Is that real? Did that really happen? She remembered it all right. Remembered that Liam got fed up with being beaten by Bob over and over and had finally cursed in Irish and wandered over to play on the Nintendo machine instead. But how much of that was real? How much, if at all, could she trust the memory?
She turned a page. There was a sketch of one of those lizard-sapiens, the bipedal descendants of a dinosaur species that should never have survived.
And did that happen? She was almost certain it had. In fact, she was pretty certain that everything she’d recorded in this notebook must be real. It was surely the things that had occurred before these memories on paper; everything that had occurred before she’d awoken in that archway … all of those things – they were the lie.
Sal looked down at the notebook in front of her, the pages flapping loosely. She’d been considering tossing it over the handrail. Perhaps it would land on the flat open bed of a lorry or rubbish truck to be carried away to some distant landfill site and buried forever. But then she realized this book of scruffy lined pages full of untidy scrawls was all that was keeping her rooted to sanity. In a way, this paper and ink was her mind. Her real mind. It was all that she had, all that she really owned. It was everything that made her … her.
It was all that she could trust.
I love you, notebook. She wrote that at the bottom of one page. You are me.
She wrote that, then drew a box around the last three words as if it might protect that single thought for all eternity. A little blue biro-ink force field.
Liam flicked through channels absently. He lay on his motel room bed and was steadfastly working his way through a packet of Oreos.
‘Is this it, then?’ said Rashim. He’d been in the motorhome for most of this afternoon, picking through the critical circuit boards pulled from the displacement machine and, with SpongeBubba’s help, working his way through the terabytes of data stored on the hard drives that had been pulled out of the networked computers. Thanks to that process he had a much clearer idea of the ordeal these three teenagers had been through over the last few months of their lives, and now had a fair idea of how their little agency worked together to preserve history. He was making notes, scribbling away on a pad of foolscap. He didn’t even look up as he spoke.
‘Is this the plan? We stay in these rooms until what? The end of time?’
Liam shrugged. He didn’t know what happened next. The last two days had been a strange, disembodied experience. He’d been lost in his own thoughts. Eaten once or twice maybe and he couldn’t remember what. He vaguely recalled taking a long walk – hours and hours alongside a busy highway – then finally coming to a halt, turning round and walking back the way he’d come.
‘There’s no more money,’ said Rashim. ‘We will have to leave here soon anyway.’
Liam flicked through channels, hardly hearing the man talk. Sal, he’d hardly seen her all day. And Maddy? Not since last night.
The team was no more. Broken into shards. Just three lost individuals, three young adults lost in their own troubled clouds of thought. His mind kept playing the last thing he remembered from his ‘supposed’ old life: that passageway down on deck E of the Titanic, rapidly filling up with freezing cold seawater. Being certain that the rest of his life was going to be measured in mere seconds. And then Foster – his older self – like some benign bigger brother, a kindly uncle, offering a hand to him, offering him a choice. Offering him a way out.
All of that was a faked memory. A montage of images. He even thought he recognized where some of the visual elements of his memory had come from now. He’d seen a film with the girls on one of those silvery discs: a film about the Titanic – in fact, it was simply called Titanic. There’d been some boyish man called Leonardo Something-or-other playing the hero. And yes … some of the images had been almost a perfect match to parts of his hazy memory. It was as if a patchwork quilt had been made from that film and others, from eyewitness accounts, from historical records and encyclopaedia articles … and dumped into his head with some crude adjustments to make him the star of that film and not that Leonardo fellow.
I’m not even Irish.
He sighed. And yet, if he’d said that aloud, it would have been with an Irish accent.
He wished Foster was still alive. The old man must have experienced this moment himself. At some point in the past, perhaps while working with the team before them, he must have found out what he was. That he wasn’t a lad called Liam O’Connor. And yet he’d pulled through, hadn’t he? He’d survived that appalling moment of truth and moved on from it. Accepted it.
And he’d changed his name. It made sense. He couldn’t still be called Liam and recruit the new Liam. It would be too much of a clue. A giveaway to the truth.
