Nomads

by Dave Hutchinson

  None of us said anything, just sat there expectantly.

  “I won’t bore you with the details,” Sachs said, “but the items were passed on to us, and our investigations led us to Robert and Leonie Hallam.” Beside me, I felt Regis stir slightly. He wanted to be bored with the details.

  Sachs wasn’t going to indulge us, though. She stood there in front of us and asked, “Where are you from?”

  “I’m from Cambridge,” I said. “Originally.”

  “I’m empowered, on behalf of Her Majesty’s government, to welcome you to Earth,” she went on, “but first I need to know how long you’ve been here and where your home solar system is.”

  Pep burst out laughing.

  Here’s how time travel works:

  Time travel does not work. (See also: Here’s How Matter Transmission Works)

  I don’t know why it doesn’t work; I’m not a physicist. I know a lot of very smart people tried very hard to make it work and they couldn’t. There was some evidence that one group of researchers had managed to send a speck of platinum the size of a grain of salt two nanoseconds back in time, but the evidence was inconclusive and two nanoseconds was no use to anyone.

  What you can do – and I can’t even begin to pretend to understand this either – is use gravitational waves to transmit a message into the underlying quantum state of the universe and instruct it to sort of spontaneously create matter. The message itself does not travel in time; it actually exists at every point in time and space since the creation of the universe, sort of a cosmic proofreading mark. Which makes time travel seem almost rational.

  This is actually an incredibly handy, not to mention vaguely godlike, thing to be able to do, and if we’d learned to do it earlier it might have made a difference, but it was just one of hundreds of mad, desperate schemes to combat the Extinction, none of which promised very much success and were, anyway, far too late to do any good. It was so utterly off the wall that Regis had to fund it himself, dumped his entire fortune into the project, but as he told me at the time, dead is dead, whether you’re a billionaire or a pauper.

  So we transmitted the message and the universe created, every thirty years back as far as the Big Bang, a sort of virtual Machine. Most of them only existed for the tiniest fraction of a second, but some, the smallest percentage, lasted long enough to create a copy of themselves out of native feedstock before falling back into their quantum state. And the copies created us.

  “Did it never occur to you to wonder why an extraterrestrial would want to join an English provincial police force?” I asked.

  “Why would anyone?” Sachs said grumpily.

  I looked at the window. It was getting dark outside; the police vehicles had gone, although a number of officers remained in the house. The Met would put out a press release saying it had been a false alarm, bad intelligence resulting in an anti-terror operation, but Regis would still have to move; the neighbours would be watching him from now on.

  After the initial shock and awe, which had not in all honesty been terribly shocking or awesome, Sachs and her people had split us up. I had wound up in an upstairs bedroom with only an armed officer for company. I’d tried to engage her in conversation about the Job, but she wasn’t inclined to talk so I’d spent my time examining the truly awful paintings which hung on the walls until Sachs got round to me. When she did make an appearance, she seemed a little shaken, from which I deduced that Regis and the others had told her at least a fraction of the truth about us.

  I said, “You were prepared to believe we were aliens, how much harder is this to believe?” It was obvious Sachs still didn’t quite believe it. Little green men pretending to be human? Sure, why not? Time travellers from the twenty-sixth century? Not so much. “Although I’m more curious as to why you thought we were aliens. Was Oxley modded? Carrying some extra bits? Not quite baseline human?”

  “Perhaps you could help us with that,” she said.

  “Not my area of expertise. Sorry.”

  “Just out of interest, what is your area of expertise, Frank? You’re not really a police officer, are you?”

  I really was a police officer, and it annoyed me that she was glossing over that, but I knew what she meant. “I do system design. Computer security.” Although that was a bit like Robert Oppenheimer telling an eleventh century swordsmith that he worked on weapons.

  “So why join the police service?”

  I shrugged. “I had to do something. I like it; it lets me help people.” And now I wouldn’t be able to do it any more. The Job, Stockford, John Weller, my house, that was all over. The comfortable, useful little life I’d made for myself had blown away, and that made me angry. “What connected Oxley to us?”

  “Some of his neighbours said they’d seen someone who was the spitting image of Cary Grant coming and going from his house in the weeks leading up to his death. We didn’t know what to make of it, but we set up a keyword alert and we’d almost forgotten about it when it popped up in your report, and that led us to you, and you led us here.”

  “I was really careful.”

  “You were, and we were very impressed. But we’re very good at our job and there are more of us than you. You never stood a chance.”

  I hadn’t really had a choice about mentioning Leonie Hallam’s description of the intruder; she’d given the same description when she made her initial call and it was in the log. It would have looked suspicious if I’d left it out. It was just pure dumb chance that I’d been the one sent to respond to the call. Otherwise Sachs and her people might have passed me by.

  “So,” I said. “What happens now? We’ve committed no crime; you have no right to hold us, we’re not required to cooperate.”

  “Technically, you’re illegal immigrants.”

  “Good luck trying to deport us.”

  “You can’t go back?”

