The Dark Restarter

by Sean McMahon

  ‘Sorry. It’s just…we’re so close now.’

  ‘We should make our way to the basement,’ said Malcolm.

  ‘And at number one,’ said Hal jokingly, ‘on the list of the ten things you don’t want to have said to you by Malcolm is…’

  Malcolm growled faintly once again, before leading the way to a place of particular significance to not only the Restarters, but him especially.

  It was, after all, the room where each of them had died.

  *

  They watched as Malcolm’s alive-self was held in place by the unseen Restarters of the past, a wild energy filling the room which offered Hal and Kara a unique perspective on how they managed to defeat a man they would never have been able to defeat in the physical world.

  At least, not then, anyway…

  The three time-travellers were all but patting themselves on the backs for a job well done. Everything was happening as it always did; they had covered all of their bases, accounted for every eventuality, and it was just a matter of allowing this final piece of cemented history to play out as it always did. In fact, it was at precisely this moment that everything went to shit.

  ‘Uh, Malcolm,’ said Kara, her eyes widening with confusion. ‘You should be dead by now, shouldn’t you?’

  It was true; at this point Malcolm’s alive-self should have hit the dirt, lying lifelessly on the floor. Instead, he was still raising a knife to an invisible assailant.

  As the energy coursing through his veins weakened, a darkness began to materialise in the centre of the blue storm Hal and Kara’s presently invisible past-Restarter-selves were generating, creating a rift that seemed to be assisting the killer of their past rather than incapacitating him.

  They heard their familiar voices above them, their own alive-selves now in the house and tending to Jerry’s hydrational requirements.

  ‘No,’ said Future Malcolm. ‘It can’t be…’

  ‘Oh, it very much be, Malc,’ said Hal, panic surging through him.

  ‘It’s…’ began Malcolm.

  ‘You!’ said Kara, as a flutterby took hold of the room around them.

  Sure enough, a form had manifested inside the rift, sharing more than a passing resemblance to none other than Malcolm himself.

  Suddenly, the missing piece of the puzzle engulfed them.

  Until this point, they had assumed that it had been a certain Dark Restarter who had changed something big to bring Hal and Kara back into their restart cycle, and back into the past.

  ‘Malcolm,’ said Hal softly. ‘Tell me it wasn’t you that went back and changed this moment to bring us here?’

  Malcolm was frozen in place. Honestly, he had assumed he’d gotten away with it. After all, they were all still here, and Hal and Kara had no memory of this moment. He was confident it had slipped through the net, unnoticed by whatever it was that acted as the guardian of cemented time.

  ‘This is bad, isn’t it,’ said Kara.

  ‘This is worse than bad,’ said Hal, spinning to face Future Malcolm. ‘How could you be so stupid? Changing this moment?! The one event in all of this that has to remain unchanged!’

  It was true. All of it.

  To bring them here, Future Malcolm had revisited his own past, saving his alive-self from the onslaught of the Restarters. The ripple effect of that was that no matter how many Dark Restarters they took out, this was a version of Malcolm they couldn’t stop. Unless…

  ‘Tell me you haven’t done this yet,’ said Hal, thinking quickly. ‘If you haven’t done it yet, this is a future we can change. This is–’

  ‘I did this…’ said Malcolm, slower than he had ever spoken before, each word a nail in a coffin. Their coffin. ‘…before you arrived. To bring you here.’

  And in that moment, Hal realised Malcolm had broken everything. They couldn’t stop what was unfolding now even if they wanted to.

  If they did, Hal and Kara would cease to be, everything they had achieved thus far would come undone. And their Malcolm, the Malcolm from the future, would be caught in an infinity loop for all eternity.

  ‘But how?’ said Kara, their time running out as the being in the rift became clearer, forcing its way into phase with them.

  ‘You must know how I did it,’ said Malcolm, your memories should have realigned themselves by now?’

  Hal and Kara thought back to that night, probing their memories, as a dull ache wormed its way across the top layers of their recollections of an already-altered past, their thoughts shifting as they attempted to absorb an equally altered truth.

