view two

They’ve bought their drugs now.

“You aren’t going to believe this.” There’s the sound of plastic bags rustling as they are removed from pockets and put down on a table.

“Bloody Hell! There’s loads.”

“It was cheap too. I don’t know what’s happening. It just kept coming. And then I asked if he had any more and he said wait a minute and brought back another pile.”

“That is a serious trip. You’d stay up for fifty years solid on that lot.”

“Something’s up here. Check a few pieces.” More rustling and some clinking in the background now.

“Nothing’s up. Don’t be paranoid.”

“Maybe it’s fate.”

There’s a tense silence for a minute and a half (I have exact time sense).

“It’s acid all right. Something else too, though. Like a different chemical process was used maybe.”

“What kind of process?”

“I don’t know. There’s some other things. Residue I should think.”

“Can you check further?”

“Not without my lab. But there’s no need. This stuff’ll work OK.”

“Come on let’s do it.”

“OK. Ready?”

There’s sounds of movement. It goes quiet for a bit whilst they “link”. I could creep to the window and take a peek but it isn’t worth the risk.

“Should we put it all back out now?”

“Leave it a bit.”

“It makes me nervous looking at this much stuff all at once.”

“Twenty minutes.”

view one

“I can’t get Paul for murder without Ray’s body right?” The policeman was telling his superior, angrily, having stormed into his office. “So I get the seized stuff sent to the lab for more analysis. We already know it’s LSD but we don’t know if it contains bits of Ray. Except it doesn’t get sent. First it doesn’t get sent right away, ’cause of some clerical problem. Then it doesn’t get sent at all because we haven’t got it.” The policeman was livid. “How can we lose so much stuff at once?”

“We didn’t lose it.” His superior said quietly.

“Well somebody lost it. The biggest acid bust ever. Gone. Once their lawyer finds out Paul and Danny’ll be on the street again. Clean.”

“Nobody lost it. It was taken.”

“What?” Something about his superior’s tone made the policeman stop his tirade.

“In the national interest.”

“What?”

“Orders from higher up. Lightning.” The officer paused to point a finger and make a zapping noise. “So basically we won’t be setting fire to anyone in transportation or storage. Sick isn’t it. Do you feel sick Jim?”

“Yeah.”

“Me too. Wanna go take some drugs?” He mimed tipping something from a glass into his mouth with his elbow bent.

view two

“I still can’t get over how it’s finally going to happen. Remember how it all started?”

“Yeah. When we thought the drum machine was knackered.”

“Thought you couldn’t program it properly more like.” They laugh.

“Then you said ‘Hey I like this bit. Can you do some more?’ and I had to admit, like, actually I didn’t know the drums could do that.”

“Then there was that time you wanted to work all fucking night, remember? The next day we got up and said ‘Meddy did some good stuff last night you know’ and then it turned out you’d crashed an hour after us but left the rig switched on.”

“That’s when it started getting weird. And we were just, like, leaving it switched on after we’d finished and then seeing what would end up on it.”

view four

“I’m just not ready to make the same conclusion sir. You must admit it’s pretty fantastic.”

“I don’t understand why we have to go through all this again. But if that’s what it takes then we will. The first reports show a loss of control of certain aspects of one of our satellites. It changed what frequencies it was listening to, OK? The next reports show more loss of control. You don’t dispute that something was taking control, progressively more and more, of one of our satellites?”

“I don’t dispute it sir, it’s in the reports in black and white. And I agree it doesn’t look like random glitches. At certain times, the satellite is being instructed by somebody other than us. But I don’t see why it can’t just be a hacker. Either a student having a laugh, or even an agent. We have hackers, so has everybody else.”

“But this is disproved by further investigation. You’ve read this next report?”

“Yes but-”

“No buts. There was a total security clamp down. Passwords changed, new programs on the satellite itself, staff moved, the satellite was even put into some kind of maintenance mode so that no legitimate access could be made. Now if we had a hacker, any kind, they’d at least take a little while to find a way through the new security measures wouldn’t they? But what do we find? No interruption in the pattern at all.”

“It’s a security leak, or the measures weren’t all they were said to be.”

“It’s an entity. An intelligence with an electromagnetic basis, rather than a physical basis.”

