Ice Black

By T.E. Mark

In 2419, the world is divided between humans and drones - synthetic beings indistinguishable from their human creators.
Drone corporations are more profitable and efficient. Their government is more stable and respected. There is no crime, and there is no poverty.
Humans, unable to compete, face a detestable inevitability – becoming a subservient underclass to the race of beings they created.
Peter Frost is an independent contractor – a corporate thief. He and his team have been commissioned by the human Directorate to steal something from the drones. Something vital to their plan for world supremacy.
ICE BLACK.
But before he can steal it, Frost must do two things. He must find out where it is, and he must find out what it is.

• Language: English
• Publisher: T.E. Mark
• Release date: Apr 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370390328

T.E. Mark

T. E. Mark is an Anglo-American Science Writer, Screenwriter and Editor. He has studied Architecture, Music and Literature in the UK and in the US and has been penning stories since childhood. His first novel, Fractured Horizons, set in the wonderful of Bath England, was written at the age of 12.Mark has written novels for young and adult readers and a selection of science articles for national and international magazines. He also writes and edits academic papers on a variety of subjects for universities, governmental and non-governmental organisations.Follow T. E. Mark at:temarkauthor.wordpress.commthomasmark.wordpress.comtemarkurbanscratch.wordpress.comContact T. E. Mark at: [e-mail].

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Text © TE Mark – 2018

http://temarkauthor.wordpress.com

Copyright © 2018 T.E. Mark

Cover Illustration by © Serge Najjar

Cover Design © Manoj Kumar Jalutharia 2018

First published in the United Kingdom, Canada and The USA in 2018

TE Mark LTD

Create Space

https://temarkauthor.wordpress.com

[e-mail]

Mark Thomas has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents act of 1998 to be the author of this work.

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Cover image by © Serge Najjar

Cover design by Manoj Kumar Jalutharia

www.fiverr.com/mkumarji

[e-mail]

The paper used in this Create Space book is made from wood grown in sustainable forests.

ISBN: 978-1986943260

ISBN-1986943267

FOR ERIN AND LUCY

CONTENTS

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

(7)

(8)

(9)

(10)

(11)

(12)

(13)

(14)

(15)

(16)

(17)

(18)

(19)

(20)

(21)

(22)

(23)

(24)

(25)

(26)

(27)

(28)

(29)

(30)

(31)

(32)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Our inventions of today will last beyond tomorrow.

For this reason, we must invent wisely.

(1)

The fall into the building’s security matrix, into the dark bottomless void, was more inconvenient and demeaning than worrisome. Peter had been here before. They all had.

It was the same mistake – the same wrong move after leaving the sub-level data vault with their prize. The same over confidence they had learned, over time, to avoid, but this time didn’t. They’d gotten sloppy.

An avoidable hazard with a price.

Sentec was another job. A suburban tech centre. A cold, granite grey building on the outskirts of Paris. The pay check, however, was glimmer. A vast sum for three weeks in the workshop and one on site.

He knew from the moment they’d reached the end of the service corridor and everything went wavy then dark what had happened – what was coming next.

Then came the cold sensation of falling.

‘Aren’t you going to ask us what we were after? Or did you get what you needed from the net’s neural probe?’

Perter, with his arms and legs in paralysis grips, made no attempt at veiling his hostility as he spoke to the mostly bald man with oversized glasses in a crisp blue suit. He met eyes with Maise to his left and Vicky across the table. Jeremy, to his right, appeared to be sleeping.

The room was arctic cold and austere. The points of light, pouring down from high above and transparent walls defied your senses leaving you no clear indication of the room’s dimensions. Peter, the consummate strategist, sat in one of the black webbed chairs circling the long conference table searching his surroundings – probing – analysing – surmising their opportunities for a way out.

The pinpoint LEDs, were like luminous streams, spreading out in wide swaths of brightness as they struck a surface.

Chilled air fell from the ceiling and the hum from the fresh air ventilators, buzzing like a cloud of distant mosquitoes, was just loud enough to be distracting. Two uniformed goons – military guards in black with hard ceramic faces, held tight at the only visible door.

