September 15, 2035
The shipwreck, the docks, the man at the fireplace with his lost dog — all of those were left behind. There were only the ruins, an outpost or a castle once upon a time, and the fading sunlight of an autumn eve. At a pedestal amidst fallen debris, a spyglass on a tripod was fixed on the horizon. Through its singular eye, one could barely see the island: walls rising from its craggy outline and, in the middle, a tree, alive and writhing, yet pitch-black and devoid of leaves.
The kitchen flooded with sunlight.
“Time to wake up, Kurt,” a man in his seventies, dressed in a tawny brown three-piece suit, said chirpily. An outfit distinctly out of place in these parts of the country, even in this time. He pulled up the remaining shades, walked to the coffee machine, and turned it on.
“I’m sorry you had to sleep in here. Had I known you were coming in last night already, I would’ve had Kaarlo give you the key to your house, or at least arrange a hotel room.”
The man sleeping on the kitchen couch muttered in agreement.
“No bother. I like travelling at nighttime. Less traffic. Lower chances of running into those Institute guys. Besides, I’m used to sleeping rough.”
He was in his fifties, clean-shaven and fit for his age, his mouth curving upward into a slight, grunting smile.
“Have some coffee and meet me at the reception. Samm’s there welcoming today’s patients and their parents. We’ll get your security clearance sorted out and we can get to work. Kaarlo will show you the ropes.”
Kurt got up from the sofa, punched a black coffee into the machine’s dials, and started tying his bootlaces. He had been working in cybersecurity for the past decade, for a small multinational corporation. Those years had burnt him out: having to create governmental backdoors for all the adware they were pushing, and being a punching bag for pushing back.
When he had gotten the call from Henri, an industrial hotshot from his hometown, offering him a job, he didn’t pause to wonder how or why he was contacting him. He had simply accepted, on the spot. He finished his coffee.
The office building was located in a quiet suburban area, connected to a garage of a former municipal depot that now served as a pit stop for Henri’s fleet of trucks. The corridors of the one-story building were as plain and old-fashioned as the kitchen. There were still personal offices, all arranged into two neat long corridors connected by the main lobby. There had once been names on all the offices; now all that was left were empty tag holders and open doors leading to empty rooms. It had been quite obvious already last night that not many people worked here.
Why Henri wanted to onboard Kurt in this half-abandoned office instead of Warén Industries’ downtown HQ was anybody’s guess.
“Samm’s already in the lab,” Henri said, waiting for him in the lobby. “Here’s your keycard. Try it on the door to see if it works.”
Kurt took the keycard from Henri and swiped it on the magnetic lock attached to the wall. He stared at the retinal scanner. The glass door clicked, and Kurt pulled it open.
“This way?”
“Yes. Down the corridor and into the closet.”
Kurt glanced at Henri and started walking down another corridor, similar to the one leading to the kitchen. At the end of the hallway was an open closet, filled with cleaning equipment and office supplies.
“What’s in here, some gear you want me to inspect?”
“Not exactly. Just stay in the back.”
Kurt eyed the closet walls suspiciously, looking for another hidden exit from the room. Henri followed Kurt into the closet and closed the door. He flipped out his phone, and after a few taps, a sturdy inner metallic door slid shut between them and the closet door.
“Down we go.”
The pair emerged from the hidden elevator into a corridor not too dissimilar to the ones above — except this time around, all the doors were closed and armed with electronic locks and blinking red lights.
“This way,” Henri said, placing emphasis on the first syllable.
Kurt had taken Henri for a no-nonsense business magnate, but right now he seemed more like a wry fox. Whatever was behind these doors was more important to him than supplying bleeding-edge tech to the rest of Europe.
Henri urged Kurt to try his card on one of the doors. Kurt complied, and yet another door clicked open.
They entered a small room, not much larger than the closet they had ridden down in. There was a table with various displays and controls, and what was probably a one-way mirror into a larger room. Henri closed the door behind them and pressed a button on one of the consoles.
“All set here,” Henri exclaimed into a microphone he had picked up from the table.
A sturdily built, middle-aged Middle Eastern woman wearing a headset and a lab coat looked at them through the glass. She was scrutinizing her own reflection. She raised her thumb and turned around to a child of around ten years old, her head shaved, sitting in a hospital gown on a lightweight hospital bed. There was a ’90s cartoon playing on a giant display and a dominating contraption of wires and pipes, something that looked like a fusion reactor, built right into the wall.
“I know this is scary, but I want you to be a brave girl. We’ll have you feeling better in no time,” Samm said gently to the child.
