Friday, 4 January 2013

Halfway up the road was a terrible location for a coffee shop. The neighbourhood was quiet and residential, and once, before big box stores, the shops lining the street had prospered. The corner grocer. The butcher. The chemist. The DIY store across from the pub. And Siegel's Cafe, right next door to the DIY store.

Only now, the corner was occupied with a Tesco's Express and the chemist had been bought out by a chain and then closed. The pub was still there, but the DIY store was long since out of business, its glass window front filled in with bricks to match the exterior wall of the building. Only the door remained, side-by-side with what had been the door to Siegel's Cafe. The sign on the door was now a chalkboard bearing a very different name.

"Nova Prospekt?" the rather ancient Alan Siegel asked, clucking his tongue. He was over eighty, stooped and rail-thin, but he was an artist with pastries. "That's not even a real name."

"Trust me, Mr Siegel. It will do well enough."

And it did, though perhaps not with the clients that Siegel had once had. Instead of ageing couples out for a morning walk, the edgy new decor helped lure in a younger crowd. Siegel added gluten-free, whole wheat, and organic berry muffins to his repertoire in the mornings, and he hired a girl with blue hair and facial piercings to run the gleaming silver monstrosity of an espresso machine the new owner had purchased to replace the old machine Siegel had cobbled together fifty years earlier.

After two weeks, Siegel had to hire two more people, and he'd extended the shop hours into the night. He hired a night manager as well, a recent business school graduate who'd worked in coffee shops for eight years.

At the end of the month, Siegel offered to show the books to the new owner, who instead handed over a business card for an accounting firm. "They'll take care of all of that," he said. "You're only obligation is to see to the pastries and soups now, Mr Siegel. You should spend time with your grandchildren."

"I don't know how you did it," Siegel said with faint, befuddled shake of his head. "It used to be, six o'clock comes up, and I could close for the night. Now, it's our busiest time."

The new owner smiled, and went back next door, to what had been the old DIY store and now was something... more.


"Just because I forgot to take the pan off the hob doesn't mean I have to carry your shit." Alec Trevelyan grunted with the effort of lifting a brand new bench grinder, still in the box, out of the boot of his Maserati. "Christ, did you have to buy the heaviest one they had?"

"It's not the act of forgetting to take the pan off the hob that has you carrying boxes, Alec," James Bond said, grabbing his rucksack before lazily leaning against the door of the car, watching dispassionately. "In fact, in the scheme of all the things that had to happen in perfect, destructive order to mean we are now homeless, that's just one of the many fascinating details. First was the act of cooking to impress a girl — stupid idea number one." Bond tapped his pockets, looking for his cigarettes. If he was going to have to listen to this all afternoon, he'd need the calming effect of nicotine. "Then there was making out with the girl in the kitchen. Stupid, unsanitary idea number two. Then, moving into the bedroom, which, normally, I would approve of. But for the fire. The fire, Alec."

"You're the one who wanted to live in a house and not a bloody flat with a proper sprinkler system. Get the boot, will you?" he added as he got the bench grinder clear. He huffed out a breath and blinked at the coffee shop. It was an industrial-looking place with the name on a chalkboard. Then he looked at the next door over, painted grey and solidly built. No sign indicated the purpose; no number showed the address. "This is the right place, isn't it?"

Bond finally found his rather crumpled pack of cigarettes, but with a sigh tucked them back into his jeans pocket. There was absolutely no smoking allowed in hackerspaces in his experience — geeks with shiny toys and big insurance policies tended to have overly sensitive fire alarms. Not that Bond had anything against that at the moment.

He scanned the building, sparing only a brief glance at the coffee shop next door. Nova Prospekt. This was the place. It was one of the best hackerspaces in London, supposedly managed by an actual honest-to-god genius who never failed to lend assistance when asked.

"This is it." He turned his attention back to Alec. "Oh, but we were just getting to the best part. The part where your companion for the evening actually smelled the bloody smoke, tried to get you to check, and you just laughed and told her it was me smoking." Bond straightened from the car and took a few steps forward, scanning the building for exits and potential weak spots in case of an attack. Hackerspaces could hold millions of quid worth of high-tech equipment; Bond was honestly surprised more weren't burgled. "Melting teflon smells nothing like cigarettes, Alec."

