by Alex Scarrow
‘I have data files that you could interpret as emotional reflexes.’
‘Would you kiss Liam?’
Bob cocked his head, a frown of confusion rumpling his forehead for a moment before he reluctantly leaned down towards Liam, puckering his horse-lips.
Liam recoiled. ‘Jay-zus, Bob! What’re you — ?’
‘No! Bob! That wasn’t an instruction… that was a question!’
He straightened up. ‘I see.’ His expression settled. ‘I have managed to reprioritize mission parameters for Liam in the past. This could be interpreted as… irrational.’
‘He came to save me from that German prison camp. Didn’t you, Bob?’
‘Is that because you valued Liam more than you valued completing your mission objective?’ asked Maddy.
Bob hesitated, his mind working its files in silence.
‘Because you cared for him?’ she pressed.
Bob finally answered. ‘Affirmative. Liam is my friend.’
Maddy tapped the perspex with her knuckles. ‘There we are, then. That was already there in Becks’s identity. She inherited feelings from Bob.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘She cares for you, Liam. Somewhere in all that data she has a file that tells her she “loves” you.’ Maddy smiled. ‘Maybe her AI was just running that file during the emulation.’
‘Does that mean she’s OK, then?’ asked Liam.
‘Bob, if we upload her AI into this body and it turns out she is wonky, can we, I dunno… reboot her or something?’
‘Affirmative. The silicon wafer can be reformatted and the AI software reloaded without any of my or her inherited data.’
‘Right.’ Maddy nodded. ‘I suppose we could give her AI a go and if she’s, like, all flaky on us, then that’s what we’ll have to do.’
‘That’s taking a risk, though, isn’t it?’ said Sal. ‘I mean there are loads of those corrupted red blocks. What if she got funny with us?’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Maddy.
‘I dunno… jealous or something. Jealous of you or me?’
‘Sal is correct,’ said Bob.
Maddy stroked her lip thoughtfully. She’d seen Becks in action. Seen the bodies left behind in her wake. God help them if she took on the role of a lover scorned.
‘Her decision-making may be unpredictable,’ Bob added.
‘Aw, come on! When hasn’t she been unpredictable?’ said Liam.
Maddy nodded. ‘True.’
‘Could we not give her a chance?’
‘We’ll have to watch her very closely,’ said Maddy. ‘The slightest sign she’s going weird and we’ll have to reboot her. I mean it… she even looks at me or Sal in a funny way, we’re going to have to totally wipe her, Liam.’
Sal bit her lip. ‘I don’t want her tearing off my head.’
Liam nodded slowly. ‘She’ll be right as rain, so she will.’ He didn’t sound entirely convincing.
‘OK, right,’ said Maddy, ‘that’s that, then.’ She turned to head for the sliding door leading back out into the main archway. ‘Come on, guys, there’s something else we need to talk about.’
Liam slid the door aside. It rattled noisily and clattered against its runners. ‘What?’
‘This agency of ours… the Pandora stuff?’
Sal and Liam looked at each other.
‘Did Foster tell you something?’ asked Sal.
Maddy nodded. ‘Oh yeah.’
CHAPTER 8
2070, Project Exodus, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs
Rashim stared, goggle-eyed, at Dr Yatsushita. ‘ What? ’
‘I said we may have to consider advancing the T-Day deadline.’
‘But… but… we’re still only at the primary testing stage!’
Rashim’s team had run several simulated tests on the transmission process and each time the simulation software had assured them that it had overshot or undershot the receiver station beacon’s snap range. Or, on the one occasion they’d landed right on the money, half the candidates would have been lost or turned into quivering mush.
‘Dr Anwar,’ Yatsushita started. He looked harried. Tired. A sleepless night or several by the look of him. His usually carefully combed silver hair was uncharacteristically dishevelled. ‘You must have been following the news-streams?’
Rashim hadn’t, or not closely anyway. He had no time for that. Every day, it seemed, one or more of the transmission candidates had been replaced with someone else, requiring him to chase up the data on their replacements, plug in the information and recalculate the total mass index.
