by Alex Scarrow
Olivera had a sense that this was where their conversation met its logical conclusion. No bartering. No pretending. No back-out clause. This was the place they were at. ‘Mr Waldstein? What … what happens now?’
Waldstein backed up several steps. Turned and said something softly to someone who must have been standing outside, just out of sight.
‘Who’s … Mr Wald-s-stein. Who’s out there? Who’re you talking to?’
A tall, muscular figure appeared behind the old man, completely bald, with the calm dispassionate face of a recently birthed support unit.
‘I’m so very sorry, Joseph.’ Waldstein looked back at him with sadness in his eyes. ‘I’m truly sorry that it has to be this way …’
In a heartbeat he was certain of Griggs’s fate. Murdered. Not by some gang of starving vagrants but by Waldstein. Directly or indirectly. The old man had made sure Frasier Griggs wasn’t going to remain a dangerous loose end.
And now I’m dead.
He backed up a step, past his own workstation to what used to be Griggs’s workstation.
‘Joseph,’ said Waldstein, ‘please don’t make this harder than it has to be. Come here.’
‘You … you don’t n-need to do this. Please … you don’t –’
‘But here’s the problem – I can’t trust you any more.’ There was genuine sadness on Waldstein’s face. ‘Do you see? I couldn’t trust Frasier either. And that’s the important thing. This is too important, Joseph. More important than Frasier, than you … than me even.’
Joseph eyed the holo-display shimmering inches above the mess of Griggs’s desk. He’d been looking through those folders of his ex-colleague’s that hadn’t been code-locked. Frasier had been recently pinhole-viewing history. One of his unofficial hobbies. He rather liked to discreetly spy on favourite historical moments, particularly civil-war history. Joseph had once caught him glimpsing the final moment of the Battle of Gettysburg, as General Pickett’s Virginians had finally withered under the barrage of musket fire, broke and routed. Then another time Frasier had been listening to Abraham Lincoln give his famous Gettysburg Address.
‘Tell me,’ pleaded Joseph, ‘what’s so important? Tell me!’
Waldstein sighed. ‘If that I could, Joseph … if only I could …’
Joseph shot another glance at the display. The pinhole-viewer interface was in standby mode, as Griggs had left it last time he’d used it. The displacement machine was fully charged after having sent back the Saleena unit. Good to go, ready to dispense its stored energy. He just needed to open the interface, dilate the pinhole, three feet, four feet. That’s all. It would be enough.
‘W-why c-can’t you tell me, Mr … Mr Waldstein? Maybe, m-maybe if you explained –’
‘Explain Pandora to you? Explain why mankind has to wipe himself out?’ Waldstein smiled sadly. ‘I explain that to you … and what? All of a sudden I’ll be able to trust you unreservedly?’
Joseph nodded. Perhaps too eagerly. His mind was on something else, though. Calculating escape.
‘I’m sorry, Joseph. What has to happen is my burden, my burden alone, and I’ll burn in hell forever for what I know has to be done.’ The old man looked like he was crying. ‘Good God, Joseph … you don’t want to know what’s in my head. Trust me!’
Three feet, just about wide enough for him to dive through. But … but … he had no idea what time-stamp, if any, was already set in the location buffer. He looked up at the support unit, still standing obediently just behind Waldstein. On a word of command it could be across the small lab in seconds, not enough time for him to pick out and tap the coordinates for a safe, density-verified location.
Oh God help me … If nothing was in the entry buffer, he’d end up in chaos space. That horrific nothingness. A swiftly crushed neck at the hands of the unit standing behind Waldstein would be infinitely preferable, surely?
‘It all has to end, Joseph. In that way. Pandora. Only then will they let it happen.’
They?
‘Let what … what h-happen? Who … who are you talking about?’
‘I’m sorry, Joseph. The time for talking is over.’ He turned to the support unit and nodded.
The support unit pushed past Waldstein, strode round a table cluttered with Joseph’s mind-map charts and printouts of gene-memory data templates.
