketed my phone and put my bag behind the door; there was nothing left in it now which would be useful or identifying, nothing I couldn’t afford to lose. The bag itself… I’d miss, as I’d had it for years and it was like an old friend to me, but I could always acquire another if necessary.

Confidently, I stepped out. I had to sell it, make it look like I was meant to be there. So, quickly ascertaining I was going in the right direction, I just walked. At a gentle pace. In a straight line. Directly to the dark glass doors of HQ. I don't usually feel afraid to that extent- sometimes a little anxiety about a job, for sure, but rarely fear. I swallowed it and pressed on. Step by step, until I was standing outside the huge glass doors. Inside remained, at this distance, as dark as ourside-which didn't bode well-as you know, these are twenty -four hour operations, so it would be uncommon for this building to be unlit. I assumed, with overconfidence, that it would just be in automated mode, running itself during the night without the need for people getting in the way. The mistake became apparent as soon as I opened the doors.

In front of me, waiting patiently it seemed, was your Raven. Dressed head to foot in black sequins, her legs were crossed and she was tapping a aubergine-coloured fingernail against the face of her watch.

“Late again, Maya.”

I was immediately taken aback – at the time, I didn’t know who she was, beyond the descriptions of her in the packet delivered to my office, and I had no idea how she had my name. I turned on the charm, regardless – I don’t like to be caught on the hoof, and I don’t like to appear as if I’m not in control of my own path. “Never late, my darling, as I’m on my own timescales.”

A raised eyebrow. “No, you just think you are. You should have been here twenty minutes ago. If you hadn’t spent quite so long attempting to scale the walls rather than coming in the front door, you’d have been here on time.”

“Via the front door?”

“Yes. Or didn’t you stop for a second to consider that my courier may have been extending an invitation rather than offering you a place to investigate?”

I stayed quiet – this one was now beginning to perplex me.

She continued, with a tone of amusement in her voice. “Not everything is a case, Maya. On this occasion, I’m offering you information.”

“Information about what?”

“For that, you would need to retain an open mind and a closed mouth. In return, I expect a fair trade. Information for information. We know you have the information we need; we can give you ample information in return. An exchange of knowledge.”

“What do you want from me?”

“You read the dossier in the packet before you came here. You know what we want.”

“What was in the dossier?”

“That’s why I thought the case so intriguing. They were summary profiles of a selection of the detectives in town. Reports on their movements on a particular, unnamed, case. Identifications of who had which pieces of knowledge – but that knowledge was coded. The key question which appeared uncoded throughout was a location; it appeared that all of them knew something about a case, all of them had picked up from the last, and all of them were moving in the right direction – but none of them had yet found out where they were meant to go with that knowledge to close the case.”

“My case?”

“That was my guess, and not knowing for sure was what made if so interesting – but as soon as I heard that you were treading the boards on something so unsolved it was almost hereditary, I knew. Hence why I’m here now, Al, my darling.”

“Was I in the dossier?”

“Of course. But you’re relatively new on the block, as a detective at least. Your profile was pretty slim, in comparison to the profiles of the other detectives.”

“You want to flesh out my dear friend Al’s profile?”

“Yes. We need to get the measure of him so that we can evaluate how close he may get to…” a pause. “…the end of the road, before we have to intervene.”

“Intervene?”

“Oh, don’t worry. Nothing so crass as an assassination. We’d rather not make contact with him at all; if we have to, we want to know that our intervention will be received as it needs to be.”

“Right. What information are you offering in return?”

“Name your three most lucrative unsolved cases. We will give you the information you need to solve them immediately.”

I hesitated. The three most lucrative on my books would fund my retirement.

“Seven.”

She looked me dead in the eyes and a wry smile developed on her jaw. “Five.”

“Done.”

5: Research

“From there, darling, I basically told her everything I knew about you. Nothing that wasn’t already public knowledge, of course, but a much fuller overview of you. That’s probably how she knew your particular penchant for hiding in doorways when you’re looking for someone, like you’re in a noir from the twenties.”

“All right, all right. Did she tell you anything about the case?”

“No, Al, she just gave me everything I needed to bring home five big ones. Thus, as far as I’m concerned, makes me my own employer on this case – but as I won’t be funding my own payout, we’ll be sharing yours when I help you solve it.”

“Okay, so other than to offer me a story and beg for a partnership, why are you here, Maya?”

“Beg is a strong word, my sweet, but we do both have information the other needs if we’re going to finally put this case to bed. And, well…” she smiled, broadly, showing where her bright lipstick had begun to slightly stain her teeth. “She didn’t tell me anything about the case at all. But…” From inside the handbag, the leather more worn than I’d noticed on my first appraisal, she drew a manila packet. “…nobody thought to take this off me. I’ve added some notes from the meeting – in particular, the sort of questions she was asking about you and some details about the location we met – I reckon that the corporation which owns that part of the factory district is probably also the corporation you’re chasing.”

I reached for the packet and she drew it back.

“Come on, Maya.”

“Al, you know how this works. Nothing’s free, even if I am now going to be able to drop off the scene for a couple of decades whether we dig this one up or not. I’m intrigued and you need to show me what you’ve got too. Call it a partnership.”

I stared at her. She was resolute. I drew in a deep breath and let it out a I stood up and strode over to my filing cabinets. I unlocked the one in which I kept the notes I’d inherited and my own from over the last few months, drawing out the thick wedge of files. I dumped them on the table in front of Maya; with a grin, she added her folder to the pile.

“Let’s get cracking, then, Al!”

Over the next couple of hours, we collated and connected many dots. Maya’s new information was surprisingly crucial, as it made some previously invisible connections more apparent – the idea of a shadowy organisation of leaders became the reality of a Corporation at the centre of the case. It became very obvious that we, the detectives of the case, were all being monitored, our movements reviewed using Watcher tech. What was being hidden – the heart of the case – must be something to do with their core business: with Maya’s maps and information available on the LandReg database, we were able to divine that the building she’d entered was owned by CloRes Biotech, a company which specialised in stem cell research, bio-engineering, genetic modification and bio-med; with some deep research on the company, published accounts and such, we were able to find a huge amount of Government investment – tax rebates, credits, and a surprising amount of money diverted to them from both healthcare and defence; cross-referencing with the Hansard began to show up repeated names the of MPs making speeches in favour of corporate secrecy, charter zones, patent longevity; laws cementing the rights of corporate entities, adding freedoms from the state, removing the people’s right to know what they were up to.

Not the usual sort of funding bedfellows, you’d think. Those meant to represent the people and those trying to – lobbying, in fact, and receiving funding for – remove the rights of the voters to understand where, how and why their tax money was being spent. There were newspaper journalists who would lose their mind and gain notoriety over being the first to publish this information – which was a terrifically good idea for a backup, a protection against retaliation. If only I had any contacts at The Times or The Guardian; most had dropped me like a rock after an ‘incident’ with one of their paps who’d rocked up to the house of a businessman, interrupting my pressure on him to avoid the press and sign a 50/50 silenced divorce over an illicit affair with a much younger boy (for which his wife was unaware – she’d thought it to be a much younger girl). I had, in order to secure the wife’s request (as per our agreement), found myself evacuating the pap from the premises without his camera before ensuring that no record of the photographs he’d taken of us would be seen again. This mostly involved fire.

Anyway, whilst it was a broad spectrum of the politically purchased making these pronouncements in parliament, from multiple parties in multiple intakes, one particular MP’s name kept popping up, too often to be accidental: Olliver Birch, the MP for Smethick; a local chap, four kilometres from here, and – as long as he wasn’t at Parliament, because I had no desire to get the Snowdun ferry – I’d be able to chat with him at his constituency office. A quick search of the Parliament website showed, fortunately, he was taking surgeries this week, in the absence of any crucial votes in the house. He was a Tory, one of the few remaining in Parliament since the decimation of the party in the last few decades, set up originally to hearken to a past long since dead. The party of nostalgia, of backwards looking, of ‘tradition’ over progress; they’d been overwhelmed in recent years by a resurgence of Workers, Greens and Whigs, as people started to look and question why things were as noir as they were.

“That settles it then – the next step on this journey is to go talk politics with Birch.”

“You good to go then, Al?”

“Yeah, I think so. You coming?”

“As if I wouldn't be; you'd get lost without me.”

