Terminal Zones, page 14
A wave of nausea came over me. Others could see it too. There were gasps. Cries. A scream. The sound of someone being sick.
‘This is not artificial intelligence,’ Nesterov declared, over the clatter and parp of the music, ‘but actual intelligence. The consciousness of slime moulds, plants and fungi, united with the knowledge of human beings.’
I looked across at Nia, whose countenance in that moment haunts me to this day – an expression of unabated horror, as if she was gazing upon the visage of death itself. I could see her body shake violently as the train groaned to a halt behind the stage, emitting an exhausted sigh, now in full view of the astonished crowd. Tears pooled in its eyes as tiny spores floated upward from fruiting blobs on its roof. There was an overwhelming smell, like honey-marinated meat left in the sun. I could see now that there was no driver. No mechanical parts and no fuel. The creature was a mass of sinew, bone, slime and skin. There was something uncanny about the face, too. Something I couldn’t put my finger on until I heard Nia scream, ‘Thomas! Thomas!’
As she uttered those words, I swear the rubbery, lipless mouth opened and contorted as if it was trying to reply to her.
‘That’s Thomas Riese! Thomas Riese!’
Nia flung herself towards the stage, but before she could get even a few metres, two guards tackled her to the ground. An anguished bellow came from deep within the train, like a terrified cow in an abattoir. Instinctively, I tried to move towards Nia, to help her, but the crowd surged to see what was going on, trapping me in the crush. She was dragged to her feet and hauled away to the sound of circus music, screaming ‘Thomas!’ over and over again. Before I knew it, they’d taken her beyond the stalls and out of sight.
‘Apologies, ladies and gentlemen,’ Nesterov laughed nervously, his cheeks flushed, ‘there’s always one, isn’t there? Thomas indeed! Good name for a train, though!’ The honky-tonk piano trilled in response, ‘Dah-dah-dah-dah dah-dah daaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh.’
I looked around at the crowd. Implausibly, they had quickly composed themselves after the fracas. Most were beaming up at the abomination on the platform. Some still waved hankies in the air. Clearly, Nesterov was insane, and a terribly insane thing was occurring right in front of us, but at the same time, it also didn’t feel that way. Not in the reality of the moment, with all the gin in teacups, balloons and Morris dancers, and folk in nice clothes watching intently, instead of running screaming in all directions. Within minutes the horror had been normalised.
‘And there’s more, ladies and gentlemen,’ Nesterov bellowed, clapping his fat hands together as the remaining hangar doors opened simultaneously and two more monstrosities emerged, blinking in the sunshine. Their train engine forms were similar but with idiosyncratic differences in length, colour and bulk. Different animals grown from similar moulds. It was only as they drew closer to the stage that I recognised their hideous visages, for I had studied both faces intently during my search for information and – unless Nia and I had been gripped by the same pareidolic delusion – I could see obvious resemblances to Edward Silverman and Gordon Tanaka.
The two new arrivals lined up in parallel, mournfully lowing at each other, films of greasy fluid spilling down their sides and dripping from their undercarriages. As the crowd burst into excited chatter, fixated on the spectacle, I took my opportunity to force my way back through the crowd until I could escape through a gap in the stalls. I ran full pelt across the car park towards a row of faux-Georgian houses, where the two guards were grappling with Nia beside an armoured security van parked on a cobbled street.
‘Stop! Leave her alone!’ I pulled out my secret phone and held it aloft. ‘I’m streaming this live,’ I lied, ‘and you’re now on camera. Stay where you are.’
The guards stopped and regarded me for a moment, with smirks on their faces. Nia, slumped between them, cried, ‘Look out!’
I didn’t know what she meant until a few seconds later when I felt something thud into me. There was a lot of pain very suddenly, then everything went black.
* * *
You could say I was lucky. They didn’t do much damage, the men who knocked me out. They smashed my phone, of course. Obliterated it. Didn’t even give back the shattered pieces. But for whatever reason, I was not considered a threat and they put me on a normal train with some soldiers who escorted me in silence to Gloucester, where I was unceremoniously hurled onto the platform.
Back in London, I got straight on the internet to see how the world had reacted to the bizarre events of the afternoon. All I found was a very slick film of the event, edited and manipulated to remove Nia, and me, and the people who screamed or puked at the sight of Nesterov’s diabolical creations. This must have been what they streamed ‘live’ but with delay enough to tweak and embellish. They had digitally touched up and smoothed out the trains to remove the more visceral details.
