Against Gravity (23 page)

“Meaning what?”

“Look – for Draeger, building the
Archimedes
was an important step on the road to proving the reality of the Omega Point. You’re an expert on Draeger, so you know the
theory.”

The idea was more than a century old. It suggested that since intelligent life always sought to preserve itself, then, faced with the ultimate extinction – the final collapse of the
universe and the end of time – that intelligence would seek to preserve itself
indefinitely
, using some unimaginable super-science of the most distant possible future. The result would
be a subjective virtual environment, which, the theory argued, would be effectively indistinguishable from Heaven.

Kendrick saw the gleam in Buddy’s eye and shook his head violently. “Oh, come
on
. The Omega Point theory just doesn’t wash. You’d have to make a lot of prior
assumptions for it to even begin to hold water.”

Buddy made a dismissive gesture. “Look, what I’m saying is, if Draeger built the
Archimedes
primarily so that the nanite computer networks up there could try and find God for
him – well, I’m saying they achieved it. Or they found
something
, that’s for sure.”

Kendrick couldn’t keep the look of scepticism off his face. “Where’s the proof?”

“You saw the evidence.” Buddy tapped the side of his head. “The visions. The
Archimedes
.”

“Or maybe there’s something hard-wired into our augs. Something triggering a collective hallucination.”

“C’mon, Kendrick, that’s grasping at straws.”

“Look, maybe there is something in this shared-experience thing. Maybe it’s something like what happened to the four of us in the Maze, but if that’s the case I’m only
getting the thirty-second preview. Whatever the rest of you have been seeing, Erik made it clear that it was a lot more than I’d seen.”

“Which would explain why you haven’t been in touch. If you had, you’d—”

“I’d know. Sure. Erik said the same thing.” Kendrick rubbed at his face. “Fine, so you’re going to the
Archimedes
. How? And what are you going to do when you
get there?”

“The Bright is the collective term by which the AI nanite communities on board the
Archimedes
refer to themselves, right? The Bright found the Omega . . . and they also found
us.”

“Buddy, this is utterly crazy.”

“Listen to me. If you didn’t see what the rest of us saw, then I’ll tell you what we were shown. The Bright have learned a lot from the Omega. The anomaly I mentioned is a
wormhole that they’ve constructed, a gateway to the end of time.”

Kendrick began to snigger. “Yeah? So what would they do with that?”

“The Bright were designed to be curious. Every answer they could possibly desire is there at the end of time, in the Omega. So why not go straight to the source?”

“This is too much, Buddy. I don’t know how to take it in. Do you know how ludicrous this sounds? A worm-hole? What kind of wormhole?”

“There’s strong evidence that the Bright have figured out a way to access zero-point energy. You know what that is, right?”

“Sure, it’s getting something out of nothing, energy out of empty space.” Physicists had long theorized that even within cold, empty vacuum vast unbounded energy resources
existed on the quantum scale, powering the constant generation of short-lived virtual particles in a seething, invisible maelstrom of creation. Finding a way to tap directly into those resources
was an objective that physicists had been hunting for decades.

“Well, you’d need nearly infinite energy to keep a wormhole indefinitely open, in order to cause the kind of fluctuations that have been observed up there. It’s hardly
surprising that Los Muertos are so concerned about preventing us getting to the
Archimedes
. If they could get their hands on energy resources like that they could hold the whole world to
ransom – if they wanted. They don’t want any of us in the way.”

A radiant smile spread across Buddy’s features, and Kendrick was reminded of a supplicant throwing down his crutches at the feet of a healing saint. “But Los Muertos we can deal
with. What matters is that the Bright have invited us to go along with them. To them, we’re all the same: you, me and anyone else who survived Ward Seventeen.”

Kendrick returned to Edinburgh and tried again to contact Caroline, without success. In the end he let himself into her flat a second time – and found it wrecked.

Either someone had searched it messily or there’d been a struggle there. He sat in Caroline’s living room, with the moonlight streaming through her window-screen, painting pale
stripes across broken furniture and a dent in one wall where it looked as though a body had impacted hard. He tried to remember that Caroline was the kind of woman who knew how to look after
herself. For an hour or so Kendrick sat on her couch and stared numbly at the wreckage.

