by Alex Scarrow
Actually, they’d found it quite by chance. A stop at a diner in the middle of one-strip town, Harcourt. A blink-it-and-miss town in the middle of Ohio’s faded industrial heartland — the rustbelt, some called it. By the look of the lifeless smokestacks and fenced-off warehouses, it had once been a very promising industrial town. Bob had pulled over on the gravel car park in front of the diner and they’d gone in for a toilet and breakfast bagel break.
The diner was empty apart from them and one young waitress in a green check dress and apron slumped across the end of the counter reading a newspaper. SpongeBob and Patrick quacked and guffawed from a TV on the other end. Rashim smiled at the sight of that.
After bringing them the pot of coffee and breakfast they’d ordered, the waitress found a reason to loiter by their table — wiping down others nearby, changing ketchup bottles and salt cellars that didn’t need changing — clearly bored witless with her own company and intrigued by the diner’s first and only customers that morning.
Her name was Kaydee-Lee Williams — at least that’s what the plastic name tag on her chest said.
It was Liam who broke the ice and asked her about the town. She was pitifully keen to answer. ‘Oh, Harcourt’s, like, totally dead. Been dying for years. Ever since they closed down the auto-parts factory. That’s all this town was really, a place for a couple of factories to go.’ She shrugged. ‘When the auto parts started getting made in China, the factories closed. Just like that. Simple.’
She told them how the town’s population shrank each year. There was no future here, people were moving away, particularly families with young children. That’s how they learned about the school in Harcourt, Green Acres Elementary. The school Kaydee-Lee said she’d once been to. No need for schools any more in a dying town, she’d said.
Maddy looked at it now. It would suit their immediate needs. It still had a live power feed that they could tap into. The local electricity company apparently hadn’t bothered to disconnect and mothball the junction box. Instead, it had obviously been cheaper just putting up some hazard signs with risk disclaimers all over them.
The town itself also had a pretty decent hardware store they could use, and they’d passed a big retail park a dozen miles back along Interstate 70. Maddy had spotted a CompUSA, a Best Buy and of course the obligatory mega-sized Walmart.
She looked up at a grey sky. Over halfway into the month, September’s late-summer promise was fading already, and tumbling autumn clouds vied with each other to be the first to drop their load on Green Acres Elementary.
‘Let’s get our stuff inside,’ she said.
Half an hour later, they’d emptied the SuperChief of all the things that had once made the archway in Brooklyn their home. And now ‘home’, or at least their temporary home, was a classroom with mouse or maybe it was rat droppings on a scuffed linoleum chequered floor and school desks and bucket chairs stacked along a cork-board wall still decorated with curling pieces of paper. Thumb-tacked pictures drawn in crayon and felt tip. Childish scrawlings that spoke of happier times here. Blue skies and suns. Mom-an’-Dad-an’-Me pictures with tents and barbecues, summer fairs and parades.
Outside it was finally raining. The tapping of heavy, greasy drops on smeared windowpanes and somewhere inside the school building they could hear an echoing drip-drip-drip where a part of the roof was failing.
Maddy offered them her best morale-boosting cheerleader’s smile. ‘It’ll be a bit comfier once we get ourselves sorted out. I promise.’
Liam remembered the moment he’d first awoken in the archway — a dark place. All damp bricks and crumbling mortar. And yes, just like now, the tap-tap-tapping of dripping water from somewhere out in the darkness. He’d thought it a horrible place to wake up. For a moment even wondered if it might be an odd version of Heaven. In which case he’d vowed to have a word with the first priest he came across.
If truth be told, his first impression of the archway hadn’t been that great. It had appeared to be every bit as grim and unwelcoming as this place. But they’d made it a home.
‘Aye, we’ll get some bits and pieces in here to make it nice.’
‘That’s right.’ Maddy stepped across the classroom and reached tentatively for a light switch. She grimaced as she flipped it, half expecting failing wiring and the progressive corrosion of damp to collude in electrocuting her. Instead, several frosted glass panels in the classroom’s low ceiling flickered and winked to life.
