Alex Scarrow - The Eternal War

› Just a moment. I shall alias-average the pixels and apply character analysis. There will be a significant margin of error, which I can attempt to contextually interpret for you.

‘Just do what you can, Bob,’ she said, holding a tissue to her face and honking noisily again into it. ‘Oh crud, I hate feeling all blocked up an’ rough,’ she muttered.

The scanned image blurred, softened then hardened again as if a cinema projectionist was messing around with the lens. Then a small highlighted green square appeared in the top left-hand corner of the image, grabbing a portion, analysing it, then moving along and highlighting another portion to the right. Step by step it moved right across the image, stepped down a row and began on the left-hand side once more. On another screen a document opened and words began to appear.

Liam leaned forward and began to read it aloud.

‘Yesterday, in the evening a second fatal collision occurred on Powder Street in as many weeks. A delivery cart belonging to Costen Brothers Distillery was responsible for crushing to death in a most horrendous manner a young dock worker. The ravaged body was identified by a flatboat captain as a crewman he had discharged earlier in the afternoon: Abraham Lincoln of New Salem.’

There was a little more to the article, an editorial rant about the increasing business of the thoroughfares beside the landing docks and the need for some order to be brought to the chaos of foot and horse traffic sharing the same avenues.

Liam looked at her. ‘Do you think …?’

She honked again into a handkerchief, shedding shreds of tissue on to the desk. ‘I fig we definubbly got a winner, Liab,’ she huffed breathlessly, her blocked nose whistling unpleasantly like a flute.

‘Bost definubbly.’

Midday in Times Square. Sal sat on her favourite bench, spattered with a pebble-dash of pigeon droppings and pink globules of discarded gum. Bob sat beside her, taking up the space two other people could easily have used.

‘You are different, though … Bob. Different from when you were first birthed .’ She turned to him. ‘Do you feel different in there … in your mind?’ she said, pointing to his bristly head. Maddy had insisted on shaving his head back down to the nut the other day. To be fair, she was right: Bob was beginning to look ridiculous. Coarse and dark, his hair should have been weighed down by its length — instead it seemed to perch on his head like a large spongy muffin. No way he was going to be able to go on missions looking like a seven-foot mushroom.

Bob was giving her question some thought. ‘I have accumulated large amounts of sensory data. This has altered my operating parameters.’ He looked down at her. ‘These are my … memories .’

‘Memories, huh?’ She smiled. ‘ Memories. You sound sort of … almost proud of them.’

He cocked his head. ‘They are my mission log. They are performance data. They are — ’

‘You,’ she finished for him. ‘They are you . They are what make you you . That’s what my dadda used to say. What makes us who we are is all the things we experience.’ She reached out and patted one of his thick arms affectionately. ‘You’re so much more now, more than you were, you big lump.’

‘More than … my operating system?’

She nodded. ‘Does that make you feel proud? Do you feel different?’ She shrugged. ‘Do you even feel ?’

‘I have sense receptors in my dermal layer — ’

‘No, I mean in your heart … I mean emotions. Do you ever feel things? Like “scared”, or “happy”, or “sad”? Things like that?’

He scanned his memories, sorting through trillions of bytes of data: fleeting images of stormtroopers and giant airships, prison camps and castles, and a million little interactions with Liam O’Connor.

‘I have experienced sensations of … attachment .’

‘Attachment? Do you mean … affection? What … for Liam?’

‘Affirmative. He is my mission operative.’

‘What about us, me and Maddy? You like us?’

His expressionless cold grey eyes burned down at her as he sorted through data to find an answer. ‘I also feel similar sensations for you and Maddy Carter.’

She hugged his arm. ‘Oh, you big chutiya bakra .’ A thought occurred to her. ‘What about Becks?’

He frowned. Now there was a challenging question for him to chew over. His eyes blinked as he worked hard for an answer.

Finally he spoke. ‘She is … a … part of me. And I am a part of her.’

‘But do you like her? Do you have sensations of attachment to her? I figure she’s like a sister or something?’

‘Sister?’ He considered that for a moment. ‘A sibling?’

‘Yes.’

‘I will consider the question,’ he said. She suspected that was probably going to keep him occupied for the rest of the day. Sal shook her head and giggled at him, then hunkered down, cradled her chin in her hands and resumed watching the world going by.

And then it happened,

Just as she was looking right at it, before her very eyes, the sign above a fast-food restaurant flickered and changed. For a moment she thought she might have been gazing at an LED screen that had finally decided to move on to the next picture in its image list. But it was just a scuffed plastic sign above the glass windows of a fast-food bar. One moment it had said KENTUCKY-STYLE FRIED CHICKEN, the next it simply read FAST FRIED CHICKEN.

She cursed under her breath, pulled out her mobile phone and dialled Maddy.

‘Yeah?’ she answered on the third ring.

‘I think I just saw a … No, I’m certain I just saw another time ripple, Maddy. A small one. You want to know what it was?’

‘It’s OK, Sal, it’s OK. We think we’ve got it nailed. Abraham Lincoln went and got himself squished by a cart in 1831. You better get yourselves back here, asap. If that’s another change you just spotted, then maybe the big time wave is coming right on its tail.’

‘OK.’

She snapped the phone shut and stuffed it back in her pocket. ‘Back home, Bob.’ She punched his arm. ‘Time for us to get busy again.’

2001, New York

‘Can I go this time?’

Maddy looked at Sal. ‘No … that’s not your job.’

‘But I always end up in here … I never get to see anything interesting!’

Maddy shook her head.

‘But why?’

‘Too dangerous.’ Maddy mentally winced at that. That was a lame reason. The poor girl had been in almost as much danger here in 2001 as she might have been with Liam in the past. And Sal could see that too.

‘Come on, Maddy, it’s just as bad here! We’ve had mutants, soldiers … those weird dinosaur things. You’re telling me “here” is safe?’ She shook her head. ‘That is totally shadd-yah!’

Liam and the two units were listening to the row as they were getting dressed.

Maddy closed her eyes tiredly. She didn’t need this. How could she explain to Sal that every trip through a portal could quite possibly strip another year or five off her natural lifespan? That the bombardment of tachyons, the immeasurable forces of chaos space, had a lethal effect on the body: aged it, corrupted it … eventually killed it. How could she explain that to her with Liam just yards away, unaware that soon — far too soon — he was going to be a dying old man?

But then she and Sal were experiencing a milder form of that contamination themselves, living as they did in the archway’s resetting temporal bubble, weren’t they? It was coming for all of them one day, death.

Something her cousin Julian had once said: ‘We’re all dead the moment we’re born. Just, some of us get there faster than others.’ Prophetic really since he died not so long after, lost in the rubble of the World Trade Center’s north tower.