Gary Gibson - Final Days

Albright paced in front of him, taking short drags on a cigarette. The stink of the tobacco made Mitchell want to sneeze. The third man in the room – Albright had called him Scott – stepped back, massaging the knuckles of one bruised fist while studying Mitchell with a malevolent expression.

They had come for him that morning, using a gun loaded with tranquillizer darts to knock him out before dragging him down to the garage located in the building’s basement. A truck sat on a raised platform towards the rear of the space, tools mounted on racks lining the nearby walls. Mitchell had also noted a work desk littered with drills and hand-held plasma torches, and fervently hoped Albright wasn’t intending to use any of those on him.

The concrete drain in the centre of the floor was still dark from the freezing water they’d hosed him down with after strapping him into the chair. Not that they’d been able to get him into it without a struggle, given that Mitchell had come to just as they’d hustled him down the steps leading to the garage. He had managed to wriggle out of the grasp of the two guards escorting him, but Scott had slammed him face-first on to a workbench, before delivering a roundhouse kick that dropped him to the ground. The guards had then strapped him in while he was still dazed and half-conscious.

‘There has to be some reason why you survived,’ said Albright, his voice thick with impatience. ‘What kept you alive while the rest of the human race died en masse?’

‘I don’t know.’

Scott glanced over his shoulder at Albright, but Albright merely shook his head. The glowing tip of his cigarette painted patterns of light in the dimly lit space, as he took a draw.

‘You want one?’ Albright asked, raising the cigarette when he noticed Mitchell was looking at it. ‘It’s the healthy kind. Lots of antioxidants and anti-cancer agents. My doctor swears by it.’

‘No thanks,’ Mitchell swallowed, tasting his own blood.

Albright came closer, kneeling before Mitchell and regarding him from just a few centimetres away. ‘Here’s what I don’t get,’ he said. ‘Why aren’t you rushing to help us find some way to try and stop this whole terrible tragedy from ever happening?’

Mitchell looked away, his mouth fixed in a tight line, breathing hard in expectation of the next blow. Albright stared at him, waiting for an answer, then straightened up, shaking his head with disgust.

‘There’s something wrong with you – on the inside,’ Albright told him. ‘Did you know that?’

Mitchell looked back at him warily. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘We took you out of your cell, night before last, and ran some deep-tissue scans on you: fMRI, X-ray, the works.’

‘No, you didn’t. I’d have known.’

‘Your evening meal was stuffed with sedatives. Anyway, the results were pretty remarkable. We ran the same tests on the other you, but the physiological changes in your body are significantly more advanced. We also ran a DNA analysis, and found it didn’t quite match the original sample taken when you first started working for the ASI. Not only that, there are structures in your brain we can’t make sense of. Your body temperature is a degree and a half cooler than it should be, and that’s not even mentioning the more extreme physiological changes. I’ve seen surveillance footage of you moving around your cell at a speed no normal human being should be capable of. There’s no conceivable way that even a couple of years in some cryogenics facility could produce changes like that.’

With a sour expression, Albright ground out his cigarette under the heel of one boot. ‘Now, we’ve analysed, frame by frame, the A/V footage from when you and Vogel disappeared into that pit,’ he continued. ‘Both of your suits dissolved and, the instant the black oil touched your flesh, you both lost consciousness and collapsed. Those suits are made from extremely tough materials designed to withstand an enormous range of lethal environments, and yet they came apart like wet tissue paper in a hurricane.’

Albright lit another cigarette and drew on it, stepping away to lean against a nearby workbench. ‘The liquid in those pits clearly acts like a universal solvent. Some of your colleagues tried to bring back samples, but it dissolved everything they tried to put it in. Which all rather begs the question: are you, in fact, the real Mitchell Stone, or are you something else altogether?’

Mitchell shook his head and laughed. ‘You’re out of your fucking mind.’

‘Okay, here’s what we’ve been thinking. Maybe the answer we need is inside you, in some way we can’t decipher just by running non-invasive scans or occasionally bouncing you off the walls. Maybe,’ Albright took another draw, ‘we’re going to have to go a little deeper.’

‘What are you talking about?’ asked Mitchell.

‘Dissection,’ said Albright. ‘Peel back your skin and see what it is that makes you tick. Put your organs in steel trays and pick them apart to see if you’re really human.’

Mitchell felt his insides twist in horror. ‘How the hell is doing that going to tell you anything?’

‘We won’t know until we look, will we?’ said Albright, an unpleasant glint in his eyes. ‘We’ve tried persuasion and reasoning, and look where it got us. But now we’re staring a holocaust in the face and, in the absence of any willing response on your part, do you really think we’d hesitate one Goddamn moment to get the answers we need, by any means necessary?’

No , thought Mitchell, not for one second . ‘There’s nothing you can do to stop what’s coming,’ he insisted, regardless. ‘Don’t you understand that? From where I’m standing, you’ve all been dead for years. You’re a ghost, Albright.’

Albright’s jaw worked like he’d just swallowed something nasty. ‘Let’s be clear on one thing: I’m not interested in this predetermination shit. The future isn’t fixed.’

‘You brought this on yourselves. I saw how the science teams at Tau Ceti were forced to take chances. They were bringing technologies that nobody understood back to Earth without any idea what the consequences might be. The sci-eval staff all fled protests, but nobody listened.’ Mitchell cleared his throat. ‘But I did listen, and I saw how anything that looked like it could turn a profit or win a war was packed into a crate and hauled straight back home.’

Albright stared at him, the cigarette burned down almost to his knuckles.

‘What you don’t seem to understand is that the future is indeterminate, yes,’ Mitchell continued, ‘ unless you find your way into it through a wormhole, and then all time between now and then becomes fixed like a fly in amber. It’s like the observer effect: once you see it or touch it, it’s locked in one state for ever. That’s why the Founders disappeared so far into the future, to a point beyond the reach even of the wormholes. It was the only way they could escape predetermination.’

Albright wiped at his mouth with one hand, a frightened look in his eyes. ‘How do you know all this?’

Mitchell let his head fall back, suddenly exhausted. They would be recording this interrogation, the same as all the others, of course. He wondered what his unseen audience were making of it all.

‘I asked you how you could know any of this,’ Albright repeated.

Mitchell brought his head back up. ‘I already told you yesterday, because of the learning pools. When I woke up, I knew things.’

‘What kinds of things?’

Mitchell struggled to find words to describe the vast repository of knowledge now resting inside his brain. He had begun to suspect that this repository somehow existed independently of him – a library inscribed deep in the microscopic foam of reality, at the most minute level, something the black pools had somehow given him the means to tap into.