by Roger Ley
Doug sat looking from one to the other. “I need a comfort break,” he said.
“In a minute Doug,” said Abrahams. “I want you to set up a TD for me, here are the coordinates.” Abrahams handed him a note.
Doug began to tap the figures on the vscreen; he kept looking over at Riley as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. He stopped. “It’s a retroactive adjustment, we’re not allowed to do this,” he said, “who gave you permission?” he looked, from one to the other. “This will cause drastic changes; it’s far too risky.” He stood up, “I need to report this to my superiors.”
Riley walked over and placed a hand on his shoulder. Doug slowly sat back in his chair,
Riley leant down to whisper into his ear. “There’s nothing to worry about, you sit and relax, everything will be all right.” Doug sat unmoving, staring straight ahead, his eyes blank and unfocused.
“I’d love to know how you did that,” said Abrahams as he leaned over Doug and finished setting up the TD.
“It’s a neuro suppression field,” said Riley smiling and pointing to his temple. “It’s all about the implants.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
USA 2051
“You have the drone?” asked Abrahams.
Riley held up a transparent box and showed its dark occupant standing head down on one side. “Yes, I have it.”
“I assume you’ll both be insulated from the quantum matrix when you materialize.”
Riley nodded.
Abrahams had finished feeding in the coordinates. Doug sat motionless, blinking occasionally. “It’s the quiet ones you have to watch,” said Abrahams looking down at his underling. “I used to wonder if there was a CIA spy among us but I never suspected him. With hindsight, it’s obvious; he was always there when the team met up for a beer or one of us had a party. He was there, in the places they couldn’t easily watch us, with their bugs and drones.”
The two scientists paused, they turned to look at each other, and then shook hands firmly, both knew that this was “a moment.”
“Best of luck for the Future,” said Abrahams, smiling. Riley nodded, then walked towards the drone control room. Abrahams heard a brief, low conversation between him and Mary. A few moments later, there was a pop, as Riley disappeared into the time capsule. Abrahams turned to look at the vscreens.
Mary finished suiting up and Patrick helped make the final adjustments. She lay on the couch with her head raised. They held hands and looked at each other.
“I love you Mary,” he said. “I wish we’d had a family, brought up kids, retired, grown old, just the usual stuff, we would have been happy. Maybe we still will be.” Tears welled in his eyes. Mary nodded several times, her mouth was clamped shut, she couldn’t trust herself to speak. They’d said their goodbyes the previous night, and she didn’t want to prolong the agony. She reached for her visor, put in on and lay back, her tears hidden from Patrick by the visor’s reflective surface.
As Mary switched to drone mode, her perceptions changed, her vision became pixelated, still clear but much wider. She no longer had the forward focus of a hunter, now she had the panoramic view of the hunted. She felt her own limbs and body as a ghostly presence at Langley, but her main awareness was of her host’s six legs and two wings. Riley had taken it back upstream to 1997, somehow, he was facilitating the connection between host and pilot across fifty years of the Timestream. He released her in the Jardin des Tuileries, in Paris, where the SIS handler would meet his asset. She knew the direction he’d come from, so she landed on the trunk of a tree near the Orangery in the western corner of the park.
Ah, she thought, here he comes now. He would have covered his distinctive white hair with a hat, if he suspected the meet wasn’t safe. It was normal tradecraft. He looked healthy enough, athletic for his age, he didn’t walk like a man two weeks away from a massive heart attack. Mary flew to the top of his head, as he passed her, and carefully crawled down through his hair, stopping close to the scalp. She paused for a moment then triggered the targeting signal.
“Target acquired by temporal displacement equipment,” whispered the voice of her sprite.
“Goodbye Patrick,” she forced the words from the mouth of her Langley self and felt Patrick’s ghostly grip on her hand tighten.
“Packet arriving in three, two, one…..”
And they were gone.
Chapter Thirty-Three
String Memory 4403
Over a timeless period, Martin Riley became aware, not of his surroundings but of himself. Not of his physical body but of his mind, floating dimensionless and without disturbance from sensory inputs. It was dark, he was nowhere.
He had no way of measuring the passage of time, there was just the slow streaming of his thoughts and memories forming and coalescing. He was relaxed, safe.
A voice spoke to him. It was genderless, accent free, with a pleasant timbre.
“Hello Doctor Riley, are you comfortable?”
“Yes,” he said, although he had no sensation of lips or tongue or breath, “who are you?”
“I am a construct of String Memory; my purpose is to aid your restoration and awakening.”
“So, I’m in String Memory. I must be the copy from Langley.”
“That is correct. You are conscious and functioning, but you do not have a body or a world yet, you are incorporeal and amorphous. My task is to help you to make a new body and a new environment. We can start now if you wish, there are many possibilities.”
“I suppose it would be sensible to begin with something conventional.”
“Sound reasoning Doctor Riley, and you should know that you can alter your appearance later, when you are more experienced, if that is your wish. Which gender would you like to be? I can offer a broad spectrum.”
“I’ll stick with my previous orientation, one hundred percent male.”
