by Alex Scarrow
‘That’s quite all right. Everyone asks eventually, Joseph. Everyone.’
The silence was uncomfortable for the younger man. Waldstein put him out of his misery. ‘I believe you have an update for me?’
‘Uh? … Uh yes! I do, sir. The AI imprints are completed now. I’ve checked them through and run simulations. They’re one hundred per cent stable.’
‘Good. Then I suppose we’re nearly ready to upload those into the units?’
‘They’re very nearly ready, sir. Full growth cycle in the next hour.’
Waldstein patted his shoulder gently, a conciliatory gesture to reassure the younger man there was no harm done just now.
Curiosity didn’t kill this cat. Did it, Mother?
‘Let’s go back inside and check on them, then.’
Chapter 1
2001, New York
Wednesday, 12 September 2001
If you’re reading this then I guess someone, somewhere, does go through the rubbish and read every piece of paper that gets balled up and tossed away. So then, in that case, here it is – my name’s Sal.
That’s all you need to know about my name.
I’m fourteen. I think. Actually, I might be fifteen now. I’m not sure. I’m from India. And here’s the tricky bit – I’m from 2026. You read that right. Please … read on. Don’t throw this away. I’m not making that up, nor am I mad. Just go with it … for now. Please?
There’s a long story that comes before this page. But all you really need to know is that right now I feel lost. I’m scared. I’ve lost another home. We can’t go back to the archway. The place we were living in. Maddy says we can’t ever go back there. Like, ever. It’s marked, she said. Compromised. It’s no longer a secret and safe place.
So now we have nowhere to hide. It’s just us lot and an old bus-thing that Maddy calls an ‘RV’.
Jahulla, what a collection of freaks we make. There’s Maddy, she’s a nerd from 2010. This is closest to her past-life time. She was like nine or ten in 2001, so she actually remembers this year.
Then there’s Liam, he’s a ship’s steward. Or was. He was working on the Titanic. Yes. That Titanic. The one that sank in 1912. He’s really out of his depth here (ha ha). Even though we’ve been stationed back in 2001 for a few months now, he’s still like some confused old fuddah-man even though he’s technically only sixteen.
There’s Foster, who really is old. Not just acting old (like Liam). He’s ninety or something and I’m pretty sure he’s dying. He knows the most about Waldstein’s agency. He was the one who recruited each of us from our past lives. But even he doesn’t know who sent those killers after us. Someone’s found out about us, what we’re doing back here to preserve the timeline.
Then there’s this man called Rashim. He’s stuck with us for now. We pulled him out of a corrupted version of Roman times because he shouldn’t have been there. He went back there with a group of people from the year 2070.
Oh … you should know this. Really important. The world’s dying in 2070. Or about to. That’s why they came back. They wanted to start over: to give humanity a second chance to get the world right. But you can’t do that, see? You just can’t mess with history. There’s ONE WAY it goes and that’s it. Call it fate, destiny, kismet. As Foster says, ‘For good or bad, history has only one true course. You mess with that, and you’re looking at chaos … Hell itself opening up.’
(He’s actually not as wacko-mad as I’m making him sound.)
That’s why we were saved, ‘recruited’, to work for this agency set up by a man called Waldstein – he’s some billionaire inventor type from the future.
And then we have two cloned humans with computers for brains: Bob and Becks. Gorilla Guy and the Ice Queen. They’re, well, ‘special’ I suppose. Let’s leave it at that. Oh … I almost forgot, we’ve also got a robot from 2070 with us that looks like a cross between a filing cabinet and the old cartoon character from when my parents were kids, ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’. I think Rashim designed him as a joke or something.
That’s us. Like I say, a bunch of freaks and we’re trying to run for our lives across a country that’s suddenly doing a double-take at anyone who looks remotely out of the ordinary. So much for remaining deep undercover.
We’re running through an America that’s still in deep shock from what happened yesterday: 9/11. You can see it in their faces; everyone expects another terrorist bomb, another aeroplane attack.
