A Dream Of Locomotives

It was beautiful. In the hour or so of afterburn I had perfect clarity, pure purpose. Plans scrolled through my head fully-formed, strategies, moves. But I lacked the software to use them. They were just pretty patterns, and I wasted them in panic.

The only comfort was that MALLARD probably hadn't done much better. In the first few minutes it would still have thought it was me, blinded by informational overload as it caromed through the Bell-Tel comsat and vanished. I knew what its plans had been, in that last moment before it fled the dying girl's body, but I didn't know how long it would take to find a hiding place and get its act together. I did know that, as soon as it did, it would start to look for me.

Ballinger had thought he'd found a clever solution. He hadn't been trying to kill me when he put the burner on me. He had been trying to force me to work, to drive me towards the only calm area amongst all the noise, the breather's self-image, a fountain that made the sound of a train. His briefing must have been uncommonly good, but he was going to die anyway, so why not? Pick MALLARD or die. Clever Ballinger. So clever, he'd wound up being blown to bits.

Flying window glass had cut my cheek, my knees were grazed where I'd been dropped on the pavement. I stopped off at a chemist's and bought micropore and skinsub and a half-hearted attempt at disguise, intending to stop off at the flat, repair the damage, try and work out what to do next.

I can't actually believe I did what I did next. I walked down through Hornsey to Turnpike Lane and then down Green Lanes, in plain view of all the traffic cameras. I wasn't thinking straight, but it was still a fantastically stupid thing to do.

Because, when I was still only halfway down Green Lanes, I saw a glow in the distance, and fire engines parked all over the road, and I knew MALLARD had finally got its act together.

Almost the whole block of shops and the flats above them was burning. A crowd had formed on the other side of the street and I edged my way in among them, wondering how MALLARD had done it. Some huge power surge into just one building? Just one flat? I heard someone say there were people still trapped in some of the flats. I stood there with the heat painting my face, watching the wall of smoke and flame where the kebab shop had been.

If MALLARD had somehow managed to make contact with one of the power companies, it would have been watching, waiting for something to indicate power use in the flat. Then...bang. Fuseboxes blown through the wall by the force of the energy going through them. A lot of the shops in this block were fast-food places, full of frying oil. They must have gone up like torches once the fire caught hold. I couldn't remember if Rixi had given me her key back or not.

I couldn't get a bus; they're all fitted with cameras, linked to a central control. Ditto for the Tube. MALLARD would be watching, if it hadn't already seen me. If it hadn't, it couldn't be sure I was dead until the autopsy report on the body taken from my flat went into some computer somewhere.

If it had seen me, on the way from Alexandra Palace to here, I couldn't even get a taxi. They all have locator beacons, in case they're stolen or hijacked. MALLARD would subvert the traffic control computers at Hendon, engineer a huge accident with me at its heart. So I walked, sticking to the sidestreets, away from the main roads and their cameras.

And I walked in the wrong direction. Hard to believe one man can be quite so stupid quite so much of the time. I wanted to be among people, to be anonymous. And instead, skulking from one sidestreet to the next, always keeping out of camera shot, I went where the chances of MALLARD finding me are quite huge. I think the breather will probably have been counting on me doing just that.

It has to kill me. Everyone but me thinks it's gone, killed by its own booby-trapped body and blown apart in the explosion. It can't risk the possibility that I'll somehow get in contact with someone who can hunt it down and erase it. It wants to live, just as much as I do, so it has to kill me.

Where would it stop, though? It isn't troubled by qualms or moral considerations; this is just one more problem to be solved with the tools at hand. If it managed to get into a missile control computer somewhere, would there be a surgical strike? A neat kiloton over Central London? It wouldn't even need an exact fix on me for that, just an approximate position.

The phone started to ring at half past nine this evening. I presume that was when the autopsy on whoever was taken out of my flat was completed. It rings every eight minutes; you can set your watch by it. All the phones in the hotel are ringing. The telephone engineers have been twice, but they can't find anything wrong with the system.

More wasted time. Now it knows I'm not dead, it's actively looking for me. It's gone back through my memories and phoned all my friends, pretending to be me, asking questions in a voice so authentic they never knew they were talking to a monster. When that didn't produce any useful information, it started to ring every phone in Central London, on the off-chance that I'll still be so confused that I'll answer. I wonder what would happen if I did. Would the thing blow up in my hand?

Now every bus and Underground and traffic camera will be looking for me. They have facial recognition software that can pick an offender out of a football crowd. It's only a matter of time before MALLARD enlists the police in its search, dreaming up some felony gross enough to have them looking enthusiastically for me and then dropping a file into every police station computer in London.

But MALLARD has a flaw, if I can exploit it. It knows what I'll do in any given situation. But it's forgotten that I know what it would do. I know all the little tricks it's been using, and all the little tricks it's going to use in the future. And I think I have a chance.

It's very late, second night here. I have to move soon. There's a door down in the lobby that opens into a little alleyway behind the hotel. There's no CCTV camera there, nor in the sidestreet the alleyway leads onto. The hotel management, for the convenience of their guests, have put a copy of the London A To Z in every room, and consulting mine I've discovered that it should be possible, with some care, to cross the city entirely using its little-known byways. I can't go North because to do that I would have to cross Oxford Street, which has the highest density of CCTV and traffic cameras of any road in London. West -- just outside the hotel -- is Park Lane, and more cameras. South is Piccadilly. More cameras. East, though...

East is a delirium of little streets. If I can get across Regent Street and the Charing Cross Road without being seen B and if I time it right I know I can B I can cut North across High Holborn and through Bloomsbury and up into Camden and Kentish Town. The further out of the centre of London you go, the less cameras there are. I can parallel the Holloway Road up to Archway. Then East again and into Essex, out into the suburbs, and eventually out into the countryside. And once I'm in the countryside MALLARD won't be able to see me.

I can do this. I really can. All I have to do is take that first step.

If I turn off the room's lights, peek out from behind the curtains, I can see out across Park Lane and into Hyde Park, a great darkness spotted with squatter bonfires. The fast-food chains have closed for the night, theatregoers are all in bed, shabby tribes of homeless people wander the streets with bin-liners and scavenged plastic bags along paths only they know. It's a different London, a London of pimps and whores and crackheads and pushers and hardcore muggers and twilight Smithfield butchers, breakneck Post Office vans, all-night poker players, empty shopping streets lit sodium-yellow and watched over by the glass eyes of unsleeping machines, silent but for the barking of packs of feral dogs and the sound of some lost and lonely drunk vomiting in a shop doorway.

And, if you listen very very hard, the faraway two-tone of a train whistle as it punches into the night beyond this transformed place. Freedom.