TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (22 page)

‘I know,’ said Waldstein after
several interminable seconds.

‘Know?
Uh … know … know what?’

Waldstein shook his head slowly, the gesture
very much like a father’s disappointment with an errant child. ‘I know
you’ve been tampering with things.’

Olivera felt his stomach flop queasily.
‘T-tamper?’

‘You’ve edited the memories of
Saleena. You added something to the unit that was sent back.’ Waldstein noticed
the faintest involuntary flicker of reaction on Joseph’s face. ‘Yes,
Joseph … I’ve had the database tagged to alert me for updates to the
source archive.’ He spread his hands in a vaguely apologetic way. ‘After
Frasier let me down, I figured it might be prudent to keep a closer eye on you
also.’

‘I … I … needed to
just … tidy up s-s-some continuity faults.’

‘Please, Joseph …’ he said,
stepping into the lab and finding
a seat to ease himself down into.
‘Please don’t lie to me. I’m too tired for that now.’ He sighed.
‘You’ve not been fixing memory mismatches. You’ve added new content to
her mind.’

Olivera couldn’t help his jaw sagging.
Perhaps that was less an admission of guilt than stuttering a denial at him.

‘Why did you add the visual memory of
a tumbling teddy bear to her recruitment memory, Joseph? Why?’ Waldstein’s
eyes narrowed. ‘What are you trying to tell her?’

The bear. Olivera realized Waldstein must
have actually viewed the visual insert: the image of the blue bear tumbling end over
end, almost defying gravity. So very deliberately conspicuous. The kind of visual image
that would stick in a mind.

‘It’s a trigger memory,
isn’t it?’

Olivera felt his cheeks burn with shame. His
face, his demeanour, his awkward shuffling were screaming his guilt out loud and, of
course, Waldstein knew what he’d been up to anyway … if not the precise
reason
why
.

‘Yes,’ Joseph said
eventually.

‘Joseph?’ Waldstein said softly.
‘Talk to me. Why the trigger memory?’

Olivera looked up at him.

He’d noticed the bear back in 2001,
while he and Frasier had been setting the field office up. That curious antique shop not
so far away had provided him with some of the props he’d needed to validate their
various recruitment memories; the
Titanic
steward’s uniform had given him
the idea of setting Liam’s recruitment aboard that famous doomed ship. A perfect
recruitment fable. There’d been other things in various other shops that had
helped him author
appropriate
life stories for each of them: the dark hoody
with splashes of neon-orange Hindi-graffiti, that T-shirt with the Intel logo.
Real
things that would
exist with them as they woke up in
the archway. Real, tangible items that would help all three engineered units
bond
with their carefully scripted memories.

The bear … adding that bear to the
replacement Saleena unit’s memory was adding something that couldn’t
possibly be. The same bear in both places: Brooklyn 2001, Mumbai 2026. A clear,
unambiguous impossibility.

A trigger.

‘Why, Joseph?’

‘Why?’ Olivera felt slightly
emboldened. His game was up. No more lying. Somehow so very liberating. ‘Let me
ask you that, s-sir. Why?’

Waldstein frowned. ‘Why
what?’

‘Why do you want mankind to destroy
itself?’

‘What the hell are you talking about,
Joseph?’

‘I know … I know about
Pandora
.’

The word caused Waldstein to shift
uneasily.

‘I know it’s s-some kind of
codeword you have, isn’t it? A codeword for the end of mankind. The
day … the precise date we destroy ourselves. That’s it, isn’t
it?’

‘This has come from Frasier,
hasn’t it? This is
his
nonsense, isn’t it?’

‘Pandora. The end of the
world … that’s what you s-saw, isn’t it?’

‘What I saw?’

There was something comforting about
unburdening himself like this. Olivera realized he was already so far over a certain
invisible line that there was nothing he could say that was going to make any difference
now. Either he was going to be instantly dismissed from the project, escorted out of the
compound … or … or perhaps worse.

‘You’re actually asking me what
I
saw
back in 2044?’ Waldstein
eyed him cautiously.
‘Is that what you’re asking me? What I saw that very first time?’

Olivera nodded hesitantly.
‘You … you didn’t … go back in time, did you? You
didn’t go back to s-see your … wife, your s-son?’

