04 – Silent Alarms

Capitalist societies romanticise the individual who takes matters into their own hands. They call this initiative, or innovation. In fact, such an individual is interfering with a systemic solution and undermining confidence in a system’s inherent reliability. A healthy society must depend on an implicit trust in its systemised responses, not sporadic personal intervention. It requires shared standards, coordinated response, and the confidence that no individual should solve a collective problem alone.

—Naomi Feld, Systemic Integrity and the Harmonious State

Sharon was in her bedroom, towelling her hair dry. The terrycloth rasped lightly against her scalp, heat still rising from her skin into the cooler air. Steam thinned on the mirror, breaking into uneven islands. A coil whine cut through the quiet of her flat, followed by the dry hiss of a holo forming itself in the living room.

“Sharon? I—are you there? Listen, I’ve run into something I can’t parse alone. Can you hear me?”

She let the towel slip to her shoulders. Damp weight gathered at the base of her neck. She didn’t turn.

“Ari,” she said. “What do you want?”

His voice arrived in a rush, audio clipping at the edges. Breath scraped too close to the mic. Words rushed out—tunnel, signal bleed, it’s a product.

She cut him off. “Now you want to talk.”

The towel sagged further. Water dripped from her hair, tracing a line down the groove of her spine.

“A few weeks late, don’t you think,” she said.

His holo had instantiated in the living room facing to her right. She could see him through the bedroom doorway, his face, in profile, was pocked with voxel jitter. He looked worse than she’d expected. Clothes wrinkled, hair uncombed. Something hollowed out behind the eyes.

“Sharon, please. Just listen.” He lifted his hands, palms open. A gesture he used when he wanted to slow a system, not confront it. “I wouldn’t be calling if it weren’t critical.”

She wrapped the towel around her wet hair. With a small rotation of her wrist, she reoriented the projection. He now faced the bedroom doorway, and her.

He flinched and his gaze snapped away, fixed abruptly on the floor. The image caught, voxelated, then stabilised again. His face was still angled down in careful avoidance.

The knot under her ribs loosened, just enough to notice. She reached for her bodysuit and pulled it on, the fabric cool and resistant, sealed her heat back in.

“You need *my* help,” she said. “You. The man who can fix anything.” She fastened the last seam. “I spent nine years trying to get you to talk, Ari, and now you want me to listen?”

“I know,” he said. The word came out stripped down. “This isn’t about us.”

“It never was for you.”

“It’s important,” he said. “Please. Just hear me out.”

She hung up the towel and stepped into the living room, a warm old place with soft low furniture worn smooth by use. A window cracked open to the river air. Stacked without order along the mantelpiece were old books of molecular biology and genetics, worn with broken spines and margins crowded with her handwriting. Awards—one shaped like a molecule, another etched with Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man—lay where she’d dropped them while unpacking, metal dulled by time rather than from handling.

She didn’t want his projection there. It didn’t belong.

“Fine,” she said. “Where would you like to talk? Somewhere crowded enough to be neutral?”

She didn’t wait for an answer.

She tapped the wall panel and the world around them flickered.

A pub assembled itself in overlapping passes. Sticky floor and sour yeast. The chemical sweetness of spilled cleaner embedded in fake carpet. Noise rose to a tolerable blur.

“There,” she said. “Better? You always did prefer a simulation.”

She met his eyes now, steady.

“Is this safe enough for you?”

“No,” he said. “Not like this.”

The familiar flatness wasn’t there, nor the defensive humour, nor the irritation her tone usually drew.

“I need to see you,” he said. “In person.”

She twisted her hair up on top of her head and held it there. It had lost its warmth from the shower and the wet hair felt cold on her neck. Her free hand dropped through the edge of the projected pub’s bar.

She studied him as she did unruly data, the deviation more telling than the mean. His posture was wrong. Shoulders pitched forward, as if compensating for imbalance. Hands stilled by effort, not calm.

“Ari,” she said, more quietly, “you don’t get to call me when you’re not right and expect me to stabilise you.”

“I know,” he said. “It’s not about me, or us. Please, just come meet me. Hear me out, yeah? Elephant and Castle Saloon, as soon as you can get there. I’ll be waiting.”

