Fall

by Rod Rees

  This feeling of elation hadn’t lasted long: what he discovered when he explored his new powers had put a real crimp on his mood.

  While he’d been driven home, he’d used PINC to review the databases carried by ABBA relating to ParaDigm’s Temporal Modulation Project but had been forced to stop, scared that the covert monitoring devices in the limo – and with it being a ParaDigm limo, there had to be monitoring devices on board – would record his reaction. The last thing he wanted was the Boles learning, as a result of biometric analysis, just how horrified – disgusted, more like – he was by what he had learnt. It was so horrific that he was at a loss to understand why the Boles hadn’t ordered ABBA to firewall the information regarding their Temporal Modulations.

  A thought struck him: maybe the Boles had firewalled the information, but a delinquent ABBA had simply ignored the instruction. Maybe ABBA wanted him to know what the Boles had been doing; maybe ABBA wanted him to know what a bunch of homicidal bastards the Boles really were.

  And now he knew, he had to be careful. For his own – and Dong E’s – safety he had to act in the manner the Boles expected him to act: hard-boiled and without much of a conscience. A bloody difficult ask. He was outraged by what ParaDigm had been doing. He was working for the biggest gang of mass murderers in history.

  Bastards.

  Yeah, and with them being bastards meant that Bole’s warning that his doing anything anti-ParaDigm would be robustly dealt with wasn’t a threat to be taken lightly. Even here, in the sanctuary of his monopad, he couldn’t be certain that he was safe from surveillance. There were persistent rumours that ParaDigm employed highly illegal moteBots to snoop on people in the privacy of their own home. With this in mind he delved into his jacket pocket and pulled out the four SecuriBots he’d liberated from a storeroom in his laboratory and set them flying.

  Fuck that they were illegal … what the Boles had been doing was illegal and immoral.

  Satisfied that his monopad was as surveillance-secure as he could make it, he opened the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk looking for the bottle of cognac he had stashed there. If ever a man needed a drink it was him. His hand shook as he poured himself a more than healthy slug, which he downed in one. The effect was instantaneous: when he poured himself a second shot, his hand was rock-steady, but he knew it wasn’t just his hand that he had to get straight but his thoughts. Now he had to decide what to do.

  Ever the scientist, he began to assemble and analyse all the data ABBA had provided via his PINC. For the next two hours he plotted and replotted the data regarding the Boles’ temporal tinkering into his Polly, referencing and cross-referencing every piece of information, no matter how small, no matter how trivial. And at the end of the two hours there, displayed before him, was a potted history of all the Temporal Modulations the Boles had made over the last hundred years. It made troubling reading.

  Rivets gave a sardonic little laugh. ‘Troubling’ was one hell of an understatement. It was so ‘troubling’ that he had difficulty getting his head around the enormity of it all. He needed someone to talk to. So, trying to sound as casual as possible, he sent an eyeMail message to Dong E hoping that the cyberBiologist wasn’t washing her hair or something.

  ‘Hi, Dong E. We’ve been promoted. How about helping me celebrate? Dinner’s on me! Love, Rivets.’

  The reply was instantaneous. ‘Just heard. Many congrats to us both. When do you wanna meet up? Love, Dong E.’

  ‘Now!’

  Dong E arrived half an hour later and as always the sight of his beautiful – and very smart – lover was enough to lift Rivets’ spirits. But that he cared for the girl so much made him extra-careful: the last thing he wanted to do was to drag her down into the temporal cesspit he was standing, arse-deep, in. He was so worried that during the time Dong E had taken to get to his apartment he’d dug his old Anti-Surveillance Bubble – a relic of his more anti-establishment student days – out of a closet, dusted it down and set it up in the middle of the room. Dong E began to giggle when she saw it.

  ‘Rivets … what on earth …?’

  Rivets placed a finger across her lips and then nodded to the SecuriBots hovering in the corners of the room. He didn’t say a word until both of them had ducked under the bubble.

  ‘Sorry about all this secret squirrel shit, Dong E, but something heavy … very heavy is going down. Seems ABBA’s gone loco and ParaDigm want you and me to unloco-ise her.’

  ‘Loco? What do you mean, loco? All of today’s testing was fine … nothing out of the ordinary.’