Waldstein shook his head slowly. ‘Oh,
Joseph … please don’t ask me what I saw.’

‘You went forward. You went
forward
in time. You …’

‘What?’ He smiled. ‘I went
forward in time to see if mankind makes it through these hard times? To see if mankind
is as stupid and self-destructive as it appears to be?’

Olivera nodded.

‘And what? All this?’ He
gestured at the small lab. ‘This project of ours, the businesses I’ve built
up, the technology companies I’ve been acquiring, buying, the billions of dollars
I’ve made … all of this, just to make sure it happens? Just to make
certain mankind wipes itself out?’ Waldstein’s voice rose in pitch. A note
of incredulity. ‘Are you seriously suggesting all of that is so I can ensure the
end of the road for mankind?’

Olivera nodded again.

‘Oh, Joseph …’ That look of
disappointment on his face again. He eased himself up off the seat. ‘You have no
idea. Not even the slightest idea. God help me! I’m not trying to
destroy
us … I’m trying to
save
us.’ He sighed as he stepped back
towards the lab’s doorway. ‘Or at least save what I can of
us … what there is to save.’

Olivera had a sense that this was where
their conversation met its logical conclusion. No bartering. No pretending. No back-out
clause. This was the place they were at. ‘Mr Waldstein? What … what
happens now?’

Waldstein backed up several steps. Turned
and said something
softly to someone who must have been standing
outside, just out of sight.

‘Who’s … Mr
Wald-s-stein. Who’s out there? Who’re you talking to?’

A tall, muscular figure appeared behind the
old man, completely bald, with the calm dispassionate face of a recently birthed support
unit.

‘I’m so very sorry,
Joseph.’ Waldstein looked back at him with sadness in his eyes. ‘I’m
truly sorry that it has to be this way …’

In a heartbeat he was certain of
Griggs’s fate. Murdered. Not by some gang of starving vagrants but by Waldstein.
Directly or indirectly. The old man had made sure Frasier Griggs wasn’t going to
remain a dangerous loose end.

And now I’m dead.

He backed up a step, past his own
workstation to what used to be Griggs’s workstation.

‘Joseph,’ said Waldstein,
‘please don’t make this harder than it has to be. Come here.’

‘You … you don’t
n-need to do this. Please … you don’t –’

‘But here’s the problem – I
can’t
trust
you any more.’ There was genuine sadness on
Waldstein’s face. ‘Do you see? I couldn’t trust Frasier either. And
that’s the important thing. This is too important, Joseph. More important than
Frasier, than you … than me even.’

Joseph eyed the holo-display shimmering
inches above the mess of Griggs’s desk. He’d been looking through those
folders of his ex-colleague’s that
hadn’t
been code-locked. Frasier
had been recently pinhole-viewing history. One of his unofficial hobbies. He rather
liked to discreetly spy on favourite historical moments, particularly civil-war history.
Joseph had once caught him glimpsing the final moment of the Battle of Gettysburg, as
General Pickett’s Virginians had finally withered under the
barrage of musket fire, broke and routed. Then another time Frasier had been listening
to Abraham Lincoln give his famous Gettysburg Address.

‘Tell me,’ pleaded Joseph,
‘what’s so important? Tell me!’

Waldstein sighed. ‘If that I could,
Joseph … if only I could …’

Joseph shot another glance at the display.
The pinhole-viewer interface was in standby mode, as Griggs had left it last time
he’d used it. The displacement machine was fully charged after having sent back
the Saleena unit. Good to go, ready to dispense its stored energy. He just needed to
open the interface, dilate the pinhole, three feet, four feet. That’s all. It
would be enough.

‘W-why c-can’t you tell me,
Mr … Mr Waldstein? Maybe, m-maybe if you explained –’

‘Explain Pandora to you? Explain why
mankind has to wipe himself out?’ Waldstein smiled sadly. ‘I explain that to
you … and what? All of a sudden I’ll be able to trust you
unreservedly?’

Joseph nodded. Perhaps too eagerly. His mind
was on something else, though. Calculating escape.

‘I’m sorry, Joseph. What has to
happen is my burden, my burden alone, and I’ll burn in hell forever for what I
know has to be done.’ The old man looked like he was crying. ‘Good God,
Joseph … you don’t want to know what’s in my head. Trust
me!’

