I
The Dyje River rivaled the sky for blue as the helicopter swept out over an open field a mile or so east of Dolní Vĕstonice. Its passenger surveyed the nearby hills, noting their rocky facade, and pondered the secrets they’d surrendered.
“Hier sind wir, meine dame,” her pilot said into his headset.
“Danke,” she responded absently, then removing her own and releasing her safety belt. She saw a jeep approaching as she opened the helicopter door, grabbed her shoulder bag and laptop case and hopped out into the swaying grass.
The jeep stopped a dozen meters away and its driver stepped out, a woman about her own height but several years younger, dressed in blue jeans, boots, and a denim work shirt. Her dark hair, put up to stay out of her face while working, contrasted with her own, honey-blonde and short-cropped. Her skin glowed in the afternoon sun, which seemed out of place, given her profession; her smile, flashed as she approached, was bright and welcoming. She felt an unstoppable surge of attraction.
“Doctor Matuschek,” the woman said as she extended her hand. “I’m Natalie Poe. Welcome to Czechia!”
“Amélie, please,” she smiled back, taking the offered hand and shaking it. Firm. Not quite soft. Lightly callused.
The woman took her shoulder bag as they stepped clear of the helicopter, making their way back to the jeep.
“I wish we could have given you a more suitable welcome,” she said, “but as I’m sure you know, we’re keeping things very low-key around here. Our mutual boss wants this to be as hush-hush as possible. Even now, only four people in the world know about it. Five, counting you.”
“I’m not one of them yet,” Matuschek answered. “Ewin told me nothing. He said he didn’t even want to speak what you’d found out loud, even on an encrypted channel.”
“I’m not surprised,” her host said as she started the jeep. “He sent his head of security from Zurich within two hours of my call, and I haven’t been permitted to communicate with anyone in any way since he arrived.
Behind them, the helicopter lifted off, returning to Prague. The jeep proceeded along a broad dirt road along the hills, then turned onto a narrower one that led into the hills themselves.
“It’s not far,” Poe said as the terrain got rougher. “The dig is similar to others in this area – Gravettian, going back about 30,000 years. Lots of artifacts, pottery, ivory carvings. Many statuettes of women.” Matuschek nodded. The boss had emailed a briefing.
“But those were mostly burial sites. What we found was something else entirely. These hills sit on top of a network of caverns, and the river used to be more in this direction. A Cro-Magnon tribe camping in the caverns was trapped when it flooded, and they all drowned. They were sealed in mud, and – well, here they are.”
She pulled the jeep off the path into a clearing between two hills, an outcropping of rock beyond. A pair of SUVs sat in the clearing, equipment cases stacked nearby. A security guard stood in front of the rocks.
“There are seventeen distinct individuals so far,” Poe continued as she nodded to the guard, who deferentially stepped aside. “Eight males, eleven females. All young, all relatively healthy. When the river hit them, it was fast and furious.”
She led Amélie down an incline between the rocks, into a small opening beneath a rock ledge. Temporary lighting had been strung along the rock walls, illuminating the dry walls of a small cavern.
“This is tight quarters,” her host continued as she led the way. “It will get tighter. Hope you’re not claustrophobic.”
“You should see my office,” Amélie replied. Poe chuckled.
They squeezed through a constricted corridor from the main cavern into a small but high-ceilinged chamber. Touching her smartphone, Poe tripled the illumination in the chamber, and Amélie found herself in what resembled a bunkhouse of skeletons.
Many were being slowly excavated from the chamber floor, and lay beneath protective canvas. Several were situated on rough shelves Poe’s team had teased out of the walls. Each had a numbered card propped beside it; an array of toolkits and instruments sat none-too-neatly arranged on a table off to the side.
Amélie bent down next to one of the skeletons and lifted its canvas covering. Poe bent next to her and turned her phone light on. They surveyed the skeleton, dry and cold and incomplete, odd wisps of sinew clinging to gray bone here and there. A card identified it as #5.
