Foresight

by Graham Storrs

  ***

  Olivia Bradley put down the phone and looked sheepishly at Jay. “Well, that seems to have settled that,” she said.

  Jay smiled. “The General explained that you can tell me anything at all about your work?”

  “Oh, no question about it. He was most emphatic.”

  “Good.” He turned to Laura. “Why don’t you start by explaining why you thought bringing Olivia out here would be a good idea? Then Olivia can tell us if you were right.”

  They were in Laura’s lab, in a small conference room off the main workshop area. The chairs were uncomfortable and the flask of filtered coffee Laura had set in the centre of the table contained a brew unfit for human consumption. He made a mental note to improve the conditions down there as soon as the current crisis was over.

  “Well,” Laura began, obviously wondering quite where to start. She guided a wave of hair off her face with the middle finger of her right hand and Jay noticed what a delicate gesture it was. “You know there has been a lot of academic work on time travel over the past couple of decades? Most of it has been trying to retrofit the work of Faber and Dickson into what we all thought we knew about physics.” He knew about Faber and Dickson, a couple of unemployed doctoral students who, at the height of the global depression now called The Adjustment, had quite literally built the first lob site in their kitchen. Dickson had died of a drug overdose two years later and Faber was killed later in the decade in an accident at a splashparty when a lighting rig collapsed.

  “It hasn’t been a successful venture, so far,” Olivia said.

  Laura explained. “Before the new time formulae were worked out, we were struggling to unify relativity with quantum theory. Now we have a completely new understanding of time that fits with neither.” Olivia wanted to jump in with something but Laura kept going. “Which is where Olivia comes in. I heard her ask a question at a conference recently that implied there had been some progress in fitting metatemporal pseudo-space with quantum theory—a many-worlds interpretation of the timefront.”

  Jay held up his hands. “I know you’re dumbing it down for me, but you need to get a lot dumber than that before I can grasp what you’re trying to tell me.”

  Laura eyed him sceptically, as if she thought he might be joking. “It sounded to me,” she said, “as if Olivia had a handle on how the future arises from the present.”

  Jay caught his breath. “What?” He turned to Olivia. “Is she saying you’ve found a way to travel into the future? And you’re working on that at Aldermaston?” It was a wild surmise but his imagination was on a hair trigger.

  Olivia was shocked. “Good God, no! I mean …” She was flustered and for a moment looked from Jay to Laura and back without seeming to know what to say. “It’s what the military wants, of course. They’d love us to build a FORESIGHT machine but we’re miles away from that. Honestly, we’re still fiddling about with the basic theory. It’ll be years before we know if a future shot is even possible.”

  Jay sat back, open mouthed. “But the future isn’t made yet,” he said. “Everybody knows that. The Universe we know stops at the present. The future is just a jumble. Chaos. It doesn’t take form until …” His grasp on physics was tenuous at best. “Isn’t the present like some kind of wave that moves into this future mish-mash and organizes it into the next moment, and then the next? How can you go forward in time if there’s nothing there?” And what would it mean? he asked himself. What could criminals and terrorists do if they could jump forward in time? “Holy crap. Tell me this isn’t true.”

  Olivia shook her head. “Well, it’s not. It isn’t true. It’s just some scraps of theory and a lot of military wishful thinking.”

  “Foresight,” Jay said, his voice weak with apprehension. “They’ve got a project up already to build it, haven’t they?”

  “All they’ve got is an acronym,” Olivia said. “Future Observation and Reconnaissance Equipment for somethingorother Intelligence Gathering … Strategic, I think. No idea what the H stands for but the T is probably ‘Time’. They want to be able to look ahead to see what the enemy is doing and then use that information to outsmart them. They see it as a sort of machine that can take spies into the future and bring them back again.”

  “The FORESIGHT machine,” Jay said.

  Olivia screwed up her face. “They might as well call it the TARDIS for all its resemblance to reality.”

