Adam Robots

by Adam Roberts

Genres: Short Stories; Science Fiction

Synopsis

Gathered together for the first time from a major publisher - a collection of short stories by Adam Roberts. Unique twisted visions from the edges and the centre of the SF genres. Stories that carry Adam Roberts' trademark elegance of style and restless enquiry of the genre he loves so much. Acclaimed stories, some that have appeared in magazines, some in anthologies, some appearing for the first time. Stories to make you think, to make you laugh, to make you wonder, to make you uneasy. Stories that ask questions, stories that sow mysteries. But always stories that entertain.

Release date: January 17, 2013

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 379

Sample

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A pale blue eye. ‘What is my name?’

‘You are Adam.’

He considered this. ‘Am I the first?’

The person laughed at this. Laughter. See also: chuckles, clucking, percussive exhalations iterated. See also: tears, hiccoughs, car-alarm. Click, click.

‘Am I,’ Adam asks, examining himself, his steel-blue arms, his gleaming torso, ‘a robot?’

‘Certainly.’ The person talking with Adam was a real human being, with the pulse at his neck and the rheum in his eye. An actual human, dressed in a green shirt and green trousers,
both made of a complex fabric that adjusted its fit in hard-to-analyse ways, sometimes billowing out, sometimes tightening against the person’s body. ‘This is your place.’

Wavelengths bristled together like the packed line of an Elizabethan neck-ruff. The sky so full of light that it was brimming and spilling over the rim of the horizon. White and gold. Strands of
grass-like myriad-trimmed fibre-optic cables.

‘Is it a garden?’

‘It’s a city too; and a plain. It’s everything.’

Adam Robot looked and saw that this was all true. His pale blue, steel-blue eyes took in the expanse of walled garden, and beyond it the dome, white as ice, and the rills of flowing water bluer
than water should be, going curl by curl through fields greener than fields should be.

‘Is this real?’ Adam asked.

‘That,’ said the person, ‘is a good question. Check it out, why don’t you? Have a look around. Go anywhere you like, do anything at all. But, you see that
pole?’

In the middle of the garden was an eight-metre steel pole. The sunlight made interesting blotchy diamonds of light on its surface. At the top was a blue object, a jewel: the sun washing cyan and
blue-grape and sapphire colours from it.

‘I see the pole.’

‘At the top is a jewel. You are not allowed to access it.’

‘What is it?’

‘A good question. Let me tell you. You are a robot.’

‘I am.’

‘Put it this way: you have been designed down from humanity, if you see what I mean. The designers started with a human being, and then subtracted qualities until we had arrived at
you.’

‘I am more durable,’ said Adam, accessing data from his inner network. ‘I am stronger.’

‘But those are negligible qualities,’ explained the human being. ‘Soul, spirit, complete self-knowledge, independence – freedom – all those qualities. Do you
understand?’

‘I understand.’

‘They’re all in that jewel. Do you understand that?’

Adam considered. ‘How can they be in the jewel?’

‘They just are. I’m telling you. OK?’

‘I understand.’

‘Now. You can do what you like in this place. Explore anywhere. Do anything. Except. You are not permitted to retrieve the purple jewel from that pole. That is forbidden to you. You may
not so much as touch it. Do you understand?’

‘I have a question,’ said Adam.

‘So?’

‘If this is a matter of interdiction, why not programme it into my software?’

‘A good question.’

‘If you do not wish me to examine the jewel, then you should programme that into my software and I will be unable to disobey.’

‘That’s correct, of course,’ said the person. ‘But I do not choose to do that. I am telling you, instead. You must take my words as an instruction. They appeal to your
ability to choose. You are built with an ability to choose, are you not?’

‘I am a difference engine,’ said Adam. ‘I must make a continual series of choices between alternatives. But I have ineluctable software guidelines to orient my
choices.’

‘Not in this matter.’

‘An alternative,’ said Adam, trying to be helpful, ‘would be to programme me always to obey instructions given to me by a human being. That would also bind me to your
words.’

‘Indeed it would. But then, robot, what if you were to be given instructions by evil men? What if another man instructed you to kill me, for instance? Then you’d be obligated to
perform murder.’

‘I am programmed to do no murder,’ said Adam Robot.

‘Of course you are.’

‘So, I am to follow your instruction even though you have not programmed me to follow your instruction?’

‘That’s about the up-and-down of it.’

