The Dreams of the Eternal City Read online

  The office had a central walkway with workspaces coming off it either side, each of which contained two circular desks facing each other. It was set up to contain security breaches, the theory being that anyone wanting to look at information left on someone else’s desk or computer would have to make a deliberate effort to go there, which would be obvious to others in the office. From his position nearest the window, Ethan could see part of the walkway behind Mohammed’s chair, whereas the dividers to his left and right insulated him from adjoining workspaces. The layout also meant that the two people who sat opposite each other tended to work as a pair and shared their workloads.

  Ethan scanned his identity card over the screen then entered his password. A picture of a DNA spiral appeared and he pressed his index finger against the top right of his keyboard. He felt a sharp pain and the screen froze. Ethan licked the cut while the machine confirmed his sample. Agents were barred from being blood donors because of how much blood they lost at work. His SDMA computer was twenty years out of date compared with his personal one at home, except in its security measures – the screen could not even project images. The archaic nature of much SDMA equipment was something to do with contracts, something to do with budgets, and something to do with security. Apparently.

  The start page of the secure work intranet loaded, depicting the SDMA logo and slogan above the words ‘Always Vigilant’, set against a sky blue background. The remainder of the screen was filled with exhortations to report suspicious activity, the number of the Public Safety Hotline (PSH), where people could report concerns, and advertisements for the various sponsors of the organisation. Ethan pressed the continue button at the bottom of the screen, taking him to the security warning:

  ‘It is incumbent upon everyone to be aware of policy. It is incumbent upon everyone to follow policy. The Sleep Code supersedes all other law.’

  Those were the words he saw whenever he opened his computer, and that had become a homily by repetition, albeit one he agreed with.

  SDMA computers were all set out in the same way and Ethan was comforted by the familiar sight. On the left-hand side of the screen was a folder called ‘Thomas_workspace’, in which he kept his personal files. In the centre were a series of shortcuts to the various software used by someone of his rank. On the right-hand side was a folder called ‘library’, which contained a full copy of the Sleep Code, with sub-folders that grouped information that agents referred to most often, such as the conditions of commonly issued sleep licences that permitted expectant mothers or shift workers to temporarily change the hours in which they were lawfully permitted to sleep. The folder also contained summaries of relevant branches of criminal and civil law, and other useful information, such as documents describing best investigative practice.

  He opened his e-mails to see that while he had been away, his supervisor Peter had assigned Ethan ten cases of suspected breaches of the Sleep Code to investigate. He added them to his spreadsheet of work; they all sounded like small jobs that he could probably conclude in a few weeks. There was also a message from the airport Security Commander, in which he said that he had made a recommendation for Ethan and Aislin to receive citations for bravery for their actions before going on holiday.

  After he had finished reading, Ethan saw Peter hanging around by a pile of papers behind Mohammed’s chair. He looked away but he had already seen him.

  “Hi Eth. Did you err… enjoy your time off and everything?”

  “Yeah, just sorted out some bits and pieces. Nothing to tell.”

  Peter picked a liver spot on his cheek.

  “Good… good. Well, I hope you’ve come back refreshed. Are you free at nine? There’s a meeting to discuss… various things.”

  “Erm… okay.”

  “Thanks. Are you all right with them other things I’ve sent through? I know there’s a lot but… oh, have you had chance to look through them yet, you’ve probably only just got here?”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  “Good, I’ll see you in the conference room then. There’s also… hang on, I’ve just got to…”

  He stepped into the main walkway, raised his hands, then said, “Hi everyone… can I have your attention a minute… yeah… thanks. We’ve got Dan and a few of the other senior managers coming round at nine, so can you file as much paper as you can by then?”

  “How can we get rid of this lot in an hour?” one of the Sleep Investigators, Alfie, shouted.

  “You don’t have to sort all of it, just enough that it looks like we’re trying to comply with policy. If they can see the other side of the office from the door it’d be a start. Thanks.”

  No one had stopped talking while Peter spoke. Ethan was irritated by the announcement, as he would not be able to do anything in half an hour, and as the brass would no doubt be at the meeting, he would be unlikely to leave the conference room before lunchtime. It’s like they go out of their way to stop you doing your work.

  Mohammed came back a few minutes later, “What’s going on?”

  “Waste of space said that we’ve got to get the desks paperless before nine ’cos the bosses are coming over.”

  “Yeah right. I can get rid of the top layer, I don’t know about paperless.”

  He laughed, making his papers rustle.

  “I’d put away as much as you can if I was you. This could be the occasion when they decide to enforce the policies rather than keep making new ones.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And put your picture of Has away as well, they might check up on that at the same time.”

  “Fuck, man, how am I supposed to get through the day without something good to look at?”

  “A reminder e-mail went round about it while I was off so they’re not likely to accept any excuses.”

  The policy against personally identifiable items was widely ignored, although Ethan did not have a picture of Aislin on his desk.

