City of Shadows

Chapter 38

16 September 2001, Interstate 90, Newton, Massachusetts

Sal’s bleary eyes widened. ‘We’re carrying on?’

‘Damn right we are.’

Maddy ushered Sal and Becks inside the motel room and closed the door after them. Not that there was anyone out there in the car park to eavesdrop — a row of empty chalets and a gravel lot with only their Winnebago SuperChief parked in the middle. All the same…

‘If it’s just us keeping history on track, and no one else — ’ she scratched the back of her head — ‘then we’ve got to keep it up. We’ve got no choice.’

‘But we do have a choice,’ said Sal. ‘We don’t have to get involved any more.’

‘Aye.’ Liam nodded. ‘Let it all go to hell as far as I’m concerned. If that’s the way history wants to take itself then stuff it. Let it.’

‘Dammit, Liam!’ snapped Maddy. ‘This is serious!’

‘And I AM being serious!’ He sat up on his bed. ‘I… I’m not sure I care any more.’ He got up, took a challenging step towards Maddy. ‘This isn’t our world! Do you not see that? We don’t have families to worry about… friends… loved ones. None of us have ever had any of that. Just memories of someone else’s families! So, honest-to-God,’ he said, shrugging, ‘what do I care if a time wave rubs out this whole world? Ireland? Cork… and everyone I was supposed to “know” living there?’

Sal nodded. ‘He’s right, Maddy. We are nothing. We have nothing. No, like, descendants. No ancestors. No family tree. Nothing!’ A faint and weary smile stole across her lips as if something had finally made sense to her. ‘I suppose that’s why we’ve always been sort of unaffected by the waves we’ve been through.’

‘Because none of you are of this timeline? None of you belong in this timeline.’ Rashim stroked the tip of his nose, thinking aloud. ‘All three of you are an artificial intrusion not susceptible to any cause-effect cycle.’ He nodded, satisfied with his train of thought. ‘That would explain how you were never changed by time waves.’

‘Yeah, I s’pose that’s what I mean,’ Sal added. ‘We don’t belong, so we don’t get changed.’

Liam wasn’t so interested in that. ‘Maddy, why should I care? Huh?’ He shrugged. ‘Time waves? As far as I’m concerned, they’re now someone else’s problem, so they are.’ He laughed humourlessly. ‘Jay-zus… I don’t even know why I speak this way. This accent. I’ve never even been to Ireland!’

Maddy had had enough. She reached out and grabbed a fistful of his shirt. ‘Liam, you bubble-head! You don’t need to have been to Ireland… to be you. Don’t you see that?’ She turned to Sal. ‘Both of you! Me too! We’re who we are because of these memories. That’s the same for everyone. Memories… define every person on this planet.’ She had a silent audience, but no one seemed to know where she was taking this.

‘We’re defined by our memories. We’re the product of our memories. That’s it.’

She glanced at both support units — living proof of that. Both of them so much more than the emotionless automatons that had slid out of their grow-tubes on to the floor.

‘So who freakin’ well cares if the bag of memories in our heads are ours or someone else’s? We’re here in this place right now, together, and we’re making our own decisions and goddammit that makes us real!’

‘Not all of your memories are false,’ added Becks to the long silence.

Maddy looked at the small frame of the support unit beside her. ‘You’re right.’ She turned back to the others, particularly Liam and Sal. She let go of his shirt. ‘We’ve been real people since we woke up together all those months ago. Real people!’ She patted down his puffed-up shirt gently, apologetically. ‘ Real people…’ She smiled at them both. ‘ Real friends.’ She grasped his arm affectionately. ‘Real family.’

Sal nodded silently. Maddy thought she caught a glint of the green of the neon sign outside reflected in her eyes, the glint of a tear perhaps.

‘We need to continue doing the job, guys. Come on… we’ve seen some of the horrific results time travel can produce. I don’t suppose we’ve even seen the worst it can do. Not yet.’

Liam gazed thoughtfully out of the window.

Sal too. ‘I hated how those poor eugenic creatures were treated.’

Maddy nodded. ‘And we made that nightmare world not happen.’

The TV still burbled quietly in the corner of the motel room.

‘I don’t see we’ve got much of a choice,’ said Maddy. ‘We have to carry on. No one else is doing it and someone has to grab the wheel, right? Someone needs to be holding the goddamn steering wheel or this world crashes and burns!’

She winced a little at her metaphor. It sounded like typical Hollywood shtick. But whatever. The point was valid. ‘We need to continue doing this job… but this time, let’s do it for ourselves. Not for — ’ she made air quotes with her fingers — ‘the agency. Not for Waldstein. But for ourselves. We decide if and when history needs fixing.’

‘You mean…’ Liam frowned. ‘You mean, if a better timeline comes along…?’

Maddy knew what he was suggesting. ‘Yeah! If it looks like a happier, shinier, funkier world,’ she said with a shrug, ‘why not? We’ll decide ourselves if intervention is required.’

She noticed Bob stirring. ‘Bob?’

‘That contradicts a primary protocol.’

‘Remember what Foster said?’ added Sal. ‘For good or bad, history has to go a certain way?’

‘Aye, he did that.’

‘Has to go a certain way, huh?’ Maddy turned to Rashim. ‘And just remind us how history goes, Dr Anwar?’

He grinned edgily as all eyes rested on him. ‘I… I, uh, don’t really think I should be involved with this argument.’

‘Tell them!’

‘Well, you know already. The world’s not too good actually. A systemic collapse of — ’

‘Right. We heat the world until the ice caps melt and about a third of the land is flooded. Then we poison what’s left of the world with chemicals until there’s no ecosystem left that’s worth a damn. Then, not happy with all of that, we decide to wipe ourselves out with some kind of Von Neumann virus that leaves nothing left alive. That about right, Rashim?’