  How they had combined their energy to keep Malcolm in place between them, how they had ended his miserable life there and then…but suddenly they weren’t so sure. There were black spots in the order of events that led to that moment. A black shadow appearing between the three of them, reaching through Malcolm and forcing their hands apart, disrupting the flow of their combined energy and preventing them from keeping him in place. They were forced apart somehow.

  No.

  By someone.

  And their killer had continued on his merry way, up that staircase in Kevin’s lodge, and–

  Hal and Kara clutched their heads in fleeting agony, as the memory was stripped from them.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ said Kara, rubbing her temples to alleviate the residual discomfort.

  ‘An implanted memory, maybe?’ said Hal, ‘He’s creating a new restart! A sixth timeline! One that–’

  Hal turned to face the Malcolm of their slowly unravelling future, realising that everything from here on out was entirely out of their control.

  ‘You get to decide, Malcolm,’ Hal said earnestly. ‘What happens next…only you can change it.’

  ‘I don’t know how,’ said Malcolm, in what appeared to be genuine sadness. ‘I’m sorry. For all of this. I…I needed you here.’

  The void within the sea of blue parted, generating a roaring wind, a humanoid shape taking an even denser form as it held the two invisible attackers at bay, not looking too dissimilar from the creatures that resided within the nexus of The White Lodge. Suddenly, time froze around them, creating a vacuum in space as well as time; as if the universe itself had no idea what should come next.

  ‘You think this is why there were no Malcolms at the White Lodge?’ said Kara, shouting over the hurricane of air that was attacking their senses.

  It made sense. How could the back catalogue of Malcolms be there if–

  ‘He’s trapping himself inside a paradox!’ shouted Hal, his words almost lost amidst the uproar. ‘And us along with it!’

  Future Malcolm stood there, utterly stupefied.

  He had to act quickly. It was the only way.

  And with that, he lunged recklessly towards the entity.

  Hal latched onto his arm and tried to hold him back, shooting a glance towards Kara that screamed “A little help would be nice.”

  She caught on quick, grabbing Malcolm’s other arm, their restarter energy crackling wildly, both noting how Future Malcolm was no longer generating a pleasant blue, and instead reverting to a tried and tested red variant.

  ‘Malcolm, no!’ shouted Hal.

  Hal didn’t know how bad it could possibly get if someone from their own future connected with an alive-version of themselves from the past, whilst a duplicated time travelling echo of themselves was simultaneously phasing through multiple timelines to alter the amalgamated history of everyone in the entire room, but he felt safe in his assumption that the answer was somewhere along the lines of “pretty fucking bad.”

  Standing in front of Future Malcolm, Hal released his grip for just a moment. Staring him straight in the eyes, he mimed the action of breaking a twig, then splayed his fingers as if the movie he was tasked with relaying during this hopeless game of charades was “Armageddon.”

  Malcolm stared back, eyes momentarily delirious, but once again present, as he mulled over his limited choice of options; he could jump into his own Echo, and hope that makin
g contact would sever the connection to his alive-self, allowing the Hal and Kara of Restart 165 to succeed in defeating him.

  But that would erase the Hal and Kara he was currently in-phase with from existence.

  Or, he could do nothing; allowing his alive-self to regain control and ultimately kill the alive Hal and Kara who were upstairs.

  Starting this entire cycle over again from the very beginning.

  Suddenly, it wasn’t about him. Not since Ophelia had he felt so certain of that. The words replayed in his mind like the endless loop he was surely condemning himself to.

  It wasn’t. About. Him.

  He had made a promise to this Hal and Kara. One that he intended to keep.

  He broke free from Kara’s grip and continued onwards towards the entity occupying the space within his physical-self, slamming into him, his own eyes red with anger.

  To his surprise, he managed to grab hold of what he assumed would be an intangible ghost, pulling him from the rift and into phase with all of them.

  Blue energy filled the gap instantly, time continued onwards, and Malcolm’s physical-self finally fell to the ground, very much dead.

