Analogs

When Gracie Giles woke up she had a headache. ‘Gigi’, as she was known to her friends, didn't mind. She didn't reach for an aspirin from her bedside table (she’d thrown all those packets away months ago). She didn't scream or moan or complain to the gods. There was no cursing and, as it turned out, no frustration or anxiety. This was because this was her first day as an analog, and she was determined that it was going to be a good day no matter what her head felt like.

She stretched her arms then pulled back the bedspread and plumped her two fat feet on the floor. There was no getting away from it — they were fat. Fat and thick like two slabs of thick fleshy meat from the butcher’s. No beauty code could transform the image and make them look slimmer and prettier, no algorithm could filter their ugliness — well, maybe they could but they weren't executing their little auto-enhancing tricks inside her head at this very moment.

At the curtains she struggled to remember what the Dechip attendant had told her. It was difficult to recall because there had been so much information. Was this the one where she pulled a drawstring? No, she remembered, she just had to put her hands on either side of the material, grab hard and pull!

Gracie would never forget that first feeling of unchipped satisfaction. Doing something for herself without having to use sensorimotor activation. Normally, to open the curtains meant doing an OPEN-UP, separating her fingertips like she was commanding the red seat to part. Like a thousand other manual tasks, any need for her to actually exert herself had been removed and all the effort had been taken away by a hidden motor or a cleverly disguised hydraulic pulley. This new feeling of using her own muscles to activate something would become more routine and familiar over time but, for now, she felt a mixture of excitement and loss.

The loss was that she no longer had any of her sensorimotor reflexes. Her primitives and the hundreds of more sophisticated neuroapps they could operate were gone. At first it felt like losing a limb — an arm or a leg, or like when you've had a bad cold and can't taste anything. Something was missing, she could almost sense what but only in her imagination. Like when she had come to open the curtains, she knew the chip was gone or at least that it had been disconnected (to actually remove a chip, well that was a different matter and a problem no one had yet solved). When the sharp red vector lines had failed to even make a faint glimmer of an appearance in front of her, Gracie knew that all the special advantages that everyone on the planet had come to regularly rely on had, in her, become no more than phantom memories.

Outside the day was calm and only just beginning. Through the pain of her headache she squinted. Two birds were doing aeronautic displays in the distance and momentarily distracting her from the stinging whistle of noise behind her eyes. The scene was so peaceful and relaxing that she itched to record it for neurotrans replay later. Only she could no longer access her REPLAY primitive, nor any of the other primitives that she’d had since the age of five. The sensorimotor action sequence (eye-flick, nose-twitch, elbow-bend) that should have activated it did nothing. She contented herself to make do with this one and only time view. The pleasure of seeing pure and innocent play, the rush of watching the spins and tricks as each bird circled and counterpointed the other’s movements. All this would be lost in the vaporized passing of an unrecorded display. And, for some reason she didn't quite yet understand or fully appreciate, that was good.

The attendant walked in unannounced. Gracie felt herself panic for a moment — hadn't these people heard of mind bells? Then she realized that the attendant wasn't being rude as there had been a tap-tap-tap on the door before he had entered. It had sounded so dull and uninspiring and not at all like the polyphonic melody of the mind bell that she was used to that she’d mistaken it for the sound of a handybot at work. She turned to face him and wondered why he automatically looked embarrassed.

'You might want to put on a robe,' he said.

‘What?...Oh!!’ Gracie said, spotting the pink, fluffy dressing gown draped over the chair where she'd left it the previous night. She grabbed it with one hand whilst using her arm to cover at least some of her modesty. It made sense that the attendant wasn't himself chipped and therefore no AutoCensor had come online to clothe her in dress appropriate to her privacy settings. She was an analog now, there were no privacy settings.

‘I guess the sooner we get you to the induction the better. I’m Tulcano.’ The attendant put forward his hand and Gracie, having quickly donned the garishly shaded robe and tied it at the waist, shook it.

‘G-Giles,' she said, remembering that everyone here only used surnames for security reasons. After she had completed her induction she would be given a new surname but most people chose to keep their original Christian names. The codemasters would be keen to know exactly who the subversives were should any one of them get caught. The interrogation techniques for analogs relied on what had been remembered or heard, not what had been recorded and noted by a chip. Once their surnames had been changed there would be a more difficult trail to follow should anyone want to join up all the dots.

‘I'm just here to check on your vitals and run a few cognitive tests,’ Tulcano said.

His face had relaxed somewhat after Gracie had covered herself up. He was a not unattractive man, about the same age as her, she guessed. It was more difficult to estimate how old he was because, even though she had instinctively invoked the INFO primitive (teeth grind-left, right-hand-wrist-anticlockwise-half-twist, left-foot-toe-raise) which would have pulled up his bio details due to her membership of the Monitorium, no vital statistics were listed in the air above his head. He had a full beard, neatly trimmed, a vid-star pert nose and a smile that came easily. If she’d have had more time she would have asked him if he was single. Dating anyone she felt like dating was one of the few one of the new chip-free freedoms she had promised herself before she had taken the plunge to go analog. 'Listen,' she said impatiently. 'Can't we just go straight the induction? I feel fine. Here, see!' She bent down and touched her toes then did a three-sixty dance spin to prove she could keep her balance. She would have done a handstand as well but thought the better of it because she still had yet to locate the rest of her clothes. Besides, she reasoned, the room was very small and she would probably have collided with the bedside table. Naturally there was more than a little flirting involved in her impromptu performance.

Tulcano clapped his hands (that smile again, Gracie thought, I've never come across someone like him before. He seems so much more than just content with everything. It's like he knows a secret and wants you to share it if only you can figure out what it is). ‘Like I said, it’s the cognitive tests which we need to do. After I've taken your blood pressure, temperature and got you to fill this with a urine sample...’ He took a test tube from his lab coat pocket. It was corked with a piece of torn off cotton wool. Before she could ask the obvious question he pulled an orange-colored funnel from his other pocket.

'A cup?' Gracie said flatly.

For once Tulcano didn't smile. He was making no apologies for the amateurish nature of his supplies. Gracie put the tube and funnel on her bed, trying to remember if she seen any cups that she might use in the communal bathroom. The effort made the headache come on again. Now she was beginning to figure the cause. When her memory of the bathroom at the end of the corridor had failed to come into full focus in her mind, she’d done it again. REPLAY (left-wink, tongue-to-roof-of-mouth, right-fist-clench), nothing. TIME-INDEX (palms-together, tiptoe-stand, head-quarter-turn-right), nothing. IMAGE-SEARCH (blow-cheeks, stomach-in), nothing. Each null response was accompanied by a stabbing pain behind her right eye. By the end of her fruitless chip search for the recording of her teeth clean and face wash the previous night, she felt dizzy and disoriented.

She sat down on the only chair in the room and Tulcano sat on the edge of the bed. ‘You're okay,’ he reassured her. ‘It's just a little disorientation is all. We've taken away all the cups to control and help regulate your fluid intake. It's best if you don't drink the tap water, just stick to the bottles in the bathroom and only the ones with your name on.’

And then Gracie could remember it. The image of the shared bathroom came clearly into her mind. She hadn't needed REPLAY or IMAGE-SEARCH, it was just there. The three sets of water bottles on the window ledge with name tags just as Tulcano had reminded her. The chipped mirror glass cabinet with its metal bar pull handles, the dusty blue-green bathroom mat on the floor, the shower cubical — all were clear in her mind. Her own mind, not a chip recording or ‘reconstructed facsimile based on available data’ memory tag.

‘Gyles!’ Tulcano clicked his fingers. 'Come back! … That's better. Now, just follow this pencil with your eyes.’

Gracie followed all of Tulcano’s directions and did all of his tests. In the days that followed she split her time into morning activities of a calisthenics programme of her own making after breakfast, an hour reading in the bright early sunshine of the small outdoor quadrangle then, following a light packed lunch (provided), an afternoon of induction training which started at two o’clock.

By day fourteen she’d had about enough of the forced routine of it all.

She’d gone through every variety of egg preparation for breakfast: poached; soft boiled; omelette; fried. Eggs, it turned out, were in plentiful supply thanks to the pair of chickens which Philpott had brought with her. She sometimes allowed them to run free around the quadrangle (much to Gracie’s annoyance). She’d also read almost every book which looked even slightly interesting from the box that Mullally had shared with her. After the novelty of having to turn the pages and not being able to scroll the text had worn off she longed for a good romance novel, but Mullally’s tastes were decidedly weird. Despite his protestations that some of them were ‘really quite harmless’, in most cases they were stomach-churning horror stories with long, drawn out descriptions which she'd rather never have read. And then there were the inductions which was, perhaps, the only part of the day that she'd really looked forward to because they were big group meetings. The rest of the time they'd been asked to keep themselves to themselves and refrain from mixing and sharing information with any of the others. It had put paid to any thought she might have had about finding love amongst the newly declared analogs and made her wonder that, if and when they all left to carry out their assignments, she'd ever be able to find a life partner or ‘husband’ (as the induction sessions said she should call them).

Now it was all over. The inductions were complete and she knew enough about how to act, talk and react to be able to reintegrate herself back into the Programmerat and what her mission would be when she did return. When she came back to the tiny room, the little nest she had built for herself which had been her home for the past two weeks, she suddenly felt very lonely. Her strapcase, which she'd packed before going down to the last induction as instructed, was all that she would be taking with her for her journey. Everything else would just be a comfortable and happy memory for her to cling onto over the trials of the next few weeks.

