by Dave Rudden
‘And it’s self-updating, isn’t it?’ he continued. ‘Like a videogame landscape, resolving round the main character every step they take. The people taken in there could wander that place for years. They could starve to death, metres from the exit.’
‘That won’t happen,’ Lawal said. She still hadn’t looked up from her device.
‘No?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘We’re going to go in after them.’
‘Then you need my help,’ the stranger said.
‘Do I?’ she said calmly. ‘And why is that?’
‘Because whoever is in there doesn’t like you very much.’
Carl gasped. He couldn’t help it. Even the security guards winced.
Now, the scientist raised her head. Her smile was fractional and humourless. ‘I do not, as a rule, care about who likes me and who doesn’t.’
‘I can imagine,’ the stranger said. ‘But, if your projectors are active, someone’s feeding them the landscape of their unconscious mind. A landscape that includes flying white monsters.’ He pointed at the banners above them, each one emblazoned with the white-raven logo of Lawal’s company.
‘A rival,’ Carl said. ‘I know Elon Musk was tweeting –’
‘It’s more personal than that,’ the man said. ‘The creatures had your face. You can’t tell me that’s business. That’s –’
Lawal held up a hand. ‘I already know who it is.’
The man looked surprised. ‘You do?’
‘Yes,’ she said, and that fractional smile disappeared. ‘It’s my son.’
There was a doorway set into the tower, barely more than a sliver between two massive blocks of ice. Bill approached it warily. It took effort, real effort, not to test every step with her toes before she took it. Hard light, she told herself for the hundredth time. If it looked real, it was real.
She had to turn sideways to slip through the gap. As she did so, a jut of ice caught her jumper and tore it.
Real enough, she thought, and was not reassured.
Inside was a bare space. The floor was cobbled with ice-glazed stones, the ceiling disappearing off into darkness. The walls were dark stone beneath a film of frost. Archways led off to other rooms, the intricate carvings on their surfaces twisting as if being worked on by invisible sculptors even as she watched. She moved closer, and faces emerged from the stone, blurry and half finished. They almost looked like …
‘Give them a minute.’
Bill jumped and spun round. Behind her back, the empty chamber had changed. The gap through which she had entered the tower had vanished, and the room had rearranged itself into a spectacularly long hall, its limits lost in shadow.
At its centre was a throne of sharp black ice, and sitting on that throne was a boy.
He couldn’t have been more than twelve, and was dressed in a We Create Futures hoodie and jeans; the red of his sweatshirt almost too bright in the gloom. There was a trail of We Create Futures stickers up his arm, as if he had stuck them on one by one, out of boredom.
Gleaming from his temples was a silver circlet.
‘Give what a minute?’ Bill asked carefully.
‘The carvings,’ he said, pointing. ‘They up the resolution when you’re looking at them, then lower it when you’re not. Saves processing power. The holo-emitters really aren’t meant to be stretching so far.’
‘Huh,’ she said. ‘You seem very well informed.’
He shrugged. ‘This is all coming from me. My memories. All I have to do is focus on them and they become real.’ He tapped the circlet on his brow with the kind of exaggerated nonchalance that Bill recognised as pretty much standard issue for an adolescent schoolboy. Or for the Doctor, come to that.
She adopted the same air too, folding her arms and looking around at the icy architecture. So what if she’d been kidnapped by pterodactyl-esque creatures with the face of a famous inventor? So what if she’d been lost in a living illusion that looked like a cross between Narnia and a heavy-metal band’s album cover? Fear was just another tool at your belt. That was another lesson she’d learned with the Doctor. Use the fear when it’s useful. Ignore it when it’s not.
‘So,’ she said. ‘Is this a good memory or a bad one?’
‘All I have are bad memories,’ the boy said. It was the kind of thing you said when you were twelve, and Bill had to remind herself that it didn’t make it any less true to him. There had been times in her life when she would have said the same thing and would have been telling the truth. She didn’t want to think about what her memory landscape would have looked like then.
