underfoot, but left nothing as clear as a print behind them.
‘Oh, good.’ He nodded. ‘So there you go — something to put a smile on your face, then?’
She gave that some thought. ‘This is minimizing our overall contamination liability.’ Her gaze shifted from their feet back up to him. ‘Correct. That makes me… happy.’
‘There you go, you miserable sod,’ he replied cheerfully. ‘Things are looking up. We’ll be home soon enough.’
They clattered down through the wet shingle until the first warm waves of tropical water hissed up to and around their feet. Up ahead the others had decided to wade knee-deep into the sea and were splashing each other noisily. She pursed her lips in thought as she watched them, a curious gesture she must have picked up from one of the girls, Liam decided. A gesture that Bob’s muscular face would have struggled to reproduce. ‘If we successfully complete the mission, Liam O’Connor, and we return to the field office, do you intend to retire me?’
‘Retire? What do you mean?’
‘Terminate this body and replace it with a male support unit? I heard Sal Vikram refer to this organic frame as a “mistake”.’
He’d not given it much thought. Becks was Sal’s error — she’d not bothered to check the gender marker on the containment tube — and they’d not had time to consider growing another. But certainly neither Maddy nor Sal had mentioned terminating her and disposing of her body.
‘Why would we want to go and do that, Becks?’
‘The male support frame is eighty-seven per cent more effective than the female frame as a combat unit.’
‘All right, maybe that’s true, but why’d the agency give us female babies as well, then?’
‘Female support frames can be useful for covert operations where a female cover is required.’
He scratched his head. ‘Well now, I really don’t see why we can’t have one of each of you, you know? A Bob and a Becks. There’re no agency rules, are there, you know, against us having two support units in a team?’
‘Negative. I am not aware of any agency rules on that.’
‘So, well, there you are… why not? We’ll have two of you instead of one.’
They walked in silence for a while, Liam intrigued by how human her question had sounded.
‘Have I functioned as efficiently as the Bob unit?’ she asked after a while.
‘Yes, of course. I don’t know what we’d have done without you so far. But you know it’s still so very weird. Aren’t you actually Bob anyway? Or at least a copy of Bob in a different skin?’
‘Negative. My AI has adapted enough since being copied to be considered a different AI ident. I have experienced data that Bob has not. Also, the organic brain that is interfaced with the AI is genetically different between the male and female support frames.’
‘Right. But… you remember being Bob, right?’
‘Of course. I recall all the incidents of our first mission, right up until the moment you removed my chip.’
Liam wished he couldn’t remember that as well. ‘Ugghh. Not something I’d like to do again in a hurry.’
‘You successfully preserved the AI. It contained six months of adaptive learning,’ she replied. ‘Both Bob and I are six months closer to fully emulating human behaviour. We are both grateful.’
He shrugged modestly. ‘Oh, you know, it’s nothing. Just part of the job.’
‘I am able to kiss you,’ she said. ‘This would be an appropriate gesture of gratitude. I have data.’
She began puckering her lips and Liam felt that odd conflicted sensation he’d felt after they’d first arrived in 2015: a tingling excitement offset with a sense of revulsion.
Bob, in a girl suit… remember.
‘Uh… that’s OK, Becks. A thanks is more than good enough.’
‘Affirmative. As you wish.’
‘Anyway, where the hell did you learn about kissing?’
‘I have a detailed description from a book I was reading while I was installed in the mainframe.’
‘Eh? What sort of books have you been reading?’
‘The book is entitled Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A novel. The digital file is in early twenty-first century PDF format. The file’s original replication date is — ’
‘Hold on,’ said Liam, stopping. ‘Do you have that file in your database still?’
She nodded. ‘My reading was interrupted. I wished to complete it. So I added it to my short-term cache.’
‘And would Bob also have the exact same file on the computer system?’
‘Of course.’
His mouth hung open. ‘There’s the code, then! Right there! That’s the code you could use! Isn’t it?’
Her eyelids fluttered as she processed the thought. ‘You are talking of a book code?’
‘That’s right, a Harry-Whatever-mijingamy book code.’
CHAPTER 41
65 million years BC, jungle
Howard noticed the young boy walking alongside him, sloshing through the warm seawater.
‘Hey,’ he said.
Edward smiled. ‘Hey. You always called Leonard, or do your friends call you Lenny?’
Howard shrugged; not a question he’d anticipated being asked. ‘Uh
… mostly just Leonard,’ he replied. ‘My mom calls me Lenny, but I hate that.’
‘I heard someone say your best subject is math.’
He nodded. ‘It was my — ’ He stopped, inwardly cursing. ‘It… is… my favourite school subject. Always loved math. It’s like, well, I dunno… I suppose it’s like a sort of poetry that only a few people get. If you know what I mean? It’s, like, exclusive.’
Chan nodded. ‘Yeah, I know what you mean. That’s why I like it. It’s something I know and other people don’t. It makes me feel kind of special, I guess. Maybe that’s why I don’t have any friends at school, cos they think I’m odd.’
Howard nodded. ‘Yeah, I guess I’m the same. A loner.’ He squinted up at the bright sun. ‘Never ever get picked for sports, because I’m the geek.’ He shrugged. ‘But that’s OK, cos I never liked sports anyway.’
Edward nodded. ‘Me neither. It’s for jocks and ditto-heads.’
‘Ditto-heads?’ Howard laughed. ‘I like it.’
‘You never heard that expression?’
Not in my time, he almost answered. But instead he just shook his head.
‘Hey!’ said Edward suddenly, and bent down to scoop up a curious twisted ammonite shell from the shingle.
‘See? There are even bigger ones of those,’ said Howard, nodding at some of the others, wading waist deep in the clear blue water, occasionally ducking down to pull shells out of the water to admire them.
They walked on in silence for a while, going a little further into the warm water. Up ahead, leading the way and deep in conversation, Howard could see the two ‘agents’ — Liam and his robo-girl. He shook his head at the irony of it. Despite their turning up in 2015 to ‘save’ Chan, they were all on the same side really, all trying to prevent the nightmare of time-travel technology from destroying the world. Same goal… different methods. He wondered how he’d never come across this agency in all the years of his campaigning, all the rallies and protests he’d been to… and no one, no one, had ever suggested, even as a joke, that there might be an agency out there actually using time travel itself to combat the corruptive effects of time travel. He wondered who was behind it, who’d set it up. Surely not the American government? Not any government, in fact. The internationally agreed penalties for that were severe. No politician would have the guts to risk having anything to do with time travel, because international law was brutal and strict on this matter. It was an automatic death penalty for any involved. The great Roald Waldstein had been a powerful speaker on the horrendous dangers of it. A great man, an influential man. Howard’s