  There was real concern in Dong E’s voice, which Rivets guessed wasn’t surprising given that his girlfriend probably knew ABBA better than anyone – she, after all, was responsible for trying to make the ABBA/human interface seamless.

  ‘Well, Thaddeus Bole didn’t seem to think ABBA has been acting normally.’

  ‘You met Thaddeus Bole … the Thaddeus Bole!’

  ‘Yeah, well, a holo-Thaddeus anyway.’

  ‘Wow! I thought Thaddeus Bole only came out on Halloween or something.’

  ‘Well, I met him and he’s freaked about ABBA. He thinks ABBA’s gone off the rails. They want me to make a fix to ABBA’s plumbing to make her cooperate.’

  ‘Cooperate … cooperate regarding what?’

  ‘It seems Septimus Bole and ABBA have had a falling-out over the Demi-Monde.’

  A shrug from Dong E. ‘So what? The Demi-Monde is yesterday’s news. The Americans haven’t introduced any neoFights into the DM for ages and now that they’ve got Norma Williams home free I’m guessing everyone else trapped in there is expendable. I heard they were thinking of shutting it down at the end of April.’ She took a sip of her drink. ‘When did Thaddeus say ABBA went rogue?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  Dong E made a quick scan of her Polly. ‘It figures. There was a spike in ABBA’s activity yesterday just before noon. Nothing out of the ordinary: I simply put it down to the cyber-grunt ABBA’s having to use to test our noöPINCs.’ She gave Rivets a bleak smile. ‘But then it might have been ABBA resisting attempts by the Boles to get her to straighten up and fly right.’ Dong E took a tentative sip of her cognac. ‘But what’s all this got to do with you, Rivets?’

  ‘Like I say, the Boles have asked me to manage a retro-fix of ABBA.’

  ‘You’ve lost me. What’s a retro-fix?’

  Rivets squirmed nervously on the couch. ‘Look, I’ve been given access to some of ParaDigm’s secret files and they’re full of the most profound shit imaginable. This is serious, Dong E, and if it all goes wrong, I’ll be dog meat. Now I’ve asked for you to be my sidekick on this project and the Boles have agreed, but the problem is that once you’re in, you’re in. So if you want to take an Include-Me-Out powder, now’s the time to do it. I’ll understand. Just walk out the door and forget the whole thing.’

  Dong E squeezed Rivets’ hand. ‘I love you, Rivets, and I’d sooner be in the shit with you than out of it without you. And don’t worry about me: I can look after myself.’

  Rivets nodded, kissed her on the cheek, knocked back another glass of cognac and began. ‘Okay, but what you should know is that ABBA throwing a wobbly isn’t the main feature.’ He took a deep, calming breath. ‘Bole and ParaDigm have found a way of sending messages from the present to the past.’

  ‘Oh, c’mon, Rivets …’

  ‘Yeah, I know. I thought it was as weird as you do, but now it’s got me shit-scared. What Bole and ParaDigm have been doing is fucking lunatic. They’ve been playing Russian roulette with the past, changing history so they can change the present.’

  ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’

  ‘Deadly fucking serious, Dong E. Over the last one hundred years or so – since 1907 – ParaDigm has made sixty-one Temporal Modulations … sending messages back in time so they can change history. The TimeStream we’re occupying is v.62 and from what I can make out, it’s a lot different from the original TimeStream, the one we should be living in.
’

  ‘But why would they do that?’

  ‘Think about it. By controlling the past, the Bole family control the present … a bespoke present … a present where ParaDigm is the most powerful company in the world … a present where Britain retained its empire and maintained political, economic and technological hegemony over the other nations of the world.’

  ‘You’ve lost me again, Rivets. Are you saying that it’s only because of these temporal changes the Boles have made that Britain is still running the world?’

  ‘Correct. In TimeStream v.01 – the original, vanilla-flavoured TimeStream – by now Britain has lost its empire and has been reduced to the status of a third-rate power.’

  ‘Bullshit. I don’t believe it. In 1907 Britain ruled a third of the planet. It would have taken political leadership of incredible incompetence to lose all that in so short a time.’

