The Forbidden City

Al held out his hand and the Bug landed on it. Four tiny figures disembarked and were quickly surrounded by angry giants.

“I can explain …” Kelly started.

“What the hell?!” Al said. “I was about to come and wake you all. And you, young man,” he said to Finn, “aren’t supposed to know this vehicle even exists!”

“It’s his birthday present! We were just taking the kid for a ride!” said Kelly.

“I’m telling my mum!” Al said.

This sent a bolt of fear through Finn.

“That’s a top-secret, prototype nano-vehicle of incalculable value and you have just put all your lives in danger,” Commander King hissed from on high.

“Ah, nuts. He’s thirteen years old. What were you doing at thirteen?” said Delta.

“I was at Eton,” said Commander King.

“This country needs a revolution,” said Kelly.

“We don’t have the time,” said Commander King, turning smartly to lead the way up the gantry. “Come.”

They entered the Control Gallery as it was blinking to life, the place crammed with computers and control systems. Various members of the Global Non-governmental Threat Response Committee were already settling themselves around a giant horseshoe-shaped table.

As Al sat, he placed the Bug on the table in front of him then carefully transferred all four of the crew to the Sony Walkman nDen, which he hooked to his top pocket and tapped to switch on the loudspeaker.

Commander King called the meeting to order with the words: “Lock us down”.

Doors locked and blinds whirred down across the long gallery windows. Numerous screens switched on, showing live feed images of the UK Prime Minister and the other world leaders who sat on the G&T. For the first time in ages, Finn tasted danger and, with only a hint of guilt, felt a growing excitement.

Commander King turned to the main screen. On it appeared the two most powerful men in China: the President of the People’s Republic and his security chief, Bo Zhang.

“Zaoshang hao daren.” Commander King addressed the President with courtly authority.

“Good morning from Beijing,” replied the President in perfect English.

“Mr President,” King began, “on behalf of the Global Non-govern—”

“Yeah, it’s late here,” Al interrupted. “Let’s skip the diplomatics and catch up at Christmas instead. What have we got?”

“Thank you, Dr Allenby,” sighed King, and ordered: “Slide.”

A picture appeared on the central screen.

It was of a Chinese police officer inside his car.

Dead.

“Shanghai, China, twenty-four hours ago. A dead police officer with no obvious sign of injury. He’d been running a simple ID and security check on a young foreigner.”

Blurred CCTV footage appeared on-screen.

“White Caucasian male, false Belgian passport, no fingerprints, nothing to trace. We think late teens. He popped up enough times on both the Airport and Forbidden City CCTV systems to provoke a routine stop-and-search enquiry.”

“The Forbidden City? I’ve been there with Her Majesty the Queen and it is most certainly not in Shanghai,” asserted the Prime Minister with idiotic certainty. “It’s in Beijing – look it up.”

“Correct, the Forbidden City was the Imperial Palace of Chinese emperors for centuries, but it’s also the name of the 23rd Industrial Progress Zone of Shanghai, a massive purpose-built, high-tech hub to the South of the city.”

Pictures flashed up on-screen of a factory complex, miles of production lines, thousands of masked workers in shiny white facilities; then of the whole huge industrial area from the air – laid out like a complex crop circle. A diagram was then overlaid, illustrating the layout and adding numbers.

“Genius!” said Al.

“It’s a picture of Pi!” Finn called out, delighted.

“Correct,” King said. “The city is laid out as a circle divided into tenths. The ratcheting out of each arc, or sector, expresses the number Pi in multiples of one tenths of a rotation, thus – 3.141592654 recurring – the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.”

“You worked that out?” said Al, amazed at Finn’s insight.

“We got shown it once in class,” Finn admitted.

“It’s the densest area of computer manufacturing in the world and the site of several advanced research plants,” King continued. “A newspaper dubbed it the Forbidden City when it was being built and the name stuck. Nearly every piece of technology we’re using and communicating on now was produced in China, much of it here –” he pointed to the screen – “in the world’s hardware hub.”

