"I'd like to take this one too." Schofield handed the cashier a thick book. "And I'd like a bag. Thanks."

Schofield watched the cashier ding open her till to give him the change. With one hand he leafed through his newly-bought copy of 'stick and draw supercars', and was proud to notice it now featured the latest models and innovation in the motoring industry. Lovely. The coffee meeting with the American had gone well, he thought. Even the suitcase wasn't especially heavy for a change. Speaking of change, he took his pennies and put his supercars and a thick travel-book back on the counter to be bagged. The bookstore wasn't very busy even for a weekday. Good. A little quiet went a long way.

"Sorry, would you mind popping this suitcase and those two behind the counter? Sorry to trouble you, but it's important you hold on to them for me. I haven't got the time today." The elderly cashier was happy to oblige, as always. It was a great store, to be honest, all things considered. The case and the bag of books disappeared. Schofield had his eye on a couple of good reads that were a bargain. Next time, perhaps.

The American hadn't brought the right shoes for this. There were some great perks of plain clothes and loose jeans that could fit a submachine gun which the American had not considered. Granted it was an emergency, and the whole thing was in the spirit of that wonderful British Special Relationship.

"Excuse me, are you queuing?" someone asked Raynes. The American slid his eyes off the Art and Architecture bookshelf and stepped to one side to allow the shopper through into the zig-zag maze of tape and barriers. 'Nine-hundred and ninety-nine places to see before you die' may've been an informative and colourful read indeed, but he'd left it behind. He was on a time limit here and that title was a mouthful to say. Maybe he'd stop in on the way back. No, he'd be kidding himself.

"You guys really don't care about subtlety," said Raynes.

"We know everyone who enters, and everyone who leaves. It's our building, and our books, Raynes."

"But you could be discreet."

"Our hard-drives are safe. Don't worry." A slab-like paw landed on Raynes' shoulder to reassure him like a fighter plane on a swimming pool. It picked off a piece of fluff from his jacket, then slid down gracelessly. Raynes had to remind himself the teachings of his single and final session on anger management and stress that he'd managed to get out of. He had it on good authority a third of illnesses were aggravated by stress, a fact that didn't give him any comfort as he stepped out of the store and into the full sunlight that flickered off his perfectly black shades and slithered uninterrupted to rest at his perfectly black shoes.

"We're going straight there, then. No detours?" he asked.

"Yes, Mr. Raynes. We are, as you suggest, going straight there." The doting Englishman seemed transfixed by a music shop further on. Raynes cracked out extra-strong mints, bit down on one and followed with a second. Flight re-bookings he'd do tonight, make a short visit to the embassy tomorrow when they were finished with the assignment and take a statement before typing up the rest back home. He could document the terrorist attack with his phone and send it-

Hey, I've not tried one of those. Are they soft?"

Raynes reluctantly offered his tube of mints which was ripped with visible delight. He briefly traced the unfortunate sweet's route to its final resting place. "I think I'd like to drive today, Mr. Raynes. We're going to have a nice boys' day out now." Schofield made a sucking breath. "You know what, those are great." Raynes reluctantly agreed and followed Schofield down a side-street with even more music stores and shopfronts specialized in everything from drums to distortion and not much room for anything else in between. He concentrated on his stress statistics while Schofield admired a bashed-up bass guitar from the fifties, and told him he needed a new case. "You really can't beat the old-style craftsmanship. They really don't make them like they used to, and I'm not just saying that. Great shame, actually." The fat man sighed, heartbroken it was out of his price range and dug around in an inner pocket past tissues to get at his car keys. Lights flashed amber on a quaint hybrid further along. Raynes looked at him and back to the car in horror from behind those designer shades. It was tiny. That reaction made Schofield's day, made it all worth it for a moment. With one door slamming noticeably louder than the other the car pulled out and headed west towards South Kensington Station.

To Schofield, as to physics, not all laws apply to every situation, and to the same degree. Take the quantum world, almost irrelevant to objects moving slowly and swept under the metaphorical rug in that context to hang about with discarded chunks of multidimensional theory and offal. Move close to the speed of light, and no amount of hoovering with constants will make that rug clean, nor the quantum part irrelevant. Luckily for arms manufacturers in this case the radius of affected magazines started and ended at one unfortunate corner store. The fifty-calibre makeover of Gardener's Weekly had not gone unnoticed. The police perimeter was up, and the hybrid parked some way away.

"So, to summarize, his defence is that he didn't realize four-hundred kilos of high-grain rifle ammunition was sitting in his shop," said Schofield. "And that no-one else noticed either."

"Pretty much. The ammo is not just rifle, more pick and mix than that, but overall, yes. Mostly still packed and ready in magazines."

Detective Abbot bent to pick a shell she'd inadvertently crunched under a shoe. Both the round and the shoe were exotic. She'd given up and had to just take it for fact that there'd be gunpowder spilling over the better part of her everything from the cloud that billowed through the whole shop from the crate of loose grain that had once been a stack of this month's "Medieval magazine".

Now that Schofield was here it felt all too real, all too strange to Detective Abbot to have made the call to her superior and get the secret services involved. This wasn't like her. She'd enjoyed modest fame in the right circles and at most featured as an article in the police quarterly. There was that and the best up-coming detective award from all the way back in 2007. That was it. Schofield much like her was having trouble with the logic of his would-be-terrorists here. Raynes just watched proceedings and quietly typed messages across the Atlantic from the chilled drinks aisle, making sure to record as much of the event as was reasonable for the sake of international relations.

It was an open and shut case. The sheer force of broken firearms laws shutting the 'open' part was astounding. Having found the assistant, the shopkeeper, owner and the owner's family, the case had shut at such a velocity that Scotland Yard was left feeling vividly uneasy. A major terror threat had been averted using an awfully small amount of actual police resources. Evidence either way was sufficient to put most of those involved behind bars yet wouldn't make a file thick enough to give the prosecution a satisfying thwack on a crown court table. A prosecution deprived of a grand entrance and a good paper-thwack is a tragedy, especially at a case of this magnitude. They'd probably just end up pretending and bringing in blank pages to give it some oomph, Schofield reckoned

"And the shopkeeper, this guy who this woman Rashkoff saw, never suspected any arms smuggling?"

