Foresight

by Graham Storrs

“You know what I mean, Doctor. There is a great deal at stake here. People are watching. And a lot of money is riding on your success. Do you understand me?” The scientist stared at Lee, aghast. “Dr Hong, do you understand me?”

  Hong nodded. “Yes. But I assure you—”

  “Don’t assure me. Just do your job.” He turned to leave. “And stay away from Waxtead. I’ll be back next week to watch the final run.”

  Chapter 4: Laura

  Dr Laura Thalman, head of the K Section technical team, was in her workshop the next morning when Jay arrived. She looked up from her work and smiled when she saw him.

  “I tried to get hold of you last night,” Jay said, “but you were unavailable. I looked for you here—they said you’d gone home.”

  She got off her stool and took her lab coat off as she spoke. “Sorry about that. Comms were down for my whole neighborhood. Power too. I came in but I had to go out again and help. There were people … So many …” Her face fell.

  Jay nodded. “You don’t have to explain.”

  “Why don’t we get out of here and talk over coffee?” she asked, already heading for the door.

  “Sure, but let’s make it the canteen. I don’t have time to go outside.” As soon as he spoke, Jay remembered Cara standing in his apartment saying, “You didn’t even have that suit on when you went out with Laura.” It hadn’t even occurred to him until then to connect Cara’s Laura with his head teknik.

  He fell silent as they walked up the corridor and took the stairs to the next floor, barely noticing his companion’s puzzled frown. Could Cara’s apparition have meant this Laura? In the two years he’d been running K Section, he’d thought several times about asking Thalman out on a date. She was an attractive woman, smart and funny, and they’d always got on well. But she was his colleague—worse still, his subordinate. It wouldn’t have been right. Then there was his relationship with Cara and Sandra. Since he’d discovered he had a teenage daughter, just two years back, his emotional life seemed so dauntingly complicated that dating was just too much to even consider. Yet, if he were going to take any woman out in the evening, Laura Thalman would perhaps be the least unlikely candidate.

  “A pfennig for your thoughts,” Laura said as they entered the cafeteria and headed for an isolated table.

  He cleared his throat. “I was just wondering if last night’s event might somehow have manifested people’s deep subconscious desires.”

  They sat down and she studied his face. “Are you serious?”

  He shook his head, remembering Cara telling him that Sandra was dead. “No, just very confused. Something very strange happened. People saw some disturbing things.”

  “What did you see?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Look, Laura, you’re one of the world’s leading authorities on time travel. You’ve had more direct experience than most. You study this stuff and work with it all the time and you’re one of the cleverest people I know. Is there any way that what happened last night was the backwash from some gigantic timesplash?” She drew a breath to speak but he held up his hand. “Wait. Let me give you two minutes to think about your answer while I fetch us some drinks.”

  He hurried off to the dispensers and came back with two cups of coffee and a selection of cakes. He arranged them on the table and sat down. As soon as he was settled, Laura took up the conversation where they had left off.

  “All the weird physics aside, a timesplash is conceptually simple,” she said. “People, or things, are put in a displacement field and lobbed like bricks back into the timestream.” Jay didn’t really need this detail, but he was prepared to listen if it meant she was working her way to a helpful conclusion of some sort.

  She seemed to remember who she was talking to. “Of course, you know all this, but humor me: maybe we’ll see what was the same last night and what was different if we look at what we know from the beginning. So you’re lobbed back,” she went on. “And you end up in the past, but you don’t belong there. Your very presence creates a temporal anomaly. Yet the past is fixed—it has happened and it can’t be changed. So the Universe resists the anomaly and thrashes about correcting itself. That’s the timesplash.”

  She took a sip of her coffee, looking at Jay over the rim of her cup as if to check that he was still listening. “A timesplash shouldn’t matter. All the weirdness with spacetime and entropy is just the past putting itself right. In the end, the brick is yanked back to the present and everyone back then has no idea that it even happened—the past returns to exactly the state it was previously in. We’ve measured this now to within the size of a proton and to tiny fractions of an electron volt.”

