Manhattan in Reverse

  Which didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Paul and Carmen had given up by then, bored, waiting for me to wrap it up. So? I prompted ‘So,’ Jenson said patiently. ‘This was nineteen seventy-two. Cassettes were state of the art then. At the time I thought it was odd, that iPod was some foreign word; Marcus was already fluent in three languages, he’d throw stuff like that at you every now and then, all part of his laid-back image. It was one of those things that linger in your mind. There was other stuff, too. The way he kept smiling every time Margaret Thatcher was on TV, like he knew something we didn’t. When I asked him about it he just said, “One day you’ll see the joke.” I’ve got a good memory, Detective, very good. All those little details kept adding up over the years. But it was the iPod which finally clinched it for me. How in God’s name could he know about iPods back in seventy-two?’

  Now I understand, I told him: time machine. Jenson gave me this look, like he was pitying me. ‘But Marcus was twelve, just like me,’ he said. ‘We’d been at prep school together since we were eight, and he already possessed the kind of suavity men don’t normally get until they’re over thirty, damnit he even unnerved the teachers. So how did an eight-year-old get to go time travelling? That was in nineteen sixty-eight, NASA hadn’t even reached the moon then, we’d only just got transistors. Nobody in sixty-eight could build a time machine.’

  But that’s the thing with time machines, I told him. They travel back from the future. I knew I’d get stick from Paul and Carmen for that one, but I couldn’t help it. Something about Jenson’s attitude was bothering me, that old policeman’s instinct. He didn’t present himself as delusional. Okay, that’s not a professional shrink’s opinion, but I knew what I was seeing. Jenson was an ordinary nerdish programmer, a self-employed contractor working from home; more recently from his laptop as he chased Orthew round the world. Something was powering this obsession. The more I heard the more I wanted to get to the root of it. ‘Exactly,’ Jenson said. His expression changed to tentative suspicion as he gazed at me. ‘At first I thought an older Marcus had come back in time and given his young self a 2010 encyclopedia. It’s the classic solution, after all, even though it completely violates causality. But knowledge alone doesn’t explain Marcus’s attitude; something changed an ordinary little boy into a charismatic, confident, wise fifty-year-old trapped in an eight-year-old body.’

  And you worked out the answer, I guessed. Jenson produced a secretive smile. ‘Information,’ he said. ‘That’s how he does it. That’s how he’s always done it. This is how it must have been first time round: Marcus grows up naturally and becomes a quantum theorist, a cosmologist, whatever . . . He’s a genius, we know that. We also know you can’t send mass back through time, wormhole theory disallows it. You can’t open a rift through time big enough to take an atom back a split second. The amount of energy to do that simply doesn’t exist in the universe. So Marcus must have worked out how to send raw information instead, something that has zero mass. Do you see? He sent his own mind back to the sixties. All his memories, all his knowledge packaged up and delivered to his earlier self; no wonder his confidence was off the scale.’

  I had to send Paul out then. He couldn’t stop laughing; which drew a hurt pout from Jenson. Carmen stayed, though she was grinning broadly; Jenson beat any of the current sitcoms on TV for chuckles. All right then, I said, so Orthew sent his grown-up memory back to his kid self, and you’re trying to find the machine that does it. Why is that, Toby?

  ‘Are you kidding?’ he grunted. ‘I want to go back myself.’

  Seems reasonable, I admitted. Is that why you broke into the Richmond lab?

  ‘Richmond was one of two possibles,’ he said. ‘I’ve been monitoring the kind of equipment he’s been buying for the last few years, after all he’s approaching fifty.’

  ‘What’s the relevance of that?’ Carmen interjected.

  ‘He’s a bloke,’ Jenson said. ‘You must have read the gossip about him and girls. There have been hundreds; models, actresses, society types.’

  ‘That always happens with rich men,’ she told him, ‘you can’t base an allegation on that, especially not the one you’re making.’

