Third Transmission

by Jack Heath

  ‘Two thirty,’ Kyntak said quietly.

  ‘Now let’s say you drove,’ Sammy said. ‘You’d leave at one, arrive at two. If you took a helicopter, you’d arrive at one thirty. In a plane, you could be there at one fifteen.’ He started pacing from side to side. ‘In all these examples, you leave the Deck at one o’clock, but you’d arrive at the Seawall at a variety of different times depending on your speed. In other words, the faster you travel, the earlier you arrive. Simple, right?’

  ‘Basic mathematics,’ King said. ‘Intuitive.’

  ‘Exactly. But this implies that if you travelled fast enough, you might arrive at the Seawall at one o’clock – exactly as you were leaving the Deck, twenty kilometres away. You’d have teleported. And if you went even faster than that, you’d arrive at twelve fifty-five or twelve fifty. You’d have travelled back in time.’

  ‘Which is impossible,’ Kyntak said, ‘because the –’

  ‘Kyntak,’ King said. ‘Let Sammy explain.’

  Kyntak fell silent.

  ‘There are a number of reasons this seems impossible,’ Sammy said. ‘The most obvious is that there is no vehicle capable of such immense speed. In order to get to the Seawall thirty seconds after leaving here, you’d have to travel at about 700 metres per second. That’s 2520 kliks per hour, with g-forces stronger than any car or helicopter or aeroplane could withstand – and you still haven’t travelled back in time. You haven’t even arrived as you were leaving. To arrive one second after you left, you’d have to travel at an incredible 72,000 kliks per hour, which is 5000 times faster than the fastest jet plane in the world, and you still haven’t travelled back in time.

  ‘So now you see the other problem: 2520 kliks per hour won’t get the job done; 72,000 kliks per hour isn’t enough. Even a 100 million kliks per hour isn’t enough. Scientists have worked out the actual threshold – the speed you’d have to exceed before you were travelling back in time – 1,079,252,848 kilometres per hour.’

  ‘The speed of light in a vacuum,’ Kyntak said.

  ‘Correct,’ Sammy said. ‘And the theory of relativity says that matter cannot travel faster than the speed of light, because it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel it, and the amount of energy in the universe is finite.’

  ‘You keep calling it a “theory”,’ King said slowly. ‘Does that mean –’

  ‘The theory of relativity is what ties gravity, speed, energy and time together,’ Sammy said. ‘It says a lot of strange things. But it has never, ever been contradicted by science.’

  ‘So time travel is impossible,’ Six said.

  Sammy shook his head. ‘Maybe not. You said Allich had already built a teleport, right?’ He tapped the relevant part of Six’s diagram. ‘This bit here? It disassembles objects, and makes copies at the other end?’

  Six nodded.

  ‘Then she wouldn’t need to send matter back in time,’ Sammy said. ‘Just information about how the matter is constructed. And scientists have been doing successful faster-than-light experiments since pre-Takeover times with quantum objects – particles like photons and electrons – because the laws of physics are different for tiny things.

  ‘Many decades ago, scientists discovered that when they fired a photon through a chamber of caesium gas, the gas distorted the photon’s wavelength in such a way that it actually exited the chamber a fraction of a second before entering it. It had travelled back in time.

  ‘However, a photon is just a photon – it doesn’t mean anything. When they tried encoding information on photons by altering their brightness before firing them into the chamber, they discovered that the measurement afterwards takes too long. Extracting the information was too slow. The photons broke the light–speed barrier, but the information they carried didn’t.’

  ‘But if Allich has found something other than caesium,’ Six said, ‘something that the photons could travel through even faster, something that distorted the wavelengths even more ...’

  ‘Or if she’s discovered a new way of encoding information on the photons,’ Sammy agreed, ‘or a faster way of examining them, then yes – maybe it’s possible. I hate to say it, but she might have built herself a time machine.’

  Kyntak said, ‘In the caesium chamber experiment, they were only able to send the photons a fraction of a second backwards in time. Even if Allich had found something better, surely her time machine would only be able to transmit information back a second or two at most.’