  “Holy crap,” he said again.

  “You see why I asked Olivia to come?” Laura said.

  “So Aldermaston caused last night’s event?” Jay asked.

  Olivia shook her head. “No way. I tell you, it’s all airware at the moment, people sitting around with whiteboards drawing Hong diagrams.”

  “Hong diagrams?” Laura asked.

  Olivia spoke quickly, apparently mostly focused on convincing Jay there was nothing to worry about. “It’s a kind of vector that describes unfolding future possibilities at a quantum level. Derived from the Schrödinger equation. Very clever, actually. A sort of many-worlds Feynman diagram.”

  Jay and Laura watched her in silence until Jay said, in a flat voice, “Who’s Hong?”

  Olivia blinked at what she obviously saw as an irrelevant turn in the conversation. “He’s a Chinese physicist. Was, I should say. He died in a fire or something, about three years ago. Pity, ’cause we could really have used someone like that in our lab.”

  Jay looked at Laura and she looked back at him, clearly thinking the same thing. He got up and walked across the room, feeling the urge to kick the furniture around, but holding it in. If the Chinese had developed a new time-travel technology … If they could see the future … None of his thoughts would resolve themselves. But it was all someone else’s problem, anyway, not his. Espionage was another department. He tried to re-focus.

  “You haven’t run any experiments? Sent a mouse forwards or whatever?”

  “Good God, no. I keep telling you. It’s all a military wet dream at the moment.”

  “What about the Chinese?”

  “The Chinese?”

  “Could they be running experiments?”

  The physicist bristled. “I hardly think so.”

  Jay ignored her wounded professional pride. “But they could, couldn’t they? If they have a three-year head start? If Hong isn’t as dead as they say he is?”

  “What? Now look, Jay, I know you’re in intelligence and everything but that’s no reason to be completely paranoid.” Jay continued to stare at her, willing her to consider the possibility. She grew more irritable but said, “Even with Hong, we’d be ten years away from doing the kind of experiment you’re talking about. Twenty, for all I know. It may be completely impossible. And, anyway …” She looked Jay in the eye and he could see she was about to deliver the coup de grace. “Even if FORESIGHT was working. Even if you could get inside it and visit the future, it wouldn’t matter. The timestream only flows one way. There would be no backwash. It’s a physical impossibility.” She said it again with extra emphasis. “A physical impossibility, Jay. Whatever caused last night’s weirdness was nothing to do with traveling to the future.”

  Chapter 9: Surprise

  Sandra made her way through an adjoining property—a place selling carpets and floor tiles, closed up and abandoned for the duration—and climbed a fence at the back of Clarke Engineering. She was at a spot where there were few windows and piles of palettes. An abandoned forklift truck gave her some cover from any cameras that might be watching. The fence was strong and new and topped with razorwire. She had to hunt out a rubbish skip and retrieve a strip of discarded carpet to throw across the top of the fence before she dared attempt it. Her hands were almost numb with cold and she tumbled dangerously into the engineering-works yard when her grip on the fence failed. For a minute, she crouched behind the forklift, shivering, waiting to be sure no-one had seen her and raised the alarm.

  All remained silent. She cut across to the wall of the building and peered in th
rough a barred and dusty window. It was an empty room—some kind of storage area with electrical components in bins, reels of cable—nothing interesting. She moved on to the next window, then the next. It was the same. All the windows were barred and inside was nothing worth seeing.

  She rounded a corner and moved along the back of the building. The wall ran unbroken for twenty meters, was punctuated by a door, then ran on again for maybe another twenty. The only windows were high and narrow, also barred. There was a large wooden reel lying in the yard on which heavy cable must once have been coiled. It comprised two wooden discs, with a fat, wooden axle connecting them. It was a meter across with a two meter diameter. Perfect. She heaved it onto its edge and rolled it over to one of the high windows. Then she pulled it onto its side again, cursing the weight of it, and climbed on top. By standing on tiptoes, she could get her nose over the windowsill and look inside.

