Infinity Cage (30 page)

Waldstein led them up one level to his personal floor and into his capacious office. They approached a section of wall lined with faux mahogany wood panelling and shelves laden with antique-looking leatherbound books and old collectors’ editions from the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Maddy read their spines:
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
. She recognized that one.
Fifty Shades of Grey
. Not that one, though.

‘I know it’s something of a cliché from old Frankenstein movies, but sometimes it’s the oldest ideas that are the best.’ He pulled a book out at head height, revealing a dull red light that flickered. ‘Roald Waldstein. Password:
Klaatu barada nikto
 …’ He turned to Maddy. ‘Facial recognition, voice recognition and, as a final back-up, a good old-fashioned, honest-to-God password.’

They heard a soft humming from behind the books that ended with an anticlimactic dull click.

‘Oh,’ said Maddy with a hint of disappointment. ‘I was expecting the whole bookshelf to swing in majestically, or rise up … or something.’

Waldstein laughed softly. ‘It would be nice, but a little less
subtle … and perhaps a movie cliché too far for me.’ He gently pushed at a section of the bookshelf and it swung inwards. Beyond was a short dark passage with another door at the far end, beside it another dully glowing red light.

‘Same again?’ said Maddy. ‘Face recognition, voice recog–?’

‘No, that’s just a safety light I had installed so I don’t trip over and break my neck in here.’ He pointed at their feet. ‘Mind the small step down there.’ He took a pace forward and down and pushed the second door inwards.

It swung open into a dark space. Light strips on the ceiling began to flicker and blink on, like lazy fireside lapdogs stirring after too long a sleep. ‘Welcome to my inner, inner sanctum.’

He led them into a modestly sized room with a low ceiling and one small window that looked out across the cold, bare, lifeless mountains. ‘Or … I suppose we could call this the headquarters –
mission control –
of our humble little agency.’

A cluttered space. Several desks and chairs within it, and a number of computer terminals and power cables snaking across the floor. On one wall was a corkboard covered with photographs. Pictures of houses and suburban streets, of mementoes, childhood toys, family gatherings. Maddy wandered over towards it. The pictures were grouped: one set for her, one for Liam, one for Sal.

Liam’s were all sepia-coloured: a montage of grainy images of Cork in Ireland, of a port town, of a church-hall school and schoolboys wearing cloth caps and funny shorts. Fishing boats and nets. Pictures of the
Titanic
below decks. The stewards’ quarters.

Sal’s were of Mumbai, high-resolution images in saturated colour: her home, family, neighbourhood. Photographs taken by a real girl who had documented much of her life on social
media. A girl whose memories had been borrowed en masse; a girl who’d died not long after her fifteenth birthday.

And then, as Maddy walked along the corkboard, there were
her
memories pinned to the board.

My God …

She was looking at a picture of her messy bedroom. There were all her childhood things: a Rubik’s cube, an EAZY STARTZ electronic kit, her Meccano sets, her Lego Technic. And one token gesture that she’d been a girl not a boy: a doll’s house. But even then there was camo netting strung across it and badly painted Warhammer figures fighting it out in the flower bed. Beside that was a photo of the front of her house, the porch, the green door. Her street. Her high school. Friends she thought she’d once had. Family …

‘I’m sorry,’ said Waldstein. ‘I forgot all those pictures were still pinned up there.’

She took a step back from it. ‘That’s my life in pictures. My entire life … right there.’

‘They’re seed memories, Maddy. Just enough images … and smells, sounds and other sensations that your mind subconsciously stitched together to build a life narrative.’ He came over and stood beside her at the board. He tapped a picture of a class of eighth-grade students. ‘We gave you this … and your mind built a fictional story of six whole years of high school. It’s what we do when we dream … We add together all the random firing of neurons when we’re in deep sleep, and as we begin to wake we assemble them into a story.’

She shook her head. ‘I know it’s all … fake, all of this, but … it feels like I can actually remember these photographs being taken. Remember every one of these moments.’

‘Joseph Olivera made your story, Maddy. As he made Liam’s and Sal’s. He was one of the best synthetic neurological
programmers in the world. Come on.’ He put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Your life isn’t those photographs; your life is what you and Liam and Sal experienced together. And, I assure you, you’ve seen and done so much more than any normal person would have in a whole lifetime.’