  Malcolm pinned the Echo of his former-self to the ground, little more than a disembodied central nervous system of red electricity, writhing in confusion, as Future Malcolm wrapped his hands around his own neck and squeezed.

  Then kept squeezing, drawing on the energy his Echo was made of.

  Memories flooded into his mind as he recalled being strangled, his life ebbing away, the darkness claiming him. An impossible contradiction of opposing realities converging, as alternate timelines wrestled with temporal constants and culminated in the bright red man of energy disintegrating into a billion blood red, restarter blue, and emerald green shards.

  A shade of green lost on all except Kara, who recognised it as the same brilliant shade of emerald as the breach between dimensions she had used to escape The White Lodge during her last stand with The Dark Restarter.

  Future Malcolm remained kneeling over the body that no longer was, over his own past that no longer was, panting like the animal of old.

  The Restarters stood there in silence, waiting for Future Malcolm to vanish.

  Perhaps keel over in agony?

  Explode, maybe? That would have been kind of cool.

  But he did neither.

  Eventually he looked up at them and laughed. An anxious laugh, laced with disbelief and confusion.

  ‘That was…’ began Hal.

  ‘Intense,’ agreed Kara.

  There was no other word for it.

  ‘We’re all still here?’ said Hal in utter fascination, patting himself over. ‘We should all be…gone.’

  ‘You…kind of saved us!’

  ‘It was my mess to clean up, Kara,’ said Malcolm, playing down the moment.

  ‘How are we here?’ said Hal, like a broken record.

  ‘Quickly,’ said Malcolm, moving towards his dead body. ‘My past-self is about to restart for the very first time, he should have made his way up the stairs by now.’

  Malcolm recalled the moments after he had been brought into phase with Hal and Kara…into the world of Restarting. He had been disorientated. Unaware that he was no longer in the world of the living.

  ‘He’ll come back down, find me, then vanish,’ said Malcolm, projecting his memories of that moment with them. ‘That’s our window!’

  ‘We can’t be here,’ mumbled Hal, certain they would cease to exist at any moment.

  They waited, as Malcolm continued kneeling, re-enacting his movements in his mind before the darkness had claimed him the very first time. Reliving every moment. Seeing Hal extend his middle finger next to the ghost he would later realise was Kara. All the way up to and including when the thick black fog had whisked him away, until his eyes eventually surged open.

  ‘It’s time,’ he said feverishly.

  ‘But if we revive you, what happens when Kevin busts out of the room behind us?’ said Hal.

  ‘We will wait and protect him if necessary. If it comes to that.’

  ‘We won’t BE here Malcolm!’ said Hal, in a flash of frustration. ‘If we restart your heart, all of us will vanish!’

  ‘I think we’ve established that the three of us aren’t going anywhere,’ said Malcolm, clearly clutching at straws.

  ‘Kara,’ said Hal. ‘You need to listen to me. This doesn’t make any sense. H G Wells over here just strangled the version of himself that brought us back here. Which means–’

  ‘Hal,’ said Kara. ‘You don’t have to keep saying it. I get it. We all do. Let’s just…get this over with.’

  Kara had a point. At this juncture, time was so screwed he was finding it hard to imagine what difference anything they did would make going forward.

  Hal growled in resignation, joining them and kneeling down next to Malcolm’s body

  ‘I want this on record that I have a bad feeling about this.’

  ‘Noted. So how does this work?’ asked Kara, rubbing her hands together and preparing to apply the imaginary paddles from what could only be described as some form of internalised defibrillator.

  ‘Link arms,’ said Malcolm, ‘and just place your hands into my chest. Then release some of the power you both share.’

  Hal looked at Kara, who shrugged, and they did just that, their touch sizzling, ready to discharge some bolts that surely wouldn’t lead to anything resembling resuscitation.

  ‘Let’s sling some blue,’ said Hal. ‘On three?’

  Kara nodded.

  ‘Okay…three,’

  ‘Wait! Are we counting down from three?’