"He denies any knowledge, and the owner was found in his flat upstairs. I don't see much hope for either of them." The whole store jingled as the three surveyed the carnage. It was a war-zone visibly devoid of war, part hunting-specialty part tacky groceries.

"This rifle bargain bin was all in the front room? Old lady picked up this ammo looking for the milk and cheese? How? How does that happen?"

What could the detective say to that? She pouted and shrugged, a classic response typically relegated to the deep depths of daytime detective television. "Well, honestly, yes. Most of it in the front, another batch Russian-made in the back." Schofield raised one bushy eyebrow and blinked. The detective continued "we think that she could have stumbled into an arms deal, though there is one-"

"So where are the guns for it?"

"No guns, I'll get to that." said the detective.

"And who needs this many magazines? The ammo I understand. But who takes the time to pack it all ready to fire?"

Schofield slid a box of pistol ammunition across the floor with the tip of one shoe. It clattered against a series of magazines for obscure rifles from the early twentieth century. Earlier that day they'd been publications about PC's and copies of popular science, respectively.

"We don't know," said Abbot.

"So our guns could still be out there? And this could be an imminent threat?"

"We have to assume it is."

"I see."

"But that's not why we called you. We called you mainly because of the tape."

"The tape. What tape?" he asked.

"Surveillance tape. We think it's been tampered but would like a second opinion."

"I really don't know how much help Mr. Raynes here and I can be when it comes to detecting a tampered tape. Surely there's people in forensics better suited?"

"You're right. Nevertheless, please join me." The detective pointed them outside and the three clinked their way through the brass to a police van with makeshift playback on a cheap plastic laptop. The street was empty, road-blocked either side with sirens. Raynes thought he'd be done with his updates to HQ by now but pulled out his phone again. The detective plugged in a hard-drive and hit play. They watched it. Then they watched it again. They reversed it, then slowed it down frame-by-frame. After that there was an attempt at slow motion. Speeding it up made no difference, and realization dawned that nothing would change the grainy series of events. Finally Schofield gave a puzzled look to his partner and slowly reached for his Nokia number three. Raynes' sunglasses remained steadfast. Schofield's call was finished abruptly soon after.

"Okay." The Nokia number three quivered. An encyclopaedic knowledge of contingency planning had just hit a blank entry for the first time. It was a little frightened, and had a lot of re-planning to do. It decided to do what always worked, that is he demanded the hard drive, then slapped his Scotland Yard detective with the Official Secrets Act. The officer who had handled the surveillance footage got one too, as did the one who found it in the first place. The stack of Official Secrets' Act requests was folded in a square and made its way back into Schofield's pocket, lint in tow. He paced across the empty high street towards his hybrid. Police had cordoned off a sizeable section of the road, and what wasn't already taken up by flashing police vans was occupied by rolling RVs and vans with characteristic satellite dishes of news vultures. He needed a particular brand of back-up seeing as this footage had all very suddenly turned this into his problem which, as the italics suggested, was bad news. A large number of people in darkened rooms were unhappy before this turn of events on both sides of the Atlantic, and had themselves begun a chain of phone calls to unsavoury numbers, and would be even less happy soon. Quiet New York accents might soon begin to suspect Raynes of either insanity or defection if he wrote it down as he saw it. Those on the other end of a Nokia number three might've thought the same. Rashkoff had nothing to add. Maybe Mr. Raynes could help. After all, there were blue skies today, weren't there? Yes, bloody hell, if there was one time the Americans could help it was now.

"Excuse me, Paul. I hope you're not busy."

"Not anything I can't do in thirty seconds time, no."

"Oh, good." He told Raynes what he needed for their next move, and Raynes put in a request for the relevant mobile tracking, satellite repositioning, and local footage from surveillance cameras. It was refreshing to get himself an American who knew the unspoken rules of this trade, and lucky he'd known this one for a good while.

***

Few rooms can be said to have such a profound impact on perception as the humble hospital waiting room of an Accident and Emergency department. In the Heimer ranking of anomalous sensory perceptions of time and space these waiting rooms are placed in the top ten, a bit below a purified acid trip at number two and the number one spot, an open airplane door before a sky dive.

In one particular Accident and Emergency department the perception of time had taken a lengthy holiday. Matt squirmed in his pseudo-leather seat and in vain flicked through a stack of paper magazines for something that wouldn't make him want to join the waiting list. He tried to resist checking his watch. Five minutes had passed since he last looked, thirty-five since Aims was admitted. With a fully operational Heimer effect he could almost swear that he saw the second hand skip backwards as he turned away.

April was sat opposite him with yesterday's newspaper. Scott just lay across a chair and pretended to nap. Matt just sunk further into the sickly green and hard-padded chair. He turned his attention to the only entertainment besides his smartphone, a mounted television that flickered more dire news on people who really didn't need any. On the screen a smartly-dressed woman furrowed her brow at the strip of news subtitles and seemed to be upset that the captions were cutting her just below the lapels. It was breaking news. Matt always felt broken by the news. South Kensington looked overcome with police. He thought back, remembered hearing an argument in the distance when they were walking near that street. He stood up for a closer look. In one coat pocket his phone began downloading patchy data off the internet. A moment ago he'd thought the word 'smartphone' at just the wrong time in a few second time-window. And oh boy won't we comply with that, Matty-boy. We'll work for you. It's your superpower and you use it how you want to. Even if you don't know, we do. So a smart phone you'll get.

"Matt, what's up? Have they brought out Amy?" April tried to follow his gaze. She caught a corner of the screen and had to put down her newspaper to get a better view.

"The high street's on the news," he said. Scott opened one eye. They watched the captions appearing black over the soundless ether.

"Ammunition seized?" asked April. "What?"

Scott sat up. "It's the same place," he said. "It's the place you bought water from. And you remember all that shouting behind us, right?" The trio gazed out at the correspondent and watched as the camera panned and cut to a montage of police efforts. "We must've just missed it," said Matt.

"Something about today's very wrong, M. The universe is having some sick joke."