“I’m not scared,” the girl insisted.
“Good. Now, this will sting a bit.”
She pushed a needle connected to a cannula into the girl’s wrist.
“Please, lie down. Once I turn this valve here, you’ll fall asleep.”
“Will I dream?”
Samm smiled. The girl lay down, and Samm opened the valve connecting the cannula to whatever drugs were hanging in the plastic bags above the bed. The girl slipped into unconsciousness.
“We’re all good here,” Samm said into the mouthpiece of her headset.
“Acknowledged,” Henri replied, taking a few glances at the displays showing various statistics Kurt couldn’t make heads or tails of. “Looks like we’re all set.”
He put down the microphone.
“Okay, Kurt. What I need you to do is keep your eyes on that display and tell me immediately if the graph there goes above or below the horizontal lines.”
“Uh, sure. Mind telling me what this is about?”
“Just watch the graph, please.”
In the larger room, Samm had opened what looked like a circular safe door in the giant apparatus. Vapour came pouring out, making the room look like a walk-in freezer. She pulled a gurney out of the safe door, its legs flipping out as it slid free. Now the room looked like a morgue.
Kurt was somewhat intrigued by the scene unfolding on the other side of the glass, but kept his eyes fixed on the graph. This seemed like busywork. After quitting field duties, he had been designing security systems for years, and he knew that whatever this graph was, it already had automated alerts if values went outside the given parameters.
Kurt tapped the edge of the console and pulled up a secondary diagnostic. Seemingly no alarms were tied to the graph.
“Listen, Henri, whatever medical procedure’s going on out there isn’t really my expertise, but there’s something that is, and I wanted to ask you about it.”
“Go ahead,” Henri said, not displeased by the interruption.
“Last night I saw two guys sitting in a black van on the other side of the road, observing the building. They didn’t seem like they were with the Institute.”
“Ah, those are Al-Wasal. A couple of local gang-banger youths, immigrant kids. Good kids. I’ve hired them to keep an eye out. Give them something to do.”
“And that’s your security?”
“Well, we have you now too, don’t we?”
Meanwhile, Samm had disconnected the catheter and rolled the child to the gurney of the giant machine. The mechanism was humming and vibrating; you could hear it even through the soundproofed glass and wall. She slid the child into the device and closed the safe hatch, turning a big metallic handle and apparently locking the unconscious child inside. Or Kurt hoped she was unconscious. Being awake inside that machine would make an MRI feel like a Sunday stroll through an open meadow.
“Okay, handing it over to you guys now. I’m going to see the rest of our patients,” Samm’s voice came through the speakers.
“Acknowledged. We’ll take it from here,” Henri said into the microphone, watching Samm disappear through a door into the corridor. He then turned his eyes to the displays and pressed a few buttons, adjusting them to what was apparently to his liking.
“Sorry for all of this. We’re running quite a tight schedule today. I guess I should explain what you just witnessed. In the future, that device will be used for space travel.”
Kurt’s heart sank. From the frying pan into the fire, he thought.
“And you’re experimenting on children?” Kurt asked, without turning his head toward Henri. For better or worse, he hadn’t signed any contracts yet.
“No,” Henri said sternly. “We’re curing cancer. Space travel will be an added bonus.”
Kurt cast a suspicious glance at the tycoon.
“And a smokescreen,” Henri continued. “The Institute doesn’t take kindly to private medical research these days.”
The graph on Kurt’s screen spiked.
“It’s out of bounds.”
An alarm sounded. Then another. And another.
“Fuck,” Henri shouted — an exclamation Kurt had never expected to hear from someone with Henri’s sartorial preferences.
“Okay, we have a problem here.”
He ran some commands on one of the terminals, and the graph returned within its original corral of parallel lines, quieting the alarms. He flipped to a screen showing feeds from multiple security cameras.
“We’ve been breached.”
Kurt took a look at the display. Most of the little windows were static tableaus of office corridors and the depot courtyard, but in one of the feeds three armed men in black military gear were working on the lock of the lobby door leading to the disguised elevator.
“These guys know what they’re doing.”
The view from the lobby went static as the armed men moved to a different camera, securing offices one by one.
“Are we secure here?”
“In theory, but I’m getting the feeling that’s not enough.”
“This was something you hadn’t planned for, wasn’t it?”
“Well, we have you now. Let’s get Samm and figure this one out.”
Henri ran a few more commands, locking the terminals, and waved Kurt toward the door.
Samm was in the middle of a room lined with hospital beds, playing with two children, both shaven and around the age of ten. The carpeted floor was covered with building blocks, toy cars, and action figures.
