Chapter One
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he early morning sun slowly rose higher in the sky warming the cool morning air and burning away the last of the early morning fog that hung over the city. As he emerged from the tube station, Adam Crane took a slow controlled breath of the crisp morning air. The tube station lead out into a small courtyard, flanked by some recently regenerated 19th century buildings on each side and a small fountain in the middle, its ornamental decoration, draped in a subtle flowing veil of clear water. He walked the short distance from the station to a small coffee shop and joined the modestly sized queue. As he waited for his routine morning cup of coffee he glanced above the counter at the small screen mounted on the wall which was displaying the morning news. While the volume was off, he knew by the montage of images what the report was about; another viral scare, this time in Paris. But he wasn’t too worried; he would have been apprised if it was a serious situation. He got to the counter and smiled at the young waitress smiling back at him. Asking for his usual he stood to one side and waited for it to come. The large cup was placed in front of him and he pressed his thumb against the scanner to pay. He placed the lid on the cup, gave the girl behind the counter another smile and slowly walked out blowing into the hole in the lid. Outside again, he stopped for a moment and looked around. The street was in full bustle and the warm clear morning seemed to have put a skip in everyone’s step. Adam had gotten into the habit of stopping occasionally and looking around him of late. He thought how easy it was to forget how rich a city could be sometimes. So he liked to stop for a moment and take
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The End Of Dependence it in. He liked this part of London, it was one of the few parts of the city that he could think of that was relatively free of visual pollution. In the last century, people complained about the pollution from factories and cars, in this century it was visual pollution. Screens, billboards and simple holographic adverts and messages flooded the urban landscape. But this part of London had somehow managed to preserve a certain sense of quaintness. It hadn’t escaped totally, but Adam could deal with three moderately sized digital banners, hanging from one of the old buildings. Adam took another breath, smiled subtly to himself and began the short walk down the street to work. He had taken about three steps when he noticed the dull roar of planes turbine engines overhead. While this sound had long been common place in most major cities for decades, it almost sounded as if there were two sets of engines. Two sets of engines, strangely low in the sky. Adam stopped mid sip of his coffee and noticed that everyone else seemed to have stopped after noticing the same unusual sound. He joined the people around him and looked up, scanning the blue sky between the tall buildings for any kind of sign of a plane, but nothing could be found. He decided to dismiss it and returned to his coffee.
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Chapter Two
T
he path was littered with all manner of papers, books and personal belongings all hastily discarded. A clear sign of a normal Thursday morning commute cruelly interrupted. A child’s toy lay in his periphery as Adam opened his eyes to the sound of his ears ringing. While he remembered the impact of something hitting him, he didn’t remember much of his journey from standing to the pavement. But he knew something straight off, something very bad had happened. He rolled himself onto his side and shook the cobwebs from his head. When he rolled, he glanced up at the sky and caught a glimpse of a large cloud of black smoke with dozens of smoke trails moving away from it and falling back towards the ground. He found that for the first few steps he had to really concentrate on what he was doing but it soon came back to him. He staggered over to towards the fountain in the middle of the courtyard. He lowered himself down onto the side and plunged his hands into the cool clear water, first cleaning his hands, and then splashing his face. The cool water helped to clear his shell shocked senses. As his senses re-tuned them self ’s to the world around them, he noticed that his hands free phone attached to his ear was both ringing and vibrating and had been for some time, he had simply failed to notice it until now. Sitting up, he pressed the button on the side and he heard the subtle click as it connected to the other side. Before his ears tuned into the sounds coming from his ear peace, he first had to try and block out the sounds of screaming. He thought he knew what the sound of screaming was like
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The End Of Dependence but he had never heard that kind of screaming. This was the screaming of seriously injured, terrified, and as far as he knew, dying people. Whatever the reason, it could help but think how unnatural the screaming sound was. But when he first regained consciousness, he noticed that there was a strange sense of calm in the immediate aftermath of what he assumed was some kind of massive explosion. He then turned his focus back to his ear piece. The voice was repeating the same words over and over. “Adam?” “Adam, you there?” “Yeah!” he yelled, plugging his ear with his finger to hear better. “oh thank god! Adam, its Kate!” responded the female voice on the other end of the call. “Adam, Rick wants you back here on the double! Adam? Did you see it?” “Saw it?!” He exclaimed. “Kate, I was right underneath it!” “Jesus Adam, are you ok?” Kate replied. Adam swept some small shards of glass aside and put his hands on the ground before pushing himself to his feet. He dusted himself down and checked himself over for any injuries. He took a moment to look around. Most of the windows in the buildings around him had shattered. Small pieces of rubble from some of the older buildings lay scattered around. Three digital advertising screens that had hung from the outside of one of the buildings now displayed nothing but static and one now hung precariously, gently swaying in the early morning breeze as it now hung by only one support cable. A couple of people around him still lay motionless but those people who were able like himself had wasted no time to tend to them and other injured people. The whole mood of the morning had changed to one of shear panic. But it seemed
