‘Your father—how does he manage to stop the clock like he does?’
‘It’s a ChronoGuard thing,’ I told him. ‘Any activity in the timestream gives off ripples that are easily detected. Dad places us both in a sort of stasis—as soon as the Chronos pick up a disturbance, he’s already gone. Does that answer your question?’
‘I guess.’
‘Good. Okay, pull up over there. I’ll walk the rest of the way.’
They dropped me by the side of the road and I thanked them before running up the street. It was already quite dark and the streetlamps were on. It didn’t look as if the world was about to end in twenty-six minutes, but then I don’t suppose it ever does.
32. The End of Life as We Know It
‘After failing to get Landen back, dealing with armageddon didn’t really hold the same sort of excitement for me that it would later. They always say the first time you save the world is the hardest—personally I have always found it tricky, but this time… I don’t know. Perhaps Landen’s loss numbed my mind and immunised me against panic. Perhaps the distraction actually helped.’
Consolidated Useful Stuff was situated in a large complex on the airfield at Stratton. There was a guardhouse but I had coincidence on my side—all three guards had been called away on some errand or other, and I was able to slip through unnoticed. I rubbed my arm, which had inexplicably twinged with pain, and followed the signs towards MycroTech Developments. I was just wondering how to get into the locked building when a voice made me jump.
‘Hello, Thursday!’
It was Wilbur, Mycroft’s boring son.
‘No time to explain, Will—I need to get into the nanotechnology lab.’
‘Why?’ asked Wilbur, fumbling with his keys.
‘There’s going to be an accident.’
‘Absolutely impossible! he scoffed, throwing the doors open to reveal a mass of spinning red lights and the raucous sound of a klaxon.
‘Heavens!’ exclaimed Wilbur. ‘Do you think it’s meant to be doing that?’
‘Call someone.’
‘Right.’
He picked up the phone. Predictably enough, it was dead. He tried another but they were all dead.
‘I’ll get help!’ he said, tugging at the doorknob, which came off in his hand. ‘What the—’
‘Entropy’s decreasing by the second, Will. Are you using Dream Topping in any of your nanomachines?’
He led me to a cabinet where a tiny drop of pink goo was suspended in midair by powerful magnets.
‘There she is. The first of her kind. Still experimental, of course. There are a few problems with the discontinuation command string. Once it starts changing organic matter into Dream Topping, it won’t stop.’
I looked at my watch and noticed that there were barely twelve minutes left.
‘What’s keeping it from working at the moment?’
‘The magnetic field keeps the nanodevice immobilised and the refrigeration system keeps it below its activation temperature of minus ten degrees… What was that?’
The lights had flickered.
‘Power grid failure.’
‘No problem, Thursday—there are three back-up generators. They can’t all fail at the same time, that would be too much of a—’
‘Coincidence, yes, I know. But they will. And when they do that coincidence will be the biggest, the best—and the last.’
‘Thursday, that’s not possible!’
‘Anything is possible right now. We’re in the middle of an isolated high coincidental localised entropic field decreasement.’
‘We’re in a what?’
‘We’re in a pseudoscientific technobabble.’
‘Ah!’ replied Wilbur, having witnessed quite a few at MycroTech Developments. ‘One of those.’
‘What happens when the final back-up fails, Wilbur?’
‘The nanodevice will be expelled into the atmosphere,’ said Wilbur grimly. ‘It is programmed to make strawberry-flavoured pudding mix and will continue to do so as long as it has organic material to work with. You, me, that table over there… Then, when someone comes to let us out in the morning, the machine will get to work on the outside.’
‘How quickly?’
‘Well,’ said Wilbur, thinking hard, ‘the device will make replicas of itself to carry out the work even faster, so the more organic matenal is swallowed up, the faster the process becomes. The entire planet? I’d give it about a week.’
‘And nothing can stop it?’
‘Nothing I know of,’ he replied sadly. ‘The best way to stop this is to not allow it to start—sort of minimum entry requirement for man-made disasters, really.’
‘Aornis!’ I shouted at the top of my voice. ‘Where the hell are you?’
There was no reply.
‘Aornis!’
And then she answered. But it was from such an unexpected quarter that I cried out in fright. She spoke to me—from my memory. It was as though a barrier had been lifted in my mind. The day on the Skyrail platform. The moment I first set eyes on Aornis. I thought it had only been a glimpse, but it wasn’t. We had spoken together for several minutes as I waited for the shuttle. I cast my mind back and scanned the newly recovered memories as my palms grew sweaty. The answers had been there all along.
‘Hello, Thursday,’ said the young woman on the bench, dabbing her nose with a powder compact.
I walked over to her.
‘You know my name?’
‘I know a lot more than that. My name is Aornis Hades—you killed my brother.’
I tried not to let my surprise show.
‘Self-defence, Miss Hades. If I could have taken him alive, I would have.’
‘No member of the Hades family has been taken alive for over eighty-three generations.’
I thought about the twin puncture, the Skyrail ticket, all the chance happenings to get me on the platform.
‘Are you manipulating coincidences, Hades?’
‘Of course!’ she replied as the shuttle hissed into the station. ‘You’re going to get on that shuttle and be shot accidentally by an SO-14 marksman. An ironic end, don’t you think? Shot by one of your own?’
‘What if I don’t get on the Skyrail? What if I take you in right here and now?’
Aornis giggled.
‘Dear Acheron was a fine and worthy Hades despite the fact he killed his brother—something Mother was very cut up about—but he was never truly aufait with some of the family’s more diabolical attributes. You’ll get on that train, Thursday—because you won’t remember anything about this conversation.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ I laughed, but Aornis returned to her powder compact and I had got on the train.
‘What is it? asked Wilbur, who had been staring at me as the memories of Aornis came flooding back.
‘Recovered memories,’ I replied grimly as the lights flickered. The first back-up generator had failed. I checked my watch. There were six minutes to go.
‘Thursday?’ murmured Wilbur, lower lip trembling. ‘I’m frightened.’
‘Me too, Will. Quiet a sec.’
And I thought back to my next meeting with Aornis. At Uffington, when she had posed as Violet De’ath. On this occasion we had been in company so she hadn’t said anything, but the next time, when I was in Osaka, she had sat next to me on the bench, just after the fortune-teller was struck by lightning.
‘Clever trick,’ she said, arranging her shopping bags so they wouldn’t fall over, ‘using the coincidence that way. Next time you won’t be so lucky—and while we’re on the subject, how did you get out of the jam on the Skyrail?’
I really didn’t want to answer her questions.
‘What are you doing to me?’ I demanded instead. ‘What are you doing to my head?’
‘A simple recollection erasure, Thursday. My particular edge is that I am instantly forgettable—you will never capture me because you will forget that we ever met. I can erase your memory of me so instantaneously I am rendered invisible. I can walk where I please, steal what I wish—I can even murder in broad daylight.’