Child of the Fall

by D Scott Johnson

  Kim willed herself not to react. Emily had figured it out, what her real relationship to Will was. Stay cool.

  “Really?”

  She nodded slowly, and her expression softened. “All these things you’ve told me. You know so much. You can help him so much. I want you in his life. The why doesn’t matter.”

  A hundred different things passed between them in the silence that followed. Emily might know. She probably knew. It wasn’t important. Kim had no intention of taking any role Emily didn’t want her to have.

  And Kim could see Emily was fine with that. “Thank you, Kim. I can’t say it too many times. If it wasn’t for you, they would’ve taken Will, and I would’ve had no way to get him back.”

  Kim turned to the bathroom to hide her shakes. “Thank me when it’s over.”

  Emily was asleep when Kim got out. Mike hadn’t changed.

  Tomorrow was going to be a very long day.

  Chapter 47

  Spencer

  Cyril’s directions took them to an unfinished part of the plant. Empty conduits stuck out of the ground where fixtures would go, with more bare rock than concrete. They eventually ended up in an actual cave. Working lights cast stark shadows everywhere, and the smell of damp was bigger and earthier.

  “Are we here?” June asked.

  “You are,” said an electronic voice in the darkness.

  June’s eyes grew wide. “Cyril?”

  A short, lightly built man walked out from the shadows. His outfit made him look like a cosplayer trying to be Master Chief from a Halo reboot with stuff he found in the basement.

  “That’s Cyril?” Spencer asked. “I always pictured him as taller.”

  He laughed. “I have missed you so much, Spencer. And now, I get to finally take this damn thing off.”

  He reached back and unhooked the helmet latches, then lifted it off his head.

  “The fuck? Tonya?”

  ***

  She had to tell the story of what happened to her twice before he believed it. Tonya’s sudden appearance was nowhere near as crazy as how she’d gotten here.

  She’d traveled through time.

  “That’s why I had to use the disguise and stay off the phone networks. I didn’t know how destructive I could be. It’s fun to think about changing the past, but being in a position to do it? I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

  “But you’re coming out now?” June asked. “Why?”

  “It’s already happened. I left about an hour ago, so causality is safe from me now. Thank God. I did not appreciate the feeling of all existence being my responsibility.”

  “Madam,” Edmund said from the box on Spencer’s hip, “while your journey was extraordinary, do you feel that your actions could actually change the entire universe?”

  “What’s he doing in there?” Tonya asked.

  “It’s a long story,” Spencer replied. “Yours is more interesting right now. And I think it’s a good question.”

  Tonya nodded as she put the helmet on a crate and sat on another. “At first I didn’t know. There are some theories that say any small change could have enormous ramifications for the future.”

  “The butterfly effect,” June said.

  “Exactly. But that sort of worked in my favor after I thought about it. I’d only gone back eight days. One of the things that kept me calm was that the butterflies wouldn’t have time for critical changes even if I made them fly differently.”

  Spencer couldn’t let that one go without a question. “One of the things?”

  Tonya smiled. Now he could tell she hadn’t been a scared rabbit. She had been having fun. “The other one was me. This me, helping the me that just left. We did causality experiments together. The first one is still ongoing, I think. I recorded a speech but varied it from the one I got when I arrived, leaving a note about the variation.”

  “What in blue blazes will that accomplish?” Edmund asked.

  “It’s a test for a standing wave in causality, and I think it’s working. The Tonya who left me a message made it slightly different, and I made a message that was slightly different from that one. Since I was able to do that, it strongly implies there is at least some parallelism in the flow of time.”

  “I’m the one who speaks the Queen’s English,” Edmund said, “and I didn’t understand one word of that.”

  Tonya laughed. “If I couldn’t vary my message, if something prevented me, then it would mean there’s only one flow of time. And that turns out to be true as well. I didn’t vary what I said on the video. I couldn’t, and I don’t know why. I did vary what I put in the notes.”

  That blew his mind. “So,” Spencer said, “if you couldn’t change some of what the previous you did, that means…” It was a seriously fucked up concept.

  “It could mean,” Tonya said as a grin bloomed, “that not only does the past affect the future, the future can affect the past. The arrow of time might point both ways.”

  “Might?” June asked.

  “I wasn’t able to do rigorous experiments, and I couldn’t repeat the ones I managed in the limited time I had. There are a few other theories that fit the observations. Infinite universes would cover what I’ve seen. It was easier to change small things than it was big ones, so causality could have an elasticity built into it. You maybe can change small things, but try anything big and the universe stretches out and stops you. I’m certain that causality must be robust in the face of legitimate time travel, otherwise someone somewhere in the universe would’ve come back and wrecked it all by now.”

  “Or,” Edmund said, “there could be an annoying person flying around willy-nilly in a blue box mucking it up one moment and fixing it the next. I must apologize for raining on this rather obtuse parade, but I have to point out that we have bigger problems right now. There’s a maniac above our heads getting ready to blow up the world, and as far as plans go, we don’t have two farthings between us to pay for a peck on the cheek from a woman of discounted virtues.”

  “Edmund’s right,” Tonya said. “And it’s gotten worse.”

