Curse of the Purple Pearl

by Adrian Speed

  “Won't that make a paradox? We can't solve mysteries by going into the future to find out the solution.”

  “We're not going to ask for the solution.” Sir Reginald finished entering the date and started preparing the machine to travel. “The clues.”

  “That still seems like cheating."

  “It is my dear, it is,” Sir Reginald's shoulders sagged as he finished setting up the time-machine. “But there is one place in all the universe where I know I can get precisely the information I require. Not too much, not too little. Just enough to preserve causality.”

  “Where?”

  “The ninety-ninth century!” Sir Reginald hauled on the time-travel lever. The time-machine burst into life, while around us Timbuktu blurred and swirled, replaced by coloured flames and lightning. Leaving behind only a puff of smoke, the time-machine disappeared with a faint pop.

  Chapter XXVI

  When the time-machine's motions came to an end I was left gasping for air and struggling from a pounding headache. Sir Reginald's face grew sterner as we arrived. He straightened his hat and picked up his cane. It took me almost a minute to overcome the disorientation. As I pulled myself upright I looked around at the surroundings and did a double-take.

  “Christ, are we twenty thousand feet up or something?” I panicked and grabbed for the controls, anything to cement me to something solid. “Are you sure we're in the right place?”

  “Quite sure,” Sir Reginald said, taking a deep breath. The air here smelt sweet. Not like a fresh alpine morning. This was sickly sweet, like the smell of cheap, shop-bought cakes coloured pink with factory-made chemicals. “Welcome, my dear, to the year 9897. The swansong of the ninety-ninth century.”

  All around us a dome of mist coated the land white, shading to eggshell blue in the distance, and it rolled in the breeze. Shadowy figures appeared and disappeared at random while distant barks of laughter and the giggle of girls rolled towards them.

  “Where are we?”

  “New York,” Sir Reginald said and then inclined his head. “Of course, it hasn't been called New York for almost four thousand years. We are currently standing right in the centre of Times Square.” I looked around. Thanks to the mist I couldn't see far, but there was nothing. “It is now home to one of thirteen access points to the most powerful super-computer ever built. Genesis: the last invention of the ninety-ninth century. Completed 9803.”

  “So, ninety-four years ago?” I looked confused.

  Sir Reginald turned and fixed me with a stern look. “Genesis is the completion of man's eternal dream,” he said. “Genesis is paradise. By the ninety-ninth century computing power reached what is known as singularity. Computing speeds increased so much they trended towards infinity. The great questions of entropy, matter, gravity, magnetism, everything, in fact, were solved. There is nothing left for man to discover. There are no more inventions which need to be built. Genesis caters to every desire.” Sir Reginald twirled the cane in his hands and brought it down with a firm clatter against the iron. “I don't like coming this far forwards, Hannah. I do not like seeing what mankind will one day become. But unfortunately the answers we need are here.”

  “So where are we going?” I looked around. As far as I could see the entire world had transformed into clouds. Besides the constantly twisting distant shadows there was nothing but mist in every direction.

  “Five hundred yards that way,” Sir Reginald pointed with his cane. “There’s the access point I need to reach. Stay close to me. It’s very easy to get disorientated in this fog. I cannot guarantee I’ll be able to find you if you stray.”

  “You couldn't get us closer?” I asked.

  “Regrettably no.” Sir Reginald stood at the edge of the time-machine. “Come along, we’ll be out of here as soon as possible.” He stepped out onto a cloud, making me start with surprise. The mist parted around his feet, revealing a blue, rocky surface underneath. He took a few steps out into the mist and then turned. “My dear, I thought I was very clear. Stay close please.”

  I moved quickly to keep up with him, my feet crunching over the ground. The floor underneath me feet felt like coarse sand, or pebbles, like giant sugar crystals, some the size of hens’ eggs and some as small as clay dust.

  “What is this? What made this?” I said as I fell into step behind Sir Reginald.

