24 — Binary

Life does not exist without flow. Water, air, commerce, information—they all require movement to sustain the systems they compose. Without the flow of blood and nerve impulses, living beings die. Without the flow of water and soil nutrients, all plant life dies. Ari Feld’s genius was to question this fundamental truth, uncovering a terrible paradox: that this particular pathogen had, for the first time in history, made flow itself toxic. By daring to interrupt it, he saved us all.

—Sharon Feld, Containing the Prion Pandemic

Dust and old decisions choked the air in the Councillor’s office at the London CGS Building. It was a dry, charged scent, nothing like the ozone, damp earth, and blood Ari had left in her memory at the Crick Institute two days earlier. The early morning sun shone through a cloudless sky to reflect off thousands of floating dust motes, each on its own erratic path. Francis Herbert sat in her high-backed chair, the ergonomic mesh doing nothing for the calcified ache in her bones, or the hollow one in her heart.

Holo displays circled her desk, a sea of red alerts. Supply chain fractures in the Midlands. Riots in Manchester. The CGS was howling, its tidy harmonies wrecked by the reality it had been built to contain.

Francis reached for the small silver-framed photograph on the corner of her desk. Anjali was laughing, her head thrown back, her dark hair lit into a halo. Adam wore that quiet, serious smile of his, looking at Anjali as if she were the axle of the universe. In the background Naomi cut an apple at the kitchen table with a paring knife, her eyes fixed entirely on the task. In Anjali’s arms, a baby. Narinder. Ari.

The baby looked at the camera with curious eyes, one hand lifted towards the lens as if even then he wanted to understand the optics. She tried to imagine who he would have been if Anjali and Adam had lived, if she hadn’t spent the next thirty years carefully shaping his life, and in doing so, inadvertently making him susceptible to the calculated manipulations of her enemies.

Grief bled from the centre of her chest and displaced the air from her lungs. They were the closest she had ever come to having a family of her own.

She set the photo down and nudged it square with the edge of the desk.

“Councillor, DCI Ardone is here.” The intercom cut through the silence.

Francis smoothed her tunic and cleared her throat. “Send her in.”

Alene marched in. The DCI looked exhausted, her posture rigid. She wore full dress uniform, stiff collar and polished buttons. She moved as if her ribs still objected to the effort, but her eyes were dry and fixed.

“Francis.”

“Alene.”

Formal titles had died in the lab with Ari.

“Thank you for coming,” Francis said. She stood, bracing her hands against the desk. “And thank you, for Ari. I know you did everything you could.”

Alene looked away, jaw tightening. She touched the dark bruising on her throat. “He did what was necessary. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Yes, he did,” Francis said, motioning Alene into the chair opposite and taking her own. “And thank you.”

Francis waited as Alene sat. “Baron?”

“Processed,” Alene said. “Secure holding cell at the Yard. Still proud, but he knows there is no way back from this. He admitted to the frame-up and the Adebayo chain. The pathogen, he still denies. Says he saw an open door and walked through it.”

“I believe him,” Francis said, her voice paper-dry in the quiet room. “William was an opportunist. The pandemic and Santo gave him an opening to exploit.”

“I don’t have anything else on Santo yet, or how Baron recruited him.”

Francis nodded. Baron’s motives were political and soured with personal grief. Santo, though, his betrayal of Ari was personal, and as far as she was concerned, he had got what he deserved.

“All that means,” Francis said, “is that the developers are still out there.”

“We’ll find them,” Alene said.

“Do.”

The intercom buzzed again. “Councillor? The other guests are here.”

Alene moved to leave, but Francis held up a hand. “Stay, Alene. You forged this alliance. You should see it finished.”

Francis straightened her tunic again. “Send them in.”

The doors swung open and the filtered air took on damp leather, cigar smoke, and the acrid smell of iron. Charles strode in first, carrying himself with the easy grace of a confident leader. Timmy entered with him, but didn’t cross the room. The big man loomed by the door, a gargoyle of black leather and unwashed hair against the white polycarbonate walls. He lifted one grime-stained finger towards a plinth displaying a piece of abstract geometric art, stopped short, then looked at Francis—the man a monolith of reality in her temple of applied economic theory.

“Councillor,” Charles said, planting himself before the desk.

He did not offer a hand.

Francis did not stand to greet him.

“Charles,” Francis replied, inclining her head. “Thank you for coming. And for your support at the Institute. It was decisive.”

