Déjà Vu: A Technothriller (37 page)

He pulled a hand through his thinning hair. It was a disaster. Mr Hatfield hadn’t said people would die.

You were fooled, he thought. Played for a fool.

It ate at him; ruined his concentration. The one thing he prized above all else was his mind. It had seen him through childhood cancer, bullying, puberty. It was the best. The knowledge that it had let him down – that he had let himself down

– was a deep wound. He was an active member of a one-in-amillion IQ society. His mind was his one world-class asset. If that could be beaten, what was he?

You are a fool.

He typed faster. He began to make more typos. His rage grew. He looked at the wall again. Underneath the large glass chamber was a sign that read, “Use Ax in Fire Emergency. Do not use Hose on electrical fires. Know your exits!”

The madman I let in, he thought.

He turned back to the screen.

He tried everything – crashing the system, rebooting it, invasive diagnostics designed to overload the computer – all came to nothing. His rage intensified. His glances at the axe became more frequent.

The screen went blue. In the middle, a white text box read, ‘User 4 has locked you out.’

“Frank, you bastard, die,” he shouted, and flung the keyboard across the room. He reached up and elbowed the glass container. Reached inside. Hefted the axe.

It was perfectly weighted. He tossed it from hand to hand. Time to shut down the computer. He rotated the axe to use the blunt, hammer-like end. He whirled it like a lasso. The axe smashed the desktop processing units. Electricity sparked. His monitor he clove in two. The coffee machine he obliterated. Again and again the hammer fell. He smashed the desks, the chairs, the lights, and, when he finally dug the axe into an electric outlet and his muscles arched with the strength of ten men, and when his brilliant mind thought, You’ve killed me, you’ve killed me, he died.

The lightning had stopped. The battle was over. Jennifer put a finger to her lips and Saskia nodded. Perhaps they would make it difficult for Frank to find them if they remained silent. Saskia looked up at the white featureless disc that provided light. She felt an urge to pray. But to whom? Frank was God. For him to hear, she only needed to speak.

“Frank, we need to talk,” she said.

Frank appeared in front of her. He said nothing but she could hear his irregular breathing over the open microphone.

“Frank, I want you to think about what you’re doing. I want you to think about the rationale behind your orders.”

He paused. “There is no rationale. There are orders.”

“Why?”

“You’re a witness.”

“A witness to what?”

“What happened to the third one of you? The man?”

Saskia ignored him. “What are we a witness to?”

Frank was interrupted by a dull clang. There was nothing metal in Asgard. It had to come from the real world. Frank seemed to realise this and, though Saskia was interested in the answer to her question, she was happy to see him distracted. “Did you hear something?” she asked mischievously.

Time traveller, she thought. David’s time travel theory. She had quite forgotten about it. It had been corroborated by Bruce. If it were true that she would travel back in time – and she had been spotted aged forty – then she was indestructible.

Frank said simply, “Time’s up. I have to kill you now.” He sounded empty, a bored actor just reading his lines.

Jennifer stammered, “N-no…please.”

Saskia stepped between Jennifer and Frank.

There was another dull thud. This time, it was accompanied by the treble of breaking glass. Saskia smiled. It was David. He had managed to free himself. The damsels would be rescued. “Did you hear that?” Saskia whispered again.

Frank stepped back. Saskia waited. Then, sure enough, he doubled at the waist and fell prone. Saskia heard him gasp for air.

Jennifer said tentatively, “Dad?”

“He can’t hear you,” Saskia murmured. The seconds passed and nothing happened. David, finish him, she thought. Frank felt the space around him. There was something invisible at his feet. Saskia sighed with disappointment. Frank was touching David’s physical form in the cubicle, and the computer was projecting that motion here.

Frank turned to them. “He’s dead.”

“No,” Jennifer whispered. She was about to collapse. Or become berserk. Saskia could not be sure. She put an arm around her shoulders.

“We don’t believe you,” she said.

Frank laughed. He kicked out with his foot. “Seems pretty dead to me. Not breathing. I reckon he’s bled out.”

