Infinity Cage (31 page)

‘Foster.’

‘Yes.’

He crossed the floor of the lab towards an old-fashioned wooden modesty screen. He pulled it aside, and dust and motes of fluff fluttered down and glowed briefly as they were caught in the shaft of light coming through the window.

‘This is where you were grown.’

She was looking into a small adjoining room, long and narrow. Both walls were lined with growth cylinders. All of them unpowered and forgotten like specimen jars in museum storage. The glass was dusty, the liquid inside them cloudy and dark. Maddy stepped forward between the two rows of tubes.

This is where I started my life.

She brushed her fingers against the glass of one, drawing a window in the dust.

‘Look, it’s probably best you don’t …’

She leaned towards the growth tube, peering in. Hanging in the middle of the foggy water floated a wrinkled carcass. She shaded her eyes to see better through the glass. The body of a young woman, thin wasted arms folded across her chest, knees drawn up, as if in death she was still ashamed of her nudity. Curly hair hung round her head like a dirty halo, framing the leathered skin of her long-dead mummified face. Her eyes, mercifully, were closed. She almost looked asleep. Asleep for fifteen years.

Me. That’s me. Maddy Version 1.

‘My God …’ she whispered.

There I float … preserved like some extinct creature in formaldehyde
.

‘When I closed this down … locked up these labs, they were no longer needed. I figured we were all finished here. History had been successfully preserved for a while … and I assumed the support units had located and
retired
you.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘I thought the agency was done with … and these were surplus to requirements.’

Surplus to requirements.

She turned round. ‘And you just left us to rot in these tubes?’

‘I had to close the labs down in a hurry. I had no choice.’

‘Just like your children, were we?’ She shook her head and cursed. ‘We were just
products
to you. Just another bunch of frikkin’ meatbots.’

‘No!’ Waldstein shook his head. ‘That’s not true. I loved all three of you. Once you were birthed and your memories installed … you became as real –’

She pushed past him, kicked the screen out of her way.

‘Maddy!’

She stopped beside Becks, then turned round to face him.

‘Maddy, you and the others are so much more than you think
you are. You became so much more than what you started out as.’ He extended a hand to her. ‘You were … you
are
 … heroes. You’re saviours of humanity.’

‘Heroes?’ She stared at his hand. ‘I feel like what I am … a product.’ Her voice hitched with anger. ‘Worse than that … a
redundant
product.’ She turned and left the lab.

Waldstein stood silent for a moment and slowly lowered his hand to his side.

Becks finally spoke. ‘I understand how Maddy feels.’

He turned to look at her. ‘You all had a purpose, the most important role … in the history of mankind … 
ever
. A mission …’

Becks nodded. ‘And now … we don’t.’

Liam finished scooping sawdust into the wooden frame of the plinth and stamped it down with his feet to make a firm bed.

‘I still suggest it is best to wait until Maddy contacts us or returns, Liam.’

‘And when might that be? Huh? Soon? Or never?’

Bob nodded. ‘This is true. But you are proposing to portal into this void to make contact with entities we know nothing about. This may be extremely hazardous.’

Liam stood on the plinth and tested the bed of sawdust with his own weight. ‘Come on, Bob, when have we done something that
hasn’t
been hazardous?’

‘You are proposing to make contact with someone who has nothing to do with Waldstein.’

‘Aye. All the more reason we need to find out who he or they … are …’

‘Their technology is far more advanced than ours –’

‘Aye, I know that.’ He stepped off the plinth. ‘But, Bob … this is it: this looks like our best chance to find out what those transmitters are there for.’

‘You expect them to explain themselves to you?’

He turned to Bob. ‘In the jungle, all we had was a vague impression of them: worn-down engravings, that was it. Just a hint of who they might be. Now –’ he pointed at the grainy
image still on the screen – ‘we finally get a chance to meet one of them in the flesh.’

‘Maddy would caution against this.’

‘No, she wouldn’t. She’d be right there with me on this. She’d want to know. And if Sal was with us now … so would she.’

