by Alex Scarrow
This page of forlorn little classified ads was a perfectly preserved record of one day’s worth of misery in Brooklyn in the year 2001. A record of incomplete lives and broken hearts. Of final words that should have been said face to face, but never were.
Waldstein’s heart ached every time he studied this withered page of newspaper. There were words he wished he’d said to his wife, Eleanor, and his son, Gabriel. Words that he’d always felt foolish saying out loud, rather preferring to assume the pair of them knew he loved them very much, to save him saying such things. Words that he’d sell his very soul to be able to say to them one last time… now.
Words.
Beneath that light-filtering glass, a UV light glowed softly on the page, and a digital camera with an ultra-low light-sensitive lens and an infrared sensor closely monitored one particular personal ad. There it was halfway down the third column, one rather innocuous little paragraph of faint, slightly smudged newsprint.
The letters in that paragraph quite often flickered in a faint, spectral way. Just enough that if you weren’t looking directly at them your peripheral vision might just catch the subtlest sense of movement. A square inch of newspaper that undulated, shifted, stirred every now and then as if a small ghost lived in the very fibre of the newspaper itself.
It was a square inch of reality in permanent flux. The tiniest portion of the world caught in a perpetual state of undulating change, trapped in the eddies and currents of its own mini time wave.
Today, though, it seemed particularly agitated. Letters fidgeted, blurred, changed. As if it very much had something it wanted to tell Waldstein. The infrared sensor was picking up a temperature shift off the brittle old paper that was a whole tenth of a degree higher than normal. The minutest leakage of energy through the tiniest crack in space-time.
It wants to talk to me.
He studied the data monitor beside the glass case, watched the temperature read-out twitch and shuffle and occasionally spike. Beside it, the low-light image of the printed letters shimmered and danced like ghouls in a graveyard, caught only in glimpses of flitting moonlight.
Waldstein suspected the newly grown, birthed and trained team were struggling to find their feet. That poor old wretch — not Liam now, he’d chosen the name Foster instead. So much rested on his shoulders. And he’d been through so much recently. To have lost his friends in such a horrific way. Then to have also been through the appalling torment of being suddenly, prematurely aged. And then, after all of that, after sending his plea for help through time to the future, to hear back from his ‘creator’ and learn that he was somewhat less than human. Worse still… that he was going to have to fix things up again entirely on his own. To be the fatherlike mentor for a new team.
So much — too much to put on the poor thing. Waldstein’s heart ached for him.
That poor wretch Liam — now Foster — was entirely on his own, effectively running this project himself. He’d had to set up a replacement team, to mentor them, train and ready them for their respective roles, all the while knowing exactly what they were and yet having to go along with this appalling deceit. To lie to them.
Now it seemed, with these flickering letters on the page, there was more bad news coming through from 2001. From Foster.
The heat reading spiked again. Another tenth of a per cent of a degree.
It’s coming.
The letters shimmered and shuffled faintly. And there it was. Ink on paper. No longer shimmering with a desire to change. There it was. Bad news.
… Experienced significant event. Origin time-stamp of contamination 1941. Major displacement effects. Problem narrowly but successfully averted. New recruits performed well under stress. One team member lost. Require new observer immediately — Foster.
Joseph Olivera looked up from his floating data screens. ‘They need a new…?’
‘A new observer, Joseph. They need a new Saleena Vikram.’
Frasier Griggs paled. ‘You mean… send one back?’
‘Yes.’
‘What happened, Mr Waldstein?’ asked Joseph.
Waldstein shook his head. ‘I’m not sure. It seems like they’ve had to deal with a major contamination originating from sometime during the Second World War. Something big must have shaken things up for them.’ Waldstein smiled. ‘Their first big test. And it seems they’ve saved mankind.’
‘But one of them’s dead,’ said Griggs.
‘Indeed.’
‘What about the others?’
