I: I think you are something much more special. The irony is that if there were no Blink, there would not have been a war.
S: That’s a lie, just like it’s a lie that the people in São Paulo would have lived if the Blink never happened. The Big Six were going to war. You can’t let socialist ideas spread. If Mars was successful here, and up there, it would have undone all your careful propaganda. The showdown was coming.
I: How do you hide for years without us finding you via your tracker?
S: I didn’t have it. We’ll get to that.
I: I have questions about time travel. How did—
S: I’m not here to talk about time travel, though I’m glad you finally figured that shit out. Who’d you talk to? You had a singular line of questioning you pushed here during the last days. None of it related to that.
I: Your socialist democracy can’t survive on Mars. They never do. People succumb to fear, no matter the government. The everyday person doesn’t want war, but it’s remarkably easy to convince them. It’s the government that determines political priorities, and it’s easy to drag people along with you by tapping into that fear. I don’t care if you have a communist mecca, a fascist regime, or a representative democracy, even some monarchy with a gutless parliament. People can always be convinced to turn on one another. All you have to do is convince them that their way of life is being attacked. Denounce all the pacifist liberal bleeding hearts and feel-good heretics, the social outcasts, the educated. Call them elites and snobs. Say they’re out of touch with real patriots. Call these rabble-rousers terrorists. Say their very existence weakens the state. In the end, the government need not do anything to silence dissent. Their neighbors will do it for them.
S: Maybe so. Everything comes around again, doesn’t it? But this time, your time . . . is over. It’s mine now. Ours. I suppose it’s an old story, isn’t it? The oldest story. It’s the dark against the light. The dark is always the easier path. Power. Domination. Blind obedience. Fear always works to build order, in the short term. But it can’t last. Fear doesn’t inspire anything like love does.
I: You aren’t going to win this by telling a pretty story and holding hands.
S: There was never anything to win. All we had to do was survive. The Big Six killed themselves. It’s a rotten choice soldiers are given. Kill your enemy to save yourself, save your friends, and commit murder. But don’t pull that trigger and you might die, your friends might die . . . you may even lose the war, because of that choice. But it’s a soldier’s choice. It’s the same argument for those who can get pregnant, you know. Now, of course, most of the corps have to give you a license to have kids. But there was an argument, a long time ago, that to continue a pregnancy or not, while a terrible decision, was a decision only the pregnant person could make. It’s that way with soldiers. You have the choice. None of it’s good, but it’s yours.
I: Why was it you who could move through time when deployed?
S: How should I know? I’m not in logistics. The Mars Reconnaissance was the last mission I engaged in, but the first time I was actually deployed. Took me a long time to figure that out. You look at time as a circle, say, all these events spinning around and around. It’s like we’re all tied to a wheel. What you did when you broke us into pieces was break us from that wheel. We bounced around inside of it, popping in and out of time, experiencing it all out of order. I spent this whole war in two places.
I: That isn’t possible.
S: Sure as shit is possible. The Big Six knew it, too. Tene-Silvia sure did. They didn’t realize how bad it was, though, thought they could keep us going with enough therapy, and trying to guide the person who traveled to the right future, the future that favored them. My shrink sure as shit was complicit. They knew I wasn’t crazy. They just didn’t know how deep it all went. We were all a bunch of guinea pigs.
I: Why come to Saint Petersburg at all, then? Why not just watch out the end of your little game safe on Mars?
S: Because I needed you, Norberg. I needed you to bring me here to this cold little cell in Southern Africa so we could come full circle.
I: The Blink—
S: It’s all a big circle, sweetheart. Time is a mindfuck, isn’t it?
I: How do you know who I am?
S: You still don’t know? That doesn’t surprise me. I was no one, to you. That’s what it is, with bullies. The things they do to you shape your life profoundly. But they often don’t even recall your face, let alone your name. You don’t know? I’m Dietz, Norberg. I’m the kid of some guy you disappeared back when you were a sergeant, a guy you probably don’t even remember. I signed up with Teni right after the Blink.
I: That’s . . . not possible.
S: Anything’s possible when you’re unstuck from time, Norberg.
(LAUGHTER)
I: You need to tell me how that’s possible. You arrived in Saint Petersburg on a Martian shuttle, already vaccinated against the Martian pox. How? Did the Martians give it to you?
S: All right, Norberg. I see from the look on your face that I’m about out of time. I can feel it, too, did you know that? I can feel the jumps coming. But to tell you everything you want to know, I need to start at the beginning. And . . . ah yes, here we are. You’ve got a little Masukisan squad out there fucking up your perimeter, which is about to take out your security. And my squad is just arriving.
(RECORDING ENDS)
“I have you,” Norberg said. “Why do you continue to be so good-spirited? You have nowhere to go. We’re scooping you up like rats from a burning cane field. There is no more Mars!”
“I’m good-spirited because I know something you don’t,” she said.
“And what is that?”
