Coldbrook

3

Even a third of a bottle of good Welsh whisky couldn’t grant him sleep.

Jonah lay back on his bed and stared at the ceiling. He hadn’t turned out his light when Vic had left, and the room was bathed in sterile fluorescence. The crystal tumbler was propped against his side, empty, and the bottle on his bedside table taunted him with its liquid gold.

He’d left Wales the year his dear Wendy had passed away, taken from this world by a cruel cancer that none of his love or anger could counter. He had raged and railed against such unfairness when he was alone, maintaining his composure when he read aloud from the newspaper as Wendy drifted in and out of a morphine-fuelled sleep. And when she was gone he had continued to rage on his own, except this time there had been no one to compose himself for. Three months later he was living in the USA, and three months after that he met Bill Coldbrook.

Coldbrook had already received approval for his project by then, and while politicians politicised and funding bodies negotiated funding, Bill was already setting up temporary base in a trailer high in the Appalachians, collecting together his books and documents, planning the project scheme by scheme, and contacting people who he wanted to poach from other projects to help him. Jonah came to meet Bill through a mutual friend of theirs at the Harvard-Smithsonian, and the thought of retiring to the mountains — immersing himself in such radical physics that many regarded it as science fiction — had appealed to a grieving Jonah.

From the day when he and Bill met, their relationship had felt like that of two brothers. They’d bickered and argued, brought out the best in each other, drank and raged, and sometimes Jonah had believed they were two elements of the same mind. Yet, ironically, the catharsis that Jonah had believed he might find in such a project was not forthcoming.

His disbelief in an afterlife had never pained him until he’d met Bill. The American had seen a like mind in Jonah, not only a brilliant scientist but a man with passion in his heart and disaffection simmering just below the surface that he presented as a public front. And Bill’s talk of the multiverse and all it might be — world upon world, a perpetual variation of quantum universes echoing with each and every decision taken or moment passed — had fuelled a frustration in Jonah’s heart. His religious friends were content in their beliefs, and Jonah slowly found himself seeking his own. This was no deity that lured him, or teased him, or subjugated him with promises of pain and pronouncements of sin. It was a faint hope — vain, though he knew; naive, so Bill told him — that, in one of those endless worlds, Wendy might live still.

It’s not like that, Bill would say, and Jonah would nod because he knew his new friend was right. But at night, lying alone in bed in a nearby hotel and nursing the early insomnia that would grow to haunt him, he couldn’t convince himself that possibilities were not endless.

Jonah was no romantic. He was no crazed Ahab, seeking the impossible in an ocean of infinities. But his long-dead wife was still with him in a way that his atheistic heart had never dreamed possible.

He sighed and sat up. If he couldn’t sleep, he might as well have another drink. He picked up the bottle and poured, and it took a few seconds for him to register that the soft chiming came from his bedside phone, not the glass.

‘What?’ he snapped, snatching up the receiver. He fumbled and dropped it, having to lean over and retrieve it from the floor. His vision swam. Damn it, he was more drunk that he thought. ‘Yes?’ he asked again, holding it to his ear.

‘-coming through, and it’s the biggest yet. I wasn’t going to call you, didn’t want to cry wolf, but. .’

‘Holly?’

‘Jonah, did I wake you?’

‘Yes,’ he said, trying to focus. He placed his tumbler on the table and stood, leaning against his bookcase. ‘What’s coming through?’

‘Sorry. I wanted you to sleep. .’ Holly trailed off, but in the background Jonah heard activity in Control. Someone shouted something — Melinda, he thought — her voice excited and loud. Someone else spoke in the distance, his voice calmer and more troubled.

‘Holly, what’s going on?’

‘-eradicator is fine, fully charged,’ Holly said, though it wasn’t to him.

‘But it should have fried it a couple of seconds ago,’ a male voice said. It sounded like Alex, the guards’ captain.

‘Holly?’ Jonah said.

‘It doesn’t fry things,’ Holly said, and Jonah smiled because she was so defensive of her work. ‘Melinda, can you see-?’

‘Biped,’ Melinda said, her voice high and shrill.

Biped, Jonah thought. Jesus Christ, a human might be coming through, and she’d held back calling him because she wanted him to bastard sleep?

‘Holly!’ he shouted, and he heard fumbling as she brought the phone to her ear again.

‘Jonah, it’s okay, everything’s fine. Can’t make it out yet, it’s dark, moving strangely, some sort of ape, I think, and-’

‘That’s no fucking ape!’ another guard said.

‘-and it’s almost at containment. Melinda’s trying to wave it back, doesn’t want it eradicated because-’

‘Trying to wave it back how? Just how close is she to the breach?’

‘She’s. . it’s all under control, Jonah. But you might want to get here.’

‘Apes don’t walk like that!’ the same voice shouted.

‘Holly, how is it walking?’ There was a thud as the phone was placed on a desk, then the unmistakable rattle of a keyboard being worked. ‘Holly? Do you need to sound the alarm?’ But she did not reply.

‘Melinda, not so close!’ Holly called. And then quieter, to someone standing close by: ‘Yeah, look, it’s okay, fully charged and operational.’

‘Then why hasn’t it fried it?’

‘I told you, it doesn’t-’

‘Positions!’ Alex shouted, and Jonah heard a metallic click. Gun being cocked?

‘Holly?’

A rattle, then Holly’s excited breathing. ‘It’s fine, Jonah. Melinda’s waving it back. I think it sees her! I think it understands!’

‘You should have called me! I’m coming to Control now.’

‘Okay, but it’s fine, Jonah.’

In the background, running feet and more excited chatter.

‘You’ll have to contain it!’ Jonah said. There was no answer, because Holly had put the receiver down again. And as he hung up on his end, he wondered why he’d felt the need to say that. The eradicator would kill any living thing that attempted to ford the breach. The robotic sample pods within the containment field would gather it. There was nothing to contain.

Outside, Jonah clicked his door shut and hurried along the corridor, joints aching. He was angry at Holly for not calling him but it was mixed with a flush of excitement. Biped, Melinda had said, and that implied so much. For three days he’d been monitoring the samples collected and classified by Melinda, and most of them had been, if not completely familiar, then at least recognisable. And for those three days he had been wondering, How similar is that Earth to our own? He’d seen the same look in everyone’s eyes at some point, the same question: Is there anything like us? It was an idea both terrifying and thrilling, and it was the one answer he sought before he’d even consider authorising extraction of any of the samples.

After that, of course, would come the preparations to send someone through.

He hurried along the corridor curved around the central core, his footsteps echoing. There were no other sounds. Most staff were sleeping right now, those of them who weren’t were down in Control. He passed the side corridor that housed Vic’s room and paused, wondering if he should wake him. Probably. But he moved past and entered the staircase instead. Holly had probably called Vic already, and Jonah wanted to reach Control as quickly as possible.

At the bottom of the stairwell he accessed a security door, leaning his chin on the eye-scanner rest. The door hissed as it opened and the air quality suddenly felt different.

More loaded.

He paused inside the door and looked along the hallway. It was twenty yards long, and for the final five yards one wall was made of solid glass, offering a panoramic view of Control’s curved, terraced layout and the breach floor below. The light flickering at that window was the dancing electric blue of the eradicator.

As Jonah’s heart skipped a beat, Coldbrook’s main alarm began to sound.