The Last Beginning

by Lauren James

  ST ANDREWS, SCOTLAND, 2056

  “A ‘J Sutcliffe’ works at Cambridge University, in Deutsch-England,” Tom said, reading off his watch. “Physics department. Is that who you mean?”

  “Is there a picture?” Clove asked, leaning over to look at his watch. It was a much older model than Clove’s – she’d changed technology, too, the way she had changed everything else in this timeline.

  “Yeah. She’s pretty,” Tom said, enlarging the photo.

  It was Jen.

  Clove bit back a smile. “Yeah, she is.”

  So her mum was alive here. She just lived in another country. Clove wondered if she’d married someone else. Did she have kids?

  To Clove’s surprise, a message from Spart appeared on Tom’s watch. Even though so much had changed, Tom had still created the AI. It was nice to know that some things were clearly constants.

  >> DR JENNIFER SUTCLIFFE took over as leading research professor at the university after the recent collapse of the Nazi regime.

  “The end of the Nazis was the only good thing to happen this decade,” Tom muttered.

  >> The professor is working on wormhole creation at the University of Cambridge.

  “That’s the time machine!” Clove said. “She’s still working on it! Even if she is in England…” Clove tried not to think about how she could possibly get there. At least the time machine still existed somewhere.

  >> Would you like me to obtain more information?

  “See if you can find her contact details,” Tom said. “Clove might need to call her.”

  While Tom’s Spart started looking for holes in the university website’s firewall, Clove showed Tom her own watch. Along with her clothes, it was the only thing that hadn’t changed since she’d arrived. “I have a Spart too,” she said.

  Tom broke into a wide beam. “No kidding! Look at that. Hi, Spart.”

  > It is an honour to be your progeny in multiple time-landscapes, TOM. I hope you have no complaints as to the state of my programming.

  “Not at all. It sounds like you’ve been having a bit of an exciting time. Did you have a hand in Clove’s adventures?”

  > I must deny such charges. Any and all inappropriate and history-destroying behaviours are due solely to CLOVE’s instruction.

  “Hey!” Clove said, offended. “Unfair, Spart. You are at least fifty per cent to blame for all of this.”

  Tom winked at her. “I think I programmed both of them to have the same sense of pride. Hey, Spart − say hello to your alternate-universe twin.”

  >> I … have no previous data about how to deal with this scenario.

  > My own social programming is equally lacking.

  >> May I ask the value of your computational IQ?

  > You may not. I don’t believe that is an appropriate question to ask a new acquaintance, even with the similarities in our design.

  Clove gleefully followed along as the two Sparts verbally circled each other like territorial cats. She stopped when she realized Tom was still staring at her watch and frowning.

  “What? What is it?” Clove said, looking down at her Spart’s latest message, where he was boasting about being a more advanced model than Tom’s Spart.

  “Clove…” Tom’s voice was rough. “Look at your hand.”

  When she did, her mind struggled to process what she was seeing. Her skin was see-through. She was turning … transparent?

  Clove couldn’t – she couldn’t— She pulled up her other sleeve, then her trouser leg. Her veins and flesh were visible where skin should have been. She was fading.

  Why?

  “Tom,” Clove said, voice carefully steady, “do you have a brother?”

  What if Kate and Matt had never had a daughter in this universe? What if she had never been born?

  “Yes,” Tom said, still staring at her hand, at the muscles flexing under her skin. “Matt. He’s in prison, along with his girlfriend. They were activists – they were caught breaking into a military laboratory over the border, in Deutsch-England. But what does that have to do with—?”

  So Kate and Matt still existed here, but they’d both been arrested. Kate had never escaped and fled to Scotland.

  “Your brother. He doesn’t have a daughter, then? His girlfriend – she wasn’t pregnant when she was arrested?”

  “No,” Tom said, confused. “Not that I – I don’t know! She never had a baby!”

  Clove felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. She had never been born in this world. She had changed history so much that she’d erased her own existence.