  After checking his papers in his assigned cabinet, Ethan skim-read the new cases he had been assigned.

  When Peter reappeared at quarter to nine, Ethan’s desk was the only one in the office to be policy compliant.

  Daniel Lee, the Senior Agent, did not arrive until half nine, when he stood in the walkway with a group Ethan had never seen before. The Sleep Investigators worked desultorily for a few minutes before the pressure of a senior manager’s presence proved too much, and they stood outside their workspaces like soldiers waiting for their bunks to be inspected.

  Mohammed made an obscene gesture when Daniel walked past. Ethan pretended not to notice.

  “Good to see you, Eth. Enjoyed your time off?” Daniel asked, shaking his hand firmly.

  “I always try to.”

  “Thanks for your work on the Smith case, it was appreciated.”

  “No worries, I’m just glad it’s over. I was sick of him by the end. I thought it was never going to finish.”

  “Well, it did get done…” He leant over his shoulder, which was easy for him given that he towered over everyone in the room. “Remind me to talk to you about security the next time I’m here. Can you go and check that the projector’s working?”

  “Yep.”

  Peter came out of his office and paced the walkway as if uncertain whether to approach the newcomers. Ethan strolled to the conference room, knowing that they would not start for a long time yet, as Daniel always found something to say to everyone; exuding the confidence of the born to lead; his height, impeccable suit, and easy manner, made him an aristocrat among them.

  Ethan stretched as he waited. The computer and projector were working fine, and he wondered why Daniel had come over. Perhaps he wanted to show Pete up for not dealing with security. Ethan hoped they would not take too long, as Aislin had said that she wanted to come round to his house that night, and he had promised that he would not finish late.

  Daniel,
Peter, and two men and a woman Ethan did not know entered the room twenty minutes later.

  “It’s all set up.”

  “Thanks,” Daniel said. The strangers seemed to be pointedly unsmiling, as if on principle. Daniel sat at the head of the desk and said, “Right, I think everyone knows everyone, except Ethan…” He turned to the others. “Ethan is one of our best SIs and he’s going to organise a lot of the work around this project. Ethan, this is Tom, who’s a Senior Dream Specialist for the DIA. He’s going to give the presentation today. Becky is a security consultant at the DIA and George is her assistant.”

  Ethan nodded and slowly cast his eyes over them, immediately on his guard. Officials from the DIA, or Dreams Investigation Agency, were notoriously arrogant when dealing with other organisations and, in his previous encounters with them, they had always made clear that the objectives of the SDMA should be suborned to their own.

  “Before we start, Eth, I need you to sign a confidentiality agreement. This doesn’t mean we don’t trust you; it’s standard procedure for the DIA whenever they give any kind of information to another agency. Pete and I have done the same.”

  Tom gave him a thick document from a folder. He had been expecting a single piece of paper and felt under pressure to sign immediately, as they were all watching him.

  “You’ll understand when Tom gives his presentation. The agreement is basically similar to the one you signed when you started working here, although it’s more… detailed, legally. It’s a formality.”

  Ethan skim read the pages before signing the bottom of each one.

  “You’ll have to tell your colleagues something of what’s going on, but before you give any information, even to the extent of the identity of who you’ve met today, I want you to ring and get my agreement, and I’ll make a note. Compile a spreadsheet as well to make sure I don’t forget anything.”

  Ethan nodded, thinking that he never forgot anything, unless deliberately. He was relieved when Tom took the papers back and attention shifted away from him. This is the thanks you get for being competent, he thought, being treated like shit. The others would never be asked to be involved in whatever this is. Things like this always mean spending time away from actual cases to produce documents that no one will ever read. The bosses don’t know the damage they cause.

  Tom spent the next few minutes fiddling around with a memory stick, until his air of mystique shattered. Daniel shuffled his immaculately placed tie a few millimetres further up his neck before skimming through a notebook.

  No one knows what they’re doing, Ethan thought. This lot must be about the Icks. The DIA aren’t bothered about anything else, they’d blame them for the rain if they thought anyone would believe them.

  “Okay, it seems to be working now.”

  Tom pressed a button and there was a crackle of violin music, then the screen filled with children playing in a park, smiling mothers pushing their pigtailed daughters on swings. Suddenly, there was a crack of lightning then a close-up of one of the mothers looking at something unseen in horror. Lumps of flesh fell from the children before they collapsed into piles of bones. Ethan leant back, looking surreptitiously at the others. The special effects were as good as those of a film and were repulsively realistic. However, if anyone else thought anything about them, they gave nothing away, so he returned his attention to the presentation.

  After piles of ash scattered, the screen exploded into white. Then, an image of a wind farm appeared overlooking a field of wheat. It turned into a nuclear power plant, then a series of other power stations, interspersed with explosions. Finally, the screen filled with the words ‘OUR SECURITY, OUR FUTURE’ in black on white letters, before the screen faded to white one final time.

  Tom closed the presentation, leaving open a folder that contained rows of files, each of which was labelled with strings of numbers.