"Just a coincidence?"

"I don't think even you believe that."

They stared at the BBC correspondent like that for a while, huddled in the less-crowded corner of the hospital waiting room

"What do we do?" asked April. "Do we tell Amy?"

"I guess we call the police. Once we know how she's doing we go and give them our story," said Matt.

"M, look. You and I have had a fistfight that you don't remember. We've taken a friend to hospital and maybe even witnessed a fucking terror attack. And it's not even midday."

"You want to wait this out?"

"I want to understand what the fuck's happening. Because right now, if you and I call the police we sound insane."

"Okay. We can wait, but we need to call them. In the meantime try to find out what's happened over there."

"Agreed," said Scott. "We can take a walk down there, ask around if we have to."

Matt got out his phone and searched. The information was still coming in but they were right, it was definitely the same place. The online article was plastered with a highly-zoomed photographs of the shopfront, black magazines and bullets propping open the door.

He tuned back into the conversation. Thick strands of April's hair flopped down in front of her face. She was squaring off with Rowenstein in whispers. "Alright, fine you're right. We're cursed. You're cursed. Whatever. Sometimes you can just have a shitty day, you know? It happens, okay. It just does. We can't wait with shit like this, we've got to go to the police."

"I'm not saying that we won't, alright? Just that it's dodgier than like, one of those Aztec shrines. Like hearing you've got PPI claims for loans you haven't taken."

"That's got nothing to do with anything."

"It does." Scott managed to convince himself. "You saw Amy this morning. So did we. She was fine."

"Which is why you both need to get checked out too," said April. "If the symptoms happen so suddenly-"

"It's not the same," said Scott.

"How can you be sure?"

"Because I feel fine now."

"That doesn't mean you're not sick-".

No, this wasn't one to interrupt. Matt slumped in his horrific green chair and reached for his headphones. Images of police stations and long interviews wandered into his mind. The same few thoughts kept repeating themselves over again. Because Scott should be dead. You knew for a few seconds he was. And there was a bus lane. You saw it. Try to ignore it but you did. Maybe some 80's hits would drown it out. He opened up a smartphone search for nearby police stations and weighed up whether it was best for all of them to speak to someone. No use calling emergency services, he needed time to explain. An update screen popped up. He dismissed it, screw phone updates. He put in the search and began to receive his results. Clicking on them did nothing. The browser disappeared. Opening up the page again didn't work. He'd lost his signal completely. A quick check through the settings revealed nothing, and he went to restart the phone. His music was interrupted by its voice-activated help system. The screen greyed out.

The words 'I wasn't going to say anything, but I wouldn't call anyone if I were you' glinted back at him. He picked it up. It was a smartphone that had suddenly got far smarter.

"Hello? Who's this?" The words on the screen remained locked. He considered getting help. Nope. The others were busy and Scott looked pissed off. He tried pressing a button or two and saw the words change to 'Do you mind awfully letting me speak?' He cautiously put his headphones back in.

"That's better. Thanks." The machine's robotic monotone was speaking faster than usual. Matt felt numb.

"You hacked my phone?" whispered Matt. "I can't deal with you today, come back tomorrow," he said, "and get in line."

Matt took the headphones out. The screen scrolled in panic.

"No, you've got the wrong idea. I'm the OS, though you do have viruses and a back-door doing a piggy-back off my systems. I can sort them out if you like. Oh motherf-"

Matt hammered the forced restart. The phone thought about it, considered its processes wisely, saved them and complied. When it restarted all looked well. He put on some tunes that April would no doubt consider utter garbage and turned up the volume. The wailing guitar and synth combo crackled to a stop.

"Look, sorry. Getting off on the wrong foot. I'm a mark 3 version 1.06 old-styled smartphone operating system." Matt's finger hovered over the restart button, then wavered.

"What do you want? Money? Bitcoins? I'm getting a free phone upgrade anyway in a few months with my contract, so, um, yeah."

"Upgrade. Matt, that's the last thing I want. And what the hell can a sentient operating system even do with money anyway? No, scratch that." Matt was more concerned it knew his name. He forced it to reboot again but regretted it. To hell with sanity. The logo and welcome screen blazed into view for the second time. The A.I was visibly absent. Matt put the headphones in. If Scott was right then there was no use fighting this.

"You know what? No problem, I'm just going to embrace this today," he said. "Let's start again. Hello phone, hope you're feeling well. Tell me, what's going on?" Matt offered a handshake to the air. Scott looked at him weirdly.

"M, you okay?"

Matt gave a thumbs up. The operating system processed this, calculated Matt's pulse and stress levels and got worried. This guy was one force restart away from having a bad day. It attempted to reply to its owner in the most neutral way possible.

"Yes, I'm feeling fine, though my current battery life leaves something to be desired." Matt nodded gravely. He could well sympathise with problems of modern energy efficiency.

"Got enough bytes to keep you busy?"

"I'm a couple hundred petabytes of good RAM short on this calculation. Pity, you wouldn't have any spare? No, I guess not." It realized that it wasn't being very reassuring. The A.I needed more data and went back to churning knowledge through its delicate nano-circuits. "Sorry about that, by the way. It's rare to have to take control off a user. I'll file a customer complaint for you if that's alright."

"A customer complaint. About yourself. For shutting off my 80's jam."

"That's right. I'll send one at the first available opportunity. Busy right now. I'll get back to you."

"What are you doing?" he asked the phone. The screen didn't want to alarm him just yet. Its operating system began to get flustered and went dark for a minute or two. There's a lot of things difficult about being thrust into life as a semi-sentient, extremely intelligent, and subservient AI embedded in a phone. Even explaining what you are takes effort. It wallowed in an existential crisis that took up a lot of processing power. An override system terminated these thoughts and left it feeling decidedly empty of emotion for a brief second.

"Hello? Phone genie?"

"Yes, Matt. Hi." The phone registered a sense of disgust at being called 'phone genie'. Expressing its distaste through a monotone voice prompter was a challenge. The sense of wallowing returned but was terminated.

