Torbin hadn’t heeded the advice. Zardino told him it would take at least ten hours to learn the ways of this machine, the half-shell pod in which he now sat. Originally he imagined something reaching this level of completion to not require any input from its occupier beyond issuing a command, to tell it to take him to whatever time. The danger of a semi-automated system was the sophistication of processing required. It may not have been the most advanced AI but it was enough to be vulnerable to corruption – a quantum virus, for example. With the threat of the Elusivers ever-present, no firewall was guaranteed to be effective against their infiltration. And so that final link had to be Torbin: assigned full program control.
Before him he saw lines of code, projected as a simple HUD display on a glass screen above the control panel. Some of the number strings represented the shield cut-off duration. And for security reasons (again the risk of Elusiver infiltration into the base) only he could know what the numbers meant, how they translated into the amount of temporal erasure he’d be exposed to. This was programming usually only conducted by the most specialised of technicians.
What it finally gave him was control. What a delicious feeling after all those years where the Elusivers had decided where he went in time and space. And even after they had ceased those ‘enlightenment’ tours, they still remained in his head, under his skin, hardly even encumbered by the ever vigilant protection of the B’tari. Indeed the Elusivers had already succeeded in their task. After all, he’d never renounce the worst atrocities of the last hundred thousand years; that was to deny humanity itself. And he couldn’t even argue the Elusivers were wrong in seeing humans as irredeemably flawed, not progressing towards enlightenment but technological oblivion.
He began the first sequence of programming. There was a specific date and time corresponding with the numbers. Except, he had to remind himself, this would not be time travel. It was more akin to reverse entropy; an undoing of cause and effect, but with such swiftness it seemed like an obliteration. Even if the process could be slowed down a million times the effect remained the same; he imagined it as watching a tidal wave consume all that was not fixed in the depths of time.
Here was the rub: every event that he had experienced, every memory could not exist in the future beyond the date of his destination; a curious duality of something that had been erased and yet for him evidentially never existed. If he got a sequence wrong by a few digits, or slightest program glitch occurred, his life could be wiped out completely. That was the true death everyone faced: the death of memory.
But could the universe ever forget completely?
The final sequence had been entered. Now a countdown ensued: thirty seconds. If the sequence had been interpreted by the AI correctly, his new time would be two days in the past. How tempting to go back further. The possibilities taunted him, one more than any other: the chance to save Emelda. And so much more: a half-forgotten litany of wrong-doings, of frustrations at his own inactions. All by just varying a few digits. Yes, it was the things you failed to do that you regret the most. It’s all about squandered time; not seizing the moment; not recognising the preciousness of a passing minute. How often the regrets of a dying man. Or a man possessed with the hope of ameliorating them.
If only I could have the awareness. The awareness...
From Zardino’s craft, Torbin watched as the spider entity took the probe containing the uploaded mind of Roidon Chanley, swiftly disappearing into some hyperspacial state. Torbin was just thinking how his plan to make contact may well have been so much better, when the field generator signalled him through the general channel. ‘Torbin Lyndau. I have received a superluminal information packet. Please prepare for transmission.’
Torbin was nonplussed, he had been focusing on the data collected from the Elusiver craft.
‘Okay,’ he said, suddenly with his attention now on this curious development. ‘record data.’
The first words: ‘Instructions from Zardino Tau.’ There was a pause, obviously in recognition of both their need to assimilate this revelatory information. The message continued: ‘Torbin, you are instructed to travel, alone, to my Earth compound and retrieve Raiya and Roidon. But on no account are you to mention this message.’
Zardino stared at Torbin with a smile beginning to form. ‘It worked, don't you see, Torbin? You have been exposed to local temporal eradication.’
‘My God! A controlled exposure! We've cheated time!’
‘We can erase the future, simply by following those instructions.’
‘I take it, then, you are not a believer in the many worlds interpretation.’
‘There are no variations of macro systems spread over parallel universes. A quantum system operates independent of its neighbour.’
‘Just had to be sure.’
‘I'm not ruling out the possibility that in one universe there is another you by some chance collection of atoms. But I don't think we need to concern ourselves with that.’
‘Then I need to get to Earth.’
‘But without my assistance.’
‘The Temporal Directive.’
The message had been retrieved in total. Only, there was a problem: what came out beyond the headline instructions appeared to be garbled nonsense. Zardino ran it through every possible filter. He eventually shook his head, and muttered, ‘It’s not Decrypting.’
‘Did anything come through?’ Torbin asked eventually, peering over at the jumbled text.
‘I wouldn’t be surprised if this is down to the Elusivers’ act of sabotage. I hardly need to tell you that they’re right across everything that goes on in your vicinity. They didn’t need to understand the transmission to know there was something that seemed useful. They’ll be monitoring for any anomalies.’
‘Or it could simply have got mashed up in the transmission.’
‘So you think it was my mistake? No, I understand how to transmit a message superluminally.’
‘Whatever. If you know how I can get back to Earth.’
Without a word Zardino took the craft back into Earth orbit. He left the flight deck and returned a few minutes later with a bulky-looking EVA suit, something that would not have appeared out of date in the twenty-first century. ‘That’s your transport,’ he announced, flatly.
