The Wintertime Paradox

by Dave Rudden

  The colour disappeared from the young man’s face. ‘What? Where?’

  The Doctor shrugged. The young man leaped to his feet, squinting at the screen, lips moving frantically and silently.

  ‘You know, I met Wittgenstein once,’ the Doctor said, gently placing his hands on Bill’s shoulders and steering her away. ‘Lovely man. Great whistler. Whistler, ironically, completely useless. But when you can paint like that, what does it matter?’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Bill said. ‘That’s why you’re here. You’re looking for show-offs.’

  ‘Nobody likes a show-off, Bill,’ the Doctor said, picking a speck of imaginary dust off his black velvet frock-coat. ‘That’s just a fact.’

  ‘Yes,’ Bill said. ‘But you’re deflating the show-offs by showing off. Tell me that’s not the only reason we’re here.’

  ‘It’s not the only reason,’ the Doctor said. ‘Of course not. I just like to … keep an eye on these things. Keep track of who’s inventing what and when. Innovation and disaster go hand in hand – just look at my outfit. It’s always worth knowing who’s impatient for the future to arrive.’

  The air of excitement in the foyer suddenly doubled as the auditorium ahead opened, and a flood of people streamed out, excitedly chatting.

  The Doctor neatly snapped a pamphlet from a woman’s hand, ignoring the annoyed look that followed. ‘Adeyemi Lawal,’ he said. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Projectors 11A through E were a little slow in compensating for my movement,’ Lawal said, watching the last of the audience file out. ‘And let Innovation Quarterly know they misquoted me. I said “our senses and our bodies”, not “your senses and bodies”.’

  Carl took down her words. After five years, it didn’t surprise him at all that his employer’s presentation had been over for less than three minutes and she was already editing the world’s response. This was what working for Adeyemi Lawal was like. That’s what made it so thrilling.

  ‘Inspired last-minute change on the memory, Ms Lawal,’ he said, handing her a glass of water. ‘Tying the idea of memory to Christmas was a stroke of genius. We’re already seeing it track very well across social media channels.’

  Something unreadable flickered over her face. ‘Yes. Well.’ She looked down at the circlet. Lights winked on its surface like gems. ‘Physical, transmittable, viewable memories. The potential of it. Psychological breakthroughs. Crime-scene walk-throughs. The teaching possibilities … And what they respond to is Christmas.’

  She placed the circlet down on a little table on the stage.

  ‘I don’t understand people, Carl. Give me circuitry any day.’

  Carl didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say. There was a sense, when working for Adeyemi Lawal, that she viewed conversation with other people as little more than a blank whiteboard to work her thoughts out on.

  ‘Now, I have some inventions to assess, do I not?’

  Carl nodded, relieved they were now on safer territory. ‘Yes, Ms Lawal. Then another private demonstration for the investors later. Shall I keep the room as is?’

  ‘Yes. No one in or out, please.’

  Lawal swept from the room, her assistant following her, and the door closed behind them. As soon as it did, the door to a maintenance closet at the back of the room opened, and a figure slipped out.

  The figure was small and slim, and moved with the practised caution of a prey animal, pausing every step to cock his head and listen, freezing every time distant chatter or laughter from the rest of the conference seemed too close or too loud. He knew that, even now, various Lawal Inc. security staff would be guarding the auditorium doors. That was why he had been sitting in that maintenance closet all morning, waiting for Lawal’s presentation to end.

  This was not the first presentation the figure had attended, despite the fact that his name and face were at the top of every Lawal Inc. security officer’s watchlist. Idly, he wondered what the consequences would be if he was caught. The thought thrilled him, as it had many times before.

  He reached the stage, turning to the empty auditorium to first make a fair imitation of Lawal’s stiff poise, and then a long and flourishing bow.

  Then he picked up the circlet and placed it on his head.

  Once more, the holo-emitters whirred and clicked, filling the room with the colour and lights of Christmas. The figure paced, taking in every detail of the snow, the tinsel and the wreaths, before stepping into the memory of that cosy little apartment. He stared for the longest time at the discoloured patch on the wall, the caution in his frame replaced by trembling, contained rage.