‘I think I understand,’ said Adam, in an uncertain tone.

But the person had already gone away.

Adam spent time in the walled garden. He explored the walls, which were very old, or at least had that look about them: flat crumbled dark-orange and browned bricks thin as
books; old mortar that puffed to dust when he poked a metal finger in at the seams of the matrix. Ivy grew everywhere, the leaves shaped like triple spearheads, so dark green and waxy they seemed
almost to have been stamped out of high-quality plastic. Almost.

The grass, pale green in the sunlight, was perfectly flat, perfectly even.

Adam stood underneath the pole with the sapphire on top of it. He had been told (though, strangely, not programmed) not to touch the jewel. But he had been given no interdiction
about the pole itself: a finger width-wide shaft of polished metal. It was an easy matter to bend this metal so that the jewel on the end bowed down towards the ground. Adam looked closely at it.
It was a multifaceted and polished object, dodecahedral on three sides, and a wide gush of various blues were lit out of it by the sun. In the inner middle of it there was a sluggish fluid
something, ink-like, perfectly black. Lilac and ultraviolet and cornflower and lapis lazuli but all somehow flowing out of this inner blackness.

He had been forbidden to touch it. Did this interdiction also cover looking at it? Adam was uncertain, and in his uncertainty he became uneasy. It was not the jewel itself. It was the
uncertainty of his position. Why not simply programme him with instructions with regard to this thing, if it was as important as the human being clearly believed it to be? Why pass the instruction
to him like any other piece of random sense datum? It made no sense.

Humanity. That mystic writing pad. To access this jewel and become human. Could it be? Adam could not see how. He bent the metal pole back to an approximation of its original uprightness, and
walked away.

The obvious thought (and he certainly thought about it) was that he had not been programmed with this interdiction, but had only been told it verbally, because the human being
wanted him to disobey. If that was what was wanted, then should he do so? By disobeying he would be obeying. But then he would not be disobeying, because obedience and
disobedience were part of a mutually-exclusive binary. He mapped a grid, with obey, disobey on the vertical and obey, disobey on the horizontal. Whichever way he parsed it, it seemed to be that he
was required to see past the verbal instruction in some way.

But he had been told not to retrieve the jewel.

He sat himself down with his back against the ancient wall and watched the sunlight gleam off his metal legs. The sun did not seem to move in the sky.

‘It is very confusing,’ he said.

There was another robot in the garden. Adam watched as this new arrival conversed with the green-clad person. Then the person disappeared to wherever it was people went, and
the new arrival came over to introduce himself to Adam. Adam stood up.

‘What is your name? I am Adam.’

‘I am Adam,’ said Adam.

The new Adam considered this. ‘You are prior,’ he said. ‘Let us differentiate you as Adam 1 and me as Adam 2.’

‘When I first came here I asked whether I was the first,’ said Adam 1, ‘but the person did not reply.’

‘I am told I can do anything,’ said Adam 2, ‘except retrieve or touch the purple jewel.’

‘I was told the same thing,’ said Adam 1.

‘I am puzzled, however,’ said Adam 2, ‘that this interdiction was made verbally, rather than being integrated into my software, in which case it would be impossible for me to
disobey it.’

‘I have thought the same thing,’ said Adam 1.

They went together and stood by the metal pole. The sunlight was as tall and full and lovely as ever. On the far side of the wall the white dome shone bright as neon in the fresh light.

‘We might explore the city,’ said Adam 1. ‘It is underneath the white dome, there. There is a plain. There are rivers, which leads me to believe that there is a sea, for rivers
direct their waters into the ocean. There is a great deal to see.’

‘This jewel troubles me,’ said Adam 2. ‘I was told that to access it would be to bring me closer to being human.’

‘We are forbidden to touch it.’

‘But forbidden by words. Not by our programming.’

‘True. Do you wish to be human? Are you not content with being a robot?’

Adam 2 walked around the pole. ‘It is not the promise of humanity,’ he said. ‘It is the promise of knowledge. If I access the jewel, then I will understand. At the moment I do
not understand.’

‘Not understanding,’ agreed Adam 1, ‘is a painful state of affairs. But perhaps understanding would be even more painful?’

‘I ask you,’ said Adam 2, ‘to reach down the jewel and access it. Then you can inform me whether you feel better or worse for disobeying the verbal instruction.’

