by Alex Scarrow
‘Yes! He’s probably more scared of you than you are of — ’
‘Oh — ’ Liam shook his head vigorously — ‘I, uh… I very much doubt that.’
‘See? He’s just checking you out,’ said Franklyn, slowly stepping forward to join Liam and Becks. ‘Hey there, big man!’ he cooed softly. ‘It’s OK, we’re not carnivores.’
‘Well, actually, I am,’ said Whitmore. ‘A little veal and a nice bottle of Sancerre on a Saturday night.’
Small beady black eyes, in a rounded head not much bigger than a cider keg, studied Liam intently. Its nostrils flared for a moment as it inhaled the curious new smell of humans, then curiosity compelled it to take a solitary step forward. Liam felt the ground beneath his feet shudder.
‘Oh, he likes you, man,’ called out Juan.
Liam felt a fetid blast of warm air across his face and closed his eyes as the dinosaur’s head moved even closer. ‘ Ohh… I’m not happy about this,’ he hissed out of the side of his mouth. Thick leathery lips the size of an automobile tyre probed his face, then moved up to explore the intriguing texture of his dark hair.
‘Oh, he really likes you, man. Want us to leave you two alone?’ chuckled Juan.
‘Hair,’ said Whitmore. ‘That’s an evolutionary step that’s millions of years away for this creature. The texture of it must be fascinating to him.’
Liam felt a sharp tug on his scalp. ‘Ow! Well, he’s bleedin’ well eating it now, so he is!’ He slapped at the creature’s mouth. ‘ Hey! Ouch! Let go! Becks! Help!’
Becks reacted swiftly. She stepped towards him and swung a fist at the alamosaurus’s nose. The blow smacked heavily against the leathery skin and with a roar of pain and horror the giant let go of Liam. Its thick muscular neck reared up suddenly, a tree-felling in reverse, and it let loose a deafening bellow that reminded Liam of the dying groans of the Titanic ’s hull. The air vibrated with its startled roar.
Liam clasped his hands over his ears to protect his rattling eardrums, as the cry spread across the plain from one giant herbivore to the next. The alamosaur stumbled back from them on its tree-trunk legs, turning in a long cumbersome arc, and began to shamble away in a loping slow-motion run that felt through the ground like the early tremors of an earthquake.
‘Oh, great!’ shouted Franklyn. ‘Now you started a stampede!’
The calm scene of moments ago, a vista of leviathans grazing peacefully across the open plain, had been instantly transformed into a deafening display of motion and panic. Liam watched the smaller species of plant-eaters scrambling to avoid being stampeded by the other alamosaurs darting into the islands of trees and ferns for cover.
‘Whoa!’ Juan was doubling up with excited laughter. ‘Those alamo things are real chickens, man! Look at the suckers go!’
Amid the confusion of movement and kicked-up dust Liam caught sight of something else. Dark shapes behind them, half a mile away, smaller than any of the other species out on the plain. Just a glimpse of them, a second, no more. Then they were gone to ground, hidden among the knee-high tufts of olive-coloured grass scattered in threadbare clumps across the open plain.
Liam turned to ask if anyone else had seen them, but the others were still marvelling at the sight of an entire food chain on the move, a thunderous spectacle of swaying folds of leathery skin and sinews taut with panic.
He turned back to look again. Nothing. As if the dark shapes had never ever existed.
What the heck are those?
Vanished like skeins of dark smoke, like that ghostly seeker.
Or am I losing me mind now?
It was fully five minutes before some semblance of calm returned to the area; the various species of herbivores gathered in a worried-looking cluster a mile away. Tall necks protruded from the pack standing fully erect, watching them from afar like impossibly large meerkats.
‘Oh, that was fun,’ said Laura. ‘Can we go do it again?’
Liam looked at Becks. Her face was folded with a confused expression. ‘Becks? What’s the matter?’
She looked down at her fist, still balled up. ‘I did not hit it very hard.’
‘You must have hit a sensitive spot,’ said Whitmore.
