Final Days

Albright took another draw, ‘we’re going to have to go a little deeper.’

‘What are you talking about?’ asked Mitchell.

‘Dissection,’ said Albright. ‘Peel back your skin and see what it is that makes you tick. Put your organs in steel trays and pick them apart to see if you’re really human.’

Mitchell felt his insides twist in horror. ‘How the hell is doing that going to tell you anything?’

‘We won’t know until we look, will we?’ said Albright, an unpleasant glint in his eyes. ‘We’ve tried persuasion and reasoning, and look where it got us. But now we’re staring a holocaust in the face and, in the absence of any willing response on your part, do you really think we’d hesitate one Goddamn moment to get the answers we need, by any means necessary?’

No, thought Mitchell, not for one second. ‘There’s nothing you can do to stop what’s coming,’ he insisted, regardless. ‘Don’t you understand that? From where I’m standing, you’ve all been dead for years. You’re a ghost, Albright.’

Albright’s jaw worked like he’d just swallowed something nasty. ‘Let’s be clear on one thing: I’m not interested in this predetermination shit. The future isn’t fixed.’

‘You brought this on yourselves. I saw how the science teams at Tau Ceti were forced to take chances. They were bringing technologies that nobody understood back to Earth without any idea what the consequences might be. The sci-eval staff all fled protests, but nobody listened.’ Mitchell cleared his throat. ‘But I did listen, and I saw how anything that looked like it could turn a profit or win a war was packed into a crate and hauled straight back home.’

Albright stared at him, the cigarette burned down almost to his knuckles.

‘What you don’t seem to understand is that the future is indeterminate, yes,’ Mitchell continued, ‘unless you find your way into it through a wormhole, and then all time between now and then becomes fixed like a fly in amber. It’s like the observer effect: once you see it or touch it, it’s locked in one state for ever. That’s why the Founders disappeared so far into the future, to a point beyond the reach even of the wormholes. It was the only way they could escape predetermination.’

Albright wiped at his mouth with one hand, a frightened look in his eyes. ‘How do you know all this?’

Mitchell let his head fall back, suddenly exhausted. They would be recording this interrogation, the same as all the others, of course. He wondered what his unseen audience were making of it all.

‘I asked you how you could know any of this,’ Albright repeated.

Mitchell brought his head back up. ‘I already told you yesterday, because of the learning pools. When I woke up, I knew things.’

‘What kinds of things?’

Mitchell struggled to find words to describe the vast repository of knowledge now resting inside his brain. He had begun to suspect that this repository somehow existed independently of him – a library inscribed deep in the microscopic foam of reality, at the most minute level, something the black pools had somehow given him the means to tap into.

He shook his head helplessly. ‘Everything,’ he finally replied.

Albright let his cigarette fall to the ground and formed his hands into fists. ‘You’re making this shit up, Goddamn you.’

‘I can tell you what’s going to happen in a thousand years, or a hundred thousand, or ten million – the broad details, anyway. Sometimes . . .’ He closed his eyes tightly for a moment and sensed the repository there, hovering always in the back of his mind, vast and nebulous. ‘Sometimes I try to ignore it, to not always be aware of it, but I can’t. I know so much, from now until so far in the future, you can’t even begin to imagine.’

Albright didn’t say anything else for a moment, and Mitchell could hear the sound of a plane droning somewhere overhead, as well as distant voices, muffled through thick walls, passing by and then fading.

‘Assuming any of this is true, why didn’t you tell me before?’ asked Albright.

‘Because I knew it wouldn’t make any difference,’ Mitchell replied. ‘I’d still wind up here in this garage having the shit beaten out of me, whatever I said.’

Albright nodded. ‘You’re right, I’m afraid.’ He gestured to Scott. ‘Hold him.’

Scott moved behind the chair, Mitchell twisting his head round to try and see him. Albright meanwhile stepped over to a workbench and began to rummage through a bag. As he turned back, he held a syringe in one hand, and a small plastic bottle filled with a clear liquid in the other.

‘What are you doing?’ Mitchell demanded.

‘Something new,’ said Albright. ‘A development from the Kepler pharms. Apparently highly effective.’

Mitchell shook his head, now terrified. ‘You don’t need to do this.’

‘Oh, but we do,’ Albright replied. ‘We were worried about damaging you before, but that’s not such a priority now.’ He came closer, an expression of what looked like genuine sorrow on his face as he approached. ‘I won’t lie to you, Mitchell. This is going to hurt. A lot.’

Mitchell twisted against his restraints, furious and terrified, and filled with a horrid certainty about what was coming next.

Scott came up behind him, wrapping one forearm around his neck and planting the other hand over the top of Mitchell’s head, effectively rendering him immobile. Mitchell struggled as Albright stepped around behind him, and out of sight, but any effort was useless.

‘Please don’t struggle,’ advised Albright. ‘I don’t want to wind up disabling you when I put the needle in.’

The back of the chair was partly open, making it easy for Albright to pull up part of Mitchell’s paper uniform and feel for his spine. A second later Mitchell felt something slide deep inside the thick musculature there.