King returned to the picture of the dead policeman, then turned to the video feed from China.

“Secretary Zhang?”

Bo Zhang rose, poised, proud and perfect, mind as sharp as the creases in his uniform – the most powerful man in the world under forty, with some 10 million security personnel under his command. He was uncomfortable having to defer to a foreigner, but his President was a founding signatory of the G&T (which Bo had only that morning learned the existence of).

“Commander,” he began, in perfect English, “Officer Ju intercepted the suspect in a food hall in sector 9 of the Forbidden City at 7:22am yesterday morning. CCTV analysis shows he’d travelled directly into the Forbidden City from Shanghai Airport six times over the previous five weeks. When questioned, the suspect contradicted this surveillance information and Officer Ju made a decision to bring him in. Last contact by radio was at 7:24am. An assault of some kind then took place. There were no marks on the body apart from a pinprick wound on the right temple. When the cranium was opened, massive nerve damage was observed in a clear path from the wound.”

An animation flashed up, a revolving 3D CAT scan of a human head, with broad red lines marking the projectile’s devastating progress through the brain.

It was like a child’s scribble inside someone’s head, thought Finn, and it reminded him of something …

“No weapon known to our analysts could have caused such damage. Given the global strategic importance of the Forbidden City complex, this committee was informed.”

“Weird …” Al said, and got up to look more closely.

“What could have done this?” asked the UK Prime Minister.

“The most extraordinary bullet in history …” Al muttered as he studied the diagram. “How big was the projectile?”

“One point five millimetres square,” Bo Zhang replied.

Then Finn remembered. “It’s like what a grub would do to an apple! Or if a human botfly gets trapped in a human skull and eats and eats through the brain till the person goes mad and eventually dies.”

“A what?” asked the Head of British Security in disgust.

“A human botfly,” came the voice from the box on Al’s top pocket. “I’ve always wanted one. How long was he under attack?”

“Less than two minutes. Who am I addressing?” asked Bo, confused.

“One of the nano subjects,” explained King.

Al popped open the Sony Walkman before a camera to reveal the four tiny people ranged across the sofa. They waved. Bo, who had been frankly disbelieving of their existence to this point, gave the tiniest nod back.

“But an insect didn’t do this,” said King, returning to task. “This is the suspect arriving on a flight from Macau.” He called up an image of a man in an airport security line. “And this is his hand luggage.”

An X-Ray image of his bag appeared. King zoomed in on a bright but tiny dot that seemed to be inside the top of a pen. Al went right up close and screwed up his eyes.

From the nDen it looked like nothing Finn had ever seen. A piece of magnified metal plankton. A black shell, some kind of square eye, a whip-like antenna, an ugly open hole (a mouth?) with a protruding rail and dangling beneath: spilled steel guts, tentacles, tools and connectors. A sharp squid of a thing.

“A robot?” Finn wondered aloud.

Al took off his glasses and gave them a clean.

“Whatever it is,” said Al, “it’s been shrunk.”

There was an awful silence.

“Are you sure?” asked the Prime Minister, appalled.

“Well, I can’t see exactly, but it looks like an incredibly sophisticated machine. The only way, in my opinion, to engineer something like that would be to build it at full size and subject it to the Boldklub shrinking process. Kaparis escaped Scarlatti with a chunk of my crucial Boldklub sequencing codefn2. We always suspected he had an accelerator, maybe he’s figured out enough to take it this far. He won’t have cracked the key fractal equations, and I doubt he’s anywhere near shrinking living things, but crude, rude, oily machines he may have mastered.”

Everyone but Bo Zhang knew who he was talking about.

“You have a suspect?” Bo asked.

King called up an image of a young, able bodied, jackal-handsome Kaparis trying to avoid a camera flash in Basel, Switzerland in 1994. Jet black eyes, jaw taut with suppressed anger.

