“No, we’re not.” Sandra’s voice was firm. She stepped out from behind Jay and he, at least, could see she meant it. The two soldiers exchanged glances.
“We thought all the people were dead,” Jay said. “They said you all died in the Apocalypse.”
“The what?” the man said with a sneer. “I suppose you could call it that. Who are you and where are you from?”
“We don’t belong here,” Jay said. “We were just leaving.”
“In that?” He jerked his thumb towards the sphere.
“That’s right. Whatever grievance you have against the post-humans, it’s none of our business. We’d just like to be left to go on our way.”
“Time travelers?” the woman asked. She too had a country burr. Neither Jay nor Sandra replied. “People saw you arrive, down on the edge of the dead zone, in among the ruins. Said it just popped out of thin air, like magic. Then the machines came and picked you up. So we followed ’em out here. You were dead and beat up when they took you out, scanners clamped all round your heads. Seems like they went to a lot of trouble to patch you up again. What makes you so important to the machines?”
A pair of Shah’s people kneeling beside the fallen androids were working on them with saws and hatchets. As Jay considered how to answer the woman’s question, one of the soldiers heaved Cara’s severed head free of its body. Jay started forwards, shocked. “What the hell are you doing?” he cried. Shah pushed his gun into Jay’s chest. Sandra caught Jay by the shoulder and pulled him back.
“It’s just tech,” she said.
“Good tech too,” said Shah’s companion. Over by the bodies, the soldier with Cara’s head stuffed it into a bag and went to work on Raines. “They’ll get a satellite over us soon and fry this whole area with microwaves: you can’t let tech like that go to waste.”
“They want us to do something for them,” Sandra said, answering Shah’s earlier question. “In the past.”
Jay had already realized that the appearance of human soldiers, obviously some kind of resistance army, meant that Cara and Raines had lied to them. Now other inconsistencies were becoming apparent—like the fact that all the weapons here seemed hardly any different from those of his own time.
“What year is this?” he asked.
Shah looked from one to the other of them. “You don’t know?”
“We came here by accident.”
“It’s 2242,” he said. “What did they want you to do?”
“Not even two hundred years,” Jay said. Why would Cara have misled them so much?
Sandra fished in her pocket and pulled out a data button. “There’s a name and address on here plus information on how to upload human brains to machines. At least that’s what they told us. Could be anything, really.” She held it out. “Take it.”
Shah reached out and took it, his dirty hands and cracked nails in sharp contrast to Sandra’s manicure. “We got anything that can read one of these?” he asked the soldier at his side.
“Sure,” she said. “HQ’s got all kind of ancient tech.”
Shah put it in the pocket of his combat jacket. “You were planning to help them?”
“Maybe,” said Sandra.
“When you from?”
“2068.”
Shah’s mouth twitched into what might have been a brief smile. “2069 was the year the first uploads were made. By 2100, they had control of all the big corporations. Ran the world, more or less. We took a long time to realize we’d become their slaves and had to fight them. We started blowing up their data centres and brain farms. Did pretty well for a while but in 2109 they moved into space lock, stock, and barrel, and started their campaign to cripple us so bad we couldn’t touch them. Dropped rocks on us. Used the big space-based solar arrays to microwave whole cities.”
Looking into Shah’s hard eyes, Jay didn’t doubt for a moment that the commander was telling the truth. The post-humans had tried to use humanity and, when they’d grown to be too much trouble, had decided to eliminate their progenitors. “Like deciding to wipe out orangutans and gorillas so you can use their forests for growing palm oil and grazing cattle.” He hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud until he saw Sandra looking at him. “To them we’re just lower primates, I suppose.”
“Except they needed us to go back and give Dr Brandt the secret of how to take that next step up the evolutionary ladder.”
“Could we really have done that in the past?”
Sandra threw up her hands. “I don’t know. I had one lecture on the physics of closed time loops when I did my degree. Some say they can’t exist, some say they’d be more like a spiral than a loop, with quantum uncertainty making every passage through the loop slightly different from the previous one. Maybe this is our ten millionth time through and it’s finally come unraveled.”