The instructors had told her what to expect when she hit the streets. She’d been shown videos projected up on a large wall screen that gave ‘before’ and ‘after’ comparisons. At first it had shocked her so much that it was the ‘after’ ones that seemed to be the artificial scenes and not the ‘before’ ones. Were people really so irregular and unhandsome? Were buildings and streets actually so decrepit, uncared for and worn and tired looking? Without their beauty filters in place big noses, fat buttocks and discolored teeth abounded. The codemasters’ clever programming no longer hid the cracked paving, unpainted facades and broken, or in many cases entirely missing, signs. Gracie had been prompted to ask how it had come to such an awful state of decay but the instructor had merely dismissed her with a 'I'm not a history teacher' response and told her that if she wanted to know more she should look it up in some PCE books. Since there were no Pre Chip Era books in Mullally’s box, she made a mental note to herself to find some when her mission was complete.

===

The outside world took much more of an effort to adjust to than Gracie had expected. She could not return to her old life even if she might have half hoped to. It was almost like breaking up with a boyfriend, the easy familiarity of the old ways of doing things which had made life so much easier to tolerate was missing. There were no hard-coded subroutines to hold her hand. The EMBRACE primitive couldn't be called on to raise the temperature of her clothing and give her that warm cozy feeling that she was not alone. HELP (double-thumb-pinch) wasn't there to give her a context sensitive list of handy options. Worst of all her Jesus avatar failed to materialize when she called upon PRAYER. That one, with its universal sensorimotor invocation (palms-together, rotate-wrists-to-vertical), she thought might have been at least partly real. So here she was in the big wide world once more. With none of her neuroapps to assist her she felt naked and vulnerable.

Walking along the cracked and mossy paved streets, at first she was thankful that there was no one else about. She was carrying her double strapped case on her back and wearing leather gloves against the weather. That, at least, gave her some comfort as she was mindful that if she did come across anyone they might mistake her disorientation and odd appearance as a kind of threat. It was good to have her hands free so that she could defend herself if needed. When Tulcano had waved her off at the door to the Dechip center (cleverly disguised as an old, boarded up and derelict hotel, or so she’d been told its surface-mapped polymesh showed it as) he’d told her not to worry. 'Remember, they're probably more frightened than you are. Half of what they're seeing isn't real anyway.' His final smiling farewell had both boosted her confidence and made her feel sad.

The first person she came across was a confident looking man, about twenty-five or so, or maybe five or six years younger. The reason she couldn't make her mind up was because, as a youth might do, he was wearing only a t-shirt and shorts. Apart from the terrible color choice of red shorts and navy blue shirt, someone of his age should have been better wrapped up against the icy wind. She was walking past a row of red-brick townhouses with small banks of steps leading to each and he had just left one of them to go take a ride on a banged up old jet scooter parked in the fueler at the side of the road. The fueler, some kind of hydrogen/electricity combination, looked to be in a worse state of maintenance than the scooter, with yellow tape wrapped around three of its mains pipes and green coolant fluid leaking from its base.

'Good morning,’ she managed, remembering her training to be polite and respectful at all times. She couldn't think of anything more to say. There was no Cyrano neuroapp to help finish her sentences or fill in the blanks, it was just plain Gracie Gyles here out on her own. The man smiled weakly before dislodging the bike from its security lock and rolling it forward slightly by its handlebars. He fussed over the rusty frame like it was a precious ornament, using a cleaning cloth which he’d carried specially for this purpose in the pocket of his shorts. Gracie thought about stopping to test out more of her Dechip engagement training but then thought better of it. Heavens knew what he was seeing as he polished here and buffeted there. To her it was a fruitless exercise. He probably saw a top of the range, straight out of the showroom, power bike instead of the tired old contraption he was spending so much time on. Her instructions had been very specific and were indelibly printed in her mind. She couldn't afford to waste time trying to make this poor sap see the better of his delusions. Just keep it civil Gracie and move on.

Politeness. It had been drilled into her back at the Dechip — never seek confrontation or get into an argument with anyone. It was a simple enough rule, less easy to carry out in practice. The reason? Not one to hold herself back, Gracie had been the first to ask the question. Immediately she’d been shot down. ‘Please raise your hand if you wish to give input into the session,’ Collins had rebuked. Gracie had felt like she was five years old all over again, except then she had been trained to hit the interrupt button in a SharedSpace dialog. After complying, Collins had gone on to explain. 'Drawing attention to yourself is a surefire way of unraveling our whole organization. Think about it. All it takes is one confrontation log or incident report with only one set of auto record video evidence for the codemasters to figure out that you're not plugged into the Programmerat. Then they'll start on inactive traceback, or profile you to look for others like you. Once they’ve got us in a pattern match we’ll all be undone. These are precarious times.'

Collins’ rousing speech had stayed with her. She could see it now that she had started her reintegration. The guy on the bike was happy believing he was living the dream. Part of him knew it wasn't real. Chip imagery was sensorimotor activated but not responsive. He might see the illusion of a pristine power bike, when he pulled off from the sidewalk he wouldn't feel the thrill of any acceleration. And, unless he had a heat pad strapped under his t-shirt, he'd feel very cold. The chipping technology sometimes did fool people if they over did it with their overlays. Some mystery word crept its way through the fog in her brain ‘psychosensory’ or something like that. On day three of her induction they’d talked about the reverse of it — how everyone in the room should take extra care to dress themselves, eat properly and get into a personal hygiene routine to combat their new feelings of dissatisfaction and discomfort. So, to avoid any further attention, she kept on walking past the man and his scooter with a fixed grin on her face and a hurrying pace.

Her destination she’d had to memorize. There were decades old technologies which might have guided her had anyone at Dechip managed to visit a museum to obtain some. Cellular networks and GPS satellites still existed but their portable end-user interfaces had long since disappeared. This much Gracie had gleaned from the induction day four — ‘Communications and Navigation’ — when her attention had perked up because she’d hoped that Trento, the communications leader, might have gone on to explain more about PCE history, though she never did. She’d discovered that something called a 'smartphone' had had a built in guidance program much like the RouteMap neuroapp and cars hadn’t steered themselves but announced instructions for their ‘driver’ to follow. Without access to any of these romantic-sounding old devices (turning a wheel to steer a vintage electric car sounded like a particularly exciting prospect), Gracie had been given a carefully constructed map printout at the end of the session and told to spend her free time memorizing the route marked on it. That same map and its taped together sheets was now buried deep in her strapcase, more for reassurance than any physical need. Its thumbed over print and little creases and folds where she'd arranged it to focus in on one quarter block or a twisty series of roads had become almost as important to her as the route itself.

Key landmarks had been hand-annotated to help. The 24/7 was the first to look out for and she thought she could make it out just ahead. Purple-shaded windows with bright orange lettering going across the top meant that there was little else it could have been other than a convenience store. Then, on the opposite side of the road and looking drab and having almost invisible signage compared to the store, was the bar ‘MONTY’S INN’. The lettering was in big bold letters that had faded over time. Their pale gray outline was, though, complete. It meant that someone cared enough that the letters could be OCR’d and boosted by a real-time ad insert. Of the two, the store and the bar, it was probably the bar which attracted more visitors, Gracie thought. Soon she arrived at the junction and so turned to cross the road. Without thinking she stepped forward and made the first mistake of her short analog life.

As the drop train sped past only inches away from her face, she fell backwards. It was like some unseen hand had grabbed the back of her coat and pulled. God, an angel, quick reactions or maybe just the blast of air that the train had made had saved her. She landed on her well-padded posterior and simply sat in a state of shock as the sound of the train’s warning horn rang in her ears.

It had been a rookie error. Half of what she was feeling now was embarrassment, the other half sheer wonder at how she was still alive. Had her best friend Meryl been with her she would have chastised her with a 'don't you use a SafeToCross neuroapp Gigi?’ Or 'Gigi, you really should invest in a clock-cycle update for your chip.’ But Meryl wasn't here and she had no chip nor any safety neuroapps to watch over her and warn her. Trains could fall out of the sky at any second to use the road, it was why they were called ‘drop trains’ after all. Everyone in the Programmerat made sure they had up-to-date apps that could tell them when it was safe to cross and, using cross signaling, indicate when they were in the road and if it wasn't clear for the train. Gracie, no longer a member of the sinister codemaster-led society, had given no such signal when she had attempted to cross and her instincts had been dulled against looking up first. It was a salutary moment and one which reinforced her list of reasons as to why she wanted shot of the whole screwed up artificiality of it all.

She got onto her knees and slowly stood up. She checked her coat, her hands, her feet, her pants. All were intact, apart from a few scuff marks on the toes of her zip shoes. There was no use trying to figure how they’d been scuffed. The drop train’s blurred image as she had been bounced backwards wouldn't stay in the mind’s eye long enough to give any useful facts about the near miss. Instead she simply removed her gloves, spat on her fingers and bent to wipe off the scuff marks. A final check on the backs of her arms and her elbows and then she put back on the gloves and walked over to the store to take a breather.

