by Alex Scarrow
‘Meatbots, eh? Bleedin’ marvellous.’
Chapter 35
2055, W.G. Systems Research Campus, near Pinedale, Wyoming
It was late in the day. Joseph Olivera had decided to stay overnight on the grounds of the W.G. Systems research compound to eat in the staff canteen and sleep in the cot in the adjoining office area. The synthi-soya gunk they served up in there almost tasted like real food. Better than the cartons of gunk he had in his apartment’s refrigerator.
Anyway, it was beginning to get dark outside and he didn’t fancy taking his Auto-Drive along the winding wooded road down to Pinedale. There were more and more vagrants drifting westward from the eastern states and he knew for certain many of them were camping out there in the woods. He’d heard some of the W.G. techies talking about several more roadside hold-ups in the last week. In most cases it was just the desperate and hungry after a little money, not exactly asking… but… in most cases the hold-up ended as a palm-transaction of whatever digi-dollars you had on account and they’d let you pass through unharmed.
Desperate times for some. No. Desperate times for many.
He felt uncomfortable anyway, leaving the lab. He’d set things in motion. Sown seeds. As a last-minute thing, he’d ended up slipping a hastily scribbled note addressed to the Maddy unit into the embryo box that Waldstein had taken back to San Francisco. And now he was beginning to panic, wondering whether he’d been stupid. There was no knowing for sure when, or even if, the team back in 2001 were going to discover the note, whether they were going to question the base office. If a message did come through from them, through that scrap of old paper, he wanted to intercept it before Waldstein saw it.
It was a relief right now that the old man was away in Denver on business. Olivera felt a mixture of guilt for betraying the man, and a desperate fear of him. Griggs… he still wasn’t certain one way or the other about poor Frasier’s fate. Perhaps his paranoia was getting the better of him; perhaps the poor fellow had just been unlucky.
The Saleena unit had been inserted back in the past now. And it wouldn’t be long before her curious mind started picking away at the tiny new details edited into her consciousness. Between that bit of memory surgery and his handwritten note, Joseph felt he’d done as much as he could to unbalance things. Those three young clones weren’t stupid. Far from it. Together, they were going to figure this all out one way or the other. Eventually.
And now perhaps he needed to find a way out for himself. Handing in his notice wasn’t exactly going to wash with Waldstein. As the man had told him: ‘Once you’re in, Joseph, you’re in. Do you understand?’
Perhaps he could plead mental exhaustion. Perhaps he could tell Waldstein he was beginning to make mistakes and it might be best if he took some kind of sabbatical? That sounded lame even before he tried saying it. He was so busy trying to find some way of phrasing a way to ask Waldstein to let him go that he failed to hear the soft scrape of a foot in the doorway. Olivera lurched suspiciously in his chair, like some mischievous little boy caught with his fingers in a sweetie jar.
‘Joseph.’
It was Waldstein. Olivera felt his heart pounding in his chest. He hadn’t been expecting the man to return this evening. ‘Mr… Mr Waldstein. I… I thought you were still in Denver on business.’
‘Indeed.’ Waldstein’s cool eyes remained on him.
Olivera looked away. Found something for his fidgeting hands to fiddle with on his desk. ‘All… all s-sorted, then? The business?’
‘Not really, no. I had to come back here early.’
Oliver nodded. ‘Oh?’ The old man looked tired, sad. ‘Everything all right, Mr Waldstein?’
‘No, Joseph. Not all right.’
No explanation. Just that. Olivera felt panic growing inside him. He dared not say anything in case his stutter betrayed him.
‘I know,’ said Waldstein after several interminable seconds.
‘Know? Uh… know… know what?’
Waldstein shook his head slowly, the gesture very much like a father’s disappointment with an errant child. ‘I know you’ve been tampering with things.’
Olivera felt his stomach flop queasily. ‘T-tamper?’
‘You’ve edited the memories of Saleena. You added something to the unit that was sent back.’ Waldstein noticed the faintest involuntary flicker of reaction on Joseph’s face. ‘Yes, Joseph… I’ve had the database tagged to alert me for updates to the source archive.’ He spread his hands in a vaguely apologetic way. ‘After Frasier let me down, I figured it might be prudent to keep a closer eye on you also.’
