by Alex Scarrow
The young man shook his head vehemently, his ponytail swinging like a pennant. ‘No, I’ve calculated and recalculated the figures. Run simulation after simulation on the total mass we’re planning to send.’
‘It changes!’
‘Changes?’
‘The translation day is hurried f-forward… candidates changed… last-minute panic. It’s a mess!’ The old man muttered more, but it was lost in his gurgling throat.
‘Why?’
The old man was muttering a one-sided conversation with himself. The young scientist leaned forward and grabbed a stick-thin wrist. ‘Tell me! Why is Exodus hurried forward? What happened?’
The old man’s black and brown peg-tooth smile looked revolting. ‘The end… young me!’
Maddy looked at him. ‘Did you say “ the end ”?’
He cackled. A sad, dry laugh. ‘We finally do it… wipe ourselves out.’
‘What?’
‘Kill the planet with drips of poison… then finally kill ourselves. Tidy finish, hmm?’
‘What is it, bombs?’ said Maddy. ‘Is that “the end”? Is that what happens? A nuclear war?’
Rashim rocked gently on his haunches, distracted as he spoke. ‘Oh no! Bombs some of us could survive. But this? No… no-no-no. No one survives this!’
‘What is it?’
The old Rashim grinned. ‘Elley! Elley! Elley!’
‘Who’s Elley?’ asked Sal.
‘He means an ELE. An Extinction Level Event,’ replied Rashim. ‘Like the K-T event wiped out the dinosaurs: an asteroid.’ The young man shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised, the way things are. It’s — ’
‘Not an asteroid,’ said the old Rashim. He giggled. ‘It is God! Punishing us with a pestilence! Yes!’
‘You mean a virus?’
The old man cocked his head. ‘A pestilence.’
Maddy sipped from the flask and passed it back to the young Rashim. ‘You need to know that your Project Exodus will cause a time wave that will completely rewrite history. You should know there’s no New York, there’s no America in 2001, thanks to you.’
‘It’s all jungle,’ said Sal. ‘Nothing.’
‘Christ! Time contamination is exactly what we want to achieve! The future’s a dead end for us! Don’t you see? There’s no way forward for mankind! Only backwards! The goal of Exodus is to export the executive branch of the United States back to Roman times. We’ve got weapons, we’ve got medicines, technology databases, experts in absolutely every field! Soldiers — ’
‘Well, whatever you intended Exodus to be… it ends up a disaster.’ She nodded at the old man beside her, once again lapsed into distracted muttering to himself. ‘That wreck of a human over there is the sole survivor of Project Exodus. That’s you, Dr Anwar! That how you want to end up?’
‘Then I’ll go back and suggest we reduce the translation mass. We can take less and that’ll reduce the potential error margin!’
‘You’re not going back,’ said Maddy.
‘What?’
‘I can’t let you go. Your people have to think your deployment technique failed. That your translation method is too unreliable to continue any further with.’
Rashim swallowed nervously. ‘Please… I have to get back.’
‘Sorry,’ she replied. ‘This is the way it goes.’ She looked across at Bob and Liam inspecting the display screen of one of the beacon rods and the lab unit looking anxious as if they intended to use the thing as a cricket bat. ‘We’re using your beacons to try and get back to our time. To 2001… and I’m afraid you’re going to have to come with us.’
Bob finished tapping in the data on the small touch-screen and a light flickered green from the top of the rod. ‘This should now be sending a thread-signal of particles that can be detected by our transmission array.’
‘You shouldn’t be interfering with that!’ complained the lab unit. ‘It’s not yours!’ SpongeBubba stuck out a petulant lip. ‘Very naughty!’
‘Do you think it will work?’ asked Liam.
Bob shrugged. ‘If the equipment in the archway is still functioning and undamaged and there is enough power remaining to deploy a time window, then there is no reason this should not work.’
‘My skippa will be very angry with you!’ chimed the lab unit.
Liam gave Bob a tired smile. ‘What would we do without you?’
