As churches go, St Anselm’s is a bit of a runt.
Taking direction from a drunk man’s brain means I have dozens of false starts before getting here. It looks like a church, with spires, stained glass, a noticeboard and the occasional gargoyle, but it’s squashed between a Thai restaurant and a boarded-up town house, like it used to exist on its own but London grew around it, trying to choke it out. It is not unique; on my way I have seen others like this, the secular architecture overtaking the spiritual.
I have passed people, but they either do not see me or avoid me when they do become aware. In this landscape, I would do the same.
But there’s also the fact that it’s a memory. Because of how it is stored, the interconnections of neurones or xenoforms, data isn’t just laid out like the reference section of a library. Data relationships and associations rule here, and I must prod and poke, give the xenoform suggestive stimulus to trigger the relevant memories. My very presence here is a form of stimulus, and I can only keep going to see what comes up. The people avoiding me may represent secrets; juicy, but not relevant to my mission.
The doors to the church are closed, but a push and the left one opens. There is a queue of people occupying the nave all the way down to the altar. The air inside is dominated by the smell of hot food and unwashed bodies. Outside films, I have never seen so many white people in one place. I have never seen so many hungry white people, either.
I think of waiting in line, but since I’m not here for food, I just walk to the front, fielding intermittent insults on the way. There are two people serving the food, and one person replenishes whatever runs out. The woman is a brunette, hair tied back, serious, maybe mid-twenties. The man is a large, beefy sort, muscular like he has spent quality time in the gym, very short hair and the kind of deep blue eyes you can see from a distance. He definitely spots me, but his appraisal is not leery. The woman does not look up.
“Excuse me,” I say.
“Are you pregnant?” asks the woman.
“What?”
“Are you pregnant. Preggers. Expecting. Up the duff. With child.”
“Er… no… I’ve never… I think I’m a lesbian.” Apart from one weird crush on someone who turned out to have the xenospheric memories of my future wife. Weird. Do they even have lesbians in 2012?
“Go to the back of the line.”
“I’m not here to eat. I don’t want food.”
She stops and looks at me. Her eyes drop to my clothing, then back to my face. She has brown eyes; wears a man’s shirt, but with a skirt. No earrings. No make-up. She points to the queue. “Well, these people are here for food, and you’re holding things up. They have to be back to wherever they live by nightfall.”
“What is it that you want?” asks the big man with the blue eyes. And his accent stops me cold. Thank God for cultural imperialism, because this man is American. I haven’t been exposed to enough of them to be able to tell, but I can say he’s from the north of that continent.
“Miss?” he asks.
“Anthony,” I say. “Anthony Salermo.”
“Who?” asks the woman.
“Three Tone,” says the man.
“Oh. What about him?” asks the woman. “Has he broken his leg again?”
“He won’t be coming back,” I say. “He dived into the Pit.”
“I see. Who told you this?” asks the woman.
“I was there. I got this address from his coat.”
The woman turns to the man. “Didn’t we ban him?”
“Yes, Doc,” he says. So she’s a doctor.
“Okay, Three Tone is dead. You’ve told us. Thank you.”
I am about to say he’s not dead, but I check myself. It’s too early for them to know, and the truth is I’m not sure to what extent the Anthony I know in the future is the alien’s personality or Salermo’s.
“I’ll go then,” I say.
“Wait,” says the man. “Who are you? I’ve never seen you before.”
“I’m Oyin Da.”
He touches his own chest with a plastic-gloved hand. “Owen Gray. And over here is Dr Bonadventure.”
“Miranda,” says the woman. “And I’m not a doctor yet.”
“She’s qualified. It was her first day at work when the Wormwood meteor fell.” Owen has a voice that sounds rich and kind. “She’s our doctor now.”
“And cook,” says Miranda. “We have people to serve, Owen. No more… chit-chat.”
Owen turns his head to whisper in Miranda’s ear, and she nods in response, all the while still serving food. He reaches under the table and takes out a device. It’s bespoke, so I look at it and can see its guts because there’s no casing, but I do not know what it is for. He beckons and I draw close. He cranks the device, something I’ve done before when trying to generate current for my father’s mad engine. When it starts going with a whine, he points it at me. It has a kind of sensor, but has been modified extensively. I would like to study it. After a minute, he turns it off. He looks at Miranda and shakes his head.