“There was never a Mars to fight. You were obliterating corporate holds on Mars. The Mars resistance? The real Mars? I told them everything. Who you would hit, what cities, and when. We got out ninety percent of civilians before your soldiers, before I—ha, yeah, me!—even hit the dirt there. This was all a big corporate circle-jerk. But it produced a Martian resistance that’s going to outlast you. My team up there is going to outlast you. And me, here? I’m going to checkmate this whole motherfucking time line.”
43.
Flash-bangs.
Always a good sign.
I leaped across the table and took Norberg by the throat. It felt good. Probably too good.
She hacked and coughed. Alarms went off. Shots fired. I heard more flash-bangs. I smashed Norberg’s head against the floor.
Two guards came in, but I was ready for them. Turns out, you spend a few years in a Martian POW camp, you have a lot of time to think about the future you’ve already seen. The future that’s finally here, this moment.
I took down the first guard. Palm strike. Throat. Smashed the kneecap of the other one. It was over in four seconds.
I gazed down at their smashed faces and thought of Frankie, from all those years ago. How I would have handled myself then, if I knew what I knew now.
But I wasn’t going that far back.
I slung the guards’ guns over my shoulder. Grabbed their flash-bangs and the most important thing—the EMP overloader—and ran into the hallway. I knew the turrets would be there because I had seen them before, of course, from the other side. I shot out the turrets. They exploded.
I ran down the hall, bare feet slapping against the metal. I rounded the corner and came upon the basement. The smell, shit, the smell was the same. The reddish dirt. The salty air from the sea.
The burst from the turret had stunned them. I shot twice. These rifles were standard ammo. All I needed to do was stun them; shoot something that wasn’t their heads. I tossed the EMP overloader into the room. That took them out.
The bodies of the squad—my squad, myself—fell in a heap. They joined the other bodies there, some squad of Masukisan misfits trying to breach the compound. The ones who conveniently set off all those lovely alarms and triggered the room’s defenses.
I c
ame upon them and stopped, dizzy and exuberant. Oh fuck, I thought. Oh fuck, I did it. This is it.
I gazed at the knocked-out bodies before me. Akesson, Chikere, Toranzos, Sharpe . . . and there, in front of them all, guarding them bodily like some big damn idiot—was me.
I seemed so small. So young. I had a long moment of dissonance, brought back to myself only because of the blaring alarms.
I suspected Norberg didn’t have many more guards in there. But I shut the big doors to the interrogation hall nonetheless, and barred them with one of the pulse rifles. Mine, as it turned out. Shit, this doubling thing was fucked up.
I pulled the utility knife from the belt of my other self, my younger self. I could not help but pull back the cuff on the collar and note the clear skin over the chest. I rubbed at my own scar reflexively, the scar Tanaka insisted I should have. The scar I would have, I did have, now.
I cut out the tracker from between the shoulder blades of my younger self, and swallowed it. I wouldn’t need it very long. I pulled out the heads-up lenses and inserted them into my eyes. I gathered my own body up into my arms, and let out my breath.
Focus. I needed the tracker, because it connected me to logistics. To the web of light. To the breakdown of time. I paged into the platoon channel and said, “This is Dietz. Team is down. We need immediate evac. Immediate!”
“Copy that, Private Dietz, hold for evac.”
Oh, to be part of a small squad again.
We broke apart.
I saw nothing. A wall of blackness.
I heaved myself backward in time, so heavy, so desperately heavy that I broke the fabric of time and space itself.
I corporealized at the edge of Cape Town, a bustling Cape Town with a busy beach and curious children who gazed at me as if I were some mythological monster come to life. And maybe I was.
I set my old self down here gently, so gently, pushing the helmet back, murmuring, “We can do this. We can break the loop. I believe in you.”
I burst apart again, still only partially corporealized.
Volition.
Control the construct.
I needed another time.
Another city.
Go back, Dietz. Go back.
Back to the beginning.
Another city. A sprawl.
I knew when and where I needed to be. I knew where this started, and it was where it would end.
I knew this city because I had grown up here. It was as if I were four years old again, staring into the lights of São Paulo. I could smell the sea on the wind.
I knew this place, and this day, because it was before the end of everything, before the beginning of the end.
I came together on a dirt street running between two rows of squatter houses, all lovingly put together with whatever the owners could find. The colors are what impress you; the people out sweeping their front stoops as if they are residents of some grand city. And it was. It is. The São Paulo I knew, the labor camps, we were grand. The people were grand.
I lifted my head, and saw him there in the doorway of the nearest shelter.
My brother, Tomás.
He gaped at me. I held open my arms.
Tomás ran, and I embraced him.
I wanted him to be safe forever. I wanted us all to be safe.
“I knew you would come,” Tomás said.
“Is Vi here? Did she find you?”
He nodded and took my hand. “She’s helping, up here. Free legal advice!”
I didn’t correct him. Vi wasn’t a lawyer. It didn’t matter. My stomach churned; a flutter in my heart. What would she say?
Tomás led me to a temporary tent at the end of the lane. And there she was, standing behind a makeshift table, her pinched face so serious, her once-soft hands dirty and calloused. She pushed a curl of her hair up over her forehead, and squinted at a piece of old paper one of the men in front of her presented.
