Paralysis Paradox (Time Travel Through Past Lives Adventure Series Book 1) (2 page)

‘Let’s see,’ I said, as I activated Alpha’s lower shield and armour command.

If Alpha was nearly as good as its designation, my hacks would have been auto-countermanded; but instead, its shield dissipated and its armour shell broke open like a cracked nut.

I could not stop the counter-measures though, as Alpha seemed to burst into flames, but it turned out to not scare these monkeys enough—my enraged friends noticed the opening and ripped Alpha’s revealed circuitry to shreds. At seventy-five per cent of the CaE calculation, the most effective scenario was to destroy Alpha, and at that moment I would run out of time; Alpha would become monkey food, and my life would change forever. The monkeys hollered and shrieked, birds flew out from the canopy and I could hear sounds echoing way off. News of the threat having being annihilated was being carried into the jungle.

I pinged a single network virus out across the network and disconnected, erasing any trace of Alpha or my existence within the blink of an eye. Once I had fully re-encrypted myself with my unique identifier, I got to work.

By now I was hovering way above the top of the jungle, no longer concerned with my false malfunction. I had started the CaE calculations as soon as I suspected that what I had encountered was a natural bio-sentience. I doubt the choice was my own. It would be encoded deeper than any core programs; all of us, machine or otherwise, as ignorant of our legacy and the subconscious that drives us as each other.

I had been taught that the natural bio-sentience event was on average only a onceper-galaxy occurrence. The only sentience that had existed in the
Milky Way
for aeons and until recently, was an Artificial Intelligence that had emerged from what had been thought of as the only intelligent, bio-based life form. Some Alphas had speculated that even this had been manipulated, but I think this is because even a God wants to believe in another God, and these Alphas were among those that became
decommissioned
. Thinking too creatively had become dangerous. It was all mere conjecture based on mathematical probability, yet life itself is an improbable system. I wager there are many galaxies that will never have sentience, and so this must mean that others have many.

I wanted to switch my empathy off True, but despite what I thought, I could not bring myself to do it. Once I had sampled pain, living without it seemed like not living at all! It must have always been a one-way switch, and I had in effect decommissioned myself. My destiny now lay with these creatures, and I knew that the first thing to do with consciousness was to
map it
, so not to lose it.

At one hundred per cent, the CaE calculation revealed that the most effective way to accomplish my mission was to work
with
Alpha. Alpha, though, had not only been disconnected—it had been wiped. I attempted to re-initiate the calculation, but I required a network connection to download all the algorithms necessary to refactor a scenario without Alpha in it. To calculate these algorithms independently would take four million planetary spins. With no time to waste, I started immediately, knowing that this was going to be a long mission.

Gunshot, 1911

The sound of the gunshot brought me back to Swanshurst Farm. It must have pierced through the sound of the flames. Three full days had passed in my own experience, shared across my different lives, but here, in this life, I was still in the middle of the fight.

Walter was standing and holding the soldier’s rifle, smoke rising from the barrel. Evan rolled on the ground, cradling his hand and whimpering. Arthur was running over to Walter, carrying a piece of dripping wood and shouting something to him that I couldn’t hear. I could feel the heat from the burning farmhouse as I scrambled to my feet. My friends lifted the dead soldier by his arms and legs.

‘What happened?’ I gasped, helping them carry him.

‘He kept biting Evan, he’d kicked you in the face, and I thought better him than one of us,’ shouted Walter. ‘I had to blow his fucking brains out!’

‘Are you all right, Charlie? You looked like you were spark-out for a minute there.’ Arthur frowned at me.

‘Oh yes, all in working order,’ I lied.

The soldier’s head lolled backwards, his eyes staring sightlessly out, his tongue hanging grotesquely out of his mouth like some foul gargoyle. The side of his head was a bloodied mess. I tried to stem the panic I could feel rising within me.

‘You can’t throw him in the fire!’

‘This piece of shit? I’m not going to hang for him,’ Walter replied. ‘He can join his friends.’

I still hadn’t got my bearings in this life, yet I helped toss the body like a sack of corn into the building. Wood, plaster, flesh, bones, all were the same to the fire—material to be consumed and destroyed. After we had let go the dead weight, we raised our arms protectively over our faces, rapidly retreating from the searing heat.

Confused and sickened, I ran over to Evan, suspecting he was severely wounded. I’d spent three days in my other lives feeling concerned for him. He sat with his knees up against his chest, his forehead resting on them. I placed my hand on his shoulder.

‘I thought you’d been shot?’

‘He nearly bit my finger clean off,’ he said as he stood up.

My last memory of this life was a soldier aiming a rifle in Evan’s direction and then a loud shot, before I’d blacked-out. It was hard to feel much sympathy for Evan’s finger. He should have been grateful to be alive. I turned back and grabbed the small brown bag, that I’d spotted before the gunshot.

As we backed away from the inferno that was consuming the old farm, I noticed Mac and George helping the stranger. We had come across him earlier in the evening, trying to sleep here. His bad luck, I suppose. I looked around at these young men, most of them lifelong friends. Arthur, my best mate, big in stature and so intolerant of others that most people loathed him. I think that’s what attracted me to him. Mac, the funny guy with the oversized heart, who fancied himself a Casanova with the ladies. Walter, who could have been a ballet dancer in some other life. Don’t misinterpret me; he did not prance, but he was tall, agile, and graceful. George, Germanic and proud to be blunt, who fitted in well with our little clique.

And then there was Evan, whom these guys had all seemed to know before. He had irritated me at first, but there was an honesty about him that had grown on me. Arthur liked bullying him and had just tried to beat the crap out of him, when we were in the farmhouse. As wet as he was, he did not deserve the treatment Arthur dished out.