  “A great deal can happen in eight thousand years, Hannah,” Sir Reginald didn't turn as he talked. He walked forwards as fast as he could without running. “We are as far forward from your time as you are from the first civilisations in Mesopotamia. Things from the year five thousand seem as old to these people as the pyramids do to you. We are in the deep future now.”

  “Or as most people call it, the present,” a woman's voice rang through the mists. Sir Reginald closed his eyes and groaned.

  “Ignore her,” Sir Reginald said and redoubled his efforts for speed. A grey shadow in the distance came into vision. A woman with full red lips in a long black dress. She didn't walk towards them, she glided.

  “Is this your new stick then Sir Reginald? Do you really want to keep hanging around cave women from the Stupid Ages?” the woman looked me up and down.

  “Er, who are you?” I returned the woman's look. Her hair was blonde, like mine, but fuller, thicker and longer. She was taller than me too, although still smaller than the average man, and better built.

  “Genesis, silly,” She put her head on one side and tugged at her hair. “Do you really want to hang around such stupid girls, Sir Reginald?”

  “I told you to ignore her,” Sir Reginald took me by the arm and led me forwards.

  A teenage boy walked out of the shadows. He wore an old English boarding school uniform.

  “Don't want to play today, Sir Reginald?” the boy said sarcastically.

  “Not much further,” Sir Reginald muttered to himself.

  An old man strode out of the mist. “Come, we can have a grand old time and sort out all your concerns.” The old man pointed to three leather arm chairs that grew out of the ground. Brandy and cigars waited next to them.

  “By default, Genesis communicates through holograms,” Sir Reginald explained. “They provide a more user-friendly interface. We need to get to the real Genesis, the true Genesis.”

  “I don't think I understand—” I said but ended in a gasp when a teenage girl, younger than me, and dressed like a catholic schoolgirl, grabbed my arm and strode along with us.

  “It's all quite simple, babes,” the girl explained, as if I was her best friend and gossiping about boys in the school lunch room. “Genesis can cater to every figment of your imagination and every need of your body. We're here to look after every human being on earth, from the cradle to the grave. We have the ability to reshape the world, to create food and water from nothing, is it surprising we can create avatars to talk through? Old grumpy puss Sir Reginald never wants to talk to us though.”

  “You can really make anything?” I gave Genesis a hard glare. The girl was as open as a book, with a smile as bright as the sun. Her doe eyes were as innocent as a child's.

  “Anything you can imagine, girlfriend,” Genesis said.

  “So if I were to ask for a blouse and a pair of trousers instead of this dress–” barely was the sentence out of my mouth than I felt cloth move beneath me. The dress was gone, banished to who knows where. In its place I wore a pair of jeans, as well-worn and comfortable as if I'd owned them for a year, and a neat, white, professional blouse, like I'd wear to an office. My phone was in the left pocket and all my other bits and pieces distributed amongst the others.

  “We can do anything, honey,” Genesis's female avatar squeezed me after looking at my astonishment.

  “Well, that's pretty impressive,” I said as if I hadn't just watched a miracle occur. “But, I mean, what if I asked for something subjective, like the best tasting chocolate ice cream ever?”

  In front of them a pedestal grew out of the ground. The blue glass-sand swirled u
p out of the ground and solidified into clouded blue glass. On the top of it sat a bowl filled to the brim with ice cream. Genesis grabbed the bowl and fed a spoonful into my mouth.

  It was the best chocolate ice cream ever made, like standing on the beach of a pacific island hit by a chocolate tsunami. Up through the nose and down through the mouth at the same time, the feeling of chocolate spread through every fibre of my being. Creamy, cold, chocolate fireworks exploded in my mind.

  “Huh? How?” I gasped.

  “We read your genetic code,” Genesis threw the rest of the bowl away. It disintegrated when it hit the ground. “Then we extrapolated your experiences from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, cross-referenced the two to custom-build the best chocolate ice-cream experience for you personally. Genesis can do everything.”

  “Well you can't possibly do everything,” I said, despite the evidence of my eyes. “You can't do the impossible.”

  “Name something impossible,” Genesis asked.

