Foster had given her no explanation for that. None at all. She had her theories. Perhaps one of them didn’t belong in this timeline; perhaps one of them had stepped across chaos space from another similar world and now there were accidentally two of them. She wondered if somewhere, beyond dimensions she couldn’t even begin to comprehend, there was an old-woman version of herself.
She decided probably not. She suspected in any dimension she was the same kind of person, destined to get stressed-out on all and everything and die young. Probably of high blood pressure or a heart attack.
Nice thought.
She emerged round the end of the queue and Foster’s eyes were drawn away from the pigeons chasing each other for breadcrumbs at his feet.
His eyes lit up at the sight of her. ‘Ahhh!’ He smiled. ‘You found me!’
She raised a hand to hush him politely. ‘I always do.’
Foster laughed. ‘I gather from that we’ve met before?’
Maddy nodded. ‘Quite a few times now.’ She looked around at the park, the duck pond, the hot-dog vendor. ‘This is like Happy Days. Like a TV show I’ve seen way too many times.’
‘Talking to me must be like talking to someone with –’
‘Alzheimer’s?’
Foster grinned. ‘I’ve said that before, haven’t I?’
‘Only every time we meet up. Listen, Foster.’ She sat down beside him. ‘This time’s going to be different, though.’
‘Oh?’
‘We have to leave New York.’
‘Leave? Why?’
Maddy explained as succinctly as possible: the handwritten message addressed to her about Pandora from some mysterious informant; sending through a message to the agency in the future and asking what the hell ‘Pandora’ was all about. And then, in short order, a squad of support units arriving right in their archway hell-bent on killing them all.
‘I don’t know what’s going on, Foster. Maybe our ability to contact the agency, to contact Waldstein, has been compromised somehow. Intercepted by someone else?’
She didn’t bother telling Foster that the last time they’d met here she’d told him about the Pandora message and it had been his suggestion that she ‘communicate forward’ and ask if Waldstein knew anything about it. Maddy hadn’t come here to blame him for that. Neither of them were to know asking about Pandora was going to lead to this.
‘Point is, someone now knows where we are, Foster, and we could be jumped at any time by more of those things. We have to leave. Like … as soon as possible!’
Foster nodded slowly. Sadly. ‘It wasn’t ever meant to last for eternity, this agency. It was a temporary fix to a problem.’ He looked up at her. ‘There’s something you need to know, Maddy.’ He ran his tongue along his teeth beneath pursed lips. ‘Maddy, the agency … it’s just –’
‘Just us.’ She shrugged. ‘I know.’
‘Seriously?’ He cocked a bushy eyebrow. ‘I already told you that as well?’
‘Yup.’
‘Jay-zus. Must be annoying for you, hearing me –’
‘We’re leaving, Foster. Leaving first thing tomorrow morning. We’re packing everything we need to set up again, and we’ll find some other place to carry on doing the job.’
‘Right.’ He nodded thoughtfully. ‘That’s probably very sensible.’
‘And I want you to come with us.’
Foster shook his head. ‘I can’t go back. You know I can’t enter a displacement field again.’
‘I know.’ She reached for one of his frail hands and squeezed it gently. ‘I know. We’re just relocating for now. No time travel, no fields, no tachyon particles. No more damage to you. We’re just taking a drive away from New York. That’s it.’
She realized just how fragile he looked now. When he’d first recruited them, yes, she’d noted he was old, but he’d looked robust-old. Like some seasoned old army veteran, hard as nails beneath a weathered exterior.
‘Maddy … I don’t think there’s much left of me.’ His smile broke her heart. ‘I’m dying. I have cancer. All over.’
She knew that; it was something else he’d already confessed on a previous visit.
‘Foster … I wish I could leave you here.’ Maddy looked around at the park, the sun streaming through September leaves, turning golden and beginning to fall. Beautiful. He’d told her he thought he might have just a few weeks left maybe; if he was really lucky, a couple of months. The rate of cellular damage caused by time travel wasn’t really quantifiable. It happened, that’s all they knew.
