The CRES code

Chapter Twenty Four - Elmton

     "It's somewhere in this general area," said Randall five days later. "As near as I can tell, anyway."

     They were standing in the middle of a large meadow. The long grass was wet from a shower that had stopped a few minutes before and water had seeped into their shoes, making their feet cold and camp. Even after more than a full week of waking up in this new world, that kind of minor discomfort was still taking a lot of getting used to. At least their clothes had stopped itching, the former businessman thought, although it still felt strange to be wearing clothes that hadn't been tailored to fit perfectly.

     A herd of cows was watching them curiously from the other side of the field and some of then had already begun to drift in their direction while contentedly chewing the cud. In another field, separated from the one they were standing in by a low hedgerow, a young man was guiding a large cart horse as it pulled a plough, turning the soil over in preparation for the winter frosts. He also glanced curiously at the hibernators whenever he could spare a moment from what he was doing. Above them, the clouds were dark and heavy. There was more rain in them, Loach thought. Another downpour could begin at any moment. Even now, there were a few cold drops of water in the air, being blown into their faces by the gusty wind. Loach turned up the collar of his coat and hunched his shoulders against the cold.

     He returned his attention to the matter at hand and looked around doubtfully. Beside him, Jane did the same. It looked like any other patch of countryside as far as either if them could tell. "What do you mean by 'this general area'?" asked the former gang boss.

     "Well, I'm pretty sure that the river we crossed back there was the river Avon," said Randall, looking back the way they'd come as if he could still see it through the trees that lined the southern horizon. "If it was, then that tributary that branched off from it was the Leam, unless the river network has changed completely over the past millennium, which isn't likely. Back in our time, rivers had remained in pretty much the same courses since the time of the Romans. If that's so, then we're about half way between where Kenilworth and Coventry used to be."

     "And no trace remains of either of those cities," pointed out Loach. "We could be twenty, thirty miles away from where you think we are."

     "If you want to be pessimistic."

     "I prefer to say realistic. There are no landmarks left from our time except the rivers, which may have moved. If there were the remains of a motorway somewhere in the area... I know the road itself will be gone but there might be a cleft cut out of a hillside where the road used to run, something like that. A feature of the landscape that would still be there after a thousand years."

     "Well, there isn't," Randall replied in a perfectly deadpan voice. "This is a very flat part of the country. Nevertheless, I believe that we are where I said we are."

     "And that's where this place is?" said Loach. "The place that can help us beat the machines?"

     "A thousand years ago, there was a hardware depot here," replied Randall. "It was a cover for a highly secret underground facility owned by my company. The purpose of the facility was to hack and eavesdrop on the communications satellites of our competitors."

     "You want to hack VIX," said Loach with a wide grin.

     "Something like that. He's on guard against any signal coming from this planet, probably putting it in a buffer while a non--sapient sub system screens it for yama666, something like that. I'm hoping he's not so vigilant about signals coming from elsewhere. Other machines in space, for instance. We use the facility to send yama666 to another machine up there somewhere. Doesn't matter if it's sapient or not. If it is, yama666 will bring it under our control. There may even be some of my own satellites still up there, in orbit. Long forgotten but still able to be reactivated. Once we have something in space under our control we tell it to send the virus to VIX, which will accept it all unsuspecting. VIX then passes it on to every other machine in the solar system. Or perhaps the first machine will be able to do it directly. Whatever."