TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (19 page)

Maddy hunkered down a little, to the
girl’s level. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘My name’s Maddy. Just like
yours.’

The girl looked at her sideways. ‘Uh,
no, it ain’t.’

‘Nadine!’ called the voice from
the back. ‘Who is it?’

‘Your name’s
Nadine
?’

‘Uh … yeah.’

That flummoxed her. ‘Nadine?’
She wasn’t expecting that. ‘Since … when?’

She shrugged. ‘Like, since,
birth.’

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

Waldstein stared at it. There it was behind
the darkened glass, in a carefully controlled and monitored sealed envelope of cool air.
A sheet of brittle and age-yellowed newspaper. A page of classified ads: columns of
messages from the hopeless, the lonely, the bereft, the bewildered. An ad from someone
who’d lost a much-loved bulldog answering to the name of Roosevelt and was
offering a reward of $200 for him. Some old soldier looking for a fellow platoon member
he served alongside during the Normandy landings, and someone else looking for a missing
daughter who might just be living in the Brooklyn area. There an ad from a very lonely
widower looking for someone else to share his suddenly empty life with – searching for a
friend who might enjoy trips to the theatre, watching matinees of old Bette Davis
movies.

This page of forlorn little classified ads
was a perfectly preserved record of one day’s worth of misery in Brooklyn in the
year 2001. A record of incomplete lives and broken hearts. Of final words that should
have been said face to face, but never were.

Waldstein’s heart ached every time he
studied this withered page of newspaper. There were words he wished he’d said to
his wife, Eleanor, and his son, Gabriel. Words that he’d always felt foolish
saying out loud, rather preferring to assume the pair of
them knew he
loved them very much, to save him saying such things. Words that he’d sell his
very soul to be able to say to them one last time … now.

Words.

Beneath that light-filtering glass, a UV
light glowed softly on the page, and a digital camera with an ultra-low light-sensitive
lens and an infrared sensor closely monitored one particular personal ad. There it was
halfway down the third column, one rather innocuous little paragraph of faint, slightly
smudged newsprint.

The letters in that paragraph quite often
flickered in a faint, spectral way. Just enough that if you weren’t looking
directly at them your peripheral vision might just catch the subtlest sense of movement.
A square inch of newspaper that undulated, shifted, stirred every now and then as if a
small ghost lived in the very fibre of the newspaper itself.

It was a square inch of reality in permanent
flux. The tiniest portion of the world caught in a perpetual state of undulating change,
trapped in the eddies and currents of its own mini time wave.

Today, though, it seemed particularly
agitated. Letters fidgeted, blurred, changed. As if it very much had something it wanted
to tell Waldstein. The infrared sensor was picking up a temperature shift off the
brittle old paper that was a whole tenth of a degree higher than normal. The minutest
leakage of energy through the tiniest crack in space-time.

It wants to talk to me.

He studied the data monitor beside the glass
case, watched the temperature read-out twitch and shuffle and occasionally spike. Beside
it, the low-light image of the printed letters shimmered and danced like ghouls in a
graveyard, caught only in glimpses of flitting moonlight.

Waldstein suspected the newly grown, birthed
and trained
team were struggling to find their feet. That poor old
wretch – not Liam now, he’d chosen the name Foster instead. So much rested on his
shoulders. And he’d been through so much recently. To have lost his friends in
such a horrific way. Then to have also been through the appalling torment of being
suddenly, prematurely aged. And then, after all of that, after sending his plea for help
through time to the future, to hear back from his ‘creator’ and learn that
he was somewhat less than human. Worse still … that he was going to have to
fix things up again entirely on his own. To be the fatherlike mentor for a new team.

So much –
too much to put on the poor
thing
. Waldstein’s heart ached for him.

That poor wretch Liam – now Foster – was
entirely on his own, effectively running this project himself. He’d had to set up
a replacement team, to mentor them, train and ready them for their respective roles, all
the while knowing exactly what they were and yet having to go along with this appalling
deceit. To lie to them.

Now it seemed, with these flickering letters
on the page, there was more bad news coming through from 2001. From Foster.

The heat reading spiked again. Another tenth
of a per cent of a degree.

It’s coming.

