Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 28

We're all still breathing heavily, poised in anticipation as Mel fiddles with the interface of the digital lock, muttering to herself. Then all of a moment, the huge double doors disappear, sliding back silently into the walls. Vash and Ty bound forward into the room like puppies, haring around.

I take a few, unsteady steps forward, overwhelmed by the bright lights after all that sneaking in the dark.

"Oi! Get the lights off you maniacs!"

Mel piles after them, trying to get a handle on the situation. They are hysterical, giggling and squealing.

I try to take in the scene. It's maybe the most lux condo I've ever seen. A few of my parents' friends came close. But this is London, by the river, someplace they call Canary Wharf, and we're in a penthouse taking up the whole riverside quarter of the building roof.

A huge open-plan living space, designer furniture, artfully exposed brick walls, lighting and everything all controlled by dozens of hidden computers, distributed processing, all of which means that Ty and Priyanka can act like Disney witches turning everything on and off with their fingertips waggling and their best witch faces on, somehow interfacing with the systems by connecting their own implants to the WIFI.

Mel is furious. We must be flashing the whole top floor of this dark ass building like a beacon sending out morse code.

I hear the sound of roaring water, clouds of steam emerge from a room in the far corner, shrieking and giggling, "OH MY GOD!" Ty comes staggering out, the shower, "Jesus you've got to see it."

"GET OUT!" Priyanka shouts from within. I guess she already jumped in.

And I feel cold in my bones all of a sudden, realising that I've been so caught up in trying to survive I'd forgotten all the awful things that have happened, and Ty and Vash, their playfulness it all seems weirdly horrific all of a sudden.

I need to get away from them. Mel is laying into Ty, hissing in quietly controlled rage. Ty is doing puppy dog eyes. I slip out onto the terrace.

London. This part of London is somebody's used up old vision of a cutting edge future, it is the first time really I have been reminded of New York, skyscrapers everywhere, and the air thronging with UAVS, drones with neon advertising messages floating in the air, sentient adbots, the air thick with the radio waves of the 9th generation mobile network. Beyond the city limits history goes backwards, but right here, the future never left.

The ground beneath the streets is pulsing with thick braids of fibre optics, arteries of data flooding in all directions, I can almost feel it. And what is left on top of all this invisible movement?

It's an area almost uninhabited, corps don't need meat workers so much these days, miles of empty office space, empty condos to house the workers they no longer use, of all the buildings I can see only handfuls of apartments are lit, street level it's a ghost town, and the brown river reflects it all back up at us. Seagulls bicker and ravens caw.

And I think about falling off the edge, think about what Sienna must have felt when I somehow threw her off that balcony, and then another face comes in, it's Ms. Grigore the teacher who I betrayed screaming to her doom, and I feel so sick with myself, look around, breathing hard, thinking about cutting again, thinking it might give me some kind of relief for a second from all this guilt, gnawing into me.

Then the voices come again, and my skin starts to change and I tense up, wondering what this strange defect is going to do to me now, and then I sense something, something beyond vision, out there in the data streams, watching me, like a hungry thing watches food and it moves, in a horrifying way, inhuman body-less thing, a thing of pure hunger, coming towards me at terrifying speeds.