by Alex Scarrow
‘My batch birth date is 25 June 2069. Waldstein sent us back to kill TimeRiders.’
‘Oh my God! Did she just say — ?’
‘That’s right, Mallard. You’re going to need to get your head round this. And fast. I can’t have you flapping your jaw like that every time something’s said. She’s from the future — get used to it.’
The younger man paled. He rocked on his heels uncertainly as his jaw hung open, catching flies once more.
Cooper decided he’d better go easy on him. After all, personally he’d had quite a few years to get used to the idea that anonymous time travellers had passed this way in recent years and just might have rather carelessly left one or two of their footsteps in history.
‘ The future? ’ he whispered.
‘Mallard, I need you to process that quietly, all right? I know it’s a helluva thing to take on board. So, just think about it for now, and later I will talk you through it, all the evidence we have. The whole deal. But for now? Right now?… I need you to shut up.’ He patted the man’s shoulder. ‘All right?’
Mallard nodded. Cooper turned back to the young woman strapped to the cell’s cot. ‘Why have you come back here to our time? Who were you after in that shopping mall?’
She started blinking rapidly.
‘You all right? What’re you doing?’ No response, just the rapid flickering of her eyelids.
‘Good God!’ Mallard was horrified. ‘I think she’s having a seizure. She’s — ’
Her eyes snapped open. ‘Negative. I am reprioritizing mission parameters. Just a moment… just a moment…’
A minute passed in silence. Long enough for Cooper to begin wondering whether he needed to prod her again.
‘Information,’ she said finally. ‘While you may be able to assist me, revealing mission objectives to you is a protocol breach. A contamination.’
‘Contamination?’
‘A time contamination: providing information to you that may cause you to behave in a way or perform actions that alter the timeline. This is a basic protocol breach and must be avoided. However…’ Her eyelids stopped fluttering and her gaze settled back on Cooper. ‘There is a greater contamination occurring at the moment which must be prevented.’
‘The people you were after?’
‘Correct. They are not of this time. They must be located immediately and dealt with.’
‘By that, I’m guessing you mean killed?’
‘Affirmative. They have with them the necessary components to facilitate further time displacements and cause even greater contamination. They must be located before they effect a displacement.’
‘Displacement? You mean time travel?’ Cooper felt hairs rising on the back of his neck. ‘My God, you… you’re actually talking about a functioning — ’ he felt ridiculous even voicing the words, but there was no other way of saying it — ‘time machine? Is that what you’re talking about? Is that what they’ve got with them?’
‘The components required to rebuild one, yes.’
Cooper felt a little unsteady. Like Mallard had a moment ago, he rocked back on his heels, settling gently against the cold wall of the cell, grateful for its support.
She played a cold, emotionless facsimile of a smile across her lips. ‘What is your name?’
‘Cooper,’ he answered. ‘Agent Niles Cooper.’
‘Cooper, I am Faith. I believe that we are able to assist each other.’
A deal. She’s proposing a deal.
‘You want us to let you out of here?’
‘Affirmative. I can lead you directly to them. I have data on their likely movements.’
‘And, if you find them, then what?’
‘I will kill them.’
‘What about their — ’ he decided to use her term — ‘ displacement machine?’
‘It must be destroyed.’
‘No, we’d want that intact. I can’t agree to those — ’
‘Negative. Allowing you to possess a fully functioning displacement device is unacceptable. That would be an even greater contamination threat. You will not be permitted that.’
‘Then I’m afraid there’s no deal, Faith.’
Her eyes closed and her eyelids began to flutter. She started to pant and flex again, an unsettling sight like a child sucking in air and preparing to throw an almighty tantrum. But then she stopped. ‘I am able to offer you an alternative, Cooper.’
‘What?’
‘My silicon mind, completely intact.’
He narrowed his eyes. ‘The computer in your head? Just like the other one… in your dead friend?’
