by Gary Gibson
‘This?’ said Casey. ‘Wait and see.’ He grinned, though he was clearly still in pain.
Wallace returned moments later with an entire bottle of Yuichi’s home-brewed whisky and a glass, both of which he set on a neighbouring table before pouring what struck me as a remarkably generous measure.
Nadia eyed the bottle. ‘Didn’t you get a warning about drinking too much, Wallace?’
‘I won’t keep it all to myself,’ Wallace replied, draining the glass in one swift motion before as quickly refreshing it.
‘Listen to the lady,’ grunted Casey. Despite his evident discomfort, he was busy slotting together a number of metal brackets and rods until they formed a tripod. He reached up to the movie projector, slipping it out of the bracket holding it to the ceiling, and placed it on the floor beneath a table. He next fitted the multi-lensed device onto the apex of the tripod. He poked at it with a few stubby, calloused fingers, then frowned. ‘Damn thing isn’t working.’
‘Jeez,’ said Wallace. ‘Just get out of the way before you break the thing again.’
I saw Wallace had already finished his second whisky. After seeing Nadia knocking back a beer first thing that morning, I was starting to wonder if I’d landed on the Island of Functional Alcoholics.
Wallace stepped forwards and expertly pressed different parts of the sphere until it glowed softly from somewhere deep inside. He stepped back, and made a number of curious gestures, in the manner of a medieval sorcerer in his laboratory summoning forth a demon.
I’d already guessed the device must itself be some kind of projector, but I found myself taking a startled step back when apparently solid spheres, rendered in primary colours, materialized in the air around us. They hung there in apparent defiance of gravity.
‘One second,’ said Wallace, making more gestures. The spheres suddenly shifted and morphed into a console floating weightlessly in the air before him.
I realized my mouth was hanging open and quickly closed it.
Wallace glanced our way. ‘If I let Casey try and set all this up, he’d break it. Guaranteed.’ He shook his head at Casey. ‘Some people just shouldn’t be allowed near anything remotely technical.’
Casey just shrugged, apparently unperturbed. ‘So who’s assigned to train Jerry, Nadia?’
‘Me.’ She grinned lopsidedly at me. ‘Not that he needs any more training. Your baby wheels are coming off, kiddo. Officially, your next mission is your first real mission.’
‘In what way does what I just went through not qualify as a “real” mission?’
She laughed. ‘A point well made.’
‘They training you hard?’ asked Casey.
‘Yeah. Why?’
‘Because sometimes it helps in this job to be able to run really, really fast.’
‘That does not,’ I said, ‘reassure me.’
‘It wasn’t meant to.’ He nodded at the contraption mounted on its tripod. ‘Hope you stick around for the show, Jerry. It’s going to be a blast.’
He turned back to Wallace and they fell into conversation, as various colourful yet immaterial shapes bobbed in the air around us.
Nadia led me a little way away. ‘Just so you know, your first official reconnaissance mission is a follow-up to a mapping expedition. Other Pathfinders spent a couple of months exploring and studying the alternate we’ll be going to. Believe me, none of us would set foot in the place if we weren’t sure it was perfectly safe.’
‘That last time was—’
‘A fluke,’ she said. ‘Understand?’
I nodded.
Selwyn came towards us, looking a little unsteady on his feet. ‘Goddam you, Vishnevsky,’ he roared at Casey. ‘What you’re doing is in bad taste, even by your usual standards. Don’t you understand that?’
‘Maybe you should relax,’ said Casey, apparently unflustered. He seemed to have recovered from his back pain. ‘Besides, I don’t give a damn what you think.’ He glanced around the bar. ‘And I’m pretty sure no one else here does, either.’
Behind him, Wallace made some alteration to his virtual console, and a hyper-realistic, three-dimensional image of the Earth – looking solid enough to reach out and touch – materialized in the air above our heads. As Wallace made tiny adjustments, the globe first grew larger, then smaller. It was so sharp and clear, I could hardly imagine that gazing down at the real thing from orbit could have given me a better view.