They’d chosen the room well. An escape from here would be difficult.

Peter’s eyes continued searching. Giving up, at anything, simply wasn’t part of his nature.

‘Ah. Mr Frost.’

The man in his 50s, maybe 60, well-dressed – heavy set – grey wisps at his temples and at the back of his head, sat back on the sim-strut table. His suntanned smile was warm. His voice, less robotic than what he’d grown to expect from humans in 2419, was casual. Even… friendly.

At stage three, they were in a disorienting free-fall. No concept of time or space. The uniqueness of the security field, was in its ability to manipulate your senses with the intention of loosening your defences to the neural scan. There was no darkness, and they weren’t falling into some bottomless abyss. Moreover, it was the fear and vulnerability it induced. Just sufficient enough for the intended extraction. Only experienced skydivers were able to think clearly during free-fall. And few of those, if any, could pull it off while falling in total darkness.

But the nets were flawed, and more importantly, could be beaten.

What they lacked, to someone with experience, someone trained, wasn’t a plausible manifestation of a transient reality, it performed as it was intended. No. What it lacked was credibility.

Buildings, even in the 25th century, were rarely designed with bottomless volcanic tubes in their sub-level service corridors.

If one could overcome their senses, they could seal themselves off from the ingeniously invasive scan.

‘Ms Roberts.’

‘It’s Maise.’ The girl’s voice, was sharp – petulant. Her charcoal black hair dusted with silver streaks beneath her black hooded raincoat glimmered the room’s light points. A pretty girl by anyone’s measure, except for the attitude, in another life would have been a sought after item for the fashion world or Hollywood. ‘I dropped the Roberts part years ago. Dad was less than an ideal role model, you know?’ She nodded to the virtual screens projected in front of the man. Presumably from his glasses. ‘If you’re having trouble keeping your data updated, maybe we can work something out.’

She glanced at Peter and rolled her eyes.

One screen displayed a rotating colour image of the girl from two years earlier. Her hair was black and longer. Her eyes, amber then, were steel grey now. The other screens, overlapping, were filled with textual data. Ostensibly the 26-year-old’s life history.

The man continued scanning the streaming data.

‘I’m sure it’s there, Dorfmann.’ The jibe was a reference to a fictitious character used by a Sector One satirist and playwright who regularly portrayed politicians as narcissistic buffoons.

Like Peter, Maise was also scanning the room for an escape route while trying to work her arms and legs free of the grips.

The man smiled displaying no offense to her derision. The screens changed as he turned to the boy who looked like he’d just hopped off his surf or snow board.

There was an intense feeling of acceleration as the fall continued. For a fleeting moment, Peter lost concentration, another mistake, and thought of calling out to Maise who was at his left as they sprinted the length of the utility corridor once the alarms had sounded.

The n-scan found its way in and accessed his memories.

And at 93 petaflops, it was able to spin out what it calculated as an ideal scenario.

He was in his modest, mostly utilitarian Paris kitchen sitting at the table in his bathrobe. The full glass wall to the deck was bright. The flowers in colourful, terra cotta boxes, a gift bequeathed him by the former tenant when she moved out, were greeting the mid-morning sun, and the flat was summer warmed.

Maise was at the counter making fenzyne draped in a white towel from the waist to the floor, with another wrapped turban-like around her shoulder length hair. It was obvious she had just stepped from the shower.

The image grew fuzzy as she turned. He remembered focusing on her breasts and tried remembering if they’d slept together.

She approached the table with two rectangular mugs - both billowing fragrant steam.

Her smile was warm – sparkly. Hardly Maise in the morning. Or at any time of the day or night for that matter. This jabbed a spike, like an alarm, into his subconscious. The intrusive neural scans were clever, but… their designers had placed more emphasis on speed than collating accurate data.

She spoke as she sat.

‘So, what’s this gig at Sentec about? What are we after?’

He snapped his head and flooded his mind with random thoughts and images. Within seconds, Maise and the kitchen had dissolved into the blackness and he was again falling.

