Alex Scarrow - City of Shadows

It was a relief right now that the old man was away in Denver on business. Olivera felt a mixture of guilt for betraying the man, and a desperate fear of him. Griggs… he still wasn’t certain one way or the other about poor Frasier’s fate. Perhaps his paranoia was getting the better of him; perhaps the poor fellow had just been unlucky.

The Saleena unit had been inserted back in the past now. And it wouldn’t be long before her curious mind started picking away at the tiny new details edited into her consciousness. Between that bit of memory surgery and his handwritten note, Joseph felt he’d done as much as he could to unbalance things. Those three young clones weren’t stupid. Far from it. Together, they were going to figure this all out one way or the other. Eventually.

And now perhaps he needed to find a way out for himself. Handing in his notice wasn’t exactly going to wash with Waldstein. As the man had told him: ‘Once you’re in, Joseph, you’re in. Do you understand?’

Perhaps he could plead mental exhaustion. Perhaps he could tell Waldstein he was beginning to make mistakes and it might be best if he took some kind of sabbatical? That sounded lame even before he tried saying it. He was so busy trying to find some way of phrasing a way to ask Waldstein to let him go that he failed to hear the soft scrape of a foot in the doorway. Olivera lurched suspiciously in his chair, like some mischievous little boy caught with his fingers in a sweetie jar.

‘Joseph.’

It was Waldstein. Olivera felt his heart pounding in his chest. He hadn’t been expecting the man to return this evening. ‘Mr… Mr Waldstein. I… I thought you were still in Denver on business.’

‘Indeed.’ Waldstein’s cool eyes remained on him.

Olivera looked away. Found something for his fidgeting hands to fiddle with on his desk. ‘All… all s-sorted, then? The business?’

‘Not really, no. I had to come back here early.’

Oliver nodded. ‘Oh?’ The old man looked tired, sad. ‘Everything all right, Mr Waldstein?’

‘No, Joseph. Not all right.’

No explanation. Just that. Olivera felt panic growing inside him. He dared not say anything in case his stutter betrayed him.

‘I know,’ said Waldstein after several interminable seconds.

‘Know? Uh… know… know what?’

Waldstein shook his head slowly, the gesture very much like a father’s disappointment with an errant child. ‘I know you’ve been tampering with things.’

Olivera felt his stomach flop queasily. ‘T-tamper?’

‘You’ve edited the memories of Saleena. You added something to the unit that was sent back.’ Waldstein noticed the faintest involuntary flicker of reaction on Joseph’s face. ‘Yes, Joseph… I’ve had the database tagged to alert me for updates to the source archive.’ He spread his hands in a vaguely apologetic way. ‘After Frasier let me down, I figured it might be prudent to keep a closer eye on you also.’

‘I… I… needed to just… tidy up s-s-some continuity faults.’

‘Please, Joseph…’ he said, stepping into the lab and finding a seat to ease himself down into. ‘Please don’t lie to me. I’m too tired for that now.’ He sighed. ‘You’ve not been fixing memory mismatches. You’ve added new content to her mind.’

Olivera couldn’t help his jaw sagging. Perhaps that was less an admission of guilt than stuttering a denial at him.

‘Why did you add the visual memory of a tumbling teddy bear to her recruitment memory, Joseph? Why?’ Waldstein’s eyes narrowed. ‘What are you trying to tell her?’

The bear. Olivera realized Waldstein must have actually viewed the visual insert: the image of the blue bear tumbling end over end, almost defying gravity. So very deliberately conspicuous. The kind of visual image that would stick in a mind.

‘It’s a trigger memory, isn’t it?’

Olivera felt his cheeks burn with shame. His face, his demeanour, his awkward shuffling were screaming his guilt out loud and, of course, Waldstein knew what he’d been up to anyway… if not the precise reason why.

‘Yes,’ Joseph said eventually.

‘Joseph?’ Waldstein said softly. ‘Talk to me. Why the trigger memory?’

Olivera looked up at him.

He’d noticed the bear back in 2001, while he and Frasier had been setting the field office up. That curious antique shop not so far away had provided him with some of the props he’d needed to validate their various recruitment memories; the Titanic steward’s uniform had given him the idea of setting Liam’s recruitment aboard that famous doomed ship. A perfect recruitment fable. There’d been other things in various other shops that had helped him author appropriate life stories for each of them: the dark hoody with splashes of neon-orange Hindi-graffiti, that T-shirt with the Intel logo. Real things that would exist with them as they woke up in the archway. Real, tangible items that would help all three engineered units bond with their carefully scripted memories.

The bear… adding that bear to the replacement Saleena unit’s memory was adding something that couldn’t possibly be. The same bear in both places: Brooklyn 2001, Mumbai 2026. A clear, unambiguous impossibility.

A trigger.

‘Why, Joseph?’

‘Why?’ Olivera felt slightly emboldened. His game was up. No more lying. Somehow so very liberating. ‘Let me ask you that, s-sir. Why?’

Waldstein frowned. ‘Why what?’

‘Why do you want mankind to destroy itself?’

‘What the hell are you talking about, Joseph?’

‘I know… I know about Pandora.’

The word caused Waldstein to shift uneasily.

‘I know it’s s-some kind of codeword you have, isn’t it? A codeword for the end of mankind. The day… the precise date we destroy ourselves. That’s it, isn’t it?’

‘This has come from Frasier, hasn’t it? This is his nonsense, isn’t it?’

‘Pandora. The end of the world… that’s what you s-saw, isn’t it?’

‘What I saw?’

There was something comforting about unburdening himself like this. Olivera realized he was already so far over a certain invisible line that there was nothing he could say that was going to make any difference now. Either he was going to be instantly dismissed from the project, escorted out of the compound… or… or perhaps worse.

‘You’re actually asking me what I saw back in 2044?’ Waldstein eyed him cautiously. ‘Is that what you’re asking me? What I saw that very first time?’

Olivera nodded hesitantly. ‘You… you didn’t… go back in time, did you? You didn’t go back to s-see your… wife, your s-son?’

Waldstein shook his head slowly. ‘Oh, Joseph… please don’t ask me what I saw.’

‘You went forward. You went forward in time. You…’

‘What?’ He smiled. ‘I went forward in time to see if mankind makes it through these hard times? To see if mankind is as stupid and self-destructive as it appears to be?’

Olivera nodded.

‘And what? All this?’ He gestured at the small lab. ‘This project of ours, the businesses I’ve built up, the technology companies I’ve been acquiring, buying, the billions of dollars I’ve made… all of this, just to make sure it happens? Just to make certain mankind wipes itself out?’ Waldstein’s voice rose in pitch. A note of incredulity. ‘Are you seriously suggesting all of that is so I can ensure the end of the road for mankind?’

Olivera nodded again.

‘Oh, Joseph…’ That look of disappointment on his face again. He eased himself up off the seat. ‘You have no idea. Not even the slightest idea. God help me! I’m not trying to destroy us… I’m trying to save us.’ He sighed as he stepped back towards the lab’s doorway. ‘Or at least save what I can of us… what there is to save.’