TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (24 page)

All of that was a faked memory. A montage of
images. He even thought he recognized where some of the visual elements of his memory
had come from now. He’d seen a film with the girls on one of those silvery discs:
a film about the
Titanic
– in fact, it was simply called
Titanic
.
There’d been some boyish man called Leonardo Something-or-other playing the hero.
And yes … some of the images had been almost a perfect match to parts of his
hazy memory. It was as if a patchwork quilt had been made from that film and others,
from eyewitness accounts, from historical records and encyclopaedia
articles … and dumped into his head with some crude adjustments to make him
the star of that film and not that Leonardo fellow.

I’m not even Irish
.

He sighed. And yet, if he’d said that
aloud, it would have been with an Irish accent.

He wished Foster was still alive. The old
man must have experienced this moment himself. At some point in the past, perhaps while
working with the team before them, he must have found out what he was. That he
wasn’t a lad called Liam O’Connor. And yet he’d pulled through,
hadn’t he? He’d survived that appalling moment of truth and moved on from
it. Accepted it.

And he’d changed his name. It made
sense. He couldn’t still be called Liam and recruit the
new
Liam. It
would be too much of a clue. A giveaway to the truth.

He’d even managed to change his
accent.

‘Jay-zus.’

Rashim looked up from his notes.
‘What’s up?’

Liam shook his head.
‘Nothing … I was just …’ His voice trailed away into
silence.

Foster had still believed in the job. Even
though he knew he’d been lied to, set up, manipulated,
exploited
by this
agency … he
still believed the job needed doing. What was
that?
Programmed
loyalty? Was that it? Had the mysterious Mr Waldstein written
into his mind a mission priority that even if he was to discover that he was a meatbot
and that he’d been lied to and exploited, his first instinct would always be to
continue doing the job?

Just like Bob. Just like Becks. Both of them
standing outside in the car park keeping an eye out for Maddy. Duty first. Always.

The door handle rattled and the door opened,
spilling sickly green light from the motel’s glowing
VACANT
sign
outside across the room’s mottled carpet. Bob’s wide frame filled the
doorway.

Speak of the devil.

‘She is back,’ he rumbled. He
stepped aside and Maddy appeared in the doorway. She waved limply.

‘Hey, Liam.’

‘Hey.’

She turned to Becks, standing outside.
‘Go next door and wake up Sal.’

‘Affirmative.’

To Liam’s eyes she seemed a little
more alert than when he’d last seen her. If he hadn’t been so lost in his
own self-pity last night, he might have been worried about her state of mind. Worried
that she hadn’t come back. Worried she’d gone and done something silly.

‘You OK, Mads? Where’ve you
been?’

‘Getting my head straight.’

He heard the door in the next room
snick
shut and Sal appeared beside Maddy, bleary-eyed, looking as if
she’d just been roused from sleep.

‘We’re leaving,’ said
Maddy.

‘Leaving?’

‘We’ve had a couple of days of
freakin’ navel-gazing, feeling sorry for ourselves.’ She pushed a frizzy
spiral of hair away from
her face. ‘OK, so we’re clones.
We’re meatbots.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I dunno, maybe when
we’ve got ourselves sorted one of us should stick our heads in an X-ray machine
and see if we’ve got frikkin’ microchips inside us like Bob and Becks. But
that’s … that’s for another time, I guess.’

Liam grimaced, remembering hacking open
Bob’s skull, months ago, in order to pull out that tiny shard of silicon in
there.

‘Yeah, I know. Not exactly a nice
thought,’ said Maddy. ‘Well, like I say … maybe it’s on the
To Do list, or maybe I just don’t wanna know, but right now I say we’re done
with the sulking. OK? That’s enough self-pity. We need to sort ourselves out. Get
things up and running again.’

16 September 2001, Interstate 90, Newton,
Massachusetts

Sal’s bleary eyes widened.
‘We’re carrying on?’

‘Damn right we are.’

Maddy ushered Sal and Becks inside the motel
room and closed the door after them. Not that there was anyone out there in the car park
to eavesdrop – a row of empty chalets and a gravel lot with only their Winnebago
SuperChief parked in the middle. All the same …

‘If it’s just us keeping history
on track, and no one else –’ she scratched the back of her head – ‘then
we’ve got to keep it up. We’ve got no choice.’