"Ah. Melting teflon is toxic. I was affected. I could have died," Alec said, though the plaintive look was somewhat strained by his effort to carry the bench grinder to the unmarked door. He was strong, but the box was unwieldy and lacked proper handles.

"Yes, well, given that I'm the recipient of your life insurance policy, and would have had a new bloody house by now because of it, you shouldn't try pushing that button too hard," Bond warned with false severity. He jogged up to the door and tested the handle — true to the website's claim, the open door policy meant that he was able to open it without waiting for someone to unlock it for him. He'd already purchased his membership, but needed to pick up his key. He turned to grin at Alec, holding the door open in a mockery of gentlemanly behaviour.

Alec huffed and hauled the bench grinder into what used to be the front end of a store. The front display shelf, once set against a street front window, had been turned into a long bench seat. Mismatched tables, sturdily built, ran the length of the space. One table was covered with a magpie's collection of electronics components; three people sat at the table, working on individual projects.

A door on the cafe side of the workshop had a chalkboard listing the cafe's hours and the soup of the day. A yellow warning sign reminded people to turn off their soldering irons and machinery before leaving the area.

Three people were currently present in the front room. All three turned to look Alec and Bond over. Then one tipped his chair back and bellowed, "Q!"

Alec brought the bench grinder to the end of the table. He set it down loudly; the table didn't even shake. Bond hefted the rucksack again and scanned the projects he could see laying around. In his experience, the quality of the space was incredibly dependent on the minds of the space's most frequent users — USB toaster projects and lava lamps run off Bluetooth meant dull spaces. Mods in general meant dull spaces, he'd decided years ago; if the geeks that ran the place didn't have enough imagination to start original projects, it wasn't worth the effort of membership.

Well, unless the tools were amazing, of course. He was hopeful about this space, at least, based on the conversation he'd had with one of the directors. She'd told him that their bench grinder was MIA, but it might've been used in the robot they'd built to cut a hole in the floor.

There was a door in the back, propped open with a welded iron piece made of scrap metal. Beyond was a machine shop and a roll-up garage door, half-open.

The man who appeared in the machine room doorway looked like he'd been on the losing end of a fight with a furnace. Soot covered his bare hands, his shirt, and his face. It might have coated his hair as well, though it was impossible to tell, with the nest of dark strands sticking up every possible way. Only his eyes were clean, with a faint line from plastic safety goggles still imprinted on his skin. The goggles were pushed up onto his dirty forehead, and as he looked towards the front of the workshop, he took a pair of glasses from where they hung at the back of his T-shirt and put them on.

His eyes went from Alec to Bond to the bench grinder, and he grinned. "This way," he said, and ducked back into the back room.

"See, now that's an example for you, Alec," Bond said with a smirk. "If you're going to play with fire, at least wear protective eyewear." He glanced at the grinder then back at Alec before turning to follow the sooty creature that was apparently Q.

Alec's sigh was deep and heartfelt, but not for Bond's benefit; his eyes were fixed on the girl sitting across the table from where he'd dumped the bench grinder. She was chewing on a blue and white striped wire as she snipped pieces off a circuit board. Under her safety glasses, her eyes were a very bright green, almost the exact shade of Alec's.

Before Alec could comment — because Bond knew Alec better than he knew anyone else on the planet — Bond elbowed him and said, "Let's get this set up."

Alec sighed again, though this time it wasn't contrived. He picked up the bench grinder and hauled it after Bond, heading for the back room.

The front room was floored in lino bearing the scars of long display shelves. The back floor had been stripped down to the concrete some time in the last couple of months, Bond guessed, which matched when this particular space had opened. A large area off to the right, built into the corner, had been stocked with an array of mismatched flat panel monitors and two CRTs, one of which Bond could swear was actually hooked up to an Apple /e. He nearly went that way, except the soot-covered Q was waiting to the left.

He was standing at the edge of a square pit cut into the floor with a pile of what looked like coal beside it, which explained at least some of the soot. He lifted his hand as if to touch his face, and then hesitated, wrinkling his nose at the black dust covering his skin. "James and 'guest'?" he asked, wiping his hand on his jeans — possibly blue, possibly black, though by now, the original colour was a moot point. Bond could barely see the white outline of a Dalek on his mottled black and blue T-shirt.

