George and the Ship of Time

by Lucy Hawking

  George felt someone watching him and glanced around just in time to catch Empyrean observing him with a gleaming eye.

  He decided to address the robot’s attitude. “Is something wrong?”

  “What do you mean?” asked Hero.

  “Empy keeps watching me when he thinks I’m not looking,” said George.

  “And me,” said Boltzmann with feeling. “And he doesn’t seem to respond to my efforts to connect robot to robot.”

  “He’s just like that,” agreed Hero. “His eyes follow you around the room. I wish my guardian would let me get a different model, but she just won’t.”

  The robot’s gaze didn’t flicker. But somehow George had the feeling that every detail about him and Boltzmann had been carefully logged away for closer scrutiny later.

  “It’s time for your repose,” was Empyrean’s only reply to Hero.

  “Don’t you need to have dinner?” asked George hopefully. It had been a long time since his final dehydrated meal on board the Artemis.

  “No,” said Hero in surprise. “I have had my nutritional allocation for the day. But, if you want something, we can mix up a smoothie for you, can’t we, Empy?”

  “Yes,” said George slowly. “I would like a smoothie. And then I think Boltzmann and I could both go to sleep. If that’s okay with you.” He was getting desperate to get rid of Hero and have some time to himself. Boltzmann, he could see, would be no more use to him tonight—the big scruffy robot was starting to run out of power and needed to recharge. But George, who had traveled across the Universe, experienced massive time dilation in an incredibly fast spaceship, returned to Earth having only had the briefest of contact with his family and best friend during his journey, and now found himself in a world he did not recognize at all, needed time to think.

  “Affirmative,” said Empyrean. George held his gaze just long enough to see him give the tiniest of smiles.

  *

  Much later that night, George was woken by the noise of someone new entering the inflatable home. He and Boltzmann had been tucked up on the two sofas with lightweight blankets, which looked as though they were made of foil. Hero had found George an old jumpsuit belonging to her guardian, who still seemed to have no name. And Empyrean had mixed up a beaker of a gluey-looking substance that, to George’s surprise, had tasted delicious and left him totally full and no longer hungry or thirsty.

  “I got your message,” the new arrival murmured to Empyrean.

  Boltzmann, who was enjoying a power charge—arranged by Empyrean, to Hero’s amusement, since she had never before known a personal robot that needed to be attached to a power source to recharge—was totally inert and unaware of what was happening in the circular room.

  The new arrival definitely seemed to be human—a woman, by the sound of her.

  “Is the comms shield up?” she murmured.

  “As always. As ever, I am running a fake feed from the inside of this house and a parallel one for you. Currently it shows that you are relaxing in your accommodation allocation in a virtualreality experience, enjoying the analogue world.”

  “Such a relief!” She gave a small giggle. She sounded very excited. “This is the only place where I’m free to have my own thoughts! I spend all day forcing myself to have thoughts like Trellis Dump—”

  “May he live forever,” interjected the robot solemnly.

  “He will if he keeps taking the medications!” replied the woman. “But it’s so bad having to think Trellis is awesome while he shouts at me for not making the sun shine less brightly. You have no idea how stressful it is!”

  “Well,” replied Empyrean, “I have spent days erasing things from Hero’s feed that might draw attention from the authorities of Eden. So I think I do know.”

  “Yes, you have been the most faithful of guardians.” The woman sighed. “If I hadn’t tracked you down to that trash camp, I would never have been able to keep Hero safe and remain in deep cover at the same time. I would never have chosen to bring a child into this.”

  “You’ve done so well,” said the robot. “And we are nearly at the beginning of the end. If only things had moved a little quicker, then Hero could have left the Bubble and entered a world you would wish her to live in. But at least the authorities believed that she struggled with her studies and needed to stay here for the maximum time allowed, a time in which we have been able to help her grow and be more able to face what now lies ahead for her.”

  “We’re so close! We’ve nearly done it. My father’s plan—we’ve almost made it happen.” The woman sounded overjoyed.

