The World Walker Series Box Set

by Ian W. Sainsbury

  Seb sat silently for a long time. When he spoke again, his voice cracked slightly. He felt utterly exhausted.

  “And Cubby?” he said.

  “Who?” said Mee.

  “The landlord,” said Seb. “We stopped him in that other universe, but not ours?”

  “No,” said Seb2. “That was our Cubby. In our universe. He’s a changed man. His apartments are about to get a makeover.”

  “But in all the other universes…?” said Seb.

  “We can’t be everywhere,” said Seb2. “But we’ve intervened in similar situations 489 times in the last year. And this is the first time we’ve had to move into a neighboring universe. It’s gonna happen, but it’s gonna happen rarely.” He glanced upward. All the images faded away. “Something I need to tell you.”

  “What?” said Seb.

  “There’s only one of you in all of the universes we’ve touched when Walking,” said Seb2. “You—me—Seb Varden—you exist in some, you’re dead in some, you were never born in others. But this universe is the only one where you became a World Walker.”

  Seb sat completely still.

  “So I can’t be everywhere, I can’t help everyone. And when I choose to save someone, I’m effectively allowing the same person to die in every other universe. And there’s only me?”

  Seb2 nodded slowly.

  “I need to sleep,” said Seb. “Come on, Mee.”

  17

  New York

  A soft bell from the speakers flanking Mason’s computer screens alerted him to an email. It was a zip folder containing the piece of code he had commissioned from Wickerman. He picked up his phone. All of his calls were routed through a complex, ever-changing route of satellites and IP networks and completely untraceable.

  “Yes?” The woman who answered the call was CEO of the largest cellphone corporation in the world. She had appeared on the cover of Time, repeatedly turned down offers of a political future from both major parties, neither of whom had been able to guess as to where her allegiance lay. She was quick-thinking, mercurial, consistently ahead of the game. Her status in the business world as a brilliant maverick had been sealed when her company had released a cellphone that retailed for the price of a large coffee. Media and industry pundits had confidently predicted her downfall, only to eat their words when the phone sold in its billions worldwide. The apps subsequently released made back the revenue—and more—initially sacrificed by selling the phones so cheaply. The apps were priced similarly to other apps, but the percentage her company took was far higher than her competitors. But, by then, she had captured nearly sixty percent of the world market, and no one was in a position to refuse her terms. She was a proud, successful woman who took orders from no one. No one other than Mason.

  When his email arrived in the account only he used, she brought a board meeting to an early halt and read it alone.

  A piece of code for an update you are due to release next week. Make sure it is included.

  She shivered. Six years ago, Mason had transferred Mark, her severely disabled brother to a state-of-the-art facility in Colorado. When she had discovered Mark had been moved without her knowledge, she’d been horrified. A helicopter had arrived to take her to him and, fearing for her brother’s life, she had obeyed telephone instructions and boarded it. On arrival, she’d been shown around a superb hospital, equipped with the latest medical technology. Mark was in the hands of the very best doctors, his needs taken care of by friendly, caring staff. He was happy. But once she was left alone with her brother, his smile suddenly disappeared as his body began to twist in agony. He lost control of his bowels and bladder and began screaming, his hands smacking his own face in pain and panic. She screamed herself, punching the emergency button. No one came. She ran for the door. It was locked. Her cellphone rang.

  “Watch carefully,” whispered a voice.

  As quickly as it had started, Mark’s fit ended, his hands unclenching, his body relaxing. He sobbed in bewilderment and she ran to him, holding his hand.

  “He has a good forty years left with proper care, I’m told,” came the whisper.

  “Who are you?” she said. “What are you?”

  “My name is Mason. As to what I am, I am your brother’s keeper. You currently control the biggest communication network in the world. I need access to it. You answer to me, now.”

  “What’s to stop me going public, going to the press?”

  “Go ahead. Mark will die slowly, in terrible pain and nothing can be traced to me. In fact, all the records here, and on your own computer, show that you requested, and paid for, his transfer to this facility. I suggest you think of his future.”

  And now, for the first time since Mason had become the true power behind her throne, he was finally giving her an order. She thought back to last weekend, when she’d spent a day with Mark in the beautiful garden in the facility where he was the only patient. He’d been happy, calm and pain-free.

  She dialed an internal number.

  “Andreas? One more piece of code coming through before we release the update. Let me know when it’s ready.”

  The code worked as it was supposed to. Over a period of ten days, Mason watched the results on his screens. All over the world hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands, millions and, finally, over a billion cellphones updated their operating systems, appearing as pulsing colors on the international map he was monitoring. The coverage wasn’t absolutely complete, but he was willing to gamble Varden and Patel hadn’t abandoned civilization completely. Both of them were city people by birth and inclination.

  Mason had used voice recognition software before, but the program he had commissioned for this task was sophisticated, subtle, and different from other similar programs in one crucial respect. It wasn’t interested in the spoken word. It was only interested in the sung word.

