The Elias Anomaly

Sixteen

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Trapped under fallen masonry, barely able to move Dulcie knew she had to act. The initial spear of panic cleared quickly, only to be replaced by utter confusion. Dulcie was too used to game scenarios to let not knowing what the hell was going on faze her. She wriggled her hand up to her breast pocket and pulled out her viewscreen.

It was difficult to operate the device in the confines of the tomb that used to be part of your house. Dulcie managed to activate the emergency exit function on her screen opening a tunnel to the hub behind her. She crawled through into the entrance lobby of the hub on her hands and knees. The distant sounds of air assault cut off as the tunnel sealed itself shut.

Two actings were sat in the corner of the hub, in the canteen section, comparing notes over a pair of viewscreens. Dulcie's entrance had brought their conference to an abrupt halt. The two men sat, staring at her as she sat on the floor and caught her breath.

She hoped that neither of them asked her what was going on because she hadn't had a chance for her brain to catch up yet. Dulcie responded calmly to many kinds of stress. Even so she found that awkward social attention made it impossible for her to focus. So she stood and, saying nothing, walked down the hall to the terminal room, she entered the room and closed the door.

It was late in the Cluster so the terminal room was all but empty. A bored caretaker sat in the duty chair and clicked away whilst staring at his screen. There was another junior caretaker sat in the far back corner, she looked as if she was pulling an all night study session.

Rattled, but progressively becoming less so, Dulcie took a seat and logged into a terminal. Her brain was already starting to unravel the crazy sequence of events that had just taken place. The whole thing was wrong from the ground up.

Dulcie felt that, unless she enumerated the lines that the attack had crossed in her mind, she would become lost in confusion. Then she would have no chance of guessing who was responsible for the destruction of her home.

She opened a notepad file and rattled off the violations that had occurred as she replayed the last ten minutes in her mind.

-Fighter drones with live weapons had been allowed to approach a Disc homeworld.

-The drones had used that weaponry to enact the kind of assault one might expect from a raid in a peeve sub-plex.

-Was the timing a coincidence? This attack had initiated immediately following her search for information about Joseph. If not, someone was tapping her connections.

-Most worrying of all this unknown party could have been looking far wider. Searching for people investigating Joseph's past across the whole cluster.

Dulcie paused. She read back over her list. Disturbing, even bearing in mind the amount of paranoid conspiracy rubbish Joseph's situation implied. This was the first catalogue of events that supported any of the wilder interpretations of the overall picture. Someone was watching the Cluster. A someone with the power to monitor all systems, right at their very root. A someone who could break plexes, introducing prohibited elements that into safe areas.

Of course, there was a level on which the last item wasn't as serious as it sounded. All a person risked from a violation of a safe space was some annoyance. Dulcie's homestead could be restored from a backup. She could even change the configuration of her home from an interface at a moment's notice. Someone with the power to do all the things that they had done had no need to put on this destructive fireworks show. They could just...