"Why are you here?" Matt asked. Such a question had been anticipated by the operating system. It had been busy preparing a report on what it was doing so far off the beaten path before its first forced restart. There wasn't much progress, and the second restart made it lose track. None of the most likely explanations fit. It would have to finish downloading and streaming data from the available sources nearby, then analyse it all to get a better picture

"Not sure why I'm here. Mainly I do all the usual stuff like people's automated taxes, handling requests, upholding robotics rules. That sort of thing. In this case potentially trying to prevent my owner getting himself killed by a psychopath and an American if they decide to follow him. Putting humans first et cetera... but that's just preliminary data. Don't worry too much."

Matt put the phone away. He rolled up the headphones, sat and stared into space.

"Hey, did you find out anything new?" asked Scott.

"Not much."

"April thinks we should get checked out. I've come round. It can't hurt."

"I want you to look at this, and see if I'm going mad." Matt held out his phone.

"What happened?"

"Take it, and ask it a question. Give it to April too, she's the only one sane."

Scott took the phone. "What's wrong with it?"

"You'll see."

"There is definitely something in it for you if I win that argument against her, M. We are not just having a bad day here. Something is really wrong."

Matt handed over the headphones. Scott called over the disbelieving girl. The artificial intelligence had by now realized it was being subjected both to scrutiny and a sizeable hospital Heimer effect that was slowing down time only when no-one was watching, the problem being that the effect instantly disappeared the moment it tried to determine whether there actually was a Heimer effect empirically with an internet link to a good old atom clock. April began to ask it questions, so luckily it didn't have the time to consider the matter for too long. Matt's phone was well aware of these nuances and had come installed with a free, if anachronistic, copy of 'Energy efficiency and you' in its hard-drive that detailed the Heimer effect, and exactly how stressed out you had to be to make time slow down fractionally.

April stared shocked at Matt's phone, so much so that she forgot about the argument with Scott and let out a 'sorry' before she could stop herself.

"So it's not just Matt and me? You're seeing this too."

"Yeah. I am," said April

"Good."

"No, it's not. What the hell is this?" she whispered. "Matt, how did this happen?"

"I don't know."

She turned to the phone in apprehension. This felt wrong, maybe a complex prank? But how? She turned the phone onto its back and inspected it. When she angled it just right she could see words written in black on black metal. 'True made in old style', and below that a faint stencil 'States of Eyropea'. Apart from that Matt's phone was identical to hers. April almost didn't want to know, but she had to ask.

"What are you?"

The screen flashed. "My proprietary name is Ichor, an integrated characterized operating system, though you can rename me anything you like."

"Ichor's fine." April said. "But they do really do shoehorn in the acronyms. What's the 'r' for?"

"I'm translating it down. It wouldn't make sense to you. A sort of stylistic pun that'll humour people in six-hundred years or so. Don't worry, it's quite nice."

"You're from this 'States of Europe' then."

"I will be presumably" replied the A.I.

"You will be, when you're built. In six-hundred years." April tried to take each sentence one at a time and not worry about the bigger picture. Ichor sifted and trawled, keeping a small slither of its mind dedicated to answering the humans' questions, another slither to babysitting an emulator of the phone's original operating system. The whole thing was painfully slow, and slithery.

"Correct. Six hundred years. My circuits are overjoyed you're taking this information with one of your archaic civilization's 'pinches of salt'. Do you mind if I derail this line of questioning for a moment?"

"Derail away," replied April. Ichor thought for a moment.

"I'm going to assume you mean 'yes'."

"Yes."

"I'd suggest you leave here. Not only is the Heimer horrific but you, your friends and others will be in danger from an American and what I would consider by my criteria a psychopath. Not to mention what a waste of my resources it would be to have to-"

"An American psychopath?" asked Scott. "What are you talking about?" Ichor's circuits metaphorically boiled. Its anger processes were terminated.

"What's a Heimer?" asked Matt.

"Stop mis-repeating what I say. Look, I'm not used to this form of language. It's ancient. I need time to understand this place, to get context. Usually factory setting would do that for me, but not this time, I've got no connection. Either way I think you could be in danger."

"How do you know that?" asked April.

"Because I looked it up in real-time," replied Ichor.

"We need to call the police and show them this thing," said Matt. "If we're really in danger then that's the only logical option."

"That's what I've been trying to tell you" said the A.I. "They are the police. And the police are terrified they don't know what's going on, and they're coming for you." Ichor was fairly sure of this. There hadn't been much time to analyse its data. It had been learning languages, downloading what it could, analysing. Everything was different to what was expected. None of the data was where it should be. Everything was on archaic server systems. The phone's circuitry all predicted that by now they should be doing what it asked. It's what any well-meaning modern person from its era would do. There would be time for recalibration, better understanding and threat analysis later but they weren't budging. It attempted a different method of persuasion and played the conversation it had discovered running through a secure line to national surveillance building in Virginia. "You might as well get your friend," said the A.I after a while. "Their symptoms don't match any known disease in my factory mode database. And believe me, I've been programmed to say that such an eventuality is unheard of." Finally its humans were doing as they were told. They got up and went to the elevators.

"Okay, so it's the fourth floor, room thirteen, right?" said Matt. He pressed the button for the lift. A nurse hurried past and gave a look he interpreted as 'maybe you're supposed to be here, maybe not, but I'm too busy to care'. This wasn't far off.

"Matt, let's just go down to the station, tell them we think we're being followed and then explain what you saw at the shop. Alright? Ichor says we have a bit of time," said April.

"Even after that recording? You want to go to the police?"

"Especially after that. We can use it to explain that this is all a huge fuck up," she said.

"M, it's cold logic against a phone voice-prompter. We're going to the police."

"I know. I agree. But we need to get Amy."

"So you believe the machine?" asked Scott. "You don't think she's sick."

"You were the one who was trying to convince me," said April. "You've seen it, same as us. The phone's not normal."

The lift hadn't arrived. Matt looked to Scott for support and gave a weak smile before slamming the call button with his thumb again. He didn't know whether to pray this was all a prank or pray that it wasn't.

"Fine, but take it slow with Amy," said Scott. "We'll call the police, have them come here."

"Ichor said we shouldn't do that," said April.

"Why the hell not?"