  ‘Yes but that first time round he was just a physicist,’ Jenson said. ‘There’s no glamour or money in that. Now though he knows how to build every post-2000 consumer item at age eight. He can’t not be a billionaire. This time round he was worth a hundred million by the time he was twenty. With that kind of money you can do anything you want. And I think I know what that is. You only have to look at his genetics division. His electronics are well in advance of anything else on the planet, but what his labs are accomplishing with DNA sequencing and stem cell research is phenomenal. They have to have started with a baseline of knowledge decades ahead of anybody else. Next time he goes back he’ll introduce the techniques he’s developed this time round into the nineteen seventies. We’ll probably have rejuvenation by nineteen ninety. Think what that’ll make him, a time-travelling immortal. I’m not going to miss out on that if I can help it.’

  I don’t get it, I told him, if Orthew goes back and gives us all immortality in the nineties, you’ll be a part of it, we all will. Why go to these criminal lengths?

  ‘I don’t know if it is time travel,’ Jenson said forlornly. ‘Not actual travelling backwards, I still don’t see how that gets round causality. It’s more likely he kicks sideways.’

  I don’t get that, I said. What do you mean?

  ‘A parallel universe,’ Jenson explained. ‘Almost identical to this one. Generating the wormhole might actually allow for total information transfer, the act of opening it creates a Xerox copy of this universe as it was in nineteen sixty-seven. Maybe. I’m not certain what theory his machine is based on, and he certainly isn’t telling anyone.’

  I looked at Carmen. She just shrugged. Okay, thank you for your statement, I told Jenson, we’ll talk again later.

  ‘You don’t believe me,’ he accused me.

  Obviously we’ll have to run some checks, I replied. ‘Tape 83–7B,’ he growled at me. ‘That’s your proof. And if it isn’t at the Richmond Centre, then he’s building it at Ealing. Check there if you want the truth.’

  Which I did. Not immediately. While Carmen and Paul sorted out Jenson’s next interview with the criminal psychologist, I went down to forensics. They found the video tape labelled 83–7B for me, which had a big red star on the label. It was the recording of a kids’ show from eighty-three: Saturday Breakfast with Bernie. Marcus Orthew was on it to promote his Nanox computer, which was tied in to a national school computer learning syllabus for which Orthanics had just won the contract. It was the usual zany rubbish, with minor celebrities being dunked in blue and purple goo at the end of their slot. Marcus Orthew played along like a good sport. But it was what happened when he came out from under the dripping nozzle which sent a shiver down my spine. Wiping the goo off his face he grinned and said: ‘That’s got to be the start of reality TV.’ In nineteen eighty-three? It was Orthew’s satellite channel which inflicted Big Brother on us in 1995.

  Toby Jenson’s computer contained a vast section on the Orthanics Ealing facility. Eight months ago, it had taken delivery of twelve specialist cryogenic superconductor cells, the power rating was higher than the ones used by Boeing’s shiny new electroramjet spaceplane. I spent a day thinking about it while the interview with Toby Jenson played over and over in my mind. In the end it was my gut police instinct I went with. Toby Jenson had convinced me. I put my whole so-called career on the line and applied for a warrant. I figured out later that was where I went wrong. Guess which company supplied and maintained the Home Office IT system? The request must have triggered red rockets in Orthew’s house. According to the security guards at the gate, Marcus Orthew arrived twelve minutes before us. Toby Jenson had thoughtfully indicated in his files the section he believed most suitable to be used for the construction of a time machine.

  He was right, and I’d been right about
him. The machine was like the core of the CERN accelerator, a warehouse packed full of high-energy physics equipment. Right at the centre, with all the fat wires and conduits and ducts focusing on it, was a dark spherical chamber with a single oval opening. The noise screeching out from the hardware set my teeth on edge, Paul and Carmen clamped their hands over their ears. Then Carmen pointed and screamed. I saw a giant brick of plastic explosive strapped to an electronics cabinet. Now I knew what to look for, I saw others, some were sitting on the superconductor cells. So that’s what it’s like being caught inside an atom bomb.

  Marcus Orthew was standing inside the central chamber. Sort of. He was becoming translucent. I yelled at the others to get out, and ran for the chamber. I reached it as he faded from sight. Then I was inside. My memories started to unwind, playing back my life. Very fast. I only recognised tiny sections amid the blur of colour and emotion: the high-speed chase that nearly killed me, the birth of my son, Dad’s funeral, the church where I got married, university. Then the playback started to slow, and I remembered that day when I was about eleven, in the park, when Kenny Mattox our local bully sat on my chest and made me eat the grass cuttings.