He’d even managed to change his accent.
‘Jay-zus.’
Rashim looked up from his notes. ‘What’s up?’
Liam shook his head. ‘Nothing … I was just …’ His voice trailed away into silence.
Foster had still believed in the job. Even though he knew he’d been lied to, set up, manipulated, exploited by this agency … he still believed the job needed doing. What was that? Programmed loyalty? Was that it? Had the mysterious Mr Waldstein written into his mind a mission priority that even if he was to discover that he was a meatbot and that he’d been lied to and exploited, his first instinct would always be to continue doing the job?
Just like Bob. Just like Becks. Both of them standing outside in the car park keeping an eye out for Maddy. Duty first. Always.
The door handle rattled and the door opened, spilling sickly green light from the motel’s glowing VACANT sign outside across the room’s mottled carpet. Bob’s wide frame filled the doorway.
Speak of the devil.
‘She is back,’ he rumbled. He stepped aside and Maddy appeared in the doorway. She waved limply.
‘Hey, Liam.’
‘Hey.’
She turned to Becks, standing outside. ‘Go next door and wake up Sal.’
‘Affirmative.’
To Liam’s eyes she seemed a little more alert than when he’d last seen her. If he hadn’t been so lost in his own self-pity last night, he might have been worried about her state of mind. Worried that she hadn’t come back. Worried she’d gone and done something silly.
‘You OK, Mads? Where’ve you been?’
‘Getting my head straight.’
He heard the door in the next room snick shut and Sal appeared beside Maddy, bleary-eyed, looking as if she’d just been roused from sleep.
‘We’re leaving,’ said Maddy.
‘Leaving?’
‘We’ve had a couple of days of freakin’ navel-gazing, feeling sorry for ourselves.’ She pushed a frizzy spiral of hair away from her face. ‘OK, so we’re clones. We’re meatbots.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I dunno, maybe when we’ve got ourselves sorted one of us should stick our heads in an X-ray machine and see if we’ve got frikkin’ microchips inside us like Bob and Becks. But that’s … that’s for another time, I guess.’
Liam grimaced, remembering hacking open Bob’s skull, months ago, in order to pull out that tiny shard of silicon in there.
‘Yeah, I know. Not exactly a nice thought,’ said Maddy. ‘Well, like I say … maybe it’s on the To Do list, or maybe I just don’t wanna know, but right now I say we’re done with the sulking. OK? That’s enough self-pity. We need to sort ourselves out. Get things up and running again.’
Chapter 38
16 September 2001, Interstate 90, Newton, Massachusetts
Sal’s bleary eyes widened. ‘We’re carrying on?’
‘Damn right we are.’
Maddy ushered Sal and Becks inside the motel room and closed the door after them. Not that there was anyone out there in the car park to eavesdrop – a row of empty chalets and a gravel lot with only their Winnebago SuperChief parked in the middle. All the same …
‘If it’s just us keeping history o
n track, and no one else –’ she scratched the back of her head – ‘then we’ve got to keep it up. We’ve got no choice.’
‘But we do have a choice,’ said Sal. ‘We don’t have to get involved any more.’
‘Aye.’ Liam nodded. ‘Let it all go to hell as far as I’m concerned. If that’s the way history wants to take itself then stuff it. Let it.’
‘Dammit, Liam!’ snapped Maddy. ‘This is serious!’
‘And I AM being serious!’ He sat up on his bed. ‘I … I’m not sure I care any more.’ He got up, took a challenging step towards Maddy. ‘This isn’t our world! Do you not see that? We don’t have families to worry about … friends … loved ones. None of us have ever had any of that. Just memories of someone else’s families! So, honest-to-God,’ he said, shrugging, ‘what do I care if a time wave rubs out this whole world? Ireland? Cork … and everyone I was supposed to “know” living there?’
Sal nodded. ‘He’s right, Maddy. We are nothing. We have nothing. No, like, descendants. No ancestors. No family tree. Nothing!’ A faint and weary smile stole across her lips as if something had finally made sense to her. ‘I suppose that’s why we’ve always been sort of unaffected by the waves we’ve been through.’