The big opaque windows of the 24/7 offered no enticements for her to enter. It was a relief as sometimes the fast scrolling animations had given her headaches in the past. Doctor Kendrick had suggested a medication that might have helped. At the time she had been tempted but hadn't had the credits to pay for them. Instead the doctor had recommended abstinence and it had turned out to be the best advice. She’d terminated all her background neuroapps, downloaded a few borderline legal ad-blockers and dialed down the clock rate of her chip. It had been the start of her analog journey and all due to doctor Kendrick, who she would have thanked if the doctor had been real and not a randomly generated avatar. So the store couldn’t tempt her inside but its windowed walls did give her a chance to regain her sensibilities and start her journey afresh.

She still had credit facilities thanks to one of the little bundle of goodies that each of the new analogs had been given on the last day of their induction. As a watch it would have rated zero on any fashion scale. It was oversized, heavy and had none of the shiny, flashy appeal that said 'wear me, buy me'. As a credit transfer identity device, tracker¹ and compass it was a valuable and prized asset to have. The pocket notebook, the second item in the goodie bundle, contained a list of contacts encoded using the cypher technique she'd learned on days 10 and 11 of the Dechip induction sessions. The third and last item was a paperback book for looking up the code letters. The watch had been preloaded with a line of credit and set to randomize its identity details on its use to prevent reverse audit tracking. Using pen and paper to write out the code translations was a new experience for them all. There were looks of consternation all round until they were shown what to do. The results wouldn't have given any of them a prize in a calligraphy contest but were, at least, legible.

Credit, then, was not a problem. Her concern about entering the store was not so much a worry about not being able to pay, she was more anxious about the people who might be in there and how well she would cope with engaging any of them socially. Without her real-time filters and active modifiers they might wonder why she didn't look like all the other perfectly shaped, blemish free examples of humanity remeshed and projected around the store. Was she too poor to run a thinner mod? Did her chip not have the cores for running enough repaints to smooth her features and clothe her in the latest fashions? In theory going into the store was a good idea. A bit of absent-minded shopping would have calmed her nerves and help restore her confidence before retrying the road crossing. In practice, and without her SaintSaëns neuroapp to play some relaxing music at the same time, it would only serve to make her more anxious.

She looked up at the sky. All she could see was a continuous covering of clouds, like an upturned mattress with tiny bumps and undulations marking where they were heaviest with rain potential. Of drop trains there was no sign and their nearly transparent tracks could barely be discerned. It was a gamble that Gracie felt compelled to take, whilst all her other instincts told her to stay where she was. No matter how many times she checked upwards to see if the sky was empty and then glanced back down to the crossing, there seemed no guarantee that she wouldn't go through a repeat of her previous experience.

She stepped forward. One foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other. The sidewalk edge. Stop. Look up, look left, keep going. Then, after repeating her stepping mantra several more times, she was across and safe. No time for self congratulation, just keep going at the same pace. She carried on around the blind corner to see the first of the streets she had memorized by name: ‘Victory Road’. Such a grand name for so inconsequential looking a place, she thought. The road was narrow with a slight incline which became steeper towards the far end. By now she had struck up a rhythm. She was walking briskly and there were fewer people around because the road wasn't a designated counterpart to any drop train track, being too narrow and gradient varying to serve for that purpose. A middle-aged couple of joggers were doing their thing and briefly acknowledged her as they passed, whilst on the far side of the road was a dog walker who had just stopped to cross.

Gracie walked quickly as further encounters with pedestrians were inevitable even though she was off the beaten route. The last detour off the main streets was ahead and on the left. There were two shifty-looking youths loitering at the intersection. She had thought to cross to avoid the dog walker but now stuck to her original route. The dog barked as it came past her. It’s just saying hello, she thought, it can't tell I'm an analog. But then maybe it could. Could dogs detect the lack of extra frequencies put out by someone who was just their plain selves, like being able to hear a high-pitched whistle that people couldn't hear? She put the thought out of her mind, she already had enough to worry about. Adding to her worries wouldn't help.

Past the two drug dealers and giving them a wide birth, she turned off the street and into a wide, steep alleyway. At one time this area might have been part of a nice suburban cul-de-sac. Now it looked derelict and unloved. Old refrigeration units lay lengthwise on the pathways, litter abounded and she sidestepped a foot-long dead rat with some disgust. Tucked into her inside coat pocket were the Dechip supplied curiosity leaflets. She hadn't handed any of them out yet because she’d planned to find her feet first before trying. At the top of the wide alley the route became steeper still, with two short sets of steps leading down either side. A young man was coming down the left set of steps. Maybe he should be her first experiment?

Being a member of the opposite sex made the task easier for her. She remembered her training. 'Cryptic clue?' she said, proffering the brightly colored cardboard square. The method of communication might have been unusual but the action was familiar enough for the man to not even break his stride as he took the card from her. Besides, the chip gesture of handing over a virtual note was almost identical and the acceptance sensorimotor sequence the same. The only unusual part of the whole transaction might occur later when the man discovered he had in his possession an actual ad card with actual writing on it. Then, if he acted on any of the advice contained on it, he could end up going through the same deprogramming exercises that had helped her get her head clear. A few months down the line he might be the one handing out the leaflets.

On to the main street now. Treestrike Road was full of fast buzzing vehicles with regular blurs of drop trains interspersed. The only way for her to cross was at the alternate about twenty yards ahead.

The alternate looked dull without its auto animation. Instead of a scrolling display in black and white stripes carpeting the way across, what was visible to the unchipped eye was barely so. The white stripes were faded, the black only just distinguishable from the road’s surface. She pressed the permission button and was surprised to see the WAIT indicator was still in working order. Static crossings like the alternates were all coded into the Programmerat. Unlike the SafeToCross neuroapp, they had a real, physical presence which, Gracie figured, were a hangover from their PCE roots. What all this boiled down to was that, without a real working switch to stop all the traffic in both directions, no supplemental chip interface circuitry would have any effect. It was like an extra layer of safety which, presumably, the designers and engineers who worked on their upgrades and maintenance could psychologically not let go of. Like how people still used glossy prints to frame their most treasured photos. Nobody wanted to cut that last umbilical cord which kept them attached, if only by the finest line, to the non-coded world. At least not yet.

Nothing but a full reversal would suit Gracie and her like-minded analog friends. For them the baby had to go back into the womb and the sinister codemasters could not be allowed to take their false reality schemes any further. Sure, it must have started with good intentions. Chipping was a boon to the disabled. As long as they could still make the sensorimotor muscle signals they had as much control over any motor or chip-controlled device as anybody else. Better yet, if they really ramped up their bio preferences, they and others could see them without any of the biological differences they had. That was fine and dandy so long as you accepted all the political manipulations which chipping inevitably laid itself open to. Gracie did not.

She steadied herself as the alternate hurried her over the road. Stopped traffic either side had had their fast-paced progress temporarily paused and were sure not to be happy. Gracie ignored them, as was her right, and carried on with her journey on the other side. Treestrike Road was another hill. At its peak it would be downhill from thereon. The walk was longer than she'd anticipated and she was getting tired. Her legs were not used to walking. It was just another dechipped task she would have to adapt to as she doubted she would be able to control a vehicle without her CoPilot neuroapp. The program did virtually all of the driving anyway except — that umbilical cord thing again — no one liked the idea of letting neuroapps take full control. Walking was the only unchipped alternative. ‘It — is — just,’ she gasped for breath as she spoke out loud, ‘so — hard!’

A side road that she didn't remember from the map came up. She crossed it with faltering steps. Was this the right way? Had she taken a wrong turn?

Then she reached the apex of the hill and knew that she hadn't. The fueling depot was ahead and marked the next and final part of her route. By now her legs were stinging with the pain of unused muscles. Her feet felt like they were trying to escape from her shoes which were tight and pinching. Her neck wasn't used to the strain of keeping her head upright and focused and her head, though now clear, wasn't yet adjusted to the concept of letting her own brain make all the calculations and adjustments it needed to keep her alive. She still had a headache.

Downhill now and not far to go. She noticed the houses were bigger here. Some were grandiose affairs with sweeping driveways and landscaped frontages. The streets were tidier too and better maintained. Her destination was in an affluent neighborhood. Another big change was the lack of people. No one else was about, the street’s only inhabitants were one or two parked stilt cars. Propped up on all four of their extended ladder legs, they looked like abandoned industrial cleaning units rather than the state-of-the-art vehicles that they were. Past two or three really big houses — the last one looking more like a small hotel than a house with so many windows and rooms she couldn't count them all — and she was there. The hostel was at the end of the street and swept around the corner. It would be her new home until she set out on her mission. She hoped and prayed she would live long enough to complete it.

===

Gracie was not a loner. She didn't like to be isolated, she liked the company of others and she enjoyed meeting people. Except none of what she had just told herself was true. How many of her friendships had relied on SharedSpace? Who amongst her closest friends had she actually met in person? And, when it came down to the bare facts why, at age of twenty-eight, was she still unmarried? The real truth of the matter was that she’d spent most of her life being alone. SharedSpace meetings were expensive. No matter how exciting the sessions were there was always an entry fee and the more interesting and new and unusual the session, the higher the fee. Also, you could never guarantee that it would be the same group of people each time. Once she’d signed up for a drop train horror experience where the train falls out of the sky at the end and everyone dies. She’d spent six one-hour in flight share days with those people and had never seen any one of them again afterwards. She’d also had a sneaky feeling that one or two of them had been digital inventions and no more real then the AI she spoke to when doing her monthly banking review. So here she was, alone again (or should that be still?), and the reason why it felt like a new experience to her was because she was an analog and had no code facilities to call on for company.

