Season 04 - Episode 07

‘the images now’

“You sneaky, sneaky biscuits!” Ga chuckles to herself as she plays back the footage again. The monitor shows a perfectly ordinary, empty room, into which steps a figure carrying a small but heavy looking box.

The figure places the box in the centre of the room and then leaves in a hurry. A few seconds later, light spills from the box and an image of a ruined, collapsed floor and the mouth of a deep, dangerous pit flickers into being. For a second or two, the image overlays the room, a thin, transparent veil, then it solidifies and the floor appears actually ruined, indistinguishable from the real thing.

Ga has written a programme to analyse all her footage, looking for sudden significant changes in the images. Now she knows what she's looking for she's finding them all the time. The Resistance are not only real, they're using some kind of holographic projection technology to fool GovCo into staying away from particular areas.

Watching the rooms and their surroundings after the projectors are placed, Ga sees people transporting food and medical supplies or even moving groups of refugees, all right under the nose of EnFo patrols.

As soon as she made this discovery, Ga had sent out a swarm of crawler drones to inspect the projectors themselves. The drones gathered every type of information she could think of but so far she has been completely unable to reverse engineer the technology.

“Who the hell are you guys?” she says, freezing the footage to stare at the figure. “And where did you get this tech? No-one has this. I mean, the monks might have had blueprints for something like this locked away, back in the day, but they're all long gone.”

Ga scrapes her immaculately painted nails over her freshly shaven and so perfectly smooth chin as she thinks. She's grudgingly impressed by The Resistance, she admits to herself. Not just their tech but the way that they're using it, not fighting but helping, not killing but saving lives.

The only thing she still doesn't understand, is why they seem to have stopped producing the projectors. Recently they've started moving already placed projectors instead, risking discovery by GovCo.

Without taking her eyes from the screen, she reaches out her right hand. The carrier drone scuttles over quickly from the edge of the desk bringing her cup into reach. She scoops it up and takes a drink.

Glancing at the carrier drone as she replaces the cup, Ga frowns and then turns, shifting her bulk around in her seat to look over at the machine. It's busily churning out a new set of standard issue crawler drones, entirely automated and by the numbers, innocently inanimate. She narrows her eyes at the thing and drums her nails on the desk.

After it created the carrier drone, entirely unbidden by her, Ga ran every diagnostic she could think of on the machine. She found nothing. Based on all the data she pulled from it, the machine is just that, a machine, a mechanical device, nothing more.

“I suppose you understand this projection tech perfectly huh?” she says to the machine. “Hell, you're probably related!”

Shaking her head, Ga turns herself back to the screens and her attention back to the kid. She wasn't expecting him to encounter people on his upward journey, she assumed it would all be empty. The discovery has made everything a lot more complicated.

It's no longer enough to simply lead him along the route she has planned, now she needs to tell him a story. The story is written, it's all ready to go, she just doesn't know how to deliver it. The crawler drones are mostly independent, they send back a video feed but she doesn't directly control them and certainly can't speak through them.

The last crawler drone of the newly minted set emerges from the machine and scuttles off about its business. The machine itself powers down, its little red light fading dull. Meanwhile Ga is watching the kid talking to his new best friend, tapping her hefty foot in irritation.

“How the hell am I going tell you what I need you to do now?” she says.

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