“You say you’ve been to the Pit, but you have no increased radiation,” she says. “Have you washed or decontaminated since being there?”
I shake my head. “No, but… Look, you’re not going to pick up radiation off me.”
“Why is that?” asks Owen.
The door of the church opens and two men saunter in. They’re dressed in padded jackets, with dark tracksuit bottoms and sneakers, one black, one white. The black one walks past me, picks up a baby potato and throws it in his mouth. The white one stares and stares at me. Then he points in my face. “You’re from the future.”
“I…”
“Are you here for me? You’re wasting your time, I must say. I’m already dead, after all.”
“Who are you?”
“Here they call me Ryan Miller,” he says. “But I’m also known as Father Marinementus. I, like you, am not really here. Come with me.”
Before I can say anything, he dives at me, grabs me by the torso and flies towards the ceiling of the church. We crash through what should be solid, but reality splinters and beyond it there is the blackness of space, with sprinkled stars and no sign of our sun. It is stylised space, for even I can see that the planets are too close together and the darkness is not as lightless, and it is not at all cold.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
Because I know he cannot harm me, whoever he is, I answer, “I’m trying to get to America.”
“Why are you coming here to do it?” His dark soutane flaps in non-existent solar winds and he turns about his own axis like an unmoored helium balloon.
“Why are you here?”
“Because I was here, little ghost. I died in Nigeria, of malaria, in the nineteenth century, prophesying. I had a complete revelation of this future and I had it transcribed as I lay dying. I got it to London by way of some British explorers of the Niger River. Because I needed to see if they killed the alien, I brought myself back into the time stream.”
“How?”
“I was reborn into a new body that I manipulated. It doesn’t matter. I was back in the time stream and monitoring events. I saw Wormwood come down on schedule, I saw the government cordon come up. I made my way back to Nigeria and died there, although Wormwood was still alive. I have seen the future, but it varies.”
“The past is one, but the futures are many,” I say.
“Yes. But not accurate. The past can be modified all the time. That’s why someone like you can visit.”
“Nothing I do can change anything.”
“Not true. If you persist, what you do becomes the communal memory of an event, and that can change decisions in the future. Look back at St Anselm.”
Through the gap in space, I see Owen and Miranda serving food like I was never there.
“Right now, you are like a forgotten dream to them. If you reappear, you’ll be déjà vu, but for them it will be a new meeting.”
“Okay, so they forget me. That doesn’t matter, right? I can’t be hurt here.”
“Who told you that?”
“My… Why?”
“It’s also not true. You are a glob of neurotransmitters, a sequence of information. You are not where you should be. What do you think the system will do when it finds out you are out of order?”
I have a sinking feeling, but I do not answer.
“Let me show you something.”
For five minutes we look through the gap at the church. Nothing happens except food being served and received. Many go to eat in the aisles; others take the food out.
“What am I—”
“Hush. Look.”
Something transparent and glistening forces its way through the door. It is blob-like and covered in mucus. It has multiple tentacles that trail passively behind it. It floats, but with purpose. The tentacles are about ten times its length, and as they drag on the floor they appear to be touching objects or eating things. None of the people in the queue, nor Owen or Miranda, appear to notice it. At the altar it stops, seemingly confused, then twists upwards towards the gap.
“Yeah, that’s enough,” says Ryan, and he closes the gap. “Data maintenance. Those are the things that will erase you if you are found where you should not be. Just so we’re clear, erasure means death to entities such as us. Whenever you come into the past, you leave a trail, contaminating everything you interact with. They follow that trail.”
“So I should go back?”
“They follow the trail slowly. You just need to keep ahead of them.”
“But you just opened a portal.”
He smiles. “I’ve been here for centuries, little ghost. You pick up a lot in that time.”
“What do I do? I need to get to—”
“America. Yes, I know. No doubt you wanted to talk to Owen some more, right? Seeing as he’s American. I will drop you at an earlier point in his timeline. That should take you where you need to go. Do you know how to get home?”
“I have a bathysphere that seems to do the trick. Don’t ask me how it works.”
“Whatever imagery works for you is fine. Just remember to be fast, or you will die.”
“Wait—”
“Goodbye.”