Saskia could feel the sweat under her headset. If she did not survive this moment, she would not be able to travel backwards in time. But she already had. David and Bruce had said so. Surely Time Itself, an unthinking God like Frank, would intervene to avoid the paradox?

Time passed.

She felt Jennifer straighten her back.

Her invulnerability melted away. David and Bruce were mistaken. She was going to die.

Frank raised his arm. Saskia guessed it was a signal to the computer that would see Jennifer and herself evaporated, or pummelled to a paste, or drowned, or burned, or something only a psychopath like Frank could dream. He raised the other arm. The gesture was almost benedictory. Saskia grimaced and waited.

Nothing happened.

Jennifer twitched nervously. “What’s happening?” she whispered.

Saskia said, “Frank?”

He growled, “I can’t move. I’m stuck.”

“Like a fly in amber,” came a fourth voice.

A figure strolled briskly into view from behind Frank. He was completely naked. Saskia marvelled at his comical appearance. The damsels had been rescued after all.

“Hello, ladies,” he said. “Pardon the attire.”

Tearfully, Jennifer said, “You were killed.”

Bruce’s smile faded. “Yes, I saw my body. This body, me,” he touched his chest, “is a back-up made when I was sitting on the cabin. I was born about two minutes ago. I’ve been inside the cabin writing more instructions for the computer. Still alive, Frank?”

“I can’t move,” he spat.

“No. Your privileges have been suspended.”

Jennifer said, “Bruce, Dad’s hurt. Let us out of the computer.”

“Already done. Go.”

Jennifer vanished.

Saskia was subdued. They had been saved by Bruce Shimoda. But this was not really him. It was a digital ghost based on a computer file that contained the real Bruce Shimoda’s DNA and the wiring of his brain. He was not real.

She remembered Bruce’s story. The digital creatures were not Real because they were not from the Real World.

She still believed that Bruce was not Real, but here he was, naked, a man who had risked his existence to save them. She struggled for a new word: a word that meant alive but not biological. In English and German the only candidate was ‘soul’.

You are not real, she thought, speaking of herself. You and Bruce are the same. Just information. The chip in your brain – the very seat of your personality, the Real You – is just information too.

Saskia gazed and Bruce. He sensed her attention and smiled.

She thought, You are one of the Unreal like Bruce. You have made the transition from physical to non-physical, concrete to abstract, flesh to ghost, fuel to fire.

She saw three witches sitting around a fire. One turned to her and said, Your fate is decided, for I have written it.

You will return, said another, as you have returned before.

She saw Scottie. Poor, dear Scottie. It was night. He was walking towards a small boat, which was tied to a small jetty. On the boat was a hooded man. Saskia called out and Scottie turned. He smiled and said something she couldn’t make out (Don’t worry about me) and reached into his pocket. He withdrew something (a Zippo lighter) from his pocket and struck it on his thigh: the lid opened on the downstroke and the wick lit on the upstroke. She waved. His lips moved but she couldn’t hear (The gift of fire) him.

She blinked.

She was back on the smooth riverbed. Bruce was near the cabin. By moonlight, he was digging a grave. His own, dead body was nearby. She reached up to remove the headset. She had to help David. Just as her hands touched the dull plastic, she heard Scottie calling from (Remember what you’re carrying) a far away place, though she could not make out his (…Ute) words.

Jennifer looked down on her father, who lay bloodied and curled around Frank’s feet. Though this was still the man who had sent her away to America, the last of her anger disappeared.

The cubicle was cramped, so she hauled him out by his lapels. He was oiled by his own blood. Frank was immobile. His muscles clenched and unclenched, but the thin film of microbots held him rigid. She wondered if he could breathe. She didn’t care.

“Dad,” she said. She slapped his cheek. There were cuts and several large swellings on his forehead. There was blood everywhere. Perhaps he had lost a great deal, perhaps not; she had no idea.

Think.

