Century Rain

TWENTY-EIGHT

They had been under way for six hours. The guidance system had failed two or three times an hour initially, but lately the ride had become lullingly smooth, with only the occasional stomach-churning veer or swerve. They had eaten a light snack of pre-packed rations (the food was tucked into unmarked foil pouches that, to Floyd’s obvious delight and fascination, warmed the food automatically when they were opened) and Floyd had explored the tiny, intimate microcosm of the toilet, with its daunting methods of collecting bodily waste under weightless conditions. Auger had asked him if he felt any motion sickness, and he had replied truthfully that he felt none.

“Good,” she said, popping a dark pill into her mouth. “It must be all that time you spent at sea. Good practice for a trip down a wormhole, even though you probably didn’t realise it at the time.”

“Are you feeling ill?” he asked.

“Apart from the fact that I’ve got a bullet lodged in my body that the robot thinks might kill me? No. I’ve never felt better.”

“I meant the pill.”

“It’s UR,” she answered, as if that explained everything. When Floyd just stared at her, she said, “Universal restorative. General-purpose medicine. It will heal anything, cure any ill. It’ll even keep you alive for ever.”

“Then you’re immortal?” he said.

“No, of course not,” Auger said, as if the very idea embarrassed her. “If I took one of these every day—or every week, or however often it is you have to take them—then I might be, I suppose. At least until the supply ran out, or I got some disease so fascinatingly exotic that even the UR couldn’t fix it. But there isn’t enough UR in the whole system for me to take it all the time, and in any case, my people don’t agree with it.”

“You don’t agree with medicine that makes you immortal?” he asked, a little surprised by her statement.

“There’s more to it than that. My side—the USNE, the Threshers, call us what you will—doesn’t have the means to make UR. What UR we do have access to is supplied in very small, expensive and controlled quantities by our moderate allies in the Polities.”

“Haven’t you tried making it yourselves?”

She popped another pill from the cylindrical dispenser and held it up for Floyd’s inspection. It looked no more impressive than a discarded button, or a nub of dark clay. “We couldn’t make it even if we knew the recipe. The technology embedded in this pill is one that we’ve chosen to reject.” With particular care, she returned the pill to its canister. “Except, of course, when we really need it, which tends to be on high-risk operations like this. So call us screaming hypocrites, and see if we care.”

“What’s so dangerous about a technology used to make pills?”

“The technology is a lot broader in its applications,” Auger said. “That isn’t really a pill. It’s a solid mass composed of billions of tiny machines, smaller than the eye can see. You wouldn’t even see them under a microscope. But they’re real, and they’re the most dangerous thing in the world.”

“And yet they can heal you?”

“They swim into your body after you’ve swallowed the pill. They’re smart enough to identify what’s wrong with you, and adept enough to put it right. The bodies of the Slashers are already swarming with tiny immortal machines. They don’t even need UR, since nothing ever goes wrong with them.”

“Can’t you be like that?”

“We could, if we wanted to. But a long time ago something bad happened that convinced us that the Slashers were wrong, or at least foolhardy, to embrace that technology so wholeheartedly. It wasn’t just…” and then she said something that sounded worryingly close to “banana technology,” but which Floyd assumed—hoped, for the sake of his sanity—he’d misheard.

“Not just that,” she continued. “But virtual reality, radical genetic engineering, neural reshaping and the digital manipulation of data. We rejected all that. We even established a high-level quasi-governmental organisation—the Threshold Committee—to keep us back from the brink of ever developing any of those lethal toys by accident. We wanted to stay on the cusp, the threshold, but never quite cross it. The Slashers call us Threshers. It’s intended as an insult, but we’re quite happy to apply it to ourselves.”

“This bad thing that happened,” Floyd said. “What was it?”

“We destroyed the Earth,” Auger said.

“That’ll do it.”

“The thing is, Floyd, it didn’t have to happen the way it did. If we allowed your world to run forward in time from the present, maybe we’d never end up with what happened in twenty seventy-seven… and everything would be different now. Not necessarily better, but different.”

