Chapter 37 - Out Of His Depth

William of ASIO disembarked at Heathrow airport. This was a nice little holiday courtesy of the Aussie taxpayer. He had a gut feeling that Imogen was avoiding him. With the tech advantage he had this seemed ludicrous, but still he was keeping an eye on her due to her high IQ so lets be consistent and assume the possibility. Her father had left for the UK and her mother had google mapped Forvik Island. Interesting, very interesting. In the true spirit of a covert operation he left without telling anyone. He would justify it when he got back with a good result. In the cover of night he left Melby bay in a motorised dinghy on the way to Forvik Island.

There was another intelligence that William was heading toward that night. One that he knew nothing about. One that defied all imagination. John had been working under Lü Zhi to build a conscious general intelligent machine. What John came up with was a hybrid solution. An octopus, genetically edited for a long life, provided the consciousness and generalised intelligence while a supercomputer provided the computational power, speed and the specialisation. An octopus was chosen because of it's intelligence and its chromatophores provided a relatively easy hardware interface between living nervous tissue and silicon. The result was both hideous and deadly. It also coordinated the defense system at Forvik Island.

Unknown to William he was being watched for the simple reason that he was watching Imogen. She fell under the entities protection when she met Lü Zhi at Maccas. He had been tracked from leaving his office through the airports and his journey to the shetlands. He could be tracked via security cameras, his voice could be recognised, along with his gait and his false credit card.

The entity had covert weapons of its own. With the help of the team at New World Explorations, implants had been embedded into young sharks able to deliver an electrical shock. Just enough to give a tickle, but not enough to induce helplessness. The sharks were as mentally sharp as their instincts were brutal. The underwater gates at the lowest level opened. The precise location of the dinghy was known to the entity due to the installed GPS tracker. The sharks were guided to intercept by the entity activating the implants. William never knew what hit him. In pitch blackness one of the sharks jumped out of the water and took off his head. William had 7 seconds of consciousness left as his head hit the water and he could feel the icy coldness drift up his severed carotid artery. Then nothing.

Under guidance the sharks pointed the dinghy out to the open Atlantic while the entity cracked the computer system storing the location history of the GPS. There was no need to trouble John of this incident. If found it would be concluded that William was the unfortunate victim of a random shark attack. The entity was operating well within its capacity.