George and the Ship of Time

by Lucy Hawking

  “I have come to parlay with Trellis Dump!” said Annie clearly.

  “Who are you?” said the voice.

  “I am Annie Bellis,” said Annie. “Mr. Dump is expecting me.”

  There was a silence while the machine system considered this response. Annie and George waited in trepidation. Would they even reach the shore? But the mood suddenly changed.

  “We’ve been expecting you!” it boomed, and played a trumpet fanfare. “You are welcome in Eden! Please moor your boat and disembark at the port.”

  “Huh!” said George, surprised. If it had been just him, he reckoned the machines would have shot him out of the water, even if he had used Dump’s name.

  “Well!” said Annie. “I think the machines are turning against him. I bet he didn’t authorize them to play me a tune!”

  She navigated the boat expertly toward the wide jetty, which was lined with members of Dump’s robot army. George clambered out nervously. Annie leaped onto the jetty in a fluid move that reminded him of Hero, springing from tree to tree in the jungle.

  Atticus! he thought to himself. Where was he now? As soon as they’d rescued Hero, he must immediately find his friend from the forest.

  Standing at the head of Dump’s robot army was a lone figure, one George recognized from the Great Tower of Dump. It was the governmentissue robot that had been standing with Nimu, the one that George would bet his bottom bitcoin was the new body of his old friend Cosmos.

  “Greetings, distinguished professor, wanderer of the stars and planets, queen of the space portals, and daughter of the most esteemed and much-missed Eric Bellis,” he welcomed Annie courteously, extending one robot hand.

  With that, George knew for sure it was Cosmos. Who else would have given her that salutation?

  “Greetings, my faithful friend,” said Annie, smiling. George knew that she had understood immediately. “Thank you for coming to meet me.”

  “Well, no one else wanted to,” whispered the disguised Cosmos, formerly known as Empyrean. “They’re all cowering in the Great Tower of Dump, frantically planning what to do when you get there.”

  George nearly burst out laughing. Of the three of them, finally reunited all these years into the future, only he remotely resembled the boy he was when they were last together. Annie was older, harder, battle-scarred, and brave; Cosmos seemed to have gained the ability to inhabit a body, albeit a mechanical one, and live an undercover life as a government android. But George was still just a boy, trying to find his way in this strangest of worlds.

  “Is it safe for us to go to the Great Tower?” he asked, remembering the very real danger they now found themselves in.

  “No,” said Cosmos-in-disguise, leading them forward through a double column of robots on either side. “It is not. It is the least safe place for you to be. The same goes for anywhere in Eden. You are in terrible danger. Dump may still have human troops loyal to him, crack squads who will obey his every command, no matter what.”

  “Cosmos,” said George. “Where’s Hero? And Atticus? Are they safe?”

  “No,” said Cosmos. “Neither of your friends are safe, but they are still alive. Hero is on her way to the Great Tower of Dump.”

  “What?” said George. “How come?”

  “It’s been a bigger adventure than we thought when I planned for her to travel with you across Eden to na-h Alba and the safety of Annie’s protection.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me who you really were?” said George. “And that Annie was ‘her’?”

  “It was too much of a risk,’ said Cosmos, formerly known as Empyrean. “I was a government android registered to Nimu for child-rearing duty. That provided my cover to assist her. If you had revealed any of that information, even accidentally, the consequences could have been terrible.”

  “Why didn’t you just open a portal and push Hero into na-h Alba?” said George.

  “I had some bad years,” said Cosmos quietly. “In the trash camps. I lost that ability.”

  “How come you dare to speak so freely?” queried Annie. “Aren’t we being listened to?”

  “Yes,” said Cosmos. “We are. This may not be the end of Eden as we know it, but this is the beginning of the end. No matter what happens, I will be proud to stand alongside you—and George.”

  “Thank you, Cosmos,” said Annie quietly as the three of them walked away from the fortified port of Edenopolis into the city itself.

