by Alex Scarrow
‘Let me quickly check in on SpongeBubba.’
Maddy unlocked the side door to the RV for him and Rashim stepped up inside.
‘Morning, skippa!’ chirped the robot, squatting in the passenger seat upfront. It was playing with the steering wheel.
‘We’re having some food over there.’ Rashim pointed through the windscreen at the mall. ‘We won’t be long.’
Maddy joined him inside. ‘Does your robot have a wireless broadcast protocol?’
‘Sure.’
‘If anyone comes looking at our vehicle … cops, for example, can he bleep a warning over to Bob?’
‘Yes, of course.’
She looked down at the lab unit. ‘Reckon you can do that for me, then, SpongeBob?’
‘SpongeBubba,’ corrected the robot. His lips quivered a jocular, angry snarl. ‘That’s my name, missy-miss!’
Maddy rolled her eyes at the lab unit’s pre-programmed plastic expression. ‘Just tell your toy to keep a lookout,’ she said to Rashim. ‘OK?’
The mall wasn’t busy. A few people inside walking freshly polished floors, mostly people who worked there. Clearly no one felt like shopping today. A jazzy rendition of a Stevie Wonder hit wafted across the bright and cheerful circular centrepiece atrium and a pair of overweight security guards shared a joke with a janitor and made one or two heads turn with their echoing laughter.
‘Up there,’ said Maddy, pointing to a balcony overlooking the atrium. ‘RealBean Coffee. The place looks open. We can get a panini or …’
She checked herself. Stupid. Sure, although the mall looked no different to any other in her time, it was still 2001. No one did paninis back then. Back now.
‘… or maybe we’ll get a toasted sandwich or something.’
Chapter 15
7.20 a.m., 12 September 2001, Interstate 95, south-west Connecticut
‘Information: you are driving too fast,’ said Faith.
Abel turned to look at her. ‘The driving is suitable,’ he replied.
‘You are driving at a faster velocity than specified on the roadside indicators.’
Abel narrowed his eyes at her, then turned to look back at the road ahead flanked by signs indicating, advertising, proclaiming all kinds of things. Finally a speed indicator wooshed past on his side. ‘The number fifty-five indicates a recommended velocity.’
‘No. I believe it means maximum velocity. You are in excess of that. That will attract unwanted attention.’
Abel lifted his foot off the accelerator, causing the truck behind to brake hard, and then a moment later the driver leaned on his horn angrily. Abel looked over his shoulder. ‘Why did the vehicle behind make that noise?’
Faith followed his gaze. ‘I believe he is annoyed.’
‘Annoyed,’ Abel repeated. ‘Why?’
She frowned for a moment. ‘I do not know why.’
The truck driver overtook them, glaring down from his cab as he passed by.
The NYPD squad car they’d stolen in the early hours of the morning had been replaced with a different car. After listening to police chatter over the radio, they’d quickly realized the vehicle’s identification number on the roof was going to make them too easy to track down. Before the light of dawn had fully arrived, they’d switched to a solitary car parked in an empty forecourt. It was small and bubble-shaped and an uncomfortable squeeze for Abel’s broad frame as he wriggled into place behind the steering wheel, but at least it wasn’t going to draw the attention of any police helicopters scanning the highways for their stolen vehicle. Of course, it wasn’t until dawn that they saw their new ride – a Volkswagen Beetle – was a rather conspicuous tangerine orange decorated with hand-painted pink daisies.
They drove in silence for a while, as they had in fact done all the way from Brooklyn. As he drove, Abel’s mind carefully sorted through the data he’d acquired in the last thirty-two hours and twenty minutes of life. Not a particularly long life, but certainly a very busy one so far.
The first nine hours of his consciousness, just as with Faith and the others of his batch, had been spent in a sterile cloning room, illuminated with a soft amber glow coming from the half a dozen growth tubes. Each of them had contained a candidate foetus held in stasis, but now recently ‘birthed’.