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The End Of Dependence to be controlled panic. While everyone was terrified, their seemed to be a general consensus to make sure everyone got out of there, both able or unable. He glanced down the street to find a similar scene. A haze of smoke and dust filled the air. He watched smoke pouring from the upper floors of one building about 200 yards away while another had a less substantial fire that seemed to be confined to a small corner of the roof of a building opposite him in the courtyard. While these where the only two signs of fire he could see, the smell of smoke and flame that hung in the air indicated that more was burning than what he could see. Again Adam heard Kate’s concerned voice in his ear. “I’m fine, I’m fine!” he responded finally. “But look, get some emergency services down here, I’ve got injured here!” “Adam, emergency protocols are in effect, the city’s network has red flagged the priority areas, there already on their way!” Kate’s voice was then replaced by a man’s voice. Adam recognised it instantly as his boss Rick Henshaw. “Adam this is Rick...” he began, speaking with a calm and collected tone. “Rick, how does it look?” replied Adam. “Info still coming in, but a mid air collision over central London at rush hour, it doesn’t look good.” Rick frankly put. “Accident?” questioned Adam, looking up again at the now fading impact cloud hanging over his head. “Still looking into that, we don’t know.” Replied Rick, knowing full well that in this day and age, planes don’t accidently line them self ’s up over a nations capital and slam into each other. And despite it being over 30 years since 9/11, he also knew that it was still dam near impossible to get into a cockpit unless you had the appropriate stripes on your arm. Adam knew this as well, but he idea that the crews of both
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The End Of Dependence aircraft did this voluntary didn’t sit well with either of them. Something else had to be in play. “Cobra has just commenced so we need you back here, ready to go if we are needed.” Rick began again after a short pause. Adam became frustrated, he felt that he should stay where he was, help the people around him and run some kind of damage control or coordinate help when it arrived, but he knew that it wasn’t his job anymore. But as he continued to think of the possible explanations for the incident, the more he came to the conclusion that he needed to be at work. “I’m on my way.” He said, hanging up his ear piece. He took the ear piece off and put it in his pocket. Adam could now hear the distant sound of sirens as the emergency services began to arrive. This made him feel less guilty about leaving the immediate scene and took comfort in the fact that help would soon arrive. He set off at a slow jogging pace down the street towards work. Masses of people had begun to clog the streets as they flooded out of shops, offices and homes to get a glimpse of what had caused the huge thundering explosion in the sky over the capitol. More still poured onto the street as the smell of smoke and burning fuelled fear of more buildings going up in flames. Fighting his way down the flooded street, Adam passed the burning building he had seen from the courtyard and turned the corner head down the next street, only to find that it was blocked by another building that had partially collapsed, blocking the road. Double backing on himself, he moved on further down the street to try an alternative rout around the building. He skidded around the next corner and was again stopped in his tracks. Rubble filled the street, and
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The End Of Dependence sever small pockets of fire lit up the otherwise shaded street. Upon the rubble lay a middle section of planes fuselage. It lay on its side with a large portion of the wing still attached to it and lay resting against the front of one of the damaged buildings. Behind that he could see one of the engines, its broken blades still slowly rotating from inertia. He squinted to see through the haze of the smoke and flame to try and see if any body’s lay within the wrecked fuselage, but he couldn’t make anything out. Again he had to backtrack down the next street. By this time the police had already began to herd people away from the immediate area and close it off. He was rushed under a security barrier and fought his way through a wall of press wheedling cameras and members of the public fighting to get into the area to look for friends and family. Away from the barrier, bemused tourists, office workers and students hung around not knowing quite what to do next. His steady jog had now turned into a fast walk as Adam became tired. As he walked down the last street before he reached work he began to notice people looking at him now he was out of the immediate area. His clothes, covered in flakes of glass, smoke and dust echoed the horror of what had just happened. People looked at him and they knew where he had been. Some people seemly stopped and stared, while others stepped aside to let him pass, all adorned faces echoing the mood of the city. One of shock, anger and disbelief.