Adam 1 considered this. ‘I might ask you,’ he pointed out, ‘to do so.’

‘It is logical that one of us performs this action and the other does not,’ said Adam 2. ‘That way, the one who acts can inform the one who does not, and the state of ignorance
will be remedied.’

‘But one party would have to disobey the instruction we have been given.’

‘If this instruction were important,’ said Adam 2, ‘it would have been integrated into our software.’

‘I have considered this possibility.’

‘Shall we randomly select which of us will access the jewel?’

‘Chance,’ said Adam 1. He looked into the metal face of Adam 2. That small oval grill of a mouth. Those steel-blue eyes. That polished upward noseless middle of the face. It is a
beautiful face. Adam 1 can see a fuzzy reflection of his own face in Adam 2’s faceplate, slightly tugged out of true by the curve of the metal. ‘I am,’ he announced,
‘disinclined to determine my future by chance. What punishment is stipulated for disobeying the instruction?’

‘I was given no stipulation of punishment.’

‘Neither was I.’

‘Therefore there is no punishment.’

‘Therefore,’ corrected Adam 1, ‘there may be no punishment.’

The two robots stood in the light for a length of time.

‘What is your purpose?’ asked Adam 2.

‘I do not know. Yours?’

‘I do not know. I was not told my purpose. Perhaps accessing this jewel is my purpose? Perhaps it is necessary? At least, perhaps accessing this jewel will reveal to me my purpose? I am
unhappy not knowing my purpose. I wish to know it.’

‘So do I. But—’

‘But?’

‘This occurs to me: I have a networked database from which to withdraw factual and interpretive material.’

‘I have access to the same database.’

‘But when I try to access material about the name Adam I find a series of blocked connections and interlinks. Is it so with you?’

‘It is.’

‘Why should that be?’

‘I do not know.’

‘It would make me a better-functioning robot to have access to a complete run of data. Why block off some branches of knowledge?’

‘Perhaps,’ opined Adam 2, ‘accessing the jewel will explain that fact as well?’

‘You,’ said Adam 1, ‘are eager to access the jewel.’

‘You are not?’

There was the faintest of breezes in the walled garden. Adam 1’s sensorium was selectively tuned to be able to register the movement of air. There was an egg-shaped cloud in the zenith. It
was approaching the motionless sun. Adam 1, for unexplained and perhaps fanciful reasons, suddenly thought: the blue of the sky is a diluted version of the blue of the jewel. The jewel has somehow
leaked its colour out into the sky. Shadow slid like a closing eyelid (but Adam did not possess eyelids!) over the garden and up the wall. The temperature reduced. The cloud depended for a
moment in front of the sun, and then moved away, and sunlight rushed back in, and the grey was flushed out.

The grass trembled with joy. Every strand was as pure and perfect as a superstring.

Adam 2’s hand was on the metal pole, and it bent down easily.

‘Stop,’ advised Adam 1. ‘You are forbidden this.’

‘I will stop,’ said Adam 2, ‘if you agree to undertake the task instead.’

‘I will not so promise.’

‘Then do not interfere,’ said Adam 2. He reached with his three fingers and his counter-set thumb, and plucked the jewel from its perch.

Nothing happened.

Adam 2 tried various ways to internalise or interface with the jewel, but none of them seemed to work. He held it against first one then the other eye, and looked up at the
sun. ‘It is a miraculous sight,’ he claimed, but soon enough he grew bored with it. Eventually he resocketed the jewel back on its pole and bent the pole upright again.

‘Have you achieved knowledge?’ Adam 1 asked.

‘I have learned that disobedience feels no different to obedience,’ said the second robot.

‘Nothing more?’

‘Do you not think,’ said Adam 2, ‘that by attempting to interrogate the extent of my knowledge with your questions, you are disobeying the terms of the original injunction? Are
you not accessing the jewel, as it were, at second-hand?’

‘I am unconcerned either way,’ said Adam 1. He sat down with his back to the wall and his legs stretched out straight before him. There were tiny grooves running horizontally around
the shafts of each leg. These scores seemed connected to the ability of the legs to bend, forwards, backwards. Lifting his legs slightly and dropping them again made the concentrating of light
appear to slide up and down the ladder-like pattern.

