With difficulty Faizan recognised a turning and forced himself to take it, even as one portion of his mind demanded that the correct route lay straight ahead, while another was adamant he’d already left it far behind. He was even starting to doubt the footsteps following behind him. It would be easy to doubt everything; to see this reality as a fiction, a dream he might wake from. Faizan had to remind himself that this life was real and that a real him had inhabited it, through an entire lifetime. Its crisis was real; its pain was real. If he failed, if he let Karam down, then that would be very real.
He struggled with the thought, couldn’t quite accept it. The footsteps were insistent. Faizan pressed against the wall of the new corridor, understanding as he did so that it was an admission of guilt should whoever approached happen to look round and see him. He thought of red jackal eyes in a black jackal face. How could anyone try and explain to something like that?
The footsteps reached their crescendo. Holding his breath, Faizan was relieved to see a human head on human shoulders. He recognised the sky blue robe, with its geometric golden trim: a steward’s uniform, just like the one that Dori’s dead agent had stolen and likely killed for. It was worn by a woman with short-cropped hair. Perhaps at this very moment she was looking for her missing companion, whose body was no doubt somewhere far behind and beneath them, sinking towards the ocean bed. Whatever her mission was, the steward didn’t look round. In a moment she was obscured by the farther wall.
Faizan held in a sigh of relief and let his eyes stray further along the new corridor. It was much like the one it branched from: metal walls painted a chipped and fading green, tendrils of wire suspended in sagging bunches, and at the farther end, a door. Its sign read STORAGE. It seemed to him a validation: that single word pierced through the morass of contradictions, the voices that insisted on other directions in far different spaces.
Beyond that door was Palimpsest—and Dori. Faizan had no plan to deal with either. In this reality, he could only stop Palimpsest if he could reach it, could physically interact with it. And that meant getting past Dori. But in that other reality, the shadow of half-formed memories that were nevertheless more real-feeling than everything around him, perhaps Faizan had a different opportunity. And therein lay a contradiction. So far, Palimpsest had been moving him without his consent or control, casting him through realities like a stone skipped across a lake. Now that he knew what the machine could do, perhaps he could make Palimpsest do it; but that would mean interfacing with it, and that would mean . . .
That would mean thinking his way around a contradiction. Was the only way to reach Palimpsest to get back to the reality in which he didn’t need to reach it? Yet still Faizan felt sure that he was missing something, a crucial element—but one his mind inevitably shied from. Because it frightened him? Yes. A thread of memory, but pursuing it filled him with such instinctive fear that he could hardly endure it.
The communicator began to trill.
The wave of half-formed panic came close to bubbling over as Faizan dashed one hand into a pocket, hardly thinking yet painfully alert, straining to catch those footsteps petering out in the distance. He wrapped a sweating palm around the communicator, almost fumbled it—and all the while, all he could wonder was whether the steps had stopped or merely paused in curiosity. He managed to bring the communicator up to his face, to tap it with a slick finger, and Karam must have understood from his expression, for to his immense gratitude she only stared back in wide-eyed miniature.
Faizan listened. There was nothing to hear except the faint insistence of his own breathing, and distantly, the slosh of waves, the patter of muted conversation from on deck.
“It’s all right,” he whispered.
Karam’s face relaxed—but only partly. “Is it Halim?” she asked.
Faizan shook his head and then, realising how badly the gesture translated to the small, static-washed screen, said, “No. It’s all right. I’m worrying too much.” He thought of attempting a reassuring smile, but his face was not quite ready for that; it would likely arrive as a grimace.
“I have good news,” Karam said, apparently choosing to believe him. “Yousef Masri’s prepared to back me, and the captain had to take his word. They’re starting the evacuation now. All of the lifeboats, and they have a helicopter, too. There’s another smaller ship nearby.”
“That is good news,” Faizan agreed, leaving unsaid the truths they both knew: that there were too many people on this vast ocean-going vessel; that it might take hours to move them all. Still, it was good news. “And you’ll go with them,” he said. He took care to make sure that it couldn’t possibly be interpreted as a question.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Adwan. I’m staying here to help coordinate, and the moment I’m certain everyone is getting safely off this ship, I’m coming to help you. Which of us is Halim more likely to listen to? Just keep him talking and wait for me.”
“Absolutely not,” he said. “I have to know you’re safe.”
“And I have to know you’re safe. That means me being with you.”
Faizan struggled for an argument that would reach her. It had always been difficult and now it was impossible. His mind was only half on the conversation, the other half turned inward, and realising that brought a further distraction of guilt, for might this not be the last time they ever spoke? At least in this reality, he thought—and the sudden understanding jarred him physically, so that he had to clamp his jaw not to gasp.
“I know why we’ve been moving between realities,” he said, when he was certain he could manoeuvre his tongue around the words.
Karam looked puzzled, perhaps more by the dramatic change of subject than what he’d actually said.
Rather than give her time to consider, Faizan pressed on quickly: “But it means I have to do this alone. You can’t possibly help me. And it means . . .” He knew he shouldn’t say it, but he couldn’t help himself. “I don’t think I’ll see you again.”
“Faizan . . .”
