“Time is linear down there,” she pointed in the direction of the closed curtains, “Any influence I make is simply the first step in a long chain that follows it. Hierarchies of choices that go rippling out from that point.”
“Causality counts,” he replied, “After a change is made, linear time continues for them.”
“Making any amendment to that first change, even by a few seconds, undoes the chain that follows it,” she said, “Sometimes the effects are minor but other times, like when I saved Marcus, an entirely new continuum is created. Before we can deal with Siva, we need to make completely sure that we’re done altering events that happen between your arrival here and Siva’s impact fifteen months later.”
“If we’re successful in stopping an ice age,” he nodded, “then making any change to the time before our first action, could undo our efforts.”
Kate sat down on the sofa and invited her father to do the same. Despite the devastation they’d just reviewed and the scale of the broader task ahead, she was dreading the next few moments even more.
“Outside that front door,” she pointed in the direction of the hallway, “thought, matter, energy… they’re all fluid, almost interchangeable. Stray thoughts and emotions can interfere with the linear world below, but this place insulates you from that.”
“I thought so,” he said.
She wondered how he’d managed to reach that conclusion based on so little information, but she didn’t have to wait long for the explanation.
“My thoughts here always seem to be accompanied by a physical disturbance in the fire,” he smiled, “or the weather outside.”
She found herself beaming at her father’s inquisitive mind. She began explaining the events within the USV, and a storm rolled in over Samphire Hoe.
FROZEN
13th April 2014
Monica stared at Bradley and stepped towards him slightly; an effect she hoped would reinforce her presence.
“In that cell down there, I’ve had a lot of time to think, about Bishop’s list, me, Douglas, Kate. I know thinking doesn’t come easily for a man like you. But see if you can work it out. See if you can join the genetic dots. With supreme order and chaos for parents… can you even estimate my daughter’s abilities?”
The frozen image of Marcus was still on the screen. She couldn’t be sure what he was doing, but she knew she had to help in any way possible. She’d introduced Bishop’s list into the conversation in an attempt to distract Bradley from Marcus. A gambit that appeared to be paying off; his focus was now on her.
During her imprisonment, she’d watched him tangentially skirting around issues that could only have been related to the photocopied list of names. Each mention, a simple test to see how she would react. She’d left the list in Nathan’s possession, so she concluded that Bradley must somehow have captured Nathan. However, the fact that Bradley was still asking questions of her, meant that Nathan had not given up anything useful. Nathan must still be alive though, she thought, otherwise Bradley would have made another sickening village square demonstration.
“Your daughter?” Bradley seemed to recover, “Oh, I still got plans for her.”
“Ha!” Monica realised she was getting to him, “I thought you said you’d strangled her to death?”
She watched him struggle, caught in a web of his own inexpertly woven lies, “I guess murdering the dead is easier to pull off for someone of your limitations.”
“Limitations?” said Bradley, loudly, “Gordo?”
At the mention of his name, the man at the nearby console turned away from the frozen video feed.
“Er… Bradley, I -” he began.
“How many Peace Keepers we got in the Hive?” he continued to stare at her.
“Er, we’ve got sixteen, some of them are already -”
“Deploy the lot.”
“Whoa, wait a minute!” the man seemed hesitant, “If the whole Hive’s going live then we’ve gotta tell the Council.”
As the man reached for his two-way radio, she saw an anger flare in Bradley’s eyes. An anger that swiftly transitioned into action; Bradley pulled from his pocket a single shot pistol and aimed it at the man.
“I said deploy the lot.”
The man initially froze in fear but then quickly complied, returning his hands to his keyboard and glancing nervously towards Bradley. Monica knew that Marcus might stand a chance against a single drone, particularly on the metal stairwell, but against sixteen she was less sure. Thinking quickly, she knew she’d have to intervene.
“OK, you win!” she begged him, “Let me talk to him! He’ll listen!”
Although Bradley still had the pistol aimed at the man, both turned to look at her.
“Did I tell you to stop working, Gordo?” he spoke to him while staring at her. The man hurriedly resumed tapping at his keyboard, as Bradley continued, “Now that’s much better, Mon! Bit of respect.”
He gripped the pistol.
“Who is he?” Bradley jerked his head towards the frozen image of Marcus.
Monica knew that every word she used could buy time.
“I don’t know his real name,” she lied, “I only know his alias.”
“I ain’t hearin’ anything new,” he drawled, “Gordo, you got ten seconds to get ‘em in the air.”
“I’m going as fast as I can!” the man pleaded, “They take twenty just to initialise!”
“Gordo, I swear if I hear another word out of your mouth…”
Monica could see the man’s control screens were beginning to fill with several different windows. One by one, the black windows were switching to a unique video feed from each of the drones within the Hive.
“His alias,” Monica raised her hands in apparent submission, then hesitantly spoke three lies, “is ‘Anti-social Networking’, I can bring him in. He… he’ll do what I tell him.”