‘You have heard about the Kosong-ni virus?’
A couple of days ago, he’d watched a few minutes of news. The last city in Bangladesh had been abandoned to floodwater. The algal blooms in the Indian Ocean were now calculated to be covering thirty-six per cent of the surface area, poisoning, completely annihilating the ecosystem beneath. The North American Federation were enforcing border restrictions on east and west state migrants. A corps of Japanese combat droids had successfully made an amphibious assault on the North Korean city of Hyesan. A lot of dead people. But then when did the news these days not feature a high body count?
And yes, there’d been something about a virus. The news-streams had speculated it might have been a chemical weapon of some kind dropped on a North Korean city by the Japanese. Or worse still, some kind of wild-card bioweapon developed by the North Koreans and accidentally exposed as a result of some missile strike.
‘Kosong-ni virus?’ So it had a name now.
Yatsushita shook his head. He pushed his way through the warren of desks towards Rashim’s. ‘You fool. You should be watching instead of… of…’ He looked at SpongeBubba squatting beside the desk and grinning with goofy teeth. ‘Instead of making your foolish toys!’
‘I haven’t got time to watch a holo-vid, Dr Yatsushita!’ Rashim replied, irritated with the project leader. ‘I’ve got — ’
‘It’s airborne! There are reports of the virus in Beijing!’
Airborne certainly wasn’t so good.
‘Our… sponsors are worried by this. They want T-Day advanced.’
Sponsors — Yatsushita’s carefully chosen word. It was transparently obvious to Rashim that Project Exodus was being funded by what was left of America’s defence budget, most probably funds topped up by a few billionaires who wanted in on it.
‘Advanced by how much?’
Dr Yatsushita hesitated. ‘They want it ready to go for the thirtieth of May.’
‘But that’s five weeks away! We need at least another six months to be sure — ’
‘We have no choice in this matter! It must be ready by then!’
Rashim pushed his round glasses up on to his forehead where they held his draping dark locks back like a hairband. ‘Did you tell them the risks involved? Did you tell them that we get this the slightest bit wrong and we’re all dead? Or worse…?’
‘I have explained all of this. Nonetheless, they insist.’
Rashim stared at his project leader. ‘Is it that bad?’
Yatsushita pulled a seat up, looked across the maze of desks and cubicles at the dozen other technicians working late. He sat down and lowered his voice. ‘It is much, much worse than the news media are reporting. They have been kept in the dark. There is an embargo on the worst of it.’
‘Worst of it? What do you mean?’
‘A smart-virus, Rashim. It is an advanced smart-virus! A Von Neumann!’
Rashim nodded slowly. Von Neumann — a hypothetical premise imagined by a Hungarian theorist, John von Neumann, over a hundred and fifty years ago. Machines capable of harvesting their own resources for infinite self-replication. Nanotechnologists had tried experimenting with that concept at the beginning of the twenty-first century with little success. Little robots the size of blood cells. But robotically there were too many practical problems to overcome. However, biologically — a very different story. After all, bacteria were biological Von Neumann machines of a
sort. But the Holy Grail — certainly in terms of weapons use — was a bacterium that could be smart, could be given genetic instructions, an objective, a specified goal. Could be given a target.
‘A sample has been isolated and analysed by a team in Tokyo,’ said Dr Yatsushita. Rashim could see the man was clearly shaken.
‘And?’
‘It is designed to depopulate. Designed to target humans only.’
‘It’s engineered?’
‘Of course it is! On contact with any human cells, it activates, breaks down the cell structures into acids, proteins.’ He ran a hand through his silver hair. ‘It completely liquidizes the infected within hours!’
‘My God!’
‘The liquid solution is used by the bacteria to make copies of themselves, to grow spores — like feathers, like pollen — that can be carried by the wind.’
‘Are there any cases of immunity yet? Ethnic-specific resistance?’
Yatsushita shook his head. ‘No. Not yet. So far it seems no one is immune. Whoever made this did not care that it would kill the whole world.’
