by RR Haywood
‘Aye.’
‘He’ll be fine.’
‘Aye.’
Twenty-Five
A war of attrition. A war of trial and error where the front-line soldiers drink coffee, eat junk food and wear jumpers in windowless rooms. A war of hacking, of firewalls, of fingers blurring over keyboards using every method and technique known and inventing more as they go along.
Berlin is a thriving metropolis of over ten million inhabitants, but where there are people, there is crime.
Nearly every business has CCTV. High-quality, real-time, full-colour footage that has to be retained for thirty days to comply with insurance policies. Such large data volumes mean that the only viable storage method for most businesses is cloud storage. A virtual bank where the footage can be uploaded and held for the required time in exchange for a monthly fee. The cloud storage operators promised state-of-the-art security and impenetrable systems.
The soldiers aim their weapons at those systems. They hack and find engineer access points. They delve, look, seek, search and slip out as unseen as their entry.
The private hospital does not have CCTV, but they know a van delivered the men. Where did the van come from? They have the end destination so they work backwards. Hacking businesses to view footage to see angles of roads and junctions in the hope of catching a glimpse of the van.
It works too. They establish the make and model of the vehicle. They establish the colour. They write code and algorithms to embed in hacked systems to do the work for them at a processing speed far higher than the limitations of the human brain permit. They scour, dismiss, negate and pass over thousands of hours of footage from tens of thousands of cameras.
They quickly establish that the van took a very circuitous route and appears to have travelled random roads in an impulsive manner. That suggests a very basic awareness of surveillance. They know this, as an advanced state of surveillance awareness would mean the van never appearing on any footage anywhere. Which would be hard but not impossible. There are crime prevention and detection websites that show maps of the known fixed points of cameras within predefined areas. Simply open the map and pick a route that goes past the least number of cameras. The van has not done that. Instead, it has simply driven round Berlin for a while before heading to the hospital.
The method is not perfect, but it helps.
A grey, brick-built warehouse on a back road in central Berlin.
The van is tracked to the very centre of Berlin. To the old part of the city. Architectural historians are consulted.
Not all brickworks made grey bricks. Some made red bricks, and those red bricks generally ended up in certain areas. Others had a yellow colour. They ended up in other certain areas. History shows us these few brickworks made grey bricks, which served these geographical sections of the city.
That information is applied to the intelligence gained from the hacked CCTV that shows the locations of the van.
The geofencing closes in yet again. The invisible circle on the map grows smaller.
From those sections, they analyse industrial zones, commercial zones, warehouses in current operation and warehouses refurbished as dwellings but that still retain the appearance of warehouses.
It is hard work. It is gruelling work. But they are highly motivated to get results and earn more money. Mother wants results. Mother has made it clear she will reward those that get her the results.
Hi Alfie. I hope you are enjoying your trip and not drinking too much! I was chatting to my friend just now. She said the old centre of Berlin is very nice. The area west of the cathedral has plenty of old buildings that survived the war. I know you love architecture so I thought I would mention it. Anyway, stay safe x
Hi Mother! Yes we are having a lovely time, thank you. That is very interesting about the old part of Berlin. We will surely take that area in. The chaps are as excited as me at seeing the Gothic architecture. Love to you and Father x
The simplest method to find a grey, brick-built warehouse on a back road in the old part of the centre of Berlin west of the cathedral would be to wave cash at cops, drug dealers, prostitutes, pizza delivery drivers, couriers, taxi firms and anyone else that spends the hours of their lives amongst the city high-rises and blend of Gothic and new architecture. However, it would only take one of those to mention that someone was interested in a grey, brick-built warehouse on a back road and then everyone would be looking for it.
The five go old school instead. Boots on the ground. The section is broken into sizeable chunks and worked through methodically. Every street is checked. Every avenue, road, alley and underpass. They become tourists walking with maps and brightly coloured rucksacks. They stop at the sights and marvel at the things they should be marvelling at. They sleep in low-cost hotels. They blend in and do not draw attention.
The race is on and the prize at stake is worth everything.
Twenty-Six
There is no change. Time does not exist.
He wakes. He trains. He sleeps. The depression becomes worse, stripping him of any shred of the man he was. He doesn’t think for himself and as that lack of cognitive challenge continues so he simply cannot think for himself.
The spiral starts. Severe shock means his head produces chemicals that upset his ability to feel evenly balanced. Too much adrenaline. Too much testosterone. Not enough serotonin and a hundred other factors all work to make it so there is nothing Ben can do to stop that spiral becoming worse.
Pull yourself together. Man up. Stop worrying. Don’t panic. Stop thinking bad things. Snap out of it. Calm down. Day after day of plummeting down into an abyss of self-pity. Steph was having an affair because he deserved it. He died because he has no worth. He is here to be punished. The self-pity mutates into self-loathing.
The two people next to him are the best in their fields of expertise. Consummate professionals who excel at what they do and make it look effortless in the process. He compares what he is to them. He takes his lack of worth and holds it stark and obvious against Safa and Harry, but that only serves to strengthen his self-perception. He is weak. He is haggard. Look at Harry. Be like Harry. Be like Safa. Snap out of it. Be a man.