‘Because none of you are of this timeline? None of you belong in this timeline.’ Rashim stroked the tip of his nose, thinking aloud. ‘All three of you are an artificial intrusion not susceptible to any cause–effect cycle.’ He nodded, satisfied with his train of thought. ‘That would explain how you were never changed by time waves.’
‘Yeah, I s’pose that’s what I mean,’ Sal added. ‘We don’t belong, so we don’t get changed.’
Liam wasn’t so interested in that. ‘Maddy, why should I care? Huh?’ He shrugged. ‘Time waves? As far as I’m concerned, they’re now someone else’s problem, so they are.’ He laughed humourlessly. ‘Jay-zus … I don’t even know why I speak this way. This accent. I’ve never even been to Ireland!’
Maddy had had enough. She reached out and grabbed a fistful of his shirt. ‘Liam, you bubble-head! You don’t need to have been to Ireland … to be you. Don’t you see that?’ She turned to Sal. ‘Both of you! Me too! We’re who we are because of these memories. That’s the same for everyone. Memories … define every person on this planet.’ She had a silent audience, but no one seemed to know where she was taking this.
‘We’re defined by our memories. We’re the product of our memories. That’s it.’
She glanced at both support units – living proof of that. Both of them so much more than the emotionless automatons that had slid out of their grow-tubes on to the floor.
‘So who freakin’ well cares if the bag of memories in our heads are ours or someone else’s? We’re here in this place right now, together, and we’re making our own decisions and goddammit that makes us real!’
‘Not all of your memories are false,’ added Becks to the long silence.
Maddy looked at the small frame of the support unit beside her. ‘You’re right.’ She turned back to the others, particularly Liam and Sal. She let go of his shirt. ‘We’ve been real people since we woke up together all those months ago. Real people!’ She patted down his puffed-up shirt gently, apologetically. ‘Real people …’ She smiled at them both. ‘Real friends.’ She grasped his arm affectionately. ‘Real family.’
Sal nodded silently. Maddy thought she caught a glint of the green of the neon sign outside reflected in her eyes, the glint of a tear perhaps.
‘We need to continue doing the job, guys. Come on … we’ve seen some of the horrific results time travel can produce. I don’t suppose we’ve even seen the worst it can do. Not yet.’
Liam gazed thoughtfully out of the window.
Sal too. ‘I hated how those poor eugenic creatures were treated.’
Maddy nodded. ‘And we made that nightmare world not happen.’
The TV still burbled quietly in the corner of the motel room.
‘I don’t see we’ve got much of a choice,’ said Maddy. ‘We have to carry on. No one else is doing it and someone has to grab the wheel, right? Someone needs to be holding the goddamn steering wheel or this world crashes and burns!’
She winced a little at her metaphor. It sounded like typical Hollywood shtick. But whatever. The point was valid. ‘We need to continue doing this job … but this time, let’s do it for ourselves. Not for –’ she made air quotes with her fingers – ‘the agency. Not for Waldstein. But for ourselves. We decide if and when history needs fixing.’
‘You mean …’ Liam frowned. ‘You mean, if a better timeline comes along …?’
Maddy knew what he was suggesting. ‘Yeah! If it looks like a happier, shinier, funkier world,’ she said with a shrug, ‘why not? We’ll decide ourselves if intervention is required.’
She noticed Bob stirring. ‘Bob?’
‘That contradicts a primary protocol.’
‘Remember what Foster said?’ added Sal. ‘For good or bad, history has to go a certain way?’
‘Aye, he did that.’
‘Has to go a certain way, huh?’ Maddy turned to Rashim. ‘And just remind us how history goes, Dr Anwar?’
He grinned edgily as all eyes rested on him. ‘I … I, uh, don’t really think I should be involved with this argument.’
‘Tell them!’
