by Alex Scarrow
Sal sat near the front of the RV, the female support unit sitting dull-eyed and vacant beside her. It wasn’t Becks yet, she’d decided. It wasn’t going to be Becks properly until they’d uploaded her AI. For now, this thing was just a spare female support unit. A blank-minded one at that.
‘That’s a gene-silicon hybrid,’ said SpongeBubba chirpily.
‘I know,’ said Sal.
‘We had two dozen of those units on Project Exodus!’ The lab robot’s goofy plastic grin widened. ‘They were spooky!’ Its bauble-round eyes gazed at her curiously. ‘What’s wrong with your gene-silicon hybrid unit?’
‘She’s got a name, you know,’ said Sal, suddenly feeling protective. ‘We call her Becks.’
‘Becks?’ If the squat, square-shaped lab unit had had shoulders, he’d have shrugged them. Instead, wide, rolling, expressionless eyes above a fixed frozen grin regarded her. ‘Hello, Becks! My name’s SpongeBubba!’
The support unit’s grey eyes remained unfocused, unblinking, unintelligent. Fixed and lifeless. Her young face a frozen frown of incomprehension.
‘Hello, Becks! My name’s SpongeBubba!’ the lab unit chirped again.
‘She’s not been installed properly,’ said Sal. ‘She doesn’t know her name yet.’ Sal sighed. ‘She can’t speak anyway.’
SpongeBubba stroked his pickle-shaped nose, a gesture he must have picked up from Rashim. ‘My model, Mitzumi HL-327 LabAssist V4.7, comes with language modules and laboratory protocols pre-installed!’
‘Well, aren’t you lucky.’
‘I didn’t have to have software installed in me after manufacture. I was function-ready!’ SpongeBubba sounded like a spoilt brat.
‘Well, at least Becks doesn’t look really stupid.’
‘My model comes with a polyform plastic casing and a library of programmable templates. Dr Anwar hacked the template code to make me look this special way!’ SpongeBubba stroked his nose again. ‘He says I’m different to any other Mitzumi unit because he hacked my template code! Skippa says I’m unique!’
Sal glanced at Rashim. He was stretched out on the seat opposite, fast asleep.
‘And your voice code too? Is that his work or do all you models talk like this?’ Sal wondered how Rashim managed to cope with SpongeBubba’s squeaky, high-pitched voice and permanent false cheeriness. Fun for a while perhaps, but already she was finding the thing incredibly irritating.
‘Oh no! My voice was approximated from a few audio files made from a children’s cartoon show that used to be on cable TV at the beginning of the twenty-first century! My voice is very special!’
‘Can you use that special voice of yours quietly?’
‘Oh yes! My volume output can be modulated!’
‘Well, how about you turn it down for me?’
‘Uh-uh.’ SpongeBubba wagged a finger at her. ‘Only skippa can adjust my user settings.’
Sal wondered how Rashim could sleep so readily. She toyed with the idea of waking him up and asking him to turn SpongeBubba off or mute him somehow. The robot was still staring at her, that stupid buck-toothed smile.
‘Shadd-yah! Are you always so… so perky and annoying?’
‘Perky?’
‘Happy.’
SpongeBubba shook his whole body, his version of a headshake. ‘No. I have no capacity to emulate human emotions. My model doesn’t require that! There is a similar model designed as a domestic support unit for civilian use. That unit is installed with gesture and mood recognition and replication code. But Dr Anwar says that’s a pointless waste of install space since if you know a robot’s a robot why pretend it can have feelings?’
‘So you’re not really happy, then? You’re just designed to look that way.’
SpongeBubba stared at her, an unwavering, goofy smile. ‘Dr Anwar designed me.’
Sal couldn’t work out if the robot was blaming his owner, or just stating a fact.
Becks pointed at something she’d seen through the windscreen. ‘Urggh… ge fug, duf,’ she gurgled excitedly and pointed.
Sal nodded, pulled her hand gently down and settled her. ‘Yes… cars, that’s right. Nice shiny cars.’
