by Gary Gibson
Kendrick shrugged apologetically at Caroline and steered a course towards Buddy. In his heart he knew that Sieracki would never simply let them go, even if the guards never returned.
20 October 2096
Edinburgh
Once back in Edinburgh, Kendrick tried to call Caroline, leaving several messages. She didn’t reply and he was not even sure what he would say to her anyway. Whatever brief truce they’d enjoyed after he’d escaped from Hardenbrooke’s clinic was clearly over.
But right now what concerned him most was the message that arrived in his wand during the flight home. He had gazed at the words for many minutes before looking away from the tiny screen. The message consisted of three words in an unadorned ASCII textfile:
AWE TEPEE PILOT
Then Kendrick made arrangements to pick up a hired car the next morning.
21 October 2096
En route to Loch Awe
Kendrick heard the car parking itself outside his flat in the early morning hours. He stepped outside and gazed up into a red-tinged pre-dawn sky. The jet lag from his long hours of flight had sent his sleep cycle spinning, but he didn’t feel he could afford to rest more than was strictly necessary.
A strong breeze whipped down the winding streets as his vehicle navigated its way through the ancient city. Kendrick kept a window open, for once enjoying the lash of wind and freezing rain. It made for a genuinely pleasant change after the burning heat of Cambodia.
Kendrick had done a lot of soul-searching in the hours since his return, even filling himself with doubt over his prompt refusal of Draeger’s offer. But there were hundreds of other Labrats scattered around the globe who could benefit from the treatment, some of them perhaps already at death’s door. Draeger using his supposed solution to every Labrat’s problems as nothing more than a bargaining tool was the basest kind of bribery. Kendrick breathed deeply, pushing the anger away from him. Instead he watched the morning light spill over distant mountain peaks.
Three words. And they could only have come from the one living person whom Kendrick had ever felt he could really trust.
The car drove on, leaving the city far behind. Grey rain clouds skirted the horizon, spreading out across a sodden landscape of hills and valleys. Kendrick listened to the news as he went. Mostly they talked about the continuing spread of Asian Rot, as close now as the fields of southern Spain, and the source of frantic headlines for the past few weeks. After a while he passed through a damp-looking Falkirk before heading north to Stirling, and then on to Loch Awe.
An hour and a half after Kendrick had left Edinburgh, brilliant sunlight finally split the rain clouds wide, sending God-sized fingers of radiance down onto the waters of the Loch and the surrounding Braes.
The rain still pelted down sporadically as he passed along the shores of the Loch. Now he assumed manual control – and almost missed the old hotel building as it loomed out of bushes of wild heather, with dense thickets of oak trees lining the path to the retreat.
Kendrick let the car park itself in the driveway to the sound of gravel spitting under its wheels. Before him was a two-storey building of granite. Bought by a wealthy Buddhist a little over a century before, since then it had become a dedicated retreat, although Kendrick had never once seen an orange robe during his visits. He walked up to the entrance and passed through the unlocked front door, finding himself in a wide hallway, a bare pine floor under his feet. At first glance it looked as though little had changed during the last several years.
“Hello, can I help you?” A young woman with a crew-cut approached Kendrick from an adjacent room. To one side he could see people sitting in a separate dining area, talking and drinking tea. He didn’t recognize the woman, but then, the kind of long-term residents who benefited most from this retreat didn’t usually spend much time inside the main building.
Kendrick looked over her shoulder towards the gardens. The parkland that extended toward the hills behind the retreat was visible through tall veranda doors at the far end of the hallway.
“Yeah, I’m looking for Buddy. Buddy Juarez.” The young woman looked blank. “Maybe you haven’t been here that long?” he suggested. “He comes up here sometimes, when he wants to get away.”
Her expression grew slightly wary. “Was he expecting you? Some of the people here don’t like to be disturbed.”
“It’s okay, Sally.” Kendrick turned to find himself facing an elderly man dressed in slacks and an open-necked shirt. A name came to him: Hamilton.
“I remember you.” Hamilton nodded. “Lukas, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Kendrick replied, recognizing one of his former aliases. “Buddy’s around, is he?”
“Yes.” Hamilton studied him. “He turned up just yesterday – rather unexpected, I’m afraid. I do hope everything’s all right for him?”
Kendrick spread his hands. “I’m sure everything’s fine, Mr Hamilton. I know how much he’s gained from visits here over the years. We made arrangements to get together while I myself was in the area.” Kendrick beamed, trying to look friendly. “Is that okay?”
“Yes, I suppose it is,” Hamilton replied after a lengthy pause. “But please remember that we have to respect the wishes of all our other residents.”
“Thanks, I appreciate that.” As Kendrick moved towards the veranda doors and the path beyond, he could feel Hamilton’s suspicious stare burning into his back with every step he took.
Leaving the building behind him, he began climbing up the increasingly steep slope. Just beyond a low dry-stone wall stood an ashram with a curved roof of corrugated iron, a trellis of ivy growing up one side of it. The whole institution radiated a certain peace, but Kendrick had never derived anything like as much pleasure from it as Buddy did. Somehow he found he always missed the hustle and bustle of busy city streets.