In the end he called Buddy and told him what he’d found.

“Shit.” Then a long-drawn-out silence. “I’m sorry, Kendrick. Do you need me there?”

“No, I don’t know if that would make any difference. I’m going to ask some questions, see what I can find out.”

“Look, I can get over there in a couple of hours—”

“It’s fine.”

“You’re going to look for her, aren’t you?”

“I’ll let you know how it goes. So stay in touch.”

“Yeah, sure. Be careful. Be
very
careful.”

Kendrick broke the connection and stared around Caroline’s ruined apartment, lost in thought.

Apart from himself, who would have known where Caroline lived? Only Malky, unless she had made new friends over the past year. An image of Malky’s dead eyes flashed through his
thoughts.

It was hard to accept what Buddy had told him about the
Archimedes
, but what he’d said about zero-point energy made some sense of both Draeger’s and Los Muertos’
actions. Zero-point energy was a prize with dangerously high stakes, and the Labrats were apparently caught right in the middle.

And then there was Hardenbrooke, who was clearly playing his own extremely dangerous game, setting each party off against the other – and presumably being paid by both without the other
realizing.

Hardenbrooke? Kendrick stared into the distance, knowing that he had only one real option left. If there was even the slightest chance that the medic had been involved with or knew something
about Caroline’s disappearance, Kendrick had to find him.

22 October 2096
Edinburgh

“Some mess, eh, Kendrick?” McCowan’s ghost sat beside him in the rain.

“Tell me I’m not crazy,” Kendrick replied. “Tell me if any of this is real.”

“Don’t talk shite.”

Kendrick had only gradually become aware of McCowan sitting beside him on the park bench. In Caroline’s flat he’d felt another wave of nausea wash through him so he had made his way
outside, desperately wanting to breathe fresh air and find somewhere to wait until the feeling of disorientation passed. He’d stopped at a stretch of green running parallel to the road into
Leith when the nausea had become particularly bad.

“Then tell me something useful. Like how to find Caroline.” As Kendrick spoke, the world around them began to move very slowly, as if caught in some viscous liquid. A dog galloped
across a street nearby in languid slow motion.

“I can stretch out our subjective time together this way,” McCowan told him. “Gives us longer to talk. But I can’t help you with Caroline, Kendrick. I’m
sorry.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Look, out of all the others who survived Ward Seventeen, you’re the only one I’m still in contact with. So, I don’t know anything about what’s happened to
Caroline. You’ll have to find that out for yourself.”

“But why are you only in contact with me?”

“Look, the treatments you received from Hardenbrooke had the unexpected side effect of blocking the signal coming from Robert . . . coming from the
Archimedes
.”

“What the hell?” Kendrick squinted at him. “Robert on the
Archimedes
?”

“Shut up and bear with me. Hardenbrooke got your augments under control, and that had the added side effect of blocking Robert – mostly. So you only got snatches, little bits of what
Buddy and the rest received. At the same time, Robert was blocking
me
, preventing me from communicating with you, or indeed with any other of the Ward Seventeen Labrats.”

McCowan held up one finger. “Except Hardenbrooke’s treatments, by blocking Robert, somehow gave me the opportunity at least to reach
you
, if nobody else. It means that I can
speak to you, but
only
you, for just seconds at a time.”

“But why wouldn’t Robert want you contacting me?”

McCowan looked at him sharply. “He’s insane – or don’t you remember what happened between the two of you? It’s hardly surprising that he bears you no
goodwill.”

“I haven’t seen Robert: no dreams, visitations, whatever it is the others got.”

McCowan had a sad look on his face. “Ken, Ken,” he said with a sigh. “You
have
seen him, plenty of times. And as for where he is, well, part of him is down here, and
part of him is up there on the
Archimedes
. You’ll be seeing more of him, once your augments learn to fully circumvent Hardenbrooke’s treatments. Robert is going to have less
trouble getting through to you now, which means, in turn, that it’ll be harder for
me
to reach you.”

