Extinction Game (6 page)

Over the next several hours, I saw things and places I can hardly describe. I no longer had any choice but to accept as absolute truth everything Nadia and Yuichi told me.

The next world we visited looked almost normal, viewed on arrival through the hermetically sealed windows of a vast dome. I saw dusty streets overgrown with weeds and trees, and buildings slowly
crumbling from decades of neglect. I saw minarets and onion domes, and learned we were in the outskirts of Istanbul – although not, of course,
my
Istanbul.

To step outside, I was told, was to die. We were on an Earth that had suffered what Yuichi called a ‘slow apocalypse’. It seemed that decades before, some as-yet-unidentified
environmental catastrophe caused the birth rate amongst higher mammalian species first to dwindle, then drop to zero, guaranteeing extinction. Humanity soon suffered the same fate. Then it got
worse: everyone under the age of thirty started to die, until the only remaining witnesses to this particular tragedy were a few doddering geriatrics.

The next world proved to be coated in ice to a depth of some miles. After that, we travelled to yet another, with a swollen sun that blazed down on desiccated ruins and oceans reduced to dusty,
lifeless bowls.

When finally we returned to the hangar and the island on which it stood, it appeared infinitely more welcoming than it had that same morning.

‘And this place?’ I asked, following Yuichi and Nadia back out through the hangar doors. The sun had crossed the sky, and now dipped towards the ocean. ‘Where does this island
fit into your categories?’

‘This alternate is a TEA,’ said Yuichi. ‘Category 1.’

‘That doesn’t tell me anything,’ I said, not quite able to hide my exasperation.

‘It means that exactly what happened here is still a mystery. We don’t know where the people went, or why, or how. There are no corpses, nothing but a few smoking holes in the ground
in the middle of nowhere where somebody dropped nukes. But there’s nothing remotely communicable in the air or the water or the food chain, or anywhere else we can identify. Whatever did for
the people here is, we hope, long gone. Besides, we’ve been here a good couple of years, and nothing’s happened to
us
.’

‘There must be records here somewhere on this alternate,’ I said. ‘Something that would make sense of where all the people went.
Somebody
must have written something,
left some kind of clue.’

‘Sure. Maybe they did, and we just haven’t found it yet. But from what we can tell, it happened fast, Jerry – real fast.’

I looked at Nadia. ‘You said this is Easter Island. That’s the one with all the statues?’

Nadia nodded. ‘They’re called
moai
,’ she said. I knew the island’s original inhabitants had left monolithic carved stone figures of revered ancestors scattered
all across their land. ‘It’s worth taking a drive out to see them.’

But why are we here, I wondered, on this remote island of all places? A thousand more questions crowded my lips, but I felt sure that for every one of them that might be answered, a hundred more
were waiting to be born.

Even so, there was one in particular that overrode all the rest.

‘Why me?’ I asked. The wind blew across the island’s slopes, singing through the wire fence surrounding the compound. ‘Why go to all the effort of finding me and bringing
me here? You told Tony I was the “new Pathfinder”. What the hell does that mean?’

‘The Pathfinders are advance scouts,’ Yuichi explained. ‘We’re Pathfinders – people like you, me and Nadia. We’re the first people to go in and explore new
alternates and assess their dangers on behalf of the Authority. When we’re not carrying out research and reconnaissance, we search for technology and data, most often from alternates more
advanced than the Authority’s own.’

‘What if there isn’t a transfer stage on the other side?’ I asked.

‘Depends,’ said Yuichi. ‘We either take a portable stage through and set that up as soon as we arrive, or we can bring someone back at a prearranged time so long as they make
sure they’re on the exact same spot where they arrived. That last one’s a little tricky, though, so we prefer not to do it too often.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘And “people like us” – what did you mean by that?’

‘If there’s one overriding thing we all have in common,’ said Yuichi, ‘it’s that each of the Pathfinders is the survivor of an extinction event. We all come from
alternates where the human race was nearly or completely obliterated – and one or two of us, like you, have every reason to think we might actually have been the last living people on our
worlds.’

I looked between them and laughed, the sound edging towards hysteria. ‘Just to be clear – you’re telling me you’re the last man and woman on Earth, but from
different
Earths?’

