by Alex Scarrow
‘I have a question for you.’ Rashim lifted his head and looked at them all. ‘Any of you heard of the Fermi Paradox?’
Maddy did, or thought she did. ‘Isn’t that the puzzle to do with why we haven’t yet found any alien civilizations out there in the universe?’
He nodded. ‘A mathematician called Fermi calculated the odds of there being other alien life forms out there in the big wide galaxy. He took into account all the usual variables: the number of stars at the right point in their life cycles, the average number of likely planets per star, the probability of any of those planets existing within the “Goldilocks Zone” around the star, the likelihood of a planet having liquid water… all those important variables.
‘Anyway, while the odds were stacked against any one solar system containing intelligent life, given that there are literally trillions of stars, his maths delivered an answer that there must be hundreds of thousands of alien civilizations out there, and tens of thousands of civilizations advanced enough in technology to be putting out radio waves, intentionally or not.
‘So the point is,’ continued Rashim, ‘when we started looking into space for radio signals, we should have stumbled across them almost immediately. According to Fermi’s maths, we should have been swimming in alien radio signals.’
‘But instead we never found anything,’ said Maddy.
‘Right. And that’s the Fermi Paradox. Why isn’t every frequency full of alien signals?’ He sighed. ‘Because we’re alone. And why are we alone?’ He smiled. He wasn’t expecting them to answer. ‘Well… in my time we figured that out for ourselves. Within a century of discovering radio waves, mankind managed to exhaust the raw materials of the planet. The raw materials, the free energy source that every emerging technological civilization gets as a gift from its historical past — fossil fuels. It’s that package of free energy that we should have used carefully while we took our time to discover and harness quantum energy. Humankind never got a chance to take anything more than a few baby steps into space. We never got the time to mature, to reach out into space, for other worlds. Hydrocarbons. Fossil fuels. Oil. We used it all up far too quickly. Too many people wanting too many things. We used it up,’ he said, sighing, ‘and then, as it began to run out, we turned on each other.’
‘The Oil Wars?’ said Liam. He had heard another traveller from Rashim’s time mention them. A man called Locke.
‘Yes. Wars between India and China. Japan and Korea. The first of those was in the 2040s. Russia and the European Bloc, there was a short war between those. And, of course, what we should have been doing is trying to fix another bigger problem. The world itself dying: warming up, rising tides, poisoned blooms of algae killing the seas.’
Rashim fell silent for a moment. ‘Anyway, that’s the answer to the Fermi Paradox; most — if not all — civilizations either destroy themselves or mine themselves dry long before they ever spread out to other planets and are able to mine, harvest them for resources. Once you’ve exhausted your home planet… it’s all over for you. Either you become extinct, or you eventually end up being cavemen once more.’
‘It’s a one-shot deal?’ said Maddy.
He nodded. ‘And perhaps every civilization makes the same mistake. Spends what it has, thinking it will never run out. Then, all of a sudden, it does.’
‘Wonderful,’ sighed Maddy.
‘But on Earth we didn’t just run out. We decided to destroy ourselves in style.’ Rashim snorted. ‘It was some kind of a genetically engineered virus… pretty much wiped us all out in the space of a few weeks. We made a nice tidy job of pretty much erasing ourselves from history.’
‘Shadd-yah,’ whispered Sal after a while. ‘This is depressing! You’re great fun to hang out with, you know that, don’t you?’
He shrugged. ‘You did ask what the future’s going to be like.’
‘I didn’t,’ she replied. ‘It was Liam who asked.’
‘Aye, and now I wish I bleedin’ well hadn’t.’
Chapter 13
12 September 2001, Washington DC
Cooper was up and at work despite the time. The Department was as much his home as the single-bed studio apartment he kept in Queens Chapel, DC. Thirty-nine, with no family, no partner, no children, not even a pet, one might say this twilight office with empty desks, a watercooler that hadn’t been switched on in years and a fading poster of Jane Fonda was his life.
