Beautiful Chaos(2)

Written by Gary Russell Read by Paramecium BGM: I Mostly Watched - Danny Schidt 后半段有点爆麦，我调音台增益没有调好 便当了一个小哥 不过终于不虐了_(:з」∠)_ Terry Lockworth checked his mobile, but there was still no signal. Maria was going to be so fed up with him – he’d had to work late but couldn’t let her know. No doubt the spag bol would be in the bin tonight. Again. Poor Maria – it wasn’t her fault she got fed up with him, but what was he supposed to do. They’d been married three months, had a child on the way (please let it be a girl), and money was tight. Sure, her dad had given them a deposit for the flat in Boston Manor, but there was still the mortgage, the bills, pre-natal classes, food... Terry shook his head as he pocketed the phone. Stop moaning, he told himself, and get on with the job, then he’d be home in an hour with any luck. More importantly, he’d be out of this mobile phone black spot in half that, so he could at least phone her then. He picked up his toolbox and took out the wire-cutters, clipped the plastic coating from the copper wiring and cut the wires. He then yanked the old cables from the junction box and pulled a long thin coil of fibre optics out of the toolbox. These were interesting fibre optics (well, OK, only Terry found them interesting) because they were even finer than normal. A new system, developed by the Americans (aren’t they always), and this building was the first in the UK to utilise them. They’d sent Terry on a course in New York six months back to learn about the system. That’d been fun – lots of nights on the town with Johnnie Bates, discovering that it really was the city that never slept. Frequently they’d only just made it to the training classes the next day, hung over but happy. Terry was sensible enough to know when to party and when to really knuckle down and get the job done, though, and he and Johnnie had come back to England, certified to work on installing these new fibre optics, which made them both popular with their boss and earned them a bit of a bonus. They’d been promised another bonus if they got this job done and, frankly, it was money in the bank the way they were going. The cabling was easy, it was the removal of the old copper stuff that was taking the time. Johnnie was a couple of floors above him, closer to the demonstration suite. They’d flipped a coin to see who hung around with the bigwigs and had the chance to nick a cup of tea off the secretaries and PAs and who got the back stairways and service corridors. Terry had lost, of course. No tea for him. He pulled a screwdriver out of his tool belt and started to open the last junction box, whistling something he’d heard on the radio on the drive over. Anything to pass the time. If he’d glanced back over the work he’d just done, he might’ve been surprised to notice that the fibre-optic cables he’d wired into the previous junction boxes were glowing strangely. Cables that weren’t actually connected to power sources rarely glowed. Never, to be frank. It just didn’t happen. Why would it? How could it? But it was happening: tiny purple pulses of energy, briefly flickering up and down the cabling. Almost like blood pumping through the veins of a huge electronic creature. Terry didn’t notice it because he was looking forwards, looking to see where he was going next, not where he had been. Which was unfortunate. Not just for Terry Lockworth, whose spaghetti bolognese would indeed go uneaten that night, but also for pretty much the whole human race. Terry laced the last bit of fibre-optic cabling into the final junction box and screwed it shut for the final time, smiling to himself. Upstairs, Johnnie ought to be receiving proof that the cabling was finished, and his monitors would be telling him that everything was good to go. As Terry finished tightening up the last screw, a massive bolt of purple alien energy rushed through his screwdriver, his hand, his whole body. It moved so fast that, by the time the miniscule charred flakes that were all that remained of Terry fell to the ground, the screwdriver was only starting to fall away from the screw head. Of course, Terry was lucky. By dying so suddenly and violently and efficiently, he was spared what was to come in the next few days. But he probably wouldn’t have seen it quite like that.