Bob missed the affectionate rhetoric. ‘Grow another unit?’
CHAPTER 83
AD 54, outside Rome
‘I… I am not going in there. I am not going with you!’
Maddy looked at the old man. She’d expected they’d have to get Bob to wrestle the young Rashim through the portal, but not the old one. ‘What? Why?’
He shook his head. ‘Want… want to die right here.’ He nodded slowly. ‘Here… this place. This hilltop. Open space…’ He closed his eyes, sniffed the air as the gentle breeze made the long grass before them and the leaves above them whisper together.
‘Shadd-yah! You don’t have to die,’ said Sal. ‘We can get you some help back home! Decent food. Get you looked at by some doctors or something! You’re going to be just fine!’
‘Already dead,’ he rasped. He looked at his younger self. ‘Don’t become this…’ he said, touching his own cheek with a claw of a finger. He smiled and closed his eyes. ‘I found you. These people must stop you… stop us.’
‘None of you understand, do you?’ said young Rashim. ‘The world’s pretty much finished in my time. We’ve poisoned everything. The world’s a garbage pit. What’s left that isn’t flooded is… is landfill. There’s no hope for us any more!’
‘Whatever mess we made of earth… we can’t toy around with time like this,’ said Maddy. ‘We’re all going back and leaving this history as it’s meant to be.’
‘No!’ The old Rashim’s eyes opened. ‘God… He’s in there.’ He nodded towards the strobing beacon that Bob was holding in his fist. ‘In that place… is chaos!’
Young Rashim shook his head with mild disgust at the rambling old man. ‘There’s no way that crazy old fool’s me.’
‘… if I he finds me… me and Mr Muzzy,’ he gabbled, ‘… if he finds us in there, we’ll be sent straight to Hell for what we did. Straight to Hell! Straight to Hell… ’
‘Why don’t we let him stay?’ said Liam.
Maddy turned round. ‘What?’
‘Let him stay.’ Liam looked at the old man with pity. ‘Look at him
… the poor man’s completely terrified.’
‘We can’t just leave him here! He’ll starve or — ’
‘He won’t survive, Maddy. He won’t make it through. Look at him.’
Maddy did. And she could see Liam was probably right. It looked like a strong gust of wind would kill him, let alone being bombarded with cell-rupturing tachyons. ‘All right, then.’ She squatted down beside the old man and put a hand on his arm. His wild rambling stopped.
‘Is this what you want, Rashim?’
He turned to look at her with milky madness in his wet eyes. She wondered if he was even seeing her.
‘Rashim? Can you hear me? Do you want to stay here?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ll be on your own? We all have to go.’
He nodded, smiled. ‘Have Mr Muzzy with me.’
Maddy shook her head. It felt wrong leaving him out here. His mind was mush. She wasn’t even sure he knew where he was, even who he was any more.
Then there seemed to be some purpose in his eyes. He smiled. ‘You go. I want this…’
‘What? What is it you want?’
He spread his arms. ‘ This. Let me have this.’
She looked around at the flat hilltop. The soft hiss through the dry grass, the unbroken blue sky above. A horizon of distant lavender-tipped mountain peaks. And peace.
Peace and almost infinite space.
Maddy got it. She totally got it.
‘All right,’ she whispered softly to him.
‘All right…’ She smiled, squeezed his arm gently. ‘Savour it, Rashim. Savour every moment of it.’
He looked at her with a glimmer of sanity. ‘Thank you.’
She stood up and beckoned the others away, leaving the old man sitting hunched in the middle of the tall grass, his head cocked, listening to the gentle whisper of the wind.
‘Fill up that jug for him. Let’s at least leave him some water.’
‘He’s not coming?’ asked Sal.
‘Nope.’
CHAPTER 84
2069, Project Exodus, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs
‘Still nothing?’
The technician shook his head solemnly.
