‘Josh,’ he replied, shaking her hand.
‘Nice to meet you, Josh.’ Her father handed him a mug of steaming tea. ‘Caitlin’s been telling us all about you.’
Josh smiled awkwardly, wondering exactly how much detail she had gone into — he wasn’t really the kind of boy that girls took home to meet their parents.
Caitlin winked at him. ‘Don’t worry, nothing bad.’
‘So back to the business in hand?’ interrupted the colonel brusquely.
‘Yes, of course. We’ve been discussing the Eschaton projections.’ Caitlin’s father pointed to a complicated time chart that was spread across the table.
‘It confirms what I’d suspected.’ The colonel leant over and traced one of the hundreds of lines back to a nexus point. ‘These convergence curves are unmistakable. They point to an intentional deviation in the continuum. Someone is manipulating the past — as predicted in your father’s Eschaton hypothesis.’
Caitlin’s father blushed while her mother rolled her eyes.
‘To cause the end of time? What would be the point of that?’ Josh asked.
‘That may not be their end goal,’ answered her father. ‘The Eschaton theory is a complex sequence of events. Whatever they’re trying to achieve may have much more selfish motives.’
‘Like Dalton wanting the Book of Deadly Names?’ Caitlin suggested.
‘Exactly. These events are not coordinated.’ He tapped along the central line of points. ‘Each one is a product of the last, or in some cases, a trigger for the next.’
Josh stared at the thousands of interconnected points on the map, fine spidery lines weaving between them and across the paper. ‘So where do we begin?’
The colonel tapped on the chart. ‘I think we have to start with the inciting incident.’
Josh focused on the spot beneath the colonel’s finger; it was surrounded by a collection of handwritten notes and symbols that spread out into a web of new threads.
There was a word underlined in red ink: “1. Prophecy.”
‘A powerful tool, in the right hands,’ the colonel began. ‘The Order has always considered itself agnostic. The internal factions that developed as we expanded have always been treated as healthy, rational, and in no way a threat to the higher purpose. But,’ the colonel traced a line to the next node, which read: “2. Division”, ‘if we introduce prophecy in the form of a messiah-figure, the Order becomes divided, radicalised, and resentment ensues.’
Two major lines split out from the division node; one leading towards: “3a. Insurgency”, the other to: “3b. Disbelief”.
‘As you can see, by the third iteration we’re looking at the internal collapse of the Order.’
‘And chaos,’ added Caitlin’s father.
‘They’ve started arresting people like Alixia, just for helping me,’ said Josh.
Caitlin took his hand. ‘That’s not your fault.’
Josh turned to the colonel. ‘If you hadn’t gone into the maelstrom, you’d never have written the book. They wouldn’t have learned about the Djinn or Nemesis.’
‘This book,’ Caitlin’s father interrupted. ‘How did it get back into the continuum?’
Everyone looked at Caitlin.
‘It was found in Herculaneum in 11.738, but no one knows how it got there.’
Her father put a pin in the timeline at the appropriate point and scribbled a note next to it.
‘Who discovered it?’
‘An Antiquarian by the name of Johansson.’
Josh’s eyes narrowed. ‘Are you sure he wasn’t a Dreadnought?’
Caitlin looked confused. ‘Why?’
‘Johansson was an artificer, one of the team that disappeared when we closed the breach.’ He looked to the colonel for some kind of confirmation. ‘It’s too much of a coincidence. Do you remember him?’
The old man nodded. ‘He’s the one that made TikTok.’
78
The Book
[Herculaneum. Date: 11.738]
Johansson was exhausted. It had taken three weeks of hard graft to clear through the outer rooms and reach the inner chamber. Ash and rubble from the ruined palace above them had choked every passageway he’d tried to enter, making the schematic that Alcubierre had sold him worse than useless. The internal layout of the lower levels had been rearranged by the seismic activity from Vesuvius and left most of the old tunnels impassable or in a state of total collapse.
There was no doubt that the breach had caused the eruption. The gravitational shift that accompanied the opening of an aperture would have stressed the underlying mantle and initiated a pyroclastic surge, sealing Herculaneum and the book under hundreds of tonnes of rubble and ash.
It was the perfect time vault. No way to reach it before the event without dying in the process and no easy way to get into it afterwards. Sohguerin could be a complete pain-in-the-ass when she put her mind to it; a genius, but a pain nonetheless.
Johansson was working for a Spanish engineer called Rocque Joaquin de Alcubierre, who had been commissioned to excavate the tunnels by the King of Two Sicilies. They were extending a deep well that had been dug thirty years before, one that had unearthed a cache of Roman statues. The site had been abandoned when Pompeii proved easier to excavate, having only four metres of volcanic ash to dig through rather than Herculaneum’s twenty.
They were close now. The Villa of Papyri, as it would come to be known, was only a few metres away. Once owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, the villa had a vast library stretching over four levels and that according to later records was totally intact. Thousands of scrolls were trapped beneath the lava flow, but Johansson was only concerned with one book, a small journal that would make him rich — if his stubborn, bitch of a wife hadn’t buried it under twenty metres of rock.