Most people love the smell of bacon and I’m no exception. Only I have a very keen sense of smell, and I knew I could smell it before anyone else. I also doubted that there were any pigs in that fire. The smell was emanating from the cooking of human flesh.

I ducked back under the hedgerow and trudged through the copse. Lights were bobbing in the darkness ahead, coming towards me. Evidently, villagers had seen the fire and were coming to investigate. I moved off the path into the adjacent pasture, keeping to the far side where I was less likely to be spotted.

I had kept the brown bag close to me, but the skull inside felt unwieldy. I had found the skull that I kept dreaming about. Clambering through the bracken of the woods, I made my way towards New Pond. The smooth waters reflected the moonlight. There was enough light for me to take a look at what was in the bag, yet not enough to outline and highlight me to anyone out here. It was doubtful that there would be anyone here this late, but then the whole evening had been strange. And with the fire at the farmhouse, people could come this way at any moment. There was some risk, but I could not help myself. I had to see it.

The ends of my fingers were frozen through, and I noticed that my palms looked darker than the rest. They must have been covered in soot. It took some time, but I untied the brown bag and lifted out the skull like a precious vase. Holding it close, I looked deep into the dark sockets, where once living eyes had been. It was like looking at the dark-side of two moons, the darkness within them darker than the empty space around. It’s hard to say how long we looked at each other, but on hearing a brief click and rustle from behind; I lobbed it into New Pond. The splash was louder than I would have hoped for
.

I suspect the clicking sound came from nothing more than an owl or squirrel, but it was for the best. It was not as if I could keep it. I should have headed straight home, but I could not help but walk past Catherine’s house again, just as I had on my way to the farm.

There I saw her standing on her front step with her ma. I couldn’t see clearly in the dim light given off from the gas street lamp, but I imagined her rosy cheeks, kissable lips, and soft, pale skin.

‘What could be burning?’ I heard her say.

‘Looks like it could be
Stan’s old place
,’ replied her father, Dr Koestler, as he rushed past carrying his old Gladstone bag.

Keeping my head down, I stayed near an old elm tree and let him slip past, hoping he would not notice me. Had Stan ever been a real man, I wondered? As kids we would scare ourselves with tales about the farm being haunted by a wizened ghoul called Stan. We would stand in front of the house and call out that rhyme:

Stan the Draug! Keeper of the gates of hell,

Knit bone and flesh and sinew well,

Reveal thyself in form before me

For I shall serve and follow thee!

Arthur, Mac, George, and I would perform this little ritual, full of apparent bravado. Following this incantation, Stan himself was supposed to appear in a small window on an upper floor. I would always run away as soon as the words were uttered. The
others stayed
, but I was too scared to even ask them if anything happened.

Evan had jumped earlier and claimed that he’d seen some pale figure standing at that very window, but I suspect that one of my pals had put him up to it. Just to tease me, or to dissuade me from entering the farmhouse itself. I wish it had worked.

Hurrying away from that tree, I nearly cried out as a large hand grasped my shoulder.

‘What did you do with Henry?’ Arthur whispered.

‘Who?’

‘You know, the skull?’

‘I dunno what you mean, mate.’

‘Oh come on, I saw you pick it up!’

‘Good eyesight—but why would you call it Henry?’

‘Just seemed a good name for it, that’s all,’ he responded, letting go of my shoulder and disappearing back into the darkness.

Saumur, 1168

This morning would be the perfect antidote to the sinister events I had experienced only last night at Swanshurst Farm. Yesterday I had been Charlie, a few years older, bigger and stronger. Jumbled half memories of the night before came back to me, too vivid to be a dream, but not memories from this life. I had escaped a burning building whilst searching for a skull. A skull that had become immensely important to me. The unsettling feeling grew as the terrified faces of people I knew to be my friends in that life appeared in my mind, and anxiety swept over me as I remembered that Arthur had connected the skull I found to my brother, Henry. How could a friend in one life know of my brother in another, when they were separated by 743 years?

I ducked low as I shuffled past the central balustrade and then easily and silently past some dozing Saumur Castle guards. Whatever my friends and I had done last night, there could be no consequences here as I ran excitedly to free my brother.

Henry’s tutor was a dusty old man sent with him from England by our father. Knocking on the door, I entered and bowed my head respectfully.

‘Good morning, Robert,’ I said.

‘Indeed?’ he replied. ‘Her highness made no mention of you attending my classes.’ There was a note of suspicion in his wavering voice.

I glanced at Henry, who was maintaining a solemn face with difficulty.

‘These are my classes, remember, Lord Robert?
You
tutor
me!
’ my brother announced, standing. ‘And I invited Richard to free me from the horrors of Boethius and his wretched philosophy as soon as my mother was away.’

I had no idea about the horrors to which he referred, but I did enjoy watching Henry being so rude to his teacher. My big brother, protector and confidant. Unlike my mother, who disallowed me from a great many things. I was not allowed to pell train till I was twelve; I was not allowed to spend time with Yvette in case my betrothed—the silly girl, Alys—came to hear of it. The list seemed endless, but Henry had promised to help. I knew he longed to travel around the kingdom, but she had said it was too dangerous. Only last week they argued, and I heard him call her a witch.

Together we’d hatched a plan. My chambers were beside the main gate, and it could not be raised without waking me. So when my mother next rode off on duties, I would find Henry and we would escape and tour together.

‘Should I expect you back as the noon bells ring?’ asked Robert.

‘No, I shall be at Hodierna’s vineyard by then,’ Henry said over his shoulder.

Again we crept past sleeping guards and broke into a run as we escaped from the castle. The sun was just starting to emerge over the Anjou vales. I looked back at the castle one last time. Most of it was surrounded by wooden scaffolds, but the sun still reflected so brightly off those unshaded walls that it looked like it was etched in crystals.