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  So there were rows of computers, radiating out like spokes of a wheel, from the dais on which she stood. People, both male and female, dressed in pristine-white, Grecian tunics sat in front of the terminals. They just seemed to be staring at the holograms that were appearing in a steady flow above the terminals. No one seemed to move, or talk, or even register their arrival.

  She knew that their computers were activated by thought, and each machine was calibrated specifically to the brain waves of its user. Each person had a remote Tablet, which linked to their terminal. They could use this Tablet anywhere in the city.

  There was a low hum echoing in the cave, a hum that was a much softer version of what she’d heard in the Portal. She turned her head and watched as the curtain of lights behind her suddenly disappeared. The silence was immediate and shocking.

  Cara noticed they stood in a now empty doorway, of sorts, atop the stone dais. It reminded her of a Stargate, but it was square, and the stone lintels were covered with intricately carved pictograms. Early hieroglyphics? No, not quite. The figures were different.

  Cara knew, from what Jac had told her, that she was staring at was the religious symbology of the Atlantean race. She was standing in what had once been their underground temple. And this huge stone doorway had been their entry into the underworld.

  ‘Jac Ulster, welcome back.’

  Cara’s eyes snapped around to see who had spoken. From between the rows of computers, a man in a white tunic stepped forward, smiling formally. He looked no older than Jac, and was a breathtakingly handsome, Nordic giant.

  ‘Hakon Fjordane, well met my friend,’ replied Jac, leading her away from the empty Portal. He was particularly careful, assisting her down the stone stairs of the dais. He must have realised just how disorientated she would be. Her feet didn’t seem to belong to her, and her body felt spongy and awkward. If Jac hadn’t been holding her up, she would have stumbled.

  ‘Another success, I see,’ the man called Hakon said, turning his attention to Cara. ‘Welcome, Cara Westchester. It is good to have you here.’

  ‘Th…thank you,’ she managed to stammer out, her tongue as responsive as sponge.

  It was strange to hear her new surname. It was allocated based on the county in which she’d lived, in her old time. Jack had lived in Ulster county, upstate New York, when the plague had taken his family. She assumed Fjordane was another county or state in Sweden or Norway.

  ‘It’s okay, Cara, you’re suffering a rather intense form of jet lag. Your body will adjust pretty quickly. Would you like to sit down?’ Jac squeezed her arm again, as they reached the marble floor that was threaded with the same undulating light as the rock walls and ceiling.

  ‘Noo…oo just keep hold…me…’

  ‘As long as you need me.’ His reply was soft and for her ears only. She looked up into his smiling green eyes, and realised how proud he looked. Another successful Retrieval. Another new member for the dwindled world population. He had a right to be proud.

  ‘Your liaison is waiting to meet you, Ms Westchester. Her name is Maggie Tasmania, and she comes from your time, so you will feel very comfortable with her. She will take you to your new quarters and show you around,’ Hakon informed her in his very precise, formal English. This Maggie, Cara thought, must have been an Australian, because she remembered hearing something about Tasmanian Devils coming from there.

  ‘Actually, I am going to give Cara the orientation. And she will not need quarters. She will be moving in with me.’

  Cara felt her heart give a little jump. Even though Jac had explained what the normal procedure would be for new arrivals, and that he was going to throw a spanner in that procedure, to keep her with him, it felt incredibly reassuring to hear him put that plan into action. It was also a little scary, going up against the humourless giant who stood in front of them.

  ‘Jac, that is against Protocol.’ Hakon’s face was a picture of stiff surprise.

  The giant studied them both more closely, obviously reassessing the situation in light of Jac’s declaration. Over many years, he must have seen hundreds of these Retrievals, she realised, and gone through this welcoming patter so often it was just rote to him. Nothing would have ever rocked his boat like this before, and he was hastily trying to work out what was between the new arrivals.