Not daring to think what horror awaited him if the time-stamp entry buffer was empty, Joseph’s finger hovered over the commit touch button on the holo-display. A warning flashed on the screen that a pinhole was now activated. The air near him pulsated subtly. It was there … but so small it was invisible. On the lab floor, yellow and black chevron tape marked out a safety square, a place not to enter while a pinhole was active. Walking through a pinhole would be like being shot by a high-calibre round – a tangent carved through the body and sent elsewhere, no different to the path of a speeding bullet, blasting a hole right through a body and depositing what it had eviscerated out the other side.
‘My God!’ Waldstein’s eyes widened as he understood what Joseph intended to do. ‘DON’T DO IT!’
Joseph tapped a command in, an instruction to widen the pinhole.
The support unit picked up on the urgency in Waldstein’s voice and leaped towards Joseph. The pinhole instantaneously inflated, from apparently nothing to a shimmering, floating orb a yard wide. Joseph turned towards it, time enough in the half second left to see that the churning, oily display was showing something more than featureless white. It was showing somewhere. Somewhere.
Not chaos space. Good enough.
He instinctively cradled his head and dived into the shimmering orb, tucking his legs up, his elbows in, to be sure he left none of them behind. In the last moment before entering it he was screaming. A wail of panic, a long, strangled bellow of defiance and fear. Most definitely fear.
This is insane!
As his head entered that swirling escape window – a window that could mean safety or death in any number of unpleasant ways – he thought he could make out the shape of horses. A wagon. Barrels.
At least it wasn’t all white, right?
At least there was that.
Chapter 36
15 September 2001, Arlington, Massachusetts
Rosalin Kellerman stared at the man in a smart business suit standing on her doorstep, and a woman beside him. A striking young woman, with startling grey eyes, wide and intense, wearing a loose gentleman’s checked shirt, several sizes too big for her but tucked into tightly fitting jeans. Athletic. But striking … in that her head was shaved almost down to the skin. And yet somehow she was still quite beautiful. Just like that Irish rock singer-songwriter from the eighties … what was her name? Sinead something or other.
‘This is number 45?’ he asked again.
Rosalin shrugged and pointed at the brass number plaque on her green door. ‘Uh … well, there’s the number right there! See it?’
‘And this is your residence?’ asked the man.
Rosalin narrowed her eyes. This was already becoming a peculiar encounter. And not the first one she’d had in the last few days.
‘Have you received a visit from a stranger recently?’ The man seemed to immediately realize that was a stupidly vague question. He pulled something out of his jacket pocket. A photograph. Held it up so she could see it. ‘A visit from this person?’
Rosalin recognized the face. The oval-shaped chin, the glasses, the frizzy, strawberry-blonde hair. Oh yeah, she remembered this girl all right.
‘You mind telling me what the hell this is all about?’
The man smiled. ‘You’ve seen her, haven’t you?’
‘Yeah … she came knocking a couple of days ago.’ Rosalin shook her head. ‘Crazy. I was pretty stupid. I really shouldn’t have let her in.’
‘You spoke with her?’ asked the intense young woman in the checked shirt.
‘You kidding?’ Rosalin snorted a laugh. ‘I couldn’t get a word in.’
‘Mom!’
Rosalin heard the alarm in her daughter’s voice and put down the tray of cakes on the counter, vaguely aware that the oven-hot tray was going to leave marks on the Formica, but Nadine’s shrill cry sounded unsettling.
She stepped into the hallway to see that a girl, a teenager, pale and scruffy, had pushed her way into the house past her daughter Nadine.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
‘This is my … my home!’ cried the girl.
Oh my God … maybe she’s a drug addict. Maybe she’s after money?
‘Get out! Get out of my house right now! Or I’ll call the police!’
The girl ignored her. Turned to the left and took the stairs up to the landing, three at a time.
‘Hey!’ called Rosalin after her. ‘Get back down here!’ No answer. ‘OUT! GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!’
Nadine was looking frightened. ‘Mom? Who is she?’
‘It’s all right, honey. You stay down here.’ She started up the stairs after the teenager.
‘Mom? Don’t go up there. Please!’
‘It’s all right, honey. You stay down here.’ The young woman – no, not a woman, a kid still, really – didn’t look dangerous as such. Just confused and frightened. ‘Stay down there, Nadine. I’ll just go up and speak to her.’