Rashim looked at the holo-screen shimmering in the air above his desk. Endless columns of data that needed collating and processing.
‘Now do you see why they want T-Day advanced?’ said Dr Yatsushita. ‘Something like Kosong-ni is what leaders have feared for decades. A perfect bioweapon.’
Rashim rubbed his temple. ‘Jesus.’
Dr Yatsushita nodded. ‘I have told our sponsors that all the T-Day candidates must make their way here immediately. We must finalize the mass index as soon as possible. We cannot keep changing the data.’
Rashim nodded. ‘Yes… yes, absolutely.’
His boss leaned forward. ‘Dr Anwar, you have family on the candidate list, don’t you?’
‘Yes… my parents.’
‘Call them, Rashim… get them here now. Before it’s too late!’
CHAPTER 9
2001, New York
‘Brace yourselves,’ said Maddy. She looked at them across the breakfast table, Liam and Sal sitting beside each other on their threadbare sofa, eyes resting expectantly on her.
They’re not going to like this.
‘Jahulla! Come on, Maddy… what is it?’
‘This agency of ours… it’s, I’m not sure how to say this…’
‘Well, just say it anyway.’ Liam fidgeted impatiently. ‘I’m sure we’ve heard worse already.’
‘Not really.’ She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. ‘The agency is just us.’
The words hung above the table in the space between them. They hung in the stillness of the archway, accompanied by the soft hum of networked computers and the muted rumble of a train running over the Williamsburg Bridge above them.
‘What do you mean just us?’ asked Sal.
‘I mean exactly that, Sal. We’re it. The three of us.’
Liam sat forward, frowning, confused. ‘But… but Foster told us there were other teams, in other places, so he did.’
‘I know he did. But he lied.’
Sal looked past her. One eye lost behind a fringe, the other one just lost. ‘But…’
‘There was that message, Maddy.’ Liam leaned on the table. ‘That message from the future about Edward Chan, so there was…’
‘There is one other person in the agency,’ she replied. ‘It’s that guy Waldstein. Roald Waldstein.’
‘That fella who invented time travel?’
‘That’s him. He’s the one who set this archway up. He’s the guy who recruited Foster and the previous team.’
Sal shook her head, working it through in her mind silently.
Liam slapped a hand on the table. ‘Jay-zus-’n’-Mother-Mary! You know I… I was wondering why it’s always us who was dealing with everything! Why them other teams were too bleedin’ lazy to get off their backsides and help out!’
Maddy splayed her hands. ‘Well, now we know.’
‘But didn’t Foster say this Waldstein was totally against time travel?’ asked Sal. ‘That he, like, campaigned against it or something?’
‘Yes, he did. But he also set this up, secretly, as a back-up plan. I guess he figured that even with international agreements prohibiting the development of time-travel technology, on the sly, every government would be having a go at it.’
Liam laughed softly. ‘I knew it! I just bleedin’ well knew it!’
‘It’s not fair Foster didn’t tell us that,’ said Sal. She looked up at Maddy. ‘Why did he lie to us?’
Maddy shrugged. ‘I guess he didn’t want to overload us. Put too much pressure on us.’
‘Did he just tell you now, Maddy? This morning?’
She nodded. ‘Yup.’
Sal’s eyes narrowed. ‘Why?’
‘Why? What?’
‘Why did he wait till now to tell you?’
‘I guess… I guess he figured from all the stuff I told him we’d been through that we were ready to find out.’
‘ Chutiya! ’ She stood up, biting her lip angrily. ‘He thinks we’re bakra? Stupid? What else is he holding back from us?’
Maddy would have liked to say ‘nothing’, but she wasn’t entirely sure that Foster had given them the whole picture yet. She too was guilty of that, holding truths back from her friends. For example, when exactly was she going to tell Liam that time travel was killing him? Ageing him? That he was going to look exactly like Foster very soon.
A bigger deal than that — that he and Liam were the same person. When the hell was she going to tell him that?
