TimeRiders: The Infinity Cage (book 9)

by Alex Scarrow

  ‘Don’t call me that,’ she snapped. ‘How many teams were there before us?’

  Waldstein looked away from her. ‘It’s not imp–’

  ‘Goddammit! How many of us did you make?!’

  ‘Three. I made three teams.’

  She shook her head, unsure what she was going to do if she lost control of herself. Punch him?

  ‘We grew three batches of you to full-growth development. Three Liams, three Maddys and three Sals. One set as test models to –’

  ‘Test models?’

  ‘Models on which to test the various cognitive back stories, your memories. To test that they had taken, that you were all mentally stable and capable of functioning properly. To test you believed you were who you thought you were. When we were happy with that, we retired those test models and grew a second batch, which we made here, then sent back to Brooklyn. To the archway.’

  ‘Retired?!’ Once again her voice had a sharp edge to it. ‘Retired! Don’t you dare … DON’T YOU DARE tell me you –’

  ‘Storage, Maddy! No … We didn’t kill them! I promise you. We put them on ice.’

  She glared at him. ‘Test models? Put us on ice? Jesus! We’re just another frikkin’ meat product to you, aren’t we? Just like Becks. We’re just another product line your big business can make and sell!’

  The air in the small laboratory was charged with tension. She turned away from him and was staring out of the window, absently cracking the joints of her fingers.

  ‘With the deepest of respect …’ Waldstein finally said, ‘you are what you are. Without the memories we assembled for you, without the life story of a girl called Maddy Carter, you would be just like this support unit: a compliant bio-software product. Organic machines. Automatons with a very limited ability to plan long-term goals, to think strategically.’

  He stepped awkwardly round one of the desks towards her. ‘We had to make you as human as possible. Had to make you believe you were human. We had to make you as self-sufficient as we could and able to think and act entirely on your own without our help. To reason emotionally as well as logically, to think instinctively. To trust your gut, to join the dots in an entirely heuristic way.’ He touched her arm gently. ‘And, my God, all three of you were remarkable creations. You all performed so incredibly well.’

  She turned and smiled sarcastically at him. ‘Good little robots, were we?’

  ‘Don’t think for one moment I thought of you like I think of these things,’ said Waldstein, gesturing at Becks. ‘They’re little more than dumb animals. Lumbering pack horses.’ He turned to the support unit. ‘No offence.’

  The lines of Becks’s scowl seemed to deepen slightly.

  ‘I thought of Liam as my son!’ He turned back to Maddy. ‘And you as the daughter Ellie and I might have one day had. And Sal … I thought of all three of you as my children!’

  Maddy narrowed her eyes. ‘So … so you were prepared to murder your own children?’

  Waldstein gazed down at the floor for a moment, then looked her in the eye. ‘Yes … I was prepared to murder my own children … if that’s what it took to buy humanity a second chance. Then … yes.’

  Maddy turned away from the window once again, then came and sat down heavily on a stool. ‘You said three batches?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So, we were the third batch?’

  ‘That’s right, Maddy. You were the third batch.’

  She frowned. ‘You made a test batch?’

  ‘Then we grew the first team. We grew them here. I went back to Brooklyn with them and I woke them up. The recruitment memories … I’m sure you’ve worked that out now, they were fabricated memories put into your minds. I was written into the memory as the man who recruited you.’

  ‘So? What happened to them?’ Maddy remembered what Foster had told them. Not much … but it hadn’t been a pleasant end for them. She wanted to see if Waldstein’s story was going to match Foster’s.

  ‘Something truly awful happened to them.’ He looked down at his pale wrinkled hands. One of them was trembling slightly. ‘There are things that exist in chaos space … I’m sure you’ve glimpsed them. Griggs and I both saw them … shapes … moving out there in all that white mist.’

  ‘Yeah, we’ve seen them.’

