City of Shadows tr-6, Page 3

  ‘She’ll still be stronger than me or Maddy, though. That’s got to be useful.’

  He shrugged. ‘I suppose… if we decide to enter her into a schoolgirl arm-wrestling competition.’

  Sal sighed. ‘Come on, we should get on with it.’

  Liam nodded. Wrinkled his nose in anticipation of what was coming. Sal knelt down and tapped the small glowing display on the pump’s control panel. The soft purring stopped. The first time they’d done this, they’d had state-of-the-art ‘W.G. Systems Growth Reactor’ tubes, with a motor at the bottom that orientated the tube smoothly to a forty-five-degree angle before opening a sluice hatch at the bottom, depositing the clone and protein soup on to the floor. This growth tube was a home-made affair, the pump and control panel recovered from the damaged system, the perspex tube purchased from a defunct distillery. The other growth tubes likewise.

  Liam grabbed the top of the cylinder of bath-warm perspex. ‘Give me a hand — we’ll tip it over nice and gentle if we can.’

  Sal braced herself against the weight of the tube as Liam pulled. It teetered, the liquid inside sloshing. The foetal shape inside twitched and jerked, finally beginning to wake up, becoming aware.

  ‘Go slowly, Liam!’ grunted Sal. The tube was impossibly heavy.

  ‘I got a hold… it’s all right, it’s all right. Just keep taking the weight as I tip it.’

  He carried on pulling, the tube canting over enough now that the viscous gloop was sloshing over the top and splatting on to the floor.

  ‘Liam! It’s too heavy! I can’t — ’

  ‘Calm down, will you? We’ll just ease it out. Pour it out so it’s a bit lighter.’

  ‘It’s going to slip! It’s — ’

  ‘Just relax! I still got a hold of it, so I — ’

  The bottom of the tube slipped on the floor under the angled weight and he lost his grip. It swung down to the ground like a felled redwood, Sal lurching back to avoid being crushed. The perspex made a loud thunk on the concrete and a tidal wave of pink soup erupted from the open top and engulfed her.

  The clone slid out, riding the mini-wave and all but ending up in Sal’s lap.

  ‘Ah Jay-zus!’ Liam flapped his hands uselessly. ‘I’m so sorry, Sal! The thing just…’

  Sal spat gunk from her mouth and wiped it from her lips and out of her eyes, thick like half-set jelly.

  ‘I hate you, Liam,’ she hissed, almost meaning it right then. ‘Really hate you.’

  Liam slipped in the muck as he hurried over and knelt down beside her, his hand uselessly wafting around Sal, wanting very much to comfort her, but at the same time not actually make any physical contact with the foul-smelling gunk coating.

  ‘I am so very… very…’

  ‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ Sal said, desperately trying not to inhale the odour of rotting meat.

  ‘You all right in there?’ It was Rashim’s voice.

  ‘Fine!’ called out Liam. ‘Don’t come in just yet! It’s messy!’ He looked down at the clone, still curled defensively in a ball, its head in Sal’s lap. Eyes slowly opened, grey. Wide. Curious and vaguely alarmed.

  Liam leaned over it and offered the clone a smile and a little wave. ‘Hello there!’

  Its mouth flexed open and closed several times, dribbling the gunk being ejected from its lungs.

  ‘Ughhh.’ Sal eased the clone’s head off her lap and on to the floor. ‘I’m soaked in this pinchudda.’

  Liam wasn’t listening. ‘Hello? You OK?’ he cooed down at the clone. Now she was out of the mist of swirling salmon-coloured soup, he could see the female unit clearly enough. The creature’s hairless head made it hard to judge her precise age. Her face looked both old and young at the same time.

  He reached down, lifted her by the shoulders till she was sitting up, produced a towel and wrapped it round her. ‘There you go.’

  Sal tutted, jet-black hair plastered against her face by the cooling, gelatinous protein soup. ‘Oh, I see… she gets the towel, does she?’

  Rashim sat cross-legged before the rack of circuitry of the displacement machine, SpongeBubba looking over his shoulder on one side and Bob over the other.

  ‘Incredible,’ he whispered. ‘The design is quite… quite brilliant. Look at that, Bubba, see? He’s sidestepped the feedback oscillation completely.’