‘But we
do
have a
choice,’ said Sal. ‘We don’t have to get involved any more.’

‘Aye.’ Liam nodded. ‘Let
it all go to hell as far as I’m concerned. If that’s the way history wants
to take itself then stuff it. Let it.’

‘Dammit, Liam!’ snapped Maddy.
‘This is serious!’

‘And I AM being serious!’ He sat
up on his bed. ‘I … I’m not sure I care any more.’ He got
up, took a challenging step towards Maddy. ‘This isn’t our world! Do you not
see that? We don’t have families to worry
about … friends … loved ones. None of us have ever had any of that.
Just memories of someone else’s families! So, honest-to-God,’ he said,
shrugging, ‘what do I care if a time wave rubs out this whole world?
Ireland? Cork … and everyone I was supposed to
“know” living there?’

Sal nodded. ‘He’s right, Maddy.
We are nothing. We have nothing. No, like, descendants. No ancestors. No family tree.
Nothing!’ A faint and weary smile stole across her lips as if something had
finally made sense to her. ‘I suppose that’s why we’ve always been
sort of unaffected by the waves we’ve been through.’

‘Because none of you are
of
this timeline? None of you belong in this timeline.’ Rashim stroked the tip of his
nose, thinking aloud. ‘All three of you are an artificial intrusion not
susceptible to any cause–effect cycle.’ He nodded, satisfied with his train of
thought. ‘That would explain how you were never changed by time waves.’

‘Yeah, I s’pose that’s
what I mean,’ Sal added. ‘We don’t belong, so we don’t get
changed.’

Liam wasn’t so interested in that.
‘Maddy, why should I care? Huh?’ He shrugged. ‘Time waves? As far as
I’m concerned, they’re now someone else’s problem, so they are.’
He laughed humourlessly. ‘Jay-zus … I don’t even know why I speak
this way. This accent. I’ve never even
been
to Ireland!’

Maddy had had enough. She reached out and
grabbed a fistful of his shirt. ‘Liam, you bubble-head! You don’t need to
have been to Ireland … to be you. Don’t you see that?’ She turned
to Sal. ‘Both of you! Me too! We’re who we are
because
of these
memories. That’s the same for everyone. Memories … define every person
on this planet.’ She had a silent audience, but no one seemed to know where she
was taking this.

‘We’re defined by our memories.
We’re the
product
of our memories. That’s it.’

She glanced at both support units – living
proof of that. Both
of them so much more than the emotionless
automatons that had slid out of their grow-tubes on to the floor.

‘So who freakin’ well cares if
the bag of memories in our heads are
ours
or
someone else’s
?
We’re here in this place right now, together, and we’re making our own
decisions and goddammit that makes us
real
!’

‘Not all of your memories are
false,’ added Becks to the long silence.

Maddy looked at the small frame of the
support unit beside her. ‘You’re right.’ She turned back to the
others, particularly Liam and Sal. She let go of his shirt. ‘We’ve been real
people since we woke up together all those months ago. Real people!’ She patted
down his puffed-up shirt gently, apologetically. ‘
Real
people …’ She smiled at them both. ‘
Real
friends.’ She
grasped his arm affectionately. ‘Real
family
.’

Sal nodded silently. Maddy thought she
caught a glint of the green of the neon sign outside reflected in her eyes, the glint of
a tear perhaps.

‘We need to continue doing the job,
guys. Come on … we’ve seen some of the horrific results time travel can
produce. I don’t suppose we’ve even seen the worst it can do. Not
yet.’

Liam gazed thoughtfully out of the
window.

Sal too. ‘I hated how those poor
eugenic creatures were treated.’

Maddy nodded. ‘And we made that
nightmare world
not
happen.’

The TV still burbled quietly in the corner
of the motel room.

‘I don’t see we’ve got
much of a choice,’ said Maddy. ‘We have to carry on. No one else is doing it
and someone has to grab the wheel, right? Someone needs to be holding the goddamn
steering wheel or this world crashes and burns!’

She winced a little at her metaphor. It
sounded like typical
Hollywood shtick. But whatever. The point was
valid. ‘We need to continue doing this job … but this time, let’s
do it for ourselves. Not for –’ she made air quotes with her fingers – ‘the
agency. Not for Waldstein. But for ourselves. We decide if and when history needs
fixing.’

