Final Days

TWENTY-FIVE

Off the coast of Guam, 8 February 2235

By sheer good fortune, their ferry departed Tumon Bay on the afternoon of the 6th, just hours before a bad storm struck the west coast of Guam, setting the sky above the island ablaze with a lightning storm the likes of which Thomas Fowler had never seen. There was something about the sight that inspired a near-religious terror in his heart, as if he were witnessing the retribution of an angry god. He stood at the starboard rail alongside Amanda and the rest of the passengers, watching this eerie display until the coast faded to a thin smear of green sandwiched between ocean and sky. He overheard someone saying that the same lightning was now wreaking havoc on Yona and Mangilao on the island’s east coast, both setting towns ablaze and killing dozens unlucky enough to be caught outside when it struck.

As she pressed closer against him, he slid one hand arou Amanda’s waist. ‘Have you seen the rust on the hydrofoils?’ she asked, gesturing over the rail towards the foaming waters below. ‘And the hull’s so patched-up, it doesn’t look like it could survive a squall, let alone a thunderstorm.’

‘It’ll make it,’ he said confidently, glancing back at the brightly lit windows of the restaurant deck, as rain began to patter down. Above the restaurant entrance, some of the crew had strung a banner that read ‘END OF THE WORLD CRUISE’, the letters hand-painted in bright rainbow colours. ‘Maybe we should head inside.’

They found the restaurant mostly deserted but for a small group of men and women huddled around a lengthy table, playing cards. These were the geophysicists from Tokyo University, whom they’d met on arriving in Guam, and one of them now waved at them to come over.

‘Jason,’ remarked Fowler, approaching the table, ‘you’re up pretty late.’

‘Never too late for gambling,’ replied Jason, tapping a spread of cards lying face down on the table before him. ‘Care to join us?’

‘Thanks, but not this time.’ Fowler took a seat along with Amanda. ‘We won’t be sticking around for long. It’s been a long enough night as it is.’

Jason turned towards him, resting one elbow on the back of Fowler’s chair, the Minnesota University t-shirt stretched taut over his not inconsiderable belly. ‘Some show, huh? Tesla would have been proud of it.’

‘Tesla?’ asked Amanda.

‘He means Tesla’s earthquake machine,’ said an older Japanese man, his accent by way of Southern California. ‘Resonant frequency, that kind of thing. He reckons those growths are going to shake the world to bits, and that tonight’s lightning storm is the prelude.’

Some of the others around the table chuckled at this suggestion, then carried on with their own separate conversations.

‘Just because it sounds crazy doesn’t mean it can’t be true,’ Jason huffed.

‘I heard someone say the growths were disrupting the normal flow of magma deep beneath the crust,’ said Fowler, recalling one pet theory that had circulated amongst his own scientific staff. ‘Something like that would be more than enough to trigger the kind of seismic activity we’ve been seeing.’

A middle-aged man, with dark features, laid down his cards and sighed. ‘I will tell you exactly what is happening,’ he said. ‘The slate is being wiped clean.’

‘Then you’re a bigger nut than Jase is, Nick,’ someone else pointed out.

‘If anyone – or anything – really wanted to destroy our world,’ Nick continued, ‘tre are far, far easier ways to go about it. Like triggering a solar flare, or dropping a black hole into the Earth’s core.’ He gestured towards the north-west, in the same direction they were sailing. ‘It seems to me that whatever created those things out in the ocean, their intention was clearly not to destroy our world.’

‘Then what do they want?’ asked Amanda, clearly fascinated.

The man called Nick smiled, placing his cards face-down on the table. ‘I can only hazard a guess, I fear. Perhaps the growths are a means of sterilizing this world in preparation for implanting an entirely alien flora and fauna for the benefit of forthcoming invaders. Or perhaps the reason is something entirely alien and unimaginable to us. What is clear, however,’ he continued, fixing his gaze on Fowler, ‘is that they could only have found their way here through the Array.’

Fowler felt Amanda’s hand reach out to take hold of his own under the table. ‘That’s hardly an original observation,’ he replied.

Nick smiled. ‘Imagine, if you would, that out there amongst the stars, we found something that we did not understand. Perhaps we would study it carefully, even bring it back here to Earth for closer scrutiny. Does that not seem like a reasonable conjecture?’

‘Sure, if you subscribe to the kind of news feed that runs items about two-headed babies and biblical visions,’ Fowler replied, doing his best to ignore the fear clutching at his heart. All the same, his comment elicited a few smiles from the rest of the table.

