Lockdown Read online

  PART ONE:

  EMERGENCY

  ‘JUST BECAUSE YOU HAVEN’T HEARD SOMEONE LIE, THAT DOESN’T MEAN THEY’RE HONEST. YOU NEED TO HEAR THEM TELL THE TRUTH WHEN THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER OFF LYING. IT’S NOT UNTIL THEY OFFEND SOMEONE OR CONFESS SOMETHING THAT YOU CAN TRUST THEM’

  —From the documentation for Truth, version 4.1

  LEAVE A MESSAGE

  REPORT 091

  UNDERCOVER AGENT: COBRA COVERT SURVEI LLANCE OF TARGET D03

  TRUTH_PREMIUM***START_TRANSCRIPTION//

  >Pick up the phone, Jarli.

  >Pick up the phone!

  >Listen, it’s Kellin. Can you hear me? I know who Viper is. And that’s a very dangerous thing to know. Viper has already made dozens of people disappear. I don’t want to be next.

  >I can’t go to the police. Absolutely anyone could be part of Viper’s network. You’re the only one I trust. Please, please, pick up!

  >I’ve hidden the evidence somewhere safe. Even if Viper finds it, the data can’t be erased. But I don’t know how I’ll—

  >Hang on.

  >Someone’s at the door.

  //END_TRANSCRIPTION***TRUTH_PREMIUM

  ACTION: VIPER ALERTED

  THREAT: NEUTRALISED

  DEADLIEST SUBSTANCE IN THE WORLD

  ‘What’s in there?’ Jarli asked, pointing.

  The steel door had four big, electronic locks. Through triple-layered glass, Jarli could see two people in airtight hazmat suits stacking plastic crates on shelves. The cold left a mist in the air and fogged the window.

  ‘Hazardous samples,’ Dr Lanagan said. She was a small, bony woman with bright red glasses, and grey hair tied back so tightly it stretched the skin of her scalp. ‘Now, if you’ll all follow me—’

  Some of the students started to follow her, but Jarli was still curious. ‘Samples of what?’

  Lanagan shrugged. ‘Various things. If we take something out of a patient’s body that might be contagious, toxic or radioactive, we store it in there.’

  ‘Why not destroy it?’ asked Anya, an athletic girl with angular features and a faint Russian accent. Jarli thought she sounded suspicious of Lanagan, but he could have been imagining things. She was hard to read.

  ‘There’s an incinerator in the basement,’ Lanagan said. ‘But the samples need to be studied first. Sometimes we keep a disease for years, hoping to develop a cure. Hence the security.’

  ‘So there are incurable diseases in there?’ Doug asked. A lanky boy with blond hair, Doug had seemed sullen and hostile when Jarli first met him, and Jarli had eventually found out that Doug’s family was in witness protection. Now he and Jarli were friends, sharing a passion for tech. They had volunteered for the science excursion hoping to check out the surgical robots.

  ‘Kids,’ Mr Hayes said. ‘We came here to learn about the brain.’ He was starting to look uncomfortable. He was a PE teacher, called in to replace Mrs Prive at the last minute, and he may have been out of his depth. He was even wearing his exercise shorts and polo shirt, which didn’t suit the cool air of Kelton Research Hospital.

  ‘Take botulism H, for example,’ Lanagan said, ignoring the teacher. ‘It’s a toxin made by the botulina bacteria, and it’s the deadliest substance in the world. A millionth of a gram could kill everyone in this room by slowly paralysing our bodies, including our hearts and lungs. A litre jug of it would be enough to make the human race extinct.’

  The kids stared at her, horrified. Even Mr Hayes looked shaken. For a moment the only sound was the rain, drumming on the hospital roof.

  Lanagan smiled faintly. ‘You can see why we lock the door. Now, who wants to see a human brain?’

  ‘Me!’ Bess stuck up her hand eagerly. Bess was Jarli’s best friend—a girl with a half-shaved head and a perpetually cheery attitude. If anyone could shrug off a speech about the extinction of humanity, it was her.

  ‘Right this way,’ Lanagan said.

  This time everyone followed. Hayes looked relieved. As they walked away, Jarli took one last peek through the glass. The people in hazmat suits had finished stacking crates and had entered an airlock full of high-pressure hoses. Water sprayed their suits from all sides. He hoped they were being careful.