His voice shook just enough to register, like a centrifuge pushed past tolerance and rattling before failure. The muscle under her sternum seized reflexively.

She kept his gaze for a long beat.

Then she nodded once.

With a sharp motion of her wrist, she severed the connection.

The pub collapsed into light fragments and vanished. His image tore free and was gone. The flat reasserted itself, her skin tingling with residual charge. 

Sharon returned to the bathroom and pulled a brush through her hair. The mirror had already cleared of condensation. The rustles and pops of the brush as it broke through tangles told her more about the state of her hair than the pull on her scalp did.

Her bodysuit had absorbed heat from her body, the fabric warm against her skin, yet she still felt a chill. She crossed to the wardrobe to get her gilet.

---

“Come in.”

She did not look up as Detective Constable Leo Hatch entered her office. She leaned over her standing desk, forearms braced, her ginger ponytail hanging over her right shoulder just above her name badge. It read, Detective Chief Inspector Alene Ardone. Alene’s attention remained fixed on the terminal embedded in the desk’s surface and the files listed there in disciplined columns. One eyebrow raised, a semaphore of inquiry, she moved through her team’s cases without hurry, skimming for discontinuities.

DC Hatch closed the door quietly and stopped just inside.

Her office occupied a north-east corner in the new tower grafted onto New Scotland Yard. The staff called the tower *New* New Scotland Yard. The humour, like the architecture, was derivative. The office was sparse, two aluminium chairs and a sofa on which she’d spent too many nights. Beside her terminal sat a tarnished 20th-century police whistle, its nickel worn thin.

Hatch stood still without fidgeting, waiting for permission to speak. She wasn’t ready to break her concentration, and he had the good sense not to impose.

Her chin rested in the crook of her hand, a finger unconsciously stroking her jawline. She flicked past a domestic homicide. Uncomplicated, the usual emotionally saturated waste. She had no interest in much of New Scotland Yard’s caseload. With property theft largely irrelevant, it was dominated by crimes of passion. She also wasn’t interested in fringe radicals like the Walkers. DCI Alene Ardone hunted for anomalies inside the system, the cases where information had been turned sideways for the kind of corruption that posed as legitimate intent. It was why her Department of Information Violations existed.

Alene terminated the feed and unfurled her back, locking her green eyes onto DC Hatch. He flushed, his gaze skittered to the window—a clumsy, transparent attempt to cover his staring at her. She ignored it.

Hatch stood rigidly, shoulders back, data-pad held too tightly against his chest. His uniform was immaculate.

*Am I that intimidating? Perhaps.* Respect was a resource she’d had to fight for, and she hadn’t earned it by being soft.

Hatch was a competent constable, a product of this world—efficient, by-the-book, and utterly unprepared for the sort of cases she thrived on. And he looked so young. At thirty-nine, that thought occurred to her more frequently.

“Go ahead, Constable,” she said.

“Apologies, ma’am.” He swallowed. “I have a flag from CGS Headquarters.”

She tilted her chin and raised her eyebrows.

Hatch stepped forward and extended the data-pad, then seemed to remember himself and pulled it back, switching to projection instead.

“A communications technician,” Hatch said. “Ari Feld. Senior clearance. He’s made multiple unauthorised access attempts on classified CGS databases.”

“Standard response?” Alene asked.

“Network lockout. Citation. Review period.”

“Yes, I know. I’m asking if you’ve already done it.”

Hatch hesitated. It was brief, but it was real.

“I would have, ma’am,” he said, “except, well, this case is different.”

That earned him her full attention. She moved around her desk, leaned back against its edge and folded her arms, eyes on his face. Closer to him now, she said nothing.

Hatch shifted his weight. The leather of his belt creaked softly. He steadied himself.

“Feld rerouted in through an external channel from a private terminal within his own office at the CGS.”

Alene’s brow lifted slightly.

“To access data he already had clearance for,” Hatch added. “Which makes no sense.”

“No,” she agreed. “It doesn’t.”

“Also, he works directly under Adebayo,” Hatch said. “Same Adebayo whose terminal you flagged last month.”