For a moment I could do nothing but stare at her.
“Come on,” Tomás said. He tugged my hand.
We came within a few meters of her, and then I had to stop, and I could not move, because the sight of her rooted me to the spot. In that one moment, that terrible and wonderful moment, I saw what this was all about. I had taken an oath of vengeance to get back at Mars for what they had done to her and Tomás and my cousins here. I started this whole thing for these people they had taken.
And I had found them again.
She saw me.
Our eyes met across the table. My palms began to sweat. What if she rejected me? She had every right. What would I do then? Just burst apart into nothing?
Vi came around the table, mouth half open. “Gina?” she said.
“Hello,” I said, and I let out my breath, because it had been years since I heard someone use my first name.
“How did you—no, Tomás, of course, I just didn’t expect—”
“I didn’t know how to tell you what I meant, when you said you were going here. I got offended. It was like you couldn’t even see me. See . . . us, this. You’re . . . but it doesn’t matter. Vi, something bad is going to happen here, and if we don’t leave now, it’s all going to come apart.”
The days of trying to change the system from within were long over. Sometimes you had to let the whole world burn behind you.
“I need you to trust me, Vi. Just one last time.”
“What about them? We can’t leave your family. Your brother, your cousins, and all these people—”
“I’ll take them too. As many as I can manage.”
“But where will we go?”
“I don’t know. Do you want to find out with me?”
“Gina? I didn’t think you would come.”
“Is that . . . good, or bad?”
Her eyes filled. “Good.” She opened her arms, and I pulled her to my chest and felt her heart beat against mine.
We broke apart over São Paulo.
I was a massive wave of energy, disrupting the bodies around me, transforming everything my altered atoms touched.
We became millions of points of light.
We Blinked.
You can’t save them all. But I could save some. I could take us all . . . someplace else, to some other time or place where there’s no war, and the corporations answer to us, and freedom isn’t just a sound bite on a corp-controlled news station.
I was high above the city now. So many people lost.
What if there was a war and nobody came?
Was I deluding myself? Millions of people of every class and position, ghouls, residents, citizens . . . people like Vi and Tomás. My cousins and citizen stakeholders. They will want to rebuild a world like the one we came from, won’t they? A world where the same people were in charge. Because it was known. It was comforting.
All I could hope was that some other place would give us a chance. There was no future here, only the past. Leaving them here condemned them to die with the rest. If I couldn’t save the world, at least I could save the people I loved.
This is not the end. There are other worlds. Other stars. Other futures. Maybe we’ll do better out there. Maybe when they have a war again, no one will come.
Maybe they will be full of light.
AFTER
“Whatever’s busted in your life—you can use its pieces to make the life you want.”
—Warren Ellis
I still believe in the military. I believe there’s sometimes a greater evil that must be vanquished. But more often than we’d like to admit, there is no greater evil, just an exchange of one set of oppressive horrors with another. Wars are for old people. For rich people. For people protected by the perpetuation of horrors on others.
I don’t regret what I’ve told people about my motives in this conflict. I don’t regret what got me here. Maybe you wanted a different story. One with more answers, less ambiguity. But that wasn’t how I experienced this war. It’s like Machado de Assis said: “I know your excellency preferred a delicate lie;
but I do not know anything more delicate than the truth.”
This is the closest I could get to the truth.
I have two sets of memories now. I have my own memory of being on Mars, spending all those years in a POW camp, listening to books on history, geography, intelligence. And I have my memories of the war as it happened, all experienced through the vision of my other self, a younger self, out there being a big damn hero.
They were different wars. The same war. The war I never want anyone else to experience ever again.
I will forever remember the protestor in São Paulo telling me to drop my weapon and join her. I know now I was never the hero.
It was her. It was us.
The heroes were always the ordinary people who pursued extraordinary change.
The power of the corrupt governments and entrenched corporations feels inevitable. No doubt so did the rule of the kings and landowners before them.
But I know better now. I know there is a greater power, and it is ours. The greater power is us.
And that is the world we will build out here, somewhere, when we bring all our pieces back together.
A future made of light.
Acknowledgments
Tremendous thanks to my agent, Hannah Bowman, who suggested extending my short story “The Light Brigade” into a novel. This was a hell of a book to figure out, structurally, and she helped me dig and navigate the trenches on this one.
Special thanks also to Joshua Bowman, for figuring out the mathematical graph Hannah and I needed to run characters through to see if the events in this book all lined up correctly. I’m told it was “a directed Hamiltonian path through a bipartite graph.” This resulted in a structured time-travel path that overcame all the corners I’d painted myself into. I owe much of the theory behind the time-traveling events here to Carlo Rovelli, who wrote The Order of Time, which provides the closest thing to science in this science-fiction novel.
Kudos to my editor, Joe Monti, for enduring the lateness and resulting abbreviated editing time line for this novel. He was the good cop to Hannah’s bad cop: a great two-punch editing duo who enabled a half-formed idea to become a novel.
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