“With respect sir, are you listening to yourself? I don’t know if I should laugh or cry. An electromagnetic space alien?”

“Well you’ll find that a number of high ranking scientific men, all over the world, don’t find the idea laughable at all.”

“All right sir. I admit there’s a possibility.”

“And you admit that, given what this entity has achieved with just one of our satellites, it has a massive potential as an intelligence asset? Even a weapon?”

“Yes, of course. If it exists.”

“So on that basis it’d be best if it communicated with us then.”

“Agreed.”

“Well the reports show that it’s main interest started out as pirate radio stations, playing tekno music. Subsequently it specialised in SDB music stations. Finally it settled on paying visits to a particular team, known as The Last DJ. By the way, I do mean visits. Whenever the entity relinquished control, it left the antenna pointed at the same place. Conclusive?”

“If you say so sir.”

“I do say so. And I further say that pirate radio people and some weird band that live in a squat are not the kind of people I’d like to have in charge of an intelligence asset. Would you?”

“No sir I wouldn’t. But I agree with all this, and I’ve placed an agent.”

“I don’t like the way you seem to be treating this as an exercise that’s all.”

“I’m treating it as a full operation sir. The agent I’ve placed is one of my most advanced, both in terms of conditioning features and training.”

“This could be a decisive operation. We’ve been trying some things at the satellite. This is a new report you haven’t seen yet. They think we could trap the entity in the satellite in some way. Now they’re not ready to do it yet, and the entity has forced our hand rather - it’s clear it’s going to attempt to contact that band in some way in two days time. That’s why the contact must be prevented.”

“Marconi’s Ghost. Nice code-name.”

view three

Ray felt music. At first it was a very faint sensation. As more people in the club took the LSD that The Last DJ had linked through the sensation became clearer. Ray was being forced back into lucidity.

This time it was good. There was no fear, just rhythmic musical beats. Unsure how he could be feeling this, Ray concentrated on the sensation.

He became aware of people. He could not talk to them, but he was somehow in touch with them. All of them. All at once. Ray guessed that they were all dancing to the music, and hence he could feel it. And he was enjoying it in the same way as he used to enjoy dancing.

As he started getting into the feeling, Ray found that he could shift his concentration. He could be closer to some dancers than to others. Where the music was clearest, he felt that the dancers enjoyed the presence of his concentration. Ray thought that they probably felt it at some subconscious level, or just thought they were getting off more than usual. In some places, however, the dancers tended to reject his presence. Ray labelled these areas as being more up-tight dancers, less ready to relax their control. Ray could feel the number of dancers in his awareness expanding. As it did so he concentrated on the new areas, finding out who was into it and who was up-tight.

Ray had been enjoying this for some time when he became aware of a network. Apart from his own presence there was something else joining the dancers together. Ray perceived links. As he looked closer, it became apparent that the links went up and not just across. This network was not flat, but had levels. There was one node at the top level, which was linked to ten or so at the middle level, half of which were linked to nothing else, but half of which were linked to all the rest of the dancers.

Ray moved his concentration to the top level. Here he felt a presence, and perhaps it felt him? The music was clearest here, and he could sense decisions about the music being made. He could sense when some rhythm was about to get softer or faster or deeper. It felt like a command post. And the presence there was trying to contact him, but in a language he could not understand.

Deciding it might be a part of his new existence he did not yet comprehend, Ray stayed listening. He could make no sense of what he heard. Also he could find no way to initiate communication himself. All he could do was remain. He tried allowing his concentration to drift away, to try to indicate that he could not understand. The top level node was aware of his withdrawal, but when he returned, all he got was more of the same incomprehensible messages. The top level had to be a single person and there seemed to be more there for Ray to see than with any of the dancers. Nevertheless he could not make himself heard. It was frustrating.

Then Ray noticed something else. Something that was spread through the dancers like a cloud. Something bad and getting worse. Something which seemed to be a part of him. He abandoned his attempts at communication. Could he lessen the effects of the cloud? Although within him, Ray felt the cloud to be foreign, and he was sure it hadn’t been there in his previous lucid moments. Could he then withdraw himself, and thus the cloud? He tried but could not. He had previously been able to withdraw himself from his friend (which must have been Danny he now realised) he remembered, but this was different. Maybe because that time he had reached out, whereas this time he had been diffused in some way. There was no time to think about this, Ray realised. Although the dancers seemed oblivious, the ill effects of the cloud were growing in them.