Her gaze sharpened.

“Adebayo,” she repeated.

“Yes, ma’am. The one with the low-level data skimming indicators. Too clean for a middle manager.”

Alene nodded once. The pieces did not lock in yet, but they were beginning to outline a shape.

“If Feld has clearance,” she said, “why tunnel out at all?”

“That’s why I brought it to your attention,” Hatch said. His words came faster now, momentum carrying him. “The work involved. The redundancy. He built an entire parallel access structure to re-enter through a door he was already authorised to use.”

Hatch had good instincts. She gestured to the sofa along the far wall. “Sit.”

Hatch perched on the edge of it, hands flat on his knees. Alene placed a chair opposite and sat, one leg crossed over the other, forearms on her knees as she replayed the sequence.

“A senior technician with authorised access using a concealed route anyway. Hiding his tracks from his own system.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Hatch said.

Above the sofa hung a portrait of The Founder. The image was ubiquitous enough that most people no longer noticed it, but Alene always did. The expression was calm, offering certainty without explanation, a promise of order that did not require engagement. But order did require engagement—hers.

She rose and crossed back to the desk, fingers brushing the whistle. The metal was cool. She hesitated, then aligned it precisely with the desk’s edge. Hatch watched her, but his attention followed her hand, not the whistle. Silvery scars cut across the knuckles, pale reminders of a time when she forged solutions with blood and bone, rather than filed them with triplicate backups.

“All right,” she said. “Send me everything you have on Ari Feld.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He stood.

“This stays internal,” she added. “No automated escalation. No courtesy notice.”

“Of course, ma’am.”

As he reached the door, she spoke again. “Good catch, Constable.”

He paused, suppressed a smile, then inclined his head and left.

Alene turned back to the terminal. The Feld anomaly was there, waiting. She began to trace it from the edge inward.

---

The Elephant and Castle Saloon, a shabby old storefront with its door and windows askew, would tilt over were it not wedged between two glass-fronted moderns. Its neon sign hummed with a tiresome persistence, the colour slightly off, as if it had never been calibrated for this century. 

Sharon pushed the door open. A brass bell rang out above her head.

Nothing had changed. Ari had brought her here once, years ago, early enough that the memory still carried novelty. He had marvelled that she’d never noticed the place before, considering how close she lived. She had marvelled, in turn, at his confidence that she should have. At the time, she’d taken his enthusiasm as a harmless eccentricity. It had taken years to recognise it as misalignment.

The door slammed of its own accord behind her, the impact shaking the walls.

She paused just inside the threshold. The smell arrived first—stale beer flattened into old wood, dust baked into the grain, disinfectant layered over rot like a bad compromise. Six booths ran along one wall, the wood darkened and scarred, the front edges of the benches polished to a dull shine by generations of denim and corduroy.

Behind the antique bar, a balding man pulled himself a pint. Foam crested and spilled unchecked over the rim, sliding down the glass to pool on the bar top. He didn’t look up. There was no one else to serve. He seemed less a bartender than another fixture of the place, worn down and stained.

“I’m looking for a man about this tall, with dark hair,” Sharon said. Her voice came out tighter than she intended.

The man wiped his hands on a rag that left them no cleaner than before and leaned forward, forearms down, the hair on them dense and matted. His mouth spread into a smile that presumed too much. “Are you now, love? Reckon I fit the bill. Tall enough, and got the dark hair.”

“What’s left of it,” she said.

“Worth a punt, innit?” the man grunted. “Room five.”

She turned away before he could say more.

Ari’s voice surfaced as she walked, bright with the kind of excitement he usually reserved for obsolete machinery. *It’s a front.* He’d lowered his voice then, conspiratorial. *Closed network dead zone. Every public space is monitored, but this place—total privacy. For a fee.* Shielded rooms with unnetworked holos built for secrecy, illicit trades, and affairs to serve people who believed someone was always listening.

She dragged a gloved finger along the wall. Paint flaked under the fabric, catching like a dry tongue. She let the possibilities line up and fall away. Illicit trade? Ari wasn’t a criminal. A lover? She snorted softly. Paranoia. That one stuck.

