by Mark Lingane
She was aware of the tears flowing down her face, but felt no emotion. She tried to scream her anger at him, but she had no voice.
So she punched him.
He doubled over.
She hesitated, stepping back and forth. Half turning. Half spinning in her head. Wanting to reach out. Wanting to run. She turned, but again felt her wrist being grabbed. And it burned as if it had been severed. She turned back and slapped his face again. He stood there in front of her, unflinching.
“Why are you doing this to me?” She clenched her fist and screamed at him.
“You can hit me as often as you want. I’ll take the pain because you’re worth it.”
She pounded her fists into him. He grabbed her and held her close. She struggled. Gradually her anger faded, replaced by tears. Folded in his arms.
“We don’t all lead a good life, Tracy.”
She lowered her head into his chest.
“When we break, we can break free.”
One. Zero.
“Are you calm now?” Chambers said.
She nodded and gave a shuddering sigh. Her world had been released and she felt exhausted. For a moment, she felt protected in the alcove of the news agency. The world passed by and she could hide. But in the dark recesses her father’s words spun around in eddies of guilt. Duty. Responsibility. Honor. She stirred and stood up.
“So, where are we headed now?” he said.
“He’s a soldier. He has to be paid, and pay tax. The HMRC is non-ministerial. It’s impossible to get in. And they know where everyone is.”
Chambers groaned. “You want to break into Revenue & Customs.”
“Think about it. It’s ideal.”
“Let’s pretend for a moment that you can get the information. How are you going to get into one of the most secure buildings in the country? We’re talking about tax, the heart of the government. And you want to rip it out.”
“The government has no heart. But we will need help.” She held out her hand and Chambers clambered to his feet.
35
WITHIN A HALF hour they were standing out front of a familiar North London house. The small terrace-lined street with its abundance of leafy trees was deathly quiet in the early hours. An occasional service vehicle flashed past on the high street. Hanson pounded on the door until it slowly creaked open. Half a face appeared.
“You must be vampires.”
“Randeep, let us in.”
“Oh, my. You look terrible.”
Hanson looked down at her outfit. Her clothes were charred and half-soaked, and she was covered in blood, cuts, and bruises. “Well, it’s been a bad day.”
“Why have you woken me?”
“You’re coming with us,” Hanson told him.
“Where to?”
“I’m not telling. Come on, cleaner.”
“Are you arresting me?”
“Let’s cut the crap. I know it’s you. You know I know it’s you. I’m not arresting you, I’m requesting you to help—as a physicist. And I think you will after you’ve heard about our day.”
“Why should I trust you? You tried to arrest me before.”
“I’m sorry. I … it was a poor decision.”
“No.” He went to close the door.
Hanson smashed her fist against it, managing to keep the latch from locking. “I think we have a time-traveling assassin,” she said.
The door couldn’t have been swung open any quicker. Randeep quickly glanced up and down the street before ushering them into the reception room. He swiveled the light switch enclosure, revealing a large, round white button. The lights in the room turned dark crimson and a low buzzing vibrated through the room as he depressed the button.
“What’s all this?” Chambers said.
“It’s an anti-surveillance system. It’ll keep our conversation private. The whole street is in information blackout. No audio and no video.”
“Are you paranoid?”
“No. I’m enlightened. Now talk to me,” he said. “Someone traveling through time is impossible.”
Hanson outlined the events of the last days, to his amazement.
He shook his head. “People can’t travel through time because there’s no such thing as time.”
They stared at him.
“Just because we name something doesn’t mean it exists. Death doesn’t exist. It’s the term we use for something ending, energy being completely spent. Time doesn’t exist. We have cause and effect; motivation, reaction and consequence, interrelated with the decay of energy. But time, as something that binds it all together, is a dream. We can’t control it any more than we can reverse the flow of energy out of the sun.”
“But what about black holes and solar flares?” Hanson said. “They’re always making movies about that stuff.”
“Being close to a dense gravity or magnetic field, such as a black hole, slows the decay in relation to places further away from the field. Energy can only decay. It can’t be reversed, only slowed. It’ll always expend. The difference in decay speed in separate areas means that, theoretically, you can look back in time by looking at areas of higher gravitational strength. But you can’t do this the other way around. Actually, it happens, but you can’t see it because light can’t travel fast enough. Events have played out at their respective speeds in their relative areas. For example, we could look back into the history of the United States, but not our own. Of course, the U.S. needs to be near a black hole and London would need to be hundreds of millions of light years away.”
“So if someone’s looking back in time at us,” she said, “it’s because we have something like a black hole here?”
“Theoretically.”
“You say that a lot.”
“We’re dealing within the limits of what we understand. We’ve defined our understanding of the world by the terms we have defined. It doesn’t mean it’s right, just understandable for now.”
Hanson sighed. “I preferred you when you were a cleaner.”