  Lanagan had a long stride for a short woman. Bess was on crutches, but she managed to keep up. ‘How many patients get brain surgery here per day?’ she asked the doctor.

  ‘Zero, usually.’

  ‘How many per week?’

  ‘This is primarily a research hospital. Most procedures are performed at the regional public hospital.’ Lanagan shot Jarli a look. ‘The only patients we have here are those in need of emergency care.’

  Jarli’s cheeks grew hot. He’d been taken to the ER twice this year. In February he and his father had been in a car crash. In May he had nearly drowned in liquid nitrogen after breaking into a factory owned by reclusive billionaire KELLIN PLOWMAN.

  None of this was Jarli’s fault—he had been targeted by a mysterious criminal mastermind known only as Viper. But it sounded like the hospital staff saw Jarli as a nuisance.

  Lanagan walked past the sign to SURGICAL THEATRE 2, and pushed open a pair of double doors leading to SURGICAL THEATRE 1. The students followed her in. Racks of stainless steel blades were mounted above big sinks. A stereo system was built into the wall on the opposite side. Blue cloths were draped over several tables. Stalk lamps hovered over tables, like at a fancy library. An MRI machine took up most of one corner. There was a window, but because of the storm clouds outside, it didn’t let in much light.

  A huge mechanical arm towered in one corner. A surgical robot.

  Doug made a beeline for the robot. Jarli should have been excited, but he felt suddenly uneasy. He remembered a statistic he’d heard somewhere: one in four people who enter a hospital will die there.

  He hoped this stat didn’t include kids on school excursions. It probably came from big city hospitals with busy emergency rooms. The Kelton hospital was quiet—he hadn’t seen a single patient since he arrived.

  ‘Why do you need all this equipment if you hardly ever use it?’ Doug was asking.

  ‘We do use it—for research,’ Lanagan replied. ‘Take a look at this.’

  She swivelled one of the stalk lights around, illuminating a glass container. As the light fell across the object inside, Jarli gasped.

  ‘Left over from a previous experiment,’ Lanagan said. ‘Ordinarily we would keep body parts in the morgue, but the morgue is closed until we can replace the flammable cladding in the walls.’

  ‘What is it?’ someone asked.

  ‘A slice of brain matter, less than a millimetre thick. The tissue surrounded a brain tumour—we removed it from the subject, put the sample on ice and took it downstairs to the lab, so it was still alive when it arrived.’

  The piece of brain looked like a branch of coral. The light shone right through the yellow-grey flesh— it looked as fragile as tissue paper.

  ‘Still alive?’ Hayes said incredulously. ‘Outside of the patient’s head?’

  ‘Indeed. It’s dead now, but for a while we could actually see the neurons firing—sending signals back and forth. And that’s important, because your thoughts and feelings and memories are not made of neurons. They are made of the connections between those neurons, which are only visible when they fire.’

  Jarli wasn’t sure if it was the surgical tools or the brain slice, but he was beginning to feel nauseous. He hoped the excursion would move on soon.

  Bess peered through the glass. ‘Are you saying this slice of brain was thinking?’

  ‘Probably not,’ Lanagan said. ‘Conscious thoughts make up very little of a brain’s activity. Most of the time it’s just telling your heart to beat, your stomach to keep digesting, and doing other
things you can’t control. But we’re working to identify patterns of connectivity across the entire brain. Someday this will help us to remove faulty neurons, treating neurological diseases with increased precision.’

  ‘What did the connections in this piece do?’

  ‘We’re still sifting through the data, but we think they processed information from the inner ear. The patient woke up with severe vertigo, and couldn’t stand. Don’t touch that!’

  Doug stepped away from a device that looked a bit like a handheld barcode scanner, mounted on a trolley. ‘I was just looking,’ he said.

  ‘That’s one of our laser scalpels,’ Lanagan told him. ‘It’s designed to vaporise soft tissue. And you, young man, are made mostly of soft tissue.’

  Doug took another step back.

  To Jarli, the walls felt too close, the ceiling too low. He wasn’t even sure of the way out—the hospital was a maze. He stuck up his hand. ‘Can I go to the bathroom?’

  ‘Me too,’ Anya said quickly.

  Hayes sighed. ‘Does anyone else need to go to the bathroom?’