The bartender’s gaze followed her, a greasy persistence she felt on her skin. The air of the narrow corridor was somehow even more suffocating. Each step carried her further from the street and deeper into a known regression. She reached the door marked *5*, the numeral hanging upside down from a loose screw, and pushed it open.

The room took the heat from her immediately. Walls, floor, ceiling—all matte black, non-reflective, sound-damped. The air felt thinner, drained of texture. A place designed to cancel itself out. At the centre, Ari sat at a plain aluminium table with four mismatched chairs. Against one wall, a sofa sagged, its upholstery darkened by stains with the remains of past transactions.

“This is predictably bleak,” she said, brushing her fingers across the options panel beside the door.

A twentieth-century Costa Coffee bloomed around them, imperfect and busy. The smell came next, an aggressive approximation of roasted beans and burnt sugar. Holo-patrons occupied the tables, fingers tapping at ancient keyboards, paper cups lifted and lowered in smooth, almost liquid motions. Laughter rose and fell on a fixed loop, precise enough to notice once you tried not to.

“Too crowded,” Ari said.

She sighed and swiped the panel again. Three-quarters of the figures vanished, leaving a quieter version of the café. She sat opposite him. The canned clinking of dishes, coffee grinding, and hissing of steaming milk did nothing to fill the vacuum between them.

Ari’s eyes stayed on the table. “I’m glad you came.”

She folded her arms. “Are you?”

He hesitated, his finger traced a slow circle where a cup had left a ring. “How have you been?”

She didn’t soften it for him. “I’m processing the dissolution of a nine-year marriage.” 

His mouth tightened.

“That too direct? Fine. I’m operating within acceptable parameters. Better?”

He retreated behind the familiar blankness, features gone slack. She’d gone too far.

“I’m… adjusting,” she added, the word small and insufficient.

He shifted. His boot squeaked against the polymer floor, a sharp synthetic sound that cut through the café murmur. His gaze followed a passing holo-patron as though it might offer a safer line of conversation.

“Right,” he said. “I, uh. I heard you got that grant. For the protein folding research. That’s good, right?”

*He heard.*

He hadn’t asked. He hadn’t called. The information had reached him indirectly, filtered through someone else.

The memory came without warning. She was back in their flat, four years earlier, the air still carrying the heat of the day. She’d burst through the door, words tumbling ahead of her, hands already sketching shapes in the air. The folding pathway. The cascade failure. Tau protein, coaxed into revealing its flaw. She’d been incandescent with the thrill of the discovery, every thought alive at once.

Ari had been jacked into the Imager. The sharp reek of gunpowder and horseflesh clung to him. He’d paused the program—a cavalry charge frozen mid-collapse—but his pupils still tracked trajectories.

“That’s great, pet,” he’d said.

His words struck like gentle indulgence, a casual dismissal from an adult to a child who had just shown them a crayon drawing. She’d pushed on anyway, talking him through it. Amino acids as origami and the single misfold that turned a cell into a traitor in the cellular ecosystem. It was chaos theory manifested in biology.

He’d nodded. Then, after a beat too few, he’d asked why she didn’t just reverse it. Write a patch.

*A patch.*

He’d flattened years of work into a bug report. Where she’d seen tragedy written into biology, he’d seen a solvable fault. The fifth tenet, always humming beneath his thinking. *Perfection Is Achieved Through Optimisation*. And still, maddeningly, he had been able to see structures other people missed. He could take a sealed system apart in his head and point to the stress fracture.

She’d walked away. He’d already unpaused the game.

“I assume Francis mentioned the research grant,” Sharon said. “It doesn’t matter. You never cared about my work unless there was a puzzle you could solve. Like that scope you built. I was only the beta tester.”

“That’s not fair,” Ari said, folding his arms, slouching back.

“When was the last time you asked me about my work,” she said, leaning in, “and didn’t immediately try to turn it into something you could fix?”

He didn’t answer. He stood instead, the movement abrupt, and crossed to the Sup disguised as a takeaway counter. He pulled out a cup.

“I ordered you an espresso.”

