‘You know as much as I did… do, Maddy.’
She shook her head. ‘No. No, I don’t. I’m making mistakes. We’re screwing up. There are things stitched in history…’ She shook her head. Not quite the right expression. ‘Things pre-baked into history. Messages… written for us, I don’t know, maybe even written by us! Like we’ve been here before or something. I don’t understand what’s going on. I don’t…’ Her voice hitched with emotion. She stopped and looked across the pigeons at a toddler on reins tormenting the birds on the ground. ‘I can’t do this on my own any more. I’m not ready. And I wasn’t ready when you walked out on us.’
‘And I wasn’t ready for this when I first started,’ he said softly. ‘But you and I? We’re made for this job.’
She looked at his grin. That stupid lopsided old grin of his. ‘You know, sometimes I don’t know whether to call you Liam or Foster.’
He laughed. A dry old cackle. A dying man’s defiant snort.
‘Does Liam know now? About me?’
Maddy nodded. ‘I think actually, in a way, he’s kind of proud that he gets to turn out like you.’
‘But maybe he’s not so happy that’s going to happen sooner than he thought?’
‘I think he’s accepted that.’ She shrugged. ‘Come to terms with it. After all, if you hadn’t grabbed us, we’d all be dead anyway. It’s all extra time. Extra bonus life, right?’
‘Aye.’
They sat in silence for a while, watching a young couple rollerblade past them. He was teaching her, and she was guffawing at how bad she was. Not a care in the world between them.
‘Please, Foster,’ Maddy said again presently. ‘Please come along with us.’
His watery eyes watched the rollerbladers zigzagging up the path and away from them.
‘Don’t make me get on my knees,’ she said.
‘All right,’ he nodded. ‘I’ll come.’
Chapter 4
10 September 2001, New York
‘She’s… what do you reckon? Fourteen? Fifteen?’ asked Liam, peering through the thick protein soup at the murky outline suspended in the growth tube.
‘It’s hard to tell,’ said Sal. Her nose was pushed against the warm perspex. The clone’s body was tucked into a foetal position, knees pulled up, slender arms wrapped protectively round them. The last twelve hours of archway time had taken her body shape from one that was definitely that of a small child to something that looked adolescent.
‘Maybe a bit younger,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to make her out through all this gross gunk.’
Liam wasn’t sure about this. Maddy’s instructions — birth her. They couldn’t leave her behind and probably wouldn’t be able to bring themselves to do that if they had to. She was going to become Becks one way or another. She was part of the team.
The other foetuses in stasis, on the other hand, were simply going to be flushed out. They were all too early in the growth stage to survive for long outside the protein solution. No more than fist-sized bodies and none of them with viable, organic rat brains yet, just sim-card-sized slices of silicon; it wasn’t going to be an easy task to bag up and throw away those pitiful-looking things floating in the other tubes.
Liam looked again at what would become Becks soon. ‘The body’s just that of a child. She’ll be younger than any of us, so she will. What good is that?’
‘She’ll still be stronger than me or Maddy, though. That’s got to be useful.’
He shrugged. ‘I suppose… if we decide to enter her into a schoolgirl arm-wrestling competition.’
Sal sighed. ‘Come on, we should get on with it.’
Liam nodded. Wrinkled his nose in anticipation of what was coming. Sal knelt down and tapped the small glowing display on the pump’s control panel. The soft purring stopped. The first time they’d done this, they’d had state-of-the-art ‘W.G. Systems Growth Reactor’ tubes, with a motor at the bottom that orientated the tube smoothly to a forty-five-degree angle before opening a sluice hatch at the bottom, depositing the clone and protein soup on to the floor. This growth tube was a home-made affair, the pump and control panel recovered from the damaged system, the perspex tube purchased from a defunct distillery. The other growth tubes likewise.
Liam grabbed the top of the cylinder of bath-warm perspex. ‘Give me a hand — we’ll tip it over nice and gentle if we can.’
Sal braced herself against the weight of the tube as Liam pulled. It teetered, the liquid inside sloshing. The foetal shape inside twitched and jerked, finally beginning to wake up, becoming aware.
‘Go slowly, Liam!’ grunted Sal. The tube was impossibly heavy.
‘I got a hold… it’s all right, it’s all right. Just keep taking the weight as I tip it.’
He carried on pulling, the tube canting over enough now that the viscous gloop was sloshing over the top and splatting on to the floor.
‘Liam! It’s too heavy! I can’t — ’
‘Calm down, will you? We’ll just ease it out. Pour it out so it’s a bit lighter.’
‘It’s going to slip! It’s — ’
‘Just relax! I still got a hold of it, so I — ’
The bottom of the tube slipped on the floor under the angled weight and he lost his grip. It swung down to the ground like a felled redwood, Sal lurching back to avoid being crushed. The perspex made a loud thunk on the concrete and a tidal wave of pink soup erupted from the open top and engulfed her.
The clone slid out, riding the mini-wave and all but ending up in Sal’s lap.
‘Ah Jay-zus!’ Liam flapped his hands uselessly. ‘I’m so sorry, Sal! The thing just…’
Sal spat gunk from her mouth and wiped it from her lips and out of her eyes, thick like half-set jelly.
‘I hate you, Liam,’ she hissed, almost meaning it right then. ‘Really hate you.’
Liam slipped in the muck as he hurried over and knelt down beside her, his hand uselessly wafting around Sal, wanting very much to comfort her, but at the same time not actually make any physical contact with the foul-smelling gunk coating.
‘I am so very… very…’
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ Sal said, desperately trying not to inhale the odour of rotting meat.
‘You all right in there?’ It was Rashim’s voice.
‘Fine!’ called out Liam. ‘Don’t come in just yet! It’s messy!’ He looked down at the clone, still curled defensively in a ball, its head in Sal’s lap. Eyes slowly opened, grey. Wide. Curious and vaguely alarmed.
Liam leaned over it and offered the clone a smile and a little wave. ‘Hello there!’
Its mouth flexed open and closed several times, dribbling the gunk being ejected from its lungs.
‘Ughhh.’ Sal eased the clone’s head off her lap and on to the floor. ‘I’m soaked in this pinchudda.’
Liam wasn’t listening. ‘Hello? You OK?’ he cooed down at the clone. Now she was out of the mist of swirling salmon-coloured soup, he could see the female unit clearly enough. The creature’s hairless head made it hard to judge her precise age. Her face looked both old and young at the same time.
He reached down, lifted her by the shoulders till she was sitting up, produced a towel and wrapped it round her. ‘There you go.’
Sal tutted, jet-black hair plastered against her face by the cooling, gelatinous protein soup. ‘Oh, I see… she gets the towel, does she?’
Rashim sat cross-legged before the rack of circuitry of the displacement machine, SpongeBubba looking over his shoulder on one side and Bob over the other.
‘Incredible,’ he whispered. ‘The design is quite… quite brilliant. Look at that, Bubba, see? He’s sidestepped the feedback oscillation completely.’
‘I see it, skippa!’
He turned to Bob. ‘Our system’s field was constantly suffering distortion variables. Outside interference and internally generated distortion. Feedback patterns.’
‘Your displacement device was much bigger than this one, correct?’