Alex Scarrow - The Doomsday Code

The last time Liam had asked Locke the question, he’d replied rather cryptically, ‘The end.’

‘Is it much farther into the future than me?’

Locke said nothing, the half-smile frozen on his face, teasing Liam.

‘A hundred? Two hundred years? … Five hundred?’

‘The End,’ said Locke again, offering nothing more.

‘The End?’ Liam hunched his shoulders. ‘Ahh, come on, what is that supposed to mean? Do you mean the end of the century?’

The older man said nothing.

‘The end of what? … End of the world ?’

Locke relented. ‘It really boils down to how you interpret this world around us, Liam. In a scientific way, or a spiritual way. Is it an ending … or a beginning?’

Liam ground his teeth with frustration. ‘That means nothing to me, so it does! That’s just the kind of mumbo-jumbo I’d expect from a priest.’

‘The prophecy, Liam. We’ve always known the Grail contained a detailed prophecy. Something happens on a certain date, a certain year.’

‘Something?’

‘ Something .’ Locke spread his hands. ‘We don’t know. That’s what I came back to find out.’

‘Something,’ uttered Liam again. ‘Something good or something bad?’

‘I suppose if you have faith, Liam, if you can believe in a caring God, then it can only mean something wonderful will happen.’

‘And do you?’

Locke scratched the tip of his nose. ‘I suppose I’ll make my mind up when I’ve managed to decode the thing.’

1194, Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire

Moonlight illuminated the forest track in front of Bob. It was just possible to see the dark stains of congealed blood in places, the scuff marks of boots, the glint of several twisted and broken loops of chain mail, and the pale feathered fletching of a few arrows deeply embedded in the dirt.

Bob reined the horse in and stepped down on to the track.

It was silent except for the hiss of a breeze through the endlessly stirring trees and the far-off hooting of an owl. He examined the signs of battle more closely.

Heavy boots close together had rucked the dirt, and many small gouges in the mud suggested arrows that had embedded themselves in the ground and been retrieved later. Bob nodded with calm certainty that this was the site of the ambush that had happened over twenty-four hours earlier.

He wandered over to one side of the track, pushing aside the thick ferns and bracken that filled the forest floor between the stout oak trunks. He soon found the first body, hastily pulled out of sight and dumped amid a thick clump of nettles, stripped of anything of value and left as carrion. He picked his way along the edge of the track, finding several more bodies, all of them stripped of their mail and their leather boots and left with nothing but their leggings and blood-stained tunics.

Half a dozen bodies in total. He flipped the last of them over; to his relief, none of them was Liam.

Relief.

Bob queried his mind for greater clarification. His on-board hardware looked dispassionately at the impulses coming in from the organic nub of flesh that barely deserved the term ‘brain’. The tiny electrical impulses fired off by the rat-brain-sized organ conformed to a pattern that humans would call an emotion.

Yes. Relief.

He stood up and listened to the night, hoping that beyond the hiss of stirring branches he might hear the faint and distant cry of human voices raised in drunken celebration or calling for help. But he heard nothing. Just the owl.

Bob’s decision-tree had been here before. On his very first mission he’d lost Liam in the aftermath of a battle for the White House; Liam had been taken away in one of a column of prison trucks. His AI then had been woefully unprepared for the decisions it had to make. But he’d managed to do it. He’d managed to reprioritize the mission goals to put rescuing Liam at the very top. Technically, a breach of his programming, but also something he’d been proud of.

This time round, it was a far easier decision. This mission’s goals were so poorly defined and ambiguous that devoting what was left of the six-month mission envelope solely to finding his friend Liam was a nanosecond evaluation.

But how?

He could wait until dawn and attempt to identify a visual trail. A body of men moving through the thick undergrowth of Sherwood Forest would leave behind something that even an inexperienced tracker could follow.

He decided that was to be his plan of action, and settled down to a hunched-over squat amid some nettles to wait for the light of dawn. He wouldn’t sleep. Instead his mind would do what it always did when the rest of the world was in slumber: a defrag . A chance to play through the endless terabytes of data stored on his hard drive.

Memories.

To replay it all, every single image, every sound, every sensation, every smell. To try and make connections, to make associations, to understand a little better what it would be like to have a real brain. To be a realhuman , instead of an engineered tool … a meat robot.

He’d just started unpacking and sorting through a slideshow of memories when he detected the faintest odour of woodsmoke. Not the ever-present odour ingrained into the tunic he was wearing, the smell of melted tallow mixed with stale sweat. This was on the air … a fire burning somewhere out in the forest tonight, caught on the fresh breeze and carried for miles.

He sniffed loudly, his broad nostrils flexing like a horse’s.

The faint odour again.

He stood up quickly, scanning the woods in a steady 360° arc, hoping to detect just the faintest flicker of light deep in the woods. He saw nothing. But … he had the odour. Not just the smell of dry seasoned logs, but the vaguely minty odour of pine needles burning.

A campfire.

He decided to follow his nose.

1194, Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire

It was morning and a mist mingled with the white smoke of a dew-damp cooking fire, drifting up through the canopy of branches above.

Liam watched Locke’s camp slowly stir to life; men in rags turning over under their damp capes, robes and animal-skin covers. He heard the snotty rattle of someone clearing his nose and hawking it out on to the ground, and the distant chup chup of someone already up and cutting firewood.

Locke was trusting him not to run, allowing him the freedom to move around the camp. Liam felt the men’s eyes on him, distrusting eyes, resentful eyes. If he did attempt to run from the camp’s perimeter into the thick undergrowth, he was certain any number of them would gladly take the opportunity to hunt him down and put an arrow in his back. And he wasn’t really going to get far barefooted. Locke had had him remove his leather boots and donate them to one of his men. A gesture of humiliation that had proved popular: a Norman noble reduced to picking his way about the camp as barefooted as a common street beggar. The men clearly liked the idea of that.

Liam watched Locke emerge from his hut, stretch and yawn. The robot emerged behind him, swathed once more in robes, the top half of its metallic head lost in the shadows of its hood, the plastic-skin chin and jaw just barely visible.

‘Listen! There is news!’ announced Locke. All heads turned towards him; the various activities of stirring men came to a halt. ‘Our leader, the Hooded Man, has received news.’ Locke nodded respectfully up at the robot standing beside him, a foot taller. ‘News from Nottingham. It is said King Richard has returned to England! And, as I speak to you now, he is travelling northwards, towards us!’

Voices raised through the camp. Locke’s men unsure how to greet the news.