by Alex Scarrow
‘But wouldn’t you want to have someone X-ray your head? Take a look inside to see if there’s a chip or something inside?’
‘Not really. Whatever’s in me head, machine or meat, it works just fine.’
She sniffed. ‘Except it’s fake.’
‘Ah well now… who’s to say anybody’s memories are for real? Hmm?’ He chuckled. A plume of breath erupted from his mouth. ‘You know, perhaps the whole world, the whole universe, is just a big pretend — someone’s idea of a funny joke. Huh?’
‘Difference is… we know our lives are a funny joke, Liam.’
‘You can never know anything for sure, Sal. In the end, it’s all a question of what you choose to believe.’ He watched a cloud of his breath drift away — turning, twisting, dissipating in the cold afternoon air.
‘Thing is… I choose to be Liam. I like him.’ He smiled at her. ‘I like being him. And maybe he was once a real lad who lived in Cork and I’m just borrowing his memories, or maybe he’s just a made-up person put together from bits and pieces. Who cares?’
‘But that’s no better than…’ She struggled to think of an example. ‘That’s no better than a child pretending to be Superman. No better than all those people who believe in God. Or Jehovah. Or Allah, or Vishnu, or — ’
‘Maybe.’ He shrugged. ‘But it works for me.’
She sighed. ‘I can’t do it, Liam,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t think I can pretend I’m who I thought I was. All I’ve got that’s real is the time in the archway. You. Maddy.’
He pointed at what was clasped in her hands. ‘Is that why you’ve got that with you all the time?’
Sal looked down at the notebook — her diary — and nodded. ‘That’s me, Liam.’ A solitary tear dripped on to the scuffed black cover. She wiped it off irritably. ‘That’s all there is left of me. Ink and paper.’
A crow cawed from the bare branches beyond the chain-link fence surrounding the playground. The solitary, ominous noise of approaching winter.
‘Sal?’ He reached out and squeezed her gloved hand. ‘Don’t do this, Sal. Eh? Don’t drift off and away from me an’ Maddy. We need you, so we do. The three of us need to hold fast together. To stay a proper team.’
‘Need me? What do I do? Nothing.’
‘You will do. When we’re set up again in London, we’ll need you watching for them little changes. Up in the centre of the city, Piccadilly Circus maybe, watching for the time waves.’
She gave that a moment’s thought. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps there was a purpose for her still. She wiped her nose and sniffed noisily. Then sniggered.
Liam smiled. ‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘No, go on. What’s so funny?’
‘Something you said.’
‘I said something funny?’
She shook her head. ‘It’s nothing.’ Her face brightened for him. ‘You’re right. We’ve still got a job to do, haven’t we?’
‘Aye. So come in, then, Sal. Before you freeze.’
‘I will. You go. I’ll be along in a minute.’
‘All right. I’m makin’ some hot chocolate. Care for some?’ He cocked a brow. ‘There’ll be a fair chance of some of them nice chocolate biscuits with the cream in the middle.’
‘Oreos.’
‘Aye, those are the fellas.’
‘Sure. Count me in.’
She watched him go, kicking those leaves again on the way back to the double doors of the school gymnasium, blue paint flaking off both and a rusting push-bar on one of them. The door clattered shut behind him.
Something you said, Liam… something funny. Really funny.
‘Perhaps the whole universe is just a big pretend?’ she muttered softly.
No, actually, not that funny after all.
Chapter 48
7 October 2001, Washington DC
Faith appraised Agent Cooper. Unlike most humans he appeared to be very task-focused, very driven. One could say binary, almost Boolean, in his mindset. He could almost have passed as one of her short-lived batch of clone brothers and sisters. Except, of course, he wasn’t six foot six inches tall and carrying around eighteen stone of muscle and dense-lattice bone. He was just as frail and vulnerable as any other human being: one of her hands round his neck and a quick twist and he’d be burger meat in a suit. That unfortunate frailty notwithstanding… she’d so far been quite impressed with his performance.