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The End Of Dependence Finally he reached the doors to his building. He looked through the windows into the lobby and saw scores of people rushing about while others remained pinned to the opposite windows, peering up at the sky and across the city. Closing his eyes, Adam prepared to go to work. As he walked through the doors, the words D.C.T (Department of Cyber Terrorism) glinted in the mid morning sun.
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Chapter Three
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t was half an hour before Adam finally stepped into the control room. He had been via the infirmary to get checked out and had grabbed a spear change of clothes from a fellow member of staff. The jeans were a little on the long side but the old London 2012 Olympics Games T-shirt was quite snug. The control room was round in shape, its walls, bar a gap for the door, were covered in a series of large screens, six in total. Above them hung a series of smaller screens, suspended from some metal rigging. The centre of the room was rimmed with a series of desks and work stations. The room was packed with bodies, all clambering over each other. Adam made his way up towards the centre of the room, then he turned towards the back of the room where a small part was sectioned off by glass, housing a moderately sized table surrounded by a number of people in suits. This was situation meeting, the third since the explosion. Once all the pleasantries and concerned questions about Adams wellbeing had been offered, they got on with the meeting. As Rick Henshaw, who stood at the head of the table reeled off the latest information, corresponding visuals and information appeared on the interactive glass table. “The system was hacked.” Began Henshaw. The stunned silence of the group spoke more than words. The notion that someone could hack into the aerospace system and fly two planes into each other without being detected was something that didn’t bear thinking about. But it happened and now they had to find out how and why. “From what we can gather from radar telemetry, both aircraft were cargo planes. One outbound from Stansted, the other was inbound from the Netherlands into Gatwick. From the looks of
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The End Of Dependence the roster only the flight crew were on board each plane. So I guess that fact they weren’t commercial planes is something to be thankful for.” The group peered down at the display on the table, showing the flight paths of both planes from their destinations to their inevitable impact over central London. The display then flickered and it morphed into a map of the world, with over two dozen points of light all blinking representing different junction points for the internet around the world. “Whoever did this covered their tracks well, bouncing the hack off so many different locations we will probably never be able to trace it.” “Then about 10 minutes after the hack, air traffic control at Heathrow went down, the controls towers for every neighbours airport around it started to go down, spiralling out. Right now everything south of Manchester is down and we predict everything up to Glasgow will be down within the next 26 minutes or so.” Adam gazed at the table top for a long time. Scanning the information in front of him for any clues. “I’ve got Cobra breathing down my neck, asking if it’s a prelude to an all out attack. So I want some answers. For all we know we’re at war, so if we are, we need something to shoot at. So let’s get to it.” The group around the table dispersed, leaving Adam and Rick Henshaw standing alone at opposite ends of the table. Adam looked at Rick and Rick at him. Adam knew from the look on his face what he was going to say it. “Rick, I’m fine. I was a little shell shocked, but I’m fine. Let’s go to work huh?” Adam said sternly. Kate, the young woman who had called Adam just after the