I guess my father would say to these Americans: ‘Get jahully well used to it.’ After all … he lived through the Terror Attacks of the Twenty-teens. All those dirty bombs and suicide attacks in northern India.
Shadd-yah. When aren’t humans always killing each other?
So, we are running. I can’t say where. I won’t say where we’re going. Just in case, reader, you’re ONE OF THEM! Can’t be too careful, right? But we have a plan. Sort of. There’s a place we’re driving to and we just stopped here at this roadside shopping mall-diner-service station place. It’s been a crazy two days. A blur. One big panic after another.
I needed to write this. Get my head on a little straighter. So … there it is. Maybe our job of stopping pinchudda morons from messing with changing time is finished now. Maybe this ‘agency’ thing’s all over. Maybe all that’s left for us is just trying to stay hidden. Staying alive. I don’t know. I don’t know what the next few weeks hold for us. Jahulla, I don’t even know what the next day holds for us.
I don’t even know if these last six or so months have even been for real. Maybe it’s all been one big nightmare and I’ll wake up again in my bedroom in Mumbai and it’ll be 2026 again.
Nice dream.
So … I’ve written enough. Maybe too much. I might just rip this up. Burn it. Eat it or something. Or maybe I’ll stuff it into my Burger King box with the rest of the cold fries and floppy gherkin where no one is likely to find it.
But writing this helped a little, I guess.
My name is Sal and, like I said, I’m lost, and quite a bit scared and not at all happy about things right now.
Chapter 2
11 September 2001, New York
Maddy took off her glasses and buried her face in her hands. Air hissed between her fingers: a long, torpid sigh that was a signal to the other two, Liam and Sal, to shut-the-heck-up for just a moment and let her think.
The archway was quiet except for its usual noises: the faint chug of a filtration pump from the back room, a tap dripping somewhere, the soft burr of a dozen PC computers’ heat fans. It sounded like it did on any normal day, except for perhaps the inane trash-talking between Liam and Sal playing Mario Kart on the Nintendo.
‘Hey, what’s up with that girl, skippa?’ chipped in SpongeBubba.
Maddy raised a hand to shush the lab robot. ‘OK.’ Her voice was muffled behind her other hand. ‘This is what we need to do.’ She straightened up, put her glasses back on and turned towards the monitors on the computer table. She addressed the webcam. ‘Computer-Bob?’
A black DOS-like dialogue box appeared on the monitor beside the camera.
> Yes, Maddy?
‘Can you force the archway’s displacement field to reset to Monday?’
Today was Tuesday, early afternoon. Outside the archway a collective pause had settled across the city: a pause in which the sky was clear of planes, television presenters had said all there was to say, and everyone was still busy wondering if the last few hours had been for real and the Twin Towers really had just been completely destroyed.
> Affirmative.
‘Do it, then. Do it now!’
‘What’s going on?’ asked Rashim.
‘We’re all going back in time,’ Sal answered. ‘By one day.’
The young technician still looked bewildered. Only a couple of hours ago – from his perspective – he’d been approached by Maddy and the others back in Roman times as he’d quietly been setting up the receiver array for the rest of his group to home in on. Now that
was all history, or not, depending how you looked at it. Now he was here, stuck with them because they couldn’t just leave him behind, dangling like a loose end. And Project Exodus, the project he’d spent the last couple of years of his life working on … well, none of that would be happening now. By grabbing him, they’d managed to prevent a group of three hundred refugees from the future completely throwing history off track.
Job done. But now he and his cartoon-character lab unit were stuck here with them.
‘So, when exactly is this place?’ asked Rashim, looking round the archway. His voice rose with growing anxiety. ‘I mean, this is twenty, twenty-first-century tech by the look of it. Yes? Am I right?’
‘This is the day the towers were knocked down by planes,’ said Liam.
‘September the eleventh, 2001,’ Maddy said quickly. ‘It’s our base-time, our field office. Where we’ve been operating out of for the last few months.’
The cursor on the dialogue box flickered.
> Stand by. Field resetting.