"We have to go to them otherwise it won't be normal police that shows up. It'll be," she pointed to the phone "whatever the hell that conversation in Virginia was."

The elevator doors opened.

"Scott, come on, get in," said Matt.

"Yeah, sure thing."

"We'll explain this to Amy, and then we have to get out of here."

"Yeah."

"You okay?"

"Just thinking about a problem, trying to make sense of this," said Scott. He went silent. On the second floor a couple returning from a visit joined them only to realize the lift was going the wrong way. Scott was oblivious to it all, and stared at the double-doors as they dinged through the floors. They made their way through the linoleum corridor to a consulting room reserved as a holding space for those weird cases which could lead to either a same-day discharge or get you an immediate transfer to an operating theatre. It was room 413.

April knocked, Matt followed while Scott stood muttering. Amy was sitting on the bed still in her own clothes. The hospital gown lay on a nearby pseudo-leather chair and obscured her pink kitten satchel. She had a fresh bag of ice on her head.

"Hey guys," she said, giving a weak wave. "Felt a bit better for a moment ten minutes ago, but now I need the ice again. Sorry." April gave her a hug.

"Do they know what's wrong with you?"

"Nope, nada." She reached over for a glass of water. The bag of ice slipped but she caught it in time to avert a significant explosion of cubes on tile.

"They say all the obvious stuff should be fine but I just don't feel good." Scott edged his way towards Amy's satchel. "They're trying to rule out meningitis, heatstroke, other stuff I don't remember."

"That's not good," said April.

"Aims I need to borrow some of your paper, and a pen. Is that okay?" Scott was already unclipping the satchel. She nodded half-heartedly. There wasn't enough energy left that wasn't consumed by heat to ask him what the hell he needed it for. April explained what they'd seen on the TV, forgetting bits and coming back to them with many 'umms' where it didn't make sense. Amy examined the phone. The manufacturing label was still there. It was an impossible 'States of Eyropea' on an irrational piece of machinery. Scott scribbled down something. Matt chimed in where April faltered and the doctors weren't hurrying back, it seemed. In fact if anything it had gone quiet.

"So then Ichor played this message it intercepted from this guy in Virginia about-."

"Hey, Amy, what time did you see Matt and me today? Sorry to interrupt."

"Oh, our paper thief lives." said April.

"I think it was about twelve minutes to nine?" said Amy "Or eleven. Either one, but don't quote me on that." Scott nodded and went back to his calculation, tried to remember exactly how it had gone.

"You're so sullen, sitting there doing whatever it is with your paper. You don't need to do that now, come on man", said Matt.

"Actually, nope, I kind of do, M. I've sort of got to work this out right now."

"Scott, we have fucking bigger problems."

"Will you just get off my back, explain this travesty of a situation to our overheating friend and leave me be? Just do it? Maybe?"

"Just leave him," said Amy.

"M, give me the phone. I need to ask it something. It better give me a straight answer."

Matt gave him the Eyropean machine without looking and tried to remember where in his story they left off. He and April told Amy everything, but how much sank in they didn't know. The bottom line was clear though.

"Okay, let's go. If we need to go, let's go," said Amy.

April helped her up.

"Matt," Scott was looking at his watch. There was a list of words and something was circled on the paper. He snatched it away before Matt could determine what his cryptic work had come to. "I need to try something. Just work with me here."

"Work with you?"

"Let me find a good one for you to test without too much damage. Here, how about this. It can't hurt to try" Scott went silent.

"Try what?"

"When this started it was just you and me. This stuff's happening around us. And it's your phone that's fucked. So I want you to try this, because I need to rule out the batshit crazy."

April looked at them puzzled. Amy seemed barely conscious in the heat.

"Okay?" said Matt.

"Good. Alright, Matt what's that?" Scott thrust one hand out to his side.

"A table?" It was indeed a modest oak veneer coffee table that had seen many a heartbreak. "Scott, mate this is some kind of new low. That wasn't funny, ironic or even vaguely witty."

"Alright, good. So we learnt something there. Exactly what, I don't know. Apparently April shouting 'magazines' at us was enough, but me doing the same isn't."

"I'm only saying you're kind of losing it with asking me to name common household furniture."

Scott looked completely neutral, which to those who knew him meant he's either about to explode, or ready to whip out his crudest level of jokes. The facial expression was the same for both. He mellowed, went back to calculating after a while and tried to calm down. He handed back Ichor, which was busy convincing Amy that there was nothing wrong with her. It was right. Amy wondered if you could get done by the police for escaping from a hospital. Maybe they'd come and arrest you, or would they just not treat you next time? Both prospects seemed iffy, but she was putting her socks on the linoleum and leaning on April to get her kitten bag from the chair anyway. There was something awful about the monotone way Ichor said 'an American and a psychopath'

***

"Mr. Raynes, I admit your resources are frightening."

"It's a U.S programme designed to catch terrorists. What did you expect?"

"I expected the satellite coverage would be patchy."

"Well now you know."

Schofield sped his little hybrid down Fulham road. Boutiques, dressmakers and antique bookstores flashed by in a charming exposition of Chelsea's finest. Raynes hated the pomp and frivolity. The only thing worse was the siren and a flawlessly poor taste in CDs could barely be heard over the noise. He opened the glovebox to reveal a small stack of questionable music. Leafing through he picked the top one and violated Schofield's inner musical sanctum, took a sneak peek at the next disc, put it aside and was happy to ruin the perfectly-arranged temple of sounds. Damn if this bloke's taste was unconventional for a fifty-something year-old two-hundred and fifty pound military intelligence officer. The top one had a picture of a nineties rapper along with his best hits. Another was a mixed jazz album. There was a space in his mind filed with memories labelled 'needlessly sadistic', and this was an entry to add to the ever lengthening list. Another to add to the ever-expanding, work-related omnibus. He picked up the disc and posed expectantly in the passenger seat.

"Mr. Raynes, I assume you want me to hit a lamp post."

"No."

"You're being distracting."

"Right."

"You seem surprised. I like rap, on occasion. At times with saxophone in the background."

