Apocalypse

22

Dennis Aubrey stood beside the control panel and watched as two security guards, their assault rifles strapped to their backs, opened the door to a chamber adjoined to the containment sphere. Joaquin stood to one side and directed their movements. One of the guards turned and picked up a robust-looking remote-control arm from the floor beside him and attached it to two rails secured to the floor of the chamber. The robotic arm carried a video camera attached just below a grappling claw at its head. The security guards closed the chamber’s outer door and sealed it.

‘Stand back, gentlemen.’ The two guards backed away, and Joaquin looked up at Aubrey on the control platform.

‘Over to you, Dennis.’

Aubrey took a deep breath and turned to his control panel. There, a television screen showed the view from the front of the remote-control arm. Aubrey checked the instruments and then pressed a button on the console before him. Instantly, the chamber’s inner door whined open. Aubrey saw the air rush through the hatch in a whorl of vapor, ice crystals glistening in mid-air as they were whipped away into the main chamber, and then the plunging sphere of blackness within appeared on the screen, its attendant writhing coils of electrical energy snapping between the walls of the chamber.

‘Chamber’s open,’ Aubrey announced. ‘Advancing inside.’

He pressed forward on a simple joystick, and the robotic arm travelled along on the rails that prevented it from being hauled into the terrifying heart of the chamber. Slowly, the arm trundled along around the edge of the chamber, passing in front of the mounted cameras within.

‘Camera number five,’ Joaquin reminded him.

Aubrey considered reminding Joaquin that he could count for himself, but for some reason he feared any reprisal his new employer might concoct. Instead, Aubrey obediently guided the robotic arm to stand in front of camera five.

This camera, Aubrey had learned from Joaquin, was different from the others, in that it did not look at a televised newsfeed. Instead it watched a screen that showed the view from a small buoy bobbing on the surface of the ocean. There was no land visible nearby, nothing to betray where the camera was located.

Carefully, Aubrey used the arm’s specially shaped grapple to dismount the camera from its base, and then placed the camera in a storage box on the arm’s platform. Then, he picked up the spare camera and secured it to the mount within the chamber before turning it on.

‘Well done,’ Joaquin clapped. ‘Now, let’s bring it out shall we?’

Patiently, Aubrey guided the robotic arm along the rails and out of the chamber, making sure to wait for the automatic seal on the inner hatch to activate. As the camera waited in the entrance chamber, jets of steam hissed and enveloped the entire device in thick water vapor that poured onto the floor and drained away into narrow grilles. A precautionary measure, to wash away any particles irradiated by the immense energy within the chamber.

‘Clear!’ called one of the guards, who was monitoring a Geiger counter.

‘Open the chamber!’ Joaquin ordered.

The outer doors were opened and Aubrey guided the arm out. Immediately the camera was grabbed by Joaquin, who hurried up to the control panel alongside Aubrey and opened the device, handing him the USB hard drive within.

‘Play it,’ he ordered.

Aubrey slipped the drive into a player on the console before him, and watched as a pixilated image of the ocean far above appeared on the screen. Flares of white noise from the bursts of electrical energy within the chamber distorted the serene image of rolling waves beneath a cloud-specked blue sky.

‘Fast forward,’ Joaquin snapped. ‘One hundred and twenty times faster.’

Aubrey obeyed, a swift mental calculation informing him that an hour on the camera’s accelerated timeline would now pass every fifteen seconds. The rolling sea wobbled and bobbed crazily and the clouds above raced past as the sun arced through the sky. Day turned to night and then the sun returned again. Several minutes had passed before suddenly a white boat zipped into view and quivered on the waves in the center of the viewfinder.

Joaquin hit the ‘Play’ button. Aubrey watched as a small fishing vessel, maybe forty feet long, sat on the surface of the ocean with its anchor chain taut. He realized that the images were still moving at double speed, the same rate at which the camera recorded time passing outside of the chamber. Several figures milled rapidly about on the deck, and then quite suddenly two of them dropped overboard into the rolling blue waves.

They were wearing diving gear, Aubrey realized.

‘Damn!’

Joaquin slammed a fist against the console and whirled to look at Aubrey.

‘When will this happen?’ he demanded.

Aubrey blinked, caught completely off guard by Joaquin’s sudden agitation. ‘When was the camera inserted into the chamber?’

‘Twenty-four hours ago!’ Joaquin raged. ‘You’re the physicist, do the math! Shall I fetch you a fucking abacus?’

Aubrey flushed red, as a sickening mixture of fear and anger swilled through his guts. His earlier ominous instinct about Joaquin’s intentions now flared grotesquely. Joaquin had brought him down here along with ten armed guards. There was no escape except via the submersible. He was trapped. Aubrey’s sense of self-preservation barged its way into his thoughts. Humor the guy, keep yourself out of trouble, and then get the hell out of here as soon as you can.