  “Make...ok, ok, hang on,” I thought about this. Invisibility cloaks were possible, but unlikely. Faster than light travel was difficult, but possible with some kind of warp drive. Something like violating the laws of thermodynamics was impossible, but pretty impossible for me to observe. Something practical then. “Make a bullet-proof vest that is as thin as spider-silk, weightless to the human touch and nearly invisible to the naked eye.” That combination should be impossible. There was no material real or imagined with those properties.

  Genesis didn't even have to think about it. A coat-hanger appeared and something hung from it, shivering in the breeze, as difficult to see as a distant cobweb.

  “Would you like to try it on?” Genesis didn't wait for an answer. The blue glass-sand rose up again forming tentacles that took the vest and put it onto me.

  “How do I know it's bullet proof?” I asked, looking down at it. I instantly regretted the question.

  A gun appeared in mid-air and fired. The bullet smashed into my chest and then ricocheted off into the distance. Not a single Newton of force had transferred into me.

  “Give us a hard one,” Genesis smiled.

  “Hannah! Please!” Sir Reginald's voice broke into my mind, as did the sound of his cane hitting the ground. Both sounded hideously distant. I looked around. I could barely see him. He had faded into the mist almost twenty metres away. Somehow I'd become unhooked from him and hadn't noticed. Sir Reginald paced over to me as fast as he could. “You must stay close to me.”

  “I'm sorry,” I looked around in bewilderment. The Genesis hologram had melted away into the mists. “I...I was just talking to Genesis and then...”

  “All Genesis wants is to fulfil your desires,” said Sir Reginald, grabbing my arm tightly. “And it can. That is its greatest crime. It will fulfil your every wish if you let it. This is precisely why I told you not to talk to it.”

  “But she—”

  “It's not a she, Hannah,” Sir Reginald glared. “It's an it. The holograms are merely a way of communicating with humans. It is no more a person than the Mona Lisa. Now please, we're almost there. Do not let go of me.”

  We walked the final hundred metres in silence. Genesis stayed in the background, watching us. I trudged along guiltily. My mind kept straying back to the chocolate ice cream. It really, truly was the best chocolate ice cream I'd ever had. Everything from the twenty-first century was going to taste like burnt cardboard by comparison. All I had to do was call out to Genesis and I'd be given another bowl, and Genesis would be happy to do it, it was all Genesis wanted to do.

  And therein lay the trap.

  I thought of the distant echoing laughter. The giggles of children and the chuckles of old men. You were never far from the sound of people enjoying themselves. But the laughter never stopped. The enjoyment never stopped. They were trapped in bliss.

  Something emerged out of the mists like the prow of a battleship. A cone impaled the earth on its point; the reverse of a spire. It stretched up to the heavens, the top wreathed in mist. At the base of it a cage elevator sat huddled like a wet hen.

  “The last remnant of the previous civilisation,” Sir Reginald said. He shuffled his grip to make sure he had my hand and led me towards it. Once inside, the elevator rose with a jerking, shaking motion, more like what I would expect from the nineteenth century, not the ninety-ninth. Then again, I supposed, it had sat unused for ninety years.

  Genesis's holograms disappeared as the elevator rose. It passed into the mists and the cloying sweet smell got worse, as though the entire world was filled with marshmallows.

  “They didn't try tempting you,” I said as we watched the swirling mists.

  “I first came here a long time ago,” Sir Reginald glared down at the planet's surface. It was like an alien world, not like the earth I knew at all. The mists closed over it as though the elevator was the only thing left in the entire universe. “Genesis doesn't have anything I need.”

  “Not tempted by the pleasures of the flesh?” I nudged him gently. The stern expression on his face was his only reply.

  The mists became brighter. The faint blue light turned more and more golden until, with a gasp, we broke through the surface. I could only stare. As far as the eye could see the world was blanketed by cotton-wool clouds. The sun burnt down above, as unchanging as the physical laws of the universe. Eight thousand years was a vast amount of time for man, but immaterial to the sun. Up above the mists the sweet smell had vanished. Earth smelt as it should again.