‘I know you’ve earned this,’ she said. ‘I know you’ve given the agency your life … and you deserve to choose how to spend the time you’ve got left. But we need you.’ She squeezed his hand again. ‘I need you.’
‘You know as much as I did … do, Maddy.’
She shook her head. ‘No. No, I don’t. I’m making mistakes. We’re screwing up. There are things stitched in history …’ She shook her head. Not quite the right expression. ‘Things pre-baked into history. Messages … written for us, I don’t know, maybe even written by us! Like we’ve been here before or something. I don’t understand what’s going on. I don’t …’ Her voice hitched with emotion. She stopped and looked across the pigeons at a toddler on reins tormenting the birds on the ground. ‘I can’t do this on my own any more. I’m not ready. And I wasn’t ready when you walked out on us.’
‘And I wasn’t ready for this when I first started,’ he said softly. ‘But you and I? We’re made for this job.’
She looked at his grin. That stupid lopsided old grin of his. ‘You know, sometimes I don’t know whether to call you Liam or Foster.’
He laughed. A dry old cackle. A dying man’s defiant snort.
‘Does Liam know now? About me?’
Maddy nodded. ‘I think actually, in a way, he’s kind of proud that he gets to turn out like you.’
‘But maybe he’s not so happy that’s going to happen sooner than he thought?’
‘I think he’s accepted that.’ She shrugged. ‘Come to terms with it. After all, if you hadn’t grabbed us, we’d all be dead anyway. It’s all extra time. Extra bonus life, right?’
‘Aye.’
They sat in silence for a while, watching a young couple rollerblade past them. He was teaching her, and she was guffawing at how bad she was. Not a care in the world between them.
‘Please, Foster,’ Maddy said again presently. ‘Please come along with us.’
His watery eyes watched the rollerbladers zigzagging up the path and away from them.
‘Don’t make me get on my knees,’ she said.
‘All right,’ he nodded. ‘I’ll come.’
Chapter 4
10 September 2001, New York
‘She’s … what do you reckon? Fourteen? Fifteen?’ asked Liam, peering through the thick protein soup at the murky outline suspended in the growth tube.
‘It’s hard to tell,’ said Sal. Her nose was pushed against the warm perspex. The clone’s body was tucked into a foetal position, knees pulled up, slender arms wrapped protectively round them. The last twelve hours of archway time had taken her body shape from one that was definitely that of a small child to something that looked adolescent.
‘Maybe a bit younger,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to make her out through all this gross gunk.’
Liam wasn’t sure about this. Maddy’s instructions – birth her. They couldn’t leave her behind and probably wouldn’t be able to bring themselves to do that if they had to. She was going to become Becks one way or another. She was part of the team.
The other foetuses in stasis, on the other hand, were simply going to be flushed out. They were all too early in the growth stage to survive for long outside the protein solution. No more than fist-sized bodies and none of them with viable, organic rat brains yet, just sim-card-sized slices of silicon; it wasn’t going to be an easy task to bag up and throw away those pitiful-looking things floating in the other tubes.
; Liam looked again at what would become Becks soon. ‘The body’s just that of a child. She’ll be younger than any of us, so she will. What good is that?’
‘She’ll still be stronger than me or Maddy, though. That’s got to be useful.’
He shrugged. ‘I suppose … if we decide to enter her into a schoolgirl arm-wrestling competition.’
Sal sighed. ‘Come on, we should get on with it.’
Liam nodded. Wrinkled his nose in anticipation of what was coming. Sal knelt down and tapped the small glowing display on the pump’s control panel. The soft purring stopped. The first time they’d done this, they’d had state-of-the-art ‘W.G. Systems Growth Reactor’ tubes, with a motor at the bottom that orientated the tube smoothly to a forty-five-degree angle before opening a sluice hatch at the bottom, depositing the clone and protein soup on to the floor. This growth tube was a home-made affair, the pump and control panel recovered from the damaged system, the perspex tube purchased from a defunct distillery. The other growth tubes likewise.
Liam grabbed the top of the cylinder of bath-warm perspex. ‘Give me a hand – we’ll tip it over nice and gentle if we can.’
