by Jason Ayres
Josh’s first impression was one of disappointment. The room just looked like a standard office with a desk, screens and a few bits of stationery dotted about.
“Looks unimpressive, doesn’t it?” said Henry. “That was deliberate – we didn’t want to draw attention to this. Stand back a bit.”
Josh complied as Henry reached under the desk and activated a hidden switch that caused the smooth, wooden floorboards to slide outwards, revealing a circle in the centre of the floor. Beneath the circle, a set of stone steps led downwards.
“Wow!” said Josh. “This is serious adventure movie stuff. Are there flaming torches lighting the way down, too?”
“No, just LED lighting,” said Henry. “Flaming torches are a bit impractical. It takes hours lighting them all every day.”
“Right, let’s go,” said Josh, marching eagerly towards the steps.
“One thing before we go any further,” said Henry, grabbing Josh’s arm to hold him back. “Knowing how Vanessa operates, we need to be on our guard. She won’t have left this place wide open for anyone to just wander in. She could have set booby traps or anything, so tread carefully.”
“In that case, you’d better lead the way,” suggested Josh. “You have been down here before, after all.”
“A long time ago,” said Henry, as he led the way down the circular stone staircase. Josh looked down and couldn’t see the end. After they had done three loops it seemed like it would go on forever.
“It’s a hell of a long way down here,” said Josh.
“It needs to be,” replied Henry. “The thinking was that the deeper we went, the better the protection would be against catastrophe on the surface – even something as catastrophic as nuclear warfare.”
Eventually, after a few hundred steps they reached a set of heavy, metal bulkhead doors which had to be opened manually. Thankfully they didn’t require a code. Beyond that was a long corridor with white, metal walls which eventually led into a vast, open cavern.
It was full of screens on every wall and computers and other technical equipment on every surface. Josh recognised some of the equipment from both his own lab and the lab in Canberra. Most of the screens were active and Josh recognised many places on the island, including his own room. Henry was right: she did have everything under surveillance.
“This place is huge,” said Josh. “It’s like something out of a Bond movie.”
“And this is just the working area,” said Henry. “There’s living space for up to a thousand people further below here.”
“We need to find out what she’s been doing down here,” said Josh.
“That looks like a good place to start,” said Henry, gesturing towards a large, elevated chair right in the centre of the room.
“We call that the captain’s chair,” said Henry. It was inspired by Star Trek.
The chair had a large workstation and screen in front of it with various buttons built into the arms.
“You can pretty much control the whole island from that station,” said Henry. “Even the climate.”
They began to walk towards it, but before they reached it, they saw a familiar figure approaching them from the other side of the room.
It was another version of Josh.
“Can I help you?” asked the other Josh, politely.
“Not another version of me!” exclaimed Josh. “They’re always popping up. Which universe have you come from?”
“I don’t think he has,” said Henry. “That’s an android – an extremely sophisticated one compared to Dani, but still an android. I can tell.”
“You are unauthorised personnel. You should not be here,” said the android Josh. It raised its arm and, to his horror, Josh saw what it was holding.
“It’s got a gun!” exclaimed Josh. “But it can’t use that, right? Androids can’t harm humans, it’s the first law of robotics.”
“As established by the great Asimov himself, over a century ago,” added Henry.
“I am unaware of such a law,” said the android Josh.
“I was afraid you might say that,” said Henry. “It’s meant to be the first thing built into any robot’s programming, but if anyone was going to find a way to circumnavigate that, it would be Vanessa.”
“Enough theorising, Henry,” said Josh. “We need to think of something quickly before it kills us.”
“How do you know we’re unauthorised personnel?” asked Henry, trying to buy some time.
“I cannot verify your identities,” said the android Josh. “I have temporarily lost contact with my prime user.”
“Yeah. That figures,” replied Henry. “I’m afraid she’s a little out of range.”
“Your prime user authorised us earlier,” said Josh. “Here, you can contact her to confirm our identities using this.”
He held out the tachyometer and surreptitiously activated it.
The android seemed unsure and walked towards Josh, promptly falling into the bubble he had created and disappearing.
“Stupid android,” said Josh. “What a poor imitation of me. He didn’t have a fraction of my brains.”
“Where did you send it?” asked Henry.
“Same place as Vanessa.”
“At least she’ll have something to play with, and luckily for her it can run off solar power.”
“Yuk,” said Josh. “Do you think she has sex with it?”
“I’m sure she does,” said Henry. “She couldn’t have the real thing so was probably using this as a substitute until she could have you for real.”
“If that’s the case, why obsess so much over me? If she had just stuck with that android substitute all of this death and destruction could have been averted.”
“You know as well as I do that no android, no matter how sophisticated, can ever truly be as perfect as a human. At least not yet anyway. Even the Josh we just met that looked identical and could probably perform sexual acts with Vanessa in a far superior way than you ever could.”
“Thanks very much!” exclaimed Josh. “I’ve never had any complaints, you know!”
