If You're Not Panicking by Now You're Not Paying Attention
The Department for the Quantification and Utilisation of Luck.
Cooper sat in a comfortable armchair in his quarters on the second floor, a low, round coffee table to one side. He was doing a crossword on his phone, which was all he used it for since they’d removed the sim chip and locked him out of the Wi-Fi, even assuming that he could have guessed the password.
They called this part of the building the Experimental Studies Suite, but he considered guinea-pig cages to be a more accurate description, although he appeared to be the only occupant at the moment. Having said that, he’d stayed in a lot worse places. It was the size of an average hotel room. In the corner farthest from the door was a single bed and a bedside table with a lamp and phone charging dock sitting on top of it. In the opposite corner was a kitchen area complete with microwave. All the walls were painted in the usual government beige.
The bathroom was behind him and a wall-mounted TV was positioned so he could view it from either the bed or where he was sitting. The room was windowless, and he only knew it was Friday morning because of his phone and the wall clock. They always disagreed with each other by a few minutes, which he found endlessly irritating.
His captors distrusted him so much that he had to keep the room door open and the only time he was out of sight was when he was in the bathroom which didn’t have a lock and was fitted with an extractor fan instead if a window.
He heard someone knocking on the open door, followed by a woman’s footsteps entering the room. A pair of black caterpillar boots appeared in his peripheral vision, but he kept on looking at his phone. She had to be a member of staff, or she’d never have gotten past the two armed guards stationed in the corridor at all times.
“How are we treating you, Mr Cooper?” he looked up to see a clean-scrubbed woman in her late thirties. He estimated, correctly, that she was five foot three inches tall. Her red hair was tied back in a pony tail, and she wore blue jeans and a green T-shirt with “Miss-ology” in black lettering on the front, her baggy clothes were almost successful in concealing her impressive figure, a laptop bag was slung over one shoulder.
“Pain in the arse,” he said, looking back at his phone.
“I beg your pardon, what did you just say to me?” she spluttered as the guards behind her looked at each other, suppressing their sniggers.
He looked up quizzically, “Pain in the arse, eleven letters? Ah, haemorrhoid!” He said, with a snap of the fingers before pretending to fill the answer to the clue (that wasn’t really there) into his crossword app.
“Oh, right,” she said, offering a handshake.
“Sorry, but who are you and why are you talking to me?” He said, ignoring it.
“My apologies,” she said, sounding rattled (which was what he wanted), “I’m Cassie Sloane, the new head of this section.”
“Oh,” he said, looking back up, “no, it’s for me to apologise, I didn’t recognise you from the description, you don’t look like a ‘frosty-faced bitch who thinks she knows better than the rest of us’ that’s not verbatim, you understand, but I think I captured the spirit of the piece,” he lied as no-one had even mentioned her, as he gave her a disingenuous grin.
She looked upset at that, and he made a mental note that the opinions of strangers mattered to her, as she said, “I just dropped in to see if you have everything you want.”
He looked over at the shelf full of DVDs and the bookshelf filled with a selection of his choice (he’d ordered escapology books and biographies of, and novels about jail breakers, just to annoy them) “Pretty much,” he said, “although whoever included the ‘Sex and the City’ box set was clearly taking the piss.”
“Good, I won’t bother you anymore, we’ll talk later,” she said, nodding and turning to leave.
“Of course,” he said, “since you’re the new high muckety-muck, the big kahuna, el numero uno, el mucho head honcho, you could tell me how much longer you intend to detain me illegally.”
She turned and squared up to him, “You’re being held perfectly legally, as Edinburgh is now under martial law, but I hope to persuade you to stay willingly, anyway,” she said.
“Waiting for Stockholm syndrome to kick in, are you? Isn’t putting an entire city under lockdown just to get me like using a laser beam to cut a birthday cake?”
“Is your ego really that big or do you truly have no idea what’s happening out there?” she said, looking genuinely surprised.
“I don’t have any broadcast radio, TV or Internet access and the paperboy is shockingly late, so why don’t you enlighten me.”
She took the laptop out of the bag, opened it, started a video playing as she laid it facing him on the coffee table, it was the kind of summary that the news channels use to compile a timeline of significant events, only this one had ‘TOP SECRET’ in red lettering on a black banner that was scrolling along the bottom.
Most of the footage comprised grainy CCTV and satellite imagery, with the rest coming from remote drones. He didn’t want to believe what he saw unfolding on that small screen, and tried to convince himself that it was all done with the modern equivalent of smoke and mirrors, but even if it were, what would be the point? There had to be thousands of better cover stories for whatever they could be hiding.
When it finished he sat stunned, there had been very few times in his life that he’d ever been at a loss for words, but this was one of them, “This is crazy,” he croaked eventually as he watched the ghostly pipe band marching at the head of a procession of hundreds as the video repeated on auto-play, “why did that battalion just surrender, without firing a shot?”
“During the world wars millions of people volunteered to risk their lives for what they loved and believed in and Morrigan has the power to make people love and believe in her.”
“Who the hell’s Morrigan?”
“The Supreme Celtic goddess of war, she’s responsible for all you see happening,” she said, as he stared, wide-eyed at the screen.
The thing that worried him the most about that statement was that he believed it. She was talking nonsense, spinning a story that could have been written by the Brothers Grimm, and yet he was positive that she was telling the truth and he didn’t know why.
