False Value Read online

  The rest of the Cage was painted in bright pastel blues, oranges and pinks and was arrayed with tables, blobby sofas, beanbags and a table-tennis table. Vending machines lined the walls and there was a genuine human-sized hamster wheel in one corner, with a bright blue cable leading to an enormous plasma screen TV. Apart from a couple of guys who’d obviously pulled an all-nighter and then crashed on the sofas, the mice ignored the delights of the Cage and headed for their work assignments with the same grim determination as commuters on Waterloo Bridge.

  The Serious Cybernetics Corporation prided itself on its lack of conformity and so the mice dressed with deliberate variety, although there were definite tribes. Skinny black jeans and a death metal sweatshirt, with or without a denim waistcoat, was one. Cargo pants, high tops, braces and check shirts were another—often with a floppy emo hairstyle that I thought had gone out of fashion when I was six. Lots of leggings in bright colors with luridly striped jumpers were favored, but not exclusively, by the women. From my initial survey it was two thirds male and ninety five percent white. I did catch sight of a couple of reassuringly dark faces among the crowd. One of them, a short skinny black guy with a retro-Afro and a Grateful Dead T-shirt caught my eye and gave me the nod—I nodded back.

  It was a good thing I had a towel wrapped around my head or I would have really stood out.

  The Serious Cybernetics Corporation actually occupied two separate buildings. The entrance, the Cage, and most of the administration were part of a speculative office development on the corner of Tabernacle Street and Epworth Street that had gone bust in 2009. When celebrity entrepreneur Terrence Skinner made his surprise migration from Silicon Valley to Silicon Roundabout he snapped it up cheap—well, by an oligarch’s definition of cheap.

  But that wasn’t enough, so he also acquired the five-story former brick warehouse further up Tabernacle Street, and built enclosed walkways on the first and fourth floors to link them.

  I knew all this because I’d taken the time to acquire the original building plans. What can I say? I like to be prepared.

  Because of this layout, most of the mice were funneled up a wide steel staircase that led from the floor of the Cage to a first floor mezzanine and then on to their open-plan offices, cubicles and conference rooms.

  The Cage had balconies on the third floor which gave a good overview of the mice in their million hordes as they went to do . . . I had no idea what they did. When I checked them out, I saw Tyrel Johnson leaning casually on the railing and looking down at us. He spotted me looking up and beckoned.

  I took the lift.

  When I joined him at the railing I pointed at the towel around my head and Johnson smiled.

  “Everyone has to wear one on their first day,” he said, and introduced me to my fellow Vogon Leo Hoyt, a white guy with darkening blond hair and cornflower blue eyes. He was wearing a credible navy M&S suit that had almost, but not quite, been tailored to fit.

  We shook hands; his grip was firm and smile sincerely welcoming. I was instantly suspicious.

  “Are we going to have a briefing?” I asked, which made Leo laugh.

  “This isn’t the police,” he said. “We don’t get briefings here. We have information dispersal conclaves.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yeah,” said Leo, and grinned.

  “Do we get one of those then?” I asked.

  “Somebody is up to no good,” said Johnson.

  “How do you know?”

  “There are unexplained gaps in the security logs,” said Johnson. “Just a few seconds here and there. Leo found them.”

  Leo looked suitably smug.

  “A glitch?” I asked Leo, who shook his head.

  “They looked like deliberate breaks,” he said, hesitated and then admitted, “I can’t find a pattern though.”

  “I want you to work the employee side,” said Johnson.

  “Interviews?” I asked.

  “No,” said Johnson. “For the first couple of days I want you to wander around and stick your nose where it doesn’t belong. Get to know some mice and get a feel for the place. Let them get used to seeing you around, and after a week or so you’ll be invisible.”

  Especially when I could take the towel off.

  Before I headed back to rejoin the mice I asked Johnson whether he’d worn a towel on his first day.

  “What do you think?” he asked, and I decided to treat that as a rhetorical question.

  * * *

  —

  I started with the emergency exits, memorizing positions and routes so that in the event of an emergency I would know where to guide people out. It’s one of those weird truths you learn early on as police that quite a high percentage of the public have all the survival instinct of a moth in a candle factory. They run the wrong way, they refuse to move, some will run toward the danger, and others will instantly whip out their phones and take footage.

  While I was studying the exits I took a moment to check the alarm systems that guarded them and tried to see if they were vulnerable to tampering either from the inside or out.

  One place I couldn’t check were the offices on the top two floors of Betelgeuse, the northernmost building. As far as I could tell, there was only one point of access for these—an enclosed skyway on the fourth floor that bridged Platina Street. Two similar skyways on the first floor gave access to the offices on the lower floors, but this one was different. For a start, it was painted a sinister clean room white, had tinted windows and terminated in a plain blue door with a security lock that not only required the correct ID card but also a passcode as well.

  “It’s a secret project,” said Victor when we had lunch together.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” said Everest, talking around a mouthful of pizza.