Three feet, just about wide enough for him
to dive through. But … but … he had no idea what time-stamp, if any,
was already set in the location buffer. He looked up at the support unit, still standing
obediently just behind Waldstein. On a word of command it could be across the small lab
in seconds, not enough time for him to pick out and tap the coordinates for a safe,
density-verified location.

Oh God help me
 … If
nothing was in the entry buffer, he’d
end up in chaos space.
That horrific nothingness. A swiftly crushed neck at the hands of the unit standing
behind Waldstein would be infinitely preferable, surely?

‘It all has to end, Joseph. In that
way. Pandora. Only then will they let it happen.’

They?

‘Let what … what h-happen?
Who … who are you talking about?’

‘I’m sorry, Joseph. The time for
talking is over.’ He turned to the support unit and nodded.

The support unit pushed past Waldstein,
strode round a table cluttered with Joseph’s mind-map charts and printouts of
gene-memory data templates.

Not daring to think what horror awaited him
if the time-stamp entry buffer was empty, Joseph’s finger hovered over the commit
touch button on the holo-display. A warning flashed on the screen that a pinhole was now
activated. The air near him pulsated subtly. It was there … but so small it
was invisible. On the lab floor, yellow and black chevron tape marked out a safety
square, a place not to enter while a pinhole was active. Walking through a pinhole would
be like being shot by a high-calibre round – a tangent carved through the body and sent
elsewhere, no different to the path of a speeding bullet, blasting a hole right through
a body and depositing what it had eviscerated out the other side.

‘My God!’ Waldstein’s eyes
widened as he understood what Joseph intended to do. ‘
DON’T DO
IT!
’

Joseph tapped a command in, an instruction
to widen the pinhole.

The support unit picked up on the urgency in
Waldstein’s voice and leaped towards Joseph. The pinhole instantaneously inflated,
from apparently nothing to a shimmering, floating orb
a yard wide.
Joseph turned towards it, time enough in the half second left to see that the churning,
oily display was showing something more than featureless white. It was showing
somewhere.
Somewhere
.

Not chaos space. Good enough.

He instinctively cradled his head and dived
into the shimmering orb, tucking his legs up, his elbows in, to be sure he left none of
them behind. In the last moment before entering it he was screaming. A wail of panic, a
long, strangled bellow of defiance and fear. Most definitely fear.

This is insane!

As his head entered that swirling escape
window – a window that could mean safety or death in any number of unpleasant ways – he
thought he could make out the shape of horses. A wagon. Barrels.

At least it wasn’t all white,
right?

At least there was that.

15 September 2001, Arlington,
Massachusetts

Rosalin Kellerman stared at the man in a
smart business suit standing on her doorstep, and a woman beside him. A striking young
woman, with startling grey eyes, wide and intense, wearing a loose gentleman’s
checked shirt, several sizes too big for her but tucked into tightly fitting jeans.
Athletic. But
striking
 … in that her head was shaved almost down to
the skin. And yet somehow she was still quite beautiful. Just like that Irish rock
singer-songwriter from the eighties … what was her name?
Sinead
something or other.

‘This is number 45?’ he asked
again.

Rosalin shrugged and pointed at the brass
number plaque on her green door. ‘Uh … well, there’s the number
right there! See it?’

‘And this is your residence?’
asked the man.

Rosalin narrowed her eyes. This was already
becoming a peculiar encounter. And not the first one she’d had in the last few
days.

‘Have you received a visit from a
stranger recently?’ The man seemed to immediately realize that was a stupidly
vague question. He pulled something out of his jacket pocket. A photograph. Held it up
so she could see it. ‘A visit from this person?’

Rosalin recognized the face. The oval-shaped
chin, the glasses,
the frizzy, strawberry-blonde hair. Oh yeah, she
remembered this girl all right.

‘You mind telling me what the hell
this is all about?’

The man smiled. ‘You’ve seen
her, haven’t you?’

‘Yeah … she came knocking a
couple of days ago.’ Rosalin shook her head. ‘Crazy. I was pretty stupid. I
really shouldn’t have let her in.’

‘You spoke with her?’ asked the
intense young woman in the checked shirt.

‘You kidding?’ Rosalin snorted a
laugh. ‘I couldn’t get a word in.’