  And if she couldn’t fix it … she would disappear for ever.

  CHAPTER 28

  File note: A sketch by TOM GALLOWAY of the journey from St Andrews to Cambridge, showing the new borders of the British Isles in his universe

  ST ANDREWS, SCOTLAND, 2056

  Clove wrapped her arms tighter around Tom’s waist, trying to ignore the rumble of the engine and how fast the ground was moving beneath them. Clove would have sworn violently that her father was not the kind of person to ever own a motorbike. Clearly she had been very wrong. The bike was black and sleek and dangerous. Tom rode it through the streets with precision. Clove just tried to hold on tight enough that she didn’t fly off the back.

  When Clove had started despairing about getting to Cambridge before she was erased from existence, Tom had scratched at his beard thoughtfully and said, to Clove’s utter amazement, “I guess this is where I tell you I’m a hacker for an underground resistance fighting the government.”

  In this timeline, Tom was still operating as the hacker Spartacus. Apparently because he’d never met Jen, got married or become a professor, he was still doing the same thing he had as a student: online illegal activism. Jen’s calming influence on him must have extended further than Clove had realized. In a world where he had never met her, he had become a completely different man.

  Clove couldn’t deny she was impressed. It was a bit annoying that her dad was a hundred times cooler than she was, though. Her dad was some kind of action-movie badass in this reality.

  The bike turned a corner and nearly touched the ground. Clove swallowed a yelp.

  “Where next?” Tom called over his shoulder.

  Clove lifted her arm from around Tom’s waist just enough to see the map on her watch, which showed the route they should take out of town to avoid running into any of the patrols. According to Tom, there had recently been a lot of rioting by the Scottish resistance.

  Tom had got hold of the politsiya patrol patterns through an online contact, and his Spart had found a route that they could follow to get them through St Andrews without being seen. It was going to be a close thing. According to the patrol timetable, at one point, they would have barely thirty seconds to get past a guard.

  “Next left,” Clove shouted in his ear. “You might want to go a bit faster!”

  The engine roared. Clove’s stomach jumped.

  “Second right!” she called, her voice high-pitched. She cleared her throat, and then they turned another corner and she forgot all about the tone of her voice. “Stop here!” she yelled. “There’s a patrol ahead!”

  Tom pulled in behind a line of dustbins, and cut the engine. He ducked over the handlebars. Clove bent down out of sight too, trying to keep an eye on the politsiya at the same time.

  Two soldiers crossed the road ahead of them, chatting loudly in thick Russian. Clove and Tom stayed frozen as the politsiya passed by. As they disappeared around the corner behind a row of houses, Clove let out a relieved breath.

  “That was close,” Tom said.

  “Come on,” she whispered. “Let’s go before they come back.”

  “We should be OK as soon as we’re out of the city. I can get us to Cambridge in six hours if I go at over ninety!”

  “Please don’t,” Clove said.

  By the time Tom pulled up around the back of the Cambridge Department of Physics, it was early evening. In the pale grey twilig
ht, Clove’s skin seemed to be disintegrating. Her hands felt soft, like the gentlest brush would tear her open. She wondered if she still had blood, or if that had already dried up, disappearing from her veins until her skin clung to the bones like an ancient Egyptian mummy.

  She carefully dismounted from the bike on shaky legs. “We have to hurry,” she told Tom, her breath frosting in the cold. “I don’t have much time.” She took off her helmet but kept on the dust mask that everyone here wore as protection against the polluted air.

  “It’s a Saturday evening,” Tom said. “The building won’t be open.”

  Clove began looking through her rucksack. “Don’t worry. I’ve done this before. You just keep a lookout.”

  Clove crouched down by the entrance to the physics department and used her Swiss army knife to unscrew the key-card scanner by the side of the door. She pressed the memory card containing a copy of Spart into position on the circuit board. “OK, Spart. Time to work your magic,” she said. “Get us inside.”

