Alex Scarrow - City of Shadows

‘I’ve been up all night, vomiting.’ His face looked almost grey.

‘The food wasn’t that bad!’

He shook his head, his dark ponytail wagging limply. ‘No, it’s my fault. I was stupid. The food was too rich. I’m used to synthetic proteins. Soya products.’ He gulped air and stifled a belch that could easily have been an empty retch. ‘Not used to the real thing.’ Rashim had had a mixed grill. Wolfed it down as he relished the texture and savoured the billionaire-luxury of eating nuggets of real meat.

Foster obviously hadn’t slept well either, dark bags evident under his sunken eyes. Maddy looked at the men in their party with a mixture of pity and contempt.

The diner was open and several trucks were parked up in the gravel car park, their drivers inside already tucking into pancake and waffle breakfasts. Further along their side of the highway was an out-of-town mall called North Haven Plaza. Across acres of car park it looked open already. At least the eateries probably were.

‘OK then, let’s try and find something a little healthier over there, if you guys are feeling a bit precious.’

‘Let me quickly check in on SpongeBubba.’

Maddy unlocked the side door to the RV for him and Rashim stepped up inside.

‘Morning, skippa!’ chirped the robot, squatting in the passenger seat upfront. It was playing with the steering wheel.

‘We’re having some food over there.’ Rashim pointed through the windscreen at the mall. ‘We won’t be long.’

Maddy joined him inside. ‘Does your robot have a wireless broadcast protocol?’

‘Sure.’

‘If anyone comes looking at our vehicle… cops, for example, can he bleep a warning over to Bob?’

‘Yes, of course.’

She looked down at the lab unit. ‘Reckon you can do that for me, then, SpongeBob?’

‘SpongeBubba,’ corrected the robot. His lips quivered a jocular, angry snarl. ‘That’s my name, missy-miss!’

Maddy rolled her eyes at the lab unit’s pre-programmed plastic expression. ‘Just tell your toy to keep a lookout,’ she said to Rashim. ‘OK?’

The mall wasn’t busy. A few people inside walking freshly polished floors, mostly people who worked there. Clearly no one felt like shopping today. A jazzy rendition of a Stevie Wonder hit wafted across the bright and cheerful circular centrepiece atrium and a pair of overweight security guards shared a joke with a janitor and made one or two heads turn with their echoing laughter.

‘Up there,’ said Maddy, pointing to a balcony overlooking the atrium. ‘RealBean Coffee. The place looks open. We can get a panini or…’

She checked herself. Stupid. Sure, although the mall looked no different to any other in her time, it was still 2001. No one did paninis back then. Back now.

‘… or maybe we’ll get a toasted sandwich or something.’

7.20 a.m., 12 September 2001, Interstate 95, south-west Connecticut

‘Information: you are driving too fast,’ said Faith.

Abel turned to look at her. ‘The driving is suitable,’ he replied.

‘You are driving at a faster velocity than specified on the roadside indicators.’

Abel narrowed his eyes at her, then turned to look back at the road ahead flanked by signs indicating, advertising, proclaiming all kinds of things. Finally a speed indicator wooshed past on his side. ‘The number fifty-five indicates a recommended velocity.’

‘No. I believe it means maximum velocity. You are in excess of that. That will attract unwanted attention.’

Abel lifted his foot off the accelerator, causing the truck behind to brake hard, and then a moment later the driver leaned on his horn angrily. Abel looked over his shoulder. ‘Why did the vehicle behind make that noise?’

Faith followed his gaze. ‘I believe he is annoyed.’

‘Annoyed,’ Abel repeated. ‘Why?’

She frowned for a moment. ‘I do not know why.’

The truck driver overtook them, glaring down from his cab as he passed by.

The NYPD squad car they’d stolen in the early hours of the morning had been replaced with a different car. After listening to police chatter over the radio, they’d quickly realized the vehicle’s identification number on the roof was going to make them too easy to track down. Before the light of dawn had fully arrived, they’d switched to a solitary car parked in an empty forecourt. It was small and bubble-shaped and an uncomfortable squeeze for Abel’s broad frame as he wriggled into place behind the steering wheel, but at least it wasn’t going to draw the attention of any police helicopters scanning the highways for their stolen vehicle. Of course, it wasn’t until dawn that they saw their new ride — a Volkswagen Beetle — was a rather conspicuous tangerine orange decorated with hand-painted pink daisies.

They drove in silence for a while, as they had in fact done all the way from Brooklyn. As he drove, Abel’s mind carefully sorted through the data he’d acquired in the last thirty-two hours and twenty minutes of life. Not a particularly long life, but certainly a very busy one so far.

The first nine hours of his consciousness, just as with Faith and the others of his batch, had been spent in a sterile cloning room, illuminated with a soft amber glow coming from the half a dozen growth tubes. Each of them had contained a candidate foetus held in stasis, but now recently ‘birthed’.

Six of them, naked and coated in the gelatinous protein solution drying out on their bare skin. They had sat huddled together on the cool tiled floor with empty, childlike minds. Frightened, confused. And then, without any warning, wireless wisdom had begun to flood into their minds: torrential packets of data and executable applets of AI software that shooed away the childlike fear and replaced it with impassive machine-mind calm.

Like awaking. Emerging from a coma.

Abel recalled his mind filling with compressed knowledge that unpacked itself into segments of his hard drive. Knowledge of the world of 2001. Knowledge of a place called New York. Of a place called Brooklyn. Knowledge of cars, trains, planes, people, skyscrapers, billboards, intersections, doughnuts, handguns, traffic lights, cops, radios, computers, mobile phones, the Spice

Girls, Shrek, George Bush, 9/11…

And then, finally, into that dimly lit, womb-like, amber-coloured room a human had stepped. Abel’s installed software was already prepped to acknowledge the man as an authorized user. His instructions to be obeyed without question.

The man pulled up a chair and sat down in front of them. ‘Your primary mission goal is to locate and terminate these humans.’ He held a data pad in his hand and tapped its screen.

In their six minds, simultaneously, they received a packet of images in rapid slide-show succession. Front images, profile images of a young man with an untidy shock of dark hair and thick, arched eyebrows. A young teenaged woman with frizzy, strawberry-blonde hair and glasses. A dark-skinned girl with jet-black hair that drooped like a velvet curtain over one eye.

‘You should also terminate any other humans or support units that appear to be collaborating with them. Your secondary goal is to destroy all the equipment you find at the location you’ll shortly be arriving at. This is their base of operations. Leave nothing intact. That is important. There are items of equipment there that can be used to displace time. That is an unacceptable contamination risk. All of it must be destroyed.

‘When these things are done, you are to activate your own self-destruct devices. This is your tertiary goal. Your mission is complete only when these people are dead, their field office has been completely destroyed and your own on-board computers have been irreparably disabled. Are these mission parameters perfectly clear?’