Manhattan in Reverse

by Peter F. Hamilton

  I drove over to the other cars and we all climbed out. Several men were up in the lorries, looking round the crates and pallets that were inside. Given how much we’d spent between us, I was glad to see how thorough they were being checking off the inventory. In theory the equipment and supplies on the lorries were enough to turn us into a self-sufficient community over the next year.

  ‘This shouldn’t take long,’ I told Zoe. ‘We need to be certain. In the land of the new arrivals, the owner of the machine tool is king.’

  ‘We’ll go meet people,’ she said.

  I met a few of them myself as I tracked down the five crates of medical supplies and equipment. They seemed all right – decent types. A little over-eager in their greetings, as I suppose I was. But then we were going to spend an awful long time together. The rest of our lives, if everything went smoothly.

  Half an hour later the last members of the group had arrived, we were satisfied everything we’d bought through newsuffolklife.co was with us, and the marshals were getting the convoy organised for the last segment on Earth. Put like that it sounded final and invigorating at the same time.

  ‘Where’s the wormhole?’ Steve asked plaintively as we got back into the BMW. ‘I want to see it.’

  ‘Two miles to go,’ Zoe said. ‘That’s all now.’

  The lorries were first out of the assembly park and onto one of the new tarmac roads that led to the wormhole, with the rest of us following. There was a wide path on the left of the road. Backpackers marched along it, about ten abreast, a constant file of them. I couldn’t see the end of the line in either direction. They all had the same eager smile on their faces as they strode ever-closer to the wormhole. Zoe and I probably looked the same.

  ‘There!’ Olivia suddenly shouted. She was pointing at the trees on the other side of the backpackers. For a moment I was confused, it was as if a dawn sun was shining through the trunks. Then we cleared the end of the little wood, and we could see the wormhole directly.

  The zero-length gap in space-time was actually manifesting as a sphere three hundred yards in diameter. Murray had opened it so that the equator was at ground level, leaving a hemisphere protruding into the air. There was nothing solid, it was simply the place one planet ended and another began. You crossed the boundary, and New Suffolk stretched out in front of you. That was the notorious eye-twister which made a lot of people shiver and even flinch away. As you drew near the threshold, you could see an alien landscape dead ahead of you, inside the hemisphere. Yet it opened outwards, delivering a panoramic view. When you went through, you emerged on the outside of the corresponding hemisphere. There was no inside.

  It was early morning on New Suffolk, where its ginger-tinted sun was rising, sending a rouge glow across the gap to light up the English countryside.

  We were half a mile away now. The kids were completely silent, entranced by the alien sunlight. Zoe and I flashed a quick triumphant smile at each other.

  The road curved round to line up on the wormhole, running through a small cutting. Police lined the top of each bank, dressed in full riot gear. They were swaying back and forwards as they struggled to hold a crowd of protestors away from the road. I could see banners and placards waving about. The chanting and shouting reached us over the sound of the convoy’s engines. Things were flying through the air over the top of the police to rain down on the road. I saw several bottles smash apart on the tarmac. Backpackers were bent double as they scurried along, holding their hands over their heads to ward off the barrage from above.

  Something thudded onto the BMW’s roof. Both kids yelped. I saw a stone skittering off the side. It didn’t matter now. The first of our convoy’s lorries had reached the wormhole. I saw it drive through, thundering off over the battered mesh road that cut across the landscape on the other side, silhouetted by that exotic rising sun. We were so close.

  Then Olivia was shouting: ‘Daddy, Daddy, stop!’

  87) Government may not employ more than one manager per twelve front-line workers in any department. No Government department may spend more than ten per cent of its budget on administration.

  88) Government will not fund any unemployment benefit scheme. Anyone without a job is entitled to five acres of arable land, and will be advanced enough crop seed to become self-sufficient.

  89) There will be no death duties. Dying is not a taxable action. Citizens are entitled to bequeath everything they have worked for to whoever they choose.

