KINDRED - Transmission 05
A personal journey, cut short.
New here? Start at The Bunker
← 04 - Transmission Navigation - 06 →
Aurelie Larousse laid her battle-worn pen on the desktop. She shook her hand to regain feeling. Forty seven pages. By hand. For the third time.
It has to be right.
She took the handwritten sheets. Tapped them against the desk—once, twice—edges dead-straight. Slid them into a blue translucent document folder. With a black marker, she wrote on the folder—top left.
Social Influence Theory - Draft 1.
She closed her eyes and breathed out. They’d told her she was crazy, that the thesis she insisted on writing was far too ambitious—far too disruptive. The world of social psychology was a small one. The ideas worth writing about—at least those her tutor deemed worthy—were few and far between. They also happened to be intensely uninteresting.
Carl Jung had been disruptive too.
They’d called him crazy.
Maybe that was a good sign?
She opened her eyes. Straightened the folder on the desk, ran her fingers over it. The plastic was cold, stiff.
Whatever the case, it was due today—and it was too late for the post. She’d have to hand-deliver it to the Sorbonne herself. Aurelie slid a blank sheet of paper to the centre of the desk. Picked the pen back up.
Professor Moreau - I submit to you my full draft
She squinted.
No. No point.
She laid the pen back down next to two others, balled up the sheet of paper in her fist, and dropped it into a grey metal waste paper basket next to the leg of her desk. She picked up the folder and dropped it into a brown leather satchel standing by the leg of her chair. Here goes nothing…
Aurelie stood.
Jeans, white trainers, grey wool jumper—good enough. She stepped over to the front door.
Un. Deux. Trois. Quatre.
Always four in this tiny apartment.
She lifted a long wool coat and a thick orange scarf off the peg, then crossed back to her desk—slipping on her outer layers. She picked up her smartphone—five notifications, all of them Campfyre—and slipped it in her coat pocket.
Lifting the strap of her satchel and placing it securely over her shoulder, she unlocked three dead bolts on the entry door and swung it open.
Dusty. Damp. The distinctive smell of a Parisian stairwell.
She shut the door behind her. Locked each bolt with a click. Then skipped down the five winding flights of stairs to the ground floor. The building door opened with a click and a buzz, and she slipped out onto the busy early evening street.
The icy air took her breath.
The door slammed shut behind her. She jumped.
People who had more important places to go than her were buzzing left and right. The waiter at the cafe on the corner opposite was shooing away lingering coffee patrons and laying out glasses and cutlery for the evening service.
The metro station was only forty-five metres to her right, but she turned left. It was better that way. She’d do a walk around the block. Fifty metres on three sides—a perfect square.
Aurelie rounded the first corner into a side street, and nearly collided with a hurrying delivery man with a hand trolley. He scowled at her as he lowered the heavy trolley off the narrow footpath onto the roadway.
She avoided eye contact.
In her pocket, her phone buzzed. She slipped it out. Instead of a Campfyre notification—a message from her mother:
Aurelie my darling, I’m doing fine! It’s so nice of you to ask, but don’t feel you need to send me five messages a day! I’m thinking of you as always, and I’m looking forward to seeing you this Saturday.
Aurelie’s steps slowed. She stared at the message a moment. Tapped reply. Typed four words.
No.
She slipped her smartphone back into her pocket. She shifted her posture. Lifted the strap of her satchel and changed sides.
A motor-scooter screamed past her, its acrid exhaust smoke sitting motionless in the thin, cold air. She coughed, and realised she’d stopped walking.
She shook her head.
Her mother always overreacted anyway. They were family—communication was important.
Aurelie set off again, a left turn. Past the public laundry, through the forest of scaffolding.
Quarante-trois, quarante-quatre, quarante-cinq…
She turned left again. The station was in front of her. Fifty-five more steps and she arrived at the top of the worn stairs. Her phone buzzed again. She fished it out of her pocket. A notification. Her brother! Her heart leapt.
No… her mother again:
Darling, please tell me you’ve been keeping up with your sessions. I worry about you—but I know you’re strong! Love you.
This time she had to reply. A short reassuring message. Edited four—no, five times.