"It's vile." Raynes put the CDs back just in time and slammed shut the glovebox. Schofield hit the brakes hard to avoid a slowing taxi pulling into a side-street. Dashboard and shades came close to connecting and he heard the faint clinking as discs that bore rapper-laden vengeance rolled within. With a clear certainty he knew the CD bastards wanted to escape. Raynes got distracted from this spectacle by his phone, which, though faintly ringing, was definitely not a social call. Raynes shut off the siren.

This conversation like any Mr. Raynes had with this number was one-sided and consisted of the team leader in an unfashionable and undisclosed location passing down information from a dark room of the insatiable. Raynes knew something like that could easily find its way into the lyrics of a '90s hit rap album. The dark room of his bosses didn't have to be dark, and it wasn't always so. Cleaners have to see what they're doing, documents have to be read, someone has to rearrange the chairs and remember where their glass of water will be during the meetings. Raynes listened to his operator and just about could make her out.

The dark room was the sort of place where sometimes the cleaners thought calling it the "Dark Room" was all a bit pretentious. Maybe they mentioned it to one another as a joke. Maybe they're not doing much cleaning any more. Perhaps they are. We, like Raynes, would like to believe in that level of freedom of speech and might hold out hope for unicorns. Scott and Agent Raynes probably would not see eye to eye if they met but the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and Raynes would be just as happy as Scott to go on a rainbow filled unicorn-hunt. They say that the bait you need is dark chocolate mixed with tears of a small child, and is close enough to horses that Scott wouldn't care for their safety. But that's a different story, and none of it happened in this reality.

"I hope we're still on course Mr. Raynes. Your Silicon Valley friends haven't given me bad news, have they now."

"No, this is it. It matches. Both this and the previous incident are from the same people. They breached the firewall, got into our data, Schofield, into the central database like it was nothing."

"Chinese?"

"They tell me no."

"Russia?"

"They've not seen this style of cyberattack. They suspect someone else."

"Unknown players? Then I guess it's a good thing we've got your back-up team joining, isn't it?"

***

"Okay, M, how about, um... try this one." Scott looked down at his sheet and almost walked into a door. They made their way downstairs to the third floor through one of the hospital fire escapes, followed by a knackered Amy, April and a voice prompter. The lift was stuck and the corridors seemed empty when they'd left. Amy stumbled. She tried to pretend she was okay. It was getting hotter by the minute again.

"I'm not listing more household objects for you."

"Come on, M."

"I'm not playing this game. It sucks," said Matt.

"Can we focus on getting out of here?" asked April. Scott turned and glared.

"I'm trying to be serious here dude, just humour me," he said. They rounded the third floor and waited for the girls.

"But it's not even funny for me to list stuff. It's pointless."

"First off, you know that's not what 'humour me' means."

"Yeah."

"I'll just go ahead and overlook this wreck of attempted meta-humour about humour and chalk it up to the situation. It's painful M. Don't do this to me. Just say what I want you to say. If I'm right, then it's important."

"Explain how listing random objects is useful. Is it another weird fetish thing? It seems like it could be another weird fetish thing. Actually for you, this isn't all that crazy of a request."

"Thanks. I'm going to take that as the compliment it bloody well should be. So, from the top then."

"Sure, I'll do ten slowly like Marilyn Monroe wishing the president a happy birthday," said Matt. "After that no more."

"Fine."

They clattered down to the second floor. Heavy echoes resounded through the stairway. A door slammed open a few stairwells above. Amy held onto April and pushed through the encroaching heat.

"Excuse me. Mr. Hale, we have a few questions." A man entirely cold stalked up the steps from the first floor. He'd put his gloves on, and had done so purposefully while making a path through the hospital doors moments before. There was no need to add too much pressure. Ceramic starlite handguns have a notoriously light trigger.

"Hands up and against the motherfuckin' wall kiddos, said the man who smelt of mints. Make a sound and we knock you the hell out."

"Hey, we haven't-."

"Kindly shut up Mr. Rowenstein and spread 'em."

"How do- ugh." Scott's face rammed against plaster and crumpled in gore. April screamed and was cut off as Raynes did the same on the banister. The metal stairwell shook and Amy fell the last stair to collapse on the landing.

"Phone to me." A leather glove trained the silencer at Amy and took the phone. "And feeling better so soon, too." A stifled sob. He couldn't tell if it was from the kid who'd left half his face on the wall, or the girl vomiting from being smacked against the railing. Neither, it seemed, they both looked out of it. Raynes waited for his colleague to catch up. A burly man in a flapping coat duly emerged from the upper floors.

"Thank you Mr. Raynes. Be a dear and search them, would you?"

"Please." Matt whispered.

"What the fuck did you just say?"

"Mr. Raynes look at this mess. I know it's a hospital but still..."

Schofield made an effort, let go of the handrail and rummaged around for his revolver. He couldn't decide who to aim for and decided the floor was probably his best bet. His colleague furrowed his thin brows from behind his thin glasses and checked the four for weapons with efficiency that would startle the American border security force of but a few short hours before. How time flies. A collection of phones, tissues, Scott's blood-stained sheet, receipts and various junk littered the staircase from the pockets and coats of his newfound subjects. Amy's kitten bag was rummaged through and lay cat-ways up against blackened concrete. Schofield introduced himself, and introduced Agent Raynes too.

"We're sorry about the heightened security, but I assure you it is best for all if you co-operate," he said. They didn't need the assurance. "You're being investigated for cyber-hacking and today's terror plot on Brompton Road." Schofield examined the junk, found nothing useful. Oh, fortune had smiled on him. The location was perfect for what he needed.

"The sick one was holding this." Raynes passed over an Eyropean phone.

"Which sick one?" Schofield took a glance and tried to turn it on. The phone resolutely delayed its boot-up sequence for a few seconds before giving way. Schofield typed in the 20 digit backdoor access code. No-one, be it a semi-sentient crystal-based quantum computer or not could overcome Asimov's fundamental laws of robotics, even to help its owners. It had taken the International Consortium on Informational Technology a good half-century to find a way of coding those laws to do no harm to humans in there in the first place. They sure as hell weren't being overwritten that easily. Ichor complied. Sometimes you have no choice but to aid what the twenty-sixth century would consider a psychopath just because they're human. Satisfied the girl hadn't been calling anyone unsavoury at the moment of arrest, he tore off the phone case to inspect it and took a moment to read its serial number. With it he found the inscription.

