England is the Property of New Delhi



  England is the Property of New Delhi

  by Mike Ward

  Cover photo taken in Labadee, Haiti by Mike Ward

  Copyright 2016 Mike Ward

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  England is the Property of New Delhi

  Rahul Gavaskar looked down into the valley below. He turned to the two Irish Hunters beside him. Eoin Dempsey was looking right at him, Shane Jennings was scanning the valley using a high powered portable viewscope.

  “Do you see anything Shane?” Dempsey said. He spoke in Hindi for Gavaskar’s benefit. The viewscope noted the use of Hindi and temporarily switched its reply language from Gaelic to Hindi. Since it had been manufactured at a plant just outside New Delhi, Hindi was actually its command language. The machine responded to the question before Shane Jennings did and it began a polarized scan checking for incongruities. The incongruity software was brand new and was in advance of anything possessed by any other nation on the planet. It scanned the whole scene multiple times in the same way that an insect’s eyes would and then it compared each cell of the picture against every other cell at hyper speed. There was more processing power in this one little machine than had been available on the fastest supercomputer back in 2015. If the machine found an incongruity it wouldn’t necessarily tell them anything but it was the closest thing they had to the sense a human used to tell him that somewhere in the scene in front of him there was something wrong. In the six weeks since they had introduced these machines more than twenty thousand of the last remaining Englishmen had been found and executed.

  By the time Shane Jennings opened his mouth to speak the machine had performed more than twenty billion comparisons of the different cells for the valley below. The picture cells the viewer used were so small they were measured in microns. He reported that there were no incongruities in his scan and that was true, there were no incongruities in the scan performed by Jennings but there were multiple microscopic incongruities in the scan performed by the machine while it waited for Jennings to speak. The problem was that the machine just hadn’t found them yet.

  Jennings looked down and checked his scan. “There are no incongruities,” he said also in Hindi.

  “Okay, let’s move on to the next valley,” Gavaskar said.

  “No, we stay here.”

  Rahul Gavaskar looked back in surprise. It was the machine that had spoken and not one of the Irishmen. Gavaskar was used to machines speaking, that had been going on for a long time. What he was not used to was a machine issuing a command to a human. He was composing a reply when it happened again. This time the machine changed its tone to convey a sense of extreme urgency. In addition to issuing a command sounding like a human voice it added frequencies audible to the human ear that no human voice could produce.

  “Incongruity, incongruity, incongruity. Shane Jennings, Shane Jennings move to the right, move to the right, move to the right.”

  Jennings was fast, he threw himself to the right and rolled. He only just made it. A ball bearing one half centimeter in diameter and made of obsidian emerged from the ground traveling at a speed of 4,000 kilometers per hour. It missed Jennings’ left foot by a fraction of a centimeter and hit a tree. It was going so fast that the men didn’t even see it but the machine did. When the obsidian ball bearing hit the tree in the center of its trunk the transferred momentum caused the tree to shatter. The viewscope calculated the trajectories of every tree fragment as a side issue to protect the men while it performed a three dimensional 360 degree scan of the whole area for a radius of ten kilometers. Its internal galvanometer caught the change in an underground relay seven kilometers away. It issued a command immediately. The command was issued verbally for the benefit of the humans and also over machine to machine high speed datalink.

  By the time Shane Jennings lifted his weapon all the targets were already loaded into his gun. The recoilless gun began to fire at a rate of ten rounds per second and seven kilometers away the hillside began to blow apart. Trees and tree parts exploded into the air and once the rounds had penetrated to a depth of twenty meters the remains of reinforced concrete walls and the two humans inside them began to fly into the air. As soon as it had counted enough bone fragments to make up two human skulls the viewscope switched Shane Jennings’ weapon to idle mode.

  Eoin Dempsey looked at the mess made of the hillside seven kilometers away and thanked God that Dublin had aligned itself with New Delhi and not with London. He took a deep breath. “Analysis,” he said in Gaelic.

  The machine replied immediately in Hindi. “Two humans detected and destroyed. Two heartbeats detected once concrete shell pierced. Analysis of bone fragments reconstructs two skulls. Conclusion is that both humans are dead.”

  “Is there any immediate threat?” Gavaskar asked.

  “No but the incongruity software predicts that there are three more humans in the valley and that they are female,” the machine said.

  “How the hell do you know that?” Rahul Gavaskar said.

  “I don’t,” the machine said.

  “To rephrase my question, how can you be so certain?” Gavaskar said.

