World of Fire (Dev Harmer 01) by James Lovegrove Read Free Book Online Page A

were the sort of people who tended to shout “I’ve done nothing!” whenever they were collared, and this time, for once, there was truth in their protestations.
    Each was brought before Dev in the interview room, one after another. He sat across the table from them, where Kahlo had sat when interrogating him. He spent the first minute simply peering deep into their eyes, saying nothing.
    “What are you staring at?”
    “Stop looking at me like that.”
    “What do you want, you perv?”
    Dev ignored the comments. He tried to see past the pouting defiance, the resentful glares, the postures of calculated affront...
    Tried to see if there was a particular absence behind the eyes.
    Something missing.
    Uncanny Valley.
    Then he asked questions.
    Mostly they were about God.
    “Do you believe in a supreme being?”
    “Do you believe in fate or destiny?”
    “Were you created by a divine force, or are you just a random assemblage of molecules?”
    “What’s going to happen to you after you die?”
    The answers varied, but the common thread was incredulity.
    “What are you on, man? This is the second century Post-Enlightenment. Are you having a joke?”
    “Newsflash. God died. Like, a hundred years ago.”
    “No heaven, no hell. Just oblivion.”
    “I haven’t heard anything so daft in ages.”
    “Oh, yeah, there’s a God. There are also fairies and unicorns.”
    Only one person, out of the forty or so Dev spoke to, twigged what was going on. He was Ben Thorne, a miner who headed up one of the more militant unions, the Fair Dues Collective. Thorne led protest rallies calling for higher wages, better benefits packages and more generous pensions. He had clashed with the city’s governor several times on social media, branding him a corporate stooge and telling him to pull his head out of the mining companies’ backsides.
    He was not popular with the Calder’s Edge authorities.
    He was also fiercely smart.
    “You want to know if I’m a Plusser, huh?” Thorne said after Dev had posed a couple of his God questions. “See if you can provoke me by challenging my faith.”
    “Do you have faith?” Dev said.
    “I have faith that you’re a chump. Do I look like I’m an AI sentience trying to pass myself off as human? Am I dead behind the eyes? Lights on but nobody home? Uncanny Valley, isn’t that what it’s called? Do you see that here?”
    Dev did not, but he forged on anyway. ‘Union activist’ would be an ideal cover identity for a Polis+ agitator.
    “Are you scared of death, Mr Thorne? Or do you live comforted by the falsehood that, when you pass on, your soul becomes subsumed into the Singularity?”
    “Do I go to that big database in the sky when I die? I doubt it.”
    “The Singularity is bullshit, right?”
    “Maybe not to the Plussers, but as far as I’m concerned, yeah.”
    “It’s a fantasy for fanatics. Does it upset you when I say that?”
    “What upsets me is that this is illegal arrest,” said Thorne. He sat back in his chair with the cocksure aggressiveness of a man who knew his rights. “The cops have just hauled in a bunch of citizens for no good reason whatsoever. That’s a lawsuit in the making. Someone, somewhere, will pay for this.”
    “You didn’t answer me.”
    “I think I did. Pretty well, too. One call when I get out of here, and my union’ll sick its best lawyer onto Calder’s Edge PD.” He rubbed index and middle fingers against thumb. “I smell a big fat compensation claim.”
    “Do you hate people like me? Just like your nonexistent Singularity tells you to?”
    “You’re persistent, I’ll give you that. Like a moleworm gnawing a scroach. All those trigger words – ‘falsehood,’ ‘bullshit,’ ‘fantasy.’ Designed to make a Polis Plusser lose their cool. Get them to flip out and break role. Military-trained, huh?”
    “This isn’t about me.”
    “Couple of my co-workers fought in the war too. They’ve told me how you’re taught to bust Plusser