He leaned forward, suddenly animated. ‘What do you do? What were you bringing to the conference? Robotics? Energy efficiency? That last one is really what we’re looking for.’
We? ‘Bit of everything,’ Bill said, unsure what the right answer here was. ‘Had a poetry lecture last week.’
The boy scowled. ‘Poetry? That’s stupid.’
Bill shrugged. ‘You’d be surprised.’ As it turned out, the Arcturan ambassador had been quite partial to Byron, and had ended up letting the Doctor and Bill out of the guillotine in return for an introduction. ‘You’re looking for energy scientists? Why?’
‘To stabilise the projectors, obviously,’ he said. ‘They can’t keep up something this complex for long. I’ve disengaged the safety protocols, but eventually that’s just going to blow us all up. So someone who could fix that would be good.’
‘Oh,’ Bill said. ‘Sure. Obviously.’
And maybe it was talking about science. Maybe Bill’s brain had been working away on it in the background and was only now providing an observation. But Bill had seen that expression before. It seemed like invention ran in the family.
‘I’m Bill,’ she said. ‘And I know what you mean about bad memories.’
There was a crack in the boy’s nonchalance. Bill could hear it.
‘Ebi. Ebi Lawal. What do you know about bad memories?’
‘Lots,’ she said, and meant it. ‘Lost my mum when I was little. There was a long time there when I couldn’t sort out the bad memories from the good. Took a while, but eventually I was far enough away from them … and her … to see that there were good memories to be had. Now, it’s those good memories that keep me going on the bad days.’
The darkness behind Ebi shivered and warped, like a stain of poisonous black mould on the air. ‘Really?’
‘Yes,’ she said, laying the word down as carefully as she had laid down her steps when she wasn’t sure what was real and what was fake. ‘Believe me.’
He nodded slowly. ‘I think that’s the problem.’
‘What is?’ Bill asked.
The curtain of darkness pulled back. Bill saw row after row of cells, barred with ice. Most were empty. A handful were not. She saw the woman and old man who had been taken when Bill had. She saw a dozen of those icy gargoyles clinging to the walls of the tower, clicking and chirruping like bats.
And she saw that the boy did not sit on a throne at all. He sat in the lap of Adeyemi Lawal.
Not the haughtily precise woman from all the banners, but a twelve-foot-tall replica carved out of the same gritty grey ice as the tower itself. As Bill watched in horror, the throne’s ice ran and re-formed into the folds of a long black gown. Long fingers curled protectively round the boy, and a face appeared, hard and sharp as a temple idol, crowned by translucent spikes of obsidian and jet.
‘My mother’s right here,’ the boy said.
‘Think of a hall of mirrors at a funfair,’ Adeyemi Lawal said. She was stalking between discarded inventions as she spoke, lifting them, examining them, and then setting them down again. It reminded Carl of her earlier assessments, deciding who to invest in and who to reject. The crowd outside clearly thought so too, their awed murmuring audible even through the thick glass.
The stranger – the Doctor, as he had introduced himself – was watching her too.
‘The hallways loop back and forth,’ she continued. ‘And
though you’re not physically that far away from other people, they are hidden by the bends and the curves of the loops, even as the reflections create the image of distance around you. You could be standing just metres apart, yet –’
‘Seeing something completely different,’ the Doctor said, still book-ended by Lawal’s security detail. ‘That’s good. And accurate. I like that. Normally my explanations just sound good, and any resemblance to what’s actually happening is coincidental. I might save that one for later.’
Lawal knelt to pick through a nest of cabling.
‘Also,’ he said. ‘You want the one to your left. With the red duct tape.’
She looked up. ‘Excuse me?’
He pointed. ‘And you’ll want the trans-ecliptic resonator from that box over there. Noticed it when I came in. Plus that hyper-attuner matrix there.’
Lawal’s eyes narrowed. ‘You think you know what I’m building.’
