The Paradox Paradox, page 31
‘RUN!’ yelled Eureka as the group began to weave, dodge, and clamber over the endless stream of rocks heading their way. At the other end of the corridor, new rocks crashed into the room via a chute, vibrating the belt as they landed. There wasn’t a way out.
‘I don’t want to die like a cartoon character!’ yelled Kez, as the belt hit what she prayed was its top speed. She wanted to look back, desperate to know how far away the crushing teeth were, but knew that slowing down now could prove fatal.
‘There!’ yelled Theo over the tumult, pointing a finger at a handle in the ceiling, hidden among the rust. With a dexterous leap from a passing rock he became airborne, grabbed the handle, and tugged it with all of his body weight. The small hatch it was attached to swung open, causing natural light and a breeze to enter the corridor. With another hop and some unexpected upper body strength he was out, lying on the roof above, one arm outstretched to pull his crew up. ‘Take my hand!’ he yelled down to them, extending the offer on a first come, first served basis. Iscah was closest, using Theo’s arm to effortlessly catapult herself through the hatch. Kez was second, a rock ripping a gash into a dangling ankle as she was pulled up.
‘THEO!’ Eureka yelled from down the conveyor belt, still struggling to get close enough to take Theo up on his offer. ‘ARM!’
Theo pulled his limb up and out of the way as a particularly large rock passed, crashing through the open hatch door, ripping it from its hinges and sending it straight at Eureka’s face.
She ducked, slightly too late, as the sheet of metal clanged off her skull, sending her crashing backwards onto the belt.
‘EUREKA, WHERE ARE YOU?’
Eureka tried to shake off the impact. She staggered to her feet but promptly fell back down to her hands and knees, both images of the corridor that she could see orbiting each other.
‘EUREKA!’
She looked behind herself at the rapidly approaching jaws. They were seconds away now, crunching relentlessly. She could feel the debris flying out from them, peppering her back.
‘Ah, shit,’ she breathed into the metal of the conveyor belt.
‘EUREKA!!!’
That’s when everything stopped. The movement, the noise, the jaws.
‘Biological life detected,’ said a calm digital voice. ‘For safety purposes, please contact your sector’s conveyor management to resume operation.’
Eureka lay on the ground for a while longer, her breathing rapid, her thoughts locked onto one particular redhead, as they often were in times of danger. Above her, the conical teeth sparkled in the little light that entered the corridor. One more movement, and she never would have made it home.
‘If anyone knew that this would happen,’ Eureka eventually yelled at the heads poking down from the hatchway, ‘then I want you to know that I will exact a terrible, terrible revenge.’
* * *
The group stood on an open-air walkway, suspended between two massive industrial structures, about a hundred metres over the rocky surface below. Directly underneath them, the conveyor belt corridor, now silent. Above them, an acid-yellow sky. Above that, the heat shield that protected the entire planet from the blistering rage of the sun.fn53
‘You alright now?’ Theo asked Eureka as she finished vomiting over the edge.
Eureka didn’t say anything. She just nodded and tapped her disguise on. The rest of the group followed suit, suddenly turning each of them into a particularly heavy-duty looking member of the human race, complete with thick clothes to match, and boots over their actual boots, which clanged off the metal grating that made up the majority of the floor.
‘Should we worry about turning that off?’ Iscah wondered, peering back down into the corridor.
‘And the vomit?’ Kez asked, watching Eureka’s final expulsion narrowly miss a parked truck.
‘Nah,’ said Theo, gazing out across the landscape. ‘This whole place is an hour away from being obliterated.’
‘Oh, right you are,’ said Iscah, slightly unnerved.
‘And on that note, welcome to Venus. It’s hot, humid, and the night shift is two hundred days long!’ Theo said, holding his arms out at the barren fuck-all that made up the planet behind him, its dull brown landscape stretching out featurelessly in every direction. The only point of interest was below them, where an assortment of heavy-duty vehicles trundled between massive industrial buildings, their exact cargo a mystery from this distance.
‘It’s a mining planet,’ whispered Theo, just making sure that everyone was on the same page.
