City of Shadows

Chapter 4

10 September 2001, New York

‘She’s… what do you reckon? Fourteen? Fifteen?’ asked Liam, peering through the thick protein soup at the murky outline suspended in the growth tube.

‘It’s hard to tell,’ said Sal. Her nose was pushed against the warm perspex. The clone’s body was tucked into a foetal position, knees pulled up, slender arms wrapped protectively round them. The last twelve hours of archway time had taken her body shape from one that was definitely that of a small child to something that looked adolescent.

‘Maybe a bit younger,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to make her out through all this gross gunk.’

Liam wasn’t sure about this. Maddy’s instructions — birth her. They couldn’t leave her behind and probably wouldn’t be able to bring themselves to do that if they had to. She was going to become Becks one way or another. She was part of the team.

The other foetuses in stasis, on the other hand, were simply going to be flushed out. They were all too early in the growth stage to survive for long outside the protein solution. No more than fist-sized bodies and none of them with viable, organic rat brains yet, just sim-card-sized slices of silicon; it wasn’t going to be an easy task to bag up and throw away those pitiful-looking things floating in the other tubes.

Liam looked again at what would become Becks soon. ‘The body’s just that of a child. She’ll be younger than any of us, so she will. What good is that?’

‘She’ll still be stronger than me or Maddy, though. That’s got to be useful.’

He shrugged. ‘I suppose… if we decide to enter her into a schoolgirl arm-wrestling competition.’

Sal sighed. ‘Come on, we should get on with it.’

Liam nodded. Wrinkled his nose in anticipation of what was coming. Sal knelt down and tapped the small glowing display on the pump’s control panel. The soft purring stopped. The first time they’d done this, they’d had state-of-the-art ‘W.G. Systems Growth Reactor’ tubes, with a motor at the bottom that orientated the tube smoothly to a forty-five-degree angle before opening a sluice hatch at the bottom, depositing the clone and protein soup on to the floor. This growth tube was a home-made affair, the pump and control panel recovered from the damaged system, the perspex tube purchased from a defunct distillery. The other growth tubes likewise.

Liam grabbed the top of the cylinder of bath-warm perspex. ‘Give me a hand — we’ll tip it over nice and gentle if we can.’

Sal braced herself against the weight of the tube as Liam pulled. It teetered, the liquid inside sloshing. The foetal shape inside twitched and jerked, finally beginning to wake up, becoming aware.

‘Go slowly, Liam!’ grunted Sal. The tube was impossibly heavy.

‘I got a hold… it’s all right, it’s all right. Just keep taking the weight as I tip it.’

He carried on pulling, the tube canting over enough now that the viscous gloop was sloshing over the top and splatting on to the floor.

‘Liam! It’s too heavy! I can’t — ’

‘Calm down, will you? We’ll just ease it out. Pour it out so it’s a bit lighter.’

‘It’s going to slip! It’s — ’

‘Just relax! I still got a hold of it, so I — ’

The bottom of the tube slipped on the floor under the angled weight and he lost his grip. It swung down to the ground like a felled redwood, Sal lurching back to avoid being crushed. The perspex made a loud thunk on the concrete and a tidal wave of pink soup erupted from the open top and engulfed her.

The clone slid out, riding the mini-wave and all but ending up in Sal’s lap.

‘Ah Jay-zus!’ Liam flapped his hands uselessly. ‘I’m so sorry, Sal! The thing just…’

Sal spat gunk from her mouth and wiped it from her lips and out of her eyes, thick like half-set jelly.

‘I hate you, Liam,’ she hissed, almost meaning it right then. ‘Really hate you.’

Liam slipped in the muck as he hurried over and knelt down beside her, his hand uselessly wafting around Sal, wanting very much to comfort her, but at the same time not actually make any physical contact with the foul-smelling gunk coating.

‘I am so very… very…’

‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ Sal said, desperately trying not to inhale the odour of rotting meat.

‘You all right in there?’ It was Rashim’s voice.

‘Fine!’ called out Liam. ‘Don’t come in just yet! It’s messy!’ He looked down at the clone, still curled defensively in a ball, its head in Sal’s lap. Eyes slowly opened, grey. Wide. Curious and vaguely alarmed.

Liam leaned over it and offered the clone a smile and a little wave. ‘Hello there!’