A couple of teenagers were wrestling heavy water-smoothed stones into place, building a path from the ashram itself to a nearby stream that ran down into the Loch – from whose shore they’d presumably lugged the stones. Several years before, Kendrick had spent a long weekend helping Buddy and some other survivors of the Maze to build a similar path at the opposite side of the house. That had been just after the Wilber Trials at a time when Kendrick had felt the very real need to work some things out in his head. He hadn’t realized until then how much the simple labour involved in building a path could distract him from his problems, how much basic fulfilment and satisfaction it could bring him.
But in the end it had not been enough. After only a couple of days he’d started to become bored, itching to get back to civilization. Buddy, however, had stayed on there for a year or two, with Kendrick paying him sporadic visits once he’d permanently relocated himself to Edinburgh. To some extent, the paths of their lives had since diverged.
But there was still that connection: the Maze.
It happened sometimes with people who’d survived major disasters together. They clung to each other, sometimes keeping in contact for the rest of their lives. Kendrick could understand that easily.
For a long time it’d been that way with Caroline, and with Buddy. There’d been others, but he’d seen too many of them die as their augments turned against them, destroying them from the inside out. He’d given up going to funerals at which half a dozen Labrats watched each other from either side of a grave, wondering which of them would be next to go.
Kendrick headed past the ashram, with a nod to the path-builders. He continued upwards, through a landscape broken by copses and isolated patches of woodland. Smoke curled up from several points among the trees.
Letting his memory guide him, he headed for one copse in particular. Kendrick had somehow never quite managed to get used to the idea of an ex-US Navy pilot living in a tepee.
Buddy was sitting outside the tent, wearing a ragged pair of dungarees over a woollen sweater, a couple of days’ worth of stubble clinging to his cheeks. He looked thinner than Kendrick remembered from the last time he’d seen him, mo
re than three years before. He had a cooking fire going in a shallow pit surrounded by pebbles, and was using a plastic spatula to prod at the contents of a tin pan balanced on a wire frame arching over the flames.
Buddy looked up and squinted at him. “So I guess you got my message. I was worried in case it might have been a little obscure.”
“I’m not the only one who could have figured it out, you realize.”
Buddy grinned back. “I don’t see them coming here. Remember how long I ended up here for, after the Maze?”
Kendrick nodded. “Couple of years?”
“You thought I was some kind of lunatic for staying here so long.” Buddy picked up a plastic bowl from where it had been sitting on the grass. He lifted the pan from the fire, covering its handle first with a dish towel. “I’m glad you came. How did things go with Draeger?”
Kendrick reeled back. “How the hell did you know about that?”
Buddy shrugged. “I keep my ear to the ground.”
“You mean Erik Whitsett wasn’t the only one spying on me?”
Some of the light faded from Buddy’s eyes. “Erik never got back in touch, Kendrick. What happened?”
“Somebody killed him, is what happened. We met, we talked – and somebody shot him.”
Buddy looked shocked. Kendrick explained what had happened in more detail.
“Los Muertos,” Buddy muttered after a pause. “They’ve been targeting us.”
“Erik mentioned something to that effect.”
Buddy looked like he was thinking hard. “I asked you how things went with Draeger. I need you to tell me straight out: are you working for him?”
Kendrick laughed. “Are you serious? Who do you think you’re talking to?”
“People do change.”
“But not that much.”
“All right, so how do you explain your meeting with him?”
“I never had the chance to speak with him face to face before. I just wanted to see what he was like, see what he had to say to me. Wouldn’t you want to be able to do that?”
“Sure. And?”
“He tried to bribe me with some miracle cure.”
Buddy smiled wryly. “There is no cure for what we have.”
“That’s pretty much what I said to him.”
“Yet you believe him? Is that what you’re saying?”
Kendrick hesitated. “He wanted something out of me, it’s true, but he wasn’t lying. He wants people to know how brilliant he is – it’s one of his flaws. So, yes, I’m inclined to believe him. I’ve also been getting some treatments myself, which gives me a serious chance of staying alive longer than without them. That lends a lot of credence to what he told me.”
“A cure.” Buddy nodded slowly. “That would be quite something.”
“If it’s true, it represents a real chance for all of us.” Kendrick knelt on the damp grass and looked across at him.
“How many other people have been offered miracle cures?” Buddy asked. “Ways of turning back the clock and fixing us?”
Kendrick grinned. “Pretty much as many people as have died testing them out.”
“Exactly,” said Buddy, stabbing the empty spatula in his direction. “So forgive me if I don’t necessarily share your enthusiasm. And how much did Erik tell you before he died?”
“He talked about the Bright – and about the things we witnessed when Sieracki isolated the four of us, back in the Maze.”
Buddy’s smile became grim. “How well I remember that. Anything else?”
“He told me you had some damn-fool plan to go to the Archimedes.”
Buddy laughed, rocking back on his haunches. “Oh, man, the look on your face. So what did you make of that?”
“Well, I said he was crazy – and that you were crazy. But, after Erik was killed, I got the impression that somebody was taking it all very seriously. Max Draeger’s also entirely aware of your intentions.”
