City of Shadows

Chapter 37

16 September 2001, Interstate 90, Newton, Massachusetts

So that’s what we all are. Machines. Meat robots, just like Bob and Becks. Everything me, Maddy and Liam remember from before arriving in that archway is just a dream. Not even that, just faked memories.

I’m not Saleena Vikram.

I’m not from 2026.

I’m not from India.

I don’t have parents.

I’m a meat product.

Sal wondered why she was even bothering to write in her diary. She’d started out writing in it because she thought it would help her keep her sanity. But why bother now when her mind wasn’t even hers anyway? It was the product of some technician or team of technicians. A faked backstory. An amalgam of images.

I’m even beginning to wonder if some or all of the stuff that happened to us since we became TimeRiders is faked memories too. I mean, how do I know for sure? Maybe we never had a German New York, or that nuclear wasteland? Maybe those dinosaur things never broke into the archway? Maybe I never met Abraham Lincoln? Maybe someone invented those stories?

Another slightly more comforting thought occurred to her: maybe there never was a pitiful eugenic creature called Sam, massacred along with several dozen others before her very eyes. Somehow that seemed a small kindness; a teaspoon of comfort in an ocean of cruel.

That blue bear. I think I get it now. Somebody put that into my memory by mistake. I wasn’t meant to see it in that Brooklyn shop. Because how could it also be in India, twenty-five years from now? Someone messed up. Made a mistake. All this time, these weeks I’ve been wondering about whether that bear meant something special, whether it was important. And guess what? It was just someone’s dumb mistake.

She shook her head. ‘Jahulla.’

No one was going to hear her, standing in this place, alone, watching the endless traffic pass beneath her. The overpass ran across six lanes of interstate traffic. Cars, trucks, buses: a constant stream of on-off-on red braking lights on the right and glaring headlights on the left, some so bright they cast stars and streaks across her tear-wet eyes. A stream of traffic in the early evening, all of them on their way to or from meaningful appointments, running errands, returning from work, going shopping. Routine events. Life. Dull maybe, but at least it was real life.

She looked down at the dog-eared notebook resting on the pedestrian railing. Dozens and dozens of pages of her small handwriting. Scribbles and sketches she’d made of the team. The page corners flickered and lifted, teased by a gentle breeze. And, by the clinical cyan light of one of the overpass’s fizzing street lights, she studied one particular sketch. A drawing she’d made of Liam playing chess with Bob. The pair of them hunkered over a chessboard placed on a packing crate table in the narrow space between the bunk beds.

Is that real? Did that really happen? She remembered it all right. Remembered that Liam got fed up with being beaten by Bob over and over and had finally cursed in Irish and wandered over to play on the Nintendo machine instead. But how much of that was real? How much, if at all, could she trust the memory?

She turned a page. There was a sketch of one of those lizard-sapiens, the bipedal descendants of a dinosaur species that should never have survived.

And did that happen? She was almost certain it had. In fact, she was pretty certain that everything she’d recorded in this notebook must be real. It was surely the things that had occurred before these memories on paper; everything that had occurred before she’d awoken in that archway… all of those things — they were the lie.

Sal looked down at the notebook in front of her, the pages flapping loosely. She’d been considering tossing it over the handrail. Perhaps it would land on the flat open bed of a lorry or rubbish truck to be carried away to some distant landfill site and buried forever. But then she realized this book of scruffy lined pages full of untidy scrawls was all that was keeping her rooted to sanity. In a way, this paper and ink was her mind. Her real mind. It was all that she had, all that she really owned. It was everything that made her… her.

It was all that she could trust.

I love you, notebook. She wrote that at the bottom of one page. You are me.

She wrote that, then drew a box around the last three words as if it might protect that single thought for all eternity. A little blue biro-ink force field.

Liam flicked through channels absently. He lay on his motel room bed and was steadfastly working his way through a packet of Oreos.

‘Is this it, then?’ said Rashim. He’d been in the motorhome for most of this afternoon, picking through the critical circuit boards pulled from the displacement machine and, with SpongeBubba’s help, working his way through the terabytes of data stored on the hard drives that had been pulled out of the networked computers. Thanks to that process he had a much clearer idea of the ordeal these three teenagers had been through over the last few months of their lives, and now had a fair idea of how their little agency worked together to preserve history. He was making notes, scribbling away on a pad of foolscap. He didn’t even look up as he spoke.

‘Is this the plan? We stay in these rooms until what? The end of time?’