But if he could not withdraw himself, maybe Ray could still manipulate something that was within him. Trying not to think of a bodily equivalent, Ray visualised an intention and let his subconscious do the rest. It worked! But the cloud was, well, like a cloud: impossible to grasp. Also simply moving the cloud around did no good, it was still there in the dancers doing harm. It had to be expelled. Ray picked a small area and visualised again. It worked again, partially, then Ray felt a strain and had to stop. Noting that the cloud did not return, he paused a moment to recover. The cloud had to go, and it wasn’t going to be easy. Ray braced himself. Feeling all the cloud, and the limits of his presence, he pushed. He felt something inside him break, but he kept on pushing and pushing. Ray had a glimpse of the cloud half gone, then passed out, exhausted.

Something revived him. Ray felt a small injection of energy. Somebody was talking to him, in the same language as the top level node had used. But it was not the top level node. The language was still incomprehensible but Ray felt that the speaker was more fluent. He quickly found the top level node again.

view two

There’re bouncers here. The bouncer’s job is security and dealing with trouble. Murdering members of the band, or whatever they call themselves, would constitute trouble.

It’s easy to keep track of where the security staff are, because they’re easy to spot. They’re all tall and broad, and they wear black nylon jackets and headset communicators.

I wait until The Last DJ are well into their set. The crowd of druggy degenerates is dancing crazy. I push my way to the front, doing a passable imitation of somebody dancing. Unsurprisingly, nobody seems to mind a hardbody chick in tight clothes wriggling past them. My passage is lubricated by the sweat now pouring off the dancers. Some of the people nearest the stage are literally dripping - if they stopped dancing they’d look extremely ill.

I get to the front and have a last quick check around. There’s only one bouncer anywhere near the stage and he’s not close enough to make a difference to me, and besides, somebody else seems to have attracted his attention. The DJ is looking out over the crowd, checking his Monitors. One of the crew has her head in a hood, the other three might as well have; they are completely absorbed in their music-making. There’s a no risk approach: a step up onto the low stage, two paces over some trailing cables and my primary target will be complete. Time to hit.

But just as I’m about to step on the stage, the one behind the hood whips it off and looks straight at me. She knows what I’m doing and is getting up to get in my way.

view one

After the collapse of his biggest acid bust, Jim the policeman took three days off. Next day he came back to work to find a message on his desk to call a certain detective. As a result of the call, later that day Jim found himself in a meeting with an enthusiastic young woman.

Following brief introductions, she started the conversation.

“It all took place in a dance club and there seems to be a drug angle.”

“What all took place, I mean what are we looking at?” Jim sensed excitement as the other officer spoke.

“I’m looking at two murders, and probably an accidental death. You’re looking at a small crowd of very ill LSD users, complaining about some sick bastards called The Last DJ selling them poisoned acid cheap. But I think your skills can help my murder investigation too. I think there might be a drug connection, basically because I can’t think of anything else.”

“OK. So it’s not the acid-heads at the hospital?”

“We’re going to the hospital to interview the man who seems to be the only usable witness. He was on security duty at the club. He’s had to have surgery because of injuries sustained at the incident.” She handed Jim a file. “I was going to leave in half an hour. Is that convenient?”

view three

The new arrival had replenished Ray’s energy after he had expelled the poison. But this was nothing compared to what happened once it started talking to the top level node.

Suddenly Ray had spatial awareness. He had a three dimensional picture of where all the dancers were. Each dancer appeared as a floating tangle of lines, with strands hanging down. Ray realised that he was seeing the dancers’ nervous systems: the tangle being the brain. The tangles floated at different heights, depending on how tall the person was. As he realised this he had a fleeting sensation of an entity listening to his realisation, as if it was listening to the answer to a question.

Ray looked for the network he had sensed earlier. It was visible! But now he could see that the nodes which he thought had gone nowhere actually connected to another, more complex system. The second system was made up of thicker lines, but more densely packed and covering a smaller area. The lines were not tangles, like the brains, but formed of straight segments, corners, squares, circles and other geometric shapes. Dazed by his new sense as he was, Ray recognised that he was seeing electronic circuitry. Naturally, where there was tekno music, there would be synthesizers and there would be computers. Again he felt the listening presence.

