TimeRiders Page 7

  Kramer quickly reset and activated the machine.

  The gunfire down the aisle suddenly ceased.

  Damn… they’re in.

  Karl appeared. ‘They’re through!’ he called out.

  ‘I know, I know. Hurry up and get in,’ he said, holding open the door of the wire cage.

  Karl drew up and looked at him. ‘Who will send you through?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll manage, Karl.’

  He hesitated. ‘No one gets left behind. Your words, remember?’

  Kramer offered him a smile. ‘No one left behind, I promise. I’ll be right behind you, my friend.’

  Kramer closed the door on him. ‘I’ll see you there, Karl.’

  He replied with a salute. ‘Yes, sir. I’ll have the men ready to move out.’

  Kramer nodded. ‘Good… see you in a minute.’ He activated the machine.

  Once more the dark area of the storage basement lit up, throwing the wooden fascias of stacked crates into stark relief.

  For a fleeting moment, as the sparks showered to the floor, it occurred to him that the contents of some of the crates and boxes down here in this dusty basement were about to be changed. History, recent history… the last hundred years to be precise, was soon going to be drastically rewritten.

  No bad thing. History as it stood had led mankind here to this dark, poisoned, overcrowded, exhausted world.

  No bad thing at all.

  Over the noise of the portable generator he heard the thud of combat boots on hard concrete echoing down the passageway swiftly and voices calling out. The police were coming, and fast. He could see the dancing beams of their torches swinging from side to side in the distance.

  He kneeled down beside the palmtop and set the co-ordinates one last time. Taking a deep breath, he set a five-second delay on the command, then hit the purge icon.

  Quickly he stepped inside the cage, pulled a grenade from his pack, pulled the pin and placed it on the floor outside the cage. He shut the door and closed his eyes… hoping that the machine would have finished sending him into the past before the grenade detonated.

  Come on!

  He cracked open his eyes and winced at the sudden blinding shower of sparks cascading around him. Through the wire of the cage he thought he saw the approaching shapes of several armed police swiftly dropping to one knee and raising their guns to fire at him.

  Come on!… Come on!… Come on!…

  It would be the cruellest turn of fate for one of their bullets to find him a microsecond before he left this world for good. Kramer clamped his eyes shut, expecting any second to recoil from the impact of several lethal high-spread large-calibre rounds or to be blown to pieces by the grenade on the floor just outside the cage.

  Then he felt it… a sensation like falling, as if the floor of the cage beneath his feet had been suddenly whipped away like the trapdoor of a hangman’s scaffold.

  CHAPTER 21

  2001, New York

  ‘Umm… that thing’s a complete mong-head,’ said Sal, studying the figure from the perspex tube pityingly.

  Maddy regarded the creature with something approaching motherly sympathy. ‘Are you sure it’s meant to be like that?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Foster, ‘the on-board computer is preloaded with a basic program of artificial intelligence: its adaptive learning code. It’ll pick things up quickly enough, you’ll see. The most important thing right now is that it imprints you people on its mind. Particularly you, Liam.’

  He frowned. ‘What do you mean by imprints?’

  ‘Think of it as being a bit like a chick hatching from an egg and deciding the first thing it sees is its mother. To ensure the learning code embeds more efficiently, let it bond with you first, Liam. Go on… go say hello.’

  Liam looked uncertainly at Foster.

  ‘Go on, it’s perfectly safe.’

  He turned to look at the large muscle-bound form on the ground and imagined this thing could quite easily rip his arms out of their sockets and beat him over the head with them if it decided that might be a fun thing to do.

  Warily, Liam took several steps forward, grimacing as his shoes slipped on the drying smelly gunk on the floor. He kneeled down beside the giant and studied it more closely.

  ‘Glaf… bug… drah?’ it gurgled in a deep voice that seemed to rumble up from its chest. The creature was entirely bald, not a single hair on its muscular body, its skin pale, almost milk-white. Liam offered the pitiful creature a friendly smile.

  ‘Hello there.’

  ‘Eh-oh,’ it mimicked.

  ‘My name is Liam,’ he said, pointing at himself. ‘Me… Liam.’