Liam shrugged. He didn’t know what happened next. The last two days had been a strange, disembodied experience. He’d been lost in his own thoughts. Eaten once or twice maybe and he couldn’t remember what. He vaguely recalled taking a long walk — hours and hours alongside a busy highway — then finally coming to a halt, turning round and walking back the way he’d come.

‘There’s no more money,’ said Rashim. ‘We will have to leave here soon anyway.’

Liam flicked through channels, hardly hearing the man talk. Sal, he’d hardly seen her all day. And Maddy? Not since last night.

The team was no more. Broken into shards. Just three lost individuals, three young adults lost in their own troubled clouds of thought. His mind kept playing the last thing he remembered from his ‘supposed’ old life: that passageway down on deck E of the Titanic, rapidly filling up with freezing cold seawater. Being certain that the rest of his life was going to be measured in mere seconds. And then Foster — his older self — like some benign bigger brother, a kindly uncle, offering a hand to him, offering him a choice. Offering him a way out.

All of that was a faked memory. A montage of images. He even thought he recognized where some of the visual elements of his memory had come from now. He’d seen a film with the girls on one of those silvery discs: a film about the Titanic — in fact, it was simply called Titanic. There’d been some boyish man called Leonardo Something-or-other playing the hero. And yes… some of the images had been almost a perfect match to parts of his hazy memory. It was as if a patchwork quilt had been made from that film and others, from eyewitness accounts, from historical records and encyclopaedia articles… and dumped into his head with some crude adjustments to make him the star of that film and not that Leonardo fellow.

I’m not even Irish.

He sighed. And yet, if he’d said that aloud, it would have been with an Irish accent.

He wished Foster was still alive. The old man must have experienced this moment himself. At some point in the past, perhaps while working with the team before them, he must have found out what he was. That he wasn’t a lad called Liam O’Connor. And yet he’d pulled through, hadn’t he? He’d survived that appalling moment of truth and moved on from it. Accepted it.

And he’d changed his name. It made sense. He couldn’t still be called Liam and recruit the new Liam. It would be too much of a clue. A giveaway to the truth.

He’d even managed to change his accent.

‘Jay-zus.’

Rashim looked up from his notes. ‘What’s up?’

Liam shook his head. ‘Nothing… I was just…’ His voice trailed away into silence.

Foster had still believed in the job. Even though he knew he’d been lied to, set up, manipulated, exploited by this agency… he still believed the job needed doing. What was that? Programmed loyalty? Was that it? Had the mysterious Mr Waldstein written into his mind a mission priority that even if he was to discover that he was a meatbot and that he’d been lied to and exploited, his first instinct would always be to continue doing the job?

Just like Bob. Just like Becks. Both of them standing outside in the car park keeping an eye out for Maddy. Duty first. Always.

The door handle rattled and the door opened, spilling sickly green light from the motel’s glowing VACANT sign outside across the room’s mottled carpet. Bob’s wide frame filled the doorway.

Speak of the devil.

‘She is back,’ he rumbled. He stepped aside and Maddy appeared in the doorway. She waved limply.

‘Hey, Liam.’

‘Hey.’

She turned to Becks, standing outside. ‘Go next door and wake up Sal.’

‘Affirmative.’

To Liam’s eyes she seemed a little more alert than when he’d last seen her. If he hadn’t been so lost in his own self-pity last night, he might have been worried about her state of mind. Worried that she hadn’t come back. Worried she’d gone and done something silly.

‘You OK, Mads? Where’ve you been?’

‘Getting my head straight.’

He heard the door in the next room snick shut and Sal appeared beside Maddy, bleary-eyed, looking as if she’d just been roused from sleep.

‘We’re leaving,’ said Maddy.

‘Leaving?’

‘We’ve had a couple of days of freakin’ navel-gazing, feeling sorry for ourselves.’ She pushed a frizzy spiral of hair away from her face. ‘OK, so we’re clones. We’re meatbots.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I dunno, maybe when we’ve got ourselves sorted one of us should stick our heads in an X-ray machine and see if we’ve got frikkin’ microchips inside us like Bob and Becks. But that’s… that’s for another time, I guess.’

Liam grimaced, remembering hacking open Bob’s skull, months ago, in order to pull out that tiny shard of silicon in there.

‘Yeah, I know. Not exactly a nice thought,’ said Maddy. ‘Well, like I say… maybe it’s on the To Do list, or maybe I just don’t wanna know, but right now I say we’re done with the sulking. OK? That’s enough self-pity. We need to sort ourselves out. Get things up and running again.’