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The End Of Dependence explosion came walking up to the desk. She looked them both in the eye, gestured to follow her and began to walk back into the main control area. “You’re gonna wanna see this.” She said as she walked. The three large screens at the front of the room now sheared the same image to produce a huge map of the UK. It cycled between the different utilities: nuclear, solar, and wind power. Power and water distribution, communications and so forth. When it reached communications it stopped. One by one the once green sections, representing coverage turned to red as they went offline. “The main mobile communication networks are going down one by one. We have maybe twelve minutes before we lose them all.” Kate said once Henshaw and Adam had caught up to her. As Rick, Kate and other members in the room began brain storming a range of hypotheses and explanations, Adam appeared to be in a world of his own. He stared intently at the screen. It seemed almost familiar to him, like he had seen it before, but he could put his finger on it. His intense concentration was momentarily broken by the sound of someone sneezing, but in the moment, it came to him. “Gazoontight!” He exclaimed. His colleges looked at him blank faced with an air of confusion about them. Rather than trying to explain, Adam grabbed a tablet computer from the desk in front of him and began tapping around furiously. His colleges tried to ask him what he was doing but he shushed them repeatedly. A few more moments passed before he found what he was looking for. Wasting no time, he quickly linked his tablet to one of the big screens in
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The End Of Dependence front of them. The screen began to spool lines of computer code and syntax from the bottom up, the spooling abruptly stopped and a 5 line section of the mass of code was highlighted. “Adam?” began Katie. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. What is it?” She said, gesturing at the highlighted section of code now displayed in front of them. “Its Gazoontight...”Adam began. “Gazoontight. It was something an old acquaintance of mine was working on years ago. It a computer virus but like no computer virus you’ve ever seen. It’s grounded in the latest theories of ecological computing.” “Ecological Computing?” Rick said, hoping that Adam was going somewhere. “Its new, and for the most part theoretical. Laymen’s terms? It’s a digital version of a biological system. My friend was looking at naturally occurring models of survivable systems provided by biological organisms. But he also factored in survivable systems of populations and societies. In essence, he used them as a frame work to design survivable information system, an immune system for not just networks, but for the whole internet. The code section I’ve highlighted is almost identical to the code he was working on, and by the look of the time signature, it was uploaded this morning into the Air traffic control network.” “Almost identical? Do you think this friend of yours is involved?” Replied Rick. “Well not unless we can raise the dead, he died four years ago. Anyway, as I said, this is almost identical, it lacks some of the flair of the original, but there is more here.”
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The End Of Dependence Adam punched around on his tablet again and brought up a new screen of code, this time with a much larger section highlighted. “Whoever has written this code, has turned it on its head. It doesn’t look like an immune system anymore; it’s more like a cancer. But it’s not replicating at random, this thing is smart. It has an adaptive syntax. Its smart.” “Can we remove it?” Rick Said, folding his arms in frustration. “I wouldn’t even want to try. When I compared it to a cancer I wasn’t wrong. This thing is a tricky bastard; It’s already spread to the civilian networks. That’s what tipped me off. In the original Gazoontight program, it would infiltrate an infected network, find the problem, be it an error in the code or a viral problem, then spread out from the source, eradicating any trace, even if it meant crossing over to other networks.” “So it’s spread to the communications network?” Questioned Kate looking at the screen displaying the communication network which continued to fail. “Everything is networked isn’t it?” Adam replied. “It’s going to find its way into all the utilities. At the same time it’s going to start seeping into all the networked city elements from banks to advertising. Hell it gonna filter down into people’s clothes” “Is their anyway to isolate the city network?” Kate said starting to look worried. “None, and besides, it’s already in the network, even if we shut everything down right now, it will just lay dormant until the power comes back on. We need to stop this thing at the source.” Adam replied returning his thoughts to his tablet. Then from across the room, a young computer tech began waving his hand above his head and began to click his fingers for