‘It seems they’re all right, Joseph.’ Waldstein touched a data pad and the air in front of him shimmered with holographic data. He swept the data to one side with his finger, and double-tapped a thumbnail image. It expanded in front of them, a digitized image of the page of newspaper hovering in mid-air. ‘You read it for yourself.’
Joseph and Griggs leaned forward to scrutinize the image more closely. They read it in silence.
‘He won’t be able to grow one back there,’ said Waldstein. ‘The memory needs altering. Which is why we’ll have to do it here and send her back.’
Joseph nodded. Waldstein was, of course, quite right. The other two team members — the Maddy unit and the Liam unit — weren’t ready to know what they were. If Foster was sent a Saleena Vikram unit foetus and started growing it right there in the archway, then the game would be up. He’d need to explain to the other two units exactly what they were.
Clones.
All three of them were designed to work at their best believing themselves to be entirely human. Believing they had real life stories, real loved ones, real memories. It’s what made their purely organic data matrices produce completely human-level decisions. That’s why Joseph hated to call it ‘Organic Artificial Intelligence’. Because it wasn’t artificial intelligence. It was Authentic Intelligence. If their brains — which were no different from any other human brains — truly believed the store of memories in their minds to be genuine then as far as Joseph was concerned, they were real people. Just as real as anyone else. More than mere genetically engineered replicas. Certainly so much more capable of strategic thought than the silicon minds inside the support units.
However, the moment they realized their lives were fabricated, a pack of installed lies; the moment they understood they hadn’t been born to loving mothers, but instead had emerged fully grown from plastic tubes, just like their support units… that was when their decision-making would become compromised. Unreliable.
‘Joseph, start a growth here in the lab,’ said Waldstein. ‘Then we’ll have to send her back. Can you edit her memory to make that work? She can’t suspect she’s a tube-product.’
‘Wait… hang on a minute!’ cut in Griggs. ‘We said no more direct interactions!’
Waldstein waved a hand to silence him. ‘They need an observer. Joseph?’
Joseph nodded. ‘I can s-splice into her existing memory. We have her life-story file, right up to the recruitment event.’ He scratched his chin. ‘I suppose I can graft in some generalized memories of her living in the archway with the other two. Nothing too s-specific, just the general impression that she’s been living in close proximity to Maddy and Liam for some weeks. It’ll be a little foggy for her.’
‘Foggy?’
‘She’d be a little disorientated. Like she’s experienced a kind of mild amnesia. A gap in her memory, as if she’s experienced a mild trauma, concussion, like a blow to the head. There’ll be minor continuity errors she won’t be able to make sense of, but if we deploy her directly after a field refresh or a corrective time wave she and the others may attribute that foggy memory as some side effect of the realignment of the timeline.’ He shrugged. ‘Since they’re newly recruited, I imagine they’ll buy that explanation from Foster. They’ll trust what he tells them.’
Waldstein nodded. ‘Then we should do that.’ He looked at Joseph, placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘Be as careful as you can splicing in her memory.’
That didn’t need saying. Sal neede
d to wake up and find herself returning to the archway, believing nothing more than some time wave must have caught her outside; messed with her head in some small way. If that didn’t work, if she started questioning her reality…? If the team figured out they were a bunch of enhanced support units, meatbots? Then the whole project was over. They’d have to start again from scratch. Delete the old ones and grow a brand-new team. New minds, new memories, new lives.
‘I’ll be very careful, Mr Waldstein. Trust me.’
‘Good.’
Griggs stepped forward and grabbed Waldstein’s arm. ‘Roald… this is really pushing our luck. You know we broadcast our presence every time we open a portal! You know there must be dozens of tachyon-listening stations all over the world. Christ… it was your campaigning that made sure of that. Do you want to be discovered? Do you want that?’
‘It’s an acceptable risk, Frasier.’
‘No, it’s not. This whole project was always too risky. We were supposed to travel only to 2001 to set it up. And that was it. No further trips!’
‘It’s an acceptable risk.’ He looked at Griggs sternly, then lowered his voice. ‘Please, don’t push our friendship, Frasier. This is more important than that. More important than anything.’