At times like these, all by herself and in strange and unfamiliar surroundings, she thought of Valerie Macrand. Valerie and Gracie had grown up together, played games in her mother's house, attended sensorimotor classes at the same school and had even gone on to work in the same func-farm building. Unlike her best friend Meryl, Valerie never did get promoted through the ranks and didn’t move on into one of the favored Monitorium security roles. Gracie had always wondered what had happened to her. At least some of the feeling of loneliness she felt now was that innocent friendship and closeness of mind she’d felt with Valerie. Sometimes she thought that those days of sitting on the carpet in the darkness of her living room with sunlight glaring through the gaps between the heavy curtains and playing simple card games had been the happiest of her life.

Valerie. What was she doing now? Was she still there in the func-farm replacing failed circuit boards, topping up the processor boxes with liquid coolant and spraying the fiber carpeting to stop all the static shocks everyone always got? Wherever she was, she wasn't lying on a bed in a small room in a building in the middle of nowhere. And she would still be chipped and part of the Programmerat, only with all of her communications protocols restricted to those of her own rank. The ranking system was one of the reasons they had lost touch. Shortly after Gracie's promotion to Network Supervisor, she had met and become friends with Meryl. Meryl was an altogether different personality — tall, thin and hyperactive to Valerie's short, stocky and easygoing nature. And, as Meryl and Gracie had been promoted again and again, they had grown more like each other. More sophisticated crafty and scheming, less homely and appreciative of the simple things in life. Forever calculating and worrying, never laughing or singing or being carefree. The loss of Valerie's friendship was like the absence of a wired-up chip — the vacuum of lost feelings was intractable and beyond her means to reactivate. She'd not even thought of Valerie and the predicament she’d left her behind in, in a long while. Was it guilt? Was that why she only remembered her when she was feeling lonely? Or was there something special about now which was prompting her to revisit those happy memories? Being analog had brought on feelings of solace but it had also triggered a new state of being in her psyche — one of hope!

The mission plan was still spinning and fresh in her thoughts. It was audacious and she would be part of a very small and select team. Few had the same kind of insider Monitorium knowledge and privileged access as her. Collins, one of the leaders of Dechip had, at first, shied away from telling her how important her task was. By the end of the second week she had a pretty firm impression that he didn't think their schemes would succeed without her.

The hostel was split into three levels. On each level there were rooms for about seven or eight guests meaning a total of no more than twenty residents. The codebook beckoned and she would use it just as soon as the time came to begin putting things in motion. She could just lie here and think about her old friends and happier times, or she could let the plan continue to worry and disturb her as she played its events and locations in its never ending loop in her mind. Alternatively (she sat up, swiveled, put her fat feet on the floor and stood) she could go down to the common room and see if anyone was about.

Down on the ground floor no one was around. It took her a while to figure out why. It was Sunday and, she reckoned — because, despite herself, she did the CLOCK sensorimotor action (forefinger-bend, touch-thumb) but it didn't give her the time — it was still much too early for breakfast.

Her stomach rumbled. She hadn't eaten since her check-in the previous night. Maybe some poached eggs on toast would distract her from going through the plan again? She'd already checked the cupboards and refrigerator in the kitchen and there was plenty of fresh and vacuum-sealed food. She thought back to Dechip and Philpott’s chickens. She’d not seen any live animals here but that didn't mean that there weren't any. Fresh eggs, though rare, weren’t entirely out of reach for the common person — they were just very expensive. When she found that the fridge was stocked with an entire box of them, she assumed that they’d been produced locally. A dozen eggs equaled about a month's regular pay for an unskilled worker. She made a mental note to pay back the owner as she took one and congratulated herself that she hadn’t called on MEMO to make the reminder.

She went through the motions of preparing breakfast as a distraction from thinking about the plan. Her mind drifted onto the subject of what kind of people lived in the hostel. Their array of names had been listed in a plaque by the main entry corridor. First names only this time and all very Anglo-Saxon like 'Paul' and 'Andrew' and 'Naomi'. The hostel was run by a charity for the homeless. Maybe the names weren't the residents actual names but pseudonyms, Gracie thought. The name listed against her room, 'Rosie', was certainly false but then that alias might have been down to Dechip’s provision. They’d organized her accommodation and that of all the others in her induction class. Everyone had been given similar but different destinations as a kind of redundancy measure. Should any one of them be discovered there would be only one loss and others could fill the gap when their coded check-in signal failed to get back to base. Dechip itself was not unique for the same reason. There were many Dechip centers and if they were all discovered there was still the leadership hierarchy to fall back on, of which Gracie was listed as number thirty-nine on the go-to list.

A yawn from the corridor broke her thoughts. She paused, her knife loaded with a scoop of butter she'd yet to apply. The man stepped into the kitchen with his bare feet slap-slapping on the pale gray linoleum floor. He was wearing a brown-checked dressing gown, loosely tied and he looked like he'd not had a morning shower or bath. His black hair was uncombed and his beard was straggly and untrimmed. Gracie immediately thought of a pet dog she'd used to fuss over as a child. Now, whose was that dog?

'Simon,' the man said, holding out his hand. Gracie abandoned her buttering activities and the half-remembered dog and shook his hand. 'Rosie,' she said, almost too confidently.

Simon chuckled. 'Yes, I know. Our names sound like something from out of the ark don't they? The couple who run this place are from some kind of Christian charity. Don't let me stop you, it looks like your egg is ready.'

Gracie switched off the power to the pan, trying to hide her use of her hand to do it by twisting her body to cover the action. Simon’s sudden arrival had almost made her forget what she was doing. She quickly completed making her breakfast and took it to the dining table set in the middle of the room. It was furnished with white-padded, tall stools with aluminum legs. Simon made himself a breakfast of cornflakes and milk. The cereal bowl he chose was twice the size of one she would have picked for herself.

'You look like you're on a mission,' he said as he watched her quickly slice into her meal and wolf it down. She wondered if his words had more than one meaning. Had he spotted that she hadn't used neural activation to operate the cooker? 'There’s plenty of eggs, you could have had two,' he added.

'I'm trying to cut down,' Gracie said, feeling a flush of embarrassment warming her cheeks. She found it hard to relax and was missing her Cyrano neuroapp again. It had always been there to help prompt her for cool things to say in difficult situations. When she turned her gaze from Simon's eyes she found herself staring at his bare and hairy chest which she could see behind his half-open dressing gown as he came to sit down opposite her. 'Been here long?' he asked.

Gracie cleared her throat. When she tried to speak her words came out in a choke. She helped herself to a glass of water from the tap. There was an awkward delay as the rain purifier chugged and grunted before dispensing about half a glass. She then downed the water like it was a shot of alcohol. 'No, you?' she replied.

Simon ignored her question, shoveling more of the huge serving of cornflakes into his mouth. Gracie felt insulted. She’d thought the conversation had been going well and was just getting the hang of making trivial chitchat on her own without any neuroprompts. When he’d finished every last flake in his bowl and emptied the remainder of the milk in it by putting it to his mouth and slurping it dry, she finally had his attention again. 'Nice watch,' he said.

The observation made Gracie’s heart pound. She felt a tightening around her jaw and neck like invisible hands were at her throat. 'It's more like jewelry than anything else,' she said, not bothering to elaborate on a lie which already felt weak. But you didn't answer my question.'

'Yes, sorry,' Simon apologized. 'It's a bad habit of mine. To tell you the truth I don't know how long I've been here. It's the lack of structure you see, the lack of routine.'

Gracie waited for him to continue. It was the longest she'd heard him speak. His voice had a nice rise and fall melody about it that was hypnotic. She wondered how someone as obviously well-spoken as he was had come to be homeless. Inside she was still beating herself up about wearing the watch that Dechip had given her down to breakfast. She’d thought it might have come in handy if any of the kitchen devices where chip-only operated. She'd been surprised to find that none of them were. Naturally, using the watch in front of Simon to work the cooker would have been just as much of a giveaway as pressing the switch on it. 'I'm not homeless though,' he added. And then, to her astonishment, his whole demeanor changed. He sat more upright, pulled his gown together and straightened his sleeves like it was a suit jacket. 'But then neither are you Rosie are you?'

===

Gracie's mission to assassinate the Chief Codemaster had ended at almost as soon as it had begun. Or so it seemed. Multiple thoughts flashed through her head as she followed Simon back to his room. The journey took place in silence. Since his change from Jekyll to Hyde he’d taken on an air of undeniable authority. He’d beckoned her to follow him and she had. When she’d tried to speak he’d closed her down with a finger to his lips and she’d obeyed. His room was on the third floor and by the time they had reached it, taking the stairs and not the small claustrophobic elevator that she had used on the way down, she was still in two minds as to whether she was walking to her execution or to a place of safety. Were there fifty Monitorium agents waiting ahead, or was their destination just somewhere to go where they would not be overheard? Questions, questions and more questions antagonized her brain until, by the time they reached his door, she’d worried herself so much that whatever happened next could never match the frights that she'd imagined for herself.

