The Eternal War

CHAPTER 33

2001, New York

Becks stood up the aluminium shelving unit that had been knocked over by falling bricks. Picked up loops of cable on spindles, dusty old motherboards, a box of electrical components, electronic gadgets and gizmos brought back to 2001, all stamped with the W.G. Systems logo.

She set these things back on their shelves, tidy and orderly, just as they had been before the archway had landed in this timeline with a crash.

She found the broom behind the cracked perspex displacement tube and began methodically sweeping the fractured and uneven concrete floor, pushing the fallen bricks and mortar into a pile in the middle. She swept the broom with a rhythmic rasp in the darkness, her eyes adjusted to the faintest glimmer of moonlight that found its way through the cracks in the archway above.

Her eyes dilated in the dark and registered little. They were glazed over. From the outside, looking to all intents and purposes like someone in a deep state of shock. Traumatized. A lost soul seeking solace in the simple task of tidying up.

But inside her head the silicon wafer computer hummed with activity, lines of code chasing each other in tireless loops as she tried desperately to make sense of the situation she was now in.

Alone.

Maddy was gone. There was no strategist. There was no team. There was not even a field office any more. This dark hole was nothing but dust-covered second-hand furniture, an old high-school desk and a row of computers that more than likely were never going to work again.

[DATA]

She shook her head. She didn’t want to acknowledge the data.

[DATA]

She closed a silicon-synaptic data gate, not wanting the machine code to tell her what she already suspected. That somehow this was all her fault. That she had provided inadequate information or, worse, inaccurate information to Madelaine Carter causing her to make an erroneous judgement call. That the team was now no longer operational.

She and Bob had both failed to apprehend the target: Abraham Lincoln. She realized that was perhaps the first error in a string of errors that had led them to this point. And now she was here sweeping bricks in the dark.

[DATA]

The stream of hexadecimal data had found another way through the myriad circuits to get her attention.

[Assessment: end-of-run condition = TRUE]

End-of-run Protocol

Extract hard drives from system computers. Destroy

Retrieve tachyon phase accelerator and displacement attenuation boards from displacement machine. Destroy

Self-terminate

The protocol left no vital technology behind; all the rest, the computers, the growth tubes in the back, the generator, even the rest of the displacement machine, used circuitry that could be assembled from components bought from any electronics store. The question was … was this really an end-of-run condition?

She looked around at the dark corners of the archway. Her memory spooled a million different moments from the last few months of stored data:

The first time she’d made a hot drink for Maddy and added coffee granules, tea leaves and chocolate powder, not realizing the hot drink was meant to be just one of those, not all of them.

The time Liam had got her and Bob to play Mario Kart on the Nintendo and they’d spent seven hours straight playing on the machine, beating Liam to last place every race.

The first time she felt something that was more than the code of her operating system or her AI plug-in. In the prehistoric past, a moment of … affection? When Liam had told her that she wasn’t a mistaken addition to the team. That she’d done well. That the team should have two support units in it. A Bob and a Becks.

Sal teaching her swearwords in Hindi, and Mumbai street slang. She had a whole database of curses and insults she could hurl, could sound as convincing as any other put-put rickshaw driver in the downtown smog.

She even had her ‘borrowed’ memories as Bob; they felt almost as real as her own: duplicated video and sound files of Bob observing the assassination of President John F. Kennedy from the Dallas book depository; Bob making the choice to search every internment camp in the Washington area to find and save Liam.

Hadn’t Bob changed a mission priority then? Actually decided his own mission priority? Rewritten code?

She stopped sweeping. Stood statue-still in the dark, the broom still held tightly in her hands. Her internal clock passed the better part of an hour with her frozen like that before, finally, a string of characters broke the deadlock.

[Assessment: end-of-run condition = FALSE]

She stirred, looked up from the floor.

Mission Priority

Damage assessment, recovery analysis

Locate and retrieve Strategist Madelaine Carter