‘You mean …’ Liam frowned.
‘You mean, if a better timeline comes along …?’

Maddy knew what he was suggesting.
‘Yeah! If it looks like a happier, shinier, funkier world,’ she said with a
shrug, ‘why not? We’ll decide ourselves if intervention is
required.’

She noticed Bob stirring.
‘Bob?’

‘That contradicts a primary
protocol.’

‘Remember what Foster said?’
added Sal. ‘For good or bad, history has to go a certain way?’

‘Aye, he did that.’

‘Has to go a certain way, huh?’
Maddy turned to Rashim. ‘And just remind us how history goes, Dr Anwar?’

He grinned edgily as all eyes rested on him.
‘I … I, uh, don’t really think I should be involved with this
argument.’

‘Tell them!’

‘Well, you know already. The
world’s not too good actually. A systemic collapse of –’

‘Right. We heat the world until the
ice caps melt and about a third of the land is flooded. Then we poison what’s left
of the world with chemicals until there’s no ecosystem left that’s worth a
damn. Then, not happy with all of that, we decide to wipe ourselves out with some kind
of Von Neumann virus that leaves nothing left alive. That about right,
Rashim?’

‘They were calling the virus
Kosong-ni
. That’s where it started. Ground zero.’ Rashim
nodded. ‘That’s a somewhat simplified version of events, but essentially,
yes, that’s it.’

‘And that’s what Foster –’
she splayed her hands – ‘that’s what
Waldstein
 … wants us to do our very best to
preserve
?
Anyone here think that might be just a little freakin’ stupid?’

‘To be fair,’ said Liam,
‘Foster was just following some orders.’

‘You’re right, Liam.’ She
smiled at him. ‘He was just like you …’

‘He
was
me.’

‘Right. And he was just doing what he
thought was the right thing to do. Like you, Liam – heart always in the right
place.’ She rested a hand on him again. Genuine affection. ‘Always in the
right place, Liam, doing what duty calls for. But maybe we’ve been wrong all along
to follow Waldstein’s directive.’ She took her glasses off the bridge of her
nose.

‘I’ve been doing some thinking.
I think that codeword, Pandora … I think that was a warning to us. A warning
that we’re doing the wrong thing.’ Maddy was reluctant to take her thoughts
a step further. But the logic was right there and needed to be said out loud.

‘Maybe we’ve been doing the
dirty work of someone not quite right in the head. Someone who quite simply is
insane.’

‘Waldstein?’

She shrugged. ‘He set this agency up.
And Bob? Didn’t you say those support units trying to kill us came from the same
place as you?’

‘Affirmative. W.G. Systems
software.’

She looked at the others. ‘Maybe
Waldstein sent them to kill us?’ A further thought occurred to her. ‘Maybe
when I sent that message asking about Pandora, when I sent that ad to the
newspaper … that’s what triggered all of this?’

The air in the room all of a sudden felt
very charged.

‘We were never meant to know how bad
the world gets,’ said Liam. ‘Were we?’

‘And now Waldstein knows we
know …?’ She pursed her lips, focusing on the lenses she was unnecessarily
scrubbing clean. Still thinking things through. ‘We can’t be relied on any
more. We’re a loose cog.’ She put her glasses back on. ‘Not fit for
purpose.’

‘Jahulla!’ whispered Sal.
‘He wants to wipe us out and start again!’

Maddy turned to Bob. ‘If we changed
our mission goals … where does that leave us, Bob? Does your core programming
mean you’d have to attempt to stop us?’ She turned to Becks. ‘Kill
us?’

Both support units looked at each other.

Bob finally spoke. Maddy wondered whether he
was speaking on behalf of the pair of them. Probably. Becks would defer to him right
now. Her mind, after all, was a pale reflection of his. ‘On previous occasions, I
have been able to override hard-coded mission parameters.’

‘And? So, this time?’

His thick brow lowered and became a monobrow
of intense thought. A long pause of deliberation. Finally he spoke. ‘I am able to
comply with a new mission directive.’ He stared at her intently. ‘And what
is your new directive?’

‘To, uh … to stop
Pandora?’ There was a tremulous, questioning tone in Maddy’s voice, worried
that somewhere deep in his coconut head a logic gate might flip its state at what
she’d just suggested and Bob might suddenly leap across the room and rip her head
off.