He could already feel his resolve faltering. He couldn’t let her say any more. Faizan tapped the screen, watched Karam’s image contract to a dot and then to nothing. Then, on sudden impulse, he dropped the device to the ground and jabbed it with his heel. He watched as the smoked glass webbed with a dozen cracks and folded into a flower of convulsed metal.
There was no going back. Now he only had to hope that she’d listen. Yet when had she ever done that? No, what he had to do was end this quickly.
Faizan hurried down the last stretch of corridor, no longer caring about the clang of his feet against the metal floor. His plan was so desperate, so based in unprovable hypothesis, that he could hardly bring himself to consider it. The door at the end was locked with a diagonal bar. Hadn’t it been a wheel? A handle? Hadn’t the door been of wood rather than metal, or—and this memory was the strangest—of faintly pulsing purple flesh? No matter. He put both hands on the bar and twisted. Hearing it click, he drew the door open.
The cargo bay was a long quadrangle, plain and steel-walled like the corridor, but expanded into grander dimensions. Columns of netting braced with metal rings hung from the ceiling and clung to the floor, each filled to brimming with cases, bags, hempen sacks, cheap plastic carriers and other less identifiable luggage. Further in, crates were stacked, still bound in clumps of mesh. It made Faizan think of some huge, gangling spider, mindlessly storing what it couldn’t eat.
And there, in the centre of the room, too large, too ungainly to be stored anywhere else, stood Palimpsest. Its golden skin returned a sullen reflection of the orange light. One rounded corner had a chunk gouged from it, out of which sparks fizzed intermittently. Seeing it for the first time in what seemed an age, seeing it as parts of him had never seen it, Faizan could hardly imagine he had built it: it looked like a sarcophagus for something ancient and alien.
Of Dori and his assistant there was no sign. He didn’t know what that meant, though it must mean something. A trap? Perhaps
. Faizan stepped through the doorway.
Immediately he heard a clicking, like the chitinous whisper of mandibles, but rendered in metal upon metal. A familiar sound; he’d heard it recently. Faizan didn’t look round, for he didn’t need to. He recognised the noise of the weapon, identical to the one Karam had taken from Dori’s dead agent. He knew it was pointed at the back of his head.
Yes. A trap it was.
Dori stepped out ahead of him, neatly blocking Faizan’s view of Palimpsest. He was wearing a dark blue robe that didn’t quite disguise his easy grace or the musculature of his upper body; he was possessed of a casual strength that Faizan only noticed now, seeing him as a threat.
“Dear gods,” said Dori. “For an intelligent man, you have the makings of a fine idiot. Did you really imagine you could sneak up on me by using a communicator that belonged to one of my own men?”
More than the weapon Faizan knew was pointed at his head, held presumably by Dori’s engineer, or the duplicate wrapped discreetly around Dori’s fist, that froze him in place: he’d been a fool indeed. That Karam had found the communicator’s frequency so easily should have been enough to make him doubt the device. Faizan had to fight back an instinct of guilt, as though he and Karam had been caught out in some sordid secret. “I only came here to talk to you,” he said, and was pleased when it sounded like the truth. “If you were listening, then you heard that, too.”
“So you two have reconciled your differences, have you?” Dori asked, his tone abruptly gracious. “Well, that’s nice.”
“Karam’s ready to put our personal history aside if it means stopping Palimpsest. She understands the risk it could pose, now that it’s malfunctioning. I’m sure you do too, Dori, so why don’t we . . .”
“But, Faizan,” Dori interrupted, “have you really not stopped to ask yourself how I knew what you were working on?” He chuckled. “Oh, don’t worry. Your darling Karam didn’t knowingly betray your secrets. How could she, when she didn’t know them herself?”
It struck Faizan then, as it should have hours before, and surely would have if he’d had even a moment to consider: Dori knew far more about Palimpsest than he had any right to. Though Faizan hated to let himself be distracted, going along with whatever twisted game Dori was playing, he couldn’t help himself. “It’s in the past,” he said. “I don’t care what she did or didn’t tell you.”
“Don’t you? Really?”
Faizan almost bit his tongue to keep the question in; what chance did his tenuous plan have if he let things slip out of control now? But Dori had him. He really did need to know. “You’re right,” he said. “Karam had no idea what I was working on. So how did you?”
“Ah,” said Dori, with a little, fluting laugh, “Adwan Faizan does have one weakness after all. Even you’re vulnerable to curiosity, eh? Well first of all I should tell you that I came across your project years ago. It was hardly revolutionary work back then, but it was interesting . . . and the more I considered, the more interesting it seemed.
“But I could tell you were holding back. Some people don’t do their best work under scrutiny, Faizan; I know that better than most. It seemed to me that if we could just lengthen your leash, then you might come up with something truly special. And as it turned out that wasn’t so difficult. The executive running your project, old Maloof, was far more interested in trying to misappropriate funds. No one had any issue with him running into a sudden heart attack . . . except, I suppose, for Maloof himself.”
“You killed him,” Faizan said. He should have been shocked, but he’d found Maloof to be a loathsome individual who no doubt had been embezzling exactly as Dori claimed, and so it was hard.
