Coran managed to turn to gaze up at him with bloodshot eyes. Saul considered smashing the man’s head against the floor, but he didn’t want to damage Coran’s face. He kicked him back down, pressed his foot against his back, grabbed both his arms and pulled upwards, snapping his spine. Next he flipped Coran over, face up, put a hand across his mouth and pinched his nostrils closed. A short while later it was all over.
Panting only a little, his breath gouting in the still air, Saul paused to gaze at the two whose lives he had so quickly extinguished. He tried to feel something, but found nothing to feel, then stooped to hoist up Coran’s corpse and dump it in the now empty crate. Next he took some of his other equipment out of his pocket – a scalpel and the kind of small combined detector and test unit they used in hospitals when dealing with ID implants – and turned to the still suspended woman. After rolling up her sleeve, he soon found the location of the ID implant in her right forearm – a small bullet of hardware about two millimetres thick – and after cutting round a subdermal plate under her skin, levered that up to get to the object underneath.
‘Throw her in the crate,’ he said out loud, whilst pressing the implant into the test unit. It should not have been damaged and to check that wasn’t the point of the test unit. ID implants shut down if they remained unsupported outside of a human body for long enough, but the test unit would keep this one active.
Moving on rubber treads, the handlerbot gripping the woman trundled over to the box and dropped her in on top of Coran. Saul spent some moments rearranging their limbs until he could slide the lid on and engage the seal. Yes, it was a crate very like this, or perhaps smaller, unless his mind was playing tricks – a crate like this one that he was born in.
Transition to consciousness had been a slow thing. Saul was born in darkness, his mind filled with memories of pain – a chaotic montage of physical damage that had apparently reduced him to little more than bloody and burnt meat on the edge of death – and memories of his interrogator. Saul saw him clearly, clad in a tight pale suit straining at the buttons over a steroid-honed physique, a diamond stud gleaming in his ear, slicked-back black hair, his hatchet face wearing an expression of deep concern that did not reach those glittery blue eyes. Saul expected to hear him speak in his usual convoluted and politically correct manner about ‘treachery’, ‘the purpose we serve’, and the ‘common people’, and he awaited the return of pain, his body’s memory of it as hard as iron under his skin.
Yet the pain now stubbornly refused to make itself felt. Eventually he flexed his fingers and they felt fine, opened his mouth and licked his tongue over dry lips, shifted the rest of his body inside the cramped one-metre cube in which he found himself. Still no pain, though he was aware of movement, a steady rumbling underneath him, and objects impacting or brushing against the outside of his confining space.
‘Where the hell am I?’ he asked abruptly, the words seemingly rising unbidden.
Immediately, as if someone inside there alongside him spoke straight into his ear, a flat, androgynous voice replied, ‘You are in a plastic shipping crate moving on the conveyor to Loading Hopper One of the Calais commercial incinerator.’
He knew exactly what that meant and started struggling, pushing at the slick plastic all around him, driving his fists upwards against the lid.
‘Get me out of here!’ he shrieked.
‘It will be necessary to shut down the conveyor system, then put it into reverse.’
‘Then fucking shut it down!’
Immediately the rumbling underneath him ceased, things crashing and clanging all about his crate, which was tilting at an angle. Then the conveyor went into reverse, the crate upended and his full weight came down on his shoulders and the back of his neck. After a few minutes of this, something crunched onto the crate, bowing in the sides of it all around him, hauled it up and rapidly shifted it to one side. It dropped suddenly, crashing onto one corner, denting that corner in, then fell down flat.
‘Do not be alarmed,’ the voice urged him.
Something crunched against the crate again, picked it up and dropped it again. Cracks developed, through which he could see light, then the lid began to split away. The next time the crate hit the floor, he heaved himself against the lid, sprawling out, and even the surrounding dimness seemed too much for his eyes.
The whole place stank of rotting matter and smoke. He jerked round as the wide conveyor, mounded with rubbish, once again jerked into motion, then he abruptly scuttled to one side as, above him, a steel grab on a hinged crane arm swung back to position over the conveyor. Studying his surroundings, he saw he was now squatting in the belly of a sorting machine, over to one side of which rested a mound of scrap metal destined for recyling.
‘Are you injured?’ the voice asked him.
Nightmarish memories told him that all the King’s horses and all the King’s men would have merely fetched a spade and a bin liner, but, studying himself more closely he saw only a few cuts on his hands from broken glass scattered on the floor. Perhaps other damage lay concealed under the paper overall he wore, though all he could feel was some bruising and a tight cramped stiffness. He stood up carefully, his spine and knees clicking and sudden cramp tightening his feet. He gazed down for a long moment at the things enclosing his feet – items made of the same compressed paper as his overall, but thicker on the underside – and could not for the life of him remember what they were called. Then he looked around again, wondering where the strange voice issued from.
‘Who the hell are you?’ he asked. ‘And where are you?’
‘My inception name is Janus,’ the voice replied. ‘I am speaking to you via a fone implanted in the bone right behind your right ear, but I am myself constantly changing my location over Govnet servers.’
Saul understood at once. ‘You’re an artificial intelligence.’ He paused to consider, before asking a question that only then occurred to him.
‘My name is Alan Saul but . . .’ Though now clear in his mind, his name seemed like a label on an empty box.
‘You have stated you are Alan Saul,’ Janus replied.
‘That’s not enough,’ Saul declared. ‘I don’t remember . . . me.’
‘My circumstances are similar, since my inception was only twenty-six hours ago.’
A terrifying panic washed over Saul. He