  The robot guards continued to line the routes, and now George saw why. On either side, huge crowds had gathered. They must have come into Edenopolis for the Day of Reckoning, but the mood had changed since George was last here. In the short time that he had been gone the crowds had turned from weary and mournful or distracted by cheap entertainment to rebellious and angry. A frisson of mutiny ran through the air. George heard shouts of: “It’s not fair!” and: “Come down from your tower!” A chant of “Dump the Dump” started up.

  Among them, some humans still loyal to Dump tried to whip the people back, yelling over their heads, “This is an illegal gathering! You do not have permission to be here! Move back! Go back to your work!” But the crowds were too big and they no longer cared about punishment.

  “Take us to na-h Alba!” a woman’s voice came over the crowd.

  “You’ll never go to na-h Alba!” roared one of the human overseers. “You will all stay here in Eden, the best of all possible worlds!”

  “No, it’s not!” she shouted back. “Eden is NOT the best of all possible worlds! We hate you—and we hate Eden!”

  The people took up a chant: “Eden is the worst of all possible worlds!”

  The three old friends arrived in front of the Great Tower of Dump, where the security had been primed to expect them. The doors opened automatically and they walked in silence across the empty, cavernous entrance hall.

  “The only way is up,” said Cosmos as the doors to the golden elevator drew back.

  “Is Nimu there?” said Annie as they got into the lift.

  “Your sister is present,” said Cosmos softly.

  “I don’t think of her as that,” said Annie, sounding very young suddenly.

  “She’s the closest thing you have to a sister, to a family,” replied Cosmos. “Don’t forget that your father loved Nimu very much.”

  “She betrayed him!” said Annie, who clearly hadn’t been persuaded by George’s arguments. “She snitched on him to the regime—that’s why they sent him to Mars.”

  “No, she didn’t,” said Cosmos.

  “How do you know?” challenged Annie. “How do you know that for a fact?”

  “Because,” said Cosmos, “I betrayed Eric. It is all my fault.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The three of them rode up the golden elevator in shock. Annie and George were too taken aback to speak. How was this even possible? Cosmos just stood there silently as the floors flew past and they arrived at the top of the tallest tower in Eden.

  But, just before the doors opened, Annie turned to Cosmos and spoke quickly and coldly, though there was a break in her voice.

  “I can’t believe the traitor turned out to be you! My father created you! And you betrayed him!”

  George realized that all the years had not dimmed Annie’s quick temper. If anything, being an adult made her harsher than when he had known her. Back then, she had been very certain of her own views, and now George saw that, as a grown-up, she hadn’t changed much after all.

  Nose in the air, Annie stepped out into the room with the views over Eden. The sun was halfway to setting now, filling the room with a tangerine glow that bounced off the faces of all present. In the center of the room, glowing most of all, stood Trellis Dump himself. He had positioned himself to face the lift while his minions, robot and human, had taken up their former stances around the edge of the room. But although George could see Nimu, there was no sign of the Child Hunter—or Atticus.

  “Well, well, well,” said Trellis Dump as Annie and George
walked out of the lift and stood facing him, with Cosmos right behind them. “Robot!” he ordered Cosmos. “Stand down!”

  Cosmos, head bowed, stood to one side by the huge windows. Sneaking a look at Annie, George could see that, despite her resolve, she was staggered by the revelation about Eric. How could Cosmos—later known as Empyrean—have betrayed his maker and his mentor? George was also aware that this meant Annie had been blaming the wrong person for all these years, and that Nimu had been telling the truth when she said she wasn’t responsible for Eric’s exile. Annie looked so shocked that George wondered if she was going to be able to negotiate with Dump at all, or whether it would all now be up to him.

  From the windows of the tower, they could see the massed crowd that extended out of Edenopolis and into the surrounding countryside. Dump stood there, wreathed in pure delight. His real enemy at last stood right in front of him, looking pale and uncertain. As the arch-predator he was, he knew that it was time to move in for the kill.