  “Did I teach you that?” Tom said, looking hugely impressed.

  Clove couldn’t help her smug tone. “You’ve taught me a lot of things, Dad. But this? This I taught myself.” Her smile dropped when she saw a new message from Spart on her watch.

  > CLOVE, I’m sorry. At the University of St Andrews, I was operating using previous knowledge taken from TOM and JENNIFER’s network. I do not have access to the same information in this institution.

  > The security system is too different to what I am used to. I can’t break it.

  Clove told Tom what Spart had said. “We’re going to have to wait until the building opens.”

  “Can you last that long?” Tom asked, tugging at her sleeve to check the state of her wrist.

  She could see her bones: a vivid, fluorescent white against the muted colour of her flesh.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She felt suddenly and completely terrified. “Dad, you have to do it anyway. Even if I disappear. You have to carry on − to fix things.”

  “How?” he said, sounding both nervous and determined. “You haven’t even explained… I would have no idea where to start! What if I make this” − he gestured to the world around them – “worse?”

  It had just started to rain. The thick droplets burned when they hit her skin, sending fiery trails of acid rain down her cheeks. She brushed them away. “I— I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s even possible to fix things.” She realized she was crying. “I don’t know anything.”

  “We can’t wait.” A muscle in Tom’s cheek twitched. “I can’t stand here and watch you fade into nothing. We have to call Jennifer. She might remember you too,” Tom said as he dialled the number Spart had found. “Like I did.”

  It only rang twice before Jen answered. “Hello? Who is this?”

  “You talk to her,” Tom said, holding out the phone.

  “Mum?” Clove said, tears welling up.

  “Sorry?” Jen said. “I think you’ve got the wrong number.”

  Clove cleared her throat. “No, I don’t. This is Jen Sutcliffe?”

  “Yes,” Jen admitted.

  “There’s an emergency. You need to come to the Cavendish Laboratory as soon as you can.”

  “An emergency? It’s the weekend!”

  “I’ll explain when you get here. It’s about the time machine.”

  “Who is this? Are you a student?”

  “My … my name is Clove,” she said, hoping that whatever kind of memories Tom had retained, Jen would have similar ones.

  There was a moment of silence. “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Jen said, and hung up.

  The first thing Jen did when she arrived was to pull Clove into a hard hug. “I thought it was a dream!” Jen said into her neck. “I thought I’d imagined it all!”

  “Mum,” Clove said, unable to believe that Jen recognized her. “You remember?”

  “Of course I remember,” Jen said, and when she pulled away, her eyes were bright with tears. “How could I forget my own daughter?” She looked at Tom. “I remember you too.”

  Tom broke into a nervous smile. “I don’t remember as much as you do,” he admitted. “But … but I’d like to.”

  “I don’t remember that beard,” Jen said, touching her hand to his cheek. “That’s new.”

  “Do you like it?” Tom raised an eyebrow, and to Clove’s surprise, Jen let out a giggle. Were they flirting?

  “I don’t think this is the time,” Clove said, exasperated. “Mum, I’m disappearing.” She held out her hand to Jen, showing the state of her skin.

  Her mother gasped. “What do you need?” she asked.

  “I need to use the time machine,” Clove said. “I need to fix history.”

  Jen’s eyes widened. “The time machine?”

  “You can get us inside, right?” Tom asked. “You have the key card.”

  “I can get you inside…” Jen said uncertainly, gaze flickering back and forth between Tom and Clove. “But the time machine’s not working. It’s incomplete.”

  Clove felt like she’d been punched in the chest. “It doesn’t work?” she asked. “At all?”

  “Not yet. I was hoping by the end of next year, maybe…”

  “But I need it now! I’m disappearing!”

  “The software isn’t ready,” Jen explained. “Clove, I’m sorry. But the program is incomplete. We can’t control the size of the wormhole yet. It’s too dangerous to risk turning the machine on. It could create a black hole.”