“I’m not following you.”

“You and I don’t share the same history, Floyd. After nineteen forty, there’s nothing in common between our two worlds.”

“What’s the significance of nineteen forty?”

“That’s the year when Germany attempted to invade France. In your timeline, the invading forces ground to a halt in the Ardennes, becoming sitting ducks waiting for the Allied planes to bomb them into the mud. The war was over by the end of the year.”

“And in your timeline?”

“The invasion was a staggering success. By the end of nineteen forty, there were very few places in Europe and North Africa that the German army hadn’t occupied. By the end of nineteen forty-one, the Japanese had joined forces with the Nazis. They launched a surprise attack on America, turning the whole thing into a global conflict. It was mechanized warfare on a scale the world had never seen before. It’s what we call the Second World War.”

“You don’t say.”

“It lasted until nineteen forty-five. The allies won, but the cost was considerable. By the time the war was over, the world was a completely different place. We’d let too many genies out of too many bottles.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t even know where to begin,” Auger said. “The Germans developed high-altitude rockets to bomb London. Within a couple of decades, the same technology would put people on the Moon. The Americans developed atomic bombs that were used to flatten Japanese cities in a single strike. Within a couple of decades, those bombs had become powerful enough to wipe out humanity many times over, in less time than it takes you to make breakfast. Then there were the computers. You’ve seen the Enigma machines. They played a significant role in wartime cryptography. But the allies built bigger, faster machines to crack the Enigma messages. Those machines filled entire rooms and drank enough power to light up an office block. But they became smaller and faster: much smaller and much faster. They shrank down to the point where you could barely see them. Valves became transistors, transistors became integrated circuits, integrated circuits became microprocessors and microprocessors became quantum optic processors… and still it snowballed. Within a few decades, there was no aspect of living that hadn’t been touched by computers. They were everywhere, so ubiquitous that you almost didn’t notice them any more. They were in our homes, in our animals, in our money, even in our bodies. And even that was just the beginning. Because by the beginning of the new century, some people were not content with just having very small machines that could process a lot of data very quickly. They wanted very small machines that could process matter itself: move it around, organise and reorganise it on a microscopic scale.”

“Why do I have the impression that this wasn’t necessarily a good thing?” Floyd asked.

“Because it wasn’t. Oh, the idea was sound, and the tiny machines did a lot of good in many areas of human life. UR was on the good side of the equation. The trouble is, when you’re dealing with what is in essence a new form of life, there simply isn’t room to make too many mistakes.”

“And human nature being what it is…” Floyd said.

“It was late July twenty seventy-seven,” Auger said. “For the last couple of years, we’d been busy releasing tiny machines into the environment in an attempt to fix the climate. The planet had been heating up for more than a century, as we spewed crap into the atmosphere. The oceans were screwed up. Sea levels were rising, flooding coastal town and cities. There were freak storms. Some places got colder. Some places got hotter. Some places just got… strange. Really strange. And that was when some coalition of dickheads had the idea that we ought to try squirting some intelligence into the weather system. ‘Smart weather,’ they called it.”

“Smart weather,” Floyd echoed, shaking his head incredulously.

“ ‘Big dumb idea’ would have been closer to the truth. It was going to solve all our problems. Weather we could turn on and off, weather we could boss around. We seeded the oceans and the upper atmosphere with tiny floating machines: invisible to the eye, harmless to people. Unthinkable numbers of them, self-replicating, self-redesigning, self-coordinating. They reflected radiation here; absorbed it there. Cooled down this place, warmed up that place. Made clouds bloom and disperse in geometric patterns, like something from a Dali painting. Made deep-ocean currents bend through right angles and flow through each other, like rush-hour traffic. They even made money out of it, painting thousand-kilometre-wide corporate logos across the Pacific Ocean in phytoplankton. They could arrange a local enhancement in the colours of the sunset, as viewed from your private island. A little more green tonight, sir? No problem at all. And you know, for a while, it actually worked. The climate stabilised and began to creep back to pre-twenty fifty conditions. The icecaps began to grow again. The deserts began to retreat. The hotspots began to cool down. People began to move back to cities they’d abandoned twenty years earlier.”