  She leaned back in her seat and smiled. She had a nice smile, he noticed, the way he’d been noticing her eyes as she spoke. All because of what Cara’s ghost had said?

  “Of course, despite the Immutability Principle, it does matter what you do in the past because, if you make a big enough splash, the ripples flow downstream to the present. The backwash—the thing that leveled Beijing and Mexico City and, lucky you, Washington. And there’s another astonishing thing that the new temporal physics has shown us. The present is a real phenomenon. The Universe we know is actually a wavefront propagating through a kind of proto-Universe consisting of a sea of randomness, an unformed possibility of existence, waiting for the present to make its choices.”

  “Very poetic.”

  “It’s pretty awesome, don’t you think? Anyway, it’s a barrier beyond which the backwash cannot pass. Those ripples of acausal mayhem from the timesplash hit the present and can’t go any farther. They dissipate their force by turning the present to chaos, messing with causality in a kind of low-powered rerun of the original splash. Of course, I don’t need to tell you what a backwash looks like.”

  Jay gave a tight smile. He’d never spoken about his experiences two years earlier in Washington DC, but the whole department seemed to know. They probably knew about his role in the London timesplash too. Maybe even Ommen, back in 2048. It gave him a kind of cachet among his fellow intelligence officers. To them he must seem like an old soldier who’d been on the front line at famous and bloody battles. Sometimes, it even made Jay feel old. Old at thirty-eight!

  “OK,” he said. “Let’s get to the part where last night couldn’t possibly be down to a timesplash.”

  She smirked, as if to say, “I knew you’d get bored.” Then she got serious. “Two lines of evidence. One is that the detectors at CERN didn’t pick up a lob. As you know, they monitor twenty-four/seven and they’re sensitive enough to spot a ten-megawatt displacement field anywhere in the world. There’s a small possibility that they screwed up somehow, but it’s highly unlikely. If there was no lob, there was no timesplash, and last night was not a backwash.”

  Jay pursed his lips. “What if the lob took place away from the Earth?” He was remembering that odd report about sunspot activity. “Would they still spot it?”

  Laura’s eyebrows went up. “You mean like in space?”

  “Sure. If you were going to send a nuke back to take out Augustus at the height of the Roman Empire, you’d do it from space—send an orbiting nuclear missile back and trigger the lob remotely.” They’d run simulations and it was frighteningly possible. A nuke in first-century Rome would certainly create a world-enveloping timesplash, but you couldn’t easily send one back because when the splash was over, that explosion would be yanked straight back where it started in the present and crammed back into a tiny space. The lob site was ground zero, not just for the sudden re-expansion of the nuclear debris, but also for a backwash that would turn an area the size of Texas to slag.

  Laura was sceptical. She’d seen the simulations too. “And where would the perp be while all this went on? On the Moon?”

  Jay held up his hands in an I-don’t-know gesture. “The point is, could it be detected?”

  “Is that what we’re looking at?”

  “It probably depends on what you say.”

  She
looked uncomfortable. “The only factor that matters is distance from CERN. I’d have to check, but, obviously, the minimum range is a twelve-thousand-kilometer sphere around Geneva. You know, the diameter of the Earth? Unless your perp was in orbit over Australia, or whatever’s opposite Geneva, then they’re bound to be spotted.” She thought about it for a moment, clearly disturbed that there might be that small window of possibility. “I’ll put in a call and find out. Unless you think I should do it now?”

  “No, not yet. So what if the perps had found a way to mask themselves from the CERN detectors?”

  Laura blew out her cheeks. “You really are clutching at straws, aren’t you? That would be very unlikely.”

  “More unlikely than an orbital nuke?”

  “Yes. You’d have to invent some completely new physics that we don’t already know about. There’s no lab in Europe that could do it.”

  “What about the Chinese? They’d have the physicists and the resources.”

  “Well, if anybody was capable of pulling off something like that, it would be the Chinese. But what would be the point?”

