by Alex Scarrow
It stared back at her with one button eye, almost challenging her to explain why not.
CHAPTER 2
2001, New York
Maddy led the five of them through the swing doors into the Museum of Natural History’s main entrance hall. Foster had brought them all here once before, not long after he’d recruited them: Maddy from a doomed passenger plane, moments before it was due to disintegrate mid-air, and Liam from the sinking Titanic. It had been a field trip, a reward for them, a change of scenery. A chance for them to see, to reach out and touch the history they were now responsible for preserving.
Both support units, Bob and Becks, eyed the enormous looming brachiosaurus skeleton stretching along the entrance hall with a detached cool, their silicon minds categorizing the sights, sounds and smells of the museum as either useful or irrelevant data.
Liam, by contrast, chuckled with delight at seeing the dinosaur once again. A class of elementary schoolkids was clustered around the long plastic-boulder-covered display plinth on which the skeleton stood, all carrying their activity clipboards, faces craned upwards to look at the towering dark bones, every mouth drooping to form a little ‘o’ for ‘orrrrr-some’.
Liam nodded a greeting at the old security guard standing beside the visitor’s book. ‘Hey, Sam, how’s it going?’
‘Whuh?’ The guard scowled at him, bemused. ‘Hang on. How do you know my — ?’
‘It’s all right,’ said Liam, grinning, ‘we met a long, long time ago, so.’
Maddy’s eyes rolled behind her glasses. ‘Oh, grow up, Liam,’ she whispered, jabbing him in the ribs and steering him away from the guard, who was still regarding them with an expression that was an even split between surly suspicion and genuine confusion.
‘Last I heard, we were meant to be a top-secret organization … you know?’
‘Aww, he won’t remember. I was dressed as one of ’em Nazi fellas then.’
‘And the timeline was erased,’ added Bob helpfully. ‘The guard will have no memory of the encounter because — ’
Maddy raised her hands to shush them. ‘All right, yes … you’re right, Bob.’ She shook her head. ‘Let’s just generally try to be secret, OK? And, while we’re at it, Liam, try to behave like adults here?’
Liam nodded. ‘Aye, you’re right. Sorry.’
‘OK,’ she sniffed, wiping her nose. She’d picked up a cold from somewhere, quite probably the dude who’d been hacking and wheezing over the counter at PizzaLand the other night — giving them a little extra unasked-for topping on their four seasons. She felt like total crud.
‘OK … today’s about learning a bit more history,’ she said snottily. ‘And we can all do with knowing a bit more, but it’s meant to be fun too, right? We could all do with some time out of the arch.’
‘S’right,’ said Sal.
‘And you guys,’ she said to Bob and Becks. ‘Split up … I don’t want you two support units Bluetoothing binary jibber-jabber to each other all morning. You should use this morning to do some more people-watching. Look and listen … watch how people talk and move and stuff.’ She glanced up at Bob. ‘Particularly you, Bob … you still come across as a bit stiff and unnatural. You need to learn how to chillax.’
Maddy watched Bob’s seven-foot frame hunch uncertainly. His thick brow arched and his mouth opened.
Beauty and the Beast. He was seven foot tall, three hundred pounds of muscle and bone: a panzer tank in human form. Becks by contrast was half a yard shorter, athletic and slight. Yet both had started out, once upon a time, as identical-looking foetuses growing in a tube of murky gunk.
Bob was cocking his head like a dog, puzzling over the term ‘chillax’.
‘Never mind.’ Maddy shook her head. ‘Just mingle a bit, OK?’
Both support units nodded sternly.
‘Right,’ said Maddy, honking into a hankie. ‘Right then, meet in the cafe up on the first floor in, say … like, two hours?’ She tried a weary flu-ridden smile. ‘And hey … you know, have fun everyone.’
Maddy watched them disperse: Liam drawn towards the entrance of the natural-history hall and the dinosaur dioramas; Sal hovering a moment, undecided, before choosing to go to the History of Native Americans exhibit on the third floor; and Bob and Becks looking for a moment like abandoned children before picking directions at random in which to saunter away.
