over.” About five minutes later we reached the bottom and emerged into a larger chamber about fifty meters in diameter, lit by a single string of lights suspended from its ceiling and disappearing around what seemed like a downward curve. In the middle of the chamber was a golf cart. It looked incongruous in the setting but Gabriel climbed into the driver’s seat and I into the passenger seat. With a flip of the red switch between us, he pressed his foot on the accelerator and away we went down the tube.
Chapter 13
The Marq V, Penthouse Env, Sir Thomas’s New Singapore Residence
Friday 13 December 2109, 1:21am +8 UTC
Three hundred and eighty-four thousand, four hundred and three kiloms away, Sir Thomas was awoken by the persistent but soft buzzing of the Dev’s speaker set into the headrest of his bed. Sir Thomas encouraged the perception that he never slept, and his image had already answered the call, recognized Agent Sharon Cochran, and deciphered enough keywords to initiate Sir Thomas’s wake up experience.
Already fully clothed in his uniform as Director of Operations of the Political and Corporate Security Unit of United Nation Police, and Head of UNPOL, Sir Thomas examined his image in the full length screen, zooming in on his face to check for the debris of sleep. None seen, he took over the conversation from his facs.
“Agent Cochran, no apology required. What do you have to report?”
“Jonah has gone missing on Far Side, sir.” Agent Cochran, like the Director, looked the same at 1:22am in the morning as she did at 8:30am in the morning, or indeed at any time of the day or night in public. Unwrinkled, neat, professional and calm, her blonde hair cut in an attractive but subtle bob, she looked directly into the Dev and waited patiently for the Director to issue his commands.
“Exactly when and where did he go missing?”
“Exiting the Lev port at Shackleton base is the last image we have of him, Sir, and that was at 9:05pm.”
Sir Thomas glanced at the time set in the lower right corner of his Devscreen, 1:23am, Friday 13 December 2109.
“Are you a suspicious person, Agent Cochran?” he asked without expression. “Do you believe in omens, good and bad luck?”
“No, sir, I believe we are the masters of our own circumstance,” replied Agent Cochran who seemed to straighten up as she said it.
“Ah the valor and ignorance of youth,” said Sir Thomas in a voice halfway between a whisper and a sigh.
Cochran’s face flushed slightly along the edges of her angular cheekbones and her jaw muscle tightened considerably. She did not like being played with like this, but knew better than to respond. Everything is a test and you either pass or you fail. She didn’t fail.
Sir Thomas, his face set again in an inscrutable shield that forbade discernment, smiled inwardly, the image of a puppet dancing on a string coming to mind. “You did well to interrupt me, Agent Cochran,” and he allowed the smile onto his face. “What actions have you taken over the past four hours?”
“Communications with Far Side have been cut off, Sir Thomas. Peary’s comms unit says that solar flare activity on the Far Side may have disrupted the Commsat network. Unable to contact Shackleton directly, I ordered a plainciv unit from Peary to Shackleton. They investigated the area outside of the Lev port and that was the last recorded position of Jonah’s Devstick. Other Devsticks in the area appeared to be in a similar situation and again the comms unit says this is probably connected to the network problem on Far Side. We dispatched a forensic team with sniffers to see if we could track, and so far they have tracked him to an area of approximately three square kiloms — but they cannot yet narrow that down further. All of Shackleton’s primary exit points have been manned, sir.”
“You have made an excellent contribution, Agent Cochran, thorough with rapid, accurate assessment of circumstances, and efficiently and beautifully executed.” the Director smiled again. “However, I am sure that there is nothing to worry about. As you say, Devs in the area are acting strangely and Jonah informed me he was taking self-time and traveling to the Moon. Even so, it is better to be cautious about these things, especially given the sensitivities of these times.”
Praise from Sir Thomas was as rare as rain in the desert and Cochran glowed inwardly, being careful not to show her pleasure.
“Keep me updated about the situation as and when you see fit. Thank you, Agent Cochran,” he said, and with a last very small, very quick twist upwards of the corners of this mouth — something that was communicated to Sharon Cochran as a very scary smile — Sir Thomas cut the feed.
Cochran took a deep breath in and out to release the tension she felt. She didn’t know why Sir Thomas made her feel so inadequate, and often wondered about that. With everyone else, including herself, she was supremely confident. She knew that she was in the top one percent of female humans her age in the known universe. Top in intelligence score, muscle to body fat, optimum height to weight ratio, and, as she’d been told by more than one person, in her looks, but Sir Thomas could take all that away with a word or a glance.
Shaking her head softly as if to rid it of the negative thoughts, she turned from her comms Dev and looked around her work area. There was nothing personal here that signified this was her workspace. Everything she needed to exist in this space was in her head. It was time to make her way back to her Env. A glance at the Dev showed her she was alone in the section complex.
“Turn off all the light between me and the Lev door,” Sharon told the Dev. The subdued optimum lights in her space shut off. She smiled in the total darkness, and turning ninety degrees to her right, took two long steps forward. She stopped, turned again ninety degrees to her left, and then taking six strides forward ordered the Dev to open the door. Without hesitating, she walked through for two strides, halting and again turning ninety degrees left, started striding towards the Lev door for her section.
Eighty five measured strides later, she stopped. The Lev said, “Where do you wish to go, Agent Cochran?”
Not in a talkative mood, Sharon tapped the car icon on her Devstick and the door to the Lev slid open, flooding the corridor with a soft blue light. She didn’t sit; the trip would be a short one as her Bulgari T8 was parked right outside the Lev port on level one. Exiting the Lev, a few contemplative moments later, she emerged from the Lev port as the matt black gull-wing door on her T8 rose to the three-quarter position.
Sliding into the custom seat, she tapped manual on the steering wheel. Jurong Island to the southern tip of Sentosa was twenty kiloms. The Travway at this time of night would not be as busy as during the day. For some reason, people still preferred to drive in daylight, but even so, this was New Singapore, and the lion always roared. Her best time was five minutes flat, her new target was four point eight minutes. The barrier light changed and the barrier went up, her foot stamped on the throttle and the T8’s twin turbines sent her airborne as she raced up the ramp, but only for a millisec as the car’s aerodymics came into play, and she was glued to the rubberized surface of the Travway.
Her focus absolute, she allowed herself the luxury of a small smile of satisfaction as the slumbering Devs controlling the norms in their Toyota autopiloted EVs came alive with the computational reality of her velocity among them.
On the other side of New Singapore, fifty kiloms away from where Cochran was weaving through the early morning traffic, a recently promoted level two officer of the Trav Control Center turned to his colleague in alarm. The screen in front of him had swooped from the placid traffic on the Travway on Marina South and focused on the West Coast Travway. The screen flipped image Devs as a vehicle went through their ranges in secs.
“It’s OK lah, it’s just her. She does it nearly every night, and hasn’t hit anyone yet,” his colleague said and turning off the tracker on the vehicle, sat back in his Biosense to watch and marvel at the performance on the screen in front of him.
Sharon glanced at the speedometer and the timer. Speed two hundred and eighty kilos, time at four minutes exactly. She navigated the off-ramp before rapidly decelerating to a hundred and ten kilos for the S-turn that took
