Gates of Rome tr-5 Read online

  This installation, carved deep into the side of Cheyenne Mountain, had once upon a time been known as NORAD. It had been kept in a state of ‘warm standby’ until the mid-2040s then finally closed down after the first Oil War. America’s old rival, Russia, was having as much trouble as America with its own internal problems to no longer be a global nuclear threat.

  Now it was simply referred to as ‘Facility 29H-Colorado’.

  ‘I suppose my grandfather’s generation… my parents’ generation even, were too busy wanting all the nice things: the big shiny holo-TV, real meat three times a week, the latest digi-fashions. Too busy with all that to notice the sea slowly rising, taking coastlines and cities with it.’

  ‘Did the big floodings happen after the Oil Wars, Rashim?’

  ‘That’s right.’ He shrugged. ‘It might have been better for us if we’d run out of oil and all the other fossil fuels a lot sooner than we did. Maybe we’d still have polar ice caps.’

  Rashim’s childhood, like everyone else his age, had been one lived in a world shifting with constant migration. Millions — billions — of people on the move, retreating from land that itself was retreating before rising tides of polluted water.

  ‘Mind you… the real problem, Bubba, was that there were just too many of us.’

  ‘Too many humans?’

  ‘Nearly ten billion. Totally unsustainable.’ He looked down at the waddling unit beside him. ‘We were so very stupid, Bubba.’

  It nodded, its plastic, pickle-shaped nose wobbling slightly. ‘Duh. Stoopid.’

  Ten billion mouths to feed. How did we ever allow ourselves to get that crowded?

  It reminded him of something a teacher once told him — Petri Dish Syndrome. Put a bacterium in a dish with something to feed on. Leave it long enough and it’ll fill the dish, then, oh boy, then… it’ll turn on itself, cannibalize its own protein to survive.

  ‘You reap what you sow,’ said SpongeBubba. He looked up at Rashim with wide, hopeful eyes. ‘Is that the correct saying to use?’

  Rashim nodded. ‘It is. Well done, Bubba.’

  ‘Hey, thanks!’

  They turned a corner into a passageway already lit with a steady glow from muted ceiling lights. At the end a pair of soldiers stood guard either side of the door to a lift.

  Rashim flicked his hand casually at them as he and his unit approached. ‘Morning, guys.’

  ‘Morning, sir,’ said the older of the two guards. Almost old enough to be his dad. Rashim felt awkward; he seemed to be the youngest member by far on the technology team. Twenty-seven and he was in charge of the ‘receiver team’, a group of eight technicians all at least ten years older than him.

  ‘You’re up early again, Dr Anwar.’

  Rashim shrugged. ‘We have calibrations to cross-check on the translation markers.’

  SpongeBubba raised a gloved cartoon hand in a mock salute at the guards. ‘S’right! Rashim’s the most important man in the whole world!’

  Rashim winced at his assistant’s sing-song exuberance.

  The older guard cocked an eyebrow. ‘You do know that outside of the facility you should have your AI unit on verbal-mute, sir, don’t you? That’s a security breach.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course… I’m sorry.’ He let go of Bubba’s gloved hand. ‘SpongeBubba, be quiet.’

  ‘You got it!’ Its plastic lips snapped shut then pouted guiltily.

  ‘Really sorry about that.’

  ‘You know I’ll have to log that security infringement, sir,’ said the soldier.

  Rashim nodded. He’d get a slapped wrist for that from the project leader, Dr Yatsushita, later on today no doubt. ‘I promise I’ll remember to mute him in future outside the lab.’

  The soldier smiled, offered Rashim a sly wink. ‘In that case, maybe we can let it go this time.’ He pressed a button and the lift doors slid open. ‘Have a nice day, sir.’

  Rashim nodded. ‘Thank you.’ He led his lab unit into the lift by the hand and the doors closed on them.