  ‘No, it is a deviation from Protocol, but there is nothing that dictates a new arrival cannot stay somewhere other than the dorms. It is just that there has never been anywhere else for them to stay. But for Cara,’ he said her name as if he were stroking her, ‘there is another alternative. My residence. I know I have to Debrief, but that can wait. I will do it this evening, after I have Cara settled in.’

  Hakon’s mouth fell open for several seconds, before he pulled himself together.

  ‘Tell me you are not involved with a Target!’

  Hakon’s voice was harsh. Ice blue eyes bored into Jac’s, and she saw her man’s jaw clamp tight, as his chest expanded. To Cara, they looked like two young punks bracing for a turf war, even though Hakon’s tunic was about as far from street threads as you could get.

  ‘All right, I will not tell you that. But it will be in my Debrief.’ Jac smiled at the taller man, his teeth gritted. ‘Well, not everything will be in the Debrief, but enough. I will return later, Hakon. Well met.’

  Hakon stood in stunned silence as Jac led her between the rows of computer terminals, toward the back of the cavern. There was a lift standing open in the far wall, and Jac drew her into it. The last sight she had of the underground complex was of the tall, fair man with cold blue eyes, staring at them in frustrated confusion.

  ‘That went well,’ she mumbled, happy to notice that her words were behaving as they should. Her body seemed less wobbly too, and she knew that she could have let Jac go, and stood on her own, now. But she clung to him anyway, more for moral support, than anything else. Or maybe she just enjoyed the contact.

  ‘Imagine someone heading for the First Class Lounge at an airport, when they’d been taken for an economy passenger. That’s what Hakon’s feeling right now. He doesn’t know whether to have me detained, or to let us go, and report me to his superior. I’ve screwed with his day, big time.’

  She laughed at his twenty first century language. When she heard the formal speech patterns he and Hakon had used with each other, she’d felt alienated. Yes, it was English. Yes, she knew all the words. But the delivery was so … alien. It felt like a little piece of home, to have Jac slip back into her idiom.

  ‘Will you be punished? I don’t want to cause you any trouble. You seemed to be so proud of yourself, a minute ago. All that kudos lost, just because of me … ’

  ‘Proud?’ He seemed momentarily confused by her words. Then, as the lift started to move upwards, his frown cleared, and he grinned. ‘Darling Cara, what you saw on my face was pride in you. I felt like I was introducing my drop-dead gorgeous prom date to my classmates. Any other sense of pride in a job well done I got over fifty or more years ago.’

  ‘Prom date, huh? Where’s my corsage, then?’ she quipped, to cover her breathless thrill. He was proud of her. Her.

  ‘I’ll have our place filled with flowers, just as soon as I can. What are your favourites, or will I just introduce you to some of our new hybrids?’

  ‘Why do I get the feeling that, if you ordered in a room full of flowers, there’d be a psych evaluation booked for you in the next heartbeat?’

  ‘Probably have one booked already, for what I’ve done with you. No biggie. Happy isn’t a terminating offence.’

  ‘You are, aren’t you? Happy, I mean. I haven’t seen you like this since you decided your over-sexed, new body wasn’t a bad thing.’

  ‘Yeah, that made me happy. In fact, just mentioning that has got my motor running. Mind if we skip the tour for a few hours? I want to introduce you to my bed. You’ll probably be seeing a lot of it in the coming weeks.’

  Her fears that his lust for her would be over the moment he ret
urned to his own time, were dissipating. And she laughed out loud.

  Just then, the doors of the elevator opened, and a group of people, dressed in white tunics, stared in at her as if she were crazy. In a way, that was exactly how she felt. She was a little-bit-crazy, middle-age woman, from the early twenty-first century, riding a lift with her young, three hundred and twelve year old lover, in New Atlantis of the twenty-fourth century. Brain fry!

  Being with Cara certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons, or the 21st Century woman amongst the 23rd Century crowd. But after the initial ‘serious discussions’ Jac attended, the inappropriate behaviour was acknowledged, and a suitable punitive action chosen.