“This is Boris,” Poe informed her. “He’d have been about five-foot-five, a little hefty. Probably was in his late twenties, which would have made him a wise old man of the tribe.”
Poe rose and crossed to #11. Amélie followed, bent down as the archaeologist lifted this skeleton’s covering.
“Genevieve,” she said. “Female. Five-foot-one. Mid-teens. And look...” She shined the light on the skeleton’s abdomen. “Pregnant when she died.”
“Where do you get these names?” Amélie asked. Poe laughed.
“Arlan lets me use local graduate students to do the busy work on these projects, as long as they don’t see anything they shouldn’t. I let them name our friends when they’re so inclined. They can get pretty creative.”
“This is all fascinating,” Amélie said as they both stood, “but so far, I’m not seeing why Arlan sent me here.”
Poe nodded. “Why is the R-and-D director of Cybec Europe wandering through an obscure Cro-Magnon dig in the middle of Czechia? I’ll show you.”
Moving to the back of the chamber, she pushed a heavy equipment case aside, revealing a locker on the cave floor. It was locked, and she tapped in a long sequence of numbers into a panel on its face to open it. Amélie noticed the number #17 written on the locker’s surface.
As she lifted the door, several lights inside the locker sprang to life.
Amélie bent low to view the skeleton within.
Half its skull was missing. Within the remaining half, she saw a small, metallic assembly of silver and blue crystal, perhaps five centimeters across, gently glowing up at her.
And below the skull, beneath the skeleton’s right elbow, a robot arm.
“You understand now our need to secrecy,” came a deep voice behind them. Standing, they turned and saw a large, bald man of middle age entering the chamber, followed by a much smaller young woman dressed much as Poe was.
“You are Doctor Matuschek. From the Hamburg laboratories.” He did not extend a hand. He was so big that Amélie wondered how he’d squeezed through the corridor.
“This is Klaus Holzner, from the Zurich center,” Poe said. “Mr. Ewin sent him to-”
“Please present your credentials,” the man interrupted.
Unsurprised at his rudeness, Amélie withdrew a plastic card from her pocket and handed it to him. He inserted it into a slot on the top of a mobile device. He held the device out for her.
“Place your right thumb on the square,” he instructed her. She complied. A moment later, he seemed satisfied, and handed back her card.
“And this is Elyse Lechner, my indispensable assistant,” Poe continued. The young woman smiled warmly and extended a hand to Amélie.
“A pleasure, doctor,” she said. “I have read all your work.” Amélie found herself surprised.
“We four, along with Mr. Ewin, are the only ones who know of this,” Holzner said soberly, nodding at the skeleton in the locker. “That is how it must remain.”
“The man outside-”
“There are four men outside,” Holzner said, “the other three are simply less obvious. And they have not seen what you are seeing, nor will they.”
Amélie bent down to survey the skeleton again, fascinated in spite of herself.
“We had half a dozen students with us,” Poe said. “As I was saying, we used them for the busy work. When Elyse found number seventeen here, we immediately sent them home. They never saw this, obviously, and neither have the guards we’ve been using since.”
She bent down next to Amélie, her eyes likewise filled with wonder. “Elyse christened this one T-800,” she continued, “just between us. It’s mildly misleading, though, because this is a female, not a male. But it’s kind of funny.”
“A cyborg,” Amélie said, “like in the movies – but from the past, not the future. Thirty thousand years in the past.” She turned her smartphone light on, to get a better look inside the skull.
“You may not take pictures!” barked Holzner, reaching for her phone. Poe lifted a hand and shook her head.
“She won’t,” she assured him. “She’s just getting a closer look.”
Fibers of metal from the device in the skull were knitted into the bone on the skull’s left side, next to where the parietal lobe had been. Additional fibers, transparent and apparently non-metallic, protruded from the open side of the device – presumably once embedded in brain tissue.
The robotic arm, similar in appearance but much larger, knit into the bone off the elbow in the same way. The arm’s digits were astonishingly detailed, the metallic carpels proportionally perfect.