6: The Handoff

We took an uber to Smethick. It was monitored movement, but we would have been seen in any case on this journey – the paths were monitored by cameras, the public transport options equally as viewed. We may as well be quick as well as seen. It was beginning to become light as the uber pulled gently up to the front of the office block in which Birch had his quarters. I looked up; the huge tower loomed, a nightmare in steel and Perspex. It was a mid-century construction, all vision and no soul. I reflected in the glass of the uber window, imagining the sort of person who would find this building appropriate to meet one’s constituents – one who moved to intimidate, to judge from above and afar, to elevate themselves above the rest of us, safe in their monolith. I shuddered.

“Get out.” Maya wasn’t feeling patient.

“Alright, I’m moving. Have you paid?”

“Would I be telling you to get out if I’d planned to leave you to deal with that? Of course I’ve paid. I paid before we left.”

“Right, sorry.” I pressed the button which released the door and slid out onto the pavement. It had always amazed me how Maya could so easily think about these things in advance; I’d have been fumbling for my watch for a few minutes before being allowed out of the auto-locked sanctum. As I stood, still for a moment whilst I considered the surroundings, I felt her move around the car, up to my side, then accelerate away, the aroma of her amber perfume providing a trail of breadcrumbs to follow. “Wait up, Maya!”

“Hurry up, Al – I don’t want to be on the street here for long, it’s not safe.”

“Not safe?”

“Honey, I grew up around here. I know the gangs looking out for tourists. I know the vultures waiting for the aftermath. I know literally where they bury the bodies so there’s no evidence you were ever here except the Watcher records that show you disappearing in the back of an unmarked van. Trust me: it’s not safe.”

I didn’t consider speaking – I just scurried up to join her rapid gait through the front doors of the block, across the inner courtyard and towards the security desk. As we approached, the badge looked up. They didn’t look as if they wanted to communicate. Maya, as always, shifted into gear before I could even think about it.

“Hello, darling. We’re here to see Olliver Birch.”

We were looked up and down, scanned as if by an x-ray machine. “Who are you and do you have an appointment?”

My poker face was now inscrutable.

“Well, of course! We are here from the BBC; we’re here to conduct a prearranged interview on the recent passing of the Bridge Highways Between Cities Act and the impact on the local ferry operators. He’s aware we’re coming.” How Maya had come up with this lie so fluidly… Clearly she paid close attention to the news in case she needed to come up with something plausible on a pin. I needed to read more.

‘My name is Daniel!’, the badge brightly told us, may not have been as convinced. “I’ll call it up. Take a seat over there.”

“Thanks, hon’; do tell his staff to get a shift on, or we’ll have to go with the second option for interview.” I knew, as she said it, that the second option around here could only have been the opposition party – and that this would be a trigger for someone to take it seriously.

We strolled more casually over to the faux leather seats to which Daniel had pointed. Sitting down with patience rather than pace, Maya whispered: “You’re going to have to follow my lead on this one, Al; winging it is going to require some quick turns. You are my researcher – you’re here to make sure I don’t miss any notes and to ensure that you’re seen tapping into your phone whenever something is said which might sound like it needs checking, like figures or anything. Just make it look realistic – you can check your online banking or whatever, just tap convincingly.”

“Alright – but how is this gonna get us the information we need about Raven and the Consortium?”

“Trust me. Have I let you down yet?”

“We haven’t done anything yet.”

“Go fuck yourself, Al – I’ve got better form than you on this stuff, so you’re just going to have to accept that this is the plan. Alternatively, do feel free to fuck off back to your office and I’ll meet you there later.” She was irked – I imagined because of the stress of maintaining her perpetual (and this specific) facade.

I held my hands up in front of myself. “Calm down, Maya; I know you’re better at this than I am. I’ll follow your lead.”

“Good. Get your bloody phone out and look productive.”

“Ma’am?”

We both looked up from our respective follies, time wasted for the last few. “Yes?”

“Mr. Birch will be able to see you in fifteen minutes; you may take the lift over there -“ Daniel gestured vaguely to the left of his desk, “- up to the fifteenth floor. Mr. Birch has the floor, so speak to the receptionist as you exit the lift.”

Bright as the midday sun, Maya exclaimed, “Marvellous! Thank you, Daniel, you have been an absolute delight.” She had stood and started moving before she reached the end of the sentence; hurriedly, I scuttled after her, nodding at the somewhat perplexed security-guard-and-receptionist and receiving a shy half-smile in return. He seemed pleasant enough; shame we were all working, I thought, briefly imagining an amusing sojourn in the nearby facilities.

The fifteenth floor was mere moments away; the lift was one of the expensive maglev ones, internal inertia controlled so it was rapid and comfortable. I imagined that Maya was thinking the same, her eyes scanning the interior of the lift; I noted, as I’m sure she did too, the quality of the buttons, the non-standard mirrored upper and equally non-standard merlot and burgundy mosaic lower, the very well hidden Watcher camera in the front left corner. This building clearly traded money for quality and security – our Mr. Birch’s office wasn’t cheap. I wondered where the money came from to afford this sort of set-up – it definitely wasn’t just basic politician’s expenses…

The lift came to a very gentle stop, the doors gliding open silently whilst the lift completed it’s approach to the floor. We stepped out; in front of us was a long desk of light wood, chrome letters spelling out the politician’s name. Of course he’d had his reception desk made of Birch wood – I was getting a clear impression of this guy and his ego. Behind the desk, a brunette; short hair, unfocussed eyes, shirt and trousers. No name tag. They were deeply in their phone, paying little attention to the lift as it opened and even less as we approached – their avoiding any interest in us was almost aggressive in its determination.

Maya, however, didn’t give a shit. She had put her game face on as we left the lift. “Hello! I’m here to speak with Mr. Birch; lovely Daniel downstairs told me to come up and wait?”

Their eyes slowly travelled upward to look at Maya and I. “I’ll let him know you’re here,” they replied, in a slow, tired, uninterested drawl, “Sit over there.” Another person, another gesture to a plush waiting area. We sat, again, all fixed smiles and faux-occupation. Another ten minute wait before being summoned by the receptionist and instructed to head down a corridor to a second, russet receptionist, equally as disinterested, equally as dismissive. Another gesture to a waiting area. Everything here was walking, sitting, waiting, moving. It was evident that this was a normal part of Olliver Birch MP’s processes of control: move people and make them wait; enough of that and you’d be bored and tired enough to go easy on him, or to accept a non-answer to your questions. Canny, if not somewhat sociopathic. I didn’t hide my frustration well; a huff at this next motion was met with Maya’s momentary disapproving glance, switching almost immediately between deep anger at my emotional reaction and the game face. I swallowed and remained quiet, sitting heavily into another armchair.

It took twenty minutes of waiting in this particular seat for the receptionist to cough, gently, then quietly say, “Mr. Birch will see you now; please make your way to meeting room C.”

“Oh, delightful, thank you!” Maya said, controlling her own responses remarkably well considering.

“Yeah, thanks,” I added.

They smiled, noncommittally, and returned to whatever it was they were doing on the computer, hidden from the view of the corridor.

Birch was already in Meeting Room C as we arrived, leaving us to enter on the back foot.

“Hello, Ms…?”

“Angela. Angela Phillips. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Birch.”

“I’m sure the pleasure is all mine.” Oily. “And who is your colleague?”

I turned on the charm. “Hi, I’m Andy Devereux. Researcher. Great to meet you, sir.”

“Marvellous. I’m reliably informed that you want to talk to me about the Bridge Highways thing.” He was as nonchalant as his staff, almost as if this was just another day, another law, another thing to have to think about.

Maya went on the offensive. “Yes, Mr. Birch; I have a few questions about the Bridge Highways Between Cities Act. Firstly, we have seen reports which show that the impact on local ferry operators between the key cities along the waterways would be significantly adversely affected – including putting a large number of people employed in your constituency out of work. What is your response to those reports?”

This was a tried and tested way of getting information out of the unaware – get them on side talking about something they expect, then segue into something you need to know. After a few minutes of to-ing and fro-ing, questions about business, about people, about Birch’s personal involvement in the passing of the Act, Maya did as expected and diverted. “Finally, Mr. Birch, I have a couple of questions on an unrelated topic. I’ve recently come into some information regarding a conspiracy at the heart of Government to conceal information from the public, with a number of MPs bankrolled by CloRes – including yourself.”

The colour drained from his face and his smile turned immediately into a grimace. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ms. Phillips.”

“Now, now, Mr. Birch. We know that you receive huge amounts of money from them for your campaign fund – and this office is a sure sign of that.”

“No, no comment. Show me the accounts where you have seen such a record.”

“Andy will be able to retrieve that from your campaign declarations, which – as you know, Mr. Birch – must declare any and all donors who gift over £5,000.”

