‘Go on,’ said Hanover, waggling his pistol towards the stairs. ‘Head on down.’
Saul didn’t move.
‘Didn’t you hear me? Get the hell down there,’ Hanover snapped. ‘And when –
if
– you get back home, take my advice: pack a bag, head for Florida, pick a colony and go there. Any damn one.’
‘I can’t leave until I get some real answers,’ Saul replied.
‘Don’t try me, son,’ Hanover grated. ‘I’ll shoot you, too, if I have to.’
‘But then who’ll deliver your message for you?’ Saul asked, noting there was now barely a metre separating him from the other man. ‘And what exactly is it that you think is going to happen?’
‘I said don’t try my—’
Saul pushed off with his right foot, slamming the heel of one hand into Hanover’s jaw. He saw the other man’s knuckles whiten as they squeezed the trigger, and twisted his body out of the way as the bullets slammed into the floor and the walls.
Hanover grunted and fought back, but Saul had the advantage now. He hit Hanover hard in the belly, and the Agnessa spun out of his hand. Saul dived for it, landing on the floor and twisting around to aim it up at Hanover – only to find him staring back down at him with an expression of infinite contempt.
In that same moment, Saul heard the sound of the safety being taken off several rifles.
He twisted around to see half a dozen Taiwanese soldiers in fatigues, their weapons levelled at him, the red dots from their laser sights dancing across his chest.
‘If I were you,’ Hanover wheezed from behind him, ‘I’d think really hard before moving so much as a fucking muscle.’
Secure Military Facility (location unknown), 29 January 2235
‘When I said I didn’t have the time to fuck around any more,’ said Albright, his voice flat and emotionless, ‘I meant I
really
didn’t have the time to fuck around any more.’
Mitchell spat out a mouthful of blood and used his tongue to feel for the gap where one of his teeth had been until a few moments ago. He leaned forward, grunting as he tested the leather straps securing him to the chair, but there was very little give.
Albright paced in front of him, taking short drags on a cigarette. The stink of the tobacco made Mitchell want to sneeze. The third man in the room – Albright had called him Scott – stepped back, massaging the knuckles of one bruised fist while studying Mitchell with a malevolent expression.
They had come for him that morning, using a gun loaded with tranquillizer darts to knock him out before dragging him down to the garage located in the building’s basement. A truck sat on a raised platform towards the rear of the space, tools mounted on racks lining the nearby walls. Mitchell had also noted a work desk littered with drills and hand-held plasma torches, and fervently hoped Albright wasn’t intending to use any of those on him.
The concrete drain in the centre of the floor was still dark from the freezing water they’d hosed him down with after strapping him into the chair. Not that they’d been able to get him into it without a struggle, given that Mitchell had come to just as they’d hustled him down the steps leading to the garage. He had managed to wriggle out of the grasp of the two guards escorting him, but Scott had slammed him face-first on to a workbench, before delivering a roundhouse kick that dropped him to the ground. The guards had then strapped him in while he was still dazed and half-conscious.
‘There has to be some reason why you survived,’ said Albright, his voice thick with impatience. ‘What kept you alive while the rest of the human race died en masse?’
‘I don’t know.’
Scott glanced over his shoulder at Albright, but Albright merely shook his head. The glowing tip of his cigarette painted patterns of light in the dimly lit space, as he took a draw.
‘You want one?’ Albright asked, raising the cigarette when he noticed Mitchell was looking at it. ‘It’s the healthy kind. Lots of antioxidants and anti-cancer agents. My doctor swears by it.’
‘No thanks,’ Mitchell swallowed, tasting his own blood.
Albright came closer, kneeling before Mitchell and regarding him from just a few centimetres away. ‘Here’s what I don’t get,’ he said. ‘Why aren’t you rushing to help us find some way to try and stop this whole terrible tragedy from ever happening?’
Mitchell looked away, his mouth fixed in a tight line, breathing hard in expectation of the next blow. Albright stared at him, waiting for an answer, then straightened up, shaking his head with disgust.
