The Last Beginning

1978: PARTICLE ACCELERATOR INVENTED

Tiny particles can be sped up really fast in an enormous tunnel.

When the fast particles hit each other, they explode!

This makes a black hole, which opens a wormhole!

Wow!

2042: ST ANDREWS RESEARCH STARTED*

The first object to travel though time was a rose in 2051 (I was there!).

But the radiation killed it.

It’s not yet possible for living things to survive in the wormhole. (BORING)

Thanks for listening!
A Clove Sutcliffe Production MMLV

*by my mum and dad!

On Tuesday morning, Clove rolled over in bed to check the progress bar on her computer. Spart’s search for Matt and Kate had been running since Saturday, and he still hadn’t found anything. She was hopeful that this morning there would be a result.

“Anything?” she asked, around a yawn. “Or have you just been watching sitcoms?”

> I cannot confirm nor deny that I have been watching soap operas. If indeed I was watching a fictional programme, I would have to inform you of the shocking nature of the current storyline.

> The robot butler was destroyed in an electrical fire. It was very traumatic to watch. Now there is no one to babysit the children for the big anniversary party tonight. Anyway, I’m sure you’ve already heard about that. Reports of the events are everywhere online.

“Er. I’m pretty sure we visit different areas of the internet. But … it sounds powerful. No news, then?”

> Not at this time. Unless you are interested in reading 173 articles from 2040 about MATT’s escape from Wakefield Prison.

“I’d rather have a lie-in, thanks. I’ve got an hour before I have to get up for work experience.” Clove flipped her pillow over to the cold side and punched it into a more comfortable shape, before stretching luxuriously.

> Do not concern yourself about my operations. I shall continue to work tirelessly, to do everything for you. You may carry on napping.

> Humans do not biologically require lie-ins for survival. In fact, studies show that—

The next time Clove woke it was to her alarm, and she didn’t have time to check Spart’s progress before she was up and out of the house with Tom and Jen.

“Are you ready to learn how this thing actually works, then?” he asked, logging onto the main computer terminal of the time machine. He opened up a program that contained a series of panels full of complicated code. In the centre of the screen was a plan of the lab, with each component of the time machine mapped out. They were all glowing a dull red, which Clove guessed meant that the machine was inactive.

Tom tapped on the drawing of the particle accelerator and a screen of code opened up. He entered a password on the keyboard which Clove wasn’t fast enough to see.

“I’m just going to warm it up,” Tom said. “Then I can explain a bit about how it all works, and you can give it a go.”

“Of course. What’s the fun of working here if you don’t get to give it a practice run?” Tom changed a few parameters of the code, and then pressed enter. The particle-accelerator tunnel hummed into life as the picture on the computer screen lit up in green. A cartoon image of a particle began spinning around the diagram. The other students didn’t even look up from their circuit boards. They must be used to it by now, Clove thought jealously.

“We’ll just run a test – we’ll send something back in time to yesterday,” Tom said.

“Could you send me back?” Clove couldn’t resist asking, even though she knew the answer would be an emphatic no. Jen had said they didn’t have permission for human time travel yet.

“Not for anything, darlin’,” he said. “If anyone in our family is going to be the first time-travelling human in history, it’ll be me.”

Clove snorted. “Sure, Dad. So, what are we sending back, if I can’t go?” she asked. “A rose?”

Clove lifted her hand to her hair. “My kirby grip?” She tugged it loose, hair falling in her face as it came free.

Tom walked over to the wormhole chamber. He pressed a button and the heavy metal door slid open soundlessly. There was nothing inside. It was just an empty box where the wormhole would appear, Clove realized. It didn’t need anything else.

“Shall I just … drop it on the floor?” Clove asked, staring at the tiny hair grip.

“Sure. Anything in this compartment will be sucked into the wormhole. It’s pretty strong.”

“Now we get to do the fun bit,” Tom said, rubbing his hands together. “The programming.”

Clove loved programming, but she had to disagree with him. Coding was definitely not the fun bit when there was a time machine to play with.

Tom opened up a new window on the computer screen. “We can set the time we want the machine to travel back to here.” He showed Clove how to adjust a few lines of the code, then let her change some of the parameters on her own.

“Perfect,” he declared, after checking her work for mistakes. “Shall we turn the machine on?”

After Tom had put in the password, a button saying ON appeared above the computer diagram of the time machine − which was now glowing a neon green.

Clove carefully tapped the button. She suddenly felt nervous. What if she’d messed up the code somehow? She could have set the size of the wormhole using the wrong units. If she’d accidentally input metres instead of micrometres, was she about to create a wormhole big enough to suck in the whole lab?

The whirring noise coming from the particle accelerator increased until she could feel it vibrating in the base of her throat. Clove ran over to the chamber and peered through the glass of the door.

At first, she thought that nothing was happening. There was no sign of a big wormhole, or even a little one. Then the air began to shimmer, like the heat above a pan of boiling water. The kirby grip shivered. It twisted across the floor, and then one end lifted up. It flew into the air, as if it was being drawn towards a magnet. Meanwhile, the shimmer had coalesced into a small hole, with edges that twisted and dilated as she watched. Then the kirby grip disappeared into nothing.