It had taken them months to find each other in the maelstrom, or to be more accurate, for her to locate him. Sohguerin was always the self-sufficient one. Johansson was in a pretty bad way when she found him. Although he’d managed to avoid the monad hunting parties and find shelter in a stable cluster — a train journey between London and Edinburgh in 11.890 — the loss of his fingers affected him severely. Unable to use his hand to make anything useful, he’d spent most of his time drinking in the buffet car, a kind of drunken groundhog day, repeating the same nine-hour journey.
She broke him out of the loop and helped heal the hand with what was left in her med kit. Then they got to work on an escape plan.
Neither of them was looking for the colonel when they found him. The maelstrom had an unusual capacity for random coincidence. The old man was stuck, living the same twenty hours over and over again. He was obsessed with remembering everything, writing it all down in ‘the book’ — which he said was full of secrets, things he’d seen and subsequently forgotten.
Sohguerin tried everything, but nothing worked. Every time the twenty hours was up, they would have to hand him the book and get him to reread it — at least the first three chapters. Once he reached page fifty, he would usually begin to flick to the end or other random pages.
There were a few seconds as the loop reset when Johansson had the book to himself. It was full of illustrations and notes on the most incredible parts of the maelstrom. While he’d repeatedly been getting wasted on the Flying Scotsman, the old man had been travelling across thousands of different worlds.
Once, when Johansson tried to hide the book, the old man became so agitated and inconsolable that Sohguerin had to force him to give it back — as if the colonel was somehow missing it without knowing it existed.
They discovered that he had accumulated a vast collection of random objects, a scrapyard of a thousand years of discarded and forgotten machinery. For fun Johansson built him a clockwork automaton, a monkey with a timer in his chest — so they all could keep track of the loop. He added a few basic routines so that it would warn him when the time was nearly up and hand the book back after the reset. At
some point, the robot became possessed by the ghost of some low-level entity and quickly became the old man’s personal assistant.
As time passed, or rather didn’t, Johansson began to spend longer periods alone amongst the scrap. During meals, Sohguerin would complain that he was shirking his duties when it came to caring for the colonel, but he refused to tell her what he was doing. His scavenging had found most of the parts for a breacher, and its construction became his obsession. Weeks passed in twenty-hour segments until he stopped appearing for meals altogether.
Sohguerin came to find him on the last day. She was concerned that the old man, who would disappear for hours at a time, was losing what was left of his mind. She told Johansson how she’d seen the colonel tearing specific pages from his book, ranting about a ‘Nemesis’ and something called the ‘Djinn.’
Johansson tried to tell her about his escape plan, but she didn’t seem to care about leaving anymore. In fact, she seemed to have thrived since they’d been stranded. Her love of the spiritual and ethereal found the whole thing deeply interesting. More than once he’d caught her communing with the ‘ghosts’ — the non-corporeal remnants of previous residents — all of which he found a bit creepy.
He showed her how the breacher was fully functional and tried desperately to persuade her to leave, but she wouldn’t — not without the colonel, and Johansson had no intention of taking the crazy old dude back with them. He didn’t tell her, however, that he planned to steal the book, because he knew she wasn’t about to let him do that. When the loop reset and he tried to take it, they got into an argument which turned into a fight, and she fell through the open aperture. It took him another five loops to get the machine working again, by which time he’d lost any hope of following her.
Finally, after three weeks of excavation, he found her body still clutching the book, both encased in a cocoon of ash.
79
Exhibit
[British Museum, London. Date: 11.954]
‘So why can’t we just go back and take the book from Johansson?’
‘Too many unknowns. It would take an entire division of Copernicans a year to even work out the first tier of consequences, let alone the butterfly effect,’ whispered Caitlin.
‘And the skull doesn’t?’
She folded back the set of doors on the cabinet. ‘Dad thinks it was the catalyst. Without it, Dalton and his cronies would have been powerless to open the breach.’
‘Can’t imagine how they got hold of my head,’ the colonel said, rubbing his neck and staring at his skull as it sat on a velvet cushion.
Josh remembered the dark pit that he’d watched the colonel being pulled into and wondered if that had ended as badly as he imagined. The colonel would have no memory of it after the time loop reset, but somehow his skull had ended up in the continuum.
They were standing in the British Museum, in front of an exhibit called ‘Earliest Hominid’, which was a collection of ancient skeletons supposedly collected in the Sterkfontein caves, in the Gauteng province of South Africa, dating back over a million years.
‘How did they find it?’
‘One of the discoverers — John T. Robinson was an Antiquarian — picked up the skull and got the shock of his life; what he saw drove him mad,’ Caitlin said, putting on a pair of leather gloves.
Josh looked confused. ‘And it’s a million-years-old?’
‘According to the Antiquarians, yes — the Copernicans refuse to acknowledge it of course.’
‘Why?’
‘The maelstrom knows no limits. Therefore time is immaterial,’ intoned the colonel.
Caitlin stared at him for a moment, she was still having difficulty coming to terms with the fact that he was Daedalus. She carefully picked the skull out of the case and held it up in the light. ‘I don’t think you should touch it,’ she warned the colonel. ‘The last thing we need is a closed loop.’