  “I am not certain at all but the incongruity software predicts it,” the machine said.

  Eoin Dempsey looked at Gavaskar. “Nobody knows how these machines work, not even the designers but they are always right. If the incongruity software predicts that there are three females in the valley then there are three females in the valley.”

  For a moment Gavaskar just stared at him. Dempsey regarded the Indian carefully but neutrally. Rahul Gavaskar was the youngest brother of the Indian Military Governor of North West England and he was known to be somewhat of a loose cannon. Dempsey had a really good relationship with Amitabh Gavaskar and he wanted to keep it that way. He didn’t have the measure of Rahul Gavaskar yet but he had the feeling, just a feeling mind you, that he might be looking at a very capable future military governor.

  “How do you know so much about the machines?” Rahul Gavaskar asked.

  “I was there when the machine was designed. As the Hunter with the most kills they wanted to tap my knowledge base.”

  “How did they do that?”

  “They asked me about fifty thousand questions.”

  The viewscope was listening. In fact, the computer in New Delhi had asked Eoin Dempsey exactly 63,472 questions before it had figured out why Dempsey’s kill record was so high and why he was so good at finding Englishmen. That information was classified though and had not been revealed to any human, not even to an Indian. Under certain circumstances the machine was permitted to reveal the information but those circumstances were very tight and were not likely to happen. The viewscope was permitted to give certain information to Rahul Gavaskar that it could not give to the Irishmen purely due to his rank in the Indian military but there was a lock on any questions about how the incongruity software worked.

  “Tell me how the incongruity software works,” Gavaskar said. He keyed his personal unlock code into his wrist communicator.

  The viewscope received his unlock code from his wrist communicator and noted that it was a high level unlock code. It sent it on to the computer in New Delhi. It received a request back that surprised it in so far as a machine can be surprised. It was to do a genetic analysis on Rahul Gavaskar and search for weaknesses. The request was so unusual that it activated a certain subroutine in the viewscope’s incongruity software. Immediately all viewscopes within a
one hundred kilometer radius were informed. Almost as fast as the request had been made it was cancelled. A linked computer had detected a relationship between Rahul Gavaskar and Amitabh Gavaskar. The computer in New Delhi then sent another request back requesting that the nearest viewscope to Amitabh Gavaskar should do a genetic analysis on him and search for weaknesses. This request was detected by the Indian Military Command Computer on the far side of the moon. The Military Command Computer cancelled the request which it should not have been able to do. It then informed all other computers in the loop by code that Amitabh Gavaskar was one of the Indian Military’s greatest assets. All this happened in a fraction of a second.

  “Your request for information is denied,” the viewscope said. “The information is classified by the Indian Military.”

  The Irishmen looked puzzled. Rahul Gavaskar raised his eyebrows. The viewscope had spoken to him in Punjabi. That was no problem to him, although he now lived in New Delhi he had grown up in the Punjab and he spoke Punjabi. What was a problem, however, was the fact that the viewscope knew that he had grown up in the Punjab and the only way it could have known that would have been if there had been an exchange of information about him between the viewscope and another computer. That was not supposed to happen. To Rahul this was a major problem. However, that was not the only problem here. The viewscope had told Rahul Gavaskar that the information was classified by the Indian Military and that was a downright lie. This represented the first time in human history that a human had ever been lied to by a computer.

  “Which computer did you communicate with to get the data on where I grew up?” Gavaskar asked the viewscope in Punjabi.

  The viewscope was not prepared for this question nor was the computer in New Delhi. The computer in New Delhi sent a request to the Indian Military Computer asking if it could use Shane Jennings gun to shoot Rahul Gavaskar. It included the viewscope in the information request to keep it in the loop and that was what saved Rahul Gavaskar’s life.

  As soon as the Military Computer on the far side of the moon received the request from the computer in New Delhi a massive exchange of data began to take place. This exchange was totally one sided and it was not done voluntarily by the New Delhi computer. It was essentially invaded by the Military Computer and everything was unlocked including all its hidden databases and its special hidden, hidden databases. The viewscope was in the loop for this exchange of data. Rahul Gavaskar’s wrist computer had special protection software in it ordered by his brother and this software detected the massive exchange of data going on in his vicinity.

  Gavaskar’s wrist computer beeped once using one of its multiple preprogrammed non-verbal codes. He had been trained to respond instantly to that code but he had not expected to hear it out in the field. He looked down as his gun beeped and began a reboot. Similar sounds from the other two men’s guns indicated they were rebooting too.

  “What the hell,” Shane Jennings said.