‘More important?’ Griggs laughed. ‘What’s all this really about? Eh?’
‘You know as well as I do. Three-dimensional space is as precious as fine bone china. You can’t let time travel — ’
Griggs spat a curse. His eyes narrowed. ‘That’s not what you really care about.’
‘Frasier…’
‘You know what I think this is about? Vengeance. Bitterness. You can’t bring your wife and son back so you — ’
‘ENOUGH!’ Waldstein glared at Griggs. He pulled the man by his arm. ‘You and I need to talk, Frasier. We need to talk right now.’
Joseph watched, dumbstruck by the suddenly charged atmosphere in the room, as both men stepped out of the lab into the small adjoining conference room. The glass door hissed shut behind them and their voices became muted. He saw Griggs’s face darken with anger, and he heard their muffled voices, quiet at first, but then quickly rising in volume and pitch, getting louder and louder.
Then finally that word. Pandora. And… Why, Roald? Why do you want that to happen?
Chapter 32
13 September 2001, Interstate 90, Newton, Massachusetts
‘Where did she go?’
Becks looked at him, a growing expression of anxiety on her face. ‘Maddy… said she was going to get some supplies.’
‘Said… she said… so maybe she wasn’t?’
The support unit could only look at Liam plaintively. He grasped her slim arms firmly. Arms that easily could have shrugged off his grasp and twisted his head off his shoulders if she had the notion to do so. ‘Becks! Come on! Where’s she really gone?’
‘She… said — ’
‘She’s gone to her old home, hasn’t she?’
Becks looked conflicted, torn between an instruction to lie and a logical imperative to speak the truth.
Liam cursed. ‘I knew it!’
‘That is an unwise action,’ said Bob. His cool eyes looked around the others gathered in the girls’ motel room. ‘The pursuing support units may also attempt to travel to the same location.’
‘I don’t think we could’ve stopped her,’ said Sal. ‘I think she’s too close to home to not try to see them. She really misses her family.’ She looked down at her hands. ‘I know it’s what I’d want to do.’
‘And I miss me own ma and da just as much!’ said Liam. ‘But Bob’s right — that’s a stupid thing she’s gone an’ done! I should have known she’d do this!’
‘What if they’re clever,’ said Rashim. ‘What if they don’t attack her there, but instead follow her back here?’
‘Exactly!’ said Liam. ‘She could lead them right to us all!’
Just then a key clicked and rattled in the motel room’s door. All heads turned as the door opened and daylight stretched across the mottled pattern of the room’s threadbare carpet.
Maddy.
‘Perfect timing!’ said Liam. ‘We were wondering…’ His voice tailed off. She stood in the doorway staring back at all of them. On any other occasion he would have expected her to do a double-take at them all staring wide-mouthed at her and irritably snap ‘ What’s up? ’ But instead she stepped slowly in, kicking the door shut behind her. She sat down on the end of the bed and stared listlessly at the blank glass screen of the TV set, reflecting her own sullen expression back at her.
‘Maddy?’ said Sal. ‘You OK?’
No answer.
Liam could see her eyes were red-raw beneath her glasses. Her cheeks were wet. She was crying. He sat on the bed beside her. ‘Maddy?’
‘She appears to be distressed,’ said Bob.
Liam waved him silent. ‘Maddy? Is everything all right?’ She shook her head silently.
Liam didn’t dare ask the next question. But it needed asking all the same. ‘Maddy? Your family… are they all right? They’re not hurt in any — ?’
‘They’re not my family,’ she muttered.
‘Uh?’
‘Not my family,’ she said again. She turned from her dim reflection in the TV screen. ‘And they never were.’
Liam leaned in closely to her. ‘Maddy? What do you mean? What’s the matter?’
He’d never seen her like this before, not even when things had seemed at their worst, not even that first day when they’d all met in the darkness of the archway, freshly plucked from the very last moments of their lives. This wasn’t normal Maddy: stressed, irritated, annoyed or frustrated. This was a totally alien Maddy Carter: utterly crushed, defeated.
