Jack shrugs. “Because she is. Or she will be. President of the United States, not to mention our best hope of containing the crisis in the last days of humanity.”
“You remember that?” I ask. “You know what’s going on?”
“I know some of it,” Jack says. “I may not have all the detail… I’m not sure I ever knew all the detail, but I know enough. I know what I’m here to do.”
“And what’s that?” Sebastian asks. What must it be like for him? What must it be like, with a son he thought of as his own, whom he brought up as his own, but who is really the result of a futuristic form of time travel? What must it be like, confronting the fact that everything he thought he knew about his own son is wrong? Pretty much the same as the way I’m feeling about Jack right now, I’d guess.
Jack looks grave again, the way that he did after seeing the footage his father and uncle had recovered from my head. “I’m here to prevent the end of the world.” He looks round at me and Grayson. “I guess we all are.”
“The literal end of the world?” I ask.
Jack shrugs. “You saw it, Celes. You saw the great disaster. The Apocalypse. Millions…
billions
of people dying. And that’s just the first phase of it. The initial disaster has knock on effects. It kills so many people, but it isn’t quite the end of the world. In our time though it looks like we
are
heading for that.”
“Which is why we came back,” I say.
Jack nods. “Us and so many others. They all tried to change things, and they either got the timing wrong, or they weren’t able to overcome the effects of the fading machine enough. Who knows how many of them there are walking around the world, believing that they are just normal people, with normal families? In fact, with the way the fading machine works, they
are
normal people with normal families.”
“What do you mean?” Jonah asks. I can hear his scientist’s interest in the advanced technology the fading machine offers.
I explain a little based on what Johnny told us back at Senator Hammond’s place. “People can’t travel through time directly, but the machine effectively re-creates us in the past, as babies.”
“Which means that we have to grow up as normal,” Jack says. “The machine imprints us with our personalities, but could you imagine being a newborn baby with the full knowledge of everything that was going to happen? It would drive you mad. An infant brain isn’t developed enough to deal with the full adult self, so that part is… locked away is the wrong way to put it. Put into storage, maybe? Which is where the problems start.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Sebastian says.
Jack gestures vaguely, as though trying to capture something impossible. “The memories are meant to come out, but in most people, the imprinting of the base personality is too strong. The lives they live here get in the way so much that all those old, locked away memories stay like that. At best, they get dreams and senses of things being subtly wrong. The implanted memories of their future selves don’t come through.”
“My fading you can’t have helped,” Sebastian says, the guilt obvious in his voice.
Jack shakes his head. “I think that’s part of why I couldn’t cope after what happened.”
What happened. The death of the woman he thought of as his mother, murdered by the Others when they believed her to be something evil and non-human.
“I had too many memories,” Jack says. “Too much trying to come through when I was so upset.”
“I’m sorry,” Sebastian says.
Jack shakes his head. “That doesn’t matter now. What matters is the Apocalypse. The one now, and the damage it causes in the future.”
“Will we be safe here?” Jonah asks. “We built this Location because we knew there might be dangers, from your mother’s dreams, from the way the world has been changing, but will it be enough?”
I nod. “It was in the footage, remember? In my buried memories. We found the information in one of the old Locations, so it must have been enough to protect things at least a little. It sounded like it was pretty hard to find though.”
Jack nods. “I remember it was hard to pin things down. Hard to find what we needed. Even I went as much on a guess as anything. We knew what the event was, but we couldn’t be precise about when it happened.”
“Why not?” Grayson asks.
“Remember how far ahead it is that we’re from,” Jack points out. “Thousands of years. In this time period, it would be like trying to pinpoint one specific event in the Bronze Age, or a Roman town.”
“They remembered Pompeii,” Grayson counters.
Jack shakes his head. “The rest of the world was left after Pompeii.”
I think that’s the first time I really get how bad what’s coming is going to be. “You mean that there won’t be anything left?”
Jack hesitates. “I don’t think anyone really knows for sure, but it’s bad, Celes. People have been predicting the end of the world for as long as there have been records, and this is the closest it has been. This world is devastated, and the world of the future… that’s worse. When I left…” He doesn’t finish that.
I haven’t really thought about that. How bad would things have to be to get him to go? To get him to give up everything he had…
we
had in the future? What is it that humanity is facing there? Whatever it is, it’s obviously bad enough that it’s on a par with what’s coming in this time, and that sounds terrifying.
“Tell us the mission, Jack,” I say. “I don’t think I can remember it alone. There’s still a block in the way. What are we back here to do?”