She followed him through and into his room, her body rigid and prepared for any shock. The room was bigger than hers and had an extra piece of furniture — a couch instead of the double bed it was obviously intended to house. Still not speaking, he walked behind the couch to a side cabinet set parallel to it. Atop of the cabinet was a curious looking rectangular box with lights, switches and a rotary dial on its front-facing edge. Mute, more with fascination now than terror, Gracie watched as he took a tiny bath-salt sized cube of metal from a tray by the machine’s side and dropped it into the square-shaped receptacle in its top. Piano music started playing from the resonance bars which, as was standard, were set half-height all around the room.

'It’s a music player,' he said, gesturing for her to sit beside him on the couch as he sat on the furthest side of it. Before she could protest he continued, 'so we can't be overheard.' He paused to compose himself. 'Derby,' he said, as if beginning anew with their introduction.

'And is that your real name or just another fiction?' Gracie said, deciding that the anxiety that the man had just put it through was worth a little bile.

'I am sorry for all the cat and mouse games,’ he said. This place was vetted beforehand but you never can tell with the Monitorium. You probably didn't know this but they collate all your audiovisual feeds via a TSR that's sits hiding in your chip looking for key streams. Anything untoward, like subversive talk or even just mentioning the word 'codemaster' triggers it. Remember how people used to talk about their chips by pointing a finger behind their ear? That can wake it up too, even if it's just your face showing displeasure.'

Gracie was mesmerized by that voice again. Simon / Derby or whoever the man was had charisma by the bucketload. The piano music was also helping soothe her nerves. As he was speaking the word 'Derby' kept threatening to recall an association with something she’d read or maybe had been told in passing. She had a creeping feeling that the man sat beside her was very, very important.

'I guess I'd better get right to it,' he continued. Gracie realized that her gaze had dropped to his toes. Her train of thought before Derby had started speaking again had been: why, if he's so important, doesn't he bother cutting his toenails? 'That might help,' she said, enjoying the sense that she had at least some control over her predicament.

'I'm kind of what you might call a leader,' Derby said. His face was unreadable. The way he said 'leader' had been flat and without pride. It was like he was sharing a secret for the first time. This was a new game to her, why wasn't he flirting with her? 'So I don't have to ask you to take me to him then?' she said, not bothering whether he got the joke.

There was an awkward moment as Derby seemed to be reluctant to say anything further or was reappraising her. Gracie hadn't known the man long enough to work out his body language. She remembered her induction — never say any more than you need to. She hadn't yet reached the stage where her day thirteen — 'What to do if you're arrested' training was needed. At least she didn't think so. Maybe the guy was just a crackpot? 'Your name,' she said, the memory strand she'd been pulling on finally getting her a result, 'It’s a city right?'

'More like a big town really, but I've never been there.'

‘In England.’ Gracie's heart was thumping again. She pulled one leg under herself to try to help keep her nerves down. 'Well, there's no need to be coy anymore. Just tell me who you are and we can get on with it.'

'The names before mine are Abingdon...'

'Birmingham.'

‘And Cambridge’

'Phew,' Gracie said. 'I'm glad that's over with! You must be number four, I'm nineteen.'

'Best if we just stick to our surnames as the Dechip should have told you,' Derby said. 'How are things back there, I don't get updates as often as I'd like Miss…?

'Sheffield,' Gracie said. The city name that Dechip had given her as a code name had been in a list with the other names at the top. 'Though I thought that Rosie and Simon might have been going places.'

Derby laughed. The tension had, at last, been broken. They both had no more cards to hide. 'It feels strange at first doesn't it?' he said ‘Being analog I mean. Like walking around naked.’

'It's more like walking around without a belt to hold your pants up when they’re two sizes too big for you,' Gracie said.

Over the next few days Gracie and Derby became firm friends. He insisted in calling her 'Sheffield' when they were talking in secret, otherwise Rosie and Simon were their nom-de-plumes of choice. Gracie found having Derby around to ask further questions about her mission a boon. He knew more about the Monitorium than anyone she'd ever met. It would have been suspiciously too much insider information had he not passed the code name test. Only those who were on the list were privy to its contents and Gracie didn't need any more convincing that Derby's chip was as defunct as her own. They both struggled to open, close and operate the simplest of devices and he had none of the defocused looks of concentration that was the tell-tale sign that someone was using a neuroapp. 'So is it just by chance that you happen to be here at the same time as me?' she said on the day before she was due to set out to the Monitorium building. It was a question she’d delayed asking because her natural nature was to be shy and unforthcoming until she got to know people really well. It seemed a bit impudent of her to question someone so high in the Dechip ranks — it was their revolution after all, she was simply the latest convert!

'The plans are never set in stone,' Derby replied. 'You probably wouldn't be surprised to hear that many of the missions that are high risk like yours have been attempted before and on several occasions.'

Gracie knew that whenever Derby started to speak she should prepare herself for a prolonged answer. Since he’d declared himself as a leader she’d observed that he loved to hear the sound of his own voice. She listened patiently as he explained how the Dechip hierarchy operated, splitting their time between each of the mission bases like the hostel, coordinating their efforts by passing on messages in code to avoid eavesdropping by sleeping TSRs that might otherwise wake at a monitored word or phrase. When he mentioned the TSRs, Gracie had remembered another question: ‘Even if, when two people talk to one another, neither of them have chips which are hooked up?’

‘It’s only your primitives which we disconnect,’ Derby explained. ‘That’s the whole point of TSRs — they can be killed but they always stay resident. It’s like a hedgehog curling up to protect itself or a tortoise hiding in its shell. It’s a way that the chips manage to stay hooked in to your brain’s neural pathways. No one has ever yet figured how to fully reverse a chip implant because the TSR’s trick of going into hiding means we can never completely isolate them. We just don’t know what other code is running in there. It might decide to trigger and epileptic fit or some kind of psychotic break where the subject can’t tell what’s real anymore. I’ve seen some of the research footage and it’s not pleasant to watch.’

She left it at that. The leaders never stayed in any one place for too long and no two leaders lived in the same dwelling. It made communications and strategies harder but kept the Dechip leadership less open to attack by a military strike. Her and Derby’s meeting had been an act of providence with a small measure of planning thrown in.

When the raid happened, Gracie was taken by surprise. She suspected Paul had been the one to raise the alarm as he was the one least perturbed by the arrival of the Monitorium agents. There had been something about Paul that made her uneasy. It was to do with the way he passed judgment on people — never directly, always as an aside so that you were never sure if who he was disparaging was you. He was also older than everyone else in the hostel and had an air of unwarranted superiority about him.

She was in the common room at the time, with Paul and David and two women. The older of the women had introduced herself but Gracie had already forgotten her name. Gail? Gabby? She knew it began with a ‘G’ because the woman, who liked to talk a lot, had mentioned the commonality in both of their names in the middle of a river of fast flowing sentences. The two women had only recently arrived but weren't mother and daughter as far as she could figure. When the agents had left and Derby was no longer amongst the group assembled in the forecourt area outside, it was the older woman who spoke first.

'Subversives,' she said, 'how are we meant to spot them if they can't?'

They had all just been addressed by an arrogant Monitorium agent dressed in black and wearing three red stripes on her left shoulder indicating her rank. Of all the assembled group only the unnamed woman and her younger friend seemed to care about the warnings of dire consequences for non-cooperation the agent had just blasted them with.

'I think she's rather sexy in those kinky black leathers,' Paul said.

'Why don’t you go over there and ask her out on a date then and claim your rewards?' David spat. His disapproval echoed with the rest of them. They were all dispossessed citizens. What did it matter if one of them had been caught dechipped? Most of them couldn't afford any souped up mods or high-priced neuroapps anyway and were benefiting little from the kind of luxuries that those who could were taking advantage of. Gracie thought that that helped to explain why the hostel had been chosen by Dechip — it made it easier for her and people like her to mix in unnoticed for their 'handicaps'. The people here just assumed she was too poor to project a better image of herself and didn't have the cores slim down her flabby thighs by an inch or two.

Later, when she was alone, the raid incident faded from her thoughts. Tomorrow was the day of her departure so she would only miss Derby's company for the one extra evening she might have spent with him in the privacy of his room. She couldn't afford to get sentimental about his loss. They’d done their best to meet in secret and stay apart during the day so no one would be any the wiser that she was missing him more so than anyone else.

That night, and for the first time in a long while, she said her prayers. Properly. There were no digital illusions to fool her and no chip created responses to help convince her. Instead she spoke sincerely and honestly, earnestly requesting reassurance that she was making the right choices. It was a selfish prayer. She wasn't the kind of person who wanted to save the world — there was no altruism in what she was about to do. Living in a world where a coded reality was the norm was only okay so long as nature could be allowed to get a look in. How many singletons like her satisfied themselves with digital partners and artificial families? There was no satisfaction in having a relationship with someone you could never touch or be intimate with. Who wanted a family that you had to save at night and reopen every morning? The honesty of her prayer with its closing 'Amen' put a seal of finality on her worries and wishes. She had prayed for a positive outcome for herself and let any concerns she might have had about how others would react at the loss of the codemaster orchestrator to God. What became of those individuals as the Programmerat toppled, as it inevitably would, was out of her hands. She slept peacefully.

