Alex Scarrow - City of Shadows

A warning? A truth? A threat? A revelation?

‘Come on, then,’ she said. ‘This won’t do itself.’

8 October 2001, Green Acres Elementary School, Harcourt, Ohio

It took Maddy half an hour to successfully connect the hard drive to the networked computers. The new PCs had a different method of logging the hard-drive idents, which meant computer-Bob had some data-shuffling to do before he could get the underlying DOS code to recognize the hard drives, and this external one, under their original ident tags.

Presently, Becks closed her eyes. The influx of new data being Bluetoothed into her mind was an odd sensation. One, of course, she’d had before as Bob had worked with her, slowly bringing her mind up to speed with his. But that had been a trickle. This was a flood. The nearest sensory equivalent was like having ice-cold liquid injected into an artery, feeling it spread, branch, travel… envelop.

There were duplicated memories among the incoming data. Memories she’d already inherited once before from Bob. Memories of memories. Then there were her very own memories: recollections of dinosaurs and jungles. Liam… and an emergent mind-state for him — a feeling — that she’d labelled and carefully put to one side. In her mind she saw medieval towns and castles, Prince John, ridiculously besotted with her. A battle… the siege of Nottingham: ranks of glinting armour and flapping banners shifting in the heat haze of a summer’s day. A remote monastery, a monk called Cabot.

And then an ancient scroll of parchment. Becks recalled leaning over it and, by the dim, flickering light of the archway, moving a deciphering ‘grille’ across faded ink nearly a thousand years old. She could see herself writing down the letters on a pad of lined paper. Then, the decoding complete, starting to read it.

Then the discontinuity. Whatever she’d read had included an instruction that locked it all away into one part of her mind.

After that her memories were of the archway dropping, literally, into a war zone. A destroyed America tearing itself apart. She remembered the one-sided battle. Skies filled with giant airships, and hulking behemoths, engineered monsters, ascending the slope of a battlefield and dropping down into their trenches. Butchery. Blood. The dismembered ruins of bodies cluttering the floor of a trench.

She recalled taking one of those giant beasts down. Staring closely into its eyes as it lay dying and seeing what looked like a plea for death: End me.

And then she’d found a heavy machine gun and fired it from the hip until its spinning barrels had overheated and locked. She remembered a dozen gunshot and bayonet wounds, her body’s enhanced biochemistry rushing to fight fires, to clog arteries and preserve a dwindling reserve of blood. But slowly losing the struggle.

Then that final lucky gunshot. The ricochet of a bullet inside her cranium, a glancing blow off the silicon in her head followed by a complete and instant shutdown.

‘Becks?’ Maddy’s voice sounded distant. A cry from the end of an impossibly long tunnel. ‘You OK?’

[System Update Complete]

Nanoseconds that felt like minutes passed in her mind, an almost reassuring pause. It appeared that the intelligence that had existed before her shutdown and death was actually largely undamaged and fully functional, but then…

[Warning: System Conflict]

Becks’s breath caught in her throat. At the very base level of her digital mind two insistent lines of programming, two distinct imperatives, were firmly at odds with each other. Commands issued by two different individuals and embedded in her, each as unavoidably authoritative as a command from God Himself might be to a holy man. One recent — Madelaine Carter’s new mission statement: The end must be prevented. And the other one much, much older. She realized that certain unlock conditions must have been satisfied. Whatever those conditions were, the part of her AI sectioned off and responsible for being the gatekeeper code had clearly decided, rightly or wrongly, that the gate could be cracked ajar.

And it opened the door on conflicting instructions she was struggling to resolve. Because the other imperative, the other mission statement released from captivity, was quite the opposite.

The end must be allowed to happen.

And those words had come from nearly two thousand years ago.

More to the point, they were Liam’s instructions. His words. Not Maddy’s. There was more. Much more in there. Her mind queried this conflict between Maddy’s mission statement and the other from antiquity, Liam’s, but the gatekeeper code refused her entry to that part of her hard drive. The explanation was in there, but not available. Not yet.

[Resolve Conflict]

Becks was on her own. She was going to have to choose between Liam and Maddy. But she realized that was a problem her mind had already been quietly working on. She had the recent mission reappraisal from Madelaine Carter complete with a perfectly logical justification: Waldstein’s initial mission parameters could no longer be trusted. The man was quite clearly insane and bent on seeing mankind destroy itself. But she also had just one sentence from Liam. A future Liam. And no justification or explanation to go along with it.

[Resolve Conflict]

1. Carter imperative — logical validation

2. O’Connor imperative — none

She located a thought buried in her head like a prehistoric mosquito entombed in amber. A frozen decision, an instruction code with an internal time tag attached to it. It was a moment of thought that had occurred in an eye-blink, fifty-nine nanoseconds after a single British bullet had penetrated her skull and fluked a glancing impact on her computer chip. Her dying mind had attempted to unlock the secrets in that portion of her drive, to propagate the data stored there elsewhere in case of damage to that partition. The gatekeeper code must have agreed this emergency measure was valid and the process had just begun… when she’d ‘died’.

And there it was — just one command from Liam with no sensible explanation to back it up. All there was to lend it authority, credence… was that it was an older Liam with knowledge of what destiny lay ahead of them all. And logic dictated that a future Liam would have the benefit of hindsight; a future Liam’s command must exceed Maddy’s authority now. However, Becks’s scrambled, dying mind had turned that logical statement that future-Liam’s command must be trusted… into love.

‘Becks? Talk to us, goddammit! You OK?’ That voice again. Still far away, but a little closer now. Becks opened her eyes. She saw Maddy, Sal and Bob staring at her, a concerned expression on all their faces.

‘How do you feel?’

‘I now have near full recollection,’ she replied coolly. Her gaze met Bob’s. ‘My own memories are restored. I calculate 6.7 per cent data corruption.’

‘That is better than our original simulated estimate,’ rumbled Bob.

‘What about Liam?’

She looked at Maddy. ‘What do you wish to know, Madelaine?’

‘When we ran the software simulation of your mind on the computer system, you said something very odd about him. Do you remember what you said?’

‘Information: it was read-only,’ said Bob. ‘She would not remember the simulation as her mind-state was not stored.’

‘Oh yeah. Of course.’ Maddy rolled her eyes at her own stupidity. ‘Of course. OK, then… uh, let’s try a different approach. Let me see…’

Sal stepped in. ‘Becks, tell us how you feel about Liam.’

[Recommended Answers]

1. I am presently confused by undefinable variables

2. I love him. Love him! LOVE HIM!

3. He is my operative