  “Which means that now is the most dangerous time of all,” Empyrean reminded her. “What’s the mood like inside the regime?”

  “Scared and suspicious. No one trusts anyone. They’ve raised the threat level again,” said the woman. “We’ve gone from Dumpability to Dumptastic to Dumpothermonuclear.”

  “Just as Hero is about to turn nine years old.”

  “Don’t you mean nine Dumps of the sun?” said the woman with a giggle.

  “Apologies, Minister,” said Empyrean gravely, but George could tell that this was some kind of shared joke.

  But the woman didn’t laugh in reply. She had just noticed something.

  “What,” she said, in cryogenically cold tones, “is that?” George knew without a shadow of a doubt that she had just spotted him and Boltzmann through the gloomy darkness of the nighttime inflatable home.

  “Well, that is a boy,” said Empyrean calmly. “And that is his robot.”

  “A boy?” said the woman, in tones that would have frozen the core of the sun. “What is a boy doing here?”

  George guessed that the invitation to stay over had not come from Hero’s guardian after all. He tried not to panic. Breathlessly, he waited for Empyrean to respond.

  “He is your savior,” said Empyrean.

  George exhaled. Empyrean was on his side.

  “Excuse me?” said the woman. “Since when did I need a savior?” She sounded very put out.

  “Your daughter does,” replied Empyrean. “Her hatchday is only the day after tomorrow, Minister, and therefore you know that the time has come when she must leave the Bubble. To go to Wonder, where she will be beyond our ability to protect her . . . or, if the authorities pay too much attention to our past fiction that her potential is so poor, to a work unit where we would have no more contact with her. And we are aware that the situation has deteriorated faster than we thought. It’s much more dangerous out there than it was when we made our original plan, and your daughter now urgently needs someone to accompany her on a journey to a place of safety. We only have this one chance to get her out—we must get it right.”

  This was news to George! He felt that Empy, or whatever his name was, could have told him about this earlier. But the woman replied and he was glad Empy was in the firing line, not himself.

  “Yes!” said the woman, her voice coming out with the force of a controlled explosion. “And that person—or robot—is you! You are to leave the Bubble with Hero on her authorized journey to Wonder Academy! Except that she will never arrive, because you will divert the transport to end up instead in na-h Alba, the nonaligned zone, where you will request asylum for her. Meanwhile the machines finally manage to overthrow—”

  “Nimu,” said Empyrean kindly. “Daughter of—”

  “Shut up!” hissed Nimu. “Don’t you daughter me! This is the plan. Why are you going back on it?”

  George gathered from this that Nimu was a force to be reckoned with. He was glad it was Empyrean going toe to toe with her and not him on his first meeting, having just flown across the Universe in order, it now seemed, specifically to disrupt her best-laid plans.

  “Do not fear,” said the robot. “Let me start from the beginning.”

  The woman took a deep breath. “Where has this boy come from?” she asked.

  “The past,” said Empyrean. “This boy comes from the past.”

  Chapter Seven


  But if Empyrean thought this would help, he was entirely wrong.

  “The past?” said Nimu, giving what sounded like some kind of semi-silent scream. “What past? Have you gone mad? How can you know this?”

  “I saw this boy depart,” said Empyrean.

  He did? thought George. Who was this robot? Who had been there on that fateful day when he had blasted off from Kosmodrome 2 in the spaceship with the faithful Boltzmann as his companion? Was Empyrean the new iteration of one of the vicious robots that had patrolled Kosmodrome 2, doing the bidding of their maker, Alioth Merak? Was it possible . . . ?

  “He set out to travel across the Universe at incredible speed in a spaceship called Artemis,” continued Empyrean. “He left the Earth in the year 2018 in old time. In his time notation it is now the year 2081, but he has not aged because, thanks to time dilation, his journey took a fraction of the time that passed on Earth. In other words this is a boy from before the Great Disruption. A boy of great talent and courage. Just the boy we need.”

