They drove in silence for a while, as they had in fact done all the way from Brooklyn. As he drove, Abel’s mind carefully sorted through the data he’d acquired in the last thirty-two hours and twenty minutes of life. Not a particularly long life, but certainly a very busy one so far.
The first nine hours of his consciousness, just as with Faith and the others of his batch, had been spent in a sterile cloning room, illuminated with a soft amber glow coming from the half a dozen growth tubes. Each of them had contained a candidate foetus held in stasis, but now recently ‘birthed’.
Six of them, naked and coated in the gelatinous protein solution drying out on their bare skin. They had sat huddled together on the cool tiled floor with empty, childlike minds. Frightened, confused. And then, without any warning, wireless wisdom had begun to flood into their minds: torrential packets of data and executable applets of AI software that shooed away the childlike fear and replaced it with impassive machine-mind calm.
Like awaking. Emerging from a coma.
Abel recalled his mind filling with compressed knowledge that unpacked itself into segments of his hard drive. Knowledge of the world of 2001. Knowledge of a place called New York. Of a place called Brooklyn. Knowledge of cars, trains, planes, people, skyscrapers, billboards, intersections, doughnuts, handguns, traffic lights, cops, radios, computers, mobile phones, the Spice
Girls, Shrek, George Bush, 9/11…
And then, finally, into that dimly lit, womb-like, amber-coloured room a human had stepped. Abel’s installed software was already prepped to acknowledge the man as an authorized user. His instructions to be obeyed without question.
The man pulled up a chair and sat down in front of them. ‘Your primary mission goal is to locate and terminate these humans.’ He held a data pad in his hand and tapped its screen.
In their six minds, simultaneously, they received a packet of images in rapid slide-show succession. Front images, profile images of a young man with an untidy shock of dark hair and thick, arched eyebrows. A young teenaged woman with frizzy, strawberry-blonde hair and glasses. A dark-skinned girl with jet-black hair that drooped like a velvet curtain over one eye.
‘You should also terminate any other humans or support units that appear to be collaborating with them. Your secondary goal is to destroy all the equipment you find at the location you’ll shortly be arriving at. This is their base of operations. Leave nothing intact. That is important. There are items of equipment there that can be used to displace time. That is an unacceptable contamination risk. All of it must be destroyed.
‘When these things are done, you are to activate your own self-destruct devices. This is your tertiary goal. Your mission is complete only when these people are dead, their field office has been completely destroyed and your own on-board computers have been irreparably disabled. Are these mission parameters perfectly clear?’
All six of them had chorused a deadpan ‘affirmative’.
Abel looked out at the bright sunny morning now, a blue cloudless sky above them. The road was clogged with morning traffic. A world of humans tirelessly going about their everyday business, getting up and going to jobs as if today was just another day. Like program loops executing regardless of the previous day’s extraordinary events. Life going on the same as before.
‘They are behaving as if nothing unusual occurred yesterday,’ said Faith as if reading his mind. ‘Why do you think that is?’
‘A post-trauma behaviour pattern,’ he replied. ‘Access your database. File 3426/344-456. Human Stress Responses.’
She blinked momentarily, digesting a short data entry on how the human mind filled itself with unnecessary repetitive tasks to block out painful thought processes. Denial. She looked at him. ‘Keeping busy so they do not have to confront what they witnessed yesterday?’
‘Correct.’
‘Experience, recollection, is useful data. Denying it makes no sense.’
‘Agreed.’
Little of what they’d experienced of human behaviour over the last twenty-three hours had made any sense. There was a frustrating randomness to human behaviour that made predicting what they were going to do next almost impossible. Like trying to accurately predict the course of a waterdrop down a rain-spattered windowpane.
There was no knowing for certain that the target named Madelaine Carter was taking her team back to her hometown. There was a strong likelihood. A reasonable probability. But no certainty. All they had to support that assumption was the indentation of that word on the jotter pad. Boston.
All they had was a very human thing… a hunch.
Faith suddenly twisted in her seat to face him. ‘I have a signal.’
His eyes locked on her and he nodded. ‘I also just detected it.’
For a second, less than that, they’d both picked up an ident signal just as they’d driven past a turn-off leading to some large square buildings fronted by an enormous car park.
‘An AI ident,’ she said. Her grey eyes locked on his. ‘Software version date — ’
‘2064,’ he finished. Nothing in this time — nothing — other than their primary target could possibly be broadcasting a signal with a future date stamp. ‘It must be them.’
‘Agreed. Take the next turning.’
Chapter 16
12 September 2001, New York
Cooper had arrived in New York not long after sunrise and was taken by an NYPD squad car over from the precinct HQ. The plain-clothes police sergeant drew up and stopped in front of a fluttering streamer of crime-scene tape.
‘As far as I can go, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Feds have it all staked out even though it was a couple of our guys that got shot,’ he added without attempting to hide his disgust.
Cooper thanked him, stepped out and flashed his ID at a uniformed officer guarding the tape line.
A chalk circle on the tarmac marked several bullet cases, and another marked a dark dried puddle of blood.
‘Is there an Agent Damon Grohl on-site?’ he asked the cop.
‘Your FBI buddies are down there somewhere,’ he replied, pointing to the opening of an alleyway beside the base of the towering support for the bridge he’d just been driven over from Manhattan.
‘So what’s down there?’
‘Damned if I know. Nothing us dumb ol’ beat cops are being allowed to see.’
Cooper crossed the intersection, flashed his ID at another uniformed cop standing at the mouth of the alleyway.
‘Yo, Cooper! Coop! Down here!’ a voice barked out from further down the alley.
It was Grohl. Cooper could make out his chunky silhouette standing two-thirds of the way down. Light from crime-scene floodlights was spilling out from some archway across cobblestones and piled rubbish.
‘Damon!’ He began to hesitantly pick his way into the mouth of the alley, sidestepping a discarded spicy chicken wrap. ‘You going to tell me what this is all about yet? I just spent the last four hours driving up here! And I really don’t know what — ’
Grohl waved at him to come on down. ‘I’m not going to shout about it. Come over here.’
Cooper made his way along the alley. At the far end of it he could see a handrail and quayside, a view of the East River and the underbelly of the bridge overhead, receding until it merged with Manhattan beyond. Warm morning sunlight picked out the tops of the skyscrapers along Wall Street. In the sky, several news choppers buzzed around where yesterday the Twin Towers had stood.