If at First... Read online

  If at First...

  Peter F. Hamilton

  Peter F. Hamilton has proven himself a modern master of epic space opera, carrying the tradition of far-future empire building begun by Heinlein and Asimov into the new millennium. But Hamilton is also a master of the short story, and when he tackles one of science fiction’s most enduring themes-time travel-the result is as provocative as it is entertaining.

  It starts in 2007 with a break-in. The victim: Marcus Orthew, the financial and technological genius behind Orthanics, the computer company whose radical products have delivered a one-two punch to the industry, all but knocking PCs and Macs out of the ring. The perpetrator: a man obsessed with Orthew. Just another simple case of celebrity stalking—or so everyone assumes at first, including Metropolitan Police Chief Detective David Lanson. But when Lanson interviews the suspect, he makes a startling claim: Orthew is from the future. Or, rather, a future—a parallel timeline. Thus begins the ride of a lifetime for Lanson, as his pursuit of the facts tumbles him headlong down a rabbit hole—and the hunter finds himself hunted.

  Originally published in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, edited by George Mann and published by Solaris Oxford, UK, in 2007.

  Peter F. Hamilton

  IF AT FIRST…

  MY NAME IS David Lanson, and I was with the Metropolitan Police for twenty-seven years. When we got handed the Jenson case I was a chief detective, heading up my own team. Not bad going; from outside you’d think I was a standard careerist ticking off the days until retirement. You’d be wrong, I’d grown to hate the job with a passion. Back when I signed on the CID were real thief-takers, but by the time the Jenson case came up I was spending all my time filling in Risk Assessment forms. I’m not kidding, the paperwork was beyond parody. All good stuff for lawyers, but we were getting hammered in the press for truly dismal crime statistics, and hammered by the politicians for not meeting their stupid targets. No wonder public confidence in us had reached rock bottom; the only useful thing we did for the average citizen by then was to hand out official crime numbers for insurance claims.

  I suppose that makes me sound bitter; but then that seems to be the fate of old men who’re stuck in a job that’s forever modernizing. The point of all this being, despite drowning in all that bureaucratic stupidity I reckoned I was quite a decent policeman. That is: I know when people are lying. In those twenty-seven years I’d heard it all, and I do mean all: desperate types who’ve made a mistake and then start sprouting bollocks to cover themselves, the genuine nutters who live in their own little world and believe every word they’re saying, drunks and potheads trying to act sober, losers with pitiful excuses, real sick ones who are so cold and polite it makes my skin crawl. Listening to all that day in day out you soon learn to tell what’s real and what isn’t.

  So anyway— We get the call from Marcus Orthew’s solicitor that his security people are holding an intruder at his Richmond research center, and they’d appreciate a full investigation of the “situation.” That was in 2007, and Orthew was a media and computer mogul then, at least that was the public perception; it wasn’t until later I found out just how wide his commercial and technological interests were. His primary hardware company, Orthanics, had just started producing solid state blocks that were generations ahead of anything the opposition were doing, they didn’t have hard drives or individual components, the entire computer was wrapped up inside a single hyperprocessor. It wiped the floor with PCs and Applemacs. He was always ahead of the game, Orthew; it was his original PCWs that blew Sinclair computers away at the start of the 1980s; everyone in my generation went and bought an Orthanics PCW as their first computer.

  But this break-in: I thought it was slightly odd the solicitor calling me rather than the company security office. Like I said, the longer you’re in the game you develop a feeling for these things. I took Paul Mathews and Carmen Galloway with me, they were lieutenants on my team, good people, and slightly less bothered about all the paperwork flooding our office than me. Smart move, I guess; they’d probably make it farther than I was ever destined to go. Orthanics security were holding on to Toby Jenson, they’d found him breaking into one of the Richmond Center labs, which the CCTV footage confirmed. And I was right, there was more to it. We read Toby Jenson his rights, and uniform division hauled him off; that was when the solicitor told me he was a stalker, a twenty-four-karat obsessive. Marcus Orthew had known about him for years, Jenson had been following him ’round the globe, hacking into Orthew’s systems, talking to people in his organization, on his domestic staff, ex-girlfriends, basically anyone who crossed his path; but they hadn’t been able to do anything about him. Jenson was smart, there was never any activity they could take him to court for, he never got physically close, all he did was talk to people, and the hacking could never be proved in law. The Richmond break-in changed all that. As it was Orthew making the allegations, my boss told me to give it complete priority; I guess she was scared about what his magazines and satellite channels would do to the Met if we let it slide.