  Thanks to his tone, no-one else owned up.

  ‘Alright,’ Hayes said. ‘You two, go. But come back quickly.’

  ‘The closest one is near reception,’ Lanagan said, pointing. ‘Out the door, turn left, and then down the stairs.’

  Jarli pushed through the double doors. As soon as he was out of sight, he took a deep gulp of chlorine-scented air and stretched his arms out wide, fighting off the claustrophobia.

  Anya came out through the doors. She nudged Jarli. ‘You OK?’

  ‘Yeah. Just needed some air.’

  They started walking along the corridor towards the stairs. Alcohol-based hand-sanitisers were mounted on the walls outside every room. The floor had been polished so many times the colour had worn off the tiles.

  ‘So,’ Anya said quietly. ‘What did you want to talk about?’

  Jarli looked blankly at her. He had assumed she honestly needed to go to the bathroom. He didn’t need to talk. He had just wanted to get out of there.

  ‘You sent me a message a few days ago,’ Anya prompted. ‘You said you had something to tell me.’

  ‘I did?’

  Anya snorted. ‘It must not have been very important.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Jarli said.

  ‘Don’t be. I am relieved. I thought it might have been something to do with . . .’ She made a snake-like motion with her hand. It took Jarli a moment to realise she was talking about Viper.

  Jarli wasn’t the only one who had been targeted by the mysterious criminal. Cobra, one of Viper’s men, had kidnapped Anya soon after ramming Jarli’s car. Viper had also crashed a plane into Doug’s house, and been involved in an attempt to kill a prominent politician. The worst part was, no-one knew exactly what Viper wanted. Money? Political power? Or something else?

  Maybe Anya was too scared to say his name out loud. Jarli felt the same way.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I haven’t heard anything.’

  ‘It’s been two months since he tried to kill the defence minister. The police must be getting close.’

  ‘Must be.’

  Jarli’s phone beeped. LIE It had been scanning his words for signs that he wasn’t telling the truth.

  Anya heard the beep. ‘You do not think they are?’

  It was annoying, being caught out by his own app, but Jarli preferred to leave it switched on. Not just to tell him when other people lied, but to tell him when he did. Jarli thought of himself as an honest person, but it was amazing how many small lies the app caught him telling each day, mostly because the truth was rude. He would say, ‘I have to get going,’ instead of ‘I don’t feel like talking to you right now.’ Or he’d say, ‘I appreciate your help,’ instead of ‘I wanted to do that myself.’ When his sister asked if he liked her haircut, he’d say ‘Yes,’ instead of ‘You look like a cockatoo.’

  ‘Vi—the man they’re looking for,’ Jarli said. ‘He has advanced tech, heaps of money and spies everywhere. He’s willing to murder people to keep his identity a secret. I don’t think the police will ever find him.’ He shivered. ‘Come on—we’d better find the bathroom.’

  They both walked down the stairs. Jarli could hear an ambulance siren getting louder and louder.

  ‘Maybe you are being a bit cynical,’ Anya said. ‘The police might have some good luck.’

  ‘They might. But how good has our luck been lately?’

  Just as they reached reception, the front doors slid open, and a disaster came in.

  BLOOD LOSS

  Two paramedics ran into reception, pushing a wheeled stretcher. Jarli couldn’t see much of the patient—he was wrapped in a blanket, and a breathing mask was strapped to his face. But he could see the splotches of blood on the sheets. Something very bad had happened to him.

  Jarli recognised one of the paramedics, a man with sideburns and a mop of orange hair—Tyson. He was the same guy who had come to the scene of Dad’s car crash, and had showed up again when a plane ploughed into Doug’s house. Kelton had a small population, so the same faces showed up a lot. Jarli hadn’t met the female paramedic before.

  ‘BP’s at eighty-six over forty-eight,’ she was shouting. ‘His heart rate’s dropping. Forty beats per minute.’

  Jarli and Anya stared, aghast. A doctor and a nurse ran up to the gurney. Jarli knew both of them—Dr Vorham and Nurse Amon. Vorham was tall, with silvery hair and a gaunt face. He had taken an interest in Jarli when he arrived in the ER covered in liquid nitrogen burns, and he had been helping Jarli’s father, whose facial scars weren’t healing properly since the crash. Amon was smaller, with a beak nose and watchful eyes. He wore navy blue scrubs—Jarli wondered if the dark colour was to hide bloodstains.