  ‘I see it, skippa!’

  He turned to Bob. ‘Our system’s field was constantly suffering distortion variables. Outside interference and internally generated distortion. Feedback patterns.’

  ‘Your displacement device was much bigger than this one, correct?’

  Rashim nodded. ‘Yes. Enormous. And large-scale introduces a whole new bunch of problems. But even so…’ He shook his head again, marvelling at the economy of the circuitry. ‘This is so ingeniously configured.’ A grin stretched across his thin lips.

  Roald Waldstein, you were fifty years ahead of anybody else.

  ‘We should take this whole rack,’ he said. ‘I know a lot of these component wafers can probably be replaced — duplicated with present-day electronics — but I need to take some time to be sure I know how he’s put it all together.’

  ‘Affirmative. We will take the complete rack.’

  ‘What about the controlling software?’ Rashim looked at the row of computer cases beneath the desk. Each one with an ON light glowing, and the flickering LED of a busy hard drive. ‘I need the software shell as well. It’s as much a part of this device as the circuits.’

  ‘Correct.’

  Rashim shook his head. ‘Those computers look primeval. How the hell can they run Waldstein’s machine’s software?’

  ‘Networked together these computers are suitably powerful,’ replied Bob. ‘They do not use the original operating software.’

  Rashim recalled the charming old names of computing’s early twenty-first-century history: Microsoft. Windows. Linux. Primitive times when code was written in a digital form of pidgin English. Not like the elegant streams of data from his time: code written by code.

  ‘We won’t need to take these clunky old computers with us, will we?’

  ‘Negative. We can extract the machines’ hard drives.’

  Hard drives? Then Rashim remembered. Data in this time used to be stored magnetically on metal disks inside sturdy carousels. Again, so primitive. So wasteful. Nothing like the efficiency of data suspended in water molecules.

  ‘Right… yes. Do you know how to do that, uh… Bob?’

  ‘I have a theoretical understanding of the system architecture of these Dell computers. Also the system AI — known as computer-Bob — can provide detailed instructions on how to dismantle the architecture. However, only Maddy has practical experience of this process.’

  ‘Right. OK.’ Rashim pinched the narrow bridge of his nose. ‘We’d best wait for her to come back before we start dismantling things, then.’

  ‘Affirmative.’

  He got to his feet. Across the archway, he watched the Indian girl, Sal, talking quietly with another girl, pale as a ghost and completely bald.

  ‘Who is that?’ asked Bubba cheerfully.

  ‘It is a support unit,’ said Bob. ‘It was set on a growth pattern before we had to deal with your Exodus contamination.’

  ‘A genetically engineered AI hybrid, SpongeBubba,’ added Rashim. ‘The US military were working with those back in the fifties and sixties. Perfect soldiers. We had a platoon of gen-bots come along with us on Exodus.’ He looked at Bob. ‘Leaner, more advanced models than you, I’m afraid.’

  Bob’s brow furrowed sulkily. ‘I know.’ Then, with something approximating a smirk, ‘I did in fact manage to disable one of them.’

  ‘Yes, you did.’ Rashim nodded respectfully and then offered him an awkward high five. ‘Good for you, big man.’

  Bob cocked his head and gazed curiously at Rashim’s palm left hovering in mid-air.

  ‘Uh… never mind,’ he said, tucking his hand away.

  Chapter 5<
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  10 September 2001, New York

  Maddy returned from Central Park with Foster just after half past one in the afternoon. Following brief introductions of Rashim and his novelty robot, they set to work. During the rest of the day Sal was largely sidelined with the drooling child support unit in her tender care while Maddy, Rashim, Foster, computer-Bob and SpongeBubba collectively pooled their technical knowledge and carefully dismantled the equipment in the archway.

  It was an exercise in identifying and extracting only the technology components that could not easily be replaced elsewhere. Bob and Liam meanwhile had been sent out to steal a vehicle big enough for them all and the equipment they were likely to take along.

  By the time lights started to flicker on, on the far side of the East River, turning Manhattan, skyscraper by skyscraper, into an enormous, inverted chandelier and the railway overhead started rumbling with trains taking city commuters home from the Big Apple to the suburbs of Brooklyn and Queens, they’d done most of what needed to be done.