  It turned out the bad guys had snatched Kim’s kid, and Mike was fucked up.

  “Kim will be here in eight hours.”

  “How do you know?” Spencer asked.

  “I sent her a note just before I came down to meet with you. She’ll be here with Emily and Mike tomorrow morning. We need to do everything we can to prepare the way.” Tonya flipped open a small box. “I think these might come in handy.”

  Phones. Tonya had brought him and June phones! Finally, he didn’t feel like an arm had been cut off. “How did you get signal all the way down here?”

  “I haven’t, but it doesn’t matter. We’ll be able to communicate with each other and access this side of the air gap. Spencer, I think you’ll like what I loaded on yours.”

  After a few moments to get them synched up, Spencer found what she was talking about. His entire toolkit. His entire fucking toolkit. All this time he’d been wandering around a messed up, mostly defenseless network—with physical access to the hardware, no less—and hadn’t been able to do anything with it that he didn’t roll by hand himself. Spencer wasn’t sure the one time he’d managed had worked at all, since June’s Abada AI seemed to have been ready for them. Now he had a full-featured, debugged toolkit.

  Then he saw the download date. Eight days ago.

  His heart stopped for a moment. She’d made him a part of one of her experiments. One of her seriously fucked up experiments. “You sent me a message for this, I remember. But it was you who called me, not the Tonya who was walking back from the raid.”

  She winked at him. “Got it in one.”

  “I don’t fucking believe it. I got a note from a time traveler. Why didn’t you tell me? Wait, okay, scratch that. I know why you couldn’t tell me.”

  She nodded. “But I also knew you disappeared down here, which meant bad things had happened. We needed options, so I risked using one of the public t
erminals to reach out to you and ordered us some phones. Then Anna caused me no end of trouble calling in the students. It was crowded that morning. Will they work?”

  “Oh yes. Before, we were dead in the water. Now we have options.”

  “You and your bloody options.” Edmund said. “Am I jumping the gun, or are the words I have a cunning plan about to march with ill-deserved confidence out of your mouth and into this conversation?”

  Spencer ignored Edmund’s chatter and turned to June. “We need to take another crack at Abada.”

  “If I have to wear another bloody disguise,” Edmund said, “I’ll have your head on a platter.”

  “You won’t, Edmund,” he said. “Where we’re going, we won’t need disguises.”

  Chapter 48

  Mike

  Signals could not travel faster than the speed of light. If they could, anywhere in the observable universe, scientists would’ve spotted the odd behavior and invalidated a theory that’d held sway in astrophysics for more than a century.

  But they hadn’t. General Relativity kept being proved right again and again, exactly, generation after generation. Nothing anyone could see, or more critically predict to see, had ever contradicted the theory.

  And yet here Mike was, in a realm that orbited a star system somewhere else, tied to his realspace body on Earth and receiving telemetry from it in real time. That was more inexplicable than being able to access an alien realmspace without an adapter. Mike wasn’t designed; he had emerged in the interstitial spaces between realms. Saying he couldn’t inhabit one designed by an alien intelligence was like saying a human couldn’t walk on another planet.

  At least now he knew why he couldn’t access the lower-level functions of the realm. They were there, but designed with different controls, different assumptions, and with a different language.

  As to the apparent violation of the speed of light, it might not be a violation at all. The idea that particles could use higher dimensions to shortcut distances in realspace had been knocking around since at least the middle of the twentieth century. That things bigger than particles might do so had been a staple of science fiction for even longer.

  There were philosophical implications as well. People had made confident, logically consistent predictions that free will could not exist if it was ever proven that particles could use higher dimensions this way. Those people were in for a disappointment. Mike knew from experience that the universe could easily challenge the rules of logic or ignore them altogether when it was time to get things done.

  Mike’s own existence, especially his ability to go outside into realspace with a human host, also relied on information traveling through these higher dimensions. He’d only been able to speculate about what sort of relativistic effects he might experience if he managed to separate his realspace host from his threads by a significant distance. Now he had an answer, or at least part of one. When he got home, he’d have a whole new angle of research to explore.

  Assuming he managed to get home at all.

  Gonzo disappeared when the door opened. She hadn’t had time to elaborate on what Mike being in another solar system meant, or what he could do about it.

  Tal stuck his head in. “Is everything well?”

  “I don’t know how to answer that right now.”

  Tal sighed. “It’s not my fault you were released into the galaxy so woefully unprepared. I have never seen a Trona secnik ton with such a low educational level. The guild has lost all respect for the office of caretaker. It really is quite insulting.” He turned and walked away.

  Gonzo flashed to life and swirled around Mike’s head. “You him must follow,” she whispered. “You here break free cannot.”

  Gonzo vanished when Tal turned around. Mike would need to figure out how to get Tal to go for a walk so he and Gonzo could have a chat, no matter how Yoda-like her side of it was.

  “You are able to walk, yes? It would take some time for me to revive more…never mind. I don’t have the energy to learn more new words. If you can’t walk, you’ll have to spend another night in there.”