‘See? We got some power! So, we’ll go get a kettle, a heater, camping stove. We’ll be living like kings before you know it.’
Sal nodded. ‘Just as good as the old archway.’ Taking Maddy’s lead, she smiled. Slightly forced. ‘And at least we don’t have to listen to the trains running overhead all the time.’
Actually, Liam had found that regular faint rumble comforting. Stepping outside into that dark, rubbish-strewn alleyway and listening to the restless noises of Brooklyn had been a somewhat reassuring thing. A sign that life was ceaselessly going on all around them.
Here in this abandoned school, they could just as easily be the last people on Earth and not know for sure one way or the other until they drove into town. And even then, given how lifeless Harcourt had looked on their way in, they’d not be certain.
‘Come on, guys!’ said Maddy. ‘We’ve got a ton of work to do if the agency’s going to be up and running again.’
‘Aye,’ Liam shrugged. ‘Under new management, so it is.’
Maddy grinned. This time not her forced make-the-troops-happy smile. This time a genuine grin of excitement. ‘Yes! Exactly what you just said, Liam. We’re Under New Management. Us! How cool’s that?’
‘We’re really going to change the world?’ asked Sal.
‘Yup…’ Maddy wiped dusty hands on the front of her jeans. ‘Now doesn’t that sound like a better job description? To make the world a better place, rather than just keeping it the same ol’ same crud? Huh?’
Rashim squatted down beside SpongeBubba, amid the plastic bags they’d carried in. ‘A better world?’ he muttered to himself. He was already checking through the more delicate parts of the displacement machine’s components. He held a circuit up in front of the lab robot. It dutifully extended a sensitive graphene-tipped sensor and began to test the integrity of the board.
Rashim looked up at the others. ‘Anything that isn’t the world I left behind works just fine for me.’
Sal gave that a moment’s thought. ‘Making a better world does sound good.’
‘Aye,’ Liam grinned. ‘Aye, it does, so.’
‘Then let’s make busy,’ said Maddy. ‘Highest-priority tasks first, ladies and gents. I need a coffee.’
Chapter 41
26 September 2001, Green Acres Elementary School, Harcourt, Ohio
We’ve been so busy I haven’t really had time to think about things that much. Which is nice. It’s such a crazy pinchudda thing — last night I realized I was missing my parents and I nearly started crying when I reminded myself they never existed! Or, if they did, they were some other girl’s mamaji and papaji!
Then I reminded myself I’m not even Indian. Then I reminded myself I’m not even human. So, as you can imagine, this is really messing with my head.
That’s why I’m glad we’ve been so busy.
A few days ago we got a load of things from a big camping store: sleeping bags, a stove and gas, kettle, lights, torches, food. All the comforts! So it’s been nice. Like a camping trip. We even made a small fire in the middle of the floor and cooked toast and sausages and stuff. SpongeBubba and Rashim were like a pair of excitable little children! Never done campfire food before. But then have I? Even if I remembered doing that… it would be someone else’s memory, wouldn’t it? Or some made-up memories concocted by some techie somewhere.
Today we need to go back to that big retail park outside of Harcourt and get some more things. Some computers and cables and stuff. Me and Bob and Becks are getting those things.
> Oh yeah, Maddy also spotted an Internet cafe last time we came. Said she wants to do some research on where we’re going to set up our permanent new home…
Maddy winced and stuck her tongue out.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Liam.
‘The coffee’s frikkin’ disgusting.’
‘Mine’s all right,’ Rashim shrugged.
‘Yeah, but you’re used to drinking some sort of soya-gunk substitute.’ Maddy put the cardboard cup down on the small table beside their Internet cubicle. The three of them were huddled together suspiciously between the cubicle partitions like three truant teenagers messing about on Facebook.
‘That cack’s all yours if you want any more of it, Rashim.’ She turned back to the computer monitor in front of them. She had Wikipedia up on the screen. ‘So… I guess we should go as far back in time from now as we can get,’ said Maddy. ‘Put down as much distance as we can between us and 2001.’