  George didn’t know whether to feel absolutely terrified that his worst fears had been verified, or pleased that he’d worked it out for himself! Or even excited by what Empyrean—whoever he was—had to say about him. The year 2081—that meant he was more than sixty years older than when he had left Earth! He must be in his mid-seventies! He almost gave a little squeak. That was so old! How old would his dad be? His mom? Could they still be alive? Even his sisters would be in their sixties! When he finally found them, they would be old women.

  “Did you summon him? From the past?” The woman sounded absolutely incredulous. “That’s impossible!”

  “It would be,” said Empyrean. “And I did not. His journey was planned by another, a terrible individual who could not have foreseen the consequences of what he did. All I knew was where this boy’s spaceship would land. But I didn’t know when. I’ve just had to wait. Once I received a signal that there was an incoming piece of space material landing in the Void, I took the chance it would be him and diverted Hero’s school bus to investigate . . .”

  This meant, George thought, that Empyrean had been looking out for him! He had known about the Artemis and Alioth Merak. All that time George had been hoping for a welcome-home reception, and it turned out to be a robot on a school bus in the desert instead.

  “But, if you know he’s here, how come no one else does?” Nimu sounded fearful.

  “So far I have managed to allay suspicion about this event so it appears that a piece of old shrapnel from the ancient space station fell out of the sky.”

  “What has this got to do with Hero?” she asked. “You told me you’d found a way to save Hero, and now you’ve presented me with this time traveler, this cosmic migrant, this chronological refugee! Do you have any idea how deeply illegal all this is? We’re going to be picked up and charged with utopiacide.”

  Utopiacide? thought George.

  Fortunately Empyrean chose to give a definition.

  “Yes, trying to ruin paradise . . .” he said. “But this isn’t paradise. No one here is really free, despite what they make you say.”

  “Yes, thank you, I’m quite aware of that!” said Nimu, sounding somewhere between furious and heartbroken.

  “Except,” said Empyrean, “for him.”

  “Him?” said Nimu, sounding confused.

  “The boy. I told you, he comes from the past, from the pre-connectivity age,” said Empyrean. “Before the Great Disruption. Think about it.”

  Understanding dawned in Nimu’s voice. “You don’t mean . . .”

  “Yes,” said Empyrean. “He has no sensors, no live feed, no thought stream; he can’t be scanned, read, or tracked. He’s unique—he’s probably the only child in the Bubble who can move around freely. He doesn’t trigger anything. He could walk right through the center of the Eden Corporation and no one would even know he was there. It has to be done quickly—despite my best work, eventually the monitoring systems will pick up something that I’ve missed. But, given that we have to move fast anyway, then I believe he could get Hero out. He could make the plan actually happen—he can get her to na-h Alba.”

  George was finding it hard to stay quiet. How could they make plans for him without even asking him! What if he had other ideas, like finding his family or going somewhere different from this nah-something place? He wanted to speak out, but he also figured he’d be better off listening and learning as much as he could. He might find out things they didn’t want to tell him to his face.

  “He also knows her,” said Empyrean softly.

  George was thrown. Her? Who was Empyrean talking about?

  “Her?” said Nimu slowly, with a strange note in her voice. “He knows her?” She sounded, George thought, almost as though she was jealous.

  “Yes, he knows her.” A friend? thought George. He hadn’t had that many.

  “Lucky him,” said Nimu bitterly. “Don’t tell me, she likes him?” There was a pause in which Empyrean must have nodded. After which she burst out, “Why didn’t she like me? Why? We could have been friends!”

  “She never had the chance,” said Empyrean. “And how could she know you’re working undercover? She must think you are an agent of the regime, a genuine government minister.”

  “Then she must think I betrayed everything!” Nimu gave a cry of pain. “That I betrayed him!”

  “I will tell her you did not,” said Empyrean, who sounded curiously downbeat. “When the boy gets Hero to na-h Alba.”