‘What are they mining?’ asked Eureka, her hands still shaking. ‘I thought Venus was quite dull, minerally speaking.’
‘Oh it is,’ nodded Theo. ‘But you don’t come to Venus to mine Venus.’
‘Then what are they mining?’
‘That,’ Theo said with a smile, pointing towards the sky.
The group looked up and noticed that the thick atmosphere above them had parted, and a colossal asteroid was heading towards the planet.
‘Woah,’ whispered Kez, as next to her Iscah did a sign over her chest and muttered something in a long dead language.
‘It’s so slow,’ said Eureka, as the asteroid, roughly half a kilometre in size, impacted the planet several miles away from where they stood. Instead of making a very large dent in the planet and wiping away the group in a cataclysm of energy, the asteroid was gently placed onto the surface, cracking apart as it landed and crumbling over a large area.
‘Ears,’ said Theo, covering his.
‘What?’ asked Kez, getting halfway through the syllable before the sound of a mountain falling down crashed over them all.
‘FUCK ME,’ Eureka yelled over the rumbling. ‘BIT LOUD.’
‘THERE’S AN ENERGY FIELD AROUND THIS PLACE,’ Theo yelled back. ‘IT DAMPENS NINETY PER CENT OF THE SOUND.’
‘WHY ISN’T IT WORKING?!’
‘IT IS WORKING!’
After thirty seconds the cacophony had departed over the horizon, and normal conversation was again possible.
‘The asteroid belt in our solar system is resource rich, but really hard to mine,’ Theo explained. ‘After finding a good rock you’ve got to fuck about in space with drills and zero gravity, using up fuel and fidgeting around as other asteroids constantly threaten to crash into you. Then, you’ve got to lug everything home and, ugh, it’s just a faff.’
‘So the solution is to just crash them here?’ Eureka asked.
‘Basically,’ Theo nodded. ‘Shatter them on a world nobody cares about, collect the good bits, and trash the rest.’ He pointed up, towards the slowly filling hole in the clouds, at a faint blue ring hovering in the sky, surrounded by a handful of starships in a very low orbit. ‘That there is called the net. There are six of them in a circle around this base, and a few hundred bases around the planet. They add resistance as the asteroids are sent through, slowing them down and converting the asteroid’s own potential and kinetic energy into power for the base, stored in batteries out there in the deserts. Real clever stuff.’
On the ground, the front of one of the bigger buildings had opened up, and a fleet of vehicles began to head to the newly crashed asteroid.
‘So what happens today?’ Eureka asked, looking down at the hundreds of tiny human specks. ‘What goes wrong?’
‘For this base, it’s delivery day. Over a twenty-four-hour period, all six nets have an asteroid arrive, sent from the belt a few weeks back,’ said Theo, gripping the corroded guard rail tightly as he spoke. ‘They’re all pretty normal, but the last one is a timebomb, literally. It’s core is full of kifoium.’
‘Is that an element?’ asked Eureka. ‘I’ve not heard of it.’
‘You’ve never heard of it because it’s impossible,’ said Theo. ‘It’s the sort of stuff that a particle accelerator the size of Saturn’s rings could create for a fraction of a fraction of a second. It’s from the really weird corner of the periodic table.’fn54
‘So how is it in the core?’ Eureka asked.
Theo shrugged.
‘For the longest time the Affinity thought it was an attack. We were on high alert for almost a decade. Then, one scientist worked out the radioactive decay pattern and … that was that. Kifoium. Too impossible to be anything but a fluke of nature.’
‘You don’t believe them?’ asked Iscah.
‘I did,’ said Theo. ‘Until today.’
‘Because we’re here?’ asked Kez.
Theo nodded.
‘Because we’re here.’
Nervously, Kez glanced up at the sky. Thick clouds billowed rapidly, obscuring her view of the last rock to hit Venus.
‘In about an hour the asteroid enters the atmosphere,’ continued Theo. ‘As it lands the kifoium ignites and it explodes. As it explodes, it breaks down into other elements, and they explode. Those elements break down further and … guess what?’
‘They explode?’ guessed Eureka.