He looked at the camera image, his mind racing with numbers. The camera had been installed twenty-four hours earlier. The Schwarschild Radius of the object in the chamber and its attendant time dilation of one hour for every hour that passed meant that the camera had therefore seen a total of twenty-four hours into the future. They had then sped forward the first few hours before seeing the boat appear on the screen.

‘It’ll happen within an hour,’ Aubrey said, before looking at Joaquin. ‘Where is the camera that took this film?’

Joaquin did not respond. Instead, he turned to his security team.

‘Get out there. I want those people gone before they can find anything, understood?’

The security guards dashed away, un-slinging their rifles as they ran. Aubrey watched them go and then turned to Joaquin. He mastered his revulsion and fear, his vocal cords tight as he spoke.

‘Joaquin, if you want me to control this device of yours and do an effective job, then you need to tell me what the hell’s going on here.’

‘You’re on a need-to-know basis,’ Joaquin retorted as he walked away.

‘You’re looking into the future but you don’t know what you’re seeing!’ Aubrey shot back, and for a brief instant was surprised at the force of his own outburst.

Joaquin turned slowly back to face Aubrey. ‘What do you mean?’

For a moment, Aubrey wondered whether he should tell Joaquin anything. The arrogant fool was playing a dangerous game that could have far greater consequences than his narcissistic little mind could ever imagine. But then an image of Katherine and the two children popped into Aubrey’s mind and he realized that he had no choice. Somehow, he had to get word out about what was happening.

‘Time,’ he said slowly, ‘is not fixed. It can change.’

Joaquin’s face twisted into a scowl of outrage and he leapt forward, grabbed Aubrey by the throat and pinned him against the console. Aubrey smelled a waft of expensive cologne as Joaquin’s soft hands squeezed tightly around his throat and he leaned in close, a madman cloaked in the finery of a king.

‘You think I have time for this? I know that time isn’t fixed! Purcell explained it all to me!’

Aubrey, his skin sheened with sweat, decided not to tell Joaquin what Charles Purcell had clearly omitted. Instead, a plan began to form in his mind as he struggled to speak.

‘I need more access to what these cameras are seeing!’ he gargled. ‘One image of the future means nothing. What if those people on that screen are just holidaymakers? You send your people in there with guns they’ll do nothing but expose your operation!’

Joaquin, his grip still fixed on Aubrey’s neck, peered sideways at the screen showing the boat on the ocean.

‘They’re not day-trippers,’ he uttered. ‘They’re diving on a barren sandbar miles out to sea. There’s nothing there.’

Aubrey managed to speak.

‘Yes there is, and whatever it is you don’t want it found, do you?’

Joaquin’s gaze moved back to Aubrey. The anger in his eyes mutated into something new, a look of bemusement. Aubrey felt the vice around his neck slacken and he coughed to clear his throat. He heard Joaquin’s voice above his own labored breathing.

‘You surprise me, Dennis. For a while I believed that you were entirely spineless.’

Aubrey slid off the console onto his feet and staggered as he put one hand out to balance himself. With the other, he massaged his neck. Joaquin’s grip had been tight, but not that tight. Aubrey faked another cough and stared at the deck as he considered what was on the screen. Joaquin’s mention of Charles Purcell had sparked a flood of revelations in Aubrey’s mind, none of them good. Purcell had been the previous chief scientist at IRIS’s supposed coral-reef conservation project, and as a former NASA physicist with a history of studies into time itself, it didn’t take much application of Aubrey’s prodigious intellect for him to realize that Purcell had in fact been stationed here at Deep Blue. The fact that Purcell had recently vanished and that his family were dead suggested that his fate was less to do with a tragic mental breakdown and more to do with Joaquin Abell.

Aubrey recalled the loss of the chartered Bimini Wings aircraft, along with IRIS’s entire scientific team, and a chill ran down his spine and sat, icy and cold, in the pit of his belly. That was probably what was below the water in the camera footage: Joaquin was planning to hide the wreckage. Joaquin Abell took a pace closer to him and pressed a finger hard into his chest.

‘If you reveal anything, to anybody, ever, of what you’ve seen here, I’ll make sure that you get a far closer look at that chamber than you’ll be comfortable with.’

Aubrey nodded, finally getting his breath back, and glanced down at the control panel. If Joaquin Abell was responsible for multiple murders, then Aubrey had to get word to the outside world. He thought of Katherine, defending IRIS at trial in court, and of the costs associated with building something like Deep Blue. It’s all a lie. IRIS is guilty, and my new employer is a mass murderer.

Aubrey looked again at the boat bobbing on the ocean. The stern of the little fishing vessel was pointing toward the camera, and he could read her name clearly.

Free Spirit.