by Alex Scarrow
It’s just me now. I’ve got to do more than that.
He looked once again at the message from the past. The Liam-now-Foster unit had ordered a replacement Saleena like someone might dial up a pizza. The unit did his job diligently, loyally – just like he was programmed to do.
Saleena Vikram.
Olivera had an idea. Another way that he could attempt to derail this project. Something he could do, something subtle enough that it could be sneaked past Waldstein’s ever-watchful eyes. A deliberate, conspicuous continuity error in Sal’s memory line. Enough of a jarring continuity error that she’d end up picking at it like a scab, worrying away at it until she’d finally worked out what it meant. Now that was something Waldstein might not spot – some small additional memory embedded in her mind, a detail not quite right. A detail that was quite impossible to be true. And it would trouble her. Make her question things.
He’d been thinking about that last night as he’d sat alone in this lab, while trying to catch a few hours’ sleep on the metal-framed cot in the corner. While he’d been watching her grow in the tube, the faint outline of a child’s body floating in a glowing amber soup.
Then he had it. It came to him.
A certain blue bear that he recalled seeing in the dusty window of an antique shop back in 2001. Not too far from the archway, as it happened. Close enough, in fact, that she was bound to stumble across it sooner or later. See it with her own eyes and then wonder how it was possible that she’d recall seeing it tumbling over and over in an inferno in Mumbai, in the year 2026
Chapter 34
13 September 2011, Interstate 90, Newton, Massachusetts
‘But that’s completely bleedin’ crazy!’ said Liam. ‘You’re saying … what? That I’m a …’
‘A meatbot, Liam. You, me and Sal – we’re just weedier, nerdier models of Bob and Becks,’ said Maddy with a bitter tone.
Liam laughed a little maniacally. ‘Aw, come on! That’s a corker, that is! There’s no way at all that I’m –’
‘Think about it, Liam. Think about it!’
‘I don’t need to think about! I’m Liam!’
Maddy got up and took a step forward. ‘I was never on an airplane from New York to Boston. A plane that supposedly blew up,’ she said. ‘And you, Liam, you were never on the Titanic and Sal was never living in 2026 in Mumbai. They’re all just made-up memories.’
‘Made-up?’ Liam frowned. He had a mind full of memories. His family and friends, Cork, his school, leaving home for Liverpool because what he really always wanted to do was to work his way on to a boat and get to see the world. But then … cross-examining those memories – and he’d done that several times over the last few months – there’d always seemed to be troublesome gaps, missing bits. He’d put that down to all that had happened to him recently – a lifetime’s worth of traumas and adventures that he’d struggled to survive through over the last few months. Who wouldn’t forget something like their mother’s maiden name after all of that? Right?
But it was more than that, wasn’t it?
‘I can remember a whole life before this, so I can. A whole bleedin’ life!’
‘Yeah? Really?’
‘Aye.’ Liam nodded vigorously. ‘Of course I can!’
‘OK then … so how did you get the job as a steward aboard the Titanic?’ There was a challenging tone in her voice, a come-on-then-genius tone. It sounded almost spiteful.
‘Well, I …’ Liam shrugged, expecting the memory to come along at his will. But there was nothing. Nothing at all. Had he just walked aboard and asked for a job? Had it been that easy? He reached further into his mind, assuming, hoping, this was just a mental blip – going blank because she was pressuring him, goading him. He tried to rewind his mind. The night the ship went down, the screaming, the panic. He recalled a gentleman calmly drinking cognac in the reading room, preferring drunken oblivion to drowning soberly. A girl left to die with him because she was in a wheelchair. He recalled an hour earlier, the ship jolting in the night, crockery lurching off dining tables and smashing on the floor.
Further still. He recalled the day before. A normal day as a ship’s steward. The routine: up at five, cabin-service breakfasts for those that had ordered it. Cleaning the rooms during the morning. Filling in as a waiter for the midday meal and the evening meal. Then cabin-service teas and suppers served until ten in the evening, then collapsing wearily into his bunk in a small cabin shared with three other men. A typical steward’s day.
Then back further.