‘It’s not quite that simple,’ said Yuichi, ‘but close enough.’

‘You’re here,’ said Nadia, ‘because we’re recruiting. There are about a dozen of us, and we all learned how to survive for very long periods of time in extremely
hostile environments. In the eyes of the Authority, that makes us uniquely qualified for the kind of work they ask us to do.’

‘And the Authority are who, exactly?’

‘That’s where it gets complicated,’ said Nadia, folding her arms. ‘We don’t really know.’

I blinked, unsure at first I had heard her correctly. ‘You don’t
know
?’

‘We know they invented the transfer stage technology,’ she continued. ‘But they keep their cards close to their chest about anything else. What matters is that they rescued us
from our various alternates and gave us a chance at a new life, when a lot of us had every reason to believe we would never set eyes on another living human being ever again.’ Her gaze fixed
on mine. ‘I know just how hard it can be, Jerry, to be alone for so very long. It drives you mad, pushes you over the edge, until the day you wake up and realize you’d rather end it all
than suffer one more day alone on a dead world. After that, it’s just a matter of time before you either lose your mind or take the easy way out.’ She stepped a little closer to me.
‘Does that sound familiar to you?’

‘A little,’ I said, unable to hide more than a hint of defensiveness. What she had said sounded so familiar, in fact, I wondered if she had spoken with Sykes, the psychiatrist who
had interviewed me.

She smiled humourlessly. ‘When you get a chance at a new life like that, you don’t ask too many questions. You’re just overjoyed not to be on your own. I’ll be straight
with you, Jerry – you’re here because we know all about you. We know from your diaries you went all across the globe looking for the people who murdered your alternate, and that you
managed to kill some of the people responsible. Most people couldn’t manage a fraction of what you’ve done, and you did it knowing you might well be alone for the rest of your life.
That,’ she said, ‘makes you an exceptional human being, and that is why the Authority want to recruit you to work for them.’

I looked between the both of them, unsure at first what to say. I was still struggling to absorb everything I had been told and learned in just the last few hours.

‘Do I get a choice in this?’ I asked at length.

‘Sure,’ said Yuichi. He looked at Nadia. ‘Tell him.’

‘The Authority can’t force you to work for them,’ she said. ‘But the alternative is just going back where you came from.’

‘Did anybody ever choose to go back?’ I asked.

She laughed as if I’d said the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard. ‘Are you fucking crazy?’ she said. ‘Of course they didn’t. Who the hell in their right
mind would?’

‘It’s just a lot to take in,’ I said, massaging my temples with both hands. ‘I mean – Jesus, a few days ago I was staring at a gun in a drawer wondering if I could
use it on myself, and now here I am, and you’re telling me all this, and . . .’

‘I know,’ said Nadia with apparently genuine sympathy. She put a hand on my shoulder. ‘I had to make the same choice myself. We all did.’

I realized I was crying; whether from joy, or grief, or sheer sensory shock, I couldn’t tell you. Most probably some combination of all of the above. These people had kidnapped me, locked
me up, shot me with darts, taken me on a roller-coaster ride to places I hadn’t even imagined might exist, then asked me to work for an organization that revealed nothing about itself, in
return for being rescued. There were plenty of things that didn’t quite add up, and I could sense there was a lot they still hadn’t told me.

Yet, despite all that, I was desperate to accept what they were offering, regardless of any conditions stated or as yet unstated, because of one single undeniable, irrefutable truth. What they
were offering me was infinitely preferable to what I’d had before. I could see in their eyes that they knew this, and that they knew I knew it. It didn’t matter, and I didn’t
care.

‘Then I’ll say yes,’ I replied. ‘Assuming somebody around here can tell me exactly what the hell it is you want me to do.’

Barely a month later, and a few short hours before I found myself trapped in a subterranean cavern, in imminent danger of being swallowed up in a lake of fire, I found myself
standing on the edge of a vast precipice.

Nadia was with me. At our feet, an enormous shaft at least a mile across had been dug deep into the Icelandic coast. The only light came from the stars above, and from Hekla, a volcano seventy
miles distant that was undergoing one of its periodic eruptions. Its summit burned red, the fiery glow clearly visible on the horizon.

