The Power Broker

by Nick Svolos

  “Anyhow, for the last ten years, from my perspective, I’ve been trying to figure out what went wrong. Tracking events back to their original cause. That’s how I got wise to Dr. Schadenfreude’s little caper. He doesn’t cause what happens, but he does manage to get rid of all the supers. I think that’s what lets the other thing, the really bad thing, happen.”

  “Wow, so his scheme actually works?”

  “Yup. There’re a few glitches, about a hundred people die, but he achieves his goal.”

  “So why didn’t we just stop him while we were at the base? With your abilities, we could have shut the whole thing down.”

  “Like I told ya, I tried. Tried blowing up the reactors, sneaking in and tying everyone up, I even just went and killed them all one time. None of it worked. In 2029, the whole world dies. Believe it or not, this is your second trip through. Third, if you count the time you got caught at the morgue.”

  “I got caught at—wait, the disconnected camera! That was you?”

  He grinned. “Yup. You saw the camera but went ahead and pulled that stunt with the kid’s blood anyways. The cops hauled you in the next day and you were sitting in a jail cell when Schadenfreude pulled the trigger.”

  Dawson eyed me. “You what?”

  “My lawyer has advised me to not answer that question as it might incriminate me.”

  Doughboy pulled the car over to the side of the road. “Don’t be so hard on him, Captain. You’d have never got this far if he followed the rules. The blood put him onto the Force ring, and that put you on to Schadenfreude. It’s all falling into place this time.”

  He gave the team a couple of minutes to stretch our legs before gathering us together for another time jump. He told us we’d make better time once they built the freeway. A quick group hand-holding session later, we were back in November of 2015, the I-15 was in place, and we were speeding back to Los Angeles on it, drawing astonished looks as the pristine classic car passed our fellow motorists.

  I reached for my cellphone and cursed. “Damn, I left all my stuff back in the base.”

  Doughboy chuckled. “Don’t worry, you’ll be going back there soon enough.”

  “Huh? No way. This is a job for the Army, isn’t it? We can get some supers to help them out.”

  “Nope, doesn’t work. Ain’t ya been wondering why I saved you, Conway? It’s because it’s you. You’re the one who saves the world.”

  ***

  Doughboy dropped the rest of the crew on the outskirts of Los Angeles, explaining that it was still Tuesday night and that they’d need to lay low and not be seen until after their earlier selves were captured in the Mojave. He stressed that they should take no action until after then, or they would only screw things up. After two o’clock Wednesday afternoon, it was up to them to act as they thought best. The team solemnly agreed to follow his instructions. The whole thing was just too weird and scary to do otherwise.

  I didn’t get off so lucky. Doughboy had me get back in the car and we got back on the freeway, heading west. “Right. I guess you got a lot of questions. Well, this is the time to ask ‘em. Shoot.”

  That was an understatement. Most of my grey matter was sore from trying to wrap itself around the whole ‘saving the world’ thing, so I decided to start small. “So, uh, let’s start with your powers. Time travel. How’s it work?”

  He pulled the pocket watch out of his shirt pocket. “On the night before I left for France, my grandfather came to see me. He gave me this watch. At first, I thought he was just handing down a keepsake, you know, to bring me luck. Then he told me that it was how he’d made it through his war. He served with the 8th Illinois Volunteers under General Oglesby in the Civil War. He showed me how it worked, at least as far as he understood. Basically, he’d stop time between volleys and make sure he wasn’t standing in the way when he started it up again and the bullets hit. He told me it felt like a cheat, but after watching a few of his buddies get killed, he got over it. Anyhow, he wanted me to have it. Thought it might give me an edge. As for going back and forth through time, I learned about that after the war. I was just playing with the dials and buttons and found myself in the eighteen hundreds. It took a little while to get it all figured out, but I think I have a pretty good handle on what this thing can do now.”

  “But, when you came back, you became a crime fighter, right? What made you do that? I seem to remember the reporters back in the day thought you were a teleporter, like Red Cap.”

