Final Days

‘Side-effect of what, exactly?’

‘They need a lot of power to be able to grow the way they are. What they can’t get from the sun, they get by tapping into geothermal energy in the very deep crust.’

Jeff had frowned at that. ‘Are they really capable of digging that deep? They look just like big flowers. Terrifying, alien, monstrously huge flowers, but still . . .’

Mitchell had smiled thinly. ‘You really don’t want to know how much they’re capable of.’

After that, they had left the motel and headed for an autocafe, where Mitchell told him more of what had happened to him following his return from Site 17.

‘No,’ Mitchell had concurred, shaking his head. ‘I can barely remember anything from those first couple of hours after you pulled me out of the pit chamber. The first thing I can remember clearly is being taken off heavy sedation, days later.’

‘You said they kept you under sedation at Arcorex, too?’

Mitchell had nodded. ‘After that, they kept me deliberately unconscious a lot of the time. I have vague recollections of being prodded by lots of people in biohazard suits.’

‘They were worried you might be carrying something, right?’

‘I suppose. Some kind of future-tech plague, or whatever they thought I might be carrying inside me.’

‘And you say you woke up with all this . . . this alien information in your head?’

Mitchell nodded. ‘What you have to understand is, those pits were helping me and Vogel, and not killing us. They actually remade us: no more diseases or ill-health. I might even live for ever. And I learned so much from them . . .’ His voice grew distant for a moment. ‘It’s hard to even know where to start.’

Jeff’s coffee had rested untouched and forgotten in his hands as he listened.

‘The Founders weren’t a single race,’ Mitchell had explained. ‘There were many of them, machine as well as biological intelligences, and a kind of hybrid of the two that’s difficult to explain.’ He paused and cracked a smile. ‘Jesus, I could tell you about things that haven’t happened yet, that won’t happen until our own sun’s cold and dark and black.’

Jeff had licked his lips. ‘Try me.’

‘There’s a war being fought, right now. It’s been going on for countless aeons and it’ll continue for countless more.’ He took a sip at his own coffee. ‘Really, it’s more like thousands of individual conflicts, all through this galaxy and a myriad others. But they’re all being fought otedme thing.’

‘The Founder Network?’

Mitchell nodded and grinned, almost shyly. ‘It sounds like bullshit, right? Like I made this all up. But you’ve been there too, under that night with no stars, a hundred trillion years in the future. You’ve been to Site 17, so you know I’m telling the truth.’

‘Yeah, I guess I do.’ Jeff’s voice had cracked slightly. He remembered the coffee and gulped it, to wash a dry stickiness out of his mouth. ‘But it’s going to take time to get my head around all of this.’

‘Not too much time,’ Mitchell had replied, nodding at a screen mounted at an angle over in one corner.

It seemed like every channel and feed was running the same footage of the Pacific growth. Wreathed in steam, it had already reached hundreds of metres in height, and was still rising out of the ocean at an accelerating rate. Warships could be seen in its shadow, each of them utterly dwarfed by its broadening petals. Helicopters buzzed around it like so many mosquitoes, while various talking heads debated whether or not the Sphere or the Western Coalition were going to try to nuke it, or any of the others now sprouting all around the globe.

‘I feel like I want to get up and yell at everyone we meet,’ Jeff had declared. ‘Just to warn them to get away.’ He had glanced around the autocafe at the lone drivers or tight family groups, all of them undoubtedly talking about nothing but the growths. ‘When I think about what’s going to happen, I feel . . . paralysed.’

Mitchell’s response had been to shake his head. ‘There’s nothing you can do for any of them. Your best strategy is to just focus on what we have to do.’

‘I understand that. I just don’t know . . .’ He paused and glanced down at his half-finished coffee, struggling to control the sudden upwelling of emotion deep within his chest ‘I don’t know that I deserve to survive what’s coming. You understand that, right?’ His tone had been plaintive, almost childlike.

‘Jeff, listen. I could tell you to try and hold it together, but I already know that you will. I was there in Arcorex – am there in Arcorex – and one thing I do remember is when you turned up and got me out of there.’

Jeff had felt a chill running down his spine. ‘But what if this time I decide not to? What if I just walked out of here right now and—’

‘No, Jeff.’ Mitchell shook his head, speaking slowly, as if to a child. ‘You’re talking about a paradox, but time paradoxes are impossible. Look . . . think of it this way. You won’t walk away without helping me, because history already shows that you didn’t. If you had, I wouldn’t be here; but I am here; ergo you did help me.’

‘You’re saying we don’t possess free will. That our actions are pretermined.’

Mitchell had given him a strange look. ‘That’s true, but it’s not the way it has to be.’

Jeff couldn’t hide his confusion. ‘What do you mean?’

Mitchell had a look on his face like he was making his mind up whether or not to tell him something. ‘If I tried to explain it right now, it would complicate things more than they really need to be. All you need to remember is that, from my perspective, you’ve already gone into Arcorex and pulled me out.’

Jeff had shaken his head in irritation. ‘Okay, okay. I get it. It’s just hard to remember sometimes that all of this has already happened for you.’

‘Once we’ve got him out, you and me are going to take him back to the motel, and leave him everything he’ll be