Baptism

    The morning after this dark night was an incredibly busy one in the city of London.  All members of the police and the Olympus security force had been called into work, for two different reasons though.
The morning of the 12th of November 2118 was a bleak autumnal one, the sky was covered in clouds, rain was falling heavily and everyone was having a truly miserable time, except the media.
    In one part of the city, police officers were attempting to close off the largest crime scene the city had ever been host to, there were bodies that needed to be collected and civilians that needed to be prevented from interfering.  The camera crews for the news were allowed entry though, they had a special understanding.
    In another part of the city Captain Angelica Ash was addressing her officers.
    “Our orders are to create a perimeter, one kilometre in radius around Olympus headquarters,” she said.  “All civilians have already been evacuated from this area, our job is to make sure no one tries to get back in.  Even though the main forces of the Followers of Mantis were put down last night, there are still plenty of supporters out there who would wish harm to the company.”
    At the start of the morning, before the Sun had even risen, Angelica had almost a thousand soldiers under her command, the entire London garrison.  By now, most squads had already been dispatched to set up checkpoints at various locations around this perimeter.
She was now under a marquis to escape the rain, examining a map of the city on a table as she gave orders to her officers.  She was back in uniform now but lacking a beret, she had always hated it.  Her hair was dripping wet and it looked as if she had been awake for a while.
    “If there is going to be anymore fighting today, the Olympus executives want it as far from the headquarters as possible,” she continued.  “This strict isolation will continue rigidly for at least the next twenty-four hours with rotating shifts and fully armed personnel….”
    She had only just noticed something, she had wanted all her lieutenants here today but one was missing.  Angelica questioned her second-in-command in a hope of discovering an answer.
    “Leftenant Halliday?” she said.  “Where is Lieutenant Harper?”
    “He hasn’t shown up yet,” Kindred Halliday reported.
    “Contact him on his radio,” Angelica ordered.
    The perimeter checkpoint system was very good at preventing large groups of overzealous cultists but it wasn’t that effective at halting a lone person who knew exactly where they were going.
    As Captain Ash was barking orders at her subordinates, a man was almost a kilometre away, very near Olympus headquarters actually.  He was trudging through the sewer, he had been for a while but that was necessary for him to acquire what he needed.
    This man was wearing pretty average street clothes, nothing that notable and was trying to make his time spent in the sewers of London as short as possible by moving as quickly as the environment would allow.  Fortunately for him, he was almost at his destination, the sewer grating just outside the back of the Olympus headquarters.
    When he arrived it took a while to locate the grating in the dark but he found it, he could hear that the rain above was still falling as heavily as it had been when he first began this subterranean voyage.  Before he climbed up to the surface, he allowed a quick glance at his watch.  It read 08:41, he would have to hurry; he was already late for work.
    He climbed up the ladder and slid the grating aside with the desperation of a man who really wanted to get out of the sewers.  As he stepped back onto familiar ground he slid the grating back and just bathed in the rain for a moment or two, hoping it would wash off at least some of the odour.
    Where he found himself now was around the back of Olympus headquarters, exactly where he wanted to be.  This man couldn’t go through the front entrance, even though there wasn’t a single human being for a kilometre, the surveillance cameras were still operational in the lobby, he knew that they would never turn those off.
    Instead he went through the small service door at the back of the huge building, first he swiped an Olympus security card through the slot and typed in a number on the keypad to open it.  He had stolen someone else’s ID badge so if Olympus did bother to check, he would never be caught, he couldn’t go through the lobby because a picture of his face was a lot harder to deny.
    The man surreptitiously crept through the back entrance, but first looked around to make sure no one was watching him enter as he almost felt compelled to do by film tradition.  Although, if someone was watching, he had just revealed his face to them.
    He stepped in and shut the door behind him, in these close quarters the smell of the sewers really made him gag, the rain had done nothing to cleanse him.
    Even with his Olympus security card, he still had to walk through those sewers because the checkpoints were so strict that even Olympus employees weren’t permitted to cross the checkpoint without specific permission from an executive.  Also, he couldn’t have posed for guard duty and then just snuck away because there would be too many eyes on him and Olympus had a reputation of severely punishing disobedience.