"I'm James," he said casually, reaching forward to shake Q's hand. As far as substances on skin that might bother Bond, soot absolutely wasn't one of them. Well, unless it was from the crumbled ruins of his former home, of course. "And that's Alec," he said, stabbing a thumb in Alec's direction. "We come bearing gifts."

Alec pointedly set down the bench grinder with a huff. "Or I do, at any rate."

Q's grin was brilliant even without the contrast of soot on his cheeks and jaw. "So I see," he said, shaking their hands. "Um, set it up where you'd like. Power points are mostly overhead — the ones in the wall are a bit dodgy. You're doing fabrication?"

James smiled noncommittally. He had several projects in mind — not the least of which was a larger home control system based on Arduino technology — but he didn't like to commit lest he get anyone actually interested in his project. The nature of his work at MI6 meant that he was gone for long stretches at a time, which tended to irritate people who wanted to contribute to anything interesting. "The project I have in mind right now is replacing my lockpicking set that got damaged beyond repair" — he shot a glare at Alec — "in a fire."

"Ours were. He'll be making two sets," Alec added quickly.

"Easy enough," Q answered, sounding amused. "We also have a lockpicking club the first and third Tuesday night of every month. If there's enough interest, we'll bump it up to once a week. Oh, you got a storage locker, didn't you?" he asked, patting at his hips. He stuck one hand into the tight pocket of his jeans and pulled out a key ring. Without waiting for an answer, he hopped over the corner of the hole in the floor. "Watch your step," he warned as he headed directly for a bank of storage lockers that looked like they'd been scavenged from a bus station.

"I travel on business a good deal, so I prefer to store works-in-progress onsite," Bond answered, following Q. The hole in the floor was interesting enough to distract from the frankly obscenely tight jeans that Q was wearing, and Bond glanced into the darkness as he walked past it. "May I ask?"

Q's grin reappeared. "Well, it's apparently an old coal cellar, but we have no idea how deep it goes. I tracked it from the manual lift that used to be right above." He pointed up at the high ceiling. "The lift chute goes all the way to the roof."

Bond looked up curiously, though he felt faintly uneasy about the idea of a potentially open access point to the building that no one had mapped or tried to investigate. He was sadly familiar with the underground networks of very old cities, and was fully aware that just because it might be complicated and distasteful to scale up the chute from a tunnel underground, it didn't mean it was impossible. He cast a wary glance at it as he passed, and looked back at Alec with a raised eyebrow.

Alec's eyes were hard and alert; he gave a minute nod, gaze tracing over the garage and back door before he turned his attention back to the pit in the floor.

"We have a few open lockers. Top, middle, or bottom?" Q asked, sorting through the keys on the ring.

"Bottom, please," Bond asked. Dust and dirt and the occasional accidental kick could be problems, but bottom lockers were always much less likely to be broken into than the top and middle ones. "I also need a key to the front door," he reminded Q.

"Shit. Right. Sorry. We didn't expect to get all the way through the cement today," he apologised, giving Bond an embarrassed grin. He worked one of the keys off the ring and asked, "Can you do copies? We have a cutting machine. It's a bit old, but it came with blanks."

Bond looked over at Alec. "You don't mind waiting, do you?" he asked, though it was more of a nod to politeness rather than an actual request.

"Not at all. Were you down there?" Alec asked, looking over as Q led Bond to a very old-looking key-cutting machine.

"Yes. I think we cut in the wrong place, though. I was still clearing out coal to try and find open space," Q answered. He peeled another key off, used it to tap the sign hanging on the machine, and then handed the key to Bond. "Before you leave, make sure to test the copy."

The sign, Bond noted, read: If you skip the safety glasses, Cthulhu gets your soul. Sacrifices third Thursday of every month.

Bond took the keys and smiled at Q. He'd brought his own safety glasses; they were old and worn and not expensive, but they'd got Bond through everything from sandstorms in the Iraqi desert to a munitions project that had gone horribly, explosively wrong. He had to replace the lenses frequently, but he was attached to them. Fortunately, they'd been in his storage locker at MI6 and not in the house when Alec had burned it down.