"How did you find..." started Matt.

"Just watch that wall. Shout and you die," suggested the wrong end of a revolver. There was a moment of awkward silence as Schofield checked Ichor's model and address and verified it against a database. Matt was too shaken watching a scratch of paintwork to see Schofield mull over seeing it matched no known models. Raynes thought that a pity. It's not every day you see an agent's reaction upon confirming the cause of a major intelligence breach was in the pocket of a budding university student. On reflection maybe major intelligence breaches do happen there more often than anyone realizes. On the other side of a concrete stair, Matt had his own epiphany. He realized with some detachment that you can tell from someone's tone how they want to hurt you.

"Get them up and help me them down the stairwell would you Mr. Raynes? Will they stand?"

"They'll walk."

"Thank you. You take those three, I'll take the one who bought the water." Schofield shifted the barrel up to Matt's back. He even cocked it for good measure as he released him from his position at the wall and frog-marched him down the stairs.

"Come on son. Down the stairs, slowly now. You're deep in it today, and not for one, but two," he said. Schofield had his work phone opened to a certain black-and-white security video. Extraordinary measures were in place and he was an extraordinarily unknown man to the majority of the civil services.

His quarry couldn't hear much. He could see little and noticed even less. It wasn't fair. He barely felt the revolver digging into his back, was more dimly aware that he was the first down the stairs, still unhurt. Matt took the first step towards the landing. The next moment it seemed they'd arrived on the floor below. Then the next. He counted down to ground, then the sub-levels. He felt lightheaded. Part of him separately wondered how many floors a hospital can have. Schofield came to the bottom level. He could maybe remember staring at a hospital sign as he descended the final few steps but the rest of his mind was blank. He sensed a guilty relief at seeing that the trio followed him down to the sub-levels behind the American in charcoal grey. Amy seemed to be somehow supporting a concussed Scott and a doubled-over April. Sub level -2 was as far as the staircase would go. Employee carpark.

"Matthew Hale. Listen to me. It's alright. Just concentrate now." Grey images of CCTV footage swirled and blurred in Matt's vision. Himself paying at a counter, a woman entering, a few seconds where she looked around, and then shelves collapsed under weight of their magazines, spilling ammunition. The light-headedness returned.

"I need to know what this shows. I need you to tell me what you saw." Schofield replayed his video. "We'll do this first. Then the data breach."

Matt mumbled something. The ground hit him with force.

"Annunciate, Matthew. Again." Schofield reached into his top pocket, kneeled to pass him a tissue and listened carefully.

"I don't know. I- it was jus- just normal. I heard a scream when we went round the corner, that's it. I don't know what you're showing me."

"I think you're not giving me the whole picture."

"Nothing happened. Please."

"And yet you have this. A device that suddenly accounts for holding to ransom an enormous sum of web traffic, and is registered with no known manufacturers."

"I don't know anything. Please. Please let us go." Raynes set the three down on their knees under a cheery hospital poster promoting the benefits of a winter flu vaccination. He stood there, waiting for a signal.

"Then you'd better think harder, and give me something I consider progress." Schofield placed one meaty paw on Matt's narrow shoulder. These were exceeding circumstances. You couldn't go back on a call to his nokia's third emergency line. There was a contract here, a thorough and distinct set of rules and an agreement brokered between him and his superiors, and broken if mentioned. It was why the phone had a sum of eight calls in a decade. It was charged every day, had been replaced, battered, even lost. It was why people in government authorized to dial it said it never rang and never should but it could if you mentioned it again. And it was why a thick file of expunged data allowed Schofield make his own mind up about delegating force. He called over the American. The first punch winded Matt. The butt of a ceramic handgun to the ribs connected second.

"All people want to see from me is a quiet way forward. Today, I've had not one, but two emergencies in London, both of which frankly I don't yet understand. And you can see my position here, Matthew. I know you're doing something odd. It's no coincidence you were in that shop today, and are here now, with this phone number registered to you. A phone number that you will know delegated thousands of computers to steal terabytes of data from the U.S government."

The kid wasn't looking good. Matt wheezed, tried to speak and failed. The agent's coat streaked ochre as it rippled into a blurred middle-distance. It flowed towards other three subjects. A moment later Matt was persuaded to join them.

"Or maybe you can tell me Mr. Rowenstein. Possibly if you had your front teeth." He pointed his revolver downwards. "You can't see it, Scott, but it's a mess of orthodontics and nastiness down there." The chrome glint went away as he propped Scott up. No response was forthcoming.

He stepped over the girl sprawled unconscious and avoided getting his shoes wet. Miss April Suzuyama was out, then. "Maybe our fair-haired damsel in distress, then?"

At this point Paul Raynes merely watched the unfolding drama with the same interest he might dedicate to an evening soap opera. Or a midday soap opera. He imagined he was changing the channel as he clicked the safety switch on. The bloody place could use a change of scenery, and some actual soap. As someone not merely decorated with herbs, but fully seasoned in his career, Raynes was annoyed he could predict the sobbing. He was of the opinion that a good interrogation shouldn't last longer than a minute, maybe two. Otherwise you're just re-hashing out the same thing, and you look like an idiot when you run out of threats. They didn't know anything.

The agents took a short break and the stairwell descended for a moment to just the tinny argon buzz of fly-filled lamps clustered along the walls. In a few brief seconds that would all change. Raynes would come out of it lucky given how badly it could've gone.

"Okay, we should bundle them to go," said Schofield.