  ‘Leee-hammm,’ it repeated as it climbed to its feet and stretched out both big hands curiously towards Liam’s face. He swallowed nervously as the thing’s large hands cupped his face.

  This thing’s going to crush my head like a ripe melon.

  With hands still wet from the sticky fluid, it curiously stroked Liam’s cheek. ‘Lee-aaamm?’

  ‘Liam,’ he corrected.

  ‘Lii-aam.’

  ‘And you are…?’ Liam turned to Foster. ‘Does it have a name?’

  Foster shrugged. ‘You can decide on the name you want to give it. Try not to think of something too stupid, though. The name’s got to last.’

  Sal suddenly giggled at the sight of the thing’s genitalia.

  Maddy turned to the old man. ‘Foster, maybe the first thing we should do is give it something to wear? I mean… Sal’s only thirteen, and I’m… well, I just don’t want to be looking at that right now.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry… Patrick is a completely dumb name for him,’ said Maddy. She sipped her coffee as she studied the large muscular form across the floor while Foster finished putting some clothes on him. ‘There was a stupid kid’s toon called SpongeBob Squarepants that had a dumb starfish character called Patrick.’

  Liam shrugged his shoulders. ‘I had a big bruiser of a cousin called Patrick. The name seemed to fit.’

  Maddy smiled. ‘I’ve got the perfect name for him.’

  They looked at her expectantly and her grin widened. ‘Arnold! You know? After the Terminator guy?’

  Liam looked confused.

  ‘Arnie… Arnold Schwarzenegger!’ she continued.

  Sal looked surprised. ‘Do you mean Schwarzenegger? The forty-fifth president of the United States?’

  Maddy gawped at her. ‘You’ve got to be kidding. President?’

  ‘Of course! I remember now,’ Sal continued. ‘We studied him in American history; they amended their constitution to allow him to be a presidential candidate. Born in Europe somewhere, wasn’t he?’

  Maddy nodded.

  ‘He started out life playing some kind of robot in a sci-fi movie once, didn’t he? What was the movie called?’

  ‘Duh…’ Maddy rolled her eyes. ‘The Terminator?’

  ‘Oh… yeah,’ said Sal, ‘that was it.’

  ‘I love those Terminator movies. They were so cool.’ Maddy ran her eyes over his hulking form and nodded approvingly at her suggestion. ‘Arnie’ was the perfect name.

  Liam was about to ask what they were both talking about – Terminators? Toons? Sigh-fies, Sponge-bobs? The girls might as well have been talking in Mongolian as far as he was concerned.

  ‘There was this funny bit in Terminator 2,’ Maddy continued, ‘when the hero, this kid called John Connor, introduces the terminator robot to this other guy as his Uncle Bob –’

  ‘Uncle Bob?’ cut in Liam. ‘Bob. That’s a good name. Nice and simple.’

  Sal nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yes… he looks like a Bob.’

  Maddy stared at them. ‘You don’t want to call him Arnie?’

  They shook their heads.

  ‘Sounds like a daft name, so it does,’ said Liam.

  Maddy’s shoulders sagged. ‘All right, then, Bob it is. Nice and simple. At least it should be easy enough for dumb-nuts over there to say.’

  Liam loo
ked across at Foster and the large clone. The clone was dressed now in a crumpled blue boiler suit and Foster led him across by the hand, like a child, to join the others sitting around the table.

  ‘Here we are.’ Foster sat him down beside Liam. The armchair’s tired springs creaked under his immense weight. ‘The basic speech software should have fully installed by now. Give it a go and talk to him.’

  Liam looked up at the large, hulking clone sitting beside him.

  ‘Uh, hello again.’

  The thing nodded and replied slowly in a deep voice that rumbled through the archway almost as loudly as one of the trains that routinely rattled over the bridge above them. ‘Hell-o, Liam.’

  Foster leaned forward and spoke slowly. ‘His full name is Liam O’Connor. Let me introduce these other two. This is Madelaine Carter, and this is Saleena Vikram. But she prefers the name Sal.’

  ‘Hell-o, Madelaine. Hell-o, Sal.’