He set it down carefully between them.

There it was again. A task completed. A measurable result.

She took the cup.

“Nothing for you?” she asked.

He rubbed at his temples. “I can’t handle any more stimulants. I’m already overclocked.”

Then he leaned forward. The slouch vanished. His eyes sharpened, scanning the remaining holo-patrons, checking the edges of the room before fixing on her.

“Listen,” he said. “I was in the deep tunnels today. I picked up a signal bleed on a secure channel. It implied the pandemic was intentional.”

The words came faster after that. Signal paths. Power surges that shouldn’t exist. Data corruption that shouldn’t have resolved into patterns.

She listened. Manufactured pathogens weren’t impossible. But the moment he framed it as a message meant for him, her earlier suspicion about paranoia resurfaced.

She set the cup down.

“Do you honestly think,” she said, “that someone capable of engineering a secure-channel bleed would gamble on a method with that kind of failure rate just to reach you? To warn *you* about a global conspiracy? To what end?”

His face closed. The urgency drained, leaving the flatness she’d seen too many times.

“I shouldn’t have come.” He stood, already turning away.

Before she could get up, he turned back. His hands came down on the table hard enough to slosh coffee over the lip of her cup.

“No. I *do* know what I was thinking,” he said, his voice intense. “I was thinking you’re the only one who can parse this. I see only noise here, but I know you’ll see the signal. I know I never gave your work that the respect it deserved. But people are dying. If anyone can tell whether this is real, it’s you.”

Sharon was stunned into silence. It was as if a genetic sequence she had mapped down to its last base pair had suddenly expressed a completely unknown protein. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard him express that much emotion. 

He had stopped fidgeting with the table. Stopped scanning the room for an exit from his own admission. He was waiting on her mind, not trying to get past it.

“You really believe this?” Her voice cracked.

“Yes. I don’t know why me specifically, but I do believe it.”

“Alright.” Her voice cooled. “Assume your premise is correct. The delivery mechanism is inefficient if you’re the target. That suggests you aren’t. You’re a conduit. Francis makes more sense.”

He nodded. Relief flickered and vanished. “If they can lure me, they can map my connections. She could do something with this information, but look at how you reacted. I can’t walk into her office with this. I’m already on shaky ground with her because of… well, never mind.”

The evasion was familiar. He’d hint at a problem, she’d try to help, and he’d retreat. She ignored it.

“Then set aside the message and consider the substance,” she said. “Distributing a pathogen worldwide would be a massive expenditure of resources. Why would anyone do that?”

“I don’t know *why*,” he said. “Right now, I need to know if it’s even possible.”

“Scientifically?” her laugh was a dry puff of air. “In a world with universal genetic sequencing, creating a targeted pathogen is a graduate-level project.”

“Then you’d know what to look for.” His voice was dangerously quiet. “Could you check?”

“What you’re asking,” she said, “isn’t a casual check.”

“If it’s nothing, I’m wrong,” he said. “But if it’s something…”

Markers would be easy enough to spot. Too-clean sequences. Folds that never occur naturally. That wasn’t the problem.

She met his eyes. The pupils were wide. His hands had stilled.

The espresso soured in her mouth, an acidic burn that had nothing to do with the quality of the beans. He wasn’t here because he needed *her*. He was here because he needed a biologist.

“So this is what you want,” she said. “Quite the switch.”

“What?”

“Nine years of tuning me out. Now you’re listening.”

He said nothing. In his silence, Sharon found her answer.

“It’s funny,” she said. “I finally have your attention, and all it took was a global catastrophe.”

He’s using me, a voice whispered in her mind. A colder voice, the one that had earned her the awards on her sideboard, overrode it. This is a critical discovery. A pathogen so well hidden that none of the thousands of scientists searching for it have identified it. A problem that didn’t care how she felt.

She stood. Killed the simulation with a flick. Black rushed back in.

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll look. Not for you. Because if there’s even a fraction of a chance this was engineered, it has to be studied.”

The tension went out of his shoulders. “Thank you, Sharon.”

“Don’t thank me.” She was already moving. “I need data. Public logs won’t be enough. I need CGS medical data.”

