TimeRiders: The Eternal War

CHAPTER 53. 2001, Dead City

Sal stared up at the stars through the shutters of their coal cellar. Oddly calming, she thought. In a world turned upside-down, where everything was wrong, bizarre, you could at least look up at the sky and see normality. Stars that shone regardless of who won a civil war, or who should or should not be a president. Their light was billions of years old. They didn’t have a care that a girl from 2026, stuck in the year 2001, in a world that should never have been, was watching them.

Funny, that.

Across from her she could see Samuel on a nest of worn blankets, twitching in his sleep, his ragged lips rustling like tent flaps with every shallow breath. Around him other genics of all the standard types she’d seen were curled up and fast asleep, producing a chorus of breathing: different sounds, different rhythms.

Soft whimperings, half-spoken muttered words, feet and hands jerking and curling. She realized these manufactured creatures dreamed in their sleep just like humans. Twitched and flexed like babies in a womb.

Babies. Children. Yes, just like frightened children. Even the smart ones, like Sam and that strange thin one, Henry. Even that giant ape … Ferocious though he might look, he was like a little baby inside that miniature head. And wasn’t it so childlike, their futile efforts to look more human? The items of clothing they each tried their best to wear properly, the names they chose for themselves. They had every reason to despise humans for the way they’d been treated, yet they did all they could to be more like them.

After the gathering at the deserted theatre, the various packs had returned to their dens to settle in for the night. She and Lincoln had spoken with Sam for a while, softly, as the other creatures began to fall asleep. She’d asked him about his life, what it was like to be ‘made’. He’d told her about the growth farms in the English countryside — enormous factories of iron struts and grimy glass where near to full-grown genics were birthed from giant copper vats, then cleaned, clothed and numbered. And about living from day one in schoolhouses: long huts stacked with hard bunk beds and straw mattresses. Living there to be educated on the basics they needed for their life-long roles, taught by other genics designed specifically to teach. His description of the growth farms had reminded her of the enormous internment camps back in 2026 along India’s northern border with Pakistan; the lives of refugees lived entirely within chain-link compounds, one day like any other.

Then, with no warning at all, he’d been crated up like so much freight and shipped to a far corner of the British Empire.

Sam had told them that at first he’d worked in a very hot place where the humans were of Sal’s colour, mostly darker. There he’d worked on maintaining field harvesters, stripping them, cleaning the engines alongside human workers who lived only marginally better lives than the genics did. It had been one of them who had taught him how to read.

Then again, without warning, he’d been packaged like freight and shipped to another country, and another. Eventually learning from the scraps of books and pamphlets he picked up and squirrelled away the names of all these strange places: New Rhodesia, Great Albany, British Central District, Cape Georgia. Finally ending up in a place called America.

Sam said he could read most things. Only occasionally did he find language too difficult for him to understand. But his one big regret was that he couldn’t write more than a child’s untidy scrawl. His hands, designed to hold spanners and wrenches, lacked the dexterity to manage something as straightforward as a pencil.

If he could have written things, he’d said he would have liked to have written ‘singsong stories’. Sal had no idea what those were. Perhaps he meant poems.

On that note he’d said he needed his rest and was fast asleep within seconds. She wondered if that was a deliberately designed ability, to be able to flick a switch inside and be instantly unconscious. Or whether it was a lifetime’s habit, learning to get rest when it was available.

‘Abraham?’ she whispered in the dark.

There was no reply.

‘Lincoln?’ she tried again. Nothing.

She was going to ask him what he thought of an idea she had. To see if they could slip out of the cellar unheard, escape the city and try to intercept these soldiers the genics were certain were coming their way. Perhaps, seeing them free and unharmed, the soldiers might let the creatures go, be redeployed to do something more useful elsewhere. Or, if not, then perhaps she and Lincoln might be able to send them off in the wrong direction on a wild-goose chase. Give these things a chance to escape and find a new home somewhere else. But the deep voice of a genic grunted irritably out of the darkness.

‘Shut up … resting now.’

So much for that idea, then.