“This is why Arlan sent for you,” Poe said. “We don’t know what that is.”
“A brain implant of some kind,” Amélie mused. “But whatever this technology is, it’s nothing like – anything. There is no technology like this anywhere, that I know of.”
“It is not of this world,” Holzner said ominously.
“I’m not sure I’d go that far,” Amélie replied.
“Oh, Arlan is convinced of it,” Poe said. “He believes wholeheartedly that this is alien technology, and you’re here to make a determination. Elyse, grab your mobile?”
The young woman crossed to the table and picked up a tablet, returned and handed it to Poe.
“This discovery is less than twelve hours old,” she told Amélie, “but Arlan’s been on this for quite a while.”
She pulled up a digital image on the tablet, handed it to Amélie. It showed a close-up of a cave painting of a human head – and a crude representation of a device like the one in the skull below drawn into it.
“This is from a cave near Antillana del Mar, in northern Spain,” she explained. “I don’t know how Arlan got hold of it, but once he did, he got very interested in archaeology, and that’s when he hired me and Elyse and about six others. For the past six years, we’ve been his alien hunters.”
“I heard about these digs, and I always wondered,” Amélie said. “I thought was just another of his billionaire eccentricities, like his obsession with building an estate on the moon.”
“Well, this obsession is certainly cheaper than that one,” Poe replied, “and far less public. But I think his belief that aliens were here tens of thousands of years ago and left tech like this behind is what got him all excited about building his own spaceships in the first place.”
“So it’s not just his black-hole ego.”
Behind her, Holzner bristled at the disrespect.
“Needless to say, Arlan’s over the Atlantic right now. We’ve arranged to have Seventeen here taken back to Hamburg for you. Mr. Holzner here has already beefed up security at your labs. I’ll be going with you, and Elyse will stay behind and continue with the dig, trying to get a more complete picture of what happened.”
Amélie Matuschek had been in place at the center of Cybec research for years, keeping an eye on the corporation’s advances in artificial intelligence and robotics. Arlan Ewin was certainly unscrupulous, even felonious at times, but she and others like her had managed to persuade him that the adoption and promotion of ethical standards in AI development and the commercialization of robots would buy him goodwill among regulators and even competitors.
But this – Ewin was a vain, selfish, soulless man, the most dominant of the plethora of social dominators populating the hi-tech echelons of the world. Amélie had no doubt whatsoever that he’d spent tens of millions chasing aliens so he could get his hands on tech like this, reverse-engineer it, exploit it, and in so doing cement himself into global preeminence. It was the nature of his kind.
That’s why she was here.
When they later emerged from the cavern, she found herself pleased that Poe would be returning to Hamburg with her.
II
“Have you made any preliminary conclusions, Amy?” Arlan Ewin asked Amélie, with the eagerness of a child asking for dessert.
His doughy face and beady eyes filled her tablet screen as she sat in her hotel room, a glass of scotch on the table next to her. She loathed that face, loathed his insinuating voice. And she really loathed being called ‘Amy’.
But despising Arlan Ewin and all like him had long since become a casual thing to her by now. She had resolved to simply enjoy being in the finest suite in the finest hotel in Prague for a few days. She focused on the task at hand.
“I haven’t even taken pictures of it yet, let alone begun studying it,” she replied. “I won’t get much of anything done with that gorilla of yours hovering over me.”
“He has an important job to do,” Ewin said. “I’ll see to it he leaves you to your work, but you surely understand how important it is that we keep this to ourselves.”
“Your Dr. Poe says the skeleton is going back to Hamburg,” she said, “and she’ll be coming, too.”
“And my gorilla. I need you to figure this out, and she can provide you with important context. How did that tech get into a Cro-Magnon woman thirty thousand years ago? She’s an expert on Cro-Magnons, and European ones in particular.”
“I’m happy to have the help.”
“Of course. And you can pick one, and only one, research staffer from your Hamburg team to assist. And tell Klaus who it is, as soon as you decide.”