  I spluttered as the soggy mass was pushed down past my teeth, crying out in shock and fear. Kenny laughed and stuffed some more grass in. I gagged and started to puke violently. Then he was scrambling off in disgust. I lay there for a while, getting my breath back and spitting out grass. I was eleven years old, and it was nineteen sixty-eight. It wasn’t the way I’d choose to arrive in the past, but in a few months Neil Armstrong would set foot on the moon, then the Beatles would break up.

  What I should have done, of course, was patented something. But what? I wasn’t a scientist or even an engineer, I can’t tell you the chemical formula for Viagra, I didn’t know the mechanical details of an airbag. There were everyday things I knew about, icons that we can’t survive without, the kind which rake in millions; but would you like to try selling a venture capitalist the idea of Lara Croft five years before the first pocket calculator hits the shops? I did that. I was actually banned from some banks in the City.

  So I fell back on the easiest thing in the world. I became a singer-songwriter. Songs are ridiculously easy to remember even if you can’t recall the exact lyrics. Remember my first big hit in seventy-eight, Shiny Happy People? I always was a big REM fan. You’ve never heard of them? Ah well, sometimes I wonder what the band members are doing this time around. Pretty In Pink, Teenage Kicks, The Unforgettable Fire, Solsbury Hill? They’re all the same; that fabulous oeuvre of mine isn’t quite as original as I make out. And I’m afraid Live Aid wasn’t actually the flash of inspiration I always said, either. But the music biz has given me a bloody good life. Every album I’ve released has been Number One on both sides of the Atlantic. That brings in money. A lot of money. It also attracts girls, I mean I never really believed the talk about backstage excess in the time I had before, but trust me here, the public never gets to hear the half of it. I thought it was the perfect cover. I’ve been employing private agencies to keep an eye on Marcus Orthew since the mid-seventies, several of his senior management team are actually on my payroll. Hell, I even bought shares in Orthogene, I knew it was going to make money, though I didn’t expect quite so much money. I can afford to do whatever the hell I want; and the beauty of that is nobody pays any attention to rock stars or how we blow our cash, everyone thinks we’re talentless junked-up kids heading for a fall. That’s what you think has happened now, isn’t it? The fall. Well you’re wrong about that.

  See, I made exactly the same mistake as poor old Toby Jenson: I underestimated Marcus. I didn’t think it through. My music made ripples, big ripples. Everyone knows me, I’m famous right across the globe as a one-off supertalent. There’s only one other person in this time who knows those songs aren’t original: Marcus. He knew I came after him. And he hasn’t quite cracked the rejuvenation treatment yet. It’s time for him to move on, to make his fresh start again in another parallel universe.

  That’s why he framed me. Next time around he’s going to become our god. It’s not something he’s going to share with anyone else.

  I looked round the interview room, which had an identical lay-out to the grubby cube just down the hall where I interviewed Toby Jenson last time around. Paul Mathews and Carmen Galloway were giving me blank-faced looks; buttoning back their anger at being dragged into the statement. I couldn’t quite get used to Paul with a full head of hair, but Orthogene’s follicle treatment is a big earner for the company, everyone in this universe uses it.

  I tried to bring my hands up to them, an emphasis to the appeal I was making, but the handcuffs were chained to the table. I glanced down as the metal pulled at my wrists. After the samples had been taken, the forensics team had washed the blood off my hands, but I couldn’t forget it, there’d been so much; the image was actually stronger than the one I kept of Toby Jenson. Yet I’d never seen those girls until I woke up to find their bodies in the hotel bed with me. The paramedics didn’t even try to revive them.

  ‘Please,’ I implored. ‘Paul, Carmen, you have to believe me.’ And I couldn’t even say for old time’s sake.

  The Forever Kitten

  The mansion’s garden was screened by lush trees. I never thought I’d be so entranced by anything as simple as horse chestnuts, but that’s what eighteen months in jail on remand will do for your appreciation of the simple things.