‘What about going forward in time?’ asked Liam.
She shook her head. ‘We go forward, and it gets increasingly difficult to remain off the radar.’
‘Off the…?’
‘To stay hidden. There’ll be more Internet, more connectivity, more information. Bound to be. I just think we’ve got a much better chance of remaining anonymous if we aim backwards.’
Liam sipped at his coffee. Her explanation made sense to him. It was hard enough getting his head around this time, without going further into an unfathomable future. ‘And I suppose we really have to pick another time? And not stay in this one?’
‘Yes, I would say so,’ said Rashim. He hunkered forward into the narrow cubicle. He lowered his voice. ‘If Waldstein is determined to locate you, he may decide to send more of those military recon units after you.’ He bit his lip. ‘They may be old genetic hybrid technology, but they’re robust, resourceful, tenacious… and very, very hard to kill.’
‘You don’t need to remind us of that,’ said Liam.
‘If he sends more, you really want to make it as difficult as possible for them to track you down. Remaining in the present simply presents one search vector for them: determining your location. But picking another time adds another search vector… when.’
‘Yeah, so we need to think about less obvious places in time to hide,’ added Maddy.
‘Like the past.’
‘Exactly.’
‘But… but how far back can we go?’ asked Liam. ‘We need some power, do we not?’
Rashim nodded. ‘Quite. And that’s going to be the limiting factor.’
Maddy tapped at the keyboard. ‘So… that does pretty much limit us to the age of electricity. When did we start having electric power everywhere?’
Rashim rolled his eyes upwards, thinking. Guessing. ‘1940?’
‘Ahhh… I think there was power a lot earlier than then,’ said Liam. ‘There was plenty of electric on the Titanic, so there…’ His words came to an abrupt halt. ‘Not that, uh… not that I was ever even on the ship.’ He shook his head and muttered something.
‘Liam’s right. Much earlier than that.’ Maddy typed a phrase into Wikipedia’s search box.
‘My history isn’t very good.’ Rashim tried again. ‘1900?’
‘Nope. Earlier.’
The man’s eyes widened behind his glasses. ‘Really? There was electricity in the 1800s?’
The monitor flickered with the result of her search: a page of text, no pictures or diagrams or embedded video clips. This is old Wikipedia, Maddy reminded herself. Just text.
‘There we go. How about this…’ She read out loud. ‘Electricity remained not much more than a curiosity of nature until 1600, when English scientist William Gilbert carried out detailed observations of the relationship between the apparent visible effects between magnetism and the as yet undefined, unnamed force of electricity. He produced and distinguished the “lodestone” effect from static electricity created by rubbing amber. He named this effect after the Latin word “electricus” meaning “like amber”, which in turn came from the Greek word for elektron.’
‘Really?’ Rashim craned his neck forward to read the small text more easily. ‘I never would have believed…’ he muttered, now silently reading on.
Maddy picked out another paragraph further down the article. ‘In 1800, Alessandro Volta created the “Voltaic Pile”, a structure of alternating layers of zinc and copper.’ She looked at Liam. ‘There you go! The first electric battery!’
‘1819…’ said Rashim, ‘Michael Faraday creates the Faraday disk! The first electromagnetic generator!’
‘ Generator? ’
Rashim grinned at her. ‘Don’t get too excited, it generated about a couple of volts of direct current. We need output that’s equivalent or thereabout to the domestic feed most people are getting today.’ He read on. ‘There… 1876, Thomas Edison builds the first power station in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Built it to supply power for his laboratory and various experiments.’
‘But it needs to be power that’s available for us to get our hands on,’ said Liam.
Maddy nodded. ‘Yeah, you’re right, that’s the really important bit. And it needs to be a totally reliable source, not some nutty inventor’s cranky prototype that keeps breaking down or something. We need power that was, like, commercially available… put out for normal people, businesses, to use.’
‘Ahhh!’ Rashim raised a finger. ‘Well then, how about this? The Edison Electric Light Station, built in 1880-81, which then came online in, let’s see… ah yes! 1882.’
