Doppelganger

by John Schettler

  “He’s got data on that?”

  “No. It’s just speculation, but what we do have is one major Prime going down—Josef Stalin. His assassination seems to be the key lever on events in my mind, but neither Nordhausen, nor I, can link that to anything the Russian battlecruiser did. It could have been happenstance.”

  “The death of a Prime Mover like Stalin would not come off that easily,” said Maeve. “Time is stubborn, and she protects Primes like her own children. Remember those assassination attempts against Napoleon from our mission to Egypt to look at the Rosetta Stone? Someone took a pot shot at him, several men in fact, and each and every one had their muskets misfire.”

  “Yes,” said Paul, “historians attributed that to the muggy climate right near Suez affecting the powder, but it did seem rather strange.”

  “Just like this little blip Nordhausen found about Marshall Ney—another assassination attempt that went bad,” said Maeve.

  “Well, Stalin didn’t fare so well, and the result was that Sergei Kirov eventually took over the Bolshevik movement. That struggle, particularly with this new figure, Ivan Volkov, led to the complete fracturing of the Russian state. Yet I just can’t connect the dots. We have to be missing something, so as dangerous as this is, I’ve got to go back. Perhaps this Fairchild woman can shed some light on all of this.”

  “It should be an easy shift,” said Maeve. “The Azores isn’t under threat for this date.”

  “It’s not that,” said Paul. “It’s the Heisenberg Wave. It’s clear it is already swept forward from the assassination of Stalin to affect all the history between 1909 and 1941. In fact, there may still be a lot of residual energy there. Kelly says he’s detected something odd for this time period centered on late July. I think I know what it is.”

  “Paradox,” said Maeve darkly.

  “Correct. July 28 1941 was the point of initial divergence according to the Golem flags. Somehow, with all these time displacements, the damn ship ended up in 1940, a year before it first arrived, which means it’s approaching its own point of entry into the time continuum, but from the past.”

  “Not very tidy,” said Maeve.

  Paul took a deep breath. “Well it’s going to cause a problem. That event is sitting there like a rock in the stream. The Heisenberg Wave is hitting it right now, yet Paradox Time is completely immune to Heisenberg variations. Ever see a big wave break on a shoreline rock? All that quantum energy is going to be like a storm front at high tide meeting an impregnable rock. Sea spray everywhere—quantum foam, and a hell of a lot of variation risk, because the wave is going to be split as soon as it reaches that Paradox.”

  “What will happen?”

  “You’ve seen wave dispersal patterns. A single tsunami set that encounters an island at sea could split and form two dispersal wave sets. The Heisenberg Wave might do the same thing, and then we get into a real witching hour—very odd effects, and very unpredictable.”

  “How so?”

  “Two Heisenberg Wave patterns will form, and they’ll also overlap and influence one another. A kind of temporal moiré will form on the other side of the Paradox time, a zone of chaos where we could see very strange events, and that is dangerous.”

  “I’m not following you, though I’ll grant you the physics has some reason for this.”

  “Too many cooks spoil the broth,” said Paul. “The Heisenberg Wave is trying to re-order the continuum to account for the variations introduced in 1908. That’s what it generated from. Now it encounters Paradox, splits into a dual wave set, and then all hell breaks loose. Anything could happen as both wave sets attempt to migrate forward from the Paradox Hour. Each one could act independently. They will no longer be in sync, and the altered states they give rise to could conflict with one another. It could manifest in any number of ways, something small, or something very big.”

  “Example?” Maeve crossed her arms, waiting.

  “If this Paradox is really solid, it generates a new Heisenberg Wave as well, which then influences and alters the waves migrating forward from 1908. It could also reflect a good deal of that initial Heisenberg Wave backwards at the point of contact. Then we get backwash, a wave flowing in reverse order, and against the arrow of time. That causes more variation, only it migrates to the past.”

  “How does it manifest?” said Maeve. “Put it on a personal level so I can grasp it.”

  “Well… You’d get things like Déjà vu, Jamais vu, Presque vu.”

  “Already seen, never seen, and almost seen,” said Maeve, translating the French.

  “Yes, people could be beset with Déjà vu, thinking they have already lived experiences due to the ripple effect of the backwash migrating through their past. Then again, they might lose memory functionality, and suffer Jamais vu, thinking familiar or routine events were all new and completely unique. The third is when you’ve got something on the tip of your tongue, but just can’t get it out—a sensation that something you know is impending, right on the cusp of happening or being expressed, but inhibited in some way.”

  “But Jamais vu is fairly rare syndrome, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but it can sometimes lead to the Caprgas Delusion.”

  “Enlighten me,” said Maeve, not being familiar with that condition.

  “Psychologists think it’s a delusion where a person comes to believe an associate, friend, or even a close family member or spouse, has been replaced by an identical imposter, a double.”

  “Invasion of the Body Snatchers?”

  “Not quite, but you have the general idea. It’s called the ‘delusional misidentification syndrome,’ and patients with extreme cases have even claimed they believed time was warped, or that they were trapped in some kind of recurring time loop.”

