Glitch (The Harem at the End of the Galaxy, #4)

by Kenze, Kyle

  I stroked her hair, then her cheek. So pretty. So sure of herself and yet clueless about the real dangers we faced. If she only knew how many times I'd folded myself into that completely untested device.

  “Oh, I'm entirely confident we can use it to deliver me safely to the planet. But what about smaller targets?” I nuzzled her hair at the back of her neck. Her scent never lost its power to enchant. “If there's a foreign object in our solar system, would I be able to transport myself into that craft? Can you aim that precisely?”

  “What foreign object? You think someone from space is attacking the Earth? That's what the Defcon warning was about?”

  This sounded familiar. We'd had this discussion before. No one ever tells you déjà vu is such a frustrating sensation, an itch at the back of the brain you can't quite scratch. And it's worse when you have layers upon layers of looped memories, most of them different in tiny ways from the current memory.

  As time went on, I became more and more confused about what was real in any given timeline and what wasn't. There must be important things I was forgetting.

  Wasn't I supposed to meet someone? Wasn't I supposed to be gathering an army of some kind?

  Think.

  “It was unusual to go directly to One without going to Two first, wasn't it?” I asked carefully. “I had the impression of an immediate, unexpected danger, didn't you?”

  Yes, we'd talked like this before. The words were coming back to me. I'd said them many times, and the logic still seemed reasonable. Our ongoing shoving matches with the likes of the Russian Federation or the North Koreans seldom moved the needle. Even hot wars like Afghanistan and Iraq rarely justified a Defcon response. Hell, when the Pentagon itself was attacked in 2001, the Defcon level was only raised to Three.

  A sudden move straight to nuclear midnight meant something unprecedented was underway. That something had to be the alien ship approaching the planet Earth out of nowhere.

  I kept figuring out things, and yet the things I figured out never really changed anything. I always remained trapped in a spacetime loop where the L-clones were dying of the virus at one end of the galaxy while the Pentagon or maybe the entire Earth was under attack on the other end.

  I always failed.

  Yet, if I always failed, how did even a portion of humanity survive? No other species had achieved that much. They'd been wiped out down to the last individual.

  I had to hold onto that. The virus had been delivered damaged. It attached itself only to males, not females. Not for the first time, I wondered how it had been damaged. Did I have something to do with that? The time-travel device changed genetics. That's how it worked. It changed mine. So if it could make some changes, why couldn't it make others?

  Maybe we'd tried, maybe I'd finally talked the three techs into making some adjustments in the equipment, but the experiment didn't go as planned. We damaged the virus, but we didn't break it. Not all humanity was wiped out, but most of it was.

  Still, if we'd done that much, why couldn't I remember any of it?

  And why didn't I keep bouncing in that direction, between the Pentagon and the aliens, over and over again until we fixed the timeline the way we wanted it?

  My head hurt. My everything hurt.

  “You don't even have the coordinates of this alleged alien craft.” Jaime came up behind me to rub my neck. “You've never been there.” It was a flat statement, not a question.

  Welp, that was one problem right there. Although I had the ability to travel without the need for the device, when I traveled in my own body, my final destination was left to randomness, fate, and the vagaries of time. That is to say, I traveled but not freely. Lots of times, thousands of times now, I'd been picked out of one place and dropped in another, and yet I never knew in advance where I would land. So much of where and when I went was beyond my control.

  And it wasn't like I could end up anywhere. I always popped in and out of the same basic places. Various spots around the D.C. of our time. Often the sub-sub-sub basement under the Pentagon. Sometimes my cubicle, sometimes my apartment. A few other scattered hot spots here and there around the metro area. And, of course, I kept popping in and out of the final days of the all-female planet on the other end of the galaxy. Sometimes the tourist spots like the Moon memorial and the beach. Sometimes the hospital.

  In all my travels, I'd never visited any place I hadn't already been. I could travel but I couldn't break out of my limited loop. It was like going around and around forever on the fucking Metro. You always got on and off at the same few stops.

  I couldn't visit the alien ship because I'd never been to the alien ship. Before I could travel there, I had to, well, travel there. I needed to use the device and calibrate it to the coordinates of my intended destination in space and time. If I did that even once, I could probably bounce back and forth from the craft forevermore until we found the timeline where humanity won. But how could I do it once?

  I had only the scant outline of a very simple plan. Figure out where the alien craft was. Somehow find and set the coordinates. Let the device transport me there... where I'd do what? I'd land naked and do battle with an intergalactic army of genocidal aliens?

  Some fucking plan that was. And yet humanity did survive for centuries after the first attack. Somebody had some plan. Somebody had done something.

  I was the traveler. I was the last man. That so-called somebody had to be none other than me, myself, and I.

  The three techs crowded in on me, stroking me, calming me. I didn't focus much on what they were saying. Some of it was too technical, some of it was just wrong. They had the theoretical knowledge, but they didn't have the boots-on-the-ground experience of time travel.

  “You can't go alone,” said Bette. “You'll be eaten alive.”

  “We don't even know if the alien ship has breathable air,” said Jaime. “What if it's open to the vacuum of space?”

  “We can't risk losing the last man on Earth,” said Felicity. “You have to stay in this bunker. Without your seed, humanity dies out.”

  “I have to go. You three don't realize it, or you're starting to realize only a little, but I've been bouncing around the same loop in time for years, and I'm starting to circle the drain. A man's mind can endure only so much endless repetition.”

  Even the beautiful repetition of the three of them kissing me, embracing me, the sweet musk of their scent insinuating its way into my nostrils...

  Time had to start moving forward again. Something had to jolt me out of this loop.

  Loop? Call it what it was. A snarl.

