Digital Life Form - part 5

 

Chapter 1

 

The first time I met Winston I hadn’t realised I’d met him, not until the time he turned up unannounced, uninvited at my flat and had let himself in, in my absence.  He was to remind me of the that first time, in the bar in Manchester where I often met up with Geek, whenever Geek wanted to pass me his latest toy for testing or just to pass the time and many pints of real ale. 

I guess I had been vaguely aware of Winston in that bar, his ebony skin fading with age, the short cropped grey hair and the mellow American accent, but I’m a bit of a people watcher by nature and would notice someone like that sat at the next bar stool sipping a good single malt ruined with ice anytime.  I would have noticed a lot of other people that night as well while I sat waiting for Geek to turn up but it’s now quite a long time ago and as no-one’s chosen to remind me of any of them it remains only Winston that I remember.

I do remember being quite excited as I supped my beer, watching the door in the mirrored back of the bar, waiting to tell Geek about the strange events that had started to occur since we’d last met.  When Geek finally turned up he sat and drank beer, gloated at the parts that he could attribute to his superior skills and frowned at the bits he couldn’t explain.  He took the package away and promised to check it out, find out why it worked the way it did and we went our separate ways, him turning left out of the bar and me turning right.  I guess the transfer of the package went unnoticed in the hurly-burly of the bar because I now know that Winston also turned right, about ten paces behind me.

Two nights later I returned home after dark, abandoning the car badly on the kerb outside the Victorian house converted into flats shared mainly by students from the earth science faculty and one, mine, occupied by only myself.  Such are the privileges of being a post-graduate lecturer-cum-wannabe PhD with an aching desire to lie on the beach while sipping long cool alcoholic drinks in the Caribbean.  Unfortunately, I was just about managing to service my aging student debt and affording to rent a flat by myself instead.  Admittedly my other needs are limited to inexpensive meals learned as a student to eke out a meagre income and copious amounts of beer at the pub whenever Geek found the time to partake of a draught.  The rest of my time is spent lecturing first year undergrads, carrying out my post grad research into igneous rock formations and pandering to Prof Andrews’ many pet projects. 

It was one of those projects that started the chain of events that led to my walking in, turning on the light and finding a near stranger sat in my easy chair with a manila folder on his knee.

The feelings that ran through me over the next few seconds ranged from outrage and indignation through to outright fear.  The old man sat casually opposite me showed no fear or concern, he looked like he believed he had the right to sit there in the middle of my flat.  He nodded once towards the door and, when it was clear to him that I didn’t have the ability to read his mind, he spoke quietly in that soft, dark voice I was about to get to know.

‘Close the door, Royston,’ he said, looking down at the folder, flicking the front open to reveal a photograph of myself.  It looked like my passport or student union photo, but blown up several times, pixelated edges rendering my image into a good but not exact approximation.  He looked back up.

‘Where’s the rock?’ he asked.  I shut the door carefully and looked around my flat.  It looked undisturbed, as tidy as I’d left it.

‘What rock?’ I asked back.

‘The one the girl gave you, in the woods near Hereford four nights ago,’ he answered levelly.  ‘And where is the Sat Nav?’  I reeled, only a handful of people knew I’d been on one of Prof Andrews’ wild goose chases near Hereford, and even fewer knew that I’d been approached in the dark by a teenage girl, one of the university party, with a rock, as Winston called it.  The Sat Nav was something only Geek and I knew anything about, not because it needed to be a secret but because it was a favour from a friend that had worked differently to expectation.  If I had any friends other than Geek then I expect I would have mentioned it to them, but I don’t.  I sat down opposite the quietly spoken intruder, pulling a chair from the dining table in the corner.

‘I can answer these questions, but I don’t know who you are or why you’ve presumed to enter my home without permission,’ I said, adding, ‘more importantly, I’d like to know what you need the information for and how you’ve come to have a file with my photo on the front.’  I sat back, watched the American closely.  The question I didn’t ask was why he needed those two specific pieces of information as the only link between them was temporal, as far as I could tell.

