by Alex Scarrow
She adjusted the cuffs of her jacket. Her hair was growing in quickly – still boyishly short, though. But now, with a vaguely feminine fringe of dark hair and office clothes Cooper had bought her from JC Penney, she almost looked like your typical Wall Street go-to girl: hard-faced, ambitious and smartly turned out.
‘In only twenty-five years from now there will be nine billion human beings attempting to exist on a diminishing resource-poor land mass. The arithmetic is inevitable, and was always entirely predictable, Cooper. Even now there are scientists that are accurately predicting mankind’s fate.’
‘Which is what?’
She shrugged. ‘You will destroy yourselves.’
He puffed his cheeks. ‘That’s, uh … that’s pretty grim.’
‘It is what will happen.’
‘Jeez, I bet you’re a blast at parties.’
She cocked an eyebrow. ‘I don’t understand the relevance or intended meaning of that comment.’
‘Never mind.’
Just then the door into the main office swung inwards with a bang. Cooper jerked and spilled coffee on to the crisp white cuff of his shirt. He saw Mallard’s face across a chest-high maze of vacant office cubicles.
‘Christ, Mallard! You made me jump!’
‘Sir! Sir!’
‘What the hell is it?’
Mallard picked his way through, past an empty watercooler that hadn’t been used in years, past desks with dust-covered computers that, if someone actually bothered to switch them on, they’d find still ran on Windows 95.
‘Sir,’ he said, breathless, as he finally stood in front of Cooper and Faith. ‘We’ve got a solid lead. Some small-town sheriff reckons he’s ID’ed one of the images we put up on the Bureau’s Most Wanted site.’
‘Where?’
Mallard looked down at a Post-it note in his hand. ‘They’re in Ohio. Someplace called Harcourt. It’s some has-been town. Used to have several auto-parts factories. They’re all closed down now. Mothballed.’
‘Hang on.’ Cooper looked at Faith. ‘That’s what you suggested, wasn’t it? They’d go to ground someplace like that? Quiet. Out of the way …?’
‘With access to a source of electricity and required technical components.’ She nodded and almost smiled. ‘It is what I would do.’
Chapter 49
8 October 2001, Green Acres Elementary School, Harcourt, Ohio
‘But it’s going to be dangerous, isn’t it?’ Sal looked at Becks. She was no taller or bulkier than any normal twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl. But she, like Bob, was originally engineered for military purposes, a killing machine; if she got the idea into her head while Bob was not around, there’d not be much of any of them left.
Maddy clucked her tongue. ‘I’ve got no idea how she’ll behave. But if she bugs out on us, we’ve got Bob right here to restrain her, or …’
‘Kill her?’
‘Look … it won’t come to that, I’m sure. More likely she’ll just swoon and pine for Liam like some pathetic fangirl.’
Sal snorted. That was kind of funny despite the seriousness of the situation. ‘But why now? Why don’t we wait until we’re settled in London?’
‘I’m not sure we’re going to have enough power back in 1888 to sustain our back-up frozen embryos. Once we go through to the past, we may not be able to regrow replacement support units. It might be just Bob and Becks … one of each. We lose them, we won’t have any back-up support units to grow.’
‘What about the San Francisco drop point?’
Maddy shook her head. ‘I don’t think it would be a good idea going anywhere near there. They’ve got to be watching that place now. No … it would be dumb for us to go back there.’
Sal nodded.
‘We can take the foetuses with us, just in case there’s some way we can find a way to grow new support units if needed. But, really, I think we need to sort Becks out now, once and for all. We need both our support units fully loaded and functional.’ She turned to them both. ‘Once we go back, we may have to ditch our embryos and that means no more support units. We’ll have to rely indefinitely on these two. Which is why … we need to test her mind out now, Sal, while we’ve got a chance here in 2001 to grow a new one from scratch if … you know … this doesn’t work out. Anyway,’ she added, ‘while Liam’s in London it might be easier. We don’t want Becks hurling herself his way and slobbering all over him.’
Sal curled her lip. An ‘eww’ written all over her face.
Maddy pulled a hard drive out of her duffel bag. Masking tape with ‘Becks’ felt-tipped across it. Becks’s complete, original consciousness, her mind, right there in a hard plastic case. Maddy held it up. ‘You ready for this, Becks?’
‘Affirmative. I am ready.’
‘All right, then.’ Maddy wasn’t entirely sure this was the sensible thing to do. But what was locked away on there, in an encrypted folder, was knowledge that was far too important to remain there forever … a decoded portion of the Holy Grail. A message sent by someone, quite possibly the previous team. Quite possibly a previous version of Maddy herself. And God knows what the message was. Another warning like that scribbled Pandora one? But whoever had sent the message from two thousand years ago, they’d thought to pass along an instruction to Becks to keep the secret locked away until certain unspecified conditions were met. And now all of that was sitting on an external hard drive: on a piece of hardware that was unable to process these thoughts; on hardware that was merely able to store them. They needed Becks’s knowledge, her memories installed back on-board a support-unit mind where, hopefully someday soon, Becks would be able to announce that these mysterious ‘conditions’ had been met, and let Maddy know what the big secret was.