  To protect Protocol, the administration removed Jac from active service, thus sending a serious message to any other Retrievers who might think to dally with a Target, and in some way jeopardise their mission. For Jac, the decision was the one he would have taken, anyway. He was not going to sacrifice the last years of his life, now he had Cara. He could give her nearly a hundred years, if she wanted them. Maybe less time than he would have liked, but still a hell of a lot more than he ever thought he’d get of happiness.

  One of the first tasks set for the new arrival was to donate DNA for the growth of their first clone. Jac regretted that he would soon lose the lovely body he’d come to think of as his. But he tried to convince himself that Cara’s new body would just be a different version of her, and as such, beautiful in its own way. And he could look forward to the years, anticipating when he would get this lush and shapely body back. If he resented the habit of integrating a new citizen into their clone shortly after their arrival, he tried not to think about it. But, the fact that there was no good reason why he should be forced to lose this Cara, played on in the back of his mind.

  The next task was a thorough absorption into the culture. This he enjoyed. Culture was his thing, and Cara was a quick study. It gave him a great deal of pleasure and pride, to introduce her to the amazing new world that was hers.

  That she still sometimes looked at him strangely, as if she was waiting for him to say or do something to hurt her, he tried to ignore. It was probably only her discomfort with their out of sync bodies that was worrying her. Once they both looked young, she would relax with him, and accept that what they had was real.

  Because, if there was anything he was sure of, it was that what he felt for Cara was love. She had saved him from his empty, lonely life. She had brought laughter, pleasure and change back into his world. He’d forgotten what it was like to love so wholeheartedly. But Cara was bringing it all back to him in wonderful, fulfilling ways.

  And he was glad that she would have a long and happy life, after he was gone. He just hoped that she would always remember him fondly, in her later years.

  ‘So, you wish to undertake training as a Retriever? It is not commonly a career choice for new arrivals,’ said the stiff-faced woman in her late forties, who was glancing through Cara’s recently completed aptitude test and CV, on her Tablet.

  ‘I am aware of that. But you see, the way I look at it, being one of the Retrieved, makes me more able to speak from my experience. I can say to a Target, “I know what it feels like to be told that you either die or start life afresh in the future.” Empathy is not to be underestimated.

  ‘Then there’s the cultural awareness. As you do most of your Retrievals from the twentieth and early twenty first centuries, I’m already up to scratch on the time-line. Well, I might have to do a bit of refreshing, if I’m sent too far back, but really, I’m made for the job. I can’t believe you haven’t enlisted more of us in the past.’

  The expression on the woman’s face, particularly as she used the phrase ‘up to scratch’, obviously answered that question pretty well. The inflexibility within the society in which she now lived was astonishing.

  But she understood the reason for it. After the chaos of the past, they had created a real utopia for themselves, and they didn’t want to jeopardise that by stepping too far away from the original design. It was the very antithesis of her era where ‘change for the sake of change’ was the catchphrase. That they earmarked only those people from the past who would safely fit within the new mindset further crystalized the structure.

  She had a feeling that, had it been anyone but Jac who had come to Retrieve her, she would have failed their entrance test, and she would have been allowed to die naturally. That Jac’s new perspective on life had coincided with meeting her, and allowed some of his own deeply buried rebellious instinct to surface, was a miracle. And she wasn’t going to let that miracle pass.

  This world needed an injection of life, real life, back into it. She wanted to give it back the exhilaration that Jac had found. Maybe she was only one person, but she had a lot of years to chip away at the new world order. Eventually she’d succeed, and then she would bring the missing children home.

  ‘I will need to enter into dialogue with my supervisor on this matter. We will contact you presently, with his pronouncement,’ the woman said, in her oh-so-formal way.

  It was the hardest thing to get used to, in this new world. It was like attending a very snooty nineteenth century boarding school, where everyone enunciated clearly and precisely, and used multi-syllabic words that most kids of her era wouldn’t even recognise as English. They’d have to carry a dictionary around with them, just to make sense of it all.

