Jumpy would have been an understatement. Sweat drops fell from my temples down to my neck. My eyes snapped to every minutia of movement, mistaking shadows for stalkers and door handles for guns. I regarded every person in the corridor with suspicion. Their eyes like steel barrels trained on me. Whenever they reached for their pockets, I braced for the worst, only for a handkerchief or handheld to appear instead of a weapon. Every corner was a portal from which danger could spring from. I was hyper aware of the metallic weight in my laptop bag. I wasn’t sure if I could draw the weapon out in time if I needed to. With what little recess of my mind that wasn’t dedicated to worrying about every little detail around me wondered, how had I ever felt safe here?

  By the time I had reached an elevator, I was drenched in sweat. The sticky sensation usually bothered me, but not when there was a steady stream of adrenaline in my veins. I had passed two elevators before this one, but they had people waiting, and so I walked on. I pressed for the elevator. As I waited, I saw a man appear from a corner on the other end of the corridor. Even from a distance, I could tell that he looked large. An ideal body type for security work. Knowing that Receiverists used algorithms to determine a person’s career, it was likely that this very man was a security officer. He didn’t run, but it only made his slow approach so much more menacing. The slow march of fatalism. I inched my hand slightly towards the opening of my laptop bag. Not like this, I pleaded.

  As if my prayer had been heeded, I heard the familiar tones play, and the elevator doors opened. This was, frankly, the closest thing I ever had to a religious experience. This opinion was discarded immediately when I turned and saw two men in the elevator. A bearded man who looked to be nearing his sixties, and another who looked like a rising politician who was no more than half the other man’s age. I hesitated. I didn’t want to enter this elevator. I glanced at the approaching man in the hallway. Step after step, the distance shortened.

  “Mate, ya coming in?” the bearded man asked.

  Fuck it, I thought, before I quickly entered the elevator, pressed a level that my muscle memory suggested, and mashed the close button. The doors reappeared and the elevator began moving. I wiped my forehead with my hand and felt a layer of dampness in my palm, which could have been from either part of me. I sighed in relief.

  “Sir, are you alright?” the young man asked with a tone of concern.

  I turned to look at him. “You mean me?”

  The young man nodded.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” I said nonchalantly. “Thanks.”

  The young man didn’t look convinced. The bearded man looked at me with an unreadable expression.

  “This place is perfectly safe,” the bearded man said in a gruff voice. “Unless if ya do something stupid. Then ya get sorted out.”

  “Oh, no need to be so severe,” the young man said politely. “No one here can do anything malicious.”

  The bearded man nodded at me. “Fella’s not from here.”

  Just as the young man turned to me with a quizzical gaze, the doors opened and I began walking away at a brisk pace.

  “Hey,” the young man said, “this isn’t the floor you pressed.”

  I turned my head and saw the two of them walking behind me. I tried to wave them off casually. “That’s alright,” I barely squeaked out. Stupid! I reprimanded myself. I need to calm down and focus. I can’t afford mistakes. They could cost me my life. I picked up my pace.

  The streets felt safer. Intellectually, I knew that this was not true. This level that gave the false impression of a city block was no different from any of the other floors. This was just another enclosed space in an enclosed world. There were as many cameras and sensors in this place as the corridors I had been in before. Maybe even more. Most likely more. And with corridors, I could at least hide. Here, it was much easier to eat a bullet if it came to that. But even knowing this, I still felt paradoxically safer. Such was the irrationality of the human psyche.

  When I entered the elevator I had been looking for, I swiped my handheld next to the panel and pressed sixteen. No response. I tried again. Still nothing. Shit! It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t have access privileges to that level. In fact, I never had. The only times I had been up there were when I was scheduled in. I exited the elevator. I wasn’t sure if it would work, but it was worth a shot. I didn’t have any other options. I began tapping away into my handheld.

  Alex: Hey Lenny, I’m hoping to speak to you about something. Can I come up to your office right now?

  I waited anxiously, praying to whichever god that was willing to hear me. A moment later, my handheld chimed.

  Lennox: Of course mate! My door’s always open to you. Come up whenever.