She watched both go with the oddest feeling of motherly instinct for the pair of them. Bob still moved around with a machine-like gait and stony-faced concentration that made him look like a Neanderthal with an anger-management problem. While Becks moved with ballerina grace; equally lethal as a killing machine in an understated way.
Weird. How different they both were: their bodies drawn from the same genetic material, their minds both running the same AI operating system, and yet their experiences, their memories, were varied enough to evolve two very different simulated intelligences. It was a bit like being a parent, Maddy supposed, watching both support units slowly ‘grow up’ and become different personalities over time.
She watched Becks as she paced thoughtfully down the hallway, pausing every now and then to study an exhibit more closely.
You really have no idea how important you are … do you, Becks?
The female support unit had data embedded in her silicon brain, a minor sector of her miniature hard drive devoted to holding a secret. Their last crisis had involved being led to a medieval document, the Holy Grail no less, containing an encoded secret that dated from somewhere around the time of Christ. Becks had been able to successfully decode the secret, which, it seemed, had also rather annoyingly included a protocol that prevented her from revealing the message she’d managed to decode. And now, whatever this Big Secret was, it was locked away in a portion of her silicon mind.
Maddy had tried asking her about what was in there, but poor Becks knew nothing; she too was locked out of that portion of her own mind. All she knew was that at some point a ‘correct condition’ would arrive that would unlock the truth.
What Maddy did know was this: whatever truth was lurking in there, it wasn’t good news. Not good at all. And it had something to do with a particular word.
Pandora.
Secrets and lies. She hated them. There was never any good that came out of a secret. They were corrosive. Like another one, a secret she was having to keep from Liam and Sal … but Liam, in particular.
He’s dying. Time travel was killing him. Every trip through the portal was corrupting his body’s cells, ageing him before his time in a far more aggressive, damaging way than the forcefield that looped them and their old archway field office back around those two days in 2001 that they were stationed in.
She sighed. Even in their eternal two-day bubble world, the same cars, the same pedestrians, the same yellow cabs passing the end of their little backstreet at the same time every day … even in this world frozen into two endlessly looped days, time was passing for them. She’d noticed it … and wondered if Sal and Liam had noticed it too, not that either had said anything to her.
We’re all ageing.
She could feel it very subtly. It didn’t show, not yet, but she could feel it. Maddy had studied her face in the mirror of their latrine. Stared at her face wondering if she might detect the first faint signs of hairline creases in her skin. But … so far, to her relief, no.
As for Sal, she was perhaps a shade taller. After all, measuring the time they’d been in the archway together in a normal way, they must have been living there now for — what? — five months?
Was it as long as that already?
Five months, and like any thirteen-year-old Sal still had a few more inches of growth left in her. Perhaps, being the youngest of them, the corrosive ageing effect of the archway’s displacement field would be kindest of all on her — take the longest to make itself felt.
But Liam … poor, poor Liam. She could see the signs of accelerated ageing in his face even if he hadn’t noticed it yet.
Or perhaps he chose not to. His jaw and cheeks were less rounded now, longer and leaner. And around his eyes — eyes that always seemed to be wide like saucers with genuine awe at something, or pinched tight mid-laughter, laughing at the oddness of this bizarre life they were living — those eyes … eyes that had seen more than any one person should ever hope to see. Around them, in his soft pale skin, Maddy could see the first hairline traces of age. The very same hairlines that would one day be the folds of wrinkled skin on Foster’s ancient face.
Yes, another freakin’ secret.
Liam and the old man who had recruited them, they were one and the same person. That’s what Foster had let slip to her. She couldn’t even begin to figure out how that worked. Was Foster a version of Liam from the far future? His older self? Or some other parallel timeline?
Oh God, it made her head hurt thinking about it.
CHAPTER 3
1831, New Orleans
Abraham Lincoln scowled at the flatboat captain. ‘But … but … this is no more than half the pay you promised me, sir!’
The captain’s dark-skinned face, buried beneath an even darker beard, wrinkled up with amusement at the young man’s indignant rancour. His eyes glinted under his faded red woollen trapper’s hat and he laughed, offering the young man a glimpse of half a dozen tobacco-stained teeth.