Obviously, Ray’s new spatial awareness was due to the entity which had energised him. It had integrated itself with him. But Ray had experienced no loss of control or will. In fact, now that something like the sense of sight had been returned to him, he felt more in control. Could this entity be something he had experienced before his change, but now appearing to him in a different way? The entity was listening to his question. Thinking it would make things easier, Ray delved through his memories of his life. Nothing he could think of provoked any response. This entity was something new and alien. This consideration brought an affirmative. The concept of alien. And Ray sensed that he was equally alien to the entity. The integration of Ray’s awareness, and knowledge, with the entity’s had effected them both.

The entity started talking to the top level node again. Now Ray felt that, although he could understand the language, he could not understand the subject under discussion. He caught some of it. Something about integration between the top level node and the entity. Then the entity saying something about a third unit, which Ray realised meant him. Apparently his presence was unplanned. Then there was further discussion. Ray gained an impression of hesitation but soon lost the thread. He turned his attention elsewhere.

As Ray became accustomed to his spatial sense he noticed something. There were two holes in the crowd of dancers; two gaps in the network. The holes were person sized. The edges of the holes had a character of rejection about them. Something more than just an unwillingness to dance. Something like a positive attempt to put up armour against the current. Obviously two unusually up-tight people, Ray thought. Unusual that they should go out to a club. More unusual that they should be in the thick of the dancers, and pressing their way towards the front. Towards the person who was the top-level node.

With a jolt Ray realised that this was more than unusual: it was wrong. He’d better tell somebody. Maybe the network was in danger.

view one

“Well, I’d been watching this bloke, off and on, since he arrived. He wasn’t making trouble or anything but something wasn’t right about him. I had a feeling. I mean you do get occasional people who just come in and stand around looking but he wasn’t like them. He hadn’t come in with anybody, he didn’t really seem to know what to do in a dance club, he didn’t seem to be enjoying it even.” The big man in the bed was telling what had happened in his own words. Jim sat by the bed in which the man lay. Next to Jim, nearer the man’s head, sat the investigating officer. She held out a Dictaphone to record the big man’s voice.

“Anyway he started to push his way to the front. I thought he was up to something, so I tried to get into a position to stop him, in case he did try anything. So I’m pushing along, you know, but not being too heavy-handed, and keeping my eye on him. I didn’t see the girl until she was getting on the stage, by which time he was also getting on the stage, and I’m thinking ‘great, two of them now’. So I asked for help and went to stop him first.”

“When you say you asked for help, how did you ask for help?” asked the woman.

“With that fucking headset I was wearing.” The man reached towards where his ear would have been, underneath the bandages covering the right side of his head. The woman nodded and the man continued his account.

“He was a bit higher than me, on stage, so it was easiest to just grab his leg and trip him. He fell over into a bunch of computer equipment.” The man paused. His eyes flicked to the Dictaphone for a moment before he continued, something not lost on either police officer. “I looked over at the girl and she’s hitting one of the women in the crew. I can remember her fingers, like this.” The man made a weak thrusting gesture with his right hand. All four fingers were rigidly extended, and held together rather than being spread. “And she hit her right in the neck, hard.” The man put his hand against his own Adam’s apple, the plane of the palm horizontal. “I remember her chin snapping down and her ponytail flicking forwards before she collapsed. I knew she was dead.”

view three

Ray had some trouble telling the entity about the approaching problem. It seemed difficult to explain in terms it understood. After he had, whilst the entity conveyed the warning to the top-level node, Ray started wondered if he could not do something himself, possibly with the entity’s assistance.

In answer he received a vague notion about boosting the energy in the network, or in the circuitry, or in the nervous systems that he could see (all three seemed similar to the entity). Ray thought about electrocution, and this seemed in line with what the entity was conveying.

The problem was that the threatening people were not connected to anything that Ray could see. Indeed, this was how he had deduced that they were a threat.

