Final Days

by Gary Gibson

  ‘Safe from what?’

  ‘I don’t know, Saul. I’m not really sure I even want to know.’

  ‘This Farad guy, do you know who he is?’

  ‘I met him about the same time I met Dan Rush, back at the Florida Array. He was another of Jeff ’s colleagues.’ She paused. ‘The thing that made me remember Maalouf just now is that he’s an encryption specialist. He’s well known in certain specialized technical fields. I couldn’t think at first why Jeff would need to hide something with military-grade locks on it, but then I remembered him talking about Maalouf and Newton and, with everything else going on, I wondered if maybe there was some connection with the files. It seemed strange he’d bring up Maalouf, of all people. And, even if there isn’t a connection, if there’s anyone that could break the encryption on those files, my guess is it would be Maalouf.’

  ‘And that’s everything you know? Are you absolutely sure there isn’t anything else you need to remember?’

  ‘Nothing, I swear.’

  Saul found it hard to hide his irritation. ‘Jesus, Olivia, military-grade encryption? What exactly is it you think Jeff’s got himself involved in?’

  ‘I already told you I don’t know,’ she said, her voice taking on a ragged edge once more. ‘I just want to know he’s safe.’

  Saul was surprised at how much her last words cut him. He’d thought he’d left his feelings for her far behind him, but it looked like he’d been wrong.

  He sighed and fell back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. ‘What makes you so sure this Maalouf guy could get inside those files?’

  ‘He’s got a fearsome reputation. He’s published a few articles, most of it pretty arcane stuff. If you want to build an encryption system, he’s the man you call up.’

  ‘Too arcane even for a dedicated systems specialist like yourself?’

  She laughed. ‘Even for me.’

  ‘Say I managed to get hold of him, how do we know we can trust him?’

  ‘Well, he did work with Jeff,’ she said tentatively, ‘and I had the definite sense they were friends – maybe even close friends. That must count for something.’

  ‘D’you think he might know where Jeff is?’

  ‘It’s possible. Maybe I should try and get in touch with Maalouf myself. I know I’ve asked too much of you already.’

  ‘No,’ he said, sitting up, ‘I don’t want you getting any more involved than you already are.’ He had a mental image of dark figures struggling by a moonlit shore, shots ringing out. ‘I can start by taking a look in the ASI’s personnel databases – see what I can find about him from there.’

  She let out a sigh that was comprised in equal parts of relief and worry. ‘Thank you, Saul, from the bottom of my heart. Really.’

  ‘There’s a lot more going on here than just one missing scientist,’ he said. ‘I assume you realize that by now.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘If nothing else, I can go to Newton and track Maalouf down in person – or at least try to find out where he might be.’

  And maybe he can tell me just what the hell is going on, he thought.

  Once she had signed off, Saul found himself reliving his memories of her body, the way she had whispered his name over and over as he moved inside her, all those many years ago. It had been hard sitting next to her the day before in the bar, wanting to reach out and touch her but keeping his distance nonetheless.

  He sighed and pulled himself off the bed, striding across the darkened room. Sleep clearly wasn’t coming any time soon. He dropped himself into an armchair by the window and linked into the ASI’s security databases, and from there to its personnel files.

  He paused before bringing up Farad Maalouf ’s data. What he was doing now had gone beyond just helping a friend, and he knew as well as Olivia that he’d be leaving a data trail that might trigger an alert, should someone else have already linked Maalouf’s ASI files to Jeff’s. But his anger at the way Donohue had treated him drove him on, regardless.

  What little information he found on Farad Maalouf proved to be out of date. The most recent records were more than a year old, at which point Maalouf had presumably ceased to be employed by the ASI. Then Saul found something that puzzled him. He should have been able to find information on where Maalouf had gone after departing the ASI, but instead there was nothing. It was as if he’d simply vanished for the better part of a year.