And what did that mean anyway?
Maddy had tried running that little doozy through her mind many times over. Did it mean Liam had been recruited from the Titanic before? Did it mean that this archway existed in a bigger loop of time, that one day Liam was going to be an old man? An old man who had somehow outlived her and Sal and now needed to renew the cycle by revisiting the last moments of their ‘normal’ lives and recruiting them all over again?
‘Maddy?’
She looked up. Sal was sitting on the end of the table. ‘There’s something I’ve seen, but I’ve been keeping to myself.’
Liam looked from her to Maddy. ‘Uh? Hang on! Has everyone here got a bleedin’ secret except me?’
Sal ignored him. ‘This may sound crazy, but… have we been recruited before?’
‘What?!’
Sal ignored him again. Her eyes were on Maddy. ‘Has Foster said anything like that?’
‘Recruited before? How do you mean?’
‘Foster said there was another team before us, right?’
Maddy nodded.
‘That they died. That that ghost thing… that “seeker” killed them.’
Liam cupped his jaw in his hands. ‘Hold on! That’s right! I remember that.’
‘Was that team us, Maddy?’
Sal’s eyes remained resolutely on Maddy, watching her fidget, delay… fudge.
Do I tell them that Liam is Foster? Because if Liam’s been here before… maybe Sal’s right and all three of us have.
‘I’m asking because I’ve seen something I can’t explain,’ said Sal. She looked at Liam. ‘Your uniform from the Titanic.’
He nodded. ‘Aye, you told me you saw one a bit like my — ’
‘No, Liam. No. It IS your tunic.’
Maddy frowned. Her turn to be silenced by a revelation. ‘What?’
‘In that antique shop, the theatre costume shop near us. There’s Liam’s tunic hanging up.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ replied Maddy. She pointed at the rack of clothes hanging just outside their bunk nook. ‘It’s over there!’
‘It’s the same, Maddy. Exactly the same!’
‘How can it be the same one, Sal? How can it be here and in that shop at the same time?’
‘It is. It’s missing the same button. It has exactly the same stain on it. The same shape in the same place!’ She stood up, strode over to the wardrobe beside the nook. She pulled out
his white tunic, still on its hanger, and brought it over to the table. She spread it out beneath the light above them.
‘There. See?’
Liam got up and studied it.
‘You got that stain on the Titanic, right? Down the left side. Big stain. What was it… wine or something?’
Liam frowned. ‘I see it. Jayzzz… never even noticed that before.’
Maddy joined them. ‘Me neither. It’s faint.’
He looked at Sal. ‘I… I don’t think I ever spilled wine down me jacket. I don’t remember doing anything like that. Chief Steward would’ve had me guts for garters.’
‘So then it wasn’t you?’
He shook his head. ‘Maybe someone who had the uniform before me?’
‘That’s possible,’ said Maddy.
Sal shook her head irritably. ‘That’s not the important bit. The point is there are two copies of it!’ She looked up at them both. ‘Do you see? Maybe that means Liam’s been here before?’
Liam’s eyes widened. ‘This is…’
‘Messing with your head?’ asked Sal.
He nodded.
CHAPTER 10
2070, Project Exodus, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs
Who was it that once said, ‘A week is a long time in politics’? Well, that was a pretty good observation to take note of, if not to adapt very slightly.
Rashim stared at the news-stream from New London, in the north of England.
A week is a long time with a pandemic.
This particular media feed had been running uninterrupted for two days now; a digi-streamer dropped on its side on the street by some panicked cameraman, had still been broadcasting powered by its own hydro-cell battery pack. The signal was being streamed round the world, no doubt watched by millions of other frightened people like Rashim.
The street had been full of people running from faint blooms descending from the sky like flakes of ash from a bonfire of paper. The blooms — viral spores — landing lightly on scalps, backs of hands, faces had an almost instantly lethal effect. The street had been full of stampeding people, and screaming voices… Then, five minutes later, after the camera had dropped and settled on its side, it was silent and full of corpses.