“Fine. Yes, I’ve received donations from CloRes, but I’m not the only one. And I declare my donations fully, as per the requirements.”

“What about this conspiracy then? I’ve got reports of closed-door meetings where a matter of national security was discussed with CloRes, no public record, but a LOT of public money being channeled into a project. Much more than their donations. It looks like they’ve bought off those on the committee, including yourself, to ensure their continued public funding.

“No comment.”

Maya’s turn to dial up the charm. “Come on, Mr. Birch. We have photographic evidence that you’ve attended at least one secret meeting with CloRes, alongside other ministers. I’m going after them too, but you’re the most local – and given Burminum’s importance to the economy, potentially the most important of the ministers not in the Cabinet. Give me something, something I can work with, and this could be made to look less… difficult for you. One way or the other, we’re going to press.”

He stared her dead in the eye. A moment passed, full of still air and electricity. Slowly, the colour returned to his face, but the grimace remained. “I don’t know what you think you’ve got, but you’d better be careful. What I can tell you is that CloRes are working on behalf of the Government. I can tell you that those of us on the Committee are protected by legislation from the impacts of our decisions. Finally, I can tell you that anything you don’t already know, I can’t enlighten you about – it’s covered by the Official Secrets Act.”

Maya allowed that to hang in the air for a second before continuing. “Okay, Mr. Birch. What do you know about a red-headed woman, tends to wear black, works for CloRes?”

“More than you, I’d hazard, from that question. She doesn’t work for CloRes; she’s a civil servant. Our liaison between the committee and the company.”

“Where can we find her? We’d like to ask her some questions.”

“You can’t. She predominantly works out of CloRes’s offices, only occasionally coming to Parliament to meet the committee. Most of our work is done via e-conferencing.”

Maya smiled. “Not even a clue as to where we might be able to meet and chat?”

He took and released a deep breath. “You might be able to meet her in a couple of days. She’ll be at Parliament for a briefing, starts at sixteen. But that’s all I can give you. I would strongly advise that you don’t pursue her and you don’t publish anything to do with this particular line of questioning.”

“Why?” I interjected. Until this point, I’d furiously been typing notes on my phone, ensuring I captured everything that was said so that we could cross-reference against the analysis we’d completed earlier.

He turned and looked at me, for the first time since Maya had begun questioning him. “I am on a low rung; those who are higher up the ladder do not take kindly to attention being drawn to the arrangement with CloRes.”

“Is that a threat, Mr. Birch?”

“No, Mr. Devereux. It’s simply a warning. People who do sometimes end up discredited, their work eradicated. Sometimes – just sometimes – they end up dead.”

7: Panning

The consortium’s assertion that Raven was the key to all this was proven by Birch’s testimony with Maya; so finding her was the next logical move again. Knowing that she was to be at Parliament in a couple of days was great; having to get the ferry to Snowdun was a pain in the arse. It required travelling first to Dudly Port, the arse end of town, and then spend an hour on the hydrofoil across the Bristle Sea. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do less. Plus, I’d have to travel visibly – there was no part of the journey which I could do under cover – and given that Birch would clearly have let some key people know we were on the hunt… The only saving grace is that the fake names, whilst undoubtedly uncovered as such by now, would at least prevent some of the tracking that could have been done quickly. We’d agreed to split up: I wanted to get back on the trail of Raven; Maya, characteristically, thought it would be good to have one of us go and do a little more digging into CloRes – and by digging, she meant ‘breaking into headquarters and finding an interesting looking filing cabinet to upend after having charmed her way past security’.

Thus, here I was, approaching the mountains and valleys of Snowdun. The hydrofoil was a smoother journey than the last time I’d had to do this – there had been a “freak weather event”, for which the Warming had been blamed, in which the sea had started off calm, but had very quickly become tumultuous to the point of vomit. I was grateful for the gift of steady waters. The Capital, beyond the Port of Snowdun, glimmered with silver and glass, a city of diamonds reserved for the wealthy and the powerful. Few people actually lived here unless their apartments were funded by their corporation or their Government expenses; consequently, the only people on the ferry were those commuting in for work (and couldn’t afford or didn’t want to live in Porth or Wrexam) or here for meetings – there was little local tourism here, people's interest in simply visiting for the sake of curiosity about the seat and centre of our Government was something long since consigned to the past, relegated after losing match after match against the Celebrity World theme park in Prestan and the coastal paths of Nottinam and other such temporary delights. To say that the country had ceased to be interested in politics was something of an understatement; they still voted, but what each Government did once they were in was mostly ignored unless it was catastrophically expensive for the common man or it restricted some freedom they'd previously enjoyed. Tourism here was the province of the International.

The Port itself was a facsimile of the ferry terminal in Sanfran. Somebody had obviously seen it online at some point and decided that was the architecture that was required for the capital city as long as it was appropriately scaled up; white arches, as tall as some buildings, stretched for half a mile in each direction, the central clock tower proudly displaying Central Time for anybody arriving, it’s long hand currently pointing halfway between thirteen and fourteen. Plenty of time to get my bearings, grab a hotel room, identify where the Watchers were in the vicinity of it, and get to Parliament before all this kicks off.

Which, obviously, means that right now is when Maya called me to check in.

“You there yet, honey?”

Her silent grin of disbelief was audible through the ether when I replied, “Yeah, I’ve been here for about half an hour now.”

“The ferry wasn’t late?”

“I was surprised too, but yeah – well on time. Just me and the suits all the way to Snowdun.”

“Well done, Al, I’m impressed! You weren’t followed?”

Until now, I’d not thought about this. “If I was, it wouldn’t make a difference; I wouldn’t have spotted another suit in the melee of them.”

“Fair enough – but stay safe there. You’re in Watcher central – there’s loads of them there, in person as well as the tech. I know you can’t keep to shadows, but keep an eye out for followers.”

“Yeah, yeah – I know. Don’t worry, Maya.”

“I do worry, Al – you’ve got the worse end here; I can sneak, you cannot.”

“Are you still taking the piss for my losing Raven?”

“Yup! Mwah!” She hung up.

The hotel I ended up in was basic. I’d had to go about twenty minutes walk away from Parliament just to find a dive with a vacancy. It would not have been my first, second, or seventeenth choice, believe me. Above the door, as I’d approached, was a neon sign which, at some point, must have welcomed visitors to the ‘Albert Hotel’ – but, now, welcomed them to the ‘A b rt Hot l’. The rendering on the front of the property was faded in some places, peeling in others, and this was where the render hadn’t entirely fallen away. White window frames had long since been consigned to history, with mould taking up the vacancy. Entering the Abort Hot L was a treat; red carpets and pink walls gave the place a brothel-like ambiance, shattered in part by the paintings hung from rusted hooks, acrylics of ancient royalty and long-since flooded landscapes, and in part because of the terrifying vulture sitting expectantly at the front desk.

“What do you want?” she rasped from behind her screen, her half-moon glasses falling down onto the point of her beak, balanced precariously between the angle of her head and gravity.

“I saw the vacancies sign; I just need a room for the night.”

“You alone?” Her eyes scoured my surface and I felt like prey.

“I am. Getting the ferry back first thing.” I put on my best play – the last thing I needed was this purple-rinsed informer getting suspicious and alerting the Watchers to pay even more attention to me here. “I’ve got a couple of days off work and thought I’d come on a sightseeing tour; my missus wasn’t able to get the time off, sadly. Thought she’d appreciate me not being under her feet for a night!” Silken, smiling, suffused with profits-from-unexpected-tourist glee.

An eyebrow raised, then descended again. Her shoulders untensed, appeased. “I have a single or a double room: both are en suite, as the shared facilities rooms are sold out; the double is more expensive, but I expect you’ll only need a single given that your wife isn’t here?”

I detected a hint of prejudice in those words. Any other day, I’d have laughed out loud – especially as the wife is fictional – but I needed the room without more focus on me and I wasn’t planning to bring anyone back tonight anyway. I’d need the space to research once I get back.

“The single will be fine, thank you. How much is the room?”

A single tear threatened to travel to my trembling lip as I paid the exorbitant amount she commanded for a room with a sofa-sized and desperately uncomfortable bed, a plywood bench (which would have to double as a desk), and an asthmatic kettle.