  ‘The first team … I lived with them for several months. I trained them, I mentored them. We had a minor contamination event to deal with. They performed admirably, just as well as you did first time round. After dealing with it, I was confident that they were ready to be left on their own. So, I came back to 2055.

  ‘From our time, Griggs, Olivera and I monitored things. We picked up a number of contamination vibrations from here: time waves. Contamination events that the team successfully managed to zero in on and correct before they became a problem in our time. Things seemed to be going well … our team was doing its job; history had its guardians. Then one day … one of those entities from the mist followed them back through a portal and entered the archway.’ He sighed. ‘They didn’t stand a chance.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The entity killed Maddy and Sal and destroyed the support unit. But, as for “Liam”, I don’t know precisely what happened. I believe he may have briefly escaped back to chaos space. Whatever happened … it damaged him badly. It aged him chronically. We got a message from him after the event. He got back into the archway, somehow dealt with the entity … but his team was dead; he was alone. And now a very, very sick old man.’

  ‘So you grew us? Team three?’

  ‘Yes. But only after I had explained to him what he was. A clone.’ Waldstein smiled proudly. ‘He was strong. He took the news with dignity, courage … he accepted what he was. What he had to do. So, then … yes, Maddy, we grew a third batch and we sent you back. The original Liam unit was instructed to stay with you, to mentor you, just as I had. Of course … we needed to adjust the recruitment memories and he needed to pick another name for himself.’

  ‘Foster.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He crossed the floor of the lab towards an old-fashioned wooden modesty screen. He pulled it aside, and dust and motes of fluff fluttered down and glowed briefly as they were caught in the shaft of light coming through the window.

  ‘This is where you were grown.’

  She was looking into a small adjoining room, long and narrow. Both walls were lined with growth cylinders. All of them unpowered and forgotten like specimen jars in museum storage. The glass was dusty, the liquid inside them cloudy and dark. Maddy stepped forward between the two rows of tubes.

  This is where I started my life.

  She brushed her fingers against the glass of one, drawing a window in the dust.

  ‘Look, it’s probably best you don’t …’

  She leaned towards the growth tube, peering in. Hanging in the middle of the foggy water floated a wrinkled carcass. She shaded her eyes to see better through the glass. The body of a young woman, thin wasted arms folded across her chest, knees drawn up, as if in death she was still ashamed of her nudity. Curly hair hung round her head like a dirty halo, framing the leathered skin of her long-dead mummified face. Her eyes, mercifully, were closed. She almost looked asleep. Asleep for fifteen years.

  Me. That’s me. Maddy Version 1.

  ‘My God …’ she whispered.

  There I float … preserved like some extinct creature in formaldehyde.

  ‘When I closed this down … locked up these labs, they were no longer needed. I figured we were all finished here. History had been successfully preserved for a while … and I assumed the support units had located and retired you.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘I thought the agency was done with … and these were surplus to requirements.’

  Surplus to requirements.

  She turned round. ‘And you just left us to rot in these tubes?’

  ‘I had to close the labs down in a hurry. I had no choice.’

  ‘Just like your children, were we?’ She shook her he
ad and cursed. ‘We were just products to you. Just another bunch of frikkin’ meatbots.’

  ‘No!’ Waldstein shook his head. ‘That’s not true. I loved all three of you. Once you were birthed and your memories installed … you became as real –’

  She pushed past him, kicked the screen out of her way.

  ‘Maddy!’

  She stopped beside Becks, then turned round to face him.

  ‘Maddy, you and the others are so much more than you think you are. You became so much more than what you started out as.’ He extended a hand to her. ‘You were … you are … heroes. You’re saviours of humanity.’

  ‘Heroes?’ She stared at his hand. ‘I feel like what I am … a product.’ Her voice hitched with anger. ‘Worse than that … a redundant product.’ She turned and left the lab.

  Waldstein stood silent for a moment and slowly lowered his hand to his side.

  Becks finally spoke. ‘I understand how Maddy feels.’

