‘No. Not a loop exactly.’
‘Then what?’
Foster looked at Maddy sitting up front in the passenger seat beside Bob. ‘She’s going to find out soon enough. If we keep heading this way.’
Liam turned to follow his gaze, looking at the back of her head. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
Foster reached out to Liam and rested a fatherly hand on his shoulder. ‘Liam, it’s all going to come clear for you soon enough. Perhaps far too soon.’
‘Oh, come on, Foster! Will you just tell me — ’
‘She’s going to learn.’ Foster lowered his voice just for Liam to hear. ‘And so is Sal. They’re both going to learn the truth. And it’s going to be hard for them. Much harder than it will be for you.’
‘Why? What do you mean? What’s going to be hard?’
‘Liam, you’ll cope… because I know I coped. And I carried on the agency’s work. I carried on doing the work Waldstein needs us to do.’
‘Jay-zus, you’re annoying!’ Liam hissed. ‘Just tell me! What are you talking about?’
Foster shook his head. ‘Maybe it’s best for the girls if they find out this way.’ He patted Liam’s arm. ‘Trust me… I think it’s for the best. You’ll learn the truth together.’
Sal sat near the front of the RV, the female support unit sitting dull-eyed and vacant beside her. It wasn’t Becks yet, she’d decided. It wasn’t going to be Becks properly until they’d uploaded her AI. For now, this thing was just a spare female support unit. A blank-minded one at that.
‘That’s a gene-silicon hybrid,’ said SpongeBubba chirpily.
‘I know,’ said Sal.
‘We had two dozen of those units on Project Exodus!’ The lab robot’s goofy plastic grin widened. ‘They were spooky!’ Its bauble-round eyes gazed at her curiously. ‘What’s wrong with your gene-silicon hybrid unit?’
‘She’s got a name, you know,’ said Sal, suddenly feeling protective. ‘We call her Becks.’
‘Becks?’ If the squat, square-shaped lab unit had had shoulders, he’d have shrugged them. Instead, wide, rolling, expressionless eyes above a fixed frozen grin regarded her. ‘Hello, Becks! My name’s SpongeBubba!’
The support unit’s grey eyes remained unfocused, unblinking, unintelligent. Fixed and lifeless. Her young face a frozen frown of incomprehension.
‘Hello, Becks! My name’s SpongeBubba!’ the lab unit chirped again.
‘She’s not been installed properly,’ said Sal. ‘She doesn’t know her name yet.’ Sal sighed. ‘She can’t speak anyway.’
SpongeBubba stroked his pickle-shaped nose, a gesture he must have picked up from Rashim. ‘My model, Mitzumi HL-327 LabAssist V4.7, comes with language modules and laboratory protocols pre-installed!’
‘Well, aren’t you lucky.’
‘I didn’t have to have software installed in me after manufacture. I was function-ready!’ SpongeBubba sounded like a spoilt brat.
‘Well, at least Becks doesn’t look really stupid.’
‘My model comes with a polyform plastic casing and a library of programmable templates. Dr Anwar hacked the template code to make me look this special way!’ SpongeBubba stroked his nose again. ‘He says I’m different to any other Mitzumi unit because he hacked my template code! Skippa says I’m unique!’
Sal glanced at Rashim. He was stretched out on the seat opposite, fast asleep.
‘And your voice code too? Is that his work or do all you models talk like this?’ Sal wondered how Rashim managed to cope with SpongeBubba’s squeaky, high-pitched voice and permanent false cheeriness. Fun for a while perhaps, but already she was finding the thing incredibly irritating.
‘Oh no! My voice was approximated from a few audio files made from a children’s cartoon show that used to be on cable TV at the beginning of the twenty-first century! My voice is very special!’
‘Can you use that special voice of yours quietly?’
‘Oh yes! My volume output can be modulated!’
‘Well, how about you turn it down for me?’
‘Uh-uh.’ SpongeBubba wagged a finger at her. ‘Only skippa can adjust my user settings.’
Sal wondered how Rashim could sleep so readily. She toyed with the idea of waking him up and asking him to turn SpongeBubba off or mute him somehow. The robot was still staring at her, that stupid buck-toothed smile.
‘Shadd-yah! Are you always so… so perky and annoying?’
‘Perky?’
‘Happy.’
SpongeBubba shook his whole body, his version of a headshake. ‘No. I have no capacity to emulate human emotions. My model doesn’t require that! There is a similar model designed as a domestic support unit for civilian use. That unit is installed with gesture and mood recognition and replication code. But Dr Anwar says that’s a pointless waste of install space since if you know a robot’s a robot why pretend it can have feelings?’
‘So you’re not really happy, then? You’re just designed to look that way.’
SpongeBubba stared at her, an unwavering, goofy smile. ‘Dr Anwar designed me.’
Sal couldn’t work out if the robot was blaming his owner, or just stating a fact.
Becks pointed at something she’d seen through the windscreen. ‘Urggh… ge fug, duf,’ she gurgled excitedly and pointed.
Sal nodded, pulled her hand gently down and settled her. ‘Yes… cars, that’s right. Nice shiny cars.’
Why me? She shook her head. Why do I get to babysit these two morons?
‘We’re going to have to stop for gas again pretty soon,’ said Maddy. The gauge was showing just under the quarter bar. ‘Maybe we should pull over for the night. Find a motel. We’re far enough away to be safe now, aren’t we?’
Bob nodded. ‘We are probably far enough to be safe.’
Even now, so late, ahead of them was a sea of traffic, red brake lights winking on and off as vehicles inched forward.
‘What do you think they’ll do? Do you think they’ll keep coming after us?’
‘I have no information on their mission parameters.’
‘But if, say, you were sent to kill us, what would you be doing?’
‘I would persist until the mission parameters were satisfied, of course.’
‘How would you go about that, Bob? For example… what would you be doing right now?’
Bob scowled. Thinking. ‘I would attempt to intercept police radio communications for references to stolen vehicles in the vicinity of the archway. I would be searching the archway for items of useful intelligence.’ He looked sideways at her. ‘We left in a hurry. We cannot be certain we have not left behind some information that could lead them to us.’
He was right. They had left in a hurry, a careless scramble to grab all their essentials. God knows what they’d left behind, what fragments of information lay scattered around in their wake. Maddy’s head began to throb with renewed stress.
She sat in silence for a while, her fingers caressing her temples. She looked down into the stationary cars on either side of them. The glow of radio tuners on dashboards. She imagined every single driver in every vehicle on this road was tuned into a news station and listening to reporters recap the day’s terrifying events. Late-night talk radio stations venting unbridled rage at this cowardly attack on innocent American civilians. Experts hurried into studios to try and make sense of things. Because that’s what everyone needed to have right now, wasn’t it? Another explanation.
Why? Why are we being attacked? What did we do to deserve this?
Of course, Maddy had been pulled from a time — 2010 — when a lot of thinking had been done on why 9/11 had happened. The fact that there had been warning signs. The fact that there had been people in the FBI, the CIA screaming warnings to President Bush back in 2000 that something like this Was. Going. To. Happen. Imminently. Maddy came from a time when there was perspective, hindsight, on this day; from a time when everyone understood that a terrorist attack on America was inevitable. But for the people in these cars all around them this whole nightmare was still — and would be for years yet — a bewildering and terrifying mystery.
She drew her mind back to more pressing issues, for her. ‘No matter how far we drive, Bob… there’s no knowing for sure that we’re going to be safe, is there?’