  Now it was Jay’s turn to look incredulous. “If you wanted to attack a foreign power with a timesplash, you wouldn’t want the whole world knowing about it. You remember, that’s why K Section exists: to stop all the bad guys from going rogue with malicious lobs.” She pulled a face at him. Cute, he thought. Seriously cute.

  “All right, what’s the second reason last night couldn’t be a timesplash?”

  She took a drink of coffee and sat back. “It doesn’t look like one. I’ve seen the satellite pictures and there is just no centre to it. When you make a timesplash, the backwash flows through to the present in a particular shape—”

  “An eleven-dimensional sphere,” he said.

  She smiled. “Sorry. I forgot again.”

  He smiled back but said nothing. The last time he’d considered the geometry of a backwash, he’d been in an armored car careening through Washington, DC, with Sandra beside him and Cara in the back, trying to decide just how long they all had to live.

  “So you know it is very localised,” she went on. “And it spreads from a single point at a well-known rate. We saw nothing like that last night. It was as if it hit the whole planet, everywhere, at the same moment.”

  “If it happened in the Earth’s core,” he said, “or so far out in space that it seemed to …” He trailed off, running out of ideas that sounded even slightly credible. He looked down at the table. Cute she may be but trashing all his ideas was not what Dr Thalman was employed to do. He looked up to find her studying him. “Something caused this, Laura. Something that had at least a passing resemblance to a timesplash. I saw spatial distortions. So did others.” As well as people who could not exist. “And it happened on our watch. K Section is supposed to be on top of this. If someone triggered some new kind of backwash, we should have known about it before it happened. That’s our job. As Chief Scientist, I expect you to be giving me answers—or, at least, suggestions.”

  She began, “I can only work with the evid—” but he cut her off, rising as he did so.

  “I don’t expect miracles, but we need to understand this. We need to make sure it never happens again. Do you know how many people died last night?” The question was unfair and he regretted asking it, only it was there in his mind all the time. If someone had used time-travel technology to cause last night’s catastrophe, he had failed in his job. His Section had failed. He was responsible.

  “Look,” he said, in a placatory tone. “I don’t mean to browbeat you, but I need answers, and fast.”

  She stood too and regarded him for a moment. “Can I call in a consultant?” she asked.

  “You can call in the massed pipes and drums of the Scots Guards if it will help.”

  She stepped around the table and made for the exit. He watched her go. A consultant would mean security clearances and lots of admin, but he didn’t suppose anybody would cavil at that under the circumstances.

  He checked the time. He needed to brief Crystal in twenty minutes and he had absolutely nothing to give her. He would spend the time calling colleagues in other security services, hoping somebody had something they could share. He would also try reaching Sandra again. And his mother.

  Chapter 5: Sandra

  After taking much time and trouble making her way to the HiQua offices, Sandra Malone found them closed, with a note on the door saying staff should work from home for the rest of the week. She peered inside but could see nobody there. The parking lot was empty. For a moment she stood by the entrance wondering what to do. She checked her commplant and got the same “emergency services only” message she’d been getting since last night. She really, really wanted to speak to Jay. If anybody knew what was going on, it would be him.

  In frustration, she headed back home. She was on foot. While a lot of the minor accidents from last night had already been cleared up, there were still enough obstacles on the road to make driving a problem. Fortunately, she lived only three kilometers from work. She could see the roofs of her housing estate from the HiQua entrance. It was bitterly cold, so she pulled her collar up against the wind and stepped out briskly.

  As she passed along the high street, she saw a coach in the parking lot of the local church. A small crowd of people were milling around it, some carrying placards while others tried to squeeze theirs into the coach’s luggage compartment. One of the banners said, “Leave Time Alone”; another said, “So are the sons of men snared in an evil TIME when it falleth suddenly upon them”. The people in the group looked perfectly normal. She had no idea where they might be going or what exactly their protest was, but it irritated her that, with all the chaos in the streets, they would choose today to make a nuisance of themselves.

