<br/><br/>Things had quietened down somewhat. The ration rush had ebbed and the dome was more or less deserted. A few people milled here and there, the displaced, homeless, people with nowhere to go except their assigned couple of square feet in the tubes. Old black and white imagery of a place called London in the second World War back on Earth flickered and died in my mind's eye. The men and women of a war torn city seeking refuge in the underground railway stations that criss crossed the capital of some country I'd forgotten the name of. Odd that they were called 'tubes' too. History apparently has a habit of repeating itself.<br/><br/>Except Eden wasn't at war. Well, not yet.<br/><br/>My PDA beeped the code that told me my personal log had just detected an unauthorised intrusion. That would be my handler hacking into it. Nobody else was apt to leaving me untraceable emails. What now? I wondered as I flipped it open and navigated through the menu. Was this a bollocking or a new mission? My fingers tapped through the memorised pathways. It could not be hacked over radiowaves, only by infrared, which meant direct line of sight and it took a conscious effort not to look around and try to spot who it might be sending me these new orders. If I were caught and interrogated I could furnish my captors with a description of who I thought my handler was, so I made sure I had no images in my mind to give them by staying focused on the PDA. Perhaps it had been that smug, condescending, self superior techie who'd just shrugged off my admonitions with a blank disinterested, uncaring face, I mused idly. He was still wandering around down there like he owned the place. I was surprised his eyes hadn't rolled when I had been lecturing him on stuff that six year olds knew by heart and that he had seemed to have forgotten, or just assumed himself above considering in the way that some of these arrogant jerks with higher security clearances than IQs often do. Just fondle the leaves with your greasy fingers, rip 'em right off, play 'she-loves-me, she-loves-me-not' with those pretty priceless petals safe in the knowledge that not even us VeeGees can touch you because we don't have the power. All we could do right now was lecture them on common sense, as I had just been forced to do, because the so called intellectuals seem prone to forgetting common sense sooner than they forget where they left their keycards.<br/><br/>Those flickers of irritation that flash across their scowling visages come as part of the territory when you're a VeeGee. They assume in their narrow minds that we volunteered for nothing more than the power trip of being sheepdogs to these sheep, and while that may have been true for a minority, being a part of the guard was nothing more than a means to an end for me, and that end was in gaining access to places that a 'civilian' wouldn't normally be authorised to even know existed. Still, if it led to them underestimating me then so much the better. That just made things easier. I had never had any personal desire to be a VeeGee - it had been my handler who had suggested it and set me on that path when I was out on the fringe wasting my life away and feeling sorry for myself after my wife and mother had been killed. It gave me purpose, and more importantly it gave me a platform from which I could one day hit back.<br/><br/>I smiled inwardly as that techie's face burned itself indelibly into my memory. He could be my handler. After all, he was within sight when the pda got hacked. Maybe if I was caught and interrogated I'd give them his description just for fun. After all, it was the only one I had. That would serve him right for showing such indignation and impatience to somebody who was just doing his job under difficult circumstances while he nonchalantly ponced about agridomes abusing the plants.<br/><br/>The code was the same as always. The initials of a classic book backwards, then page, paragraph and word numbers in binary coded decimal. This time it was CRT, The Railway Children. My handler seemed particularly fond of The Railway Children, and while it was an interesting enough book it was much more suited to children than adults. The code was unbreakable unless you had my own personal pda as the book's pages had been compressed with an obscure font in order to make the pages and paragraphs differ from the standard version available in the colony's digital ebook database. Decoding was relatively easy, though a little laborious. Just split the pda into two screens - one for the code and one for the ebook. In five minutes the message had been spelled out, and it wasn't quite what I had expected.<br/><br/>What I had expected was a brief 'stand by' message, instructions to back down, lie low, do nothing to bring attention to myself while the situation was assessed by Plymouth's Elders and their advisers. Instead it was something typical of what my father might have wanted done. I remembered him educating me about how to take care of myself when I was about six years old and taking shit from some kids in school. " Son," he'd told me. "The thing with fighting is to hit the guy hard, rock him on his heels. Make him doubt himself. Then when you've done that you don't step back and wait for him to come back at you - you close on the sumbitch while he's off balance and hit him again, and you keep doing this again and again until he's flat on his ass. Then, when you got that sumbitch on the deck, you stamp on his face, kick him in the crotch, do whatever it takes to keep him there until he curls up in a ball. And when he uncurls you kick him again. That's how you deal with people looking to fight, son. No quarter. Make 'em think twice about picking on you agin."<br/><br/>This was precisely the strategy that we seemed to be employing against Eden. We'd hit 'em hard, knocked them back until they were reeling, and now instead of leaving them a breathing space to recover and get back on their feet we were going to knock them flat on their smarmy, condescending, smug and superior asses. I might have smiled, but this was personally extremely dangerous to me. Eden was surely wide awake and alert now, all signs of complacency eradicated, and a smart analyst might soon figure out that the accident wasn't quite an accident after all. If there were any smart analysts left. For sure there must be some investigation into exactly what had happened taking place even as I sat here contemplating what to do next. Maybe they already knew. Maybe I was already being watched.<br/><br/>The paranoia of working incognito on enemy ground seeped into my soul as I deleted the message. How, I wondered, was I going to pull this off? Poisons in the water supply to the agridomes? Fire in the food preparation areas or maybe even a bubble breach? How about something a little more creative? How about destroying the digital archives that contained a digest of all humanities knowledge through the ages? That would stop their technology in its tracks. God knows how many top scientists had been reduced to base elements in the containment breach, and if we took down their source material then Eden's growth would surely stagnate. Was the archive mirrored, I wondered, or striped somewhere? Must be, I reasoned. Scratch that. Putting Eden into the dark ages would take more than a hacker reformatting their central computer core.<br/><br/>No, subtlety was no good. It had to be something that would scare the shit out of every living soul still inhabiting what remained of Eden. Something to make them want to run and hide, duck and cover under benches and tables, send them scurrying into the tubes like the doodlebugs over that place on old Earth used to do to the inhabitants of that ancient city. I stood and headed back toward the agridome, needing something to eat and drink, some fuel to help me concentrate my mind on just how I might accomplish that.