There was plenty of outrage on social media, of course – the kind of nugatory chatter which the state gladly permitted – but all the government-sponsored news sites declared the launch a triumph. A damned good show. A tonic for the nation.
The fuckers.
I tried to contact Nia on our encrypted channel but there was no reply. I couldn’t think where else to look online. Nia didn’t have much of an internet footprint. She’d never bothered with social media and her entire career had played out within the Organistrive world. Now she may as well not have existed.
Opinion pieces came out over the following week with speculation about what self-growing, self-driving, self-navigating transportation might look like if rolled out. They admitted these prototypes were not perfect yet, and might not come into service for perhaps five years. That seemed to quell some fears but Nesterov was concerned enough about the reaction to launch a propaganda campaign. This consisted of a family-friendly series of films about anthropomorphic, driverless trains, set in the landscape of Nesterov’s mutated Gloucestershire. These were sanitised toytown versions of the monstrosities I’d seen in the flesh. Thomas, Gordon and Henry looked much more like traditional locomotives, their faces infantilised, with that damned circus ragtime playing over the opening credits.
It was appalling to watch, knowing the grim truth these films represented. But I had to keep checking the latest episodes, looking for clues about what Nesterov might be up to behind the scenes. It was the only thing I could think to do. The doors to his slime factory had closed once more and he’d stepped up the military guard on his estate. After my exposure at the conference, they’d have my face and fingerprints logged on their systems for sure. One glimpse of me on their security scanners and I was a dead man – a disappeared man – or something even worse.
I put feelers out to see if any of my comrade journalists were up for an investigation. They said they’d see what they could do. I didn’t hold my breath. Instead, I stayed at home and drank gallons of cheap wine, reading old novels written in those eras before I was born, when people believed there was a future worth living in.
A year later a new character was introduced to Organistrive’s propaganda film series, in an episode entitled ‘Thomas’s Silly Mistake’. She was a tank engine from Kenya, and I was horrified to recognise her face.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to everyone who has published my fiction over the years…
Gary Budden, Kit Caless, Dan Coxon, Ashley Stokes, Robin Jones, John Lavin, Marian Womack, Richard Brook, Luca Csepely-Knorr and Jared Shurin.
Thanks also to Jen Orpin for inspiring ‘My Father, The Motorway Bridge’, and to Vince Haig for the cover.
‘We Are the Disease’ was first published in The Shadow Booth Vol II, ed. Dan Coxon (2018)
‘When Nature Calls’ was first published in Unthology 10, ed. Ashley Stokes and Robin Jones (Unthank, 2018)
‘A Dream Life of Hackney Marshes’ was first published in Acquired for Development By… Ed. Kit Caless and Gary Budden (Influx Press, 2012)
‘Thenar Space’ was first published in The Lonely Crowd Issue 9, ed. John Lavin, (2018)
‘Tyrannosaurs Bask in the Warmth of the Asteroid’ was first published in An Invite to Eternity, ed. Gary Budden and Marian Womack, (Calque Press, 2019)
‘The Levels’ was first published as ‘The Knucker’ in This Dreaming Isle, ed. Dan Coxon (Unsung Stories, 2018)
‘My Father, The Motorway Bridge’ appeared in You Love Me Really: Journeys Through Landscapes of Post-War Infrastructure, ed. Richard Brook and Luca Csepely-Knorr (2021)
‘Meet on the Edge’ was first published in Out of the Darkness, ed. Dan Coxon (Unsung Stories, 2021)
About the Author
Author photo: Sara-Louise Bowrey
Gareth E. Rees is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, based in Hastings, East Sussex. He’s the founder of the website, Unofficial Britain (www.unofficialbritain.com) and the author of Unofficial Britain (Elliott & Thompson, 2020) Car Park Life (Influx Press, 2019), The Stone Tide (Influx Press, 2018) and Marshland (Influx Press, 2013). He has also contributed short stories to numerous anthologies of weird fiction and horror.
Influx Press is an independent publisher based in London, committed to publishing innovative and challenging literature from across the UK and beyond.
Lifetime supporters: Bob West and Barbara Richards
www.influxpress.com
@Influxpress
Copyright
Published by Influx Press
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All rights reserved.
© Gareth E. Rees, 2022
Copyright of the text rests with the author.
The right of Gareth E. Rees to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Influx Press.
First edition 2022. Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books.
Paperback ISBN: 9781914391132
Ebook ISBN: 9781914391149
Editors: Gary Budden, Dan Coxon
Proofreader: Trudi Suzanne Shaw
Cover design: Vince Haig
Interior design: Vince Haig
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Gareth E. Rees, Terminal Zones