She resumed eating the bowl of Cow amp; Gate baby food.
Cooper in turn was silently appraising her. Perched on the edge of his desk, he grimaced as he watched her spoon the baby food into her mouth. ‘I can’t believe you can chow down that stuff.’
‘It is an optimal formula,’ she replied with her mouth full. ‘Maximum nutrition with a minimum of energy consumed in the process of breaking it down and digesting it.’
She noticed he was looking at her intently. ‘What is it, Agent Cooper?’
‘You’ve, uh… you’ve got a blob of that stuff right there on the end of your nose.’
She remained staring at him — a face that seemed to be wondering why that mattered in any meaningful way.
‘It’s not a good look, Faith.’ He leaned forward, reached out with a finger and deftly flicked it away.
‘ Not a good look,’ she mimicked him. An almost exact copy of his southern Virginian accent. ‘Why?’
‘Why… why? Because you don’t want to look like some sort of day-release outpatient from a nuthouse.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘You’re odd enough without dried baby food plastered all over your face. If you’re going to be working alongside me, we need you to not attract any attention. I’m pretty much exceeding my authority letting you down here as it is.’
Faith finished her food, put down the bowl and carefully wiped round her mouth. ‘I understand.’
Cooper really had stuck his neck out. He’d brought her to The Department a couple of weeks ago. Ushered her past several ID checks, pulling rank on the security personnel. And now here she was down on the mezzanine floor in his domain — the ‘catacombs’ — being kept here like some sort of a pet.
Truth was he didn’t know what to do with her. She couldn’t be left to her own devices roaming around Boston conducting her very own hunt-and-seek mission, murdering who she pleased because she might just consider them ‘a contaminant’ — whatever the heck that was really supposed to mean. And he didn’t want to kill her. She was all he had. She was his only connection to whoever these mysterious time travellers were.
What he had was not very much: an autopsy report on Faith’s dead colleague, and a tiny chunk of fried circuitry pulled from his head that wasn’t anything more now than an interesting fingernail-sized nugget of silicon and graphene.
This creature, this flesh-and-blood robot-woman, was the best piece of evidence he had that he wasn’t going mad; that time travel had been quietly going on right in front of everyone’s nose for God knows how long. For God knows how many decades. Cooper couldn’t even begin to contemplate how valuable the treasure trove of knowledge residing in that digital mind of hers was.
But right now the only investigative process he had on the go was Agent Mallard out there doing the donkey work to track down and confiscate all the CCTV footage that he could lay his hands on. There was the footage from the mall, but also a petrol station, a diner and a motel they’d used the day before. Mallard had already brought back several boxes of tapes, and from those there were some not bad, albeit grainy images of their faces that they’d managed to isolate and enhance.
But that was it. Other than Mallard’s legwork, and hoping for a lead to turn up, he had this unlikely ‘woman’ in front of him.
‘I know I keep saying this,’ he said, breaking the long silence, ‘but if you just shared with me the data you have on them, I could put it to good use. I can get priority access to the Bureau’s IT department. We can tap all sorts of databases… medical insurance, local and state law-enforcement incident reports, b
ank records, traffic — ’
‘No,’ she said softly. ‘Your assistance in this matter is — ’ she paused, her eyelids flickering as she considered a choice of phrase — ‘ appreciated. However, I am unable to share with you data about the target.’
Perhaps he could try a different angle. ‘Well, what about you, then? Hmmm? Or how about telling me something about where you’ve come from?’
Her cool grey eyes locked on his. ‘You wish to know about the future?’
He shrugged. ‘Yeah, why not?’
She silently considered that for a moment. ‘I am unable to tell you specific details. But I can discuss the early symptoms that are occurring in the world at present.’
‘Symptoms?’ He laughed at that. ‘You make the world sound like it’s a hospital patient.’
She cocked her head slightly. ‘That analogy is suitable. This world is “sick”. It is unsustainable. It is dying.’
‘Dying? What do you mean?’
