“That’s the problem. They might already have you.” I tell her about the bald guy making Abraham vanish. “We have to assume they could have versions of me too.”
“You think anyone they grabbed will give up our locations?”
“Depends on how bad these people really are, and what they’re willing to do to get what they want.”
“And we have no idea what that is.”
“Not yet,” I reply. “But we’re going to figure it out in a hurry.”
“That little girl is facing these guys all alone?”
I take her hand and give it a gentle squeeze. “Not for long. We’ll find her.”
The bustling city of Santa Barbara has grown a lot since my century, but it still has a lot of its original charm. Mission-style archways and beach culture have remained. Despite the addition of the metaspace and its myriad scenic diversions, the sunny coastal weather and the allure of the Pacific Ocean have kept people’s attention. California is also a leader in “Natural Beauty Zones” where meta enhancements have been unplugged to remind people to stay invested in “authentic nature.” People who have grown tired of the digital universe can go retro and just sit around enjoying the scenery. It’s good to know an old-school time traveler like me can still find a few places to fit in.
The safe house is an unassuming apartment off State Street that sits above a surf shop. I’ve been to it a few times throughout the century, but it hasn’t changed much. Viewed through my meta-sunglasses, the digital façade has new beaches featured and the surfers in the recordings are performing tricks that would have been unheard of in my time. But when we enter the store, the long-haired bro behind the counter seems like he would fit into any number of Point Break movies they’ve remade in the last hundred years. He’s shirtless and sandy and lights up at the sight of Mym.
“Yo, Miss Quickly! Good to see you. We’ve been keeping the place tight and right, yeah?” He scoots around the counter and spreads his arms. “Business is up as you can see.” He points to the nearly empty surfboard racks. “The tour tots been bangin’ up the rentals a bit, but I keep ’em going on. You been getting our rent okay?”
“I’m not checking up on the store today, Chex. Just headed upstairs to get some work done.”
“Right, right,” Chex replies. “Gots to keep those digits in the plus column and all that.” He looks at me and tosses his hair out of his eyes. “Sup, mango.”
“Ben,” I reply, extending a hand.
Mym makes straight for the door at the back of the room and unlocks it with her fingerprint. Chex’s eyes trail her a little longer than I appreciate before finally coming back to me. He shakes my hand.
“And she’s Mrs. Travers these days,” I add.
Chex stares at me blankly for a moment, then finally nods. “Oh, freaky. You’re the mister to her S? Right and tight, mo. Right and tight.” He holds a couple fingers up in what might presumably be the latest version of a hang ten symbol. That or it’s something rude I’ve failed to research about this decade. Either way, I just smile.
“Catch you later . . . mango,” I say.
“See my man go!” Chex shouts and hops back across the counter. “Tight and right.” He goes back to minding the front door.
I find Mym upstairs running through recent activity logs for the safe house. The converted apartment is one of our less-frequent hideouts, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t had traffic. With any number of past and future selves roaming the fractal universe, even the out-of-the-way locations can be hotspots depending on the decade. It pays to stay alert. I walk up behind Mym where she’s viewing a display projected on the wall. “Any sign of company?”
“I’m checking now. Running a scan of authorized access codes.”
I glance around the apartment. Unlike Dr. Quickly’s safe houses, which tend to resemble libraries full of knickknacks, Mym’s personal spots are tidy and modern. Dr. Quickly has stuck to analog time travel methods—photos and carefully catalogued anchors—but Mym has embraced the digital age, combining her father’s methods with modern tech whenever possible to streamline the process. We’ve begun creating new spaces for the two of us, but this one was set up well before she met me.
I locate the temporal spectrometer and start running a test on the copper door handle. If I’m lucky, it will be from a timestream we can track.
“How old do we think our daughter needs to be before we let her time travel alone? Would we have given her a personal access code or do you think she uses one of ours?” I ask.