Sal braced herself against the weight of the tube as Liam pulled. It teetered, the liquid inside sloshing. The foetal shape inside twitched and jerked, finally beginning to wake up, becoming aware.
‘Go slowly, Liam!’ grunted Sal. The tube was impossibly heavy.
‘I got a hold … it’s all right, it’s all right. Just keep taking the weight as I tip it.’
He carried on pulling, the tube canting over enough now that the viscous gloop was sloshing over the top and splatting on to the floor.
‘Liam! It’s too heavy! I can’t –’
‘Calm down, will you? We’ll just ease it out. Pour it out so it’s a bit lighter.’
‘It’s going to slip! It’s –’
‘Just relax! I still got a hold of it, so I –’
The bottom of the tube slipped on the floor under the angled weight and he lost his grip. It swung down to the ground like a felled redwood, Sal lurching back to avoid being crushed. The perspex made a loud thunk on the concrete and a tidal wave of pink soup erupted from the open top and engulfed her.
The clone slid out, riding the mini-wave and all but ending up in Sal’s lap.
‘Ah Jay-zus!’ Liam flapped his hands uselessly. ‘I’m so sorry, Sal! The thing just …’
Sal spat gunk from her mouth and wiped it from her lips and out of her eyes, thick like half-set jelly.
‘I hate you, Liam,’ she hissed, almost meaning it right then. ‘Really hate you.’
Liam slipped in the muck as he hurried over and knelt down beside her, his hand uselessly wafting around Sal, wanting very much to comfort her, but at the same time not actually make any physical contact with the foul-smelling gunk coating.
‘I am so very … very …’
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ Sal said, desperately trying not to inhale the odour of rotting meat.
‘You all right in there?’ It was Rashim’s voice.
‘Fine!’ called out Liam. ‘Don’t come in just yet! It’s messy!’ He looked down at the clone, still curled defensively in a ball, its head in Sal’s lap. Eyes slowly opened, grey. Wide. Curious and vaguely alarmed.
Liam leaned over it and offered the clone a smile and a little wave. ‘Hello there!’
Its mouth flexed open and closed several times, dribbling the gunk being ejected from its lungs.
‘Ughhh.’ Sal eased the clone’s head off her lap and on to the floor. ‘I’m soaked in this pinchudda.’
Liam wasn’t listening. ‘Hello? You OK?’ he cooed down at the clone. Now she was out of the mist of swirling salmon-coloured soup, he could see the female unit clearly enough. The creature’s hairless head made it hard to judge her precise age. Her face looked both old and young at the same time.
He reached down, lifted her by the shoulders till she was sitting up, produced a towel and wrapped it round her. ‘There you go.’
Sal tutted, jet-black hair plastered against her face by the cooling, gelatinous protein soup. ‘Oh, I see … she gets the towel, does she?’
Rashim sat cross-legged before the rack of circuitry of the displacement machine, SpongeBubba looking over his shoulder on one side and Bob over the other.
‘Incredible,’ he whispered. ‘The design is quite … quite brilliant. Look at that, Bubba, see? He’s sidestepped the feedback oscillation completely.’
‘I see it, skippa!’
He turned to Bob. ‘Our system’s field was constantly suffering distortion variables. Outside interference and internally generated distortion. Feedback patterns.’
‘Your displacement device was much bigger than this one, correct?’
Rashim nodded. ‘Yes. Enormous. And large-scale introduces a whole new bunch of problems. But even so …’ He shook his head again, marvelling at the economy of the circuitry. ‘This is so ingeniously configured.’ A grin stretched across his thin lips.
Roald Waldstein, you were fifty years ahead of anybody else.
‘We should take this whole rack,’ he said. ‘I know a lot of these component wafers can probably be replaced – duplicated with present-day electronics – but I need to take some time to be sure I know how he’s put it all together.’
‘Affirmative. We will take the complete rack.’
‘What about the controlling software?’ Rashim looked at the row of computer cases beneath the desk. Each one with an ON light glowing, and the flickering LED of a busy hard drive. ‘I need the software shell as well. It’s as much a part of this device as the circuits.’