===

Awaking on the day of her mission, Gracie felt relaxed and ready for what awaited. It was time to use her codebook and contact list. The two emergency contacts, marked with an 'e', she skipped over. The three backups marked ‘b’ at the end of the list she wouldn't need to call on. They were only there if she felt she had to abort and it was necessary to notify someone else to fill her shoes. That left six names in the middle which had no mark against them and therefore were the most important. These were her potential partners for the task ahead. All six could be called upon if needed, or just one or two. The strategy was left entirely at her discretion, as a field operative there was little point in asking for further advice. Out here the situation was always fluid. Nobody could have told her that she would meet one of the very senior leaders and be able to benefit from several days of his input and 'live' perspective of events. There was no counsel which could have predicted the subsequent raid and Derby's arrest. Events happened outside of the supervisory reach of Dechip’s minimalist leadership team, and communications to apprise them of them were sporadic and slow. For these reasons, Gracie had been left to make her own choices as to how many in the list she should call on for assistance. Feeling that Derby's arrest had been a portent that the more people she partnered with the more she was putting them all at risk, she chose just two to contact.

She selected the names at random and had their sixteen digit key string ID codes decoded and transcribed in a matter of minutes, using the paperback book as the source cypher. Then, after she’d put in the transcribed IDs into the clunky watch using its even more cumbersome touchscreen interface, she activated its tracker and burned the book. The matches had been conveniently taped onto the book’s inside back cover, the metal wastebin she’d chosen to burn it in she'd stolen from the kitchen. She waited until the fire had died and the smoke had cleared, then closed the window and replaced the battery in the smoke detector. She could have left the ashes and bin as they were but instead flushed the bin’s gray cinders down the toilet in the bathroom at the end of the floor, then washed it out and returned it to the kitchen. The extra time taken would allow the tracker in her watch to communicate its signal to the two compatriots she had selected to help her.

It was raining outside by the time she had made all her preparations. All the while she had been getting ready (having a morning shower; getting dressed; preparing and eating her breakfast) she’d kept checking the watch to see if the signal she’d sent had been received and acknowledged. The first green pip lit up about 7:30 then, after she’d returned to her room and done her morning calisthenics programme, the second pip acknowledgment response had come through.

The rain bothered her more than it should have. It was something she hadn't anticipated and, having sneaked out the back door of the hostel so that she wouldn't be seen leaving, she couldn't just step back inside and grab an umbrella from the china pot in the corner of the entrance hallway where there were three or four going spare. Instead, she pulled up the zip on her coat so that its neck was tightly sealed against the raindrops and made her way as quickly as possible to the nearest drop train stop.

Walking had been the only option to get to the hostel from Dechip. To travel by train would have been a risky move. No matter how many random identities her watch generated when she used it for credit, a quick statistical analysis would soon reveal the locale from which, with regular frequency, persons ‘A’ boarded yet persons 'B' alighted further on. Besides, it had only been a short walk to get to the sleeper-cell location and drop trains weren’t really for short trips. They excelled at gulping down long distances — distances which people on foot could not even begin to contemplate. The Monitorium HQ was at one such distance. It was where the Chief Codemaster worked and lived and was the destination where Gracie and her two randomly chosen associates would meet to carry out his assassination.

She called him 'he', but 'she' would have equally served. The Chief Codemaster projected different guises and body shells according to his or her whim. Only an analog would be able to see the true identity of the person who ran and manipulated the Programmerat, and no analog had ever done so and returned alive to report back on their findings.

She arrived at the call post at the top of the hill by the fueling depot she'd passed on her journey down. Thoughts were going through her mind as to how successful her compadres might be faring with their own assignments. Had some succeeded and returned back to their sleeper locations awaiting new orders? Could it even be that the Chief Codemaster had already been assassinated by a fellow analog and her mission had already been completed? Maybe that was too much to hope for and few outside the six on her list were likely to have the necessary security clearances to make the attempt. Then again, there could be more brute force methods assigned which would obviate the need for any clearance. A demolition of the entire building, for example, would serve equally well to do the job.

She continued musing on different assassination methods as she grabbed the call post and allowed her watch to dole out the appropriate number of credits for her preconfigured journey. No one else in the waiting line raised an eyebrow at her use of the mechanical call method. She wondered whether it was so long out of use that they didn't recognize what she’d just done. Then again, so many of them had that defocused look in their eyes which meant they were watching a vid or engaged in a call, that she was probably invisible to them. It gave her a stark reminder of her motivations for her mission. To see all these people gathered here and how little they were engaging with one another was a crime. It was social programming of the worst kind. More like an addiction than a habit, they’d all scrunch-pinched the news or winked up a virtual avatar to keep them company rather than just have a chat or pass the time of day with a real person. Maybe some of them were communicating with friends or relatives but Gracie doubted it. If her own experience was anything to go by, friendships were hard to come by and relationships even harder to establish. Yet here, at this in-the-middle-of-nowhere drop train stop, there was an entire microcosm of life and with it the potential for social engagement. Gracie could feel in her bones that this was what they all should be doing — looking one another in the eye, saying 'hello' and exchanging pleasantries with one another about the first trivial topic that sprang into their minds. These people (and she would have included herself in their number until only very recently) were more like machines. They lacked zest, their faces were unanimated, they had no life in them at all. The Programmerat had seen to it that any impulse they might have had to socialize had been nullified by an instant sensorimotor gesture activated solitary experience which doomed them to empty, vacuous lifestyles.

The train that Gracie had requested was late to arrive but the most popular amongst those who were waiting, so there was a big huddle of people who wanted to board when it arrived. The rush of air from its rapid descent blew away her melancholy musings about Programmerat society. Her spirits rose at the smell of freshly displaced dust and ozone from the train’s heavy motors which filled her nostrils as she stepped inside. Despite its popularity, the train was half empty and she found a seat in a carriage marked for her destination with ease. She sat next to a young man who, from the way his eyes were tracking left and right, she figured was reading a book. The unusual decision not to have its audio version automatically read out to him by a cast of AI narrators and actors gave her some hope for the future. She thought about surreptitiously slipping the reader one of her curiosity leaflets but decided against it. It was too risky now that her main mission had begun. Seeing the young man reading also filled her with regret at burning the codebook. It had been a murder mystery and she'd read a few pages of it back at the hostel before getting a headache at the effort of focusing her eyes on a print copy without her MyoMag neuroapp to help her. Books should be prized not burned, she thought. Someone should put that in a manifesto.

Even though the train was fast it took nearly an hour and a half for it to complete the journey. There was the usual sense of being overweight and too heavy to move as it took to the air then, after an uneventful journey and only half a dozen more stops, they were there. At the second to last stop her carriage fused with an intercontinental but she was so used to the experience of flying at a thousand miles an hour that she barely noticed the extra acceleration and breaking when it happened. She had passed the time by meditating. It was a trick she had often employed on longer journeys despite there being many chip-generated diversional temptations which she might have activated. It was the rebel in her which had made her go against the grain and opt for peace and relaxation as opposed to constant neuro stimulation. Choosing not to keep her chip time at the recommended 90 - 95% was frowned upon and had, no doubt, been reported to her psycheval to be raised as a reprogramming issue at her next annual mental health checkup. She hadn’t let that put her off then and now it seemed incredulous to think that it ever might have.

It was half past eleven when she arrived at the Grand Marquis station. Immediately the rusty tang of stale air which greeted her as she disembarked brought back memories of her last visit three years previously. It had been a sad time for her because, despite being a business trip requiring her to physically oversee the final switchover to a new func-farm at the Monitorium HQ, she had just broken up with her boyfriend at the time. As her feet click-clacked along the hard black metal slabs of the platform she wondered, as she had oftentimes before, if he had been real. They had been on so many dates and met in SharedSpace so many times that she was convinced against all statistical odds to the contrary that he was more than a computer generated facsimile. They had even made love on more than one occasion, though naturally none of their love making sessions had ever borne fruit.

She’d no need to learn the route to the headquarters of the Programmerat’s secret police since she’d been guided there last time by a corporate Goto neuroapp. Her guide had rather charmingly pointed out, and given her the history of, many of the landmark buildings along the route. That time she'd decided for herself to walk, this time it was a security measure that those at Dechip had insisted on. The walk was rather pleasant. Once she’d crossed the first of only two alternates, the rest of the route was along brightly lit tree-lined roads with several park squares offering rest and escape from the hustle and bustle of a busy city along the way.

Halfway to one such square — the rendezvous which had been set for her meeting with her two analog cohorts — was an ancient-looking church. It bore no name, possibly because she was walking by the back of it though she couldn't be sure because wherever the entrance was it was hidden by a tall and rusty iron railing which ran the length of its perimeter. She estimated that it was probably many hundreds of years old but couldn't remember its exact age or its name from the Goto’s description of it. Had it deliberately omitted the details under a codemaster directive? It seemed the most likely explanation given the Programmerat’s active drive to erase all communal worship via its ban on SharedSpace use for religious assemblies. She fantasized that one day the church would be restored to its former glory and she would be the first to volunteer to make sure its lawns were cut and its upkeep managed properly. Part of her sadness now was not only because the walk to the park square meeting point reminded her of her old flame, but also because she could now see clearly how much was being hidden and lost. There was a price they were all paying for the sake of allowing one person to mediate everything they could see hear and do. If there had ever been before, there was no doubt in her mind now: the Chief Codemaster had to die.