‘Sal acted alone to find answers, Liam. As you are doing. This action did not end well for her.’

‘Bob …’ He gathered up his long hair and tied it back in a ponytail. ‘Look, me ol’ fella, I know this seems like a badly prepared plan, but we haven’t exactly had a plan since we started running for our lives. Just questions followed by more questions and not much in the way of answers. And that, my friend, is what I need more than anything.’

Bob stepped towards him. ‘I have a bad feeling about this.’

‘Seriously?!’ Liam laughed. ‘You’re a meatbot. Since when have you ever come to one of your logical conclusions based on something as half-arsed as a
bad feeling
?’

‘Instinct … non-conscious intuitive thought is how you and Maddy have been able to survive this long. That is why I trust your judgement.’

‘Well, thanks, Bob … but –’

‘What is your
instinct
telling you now, Liam?’

‘That maybe I’ll walk away finally knowing everything.’ He shrugged. ‘Or not walk away at all. Truth is, Bob … I think Waldstein’s just a sideshow here. He made us and this agency to keep some order. Right? Like, we’re his policemen, making sure the whole time-travel carnival doesn’t turn into a messy free-for-all. I can understand that. Sensible goal. But those transmitters?’ He shook his head. ‘We were meant to find them. That’s how it feels to me anyway. We were led to them … they mean something important and we were always meant to find out what.’

‘Always?’

‘Aye … always. Right? The Voynich Manuscript? The Holy Grail? All that stuff has been waiting around quite a while for us to put it all together.’ He looked again at the screen. ‘Right there is the fella with the answers. I’m sure of it.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

Liam grinned. ‘Instinct.’ He slapped his arm. ‘Look … I’ve just got to do this. You know?’

‘Liam, you are aware of the aphorism “curiosity killed the cat”?’

‘Aye. I know that saying. But think of it this way … at least the cat died knowing
something
, right?’

> The displacement machine is fully charged, Liam
.

‘There ya go. Perfect timing. It’s an omen of good things.’ Liam smiled. ‘I’m ready to go.’

‘I will come along with you, of course.’

‘I know you will, fella. I know you will. You always do.’

He was gone. Sometime during yesterday afternoon or overnight he’d left. Maddy found the note on his large desk, leaning against a framed holo-picture of him shaking hands with another man she didn’t recognize. He might have been a president.

His large office was just as he’d left it. A camp bed in the corner with the quilt turned back, clothes in an untidy pile on the end, empty cans of food stacked on the floor like a small supermarket-product pyramid. The ‘secret’ door to his lab had been left wide open, swung inwards. She’d looked in there for Waldstein first before she’d come back out and found his handwritten note in an envelope perched on the desk, her name scrawled hastily across the front of it.

Maddy,

I’m sorry. I created you and the others to be as real as I could. To believe you were people who’d had lives, to believe you’d left behind loved ones. So that you’d care enough what happens to mankind. Perhaps that was a mistake. I don’t know. I do know you were never meant to find that out. And you wouldn’t have if Joseph hadn’t betrayed me. But that’s by the by. Spilled milk. And
we both know what we’re not supposed to do over spilled milk, right?

The point is, Maddy, you were ‘born’ an artificial person (I hate that term ‘artificial’), but you became real. You’re just as human as me or anyone else. Probably more so. Liam too.

 

I wanted you both to be here in the present, to be among the few survivors, to be part of the rebuilding of society. This world has been cleansed. Just like Noah’s flood (if you want to use that biblical metaphor). And now it needs strong people to start again. I can’t think of two better humans to be there at the beginning.

 

I left the lab door open deliberately. I have unlocked the computer system. I want you to open a portal to wherever you’ve been hiding away from me and invite Liam through. There’s more than enough power in the campus’s emergency generator to do that. I think that would be the best thing for you; to both be part of this new world.

 

Or, if you choose, you can go into the past. Anywhere you want. Live out your lives wherever makes you happiest. But, please, make it a one-way trip. If the present isn’t for you, then find somewhere that’ll make you happy. And stay there. Remember the membrane; the fewer holes we punch through, the better.