They made their way across the plain towards the coastline on the horizon, most of the time with Franklyn complaining about how Becks had ruined his chance to study the creatures up close. By noon they were standing among a scattering of boulders and looking at a broad beach of dark coarse sand and a tranquil tropical ocean sending gently lapping waves of surf up the shingle and back down again with a soothing hiss.
‘So?’ said Liam.
Becks studied the view for a long moment, her eyes narrowed. ‘Twenty-one miles north-east of our current location.’
Liam grimaced. ‘So then it’s underwater, is it?’
‘Negative,’ she replied, pointing at the horizon ahead of them. ‘This is a large bay. Observe the horizon.’
Liam looked again, squinting. Then he saw it: a pale line of low humps on the horizon that he’d earlier assumed were clouds. Following the uneven grey-blue line to the left he could see it becoming more distinct as it drew closer. The broad beach they were looking along seemed to promise that it was angling gradually towards the distant spur of land and, if they were patient enough with it, it would link up with the spur eventually.
‘Recommendation: we follow the beach around to the landmass ahead.’
Liam nodded at the low hump of land. ‘Is that the place we need to be?’
She nodded. ‘Information: the distance of the landmass is nine point seven six miles.’
Whitmore nodded. ‘Then that spur has to be it, right? That’s what will one day be the fossil bed.’
Becks nodded slowly. ‘Information: a ninety-three per cent probability you are correct.’
‘My God,’ he said, scratching his beard. ‘Who knows? Some of the footprints we’ll see along the beach over there might just end up being some of the fossils we’ve seen in museums in our time?’ His eyes widened and he shook his head incredulously. ‘Isn’t that the craziest idea?’ He slapped Liam on the shoulder. ‘Time travel must drive you insane if you think about it too much.’
Liam cocked an eyebrow. ‘Oh, I’ve had my share of headaches thinking on it, so I have.’
They stepped forward, down through the boulders and on to the coarse shingle. ‘This is good,’ said Becks to Liam, pointing at the beach. ‘We are not leaving tracks.’
He looked down. She was right. The beach wasn’t sand, it was a coarse gravel that clacked and shifted wetly underfoot, but left nothing as clear as a print behind them.
‘Oh, good.’ He nodded. ‘So there you go — something to put a smile on your face, then?’
She gave that some thought. ‘This is minimizing our overall contamination liability.’ Her gaze shifted from their feet back up to him. ‘Correct. That makes me… happy.’
‘There you go, you miserable sod,’ he replied cheerfully. ‘Things are looking up. We’ll be home soon enough.’
They clattered down through the wet shingle until the first warm waves of tropical water hissed up to and around their feet. Up ahead the others had decided to wade knee-deep into the sea and were splashing each other noisily. She pursed her lips in thought as she watched them, a curious gesture she must have picked up from one of the girls, Liam decided. A gesture that Bob’s muscular face would have struggled to reproduce. ‘If we successfully complete the mission, Liam O’Connor, and we return to the field office, do you intend to retire me?’
‘Retire? What do you mean?’
‘Terminate this body and replace it with a male support unit? I heard Sal Vikram refer to this organic frame as a “mistake”.’
He’d not given it much thought. Becks was Sal’s error — she’d not bothered to check the gender marker on the containment tube — and they’d not had time to consider growing another. But certainly neither Maddy nor Sal had mentioned terminating her and disposing of her body.
‘Why would we want to go and do that, Becks?’
‘The male support frame is eighty-seven per cent more effective than the female frame as a combat unit.’
‘All right, maybe that’s true, but why’d the agency give us female babies as well, then?’
‘Female support frames can be useful for covert operations where a female cover is required.’
He scratched his head. ‘Well now, I really don’t see why we can’t have one of each of you, you know? A Bob and a Becks. There’re no agency rules, are there, you know, against us having two support units in a team?’
‘Negative. I am not aware of any agency rules on that.’
‘So, well, there you are… why not? We’ll have two of you instead of one.’
They walked in silence for a while, Liam intrigued by how human her question had sounded.