Jay shuddered. He didn’t like to think about temporal weirdness. It made his brain itch. Even so, he had to ask. “So what happens now? You gave him the data. We can’t give it to Dr Brandt now. Does that mean this universe can’t exist, or what?”
She looked pained. “I don’t know. Obviously it still exists. Maybe the fact that we did it on our last pass through the loop means this universe is OK. When we get back and don’t do it, that’ll just mean a new probable future starts unfolding. Maybe one in which the post-humans don’t go to war with the humans. This universe is an island anyway. I can’t see why it wouldn’t just keep going.”
Shah was studying them. “If you don’t go back, there’s zero chance you’ll tell the machines anything.”
Jay’s heartbeat quickened. Not good. “Listen,” he said. “I’m pretty useless at this time paradox stuff but even I understand that it doesn’t matter what we do any more. Not now you’ve got the data. This universe will keep on going its own miserable way. The loop’s broken. We can’t help or hinder you any more.”
“Yeah, well, you would say that wouldn’t you? Seems to me our own egg-heads should get a look at you, ask you a few questions.”
Not good. Not good. They had to get into the sphere and go back before the path that led them there deteriorated and left them stranded. He knew Sandra was thinking the same thing and, for her, to think was to act. The thought of stopping her flashed through his mind but he knew she was right. They had to do something right now or lose the chance of ever going home. He turned to the soldier covering them from his left, threw his arms wide open and walked towards her, saying, “Surely you can see the sense in letting us go back?”
There was a scuffle from Shah’s direction. Jay turned to find Sandra holding the commander in some complicated kind of arm lock with her left hand while her right hand held a pistol to his temple.
“Everybody stay calm,” she said, loudly enough for them all to hear. “I’m not going to hurt him. We’re just going to leave. Everybody lower your weapons. Jay, get over here.” He walked the few paces to Sandra, painfully aware that half the weapons that had snapped up when Sandra made her move were aimed at him. To the woman who was with Shah, she said, “Give him your gun.” The soldier hesitated. Sandra bored the barrel of her pistol into Shah’s temple and glared at her. “Do it!”
Reluctantly, the woman handed Jay her weapon, a lightweight submachine gun.
He took it from her and waved her towards the group dismantling the androids. “Everybody over there,” he said. He waved the gun at the other nearby soldiers and told them to join the others by the androids.
He heard Sandra hissing in Shah’s ear, “Do you really want to interrogate us so much you’d die for it? You’ve got everything from us that’s worth having. We’re not going to help the machines when we get back. So tell your fucking soldiers to lower their weapons.”
Jay couldn’t watch because he was busy trying to cover five angry soldiers any one of whom might decide to be a hero at any moment, but the silence from Shah told him the man was still seething.
“Shah,” he shouted. “We’re either going home, right now, or we’re goi
ng to die here. You and maybe half your crew can die with us, or you can let us go. We’ve got nothing to lose and you’ve got nothing to gain by keeping us.” Just to add a bit more pressure, he added, “That microwave satellite will be overhead any minute now.”
Shah’s silence continued. The guns were still pointing at him and Sandra. He could see the uncertainty in people’s eyes. It had cost them a lot to capture Jay and Sandra. Friends and comrades had died. But now they were faced with more deaths, their own deaths, and the captives probably dying anyway. It had gone from expensive victory to expensive failure in a few seconds and nobody wanted to die in a losing battle. Beyond the immediate group of soldiers, he could see that others outside the fence had noticed that something was wrong and were drifting back. Finally, the commander spoke.
“Everybody stand down. Lower your weapons. I’m letting them go.”
One or two of his men seemed very reluctant. Sandra kept hold of Shah and they backed towards the sphere. Despite the commander’s order, Jay felt horribly vulnerable and exposed. The situation could turn into a bloodbath at any moment. The few meters to the sphere seemed to take a lifetime to traverse. He prayed that Sandra would not trip, and that nobody sneezed.
