TimeRiders 05 - Gates of Rome Read online

  Sal was certain of one thing: that she could trust her own eyes, what she actually saw. She’d taken a close look again at the tunic that was hanging in a closet just outside the nook where their bunk beds were. The clothes they’d all been wearing the day they’d arrived in the archway hung in there. No longer worn because they were so precious, a last link to the lives they’d lived before this. Before becoming TimeRiders.

  She’d unhooked Liam’s tunic, the very same one he’d arrived in the night the Titanic had gone down. The tunic, complete with two rows of brass buttons and the White Star Line’s star symbol on its purple collar. And yes … there it had been, the thing she was looking for, that ever-so-faint, comma-shaped red wine stain on the right shoulder. So faint. Somebody had once gone to a lot of trouble to try and remove it and failed.

  And here’s the thing. The exact same stain … the exact same stain … was on the tunic hanging in that odd little antique and costume-hire shop a few blocks away. An exact duplicate of Liam’s tunic. Sal scribbled the obvious question in her diary.

  So, how come there’s a duplicate of what he was wearing hanging in that shop?

  The question begged all sorts of answers, none of which Sal thought she liked the sound of. The answer that unsettled most was the one she decided to write down.

  Does that mean we’ve been here before?

  She looked up from her scribbling. The removal truck was still trying to inch past the taxi, and both men were still enthusiastically haranguing each other, their Brooklyn voices lost beneath the frenetic whir of tumble dryers in the laundry. She turned to look at the round porthole of the nearest of them, spin-drying her and Maddy’s clothes. They were all clothes from 2001 now, garments that allowed them to blend in. Her eyes were drawn to a pale green ankle sock spinning round and round, pushed up against the window, caught in a spiral of forces it couldn’t escape.

  Like us. Her, Maddy and Liam, three unfortunate souls unknowingly stuck in an endless loop they were doomed to live over and over again.

  She looked down at the biro in her hand. At the diary, a nondescript notebook of lined pages that you could pick up in any stationery store. She leafed through the pages, realizing she had filled more than a quarter of it with her small, tidy handwriting and sketches and doodles. And before the first of her entries, written months’ worth of ‘time-bubble days’ ago, right there … the torn edges of dozens and dozens of pages ripped out by someone.

  A thought suddenly occurred to her that left a chill running down her back, like a ghostly finger tracing her vertebrae, making the flesh on her bare arms pucker into goosebumps.

  Oh shadd-yah. Was that me?

  She wondered if the pages of this diary had been used by her … before.

  Another me? A previous me?

  She felt sick. Hadn’t Foster said something about the fate of the previous team? Something about ‘being torn to pieces’, something about ‘there being little left’. She remembered that first day vividly. Being awoken on her bunk, meeting Maddy and Liam for the first time, seeing Foster’s old face leaning over her and realizing it was the same face she’d seen just before she’d died, just before her home in Mumbai had collapsed into a raging inferno.

  And there was that thing … that ghostly form in the dark that he’d had to hastily usher them away from. The seeker. Didn’t he say it was that ethereal, glowing shape – little more than fragile membrane, like a jellyfish, like a plume of smoke – that had ripped the previous team to unrecognizable shreds?

  The previous team.

  Us?

  CHAPTER 2

  2070, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs

  ‘But why, skippa?’

  Rashim Anwar shook his head at the childlike question. The thing’s squeaky voice and perpetual goofy, dumb smile – all of that Rashim’s choice, of course. His laboratory assistant unit, one of the half-size models, came up to no more than his waist in height. In the default factory-shipped polygenic skin, the domestic models looked like little plasticine children. No hair, faces deliberately artificial-looking, inexpressive, neutral. But shapes and sizes varied. Rashim’s one was designed for a lab environment, squat and square, nothing like a plasticine child, more like a filing cabinet on legs.

  Rashim couldn’t help customizing his unit, his inner geek looking for a way to express itself. The lab assistant unit’s shape and configuration were roughly the same as the cartoon character’s anyway; close enough that hacking the polygenic skin’s configuration code to make the unit look even more like the character was a couple of hours’ work. Little more than changing the programmable plastic skin from the default utilitarian grey to a bright yellow, and getting the face to extrude and replicate the cartoon character’s goofy features.

  ‘But why, skippa?’ it asked again with a squeaky voice. It looked up at Rashim with big round eyes, above a perky, pickle-shaped nose and two jutting tombstone teeth.

  Rashim vaguely remembered those old cartoons. His grandfather used to watch them, rocking and laughing at the dumb antics played out on-screen. Rashim had worked from this vague childhood memory. It had made him feel like a kid once more, hacking the unit’s configuration code and watching the polygenic plastic change colour and reconfigure. Looking down at the inquisitive robot, he figured he had it pretty close, although he wasn’t so sure he’d got the character’s name quite right.

  ‘SpongeBubba … it’s hard to explain.’

  ‘Please explain to me, skippa! Please!’

  ‘Well, I suppose it’s a design fault in our programming.’

  ‘Programming? But humans don’t have artificial intelligence routines!’ SpongeBubba squawked.

  Rashim lifted his glasses and pushed a coil of dark hair from his face. They stopped at a closed doorway and he presented his left eye for a retina ID scan. ‘It’s just a figure of speech, SpongeBubba. The point is we have our faults, just like bad lines of code. The difference between you and me, though, is that it’s not so easy to edit our behaviour. We are who we are.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ said the unit. Frown grooves ran along its yellow plastic skin. ‘Why do humans want to destroy their own world?’

  The doorway in front of them cranked open. Hinges carrying a three-ton blast-proof door creaked and echoed across a dark and dusty control room, its walls lined with the glass of large strategic display monitors. Over a hundred years ago, this installation had been built as a command and control centre in preparation for what had seemed like an inevitable nuclear war with Russia. Now it was little more than a museum piece.

  Rashim hesitated before the open door and the dark passageway beyond. ‘I suppose it’s in our nature. We don’t like bad news … so we just ignore it.’

  ‘Well, duh-huh, that’s just plain stoopid!’

  He smiled. The unit’s speech patterns were a result of his hacking as well.

  ‘It is stupid, Bubba. There was a time when we could have turned things around. Saved the earth from overheating, but I suppose it seemed like too much hard work at the time. So we didn’t bother.’

  ‘Well, duh,’ squawked SpongeBubba again.

  Rashim smiled. Exactly … duh.

  He led the way down the passageway. The blast door clanked as it closed behind them and motion-sensitive lights in the passageway flickered on. A fading sign on the concrete wall informed him that they were now entering a security level three zone. Lining the wall either side of the sign were old framed photographs of past US presidents: Bush, Obama, Palin, Schwarzenegger, Vasquez, Esquerra.

  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 g
randfather’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 ulti
mately 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.