  I pressed for the elevator again. When it arrived, I entered and placed my handheld near the interface and tried sixteen once again. This time, the tones played and the button lit up. Once the doors closed, rather than feeling relieved, my anxiety grew as the elevator took me closer. This is it, I thought. There’s no turning back. I was going to see Lennox. And I could imagine several different scenarios that would end badly for me. I couldn’t picture what a good scenario looked like, but I couldn’t let that matter now.

  When the elevator doors opened, I let out a sigh of relief. Not seeing an army of armed security guards waiting for me was very fortuitous. I began walking the floor at a casual pace, not wanting to alert anyone. Lennox was an incredibly important person around here. Any threat to his life would undoubtedly be met with extreme prejudice.

  Walking through the office space was almost surreal. It looked so normal. Like they could be doing taxes, or trading stocks, or copywriting. But instead, they were working on things that had far-reaching consequences for the entire world. On predictions and forecasts down to the actions of individuals. On clandestine plans on the behalf of the future without any oversight or limits to their power. On violating the sanctity of time. They were, in plain terms, playing god. That didn’t sit right with me. They claimed to do so for the betterment of everyone, including the rest of the world that didn’t ask to be a part of the Receiverists’ machinations. But that couldn’t be right. This unchecked power could only lead to ruin. It was what dictators and industrial complexes had in common. And I believed them simply because I had wanted to believe in something greater. That made me no different to the executioners who thought they were ridding the world of evil, or defence researchers who thought that building the next weapon of mass destruction was making the world a safer place. I felt the disgust clawing at the base of my oesophagus.

  Lennox’s door looked the same as it had the previous times I had been here. And yet, it was different. This was likely the last time I would ever see the door like this. It was a portal to which I wouldn’t return from. I waved my handheld in front of the interface and the door opened. On the other side was Lennox sitting in front of his desk. He was reading something from his handheld. He snorted. A moment later, he looked up. For an ever so brief instant, I thought I saw eyes that could see everything. Eyes that knew what I knew and what I was going to do. But that could have the imaginings of a paranoid and adrenaline-drunk man, as Lennox’s expression was as jovial as ever.

  “Alex!” Lennox said boisterously. “Come in.”

  I closed the door behind me and took a seat in the chair on the other side of Lennox’s desk.

  “Coffee?” he asked. “I’d have ordered one for you before you got here, but you’ve sprung up on me this time.”

  “No, thanks,” I said. Now that I was here, I realised just how ill prepared I was. I didn’t really have much of a plan other than to ask Lennox for answers.

  “So. How can I help you?” Lennox asked, before nodding at my laptop bag. “I see you’ve brought your computer with you. Did you want to show me some progress?” He rubbed his hands together as if I was about to hand him a medium rare steak.

  “Well, not exactly,” I said as I pulled out the gun from the bag and pointed it at the wider man.

  Lennox’s eyes went wide. “Oh. That wasn’t what I was expecting.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” I agreed. “Now lock the door to your office and turn off the surveillance in this room. I’m not fucking around.” My threat was punctuated with a flick of the safety switch.

  Lennox brought his hands up in a placating manner. “Alright, alright. There’s no need for threats.” He slowly rose and walked over to the interface near the door. A couple of taps later, a mechanical sound came from the door handle. A few more taps later, Lennox turned to me and said, “You’re just gonna have to trust me on this one. The surveillance has been deactivated.”

  I gestured for him to sit back down at his desk with my gun. “Give me your handheld. And don’t you dare touch any of the electronic devices.”

  After he obliged, he said in a hurt voice, “I thought we were friends, Alex. I’ve been good to you, haven’t I?”

  “Friends don’t lie to each other’s faces,” I said venomously. “Getting into your office, I’ve lied in the same way you’ve been lying to me this whole time. Manipulating me with half-truths and omissions.”

  “I knew something was off,” Lennox said. “You never call me Lenny.”

  “You’ve been lying to me about my research all this time,” I said. “You knew what it was really about, but you pretended like you didn’t.”

  Lennox sighed. “You’re right. I’ve been making omissions. But a lot of the details are on a need-to-know basis for very good reasons. But I didn’t lie to you about the most important part—the goal. All this work is going towards making sure humanity has a future. That people will survive the next century. And the one after that.”