“Okay, even if all you say is true, why did they abandon their weapons?” Cooper said, “Changing sides is one thing, but giving up a tactical advantage is a whole different matter.”
“Because Morrigan is not the goddess of peace. She wants a long, bloody war, and if she used modern weaponry, or even nukes, it would be over far too fast for her taste. If she’d been active at the time World War One started, there wouldn’t have been a World War Two, as the first one would still be going.
“Well, those fifteen guys trying to get away didn’t seem too lovey-dovey, the way they opened fire, trying to get back to their vehicles to bug out,” he said, not willing to admit what he felt deep down inside, even to himself.
“They were English, of Anglo-Saxon stock, you have to have Celtic DNA for her to control you, like you and me,” she said, she could trace her own roots back to Robert the Bruce, in the thirteenth century, and they’d had him tested to establish his lineage.
“Celts, right, Scots, Irish and Welsh,” he said, closing the laptop and turning to face her.
“It goes a lot farther than that, we can trace the Celtic race back to 1200 BC. They spread throughout western Europe, from the Russian steps, through Germany, France and Spain.
“Let’s say, for the sake of argument, I believe you, you’re talking about faith like it’s a tangible thing which has to be nonsense.”
“The same way that placebos are? Some people who take them get better because they believe they’re real, even though they’re just sugar pills. Have you ever heard of the Tinkerbell effect?”
“Tinkerbell, as in the fairy in Peter Pan?”
She nodded, picking up her laptop and putting it back in the carrying case “In the panto the children have to clap to show their belief in Tinkerbell, or she dies.”
“That’s little children, they’ll believe their faces will stay that way if the wind changes, adults are a lot more cynical,” he said.
“Belief is the key word here, what would happen if you walked into a shop and offered to pay for your purchase with a tenner, but the assistant wouldn’t take it because she said she didn’t believe in money?”
“I’d tell her to go home and sleep it off and go elsewhere.”
“But suppose in every shop you went into you were told the same thing? And that was true for everybody all over the world, then money would no longer be real because nobody would believe in it and we’d all go back to the barter system. And that’s the way it was with magick. It was real until people stopped believing, then it wasn’t. But with Morrigan’s return, as more and more people believe in a magickal goddess magick will come back, unless we can stop it.
“Oh, I get it now,” Cooper said, “like the way an Oxford degree makes people automatically think you’re clever, which, don’t get me wrong, I know you are, but that’s not always the case.”
She blushed bright red, “How did you know I went to…”
“Quite simple, really, there’s a little bit of posh left in your accent, although not enough for most people to spot, as you’ve worked hard to eradicate it, to blend in, no doubt and people from your background, with enough brains to find the front door, only go to one of the top two universities, now, although Cambridge is undoubtedly the best choice for the hard sciences, with your preference for the humanities Oxford is where you’d want to go.”
“So, now you understand what’s happening and why, will you help?” she said looking extremely uncomfortable as he leaned back and crossed his legs whilst beaming with an irritating grin.
“I’m not sure, why don’t you let me go home and pick up some clothes and stuff, then I’ll let you know when I come back,” he said standing up.
“Once the army took back what was left of their tank armour,” she said, “which they were not happy about losing in the first place, there wasn’t much more than a hole in the ground where your house used to be. Although you’ll be happy to hear that your cars survived intact.”
“Not that one, the one the army don’t know about.”
She raised a quizzical eyebrow at that, “Of course,” she said, “but considering that you were army inter-corps cross country champion two years running, we’d have to shackle your ankles first.”
He sat back down at that, “Look,” he said, “you have a whole army, airforce and navy to play with, you don’t need me.”
“If I’m right,” she said, “you might be the only one we do need.”
“Then you really are screwed,” he said, returning to his crossword.
“So you definitely won’t help?” She said, hands on hips.
“I’ve been snatched off the street and used as a guinea pig, so no, I won’t.”
She stood frozen in place, a look of bitter disappointed etched deeply onto her face as he sat playing with his phone and ignoring her. After a few seconds, she spun around and stormed out.
Nearly five minutes passed before she returned and threw a heavy backpack into his lap he gasped and gave a soprano “Ouch,” of pain. It was the bag he’d been carrying when he left the house, he checked it thoroughly, the gun was missing as was the phoney documents, but all the money and his real bank cards and ID were there, he even found his phone sim zipped into a side pocket. “Go, get out of here,” she said, the disappointment being replaced by a cold, dispassionate anger.
“You’re,” Cooper squeaked, then paused to let his voice return to its usual baritone, ‘letting me go?”
“Things are going to get really bad here,” she said, “and if you’re not a help, you’re a hindrance. We’ll need every soldier, instead of wasting some of them guarding you.”
“Okay, but why give me my stuff back, is there a tracking chip sewn into the lining of the bag, by any chance?”
“No! How dare you!” she said, genuinely offended, “I’m doing it because I feel partially responsible for you being here, and I don’t want a guilty conscience, so take the last piece of advice I’ll ever give you and catch a plane to the other side of the world, where you’ll probably die of old age before she reaches you.”
Cooper clipped the sim card into his phone, stood up and was already calling for a taxi as he stepped around her, past the two guards, heading for the stairs to the exit.