“David Anthony Pytor Kaparis,” said King. “Born 1965. A brilliant young scientist brought low by a nervous breakdown following the collapse of a crackpot theory of super-organisms. Went into banking and finance for a decade till he was paralysed as the result of some kind of accident circa 2000 and confined to an iron lung. He disappeared into the criminal underworld from where he rigged the markets and caused the financial crash of 2008, making himself the world’s first trillionaire in the process. Bent on world domination. He was the man behind the Scarlatti emergency and is the global public enemy par excellence.”

“You think Kaparis would attack again so soon?” said the Prime Minister.

“Who else?” said Al as he studied the photograph. “Who else would have the audacity to imagine it, let alone the resources to pull it off?”

“Can we take another look at the killer?” asked Finn.

A copy of a false Belgian passport flashed up. A bearded face, hard and determined.

“Check his eyes,” said Finn, sitting forward.

The shot zoomed in. Up close the iris was pure photo-shop blue.

“The iris in this shot has been erased and retouched,” said Finn. “He’s one of Them.”

“The two Kaparis field agents we recovered during Operation Scarlatti showed severe damage to the cornea,” Commander King explained to Bo, “with scar tissue running through the optic nerve into the brain, consistent with the insertion of some kind of probe. We suspect some kind of brain conditioning. Here the scarring has been disguised.”

“What’s Kaparis doing in China? What’s he after?” asked Kelly.

“Industrial espionage?” the Head of Intelligence suggested.

“But only the tech is built in Shanghai. The design work goes on in Silicon Valley – that’s where a spy would be,” said General Mount.

Commander King turned and addressed Bo Zhang again. “Not to be indelicate, but is it true there’s a new supercomputer at Qin Research at the heart of the Forbidden City? The ‘Shen Yu’? A quantum computer that’s being tested as we speak?”

Bo Zhang said nothing, but there was thunder behind his eyes. Someone would suffer for this.

The Chinese President simply nodded. “A perfectly legitimate research project.”

“A what computer?” asked Finn.

“A quantum computer,” said Commander King, “designed to take advantage of the strange behaviour of matter at the quantum level – super-positioning, or the ability to be in two states at once. A single ‘bit’ of conventional computer memory either holds a 0 or a 1. A single ‘qubit’ in a quantum dot can be both 1 and 0 at the same time. In theory that makes it capable of processing contradictory information and thinking for itself – at 4000 times the speed of conventional computers.”

“Thinking for itself? As if it were alive?” said Finn.

“Correct,” said Commander King.

“Governments and companies waste buckets of money on them so that clever young researchers can ask them ‘what’s the meaning of life?’ and so on. They have had no useful application thus far,” said the Head of Intelligence with contempt.

“Only because at the moment so much conventional computing is needed to figure out what they’re saying,” said Al.

“We don’t want Dr Kaparis anywhere near this technology,” insisted King.

“If that’s what he’s after. We know nothing for certain,” insisted General Mount.

“True,” agreed Al. “It’s speculation at this stage.”

“So what’s the next stage?” asked the Prime Minister.

Al pondered a moment.

“This kid has made six visits, so we have to assume he’s released six nano-bots of the kind pictured here. Only one of them has to get inside your quantum computer and at the very least Kaparis will have stolen its design. And that’s probably only the start of it. We have to stop him.”

“But how?” asked Bo Zhang.

Then Al said the words Finn was virtually bursting for him to say.

“If there are half a dozen nano-bots flying about, they’ll show up plain as day on our nano-radar rigsfn3. I say we go out there. We find them, then we destroy them.”

“We can hunt them down in the new nCraft …” said Delta, almost breathless.

“YES!” said Finn.

Tap tap tap! came a knocking from the main door. Tap tap tap!

One by one, committee members turned to see what was happening. There, pressed up against the blacked-out 20mm-thick bulletproof glass was a face. The peering, distinctive, concerned face of a woman in an overcoat and slippers.

Grandma.

She was rapping on the glass with the handle of her umbrella and saying quite distinctly – “NO!”

