'Hide your tie in your bag,' Kate said to Lisa, as they ascended the travelator with the other shoppers.
Lisa looked at her suspiciously. 'Why?'
Kate Maguire tutted and rolled her eyes. 'Because we're nicking off, you idiot! Hyperville's packed with CCTV.
Anybody spots us, we'll be slung out!'
'Oh. Right.' Lisa Henshaw looked abashed, and pulled her
St Mary's School tie off and shoved it into her bag.
Tall and graceful, in their smart white blouses and black skirts, the two teenage girls could just about have passed for
shop-girls or young professionals. Kate's eyes flicked back and forth as she took in the crowds around them: a mixture of people, even now, midweek. Young and old, casual and formal, some mums with kids and some older people. All heading the same way. All heading for Hyperville – which was
always alive, always packed, always echoing and light.
Kate's heart skipped a beat as she looked down through the glass tube of the travelator and saw the endless car parks,
giving way in the distance to the fields and lakes. The world beyond Hyperville. And up ahead of them was the gaping,
glittering maw of the place itself, smelling sweetly of some chemical aroma. And coffee.
'Come on,' she said to Lisa. 'Let's have some fun.'
Up on Seventh Boulevard, high in the top reaches of the shopZone, Kate nodded to Lisa.
'They say they watch everyone. They say they can see everything everyone does in here.'
'Don't people mind?'
Kate shrugged. 'You know what things are like. It's 2009.
All those things happening in London. Security alerts, aliens and stuff. People like it now. They like to feel safer.'
'You think?'
'Sure. Bet you, in four or five years' time they'll have armed police and we'll all be showing ID cards everywhere we go.
Nobody minds – well, nobody except a few civil liberties cranks.'
They stood looking out at the bustling ShopZone. Lisa shook her head. 'Never realised how massive the place was.'
'Biggest in Europe,' said Kate with a grin. 'They're meant to
be building others now, but this was the first. I used to come here as a little kid when it was being built. I used to sit on the
hill with my binocs and watch the scaffolding going up for the Pyramid. You remember when it all started?'
'We were in primary school,' said Lisa absently, gazing out across the mall. 'And what the hell's that?' she added,
pointing.
A metal sphere, like a mirrorball with a glowing blue underside, was bobbing above the shoppers. It swivelled like
a jittery predator, its circumference bounded with a ring of red electronic eyes. It seemed to float on air, and to move with
the swift, darting motion of a dragonfly.
'Japanese tech,' said Kate confidently. 'They call it an Oculator.'
'You're making that up.'
'Honest! I googled it. Found out all about it. It moves on tiny gas-jets. It looks like metal, but I think it's some sort of
really light plastic.'
As if it could hear them, the Oculator whizzed over to their balcony, an electronic eye flipping up to stare straight at
them. Lisa took an involuntary step backwards.
'I don't like it,' she said.
Kate laughed. 'Look normal,' she said. 'Smile at it. Like you're on Big Brother.'
And the Oculator's eye seemed to pulse, as if it had heard Kate's words.
Deep within the heart of Hyperville, silver walls curved to form a soft, enclosing chamber lined with monitor screens.
On his podium at the back of the room, like a captain on the bridge of his ship, Max Carson gripped the rail in front
of him, surveying the technicians in their headsets. Thin-faced, with pale lips and slicked-back, coal-dark hair, he was
a slim, bony man in his thirties, dressed in an expensive black suit and shirt with gold cufflinks. He wore a small, almost-
invisible, clear plastic earpiece in each ear, like discreet iPod headphones.
Max Carson was newly appointed at Hyperville, in a role broadly known as Director of Operations. Sir Gerry's aide,
Miss Devonshire, had recommended Max highly. All Sir Gerry knew was that Hyperville had struggled before they had Max,
and that now it seemed to run smoothly with oiled precision.
Every organisation, Sir Gerry said, needed a Max.
'Seven, focus me that one.'
Max's voice was low, but a radio-mike in his collar carried it into the headphones of every operative.
One of the screens blossomed and grew, until it covered the entire chessboard of tiles – the face of a girl filling the room.
She was smiling, arms folded as she looked into the camera.
Max stroked his chin thoughtfully. 'That young woman's here almost every week,' he said. 'I wonder about her. Seven,
information.'
The operative's hands flickered over his keyboard and, an instant later, the young woman's picture was uploaded to the
terminal in front of Max, together with a stream of data.
A voice chattered in Max's earpiece, and he nodded.
'Of course,' he said. 'Excellent idea.' He spoke into his collar-mike again. 'See if you can get her tagged. I'd like to
track her.'
Kate and Lisa rode the escalator-tubes down to the corner of Ninth Boulevard and Western Avenue, to a plaza bathed
in near-natural light, where a juggler and a fire-eater were entertaining awestruck small children and their parents.
Kate nodded to the softly lit waterfalls either side of the lift-tubes.
'See those?' she said. 'They're to make people feel calm. Shopping's stressful, but if they can get people to relax, they
spend more.' She sniffed the air. 'And smell that.'