by Alex Scarrow
Joseph wasn’t entirely sure what ‘no walking away’ actually meant. An implied threat of some sort? Waldstein was a billionaire, a powerful man. Not someone to cross.
Not that it mattered. Betraying confidentialities, stealing secrets for a commercial rival, was of absolutely no interest at all to Joseph. His passion was his science. A hunger for knowledge.
And this man, Waldstein … the Visionary. The Genius. To have such a privilege to meet the legend himself … and now the possibility of actually working alongside him. There was never going to be a moment’s doubt, not in Dr Joseph Olivera’s mind.
Absolutely no doubt, and yet burning curiosity prodded him to ask one last question. ‘Is there anything you could tell me … Mr Waldstein, about this project? The general nature of the work … perhaps?’
Waldstein steepled his fingers beneath his chin and closed his eyes in silent contemplation. Joseph took the moment to look around the enormous room, glowing from the flood of daylight streaming in through almost three-sixty degrees of panoramic spotless glass. This man with his portfolio of technology patents was fast on his way to becoming one of the richest men in the country. And yet there was a simplicity to this room and its comforts.
A bed.
A desk.
A couple of chairs. No more than that. After all, what more does a true genius want? The mind itself is the palace where all the real treasures, the works of art, the indulgences exist.
Presently Waldstein lowered his hands and opened his eyes. ‘The work, Joseph … is really quite simple. It is the business of saving mankind from itself.’
Beyond Waldstein’s narrow shoulders, Joseph caught a glimpse of the mint-green outline of the Statue of Liberty. So faint, she wavered and undulated in the distance – what? A mile away? – And, yes, Waldstein was right, she really did look as if she was standing directly on the water.
Like Jesus, walking on water.
‘So, tell me, Joseph, will you help me? Help me save mankind from itself?’
From the first moment he’d stepped into this room and come face to face with this brilliant man, there really was only ever going to be one answer Joseph could give.
‘Yes.’
CHAPTER 1
2001, New York
Sal stared at it through the grubby shop window.
She was standing outside Weisman’s Stage Surplus on a pavement filled with bric-à-brac that the owner had allowed to spill outside: an old five-foot dime-store Indian carved out of mahogany, a treasure play-chest full of children’s dressing-up clothes, dusty books stacked in greengrocer’s crates.
It was the store fifteen minutes away from their archway that she’d used to find suitable clothes for Liam, Bob and Becks’s recent mission. That last visit, she hadn’t been sure this little place would have what they’d need to go about their business anonymously in the twelfth century. But, surprisingly, among the laden racks of clothes reeking of mothballs and lavender soap, she’d managed to find enough bits and pieces for them to pass unnoticed as three grubby peasants.
A good place to use again, she’d noted as they’d made their way home through the backstreets of Brooklyn with their medieval costumes in plastic bags.
But today she wasn’t here looking through the dusty window at the pitifully sad-looking store display to find something for the others to wear. She was here because of the thing she was looking at now, the thing sitting on the rocking-chair just inside the window. A row of soft toys and dolls sat together on the worn wooden seat side by side like they were posing for a family photo. Several dolls, a clown that would give any child nightmares, an elephant with big ears, a frog with stuffing bursting from a torn seam … and one small sky-blue teddy bear with a single button eye and the loose strands of stitching where another button eye must have been once.
‘I know you,’ she whispered.
She’d spotted this teddy bear the last time she was here. But with one thing and another she’d forgotten about it, let it go.
Now here she was, drawn to the shop, drawn to gaze at this sad-looking bear. It reminded her of something. A digi-stream show from her time maybe? A character in an old cartoon? Something, a wisp of a memory that vanished from her mind like a curl of smoke as she reached out to grasp it.
Last night she’d had that dream – no, not dream … nightmare – again. The moment the old man – Foster – had pulled her out from certain death to be recruited to the agency. Their apartment block, one of the super-tall glass and steel tenement towers that you saw everywhere in Mumbai nowadays, was on fire and its steel superstructure had been buckling, preparing to collapse in on itself.