  I’d met Victor and Everest during my initial wanderings. Everest had marched up to me in one of the multifunction floating workspaces and demanded to know whether I’d got my job because I was black.

  “Of course,” I said, just to see what the reaction would be. “I didn’t even have to interview.”

  He was a stout white man, heavy around the hips, face adorned with the traditional round glasses and neck beard and topped with a mass of curly brown hobbit hair. He was dressed in a purple OCP T-shirt, baggy khaki shorts, black socks and sandals. His ID card was purple and yellow and gave his name as Harvey Window.

  “Told you,” he said to his companion—a short, round white woman with small blue eyes and brown hair cut into a short back and sides. She ignored him and held out a hand.

  “My name is Victor, pleased to meet you.” There was a stress on the name that said here is a clue, let’s see if you get one. I shook his hand and said I was pleased to meet him too.

  “This is Everest,” said Victor.

  Everest held out a clammy hand for me to shake and then, after the merest clasp, snatched it back.

  “Let me make things very clear,” he said. “We are the company assets and you are here to keep us safe. Not for your benefit, but for our benefit.”

  “I live but to serve,” I said, which he seemed to accept at face value.

  “Good,” he said and, turning, walked away.

  “Everest?” I asked. “Not Gates or Bill or Money?”

  Victor shrugged.

  “Someone called him Update once and we almost had to call the police,” said Victor and sniggered.

  “Really?” I asked. “The police?”

  “Really,” said Victor. “He tried to take a bite out of an Asset Co-ordinator and if Tyson hadn’t grabbed him I think he would have drawn blood.”

  “Tyson?”

  “Your boss,” she said. “Tyrel.”

  “Victor!” Everest called from across the room. “We have that thing—remember.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Victor as he turned to follo
w Everest. “We’re the freaky ones—everybody else is normal.”

  Later I’d made a point of hanging out on one of the balconies overlooking the Cage until Victor and Everest turned up for lunch, although of course at the Serious Cybernetics Corporation, lunchtime was an illusion. Once I clocked where they were sitting I wandered down and bumped into them accidentally.

  The Cage had a truly mad array of snack machines, all of them completely free—the better to encourage the mice not to wander beyond the confines of the office. They were wonderfully varied and some, like the doughnut machine with the art deco stylings, were either antiques or reproductions of antiques.

  I’d been boringly conventional and had a tuna and sweetcorn baguette from a machine adorned with a reproduction of Delacroix’s Liberty Being Too Busy Leading the People to Pull Her Dress Back Up across its front. Victor had a box of sushi from a genuine Japanese automated sushi dispenser and Everest had a pepperoni pizza from a machine that purported to make it from scratch.

  He stared at me as I sat down and continued to stare at me as I said hello and for about a minute after I started talking to Victor, and then went back to his pizza as if I didn’t exist. Occasionally he would take a series of precise slurps from a can of Mountain Dew, and he said nothing until I asked Victor about the top floors of Betelgeuse.

  “Those are the Bambleweeny floors,” he said. “And off limits.”

  “What do they do up there?” I asked.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “It’s easier to guard something when you know what it is,” I said.

  Everest’s brow wrinkled as he thought about my answer.

  “If Tyson didn’t brief you,” he said, “then you don’t need to know.” Which showed a charming faith in the wisdom of hierarchies.

  Victor giggled and put his hand over his mouth.

  I gave him a quizzical look and he returned a little shake of his head and rolled his eyes at Everest who was diligently finishing his pizza.

  “It’s a mystery,” said Victor.

  * * *

  —

  One way in which us Vogons differed from run-of-the-mill mice was that we had a definite shift pattern, so come five Johnson insisted I clock out.

  “Tired people don’t do their jobs properly,” he said, demonstrating one of the reasons why he’d left the police.

  I took my towel with me and showed it to Beverley when I got home.

  “And you wore that all day?” she asked.

  “To be honest, I forgot I was wearing it after a while,” I said.

  Eventually it got incorporated into Beverley’s improvised Bulge support system but only after it had been washed. I said this was great, because now I would always know where my towel was, but that got me yet another blank look.

  The next day I turned up for work sans towel, but I kept the suit. I managed to ingratiate myself with a number of mice and Victor invited me to join one of the floating role-playing games that assembled in one of the satellite conference rooms accessible from the Cage.

  “Metamorphosis Alpha,” said Victor, when I asked what we were playing. Which turned out to be an ancient game from the 1970s with a horrible resolution mechanic but I’m not a purist about these things. Besides being fun, it was a useful way to get to know my fellow mice—the better to guard them from harm, or themselves.

  Leo Hoyt spotted us playing in the corner of the Cage and came over to glower at me, and then walked away shaking his head.

  “I bet he prefers World of Darkness,” said Victor.

  Everest made a rude noise.