  ‘Well, we did! And to prevent this slide into obscurity, the Boles started fucking around with history, organising things so that ParaDigm, and hence Britain, had intellectual and commercial dominance in the fields of information technology, pharmaceuticals, energy and finance.’

  ‘This is crazy, Rivets, no one can alter time. That’s just sci-fi fantasy.’

  ‘I know it’s difficult to get your head around, but try to understand that this isn’t science fiction but science fact.’

  Dong E refilled her tumbler of cognac and took a long swig. ‘Okay. Why don’t you tell me what sort of temporal changes ParaDigm has been making?’

  ‘Marilyn … bring up my TimeStream Tracker Analysis Program,’ Rivets ordered in a slurred voice. He hadn’t realised it was possible to get so pissed so quickly.

  ‘My pleasure, Robert,’ came Marilyn’s instant reply as the Polly’s screen mutated into a psychedelic swirl of colours and shapes.

  At first glance what was shown on the screen was just an everyday flowchart made up of sixty-two red lines. Rivets pointed a finger at them and explained. ‘Each line represents a TimeStream. They begin here on the left with TimeStream v.01 – the original TimeStream – and as the lines move from left to right across the screen, you’ll see that they split, each split representing a Temporal Modulation made by the Boles. Eventually we arrive here’ – he tapped the final line – ‘at TimeStream v.62, the TimeStream that you and me and everybody else on earth is now living in. What the graphic shows are the Ghosts of TimeStreams Past.’

  ‘Why ghosts?’

  ‘Because that’s all that remains once a Temporal Modulation is made: the old TimeStream is washed away just like a kid’s sandcastle is obliterated by an incoming tide. Of course, they continue on in some parallel universe, but we follow the new historical trajectory.’

  ‘So we don’t know how those other TimeStreams would have played out?’

  ‘Not precisely, but a lot can be learned from ghosts. I’ve been playing the detective, putting all the hints and clues together, and I think I’ve assembled a pretty accurate picture of what these bastards have been doing.’ He tapped his finger on the Polly’s screen at the point of the first branching of the TimeStreams. ‘The first Modulations the Boles made are easiest to identify because they were relatively simple. Then, all the Boles were intent on doing was changing things so that ParaDigm became the most powerful company in the world. The first change was made in 1907 …’

  ‘Why then? Why not earlier? Why did the Boles wait until then to start making their adjustments?’

  ‘The Message Spheres used to transmit instructions to the past travel via two merged wormholes called a Cavor Duality, this Duality spanning the temporal distance between the beginning and end of the wormholes. To do this, there has to be a working TiME – a Temporal Modulating Engine – at both ends of the Duality and as the first successful TiME was built in Tunguska in 1907, that’s Year Zero for Temporal Modulation.’

  ‘Tunguska? Was that the place in Siberia where the meteor struck?’

  ‘The location’s right but there was no meteor. It was a TiME machine blowing up in 1908 that caused all the devastation.’

  ‘That must have been one hell of an explosion. If I remember, it took out half of Siberia.’

  ‘It did. The power associated with creating these wormholes is immense and that’s why the Boles always site their TiME machines in out-of-the-way places. They know from experience the destructive force unleashed if a TiME goes bang.’

  Dong E whistled. ‘Wow! Tunguska was big. The Boles must be terrified that if they screw up again, they’ll do damage they won’t be able to walk away from.’

  ‘Oh, they are, but they sussed the reason why the Tunguska site went kaboom. It’s a peculiarity of Temporal Modulation that makes it dangerous to attempt Modulations at a distance of less than twenty-five years. It’s called the Law of Temporal Boundaries. Try to make a Modulation at a distance of less than twenty-five years and everything goes bang big time.’

  ‘Bloody inconvenient.’

  ‘Yeah, it is, especially since correcting ABBA’s delinquency means I’ve got to communicate with her programmers in 1994, six years before she went live.’ Rivets refilled his glass. ‘It’ll take a lot of research to make sure what I ask the class of 1994 to do is feasible given their primitive technology.’ He gave a shrug. ‘Anyway, getting back to my matrix: the Boles transmitted their first Temporal Modulation in 1932, the one which established the Bole Institute for the Advancement of History in 1907.’