  She passed the window of Tom’s Martial Arts Centre, a shabby little place, crammed between a lawyer’s office and a dentist. Four nights a week, Sandra visited Tom’s to practice karate. On two of those nights she taught a beginners’ course to a roomful of skinny eleven-year-olds. Tom himself was overweight and had a sloppy, careless fighting style. Sandra had beaten him easily in their first few sparring sessions and he had ceased to spar with her after that. He was a terrible example to the students, yet he was the owner and he taught the advanced classes. There were a couple of promising young men, working towards their black belts, and they gladly came in on Tom’s nights off to practice with Sandra. They understood, without ever needing to be told, that Tom should not hear about it.

  Farther up the street, a middle-aged woman was dragging broken sheets of plasterboard out through the front of a grocery store and piling them with other building rubble in the street. The woman’s face was wet with tears. Sandra stopped and offered to help but the woman looked at her with an angry frown, threw down what she was dragging, and turned to face the shop door. Her fists were clenched and she shouted into the dim interior, “I wouldn’t be having to clear out all this shit if the stupid bastard I married didn’t do every bloody thing half arsed. I told him to get proper builders in and get the job done right for once in his stupid life, but no, he always knows better than everyone else.” Without even glancing back at Sandra, the woman marched inside, crunching across the rubbish-strewn floor, still shouting for the benefit of whoever was inside.

  Sandra walked on. Her own street, when she came to it, was relatively unscathed. A house a few doors down from hers had a windowpane lying in pieces on the front lawn and another near the end of the street had a crack in its brickwork, but her own house was intact, despite all the rumbling and shaking that had gone on. She noticed a van parked up the road bearing the livery of the local electricity company and hoped that wasn’t a sign their power was off.

  “Cara!” she called, entering the hall and stripping off her coat, scarf, and gloves.

  “Mum?” Cara came wandering into the kitchen as Sandra was reaching for the kettle.

  “Coffee?” Sandra asked.

  “I�
��ve just had one. What are you doing home?”

  “Office is shut. I’m working at home until further notice.”

  “Cool.” She wandered away again but came back. “The electricity man came. He wanted to check something or other.”

  Sandra’s heart beat faster. “You didn’t let him in, did you?”

  Cara rolled her eyes. “No, Mum. I told him to come back when you got home.”

  “Good girl. Don’t ever let anybody in. Ever.”

  Cara sighed and set off again. “Yeah, I know.”

  “What are you studying today?” Sandra called, before Cara was out of sight.

  “Developmental psych.”

  “Interesting?”

  Cara shrugged. “Kinda.” She gave Sandra a little smile and headed on to her room.

  A degree in psychology was not what Sandra wanted for her eighteen-year-old daughter. She’d wanted Cara to study something more practical and useful—like engineering or medicine—but Cara wanted to be a world-leading criminologist. Which was no doubt Jay’s influence. Having a father who used to be a cop must have colored her thinking. Since he and Cara went to Washington to rescue Sandra, Jay had been his daughter’s hero. Neither of them knew what Jay did now, some secret squirrel stuff no doubt. All he would say was he had become a civil servant in the European bureaucracy. To Sandra it meant intelligence work for sure. To Cara, his reticence just piled on the mystery and glamour.

  She took her coffee through to the living room, slumped into her favorite armchair and flicked up a display to watch the newsfeeds. She was still cold from her walk and cuddled the hot drink as she watched the scenes of tragedy and loss unfold. The tsunami that had hit countries all over south-east Asia was the worst of it. Thousands had died. Possibly hundreds of thousands. They would not know until rescue teams could reach isolated towns and villages and count the dead. But even the small stuff was serious—the road accidents, the people caught in collapsed buildings, or by fallen power lines, the people who’d died in gas explosions and house fires—a handful of fatalities in every town in every country added up to a major global catastrophe. There were even pundits speculating that the number of suicides over the next few days or weeks might outnumber the accidental deaths. People had seen things. There had been ghosts and demons, poltergeists and angels. For a few minutes, the veil that separates the dead from the living had been torn aside.