  He turned to look at her. ‘You all had a purpose, the most important role … in the history of mankind … ever. A mission …’

  Becks nodded. ‘And now … we don’t.’

  CHAPTER 53

  1890, London

  Liam finished scooping sawdust into the wooden frame of the plinth and stamped it down with his feet to make a firm bed.

  ‘I still suggest it is best to wait until Maddy contacts us or returns, Liam.’

  ‘And when might that be? Huh? Soon? Or never?’

  Bob nodded. ‘This is true. But you are proposing to portal into this void to make contact with entities we know nothing about. This may be extremely hazardous.’

  Liam stood on the plinth and tested the bed of sawdust with his own weight. ‘Come on, Bob, when have we done something that hasn’t been hazardous?’

  ‘You are proposing to make contact with someone who has nothing to do with Waldstein.’

  ‘Aye. All the more reason we need to find out who he or they … are …’

  ‘Their technology is far more advanced than ours –’

  ‘Aye, I know that.’ He stepped off the plinth. ‘But, Bob … this is it: this looks like our best chance to find out what those transmitters are there for.’

  ‘You expect them to explain themselves to you?’

  He turned to Bob. ‘In the jungle, all we had was a vague impression of them: worn-down engravings, that was it. Just a hint of who they might be. Now –’ he pointed at the grainy image still on the screen – ‘we finally get a chance to meet one of them in the flesh.’

  ‘Maddy would caution against this.’

  ‘No, she wouldn’t. She’d be right there with me on this. She’d want to know. And if Sal was with us now … so would she.’

  ‘Sal acted alone to find answers, Liam. As you are doing. This action did not end well for her.’

  ‘Bob …’ He gathered up his long hair and tied it back in a ponytail. ‘Look, me ol’ fella, I know this seems like a badly prepared plan, but we haven’t exactly had a plan since we started running for our lives. Just questions followed by more questions and not much in the way of answers. And that, my friend, is what I need more than anything.’

  Bob stepped towards him. ‘I have a bad feeling about this.’

  ‘Seriously?!’ Liam laughed. ‘You’re a meatbot. Since when have you ever come to one of your logical conclusions based on something as half-arsed as a bad feeling?’

  ‘Instinct … non-conscious intuitive thought is how you and Maddy have been able to survive this long. That is why I trust your judgement.’

  ‘Well, thanks, Bob … but –’

  ‘What is your instinct telling you now, Liam?’

  ‘That maybe I’ll walk away finally knowing everything.’ He shrugged. ‘Or not walk away at all. Truth is, Bob … I think Waldstein’s just a sideshow here. He made us and this agency to keep some order. Right? Like, we’re his policemen, making sure the whole time-travel carnival doesn’t turn into a messy free-for-all. I can understand that. Sensible goal. But those transmitters?’ He shook his head. ‘We were meant to find them. That’s how it feels to me anyway. We were led to them … they mean something important and we were always meant to find out what.’

  ‘Always?’

  ‘Aye … always. Right? The Voynich Manuscript? The Holy Grail? All that stuff has been waiting around quite a while for us to put it all together.’ He looked again at the screen. ‘Right there is the fella with the answers. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  Liam grinned. ‘Instinct.’ He slapped his arm. ‘Look … I’ve just got to do this. You know?’

  ‘Liam, you are aware of the aphorism “curiosity killed the cat”?’

  ‘Aye. I know that saying. But think of it this way … at least the cat died knowing something, right?’

  > The displacement machine is fully charged, Liam.

  ‘There ya go. Perfect timing. It’s an omen of good things.’ Liam smiled. ‘I’m ready to go.’

  ‘I will come along with you, of course.’

  ‘I know you will, fella. I know you will. You always do.’

  CHAPTER 54

  2070, W.G. Systems

  Denver Research Campus

  He was gone. Sometime during yesterday afternoon or overnight he’d left. Maddy found the note on his large desk, leaning against a framed holo-picture of him shaking hands with another man she didn’t recognize. He might have been a president.