‘Oh man, conspiracy theories,’ said Jason. ‘I love conspiracy theories.’

‘What is irrefutable, to my mind,’ Nick continued, a glint of malice now evident in his gaze, ‘is that we are currently witness to the greatest act of murder in history. I mean the murder of an entire planet and its civilization.’

Amanda’s grip on Fowler’s hand became so tight that it hurt.

‘You really think someone caused all this?’ Fowler replied.

‘An act of negligence, perhaps, if not outright murder, but the result is the same.’

‘I think Jason was right,’ said Fowler. ‘I’ve heard a hundred conspiracy theories just like that one in the past week.’

The table had by now become quite silent.

‘Perhaps,’ said Nick, conceding the other man’s point. ‘And yet I have found myself encountering the most remarkable people on this voyage. Some, I suspect, are far better informed than one might reasonably expect.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Amanda, ‘but I didn’t catch your last name.’

‘If you’ll excuse us, we have to go,’ she said, suddenly standing up and tugging at Fowler’s arm. ‘Like we said, it’s been a long night for all of us.’

‘Of course,’ said Nick, his smile tightening across his teeth. ‘I wish you a good night.’

‘He recognized you,’ she whispered as they hurried back to their cabin. ‘I don’t know who he is, but he sure as hell knows who you are.’

‘Can you place him? Was he working anywhere on the Tau Ceti station?’

‘I really don’t think so. There’s very few of the staff we didn’t account for during the clean-up process, and he’s not one of them. But the way he was looking at us . . .’ She shuddered despite the tropical heat. ‘He knows, Thomas, I feel sure of it.’

‘It’s not like it takes a great leap of logic to figure out that the growths might be the result of some error of human judgement. It’s unlikely he was making any personal reference to either of us.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘stop trying to rationalize this! I could see it in his face, the way he was looking at you. It’s not just that he knows about the Founders: he also knows who you are.’

They came to the door of their cabin, and Fowler put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. ‘Even if that turned out to be the case, it’s much too late to worry about it now. We already know what’s in our future.’

‘But how sure are you, really, that it’s set in stone?’

He hesitated, but only for a moment. ‘Sure enough to believe that what I saw in that video is bound to come to pass, whatever else happens in the meantime.’

They were woken during the night by angry shouting, followed by gunfire. Fowler pressed his ear to the cabin door, unwilling to risk stepping out into the corridor and wishing he had thought to arm himself. When first light came, he summoned up the courage to venture out on his own and learned, from a member of the crew, that a few of the more belligerent passengers, who had apparently come on board armed with sports rifles, had demanded the ferry make a detour towards a pod of whales sighted several kilometres to the east. The captain’s blank refusal had led to an argument, and the argument – largely fuelled by alcohol – had led to a violent altercation, leaving two of the passengers dead and another seriously injured. Their sleep after that was restless, and Fowler dreamed of bone-white flowers growing from blood-red seas.

The Pacific growth – the first one of all to come into existence – became visible on the horizon the following afternoon. It looked to Fowler like something that Magritte might have imagined: a silver and gold behemoth resembling a flower only in the most abstract terms, and self-constructed on a scale that ded all logic. The senses rebelled at the sight of it when seen directly, and he felt the same tight knot of primitive terror deep in his chest that he’d experienced on first seeing the news footage of this same growth.

Once again they gathered by the rail with the rest of the passengers, steadying themselves cautiously as the ferry rose and dipped with the waves. The growth was still sufficiently distant for the lowest part of its base to be hidden below the curve of the horizon, and yet the complex structures sprouting from its massive stem, like tangled nests of leaves, were clearly visible even at so great a distance. So was a haze of barely discernible black dots and curious twists of light that clouded its upper half.

‘Do you think he was right?’ Fowler asked, tasting salt as waves broke against the hull. ‘That man last night, I mean – in what he said about the slate being wiped clean.’

Amanda laughed and shook her head. ‘Nick? I think he’s watched too many bad TriView shows. No, it’s probably something much more prosaic than that.’

‘Like what?’

‘A construction tool,’ she suggested. ‘An earth-digging machine that a bunch of ants accidentally figured out how to switch on, and now it’s rolling over their own anthill. That would be about the size of it.’

‘He was right about one thing: there are easier ways to wipe us out.’

‘What you said about the earthquakes. Do we know if that’s the case?’

