City of Shadows

Chapter 26

2055, outside Denver, Colorado

Joseph Olivera had got to know Frasier Griggs quite well. Griggs was the only other man in the world, other than Roald Waldstein, of course, who knew of the TimeRiders’ existence.

Frasier Griggs was Waldstein’s lesser-known junior partner. Where Waldstein was the source of the patents, the ideas man, the genius, Griggs was the practical other half: the software designer behind Waldstein’s prototypes, the builder; the Steve Wozniak to Waldstein’s Steve Jobs. Although most people assumed the ‘G’ in W.G. Systems was in memory of Waldstein’s dead son, Gabriel, Griggs was in fact the ‘Real G’. The company’s first stakeholder, the fledgling company’s first employee and perhaps the closest thing to a friend that Waldstein had ever had. Hell, on his desk, Griggs even had a tea mug with that printed on the side — The Real G.

The TimeRiders team established in 2001 became effectively ‘active’, and monitoring their activities began on 4 September 2054. On a day-to-day basis, Joseph and Griggs were the ‘base team’ doing that.

Only four months after the team started functioning, things began to go wrong. On 3 January 2055, they received a broad-burst tachyon signal from 2001. A malfunction with the field office’s displacement field had caused the first team to be killed. They’d received a garbled plea for help from one of them who’d managed to survive. Griggs panicked. For the first time since working for Waldstein, Joseph saw his boss’s normally ice-cool composure slip.

It wasn’t that the team had been destroyed that unsettled him; it was the fact that one of them had been careless enough to send an unencrypted, widespread tachyon signal. It was sheer blind luck for Waldstein that the message hadn’t included a mention of his name. But it might as well have, given he was quite likely the only person in the world, at that moment, with the know-how to send a traveller back in time.

That short signal could have been picked up by labs right across the world, and it could only mean one thing for everyone who might have detected it: that somebody was already up and running with viable displacement technology.

Joseph remembered Griggs and Waldstein having a blazing row that morning. One held behind closed doors, not meant for Joseph to hear, but the one word he did pick out from their heated exchange was the word ‘Pandora’.

Waldstein had little choice. Either he had to go back to 2001 and set things up all over again, or he had to send a message to the survivor, instructing him on how to set things up for himself.

Waldstein wanted to go back, but Griggs insisted that another trip back to 2001 was pushing their luck too far. If this was it, if this meant the premature end of their project, then so be it. Better than the three of them facing a lethal injection.

Joseph soon learned who’d sent the message, who the sole survivor was. It was Liam O’Connor. A second message arrived after the first, this time via the safe method: the personal advert. A field malfunction, that’s what he’d said. Equipment failure. The Liam unit had been aged chronically by a sudden blast of tachyon radiation that had bathed the entire archway with a lethal dose. The other two units hadn’t stood a chance. They’d died in their sleep.

Waldstein replied with a detailed packet of instructions. And not a single word of support or comfort. But then that was it, wasn’t it? The Liam unit was merely a piece of equipment to Waldstein: a disposable asset. Joseph had wondered how the man could be so cold; in a way, the Liam unit was as much a part of Waldstein as he was a part of Joseph’s programming.

Poor Liam. He’d be alone back there. Alone, and suddenly aware now of what he was. Joseph felt for him. The boy was so young and yet now so old and quite clearly entirely on his own. The ‘base team’ was offering him instructions from afar and that was pretty much all the support the poor man had.

That was the first thing. The second misfortune happened not long after.

A contamination event had occurred in 1941. It appeared the event had been corrected by the re-established team but one of the team had been killed. The observer unit: Saleena Vikram. They needed to grow a new one with an adjusted memory: one that would allow her to be inserted into the existing team. Some tricky synaptic programming there for Joseph to do.

There was no avoiding it; they were going to need to carry out the ‘edit job’ on the Saleena unit here in 2055, then send it back.

That was it for Griggs. Too much. He wanted out. There was another blazing row between him and Waldstein behind closed glass doors. This time Joseph picked out one word several times over. Pandora. And Griggs screaming at Waldstein, ‘Why? Why do you want that to happen?’

The third thing was Griggs’s death a few days later. It was sudden, unexpected and left Joseph feeling distinctly uncertain about this whole project.

The night before he died, Griggs had been on edge. He’d also been drinking. Joseph didn’t get much sense out of Frasier other than he’d told Waldstein he’d finally decided he was going to leave this project, that he didn’t want to have anything more to do with ‘this madness’.

The next day Frasier Griggs was found dead several miles outside W.G. Systems’ Pinedale, Wyoming campus. The official verdict was that some ‘flood migrants’ must have ambushed him. There were plenty of them out here now — the displaced, the desperate, the hungry — millions of them from the various east-coast states partially or completely submerged by the advancing Atlantic Ocean. The lucky rich lived in fortified urbanizations. The rest in large displacement camps. That’s how it was. The haves and the have-nots separated by coils of razor wire and private security firms.

It could have occurred as the official verdict stated: that poor Frasier had just set his Auto-Drive to take him home along the wrong road at the wrong time and the hastily erected roadblock, the subsequent murder and vehicle theft were just another sad sign of these dark times.

But then Joseph discovered something that made him suddenly very frightened of Waldstein. Griggs’s personal digi-pen — a very expensive one modelled to look like an old-fashioned fountain pen — was sitting in Griggs’s Real G mug like some carelessly discarded biro. Something he never did. He had a brass holder for his digi-pen and it always nestled there when not in use — one of his obsessive-compulsive habits. He’d never leave it like that, poking out of his mug.

So that’s why Joseph picked it up and thumbed the control nub.

A memo. It wasn’t even password-locked. It was the last entry recorded on Griggs’s digi-pen. He must have recorded it not long after he’d rowed with Waldstein. He sounded angry still. Perhaps even frightened.

‘ He’s insane. The man’s completely insane, Joseph.’ Griggs’s words were badly slurred. He must have carried on drinking after Joseph had bid him goodnight.

‘ I think he wants the whole world to die, Joseph. That’s what Pandora is. It’s the end of the world. Roald knows all about it. When it happens, how it happens. And you and I… and those poor clones back in 2001… we’re here to make sure it happens that way. ’

A pause. Joseph heard the slosh of liquid, the clink of a glass. The sound of a gulp.

‘ You know… that first time he used a time machine? Back in ’44. I don’t think he went back in time to see his wife, his son, like he always claimed. No. I think he went forward. I think he discovered how mankind finally kills itself off. And all this… everything… his campaign against time travel, this little project, those poor lab rats back there in New York in that archway, you and me… it’s all been to make for certain it damn well happens that way. We’ve been played for fools, you and me, Joseph. Fools! ’

Another pause.

‘ You can stop this, Joseph. I… can’t. He won’t let me back in after what I said. He won’t trust me anywhere near this project. I should’ve shut my mouth. I shouldn’t have confronted him. But it’s done. I’m out of the circle of trust… and that’s how it is. But you can do something. You’re all he has now. He trusts you. You could derail this thing! Sabotage it! ’

The sound of heavy breathing, rustling across the mic.

‘ Joseph. History has to be changed. Do you understand? Not preserved… but changed. You have to do it! You’ve got to steer us all away from wiping ourselves out!’

Another pause.

‘ God forgive me for my part in all of this… ’