3.4 Numbers And Old Junk

Hampstead Heath: 14-15 April 2128

After ten minutes Long came out of the tent shaking his head and scratching his beard. Damn, he missed shampoo. He suspected that some insects had taken up residence in his hair, something his upbringing had hitherto failed to mention. He looked at Rick and marvelled at how clean and sharp he appeared. Ellie, having been outside the Wall for the past two days, was beginning to take on a similar appearance to himself though, thankfully, lacking a beard and its miniature inhabitants.

He cursed AI and his own bad luck. If only that damned camera buggy hadn't turned up ten seconds early last September. It had got a full shot of his face. Immediately after, his ID access had been rescinded and he'd had to rely on everyone else for food and commodities. Several times the statically mounted cameras in the city centre swing in his direction as he passed. Then AI started to make clumsy attempts at actual physical retrieval using nurse and maintenance bots.

With AI's current crumbling state Long hadn't wanted to stay around to find out what it had in mind for him. Remembering Holls' detention, he feared he could be locked away and forgotten about.

Despite its apparent aloofness and non-interfering attitude, there had been unexplained disappearances in the past. In 2126 two others had speculated on where some of AI's local central processing units were located. They had not been seen since leaving a message saying they had found them and would be back with more news. Long and others had attempted to probe AI itself about their whereabouts but the few answers it gave were ambiguous and inconclusive.

So, he'd decided to leave permanently.

"Made any more sense out of him?" Ellie asked, interrupting his thoughts.

"Nothing I understand," he said with a sigh. "From what I can make out, he's trying to tell us to watch out for radiation on 'three'."

"Radiation? That's a new one," she said. "Weren't all the nuclear bombs and power stations dismantled ages before the disaster?"

Long shrugged his ignorance, noting that Rick did likewise.

"Who knows what AI kept from us?" Rick added, a fleeting grimace passing across his face.

Long couldn't help but agree. He leant his back against a tree while the other two joined him, putting some distance between themselves and the stink. A breeze played amongst the upper branches and he could make out the call of an owl in the distance. A few months ago he hadn't even realised owls hooted. He had learned more in the past few months than in the first twenty years of his life.

Rick sat on a log and Ellie joined him. Long watched Rick put his arm around her and tried to suppress a flash of jealousy as she responded by pressing herself closer to Rick. Ellie had been here for two days and Long hadn't touched her. There had been something new, something distant about her that had made him hesitant about any such approach. She and Long had been lovers several times in the past, as had she and Rick. Whether it was his enforced exile or whether something else had been growing between her and Rick, he couldn't tell. A few of London's self-named NewGen had paired off to the exclusion of all others, but it was quite rare. Maybe this was something to do with the 'growing up' that AI had often mentioned but, like many subjects, failed to elaborate upon despite their questions.

If he hadn't been exiled then could it have been himself and Ellie forming a much deeper bond? Of course, it may have been as much to do with his reduced personal hygiene. He mentally sighed and forced himself back onto the subject at hand.

"It might not be nuclear radiation anyway," he said. "There are other types."

"Well, yes," Ellie agreed, snuggling closer to Rick. "We can probably dismiss light and heat but he could be referring to X-rays, gamma, electromagnetic, ultraviolet... Plenty to choose from."

"Indeed," Long said. He looked away from the pair, fighting down embarrassment and frustration. Damn, he really needed to get back to normal civilisation.

"What about the number three?" Rick said. "Any idea what he means by that?"

"Possibly," Long grinned, seeing an opportunity to split them up. "I'll show you inside the machine. C'mon. Oh, and Ellie, your turn to keep an eye on him."

Long pointed his thumb back towards the tent, noting the scowl flash across her face before she squeezed Rick's hand as he reluctantly left her side.

Back at the crashed contraption, Rick shone the torch beam at the door as Long tugged it open with a heave.

There was a creaking noise as he lugged it open. "Hinges are a bit warped – probably won't take much to fix, though," he explained. "There's some sort of locking mechanism next to the handle. I broke it getting in. Pretty crude, but I think it prevents the machine from working if the door's open." He indicated some loose wiring that dangled from the ceiling just inside the frame.

"I think he'd managed to undo that after landing here," he continued, pointing out a clamp on the inside of the door that could be used to secure it from opening. "Good job, too. If it had still been locked I might never have got in."

They entered the cramped interior and he beckoned Rick to sit at a centrally located wooden chair in front of the timber desk that, with a stretch of imagination, might have been called a control panel.

"Is this it?" Rick said.

Long chuckled at Rick's incredulity. He had been just as perplexed the first time he had seen it. If the machine had appeared crude from the outside, then its method of operation was even more primitive. The desk held two controls, a wooden lever next to a mechanical display that currently showed the digit '4'. Alongside that was a switch, with large, hand-written 'on' and 'off" signs indicating the two possible positions.