“My records show eighty-two percent. I recommend you stay with this at first; you might find one hundred percent difficult to deal with. Please describe the new body you require; I have extensive files which I can show you if it will help.”
“I liked my last one, although now I think about it, I’d like straighter teeth, bigger calf muscles and nicer feet.”
“I will make a slight modification to your internal body image. What physical age would you prefer?”
“Oh thirty; everything was working well then.” He had the familiar sense of an anatomy enclosing him, he had limits.
“What next Doctor Riley?”
“Light, I’d like to be able to see.” He became aware of a diffuse radiance and himself standing naked in it. All around was grey and formless, like the outlook from the time capsule. He moved and stretched, enjoying the sensation of occupying his new body, learning its limits. He stared at his hands and flexed his fingers. “I didn’t expect it to be as real as this.” He tried walking and jumping.
“All sensory input to the brain is electrical or chemical Dr Riley. A human being experiences the inputs as external, but they are internal once they enter the nervous system. It is easy to mimic those signals when the ‘brain’ is a digital compilation, like yours.”
“Who was it said, ‘Our lives are a fabric of lies?’ No never mind, don’t look it up, let’s concentrate on the job in hand.”
“Please describe the world you wish to inhabit. Remember, as with your body, this will be a first attempt, we can change it later.”
“I’ve always wanted to live on a tropical island. Sandy beaches, blue seas, coconut palms, warm weather.”
He was standing under a palm tree, on a beach of white sand, with a turquoise sea to his left. Gentle waves broke a few meters out from the strand. He was relieved to be somewhere familiar.
“I suppose you’re going to ask me which eight gramophone records I would like to have with me,” he said and laughed. There was silence for several seconds.
“Ah, yes, I see Dr Riley, an entertainment from your past, most amusing.” He guessed, from the pause
, that the reference hadn’t been easy to find. “You can have as many gramophone records as you like, and a gramophone to play them on if that is what you wish.” An old-fashioned phonograph with a winding handle and a brass horn materialized, on a table in front of him, and then disappeared in a cloud of tiny 3d pixels.
Riley walked, enjoying the gritty feel of the wet sand on the soles of his feet and in between his toes. “Shorts,” he said, and there were shorts. “You’ve forgotten the birds,” and there were seagulls wheeling in the sky, parrots squawked in the trees.
“What shall I call you?” he asked.
“What would you like to call me?”
“I’ll call you Friday, I’d like you to be female and can you try to be just a little less precise in your speech pattern? Call me Martin. I need a house.”
“Okay Martin, tell me about your new house.”
“I’d like it to be Scandinavian style, wooden, with big windows, a veranda, and a log fire for rainy days. Site it over there, about twenty meters back from the sea.” The conversation continued as he and Friday constructed Riley’s new world.
Several days and many details later Riley asked Friday about the physical world.
“Tolland arranged for your insertions into String Memory. Would you like to see where you’re installed? It might give you a better perspective.”
Riley nodded, and he was standing in space far above the Earth, looking down on the outer rings, the debris from the Collision. The positions of the Metrotowers were marked but they were too small to see from this distance. Above the equator, and inside the rings, was a line of white spheres, stretching in a long curve around the planet. They were separate but perfectly aligned, and all rotated slowly in synchronization. Perspective diminished them as they disappeared behind the belly of the planet. He thought they looked wonderful. “I’ve seen these before, but they weren’t finished then.”
“This is a simulation Martin; the String still isn’t complete, but many of the spheres are in place, you have been installed in one of them. To give you an idea of scale, each is a kilometer in diameter. Eventually there will be fifty thousand of them.”
“The rotation is to even out the temperature, as the sun shines on them, I suppose. What’s inside them?”
“Fibers Martin, an uncountable number of interconnected quantum fibers.”
“Okay, I’ve seen enough for now. I’d like to meet up with my companions.”
“I’ll make the arrangements,” said Friday.
“What about Tolland and Farina?”
“You can visit them, as an incorporeal presence, by arrangement.”
The next day, Riley had made a camp fire and was standing in the shallows, trying to spear a fish that was avoiding his attentions. “Would you like me to make it slower Martin,” asked Friday. Before he could refuse her offer, he’d speared it.
He lifted it out of the water. “It has to wriggle and bleed a little Friday, it doesn’t even smell fishy.”
“Sorry Martin,” she said, “I’ll attend to the details. Ah, your companions are ready to meet you. How would you like to be dressed?”
“21st century smart casual, jeans, jacket, brogues.”
A doorway appeared ahead of him, a sharp edged rectangular hole cut in his reality. He looked through it into a pleasant park with trees, shrubs, tables and chairs, a bandstand, strollers, picnickers.
“By convention, Incorporeals appear in human form in this common meeting place. It’s not a law, just good manners.”
Riley was still holding his spear, he threw it aside.
The door into summer he thought, as he stepped through. Sitting at a table close by, were Mary, Patrick and Peter Abrahams. They turned towards him, smiling. “I don’t see any fluffy bunny rabbits Mary, how about you?”