“If she’s using our accounts for everything, she’ll be harder to track,” Mym says. “She should still have a user access file somewhere though, at least for fingerprint and retinal scan locks. I’m not finding anything in the records here. No reference to a Piper Travers accessing this space.”
The temporal spectrometer results from the door handle don’t match any known timestreams either. Another dead end. I frown. “What about call logs? Any evidence that we’ve used the tachyon pulse transmitter to call anyone named Piper?”
“Good idea,” Mym says, running the search of our call logs. The program pings back a result right away. “Oh wow. We do have a record of making a call to a Piper Travers number.”
“When?”
Mym blinks at the call line. “Um. Right now? This is like ten . . . eight seconds from now.”
She looks at me and I shrug. “Okay. Let’s do that.”
She hesitates for just a second, then addresses the call management system. “CMS, call Piper Travers.”
The tachyon pulse transmitter in the corner fires up and starts clicking through its transmission warm-up. We get a ringing and then a bit of static.
“Hello?” Mym says.
There is a faint murmur that sounds like someone muttering to themselves, then the TPT clicks and the line goes dead.
I look to Mym. “You think the transmission failed?”
“I don’t know. It sounded like someone might have picked up for a second.”
She is about to try again when we get an incoming call. The COM screen lights up with the ASCOTT logo, a variety of scientific instruments on a shield over a field of green.
Mym makes sure our location settings are off, then picks up the call.
The reddened face of Jermaine Clevis appears on screen. I’m not sure if he’s angry, concerned, or simply out of breath. “I’m so glad I reached you. Terrible, terrible day. Are you safe?”
“We’re safe enough for now,” Mym replies.
“Good. Very good,” Jermaine says, wringing his hands. He appears to be in his office. He glances up to someone out of frame. “Yes. Of course I have to show them. It’s . . . well, if there’s any way to avoid it . . .”
“What’s happened?” Mym asks. “More abductions?”
Jermaine nods vigorously, then shakes his head. “No. Not more than we know of, but there have been developments. We caught one of the perpetrators, mind you. Found him still on the grounds. He hadn’t jumped away.”
“Getting degravitized in the face will do that to you,” I comment.
Jermaine apparently doesn’t hear me. He keeps glancing at something on his desk. “Miss Quickly. Or rather, Mrs. Travers as I should say.” He gives an apologetic sort of grimace. “It seems the abductors left a message for you.”
“For me?” Mym asks. “Why me?”
Jermaine runs a hand through his feathery hair. It sticks out in odd tufts afterward, perhaps the result of some dislodged hair product. “I don’t know where to begin exactly, but it seems we had a serious security breach.”
“I’d say so,” I mutter.
Mym swats at me. “Shh. Let him speak.”
“It’s rather grim news, I’m afraid.” Jermaine straightens up and tries to compose himself. “These ruffians gained access to some sensitive electronic documents. Documents regarding you.”
“What sort of documents?” Mym asks.
“They have to do with your father,” Jermaine sa
ys. “They pertain to a certain device that was in your father’s keeping that ASCOTT had a vested interest in. A device intended to safeguard the manner in which Dr. Quickly and other analog travelers conducted themselves in time. I suspect you know to which device I’m referring.”
Mym’s eyes narrow. “I do, but what has that got to do with ASCOTT? Or with me?”
Jermaine swallows hard and winces. “Well, it was really more a matter of record keeping on our end. Updating the files regarding your father’s legal date of death. A technicality really. We just wanted to be accurate about the ownership of the device in this timestream.”
“My father’s will clearly states that his possessions remain the property of his other selves, or if none are able to claim them, then they pass to me.”
“Of course. And that’s what we have in our files, but during the update of our records, some information was compromised. Information that should have been confidential was exposed to third parties. Information about your father’s device. I’m afraid its existence is no longer a secret.”
“What device?” I ask. “What are you guys talking about?”
Mym turns to me. “A long time ago, Dad designed a tool. A safeguard against the improper use of his chronometers. It’s a sort of temporal tuner. All the chronometers we use are tuned from frequencies determined by this one device. Dad named it the warp clock.”