She slipped the phone back into her pocket.
Aurelie descended the steps into the metro station. The constant street level noise from the taxis and scooters melted away. She took a deep breath.
Beeping through the ticket gates, she felt the familiar press and proximity.
Humidity. Sweat mixed with perfume. Overwhite lights. Sudden, hot drafts of ozone and burnt steel.
Delayed by the crush of humanity, she arrived at the same moment as the train. Passengers were jostling for position mere centimetres from the platform edge—and oblivion.
She glanced at the carriages as it slowed—humans packed in like sardines. She stepped backwards, her back against the white ceramic tiles. The timeboard updated. It was only three minutes until the following train.
Worth waiting for.
She clutched her satchel closely to her body as the doors hissed open. She eased along the platform, and was immersed in a wash of movement.
Streams of people—office workers, families, tourists, and with them, no doubt, the omnipresent pickpockets—crisscrossed the platform. Their movements purposeful… automated.
The doors closed once more, and the train pulled away. The human tide receded as quickly as it had risen. Aurelie shuddered and her vision blurred. She steadied herself against the wall.
She pulled out her phone. Opened up her notes; typed:
Social networks don’t only connect people… they create pathways, or vectors of influence. Map the pathways, see where they lead. What could we do with this?
She stared at the words and grimaced. Professor Moreau would call it extrapolation—or downright fantasy. But it felt so real...
He’d probably be right.
The silence was broken by the tortured strains of a busking violinist across the tracks on the opposite platform. She deleted the note and slid her phone into her pocket.
The next train arrived on cue two minutes later. It was all but empty. As it pulled to a stop, the doors hissed open. She breathed deeply and stepped on board. She sat on a fold-down seat.
The doors closed and the train pulled away from the station with the familiar whine and rattle.
* * *
The man in the black suit sitting across from the young woman looked up at her in amazement. He fished into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out the computer printout given to him earlier that evening by the chief technician.
It’s all turning out so… perfectly.
What had the instructions been at the Campfyre offices the day before?
Insert the security device, enter a computer—a web—address. Press ‘Enter’.
He squinted at one side of the crinkled piece of paper. Nothing more than a long list of figures, scraps of information and place names.
Meaningless.
He’d needed a little more help. Thankfully the techs scrawled a few more, human readable, instructions on the back of the sheet.
He was to enter Paris metro line four at the station at its northern extremity, Porte de Clignancourt. Alight at the first door of the third carriage of the train that was due to leave that station at exactly 4:17 p.m.
He should then expect the subject to get into the same carriage on the same train at Strasbourg Saint-Denis, some eight stations later.
Female. Medium height. Orange scarf and a long wool coat over jeans, white trainers for shoes. She’d be carrying nothing more than a brown leather satchel.
He held the printout up in front of him, hidden from the girl’s view by a discarded newspaper. He glanced upward; then flicked his eyes to the left to avoid suspicion. He gasped.
Every detail matched.
The coat. The scarf. The satchel. The exact carriage.
The exact time.
How could the system know so precisely what this young lady would do, or what she would wear?
What if she’d been early? Late? Forgotten something? Changed her mind?
But she hadn’t.
The machine—the… AI had known.
He brought the newspaper back up in front of his eyes. His face flushed, his breath short. His years of experience had prepared him for most things—but this…
The train clattered mechanically down the dark tunnels, stopping with an unnerving regularity at the well-lit stations. One after the other.
The humanity around him shifted, moved. But he was oblivious. He had eyes for only one thing. Now the final details just needed to line up, and he’d be able to carry out his mission as planned.
His subject stood as the train slowed on approach to Saint-Michel station. She lowered her head as she pushed her way past the harried workers and lost tourists. The man watched as she stepped off the train amidst a gaggle of birthday party revellers, then stood himself and leapt off the train just before the doors closed behind him.
He slunk behind a group of shoppers as she paused to take a quick look at her phone. She shuffled on her feet, then slipped her phone back in her pocket.
He followed as Aurelie Larousse strode off in the direction of the station concourse and La Sorbonne.
She never arrived.
← 04 - Transmission Navigation - 06 →
Learn more at https://www.aninformedcitizen.com