  Saul felt a prickling sensation throughout his body when he found the situation was much the same with Jeff Cairn’s own personnel records. The curious gaps in the data trail for both men might be explained by their working off-world but, if so, there was no official record showing their time of departure. And hadn’t Olivia told him that Jeff had returned from his work only a few days ago? Again, there was no evidence, either way, that he had passed through the Array.

  Of course, Olivia had pointed out that Jeff was working on some secret project for the ASI, therefore it was entirely conceivable it had been secret enough for the security services to want to conceal both men’s movements.

  He next checked Dan Rush’s files, and felt little surprise when it turned out to be the same story all over again. He subsequently ran a side-by-side comparison, and found they had all ceased to be in the official employ of the ASI on the exact same date, two years previously.

  He lastly checked Mitchell’s records. His death was recorded as having taken place a month earlier, but wen Saul tried to pull up the post-mortem report, he quickly discovered even his own security clearance wasn’t high enough to let him see it.

  He woke several hours later, still sprawled in the armchair, to find another call alert waiting for him.

  ‘Saul,’ Olivia sounded breathless, when he returned her call, ‘have you seen the news?’

  Saul pulled his rumpled form upright, the muscles in the back of his neck protesting at the awkward angle they’d been forced into for much of the night. It was still dark outside.

  He glanced at the wall-mounted TriView at the other end of the room. ‘Why?’ he mumbled.

  ‘Just turn it on, Saul. Turn it on right now. Then get back to me.’

  He disconnected and watched the news, while he waited for the room to make him some coffee. By the time it was ready, the first glimmer of dawn had started to push its way above the mountains.

  Everything else in the news – even the border incidents down Mexical way – had been pushed to one side by the appearance of what some people described as an artificial island, and a few others were even calling an alien invasion.

  Endless aerial shots paraded across the screen, one after the other, of a vast flower-like growth rising out of the Pacific Ocean near the Mariana Islands. There were reports of loud booms being heard and seismic activity within the vicinity, which some claimed were both connected to the rash of earthquakes that had already claimed thousands of lives throughout the Asian Pacific region in just the last few days. Saul struggled to take any of it seriously, deciding it was too much like some overwrought science-fiction drama to be remotely believable.

  He pulled up other news feeds, expecting to find nothing but the usual sober mix about politicians and murder hunts. Instead he saw those very same politicians being forced to admit they had no idea what was happening out in the Pacific.

  It dawned on him gradually that what he was seeing was real – and now, it seemed, there were more of them pushing up from the deep rock-bed of the ocean floor, scattered at distances from the first growth of up to a few thousand kilometres.

  Badly shaken, Saul kept a news feed running as his car pulled back out on to the road an hour later, heading south-west. A tsunami had just hit the south-west coast of Japan, and news of further quakes was coming in from other parts of the world. Two talking heads argued over whether or not those things were powering their massive growth with thermal energy drawn from the Earth’s deep crust, which just might explain the unprecedented build-up in seismic activity. By the time the interview ended, the two of t
hem were nearly coming to blows.

  He switched to another feed, and listened to a Harvard biotechnology specialist suggesting that the booming sounds were the result of that same furious rate of growth. At the rate the first ‘growth’ was expanding, it would reach more than a kilometre in hight within a few days.

  Saul shut down the feed, his skin coated in a cold sweat, and thought of weeds infesting a garden. He leaned back, the seat adjusting to his new position, and watched the mountains slide past under a dawn sky, as the hire car sped him towards a regional hopper port.

  Something above and beyond the sheer preposterousness of that thing growing in the Pacific niggled at him, until he realized, with a cold clenching in his gut, that it wasn’t located so very far from the shores of Taiwan.

  SEVENTEEN

  Arcorex Facility, Omaha, 4 February 2235

  The Arcorex facility was located in a business park just outside the Omaha city limits, and consisted of half a dozen three- and four-storey buildings gathered around manicured lawns and picnic areas, their pale walls now gleaming dully in the moonlight.

  ‘Their tags claim they’re a toy manufacturer,’ muttered Mitchell, frowning, as he peered through the forward windscreen. They were parked on the opposite side of the road, only a short distance from the main gate.

