The Eternal War

CHAPTER 12

2001, New York

Maddy sat with her feet up on the computer desk, her trainers resting on a stack of pizza boxes. She watched the monitor in front of her, a looping display of tragedy unfolding in painful endless repetition.

The flickering, shaking camcorder footage of a passenger plane swooping low across the skyscrapers of Manhattan … and in those precious heartbeats of time before it finally crashes into the side of the north tower … a hope? Even though you know what happens, isn’t there always that fleeting moment of hope, a possibility that it might actually miss this time? That it just flies between them? That Julian and nearly three thousand other people might return home that day and tell their families of the near miss that terrified them all for a few moments?

But the loop of footage never changes.

She watched it in slow motion. It ended, as it always did, with an orange fireball, a quickly growing pillar of black smoke and a million sheets of paper raining down like confetti, like snow to the streets of Manhattan.

Maddy remembered that day as if it was yesterday. She’d been nine. She’d been at school. An ashen-faced teacher’s assistant had burst into their classroom and blurted out the news. The television set in the corner had been switched on and there it was, the smouldering north tower. She remembered her teacher sobbing, and other girls in her class following suit.

Or maybe there was a chance that this world with its subtly altered reality — no President Lincoln — was going to be different enough for the American Airlines Flight 11 to take off and arrive at its destination, and no one was going to die tomorrow. It had only been one tiny ripple of change so far … but, not for the first time, she wondered how nice it would be to preserve an alternate world changed just enough to spare Julian, and three thousand others, their lives.

‘Maddy?’

She looked up at Becks, standing beside her. ‘Uh? Hey, Becks.’

‘I have finished.’

Maddy had given her the task of checking on the growth tubes in the back. There were six foetuses hanging in that awful murky, smelly growth solution, being fed a mix of nutrients that kept them in stasis. None of them would grow any larger until they activated the growth mode and cut the mix with steroids. As long as they had power feeding the tubes, the foetuses — future Bobs and Becks — took care of themselves. Although, occasionally, the filters needed to be pulled out, cleared of gunk and put back in. A quite horrible job. Even worse, Maddy mused, than pulling rotting hair and skin and whatever else was in there from a blocked plughole. Even worse, if it was possible, than emptying their chemical toilet.

‘All of the growth tubes are performing optimally,’ she said drily. ‘All the in-vitro clone candidates are fine.’

‘Good.’

‘Do you wish me to make you some coffee?’

Maddy could still smell that gunk on Becks’s hands. ‘Uhh … no, that’s OK.’ She picked up a remote control and switched one of the monitors to show a cable channel. The Simpsons was on. She recognized it as an old episode she’d seen too many times over the years. But, of course, here in 2001, for every kid just coming in from school and watching it now, it was a brand-new episode.

And one of those kids … is — was — me.

She had to be out there, right now: a nine-year-old Madelaine Carter, sitting in the kitchen having an after-school bowl of Nugget Crunch, most probably watching the very same episode. And Mom, sitting at the kitchen table beside her, asking her about her day and Maddy grunting answers back.

What she’d give to just grab her coat, her wallet, walk out of the arch and get the first flight from JFK to Boston. What she’d give to walk up the front yard, on to the porch and ring the doorbell. To say, ‘Hi, Mom,’ when she opened the front door. ‘I’m your little girl all grown up. How’s tricks?’

Most of all, what she’d give to step in past her mom, cross the hall into the kitchen, hunker down in front of that little girl, with her frizzy hair tied in a ponytail, her hands dirty, her jeans scuffed from playing soccer with the boys.

‘Hey there, Maddy, wanna know who I am?’

Becks sat down beside her. Silent, studying her face intently, before she cocked her head curiously. ‘Maddy Carter. Why are you crying?’

‘Uh?’ She shook her head, her mind once again back in the archway, her eyes once more on the screen watching Homer trashing Ned Flanders’s lawnmower.

‘Dirt,’ she mumbled. ‘Dirt in my eye.’ She rubbed them dry under her glasses. ‘Becks?’

‘Yes, Maddy?’

‘You recall our last conversation with Foster?’

‘When we went to Central Park?’

‘That’s right.’

That’s where she could find him same time, same day. For him, a moment that passed once; for her, looping back in their forty-eight-hour bubble, it could be a repeated encounter out there in the park, beside the duck pond.

‘I recall your conversation with Foster.’

‘You remember we asked you when you could unlock that data … the decoded message in the Grail.’

‘Yes, Maddy, I remember that.’

‘You replied — ’

‘The data would be unlocked when it is the end.’

‘Yes … “the end”. What did you mean by that?’

Becks cocked her head on one side. ‘It is the only answer the protocol permits me to offer.’

‘But what do you think it means? What is it referring to? The end of what?’

Becks shrugged. ‘I have no data on that.’

‘The end of … me? You? The agency? The world?’

The support unit’s grey eyes locked on hers. ‘I repeat, I have no data to interpret that message.’

‘Is there no way we could dig that hard drive out of your head and access that locked part of the drive? Scan it somehow? Siphon the data?’

Becks studied her coolly.

‘No offence meant, Becks … but hacking open your skull and digging out your brain seems like the only way we’re going to find out what “the end” actually means.’

‘Tampering with my on-board computer would trigger the self-destruct mechanism. There is no viable way to bypass this protocol. The information will be revealed to you when certain conditions are met.’

‘But you don’t even know what those conditions are!’

‘I will know when it happens,’ she replied calmly. ‘Then you will know the contents of the message.’

Maddy shook her head with frustration. ‘Argghh … you’re so annoying!’

‘I apologize.’

She sighed. ‘Go and make yourself useful. Make some toast or something.’

‘Yes, Maddy.’ Becks turned obediently and headed towards their kitchen area. ‘And wash your hands first!’

Maddy settled back into her chair and watched the world outside through her bank of monitors — the subtly changed world that now no longer recognized the name Abraham Lincoln.

Secrets and freakin’ lies.

She resumed her little daydream of going home, seeing Mom, seeing herself and kissing all this insane nonsense goodbye.