“Don’t mistake my presence for submission,” Charles said. “We didn’t fight for you, or for the CGS. We fought for Ari. And because removing Baron was a security imperative for my people.”

“Very practical,” Francis said.

She looked at Charles properly. He wore his dignity well despite his patched morning suit. Francis had noted his courage at Sharon’s lab, his hands-on leadership style.

She gestured to the chairs. “Please, sit.”

Charles remained standing. “This isn’t tea, Councillor. We are here because DCI Ardone said you want to make an offer.”

“I do,” Francis said. “But before that, I owe you an accounting. You should hear the truth about why the Walkers exist.”

Charles frowned. “We exist because we chose to leave. Because we rejected your controlling worldview.”

“You exist because you served a function for the CGS,” Francis said softly.

Charles stiffened. “I beg your pardon?”

“Naomi Feld’s theory of economic interdependency was beautiful,” Francis said, going to the window. Sunlight glossed the park and the crowded plaza below. “But she was a theorist. She treated humanity as data. Input, output, consumption, recycling. She believed that if people were fed and given achievable goals, contentment would follow.”

She turned back to face him. “Her son Adam, Ari’s father and a civil engineer, understood the practical risks of her theories better than either of us did. He warned me that every sealed system builds towards its own failure if you don’t give it a way to vent. I had a global system to construct, Charles. I could not afford an explosion.”

She held Charles’s gaze. “The CGS needed a place where the disaffected could go without bringing the whole structure down. Somewhere dissatisfaction could connect and redefine itself against a visible rival. I needed an outlet for the framework to survive.”

Charles clenched his fists and glared at her. The colour drained from his face, leaving it grey.

“I instructed Adam to demarcate Walker territory out of the infrastructure the Mono and the Sup had made redundant. In London that meant car parks, underground storage, deep-level shelters, old utility tunnels, even the old Mail Rail. When the Sup went in, I made sure it was vulnerable where it intersected with your compounds. Your tithe was calculated into the supply chain. Enough to sustain you, but never enough to let you become uncontrollable.”

“Our struggle, our survival—” Charles thumped his palms on his chest, “—the people we lost to Baron’s patrols. That was nothing more than a line in your budget?”

“It was necessary,” Francis said. Her heart hammered, but she kept her tone even.

“You needed specimens in a controlled habitat,” Charles spat. “Santo was right. We were zoo animals.” He took a step forward, hands clenched. “You lied to us. For decades, our independence was a charade.”

Alene rose out of her chair at once. The gold braid on her uniform caught the light. She stepped between them and lifted a hand to Charles, barring the path.

“Charles,” Alene said. “The past is a cold case. There is no justice waiting there. Think about your people’s future. Listen first. You don’t have to like her to benefit from her offer.”

He looked into Alene’s eyes. The violence receded, though it did not go quiet.

Charles scowled at Francis over Alene’s shoulder, chest heaving. “You played god with our lives.”

“I was governing,” Francis said. “And yes, I used Baron’s Capo hatred against you. The threat to you had to remain credible for you to fulfil your part.”

“Credible? You put us in a cage and handed our enemy the key.”

She was pushing him too far, but for this to work, for her to create a new future, she needed Charles to know the unsanctioned risk she and Adam had taken all those years ago.

“I made you a sanctuary,” Francis said, and even to her own ears the word sounded obscene. “Where else could the disaffected have gone and survived? I gave you a world where you could live by your own rules, protected from the CGS’s full might. Yes, it was manipulative, but it also saved many lives.”

Charles looked at Alene as if for confirmation. Alene said nothing.

Beside the door, Timmy shifted. He folded his arms and the leather of his jacket creaked, like old wood groaning under strain. He kept his eyes on the back of Charles’s head and cleared his throat, a low grinding rumble in the office.

Charles heard it. Some of the tension left his shoulders.

“My mother died because of your calculating system. My father died from his anger with it.” Charles touched a patch on his suit. “To you, those deaths were actuarial calculations.” He looked at his hands, calloused and scarred from years of scraping survival out of the dark. “You didn’t just kill them, Francis. You stole the meaning of their deaths—of every Walker sacrifice.”

Francis came back from the window and stood before Charles and Alene, her desk behind her.

“You may not believe me, Charles, but I know what the system costs. I have just lost my son to it. I have spent a lifetime choosing which suffering could be borne and which would break the structure. Yes, there was a cost to the Walkers, but there would have been more otherwise. How many more of your people would have suffered your father’s fate if I hadn’t allowed the Walkers to exist?”

