Final Days

EIGHT

Secure Military Facility (location unknown), 28 January 2235

Mitchell Stone awoke to pale-green light filtering through a barred window, high up, the shadows of branches flickering against the wall opposite. He stared up at a ceiling painted yellow, faint lines scarring the plaster, before smoothing both hands across his face and close-cropped scalp. The air smelled of detergent.

The memories slowly trickled back. He remembered being revived in a lunar cryogenics facility, then being transported to a ship carrying a wormhole gate that led back to a time when grey ashen clouds hadn’t yet swept the world clean.

He tested his fingers, wiggling them slightly before raising one arm and bringing it close to his face. He studied the delicate whorls of his fingertips as if he had never seen them before, more memories slowly dripping back into his conscious mind like sticky molasses. With every day that passed, they came back to him a little more quickly – an inevitable side effect, Albright had assured him, of the cryogenics revival process.

Mitchell sat up on the thin mattress, clad only in disposable medical blues, and swung his arm from side to side, slowly at first, then with increasing rapidity, until it moved in a blur of speed. He finally stopped and pressed it close to his chest, gasping at the sudden pain lancing through his muscles.

He looked over at the far wall of his cell, four metres away. He imagined himself there, and—

—he was there, his face pressed to the opposite wall, pinpricks of sweat standing out on his forehead. He groaned as cramp took hold of both his legs, pinpricks of fire spreading simultaneously through his chest and belly. He let himself slide down the wall to rest on his haunches, once more waiting for the pain to diminish. But, with every day that passed, the agony was just that little bit less.

After that, he stood up again, on unsteady legs, and stepped over to the wall immediately beneath the window.

The barred window was tiny, much too small to even contemplate squeezing through. It had also been placed far enough above head height to make it almost impossible to see more than a thin sliver of sky. Mitchell jumped up, and managed to grab hold of two bars, before pulling himself up with a grunt.

On his first day here, he’d been as weak as a fish flopping on a fisherman’s deck, but now his upper-body strength was coming back to him fast. He caught a glimpse of sycamores planted in a line beyond the window, and an airstrip further off. Low one- and two-storey buildings with whitewashed exteriors stood beyond it. He dropped back down, entranced by that vision of blue skies and flourishing grass. Just then, he heard the sound of footsteps approaching his cell door.

The guards were coming for him yet again.

‘All right, interview five,’ began Albright, tapping at the desk between them.

Mitchell guessed his interrogator was in his mid-forties, with hair greying at the temples. He wore the uniform of the Second Republic’s military.

‘Subject is Mitchell Stone. All right, Mitchell,’ said Albright, looking back up. ‘Let’s start from the beginning again. Tell me how you wound up in that cryogenics lab.’

Mitchell shifted in the folding metal chair, to which he was handcuffed on either side, and glanced up at the bouquet of omnidirectional lenses mounted in the ceiling directly overhead. ‘You’ve asked me that same question every single day since I woke up,’ he said, dropping his gaze again. ‘And every single day I give you exactly the same answer.’

Albright’s expression remained stony. ‘Things are going to be a little different this time, Mitchell, so just humour me.’

‘I was trying to reach the colonies,’ Mitchell replied, spreading his hands as far as the handcuffs would allow. ‘By that time the growths were spreading fast back on Earth. I couldn’t get to any of the colony gates in all the panic, so I figured I had at least an outside chance of staying alive in the cryo lab.’ He lowered his hands again. ‘And that’s where you found me, ten years later.’

Albright glanced down and scratched a note into the reflective surface of his desk with a plastic stylus.

Books lined a plywood bookcase set against one wall, next to which stood a hospital gurney equipped with leather restraints and a small medical-supplies cabinet. A window beyond the desk offered a better view of what was undoubtedly one of Array Security and Immigration’s regional admin centres, and Mitchell gazed past Albright’s shoulder and out at the sunlit landscape with longing.

‘Why were you trying to reach the colonies?’ asked Albright.

Mitchell sighed. ‘I didn’t want to die, any more than anyone else did.’

Albright frowned. ‘Are you sure that’s the only reason?’

Mitchell shrugged. ‘I can’t think of any other.’

Albright touched the desk once more, and Mitchell saw icons blink and shift across its surface. Contacts would have made his life much easier, but clearly they weren’t going to trust him with anything like that.

A small TriView screen came to life on the wall behind Albright’s desk. It showed a still image of a man lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by a tangle of machinery and tubes. A figure dressed in a protective suit, face hidden behind a visor, stood by his bedside, taking notes.

This, thought Mitchell, was something new.

‘Do you recognize the man in the bed?’ asked Albright.

Mitchell found he couldn’t drag his eyes away from the image. Intellectually, he’d realized that his younger self was, at that very moment, still recovering from his recent experiences at Site 17, but actually seeing the evidence here was another matter.

‘It’s me,’ he replied. ‘Where are you keeping him?’

Albright smiled. ‘Don’t you remember?’

He did, of course, although the memory only returned to him at that very moment. Mitchell found he couldn’t tear his gaze from his younger self, his features soft and relaxed under the influence of powerful sedatives.

‘Do you actually understand why there are two of you?’ asked Albright.

‘Because when you brought me back here from that cryo lab ten years in the future, you brought me into my own past,’ Mitchell replied, finally looking away from the screen.

He could barely remember the ward they’d put him after Site 17; they’d kept him unconscious almost around the clock. Someone had rescued him – no, would rescue him – by breaking into the ward and half carrying him to safety, but for the moment that rescuer’s face remained an unidentifiable blur. After that Mitchell had woken up in a motel, alongside everything he needed to get himself to Copernicus.

