Alex Scarrow - City of Shadows

It’s replaced by noise and chaos of a wholly different kind.

London, 2067.

The grass is gone. Piccadilly Circus heaves with humanity, a city crowded with thirty million inhabitants. The statue of Eros looks up at looming mega-skyscrapers encrusted with holographic displays and garish adverts for soyo-protein products. The sky buzzes with corporate jyro-copters and police air-skimmers with winking blue lights and brilliant white searchlights tracking and monitoring the heaving populace below. A torrential downpour cascades from an unhealthy, lemon-tinted sky, overcast with polluted clouds.

Rain-slicked pedestrians push and jostle each other across waterlogged pavements, every last one of them wearing air filters on their faces.

London: one of a couple of dozen metropolises around the world playing host to its share of the migrating billions. Even though this city’s levees that hold back the swollen Thames are sure to fail one day soon and it will join New York as another city lost to the rising seas, every day thousands more people swarm in and live cheek by jowl in cluttered tenement blocks that dwarf the old buildings of Canary Wharf.

In a way it’s not so very different from the conditions of Whitechapel nearly two centuries ago.

London buzzes like a shaken beehive. Pounding music from hawkers on the street and second-tier pedestrian walkways above. A deafening riot of noise and movement and colour. Kerbside bazaars sell snake-oil cures for toxin-induced asthma. A trader sells slabs of pink-coloured dough that he’s claiming is real meat. If it is… God knows what creature it once was. Genetically engineered apelike work-units marked by tattoo bar-codes and dressed in orange overalls move sullenly among the press of people, clearing trash, carelessly tossing the body of some starved-to-death immigrant into the back of a waste recycler.

This is the London that will exist a mere five decades after the last-ever Olympic Games are held here. Back in a time before the inevitable end was writ large for all to see and then foolishly ignored by one and all. Back before the first big oil shock, when supplies began to falter, before the sea level really started rising fast, the sky discolouring, crops failing, ecosystems collapsing.

But of course this is the way it has to be. This is the timeline a certain Roald Waldstein is so very desperate to preserve… at all costs. It has to be this.

And nothing else but this.

1888, Holborn Viaduct, London

Wednesday 19 December

This is where we live now. It’s not so very different to our last home, I guess. I’m getting used to it. We don’t get the twenty-times-a-day rumble of a train over us. Instead, we have the constant deep engine rumble of Holborn Viaduct’s power generator. Not so different, I suppose, to listening to the back-up generator we used to have.

We’re settled now. Finding new routines. It’s a different feel in here with Rashim and SpongeBubba keeping us company. I think I like it. SpongeBubba makes me laugh; the thing looks so ridiculous with that wobbling nose. We have to keep him out of sight of that nosy man Delbert. God knows what he’d make of that lab unit.

We have a decision to make about the killer support unit. Its organic body is being kept alive. It’s like some person in an almost vegetative state; the eyes are open but there’s nothing going on inside its head. The thing drools when we try and feed it this barley gruel. Totally disgusting. Rashim says we can keep it going indefinitely if we keep feeding it. The big question is whether we open up its… her… cranium and flip the ‘hard-set’ switch inside. I’m not sure how Maddy feels.

Liam, of course, says we should.

Me? I’m not sure. This support unit spent the last couple of months wanting nothing more than to kill us all. I know its programming will all be erased… but will it really be? Completely?

So, we have our new home. A new place in history, which I do find very fascinating. In many ways it feels like when we were first woken up by Foster. Scary, but exciting, new. It does feel a bit like that again. But it won’t ever be the same. Not now that we know we’re fakes. Pretend-humans. In fact, there’s only one real person in here. Rashim.

Perhaps this time around, though, it’s better. Like Maddy said, we’re in charge now. We can decide whether or not we want to fix history. And who’s going to stop us now? No one, NO ONE knows where we are now, not even Mr Roald Waldstein.

I like that. That makes me feel safe.

Maddy joined Liam standing in their side door. He was watching Farringdon Street slowly come to life. It was just gone seven in the morning and wisps of morning mist spun like silk across the wide cobbled street. Today looked like it was going to be another nice one. A clear blue sky waiting for the sun to get up and join it. A lamp-snuffer was putting out the street’s gas lamps with his long-handled snuffer tray. Above them, on top of the viaduct, the electric-powered lights would be turned off manually by a man from the Edison Electric Company. They were beginning to learn the morning routine along Farringdon Street.

‘Good morning,’ said Maddy.

Liam nodded. He seemed a lot brighter since returning from the Whitechapel jump less than a week ago. ‘Aye, looks like it’ll be nice today.’

She had an enamel mug of coffee for him. Handed it to him and took up a place on the doorstep beside him. ‘I like that we’re not endlessly recycling in a two-day loop,’ she said. ‘Things change. That’s kinda nice.’

‘You sure we don’t need to set up a field?’

‘Yup. We’re quite safe here. No one’s looking for time travellers.’ She laughed. ‘No one in this time has even thought about time travel, I’d say. I mean… wasn’t it that writer guy, H. G. Wells, who first thought up the idea of time travel?’

Liam shrugged. ‘I’m sure somebody must’ve thought of the idea before he did. It must be the oldest fanciful notion ever; that it might be fun to travel backwards or forwards through time.’

‘Yeah, well.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘He was the first one to write a fiction book about it.’

‘Mark Twain.’

‘What?’

‘Mark Twain wrote a book about time travel. I’m sure he did. A Yankee Fella in King Arthur’s Court I think it was called. Or something like that.’

Maddy hunched her shoulders. ‘Oh well, whatever. My point is we don’t have to worry quite so much about staying under the radar here. Nor do we have to worry about time waves. None of us are real. None of us belong in this timeline, so it really doesn’t matter.’

He looked at her. ‘You’re OK, are you? Not… uh, not upset about — ’

‘About not being the real Maddy Carter from Boston?’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Not really. Not any more. I think I quite like the feeling of freedom. I quite like not missing my mom and dad and my cousin Julian. Somebody made all those people up. Put painful memories of them into my head. I’m damned if I’m going to spend another second grieving for figments of someone’s imagination. Stuff ’em.’

Liam laughed. ‘Aye, that does seem a bit daft.’

‘I am who I am. Right now, in this moment of time, this is who I am. And that’s all.’ She looked sideways at him and smiled. ‘Nice thought that, isn’t it? It’s liberating.’

‘Aye.’

They heard a steam whistle echoing up from the far end of Farringdon Street where the docks and the River Thames were. Barges came in there and loaded and emptied round the clock. A never-ending cycle of trade and commerce.

‘On the other hand, Sal’s not coping so well, I don’t think,’ said Liam finally.

Maddy nodded. ‘You and I should keep an eye on her. After all, I suppose we literally really are family now.’