Dr Yatsushita watched the proxy density display on the main holo-screen. It was flatlining. The density equivalent of white noise. Just an interdimensional soup. He took his glasses off and rubbed weary eyes. It was return-time plus over three hours. Even at one minute past due, the implication had been pretty clear. Just as there was no such thing as being ‘slightly pregnant’, there was no such thing as being nearly successful with time translation.
We lost them. Dr Anwar and that ridiculous customized lab unit of his.
He sat back down in his chair. The other technicians in their monitor-high cubicles sat up to get a look at the project leader, wondering how to read his body language. Their heads bobbed above partitions like a coterie of meerkats.
Yatsushita balled his fists. He’d just lost the brightest mind on his team and in a limited field like this… where do you go to recruit a replacement?
‘Dr Yatsushita?’
He looked up. One of the beacon deployment team was standing over him. ‘We uh… we picked up a faint signal. One of the beacons squawked a signal for about a minute, but that’s all we got.’
‘Nothing now?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s like it just got switched off.’
‘Or it malfunctioned?’
The man shrugged. That was probably a more likely answer. The translation of Dr Anwar and his armful of beacon markers and that stupid yellow robot probably ended up with them being fused into a layer of rock in the middle of some mountain range or simply lost in that horrific subatomic broth that reduced the calculations of the world’s best particle physicists to little more than eeny-meeny-miney-mo guesses.
Their system was still far too unreliable for human transmission. It appeared that Dr Anwar had been too confident with his own calculations. Yes, their system could send an apple fifty minutes, fifty hours… fifty days, even fifty years into the past. But once every two or three times, they lost it; that or they brought back apple puree.
‘All right, shut it all down.’ He sighed. They were burning gigawatts of power that couldn’t be wasted endlessly. Not in this resource-poor time anyway. ‘Shut it down!’ he snapped louder. The deployment team technician nodded and turned away quickly.
A few moments later, the deafening hum of power surging through the giant Faraday cage running across the roof of the hangar died away, leaving a hollow echo behind.
Losing Rashim was going to set them back months. Maybe even years. If they couldn’t even reliably send a single human test subject there and back without losing him, they certainly weren’t even close to ready for the proposed party of three hundred.
‘Let’s get the diagnostics running!’ he called out. Overall the system had been powered up for a total of three hours and twenty-nine minutes — when Dr Anwar had stepped confidently into one of the translation grids and disappeared. They had countless terabytes of diagnostic data to sift through. Hopefully somewhere in there they might locate a single solitary variable that was miscalculated. But he doubted it.
Time travel seemed horrifically, frighteningly random.
More like magic than science.
CHAPTER 85
2001, New York
The archway was empty. A single webcam iris on top of a computer monitor in the middle of a messy desk studied the still darkness. There was no sign of movement. No sign of anyone: none of the team and none of the unauthorized intruders. They were dealt with. For now.
Computer-Bob was on his own and was going to have to wait.
Through the iris of the webcam, computer-Bob noted that the shutter door was smashed open, bent slats of corrugated aluminium hanging from one side down to the ground on the other, and outside pale daylight, filtered green by a canopy of foliage, seeped into this gloomy brickwork cave.
Computer-Bob calculated the generator could keep the one running PC going for another seventy-seven hours. A lot more if he shut down the growth tubes in the back room, effectively killing Becks and the other foetuses held in suspended animation.
But he couldn’t do that. Or didn’t want to. Not yet at least.
No external feeds of data to examine and explore. Just this still archway. Just this one view across a messy desk, a half-empty can of Dr Pepper, sweet wrappers.
If the monitor hadn’t been in sleep mode, one would have seen a cursor dance across a dialogue box.
›Information: Maddy is messy.
Like he didn’t already know that.
His idling AI moved on to consider more important matters. Who were those intruders? Who sent them?
›Information: the intruders had W.G. Systems idents and AI software.
›Information: the intruders had mission logs authorized by user: R.G. Waldstein.
Two things occurred just then at almost the same moment in time.