‘Population tangents increasing versus rapidly diminishing world resources. Even in this time evidence of this, of these future problems, is known to your world leaders. But they choose to do nothing. Oil will run out. Global warming will increase. The polar caps will melt and a third of the world’s land mass will be submerged by rising sea levels. It will become accepted in 2035 — far too late to deploy corrective measures — that global warming was more significantly affected by the explosion in world population than it was by hydrocarbon usage.’
She adjusted the cuffs of her jacket. Her hair was growing in quickly — still boyishly short, though. But now, with a vaguely feminine fringe of dark hair and office clothes Cooper had bought her from JC Penney, she almost looked like your typical Wall Street go-to girl: hard-faced, ambitious and smartly turned out.
‘In only twenty-five years from now there will be nine billion human beings attempting to exist on a diminishing resource-poor land mass. The arithmetic is inevitable, and was always entirely predictable, Cooper. Even now there are scientists that are accurately predicting mankind’s fate.’
‘Which is what?’
She shrugged. ‘You will destroy yourselves.’
He puffed his cheeks. ‘That’s, uh… that’s pretty grim.’
‘It is what will happen.’
‘Jeez, I bet you’re a blast at parties.’
She cocked an eyebrow. ‘I don’t understand the relevance or intended meaning of that comment.’
‘Never mind.’
Just then the door into the main office swung inwards with a bang. Cooper jerked and spilled coffee on to the crisp white cuff of his shirt. He saw Mallard’s face across a chest-high maze of vacant office cubicles.
‘Christ, Mallard! You made me jump!’
‘Sir! Sir!’
‘What the hell is it?’
Mallard picked his way through, past an empty watercooler that hadn’t been used in years, past desks with dust-covered computers that, if someone actually bothered to switch them on, they’d find still ran on Windows 95.
‘Sir,’ he said, breathless, as he finally stood in front of Cooper and Faith. ‘We’ve got a solid lead. Some small-town sheriff reckons he’s ID’ed one of the images we put up on the Bureau’s Most Wanted site.’
‘Where?’
Mallard looked down at a Post-it note in his hand. ‘They’re in Ohio. Someplace called Harcourt. It’s some has-been town. Used to have several auto-parts factories. They’re all closed down now. Mothballed.’
‘Hang on.’ Cooper looked at Faith. ‘That’s what you suggested, wasn’t it? They’d go to ground someplace like that? Quiet. Out of the way…?’
‘With access to a source of electricity and required technical components.’ She nodded and almost smiled. ‘It is what I would do.’
Chapter 49
8 October 2001, Green Acres Elementary School, Harcourt, Ohio
‘But it’s going to be dangerous, isn’t it?’ Sal looked at Becks. She was no taller or bulkier than any normal twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl. But she, like Bob, was originally engineered for military purposes, a killing machine; if she got the idea into her head while Bob was not around, there’d not be much of any of them left.
Maddy clucked her tongue. ‘I’ve got no idea how she’ll behave. But if she bugs out on us, we’ve got Bob right here to restrain her, or…’
‘Kill her?’
‘Look… it won’t come to that, I’m sure. More likely she’ll just swoon and pine for Liam like some pathetic fangirl.’
Sal snorted. That was kind of funny despite the seriousness of the situation. ‘But why now? Why don’t we wait until we’re settled in London?’
‘I’m not sure we’re going to have enough power back in 1888 to sustain our back-up frozen embryos. Once we go through to the past, we may not be able to regrow replacement support units. It might be just Bob and Becks… one of each. We lose them, we won’t have any back-up support units to grow.’
‘What about the San Francisco drop point?’
Maddy shook her head. ‘I don’t think it would be a good idea going anywhere near there. They’ve got to be watching that place now. No… it would be dumb for us to go back there.’
Sal nodded.