“Get the children. We need to go to Kaarlo.”
“Why? What’s going on?” Samm stood up from the floor, nodding to Kurt. Kurt nodded back. The children kept their focus on re-enacting some imaginary battle with the toys.
“There are some commando types upstairs trying to get down here.”
“We need to either hunker down or bail out,” Kurt said, making his introductions to Samm.
“What commando types? Like hell we’re bailing. We’re not going to leave Christie alone in there. You go get Kaarlo, and I’ll stay here with the kids.”
“You heard the lady. Let’s go, Kurt.”
This time they went through three doors, two of them armored, and ended up in a spacious underground garage.
Two semi-truck tractors stood in the middle of the garage, with various mechanical equipment spread around them and hung on the walls. Another man in his seventies — large, seemingly strong for his age, with a sparse gray beard — was wearing work clothes and hunching over a display attached to one of the tool carts.
“So, you finally got my replacement. And looks like you brought some extras in tow, too,” Kaarlo shouted from the other end of the garage.
“Yeah, I needed to upgrade the old model!” Henri replied, in a tone not exactly fitting the situation.
Kaarlo wiped his hands on a rag lying on the cart, took a swig from a can of beer next to it, and came forward to greet the pair.
“Nice to meet you again,” Kaarlo said, giving Kurt a firm handshake, driven home with a heartfelt smile. “I take it you slept well?”
“Like a log, but should we go straight to the issue at hand? I don’t know how long the security here will hold.”
“By the looks of it, not many minutes. I guess we have two options: either we fight or we fly. And Samm’s probably already made the decision for you. Us bachelors don’t really have much say about it.”
“What kind of defensive capabilities do we have?” Kurt asked, looking around the garage.
“All we have are small arms in the cabinet over there, and whatever we’ve been installing on our trucks.”
Kurt had heard rumors that truckers were hiding mounted weaponry under their hoods to deter whatever bandits or militias the Institute and governments in neighboring countries let roam wild, but he had never given it much thought. The world was going down the drain fast, but it wasn’t all Mad Max yet.
“There are only three of them right now,” Kaarlo continued. “I bet we could take them easy.”
“I don’t know. They look more professional than us. Kurt excluded,” Henri said, nodding Kurt’s way. “Besides, we don’t have any rifles.”
“We have the shipment from OmniCore.”
Kurt liked these people. They seemed to have their hearts in the right place and an attitude to match.
They quickly formulated a plan. Kaarlo would unload a chaingun from the OmniCore shipment, attach it to some truck batteries, and bolt it to the floor of the corridor, giving whoever was coming their way an unpleasant surprise. There was no time to create an autofire mechanism, so Kaarlo would have to operate the makeshift turret himself. Meanwhile, Henri and Kurt would pick up sidearms and board one of the tractors, take the truck elevator up to the hangar, and make sure there weren’t reinforcements waiting.
Soon, Kurt was piloting a purring semi-tractor rising above the garage floor. It had been a while since he had commanded a rig of this size — complete with armaments, no less.
The garage ceiling opened, giving way to the hangar Kurt had observed looming above the office building. No sooner were they fully on ground level than the hangar door opened.
“Let’s go. I’ll handle the gate from here,” Henri said, riding shotgun and fiddling with his phone.
Kurt pressed the accelerator softly, and the tractor crept out of the hangar into the sunlit courtyard littered with crates, pallets, and spools of cable. As soon as they were outside and turning toward the gate, Kurt noticed the swarm. It hovered over the building, consisting of about as many drones as a New Year’s display.
The swarm noticed the truck too; one drone separated from it and started following them.
“Any ideas?” Kurt asked.
“Yes. And one of them is right there under your left stalk. Take us out of the gate and around the block. We’ll engage the swarm at the office front door.”
Kurt did as he was told, accelerating slightly as they approached the gate leading to the end of a cul-de-sac lined with hawthorn hedges and quaint single-family houses. Henri opened the gate using his phone.
“Move slow. I don’t think they’re expecting us to fight them.”
Again, Kurt complied, taking his time navigating out of the depot yard and onto the main street. After two turns, they were approaching the office entrance. The entire swarm was now above them, alerted to a possible threat, the buzzing rising over the hum of the engine.
“Damn, this is going to get loud. But let’s get to it.”
Kurt looked to his left, locating a group of buttons labeled OmniCore Sentry Gun. He pressed Engage, and a 3D grid appeared on one of the dashboard displays, showing LiDAR-mapped wireframes of their surroundings. Multiple points representing drones flew to and fro around them.