  “Bullshit!” I shouted. I was glad my index finger was off the trigger. I was white-knuckling the grip. “You didn’t think time travel was important enough to bring up?”

  Lennox raised his eyebrows, before leaning back into his chair. “Ah, so you’ve figured it out. I always thought you were brilliant at maths, so maybe you’d finish the work but never figure out the true application. This proves that you’re a genius. Full stop.” He clapped slowly.

  His mannerisms and musings had always been a little annoying to me, but right now it was down right irritating.

  “Yes,” Lennox continued calmly, “what you’ll solve—have solved, based on this conversation we’re having right now—is indeed a new model for particle physics. No one lied to you about that. And yes, as a consequence, the model describes a more nuanced nature of time. You can call it time travel—which isn’t entirely correct—but it’s the single most fundamental tool to the continued existence of humanity. It is a necessity. I told you right from the beginning that your work is important to the survival of all of us. This detail doesn’t contradict that.”

  “That’s beside the point,” I rebuffed. “It’s a lie by omission. If you’d told me upfront that this work was about time travel, then I never would have agreed to it.”

  “And that is the point,” Lennox said. “That’s why we never told you.”

  “Then you admit it!” I shouted. “You’ve been manipulating me this whole damn time.”

  Lennox shrugged. “Sure. But I think ‘manipulating’ isn’t the word I’d use. It has too many negative connotations. I like to think that we’ve been guiding you. Like… a teacher guiding a student to solve a problem without giving away the point, so the student—you—can reach it naturally. And the point here is greatness. With the work you’ve done, your career and legacy is guaranteed to go down as possibly the most important in history. So did we manipulate you? Sure. But it is you who will transcend because of us.”

  “I didn’t ask for any of this,” I said. “That’s not right.”

  “‘Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them,’” Lennox quoted. He aimed a finger gun at me. “And that last one? That’s you.” He fired his imaginary gun and made a “pew” sound.

  I unconsciously recoiled as if I had been shot. I shook my head violently. Lennox was shoving this idea of doing me a favour down my throat and it wasn’t going anywhere I needed the conversation to go. He was obnoxiously good at controlling the conversation. I had to step on the brakes.

  “Tell me about the time travel,” I demanded firmly. “Tell me what it really is that you people do here.”

  “As for the ‘time travel’, I’m really not the best person for this,” Lennox said. “You should be speaking to Mariam instead. She’s much smarter than I am. But let’s be serious. Unless Mariam comes in here, you’ll never speak to her.”

  “Then you’re just gonna have to do your best,” I said.

  “Wrong,” Lennox said. “I can bring her here. For your troubles and how courageous you are in holding a poor innocent lad such as myself hostage, you deserve some answers. I can call her.”

  I thought about it for a moment, wondering if this was some trick. “No funny business,” I said, fixing my gun on Lennox again as I handed him back his handheld.

  “No funny business,” Lennox said as he began tapping away. He held the device in such a way that I could see the familiar face that appeared on the screen, but only Lennox’s face could be seen from the other end. “Mariam?”

  “Oh for god’s sake Lenny,” Mariam’s annoyed voice came from the speaker, “have some patience. The quarterly report for the General Executive still isn’t ready, but if you keep calling me like this then we’re well and truly going to miss the deadline.”

  “Oh no, I’m not calling about that,” Lennox replied. “Can you come over to my office right now? Something’s come up and I want to run through some ideas with you.”

  The hesitance on Mariam’s face made me tense. “Is it urgent?”

  “You could say that, yes,” Lennox said. “But not too urgent. Just hoping to pick your brain a little.”

  Mariam sighed. “I’ll push back my meeting with energy engineering and be there in a bit.”

  The call ended and Lennox handed me his handheld yet again. “Now where were we?” he wondered aloud. “Ah yes. Your other question. What we actually do here. You already know that. Our work is to ensure not only the survival of our species into the future, but also our prosperity. We’ve always been upfront about this, no? You’re making me feel like a broken record.”

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  “Yes, yes,” I dismissed impatiently, “but what does time travel have to do with any of it?”

  Lennox chuckled. “Alex my boy, time travel has everything to do with it. It’s not that we believe time travel is possible. No. We know it’s possible.”