‘I… I… needed to just… tidy up s-s-some continuity faults.’
‘Please, Joseph…’ he said, stepping into the lab and finding a seat to ease himself down into. ‘Please don’t lie to me. I’m too tired for that now.’ He sighed. ‘You’ve not been fixing memory mismatches. You’ve added new content to her mind.’
Olivera couldn’t help his jaw sagging. Perhaps that was less an admission of guilt than stuttering a denial at him.
‘Why did you add the visual memory of a tumbling teddy bear to her recruitment memory, Joseph? Why?’ Waldstein’s eyes narrowed. ‘What are you trying to tell her?’
The bear. Olivera realized Waldstein must have actually viewed the visual insert: the image of the blue bear tumbling end over end, almost defying gravity. So very deliberately conspicuous. The kind of visual image that would stick in a mind.
‘It’s a trigger memory, isn’t it?’
Olivera felt his cheeks burn with shame. His face, his demeanour, his awkward shuffling were screaming his guilt out loud and, of course, Waldstein knew what he’d been up to anyway… if not the precise reason why.
‘Yes,’ Joseph said eventually.
‘Joseph?’ Waldstein said softly. ‘Talk to me. Why the trigger memory?’
Olivera looked up at him.
He’d noticed the bear back in 2001, while he and Frasier had been setting the field office up. That curious antique shop not so far away had provided him with some of the props he’d needed to validate their various recruitment memories; the Titanic steward’s uniform had given him the idea of setting Liam’s recruitment aboard that famous doomed ship. A perfect recruitment fable. There’d been other things in various other shops that had helped him author appropriate life stories for each of them: the dark hoody with splashes of neon-orange Hindi-graffiti, that T-shirt with the Intel logo. Real things that would exist with them as they woke up in the archway. Real, tangible items that would help all three engineered units bond with their carefully scripted memories.
The bear… adding that bear to the replacement Saleena unit’s memory was adding something that couldn’t possibly be. The same bear in both places: Brooklyn 2001, Mumbai 2026. A clear, unambiguous impossibility.
A trigger.
‘Why, Joseph?’
‘Why?’ Olivera felt slightly emboldened. His game was up. No more lying. Somehow so very liberating. ‘Let me ask you that, s-sir. Why?’
Waldstein frowned. ‘Why what?’
‘Why do you want mankind to destroy itself?’
‘What the hell are you talking about, Joseph?’
‘I know… I know about Pandora.’
The word caused Waldstein to shift uneasily.
‘I know it’s s-some kind of codeword you have, isn’t it? A codeword for the end of mankind. The day… the precise date we destroy ourselves. That’s it, isn’t it?’
‘This has come from Frasier, hasn’t it? This is his nonsense, isn’t it?’
‘Pandora. The end of the world… that’s what you s-saw, isn’t it?’
‘What I saw?’
There was something comforting about unburdening himself like this. Olivera realized he was already so far over a certain invisible line that there was nothing he could say that was going to make any difference now. Either he was going to be instantly dismissed from the project, escorted out of the compound… or… or perhaps worse.
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‘You’re actually asking me what I saw back in 2044?’ Waldstein eyed him cautiously. ‘Is that what you’re asking me? What I saw that very first time?’
Olivera nodded hesitantly. ‘You… you didn’t… go back in time, did you? You didn’t go back to s-see your… wife, your s-son?’
Waldstein shook his head slowly. ‘Oh, Joseph… please don’t ask me what I saw.’
‘You went forward. You went forward in time. You…’
‘What?’ He smiled. ‘I went forward in time to see if mankind makes it through these hard times? To see if mankind is as stupid and self-destructive as it appears to be?’
Olivera nodded.
‘And what? All this?’ He gestured at the small lab. ‘This project of ours, the businesses I’ve built up, the technology companies I’ve been acquiring, buying, the billions of dollars I’ve made… all of this, just to make sure it happens? Just to make certain mankind wipes itself out?’ Waldstein’s voice rose in pitch. A note of incredulity. ‘Are you seriously suggesting all of that is so I can ensure the end of the road for mankind?’
