TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (21 page)

Waldstein nodded. ‘Of course.’
He sighed, trying a weary morale-raising smile. ‘Then that’ll be all our
messy housekeeping done. Back on an even keel, as I think the saying goes.’

Joseph watched Waldstein go. Then, finally
alone in the lab, he took in a deep breath and let it out.

Jesus.

He recalled a couple of things Waldstein had
said. Things that had echoed what Griggs had been fixating on.

We deserve this hopeless world? We need
to keep things on track?

Frasier Griggs was right
.
He was
certain of it now. Quite certain that beneath his carefully orchestrated enigmatic
composure, withstanding his publicly declared ambition to save mankind from itself –
Waldstein had quietly gone insane. The man seemed utterly intent on steering the ship
on to
the rocks, not
away
from them. Intent on steering mankind
towards its own demise.

Pandora
.

Joseph realized it was all down to one
person. Himself. Griggs had been foolish and confronted Waldstein directly. Now he was
dead. Perhaps he could smuggle a warning to the team, just something to alert them to
whatever this ‘Pandora’ was that Waldstein was attempting to preserve.
Something discreet. A note. Something.

It’s just me now. I’ve got
to do more than that.

He looked once again at the message from the
past. The Liam-now-Foster unit had ordered a replacement Saleena like someone might dial
up a pizza. The unit did his job diligently, loyally – just like he was programmed to
do.

Saleena Vikram.

Olivera had an idea. Another way that he
could attempt to derail this project. Something he could do, something subtle enough
that it could be sneaked past Waldstein’s ever-watchful eyes. A deliberate,
conspicuous continuity error in Sal’s memory line. Enough of a jarring continuity
error that she’d end up picking at it like a scab, worrying away at it until
she’d finally worked out what it meant. Now that was something Waldstein might not
spot – some small additional memory embedded in her mind, a detail not quite right. A
detail that was quite impossible to be true. And it would trouble her. Make her question
things.

He’d been thinking about that last
night as he’d sat alone in this lab, while trying to catch a few hours’
sleep on the metal-framed cot in the corner. While he’d been watching her grow in
the tube, the faint outline of a child’s body floating in a glowing amber
soup.

Then he had it. It came to him.

A certain blue bear that he recalled seeing
in the dusty window of an antique shop back in 2001. Not too far from the
archway, as it happened. Close enough, in fact, that she was bound to
stumble across it sooner or later. See it with her own eyes and then wonder how it was
possible that she’d recall seeing it tumbling over and over in an inferno in
Mumbai, in the year 2026

13 September 2011, Interstate 90, Newton,
Massachusetts

‘But that’s completely
bleedin’ crazy!’ said Liam. ‘You’re saying … what?
That I’m a …’

‘A meatbot, Liam. You, me and Sal –
we’re just weedier, nerdier models of Bob and Becks,’ said Maddy with a
bitter tone.

Liam laughed a little maniacally. ‘Aw,
come on! That’s a corker, that is! There’s no way at all that I’m
–’

‘Think about it, Liam. Think about
it!’

‘I don’t need to think about!
I’m Liam!’

Maddy got up and took a step forward.
‘I was never on an airplane from New York to Boston. A plane that supposedly blew
up,’ she said. ‘And you, Liam, you were never on the
Titanic
and
Sal was never living in 2026 in Mumbai. They’re all just made-up
memories.’

‘
Made-up?
’ Liam
frowned. He had a mind full of memories. His family and friends, Cork, his school,
leaving home for Liverpool because what he really always wanted to do was to work his
way on to a boat and get to see the world. But then … cross-examining those
memories – and he’d done that several times over the last few months –
there’d always seemed to be troublesome gaps, missing bits. He’d put that
down to all that had happened to him recently – a lifetime’s worth of traumas
and adventures that he’d struggled to survive through over the
last few months. Who wouldn’t forget something like their mother’s maiden
name after all of that? Right?

But it was more than that, wasn’t
it?

‘I can remember a whole life before
this, so I can.
A whole bleedin’ life!
’

‘Yeah? Really?’

‘Aye.’ Liam nodded vigorously.
‘Of course I can!’

‘OK then … so how did you
get the job as a steward aboard the
Titanic
?’ There was a challenging
tone in her voice, a
come-on-then-genius
tone. It sounded almost spiteful.