And now they were acting entirely on their own, beyond the agency’s original remit, Maddy realized they had twice as much need to know what dark secret had been transported across a thousand years of Roman history and the Dark Ages, across another thousand years of Holy Grail history for their eyes only.
A warning? A truth? A threat? A revelation?
‘Come on, then,’ she said. ‘This won’t do itself.’
Chapter 50
8 October 2001, Green Acres Elementary School, Harcourt, Ohio
It took Maddy half an hour to successfully connect the hard drive to the networked computers. The new PCs had a different method of logging the hard-drive idents, which meant computer-Bob had some data-shuffling to do before he could get the underlying DOS code to recognize the hard drives, and this external one, under their original ident tags.
Presently, Becks closed her eyes. The influx of new data being Bluetoothed into her mind was an odd sensation. One, of course, she’d had before as Bob had worked with her, slowly bringing her mind up to speed with his. But that had been a trickle. This was a flood. The nearest sensory equivalent was like having ice-cold liquid injected into an artery, feeling it spread, branch, travel … envelop.
There were duplicated memories among the incoming data. Memories she’d already inherited once before from Bob. Memories of memories. Then there were her very own memories: recollections of dinosaurs and jungles. Liam … and an emergent mind-state for him – a feeling – that she’d labelled and carefully put to one side. In her mind she saw medieval towns and castles, Prince John, ridiculously besotted with her. A battle … the siege of Nottingham: ranks of glinting armour and flapping banners shifting in the heat haze of a summer’s day. A remote monastery, a monk called Cabot.
And then an ancient scroll of parchment. Becks recalled leaning over it and, by the dim, flickering light of the archway, moving a deciphering ‘grille’ across faded ink nearly a thousand years old. She could see herself writing down the letters on a pad of lined paper. Then, the decoding complete, starting to read it.
Then the discontinuity. Whatever she’d read had included an instruction that locked it all away into one part of her mind.
After that her memories were of the archway dropping, lite
rally, into a war zone. A destroyed America tearing itself apart. She remembered the one-sided battle. Skies filled with giant airships, and hulking behemoths, engineered monsters, ascending the slope of a battlefield and dropping down into their trenches. Butchery. Blood. The dismembered ruins of bodies cluttering the floor of a trench.
She recalled taking one of those giant beasts down. Staring closely into its eyes as it lay dying and seeing what looked like a plea for death: End me.
And then she’d found a heavy machine gun and fired it from the hip until its spinning barrels had overheated and locked. She remembered a dozen gunshot and bayonet wounds, her body’s enhanced biochemistry rushing to fight fires, to clog arteries and preserve a dwindling reserve of blood. But slowly losing the struggle.
Then that final lucky gunshot. The ricochet of a bullet inside her cranium, a glancing blow off the silicon in her head followed by a complete and instant shutdown.
‘Becks?’ Maddy’s voice sounded distant. A cry from the end of an impossibly long tunnel. ‘You OK?’
[System Update Complete]
Nanoseconds that felt like minutes passed in her mind, an almost reassuring pause. It appeared that the intelligence that had existed before her shutdown and death was actually largely undamaged and fully functional, but then …
[Warning: System Conflict]
Becks’s breath caught in her throat. At the very base level of her digital mind two insistent lines of programming, two distinct imperatives, were firmly at odds with each other. Commands issued by two different individuals and embedded in her, each as unavoidably authoritative as a command from God Himself might be to a holy man. One recent – Madelaine Carter’s new mission statement: The end must be prevented. And the other one much, much older. She realized that certain unlock conditions must have been satisfied. Whatever those conditions were, the part of her AI sectioned off and responsible for being the gatekeeper code had clearly decided, rightly or wrongly, that the gate could be cracked ajar.
And it opened the door on conflicting instructions she was struggling to resolve. Because the other imperative, the other mission statement released from captivity, was quite the opposite.
The end must be allowed to happen.
And those words had come from nearly two thousand years ago.
More to the point, they were Liam’s instructions. His words. Not Maddy’s.There was more. Much more in there. Her mind queried this conflict between Maddy’s mission statement and the other from antiquity, Liam’s, but the gatekeeper code refused her entry to that part of her hard drive. The explanation was in there, but not available. Not yet.
[Resolve Conflict]
Becks was on her own. She was going to have to choose between Liam and Maddy. But she realized that was a problem her mind had already been quietly working on. She had the recent mission reappraisal from Madelaine Carter complete with a perfectly logical justification: Waldstein’s initial mission parameters could no longer be trusted. The man was quite clearly insane and bent on seeing mankind destroy itself. But she also had just one sentence from Liam. A future Liam. And no justification or explanation to go along with it.
[Resolve Conflict]
1. Carter imperative – logical validation
2. O’Connor imperative – none
She located a thought buried in her head like a prehistoric mosquito entombed in amber. A frozen decision, an instruction code with an internal time tag attached to it. It was a moment of thought that had occurred in an eye-blink, fifty-nine nanoseconds after a single British bullet had penetrated her skull and fluked a glancing impact on her computer chip. Her dying mind had attempted to unlock the secrets in that portion of her drive, to propagate the data stored there elsewhere in case of damage to that partition. The gatekeeper code must have agreed this emergency measure was valid and the process had just begun … when she’d ‘died’.
