But then behind him, beyond the bedroom door, Anna heard footsteps.
Professor Mallahide had forgotten his own warning: he’d spoken too loud, and now the counsellor – woken by the noise – was coming to see what was going on. There was a knock at the door.
‘Anna?’ said a voice from outside. ‘Anna? Are you all right in there?’
‘I’m fine!’ Anna called.
‘It’s not a dream, Anna,’ her father whispered. ‘But until I’m ready, it has to be a secret. Don’t worry.’ He smiled at her. ‘You’ll see me again.’ Then his face lost focus. He burst apart into nothingness. He vanished.
The door opened.
‘Are you OK, Anna?’ said the counsellor, oblivious to the strange patch of cloudiness in the air that briefly shimmered, then disappeared from sight. ‘I heard voices. Are you having trouble sleeping?’
‘I’m fine,’ said Anna after a moment. ‘Really. I’m fine.’
But she wasn’t fine. Not really. Not at all.
THE GATHERING SWARM
‘WHO IS IT?’ the voice from the intercom squawked. ‘Who’s there? What do you want?’
‘I’m from the council,’ Geoff Snedley replied. ‘I’m here about your pest problem?’
‘All right, all right,’ said Mrs de Winter, opening the door. ‘No need to tell the whole block about it. Come in before somebody sees you!’
Dutifully doing his best not to wrinkle his nose at the smell, Geoff followed the old lady in.
Mrs de Winter didn’t get out much. Also, and rather importantly, she had lost her sense of smell after a bad head cold some years before. Her flat stank – of bad air, stale food and loneliness. But she didn’t know. And Geoff, who had been to plenty of places just like this before, saw no reason to tell her.
‘So,’ he said. ‘What exactly is the problem again?’
‘Cockroaches,’ Mrs de Winter stated bluntly. ‘Little ’orrors are everywhere. The bathroom. The lounge. I woke to one waving its nasty long feelers at me over the top of the duvet the other day: must’ve been an inch long at least! And as for the kitchen, well . . .’
‘The kitchen,’ said Geoff. ‘That’s where you see them most?’
‘I’m a very clean person,’ said Mrs de Winter with great emphasis. ‘Just like I told that young lass on the phone yesterday. I’m very careful, me. Very . . . hygienic.’
‘I’m sure,’ said Geoff, still managing not to wrinkle his nose. ‘Through this way, was it?’ Unstrapping the tank of insecticide from his back, he followed her into the tiny room. Again, Geoff had seen hundreds of places just like it. Crater-like holes in the plaster on the wall. A damp patch in one corner. Carpet tiles sticky underfoot.
‘Very nice place you’ve got here,’ he lied. ‘Would you mind standing over there by the door, Mrs de Winter? I’m just going to shift this cooker of yours and see what we find.’
‘You’ll see!’ crowed the old woman. ‘It’ll be crawling with them. Crawling! Nasty brown bodies. Wriggling little legs!’
‘Well, if it is, we’ll be ready,’ said Geoff, patting his tank of insecticide with what enthusiasm he could muster. ‘Won’t we?’
Switching on his torch and angling it to get a good view, he took a deep breath, pulled the grease-covered cooker a few centimetres from the kitchen wall – and looked.
Nothing.
He’d taken Mrs de Winter at her word: if she’d seen cockroaches, then the place was probably riddled with them. But nothing was there. Nothing in the cupboards, either.
‘Hmmm,’ he said. ‘Shall we try the bathroom?’
While the old woman prattled on around him, he carefully pulled back one of the panels on the side of the bath. Another prime spot – but the same non-result.
The bedroom? Nothing. The lounge? Filthy like the rest of the flat, but still nothing.
‘Well,’ said Mrs de Winter in fury, ‘if that isn’t just bloody typical. I wait in all week for one of you lot to come by. And what happens when you get here? They’re hiding. Yes! They heard you coming and hid! That’s what they’re doing, the little beasts!’
Leaning down, Geoff ran one gloved finger along a patch of the baseboard. The finger came away coated in dust, old hair and – he noticed – the tiny black dots of cockroach droppings. He frowned.
