within one hour’s travel time from here. Search criteria: clean white sand beach, stand-alone bedroom or cabin, occupancy less than twenty percent, with sailing craft for rent within one kilom of Vacenv.” A list of Vacenvs came up. It wasn’t a long list as December is always high season in South East Asia which is where the map and list had focused, given my criteria. While looking down the list I thought about what I would write to Sir Thomas. It would be better to send him an email as I didn’t trust myself not to show emotion if I was looking at him. I’d just write something short but ask if he had any further leads on the runner — that way it would look as if I knew nothing. I called up my comms program on the Dev and, selecting Sir Thomas from my list of contacts, dictated.
Dear Sir Thomas,
Hope you are well. I am planning on taking a vac. I just wanted to check with you that I personally am in no danger from the runner that escaped? I was thinking about going to a beach in the Southern Thailand Geographic. In your opinion is it safe for me to do so? I should be gone for three or four days — I’ll bring you back some of that whisky you like.
With warm regards,
Your nephew,
Jonah.
Jonah James Oliver
Arbitrator at Law
Coughington and Scuttle
My signature appended itself to the message automatically. The ‘Chatnip’ app gave me a list of my ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ to delete, which I did. I thought it looked a bit too formal but then I always attach my signature to my emails. Just stay normal, keep everything as normal as possible, I thought, and said, “Send.”
I turned my attention back to the list of Vacenvs and one looked particularly interesting. A tiny Vacenv in a small village called Tha Sala, about fifteen kiloms north from Nakorn Si Thammarat further up along the coast. Using the Changi Lev port, I could reach Phuket within ten mins, and then catch an airship transport across to Nakorn Si Thammarat. I could be on the beach in Tha Sala within an hour of leaving New Singapore. The Lev between New Singapore had only finished construction last year. The final section of tube was put in place in November, ready for pumping out the air. The resulting vacuum allows us to travel at eight thousand kilos per hour, with high speed mag-lev, in the little sixteen seat pods that we call Levs. The idea was adopted for building elevators and many buildings now have the Lev tubes coiled up like a giant spring either inside or outside of the structures to which they provide transport. They were first called Vactrains but when the pods came along and they were put in buildings, trains just didn’t fit anymore. The Transatlantic Lev can take you from London to New York in less than an hour.
The Geographic of Thailand had standardized on South East Asia Time (SEAT) back in 2020, as had Indonesia, so I hit the comms button next to their name. The hands of a little clock started spinning where my finger had touched the screen. The hands spun some more and then I realized I was still naked. I quickly turned off the cam on my Dev and went to voice-only mode on my side. The clock hands disappeared and a man, standing on a beach, his back to the ocean appeared on my Devscreen. He looked Thai, was wearing a sarong and had a large fish dangling from a meaty fist.
“Sawasdee Khrap, good morning, Mr Oliver, my name is Bank. Please excuse the fish — I was just on my way to the kitchen when I heard your call. How can I be of service, sir?”
“Good morning, Khun Bank. I’m thinking of staying at your Vacenv for a few days. Do you still have beach front cottages available?”
“Yes we do, Mr Oliver. We’ve just opened and are still in soft launch so we’re not doing any marketing right now. In fact we only have two other guests staying here tonight. When were you planning on arriving, sir?”
“I was thinking about coming over there before lunch. Could you arrange a car for me? I’ll call you when I’m boarding the airship.”
“Certainly, Mr Oliver. And I take it you would like one of our beach cottages is that right, sir?”
“Yes, that’s right. As near to the sea as possible, OK?”
“Yes Mr Oliver, thank you. So we’ll look forward to seeing you around lunchtime then.”
“Yes, thanks, and save me some of that fish for later,” I said. His face broke into a grin and he gave me a thumbs up as I cut the call. I felt better. At least I was doing something, moving. It had to be an improvement on sitting around brooding over the circumstances I found myself in. I looked across the room at the clothes racks by the sleeper, and frowned. I didn’t have any clothes that were suitable for the beach. Everything I had was either formal or smart-casual. Do clothes define a person? Probably not, but they do tell you a lot about someone’s lifestyle, and mine spoke volumes. The last time that I had taken any time off, ‘self-time’, was when I had just arrived in New Singapore from the Scotland Geographic. All I ever do is contribute and sleep a dreamless sleep.
Chapter 9
UNPOL Headquarters, Deep Trace Operations Room, 188th floor.
Thursday 12 December 2109, 10:00am +8 UTC
Martine Shorne was the eldest in the team- ‘The Gang of Four’ as they were unofficially known: Marty, as she was usually called, plus Dom, Fatima, and Stanislav, the boy from the Urals Geographic. Together they traced the untraceable. They got the cases that others found impossible, and Case #JM-2109 was somewhere out there beyond impossible. But there was always something.
They had been given the case at 4:45pm yesterday, six days after his escape. They’d heard about the escape along with the rest of the planet’s population by mid-noon on the Friday when it had been released to the newsfeeds globally. The news quickly became the most commented upon topic online and off.
Marty had gone over the entire timeline and absorbed all the data. It amounted to nothing. By the second degree of separation, everything disappeared. The lead from the tip-off that led to the raid, the capture, transportation to New Singapore, the footage of the interviews, containment, and finally the clouded-out, gas-filled image of the black hole in the wall of the White Room and the blunt cylindrical rear end of the mole.
The Devcockpit they’d recovered gave them nothing; neither did the Mole, found six kiloms away in a warehouse in Old Jurong Port, and completely destroyed with a magnesium bomb. She smiled: she had to admire the planning and execution. Altogether it was a work of art. From the fake mines in the tunnel, the collapsed roof of the tunnel three-quarters of the way down, to the electromagnetic pulse mines that had destroyed the remote control bomb disposal units, it was all beautifully planned and flawlessly executed.
The sixteen grade one illegals had also disappeared, their PUIs a complete falsification. She knew they were dealing with someone brilliant, but then the 'Gang of Four' were pretty stellar too, and now it was their turn to play. Trace Operations had its hereditary roots in the profiling of serial murderers by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the twentieth century; their primary role being to predict where the accused was and what they were likely to do next. They played ‘what if’ all day and often all night long until they had worked out what was the most plausible course of action for any given individual, group or event. In a sense, they made predictions. In another they were fortunetellers, but a far more sophisticated truth is that everything they did was based on intuition, insight, experience and derived from fact. They also loved a challenge.
They had half a floor of the northern tower of the UNPOL Complex to themselves. Two thousand square meters of cool rubberized black floor space. The walls were Devscreens and the ceiling appeared to be whatever they wanted it to be, on any given day. It was a huge Devscreen separated from the floor by a height of fifteen meters. Today, as per usual, it was black to match the floor. Despite the size of the room there was no echo, and their name for it was the Cave.
No one entered their space without asking first. It was an unwritten rule but one enforced by the threat of what might happen to one’s digital history if unheeded. There was a rumor, carefully cultivated, that a senior level UNPOL officer had barged into their space without invitation. That night he had gone to dinner and found that he no longer existed as a person. His PUI had been wiped along with his ability to cred the dinner. He’d been contained