“Aren’t all time travel devices tuned to specific temporal frequencies?” I ask. “Why is this device such a big secret?”
Mym turns to Jermaine. “I need to pause your transmission for just a second, director. Hold tight.”
Jermaine puts up a hand to object. “I have more—” but the rest of his words stay frozen in his mouth as the transmission freezes.
“The warp clock is how our chronometers get made in the first place,” Mym says. “There was no one we could trust with that.”
“Well, Jermaine obviously knew,” I say. “Who else knew about it?”
“Just Abe that I know of. He’s the one who actually built it. He needed it to fix the chronometers and create more. Other than that, I can’t think of anyone who would know about it.”
“Why all the secrecy?” I ask. “Just to keep other people from making chronometers? Was that ever a major threat? Seems like they are pretty complicated for anyone else to fabricate anyway.”
“Tuning new chronometers is not all that the warp clock is good for,” Mym replies. “It also turns them off.”
“Off?”
“They wanted a failsafe. Just in case chronometers fall into the wrong hands or someone needs to shut a time traveler down. If you have the warp clock, you control all of the chronometers that were tuned from it.”
“Why would Abe build something so dangerous?” I ask. “Isn’t that a bad idea?”
“It was actually ASCOTT that wanted it created,” Mym says. “And Dad agreed to it. He thought it was the best solution to the problem. A compromise we all could agree on.”
“What problem?” I ask.
“The problem of us,” Mym says, her gesture encompassing both of us. “The problem of unregulated time travelers. When ASCOTT formed, they wanted to keep anyone from operating outside the jurisdiction of the central streams. Outside of ASCOTT’s control. Even us.”
“I thought that ASCOTT always left Harry alone on account of him being the father of time travel. It would be like the Federal Aviation Administration trying to fine the Wright Brothers or something.”
“But that’s exactly what they wanted to do,” Mym explains. “They did want to regulate us. Make sure we followed the rules and didn’t create a bunch of paradoxes and new timestreams. They were convinced no one could be trusted to regulate themselves. Even Dad. That’s why Abraham’s warp clock was the compromise.”
“How so?” I ask.
“Dad agreed to the compromise because he thought it wasn’t a bad idea to have someone he trusted to keep him in check. He knew his limitations, but he saw the potential for danger and didn’t want ASCOTT to be the ones with their fingers on the button. He felt better about it being Abe. ”
“Like Superman and Batman,” I reply.
Mym just looks at me, confused.
“Superman gave Batman some kryptonite to use on him if he ever went crazy and needed to be stopped. Abe’s like Quickly’s Batman.”
“Sure. If that’s how you want to see it,” Mym says. “But now the word is out that it exists. I wouldn’t be surprised if every criminal in the time travel universe wants to get their hands on it.”
“What do they plan to do with it?” I ask.
“Not sure I want to find out.” She turns to the screen and unfreezes Jermaine again.
“—information to give you,” Jermaine continues, seemingly unaware we’ve been gone. “Let me finish what I meant to tell you before you go.”
“We’re listening,” Mym says.
“They’ve sent their demands. These attackers from the funeral. They want you to turn over the device to them, or they’ll hurt more of the hostages.”
“More?” Mym says. She moves closer to the screen. “They’ve hurt someone already before we even got their demands?”
“They sent a video,” Jermaine says. “I’m afraid it’s rather shocking and graphic. I have to warn you.”
“Just tell us who they’ve hurt,” I say, my stomach in knots recalling the men making people vanish from the funeral. “Was it Abraham? One of our other friends? Who else do they have?”
Jermaine looks even more uncomfortable. He clears his throat and finally responds. “It’s you, Mr. Travers. They’ve killed you. And if you don’t cooperate, they mean to do it again.”
4
“Don’t forget that when you are skipping around in time, you miss people. And you may also be missing out.” -Journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, 2272
“What do you mean, they killed me?”
