City of Shadows

Chapter 34

13 September 2011, Interstate 90, Newton, Massachusetts

‘But that’s completely bleedin’ crazy!’ said Liam. ‘You’re saying… what? That I’m a…’

‘A meatbot, Liam. You, me and Sal — we’re just weedier, nerdier models of Bob and Becks,’ said Maddy with a bitter tone.

Liam laughed a little maniacally. ‘Aw, come on! That’s a corker, that is! There’s no way at all that I’m — ’

‘Think about it, Liam. Think about it!’

‘I don’t need to think about! I’m Liam!’

Maddy got up and took a step forward. ‘I was never on an airplane from New York to Boston. A plane that supposedly blew up,’ she said. ‘And you, Liam, you were never on the Titanic and Sal was never living in 2026 in Mumbai. They’re all just made-up memories.’

‘ Made-up? ’ Liam frowned. He had a mind full of memories. His family and friends, Cork, his school, leaving home for Liverpool because what he really always wanted to do was to work his way on to a boat and get to see the world. But then… cross-examining those memories — and he’d done that several times over the last few months — there’d always seemed to be troublesome gaps, missing bits. He’d put that down to all that had happened to him recently — a lifetime’s worth of traumas and adventures that he’d struggled to survive through over the last few months. Who wouldn’t forget something like their mother’s maiden name after all of that? Right?

But it was more than that, wasn’t it?

‘I can remember a whole life before this, so I can. A whole bleedin’ life! ’

‘Yeah? Really?’

‘Aye.’ Liam nodded vigorously. ‘Of course I can!’

‘OK then… so how did you get the job as a steward aboard the Titanic?’ There was a challenging tone in her voice, a come-on-then-genius tone. It sounded almost spiteful.

‘Well, I…’ Liam shrugged, expecting the memory to come along at his will. But there was nothing. Nothing at all. Had he just walked aboard and asked for a job? Had it been that easy? He reached further into his mind, assuming, hoping, this was just a mental blip — going blank because she was pressuring him, goading him. He tried to rewind his mind. The night the ship went down, the screaming, the panic. He recalled a gentleman calmly drinking cognac in the reading room, preferring drunken oblivion to drowning soberly. A girl left to die with him because she was in a wheelchair. He recalled an hour earlier, the ship jolting in the night, crockery lurching off dining tables and smashing on the floor.

Further still. He recalled the day before. A normal day as a ship’s steward. The routine: up at five, cabin-service breakfasts for those that had ordered it. Cleaning the rooms during the morning. Filling in as a waiter for the midday meal and the evening meal. Then cabin-service teas and suppers served until ten in the evening, then collapsing wearily into his bunk in a small cabin shared with three other men. A typical steward’s day.

Then back further.

But nothing. It was like the blackness after the end titles of a movie. Void. White noise. Nothing.

‘I…’ His mouth hung open until finally it snapped shut with a wet clup.

‘I’m so sorry, Liam,’ whispered Maddy. ‘So sorry.’

‘No! Wait! What about me parents! My family! I remember them!’

‘Go on then, Liam. Tell me about them.’

‘Me ma, me da… they were…’ He closed his eyes. But he could manage to conjure up only one decent mental image of them. Just one. And that was a photograph. Just one faded, sepia-coloured image.

‘What about your home? You said it was Cork, wasn’t it?’

Cork in Ireland. Could he even recall whereabouts they lived in that city? No, not really. He just knew the name. He could conjure up no more than a couple of images of the place — the docks, St Fin Barre’s Cathedral, St Patrick’s Street — and that was about it. Again, almost as if they were mere photographs pulled from some photo archive somewhere.

‘Ah… Jay-zus…’ he whispered.

‘It’s just the same for me,’ said Maddy softly. She sat down beside him. ‘Bits and pieces. Like somebody just googled up a whole bunch of pictures, music, films, news, clothes, computer games, TV shows from the year 2010 and made me out of all of that.’ She wiped a tear off her cheek. ‘You know what my mind is? It’s the search results you get back if you do a “things you might find in the year 2010” search on whatever passes for the Internet…’ She shrugged. ‘From whatever frikkin’ year we actually come from.’

‘Do you think we’ve got computers in our heads too?’ asked Sal.

‘Maybe I’ll stick my head in an X-ray machine sometime and find out,’ Maddy replied, wiping a snotty nose. She laughed. ‘Maybe not. Last thing I want to know is that there’s nothing in my skull but a rat’s brain linked to a sim card.’ She looked apologetically at Bob. ‘No offence.’

Bob shrugged. ‘I cannot be offended.’

‘And the difference is that we can,’ said Maddy, finding a hint of a smile. ‘So maybe we’re different somehow. Clones, but maybe we’re more human or something.’

Sal nodded. She was looking down at her hands in her lap. ‘I just… I just can’t believe we never worked this out. I mean…’ She looked up at them. ‘When we woke up in the archway, how come none of us thought to ask why we didn’t see a portal when we were recruited?’

‘Exactly.’ Maddy got to her feet. ‘So why didn’t they put a portal memory into our heads? Why make that mistake?’

‘Perhaps…’ Rashim cut in, clearing his throat. ‘Perhaps they hadn’t yet perfected the portal system while they were writing your memories?’

The others looked at him accusingly. ‘Thanks for your input, human!’ snapped Sal.

He raised his hands apologetically. ‘Just saying.’

‘No.’ Maddy shook her head. ‘Rashim’s right. Maybe that’s why they, he, Waldstein… whoever made us was still putting it all together. Maybe they were doing it in a hurry. I guess if we all think hard, we’d find other little errors in there.’

‘My blue bear,’ whispered Sal to herself. She addressed the others. ‘I remembered a bear, a soft toy, in Mumbai… but it was exactly the same bear in the window of that shop in Brooklyn.’ She shook her head. ‘Someone… someone who made us must have seen it in the window, and thought it would make a nice little detail to put into my… life.’ Her voice hitched. ‘Nice touch,’ she hissed.

The room was quiet for a while, the three of them silently trawling through their minds, sorting memories into piles of true and false — sorting them into before and after their recruitment.

Finally Liam spoke. ‘I get it now.’

He looked at Bob, arms crossed and eyes lost in the shadow of a neolithic brow, and Becks sitting beside him slight and wraithlike, with wide, vacant, dumb-animal eyes.

‘Meatbots, eh? Bleedin’ marvellous.’