‘Think about the amount of energy the growths must need to reach such an enormous size in so little time.’ A big wave smashed into the ferry, and they staggered slightly as the deck tilted first one way, then the other. ‘The leaves are for gathering solar energy, but I reckon that wouldn’t give them a fraction of the total power they’d need. Geothermal power is a fast way to get the rest of that energy, so they drill deep into the crust, or maybe even further.’

‘And the atmospheric phenomena we’re seeing? What about that?’

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘But I don’t think Tesla’s got much to do with it.’

‘I’m still glad we came here, you know,’ she said. ‘Somehow seeing it like this – actually being here – makes all the difference.’

‘You think we’re getting what we deserve by being here?’

She looked at him. ‘Don’t you?’

He shook his head. ‘I think we were just unlucky. Curiosity defines us. It’s what makes us human. There’s no way you could explore something like the Founder Network and not expect to get your fingers burned.’ He pulled her closer and nodded up at the sky. ‘Out there, quo;re seeuo;ll survive . . . or other people will, at any rate.’

A message was broadcast over the ferry’s tannoy system before Amanda could form a reply. The captain proposed taking a vote on whether to sail the ferry to within a kilometre of the growth’s base, and the result of the vote would be announced the following morning.

Fowler felt overcome by a mixture of excitement and terror as he listened. That single glimpse, in a fragmentary video, of Amanda standing on the deck of this very same ferry, had given him the sense of fulfilling some kind of personal destiny just by being here. The end was close, but at least it was an end they had chosen together, and of their own free will. From this point on, there could be no surprises.

Quite soon they retired once more for the night, waking frequently to the sounds of shattering glass or loud music emanating from the deck, then later to screams and moans coming from the cabins adjacent to their own. They both woke early, to find the sun still boiling its way up over the horizon, and stepping over snoring bodies and the remains of smashed wine bottles as they made their way to the restaurant deck. It proved to be deserted, except for the man called Nick, who stood by the railing, looking out to sea. He turned and nodded to them as they approached, almost as if he’d been waiting for them.

‘Mr Fowler,’ he said. ‘I’ve been up all night thinking about you.’

Fowler managed to hide his shock. They’d used false identities this far, after all. He glanced sideways at Amanda and saw the look of silent fury on her face. But, instead of feeling angry or afraid, he himself felt only a sense of calm inevitability.

‘I wondered if you recognized me,’ he said, stepping outside again to join him.

The man called Nick leaned once more against the railing, this time with his back to the sea. He shrugged. ‘At first I wasn’t sure, but then I did a little research in the feed archives, to be certain. So . . . are you here with us to save the day? Or is that just too much to hope for?’

‘Would that I were. Do the rest of your friends know who I am?’

‘Why?’ The scientist laughed. ‘Are you afraid of what they might think of you?’

‘I wasn’t aware I had committed any crime,’ Fowler replied levelly.

‘Merely a crime of hubris, perhaps,’ said Nick. ‘I know about the Founder Network, Mr Fowler. I even have a good idea how all of this came about.’

Amanda caught Thomas’s eye as she stepped up beside him, glancing pointedly first at the rail against which the scientist leaned, and then at the empty restaurant behind them. He guessed what she was thinking: there would be no witnesses if they could manage to tip the man over the railing.

He squeezed her hand and shook his head fractionally. What was the point of killing this , when their own lives were now numbered merely in days, if not hours?

‘We don’t know who you are,’ she then said to the scientist, her voice low and almost menacing. ‘Did you follow us here? Is that why you’re on this ferry?’

He shook his head. ‘Not at all; serendipity, nothing more. This trip was my one chance to see direct evidence of the things that took my brother away from me. After I recognized you at the airfield in Guam, I managed to persuade my colleagues that we should board this same ferry. I needed to be sure, you see.’

Fowler frowned. ‘Your brother?’

‘My name is Nicolas Rodriguez,’ he said. ‘My brother’s name was David.’

Fowler saw Amanda’s eyes widen, her complexion turning even paler than usual.

‘You know that name, David Rodriguez?’ Fowler asked her. There was something familiar about it.

She nodded. ‘One of the early casualties from Site 17. He got caught in a . . . in a temporal anomaly, I guess you’d call it.’

Fowler nodded, something cold and indigestible settling into the pit of his stomach as he finally remembered the unpleasant details of the incident.

‘I’m sorry about your brother,’ he told Nick. ‘I wish there was something we could have done for him.’