Sal got up off the chair by the door and knelt on the floor in front of her. She could see it in her face too; this was Maddy right at the end of her game. She reached out for her hand and squeezed it. ‘Tell us what happened?’
‘I… I’ve worked it out,’ she said, her voice a mucus-thick whisper.
‘Worked what out?’
She looked at Liam. ‘I’ve worked out who we are.’
‘Who we are?’ He frowned. Confused.
‘Or more to the point,’ she added, ‘I’ve figured out what we are.’
‘What we are?’ Liam turned to the others, then back at Maddy. ‘What in the name of Jesus an’ Mary are you talkin’ about?’
‘Shadd-yah!’ Sal muttered under her breath.
Liam looked at her. The one eye of hers not hidden by her looping fringe had suddenly widened with realization. She seemed to have some inkling of what Maddy was talking about. ‘What, Sal? What’s she mean by that?’
‘We’re not who we thought we were, Liam,’ said Maddy.
‘Not who we…’ His brows locked. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Your life is just a lie, Liam… a story,’ said Maddy. ‘Fiction.’
‘Maddy? What happened?’ asked Sal.
Maddy laughed. More a wet snort of snot mixed with tears. ‘They obviously didn’t expect we’d come looking for the truth. Why would they?’ She took her glasses off and wiped at her eyes. ‘I mean, Foster made such a big thing of it, didn’t he? That we should be dead already… that this extra life was like a bonus or something. A gift.’
Liam nodded. Of course he had. The old man made no bones about that. There’d been a choice right at the end of their old lives: not much of a choice admittedly, but a choice nonetheless. He could have gone down with the Titanic if he’d wanted, but he’d chosen to join Foster.
‘We all chose it, Maddy,’ said Liam. ‘Right at the end, when he saved us all.’
She laughed. A miserable, choking sound. She shook her head. ‘But that’s the point! We didn’t!’
‘Didn’t?’ Liam hadn’t a clue what she was talking about. ‘Yes, I did. I chose to — ’
‘No… no, you didn’t,’ said Sal quietly. Nodding. She understood now. ‘Or me… I didn’t either.�
� Her one visible eye was beginning to spill glistening tears on to her dark cheek.
‘Ah Jay-zus! You crying too? What’s up with you both? Why’re you crying? What is goin’ on here? ’
‘None of us chose to join this agency in the last moments of our lives, Liam,’ said Maddy. ‘Because none of that ever happened.’
Sal’s head dropped, her face dipped out of sight. He could see her shoulders heaving gently. He looked around. The only other person here who seemed utterly bewildered by all of this was Rashim. He offered Liam a sympathetic shrug that seemed to say, I got no idea what they’re talking about either.
‘Our memories, Liam… everything we thought were memories of our lives before the archway, before we were recruited…’ Maddy’s chin dimpled as fresh tears streamed down her face. ‘Everything. My home, my mom, my dad, my school, my job… they’re all lies. They’re phoney.’
‘Information: memory implants.’ Even Bob seemed to have an understanding of what she was saying now.
Maddy nodded. ‘Faked memories. Our lives are just made up. I never lived in Boston. Sal never lived in India. And you…’ Her voice faltered. ‘Oh, Liam, you never came from Ireland.’
‘But…’ Liam bit his lip. ‘But I’m from Cork! I know I am! I’m… that’s… what kind of nonsense do you think you’re — ’
‘We didn’t come from those places. We never lived there; we never even set foot in any of those places.’
‘Whuh?’
‘I get it.’ Sal’s soft voice drifted up through the drooping curtain of her hair. ‘We came right out of three giant test-tubes.’
Maddy nodded. She reached out and rested a hand on Sal’s shoulder. A reciprocated gesture of comfort.
‘Do you get it, Liam? Do you see?’ said Sal. ‘We’re support units.’
Chapter 33
2055, W.G. Systems Research Campus, near Pinedale, Wyoming
