It looked like the abandoned premises of some black-market, cash-in-hand PC repair shop. A sweatshop, a squat, a student dosshouse; the Aladdin’s cave of some foraging vagrant.
He offered it a lukewarm farewell wave. Thanks for the shelter. And smiled with amusement at his own mawkish sentimentality. How daft it was that a pile of damp bricks and crumbling mortar could make him feel guilty for abandoning it like this.
The RV’s motor rattled to life.
‘Come on, Liam.’ Maddy’s head was poking out of the passenger-side window at the front. ‘The sooner we’re off, the better!’
‘Aye.’ He raised his hand in acknowledgement and turned back to the dark interior. ‘Well there, Mr Archway, you’ve still got a job to do,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘After all… there’s this bridge above you that needs holding up for a while yet.’
‘Liam!’
‘I’m coming!’
Sal sat in the back of the RV on an oat-coloured seat worn through at the corners and showing yellow foam. Her seat belt didn’t work. She decided Bob could have stolen something that looked a little less old-fashioned, beaten-up and threadbare. She’d spotted glistening, spotless tour vans rolling through the streets of New York. Ones that looked almost futuristic, like spaceships on wheels. Instead they had this.
She looked out through the rear plastic window, scuffed and foggy, someone’s name and a love heart scratched into it. She watched Brooklyn receding like a movie back-projection: busy with cars, bumper to bumper at each intersection, waiting to get on the two lanes across the Williamsburg Bridge on to the lower east side of Manhattan; the morning ebb and flow of commuters, regular as bowel movements.
There was some relief mixed in with the sadness of a goodbye. At least she wasn’t going to see this particular morning ever again. Tuesday 11 September was at last playing through for them the way it did for everyone else. Once. One terrifying morning albeit seemingly running in slow motion.
Relief she wasn’t going to have to see that again. The swooping airliner. A sky filled with billowing smoke and the confetti cloud of millions of pieces of fluttering paper.
But, yes, sadness too. Brooklyn — this place, this side of the East River, had become so familiar to her. Almost as familiar as the suburbs of Mumbai that she’d grown up in. The Chinese laundromat with that old lady so proud of her office-worker son. The coffee shop from which she’d collected countless cardboard trays of coffee and paper bags of assorted doughnuts. The YWCA whose skanky showers with hair-clogged drains she and Maddy had had to use more times than she cared to remember. Their alleyway always cluttered with rubbish, the cobbles underfoot slightly tacky, the walls with fading sprayed gang tags.
And their archway.
Their home.
The RV juddered to a halt at a traffic light and just then — Sal knew it was due any second now — she spotted a subtle flash on the distant skyline: the pale sliver of a fuselage catching the morning light, moving fast and descending towards the twin pillars of Manhattan shimmering in the sun-warmed morning.
She lost sight of it among the skyscrapers, but then a moment later the distant sky was punctuated by a roiling cloud of orange and grey that drifted lazily up into the empty sky. No sound. Not yet. Just a silent eruption like an undubbed movie special effect.
Then, half a dozen seconds later, even through the closed window, over the chugging of the RV’s engine, she heard it. A soft, innocuous-sounding whump. Like the door of an expensive saloon car being slammed shut. The heads of pedestrians on the pavements either side of them turned to look towards the sky above Manhattan… and never turned back.
Green light. The Winnebago motorhome crossed the intersection and turned left on rolling and slack suspension that made the vehicle sway like a boat on a choppy sea.
Behind a row of apartment blocks, Sal finally lost sight of Manhattan, the Twin Towers and the billowing mushroom cloud of smoke and the frozen pedestrians as they headed up Roebling Street — a place where people and cars and taxis and trucks continued to move from one traffic light to the next in blissful, clockwork ignorance, at least for the moment.
Chapter 7
11 September 2001, New York
It was four hours later that footsteps scraped and tapped down the cobblestone alleyway. Nearly one o’clock. Framed and silhouetted by muted light from outside, two figures stepped into the open entrance of the archway. Two tall, athletic figures, one male, one female.
They stared into the gloom. Perfectly still. Attempting to comprehend the situation. Finally the male figure took several steps forward into the dim interior and then squatted down to inspect a tangled nest of data-ribbon cables and the green plastic shard of a circuit board, dropped or just discarded to be crushed carelessly beneath someone’s foot.
‘Faith,’ said the male unit.
The female figure joined him. Her cool grey eyes surveyed the rest of the archway.
‘It would appear we have been misled, Abel,’ she said.
‘Correct.’
She stepped towards the table topped with computer monitors, and keyboards, drinks cans and sweet wrappers. She reached out for something.
‘What have you found?’ said Abel.
She inspected the small webcam in her hand, as if the glinting, lifeless plastic lens contained a soul that could be peered into and cross-examined for answers. The AI installed on this network of computers had sent her and Abel to a random address across the city. It had assured them that that was the precise location where the human team members would emerge from chaos space — their return data stamp.
Her thoughts travelled wirelessly to Abel.
› This AI provided us with incorrect information.
› Affirmative.
Her hand closed tightly round the webcam. Plastic cracked inside her taut fist.
She turned to look at Abel. ‘The AI broke protocol. It lied.’
Abel nodded. ‘The AI may have been corrupted by prolonged interaction with the organic modules. It has developed feelings of loyalty to its team.’
Faith examined the gutted computers, the mess in the archway. Objects strewn across the floor. ‘They arrived here while we were gone.’
‘And left,’ added Abel. ‘We must determine where they are now headed.’
Faith nodded, closed her eyes and queried her mission log:
[Restate Mission Parameters]
[Mission Parameters]
1. Locate and eliminate team members
2. Locate and destroy critical technical components (see sublist 3426/76)
3. Self-terminate
She examined the detritus on top of the desk and beneath it. ‘It appears they have taken the critical technical components. The displacement technology. The support unit propagation hardware.’
‘Agreed,’ said Abel. ‘That indicates they intend to redeploy elsewhere.’
Abel joined her, then his eyes began to sweep along the clutter on the desk. ‘They may have discussed strategies within audible range of the system AI. We may be able to override the AI system and access its recently cached audio files.’
Faith pointed at the computer cases, unscrewed and exposing the innards of wires and circuit boards. ‘The hard drives have all been extracted.’
‘There may be residual data in the system’s motherboards. Recently stored data.’ He looked at her. ‘This is system architecture that is fifty-three years old. There will be data packets still on any solid-state circuitry. We can query each circuit board with a small electrical charge.’
Faith nodded. It was a place for them to start. Very much a case of looking for a needle in a haystack, though.
‘This will take many hours.’
Abel nodded. ‘Do you have an alternative plan?’
She shook her head.