  She saw a large room with a bare concrete floor. Half a dozen people in white overalls moved about, tending equipment. Every one of them was Asian. The walls were lined with banks of gray electronics cabinets. The ones with glass fronts she could see were packed with circuit boards. Others had high voltage warning signs on them. She felt her stomach knot. Was she looking at supercapacitor arrays? She scanned the room quickly, searching for the chest-freezer-sized boxes she feared she would find. And there they were, stacked four high, filling the far corner: focus fusion reactors, enough to deliver hundreds of megawatts to the capacitor banks. And from there it would go to …

  She had to strain her neck to follow the fat cables snaking away from the electronics to the low platform in the space below her window. For a temporal displacement rig, it was odd. The platform was circular and six tall columns rose up around it in a perfect hexagon. They curved towards one another, well above her eye level. Within this giant birdcage, at the dead centre of the platform, sat a black sphere, two meters in diameter. About the height of the tallest teknik tending the machines.

  She had a sudden flashback to another room on another continent and another sphere, this one made of clear plastic. “Because it has to be done and no-one else can do it,” a dead man’s voice said in her memory.

  Her heart was racing. Whatever fancy refinements they’d made, those stupid bastards at HiQua had built a lob site. What possible commercial benefit a lob into the past could give anybody, Sandra could not imagine—unless they planned to run it as some kind of fairground ride. There was always talk about so-called chronotourism. Entrepreneurs with more money than brain cells were always trying to get a scheme up and running, but no government would ever license them. The risks were far too great. She’d read speculation about sending microbots back in time to grab cells from extinct animals—gorillas, polar bears, even dodos—sequence their genes, and bring back the knowledge of how to remake them. Fine if you were a paleontologist but unless you were raising the dead on a Jurassic Park scale, she still couldn’t see what was in it for HiQua.

  “Seen enough?”

  She jumped so hard the reel she was on rattled. In a flash, she dropped to a crouch, turning to face whoever it was.

  Farid Hamiye was standing well away from her, pointing a stunner at her chest. Her sudden reaction made his grin fade for a moment, but it was soon back in place. She had no cover except the reel she was standing on and the distance between them was too great for a surprise attack. Her heart was hammering, but she forced herself to remain calm. As casually as she could, she jumped down off the reel and stood facing him.

  “I thought you’d gone,” she said, cursing herself for letting him creep up on her.

  “Well, that makes two of us. Lucky I spotted your car parked in the road as I drove away. If I hadn’t come back to investigate, I might never have had the chance to meet you again.” She smiled and took a step towards him, needing to close the distance. He took a step back. “Don’t,” he said, “or I will shoot you.”

  She stopped and raised her hands, still smiling. “I suppose you’re wondering what I’m doing here.”

  He smiled back. He had a great smile. “I suppose you’re going to give me a load of rubbish about getting lost or some—”

  She dived right, hearing the whine of the stunner’s discharge as she hit the concrete and rolled, then up onto her feet and into a headlong charge straight for him. He’d missed and that meant she still had a chance to reach him and disarm him. But he was cool, and fast. His second shot hit her in the shoulder and her body convulsed as fifty thousand volts streaked through her nervous system, clenching every muscle, blasting her thoughts to fragments. The last thing she felt was skidding across the ground to fetch up at his beautiful shoes.

  ***

  “No, you’re not listening to me.” Cara tried to keep the tears out of her voice. Why wouldn’t the stupid man just listen?

  “I’m sure she’s all right, darling,” Jay said. “She’s just a bit late, that’s all.”

  “No. Someone came to the house. She went after them. Now she hasn’t even called for more than two hours. She’s in trouble, Dad.” And I’m stuck at Gran’s, she thought, and you’re over there in Berlin. “You have to do something. You have to come here and find her. It’s happening all over again.”