‘You were delirious when they recovered you from the chamber of pits, but Eliza Schlegel made sure everything you said was properly recorded and transcribed.’ Albright glanced again at his desk. ‘Now, apparently you made reference several times to being ‘sent back’ to carry out some task.’ Albright leaned forward. ‘What kind of task?’

Mitchell licked suddenly dry lips. ‘I don’t remember ever saying that.’

‘Really? I can play it back for you right now.’

The picture on the screen changed to show the interior of a medvac unit. He now lay on a palette with an oxygen mask over his mouth, while Lou Winston passed a diagnostics wand over his body. Mitchell watched his younger self suddenly jerk awake on the pallet, ripping the mask from his face in a panic. A rush of words came spilling out, ones he even now couldn’t remember uttering, and his voice was filled with a terrible urgency. He had a sudden vivid recollection of grabbing Dan Rush’s arm, as they lifted him into the unit, but that was all.

Mitchell gripped the arms of his chair tightly, and waited for Albright to switch the recording off. ‘I don’t remember any of that.’

Albright shook his head. ‘We know you’re lying, Mitchell. The effects of long-term cryogenic storage are well known, and full rcovery of memory takes a week at best. You’ve been here longer than that, and perhaps you don’t remember everything, but you’ll still remember enough to answer most of our questions.’

‘Why does it matter to you?’

Albright laughed, shaking his head. ‘Now you’re just being obstructive. We have recordings of you claiming this task was given to you by the Founders. How is that possible?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why don’t you tell me the truth?’

Mitchell leaned back, staring once more up at the small constellation of lenses overhead. ‘How about I answer a question, but only if you answer one of mine. Is that a deal?’

‘We don’t do “deals”, Mitchell.’

Mitchell stared at him and waited.

‘Fine,’ Albright sighed, after more than half a minute had passed. ‘But I’m not making any promises.’

‘I know you sent unmanned probes into the ruins of the near-future Copernicus City, right?’

‘The same probes that recovered you from the lab, yes.’

Mitchell licked his lips, suddenly full of a nervous anxiety. ‘Did you send them into the Lunar Array itself ? Did they tell you if the CTC gates to the colonies were still open?’

Albright regarded him steadily. ‘There hasn’t been the time to make a detailed enough investigation. Certainly the Array looks half ruined but, as to the integrity of the gates, I don’t have enough clearance to know one way or the other. Now it’s my turn,’ he said, pointing a finger towards the screen. ‘How the hell did you get out of that secure ward and find your way to the Moon, in the first place?’

The corner of Mitchell’s mouth twitched. ‘You mean, how am I going to get out of there? That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?’

Albright stood up from behind his desk and walked forward to stand in front of Mitchell, his face red with anger. ‘Stop fucking around. There’s too much at stake, and the people who put me in charge of getting answers from you are starting to get very impatient.’

‘Whatever I tell you doesn’t matter a damn,’ Mitchell rasped. ‘You know why? Because, from my perspective, everything you’re trying to stop has already happened more than ten years in my past. The only reason you’re here, asking me these questions, is because the people you work for are too mentally limited to understand that one simple fact.’

Albright was breathing hard through his nose and, for a moment, Mitchell thoughhe might strike him. But, after a second or two, his interrogator took a step back, wiping his hand across his mouth.

‘You were in charge of interrogations at the Lunar Array, a few years back, weren’t you?’ asked Albright.

‘Sure. Right after the Galileo gate was sabotaged.’

Albright nodded. ‘And how did you know if detainees were telling the truth or not?’

‘We used infra-red cameras to pick up increases in subcutaneous blood flow, and voltage scanners that could remotely map brain wave functions in three dimensions and tell us whether or not they were lying. That the kind of thing you mean?’

‘You’ve already noticed we have the same devices here?’ Albright nodded towards the lenses suspended above Mitchell’s head. ‘You’ve also worked in the ASI long enough to know just what’s going to happen to you if you don’t start telling us the truth.’

Mitchell closed his eyes for a moment, remembering how, after waking in the motel, he’d managed to make his way through the Florida–Copernicus gate, only to be spotted by ASI agents on the lookout for him inside the Lunar Array. He’d found an airlock equipped with pressure suits, and made his escape across the silent lunar landscape, the great crescent shape of the Array rising to one side as he headed for the cryo labs situated further along the crater wall.

‘You want to know the truth?’ he said, opening his eyes again. ‘The learning pools remade me. They pulled me apart and put me together again, better than before.’

Albright frowned. ‘Learning pools?’

‘The pits me and Vogel got caught in.’

He remembered the sense of stark terror as the black, tar-like liquid had started to fill the pit all around them, and then that sense of floating in a timeless void. ‘When Jeff Cairns found me, I was still trying to understand what had happened to me. But one thing above all had changed: I wasn’t afraid of anything any more, not even death.’ He locked eyes with Albright. ‘Or anything you could possibly threaten me with.’

Albright stared at him for several seconds, then stepped back to his desk and swept his hand across it in a practised gesture. The desk’s surface dulled to an inanimate grey.

‘The next time we meet isn’t going to be nearly as civilized,’ said Albright. ‘Because there’s too much at stake. But I want you to think about one thing that’s been puzzling me, before we meet again tomorrow morning.’

‘What?’

‘You were the only thing still alive anywhere on the Moon or Earth, when we found you,’ said Albright. ‘Why you? Why would whatever wiped out every last trace of life everywhere else lve you untouched?’

Mitchell looked towards the window, and said nothing.