Olivera nodded again.
‘Oh, Joseph…’ That look of disappointment on his face again. He eased himself up off the seat. ‘You have no idea. Not even the slightest idea. God help me! I’m not trying to destroy us… I’m trying to save us.’ He sighed as he stepped back towards the lab’s doorway. ‘Or at least save what I can of us… what there is to save.’
Olivera had a sense that this was where their conversation met its logical conclusion. No bartering. No pretending. No back-out clause. This was the place they were at. ‘Mr Waldstein? What… what happens now?’
Waldstein backed up several steps. Turned and said something softly to someone who must have been standing outside, just out of sight.
‘Who’s… Mr Wald-s-stein. Who’s out there? Who’re you talking to?’
A tall, muscular figure appeared behind the old man, completely bald, with the calm dispassionate face of a recently birthed support unit.
‘I’m so very sorry, Joseph.’ Waldstein looked back at him with sadness in his eyes. ‘I’m truly sorry that it has to be this way…’
In a heartbeat he was certain of Griggs’s fate. Murdered. Not by some gang of starving vagrants but by Waldstein. Directly or indirectly. The old man had made sure Frasier Griggs wasn’t going to remain a dangerous loose end.
And now I’m dead.
He backed up a step, past his own workstation to what used to be Griggs’s workstation.
‘Joseph,’ said Waldstein, ‘please don’t make this harder than it has to be. Come here.’
‘You… you don’t n-need to do this. Please… you don’t — ’
‘But here’s the problem — I can’t trust you any more.’ There was genuine sadness on Waldstein’s face. ‘Do you see? I couldn’t trust Frasier either. And that’s the important thing. This is too important, Joseph. More important than Frasier, than you… than me even.’
Joseph eyed the holo-display shimmering inches above the mess of Griggs’s desk. He’d been looking through those folders of his ex-colleague’s that hadn’t been code-locked. Frasier had been recently pinhole-viewing history. One of his unofficial hobbies. He rather liked to discreetly spy on favourite historical moments, particularly civil-war history. Joseph had once caught him glimpsing the final moment of the Battle of Gettysburg, as General Pickett’s Virginians had finally withered under the barrage of musket fire, broke and routed. Then another time Frasier had been listening to Abraham Lincoln give his famous Gettysburg Address.
‘Tell me,’ pleaded Joseph, ‘what’s so important? Tell me!’
Waldstein sighed. ‘If that I could, Joseph… if only I could…’
Joseph shot another glance at the display. The pinhole-viewer interface was in standby mode, as Griggs had left it last time he’d used it. The displacement machine was fully charged after having sent back the Saleena unit. Good to go, ready to dispense its stored energy. He just needed to open the interface, dilate the pinhole, three feet, four feet. That’s all. It would be enough.
‘W-why c-can’t you tell me, Mr… Mr Waldstein? Maybe, m-maybe if you explained — ’
‘Explain Pandora to you? Explain why mankind has to wipe himself out?’ Waldstein smiled sadly. ‘I explain that to you… and what? All of a sudden I’ll be able to trust you unreservedly?’
Joseph nodded. Perhaps too eagerly. His mind was on something else, though. Calculating escape.
‘I’m sorry, Joseph. What has to happen is my burden, my burden alone, and I’ll burn in hell forever for what I know has to be done.’ The old man looked like he was crying. ‘Good God, Joseph… you don’t want to know what’s in my head. Trust me!’
Three feet, just about wide enough for him to dive through. But… but… he had no idea what time-stamp, if any, was already set in the location buffer. He looked up at the support unit, still standing obediently just behind Waldstein. On a word of command it could be across the small lab in seconds, not enough time for him to pick out and tap the coordinates for a safe, density-verified location.
Oh God help me… If nothing was in the entry buffer, he’d end up in chaos space. That horrific nothingness. A swiftly crushed neck at the hands of the unit standing behind Waldstein would be infinitely preferable, surely?
