Prologue: The Voice - Datastream

The man sitting in the black leather chair lifts the cigar from the corner of his mouth, exhales smoke from between pursed lips, and replaces the cigar. His face is a mask of concentration, and his fingers – long, thin and pale – tap out a steady tattoo on the edge of his heavy oak desk. The laptop facing him is on, but the screen is blank apart from a steady line of changing binary across the centre. The code is hypnotic: an ever changing line of zeroes and ones. The man is content to watch the numbers change in their systematic rhythm, translating them in his head as he sucks at the end of his cigar.

But the line changes, static tearing the order of the binary to pieces for a fraction of a second before the rhythm is re-established. But the man has noticed – he sits alert in his chair and sees the difference after almost a minute of staring at the binary stream. Written carefully into the stream are two words, almost indistinguishable from the mass of flowing numbers which travel across the screen.


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