Nowadays? She checked herself. She came from 2026. Nowadays was where she was based, 2001. Her new home … of sorts.
Foster had plucked her from the very last seconds of her life. Given her a choice: to work for the agency or join her family and die in the flames of the collapsing building.
Some choice.
Not that she actually got to choose. Dadda had chosen for her, thrusting her towards the old man … Mama screaming and crying to hold her one more time.
Stop it! Stop it!
Sal bit her lip. She didn’t need to replay the memory again in her head. It was all still fresh enough, thanks. That awful moment was done, her parents gone, dust, and she was here in New York instead of Mumbai. All done. Or, more accurately, yet to be done. Yet to happen twenty-five years from now.
Yet to happen … that at least stole some of the sting of losing her parents, of knowing that they died along with everyone else when that tower block collapsed in on itself. Because – and this is the bit that really messed her head up – they were alive right now. At this moment in time they were children, her age, and they were yet to even meet each other. That was going to happen in twelve years’ time, 2013. They were going to meet at a consumer electronics show in New Delhi. Both their families were going to thoroughly approve of the match, and within the very same year Sal was going to already be a bump growing in her mama’s tummy.
And now she was looking at a small blue teddy bear that had absolutely no logical reason to be sitting here in New York in 2001. A bear, unmistakably the same bear, that she’d seen her neighbours’ – Mr and Mrs Chaudhry – youngest boy, Rakesh, always clinging on to and slobbering over.
Unmistakably.
The same teddy bear.
It was the very last thing she’d seen from the final second of her old life of 2026 … that teddy bear, spinning head over heels into flames as the floor had suddenly collapsed beneath their feet and the building shuddered in on itself.
Then she’d awoken here in New York, 2001.
‘It’s the same … I’m sure,’ she whispered to herself, a confused frown stretching from one brow to the other. Her eyes had never let her down. She saw little things, the tiny details: the way the button eye drooped at an angle, the stitching through only three of the four holes; the bear’s pale blue material threadbare on the left arm but not the right, as if the right had been replaced at a later time.
The tiny details. Her eyes and her mind were compulsively drawn to those sorts of things. An obsessive habit. She tucked her drooping fringe back up behind one ear and leaned forward until her forehead thudded softly against the shop window. She’d always been able to spot the little things that others missed, seen patterns in a seemingly random mess. That’s why she’d been so good at playing Pikodu.
‘It’s the same,’ she whispered.
How the shadd-yah is that even possible?
Her mobile phone suddenly vibrated in the pocket of her jacket. She fished for it and pulled it out.
‘Yeah?’
‘Had you forgotten?’ Maddy sighed impatiently.
‘Forgotten? What?’
‘Today? This morning? Trip to the museum? Remember?’
Sal winced then bumped her head against the window again. Yes of course, they’d been discussing it last night before turning in. But with her dream … no
, nightmare … that horrible memory … she’d completely forgotten. She cursed under her breath. ‘I’m on my way back.’
‘Meet us there if you like. On the front steps of the museum?’
‘Right.’
‘About an hour?’
‘OK.’
Sal snapped her cell closed, once again faintly amused at how old-fashioned it looked compared to the T-buds almost everyone back in Mumbai had looped over their ears.
She looked once again at the blue bear. The blue bear that shouldn’t be there.
It stared back at her with one button eye, almost challenging her to explain why not.
CHAPTER 2
2001, New York
Maddy led the five of them through the swing doors into the Museum of Natural History’s main entrance hall. Foster had brought them all here once before, not long after he’d recruited them: Maddy from a doomed passenger plane, moments before it was due to disintegrate mid-air, and Liam from the sinking Titanic. It had been a field trip, a reward for them, a change of scenery. A chance for them to see, to reach out and touch the history they were now responsible for preserving.