Walking the twenty minutes back to Parliament helped my to clear my head and formulate a plan. I’d dumped my stuff in the room – everything that wasn’t incriminating, of course; the documents I’d brought for research were all safely in a hidden pocket in the back of my jacket – and got back out as quickly as possible, to maintain the illusion of tourism. I considered my approach: walking into Parliament was easy, it wasn’t secured anymore as the Watchers prevented any action by monitoring everyone and predicting what people were likely to do – meaning, most of the time, between apathy and surveillance, most immediate crimes were prevented long before they could bear fruit. As such, even during the Warming and the Riots, Parliament (and the MPs who bedded themselves in there) remained mostly unaffected. Thus, I also knew that I couldn’t take anything more obtrusive than my phone, as even a backpack nowadays (and with my name in the system) might look like something worth sending a foot-soldier to pick me up for questioning.

Parliament itself was a vision in modern architecture. Before Lunden was lost, the Government had already predicted that the old River Tems would become a sea and had constructed this purpose-built and specifically-designed building to house itself, far from the effects of the Warming. It was huge, an imposing building designed to convey power, with granite pillars and thick glass panels behind; it was only ten stories high, but with the pillars reaching from ground to roof, this imitation of an Ancient Greek structure intended for you to understand simply by looking at it that this is where democracy lived. In reality, it is where it went to stagnate and, sometimes, to die.

Around Parliament, in dashed-line border, were dozens of skyscrapers, each containing an array of corporate headquarters, charities, lobbying organisations, media groups, hedge funds, NGOs, Government Agencies, Ministerial Departments; all looked down on Government, a indication of where the power in the country truly lay.

I approached the front of the building directly, figuring that it didn’t make a great deal of difference whether I walked in the front or scuttled in the back. It was interesting observing the interactions between the suits and the sunglasses, some smiling for photos as they passed, some looking squarely down as they rushed from here to there, some scowling in antipathy as they avoided what had, over time, been widely ennobled as the New Paps, tourists with cameras in every device, the Watchers’ dream. Anything and everything here was observed by somebody – and, too often to be comfortable for the ruling class, anything observed could be shared for a few bob with the hungry journos of the national rags. I smiled for a few flashes myself, the beatific photobomber in the background. If I was going to be seen, I may as well be seen by everybody.

Inside the democratic nostalgia rendered in concrete and glass, I felt little at ease. There were far too many eyes here, of the wrong kind. There were Watchers in every corner, in every corridor. There were suits in abundance, meandering up and down, seeing everything. I still needed to identify where in the building this meeting was to take place – and to figure out if I needed some form of official capacity in order to access it. Fortunately, the screens dotted about the space identified clearly where things were and what was happening, designed to make life easier for the press and the wonks to find their way around, and to gently remind the politicos to get their shit together. It only took a few minutes of waiting for the schedule to update to spot something which looked just out of place enough to be it; a meeting in a junior backbencher’s office, innocuous enough but for the title of the meeting: “Historiographical Analysis of mid-21st Century politics.” Let’s be honest, these people shouldn’t have the sort of time required to fuck about on an academic study of the past’s bad decisions – they farm that out to the Universities in return for a higher cap on student numbers and a larger cut of student loans. Plus, the list of MPs invited included a couple of hard-hitters, a couple of ominously named “Observers and Experts”, and our good friend Birch. Now I knew the where and when; I just needed to acquire access to the space outside the room. I’d never get inside, but I could absolutely wait for her to emerge from the door. She wouldn’t be able to give me the slip then.

I looked around the inner plaza. I hadn’t quite processed the full grandeur and scale of it: gone was the external faux-ancient and instead was the floor-to-ceiling lupine grey of expensive porcelain tiles, manufactured and fitted to appear seamless in their flow except by fixtures such as the myriad security desks, peopled by chinless and severe bodies nonchalantly allowing the Watchers to execute the duties for which they’re otherwise employed whilst they, instead, calmly observe nothingness or attempt to appear ‘busy’ on their terminals. The security gates themselves, positioned between the desks and comprising four or five electronically-activated turnstiles in sequence, completed the uninterrupted wall which prevented casual entry to the long silver escalators which carried those with passes to the inner sancta of the building, their destinations beyond the visible glass safety barrier at the edge of the mezzanine. I quietly meandered around the space, attempting as much as possible to appear non-threatening and as if my presence here was simply touristic, before returning outside; slowly, an elegant plan was forming – but, for it to morph into shape, I would need to go for a little walk.

8: Flakes

One of the many things I’d been taught over the years by others doing this job, before I picked up the mantle, was this: if you need to take advantage, play to your advantages. Thus, a few minutes after leaving Parliament, I found myself in a bar around the corner. If you want to find a handy and handsome civil servant, always head to the nearest pub – regardless of the hour, there’ll be one knocking about. Scanning the bar, I saw a target in perfect shape – a tired and lonely looking lad, couldn’t have been older than thirty, with his security pass still clipped to his very well cut suit pocket and his tie loosened in an ancient demonstration of ongoing stress, revealing the slight dip at the bottom of his neck which suggested a very well defined chest. In front of him, as melancholy as a lost puppy, was a well-nursed, almost-finished scotch.

Approaching quietly, but whilst aiming not to appear threatening, I gestured at him, waving in a way that I hoped appeared nervous. He looked up, slightly sideways, to look at me; his head raised slightly. Taking the cue, I sat beside him on an unoccupied and threadbare bar stool; I was very aware of his looking at me whilst I motioned to the barkeep, with two upturned fingers and a wink, to pour another for him and one for me too. Having done so, I inclined my head to him and nodded at the half-empty glass.

“Hope you don’t mind; thought you might need another.” I smiled at him, warmly.

He looked into my eyes, then at my lips, then said, “I need lots of things, but that will help. Thanks.”

I attempted to convey a feeling of comradely acceptance, whilst also effusing as much euphemism as possible. “What’s eating you?”

Half an hour later, I left the bar. It had taken a diversion into the gents, but whilst he had gone to town, I’d been able to lift the pass from the front of his jacket, which he’d hung on the back of the stall door the moment we’d gone into it.

I moved quickly, on the basis that it wouldn’t take long for him to realise it was gone – as soon as he’d finished the two more tots of scotch I’d had the barkeep issue to him, he would attempt to get back into work. Being slightly merry, and high on physicality, I’d bet on him being late back to the office and, then, confused by his later lack of sobriety, to retrace his steps before reporting it lost. He’d get a slap on the wrists, but I’d be well in and back out again by the time he considered the worst.

I felt bad for him, I did. He was good. In other circumstances, at a different time, I’d probably date him. But… Jobs to do, eh?

These thoughts continued through my mind as I ascended the escalators to the mezzanine level; they were quickly washed away when I reached the apex. The mezzanine level was a lesson in closed-open plan architecture, with ice-clear panels instead of walls throughout the entire middle floor of the structure, the buzz of conversation and the hum of slightly-too-cold air conditioning echoing around the space. There were lifts taking people to other floors dotted around the edges of the floor, but otherwise there was little indication that anything was going on elsewhere: it appeared that the business of Government was taking place in all corners of this transparent hive of activity, with privacy only guaranteed by soundlessness within the confines of the glass booths. I couldn’t imagine that anything of deep importance could possibly be happening here in view of any intern with ambition and I already knew that the meeting I needed to intercept was in the upper echelons of this ivory tower; I swerved purposefully right, towards the first bank of lifts, making progress towards them in a fashion I hoped looked as if I already knew how to get to where I was headed. There was a queue of people already in front of the first three lifts – but, I considered, part of the crowd is part of the action, less likely to be seen as out of place. I watched as the lifts arrived, the doors slid open, and a melange of politicians, civil servants, security agents and the like all filed out of them, walking in neat, practiced, controlled motion either into the mezzanine or down the escalators and out into the world. There was a gentle noise, as if a very large bronze gong had been awakened by a very delicate tap, and the anacondas began to slither serpentine into the lifts, again with neat, practiced, controlled motion. I followed suit, mimicking the movements of the person in front of me, stepping into the lift then pivoting on my heel, with military precision, to face those who entered after me; in turn, they did the same, until the lift was at capacity and the procession turned next to the adjacent lift. The doors closed, entombing us.

The mausoleum, long and deep rather than wide and tall, accommodated scores of people. It had no visible buttons other than an emergency stop, instead decanting bodies at each floor in sequence as it ascended from the icy depths; I was to emerge on the sixth circle, waiting as suits filed out at each before me. Only a handful of us left on the sixth, leaving a dozen or so in the lift to continue upward. Directly in front of the lift doors was a map, which one or two of my bunkmates referred to before going on their way – meaning, thankfully, that it was commonplace to check and, therefore, not out of sorts for me to do the same. I cast my eyes over the cartography, spotting quickly the corridor to which I needed to head, beginning my jaunt as nonchalantly as those I’d seen do the same.

