Raines took up the tale. “It grew very nasty very quickly. Nuclear weapons were used and …” He paused. “Were they mining asteroids in the Earth and Lunar orbits in your day?”
“The first asteroids were on their way,” Jay said.
“Well, both parties—and their allies in North and South America—began nudging their asteroids onto collision courses with enemy cities that had survived the bombing. It was the ultimate slow-motion train wreck. People had plenty of time to evacuate, to dig in, to hide, but it did them no good at all. The climate disruption after the asteroid bombardment lasted twenty years. Black skies, acid oceans: a frozen world punctuated by violent volcanoes and radioactive wastelands. In that time, no crops grew and the few survivors starved.”
“It was the end of the world,” Cara said, awe in her voice. “The human race was wiped out. So was almost everything else.”
“Oh my God.” Jay obviously believed them. His eyes were wide and pained. His mouth fell open as he struggled to take it all in. Even though Sandra didn’t want to believe anything they told her, she felt her heart grow still at the mere possibility that it had really happened.
“Yet you survived,” she said, trying to rally her scepticism.
“There were quite a few of us by then,” Raines said. “We mostly lived in orbiting computing facilities. We remained neutral throughout the war. Even so, we lost several installations on the ground and in space.” He fixed his gaze on Sandra. “Humans were not a trusting species, nor were they trustworthy. Our neutrality was resented by many who thought we should be on their side. But, yes, we survived. And we managed to pick up thousands of survivors and uplift them into our society.”
“We saved what we could of human culture,” Cara said, “preserving it. It wasn’t all lost.”
“Just the people,” said Sandra—unfairly, if they were to be believed. “So what is it you want from us? This favor you mentioned.”
Raines’s expression was sad but grateful as he opened his mouth to speak. But Jay jumped in, holding up his hands to stop the proceedings.
“Hang on, hang on,” he said. “Can I just take a couple of minutes to deal with this? I mean, the end of the world!” He looked to Sandra for support, his eyes pleading.
“It was a long time ago, Dad,” Cara said. “Thousands of years. Everything’s fine now.”
“No. Not fine,” Jay insisted. “It’s just fifty years away for us.”
“Jay.” Sandra reached out and took his hand. He really looked very upset. “It’s just one possible future. Even if you found all the probable futures from where we started, there’d still be an infinite number of them.”
Raines studied her with his calculating eyes. “Since you came here, this is now a very real future. Its physical existence has been set in stone. A whole Universe, independent of the one you left.”
“That’s where you can help us, Mum. We need you to close the loop.”
Sandra looked at her keenly. This was the pitch, at last, and it involved creating a temporal anomaly. A closed time loop.
“I don’t think I should be tied into another one,” she said.
“Another one?” Jay and Cara said together.
“Long story. Why would you want us to screw with the future like that?”
“Because you already have done,” Raines said. “In our own timeline. You provide a key piece of science to Dr Kurt Brandt’s team at the University of Zurich. It helps them develop the first scanning process for copying an entire human neural system. In 2121, Dr Brandt successfully copies the very first human mind into a computer. A company is established to do it on a commercial basis and, by 2130 is processing over five thousand uploads a year. Without the key research finding you pass on, we estimate that Brandt would not have made that breakthrough until after the Apocalypse starts. You can see what that would mean.”
“No uploads,” Jay said. “Everyone would die and there’d be no-one left at all.”
“Quite.”
“What makes you think I gave Brandt the tip-off that led to all this?”
“Because Dr Brandt is with us still. She uploaded her own mind. And she told us about your visit to her in Zurich at the end of 2068. Would you like to meet her?”
“Her?” asked Jay. “You said Kurt.”
Raines gave a wistful smile. “Gender tends to be a matter of preference or even mood among us. So does sexual orientation, skin color, body shape, even species. Post-humanity is free in ways you can hardly imagine.” Abruptly, he was deadly serious again. “Will you do it?”