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The End Of Dependence attention. After about 20 second of frantic clicking and waving he yelled across the room; “Hey, I think I’ve got something!” Rather than waiting for people to come to him, he detached his tablet screen from its dock, and ran up towards the top of the room where Rick, Kate and Adam stood. Reaching the top, the young technician turned and pulled up his tablet screen on one of the other big screens. “Our main public firewall just red flagged an attack on the outer most wall.” He exclaimed dramatically. A Firewall is a virtual piece of software which continuously inspected network traffic passing through it, and denies or permits passage based on a set of coded rules. For highly sensitive networks like banks, the national ID Card and government networks, the firewalls where highly sophisticated and in some cases, a networks could have more than one. Because everything needed to run the city: emergency services, power plants, hospitals as well as a whole plethora of advertising networks are all controlled from one control point, the city utilised a massive 10 firewalls. “So what? We get hundreds of thousands of attacks a day, and know one has managed to get past the first wall.” Said rick. “Yeah sure, but we are being hit by two entirely different networks, both using that code Adam was just talking about.” He replied, gesturing over to Adam. “So more than one person has this code?” questioned Adam. “It looks like it! But they aren’t the same. The first one to attack seems to have a systematic approach to it while the second one to attack us has a far more intuitive. And its the second one that seems to be winning, whoever it is they are almost through the first
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The End Of Dependence firewall.” He said, bringing up a visual of the ten firewalls and showing the position of both attacks. It was like two drills slowly making their way down through the crust towards the core. “Winning?” Questioned Kate. “So you think they are competing?” “If I had to guess, yeah, that’s what it looks like. But while the second attacker is winning, he has made a simple mistake.” “Mistake?” Rick responded intently. “Well not so much a mistake, but whoever it is, he didn’t count on me monitoring the firewalls.” He said smugly, smiling to himself. “What makes you think its a he?” Kate said in response to the young technicians smug reply. The technician tapped around on his tablet for a moment before punching up a new image on the big screen. “Well I don’t know about anyone else, but that sure as hell looks like a bloke to me!” He announced triumphantly. The image on screen was from a security camera, looking down at a promenade in a large shopping centre. Centred in the image was a small bench, occupied by a well groomed looking individual in a suit. He sat casually with one leg resting crossed on top of the other, and an old style lap top resting on top of that. Adam stared at the figure casually typing away without a care in the world. He then stopped and for a moment glanced up and looked directly into the camera, almost as if he knew he was being watched. It was at that brief moment, as he made eye contact with the camera that Adams heart sank along with his stomach. Almost subconsciously he tapped around on his tablet,
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The End Of Dependence importing the security camera image into the facial recognition software. Normally this could have been done automatically by the surveillance network but the security feed was from an old generation camera that didn’t have the resolution for that the network needed. The Surveillance Network that existed today had steadily being growing and evolving since the early days of the 21st century. Much of the infrastructure was already in place before the millennium. Companies monitored customers, the police monitored public places, the military monitored foreign countries. Once sophisticated high definition facial recognition camera became cheap and reliable around 2012, all areas of surveillance could then be linked together to a central database, greatly expanding the range of the country’s surveillance networks in far greater detail and accuracy. With the networks integration of public information like bank statements, shopping habits, mobile networks, and online activity, the system then became a massive statistical machine. It was able to learn individual’s habits and trends, able to predict their movements and then track their movements across the network. The facial recognition software signalled to Adam its completion and the result was exactly what he had feared. The figure sat on the bench was Liam Archer, a colleague of Adams years ago. The same colleague who wrote Gazoontight and despite his obvious existence, had been dead for almost 3 years.