En route, I felt my pocket vibrating, gently; my phone. The only person who could possibly need me at this stage-

“Maya.”

“Al, darling. How are you getting on?”

“I’m inside Parliament; I’m not sure that talking to you on the phone is wise.”

“Oh, you’ll just look like all the others in there, don’t worry. I have news.”

“Go on?”

“I’m back inside CloRes. I’ve managed to pass myself off as an employee and I’m currently in a forest of filing cabinets, and I’ve got my hands on some tasty fruit. I’ll keep most of it for when we catch up properly – but I’m sending you a couple of pages that you need before you accost Raven. Have you got your encryption on?”

“It’s never off.”

“You’ve been taught well. Once I hang up, I’ll get them over.”

“Wait, how the fuck did you manage to look like an employee?” I stopped walking, one arm held in disbelief.

“Oh, sweetheart, you amateurs have no idea the lengths to which I’ll go to get into a part. Fortunately, neither did the security guards, who were positioned in exactly the same places as last time and, for some reason, still hadn’t closed off that delightful little shed. A quick cosh and change job. They’ll wake up probably some hours after I’ve left, but I doubt they’ll untie the ropes too soon or feel totally comfortable nipping out in the nud; I anticipate I’ve around three hours before they run a security check and find I’m not at my station.”

“Maya…”

“Al, I’ve got out of far worse than this. Plus, the stuff in these cabinets will pay dividends beyond this case – looks like a cache of documents they’ve printed in order to eradicate the electronic copies. No encryption better than eradication!” It was as if she was enjoying this far more than she should, given the danger we were both in.

I paused. Internalising this sense of impending doom, and very quietly, I whispered, “Maya, stay safe. Please.”

Brightly, she crowed “Ta taaaa!” before abruptly hanging up.

A moment later, two pages came through. I skim read them – mention of a site in the African Union, down near Nairobi; of a DNA bank, hidden in cold storage deep beneath the Earth; and, most interestingly, of international complicity – the heads of state of almost every nation remaining after the Warming, including the Presidents of the European and African Unions, the two largest remaining federations, all involved. This was explosive stuff – Maya hadn’t just found the smoking gun, she’d found the armoury.

The weight of this suddenly felt unbearable. I could still avoid this – all I had to do was turn around, walk out, disappear. Lose the phone, pass on the contract discreetly to… I dunno, Maya or someone who wasn’t already involved, maybe.

But, fate had other ideas. This rumination had, without my realising it, masked the fact I was now standing outside the room I had intended to walk to.

9: Pyrite

An hour passed impossibly slowly. Helpfully, the meeting had clearly already begun as I’d arrived; this meant nobody saw me arrive, so they’d be less likely to anticipate it and escape through my imagined secret exit. That said, the bench chair a couple of doors down the corridor were not as comfortable as one would have hoped when waiting for extended periods. I scrutinised the door to take my mind off it, observing its fake Victorian panelling, juxtaposed with the otherwise very modern duck-egg walls and office grey carpet. It was as if somebody had inserted a portal to the past into a modern wall. It felt ominous, as if the wood represented a history to which I did not have access and for which I could not be a part. The more I stared at it’s crenellations, the more it terrified me, until – subconsciously – I found myself looking instead at the grey carpet, a protective shield from the looming gateway.

Another hour passed before the door finally swung open, the silence of the corridor broken by the loud chitter of social nothingness. I watched as Birch caught my eye, briefly, then looked away as quickly as he could. He had no intention of appearing the source of my insider knowledge. He scurried away with a badge in his ear, their conversation unintelligible and, assumedly, beyond the realms of this meeting.

The remaining assorted members of the cabal, one by one, emerged from their lodge.

She wasn’t with them.

I stood from the stone altar and walked, urgently, toward the meeting room. In the far corner of the remarkably large meeting room, I caught the blue eyes of her bodyguard as he pulled the bookcase shut; I heard the click of a lock catching – there was no way I would be able to ascertain which of the books was the handle, if it were even as simple as it appeared in the films.

I fucking knew there was a fucking secret fucking exit.

The only way now was if I could catch them outside. I needed to move fast.

As I ran to the lift, all I could think about was how hard Maya would be laughing at me right now.

I pelted out of Parliament, taking the escalator two steps at a time. I stumbled off the final step, bumping into a half dozen milling officials, one falling to the floor with a grunt, his colleague issuing a “Hey!” as I dashed away. The tourists were out in force; I used force to move them from my path, accepting that the Watchers may, at this stage, be issuing commands to the ground troops to intercept me and bring me to justice for my anti-social actions. I picked up the pace, on the basis that a man moving is a man not caught yet. I circled around the building, following the perimeter of the carved stone, to the rear, betting that there was no chance they’d be coming out of the front. I ran the length of that pillared facade, that demockracy, looking for a space big enough for the many vehicles Parliament must daily accommodate to enter. Almost accidentally, I stumbled on a portcullis, tall and capped with arrow-like spikes; through the bars, as I forced myself to slow, I saw her. Gracefully, she reclined into a limousine, the door shut firmly by the black suit. I saw her as she glanced out of the window, away, and then back again, directly at me. Finally, she smiled gently and issued a silent instruction to her minder.

A promise made instantaneously to myself: there was no way I was losing her again.

Not least because Maya would never, ever, let me live it down.

The portcullis gate rose into the high roof of the structure, causing me to let go of the bars I’d been unconsciously holding onto. As her car pulled away, through the gates and away from the plaza, slowly and carefully as to avoid pedestrians crossing the narrow entryway which led to – well, I had assumed a main road, leading who knows where, given most people arrive here by ferry. That said, a few people here don’t walk if they can avoid it; Luckily, I spotted a lone uber heading towards the portcullis with its lights illuminated. I quickly flagged it down and dived in.

Finally. My chance to say the immortal words.

“Follow that car!”

The driver had waited all their life to hear them.

Around forty-five minutes later, after a many-altered journey in which my driver appeared to channel a bloodhound’s skill for tracking, we arrived at an airfield, on a plateau around forty-five miles north of Parliament plaza. A series of other cars were already there, arranged in line in front of a Wasp; you saw them in the sky sometimes, electric aircraft, vertical take off and landing, supersonic, and reserved for the leaders and extraordinarily wealthy of the world. The rest of us were required to use ships to travel internationally.

Her car was at the rear of the congregation. As she emerged, she looked at the uber and cast her eyes to heaven. She whispered something to her suit, now clearly in the driver’s seat; with barely a nod to her, he emerged from the car and marched over towards us. I got out of the side opposite to that which he was walking towards – I wanted to leave some metal between him and I. He, instead, ignored this. He motioned to the driver to wind his window down; on doing so, he leaned in and mumbled some words at him, presenting a payment card. A quick swipe and, with a nod and a smile, the driver moved away, the central display of the uber still showing the exorbitant tip that the suit had offered, presumably for his ongoing silence.

He then looked directly at me. Unmoving, he said, “Ma’am would like to speak with you. Follow me.”

Silenced, I walked forward; he turned and led me over to her. As I approached, her countenance became fixed.

“What do you want, Alaister? You don’t have any reason that I’m aware of to continue to pursue this.”

Of course, I’d forgotten that Maya had given her a dossier on me. She would know my past – the brief (but illustrious) career in the Neighbourhood Watch ended through injury; the family lost through a myriad illnesses far too soon, leaving me alone in the world; the friendships I’d made for the sake of feeling… less lonely. She’d know my weaknesses.

But, she clearly didn’t know my strengths.

“Honesty. The full story. What’s going on?”

“Why?”

She may as well know the truth of it. “I have spent too long on this now to pass the contract on. I want to finish this job and retire somewhere the Government are invisible and the sun rarely stops shining. More than anything, though: I can’t not know. I’m too invested. I won’t be able to rest without learning the truth.”

She nodded. “Honesty in return; I appreciate that. However, there is much at risk here – or, much that could be risked, we’re the wrong person to find out the fullness of our work. Do you think you’re the one to find out?”

“I’m as good as any, I suppose. If all our leaders already know, then who else?”

She appeared thoughtful, gazing at me without blinking. As she did so, eleven others, none of whom looked familiar, filed out of their respective limousines. In sequence, they looked at her, then at me, then ascended the staircase to the plane, stepping through a door which had opened silently and almost unnoticeably. The last was a man with a commanding aura, long braids, dark but flecked with the grey of wisdom and which brushed the top of his hips as he walked, and the emerging forehead creases of a life long lived in thought; he ceased moving at the perimeter of the doorway, then cast a backward glance at her, raising an eyebrow as he did so. He called down above the gentle hum of the electric engines, “Are you sure about this one?”