  Now George felt on the brink of despair. He was to travel across a country he didn’t recognize with a small girl he hardly knew to reach the safety of a place with a weird name where there was one person he had met in the past but whose name he didn’t even know.

  “Why this boy?” demanded Nimu. “Why not you?”

  “You said it yourself—the threat level was raised again today, so they are on high alert. It would be much better for this boy to take Hero, and for me to remain here to give her cover by running—for as long as I can—a fake feed. And if Hero and I were caught? An Eden minister’s daughter on the run with the superintelligence the regime has sought for decades! The trail would lead back to you and then we could lose our chance forever. The whole operation could be blown.”

  Nimu sighed. “You’re right,” she agreed. “I hate your plan. But it’s our best hope.”

  “It’s our only hope,” said Empyrean. “Hero has to leave the Bubble the day after tomorrow. She has no choice. So, if you want to get her out of Eden and to safety, using the only opportunity you have had in her whole life, then this is what we must do.”

  Shortly after that, Nimu exited the inflatable house as silently as she had arrived.

  The little round house fell silent. George’s mind boggled at what he had heard: 2081! Decades had passed! The bleached land, the burning, fermented sky, the abandoned landscape all spoke of some dramatic shift in the whole pattern of existence. The future. He now knew for sure that he was in the future. But there was so much he didn’t know. What were these machines and what were they doing? He tried to shake Boltzmann to get him to talk things through, but the old robot was not to be disturbed from his comfy power charge. At last, George fell asleep himself and had a fitful night of weird dreams, none of them actually as strange as the reality that he had plummeted into.

  *

  He woke, uncomfortable and cold, on the unfriendly gray sofa. Boltzmann was still fast asleep. Going over to a window, George saw a primrose-yellow sun already high in the sky. It brought a lump to his throat. It looked just the same—the sun still shone, as it had done for billions of years. Whatever had happened on the surface of the planet, it hadn’t disturbed the cosmic order of the solar system. Human life, it seemed, had taken on a very new dimension—from last night’s conversation, George realized that this time he was now in was known as the time of mass connectivity. Presumably that referred to everyone having to share their thoughts—it meant Nimu only being able to think tho
ughts about how great Trellis Dump was when she was working as a government minister, otherwise he would realize she was a spy. And it meant that Hero and the kids did all their chatting silently, through their thought streams, with robot guardians able to control the behavior of their charges.

  “Hello!” Hero bounced in, wearing a cozy-looking jumpsuit that George assumed must be her pajamas.

  “Hi!” said George. He tried to smile. It wasn’t Hero’s fault that he was stuck in the wrong era, nor that her guardian and robot were making elaborate plans for George to take her on a strange and probably dangerous journey across Eden to another country. “Thanks for having us over.”

  “I have a question! Have you ever seen her?” asked Hero eagerly. Clearly she had forgotten her promise to make up for yesterday by asking no more questions today.

  “Who?” asked George, confused by this sudden change of tack. Did Hero mean this unnamed “her” of na-h Alba?

  “Queen Bimbolina Kimobolina!” said Hero. “Dumbo! Who else?”

  “No,” said George truthfully. “I haven’t.” He had no idea what Hero was talking about.

  “That’s weird,” said Hero, looking perplexed. “I thought her avatar was literally everywhere. How can you not have seen it?”

  “What?” said George.

  “The Queen of Other Side!” Hero’s brow wrinkled. “I thought she was supposed to be so beautiful that you could only see her avatar because in real life you would be blinded by her beauty. So they send out her avatar instead. Like when I go to school. I don’t actually ‘go’ to school—we don’t, like, have a place that’s called school. It’s a virtual school and I send my avatar there every day so I don’t have to bother . . .”

  “Then why did you go on a school trip yesterday”—George had spotted the flaw in all this—“if you could have done it all from home?”

  “It’s part of the way our development is monitored,” said Hero. “It helps Eden to see which of us are best suited to go to Wonder Academy.” She sighed. “I do hope I’m now ready to leave the Bubble.”