Charles was calm now, but his grimace showed he didn’t like it. She could relate. Too often, she’d forced herself to tolerate, or do, something distasteful yet necessary.

“I’m telling you this, Charles, because the system is breaking. The pandemic has shown every seam in it. We must build something new. Something that will be better for your people and for the CGS. This is my offer—the Walkers get formal recognition and a seat on the Council.”

“We don’t want your seat,” Charles said, his voice hollow. “We will not become you. We keep our culture. We take what we need.”

“I am not asking you to become the CGS. Quite the opposite. Those who cannot live a placid life will still need your communities, but they will no longer exist as a managed resource. You would govern yourselves openly.”

Charles stared at her. Then his gaze dropped to the floor. When he spoke again, pride was still there, in the muscles of his jaw and the tightness of his throat.

“At this moment, what I want most is access to Dr Feld’s cure. My community is being devastated, Councillor. My son, Benjamin. The fever is on him.”

Francis’s hand went to her tunic. Ari shaking, dying on the lab floor. She would not let another boy die.

“Today,” she said. “The first doses of the dampener and the pacemakers are being prepped at the Crick. Benjamin will be first. I give you my word.”

“No,” Charles said. “He will be second. We’re done being your experiments.”

“As you wish,” she said.

Charles nodded once, an unsteady motion. “Right then. We will talk of treaties later. Save my son.”

He turned and walked out, Timmy trailing him. The big man paused as he held the door and looked back at Francis—another witness to her confession.

When the doors closed, Francis leaned back against her desk and let the adrenaline run off.

“He’s going to be a hard partner,” Alene said.

“He is a good man,” Francis said. “Better than I deserve.”

She turned back to the window. The next structure would have vents, and it would be built to take damage and keep standing.

She reached over and touched the silver frame. Ari, my sweet, broken boy, she thought, closing her eyes. Naomi gave us the theory, but you applied it to our greatest threat. You saved us. You saved me.

She set the photograph face down on the desk.

---

Alene walked along the path bordering the lake in St James’s Park, her shoes crunching on the gravel. She wore a thin coat over a plain tunic, comfortable in the warmth of the morning sun. She touched the lapel, the cotton yielding under her fingers, softer than the stiff collar of her uniform, which only a few months ago had chafed against her bruised neck.

Sharon kept pace beside her, her hair shorter, a practical bob that framed her face and made her dark eyes seem even larger. She looked tired.

The winter rains that had lashed London during the crisis and its aftermath had given way to persistent sunshine that coaxed the geraniums in the Memorial Gardens into brilliant orange and yellow blooms. The air smelt of damp earth, cut grass, the spiciness of geraniums, and a metallic trace of fertiliser.

London wore its new peace like a skin graft, functional, but the seams were still fresh against the old grey stone. Mono cars sliced past, the maglev drone a lullaby compared to the screaming metal of the protestors who had left the park months ago.

They walked in an easy silence, a comfortable familiarity that had formed over months of these weekly rendezvous. Alene had long since let Sharon’s breach of confidence with Francis scar over with the other wounds the investigation had left behind.

Alene’s secure comms unit pinged, a synthetic buzz that broke through the murmur of wind through young leaves. She silenced it without breaking stride, though her eyes scanned the perimeter.

A holo flickered into existence above her palm, its colours thinned by the sunlight. The image was grainy with interference at the source. The background was a wash of white glare and red dust. Alene imagined she could smell the dry heat of a place far from this green park.

Hatch’s face resolved in the static. He looked older, his skin tanned, the eagerness of the constable burned away by months of global hunting. The shrill cry of a carrion bird cut through the audio link, wild enough to make the manicured park seem artificial.

“Ma’am,” he said, his voice tinny but clear. “You were right about the packet signatures. The data fragments, they’re not local. They weren’t even routed through standard CGS nodes.”

“Source?” Alene asked in the clipped voice of command.

“It’s a deep archive,” Hatch said, wiping sweat from his forehead. “Pre-CGS architecture. I’ve traced the echo to a defunct server farm in the Ural region. I reckon I’m close to the source.”

Alene’s expression softened fractionally. The boy who had trembled at her doorframe now worked a trail across continents.

“Proceed with caution,” Alene said. “If the developers are still active, they’ll have alarms.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Get it sorted, Hatch,” Alene added, before severing the connection. The image vanished. Alene lowered her arm. She looked at Sharon. “He’s good. Better than I was at his age.”

“He believes he’ll find them?” Sharon said.