‘Well, I …’ Liam shrugged,
expecting the memory to come along at his will. But there was nothing. Nothing at all.
Had he just walked aboard and asked for a job? Had it been that easy? He reached further
into his mind, assuming, hoping, this was just a mental blip – going blank because she
was pressuring him, goading him. He tried to rewind his mind. The night the ship went
down, the screaming, the panic. He recalled a gentleman calmly drinking cognac in the
reading room, preferring drunken oblivion to drowning soberly. A girl left to die with
him because she was in a wheelchair. He recalled an hour earlier, the ship jolting in
the night, crockery lurching off dining tables and smashing on the floor.

Further still. He recalled the day before. A
normal day as a ship’s steward. The routine: up at five, cabin-service breakfasts
for those that had ordered it. Cleaning the rooms during the morning. Filling in as a
waiter for the midday meal and the evening meal. Then cabin-service teas and suppers
served until ten in the evening, then collapsing wearily into his bunk in a small cabin
shared with three other men. A typical steward’s day.

Then back further.

But nothing. It was like the blackness after
the end titles of a movie. Void. White noise. Nothing.

‘I …’ His mouth hung open
until finally it snapped shut with a wet
clup
.

‘I’m so sorry, Liam,’
whispered Maddy. ‘So sorry.’

‘No! Wait! What about me parents! My
family! I remember them!’

‘Go on then, Liam. Tell me about
them.’

‘Me ma, me da … they
were …’ He closed his eyes. But he could manage to conjure up only one decent
mental image of them. Just one. And that was a photograph. Just one faded,
sepia-coloured image.

‘What about your home? You said it was
Cork, wasn’t it?’

Cork in Ireland. Could he even recall
whereabouts they lived in that city? No, not really. He just knew the name. He could
conjure up no more than a couple of images of the place – the docks, St Fin
Barre’s Cathedral, St Patrick’s Street – and that was about it. Again,
almost as if they were mere photographs pulled from some photo archive somewhere.

‘Ah … Jay-zus …’
he whispered.

‘It’s just the same for
me,’ said Maddy softly. She sat down beside him. ‘Bits and pieces. Like
somebody just googled up a whole bunch of pictures, music, films, news, clothes,
computer games, TV shows from the year 2010 and made me out of all of that.’ She
wiped a tear off her cheek. ‘You know what my mind is? It’s the search
results you get back if you do a “things you might find in the year 2010”
search on whatever passes for the Internet …’ She shrugged. ‘From
whatever frikkin’ year we actually come from.’

‘Do you think we’ve got
computers in our heads too?’ asked Sal.

‘Maybe I’ll stick my head in an
X-ray machine sometime and
find out,’ Maddy replied, wiping a
snotty nose. She laughed. ‘Maybe not. Last thing I want to know is that
there’s nothing in my skull but a rat’s brain linked to a sim card.’
She looked apologetically at Bob. ‘No offence.’

Bob shrugged. ‘I cannot be
offended.’

‘And the difference is that we
can,’ said Maddy, finding a hint of a smile. ‘So maybe we’re different
somehow. Clones, but maybe we’re more human or something.’

Sal nodded. She was looking down at her
hands in her lap. ‘I just … I just can’t believe we never worked
this out. I mean …’ She looked up at them. ‘When we woke up in the
archway, how come none of us thought to ask why we didn’t see a portal when we
were recruited?’

‘Exactly.’ Maddy got to her
feet. ‘So why didn’t they put a portal memory into our heads? Why make that
mistake?’

‘Perhaps …’ Rashim cut in,
clearing his throat. ‘Perhaps they hadn’t yet perfected the portal system
while they were writing your memories?’

The others looked at him accusingly.
‘Thanks for your input,
human
!’ snapped Sal.

He raised his hands apologetically.
‘Just saying.’

‘No.’ Maddy shook her head.
‘Rashim’s right. Maybe that’s why they, he,
Waldstein … 
whoever
made us was still putting it all together.
Maybe they were doing it in a hurry. I guess if we all think hard, we’d find other
little errors in there.’