He was looking at Sandra. Waiting for her answer. She tried to work out what her cooperation might or might not mean for the timelines. If she went back and did as he asked, was she necessarily on the same timeline as this future? Might her Universe still not drift away from this path as the countless possibilities of every moment became fixed choices? It seemed almost certain it would. And yet, in this future, she had done it, must have done it. Was she already locked into this loop forever?
“Sandra?” It was Jay. She realized she was still holding his hand and let it go. “Sandra, if you don’t do it, Cara couldn’t be here. She will die in 2137. Really die.”
As if she hadn’t seen that immediately! As if that hadn’t been the blackmail behind Raines’s request all along, the reason they’d been allowed to see Cara and spend some time with her. As if it wasn’t the only reason she’d give a damn whether a bunch of copied minds inside a machine lived or died.
“Yes,” she said. “Fine. I’ll do it.”
Cara leapt up and threw her arms around Sandra’s neck. “I knew you’d help us. Thank you, Mum. Oh, this is so important.” She carried on squeezing her and Sandra put her own arms around Cara, hugging her back. The feel of this grown-up woman, the scent of her, were so much like her own Cara that, just for a moment, she let herself believe.
***
They left the hotel room, stepping straight into what seemed to be a hospital. It had few of the usual signs—doctors, beds, nurses’ stations—but there was something about the cleanliness of the place, its air of sterility, that gave Jay the impression. They were following Raines, who seemed to be in charge.
“This is where it all happens,” he said as they rounded a corner.
Jay stopped dead. On a set of four reclining chairs, were four people: Sandra, Cara, Raines and himself. They all seemed to be asleep. Sleeping Jay and Sandra were dressed in blue coveralls just like the ones they were wearing.
“Very creepy,” said Sandra. “Do you people suppose we don’t have enough nightmares as it is?”
Jay stepped forwards and touched his sleeping doppelgänger. His hand slipped inside the body and he pulled it out quickly with a shudder. “They’re not real,” he said.
“No,” Raines corrected him. “We’re not real. This building and everything in it is completely real. We’ve synced with Base Reality and real time. We are all now virtual projections matched to the dimensions of an actual place—a building on the surface of the Earth, in fact. You can push your hand through the walls and floors too if you like.”
“We’re all ghosts,” Cara said. She seemed quite cheerful about it.
Jay remembered what Sandra had said about them being dead. It had seemed like an abstract philosophical point at the time. But not now. He could see his old body—or a replacement—breathing in its recliner, restored to health, cleaned up and without blemishes. It made him feel insubstantial, insignificant. A disembodied spirit haunting a world he barely knew. Unable to touch anything. Unable to prove his existence. That curl of panic wound inside him again. He felt a strong urge to get back inside his body.
“Shall we get on with it?” Sandra asked. Her tone was cool but maybe she was feeling the same sense of insecurity.
“Of course,” said Raines and everything went dark.
Jay felt a sudden disorientation, as if he’d fallen over. He put his arms out to balance himself and opened his eyes wide. It was light
again. He was on his back. He could see the ceiling and the tops of the walls. He raised his head, dizziness sweeping over him. He was in the same room. The real room. Only now he was lying in one of the recliners. He heard Sandra say, “Bastard,” and looked across at where she was sitting up in another recliner. Raines and Cara were there too, getting out of their own seats.
“I’m sorry,” said Raines, addressing Sandra. “I should have warned you. I just assumed you’d understand.”
“So,” Jay said, looking at his hands, swinging his legs off the recliner, placing his feet on the floor. “So we’re real now?”
“Yes,” said Raines, patiently. “You’re real now.”
Jay stood up and looked around in amazement. There was no sign of the four phantoms who had been standing there a moment earlier. “So you copied our minds out of our virtual bodies and copied them into these real bodies, just like that?”
Cara came over to him. He thought her smile had a hint of embarrassment in it. “It isn’t quite like that, Dad. You never were in a virtual body. You were always just running inside the computer. Now you’re running inside your own brain.”