  Joe Gordon was waiting for me. The venture capitalist and his wife Fiona were sitting on ornamental metal chairs in a sunken patio area. Their five-year-old daughter, Heloise, was sprawled on a pile of cushions, playing with a ginger kitten.

  ‘Thanks for paying my bail,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry it took so long, Doctor,’ he said. ‘The preparations weren’t easy, but we have a private plane waiting to take you to the Caribbean – an island the EU has no extradition treaty with.’

  ‘I see. Do you think it’s necessary?’

  ‘For the moment, yes. The Brussels Bioethics Commission is looking to make an example of you. They didn’t appreciate how many regulations you violated.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have minded if the treatment worked properly.’

  ‘Of course not, but that day isn’t yet here, is it? We can set you up with another lab out there.’

  ‘Ah well, there are worse places to be exiled. I appreciate it.’

  ‘Least we could do. My colleagues and I made a lot of money from the Viagra gland you developed.’

  I looked at Heloise again. She was a beautiful child, and the smile on her face as she played with the kitten was angelic. The ball of ginger fluff was full of rascally high spirits, just like every two-month-old kitten. I kept staring, shocked by the familiar marbling pattern in its fluffy light fur.

  ‘Yes,’ Joe said with quiet pride. ‘I managed to save one before the court had the litter destroyed. A simple substitution; the police never knew.’

  ‘It’s three years old now,’ I whispered.

  ‘Indeed. Heloise is very fond of it.’

  ‘Do you understand what this means? The initial stasis-regeneration procedure is valid. If the kitten is still alive and maintaining itself at the same biological age after this long, then in theory it can live forever, just as it is. The procedure stabilized its cellular structure.’

  ‘I understand perfectly, thank you, Doctor. Which is why we intend to keep on funding your research. We believe human rejuvenation is possible.’

  I recognized the greed in his eyes: it wasn’t pleasant. ‘It’s still a long way off. This procedure was just the first of a great many. It has no real practical application, we can’t use it on an adult. Once a mammal reaches sexual maturity its cells can’t accept such a radical modification.’

  ‘We have every confidence that in the end you’ll produce the result we all want.’

  I turned back to the child with her pet, feeling more optimistic than I had in three years. ‘I can do it,’ I said through cle
nched teeth. ‘I can.’ Revenge, it is said, is best served cold. I could see myself looking down on the gravestones of those fools in the Bioethics Commission; in say . . . oh, about five hundred years’ time. They’d be very cold indeed by then.

  Joe’s affable smile suddenly hardened. I turned, fearing the police had arrived. I’m still very twitchy about raids.

  It wasn’t the police. The teenage girl coming out from the house was dressed in a black leather micro-skirt and very tight scarlet T-shirt. She would have been attractive if it wasn’t for the permanent expression of belligerence on her face; the tattoos weren’t nice either. The short sleeves on the T-shirt revealed track marks on her arms. ‘Is that . . .’

  ‘Saskia,’ Joe said with extreme distaste.

  I really wouldn’t have recognized his older daughter. Saskia used to be a lovely girl; but this creature was the kind of horror story that belonged on the front page of a tabloid.

  ‘Whatcha starin’ at?’ she demanded.

  ‘Nothing,’ I promised quickly.

  ‘I need money,’ she told her father.

  ‘Get a job.’

  Her face screwed up in rage. I really believed she was going to hit him. I could see Heloise behind her on the verge of tears, arms curling protectively around the kitten.

  ‘You know what I’ll do to get it if you don’t,’ Saskia said.

  ‘Fine,’ Joe snapped. ‘We no longer care.’

  She made an obscene gesture and hurried back through the mansion. For a moment I thought Joe was going to run after her. I’d never seen him so angry. Instead he turned to his wife who was frozen in her chair, shaking slightly. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked tenderly.

  She nodded bravely, her eyes slowly becoming unfocused.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Joe said bitterly. ‘We didn’t spoil her, we were very careful about that. Then about a year ago she started hanging out with the wrong sort: we’ve been living in a nightmare ever since. She’s quit school; she’s got a drug habit, she steals from us constantly, I can’t remember how many times she’s been arrested for joyriding and shoplifting.’