Infinity Cage (29 page)

‘It all makes sense … now,’ she said.

Maddy and Becks were sitting in the middle of a deserted staff canteen, a large open-plan floor filled with round black tables, gel-seat chairs and plastic plants in large terracotta pots. Spotlights in the ceiling cast muted pools of light across the beige carpet. In one corner of the canteen, holographic beams projected a soothing forest scene, while the sounds of a babbling brook, birdsong and the hiss of swaying branches and leaves filled the room.

The long wall of the canteen was floor-to-ceiling glass. It was pitch-black outside and they could only see their own reflections staring solemnly back at them.

She slurped at a spoonful of a concoction made of organo-beef granules and black-bean noodles. She looked at Becks. ‘You know what?’

‘What, Maddy?’

‘I feel … like, I dunno, I feel like a ton of weight’s been shifted off my shoulders. Like I’ve just finished running some kind of ridiculously long marathon and I can go collapse in a dark hole now.’ She absently stirred the bowl in front of her. ‘I feel so tired. Totally exhausted.’

‘After you have eaten, you should get some rest, Maddy.’
Becks studied her and realized how
spent
she looked. Her eyes were red-rimmed and heavy, her freckled skin pale and drawn. Even her wild, wilful, frizzy hair looked like the life had been wrung out of it and it dangled in tired and matted corkscrews.

‘You look unwell, Maddy.’

‘Actually, you know, I know I’m tired, but I feel pretty good.’ She smiled. ‘We did what was needed, right? What had to be done. We were there and we stopped …’ She paused for a moment, silently counting on her fingers. ‘Over the last two and a half years we stopped four separate attempts by other people to derail this timeline. We saved this world four times.’

To Becks’s ears that sounded like bravado. Like a heavy-handed dose of false cheer.

‘You have performed very well, Maddy.’

They ate in silence for a while, the canteen echoing with the sound of their forks scraping porcelain and the soft chirruping of woodland creatures.

Finally, Maddy spoke again. ‘So I guess that transmitter in the jungle and the other one in Jerusalem weren’t made by future humans, like we thought, but
aliens
 … Waldstein’s
Caretakers
?’

‘Correct.’

‘My God!’ She laughed. ‘Aliens?’ She lowered her fork and stared at Becks. ‘It so makes sense!’ She closed her eyes briefly, trying to recall the carved hieroglyphics on the floor stones. Adam had been certain some of the figures depicted the builders, the creators of the transmitters. Adam had called them the ‘Archaeologists’. He’d said these people from the future would probably have been worshipped like gods.

You were closer than you realized, Adam
.

If those carved figures had been actual extra-terrestrials … then of course the primitive Mayan people would have seen them as godlike.

‘Maddy?’

‘Huh?’

‘Do you think Roald Waldstein knows about the transmitters? He did not make any reference to them.’

She nodded thoughtfully. ‘No, he didn’t. I don’t know how those things fit into his story. Perhaps they’re devices that allow them to monitor time-travel activity, or the state of that “membrane” between here and chaos. Or maybe they use them to call home or something!’ She shook her head. ‘Rashim would have really got off on this, wouldn’t he? What with his theories about pocket universes and all the Drake-Equation stuff.’

‘Yes.’ Becks nodded. ‘He would have found this very interesting.’

They finished the rest of their food in a morbid silence. Just the two of them, sitting side by side like the last two sisters in an abandoned nunnery. Mentioning Rashim had once again set Maddy’s mind off thinking about absent friends.

There was an accommodation wing on the other side of the fifth floor, the one below Waldstein’s. There were a dozen bedrooms and a shared bathroom. It had been set up for members of the research staff who preferred to sleep over on the campus rather than travel the mountain road back down to the nearest town for the night. Waldstein showed them a room each and left them to get some sleep.

The next morning he came down and met the two of them in the canteen. He shuffled in, carrying a coffee cup rattling in a saucer in one shaking hand, and wearing a thick, woolly dark-green dressing-gown over baggy trousers and a jumper, his snow-white hair tufted and left messy by a restless night.

‘How do you feel now, Maddy? Better?’

‘Yeah, thanks,’ said Maddy. ‘I haven’t slept that well in quite a while, Mr Waldstein.’