===

The three analogs recognized each other just as each took a seat on one of the empty park benches. The little compass app built into the watch had helped, though Gracie had been thinking that landmarks would have suited just as well. At precisely twelve noon she took her seat on the west bench whilst Rowditch and Hollington took theirs on the east and north ones. The park square was not a popular meeting place, as evidenced by the empty benches and the lack of people hanging around. As Gracie knew, most simply used it as a shortcut to get from the northeast entrance to the southwest without having to traipse around the perimeter. Although surrounded by grandiose buildings and enclosed in a pleasant border of trees which were just turning green as winter was coming to an end, the small green space had a bad reputation.

They gathered together at the southwest entrance and stood in a huddle to do their introductions and exchange handshakes. Hollington and Gracie gave each other an extra wink as they had met before at hostel, where she had known him as 'Andrew'. 'Sheffield,' she said as the two others gave their Dechip assigned names. Gracie wondered if, when this was all over and the world could begin the slow and long process of healing itself of the heinous wounds that chipping had inflicted on it, they would eventually feel free enough to use their own names. Rowditch was younger than her by a few years and had a square build. With long straw-blonde hair tied tightly at the back, she looked like she could handle around herself in a fight. Hollington, or 'Andrew' as she was still tempted to call him, was an older Asian man, small in stature but with a pleasant bearing about him which he'd kept hidden at the hostel. 'I had no idea,' Gracie said when she’d finished her handshake with him.

'Me neither,' Hollington replied. 'You certainly covered it up well.'

'I found that staring into space seemed to fool most people, except for Derby that is. You would know him has 'Simon'. He recognized me by my watch, so I took it off after that and kept it in my pocket. He taught me a few tricks and he had his imitation down to a fine art. I'm not surprised you didn't know he was analog as well. Gracie found herself speaking quickly as it as as if all her thoughts had been bottled up and the bottle lid had just been ejected. It was a result of her being alone for so long with no one else she could confide in. She was so grateful that Rowditch and Hollington were here that she felt like crying. ‘I don't know how those Monitorium agents discovered he was dechipped and yet missed the both of us,’ she continued. ‘All I can think is that he let himself be arrested to distract them from me. Or maybe they came specifically for him or figured out that he was one of the leaders? I only hope that...’ She stopped speaking. Hollington’s face had changed from smiling and welcoming to grim and serious. The change had started almost as soon as she’d mentioned Simon's name.

'I don't know who you think he was but he wasn't code name Derby,' he said. 'Derby was one of my PCE teachers when I went through my Dechip induction. I can tell you for a fact that Simon wasn't him. Everyone at my Dechip was so pleased that he’d chosen to spend some time with us. His knowledge of the organization was highly detailed, there's no way that he could have been anything but a leader.’

Gracie went cold. Could Hollington be mistaken? Just how much had she confided to Derby about their mission? If he wasn't who he said he was, then just who was he and how did he know about all the cities that the leaders used as code names?

Rowditch looked impatient. 'It's great that you two are catching up on old times but we should be getting on. Unless Sheffield here has told this leader impostor our entire mission plan we should just assume he's a spy of some sort and put it into our reports when we check back in.' Her interruption had a focusing effect. They could go round in circles thinking about who to trust and who not to. Whether or not Gracie’s faith in Derby had been misplaced, it didn't alter anything. They had a job to do and they’d each made a commitment to see it through. Such a dangerous mission was bound to make them all feel uneasy and have doubts. It wasn't every day that you tried to assassinate someone. The blonde-haired fighter picked three blades of grass. ‘With only three of us we don’t have to split into teams it’s just who does what that needs to be decided,’ she said as she held the blades in her hand so that they could draw lots. ‘The shortest is objective one, the longest three.’ Gracie nodded her assent. The shortest blade and the most dangerous role went to her.

'Damn!' Rowditch said after Hollington had taken the middle-length blade 'distraction and chaos' and Gracie’s pick had left her with 'security and alarms'. 'I had hoped that I'd get to be the one.' None of them mentioned the word 'assassin'. Gracie didn't know much about TSRs or even, following Hollington’s disclosure, whether they were real, but they all were cautious enough to avoid saying anything that might be overheard should anyone walk past. Each of the roles had been clearly marked '1', '2', and '3' in their assignment notes and no reminder of what they were was needed. The notes and training had been the same at each of their Dechip centers. Gracie sometimes wondered at the timing of it all and why she had been in been an ‘activator’ and not a 'sleeper' but trusted that Dechip had its reasons.

The buildings became bigger and with more and more storeys as they walked the short distance to the Monitorium HQ. The flashbacks to sensorimotor reflex sequences were fewer now for Gracie yet still tugged on her like feelings of loss from a close bereavement. Right now a (deep-breath; double-fist-clench; twist-right-wrist) would have been handy to activate HEALTH-TRACK and see what distance they had covered so far. Somehow she didn't feel the weaker for the extra facility not being there. She was learning that it was enough to be able to count and measure off your own distances. She didn't need a neuroapp to give her a readout of how many steps she had covered or how many laps or miles she had done, her instincts could tell her all that. Being analog was growing on her, she was feeling fitter and healthier as each day gave her new untainted discoveries of what life was going to be like for her in the future. She felt good.

Entry to the Monitorium HQ was secured by chip key signature. Since they all had chips, the fact that those chips were all disconnected from their brains’ neural pathways made not a jot of difference to the head scanner. As they each passed through the single lane gate an automated voice asked them to remain stationary as the scanner, which looked like an oversized transparent dome-shaped hair dryer, descended via a robotic arm. Naturally, they all passed the security clearance protocol which prevented those with lower Monitorium access rights from entering. The HQ was the main operations base for the Programmerat. Only those who had worked in its secret service for many years and had climbed up the ranks were allowed inside. The three of them were trusted employees with spotless records, there was never any doubt that they would all pass the primary security check which kept those less privileged without.

Once past the gate it was on to the main building which was several hundred yards beyond the walled perimeter. Gracie's nerves began to kick in. She tried to maintain a steady and nonchalant gait but failed. Without her SaintSaëns streaming confidence-boosting music in her ears and with no friendly avatar she could sensorimotor summon to walk beside her, the feelings of being in it on her own again resurfaced. Then she checked herself. She wasn't alone, Rowditch and Hollington were right here walking alongside of her. They were all three in the same boat and were present and real, not virtual or projected. What had been the onset of fear, changed. Transforming itself into what? It was a new feeling, one which she didn't recognize. She felt warm, glowing almost. Her gait steadied, her stride became more determined. What they were about to do would change the course of history, she had known that. What she hadn't realized was how much it was going to change her. It was almost like an impossible dream, a miracle beyond anything she'd anticipated. Following the dispatch of the Chief Codemaster the analogs would rise and rule and reality — a clear, unfiltered and unmonitored reality — would be restored.

The building was soon too close for her to arch her neck up and see the top of. It stretched to her left and to her right like it was its own horizon. The Monitorium was everything and everything was the Monitorium. By comparison, the double door entrance at the top of a series of pyramid-shaped steps was tiny.

Inside, Hollington headed left towards the conti-descender to the basement levels. He’d chosen one of the two places Gracie might have chosen if his role had come to her. The underground levels at the Monitorium HQ contained all the batteries and recharging engines which kept it alive and functioning. Hollington was going to have fun down there turning off ventilators, switching power lines and interrupting heating and lighting feeds. The second place Gracie might have decided to go to would have been one of the floors in the Communications Block, which ran as a twin vertical stack of floor sections at mid-level in the building complex. Rowditch stayed on the ground floor. There was a security floor at every tenth level so she could have begun her hacking activities in any one of them but chose to start at the lowest. Gracie could understand her reasoning. Questions might be asked why a maintenance engineer would need access to a fourth or fifth level security floor when whatever upgrade was being applied had not been done at all the lower levels first. The three of them were each more than capable of doing the jobs they’d chosen. They all had both a background in maintenance and a bio-security clearance which would let them roam freely around the building. Only the top three floors of the complex were off limits to everyone and the combination of Rowditch’s and Hollington’s efforts would see to it that Gracie would be able to overcome this last obstacle to the home of the Chief Codemaster.

She reset her watch under the cover of her cuff as her companions went on their own ways. They would need time to put their tasks into effect but that didn't mean that she would be idle whilst she waited for their pip signals to come through again. The job of getting to the one hundred and sixtieth floor was left to her own discretion. It wouldn't be easy. The further up she went the higher the security would be and, correspondingly, the more difficult the task to justify her presence there. The hardest floors to get past would be the security floors, not that they were any more secure than any other floor but because of the sheer density of Monitorium level sixes which occupied them. Her level seven clearance was guaranteed to allow her to go further on but the conti-ascender terminated for interchange switching on those floors so she couldn't just sweep up past them and ignore the scrutiny she would receive there.

