Zero Bomb Read online

  It was suicidal, though. No mistake about it. His mother, with the tentative blessing of Southampton’s local councillors, had undertaken to breach the machine nest, perform a covert operation tantamount to stealing their eggs. Given the nature of such an assault – close to full-frontal – the odds would be heavily stacked against a full detachment, never mind a single woman wearing analogue armour. In the gaping quiet they shared as Fallow prepared her bodysuit, helped to charge the scramknife she would use as a last resort, she admitted as much to him. Her concession was only intended to smooth her passage, however. Fallow knew it made no odds.

  Twenty or more hours into Morn’s mission, Fallow found himself pacing the room, agitating for fresh air while knowing that if he were actually out there, up there on the city wall’s ramparts, he would only be awaiting the pigeon released if her farmour unit went down, or if his mother’s tether to this earth was severed eternally, or both. There were so rarely birds in the sky these days he imagined the sight would be equal parts biblical and devastating: a mote of white and dun set against the blackwinter.

  The imagination was a madness. Intolerable, endless madness. If he were to bear witness to that bird, would he be the one to catch it? Hold it to his breast, confirm its provenance? Fallow thought as much – he had hand-reared and trained his mother’s death-bird, and in any case, it was expected of him to perform this as a duty. The task was simpler than the period it presaged: with the bird’s arrival would begin the awful wait for his mother’s chimerical remains to stagger back into the camp, whereupon the city’s daughters would snare her and Fallow would arrive to deliver the coup de grâce.

  Morn had not spoken to her son about this in the slow hour before she left. The scouting engineers had been busy modifying her suit; she was with the battle group commander, stationed inside the local post office. Then she would have been meditating.

  Should his mother’s last act of insurgency fail, which in all probability it would, they would need to begin siege preparations. The city was already dug in, already operating rations. There was nothing the machines could not have gleaned from millennia of successful campaigns. There was no cause for imagination or innovation: the playbooks were written and encoded. Southampton could be sacked, turned by decree into a fresh mountain of bones. The heads of fallen defenders could be slung over the city walls to traumatise their loved ones. Water supplies could be poisoned. Incendiary bombs could be launched. Napalm strikes could be summoned from orbital delivery systems. Nuclear holocaust was no less an option than it ever was. Mechanical rape was a means to control and subjugate. It went on, and on, the unending horror of it – the multiple, layered horrors of sapiens history made stark, available as mere tools or processes or points of reference to the machines. Who knew what insatiable, unsayable impulses would decide which mode of death would be selected come the true end, rapidly approaching?

  There’ll be another way, Fallow told himself. His grandfather Kip would have wanted that. That stupid old woman would realise her folly and turn back before the coast, and with her strategic mind she would help the city forge an alternative defence together. Necessity and invention. It was that or extinction.

  Fallow sat in the corner of the cell and imagined what it would be like to be a prisoner here. In the face of their enemy, committing crimes against other humans seemed an antiquated concept now. It was a wrench to know it still happened.

  * * *

  Later the knock came. Fallow stood up in the corner but continued to face the cell wall. For some time now he had analysed the marks scratched there – ancient football slogans and hatched day-markers, and behind the old web of a long-departed spider, some ultra-nationalist symbols, the last dying screams of racial tension, more things made suddenly irrelevant, or at least partially hidden, by the larger threat. These markings were fixed in his attention as the family guard filed into the room. He counted three sets of feet. One of the guards cleared their throat.

  ‘We’ve had word, Sir.’

  Fallow turned. Four guards, not three. Two men, two women. Their expressions were unreadable. Practised, he supposed. To bear news of this kind was hardly a novelty for them. More of a grim tradition, with the war this far gone. One of them had a wet canvas bag held up to his chest like an offering; Fallow knew it carried the remains of his mother’s pigeon. Sometimes the death-birds didn’t land on returning. It was said this was because they intuited grief. As if the birds did not wish to be the messenger, omen. When it happened, someone was usually tasked to shoot them down.