‘They explode,’ nodded Theo. ‘All of this, in the blink of an eye. You could see the flash from Earth, during the day.’
‘And we have to survive this for potentially a couple of seconds,’ said Iscah. ‘How?’
‘Two ways,’ said Theo. ‘Either the energy released impacts the beacon signal, distorting it in our favour. Or, we get on a ship.’
Theo pointed at a series of landing pads that ran around the exterior of the main building. Four starships sat, some industrial, some sleek, most of them connected to large refuelling cables, and all of them covered in a thick layer of Venusian dust.
‘We’ve got some options,’ Kez sighed thankfully.
‘That’s a lot of ships for a bunch of people with teleporters,’ said Eureka.
‘They’re only shuttles, taking people to the space station in orbit,’ explained Theo. ‘The atmosphere here is beyond thick, the planet is full of explosions, and occasionally a metalstorm rolls in. It’s safer to go retro.’
‘A metalstorm?’ asked Eureka.
‘It’s as it sounds,’ said Theo. ‘You explode metal into the air all day, eventually it’s going to get swept up into the weather patterns.’
‘So which ship is our target?’ asked Iscah, really hoping it wasn’t the clapped-out old yellow one.
‘The clapped-out old yellow one,’ said Theo, pointing to the third landing pad.
‘And you’re on board?’ asked Eureka.
‘Seven-year-old me,’ Theo nodded. ‘School trip on a public shuttle. We had a tour, saw a few asteroids come in, then went home. I don’t remember much of it to be honest.’
‘Seems like a risk,’ said Iscah. ‘Being that close to your past self. Why not one of the other ships?’
‘Because,’ said Theo darkly, ‘only one ship makes it out of here today.’ The group looked down at the shuttle. It could maybe fit a hundred people, a hundred and fifty tops.
‘How many people work here?’ asked Iscah quietly.
‘Few thousand per plant,’ said Theo, watching more people than could ever fit in the ship walk around below him. ‘Today is a dark day in the history books.’
Suddenly, the beacon beeped, indicating the arrival point of the next temporal schism. Theo stared at the readout before jerking his head to the sky.
‘It’s already here!’ he yelled, pointing unnecessarily as a large explosion in the sky shoved nearby clouds out of the way. Moments later a bang followed, utterly lost in the noise of the plant. Something fell, sailing down from the atmosphere, past the group on the walkway, and landing with a plume of dust on the ground, thirty storeys below.
‘I hope this place has a lift,’ Eureka sighed, as the four of them ran downstairs to collect their prize.
* * *
‘Eighteen, nineteen, twenty …’
Paula Marques was counting students as they climbed onboard the yellow transport shuttle, tapping each one gently on the head as they walked past her. This was unnecessary, as their school uniforms contained trackers, but Paula had learned long ago to not trust any technology that a child could easily lose.
‘Thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four.’
The heads ran out, causing her to sigh. One missing.
She mounted the stairs, leaned her head around the corner, into the body of the ship, and called out to her co-worker, who at that moment was trying their best to wrangle children into their seats.
‘One missing, Mx Hoffman,’ she said over the sounds of giggling and nose picking.
‘Theo Garnett?’ they asked without looking, their attention taken up by fiddly safety harnesses and wriggling occupants. Paula glanced around the shuttle briefly, noticed that everyone was paired up properly, nodded, and went on a hunt for him.
* * *
‘Bollocking fuck,’ Theo said, looking down at the remains of the temporally displaced item. ‘Someone’s run over the fucking thing!’
Run over was an understatement. Clearly, several tonnes of heavy-duty mining equipment had crushed whatever this had once been into fragments and dust.
‘Looks like some electronics,’ Iscah said, coming to a halt next to Theo.
‘That bit is definitely a screen,’ Kez said as she made it to the landing site, slightly out of breath. ‘Or rather, was.’
Theo bent down and carefully scooped up the remains, taking care to not leave a single fragment behind.
‘Any components you recognise, Eureka?’ he asked, without realising that she was still about fifty metres from where the three of them stood, cursing the fruit juice she’d had that morning for breakfast.