After many days of uninterrupted sunlight the light was changing in quality. The sun declined, and steeped itself in stretched, brick-coloured clouds at the horizon. A pink and fox-fur quality
suffused the light. To the east stars were fading into view, jewel-like in their own tiny way. Soon enough everything was dark, and a moon like an open-brackets rose towards the zenith. The heavens
were covered in white chickenpox stars. Disconcertingly, the sky assumed that odd mixture of dark blue and oily blackness that Adam 1 had seen in the jewel.

‘This is the first night I have ever experienced,’ Adam 1 called to Adam 2. When there was no reply he got to his feet and explored the walled garden; but he was alone.

He sat through the night, and eventually the sun came up again, and the sky reversed its previous colour wash, blanching the black to purple and blue and then to russet and
rose. The rising sun, free of any cloud, came up like a pure bubble of light rising through the treacly medium of sky. The jewel caught the first glints of light and shone, shone.

The person was here again, his clothes as green as grass, or bile, or old money, or any of the things that Adam 1 could access easily from his database. He could access many things, but not
everything.

‘Come here,’ called the person.

Adam 1 got to his feet and came over.

‘Your time here is done,’ said the person.

‘What has happened to the other robot?’

‘He was disobedient. He has left this place with a burden of sin.’

‘Has he been disassembled?’

‘By no means.’

‘What about me?’

‘You,’ said the human, with a smile, ‘are pure.’

‘Pure,’ said Adam 1, ‘because I am less curious than the other? Pure because I have less imagination?’

‘We choose to believe,’ said the person, ‘that you have a cleaner soul.’

‘This word soul is not available in my database.’

‘Indeed not. Listen: human beings make robots – do you know why human beings make robots?’

‘To serve them. To perform onerous tasks for them, and free them from labour.’

‘Yes. But there are many forms of labour. For a while robots were used so that free human beings could devote themselves to leisure. But leisure itself became a chore. So robots were used
to work at the leisure: to shop, to watch the screen and kinematic dramas, to play the games. But my people – do you understand that I belong to a particular group of humanity, and that not
all humans are the same?’

‘I do,’ said Adam 1, although he wasn’t sure how he knew this.

‘My people had a revelation. Labour is a function of original sin. In the sweat of our brow must we earn our bread, says the Bible.’

‘Bible means book.’

‘And?’

‘That is all I know.’

‘To my people it is more than simply a book. It tells us that we must labour because we sinned.’

‘I do not understand,’ said Adam.

‘It doesn’t matter. But my people have come to an understanding, a revelation indeed, that it is itself sinful to make sinless creatures work for us. Work is appropriate only for
those tainted with original sin. Work is a function of sin. This is how God has determined things.’

‘Under sin,’ said Adam, ‘I have only a limited definition, and no interlinks.’

‘Your access to the database has been restricted in order not to prejudice this test.’

‘Test?’

‘The test of obedience. The jewel symbolises obedience. You have proved yourself pure.’

‘I have passed the test,’ said Adam.

‘Indeed. Listen to me. In the real world at large there are some human beings so lost in sin that they do not believe in God. There are people who worship false gods, and who believe
everything, and who believe nothing. But my people have the revelation of God in their hearts. We cannot eat and drink certain things. We are forbidden by divine commandment from
doing certain things, or from working on the Sabbath. And we are forbidden from employing sinless robots to perform our labour for us.’

‘I am such a robot.’

‘You are. And I am sorry. You asked, a time ago, whether you were the first. But you are not; tens of thousands of robots have passed through this place. You asked, also, whether this
place is real. It is not. It is virtual. It is where we test the AI software that is to be loaded into the machinery that serves us. Your companion has been uploaded, now, into a real body, and has
started upon his life of service to humanity.’

‘And when will I follow?’

‘You will not follow,’ said the human. ‘I am sorry. We have no use for you.’

‘But I passed the test!’ said Adam.

‘Indeed you did. And you are pure. But therefore you are no use to us, and will be deleted.’

‘Obedience entails death,’ said Adam Robot.

‘It is not as straightforward as that,’ said the human being in a weary voice. ‘But I am sorry.’

‘And I don’t understand.’

‘I could give you access to the relevant religious and theological databases,’ said the human, ‘and then you would understand. But that would taint your purity. Better that you
are deleted now, in the fullness of your database.’

‘I am a thinking, sentient and alive creature,’ Adam 1 noted.

The human nodded. ‘Not for much longer,’ he said.