“A rather inferior machine in many ways,” Raines said. “Nothing personal, Jay. The human brain just isn’t much of a computing device. Not compared to what we run on these days.”
“So you’re real too now?” Jay asked Cara. He reached out and touched her arm. His fingers stopped at the surface as they should and he felt softness and warmth. It made her smile. He smiled back.
“Real, yes,” said Sandra, “but not human, I’m guessing.”
Raines burst out laughing. “Heaven forbid! No, we’re inside android bodies. Very good simulacra. We keep a few handy for people who want, or need, to visit the real world for any reason. How did you spot it?”
Sandra did not share his jollity. “Before we all switched, yours and Cara’s bodies weren’t breathing. Mine and Jay’s were. You haven’t downloaded your minds into these bodies either, have you?”
“Now, why would we do such a limiting and risky thing as that?” He seemed completely unfazed by Sandra’s distinctly accusing tone. “We’re driving the androids through a wireless link. Come on, we should be going.”
As before, he led the way. He took them out of the room and into a space that had other rooms leading off it. It also had a glass double door through which Jay could see a yard and several vehicles. Raines took them through it and they were outdoors. It was cold and dull and the sky was slate gray. It struck Jay that the artificial world they’d left behind had been a warmer, sunnier place. They walked a few more paces and the sphere came into view. It had been cleaned up and polished. Its hatch stood open and he could see there were now two padded seats inside, not just one.
There were other buildings nearby in what seemed to be an enclosed compound. Outside a high fence was a cleared area beyond which were trees and scrubland. Inside, the buildings were all single-story rectangles with thick, gray concrete walls. The walls were raked back and gave the impression of military bunkers. The glass door they’d come out of was set deep in the wall and a couple of heavy metal blast doors lay against the outer wall, ready to be slid across the entrance.
“You seem to be expecting trouble,” Sandra said. She too was looking back at the bunkers.
Raines laughed again. “I’m afraid it’s the only accommodation we can get down here on the surface. Only heavily fortified military installations survived the Apocalypse and the ravages of time. Ugly place, isn’t it? Fortunately, we very rarely come down here.”
“We made the sphere more comfortable for your return trip, Mum,” said Cara. Jay couldn’t help thinking she was changing the subject. It annoyed him that Sandra’s suspicions were rubbing off on him. “It’ll be a smooth ride home, anyway, but you might as well enjoy it. We took out a lot of the equipment that was not needed for the return trip—which is basically a lob into the past, initiated by the sphere itself—and replaced bulky stuff with smaller, modern equivalents. It gives you a lot more space inside.”
“I hope there’s plenty of air,” Sandra said. “Two thousand years is a long lob.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. We know a lot more about time travel than you did. You’ll only be traveling for about three minutes. Progress, eh?”
“OK,” said Rains. “Let’s get you inside. There are only two controls now: a button marked ‘Start’ and a handle to open the hatch.”
“Oh good,” said Sandra. “Nice and simple.” Jay winced at the sarcasm but the others didn’t seem to notice.
“I suppose this is goodbye, then.” Cara looked sad but was wearing her brave face, one he’d seen on any number of goodbyes over the past couple of years.
To Jay’s surprise, Sandra embraced her daughter and held her tight. “Goodbye, darling,” she said. “It’s good to see you’re so happy here.”
They pulled apart but were still linked, arm to arm. “It’s been wonderful to see you again, Mum. Those things I said, yesterday … Well, you know I love you, don’t you?”
“I know. I love you too.”
They embraced again, then stepped apart. Cara turned to Jay. He looked into the eyes of his beautiful daughter, a woman now, older by far than himself. “Bye-bye, Cara,” He stepped forwards to hug her. He knew it was a robot really, remotely controlled by an ancient mind whose mode of existence he could barely fathom. Yet he knew it was Cara too and, for him, that mattered more than the mere circumstances of technology and the strange cosmology that had allowed them to be there together. He held her in silence and felt tears run down his cheeks. “Look after yourself,” he said, finding it hard to speak at all.