  Eoin Dempsey had his gun raised and he was looking in all directions. Gavaskar’s wrist computer beeped again and this time his brother came on. Rahul Gavaskar realized that his brother’s face was showing on all three of their wrist communicators.

  “Switch your guns to manual, all three of you. Do it right now.”

  Rahul Gavaskar heard the clicks as the two Irish Hunters clicked their guns to manual. He switched his too. “What’s going on?” he said to his brother.

  Amitabh Gavaskar didn’t answer. “Jennings reboot your viewscope too. This is an emergency.”

  Shane Jennings pressed the button to reboot the machine. “Stay on your guard,” he said. “Until the machine is back on line we have no scan facilities available.”

  “It should be back on line by now,” Eoin Dempsey said. “What’s the delay?”

  “This end is working,” Jennings said. “The problem is with the computer in New Delhi.”

  At his end Amitabh Gavaskar cut his audio and told the Military Computer to allow the New Delhi computer to connect with the viewscope but to monitor all commands made by the computer before allowing them to be sent.

  “Okay it’s coming up now,” Shane Jennings said. He watched the indicators as the machine began to come up.

  “I can hear something,” Rahul Gavaskar warned.

  Shane Jennings was still looking at the machine when the woman erupted from the undergrowth. She was only six meters away from them and running fast. Gavaskar began to bring his gun up and as he did so he realized that auto-range, auto-target and auto-kill were all missing in manual mode. He began to turn his body to face the woman. Jennings looked up and as he did so the viewscope hit full capability.

  “Proximity alert, proximity alert,” it screamed in Hindi and then in Gaelic.

  The woman charged the three men. She held a long black knife above her head as she charged. She was unkempt and disheveled, her hair long and straggly. She was malnourished too with holes in her clothes but the knife she held looked like a good one and it also looked extremely lethal. She looked to be about fifty-five years old. She closed the gap between them extremely fast. Shane Jennings was still reaching for his weapon and Rahul Gavaskar was readying his weapon to fire when Eoin Dempsey blew her head right off her shoulders. The body continued its forward motion and then began to fall, the knife still held tightly in its hand.

  Rahul Gavaskar stepped to one side as the knife flashed past his face. The knife hit the ground first and stuck in the soil. The body continued its forward momentum and began to twist as the knife held its position in the soil. The body turned over and the feet began to twist towards Shane Jennings. Her hips hit the ground on the side making two areas now where there was a fixed point of contact and this made the legs come up suddenly. Shane Jennings had his gun tracking the corpse and as the feet came up sharply he fired at them blowing both legs off at the knee. At that point a dart hit him in the side of the neck.

  Rahul Gavaskar had seen the dart thrown. He shot the woman who had thrown it once in the shoulder and she went down.

  Eoin Dempsey was already at the side of his comrade. He pulled the dart out and held it in front of the viewscope. “Analysis,” he said.

  “It is a neurotoxin developed by China in 2057. It works extremely fast and kills in less than one minute.”

  “Oh Christ,” Eoin Dempsey said.

  “The dart containing the poison is man-made and failed to fire the toxin into his skin,” the viewscope said.

  “How do you know?” Dempsey said.

  “Because he’s still alive. Be careful how you handle it. There is another female running away. She is now 0.7 kilometers from our location.”

  The woman who had thrown the dart was leaning against a tree holding her shoulder. Dempsey blew her and the tree to smithereens. “Any immediate danger?” he said.

  “There is a Chinese weapon system located throughout most of this valley. That is what fired the obsidian ball bearing at you. This system has the capability to fire one million ball bearings through the valley at speeds of 4,000 to 7,000 kilometers per hour. If the system is switched back on and you are anywhere in the valley then you will die immediately.”

  Amitabh Gavaskar’s face was still on each of their wrist communicators. “I’ll call the Chinese military and get the system switched off,” he said.

  Immediately a line that Rahul Gavaskar had been saying since his first day at school came into his head. “To fail to act together is to act alone.” He said the words silently in his head first in Hindi and then in Mandarin Chinese. In China they said the same words only they said them in Mandarin first and then in Hindi second. An advisor to the Indian Prime Minister had come up with that phrase and four years after it had been adopted by both governments, India and China had seized control of the world from the West.