  “You're confused about what's real and what's not real,” Jaime said. “Oh, we've always known that about you.”

  “It's not important,” Felicity said. “You're a little absent-minded, that's all.”

  I didn't use to be. I've changed.

  We rocked together. The three of them understood how to ground me. The taste of their smooth bodies, the silk of their sweet muffs...

  Entangled together, we performed an intricate four-way dance. My dick, my tongue, my fingers. Every part of me was engaged, and the healing power of our joining brought me back to reality again. The confusion lifted for a time.

  “If my travels leave traces in spacetime, we should be looking for those traces,” I said.

  “We know. We are,” Jaime said. “We've dedicated a lot of computer resources to searching the near solar system.”

  Felicity was frowning into one of the monitors. “We keep coming back with one area of spacetime damage, but it's fairly old damage and it's fairly far away in the vicinity of Mars. Not sure how it would be related to you or to planet Earth at all.” She tapped the screen.

  I saw nothing except charts that meant nothing to me. I analyzed political trends, not scientific data.

  “That's Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars famous for being one of the smallest moons in our solar system. The other is Deimos, which is even smaller. They were first observed in Mars orbit som
etime around 1877, and they have every appearance of being two asteroids hollowed out to serve as spacecraft.”

  This sounded like History Channel stuff to me. Although... had we been here before? Had we talked about this stuff before? Something tickled in my brain.

  “You can look it up,” Bette said. “Historians have never been able to explain who created them or how they got there, but we're starting to wonder if they were the craft responsible for carrying your aliens from Andromeda.”

  “And they've just been sitting there rotating on their thumbs for almost a hundred and fifty years?” I didn't want to sound sarcastic. They were the ones who went to MIT and CalTech, not me. But I needed to be convinced.

  Felicity lifted a slim shoulder in a half-shrug. “Presumably, it takes time to detect signs of what they'd considered advanced intelligent life and then tailor the virus to destroy that life without taking out the entire ecosystem. There isn't much point in conquering a planet you've completely destroyed. The galaxy is already teeming with millions of empty planets that don't support life.”

  Well, we'd just been saying we needed a target. The moons of Mars were as good a target as any.

  “There's two of them,” I said slowly. “Why Phobos?”

  “It might not matter which one we target. They might be, probably are, both alien craft.” Jaime too had a pretty shrug. “But Phobos appears to be slowly falling out of orbit, and there's no evidence they're trying to stabilize it. This suggests to me that they could be about to leave the vicinity of Mars.”

  I lifted an eyebrow to ask the obvious question.

  “If they planned to stay, they'd adjust their orbit to avoid crashing into the Martian surface. But if they plan to leave anyway, they might want to avoid alerting us to their ability to maneuver until the last possible moment. At our current level of technology, we would almost immediately pick up on it if they used a rocket to stabilize their orbit.”

  “We'd pick up on the fact they were leaving orbit, too.”

  “True. But we don't know what propulsion system they use or how fast they travel,” Bette said. “Once they're ready to move, maybe they intend to be here in hours. It would take months, if not years, for the Earth to mount a response.”

  Unless that response came from us. We were the only ones who could travel instantaneously.

  Shit. I used to watch movies about unlikely heroes. I never planned on being one.

  “Talk me down,” I said. “Explain to me why the damage in spacetime near those moons can't come from their own device.”

  “You know better.” Felicity was hugging me again. “They can't have a device like ours. We'd see evidence of cosmic breakdown all over the Milky Way, not to mention the Andromeda Galaxy. But we know both of them are perfectly healthy spiral galaxies with their large black holes confined to their centers. We've never had any reason to suspect a black hole or any other spacetime damage in the vicinity of Mars. This is new. This is us.”

  Us? It was me. I squared my shoulders. There must be a way to tunnel through time to the aliens and do something to them, because I'd already traveled in time and done something to them.

  Jaime and Bette added themselves to the group hug. “Humanity can be saved,” Jaime said. “It really can, Clayton. We can't lose hope. There's a way to do it, and we're going to find it.”

  “If I can only remember how I did it before I lose all brain function.”

  “Excuse me. If I can get your attention.”

  The four of us spun around. There, just inside the airlock, stood General D. Chase Dyers and her latest sidekick, Brandy the messenger girl. They hadn't come down the elevator, hadn't gone through the clean room. They'd simply materialized, naked and barefoot, Brandy's auburn hair in a bit of a tangle from their zero-gravity encounter.

  She smiled. “The U.S. Army has arrived on the scene.”

  Dyers, her lips slick with something that could only be pussy, kept her face expressionless. Maybe a smile lacked the appropriate gravitas for a general's entrance.

  Behind the two women from 2020, two more women materialized. Also naked, also curvy. But these two voluptuous beauties came from the future.

  Darlene and Jing.

  My plan wasn't such a complete failure after all. At least some of the women I'd seeded had finally developed the ability to travel independently through time.

  Felicity, Jaime, Bette, Brandy, Daisy/Dyers, Darlene, and Jing. And of course me.

  Eight of us against the Andromeda Galaxy.

  Fuck it. Those other guys didn't stand a chance.

  ☼☼☼

  Clayton's adventures conclude in Explode, Book #5, the final episode in the Harem at the End of the Galaxy series. Everybody comes together... and not just to defeat the alien menace.

  auth

  About Kyle Kenze

  I'm a regular guy from Texas who used to work in a cube in a well-known space center in Houston. It was less thrilling than you might think, but I got pretty good at filling in the slow parts of the day with my own private sci-fi fantasies. Now it's time to share my twisted stories with the world at large.

  If you found a minor typo or want to join my mailing list, please feel free to email me at kylekenze@gmail.com.

  Visit my page at Kyle's Harem to find out where you can buy or borrow all my books.