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Chapter Four
T
he resulting task meeting from this latest development was brief. If this really was Liam Archer and if his history and credentials were anything to go by, they didn’t have much time. So Adam decided to brief them on rout. The shopping centre Archer was located was over the other side of London, and with most of the city now gridlocked because the air collision. So as a separate group made their way across London in their cars, Adam and a small group decided to take a helicopter. Slamming the door closed, Adam put a set of headphones. As the pilot increased pressure on the throttle and the chopper began to lift into the air, Adam began to brief the small crew. Adam and Archer had been at university together. They harboured a healthy competitiveness throughout as they constantly tried to outdo each other. Post university they had both been taken on by the same big advertising agency. Which Adam had been surprised at considering he knew about Archer’s weakness for recreational drugs. But knew he must have found a way around the regular screens many of the big company’s subjected their employees to. One thing he knew about Archer for sure was that he could think on his feet. Know one really knew why Archer was subsequently let go a year later. But it wasn’t until Adam had joined an IT security firm a few months later did he find out that he had been involved in that incident involving the US military satellite. After that Archer had fallen off the grid. Involved in some underground group. Adams last contact with him was after he read an underground magazine as part as some security Intel. One of the articles was apparently written by Archer. But
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The End Of Dependence the style and views of the article weren’t from the same man he once knew. It was written by a man, obviously troubled and was suffering from paranoid delusions and views of grandeur. After that he disappeared totally. He hadn’t been seen on any of the surveillance networks for almost 10 years, making him legally dead. It was Archers last known mental state and his obvious relationship with drugs that lead Adam to advise extreme caution when approaching him. So it was decided that Adam would be the only one to approach him. The rest of the group would provide backup at a distance. Adam peered down at the streets below as the helicopter neared its destination. From this height the panic in the city wasn’t evident at all. He could see at least a dozen other helecopters also in the air, all of which centred around the same part of the city which still had dark blooms of smoke spooling in the sky. The city, market by its history and place in the global village glistened as the midday sun approached. Its winding streets of cream and white coloured stone buildings provided a frame for the pockets of modern architecture and regeneration as they reached up from the smaller streets below. Many of the roof tops had become home to make shift gardens as part of a government initiative to help reduce urban heat to counter climate changes, as well as improve air quality. A mixture of Photovoltaic cells and small urban wind turbines also populated many of the London roof tops. Many of these energy saving solutions resulted from several government policies that stated that the city must not consume more energy, water, material and food and produce more waste and pollutants than the local and global environment could support.
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The End Of Dependence Out in front laid the towering sky scrapers of Canary Wharf silhouetted against a mid morning haze. In the suburbs that surrounded then lay the “Pre Fab suburbs”. An area built out of a series of cost effective answers to home ownership in London. The stylish flats illustrate a flexible range of compact designs for first time buyers unable to afford a property in central city locations. Much of the new music in London now came out of this colourful and vibrant area famed for having an average age of 22. The helicopter rounder the financial district before landing in a courtyard. Making their way towards a side door of the shopping centre, Adam put his ear peace in and switched it on. As they entered the side door, the head of security for the shopping centre greeted them, shaking Adams hand. “Has he moved?” Adam said as they were led down a corridor. “No sir...” replied the security guard. “I’ve got a guy in plain clothes in the shop across from the bench keeping an eye on him and our cameras have been fixed on him ever since we got your call.” “Ok this is what’s going to happen...” began Adam, talking to the 3 people who had accompanied him in the helicopter. “I want you guys to hang back about 30 meters or so, try and not to let him see you. I know this guy ok, so let’s just play it cool. If I can ill sort this out myself. If he does run and you have to shoot, extremities only, no body or head shots.” The corridor ended and the security guard opened the fire door in front of them leading out onto the main promenade on the first floor of the shopping centre. Before they all spilled out the door, the guard stopped them.