  Jeff shook his head. ‘Trust me when I say they aren’t.’ He removed the fake contacts Mitchell had given him, the corporate logos floating above the buildings vanishing from sight for a few moments while he swapped them for his own. He would need to have access to his own Ubiquitous Profile if he was going to have any chance at all of getting past building security.

  ‘You ready?’ asked Mitchell, as Jeff blinked his contacts into place.

  Jeff shrugged and gave him a look that said ready as I’ll ever be.

  Mitchell touched the dashboard, which lit up beneath his fingers, and the van started to move back out on to the road. They drove straight on past the Arcorex lot before turning off into a car park adjacent to it.

  Jeff stared out at his old workplace as they came to a halt once more. ‘I’m still struggling to get my head around everything you’ve told me,’ he said, ‘but I guess you know that.’

  ‘I do.’ Mitchell nodded towards Arcorex. ‘By the way, I didn’t get a chance to thank you for helping me.’

  ‘For what – listening to your insane plan? Remind me again why you’re so sure it’s even going to work.’

  ‘It already did work, or I wouldn’t be sitting here with you right now. And you’re the one who got me out of there.’

  Jeff gave a laugh, but it came out half-strangled. ‘You mean will get you out of there.’

  &uoI swear, it’s going to be fine.’ Mitchell gave him a look that was undoubtedly meant to be reassuring, then pushed the van’s door open and jumped down. ‘We’ll drop him off at the motel, and he’ll make his own way to the Moon,’ he said, looking back up at Jeff. ‘And then we—’

  ‘Stop.’ Jeff put out a hand. Two Mitchells? It was almost more than his mind could deal with. ‘No more. I’m doing it.’ His skin felt slick with sweat, despite the cool February air.

  ‘Okay.’ Mitchell stepped back and glanced around. ‘Time to find a new ride out of here. Maybe that one.’ He gestured towards a four-door sedan quietly grazing on some bales of biomass towards the far end of the car park.

  ‘Good luck,’ said Jeff.

  Mitchell silently nodded, then slammed the passenger door shut. Shuffling sideways into the driver’s seat, Jeff took manual control, guiding the van back out of the car park. He glanced in the rear-view mirror, to see Mitchell making his way over to the sedan.

  Jeff parked alongside the gates, just next to the short driveway leading up to Arcorex’s main entrance. He got out and walked the rest of the way, trying not to think about the gasoline canisters Mitchell had wired up in the back of the van. Floating in the air before him, a message appeared as he approached the entrance, warning him to comply at all times or risk facing unspecified countermeasures. His contacts chose the same moment to let him know he was being remotely scanned. Jeff tried hard to relax, to avoid looking as scared as he felt, but in truth he was rigid with fear.

  Another message appeared, telling him he was clear to go forward. He felt his shoulders sag with relief, and he walked on at a brisker pace. He really hadn’t believed until that moment that he would still be listed as an active member of staff.

  Just then he saw a beam of light flicker between two buildings as Arcorex’s armed security made their regular patrol. He wondered if anyone from the neighbouring businesses had ever paused to wonder just why a toy manufacturer needed countermeasure warnings and guards armed with Cobras.

  He thrust his hands deep in his pockets and pushed on through the entrance. At least it was the kind of operation where people often put in very irregular hours, which meant being here so late at night did not, in itself, imply suspicious activity.

  Jeff had spent much of the last four days helping Mitchell prepare his elaborate plan. Whatever time hadn’t been spent sleeping or hiding in the back of whichever van, car or truck they’d stolen that day had been spent driving around Omaha, trying to locate supplies and looking for what Mitchell called the ‘right’ motel.

  ‘That’s it, right there,’ Mitchell had gestured through the windscreen towards a nondescript two-storey building set back on the other side of a wide lawn.

  ‘You’re sure that’s where we took you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Mitchell nodded, still staring out at the motel. After a moment, his shoulders lifted and he let out a heavy sigh. ‘That’s the place, all right. I remember it distinctly.’