‘My blue bear,’ whispered Sal to
herself. She addressed the others. ‘I remembered a bear, a soft toy, in
Mumbai … but it was exactly the same bear in the window of that shop in
Brooklyn.’ She shook her head. ‘Someone … someone who made us must
have seen it in the window, and thought it would make a nice little detail to put into
my … life.’ Her voice hitched. ‘Nice touch,’ she hissed.

The room was quiet for a while, the three of
them silently trawling through their minds, sorting memories into piles of true and
false – sorting them into
before
and
after
their recruitment.

Finally Liam spoke. ‘I get it
now.’

He looked at Bob, arms crossed and eyes lost
in the shadow of a neolithic brow, and Becks sitting beside him slight and wraithlike,
with wide, vacant, dumb-animal eyes.

‘Meatbots, eh? Bleedin’
marvellous.’

2055, W.G. Systems Research Campus, near
Pinedale, Wyoming

It was late in the day. Joseph Olivera had
decided to stay overnight on the grounds of the W.G. Systems research compound to eat in
the staff canteen and sleep in the cot in the adjoining office area. The synthi-soya
gunk they served up in there almost tasted like real food. Better than the cartons of
gunk he had in his apartment’s refrigerator.

Anyway, it was beginning to get dark outside
and he didn’t fancy taking his Auto-Drive along the winding wooded road down to
Pinedale. There were more and more vagrants drifting westward from the eastern states
and he knew for certain many of them were camping out there in the woods. He’d
heard some of the W.G. techies talking about several more roadside hold-ups in the last
week. In most cases it was just the desperate and hungry after a little money, not
exactly asking … but … in most cases the hold-up ended as a
palm-transaction of whatever digi-dollars you had on account and they’d let you
pass through unharmed.

Desperate times for some. No. Desperate
times for many.

He felt uncomfortable anyway, leaving the
lab. He’d set things in motion. Sown seeds. As a last-minute thing, he’d
ended up slipping a hastily scribbled note addressed to the Maddy unit into the embryo
box that Waldstein had taken back to San
Francisco. And now he was
beginning to panic, wondering whether he’d been stupid. There was no knowing for
sure when, or even
if
, the team back in 2001 were going to discover the note,
whether they were going to question the base office. If a message did come through from
them, through that scrap of old paper, he wanted to intercept it before Waldstein saw
it.

It was a relief right now that the old man
was away in Denver on business. Olivera felt a mixture of guilt for betraying the man,
and a desperate fear of him. Griggs … he still wasn’t certain one way or
the other about poor Frasier’s fate. Perhaps his paranoia was getting the better
of him; perhaps the poor fellow had just been unlucky.

The Saleena unit had been inserted back in
the past now. And it wouldn’t be long before her curious mind started picking away
at the tiny new details edited into her consciousness. Between that bit of memory
surgery and his handwritten note, Joseph felt he’d done as much as he could to
unbalance things. Those three young clones weren’t stupid. Far from it. Together,
they were going to figure this all out one way or the other. Eventually.

And now perhaps he needed to find a way out
for himself. Handing in his notice wasn’t exactly going to wash with Waldstein. As
the man had told him: ‘Once you’re in, Joseph, you’re in. Do you
understand?’

Perhaps he could plead mental exhaustion.
Perhaps he could tell Waldstein he was beginning to make mistakes and it might be best
if he took some kind of sabbatical? That sounded lame even before he tried saying it. He
was so busy trying to find some way of phrasing a way to ask Waldstein to let him go
that he failed to hear the soft scrape of a foot in the doorway. Olivera lurched
suspiciously in his chair, like some mischievous little boy caught with his fingers in a
sweetie jar.

‘Joseph.’

It was Waldstein. Olivera felt his heart
pounding in his chest. He hadn’t been expecting the man to return this evening.
‘Mr … Mr Waldstein. I … I thought you were still in Denver on
business.’

‘Indeed.’ Waldstein’s cool
eyes remained on him.

Olivera looked away. Found something for his
fidgeting hands to fiddle with on his desk. ‘All … all s-sorted, then?
The business?’

‘Not really, no. I had to come back
here early.’

Oliver nodded. ‘Oh?’ The old man
looked tired, sad. ‘Everything all right, Mr Waldstein?’

‘No, Joseph. Not all right.’

No explanation. Just that. Olivera felt
panic growing inside him. He dared not say anything in case his stutter betrayed
him.