‘Mr Hays.’

Jeremy, with his long blonde hair curtaining his handsome, young face looked off into the distance. ‘You have the wrong guy pal.’ He slouched back in the chair. ‘I was just passing by when these folks asked for my help with some office furniture.’ His eyes widened. ‘It’s not like me to turn down people in need, you know?’

He turned to the man as the corners of his mouth curled into a grin.

They were now struck with the sensation of an updraft. Cool metallic smelling air was coming at them from below.

Peter and the others gazed into the darkness. But that’s all it was, darkness with no bottom and there was nothing to do but wait – wait for the operator to close the programme.

‘Ms Kim.’

The man they would later find to be a member of the human Directorate, a man by the name of Dominic Flach, addressed Vicky while scanning his projected screens, now holding Vicky Kim’s picture from an early arrest along with a wealth of background data.

‘I’m sorry. I’m really not allowed to speak with strangers.’ She gave him a dry look and yawned. ‘It’s an eastern custom. Nothing you’d be familiar with.’

Vicky held vile contempt for governments. There were two in 2419. The one the humans still clung to and the one governing the drone population. She found their duplicity and transparent attempts at sounding genuine abhorrent.

She squirmed in her chair against the numbing restraints. Her eyes were dark and her look indignant.

‘If your security matrix and neural-scans are so weak that you’re having to question us about our…’

‘Oh.’ He held up a hand. ‘I’m not here to question you, Ms Kim. And trust me…’ he held up the sparkly glass cylinder holding the micro data discs Peter had used when they were in the building’s lower vault.

‘Then what?’ she fired while glancing at the others, now aware that he had what they’d come for… or assumed they’d come for.

One of the things that made Peter the best at what he did was that he anticipated – thought several moves ahead. Stealing the corporation’s investment plans for the next quarter and keeping them in an easy to find tube while stashing what they were really after in a subcutaneous capsule in his forearm was something he’d learned early on. Now it was standard procedure.

Vicky squinted.

‘Ah! Then what indeed.’ He turned his eyes to Peter. ‘As the world has habitually drawn people together with diverse and often opposing interests, I am, at this time, odd as it may seem...’ he let out a breathy sigh. ‘How shall I put this? Hm. In need of your services.’

The end of the fall was as expected. They hit the cold, glass-block floor at the end of the corridor and everything was quiet and dark, and it seemed to each of them that the world had ended.

Blackness.

Cold, dark, black unconsciousness consumed them like a felt quilt but on the inside.

Peter was on a soft table – a gurney. Though he sensed brightness, it was a misty haze seen through a strong sedative and his tightly sealed lids.

He felt their hands as they searched him, and the warmth of the infrared light probe as it scanned every inch of his skin for microno-grams. Micron thick storage caps. Easy to hide. Almost impossible to find even with high tech equipment.

Following the search, they were given their clothes, then taken to a large room and placed in chairs with their arms and legs locked in the numbing grips.

The room was cavernous, utilitarian grey, and those pin points of light which sprinkled the room with luminous circles and elongated ellipses made it a challenge to your spatial perception.

‘Employ us?’ With suspicious eyes, still groggy from the aerosol applied sedative, Peter scanned the others who gave him cautioning looks. Maise, guardedly, shook her head and Vicky’s eyes were sceptical slits.

‘I trust by now,’ returned the man, ‘your employers at the Tiburon Corporation are aware of your failure.’ He fumbled with the transparent tube examining the miniature diskettes. Mr Flach looked down into Peter’s eyes. ‘A calculated risk in your profession, eh Mr Frost?’

‘Everything is fixable. Even with them.’ He focused on the glass phial. ‘If those are that important to them, they’ll simply hire someone else. Trust me.’

Mr Flach dropped the tube into his breast pocket and folded his arms. He sat on the table.

‘Can I ask you something Mr Frost?’

‘Why not?’ He struggled against the restraints. ‘You have us at a bit of a disadvantage. I don’t see a verbal protest carrying much weight.’

Flach chuckled and continued. It was odd how he seemed to be enjoying this level of engagement.

