Static danced across the car windscreen like raindrops.
“Just like the old days”, grumbled Budinski under his breath.
“Wouldn’t know,” said Smith.
“Wasn’t asking.”
“ Well I was telling.” Smith snapped. “ You know I’m half your age.
“Don’t get shitty with me because you had to have a coffee with a deluded hippy.” said Budinski, looking over at his partner, tiredly. “I was the one who had to walk into the place. You wouldn’t believe the mould that had built up on the walls.”
“You gonna drive this thing manually to the office or what old man?”
“Guess I have to don’t I?”
Smith stared blankly out of the window, ignoring her partner.
He tapped the top right-hand corner of the windscreen and immediately the static vanished and sunlight shone in through the glass. Both squinted and pushed back into their seats as their eyes adjusted to the light. Budinski slid his hand over the deep blue velvet roof and a compartment opened seamlessly. He pulled out a pair of sunglasses and proceeded to hide his tired eyes from the light. He looked over at Smith and smiled pulling his face into a smug asymmetry.
“You’re not cool you know.”
Budinski ignored her comment and pulled out into the road.
He shifted up gears as a traffic light turned yellow. The streets were empty as the Grid was down and only authorised members of the government and security forces were given access to drive manually. Deviation outside of the set Grid course was considered highly dangerous, as the variables of driving could never be calculated fully. It was common knowledge that driving a car manually was four times more dangerous than flying in a plane. How people in the twentieth and early twenty-first century had ever considered taking the risk was a mystery. Now safety was guaranteed by the operating systems installed in all cars, regardless of brand, that predicted the dangers of the road to an almost one hundred percent level of certainty.
“This isn’t good Sahar,” Budinski always used her first name when he wanted to address something serious. It was so seldom that Smith really felt her name had meaning when he used it. “The Grid has been down three times in just one week. It’s practically unheard of since back when I was young.”
There was a flicker on the windscreen as the view changed from the real thing to a video image of what they had just been seeing. "Back on The Grid, I guess," said Budinski, letting go of the wheel. He'd never really liked the idea of watching the world through a camera. Of course, with the video image you could inlay the real world with a whole host of analytics that were genuinely useful, but there was just something unsettling about never truly seeing reality in its raw form. Too many distractions, he thought.
***
“There’s a voice message waiting”, Budinski said as they got out of the car and walked to the office door.
Dark and dank the office had few redeeming features. Budinski sat at a large teak desk of a mid-twentieth century design set against a peeling wall. Smith launched herself horizontally onto an old stained sofa and took out her mobile, taking no time at all to begin scrolling down the content displayed on the thin translucent rectangle.
Taking his own mobile out, Budinski set it down onto the desk. Instantly the grain of the wood lit up with blue light pulsing from the phone. After a few seconds the backboard became bright white and a menu screen came into focus. A square encasing a picture of an old early mobile phone with a stumpy antenna glowed green.
“Play queued message”, grunted Budinski. The edges of the box expanded and the green colour flooded into the rest of the screen.
The sound of a masked voice came from unseen speakers. “As you may have noticed the net has experienced some turbulence as of late,” The tasks never came with any video and certainly not with the original voice print, government officials had long since taken their presence off of the Grid. It was just not possible to do the job efficiently and deal with the status of such power. One mistake and the public came down on you like a pack of dogs and you never found time to actually implement the changes you needed. At least that was the official line. That kind of exposure was left to those that wanted celebrity. To become famous overnight but forever be at the mercy of the public’s opinion. No, accountability for government officials was tethered purely to the job title they worked under, never their name.
“A major monitoring hub has… gone down, shall we say.” The voice continued. “Our deviant net profiling has taken a hit as a consequence and we’ve had to separate the task between auxillary stations outside of the country. This is not the first attack on such a station, but this is the largest. We believe, from video footage recovered from the facility that the culprit is one lone man.”
Budinski looked over at Smith and raised an eyebrow.
“If we are to secure the safety of this country then he must be stopped.” The voice finished, and the green screen faded to white again.
An image of a document in a blue box began to flash on the corner of the screen. Budinski tapped it. “What do we get to know then,” He muttered to himself and began to read as text began to fill the white backboard. “Seems our friend has been on quite the tour around the country. The last hit was in Scotland, up in the highlands. A major facility as our friend with the auto-tuner said. Here’s the video footage from the security cameras.” Budinski sat back and Smith got up from the sofa to get a close look.
The camera pointed down a long corridor walled on one side by two tall glass windows. Suddenly the glass of one shattered into the corridor.
“That glass must have been bullet proof,” said Smith, her interest piqued. “I didn’t even see any bullet punctures before it fell to pieces.”
“No explosion either,” remarked Budinski. “It just shatters.” As the film continues, men and women in grey suits began to file out of doors lining the corridor’s opposite wall. A few come to inspect the glass. They look up from the grains littering the linoleum floor and immediately turn and run.
“Our friend perhaps?” grumbled Budinski.
“I guess so,”
“He must be packing something lethal to have done what he did. Guess I’d run to.”
“You getting scared old man?”
After a few seconds a man with burnt orange hair walked into view of the camera. He wore a long dark coat that ran down to his knees and on his feet were a pair of hide boots like something from an old western film. He stopped for a second, then as if he felt Budinski and Smith watching him lifted his head up to the camera on his left and grinned. He whipped his hand out of his coat fast and pretended to fire at the camera. The film went dead.
“That’s it. Four fingers and a thumb?” said Smith, unsatisfied.
“I think you’ll find he only used two Sahar.”
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