Ian Hocking - Déjà Vu

‘Yes, Ms Castle?’

‘Keep an eye on your wallet.’

MI5: Intelligence and Security Committee Special Report

Presented to Parliament by the Prime Minister by Command of His Majesty, January 2023

Appendix Four:

The Intelligence and Security Agencies may request the redaction of sensitive material in the Report that would damage their work, for example by revealing their targets, methods, sources or operational capabilities. The following statement has thus been redacted from the public version of the Report. The ISC finds that, while corroborating evidence exists for some claims within the statement (such as the identification of the accelerant used in the burning of 184 Tyndale Road, Oxford), the putative author SASKIA BRANDT is likely to be fictitious. Neither does the committee consider ‘time travel’ to be a credible explanation for the death of JOHN HARTFIELD, KBE.

The statement below was filed with Brélaz and Mächler, Geneva, on 29 September, 2022, and obtained by this department 30 September, 2023. It reads:

To whom it may concern:

You know me as Saskia Brandt. You, or someone you are associated with, have my friends David and Jennifer Proctor in custody. With this statement, I hereby accept responsibility for the murder of John Hartfield. I have no material evidence to offer in support of the claims herein. However, you will know by now that the Ego unit in David’s possession was able to decrypt this text, where no other machines could. I hope this establishes my bona fides. There are facts I must withhold for several reasons. However, where I can be clear, I will be so. I will describe recent events from my own perspective. My purpose is not personal exoneration—indeed, this document incriminates me—but the exoneration of my friends.

Before I continue, let me say this. There is a fundamental, human need for causation in action. It has been an unhelpful drive within myself throughout my life. For you to understand the events I will now describe, you should push this notion aside. The events have no true beginning, just as there is no true beginning for the ‘will to act’ in the human pre-motor cortex. Everything is circular. Nothing ends, or begins.

On 22 September of this year, I tracked Professor Bruce Shimoda to a Bristol hotel room, where he intended to make good on a promise of suicide made to himself as a younger man. He had become, by his own interpretation, a weak and dependent individual. I made entry into the hotel room. After a short struggle, we talked. I told him the complete version of the abbreviated story I am now telling you. And I told him he could live again. He told me about his nightmares of children with no eyes. By dawn, we were en route to Scotland. In West Lothian, I helped him infiltrate the ruined research centre and connect his mind to the virtual reality known as Onogoro. Autonomous systems monitoring the Centre sent an alert to the Home Office. That evening, a team was assembled under the command of Colonel Harrison McWhirter and dispatched to West Lothian.

I knew that McWhirter had made attempts over the years to confront David Proctor, the man he blamed for the bombing of 2003. The complexity of the situation involving Shimoda would provide him with the reason he needed to bring Proctor back to the scene of the crime. Proctor’s summons duly arrived via the Home Office and made clear that Shimoda had broken into the West Lothian Centre.

Proctor and Shimoda had grown estranged over the years. I knew that Proctor would accept the summons, but in order for him to kill Shimoda—that is, complete his suicide—I needed to motivate him sufficiently and give him appropriate means to circumvent McWhirter’s security. So I travelled to Oxford and entered his home office as he worked at his desk. I put my gun to the small of his back. Without revealing my true identity, I introduced myself as a militant NeoHuman opposed to experimentation on artificial organisms. I gave him the two Ego computers, the instructions on how to most effectively disable Onogoro once and for all, and an overnight bag.

As Proctor walked from the house, I set fire to it. You will find traces of carbon disulphide, the accelerant I used, on the staircase. I watched Proctor rush back into the house to get something. It was the drawing his daughter, Jennifer, had made when she was a child: a stick-figure family in a house. Why did I set the fire? Proctor was about to risk everything. He needed to know there was no going back.

The reader will detect a conceptual difficulty here. Why would I feel the need to act as though I am part of the chain of causation, when I know that Proctor must go to the West Lothian Centre, and that I must travel in time? As an older Jennifer Proctor once told me: If the arrows strikes the target, the archer must have shot. One cannot have the former without the latter. All my arrows were loosed before I became aware of their flight. This is no small madness. My statement is not the place to explore my psychology, but I am stalked by these indifferent monsters. You, reader, cannot see them clearly. For me, the light of time travel illuminates them. For you, they remain shadows.

Following Proctor’s escape, other events took place as they have been described to you by him. I prepared Proctor’s motorbike and stored it along with other supplies in the shed near his ultimate landing. Then I assisted his escape. He performed wonderfully. In Proctor’s rucksack was a third Ego unit. It contained instructions for Proctor: reach locker J327 at Terminal Five, Heathrow Airport. It also contained a programmable logic controller rootkit that would compromise the Met Four Base security system, as well as those computers dedicated to Project Déjà Vu. This rootkit would enable the Ego unit to alter the temporal trajectory of John Hartfield’s journey, redirecting his body to the power plant of the West Lothian Centre in 2003.

When they put Scotty into an ambulance at Heathrow, I was there for him, as I promised. I was by his bed the following day when his phone rang. I spoke to myself. This is not as stretching as it sounds. Doesn’t everyone talk to their past selves and their future selves?

In the ruins of the West Lothian Centre, on a wall near Proctor’s old laboratory, I wrote: ‘Das Kribbeln in meinen Fingerspitzen lässt mich ahnen, es scheint ein Unglück sich anzubahnen.’ By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. Whose idea was it to write that? I wrote, after all, what I remembered reading. This is the small madness. Where does meaning come from?

Time travel or no time travel, where does it come from? Ask yourself.

The circle closes. Nothing ends, or begins. This is the last you will hear from me, and the last time I will use the name

Saskia lifted her head and licked her dust-covered lips. Her eyes were dry and raw. She looked around for Bruce and saw that he had gone. She must have lost consciousness and been unable to answer his calls. With luck, he had already been evacuated.

As much as she was scared, she was satisfied. The coincidence was extraordinary but the explanation clear. Hartfield was dead. The time machine had redirected him according to Ego’s instructions, who in turn had been carrying out her own plan.

That said, it was difficult to feel responsible.

The structure seemed solid again. Though, moments before, the walls and ceiling had ground together like teeth, they were now still. The illusion of immobility had returned. Saskia stood.

Ahead of her, southwards and away from the nearest stairway, the emergency lighting had failed. She had seen Helen Proctor fall into that blackness. Saskia clambered over. She stepped on cabling, masonry and other debris. Her intention was clear. She would save this woman’s life and repair the lives of David and Jennifer. She would give them the opportunity to avoid the pain that was in store.