  A battered Winnebago SuperChief motorhome was parked up in the alleyway, a snug, hand-in-glove squeeze between the row of archways and the graffiti’d brick wall opposite. The rack carrying the displacement machine had been carefully lifted in and secured tightly in the RV’s toilet cubicle. The PCs had been stripped of their internal hard drives and the filing cabinet beside Maddy’s desk had been emptied. Its drawers were full of a messy miscellany of discarded wires and circuit boards and gadgets: a taser, something that looked like a Geiger counter, the babel-buds, a non-functioning wrist-mounted computer of some sort with ‘H-data WristBuddee-57’ stamped on one side. Gadgets and parts of gadgets, most of them clearly not from the year 2001. Nothing like that could stay behind.

  The improvised growth tubes were too large to take along, but the pumps and computer interface were removed and carefully stored in the RV. The protein solution and the dead foetuses were gone now, poured away into the East River.

  Like any normal family moving house, it was a revelation to Maddy, Liam and Sal discovering how much clutter they’d already managed to acquire. Magazines and books, a Nintendo and a TV, a kettle and sandwich toaster, a chemical toilet, a wardrobe full of clothes, a shelf in their bunk archway filled with half-used toiletries. And rubbish. A small pyramid of empty drinks cans, a teetering Jenga tower of pizza boxes and takeaway cartons.

  As they left the archway, tired after a busy day, the last of Monday’s fading sunset left the sky a deep blue and there existed that momentary gasp of air, that fleeting pause between the last of Manhattan’s office dwellers vacating the city and the emergence of the first eager beavers of New York’s nightlife.

  Times Square was still busy, but mostly with ambling tourists coming home to their 5th Avenue hotels after a day’s sightseeing. Bob, SpongeBubba and the freshly birthed girl clone — yet to be called ‘Becks’: they were still debating whether to consider her a new personality entirely, that was still up for discussion — were left to watch over the SuperChief and the archway. The rest of them headed across to Manhattan, one last time in Times Square. They found a Mexican-themed place that looked out across the winking lights and animated billboards, the news ticker around the Hershey store, the stop-start intersections and sluggish convoys of yellow cabs, gaggles of goggle-eyed tourists, and the last city suit walking home with a gym bag slung over one shoulder.

  It was quiet in the restaurant. They ordered from the waitress quickly and then were left alone to the privacy of their faux dark wood and red-velvet-cushioned booth to talk.

  ‘So…’ Maddy clasped her hands like a host desperate to get her party started. ‘Here we are, then.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Liam, ‘the first proper chance I’ve had to sit down, rest and eat in ages.’

  Maddy nodded. It seemed an eternity ago that they’d been cornered by guards in Caligula’s palace. Since then they’d been running, hiding, scavenging. She realized she hadn’t eaten properly in days, the best part of a week in fact. That went some way towards explaining her ordering the triple bean and beef mega-burrito.

  ‘You’re running,’ said Foster. ‘I can understand that… but have any of you thought where to?’

  ‘No.’ Maddy tucked hair behind her ear. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Well now, to be sure, we want to know who sent those support units after us.’ Liam looked at Sal for support. She nodded. Clearly the most pressing question hovering between them all.

  Maddy shook her head. ‘Somebody from the future. Obviously. I don’t know.’

  ‘Did you say the male units looked just like our Bob?’ asked Foster.

  ‘Yup. Like his evil twin or something.’

  ‘These are military clones you’re talking about,’ said Rashim.

  She nodded. ‘Military use, yeah.’

  ‘Then if they looked exactly like your Bob, they’d be from the same or a similar birth batch. The cloning process develops genetic-copy errors if you reproduce from the same DNA indefinitely. So the batches have relatively small print runs. Twenty maybe thirty units per base DNA pattern.’ Rashim stroked the fine tip of his nose. ‘I recall that the military contractors producing clone units back in the 2050s were constantly having to start over with new candidate genomes to engineer.’

  Liam chuckled. The others looked at him and his face quickly straightened. ‘ Back in the 2050s? ’ He grinned. ‘I mean, doesn’t that sound odd? That’s the future for all of us, so it is. The far future for me!’ He shrugged; no one seemed particularly tickled by that. ‘Just sounded a bit funny, that’s all.’

