Alex Scarrow - City of Shadows

‘You mean…’ Liam frowned. ‘You mean, if a better timeline comes along…?’

Maddy knew what he was suggesting. ‘Yeah! If it looks like a happier, shinier, funkier world,’ she said with a shrug, ‘why not? We’ll decide ourselves if intervention is required.’

She noticed Bob stirring. ‘Bob?’

‘That contradicts a primary protocol.’

‘Remember what Foster said?’ added Sal. ‘For good or bad, history has to go a certain way?’

‘Aye, he did that.’

‘Has to go a certain way, huh?’ Maddy turned to Rashim. ‘And just remind us how history goes, Dr Anwar?’

He grinned edgily as all eyes rested on him. ‘I… I, uh, don’t really think I should be involved with this argument.’

‘Tell them!’

‘Well, you know already. The world’s not too good actually. A systemic collapse of — ’

‘Right. We heat the world until the ice caps melt and about a third of the land is flooded. Then we poison what’s left of the world with chemicals until there’s no ecosystem left that’s worth a damn. Then, not happy with all of that, we decide to wipe ourselves out with some kind of Von Neumann virus that leaves nothing left alive. That about right, Rashim?’

‘They were calling the virus Kosong-ni. That’s where it started. Ground zero.’ Rashim nodded. ‘That’s a somewhat simplified version of events, but essentially, yes, that’s it.’

‘And that’s what Foster — ’ she splayed her hands — ‘that’s what Waldstein… wants us to do our very best to preserve? Anyone here think that might be just a little freakin’ stupid?’

‘To be fair,’ said Liam, ‘Foster was just following some orders.’

‘You’re right, Liam.’ She smiled at him. ‘He was just like you…’

‘He was me.’

‘Right. And he was just doing what he thought was the right thing to do. Like you, Liam — heart always in the right place.’ She rested a hand on him again. Genuine affection. ‘Always in the right place, Liam, doing what duty calls for. But maybe we’ve been wrong all along to follow Waldstein’s directive.’ She took her glasses off the bridge of her nose.

‘I’ve been doing some thinking. I think that codeword, Pandora… I think that was a warning to us. A warning that we’re doing the wrong thing.’ Maddy was reluctant to take her thoughts a step further. But the logic was right there and needed to be said out loud.

‘Maybe we’ve been doing the dirty work of someone not quite right in the head. Someone who quite simply is insane.’

‘Waldstein?’

She shrugged. ‘He set this agency up. And Bob? Didn’t you say those support units trying to kill us came from the same place as you?’

‘Affirmative. W.G. Systems software.’

She looked at the others. ‘Maybe Waldstein sent them to kill us?’ A further thought occurred to her. ‘Maybe when I sent that message asking about Pandora, when I sent that ad to the newspaper… that’s what triggered all of this?’

The air in the room all of a sudden felt very charged.

‘We were never meant to know how bad the world gets,’ said Liam. ‘Were we?’

‘And now Waldstein knows we know…?’ She pursed her lips, focusing on the lenses she was unnecessarily scrubbing clean. Still thinking things through. ‘We can’t be relied on any more. We’re a loose cog.’ She put her glasses back on. ‘Not fit for purpose.’

‘Jahulla!’ whispered Sal. ‘He wants to wipe us out and start again!’

Maddy turned to Bob. ‘If we changed our mission goals… where does that leave us, Bob? Does your core programming mean you’d have to attempt to stop us?’ She turned to Becks. ‘Kill us?’

Both support units looked at each other.

Bob finally spoke. Maddy wondered whether he was speaking on behalf of the pair of them. Probably. Becks would defer to him right now. Her mind, after all, was a pale reflection of his. ‘On previous occasions, I have been able to override hard-coded mission parameters.’

‘And? So, this time?’

His thick brow lowered and became a monobrow of intense thought. A long pause of deliberation. Finally he spoke. ‘I am able to comply with a new mission directive.’ He stared at her intently. ‘And what is your new directive?’

‘To, uh… to stop Pandora?’ There was a tremulous, questioning tone in Maddy’s voice, worried that somewhere deep in his coconut head a logic gate might flip its state at what she’d just suggested and Bob might suddenly leap across the room and rip her head off.

‘Your stated intention is to prevent the future event codenamed Pandora from occurring?’

She nodded slowly. ‘That’s kind of it. Yeah. You know… save the world?’ She winced as Bob’s forehead creased with thought and his eyes seemed to disappear into the shadow cast by his thick Neanderthal brow.

‘What do you think? Bob? That OK with you?’

‘The original mission goal of preserving the destruction of the world and humankind appears to be an illogical mission goal,’ he announced finally. Maddy let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding for the best part of a minute. ‘Becks?’

She nodded; her mind had processed the same information and arrived at the same answer. ‘With the information that Dr Rashim Anwar has provided us of the future, the previous directive appears to make no sense.’

‘If that’s your plan, Maddy, if you wish to work against the goal of your agency then you need to be somewhere else entirely,’ said Rashim. ‘You need to get as far away from here as possible. Another place, maybe even another time. You know that, don’t you?’ Maddy knew.

‘If you really are what you think you are… engineered units,’ he said that carefully, desperate not to cause offence, ‘then if Waldstein’s after you, he will, I’m sure, have all your pre-inception date memories on file. He’ll know everything there is to know about you.’

Liam stirred. ‘Pre-inception?’

‘Before our recruitment,’ clarified Maddy. ‘Our so-called life stories.’

‘Right,’ said Rashim. ‘He’ll certainly guess you’ve come up here to find your family, Maddy. He… or more of his support units… could be close by, closing in on us as we speak.’

‘You’re right.’

‘A new base for us to set up?’ Liam’s clouded face seemed to brighten a little.

‘Yup, new home. New mission.’

‘I’m not sure I get what our mission is, though,’ said Sal.

Maddy wasn’t a hundred per cent sure herself. To make Pandora NOT happen. Yes, that… but also to continue, in some moderated way, the mission they used to have: to make sure no reckless time traveller set this world hurtling towards another nightmare timeline.

‘We’re going to make the call, Sal. We’re going to take control of history. We’re going to steer it so the world gets a future where we don’t kill ourselves off. Where we don’t completely trash this planet.’

Liam nodded. ‘Now that makes a bit more sense to me, so.’

Even Sal perked up a little bit. ‘But if we’re moving on to somewhere else… aren’t we going to need some more money, or something?’

‘Aye,’ said Liam. ‘We’ve nearly run out.’

‘True.’ Maddy shrugged. ‘I guess we better think about where we’re going to get some more, then.’

16 September 2001, Interstate 90, Westfield, Massachusetts

Bob held the gun up at the man behind the counter. The sock pulled over his large head was far too small and stretched so taut that his thick horse-lips were mashed against his teeth and squished back into a hideous leer, halfway between a snarl and a grin.

‘I ’eed you to ’ive ’e all your ’oney!’