The Dark Restarter

by Sean McMahon

  Were they really expected to believe that a bunch of restarts in a hospital after the events that transpired here would seriously reform a psychopathic murderer?

  Were they really stupid enough, in their innate nature to see the best in people, to be blinded by the fact that all they were really doing was assisting the very person that had killed them in the first place?

  And what? Now they would restart his heart? Freeing him from the bubble that protected the innocent lives outside the Pentney Lakes?

  He had to be stopped. Permanently.

  ‘Kara,’ whispered Hal, returning to her side, his eyes equal parts kindness and worry.

  “But mostly kindness…” she thought.

  She could always rely on him for that.

  The one constant.

  Her compass in the dark.

  But he was wrong this time. He was wrong to see the good. There was only death here. Only one way to protect her friend. Friends plural. Her family. Oh God, her family.

  A life for a life. Those were the rules.

  ‘Kara’, Hal repeated, reaching out and wrapping his fingers around her knife-wielding hand.

  She tried to pull away, red energy arcing out across the blade and upwards like a lightning rod; a conduit for the strength she would need for this final act, swirling in amongst the blue of Hal’s own dwindling Restarter energy.

  The contrasting colours of temporally-charged power swirled with such tenacity that the random patterns began to form what appeared to be a double helix.

  ‘He’s going to kill us, Hal,’ she whispered, her cheeks feeling wet from what must have been tears. ‘I…have to save us…I…’

  ‘You’ve done enough saving for one day,’ he said softly, his words full of comforting reassurance and more than a sprinkling of sadness. ‘I’m sorry you had to go through that alone. But you can stop now. Just stop. Let go of the knife. I’ve got you.’

  The red began to die down in intensity until, after what could have been minutes, maybe hours, the dark energy she was channelling brightened, returning to a far more manageable blue.

  Begrudgingly, she let go of the knife, severing their connection as Hal took it from her.

  The blade dissolved instantly in Hal’s hand. Less than dust.

  Malcolm sat there on the ground, eyes wide with wonder.

  Kara’s legs buckled beneath her, suddenly feeling like sun bleached ink on withering parchment.

  ‘He made me kill him, Hal! There was no other choice. I tried to…’ her sobs becoming more uncontrollable, the words harder to understand.

  ‘I said he could take me but he wanted you and the others our families and Greg and he wouldn’t stop he meant it I could see it I…I…’ she gasped for air.

  Hal kneeled down next to her.

  ‘I know. There was no other choice. I saw and heard it all.’

  Malcolm pulled himself onto all fours and slowly crawled towards the Restarters, then reached out hesitantly, his hand hanging in mid-air, as if waiting for Hal’s consent.

  Hal nodded, and Malcolm placed his hand on her shoulder in a comforting manner.

  Kara swished her hair out of her eyes and balled her hand into a fist, as if attempting to summon the time traveller’s knife back into phase, fully expecting to see the red energy radiating between Future Malcolm’s hand and her shoulder.

  Only the red electricity had changed. Mutated. Shifting into something she would never have believed had she not seen it with her own eyes.

  The Restarter energy Malcolm was siphoning from the past, from them, from the universe itself…whatever it was that was powering them wasn’t important. What was important, more than anything, was one simple fact;

  There wasn’t a trace of red between the three of them.

  Only blue.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  The Immortal Instruments

  203rd Restart – Saturday, August 25th, 2018, 5:19pm

  Hal had expected something transformative to occur after defeating Malcolm’s considerably darker past-self.

  Like a gong being sounded, as if to signify they had completed their challenge and had levelled up. As if the heavens would split, showering them in congratulatory sparkles of shimmering blue Restarter shards that maybe they could cash in at the Starbucks gift shop before they left. It seemed plausible to Hal that the coffee chain would have found a way to facilitate breaking into the trans-dimensional market.

  But the reality was far more anticlimactic. They simply…continued to exist.

  ‘So…what happens now?’ said Kara, vocalising their shared thoughts.

  Hal was equally stuck on how they should proceed.

  ‘I know, right? Do we just…ride this restart out?’ opening the question to the floor but steering it slightly more towards the man from their future.

  ‘Why are you looking at me?’

  ‘Well, ya know,’ remarked Hal. ‘This was essentially the end game of the plan you’ve spent the best part of three hundred-or-so restarts putting together. I figured you’d have a contingency once we took out Bowser. You better not be telling us our princess is in another castle…’

  ‘I honestly have no idea why you insist on using words in such a ridiculous order,’ said Malcolm, feigning fatigue to mask the fact he was stalling whilst he got his thoughts into something resembling order.

  ‘Malcolm….’ said Kara, singing his name with a questioning tone.

  ‘Yes, Kara?’

  ‘Oh, for fu–’ she replied, before revealing what was suddenly all-too-apparent. ‘He has no idea. Look at him! He has no idea what to do next!’

  ‘Well, this is just perfect,’ said Hal, in a way that truly displayed the utter lack of perfection in the absence of any notable paradigm shift to their situation. He sighed irritably. ‘Well, I guess we could just head back to Fir Lodge and see what’s going on.’