“I meant technically superior,” clarified Henry. “Just because he might have unlimited stamina in bed, what he wouldn’t have is that cocktail of pheromones and hormones that make the sexual attraction between two living, breathing beings so exhilarating. We’re still a long way from replicating that, if indeed we ever can.”
“That didn’t seem to bother your other self. He had one called Dani which Vanessa implied your counterpart was having, shall we say, relations with.”
Henry paused and Josh thought he saw him blush slightly, which could mean only one thing.
“You had Dani, too, didn’t you?” he asked.
“I did and there’s no shame in it,” replied Henry. “A lot of people have sex robots these days. And let’s face it, I was married to Vanessa. Can you blame me?”
“Not at all,” said Josh. “At least you could be confident Dani wouldn’t kill you.”
“That’s true,” said Henry. “And despite the lack of pheromones I still had a far greater connection with Dani than I ever had with Vanessa. Dani was infinitely preferable.”
“You know what you said about our android friend keeping Vanessa company in 10,000 BC,” remarked Josh. “I don’t think he is, because he’s going to materialise hundreds of feet below ground.”
“What happens if you materialise inside solid rock?” asked Henry.
“I don’t know but I can’t imagine it’s very pleasant,” replied Josh.
“With any luck, she won’t be lonely for long, anyway,” said Henry. “Once we’ve done what needs to be done, she should be erased from history altogether. And speaking of erasing things, we really need to get into this system and see what damage she’s done to the multiverse.”
Henry moved over to the captain’s chair to examine the screen.
“We’re in luck. She’s left this open, and what’s more, I recognise this system. It’s the same as I was usin
g to analyse the multiverse from my universe. I should be able to analyse what she’s done and then shut it down – permanently.”
“While you do that, I’m going to have a scout around and see what else is down here,” replied Josh.
“Be careful,” warned Henry. “Just in case she’s got any other nasty surprises down here.”
Henry hadn’t been exaggerating when he had said that the place was huge. As Josh explored he found that in addition to the residential areas, there were all manner of recreational areas. It was like a whole town underground, with gyms, restaurants, a large cinema, squash and tennis courts, and even a swimming pool.
He found large storage areas with plenty of tinned food but also greenhouses with artificial light for growing fresh food. It reminded him of footage he had seen of the first Mars colonies – effectively they had re-created that project here underground on Earth.
After about an hour of exploring, he returned to Henry who didn’t have good news.
“She’s deleted my universe!” he exclaimed. “Sometime yesterday, before she came to meet you. And not just mine either, she’s wiped out the whole multiverse. This universe we’re standing in now is the only one left.”
“Why would she do that?” asked Josh. “All those people…all gone. We’re talking trillions!”
“I doubt she was remotely bothered about that,” said Henry. “We already know how little value she places on human life.”
“And not just human life,” said Josh. “All life, on all the planets in the universe.”
“It’s murder on an unprecedented scale,” said Henry.
“She must have had some reason for doing it,” said Josh. “It can’t just have been down to her love of killing people.”
“Perhaps she saw the other universes as a threat,” said Henry. “She might have envisaged the particular scenario we’ve just played out – that someone from another universe would come to stop her.”
“Which is exactly what you’ve done,” said Josh.
“And now I can never go home,” said Henry morosely.
“On the bright side, you’re still alive here. You didn’t disappear when she wiped your universe.”
“True, so it looks like I’m destined to live out my life here,” said Henry.
“There’s no way to restore the universes she deleted?” asked Josh, thinking about the poor guy he had left stranded in one of those other worlds in 1988, just before Vanessa had unleashed her reign of terror. It looked like there was no chance of getting him back now. Hopefully he had at least been able to live out a full life there before his universe was obliterated.
“No – it’s not like you can just hit undo. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.”
“Maybe this isn’t such a bad thing,” said Josh. “We had already discovered that too many universes might trigger a new Big Bang. Now we are back to a single universe, perhaps we should keep it that way.”
“Perhaps we should,” said Henry. “On the plus side, only one universe means that there aren’t any rogue Vanessas out there in other universes who might cause more trouble in the future.”
“That’s a relief,” said Josh. “All we need to do now is to put everything back here to how it was before she went on the rampage, and all our worries will be over.”
“And what about me?” asked Henry. “If we do manage to fix things and bring back the other Henry, then there will be two of us running around.”
“That’s alright,” replied Josh, “we’ll just pass you off as your own long-lost twin brother. It’s been done before.”
“Do you think the other Henry will mind?” asked his counterpart. “It will be a bit weird for him, knowing he’s got a duplicate.”
“Would you mind?”
“No, I don’t think I would,” replied Henry, with a thoughtful look on his face as he considered the possibility.
“There’s your answer, then,” concluded Josh.
Later that evening, after shutting down all the equipment in the bunker for good, they returned to the villa to eat. Henry proved to be a dab hand in the kitchen and was rustling up their evening meal.
“There’s not a lot of fresh food left in the fridge up here, but I managed to knock us up a couple of omelettes,” he said.
“I noticed plenty of provisions down in the bunker,” said Josh.
