“We boast of being free! To show how much we have become slaves, it is enough just to cast a glance on the capital and examine the morals of its inhabitants.”

Jean-Paul Marat

5 years previously…

The tinny melody of his phone alarm woke Mike up early in the morning as it always did, some old tune from a band he’d loved years ago when he’d had time for music. Now, he could hardly recall the group’s name. The dawn sun pierced through a slight gap in his badly-fitted curtains and landed directly on his eyes, turning his vision bright red even with them closed.

The flat was cramped and in disarray, an overburdened bedside-shelf sagging on its failing fixings with cracks running down the off-white walls behind. A laptop sat on a compact computer desk, a wheeled model where the keyboard slides underneath the upper surface to save space. To slide it under now, however, would have resulted in numerous half-finished energy drinks falling onto the scattered textbooks and unidentifiable electrical items below. The remains of the last night’s Chinese take-out mouldered in its box above.

With a groan he rolled over, almost falling out of his small camp bed and into the pile of laundry that lay beside it. As he struggled to rise he told himself once again that today would be the day he sorted out the apartment, then as usual immediately forgot his resolution as he thought about the coming day’s work.

Today was the day. Granted, there had been many the days before, and there would be many again, but today was finally the day he got to flick the switch, finally got to see his work in action. The program was ready, the hardware checked and double-checked, the procedures agreed. Sure, today was just a trial-run, but it all started here. After this day, nothing would be the same.

His excited musings carried him through the shower and the remains of the Chinese obliviously, occupied his thoughts so that he rode the Tube on automatic and arrived at the lab with no clear memory of the journey. He hurried through the locker room to grab his lab coat, swinging it on over the same clothes he had been wearing the past… how long was it? He wasn’t sure. He made another swiftly-discarded mental note to change his clothes.

Better shave this beard, too, he said to himself, catching sight of his reflection in the locker room mirror. He rubbed at the knotty mass of facial hair that almost completely rearranged his features, his normally youthful face somehow older and more grizzled. The bags under his eyes didn’t help either. He would tidy himself up, after today. He would.

He made his way up to the 6th floor by the elevator, ID hanging at an angle from his breast pocket as he made preoccupied greetings to his fellow researchers. It wasn’t until he reached the glass-walled office that was his work space that he finally relaxed, catching a breath he hadn’t even been aware he needed.

“Morning, Mike,” came Majid’s voice.

Mike and Majid had been working together since he’d first come to the lab those few years ago. It had been Majid that he’d first shown his plans to, Majid who’d questioned and tested every posited idea until Mike felt he really had something he could offer to R&D. They’d been lab partners ever since, and Mike was well aware that there was no way he could have made such significant advances on his own.

“Morning, Maj,” Mike replied, moving over to look at the screen on which Majid’s work was displayed.

Something of Mike’s tension must have got through, because Majid stopped in his typing and turned to face him.

“Calm down, Mike. Everything’s ready. I’ve been running the models for hours, the final checks are nearly done. We could boot them up now, you know.”

Majid smiled at Mike’s reaction, and held up a hand to stop him.

“…but we won’t, will we? We’ll wait for the final modelling sequences to finish, check over the data, and then we’ll go for it. We’re talking about autonomous extrapolative machine learning here. No point falling at the last hurdle, is there?”

“It’s just…”

“I know, Mike.”

“It will change everything! Once we know the cloud works… We’ll be able to target tumours before they’re visible even to microscopes. We’ll be able to perform major surgery faster than removing a cataract, non-invasively and without side-effects. We’re talking about enhancing immune systems, Majid!”

“I was with you when we pitched this, right? I know, Mike. Calm down.”

Mike took a deep breath.

“Alright, alright, I’m cool. Sorry, I got a little carried away there.” His face flushed as he struggled to regain his composure. “I need a pick me up. Coffee?”

“Yeah, cheers.”

Majid turned back to the keyboard as Mike shook himself off and walked back out. He made way for a lab assistant, whose name he had always been too busy to learn, to enter the room, then headed to the boxy kitchenette further up the hall.