‘You are too lazy, monsieur. No good to me.’
Abraham’s jaw hung open. ‘Curse you, sir! I worked my fair share!’
‘Non …’ He shrugged. ‘You lazy. No good to me. Not very good worker.’
‘Now … listen here …’ Abraham balled his fists in frustration, taking a step off the wooden dockside on to the bobbing prow of the flatboat, piled high with bundles of beaver pelts. The captain, Jacques, short and stocky, remained unfazed at the young beanpole of a man towering over him.
‘You get half … no more,’ he said calmly.
Abraham felt his temper get the better of him. He reached out and grabbed the collar of the little Frenchman’s chequered shirt in one big-knuckled fist. ‘Curse you … I earned — ’
The little man was quicker and more agile than his stocky frame would suggest, and with a deft flick of his strong arms he pulled Abraham off balance. He stuck a booted foot behind his heels and shoved him backwards.
Abraham pinwheeled with his arms, his feet unable to step backwards to recover his balance. He toppled over the side of the flatboat and into the Mississippi river, surfacing from the muddy water coughing and spluttering to hear the rest of the flatboat crew, half a dozen lads his own age or thereabouts, guffawing with laughter.
Jacques bellowed at them to get back to work and they resumed tossing the bales of pelts from one to the other ashore on to the busy dockside.
Abraham pulled himself, dripping and still spluttering, on to the wooden planks of the dock, his hot temper doused for now by the cool river. He turned to Jacques, the man’s broad shoulders shaking with poorly concealed laughter.
‘It ain’t fair, I tell you!’ He pushed a tress of dark sopping hair out of his eyes and glared back at the captain. ‘Hell’s teeth, sir … you are even paying a negro more than I!’
Jacques turned to look at the one dark-skinned member of his crew. He shrugged at that. ‘He a better worker than you, boy.’
Abraham realized by the Frenchman’s undaunted, wrinkled smile that he was not going to get anywhere with him. ‘Well, to Hell with you, then!’ He spat. ‘Crook! You thieving piratical parasite!’ He stood on the edge of the wooden jetty, standing as tall and defiantly as his six-foot-four-inch frame would let him. ‘I shall … I shall go find other work, then!’
Captain Jacques’s bearded smile only widened further. ‘As you wish.’ He waved a hand at him. ‘Good luck, mon ami. You will need it.’
CHAPTER 4
2001, New York
Liam found himself drawn back to the main hall and that splendid brachiosaurus skeleton erected in the middle of it. He was staring up so long at the long arch of vertebrae that comprised its neck that he failed to notice another bustling class of elementary students gather round him, just like the other class, all carrying bright orange activity clipboards. They cooed and orrrrred as the others had, craning their necks to look up at the Cretaceous leviathan.
A teacher, or perhaps it was a museum tour guide, was giving the children the vital statistics of the beast, or, as Maddy would say, they were getting a ‘fact-up’.
‘… roamed the plains in small family groups of no more than a dozen …’
‘Well, that’s not true,’ grunted Liam under his breath.
A tiny boy beside him with thick-framed spectacles and a buzzcut of blond hair that stood erect like a toilet brush looked up at him curiously.
‘… their thick green hides, most probably as thick as rhinoceros hides, probably helped to keep them …’
‘Brown, actually,’ Liam muttered again. ‘They were brown.’
The boy tugged gently at his shirtsleeve and Liam looked down at him. He whispered something Liam couldn’t hear. He squatted down beside the child. ‘What’s that again, fella?’
The boy eyed the guide warily. She was still addressing the assembled children. ‘I said,’ he whispered again, ‘are you a … a real dinosaur man?’
Liam laughed softly. He realized the little chap was asking whether he was an expert, a palaeontologist. He stroked his chin thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Well now … yes, I suppose you could say I am.’ He whispered softly, pointing up at the towering bones. ‘I seen these fellas in the flesh, so I have. And I can tell you they’re certainly not green.’
Behind thick milk-bottle lenses, the boy’s eyes widened. ‘You … you seen dinosaurs for, like, real?’