  “So you’ve seen it?” I asked.

  “Yes, we have evidence,” Lennox said. “Our existence is evidence. The signal was first discovered by the founder of our organisation when she was a teenager over a hundred years ago. She was a genius then, and she still is now. When she decoded it, the signal revealed things to her. Predictions about the future. Knowledge that was generations ahead. The coordinates to where we are now to build a sanctuary.”

  “Was that the only time you’ve received… the signal?” I asked.

  “No,” Lennox answered. “We still get data drops sporadically. It’s impossible to predict when they arrive. We’re very much kept on a need-to-know basis.”

  “So when instructions arrive from the future, you carry them out?” I asked.

  Lennox winked. “Bingo.”

  “Assuming you’re telling the truth,” I began, “how can you trust what you’re provided? How do you know you’re not manipulated into doing terrible things?”

  “That’s a philosophical question, Alex,” Lennox said. “Have you ever thought about why we’re called Receiverists?”

  “You’ve told me already,” I said. “Because you’ll be receiving refugees when the time comes.”

  “No, I never said that,” he corrected. “You said that. You assumed I corroborated with you when I didn’t.”

  I racked my brain to recall what was exactly said and what wasn’t. “Half-truths and omissions,” I realised. It made me angry just how little truth I was actually given. Lennox looked smug. “Then tell me. Why are you called Receiverists?”

  “Because we receive messages from the future,” he explained simply.

  “If that’s the case, then why don’t you call yourselves Receivers?”

  “Because that’s an object,” Lennox snickered. “It would be an awful name. And also, being Receiverists implies that we have a philosophy. Receiverism.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “It’s a formal logic argument outlined by the General Executive Receiverist over a hundred years ago,” Lennox explained. “I think you’d love her, but being over a hundred and thirty years old means she doesn’t get out much. But to give you the high level summary, it really just comes down to two main premises. First, we are receiving messages originating from a further point in time by Future Humans. That’s what we call them. Second, Future Humans must operate in the interest of humanity. Therefore, we ought to act in accordance with the messages from Future Humans.”

  I couldn’t place what exactly the trouble was, but something about that argument felt off. In truth, I didn’t care about the logic. The conclusion offended me. “That can’t be right,” I said. To my dismay, my voice sounded petulant. “All that means is you’re completely subservient to the so-called Future Humans. Blindly following orders without question. How do you know they really have your best interests in mind, apart from apologetics you’ve convinced yourselves with? Have you ever communicated with them?”

  “No.”

  “But you can,” I said. “You can leave messages for them to find, and they can send responses back in time.”

  Lennox sighed. “Yes, in theory we could do that. But we’re not allowed. The Law of Zero Transmission existed for as long as this city has. The General Executive herself had personally placed the decree, enforceable by punishment.”

  “That seems awfully disproportionate,” I said.

  “We take all matters involving time very seriously. There can be no room for error.”

  I was perplexed. “Why isn’t that allowed? Is open dialogue not a good thing? More information cannot be bad.”

  “There’s a tradeoff between information and the energy required to transmit messages back through time,” Lennox said. “So if it’s not necessary, it’s to be avoided. But more broadly, using the logical framework of Receverism, you can deduce that the messages by Future Humans aren’t just necessary, but sufficient. So there’s no need at all to seek out two-way communication. Because we’re provided with everything we need.”

  “Then my question still stands,” I said. “You don’t know for sure that the Future Humans are acting in the best interests of humanity. They could be a group of individuals placing their own prosperity above everyone else’s. It’s entirely possible that every Receiverist here is being misled and manipulated into doing something terrible.”

  “Of course, I haven’t given you a comprehensive account of Receiverism, so your ignorance is understandable,” Lennox said. “Based on what we know about The Event, it will be totally catastrophic on a global scale. The thing about the surface right now is that every country is interlinked and dependent on one another. So when the disruption is ubiquitous, infrastructure fails. Supply chains break. No single, isolated group of people will be able to survive on their own.”

  “And how do you know for certain?” I asked.

