“Surfers Paradise,” Maddie said, shaking her head. “Maybe it was, once. Right now, it feels like we’re about as far from paradise as you can get.”
4
SURFERS PARADISE, AUSTRALIA
That night, the clockwork room—the most impossible place on the planet by all rational measures—felt like an oasis. The name it had been given conjured up images of basic technologies with cogs and levers and nuts and bolts, and though all those were present, those images could not have been further from the reality of the place. There were technologies at play here which transcended even the most advanced human developments by millennia, all underpinned by concepts which would be impossible for even the most brilliant scientists and philosophers to grasp.
This was pure god-tech.
Though hours had passed, the atmosphere in the room remained consistent: always the same temperature and humidity. The lighting felt improbably natural, like being out in broad daylight but without any windows or sunlight. The room was almost completely featureless save for the central console, and that, apart from four wheels so silvery white they were nearly translucent was smooth. The door they used to come in and out (which, Jenny had noticed, didn’t seem to actually be there until they needed to go through it) was the only visible opening. Yet it felt remarkably complete, compact and self-contained, and it was silent; there was never any noise nor even the slightest vibration to suggest an external engine or other power supply. Nothing about the room made sense.
But even more bizarre than the existence of the room itself, even more inexplicable than its physics or its power or capabilities, was the fact that Maddie and Jenny found that they could both operate it. They each gravitated towards different functions, but they both found they had an inherent understanding which deepened the longer they spent looking.
“Maybe you’re half-god too?” Jenny suggested.
Maddie just laughed. “Yeah, sure. Mom was an angel, I’ll give you that, but if my pop was a god, then he was the only god who’d willingly shit on anyone who ever asked him for anything. He was not a good man. Thought only about himself, and that was only when he wasn’t drunk and incapable of having lucid thoughts. If he’d been a god, he might have used his divine intervention to do something about the rioting and subsequent fire that laid waste to the correctional facility where he’d spent the last decade of his decidedly ungodly life.”
“Fair enough.”
Maddie stepped back from the console and stared at it. “You know, I’m starting to wonder if it’s us working this thing or this thing working us.”
“That’s no weirder than anything else that’s happened today, but it doesn’t make sense.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re here. It seems to need us. If it was autonomous, the room would just operate itself, wouldn’t it?”
“Think about it, though. This must be some kind of vehicle.”
“It’s some kind of transportation system, that’s for sure.”
“And a lot more besides, I’d guess. But you wouldn’t build a truck then leave it to drive itself around empty.”
“I’m sure you’re right, but how does it know what to do and where to go? I can’t explain how you got here, but I know when I stepped into this room at the top of the Shard in London, all I was thinking about was that I had to get away from there, that I had to get as far away as I could.”
“And you did. If my memory of geography serves me right, you’re pretty much exactly on the opposite side of the planet, give or take.”
“So we just think about what we want and the machine makes it happen? Surely it can’t be that easy?”
“Everything would already be back to normal if that were the case. All I was thinking about was not getting attacked, and all I’ve thought about since I got here is getting home. No, I think there has to be limits to what the room can do.”
“We could try asking.”
“Asking who? Asking what? How?”
“Asking the room? Right now, we’re flying blind. We don’t know how either of us fits into all of this, or why we’re here together.”
“Or why a random surfer guy decided to try and take you out just now.”
“It was because I’m internet famous.”
“Is that a thing?”
“Yep. I ended up on a livestream with a god when this all kicked off. Everybody saw it. The whole world.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes.”
“Weird.”
Jenny walked around to another face of the console, looking for inspiration. “There’s so much of this we need to try and understand. My dad used to say it was important to make sure you’d got all the facts so you could make the most informed decision.”
“Sounds like sage advice. Was he a therapist?”
“No, he worked in insurance, and somehow, he was from another planet and his best friend was a god.”
“Then he was worth listening to, I guess. So, where do we start?”
“Maybe we should focus less on the machine, and more on trying to work out why we’re here?”
“Listening.”
“Off the top of my head…I need to know what happened in the three weeks I wasn’t here, for starters. In the time between me leaving London and arriving here, how far did the Bleed spread, and how much damage did it do? How does it travel? How does it kill? I saw something on a TV when I first got here saying we’d got less than a month before it reaches Australia.”
“So, if we can see what happened in the three weeks you lost…”
“Then we might be able to understand what we can do