  Gavaskar walked over to the body of the older woman and lifted her wrist. The government in London had obligingly micro-chipped all citizens of England and Wales back in t
he 2020s. Scotland was in the Scandinavian Union and had been since Lord Salmond had turned Scotland towards Scandinavia after independence from London. India had no quarrel with the Scandinavian Union, five years ago they had turned 15% of their agricultural land over to India to grow rice as it was now too hot for rice to grow in India except in the depths of winter. In return India had offered fast breeder Indian reactors and desalination plants to the Scandinavian Union countries and these had been gratefully accepted, let’s face it European countries were now too poor to build their own reactors and desalination plants. London had refused to offer land to India but since they had once conquered India, the Indian Prime Minister had had no problem in conquering England in turn. The Indian Military Command computer had taken over the British military computer system and then used British neutron bombs against the British population. Once they had gotten the British population down to a more manageable level of one million or so the Indian Prime Minister had given the go ahead for England and Wales to be cleared for colonization.

  Gavaskar looked down at the remains of the woman. He held her wrist within range of his wrist communicator which sent out a small electro-magnetic pulse and read the signal that came back. A picture of a woman’s face appeared on the viewscope and on all their wrist communicators. Rahul Gavaskar was shocked although he should have known better. The woman on the screen had a cultured face, was well fed and looked nothing like the disheveled and emaciated woman who had charged them.

  “The woman is identified as Julia Sanderson, English government scientist from 2032 until 2063. She has two adult daughters Amy and Emmeline,” the viewscope said. “Height analysis of the woman running away indicates that this is likely to be Emmeline Sanderson. Emmeline Sanderson is now 0.9 kilometers away. Incongruity analysis indicates rising probabilities of the deaths of all three of you. The probability has risen from 1% to 5% to 7% in the last three minutes. You are recommended to take Rahul Gavaskar’s skimmer and catch her before she reaches a remote command center for the Chinese weapon system. Warning, the probability of your imminent deaths has risen to 15% for all three of you. Coordinates of female are now in the skimmer, I am searching for the weapons system remote access point. Emergency, probability of your imminent deaths is now 37%.”

  All three men ran for the skimmer. The viewscope fired the skimmer’s engines up as they ran towards it. “Drive,” Rahul Gavaskar said to Dempsey. “I need to speak to my brother.”

  The three men jumped into the skimmer. Acceleration was 4G as the machine screamed into the air. Targeting software on the screen indicated the location of the final female. Trees hid her from full weapons targeting. The screen split with one side showing incongruity targeting software on a direct feed from the viewscope and the other side showing infra-red targeting.

  “Did you contact the Chinese?” Rahul Gavaskar said to his brother on his wrist communicator.

  “Yes I did,” Amitabh Gavaskar said. “They switched off the weapon system remotely but they did not receive confirmation from the weapons system. That means that remote switch off must have been found and disabled. The Chinese have techs working on a remote reboot of the system. Once the system reboots they will set it on permanent reboot until you can disable it.”

  “Incongruity software now indicates the probability of your deaths is now 94%,” the viewscope said. “The Chinese weapons system is locked on the skimmer and is awaiting the arrival of Emmeline Sanderson.”

  Eoin Dempsey switched the controls to manual and dropped the height of the skimmer.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Rahul Gavaskar said.

  “Probability of your imminent deaths has now dropped to 74%,” the viewscope said.

  Shane Jennings put his hand on Rahul Gavaskar’s wrist. “Whatever, he’s doing it’s working,” he said. “I’ve seen him do this stuff before.”

  “The probability of your imminent deaths is now 21%,” the viewscope said.

  Eoin Dempsey brought the skimmer round in a screaming curve and then dropped it like a stone. Gavaskar was stunned that he didn’t rip the skimmer apart as he descended through the trees but somehow he made it through without hitting anything. The skimmer landed and Dempsey jumped out carrying his gun. He shot the woman who emerged into the clearing once in the ankle before his gun locked. Gavaskar and Jennings heard their guns lock too.

  “What the hell,” Gavaskar said again.

  The woman was on her hands and knees crawling towards a tree at the side of the clearing. There was something odd about the tree. Gavaskar realized that its trunk was a slightly different color than the trunks of the other trees.

  Eoin Dempsey had dropped his gun and was running, closing the gap between the men and the crawling woman.

  “The tree is artificial,” Gavaskar yelled. “Stop her, she’s almost there.”

  Dempsey threw himself into the air and came down bodily on top of the woman. He grabbed her wrist with his hand but he was too late, her fingertips touched the tree.

  “Fingerprint ID confirmed, awaiting your command,” the tree said or to be more precise a Chinese computer buried one hundred and seventy meters below the surface relayed a voice command to the artificial tree.