“I can probably handle this myself.”
“That suits me fine. The fewer people, the better.”
“Arlan, you don’t really believe this technology is alien, do you?”
“If you have a better explanation, I’m all ears.”
“You’ve known about this for a while, but you never said anything.”
He tried to sound contrite, but she could tell by his shifty eyes that he wasn’t.
“Need-to-know, Amy. I’ve had to keep the lid on and bring people in at the right time. This is the first major find, so now’s the time.”
“This is why you transferred me to Hamburg in the first place, isn’t it?"
He shrugged and smiled.
“I like to plan ahead.”
He was despicable.
“I’ll meet you at your lab tomorrow afternoon. Klaus will have the skeleton there overnight.”
The call ended.
She had a window. She knew what she needed to do.
Hamburg. Haven to cholera, concentration camps, Nazi stooges. Of businesses that had used Jewish children as slave labor a century earlier; where city leaders couldn’t be bothered with trifles like the germ theory of disease.
That had all been long ago, of course, and the city had its more positive accomplishments: some of the most beautiful music ever created had been composed here; opera had come to full fruition in its theaters. And today, of course, it was one of Europe’s cleanest, fastest-growing and most progressive cities.
She looked down on the city from a window of the company jet, taking it in with mixed feelings. On the one hand, she wasn’t wild about her assignment here; on the other, Europe – and Hamburg in particular – had been far more receptive to her, and those like her, than the United States had been. She didn’t love the job, but neither did she regret it.
She’d awakened the company pilot at an ungodly hour and left a message with Natalie, with whom she’d had dinner before her call with Ewin. The skeleton would already be in her building, secured by the gorilla; she needed time with it before either Natalie or Ewin arrived at the labs.
Dawn would soon arrive. A car was waiting for her at the private airfield at Ottensen. She patted the computer bag in her lap.
Holzner had already placed one of his goons outside her office and the side entrance to her main lab when she arrived. That meant the cyborg skeleton had been delivered in the night, as she’d expected. She didn’t bother flashing her badge at him; she was well-known in the research complex, and her card and code in the door lock was all the evidence of her authenticity that was necessary.
Neither Holzner nor any of his men would have been in her office – it was completely secure, even from Security, at her strenuous insistence to Ewin – and the lab where the skeleton lay, beyond her office, possessed no cameras she hadn’t personally authorized. Ewin understood that violation of this policy would mean her departure, and he wasn’t about to risk that: she was his competitive edge. He’d have underlined the no-cameras rule to Holzner, who surely would have chafed, and probably openly objected.
She went to work. The sun was up, and both Natalie and Ewin would be arriving over the next few hours.
Holzner beat them both, and was visibly perturbed that she had arrived so early. He almost certainly hadn’t expected her until midday, figuring she would have traveled back to Germany over the morning, and had attempted a few hours of shut-eye.
She had left all the doors locked, and was alerted to his presence by rude banging on the main lab door off the central corridor. A monitor next to the inside of the door displayed his ruddy, irritated face.
She had wrapped up her initial task. She casually strolled to the door and opened it.
“Herr Holzner,” she said with an indifferent smile. “Won’t you come in?”
“We were not expecting you so early,” he grumbled.
“Would you like some coffee?” The room had prepared a carafe for her when she’d arrived; but he ignored the offer.
“Mr. Ewin will soon be en route from London,” he briskly informed her. “Everything must be in order.”
“Of course,” she replied. “That’s why I thought it wise to get an early start.”
“I will observe,” he declared.
“That’s fine,” she nodded, “but please, take a seat to the side.” She nodded at the far end of the workbench upon which he’d deposited the skeleton hours earlier. “And... no pictures, please.”
He stiffened as though she’d slapped him. He knew contempt when he heard it, and was genuinely puzzled over her disdain. Not that he cared.
Another hour of measurements and scans ensued, and the main door clicked upon to admit Natalie Poe.