“Oh, absolutely. I killed him and I did you a favour, so please try not to sound so judgemental. And wasn’t I right? With no Maloof sitting on your shoulder, you soon began to realise what your machine might really be capable of. Only it turned out you were a little too good at keeping secrets; it didn’t take long for anything interesting to start vanishing from your reports. I knew that either you’d suddenly grown terribly stupid or that you were hiding something—and aside from the occasional aberration, you are not a stupid man, Faizan. Well, I hate to have a secret kept from me. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t grow a little obsessed with you.”
“So you seduced Karam,” Faizan said. He surprised himself by not sounding especially bitter.
“She didn’t make it easy. Does that make you feel better? Well, it should. Even when all my efforts began to pay off, she still wouldn’t betray you. I tell you, you were a fool to let that one go. Still, there were days when I’d have liked to snap her neck for that stubbornness.” Dori reached into a slit in his robe, drew forth something tiny and metallic. When he held it in the flat of his palm it spread silvery wings and made a fragile whirring sound. It looked like an ornamental model of a locust, crafted from dull gold, but with the head too large, staring with disproportionate, jewelled eyes.
He said, “In the end, the most our dear Karam was good for was inadvertently smuggling one of these into your laboratory. Lovely work, is it not? My own invention: a more useful spy, as it turned out, than any of my flesh-and-blood agents.”
So that was it. For how long had those artificial eyes overseen his work, and Dori through them?
“As I’m sure you now see,” continued Dori, “I know your machine almost as well as you do. And I don’t believe for one moment that it’s going to explode. I don’t believe it’s going to turn this reality inside out or make frogs and blood rain from the sky. You understand,” he said, indicating with only a motion of his eyes the man now standing behind Faizan, “that I don’t at all speak from a position of ignorance.”
“So what, then?” Faizan asked. There was coldness growing in the pit of his stomach, an icy ball of fear. “What does your expert think is wrong?”
“Touma believes that, setting aside some minor functional impairment of little interest to us, the damage has erased a good portion of the inhibitor code you set on your machine’s master control daemon.”
Yes, Faizan thought. Your man knows his business. “And you don’t consider that a danger?” he asked, trying his best to sound sarcastic, trying his hardest to ignore the way the fear-cold was spreading up through his innards.
“A danger?” For the first time, Dori actually looked as though he was considering something Faizan had said. “Yes, of course. But more than that, I consider it fascinating. If I had one criticism of your project, my friend, I would have to say that I found it a little boring . . . all those safety checks, all those precautions. How did you expect it to do anything at all?”
Faizan had no answer to that. He had never dared hope to make Dori see reason, not really. Yet to talk with him, to realise how diametrically opposed they were: Faizan still found that shocking. His one slender hope had lain in Dori’s not knowing that Palimpsest, in all likelihood, posed no threat; that Dori might be afraid enough of losing it, and perhaps in the process his own life, to take the gamble of letting Faizan try and render his creation safe. And yes, it had been a slender hope indeed, and yes, Dori’s man was certainly good, to have worked out so much in so little time.
Now the only question left was why Dori was bothering to keep him alive, and Faizan had no desire to ask that.
“Dori,” Faizan said instead, “the way I see it, you have only two options. You can get out of my way or you can shoot me.”
“Really?” Dori looked more amused than ever. “Of the two of us, I’d never have guessed it would be you who’d be telling me what my options were.”
“Then let me rephrase,” Faizan said, steadily. “I have to get to my machine. I have to try to stop it. Whatever your man thinks, it’s unstable, and because I made it, I can’t let it hurt people. I have to do everything I can, do you understand? I have no choice.”
“I have to admit,” said Dori, “you’re disappointing me. The truth is I’d had some hopes of us working together. You built somethin
g so fearsomely capable of destruction. You dispatched the men I sent after you, without much trouble and apparently without much conscience either. I thought at the very least that I should try and talk to you; see if there might be some hope for you.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint,” Faizan said.
“You should be,” Dori agreed, and he raised his weapon and fired.
It was so quick—a snake darting. Faizan had never seen anyone move so fast. He’d needed time to prepare, to ready his mind, and all he could think in that moment was that he had no time at all. There was fire, a lick of it like a forked tongue from the scarab-weapon’s vents, and then pain, and Faizan clutched for his focus as a drowning man would a broken spar, even as the impact tore him from his feet.
I’ve been shot, he thought. The pain was bewildering, beyond anything he could have imagined: the sensation of having a part of him brutally opened to the world, the awareness of what should be inside flooding out.
I’ve been shot.
But hadn’t that been the plan?
Now the pain was distant. If Faizan wanted it to be, it was all distant: his body, Dori, the storage bay, all little more than a shadow violently flickering.
He had been shot, and it was excruciating—but only in one single reality. There were many versions of him. Most were unhurt. Others were sick; some were long dead. A tiny few lived in realities where there existed nothing at all like the weapon Dori had wielded. And though he was Adwan Faizan, he was all of those other versions of himself as well, and all of them at once. Faizan was shot, but he was unhurt. He was dying, but elsewhere he lived. All possibilities were the same. All were within reach.
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