He led her away from the board towards the desks and computers. ‘This is where I designed and tested the second-generation displacement machine. Where my colleague Griggs designed, coded and tested the support software. We had it up and running here before we took the critical parts back, component by component, to that archway beneath the Williamsburg Bridge and we set it up again there. Most of the non-critical components – the computer network, the power generator, the water-displacement tub, all the computer monitors and cables, for example – we sourced from the time.’

‘Who is Griggs?’ asked Maddy.

‘Griggs was my business partner – the “G” in “W.G.” and quite an exceptional computer engineer and software designer. We built the W.G. Systems business together. From the back room of my house in 2047, to a fifteen-billion-dollar technology firm.’ He looked across the small lab at his messy desk. ‘Some of those early days were fun. It wasn’t about making money for money’s sake, it was about making money for a clear purpose … so that I could safely set up something like this.’

‘He knew about your encounter with …?’

‘No. He knew just what I told him. That time travel was reckless. Dangerous.’ Waldstein then pointed at a seven-foot-tall rectangular wire cage in the corner of the room, hooked up by a rat’s nest of wires to a tall rack of circuit boards standing beside it. ‘And that’s the displacement machine.’

‘It looks … primitive.’

‘Yours was refined, a definite improvement on this one. The
perspex tube and displacement water was a more robust framework. But the guts of the machine and the software interface,’ he said, pointing to the rack of circuitry, ‘are fundamentally the same.’

‘You’re saying you built up W.G. Systems’ business empire just so you could set this up?’ It didn’t look like much to Maddy. ‘You could have done something like this in your home.’

He shook his head. ‘Not on my own. Behind the half a dozen boards of circuitry that make this displacement technology safe, predictable, accurate … lie billions of dollars’ worth of hardware and software patents.’ He looked around. ‘I know this probably is not what you were expecting to see, but it took building a business empire to get to this.’

‘And this place?’ She looked around the small cluttered space. ‘This is where you monitored our progress from?’

Waldstein nodded. ‘We had the agency up and running from the eighteenth of February 2054. And, yes, from that day on, Griggs, Olivera and I came in here pretty much every day to keep an eye out for any communications from our teams.’

‘
Teams?
’ Maddy frowned, puzzled by the plural. ‘Did you just say teams? As in … 
more
than one?’

Waldstein hesitated, then with a nod he eventually elaborated. ‘Yes, Maddy. As in more than one team.’

‘Jesus!’ Maddy cursed. ‘Jesus! I frikkin’ knew it! I knew it wasn’t just us! There were other teams? Other field offices in other places? Other times?’

‘No. Just the one field office. And just you, Liam and Sal.’

‘But you just said … 
teams
?’

Waldstein paused for a moment, wondering how to continue, then suddenly the penny dropped for her. Maddy understood. ‘We weren’t the first team, were we?’

‘I’m so sorry, Maddy.’ He reached out for her hand, but she
snatched it away from him. ‘God help me, my dear girl … I feel like I’m heaping one revelation after another on to you.’

‘Don’t call me that,’ she snapped. ‘How many teams were there before us?’

Waldstein looked away from her. ‘It’s not imp–’

‘Goddammit! How many of us did you make?!’

‘Three. I made three teams.’

She shook her head, unsure what she was going to do if she lost control of herself. Punch him?

‘We grew three batches of you to full-growth development. Three Liams, three Maddys and three Sals. One set as test models to –’

‘Test models?’

‘Models on which to test the various cognitive back stories, your memories. To test that they had taken, that you were all mentally stable and capable of functioning properly. To test you believed you were who you thought you were. When we were happy with that, we retired those test models and grew a second batch, which we made here, then sent back to Brooklyn. To the archway.’

‘Retired?!’ Once again her voice had a sharp edge to it. ‘
Retired!
Don’t you dare … DON’T YOU DARE tell me you –’

‘
Storage
, Maddy! No … We didn’t
kill
them! I promise you. We put them on ice.’