Custodian of secrets so secret even Presidents aren’t privy to them. That’s me.
Perhaps not the world’s most exciting job. But an important one nonetheless.
Last night he’d stayed here, slept in the cot he kept in his personal office.
His PC was on and he was streaming MSNBC, watching it as his coffee and breakfast bagel cooled enough to have without burning the roof of his mouth. It was quite early in the morning; outside in the world, the sky was still dark. On the monitor he watched a news camera pan across rescue workers picking through the smouldering rubble of the World Trade Center. Brilliantly stark floodlights illuminated the enormous mound of rubble and twisted spars of metal. Dots of neon-orange light-reflective jackets decorated the mounds of dust and concrete; dozens of emergency workers picked through the remains of the towers in the vain hope of finding survivors.
The phone rang.
Cooper looked at it. The phones down here never rang. Well, rarely anyway.
He picked it up. ‘Cooper.’
‘Coop, it’s Damon.’
Damon Grohl. A friend from the FBI Academy many years ago. Friends still. Christmas cards were exchanged every year and every now and then they shared a beer, if that counted.
‘Damon!’ Cooper’s mood lifted. ‘Well, been a while! How are you, ol’ buddy?’
‘Fine. Fine. The Bureau down this way is chasing around like a headless chicken with what went down yesterday.’
Headless chicken? Damon was probably right about that. FBI heads were going to start rolling pretty soon over this. Letting something like this slip through their fingers.
‘I can imagine. Not much fun.’
‘Look, Coop, something’s come up that, uh… might be, well, your thing, if you get my meaning.’
Cooper’s curiosity was piqued. ‘My thing?’
‘We’ve got a double cop killing over in Brooklyn. Happened after midnight this morning.’
‘How’s that anything to do with me? The Department?’ A thought occurred to him. ‘Is this linked to yesterday…?’
‘Twin Towers? Who knows? Might be. We’re looking at pretty much anything that moves right now.’
‘You said this cop killing might be my sort of thing?’ A little careless of him, to be honest, talking so candidly like this over the phone.
‘Your phone line is encrypted, right?’
‘Yes. But keep what you say foggy… if you know what I mean.’
‘Foggy? Sure. So, Coop, are you still doing that whole X Files thing down in Washington?’
‘You know I can’t comment on that.’
He heard Damon draw a breath.
‘Damon? What the hell is it?’
‘I think I’ve got something you might want to take a look at, if you can get up here quickly.’
Chapter 14
7.01 a.m., 12 September 2001, outside Branford, Connecticut
Maddy was knocking on the adjoining motel room wall for him to get up. Liam yawned and cracked open eyes to look at the digital clock on his bedside ledge. Just gone seven.
He thumped the wall back. ‘All right! Jay-zus! I’m getting up, so I am!’ he shouted.
He heard Sal’s muffled laughter on the other side.
Bob was already awake. Not that he ever slept. ‘Maddy has instructed me to tell you we are getting ready to move on.’
They’d all decided they needed a good night’s rest before resuming their journey up to Boston. They’d all been strung out, far more exhausted than they’d realized. A week in Ancient Rome struggling to stay alive and now
this. Fatigue had finally caught up with them all.
‘Maddy says we will eat some breakfast then set off.’
Liam’s stomach still groaned. Last night’s triple-decker meat platter pizza was still lying heavily in his gut. He wondered if he could manage anything else right now.
They met outside in the car park beside the RV. Rashim was looking particularly ill.
‘Jesus, what’s up with you?’ asked Maddy.
‘I’ve been up all night, vomiting.’ His face looked almost grey.
‘The food wasn’t that bad!’
He shook his head, his dark ponytail wagging limply. ‘No, it’s my fault. I was stupid. The food was too rich. I’m used to synthetic proteins. Soya products.’ He gulped air and stifled a belch that could easily have been an empty retch. ‘Not used to the real thing.’ Rashim had had a mixed grill. Wolfed it down as he relished the texture and savoured the billionaire-luxury of eating nuggets of real meat.