‘We can take the foetuses with us, just in case there’s some way we can find a way to grow new support units if needed. But, really, I think we need to sort Becks out now, once and for all. We need both our support units fully loaded and functional.’ She turned to them both. ‘Once we go back, we may have to ditch our embryos and that means no more support units. We’ll have to rely indefinitely on these two. Which is why… we need to test her mind out now, Sal, while we’ve got a chance here in 2001 to grow a new one from scratch if… you know… this doesn’t work out. Anyway,’ she added, ‘while Liam’s in London it might be easier. We don’t want Becks hurling herself his way and slobbering all over him.’
Sal curled her lip. An ‘eww’ written all over her face.
Maddy pulled a hard drive out of her duffel bag. Masking tape with ‘Becks’ felt-tipped across it. Becks’s complete, original consciousness, her mind, right there in a hard plastic case. Maddy held it up. ‘You ready for this, Becks?’
‘Affirmative. I am ready.’
‘All right, then.’ Maddy wasn’t entirely sure this was the sensible thing to do. But what was locked away on there, in an encrypted folder, was knowledge that was far too important to remain there forever… a decoded portion of the Holy Grail. A message sent by someone, quite possibly the previous team. Quite possibly a previous version of Maddy herself. And God knows what the message was. Another warning like that scribbled Pandora one? But whoever had sent the message from two thousand years ago, they’d thought to pass along an instruction to Becks to keep the secret locked away until certain unspecified conditions were met. And now all of that was sitting on an external hard drive: on a piece of hardware that was unable to process these thoughts; on hardware that was merely able to store them. They needed Becks’s knowledge, her memories installed back on-board a support-unit mind where, hopefully someday soon, Becks would be able to announce that these mysterious ‘conditions’ had been met, and let Maddy know what the big secret was.
And now they were acting entirely on their own, beyond the agency’s original remit, Maddy realized they had twice as much need to know what dark secret had been transported across a thousand years of Roman history and the Dark Ages, across another thousand years of Holy Grail history for their eyes only.
A warning? A truth? A threat? A revelation?
‘Come on, then,’ she said. ‘This won’t do itself.’
Chapter 50
8 October 2001, Green Acres Elementary School, Harcourt, Ohio
It took Maddy half an hour to successfully connect the hard drive to the networked computers. The new PCs had a different method of logging the hard-drive idents, which meant computer-Bob had some data-shuffling to do before he could get the underlying DOS code to recognize the hard d
rives, and this external one, under their original ident tags.
Presently, Becks closed her eyes. The influx of new data being Bluetoothed into her mind was an odd sensation. One, of course, she’d had before as Bob had worked with her, slowly bringing her mind up to speed with his. But that had been a trickle. This was a flood. The nearest sensory equivalent was like having ice-cold liquid injected into an artery, feeling it spread, branch, travel… envelop.
There were duplicated memories among the incoming data. Memories she’d already inherited once before from Bob. Memories of memories. Then there were her very own memories: recollections of dinosaurs and jungles. Liam… and an emergent mind-state for him — a feeling — that she’d labelled and carefully put to one side. In her mind she saw medieval towns and castles, Prince John, ridiculously besotted with her. A battle… the siege of Nottingham: ranks of glinting armour and flapping banners shifting in the heat haze of a summer’s day. A remote monastery, a monk called Cabot.
And then an ancient scroll of parchment. Becks recalled leaning over it and, by the dim, flickering light of the archway, moving a deciphering ‘grille’ across faded ink nearly a thousand years old. She could see herself writing down the letters on a pad of lined paper. Then, the decoding complete, starting to read it.
Then the discontinuity. Whatever she’d read had included an instruction that locked it all away into one part of her mind.
After that her memories were of the archway dropping, literally, into a war zone. A destroyed America tearing itself apart. She remembered the one-sided battle. Skies filled with giant airships, and hulking behemoths, engineered monsters, ascending the slope of a battlefield and dropping down into their trenches. Butchery. Blood. The dismembered ruins of bodies cluttering the floor of a trench.
She recalled taking one of those giant beasts down. Staring closely into its eyes as it lay dying and seeing what looked like a plea for death: End me.