•
In the quiet of AR1, Nathan was still coming to terms with the fact that for the past nine months, his free will had quite possibly not actually been his own.
His motivation for escaping Luóxuán Biotech had been real enough, but he could no longer be sure how real his subsequent choices were. No matter how much he considered it, his choices felt like real ones; the decisions he’d made appeared consistent and made logical sense.
Part of him thought that Marcus shouldn’t have told him. He could have lived in ignorant bliss; convinced that he himself was protecting the dozen red-lined descendants of his grandpa’s list.
He was disturbed from his contemplation by the arrival of a concerned looking Izzy Kitrick.
“Hey, Izzy, what’s up?”
“Did you clear him to leave the Warren?” she replied, walking into the room, “You know… Blake?”
“Marcus?” Nathan stood up from the sofa, “No. You’re not saying…?”
“Yeah,” she nodded, “he said you’d cleared it.”
Nathan glanced at the coffee table and realised that Marcus had taken the laptop with him.
“No,” he shook his head, “No, I didn’t. Alright, let’s hope he didn’t go far.”
He drew a deep breath and they walked out of AR1. As he stepped into the narrow passageway he felt something scuff under his foot: a single paperclip, glistening in a shallow puddle of water.
A glance to his right confirmed his first thought: the door of the Arrivals Lounge was no longer frozen.
•
Against the backdrop of the USV’s simulated night sky, the drone simply hung in the air. It was only receiving instructions from Marcus’ laptop.
He brought up the video feed coming from its onboard camera and saw its last captured video frame; a blurry freeze-frame of Marcus himself holding the laptop at the moment he’d assumed control. Marcus waved to the drone’s camera, but the still image remained. The drone was blind.
He experimented increasing the power to the rotors and saw the drone rise in height. He returned it to its original height, hovering in front
of him on the opposite side of the stairwell’s metal handrail. He opened the stun controls and the drone obediently lowered the sting-like rod from its undercarriage.
Marcus found a screen button marked ‘Administer’, a clinical description of its actual purpose. Taking a step further back from the handrail, he tentatively clicked the button. The drone responded by emitting a short electric shock that discharged harmlessly into the metal framework. The actual duration could only have been one tenth of a second. He experimented again, this time holding the button down for longer; the duration of the shock matched the duration of the button press. There didn’t appear to be any options for adjusting the duration of discharge.
A cold feeling spread through him.
There was nothing automatic about this process.
A human being had physically held down the button that had killed Geraldine. Someone had held down the button and watched while Geraldine’s life was taken away, second by second.
He wanted to take his newly acquired drone and unleash chaos, but he knew it wasn’t a solution. Monica had once told him that chaos was not achieved by random disruption, it was the work of meticulous planning.
He would need a plan and a place to store the drone.
He pulled his replenished inhaler from his pocket and took a dose.
After so long without using it, he began to feel the effects almost immediately. The heightened contrast between his present and former mental states was clearer than ever.
He looked at the laptop screen and then cast his eye out over the USV’s flat landscape below. Abruptly, the simulated stars went out and, in the middle of the USV’s night, the artificial sun resumed full brightness. While he blinked and shielded his eyes against the sudden change, he heard a low howl as the USV’s public address system activated.
“Well, hey there folks,” the voice echoed around the cavernous chamber, “here’s a wake-up call.”
As Marcus’ eyes adjusted to the sudden dawn, he began to see signs of life far below; people emerging from their dwellings and looking skyward towards the illuminated circle in their sky. Coming so soon after his drone subversion, Marcus knew the timing was not a coincidence. There was a slight rumbling sound followed by a new voice.
“This is Monica Walker…”
His first thought was that she was alive. But as fast as he could form the thought, he realised that it could just be a recording.
“… with a message for Mr. Anti-social Networking, standing on the Glaucus stairwell.”
The fact she knew his position proved it wasn’t a recording. As the inhaler’s effects took hold, he also realised the significance of the name she’d chosen instead of his usual ‘Blackbox’ alias.
When he’d originally got Kate out of London, they’d been forced to raid a fellow hacker’s basement flat for alternative clothing. He’d worn a long-sleeved grey T-shirt emblazoned with the sarcastic words ‘Anti-social Networking’; something Monica had commented on when they’d first met. Since then, the term had become their shorthand for acting in an unsocial manner for the sake of appearances. Marcus knew she was under duress and should therefore consider her words carefully.
“I can think of at least a dozen reasons…”
He knew she must be talking about Nathan’s twelve.
“… why you wouldn’t trust what I’m saying…”
He could see what she was doing.
“… but I want you to come back to the centre of the USV.”
Get as far away from it as possible.
“The Peace Keepers will give you safe passage…”
They’re going to hit you with everything.
“… so that we can talk things through.”
There would be no words.
“Deliberately putting everyone in danger…”
Getting everyone to safety…
“… is the wrong thing to do.”
Is the best thing to do.
“Wait for me.”
Don’t wait for her.
There was a muffled commotion transmitted by the public-address system. Clearly, someone had taken issue with her last statement. The muffled sound stopped and Marcus heard a single gunshot.