He was busily cursing whoever had failed to refill the coffee maker as he prepared the drinks himself when he became aware that something was happening. An alien hissing, spluttering sound filled the hallway, and he was suddenly aware of the smell of… garlic? Something similar, anyway, yet more metallic, caustic. The sound grew louder quickly, tendrils of smoke appearing through the kitchenette door.

Dropping the coffee cups to the floor, forgotten, Mike sprinted out and towards the lab, hardly able to open his eyes from both fear and the burning smoke. That was why he didn’t see the man striding out of the laboratory until the very last second. Freezing, suddenly almost face-to-face with the stranger, Mike did not get even half a second to get out one of the many questions and fears spinning through his mind. The punch to his lower jaw sent him flying backwards, and into darkness.

When he came to the hallway was a roiling mass of white smoke that burnt his eyes and lungs. He coughed violently and doubled up in pain as he involuntarily drew in another deep breath, before painfully reaching down to draw the tail of his lab coat to his mouth. Though not entirely effective, he found himself able to breathe easier. His watering eyes turned the world weak and quivering, the hall spinning before him, the stairway entrance almost totally obscured ahead.

Mike did not head for the entrance, however, but headed deeper into the thick smoke, trying to draw in as little breath as possible. Stumbling into the lab, he nearly tripped over the nameless lab assistant, catching himself with one hand but losing the edge of his coat in the process. Clawing it back on to his mouth, Mike quickly realised that to drag both the body of the assistant and Majid was going to require both hands, meaning he would have to release his grip on the coat. He took a deep, burning breath, and did so.

By the time he had managed to drag the two unconscious forms out, the sounds and yells of others could be heard coming up the stairs. People started arriving in pairs, in groups, questions unsaid as they caught sight of the ragged, exhausted Mike and two prone forms beside him. Whatever had been burning… phosphorous, Mike realised… had fizzled out and the smoke was less caustic, though his eyes remained cloudy and vision vague. One vision remained clear, however. The face of the man who had smashed him to the floor, left him there amongst the scorching, acidic smoke, was the face of someone he knew well.

It was the face of Jacob Trials.

It took him several months, but Mike eventually found what he was looking for. Sitting in the detritus of his apartment, the floor no longer visible under old take-away pizza and home-delivered Chinese, his skin sallow and pallid from lack of sunlight, racked by a cough that would never truly go away, he finally found what he was looking for on a tiny sub forum of an unpopular chat site. He wouldn’t have spotted it if he hadn’t been looking, but there it was, a seemingly innocuous thread that led to a link, a link to a contact, a contact to, after a long period of emails and a mutual growing of trust, a meeting.

She called herself Anna, and she was accompanied by a man so intimidating that Mike nearly bolted there and then. The man’s arms were as thick as Mike’s shoulders, and a livid scar ran from the corner of his left eye down to his neck. Mike couldn’t imagine what kind of accident had left such a mark. He must have been almost seven feet tall.

More than his physical appearance, though, it was the man’s eyes that put Mike on edge. They were a cold, steel grey, and they gave Mike a look that seemed to pierce deep inside his thoughts, taking every piece of his character in in quick succession and dismissing him as no threat. The man’s gaze fell to monitoring the surrounding area.

The woman, on the other hand, seemed relaxed and casual, smiling as she sat across from him staring at the menu.

They’d arranged to meet in the Birmingham shopping centre, the Bullring, a few days before. Apparently, it was best to travel around as much as and as erratically as possible on public transport before any such meeting, so Mike was already fatigued from days of trains, buses, and cramped hotel rooms. And now they were sitting down in broad daylight and she was ordering peri-peri chicken! Some part of Mike was surprised, even irritated by such a blithe, unconcerned attitude when there could be enemies at any turn.

“Oh, don’t look so serious,” she said suddenly, turning away from the waitress who had just taken her order. “We’re fine here. No-one knows we’re coming, no-one is following us. There are no super-spy satellites watching us over our tin-foil hats…”

She spoke the last sentence with a derisive laugh that made Mike feel small and paranoid.