  “Hah! Naw, I’m nothing like Seamus. I guess if you saw me back then, I can see how you’d think I was teleporting, though.”

  “Seamus? Wait. You were on a first name basis with Red Cap?”

  “Sure. We was in the same unit. So was Barnabus, er, I guess you know him as ‘Ultiman’, right?” I must have looked pretty gobsmacked right about then, because the time-hopping soldier added, “You might want to close your mouth, kiddo. You’re gonna wind up with a mouthful of bugs.”

  I’ve found photos that show Ultiman hadn’t aged a day since the Korean War. Even though he looked like he was on the edge of thirty, he’s admitted to being much older. I’d never gotten a straight answer out of him as to how much older, though. “OK, man, you can’t just drop a lead like that on a reporter and not come across with the story,” I said, cursing the luck that led me to be here without my voice recorder.

  He laughed. “It’s a long story. I’ll tell it to you sometime if you’re still interested. For now, I think we’d better stay on mission.”

  Interested? Hell yeah, I was interested! Costumed superhumans started popping out of the woodwork after the first World War, and this man was one of the first. The things this guy knew would make for an incredible story. That, plus that last little revelation about Ultiman, hell, it was like showing a five-year-old the biggest, most awesome Christmas present ever, and then telling him that he’d have to wait six months to open it.

  I sighed and let it drop. He was right. Apparently, I had a world to save. “OK, so what happens? And why me? I don’t see what makes me your go-to guy when it comes to stopping a cataclysm. Hell, I’ll be almost fifty when the end comes.”

  We were downtown now, and Doughboy pulled us into a parking lot near Pershing Square. “I think I mentioned, this isn’t our first go-round. Last time, it took me a day and a half to convince you. You’re a stubborn man, Conway. Forgive me, but I think I’ll just cut to the chase this time.” He grabbed my hand and pressed a button on the watch.

  The now familiar strobe light of the rising and falling sun flashed in the window. Cars entered the parking lot, parked and left again in instants. Traffic flew by us in a blur. A building across the street collapsed in on itself, followed by others. The sky turned dark and red. A small volcano sprang from the earth somewhere down the street.

  Then it stopped. “End of the line,” Doughboy said. “Welcome to the end of the world.”

  We got out of Alice and stepped around the rubble and out onto the street. The sky was dark, laden with thick, black clouds that didn’t look like they held water, reflecting a red glow from the devastation below. The air reeked of sulphur. The area around Pershing Square was buried under collapsed buildings. Dead and burnt palm trees decorated the ruined plaza.

  It was hot. Unbearably so. There had to be a lava flow somewhere close by.

  “My God…” was all I could manage to say.

  “Yeah,” Doughboy replied. “I’ve done a fair bit of traveling over the last ten years. The story’s the same everywhere I’ve managed to get to. Far as I can tell, the rest of the world’s just like this.”

  On what was left of the sidewalk, a news rack lay on its side. It had the logo of the Beacon, smudged though it was, embossed on the transparency set in the door. He walked over to it, pried it open with his bayonet, pulled out a sheet of paper and handed it to me. “Here, you need to read this.”

  Blinking tears from my stinging eyes—it was the sulphur in the air, dammit—I noticed that the whole thin
g was manually typeset. The masthead had no logo, just a larger typeface declaring this to be the Final Edition of the Los Angeles Beacon. A line below it, in a smaller font, read “Reuben Conway, acting Publisher.” It had a publication date of July 24, 2028. I began to read the single article.

  It is with great regret that I write these words. I don’t know if anyone will read them, but I hope that somehow they’ll find their way to someone who can. It is for you, dear reader, that I write these words, if for no other reason than to let you know that once, on this planet, there lived a race of people who lived, loved, and passed that life and love on to be cherished by future generations. We had more than our share of failures, made heinous mistakes and committed atrocities that stagger the imagination and conscience, but through it all we were confident that, for all our faults, the best parts of us, life and love, would persevere. We had hope that the chain would continue, that our descendants would carry life and love into the future and without end. We had the responsibility to ensure that it did.

