Nomads

by Dave Hutchinson

  “There’s no way to check this as a fact, unless we can find one of them,” said Regis, “but it looks as if someone inserted some subroutines into the original message, the one that caused the Machines to spontaneously self-compile.”

  “Which is enormously complicated, should have been impossible, and could have fucked things up for all of us,” Jan Tyrian said. “I can only think of half a dozen people in the world who could even have thought to try it, and two of them are here already.”

  I sat back in my over-designed and uncomfortable chair and rubbed my eyes. Beside me, Sachs remained silent. It was some time since she’d said anything because a lot of it was going straight over her head, but everything was being recorded and she could have it explained to her by experts later. The important thing was that we were talking.

  “What I’m thinking,” Regis said, mostly for Sachs’s benefit, “is that we built a lifeboat and somebody climbed aboard without us realising.”

  “Is that a bad thing, particularly?” Sachs asked.

  I took my hands away from my eyes. “I told you, people are just as stupid five hundred years from now. We had to be selective. There were some people you wouldn’t want running around here.”

  “There was actually a rigorous programme of testing,” Regis told her. “We turned a lot of people away.” He didn’t mention that I had almost been among them, and I didn’t mention that I’d hacked into the database and looked at my test results.

  “Criminals,” Sachs said. “You’re telling me there are criminals here from five hundred years in the future.”

  There was a long, awkward silence. Eventually, Jan Tyrian said, “I’m afraid there’s no way of knowing. I can only make the vaguest guess at how it was accomplished in the first place. They were desperate, certainly, but we all were.” This earned him a hard stare from Regis. The very last thing we wanted the natives to know about was the Extinction.

  She looked around the table. “What have you done?”

  “I saved my people,” Regis said with such magisterial gravity that I almost guffawed. “If someone subverted the project, that’s not my fault.”

  ‘My people’ was anyone who could pony up a large enough contribution to the costs of the research project, salted with a handful of people Regis thought would be of some use to him in the twenty-first century. What we had actually done was send the top one percent of the world’s wealthiest kleptocrats back in time. They were not, on the whole, the most trustworthy people in the solar system. But Sachs didn’t need to know that. They’d all passed the tests, even if Regis had put his finger on the scales on the behalf of some of them, and as far as I could tell they were all behaving themselves, making themselves unobtrusively rich again and not bothering anyone. This other group, though, the ones who’d climbed into the lifeboat…well, there was no way to know. They were rich and they were desperate and there was at least one genius among their number.

  I said, “May we see the autopsy report on Mr Oxley, please? And an inventory of everything that you found?”

  “Do you think that would help?” asked Sachs.

  “It can’t hurt. In fact, if you could let me see the whole file on his suicide and your investigation it might be useful.”

  “Okay. I’ll see about that.” She made a note on the pad in front of her. “Anything else?”

  I hadn’t had a chance for a quiet chat with Regis before this meeting, but from their body language I assumed that he and Sachs were involved in some kind of negotiation regarding our future. There was nothing I could do about that, so I might as well forget it until it became relevant to me.

  I said, “Somewhere to live might be nice.” There were noises of agreement around the table, except from Regis, who I presumed had already made provisions for himself.

  She frowned fractionally and made another note. “I’ll see about that too. Don’t expect the Ritz, though, we’re on a budget.”

  “I had a place to live,” I pointed out. “Before you came crashing into my life.”

  She regarded me levelly for a few moments, then she made another note.

  “And if you think you have us over a barrel, you ought to remember that we have capabilities that you can’t begin to imagine.” Everyone looked at me. “So if you want our cooperation it might be best if you treat us with some respect, or we’ll just walk out of here and you’ll never see us again.”

  Sachs narrowed her eyes at me. “Point noted,” she said evenly.

  “Thank you. Now, could we please have some decent food in here?”

  “‘Capabilities that you can’t begin to imagine’?” Regis said quietly to me later.