She wore fresh work clothes, slightly more stylish than the denim of the previous afternoon and not quite as colorful as the pants and blouse she’d worn to dinner. She’d been fetched from her apartment in Brno by the company helicopter at dawn, then picked up at the airport by the same company jet that she herself had taken and delivered to Hamburg.
Amélie brightened at her presence.
“Good morning,” Poe said, setting down her laptop bag on a table. “I was surprised you weren’t at the airport. I thought we were flying in together?”
“I wanted to get an early start,” Amélie explained, “with Arlan on his way. And I didn’t want to cost you any sleep.”
“Thank you. But I wouldn’t have minded.”
“Grab some coffee if you like,” Amélie offered, nodding toward the carafe. “Then I’ll show you what I have so far.”
They spent the next hour going over the scans performed so far on the brain implant. The robotic arm, though obviously similar in substance to the implant, was of far less immediate interest. They huddled over a screen on a desk table as Amélie pointed out items of interest and mused over their meaning.
She had begun building a digital twin of the brain implant, nanometer-precise, but had only the vaguest beginnings of an understanding of its composition. A great deal of spectroscopy and other introspections would be needed to figure out exactly what it was made of – it would take weeks, if not months, to complete the digital model.
Poe had many questions, surprisingly insightful and physics-grounded for an archaeologist. Amélie was caught off-guard by her obvious knowledgeability and awareness, but it caused her to enjoy her all the more.
“It almost seems... organic,” she said at one point, and looked over at Amélie with wide, curious eyes.
Amélie nodded. “Some components seem to be somewhat metallic, yet organic in structure,” she replied. “I think some of these materials we’ve never seen before, and I doubt any of them exist in nature.”
“Außerirdischer,” Holzner muttered from his post nearby. Poe looked his way and smiled patiently.
She then walked over to the skeleton, bending low and peering at the inscrutable glowing assembly inside the skull. She turned on her smartphone light and leaned in, scrutinizing it from inches away. Amélie watched.
Poe frowned, then shifted her attention to the skeleton’s robotic limb. She gave it a long, up-close look as well, then stood and returned to Amélie at the desk table.
“It’s past noon,” Amélie said. “Hungry?”
III
Arlan Ewin’s motorcade swept up to the lab complex’s main entrance with grave pomp, his limousine slowing with exaggerated importance, eager sycophants piling out of auxiliary vehicles and lining up near the car as the imperious billionaire’s birdish door-opener performed his function. Ewin hoisted himself into the afternoon air with a self-appreciative sense of gravity, solemnly surveying his domain and nodding to the historicity of the moment as he paused to button his suit jacket before proceeding into the building.
His baby-fat cheeks involuntarily puffed as he fought not to squint, the bright sun contrasting the harsh shadow of the research center’s emergency room-like entrance. Motionless guards stood to either side of the sliding glass doors, which parted to release the facility’s chief administrator, who had thought Ewin was still at least an hour out. Young – mid-30s – and simultaneously sending out the vibe of a grad school drop-out and someone who had won their post in a company-wide raffle, he rushed to Ewin, extending a hand that was generously accepted.
Pleasantries began, but were quickly aborted; Arlan Ewin was here to ceremoniously commence the making of history, and had little time to spare for nerd worship. He asked to be taken straight to Amélie.
He was appalled to find her and her companion in the complex’s dining room, finishing lunch. They both waved when they saw him, and only Poe betrayed any discomfort at Ewin’s brisk pace and disapproving stare. An entourage of nameless, faceless young people trailed in his wake like a breezy bridal train.
“I’d have thought I’d find you at work, given the importance of what we’re working on,” he said tartly. Holzner hovered just behind him, glowering.
“Calm yourself, Arlan,” Amélie said as she and Poe stood. “I’ve already been at it eight hours, and we have things to show you. Not much, yet, but a start. Let’s go.”
Ewin parked his entourage in the corridor, allowing only Holzner to follow him into the lab. He removed his suit coat and absently handed it to Holzner, who stared at it with uncertainty before placing it on the back of a desk chair. Amélie and Poe waited for him to speak as he approached the skeleton dramatically, bending down to survey its secrets – anomalous artifacts that, to him, delivered the truth he’d longed for all his life: assurance that We Are Not Alone.