‘I know I know,’ the Doctor said. ‘Someone inside the projections doesn’t see the whole picture, but the network of emitters has to, or the whole thing doesn’t work. They have to know exactly where the people inside the projections are, so they can arrange the image around them. You’re trying to hack into that network to locate Bill and your son.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m going to momentarily interrupt the signal so I can see where they are for myself. And I don’t need your help,’ she said, though Carl noticed she did reach down for the red-marked cabling.
‘I got to read up on you a little bit,’ the Doctor said. ‘You’ve been doing this for a long time. Working on your own. Being the best. Being the smartest. Other people just get in the way, don’t they? Unless you need an extra pair of hands to pass you a tablet or hold a torch or get impressed by your timeship.’
‘Timeship?’ Lawal asked.
‘The point is, you’re wrong. You’re not wrong about a lot, but you’re wrong about this. Other people don’t get in the way. They’re another viewpoint. And that viewpoint is always useful. I can help. I need to help.’
‘Why?’ she said.
‘Because one of the many, many people who taught me that lesson is in there, and I need to get her back.’
There was a long moment of silence, and then she let out a sigh, throwing the Doctor the tablet she was holding. ‘The blueprints are all there.’
Carl stepped forward. ‘Preliminary and proprietary, of course, so you’ll have to sign a non-disclosure agreement.’
The Doctor stepped round him as if he wasn’t there, eyes fixed on the screen of the tablet, which had begun to flash red. ‘Now, I’m not a scientist or anything … Oh wait. Yes I am. Tell me, just how large an explosion should I be associating with the words “power source critical”?’
‘My God,’ Carl said. ‘That could take out the entire block.’
‘Don’t be dramatic,’ Lawal said. ‘Just the building, I imagine. And everyone in it. Doctor?’
‘Yes?’
‘Get to work.’
‘Did she send you?’
The world had shimmered and changed again. And, while Bill couldn’t say she exactly missed the grimdark tower with its leering carvings and icy shadows, at least it had made more sense than what was now before her.
The apartment wasn’t much bigger than the one Bill shared with her foster-mum. It was rundown in a warm, lived-in kind of way, the couch sagging beneath its throws, the walls painted blue several tenants ago. It had been decorated for Christmas, clearly on a budget – the tinsel limp and the wreath yellowing at the edges. With the practised eye of a student renter, Bill could see the places where somebody had slapped on another slightly mismatched coat of blue to hide the marks and spills.
The tower had been trying to be scary, in a very twelve-year-old kind of way, but the failed normality of the apartment was far more frightening. It wasn’t just that only three walls of the room had materialised around them, like a doll’s house. It wasn’t even the Ice-Mother looming over them like a grotesque puppetmaster ready to play make-believe.
It was the stain that consumed one entire wall, bubbling black under its skin of paint, pulsing like a telltale heart.
‘I said –’ the boy sat up on his perch, and the bruise of mould frothed and popped – ‘did my mother send you?’ His voice was tight with paranoia. He seemed to have forgotten that he’d been the one who kidnapped Bill.
None of this is real, she thought. All of it is real.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t even know she had a son.’
‘That’s the problem,’ he spat. The Ice-Mother growled in sympathy, a bass rumble that set the whole structure shaking. Bill was trying very hard not to look at the towering monster. Looking at her made the fear a lot harder to control. Worse, it made her think of her own mum, and that made her equal parts sad and angry. The circlet glinted on the boy’s head. He has no idea how lucky he is.
‘What’s the problem?’ she asked, trying to figure out a course of action.
‘Nobody knows I exist,’ he said. ‘Mum says it’s a security issue. She says our lives should be our lives. The world should be kept at arm’s length. That’s why we still live in her crummy old apartment. That’s why I get tutored instead of going to a real school. She spends her life presenting at expos and conferences and media events and I sit in the hotel room like a … phone charger. Ready for when she needs me and abandoned when she doesn’t.’
‘She forgot your birthday. Remember that?’ The Ice-Mother should have sounded evil. She should have sounded like a vicious avalanche. But she didn’t. She sounded small, and hurt, and frustrated. She sounded like Ebi.