  ‘And you,’ said Liam, pointing a finger towards him, ‘we are going to call you Bob.’

  His emotionless face considered that in silence for a moment. Then finally, with a sincere nod, he announced solemnly to them all, ‘I am… Bob.’

  Foster smiled encouragingly. ‘Excellent! The name’s registered in his memory; that’s all the introductions done.’

  ‘So, what happens next, Mr Foster?’

  ‘You all get a good night’s rest. It’s been a long day for all of you. Tomorrow we’re going to be very busy.’

  ‘Doing what?’ asked Sal.

  ‘Training, of course.’

  CHAPTER 22

  2001, New York

  Monday 2 (I think)

  I found this exercise book in the archway. The front pages are all pulled out, so I guess someone from the previous team was using it before me. I’m going to use it as a diary. Maybe that’s what they were using it for too, who knows?

  So, it’s weird. Like a dream. Like a strange movie. No school to go to. No busy streets thick with rickshaws and Mumbai smog. No having to wear an anti-choke airmask when I step out.

  No Mum and Dad.

  Jahulla. It’s so weird.

  The other two seem to be coping with this freakiness better. Maddy and Liam. I think I like them both. Maddy is eighteen. She’s really über-smarts with technical things. She told me that she was a computer programmer back in 2010; she worked on computer games for a job. For a hobby she says she liked ‘hacking’ things. It’s kind of strange, though. She’s sort of from the same time as my parents… She even likes some of the same old-fashioned music as them. And yet she’s just a few years older than me.

  That’s just so weird.

  And Liam? How total-weird. Sixteen years old… or a hundred and five years old when you realize he was born in 1896. That makes him a really, really old man! But he’s still cute. I like that he’s from an oldy-fashioned time, when people dressed all smart in clothes with lots of buttons and said, ‘How do you do?’

  I feel so odd. I miss my parents. I miss our high apartment. I miss the tops of skyscrapers poking out of the street smog. I even miss watching the elektra-Bollywood show with Mum (even though the song and dance routines are totally jahully embarrassing).

  But I’m sort of excited too. I’m here in New York! In the times before things turned bad. Before the global warm-up, the overcrowded cities, the food rationing, the terror bombs in the north, the oil shortages and all that nasty stuff.

  And it’s, like, so strange to think that in India right now my dad is about the same age as me, a fourteen-year-old boy living in Mumbai, and Mum’s twelve and lives up in Delhi… and they won’t even meet each other for another ten years!

  I miss them, though. Sometimes, when the others aren’t around I cry. But I don’t let them see that. So far, I’ve kept cool.

  Foster is taking me out of the field office this morning to begin my training as the team’s ‘observer’. I really don’t understand yet what an ‘observer’ does, but I’m sure I will do very soon.

  ‘OK, Sal,’ said Foster, ‘this is Monday morning, Monday the tenth of September, the day before disaster strikes.’ He looked around at Times Square, the very centre of New York, the bustling heart of the city. It was just after 10 a.m., and 5th Avenue was teeming with life.

  ‘Think of today as “normal” New York. This is how it should look. You understand?’

  Sal nodded.

  ‘You’re the team’s observer, Sal. The observer is like the nose of a dog – there to detect the very first scent of a reality shift in the timeline.’

  ‘Because someone went and changed something in the past?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  She gestured around at Times Square, busy and noisy with early-morning traffic. ‘But how am I going to know when something is different here?’

  He nodded, then thoughtfully stroked his chin. ‘Perhaps I should explain why you in particular were recruited. What’s so special about you. That might help to explain things.’

  She shrugged. Perhaps it might. There was nothing she considered particularly special about herself. She preferred black clothes instead of the bright neon poly-silks all the other bolly-boppers liked to wear. She preferred dark-head rock music instead of boomtastic street hop. She preferred her own company and a good puzzle-ebook rather than hanging around some grimy street corner with a load of stupid ditto-heads choking behind their masks on street poison.

  ‘Our archived records of 2026 zeroed in on you as an ideal candidate for recruitment for two reasons, Sal. Firstly, we knew exactly when and where you were going to die, which made it possible to locate and extract you.’

  Sal nodded silently. She understood that now.