Why me? She shook her head. Why do I get to babysit these two morons?
‘We’re going to have to stop for gas again pretty soon,’ said Maddy. The gauge was showing just under the quarter bar. ‘Maybe we should pull over for the night. Find a motel. We’re far enough away to be safe now, aren’t we?’
Bob nodded. ‘We are probably far enough to be safe.’
Even now, so late, ahead of them was a sea of traffic, red brake lights winking on and off as vehicles inched forward.
‘What do you think they’ll do? Do you think they’ll keep coming after us?’
‘I have no information on their mission parameters.’
‘But if, say, you were sent to kill us, what would you be doing?’
‘I would persist until the mission parameters were satisfied, of course.’
‘How would you go about that, Bob? For example… what would you be doing right now?’
Bob scowled. Thinking. ‘I would attempt to intercept police radio communications for references to stolen vehicles in the vicinity of the archway. I would be searching the archway for items of useful intelligence.’ He looked sideways at her. ‘We left in a hurry. We cannot be certain we have not left behind some information that could lead them to us.’
He was right. They had left in a hurry, a careless scramble to grab all their essentials. God knows what they’d left behind, what fragments of information lay scattered around in their wake. Maddy’s head began to throb with renewed stress.
She sat in silence for a while, her fingers caressing her temples. She looked down into the stationary cars on either side of them. The glow of radio tuners on dashboards. She imagined every single driver in every vehicle on this road was tuned into a news station and listening to reporters recap the day’s terrifying events. Late-night talk radio stations venting unbridled rage at this cowardly attack on innocent American civilians. Experts hurried into studios to try and make sense of things. Because that’s what everyone needed to have right now, wasn’t it? Another explanation.
Why? Why are we being attacked? What did we do to deserve this?
Of course, Maddy had been pulled from a time — 2010 — when a lot of thinking had been done on why 9/11 had happened. The fact that there had been warning signs. The fact that there had been people in the FBI, the CIA screaming warnings to President Bush back in 2000 that something like this Was. Going. To. Happen. Imminently. Maddy came from a time when there was perspective, hindsight, on this day; from a time when everyone understood that a terrorist attack on America was inevitable. But for the people in these cars all around them this whole nightmare was still — and would be for years yet — a bewildering and terrifying mystery.
She drew her mind back to more pressing issues, for her. ‘No matter how far we drive, Bob… there’s no knowing for sure that we’re going to be safe, is there?’
‘No.’
She glanced at the gauge again. ‘And how far have we gone?’
‘We are only eighty miles from New York as a direct-line distance.’
‘Eighty miles? Might as well be a thousand and one, I suppose… Let’s take the next turn-off, then. We’ve got to fill up sometime soon anyway.’
Bob nodded. ‘Affirmative. Next turning.’
‘And how much further to Boston? It’s not that far, is it?’
‘Approximately a hundred and twenty miles as a direct-line distance from our current location.’
‘We can do the rest of the drive after a rest break.’ She pointed at a road sign looming towards them on the right. ‘Let’s take that next turn-off. The one for Branford. See if we can find a gas station and someplace to get some food, a diner or something.’
Maddy suddenly realized how bone-weary she felt; physically, mentally, spiritually, she was completely spent. A bed would be good. A bed with
clean, crisp white sheets. God… better still, a hot shower. A bath even!
‘Actually, the hell with that. Let’s see if we can stop and find a motel too. We can do the rest of the drive tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’ He nodded approval. Perhaps even Bob realized she needed a night off.
‘Affirmative.’
Chapter 11
12 September 2001, Washington DC
The duty corridor off the mezzanine floor was windowless. The ‘catacombs’, that’s what he’d heard one of the personnel who worked down here call it once. Several offices along an unused floor beneath an anonymous government building in Washington.
These offices had another name — a semi-official name. The few personnel who worked down in this artificially illuminated netherworld called it ‘The Department’. More than half a century ago — fifty-six years to be precise — was when The Department was set up. Not here, though. The Department didn’t have proper offices to call its own until after the 1947 ‘New Mexico Incident’. But this had been its one and only home since then.
