Déjà Vu: A Technothriller by Hocking, Ian (ebook reader that looks like a book .TXT) 📗

He threw his shoulder against her door. The shoulder cracked; the door did nothing. Desperately, he watched her. She was suspended a few centimetres from the floor.

She was running. David looked over at Saskia. She was running too.

He staggered from the room.

In the main laboratory David found a man tapping at a keyboard. The sight was an unsettling echo of Bruce’s frantic programming only seconds before. “Turn that fucking computer off,” he shouted.

“I’m trying,” said the man. He glanced up briefly. “You don’t look too good.”

“Just get a bloody move on.”

He limped towards the middle of the room and leaned against the storage device for a rest. The floor seemed to tilt. Walking had become as difficult as skateboarding. He wiped his forehead. More blood. He remembered that there had been a man, Groove, who had a welding torch. He could use the torch.

He stepped with the deliberation of a drunk. His shoe snagged on something. It was Groove. He was unconscious.

The hard kernel of David’s mind – the part that had counselled him against hypothermia in Belford, and had kept him safe while fleeing on the motorcycle – told him that he was in no position to light a welding torch. His hands were oily with blood and sweat. He could barely walk. And, if he lost concentration, he might faint.

He looked at the torch.

Not the torch, said the voice. It sounded like a mixture of his mother, his daughter and God. It was irresistible. The cable. Follow it.

His head traced the path of the welding cable. Back to the cylinder. The cylinder.

That’s right.

The cylinder was a metre high. Three quarters of it was blue and the rest yellow. It rested on a trolley. He managed to get around the back of it without falling over and grabbed the two handles. He pushed. It rolled forward like a wheelchair. The welding torch trailed alongside.

Go.

He fell into the tiny cubicle room and managed to keep his balance only through sheer speed and a glancing impact with the far wall. He screamed with berserk rage and hoisted the welding bottle above his head. For a moment he tottered backwards but the wall was there again – this time to save him – and he swaggered towards Frank Stone’s back. The cylinder glanced off the middle of the pane and left a large white star. Frank turned.

Jennifer and Saskia sprinted faster than a thrown stone. Behind them, where they did not dare to look, they heard laugher and thunder. Frank was coming after them. It was impossible, thought Saskia, to outrun a god in His own universe.

“Must run a bit faster,” she heard Jennifer say.

“I’ve never run this fast in my life,” Saskia called back.

They were heading for a rocky crag. It was nothing more than a blue edge, sparkling in the false moonlight. “That’s because,” Jennifer panted, “we’re not really running. We’re running on the spot. Less fatigue.”

“Can we make it?” Saskia pointed to the crag.

Jennifer – an anonymous will-o’-the-wisp – shook her head. “No. Even if we did, there wouldn’t be any protection.”

The thunder rolled and Saskia felt heat on her back. The planet shook beneath them. Finally, unbelievably, they reached the crag and jumped into its shadow. They crouched, breathing heavily. Saskia looked over the top of the spur.

Frank was flying through the air. Except he wasn’t really flying…he bounded, as though gravity held him in the gentlest of grips. Red, not blue, forks of electricity cracked connected the ground with the sky. The edges of the canyon began to crumble.

“Watch out,” Jennifer said. Saskia was pulled deeper into the crag. Pebbles dashed upon the rock she had crouched behind. “What’s happening?” Jennifer asked. Her arm was still on Saskia’s shoulder. It would not let go, even when Saskia shrugged.

“It seems that Frank is fighting an adversary.”

“Is it Dad?”

“I cannot tell. We don’t know that he is still alive.”

Jennifer’s hand, which was not a hand, but a legion of microbots, gripped her hard. “Of course he’s alive. He’s outside the computer. He’ll help us.”

Some fist-sized rocks thumped into the ground nearby. Saskia hugged Jennifer roughly. “Be careful. I think those can kill.”

“Of course they can,” Jennifer said petulantly. Then she added, “Thanks.”

There was a roar. Saskia peeked out. Frank was flitting to avoid the red bursts of lightning. She realised that the lightning was following him. Frank stopped on a cliff-edge. The moon hung behind him. “Who are you?” he shouted to the sky.

Thunder pealed like the bell of some final battle.

Mikey shifted in his seat. He typed ‘lightning.at.user4 = 1’ and checked again the little box on the screen that contained the text, ‘Status User 4: Present, Full Privileges’. The text did not change. Frank - or User 4 - had avoided the bolt. Mikey slammed his palm into the monitor. He would have given his life for Jennifer, but he was he was checked at every turn: it would take too long to run into the interaction chamber and manually remove her; it would take too long to write an automatic script for the computer to fight Frank on his behalf; everything would take too long. His one last hope was the stranger who had emerged from the chamber only seconds before. That man was in a bad way, but he was fighting for Jennifer too. They both were.

He pulled a hand through his thinning hair. It was a disaster. Mr Hatfield hadn’t said people would die.

You were fooled, he thought. Played for a fool.

It ate at him; ruined his concentration. The one thing he prized above all else was his mind. It had seen him through childhood cancer, bullying, puberty. It was the best. The knowledge that it had let him down – that he had let himself down

– was a deep wound. He was an active member of a one-in-amillion IQ society. His mind was his one world-class asset. If that could be beaten, what was he?

You are a fool.

He typed faster. He began to