  We were nearing the top of the great reverse spire. The elevator creaked and groaned a little until with a shudder it delivered us to the summit.

  “Behold!” Sir Reginald waved his cane behind me. “The true Genesis.”

  My first thought was I'd stumbled across a satanic, robotic cathedral of Barcelona. Hideously organic shapes of metal curved and swirled around each other. Pylons and antennas bristled from its surface like fins on a fish, crackling with electricity. It was huge, covering the entirety of the surface of the cone and stank of burnt air and plastic.

  “That's Genesis?” I gasped. At the base a thin grey strip ran the length of the structure. As we approached I realised the strip was the height of a man.

  “One of the thirteen access points.” Sir Reginald said as we walked towards it. “Genesis itself is everywhere on earth. At this point in history the difference between Genesis and earth itself is sufficiently indistinct as to be non-existent. Come along. Genesis will not work to tempt you up here.” Sir Reginald let go of me and I followed him cautiously. The ground I stepped on was utterly clean as if dust and dirt had never touched it.

  We approached the access point. It was lined with computer screens and keyboards built flush into the structure. I did not recognise the symbols on the keys and it was an alien shape. Not a single screw or rivet could be seen anywhere. It was as though the entire thing had grown from a single metal crystal.

  “Genesis Computer,” Sir Reginald said as he approached. “Recognise user: Sir Reginald Derby.”

  A bright light shot from the access point, scanned us both and focused on Sir Reginald's face. A turret gun rose out of the floor and took aim at me.

  “And his authorised associate.” The turret retreated back into the floor.

  The machine warbled some unknown language for a few moments and then a bright, crisp voice broke out. It sounded like a woman from BBC radio.

  “User settings applied. Voice interface preferred. Language: early twenty-first-century English.” The computer continued brightly. “What can we do for you today, Sir Reginald?”

  “I require information,” Sir Reginald began.

  “Wait,” I stepped between the access point and Sir Reginald, “why can't we talk to the holograms but we can talk to the computer?”

  “Because the holograms are programs designed to satisfy our desires,” Sir Reginald explained patiently, “this is programmed to follow my instructions.”

  “Explain better.”
>
  “Mnng,” Sir Reginald took off his hat and rubbed his hands through his hair while he thought. “Your computerised telephone has a digital assistant, does it not?”

  “Yes,” I said, thinking of the program that allowed me to book appointments with voice commands and told me when the London Underground ran late.

  “Imagine that the holograms below are the digital assistants,” Sir Reginald put his hat back on. “And we are operating the command line.” Instantly the old-fashioned 1980s computers came to mind, with a flashing white bar waiting for commands. “Do you understand?”

  “I guess.”

  “Good,” Sir Reginald approached the access terminal and rested against it so he could see the screen. “Genesis computer, prepare to access your historical records.”

  “Genesis ready.”

  “Are you aware of a pearl approximately two inches across of purple colour known as the Purple Pearl or Marcus Aurelius Pearl?” Sir Reginald asked.

  “I am.”

  “Is the pearl still extant in the ninety-ninth century?”

  The computer fell silent and a pause seemed to string out forever. I pulled out my phone to note the answer. Eventually, however, my mind began to wander and I stared up at the antenna high above us. They fluttered in a breeze I couldn't feel.

  “Negative.” Genesis said at last.

  “Does the last record of the pearl occur after the third millennium?” Sir Reginald asked, remembering he had seen it in the twenty-third century in Luna.

  “Yes.”

  “What is the earliest known description of the pearl?”

  “A second-century listing of the Parthian Empire's crown jewels. It is believed this source is a Latin translation of a Greek original from the first century BC,” Genesis answered. I found the voice disquieting. It wasn't robotic, like the voice synthesisers of my time, but it wasn't human like the holograms below. It spoke like a person reading from a book.

  “The Parthian Empire, eh?” Sir Reginald rubbed his chin. “That is interesting. What are the origins of the pearl?”