  As he stared, the discoloured patch began to grow.

  ‘I remember her!’ Bill said, staring up at the huge display from which Adeyemi Lawal stared sternly back. ‘From my time. She’d just started her company. I guess it went well. Will go well.’ She gave the Doctor a sidelong glance. ‘Should I buy shares?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely,’ the Doctor said distractedly, thumbing through a pamphlet marked with the white-raven logo of Lawal Inc. ‘The space–time continuum loves it when you exploit future knowledge for personal gain. I’ve got whole rooms in the TARDIS brimming with money.’

  ‘What?’ Bill said. ‘Really?’

  ‘No,’ the Doctor said, throwing her a withering glance.

  ‘Just, you do have kind of a Scrooge McDuck thing going on …’

  ‘Purely coincidental.’ The Doctor closed the pamphlet with a snap. ‘She’s making memories real. Real enough for others to see and touch. That sounds dangerous.’

  ‘Does it?’ Bill said. ‘Why? Being able to consult your memory sounds really great, actually. I’d love perfect recall. Especially coming up to exam time.’ She paused. ‘And, you know, if you lost someone. When you lose someone. It’d help you remember them.’

  The Doctor’s voice softened. He knew exactly who Bill was referring to. ‘I can understand the desire, Bill, but it’s the method I worry about. Memories aren’t the kind of thing you can pin down. How did we meet?’

  Bill frowned at the sudden change of topic. ‘You called me to your office. You had noticed that I was sneaking into your lectures, even though I just worked in the kitchen.’

  ‘There’s no just about working in a kitchen,’ the Doctor said. ‘Kitchens are great. They’re the heart of things. And what is your first memory of me?’

  ‘You were … I don’t know. It’s hard to say what I thought of you then, after everything we’ve done since.’

  ‘Exactly,’ the Doctor said. ‘That was our first meeting. But remembering it now is totally different, because of what’s happened in between. You no doubt remember me being wise and mysterious and charming –’

  ‘You threw a book at me,’ Bill interrupted. ‘Or to me. You wanted me to catch it, but I remember feeling like, if I hadn’t, then you might have decided I wouldn’t be your student at all. I remember feeling … tested.’ She paused at the look on the Doctor’s face. ‘It’s OK, Doctor,’ she said. ‘I passed.’

  ‘But that’s what I mean,’ the Doctor said. ‘Which is right? Was I testing you? Was I judgemental? Was I cross? Or was I fascinated? Impressed? Was I just throwing you a book because that was the quickest way to get it across the room to you? Which of those memories is the correct one?’

  ‘They’re all correct,’ Bill said, after a moment. It should have felt strange, an academic discussion on the nature of memory at a science conference twenty-odd years in the future, but, then again, class was in session. It always was.

  ‘Exactly,’ the Doctor said. ‘There’s no such thing as perfect memory. Everything is filtered. Interpreted. Rewritten over and over again. An ex texts you out of nowhere on New Year’s Eve, and you suddenly forget all the horrible things they did. You remember an argument as being calm and controlled, and all the other person remembers is trying not to cry.’ He looked again at the pamphlet. ‘Hard-light hologram. A projection that feels real. Giving one person’s memories form and weight is a very dange
rous thing to do indeed. You never know exactly what you’re going to get.’

  That was when the screaming started.

  Bill was learning a lot about screams in the company of the Doctor. There were the screams of soldiers facing something they’d never dreamed they would face. There were the screams you screamed in a dark and creaking house when your friends were vanishing left and right. There were the screams you gasped when your oxygen was running low.

  This scream was a contagion. It dropped into the room like a rock into a pool, spreading ripples of panic out through the crowd. People started to turn, to push, to shove, trying to flee, while ahead the crowd contracted inwards like a balloon under a needle seconds before the fatal pop.

  And then the moment broke, the crowd shattered, and Bill and the Doctor were left facing a monster.

  When Bill was a kid, her teacher had told her that birds evolved from dinosaurs. She had found that hard to imagine – birds looked so harmless, with their fat little bodies and their springy, hopping legs. Bit of a glo down, she remembered thinking.