‘There’s something wrong with you – on the inside,’ Albright told him. ‘Did you know that?’
Mitchell looked back at him warily. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘We took you out of your cell, night before last, and ran some deep-tissue scans on you: fMRI, X-ray, the works.’
‘No, you didn’t. I’d have known.’
‘Your evening meal was stuffed with sedatives. Anyway, the results were pretty remarkable. We ran the same tests on the
other
you, but the physiological changes in
your
body are significantly more advanced. We also ran a DNA analysis, and found it didn’t quite match the original sample taken when you first started working for the ASI. Not only that, there are structures in your brain we can’t make sense of. Your body temperature is a degree and a half cooler than it should be, and that’s not even mentioning the more extreme physiological changes. I’ve seen surveillance footage of you moving around your cell at a speed no normal human being should be capable of. There’s no conceivable way that even a couple of years in some cryogenics facility could produce changes like that.’
With a sour expression, Albright ground out his cigarette under the heel of one boot. ‘Now, we’ve analysed, frame by frame, the A/V footage from when you and Vogel disappeared into that pit,’ he continued. ‘Both of your suits dissolved and, the instant the black oil touched your flesh, you both lost consciousness and collapsed. Those suits are made from extremely tough materials designed to withstand an enormous range of lethal environments, and yet they came apart like wet tissue paper in a hurricane.’
Albright lit another cigarette and drew on it, stepping away to lean against a nearby workbench. ‘The liquid in those pits clearly acts like a universal solvent. Some of your colleagues tried to bring back samples, but it dissolved everything they tried to put it in. Which all rather begs the question: are you, in fact, the real Mitchell Stone, or are you something else altogether?’
Mitchell shook his head and laughed. ‘You’re out of your fucking mind.’
‘Okay, here’s what we’ve been thinking. Maybe the answer we need is
inside
you, in some way we can’t decipher just by running non-invasive scans or occasionally bouncing you off the walls. Maybe,’ Albright took another draw, ‘we’re going to have to go a little deeper.’
‘What are you talking about?’ asked Mitchell.
‘Dissection,’ said Albright. ‘Peel back your skin and see what it is that makes you tick. Put your organs in steel trays and pick them apart to see if you’re really human.’
Mitchell felt his insides twist in horror. ‘How the hell is doing that going to tell you anything?’
‘We won’t know until we look, will we?’ said Albright, an unpleasant glint in his eyes. ‘We’ve tried persuasion and reasoning, and look where it got us. But now we’re staring a holocaust in the face and, in the absence of any willing response on your part, do you really think we’d hesitate one Goddamn moment to get the answers we need, by any means necessary?’
No
, thought Mitchell,
not for one second
. ‘There’s nothing you can do to stop what’s coming,’ he insisted, regardless. ‘Don’t you understand that? From where I’m standing, you’ve all been dead for years. You’re a ghost, Albright.’
Albright’s jaw worked like he’d just swallowed something nasty. ‘Let’s be clear on one thing: I’m not interested in this predetermination shit. The future isn’t fixed.’
‘You brought this on yourselves. I saw how the science teams at Tau Ceti were forced to take chances. They were bringing technologies that nobody understood back to Earth without any idea what the consequences might be. The sci-eval staff all fled protests, but nobody listened.’ Mitchell cleared his throat. ‘But I
did
listen, and I saw how anything that looked like it could turn a profit or win a war was packed into a crate and hauled straight back home.’
Albright stared at him, the cigarette burned down almost to his knuckles.
‘What you don’t seem to understand is that the future is indeterminate, yes,’ Mitchell continued, ‘
unless
you find your way into it through a wormhole, and then all time between now and then becomes fixed like a fly in amber. It’s like the observer effect: once you see it or touch it, it’s locked in one state for ever. That’s why the Founders disappeared so far into the future, to a point beyond the reach even of the wormholes. It was the only way they could
escape
predetermination.’