‘Well, you know already. The world’s not too good actually. A systemic collapse of –’
‘Right. We heat the world until the ice caps melt and about a third of the land is flooded. Then we poison what’s left of the world with chemicals until there’s no ecosystem left that’s worth a damn. Then, not happy with all of that, we decide to wipe ourselves out with some kind of Von Neumann virus that leaves nothing left alive. That about right, Rashim?’
‘They were calling the virus Kosong-ni. That’s where it started. Ground zero.’ Rashim nodded. ‘That’s a somewhat simplified version of events, but essentially, yes, that’s it.’
‘And that’s what Foster –’ she splayed her hands – ‘that’s what Waldstein … wants us to do our very best to preserve? Anyone here think that might be just a little freakin’ stupid?’
‘To be fair,’ said Liam, ‘Foster was just following some orders.’
‘You’re right, Liam.’ She smiled at him. ‘He was just like you …’
‘He was me.’
‘Right. And he was just doing what he thought was the right thing to do. Like you, Liam – heart always in the right place.’ She rested a hand on him again. Genuine affection. ‘Always in the right place, Liam, doing what duty calls for. But maybe we’ve been wrong all along to follow Waldstein’s directive.’ She took her glasses off the bridge of her nose.
‘I’ve been doing some thinking. I think that codeword, Pandora … I think that was a warning to us. A warning that we’re doing the wrong thing.’ Maddy was reluctant to take her thoughts a step further. But the logic was right there and needed to be said out loud.
‘Maybe we’ve been doing the dirty work of someone not quite right in the head. Someone who quite simply is insane.’
‘Waldstein?’
She shrugged. ‘He set this agency up. And Bob? Didn’t you say those support units trying to kill us came from the same place as you?’
‘Affirmative. W.G. Systems software.’
She looked at the others. ‘Maybe Waldstein sent them to kill us?’ A further thought occurred to her. ‘Maybe when I sent that message asking about Pandora, when I sent that ad to the newspaper … that’s what triggered all of this?’
The air in the room all of a sudden felt very charged.
‘We were never meant to know how bad the world gets,’ said Liam. ‘Were we?’
‘And now Waldstein knows we know …?’ She pursed her lips, focusing on the lenses she was unnecessarily scrubbing clean. Still thinking things through. ‘We can’t be relied on any more. We’re a loose cog.’ She put her glasses back on. ‘Not fit for purpose.’
‘Jahulla!’ whis
pered Sal. ‘He wants to wipe us out and start again!’
Maddy turned to Bob. ‘If we changed our mission goals … where does that leave us, Bob? Does your core programming mean you’d have to attempt to stop us?’ She turned to Becks. ‘Kill us?’
Both support units looked at each other.
Bob finally spoke. Maddy wondered whether he was speaking on behalf of the pair of them. Probably. Becks would defer to him right now. Her mind, after all, was a pale reflection of his. ‘On previous occasions, I have been able to override hard-coded mission parameters.’
‘And? So, this time?’
His thick brow lowered and became a monobrow of intense thought. A long pause of deliberation. Finally he spoke. ‘I am able to comply with a new mission directive.’ He stared at her intently. ‘And what is your new directive?’
‘To, uh … to stop Pandora?’ There was a tremulous, questioning tone in Maddy’s voice, worried that somewhere deep in his coconut head a logic gate might flip its state at what she’d just suggested and Bob might suddenly leap across the room and rip her head off.
‘Your stated intention is to prevent the future event codenamed Pandora from occurring?’
She nodded slowly. ‘That’s kind of it. Yeah. You know … save the world?’ She winced as Bob’s forehead creased with thought and his eyes seemed to disappear into the shadow cast by his thick Neanderthal brow.
‘What do you think? Bob? That OK with you?’
‘The original mission goal of preserving the destruction of the world and humankind appears to be an illogical mission goal,’ he announced finally. Maddy let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding for the best part of a minute. ‘Becks?’
She nodded; her mind had processed the same information and arrived at the same answer. ‘With the information that Dr Rashim Anwar has provided us of the future, the previous directive appears to make no sense.’