‘Correct. I will, of course, delete all files associated with time displacement, but you would be left with the computer architecture entirely intact.’
‘Jesus,’ whispered Mallard. ‘That’s a fifty-year jump in computer technology!’
Cooper nodded slowly. ‘Yes… yes, it is.’
‘Do we have an agreement?’ asked Faith.
He tapped his chin again. He could feel those hairs on the back of his neck once more, his scalp prickling.
‘All right. I think we have the basis of an agreement.’
Chapter 30
13 September 2001, Interstate 90, Newton, Massachusetts
It was mid-afternoon the next day when the debate in her head finally came to an end and she got up off her bed. Sal was still snoring.
Becks heard her stir, looked up from where she was sitting cross-legged on the floor. ‘Where are you going, Maddy?’
‘Out,’ she replied softly.
‘Are you going to visit your family?’
No point lying to her. ‘Yes.’
‘The others are worried about you doing this.’
‘I need to go.’
She and Becks had had this conversation before. Back when the archway was a pile of rubble in the bottom of a bomb crater, barely holding itself together. She’d nearly walked out on Becks and the others then. She’d planned to somehow make her way back to Boston in the vain hope of finding an alternate version of her parents, perhaps even a version of herself. It had been a moment of weakness. A moment when she’d been prepared to leave her friends to deal with things on their own.
Maddy doubted Becks had a memory of that particular conversation, of walking out, abandoning her in the archway. At the moment she wasn’t sure what memories Becks had back in that skull of hers. Bob had been filling her mind up with as much as he could over the last couple of days, a slow process over their nearfield wireless link. Whatever memories she had on-board now would be Bob’s, not her’s anyway. Becks’s full mind remained on an external hard drive.
‘Don’t wake Sal. If she does wake and asks where I am… tell her I’ve gone to get some supplies in or something.’
‘Yes, Maddy. Be careful, Maddy,’ she added almost as an afterthought.
Half an hour later she was on a Greyhound bus heading towards Arlington. Maddy realized she’d forgotten how the lines were organized, which ones went where. And yet once upon a time she must have taken them everywhere: to school, back home, into the city to meet friends from high school.
I’m nineteen and I’m already going freakin’ senile. How come I can’t remember which buses I used to take? She wondered whether a new bus service had taken over here, and perhaps that was why none of the numbers or routes made sense to her.
The bus passed a high school and she looked out on a football field; several dozen young men lined up in their tracksuits, donning shoulder pads and helmets, preparing to practise a few set pieces. Some younger boys kicking a soccer ball around on another field. Maddy realized she couldn’t even remember the name of her high school. Not even the name. Nor the names of any of her teachers. Or their faces. God… nor could she even recall any of her friends.
I had some friends, right? At least one friend… surely?
But none came to mind. Not a single one. She felt the first stirring of panic set in.
I really am losing my mind
!
She could guess what this was — this was that damned archway field, the time bubble. Those freakin’ particles killing her mind, one brain cell at a time. She’d just now joked about going senile, but maybe that was just it. Sitting in that brick dungeon all these months was gradually, memory by memory, wiping her mind clean.
She was suddenly grateful to be out of there — OK, they were on the run, but at least they were free from the ever-present corrosive effect of that technology. And grateful, so grateful that she still had enough of her mind and memories left intact to at least find her way home.
The Greyhound dropped her off outside a small 7-Eleven store. She smiled. Her mind remembered that all right. The first familiar sight so far, it was the only convenience store around for miles. The rest of this suburb was endless loops of road flanked on either side by well-tended lawns and picket fences, long paved and brown asphalt driveways leading up to grand-looking white-collar homes.
She passed the store, and second on her right Silverdale Crescent. Lined with mature maple trees, their leaves beginning to turn golden for the autumn, not quite ready to fall. She stepped aside for a couple of boys riding their bikes along the pavement, talking to each other about an upcoming game console called the Xbox, that was due to be released this Thanksgiving.