But nothing. It was like the blackness after the end titles of a movie. Void. White noise. Nothing.
‘I …’ His mouth hung open until finally it snapped shut with a wet clup.
‘I’m so sorry, Liam,’ whispered Maddy. ‘So sorry.’
‘No! Wait! What about me parents! My family! I remember them!’
‘Go on then, Liam. Tell me about them.’
‘Me ma, me da … they were …’ He closed his eyes. But he could manage to conjure up only one decent mental image of them. Just one. And that was a photograph. Just one faded, sepia-coloured image.
‘What about your home? You said it was Cork, wasn’t it?’
Cork in Ireland. Could he even recall whereabouts they lived in that city? No, not really. He just knew the name. He could conjure up no more than a couple of images of the place – the docks, St Fin Barre’s Cathedral, St Patrick’s Street – and that was about it. Again, almost as if they were mere photographs pulled from some photo archive somewhere.
‘Ah … Jay-zus …’ he whispered.
‘It’s just the same for me,’ said Maddy softly. She sat down beside him. ‘Bits and pieces. Like somebody just googled up a whole bunch of pictures, music, films, news, clothes, computer games, TV shows from the year 2010 and made me out of all of that.’ She wiped a tear off her cheek. ‘You know what my mind is? It’s the search results you get back if you do a “things you might find in the year 2010” search on whatever passes for the Internet …’ She shrugged. ‘From whatever frikkin’ year we actually come from.’
‘Do you think we’ve got computers in our heads too?’ asked Sal.
‘Maybe I’ll stick my head in an X-ray machine sometime and find out,’ Maddy replied, wiping a snotty nose. She laughed. ‘Maybe not. Last thing I want to know is that there’s nothing in my skull but a rat’s brain linked to a sim card.’ She looked apologetically at Bob. ‘No offence.’
Bob shrugged. ‘I cannot be offended.’
‘And the difference is that we can,’ said Maddy, finding a hint of a smile. ‘So maybe we’re different somehow. Clones, but maybe we’re more human or something.’
Sal nodded. She was looking down at her hands in her lap. ‘I just … I just can’t believe we never worked this out. I mean …’ She looked up at them. ‘When we woke up in the archway, how come none of us thought to ask why we didn’t see a portal when we were recruited?’
‘Exactly.’ Maddy got to her feet. ‘So why didn’t they put a portal memory into our heads? Why make that mistake?’
‘Perhaps …’ Rashim cut in, clearing his throat. ‘Perhaps they hadn’t yet perfected the portal system while they were writing your memories?’
The others looked at him accusingly. ‘Thanks for your input, human!’ snapped Sal.
He raised his hands apologetically. ‘Just saying.’
‘No.’ Maddy shook her head. ‘Rashim’s right. Maybe that’s why they, he, Waldstein … whoever made us was still putting it all together. Maybe they were doing it in a hurry. I guess if we all think hard, we’d find other little errors in there.’
‘My blue bear,’ whispered Sal to herself. She addressed the others. ‘I remembered a bear, a soft toy, in Mumbai … but it was exactly the same bear in the window of that shop in Brooklyn.’ She shook her head. ‘Someone … someone who made us must have seen it in the window, and thought it would make a nice little detail to put into my … life.’ Her voice hitched. ‘Nice tou
ch,’ she hissed.
The room was quiet for a while, the three of them silently trawling through their minds, sorting memories into piles of true and false – sorting them into before and after their recruitment.
Finally Liam spoke. ‘I get it now.’
He looked at Bob, arms crossed and eyes lost in the shadow of a neolithic brow, and Becks sitting beside him slight and wraithlike, with wide, vacant, dumb-animal eyes.
‘Meatbots, eh? Bleedin’ marvellous.’
Chapter 35
2055, W.G. Systems Research Campus, near Pinedale, Wyoming
It was late in the day. Joseph Olivera had decided to stay overnight on the grounds of the W.G. Systems research compound to eat in the staff canteen and sleep in the cot in the adjoining office area. The synthi-soya gunk they served up in there almost tasted like real food. Better than the cartons of gunk he had in his apartment’s refrigerator.