  ‘As evidenced by my opening with the number three, Kar’. Yes.’

  ‘Can we count up from one instead?’

  ‘You’re seriously overthinking this,’ said Hal with a frown.

  But he obliged, counted upwards to three, and they plunged their hands into the heart of their killer.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

  The Impossible Girl

  204th Restart – Saturday, August 25th, 2018, 9:04pm

  The crackle of energy fluctuating between them was met with a crescendo of thunder above them, as the un-beating heart within the deceased man beneath them restarted, a faint pulse surging throughout his lifeless body, causing him to convulse, until he eventually stopped shaking and drew a single, raggedy breath.

  The Restarters exchanged a brief glance of amazement that it had actually worked, as the cabin above them shook with such intensity that Hal felt certain a re-evaluation of the Richter scale may be in order, and for a New York Minute Hal and Kara wondered if they’d finally taken things too far.

  Neither of them had any point of reference for what a thousand suns colliding simultaneously would sound like, but felt safe in assuming it would hold more than a passing similarity to the soul-shattering rumble they had just experienced; an apparent by-product of having just been responsible for creating a crack in time so gargantuan that it was felt across the present, past and future of every timeline in existence, including those that had yet to even form.

  Unbeknownst to the time travellers a momentary occurrence of global déjà vu rippled outwards from where they were kneeling, one that was well on its way to engulfing the entire Earth.

  They had broken the cycle, but at what cost? Once again, they had jammed the fork of defiance into the electrical socket that represented time itself, affecting not only the lives of everyone they would ever come into contact with, but everyone in-between, sending potentially thousands of futures belonging to strangers they hadn’t even met into disarray.

  A notable cracking sound filled their eardrums.

  ‘You think that cracking noise was a good thing?’ asked Kara.

  ‘It’s probably fine,’ lied Hal sarcastically.

  Thunder bellowed once again in the sky above them, an angry roar that seemed to call Hal out on his bullshit, as swirls of fog rippled in and out of phase around them, cracks of blue
and red light opening like hungry mouths, before vanishing just as quickly, then springing back into existence moments later; Angry sneers of trans-dimensional energy bleeding from the innumerable nexuses that seemed to cackle with glee at their unexpected release into a realm of corporeality.

  Kara shuddered, perceiving the curved cuts in reality as frowns, but they could just have easily been disembodied smiles, awkwardly flipped on their axis.

  ‘This was a mistake,’ muttered Kara.

  ‘I’m sensing that,’ Hal agreed emphatically, as another bout of thunder boomed in apparent agreement. ‘And it sounds like Odin agrees with you.’

  Future Malcolm crawled towards them, his body rippling with a red energy that seemed eager to tear him apart, but instead fluctuated wildly, allowing him to remain very much whole, like a teleportation experiment gone horribly awry.

  A thunderous rush of air flooded the basement, a heady mix of both an audible and physical variety assaulting the three of them.

  ‘You’ve got red on you,’ yelled Hal, pointing towards him.

  ‘It’s done,’ bellowed Malcolm. ‘We’re finally fre–’

  Malcolm’s glaringly presumptuous claim that everything was still on track, as opposed to clearly being so far off the rails that the metaphoric train of best laid plans was going to need one hell of a parachute if it had any hope of landing on terra firma any time soon, was ultimately cut short, as he saw the same rippling energy that was afflicting him surging around the two Restarters.

  Energy, albeit of the bluer variety, that pulsated savagely, as if trying to dismantle their bodies. Desperate to dematerialise the trio, so that they could be reinserted into whatever new timeline they had so carelessly created.

  It was the first instance Malcolm had seen the Restart process up close, yet somehow caught mid- phase, snagged on a paradox that seemed reluctant to release the three of them back into the wild until it had run the numbers on exactly where to send them.

  Seeing the look of wonder on Malcolm’s face, Kara looked down at her hand, and twisted her fingers. It was surely a matter of time before the pain of what was happening to their bodies would kick in, and yet…they remained. Unchanged, unclaimed, and still somehow in phase with the past.