“Call me a fatalist,” Floyd said, “but I sense a ‘but’ coming along.”

“It was never going to work. Late in twenty seventy-six there were rumours—unconfirmed reports—of some weather patterns refusing to follow orders. Ocean circulation events no one could turn off. Clouds that wouldn’t disperse, no matter what you did to them. A persistent obscene symbol off the Bay of Biscay that had to be airbrushed out of every satellite image. It was clear—even though no one was admitting it—that some of the machines had evolved a little too far. They were more interested in their own self-preservation than obeying sequenced shutdown-and-disassemble commands. So you know what the coalition of dickheads did, for an encore?”

“I’m sure you’re about to tell me.”

“They came up with some even cleverer, slyer machines and said they’d sort out the first wave. And so they were given authorisation to inject these into the environment as well. Trouble is, they only made things worse. Teething problems, they said. Meanwhile, the out-of-control weather events were getting more freakish by the hour, far worse than anything we’d had to deal with before. Now it was mechanized weather. By mid-twenty seventy-seven, they’d thrown eight layers of technology into the fray, and things hadn’t improved. But then there was a hopeful sign: in early July of that year, the obscene symbol dissipated. Everyone got very excited, saying that the tide was turning and the machines had begun to return to human control. They all breathed one vast collective sigh of relief.”

“Which, I take it, was premature.”

“The phytoplankton bloom making up the obscene symbol had vanished for a reason: the machines had eaten the plankton. They’d started using living organisms to fuel themselves. It was against the most fundamental structures built into their programming—they weren’t supposed to harm living things—but still they did it. And it got much worse, really fast. After the plankton, they worked their way up the marine food chain pretty damn quickly. By mid-July there wasn’t much left alive in the entire Atlantic Ocean, apart from the machines. By the twentieth of that month, the machines had begun to attack land-based organisms. For a few days, the whiz kids still thought they could keep a lid on things. They had some small successes, but not enough to make a difference. On the twenty-seventh, the machines digested humanity. It happened very quickly. So quickly it was almost funny. It was like the Black Death directed by Buster Keaton. By the twenty-eighth, with the exception of a few extremophile organisms buried deep underground, there were no living things left alive on Earth.”

“But someone must have survived,” Floyd said, “or else you wouldn’t be here to tell me any of this.”

“Some people made it through,” Auger said. “They were the ones who’d already left the surface of the Earth, moving into space habitats and colonies. Primitive, ramshackle affairs, barely self-sufficient, but enough to keep them alive while they coped with the loss of the Earth, and the numbing psychic trauma of what had happened. It was about then that we split into two political groupings. My people, the Threshers, said that nothing like this could ever be allowed to happen again, which is why we rejected the nanotechnology that had led to the development of the machines—and so much more—in the first place. The Slashers, on the other hand, thought that the damage was done and that there was no point in limiting themselves out of some misguided sense of penitence.”

Floyd was silent for a few moments, as he attempted to get his brain around everything Auger had told him. “But you told me you’re from twenty-two-whatever-it-was,” he said eventually. “If all this happened in the middle of the twenty-first century, there’s still quite a lot of history you haven’t told me about yet, surely.”

“Two hundred years of it,” Auger said, “but I’ll spare you the details. Really, not much has happened. The same political groupings still exist. We control access to Earth, and the Slashers control access to the rest of the galaxy. Most of the time, it’s been reasonably peaceable.”

“Most of the time?”

“We had a couple of small… disagreements. The Slashers keep trying to repair the Earth, with or without our consent. So far, they’ve only made things worse. There’s a whole ecology of machines down there now. The last time they tried—twenty-three years ago—we ended up having a small war over access rights. It turned messy—really messy—but we patched things up afterwards. It’s just a shame about what happened to Mars.”

“Nice to see wars haven’t gone out of fashion,” Floyd said.