I was on yet another post-apocalyptic alternate. I had, as yet, seen no other kind of parallel, and yet I knew that by its very nature the multiverse must contain an enormous variety of
timelines where there had been no extinction event within living memory. The Authority’s peculiar obsession with dying or dead worlds was something for which I still had no explanation.

Integrated circuitry in the visor of my spacesuit compensated for the lack of light, so that I could see where a road had been cut into the walls of the shaft. It spiralled down until it finally
vanished into stygian depths, where not even my suit’s circuitry could compensate. On the far side of the shaft lay the war-ravaged ruins of Reykjavik, where the Icelanders had made their
last stand against invading European and American forces.

According to the readout on my helmet’s display, it was a chilly 268 degrees below zero, cold enough that the snow lying all around us was composed not of crystallized water, but of frozen
air. As their world spiralled out of its former orbit, moving farther and farther away from the life-giving sun, the atmosphere had grown sufficiently cold that it had frozen into a thin layer
clinging to the ground. Beyond my visor lay only hard vacuum, and certain death were I to remove my helmet.

Without an atmosphere to scatter the light and make them twinkle, the stars were bright and unblinking. Nadia had earlier, for my benefit, pointed towards the horizon and indicated the rough
location of the sun. I saw nothing except a star a little brighter than the rest, surrounded by unending darkness.

‘What is that?’ I asked, seeing a dot of red light flash in one corner of my visor. A faint beeping accompanied it. The air inside the suit tasted dry and rubbery, and my throat
rasped every time I swallowed. There were other readouts, projected onto the interior curve of my spacesuit’s helmet, many of them as yet indecipherable to me. Part of the reason we had come
to this alternate was so I could learn how to manoeuvre inside such suits as this.

‘Some kind of alert,’ said Nadia, her voice clipped. ‘I just hope it’s nothing to do with that tremor a minute ago.’

As it would soon turn out, it had everything to do with the tremor. As if in response, the ground shifted once again beneath our feet, just very slightly, and I automatically stepped back from
the edge of the chasm.

I looked over at Nadia; her face was barely visible behind the visor of her spacesuit. My suit’s electronics painted her face in witchy green. ‘So what’s it about?’ I
asked.

‘Don’t know,’ she replied. ‘The suit radio’s a piece of crap. Hasn’t got enough range even to contact our Forward Base directly.’ She gestured towards
the Excursion Vehicle parked nearby that had brought us here. ‘Let’s head back inside.’

I nodded, and followed her back over to the vehicle, sweating and cursing as I tried to walk in the heavy suit. I felt fitter and in better shape than I had in a long time, thanks to the
intensive programme of training the Authority were putting me through. They needed their Pathfinders fit and healthy, but trying to walk around in the suit felt as if I was trying to wade through
rapidly hardening mud.

The Excursion Vehicle – or EV for short – consisted of a pressurized steel cylinder with wheels like rugged balloons and a slit-like windscreen at the front. Once we had cycled
through its airlock, Nadia barely paused to pull her helmet off before climbing into the driver’s seat and leaning over a microphone built into the dashboard. I stood listening, my own helmet
under the crook of one arm, as she spoke rapidly.

‘Nadia Mirkowsky here, out on EV-6. I just received a priority alert and felt a couple of strong tremors. Can you give me any more information?’

She repeated this message twice more before a reply came. ‘Miss Mirkowsky?’ said a voice. ‘There’s a general evacuation alert being broadcast and your orders are to get
back immediately.’

‘Evacuation?’ I echoed, more than a little alarmed, but Nadia abruptly put a hand up to quiet me.

‘Anything else?’ she asked. ‘Last I heard, there was a dig team down inside the Retreat.’

The Retreat was the name the Icelanders had given to the subterranean stronghold in which they had hoped to survive the death of their world. ‘I can’t tell you their status,’
came the reply, ‘but the evacuation order still stands. All I know is, the seismometers are going off the scale, and anyone who’s on excursion needs to get back here now. It looks like
Hekla’s going to blow sooner than expected.’