‘As you and your team obviously have no allegiance to your own kind, I’d like to…’

‘Hey! Hey-Hey-Hey! You can drop that allegiance shit. They were our kind when you granted them citizenship and were still manufacturing and selling the bastards. I can still remember the adverts:

We are brothers and sisters in every way that matters.

‘And now that they’ve grabbed control of their own corps and cut you out, they’re what, the enemy?’ He shrugged. ‘My enemy?’

Flach sighed and lifted from the table. He walked past the guards to the other side and leaned back facing Peter.

‘Let’s approach this differently, shall we?’

‘Yeah. Yeah… let’s do that.’ He rolled his eyes and continued working the grips trying to force the blood flow back into his hands and fingers.

Here Flach went into a dialogue about the escalating tensions between the humans and drones and how, at the present rate, the drones would outpace them technologically, administratively, and economically within 20 years. Conceivably less. And how the projections of the future saw them, in many ways, as the planet’s underclass.

Peter appeared bored. He’d heard all this before and never had a problem tuning it out. For various reasons, his business for one, he saw no real benefit in politics.

Flach went on. ‘Hell, our people are already buying over 30% of their large ticket items from drone manufacturers. Transports – refrigerators – most home electronics.’ He glanced at Jeremy who again had his eyes closed feigning sleep. ‘Office furnishings.’

Peter dropped his head. ‘Embarrassing. But to be honest, I don’t give a damn about your political or economic woes. Maybe this is something you should have considered when you were all revelling in the tremendous breakthrough of synthetic beings. But then, maybe all the money pouring in clouded your vision. Outweighed your concerns? Made you skip over that one obviously alarmist risk analysis?’

He chuckled and squinted over at Maise.

Dominic pulled off his glasses and blew into one of the lenses. ‘Tell me… Have you heard of Ice Black, Mr Frost?’

Peter made a condescending mouth noise. ‘Yeah, rumours here and there. A nick-name. The Drone Secretary General, or something?’

‘Hardly rumours.’

‘Wait,’ said Vicky from the end of the table. ‘You mean there is some chick walking around at their Command Authority who can actually communicate with their entire population at any given moment? Worldwide?’

This was a rare outburst for Vicky who typically coveted her words like others did their jewellery or dispensary notes.

‘Not just communicate, Ms Kim, but faced with some kind of emergency, something the Secretary General deems an emergency, she can send out an overriding command to every drone on the planet. A command that would supersede all other programming.’

Flach took in a deep breath, leaned back on the table and exhaled. He gripped the table with both hands.

They were all aware of what he was saying. The drones, now 35% of Earth’s population, depending on whose census you believed, hovering just below the agreed production limit, could, at the Secretary General’s command, turn on the humans. A service model gardener, maintenance technician, nanny or nail stylist would suddenly become a combat model. The war both sides were trying to avoid would presumably be over in days. And unless the humans did the unthinkable, violated the nuclear arms treaty, there could be only one outcome.

‘So, you see,’ continued Flach, ‘at this point, there can be no real competition between us. If things continue in this direction, and all evidence indicates it will, the robotic servants our predecessors created will indeed become the dominant species on the planet. And we…?’ He let out a breathy sigh. ‘Well….’ Again he pulled off his glasses and began wiping them with a tan chamois. ‘I’ll be honest. We need her or whatever it is that grants her this ability.’

Jeremy scrunched his face and caught Peter’s attention. ‘Hey man, are you buying into this? I mean… why is he even talking to us? I gave up my dreams of a career in politics sometime around the fourth grade.’

‘Really,’ joined Maise. ‘Because if you’re expecting us to…’

‘Your price, Mr Frost?’ He looked Peter directly in the eyes. ‘And the price for a job such as this, can indeed extend beyond an exchange of money.’

Peter knew, without question, what the man was alluding to and sat quietly, thinking. There was something else. Something much more important to him than money. And this man knew it. Which wasn’t a great shock. The governments knew everything about everyone. Every word or action from the time you were born or activated was recorded and stored. There were, of course ways around it, but… the