Six of them, naked and coated in the gelatinous protein solution drying out on their bare skin. They had sat huddled together on the cool tiled floor with empty, childlike minds. Frightened, confused. And then, without any warning, wireless wisdom had begun to flood into their minds: torrential packets of data and executable applets of AI software that shooed away the childlike fear and replaced it with impassive machine-mind calm.
Like awaking. Emerging from a coma.
Abel recalled his mind filling with compressed knowledge that unpacked itself into segments of his hard drive. Knowledge of the world of 2001. Knowledge of a place called New York. Of a place called Brooklyn. Knowledge of cars, trains, planes, people, skyscrapers, billboards, intersections, doughnuts, handguns, traffic lights, cops, radios, computers, mobile phones, the Spice Girls, Shrek, George Bush, 9/11 …
And then, finally, into that dimly lit, womb-like, amber-coloured room a human had stepped. Abel’s installed software was already prepped to acknowledge the man as an authorized user. His instructions to be obeyed without question.
The man pulled up a chair and sat down in front of them. ‘Your primary mission goal is to locate and terminate these humans.’ He held a data pad in his hand and tapped its screen.
In their six minds, simultaneously, they received a packet of images in rapid slide-show succession. Front images, profile images of a young man with an untidy shock of dark hair and thick, arched eyebrows. A young teenaged woman with frizzy, strawberry-blonde hair and glasses. A dark-skinned girl with jet-black hair that drooped like a velvet curtain over one eye.
‘You should also terminate any other humans or support units that appear to be collaborating with them. Your secondary goal is to destroy all the equipment you find at the location you’ll shortly be arriving at. This is their base of operations. Leave nothing intact. That is important. There are items of equipment there that can be used to displace time. That is an unacceptable contamination risk. All of it must be destroyed.
‘When these things are done, you are to activate your own self-destruct devices. This is your tertiary goal. Your mission is complete only when these people are dead, their field office has been completely destroyed and your own on-board computers have been irreparably disabled. Are these mission parameters perfectly clear?’
All six of them had chorused a deadpan ‘affirmative’.
Abel looked out at the bright sunny morning now, a blue cloudless sky above them. The road was clogged with morning traffic. A world of humans tirelessly going about their everyday business, getting up and going to jobs as if today was just another day. Like program loops executing regardless of the previous day’s extraordinary events. Life going on the same as before.
‘They are behaving as if nothing unusual occurred yesterday,’ said Faith as if reading his mind. ‘Why do you think that is?’
‘A post-trauma behaviour pattern,’ he replied. ‘Access your database. File 3426/344-456. Human Stress Responses.’
She blinked momentarily, digesting a short data entry on how the human mind filled itself with unnecessary repetitive tasks to block out painful thought processes. Denial. She looked at him. ‘Keeping busy so they do not have to confront what they witnessed yesterday?’
‘Correct.’
‘Experience, recollection, is useful data. Denying it makes no sense.’
‘Agreed.’
Little of what they’d experienced of human behaviour over the last twenty-three hours had made any sense. There was a frustrating randomness to human behaviour that made predicting what they were going to do next almost impossible. Like trying to accurately predict the course of a waterdrop down a rain-spattered windowpane.
There was no knowing for certain tha
t the target named Madelaine Carter was taking her team back to her hometown. There was a strong likelihood. A reasonable probability. But no certainty. All they had to support that assumption was the indentation of that word on the jotter pad. Boston.
All they had was a very human thing … a hunch.
Faith suddenly twisted in her seat to face him. ‘I have a signal.’
His eyes locked on her and he nodded. ‘I also just detected it.’
For a second, less than that, they’d both picked up an ident signal just as they’d driven past a turn-off leading to some large square buildings fronted by an enormous car park.
‘An AI ident,’ she said. Her grey eyes locked on his. ‘Software version date –’
‘2064,’ he finished. Nothing in this time – nothing – other than their primary target could possibly be broadcasting a signal with a future date stamp. ‘It must be them.’
‘Agreed. Take the next turning.’
Chapter 16
12 September 2001, New York
Cooper had arrived in New York not long after sunrise and was taken by an NYPD squad car over from the precinct HQ. The plain-clothes police sergeant drew up and stopped in front of a fluttering streamer of crime-scene tape.
