File note: A sketch by TOM GALLOWAY of the journey from St Andrews to Cambridge, showing the new borders of the British Isles in his universe
ST ANDREWS, SCOTLAND, 2056
Clove wrapped her arms tighter around Tom’s waist, trying to ignore the rumble of the engine and how fast the ground was moving beneath them. Clove would have sworn violently that her father was not the kind of person to ever own a motorbike. Clearly she had been very wrong. The bike was black and sleek and dangerous. Tom rode it through the streets with precision. Clove just tried to hold on tight enough that she didn’t fly off the back.
When Clove had started despairing about getting to Cambridge before she was erased from existence, Tom had scratched at his beard thoughtfully and said, to Clove’s utter amazement, “I guess this is where I tell you I’m a hacker for an underground resistance fighting the government.”
In this timeline, Tom was still operating as the hacker Spartacus. Apparently because he’d never met Jen, got married or become a professor, he was still doing the same thing he had as a student: online illegal activism. Jen’s calming influence on him must have extended further than Clove had realized. In a world where he had never met her, he had become a completely different man.
Clove couldn’t deny she was impressed. It was a bit annoying that her dad was a hundred times cooler than she was, though. Her dad was some kind of action-movie badass in this reality.
The bike turned a corner and nearly touched the ground. Clove swallowed a yelp.
“Where next?” Tom called over his shoulder.
Clove lifted her arm from around Tom’s waist just enough to see the map on her watch, which showed the route they should take out of town to avoid running into any of the patrols. According to Tom, there had recently been a lot of rioting by the Scottish resistance.
Tom had got hold of the politsiya patrol patterns through an online contact, and his Spart had found a route that they could follow to get them through St Andrews without being seen. It was going to be a close thing. According to the patrol timetable, at one point, they would have barely thirty seconds to get past a guard.
“Next left,” Clove shouted in his ear. “You might want to go a bit faster!”
The engine roared. Clove’s stomach jumped.
“Second right!” she called, her voice high-pitched. She cleared her throat, and then they turned another corner and she forgot all about the tone of her voice. “Stop here!” she yelled. “There’s a patrol ahead!”
Tom pulled in behind a line of dustbins, and cut the engine. He ducked over the handlebars. Clove bent down out of sight too, trying to keep an eye on the politsiya at the same time.
Two soldiers crossed the road ahead of them, chatting loudly in thick Russian. Clove and Tom stayed frozen as the politsiya passed by. As they disappeared around the corner behind a row of houses, Clove let out a relieved breath.
“That was close,” Tom said.
“Come on,” she whispered. “Let’s go before they come back.”
“We should be OK as soon as we’re out of the city. I can get us to Cambridge in six hours if I go at over ninety!”
“Please don’t,” Clove said.
By the time Tom pulled up around the back of the Cambridge Department of Physics, it was early evening. In the pale grey twilight, Clove’s skin seemed to be disintegrating. Her hands felt soft, like the gentlest brush would tear her open. She wondered if she still had blood, or if that had already dried up, disappearing from her veins until her skin clung to the bones like an ancient Egyptian mummy.
She carefully dismounted from the bike on shaky legs. “We have to hurry,” she told Tom, her breath frosting in the cold. “I don’t have much time.” She took off her helmet but kept on the dust mask that everyone here wore as protection against the polluted air.
“It’s a Saturday evening,” Tom said. “The building won’t be open.”
Clove began looking through her rucksack. “Don’t worry. I’ve done this before. You just keep a lookout.”
Clove crouched down by the entrance to the physics department and used her Swiss army knife to unscrew the key-card scanner by the side of the door. She pressed the memory card containing a copy of Spart into position on the circuit board. “OK, Spart. Time to work your magic,” she said. “Get us inside.”
“Did I teach you that?” Tom said, looking hugely impressed.
Clove couldn’t help her smug tone. “You’ve taught me a lot of things, Dad. But this? This I taught myself.” Her smile dropped when she saw a new message from Spart on her watch.
> CLOVE, I’m sorry. At the University of St Andrews, I was operating using previous knowledge taken from TOM and JENNIFER’s network. I do not have access to the same information in this institution.