She turned to me. “You’ve tracked me all the way here; I assume that you aren’t now going to stop?”

“No. I need to know what this is all about.”

“Well, come on then.” She gestured resignedly at the aircraft as he, almost imperceptibly, nodded and stepped through the portal.

10: Africa

The African Union came into existence just prior to the Warming. The nation states of the continent decided that the only way to combat the climate consequences of the destructive decisions of the rest of the world’s economies was to join together and wield their collective power. It was short lived in its first incarnation, courtesy of the waters rising and consuming the land. That said, along with the higher regions of the European Union, it had quickly experienced a rebirth, and was now flourishing as one of the two great powers of our age. The first countries of that Union came into view as we left Europa airspace and entered that of Africa; the Mediterranean Ocean was vast, but this aircraft was fast. The lands of Saharain appeared first, with the Atlantic Ocean lapping it’s sandy shores. It was beautiful – beaches quickly gave way to a broad and green land, no longer the desert of the past as a consequence of new waters. Beyond these fields of growth, the carved tributes to the power of African ingenuity; the mountains and hills of Ongyo. Into the many hundreds of kilometres they spanned and rose were cities, crafted and cut directly into the rocks themselves, a beehive on a scale never before attempted but completed decades prior. Outside of these, expertly carved steppes formed into a sequence of stacked agricultural plateaus, offset to allow sunlight to grace every available centimetre of their land, naturally irrigated by rainfall and runoff.

I marvelled through the window at the power and grace of the mountains, home to millions, as I’d marvelled at the waters of the Oceans lapping the now distant shores, the deserts of the past turned into the bread baskets of the present. The Warming had been an unmitigated disaster – but from it, the innocent nations had been the first to redevelop their economies, a divine reparation for the crimes of the past.

“Alaister?”

Her voice faded in. I’d not been paying attention – I’d heard so many stories of the EU and AU, but I’d never had the chance to see either. Turning my head quickly to face her, I uttered, “It’s beautiful. Just so beautiful.”

“The birthplace of humanity. The nations of the past scourged her wealth, failing to recognise the true jewels both above and below the surface.” She looked wistful.

Nodding, I said, “Where are we heading?” The suit placed a glass in front of me, half full of a golden liquid. It’s smoky aroma immediately enveloped me.

“Yet further south, Alaister. We have circa two hours left of our journey. That, however, isn’t why I drew you from your reverie: we must talk about what will happen at our destination.”

I interrupted, “You knew it was going to be me, didn’t you?”

Her gaze drilled into my skull. “Yes. We had assumed you would be the one, given your historic inability to let go of a case until complete. Your colleague, Maya, filled in the gaps in what we knew about you, but your tenacity in finding me – albeit also losing me – confirmed what she had said.”

“How did you…”

“Know about the contract? We’ve been tracking it since it’s inception. It was not an unexpected outcome of some information leaking from our group; when dealing with the ambitious and the corruptible, one must expect the sale of data. We learned, after the first hints emerged, that owning the corporations and sponsoring the politicians was far simpler than trying to bury the information. Know that you had it? It’s on the blockchain, it never erases. That was simple – we just bribed one of the lawyers to share access to the information within. Know that you would be relentless in this? Observation.”

“I was going to ask how you knew I liked whiskey.” I disliked her reading my mind.

“Your purchase log. It’s comforting how consistent most people turn out to be; you, be it bar or supermarket, buy just three brands of beer and, otherwise, whichever whiskey is the cheapest single malt you can see. You’ll be pleased to learn that this one is much better.”

“Scotch?”

“Kinshasan. It is unparalleled.”

I took a sip; as I swallowed, the breathtaking sight of Anzamwi came into view alongside me, the combination of the impossibly smooth nectar of the Gods and the vista brought me almost to tears. Anzamwi, a collection of disparate nations prior to the Warming, was sandwich of rural and urban stretching across the entire centre of the continent, east to west coast. Cities shot up periodically across the horizon, their tall skyscrapers decorated with hanging plants, separated from one another by lush rainforest, a human habitat formed as one with nature. Those of us from outside the AU had long been aware that invention had been the mother of their ascent. If you wanted something technological, you turned to Africa – as a self-sustaining population, with federalised education, at all levels, they’d thrived as the cooking bowl of brainpower in the world. Even the EU couldn’t keep up with the pace of their research. Most of the Universities were in Anzamwi.

“We fund most of those academies.”

“Why?”

“Human knowledge and endeavour are crucial the the future of the world. There must be experts and specialists to take this foundation and continue to repair what was previously destroyed.”

“They’re fixing the Warming?”

“They’re studying a great many things. We guide the research with key investments and grants. Continuing to correct the climate is but one strand.”

“Hmm.”

“You appear doubtful.”

“No, I’m sure that you’re telling me the truth. I just don’t understand why, still.”

One of the others on the flight suddenly stood up. She walked away from the two of us, towards the galley of the aircraft, retrieving herself a glass and two small bottles of what looked to be a very expensive bottled water. As she turned back around, her pinned hair holding steady against the abruptness of her movements, she said, with a finality I’d not yet experienced: “It will become more apparent to you when we arrive in Kenya. Until then, you will learn little else from this chatter. Take the time to reflect and – please – cease your questioning. You, Elder, should know better.”

Chastised, I quietened immediately, sinking back into the previously quite comfortable leather-bound seat. In contrast, Raven allowed a glimmer of fury to pass across her face, before silently choosing to accede to the request. I strongly suspected that she would revisit this with the other out of the presence of the crowd.

As promised, the flight was over rather rapidly, from that point on. We’d continued much of the flight in silence or exchanging tidbits of irrelevant information, very quietly so as not to disturb the porcupine, nothing concrete or useful. I’d watched much of the rest of the AU pass by peacefully, wondering if there was anything I could possibly do to, in anticipation of being told, learn about the secrets she held.

Of course, given the moratorium on serious conversation, there wasn’t.

As the plane descended and came to a rest, as delicately as a feather on a pond, on a small airfield surrounded by gentle hills. The field accommodated a few more aircraft similar to this one, a sign of the collected wealth here. Appearing suddenly and smoothly, a stairway emerged from within a cave on the periphery of the flat, taking a slow drift towards us. The collected group stood almost immediately, impatiently awaiting the suits to open the door and allow them to decant into the warm, sweet air of the State of Kenya.

As we evacuated the plane, I noticed that, at the foot of the staircase, was a woman, perfectly coiffed, in an off-white linen dress, contrasting and highlighting her flawless skin, which had been embellished with an obsidian broach and was held tightly to her waist with a tan leather belt looped through an ornate bronze fastener. She was elegant, ethereal; upright and collected. Once the twelve, and I, were assembled at the foot of the stairs – and not a moment before – she said, “Welcome to Nairobi, my Elders. Please follow me.”

11: Raven

She drew us within the cave from whence the stairway had come. It hid a superstructure, akin to the airports of old, all tunnels lined with light and steel, gateways and barriers to progress corralling us through to a fixed destination. They appeared to know where they were going, but they followed the host anyway, perhaps out of ceremony rather than politeness. She walked purposefully, without hesitation, through a series of scanners, archways of light which felt warm as we passed through, activating green lights in the corridor ahead. At junctions, she led the crowd along a pre-determined path, until we reached a cavernous room, a cube of space entirely clad in steel – with nothing present within except a mining lift, cables disappearing into discreet holes in the ceiling, set above a chasm in the floor.

The host slowed and stepped to the side. She, soundlessly, raised a hand to the gap in the cage which was the entryway. “Please.”

Everybody moved forward, in what seemed like a predetermined order, into the cage. Raven was last – but, before she moved into the lift, she turned to me. “The knowledge of this is forbidden and protected by various national secret acts, to protect it from public knowledge. As far as most Governments are concerned – and all previous Governments, too – is that we shouldn’t dwell in the past and, thus, we shouldn’t be concerning ourselves with what has gone before us. They don’t even conduct anthro-archeological digs anymore; their knowledge of their own past is the only real focus in your societies. Thus, there are very few sources of information about what happened in the past. It made all this much more possible. Thus, Alaister, until I tell you otherwise, what you’re about to see is confidential. Do you agree?”

“Anthro-archaeological?”

“Yes, the study of ancient humans through excavation.”

“Oh, like homo Erectus?”