  As the lift hummed, taking them down to level three, he cleared his mind of unnecessary things. SpongeBubba’s childlike curiosity about the world outside could wait. There were figures to process and check; yesterday’s intra-mail about a change of mass tolerance meant several days’ worth of recalibrating. And the deadline was now just over six months away.

  ‘Bubba, any other messages land in my in-box this morning?’

  SpongeBubba looked up at him, desperately wanting to speak, his eyes rolling, plastic lips quivering with frustration.

  ‘Unmute.’

  ‘Yes!’ he blurted eagerly. ‘Yes, skippa! Three from Dr Yatsushita. Seven from — ’

  ‘I’ll deal with them this afternoon. Remind me.’

  ‘Yes, skippa! Storing.’

  The hum inside the small lift dropped in tone, and then the elevator shuddered gently as it came to rest. The doors slid open to reveal chipboard panels, erected in front of the lift to block any view of the area beyond. On one of them was tacked a sign.

  Now Entering Level Three Security Zone

  A last warning to turn back for anyone who shouldn’t be down here. Beneath it, handwritten with a magic marker, was a little more information.

  Welcome to Project Exodus

  CHAPTER 3

  2001, New York

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ said Liam.

  ‘Believe it.’ Maddy tapped her front teeth with a biro absently. ‘I never…’ She looked queasy. ‘I never ever want to do something like that again.’

  Liam nodded slowly. ‘It isn’t an easy thing.’ He recalled having to retrieve Bob’s hard drive. Reminding himself over and over that it wasn’t some kind of horrendous mutilation he was performing on the support unit… it was merely getting a friend back.

  Maddy glanced across the archway at where the carrier bag had been by the shutter door; a bag containing something the size of a basketball, tied up and put inside yet another bag. Thankfully it was gone now. Bob had taken it away earlier. They’d discussed whether her head deserved some sort of a burial, a ritual, a few words said. But none of them could decide how to do it or what to say. In the end Bob just took it away. Maddy didn’t want to know what he did with it. It wasn’t Becks any more; it was just ten pounds of meat, bone and cartilage.

  ‘Data retrieval,’ she muttered, blanking out the memory with technical terms. ‘That’s all it is,’ she told herself. ‘Just like pulling the motherboard out of a PC. No big deal.’

  She’d discovered Becks’s body almost completely buried beneath a mound of other bodies, several separate, distinct entry and exit wounds to her head. Any one of those would have been fatal to a normal human. But her genetically engineered, thicker skull and much smaller organic brain meant that she could suffer catastrophic cranial trauma and still be viable. But clearly she was not immortal. Her body had sustained enough damage and blood loss that it had finally closed down and died.

  Sal settled on the arm of the threadbare sofa beside Maddy. ‘Think her chip’s OK?’

  Maddy nodded towards the bank of screens across the archway. Several of them were spooling streams of encoded data. ‘Computer-Bob’s running a diagnostic on her chipset right now. I don’t know. I hope so. It’s gonna take a while. The silicon wafer casing’s dented. A bullet must have hit it on the way through. I don’t know what that’s done to the drive inside. We’ll just have to wait and see.’

  The three of them silently watched the spooling screens, a flickering stream of letters and numbers, data: countless terabytes of stored memories of dinosaurs and jungles, knights and castles.

  All that made Becks… Becks.

  ‘We’ll re-grow her, though,’ said Liam. ‘Aye?’

  Sal nodded. ‘Yeah, two support units are better than one.’ She looked down at Maddy. ‘Right?’

  ‘Sure we will. But…’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘There’s no certainty that we can use her AI. If there’s too much damage, if it
’s an unreliable AI, she could be a hazard to us. We may need to work from default AI code.’

  ‘That won’t be our Becks, then,’ said Liam.

  Both support units, Becks and Bob, had developed distinctly different artificial intelligences despite running the very same operating system. Maddy’s best guess was that it was something in the way the small organic brain interacted with the silicon, that it was the ‘meat’ component of their minds that ultimately defined them, gave them their individual personalities.

  ‘You’re right,’ she replied, ‘it wouldn’t be the same Becks.’