  “Doesn’t work that way,” I said. “It was a one-way trip.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “We’re refugees.” Which was true, but didn’t even remotely begin to cover everything. “And please don’t ask me what we’re refugees from, because I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you anything about the future because it would change this timeline.” This was bullshit, and it didn’t matter anyway because the timeline needed to be changed. Anything that stopped events leading to the Extinction was a good thing, as far as I was concerned.

  We sat looking at each other for a while, each of us wondering what was going through the other’s mind. She said, “I need to know if your presence here represents some kind of threat.”

  I shook my head. “We’ve been taking care not to make waves since we arrived.” Apart from using ancient stock market data to make ourselves rich. “We just want to be left alone.”

  That option obviously no longer existed, but Sachs chose to set it aside for the moment. She said, “What’s happening at Dronfield Farm? Are the Hallams part of your group?”

  “I don’t know. The Machines are all equipped with beacons, so we can find each other if we have to – and most of us seem not to want to. There’s no beacon at the farm, or anywhere in the area.”

  “Could they have turned it off?”

  “Sure, but why would they?”

  “You didn’t recognise each other?”

  “No, but that doesn’t mean anything. I didn’t meet everyone who was coming here. Anyway, an hour or so in their Machine and they could look like anyone they wanted to.”

  She thought about that. “If they’re completely blameless, why was an avatar wandering around their farm, though?” She’d obviously been picking up bits of terminology from the others.

  “That’s what I’ve been wondering. An avatar’s basically a semi-sentient machine; we use them for hard physical work. The fact that it looks like Cary Grant doesn’t mean anything. The Machines have a menu of hundreds of different designs; the Cary Grant one was just in fashion when we left. It’s the first one someone would think of using.�
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  Sachs sat and looked at me for a while again. I could see she was struggling, but I actually thought she was coping pretty well, notwithstanding she’d been forced to take a sudden hundred and eighty degree turn after believing we were the advance party of an alien invasion. “What I can tell you,” I said, “because it won’t change the timeline at all, is that people are just as stupid in five hundred years as they are now. If you keep that in mind you’ll do all right.”

  She sighed. “You’re all going to have to be properly debriefed, but first I need to know if we have to do anything about the Hallams.”

  I thought about it. “Yes,” I said finally. “Yes, we do.”

  “How many of you are there, by the way?” Sachs asked.

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “And that’s the honest truth; I just don’t know.”

  She let it drop. We were sitting in her car in the little patch of Forestry Commission plantation that bordered Dronfield Farm, drinking coffee from a thermos and eating slightly stale croissants we’d bought at a service station on the M1 on the way up from London.

  “You ought to let Jan Tyrian have a look at Oxley’s Machine,” I said, something occurring to me. “It should have self-destructed when he died.” She glanced at me. “Nothing spectacular; it should just have decompiled itself. If it didn’t, someone carried out quite a fundamental hack on it.”

  “Is that significant?”

  “It’s not something you’d do by accident.”

  She brushed pastry crumbs from her lap and took a sip of coffee. “What can we expect here?”

  “If they are part of our group, there will be countermeasures. They should be nonlethal.”

  “But if someone’s been hacking the Machines…”

  “Quite.” I kept thinking of what Pep had said, about Regis’s theory that we’d picked up a hitch-hiker. I hadn’t seen him since Sachs gatecrashed our meeting, so I hadn’t had the chance to ask him what that meant.

  “How bad could it be?”

  “Pretty bad.” We’d stopped off at my house and Sachs had boggled for twenty minutes or so while she watched my Machine compile some gear. Ideally, I would have liked Pep to be there too, for support, but Pep was in the doghouse because she’d grown bored waiting for Sachs to interview her and she’d dislocated her guard’s shoulder for something to do.

  “Well, we’d better be about it then,” said Sachs. She opened her door and tipped the remains of her coffee onto the ground.

  “Yup,” I said, getting out of the car and slinging my rucksack over one shoulder.

  We walked through the trees until we reached the edge of the field, where we paused and surveyed Dronfield Farm.

  “Looks deserted,” Sachs said, lowering her binoculars.

  “Looks that way,” I said. I unzipped my rucksack and took out a black polyhedron the size of a golfball. I threw it as hard as I could, and it landed just inside the wire surrounding the farm. I consulted a readout on my tablet, then led the way across the field to the fence. I threw another couple of sensors into the yard, checked again, then climbed through the fence and walked up to the house, Sachs following a couple of footsteps behind. If she was at all anxious about doing any of this – and she’d be inhuman if she wasn’t – she was hiding it remarkably well.

  “They’ve gone,” she said, nodding at the front door, which stood slightly ajar.

  I held the tablet up and turned in a slow circle. The only lifesigns it picked up were mine and Sachs’s. I took out another couple of sensors and pitched them through the gap between the door and the frame, bouncing them off the wall inside and along the hall. I looked at the tablet, then nudged the door open with my toe.

  “Well,” I said.

  Eight

  It would have been nice to tell the inhabitants of the Twenty-First Century that there was a bright future among the stars waiting for their great-grandchildren, but there wasn’t. Humanity had died – would die – mostly on the planet of its birth, still trying to make sense of what had gone wrong.