“There’s a trail. You have doubts?”

Sharon didn’t answer immediately. She stopped to watch a pair of pelicans gliding across the lake. One of the heavy birds flapped down with an awkward splash. Alene tracked the expanding ripples.

“I’ve run the simulations, Alene. Thousands of them,” Sharon said, her hands opening and closing at her sides. “The protein is too exact. It targets the autonomic nervous system with a precision that defies evolutionary randomness. But nature—” Sharon waved an arm at the park around them, “—nature is vast. A protein can misfold in a billion ways. Maybe it was just a statistical inevitability. A random mutation that found a critical vulnerability in our biology.”

“So you can’t rule out a natural occurrence?” Alene asked, uncomfortable with the idea of a crime without a criminal.

Sharon paused, her gaze drifting back to the water. “No, but I seriously doubt it,” she said. “If Hatch never finds a hand behind it, we have to accept that maybe we were just unlucky. That the CGS’s system of constrained production gave biology a vector to attack all of humanity at once with a random mutation.”

Alene nodded. Ari would have rejected that answer. A system failure doesn’t happen without a logical driver.

The path curved gently, leading them away from the organic beauty of the lake and towards the structured geometry of Duck Island. Ahead, the grand plaza of the CGS Building covered the lake, the structure gleaming in the sunlight. The puncture in the glass dome from her and Ari’s heist had been erased by a team of drones, leaving an unbroken surface that reflected the calm sky. A thin crowd drifted through the plaza, tourists and bureaucrats moving with the ease of restored order.

They crossed the southwestern footbridge and stopped at the western edge of the plaza. There were two statues now.

To the left stood Naomi Feld, The Founder. Her bronze form standing serene and intellectual, her hand outstretched in instruction, her gaze fixed on the horizon of a perfect future. To the right, on a matching plinth of white marble, stood a new figure. It was Ari. Or rather, it was a simulation of Ari.

The bronze figure stood tall, chest out, chin lifted in a noble gaze. He held a specialised tool in one hand, raising it like an emblem. His clothes were a stylised version of a technician’s jumpsuit, fitted through the chest and shoulders. His face was handsome and devoid of doubt.

Alene stared at it. Her weight shifting from foot to foot. She glanced at Sharon, unable to read her yet.

“They cleaned him up,” Alene said softly.

“They debugged him,” Sharon corrected, her mouth tightening to one side as she studied the statue. “Look at him. He looks like a propaganda render or like a hero from one of his Imagers.”

The sculptor had given him the hands of a pianist, long and steady. Alene remembered them covered in grease, knuckles white with tension, shaking with the fever that was burning him alive. Those hands had saved her life.

“Yeah, he was a right mess of glitches,” Alene said. “Things didn’t need to be perfect for him to find value in them.”

The bronze eyes stared into the distance. The real Ari looked at the details, the flaws and their fasteners, the frayed wires inside the panel. He had looked at her with that same attention and found nothing needing to be fixed.

She read the bold lettering carved into the marble below his effigy.

NARINDER FELD – THE SAVIOUR

“He would have hated it,” Sharon whispered. She stepped closer, confronting the bronze face that was so familiar and yet so alien. “He’ll live forever, but not as he truly was. He was just a man. A brilliant, broken, terrified man.” She let out a soft sob.

“The public needs personification of their salvation,” Alene said, recalling the logic Francis had used to sell the monument. “They need to remember that the system produces heroes. The System Is Self-Correcting.”

“And you and I have the truth,” Sharon said. She turned to Alene, her eyes wet but clear. “Francis loved him, in her own twisted way. I saw her face when the sculpture was unveiled. She wasn’t looking at the crowd. She was looking at him.”

“It’s her way of honouring him,” Alene said.

“And exploiting him.” Sharon wiped a tear from her eye with the heel of her hand. “Francis loved like a gardener pruning a bonsai, cutting away whatever spoiled the shape she wanted. This shape serves her purpose.”

“Maybe it’s a fair exchange,” Alene said. “He saves her system one last time, and she makes sure no one ever forgets his name.”

Alene looked from the statue of the grandmother to the statue of the grandson, the guardians of Francis’s utopia.

“He would have loathed being put on a pedestal next to his grandmother,” Sharon murmured, following Alene’s gaze. “He spent his whole life hiding from her legacy. And now they’re a matched set.”