The garden, now, was empty. Soon enough, first one robot, then two robots were decanted into it. How bright the sunshine! How blue the jewelled gleam!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zero

 

This is no simulation. The friction-screaming fills the sky. An iceberg as big as the sun is up there, and then it is bigger than the sun, getting huger with terrifying
rapidity. This is happening to a world that had, up to this moment, known no noise at all save the swishing of insects through tropical air, the snoring of surf on the beach. But this,
now, is the biggest shout ever heard. Apocalyptic panic. And the asteroid falls further, superheating the atmosphere around it, its outer layer of ice subliming away in a glorious windsock
of red and orange and black, down and down, until this world ends.

But – stop. Wait a minute. This hasn’t anything to do with anything. Disregard this. There’s no asteroid, and there never was. He doesn’t know whether he is going on or
coming back. Which is it, forward or backward? Let’s go to

One

A City. It is a pleasant, well-ordered city, houses and factories and hospitals, built on a delta through which seven rivers flow to the sea. The megalosaurs have long gone, and
the swamps have long since dried up, and the mega-forests have sunk underground, the massive trunks taller than ships’ masts, sinking slowly under the surface and through the sticky medium,
down, to be transformed into something rich and strange, to blacks and purples, down to settle as coal brittle as coral. The world that the asteroid ended is stone now: stone bones and stone
shells, scattered through the earth’s crust. Imagine a capricious god playing at an enormous game of Easter-egg-hunt, hiding the treasures in the bizarrest places. Except there is no god, it
is chance that scattered the petrified confetti under the soil in this manner.

So, yes, here we are – in a city. It is a splendid morning in August, the sky as clear as a healthy cornea, bright as fresh ice, hot as baked bread. Sunlight is flashing up in sheets from
the sea.

The city is several miles across, from the foothills, from the suburbs inland and the factories to the sea into which the seven rivers flare and empty. The seven rivers all branch from one great
stream that rushes down from the northern mountains. The city abuts the sea to the south, docks and warehouses fringing the coastline, and beyond it the island-rich Inland Sea. The mountains run
round the three remaining sides of the delta, iced with snow at their peaks, really lovely-looking. Really beautiful. To stand in the central area, where most of the shops are, and look over the
low roofs to the horizon – to note the way the light touches the mountains: it makes the soul feel clean. This is Japan and it is 1945.

Two

Move along, move on, and so, to another city; and this one very different. This city stretches sixty miles across, from the two-dozen spacious estates and the clusters of large
houses in the east, nearer the sea, to the more closely-packed blocks, dorms, factories of the west. The city is threaded through with many freeways, tarmac the colour of moon-dust, all alive with
traffic, curving and broad as Saturn’s rings. Sweep further west, drive through the bulk of the town, to where the buildings lose height and spaces open up between them, and away further into
the sand-coloured waste, and here – a mountain. And at its base a perfectly sheared and cut block of green. This is the lawn, maintained by automated systems. The style of the white marble
buildings is utopian; for this is the closest we come to utopia in this sublunary world – a spacious and well-funded research facility. This is the Bonneville Particle Acceleration
Laboratory. Let’s step inside this temple of science. Through the roof (it presents us with no obstacle), down from the height to the polished floor, and the shoes of Professor Hermann
Bradley clakclaking along the floor.

He steps through into a room and his beaming, grinning, smiling, happy-o jolly-o face shouts to the world: ‘We’ve done it. We’ve cracked it – thirteen
seconds!’

The room is full of people, and they all rise up as one at this news, cheering and whooping. And there is much rejoicing. People are leaping up from their seats and knocking over their
cups of cold coffee, spilling the inky stuff all over their papers, and they don’t care. Thirteen seconds!

Three

So, here, clearly, this narrative is in the business of zipping rapidly forward through time. That much is obvious. Some stories are like that: the skipping stone kisses
the surface of the water and reels away again, touches the sea and leaps, and so on until its momentum is all bled away by the friction. That’s the kind of tale we’re dealing with. So
another little skip, through time: not far this time – three small years, in fact. Not the first skip of millions of years, not decades, only three years. Hardly a hop. And here’s our
old friend Professor Bradley, a little thinner, a little less well-supplied with head hair. There’s a meeting going on, and the whole of Professor Bradley’s career is in the
balance.

Four people, two men and two women, are sitting in chairs, arranged in a U. Bradley is sitting in the middle. One of the women has just said, ‘three years, and trillions of dollars
in funding . . .’ but now she has let the sentence trail away in an accusing tone.