They heard the soft whine of energy discharging into the displacement machine and then the fluorescent lights dangling from the archway’s low ceiling suddenly blinked out and a moment later flickered back on. The archway was still in the mess it had been when she and Sal had fled back in time to the reign of Caligula. Tidying all this up, however, was the last thing on her mind at the moment.
‘And now … it’s yesterday,’ said Maddy. ‘The day before 9/11.’ She sat down in the office chair beside the desk and huffed air. ‘Which now gives us twenty-four hours’ breathing space before those psychotic killer meatbots come back to finish us off.’
Rashim’s dark eyebrows rose, looking from Maddy to the others, for someone to add a word or two more of explanation. ‘Psychotic …?’
‘There’re more of them?’ asked Liam.
‘Two more, we think,’ said Sal. ‘Six of them came through.’
‘What killer things are these?’ asked Rashim.
‘Six! Jay-zus!’ Liam’s jaw dropped. ‘And you two managed to kill four of ’em?’
‘Could someone please tell me what psycho killer things you’re talking about?’
‘Yes. We did pretty good, huh?’
Liam laughed. ‘I’ll say –’
Rashim closed his eyes. ‘PLEASE, EVERYONE, WILL YOU STOP IGNORING ME!’
The others turned to look at him.
‘I … I’m …’ Rashim opened his eyes and smiled half apologetically. ‘I … I’m very close to … uh, losing my mind. Please – the least one of you people can do is answer just one of my questions.’
Sal pointed at Bob. ‘The psychotic meatbots we’re talking about are clones, support units like these two. Four men and two women. They came from the future to kill us.’
Rashim nodded gratefully, then silently appraised Bob. ‘He’s a military-grade gene product, isn’t he? One of the earlier-gen versions?’
‘Correct,’ Bob rumbled.
‘Computer-Bob dealt with two of them for us,’ said Maddy. ‘And one got taken out by a time wave, I think. The other one … well, you guys saw what happened.’
One of the units had managed to leap after Maddy and Sal as their hastily opened escape portal began to collapse in on itself. It had emerged on the other side missing both its feet and one hand and yet it had still managed to be quite lethal. As Bob held it down, Maddy had put several rounds into its bald human head. The first and last time she ever intended to fire a gun at anything point blank.
‘You said six of them?’ said Rashim.
Maddy nodded. ‘Yup, there are two more of them and they may be out there in New York somewhere.’
Sal sat down on the other chair beside Maddy. She scuffed the toes of her boots against the floor. ‘More of them could arrive,’ she said. ‘Right, Maddy? Another six?’
Maddy nodded. ‘Tuesday morning, sometime during Tuesday morning, that’s when they arrived. So right now it’s twelve noon, Monday. Which means we’ve got eighteen, maybe nineteen hours before they come again. And if another batch – technically, I guess, the same batch – don’t come then we’ve still got those other two to worry about. And they’ll be back from wherever computer-Bob sent them on a wild-goose chase. That’s right, Bob, isn’t it?’
> Affirmative.
‘Affirmative.’
Both Bobs answered the question.
Maddy turned to look at them all. ‘Two of them we might stand a chance against. But if another six turn up right here in this archway …?’ She pulled on her lip, made a face. Not the sort of face to instil confidence in her little team.
‘We could set some sort of a trap for them,’ said Liam. ‘As soon as they arrive, get Bob to open a portal and drop them right into that chaos space. Could we not do that?’
Maddy shrugged. ‘We could do. But, Liam, you’re missing the point. And it’s actually quite a big point.’
Liam splayed his hands. Irritated by her patronizing tone of voice. ‘What?’
‘Someone else knows about us, Liam. Someone knows exactly when and where we are. We’re not a secret any more.’
‘That means we’re still in danger?’ added Sal quietly.
‘If we stay here, yes.’ Maddy’s words rang round the archway, a reverberation off damp brick walls that seemed to last indefinitely and not quite fade away.
Liam muttered a curse under his breath. ‘That’s great. I was just about gettin’ used to this place, so I was.’
