The four members of the inner circle had drifted casually together in their special corner of the outdoor play area, by the dirty climbing frame that no one ever used. 'So we're terrorists,' said Julie cheerfully. 'We should give ourselves up to the police.'
'No, our picture's different,' Gary said. 'It doesn't kill people, it...'
A chorus of four voices: '... makes us stronger.'
Jonathan said, 'What do Deep Greens terrorize about? I mean, what don't they like?'
'I think it's biochips,' Khalid said uncertainly. 'Tiny computers for building into people's heads. They say it's unnatural, or something. There was a bit about it in one of those old issues of New Scientist in the lab.'
'Be good for exams,' Jonathan suggested. 'But you can't take calculators into the exam room. "Everyone with a biochip, please leave your head at the door."'
They all laughed, but Jonathan felt a tiny shiver of uncertainty, as though he'd stepped on a stair that wasn't there. 'Biochip' sounded very like something he'd overheard in one of his parents' rare shouting matches. And he was pretty sure he'd heard 'unnatural' too. Please don't let Mum and Dad be tangled up with terrorists, he thought suddenly. But it was too silly. They weren't like that....
'There was something about control systems too,' said Khalid. 'You wouldn't want to be controlled, now.'
As usual, the chatter soon went off in a new direction, or rather an old one: the walls of type-two darkness that the school used to mark off-limits areas like the corridor leading to the old storeroom. The Club were curious about how it worked, and had done some experiments. Some of the things they knew about the dark and had written down were:
Khalid's Visibility Theory, which had been proved by painful experiment. Dark zones were brilliant hiding places when it came to hiding from other kids, but teachers could spot you even through the blackness and tick you off something rotten for being where you shouldn't be. Probably they had some kind of special detector, but no one had ever seen one.
Jonathan's Bus Footnote to Khalid's discovery was simply that the driver of the school bus certainly looked as if he was seeing something through the black windscreen. Of course (this was Gary's idea) the bus might be computer-guided, with the steering wheel turning all by itself and the driver just pretending--but why should he bother?
Julie's Mirror was the weirdest thing of all. Even Julie hadn't believed it could work, but if you stood outside a type-two dark place and held a mirror just inside (so it looked as though your arm was cut off by the black wall), you could shine a torch at the place where you couldn't see the mirror, and the beam would come bouncing back out of the blackness to make a bright spot on your clothes or the wall. As Jonathan pointed out, this was how you could have bright patches of sunlight on the floor of a classroom whose windows all looked out into protecting darkness. It was a kind of dark that light could travel through but eyesight couldn't. None of the Optics textbooks said a word about it.
By now, Harry had had his Club invitation and was counting the minutes to his first meeting on Thursday, two days away. Perhaps he would have some ideas for new experiments when he'd passed his ordeal and joined the Club. Harry was extra good at maths and physics.
'Which makes it sort of interesting,' Gary said. 'If our picture works by maths like those BLIT things ... will Harry be able to take it for longer because his brain's built that way? Or will it be harder because it's coming on his own wavelength? Sort of thing?'
The Shudder Club reckoned that, although of course you shouldn't do experiments on people, this was a neat idea that you could argue either side of. And they did.
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