  His large office was just as he’d left it. A camp bed in the corner with the quilt turned back, clothes in an untidy pile on the end, empty cans of food stacked on the floor like a small supermarket-product pyramid. The ‘secret’ door to his lab had been left wide open, swung inwards. She’d looked in there for Waldstein first before she’d come back out and found his handwritten note in an envelope perched on the desk, her name scrawled hastily across the front of it.

  Maddy,

  I’m sorry. I created you and the others to be as real as I could. To believe you were people who’d had lives, to believe you’d left behind loved ones. So that you’d care enough what happens to mankind. Perhaps that was a mistake. I don’t know. I do know you were never meant to find that out. And you wouldn’t have if Joseph hadn’t betrayed me. But that’s by the by. Spilled milk. And we both know what we’re not supposed to do over spilled milk, right?

  The point is, Maddy, you were ‘born’ an artificial person (I hate that term ‘artificial’), but you became real. You’re just as human as me or anyone else. Probably more so. Liam too.

  I wanted you both to be here in the present, to be among the few survivors, to be part of the rebuilding of society. This world has been cleansed. Just like Noah’s flood (if you want to use that biblical metaphor). And now it needs strong people to start again. I can’t think of two better humans to be there at the beginning.

  I left the lab door open deliberately. I have unlocked the computer system. I want you to open a portal to wherever you’ve been hiding away from me and invite Liam through. There’s more than enough power in the campus’s emergency generator to do that. I think that would be the best thing for you; to both be part of this new world.

  Or, if you choose, you can go into the past. Anywhere you want. Live out your lives wherever makes you happiest. But, please, make it a one-way trip. If the present isn’t for you, then find somewhere that’ll make you happy. And stay there. Remember the membrane; the fewer holes we punch through, the better.

  If you choose that, Maddy, then make sure you leave your support unit behind with orders to destroy my displacement machine. Plus all the digital storage drives in the lab. There’s nothing outside that room that could be used by anyone to rebuild this technology. So if she smashes the circuit boards and magnetic discs then sets the place on fire … that will do it.

  Finally, you’re probably wondering where I am. No, I haven’t gone back in time. I was rather tempted, but I think another blast of tachyon radiation will finish me off. So
, Maddy, look out of my office window … go on … I’m out there somewhere. Eleanor used to tell me I don’t get out of the house enough. She was quite right. A few days in the great outdoors, perhaps I might even spot the first green shoots of new life in all that dust. Who knows? I do wish I’d had a chance to see all three of you. I wish I’d had a chance to say hello and goodbye to Liam. Will you tell him he made me very proud?

  Roald Waldstein

  She placed the note back down on the desk.

  ‘What did the note say, Maddy?’ asked Becks.

  ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘Gone into the past?’

  ‘No … out there. The old fool’s gone out there to die on his own.’ She shook her head angrily. ‘I guess he figures it’s some poetic grand gesture.’ She took her glasses off and dabbed at her eyes, surprised that she was starting to cry yet again. ‘Well, he’s just an idiot for doing that.’

  No one’s going to miss you, Roald. No one’s going to know what you did. Or even care. You could have stayed here with us. You could have tried coming back in time with us.

  She felt angry with him more than anything else. She’d have forgiven him for making her believe she was human, for trying to kill her … in fact, she already had. Now the job was done there were an infinite number of warm, comfortable and pretty places he could have ‘retired’ to for however long he had left to live.

  Instead … he chose this. A pointless, sad ‘grand’ gesture.

  ‘Maddy? We need to decide what we are going to do now.’

  ‘Yup.’ She sniffed, then puffed out air. Once again it was time for her to figure out what happened next. She placed her glasses back on the bridge of her nose. ‘I guess we go back to London. We regroup with Liam … and tell him what happened to Rashim, and we let him know what all this was about.’