‘They were calling the virus Kosong-ni. That’s where it started. Ground zero.’ Rashim nodded. ‘That’s a somewhat simplified version of events, but essentially, yes, that’s it.’

‘And that’s what Foster — ’ she splayed her hands — ‘that’s what Waldstein… wants us to do our very best to preserve? Anyone here think that might be just a little freakin’ stupid?’

‘To be fair,’ said Liam, ‘Foster was just following some orders.’

‘You’re right, Liam.’ She smiled at him. ‘He was just like you…’

‘He was me.’

‘Right. And he was just doing what he thought was the right thing to do. Like you, Liam — heart always in the right place.’ She rested a hand on him again. Genuine affection. ‘Always in the right place, Liam, doing what duty calls for. But maybe we’ve been wrong all along to follow Waldstein’s directive.’ She took her glasses off the bridge of her nose.

‘I’ve been doing some thinking. I think that codeword, Pandora… I think that was a warning to us. A warning that we’re doing the wrong thing.’ Maddy was reluctant to take her thoughts a step further. But the logic was right there and needed to be said out loud.

‘Maybe we’ve been doing the dirty work of someone not quite right in the head. Someone who quite simply is insane.’

‘Waldstein?’

She shrugged. ‘He set this agency up. And Bob? Didn’t you say those support units trying to kill us came from the same place as you?’

‘Affirmative. W.G. Systems software.’

She looked at the others. ‘Maybe Waldstein sent them to kill us?’ A further thought occurred to her. ‘Maybe when I sent that message asking about Pandora, when I sent that ad to the newspaper… that’s what triggered all of this?’

The air in the room all of a sudden felt very charged.

‘We were never meant to know how bad the world gets,’ said Liam. ‘Were we?’

‘And now Waldstein knows we know…?’ She pursed her lips, focusing on the lenses she was unnecessarily scrubbing clean. Still thinking things through. ‘We can’t be relied on any more. We’re a loose cog.’ She put her glasses back on. ‘Not fit for purpose.’

‘Jahulla!’ whispered Sal. ‘He wants to wipe us out and start again!’

Maddy turned to Bob. ‘If we changed our mission goals… where does that leave us, Bob? Does your core programming mean you’d have to attempt to stop us?’ She turned to Becks. ‘Kill us?’

Both support units looked at each other.

Bob finally spoke. Maddy wondered whether he was speaking on behalf of the pair of them. Probably. Becks would defer to him right now. Her mind, after all, was a pale reflection of his. ‘On previous occasions, I have been able to override hard-coded mission parameters.’

‘And? So, this time?’

His thick brow lowered and became a monobrow of intense thought. A long pause of deliberation. Finally he spoke. ‘I am able to comply with a new mission directive.’ He stared at her intently. ‘And what is your new directive?’

‘To, uh… to stop Pandora?’ There was a tremulous, questioning tone in Maddy’s voice, worried that somewhere deep in his coconut head a logic gate might flip its state at what she’d just suggested and Bob might suddenly leap across the room and rip her head off.

‘Your stated intention is to prevent the future event codenamed Pandora from occurring?’

She nodded slowly. ‘That’s kind of it. Yeah. You know… save the world?’ She winced as Bob’s forehead creased with thought and his eyes seemed to disappear into the shadow cast by his thick Neanderthal brow.

‘What do you think? Bob? That OK with you?’

‘The original mission goal of preserving the destruction of the world and humankind appears to be an illogical mission goal,’ he announced finally. Maddy let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding for the best part of a minute. ‘Becks?’

She nodded; her mind had processed the same information and arrived at the same answer. ‘With the information that Dr Rashim Anwar has provided us of the future, the previous directive appears to make no sense.’

‘If that’s your plan, Maddy, if you wish to work against the goal of your agency then you need to be somewhere else entirely,’ said Rashim. ‘You need to get as far away from here as possible. Another place, maybe even another time. You know that, don’t you?’ Maddy knew.

‘If you really are what you think you are… engineered units,’ he said that carefully, desperate not to cause offence, ‘then if Waldstein’s after you, he will, I’m sure, have all your pre-inception date memories on file. He’ll know everything there is to know about you.’

Liam stirred. ‘Pre-inception?’

‘Before our recruitment,’ clarified Maddy. ‘Our so-called life stories.’

‘Right,’ said Rashim. ‘He’ll certainly guess you’ve come up here to find your family, Maddy. He… or more of his support units… could be close by, closing in on us as we speak.’

‘You’re right.’

‘A new base for us to set up?’ Liam’s clouded face seemed to brighten a little.

‘Yup, new home. New mission.’

‘I’m not sure I get what our mission is, though,’ said Sal.

Maddy wasn’t a hundred per cent sure herself. To make Pandora NOT happen. Yes, that… but also to continue, in some moderated way, the mission they used to have: to make sure no reckless time traveller set this world hurtling towards another nightmare timeline.

‘We’re going to make the call, Sal. We’re going to take control of history. We’re going to steer it so the world gets a future where we don’t kill ourselves off. Where we don’t completely trash this planet.’

Liam nodded. ‘Now that makes a bit more sense to me, so.’

Even Sal perked up a little bit. ‘But if we’re moving on to somewhere else… aren’t we going to need some more money, or something?’

‘Aye,’ said Liam. ‘We’ve nearly run out.’

‘True.’ Maddy shrugged. ‘I guess we better think about where we’re going to get some more, then.’