Foster obviously hadn’t slept well either, dark bags evident under his sunken eyes. Maddy looked at the men in their party with a mixture of pity and contempt.
The diner was open and several trucks were parked up in the gravel car park, their drivers inside already tucking into pancake and waffle breakfasts. Further along their side of the highway was an out-of-town mall called North Haven Plaza. Across acres of car park it looked open already. At least the eateries probably were.
‘OK then, let’s try and find something a little healthier over there, if you guys are feeling a bit precious.’
‘Let me quickly check in on SpongeBubba.’
Maddy unlocked the side door to the RV for him and Rashim stepped up inside.
‘Morning, skippa!’ chirped the robot, squatting in the passenger seat upfront. It was playing with the steering wheel.
‘We’re having some food over there.’ Rashim pointed through the windscreen at the mall. ‘We won’t be long.’
Maddy joined him inside. ‘Does your robot have a wireless broadcast protocol?’
‘Sure.’
‘If anyone comes looking at our vehicle… cops, for example, can he bleep a warning over to Bob?’
‘Yes, of course.’
She looked down at the lab unit. ‘Reckon you can do that for me, then, SpongeBob?’
‘SpongeBubba,’ corrected the robot. His lips quivered a jocular, angry snarl. ‘That’s my name, missy-miss!’
Maddy rolled her eyes at the lab unit’s pre-programmed plastic expression. ‘Just tell your toy to keep a lookout,’ she said to Rashim. ‘OK?’
The mall wasn’t busy. A few people inside walking freshly polished floors, mostly people who worked there. Clearly no one felt like shopping today. A jazzy rendition of a Stevie Wonder hit wafted across the bright and cheerful circular centrepiece atrium and a pair of overweight security guards shared a joke with a janitor and made one or two heads turn with their echoing laughter.
‘Up there,’ said Maddy, pointing to a balcony overlooking the atrium. ‘RealBean Coffee. The place looks open. We can get a panini or…’
She checked herself. Stupid. Sure, although the mall looked no different to any other in her time, it was still 2001. No one did paninis back then. Back now.
‘… or maybe we’ll get a toasted sandwich or something.’
Chapter 15
7.20 a.m., 12 September 2001, Interstate 95, south-west Connecticut
‘Information: you are driving too fast,’ said Faith.
Abel turned to look at her. ‘The driving is suitable,’ he replied.
‘You are driving at a faster velocity than specified on the roadside indicators.’
Abel narrowed his eyes at her, then turned to look back at the road ahead flanked by signs indicating, advertising, proclaiming all kinds of things. Finally a speed indicator wooshed past on his side. ‘The number fifty-five indicates a recommended velocity.’
‘No. I believe it means maximum velocity. You are in excess of that. That will attract unwanted attention.’
Abel lifted his foot off the accelerator, causing the truck behind to brake hard, and then a moment later the driver leaned on his horn angrily. Abel looked over his shoulder. ‘Why did the vehicle behind make that noise?’
Faith followed his gaze. ‘I believe he is annoyed.’
‘Annoyed,’ Abel repeated. ‘Why?’
She frowned for a moment. ‘I do not know why.’
The truck driver overtook them, glaring down from his cab as he passed by.
The NYPD squad car they’d stolen in the early hours of the morning had been replaced with a different car. After listening to police chatter over the radio, they’d quickly realized the vehicle’s identification number on the roof was going to make them too easy to track down. Before the light of dawn had fully arrived, they’d switched to a solitary car parked in an empty forecourt. It was small and bubble-shaped and an uncomfortable squeeze for Abel’s broad frame as he wriggled into place behind the steering wheel, but at least it wasn’t going to draw the attention of any police helicopters scanning the highways for their stolen vehicle. Of course, it wasn’t until dawn that they saw their new ride — a Volkswagen Beetle — was a rather conspicuous tangerine orange decorated with hand-painted pink daisies.