  ‘When does your clone unit come from?’ said Rashim. ‘Do you know his precise inception date?’

  ‘Bob?’ Maddy struggled to remember. ‘Uh, I think it’s the 2050s…’

  ‘2054, if I recall correctly,’ said Foster.

  ‘Then your enemy, whoever sent those killer units, must come from the same time.’ Rashim folded his arms. ‘That’s an assumption, of course.’

  Liam shuffled uncomfortably. ‘But who’s our enemy? Who’ve we gone and annoyed?’

  ‘What?’ Maddy laughed. ‘Who’s our enemy? You mean apart from some secretive association of Templar Knights? A government-backed top-secret project called Exodus, that group of anti-time travel activists who tried to assassinate Chan, Kramer’s bunch of neo-Nazis.’ Maddy paused. ‘Need I go on?’

  ‘Well,’ Liam shrugged, ‘apart from them, that is.’

  ‘The point is,’ cut in Foster, ‘the world, down the line, is an increasingly grim place.’ He looked at Sal. ‘You’ve seen the storm clouds of the future, haven’t you, Sal?’

  She nodded. ‘Not good.’

  ‘A world full of people who see the only way of escape is back through time. And we…?’ Foster looked around at them. ‘We’re who’re standing in their way. That’s a lot of enemies to choose from.’ He turned to Rashim. ‘Maddy told me your group came from 2070?’

  ‘2069 actually,’ Rashim sighed. ‘The world’s dying. I mean, it’s not good at all. The food chain’s poisoned so that we’re all living on soya-synth products. And the floods took a lot of land. Migrating people, billions. And wars. And God knows we’ve had a lot of them. But that’s what everyone’s worried about… petrified of, you see? A big war. There are countries and power blocs in my time that are in a desperate position. Desperate enough to consider the use of extreme weaponry: bioweapons, nanoweapons.’

  ‘What’re those?’ asked Liam.

  ‘ Plague… is perhaps the best word for it, Liam. Whether it’s something genetically revamped, or self-replicating nano-bots, either way it becomes a weapon that doesn’t discriminate over borders, nationalities.’ He looked out of the window at the flickering lights of Times Square. ‘We’re in a bad place. Desperate times. It’s inevitable that something like that will eventually happen. We’ll wipe ourselves out. We’re destined to engineer our own end.’

  ‘ The end.’ Maddy leaned forward. ‘That’s what Becks said to me. That was what s
he said was the “reveal condition” for the Pandora message, the Grail message. The end.’

  ‘Pandora?’

  She looked at Rashim, wondering how much they should be letting their new, temporary accomplice in on.

  ‘All we know,’ said Foster, ‘is that the people who want you dead had access to weapons technology from 2054. Apparently, the very same foetus batch as Bob and Becks, no less.’

  ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’ Maddy stared at him. ‘That feels like an enemy very close to home. Perhaps someone inside the agency?’

  Liam started. ‘You mean a turncoat in our Mr Waldstein’s secret time-police force?’

  ‘A traitor.’ She pressed her lips together thoughtfully. ‘I just hope not. We can do without that.’

  ‘Maybe when you sent that message asking about Pandora,’ said Sal, ‘someone else got it? Intercepted it?’

  That thought was met with silence. A silence that lasted several minutes and ended when the waitress arrived with an arm laden with hot plates. She served them out, along with the drinks they’d ordered, and, after looking at their glum faces, put a hand on her hip.

  ‘This some kinda office party?’

  Maddy nodded. ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Sheeesh…’ The waitress made a face, half pity, half amusement. ‘I’d hate to work at your place.’ She wished them a perfunctory ‘bon appetit’ and left them to it.

  ‘We’re none the wiser as to who wants us dead,’ said Liam. ‘So, how about we decide what we’re doing? Where we’re going to go? Because… I’m completely confused.’

  Sal nodded at Rashim. ‘And what about our new friend? Is Rashim staying with us?’

  ‘Uhh…’ Rashim cleared his throat, fidgeted with his cutlery. ‘Well, I’d really like to tag along. You know, if that’s all right? I won’t be a nuisance.’

  Maddy shot a glance at Foster. Is this my call? She wondered if now they had Foster back with them, he might resume the mantle of team leader, relieve her of the burden of making the decisions.