  Lennox looked at me as if I had told a joke. “You know this yourself. You’ve lived up there all your life. If anything, this is the easiest thing to believe out of everything I’ve told you. Anyway, any technology that enables sending information back in time would require tremendous effort, resources, and coordination on a global level. Future Humans are therefore constrained by scarcity to act in the interests of aggregated prosperity, not aggregated detriment. The effort taken to send these messages back in time cannot be profitable. It can only be a final stand for survival.”

  I realised, begrudgingly, that I was starting to see the argument. Is he right? I wondered with bubbling panic. Does all this really make sense?

  “And plus,” Lennox continued, “even if it’s manipulation, it’d still be guidance. Like the way we guided you. You thought you’d solve some mildly important problem, maybe something that’ll improve the energy efficiency of solar panels by some nominal amount. Instead, look what you’ve achieved. You’ve unlocked the gates to humanity’s future, and everyone will remember you for it. If Future Humans led us to solutions we didn’t expect, then so be it. To be a Receiverist is to be faithful. Unlike your surface world, we trust one another. Even when we’re not told all the details. And we trust the grand plan pieced together in the messages from the Future Humans.” He sighed. “I trusted you by bringing you into this city and handing you the gun that you’re pointing at me now. I hate to say it Alex, but you’re not a very faithful person.”

  I felt a flash of anger. “Don’t you try to pin this on me!” I snapped. “I was trusting. I was faithful. But you misled me. You’re a hypocrite.”

  “No. Your problem is that you don’t trust me enough. Even after I explained everything, you still refuse to entertain the possibility that I might be right, and that this is a good thing.” Lennox leaned forward. “There’s an insecurity in you. And rather than confronting it, you try to run. But you can’t run from the inevitable, Alex.”

  “And what, pray tell, is that inevitability?” I challenged.

  Before Lennox got a chance to respond, there was a knock at the door.

  “That must be Mariam,” Lennox said. “I’ll go get her.”

  “No,” I said quickly. “You stay right there.”

  Lennox shrugged as I rose and walked to the interface at the door. I tapped the unlock and the door clicked. I held the gun behind my back as I opened the door.

  “Alex?” Mariam said in bemusement as she walked in. “I didn’t expect you to be here.” She shot a concerned look at Lennox. “Must be one hell of a conversation if you’re locking the door, Lenny.”

  I closed the door behind her and locked the door again. The mechanical click made Mariam spin around.

  “What is this?” she asked. There was a tinge of fear in her voice.

  “Relax,” Lennox said nonchalantly. “Alex just wants some answers. We should help him with that.”

  “Lenny, are you sure—”

  I pulled out my gun and raised it in the air. “Give me your handheld, Mariam.”

  Mariam was petrified. A moment passed, before she handed me her device. I gestured for her to sit in the other vacant chair on my side of the desk. I sat after she obliged.

  “Mariam,” Lennox began in a calm voice, “would you be so kind as to explain to Alex the phenomenon that he refers to as time travel?”

  Mariam’s eyes went wide. “So he’s solved it?” she asked Lennox, before turning to me. “You’ve solved it, then?”

  I nodded. “And I saw the implication. And now I want answers. Real answers, not half-truths.”

  “Give me a moment to collect my thoughts,” Mariam said. She rested a hand on her chest, closed her eyes and breathed deeply for several moments. I felt the urge to calm her, but I didn’t want to lose my leverage. I needed them to believe that I was willing to shoot them.

  “Okay,” Mariam said to herself, before saying a little louder, more resolutely, “Okay. And Lenny, you’ve explained to him some contexts already?”

  “Only at a high level,” Lennox said. “I’ve told him that we receive messages from the future.”

  “Where do I even begin,” Mariam said. “At our current understanding, we know that in the future, a stochastic model will be shown to account for the properties of matter with remarkable accuracy. Better than any model that came before it by many orders of magnitude. The caveat will be that—purely on a technicality—the model will necessarily imply the existence of an exotic subatomic particle, such that changes to its vibration rate will backecho through time.”

  I breathed sharply. Bachecho. That word again. I felt Lennox’s eyes silently taking in my reaction. I ignored him.

  “As you can imagine,” Mariam continued, “particle physicists will do what they do best and set out to try to find this exotic particle. They won’t expect it to exist because it obviously violated their understanding of physics and reality. Mathematicians won’t expect it either. They’ll think the result is a mathematical novelty and exists purely as an expediency.”