  ‘She could have a long line of these chambers,’ Sammy said. ‘A photon in each one, travelling back in time and triggering the release of the next. With a long enough line, you could send information back hours, days, or even years. That could be what the Tower is for. It might contain a line of chambers stretching all the way from the top to the centre of the Earth.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ King said to Six. ‘What made you suspect this in the first place? You think these soldiers are from the future? That they’re armed with technology that hasn’t been invented yet?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Six said. ‘I think they appeared in Allich’s time machine, and she sent them here to wipe us out. And I think that after they’re done, they’ll return to her facility, and she’ll use the machine to send them back in time, so they’ll appear in the past and she can send them to wipe us out. They’re in a loop. See?’

  Sammy paled. Six guessed he was starting to see the implications. ‘That would mean ... they ...’

  ‘What would be the point?’ King demanded. ‘Why not just use regular soldiers?’

  ‘Because these soldiers can see the future,’ Six said. ‘And what’s more, they can’t die.’

  Six knew he should be trying to figure out how to defend the Deck, how to protect the surviving agents from the monstrous force pitted against them. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the girl, the one Allich had used in her demonstration.

  He and Ace must have watched her entire life, beginning to end. She didn’t exist until she appeared in Allich’s machine, and she was gone forever once it sent her back. There had only been perhaps seven minutes in between.

  But it wouldn’t have felt like that to her. It would have felt like an eternity – in fact, it was an eternity. She would remember Allich’s speech, and before that, she’d remember coming out of the machine, and before that, she’d remember going into the machine, and before that, she’d remember Allich’s speech, and before that, she’d remember coming out of the machine, and before that ...

  No wonder she and the soldier had both repeated everything everyone said, as they were saying it – it had been burned into their brains with endless repetition.

  And there was no point, Six thought. No reason. She had been created and destroyed as nothing more than a demonstration, proof that a human being could be sent back in time. Even the card she’d carried bore no message – just a group of signatures, so Allich’s guests could watch their own handwriting break the laws of physics.

  Six had promised to save the girl. But now it was way too late. She had died young, and yet lived forever, and Six didn’t know which was worse.

  ‘What do you mean, they can’t die?’ Kyntak was saying. ‘How? Why?’

  ‘Because they’re here,’ Six said. ‘If they die, they can’t get back to the machine, and then they can’t appear in the first place. The fact that these time-travelling soldiers exist at all is proof that they will survive. They can’t even be severely injured, because otherwise they would already bear those injuries. And they can see the future, because it’s in their past.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand,’ King said.

  ‘They’ve done all this before,’ Six said, ‘an infinite number of times. That’s why they’re only wearing body armour in certain places – they know where they’re going to get shot. And that’s how their reflexes appear to be so good; they already know what’s going to happen.’ He paused. ‘I think there was one on the CNS Gomorrah this morning – he attacked me, and seeme
d to know what I was going to do before I did it.’

  ‘Why are they all so big?’ Kyntak asked.

  Six shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Where did they come from in the first place?’

  ‘They appeared in the time machine.’

  ‘No, I mean before that. Where do they originate?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe they have no origin.’

  ‘Then why does Allich’s time machine make soldiers instead of violinists, or ducks, or turnips?’

  Six said, ‘I don’t know, Kyntak.’

  ‘We have to let him go,’ Sammy murmured.

  Six was silent.

  ‘What?’ Kyntak asked. ‘Who?’

  ‘The soldier we captured,’ Sammy said. ‘We have to release him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because otherwise he’ll escape,’ Sammy said, ‘or the others will break in here and take him.’

  ‘You don’t know that for sure,’ Kyntak said.

  ‘Yes we do,’ Sammy replied. ‘We know that he’ll make it back to the time machine in one piece, because otherwise he wouldn’t be here. So if we try to keep him imprisoned, he will be taken from us by force.’

  ‘We have to destroy the machine,’ Six said.

  Everyone turned to look at him.