  ‘Do you think it was quick?’ Fallow asked them.

  ‘Sir.’ The eldest guard stepped forward. ‘Would you come with us?’

  ‘Why?’ said Fallow. ‘To be told what? I already know what’s happened. I’ll get on with it. Come for me when her body reappears.’

  ‘Sir, please,’ insisted the guard. ‘You must.’

  ‘No,’ said Fallow. ‘I told them I wanted my own time with this. Run along. Tell the council I send my condolences. They have lost a queen.’

  He clutched his stomach. His eyelids felt heavy. He wondered how else to process it. His stepmother having already gone had prepared him for a fresh turn of grief, but this was still enormous.

  ‘The bird was not all that returned,’ whispered the old guard. He wiped his forehead. It was humid in the cell.

  ‘You mean to say her body’s back already?’

  ‘No…’

  ‘Why are you being so cryptic?’

  ‘We were asked to collect you. For an audience. That’s all we know.’

  ‘Fine,’ Fallow said. He picked up the chamber pot and marched out before them. There was a waste processing unit mounted in the wall opposite the cell; Fallow tipped out the contents of the pot and held his breath as he walked away, so as not to scent what movement had inevitably stirred. The guards filed past, and he hung there against the wall a moment, watching. None turned to the other. They were set in formation.

  ‘I’ll need someone to check out a gun from the armoury,’ he shouted after them. ‘Large calibre. I don’t want to recognise her face – not mounted on a monster. And I want it to be quick.’

  * * *

  Up top, putrid yellow rays of sunlight splintered the blackwinter. Fallow staggered along the land-facing wall top, shielding his eyes. He looked out over the coarsened wasteland of the South Downs, Eastleigh, and farther to the left, all that remained of the New Forest. Recently, the machines had found a means to petrify and process vegetation for their own mysterious ends, and their work had been alarmingly rapid. The M3 motorway was a brown glass river that ran into a sinkhole that had recently grown to swallow the entirety of Southampton Airport. Tunnelling machines were responsible, was the general consensus – two of the city’s most trusted scouts had sighted something like the arches of an iron leviathan as it surfaced and dove once more on the horizon.

  Lucky, Fallow thought, that the city walls stood on foundations dozens of metres deep. Which made it feel all the more wasteful that his mother had left at all.

  He had been in the cell for the better part of two days, and had only slept for a fraction of that. His eyes were gritty, his vision narrowed. It was windy, though the landside was always the city’s leeside: the coastal defence wall over Southampton Water took the brunt of the heaving weather, even now there would be someone trying to refill the mortar down there.

  The guards had told him to go to the old phone box in the square, but Fallow asked for ten minutes alone first. Now he stood on the wall and held his hips. He considered his mother’s voice, the croak of it, the means by which she inflected certain words – she could lisp, or mumble, or stammer. She carried her trauma in her voice.

  Fallow descended the staircase. The wrought-iron handle was cold, burning his hand.

  At the foot of the staircase was a woman in a well-worn hazardous materials suit. Her face was perfectly oval inside the hood. He vaguely recognised her from the sciences encampment at the university;
he had done some reading there in the early days of Southampton’s self-incarceration. She was not wearing breathing equipment.

  ‘We… Fallow,’ she started.

  ‘She can’t be back already,’ said Fallow.

  The woman shook her head. ‘She is not. There was, however, an important development.’ She gestured with a low hand. ‘After you.’

  Fallow walked with her. They were going to the main square, the speakers’ stages. He saw a crowd was forming. There were cheers and singing. An old marching song, supposedly sung in the first days, when the battles were more easily entered into.

  The crowd parted as Fallow approached. The crowd silenced at knowing his face. In the spaces between them, Fallow saw the first hints of what lay before him. Pewter casing, waning lights. The curve of a gyroscopic ball. It was a machine – a wheeler.