After a few minutes, he stood upright, still staring down at the broken skull as he rendered his verdict:
“Magnificent!!!”
Amélie was amused, Poe polite as he turned and beamed at them, their dereliction forgotten. He clapped his hands together.
“So... what can you tell me so far?”
“Organic?”
“Sort of,” Amélie replied, “and not exactly, and it’s just speculation and far too early to know. Arlan, it will take months, if not years, to fully understand these artifacts-”
“Tell me what you mean by ‘organic’!’
She suppressed her bristling at his interruption, took a breath. “I mean that the structure of both the arm and brain implant seem to possess nominal inconsistencies in structure. They look less like rigidly-designed machine components and more like organic tissue.”
“...yet the materials themselves contain metals,” Poe interjected. Ewin looked at her in surprise, as if she had no business speaking.
Amélie nodded. “That’s just from the most fleeting spectroscopy.”
“What about its function?” Ewin changed the subject. “I don’t mean the arm, that’s obvious, I mean the brain thing. What do you think it’s for?”
Amélie and Poe exchanged a look, offering each other first response.
“It was nested against the parietal lobe,” Poe replied, “suggesting that it was somehow connected to the woman’s sensory experiences. Maybe it was a device for recording her physical experiences.”
“Like a log of her perceptions,” Ewin said.
“Not exactly,” Amélie interjected. “Perception happens in the cerebral cortex. A device in the parietal lobe would be tracking what is actually happening to the host, not what the host thinks is happening.”
“Interesting, interesting,” Ewin nodded. “And how would this data get distributed? Could the thing also be some kind of transmitter? Could this cavewoman’s experiences have been uploaded, somehow-”
“Arlan, there’s no telling,” Amélie said. “Its function is even more obscure than its composition. I’ll need an assortment of experts to-”
“No experts!” Ewin interrupted her again. “We keep this tight. We’ll have that assistant of yours run interference and parse out analyses and evaluations piecemeal, under absolute secrecy, without comprehensive consultation.”
“Arlan, if we take that approach, then a complete analysis will take ten times as long.”
“Then it takes ten times as long. Amy, this is the most important moment in human history! We’re in possession of technology from the stars. There has never been a greater game-changer, since hominids began walking upright.”
“Let’s not start-”
“Dr. Poe,” Ewin said, pivoting, “What’s your explanation for the presence of technology far in advance of even the best we have today, buried for 30,000 years in the Paleolithic past? I’m asking for your professional perspective.”
Feeling put on the spot, she paused and considered her reply before speaking.
“Clearly, this is an unprecedented find,” she said carefully. “There are just a few possibilities, and none of them seem at all realistic.”
“Arlan, we’ve had this argument endlessly,” Amélie said. “‘Aliens among us’ is wishful thinking at best, and completely disregarding of even the most basic physics at worst. The incidence of planets with conditions close enough to our own to feasibly host evolving life has got to be one-in-billions, and the speed of light is insurmountable-”
“You’re right, Amy, I don’t want to rehash all that. Let’s just go with Occam’s Razor. Dr. Poe, what are the other possibilities? What, besides extraterrestrial life, could explain the technology in that Cro-Magnon?”
“There are only two,” she said with guarded authority. “One, that ours is not the first advanced human civilization; that homo sapiens or some cousin species actually flourished and developed advanced technology tens of thousands of years ago, then vanished without trace – excepting the body parts we just dug up.”
“And what’s the other?”
“Time travel,” she said slowly, looking at Amélie. “Either our Number Seventeen was injured, then repaired by a visitor from our future, or-”
“Or what?”
“Or she herself is a time traveler, and possessed those artificial parts before she traveled into the past.”
“Now who’s ditching physics?” Ewin asked Amélie, with more than a little condescension. “What’s more likely? An extraterrestrial ship – maybe a sub-light generation ship! - making its way to Earth? Or the reversal of time’s arrow, which physicists have declared as impossible as exceeding the speed of light?”