  That she fought to retain her own idiom was just bloody-minded on her part. The more people looked down their noses at her slang and informality, the more she amped it up. She didn’t know how many times she’d caught Jac laughing at her antics. It warmed her heart that he accepted her just as she was. That he didn’t wanting to change her, to fit in with his world, was a wonderful affirmation of his affection for her.

  Of course, it wasn’t all plain sailing with him. He didn’t want her to be a Retriever, especially now he had been removed from duty. And she understood why. It hurt him that she could be doing the job he was no longer permitted to do. He also didn’t want her being away from him for extended periods, even though he wouldn’t experience the absence.

  He thought the work was too dangerous for her, and too soul-destroying. She got all that, but she’d always enjoyed work that other people found too challenging. It galvanised her. She’d go crazy in the perfectly orchestrated world of New Atlantis, if she didn’t find something to challenge her.

  Not that she didn’t like the new world, she did. Beauty was always pleasing to her. And New Atlantis, rebuilt on the site of the first Atlantis, which had resurfaced during one of the earth’s geothermal upheavals during the Dark Age, was truly beautiful. It was modelled directly on its predecessor.

  At first, that had been a Greco-Roman rehash based on what was left archeologically on the site, and what they envisaged Atlantis would look like. Once time travel was operational, they sent researchers back to gain detailed and accurate information on the civilization and rebuilt accordingly. From what she had read, and what Jac had told her, it was now a surprisingly close replica to the original. Even the clothing the culture adopted had come from that pre-classical period: very refined, very practical, and very simple.

  But she really missed the noise and the in-your-face individualism of her era, sometimes. Although the violence, inequality, and million other damning characteristics of her time, she was happy to forgo. After all, theirs was the society that finally brought about Armageddon. She wasn’t in a hurry to rock the boat enough to start that up again.

  As she wandered back through the manicured gardens, set amongst elegant columned architecture, she marvelled at how different her life was now. She lived with a man she loved more than life, she would soon be having the ultimate makeover, and she might even have a chance to Time Travel for a living. Whose fantasy-life was she living?

  Sometimes, a little part of her wondered if she was actually sitting in a padded room somewhere, strapped into a straight-jacket, with drool running down her chin. And all this was just
a paranoid schizophrenic’s delusion.

  If that was true, then she’d stick with the delusion, because she was happier here than she had ever been in her old life. If only she could believe that Jac’s affection for her would last, she’d be the happiest woman on the planet, in this or any other time. But the nagging fear still remained. Sooner or later, the survival-induced attraction would fade, and Jac would look at her with sorrow, not love, as he told her goodbye.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘I get that I can’t see my own clone, because it would create an identity crisis. But why can’t I see the other clones? You’ve seen them.’

  Jac sighed heavily, and ran his fingers through his hair. He was in need of a trim, but as Cara liked it longer he’d put off running shears over it, to please her. But people looked at him pointedly, and he didn’t like their unspoken criticism. In his culture, men wore their hair buzz-cut short all over, except for the lock that fell over the forehead. Sooner or later, he’d bow to societal pressure again, and cut it.

  ‘I only got to visit the clone tubes once, a hundred years ago, because of some work I was involved in at the time. It was an unsettling experience, and I don’t want you to have that sort of distress, especially before you go through your first integration. There’s still a chance you might C & B. You’re adapting brilliantly, but no one knows what might just tip you over.’

  ‘Are they that terrible?’ she asked, as she sat down in his lap, taking his focus away from the work he had in front of him. He was prepping for his new role as cultural tutor for trainee Retrievers. He had his first class the next day, and he was nervous.

  But Cara had a way of getting him out of his head and calming his worries, even as she was frustrating the life out of him with her questions. She was like a little child who asked ‘Why, why, why?’ Sometimes, he just wanted to yell at her, ‘Because!’ and be done with it.