  ‘I really hope her computer’s all right,’ said Liam wistfully.

  Sal looked at him. ‘She was a bit… I don’t know, a bit cold, though, sometimes, don’t you think?’

  He shook his head thoughtfully. ‘I think she was beginning to learn how to feel things.’

  Maddy thought she’d seen something of that in the support unit, the emergence of behaviour that might be described as an emotion — a desire to please, to seek approval.

  ‘We’ll just have to wait and see what we get. If the data’s good, she should be pretty much the Becks we know and love.’

  If the data’s good.

  But Maddy’s mind was on something else, on that portion of the hard drive Becks had partitioned off and encrypted. Several millimetres of silicon that contained a secret so important that it had become the source of the legend of the Holy Grail, caused the very existence of the Knights Templar and compelled King Richard to launch his own crusade to retake Jerusalem. A secret transmitted across two thousand years of history. A secret meant for them.

  But not yet apparently.

  What was it Becks had said? That the message contained instructions for the truth not to be revealed just yet.

  ‘ When it is the end… ’

  ‘I hope the message from that old manuscript isn’t all messed up,’ said Liam as if he was reading her thoughts. ‘I’d love to find out what it said one day, so I would.’

  Maddy smiled. ‘Me too.’

  The shutter door rattled gently as a fist banged against it outside.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ said Sal. She hopped off the sofa’s arm, crossed the archway and hit the shutter’s button. It cranked up noisily, letting in daylight and revealing Bob’s thick, hairy legs. In an attempt to make him blend in more with the tourists in Times Square, Sal was trying out the shorts-and-flip-flops-and-Hawaiian-shirt look on him. Maddy wasn’t entirely sure that was working. He looked like a freakish version of Clark Kent taking a vacation.

  Bob ducked down under the shutter, holding a cardboard take-away tray in his ham-shank-sized hands.

  ‘Who requested the caramel frappuccino?’

  CHAPTER 4

  2001, Central Park, New York

  They walked slowly round the duck pond, kicking the first dry leaves of autumn aside. They watched a young couple rollerblading ahead of them. Maddy smiled sadly, envious of the pair of them, both about her age and seemingly without a solitary care in the world. She watched the young man, tanned, lean, handsome, with long wavy blond hair and a small goatee, leading his unsteady girlfriend by the hands, her feet splaying and weaving uncertainly, laughing at how terrible she was.

  To have that moment. Just that one moment.

  Foster touched her arm sympathetically. ‘I know what you’re thinking.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re thinking ignorance is bliss.’

  She offered him a confessional shrug. ‘I wish I was someone else, Foster. Anyone else.’ She nodded at the couple, their legs beginning to tangle, the young man laughing along with his giggling girlfriend. ‘Being either of them would be nice.’

  ‘They’ll never experience anything like you’ll experience. What you’ve experienced already.’

  Maddy sighed. ‘But it’s too much. I can’t cope with all of it.’ She looked at his old face, sunken cheeks and eyes framed by a fan of wrinkles, ‘laughter lines’ if one was being kind. ‘Every time I come and visit you… it seems I’ve got more and more to unload on you.’

  He cackled. ‘It must get annoying, having to repeat yourself.’

  She shrugged that away. That was the deal. That’s how it was. Foster was here at this time in Central Park. Mid-morning, feeding the pigeons, then on his merry way to live out whatever time he had left however he wanted. For him an hour that came and went, but for Maddy — reliving the same two New York days, the 10th and 11th September 2001 — it was a repeated chance to see him again. To get his advice. But every time they met, it would be the first time he’d seen her since walking away from the team and leaving her in charge. So their conversation began with an ever-increasing recap from her of the events she and the others had endured.

  ‘You guys do seem to have been through quite a lot,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  His face, skin like fine parchment, creased with a grin. ‘Abraham Lincoln sounds a character, so he does. Did he really outrun both your support units?’

  ‘Oh yeah, the guy can run like a kid chasing an ice-cream van.’

  They both laughed.

