City of Shadows

Chapter 15

7.20 a.m., 12 September 2001, Interstate 95, south-west Connecticut

‘Information: you are driving too fast,’ said Faith.

Abel turned to look at her. ‘The driving is suitable,’ he replied.

‘You are driving at a faster velocity than specified on the roadside indicators.’

Abel narrowed his eyes at her, then turned to look back at the road ahead flanked by signs indicating, advertising, proclaiming all kinds of things. Finally a speed indicator wooshed past on his side. ‘The number fifty-five indicates a recommended velocity.’

‘No. I believe it means maximum velocity. You are in excess of that. That will attract unwanted attention.’

Abel lifted his foot off the accelerator, causing the truck behind to brake hard, and then a moment later the driver leaned on his horn angrily. Abel looked over his shoulder. ‘Why did the vehicle behind make that noise?’

Faith followed his gaze. ‘I believe he is annoyed.’

‘Annoyed,’ Abel repeated. ‘Why?’

She frowned for a moment. ‘I do not know why.’

The truck driver overtook them, glaring down from his cab as he passed by.

The NYPD squad car they’d stolen in the early hours of the morning had been replaced with a different car. After listening to police chatter over the radio, they’d quickly realized the vehicle’s identification number on the roof was going to make them too easy to track down. Before the light of dawn had fully arrived, they’d switched to a solitary car parked in an empty forecourt. It was small and bubble-shaped and an uncomfortable squeeze for Abel’s broad frame as he wriggled into place behind the steering wheel, but at least it wasn’t going to draw the attention of any police helicopters scanning the highways for their stolen vehicle. Of course, it wasn’t until dawn that they saw their new ride — a Volkswagen Beetle — was a rather conspicuous tangerine orange decorated with hand-painted pink daisies.

They drove in silence for a while, as they had in fact done all the way from Brooklyn. As he drove, Abel’s mind carefully sorted through the data he’d acquired in the last thirty-two hours and twenty minutes of life. Not a particularly long life, but certainly a very busy one so far.

The first nine hours of his consciousness, just as with Faith and the others of his batch, had been spent in a sterile cloning room, illuminated with a soft amber glow coming from the half a dozen growth tubes. Each of them had contained a candidate foetus held in stasis, but now recently ‘birthed’.

Six of them, naked and coated in the gelatinous protein solution drying out on their bare skin. They had sat huddled together on the cool tiled floor with empty, childlike minds. Frightened, confused. And then, without any warning, wireless wisdom had begun to flood into their minds: torrential packets of data and executable applets of AI software that shooed away the childlike fear and replaced it with impassive machine-mind calm.

Like awaking. Emerging from a coma.

Abel recalled his mind filling with compressed knowledge that unpacked itself into segments of his hard drive. Knowledge of the world of 2001. Knowledge of a place called New York. Of a place called Brooklyn. Knowledge of cars, trains, planes, people, skyscrapers, billboards, intersections, doughnuts, handguns, traffic lights, cops, radios, computers, mobile phones, the Spice

Girls, Shrek, George Bush, 9/11…

And then, finally, into that dimly lit, womb-like, amber-coloured room a human had stepped. Abel’s installed software was already prepped to acknowledge the man as an authorized user. His instructions to be obeyed without question.

The man pulled up a chair and sat down in front of them. ‘Your primary mission goal is to locate and terminate these humans.’ He held a data pad in his hand and tapped its screen.

In their six minds, simultaneously, they received a packet of images in rapid slide-show succession. Front images, profile images of a young man with an untidy shock of dark hair and thick, arched eyebrows. A young teenaged woman with frizzy, strawberry-blonde hair and glasses. A dark-skinned girl with jet-black hair that drooped like a velvet curtain over one eye.

‘You should also terminate any other humans or support units that appear to be collaborating with them. Your secondary goal is to destroy all the equipment you find at the location you’ll shortly be arriving at. This is their base of operations. Leave nothing intact. That is important. There are items of equipment there that can be used to displace time. That is an unacceptable contamination risk. All of it must be destroyed.

‘When these things are done, you are to activate your own self-destruct devices. This is your tertiary goal. Your mission is complete only when these people are dead, their field office has been completely destroyed and your own on-board computers have been irreparably disabled. Are these mission parameters perfectly clear?’

All six of them had chorused a deadpan ‘affirmative’.

Abel looked out at the bright sunny morning now, a blue cloudless sky above them. The road was clogged with morning traffic. A world of humans tirelessly going about their everyday business, getting up and going to jobs as if today was just another day. Like program loops executing regardless of the previous day’s extraordinary events. Life going on the same as before.

‘They are behaving as if nothing unusual occurred yesterday,’ said Faith as if reading his mind. ‘Why do you think that is?’

‘A post-trauma behaviour pattern,’ he replied. ‘Access your database. File 3426/344-456. Human Stress Responses.’

She blinked momentarily, digesting a short data entry on how the human mind filled itself with unnecessary repetitive tasks to block out painful thought processes. Denial. She looked at him. ‘Keeping busy so they do not have to confront what they witnessed yesterday?’

‘Correct.’

‘Experience, recollection, is useful data. Denying it makes no sense.’

‘Agreed.’

Little of what they’d experienced of human behaviour over the last twenty-three hours had made any sense. There was a frustrating randomness to human behaviour that made predicting what they were going to do next almost impossible. Like trying to accurately predict the course of a waterdrop down a rain-spattered windowpane.

There was no knowing for certain that the target named Madelaine Carter was taking her team back to her hometown. There was a strong likelihood. A reasonable probability. But no certainty. All they had to support that assumption was the indentation of that word on the jotter pad. Boston.

All they had was a very human thing… a hunch.

Faith suddenly twisted in her seat to face him. ‘I have a signal.’

His eyes locked on her and he nodded. ‘I also just detected it.’

For a second, less than that, they’d both picked up an ident signal just as they’d driven past a turn-off leading to some large square buildings fronted by an enormous car park.

‘An AI ident,’ she said. Her grey eyes locked on his. ‘Software version date — ’

‘2064,’ he finished. Nothing in this time — nothing — other than their primary target could possibly be broadcasting a signal with a future date stamp. ‘It must be them.’

‘Agreed. Take the next turning.’