‘You’re showing some kind of film?’ I asked Wallace.
‘“Film” isn’t really the right word,’ Wallace replied, with evident pride. ‘What we’ve got here is a far more sophisticated technology than straightforward two-dimensional projection.’
Casey clapped Wallace on the shoulder. ‘Couldn’t have done any of this without my partner here,’ he said. ‘He keeps trying to tell me how all this junk works, and it’s the best damn cure for insomnia I ever found.’
‘Unfortunately,’ said Wallace, ‘Casey fails to appreciate the technical difficulties involved in hacking into heavily encrypted networks in order to obtain the kind of footage we’re about to show.’
‘Wallace used to work in network security,’ added Nadia from beside me.
‘We just got back from an alternate prior to its extinction event,’ Wallace continued. He seemed to have lost his earlier reticence. ‘That’s what you’re gonna see tonight. Back where we just came from,’ said Wallace, his excitement palpable, ‘there was absolutely no possibility of anyone surviving. It took more groundwork than you’d believe before we could even begin to hack into the networks.’
‘Networks?’ I echoed.
‘Both orbital and ground-based military,’ he said. ‘And was it ever a challenge! Their satellite technology was at least a couple of years ahead of the curve compared to where I—’
‘Wallace,’ said Casey, ‘let’s save it for the damn show.’ He looked around and saw people looking expectantly at the projection. ‘I’d say about now is as good a time as any, since we’re all here.’
Wallace nodded and turned back to his virtual console without another word. He stepped backwards, shooing the rest of us out of his way, and the console drifted after him, coming to a halt only when he did.
The holographic image of the Earth grew even larger, until it reached from the ceiling to the floor. Some trick of the technology now made it appear to be floating against starry blackness, obscuring even those people standing on the far side of the projection from me. I wondered if the technology to do all this came from the Authority’s own parallel. Given they had invented the transfer stages, I felt sure they must be capable of any number of technological marvels.
Someone cut the music, and I saw a microphone had appeared in Casey’s hand. He hoisted himself up on top of the bar, standing carefully until the top of his head brushed against the ceiling. He peered to either side of the projection until he could ascertain that he had the full attention of everyone present.
‘You all hear me okay?’ he asked, his voice booming across the bar. A last few stragglers wandered in from the pool as he spoke. ‘All right, people. Now, me and Wallace only had a couple of hours to edit down what I’d estimate is maybe a couple of thousand hours of footage, but if you weren’t there, it should still give you a pretty damn good idea just what we were dealing with on this latest trip.’
I leaned in towards Nadia. ‘That woman I ran into earlier – Chloe. She’s the only one who isn’t here.’
‘I wouldn’t trouble yourself over it,’ she said quietly, then determinedly turned away from me to watch the show.
The image of the Earth began to shrink again, stopping once the moon came into view. It was immediately clear that the moon was a great deal closer to its parent than it should be.
‘Presenting our world-burster,’ said Casey. ‘What you’re about to see, ladies and gentlemen, would have made generations of action-movie directors cream themselves.’
I had an unsettling realization that we were literally about to se
e the end of the world – or a world, at any rate. I had initially assumed that Wallace had used some software trick to make the moon and Earth appear to be so close to each other, but I now understood that what I was seeing was real, and it sent a dreadful chill through me.
Screeds of technical data appeared, floating in the air. None of it meant anything to me. Casey handed his microphone down to Wallace, who then began to describe in some considerable detail just how he had yanked data from a network of military satellites in order to gain most of the footage we were now watching.
‘We’re still working on the question of just how this particular extinction event came about,’ said Wallace, ‘but the most likely culprit is a high-energy physics experiment attempting to generate artificial gravitational waves. On a technical note, I—’
Casey reached down and grabbed the microphone back before Wallace could continue, and I heard a titter from someone in the audience.
