It seemed like every channel and feed was running the same footage of the Pacific growth. Wreathed in steam, it had already reached hundreds of metres in height, and was still rising out of the ocean at an accelerating rate. Warships could be seen in its shadow, each of them utterly dwarfed by its broadening petals. Helicopters buzzed around it like so many mosquitoes, while various talking heads debated whether or not the Sphere or the Western Coalition were going to try to nuke it, or any of the others now sprouting all around the globe.
‘I feel like I want to get up and yell at everyone we meet,’ Jeff had declared. ‘Just to warn them to get away.’ He had glanced around the autocafé at the lone drivers or tight family groups, all of them undoubtedly talking about nothing but the growths. ‘When I think about what’s going to happen, I feel . . . paralysed.’
Mitchell’s response had been to shake his head. ‘There’s nothing you can do for any of them. Your best strategy is to just focus on what we have to do.’
‘I understand that. I just don’t know . . .’ He paused and glanced down at his half-finished coffee, struggling to control the sudden upwelling of emotion deep within his chest ‘I don’t know that I deserve to survive what’s coming. You understand that, right?’ His tone had been plaintive, almost childlike.
‘Jeff, listen. I could tell you to try and hold it together, but I already know that you will. I was there in Arcorex – am there in Arcorex – and one thing I do remember is when you turned up and got me out of there.’
Jeff had felt a chill running down his spine. ‘But what if this time I decide not to? What if I just walked out of here right now and—’
‘No, Jeff.’ Mitchell shook his head, speaking slowly, as if to a child. ‘You’re talking about a paradox, but time paradoxes are impossible. Look . . . think of it this way. You won’t walk away without helping me, because history already shows that you didn’t. If you had, I wouldn’t be here; but I am here; ergo you did help me.’
‘You’re saying we don’t possess free will. That our actions are pretermined.’
Mitchell had given him a strange look. ‘That’s true, but it’s not the way it has to be.’
Jeff couldn’t hide his confusion. ‘What do you mean?’
Mitchell had a look on his face like he was making his mind up whether or not to tell him something. ‘If I tried to explain it right now, it would complicate things more than they really need to be. All you need to remember is that, from my perspective, you’ve already gone into Arcorex and pulled me out.’
Jeff had shaken his head in irritation. ‘Okay, okay. I get it. It’s just hard to remember sometimes that all of this has already happened for you.’
‘Once we’ve got him out, you and me are going to take him back to the motel, and leave him everything he’ll be needing to get himself to Copernicus.’
Jeff had finished the last of his coffee and realized his hands were shaking. The whole thing sounded absurd beyond words, yet one glance at the TriView was all he needed to know otherwise. He looked back at Mitchell, and felt as if the whole universe had somehow shrunk to encompass only the Formica-topped table at which they sat, while the rest of the world had been reduced to a blurred video loop running almost forgotten in the background.
‘That simple?’ said Jeff, with a slight twist of his lips.
‘I remember waking up in that motel room,’ Mitchell had continued, clearly not appreciating the joke. ‘I headed straight for Florida, because I could see from the news feeds what was coming. I spent – will spend – a couple of days setting up a false ID, so I could get past Copernicus’s security. That’s one reason I was able to get fake UPs for both of us as quickly as I did.’
‘You said something went wrong,’ Jeff queried.
‘Getting to the Florida Array was more difficult than you can imagine,’ said Mitchell. ‘By that time vast crowds were already gathering there, but I managed to make it through them. I faked my way past the security cordons, and all the way through to the Lunar Array, except ASI agents arrested me soon after I got there. But I managed to escape, stole a spacesuit and made my way out on to the surface. By then things were starting to change fast. The face of the Earth was becoming blanketed beneath dense grey clouds. I managed to get to one of the R&D labs in the middle of all the panic, and sealed myself inside one of the cryogenic units.’
Jeff had shivered at the look on Mitchell’s face. Even though he was describing the end of the world, his expression remained soft, almost dreamy.
‘And that’s what saved your life, while every other living thing on the Moon and Earth was wiped out?’
‘Maybe.’ Mitchell shrugged. ‘At least I can’t think of any other explanation. The next thing I remembr is being revived, and I couldn’t believe it when I learned I’d been brought back into my own past. I remember staring through the window at things I was sure I’d never see again – things like trees, birds, grass. They started interrogating me straight away, but there wasn’t much I could tell them.’
‘Then you broke out?’
‘I had to, because by then I’d started to remember things. After that, it was just a matter of time before I figured a way out.’
‘And then you came looking for me,’ said Jeff.
Mitchell smiled softly. ‘And then I came looking for you.’
Jeff had hugged himself, as if warding off a chill.
A metal panel, set into Arcorex’s main entrance, flashed from red to green as Jeff approached. He half expected alarms to begin blaring the moment he crossed the threshold, but, once again, nothing happened.
Get a grip, he told himself. As far as anyone else was concerned, he was just another member of staff coming in for an all-nighter.
Jeff swiftly crossed an atrium, partly lit by moonlight spilling down through angled panes of glass, and walked past a reception area, where a single security guard sat on a mesh-backed chair. The man flicked his eyes towards the new arrival for a moment, then returned his attention to a bank of screens. Jeff gave him a bare nod and continued across the expanse of polished marble until he arrived at a row of elevators.
As the elevator carried him below ground level, his UP began flashing a standard warning that he was now entering a high-security area. When the doors hissed open, he found himself at one end of a whitewashed corridor that was bleakly illuminated by strip lights. Mitchell had said he remembered seeing the letters B3 painted on one wall, which would mean he had been held in the lowest basement level, where all artefacts from Site 17, and other far-future locations, were analysed under strictly controlled conditions.
He moved further down the corridor, peering in through windows at labs where often incomprehensible alien machinery was X-rayed, chemically tested, blasted with radiation or simply picked apart by teams of engineers. He finally stopped and looked around, feeling frustrated. There was nowhere they could possibly be keeping Mitchell down here. In that case, how could he . . . ?
Of course. How could he have forgotten? Beyond the labs, there was an emergency ward at the very far end of the corridor; but, given Arcorex’s excellent safety record, the ward had never been used – at least until now. If they were going to keep Mitchell anywhere, it would be there.
He turned a corner and kept walking, until he reached a door where the corridor ended. Looking in through a window, he spotted four hospital-style beds, all of them vacant, but noticed an airlock at the far end of the ward that clearly led into a separate isolation unit. He entered the room, squeezed inside the tiny airlock, before using a standard staff-access code to unlock the door beyond.