  ‘We can’t let ChaoSonic have access to a time machine,’ he continued. ‘Imagine what they could do with it. They could go back and kill you when you were just a child,’ he pointed at King, ‘and then the Deck would never be created. They could stop Project Falcon, and then you and I’ – he looked at Kyntak – ‘would never exist. They would have absolute power.’

  A chill crawled up his spine. What if they already did? What if ChaoSonic’s massive empire had been constructed by hurling operatives back across the decades, armed with knowledge of future stock market fluctuations and influential politicians and weapons that hadn’t been invented yet?

  ‘Actually, no,’ Sammy said. He drummed his fingers on his thigh. ‘There’s some good news there. First, you said Allich only got the teleport working three years ago, right?’

  ‘Two years, eight months,’ Six said. ‘At most.’

  ‘Then she can’t send anything further back than that,’ Sammy said. ‘Because there would be nothing to recreate it at the other end. Her field of influence is limited.’

  King nodded. ‘Okay. So we don’t need to worry about her having our parents killed, or anything like that.’

  ‘No. And the other thing is, they can’t change the past.’

  ‘Why not?’ King asked.

  Sammy smiled wearily. ‘Because it’s already happened.’

  ‘But if you can go back,’ Six said, ‘aren’t you changing things just by being there?’

  ‘There’s a famous concept called the grandfather paradox,’ Sammy said. ‘The basic idea is that if you went back in time and killed your grandfather before he met your grandmother, you would never be born. But if you were never born, you could never go back in time to kill him. So he would live, he’d meet your grandmother, and you would be born. And then you do get to go back and kill him. Paradox. See?’

  ‘People used it as an argument against the possibility of time travel,’ Kyntak said.

  ‘That’s right. But in reality, it doesn’t rule out time travel at all. It just rules out killing your grandfather.’ Sammy shrugged. ‘The truth is, if you had a time machine, you could go back in time and attempt to kill your grandfather, but the fact that you exist proves that you will fail. Maybe you’ll kill the wrong guy, maybe you’ll have a sudden change of heart, or maybe somebody will kill you before you get the chance. But the one thing that you can be sure will not happen is the death of your grandfather before he meets your grandmother.’

  ‘But say you did murder the wrong man,’ Six said. ‘Doesn’t that change the past?’

  ‘This is the tricky part,’ Sammy said. ‘In that scenario, by the time you’re building your time machine and deciding to go back, it’s already happened. Somewhere in the past, you already appeared, tried to kill your grandfather, and killed the wrong guy. So, there’s no way to change the past, but it’s possible that you already did.’

  ‘So what’s the point of even having a time machine?’ King said. ‘Besides making super-soldiers out of thin air?’

  ‘Let’s look at this from ChaoSonic’s point of view,’ Sammy said. ‘They can’t go back and stop Six’s makers, because they can only go back two years and eight months. And they can’t go back a few months and shoot him in the head, because he’s still alive now, so they’d fail. But say they decided to go back two years, find him while he slept, and surgically implant a tracking beacon into his brain. That would be very useful to them, and the chip would already be there, even though they haven’t even decided to do it yet.’

  Everyone stared at Six. His scalp felt suddenly hot, and he imagined he could hear a faint beeping.

  ‘So,’ Sammy said, ‘their power is not unlimited. But Six’s right – we have to destroy the machine. We don’t know how many ways they’ve already meddled with the past, but we’d better stop them before they can do any more damage.’

  ‘But first, we have to get everybody out of here,’ Six said.

  King frowned. ‘What? We’re safer here than anywhere else.’

  ‘No, we’re not. These soldiers can’t be killed. They will never fire a shot that misses, because they know it’ll hit before they pull the trigger. And if they try to get in here, no matter how well we defend it, they will succeed. They can never, ever fail at anything they attempt to do. See?’ He clenched and unclenched his fists, trying to block off the rising dread. ‘Our only option is to run.’

  ‘We belong here,’ King said. ‘The City needs us.’

  ‘We can’t save the City if we’re dead,’ Six replied.