    This way wasn’t that bad, all he had to do was make a few turns through the colourful pipe lined corridors and he would be at the service lift.  He had always thought this to be a major design flaw in this building that was very easy to exploit but he had refrained from sharing this information with anyone for obvious reasons.  
    He had arrived at the service lift, it was an unattractive mesh construct but he didn’t mind, he just swiped his card in the slot and the doors slid away.  As he entered he quickly typed in the number for the 111th floor and the lift obeyed.
    On the way up it dawned on him that this building was practically deserted, every single member of the Olympus security personnel had been called away to deal with the ‘Mantis’ crisis and many of the executives were in hiding, for fear of assassination.
    Right now he had an opportunity to do whatever he wanted in the headquarters of one of the largest companies on Earth, it was a pity he couldn’t think of anything to do.  This man wasn’t the most imaginative of characters, even what he was doing at this very moment was planned by someone else.
    The reason he had to take this lift was because there were also cameras in the main lifts; not many people knew this, as they weren’t as obvious as the ones in the lobby.  
He looked down at the security card in his gloved hand; the name on it said ‘Hilary Spencer’.  The disturbing thing was that he stole this card from a man, poor guy, having a name like that, he felt bad for taking it now.  That guy probably had enough problems.
    For the rest of the way up the man played over exactly what he was going to do when he reached the 111th floor and what he was going to afterwards.
    The lift stopped at the top floor of Olympus tower and the man gingerly disembarked, this floor had dark grey walls covering narrow corridors and the floors were sparkly, which the man found pleasing.  
There was a control panel by the wall immediately on his right, there needed to be for the service entrance in case anything went wrong with the security system.  The man swiped the card in the slot and the panel opened, he flicked the switch that had ‘Emergency Override’ printed next to it.
    A sound could be heard briefly resonating around the narrow passageways, he hoped that was the sound it made when the security system had been turned off.  He replaced the control panel and uneasily began to walk forwards, he wasn’t just afraid of setting off an alarm, he was afraid of losing his life.
    This was meant to be the most sensitive floor of the Olympus building and had a lethal security system.  He stepped forwards as carefully as possible, everything seemed to be fine.  He saw a sensor on one of the walls, he ran his hand in front of it, bracing himself for the worst.  Nothing happened.
    No light turned on or anything.  He looked at the other wall.  That was where the laser turrets known as C-beam Projectors were supposed to be uncovered if the motion sensors were tripped.  
He could see the edge of the wall that comes away, revealing the deadly modern trap.  The reason he knew so much about this place was because a while ago he had befriended a guy who used to work up here as a guard.
    There were no guards up here anymore, protocol dictated that they could leave their posts if there was an emergency and most people who worked for Olympus certainly considered the recent events in London an emergency.  The Followers of Mantis were being taken seriously now that they have been responsible for so many police funerals.  It was strange that they were now more feared even though their number of members have been significantly lowered.
    He knew that it was possible to get past the security system just by stealing someone else’s security card but there was no way he could have made his way past the guards up here, short of murder and he really didn’t want to do that.
    The man walked through the thin corridors, knowing exactly where he needed to go.  It didn’t take long for him to find what he had been searching for, soon he was in front of a double door with the two words he had wanted to see written over them:

OLYMPUS ARCHIVES

    This was the room that contained all of Olympus’ secrets within, if he had the time he could discover some incredible information but he lacked that luxury.  Once again he used the card, swiping it in the slot adjacent to the door and the way opened for him.
    Inside the room was not as big as he had expected, it was a small octagonal space with a single computer in the centre and a built in chair.  The computer was built into the pale grey walls, all that he could do was sit in the chair and switch on the quite small monitor.
    There was nothing but a compact keyboard and mouse apart from the now active computer monitor.  Nevertheless, the man proceeded in removing a flash drive from his jacket pocket and plugging it into the side of the computer.
    It took him longer than expected to find the information he craved, there were a lot of files, but after a few minutes he located the program he had put so much effort into finding.  He clicked the mouse on the file listed, ‘Hypnos Access Codes’.
    After selecting to copy this file onto the flash drive, while waiting a few seconds for it to finish, he read through the program to make sure that it was the right one.  
Most of it he couldn’t understand, it was in computer language and there were pages of the stuff, clearly it was not meant for a human mind.  There was one word that he could read, it was at the beginning of the document and he didn’t understand what it meant, but at least he could say it.