She glared at him. ‘Test models? Put us on ice? Jesus! We’re just another frikkin’ meat product to you, aren’t we? Just like Becks. We’re just another product line your big business can make and sell!’

The air in the small laboratory was charged with tension. She turned away from him and was staring out of the window, absently cracking the joints of her fingers.

‘With the deepest of respect …’ Waldstein finally said, ‘you
are what you are. Without the memories we assembled for you, without the life story of a girl called Maddy Carter, you would be just like this support unit: a compliant bio-software product. Organic machines. Automatons with a very limited ability to plan long-term goals, to think strategically.’

He stepped awkwardly round one of the desks towards her. ‘We had to make you as human as possible. Had to make you believe you were human. We had to make you as self-sufficient as we could and able to think and act entirely on your own without our help. To reason emotionally as well as logically, to think instinctively. To trust your gut, to join the dots in an entirely heuristic way.’ He touched her arm gently. ‘And, my God,
all three of you
were remarkable creations. You all performed so incredibly well.’

She turned and smiled sarcastically at him. ‘Good little robots, were we?’

‘Don’t think for one moment I thought of you like I think of these things,’ said Waldstein, gesturing at Becks. ‘They’re little more than dumb animals. Lumbering pack horses.’ He turned to the support unit. ‘No offence.’

The lines of Becks’s scowl seemed to deepen slightly.

‘I thought of Liam as my son!’ He turned back to Maddy. ‘And you as the daughter Ellie and I might have one day had. And Sal … I thought of all three of you as my
children
!’

Maddy narrowed her eyes. ‘So … so you were prepared to murder your own children?’

Waldstein gazed down at the floor for a moment, then looked her in the eye. ‘Yes … I was prepared to murder my own children … if that’s what it took to buy humanity a second chance. Then … yes.’

Maddy turned away from the window once again, then came and sat down heavily on a stool. ‘You said
three
batches?’

‘Yes.’

‘So, we were the third batch?’

‘That’s right, Maddy. You were the
third
batch.’

She frowned. ‘You made a test batch?’

‘Then we grew the
first
team. We grew them here. I went back to Brooklyn with them and I woke them up. The recruitment memories … I’m sure you’ve worked that out now, they were fabricated memories put into your minds. I was written into the memory as the man who recruited you.’

‘So? What happened to them?’ Maddy remembered what Foster had told them. Not much … but it hadn’t been a pleasant end for them. She wanted to see if Waldstein’s story was going to match Foster’s.

‘Something truly awful happened to them.’ He looked down at his pale wrinkled hands. One of them was trembling slightly. ‘There are things that exist in chaos space … I’m sure you’ve glimpsed them. Griggs and I both saw them … shapes … moving out there in all that white mist.’

‘Yeah, we’ve seen them.’

‘The first team … I lived with them for several months. I trained them, I mentored them. We had a minor contamination event to deal with. They performed admirably, just as well as you did first time round. After dealing with it, I was confident that they were ready to be left on their own. So, I came back to 2055.

‘From our time, Griggs, Olivera and I monitored things. We picked up a number of contamination vibrations from here: time waves. Contamination events that the team successfully managed to zero in on and correct before they became a problem in our time. Things seemed to be going well … our team was doing its job; history had its guardians. Then one day … one of those entities from the mist followed them back through a portal and entered the archway.’ He sighed. ‘They didn’t stand a chance.’

‘Go on.’

‘The entity killed Maddy and Sal and destroyed the support unit. But, as for “Liam”, I don’t know precisely what happened. I believe he may have briefly escaped back to chaos space. Whatever happened … it damaged him badly. It aged him chronically. We got a message from him after the event. He got back into the archway, somehow dealt with the entity … but his team was dead; he was alone. And now a very, very sick old man.’

‘So you grew us? Team three?’

‘Yes. But only after I had explained to him what he was. A clone.’ Waldstein smiled proudly. ‘He was strong. He took the news with dignity, courage … he accepted what he was. What he had to do. So, then … yes, Maddy, we grew a third batch and we sent you back. The original Liam unit was instructed to stay with you, to mentor you, just as I had. Of course … we needed to adjust the recruitment memories and he needed to pick another name for himself.’