  It was hard to sit still. “But they’ll find it?” I asked.

  “Yes. To their surprise, they will.”

  “Okay. Let’s say I accept that. Then how does time travel work?”

  Mariam sighed. “We don’t call it time travel, because nothing physical is actually sent back,” she said. “We just refer to it as backechoing. The things that are actually travelling backwards in time are just waves. Differentials. Backechoes, which are caused by future vibration rate changes, can act as binary signals. So with the right tools, one simply needs to encode information into a series of vibration rate changes, and the information will backecho into the past.”

  The maths just wasn’t clicking. “How would you determine how far back the signals travel? Surely they can’t travel backwards in time infinitely.”

  “You’re right,” Mariam said. “That would require infinite energy, which is infeasible. How far back depends on the magnitude of the vibration rate change.”

  “Ah, so the further back you go, the greater the magnitude you need, which requires greater amounts of energy.”

  Mariam nodded. “Exactly. And the energy you need grows exponentially as a function of magnitude. And the size of the information. We’re fairly certain that this is why the messages we’ve received so far are sporadic and small in size.”

  “What if I tried to break causality?” I asked. “Say I detect a backecho that I know I made at a later point in time. But I kill myself so the vibration rate change can never be caused by me. Doesn’t that break causality?”

  Mariam smiled. “No it wouldn’t, because you don’t know for a fact that you caused the backecho. Maybe the message encoded into the backecho told you that, but it’s just a message. The inciting vibration will still happen eventually, as necessary, but it could be caused by someone else. Hence, causality is not broken.”

  “Okay, let me amend that,” I said. “Let’s say I’ve locked myself alone in an insulated environment where only I can cause vibration rate changes. Then what?”

  “Then you’ll eventually cause the change,” Mariam said. “You may try to kill yourself, but you’ll fail and you’ll cause the change later. Or you do succeed to kill yourself, but you’ll have caused the change before. You can’t trick certainty, but certainty can trick you. You can’t run from inevitability.”

  “Does that mean the cause is my detection of the signal, that the effect is the vibration rate changes I’ll make in the future?” I asked.

  “Admittedly, the distinction between cause and effect becomes somewhat archaic and arbitrary,” Mariam said. “You need to elevate your perspective to the post-causal way of thinking.”

  The implications swarmed my mind like an angry hive. They buzzed and buzzed, one after the other, until I could hear the distinct tone of the queen. She sang a one note song of calamity. I could only ignore it by drowning it with something else. And so I did.

  “But time travel—backecho, or whatever you call it, is too dangerous,” I said. “Knowing what will happen in the future when other people don’t? Knowing exactly what to do and when to do it? That’s a weapon infinitely more powerful than the atom bomb. And like the atom bomb, it’ll only cause escalation in the worst ways possible, not prosperity. And like the atom bomb, this is a mistake. This is a line that shouldn’t be crossed. You might know whatever you know about the future, but I know what will happen at the end. There will be nothing left.”

  “Oh, but my boy,” Lennox began, “that’s the true elegance of Receiverism. That the motions have already been set, and that we’re just doing exactly what we’re supposed to. Not more. Not less. Perfection, is what it is. It means your cute but vapid ethics conjecturing is pointless. The line will be crossed. It already has been.”

  “Then you are the final destroyer of all of us!” I said angrily. “With all your grand delusions about saving humanity, when the bullet was fired at us, you chose to let it happen instead of pushing humanity out of the way.”

  “I could turn the metaphor around and say you’re the one who wants humanity to just die rather than to intervene,” Lennox said. “All because you’re a deeply fearful person. But it’s pointless, because in real life, you can’t move faster than a speeding bullet. And perhaps that’s the best metaphor of all.”

  “And you’re in no position to accuse,” he continued. “A Receiverist’s life’s work is ultimately to ensure that humanity survives and prospers in the future. Among many things, Sanctuary is an undeniable example of that. This city will shelter millions, and provide necessities to many more. But what have you done? All you’ve accomplished so far in your life is doing maths that make insurance companies, fund managers and traders a little richer. But now, you’ll do something truly meaningful for the first time in your life by giving humanity a fighting chance in the ever bleak future. You have Receiverism to thank for that.”