They’d been here. No doubt about that. And once roaches were in a place, they didn’t leave unless you made them: he’d been an exterminator for six years; he knew that much. Stranger still, this was the third false alarm he’d encountered that morning. All over the place, it seemed, people were finding their cockroach problems had miraculously cleared up before he’d arrived. Much more of this and he’d be out of a job.
Where were they? Where had all London’s cockroaches gone? What was going on?
In Finsbury Park, in North London, Mr Pinkerton sat on a bench with his bag of bread clutched in his hand. He’d been waiting there for nearly an hour already, but the pigeons hadn’t come. He’d been told often enough that they were vermin, that he shouldn’t feed them, but since his wife had passed away he had nobody else to talk to, and now listening to the delighted bubbling noise the pigeons made when he threw them the bread had become the highlight of his whole day.
But they weren’t there. They didn’t come, even when he waited. In fact, there was no sign of them anywhere. The reason for this was simple: there were no longer any pigeons left in the park.
Mr Pinkerton could sit there all day if he chose: there were no pigeons left in London. There were no squirrels either, of course. There were no mice and no rats: under London’s surface, in the miles of sewers built more than a hundred years before, the only sound was the movement of the water.
Imperceptibly – for now – London was starting to change.
Professor Mallahide needed to grow. He needed to increase himself – increase the size of the swarm of machines he had become. Until he did so, he could be confined in one place and was therefore vulnerable to attack or capture: his whole beautiful, transcendent experiment could be strangled at birth. This was not a possibility he was prepared to tolerate: hence the need to lie low and not reveal himself – except to Anna, of course – until he was strong enough.
He needed source material, raw ingredients for the nanobots to build more of themselves. He needed mass. It didn’t much matter where he got it. So to start with, he decided to take a few things that – he thought – wouldn’t be missed.
It wasn’t exactly like stealing or killing, he told himself. Each creature he took – each tiny life he claimed and each small body he converted into more of himself – was only borrowed, after all, not destroyed. On the contrary, he told himself: every single detail of his victims – every cell, every atom – was meticulously stored. His memory was now vastly expanded: its storage capacity had been multiplied by his transformation and was growing exponentially all the time, as the swarm did. So these weren’t ‘victims’ at all. They could be returned to life and their original form at any time he chose – and he would do so, he told himself, just as soon as there was enough of him to spare the mass. Of course he would. He wasn’t a killer. And (he told himself ) it was worth it.
Exulting, letting the wind currents play all the way through himself, Mallahide hung in the air over London.
For the last ten years of his life he’d been waiting to take this step – waiting to abandon the constrictions of his physical body at last. It was even better than he’d dreamed! He didn’t need to eat, or sleep, or go to the toilet; he felt no pain and he never got tired. But wonderful as it was, the thrill of being released at long last from everyday human weaknesses . . . well, that was only a part of it.
All the information, all the memory and sensation and feeling from every creature he’d taken, was all his to access when he wished. He knew what it was to fly like a bird. He knew the sensations of mice: the quivering, shivering, hyper-awareness that came with their speeded-up nervous system. And he now knew more about cockroaches than cockroac
hes did themselves: their movements, the exact consistency and construction of their armoured brown bodies – what it felt like to be one. Cockroaches, the professor had decided, were particularly fascinating . . .
Humans always went on about ‘the real world’. When Mallahide told them what he could offer them, he anticipated that many of them wouldn’t understand at first: they would be scared of leaving their bodies behind, scared of becoming like him because they’d think that things wouldn’t feel the same.
But that, of course, was where they were wrong. Of course they could make things feel the same for themselves – if they chose to. Mallahide’s own original body could be remade if he ever missed it: that was how he had managed to pay Anna his visit. His machines could replicate any of the body’s sensory mechanisms: taste, sight, hearing, even touch. But as well as the human senses, his machines could make better ones.