Nicolas Rodriguez shook his head like he was disappointed. ‘It took a long time, and a fortune in bribes, to learn the truth. I envy him for the things he must have seen. But you told us lies about him, and our mother died believing he was killed in some routine laboratory accident. Imagine how I felt when I discovered he was caught up in some miserable form of limbo between life and death. I clung to the hope that my informants were wrong, and I had been fed just some ridiculous fantasy.’

He glanced over his shoulder towards the growth, which was now towering overhead. ‘Then I began to understand that I had not, after all, wasted my family’s fortune on bribes. I kept digging for more information. I learned that you were one of those responsible for the research programme of which my brother was part. Now, it seems, we are all to be exterminated like cockroaches scuttling in a drain.’

‘So now you know who we are,’ said Fowler, ‘but there’s no reason to blame us for what happened to your brother.’

‘On the contrary,’ Rodriguez replied, staring directly at Amanda. ‘What happened to him was no accident, was it? And I recognized you in particular, Miss Boruzov.’

Fowler glanced between them in puzzlement. ‘What are you talking about?’ he demanded.

‘I suppose it doesn’t matter now,’ said Amanda, her eyes fixed firmly on Rodriguez. ‘His brother was smuggling high-security data back home. We . . . decided to arrange an accident to neutralize him.’

‘And is that how you choose to deal with your brightest and best?’ demanded Rodriguez. ‘Better that you’d simply put a bullet in his brain than allow him to suffer this . . . this living death.’

‘He has no idea that he’s caught in a temporal field,’ Amanda insisted. ‘His subjective experience of time ensures he isn’t even aware that anything’s wrong. You could hardly call it a “living death”.’

‘Perhaps,’ Rodriguez replied grimly, ‘that is something we should leave for others to decide.’

‘Others?’ echoed Amanda.

‘My colleagues,’ Rodriguez explained. ‘I eventually told them of my suspicions last night. Then we went to the captain, who will give you more of a chance than you allowed my brother. We will select a jury, and let them decide what should be done with you.’

Amanda burst out laughing. ‘That’s absolutely ridiculous! We’re all going to be dead in a few days anyway. What difference can it possibly make?’

‘So it’s true?’ Rodriguez countered. ‘Those things sprouting everywhere from our planet will destroy us?’

Amanda opened and closed her mouth, then turned away to stare fixedly out to sea.

Rodriguez eyed her for a moment, then turned back to Fowler with a look of satisfaction. ‘We seek closure, you see. I, for one, desire closure. I want to see you made an example of – in front of God, if no one else.’

Amanda swung back round, her face twisted in fury. ‘This is insane,’ she spat. ‘We’re not responsible for that . . . thing out there. We did everything we could to stop it.’

‘No,’ intervened Fowler, putting a restraining hand on her shoulder. ‘Listen to me, Nick. We came here ourselves because we know we share at least some responsibility for what’s happening. We’re not running away, like so many others, and you must take that into account.’

‘Then let us find out the truth.’

Fowler now became aware they were no longer alone. He looked to one side and saw three of Rodriguez’s colleagues had joined them on the restaurant deck, in the company of two crew members who were conspicuously armed. He noted, with an unpleasant churning in his stomach, that one of the latter had a length of rope slung over one arm.

‘Wait,’ said Amanda. ‘Please, before anything else, there’s something we have to do.’

‘What?’ asked Rodriuez impatiently.

Fowler saw Amanda swallow hard. ‘We need to make a recording. I swear it won’t take long.’

Rodriguez’s eyes narrowed with suspicion.

‘Please,’ Fowler beseeched him. ‘Think of it as a last request, if you prefer.’

Rodriguez’s nostrils flared briefly, then nodded assent with a brief jerk of his head.

Fowler stepped away from the rail, and set his contacts to record and upload the proceedings to a secure server he’d long since prepared. The video would then be stored, along with a cache of other files, in half a dozen separate orbital satellites that would remain untouched by the growths.

He panned up the entire height of the original growth, looming nearby, to where it disappeared into the clouds. The memory of previously watching these same images now collided with the experience of creating them for the first time, every action and thought so thoroughly locked in place that even the desire to break free of the cycle of predetermination was, he saw now, predetermined.

He panned back down, until he had Amanda encompassed in his gaze, her pale and beautiful features marred by worry and fear of what the next few hours held. But before he could do anything more than grab a fleeting recording of her, rough hands grabbed him from behind, dragging him towards the bridge and a fate that seemed as certain as anything else that had come tumbling down from the future into the present.