‘Correct.’
Rashim shook his head. ‘Those computers look primeval. How the hell can they run Waldstein’s machine’s software?’
‘Networked together these computers are suitably powerful,’ replied Bob. ‘They do not use the original operating software.’
Rashim recalled the charming old names of computing’s early twenty-first-century history: Microsoft. Windows. Linux. Primitive times when code was written in a digital form of pidgin English. Not like the elegant streams of data from his time: code written by code.
‘We won’t need to take these clunky old computers with us, will we?’
‘Negative. We can extract the machines’ hard drives.’
Hard drives? Then Rashim remembered. Data in this time used to be stored magnetically on metal disks inside sturdy carousels. Again, so primitive. So wasteful. Nothing like the efficiency of data suspended in water molecules.
‘Right … yes. Do you know how to do that, uh … Bob?’
‘I have a theoretical understanding of the system architecture of these Dell computers. Also the system AI – known as computer-Bob – can provide detailed instructions on how to dismantle the architecture. However, only Maddy has practical experience of this process.’
‘Right. OK.’ Rashim pinched the narrow bridge of his nose. ‘We’d best wait for her to come back before we start dismantling things, then.’
‘Affirmative.’
He got to his feet. Across the archway, he watched the Indian girl, Sal, talking quietly with another girl, pale as a ghost and completely bald.
‘Who is that?’ asked Bubba cheerfully.
‘It is a support unit,’ said Bob. ‘It was set on a growth pattern before we had to deal with your Exodus contamination.’
‘A genetically engineered AI hybrid, SpongeBubba,’ added Rashim. ‘The US military were working with those back in the fifties and sixties. Perfect soldiers. We had a platoon of gen-bots come along with us on Exodus.’ He looked at Bob. ‘Leaner, more advanced models than you, I’m afraid.’
Bob’s brow furrowed sulkily. ‘I know.’ Then, with something approximating a smirk, ‘I did in fact manage to disable one of them.’
‘Yes, you did.’ Rashim nodded respectfully and then offered him an awkward high five. ‘Good for you, big man.’
Bob cocked his head a
nd gazed curiously at Rashim’s palm left hovering in mid-air.
‘Uh … never mind,’ he said, tucking his hand away.
Chapter 5
10 September 2001, New York
Maddy returned from Central Park with Foster just after half past one in the afternoon. Following brief introductions of Rashim and his novelty robot, they set to work. During the rest of the day Sal was largely sidelined with the drooling child support unit in her tender care while Maddy, Rashim, Foster, computer-Bob and SpongeBubba collectively pooled their technical knowledge and carefully dismantled the equipment in the archway.
It was an exercise in identifying and extracting only the technology components that could not easily be replaced elsewhere. Bob and Liam meanwhile had been sent out to steal a vehicle big enough for them all and the equipment they were likely to take along.
By the time lights started to flicker on, on the far side of the East River, turning Manhattan, skyscraper by skyscraper, into an enormous, inverted chandelier and the railway overhead started rumbling with trains taking city commuters home from the Big Apple to the suburbs of Brooklyn and Queens, they’d done most of what needed to be done.
A battered Winnebago SuperChief motorhome was parked up in the alleyway, a snug, hand-in-glove squeeze between the row of archways and the graffiti’d brick wall opposite. The rack carrying the displacement machine had been carefully lifted in and secured tightly in the RV’s toilet cubicle. The PCs had been stripped of their internal hard drives and the filing cabinet beside Maddy’s desk had been emptied. Its drawers were full of a messy miscellany of discarded wires and circuit boards and gadgets: a taser, something that looked like a Geiger counter, the babel-buds, a non-functioning wrist-mounted computer of some sort with ‘H-data WristBuddee-57’ stamped on one side. Gadgets and parts of gadgets, most of them clearly not from the year 2001. Nothing like that could stay behind.
The improvised growth tubes were too large to take along, but the pumps and computer interface were removed and carefully stored in the RV. The protein solution and the dead foetuses were gone now, poured away into the East River.