Anyway, it was beginning to get dark outside and he didn’t fancy taking his Auto-Drive along the winding wooded road down to Pinedale. There were more and more vagrants drifting westward from the eastern states and he knew for certain many of them were camping out there in the woods. He’d heard some of the W.G. techies talking about several more roadside hold-ups in the last week. In most cases it was just the desperate and hungry after a little money, not exactly asking … but … in most cases the hold-up ended as a palm-transaction of whatever digi-dollars you had on account and they’d let you pass through unharmed.
Desperate times for some. No. Desperate times for many.
He felt uncomfortable anyway, leaving the lab. He’d set things in motion. Sown seeds. As a last-minute thing, he’d ended up slipping a hastily scribbled note addressed to the Maddy unit into the embryo box that Waldstein had taken back to San Francisco. And now he was beginning to panic, wondering whether he’d been stupid. There was no knowing for sure when, or even if, the team back in 2001 were going to discover the note, whether they were going to question the base office. If a message did come through from them, through that scrap of old paper, he wanted to intercept it before Waldstein saw it.
It was a relief right now that the old man was away in Denver on business. Olivera felt a mixture of guilt for betraying the man, and a desperate fear of him. Griggs … he still wasn’t certain one way or the other about poor Frasier’s fate. Perhaps his paranoia was getting the better of him; perhaps the poor fellow had just been unlucky.
The Saleena unit had been inserted back in the past now. And it wouldn’t be long before her curious mind started picking away at the tiny new details edited into her consciousness. Between that bit of memory surgery and his handwritten note, Joseph felt he’d done as much as he could to unbalance things. Those three young clones weren’t stupid. Far from it. Together, they were going to figure this all out one way or the other. Eventually.
And now perhaps he needed to find a way out for himself. Handing in his notice wasn’t exactly going to wash with Waldstein. As the man had told him: ‘Once you’re in, Joseph, you’re in. Do you understand?’
Perhaps he could plead mental exhaustion. Perhaps he could tell Waldstein he was beginning to make mistakes and it might be best if he took some kind of sabbatical? That sounded lame even before he tried saying it. He was so busy trying to find some way of phrasing a way to ask Waldstein to let him go that he failed to hear the soft scrape of a foot in the doorway. Olivera lurched suspiciously in his chair, like some mischievous little boy caught with his fingers in a sweetie jar.
‘Joseph.’
It was Waldstein. Olivera felt his heart pounding in his chest. He hadn’t been expecting the man to return this evening. ‘Mr … Mr Waldstein. I … I thought you were still in Denver on business.’
‘Indeed.’ Waldstein’s cool eyes remained on him.
Olivera looked away. Found something for his fidgeting hands to fiddle with on his desk. ‘All … all s-sorted, then? The business?’
‘Not really, no. I had to come back here early.’
Oliver nodded. ‘Oh?’ The old man looked tired, sad. ‘Everything all right, Mr Waldstein?’
‘No, Joseph. Not all right.’
No explanation. Just that. Olivera felt panic growing inside him. He dared not say anything in case his stutter betrayed him.
‘I know,’ said Waldstein after several interminable seconds.
‘Know? Uh … know … know what?’
Waldstein shook his head slowly, the gesture very much like a father’s disappointment with an errant child. ‘I know you’ve been tampering with things.’
Olivera felt his stomach flop queasily. ‘T-tamper?’
‘You’ve edited the memories of Saleena. You added something to the unit that was sent back.’ Waldstein noticed the faintest involuntary flicker of reaction on Joseph’s face. ‘Yes, Joseph … I’ve had the database tagged to alert me for updates to the source archive.’ He spread his hands in a vaguely apologetic way. ‘After Frasier let me down, I figured it might be prudent to keep a closer eye on you also.’
‘I … I … needed to just … tidy up s-s-some continuity faults.’
‘Please, Joseph …’ he said, stepping into the lab and finding a seat to ease himself down into. ‘Please don’t lie to me. I’m too tired for that now.’ He sighed. ‘You’ve not been fixing memory mismatches. You’ve added new content to her mind.’