  She regretted thinking that now. The creature before them was like a missing evolutionary link – a bird on a prehistoric scale, lanky and raw-boned, halfway between a velociraptor and a crow. It was amazing how different you could feel about a bird’s twitching, juddering movements when its talons were savagely sharp and as long as your arm.

  But that wasn’t the strangest thing. It wasn’t even the second-strangest thing. The second-strangest thing about the creature was that it was carved from ice. Every inch of it – from its gangling limbs to its bat-like folds of skin – was made of a dark grey ice that thudded with an internal crimson light. Flecks drizzled off the creature as it moved, flecks the grey-black of mould. The kind of colour that would make you call your landlord at once.

  No. The strangest thing about the creature was that it had the face of Adeyemi Lawal.

  Another creature emerged from the auditorium, then a third; half flapping, half stumbling, barely able to keep themselves in the air. Both of them had Adeyemi Lawal’s face too, delicate features distorted by mouths of long, sharp fangs. They seemed just as upset about the situation as the audience – fumbling like baby birds finding their way around a nest. Then, as one, they lunged, delving into the fleeing crowd.

  One grabbed a woman a little older than Bill, then pivoted in mid-air to snap its wings open and take off. The crackling beat of its wings blew people off their feet in a storm of ice flecks.

  The second screeched with a voice like a glacier calving, and pounced on an old man, dragging him up into the air with ragged beats of its wings.

  ‘Doctor!’ Bill shouted. ‘What do we –?’

  It was exactly the wrong thing to do. The third of the creatures turned to her, its human head bobbing on that pterodactyl neck. Bill had just enough time to see the two other monsters dive back towards the auditorium – prey clutched tight to their scrawny chests.

  Then the third was upon her. Claws closed round her wrist and shoulder. A nightmare head hissed cold spittle into her face. Then, with a heave that nearly wrenched her arm out of its socket, the beast took to the air. Bill’s stomach plunged into her toes. Her view of the conference-centre foyer spun crazily, from the fleeing crowd to the rippling banners to the shocked look on the Doctor’s face.

  Then cold, and dark, and rushing flight.

  In a conference room three floors up, Adeyemi Lawal was changing lives.

  ‘Impressive,’ she said to fourteen-year-old Andrea Borg from Malta. ‘I could see myself investing in this,’ she said. ‘Carl, get a preliminary contract written up. Who’s next?’

  The assistant walked the young boy to the door, then checked his clipboard. ‘John White. Theoretical presentation on why time travel is impossible –’

  ‘No,’ Lawal said. ‘I don’t have time for people telling me things are impossible.’ She frowned. ‘Can you hear … screaming?’

  The sentence had barely left Lawal’s lips when two of her security detail burst in the door. Attacks weren’t unheard of at We Create Futures. There were always overzealous fans. Protesters uncomfortable with the speed at which the future was arriving, who felt it should be left where it was. That was why Lawal’s security carried sleek white non-lethal stun guns of her own design.

  ‘Your helicopter is on the roof, Ms Lawal,’ Carl said. ‘We can have you out in –’

  Lawal looked around. ‘Where’s Ebi?’

  Carl went grey. There was no point in apologising. Apologies ranked lower with Adeyemi Lawal than compliments. ‘He didn’t show up for breakfast, Ms Lawal. We were hoping to have him located before you –’

  ‘Noticed he was gone,’ she finished, then opened her briefcase to reveal her own gleaming stun gun. ‘I see.’

  Bill had just enough time to scream before the darkness folded away like a vampire’s cape and she landed in pure white snow.

  Rolling awkwardly on to her back, trying to rub life back into her arms where the creature’s claws had clamped them, Bill looked up and saw the ice-gargoyle bank in mid-air, then turn back lazily, flapping its great wings before vanishing once more into the dark sky of …

  How long were we flying? Unless Bill’s eyes were lying, they were no longer in the convention centre. They certainly weren’t in the auditorium the creature had dived into only moments before, unless the place had undergone serious redecoration.