Alene tore her gaze away and let it drift to the CGS Building behind the Feld figures. It was a monolith of control, a machine that consumed people to keep running. The system had cost her a partner, and it had cost Ari his life. It demanded you cut away parts of yourself to serve the whole.

But she considered the people in the plaza. A family ate lunch on a bench. Teenagers laughed their way across the plaza. No one was dying in the streets.

The machine still ran. It still asked for blood, but for now it also kept people fed, dry, and peaceful. Bing better than Churchill’s least-worst option wasn’t much consolation, but London had survived on worse.

“I should go,” Alene said. “I have a briefing with the European councillors.”

“And I have a culture to check,” Sharon said. “The non-invasive delivery mechanism. It’s promising. Much easier to deploy than the current protocol.”

“Good.”

They stood there for a moment, bound together by a dead man and the world that had survived him.

Alene took Sharon’s hand. “Same time next week?”

“Yes. See you then.”

Alene turned and walked away, her stride long and purposeful. She didn’t look back at the statue. She had the memory of his hand in hers, trembling and warm. She had his words. You repaired yourself. It’s not a problem, it’s awe-inspiring.

At the southwestern bridge, she paused and glanced back.

Sharon was still standing there, a small figure in the shadow of two giants. Alene watched as Sharon pulled a small, jagged object from her pocket. The broken circuit board. Sharon thumbed the broken traces. Then she closed both hands around it and pressed it hard against her chest, as if trying to power a circuit that would never be whole again.

---

The Walker workshop beat and hissed around Benjamin, its benches crowded with half-mended sets and parts laid out for stripping. He sat on the high stool in the corner that had been Ari’s.

“Steady,” he said, low and patient.

Beside him, a girl no older than eight gnawed her lip and squinted through the mounted magnifying glass at a circuit board pulled from a pre-CGS toaster. The soldering iron trembled in her hand.

“I can’t,” she whispered. “It’s too small.”

“You can.” Benjamin laid his hand over hers, enough to stop the shaking, but he left the positioning to her. “Don’t look at all of it. Just that point there. Wire to pad. That’s all.”

She took a breath and touched the iron to the solder. A thread of silver smoke curled up. The bead settled bright and round.

Benjamin tugged the wire. It held.

“I did it,” she said.

“You did.” He gave her a small nod. “Now do the next one.”

She bent back over the board before her grin had finished leaving her face. Benjamin watched her for a moment, then reached for the rag by his knee and wiped flux from his hands. Heat and friction had hardened the pads of his fingers, making them tools themselves.

Children from the tunnels worked the other benches. Two topside kids sat among them, tunics already marked with grease. One boy had a vacuum cleaner open like a patient in an operating theatre. Another was sorting screws by size into jar caps.

Across the room, a heavy thud-hiss kept time under the high whine of the new CGS laser-soldering pens.

Dax straddled the chassis of a salvaged Mono car with a pair of callipers in one hand and his plasma cutter in the other. He measured twice, grunted, then cut. The new black shell over his ear caught the cutter flare when he turned his head. A spanner hit stone somewhere behind him. He flinched, swore under his breath, tapped the side of the implant, and got on with welding the new pump housing into place.

“What are those?” the girl asked. She had finished her soldering and was wiping her hands on her blouse.

Benjamin dropped the rag on the bench and followed the girl’s gaze to a spot just above where his tools hung on the wall. Two walker-talkers stood side by side on a narrow shelf fixed into the stone. The one on the left was Ari’s, its casing rubbed smooth in places, the antenna slightly bent. On the right was the one Benjamin had rebuilt from bits and bobs and patience.

Benjamin took down the one he had rebuilt. It felt heavy and solid, the smooth plastic soothing against his calloused palm. “Walker-talkers,” he said. “Old signal kit.”

“Do they work?”

“Yeah,” he said. “They work.”

He thumbed the switch. A burst of static filled the small corner, a white-noise hiss that layered over the clangs and thumps of the workshop. He listened for a second, then pressed the transmit button. The static dropped away.

He held the button down again for a long second. He was keeping a promise. I’ll be listening.

“Is anyone there?” the girl asked.

Benjamin let go. Static rushed back, soft and grainy.

“No,” he said. “Not anymore.”

He switched the walker-talker off and put it back beside the other one. The topsiders had built a statue. This was all his.

The girl was still holding the soldering iron and watching him. A broken toaster that was close to being whole again waited for them on the workbench.

He picked up Ari’s old screwdriver and turned it once in his hand. The balance was just right.

“Right,” Benjamin said. “Let’s see what else we can fix.”