During the weeks of preparation prior to her arrival at Met Four, Jennifer had been given numerous intellectual and psychological tests. The first-aid exam had been the last. For a job in a research facility that teemed with hidden cameras and expert medical staff, Jennifer had viewed the exam with some contempt. She had downloaded a manual on the Friday evening and memorised its contents for the test on Monday. She had not given the topic a single thought since.

She pictured the first-aid manual and read the cover: There’s no place like home.

She saw a door with the letter ‘A’ written above. It was the garage door from their old house in Oxford. She would need to remember its layout – and her past – to unlock the medical knowledge she had stowed there. The garage was main route. Each room was a mnemonic that corresponded to the table of contents in the first-aid manual. She could readily summon help from research centre’s medical sickbay; but she would not do it yet, because it would mean disaster for her father, herself and Saskia.

Underneath the letter A – it was not coloured, but neither was it colourless – was the word ‘Airway’.

Jennifer knelt by her father’s head and checked his airway. On the garage door, beneath the word ‘Airway’, there was a picture. It showed a cartoon woman with her cheek near the casualty’s mouth. Jennifer did the same. She eased two fingers under his chin and tilted. She could not feel breath on her cheek or see his chest rise.

She imagined the garage door opening. It tilted upwards with a creak because her father had never cared to oil it. From inside came the smell of black paint and sawdust. The best smell in the world. It was a friendly place. She remembered running inside, aged four or five, to watch her father tinker with chairs and cupboard doors. She watched him clamp them to his Workmate and commence torture with screwdrivers, hammers and electric sanders. Invariably he would become angry with the chair or cupboard door: a screw would not enter correctly, or it would drop to the concrete floor, never to be found. “The universe conspires against me,” he would rage, and Jennifer would clap her hands, because she knew that he would never be angry with her; she could disarm him with a glance. When she was older, she would fetch him cups of tea, though he worked in the garage less and less. He spent more weekends at the department. The times when he worked there became more precious. He talked her through her homework as she sat in a corner of the garage at a badly-constructed desk. Once he had made a hanging mobile from marbles and strings in order to demonstrate the movement of the planets. She watched silently with amusement. The mobile did not work; few of his creations did.

But his enthusiasm was a powerful force. She saw it less and less as she grew older. She became a woman. Her father became more distant. He was not sure who she had become. Their conversations became more superficial. More silences. Not awkward, but more frequent. She began to excel at school and, with that, came the bullies. David did not know how to help her. It was not an equation to be solved or a mobile to be built. Her bullying found his limits.

She looked back now, almost smelling the garage, and realised that she had overreacted. At the age of twenty, she had an aerial view of her teenage years and realised that her tantrums and silences and her solemnity were acts of a kind. They were not real. And she knew that, when she reached thirty, she would look back and say the same of the mistakes of her twenties, and again when she was forty.

These thoughts flashed through her mind in a second.

She looked now into the garage.

The first thing she saw was the Workmate. She saw that there were two balloons jammed, trapped, between its two planks of wood. Good. That meant ‘air’.

She pinched her father’s nose with her right hand and kept his head tilted with her left. She sealed her lips over his and blew. It really felt like blowing into a balloon: there was a building resistance, the sound of rushing air, and the expansion of her father’s chest. When she withdrew, her warm breath was returned to her. Nothing else happened.

Her father’s eyes were open. She could only see the whites.

There were two balloons so she breathed twice.

David awoke slowly. He blinked because there were strong lights in the room. He was on his back. Close by, two women were talking in a low murmur. He blinked again to clear the haze from his mind. He remembered nothing.

“Hello?” he asked.

“Dad,” said a voice. It was Jennifer. She came into view. It was shock to see her so old. He realised that he had been dreaming of her as a child. “Do you remember anything?”

He nodded and sat up. “Yes, everything. I feel sick.”

“You stopped breathing. I gave you mouth-to-mouth.”

David closed his eyes and took some long, slow breaths. The blood was draining from his head so he lay back down. As the back of his skull tapped the floor, he gave a yell.

“What’s wrong?” asked another voice. It was Saskia.

“Did I walk into a door?”

Jennifer squeezed his hand. “Do you remember when I was kid and said that, when confronted with a problem, I should use my head?”