Her Dechip training kicked in again. The key to this or any other mission’s success lay in not arousing any suspicion. That meant no loitering or indecision. She walked confidently to the leftmost ascender and stepped into the gap. Controlling machinery slowed the rolling platforms to accept her, needing no sensorimotor gesture. During the course of her approach the ascender had worked out its current availability (usually empty on the ground floor) and either opened a new platform plate or indicated with a floor-lit arrow where she should step on. It was her intimate familiarity with Monitorium protocols which enabled her to know that she wouldn't have to worry about not being chipped for the ascender to work for her. Like many off the primary facilities here, chip reliance was minimized. So much else in the building was either a chip-activated procedure or relied on the FACADE background primitive. Most didn’t have the clock speed or enough multiple cores to operate both them and the basics like getting around safely.

Arriving at the first security floor she made straight for the spot desk as soon as the ledge to the floor was low enough to step onto. 'Operator 10-alpha-century-Macbeth,' she said. The spot guard’s face showed no emotion until she put her palm on the bio plate. He hadn’t been running his RECOGNIZER primitive or else his face might have changed earlier. The smile, when it came, was lopsided and unpracticed. 'Nice to see you again Miss...?,' he said, his eyes flickering up and down as he scanned his personnel listing. Gracie knew he would find no matching name and the guard should have known better than to ask. Many senior operators did use their real names but it was protocol for her to offer it first, not for him to inquire. She had no time for pleasantries. 'Let's just leave it at Operator Macbeth shall we?' she said.

'As you wish miss,' the guard said. 'How can I help?' She gave him a list of maintenance tasks for the top level func-farm. It was a convincing schedule and very close to her last upgrade and servicing list. His reaction was telling. 'I'll signal the other floors to wave you through. I hadn't realized the urgency— '

She cut him short, 'No need to apologize,' she said, 'but you understand we're talking about a downtime disrupt if I don't get the installation cross-patches signed off.' She requested a standard toolkit which the guard quickly supplied. There was no need for her to elaborate on her story. She'd already dispensed enough techno jargon in her list to make the guard’s eyes glaze over. She walked rapidly to the ascender on the far side of the spot desk and stepped inside to go to the next floor. Fifteen further ascents later and she was at her destination.

Whatever cool she’d had at the outset of the journey up the towering Monitorium building had now given way to to an outbreak of nervous sweats. Her shirt blouse felt too tight, especially around the armpits, and her underwear felt damp and clingy. She removed her coat, realizing that she should have taken it off much earlier but hadn't because it had been it had helped cover the unofficial clothes she was wearing. Instead of making excuses she approached the spot desk and requested a fresh uniform. The seal pack was dispensed almost as soon as she’d asked and she tucked it under her left arm. With her coat in her left hand she could entered the changing facility using its palm bio scan without breaking stride.

She waited until she had changed to check the pip trackers on her watch. There was no point in making herself feel even more nervous than she already was. The change of clothing did help make her feel a little more comfortable and her panic sweats had subsided. She palm-locked the locker where she’d put her coat then checked the pips to see if Hollington and Rowditch had given her the all clear. When only one was showing she wasn't surprised. She’d expected to witness the outcome of Hollington’s efforts before he activated his tracker anyway. She walked to the vanity station to give herself a little pep talk whilst she waited but didn't get time to say anything as, as soon as she reached it, the lights went out. In the darkness she could see her watch was now showing two green pips.

Gracie didn't need her sensorimotor activated SCHEMATIC overlay to know what to do and where to go next. The reflex action was half-forgotten and, as she was learning, unnecessary as her memory could serve equally well. She’d seen the plan of the changing facility many weeks back along with half a dozen other printed schemas. She’d memorized the blocks, noted the connecting routes and learned how to imagine herself overcoming what obstacles might be in her way.

She wasn't a slim woman, so the climb onto the only toilet in the changing facility and from there into the ventilation space above it wasn't easy. Her passage was made more difficult because she was working in the dark except for the standard headlamp she’d strapped on from the toolkit the spot guard had given her.

When she emerged from the up shaft and into the executive washroom she felt relieved. The plans of the Monitorium building held by Dechip were blank for everything above the one hundred and sixtieth floor. She could have exited her short climb up in the middle of a room full of people or in a busy corridor or a domicile like a living room or a bedroom. How many worked in this, the most remote and privileged of places, she had no idea. Certainly she had never been here or had even come close to visiting it. Not once had she been invited to any executive functions and she knew no one who had. Thankfully, all security observation feeds relied on AMBAP and Gracie’s amalgamation background processor was no longer live. If it had been, that one feed would have been enough to trigger an alarm once her whereabouts had been calculated with pinpoint accuracy from what she was seeing.

She hadn't been surprised that the lighting was still working on this floor. What did surprise her, as she sneaked to peer and see outside the washroom and what lay beyond, was that there was no one here. Neither, she discovered as she made her way to each of the areas on the rest of the floor, was there anyone anywhere else. With an open-plan design the space was mostly taken up by interchangeable func-farm units. She recognized them as the kind which were designed for satellites and orbital stations. They needed zero maintenance and could be installed or swapped in and out by a low-level robot handler. Some furniture was scattered around — the odd workstation, a chair here, a table there — and the washroom testified to the fact that the floor had once served as a space for people to inhabit. Whatever its original design, it served that function no longer. When she took the ascender to the next floor she found the same. Fearing her team had made its breach of the HQ for nothing, she looked for the next ascender. There was none. Instead there was a spiral staircase which Gracie recognized as an auto rotator. Her hopes rose again. The reports had to be correct, the Chief Codemaster could be nowhere but at the top of those stairs.

Except that he wasn't.

The topmost floor of the Monitorium HQ, as she was spun upwards and emerged at the end of the auto rotating staircase, was also devoid of people. Though more domiciliary in nature with spaces like a kitchen, a dining block and a lounge area, the Chief Codemaster’s home appeared more like an exhibit piece for what a family habitat should be than a real living space. There were no personal touches, nothing to relieve the eye from the uniformly painted walls, plain carpeting and functional brown and black fittings. Someone might have lived here at one time but the current occupier was either an infrequent visitor or else their handybots were meticulous in their tidying routines.

It was a puzzle which was solved when Gracie came to the last of the three bedrooms in the only corner of the floor she had yet to check. ‘Derby!’ she said, forgetting all her assassination training in an instant. ‘You’re in charge of all this?’

Derby was sitting upright in a king-sized bed fit for a president. He had a look on his face like a child who’d just been caught stealing candy from a jar. ‘It’s not what you think,’ he said. ‘I was just trying it out. I’m sorry but I kind of piggybacked on your mission. Call it supervision if you like.’

‘You can cut out the pretence that you’re one of the leaders,’ Gracie said, trying to find a position in the room from where she could get a tactical advantage. ‘I already know that you’re a fake.’

Derby swiveled off the bed. Gracie watched him like a hawk, waiting for him to pull a weapon or make a darting move towards her. ‘The leadership team structure is more sophisticated than anyone knows,’ he said. ‘We have duplications and redundancies for almost every role.’ He placated her using a calming motion with his hand. ‘Listen, there’s something you must see. It's going to shake you up a bit and the smell might make you wretch but it explains why we've never heard back from anyone who's been on this mission before. Why no one has ever succeeded you might say.’

Gracie was momentarily paralyzed into inaction. If she trusted Derby and allowed herself to be mesmerized again by his charming personality she would lose any advantage or resolve she had to carry out her mission. On the other hand what he was saying sounded earnest and he’d yet to pull a gun or knife or make any threatening move.

‘It’s in the bathroom,’ he said, ‘and don’t worry, this entire floor is TSR shielded.’ He led the way. She kept her distance as he turned his back to her, still half-expecting a sudden move or perhaps some guards to come rushing through the door to protect their leader. When she saw the half-rotted decaying body sitting in the shower chair all her doubts about Derby's honesty were erased. She covered her mouth and nose by pulling up the neck of her maintenance uniform.

‘He's probably been here for years. The images we see of him today are just an AI avatar of course,’ Derby explained. ‘Might have all started out of vanity or laziness, then he just died and the avatar kept going.’

Gracie felt numb. All their efforts have been for nothing. An avatar AI could be spawned from anywhere, it couldn't be killed. The Programmerat was a self-promoting and perpetuating digital blight on humanity which could never be stopped. She had a vision of it continuing to dehumanise the human race until people no longer had any real, physical control over what they did and how they interacted with the world and other people. Soon no one would be able to tell what was real and what was not. Falsely rendered views and increasing automation would put an end to all social interaction — or fill it with so many chip-generated experiences that it would become impossible to tell reality from unreality. “I guess we might as well die too then,” she said. “Give up, I mean.”

‘Not really,’ Derby said, turning to face her. He put his hands on either side of her face. They were warm on her cheeks. ‘Don't you see? It's what the others who came here saw too. Me and you, us — we’re free, we made it! This technology will go nowhere because it’s not drive by a human heart. Now all we have to do is encourage others to join us. It's the analogs who run this world, not the codemasters. Anyone who doesn't believe that — well, all they have to do is to set out to assassinate the Chief Codemaster then they will know the truth too. ‘Together Rosie, we can do it together!’

Gracie felt as though a huge burden had been lifted from her shoulders. She didn’t have to murder anyone or blow up a building or cause chaos. She was just the latest in a long line of people who had woken up to what being alive was really about. Derby’s hands clasping her face would be the first memory of that new life. She smiled. ‘My name’s Gracie,’ she said. ‘Gracie Gyles.’

 

 

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