Hotston - Tangles Game

An Abaddon Books Publication

www.abaddonbooks.com

abaddon@rebellion.co.uk

First published in 2019 by Abaddon Books, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley

Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley

Head of Books and Comics Publishing: Ben Smith

Editors: David Thomas Moore, Michael Rowley and Kate Coe

Marketing and PR: Remy Njambi

Cover: Sam Gretton

Design: Sam Gretton, Oz Osborne and Gemma Sheldrake

Copyright 2019 Rebellion. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78618-107-7

Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book wouldnt have happened without a huge array of people. Thanks to my editor extraordinaire, David Thomas Moore, who has a special talent for destroying overwriting. Special thanks to Helen Smith, Ben Lancaster, Dave Ingham, Tim Ball and David Young for their thoughts on the technical elements of the subjectas might be expected, all errors are my own. Having said that, almost nothing in here is outside the realms of current technology.

On top of that, there were a legion of beta readers, not least of whom were Sean Crossey, Bex Cardnell-Hesketh, Sarah Cawkwell and David Meads. Over time the number of people who have encouraged me to write are legion, but particular shout-outs to Ned Sproston, Stuart Keen and Charlie Holmesall of whom have given me encouragement when they didnt know I needed it.

And finally... to Benjamin Burroughsthe cloak to my daggerthank you for all your patience and faith. This ones for you.

More money has been lost because of four words than at the point of a gun. Those words are this time is different.

Carmen M. Reinhart,
This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly

CHAPTER ONE

988, 999, 996, 992, 961, 973, 987, 999, 983.

Fucking jealous bastards, muttered Amanda. Shed been in London three days before, travelling on the tube on her way out to the airport. Shed touched in but not touched out.

A ride I could have been chauffeured on, she said out loud, as if the air around her was responsible for the battering her social credit score was taking.

As well as a penalty fare three times the normal cost, the metro had flagged her up as untrustworthy. The mark would evaporate in a weeks time, but friends were leaving shocked and angry responses on her different online profiles, asking what shed done, assuming shed been wronged or was otherwise justified. She was, of course, but the tale would have to be delivered to each of them, to work colleagues, clients and friends, customised according to their own prejudices and assumptions about her and the system that had remarked on her human worth. She knew which laugh shed use with clients when dismissing the event, knew how shed splay her hands with her friends over dinner as she exclaimed her outrage. It irritated her, spending so much time and energy figuring out how to manage the effects of the downgrade.

Thank God it wasnt something serious, she reminded herself. The system could take weeks to rectify actual errors even if promptly notified; it was literally designed not to forget.

Responding to the searches she was making, the AI that coordinated her online presence flushed the screen with suggestions for improving her score, the first of which was to always touch in and touch out when using the tube.

No screens or frames, said a voice from nearby. Amanda looked up to find a short-haired, rough-skinned woman in a dour green uniform staring at her hard. The official waved her finger down, her mouth set in a thin line.

Amanda wanted to argue, to ask if she really looked like the type they should be worried about using her tablet in the customs queue, but she held her tongue.

Flicking off the screen, she returned to shuffling toward passport control, even as the officials gaze slid off her onto someone else surreptitiously checking their accounts for messages now theyd landed.

The Arrivals hall was a broad, poorly-lit floor with a low ceiling and colours reminiscent of varnished puke. Large tinted windows ran along one side but the view, of tarmac and grey skies against a featureless horizon, only reinforced the sense that she and all the travellers around her were lost, held nameless, outside civilisation.

Four dozen booths processed people one at a time: two dozen for travellers from the European Union, and the same again for the rest of the world. If her own queue had taken an hour to spit her out after disembarking, she knew the others would be there as long again. The thought didnt exactly lift her mood but Amanda was able to take a breath and be thankful she was coming home, which was no small feat.

She missed a bombing in Geneva by hours, her flight one of the last to leave the city before it was shut down entirely. There were no frames showing the carnage in customs, but shed watched more than her fill while waiting for the flight to gain clearance to take off.

A booth flashed luminous red to call her forwards. Amanda stepped in, putting her feet in the yellow outlines, showing her face to the camera and placing her hand on the tacky glass shelf so it could take her biometricsfinger print, iris scan, facial recognition. The lights around her head dimmed while they processed her identity.

Shed signed up for the blockchain passport as soon as the government had announced the beta program. No need to hunt up and down the flat for a paper passport shed put in a safe place, no need to renew every five years, no fear of her ID being stolen and of her blamed for being lax with her own security, when it was just as likely the authorities had been hacked.

Her chest tightened at the thought of being free of the airport, of being home. She could smell the wedge of lime in her gin.

The white light flickered but didnt turn green. Amandas neck tightened; she wanted to look around for an official to come and sort out what was taking so long, but breaking eye contact with the camera ran the risk of being forced to start again, or worse, having to go join the ordinary queue and be processed manually.

As she stood there, staring into the box, she made out dark trousered legs approaching out the corner of her eye. They reached the exit of her booth and stopped.

The lights turned red, as if she were done, as if shed already exited. No one stepped forward to push her out of the way, she hadnt disappeared entirely. Or, she thought, looking around, the men on either side of the booth were dissuading anyone from approaching. She felt like a bacterium surrounded by white blood cells.