 

If you choose that, Maddy, then make sure you leave your support unit behind with orders to destroy my displacement machine. Plus all the digital storage drives in the lab. There’s nothing outside that room that could be used by anyone to rebuild this technology. So if she smashes the circuit boards and magnetic discs then sets the place on fire … that will do it.

 

Finally, you’re probably wondering where I am. No, I haven’t gone back in time. I was rather tempted, but I think another blast of tachyon radiation will finish me off. So, Maddy, look out of my office window … go on … I’m out there somewhere. Eleanor used to tell me I don’t get out of the house enough. She was
quite right. A few days in the great outdoors, perhaps I might even spot the first green shoots of new life in all that dust. Who knows? I do wish I’d had a chance to see all three of you. I wish I’d had a chance to say hello and goodbye to Liam. Will you tell him he made me very proud?

 

Roald Waldstein

She placed the note back down on the desk.

‘What did the note say, Maddy?’ asked Becks.

‘He’s gone.’

‘Gone into the past?’

‘No … out there. The old fool’s gone out there to die on his own.’ She shook her head angrily. ‘I guess he figures it’s some poetic grand gesture.’ She took her glasses off and dabbed at her eyes, surprised that she was starting to cry yet again. ‘Well, he’s just an idiot for doing that.’

No one’s going to miss you, Roald. No one’s going to know what you did. Or even care. You could have stayed here with us. You could have tried coming back in time with us
.

She felt angry with him more than anything else. She’d have forgiven him for making her believe she was human, for trying to kill her … in fact, she already had. Now the job was done there were an infinite number of warm, comfortable and pretty places he could have ‘retired’ to for however long he had left to live.

Instead … he chose this. A pointless, sad ‘grand’ gesture
.

‘Maddy? We need to decide what we are going to do now.’

‘Yup.’ She sniffed, then puffed out air. Once again it was time for her to figure out what happened next. She placed her glasses back on the bridge of her nose. ‘I guess we go back to London. We regroup with Liam … and tell him what happened to Rashim, and we let him know what all this was about.’

‘And then?’

What then? She shrugged. She could see that was probably the point at which their paths finally parted. She knew, if Liam was released from any duty or obligations, the time and place he desperately yearned to get back to: he’d be the Sheriff of Nottingham again – that or return to the high seas to become a pirate king once more. Especially if he had Bob by his side.

And what about me?

Nothing quite so ambitious. The dungeon would feel just dark, damp and depressing if it ended up being only her and Becks and that stupid yellow robot living there. She wasn’t going to stay there. And she certainly didn’t want to come back here and be one of the few survivors hacking out a meagre existence – all dust and acid rain.

She could spin a globe, throw darts into a spread-out map, randomly flick through the pages of a history almanac … or she could go somewhere in particular. Find a certain someone who might feel something for her. Someone who might give her a very ordinary, very unremarkable, very happy life.

And what about Becks? Well, first she’d better follow Waldstein’s advice and get her to trash the lab. Then, maybe with a timed charge ticking down to destroy the machine behind her, perhaps she’d let Becks choose her own somewhere to live out her unnaturally long life. Mind you, she had no idea when and where Becks would choose. There’d been several places they’d explored recently that seemed to have awakened her imagination: the savannahs of Africa, the jungles and rainforests. Perhaps she’d enjoy living among the bonobo chimps in deepest, darkest Africa … Perhaps she’d become some kind of female Tarzan.

Maddy smiled at the thought of that. She turned to Becks to suggest that as an idea, but instead found her staring at her.

Becks’s eyes were wide and round. Her jaw hung slack and open. She looked startled.

‘Becks? What’s the matter?’

Her grey eyes settled on Maddy. ‘The decryption-lock condition has just been satisfied. That … or it has just been removed.’

‘What?!’

‘The message, Maddy … the message that was embedded in the Holy Grail. I can now reveal the entire message to you.’