“I’m sorry, Shah,” he heard Sandra say. “I promise you, we’ll do nothing to help them. I don’t think that will help you, but it might avoid this whole miserable future for my own timeline.”
“Yeah? Thanks.” His tone implied it was not enough.
“It’s the best deal you can get,” Jay said, angry at Shah’s refusal to believe her. “We didn’t write the laws of physics.”
“Sounds to me like you’ve already helped them before. Lots of times.”
“Yeah, well …” Jay had to admit that might have been true. So maybe Shah’s distrust was justified. “They tricked us.”
“Jay, get in.” Sandra’s command snapped him out of his unhappy musings. They were standing beside the sphere. He climbed inside, doing his best to keep his gun pointed at Shah’s soldiers. Sandra released Shah and the resistance fighter stepped away from her. Jay kept him covered while Sandra climbed aboard and took her seat.
“There may be something in the data I gave you that you can use against them,” Sandra told him. He stared back at her, grim-faced as ever. “Jay, you ready?”
He grabbed the handle on the hatch. “You?”
She nodded and he dragged the hatch closed. As soon as he began, Shah threw himself to the ground and shouted, “Shoot them!”
But the hatch was down before Shah’s soldiers could respond. It hissed shut as a fusillade rattled against the sphere’s tough outer shell. Jay whacked the “Start” button and fell into his seat.
Chapter 16: Home
“Bloody hell,” he said. The sound of gunfire stopped. Jay’s stomach lurched as he became instantly weightless.
“We’ve lobbed,” Sandra said. She was lying back in her seat, strapped in, eyes closed. She looked across at him and put out a hand to help him float back into his seat. “That was pretty ballsy of you to take the initiative like that.”
“Like what?” He squirmed into position and wrangled the straps round himself.
“Creating a distraction so I could nobble Shah. I was going to try some more talking, but you were probably right.”
He winced. “Actually, I thought you were going to go for Shah anyway so I’d better give you a bit of a hand.”
Sandra’s expression flipped to astonished. “You thought I was …?” And then to angry. “What kind of crazy, reckless lunatic do you think I am? You really thought I’d risk both our lives before we’d exhausted every chance of negotiating?”
“Shit. No, no, I just thought …” Jay stammered and blustered his way through a long series of denials, aghast that he could have got it so wrong. Then a smile began to spread across Sandra’s face. He stopped trying to excuse himself. “You rat! I was right. You really were going to attack him.”
“Had you going for a while there, spy boy.”
Jay relaxed and found himself smiling too. “How long am I going to be cooped up in here with you?”
“A hundred and eighty-year lob? Couple of minutes.”
“So they probably haven’t got wonderful new insights into time travel, then?”
“Probably not.”
“Do you …?” He almost didn’t have the courage to ask. “Do you think that was really Cara we met?”
Sandra was silent for a moment. “I think so. Only … She wasn’t the Cara I know.”
“Maybe being a disembodied super-intellect changes a girl.”
“If it was her, she was colluding with them in a genocide against the whole of humanity.”
“That’s teenagers for you.”
He glanced at her face. She wasn’t smiling. The hard set of her lips made him regret his feeble attempt at humor. After a while, she said, “Probable futures. But each future is only a product of its own past. If Cara really lived to be eighty-seven, we have no idea what kind of life she led and how that might have shaped her.”
She would die nearly seventy years in the future. In seventy years, almost anything could happen. Seventy years ago in his own time, cars were petrol driven, the U.S. was the world’s superpower, and the net had barely been invented. Jay wondered about the next seventy. “She never said what happened to us.”
“Let’s hope we grew old and died.”
“You really don’t want to be uploaded to a computer, do you?”
“I’ve just been uploaded—and then downloaded again. That’s plenty for me. Who’s to say we’re not still running back there in 2242?”