‘That sounds promising,’ said Maddy. ‘But I dunno… New Jersey’s still pretty close to where we were. If we’re going to play it safe and put as much distance as we — ’
‘It’s not in New Jersey.’
‘Uh! Where, then?’
‘London.’
‘London?’ She took a moment to take that in. Not in America? She’d presumed just now that something as forward-thinking, something so modern as electricity must have been a solely American thing long before anyone else. Even before the turn of the century.
‘You mean London, England?’
‘Yes, of course I mean London, England. A steam-powered 125-horsepower generator beneath — ’ he traced his finger down through the text to find his place — ‘beneath a place called the Holborn Viaduct. Yes, and that’s in central London.’ He read the article from where his finger touched the screen. ‘It was built to power the lights on the viaduct, but also to premises in the area, the City Temple and the Old Bailey.’ He looked at them. ‘Whatever that was.’
Maddy stroked her chin thoughtfully. ‘Do you think it might have been churning out enough for our needs?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps.’ Rashim picked up a biro and began scribbling down scraps of information from the article.
‘No need,’ she said. She clicked her mouse on an icon to one side of the screen and smiled. ‘It’s already printing.’
‘London.’ Liam turned to look at her. He was just about to say he’d always wanted to visit the city as a boy. But once again, there it was, stupid circular thinking; he’d never been a little boy with dreams and wishes. He settled for a thoughtful nod. ‘Aye, London sounds like a good enough bet to me.’
Maddy was grinning like a loon. ‘London!’ Truly and genuinely, a terrifyingly Cheshire cat-sized grin. Something she realized she hadn’t done in a while; an honest expression of excitement. ‘Victorian London! All top hats and posh frocks?’
Her growing excitement was wholly infectious. Liam found himself smiling straight back at her. He remembered their fleeting visit to San Francisco in 1906, the childlike beam of pleasure on her face as they’d strutted down that broad and busy thoroughfare: her with a plume of ostrich feathers on her head and wearing a bodice tight enough to make her want to cough up a kidney, and him with a top hat on his head tilted at a jaunty, gentleman-about-town angle.
‘Aye… I think we just might’ve found ourselves a new home.’
She squeezed his hand. ‘Yup,’ she said right back. ‘Rashim?’
‘Yes?’
‘How long do you think it will take you to rebuild the displacement machine?’
She knew he’d do it — the instinctive response habit of any technician, engineer, plumber — he sucked air in through his teeth. ‘I don’t know. We have the key component boards and they’re still intact incredibly. But I’m going to have to, uh… reverse-engineer them. The basic process pipeline is the same as we had on Project Exodus, but there are implementation differences that I’ve got to learn and adapt to work with these components.’
‘Just give me your best guess.’
‘A couple of weeks? A month, two maybe?’
‘You don’t know, do you?’
‘You asked me to guess.’ He shrugged. ‘So, I’m guessing.’
Chapter 42
1 October 2001, Harcourt, Ohio
‘So that’s twenty-seven dollars and — ’
‘Ninety cents,’ Liam finished. He smiled at her and she blushed. ‘I know that off by heart.’
‘And I know what you’re gonna order by heart,’ said Kaydee-Lee. ‘Why do you always order the same thing?’
Liam had been up to the diner virtually every morning since they’d settled into the abandoned elementary school. It was boredom, that’s why he volunteered to do the breakfast bagel run. Maddy, Rashim and SpongeBubba seemed to be spending all their waking hours either poring over pencil-sketched schematics or huddled over a make-do workbench, carefully soldering electrical components together by the light of a desktop lamp. Sal seemed to be busy on the computers most of the time. They had a similar set-up of twelve networked PCs as they’d had back in Brooklyn, the old hard drives from the archway system installed. Once the W.G. Systems operating code had been loaded up and had successfully kicked Windows 2000 to the kerb, computer-Bob was able to talk Sal through installing all the other bits and pieces.
‘I know what bagel filling everyone likes… saves me having to, you know, disturb them from their work.’