  We failed.

  Once, we had among our numbers very rare individuals with tremendous power. Some were tormentors, but many were our protectors. We both feared and admired them. We called them “supers”. They could do things that the rest of us couldn’t, and that frightened many of us. They’re gone now. In 2015, a villain named Dr. Schadenfreude released a nanovirus that took away the parts that made them super. The world lost its ability to produce them.

  What was done couldn’t be undone, and we went on with our lives. No more were we subject to the depredations of people we couldn’t defend ourselves against, but then, neither were we protected by them.

  We learned that Dr. Schadenfreude was working on behalf of an organization known as Bedlam. Their goal was to destabilize the world and then pick up the pieces, establishing their own unchallenged rule. For that, the supers would have to be eliminated. Once the nanovirus had run its course, one by one, the world’s governments fell under Bedlam’s control.

  Even so, we had hope. Hope that, like all things, this dark time would one day pass. Hope that our children or theirs would once again walk in freedom.

  And then, something wonderful happened. At least we thought it was wonderful at the time. Two years ago, a powerful man took the field to stand in Bedlam’s path of domination. Calling himself Terminus, he stopped Bedlam in its tracks. Time after time, Bedlam sent its slave-armies against him, but nothing could withstand his power.

  Within weeks, Bedlam was no more. The world was free. Hope had survived.

  A grateful world turned to Terminus for leadership. Many worshipped him as a God. Can you see our mistake? For all his power, he was still just a man, and few men can resist Godhood. He began to believe them. His adherents began to round up the non-believers. At first, he stopped them, telling them that this was not the way. Later, he allowed them to take only the loudest of his detractors. Eventually, Terminus started helping his followers silence dissent.

  Terminus took the field once more. He unleashed his full power, but something went wrong. He lost control. Something happened in the Earth’s core. I don’t understand the details, but the tectonic plates shifted. You can see the results in the shattered world around you.

  Once we had superhumans. They could have stopped Terminus. They could have stopped Bedlam from ever causing him to rise in the first place. But they were all gone by the time we needed them.

  And that, dear reader, was my fault. This is my confession.

  Before Dr. Schadenfreude could unleash his nanovirus, he had to eliminate the only force that could stop him. The Angels, a team of supers who once protected this city. He managed to arrange a series of events that led to them being in a North Korean prison when he implemented his scheme. I tried to stop them from going, but they went anyway. I should have been more persuasive. I should have found a way.

  I failed. I’m sorry.

  This will be the last printing of this newspaper. There’s nobody here but me now, and I don’t think there’s anything left to report.

  To whoever reads this, I wish you luck. I wish you life and love, but most importantly I wish you hope.

  I staggered over to the hood of a derelict Police car and sat down. Questions competed for space in my head. Did The Angels ever get out of Korea? What happened to Helen? Did she die in a jail cell, believing I’d lied to her? What the hell’s Bedlam?

  “What do you think?” Doughboy asked.

  “Not my best work,” I croaked. “Too wordy and emotional.”

  “Under the circumstances,” the hero regarded me empathetically, “I think that can be excused. Besides, this version of you got what he hoped for. Someone read it.”

  I shook my head. “That may be true, but this would be more useful as a news piece. Hard facts. Dates and places. This is a freakin’ editorial.” I crumpled the damned thing up and threw it to the ground. There weren’t any cops any more to bust me for littering. “Might as well be a greeting card.”

  “I wouldn’t say that, Conway,” Doughboy said. “That thing tells us everything we need to know.”

  I realized he was right. Leaping to my feet, I snatched up the paper and smoothed it out. “Yeah! All we gotta do is take this back and show it to Ultiman, right? They don’t go to Korea, we stop Dr. S, bada-bing, bada-boom, everything’s cool. Let’s fire up the Wayback Machine, Mr. Peabody!”