Another shocking thought. “But we’re here.” Yet he saw immediately what she meant. Once they had a copy running in their computers, there would be no reason to delete it just because they wanted to install a copy in a human head. Maybe their continuing existence in 2242 was Cara’s price for cooperating.
“Maybe I should hunt down Raines’s grandparents and make sure they don’t have children,” he said.
“Way ahead of you.”
They hit the ground with a jarring thump. Jay lay in his seat feeling as if he had a pile of sand on top of him. “I hate gravity,” he said.
“At least we didn’t die this time.”
“We haven’t opened the hatch yet. What do you think’s out there? Will we be back in Clarke Engineering?”
Sandra shook her head, slowly. “I don’t think so. We should be in the same location we started from. It’s a lob, remember, not a yankback. Trouble is, we don’t know where that was. They moved the sphere.”
“If Shah was telling the truth.”
“And we’ll be a fortnight on from the night of the gunfight.”
“If Raines was telling the truth.”
He unclipped his harness then took hold of the hatch handle with one hand and raised his gun with the other. He checked to see if Sandra was ready. She was holding her pistol in a two-handed grip aiming at the hatch. He pushed the release and threw open the door.
Sandra was out and on one knee sweeping the area by the time the hatch was fully open. He joined her outside, moving quickly to the back of the sphere to check all angles. They were alone in a large sports field. A light snow was falling, turning to slush on contact with the soggy ground. He checked his commplant. He had net access and all the usual services. The clock said it was eight twenty, AM. The date was fifteen days on from when they had left.
“We’re in a little village called Haslingfield,” said Sandra “A few kilometers south-west of Cambridge.”
There were trees on three sides of the enormous, rectangular field. On the fourth side was a small pavilion and, beyond it, a few red-brick houses. Standing in the middle of a wet field with snow falling from an iron-gray sky, Jay regarded the houses with longing. He dialed the local police. He needed someone to guard the sphere until he could organize a truck to take it to the nearest military base. The police sergeant who took the call goggled at Jay’s E
DF MI credentials. He seemed so impressed that Jay also asked him to arrange a car to take them down to London.
“They’ll be here in about ten minutes,” he said when he’d hung up.
“Did you tell them to bring warm clothes?”
From the sphere, a flash and a dull “Whump!” made them raise their guns and turn. Jay dropped to one knee in the wet mud and immediately regretted it. No-one was around but a fire was burning inside the sphere. So, Raines had not lied about the self-destructing new parts. He grabbed the hatch and closed it as quickly as he could. The sphere was airtight and the flames would not burn for long.
“I was hoping we could keep that going, maybe throw in a couple of logs,” Sandra said. “These overalls weren’t designed for an English winter.”
“Sorry. I need the fire to go out to preserve whatever I can. The Chinese have built at least one FORESIGHT machine and we’ll need every little clue we can find to catch up.”
“Seems like the kind of technology no-one should have.”
He regarded the bullet-scarred sphere. “Yeah, real end of the world stuff. Worse than timesplashing.” He could imagine Crystal’s face when he told her there was a new universe out there waiting to bump into their own in about a hundred and eighty years. Which reminded him … “I need to phone the office.”
“I’ll call Cara. She’s probably driven your mother to drink by now.”
***
Sandra and Jay spent the night at his mother’s house and Jay left for Berlin early the next morning. Sandra was to follow on in the afternoon for what Jay called her “debrief”. She wasn’t looking forward to it. She had killed people, wounded others. If they wanted to, the authorities could make a lot of trouble for her. Jay’s parting words were, “Don’t worry. It’ll all be sorted by the time you get there.”
She checked the time. What on earth was Cara doing that was taking so long?
“Oh, I knew, of course, that he wasn’t with the Met,” Dot was saying. “He never really had us fooled with that one, but you go along with these things. I always suspected it was some secret work for the government or something like that. His father used to say he was probably a drug smuggler or an assassin, but I think he was joking, really. He’d be gobsmacked to hear that our Jay is such an important man in military intelligence.”
Foresight: Timesplash 3 Page 29