Bill knew that inner voice too. Why is it always easier to remember the bad, rather than the good?
‘Yeah,’ Ebi said. ‘I remember.’
‘You were nine. She was launching a new phone design. Do you think she even remembers that she let you down?’
‘Why don’t you ask her?’ Bill said.
The Ice-Mother’s head whipped round with a hiss of dislodged frost. Ebi scrubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. ‘What?’
‘You can ask her,’ Bill said. ‘That’s not a luxury everybody has. Your memory is one side of the story. Do you know hers?’
It was the wrong thing to say. Ebi jumped from the Ice-Mother’s lap, stalking forward with fists clenched. ‘That’s all I hear! That’s the only version that ever gets told! She even used this place in her presentation, like a … a … prop. Like a movie backdrop for her origin story, when really it’s –’
His voice caught in his throat, just as the whole chamber suddenly dissolved in a snowstorm of static. For just a moment, Bill saw the whole auditorium through rippling veils of translucent hard-light. She saw how close the door was, and how it might as well have been on the moon. She saw the Doctor, and Adeyemi Lawal bent over a bolted-together collection of antennae and circuitry, and she saw the look on the inventor’s face when she spotted her son and the monstrosity looming behind him.
‘Is that …’ Lawal’s voice was faint, though whether that was due to distance or horror Bill couldn’t tell. ‘Is that how you see me?’
And then they were gone. Bill rushed forward, but came up short against a wall of stone.
‘Ebi,’ she said. The Ice-Mother was growing, her fingers sharpening to claws, great jagged icicles rising like armour from her shoulders and chest. ‘Listen to me. If you don’t stop, then your story will be the one that gets told. You win the argument. She is who you think she is.’
The boy scowled. ‘Good!’
‘Well, that’s just it. Do you want her to be?’
Another blizzard of pixels, through which Bill could see the Doctor and Lawal, closer now, fighting to get through. She had to give them time. She had to make Ebi see.
‘Do you want to be right about your mother? Do you want this to be the version of her that’s true?’ She stepped closer, careful now, aware of the Ice-Mother’s eyes boring into her, the memory-creature now nearly h
alf the size of the tower itself. ‘Because I remember my mother as a saint, Ebi. I remember her as the best person I ever knew, and I would give all those good memories up if I could have one new moment with her today.’
Ebi was close now, close enough for Bill to see the pain in his eyes.
‘If I had the chance to choose between memories and a real mother, no matter how real those memories felt, I know which one I’d pick.’
‘Ebi!’
A hand found Bill’s shoulder, and she whirled to find the Doctor. He caught her up in a hug, then composed himself. ‘Well done, Bill.’
‘You heard us?’
‘All of it,’ he said, looking past Bill at the Lawals. ‘I hope she heard it too.’
The tower had vanished, replaced by a million swirling pixels. Now there was just the apartment, the pulsing void-black stain, and the gargantuan, growling Ice-Mother.
‘Ebi,’ the real Adeyemi Lawal said. Her composure was gone, replaced by bitter anger. ‘Stop this right now.’
‘This memory,’ he snapped, pointing at the stain. ‘You took this memory. Last Christmas, when we fought and I threw a glass at the wall. You took that, and you used it as promotional material.’
The stain, Bill thought. Just a tiny thing, and yet it had grown and grown until it was a darkness big enough to drown them both.
Lawal shook her head. ‘That’s not … that isn’t …’
‘To embarrass me. To make me feel bad.’
‘Carl thought I was using it as well,’ she said, and wiped a hand angrily across one eye in a gesture that was so like Ebi’s earlier it made Bill’s heart hurt. ‘But I didn’t mean for that memory to come up at all. It’s just been eating at me for this long, and I haven’t been able to think of anything else.’
‘Because …’ Ebi’s voice was suddenly uncertain. ‘Because of what I did?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Because of how badly I reacted. Because of how badly I always react.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s OK,’ he said, looking up at the mountainous form of the Ice-Mother above them, her blades looming like sickle moons. ‘I’m sorry too.’