At the top of the stairs she could hear the teenager had gone into Nadine’s bedroom. She could hear movement from in there. Movement … and now, what was that? Sobbing?
She approached the open door, spilling afternoon light out from Nadine’s room across the hallway carpet. And there, sitting on the end of her bed, was the teenager, rocking gently, her face buried in her hands.
All of a sudden bellowing at this kid to get out before she set the cops on her seemed like overkill. She clearly wasn’t a danger to anyone. She certainly didn’t need to be cuffed like a gangster and rough-handled into the back of a squad car.
‘Hello?’ Rosalin said softly. ‘Can I help you?’
That had happened two days ago. Now Rosalin looked at the smart young man and the striking, shaven-headed woman sitting side by side on her couch. The young man had shown her an FBI pass and said his name was Agent Cooper. The young woman he’d introduced as Agent Faith.
A cafetière was steaming on the coffee table in front of them, untouched. Rosalin had no idea why she’d offered them coffee. Maybe she was just as curious about that poor girl as they were.
‘And what did she tell you?’ asked Agent Faith.
‘All sorts of crazy nonsense really. I thought she was drunk or on drugs or something.’
‘What specifically did she tell you?’ asked Agent Cooper. Rosalin preferred him asking. At least he smiled kindly. The woman on the other hand, Agent Faith, was like a goddamned robot. Face like an emotionless psychopath.
‘She said some crazy things … like she was from the future. That she’d died in a plane crash or something in 2010, but someone saved her from the plane.’
‘Saved her …?’
‘She said the plane was in mid-air. She said she was “beamed out”.’
‘Beamed out?’ Cooper laughed politely. ‘What? Like Star Trek beamed out?’
‘I don’t know what she meant exactly. It wasn’t making much sense to me.’ Rosalin shrugged. ‘That’s when I figured she wasn’t a druggy, but maybe some sort of sick person, you know? On medication or something?’
‘Indeed.’
‘She said she got beamed back from the future, from 2010, to now. And was working for some sort of time police. Trying to stop people from the future time travelling.’ Rosalin laughed self-consciously. It was the kind of make-believe game her youngest son played with his friends, tearing round the kitchen with plastic laser guns and making whoop-whoop noises.
‘The girl is deluded,’ said Agent Faith. ‘None of this is correct.’
‘Sure, of course,’ Rosalin nodded. ‘But …’
‘But what?’ asked Agent Cooper.
‘But … she was saying things that sounded so …’ She shrugged. ‘Convincing, I guess.’
Cooper sat forward. ‘Such as?’
‘Well … let’s see.’ Rosalin narrowed her eyes. ‘Oh yeah, she said that we’ll be going to war with Iraq again. And after that with some other country called Afganistan-izan or something. She said some other weird things … can’t remember them, though. Just odd stuff.’ Rosalin shook her head. As that girl had sobbed and told her story, she’d almost found herself believing some of it.
‘Did she explain why she came to your house?’ asked Cooper.
‘Oh yes … yes. That was the strangest thing of all. She said she had memories of living here in this house. I mean … living here right now. In 2001. That she’d lived here as a girl with her mom and dad. That she remembered the house looking very different on the inside and –’
‘But she’s never in fact lived here?’
Rosalin shook her head. ‘No! We’ve been living here since before Nadine was born. Since 1990.’
‘And this girl is in no way related to you?’
‘No! Look, of course not! I’ve never seen her before!’ Rosalin looked at the coffee. It wasn’t going to get drunk. ‘I told her that. Told her that we’ve been living here for more than ten years … that’s when she went funny.’
‘Funny?’
Rosalin recalled the girl had abruptly stopped mid-sentence, as if something in her mind had suddenly snapped. Discovered a hidden touchstone of truth. ‘She just got up and left. Walked out of the house, sort of in a trance or something.’
‘And she’s not been back since?’
‘No. Like I said, that was a couple of days ago.’
Agent Cooper nodded and offered her another charming smile. ‘Well, Mrs Kellerman, thank you for talking to us.’ He shrugged apologetically as he stood up. ‘And for the coffee. I’m sure it was very nice coffee.’