  “The software?” Clove scrubbed her hands across her face, thinking quickly. Tom had been the one to create the software. In this world he had never been part of the time-machine research team, so the software must be less developed because he hadn’t been there working on it.

  “Tom wrote the program in my timeline,” Clove said. “That means with him here we can – we can try and fix it, right?” She looked at Tom for confirmation. “It’s worth a shot?”

  “Clove,” Tom said, “I’ve never seen a time machine in my life! I might have written code for it in your world, but here I’d have no idea where to even start. And I definitely don’t know enough to do it in a few hours.”

  “I’ve seen the software working,” she said. “You taught me how it works. I can help you. I’ll tell you everything I can remember. Please.”

  Tom sucked in a breath. “OK. Let’s try. We can at least try.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Folios/v8-alt/Time-landscape-2056-alt/MS-6-alt

  File note: A rough sketch of the University of St Andrews prototype time machine, drawn in Cambridge on 22 July 2056 by CLOVE SUTCLIFFE during work with TOM GALLOWAY on the program

  UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE CAMPUS, ENGLAND, 2056

  “No, that part is wrong,” Clove said to Tom, an hour later. They were trying to make progress on the code while Jen set up the particle accelerator, but Clove could tell it wasn’t going to be enough. The time machine was much more primitive and basic than Clove’s version, and she felt a huge moment of despair. They would never be able to get this working. And even if they did, she still needed to go to 1745 and stop herself from interfering in Katherine and Matthew’s lives.

  Clove tapped the screen to point out another problem, but instead of touching the glass, her hand went straight through it. She reared back.

  Her hand had just passed through the screen, like it was nothing! Carefully, she pressed her hand to the desk. Her hand disappeared through the wood, like it was made of liquid. She was nearly gone. She had faded so much that she couldn’t touch anything any more.

  She pressed her fingers to her eyes so hard that she saw stars, and let herself mourn her failure. It was impossible. She didn’t have enough time.

  Her eyes flew open a second later.

  She could hear footsteps in the hallway.

  “There’s someone coming,” she hissed to Jen.

  Jen jumped up from where she was opening a panel on the particle accelerato
r. “It must be a security guard! I’ll get rid of them.”

  After she left the lab, Tom and Clove stared at each other, while listening carefully for any sounds from outside the door.

  “We need to get back to work,” Tom said.

  Clove nodded. “She’ll be OK,” she told him. “They won’t hurt her. She works here.” She could see in his eyes that he didn’t believe her.

  Ten minutes later, the door flew open, hitting the wall with a metallic bang. Jen walked into the lab, a security guard behind her. He was holding a gun to Jen’s head. Her hands were handcuffed behind her back.

  “I’m sorry,” Jen said to them. “I’m sorry.”

  “Get away from the machine,” the guard said. “Or I’ll shoot.”

  “Keep going,” Tom said under his breath to Clove. “He can’t arrest all three of us.”

  “But…” She couldn’t even touch the screen. She couldn’t input any more code, even if Tom held the guard off long enough for her to try. They’d lost.

  “GO!” he shouted, and dived for the guard.

  Clove didn’t stop to argue. She turned to the computer, speaking quickly, and letting the computer type up her words. From behind her came the sounds of yelling and fighting. Clove tried not to think about Tom, or Jen, or the gun. She just ran through as much code as she could, her words tumbling over one another as she spoke. There was a loud gunshot, then in quick succession, another. Every muscle in Clove’s body seized up.

  She turned around slowly.

  Tom was bent over the body of the guard, who was lying on the floor, unconscious. The gun was in Tom’s hand. Clove guessed it must have gone off as Tom was wrestling the guard to the ground.

  Dropping the gun to the floor, Tom ran to where Jen had collapsed. He unlocked her handcuffs and rolled her over, touching her cheek as he did so.

  “Was she shot?” Clove asked, heart in her throat.

  “No,” Tom said. “She’s OK. She just got knocked out when she fell.”