  “Now you’ve got my attention,” said Maeve. “You think this isn’t really a delusion at all.”

  “I have my suspicions, because things like this can happen in a Chaos Zone. These patients might have been experiencing something very real. Beyond that, you get memory loss, because lived events are suddenly being reordered, and time has to account for the memory of those events in living persons. You see, our brain is like Kelly’s RAM bank—our Touchstone Database. We keep it running here at all times, and protected by a low order nexus point. A human brain is like that, only it won’t be protected—unless it’s also in a nexus bubble. That’s why we remember the history and don’t suffer the memory loss. You see how disturbing this is? Events change and things you once knew simply vanish, like that key that was hanging around my neck.”

  “Scary,” said Maeve. “You mean I might suddenly lose a Shakespeare play and never know it was gone?”

  “Worse than that—you might suddenly lose a person and not even remember they ever existed. And there are other effects that could arise from the dual Heisenberg Waves after the Paradox is encountered. This can cause real time loops, replays, echoes, phasing events, things falling out of sync with their own time, even the shifting of physical matter. The duality of the Heisenberg Wave also introduces another dangerous possibility. A doppelganger could arise—a double walker… perhaps more than one.”

  “Your Capgras Delusion made real?”

  “Exactly. That may not matter if the duplicate is just another nobody, but if it happens with a Prime…”

  “I see where this is going,” said Maeve. “I had never considered this possibility.”

  “Yes,” said Paul. “The problem is, if we do get one, it will most likely be a Prime, because they tend to inhabit Nexus Bubbles, which can protect them from Paradox effects. You were worried about Stalin, well suppose he were still alive in that milieu when this Heisenberg Wave splits, and the world ends up with two men of steel. Can you imagine the consequences—two Stalins? And that is just the little stuff.”

  “My god,” said Maeve. “What else?”

  “It’s easy to see that all these effects can cause real chaos. In fact, now I’m beginning to really see the danger that Fair
child spoke of when she use my terminology—Grand Finality. Things could come flying apart to such an extent that time is unable to restore a viable continuum. In effect, the meridian suffers a fatal break—it shatters.”

  “But wouldn’t that just mean things spin off onto another meridian?”

  Paul gave her a long look. “You don’t understand,” he said slowly. “Forget the many worlds theory, that’s all bunk. A meridian is just a possible reordering of events. You can have an infinite number of them, but only one universe. Everything settles onto one meridian in the end. All the others are ‘also rans.’ They are just possible outcomes arising from a variation introduced in the continuum by a time traveler. That variation generates a Heisenberg Wave, and as that wave moves forward, it slowly weaves all the various strands from these possible meridians back into one—but only one remains in the end. All the others never happen. Once the Heisenberg Wave completes its migration, the entire universe settles back into one meridian—the prime meridian. We all think it’s the one we were born to, and we are correct, because you never leave the prime meridian of time, Maeve, but it changes… it changes… The one we are standing in now stretches all the way back through time. But in 1908, it started to fray, and that loosened thread is migrating forward like a run in good hosiery.”

  “And when it gets here?” Maeve’s eyes held as much fear as anything else as she waited.

  “Then God help anyone who is not in a protected Nexus Point.”

  There was a long silence between them after that. Maeve’s eyes reflected the seriousness of what Paul was telling her now. It could all come unraveled. It might be so badly frayed that time cannot hold the rope of causality together, and that rope was now grinding and stretching against the sharpened rock of a major Paradox event.

  “How long before the wave reaches us?”

  “I don’t know,” said Paul frankly, “but we’ll certainly see it coming. The Golem modules will see the variations, and we’ll be able to monitor the progression of the damage on the chronology line. Right now we have solid green before 1908, except for that one little yellow blip in 1815 that seemed to have no consequence. Yet in June of 1908, things go from yellow, to amber, to red, and the damage to the meridian as it passes through WWII is quite profound. Now we see black on the chronology line for the first time, right at 28 July, 1941—Paradox.”

  “The ship,” she said in a low voice.

  Paul nodded.

  “That damn Russian ship… What was the code name Nordhausen said the British once use for it?”

  Paul looked down, thinking, then remembered the word.

  “Geronimo,” he said, and the silence returned.

  Maeve finally met his eyes again, understanding. “So this is why the voices from the future went silent…. Yet you’ve said the Heisenberg Wave is still in the 1940s. Only minor variations have been detected here.”

  “Yes, the Golems are having difficulty finding variation data from beyond July of 1941. Paradox has a very strong penumbra, a shadow that can be quite impenetrable. So we aren’t sure if the main Heisenberg Wave has passed through that point in time yet.”

  “Then what causes the minor variations we have detected here?”

  “The P waves,” said Paul. “Predictive waves, precursors. When an earthquake happens, the seismic waves migrate through the earth’s crust. There are those that migrate through the deeper crust called body waves or P waves, and these are very fast, often reaching seismic monitors before the real damaging waves that follow. The P waves often produce low frequency acoustic energy as well.”

  “You mean you can hear them?”