Both support units, Bob and Becks, eyed the enormous looming brachiosaurus skeleton stretching along the entrance hall with a detached cool, their silicon minds categorizing the sights, sounds and smells of the museum as either useful or irrelevant data.
Liam, by contrast, chuckled with delight at seeing the dinosaur once again. A class of elementary schoolkids was clustered around the long plastic-boulder-covered display plinth on which the skeleton stood, all carrying their activity clipboards, faces craned upwards to look at the towering dark bones, every mouth drooping to form a little ‘o’ for ‘orrrrr-some’.
Liam nodded a greeting at the old security guard standing beside the visitor’s book. ‘Hey, Sam, how’s it going?’
‘Whuh?’ The guard scowled at him, bemused. ‘Hang on. How do you know my –?’
‘It’s all right,’ said Liam, grinning, ‘we met a long, long time ago, so.’
Maddy’s eyes rolled behind her glasses. ‘Oh, grow up, Liam,’ she whispered, jabbing him in the ribs and steering him away from the guard, who was still regarding them with an expression that was an even split between surly suspicion and genuine confusion.
‘Last I heard, we were meant to be a top-secret organization … you know?’
‘Aww, he won’t remember. I was dressed as one of ’em Nazi fellas then.’
‘And the timeline was erased,’ added Bob helpfully. ‘The guard will have no memory of the encounter because –’
Maddy raised her hands to shush them. ‘All right, yes … you’re right, Bob.’ She shook her head. ‘Let’s just generally try to be secret, OK? And, while we’re at it, Liam, try to behave like adults here?’
Liam nodded. ‘Aye, you’re right. Sorry.’
‘OK,’ she sniffed, wiping her nose. She’d picked up a cold from somewhere, quite probably the dude who’d been hacking and wheezing over the counter at PizzaLand the other night – giving them a little extra unasked-for topping on their four seasons. She felt like total crud.
‘OK … today’s about learning a bit more history,’ she said snottily. ‘And we can all do with knowing a bit more, but it’s meant to be fun too, right? We could all do with some time out of the arch.’
‘S’right,’ said Sal.
‘And you guys,’ she said to Bob and Becks. ‘Split up … I don’t want you two support units Bluetoothing binary jibber-jabber to each other all morning. You should use this morning to do some more people-watching. Look and listen … watch how people talk and move and stuff.’ She glanced up at Bob. ‘Particularly you, Bob … you still come across as a bit stiff and unnatural. You need to learn how to chillax.’
Maddy watched Bob’s seven-foot frame hunch uncertainly. His thick brow arched and his mouth opened.
Beauty and the Beast. He was seven foot tall, three hundred pounds of muscle and bone: a panzer tank in human form. Becks by contrast was half a yard shorter, athletic and slight. Yet both had started out, once upon a time, as identical-looking foetuses growing in a tube of murky gunk.
Bob was cocking his head like a dog, puzzling over the term ‘chillax’.
‘Never mind.’ Maddy shook her head. ‘Just mingle a bit, OK?’
Both support units nodded sternly.
‘Right,’ said Maddy, honking into a hankie. ‘Right then, meet in the cafe up on the first floor in, say … like, two hours?’ She tried a weary flu-ridden smile. ‘And hey … you know, have fun everyone.’
Maddy watched them disperse: Liam drawn towards the entrance of the natural-history hall and the dinosaur dioramas; Sal hovering a moment, undecided, before choosing to go to the History of Native Americans exhibit on the third floor; and Bob and Becks looking for a moment like abandoned children before picking directions at random in which to saunter away.
She watched both go with the oddest feeling of motherly instinct for the pair of them. Bob still moved around with a machine-like gait and stony-faced concentration that made him look like a Neanderthal with an anger-management problem. While Becks moved with ballerina grace; equally lethal as a killing machine in an understated way.