“There are other temporal issues as well. We can’t see the future, but we can alter it mathematically. It’s adaptive based on what you know.”
Randeep glanced around. He picked up a ball from the mantel and held it up. “Watch.” He twisted it in his fingers and then placed it behind his back. “The closer you get to something happening the greater the chance of it happening. Or the more certain it is. We even have sayings for it: ‘It’s an accident waiting to happen.’ ‘He had it coming.’ ‘We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.’ As a race, we’re smart enough to know what’s coming, if we think about it. But therein lies the problem—the thinking part. The more we know, the greater the inevitability of the future.”
They stared at the physicist.
“There are infinite possible futures. These narrow as we get closer to a point in time. But the fact that we observe the future means that we can change it, which means we weight the possible futures.”
He swapped the ball from hand to hand behind his back, left to right, right to left.
“It’s elementary physics. Say I can see into the future. I try to hide from someone who’s looking for me. I see that if I hide at a particular time the searcher won’t see me. But the fact that I’ve adapted the present to deal with a possible future has increased the chance of that future happening.”
He held his clenched hands in front of him. “The ball is in either my left hand or my right hand. Guess.”
Hanson picked the left. It was empty. Randeep opened his right hand to reveal the ball.
“Now you, Mr. Reggie, stand behind me and watch.” Chambers moved behind Randeep, who swapped the ball from hand to hand, then brought his hands around to the front. “Ask your partner which hand it’s in,” he said to Hanson.
Hanson shrugged and looked at Chambers, who indicated the right. She tapped Randeep’s right hand, and he opened it to reveal the ball.
“So the future can be written,” she said.
“What do you think?” Hanson asked Chambers.
“I’m thinking we should’ve gone to an illustrator rather than a physics genius,” Chambers replied.
“Knowing the future makes what I see inevitable. I reinforce a particular future thread,” Randeep said.
“But that can’t work everywhere. Surely a decision you make here can’t affect what someone has for dinner on the other side of the planet,” Hanson said.
“If a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon causes a tidal wave in Japan, who knows?”
“I thought that was about sensitivity and weather science.”
“Please don’t use weather and science together. This is something new, and we have no metric for explaining or measuring the consequences other than the philosophy of quantum mechanics.”
“Now that my brain has melted,” Hanson said, “tell me what can go back through time.”
Randeep shrugged. “Things without weight. Messages, theoretically. All information we transmit today is a form of energy. Sound waves. Light waves. We can’t see the future, but future people can tell us about it, and guide it on the wire, so to speak.”
“Why is weight an issue?”
“It’s all to do with the natural decay of the universe. If you suddenly modify it, the shift in energy would cause a nuclear explosion.”
Hanson frowned. “So we don’t have a time-traveling assassin?”
“No. We have something better.”
“What?”
“A new stage of quantum mechanics.”
“Yeah, not quite as exciting as the cyborg assassin from the future,” Chambers said.
“Who said it was a cyborg?” Randeep said.
“Er, no one,” Chambers said. “I thought it would sound cooler and more dangerous.”
“Please, this is serious. Proof like this can change everything we understand about temporal decay, polarity realignment. Just everything.” Randeep sat down, pulled out a notepad and started to scrawl across the pages.
Hanson coughed.
Randeep looked up. “Oh yes, sorry.” He clutched the notepad and pen in his hand, seemingly mesmerized by the equations. He looked at Hanson. “That EM device you found under the car, it threw a field in excess of two hundred and fifty kilotesla a mile into the sky. It’s impossible for something that small to generate that kind of power. It’s impossible for it to be so directional.”
Randeep stood up and resumed his pacing, lost in thought. “Unless … they’re sending something back. Anything would do. Say you could send a physical object back in time: if you sent it back in exactly the right place, the atomic difference would be enormous. The power would have to be released or it would explode.” He stopped pacing and mimed an upward explosion. “The equivalent of a neutron bomb. It would destroy anything electronic above and—no!”
“What?” Hanson said.
“Gravitational force. Black hole. A moment frozen in time. From our point of view, a plane would hang in the air. Not for long, but long enough for physics to change.”
“The bomb under the car had CF-555 written on it,” Hanson said. “You’re saying it was a bomb from the future.”
He looked at her. “Interesting. Yes. Yes. Probably. No. Kind of a bomb, but not a bomb. Wait. It would act like a bomb, but it wouldn’t be made up of anything explosive. Something … with an extremely short half-life, like one of the light elements. Hydrogen. Helium.” He started to ramble figures aloud, tracing images with a finger on the wall.
“And this is how our assassin is doing it?” Hanson asked.
“No. You can’t send a person. Only chemicals.”
“But aren’t we chemicals?”
“No. Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. You’d need to talk to a bionanotech person. Maybe some cyborg hybrid could do it.”
Chambers smiled. “What if they sort of came here and then went back?”