‘I’m pretty sure that little rectangle is digital storage,’ she said between heavy breaths a minute later. ‘I’ve seen other devices like it in museums.’
‘Could we recover any data from it?’ Iscah wondered. ‘Pictures? Messages? Locational information? That sort of thing?’
‘I might be able to rig something up to read it,’ Kez nodded. ‘It’ll just be a few yottabytes of rudimentary binary code, right?’
‘Gigabytes,’ Eureka panted. ‘There on the side. Two GB. Gigabytes.’
‘Oh,’ giggled Kez, unimpressed. ‘I could probably read the data off it from here.’
Eureka suddenly felt very, very old. This feeling didn’t last long, as another asteroid had recently landed behind one of the towering buildings that surrounded the group, surprising them with thirty seconds of deafening noise.
‘Well, as your twat-in-charge, I vote we skedaddle as soon as possible,’ Theo said. ‘The bigger the distance between us and this planet, the better.’
The group nodded and began running back the way they had come, with the exception of Eureka who genuinely considered dying in the dust as a preferable alternative to moving her burning limbs with any sort of speed.
* * *
As Paula entered one of the visitor overlooks, she happened to witness a miracle of modern science for the fourth time that day. Without warning, millions of tonnes of rock and metal came slowly crashing down in the distance, perfectly framed by the curved glass that enveloped the front of this viewpoint. A colossal plume of dust blew out in every direction and, after a few moments, all that could be seen were a couple of bursts of lightning crackling away under the skin of this newly formed haze. She felt small, but part of something powerful.
‘Hi, Mrs Marques!’
A voice from the back of the room, high pitched and a bit sniffly, indicated that she’d found her mark. Theo Garnett was standing by the back wall, facing away from the explosion, absorbed in what he was watching.
‘What did I say about wandering off, Theo?’ Paula said, walking over and squatting down beside him. ‘Did you not hear the call to leave?’
Little Theo shook his head, causing his dark, curly hair to jiggle on top of his head. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Marques,’ he said, looking at her with puppy-dog eyes. ‘I’ll just say goodbye.’
With that, he turned back to the small desk, half built into the wall that he was staring over on his tiptoes. ‘Bye, Lucas!’
Paula glanced over the desk which would usually be staffed by a visitor liaison. Nobody was there, and Theo was saying goodbye to that nobody. ‘Theo,’ she asked softly. ‘Who’s Lucas?’
Theo pointed a sticky finger over the desk, straight at a small bowl of water and its inhabitant on the far wall. ‘Lucas!’ he beamed.
Paula breathed a sigh of relief.
‘Lucas is a fish,’ she smiled.
Theo nodded, hard.
‘A shubunkin,’ he said. ‘I told the man here that he needed a bigger tank for him before he turned two, or he’ll not be happy.’
‘You know a lot about fish?’ Paula asked, causing Theo to monologue the entire journey back to the shuttle.
‘… but they’ll live fifteen years if you take care of them properly!’ Theo eventually concluded.
‘OK,’ said Paula, who had taken approximately none of that in. ‘You’re a very clever boy, aren’t you?’
Theo nodded and scampered up the stairs to the ship, slightly tripping over a couple of them. At the top, he turned back to her.
‘I had a lovely time today, Mrs Marques.’
Paula’s heart lit up. She didn’t know it, but every comment like that added three more months to her career.
‘Did you enjoy watching the asteroids?’ she smiled.
Theo thought about that for a moment, as if he wasn’t expecting to be asked about the entire point of the visit.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I liked Lucas though. I wish I could have taken him home with me.’
And, with that, he vanished onto the ship.
The overwhelming call of motherhood made Paula briefly consider fish-napping Lucas, before common sense took back the wheel. She chuckled to herself and began to board the ship, where she too tripped over the top step, but only because a voice suddenly piped up from behind her.
‘Room for a few more?’ asked an odd-looking man standing at the foot of the stairs with a few friends of his, beaming and panting in equal measure.
* * *
‘This is going to go wrong,’ Kez said, watching the ground crew connect the ship to various cables from her claustrophobically small seat. ‘It’s been too easy so far.’