Poe interjected. “If we’re going into likelihoods, then a hidden civilization on the order I just mentioned disappearing without leaving any hint of existence is just as improbable as time travel.”
“There you go,” Ewin nodded with triumph. “Amélie, I’m not seeing a better explanation here than extraterrestrials.”
Amélie sighed inwardly. This argument would never go away, and she knew it, and part of her was grateful for it: it would serve to distract him, probably forever, and that would make her job easier in the end.
They burned up another hour in argument, discussion of Amélie’s initial scans, and finally the disposition of the skeleton. He instructed Amélie and Poe to extract the anomalous technology from the skeleton, do another round of analysis, then prepare it for transport to the United States.
When Amélie objected that it would be easier to study it here, and more secure as well, Ewin made a show of being resolute, but Amélie was confident she would prevail. She would have several days to wear him down.
Ewin took a few selfies of himself with Number Seventeen, as well as a hundred or so close-ups of the implant and arm - to Holzner’s great discomfort – then announced that he was headed for his London offices, and that he would return after the weekend.
IV
Amélie blinked as the early morning light reached through the window and touched her eyelids. She felt the sweet fatigue of the night wash back over her, through her nerves and muscles. Breathing in, she could smell Natalie’s citrus hair and vanilla skin, feel her warm breathing on her shoulder. She was careful not to move suddenly and wake her.
“You’re awake,” Natalie sleepily noted. They both shifted in the bed, Natalie easing to the side and propping herself on her elbow. She leaned in and kissed Amélie.
“Good morning,” she smiled.
“Good morning,” Amélie smiled back.
“So,” Natalie said, brushing a hair from Amélie’s forehead, “what happens now?”
“Now,” Amélie replied, sitting up, “he’ll dig in on this relentlessly for months on end, and drag me with him, and be obsessed with security and keeping his goons all over me – all the while teasing the whole world that he has something great in store. And he’ll argue with me day and night about how reverse-engineering this ‘alien’ tech will give him the chance to bestow great gifts upon the world, and how he’ll improve the lives of everyone on the planet. Which is bullshit; he’s only interested in improving his own.”
Natalie laughed softly.
“I mean, what happens now with us, but I agree with everything you just said.”
Amélie was momentarily sheepish, but proceeded: “Well, since I talked him into keeping the work here in Hamburg, I won’t be going to the States, so – who knows?”
Natalie touched her shoulder. “I’m not so sure I want to stay on the Cybec payroll at this point. And I’ve done my share of globe-hopping. Might be worth seeing if the university here can use me.” She kissed her again. “Maybe give the future a chance to unfold of its own accord.”
“I like that idea,” Amélie smiled.
“You’re going to stay with Arlan,” Natalie said. It wasn’t a question.
Amélie shrugged. “The world has gone to shit,” she almost muttered, “terrible men rising in nation after nation... the planet on fire... the Ewins all getting richer and richer while the rest of the world struggles. Maybe, possibly,” she took a deep breath, “Maybe I can do something with this ‘alien’ tech of his and actually persuade him to use it in a way that benefits everyone.”
Natalie lifted herself off the bed, stretching a bit as she stood. She opened the curtains a bit wider.
“I think we both know that’s not going to happen,” she said solemnly as she looked out into the morning.
“Not likely, no,” Amélie agreed. “He’s a bastard.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Natalie turned and sat on the bed’s edge. She took Amélie’s hand.
“You can be real with me,” she said. “He’s not going to get anything out of that ‘alien’ tech. You know that: because, to begin with, it isn’t ‘alien’ tech – it really did come from the future.”
Stunned at the firmness in Natalie’s voice, Amélie waited in silence as she continued.
“But mostly, he’ll get nothing from it because the artifacts in that lab aren’t the ones I found in that cave.”
Amélie felt a cold shiver.