  JANNETTE

  It took us bloody hours to get from the station to the wormhole. The Public Responsibility Movement was supposed to provide buses. I only ever saw two of them, and they took forever to drive around the jammed-up circuit between the station and the rally site. As for the PRM stewards, they’d got into fights with the backpackers streaming out of the station who were asking directions and wanting to know if they could use our buses. The police were separating the two factions as best they could, but the station car park was a perpetual near-riot.

  Abbey used the waiting time to stock up at an off-licence. By the time we got on the bus she was completely pissed. She’s not a quiet drunk.

  As we inched our way across the motorway flyover I could look down on the solid lines of motionless vehicles clotting all the lanes below. There were hundreds of them, thousands. All of them waiting their turn to drive up the off road. Each one full of people who wanted to go through the wormhole. So many? Actually seeing how many people wanted to leave was quite a shock. The news says it’s like this every day. How can that many people be stupid enough to swallow Murray’s promises? I know the country isn’t perfect, but at least we’re trying to make it progressive, somewhere we’re not ashamed to have our kids grow up in.

  The bus finally made it to the rally area. A huge Airbus A380 flew low overhead as we climbed out, coming in to land at Stansted just a few miles to the north. I had to press my hands over my ears the engine noise was so loud. I didn’t recognize the airline logo; but it was no doubt bringing another batch of eager refugees from abroad who wanted to join the exodus.

  I tracked it across the sky. And there right ahead of me was the wormhole. It was like some gold-chrome bubble squatting on the horizon. I squinted into the brilliant rosy light it was radiating.

  ‘I didn’t realize it was that big,’ I muttered. The damn thing was intimidating this close up.

  ‘Let’s get to it,’ Abbey slurred, and marched off towards the sprawling crush of protestors ahead of us.

  Now I remember why I’d stopped going to protests. All that romance about bonding with the crowd, sharing a purpose with your fellow travellers; the singing, the camaraderie, the communal contentment. It’s all bollocks.

  I got batted about like some cheap football. Everybody wanted to score points by shoving into me. The shouting was loud, in my ear; it never stopped. I got clobbered by placards several times as their carriers dropped them for a rest.

  Then we got real near to the police line, and a beer can landed on my shoulder. I jumped at the shock. Fortunately it was empty. But I could see bottles flying overhead, which made me very nervous.

  ‘Let me through, you arseholes!’ Abbey thundered at the police, using her best I’m-in-charge-here voice.

  The nearest constable gave her a confused look. Then she was banging on his riot shield in fury. ‘I have a right to get past you can’t stop me you fascist bastard this is still a free country why don’t you piss off and go and bugger your chief constable let me through . . .’ All the while she was pushing up against his shield. I was pressed up behind her. Our helpful comrades behind me were making a real effort to add their strength to the shove. I shouted out in pain from the crushing force but no one heard or took any notice.

  Something had to give. For once it was the police line. I was suddenly lurching forward to land on top of Abbey, who had come to rest on top of the policeman. A ragged cheer went up from behind. There were a lot of whistles going off. I was on my knees when I heard dogs barking, an
d whimpered in fright. I hate dogs, I’m really scared of them. Policemen were moving fast to plug the gap Abbey had created. Several wrestling matches had developed on either side of me. Protestors were being cuffed and dragged off. Clothes got ripped. Those horrible telescoping batons were striking people who weren’t even threatening. I saw blood.

  Someone tugged the neck of my blouse, lugging me to my feet. I was crying and shaking. My knee was red hot, I could barely stand on it.

  A police helmet was thrust into my face. ‘You all right?’ a muffled voice demanded from behind the misted visor.

  I just wailed at him. It was pathetic, but I was so miserable and panicky I didn’t care.

  ‘Sit there! Wait!’ I was pushed onto the top of the fresh earth bank. Ten feet below me backpackers were cowering as they scrambled along the path towards the shining wormhole. They all looked at me in fright, as if I was some kind of demon. That’s not right, not right at all. I’m one of the good guys. The vehicles heading for the wormhole were swishing past, their drivers grim as they gripped the steering wheels.