  Fallow did not hesitate. Somewhere amidst the commotion, the woman in her protective suit had taken his hand. She stroked it. He approached and knelt to the wheeler. It was a fully grown machine, soiled by travel and blemished at the usual contact points.

  ‘What is this thing doing inside the walls?’ demanded Fallow.

  The crowd stared. The woman knelt beside him. She opened her hand: there was a knife across her palm. Circuits snaked across the blade’s surface. He recognised it.

  ‘Your mother’s scramknife was embedded in the machine’s core nervous column,’ said the woman. ‘The knife was broadcasting a message when the wheeler arrived.’

  ‘What do you mean, a message?’

  ‘Coordinates.’

  ‘For where?’

  ‘Fallow.’ The woman was scowling. ‘Your mother has turned this machine. It is an informant. It has told us where to hit them. Every node. Every terminal.’

  ‘But how?’ asked Fallow. He was agog. The wheeler lay prostrate with seemingly no energy or desire to right itself. He could not make the link.

  ‘From cursory analysis, it appears your mother found a way to encode the scramknife. We are reverse-engineering the command strings, but it—’

  ‘An infection?’

  ‘No. Not an infection. Or at least not with virality – the machine would otherwise corrupt the rest of its local network, and in any case, they have learned well enough how to guard against such an attack. You will remember our attempted glitch-bomb – any infection is contained, the hosts extinguished within milliseconds. For them it is a cold logic. Quarantine is not an option.’

  ‘So what? A lucky malfunction? Did the knife damage it?’

  ‘Again, no. They are well shielded against physical penetration. Instead, it seems… I can only describe it as more of a persuasive technique. A string of queries. The memory module contains an abnormally large amount of encoded data.’

  ‘Questions? She confused it?’

  The woman looked around her. She leaned towards him and quietly cleared her throat. ‘We can only go from what the data recovery team has gleaned thus far.’

  ‘Which is…’

  ‘Which is that your mother gave this wheeler a story. Lady Morn delivered a payload of stories, in fact. Her story – your story, of course. But also our story. And so I would have to say the machine empathised. It felt us all, at once – and it was compelled to help.’

  Fallow closed his eyes. ‘And now?’

  ‘We listen. We take notes. We prepare an assault.’

  Fallow shook his head. ‘It could be an ambush. It could be lying, to expose us. The machines know us. They know what we run on. They understand nostalgia and sentimentality and—’

  Fallow was interrupted by a great and sonorous thud that echoed deep into the city. The crowd scattered in response, some clearly shaken and gasping. The woman with Fallow stood to her feet. Fallow did the same.

  ‘What is that?’ asked Fallow. Yet in his stomach, he already knew. Through a smoking gash in the main gate strode a suit of farmour, glistening with marsh vegetation and rich, coppery mud. The unit’s protective ribs were smashed. The pigeon-cage door clattered open and closed. The thing drew itself across the floor, clanking and rattling and buzzing at its joints.

  Fallow went to it. His mother was inside, shivering. He looked her up and down. For evidence of machine tampering – the faults and flaws. Distorted limbs, or unsewn skin. Unmoored sections. When it came to chimera, there were a great many tells, all of which led to the same conclusion, and so the same result. But there were none evident here. Either the machines’ handiwork had vastly improved, or this was really his mother. This really was Lady Mornington.

  ‘Mother,’ said Fallow.

  Morn held out a hand. She was frail, exhausted. Dehydration had yellowed the whites of her eyes.

  ‘They spared you,’ said Fallow.

  Was that a flash of a smile? Morn pursed her lips and shook her head. She said they did not. She said no. She had the strength remaining to pull Fallow into the smashed fascia of the unit, and so into her.

  ‘They feared me,’ whispered Morn. ‘Actually, dear boy, they feared me. For in me they saw a machine with human parts.’

  PART III

  SEMOLT FIELD NOTES

  Welcome to Scotland Yard’s digitised archives. You are accessing evidence files from the Cold Veil case of 2032. This case is classed as sensitive. Tap here to go back, or here for a background.