> The security system is too different to what I am used to. I can’t break it.
Clove told Tom what Spart had said. “We’re going to have to wait until the building opens.”
“Can you last that long?” Tom asked, tugging at her sleeve to check the state of her wrist.
She could see her bones: a vivid, fluorescent white against the muted colour of her flesh.
“I don’t know,” she said. She felt suddenly and completely terrified. “Dad, you have to do it anyway. Even if I disappear. You have to carry on − to fix things.”
“How?” he said, sounding both nervous and determined. “You haven’t even explained… I would have no idea where to start! What if I make this” − he gestured to the world around them – “worse?”
It had just started to rain. The thick droplets burned when they hit her skin, sending fiery trails of acid rain down her cheeks. She brushed them away. “I— I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s even possible to fix things.” She realized she was crying. “I don’t know anything.”
“We can’t wait.” A muscle in Tom’s cheek twitched. “I can’t stand here and watch you fade into nothing. We have to call Jennifer. She might remember you too,” Tom said as he dialled the number Spart had found. “Like I did.”
It only rang twice before Jen answered. “Hello? Who is this?”
“You talk to her,” Tom said, holding out the phone.
“Mum?” Clove said, tears welling up.
“Sorry?” Jen said. “I think you’ve got the wrong number.”
Clove cleared her throat. “No, I don’t. This is Jen Sutcliffe?”
“Yes,” Jen admitted.
“There’s an emergency. You need to come to the Cavendish Laboratory as soon as you can.”
“An emergency? It’s the weekend!”
“I’ll explain when you get here. It’s about the time machine.”
“Who is this? Are you a student?”
“My … my name is Clove,” she said, hoping that whatever kind of memories Tom had retained, Jen would have similar ones.
There was a moment of silence. “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Jen said, and hung up.
The first thing Jen did when she arrived was to pull Clove into a hard hug. “I thought it was a dream!” Jen said into her neck. “I thought I’d imagined it all!”
“Mum,” Clove said, unable to believe that Jen recognized her. “You remember?”
“Of course I remember,” Jen said, and when she pulled away, her eyes were bright with tears. “How could I forget my own daughter?” She looked at Tom. “I remember you too.”
Tom broke into a nervous smile. “I don’t remember as much as you do,” he admitted. “But … but I’d like to.”
“I don’t remember that beard,” Jen said, touching her hand to his cheek. “That’s new.”
“Do you like it?” Tom raised an eyebrow, and to Clove’s surprise, Jen let out a giggle. Were they flirting?
“I don’t think this is the time,” Clove said, exasperated. “Mum, I’m disappearing.” She held out her hand to Jen, showing the state of her skin.
Her mother gasped. “What do you need?” she asked.
“I need to use the time machine,” Clove said. “I need to fix history.”
Jen’s eyes widened. “The time machine?”
“You can get us inside, right?” Tom asked. “You have the key card.”
“I can get you inside…” Jen said uncertainly, gaze flickering back and forth between Tom and Clove. “But the time machine’s not working. It’s incomplete.”
Clove felt like she’d been punched in the chest. “It doesn’t work?” she asked. “At all?”
“Not yet. I was hoping by the end of next year, maybe…”
“But I need it now! I’m disappearing!”
“The software isn’t ready,” Jen explained. “Clove, I’m sorry. But the program is incomplete. We can’t control the size of the wormhole yet. It’s too dangerous to risk turning the machine on. It could create a black hole.”
“The software?” Clove scrubbed her hands across her face, thinking quickly. Tom had been the one to create the software. In this world he had never been part of the time-machine research team, so the software must be less developed because he hadn’t been there working on it.
“Tom wrote the program in my timeline,” Clove said. “That means with him here we can – we can try and fix it, right?” She looked at Tom for confirmation. “It’s worth a shot?”
“Clove,” Tom said, “I’ve never seen a time machine in my life! I might have written code for it in your world, but here I’d have no idea where to even start. And I definitely don’t know enough to do it in a few hours.”
“I’ve seen the software working,” she said. “You taught me how it works. I can help you. I’ll tell you everything I can remember. Please.”
Tom sucked in a breath. “OK. Let’s try. We can at least try.”