‘It all has to end, Joseph. In that way. Pandora. Only then will they let it happen.’
They?
‘Let what… what h-happen? Who… who are you talking about?’
‘I’m sorry, Joseph. The time for talking is over.’ He turned to the support unit and nodded.
The support unit pushed past Waldstein, strode round a table cluttered with Joseph’s mind-map charts and printouts of gene-memory data templates.
Not daring to think what horror awaited him if the time-stamp entry buffer was empty, Joseph’s finger hovered over the commit touch button on the holo-display. A warning flashed on the screen that a pinhole was now activated. The air near him pulsated subtly. It was there… but so small it was invisible. On the lab floor, yellow and black chevron tape marked out a safety square, a place not to enter while a pinhole was active. Walking through a pinhole would be like being shot by a high-calibre round — a tangent carved through the body and sent elsewhere, no different to the path of a speeding bullet, blasting a hole right through a body and depositing what it had eviscerated out the other side.
‘My God!’ Waldstein’s eyes widened as he understood what Joseph intended to do. ‘ DON’T DO IT! ’
Joseph tapped a command in, an instruction to widen the pinhole.
The support unit picked up on the urgency in Waldstein’s voice and leaped towards Joseph. The pinhole instantaneously inflated, from apparently nothing to a shimmering, floating orb a yard wide. Joseph turned towards it, time enough in the half second left to see that the churning, oily display was showing something more than featureless white. It was showing somewhere. Somewhere.
Not chaos space. Good enough.
He instinctively cradled his head and dived into the shimmering orb, tucking his legs up, his elbows in, to be sure he left none of them behind. In the last moment before entering it he was screaming. A wail of panic, a long, strangled bellow of defiance and fear. Most definitely fear.
This is insane!
As his head entered that swirling escape window — a window that could mean safety or death in any number of unpleasant ways — he thought he could make out the shape of horses. A wagon. Barrels.
At least it wasn’t all white, right?
At least there was that.
Chapter 36
15 September 2001, Arlington, Massachusetts
Rosalin Kellerman stared at the man in a smart business suit standing on her doorstep, and a woman beside him. A striking young woman, with startling grey eyes, wide and intense, wearing a loose gentleman’s checked shirt, several sizes too big for her but tucked into tightly fitting jeans. Athletic. But striking… in that her hea
d was shaved almost down to the skin. And yet somehow she was still quite beautiful. Just like that Irish rock singer-songwriter from the eighties… what was her name? Sinead something or other.
‘This is number 45?’ he asked again.
Rosalin shrugged and pointed at the brass number plaque on her green door. ‘Uh… well, there’s the number right there! See it?’
‘And this is your residence?’ asked the man.
Rosalin narrowed her eyes. This was already becoming a peculiar encounter. And not the first one she’d had in the last few days.
‘Have you received a visit from a stranger recently?’ The man seemed to immediately realize that was a stupidly vague question. He pulled something out of his jacket pocket. A photograph. Held it up so she could see it. ‘A visit from this person?’
Rosalin recognized the face. The oval-shaped chin, the glasses, the frizzy, strawberry-blonde hair. Oh yeah, she remembered this girl all right.
‘You mind telling me what the hell this is all about?’
The man smiled. ‘You’ve seen her, haven’t you?’
‘Yeah… she came knocking a couple of days ago.’ Rosalin shook her head. ‘Crazy. I was pretty stupid. I really shouldn’t have let her in.’
‘You spoke with her?’ asked the intense young woman in the checked shirt.
‘You kidding?’ Rosalin snorted a laugh. ‘I couldn’t get a word in.’
‘Mom!’
Rosalin heard the alarm in her daughter’s voice and put down the tray of cakes on the counter, vaguely aware that the oven-hot tray was going to leave marks on the Formica, but Nadine’s shrill cry sounded unsettling.
She stepped into the hallway to see that a girl, a teenager, pale and scruffy, had pushed her way into the house past her daughter Nadine.
‘ What the hell do you think you’re doing? ’
‘This is my… my home!’ cried the girl.
Oh my God… maybe she’s a drug addict. Maybe she’s after money?