‘I’m thinking the sooner we leave, the better,’ said Maddy. She regarded the gloomy interior. Hardly a place anyone would normally look at with dewy-eyed fondness. But it had become their home. It had become something of a safe haven, a nest, a shelter. And yes, between the seemingly constant firefighting they’d experienced from here, there had been moments of … dare she say … fun.
Fun. Some good memories. Among all the scary ones, that is.
Liam sighed. ‘Ah well …’ was all the consolation he could offer them. ‘Ah well.’
‘It’s just bricks,’ said Sal without a great deal of conviction.
The squat lab robot flexed its pliable plastic face, wrinkling its pickle-shaped nose as its round and permanently staring eyes scanned the gloomy interior. ‘It’s a very messy place. I don’t like it very much.’
‘Yeah, but it’s home,’ said Maddy. ‘Or it was anyway.’
She looked around the pitted and cracked floor to where a shallow scoop of concrete was missing – where so many terrifying and unplanned last-minute portals had been opened up. Where a thick loop of cables dangled from the ceiling – from which a horrific Cretaceous-era carnivore had once dropped down and butchered a man right in front of her eyes. Where power cables snaked from one side of the archway’s floor to the other – there had once lain a carpet of dead and dying Confederate and Union soldiers, men feebly crying out for water amid the acrid smoke of battle, bleeding out for a war that should never have been. Where the walls flanked the shutter door – the probing claws of irradiated mutant humans had once tried to pick through crumbling mortar to get in at them, to eat them.
And, planted on the very desk she was sitting at now, the severed head of a young woman had rested recently. Grey eyes, beautiful grey eyes, glazed over and lifeless, the cranium hacked open to reveal a bloody pulp, and a small, invaluable microchip inside.
Ahhh, memories. Precious memories, Maddy noted unenthusiastically.
‘You’re right, Sal, it’s just a bunch of bricks. The sooner we get the hell out of here, the better.’
Chapter 3
10 September 2001, New York
Maddy took the subway across to Manhattan and emerged at 57th Street into the warmth of the sun. Middle of the day, that’s when the old man could be found in Central Park. That was Foster’s pact with her, his tacit promise when he’d walked out on the team after their first mission.
You’ll always find me here at the same time. Feeding the pigeons.
She’d made this trip
nearly a dozen times now over the last six months. Six months’ worth of their ‘bubble time’ – Monday and Tuesday, the 10th and 11th, looped over and over again. Every time she sat down with him on that bench by the duck pond, beside the hot-dog cart, it was – for Foster – like their very first meeting after he’d bid farewell and left her in charge of the team. The world outside the archway’s protective field was linear, a sequence of moments experienced by everyone in sensible chronological order.
But, for Maddy and the others, it was time that occurred inside the archway that appeared to be linear, while everything outside was a weird and endless forty-eight-hour Groundhog Day.
She’d asked the old man once why it was that she never bumped into copies of herself. His answer had been both straightforward and oddly cryptic.
‘You’re not of this timeline, Maddy. None of you are. You might as well be aliens visiting from another planet as far as earthly cause and effect is concerned.’
Reassuring perhaps, but she’d still ended up none the wiser.
As always, she caught sight of him sitting on the bench, sitting back and savouring the sun on his wrinkled face, in that dark blue cardigan of his, jeans too big for his narrow frame and that scuffed old Yankees baseball cap clasped in his liver-spotted hands. She stopped for a moment, watching him through the hot-dog queue, watching him through the clouds of billowing steam coming from the cart’s griddle.
A quiff of silver-white hair fluttering on his head: untidy, unruly hair. The likeness was so obvious now Maddy knew, now they all knew. She wondered how none of them had ever noticed, or remarked, how much alike Foster and Liam looked. Yes, age completely alters a person’s appearance, but there are those things that survive the years intact: the shape and set of a person’s eyes, the habitual expression on one’s face, the lazy way you sit when you think no one’s looking – things that are as unique as a fingerprint.
Liam and Foster, the very same person, and she hadn’t seen it until he’d told her.