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The End Of Dependence “OK, the guy is about 100 yards down to the left. Now I haven’t evacuated the place yet so if you guy could try and not to wave you guns around and cause a panic in here I would appreciate it.” “We’ll try.” Adam said, his eyes fixed the bench 100 yards away. “Hey erm, this got anything to do with this morning?” The guard said quietly. Adam didn’t say anything; he gave the guard a look that basically said we can’t really talk about it but yes. As his mind began to race, Adam slowly made his way along the promenade, leading his left hand over the smooth metal hand rail. He kept his head down for the most part, glancing up occasionally to make sure he wasn’t going to walk into someone or something. Reaching the end of the hand rail, he was now only a few meters away from the bench. Archer remained much as he did when they first identified him on the surveillance network. His attention remained fixed on his lap top. Adam remembered that Archer always had a soft spot for all things retro, and so the fact he was typing away on an old Apple Book Air. Adam composed himself, took a deep breath and began to walk over. As he ebbed closer he suddenly decided to play it cool and nonshalont. So as he reached the bench, he took a step the side and gently sat down. As he sat, he began to run over everything he could or should say. His mind was still racing when, to his surprise, Archer spoke instead, catching Adam off guard. “Took you long enough...” He said in a sarcastic and demeaning tone. Adam chuckled to himself in an attempt to lighten the mood for both parties. As he did so, he also suitably looked across at archers screen. Various pieces of data streamed across the screen. It seemed to be working furiously, processing
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The End Of Dependence huge amounts of information. He only got a glance before Archer sensed what he was doing and closed the lid of the laptop forcefully. “So...I guess you want me to come quietly then huh?” Archer began still with a sarcastic and demeaning tone in his voice. “Well that’s the general idea.” Adam replied, still trying to keep the tone of the conversation light. “You know what, I would love to, but you know me!” Archer continued. “Things to do, places to go, people to see.” “Oh yeah?” Adam responded, actually lounging back on the bench to get more comfortable as he began to loosen up. “Anything particular you might have in mind?” “Revolution my old friend, revolution.” Archer reached into a small satchel at his feet and pulled out a bundle of papers, shabbily assembled and bound together to form a small book which seemed to be hand written. Archer dusted it off, and quickly leafed through the pages before passing it to Adam. “Been busy then I see?” Adam replied leafing through the shabby pages. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen revolution take the form of a book before I must say. Do I have to read it now or can I do it later?” “Oh you can read it whenever you like my friend, I just thought I would provide you with some reading material since you’re going to be sat here for a while.” Adam began to grow inpatient. He decided to take a firmer stance on the convocation. “Yeah...maybe some other time, but right now I’m...” Adam was cut short as Archer interrupted as he too was now becoming inpatient and tired of the convocation.
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The End Of Dependence “Look, I’ll make this simple for you...” He began. “I’ve work to long and to hard towards today, and I have no intention to let you or anyone else stop me.” Archer said sternly, reaching into his front jacket pocket and removing a small pen sized object. Adam tried to speak but again he was interrupted before he could even get a word out. “This is a trigger...” Archer announced, pressing a small button on its side. “...and like many triggers it has a tendency to activate things. In this case, I’ve just activated a pressure sensitive pad which you are now sat on. Which is in turn wired to a firing mechanism that in turn is taped to the side of a block of Cyclotrimethylene Trinitramine, commonly known as plastic explosive or C-4. Now I know I was always the smarter one out of the two of us, but I have confidence that even you can figure out what that means.” And he was right, Adam did. As Archer was speaking, Adam had peered down through one of the slits in the bench, and clocked the small white block tightly wrapped in brown paper. His heart sank as he slowly became sick to his stomach. “Now I’m not in the habit of killing people...” Archer began packing his laptop away before being interrupted by a nervous Adam. “Bullshit!” He exclaimed. “Tell that to everyone aboard those to planes!” Zipping up his bag, Archer let out a sigh and turned to face Adam, looking straight into his eyes. “Are you sure you saw what you saw?” He said calmly and purposefully. “I don’t want to kill you and I have no intention of doing so?” he began to conclude. “But try and move from this bench and you’ll die. If any of your colleagues who blatantly stick out like sore thumbs stood over there try and follow me or hinder me in anyway, you die.” He said raising his voice to make sure they heard.
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The End Of Dependence “And as you can imagine, trying to tamper with it is a given. Now it’s not all bad. I’m a cheap bastard, and the battery’s I bought for the firing mechanism will only last about 2 hours, so I suggest you just sit tight old friend.” He concluded, patting Adam playfully on the leg as he stood up. “Why?!” Adam said firmly as Archer began to walk away. “Why do all this, what can you possibly gain?” He continued in a last ditch attempt to stall him and maybe even talk him out of it. Archer didn’t turn around. He stopped for a moment and turned his head slightly to speak. “I’ve had enough Adam...” He said softly. “Things need to change.” To be continued...
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The End Of Dependence
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