  Mike squelched out onto the mud, but then stopped. This wasn’t created by a team of writers. It represented a real place. When the shelter door shut behind him, the remaining natural flat light cut off all shadows, leaving him standing in a landscape decayed beyond recognition.

  A cold, humid breeze kicked up and made the branches of the single tree construct nearby creak and clack together. He stood in the grave of an entire civilization. They were alone, the only living things on an entire—simulated—system. “How long?”

  “How long what?”

  Mike walked toward the holo, the only thing left that hinted at the beauty that must once have been. “How long has it been like this?”

  Tal straightened. “Cantlezna took approximately two efnek to complete. I have been caretaker for five more.”

  Efneck was Tal’s word for centuries. They also had a word for the death of civilizations—of entire planets. When Mike caught up to him, they fell into step together. “Was it a war?”

  “Nothing so dramatic. A standard announcement was all that was required.”

  He was clinical, like it happened every day. “Did they suffer?”

  “No. It was quite peaceful. I’m not sure any of them understood what was happening at the end. They typically don’t.”

  Mike looked at the planet with new eyes now. He had never walked on anything other than pavement here. No sand, no dirt, just a thin layer of wet muck over whatever passed for concrete. Probably concrete. The stuff was easy to make, and the environment was similar to Earth’s. That didn’t account for the trees. On a hunch, he walked up to the next one they encountered that was still standing. About a foot from the trunk, he stumbled off an unseen grate onto much softer soil.

  The planet, at least this part anyway, wasn’t paved. It was landscaped. He stopped. If the trees were placed to be decorative, then they would be in a pattern. And they were, a very recognizable one. Trees were in a line with wide, flat spaces on either side. Streets.

  His footprints were clearly seen walking straight down the middle of one. Intersections were marked out by trees either on the corners, or in the center. Low mounds were regularly spaced out along each street.

  Houses.

  He could even make out driveways.

  Tal was leading him through a suburb. But it wasn’t exactly like one on Earth. The streets curved wrong and were too wide, as were the houses. It looked like a human settlement placed on a sheet of rubber and then stretched, houses and all.

  When they crested the next hill, the conclusion was inescapable. Off in the distance stood the ruins of a city. A big one.

  “We can’t possibly reach that in less than a day,” Mike said. The towers were the same ones he’d seen in the distance yesterday. Now in clear view, it was a spectacular ruin. Mounds of rubble marked collapsed skyscrapers, while other towers leaned dangerously. Some of the tops had crashed into other buildings, creating an obvious domino effect that left broken stubs stabbing jaggedly into the sky. The desolation was oppressive. It wasn’t a city, it was an ancient coffin left empty on the ground.

  “You misunderstand. My Salta is no longer in the center of the capital. Come along.”

  Mike needed to talk to Gonzo. He had to get rid of Tal.

  Then it came to him. Mike made sure he was turned toward Tal when he said, “What? Oh, you’re back!”

  Tal stopped.

  “Yeah, he’s been pretty irritated. I can’t translate like you can.”

  Tal walked over. “Has your other half reestablished contact?”

  Mike held up a finger, which made Tal back off in a huff. Good. He turned his back on the holo. “No, Really? That’s what took so long? Wait, hang on.” He faced Tal and took a gamble. “I’m not rishta, but my other half is. A lot.” Tal had used the word in the context of religious modesty.

  “That’s very unusual.”

  He turn
ed away from Tal. “I’m trying, but he doesn’t understand.” He turned back. “If you wouldn’t mind?”

  “How are you not able to…” he did a thing with his head Mike recognized as his version of an eye roll. “Why must you speak to her out loud?”

  It was fun to irritate Tal, especially when he had a legitimate reason to ask him a question. “You mean we don’t have to? How?”

  Tal didn’t cooperate. “For the last time, I’m not your teacher. I’ll be over there.” He indicated an area across the street they’d been walking down.

  “It can’t be line of sight.”

  That wound him up tighter. “Why not?”

  “I don’t make the rules, she does.” Which was true.

  “Fine.” He stomped over the next hill.

  Gonzo swirled to life but then vanished.

  Tal was cheating. “I’m serious,” Mike shouted. “She knows. I’ll come get you when she’s done.” Also true, but for a different value of she.

  Gonzo zipped around his head. The laughter didn’t need translating. “Unpaired doomed idiocy they to and say are. Your mate this clever is?”

  The first part made no sense, but he was pretty sure he understood the second. “She’s definitely smarter than I am.”

  “That key pairing the to a is successful. You your ceremony when, you powerful complete will be.”

  Mike needed Kim so he could understand the gibberish. “Lady, he’s not going to wait forever. You need to simplify. Something’s about to happen, right?”

  “Yes. He you his place, you but wants can not take.”

  That sounded like the opposite of going home. “I can’t take his place? What place?”

  “This so frustrating is. Do his terms to agree not. Fight you if must. Please him destroy do not.”

  She was almost making sense. “Don’t agree, fight him if I have to, but don’t kill him?”

  “Yes. Please. We apart long he me you for so but by have been can not join destroying. So have been. He I know that what happen but does not is do. You manage that I home sure you if will get for.”

  “Lost me again.”