  I saw a big navy-blue BMW 4x4 towing a horsebox. The driver was peering forward intently. Visual recognition kicked in.

  ‘Get your fucking hands off me dickhead this is assault you know I’ll have you in court oh shit get those cuffs off right now they’re too tight you’re deliberately torturing me help help,’ Abbey was yelling behind me.

  ‘It’s Colin,’ I whispered. ‘Abbey, that’s Colin!’ My voice was rising.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Colin!’ I pointed frantically. There was Olivia sitting in the back seat, face pressed up against the glass to look out at all the mad people thronging above the bank. Seeing me. We both gaped at each other. ‘He’s taking them. Oh God, he’s taking them through the wormhole.’

  Abbey gave her arresting officer an almighty shove, her weight pushing him off balance. ‘Get them,’ she screamed at me. ‘Move.’ Three furious policemen made a grab for her. A truncheon was raised. Her shoulder slammed into me. I tumbled down the bank, arms windmilling wildly for balance. My knee was agony. I crashed into a backpacker, and fell onto the tarmac barely a yard from a transit van which swerved violently.

  ‘Grab them back,’ Abbey cried. ‘They’re yours. It’s your right.’ She vanished beneath her private scrum of police.

  The vehicles along the road were all braking. I looked up. Everybody was stuck behind Colin’s BMW, which had stopped. The driver’s window slid down smoothly and he stuck his head out. We just gazed at each other. A whole flood of emotions washed over his face. Mainly anger, but I could see regret there as well.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. The rear door opened.

  I looked at the open door. I got to my feet. I looked back up the bank at the violent melee of protestors and police. I looked back at the BMW. The wormhole was waiting beyond it. Cars were blowing their horns in exasperation, people shouting at me to get a move on.

  I start walking towards the BMW with its open door. I know it’s just plain wrong. Morally. Ideologically. I truly believe that. But what else can I do?

  If at First . . .

  ‘My name is David Lanson, and I was with the Metropolitan Police for twenty-seven years. When we got handed the Jenson case I was a chief detective, heading up my own team. Not bad going; from outside you’d think I was a standard careerist ticking off the days until retirement. You’d be wrong, I’d grown to hate the job with a passion. Back when I signed on the CID were real thief-takers, but by the time the Jenson case came up I was spending all my time filling in Risk Assessment forms. I’m not kidding, the paperwork was beyond parody. All good stuff for lawyers, but we were getting hammered in the press for truly dismal crime statistics, and hammered by the politicians for not meeting their stupid targets. No wonder public confidence in us had reached rock bottom; the only useful thing we did for the average citizen by then was to hand out official crime numbers for insurance claims.

  I suppose that makes me sound bitter; but then that seems to be the fate of old men who’re stuck in a job that’s forever modernizing. The point of all this being, despite drowning in all that bureaucratic stupidity, I reckoned I was quite a decent policeman. That is: I know when people are lying. In those twenty-seven years I’d heard it all, and I do mean all: desperate types who’ve made a mistake and then start spouting bollocks to cover themselves, the genuine nutters who live in their own little world and believe every word they’re saying, drunks and potheads trying to act sober, losers with pitiful excuses, real sick ones who are so cold and polite it makes my skin crawl. Listening to all that day in day out you soon learn to tell what’s real and what isn’t.

  So anyway, we get the call from Marcus Orthew’s solicitor that his security people are holding an intruder at his Richmond research centre, and they’d appreciate a full investigation of the ‘situation’. That was in 2007, and Orthew was a media and computer mogul then, at least that was the public perception; it wasn’t until later I found out just how wide his commercial and technological interests were. His primary hardware company, Orthanics, had just started producing solid-state blocks that were generations ahead of anything the opposition was doing. They didn’t have hard drives or individual components, the entire computer was wrapped up inside a single hyperprocessor. It wiped the floor with PCs and Apple Macs. He was always ahead of the game, Orthew; it was his original PCWs that blew Sinclair computers away at the start of the eighties; everyone in my generation went and bought an Orthanics PCW as their first computer.

