A wallpad ORANGE

Chapter 4. The Incredible Twist, Courtesy of the CA5

JULIE HAD HER eyes tightly shut and her teeth tightly clenched. Her entire body was rigid with fear. She awaited the inevitable ...

A huge crash sounded above the reinforced steel ceiling of the Surveillance and Security Unit control room, the noise buffeting through the hole that had opened up for the Ball of Justice.

Then another crash, followed by another ... and another.

The room was shaking. A low-pitched rumbling accompanied the crashing. Julie thought it was the beginning of her torture and subsequent death. She heard a wailing piercing scream in the far distance, yet she knew it was her own. But the crashes above her, muffled her scream.

Then she heard and felt among this sickening cacophony a burst of thuds sounding like arrows being fired into the wood of the Beechwood chair.

Am I being skewered, or what? Funny, but I can't feel any pain yet. I suppose it's delayed shock.

Then the last thing she expected happened. Someone was shouting at her and shaking her shoulders.

"Julie! Julie! Get up, you're free!"

Julie opened her eyes and saw Sally. She realised the thuds she had heard were the sounds of the metal clasps as they had sprang back into their passive positions inside the wood of the chair.

"Quick!" shouted Sally, amid the continued crashing noises overhead. "The laser bombs are targeting the hub's surveillance and security systems. The whole system's down! See, all the monitors have gone blank. Only emergency lighting and localised equipment will work now. Luckily for us, I knew the Ball of Justice requires external commands, which aided the Filipino Alliance attack. But, hurry, this system will reconnect itself and boot up if you don't quickly help me! I told you not to underestimate the CA5, didn't I? I was banking on its accurate predictions. Quick!"

Julie, shook her head as if in an effort to clear it. This day was like something out of a nightmarish thriller. It was too impossible to be true, yet, paradoxically, too impossible to be false.

Sally led Julie to a desk, reached into her large plastic sandwich lunchbox and plucked out two pairs of pliers. One of which she palmed to Julie.

She then urgently accompanied Julie over to a place in the circular wall where an olive-green compartment covering was facing them.

"Watch carefully," shouted Sally above the crashing and rumbling overhead that though diminishing was still extremely noisy. Sally pressed two yellow buttons, and a clunking noise sounded from behind the covering. She pulled at the covering, which was magnetically held into position, and it came free, revealing a bank of printed circuit boards. She threw the covering over to the side and onto the floor.

"Now pay attention, right?" she shouted, imploringly. "See these two blue wires between these two cards? Each must be cut." Sally demonstrated her instruction by urgently cutting the two wires. "See? Simples. And be careful not to cut any other wires—just in case. Got it!"

"Yeah," shouted Julie, still trembling from her ordeal, but at least the noise above was diminishing yet further.

"Well, there are sixty-five more of these wall-tech compartments to disable. You start on that side of the room, and I'll carry on, on this side. Got it!"

"No probs," shouted Julie. "I'll race you!"

"Just like old times, hey?"

Julie sprinted to her first wall-tech compartment covering, determined to beat her friend Sally to the final sixty-sixth compartment.

After Julie had completed nineteen wall-tech compartment disablements, the crashing of laser bombs fizzled out.

"Phew!" she said aloud. "That's a relief, I couldn't hear myself think."

"Yeah, but it's bad news," called back Sally, while busily continuing with her task. "Now that the attack on our hub is over, the Filipino Alliance will be concentrating their attacks on other targets. You see, despite the ear-shattering laser bomb pummelling they can't hope to completely destroy the hub. And if we can finish this job before wallpad can prevent us, we can disable a major wallpad nexus. And the Filipino Alliance will almost instantly notice. And while this control room's Surveillance and Security Systems are down, the Filipino Alliance will start injecting viruses and taking advantage in all kinds of sophisticated ways. So you go like the wind, Jules. This is our chance to be part of that advantage!"

And so, Julie found more strength in her sixty-six-year-old body than she thought possible, working frenetically in an effort to beat the almighty wallpad.

"Looks like the monitors are booting up," warned Julie, noticing the sea of wall-to-wall monitor screens scrolling an avalanche of blue text on their black backgrounds.

"Ignore the monitors!" insisted Sally. "Keep cutting the wires, we're nearly done!"

Thirty seconds later, Julie had just finished her twenty-seventh wire-pair disablement when she realised Sally was lifting off the covering on the adjacent compartment.

Seconds later, the task was complete. All sixty-six compartments, one for each year of the women's lives, had been disabled.

"You were quick," said Julie.

"I've had a lot of surreptitious practice."

They both looked at the monitor screens. They were all still booting up. The blue text had changed to green, a sign that the boot up process was almost complete.

"I hope you didn't miss any wires," said a concerned Sally.

"No chance," retorted Julie. "I might be slower than you on my feet, but I spent twenty years in the computer hardware factories. I must have spent at least five of those years cutting and soldering wires when the robots broke down. Shame wallpad phased out the robots. Cost me my best job ever."

"Well, we'll soon find out," said Sally with a shiver. "The last stage of the boot up requires external verification from the wallpad satellite server system. Hold your breath, here it comes ..."

On the monitors, the green text scrolled down, disappearing beneath the screens. Then, the orange lowercase "w" logo of the wallpad ORANGE corporation scrolled down and paused in the centre of each screen.

"If that orange 'w' logo bursts into a rainbow of colour," explained Sally, "then the boot up will have been successful and we'll be stuffed. And I'm sure if the boot up succeeds, the first image we'll see on the screens will be wallpad woman's bitch of a face."

Julie and Sally hugged each other for comfort, anxiously staring at the wallpad "w" logo, willing it not to burst into a rainbow of colour.

The logo began to bulge and then it ...

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I hope you enjoyed this Chapter. I welcome any votes, comments or constructive criticisms (style, spelling, grammar and punctuation errors).

T. J. P. CAMPBELL.