Liam nodded, his face all of a sudden very serious. ‘Aye. Went back in a time machine, so I did. Saw all sorts of dinosaurs … including this big beastie.’ He tapped his nose with his forefinger. ‘But that’s super top secret, young man, all right?’
The boy nodded so vigorously his glasses almost fell off his face.
‘I’ll tell you something else too … We saw ’em in huge herds. Hundreds of the fellas all together in one place. Incredible sight, so it was.’ He winked at the boy. ‘Not small groups like your teacher just said.’
‘Wow,’ the boy gasped.
‘And, like I said, they were brown, like dust, you see, because there wasn’t such a thing as grass back then. They were brown as camouflage against the dirt, not green against grass. See what I mean?’
The boy nodded. ‘Should I put that down on my activity sheet, mister? Brown?’
Liam glanced down at the boy’s clipboard and saw a pop quiz. One of the questions was about the supposed colour of their hides.
He nodded. ‘Sure … put down brown.’
The boy’s forehead furrowed with a difficult dilemma. ‘But … er … I might not get a tick for that.’
Liam shrugged. ‘Aye … maybe so, but at least you’d be right, eh?’
He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see Becks standing over them, her hair tied back in a tidy ponytail and wearing a plain dark woolly jumper that covered the still very visible scar tissue up her left arm.
‘Liam, you are aware Maddy would not approve of this,’ she cautioned.
‘Ahh … and you see this girl?’ whispered Liam to the boy. The boy looked warily up at her stern expression. ‘She saw these dinosaurs too … smacked one of ’em right on the nose, so she did. Actually started a stampede.’
‘This person does not have security clearance to know about our operations,’ Becks uttered firmly. ‘I recommend that you stop.’
Liam smiled. ‘Right, yes … of course.’ He glanced at the boy’s clipboard. ‘Brown, OK?’ He flicked him a conspiratorial wink and stood up. ‘What’s up, Becks?’
‘It is time now,’ she replied.
‘Uh?’
She nodded at a large digital clock above the entrance. It was a couple of minutes to eleven. ‘Time for us to
drink coffee.’
CHAPTER 5
1831, New Orleans
Abraham Lincoln staggered across the bar, knocking several tables along the way, leaving a trail of spilled whisky and snarled curses behind him as he stepped outside into the evening. The paltry sum of money with which that blood-sucking little French trapper had paid him off was all gone now, tossed down his throat during the afternoon.
The evening was still busy with dock workers hefting bales of hides and pelts off a row of flatboats, little more than rafts made from logs lashed together with a rudimentary shack in the middle. Across the river, he could make out the chimney stacks of several paddle steamers impatiently puffing clouds into the crimson sky. Their several decks were lit by gas lamps. To his whisky-soaked mind they looked like giant wedding cakes lined with candles floating on the glistening Mississippi. Quite something to behold.
New Orleans was alive and bustling with activity, even now, with the sky smearing from afternoon, to evening, to night. By contrast, back in New Salem, the hearth fires would be burning and thick log doors battened firmly shut for the night.
This is the place he wanted to be. Needed to be. A young man like him with a keen mind and a quick wit could make his fortune right here among all this … this … opportunity. That was it — even the air in New Orleans tasted of opportunity. If a fellow was clever, used his mind, he could make his fortune on these streets along this dockside. Abraham knew he had the kind of instinct and smarts to make himself rich. Rich beyond the dreams of a backwoods boy. He just needed that first little chance to get him going. Enough money to get his first enterprise under way.
Not that he knew yet what his first money-making scheme was going to be. And, of course, he’d just gone and spent all the money he had on an ill-tempered afternoon of drinking. Now he was no better than the dozen other drunks tottering up and down the busy twilit thoroughfare: crossbreed trappers and frontiersmen in tattered deerskins, even one or two Pawnee unused to the bottled white-man’s curse, sprawled unconscious amidst stacked sacks of grain … and now him too, swerving to and fro among businessmen wearing stove-pipe hats and their purse-lipped wives in shawls and bonnets, their bags and possessions behind them on the backs of silent, sullen-faced slaves.