  Before Bill, a snowfield stretched as far as she could see – a featureless, pristine wasteland as white as the sky above was black. This wasn’t Dublin. She was pretty sure this wasn’t even Earth, because she couldn’t imagine an expanse of snow – not even in the Arctic – that was this inhumanly, perfectly untouched.

  Just thirty metres away, an immense tower rose up to scrape the sky like a jutting piece of rib, its curving length carved entirely from ice and white, white snow.

  Bill was the kind of person who liked asking questions. She liked categorising things. Finding answers, or the gaps where answers should be. That was what the Doctor had seen in her. And right now the answer she was getting to all of her questions was ‘fairy tale’.

  Not because the landscape was jolly and colourful and benevolent – it wasn’t. The ice blocks of the fortress behind her were black with frozen dirt, and their edges looked sharp enough to cut you to the bone. The landscape in front of her looked fantastical, but in the old sense of the word – it looked like a Brothers Grimm story, or the nightmare that might have inspired it, hundreds of years ago when every winter hid bears or wolves.

  No, it was like a fairy tale because it wasn’t real. Bill knew it wasn’t real, because the wind blizzarding flecks of snow upward didn’t touch a strand of her hair. The snow under her feet was as crunchy and satisfying as anyone could ask snow to be, but it had the temperature of dandruff or packing foam.

  Hard-light hologram. That was what the Doctor had said. A projection that feels real.

  ‘Star Trek holodeck,’ she said, above the howling of the not-wind. ‘Cool.’

  She was in some sort of illusion. She might even just be in the auditorium, metres from safety. Or you could be on the roof. You could be standing on the edge of a lift shaft.

  Memories weren’t always trustworthy. Bill hadn’t needed the Doctor to tell her that. Now, she found herself in the unenviable position of having to treat them like solid ground.

  ‘Less cool,’ she said. ‘Very much less cool.’

  And then she saw the other impact craters in the snow, the footsteps leading away towards the tower, and realised that if there were other people here, they would need her help.

  Bill set out.

  In the foyer of the convention centre, Carl was watching a tall, lanky Scottish man shout into a pair of sunglasses.

  ‘Come on! Calibrate!’

  The man was the only person still inside. Everyone else had been moved outside and was now pressed up against the building’s great glass doors, staring in at the hundreds of inventions a
nd presentations they had been forced to leave behind.

  A security guard had approached Lawal and Carl as they entered.

  ‘We tried to throw him out,’ the guard said.

  ‘And?’ Lawal asked, fixing the stranger with that intent stare.

  ‘And he shouted at us.’

  ‘Ms Lawal.’ The man was coming towards them, putting his sunglasses into a pocket. ‘Big fan. Especially of the way your memory projector has metastasised into a full-on mini universe of horrors.’

  He pointed at the door to the auditorium. It no longer opened out onto a room full of chairs. Instead, what lay beyond was a howling white wilderness, the inky black sky dominated by a bulging moon. Carl started as a bristled, colossal something began to inch its immense crimson bulk around the glowing silver orb with a soft and sinister rasp. ‘Is that … tinsel?’

  A sudden blast of wind that none of them actually felt blew snow across the carpet, where it fizzled away to static.

  ‘Tell me,’ the stranger said. ‘Bug, or feature?’

  ‘Get him out of here,’ Lawal said, as if simply saying the words deleted him from the equations already running in her head. She turned towards the doorway leading to the seemingly infinite plain and stowed her stun gun at the small of her back.

  ‘Hippocampal encoding,’ the man said quickly. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? You need as much detail as possible, so you’re connecting directly to the brain’s unconscious memory centres. Lifting it right off the disc.’

  Lawal held out her hand and Carl passed her a tablet, on which she made notes with sharp, delicate strokes of her nails. There was a guard at each of the stranger’s shoulders now, their confidence bolstered by their boss’s presence.

  ‘This isn’t a human memory,’ the stranger said. ‘It can’t be. But people remember all sorts of things. They remember bad dreams. They remember pain, and pain colours things. Pollutes them, like an oil slick across fresh water. And this machine makes all of that real. Real enough to touch. Real enough to kill.’

  For a long moment, the only sound in the foyer was that of Lawal’s nails clicking on her tablet.