  “Okay, I know that opening clip may seem a bit dramatic, but we like to show the seriousness of the threats we face…” He paused. “Yes, people have commented that it seems dramatic although we’ve stopped many similar plots in recent months. I don’t know if anyone has seen in the news the rise of attacks on power plants?”

  He looked around the room expectantly, but everyone was silent until Daniel said, “There was a report on the BBC a few weeks ago about animal rights protestors who were arrested trying to break into one.”

  “Yes, well, this subject has been in the news a lot recently. In the last two years, there has been a large rise in the disruption of power supply across the UK.”

  He pressed a button then stood to one side as a line chart filled the screen. It showed a similar level for the years 2030–2038, then a large rise in the following two years.

  “Okay, bear in mind that these are stoppages, not necessarily attacks. Stoppages. So some of them might be caused by accidents, for example. Or illegal industrial action. However, we have information that much of this increase…” he waved at the point where the line rose as if about to perform a sleight of hand, “has been caused by the Iklonian cult. There has been an increase in their activity over the same timeframe that makes us think that the rise in stoppages is not a coincidence. That it can’t be a coincidence.

  “Your organisation has supplied statistics to us that shows a correspondence between the level of stoppages and the incidence of sleep related disorder. We think that the Iklonian cult may be sabotaging power stations with the aim of disrupting sleep patterns across the country. A cold country is a tired country.”

  Peter sat up in his chair. “Wouldn’t that work the other way though? Whenever I’m too warm, I always feel drowsy.”

  “No. Just before the body goes to sleep, its temperature decreases. Being hot will make you drowsy but it won’t make you sleep better. Being too hot at night will disrupt your sleep. Anyway, if you’re cold, what do you do? You go to bed. Especially if you can’t afford to turn the heating up. The increases in retail prices of electricity and gas have resulted in an increase in fuel poverty of forty per cent over the period of interest. All of which means that the Iklonians have a large potential target audience.

  “Projections by our private sector partners show that sleep related disorder has reduced productivity across the economy by eighteen per cent last year, seriously harming Britain’s service sector and making many businesses uncompetitive compared to their counterparts in India and China. This additional threat has the potential to cause critical damage to the national economy.

  “The Sleep Code, the SDMA, and the DIA, have been in place for almost twenty years, and during that time, the national economy grew 1.2 per cent faster than in the preceding fifteen years, allowing Great Britain to claw back the competitive advantage that had developed with mass labour, unregulated economies. The current security crisis has the potential not only to undermine fundamental law, with far-reaching consequences for public safety, but to seriously damage economic security. There are many side issues, such as the rise in accidents now that subversives have started to encourage night driving, but the point does not need to be laboured.”

  Daniel looked at Ethan.

  “So that’s the basis of the project. It will be codenamed Hypnos. We’ll need to break it down into manageable sections and go through exactly what’s required…”

  Tom must have used his most interesting material at the start of his presentation, as the rest was very boring, comprising much repetition and paraphrasing of what he had already said, numerous graphs that all looked the same, and hand movements.

  What it came down to was what Ethan had suspected after the first five minutes. They wanted the SDMA, or, more specifically, him, to go through every breach of the Sleep Code in the last three years (the year before the increase was required to give a context), to determine whether any of them could be linked to ‘stoppages’ at power plants. Other information held by the SDMA would also need to be researched, to dete
rmine whether any further incidents could be linked to the pattern.

  It was such a huge job that he could not even estimate how long it would take. From other research, he knew that the organisation had recorded 138,765 suspected SC breaches nationally the previous year and, in his experience, there would be around five suspicious incidents recorded for every identified SC case. Furthermore, the SDMA held a vast amount of information shared by other organisations that would be relevant to the task. To do a proper job, he would have to research overall patterns in the data then read a large enough sample of cases to allow him to generalise about them. It was the kind of project that might never finish. Surely they know that my cases must be the priority.

  Ethan had never had much confidence in the DIA, and his preconceptions had been confirmed by factual errors in Tom’s presentation. For example, the SDMA and the DIA had not been formed at the same time as the Sleep Code came into effect, as he had suggested. The SDMA had been created two years later, after police forces had argued that they did not have the resources and training to deal with SC cases. The DIA was created thereafter as a conduit between the security services and the SDMA. Such a basic lack of knowledge was redolent of someone seriously lacking experience. Apart from their competence, DIA agents’ main problem was that they seemed to believe that the Iklonians were behind everything. In fact, they were only the most prominent of a range of subversive organisations who opposed the Sleep Code, and in Ethan’s experience, most SC breaches were caused by laziness and lack of personal discipline rather than anything organised.

  “Any questions?”

  Ethan looked at Daniel, knowing that there was no point making an interjection at this stage. The decision to proceed had obviously been taken long ago and the best Ethan could do was to scope out the project and suggest ways to make it more practical. Daniel stood and shook Tom’s hand.