Buddy shrugged. “If Los Muertos know about us, then Draeger figuring certain things out is no surprise. But what we’ve got planned will be over before he can do anything to stop or hinder us.”
“Look, there was a bomb incident in a bar. And someone else tried to kidnap me. Whatever’s going on, you clearly know a lot more than I do.”
Buddy pursed his lips, then started dishing food onto a paper plate. “Hungry?” he asked.
“Not particularly.”
Buddy shrugged, and continued talking between mouthfuls. “It’s not like I’ve been hiding anything from you. In fact, I’ve been trying to draw you in. I understand exactly why you’ve been keeping out of sight, but it made it harder to track you down.”
“Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem a problem for anyone else.”
“Yeah, well . . . once I realized something might have happened to Erik I figured I’d better take care of things myself. A lot’s been happening since you and I last saw each other. Four people don’t regularly share the same nightmare unless there’s something particular going on, right?”
“If you’re referring to Sieracki’s experiment, then, granted, we shared something. But it was all in our own heads. There was nothing objectively real about it.”
“No, what we saw was real. The Bright are real.”
“The Bright were from Robert’s deranged—”
“For Christ’s sake!” Buddy dropped the plate onto the grass and threw up his hands in the air. “Will you listen to yourself? What is it about all this that you can’t accept? You were the one who told me the most about the Bright, before Robert died and—”
“Don’t say it,” Kendrick interrupted quickly.
“Look, I’m sorry. But it’s just—”
“Here’s a question back at you. When did your augmentations turn rogue?”
Buddy looked impressed. “What makes you think they have?”
“I found some medical records with all our names on them. They told me everything I needed to know. So tell me when.”
“Round about the same time as you, probably. Anyone who got out of Ward Seventeen who hadn’t yet developed rogue augments went on to develop them between nine and twelve months ago. We’re all in the same fix. That’s just one more reason why we all have to work together.”
Buddy stood up to stretch his legs. “Okay, I brought some stuff I wanted to show you. It’s all back in the tent, so care to join me?”
He turned away, ducking down to crawl into the tent’s interior. Kendrick hesitated a moment, then followed.
Although it was based around an ancient design, the tepee had been made from modern heat-absorbing artificial fibres. There was enough room inside for both men to stand, and the supporting struts were fashioned from super-light alloy. Rather than living by basic means, Buddy had been able to spend his time here at the retreat in relative comfort while still maintaining the near-complete isolation he’d once craved.
Noise and activity covered the interior walls, eepsheets and printouts having been hastily taped onto any available surface. Kendrick noticed that the London Times was tacked up near his head, its real-time default set to its technology pages.
Kendrick saw mostly pictures and videos of the Archimedes orbital. One image looped endlessly, a computer animation very similar to the one he had found in Caroline’s working files.
He studied some of the printouts, most of which were related to the LA Nuke, the Wilber Trials – anything that tied in to the history of the Labrats. If he hadn’t known better, or hadn’t seen some of the things he’d seen over the past several days, he would have thought that this was the work of an obsessive or a madman.
“I said I wanted to show you something. Look at this.” Buddy carefully detached one eepsheet from the tent’s inner wall. The ’sheet was tuned in to what appeared to be a journal.
“This is a multi-author feed that collates information relating to the space industry,” Buddy explained. “A lot, but not all of it, consists of technical and safety issues.”
K
endrick took the eepsheet and flicked through its summary page. “What am I supposed to be looking for here?”
“There’s something happening near the Archimedes. A spatial anomaly that’s got half the physicists in the world spinning on their heads.”
“Meaning what?”
“Look – for Draeger, building the Archimedes was an important step on the road to proving the reality of the Omega Point. You’re an expert on Draeger, so you know the theory.”
The idea was more than a century old. It suggested that since intelligent life always sought to preserve itself, then, faced with the ultimate extinction – the final collapse of the universe and the end of time – that intelligence would seek to preserve itself indefinitely, using some unimaginable super-science of the most distant possible future. The result would be a subjective virtual environment, which, the theory argued, would be effectively indistinguishable from Heaven.
Kendrick saw the gleam in Buddy’s eye and shook his head violently. “Oh, come on. The Omega Point theory just doesn’t wash. You’d have to make a lot of prior assumptions for it to even begin to hold water.”
Buddy made a dismissive gesture. “Look, what I’m saying is, if Draeger built the Archimedes primarily so that the nanite computer networks up there could try and find God for him – well, I’m saying they achieved it. Or they found something, that’s for sure.”
Kendrick couldn’t keep the look of scepticism off his face. “Where’s the proof?”
“You saw the evidence.” Buddy tapped the side of his head. “The visions. The Archimedes.”
“Or maybe there’s something hard-wired into our augs. Something triggering a collective hallucination.”
“C’mon, Kendrick, that’s grasping at straws.”
“Look, maybe there is something in this shared-experience thing. Maybe it’s something like what happened to the four of us in the Maze, but if that’s the case I’m only getting the thirty-second preview. Whatever the rest of you have been seeing, Erik made it clear that it was a lot more than I’d seen.”