“But… we don’t know who could be watching, do we? If it really is this… this Ministry you told me about…”

Mike’s words cut off as the fearsome man glanced suddenly in his direction, but his eyes resumed their roaming a second later as if nothing had happened. Mike found himself coughing again. It was always especially bad during times of stress.

“Oh, don’t worry about Korez, here,” Anna continued flippantly, the stress on the second syllable, “He’s more than enough security.”

Mike expected a reaction from the man, a nod or at least some indication that he was aware they were talking about him, but this Korez simply continued his patrolling gaze.

“He was a mercenary, you know,” said Anna, whispering the word excitedly with a small smile. “But he feels strongly about our cause. A real freedom fighter…” and as she spoke she lightly punched him on the arm. Korez did not react.

Anna was nothing like he'd been expecting. She was approaching this meeting as if they were old friends catching up on the latest gossip, not two strangers rendezvousing for the first time under the nose of an organisation that condoned and even sponsored brutal thefts and industrial sabotage. He felt his face reddening in frustration.

"Keep it civil, friendly," she said in suddenly more serious tones. "We're just talking about day-to-day things, right? No point drawing attention to ourselves." Her voice returned to its cheery inflections. "Now, why not order something? It's delicious..."

Mike got to know the Organisation over the following weeks and months. That's what they called themselves, just the 'Organisation.' They were a mixed bunch, a membership consisting of people from many different walks of life.

At its nucleus were a number of people who had experienced first-hand the machinations of the Ministry; Turnball, an aging tech developer who had seen his life's work rendered worthless when any record of his patents disappeared and a stripped-down version of his proprietary software began appearing in every new smart-watch under the sun; Naristra, first female chairperson of her Fortune 500 company until she was ruthlessly removed in a coup d'état to prevent her moving the headquarters to the Middle East. She did not contend the evidence of the 'flaws,' as she called them, in her personality that led to her removal, but she insisted there was no legal means by which such information could have been discovered; Sam, a now ex-reporter who had been mystified then alarmed as his exposé into misappropriated government funds uncovered not corruption but a thick pipeline of funds channeled directly into a shady, classified body carrying out operations without public oversight.

Some of these members were more worthy than others. Some, and Mike counted himself amongst them, were simple innocents who had seen their blameless lives and works turned upside down in an instant of violence or treachery, whilst others were... harder to sympathise with.

Take Theodore Rainier, for example. The Frenchman had been notorious a few years back for calling for some truly stomach-churning measures against illegal immigrants to the continent. It had been of great relief, and much mirth, to the international community when the unfortunately-popular former celebrity and political grandstander was suddenly revealed to be penniless, his fortune and the campaign funds he had received run dry in a series of thoughtless investments and murky dealings. It was only with time that he had managed to convince the Organisation that there had been no such investments, no such dealings, and that he was yet another victim of the Ministry.

No single one of these members could have proven the existence of an overarching strategy behind each seemingly unconnected and disparate change in fortune. Each seemed unique, a case of industrial espionage here, financial fraud there, even just randomised acts of god or bad luck, but a pattern began to emerge with the knowledge of other such cases. Somebody, some group of people, was working behind the scenes not just within the British Isles but internationally for unexplained ends, and these people had come together to find out who.

Not even Rainier worried Mike as much as the man called Korez did, however. Try as he might, Mike never shook the feeling that the only reason he didn't have a knife through his throat was because Korez couldn't be bothered to make the effort. As to Korez's reasons for joining the Organisation, they remained as opaque as his thoughts. He’d brought up his unease with the others, when and where he could, but no-one else seemed to share his feelings. The rest of the group were just happy to have someone who could protect them, make them feel a little safer. Korez and the handful of men he brought with him certainly managed that.

It had taken years, decades even, for the existence of the Ministry to be uncovered, for information about its means and processes to be gathered. They had been missing one thing. A way in.

Mike was the one who would provide that way in, through his connection to his old friend, an agent who seemed more and more to be taking on the full responsibilities of Ministry operations.

The Organisation would use Mike, who would use Jacob Trials, to find the Ministry.