The letters shimmered and shuffled faintly.
And there it was. Ink on paper. No longer shimmering with a desire to change. There it
was. Bad news.

… Experienced significant event.
Origin time-stamp of contamination 1941. Major displacement effects. Problem
narrowly but successfully averted. New recruits performed well under stress. One
team member lost. Require new observer immediately – Foster.

Joseph Olivera looked up from his floating data
screens. ‘They need a new …?’

‘A new observer, Joseph. They need a
new Saleena Vikram.’

Frasier Griggs paled. ‘You
mean … send one back?’

‘Yes.’

‘What happened, Mr Waldstein?’
asked Joseph.

Waldstein shook his head. ‘I’m
not sure. It seems like they’ve had to deal with a
major
contamination
originating from sometime during the Second World War. Something big must have shaken
things up for them.’ Waldstein smiled. ‘Their first big test. And it seems
they’ve saved mankind.’

‘But one of them’s dead,’
said Griggs.

‘Indeed.’

‘What about the others?’

‘It seems they’re all right,
Joseph.’ Waldstein touched a data pad and the air in front of him shimmered with
holographic data. He swept the data to one side with his finger, and double-tapped a
thumbnail image. It expanded in front of them, a digitized image of the page of
newspaper hovering in mid-air. ‘You read it for yourself.’

Joseph and Griggs leaned forward to
scrutinize the image more closely. They read it in silence.

‘He won’t be able to grow one
back there,’ said Waldstein. ‘The memory needs altering. Which is why
we’ll have to do it here and send her back.’

Joseph nodded. Waldstein was, of course,
quite right. The other two team members – the Maddy unit and the Liam unit –
weren’t ready to know what they were. If Foster was sent a Saleena Vikram unit
foetus and started growing it right there in the archway, then the game would be up.
He’d need to explain to the other two
units
exactly what they were.

Clones.

All three of them were designed to work at
their best believing themselves to be entirely human. Believing they had real life
stories, real loved ones, real memories. It’s what made their purely organic data
matrices produce completely
human-level decisions
. That’s why Joseph
hated to call it ‘Organic Artificial Intelligence’. Because it wasn’t
artificial
intelligence. It was Authentic Intelligence. If their brains –
which were no different from any other human brains – truly believed the store of
memories in their minds to be genuine then as far as Joseph was concerned, they were
real
people. Just as real as anyone else. More than mere genetically
engineered replicas. Certainly so much more capable of strategic thought than the
silicon minds inside the support units.

However, the moment they realized their
lives were fabricated, a pack of installed lies; the moment they understood they
hadn’t been born to loving mothers, but instead had emerged fully grown from
plastic tubes, just like their support units … that was when their
decision-making would become compromised. Unreliable.

‘Joseph, start a growth here in the
lab,’ said Waldstein. ‘Then we’ll have to send her back. Can you edit
her memory to make that work? She can’t suspect she’s a
tube-product.’

‘Wait … hang on a
minute!’ cut in Griggs. ‘We said no more direct interactions!’

Waldstein waved a hand to silence him.
‘They need an observer. Joseph?’

Joseph nodded. ‘I can s-splice into
her existing memory. We have her life-story file, right up to the recruitment
event.’ He scratched his chin. ‘I suppose I can graft in some generalized
memories of her living in the archway with the other two. Nothing too s-specific, just
the general impression that she’s
been living in close proximity
to Maddy and Liam for some weeks. It’ll be a little foggy for her.’

‘Foggy?’

‘She’d be a little
disorientated. Like she’s experienced a kind of mild amnesia. A gap in her memory,
as if she’s experienced a mild trauma, concussion, like a blow to the head.
There’ll be minor continuity errors she won’t be able to make sense of, but
if we deploy her directly after a field refresh or a corrective time wave she and the
others may attribute that foggy memory as some side effect of the realignment of the
timeline.’ He shrugged. ‘Since they’re newly recruited, I imagine
they’ll buy that explanation from Foster. They’ll trust what he tells
them.’

Waldstein nodded. ‘Then we should do
that.’ He looked at Joseph, placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘Be as careful as
you can splicing in her memory.’