‘Have I functioned as efficiently as the Bob unit?’ she asked after a while.
‘Yes, of course. I don’t know what we’d have done without you so far. But you know it’s still so very weird. Aren’t you actually Bob anyway? Or at least a copy of Bob in a different skin?’
‘Negative. My AI has adapted enough since being copied to be considered a different AI ident. I have experienced data that Bob has not. Also, the organic brain that is interfaced with the AI is genetically different between the male and female support frames.’
‘Right. But… you remember being Bob, right?’
‘Of course. I recall all the incidents of our first mission, right up until the moment you removed my chip.’
Liam wished he couldn’t remember that as well. ‘Ugghh. Not something I’d like to do again in a hurry.’
‘You successfully preserved the AI. It contained six months of adaptive learning,’ she replied. ‘Both Bob and I are six months closer to fully emulating human behaviour. We are both grateful.’
He shrugged modestly. ‘Oh, you know, it’s nothing. Just part of the job.’
‘I am able to kiss you,’ she said. ‘This would be an appropriate gesture of gratitude. I have data.’
She began puckering her lips and Liam felt that odd conflicted sensation he’d felt after they’d first arrived in 2015: a tingling excitement offset with a sense of revulsion.
Bob, in a girl suit… remember.
‘Uh… that’s OK, Becks. A thanks is more than good enough.’
‘Affirmative. As you wish.’
‘Anyway, where the hell did you learn about kissing?’
‘I have a detailed description from a book I was reading while I was installed in the mainframe.’
‘Eh? What sort of books have you been reading?’
‘The book is entitled Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A novel. The digital file is in early twenty-first century PDF format. The file’s original replication date is — ’
‘Hold on,’ said Liam, stopping. ‘Do you have that file in your database still?’
She nodded. ‘My reading was interrupted. I wished to complete it. So I added it to my short-term cache.’
‘And would Bob also have the exact same file on the computer system?’
‘Of course.’
His mouth hung open. ‘There’s the code, then! Right there! That’s the code you could use! Isn’t it?’
Her eyelids fluttered as she processed the thought. ‘You are talking of a book code?’
‘That’s right, a Harry-Whatever-mijingamy book code.’
CHAPTER 41
65 million years BC, jungle
Howard noticed the young boy walking alongside him, sloshing through the warm seawater.
‘Hey,’ he said.
Edward smiled. ‘Hey. You always called Leonard, or do your friends call you Lenny?’
Howard shrugged; not a question he’d anticipated being asked. ‘Uh
… mostly just Leonard,’ he replied. ‘My mom calls me Lenny, but I hate that.’
‘I heard someone say your best subject is math.’
He nodded. ‘It was my — ’ He stopped, inwardly cursing. ‘It… is… my favourite school subject. Always loved math. It’s like, well, I dunno… I suppose it’s like a sort of poetry that only a few people get. If you know what I mean? It’s, like, exclusive.’
Chan nodded. ‘Yeah, I know what you mean. That’s why I like it. It’s something I know and other people don’t. It makes me feel kind of special, I guess. Maybe that’s why I don’t have any friends at school, cos they think I’m odd.’
Howard nodded. ‘Yeah, I guess I’m the same. A loner.’ He squinted up at the bright sun. ‘Never ever get picked for sports, because I’m the geek.’ He shrugged. ‘But that’s OK, cos I never liked sports anyway.’
Edward nodded. ‘Me neither. It’s for jocks and ditto-heads.’
‘Ditto-heads?’ Howard laughed. ‘I like it.’
‘You never heard that expression?’
Not in my time, he almost answered. But instead he just shook his head.
‘Hey!’ said Edward suddenly, and bent down to scoop up a curious twisted ammonite shell from the shingle.
‘See? There are even bigger ones of those,’ said Howard, nodding at some of the others, wading waist deep in the clear blue water, occasionally ducking down to pull shells out of the water to admire them.