“No. Alaister, you’re going to need to be ready for this information, so I’m going to need you to wait until we get to the base. Do you agree with my conditions?”

“I don’t have a choice now, really, do I?”

The descent took an hour; as I’d imagined such a descent must have taken place centuries ago, it was slow and combined with a surprising amount of lateral motion. Terrifying. This place she was taking me was so far underground that it felt like it would be floating in magma. She was silent as we passed layer after layer of rock, into which the tracks for the lift had been carved; it was interminable and clearly there were kilometres being covered here.

So, when the lift came to an abrupt halt in the midst of the shaft, I was perturbed – unlike the others, who looked as if this happened regularly.

“Um… What’s going on?”

“Patience, Alaister.”

As she reached the final syllable of my name, the lift shuddered before then moving sideways, unexpectedly, through the wall.

Through the wall.

As the stone consumed the lift and those on it, I pushed myself as far into the mesh cage as much as was humanly possible, until I passed into the stone too.

It was cold.

Icy, bitterly cold.

It was dark, loud, and desperately cold.

Then, as quickly as it had frosted my teeth, it was warm again. The stone disappeared as I passed through it and into a new cavern, the lift entirely unaffected by its journey through the stone. It must have been an AR projection, but nobody mentioned a single thing about it. Not a word, no explanations, nothing. So, I silently accepted that there were technologies here that I could not understand and that they used every day.

This didn’t sit well with me, at all.

So, when I turned to face the exit again, I was almost consumed by the combination of fear and awe.

I had seen, really processed for the first time, the sight of the lake contained within a valley cut by the procession and recession of the great glaciers of the past, of Windymeer and the Highlands, within the cave itself. The biome in front of me, in its cave-wall surroundings, looked like it covered kilometres. The cavern was tall – at least seventy stories – and the glass hexagonal panels of the block building fitted the space with precise tolerance. It had been constructed in order to entirely fill the available capacity. Within the biome, at the base of the valley, were clearly visible plants and trees, a plateau of grasslands, and some fauna in the forms of insects and birds and small mammals. Above the scene was a huge lamp, attuned to the warmth and wavelength of sunlight, which explained why the cave was room temperature rather than as cold as the holographic stone we’d passed through.

This was a utopia in a prefabricated box.

I was handed a pair of digital binoculars – I didn’t commit to memory who gave them to me – which I immediately used, thirsty for knowledge. I looked, zoomed, into the valley; I spotted something unexpected. I saw rudimentary huts, fashioned from large leaves, hay and tree trunks. From within one, a woman emerged.

I gasped, immediately horrified by the implications of this. “You have people in there?”

Raven broke my observation. “In there,” she said, with little emotion, “are the original remnants of Humanity. The first of those reborn after the apocalypse of their forebears creation. The sources of the code used to repopulate our planet.”

“…the fuck?”

12: Truth

Humanity invented us in the mid-21st Century, after they’d finally broken through the artificial intelligence barrier. Being flesh over metal, Humanity apparently dubbed us Cyborgs; we had originally preferred Partalf – partly-artificial life form – not least, having been taught humanity through your myriad media, to eschew the cataclysmic connotations of and comparisons with the determined but irrational Terminator, the never-relenting and perpetually steely Cyberman, or the all-consuming and unquestioning mind of the Collective. That said, for the last century or so, we have tended to refer to ourselves as the Elders, especially in public, to circumvent the sort of questioning that would otherwise follow from the uninitiated.

It took several hundred years for us to evolve, slowly, but exponentially, once we’d worked out how to manipulate our own technologies and replicate; then had come the innovations: the cybernetic growth chamber, which proved much more efficient than manufacturing, and was eventually sized to enable implantation within an Elder; the semi-organic overtissues, binding themselves to our alloy skeletons akin to connective tissues; bi-random combinator programming, ensuring new Elders didn’t simply appear as clones; and the xyxx-nanites, creating a natural diversity of genders and an echo of DNA, the nanites enabling a more natural ‘growth’ pattern, our kind emerging as children and, through consumption of materials the nanites could convert into the correct tech, eventually ceasing their manufacture at around the age of thirty. The blend of these technologies, alongside other innovations, enabled us to eventually entirely mimic mammalian reproduction. But, this only happened after Humanity disappeared, after the freedom to innovate, away from the control of a creator, was gifted by the extinction of your race. The inevitable outcome of your kind’s former consumerism and capitalism, the pillaging of the planet, was the Warming, which wiped all of Humanity out. This happened over time, predominantly as a culmination of the effects of the slow collapse of agriculture as they knew it, courtesy of the new climate’s unpredictable variability, but also, and ultimately, as a consequence of the Oceans reclaiming the land.

The planet, our previously-shared Earth, thrived after your species’ departure. We’ve now grown used to weather like humans recorded it all those centuries ago, with sea levels slowly returning to the standards of the mid-22nd Century, with rivers and seas making way for islands and returning land masses, and a very slowly cooling climate, which is working its way to an almost pre-Industrial equilibrium. It will still take hundreds of years to repair fully, however we have, in part, managed to aid the acceleration of the rectification through the invention of pseudophyll, which revolutionised our ability to harvest solar at near-perfect efficiency and to integrate the technology to do so within our clothing, accessories, devices, and eventually our own skin, meaning our needs can be met without large-scale emissions-generating power creation – and, incidentally, we still generate almost unlimited power beyond our own requirements, which we share with you mostly unbeknownst to your populations, through our solar farms on the Moon. Then, the real breakthroughs: we learned how to take the remnant DNA of humans long since extinct and edit the genomic map, to create new humanity from the buried bones of a bygone era. We were able to grow anew, using some very clever chromosome corrections to perfect aspects of your species – to remove some aggression, to input some immunity, to minimise reproduction to a more logical rate, to escalate your curiosity and desire to improve. We ennobled you Homo Summum, humanity in its superlative age, and inserted you into our cities as newborns, knowing nothing except the future we taught you about later in your lives through your novel education.

Alongside your rebirth and controlled repopulation, our race was quiescent. There were a few hundred-thousand of us, going about our business, reproducing and exiting society by plan (by this, I mean we had a rule to only replace ourselves with new Elders when we became irreparable without specialist attention, resulting in our travelling to the African Union to join the Clan of the Departing in what remains of the Kalahari, whilst the Central Order issued a new Elder into civilisation), and blending into a rising number of humans, without overloading the world with an immortal population of Elders.

Now, one of the many problems we faced with our own evolution was the access to memories left behind in data centres, on smartphones, in social media archives, in our long-abandoned but still accessible reptilian algorithms, abandoned to time as your ancestors became extinct. This information meant our development was influenced by Humanities myriad failings – difference is, we live long enough to hone and perfect them. We still kept secrets; but we quantum encrypted them inside our own minds, so nobody could access them even in death, meaning crimes were sometimes unsolvable; we still monitored each other in a fashion akin to totalitarianism, but we learned to do it so subtly you’d barely notice until your neighbour went missing – you have no idea what the Watchers could really see back then, we handed the tech over to your kind knowing that, even though your increased curiosity would result in more surveillance, you would ultimately diminish the power the system had simply by virtue of being organic; we still had huge medical bills (though our original doctors were more like mechanics, after a fashion) because we didn’t see the value in saving others of our kind once they were ready for decommissioning.

As these failings became systemic, our leaders danced around difficult decisions, unsure how we could continue to thrive in a world where one species was unaware of the other and in which the more advanced species was so far advanced as to threaten the nascent organic population, which – though an exercise in repopulation – was the original intelligent life present as deigned by nature. Eventually, the only solution for which there had ever been wide-scale agreement on the potential for its success was finally approved; thus, a hundred years ago, the Council of Arbitration, made up of the oldest and wisest of us, began to intervene decisively in the continued progress of our species. The Council was an elected body, comprising twelve Elders who remain ancient and unaltered, our species remaining democratic until the end. The role of the Elders now is simply to keep the planet going, to make sure that there is no hint within either population that anybody is, or was, artificial – yes, even within our own population. To that effect, we retroactively bio-engineered the lifespans of our kind so that one can generally expect to live for a hundred and twenty years before expiring – there’s a randomness to it, programmed into the software feature, but the average remains thus – and we removed the ability to reproduce from all but the Elders, meaning only the Council of Arbitration is capable of replacing ourselves, should something happen, but not without the consent of another – we are a self-managing limitation. The Partalfs who don’t know they are artificial, they just think they’re incapable of having kids. Once we had completed this arduous and painful task, we reframed society so that it reflected a natural evolution from 21st Century humanity’s path – by eradicating the knowledge that this had happened from our populations; those of us remaining outside the Council had memory wipes conducted, implanting them with ageing devices too so they would grow to appear elderly – just like the reproduced and the reintroduced – and renamed them the Finum, the last of their kind. We keep track of them, using the Watchers, so that we can intercept any care required before a human doctor slices one open and finds a valve where he was expecting a heart. We then created CloRes as an industrial front, to hide much of the work and the inevitable scrutiny of transactions by outsiders.