Maddy felt an overpowering urge to run the last hundred yards home. This was her street, the place where all of her childhood years had been spent. This was where her life had once made sense, when it was simple and stress free. Decisions no more demanding than which cartoon channel to watch, which flavour ice cream to eat.
Across the road a bed of flowers, Sweet Carolines, glowed in shafts of warm sunlight, tidy rows of purples and creamy pinks. A chestnut-coloured Labrador on a long leash followed an old lady wearing gardening gloves and holding a shopping list in one hand.
She heard the soft boom of rock music and a Ford Zodiac pulled up a long driveway. It was painted with skulls and flaming guitars. A young lad with long hair got out, a guitar case over his shoulder and a small practice amp in one hand.
Band rehearsal.
She smiled. Even only days after 9/11, life was still going on for everyone. The bad guys hadn’t won. America hadn’t ground to a halt. Kids were still taking their guitars and doing band practice.
And God, it felt so good to be coming home. Maddy tried to remember the last time she’d been back home to see Mom and Dad. Because since she’d left home to work for that software games company, she’d been living in…
Once again her mind was letting her down.
‘Oh, come on, girl,’ she chided herself. She’d been living… where?… Where?
She stopped. Nothing was coming. She couldn’t even remember where in New York she’d been staying. Or was it New Jersey? And yet she’d been on a damned plane when Foster had saved her. Where the hell was she going? Was she going home for a visit? It must’ve been. Home for Thanksgiving or Easter, or Christmas or something. But home from where exactly?
Her confusion was brushed to one side as she caught a glimpse of the family house up ahead. Home. Unmistakably home. There it was, unchanged in all these years. A large family home built in a mock antebellum style. Covered porch along the front, shingle tiles and white painted supports.
She turned up the empty drive. Dad was probably still at work and Mom always parked her car in the carport.
Did she actually do that? Did she? Was that a memory?
Maddy had the distinct impression she’d just made that bit up, like someone joining the dots on a child’s puzzle. Filling in gaps with whatever seemed to fit. Just to hurry up and finish the picture off — damned if it was a hundred per cent right or not.
She noticed the bedroom window above the carport was open and a gentle warm afternoon breeze was teasing a pink curtain in and out. Her bedroom. Now that she was certain of. The front room above the carport, that was hers all right.
But a pink curtain?
I never liked pink… did I?
She shrugged. She’d still been a bit girly at age nine. Torn between being like all the other girls or being a tomboy. Maybe the pink curtain was a phase in her younger life she’d chosen to blot out, to not remember. A phase where she’d made a half-hearted attempt to appear feminine. Beyond that curtain, inside the room, she was pretty sure it was all Star Wars action figures and comic books, Warhammer figurines and models of tanks and guns.
The window being open meant one thing. I must be at home. Maddy stopped before the whitewashed steps leading up to the front door.
I’m at home. I’m in this house somewhere. Me. I’m home from school. Of course she was. It was after three.
It’s me in there. Me, aged nine.
She felt an overpowering rush of emotion. It was going to be so strange meeting herself. Like looking in a peculiar mirror that could filter away years, allow her to look back through ten years of time and see herself with braces still welded to her teeth and that always impossible hair of hers dragged into submission by a brush and pulled tightly into two bobbing Goldilocks ponytails.
She was trembling. It was going to be impossibly weird.
‘And what the hell do I say?’ she muttered.
She took the steps up to the porch slowly. There was the garden gnome with a chainsaw. Her idea of a joke present for Mom, who just hated gardening and could quite happily have taken a chainsaw to all the delicately trimmed bushes up and down Silverdale Crescent. And there, across the porch, was the rocking-chair. She smiled at the memory of the thing. Dad’s favourite chair… where he spent summer evenings smoking a long clay pipe and rocking back and forth.
