Liam slipped in the muck as he hurried over and knelt down beside her, his hand uselessly wafting around Sal, wanting very much to comfort her, but at the same time not actually make any physical contact with the foul- smelling gunk coating.
‘I am so very… very…’
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ Sal said, desperately trying not to inhale the odour of rotting meat.
‘You all right in there?’ It was Rashim’s voice.
‘Fine!’ called out Liam. ‘Don’t come in just yet! It’s messy!’ He looked down at the clone, still curled defensively in a ball, its head in Sal’s lap. Eyes slowly opened, grey. Wide. Curious and vaguely alarmed.
Liam leaned over it and offered the clone a smile and a little wave. ‘Hello there!’
Its mouth flexed open and closed several times, dribbling the gunk being ejected from its lungs.
‘Ughhh.’ Sal eased the clone’s head off her lap and on to the floor. ‘I’m soaked in this pinchudda.’
Liam wasn’t listening. ‘Hello? You OK?’ he cooed down at the clone. Now she was out of the mist of swirling salmon-coloured soup, he could see the female unit clearly enough. The creature’s hairless head made it hard to judge her precise age. Her face looked both old and young at the same time.
He reached down, lifted her by the shoulders till she was sitting up, produced a towel and wrapped it round her. ‘There you go.’
Sal tutted, jet-black hair plastered against her face by the cooling, gelatinous protein soup. ‘Oh, I see… she gets the towel, does she?’
Rashim sat cross-legged before the rack of circuitry of the displacement machine, SpongeBubba looking over his shoulder on one side and Bob over the other.
‘Incredible,’ he whispered. ‘The design is quite… quite brilliant. Look at that, Bubba, see? He’s sidestepped the feedback oscillation completely.’
‘I see it, skippa!’
He turned to Bob. ‘Our system’s field was constantly suffering distortion variables. Outside interference and internally generated distortion. Feedback patterns.’
‘Your displacement device was much bigger than this one, correct?’
Rashim nodded. ‘Yes. Enormous. And large-scale introduces a whole new bunch of problems. But even so…’ He shook his head again, marvelling at the economy of the circuitry. ‘This is so ingeniously configured.’ A grin stretched across his thin lips.
Roald Waldstein, you were fifty years ahead of anybody else.
‘We should take this whole rack,’ he said. ‘I know a lot of these component wafers can probably be replaced — duplicated with present-day electronics — but I need to take some time to be sure I know how he’s put it all together.’
‘Affirmative. We will take the complete rack.’
‘What about the controlling software?’ Rashim looked at the row of computer cases beneath the desk. Each one with an ON light glowing, and the flickering LED of a busy hard drive. ‘I need the software shell as well. It’s as much a part of this device as the circuits.’
‘Correct.’
Rashim shook his head. ‘Those computers look primeval. How the hell can they run Waldstein’s machine’s software?’
‘Networked together these computers are suitably powerful,’ replied Bob. ‘They do not use the original operating software.’
Rashim recalled the charming old names of computing’s early twenty-first-century history: Microsoft. Windows. Linux. Primitive times when code was written in a digital form of pidgin English. Not like the elegant streams of data from his time: code written by code.
‘We won’t need to take these clunky old computers with us, will we?’
‘Negative. We can extract the machines’ hard drives.’
Hard drives? Then Rashim remembered. Data in this time used to be stored magnetically on metal disks inside sturdy carousels. Again, so primitive. So wasteful. Nothing like the efficiency of data suspended in water molecules.
‘Right… yes. Do you know how to do that, uh… Bob?’
‘I have a theoretical understanding of the system architecture of these Dell computers. Also the system AI — known as computer-Bob — can provide detailed instructions on how to dismantle the architecture. However, only Maddy has practical experience of this process.’
‘Right. OK.’ Rashim pinched the narrow bridge of his nose. ‘We’d best wait for her to come back before we start dismantling things, then.’
‘Affirmative.’
He got to his feet. Across the archway, he watched the Indian girl, Sal, talking quietly with another girl, pale as a ghost and completely bald.
‘Who is that?’ asked Bubba cheerfully.
‘It is a support unit,’ said Bob. ‘It was set on a growth pattern before we had to deal with your Exodus contamination.’
‘A genetically engineered AI hybrid, SpongeBubba,’ added Rashim. ‘The US military were working with those back in the fifties and sixties. Perfect soldiers. We had a platoon of gen-bots come along with us on Exodus.’ He looked at Bob. ‘Leaner, more advanced models than you, I’m afraid.’
Bob’s brow furrowed sulkily. ‘I know.’ Then, with something approximating a smirk, ‘I did in fact manage to disable one of them.’
‘Yes, you did.’ Rashim nodded respectfully and then offered him an awkward high five. ‘Good for you, big man.’
Bob cocked his head and gazed curiously at Rashim’s palm left hovering in mid-air.
‘Uh… never mind,’ he said, tucking his hand away.
Chapter 5
10 September 2001, New York
Maddy returned from Central Park with Foster just after half past one in the afternoon. Following brief introductions of Rashim and his novelty robot, they set to work. During the rest of the day Sal was largely sidelined with the drooling child support unit in her tender care while Maddy, Rashim, Foster, computer-Bob and SpongeBubba collectively pooled their technical knowledge and carefully dismantled the equipment in the archway.
It was an exercise in identifying and extracting only the technology components that could not easily be replaced elsewhere. Bob and Liam meanwhile had been sent out to steal a vehicle big enough for them all and the equipment they were likely to take along.
By the time lights started to flicker on, on the far side of the East River, turning Manhattan, skyscraper by skyscraper, into an enormous, inverted chandelier and the railway overhead started rumbling with trains taking city commuters home from the Big Apple to the suburbs of Brooklyn and Queens, they’d done most of what needed to be done.
A battered Winnebago SuperChief motorhome was parked up in the alleyway, a snug, hand-in-glove squeeze between the row of archways and the graffiti’d brick wall opposite. The rack carrying the displacement machine had been carefully lifted in and secured tightly in the RV’s toilet cubicle. The PCs had been stripped of their internal hard drives and the filing cabinet beside Maddy’s desk had been emptied. Its drawers were full of a messy miscellany of discarded wires and circuit boards and gadgets: a taser, something that looked like a Geiger counter, the babel- buds, a non-functioning wrist-mounted computer of some sort with ‘H-data WristBuddee-57’ stamped on one side. Gadgets and parts of gadgets, most of them clearly not from the year 2001. Nothing like that could stay behind.
The improvised growth tubes were too large to take along, but the pumps and computer interface were removed and carefully stored in the RV. The protein solution and the dead foetuses were gone now, poured away
