“It isn’t?”
“No. But you’re half-right. You see, one of the two people in this ship is a time traveller. And it isn’t me. Do you want me to carry on?”
“I thought I had you figured out for a moment,” Floyd said.
“One step at a time,” Auger told him. Then there was a shriek from some part of the instrument panel and a dozen red lights started flashing in synchronisation. Auger bit her lip and pushed her joystick to one side. Floyd felt the ship veer: a sickening feeling like a car hitting ice.
“Was that a… what did she call it? Smash?”
“That was a software crash, yes,” Auger said. She flipped a bank of switches, then threw back a glass cover to press a large red button. “And this is the reboot sequence, so pay attention.”
“We’ve only just left.”
“I know,” she said. “We’ve got thirty more hours of this to get through. I think the ride home is going to be a lot more interesting than I was hoping.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
They had been under way for six hours. The guidance system had failed two or three times an hour initially, but lately the ride had become lullingly smooth, with only the occasional stomach-churning veer or swerve. They had eaten a light snack of pre-packed rations (the food was tucked into unmarked foil pouches that, to Floyd’s obvious delight and fascination, warmed the food automatically when they were opened) and Floyd had explored the tiny, intimate microcosm of the toilet, with its daunting methods of collecting bodily waste under weightless conditions. Auger had asked him if he felt any motion sickness, and he had replied truthfully that he felt none.
“Good,” she said, popping a dark pill into her mouth. “It must be all that time you spent at sea. Good practice for a trip down a wormhole, even though you probably didn’t realise it at the time.”
“Are you feeling ill?” he asked.
“Apart from the fact that I’ve got a bullet lodged in my body that the robot thinks might kill me? No. I’ve never felt better.”
“I meant the pill.”
“It’s UR,” she answered, as if that explained everything. When Floyd just stared at her, she said, “Universal restorative. General-purpose medicine. It will heal anything, cure any ill. It’ll even keep you alive for ever.”
“Then you’re immortal?” he said.
“No, of course not,” Auger said, as if the very idea embarrassed her. “If I took one of these every day—or every week, or however often it is you have to take them—then I might be, I suppose. At least until the supply ran out, or I got some disease so fascinatingly exotic that even the UR couldn’t fix it. But there isn’t enough UR in the whole system for me to take it all the time, and in any case, my people don’t agree with it.”
“You don’t agree with medicine that makes you immortal?” he asked, a little surprised by her statement.
“There’s more to it than that. My side—the USNE, the Threshers, call us what you will—doesn’t have the means to make UR. What UR we do have access to is supplied in very small, expensive and controlled quantities by our moderate allies in the Polities.”
“Haven’t you tried making it yourselves?”
She popped another pill from the cylindrical dispenser and held it up for Floyd’s inspection. It looked no more impressive than a discarded button, or a nub of dark clay. “We couldn’t make it even if we knew the recipe. The technology embedded in this pill is one that we’ve chosen to reject.” With particular care, she returned the pill to its canister. “Except, of course, when we really need it, which tends to be on high-risk operations like this. So call us screaming hypocrites, and see if we care.”
“What’s so dangerous about a technology used to make pills?”
“The technology is a lot broader in its applications,” Auger said. “That isn’t really a pill. It’s a solid mass composed of billions of tiny machines, smaller than the eye can see. You wouldn’t even see them under a microscope. But they’re real, and they’re the most dangerous thing in the world.”
“And yet they can heal you?”
“They swim into your body after you’ve swallowed the pill. They’re smart enough to identify what’s wrong with you, and adept enough to put it right. The bodies of the Slashers are already swarming with tiny immortal machines. They don’t even need UR, since nothing ever goes wrong with them.”
“Can’t you be like that?”
“We could, if we wanted to. But a long time ago something bad happened that convinced us that the Slashers were wrong, or at least foolhardy, to embrace that technology so wholeheartedly. It wasn’t just…” and then she said something that sounded worryingly close to “banana technology,” but which Floyd assumed—hoped, for the sake of his sanity—he’d misheard.
“Not just that,” she continued. “But virtual reality, radical genetic engineering, neural reshaping and the digital manipulation of data. We rejected all that. We even established a high-level quasi-governmental organisation—the Threshold Committee—to keep us back from the brink of ever developing any of those lethal toys by accident. We wanted to stay on the cusp, the threshold, but never quite cross it. The Slashers call us Threshers. It’s intended as an insult, but we’re quite happy to apply it to ourselves.”
“This bad thing that happened,” Floyd said. “What was it?”
“We destroyed the Earth,” Auger said.
“That’ll do it.”
“The thing is, Floyd, it didn’t have to happen the way it did. If we allowed your world to run forward in time from the present, maybe we’d never end up with what happened in twenty seventy-seven… and everything would be different now. Not necessarily better, but different.”
“I’m not following you.”
“You and I don’t share the same history, Floyd. After nineteen forty, there’s nothing in common between our two worlds.”
“What’s the significance of nineteen forty?”
“That’s the year when Germany attempted to invade France. In your timeline, the invading forces ground to a halt in the Ardennes, becoming sitting ducks waiting for the Allied planes to bomb them into the mud. The war was over by the end of the year.”
“And in your timeline?”
“The invasion was a staggering success. By the end of nineteen forty, there were very few places in Europe and North Africa that the German army hadn’t occupied. By the end of nineteen forty-one, the Japanese had joined forces with the Nazis. They launched a surprise attack on America, turning the whole thing into a global conflict. It was mechanized warfare on a scale the world had never seen before. It’s what we call the Second World War.”
“You don’t say.”
“It lasted until nineteen forty-five. The allies won, but the cost was considerable. By the time the war was over, the world was a completely different place. We’d let too many genies out of too many bottles.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t even know where to begin,” Auger said. “The Germans developed high-altitude rockets to bomb London. Within a couple of decades, the same technology would put people on the Moon. The Americans developed atomic bombs that were used to flatten Japanese cities in a single strike. Within a couple of decades, those bombs had become powerful enough to wipe out humanity many times over, in less time than it takes you to make breakfast. Then there were the computers. You’ve seen the Enigma machines. They played a significant role in wartime cryptography. But the allies built bigger, faster machines to crack the Enigma messages. Those machines filled entire rooms and drank enough power to light up an office block. But they became smaller and faster: much smaller and much faster. They shrank down to the point where you could barely see them. Valves became transistors, transistors became integrated circuits, integrated circuits became microprocessors and microprocessors became quantum optic processors… and still it snowballed. Within a few decades, there was no aspect of living that hadn’t been touched by computers. They were everywhere, so ubiquitous that you almost didn’t notice them any more. They were in our homes, in our animals, in our money, even in our bodies. And even that was just the beginning. Because by the beginning of the new century, some people were not content with just having very small machines that could process a lot of data very quickly. They wanted very small machines that could process matter itself: move it around, organise and reorganise it on a microscopic scale.”