  ‘What do we have?’ Vorham asked.

  ‘Multiple contusions and fractures,’ said Tyson. ‘A bone fragment might have nicked the femoral artery.’

  ‘Do we know what happened to him?’

  ‘The police found him in a car crusher,’ the female paramedic said. She was a pale woman with thin eyebrows and dark plaited hair.

  Vorham didn’t seem surprised to hear this. ‘Tell Dr Lanagan to scrub up for surgery,’ he said.

  ‘She’s with a school group,’ Amon said.

  ‘Get them out of the way, ASAP,’ Vorham said. ‘This will be hard enough without a bunch of kids looking over my shoulder.’

  Vorham and Amon took the gurney and pushed it through another set of doors towards the lift. Tyson ran over to the reception desk and snatched up the phone.

  ‘Code blue. Dr Lanagan to scrub up for surgery in Theatre One.’ His voice echoed over the PA system throughout the hospital. ‘Lanagan to Theatre One. Code blue.’

  ‘She’s already there,’ Jarli said quietly.

  The female paramedic noticed Jarli and Anya standing nearby, looking shell-shocked.

  ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Jarli, right? I’m Olivia. We met yesterday.’

  ‘We did?’ Jarli was too shaken to remember anything from more than five seconds ago, but he was pretty sure he had never seen Olivia before.

  ‘A van dropped you off in front of the video store,’ she said. ‘You looked lost. I asked if you were OK.’

  Jarli didn’t think any of that had happened, but his app didn’t go off, so the paramedic believed what she was saying. She must have seen him on TV—the app had made him briefly famous—and then met someone else who looked like him.

  ‘Will that man be alright?’ Anya asked.

  ‘He’s in good hands,’ Olivia said.

  If Jarli’s phone had been running Truth Premium—a rip-off of his own app, Truth—it probably would have told him that Olivia was reframing. But he didn’t need an app to notice that Olivia had avoided answering Anya’s question.

  Jarli had uninstalled Truth Premium when he discovered it was created by Viper. The master criminal had hijacked the publicity around Jarli’s app and used it to market his own version. Viper’s app
was more sophisticated than Jarli’s, but it had a secret feature—a whitelist. There were certain people the app always trusted, no matter what they said.

  ‘Did you say he was in a car crusher!?’ Anya was asking.

  Olivia nodded. ‘Police were investigating a break in at the scrap yard, and they heard screaming from inside the crusher. They switched the machine off as soon as they could, but . . .’

  Jarli shuddered. He had seen the crusher at the scrap yard, and heard the shriek of tortured metal as it worked. The thought of being trapped inside would give him nightmares.

  ‘Did the injured man work at the scrap yard?’ Anya asked.

  Olivia coughed. ‘Uh, no. That was Kellin Plowman on the gurney. He—’

  ‘Kellin Plowman?’ Jarli exclaimed.

  Plowman was the eccentric billionaire who owned the factory Jarli had been burned in. Later, when they met in person, Plowman had offered to buy Jarli’s newest creation, a homemade firewall.

  He had made his fortune by inventing a new kind of encryption. Jarli had once tried to break it, just for fun. Like all the tens of thousands of nerds before him, he had failed.

  Plowman was the one who had told Jarli that Truth Premium was made by Viper. And now he’d been found in a car crusher. Jarli felt sick.

  ‘Did he say who did this to him?’ Anya asked.

  Olivia hesitated, perhaps realising that she shouldn’t be talking about a patient to two random schoolchildren. ‘You kids should find your teacher. Sounds like you’ll be getting back on the bus pretty soon.’ She turned away to talk to Tyson.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Jarli whispered to Anya. ‘I just talked to him last week.’

  ‘What about?

  ‘Uh . . .’ Jarli tried to remember. ‘I was asking him a question about Supply Chain.’

  ‘What is that?’ Anya asked.

  ‘Plowman invented it. It’s a sort of de-centralised ledger,where information is shared across thousands of different servers and devices, but protected by a cryptographic hash function so no-one can modify—’

  ‘You have already lost me.’

  ‘The point is, it’s a really good way of keeping secrets,’ Jarli said. ‘And I got the feeling Plowman knew something he wasn’t telling me. About Viper.’