  There were rumors that Terrence Skinner sometimes sat in on these pickup RPG sessions, although Victor and Everest said he’d never sat down with them. A lot of the mice didn’t so much admire Skinner as worship the ground he walked on. He was famous for being the dull tech billionaire, the one whose company InCon nobody could remember the name of, the one that had made his fortune behind the scenes and wasn’t blowing it on Mars rockets, sewage systems and genetically modified rice.

  I wasn’t introduced to the Great Man immediately—that was not how things worked at the SCC. Instead Terrence Skinner practiced what he called “management by walking around” which involved him striding through the various cubicle farms, trailing personal assistants and nervous project facilitators in his wake.

  He tried to drop in on me unexpectedly on my third day while I was hot-desking in the Haggunenons’ room. You could hear him coming twenty meters away, but Johnson had briefed me so I looked suitably surprised when he materialized at my shoulder.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m checking yesterday’s entry logs for anomalies,” I said.

  Terrence Skinner was a tall, rangy man with widely spaced blue eyes, thinning blond hair and thin lips. He wore an expensive black linen blazer over a faded blue Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy T-shirt with a picture of a smiley face with lolling tongue and hands covering its eyes. The words Don’t Panic were written in large friendly letters next to the face.

  “What kind of anomalies?” He had a strong, almost comical, Australian accent. An affectation, I knew, because I’d seen a TED Talk from five years previously when his accent was much less pronounced and almost hidden beneath a layer of West Coast tech-speak.

  I was actually looking to see if there were any breaks in the CCTV coverage that corresponded with any particular person entering the building, only I wasn’t about to announce that to Skinner’s entourage—just in case.

  “Anything irregular, double entries, duplicate IDs—that sort of thing,” I said.

  “Do you think somebody’s sneaking in?”

  “It’s always possible, sir,” I said. “No system is foolproof.”

  “Not when there are so many inventive fools, eh?” said Skinner who, I noticed, didn’t invite me to call him Terry or even Mr. Skinner.

  I gave a convincing little chuckle, because it never hurts to ingratiate yourself with the boss.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “I’m pretty certain that we have algorithms looking for that sort thing.”

  “You never know,” I said.

  A tall, athletic white woman dressed in a lightweight suit, one of the team of bodyguards that guarded Skinner in shifts, gave me a curious look before returning to her scanning-the-cubicles-for-lethal-threats routine.

  You want to start with the snack machines, lady, I thought. That’s an early death from type 2 diabetes right there.

  Skinner turned to the woman.

  “I feel safer already,” he said, gave me a friendly nod and off he swept.

  I asked Johnson about the bodyguards when I handed in the results of my anomaly search.

  “Somebody tried to kill him in California,” he said. “So he hired some specialist security.”

  “Who was it tried to kill him?”

  “It was just a carjacking,” said Johnson. “But he got paranoid and wanted the extra reassurance. It’s the fashionable thing to do in California—or so I’m told.” He glanced down at the printout I’d done for him. “Anything tasty?”

  I said as far as I could tell nobody was sneaking in.

  Johnson grunted.

  “They’re sure it was a carjacking?” I asked.

  Johnson gave me a look.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “The American police.”

  “Why do you care?” he asked.

  “What if it wasn’t a carjacking?” I said. “What if it was a proper assassination attempt?”

  “You think Google’s out to get him?”

  “He thinks it’s serious enough, doesn’t he? Why else did he get the bodyguards?”

  “He has a personal masseuse, you know,” said Johnson.

  “It might be a security threat,” I said.

&n
bsp; “You really are fresh out of the Job, aren’t you?”

  “It might be though, mightn’t it?”

  Johnson sighed.

  “The personal security of Mr. Skinner is not our concern,” said Johnson. “We’re here for the premises and the mice. And somebody is sneaking around behind our back—I can feel it.”

  “Gut instinct?”

  Johnson waved his hand at his office door.

  “Go play with the mice, Peter,” he said. “Find me a rat.”

  And just to prove that the private sector wasn’t that different from the police, I found the rat the very next day—entirely by chance.

  I’d taken to swinging past the fourth floor skyway at random intervals. If Johnson had asked, I would have told him that its forbidden nature would attract the most rats. I really hoped he didn’t ask, because it was a terrible excuse and the truth was I was dying to know what the secret might be.

  A series of team meetings and high-level conference calls were scheduled for that afternoon, to coincide with morning on the West Coast of America. With most of the management tied up, the rest of the mice took the opportunity to skive off. If I were a rat, I thought, now would be a good time to poke about where I didn’t belong. So I headed up to the fourth floor skyway to see if anyone was poking about up there.

  I didn’t actually expect anyone to be trying to break into the security door in broad daylight, so I was a bit surprised to turn the corner and find someone doing just that.

  He was a skinny white man in his twenties, with black hair, long legs in spray-on black jeans and pristine white high tops. White T-shirt tight across his back as he leaned against the blue door—his open palm pressed where I guessed the lock had to be.

  I considered letting him break in, but he must have heard me or something because he snapped away from the door and turned to face me. Which is when I recognized him.