On several occasions in those fifty-six years, these offices had experienced short bursts of frenetic activity; carefully vetted FBI agents had been drafted in to do routine belt-’n’-braces work, but never fully briefed on the various case files they were doing the heavy lifting on.
On a need-to-know basis. That’s how The Department did its business.
There’d been a buzz of activity here back in ’47, and again in 1963 after the ‘Dallas Incident’. There were a lot of paper files generated over that, all of them still down here in the catacombs. Everything one would ever want to know about the death of a President was stored in dog-eared cardboard folders, in dusty filing cabinets labelled ‘J-759’. And, if one took the time to dig through thousands of yellowing pages of gathered intelligence and witness depositions, one might in fact find the correct name of the man who actually killed President Kennedy.
Not Oswald. Certainly not one L. H. Oswald.
There were other labelled files down here, of other incidents over the decades that had been passed over to The Department to if not investigate then at least to safely archive. Fragments of intelligence gathered that would live forever down here in this air-conditioned twilight, far too sensitive, too incendiary, too dangerous to ever appear in the public eye.
There was file N-27, a certain dark secret from the very last days of the Second World War; a whole drawer of one of the filing cabinets was devoted to that. Then, of course, there was file R-497, the event that occurred in Roswell, New Mexico — several filing cabinets for that one — and typically plenty of silly TV shows, films and tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories about R-497.
And then there were several other, smaller, files.
One of those files had the equally uninspiring name of 414-T. Possibly the slimmest file in the pack of secrets, slumbering down here in the semi-darkness.
The Department was run ‘off the books’. Its funding came from a lump sum dropped into a bank account just after the Second World War. Over the last half a century that lump sum had been managed by a financial management company and invested in various things. Back in the seventies, for example, some of that money had been spent purchasing shares in a promising little tech company with a rainbow-coloured apple for a logo.
The Department had a staff that had on a few occasions numbered as high as thirty-five men, but tended in quiet times to number as few as three. As it did right now. The ‘Head’, his assistant and a solitary clerical officer.
Niles Cooper was the ‘Head’ right now, and possibly for the foreseeable future. Handed that role by his predecessor, a middle-aged pen-pusher called Pullman, who’d been looking for an easy assignment to carry him over until retirement. Before him, there’d been an old man called Wallace who’d run The Department — so it was said — since it was set up back in 1945.
Every ‘Head’ had his pet file, so Pullman told Cooper the day he retired and passed the keys to this place over to his younger successor. Pullman said his pet file had been R-497, the Roswell one.
Cooper’s was the slimmest one: 414-T.
Something of an enigma, that one. Several black-and-white photographs, very poor quality if truth be told. They’d been recovered, supposedly, by a Russian intelligence officer from one of the artillery-damaged barrack buildings near Obersalzsberg, near the mountain-top retreat of Adolf Hitler.
The Eagle’s Nest.
But there was no guarantee of the accuracy of that. It might have come from somewhere else, just as likely one of the many bombed-out ministry buildings along the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin. The images did have the ink-stamp of a swastika and a correctly configured intelligence reference number used by the Gestapo. So they were at least half-likely to be genuine.
Three photographs in total. The first in the sequence showed what appeared to be the aftermath of a bonfire of bodies in some snowy wood. A jumble of blackened limbs amid ice-melt and slush, surrounded by fir trees with snow-laden branches.
The second photograph was unpleasant. A close-up of a human skull, scorched completely black, and what appeared to be a section of skull cracked or carved open and lying in the snow nearby. The rest of the skull looked empty. Scooped out even.
But it was the third image that made this sequence so interesting, that had granted this slim file a place in The Department’s twilight bowels. The third image was of an assault rifle, like everything else scorched black and the gun barrel bent by the heat of the fire. There were notes stapled to the photograph. Notes made on some typewriter and in German, then added to some years later in English, handwritten blue ink, notes made by some American or British firearms expert:
Make and model is unknown. Not Russian. Certainly not one of ours! Could be a German prototype? The firing mechanism indecipherable. Can’t see how this gun would actually work!