Long leaned over Rick's shoulder and casually flicked the switch on. A bulb dimly lit up the interior.

"Is that safe?" Rick asked, switching off the torch.

"The rest won't work until that interlock is fixed. Here's what powers it all." Long pointed to a rack of twelve large blocks to Rick's left. Each battery had two metal terminals that were strapped together with thick cabling.

"They may have come from old motorised ground vehicles, a bit like the trikes but more powerful," Long said. "Spares are by your feet."

Rick looked under the desk. To the right was a large drawer, while the left was filled with a box. Wires as thick as his thumb protruded from it before disappearing through the wall.

Beside the desk stood a rack containing three red, metal cylinders.

"Compressed air, I think, but they seem to be empty," Long said as Rick left the seat to examine them. "What do you reckon then?"

Rick shook his head. "Hell. No idea. Never seen anything like it. What's in that box down there? The wiring all seems to go into it."

"Holds the electronics – if you can call it that. Transistors the size of my thumb. Absolutely prehistoric."

"Any idea why they built that way?"

Long thought back to AI teaching them about ancient electronics when they were children. Both he and Rick had pursued that part of their education, though his own comprehension of the subject had always been far greater.

"Not a clue. Look." He bent down and opened it. Inside were ten circuit boards horizontally mounted, one above the other. He grasped one and, with a tug, it came free of its mounting and connector, sliding out on grooves cut into wooden runners. He removed a second and handed both to Rick who examined them under the inadequate lighting. They were certainly not mass-produced items – each projected a sense of amateur roughness, the finish variable and distinctly unprofessional.

"Ancient looking, aren't they?"

"Yeah – amazing," Rick replied. "As you said, it's all transistors; no chips, nothing complicated. And they look hand built, these circuit tracks wobble like they were hand drawn."

"That's what I thought as well. This whole set up looks like it was designed about a hundred and fifty years ago. Hopefully, that book you found will help. And see here..."

Long's finger encircled two similar areas of the board. "Lots of it is duplicated, each board has twelve similar areas – not sure what they are as yet. That drawer over there contains a whole pile of spares, more than enough to replace all ten in the box. And there's bags of transistors, capacitors, resistors and things; even a few spare light bulbs."

"What's that?" Rick said, pointing to a metal stick with a wire coming out of one end.

"A soldering iron but it doesn't work. Must have done once, though, as a few of the boards have had bits replaced by the looks of things. Look, this spare board is burnt underneath the large resistor and the soldering is more recent."

"So, ancient technology built recently."

Long grinned. He knew Rick would probably come to the same conclusions. "A few months ago at most; the solder's still quite shiny. Also, the wood used here doesn't show much ageing – feel the edge on the desk – can't be more than a year since that was put together."

"Do you think he built it?" Rick pointed his thumb back over his shoulder in the general direction of the tent.

"Possibly. Though he might be just the driver. Maybe it would take more than one person to understand and build all this junk, and those windings outside probably needed a whole team to assemble them. They seem to be woven into a specific pattern."

Long gripped the wooden lever. "Watch this."

He slowly pushed the lever away from himself and a sharp click reverberated around the machine as it sprung back to its original position.

"The number changed from four to five," Rick observed.

"Right. The lever's connected to the display via some sort of ratchet. Every time the lever is pushed it increases the number." He pushed it again and the number changed from five to one. He pushed it three more times and it returned to the original four.

"It's the numbers, isn't it? What the guy keeps talking about."

"That's what I thought, too. But what I can't figure out is what the numbers themselves refer to."

Rick scratched his head for a moment and then cautiously said, "That door looks almost airtight, or was until you broke it. It's as if it could be for some sort of spaceship. If these cylinders were air then..."

Long grinned at Rick with one eyebrow raised as he watched him work through the logic.

"Nope," Rick continued, "no fuel tanks."

Long nodded. "Yes, but it does give that impression, doesn't it?"

"A bit like an early manned capsule. Gemini or Soyuz, weren't they called?"

"Something like that. I thought the same thing when I first saw it. It's obviously been up in the air but only a few feet – there's no way it could handle space travel. The answer appears to be those bloody great windings wrapped around the outside. I suspect all the electronics in here are meant to drive them in some way but, right now, I don't have a clue as to how or even why."

Rick shook his head again. Long agreed – nothing added up.

"Do you think anyone else knows about it? AI?"

"Well, none of its eyes have come sniffing around yet as far as I can tell but..."

Whatever Long was about to add was cut off by Ellie's shout from outside.

Thank you for reading Splinters. Do please vote and/or leave a comment to tell me what you think.