Jermaine still looks uncomfortable. “I’m going to transmit the video file to you now. Watch it when you decide. Like I said, it’s quite disturbing.” He looks down at his desk. “Okay. Transmission sent. You have our deepest sympathies.”
Did he just try to console me about my own death?
“Let me see this video,” I say.
Mym hesitates, then activates the play button on the virtual view screen. A scene replaces Director Clevis’s office. The video is jumbled and poorly focused. A handheld camera is bouncing around the scene at a nauseating speed but finally settles on several figures in the center of a room with stone walls. It may be some sort of basement. The men in the frame are masked, some with ski masks, others with more elaborate methods. Oddly, one is dressed in a Hawaiian shirt. The man in the center of the frame is wearing a heavy metal helmet that is dome-shaped with circular eyeholes. The helmet flares at the neck but successfully covers all but the glassy eyes peering out. He is the first to speak. His voice has a vaguely echoing quality inside the helmet.
“Mym Travers. This message is for you alone. You will hand over the warp clock at the location we tell you, at the time we tell you, or people you love will die.” He gestures to the man with the camera. “Feed in the video. Show her the price she’ll pay if she refuses.”
The man with the camera fumbles with something, causing the view to dip. We spend several seconds looking at the floor while he attempts to play the video. The man in the helmet grumbles something, then the man with the camera straightens it again. “There were two files with the same name for some reason. Not sure why they sent it twice. Okay, here we go.”
The video jumps to a different scene. A dim room, the walls are wood. Could be a cabin. Two men are tied to chairs. As the camera zooms in on the face of one man, I recognize myself. Only it isn’t my face—not exactly. This man is older than me, perhaps a decade or more. A sprinkling of gray hair has made an appearance on his stubbled chin and his hairline has receded somewhat. The lines around his eyes are more pronounced as well. But there’s no denying it’s me. The
camera pivots and focuses on the second chair. This man has his head down, but someone grabs his hair and pulls his head up to look at the camera.
Mym gasps.
This one is me too. I can’t be sure if it’s my current timeline. There could be any number of versions of myself roaming the fractal universe, but this version can’t be far off. If we differ in age, it doesn’t look to be by much. My other self glares at his captors and begins to say something, but the video cuts to a different scene.
Two men are now standing near a wall, hands bound with canvas bags over their heads. The men have been secured to posts in the ground. Someone near the camera speaks.
“They didn’t say which one. I guess we get to pick.”
A rifle barrel pivots into view, though it’s not a modern gun. It appears to be a musket of some kind, the type you’d find at a Revolutionary War reenactment. The cameraman backs up a step and more of the man with the gun comes into view. He’s wearing old-fashioned attire as well—a collared coat with epaulettes and shiny buttons. The coat has long tails. He has a modern mask, however, a rubberized face like you’d see in a Halloween costume store. This one might be George Washington or some other colonial figure. The man lifts the musket to his shoulder, aims at the man on the right, and squeezes the trigger.
The blast from the gun sends a cloud of smoke billowing from the barrel.
The shot hits the man on the right squarely in the chest, and he collapses immediately to the ground. His hands are still linked to the post. His body hits the ground with a meaty thump.
“Oh my God!” Mym puts a hand to her mouth.
The other captive has flinched and ducked involuntarily and now shifts from side to side trying to ascertain what has happened.
“Okay, you got that recorded, right?” The man in the rubber mask turns to the cameraman. “Send that back.”
The camera pans to the ground and the figure of the man lying there. A stain of blood has already begun to wick through the fibers of his shirt. I can’t tell which version of me it was. The only distinguishing feature that can be discerned is that the me on the ground has a tear in the knee of his pants—otherwise, they are dressed nearly identically. The second me is cut loose from the post and yanked forward by the rope. His bagged head pivots as the man in the mask nudges him with the barrel of the rifle.
In Times Like These Boxed Set Page 164