Auger nodded sadly. “But in the last few months, things have turned sour again. That’s why I wasn’t exactly thrilled to discover a Slasher presence in your Paris. It tells me that they’re up to something, and that makes me worried. I can’t help but think it has to be bad news.”

“Wait,” Floyd said. “There’s something I need to get straight here. A few hours ago you told me you were not a time-traveller.”

“That’s right,” Auger said, tight-lipped.

“But you keep on telling me you’re from the future,” he said, “born in the year twenty-two-whatever. You’ve even given me a history lesson about some of the events that have occurred between my time and yours. Mad weather… mad machines… people living in space…”

“Yes,” Auger said helpfully, raising an eyebrow.

“Then you must have travelled back to the present. Why pretend otherwise? This ship must be your time machine, or whatever you want to call it. Are you taking me back to the future?”

She looked at him hard. “What year is it, Floyd?”

“It’s nineteen fifty-nine,” he said.

“No,” she said. “It isn’t. It’s twenty-two sixty-six—more than three hundred years into what you think of as the future.”

“You mean it will be when we come out of the other end of this thing. Or have we somehow already entered the future?”

“No,” she said, with an infinite and alarming patience. “It isn’t nineteen fifty-nine now. It wasn’t nineteen fifty-nine yesterday and it wasn’t nineteen fifty-nine when we met last week.”

“Now you’re making even less sense than usual.”

“I’m saying that your whole existence is…” She grasped for words that would make sense to him. “Something other than what you think it is. On one level, it’s not even true to say that you are Wendell Floyd.”

“Maybe the robot should have put you under after all. You’re starting to sound feverish.”

“I wish it was a fever. That would make life a lot easier for all concerned.”

“Not least for me.” Floyd scratched at his bandage, wondering if the delusional one was himself. His arm floated free, light as a balloon. It was as if they were falling, as if in a dream. He was going to wake up back in his room in rue du Dragon and laugh all this off with Custine over bad coffee and burnt toast. One bump on the head too many, that was his problem.

But he kept on not waking up.

“So let’s start with me,” he said. “Start with this poor sap named Wendell Floyd. Explain how it is that I might not even be who I think I am.”

“Wendell Floyd is dead,” Auger said. “He died hundreds of years ago.”

That was when an alarm started buzzing somewhere in the cabin. Floyd’s hand reached for the joystick, ready to nudge the ship back on course. But Auger shook her head, holding up three fingers in warning. “This is different,” she said. “The guidance system is still on-line.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“I’m not sure. They only gave me the idiot’s guide to flying this thing.” Auger threw banks of switches, making the screens light up with different numbers and diagrams. Nothing she did made the audible alarm turn off.

“Any clues?” Floyd asked.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the ship,” she said. “Everything looks good—or at least acceptable—on all boards. And it doesn’t look as though it has anything to do with the tunnel geometry ahead of us.”

“What, then?”

She threw more toggles, tapping the nail of an index finger against one of the screens and frowning at the avalanche of tiny digits and letters. “Not good,” she said. “Not good at all.”

“Just tell me,” Floyd said, frustration beginning to well up in his voice.

“Something’s coming up behind us. That’s what this alarm is telling us. The proximity system is picking up some kind of rearward echo. I can’t read the numbers well enough to work out what it is, but it could be another ship.”

“How could there be another ship?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Believe me, I wish I did. The tunnel is vacuum-sealed at the Paris end. Even if it was somehow possible to get two ships into it at the same time—and I’m not even sure the mathematics allows that—then it still can’t have happened. There is no other ship in the E2 recovery bubble. We should be the only rat in this drainpipe.”

“Something else then? Another machine, but not necessarily a ship?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s some debris we dropped behind us. It was a bumpy insertion, and some stuff probably got knocked off the ship. It might be following us, sucked along in our wake. If we have a wake.”

“But why would we not have seen it until now, in that case?”

“That’s a damned good question,” she said under her breath, as if he was the last person in the world she wanted to know it.