The nunatak appeared as a massive solitary peak, a rough pyramid worthy of Egypt rising abruptly from the ice. In stark contrast to the flat expanse of the surrounding glacier, the grey-lit rock face was craggy and steep, and its shadowed slopes were dotted and splashed with patches of brown and green where cold-adapted lichen and moss eked out an existence in the peak’s crevices and cracks.

  Area 71’s entrance was on the sheltered leeward side, marked by a road through the rocks that was a caesarean scar across the pristine landscape. Sly gratefully accepted Ramirez’s offer to reconnoitre, and watched through the misted window as the team came out on to the ice and climbed the scree, occasionally pausing to stare at the dark peak above.

  Sly remained with Tony in the warmth of the cab until Ramirez sent word, then checked his protective gear before stepping out into the bitter cold and wail of the wind. Shivering hard, he followed the wide, exposed track with his eyes down on his boots. Despite himself he couldn’t help but imagine unseen valleys packed with a crushing weight of ice, far beneath his feet.

  The rest of the team waited and made way as he passed, watching him as he gaped at the smooth, black and shiny wall stretched across the cave mouth, alien against lichen-covered, mottled-grey rock. Cables, secured by screws into the mountain, held the space-age fabric taut, flat and utterly rigid. Given its location, this was an astonishing feat of engineering.

  The black wall even sported a bigger-than-garage sized door: a metal-edged, ten by ten metre frame filled with lightweight polyurethane. On the left side of the square, a recessed handle in hardy galvanized metal revealed a judas gate. The door within a door wasn’t locked and swung open easily when Sly twisted the handle with a gloved hand. He bowed his head, stepped over and through.

  Inside lights came on automatically, revealing room for a handful of people between the outer wall and another inner skin of the same shiny material. The roof above was tight-stretched and transparent. Inside, the sound of the wind faded.

  “An airlock,” said Trap Singh, nasal through his mask. “To stop the heat from escaping. Over-engineered but cheap, CU’s signature move.”

  Sly wondered how Charlton U got permission to build all this, or if in fact it had. Antarctica was supposed to be left as pristine as they found it, but here was a super-modern door at the end of a road clearly blasted out by plastic explosive.

  If I asked a dozen people to go live in a hole, I’d make it nice, but who agreed to let Charlton do this?

  In line with instructions on a faded poster on the opposite wall, he brought seven people into the airlock on the first go. The judas gate was well-made and clunked as he shut it. Not European luxury-car thunk, but nearly – the well-built, mid-range Mexican-made thonk. Fans buzzed as the door closed, sucking cold air out near the floor. Heated air fluttered through flaps at head height and the chamber’s air gradually warmed. A minute later Sly opened the second door and waved the first members of Peacock into Area 71.

  Then he closed the door – another thonk – and cycled through the last of the group. When the inner door to Area 71 open the second time he followed through. Inside it was… pleasant. Not t-shirt temperature, as his breath steamed in the cold air that had accompanied them inside, but paradise compared to the reverse-inferno outside. He was frankly startled: after the video he’d not expected comfort.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “The builders must’ve had serious weight restrictions,” Singh said, a lift in his nasally voice, the sound of a geek speculating. “It’s all high-density, low-weight materials – silica aerogel, or polyurethane. I bet it can all be pulled apart, collapsed or rolled up, or could before the college glued it to the South Pole.”

  “We’re a thousand miles from the South Pole,” said a southern drawl. When the speaker removed his face-mask Sly saw Michael Lee, the other engineering sergeant. “But I catch your drift.”

  Ping. The sound through the shades was Gus, announcing it had accessed the base LAN and computers. Sly checked but saw no access to the satellite. The site schematic appeared in Sly’s vision then expanded as chairs and tool-racks populated the map-key. Bodycams and other cameras continued to feed Gus with detail by the megabyte, and the map’s details grew.

  Still in the garage Sly passed lockers, hooks for outdoor clothes, and barrels for vehicle fuel, while walking over a flat, rippled lake of poured concrete – a parking bay for the tracked vehicle now out on the ice. Bringing the vehicle in would crack the airlock like an egg, losing a lot of the garage’s heat, but Sly found more insulated internal doors to limit the damage. The designers evidently thought of everything.

  He asked Gus to draft an email for Fox’s mission command, to send the next time the base had a satellite fly-over. The polar-orbiting satellites were literally lifesavers, but their rare overflights were easily disrupted by snowstorms or even high winds. Area 71 was cut off now and could remain so days at a time.

  That also meant his local Gus node was currently configured as an independent agent. The AI would be functionally limited until it burrowed into the local computing infrastructure, exploiting any unused processing capacity.

  Uneasy, he looked at the update map and schematics.

  Were Ronnie Thorpe’s killers in this part of the complex? I hope not. I wouldn’t want to be cut off from external communications during a firefight. Fox’s briefing and available schematics suggest no one could follow the research team this close to the surface, but how far can I trust those conclusions? Information’s only as trustworthy as the source, and I trust Jarvis and Fox about as far as I could throw them.

  Too late. We’re here now.

  He followed the others up into the complex and watched Gus do what Gus was designed to do. Using images from bodycams to build up a map.

  Mike was wrong. I made a fuss when Argos was taken. I just didn’t win.

  The memory was painful. The lawyers pried Argos from Sly’s clutching fingers, pounded him over the head with his orders before he pulled back and let Argos go, inches short of doing something rash. Even thinking about it now made his blood pressure spike. The handover team left nothing behind, no papers or copies of files, no early prototypes or code. Sly watched them try to salt the earth.

  In Roman mythology the grieving Hera, Zeus's consort, mourned her watchful servant Argos Panoptes by replicating his eyes on the feathers of peacocks.

  The choice of name for his next project was a small, petty but personally satisfying middle-digit salute to the bureaucrats who sold him out.

  Naturally his grudge went further than that.

  Like Hera, I told my last piece of Argos to go forth and replicate, at least until it was safe to come back. Like a parasite or a virus, or a guerilla army in the wilderness, that’s exactly what it did. As long as Gus keeps its core code locked away, distributed across the nodal swarm, Oversight can’t prove Gus and Argos are the same thing, or destroy the last copy without my help.

  Sly didn’t tell Gus to stop seeding copies. Only to be discreet.