‘As far as I can go, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Feds have it all staked out even though it was a couple of our guys that got shot,’ he added without attempting to hide his disgust.
Cooper thanked him, stepped out and flashed his ID at a uniformed officer guarding the tape line.
A chalk circle on the tarmac marked several bullet cases, and another marked a dark dried puddle of blood.
‘Is there an Agent Damon Grohl on-site?’ he asked the cop.
‘Your FBI buddies are down there somewhere,’ he replied, pointing to the opening of an alleyway beside the base of the towering support for the bridge he’d just been driven over from Manhattan.
‘So what’s down there?’
‘Damned if I know. Nothing us dumb ol’ beat cops are being allowed to see.’
Cooper crossed the intersection, flashed his ID at another uniformed cop standing at the mouth of the alleyway.
‘Yo, Cooper! Coop! Down here!’ a voice barked out from further down the alley.
It was Grohl. Cooper could make out his chunky silhouette standing two-thirds of the way down. Light from crime-scene floodlights was spilling out from some archway across cobblestones and piled rubbish.
‘Damon!’ He began to hesitantly pick his way into the mouth of the alley, sidestepping a discarded spicy chicken wrap. ‘You going to tell me what this is all about yet? I just spent the last four hours driving up here! And I really don’t know what –’
Grohl waved at him to come on down. ‘I’m not going to shout about it. Come over here.’
Cooper made his way along the alley. At the far end of it he could see a handrail and quayside, a view of the East River and the underbelly of the bridge overhead, receding until it merged with Manhattan beyond. Warm morning sunlight picked out the tops of the skyscrapers along Wall Street. In the sky, several news choppers buzzed around where yesterday the Twin Towers had stood.
He joined Grohl and shook his hand. ‘Sheesh … long journey all the way up from Washington this morning. Every plane in America’s been grounded. I had to damn well drive.’ He looked at his old Academy buddy. ‘Now I was trying to figure out what the hell it is you think you’ve got that made you decide to give me a call.’
Grohl smiled. ‘Come on, Coop, everyone in the Agency knows you’re the custodian of all that weird X Files stuff.’ He slapped Cooper affectionately on the arm and grinned, a knowing boy-have-I-got-something-for-you expression. ‘You won’t be disappointed.’
They were standing beside a brick archway; a metal shutter door was wound three-quarters of the way up, but still low enough that they both had to duck down to look under. ‘What’s in here?’
‘Last night, early hours of the morning actually, there was that double cop killing. You probably saw the evidence markers out there on the intersection?’ Cooper nodded.
‘Eyewitness saw the whole thing. Said they emerged from this alleyway, two of them; one male, one female, mid-twenties, white, tall, athletic. And get this –’ he grinned – ‘both as bald as buddhas. Walked right up, assaulted the first cop, took his gun off him and shot him and his partner dead, execution style. Two to the chest, one to the head. Then calm as you please they both got into the squad car and drove it away.’
‘Sheeesh. Linked to the Trade Center? Terrorists?’
‘That’s what we thought. That’s why we got handed this one so quickly. Follow me.’ He ducked down, led the way inside. ‘Precinct cops were first on the scene. They searched the alleyway and found this archway left wide open.’
Cooper ducked under after him and stood up inside.
‘And this is where it all gets very weird.’
Cooper looked around. The place looked as if it had been burgled or rifled through. A mess of things pulled out and strewn across the floor. He noted the bunk beds, the table, armchairs. Kettle, pizza boxes, burger wrappers and drinks cans. ‘What? This some sort of drugs den? A gang crib?’
Grohl shrugged. ‘No. Not narcotics, not even a trace. But we did find this.’ He pointed down to spatters and smears of dried blood on the floor, each mark highlighted with a chalk circle and an evidence number. ‘Something went down in here. A fight. Crime-scene pathologist reckons there’s enough blood on the floor to suggest another possible homicide. Two dead cops out there and another possible killing in here. But no body. Anyway, we got handed this ball because it might … might … have something to do with the terror attack.’