Just as Ray was thinking this, it suddenly wasn’t true any more. One of them had slipped or something and now was connected, to some circuitry. In three places Ray had a view of that person’s nerves. The nerves did not look like the dancers’, though: the picture was fainter and did not extend much more than a centimetre away from the circuitry.

Ray had no time to wonder about why this might be. He turned on the juice before the person could disconnect. A tracery of nerves appeared as clear, sharp black lines. Ray could see a web founded on joining the three points, but extending in a cloud around them. He just had time to recognise that the three points had been the two hands and the face before the web blurred and then vanished.

view one

“She didn’t so much as break step. The DJ was just behind the woman she’d hit. She went straight for him. In the neck, right? But not hitting, grabbing like this.” The man held out his right hand again, this time forming a pincer with his thumb versus his index and middle fingers. “She fucking tore his windpipe out. It can be done you know, you put your fingers here.” Again he brought his right hand to his neck, this time pressing the ends of the pincer into the fleshy part under the chin. His trachea was encircled by his fingers. His voice was thus slightly distorted as he said “Close the hand and it comes out.”

“I have seen the bodies of the victims, sir. You don’t have to convince me.”

“Yeah well I just wanted to say that you hear these things can be done, but seeing it is different, you know?” His right hand now waved expressively.

“OK. Please continue.”

“Looking back, I should’ve just hit her. She’s just killed two people, and I just grab her. Stupid. I don’t know. Anyway I grabbed her just as she was turning round after ..... getting the DJ. She looked so small, I thought I’d restrain her. Pretty funny, right? Maybe she was small, but it was like wires: hard. As soon as I wrapped my arms around her she was twisting around. She got an arm free, or maybe I never had it in the first place. I hardly saw it then wham! Right on my ear. It was a punch I think. Then again. I couldn’t hold her. The pain was just, fuck. Then she got away completely, must have hit me a few more times. Anyway I passed out.”

Jim sat, impassive. Partly because it was up to the investigating officer to conduct the interview, but mostly because he had read the reports, both of the corpses and of the man’s injury, already. For Jim the clinical detail of the written word had more impact than even the most articulate witness.

According to the report, the first blow had probably shattered the headset’s speaker, damaged the outer ear directly, and the inner and middle ear by compression. The following blows did further damage to the outer, middle and inner ear, some damage to the temporal bone but were most destructive in that they drove the bits of metal and plastic into the middle, and perhaps inner ear, hence the surgical operation to pick them out a few hours before the interview. The autopsies’ reports had been all together simpler. Two of, overwhelming damage to the superior part of the trachea, causing asphyxia and death. One of, deep electrical burns to forehead and palms of both hands, current would have been sufficient to induce cardiac spasm and do overwhelming neurological damage, either of which would cause death.

As was his job, Jim asked himself whether the attacker been on drugs. Much as the case fascinated him, the honest truth was that people on drugs absolutely did not fight in such a precise and lethal manner.

view four

“Bit of a mess I suppose sir.”

“It’s a bloody awful mess. But we’ve avoided the worst. We can be pretty sure Marconi hasn’t fallen into anybody else’s hands, although we don’t know where it is.”

“My agent hasn’t reappeared either. And the Controller who followed her in to Collect after Completion is dead.”

“I’m fully aware of that and there’s no need to take that tone.”

“Sorry sir. It’s possible she could be a bit of a problem. We haven’t actually had an agent of her capacity do a partial and go rogue on us before.”

“No. What will she do?”

“Her mission will remain I suppose.”

view two

Following The Last DJ’s split in disgrace, amidst allegations of drug dealing, this paper has received a note. In the note, signed by five members, The Last DJ protest their innocence. It is difficult to see how they can make this claim. It is clear that they did sell bad drugs to many people at a certain club on a certain night. Some of those young ravers may never rave again they were so traumatised. It takes a certain attitude to sell poisoned acid to an entire club. No wonder they’re changing their names and operating separately, a move the note says has been forced on them.

I don’t read any more. They’re still out there. Somewhere. They’ll surface, maybe not in the mainstream world, maybe not for a while, but I can lie low just as long as they can. Longer in fact: I’ve been trained.

I crumple the music paper I was reading and throw it in a bin by the park bench I’m sitting on. Seven wasps are disturbed by this. I pinch them out of the air one-by-one, killing them as they fly around.