  Over the last few months, Mason’s software had imported every recording Meera Patel had ever made. There was plenty available—early demos, an EP, three albums with her band and some unique content online, either recorded at live shows by fans, or put out by the band itself. Then the search algorithm online had found recordings posted in the last twelve months. Mason immediately attempted to track the geographical origin of the recordings, only to find a maze of broken links and dead ends convoluted enough to challenge his own precautions. Maybe even more so. Where Patel—or Varden—had got their sudden mastery of technology from, Mason had no idea.

  All of the recordings made up a database which was passively listening to each call being made by the billions of phones now using the updated operating system. Whenever a call was in progress, the code kicked in and checked for any singing in the background. Male voices were filtered out first, then any recordings which perfectly matched the database, as these could only be recordings. Frequency range was the next filter, as Patel’s singing voice was husky and low, which put her into a group encompassing approximately thirty percent of female singers. The next filter was far more complex, identifying formants and phonemes favored by Patel in her songs. Any close matches were then compared with the database to find musical similarities in timbre, tone, sustain, pitch, and intervals. Only 0.00027% of all calls reached the final set of filters which were the most sophisticated of all, attempting to identify and match traces of dialect, cadence and vocabulary.

  The real genius of the code Wickerman had supplied was its two-way nature. It fed information back, but also learned as it received feedback from the voice recognition software. It got quicker and more accurate with every call. As a result, on the eleventh day after activation, a red light winked onto the screen and an alarm sounded. Within a few seconds, two more lights appeared as the software automatically zoomed in on the location. Another three lights appeared, then the alarm stopped, meaning the source was no longer being listened to. Six cellphones had signaled that they’d heard the singing voice of Meera Patel.

  Mason noted the time and the location, then waited. Three da
ys later, nine cellphones triggered the alarm again. The area pinpointed was less than a mile from the first. Mason picked up the phone.

  “Westlake,” he whispered, “assemble a team. No Manna users.” If he sent a team including Users, Varden would know they were coming before they got anywhere near. “How long?”

  Westlake didn’t respond immediately. He was doing some quick mental calculations. He’d need a team of eight and they’d be coming from various parts of the country.

  “Fifteen to twenty hours,” he said, allowing a couple of hours for unforeseen delays.

  “Do it,” whispered Mason. “And go via Ford’s place. You’re going to need to look like someone else.” Despite his distrust of Ford, the man’s ability to alter his own, or another’s, appearance was unparalleled.

  “Who do I need to look like?” said Westlake.

  “Sebastian Varden,” said Mason. There was a long pause at the other end of the line. Westlake clearly remembered cutting off Seb Varden’s head and watching it, and his body, being burned down to a blackened skeleton. But no one questioned Mason, not even a special-forces trained multiple murderer like Westlake.

  “Yes, sir. And our final destination?”

  “Mexico City.”

  18

  Las Vegas

  The sun was just beginning to dip below the horizon. In Walt’s yard, the buzz and dart of hummingbirds and the scuttle of lizards were the only sounds. Walt sat in a garden chair watching the shadows lengthen and the last of the light slide away. He hadn’t had a drink all day. He checked his pockets one last time. Passport—not in his own name, naturally—his wallet, and a small key. No phone—it was on the desk in his office. He stripped all his credit cards out of the wallet and tossed them into the trash, leaving $3,000 cash which he rolled up and put in his pants pocket.

  Walt looked back at the house. Gaudy, opulent, over-the-top, its design based on the Taj Mahal, for thirty years it had stood as a beacon of bad taste in a neighborhood famous for it. He admitted he felt a sentimental attachment to the hideous piece of architecture. Leaving it was one of the sacrifices he was going to have to make. The car, much of his money, and the few friends he’d made in Las Vegas—none close—were others. He felt few regrets about any of them. The true sacrifice was yet to happen, and it was a sacrifice he would have to keep making if he was ever to be truly free of Mason.

  Standing slowly and taking a few deep breaths, Walt began to still his mental processes and bring an intense focus to bear on the earth a few feet in front of him. Over eighty years of practicing with Manna along with his own innate ability had made his talent formidable.

  The obscure but powerful use of Manna he was using had been first demonstrated to Walt by Sid Bernbaum, his mentor. Sid had taken him out to a junkyard one night and told him the Jewish legend of the Golem. According to the ancient stories, the golem was a creature made of clay and given ‘animus’, or spirit, by the will and prayers of a rabbi versed in the mystic arts hidden in the Torah. Walt had watched Sid concentrate, hold out a hand. A creature had formed itself from the dirt. A clumsy, misshapen being, its passing acquaintance with the human form only emphasizing its monstrousness. It had lived for a few minutes, then collapsed back into the dirt which had given it shape. Walt had practiced night after night for months until he began to match, then supersede, the realism and longevity of Sid’s golems. “The accepted word these days is ‘homunculi’,” said Sid, “but they will always be golems to me.”

  Now, over seven decades later, Walt’s homunculi were so advanced they could last for many hours and obey simple instructions. He’d even had one open the door to a pizza delivery guy once, but the resulting scream confirmed Walt’s theory that a homunculus could never look truly human.