“I don’t have access.”

“Then get it,” she said. “Break in if you have to.”

“Ring me when you have the data.” She reached the door and paused. “Until then, we have nothing more to talk about.”

She left him there.

The corridor felt longer on the way out.

Back in her flat, she dropped onto the sofa without removing her gilet. Weeks spent on the pathogen and nothing. She had been looking at it wrong. Everyone had. An engineered pathogen would have deliberate failure points, not accidental ones.

If this pathogen had been designed, she would deconstruct it.

---

Ari returned to his flat with the exchange with Sharon still executing in the background, a clean sequence that refused to terminate. It was worth the cost. He would get Sharon more data and she would analyse the pathogen. Francis would accept the findings and would know what to do with them.

He crossed to the workbench without looking at the clothes draped over the chair or the tray with yesterday’s congealed dinner beside a diagnostic scanner. He ordered a nutrient slurry from the Sup—fuel, not flavour. The timer flashed a completion window. Sixteen minutes and nine seconds.

The integrated terminal came alive at his touch. He pulled a public news feed onto a secondary holo and let it hover at his shoulder, a ribbon of sanctioned calm wrapped around accumulating disaster. The background chatter steadied him.

“…cannot explain the source of this most deadly affliction, which has killed over one hundred million people globally to date…” the anchor said, immaculate and appropriately concerned.

He had seen the bodies in raw CGS feeds, but he had no frame for that many people. He and Sharon might be the only ones who knew why. The thought tried to spawn side processes he could not afford.

Sharon’s imperative echoed in his head. He had to get her the data.

His hands moved. Scripts nested. Queries fanned out and returned. The public layers of the CGS network peeled back under familiar pressure as he mapped perimeter defences, looking for hairline fractures.

“…the Walkers have again disrupted a primary Sup line, the fifth incident this week…”

He filtered it out. The Walkers were a known bug with a predictable, low-level impact. Annoying, but not a system-critical threat.

The feed cut to a man with a judicial face and a mane of silver hair.

“…these actions, taken at a moment of extreme vulnerability, are an insult to the tenets of economic stability…”

Ari’s fingers slowed. He knew this voice. CGS functionaries generally spoke with clipped, efficient modulation like data bursts, but Justice William Baron articulated with a deliberate latency intended to command. He had the presence of men from Ari’s historical Imager simulations—kings, or generals. Figures who didn’t serve a system, but bent it to their will.

Ari let the feed run and refocused his attention on the primary objective.

The Sup chimed. He tore the seal with his teeth, swallowed the slurry in three pulls, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and dove back in.

The medical repositories hid behind a clean CGS interface with just four words.

TOP SECRET. ACCESS DENIED.

The barrier was a multi-layered, non-Euclidean defence matrix that folded in on itself. For a heartbeat the technician in him admired the architecture of the thing, but then the wall asserted itself again.

“Bollocks.” He leaned in. “We’ll see.”

He launched a multi-pronged assault. Network pathways he had coded were blocked, the keys shattering against the first firewall. Packet sniffers returned nothing but their own reflections. A brute-force run battered against even more security protocols. He adjusted, cut threads, rerouted. The system absorbed it all.

TOP SECRET. ACCESS DENIED.

He slumped back, his eyes burning, a headache pulsing behind his temples. He pulled back long enough to run a diff on his own failures, comparing the system’s responses against his intrusion signatures. The logs scrolled and scrolled while he rested his eyes. 

Then it stopped. An administrative access to the files he was after, stamped moments before the defences rose. The user field was gone, excised by a clearance he did not possess.

Someone had just locked the door and, as an extra precaution, tossed their key into the Thames.

His heart knocked hard against his ribs. He forgot to blink. He launched the trace with targeted probes and narrowing scopes. The objective rerouted. Phantom admin, not medical data.

The air thickened with the smell of warm plastic. His shoulders hunched. His hands cramped and shook, then steadied by force of will. He pushed until the world pixelated at the edges.

The code smeared and he pitched forward, striking the terminal with a hollow sound. He rubbed his cheek where it had struck the terminal and conceded it was time for bed.