  ‘Strange priority.’

  ‘Not really. Remember that even the most nugatory Temporal Modulations can, over the course of history, have unforeseen and unwelcomed consequences … the Butterfly Effect. So the Boles set up the Institute to make sure that the Temporal Modulations they made would achieve the designated outcome and nothing more. The Institute’s mission is to help the Boles understand the ripple effects of the Temporal Modulations they make. They set up a branch of the Institute in all the important countries of the world and charged them with the study of the “what-ifs” of history: the impact the alterations they planned would have on history’s flow. The Boles use the Institute to simulate the Temporal Modulations to make sure they don’t do anything that will come back and bite them on the arse.’

  ‘Okay, so once the Boles had set up their Institutes, what did they do then?’

  ‘Well, next up were the purchase of British Tabulating Equipment in 1909 and then the Tabulating Machine Company in the USA in 1911, these being merged to form the Imperial Business Machines division of ParaDigm Technology in 1923.’

  ‘Hang on a moment. These seem pretty pedestrian sorts of changes. If they’re in the business of changing history, why didn’t they stop the Great War or organise the assassination of Hitler? They could have saved millions of lives. They could have prevented all those poor Jews going to the gas chambers.’

  ‘Too imprecise. The Boles have always avoided making any Temporal Modulation that cancels an event, like a war, a plague or a famine, which resulted in a substantial number of deaths. The reason for this is that it’s impossible to forecast the impact on the TimeStream of such a large number of Resurrectionees. So, for example, if they’d intervened to prevent the Great War, the changes caused to history by the eight million or so people not dying would be incalculable. The Boles only make the changes that the Institute has a pretty firm handle on regarding their consequences. To do anything major could endanger the Boles’ control of the TimeStream.’

  ‘Okay, I can understand that. So what’s next?’

  ‘A lot. As time went by, the Boles became bolder. By the time the 1930s had rolled around, ParaDigm – prompted by future Boles – started to recruit what they call Singularities, the geniuses who shape history, and by doing this and giving them suitable hints and tips from the future, ParaDigm became a powerhouse of technological creativity.’

  ‘Why go to all this trouble? Wouldn’t it have been easier to simply send the technical details of the inventions they were interested in back through time?’

&n
bsp; ‘The thing you have to realise, Dong E, is that the amount of information the Boles can send is strictly limited – each Temporal Modulation can only be described in three hundred words at the most, so the easiest way of getting hold of an invention is to hire the guy responsible for it. Thanks to the Singularities the Boles hired, ParaDigm patented television in 1920, penicillin in 1925, the jet engine in 1930 and the transistor in 1936. After the Second World War the pace quickened: the integrated circuit was unveiled by ParaDigm in 1950, the microprocessor in 1961 and the X.25 packet switch in 1962; the introduction of Polly-DOS, the personal computer, came in 1972 and the Polly Network in 1976. The mighty ParaDigm Windows and ParaDigm PollyOllyGoogle were launched in 1980. Of course, the most dramatic of all was the public announcement of the first QuanPuter – ABBA – in 2000. Over the last eighty years, the majority of the most important inventions in the fields of information technology and medicine have been made by ParaDigm and every one of them has been a consequence of a Temporal Modulation.’

  Dong E shook her head in disbelief. ‘But you’re telling me that ParaDigm didn’t actually invent any of the technological breakthroughs it’s famous for?’

  ‘Not one! All that happened was that the ParaDigm of the future sent information to the ParaDigm of the past which enabled it to co-opt the original inventor and get him to work for ParaDigm.’

  ‘Bastards!’

  ‘And it wasn’t just scientists and their inventions the Boles were interested in. By using advice from the future, Septimus’ great-grandfather, Beowulf Bole, amassed a fortune during the Crash of 1926, selling high and buying low. And that’s when the Boles got really ambitious and things started running out of control.’

  Rivets ran his finger around the suddenly too-tight collar of his shirt. ‘In 1937 ParaDigm announced that it was setting up a research facility in Polglass, Scotland, the aim of which, so the publicity blurb had it, was “to explore alternative sources of energy production” but which in reality was the first step in the development and manufacture of the atomic bomb.’