They drove in silence for a while, as they had in fact done all the way from Brooklyn. As he drove, Abel’s mind carefully sorted through the data he’d acquired in the last thirty-two hours and twenty minutes of life. Not a particularly long life, but certainly a very busy one so far.
The first nine hours of his consciousness, just as with Faith and the others of his batch, had been spent in a sterile cloning room, illuminated with a soft amber glow coming from the half a dozen growth tubes. Each of them had contained a candidate foetus held in stasis, but now recently ‘birthed’.
Six of them, naked and coated in the gelatinous protein solution drying out on their bare skin. They had sat huddled together on the cool tiled floor with empty, childlike minds. Frightened, confused. And then, without any warning, wireless wisdom had begun to flood into their minds: torrential packets of data and executable applets of AI software that shooed away the childlike fear and replaced it with impassive machine-mind calm.
Like awaking. Emerging from a coma.
Abel recalled his mind filling with compressed knowledge that unpacked itself into segments of his hard drive. Knowledge of the world of 2001. Knowledge of a place called New York. Of a place called Brooklyn. Knowledge of cars, trains, planes, people, skyscrapers, billboards, intersections, doughnuts, handguns, traffic lights, cops, radios, computers, mobile phones, the Spice
Girls, Shrek, George Bush, 9/11…
And then, finally, into that dimly lit, womb-like, amber-coloured room a human had stepped. Abel’s installed software was already prepped to acknowledge the man as an authorized user. His instructions to be obeyed without question.
The man pulled up a chair and sat down in front of them. ‘Your primary mission goal is to locate and terminate these humans.’ He held a data pad in his hand and tapped its screen.
In their six minds, simultaneously, they received a packet of images in rapid slide-show succession. Front images, profile images of a young man with an untidy shock of dark hair and thick, arched eyebrows. A young teenaged woman with frizzy, strawberry-blonde hair and glasses. A dark-skinned girl with jet-black hair that drooped like a velvet curtain over one eye.
‘You should also terminate any other humans or support units that appear to be collaborating with them. Your secondary goal is to destroy all the equipment you find at the location you’ll shortly be arriving at. This is their base of operations. Leave nothing intact. That is important. There are items of equipment there that can be used to displace time. That is an unacceptable contamination risk. All of it must be destroyed.
‘When these things are done, you are to activate your own self-destruct devices. This is your tertiary goal. Your mission is complete only when these people are dead, their field
office has been completely destroyed and your own on-board computers have been irreparably disabled. Are these mission parameters perfectly clear?’
All six of them had chorused a deadpan ‘affirmative’.
Abel looked out at the bright sunny morning now, a blue cloudless sky above them. The road was clogged with morning traffic. A world of humans tirelessly going about their everyday business, getting up and going to jobs as if today was just another day. Like program loops executing regardless of the previous day’s extraordinary events. Life going on the same as before.
‘They are behaving as if nothing unusual occurred yesterday,’ said Faith as if reading his mind. ‘Why do you think that is?’
‘A post-trauma behaviour pattern,’ he replied. ‘Access your database. File 3426/344-456. Human Stress Responses.’
She blinked momentarily, digesting a short data entry on how the human mind filled itself with unnecessary repetitive tasks to block out painful thought processes. Denial. She looked at him. ‘Keeping busy so they do not have to confront what they witnessed yesterday?’
‘Correct.’
‘Experience, recollection, is useful data. Denying it makes no sense.’
‘Agreed.’
Little of what they’d experienced of human behaviour over the last twenty-three hours had made any sense. There was a frustrating randomness to human behaviour that made predicting what they were going to do next almost impossible. Like trying to accurately predict the course of a waterdrop down a rain-spattered windowpane.
There was no knowing for certain that the target named Madelaine Carter was taking her team back to her hometown. There was a strong likelihood. A reasonable probability. But no certainty. All they had to support that assumption was the indentation of that word on the jotter pad. Boston.
All they had was a very human thing… a hunch.
