The Pattern Mafia

CHAPTER ONE – Ed the Ted

Ed the Ted is on the run; he just doesn’t know it yet. August morning heat is building in the cobbles and reflecting from the metal doors of the lockups under the railway arches on the Street-with-No-Name. Ed ambles along on automatic thinking simple fractal thoughts; his world defined by the bliss of his first rollup of the day. And there it stands, this wooden crate no bigger than a grocery box, rough pine planks nailed and strapped with black nylon tape with the remains of an electronic flight tag hanging from the tape. Which means Heathrow. Which means Turkish. Ed lets out a sigh weighted with years of irritation and trivial grievances. He opens the door to the garage and steps over the crate. Pulls out his phone, texts Turkish, and goes in search of his sack barrow.

Ed the Ted’s cave is home to a number of vehicles in various states of repair; the oldest ones at the back are covered in grimy tarpaulin, their humped backs like beasts hibernating. The youngest vehicle is a Ford Fiesta RS standing on jacks at the front with both its front wheels missing. ‘Betsy’, Ed’s beloved 1965 Norton Commando Cafe Racer is the cleanest machine in the lock-up, displayed in a sacred space all of its own.

Ed should have died from lung cancer in his fifties, but the cancer never triggered. Thin and cadaverous in his dirty brown overalls he levers open the lid. Ash from the thin rollup hanging from Ed’s nicotine stained lips falls into the crate. He brushes the ash from the surface of a complex metal casting buried in polystyrene beads. With a grunt, Ed heaves the casting clear, levers it up onto the workbench and turns on the Anglepoise light to get a better look.

The casting is aluminium and complex. It’s all ventricles and cavities, about as big and heavy as a two-pot piston block. It looks old and hard-used, ready for the skip. It’s more organic-looking than any casting he has seen; impossibly complex. Or maybe it’s been 3D printed; that makes more sense. Ed has no idea what it is for. Considering Ed’s normal line of work this brings him a blessed sense of relief.

“No idea Betsy love,” he tells his beloved bike. “Time for a brew.”

At the back of the lock-up Ed’s office leans away from the hibernating motors like a chipboard dam, its face hammered together from cheap panels nailed over a rough two by two frame with a crudely fitted Perspex window grown translucent with scratches and dust.

In the office a battered desk stands by the window. It’s covered in a swarf of ancient papers, the complex appendectomy of a Weber twin choke carburettor, and cans of Cola stuffed with fag ends. Ed the Ted’s office chair dates from a time before engineering had solved the problem of the fully functional caster. A stained orange seat cover attempts to cover a rip in the ash grey seat fabric; a fluff of organic brown stuffing exudes from the scar like some exotic fungal infection. For his guests Ted had installed the broken carcass of a shit-brown MFI mock-leather sofa that, driven by some vinyl-nerved animus, had crawled into the corner of the office, and died. The office smells of grease, sweat, and dead dreams.

On the floor a battered metal-bodied electric kettle stands on Ed’s antique “Never Never Land” souvenir tray from Southend-on-Sea. A distressed Russell Hobbs kettle shares the tray with a chipped Lady Di commemoration teapot and a Twinning’s tinplate caddy filled with Aldi teabags. A dumpy pint bottle holds last Friday’s milk which had separated into complex layered tissues of fat and water.

Ed’s phone tinks at him. The text says,

FELL OF A BOEING DHL WEST COAST OVERNIGHT GET WHAT U CAN 4 IT.

The message is a gift for any copper, the silly sod. Ed makes a black tea with six lumps and runs through a list of the most likely takers for the casting. Best he can do will be to sell it for scrap and tell Turkish his expenses ate the take. Pity though, someone’s stealth bomber or sub-orbital is missing a compound pump. But it’s much more intricate than any pump. Ed can’t get the organic nature of the thing out of his head.

“Let’s ‘ave a closer look.”

Ed starts for his bench and freezes, which is exactly what his garage is starting to do. The thing on the desk is covered in a thick white fur. The frost spreading out over the bench from the lathe and the wall behind the lathe. It has reached his old Ford Cortina, the austerity scale Harley-Earl tail fin and corroded rear light cluster covered in frost. The frost is spreading out across the garage floor and Ed can feel the tug of cold from where he stands.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Ed wheezes.

Endothermic device? Certainly looks like it. But where is the energy to run it coming from? And how do you turn it off? Ed looks at the Anglepoise, which is the closest power source to the thing that is definitely not a pump. Ed draws deep on his rollup and his courage and crab walks sideways to the bench. He leans over to the mains socket and turns the lamp off, plunging the garage back into gloom.

Ed jumps back with a cry. He fumbles for the switch while trying to keep as far away from the thing as possible. He snaps the light back on. It’s just a block of metal again.

“Not possible,” he assures nobody at all.

Just one more time, to make sure I’m not going mad. He turns off the Anglepoise. It’s there, a fragile ghost of a structure. The x-ray of some engineered chrysalis extending beyond the motor and fading to smoke. It really isn’t in his head. It really does do that. Ed sits in the dark for a long time watching the thing by the light from his rollup. When he turns the light back on the ghost disappears again. Still there though. Invisible. Organic. Grown by … something.

Ed the Ted believes in his trinity: Southend-on-Sea, pints of Fuller’s London Pride, and proper British engineering — the three things that never let him down. He does not believe in weird alien bollocks. Right now all he really wants to do is weld up the door to the garage, empty his bank account, and take a very long holiday somewhere far, far, away; preferably on the other side of the planet. New Zealand. Where all the Netterrati have built their bunkers. That would feel much safer. He calls Turkish instead. Voicemail.

“Pub! Now you pillock, pronto!” Ed stutters.  

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Dear reader, this is for the Substack Algol.

Hi Al, I hope you are well.

This is a Science Fiction story so it would be good if you would consider adding this to the Science Fiction tab because although this is a Science Fiction story, nearly all me work is Science Fiction, it never appears under the Science Fiction tab.

I hope this helps,

Yours Steve Kelsey, Science Fiction author

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