“How?” Randeep sat and placed his hand on his forehead. “Unless … if the decay is too slow, the displacement would be like a high-pressure weather system. Nature abhors a vacuum. It would get pushed back so equilibrium would form. But if you have something that’s decaying quickly then maybe it stays where it is because the pressure is different. I don’t know. This is all theoretical.”
Randeep reclined in his chair and stared at the ceiling. “However, we haven’t examined the fundamental question. How are they sending things? The theory of electromagnetic bombs from the future is all very well, but how would they actually get them here?”
“Couldn’t we go forward and find out?” Chambers said.
“We can’t go forward. It’s impossible.”
“But what if someone could go,” Hanson suggested, “or could see into the future? Would that person be considered, I don’t know, a problem?”
Randeep leapt up and stared at her. “That individual would be the most dangerous person in the universe.”
They all fell quiet for a moment as the thought sank in. Then Randeep began pacing again.
“I’ve seen you with Poundriff,” Hanson said.
Hearing the old name stopped Randeep’s pacing. “The man gave me my job and a generous research grant.”
“Do you know where he lives? Because I think he has some answers.”
Randeep shook his head. “I wasn’t invited to his house. He prefers marketing people, and they don’t talk to me.”
“You had a military pass that got you into the crash site,” she pointed out to him.
Randeep nodded. He lifted out the pass on a string around his neck. “It’s a significant pass. It allows me into many places.”
“Will it allow you into the tax department?”
“No. But it will let me into the Churchill War Rooms, which is the same building. I’ve used it there before.”
“Let’s go.”
36
HALF AN HOUR later they were hovering behind the trees in St. James’s Park, watching the guards march by. The guards came past at ten-minute intervals, sweeping down from Number Ten.
Hanson glanced at her watch. Three AM was approaching. They still had a couple of hours before the sun rose. She rubbed her palm over her eyes. The fatigue was beginning to weigh on her. Chambers still seemed alert, but Randeep yawned every three seconds. After three seconds, it became exceedingly annoying.
The guards paused for a quiet smoke at Clive Steps before proceeding on to Great George Street and Parliament Square. Once out of view, Hanson, Chambers and Randeep scampered across the road and slipped to the right of the stairs toward the entrance of the Churchill War Rooms. Randeep swiped his pass against the reader, Chambers pulled the door open, and they all piled into the foyer.
Randeep pulled open the small keypad mounted on the wall and typed in 3-0-1-1-1-8-7-4. The alarm deactivated.
“What was the code?” Hanson asked.
“Churchill’s birth date.”
“How do you even know that?”
“I’ve been here before. The displays are highly educational.” Randeep yawned again.
“You stay here. I don’t want to drag you into trouble.”
“Fine. I don’t like trouble.”
“Hang on a minute,” Chambers whispered. “If we’re dealing with people from the future, won’t they know we came here?”
“It’s complicated,” Randeep said. “On one level, yes. But it all relies on information. If someone recorded it, then maybe. But if history’s written by the winners, and you’re the winners, you can say whatever you want, ignoring small events like this.”
“A simple yes or no would’ve done,” Hanson said.
“When it comes to time there’s no simple—”
“That’s another way,” Randeep muttered, as they ran into the catacombs. “Be unpredictable.”
Hanson and Chambers hurried into the service tunnel. Noise of industry filtered through, indicating there were people around. Peering around a corner, Hanson saw a janitor slowly pushing a small cart loaded with cleaning equipment. She ducked back out of sight.
Chambers indicated an air-conditioning control room opposite. They found a service hatch and climbed up into the ducting. Hanson led as they crawled along, being guided by the grills for each room below. Eventually, the ducting turned back on itself and they found a quiet room and eased down into it. They eased open the door and looked into the hallway.
A sign in the center of the corridor indicated that HMRC security was to their right. They quietly crept along the hallway and slipped into a storage room. Hanson glanced around the doorway toward the security station. She gasped. One monitor showed news footage of her.
“He chased me last night,” Hanson said. “They’re waiting for us.”
Chambers peeked around. A security guard with a long scar on the side of his face was standing in the center of the corridor on the other side of the station barrier, surrounded by safety and surveillance equipment. He was checking the face of a cleaner as she moved through the wire gate of the checkpoint.
“How do we get past?” Chambers said. “There was a light switch back at the corner, maybe we could—”
“No, they’ll know it’s us. Where’s the Mission Impossible team when you need them?” Hanson slumped down to the floor. She screwed up her face in concentration. “Winners write history,” she whispered, “but surely they only write what they know.”
She tapped her fingers on the floor. Her eyes roved over the contents of the room. A large fire-escape map was pinned to the wall. “Got you. They’ll know it’s us.” She tapped her finger on a point on the chart. “You go there. I’ll give you fifteen seconds. And come around the back.”