(Signed: G. H. Davison. 16th February 1952)
Someone had drawn a blue-ink circle on a copy of the photograph. The circle looped round some markings beneath the weapon’s breech, a cluster of faint indented numbers and letters. The manufacturer’s markings, batch number, model number, and possibly the weapon’s date of manufacture.
Cooper had studied this photograph many times over the years. Each time, he’d studied it under a magnifying glass with the help of his angled desk lamp, like a manic philatelist examining a perfect and precious unmarked penny black stamp. And every time he’d peered closely at this black-and-white photograph he’d experienced the same shiver of excitement, of promise.
A possibility.
A possibility, and that’s all it was, a possibility that those last four numbers of the manufacturer’s mark were the year of manufacture.
2066.
Chapter 12
11 September 2001, outside Branford, Connecticut
The motel was pretty basic, just what Maddy expected for thirty-nine dollars a night. A double bed, a table, a wobbly hanger rack and a small TV, manacled to a wall bracket. They got three rooms: one for Maddy, Sal and Becks, one for Liam and Bob and one for Foster and Rashim. Basic, but at least each room had an en-suite bathroom with a bathtub too small to drown a cat in and presided over by a shower unit that sprayed a lethargic afterthought of tepid water.
SpongeBubba had the RV with an aisle full of plastic bags all to himself.
They all freshened up, each of them relishing their turn in the showers, before heading to the diner next door for dinner. They chose unhealthy, heart-attack meals from a menu with helpful, if somewhat misleading, pictures. After that, they reconvened in Foster and Rashim’s room.
The TV was turned up enough that anyone in a neighbouring room wasn’t going to easily pick words out of their conversation through the paper-thin walls. Fox News was on and there was understandably only one story today. President George Bush had held a press conference and given the administration’s official response to the day’s acts of terrorism, and now his words were being dissected by news hosts
in meticulous detail.
Foster was slumped in the room’s only chair. The others were perched on the double bed. Becks sat cross-legged on the carpet like a nursery-school child waiting for storytime and Bob stood in the corner of the room keeping a wary eye, through the window blinds, on the RV parked outside.
‘You want to know what the future’s like?’ said Rashim.
Maddy nodded. ‘Yeah, Liam’s right, we really should get to know how this century all plays out. All we’ve got are scraps of info. Bits here, bits there. Even Foster only knows some of it.’
The old man nodded. ‘Only what was available on the archway’s computer database and that only takes us up to the year 2054.’
Rashim looked at Foster. ‘The year your secret agency originates from?’
‘I suppose that must be it,’ Foster answered with a shrug. ‘It’s the year from which Waldstein set it all up and took it back to 2001.’
‘2054? I was just a small boy then!’ Rashim laughed.
‘Go on, please. Tell us what you can,’ said Liam.
Rashim leaned back on the bed, hands behind his head, looking up at the low cracked plaster ceiling above. ‘It’s not a happy story, boys and girls. We screwed things up. Mankind did. We made a mess of everything. Funny, it’s all history to me, but the future to you.’ He sighed. ‘The world hit seven billion people on the thirty-first of October 2011. In my time historians use that date a lot. Like some sort of a marker. The point at which it all began to go bad.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, whether it was the population explosion or peak oil to blame, 2011 is retrospectively seen as the point at which the world crossed the line and was doomed.’
‘ Peak oil? What’s that?’ asked Liam.
‘Peak oil is the term for the point at which we were never going to have enough oil-based energy to tide us over until we could rely on a new source of energy. Oh, there were things being trialled on a small scale: renewables, wind, tide energy, zero-point energy. But nothing that was near enough to replacing oil. The rest of the century was one war after another being fought for the remaining oil fields, while the world continued to warm up as we ferociously burned our dwindling supply of fossil fuels and the oceans continued to rise.