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  Thank you. You are now viewing a case overview.

  • The Cold Veil uprising, 2032

  • Attack on Birmingham

  • Attacks elsewhere in England

  • Key belligerents and subsequent trials

  • Laurel M. Brace (English science fiction author and anti-technology militant, 1950–2032)

  • Theories on the death of Laurel M. Brace

  • The Cold Veil (novel; proscribed under the Terrorism Publications Act, 2020)

  • Legacy in English lawmaking

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  Thank you. You are browsing the collected personal effects of Laurel M. Brace.

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  Thank you. You searched for ‘Angelika Semolt’. There is one (1) folder in this record: Semolt field notes

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  Semolt field notes

  Context: handwritten correspondence sent by Angelika Semolt to Laurel M. Brace concerning a third activist, Remi , before a week-long Luddite-inspired uprising in 2032. Semolt was arrested in London four days after the so-called ‘zeroing’ attack on Birmingham, during which ninety-two people died and 58% of the urban population was displaced. Semolt was later convicted of multiple offences, including murder, attempted murder, possession of firearm with intent to endanger life, unlawful collection of information for terrorist purposes, possessing a document containing information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism, and weapons training.

  To start reading the Semolt notes chronologically, go here. Or tap here to start a new search.

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  Curator’s note: These pieces were transcribed from graph paper found in a folder among Laurel M. Brace’s possessions. While each piece is numbered for quick reference and easy comprehension, we believe many more segments to be missing or destroyed.

  #1

  Despite her cold leads in the past, I recently renewed contact with our sympathetic doctor friend in the north. She described another potential project: Mancunian male, late thirties/early forties. This man’s wife (‘Joan’) recently called the doctor’s clinic with concerns about her husband’s detachment in recent months. Emotionally flat/sexually disinterested/increasingly absent from the family home. A young daughter, Martha. I began a trawl, with interesting results. Zero pornography use. No credit card debt. He buys sleeping tablets from the States, likely with well-concealed crypto. A dalliance with St John’s wort (usually typical of someone cognisant enough to self-diagnose an issue, yet too proud to seek intervention). Crucially, he is a reluctant technology user. Minimal mobile data/messaging use. Limited social media presence (with past accounts purged).
Pre-Scrappage petrol car. No other domestic autom. Voted against UBI, sadly. More interesting is his acute aversion to all forms of news media.

  To my mind, this one might be saveable. What do you think?

  #2

  Hello Laurel. Apologies for delay in response – it has been an intensive few weeks in the lab. It will be something to leave this place and these callous robots I work around. Today I watched a malfunctioning arm crush a whole colony of mice, then continue its routines as if nothing happened.

  It was disappointing to hear of the Bristol railway operation not going to plan. The path is winding. What matters is that you saw success with the electromagnet – a partial blackout is still a blackout! I read with satisfaction of stranded passengers and ‘lost productivity’. How long before the public begin to make links? Do they not see it is all lost should this shift go unchecked? I wish you fortitude with the next test. The movement sustains.

  Re: our friend in the north. The Mancunian’s name is Remi. With your blessing I pursued the good doctor’s lead – Pietro sent the fox up there a fortnight ago. Her data and tissue samples confirm my initial suspicion: Remi needs saving. I should add that there is mounting evidence of trauma – cause so far unknown, but conceivably linked to his media consumption (or lack of – see previous note). I ran Remi’s saliva through the lab after hours – nothing untoward/hereditary in a physiological sense. I had Rupal collect a blood specimen, also clean. Otherwise his main ailments are the common produce of this country: anxiety, paranoia, insomnia. Remi’s wife Joan has called the family doctor several times more. She told the doctor she is forbidden from telling Remi the date and time, or from discussing anything that might suggest the influence or exertion of forces acting beyond the family home. I had Rupal make several audio recordings, as this seems extraordinary to me. Nothing yet – except perhaps to note that Remi’s daughter has stopped calling him Daddy.