His life around him changes without a flicker of reaction that he even sees it. The bathroom they share fills with objects. New towels in different colours. Different toothpastes and brushes. A mirror that he doesn’t look at. Razors for Safa. Scissors for Harry to trim his beard. A light over the mirror. Shampoos and conditioners in the shower. A toilet brush. Cleaning materials and products. Shelves. Rails. He doesn’t notice when the shower starts producing hot water and doesn’t notice the air of victory Malcolm and Konrad have at finally figuring out how to do it.
A rug on the floor in the communal room. Clothes draped on the back of the blue chairs. Books stacked on a low table. Boots, trainers and flip-flops outside their rooms in the corridor.
The three austere, sterile rooms become one austere, sterile room. Safa’s and Harry’s rooms gain rugs and clothes rails. They gain side units next to their beds on which rest more books, drinking glasses and battery-operated soft lights. Dimmer switches for the glaring lights appear on the walls. Shelving units filled with deodorants, hairbrushes, hairbands and personal objects that are gained over the days, weeks and months of their existence in the bunker.
Ben walks through it but sees none of it. His room remains as it was. Sterile and cold. Empty and austere. He has no worth so therefore he does not deserve any softness. His life becomes empty and meaningless.
The fat disappears from his body. He becomes lean and hard. The muscles show in his limbs and torso. He weathers and browns. His beard grows, his hair becomes unkempt. The bags under his eyes darken and grow too. The haggard look intensifies week by week. The battles are at night. The worst of times. The most awful of times, when he fights to prevent sleep while feeling so tired that all he wants is sleep. Sleep brings the nightmares. The ever-worsening terrors in his head. They become confusing and j
umbled. Steph becomes Safa. Safa was having an affair. Safa was going to leave him. Steph is here. It is Steph making him cling to a life he does not deserve. He killed Safa and Steph when he was seventeen. He tried to save Steph and Safa when he was seventeen but Roland killed them while Harry laughed.
The main room changes around him. The chairs and tables broken during the big fight are replaced. The food varies. The uniqueness of people living in a place starts to show. Stains on the tables. Circle marks from the coffee mugs. The mark on the floor where Harry knocked the jug of coffee over.
Malcolm and Konrad move around them. Fixing, repairing, fetching and carrying. Waiting and watching.
Roland frets. His nerves fraying with every passing week. Safa remains brutal and never before has a person guarded another as she does Ben. Never before has such a protective energy enveloped another as hers does him. The others don’t speak to Ben. Don’t speak to him. Don’t even look at him. Roland stops asking because to ask will invoke her wrath and they all get caught up in the challenge of waiting for Ben to snap out of it.
Safa’s dedication becomes a thing. An entity. An almost living object to be discussed and thought about. Wherever Ben goes she is there. At his side. Behind him. In front of him. She knows what he did. He saved that woman and child. He killed so they could have life. He did it at Holborn. He killed so others could live and for that, her energy seems endless. She will never tire. She will never submit. Ben has worth. Harry retrains with eighty or more years of new skills, weapons and tactics to play with. His proficiency in his art is sublime. He is perfection at what he does. He gives calm to Safa. He gives patience and can say more in one nod than Roland, Malcolm and Konrad can do with many words.
Safa tries repeatedly to bring Ben out. To draw him from himself. And in those months that pass, she has hope only once and cries only once.
Four months in. She was lying in bed unable to sleep with her black and white mind having made a rare foray into the murky world of theoretical science. She was confused and that confusion caused irritation. She wished she had not even started thinking about it but the thought was there. She tossed and turned, huffed and puffed and finally sat up to scowl at the room before marching from her room to knock on Ben’s door.
‘You up?’ she asked.
‘Huh?’ Ben said. He was still awake, lying on his bed, and showed surprise at the soft knock and her tone, implying a sense of urgency. ‘Er, yeah . . .’
‘Thank fuck,’ she said, marching into his room and not stopping until she reached the end of his bed, where she plonked down and lifted a hand as though ready to make a point. He scooted his legs out of the way and sat up. His eyes flicked to her body and the fact that she was wearing only a bra and a pair of tight-fitting shorts.
‘Right, you’re smart as fuck,’ she said, still holding that hand out. ‘So . . . if I went back and killed me as a baby, would I still be here? And would it be me that went back and killed the baby me? And how would that work because I would have been killed as a baby by the me later but then how would I go back and kill myself as a baby if I died as a baby?’
‘What the fuck?’
The planets aligned. The ambience. The surprise at her marching into his room in her underwear and the convoluted question all served to bring his faculties back in one glorious, beautiful moment of full cognitive function.
‘Is it possible?’
‘What?’ He snorted a laugh and shook his head. ‘Is what possible?’
‘Listen,’ she said, whacking his bare leg gently and only then registering that he was also wearing only a pair of boxer shorts. ‘So right . . . I’m a baby, okay? I go back and . . . so . . . I’m me now and I go back and kill me the baby . . . can I do that?’
‘Er . . . fuck,’ he said, thinking hard. The room was dark. His light was off and only the soft glow from her bedside lamp was spilling in. ‘Er . . . yeah, yeah it must be possible but . . .’
