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Back Extinction Game
Chapters (33)
  1. Title page
  2. CONTENTS
  3. ONE
  4. TWO
  5. THREE
  6. FOUR
  7. FIVE
  8. SIX
  9. SEVEN
  10. EIGHT
  11. NINE
  12. TEN
  13. ELEVEN
  14. TWELVE
  15. THIRTEEN
  16. FOURTEEN
  17. FIFTEEN
  18. SIXTEEN
  19. SEVENTEEN
  20. EIGHTEEN
  21. NINETEEN
  22. TWENTY
  23. TWENTY-ONE
  24. TWENTY-TWO
  25. TWENTY-THREE
  26. TWENTY-FOUR
  27. TWENTY-FIVE
  28. TWENTY-SIX
  29. TWENTY-SEVEN
  30. TWENTY-EIGHT
  31. Acknowledgements
  32. By Gary Gibson
  33. Copyright page

‘Don’t feel pity for him,’ said Casey. ‘He told me what I needed to know, and then I stuck him in there. He’ll be a walking plague vector when I send him over to the Authority’s alternate, him and those bees.’ He cocked his head at me. ‘Don’t you want to know just what he told me?’

I stared down at my feet, too frightened to meet Casey’s eyes.

Casey shrugged when I didn’t answer, and continued regardless. ‘Turns out there was a nuclear war where the Authority came from,’ he said. ‘All the way back in their Eighties. Not some two-minute affair, either; seems it dragged on for some decades, long into the Nineties, with the US fighting Soviet detachments all over South America. Seems like democracy took a distinct step back during all this. Want to know why they call themselves “the Authority”? It’s short for “Provisional Civil Authority for the Emergency”.’

He walked across the basement, staring back in at Greenbrooke for a moment before continuing. ‘Over there, the CIA was replaced by the Patriots, the nearest thing their America ever had to the Gestapo. Then all of a sudden,’ he said, turning back to look at me and waving one hand as if it were holding a magic wand, ‘they stumble across this abandoned transfer stage, somewhere in the Bolivian jungle when they’re supposed to be hunting Cuban troops.’

I looked back up at him. ‘I know half of this already,’ I said. ‘Wallace told me, so you can shut the hell up.’

‘So did he mention the way the original stage-builders abandoned their bases, destroying all their computers and most of their records before disappearing?’ I nodded. ‘The only reason I can see why they’d have done any such thing,’ he continued, ‘is because they were afraid of something – something they encountered while they were exploring all those alternate realities themselves. At first I thought maybe that’s why the Authority wanted to find such terrible weapons – because they were afraid they might run into whatever it is that scared the stage-builders so bad.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘But the real reason, it turns out, is hardly so noble. No, the reason Greenbrooke and his Patriot cronies pushed as hard as they did for the Pathfinder project to focus on weapons acquisition was so they could beat the Soviets in their own alternate into submission.’

‘You’re certain of this?’