‘OK, Royston, I’ll level with you as far as I can.  You’ve probably guessed I’m not local and that I don’t have jurisdiction over you.  But you’ll also have noticed that I’ve entered your flat without alerting your neighbours and because you’re a smart guy you’ll have worked out that I’ve searched your flat for both the rock and the Sat Nav with no luck, yet nothing is out of place.  Believe me, there isn’t a single trace that I have been in this building, let alone your flat and that should tell you that you’re dealing with someone you shouldn’t fuck around with,’ he said.  After a pause he lifted the file slightly.

‘And I know from your file that you’re essentially one of the good guys.  You may be surprised to find out that I’m one of those too.’  So far he’d got one thing right – I was surprised, however I didn’t relate breaking and entering as a good guy endeavour, nor implicit threats.  He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a wallet, flipped it open and showed me an ID that claimed he was part of the United Nations International Security Committee.

‘UNISC looks at trans-border international threats,’ he explained as I digested as much information the ID provided.

‘Never heard of them,’ I said, adding, ‘is Winston really your name?’

‘Is Royston really yours?’ he asked, slamming the wallet shut and placing it carefully in his jacket.  ‘The organisation isn’t supposed to be well known but it does exist and if you Google for it you’ll find it easily enough.  It’s nothing to do with the Security Council, a separate arm so to speak, but it often provides critical advice to them.’

‘So, trans-border threats?  Such as rocks from space and consumer goods, a pretty broad remit wouldn’t you say?’ I asked.  Winston didn’t reply, not at first.  Then he leaned forward.

‘Where’s the rock and where’s the Sat Nav?’

‘Not here.’

‘I know that.  You know I know that.  If it’s the monetary value of the Sat Nav then I can recompense you,’ he offered, leaning back again.

‘I presume you intended to leave a pile of ten pound notes behind if you’d found it,’ I replied.  He smiled.

‘Probably not, you got me there.  But you would have got it back, or at least one like it.  I just need that particular one.’

‘You collect rocks and Sat Navs, eh?’ I asked, feeling braver by the second, braver until Winston raised his voice suddenly.

‘Don’t fuck with me Royston,’ he bellowed, then moderated his voice as I cowered back in the dining chair, ‘let’s start with the rock first,’ he said.  I took a deep breath and reminded myself of the night I spent in Herefordshire searching for meteorites. 

*

The call had come from Prof, early evening.

‘Royston, I need a favour.’  I sighed inwardly, Prof’s favours usually cost me time and money but he’s the faculty boss and I need to retain my position while completing my post grad work.

‘What sort of favour?’

‘Field trip, helping to look after undergrads from the department.  You’ll know most of them.  There’s a lot of meteor activity expected to hit the UK over the next few nights, I want to set up a net to try and capture some examples that haven’t had a chance to become contaminated.’

‘The Panspermia Project?’ I asked, knowing the answer.  Professor Andrews is a fervent supporter of Fred Hoyle’s proposition that life on Earth was germinated from space.  He was one of the initial group of astronomers, biologists and geologists who formed a working group with the Royal Society to try and prove that Panspermia is at the very least plausible. 

‘When?’ I asked, looking at my diary.  Generally it’s not too full but I knew that I had a hospital check-up scheduled.

‘Thursday to Sunday should see it through, you can reschedule your classes,’ he replied.  I explained that Thursday wasn’t possible until the evening so he agreed to take the group, sort out the accommodation, set them on their tasks and would await my presence in the bar of a pub in a Herefordshire village I’d never heard of.  Prof barked a post-code at me then hung up.  I knew that I’d had all the briefing I was going to get, just hoped that the undergrads got a better one.

*

Winston leaned forward to interrupt.

‘Where do you stand on the Panspermia idea?’ 

‘Somewhere between possible to total bollocks, to be blunt,’ I said, watching his reaction to the obscenity.  If he understood the word he didn’t show offence, just nodded, leaned back into his chair and indicated I should continue, an indication I initially ignored, continuing, ‘if it is possible it’s not a complete solution, the concept that planets are seeded by bacteria from other planets. 