DAY ONE 21:56 (LOCAL GMT+8). The Forbidden City, Shanghai. Nano-Botmass:*52

XE.CUTE.BOT52:GO

The colossal black concrete barn that housed the Shen Yu quantum computer lay at the very heart of the Forbidden City.

After tunnelling out of the dead policeman’s brain, the XE. bot had flown through the Forbidden City and located the barn, entered its air-conditioning system, then spent many hours eating through layers of dust-filter membrane.

Once through the filters, the XE. bot flew along through six metres of aluminium ducting finally to emerge inside the Shen Yu Hall itself.

XE.CUTE.BOT52:STOP

Ranks of hyper-servers were arranged like city blocks over an area the size of a football pitch.

The XE. bot hovered, mapping the Hall and aligning itself.

At the very centre of the server blocks stood the Quantum Hub itself.

XE.CUTE.BOT52:GO

The XE. bot flew directly to the Quantum Hub. It landed on a pipe through which liquid nitrogen coolant was being pumped. It cut into the pipe and entered the liquid, sealing the breach with an expanding polymer plug, and allowing itself to be pumped along into the quantum core.

Inside it raised its body shell and flew into the crystal cluster at the great quantum computer’s heart, exposing its own crystal core to the perfect light – photonic nano-beam laser light – and captured it. Stole it.

The light of life.

And the XE. became a new thing.

Infected with intelligence.

It navigated its way back out through the coolant pipes, leaving the Quantum Hub unharmed and intact.

Then it thought:

I CAN FLY.

And the bot flew. It flew up to the ceiling, back the way it came, squeezing out through the air filters into the night and across the rooftops of the Forbidden City, a secret fire dancing within. A fire that would spread.

SEE XE.CUTE FLY.

The bot flew all the way back to Food Hall D in Sector 9, all the way back to the Kung Fu Noodles concession.

I STOP.

It waited near the ceiling until the cash tray of Till Number 3 was opened by the cashier, then it dropped into it before it was closed again.

I SEEK.

When the cash tray closed, the bot crawled through a seam in the housing at the back of the tray and inside the till. Into its electronics. It made its way to a position on the till’s circuit board near the power supply unit.

I FIND.

There it found the fifty-one other bots of the Vector Program, arranged and interlinked into a production suite, waiting for it. The final piece of their jigsaw.

The XE.CUTE bot connected itself to the head of the assembly.

Then it established a communications link with Kaparis Command on Song Island via the secure Confetti fn1 network.

Then it instructed the Vector assembly suite to start self-replicating.

XE.CUTECONNEXBOT(ALL)> RUN

SEE VECTOR RUN …

Kaparis watched data dart to and fro across his screens.

He glowed.

A quantum mind was at work within the crystal belly of the XE.CUTE bot. It could think in a way that would allow it to operate without constant instruction. It could adapt. Survive.

It could pass on its stolen light.

Success … Kaparis let himself savour it a moment. All his victories were private. Selfish.

Exactly how he liked it.

The fifty-two prime bots would replicate themselves, then replicate themselves again, then replicate themselves again – on and on ad infinitum. And every time a bot was made, a tiny crystal would be created too, just a few atoms thick, and that crystal would glow with the same photonic light that the Prime XE.CUTE bot had just stolen.

It would allow that bot to think, would allow it to make a simple choicefn2. It might make a wrong choice and be destroyed, any number of bots might, but eventually one would make the right choice and the community of bots as a whole would learn and progress.

All that was needed was an inexhaustible supply of bots.

DAY ONE 17:54 (GMT+1). Hook Hall, Surrey, UK.

For eighteen hours after the G&T meeting broke up, Hook Hall was in full swing.