Olivera couldn’t help his jaw sagging. Perhaps that was less an admission of guilt than stuttering a denial at him.
‘Why did you add the visual memory of a tumbling teddy bear to her recruitment memory, Joseph? Why?’ Waldstein’s eyes narrowed. ‘What are you trying to tell her?’
The bear. Olivera realized Waldstein must have actually viewed the visual insert: the image of the blue bear tumbling end over end, almost defying gravity. So very deliberately conspicuous. The kind of visual image that would stick in a mind.
‘It’s a trigger memory, isn’t it?’
Olivera felt his cheeks burn with shame. His face, his demeanour, his awkward shuffling were screaming his guilt out loud and, of course, Waldstein knew what he’d been up to anyway … if not the precise reason why.
‘Yes,’ Joseph said eventually.
‘Joseph?’ Waldstein said softly. ‘Talk to me. Why the trigger memory?’
Olivera looked up at him.
He’d noticed the bear back in 2001, while he and Frasier had been setting the field office up. That curious antique shop not so far away had provided him with some of the props he’d needed to validate their various recruitment memories; the Titanic steward’s uniform had given him the idea of setting Liam’s recruitment aboard that famous doomed ship. A perfect recruitment fable. There’d been other things in various other shops that had helped him author appropriate life stories for each of them: the dark hoody with splashes of neon-orange Hindi-graffiti, that T-shirt with the Intel logo. Real things that would exist with them as they woke up in the archway. Real, tangible items that would help all three engineered units bond with their carefully scripted memories.
The bear … adding that bear to the replacement Saleena unit’s memory was adding something that couldn’t possibly be. The same bear in both places: Brooklyn 2001, Mumbai 2026. A clear, unambiguous impossibility.
A trigger.
‘Why, Joseph?’
‘Why?’ Olivera felt slightly emboldened. His game was up. No more lying. Somehow so very liberating. ‘Let me ask you that, s-sir. Why?’
Waldstein frowned. ‘Why what?’
‘Why do you want mankind to destroy itself?’
‘What the hell are you talking about, Joseph?’
‘I know … I know about Pandora.’
The word caused Waldstein to shift uneasily.
‘I know it’s s-some kind of codeword you have, isn’t it? A codeword for the end of mankind. The day … the precise date we destroy ourselves. That’s it, isn’t it?’
‘This has come from Frasier, hasn’t it? This is his nonsense, isn’t it?
’
‘Pandora. The end of the world … that’s what you s-saw, isn’t it?’
‘What I saw?’
There was something comforting about unburdening himself like this. Olivera realized he was already so far over a certain invisible line that there was nothing he could say that was going to make any difference now. Either he was going to be instantly dismissed from the project, escorted out of the compound … or … or perhaps worse.
‘You’re actually asking me what I saw back in 2044?’ Waldstein eyed him cautiously. ‘Is that what you’re asking me? What I saw that very first time?’
Olivera nodded hesitantly. ‘You … you didn’t … go back in time, did you? You didn’t go back to s-see your … wife, your s-son?’
Waldstein shook his head slowly. ‘Oh, Joseph … please don’t ask me what I saw.’
‘You went forward. You went forward in time. You …’
‘What?’ He smiled. ‘I went forward in time to see if mankind makes it through these hard times? To see if mankind is as stupid and self-destructive as it appears to be?’
Olivera nodded.
‘And what? All this?’ He gestured at the small lab. ‘This project of ours, the businesses I’ve built up, the technology companies I’ve been acquiring, buying, the billions of dollars I’ve made … all of this, just to make sure it happens? Just to make certain mankind wipes itself out?’ Waldstein’s voice rose in pitch. A note of incredulity. ‘Are you seriously suggesting all of that is so I can ensure the end of the road for mankind?’
Olivera nodded again.
‘Oh, Joseph …’ That look of disappointment on his face again. He eased himself up off the seat. ‘You have no idea. Not even the slightest idea. God help me! I’m not trying to destroy us … I’m trying to save us.’ He sighed as he stepped back towards the lab’s doorway. ‘Or at least save what I can of us … what there is to save.’