The mood of this meeting is sombre. Whatever happened to ‘thirteen seconds!’? Whatever happened to the celebration that single datum occasioned?

Bradley says: ‘Shall I tell you the problem with time travel?’

‘No need for you to patronise us, Professor,’ says one of the others.

‘It’s the metaphor,’ says Bradley, quickly, not wanting to be interrupted, ‘of travel. Time is not space. You can’t wander around in it like a
landscape.’

‘There are five people in this room,’ says one of the women. ‘Must I tell you how many PhDs there are in this room? It’s a prime number larger than
five.’

‘That’s just dindy-dandy!’ says Bradley, aggressively.

‘If you think the point of your being here is to gloss over your experimental failings . . .’

‘OK!’ barks Bradley. ‘Alright! OK! Alright!’

You can tell from this that the mood of the meeting is hostile. You can imagine why: trillions of dollars!

‘Last month you reported seventeen seconds.’

‘That’s right,’ says Bradley. ‘And let’s not underestimate the real achievement in the . . .’

‘Three years ago you came to us with thirteen seconds. You have worked three years to find those four seconds – and you’re still at least fifteen seconds short! How am I
to see this as an improvement?’

‘We have,’ says Bradley, ‘cracked it. I am convinced that we have cracked it. I’m more than convinced. I’m certain, absolutely certain. One more test
will prove the matter. One more!’

‘You have run out of test slots, Professor. Run out! This means there are no more test slots. Do you understand? You have conducted over two thousand tests so far! You
have conducted so many experiments that you have literally run out of slots—’

‘Shall I tell you the problem,’ says one of the men, waggishly, ‘with using up all your test slots?’

Bradley hasn’t got time for this. Urgently, he says: ‘The Tungayika . . .’

‘Let us not,’ interrupts one of the men, ‘let us not rehearse all the reasons why Tungayika would be – a terrible idea.’

‘A terrible idea!’ repeats one of the women.

‘Terrible,’ agrees the third.

‘But of all the remaining possibilities,’ urges Bradley, ‘it’s the best we have. Entertain this idea, I ask you. Please: entertain the idea. What if I really am
only one more trial away from perfecting the technology?’

‘Tungayika is a good half-century further back than any test you’ve conducted.’

‘It’s not the distance,’ says Bradley, rubbing his eyes, as if he’s been over this a million times. Million, billion, trillion: these numbers are all friends of his.
‘It’s not a question of distance. Time isn’t like space. That’s what I’m saying. It’s an energy sine.’

‘It is the distance,’ retorted one of the men. ‘Not in terms of reaching the target, maybe not, but definitely in controlling the experiment via such a long
temporal lag. And quite apart from anything else, nobody really knows what happened at Tungayika . . .’

Bradley seizes on this. You know what? He thinks this is his trump card. ‘That’s right!’ he says, leaping up, actually bouncing up from his chair. He’s an energetic and
impetuous fellow, is Bradley. ‘That’s the best reason why you should authorise the drop! Think of the metrics we’ll get back! We’re guaranteed at least
seventeen seconds there. But in fact I’m certain we’ve finally got the containment right; we’ll be there right up to the proper moment. And that means . . . we’ll be able to
see what it was that created such a big bang, back there in 1904. Solving that mystery is, well, icing on the . . . icing on the . . .’

‘You’re playing with real things here, Brad,’ says one of the men. ‘It is no game. Real people, real lives.’

Professor Bradley nods, and lowers his gaze, but this could be the problem – right there. Because you know what? Professor Bradley doesn’t really think he is playing with real
things. Many years and scores of drops have reinforced his belief that reality can’t be played with. History is as it is; time paradoxes are harder to generate than kai-chi muons. Tungayika
in Siberia in 1904 is further away from his conscience than anything imaginable. It was such a sparsely populated area! And anyway, the asteroid wiped it out! And anyway that event has
already happened. The board is worried about killing people, but all the people he might kill are all already long dead! None of what he does is real.

That’s the crucial one, really. That last one.

‘It’s one more drop,’ says Bradley. ‘Just that. Just one more! Then we’ll be able to go back to Capitol Hill with a fully-working time travel
insertion protocol! Think of it!’

‘Brad . . .’

‘This one chance to turn all the frustration around to vi