“Yeah, we made sure we were well stocked down there with food that would never go off,” said Henry. “It was mostly canned stuff but enough to feed a community for a good few years in the event of catastrophe.”
“But not much in the way of fresh food?” asked Josh.
“The plan was to grow it. We had all sorts of advanced hydroponic centres set up down there.”
“I noticed,” said Josh. “So here’s an odd thing. All the time I was living here with Vanessa she was serving me up plenty of fresh food. She claimed it was being made by replicators, but I was a bit sceptical about that even with my memory loss. Yes, we can 3D print pretty much anything these days, but fresh food?”
“She must have been travelling through time to get stuff,” replied Henry. “This island’s uninhabited but it’s only half an hour by boat to the nearest populated island so she could have gone there in the past, before the virus.”
“How did she get there?” asked Josh. “There are no boats on this island.”
“She probably had a yacht stashed in the past and sailed off to the supermarket there to stock up once a week. Either that or she just stole food out of the fridge from this very villa when other people were staying in it.”
“Well, regardless of how the eggs got here, I’m quite happy with omelettes,” said Josh. “And I also took the liberty of bringing these up from the bunker earlier.”
He presented Henry with a couple of bottles of the same 2028 claret that Vanessa had plied him with a few evenings ago.
“She’s got a fantastic wine cellar down there,” explained Josh. “Apparently she brought a load with her on her yacht when she sailed here. That yacht’s got to still be around here somewhere.”
“That’s another thing that would be tricky to do, if we ever developed the technology,” said Henry. “Making staple foods, I can envisage that. But the subtleties and nuances of wine that varies from year to year? You’d need some seriously sophisticated algorithms to re-create those.”
“We could really do with finding that,” said Henry.
“Plenty of time for that tomorrow,” said Josh. “For now, I suggest we uncork these and discuss how we’re going to put the world back together.”
After their omelettes, they did just that, sitting out on the decking watching the sun set.
“I must say I find this company infinitely preferable to before,” said Josh. “Even when I was suffering from amnesia and didn’t know the truth about Vanessa, I felt uneasy in her presence.”
“At least neither of us will ever have to see her again once this is all sorted,” said Henry.
“Let’s hope so,” replied Josh. “But we are going to have to think extremely carefully about how we handle this. We may have got rid of her in the present, but the past is another matter. If we are going to go back in time to try and stop her doing what she did then we cannot risk giving her even the slightest hint of what we’re doing.”
“Absolutely,” said Henry. “If we did, then all the work we’ve done here today could be completely wiped out. It’s too risky going back to try and stop her releasing the virus or running the other me over. We need to go much further back in time than that, to before any of this even got started.”
“How far are you suggesting?” asked Josh. “To when she was a teenager? Or even younger? Surely you can’t be talking about killing her as a child?”
“Would you kill Hitler as a child?” asked Henry.
“I’m not getting into that debate again. I’ve discussed it at length with Peter and Charlie before, and we concluded that it would change history so much as to make the current world unr
ecognisable.”
“We don’t have to kill her as a child. We just have to prevent her from ever being born.”
“Won’t that make massive changes to the timeline, too?” said Josh.
“Not to the extent killing Hitler would. It will change things locally in Australia, and the Henry from this universe will never meet her. But in the wider scheme of world events, I don’t think it will have a huge impact – except on things that she directly caused, like the virus.”
“How do you propose preventing her birth?” asked Josh.
“It’s pretty straightforward, to be honest,” said Henry. “And the good news is, nobody needs to get hurt. A few lives go in different directions, but hey, I had to break a few eggs to make those omelettes earlier, didn’t I?”
“I’m not sure that’s a relevant analogy, but go on,” said Josh.
“OK, well, the good news is that being married to her, I know plenty about her family history,” replied Henry. “Her mother died a few years ago and was very forgetful in her later years. She only had one topic of conversation and that was about how she and Vanessa’s father met. She used to repeat it over and over again to everyone she spoke to.”
“That’s handy,” said Josh. “I think I know where this is going. You had better tell me the story.”
“It all happened back in the 1980s,” replied Henry. “Their names were Mike and Jane and they met at the Oz for Africa concert in Sydney. Have you heard of it? It was on the same day as Live Aid, a famous famine relief concert that took place in the UK and America.”
“Yes, my parents used to talk about it,” said Josh. “It was a pretty landmark event by all accounts.”
“It certainly was. There were concerts all over the world. Anyway, Jane’s story, which she told me about a hundred times, was that they met when Mike spilled a drink all over her during legendary Aussie band Men at Work’s set.”
“I think I’ve heard of them,” said Josh. “Didn’t they do that Down Under song?”
“That’s them,” said Henry. “Anyway, he offered to buy her a drink by way of an apology and after that they spent the rest of the day together. It was love at first sight, apparently, and they were gutted at the end of the night when they had to part. She lived locally, but he had travelled all the way there from Melbourne. They were both only seventeen and he had to leave her to travel back that night. Over the next few months they wrote to each other every day. There was no internet back then, of course, and eventually he saved up the money to go and visit her in Sydney. They got engaged, and he never went back.”