Story: The Disappearance (XXI)

Story: The Disappearance (XXI)
(Part O , XX)

(A conclusion)

The abandoned David Macra airfield, once a part of the prison, which in its turn used to be a barracks still looked ridiculously abandoned. Indeed, if you looked up 'abandoned' in a picture encyclopaedia you'd see something quite like it but with tumbrels rolling along the long lost airstrip and a few decades old prop plane tyres lying in heaps.

We had pulled in the whole PCCD in an attempt to put ourselves out of business. If we were right, if Abbott the Mesopotamian super-computer were right, and if we got a share shake of fortune's hand, we would put ourselves out of business in the next few minutes. Five unmarked cars rolled in up the airfield drive and surrounded the truck. Ten of us disembarked and asked the driver to kindly leave the vehicle. Our badges were in plain sight. Those ten then scouted the facility and its grounds while the remaining ten - myself, Carter, and Swanson included - entered the hangar and set to looking for the production facility.

Within the hangar there was nothing, a surprising amount of nothing. Was it possible we'd been mistaken, that the driver had pulled in just for a break or to fool us? I didn't think so. Carter's sensor scan was kicking back all kinds of echoes and disruptions consistent with scan repulsors and my own sixth sense was screaming for attention like a banshee at an opera recital. It had to be here somewhere. Plainly the conspirators weren't smart enough to fool us for long if they had just been planning to openly send trucks in here on a regular basis.

McLellan came in with a report on the driver: She had fallen down and fainted under the smallest of pressure, and they suspected a post-hypnotic suggestion stopping us from extracting anything useful in the near future. A pro would have to be brought in to deprogram her. Plainly they weren't quite as stupid as I had thought. I scuffed the floor absently and tried not to think about what would happen if we shut down the production the way we were planning. If the precedent set by future me and future Agnes were anything to go by then the paradox wouldn't be a bad one, just a scar on the fabric of spacetime. On the other hand, if Abbott were wrong we could be triggering the time singularity we had been trying to avert, in the noble cause of stopping all those Biscuit Phenomena before they had ever occurred.

The floor was utterly normal, if now marginally scruffier than it had been. I asked McLellan to have someone drive the lorry into the hangar. It was possible the vehicle was needed to trigger an entryway. Accordingly Israf backed it in rather gingerly and we waited to see what would happen. Still nothing. Either there was hidden surveilance, an appointed time, or we were wasting our time on a red herring. McLellen's next report was on the site as a whole: Clean as far as they could tell, but with sensor disruption around the hangar. That disruption was the only thing denoting this as a site of interest.

The sensor repulsor, an invention from South America, was designed to meet the probes sent out from our scanners and cancel them out with both counter-signals as well as physically slitted concrete layers in the walls and the ground. There had to be something here! It was time for the heavy mob. Carter eventually found the key in the abandoned office, jiggling an old dartboard with a photo of Vampira above the double twenty. The whole interior of the hangar sank smoothly into the ground and after a thirty seconds a biscuit production facility came into view. An utterly deserted facility. They had run while they had the chance. Would they regroup and make the deliveries from elsewhere, or was the job done?

The facility was quite large, covering a couple of hectares of underground real estate. It was the same place we had escaped from on our time travel jaunt, that fateful escapade where adorable Agnes and I had taken out her supposedly dead uncle Rolf. Which now couldn't happen. And hadn't happened? A whole second set of memories were beginning to coexist with the existing ones.

The temporal inertia faded away and we reset onto whole new life paths. The next morning I woke up in my digs and dashed out late for a practical I was supposed to be giving for the third year archaeologists before realising what had happened. Two sets of memories... And presumably that fading shadow of a man had never happened now. People were going to be extremely confused.

I kept going, took the prac and then called Danielle Eloise Carter. Priorities were priorities after all. If we remembered then so did the profiteers, and leopards didn't change their spots.


Concluded. Probably.