“That’s why you got here in the wee hours the very next morning, before me and before Ewin,” Natalie gently continued. “You swapped out the real implant and arm for fakes.”
She started to protest, to laugh it off, but Natalie continued:
“I’ve spent my adult life studying the tiniest details in bones and rocks of all kinds,” she said. “Did you think I wouldn’t notice the tiniest details of the implant and arm?”
“Why, why would I do such a thing?” Amélie almost stuttered, her eyes wide.
“Because, sweet woman,” Natalie smiled, leaning in and stroking her cheek, then gently tapping the left side of her head, “you, too, are a T-800.”
“I... how can...”
Natalie took her hand.
“That really is technology from the future, and Seventeen was from the future, and you are from the future,” Natalie said with conviction. “There’s no other possible explanation for how you could possibly be in possession of fake implants that so closely resemble the real ones. You expected me to be fooled – Ewin, of course, wants to believe – and you didn’t have time to make fakes in any case. You’d’ve had to already been in possession of them.
“And that means you’ve been anticipating this moment for a long time. You’ve been aware that they’d be needed, which means you’re aware of time travelers with cybernetic parts, which means you yourself are either a time traveler or somehow a contemporary woman in league with them.”
“It also explains why you’re in this particular job, positioned to intervene if a megalomaniac like Ewin made a discovery like this. And I’ll bet all the money in my bank account against all the money in yours that there are one or more of you strategically placed in the US government, and likely other major governments, to say nothing the richer universities.” She smiled with certainty and reassurance.
Amélie sighed. Then she nodded.
“All true,” she said in a small voice. “You aren’t wrong about any of it.”
“So,” Natalie said, laying back on her side and propping herself up with her arm again, “how many of you are there?”
“At any given time, a few dozen,” Amélie replied, “protracted across decades. I myself have been here almost twenty years, but there are some before and ahead of me. A few have been here more than six decades. We all know we will die here, and make provisions that our bodies are disposed of when we die so our implants will never be discovered.
“The implants are used to pass information forward,” she continued. “The idea is to create a chain that stretches, unbroken, across fifty thousand years. I have data in my implant that was passed to me by the implants of those who’ve been here much longer, and my implant will in turn pass that data, plus my personal data, on to younger travelers in the chain who have only just arrived. On the chain goes.”
“What’s it for?”
Amélie stared out into nothing, recalling where she’d come from.
“I just ranted about how shitty the world is right now,” she said, “because of them. Because of the mess they made, the mess they always make, with their selfish, monstrous behavior.
“But the future I come from, it’s not like that at all. The world is clean, the earth is strong; there’s no more war, no more needless death. There’s enough for everyone, and nobody has too much. We’ve mastered the gene, we’ve perfected birthing; disease is gone, life lasts much longer. More time for everything. More time for this...” And she kissed her again.
“What does your chain through time have to do with it?”
“We are scattered through time to ensure that future,” she said. “The timeline we’re living in right now is an intentional one, designed and planned, and safeguarded by those of us who volunteer to preserve it. All of us who are sent back have little missions, tasks to do, to nudge the future in the direction it needs to go. Protecting a child; eliminating a monster. My own job, you know – make sure our tech is never discovered, which truly would change everything in the awful way Ewin is planning. If anyone like him ever got a hold of it and managed to understand it, the future I come from would vanish like a soap bubble.”
Natalie nodded.
“I understand,” she said, and she squeezed Amélie’s hand. “What a beautiful thing, that you were willing to give it all up and be part of this.”
“I’m beginning to realize that it has its compensations,” she replied with a smile.
“So, you and hundreds of others are sprinkled through time, each doing your part to nudge the future,” Natalie continued. “What is it that made the difference? What is it you all have engineered that changed the world from this present to that future?”
“Simple, really,” Amélie almost chuckled. “We got rid of them all.”
Natalie laughed, hard.
“Of course!” she grinned at the thought. “The billionaires! You got rid of the billionaires!”
“Oh, not the billionaires,” taking her turn to laugh. “The men...”
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