Secretary Bo Zhang and Commander King quickly struck up a bureaucratic rapport. King would take overall control, with Bo Zhang in charge of implementation. A Hook Hall team was to fly out to Shanghai and set up nano-radar in the Forbidden City, with cover particularly thick around the Shen Yu experimental quantum plant. Suitable headquarters and accommodation would be found. Signatories to the G&T agreement the world over were informed that a preliminary investigation was taking place and that the threat level was judged AMBER.

A team of technicians in the CFAC prepared to fire-up Al’s Henge for the second time in twenty-four hours in order to shrink more radar systems and nano-supplies.

Stubbs supervised final adjustments to two brand new X2 nCraft – aka ‘Skimmers’ (way prettier than the Ugly Bug, like torpedoes crossed with flying fish) – while Kelly and Delta stocked up on supplies and went through tactical and fallback procedures with military planners, both loving the ‘mission focus’ after so many months idle.

In southwest France, as a precaution, eleven members of the Equipe Bleu of the Commando Hubertfn1 cancelled a long lunch and a game of pétanque as they were scrambled to join the special operations vessel A645 Alizé then 200 miles West of French Polynesia, now diverting north to Chinese waters.

And Finn …

Finn spent his thirteenth birthday struggling against a Gale Force 7 sulk.

Grandma held a unique position within Hook Hall set up by dint of being Al’s mother, Finn’s grandmother, and Totally Formidable (she’d spent half a lifetime caring for the criminally insane as Lead Nurse at Broadmoor, the UK’s most high-security hospital) and there was absolutely no way she was going to let Finn go on the mission with the rest of the nano-crew. She hated her grandson to be unhappy, but it was preferable to him being dead.

And Finn certainly was unhappy. He had refused to ‘go’ to school with Hudson, refused to help any of the crew or Al with their preparations, even refused to accept a Skype call from Carla (as she had the audacity to be in China herself, if a good 1000 miles south of Shanghai).

He spent most of the day in his nano-room, torturing himself by checking out epic Chinese bugs online. He had a classic green praying mantis in his collection already, but China boasted extraordinary multi-coloured versions, striped like tigers and poised like kung fu masters ten times his size. Not that he was going to see one. Not that he was going to see anything …

He reappeared at teatime to make one last desperate appeal.

“I am going!” he demanded.

“No!” repeated Grandma.

“It’s not fair!” said Finn.

“Nothing is fair,” Al confirmed, “but this is just an exploratory investigation.”

“So I’m involved in everything we do – but I’m dropped as soon as anything exciting happens?!” said Finn. “Everybody is going to be there!”

“I’ll still be here!” said Grandma. “And Hudson’s coming for a birthday sleepover!”

“No he isn’t! I’m going to China! I have medals from three countries! Look around, do you see any Scarlatti wasps?” asked Finn.

“Firstly,” said Al, wagging his finger, “you weren’t meant to be involved in Scarlatti. That was an accident from which we’re still trying to recover and, secondly, think of me, Grandma and Yo-yo. We nearly lost you once, we’re not going through that again.”

“Hear hear!” agreed Grandma. “God saves the world one soul at a time, and you’re next.”

“I’M THIRTEEN YEARS OLD AND NINE MILLIMETRES TALL – GIVE ME A BREAK!”

“And we’re not going to make it worse for you by allowing you to get killed!” Al replied.

Finn threw an empty nano-water bottle up at him. It bounced off his chest.

“Come on,” pleaded Al. “If this is a real attack, and it’s probably not, but if it is? Kaparis is behind it.”

“It’s YOU he wants, Finn. That ridiculous man …” said Grandma, having to repack Al’s bag to cope with the thought.

“When a man that crazy, that powerful, is focused on taking over the world – that’s bad enough,” said Al. “But when he’s gunning for revenge against a thirteen-year-old boy? Let’s not go there.”

“I’ve already beaten him once and I’m not afraid of death!” said Finn.

“Infinity!” cried Grandma.

Al snapped his fingers and pointed straight down at him. “That’s the Drake family problem right there – like father like son. No temporal fear. On the Allenby side, we live in constant terror. Your mother was the only one of us with any guts.”