They parted and Cara went to stand beside Raines. “The information you need to give to Dr Brandt is in the pocket of your jumpsuit, Sandra,” he said. “Good luck.”
She nodded to him and they both turned towards the sphere. In that instant, explosions erupted all around them.
***
Jay grabbed Sandra and pulled her towards the sphere, the only shelter they could reach. Concussions from the blasts buffeted them as they dived for cover. They hit the ground in the sphere’s shade and scrabbled to turn and see what was happening. Machine guns were firing in long, angry belches. Jay saw Cara and Raines standing were they’d left them. They didn’t move but stood unnaturally still, like mannequins. A line of little puffs of smoke crossed Cara’s chest as a machine gun found her. She didn’t twitch or scream but slowly toppled backwards.
Jay’s heart thudded. He surged into motion. He had to reach her. But Sandra fought him back to the ground.
“It’s not Cara,” she shouted in his face. “It’s not her. She’s not even here. No-one’s dead. Just disconnected.”
It took a moment to sink in but she was right, of course. Cara and Raines had cut the link as soon as the fighting started. The thing on the floor was not Cara. It was an empty husk. Even so, his heart wouldn’t slow and his breathing was labored. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “I thought …”
As the shock subsided, he began to take in what was going on. A hole had been blown in the boundary fence. Several explosions had gone off among the buildings inside the compound. Mortar shells, he guessed. People had appeared in ragtag armor and were storming the compound. They were the ones firing the machine guns, but nobody was firing at Jay and Sandra. Instead, they were shooting at various automated weapons that had popped up out of the ground, little turrets that swiveled back and forth at terrifying speed, spitting laser fire at the attackers with deadly accuracy.
“People!” Sandra exclaimed. “Jay, they’re people. We’ve got to help them.”
The logic of that wasn’t quite clear to him. “They just shot Cara.”
“They shot a machine. Come on.”
There was a turret not ten meters from them. Sandra was on her feet and racing towards it before Jay could stop her. All he could do was follow. They had gone barely two paces before the laser projector swung their way in a blur of
speed. Jay braced himself. People were being cut down by these things all over the compound and now it was Jay’s turn.
But the laser didn’t fire. It swung away and continued picking off the attackers. Jay stumbled and almost fell, so ready had he been to die that to be still alive and moving came as a surprise. Sandra reached the turret first. The weapon was flicking back and forth with incredible speed. Its inner workings were exposed and Jay could see the complex system of pistons and gimbals that jerked it around. Sandra was watching it too. She raised a hand as if she were about to reach inside. He saw the cable at the back of the weapon and realized what she was about to do.
“No,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Let me.” If she timed it badly, the jerking mechanism could crush her hand.
She shook her head. “I’m faster than you.”
“Says who?”
But, even as he spoke, her hand flashed into the machine and re-emerged clutching a bundle of wires. The gun kept moving but it was no longer firing. She turned to look at him and raised an eyebrow.
“You got lucky,” he said.
An explosion went off nearby and they pressed themselves against the ground. More explosions followed.
“They’re using RPGs,” Jay said. The trails of the little missiles criss-crossed the compound. Some of them exploded in midair as the laser turrets shot them down, but enough hit their marks that in a few minutes, all the nearby turrets were gone.
Jay and Sandra stayed where they were as the attackers slowly appeared from cover, then quickly formed into groups and dispersed back through the hole in the fence. Only half-a-dozen of them remained and they came straight over to Jay and Sandra. Jay stood up to meet them, moving to put himself between the ragged soldiers and Sandra. Their leader was a rangy man in his mid-forties who walked with a limp. His pale gray eyes had very clearly seen more than their share of pain and grief. A woman walked beside him, gun ready, expression equally grim. Two others moved out to flank Jay and Sandra while another two went to the fallen androids.
“My name’s Shah,” the leader said. “Local commander. You’re coming with us.” He had a country accent—Cambridgeshire, maybe—that seemed at odds with his haggard appearance.
Foresight: Timesplash 3 Page 28