  “I can’t, Cara. You know I can’t. I’ve got a whole section to run and there’s a crisis on. Your mum’s a very resourceful woman, she’ll—”

  Cara shouted over him. “If you tell me that one more time I’m going to scream!” She took a breath. “Look, you know what it means if someone’s stalking Mum again. You of all people know what kind of danger she’s in if one of your old enemies gets his hands on her. Why won’t you do something? And after last night too! Do you think it’s just a coincidence that the whole world turns to shit and the next day people turn up looking for Mum? Do you?”

  Jay was beginning to look exasperated. “Yes,” he said. “Yes I do think it’s a coincidence. What happened last night wasn’t a timesplash. Maybe it has nothing to do with time travel at all.” He paused for a moment and Cara thought he looked a bit shifty, as if he didn’t really believe what he was saying. When he spoke again, he was on a fresh tack. “Your mum’s been in touch with me during the day. It all sounds like some kind of mix-up. It’s something to do with that company she works for. They’ve dug into her past and made the MI5 connection and now they think she’s some kind of spy. That’s why they sent someone to bug the house. It’s all just a misunderstanding, honey. Yes, she thinks there’s a time-travel connection but you know your mum: she sees ghosts from her past under every bed.”

  None of which convinced Cara. “So you’re just going to abandon her?”

  “No! Of course I’m not. I’ll do something, all right? I’ll sort something out.”

  “What?”

  “Something.” He looked irritated. “I don’t know, but it’s a storm in a teacup, you’ll see.”

  Cara could see she wasn’t going to get any farther. “It better be nothing, for your sake.”

  “For my sake?”

  “If I tell Mum you just left her alone to die, she’ll come over there and kick your arse. And you know she can.”

  Her father’s face was a scowl. “No-one’s going to die, all right? Least of all your mother.” Again he had that shifty look.

  “So you’re going to do something?”

  “I said I would.” Cara humphed, letting her displeasure show. “Look, I’ve got to go,” Jay said. “You haven’t been worrying your gran with all this nonsense, have you?”

  “Of course not! And it’s not nonsense!”

  Jay gave a non-committal smile. “I really have to go, love. Say hello to Gran—and to Sandra when she gets home.”

  He’d hung up before she had time to remonstrate. Bloody man! How could her own father be such an idiot? She should get on a plane and go over there, bang on his office door and demand that he do something.

  Or …

  She put in another call. “Dom?”

  A young man wit
h ginger hair and a long face stared at her in surprise. “Cara? I mean … Hi! How’s it going? Wow! What about last night, eh?”

  “Shut up, Dom and listen. You’re, like, a genius hacker, right?”

  Caught between the scent of trouble and the opportunity to show off to the beautiful Cara, the young man hesitated. “Well …”

  “I need a favor,” she said. “I’d owe you big time.” Cara was used to boys doing her favors. What was wrong with the boy?

  “Please, Dom,” she said, wheedling.

  “I’d like to,” he said, still uncertain. “What is it you want?”

  She smiled at him. “Oh, thank you. I just need you to hack someone’s commplant.”

  “What? Whose?”

  She took that as an admission that he could do it. “My mother’s. She’s in trouble and I need to find her. I want you to look at her commplant and tell me where she is.”

  “Your mother’s gone missing? Have you called the police? Was she caught in the quake?”

  Cara shook her head. “It’s not like that. And I don’t want the police involved. Look, I can’t really explain, but I have to find her. Will you do it?”

  He looked pained. “Well, I suppose I could reach in and extract her Galileo coordinates. It would be pretty easy if you could get me a couple of numbers off her installation documentation.”

  “No problem.” She had full access to the household files. “When can you start?”

  “As soon as I get the details from you.”

  Cara was already searching through the documents. She’d have to make up some story for her gran but that wouldn’t be too hard. She’d probably need a car too. She set an agent hunting through local hire companies for the cheapest deal. She started thinking about what she needed to take with her.