‘Erich Vogel,’ Jeff finished for her, stepping back from the doors and gazing at Mitchell. ‘I already asked you about Vogel, but you never gave me a straight answer.’
One corner of Mitchell’s mouth twitched. ‘He’s not dead, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Then where is he?’ asked Olivia.
‘He went ahead.’
Olivia frowned. ‘Ahead to where?’
The corner of Mitchell’s mouth curled again, into an almost apologetic smile. ‘To the very end of time.’
Olivia stared at Jeff, then back at Mitchell. ‘What?’
‘Look,’ said Mitchell, ‘the exploration teams went a long, long way into the future, but there are routes through the Founder Network that can take you much farther still – so far ahead in time that I don’t even know how to describe it. Except that it’s long after the universe, as we know it, has effectively ceased to exist.’
‘You believe this?’ she asked, looking at Jeff.
Jeff shrugged helplessly. ‘After what I’ve seen during the past couple of weeks, I think I’ll believe pretty much anything.’
‘The Founder Network zigzags across the whole universe,’ Mitchell went on. ‘Jeff told you about it, surely?’
She nodded, and Mitchell reached up to tap the side of his head. ‘The pools – the learning pools, I call them – they put a road map of the whole thing here inside my head.’
‘What about Erich?’ asked Jeff. ‘How could you have spoken to him? There was no sign of himivia starl when we found you.’
‘I can’t tell you exactly how I know, but some time between losing consciousness and when you found me, I talked to him.’
‘Talked? How?’
‘I just know that, before you found me, Erich and I’d . . . communicated in some way. He said he was going up ahead, to find the Founders and the civilization they created close to the end of everything. When I woke up, I was all alone.’
‘Why didn’t you go with him?’ asked Olivia.
Mitchell paused, as if he was being careful to find the right words. ‘There were things I had to do first.’
‘What things?’
‘I had to remember certain things,’ he answered after a pause.
Olivia could feel herself getting angry, again, at what struck her as deliberate obfuscation. ‘What things?’
‘Everything . . .’ said Mitchell. ‘Like taking a snapshot of everything living on Earth, and preserving it with all its thoughts intact, and carrying it through to the far future. “Remember” isn’t really the right word . . . but the memories will live and breathe and think, put it that way.’
Olivia stared at him, suddenly frightened. ‘And you can do that?’
‘In a sense,’ he replied eventually, his expression almost reverential as he continued. ‘All this would make more sense if you’d seen what those learning pools showed me. Death has no real meaning to the Founders. It’s not a concept they really understand, because they vanquished it so very long ago.’
Olivia stared at the strange half-smile on his face and shivered.
A fresh tremor caused the table to rattle. The three of them waited, ready to bolt outside if it grew worse, but it faded after a few seconds.
‘Time to get moving,’ said Jeff, heading towards the exit. ‘We’ve probably wasted too much time already.’
TWENTY-THREE
Sophia Array, Newton Colony, 7 February 2235
It took Saul nearly sixteen hours to make his way back through the gate to Copernicus. Measured in light-years, the distance he had to cross was impossible for a human mind to contemplate, but measured through the wormhole it was a little under three and a half kilometres – three kilometres to the Sophia Array in the company of a squad of ASI troopers, then three hundred and fifty metres from the outer security perimeter to the transfer stan, and a final stretch of one hundred and fifty metres, including that short, anticlimactic trip through the wormhole itself. And yet every step involved hours of interminable waiting, as he passed through security cordons that hadn’t even been in place when he’d been heading the other way.
If anything, Narendra had underestimated the scale of the military operation taking place. Sophia’s public UP networks had remained out of action, while the remaining communications bandwidth had been commandeered by military networks to which Saul soon found he was not permitted access. He felt overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of equipment and personnel pouring through from Florida: even once he had passed through the final checkpoint within the Sophia Array, he was then obliged to wait for another three hours while battlefield-equipped Black Dogs and their human operators were shipped through to Newton. Saul sat on a bench in a warehouse area, eating from a ration pack, as he watched dozens of the four-legged machines being unpacked from crates by engineers who then ran them through software checks, before sending them out on to the streets of Sophia.
He passed time by playing back the decrypted video fragments or else browsing through a selection of the hundreds of classified documents that accompanied them, hoping they might help make some sense of what he had witnessed so far, but the more he read, the more an almost physical dread overwhelmed him. Some of the documents focused solely on the growths, including speculations on their origin, while the majority detailed the exploration of something called the Founder Network. Saul read on, numbed by what he now learned. No wonder Donohue had worked so hard to suppress it all.
One report detailed an incident on a world so far in the future that – assuming he interpreted what he read correctly, although he was far from sure he did – the last remaining stars had long since burned to cinders. The main part of the report explicitly referenced Mitchell, appearing to suggest that he had somehow died and then come back to life – a claim no less extraordinary than any other Saul had so far encountered.
He closed his eyes and leaned forward to rest his head on his folded arms, inhaling deeply just to counteract a sudden rush of nausea. He couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for Jeff Cairns to know so much and never be able to talk about it. If it had been Saul himself, he’d have cracked up long ago. And, if some of the personnel psych-eval reports he’d glanced through were anything to go by, a lot of people had done precisely that.
No wonder Narendra had been so eager to show him this footage. That hadn’t just been because he wanted Saul to explain it; he’d been unable to sustain the horror of knowing everything – on Earth, at any rate – was shortly coming to an end.
Saul stretched out on the bench and dozed for a few hours amidst the roar and whirr of machinery being assembled. He woke up to find that the last of the Dogs had departed, his UP flashing a message to inform him that he could now board a shuttle-car.
As he disembarked in the Lunar Array, twenty minutes later, he saw several hundred troopers in chameleon armour preparing to head the other way, their outlines blurring as they jostled like some nightmare assemblage of ghosts. Saul made his way directly to the Copernicus–Florida gly till trying to process all the information he had absorbed, not least the destruction of everything he had ever known.
He boarded an elevator and slumped back against cool steel, closing his eyes as it whisked him twenty floors up to the Florida ASI’s command centre. The air was full of a distant rumble, like static; the massed voices of however many millions of refugees that had by now arrived at the perimeter. He thought of the crowds he’d already passed through, and wondered with a chill how many of them had since died.
Stepping out into a wide corridor, he made his way straight over to a window and stared out, with appalled fascination, at a sea of human flesh pressing up against a security cordon that had clearly undergone heavy reinforcement since he’d last seen it. A blaze of red on the horizon heralded the coming dawn, and he could make out hundreds of bodies, scattered across a no man’s land separating the mob from a nearly unbroken phalanx of sonar tanks and illuminated by powerful arc lights. Black Dogs roamed this no man’s land, while armoured drones buzzed through the air like a swarm of mechanical locusts.