Its mouth flexed open and closed several times, dribbling the gunk being ejected from its lungs.

‘Ughhh.’ Sal eased the clone’s head off her lap and on to the floor. ‘I’m soaked in this pinchudda.’

Liam wasn’t listening. ‘Hello? You OK?’ he cooed down at the clone. Now she was out of the mist of swirling salmon-coloured soup, he could see the female unit clearly enough. The creature’s hairless head made it hard to judge her precise age. Her face looked both old and young at the same time.

He reached down, lifted her by the shoulders till she was sitting up, produced a towel and wrapped it round her. ‘There you go.’

Sal tutted, jet-black hair plastered against her face by the cooling, gelatinous protein soup. ‘Oh, I see… she gets the towel, does she?’

Rashim sat cross-legged before the rack of circuitry of the displacement machine, SpongeBubba looking over his shoulder on one side and Bob over the other.

‘Incredible,’ he whispered. ‘The design is quite… quite brilliant. Look at that, Bubba, see? He’s sidestepped the feedback oscillation completely.’

‘I see it, skippa!’

He turned to Bob. ‘Our system’s field was constantly suffering distortion variables. Outside interference and internally generated distortion. Feedback patterns.’

‘Your displacement device was much bigger than this one, correct?’

Rashim nodded. ‘Yes. Enormous. And large-scale introduces a whole new bunch of problems. But even so…’ He shook his head again, marvelling at the economy of the circuitry. ‘This is so ingeniously configured.’ A grin stretched across his thin lips.

Roald Waldstein, you were fifty years ahead of anybody else.

‘We should take this whole rack,’ he said. ‘I know a lot of these component wafers can probably be replaced — duplicated with present-day electronics — but I need to take some time to be sure I know how he’s put it all together.’

‘Affirmative. We will take the complete rack.’

‘What about the controlling software?’ Rashim looked at the row of computer cases beneath the desk. Each one with an ON light glowing, and the flickering LED of a busy hard drive. ‘I need the software shell as well. It’s as much a part of this device as the circuits.’

‘Correct.’

Rashim shook his head. ‘Those computers look primeval. How the hell can they run Waldstein’s machine’s software?’

‘Networked together these computers are suitably powerful,’ replied Bob. ‘They do not use the original operating software.’

Rashim recalled the charming old names of computing’s early twenty-first-century history: Microsoft. Windows. Linux. Primitive times when code was written in a digital form of pidgin English. Not like the elegant streams of data from his time: code written by code.

‘We won’t need to take these clunky old computers with us, will we?’

‘Negative. We can extract the machines’ hard drives.’

Hard drives? Then Rashim remembered. Data in this time used to be stored magnetically on metal disks inside sturdy carousels. Again, so primitive. So wasteful. Nothing like the efficiency of data suspended in water molecules.

‘Right… yes. Do you know how to do that, uh… Bob?’

‘I have a theoretical understanding of the system architecture of these Dell computers. Also the system AI — known as computer-Bob — can provide detailed instructions on how to dismantle the architecture. However, only Maddy has practical experience of this process.’

‘Right. OK.’ Rashim pinched the narrow bridge of his nose. ‘We’d best wait for her to come back before we start dismantling things, then.’

‘Affirmative.’

He got to his feet. Across the archway, he watched the Indian girl, Sal, talking quietly with another girl, pale as a ghost and completely bald.

‘Who is that?’ asked Bubba cheerfully.

‘It is a support unit,’ said Bob. ‘It was set on a growth pattern before we had to deal with your Exodus contamination.’

‘A genetically engineered AI hybrid, SpongeBubba,’ added Rashim. ‘The US military were working with those back in the fifties and sixties. Perfect soldiers. We had a platoon of gen-bots come along with us on Exodus.’ He looked at Bob. ‘Leaner, more advanced models than you, I’m afraid.’

Bob’s brow furrowed sulkily. ‘I know.’ Then, with something approximating a smirk, ‘I did in fact manage to disable one of them.’

‘Yes, you did.’ Rashim nodded respectfully and then offered him an awkward high five. ‘Good for you, big man.’

Bob cocked his head and gazed curiously at Rashim’s palm left hovering in mid-air.

‘Uh… never mind,’ he said, tucking his hand away.