And there it was – just one command from Liam with no sensible explanation to back it up. All there was to lend it authority, credence … was that it was an older Liam with knowledge of what destiny lay ahead of them all. And logic dictated that a future Liam would have the benefit of hindsight; a future Liam’s command must exceed Maddy’s authority now. However, Becks’s scrambled, dying mind had turned that logical statement that future-Liam’s command must be trusted … into love.
‘Becks? Talk to us, goddammit! You OK?’ That voice again. Still far away, but a little closer now. Becks opened her eyes. She saw Maddy, Sal and Bob staring at her, a concerned expression on all their faces.
‘How do you feel?’
‘I now have near full recollection,’ she replied coolly. Her gaze met Bob’s. ‘My own memories are restored. I calculate 6.7 per cent data corruption.’
‘That is better than our original simulated estimate,’ rumbled Bob.
‘What about Liam?’
She looked at Maddy. ‘What do you wish to know, Madelaine?’
‘When we ran the software simulation of your mind on the computer system, you said something very odd about him. Do you remember what you said?’
‘Information: it was read-only,’ said Bob. ‘She would not remember the simulation as her mind-state was not stored.’
‘Oh yeah. Of course.’ Maddy rolled her eyes at her own stupidity. ‘Of course. OK, then … uh, let’s try a different approach. Let me see …’
Sal stepped in. ‘Becks, tell us how you feel about Liam.’
[Recommended Answers]
1. I am presently confused by undefinable variables
2. I love him. Love him! LOVE HIM!
3. He is my operative
She offered the third answer and that seemed to please all three of them.
Maddy grinned with relief. She patted Becks affectionately. ‘It’s really good to have you back again.’
‘Thank you,’ she replied, smiling. ‘It is good to be fully functional again.’
Chapter 51
5 December 1888, Holborn Viaduct, London
‘Do you hear that, Liam?’ Rashim tapped the brick wall again. They both heard the faint clatter and rustle of loose mortar dropping on the far side.
‘It sounds like there’s a hollow there.’
Rashim nodded. ‘That’s got to be it – the conduit.’
‘Well done, skippa!’ chirped SpongeBubba. Above the lab unit’s goofy grin, its small gherkin-shaped nose wobbled slightly as it fidgeted from foot to foot.
Liam, Rashim and SpongeBubba had settled into their viaduct archway – the dungeon they were calling it now – a few days ago and all three had been kept busy. Rashim had figured out a way to make them some money. Obvious really. So obvious the entire team had collectively, figuratively palmed their foreheads when he’d mentioned it.
Gambling. More specifically, card games. Every public house seemed to have a room at the back, thick with pipe smoke, where a ‘gambling party’ had gathered: working men who were stupid enough to lose their wages night after night. Rashim and Liam had played faro several nights on the trot, learning how to count the cards, and Rashim calculating the odds. There was also hazard, which relied purely on chance, and a game they avoided like the plague. Chance wasn’t any good to them.
After four consecutive nights of winning at several different gatherings, they were beginning to be recognized. Liam suggested any further money they’d need to make might be best earned placing bets on horses. A little trip of a few weeks into the future would give them the names of every winning horse in the country. Once they were all properly settled, that was going to be the first order of business.
With some money to tide them over, Liam had been busy buying some furnishings and comforts. There were plenty of pawnshops and second-hand furniture shops nearby in Holborn. It also gave him a chance to find his way around this part of London. To drink in and learn the finer nuances of London life in this time.
This morning, though, their attention had turned to the task of hooking into the source of electric power that w
as chugging away close by. They’d been digging small ‘sample’ holes along the back wall all morning. At first where they’d expected to find the narrow space according to the blueprints Maddy had printed out for them. And then, when it became clear the blueprints weren’t entirely accurate, at random intervals along the wall.
Rashim worked the tip of his screwdriver along the mortar around a loose brick. This time, finally, it looked like they’d found the narrow voids beyond; they could hear the hollow echo of skittering rats, the tap and echo of grit and mortar falling off the brick wall on the far side. The mortar was like clay.
‘Not very good,’ he said. ‘The building contractor must have been using a cheap mix.’
The brick shifted. It was loose enough now to remove with his fingers. He pulled it free. Liam flipped on a torch and shone it through the small hole in the wall into the darkness beyond. They could make out a passage about a yard wide and only the same again high.
Rashim cursed. ‘I was actually hoping it was tall enough to be a walk space.’
Liam studied the floor of the passageway, littered with rat droppings. ‘It’s a crawl space,’ he said. He grimaced. ‘And it’s covered in rat poo.’
‘Great.’
They eased another dozen bricks out and widened the hole. Rashim consulted the blueprint by the light of Liam’s torch. ‘Twenty, maybe thirty metres down there, and that takes us very, very close to where the generator is supposed to be located.’
Liam took off his thick felt coat and began to unbutton his waistcoat.
Rashim sighed. ‘No, maybe … I should go. If they’ve used this conduit for laying down cables then it’s best I take a look at them.’