Weird. How different they both were: their bodies drawn from the same genetic material, their minds both running the same AI operating system, and yet their experiences, their memories, were varied enough to evolve two very different simulated intelligences. It was a bit like being a parent, Maddy supposed, watching both support units slowly ‘grow up’ and become different personalities over time.
She watched Becks as she paced thoughtfully down the hallway, pausing every now and then to study an exhibit more closely.
You really have no idea how important you are … do you, Becks?
The female support unit had data embedded in her silicon brain, a minor sector of her miniature hard drive devoted to holding a secret. Their last crisis had involved being led to a medieval document, the Holy Grail no less, containing an encoded secret that dated from somewhere around the time of Christ. Becks had been able to successfully decode the secret, which, it seemed, had also rather annoyingly included a protocol that prevented her from revealing the message she’d managed to decode. And now, whatever this Big Secret was, it was locked away in a portion of her silicon mind.
Maddy had tried asking her about what was in there, but poor Becks knew nothing; she too was locked out of that portion of her own mind. All she knew was that at some point a ‘correct condition’ would arrive that would unlock the truth.
What Maddy did know was this: whatever truth was lurking in there, it wasn’t good news. Not good at all. And it had something to do with a particular word.
Pandora.
Secrets and lies. She hated them. There was never any good that came out of a secret. They were corrosive. Like another one, a secret she was having to keep from Liam and Sal … but Liam, in particular.
He’s dying. Time travel was killing him. Every trip through the portal was corrupting his body’s cells, ageing him before his time in a far more aggressive, damaging way than the forcefield that looped them and their old archway field office back around those two days in 2001 that they were stationed in.
She sighed. Even in their eternal two-day bubble world, the same cars, the same pedestrians, the same yellow cabs passing the end of their little backstreet at the same time every day … even in this world frozen into two endlessly looped days, time was passing for them. She’d noticed it … and wondered if Sal and Liam had noticed it too, not that either had said anything to her.
We’re all ageing.
She could feel it very subtly. It didn’t show, not yet, but she could feel it. Maddy had studied her face in the mirror of their latrine. Stared at her face wondering if she might detect the first faint signs of hairline creases in her skin. But … so far, to her relief, no.
As for Sal, she was perhaps a shade taller. After all, measuring the time they’d bee
n in the archway together in a normal way, they must have been living there now for – what? – five months?
Was it as long as that already?
Five months, and like any thirteen-year-old Sal still had a few more inches of growth left in her. Perhaps, being the youngest of them, the corrosive ageing effect of the archway’s displacement field would be kindest of all on her – take the longest to make itself felt.
But Liam … poor, poor Liam. She could see the signs of accelerated ageing in his face even if he hadn’t noticed it yet. Or perhaps he chose not to. His jaw and cheeks were less rounded now, longer and leaner. And around his eyes – eyes that always seemed to be wide like saucers with genuine awe at something, or pinched tight mid-laughter, laughing at the oddness of this bizarre life they were living – those eyes … eyes that had seen more than any one person should ever hope to see. Around them, in his soft pale skin, Maddy could see the first hairline traces of age. The very same hairlines that would one day be the folds of wrinkled skin on Foster’s ancient face.
Yes, another freakin’ secret.
Liam and the old man who had recruited them, they were one and the same person. That’s what Foster had let slip to her. She couldn’t even begin to figure out how that worked. Was Foster a version of Liam from the far future? His older self? Or some other parallel timeline?
Oh God, it made her head hurt thinking about it.
CHAPTER 3
1831, New Orleans
Abraham Lincoln scowled at the flatboat captain. ‘But … but … this is no more than half the pay you promised me, sir!’
The captain’s dark-skinned face, buried beneath an even darker beard, wrinkled up with amusement at the young man’s indignant rancour. His eyes glinted under his faded red woollen trapper’s hat and he laughed, offering the young man a glimpse of half a dozen tobacco-stained teeth.
‘You are too lazy, monsieur. No good to me.’
Abraham’s jaw hung open. ‘Curse you, sir! I worked my fair share!’