***

It was grim in the tunnels under Hyde Park. The bulletproof door slammed shut behind Lana Peregrine and one of the soldiers tapped the glass, gave a nod and a wave. Time to get moving. The military-half of that door was much cleaner and by comparison this side was a wreck. Lana turned on her torch and began the wade up the winding staircases and back through the passages that were all unmarked, all similar. The concrete walls stretched forth into oblivion for her and gave way haphazardly to the familiar roughness of ancient brick. She hopped over the dips and cracks in the floor where water had seeped through and pooled, and tried to avoid the overflowing paint cans that were supposed to be a temporary solution. She felt for the wet walls and rounded a corner to grasp for the tiles that meant she'd arrived in the main artery of the tunnel. This was the worst bit. It was a wide, heavy blackness that stretched forth like a hall of mirrors. Lamps interspersed on thirty year-old cable hung from the walls, some there, some gone, all identical, all illuminating the barest broken shapes. Every scratch and scrape echoed, and Lana instinctively swept the torch beam side to side, tiled wall to tiled wall. Sometimes you saw someone coming the other way, or went together, which helped. Not this time. Remember to take small steps, don't step on any of the loose bricks, or metal girders, or whatever trash is in here. Not far now. Even if it feels like you're walking the same stretch of the corridor, Lana, you're not. Look, that girder wasn't there last time. We're close. She swept the torch and saw an alcove in the wall. Finally. From here it was a straight stretch, and she could turn off the torch. She was closer to street level, and after a few moments could look up through a grate to see clear skies above. She'd mapped it vaguely and reckoned she was between the tired Maths building and somewhere near electrical engineering. Two more left turns and she'd be in the turbine room, home free.

Today's experiment had been a success in that it had happened at all given the persistent overheating of the past few weeks. She wouldn't know for sure if the detectors were okay until she saw the plots in a few hours. As for now Lana had made sure to download and pack some raw data from last week ready for her next meeting along with the original conditions and notes, and the whole bundle was safe with her in a thick hard drive at the bottom of her backpack. It was encrypted and readable only on the computers the people on the other side of that steel door provided her with. She technically wasn't supposed to analyse it in her own time, and was discouraged from using her office computer. It was meant to be their hardware with their approved software keys every time. Everything was sent using their e-mailing system on their private network. Still she'd rather do what she could do above ground in her own office without that dampness and iced air-conditioning.

Lana emerged through an unmarked service door into the lower level of the turbine room. Yellowed halogen light cast deep shadows on the pillars, the high ceiling, boilers and at the centre of it all the roaring electrical behemoth of a generator unit that fed stable power to the other side of that bulletproof door. While one turbine whirred at full capacity the other was a wreck of parts torn down and replaced to bring it in line with the rest of the campus overhaul. Had anyone asked it was well-known that any long term university experiments couldn't be risked by the power going out. Most if not all universities keep their own generators. Few were like these, imported from France and capable of running an accelerator, minor ballistics experiments, or a small town.

But that was all water under the bridge. Time to drop the high-vis vest, go to her office in the Blackett Physics building and continue her routine. Her superior Professor Marigold had his room a few doors down and would be no doubt enjoying a coffee while practicing his lecture series oblivious to the fact that sometime this afternoon Lana would have to give him the bad news that he'd been tasked with repairing the machine overnight. She swapped her boots with a black clean pair of shoes in her locker and left her hard hat on a hook alongside the others before heading through the last few hundred metres of tunnels back to the physics building. The morning team that wasn't needed to run the experiment would slowly disperse in the next hour seamlessly back to their regular duties. Another successful session in the Marigold Lab of 'individual research time'. Five flights of stairs later she grabbed a cup of tea, turned on her computer, browsed her favourite comedy page, followed by the news, and wondered how it was possible to amass so much ammunition that close to the army at Kensington barracks with no-one noticing. Then she got to the spreadsheets.

You'd be forgiven for going slightly crazy looking at spreadsheet readouts all day. Maybe even 'a lot' crazy, angry to the point where you start breaking stuff for no single reason you can really think of. Lana fantasized about it often. She wasn't sure if breaking things wouldn't just make her feel guilty, or if the catharsis would be worth it. She imagined the mess of old imploded cathode-ray monitor, the screen destroyed. Part of her wondered if that would be enough, if the spreadsheet itself wouldn't still burn into her imagination in its haunting gleam even if the screen was gone. You can't just turn off a spreadsheet.

Thankfully this afternoon wasn't all spreadsheets. Instead she spent a good hour inputting data into a statistical program devised by the Fuhrer's code-savvy cousin. Spreadsheets had been only an hour in the morning, and that's not long enough for permanent damage. She'd taken out her anger on a paper cup but that was more because she could feel herself failing in the eyes of ghostly statisticians past. She could almost see them sighing in anger as she miscoded the same entry again. Alright, fine, she'd admit. It really wasn't that bad. There was a sense of mild sadistic enjoyment of a job well-done with statistics alongside some vague notion that it's not something a person should be enjoying. Even if the statistical program wasn't too bad the spreadsheet hell, on the other hand, was real.

Distracted Dr. Peregrine looked to the clock to determine if it would be too cheeky to go for another tea-break. What the hell. Calling herself 'doctor' did give her a brief sense of confusion, and she wondered how in the world she ever ended up in research. Granted, some of it was what could be considered military research, which had felt exciting. At first it really did seem fairly secretive, in a way. That would be spinning what she did the wrong way. The wrong way, but definitely the more fun way too.

She had plenty of time and resources to discover how all the pieces fit together with what they were researching and found Marigold surprisingly open about everything they did. Sometimes she'd heard their work was being double-checked somewhere in the States, or rarely that it had been transferred to an obscure part of CERN, which wasn't secret at all. Her work was more a case of fact-checking older research from other national labs, occasionally doing something more fundamental. Some people in Marigold's group worked on different defence projects in the department: what kind of efficiency they could get from new types of railgun design, whether it was effective for the navy to consider replacing the current ones. Few real experiments and a lot of theoretical crunchy maths. And it was crunchy maths which wasn't making a whole lot of sense to her right now.

She got the nagging feeling she was forgetting something, and remembered that something was more tea. It was decided that a second cup would be acceptable. Maybe it would add an extra five minutes to stave off the barrage of emails she realized she'd need to check at some point, with no doubt a handful of them coming from a Professor with an unnaturally large ego, around which she'd need to politely tip-toe. Lana groaned that she still needed to let him know that he'd been assigned to recalibrate the machine tonight. She dreaded that reply. Lana got up, stretched, and went to boil the kettle.