  Unless we were carrying a lot of mods, we were indistinguishable from the natives, disappointingly baseline. “It’ll keep them on their toes,” I told him.

  “I don’t want these people antagonised,” he said. “Things are very delicate at the moment.”

  I looked at him. “Oh, I’m sorry, Regis,” I said. “I’ve lost my home and my job and pretty much everything I’ve worked for – and I have worked, not sat on my fat arse indulging in insider dealing – since I got here. I apologise for being antagonistic.”

  He gave me a long-suffering look and lowered his voice even further. “They’re chomping at the bit to stick us into NMR scanners and take blood and tissue samples and Christ knows what all else,” he said. “Basically everything short of actual vivisection. At the moment I’ve managed to talk them out of it, but that’s going to change if we piss them off. Seriously, Francesco. Just behave.”

  “Fuck you, Regis,” I said, and I walked away.

  Nine

  My Machine spat me out, naked and fully conscious and screaming, on the third floor of a disused parking garage in Leamington Spa at half past three on an October morning in 2009, five hundred years or so before the Extinction. Simultaneously, several thousand other Machines in deserted places around the world and at various points in human history were ejecting their creations, each one built to specifications embedded in the original quantum message. I had no idea how all that had been achieved; at that point the only thing that mattered was that it had been achieved.

  The parking garage had been abandoned for some time, waiting for demolition which kept being put off because the economy was in freefall. The Machine set up defences, then it made me clothes and food and a cosy little pod to sleep in. It also made me a terminal, and I set about hacking into various databases and backstopping an identity for myself. After a few days, the Machine made me currency and various bits and pieces of identification, and I set out to have a look around.

  First priority was shelter. I solved that by looking at the cards in newsagents’ windows until I found one that looked, from its faded biro writing and general state of shabbiness, to have been there for some time. I made an appointment to see it, and the landlord was so relieved when I said I’d take it and pulled out a wad of cash to cover the deposit and the first six months’ rent that he didn’t even bother to look at my carefully-backstopped references. Two days later, with the Machine disguised as a large steamer trunk, I moved in.

  After that, it was just a case of sitting tight and collecting pieces of identity. A new passport, to replace the phantom one which I had convinced the Home Office database had just expired, arrived, as did utility bills, and I used those to open bank accounts. In the evenings, I sat and wandered through the charmingly primitive security of various databases and filled in Frank Grant’s backstory.

  All of this would have been difficult or flat-out impossible for one of the natives, but I had a number of advantages. Firstly, the Machine took care of all my needs, from food to a top-of-the-line laptop. Secondly, I was a security consultant from the twenty-sixth century, which as far as the computer systems of the twenty-first century were concerned meant I was basically a wizard. Thirdly, I had done my homework in nitpicking detail. Preparation is everything.

  Sometimes, late at night, I thought about Francesco, the origin
al Frank. He had not travelled in time; he’d simply been copied and reproduced by the weirdest 3D printer ever imagined. Eventually quarantine would have failed somehow, the Extinction would have reached the Halo, the habs would have gone dark one by one, and Francesco would have faced death along with the rest of the human race. I presumed he faced it blind drunk.

  After a week or so of sleeping on a camp bed in one of the offices of the building on Northumberland Avenue, I was told to gather together my things – which amounted to a toothbrush and a razor and a couple of changes of clothes provided by Sachs’s people – and I was taken down to the garage beneath the building and invited to get into a black SUV with smoked windows.

  I had never spent a lot of time in London, so, apart from Trafalgar Square and a glimpse of King’s Cross station as it went by, I had no idea where we were. Neither the driver nor the three large minders who accompanied us seemed inclined to tell me.

  Finally, we pulled into a side street and went down a ramp into another underground garage, and from there a lift took us up six floors to a little carpet-floored vestibule that smelled of wood polish and Brasso. There were two big, old-fashioned doors here. One had an EMERGENCY EXIT sign on it, the other the number 54 and a column of locks. One of the minders took a bunch of keys from his pocket and spent a couple of minutes opening the door, and then we stepped into my new home.