‘Support unit, have you fed yourself? Are you nutritionally replenished?’

Becks looked at the half-empty tumbler of pondwater-green sludge in front of her. ‘Yes, the protein solution is adequate.’

‘Good.’ He sat down at the end of the table.

‘Can I ask you a question about Foster?’

‘About Foster?’ The old man shook his head and laughed softly. ‘No, if that’s what you’re asking, he wasn’t a clone engineered from my DNA.’

‘But he looked very much like you …’

‘As Liam will one day, I imagine. But no … It wasn’t me.’

‘Then who?’ asked Maddy. ‘And what about me? I want to know whose DNA I was engineered from.’

He sighed, leaned forward and started fumbling inside his dressing-gown for something, then pulled out an old worn leather wallet. He opened it up and leafed through various pouches full of yellowing, dog-eared corners of paper. He found what he was looking for and pulled it out very carefully.

A photograph. He handed it to her. She saw a couple and a baby. A man and a woman holding each other, smiling; clearly a couple deeply in love – happy times for them and their newborn child. The couple were in their early thirties. The man had wiry thick dark hair, prematurely greying at the temples, deep-set eyes within a lean face. The woman had curly strawberry-blonde hair, pulled back to reveal a pale freckly face.

It took Maddy a few moments to realize who she was looking at. The man in the photo … was a
much
younger version of Waldstein. The angled jaw, the lean face, the dark brows, the unruly dark hair. She then looked at the woman holding the baby.

OhMyGod …

‘May I see, Maddy?’ asked Becks.

She turned the photo towards her. ‘The woman? It looks … like …’

‘It looks like you, Maddy,’ said Becks.

‘An older version of me!’

‘That’s my wife, Eleanor. Me … and that’s my son, Gabriel.’

Maddy slapped her hand down against the table. ‘Oh, I get it. I get it now. You engineered me from your
wife’s
DNA?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Sal?’

‘Her DNA came from … our research-campus gene pool. We screened for a suitable candidate with pronounced visual acuity, high intelligence. We ended up with someone Asian, so she was given appropriate life memories.’

‘And what about Liam … Foster …?’

‘Yes. They both came from my son’s DNA.’ Waldstein looked away from her for a moment, unable to look her in the eye. ‘You will never know how hard it was for me to see your faces growing in those tubes, to see my wife behind the glass. To see the young man my son could have grown up to be behind that glass. To see how much he would have ended up looking like me if he’d lived his life.’

His weak voice began to warble with emotion. ‘And the pair of you will never know how hard it was for me to leave you behind in Brooklyn at the turn of the century and come back to this godforsaken time.’

‘But that didn’t stop you being able to instruct a whole batch of support units to come gunning for us,’ replied Maddy.

‘Yes … yes, I know. But maybe now you understand the stakes. Left to your own devices you might just have decided to turn today into a better, rosier, happier world. And, my God, if you had … there’d be nothing left of Earth now.
Nothing!
’

A solitary tear spilled down on to one of his craggy cheeks. ‘I had to order those support units to kill copies of my son and my wife. I had no choice. And I can’t imagine you will ever … 
ever
understand how difficult that was for me.’

They sat round the table in an uncomfortable silence, listening to birdsong and Becks slurping from her tumbler of protein solution.

‘I said “welcome home” when I met you at the gate,’ Waldstein said finally. ‘In many respects, you have come home … this place
is
your home, Maddy.’

‘The only
home
Liam and I have ever had was what we managed to make for ourselves in New York. And you forced us to run from that.’

‘I completely understand how you must still feel,’ he replied. ‘I’m sorry. What I did was a mistake.’

‘You have no frikkin’ idea how I feel! To give me a memory of a life, then discover it’s just fake?! Everything I thought I was, every emotion, every preference, every choice I made … were they my choices? Or someone else’s? Were they programmed into my head … or free decisions? For God’s sake, who the hell am I?’

‘You are the person you’ve become over the last few years, Maddy. The sum of your own experiences and emotions. What you’ve lived makes you Maddy Carter, not the library of memories you had pre-installed.’

Waldstein set his coffee cup down carefully on the table, then picked up the old photograph, tucked it back in his wallet and put it away inside his dressing-gown.