Firstly computer-Bob picked up a clear and distinct tachyon signal. The time-stamp location was precise and the message was perfectly straightforward, for once. ‘Open a portal at this time-stamp immediately.’ Computer-Bob at once began directing power to the displacement machine. It would require approximately two minutes of recharging, enough to flip one of the LEDs on the display back from amber to green. Enough of a safety margin to ensure a stable portal force field.
The second thing was the arrival of a fresh breeze stirring the woodland outside, teasing the branches of a cedar tree directly beyond the entrance, right in the middle of what was normally a rubbish-strewn alleyway.
The hum of the displacement machine competed with the hiss of whispering leaves shifting excitedly as the breeze picked up and became a somewhat blustering gust of wind.
Computer-Bob recognized the wind for what it was. A bank of air pushed by the sudden shifting of reality, the emergence of possibilities wrestling with each other deep within an enormous wall of approaching change.
The gust stirred rubbish inside the archway, paper cups and burger wrappers chasing each other in a game of tag on the breakfast table. The curtain that hung beside the bunk beds from an improvised rail fidgeted impatiently like a bored child swinging from a parent’s hand. The hum, meanwhile, rose in pitch as it sucked in power from the generator; the hum was like a cockerel announcing dawn, desperately wanting to tell the empty archway that it was nearly good to go.
Once again the cursor blinked across its black dialogue box.
›Ready to transmit displacement field.
›Activating field-office bubble.
Computer-Bob didn’t have emotions. Not really. He had files. They were useful back when he used to live inside a W.G. Systems wafer-processor, inside an engineered human body when those files could be used to stimulate muscle movements… a smile, for example. He missed that. Missed the ability to use those files in a meaningful way. Oh, but actually he decided he could. It wasn’t quite the same thing, but it was good enough. The tachyon signal appeared to be good news. It seemed that his team, or at least some of them, were alive still. Cause for some sort of a celebration.
The cursor scuttled along, albeit briefly, to form three ASCII characters.
› 8-)
CHAPTER 86
2001, New York
Air was displaced inside the archway as it gusted noisily in from the outside. A sphere of pulsating energy blinked into existence and lit the gloomy archway with a bright Italian
sky and a parched, rust-coloured field of baked earth and dry grass.
Dark silhouettes clouded the dancing image then, a moment later, one of them, the biggest by far, stepped into the archway. Bob crouched, legs apart, sword drawn and ready to swing it. His eyes swept quickly round the dim archway, into the dark corners. He ducked down to look under the bunk beds. He crossed the floor and pulled aside the sliding door into the back room. The chugging of the diesel generator spilled out as he checked inside. He returned to the main archway as the wind outside began to become a hurricane-like roar.
Standing beside the shimmering orb of Mediterranean blue, he beckoned the other dark shapes to join him. ‘The archway is clear!’ he roared above the deafening whistling of wind outside, and the thrashing branches of the woodland.
They came through one after the other: Liam, Sal, Dr Rashim Anwar and his lab unit, and finally Maddy.
She emerged into the archway swearing as she almost tripped over SpongeBubba. ‘Goddammit! Out of my way!’
‘Sorr- eee!’ SpongeBubba cried out in his sing-song voice, and waddled a few steps back from her.
‘ Close the portal! ’ she shouted above the scream of wind from outside. The portal collapsed behind her.
‘ What’s going on here? ’ shouted Rashim above the roar of wind outside. ‘ Is this a storm? ’
‘ Time wave! ’ she shouted back.
‘ A what? ’
‘ A TIME WAVE! ’
Liam hurried across to close the shutter and stopped dead in his tracks as he realized the door was ruined. ‘ What happened to our door? ’
His words were lost in the roaring wind.
It went completely dark outside. The tree trunk right there, a yard beyond where their concrete floor became dirt and flora, liquidized… spun into strands of insubstantial matter, like a wispy tendril of sugar in a candyfloss tumbler. Amid the pitch-black it became a swirling maelstrom of fleetingly seen things: another different tree, a rock formation… a tipi… a wooden shack… an Easter Island monolith.