  “Not unless you have very good ears. They manifest as ultrasound, very low amplitude sound, and other ambient vibrations. Then the main surface shock waves come, which create the real shear and roll in the crust that causes most of the damage in an earthquake. My theory posits that a Heisenberg Wave acts the same way. First it sends out rapid waves that are precursors to what is going to happen. So I call them P waves, as they can be predictive of what is to come—yet they don’t cause the real damage. Ever get a sensation of imminent doom? That’s a P wave passing through, you sense it, feel it on some level, though you can’t really hear it. They just begin introducing minor variations and other odd effects. Think of them as outliers, harbingers, little foreshocks of the damage yet to come. As to the future, they are at the greatest angle of divergence, so they get the worst of these P wave effects.”

  “Angle of divergence?”

  Paul thrust out both arms in front of him in a V. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” he said. “As they do so, they are very close to one another in the beginning, yet the farther they go, the farther apart they become. Think of those roads as two possible time meridians. There are actually hundreds, thousands, perhaps even an infinite number of possible meridians, but let’s just stay with these two for this example. When they are close together, they are very similar, with only minor variations. Yet as they diverge, that gulf between them sees them become very different. The farther they go, the wider the divergence, and the greater the variation. So… these precursor waves, these foreshocks, well they can cause minor alterations to both meridians, which are retained when these two roads must eventually become one road again. That’s what the Heisenberg Wave is doing, pulling the two possible meridians together again into one new altered prime meridian. Think of it like a zipper, to mix metaphors here. So, way out in the future, these precursor shocks are much more severe than they are here. It’s like a whip cracking. The energy flows in a wave along the whip, from the point of initial variation at the handle, to the snapping crack of real change in the future at the far end.”

  “You mean they are going to suffer more damage than we will at this point. The changes become progressively worse the farther on in time you go.” Maeve was grasping it now.

  “Correct. They could have all these effects I’ve described underway there, only much worse than we’ll get them here. The Ambassadors even hinted at that. Remember? Soon the main Heisenberg Wave will migrate forward, the S wave that can shear and roll events into an altered state, and it eventually settles down, joining all the possible meridians back into one new prime. We’re just starting to see some of the effects here—that phase shift I went through was a perfect example. In the future, it will be much worse, possibly bad enough to stifle those voices.”

  Maeve nodded, with only one more question in her mind now, and it was soon on her lips. “Can we stop this? Is there anything we can do?”

  “I’m not really sure, but we can damn well try.”

  Chapter 27

  Kirov was at the heart of it now, they could all see that. Even if all the connections to the major variations had not yet been mapped out, it was clear that the ship was going to cause severe trauma to the continuum because of its presence at a point in time prior to its first displacement to the past. Paul thought deeply about the impending Paradox event, and knew what he believed might happen.

  “One thing is certain,” he told the team members. “That ship has already displaced from this present meridian. The event has already occurred. Kirov was reported missing in that Norwegian Sea accident. Then it mysteriously returns in the Pacific, evading detection by a very capable US Navy, not to mention the spy satellite networks, so that means it was arriving from some point in the past. Then after the eruption of that Demon Volcano, the ship is reported as being sunk in that recent engagement with the 7th Fleet, but I don’t think that’s what happened. I think the damn ship displaced again, and the Golem variation data we’ve got here is ample evidence of that.”

  “Agreed,” said Robert. “So then what happens to the ship that was approaching Paradox Hour from the past?”

  Paul smiled. “There aren’t two ships, Robert, only one. The ship that vanished again in the Pacific recently is the same one approaching Paradox Hour in 1941. We may speak of them as if they were separate entities, but in reality, they are one and th
e same.”

  “Then how is there Paradox here?”

  “Because in 1941, the ship is now about to enter time reserved for their initial arrival—Paradox Time. That is not possible.”

  “But you just said there was only one ship, so it’s not like there’s any real collision here. We have only one entity. Why wouldn’t they just sail on into Paradox Hour and simply become the ship arriving from the future?”

  “There you go again. There isn’t a separate ship arriving from the future. They are that ship, and in order for them to be there at all, the first arrival event must occur. It’s an imperative. So time will not permit what you suggest.”

  “Christ, how did they end up displacing to a time before their first arrival?”

  “I haven’t mapped out all the time they may have made, but it’s clear that they somehow managed to get to 1908, and then attempted to move forward again.”

  “They were most likely trying to get home,” said Maeve. “Yet we still haven’t accounted for how the ship moves each time. We have several very energetic events that explain some of its shifts, including the nukes they were flinging around, but at other times we have evidence of a displacement that seems to have no direct cause.”

  “Yes,” said Paul. “I’ll see if Fairchild knows anything about that, but my guess is that it has something to do with the ships nuclear reactors.”

  “A lot of ships use nuclear propulsion, but they don’t just start shifting in time,” said Nordhausen.

  “True, but this one does. That’s a given. We have to work from known facts.”

  “I still don’t get what you said about there being only one ship,” said Kelly, finally joining the other team members after setting up his shift program for the planned mission to the Azores.