‘Tell me, would you like to see where you were born?’

Liam studied the screen. ‘How big a space are we looking at?’

> If it is one continuous void, then it is 270 feet long, 190 feet wide and 57 feet high.

‘It’s big, but, if I’m looking at that right, it’s not a circular space like the other one.’

‘The shape of the chamber may be an irrelevant detail. The engineers who constructed the other beam created a circular chamber to reflect the geometry above it.’

Liam understood what Bob was getting at; they may have been wary of creating a void that would look too much out of place, particularly if at some point down the line someone started conducting seismic surveys.

> This void is significantly deeper than the other one. A greater attempt has been made to conceal it.

‘Because it’s bang in the middle of one of the oldest cities in the world … I can see why they’d want to place it deeper. Computer-Bob, can we open a pinhole in there and get a look?’

> Affirmative. Where do you want to locate the pinhole in this void?

‘Somewhere in the middle?’

‘Caution.’ Bob pointed at the screen.

They were looking at a theoretical 3D model of the ground beneath the temple compound. It had taken computer-Bob most
of the day and well into the evening to lightly probe and probe again in a densely plotted grid pattern. Liam had watched the model slowly build up in detail on one of the screens as the density information from each new probe added to the sum total of what lay down there beneath the temple. He could see a wire-frame outline that looked like it might represent the steps he’d descended beneath the building. And this model confirmed what he’d said; there was what appeared to be an endless labyrinth of passages and stairwells, catacombs and sewers descending down into this giant slab of bedrock. A porous, sponge-like mass of spaces carved by those who had lived on this rock long before the city became known as Jerusalem. According to Sir Richard F. Barton’s book, the giant slab of bedrock on which the city was perched had probably been occupied by humans as far back as the Bronze Age, as long as 15,000 years ago. Liam wondered if the transmitters’ engineers had even gone back as far as that in order to hollow out the space they needed to install their device.

‘I suggest we open a pinhole away from the centre. If a tachyon beam is now active and, like the other transmitter, located in the middle of the void, the pinhole will open within the beam.’ He turned to Liam. ‘They may detect that.’

‘They?’ Liam grinned skittishly. ‘And here we are still having no bleedin’ idea who “they” are. I do hope they’re nice and friendly and don’t mind someone having a little peek.’

He turned to the screen. ‘All right, let’s put the pinhole up high and discreet in one of the corners. How about that?’

> Affirmative. Displacement machine has sufficient charge to proceed.

‘Right then.’ Liam rubbed his hands together. ‘Let’s take a look.’

> Beginning …

Liam and Bob patiently watched a screen to the right. In one small window, a scrolling density-scan display was showing a relentlessly flat line. It quivered for just the briefest moment.

‘The pinhole is being opened,’ said Bob.

Then another window popped open on the monitor. Pixels began to appear, column after column, from the left. Black and featureless pixels showing nothing at all, until the very last column; they could see the faintest vertical line of grey pixels.

‘What’s the line?’

Bob shook his head.

‘Damn it … it was just starting to get interesting. Can we do another pinhole? Move it along a few feet, and turn it a bit more to the right so we can centre on that line?’

> Affirmative.

They waited again, saw the density scan wobble slightly. Then once more another image began to build itself on the monitor, stripe by stripe from left to right.

‘Oh … my … God …’ Liam slapped the edge of the desk. ‘I think we got something this time!’

A vertical stripe of pure white ran midway across the image. At the bottom of the stripe there were some grey pixels pooling on either side of it.

‘Those pixels could be light reflected,’ said Liam. He looked at Bob. ‘A shiny, smooth floor maybe? Just like the other one?’

‘Yes, it could be.’

‘Computer-Bob, can we do another one with more detail?’

> I can do a higher-resolution image.

‘Can you make it any lighter?’

> No.

‘Can you move in any closer?’

> Of course. I can locate the pinhole closer to the centre of this void.

‘We must be cautious now, Liam,’ said Bob. ‘The chamber may not be deserted as the other one was. There may be sensors … they may be able to detect a burst of particles if we do this too many times or too closely.’

> Bob is correct. We increase the chance of broadcasting our presence.