Already Mallahide was building on the knowledge he’d taken from the creatures he’d absorbed. Already his capabilities had developed far beyond those of ordinary humans. He could see in spectra beyond human comprehension, in colours that human beings didn’t even have names for. He could taste the world like a gourmet, his machines instantaneously registering not just exact chemical composition but the sensations of the chemicals interacting. He could hear everything in the city, switching through the frequencies at will, from the heartbeat of its smallest insects to the individual explosions of the petrol that powered the thunder of its traffic.
By leaving his human body behind, Mallahide hadn’t made himself artificial. He had made himself more real. The world was more real to him than it was for anybody else: he could sense more, feel more, touch more than anyone else alive.
But not for long. Soon, he hoped, there would be others . . .
‘And finally,’ said the announcer, ‘scientists are baffled by the thin grey haze that seems to have appeared over the London skyline. Just your typical overcast London weather, you say? Apparently not: meteorologists claim that according to their best information, the skies should be completely clear! Environmental campaigners are blaming the cloud squarely on one thing: pollution. More on this item after the break.’
‘That’s what we’re telling them?’ asked the prime minister.
‘It’s easy enough to believe, sir,’ said his press officer. ‘I think people will be convinced.’
‘They’d better be,’ said Mr Sinclair. ‘I mean, if the world actually found out the truth . . .’ He shuddered. Then he turned to face Professor Mallahide’s ex-assistant. ‘Right, Dr Belforth: I want you to tell me everything again, once more, slowly, from the top.’
Belforth, a slightly overweight twenty-five-year-old man whose prominent eyes and habit of talking out of one side of his mouth gave him an unfortunately goofy expression, took a deep breath.
‘It’s the machines,’ he said. ‘Mallahide’s nanobots. Somehow they must have escaped from the lab.’
‘Somehow,’ Mr Sinclair echoed, with heavy emphasis.
‘I don’t understand it, sir,’ said Belforth unhappily. ‘We took every precaution. The security systems were designed by Professor Mallahide himself—’
‘And we all know how well that worked out for him, don’t we?’ the prime minister replied.
Belforth bit his lip. ‘The news gets worse, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘The swarm is expanding at an exponential rate, exactly as it was programmed to do. We’re tracking the nanobots as best we can, but—’
‘All right,’ said the prime minister again, waving his hand. ‘Enough details: how do we stop this?’
‘That’s just it, sir,’ said Belforth – and bit his lip again.
‘Let me guess,’ said Mr Sinclair. ‘You don’t know.’
SENSITIVITY
A GAP IN Chris’s bedroom curtains had let through a beam of daylight that crossed the room and hit his pillow. Chris opened his eyes a crack, and it was just as if someone was hammering pokers into his skull.
Chris felt horrendous. His throat was dry, and there was a strange kind of throbbing in his head. At first he thought it was tinnitus, like he’d been listening to his headphones too loud. But there was another note to it, something darker and uglier, between a grind and a screech, on and on. He felt weird in his mind too: twitchy and stressed, for no reason he could see or understand.
The bracelet, of course, was still attached to his arm. The night before, Chris had actually broken one of his dad’s pairs of wire cutters on the damn thing . . .
There was a knock on the door. Chris burrowed himself under his duvet and groaned. It was his mother.
‘Morning!’ she said brightly. ‘Come on, you, it’s time to get up.’
‘Mum,’ he said from under his duvet, ‘I . . . don’t know. I think I’m sick with something.’
He heard her hesitate at the door. He knew what she was thinking: it was a weekday after all – she probably thought he was trying to get out of going to school. But she came over and felt his forehead.
‘Well, you don’t have a temperature,’ she told him. She gave him a long look. ‘Chris . . . you know, Mr Cunningham called this morning.’
‘Yeah? What did he want?’ Maybe he was saved. Maybe his headteacher had rung to say the school had been squashed flat by the monster the other night. Then he could stay in bed and—
‘He said that the school is open as normal today.’ His mother grinned as she saw Chris’s disappointment. ‘Kiddo,’ she announced, ‘if a giant monster appearing in the middle of London hasn’t stopped the world going about its business, then I think you can cope with a little headache. Come on, get yourself together.’