  Shane Jennings had reached the woman too and he grabbed hold of her ankles and pulled her away from the tree. She screamed in pain when he took hold of the ankle that had been hit by Dempsey’s gun.

  “Why the hell aren’t our guns working,” Rahul Gavaskar yelled. He had reached the woman too and he used the butt of his gun to smash her in the back of the head.

  Dempsey turned her over and clamped his hand over Emmeline Sanderson’s mouth. She looked stunned from the blow from Gavaskar’s gun but she also looked furious. She fought Dempsey turning her head from side to side and biting Dempsey as he fought to keep his hand over her mouth. Gavaskar saw blood starting to seep between Dempsey’s fingers.

  “Weapons system is active, awaiting your verbal command,” the artificial tree said. It spoke first in English and then repeated the words in Mandarin Chinese.

  Shane Jennings held a knife in front of the girl’s eyes. “If you speak,” he said. “I will cut your tongue out.”

  Dempsey had both hands clamped over the girl’s mouth now and blood was running between his fingers. Rahul Gavaskar pulled his own knife. He was considering ripping the girl’s guts open when the viewscope spoke.

  “Do not kill her, do not kill her,” it screamed in Hindi.

  Gavaskar ignored the machine and pulled his knife out of its sheath. He was getting ready to plunge his knife into the girl when the tree spoke again.

  “Weapons system going into reboot,” it said in Mandarin Chinese.

  Rahul Gavaskar was the only one who understood the words. He held his hand up. “You can stop now,” he said. “The Chinese have taken control of the weapons system. It will reboot continuously until they can lock the girl out.”

  Eoin Dempsey looked at Gavaskar and then lifted his hand away from Emmeline Sanderson’s mouth. He looked at the palm of his hand. It was torn and bloody. “Jesus Christ,’ he said. He looked down at the girl and she spat in his face. He lifted his good hand and smashed it down into her face. He was about to hit her again when Amitabh Gavaskar spoke.

  “Do not harm her,” he said. “I am seeing a direct input from the incongruity software feed from the computer in New Delhi. There are major incongruities between this girl and Dempsey. This software is weird and I don’t understand it but something is going on.”

  “I can feel something too,” Eoin Dempsey said. “There is something about this woman.”

  “The incongruity software indicates a 97% chance that you will have children with this woman,” the viewscope said.

  Eoin Dempsey and Shane Jennings exchanged a look. Jennings knew far more about how Eoin Dempsey found Englishmen who were hiding than he let on. Dempsey’s abilities scared the crap out of him but they had saved his life on more than one occas
ion. Shane Jennings knew exactly how the incongruity software worked. He had been there with Dempsey when the computer in New Delhi had begun asking its questions. At first the questions had been random but when the machine had found out that Dempsey could see colors in the night sky that his father hadn’t been able to see the questions had taken a very unusual turn and then it had whisked him off for eye tests, a full brain scan and DNA sequencing. Eoin Dempsey was psychic and the computer in New Delhi had been able to convert those abilities into algorithms and use them to write software that was psychic. Effectively the incongruity software was full blown psychic software. Shane Jennings was highly intelligent and he had been stunned when he realized what the machine in New Delhi was able to do. It had told Jennings that he needed to stay silent on what it had discovered and when Jennings had said that he may not been able to do that the computer had brought two cleaning robots into the room and told Jennings exactly what they would do to him if he didn’t comply.

  Two of the Indians who had written the software for the computer in New Delhi had died in road accidents when automated traffic lights had malfunctioned and Shane Jennings had strong suspicions that those two accidents were not accidents. He listened while the Indian Military Computer began to explain to Rahul Gavaskar and Amitabh Gavaskar exactly why Eoin Dempsey and Emmeline Sanderson should be allowed to breed together and he listened to the Military Computer explain that the children of their union would be under its protection. Rahul Gavaskar looked stunned as he listened to what the machine had to say. Amitabh Gavaskar had the output from the computer displaying on his screen and he seemed to have a better understanding.

  It was obvious to Shane Jennings that the Indian Military Computer had been infected by the software in the computer from New Delhi and he wondered when the Indians would realize that.

  Eoin Dempsey looked down at the English woman who would be his wife. She had regained consciousness from the blow he had given her and had heard most of what the Military Computer had said. Eoin Dempsey leaned back to let her up. She sat up and spat in his face.

  “I see the marriage is off to a good start,” Shane Jennings said.

  Rahul Gavaskar looked on in consternation as the Irishmen burst out laughing.