The woman followed her colleague’s lead and both agents headed towards the hallway and the front door.
‘But one thing I don’t understand,’ said Rosalin. ‘Why are the FBI after her? I mean … you know … if she’s just some kid who needs help?’
Agent Cooper shrugged that question away. But his female partner stopped dead.
‘See, I’m … well, I’ve got a journalist coming over later today,’ continued Rosalin. ‘I called the National Enquirer.’ She bit her lip, slightly embarrassed. ‘I know it’s a stupid newspaper. They run stupid My-Uncle-is-an-Alien-from-Mars stories … but they pay pretty well for them.’
Agent Faith turned to look at her. ‘You will be telling this story to a newspaper?’
Rosalin nodded guiltily. ‘Is that, uh … you know, a problem?’
Faith’s movement was little more than a blur. The dull crack of a single gunshot was reverberating around the home’s hallway before Agent Cooper fully realized she’d reached under his jacket and wrenched out his standard-issue firearm and used it.
Mrs Kellerman was dead before her legs buckled and she dropped to the floor. Blood trickled from a tidy dark hole between her carefully plucked eyebrows and pooled on the waxed wooden parquet slats beneath her head.
‘Jesus! What –?’
‘She was a contamination risk.’
Cooper realized he was trembling. ‘You … can’t … you can’t just go and shoot –’
‘My primary mission parameter is to eliminate the agency team. My secondary mission parameter is to ensure no significant time-contamination events occur.’
She handed the gun back to him.
‘Thank you for the use of your weapon, Agent Cooper.’
Chapter 37
16 September 2001, Interstate 90, Newton, Massachusetts
So that’s what we all are. Machines. Meat robots, just like Bob and Becks. Everything me, Maddy and Liam remember from before arriving in that archway is just a dream. Not even that, just faked memories.
I’m not Saleena Vikram.
I’m not from 2026.
I’m not
from India.
I don’t have parents.
I’m a meat product.
Sal wondered why she was even bothering to write in her diary. She’d started out writing in it because she thought it would help her keep her sanity. But why bother now when her mind wasn’t even hers anyway? It was the product of some technician or team of technicians. A faked backstory. An amalgam of images.
I’m even beginning to wonder if some or all of the stuff that happened to us since we became TimeRiders is faked memories too. I mean, how do I know for sure? Maybe we never had a German New York, or that nuclear wasteland? Maybe those dinosaur things never broke into the archway? Maybe I never met Abraham Lincoln? Maybe someone invented those stories?
Another slightly more comforting thought occurred to her: maybe there never was a pitiful eugenic creature called Sam, massacred along with several dozen others before her very eyes. Somehow that seemed a small kindness; a teaspoon of comfort in an ocean of cruel.
That blue bear. I think I get it now. Somebody put that into my memory by mistake. I wasn’t meant to see it in that Brooklyn shop. Because how could it also be in India, twenty-five years from now? Someone messed up. Made a mistake. All this time, these weeks I’ve been wondering about whether that bear meant something special, whether it was important. And guess what? It was just someone’s dumb mistake.
She shook her head. ‘Jahulla.’
No one was going to hear her, standing in this place, alone, watching the endless traffic pass beneath her. The overpass ran across six lanes of interstate traffic. Cars, trucks, buses: a constant stream of on-off-on red braking lights on the right and glaring headlights on the left, some so bright they cast stars and streaks across her tear-wet eyes. A stream of traffic in the early evening, all of them on their way to or from meaningful appointments, running errands, returning from work, going shopping. Routine events. Life. Dull maybe, but at least it was real life.
She looked down at the dog-eared notebook resting on the pedestrian railing. Dozens and dozens of pages of her small handwriting. Scribbles and sketches she’d made of the team. The page corners flickered and lifted, teased by a gentle breeze. And, by the clinical cyan light of one of the overpass’s fizzing street lights, she studied one particular sketch. A drawing she’d made of Liam playing chess with Bob. The pair of them hunkered over a chessboard placed on a packing crate table in the narrow space between the bunk beds.