  His mind emptied of every thought other than the image of what he wanted to create, Walt held out his hand and watched the earth begin to spiral upward like a miniature cyclone. As it grew, a core formed. There was no need for a skeletal structure. The entire creation was made in two stages. The first was workmanlike, rough, merely throwing matter together to produce the right dimensions with which to work. The second stage was more like sculpture, taking the rough figure and carving out fine details, adding color, expression and because it needed to mimic humanity, a capacity for movement as if it possessed the skeleton and musculature of its artist.

  The whole process took just under eight minutes, more than double the time Walt normally spent on a homunculus. He was sweating slightly as he looked at the figure before him. The creature’s skin was ashen gray, its eyes dark shadows. He’d added clothes to it, but had only used shades of blue and gray. The cameras in the house were black and white, so there was no need to waste energy trying to reproduce the ivory of Walt’s shirt or the burgundy of his Italian loafers.

  Walt had the creature walk up and down the yard a couple of times. He certainly walked like Walt and even aped some of his mannerisms—the way he pinched the bridge of his nose when tired, or stretched his upper back muscles by holding his arms behind him, hands clasped together. The creature couldn’t speak. No need—there were no microphones in the house to pick up sound.

  There was only one final gift to give, but Walt hesitated. What he was about to do, no one ever did. It would leave him exposed in ways he hadn’t experienced since he was a boy. But if he didn’t go ahead, Mason would inexorably track him down and kill him. Slowly.

  Walt closed his eyes and offered up a silent prayer to the god he’d stopped believing in ninety years previously. Then he walked up to the homunculus and took both of its coarse, lumpen hands in his. He closed his eyes, opened up the channel through which Manna had flowed in his body almost all of his life. He let all the Manna he possessed course through him, leaving through his fingertips, filling his creation with enough to keep it going—he hoped—for twenty-four hours or more. Long enough for him to get away. Long enough for him to be on a plane to somewhere quiet. Somewhere simple. Somewhere Mason would never care quite enough to go looking for him. Somewhere it wouldn’t matter that he had just got rid of every last vestige of Manna in his entire body. Somewhere he could avoid the temptation of looking for more.

  Walt would have to learn to exist like a normal mortal again. He could no longer slow the aging process. If he wanted something from someone, he couldn’t just get it. He’d have to ask. And if someone wanted to kill him badly enough, he’d almost certainly have to die, since all of his defenses had gone. Although over a hundred years old, he had a body a fifty-year-old would be happy with. Barring accident or violent murder, he might live for another fifty years. If he walked away from trouble. The problem was, he was about to do the opposite.

  Walt nodded at the homunculus. It nodded back and stepped back into the house, sliding the door shut behind him. Walt watched it fix itself a large bourbon, grab a cold beer and head toward the office. It hesitated as it reached the door, looked out toward where Walt was standing in the dark, flicked off the light switch and was gone.

  Walt climbed the fence at the back of the yard, cut through a neighbor’s garden and strolled up to the guard house at the perimeter of the gated community.

  “Hey, Pete,” he said as the overweight security guard looked up from the ball game to register his approach. “I need a taxi to the airport. Phone’s dead. Can you call one for me?”

  “Sure thing, Mr. Ford.” As the man dialed, Walt peeled two hundreds off the roll in his pocket. Pete’s eyes widened when he saw them. Walt leaned close enough to get a nose-full of acrid aftershave; the kind often used to mask worse odors beneath. He only flinched a little.

  “I’m still at home, safely tucked up in bed,” he said. “You haven’t seen me since I drove in this evening. Ok?”

  Pete eyed the hundreds greedily, then tucked them in his breast pocket, smiling.

  “Sure thing, Mr. Ford. No problem. No problem at all.”

  McCarran airport was busy, and Walt knew a man his age, wearing a suit and traveling alone woul
d be unlikely to be remembered. He bought a one-way flight to London Heathrow, from where he could transfer to almost anywhere. He had used his key to open a luggage locker rented weeks ago. The carry-on bag he now wheeled behind him contained old books, mostly maps and atlases, tying in with his passport which announced him as Professor Patrick Henson, an academic specializing in mediaeval cartography. Nestled between the pages of the most fragile-looking volumes were bearer bonds amounting to a little over two million dollars.

  As the fasten seatbelt light went off and the charming stewardess brought him a bone-dry Jerez sherry, he felt a little of the pressure lift, but not much. He believed he was out of Mason’s reach for now. Maybe forever. But he had no Manna. And if he wanted to stay hidden, he could never Use again. He was normal. A nobody. And he’d decided he had to contact Meera. Had to warn her that Mason hadn’t given up. That he was coming for her. And if Seb Varden really had died that day at the building site, or if he wasn’t there to save her when Mason came looking, her life would become a living hell.

  So Walter Ford, an old man in a middle-aged man’s body, a man who had once helped kidnap Meera and had helped Mason’s men kill the people who had sheltered her, was now going to try and find her and offer his help. Which, now that he had no power at all, was a pretty worthless offer. It was a crazy plan. But Walt knew he was going to see it through. Something had finally changed in him. As he looked out at the moonlight on the clouds above Nevada, he wondered if this was how it felt to have a conscience. If so, it felt like shit.

  19