  There was a tense silence.

  ‘The guy we have locked up,’ Kyntak said. ‘He already knows what we’re going to do with him, doesn’t he? Even though we haven’t decided yet.’

  Sammy nodded. ‘Yes, I imagine he does.’ He sighed. ‘Makes you feel kind of helpless, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Welcome to my world,’ Six said.

  MISSION

  THREE

  Day 2

  EVACUATION

  Aware that he was holding enough nitroglycerine to vaporise his arm and liquefy the rest of him, Six slowly and carefully placed the charge against the ceiling. The vacuum cells on the underside immediately sucked away 80 per cent of the air molecules, creating enough negative pressure that the charge stuck fast to the concrete.

  Nitro was a relatively stable explosive. Just the same, Six took great care as he flicked the switch on the side marked arm/disarm.

  The light on the front clicked from green to red, matching the other seven charges arranged in a square on the ceiling of the cell.

  Holding onto the top rung of the ladder with one hand, Six leaned back and turned his head to look at the ring of people below. ‘Final charge planted,’ he called. ‘Coming down.’

  This cell had once housed a woman named Gen Soreth. She had been arrested and shuf?ed by the Deck for stealing a truck ?lled with Nitron B, a drug used to treat cystic fibrosis. She was nearing the end of her four-year sentence when Vanish’s soldiers drilled through the ceiling of her cell and shot her in the head. They didn’t know or care who Gen Soreth was – they just needed her cell so they could blast through the floor into the one below, which held Methryn Crexe, former director of the Lab.

  They didn’t care much about who Crexe was either. They abducted him, and then executed him, only to get Six’s attention. For the same purpose, they also killed every single occupant of a downtown apartment building and, shortly afterwards, a Deck agent who Six dearly missed. Agent Two.

  Fourteen dead in a single day. Just as bait for him. Six had once been told that the other agents at the Deck admired him because of his vow to never again take a human life. But with such a long trail of bodie
s behind him – some friends like Agent Two, some strangers like Gen Soreth – it never felt like he deserved that admiration. He hadn’t killed anyone in a long time – but many had died because of him.

  He didn’t know why these time-soldiers had been sent, but Six hoped that, for once, it had nothing to do with him.

  The floor of Soreth’s cell had not yet been rebuilt, so it was still joined to Crexe’s. Six climbed past the broken concrete edge, and stepped down the last few rungs to the ground. He laid the ladder flat against the floor so it wouldn’t be twisted in the blast, before he jogged over to where the others were waiting.

  ‘Get everyone back to a safe distance,’ King said. He didn’t meet Six’s eye.

  Six knew that the idea of abandoning the Deck went against every instinct King had. He worked thirteen-hour days, seven days a week. He had no wife, siblings, parents or children other than Six. All his friends were here. He ate his meals here. He often slept on the couch in his of?ce. The Deck was his home, much more than the small house in which Six had been raised. To King, that house was now just an address to put on forms, and a bed for when his neck got sore from too many nights on the couch.

  ‘We’ll be back,’ Six said. ‘They won’t take it away from us.’

  King just nodded.

  It had been Sammy’s idea to blow out the roof of Soreth’s cell again to get everyone out. He said that the ceiling of Soreth’s cell had only recently been repaired, so it would not be suspicious if the soldiers saw a hole in it. And the fact that there was another hole between Soreth’s cell and Crexe’s would make it look like existing damage rather than an escape attempt.

  The evacuation would have to be undetectable not only while they were doing it, but also after they had gone. Otherwise, the soldiers would already know about it.

  Until Allich’s time machine was destroyed, Six would have to get used to this kind of thinking. Past future tense. Paradoxes. People knowing about things that hadn’t happened yet.

  Behind the chalk safety line, the injured personnel had been prepped for transport. The six who could still use their arms and legs had been mummified with compresses and splints. Eight gurneys, once used to relocate violent prisoners, now held the comatose agents inside their nets of straps and buckles. Each gurney was fastened to one of the agents who was still fit for duty, like a giant backpack.