‘Accepted that it does appear likely that bacteria can survive in a stasis condition for millennia from samples recovered from Antarctica, and that certain forms have been proven to survive the extremes of space travel there is still the very low probability that bacteria-bearing meteorites, the professor’s favourite vehicle, would end up on planets capable of bearing life.  My other, and probably main, opposition is that somewhere along the way life had to start on one planet first.  If it’s possible to have occurred spontaneously once it’s equally likely it could happen spontaneously on any planet with the right conditions.’ 

Winston just nodded politely so I resumed my description about how the girl gave me the rock.

*

By the time I reached the pub it was already dark and judging by the sound from within the professor was up to his usual party tricks.  I managed to slip inside, dump my bags in the bedroom booked for me and grabbed a shower.  The Prof might be living the life but I knew my role was in the field, stone cold sober and right through until dawn.  I joined him downstairs and, once I’d pulled him away from regaling a group of Young Farmers, found out the plan so far. 

Pointing at the Ordnance Survey map he showed me where the undergrads were positioned, the radio frequencies they were using and the rendezvous arrangements for later.  I noticed that his radio was turned off and had no doubt that it would remain off until breakfast when he would gather in the night’s report, any samples with grid references and any other information to mull over as he strolled the Herefordshire hills.

Grabbing the various maps and sheets of information he’d provided me with, I stood and thanked him, struggled into my coat and left for a very long and fruitless night.

The second night was more interesting – we’d all gotten a feel for the area, our sleep patterns were about as good as they would get and we actually saw some meteorites plummeting to Earth – the first night had been a dead end, probably because Prof had erred on the side of caution.

However, seeing a meteorite track in and intercepting it are two completely different things – the darkness makes it easier to see the trajectory but nearly impossible to judge scale.  Most burn up anyway and those that don’t, well, they just disappear from view.  The advantage we had as a group was a thermal imager and a laser guider which I operated from a vantage point atop a hill.  Whenever a meteorite was observed falling in one of the eight sectors around the hill I declared the sector code over the radio.  The team in that sector started to home in on where they thought the meteorite had landed and the teams from the adjacent sectors, if not already deployed to the other side of their sector, started to converge. 

As the call was made I tracked using the thermal imager then, when the image stabilised, cross referenced with the laser guide which was picked up as a guiding beacon to the teams on the ground.  The thermal image from the converging teams also helped me to guide them in to the target until they were inside a few feet of the meteorite – at that point they would be masking the thermal image beyond recognition and blocking the laser so would need to use their own low power thermal detectors to home in.  I would resume scanning the night sky and that particular team, if they found anything, would bag and tag the meteorite in a hygienically prepared container.

We found two meteorites that second night.

By the final night we’d collected maybe ten or eleven potential candidates, enough to make the Prof reasonably happy, so happy that he offered to buy everyone a drink and give us the night off.  We were sat in a large circle in the lounge bar, all of us except the Prof pooped from several nights of meteorite searching and very little sleep during the day.  By the time we’d had three drinks each the undergrads were falling asleep in their chairs and I decided I needed to go outside for a walk to clear my head.  Prof decided to join me, partly because it was a fine evening and partly because the pub was full of snoring undergraduates.  However it turns out that there was another, more important agenda, but I wouldn’t find that out for some time.

The village that had acted as our base for the past five days was slipping into slumber, odd lights glowing behind random curtains, some ground level, most higher.  It was then that the girl emerged from the dark, hair straggling, face muddied, grin wide.  I guess I’d always placed my departmental head in the category that children put their parents in, so when she approached, I misread the situation, thought that she was making a bee-line for me. 

What I hadn’t realised was that while I had sat freezing my balls off on top of various Herefordshire hills, Prof had been developing the students, favouring the female candidates and probably not concerning himself too much about their academic promise too much.  As she breezed past me into Prof’s arms she pushed a rock into my hand.

‘You missed one,’ she said as she steered Prof back to the pub.

‘Make sure you store it in a sterile container with the others,’ the Prof said over his shoulder.  I tossed the rock in my hand.

‘Like it matters now,’ I thought.

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Digital Life Form will be back with part 6 soon.  Can't wait?  Like all of my books Digital Life Form is available as an eBook and paperback on Amazon and can be read for free if you're an Amazon Prime or Kindle Unlimited customer.