  I seethed. That wasn’t fair. I chose to study financial mathematics not because I wanted to make those people richer, but because it was what was available to me if I wanted a career. If I wanted to leave England.

  “Well, I refuse to participate,” I said firmly. “I’ve burned all traces of my work. It doesn’t exist anymore.”

  I had wanted to save this leverage for when the situation became more dire. Perhaps to bargain my safety with it. But I couldn’t. It had become something larger than my life. Lennox didn’t react, but Mariam did.

  “And why would you do that?” Mariam asked in a tone that wasn’t chiding, but of genuine perplexity.

  It bothered me that she couldn’t understand. “If what you’re telling me about my work is true, then this should never be allowed to exist. I will not be responsible for the consequences of this research.”

  “But you already are,” Mariam said. “The existence of the signal not only guarantees that you’ll be responsible for the creation of backechoing. It means that with certainty, you’ll eventually publish your work yourself, or you’ll set off a chain of events that cause your work to be published by someone else. Either way, it all starts with you. It has already started.”

  “You can’t run from inevitability, Alex,” Lennox said with an amused smile, like he was appreciating a good joke. “And it’s for the same reason why the gun you’ve been threatening me with is nothing but a toy. Alex, your destiny isn’t to kill me. Your destiny is to be the father of backechoing. To be our father. We exist because of what you’ll do. Every instance of your life has been determined by the succeeding instance. And this backwards recursion is what you are, completely. The same goes for me, Mariam, and everything else. It’s why I can freely give you these answers. Because I know you won’t be a nuisance. All because of the first signal.”

  The gun was cold metal, yet my palms dripped with sweat as if it had been scorching. I had a headache, but the agony I felt wasn’t just physical. The fabric of my reality was being ripped away by words from a man who I didn’t trust. Couldn’t trust. For an infinitesimal minutia of a moment, there was a wrath within me that made my index finger twitch ever slightly towards the trigger. It passed without consequence as I felt the chills of having only realised how close I was to the edge.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said. The words sounded hollow. “I don’t believe a single word from either of you unless you show me definitive proof of what you’re claiming. Of backechoes. Of information about the future that can’t be predicted by models.”

  Lennox regarded me for an uncomfortably long moment. His eyes were cold and I feared the calculus behind them. The metallic weight in my hand didn’t feel like protection or reassurance. It hadn’t for a while now.

  “I’ll give you a choice, because I’m a fucking saint,” Lennox said. “If you wish to leave and go back to the surface, I’ll honour it.”

  After all that had happened, that seemed too good to be true. “And what’s the other option?” I asked.

  “I can show you the definitive proof you want,” Lennox started, “that’ll dispel all doubts you have about the truth of what we’re telling you. It’ll forever and irrevocably change the way you think and perceive the world. But there’s a catch. You must work as a Receiverist down here for the rest of your life.”

  “And why’s that?” I asked. “You’ve already given me a lot of details. There’s a lot I already know.”

  “Because there are limits to my trust, especially to someone like you who’s broken it,” Lennox said. “All the stuff you already know and see, that’s unverifiable. Nothing but hearsay to the outside world. No one will believe you. But the evidence you’re looking for? That’s different. Beyond mere words or a city that no one can find. We can’t have you taking that information out there.”

  I couldn’t trust Lennox with even giving me coffee anymore, but he seemed serious. So much so that I could almost believe by looking into his eyes that indeed, he had irrefutable proof.

  “The choice is obvious, isn’t it?” Mariam asked rhetorically. “You’ve seen what we do here. You’ve seen that we’re at the very forefront of humanity, and that the work we do—that you’ll do—will be more meaningful than anything out there. Out there is nothing but chaos and tragedy. That’s all that awaits you and everyone else above. But here, there’s not just security, but hope. We can use someone like you. Don’t waste your life up there when you know that everything you’ve ever wanted is down here.”

  The silence stretched as I thought through my options. But in the end, I realised that I had already known what I would choose before Lennox had even posed the question.

  “I’d like to leave, then.”