  Hal and Kara stared at Malcolm expecting an objection, but he simply broke eye-contact and stared at a dried-out patch of grass.

  ‘Great,’ said Kara. ‘Just great.’

  *

  ‘So,’ said Hal, having made their way back to the more comforting territory of their home turf at the rear of Fir Lodge, plonking himself down on an unused deck chair as he addressed Kara, instead of the essentially useless time traveller Malcolm, who insisted on standing. Presumably just for stylistic purposes. ‘With The Dark Restarter out of action, where does that leave us?’

  ‘Well, I guess it works the same as Peter,’ mused Kara. ‘Since Malcolm teamed up with himself and stole Pete’s life from him, he hasn’t returned. I think it’s safe to say the same will apply to Malcolm’s past-self and…’ she struggled to finish her sentence. But they all knew she was going to say “Fearne.”

  ‘I feel like now would be a good time to discuss that,’ said Malcolm.

  ‘Discuss what? You murdering another one of our friends?’ said Kara sharply.

  ‘I told you, they are not dead in the way that you think.’

  In truth, she had forgotten about that little morsel of information he had dropped. She reasoned that stabbing a temporally-displaced serial killer through the chest and erasing them from time itself would probably tend to do that to a person.

  ‘You keep saying that as if you didn’t kill them,’ she said. ‘As if it wasn’t your hand that took them from us. But it was, Malcolm.’

  “A younger hand maybe,” she thought, but one that belonged to him all the same.

  ‘Wait’ said Hal, his voice suddenly filled with unexpected hope. ‘You mean we can bring them back?’

  ‘No,’ said Malcolm flatly. ‘They were Echoes,’ he added quickly and simply to ease Hal’s torment. ‘Not the true versions of your friends. I discovered them purely by luck during one of my earlier expeditions to The White Lodge.’

  Hal and Kara stared blankly.

  ‘And they didn’t betray you. At least, not until I intervened,’ clarified Malcolm. ‘They failed.’

  ‘What do you me
an, failed?’ asked Kara.

  ‘They were stuck,’ Future Malcolm continued. ‘Barely sentient shadows. I found them in Fir Lodge, on what would soon transpire to be their last ever “Repeat”. After I manipulated them into exchanging their lives for yours, they should have faded away…’

  The Restarters knew what he was getting at.

  By Peter and Fearne changing their own past, they would have dematerialised. Sent hurtling back to the present, none the wiser of their dark deeds. Leaving Hal and Kara to pick up the pieces. A truth they knew all too well from first-hand experience.

  ‘But,’ Future Malcolm added, his use of the word seemingly brimming with revelation. ‘A unique opportunity presented itself.’

  ‘Of course it did,’ groaned Kara.

  ‘Before they were fully reclaimed by the fog, I latched onto them. After all, if their present-selves were alive and well, what harm could it do? Using the last of their retained charge I placed them into a new timeline.’ One of his own design, he neglected to add. ‘One where they could…serve an even greater purpose.’

  Before reality had a chance to shift.

  Before Kara and Hal’s first ever restart could take hold.

  ‘Imagine my amazement once we arrived, when the fog stopped chasing their…echoes. Echoes that possessed all of their prior memories, no less,’ lamented Malcolm. ‘Entirely self-sufficient.’

  In truth, Malcolm hadn’t known for sure just how convincing these facsimiles would be. Nor how they retained their sense of self to the point of making new decisions of their very own, acting entirely independently, their minds a perfect replica of their predecessors.

  Fearne especially.

  She, in particular, had been right about him all along. How he was using them like puppets to facilitate his own dark deeds and opportunistic agenda.

  Indeed, that had raised a philosophical quandary in his own mind; how real were any of them, if their consciousnesses could be replicated so easily? Like a severed limb, somehow evolving into an entirely new body, one with its own hopes and dreams, whilst the phantom limb of the future continued onwards through time.

  ‘I needed you to experience true loss,’ continued Malcolm. ‘So that when the time came for you to act, you would no longer require the proximity of your past-selves. Though I must admit, I assumed you’d need at least another Restarter to generate a charge. You're very special Kara.’

  Kara’s skin crawled as if she were in the middle of a work appraisal chaired by Satan, and she brought her guard back up.

  ‘More importantly,’ continued Malcolm, ‘I needed my younger self to believe the stakes. I needed him to trust my intentions were to serve mutual benefit. And what better way to do that than…’

  If what Malcolm was suggesting were true, Peter and Fearne were never in real danger at all.

  ‘Offering up Peter and Fearne to him,’ said Hal. ‘That explains why Fearne couldn’t remember Peter’s funeral. She simply hadn’t lived through it yet.’

  ‘And why Peter didn’t return to the future without us,’ said Kara. ‘When we stopped Past Malcolm I mean. And barged through that door when we first got here?’

  ‘I know not of Peter’s funeral,’ said Malcolm, ‘but yes. I was concerned that would have given the game away in terms of Peter’s…chronological affiliation.’

  Hal and Kara shifted uncomfortably, feeling like rookies for missing such a glaring inconsistency. Luckily, Malcolm was in a talky mood, and permitted them to gloss over it.