So that was how Chris had found himself back at school again. He still felt rotten, but that wasn’t going to save him from the school morning’s opening event, a brutal double dose of biology. Chris hated biology. Without lifting his eyes from the ground, he shuffled over to a desk. His bout of self-pity was abruptly interrupted when a shadow appeared in front of him. He looked up. To his surprise, he saw Anna Mallahide.
The counsellor had wanted to call the school to tell them Anna wasn’t coming and why, but Anna had refused. She didn’t want to stay in the apartment; she didn’t want special treatment. What Anna wanted was a friend.
‘You look kind of rough,’ she told Chris.
‘Weird weekend,’ he muttered back. If he’d asked Anna about hers, he might have got a surprise, but he didn’t. ‘What?’ he asked instead when she kept standing there in front of him.
‘Listen, I’m . . . sorry about the other day,’ Anna announced quickly. ‘I walked off without giving you a chance. That was rude of me. I apologize.’ She bit her lip.
Chris stared at her.
‘Ms Lucas said for today she’d want us all to get in pairs,’ Anna reminded him. ‘So . . . how about you and I forget last week and try the whole partner thing again?’
Chris blinked, then shrugged. ‘All right.’
‘All right,’ said Anna.
‘Today we’re going to start something new,’ Ms Lucas announced once the class had settled. ‘We’re going to do an experiment on live creatures. Naturally this means you’ve got to treat the subjects of the experiment with a bit of respect. These are living things, helping us to learn about the world – and if I see anyone being mean or cruel to them, there’s going to be trouble. Understood? Now, has everyone paired up?’
Chris and Anna exchanged a look. The fact that they were together again had not escaped the notice of other people in the room. At the desk beside them, Johnny Castle made a sort of contemptuous snorking noise through his nose. Gwen Hadlock – the other person Chris had, until recently, been trying hardest to impress – just smirked.
Chris sighed.
‘Everyone got their gloves on? All right,’ said Ms Lucas. ‘It’s time to introduce you to the animals we’ll be working with for the next two weeks. Boys and girls?’ She paused, grinned, and whipped the cloth off the rectangular glass tank on her desk. ‘Meet your n
ew friends, the earthworms.’
There was a groan of disgust from the class as they caught sight of the glass tank’s wriggling pink contents. Still grinning, Ms Lucas picked up the tank and began to take it around the desks.
‘Each pair gets to pick their own worm,’ she announced. ‘Pick ’em up gently. Come on, they’re not going to bite you!’ Ignoring the exaggerated cries of horror, she started going around the room, dispensing her charges.
When the tank got to Chris and Anna’s desk, Chris stared at the worms: their slithering segmented bodies, the livid pink of their saddles, the crumbs of black soil, and the way the worms tangled around each other. He gulped.
Letting out a short sigh, Anna – beside him – picked a worm out of the tank and deposited it on the small plate in front of them.
Johnny Castle, watching this, sniggered.
‘Now,’ said Ms Lucas, ‘what I want you all to do with your worms is very simple: I want you to take your rulers and measure them. I warn you, the worms aren’t going to stay still, so while one partner measures, the other partner is going to nudge the worm so that it lines up as straight as possible alongside the ruler. Gently, now,’ she repeated. ‘Try not to hurt them. In a moment I’m going to ask you all to give me your measurements, and we’re going to work out an average length over the whole class. Then I’ll take the worms back to their worm bin. We’ll keep measuring them every so often over the rest of the term and see how they’re progressing . . .’
While Ms Lucas continued to talk, Anna and Chris looked at each other.
‘You want to measure or nudge?’ asked Anna politely – almost as if she didn’t already know the answer.
‘I’ll, er, measure,’ said Chris – hoping that nobody overheard him.
‘Wuss,’ said Johnny delightedly.
Anna sucked her teeth but said nothing – just started gently encouraging the slithering, wriggling worm to lie alongside Chris’s ruler.
‘Any lengths yet, class?’
‘They keep changing, miss!’