  It was a big flat with high ceilings and thick walls and wood-block floors and utilitarian, slightly-worn furniture. It was one of those places where there is a Residents’ Committee and you have to apply in writing if you want to put a hook in the wall to hang a painting. The bathroom was tiled like an old public lavatory and the bath was a huge cast-iron monstrosity with a confusing-looking mixer tap/shower arrangement. The most modern thing in the flat was the retro-style SMEG fridge-freezer in the kitchen, which stood in a corner like an invader from the 1950s. I could imagine Hercule Poirot living here, if he lowered his standards catastrophically.

  “There’ll be one of us in here and outside all the time, sir,” said one of the minders. I lifted the net curtain back from one of the windows and found myself looking down five floors into a busy London street. Directly opposite was another big block dating from the early years of the twentieth century, a wall of windows and shallow balconies. “We’d rather you didn’t do that, sir, actually,” the minder added.

  I let the curtain fall back and looked sourly around the living room, noting the things which were not there. No telephone or visible phone line, no television, no little ping in my head to denote a live wifi hotspot. I said, “If you think I’m going to spend an open-ended length of time cooped up in here you’re crazy.”

  “We’re only ten minutes’ walk from Regent’s Park,” said the minder. “I’m sure we can work something out, once you’re settled. I’m Andrew, by the way.”

  He looked like a rugby player who had graduated with a 2:2 in Classics from a minor Oxford college. “Frank.” We shook hands.

  “This isn’t such a bad place,” he told me. “Concierge service, health club in the basement, nice gardens at the back. I’ve seen worse.”

  Compared to my flat at the station in Stockford, it had a certain faded grandeur, but at least there I’d been able to come and go as I pleased. “I’ll need clothes,” I said. “And toilet things. And food.”

  Andrew nodded. “I’ll be happy to organise that, if you’ll just give me a list.” He looked round the flat. “In the meantime, I understand there’s a terrific shawarma place round the corner on Baker Street. How about we get a takeaway?”

  Central London property prices being what they were, the flat was probably worth well over a million pounds, but it was still a prison, and I set out to become a good prisoner. I didn’t make waves about having to share it with Andrew or one of the other minders. I didn’t comment on the fact that someone was sitting in an armchair in the vestibule outside twenty-four hours a day. I didn’t even mention that the door to the emergency stairs was kept locked at all times. I sat and made smalltalk with my jailors and I worked my way through a dogeared stack of airport thrillers which had probably seen service in a number of similar safe houses. After a couple of weeks, I was deemed harmless enough to be allowed out for a walk every few days. Accompanied by Andrew and several other minders, I walked in Regent’s Park and up onto Parliament Hill, and one afternoon we all went to the Zoo. I had a growing sense that I was surplus to requirements, that I had fulfilled some purpose but still needed watching. I tried not to let my annoyance show, but I got snappy a couple of times, and afterward my walks were suspended for a few days.

  Three days a week, I was taken down to the garage and driven back to Northumberland Avenue to meet with Sachs and the others. I could judge by everyone’s body language how well Regis’ negotiations with the British authorities were going. Sometimes things were tense, sometimes they were relaxed. Things seemed to have stalled.

  One morning, after coffee and smalltalk, Sachs handed me a battered briefcase. I opened it and saw a number of fat folders stuffed inside.

  “That’s everything you asked for,” she said. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to read it here; I can’t let you take it out of the building. And if you want to make notes you’ll have to surrender them at the end of the day.”

  It was better than ploughing through yet another Arthur Hailey. I took myself off to a little office down the corridor from the meeting room, and there, with another minder standing outside the door, I took the folders out of the briefcase and arranged them on the desk in front of me.