Grohl beckoned Cooper to follow him across the floor towards a desk cluttered with wires and circuit boards. He picked up something sitting in a plastic evidence bag.
‘And this little beauty is why I thought I’d give you a call, old friend.’ He passed it to Cooper. ‘Don’t worry, it’s already been dusted for prints. You can get it out and take a look at it.’
Cooper reached into the bag and pulled out a smooth, fist-sized piece of glossy black plastic and chrome. ‘What is this thing? Some sort of digital organizer?’
‘Turn it over.’
He did and noted the logo on the back in the centre. An apple.
‘This is some sort of prototype Apple product?’
Grohl took it back off him. Pressed a button at the bottom and the screen glowed brightly. He slid his finger across the screen.
‘Jesus! That’s …’
‘Touch-the-screen technology. Very fancy, huh?’
Cooper nodded. It wasn’t fancy, it was stunning. But he still wasn’t sure what he was doing all the way up here this morning. There was enough work the FBI needed to be doing chasing down whatever leads they might have on the horrific events of yesterday.
‘Jesus, Coop, even the military doesn’t have anything near as slick as this little beauty.’ Grohl’s thumb found an icon on the screen and tapped it. ‘Check it out. This is where it gets real interesting, though.’ He turned the device round and showed him the screen. Cooper squinted at a page of text.
‘What am I looking at?’
‘System software information. Look at the software version date.’
Cooper’s stomach did a queasy turnover in his belly. It was showing the year as 2009.
‘And the device’s calendar is set to 2010. You ever see anything like this gadget? It looks like something right out of Star Trek.’
Cooper shook his head. No, he’d seen nothing as advanced as this, not even mocked-up prototypes at a gadget show.
‘Damon, it looks to me a bit like a super-advanced version of those new Apple iPod things the kids are all asking for Thanksgiving.’
‘Oh, and this thing is also designed to make phone calls.’
‘It’s a phone as well?’
‘Oh yeah, only … it doesn’t connect to anything because it’s using a telecoms protocol that doe
sn’t actually exist …’ His eyes met Cooper’s and Cooper understood what word his friend was leaving unsaid and dangling in the space between them.
… Yet.
Chapter 17
7.24 a.m., 12 September 2001, outside Branford, Connecticut
Abel swung the Volkswagen Beetle into the car park and climbed out of the vehicle, the engine still ticking as he crossed the tarmac towards the source of the signal, a large white vehicle with wide perspex windows at the front and back. It looked like some kind of habitation module on wheels.
Faith strode beside him. She withdrew the handgun from the waistband of the jogging bottoms she was wearing, stolen from some hapless runner what seemed like a lifetime ago.
‘They are here,’ she said.
Abel nodded and reached for the handle of the vehicle’s rear door. It failed to turn. He grabbed it tighter and twisted it hard. Something snapped softly and clattered on to the floor inside. He pulled open the door and stepped up inside the vehicle. The RV lurched gently under his weight.
Inside his eyes picked out a mess of bin liners and plastic bags piled down the vehicle’s central aisle towards the driver and passengers’ seats up at the front.
And a small, yellow cubed android was sitting on one of the seats. Big ping-pong-ball eyes batted lashes as its pickle-shaped nose quivered. ‘You’re not supposed to come in here,’ it said with a cautionary tattle-tale voice.
Abel’s mind detected a squirt of data. A broadcasted alert. The yellow robot was beaming an alarm signal. A fainter signal approximately a quarter of a mile away registered an acknowledgement. He dropped back on to the ground outside and turned to Faith.
She’d picked that up too.
‘The acknowledgement came from over there,’ she said, pointing towards a large squat white building, sporting signs of big-brand retailers. Between them a sea of tarmac beginning to fill with cars parking up: early-bird shoppers.
‘They are inside that building,’ said Abel.
‘My God.’ Rashim shook his head with disbelief. He looked around the mini-mart and then reached into a freezer unit and picked up a shrink-wrapped pack-of-three Ma Jackson’s Shaked n’ Baked Tennessee Chicken Drummers. ‘This is real? Real food?’