Food delivery

It was Alain’s day to monitor the comms channel.

‘Xavier’s nearly here. But he has others with him.’

‘Should we go to him?’

‘Better wait, he will signal us when it’s safe.’ 

Brontë, Alain, and Hugo were sitting together in a small storage area to one side of the warehouse area. Full of bales of packing material, billowing up in cushiony mounds, it made a convenient place to hide when the infrequent security checks happened.

When they had first arrived, three days before, they had spotted a shift crew vehicle waiting for entry and quickly slipped aboard. None of the worker clones on board had acknowledged them and they had sat, stock-still, emulating the others, for the short ride to the disembarkation point. They followed the group to a food delivery area and sat with them to eat the cubes of  food and drink the bottled water each was given. Observing what the programmed clones were doing, they mimicked their actions and had so far gone undetected by the security team. The work was tedious and the shifts were long, but by embedding themselves into the warehouse routine immediately as part of the system, they had become invisible. Food was available and there seemed to be little risk of being mailed out for spare parts, clones here had a different use.

The ear-splitting noise that smashed through the air startled them. It stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

‘Something’s breached the building cordon,’ said Hugo. ‘Clumsy.’

Alain nodded, his hand to his ear again. ‘That was Xavier. But it’s okay, he’s shielding himself and the others upstairs. He says there’s a risk the Developers have sent a team here, looking for us.’