  I went out to Jenson’s house with Paul and Carmen. Jesus, you should have seen the bloody place: I mean it was out of a Hollywood serial killer film. Every room was filled with stuff on Orthew; thousands of pictures taken all over the world, company press releases dating back decades, filing cabinets full of newspaper clippings, articles, every whisper of gossip, records of his movements, maps with his houses and factories on them, copies of his magazines, tapes of interviews Jenson had made, City financial reports on the company. It was a cross between a shrine and a Marcus Orthew museum. It spooked the hell out of me. No doubt about it, Jenson was totally fixated on Orthew. Forensics had to hire a removal lorry to clear the place out.

  I interviewed Jenson the next day, and that was when it started to get really weird. I’ll tell you it as straight as I can remember, which is pretty much verbatim, I’m never ever going to forget that afternoon. First off, he wasn’t upset that he’d been caught, more like resigned. Almost like a premier league footballer who’s lost the Cup Final, you know: It’s a blow but life goes on. The first thing he said was: “I should have realized. Marcus Orthew is a genius, he was bound to catch me out.” Which is kind of ironic, really, isn’t it? So I asked him what exactly he thought he’d been caught out doing. Get this: He said, “I was trying to find where he was building his time machine.” Paul and Carmen just laughed at him. To them it was a Sectioning case, pure and simple. Walk the poor bloke past the station doctor, get the certificate signed, lock him up in a padded room, and supply him with good drugs for the next thirty years. I thought more or less the same thing, too; we wouldn’t even need to go to trial, but we were recording the interview, and all his delusions would help coax a signature out of the doc, so I asked him what made him think Orthew was building a time machine. Jenson said they went to school together, that’s how he knew. Now, the thing is, I checked this later, and they actually did go to some boarding school in Lincolnshire. Well that’s fair enough, obsessions can start very early, grudges, too; maybe some fight over a bar of chocolate spiraled out of control, and it’d been festering in Jenson’s mind ever since. Jenson claimed otherwise. Marcus Orthew was the coolest kid in school, apparently. Didn’t surprise me; from what I’d seen of him in interviews over the years he was one of the most urbane men on the planet. Women found that very attractive, you didn’t have to look through Jenson’s press cuttings to know that, Orthew’s girlfriends were legendary, even the broadsheets reported them.

  So how on earth did Jenson decide that the coolest kid in school had evolved into someone building a time machine? “It’s simple,” he told us earnestly. “When I was at school I got a cassette recorder for my twelfth birthday. I was really pleased with it,
nobody else had one. Marcus saw it and just laughed. He snatched one of the cassettes off me, a C-90 I remember, and he said: State of the art, huh, damn it’s almost the same size as an iPod.”

  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 1971. 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 lingers 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 that finally clinched it for me. How in God’s name could he know about iPods back in ’71?”

  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 traveling? That was in 1967, NASA hadn’t even reached the moon then, we’d only just gotten transistors. Nobody in ’67 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, and 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 1960s. 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 into the 1970s the techniques he’s developed this time ’round. We’ll probably have rejuvenation by 1990. Think what that’ll make him, a time-traveling 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 ’90s, 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 traveling backward, I still don’t see how that gets around 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 1967. 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 Center, 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 videotape labeled 83-7B for me, which had a big red star on the label. It was the recording of a kids’ show from ’83: 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 that 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 1983? It was Orthew’s satellite channel that 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 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 const
ruction 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 center, 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 explosives 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 recognized tiny sections amid the blur of color 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 1968. It wasn’t the way I would’ve chosen 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 air bag. There were everyday things I knew about, icons that we can’t survive without, the kind that 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.