  ‘But secondly you were a Mumbai regional under-12s champion for Pikodu.’

  Pikodu was a picture-based puzzle game. It involved spotting repeated patterns in large, cleverly designed grids of random images.

  Sal nodded. She was a champion, sort of… until she got bored of it. It was a fad, a craze that came in from Japan. For a few years it seemed everyone was into playing Pikodu Training on their Nintendo FlexiBoy, on the train, in the bath… on the toilet.

  ‘The point is, Sal, it means we knew you’d make a perfect observer. Your ability to spot tiny details quickly – to notice things that others would easily miss, to see patterns in chaos – that makes you the perfect candidate.’

  His hand swept out across the busy square.

  ‘You’ll witness this morning scene over and over. It’ll always be the same and you’ll become familiar with it. You’ll learn that –’ Foster glanced at his watch, then pointed across the square at a young mother who’d stopped pushing her buggy to pick up a soft toy tossed out by her child – ‘at exactly ten fourteen a.m. the woman wearing red jeans over there will have to stop on a pedestrian crossing to retrieve a teddy bear for her baby.’

  Foster looked around.

  ‘That those two old men wearing smart suits will stop outside the McDonald’s and light up cigarettes.’

  Sal made a face. ‘Ewww. Is that legal?’

  ‘To smoke?’

  She nodded, staring with wide-eyed amazement at both men as they casually sucked in then blew out clouds of blue smoke.

  Foster laughed gently. ‘Yes, Sal. It is still.’ He pointed to a giant billboard high up the front of a building. ‘You’ll know that on this particular day the movie Shrek is showing.’ He pointed to another billboard. ‘That the movie The Planet of the Apes is opening soon.’ And another. ‘That Tommy Hilfiger shirts are the height of fashion.’

  Sal curled her lips in disgust and realized that they really loved their naff clothes back in 2001.

  He turned back to look down at her. ‘Your eyes will register all these tiny details, your mind will remember them,’ he said quietly, his eyes locked intently on hers, ‘and then, one day soon, you’ll know instantly when something’s different.’

  ‘A shift?’

  His face creased with an approving smile. ‘That�
��s right, Sal, a shift – the very first sign that something has been changed in the past.’

  She looked around and realized that, in a way, it was a bit like a very large game of Pikodu.

  ‘You’ll see this before either of the others will because, well… that’s your special talent, Sal.’

  ‘Because I once was a finalist in a jahully old puzzle competition?’

  ‘Yes,’ he laughed, ‘because you once were a finalist in a jahully old competition. And because every Monday you will come out of the archway and take a walk across the Williamsburg Bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan in this glorious sunshine and you’ll get to know this day like no other person in the world.’

  ‘Did the team before us have an observer?’

  Foster hesitated a moment before answering. ‘Yes, they did. Every team does.’

  ‘Tell me about him… or was it a her?’

  The smile slowly faded from his face. ‘She… she didn’t really have much time to learn her job before –’ he sighed – ‘before we accidentally trapped that seeker.’

  She looked at him sombrely. ‘Will there be other seekers?’

  He shook his head. ‘No… because we’ll always be more careful in future. It’s not a mistake I plan to repeat.’

  ‘Where did it come from?’

  He hesitated a moment before answering. ‘Another dimension.’ He turned to her. ‘It’s the dimension you travel through when you ride time.’

  ‘That sounds… well, it doesn’t sound safe.’

  ‘It’s chaos-space. We’re merely travelling through it… instantaneously. You wouldn’t really want to hang around there.’ She sensed there was a lot more he could tell her about it, but for now he seemed keen to change the subject.

  ‘Come on.’ His face brightened. ‘Let’s see some more of the city. Did you visit Central Park when your dad took you to New York?’

  She thought about that for a moment. She remembered a large open area in the middle of Manhattan in which rusting vehicles were stacked one on top of the other: a giant automobile junkyard.

  ‘Is it the place where all the old cars were dumped when the oil ran out?’

  Foster nodded sadly. ‘Yes. But back in 2001 – now – it’s still a beautiful park, with grass and trees and a lovely lake. Would you like to go see it?’