  ‘Has it occurred to you,’ asked Jeff, ‘that you’re caught up in a temporal loop?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Mitchell had asked, as he guided them to a stop.

  ‘We’re about to help the other you escape from Arcorex, so he can make his way to the Moon, where he’ll get caught. Except – if I’ve got this right – he’ll escape, and wind up putting himself in cryogenic suspension, until a team from Tau Ceti arrives through a wormhole link sometime in the near-future. Yes?’

  Mitchell had nodded. ‘Right so far.’

  ‘That team brought him – and by him, I mean you – back through the gates, back through time to the present, and now there’s two of you. And now you’re trying to make sure the Mitch I knew from Site 17 makes it to the Moon, so he can escape to that same cryogenics lab and become you. It’s just . . . mind-boggling.’

  Mitchell nodded, his expression distracted, as he walked around to the rear of the van. He had opened it and lifted out a couple of shopping bags full of clothes that had been stowed in next to the cans of gasoline they’d purchased at such exorbitant cost.

  ‘Shouldn’t you book the room first?’ Jeff had enquired.

  ‘Did it right there, while you were talking,’ Mitchell replied, slamming the doors shut again.

  The motel was self-service, and had therefore scanned their UPs before allowing them access to the vestibule. Directions appeared in the air; they followed them up a stairwell and along a cramped corridor. The door of the room Mitchell had booked swung open at their approach.

  A TriView opposite the single tiny bed came alive as they entered. It was tuned to a news feed revealing how more growths had been detected, in the Antarctic and North Atlantic respectively, a long, long way from where the first of their kind had appeared.

  They two men had glanced at each other wordlessly, then Jeff fell into a chair to watch the rest of the report, while Mitchell ripped open several vacuum-wrapped packs of freshly fabbed clothing, before dumping them on top of a cheap dresser.

  ‘I already kept an eye on the news while you were sleeping on the way here,’ Mitchell had explained, after glancing briefly up at the screen. ‘There’ve been a lot more bad quakes occurring in the Asian Pacific.’

  ‘Are those growths the reason?’ asked Jeff.

  ‘Not exactly,’ Mitchell repl
ied. ‘More of a side-effect.’

  ‘Side-effect of what, exactly?’

  ‘They need a lot of power to be able to grow the way they are. What they can’t get from the sun, they get by tapping into geothermal energy in the very deep crust.’

  Jeff had frowned at that. ‘Are they really capable of digging that deep? They look just like big flowers. Terrifying, alien, monstrously huge flowers, but still . . .’

  Mitchell had smiled thinly. ‘You really don’t want to know how much they’re capable of.’

  After that, they had left the motel and headed for an autocafé, where Mitchell told him more of what had happened to him following his return from Site 17.

  ‘No,’ Mitchell had concurred, shaking his head. ‘I can barely remember anything from those first couple of hours after you pulled me out of the pit chamber. The first thing I can remember clearly is being taken off heavy sedation, days later.’

  ‘You said they kept you under sedation at Arcorex, too?’

  Mitchell had nodded. ‘After that, they kept me deliberately unconscious a lot of the time. I have vague recollections of being prodded by lots of people in biohazard suits.’

  ‘They were worried you might be carrying something, right?’

  ‘I suppose. Some kind of future-tech plague, or whatever they thought I might be carrying inside me.’

  ‘And you say you woke up with all this . . . this alien information in your head?’

  Mitchell nodded. ‘What you have to understand is, those pits were helping me and Vogel, and not killing us. They actually remade us: no more diseases or ill-health. I might even live for ever. And I learned so much from them . . .’ His voice grew distant for a moment. ‘It’s hard to even know where to start.’

  Jeff’s coffee had rested untouched and forgotten in his hands as he listened.

  ‘The Founders weren’t a single race,’ Mitchell had explained. ‘There were many of them, machine as well as biological intelligences, and a kind of hybrid of the two that’s difficult to explain.’ He paused and cracked a smile. ‘Jesus, I could tell you about things that haven’t happened yet, that won’t happen until our own sun’s cold and dark and black.’