WINDOW
~
Douglas watched through the Samphire construct window. He knew Kate was outside, controlling what was visible to him, but the constantly shifting perspective and often discontinuous time periods was taking some getting used to. Frequently he would hear her voice, as though she was still standing next to him, despite her not being present at all.
The current content of the window was a high perspective view of the cottage remnants. He watched a tsunami sweep towards the Dover coastline and then engulf it.
“Couldn’t you have just parted the waters around it?” he asked.
“I’m good,” said Kate, “but not that good. Or rather, I wasn’t that good when I put this fix in place.”
Douglas now understood that he was seeing a review of actions she’d already taken. It made sense, this event had taken place before the Node had departed, they’d not begun to address Siva yet.
The perspective collapsed and reformed in the Warren’s Arrivals Lounge. He recognised the arrivals track, but it was obviously damaged. The room was also full of packing cases and, bizarrely, an artificial Christmas tree.
“OK,” said Kate, “This is where the seawater breaches the arrivals tube.”
“Who are the two men?”
“Cal Dawson and Woodrow Forrestal.”
He didn’t recognise either of them, but then considered that he’d no reason to. Monica had been finishing the Warren without him for several years.
Douglas saw the tree’s tinsel-covered branches shimmer; evidently the advancing seawater was displacing a significant amount of air ahead of its arrival. The seawater gushed in, then one of the men ran into the room, closing the door behind him. Douglas watched as the man, wading through ice cold seawater, stacked the crates against the door and tied them in place with electrical cable.
“What’s he doing?”
“Sacrificing himself,” she said, “to buy time for everyone to escape.”
“The poor man,” Douglas shook his head at the selfless act of bravery, “But, surely it’ll never hold back the seawater?”
“It didn’t,” she replied, “I intervened.”
From a submerged viewpoint within the room he could now see the man was inert and sinking through the cold water. Suddenly the seawater began to rapidly freeze around him; spreading out to fill the entire space.
“An ice dam?”
“Yep,” she replied, “I knew Cal, he was such a good man. I wanted to make sure his actions gave people the time they needed. As it turned out, I’ve ended up maintaining the ice far longer than I originally thought.”
“Wait a minute,” the thought suddenly occurred to him, “A moment ago you said you couldn’t control the seawater to deflect around the Warren’s entrance, but here you’re maintaining an ice dam?”
“In the same way that you’re seeing these events out of sequence, my interventions are non-linear too. My abilities didn’t progress according to their linear time. I’m moving us forwards…”
The view in front of him collapsed then unfolded again, to see a man holding a laptop.
“I’m guessing that’s Marcus?” he asked, but found his attention drawn to the metal stairs, “Whoa! I’d forgotten how high those things ran.”
Douglas had been on those stairs a few days before Monica’s engineered cave-in. But it had been so long ago that the vertiginous view now seemed brand new.
He heard his wife’s message ringing out around the USV and ultimately the gunshot sound that Kate had warned him about. He felt the Samphire Cottage room shudder around him.
“Take it easy, Dad,” she said, “Everything so far has been in review. Now we get to decide how things go.”
Douglas waited for the shuddering to subside. It seemed his daughter had learned the
patience that was necessary for life within the Boundary. For him, a sense of urgency and emotion still prevailed. He noticed that the view through the window had stopped moving.
“I’ve stopped us here,” said Kate, closing the front door and walking into the living room, “Time’s not going anywhere.”
“I started to get upset,” he confessed, straightening a picture on the wall, “I’m sorry.”
She gave him a hug but it seemed that it was somehow an unfamiliar action for her. Not for the first time, he wondered how long she’d been here in human linear terms.
“I’ve been thinking about Mum and the twelve red-liners,” she said, “There might be a way, but it’s a little beyond me at the minute.”
“Can I help?” he delivered a parental response without really thinking, “Sorry, Katie, that was stupid. Of course I can’t.
“Of course you can,” she smiled and studied his face, “I just need to pop outside for a bit.”
As she turned to walk back towards the hallway, another seemingly automatic parental phrase escaped his mouth.
“How long will you be out?” he closed his eyes in embarrassment.
“Not long,” she gave him a broad smile.
Her heard the front door open and then close behind her.
He shook his head. It seemed that no matter where in the world, or universe, his daughter was, he’d care for her just the same. The front door opened again and she walked back into the living room.
“Did you forget something?” he asked.
She frowned at him.
“Oh, I see,” she smiled, “because of the door and… No, I’ve done what I needed to do. Are you ready?”
He took a deep breath, shook out his arms and gave a firm nod.
“Go.”
GO
9th April 2107
Lana placed her headset into position.
“All stations report in,” it felt a little like the old FLC days, she thought.
“Mike Sanders, Shuttle cargo bay.”
“Cathy Gant, Module Alpha.”
“Anna Bergstrom, Field Control.”
“Fai, Internal server.”
Boundary (Field Book 3) Page 35