  Doughboy smiled and shook his head. “Funny, you said the same thing last time. I still don’t get the reference. Anyhow, it doesn’t work like that. Remember, from your perspective, The Angels have already gone. It’s part of your past. You can’t do anything to change that.”

  “Why not?”

  He sighed and took a seat on a pile of rubble. “There’s a lot I still don’t understand about this thing. The watch didn’t come with a manual. But one of the things I’ve figured out is that you can’t change your own past. Believe me, I tried. Once I figured out I could go back in time, the first thing I wanted to do was stop the war from ever happening. You know, I lost a lot of friends and I thought I could bring ‘em back. So, I went back and shot Prince Frederick William of Prussia, the guy who started the whole thing.” I opened my mouth to protest, but he held up a hand and went on. “I know that’s not the guy you know about. His son went on to become Emperor, that’s the Kaiser Wilhelm that you know. The thing that changed was, instead of the war starting when the Prussians invaded Alsace, it began with a kid in Bosnia shooting an Austrian Archduke. The end result was the same, though. I guess some things just have to happen.” He shrugged sadly.

  “So, how does this time travel thing work, then? I mean, you went back in time and brought me here. If I stop this from happening, doesn’t your whole motivation to rescue me go away? Seems like the whole thing ends up in a loop.”

  He reached into his rucksack, pulling out a weathered copy of The Return of the King and held it up. “When you look at this, what do you see?”

  “A book. The third part of The Lord of the Rings.”

  “Right. You’ve read it?” I nodded. “Good. Now, you’re seeing it as a single object. But if I wanted to ask Frodo the same question, I’d have to go into the book and find him. If I did it early on, he’s paralyzed in a cocoon. Sometime later, he and Samwise are dressed up as orcs and walking across Mordor. On later pages, he’s in Mount Doom. So, if I went back to the The Two Towers, I could tell him to watch out for Shelob, and the rest of this book might turn out different, but from Frodo’s perspective, it would all just look like the normal progression of events.”

  “Yeah, but aren’t you making my point? You prevent Frodo from getting caught by Shelob, but then you’d have no reason to tell him to avoid her, so you wouldn’t, and then Frodo’s back in the web.”

  “Ah, but you’re forgetting we’re not characters in the book. We’re just reading it. We perceive the events in an entirely different way than our hobbit friend does. We’d just notice that the story’s different from the first time we rea
d it.”

  I struggled to get my head around this. It took me a while to work through his logic but I spotted a flaw. “OK, I think I get it. I’m Frodo, and the time stream is the book. But, you’re not outside the book. By your analogy, you’re a character in this just like me.”

  “Not quite. I’m more like the editor. My frame of reference is based on 1928, when I got bounced forward. So, I can change stuff in your time and then go back to my time and watch the story unfold.”

  It all started to become clear. I began to pace around. “Woah. This is pretty heavy. And you can’t go forward past this point in time?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing to go to. Everybody’s dead.”

  “I see. No characters, no story.”

  “That’s my take on it. I guess the author just puts down his pen.”

  I stopped pacing. Dammit, why did I have to be Frodo? “So, what am I supposed to do?”

  “So, you’re convinced? Because you’re not going to like it.”

  “Convinced about what? This?” I waved at the devastation around us. “Yeah, you made your point. I’m on board.”

  “Good.” He got up and started walking back to the ReVere. “What time did you get to the Tower on Monday?”

  I hurried to follow him. “Uh, just before nine in the morning. Why?”

  He made an adjustment to his watch. “We need to get there before you do.” He said it like that was supposed to make sense. We got back into the wondrous old machine and he held out his hand. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  XV

  We emerged from our time-jump, during which I got to watch the world un-destroy itself, beside the reassembled Pershing Square, and walked the few blocks to the Angel Tower. We drew odd looks from the morning commute folks, mostly due to the hero’s get-up, but it also might have had something to do with the stench of sulphur we’d brought with us from the future. Despite my persistent questioning, Doughboy refused to explain his plan, merely stating that I’d know soon enough.