‘Right,’ said Casey. ‘However the hell it happened, the results are startlingly clear. We stitched together all that orbital stuff with some ground-based surveillance footage to give you a pretty accurate depiction of just how things went down in the final hours.’
Wallace had returned his attention to his console. The image juddered and changed so that we all saw the Earth from low orbit. Clouds cast shadows over Asia Minor, far below. The moon, far larger than it should have been, hung huge above the curving horizon. I could tell from the exaggerated pace of the clouds that the footage had been sped up so that hours passed in minutes. I could have walked all the way around the projection if I had wanted, and Oskar in fact began to do precisely this, peering first at the Antarctic continent and then back at the approaching moon.
I could see what was coming, with dreadful inevitability.
‘They knew they were going to die,’ Casey continued, ‘but someone down there still wanted to witness the whole damn thing for as long as they could.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe the people in charge of their communications networks were crazy enough to think they could somehow survive. If not for them, we wouldn’t have hardly any of this.’
A number of separate, two-dimensional moving images appeared, arranged in a ring around the Earth about level with the Antarctic. They showed what looked like ground-based views of the approaching moon. One in particular caught my attention. It appeared to have been filmed on a hand-held camera, its owner directing its lens towards the distorted face of the falling moon. Luna’s craters and hills were entirely visible with the naked eye; indeed, the ancient satellite blocked out much of the sky as it rose over a savannah plain. As I watched, deep cracks appeared in its crust, growing wider and deeper with every passing second, like something out of a nightmare.
‘How could they get this footage, if the guy was down on the ground while all this was happening?’ I whispered to Nadia, but she just shook her head.
‘Wallace’s a wizard at this stuff,’ she whispered back. ‘That’s all you need to know.’
I tore my gaze from the awful sight and moved my attention to another of the accompanying videos. This one showed a different view from orbit, and I watched an enormous shadow crawl across the face of the Earth.
I put one hand to my belly, feeling my insides twist. The things I had lived through back on my own alternate, as terrible as they were, barely compared to what I was witnessing. If some other version of me had lived on that world, he would have been under no illusions about his chances of survival.
‘It took a month for their Moon to spiral all the way down from its usual orbit and towards the Earth,’ said Casey, continuing his narration. ‘We’ve got evidence there was some kind of attempt to build a ship at record speed, presumably to blast a few survivors off towards Mars, but I think they realized pretty soon that wasn’t going to work.’
‘Why not?’ somebody shouted out. Someone else laughed, and I realized that many of those people around me, rather than being appalled, were in fact enjoying the spectacle.
‘There’s no way to create a long-term sustainable living environment under that kind of time limit,’ Casey replied easily. ‘They could have survived for a couple of years maybe, perhaps a little longer, but no more than that. I guess they decided they’d rather die quickly with the rest of humanity than face a long, slow death with no possibility of rescue.’ He shrugged. ‘Either that, or they killed each other fighting for a berth on the ship.’
‘I’m not sure I can watch this,’ I muttered to Nadia.
‘Stick around,’ she muttered. ‘You need to get hardened to stuff like this, Jerry.’
‘Now this mission,’ Casey continued, ‘was about collecting observational data for a change, instead of bloody artefact retrieval. Specifically, it was about. . .’ He frowned and glanced over at Wallace. ‘What the hell did they call it again?’
‘“The interaction between two co-orbiting bodies following a quantum-phase trigger event”,’ Wallace replied.
‘Yeah,’ said Casey. ‘That. Whatever the fuck that is.’ That got him a few laughs from around the room.
I swallowed hard as the show continued. Whoever had been wielding the hand-held camera had somehow managed to keep a steady focus on the surface of the moon as it rushed towards them, the cracks in its surface growing yet wider. I couldn’t imagine what kind of fortitude it took to just stand there and watch, instead of screaming and running.
I glanced back at the main projection, and saw there was something odd about the shape of both worlds. Their outlines were becoming distended where they were closest, as if they were being twisted out of shape.