‘Let’s just do it,’ Liam said impatiently. ‘I need to see more than a white line.’

> Affirmative. Proceeding …

Once again the density display fluctuated, then another image began to build itself strip by strip on the screen. This time more slowly. The pixellation was gone. Now they were looking at a grainy image instead of a blocky one.

Liam leaned forward and stared intensely at the screen. ‘The light … that’s definitely another one of those beams.’ He squinted. ‘Computer-Bob, can you make that bigger?’

> I will maximize the image.

The entire screen was filled by the dark and grainy image file. Liam could see the glowing beam was spilling from an opened section of a vast cylindrical structure that extended out of the picture, presumably as the one in the jungle had done, all the way up to the ceiling.

‘Can you zoom in some more on the cylinder?’

The image shuffled in steps, expanding and growing in size, becoming blurrier, grainier. He squinted as he stared at what appeared to be the faint lines of hundreds of palm-sized symbols on the smooth surface.

‘It’s the same thing, isn’t it? Exactly the same?’

Bob nodded. ‘It appears to be.’

‘Zoom back so it’s all on the screen again, please, computer-Bob.’

> Affirmative.

The image shuffled back out again. Liam studied the glowing light. Just like the other transmitter, it was featureless and white, a sliver of chaos space. The floor at the base of the column reflected the glow – a wedge of light that spread out across the smooth surface and eventually petered out into darkness. But there was something else there, just about caught by the furthest reach of light. The faintest blur of something hiding right on the cusp of being lost in darkness.

‘What’s that? There … bottom left-hand corner of the image?’

> I see something.

‘Zoom in on it, will you?’

Once again the image jerked as it expanded in steps. The grey smudge shuffled to the centre of the image as computer-Bob zoomed in on it.

‘That’s … that’s some kind of a face, isn’t it?’ Liam leaned across the desk and studied the faint, ghostly image: an oval with a distinctly pointed bottom, quite possibly the sharp line of a chin. Two dark pools that might just be the orbits of deeply sunken eyes. And – if that oval was indeed a head – then, just above it on the side nearest the light, a solitary pixel hinted at some kind of short stubby protrusion emerging from its forehead.

‘Are we looking at one of … 
them
?’

‘If that is a face, Liam, then … it appears to be looking directly at the pinhole.’ Bob leaned down beside him, both of their faces now glowing from the cool spill of light from the computer monitor. He turned to Liam. ‘Which appears to suggest … they now know they are being watched.’

A chill ran down Liam’s spine and brought goosebumps out along his forearms.

He nodded. He reached out and traced his finger slowly along more of the blurry pixels. He thought he could make out the line of a long bare neck, a lean naked shoulder … and, slightly fainter, something just visible peeking over the top of the shoulder, the ghostly outline of what looked just a little bit like a wing.

Bob turned to Liam and cocked a thick coarse brow.

‘Uh-huh. I know what you’re thinking, Bob.’

I don’t believe in this kind of thing … there aren’t angels in the clouds or devils with pitchforks deep underground. What I’m looking at is a grey pixel. That’s it. Nothing more.

‘What next, Liam?’

He stood up, stepped back and took a deep breath. ‘It looks like they’re there. Or one of them is.’

Bob nodded.

‘I, uh … all right, I wasn’t actually expecting to find someone home.’

‘Liam, we know there’s a beam here. We know exactly where it is. That was our original mission objective, to confirm the precise location of the other transmitter. We should wait until Maddy returns, then –’

‘Or –’ he looked at Bob – ‘we can make contact.’

‘If we wait, there will be more of us.’

‘Strength in numbers, huh?’

‘Correct.’

Liam shook his head. ‘Do you honestly think five trespassers instead of two are going to make any difference to the people who made something like this?’

Bob scowled.

‘If we’re not welcome … I’m sure they’ll do us in just as
easily, five or two. And …’ He spread his hands. ‘Maybe two will look a bit less threatening?’

‘I recommend we wait until the others have returned.’

‘And whoever that is standing down there … he might just be leaving.’ Liam pursed his lips. ‘I want to talk to him. I’ve got a million bleedin’ questions I want to ask him. I think we should make contact.’