Chapter 1

At 7:14 am on Monday morning Connor’s father is driving into the city when his car veers out of the lane and collides with a concrete barrier at an exit ramp. Feeds from CCTV along the roadside show Montgomery keeling forwards and swinging the steering wheel a second before the crash, forcing the car off autopilot. Feeds from Montgomery’s augmented specs show much the same thing, a sudden lunge forwards and a jerk of the wheel, as though swerving to miss something in the road, though the lane is clear. The camera across the motorway shows the car in profile hitting the barrier, shattering, the rear wheels lifting and falling almost as an afterthought.

Within the next second the eighty-or-so cars lining up for the exit ramp brake in unison, using a combination of collision-detection and convoy-comm. Within thirty minutes the emergency response have digitally mapped the crash site and cleared the road, and within forty minutes all signs of the crash are gone. The Monday morning peak traffic continues to flow.

In the post-crash analysis the accident was attributed to a heart attack, largely due to the way Montgomery had suddenly squeezed the wheel in a white-knuckle grip and fallen forwards.

Connor wasn’t so sure. He had all the CCTV, and he had the feed from his father’s augmented specs, a first-person view of the entire commute from the minute the man stepped out of his house to the moment the concrete barrier came through the windscreen. He’d watched it in full immersion, so it felt like he’d been sitting in the car. He’d watched it a thousand times.

***

In the early hours of the morning before sunrise, when the sky was a dull grey and the sea was a dark mirror, Connor stood in the middle of the empty wharf in his orange high-vis jacket. He could have been artificial, a robot sentry, except every few minutes he’d shrug his shoulders against the cold. Solid white digits in the upper right-hand corner of his vision read the time to be four-fifteen in the morning.

He breathed deep, pulling air in through his nose. He was almost used to the nights. Being up when everyone else was asleep wasn’t a terrible thing, it was just the standing, the physical ache of being upright for eight hours at a time.

Out over the concrete wharf, surrounding Connor in a clean semi-circle, seven different virtual window frames lit up the night in soft glowing pastel colours. These were images in Connor’s glasses, but to Connor they were as real as the wharf. Their light gleamed off the chains and winches on the fishing boats.

“Jimmy, how are we looking,” he said to a face in one of the frames.

Jimmy was almost completely beard; his eyes were the only visible part of him. “I got it down to two hours twelve minutes. I think I’m going blind.”

“You’re a machine.”

“Oh, and we had a power outage last night. That’s twice in four days. A pattern?”

Connor rolled his shoulders. “Maybe they’re trying to slow us down.”

“Maybe they are.”

The fishing boats tied to the wharf squeaked in the dark. Connor turned his head to the night sky and invoked a cloud of small meteorites, watched as they bloomed into an orange cloud at the edge of the atmosphere, then ripped through the air over the ocean, lighting up the water. They came at Connor in a quick-fire stream and as they reached him, he aimed and swung with his fists, detonating them in loud explosions, sending fountains of shrapnel out into the water.

And the empires come and go.

It’s a world-wide walk-on talent show.

Connor and Jimmy were both quietly humming the chorus now. Jimmy was a lyrics guy, he liked a song if he liked the lyrics, that was all that mattered.

Two years ago Connor had used the name Veritas to publish his first documentary, a piece about foetal genetic-screening and how the government was using it to keep the masses dumb and intellectually inferior. He’d used video from the internet and some basic computer animation. Once you looked into this stuff the evidence was everywhere, and the further you went down the rabbit hole the more you realised how bad it was.

The One Earth Order was slowly but surely seizing control of the planet.

Connor’s movie went viral, so he started recruiting friends and now Veritas was six people, five college drop-outs and some old guy in Iran. They’d released two more documentaries, one on government-engineered vaccinations, and another on mandatory software upgrades. As far as Connor was concerned this was a war, a war of information, a class war. In two days they’d be releasing “The New Economy”, a piece about the international banking cartels and how they were all ultimately working for the puppet-masters, the One Earth Order elite. Evidence was not the problem. The problem was fitting all of it into a clean and digestible two-hour package.

“How’s your girlfriend,” Jimmy said, through a huge yawn.

Connor glanced over at frame number five, where a beautiful young blonde smiled back at him. “She seems to be okay. She looks okay. Hello Lucy.”

“Hello you.”

“What are you doing?”

“Just thinking about all the things I want to know about you.”

Connor had bought her at a fire sale for five dollars. She was an AI, computer-generated imagery. Three days into their relationship and she still hadn’t taken any clothes off, which was unheard of, for these sorts of AIs. It meant that she was either cheap, or very high quality, he couldn’t decide which.

“Jimmy here was wondering when I was going to get to see your tits.”

“Well, you can yell Jimmy that I don’t just show them on demand. You have to work for them.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jimmy said.

“She thinks I’m handsome.”

“Does she.”

Suddenly, a loud tone chimed in Connor’s ears and a giant circular arrow appeared out over the sea, rotating slowly in place. The update installed, the arrow was replaced with a quick disclaimer, and then everything went back to normal. Only now Connor’s frames flickered like strobes every time he moved his head.

Fucking updates. Get your filthy shadow-fingers out of my glasses you bastards. You don’t have my permission. You never had my permission. You never had permission to take my father, either.

