The Decision
The Disc was simple, white, and floating amidst the fires of the end of the world. The light from the flames flickered against the faces of the two hollow men standing on it. Hollow men, whose feelings, like their hope, had drained away.
Lifeless eyes stared from them, towards a figure they had not before seen hereanding on it. Hollow men whose feelings, like their hope, had dr. It was: "100%".
David Nix tried to speak. Do something! Words! Actions! Something! "Frank."
Try again. "Frank." And again. "Do you remember Dr Kayani?"
Kayani had helped build the Monitor. He had been the first man to look at his own future using it. And the last. He was the reason they had cut the remote links to the Monitor, so you had to come up here, on this glorified lift, to use it, and see the future wrapped around you. He'd always liked to talk about his mother, who used to say that the only thing fixed about the future was the day of your death.
"Yes."
"He must have felt like this." When he saw himself throw himself off the Jules Verne bridge.
"Not at first." Frank was right. At first, the probability had been small. But it had gnawed at Kayani, even then, and every time he went back to the Monitor to check again, the probability had gone up again. He had talked to his wife, talked to his children and grandmother and psychiatrist. It had eaten him.
"You know what he said at the end?"
"What he always saw himself saying." He had said: "It's such a relief." And fallen more than a mile.
"He had thirty-one days, after he first saw it. We have thirty-one years." A long time to wait for relief.
"At least then we'll find out what causes it." Yes. What caused it? What was hidden by the static before the flames?
"I'm thinking of closing us to entry, Frank. No new recruits from Earth."
"Wouldn't that mean leaving everyone on Earth to perish in that – fireball?"
Presumably it would. Before Nix could reply, he heard someone shift uneasily behind him.
"Oh, it's the future", he heard Frank say, almost emptily, "meet the New Future".
Nix forced himself to turn around, to see the reflected flames flickering over the face of the third figure on the Disc.
"Something to say?" he asked.
Athena was the only person to have seen her own future since Dr Kayani. Looking at her future recruitments of suitable candidates, and then going out to find them in reality. She said it saved time. She had returned from such a trip just that day, and was still dressed for 80s America. She had never seen anything but success in her own future. "What do your eyes see, all around us?" he asked. At least she wouldn't see any bodies, the heat at this place and time was enough to melt bone.
She paused before replying, and he saw the end of the world reflected in eyes that saw a thousand times more than any human eye ever would. He wondered sometimes if those eyes were the reason she had always seen only the good in the future. An irrational part of him still wondered if those eyes would see something good in this future.
"I can see a holocaust", she admitted. "But that doesn't mean we should give up! Even if the Monitor thinks all this is certain it could be wrong!"
Except that it couldn't be that wrong. "I've seen its design, as well as yours. There is a lot less to go wrong with it than there is with you."
"We make the future," she insisted, "we don't travel to it."
"Hang on," interrupted Frank, "she could be right…"
The idiot. "Didn't you say she had given you Hope before? She is metal and wires, Frank", he said inaccurately. Looking at her standing there in her denim trousers, indomitable in a way that no real little girl ever could be before her owner, he was suddenly struck by how alien it was here. "It can't think rationally, Frank. Its programming won't let it give up on its job. It is a spy robot that has recruited people from within the KGB's Eighteenth Directorate, and smuggled people out of Arzamas-16in Stalin's time. It's swum through Lake Karachay and washed the radioactivity off afterwards. And it is physically incapable of giving up at its job."
"And perhaps I can find someone who can help now", it insisted.
"No! We don't know anything about what causes all this" – he gestured at the devastation around them – "and I will not risk it coming through with any new recruits. If it does, that will end everything. If we close ourselves off from that, at least we know some part of humanity will survive."
"But we could rescue some people," argued Frank.
"Not many! And we would be risking the end of humanity."
Then the robot spoke up again. "We have to try…"
"You'll fail!" he almost shouted.
"Then," it said simply, "I'll fail trying."
He paused for a second to get his breath back. The little machine in front of him would never accept the logic, he knew. Frank might, and the others. At least he, now, knew what to do. Kayani had been right. It was a relief. And perhaps Frank would listen.
"We are living in humanities only lifeboat. Whatever happens, whatever I have to do, or abandon, or destroy, I'm not risking it for anything. Or anyone."
He still did not know what was coming in the static that obscured the cause of the destruction. He would not be able to do anything about it even if he did. In thirty-one years he would know all about it. But at least he knew now what he would be doing for those thirty-one years.
He would save a part of the world. And that was enough.