  I often thought that we were perhaps not meant to be a spacefaring race. That kind of effort takes huge amounts of money, the amounts you only get when hundreds of nations get together and cooperate with a single purpose, and that never happened. Not once.

  Mankind’s Future In Space comprised the many habs of the orbital Halo, a base on the Moon, an admittedly ambitious terraforming effort that had left Mars even more uninhabitable than it had started out, asteroid-mining stations on Ceres and Vesta, and a heavily-shielded robot laboratory orbiting Europa – basically a solid-state observatory the size of a fridge. How on Earth could I tell anybody that? The Human Race doesn’t even make it as far as Saturn – oh, and by the way, we all die screaming in 2572.

  There were those who believed the Extinction was self-aware. I didn’t buy that, myself, but I could see why people would think that. It was easier to blame a malign sentience for what was happening, rather than being more honest and blaming ourselves for creating the catastrophe. No one knew where it had come from. The presumption was that some nation or other had developed it from existing nanotechnology and then either released it by accident or, having become annoyed with another nation, used it deliberately.

  In the end, though, it didn’t matter whether it was sentient or not. It moved across the face of the Earth like a pandemic, decompiling everything it touched, and nothing we did could stop it. Eventually it would break down the entire Solar System.

  Armstrong Base succumbed to the Extinction. Lagrange One blew up, nobody knew whether it was a particularly catastrophic accident or mass suicide. When we left, the people in the Belter colonies and those aboard Gateway Station were still alive, so technically the Human Race hadn’t become extinct. It merely had to get used to the idea that the Galaxy had just become a very lonely place to live. And anyway, it was only a matter of time.

  There had not, it goes without saying, been any way to evacuate Earth, even if there had been anywhere to put the evacuees. Mankind faced up to its death the way it had always faced the really big issues. Badly.

  And several thousand of us ran away. Kind of.

  “Some of the Machines have been glitching recently,” said Jan Tyrian. “It’s nothing serious and it’s easily fixed, but it’s a worry because we rely on them so much.”

  “Speak for yourself,” I said, and then I remembered what I had last used my Machine for. I leaned forward and took one of the sandwiches. I peeled the bread apart. Pressed chicken breast, a smear of cranberry jelly, a couple of bits of lettuce. I reassembled the sandwich and put it back on the platter in the middle of the table.

  “When it became obvious that it wasn’t just one or two Machines, we decided to map their beacons, and Jan Tyrian’s been visiting them and running updates,” said Regis. “We estimate around fifteen percent of them are affected – and that’s just the ones that are accessible to us here and now; people are going to keep on arriving for the next hundred years or so and we can’t do anything about them until they get here.”

  We were sitting in a bleak, windowless room deep in the bowels of an anonymous building just off Northumberland Avenue. The food was awful and the daylight emulation lighting was giving me a headache. The others looked none the worse for whatever they had been through since I’d last seen them. Sachs and I had left the Hallams’ deserted house to a search team and come back to London for a council of war, or at least a council to try and work out what it was that we were at war with. I’d spent a couple of hours with a computer artist, coming up with likenesses of the Hallams for circulation to the police, and that was worth a try, but if they had access to a Machine – and there was a large void under Dronfield Farm which the authorities had still not managed to break into – the chances were they didn’t look like the Hallams any more.

  “The information which created the Machines in the first place was ferociously complex and fragile,” Jan Tyrian went on. “We expected errors – there was only a ten pe
rcent chance that it would work at all – but we expected them to be evenly distributed instead of randomly affecting a small number of Machines.”

  “You’re thinking sabotage,” I said.

  He shrugged. “It’s one possibility. I ran diagnostics on the Machines I checked, and I found an anomaly, way back in the event logs shortly after they were compiled.”

  I felt cold fingers walking up the back of my neck. “Is this going where I think it’s going?”

  “Oh, you’ll never guess this one,” Regis said. “Not in a million years.”

  Jan Tyrian looked at him and gave him a little frown of annoyance. “The Machines are programmed to do a number of production runs as part of their boot-up routine, from various inanimate objects to a number of avatars, before going on to their main job, which is compiling us. The test jobs are decompiled for reuse of feedstock, but in every machine that glitched I found a deficit. Missing feedstock.”

  “The avatars decided they didn’t want to go back in the soup,” Pep said.

  This time, Jan Tyrian glared at her. “It really isn’t funny.”

  She bugged her eyes out at him. “Some of it is.”

  I looked at Jan Tyrian. Then I looked at Pep. Then I looked at Jan Tyrian. “So, we’ve got a bunch of glitching Machines and they’ve all, what, compiled spurious avatars?”

  Regis and Jan Tyrian looked at each other. “An avatar is minimally sentient,” Jan Tyrian said. “It’s supposed to wait for instructions, not take off on its own. It would be like a production line making one extra car and the car deciding to drive away of its own volition. No, I think they’ve been making spurious people.”

  Nobody said anything.