A signal coming from the
Archimedes
? Knowing that made it easier, more real, more objective. “So why can’t you just – I don’t know – transmit yourself to the
station or something, if that’s presumably how Robert got there?”

McCowan made an exasperated sound. “I’ve tried and failed every time, thanks to that son of a bitch. I can’t get there on my own. And as long as Robert’s the only human
mind directly interfacing with the Bright I can’t be that sure the wormhole to the Omega is ever going to open.”

A spasm of pain shot through Kendrick’s skull and he grabbed his head, gasping at the suddenness of it. McCowan was right, though: it wasn’t as bad as previously.

Not quite.

“I don’t give a shit about Robert. What about Caroline, for Christ’s sake? What the hell about her?”

“Find her if you can but, whatever you do, I need you to get to the Maze. If you can do that, I can give you all the answers you’ve been looking for. But you need to
hurry.”

“The Maze?” Kendrick screamed through a storm of agony. “Are you fucking
insane
?”

Another intense flash of pain. Any lingering illusion of reality McCowan had possessed abruptly disappeared as his seated figure twisted into a sudden smear of colour before vanishing
entirely.

Kendrick moaned as the full weight of the seizure came upon him. He crumpled to the grass under his feet.

The Maze? Why would McCowan want him there? And where exactly
was
he—

—Unless, in some way, he was still down there. That revelation hit Kendrick like a ton of bricks.

He looked back up and the city around him was gone.

He pushed himself up onto his knees. That same tiny figure came buzzing towards him on azure wings, its passage through the long-stalked grass sending puffs of pollen floating into the air.

“I know you,” Kendrick said, as the creature hovered quite close to him, only a metre or so away. In response, the tiny lips twisted up in a cruel smile. Laughter fell from its
mouth, a tinkling half-crazed sound.

“I know you!” it cried. “I know you! I know you!”

McCowan had been right. On some deep level, Kendrick had known from the start but now he couldn’t avoid the truth any longer. The creature had Robert’s face. And it buzzed around him
on silken wings, its laughter chiming in his ears.

Then, as suddenly as he had left it, he was back in a damp park in Edinburgh, his fingers digging spasmodically into the hard turf beneath him.

It didn’t take long for Draeger to show his hand.

As Kendrick headed for home, turning down a quiet side street leading towards Leith Walk, he caught sight of an expensive-looking limousine driving towards him at speed. It braked hard and a
door swung open in front of him even before it had come to a halt. Kendrick stepped back, alarmed.

He’d barely registered the two men heading his way on the opposite side of the street. They stepped quickly towards him, pulling pistols from their jacket pockets and aiming them at his
head. He glanced around and realized, to his chagrin, that there was no one else to be seen. They must have deliberately waited until they were sure there’d be no witnesses.

Smeby stepped out from the limousine and studied Kendrick with an expression of mild amusement. Then he gestured to the two gunmen, who dragged Kendrick forward and bundled him into the rear of
the vehicle.

Another car slipped by and kept on going. Kendrick found his voice and yelled out, hoping to attract someone’s attention. His voice sounded dull and flat inside the limousine.

Then he felt the muzzle of a gun pressed against his neck and he grew still.

“These weapons are extremely quiet.” Smeby leant over from a front seat. “Nobody would hear it.”

The gunmen sat on either side of Kendrick. “There’s no point in killing me,” he said.

“I wasn’t talking about killing you,” Smeby replied. “I was talking about blowing your kneecaps off.”

Kendrick tried not to show his fear. “You could have given me a call if you wanted to see me this badly.”

“If we’d asked you to come to the Arlington to meet with us, would you really have come?”

No
, thought Kendrick, looking away.

The limousine drove into an underground parking area beneath the hotel. Kendrick was dismayed to see that there was no one else around here either, no one to witness what was
happening to him. The gunmen marched him to an elevator, keeping a firm grip on each of his shoulders. Their guns were pressed up against his head and neck respectively. Then they rode up in
silence, along with Smeby, and a few moments later were back in the same suite as before.