  There were four of them, marked with stripes of varying colours denoting levels of confidentiality. There were little holes on the front covers where, I presumed, reading lists had been stapled and then removed so that I couldn’t memorise the initials of whoever had been there ahead of me. I glanced quickly through their contents, rearranged the folders in what seemed to be chronological order of panic, and started at the beginning.

  Andrew Graham Oxley had been found dead at his home in Spicer Street, Cardiff, three and a half years ago. It was a hot midsummer and his next door neighbour had begun to notice an unpleasant smell coming from somewhere. She hadn’t seen Oxley for a couple of weeks and eventually she put two and two together and called the police. The officers who attended the scene checked the house both front and back and found all windows shut and all exterior doors locked. Looking through the windows, they could see no signs of a struggle, no sign of a body, but yes, there was a suggestive smell, so they brought in a local locksmith to let them in through the back door.

  They found Mr Oxley in an upstairs bedroom at the back of the house, in an advanced state of decomposition. He was lying face-down on the floor, possibly having had second thoughts at the last minute. There were two empty packets of sleeping tablets on the bedside table. There were photographs of the scene, which I glanced at and put to one side.

  Mr Oxley was a stereotype. Lived alone, kept himself to himself, was polite but not overly friendly with his neighbours. Nobody could remember quite when they’d last seen him, but no one thought he’d been particularly depressed or particularly happy. His immediate neighbour, a Mrs Balcon, remembered that he had recently received several visits from a well-dressed gentleman who, she said, strongly resembled Cary Grant, but she hadn’t seen the gentleman for some weeks. Attempts to identify ‘Cary Grant’ went nowhere, and eventually petered out due to lack of resources.

  The body was taken to the mortuary of a local hospital, where an autopsy was performed. Allowing for decomposition, it found that Mr Oxley had been an adult male of between forty and fifty years, a little under two metres tall and in good health, deceased for between one and two weeks. Toxicology results were rendered inconclusive due to the state of the body, but the coroner eventually ruled that Mr Oxley had taken his own life.

  Meanwhile, investigations to track down next of kin were proving unproductive. Mr Oxley seemed to have no living family, and few, if any, close friends
– no one who looked like Cary Grant, anyway. For the past eight years he had worked as an accountant with a small engineering firm on the other side of the city. His employers said he was quiet, conscientious, otherwise forgettable.

  Eventually, Mr Oxley’s estate passed into the hands of the courts, who employed a local firm to clear his house. In the course of the clearance several sets of keys were found which did not fit any of the locks which Mr Oxley would have encountered during his life. People collect keys, down the years; most families will have half a dozen or so which no longer have any use – keys to long-lost bicycle locks or suitcases, keys to former homes which were somehow not handed over to new owners – but someone actually made an effort to try and fit Mr Oxley’s keys to their locks.

  I was on to the next folder now, a much higher security classification. It seemed that everyone involved with the investigation into Andrew Oxley’s death had behaved with admirable professionalism, particularly the clerk who had gone an extra mile and actually identified one of the sets of keys as belonging to a lock-up garage under a railway arch a few minutes’ drive from Spicer Street. When the clerk visited the lock-up he discovered it to be empty apart from something he described as ‘a large grey ceramic sculpture’. There were photographs of the sculpture, both in situ and later in a laboratory at Cardiff University, where it was taken in an attempt to ascertain what it was. The Machine – because that was what it was – seemed completely inert, a solid block of… something, no one could be quite sure, and that was when the authorities began to take a keener interest.

  A senior pathologist was invited to take another look at Mr Oxley’s autopsy results and some of the samples taken from his body, and she discovered what appeared to be elevated levels of unusual elements in the samples – breakdown products from nanotechnology which had decompiled when their host died, but the authorities weren’t to know that. Additionally, she found anomalous structures in Oxley’s long bones, overlooked during the first autopsy because all the original pathologist had been trying to do was establish the cause of death.