Alex Scarrow - City of Shadows

‘Anyway, while the odds were stacked against any one solar system containing intelligent life, given that there are literally trillions of stars, his maths delivered an answer that there must be hundreds of thousands of alien civilizations out there, and tens of thousands of civilizations advanced enough in technology to be putting out radio waves, intentionally or not.

‘So the point is,’ continued Rashim, ‘when we started looking into space for radio signals, we should have stumbled across them almost immediately. According to Fermi’s maths, we should have been swimming in alien radio signals.’

‘But instead we never found anything,’ said Maddy.

‘Right. And that’s the Fermi Paradox. Why isn’t every frequency full of alien signals?’ He sighed. ‘Because we’re alone. And why are we alone?’ He smiled. He wasn’t expecting them to answer. ‘Well… in my time we figured that out for ourselves. Within a century of discovering radio waves, mankind managed to exhaust the raw materials of the planet. The raw materials, the free energy source that every emerging technological civilization gets as a gift from its historical past — fossil fuels. It’s that package of free energy that we should have used carefully while we took our time to discover and harness quantum energy. Humankind never got a chance to take anything more than a few baby steps into space. We never got the time to mature, to reach out into space, for other worlds. Hydrocarbons. Fossil fuels. Oil. We used it all up far too quickly. Too many people wanting too many things. We used it up,’ he said, sighing, ‘and then, as it began to run out, we turned on each other.’

‘The Oil Wars?’ said Liam. He had heard another traveller from Rashim’s time mention them. A man called Locke.

‘Yes. Wars between India and China. Japan and Korea. The first of those was in the 2040s. Russia and the European Bloc, there was a short war between those. And, of course, what we should have been doing is trying to fix another bigger problem. The world itself dying: warming up, rising tides, poisoned blooms of algae killing the seas.’

Rashim fell silent for a moment. ‘Anyway, that’s the answer to the Fermi Paradox; most — if not all — civilizations either destroy themselves or mine themselves dry long before they ever spread out to other planets and are able to mine, harvest them for resources. Once you’ve exhausted your home planet… it’s all over for you. Either you become extinct, or you eventually end up being cavemen once more.’

‘It’s a one-shot deal?’ said Maddy.

He nodded. ‘And perhaps every civilization makes the same mistake. Spends what it has, thinking it will never run out. Then, all of a sudden, it does.’

‘Wonderful,’ sighed Maddy.

‘But on Earth we didn’t just run out. We decided to destroy ourselves in style.’ Rashim snorted. ‘It was some kind of a genetically engineered virus… pretty much wiped us all out in the space of a few weeks. We made a nice tidy job of pretty much erasing ourselves from history.’

‘Shadd-yah,’ whispered Sal after a while. ‘This is depressing! You’re great fun to hang out with, you know that, don’t you?’

He shrugged. ‘You did ask what the future’s going to be like.’

‘I didn’t,’ she replied. ‘It was Liam who asked.’

‘Aye, and now I wish I bleedin’ well hadn’t.’

12 September 2001, Washington DC

Cooper was up and at work despite the time. The Department was as much his home as the single-bed studio apartment he kept in Queens Chapel, DC. Thirty-nine, with no family, no partner, no children, not even a pet, one might say this twilight office with empty desks, a watercooler that hadn’t been switched on in years and a fading poster of Jane Fonda was his life.

Custodian of secrets so secret even Presidents aren’t privy to them. That’s me.

Perhaps not the world’s most exciting job. But an important one nonetheless.

Last night he’d stayed here, slept in the cot he kept in his personal office.

His PC was on and he was streaming MSNBC, watching it as his coffee and breakfast bagel cooled enough to have without burning the roof of his mouth. It was quite early in the morning; outside in the world, the sky was still dark. On the monitor he watched a news camera pan across rescue workers picking through the smouldering rubble of the World Trade Center. Brilliantly stark floodlights illuminated the enormous mound of rubble and twisted spars of metal. Dots of neon-orange light-reflective jackets decorated the mounds of dust and concrete; dozens of emergency workers picked through the remains of the towers in the vain hope of finding survivors.

The phone rang.

Cooper looked at it. The phones down here never rang. Well, rarely anyway.

He picked it up. ‘Cooper.’

‘Coop, it’s Damon.’

Damon Grohl. A friend from the FBI Academy many years ago. Friends still. Christmas cards were exchanged every year and every now and then they shared a beer, if that counted.

‘Damon!’ Cooper’s mood lifted. ‘Well, been a while! How are you, ol’ buddy?’

‘Fine. Fine. The Bureau down this way is chasing around like a headless chicken with what went down yesterday.’

Headless chicken? Damon was probably right about that. FBI heads were going to start rolling pretty soon over this. Letting something like this slip through their fingers.

‘I can imagine. Not much fun.’

‘Look, Coop, something’s come up that, uh… might be, well, your thing, if you get my meaning.’

Cooper’s curiosity was piqued. ‘My thing?’

‘We’ve got a double cop killing over in Brooklyn. Happened after midnight this morning.’

‘How’s that anything to do with me? The Department?’ A thought occurred to him. ‘Is this linked to yesterday…?’

‘Twin Towers? Who knows? Might be. We’re looking at pretty much anything that moves right now.’

‘You said this cop killing might be my sort of thing?’ A little careless of him, to be honest, talking so candidly like this over the phone.

‘Your phone line is encrypted, right?’

‘Yes. But keep what you say foggy… if you know what I mean.’

‘Foggy? Sure. So, Coop, are you still doing that whole X Files thing down in Washington?’

‘You know I can’t comment on that.’

He heard Damon draw a breath.

‘Damon? What the hell is it?’

‘I think I’ve got something you might want to take a look at, if you can get up here quickly.’

7.01 a.m., 12 September 2001, outside Branford, Connecticut

Maddy was knocking on the adjoining motel room wall for him to get up. Liam yawned and cracked open eyes to look at the digital clock on his bedside ledge. Just gone seven.

He thumped the wall back. ‘All right! Jay-zus! I’m getting up, so I am!’ he shouted.

He heard Sal’s muffled laughter on the other side.

Bob was already awake. Not that he ever slept. ‘Maddy has instructed me to tell you we are getting ready to move on.’

They’d all decided they needed a good night’s rest before resuming their journey up to Boston. They’d all been strung out, far more exhausted than they’d realized. A week in Ancient Rome struggling to stay alive and now this. Fatigue had finally caught up with them all.

‘Maddy says we will eat some breakfast then set off.’

Liam’s stomach still groaned. Last night’s triple-decker meat platter pizza was still lying heavily in his gut. He wondered if he could manage anything else right now.

They met outside in the car park beside the RV. Rashim was looking particularly ill.

‘Jesus, what’s up with you?’ asked Maddy.