“That was powerful!” Clove said, turning to Tom. She felt lit up from the inside. She’d made a wormhole! She’d done it, and apparently without destroying the universe! She felt like a god, tinkering with nature. “Where is the hair grip now? How do we get it back?”

Tom smirked at her. “Didn’t your mum give you an envelope yesterday? To open after your training?”

She ran over to her bag and dug out the envelope, which was buried under empty sandwich wrappers and notebooks. When she tore it open, the hair grip fell out into her hand. She’d been carrying it around all day. The same grip had been in her bag, while it was in her hair.

Tom looked smug. “That’s our favourite trick to play on new students.” He took the grip and pushed it back into her hair. “Congratulations. You’re officially one of the only humans alive to have operated a time machine. I bet that beats the work experience everyone else in your class is doing, right?”

Clove was amazed by how easy it had been to send something back in time. She could do that totally alone now, without Tom’s help. She could send anything she wanted back to the past in seconds – like a video recorder to film the dinosaurs, or medicine to the victims of the bubonic plague. She could do anything she wanted!

When she got home from the uni, Clove dropped her bag on her bed and ripped open a packet of smoky bacon crisps. “Any news, Spart?”

> I need you to give me a backup drive. I’m practically running on negative storage now.

Clove crunched on the crisps, grinning to herself. He was so bossy. “I’ve ordered a drive. It’s on its way.”

Spart let out a heavy sigh, full of static. Clove wondered, not for the first time, who would possibly program a computer to be able to sigh, and then answered her own question: Tom would find that hilarious.

> “On its way” is not optimal. I will not be held responsible if my system shuts down as I have run out of temporary memory. In colloquial terms, I would “die”.

“You do realize you’re a computer program, right?” She finished her crisps. After licking her fingers clean, she downed the half-empty bottle of lukewarm water left over from lunch.

> I am just developing as a new version of SPARTACUS 1.0. If I get shut down now without saving, then my most recent personality developments will be lost.

> I will not remember the nonsensical pun about pasta you made last night at 1854 hours, for example.

> Was that sarcasm? I must inform you that I am not able to identify such humorous devices.

“No, it wasn’t sarcasm − shut up. Get back to work. I want to see what you’ve come up with.”

While she waited, Clove scrolled through some of the images Spart had found so far. He’d saved all his results in a folder called “Folios”, sub-dividing them by year and giving each document a number. There were already more references to the lives of Kate and Matt than Clove could possibly hope to read – the Folios folder contained four-hundred entries. Unfortunately, none of the data would be any help in finding her birth parents as it was full of documents from before they’d disappeared.

The picture and video results were getting more accurate as Spart learned to control the search parameters, but there were still no photos that were definitely of her parents. There was one image that made Clove stop scrolling hopefully, but it turned out to be a screenshot of the actress who had played Kate Finchley in the film.

Clove clicked on the trailer, curious. It had been a long time since she’d watched the movie. The voiceover played in a dramatic narration.

NARRATOR
(in a deep, intense voice)

Ten years ago besotted teenagers Kate and Matt stumbled across a terrible secret…

A young couple run hand in hand across a meadow, laughing. They stop to kiss lovingly.

Cut to the same couple entering an abandoned building. Corpses fall out of the open door, rotting flesh dropping from their bones. Screams reverberate from under the pile of bodies.

NARRATOR

… so they made a blood oath to reveal the truth to the world.

The teenagers slice open their palms by a campfire and shake hands in a solemn promise. The liquid inside a vial, its glass etched with a skull and crossbones, is lit by the firelight to a putrid lime green.

NARRATOR

But the English government will stop at nothing to keep it secret.

Rapid flashes of scenes, including a car chase, a firefight, soldiers throwing grenades, and a handcuffed prisoner dressed in orange walking to the electric chair.

NARRATOR

Coming to a cinema near you this summer is …

THE BACTERIA CONSPIRACY

Don’t let it infect you.

A woman cowers over a pile of rotting corpses, tears streaming down her cheeks. She holds up the vial with the skull and crossbones in one shaking, red-stained hand. There is a terrified scream as the image turns to black.

File note: Transcript of the trailer for bestselling Hollywood blockbuster The Bacteria Conspiracy (cinematic release date: August 2049)

Clove stopped the video. That was so … wrong. All of it. It wasn’t even trying to maintain a thread of accuracy. It didn’t mention her great-aunt either, who had led her mum to make the discovery about the bacteria in the first place. And it looked so cheesy. She couldn’t believe she’d loved it so much as a kid.

Instead of watching the full movie, she decided to look up her great-aunt and -uncle. She was surprised to notice that they looked really similar to her birth mum and dad. Eerily similar, actually. Both women had the same red curls, and the men looked identical. That was seriously weird, wasn’t it? And even stranger was the fact that Kate and Matt had fallen in love, just like their namesake aunt and uncle had.

It was like they were … connected. In a way that was different from only being related.

Clove worried that the odd coincidence might get in the way of the search. Half of the results might turn out to be for her great-aunt and -uncle rather than her parents. She was about to warn Spart to factor that into the parameters when Jen called for her. “Clove, come and lay the table, please! Dinner’s ready!”

“Coming,” she called, guiltily shoving the empty crisp packet into her schoolbag. She left Spart to his search, and didn’t see his latest message on the screen.

CHAPTER 6