  But this break-in: I thought it was slightly odd the solicitor calling me rather than the company security office. Like I said, the longer you’re in the game you develop a feeling for these things. I took Paul Mathews and Carmen Galloway with me, they were lieutenants in my team, good people, and slightly less bothered about all the paperwork flooding our office than me. Smart move, I guess; they’d probably make it further than I was ever destined to go. Orthanics security were holding on to Toby Jenson. They’d found him breaking in to one of the Richmond Centre labs, which the CCTV footage confirmed. And I was right, there was more to it. We read Toby Jenson his rights, and uniform division hauled him off; that was when the solicitor told me he was a stalker, a twenty-four-carat obsessive. Marcus Orthew had known about him for years, Jenson had been following him round the globe, hacking into Orthew’s systems, talking to people in his organization, on his domestic staff, ex-girlfriends, basically anyone who crossed his path; but they hadn’t been able to do anything about him. Jenson was smart, there was never any activity they could take him to court for, he never got physically close, all he did was talk to people, the hacking could never be proved in law. The Richmond break-in changed all that. As it was Orthew making the allegations, my boss told me to give it complete priority; I guess she was scared about what his magazines and satellite channels would do to the Met if we let it slide.

  I went out to Jenson’s house with Paul and Carmen. Jesus, you should have seen the bloody place: I mean it was out of a Hollywood serial-killer film. Every room was filled with stuff on Orthew; thousands of pictures taken all over the world, company press releases dating back decades, filing cabinets full of newspaper clippings, articles, every whisper of gossip, records of his movements, maps with his houses and factories on, copies of his magazines, tapes of interviews which Jenson had made, City financial reports on the company. It was a cross between a shrine and a Marcus Orthew museum. It spooked the hell out of me. No doubt about it, Jenson was totally fixated on Orthew. Forensics had to hire a removal lorry to clear the place out.

  I interviewed Jenson the next day and that was when it started to get really weird. I’ll tell you it as straight as I can remember, which is pretty much verbatim. I’m never ever going to forget that afternoon. First off, he wasn’t upset that he’d been caught, more like resigned. Almost like a Premier League footballer who’s lost the Cup Final; you know: it’s a blow but life goes on. The first thing he said was: ‘I should have r
ealised. Marcus Orthew is a genius, he was bound to catch me out.’ Which is kind of ironic, really, isn’t it? So I asked him what exactly he thought he’d been caught out doing. Get this, he said: ‘I was trying to find where he was building his time machine.’ Paul and Carmen just laughed at him. To them it was a Sectioning case, pure and simple. Walk the poor bloke past the station doctor, get the certificate signed, lock him up in a padded room, and supply him with good drugs for the next thirty years. I thought more or less the same thing, too; we wouldn’t even need to go to trial, but we were recording the interview, and all his delusions would help coax a signature out of the doc, so I asked him what made him think Orthew was building a time machine. Jenson said they went to school together, that’s how he knew. Now the thing is, I checked this later; and they actually did go to some boarding school in Lincolnshire. Well that’s fair enough, obsessions can start very early, grudges, too; maybe some fight over a bar of chocolate spiralled out of control, and it’d been festering in Jenson’s mind ever since. Jenson claimed otherwise. Marcus Orthew was the coolest kid in school, apparently. Didn’t surprise me. From what I’d seen of him in interviews over the years he was one of the most urbane men on the planet. Women found that very attractive. You didn’t have to look through Jenson’s press cuttings to know that, Orthew’s girlfriends were legendary, even the broadsheets reported them.

  So how on earth did Jenson decide that the coolest kid in school had evolved into someone building a time machine? ‘It’s simple,’ he told us earnestly. ‘When I was at school I got a cassette recorder for my twelfth birthday. I was really pleased with it, nobody else had one. Marcus saw it and just laughed. He snatched one of the cassettes off me, a C-90 I remember, and he said: State of the art, huh? Damn it’s almost the same size as an iPod.’