  Malcolm continued, highlighting how not only delivering two Restarters to himself, but also permitting him to kill them by his own hand was a powerful means to gain his own trust.

  ‘I’m sorry for not telling you,’ said Malcolm, an odd truthfulness lining the words. ‘But the reaction you and Kara displayed upon witnessing their respective deaths had to be genuine. I would have known if it wasn’t.’

  Suddenly, Malcolm’s claim didn’t seem that far-fetched.

  If he had indeed retrieved a version of Peter and Fearne from a timeline that was scheduled to collapse, then brought them into phase with the version of Hal and Kara that had arrived from the actual future, it would have meant that Peter and Fearne were alive and well in the present.

  “Little more than immortal instruments,” thought Hal. Instruments strung with strings that could never truly be snapped.

  ‘Oh my god,’ said Hal in sheer awe of Malcolm’s gamble. ‘They’re alive, Kara.’

  ‘That is my understanding,’ said Malcolm. ‘What happened to their echoes should not hold any duress on their present selves.’

  ‘You can’t possibly know that,’ said Kara angrily.

  She had always worked on the assumption that their Restarter-selves were transported back into their living bodies once they had fixed whatever broken timeline they were living within. But she found herself wondering just how certain she could really be. After all, she had seen a frightening display of evidence to the contrary whilst fighting Dark Malcolm at The White Lodge.

  She really needed to tell Hal what she saw. How there were countless versions of both her and Hal, speaking oddly in reverse. How–

  ‘Everything I have done I have done to free us all,’ said Malcolm, breaking Kara’s train of thought.

  ‘Oh, that’s rich,’ said Kara. ‘Don’t dress this up. Everything you’ve done you’ve done for yourself.’

  ‘Kara,’ said Hal quietly.

  ‘What?’ she snapped. ‘There’s no way he could have known killing the Restarter versions of Pete and Fearne would have guaranteed their safety in the present Hal! He’s just not that smar–’

  ‘We have to restart his heart.’

  Hal’s words cut the air between them and landed like an anvil.

  ‘Why?! If we don't, he'll cease to be and we can...we can fix time. We won’t be interrupted now. We've done it before, we can do it again.’

  ‘That's just it,’ said Hal. ‘If we don't, he'll never make it to the hospital. Never come back and bring us into phase with Pete and Fearne’s echoes. The Dark Restarter version of himself will never be destroyed, and all this...’ he added, raising his arms to encompass everything around them. ‘…All this will just keep going around. An endless cycle. An infinity loop that we'll never, ever escape from. It's the only way–’

  ‘To break the chain,’ said Kara angrily, finishing his sentence and hating him a little for how right he was.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Hal glumly.

  ‘We can't do this Hal. If he ever wakes up from that coma...’

  ‘I'm not saying there won't be consequences, I'm saying we don't have any choice. Besides, you said it yourself, the potential brain damage alone…if we’re lucky he'll be a vegetable for the rest of his life.’

  ‘You know I’m standing right here, don’t you? I can hear every word you’re say–’

  ‘Honestly, Sauron, it's like you’re actively trying to sabotage yourself. The heroes are talking.’

  Malcolm scowled, but remained quiet, as the silence between the three of them grew louder, until Kara finally exploded.

  ‘Fuck!’ she shouted. ‘Fucking fuck! Fine. Let's go do this so we can get out of here.’

  ‘So,’ said Hal, rubbing his hands together in preparation for a good old-fashioned Time Heist. ‘All we have to do is run over to Kev’s Saturday evening, give ol’ Frankenstein here a jump-start and–’

  ‘Technically, you will both be playing the role of Victor Frankenstein. It is a common misconception that the monster was named Frankenstein, when in actuality–’

  ‘Really?’ said Hal in disbelief. ‘Now’s the time you decide to chip in to correct a reference?’

  ‘If you’re going to reference a literary classic, you might as well reference it correctly. Besides, I’m afraid it’s not going to be quite as simple as “Jump starting” Frankenstein’s monster,’ said Malcolm.

  ‘Malcolm, I swear to God,’ said Kara, reaching breaking point.

  Malcolm raise
d his hands apologetically in an attempt to show it had not been his intention to antagonise her.

  ‘What I mean is, we must first ensure your 165th restart plays out exactly as it did before. Everything must be identical.’

  ‘We’ll figure it out as we go,’ said Hal. ‘You in?’ he added, shooting Kara a look that implied if she wasn’t, he’d back her all the way.

  ‘You mean, am I ready to resurrect our killer?’

  She held Hal’s gaze, before throwing up her hands in defeat.

  ‘Why the hell not. It’s not like we have anything even remotely plan-like to fall back on. I’m in.’

  ‘Well then,’ said Hal, pulling himself up from the chair and dusting himself down. ‘Let’s get this party Restarted.’

  His words causing Malcolm to groan, and Kara to protest that they were all better than catchphrases like that.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  Restart my Heart

  204th Restart – Friday, August 24th, 2018, 12:01pm

  'You know,’ said Hal, having just passed through the Restart Point and unclenching his stomach, utterly nailing a flawless time-traveller landing, ‘I don’t think we’re going to have to actually do all that much.’