Day of the Predator

CHAPTER 80

2001, New York

Monday (time cycle 50)

They stayed for a few days, Edward and Laura. Maddy said they were probably suffering some sort of radiation sickness from the lab explosion and needed some rest and recuperation. It was nice to have some new faces around here for a while, anyway. But Maddy said they had to go. She was right, of course. They had things to do, lives to go and lead.

But not long lives… not Edward, anyway.

I read his file on our computer. This is so sad. He will write his great maths paper in 2029 that will change the world, and he’ll be just twenty-two when he does that. But then he’ll be dead from cancer before his twenty-seventh birthday.

Cancer at twenty-seven?

That seems so unfair. Twenty-seven years isn’t a life. It’s just a taster of life, isn’t it? I know I couldn’t have told him that and, even if I could, would it have been fair to tell him? Would anyone want to know the exact day they were going to die? I know I wouldn’t.

We were going to send them back to 2015; that was the original plan. But Maddy figured that wasn’t going to work: they’ve both seen too much; they both know too much. Maybe that’s not so important for the girl Laura. Maybe her life isn’t ever going to affect the world that much. But Chan… he’s everything the future’s going to be. It all kind of starts with what he’s going to one day write in a paper.

So what did we do? We left them outside when the field reset. We watched with the shutter open. We watched time come and take them away. Reality just erased them, like someone deleting files off a computer. Maddy says she’s pretty sure that’s going to make things all right again. Reality will bring them back. They’ll be born once more, like all the other kids who died; they’ll be born… be babies, toddlers, kids, teenagers a second time. Only this time they’ll visit some energy lab in 2015 and then get to go home and tell their mums and dads what a totally boring day trip they had.

Well, at least that’s what we’re hoping.

And what about the person, whoever that was, who tried to kill Edward? I suppose we’ll know whether history’s been changed enough that he or she makes some different choices. If we get the same message again from the future… then, well, we’ll have to deal with this all over again, won’t we? Hopefully not.

We just have to wait and see if this fixes everything. Nothing’s certain. Nothing’s final.

‘Everything’s fluid’… that’s Maddy’s phrase. What does that really mean?

So, the female support unit, Becks (still trying to get used to that name), is still healing. Those creatures really messed her arm up by the look of it. Bob says the regrown skin will probably show a lot of scarring, and the muscles and tendons may never be fully functional again. Which led to an argument between Maddy and Liam.

Maddy suggested flushing the body and growing a new support unit, one of the big tough male ones. But Liam got angry. He said ‘she deserves better’.

I don’t know what I think. After all, they’re just organic robots, aren’t they? And whatever knowledge her AI picked up would be saved, right?

But Liam says there’s more to them than just the computer… there’s something else in there, something human-like in their heads. So maybe he’s right. It does seem unfair to do that to her. After all, it seems she did really well.

Anyway, she’s got a name… I mean, how can you just flush something away that’s got, like, a name? It’s wrong, isn’t it?

Seems like the argument’s all settled now, though. Looks like we’re keeping her but also growing another Bob. Maddy said there seemed to be nothing in the ‘how to’ manual that says we can’t have two support units.

So why not?