‘But how?’ She asked in that tone that instantly demanded the answer. ‘If I was dead as a baby how could I go back and kill me?’
‘That’s kinda straying into parallel world theory but yeah . . . think it through . . . by the very fact that you could go back and kill yourself as a baby means that it is possible. So if it is possible then yes, you could do it.’
‘Eh?’ she said, shaking her head in confusion.
‘Okay,’ he said, leaning forward towards her. ‘You’re here, right? So you can use the time machine to go back and kill the baby you. Just by the fact that is possible means that, yes, you could do it. But it would also mean that by killing the baby you, you would not cease to exist. Because if you ceased to exist at the point of killing the baby you then it would mean me and Harry never met you. Which means you never grew up, never joined the police, never got brought here and so on . . . but that would mean you would then never be here in order to go back and kill the baby you.’
‘What the fuck did you just say?’ she asked with a laugh at the utter confusion in her head.
‘No, think about it. You would have to continue to exist,’ Ben said. ‘Because otherwise you would never be here to go back and kill the baby you . . . which would mean the baby you grew up and came here . . . so that must be like parallel worlds or something.’
‘Parallel worlds?’
‘Yeah. Like . . . infinite worlds all together. See, we think of time as linear, right? That it only goes forward? But the time machine breaks that belief because we can go back . . . but what if we haven’t gone back or we have gone back but not to our past. See what I mean?’
‘No. Not one word,’ she said, no longer interested in what he said but only seeing that spark in his eyes. The same spark she saw during the first few days when he questioned everything and was working things out. The change was profound. His whole manner seemed alive and animated. The proper Ben was there.
‘So, right,’ he said and reached out to lift her hand. ‘This is you here.’ He waved her hand up and down, making her smile at the feel of it. ‘So we have Safa here now . . . but if we take Safa’ – he waved her hand again – ‘and go back to kill baby Safa . . . then maybe we are not killing the baby Safa that you were . . . but another baby Safa . . . like . . . like . . . so every time you do anything . . . anything at all, right? You make a decision and do something, but what if you made a different decision and did something else? That life continues to run.’
‘I’m so lost,’ she said, still not listening but wholly and utterly absorbed in watching him.
‘Ah okay.’ He smiled. He actually smiled. A flash of teeth showed through his beard as he waved her hand up and down. ‘So, er . . . you wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is . . . is what?’
‘Er . . . have a piss.’
‘Right.’ He blinked and smiled again. ‘But what if you didn’t have a piss? One of you has a piss and the other brushes her teeth and the other uses the shower and the other decides to go for a run and another decides to take a shit on Harry’s bed and—’
‘What?’ She laughed.
‘You get what I mean? You do one thing but anything you could possibly do is still done but by infinite yous . . . and it stretches off infinitely. Like every person that ever lived all having infinite variations of every possible decision and every possible way of living. So . . . the you now and here’ – he waved her hand again – ‘goes back and kills the baby you but who knows if it is the baby you from you now or the baby you from another you? Make sense?’
‘Not one word,’ she said.
‘In which case,’ he said, ‘I cannot answer your question.’
‘Well, thanks for trying,’ she said, thrilled at seeing him back.
‘Welcome,’ he said.
A pause. A hesitancy. A sudden awareness of near nudity and the darkness of the room. She is beautiful. Stunning. Flawless. He is not worthy. He is haggard and weak.
She saw it happen. She saw the change and swallowed to cough. ‘Er . . . so . . .’ She s
aw him slipping and the dark shadow crossing his face. Her mind raced to think of something to continue the conversation but it was too late. She hesitated too long. ‘Thanks,’ she said instead.
He nodded. His eyes once more devoid of that spark.
‘Much clearer.’ She smiled and stood up. ‘I’ll come back if I get stuck again.’
‘Okay.’
‘Night, Ben.’ She crossed to the door, wondering if his eyes were watching her backside. She turned at the threshold to glance back but couldn’t tell if he was looking her way or not.
That night gave the hope. He came back. Not for long but it proved the proper Ben was still there. It was a magical few minutes and an experience that stayed with her over the next weeks.
It stayed with him too, and it made him worse. He’d felt alive for the first time in months but that made him feel guilty. He also saw her body and felt the reaction inside and that made the guilt multiply a hundredfold. How dare he feel alive? How dare he even consider looking at Safa that way? Steph was having an affair. Steph was leaving him. He is dead. He is worthless. He is nothing.
It was also that night of hope that made Safa cry for the first time since arriving.
As tough as Safa is, she is still a beautiful woman who knows all too well the way men react to her physical appearance and she saw a hint of that reaction in Ben that night. Only for a split second and she knew it was in surprise at her marching into his room in her underwear and not once did she feel threatened or sense anything predatory in him, but seeing that reaction in him planted a seed. The proper Ben was still there. The man was there.
It was not a decision taken lightly, but his decline was worsening. He was so withdrawn it was painful to watch. Like he was dying ever so slowly and they had to just stand by and let it happen. Something had to give. It was desperate. She could sense Harry’s frustration growing. Harry was ready to go, she was too. Enough time had been given. The seed grew into a plan.