Connor cleared the frames with a sweep of a hand and walked out to the end of the wharf. Just off his left shoulder his bank account was incrementing slowly. One hour to go. A good way to deal with these low temperatures, he’d discovered, was to load a winter world-skin. He selected the Arctic theme from a drop-down and the wharf became buried under a half-foot of snow, banked into icy drifts around the bollards. The sea became a jagged plane of blue ice all the way out to the horizon. Surrounded in the frozen landscape, the air felt incongruously warm.

Behind him, up past the chicken-wire fencing, a large black SUV pulled up and came to a stop on the dirt shoulder behind Connor’s red hatchback. Connor didn’t see it arrive, he only noticed it when he turned back from the water. From this distance it was hard to make out much detail, except the shiny paintjob, and the size of it.

Jimmy’s voice sounded in Connor’s left ear. “By the way, we’re sorted for the trip, I picked it up last night. You should come over and have a look.”

They were planning a road trip; as soon as ‘The New Economy’ was out they were going to drive around the country for five weeks, no itinerary. Neither of them had ever been anywhere.

“Cool,” Connor said. “Hey, I’m feeding you my stream. You seeing this?”

“Yeah, I’ve got you. Seeing what.”

“The SUV.”

“Where did that come from.”

“Don’t know. Might be worth saving the stream.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Connor kept walking back along the wharf past the fishing boats until he neared the fencing and the swing-arm gate. From here he could catch the number plate.

“Lucy?”

The pink frame came in beside Jimmy’s. “Hello Connor! Hey I’ve got a question –”

“Are you hosted remotely?”

She tilted her head, like a puppy. “What do you mean?”

He wasn’t sure what he meant. “Just stay here with me for the next little while.”

“Whatever you need, hon.”

Connor’s glasses picked up the number plate and he passed it to a snooper application to start digging around for details. Sensors in the tyres were showing 0.05% wear: brand new, the thing had just rolled out of the factory. After a few seconds of waiting for the snooper to come back Connor did a vehicle search over all the people and organisations that Veritas had ever touched. None of the company fleet vehicles looked like the SUV, which didn’t mean much; people buy new vehicles.

He could feel Jimmy quietly panicking on the other end of the connection. “Probably just some rich bastard scoping out a fishing spot,” Connor said.

“Looks like the fucking C.I.A.”

Eventually the snooper popped up a result – it had failed to find an owner, but it had found occurrences of the plate number in publically uploaded photos and video. They’d driven down that morning from somewhere on the far side of the city. A five-hour drive.

No one got out of the vehicle, and Connor finished the rest of his shift watching the boats, until 6am ticked over and his account stopped incrementing. The sky was lighter and the virtual snow was melting away in the warming air, runnels of water sluicing off the wharf into the sea.

Connor was good under pressure. He was always leading the scores in his games, taking out human-level soldiers singlehandedly with silenced AK47s while his comrades lay dead around him. He’d tested himself in real-world prisoner-of-war simulations, where the guards cut you and pulled your fingernails out. He hadn’t felt the pain, of course, but he’d watched the nails slipping from the ends of his fingers. He’d played through simulations of raids on his apartment, crouched in a dark corner while S.W.A.T. uniforms breached the door and filed through his crosshairs. Connor was the snake that lay coiled in the shadows. Cool, calculated, accurate, effective. He didn’t make desperate moves, he didn’t rely on a luck; he played slow and careful, by the numbers, low risk, long mission times, patient.

So he wasn’t nervous. As he walked up the incline of the drive to the road two people stepped out, a man and a woman, both tall, lean, well-dressed people. She wore heels; he had a hairdo that could have been injection-moulded plastic. They were also both wearing black augmented contact lenses. These covered their irises and most of the whites of the eyes, large, because of the batteries.

Some companies used lenses if glasses weren’t secure enough, if they couldn’t afford to have someone catch an angle on the inner displays. Connor knew this. But it didn’t make them look any less creepy.

And then, both at the same time, Connor and his glasses picked up the company icon on the door of the SUV, the orange six-armed spiral. Connor’s vision suddenly flooded with company details but it was all redundant by that point, because Connor had seen the logo before and he knew what he was looking at. The company was called Hurricane. A software shop. They specialised in stock-market investment tools, pattern finders, predictive models. Connor’s father had worked for them.

The man extended a hand. “Hi. I’m Albert. This is Blair. You must be Connor.” Connor shook the hand, then shook Blair’s. Cold, dry, firm. For a moment he just stood there, watching the reflection of the road in Albert’s lenses. “Shall we follow you home?” Albert said.

***

Connor only had one real memory of his father.

They were out on the patio over the noisy downtown street, surrounded in mirror-glass skyscrapers that reflected the sunlight in blinding shards. Connor sat on the lawn, his infant hands down in the grass, held still as ants emerged and crawled over his skin.

“You know how ants find their food?" the man at the patio railing says. He is a tall dark blot against the reflected sunlight. "They all go out exploring, leaving trails everywhere, laying them all over everything like spider web. When they find food they go back home along their trail, making it stronger.” He steps forward and crouches. "Other ants follow the stronger trails, making them even stronger. All those other trails, the one’s that aren’t useful, they just fade away. Until all you’ve got left are the good ones.” He reaches out and puts a hand around Connor’s little head. “Do you know what that is? It’s a neural network, Connor, just like what you’ve got. If you got enough ants together, and enough lawn, who knows what would happen.”