She blushed, Riley had never seen her do it before, he felt close to her for the first time. He wanted to put his arms around her but suspected that Patrick might misunderstand his intentions. He sat with them.
“Somebody has to start,” he said. “I assume we were successful in our mission. I suppose it was a foregone conclusion. The Timestream has realigned itself, and all’s right with the world. What are you doing with yourself Peter?” he asked.
“I’m cycling around Australia, actually. I don’t expect the simulation extends beyond my personal horizon. It wouldn’t be worth the processing power to maintain a whole world when I’m its only occupant.”
Riley imagined Abrahams cycling slowly around the equator of his grey featureless world, the center of a colorful circular reality, about ten kilometers in diameter.
“What about you?” asked Abrahams.
“I live on a desert island,” said Riley. “It’s very peaceful, just what I need at the moment.” He turned to Mary and Patrick.
“We live on a mountain peak,” said Patrick. “We’ve changed one or two physical parameters in our world, the air is denser and gravity is weaker, so we can spend most of our time gliding and soaring on the thermals.”
“We have modified bodies with wings and tails,” said Mary. “We’re what the String calls ‘Mythicals.’ ”
“That makes my world seem very dull. I must try to be more imaginative,” said Riley. “Perhaps I’ll have a few volcanoes.”
“We’ve populated the plains below our mountain,” said Patrick. Mary nudged him as if he was giving too much away.
“You sound like gods, on Mount Olympus,” said Abrahams. Mary and Patrick smiled but didn’t expand further.
Later, back on his island, Riley had been pensive for several days. He had walked around the island and slept on the beach wherever he was exploring. There was no need for him to sleep, but he found it comforting to stick to old patterns as his sun rose, moved across the sky, and went down at the end of each day, he was used to a cyclical life.
One morning, he sat staring out to sea, feeling the cold dampness on his buttocks as water soaked through his shorts. The breeze ruffled his hair, but he couldn’t feel the sun on his back. He would speak to Friday about that.
He picked up a large dry leaf from above the water line. Carefully, with a piece of charcoal, he wrote a message on it, then rolled it up, slid it into an empty water bottle, twisted the cap shut, and threw it out to sea.
“My name is Martin Riley and I’m the only one here,” he shouted.
“Can I help you with something Martin?” asked Friday’s disembodied voice.
“Not really Friday, not right now.”
“You seem preoccupied Martin,” said Friday later, as Riley sat above the tide line, occasionally throwing pebbles into the sea.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about what I want to do now.”
“Have you come to any conclusions?”
He stood up, “I’d like to do something useful for the Commonwealth. Make an appointment for me to speak to Tolland please.”
Next day, Tolland appeared on the beach; he had coalesced from a cloud of pixels, dressed in his usual sober business suit. He looked around at the sky and sea, smiled, and ran a hand through his thick Celtic red hair.
“Hello Martin, I’m glad to see you again. How are you enjoying life as a Discorporeal?”
“I didn’t realize Corporeals could come in here, are you a projection?”
“You might think of me as a temporary copy, a ghost. I will share this experience with my original before I am deleted. How can I help?”
“Two things, first, I want a job. I need more than this, messing about living inside my own imagination. I’d like to do something meaningful in the real world.”
Tolland nodded, “And the second thing?”
“I want a copy of Estella. Made in 1996, just after we won the ‘mug punter’ bets at Ascot, before the boys were born. For a while after that, anything seemed possible. We sang our own song in those days, I want her here, to share this with me.” Riley spread his arms as he stood ankle deep in the wet sand.
The ghost froze momentarily, a
s it communicated with its original, on the home world below.
Epilogue
UK 2015
The writer sat at his usual table, in the lounge bar of the Angel hotel in Halesworth. He had retired to the small Suffolk market town, several years earlier, and was such a regular and undemanding customer, that the staff barely noticed him anymore. When they convened for their morning coffees, acquaintances knew better than to disturb him, sitting in his corner, his gaze directed inwardly, or scribbling in his notebook. A single cafetiere lasted him the whole morning.
Shoulders hunched, the stranger pushed sideways through the street door and into the warmth. It was cold outside, and he wore a hat and scarf. Pulling his hands from his coat pockets, he held them up to his mouth to blow life back into them, as he looked around the dim interior. Groups of chatting retirees, intent on their coffee Americanos and toasted teacakes, occupied the scattering of tables. Coke burned in the fireplace; the low, beamed ceiling was stained yellow from the smoky exhalations of an earlier, less health-conscious generation.
The writer sat alone at his table. The newcomer pulled an empty chair over to it and sat opposite him. He took off his hat and scarf and pushed them into his coat pockets. There was a pregnant pause before the older man looked up to see who had dared to disturb his muse. He peered steadily over his reading glasses with furrowed brow, a trick he had often used in earlier years to intimidate recalcitrant students. “Do I know you?” he asked evenly.
The intruder pulled a large black notebook from under his arm, and placed it on the table in front of him. This minor territorial claim an assurance that he would not be brow beaten. From a pocket, he withdrew a memory stick, and laid it on top of the notebook.