Over the next minute the darkness separating the two worlds reduced to a narrow gap, then a sliver and, finally, nothing. The moon had by now become egg-shaped, with enormous fissures reaching around to its far side. Brilliant incandescent light flared where the two bodies met, and from that moment on they appeared to merge into each other, the moon sinking deep into the Earth’s crust like a pebble dropped into wet mud. I saw lunar craters melting into molten slag before they, too, were sucked deep within the Earth’s embrace.
Unbelievably, the view of the savannah continued. The moon had made contact with the ground at some point perhaps a thousand miles farther over the horizon from whoever was wielding the camera, and they now directed its gaze towards a great dark dome, tinted deep blue with distance, and sinking slowly downwards. A line of fire burned along the horizon, growing wider and taller. Great dust clouds at its base spread and darkened as they rushed towards the lens.
For whose benefit, I wondered, had they been recording all this? Or was it that witnessing the vehicle of their passing, from the other side of a camera lens, somehow made it seem less real?
Suddenly, all across the savannah, birds rose in great dark clouds, even as streaks of cirrus high in the atmosphere suddenly evaporated. The ground tilted, and fire shot upwards from distant black hills as magma was released from deep beneath the Earth’s crust.
Dust rose in great clouds, obscuring the view, but not so much that I couldn’t see the vast wall of superheated rock and lava sweeping over the hills and towards the camera . . .
The picture cut off. I drew a shuddering breath, realizing I’d been holding it in all this time. I had to force my hands, now damp with sweat, to unclench. I wiped them on my shirt, and tried to retrieve my scattered nerves.
Despite this I steeled myself, and continued to watch. If the rest of them could do it, so could I. As Nadia had said: I might well see far worse things than this.
All of the views of the merged Earth and moon were now from orbit. The planet’s crust rippled like water, white-hot where the moon had collided with it, the colour fading to a deep burned orange farther around the globe. There were no longer any recognizable continents or oceans, only an endless ocean of fire as magma swallowed up the great landmasses.
And through it all Casey kept talking, narrating the whole damn thing, glancing occasionally at a piece of much-folded paper in one hand to remind himsel
f of what he wanted to say.
I turned away, finally unable to bear any more. Casey’s voice boomed in my ears like a particularly raucous, drunken angel sounding the final trumpet. And then I heard angry shouting, and turned back to see Selwyn, red-faced with fury, staring up at Casey with his hands balled into fists.
‘Damn you, Vishnevsky! You have no respect for human life. You can’t treat this as an entertainment!’
Casey said something I didn’t catch. Selwyn responded by noisily pushing past the people nearest him, almost tripping over Oskar’s enormous hound in the process.
I’d had enough too, but I wanted my exit to be rather more quiet and unobtrusive than Selwyn’s. Perhaps, I thought, I could catch the little Welshman outside, and talk to him about what we had just seen. But as I quietly stepped towards the open patio door and made my way out past the pool, I could feel all of their eyes boring into my back regardless.
I quickened my pace, walking all the way around the side of the hotel until I was back at the front entrance. I breathed in deep, feeling as if my lungs were clogged with soot and ashes.
I couldn’t see Selwyn Rudd anywhere, but then my attention was drawn towards a figure making its way along the road by the harbour. Whoever it was, it clearly wasn’t Selwyn, particularly since it was coming towards the hotel, rather than away from it. It wasn’t until the figure drew closer that I saw it was Chloe, the woman Yuichi had run off to speak to. It struck me in that moment, now that I could see her more clearly and she wasn’t actively fleeing from my presence, that she was actually quite beautiful.
‘Hi,’ I said, stepping towards her. She appeared once again to be deep in contemplation. She looked up and saw me, slowly coming to a halt near the hotel steps. This time, at least, she didn’t look as if she was going to run away, even though she regarded me with nearly as much trepidation as before.
I nodded towards the bar, Casey’s amplified voice still booming noisily through the air. ‘So how come you weren’t in there with the rest of them?’ I asked.