“We’re here to stop it,” he says. “There are signs of things getting worse, of heat rising and natural disasters increasing, but everything we’ve done points to a single moment that triggers the end. The Apocalypse isn’t an accident. People cause it. Specific people.”
It’s easy to guess who. “Senator Hammond.”
Jack nods. “He’s one of them.”
“He said that he wanted to fade Johnny to stop him remembering something he was going to do,” I say. “It’s this, isn’t it? He causes the Apocalypse.”
“That’s what I think,” Jack says. “That’s what we all thought, when I left. I was given a list of people who were part of it, and his name was at the top of the list.”
“Who else is on it?” Grayson asks.
Jack shakes his head. “That isn’t important now. If I’d remembered a few years ago, maybe it would have made a difference. Now though, there isn’t time.”
“You make it sound like the end of the world is coming tomorrow,” Grayson says. Jack doesn’t answer.
“It isn’t, is it Jack?” I ask. “It isn’t literally tomorrow?”
Jack shakes his head. “Not tomorrow, I don’t think, but it
could
be days. Remember that I left before we found the exact date. That’s why I arrived early.”
I think back to the images that I saw in the footage from my memories. There wasn’t a date there either, but it’s obvious that I know it. If I could just get through to the memories that are buried in me, we’d know. Jack seems to sense what I’m thinking, because he puts a hand on my arm.
“Even if we knew for sure, it wouldn’t change the timescale, and we don’t have much time to spare to make you remember. We need to act now, and just trust that you’ll remember what you need to as we go.”
“So, what exactly is it that we need to do?” I ask.
“The plan used to be simple, but now, I think that there are two priorities,” Jack says. “It used to be just a case of stopping this, but now, with it so close…”
“You aren’t sure if we can actually do this?” Grayson asks.
Jack shakes his head. “So we need to get as many people to safety as we can. There are buildings that will withstand what’s coming. The strongest Locations, Hammond’s base.”
“It’s not enough,” I say. I can still remember too much of those images. “Whatever we do, people will still die. So many of them. We need to stop this.”
“Which means we need to stop Senator Hammond,” Jack says. “Whatever it takes.”
Something about the way he says that sounds ominous. “What are you saying, Jack?” I ask. “Exactly what was the mission you were sent back with?”
Jack looks at me for several seconds. “It’s simple Celes. I was sent back to kill the people who are going to cause this, before they can kill everyone else.”
SEVENTEEN
“
Y
ou want to assassinate Wilson Hammond?” Jonah asks, sounding shocked. Jack looks at him and shrugs.
“The Faders have killed people before. How many of the Others have I killed, over the years? And I know some of our people have gone out hunting them.”
“The Others would have killed us,” Sebastian points out. “It was us or them.”
“Right now, it’s Hammond or the entire planet,” Jack says. “Look, I don’t actually want to kill him. I just want to stop him. If you can give me a better way, then I’ll use it. It’s just that right now I can’t see one. Can you, Jonah?”
His uncle shakes his head. “I guess not.”
“Are you sure this is what we need to do?” I ask Jack.
He takes my hand in his. “I guess this is one of those areas where the you from the future understands better,” he says. “There, you’ve seen everything that’s going on, you’ve made so many hard decisions… it’s almost a shock to hear you ask it.”
“I
am
asking it though,” I say. I’m not going to be pushed into agreeing with Jack just because he’s so confident, and perfect, and…
“If we imprison him, he might escape,” Jack says. “If we talk to him, he’ll lie, or have us killed. If we shut down his plans for now, he’ll start them back up again. The world isn’t safe with him in it, Celes.”
“I don’t like agreeing with Jack,” Grayson says, moving to stand by the projector, “but put it like that, it doesn’t sound like we have a lot of choice.”
“I understand that,” Jonah says, “even if I don’t like it. What I’m saying is that you won’t find it easy.”
I nod. “Jonah has a point. I mean, senators are going to be pretty well guarded.”
“Senators?” Jonah says. “You haven’t seen the news? You don’t know what day it is?”
I shake my head. I don’t know what he means. With everything that’s been going on recently, I guess I haven’t been keeping up with the rest of the world too much.
“Turn on the TV function,” Sebastian says, and Jonah moves over to the projector controls, pressing buttons. Quickly, images come onto the projector screen once again, only this time, they’re obviously taken from current news channels. Four of them occupy parts of the projection in a split screen effect. I realize that they’re all showing the same thing.
Election coverage.