Albright wiped at his mouth with one hand, a frightened look in his eyes. ‘How do you know all this?’
Mitchell let his head fall back, suddenly exhausted. They would be recording this interrogation, the same as all the others, of course. He wondered what his unseen audience were making of it all.
‘I asked you how you could know any of this,’ Albright repeated.
Mitchell brought his head back up. ‘I already told you yesterday, because of the learning pools. When I woke up, I
knew
things.’
‘What kinds of things?’
Mitchell struggled to find words to describe the vast repository of knowledge now resting inside his brain. He had begun to suspect that this repository somehow existed independently of him – a library inscribed deep in the microscopic foam of reality, at the most minute level, something the black pools had somehow given him the means to tap into.
He shook his head helplessly. ‘Everything,’ he finally replied.
Albright let his cigarette fall to the ground and formed his hands into fists. ‘You’re making this shit up, Goddamn you.’
‘I can tell you what’s going to happen in a thousand years, or a hundred thousand, or ten million – the broad details, anyway. Sometimes . . .’ He closed his eyes tightly for a moment and sensed the repository there, hovering always in the back of his mind, vast and nebulous. ‘Sometimes I
try
to ignore it, to not
always
be aware of it, but I can’t. I know so much, from now until so far in the future, you can’t even begin to imagine.’
Albright didn’t say anything else for a moment, and Mitchell could hear the sound of a plane droning somewhere overhead, as well as distant voices, muffled through thick walls, passing by and then fading.
‘Assuming any of this is true, why didn’t you tell me before?’ asked Albright.
‘Because I knew it wouldn’t make any difference,’ Mitchell replied. ‘I’d still wind up here in this garage having the shit beaten out of me, whatever I said.’
Albright nodded. ‘You’re right, I’m afraid.’ He gestured to Scott. ‘Hold him.’
Scott moved behind the chair, Mitchell twisting his head round to try and see him. Albright meanwhile stepped over to a workbench and began to rummage through a bag. As he turned back, he held a syringe in one hand, and a small plastic bottle filled with a clear liquid in the other.
‘What are you doing?’ Mitchell demanded.
‘Something new,’ said Albright. ‘A development from the Kepler pharms. Apparently highly effective.’
‘Oh, but we do,’ Albright replied. ‘We were worried about damaging you before, but that’s not such a priority now.’ He came closer, an expression of what looked like genuine sorrow on his face as he approached. ‘I won’t lie to you, Mitchell. This is going to hurt. A lot.’
Mitchell twisted against his restraints, furious and terrified, and filled with a horrid certainty about what was coming next.
Scott came up behind him, wrapping one forearm around his neck and planting the other hand over the top of Mitchell’s head, effectively rendering him immobile. Mitchell struggled as Albright stepped around behind him, and out of sight, but any effort was useless.
‘Please don’t struggle,’ advised Albright. ‘I don’t want to wind up disabling you when I put the needle in.’
The back of the chair was partly open, making it easy for Albright to pull up part of Mitchell’s paper uniform and feel for his spine. A second later Mitchell felt something slide deep inside the thick musculature there.
The pain was like nothing he had ever experienced. Fire spread through his muscles and, as he struggled to escape, he felt as if his bones might snap. Bile surged up the back of his throat and he vomited over Scott’s arm.
After a little while the pain faded. He drifted on a black tide under a starless sky, his skull seeming full of soft cotton wool that scratched against the back of his eyeballs.
Well, he’s still alive
, Albright said from somewhere far, far away.
Tell me more about the learning pools, Mitchell. Tell me what they told you about the Founders
.
Mitchell woke to the dawn light spreading across the upper wall of his cell. He lay there for some minutes without moving, thinking about what it might be like to be strapped to a table and cut apart with scalpels. Albright and the men he worked for were little better than primitive sorcerers, desperate to divine their own fate from his still-warm entrails.