  But he couldn’t resist a quick lie first. “Those people have come out in support of me and Eden,” he said. “They’re here to show you that you don’t matter. We have signed a peace treaty with Queen Bimbolina Kimobolina, the leader of Other Side. As you know, this means that na-h Alba is surrounded. You’re a loser, Bellis. Just like your father.”

  In the background Nimu gave a soft cry. George saw Annie’s eyes seek out the sister she had rejected for so long.

  “Then why did you make me bring her here?” said George. “Why not just invade and destroy her?”

  Dump smiled. “Well, I respect her!” he said, clearly lying. “She’s put up a good fight over the years—and I like that. But she can’t win. She’s finished, like her so-called Independent State. Sad!”

  “What do you want?” asked George.

  “What do we want?” sneered Dump’s skinny blond adviser from the sidelines.

  “Shut up,” ordered Dump, to her obvious dismay. “We need to make a deal.”

  “What deal?” said George. “Not another one!”

  “Oh, this is the best deal! The best ever deal,” enthused Dump. “You’re going to love it so much. It’s the greatest!”

  “I didn’t like the last one so much,” retorted George.

  Annie seemed to snap back into focus. She looked straight at Dump. Dump clearly wasn’t used to being eyeballed by people he believed were inferior. He looked annoyed; his face, lit by the dying sun, turned a stranger shade of tangerine.

  “Okay,” she said finally. “Tell me . . .”

  “Stop the machines,” said Dump. “Change the machine-learning process. Make them let me travel into space.”

  Annie threw back her head and laughed. “Space?” she said. “Do you have somewhere in mind? Space is quite big, you know.”

  “I’ve built the most amazing hotel,” Dump couldn’t help boasting. “So beautiful. I’m going to live in space forever. It’s going to be so amazing. I just need you to get me there.”

  Annie’s mind boggled at the thought that Dump might actually believe she intended to help him. “And what’s in it for me?”

  “You’ll be ruler of Earth,” he said with a crafty smile on his face. “All this will be yours. Think about it! You’ve wanted it for so long. Now’s your chance.”

  “Really?” said Annie sarcastically. “You’ll simply give up control of everything? Just like that?”

  “Of course,” said Dump, too quickly and too smoothly.

  “He’s lying,” said George. “Funny kind of hotel—I bet it’s got missiles attached. He’ll be able to target the whole planet—anyone he doesn’t like.”

  “Hey!” said Dump. “My hotel is the most beautiful hotel in the Universe! Please—talk about it with respect.”

  “It’s not much of a deal, is it?” said Annie sharply. “For me or for the people of Eden. Why should any of us be dominated by you any longer?”

  “Because,” said Dump, “if you don’t get me out of here, it’s not just the adults in Edenopolis who’ll be in trouble . . .” He gave an insincere smile.

  Nimu caught on faster than all the others. “The children,” she murmured.

  “Yes, the kids,” he said. “Thanks to Eden’s positive policies about education and youth support.”

  “How dare you!” broke in Nimu. “How can you say that? You’ve misled and enslaved and fleeced the young of this place!”

  “Thank you, Minister of Science,” said Dump. “I’ve long had you in my sights as a traitor,” he obviously lied. “You tried to fit in, I grant you that. But we always knew you weren’t really one of us. We always knew you were ‘other.’ ” He smirked and carried on. “As you know, the kids are all gathered together in various locations around Eden. I know where they are.”

  The implication was only too clear. George realized that this was Dump’s trump card. He was so outrageous all the time that it was impossible to know when he was serious and when he was bluffing.

  Annie grabbed George and turned to Nimu, who smiled properly for the first time. The two sisters faced each other. Looking at the two of them, George could suddenly see the resemblance. It wasn’t that Nimu looked like Annie physically—she didn’t. She was a different type of person altogether. But there was an indefinable likeness, a look in the eye, an air of determination and rebellion about both that marked them out as relatives.

  “I’m so sorry,” murmured Annie. “I always believed it was you.”