The colonel nodded and went back through the aperture and into the Nautilus.
Caitlin placed the skull into a simple wooden box and took out a replacement.
She inspected the fake and placed it in the cabinet. ‘Don’t want them thinking it’s missing do we?’
‘But won’t Dalton notice?’
‘It won’t matter, and better his plan fails now. Hopefully, his followers will see the failure as a sign and forget about the whole thing.’
‘I doubt that,’ said Fey, stepping out of the shadows.
‘What an earth are you doing here?’ Caitlin said, closing the box quickly.
‘When Bentley told me who had stolen the skull. I simply followed it back to the most logical intercession — I’ve been waiting for you.’
‘We didn’t steal it, that was Dalton — at least the first time,’ said Josh, ‘we’re trying to stop him — like Darkling ask me to.’
Fey pulled out a pistol. ‘There’s a thirty-two-point-three per cent probability that this constitutes an Eschaton precursor. Keep your hands where I can see them.’
Caitlin raised her hands. ‘I don’t remember Scriptorians carrying weapons.’
‘Augurs have privileges,’ she said, smiling. ‘Especially ones assigned to eschaton-three-alpha.’
‘You’re an Augur?’ Josh said in amazement.
Fey nodded. ‘Darkling and I were assigned to you.’
‘So you know we’re trying to avoid an event,’ Caitlin pleaded.
She cocked the gun and held it up to Josh’s face.
‘What was eschaton-three-alpha again?’ Josh asked Caitlin flippantly, trying to buy them some time while he tried to think of a way out.
Fey waved the gun for them to move away from the cabinet. ‘Insurgency — which is what I’m arresting you for, under the Eschaton Confinement Act.’
Four more Augurs appeared around them, each one holding an antique gun.
80
Illness
The MRI scan had shown no sign of a tumour, but did reveal a network of small dark patches that were called ‘Amyloid Plaques’ — a sign of early-onset Alzheimers.
Fermi wasn’t listening as the doctor babbled on about BACE inhibitors and anti-amyloid drugs; he was too busy processing the death sentence. Alzheimer’s was a degenerative neurological disorder; his brain was slowly decaying as plaques stole his memory and the ability to control his body.
There was only one question that mattered.
‘How long?’
‘Two, maybe three years. If you stick to the medication maybe a little longer.’
The doctor seemed a little taken aback by Fermi’s reaction. They had known each other for years, and the man was genuinely upset by the diagnosis, but Fermi didn’t have time for sentimentality. His research had been his life for the last two years, and he was so close — now he had a deadline.
There was no one in his life to console him, no wife or children to hold his hand and cry at his bedside while he forgot their names. It would be a simple death, uncomplicated by emotion, but he needed to postpone it as long as possible — long enough to complete the job.
While he’d been hospitalised, Fermi had a lot of time to think. He’d been inspired by something that Lenin said just before the blackout — about needing more time. He was so focused on trying to move things into the future, so frustrated by the limitations of the technology, that it hadn’t occurred to him that he go back and improve the past.
The complexity of calculating the future was proving too much for the equipment, but historical data was a known set of parameters, at least the more recent periods. It would require significantly less processing to calculate a temporal trajectory into the past, and if he was successful, he could accelerate the technology exponentially — shift the digital revolution back thirty years, and by Moore’s law his current CPUs would be over thirty-thousand times more powerful.
That kind of computing power could model new breakthroughs in drug therapy — find a cure for his condition before he was even diagnosed.
81
&
nbsp; Founder
‘Bloody Fey. I should have known!’ Caitlin paced around her cell like a big cat trapped in a cage.
Josh sat on the bench in the cell next to hers, thick iron bars between them — which was not such a terrible thing at that precise moment. He’d experienced this kind of mood before, and it was safer to have a few inches of metal between them.
‘How could you know?’
‘Her abilities with timelines. I was so busy being annoyed with Dalton that I missed it.’
She grabbed hold of the bars with two hands and shook them.
‘But the Wyrrm — he took that one for the team.’ Josh put his hands over hers.
‘He was just doing his duty; trying to stop a perdurant, one of the precursors of an Eschaton cascade.’
‘You don’t know that for sure.’
Caitlin bit her lip. ‘They were watching the skull — tailing Dalton probably.’
‘Waiting for him to steal it?’
She nodded. ‘Waiting for someone to try.’
She sat back down on her bunk and put her head in her hands. ‘This was supposed to fix the problem. Now we’ve made it even worse! We changed the continuum.’
‘How?’
‘Think about it. Dalton’s not going to use the skull to open the breach, that’s never going to happen now. But he knows you’re the Nemesis and they’ve initiated some kind of Eschaton emergency plan. It couldn’t have gone much worse.’
Josh didn’t know what to say. He had no idea where the colonel and her parents were; they would be stuck in the maelstrom waiting for a signal — which was never going to come: Fey’s team had confiscated all of their equipment.
‘Can’t we just tell them what we know — what’s the worst that can happen?’
‘Well, they might redact us for starters. I don’t know about you, but I quite like my memory the way it is.’
The Infinity Engines Books 1-3 Page 62