Again. She had the distinct impression that she was inking in details, filling in gaps in her mind with memories that seemed appropriate, most likely. She was creating mental images to fill her blank memory. Worse still, she suddenly realized, she was borrowing images, scenes, from old movies, from old TV shows. Why the hell was she seeing Dad with long white whiskers? Wearing worn old dungarees and a battered straw hat?
‘That’s not right… that’s The Waltons,’ she whispered. It had been on TV back in the motel room: some old rerun of The Waltons on cable. And now her mind was taking bits of that old show and superimposing it on her scant childhood memories. Filling in. Filling in.
The front door. Now, dammit, she remembered this for sure. Reassuring, a genuine memory this time. Mint green with that brass knocker. How many times had she closed that behind her or watched her mother fumble with shopping bags to find her keys to open it?
She reached for the knocker and hesitated. What the crud was she going to say to Mom? How was she going to explain who she was?
It was going to be difficult. Mom was in there somewhere, probably glued to the TV on the breakfast bar in the kitchen, still watching the news on Fox. Perhaps still crying for her poor older sister who’d lost a wonderful son in that pile of still-smouldering rubble. And Maddy could imagine herself up in her bedroom painting her Warhammer figures. Keeping her mind occupied. Not wanting to think about the fact that Julian was gone for good. Not wanting to pester Mom with difficult questions right now.
This was going to be awkward.
She grabbed the knocker and tapped it firmly against the door.
Hi, Mom. Can you guess who I am?
No, that wouldn’t do.
Hi. I have something really important to tell you… Can I come in?
No. That made her sound like a goddamn Jehovah’s Witness.
Mom, it’s me… Maddy. I’ve come from nine years in the future.
She heard footsteps inside. The squeak of trainers on parquet floor, then the rattle and clack of the latch and the door opened.
‘Yeah?’
A girl. About the age she was expecting, blonde. She was wearing a Spice Girls T-shirt and pink jeans with a glitter pattern down one leg and floral pumps.
God! Is that really me!? It can’t be!
‘Yeah?’ said the girl again with an impatient shru
g. ‘Help you?’
Maddy was tongue-tied. ‘I… uh…’
‘You want to speak to my mom?’
Maddy nodded mutely.
‘Mom!’ called out the girl. ‘It’s for you-hoo!’
‘Who is it?’ A woman’s voice from somewhere in the back.
The girl made a wearisome face. ‘Mom says… who is it?’
Maddy felt her resolve beginning to fail her. She wanted to mumble something like I guess I got the wrong house, sorry about that, turn around and walk away. But she couldn’t walk away. Not now. She was past that point, over it. She was here, she’d already knocked and waited and now the door was open and she was just seconds away from speaking to Mom. Too late to run. She was here now and she really needed Mom and Dad’s help. It was now or never.
Maddy hunkered down a little, to the girl’s level. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘My name’s Maddy. Just like yours.’
The girl looked at her sideways. ‘Uh, no, it ain’t.’
‘Nadine!’ called the voice from the back. ‘Who is it?’
‘Your name’s Nadine?’
‘Uh… yeah.’
That flummoxed her. ‘Nadine?’ She wasn’t expecting that. ‘Since… when?’
She shrugged. ‘Like, since, birth.’
Chapter 31
2055, W.G. Systems Research Campus, near Pinedale, Wyoming
Waldstein stared at it. There it was behind the darkened glass, in a carefully controlled and monitored sealed envelope of cool air. A sheet of brittle and age-yellowed newspaper. A page of classified ads: columns of messages from the hopeless, the lonely, the bereft, the bewildered. An ad from someone who’d lost a much-loved bulldog answering to the name of Roosevelt and was offering a reward of $200 for him. Some old soldier looking for a fellow platoon member he served alongside during the Normandy landings, and someone else looking for a missing daughter who might just be living in the Brooklyn area. There an ad from a very lonely widower looking for someone else to share his suddenly empty life with — searching for a friend who might enjoy trips to the theatre, watching matinees of old Bette Davis movies.