Albright stared at him, the cigarette burned down almost to his knuckles.

‘What you don’t seem to understand is that the future is indeterminate, yes,’ Mitchell continued, ‘unless you find your way into it through a wormhole, and then all time between now and then becomes fixed like a fly in amber. It’s like the observer effect: once you see it or touch it, it’s locked in one state for ever. That’s why the Founders disappeared so far into the future, to a point beyond the reach even of the wormholes. It was the only way they could escape predetermination.’

Albright wiped at his mouth with one hand, a frightened look in his eyes. ‘How do you know all this?’

Mitchell let his head fall back, suddenly exhausted. They would be recording this interrogation, the same as all the others, of course. He wondered what his unseen audience were making of it all.

‘I asked you how you could know any of this,’ Albright repeated.

Mitchell brought his head back up. ‘I already told you yesterday, because of the learning pools. When I woke up, I knew things.’

‘What kinds of things?’

Mitchell struggled to find words to describe the vast repository of knowledge now resting inside his brain. He had begun to suspect that this repository somehow existed independently of him – a library inscribed deep in the microscopic foam of reality, at the most minute level, something the black pools had somehow given him the means to tap into.

He shook his head helplessly. ‘Everything,’ he finally replied.

Albright let his cigarette fall to the ground and formed his hands into fists. ‘You’re making this shit up, Goddamn you.’

‘I can tell you what’s going to happen in a thousand years, or a hundred thousand, or ten million – the broad details, anyway. Sometimes . . .’ He closed his eyes tightly for a moment and sensed the repository there, hovering always in the back of his mind, vast and nebulous. ‘Sometimes I try to ignore it, to not always be aware of it, but I can’t. I know so much, from now until so far in the future, you can’t even begin to imagine.’

Albright didn’t say anything else for a moment, and Mitchell could hear the sound of a plane droning somewhere overhead, as well as distant voices, muffled through thick walls, passing by and then fading.

‘Assuming any of this is true, why didn’t you tell me before?’ asked Albright.

‘Because I knew it wouldn’t make any difference,’ Mitchell replied. ‘I’d still wind up here in this garage having the shit beaten out of me, whatever I said.’

Albright nodded. ‘You’re right, I’m afraid.’ He gestured to Scott. ‘Hold him.’