They walked on in silence for a while, going a little further into the warm water. Up ahead, leading the way and deep in conversation, Howard could see the two ‘agents’ — Liam and his robo-girl. He shook his head at the irony of it. Despite their turning up in 2015 to ‘save’ Chan, they were all on the same side really, all trying to prevent the nightmare of time-travel technology from destroying the world. Same goal… different methods. He wondered how he’d never come across this agency in all the years of his campaigning, all the rallies and protests he’d been to… and no one, no one, had ever suggested, even as a joke, that there might be an agency out there actually using time travel itself to combat the corruptive effects of time travel. He wondered who was behind it, who’d set it up. Surely not the American government? Not any government, in fact. The internationally agreed penalties for that were severe. No politician would have the guts to risk having anything to do with time travel, because international law was brutal and strict on this matter. It was an automatic death penalty for any involved. The great Roald Waldstein had been a powerful speaker on the horrendous dangers of it. A great man, an influential man. Howard’s small campaigning group had achieved far less. His group was little more than bunches of students in universities and colleges around the world.
But this secret agency, they were going about matters in the wrong way. Attempting to repair history that had been damaged by careless travellers? That was very much like trying to close the barn door after all the horses have bolted. No — worse than that… it was having to go out and hunt all those horses down then drag them kicking and screaming all the way back to the barn. On the other hand, his campaign group’s approach had been far simpler.
Destroy the possibility of time travel at its very root. Instead of closing the barn door, they were burning the cursed thing down with all the horses still inside.
He looked at Edward Chan. The boy smiled back at him then looked down at the lustrous pink and purple sheen of the shell in his hand. He stroked the smooth surface, then held it out. ‘You can have it if you want it, Leonard.’
Howard shook his head. ‘No, it’s er… no thanks.’
He has to die, you know that, Howard? Burn the barn, right? Burn it long before any horses get out.
He realized he was delaying the necessary, putting it off and putting it off. And yet he knew it had to be done. In theory the future — the future after the year 2015 — must already be changing, must have changed by now. It would be a world where this boy vanished in an explosion and never got to fulfil his destiny. It was surely a world where a man called Roald Waldstein would never become the figurehead of an internat
ional campaign, never become a billionaire from all his other inventions, never become a household name. And, yes, this world would still have its problems: dwindling supplies of resources, global warming, rising seas, migrating billions and dangerous levels of over-population. But… at least it would no longer have the ever-present threat of complete and utter annihilation dangling over it.
He’d once heard a speaker at a rally ask the audience what must lie beyond the dimension of space-time we all exist in. Is it Hell? And to meddle with dimensions beyond what we know was surely no different from opening a door to the devil himself and inviting him right on in. He’d spoken of a medieval artist called Hieronymus Bosch who’d claimed he’d once caught a glimpse of the devil and the underworld and painted endless nightmarish visions of what he’d seen. Perhaps, the speaker had said, perhaps what he’d glimpsed were dimensions beyond our understanding, a momentary rip in space and time. Howard shuddered at the thought.
You know the boy has to die, Howard. Burn the barn. Burn the barn. What are you waiting for?
He was so deep in thought he didn’t at first register the voices from further up the beach. Voices crying out a warning, screaming a warning back at them.
Edward grabbed his arm and yanked him hard. Howard’s thoughts were shaken away.
‘What the h-?’
‘RUN!’ screamed Edward, pointing his finger at something behind him. Howard turned round to see an odd-looking dark wave approaching him fast. Water rolled down either side of an enormous grey hump, sliding up the shallows towards him like a gigantic torpedo. He spotted a large fin at the top of the large grey hump — large, very large… the size of a car, no, bigger — the size of a bus!
Edward was still pulling him back from the thing, trying to get Howard’s leaden fight-or-flight response to do something. Howard started to react, but far too sluggishly, too clumsily. He stumbled backwards over something in the thigh-deep water and an instant later was flailing on his back, his head underwater. Surfacing a moment later, spluttering for air, his legs scrambling to find a steady footing below, all he could see now was an approaching dark cave, riding up out of the shallow water at him like a freight train, a cave lined with stalactites and stalagmites of razor-sharp teeth and dangling tatters of rotting meat swinging between them.