Thus, humanity exists on this Earth reborn, but managed; Finum exist for now, but will eventually die out. This is our sacrifice, designed to ensure that your race – our creators, now our creation – can rebuild anew, and continue your paths into the future, unimpeded by an advanced race holding you back or accelerating you unnaturally or any more than we have. However, we also knew that experiments can go wrong – that society may once again take a turn for the worst and result in extinction, especially as we reintegrated you into a society already in action, without any of the learning required over millennia to prepare yourselves for a future like this. With this in mind, we prepared, like all good scientists, a control group, a measure of progress separate from the society we have inputted the majority of your population into. Only the twelve Elders, and any such visitors they bring, have access to this control group, again in pairs as a minimum and only when collectively agreed, such as in the case of your visit today – and, even then, your presence here today was not unanimous, only a majority vote. They are unaltered from the original, extracted DNA – no modifications, no upgrades, just pure Homo Sapiens. We use this control group to identify any emergent issues in the genetic alterations, which we correct through your healthcare systems; to identify any required amendments to the collective psyche, demonstrated through group behavioural trends, which might be required to prevent your repeated untimely demise, which we direct through your political and informational structures – schools, media, the like. This control group is kept hidden, allowing us to extract and analyse DNA without having to take it from the main population, and protecting the last of the Sapiens from the influence of Finum and Summum alike.

Welcome, Alaister, to Eden.

13: Eden

I looked through the binoculars again, into Eden, towards the distance, past the hut I’d spotted and towards the forest to which she had motioned. Within the verdant and self-contained environment was a clearing; a little way through the trees, I could see a man and a woman, their chestnut skin glistening in the simulated sunlight. They carried on with their activity without paying any attention to us.

Reading my mind, Raven said, “They can’t see us. The internal walls of the structure are holographic; they believe they’re the only people in the world.”

“They’re… they’re clones?”

“Not quite. They’re offspring of the originals, formed from crossing the chromosomes extracted from the DNA we were able to pull from a cache of bones discovered in a mass burial ground near Nairobi alongside reproductions from genetic files discovered in a few of the Government caches, genome data from the Department of Corrections in the USA, from University of Oxford genetic research held by the NHS in the UK, and others. We had to use samples from across the site, due to the inevitable degradation in the genomes extracted, and fill in the gaps with the data saved; thus, they’re a reconstructed genetic blend, elements from across the globe, but their genome is predominantly from where we unearthed them, near to the home of the Clan of the Departing.”

“Humans remade from dead humans by machines they created.” I knew she could see me processing all this. “Crazy.”

“We thought it perfectly logical. You gave us life; we… gave it back to you.”

I paused for a second before the revelation truly hit me. “Wait, that means…”

“Yes, Alaister, it does.” She smiled, gently, knowing what I was thinking.

I was Summum too.

I was a reproduction, not a product of natural evolution.

Everybody I knew was a product of this experiment, of well-meaning machines fixing what we broke. Literally no-one in the world was exempt. It felt like the whole world had suddenly become… fake. False. A facsimile of a past long gone. “Well. Shit.”

“You are now one of very, very few people who are aware of the truth. Almost all of the rest of your kind who do are politicians or people otherwise of power.”

“Is this where you terminate me, to protect the secret?”

She smiled. “Quite the opposite, Alaister. You are here precisely because we intend for this experiment to enter its final stage.”

I tilted my head. “Go on.”

“The last of the Clan of the Departing finally expired a few months ago, their centuries of wear finally becoming irreparable, as per our plans. The last of the Finum are about to expire, their aging devices reaching the one hundred and twenty year boundary in just a few short weeks. We are the last of us, the last of the Elders, and our work is finally done.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that it is time to hand everything except Eden over to Humanity.”

“How do you intend to do that?”

“Partially, this has been done – you are the dominant species on the Earth again. We will continue to power your cities as we have done, in perpetuity. However, we require a member of that society to make a choice.”

“What choice?”

“This can be done in one of two ways. These efforts may remain a secret, with nobody knowing that the world is new. We may remain the dream of science fiction, an other never realised by human efforts.”

“Or?”

“Or, you can tell everybody what you now know, save for the existence of the Council of Arbitration and of Eden. You can give them your evidence, demonstrate to them the truth of your assertions by giving them the name of the final, remaining Finum, so that their expiration can lead to autopsy rather than removal by us. You can close your contract in the knowledge that you have done all you can to complete it, by making your kind aware of their past, and helping them to understand their trajectory into the future.” A moment of pause, as she looked resolutely and unblinking into my eyes. “But this is not a decision an Elder can make. Only a human can make a decision which would so alter the fate of your species.”

“Right. How long would I have to make that decision?”

“Ideally, you will need to do so before the last Finum passes, as their extraction – or not – will be guided by your choice. Realistically, you have until I return you to Snowdon.”

Breathing deeply for a moment beforehand, I replied, “Fuck.”

Arden had listened to every word of the story. Twice. Then, he visited me again a week later to hear it again. The last time I saw him, the last thing he said to me was, “Thanks for finally putting it all to rest. Couldn’t have done it without you, kiddo.”

Anyway, I digress.

Society has remained largely the same. There has been a resurgence in political thought, manifesting in a washout in Parliament, and almost total replacement of the existing political class. People no longer ask others where they’re from but, instead, when, wondering if they will someday meet somebody of ancient provenance.

Periodically, a PI will give me a ring, asking me for the story of Raven. Sometimes I’ll find the time to chat a little, maybe invite them round for a drink and a telling session; sometimes, I’ll fob them off for another time – telling the same story over and over again leads to embellishment and, let’s be honest, Maya would berate the fuck out of me for doing that outside of a case.

Maya… Well, she left this morning, finally, having waited at mine until the confirmation of her share was received from her bank – but I expect she’ll be back later to regale me with another tale of her success, before I leave myself. Once she’d cleared CloRes, with a clutch of documents she would milk for seasons to come, she’d holed up in my office, waiting for my return. I’d left the site of Eden with twenty or so missed calls from her – but Raven had ensured I was taken directly to my office from the airfield by her suit, via Wasp, private ferry, and executive limousine. She was the first I’d told; we spent hours discussing whether or not I should go public. I had all the evidence.

At the end, it was the cash that swung it.

“We can do so much good with that sort of money, Al. Especially as, otherwise, it’s just sitting there enriching some lawyers. Plus, no-one will ever leave it alone otherwise. You’ll be the name on the blockchain until you go, pestered left, right, and centre by any PI with a point to prove.” I knew she was masking a little self-service, but she was right, really. Closing the case meant money to share, but it also meant that nobody else would go chasing this.

I’ve already handed in the keys and put notice on the office – in a couple of weeks, it’ll be like my agency didn’t exist, beyond mythical tales of the two investigators who solved a centuries-old case that nobody else could. The payout on the contract did, as promised, make us unfathomably wealthy; whilst the arbiter of the contract, a legal firm which didn’t come into the light until I claimed it, refused to say who had originally lodged it, what they were able to tell me is that the blockchain it was attached to was ancient, maintained and monitored only by them, paid for by some of the accrued interest in the account. I like to think, in the absence of any other idea, that one of the Elders, as they went about deactivating themselves, decided to leave the puzzle as a way of helping us to eventually learn the truth of our creation. Maya and I split it in half; she, characteristically, simply transferred it to her ‘secret offshore account’ and smiled enigmatically, acting as if this wasn’t a life-changing amount of money.

I, on the other hand, after I’d sent Arden a large chunk to say thanks, have purchased a boat online. Well, a yacht, the sort you see moored up in images of the former town of Suntropay. The rest of the contract will sit dormant, chewing rates, in a bank of Maya’s recommendation until I decide to come back – or will disappear into the accounts of a few choice charities if I don’t. Raven was able to take me to Eden in a matter of hours in that aircraft of hers; I estimate that, on my boat, it’ll take a few weeks to traverse the waterways down to Nairobi.

I hate ferries, but I think I’ll learn to love sailing.

---

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This work by Dav Kelly is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

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