    This word didn’t look like English but he knew why it was there and what it was for.  If he knew Olympus, there was probably a reason why they chose that word and he had a lot of time before the end of his plan, a lot of time to discover the story behind it.
    The file finished copying, the man snatched the flash drive out of the computer and hastily placed it back in his jacket.  He made sure that everything was how he had left it, it was very important that the company didn’t know that something had been stolen from them.  After completing his task he left the Archives, locking it behind him and then he went back into the service lift, turning the security system back on before he left.  In the lift he didn’t type in the number for the ground floor, he wasn’t done here yet.
    The intruder typed in the number for the third floor, just a quick stop before leaving this place.  The third floor was among the group of floors where the Olympus security spent their breaks, it had a lot of recreational facilities but this man wasn’t interested in that, on this floor was where some of the lockers and changing rooms were.
    When the lift halted, the man exited and made his way swiftly over to the lockers of the security force, which was where a lot of personal artefacts were kept.  This man walked through this place quickly and surely as if he had been there hundreds of times before.  Soon he was at the personal lockers located in the changing rooms.
    First things first, he needed to locate Hilary Spencer’s locker, he checked the number on the card to find it.  When he did, he opened it with the card and left it in there for him to find.  Then the man located his own locker.    
    It was not too far from Hilary’s, he used his own ID card to open it and quickly went about changing into his uniform.  He decided to leave all his clothes in his locker, including the flash drive, he reasoned that it was probably safer in there than on his person.  It was irreplaceable, this was the only opportunity he would ever have to get it and he couldn’t afford the risk of it falling out of his pocket.
    When he had finished changing he looked at himself in the mirror, in this uniform he didn’t even recognise himself anymore, he straightened his beret and slammed the locker shut.  His ID card was still in his hand, he examined it for a while; it was just like his reflection, unrecognisable.  He remembered the day he posed for this photo, it was his first day about four years ago and he had hated the fact that they made him wear that stupid beret for it.
    The man in the picture looked so peculiar, it was strange, he didn’t feel as if his personality had changed at all since then but he looked like a different person.
    Below the picture was his name and rank printed so neatly, ‘Lieutenant Michael Harper’.  Even the name was unfamiliar to him, most of his life he had been called something else.  Below the name was his birthday, the 23rd of January 2088.  At least this part was true, he thought to himself; there was no reason to manufacture a new identity regarding that detail.  He didn’t mind the rest of the deception; he just kept telling himself that it was almost over now.
    He returned to the service lift, since he had already activated it on the ground floor he didn’t need to use a card again, he just typed in the number for the ground floor and off he went.
    Michael Harper leant against the wall of the lift on the short way down, he felt completely drained by what he had just done and now he had to go to work.  He admitted to himself that he felt slightly guilty about breaking the Contract of Allegiance, the document that everyone must sign before becoming a member of Olympus’ Security Force, but he soon got over it.
    The lift stopped and he hurriedly jogged back to the service door he entered from.  Opening it from the inside required no ID card either, there would be no record he was ever here today.  He opened the door, left the Olympus building and let it slam behind him, he took a few steps and looked up at the sky.
    It had stopped raining, the weather forecast he saw before he left the house this morning had said that the rain would be all day.  This nice surprise was something at least, he didn’t feel too bad about going to work anymore.
    The ground was still wet and the sky was still covered in clouds.  There were breaks in the clouds at only two places, which were a couple of small neat holes in the sky as if someone had poked through to tear away some divine eyeholes.
    Sunlight managed to get through to the Earth through these narrow tears in the aerial lining, the light reflected off the puddles and for just an instant, made this city seem an alright place to live and work.  A casual observer would’ve never known the atrocities that had taken place in this city the previous night.
    Michael Harper looked at the two portals of light in the sky and softly spoke half to himself and half to someone else, “I’m coming for you.”
    Michael was so distracted that he had stopped dead in his tracks, he only remembered that he had a job to go to when his radio went off.
    “Harper?” the familiar voice of Leftenant Kindred Halliday said.  “Where are you?  Captain Ash needs you at the front.”
    “Sorry,” Michael replied.  “I’m on my way now, tell her I’ll be there as soon as I can.”