  Foster nodded at a bench beside the path in the shade of a maple tree. ‘Can we sit? My old legs aren’t what they used to be.’

  ‘Sure.’

  She looked at him, wondering how many days he had left, wondering how much life the displacement machine had stolen from him. A couple of meetings ago, here beside this same pond, he’d admitted he was only twenty-seven years old. More than that — something that had rocked her to the core — he’d told her that he was once Liam. He’d not explained how that could be; in fact, he’d refused to explain. But he’d told her because he wanted her to know that every time Liam went back into the past, the process was gradually killing him: ageing him before his time. That he would all too soon end up like him. She alone needed to be the judge of how much his body could take. That’s why she had to know.

  They settled down, looking further up the path at the pigeons indignantly puffing themselves up and backing off as several Canadian geese waddled over to take possession of ground littered with scattered breadcrumbs.

  ‘Foster?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is it you’re not telling me?’

  He looked at her, a disarming smile. His best attempt at deflecting her.

  ‘Come on, Foster… you’ve only given me half what I need to know.’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you think you know.’

  ‘Why are you… why can’t you just tell me everything?’

  ‘Because I don’t know everything.’

  ‘You know more than me. You know more than you’ve told me!’

  He held her gaze. Eventually he nodded with some regret. ‘All right, yes, that’s true.’

  ‘Why? Why don’t you tell me all you know? What are you holding back?’

  ‘Knowledge, Maddy… foreknowledge.’

  ‘Pandora?’

  He shook his head. She’d explained to him about the note she’d discovered. About the specific mention of that particular word in the Voynich Manuscript. ‘I know nothing about Pandora,’ he’d said and she suspected he was being straight with her about that.

  ‘It’s a message, Foster. A message someone’s trying to get to me. It’s got to be important, right?’

  His fingers steepled beneath the wattled flesh of his jaw and he rested his chin on them. ‘Quite possibly, very.’

  ‘So what do I do about it?’

  He watched the pigeons and geese strutting warily round each other, sizing each other up. Finally he spoke. ‘Perhaps you should ask about it.’

  ‘Ask who?’

  His eyebrows arched suggestively.

  ‘What? You mean call forward? The future? The agency?’

  ‘Not a tachyon signal,’ he said quickly. ‘You absolutely can not do that. The particles will give you away.’

  She knew that already. ‘The drop document?’<
br />
  Foster had left Maddy a small library of instructions and advice. One entry had been how to communicate with the agency in extreme circumstances. What was actually classified as ‘an extreme circumstance’ had not been made entirely clear. The method of communication was to place a personal advert in the lonely hearts ads of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, beginning with the words ‘ A soul lost in time…’

  Someone, somewhere in the future obviously had a yellowing copy of the newspaper and was watching that page for a subtle change. Watching for a gentle ripple in reality that altered nothing but the wording of that one personal ad.

  ‘Ask,’ he said again finally. ‘Why not?’

  ‘You really don’t know about Pandora… do you?’

  Foster shook his head. She thought she knew him — and Liam for that matter — well enough to spot a lie. They were both completely rubbish at it.

  ‘Maybe I will,’ said Maddy.

  ‘And do let me know what he says. I’m just as curious now as you — ’

  She turned to look at him. ‘ He? ’

  Foster closed his eyes. She realized he’d let slip something he hadn’t wanted to.

  ‘He? Who? Who is he? The agency?’ She turned in her seat, grabbed his arm. ‘Foster?! Are you saying the agency is what? Just… just one person?’

  He said nothing.

  ‘What about all the other teams?’

  The old man’s lips tightened. His gaze flicked away from her.

  ‘Foster? Tell me! The other teams…?’

  ‘There are no other teams, Maddy,’ he whispered. His eyes drifted back to hers. ‘I’m so sorry. You’re alone. The agency is you. Just you.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘… And Waldstein.’

  She all but missed hearing Waldstein’s name. Her mind was reeling, light-headed with a growing panic.

  You’re alone.

  The agency is you.