That didn’t need saying. Sal needed to
wake up and find herself returning to the archway, believing nothing more than some time
wave must have caught her outside; messed with her head in some small way. If that
didn’t work, if she started questioning her reality …? If the team figured
out they were a bunch of enhanced support units, meatbots? Then the whole project was
over. They’d have to start again from scratch.
Delete
the old ones and
grow a brand-new team. New minds, new memories, new lives.

‘I’ll be very careful, Mr
Waldstein. Trust me.’

‘Good.’

Griggs stepped forward and grabbed
Waldstein’s arm. ‘Roald … this is really pushing our luck. You
know we broadcast our presence every time we open a portal! You know there must be
dozens of tachyon-listening stations all over the world. Christ … it was your
campaigning that made sure of that. Do you want to be discovered? Do you want
that?’

‘It’s an acceptable risk,
Frasier.’

‘No, it’s not. This whole
project was always too risky. We were supposed to travel only to 2001 to set it up. And
that was it. No further trips!’

‘It’s an acceptable risk.’
He looked at Griggs sternly, then lowered his voice. ‘Please, don’t push our
friendship, Frasier. This is more important than that. More important than
anything.’

‘More important?’ Griggs
laughed. ‘What’s all this really about? Eh?’

‘You know as well as I do.
Three-dimensional space is as precious as fine bone china. You can’t let time
travel –’

Griggs spat a curse. His eyes narrowed.
‘That’s not what you really care about.’

‘Frasier …’

‘You know what I think this is about?
Vengeance. Bitterness. You can’t bring your wife and son back so you –’

‘ENOUGH!’ Waldstein glared at
Griggs. He pulled the man by his arm. ‘You and I need to talk, Frasier. We need to
talk right now.’

Joseph watched, dumbstruck by the suddenly
charged atmosphere in the room, as both men stepped out of the lab into the small
adjoining conference room. The glass door hissed shut behind them and their voices
became muted. He saw Griggs’s face darken with anger, and he heard their muffled
voices, quiet at first, but then quickly rising in volume and pitch, getting louder and
louder.

Then finally that word.
Pandora
.
And … 
Why, Roald? Why do you want that to happen?

13 September 2001, Interstate 90, Newton,
Massachusetts

‘Where did she go?’

Becks looked at him, a growing expression of
anxiety on her face. ‘Maddy … said she was going to get some
supplies.’

‘Said … she
said
 … so maybe she wasn’t?’

The support unit could only look at Liam
plaintively. He grasped her slim arms firmly. Arms that easily could have shrugged off
his grasp and twisted his head off his shoulders if she had the notion to do so.
‘Becks! Come on! Where’s she
really
gone?’

‘She … said –’

‘She’s gone to her old home,
hasn’t she?’

Becks looked conflicted, torn between an
instruction to lie and a logical imperative to speak the truth.

Liam cursed. ‘I knew it!’

‘That is an unwise action,’ said
Bob. His cool eyes looked around the others gathered in the girls’ motel room.
‘The pursuing support units may also attempt to travel to the same
location.’

‘I don’t think we could’ve
stopped her,’ said Sal. ‘I think she’s too close to home to not try to
see them. She really misses her family.’ She looked down at her hands. ‘I
know it’s what I’d want to do.’

‘And I miss me own ma and da just as
much!’ said Liam. ‘But
Bob’s right – that’s a
stupid thing she’s gone an’ done! I should have known she’d do
this!’

‘What if they’re clever,’
said Rashim. ‘What if they don’t attack her there, but instead follow her
back here?’

‘Exactly!’ said Liam. ‘She
could lead them right to us all!’

Just then a key clicked and rattled in the
motel room’s door. All heads turned as the door opened and daylight stretched
across the mottled pattern of the room’s threadbare carpet.

Maddy.

‘Perfect timing!’ said Liam.
‘We were wondering …’ His voice tailed off. She stood in the doorway
staring back at all of them. On any other occasion he would have expected her to do a
double-take at them all staring wide-mouthed at her and irritably snap
‘
What’s up?
’ But instead she stepped slowly in, kicking
the door shut behind her. She sat down on the end of the bed and stared listlessly at
the blank glass screen of the TV set, reflecting her own sullen expression back at
her.