Once Torbin had got over the initial surprise he got in the suit. He then strapped an equally ancient-looking chemical propulsion unit to his back; the weight of it nearly made him topple over. Zardino had to help him along to the airlock. He felt like an academy rookie astronaut from those early days of space walks: those pre-space nerves.
Zardino assured him that he simply needed to vector the helmet display towards his destination, using what were essentially small stick controls on arm rests. Even the position of the compound was marked; he wondered if it could have simply been programmed in to navigate automatically, but perhaps that contravened some rule of the Temporal Directive.
Falling towards terra-firma was something akin to the initial free fall of a parachute jump, except there would be no parachute. Green squares of fields surrounded by hills rotated gyroscopically, nauseatingly, until the side thrusters kicked in. Amidst the adrenalin rush, he continued to direct his path to the target. ‘That fucking temporal directive,’ he mouthed. And yet in a way he was glad to be given this freedom. A chance to prove himself; to rescue her. And how good it would feel to circumvent the Elusivers’ plans.
Despite the level of control he had over the space suit, Zardino had not trusted him to activate the retro thrusters at the exact right moment. When the ground became perilously close Torbin found his coordination was leaving him almost completely, and that he was very much on the point of vomiting.
Yet he was close enough to the target now that it mattered little. The thrusters came on line, and he landed on his feet as gently as if he had just jumped in Moon gravity. Except his legs felt so weak they crumpled beneath him.
It only took a few seconds for Torbin to get over the euphoria of having survived the drop for him to start removing the suit. He carried it with him for the last few hundred metres towards the compound.
The entrance to the compound was buried beneath a slightly discoloured patch of grass in the side of a hill. The tunnel down took Torbin through hundreds of metres of chalk, clay and lastly sandstone. He eventually reached a metal door with a security ident panel. The only thing he needed to do was stand before it whilst it scanned him, not only for DNA but also for signs that his physical appearance had in any way been altered. Zardino was particularly proud if his security measures. Yet, given the recent dealings with the Elusivers, this seemed a tad naive. If it were a game, then the game had changed: the Elusivers just didn't play by the old rules.
The door opened with a hiss, and now he was in another grey-white corridor. One of the doors led to Raiya's quarters. It occurred to him that Raiya may be asleep. Torbin rehearsed in his mind what he would say to her; but it all sounded preposterous, like some weak ploy designed to get her to leave with him.
Her door was the only one with a comm system and a security monitor. He pressed his finger on the ident pad, then a message came up that he was allowed voice comm.
It took nearly a minute before she responded. ‘Torbin ... it’s late.’ But she opened the door before he had time to respond.
She was in a purple towelling robe, her hair slightly wild about her face; such a contrast to how he had always seen her before when so neatly made up, formal – her professional distance. At least she didn't appear annoyed at his inopportune visit.
She even smiled at him. ‘Did you get it?’ she asked.
‘It?’
‘His memory – from the---’
‘Oh, Raiya, no, I’m so sorry. The Elusivers---’
‘I don't want to know about the fucking Elusivers, I want Roidon back.’ Her anger now was palpable. He’d awakened Raiya to tell her this.
‘You mean the old Roidon?’
‘Of course I mean the old Roidon. Not that shell of a man who can barely string a sentence together.’
Had it really occurred to him that Raiya was truly in love with Roidon? Torbin had told himself – created the logical narrative – that it was merely infatuation with a young-looking man who possessed an undeniable charisma. How it must have pained her to see what was left of the man.
‘Raiya, we need to leave,’ he told her. ‘I wish I could explain to you why, but you just need you to trust me – for your own safety.’ For a few seconds Torbin considered that she might go with him alone, but added, ‘And Roidon should come too.’
Raiya looked thoughtful, perhaps she was considering the implications of the last sentence. ‘Torbin,’ she said at last, ‘I believe you to be a genuinely decent man trying to do the right thing. So I am prepared to trust you.’
Torbin, Raiya and Roidon headed away in the remaining craft left at the compound. Any detail of the ground had disappeared in seconds, and within a few minutes the curvature of the Earth was apparent. All he had to do was wait for the ship to reach the coordinates given to him by Zardino.
Raiya was quiet; Torbin guessed she was embarrassed by Roidon’s current condition: he was babbling away in incoherent bursts, seemingly exited about heading towards space. For a while Torbin took a discreet pleasure in hearing this once eloquent, highly intelligent man speak like a small child. At first it had shocked him; there were just no adults he knew of with this level of brain damage. Neurosurgery had advanced sufficiently to repair most of the effects of a serious accident, and dementia was a thing of the past. Perhaps Roidon was lucky to be alive, given what the Elusivers – or their acolytes – had done during a deep-memory trawl. Surely they could have got all the knowledge they needed without resorting to such a heavy-handed approach. Perhaps Roidon had been left in this state as warning to Torbin himself.
Now a sense of shame had surfaced. Roidon had put himself in that situation as essentially a sacrifice; he did it to save Raiya, and for that she would always love him – brain-damaged or not.
All Torbin could do now was focus on the task of stopping the temporal eradication wave.
***