Henri pressed a few buttons next to the display, locking the system onto the drones.
“Stop right here and let it work its magic,” Henri advised.
Kurt nodded as the air filled with a whirring sound and drones dropped from the sky like gigantic dead flies, one after another. A few of them veered toward the truck, their barrels blazing. Kurt instinctively ducked behind the dashboard, but the truck's windshield was heavily armored. Through the mayhem, he noticed the Al-Wasal van parked by the entrance. The gangsters were nowhere to be seen.
Dozens of dead or dying drone husks were now spread across the street and neighbouring yards. The remaining drones regrouped and fled toward the nearby woods.
“Should we give chase?” Kurt asked, thoroughly impressed by the truck’s offensive capabilities.
“Negative. Let’s check on Kaarlo and keep the entrance guarded.”
They left the truck running and disembarked with their pistols drawn, the sentry gun set on overwatch. At least no drone would creep up on them. Henri sought cover near the main doors and started calling someone. Meanwhile, Kurt approached the Al-Wasal van and found the guards dead, probably strangled, in the back.
“Yeah, they were professionals,” he muttered, looking at the corpses of the two teenagers. Kurt slammed the van door shut, holstered his sidearm, and picked up the remains of a drone from the street.
It was slick, made of stainless steel and painted black, equipped with state-of-the-art sensors and what looked like two small-caliber pistol barrels. In its unpainted, shining belly — ripped open by sentry-gun fire — was a small machinery engraving depicting an octagonal labyrinth, with a leafless tree at its center.
“Kurt!” Henri shouted, sounding distraught. “Kaarlo’s not picking up, and Samm says he might’ve been wounded!”
Kurt sprinted to Henri, redrawing his gun.
“Did he manage to stop the intruders?”
“Yes, I think so. But let’s be careful.”
They went back inside, retracing their route to the closet. The glass door was unlocked; the steel door of the elevator had been cut wide open. Henri dispatched the elevator back to the ground floor. It was filled with blood and what seemed to be the remains of one of the commandos. Kaarlo’s rig had worked above expectations.
They entered the elevator, trying not to step on too much blood or too many body parts. Downstairs, the scene was as ugly as in the elevator. Gore and entrails were splattered across the corridor walls and carpet, the bulk of the assailants’ bodies almost vaporized. Only their assault rifles and the choicest remnants of their corpses marked the spots where they had fallen. Next to the jerry-rigged turret, surrounded by empty shell casings, Kaarlo lay on the floor, Samm kneeling over him.
“Is he alive?” Henri cried.
“Barely. He’s got a pulse, but it’s fading.”
It looked like Kaarlo had been shot in the neck while activating his weaponry. He was unconscious and bleeding badly as Samm tried to tourniquet his wound.
“Can you save him?” Henri pleaded.
“Not happening. We’d need a full-blown ICU staff here,” Samm retorted, still trying to tend to Kaarlo’s injuries.
“We have the Chamber, damn it!” Henri raised his voice above the hum and vibration emanating from the adjacent room.
“And Christie’s in there, and—”
“We abort and deal with her later.”
“We have two other kids waiting, and we’re already behind schedule. Listen—”
“Fuck the schedule.”
“No, we won’t fuck the schedule. If we put Kaarlo in now, he’s going to be in there for Allah knows how long. And our kids don’t have that long.”
“Fuck,” Henri said, kneeling next to the dying mechanic, tears forming in his eyes. “The ‘old model’ was supposed to be just a joke.”
With those words, Kaarlo was gone.
Henri gathered himself quickly and stood up.
“You know, Kurt, we go way back. Way further than anyone realizes.”
Unsure how to respond, Kurt remained silent.
“This was all my fault. I should’ve been better prepared for something like this to happen,” Henri muttered.
“Well, you have me now, don’t you?”
“No rest for the wicked. Someone’s bound to have called the cops by now, and they’re all on the Institute’s payroll.”
“Those drones were sent from somewhere nearby. We could still catch them.”
“We can worry about who did this later — the hows and the whys. Right now we need to clean this mess up — quickly. You go clean up the drones and get that truck back down here. I’ll handle things here. And call headquarters for some extra hands.”
“I’m on it, boss,” Kurt said, starting toward the elevator.
“Hey, Kurt — before I forget. Here’s the key to your house.”
Henri tossed a set of keys to Kurt, and he caught them confidently. He examined the keys and the keychain with an address label attached.
“But this is—” Kurt began.
“Yes,” Henri said, smiling through tearful eyes. “Welcome home, Kurt.”
Lasse Rintakumpu
Trucker 2056 designer and developer