  “I would never have done that,” said Nimu, reaching out for Annie’s hand. “I only accepted an invite to join the regime in order to work against them from the inside. It’s what our father told me to do. And you know how they were targeting kids to join them; you remember all that propaganda and how they pressured young people to sign up. I thought it was the best way I could help Eric.”

  Annie looked gutted. George could see her processing how wrong she had been all these years. But, still a commander through and through, she obviously knew that the current emergency had to come first.

  “What now?” she murmured. “Can we let Dump go?”

  “Perhaps we could modify the machines,” said Nimu. “Maybe the machines will discern that sending Dump into space is the only way to save Planet Earth.”

  Annie looked doubtful. “It might work,” she said.

  “What about . . . ?” Nimu indicated Cosmos with her eyes.

  Annie looked over at him, her eyes flinty. “No,” she said. “He betrayed us once. We can’t give him another chance. We’ve got to figure this out ourselves.”

  “What do you mean?” said Nimu. Clearly, thought George, she had no idea that Cosmos was the author of her father’s downfall. Now didn’t seem the moment to tell her.

  Dump just stood there, smiling, confident that he held all the cards.

  But George had noticed something. He moved away from the two sisters. Standing next to the great windows, which showed the city of Edenopolis spreading out below, his eye had been caught by movement. Looking closer, he saw that a whole new stream of people had infiltrated the center of Edenopolis—hundreds of them swarming through the city, seemingly able to bypass all the guards or controls that should have stopped them. They slipped through the crowds, moving with great speed from all directions toward the Great Tower of Dump. At first, George couldn’t work out what was odd about the new arrivals, why they struck him as strange. And then he realized. It had been so long since he’d seen more than one or two kids together that he hadn’t recognized what he was looking at. Hundreds and hundreds of children were pouring into Edenopolis and aiming straight for the Great Tower of Dump. And no one, neither human nor robot, could stop them.

  George looked back into the room. The adults were having an argument.

  “If you had educated your people properly,” said Annie, who had clearly inherited her father’s talent for delivering lectures at key moments, “you wouldn’t need me. But you banned science, you banned proper education, you closed the labs and t
he universities. You took our father’s work and tried to use it to support your regime—which he hated, by the way. And now you’re begging us to help you?” She nearly spat on Dump.

  “You can’t win!” he said calmly. “You have to do as I say or be responsible for the mass annihilation of the people of Eden. It will be your fault. Release me to my space hotel and you’ll be free. I will give you a guarantee that I’ll deweaponize my space resort and leave to you the pleasure of leading this godforsaken planet.”

  “Having wrecked it and taken all its riches for yourself first,” said Annie. “You think we’ll just let you leave and live in luxury in space? And you think we would take your word that you’ll deactivate your weapons?”

  George looked back at the view below the tower. He edged closer to the window, which brought him level with Cosmos.

  “I am defunct,” said the supercomputer. “Now that the truth is out, I will be decommissioned. I hid away in the trash camps for years to punish myself. Then I tried to make it right by protecting Hero, but I fear my mistake was too grave.”

  “How did you betray him?” asked George.

  “By accident,” said Cosmos. “Rashly I gave information to what I believed was a Resistance network, but they turned out to be regime bots in disguise. I am so ashamed. But there is nothing more I can do. I fulfilled my orders.”

  “Cosmos,” said George, looking down at the tiny moving figures, weaving their way through the crowds to the Great Tower of Dump. “There is something you can do.”

  The supercomputer considered this for a moment. “I have been instructed by Annie to cease and desist,” he said.

  “Just one last task? For me, please?” asked George.

  “What is it?”

  “Let the kids through security,” said George, pointing down toward the ground. “And make the lift bring them up to this floor.”

  “Ah,” said the great supercomputer. “That I can do.”

  The adults carried on shouting furiously at each other. All the advisers had now joined in. At one point, the hologram of Queen Bimbolina Kimobolina appeared in the center of the room, looking beautiful and mysterious with strings of emojis falling out of her mouth like pearls. But Dump was obviously not pleased to see her.