Alpha Omega

STRANGER THINGS MEETS BLACK MIRROR AND READY PLAYER ONE IN THIS UNSETTLING, NEAR-FUTURE SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL

The students at NutriStart Skills Academy begin to show symptoms of an unknown, bloody contagion…

Atimer appears on the giant screen on stage and ticks down from twenty to zero, and the tension in the auditorium becomes almost unbearable as every boy and girl restrains themselves from chanting like they’re launching a rocket. At zero, the blue screen is replaced with the broad, terrifying face of the Deputy Headmaster. Something has gone wrong with the resolution of the broadcast. His features have been stretched to fit the screen and he looks grotesquely wide and amphibious. Even on a screen of this size, the picture is infinitely brighter and clearer than real life, and Peepsy can see every glistening hair in his nostrils, every delicate, purpling thread-vein, the slightly receding gums above his canine teeth when he tries to smile.

“GOOD MORNING EVERYONE,” says Mr Tooley’s cavernous mouth. The volume is instantly adjusted by a techie somewhere up on the balcony.

“Good morning,” he says again. “Thank you for your patience.” Peepsy can see and hear the saliva sluicing between his teeth when he forms his words. It’s hypnotic. “There are several important announcements to make this morning, but as you know we are delighted to welcome back one of the NSA’s most prestigious alumni for a very special assembly.” His eyes roll downwards and it’s obvious he’s reading something off a screen. “Jess Goldie has been the star of twenty of the highestgrossing NutriStart feature films, including The Huntress, Zero Hour, Dark Web, Dark Huntress, The Spider, Dark Spider, Rogue Female, Rogue Female II: Daggerfall, Dark Dagger, Shadow Web and Entropy Calling.

She has also been lead singer for the multiplatinum-selling NutriStart grime collective Runnaz, and some of our older students may remember that Jess was one of the original influencers behind the ‘101 genuinely life-changing salads’ mini-series.”

There’s a general whispering. Mr Tooley looks up.

“Now: this is a fantastic opportunity for us, and I have no doubt that you will all take something from Jess’s presentation. Can I ask, however, that your PADs are disabled and put away. NSA will be recording this for the In World portfolio, so there is no need for anyone to record their own, private version.”

Barely suppressed groans, the sounds of PAD cases being zipped.

“Well, then. Without further ado. Please welcome: Jess Goldie.”

The auditorium breaks into applause as a girl who can’t be twenty years old strides onto the stage with pneumatic brio, flicks her blonde hair over one shoulder, and scans the crowd like it’s a presidential rally.

“Hiya NSA!” she laughs. Her voice is deep and goddess-like. She must be wearing a tiny headset microphone, because her NutriStart all-in-one is too slight and figure-hugging to conceal wiring of any kind. “It’s so great to be back!”

Mr Tooley’s face is still there, a permanent backdrop to the presentation.

“Let me start with a quotation,”

Jess says, turning serious very suddenly. “Listen to this: ‘No one can construct the bridge upon which you must cross the stream of life. No one, but you yourself alone.’ Do you know who said that?”

Peepsy tunes out, partly bored by the talk, partly mesmerised by Mr Tooley’s gigantic visage. The Deputy Head seems to have forgotten that he’s on screen at all, and has a lobotomised, thousandyard stare that drifts unsettlingly over the auditorium from left to right and then back again.

“We tell ourselves unhelpful narratives. I’m not clever enough. I’m not beautiful enough. I’m not happy enough. Only it’s not really us that tells us these things, it’s our subconscious. Now, our subconscious is the bit at the back of our brain…”

Jess is still going strong, strutting noisily in her heels up and down the stage. There’s something soft-focus about her that’s difficult to place. If it weren’t for her thundering steps, Peepsy thinks, she might be a hologram.

“… and before you know it your teenage years are behind you and you realise you’ve wasted all that time…”

Everyone has suddenly started applauding again, because Jess has apparently finished, and the dormant face of Mr Tooley is roused into action.

“Thank you, Jess, once again,” he says, “and good luck with the new album.”

“Thank you everybody!” she booms, skipping off to the side of the stage. “Think big! Dream big! Love yourself!”

“Very good,” Mr Tooley says. “Now. There are several routine items of business to relay to you, but before that there is a very important announcement from the Headmaster.”

The atmosphere in the hall is unbearably hot, but the mention of the Head sends a shiver of anticipation through the audience.

“As some of you may have noticed, the

construction teams have returned to the perimeter site, where they will be working for the remainder of the term. It goes without saying that this area of the Academy remains strictly off-limits to all staff and pupils –”

There’s a scream. About ten rows in front of Peepsy, some Year 7 students leap to their feet in an almost perfect circle, like an asteroid has landed among them. In the centre of the uproar is a red cloud, and in the centre of the cloud is a boy.

Mr Tooley is still talking.

It takes a moment for Peepsy to realise that the cloud is blood, spraying from the boy’s nostrils as though from an aerosol. A handful of his classmates, who weren’t quick enough in moving, have blazers that are now dark and glistening.

Most of the Year 7s are clambering over each other to escape. Nobody seems inclined give the boy any help, and he’s just spinning in panic like a garden sprinkler. Down below, the teachers are on their feet, and Mr Rosen is the first to set off, leaping up the stairs with his weird stork legs, two or three at a time. The Deputy Head has finally realised that something is amiss and has disappeared from the screen.

Despite Mr Rosen’s best efforts, it’s actually another teacher who reaches the boy first, Mr Briggs, ex-Royal Marines and now Head of Resilience and occasional 1st XI football coach when his drinking is under control. He throws off his suit jacket and wades into the squirming children, and even from where Peepsy is sitting you can see the knotted vein pulsing on the side of his forehead. The intense, slightly lost look on his face suggests he’s having some kind of flash-back. By the time he’s hoisted the stricken child and flopped him over one of his shoulders, Mr Briggs’s cheeks are wet with tears and it’s obvious that in his head it’s a decade ago and he’s on a battlefield in Syria or Russia or Korea and the weight on his back is a corpse. Mr Rosen has only just reached the edge of the row, and is standing redundant, not knowing what to do with his hands as the boy is carried away, down the stairs and out of Exit A.

The hall is in uproar. Those students who brought their PADs in with them have been filming the whole episode, and you can be sure that by first Recreational Period someone resourceful will have found a way to get the incident smuggled out and posted on Alpha. Form tutors are desperately trying to keep the children seated and calm, but the river has already burst its banks and there’s nothing they can do to get it under control.

The projector suddenly fires up again, and instead of Mr Tooley’s face it starts showing a three-and-a-half-minute promotional video for the school with a deafening ukulele soundtrack that momentarily silences the students. It opens with a shot of the Headmaster, Mr Graves, pacing around a sunlit wheat field with a benevolent expression on his face that Peepsy is certain has been added in post-production. The teachers are all looking around and mouthing things to each other, which is never a good sign.

The fire alarm comes as a relief, a single, solid, piercing tone that summons the school to the Recreational Spaces. The auditorium thunders under thousands of dragged feet. Under the guidance of Miss Potter and another teacher who Peepsy doesn’t recognise, class 8B filter away either side of him.

Peepsy is the last to leave. He watches the promo video to its end. When the hall is finally quiet, he can hear the seats below him are still dripping.

Alpha Omega by Nicholas Bowling is available to buy from 21 July, RRP £8.99. See titanbooks.com for more information.