"I'll return the key in a moment," he said as he put on the glasses. He dropped the rucksack to the floor before turning his focus to the machine.

Q nodded, lurking close by just long enough to make certain Bond wasn't about to cut off a finger or — more importantly — blow up the machine. Then he turned and headed right back to the hole in the floor.

It had been some time since Bond had needed to copy keys, but he'd mastered stranger skills since joining the Navy, and MI6 had only served to hone those skills. He cut just one, though he resolved to make a second copy when he had some time alone, just in case. Not that he couldn't just pick the locks to the front door.

When he finished and shut down the machine, Alec drifted over. He casually leaned against the side of the machine and spoke softly: "It does look like they cut in on top of a pile of coal. Could be a closed-off cellar..."

"Or it could be a direct route to the lair of Cthulhu himself?" Bond asked with a wry smile. He tugged the safety glasses down to rest around his neck and blew on the key to dislodge some of the metal dust that still clung to it. "They seem fairly determined. I'll keep an eye on it."

Alec nodded, smiling wryly. "Or we're just a couple of paranoid old bastards," he murmured. "You going to stay a while? There's a pub across the way. I could do with a pint."

"Two sets, Alec? Might take me longer than a pint," Bond said with a raised eyebrow. He leaned down to grab his rucksack and looked around

"You want to make the picks now?" Alec sighed and patted Bond's shoulder. Hard. "A pint and dinner, then. Text me when you're ready to go."

"Thanks," Bond replied, resisting the urge to ask for Alec's keys. The last thing he needed was to be left in a trendy area dominated by the young colourfully-haired and well-pierced Soho crowds if Alec found a date. But the idea of going back to the cold, impersonal hotel room alone made Bond want to pick a fight just to make the night interesting. Better to choose the type of stress-relief that ended with physical proof of time well-invested. "See you in a couple hours."

Alec grinned and raised his voice, shouting, "Q!"

Bond saw that Q was sprawled belly-down on the floor by the hole. He twisted around with the sort of grace Bond had learned to associate with bored housewives who took yoga or martial artists. "Something wrong?" Q called back. He'd put his glasses aside and was wearing his goggles again.

"Keep an eye on James. He gets in trouble if left unsupervised." Alec smirked at Bond, waved to Q, and sauntered out.

Q laughed, watching Alec leave before he gave Bond a warm, friendly smile. Then he flopped back down on his belly and slithered headfirst back into the hole, pulling the coal out of the way like a dog trying to bury a bone.

"Going to dislocate an arm that way," Bond chuckled to himself.

Q's voice was muffled as he answered, "I just need the space so the cam-rover can get in there."

Well, apparently Q had both exceptional hearing and the ability to focus on more than one thing at a time. That was interesting. "Would you like help?" he asked, turning to watch. Q's grace was quite captivating, and Bond didn't bother to hide his appreciative evaluation of Q's wiry musculature.

"You'll get filthy," Q warned as he hauled out another couple of pieces of heavy coal. He was running out of room to stack them. "Though there should be something you can use to rake the coal away from the hole and make room for a fresh stack, if you don't mind. I think Firebird has some old garden tools in the back corner there, beyond the servers."

"Perhaps it's best if I do the excavating for a while, and you move the coal. Give yourself a chance to rest," Bond suggested, walking over to the hole. He took off his jacket and set both it and his rucksack down, away from the coal. Knowing that he was going to be spending some quality time in the machine shop, he'd worn old, stained jeans and a thick black cotton jumper that, despite the burns along the sleeves and chest, was still his best defence against flying bits of solder and other hot metal fragments. He didn't mind getting dirty in these clothes, and it was certainly preferable to watching Q dislocate his shoulder.

Q rolled onto his back and looked up through his fringe. "You signed the insurance waiver? Sorry, but I have to ask."

Bond looked down at him, amused. "Of course." He'd sent an email copy the day he signed up for his membership, knowing how picky the directors could be about such things. He held out a hand to Q, resisting the urge to bend and haul Q up by his shoulders in an effort to avoid putting any more strain on Q's joints.

Q grinned and clasped Bond's forearm, letting Bond help him to his feet. He weighed so little that Bond probably could have lifted him with one arm, and he all but bounced up onto his toes. "I'll get the rake."