Decoherence

by Liana Brooks

  It was such a slight change, green to blue. Emir would have dismissed it as an office prank if he’d noticed it at all. Surely, this iteration’s Emir would be no different.

  Senturi pushed the door open, and red lights flared in the hall.

  “Fan out, control the exits.” Everyone moved but Senturi. “Problems?” This was not the time for him to remember he was a spoiled child coddled by a mother in the world’s Ruling Council.

  “Someone needs to go into the building,” Senturi said. “I should go.”

  “I will. I’ve been there before and know the layout. Get back to the drop site and wait for Emir.”

  She pulled her face mask on and stormed into the eerily silent hall, flooded in red. As a child, she’d read a horror story about a house with bleeding walls. This was that building. Cold and silent as a tomb, red light dripping from above, boots echoing on the tile. This is what it felt like to storm the gates of death.

  The faint murmur of a voice intruded on the silence.

  She hurried forward, trying to locate the sound. It came from the office, muffled by a wall.

  “I am telling you, Agent Marrins, the alarms are going off, and everything is in danger.” It was Emir’s voice, but worried, harried. This was the Emir from the other iteration.

  Rose jiggled the door handle and found it locked. She leaned in to listen.

  There was a prolonged pause. “Once again, Agent, I must remind you of the vital importance of secrecy.” A breath. “You . . . I . . . ugh! I am developing a machine that will change the course of humanity. Make the world a better place.”

  That was debatable.

  The other Emir made a squelching sound of frustration. “Agent Marrins? Agent . . . insufferable imbecile.” Something made a crunching sound, probably a plastic of some kind, possibly the comm line.

  Rose smiled. This would be the easiest detonation she’d ever done. Shoot Emir now, and the whole iteration would crumble to dust.

  The other Emir began to pace.

  A melody played, then . . . “Agent Rose, this is Emir. You must come to the lab. Now! You must come now!” His footsteps stopped. “Agent Rose, you must come to the lab. You owe me that much. My life is in danger. They are coming for me. If I don’t give them what they want, they will kill me. They know it works now. I can’t stall any longer.”

  She sighed. “Why must you make your life difficult?” Rose asked the man who couldn’t hear her. Of course they were coming to kill him. What other possible outcome could there be?

  “My machine!” Emir said. “You told them it works. You showed them it works.”

  Rose’s hand clenched on her gun, thumb hovering over the safety. Usually it took only moments for an iteration to collapse, but if there was someone else continuing Emir’s work, he could—­theoretically—­be replaced. They didn’t have the other nodes collected. Without letting this iteration progress, they couldn’t even find the other nodes.

  Coming back to this nightmare wasn’t on her wish list, so she waited. They might need the name of his collaborators later.

  A thought whispered in her mind: If Emir could be replaced here, he could be replaced elsewhere.

  “Agent Rose!”

  She startled, half expecting to see Emir standing in front of her. But he was still on the comm. Talking to her other self, she realized. Not that it mattered, but she’d rather not kill herself again. It gave her a headache.

  “Please, I beg of you. Come to the lab tonight. Bring your partner, bring Altin, bring anyone, but come. Save me!” There was a pause that grew into the silence of rejection. A shuddering sob tore through the stillness of the red-­soaked lab. It was the cry of the prisoner facing execution.

  That would haunt her.

  It was so out of character for Emir—­for the true Emir, or any of the others she’d encountered—­that she knew this iteration was truly different. And that meant it had to be eliminated.

  It was easier to take out the other nodes without giving them warning. She did everything she could to make sure they didn’t suffer. Now . . . she flipped the safety off, pulled her goggles on, and aimed for the heat-­bright outline of the cowering Dr. Emir.

  “Commander Rose?” Donovan’s voice crackled in her ear.

  She flipped the safety back on and touched her commlink to turn it on. “Yes?” she demanded through gritted teeth.

  “Pull back. On Emir’s orders.”

  In his office, Emir pushed away from his chair and stumbled toward the door.

  Rose shook her head. “I have the target node in sight. Confirm orders to withdraw.” Donovan could play games if he wanted, but she wasn’t going to.

  Emir was poking something on the wall. A keypad, probably. In less than a minute, he’d leave his lab and come face-­to-­face with reality.

  “Order confirmed,” the real Emir said over the comm. “Pull back to the tree line, Commander. I have something special planned for this meddlesome other of mine.”

  Donovan, you fool. She replied with a clipped, “Yes, sir.” Swinging her gun onto her shoulder Rose pulled her goggles off and ran down the hall as the other Emir stepped out. She waited in the shadows by the back door until she heard his footsteps fade away in the direction of the building’s main entrance. Quietly opening the door, she stepped into the darkness and ran for the rendezvous point as a siren’s wail screamed in the distant darkness.

  “Where are we going, sir?” Donovan asked, as the portal spun faster, changing from purple to white.

  “We’re going to answer a call,” Emir said as he stepped through the portal, a comtech and Donovan following after.

  They arrived in an empty field with drought-­dry grasses and copses of trees huddling in clumps along the moonlit horizon.

  Emir waved his hand at the tech. “Start the call on the scheduled time. Donovan, watch the portal. We’ll be transitioning back momentarily.”

  Swallowing a growl of dry irritation, Donovan spat out a, “Yes, sir.”

  In his growing impatience to escape Prime, he’d forgotten why he worked hard to get along with Senturi and Rose in the first place. A single person couldn’t keep Emir in check. His ego was bigger than any one person, and his tendency to create convoluted schemes only made life more difficult for everyone around him.

  With Senturi busily spinning his own webs and Rose lost to her latest doomed project, he was the sole proprietor of Emir’s sanity. And it seemed he’d misplaced it in his rush to line everything up.

  “Sir?” The tech looked up. “The original call just ended.”

  Emir held out his hand. “Put it on the open comm.”

  “Yes, sir.” The tech sat cross-­legged in the long grass, ignoring the plague of midnight insects, and tapped industriously at his computer screen. “Connecting now, sir.”

  An unnatural ringing of a flat bell tone cut into the night air.

  “What?” a surly male voice demanded.

  “Agent Marrins?” Emir asked with a voice of silk as he smiled.

  Donovan looked away. He knew that expression. It meant that Emir had found a new form of torture to inflict and a new victim to practice his cruelty on.

  “Emir, is this you again? I told you to shut your mouth and let me sleep.” The man had just signed his death warrant.

  Emir chuckled. “I am the Emir. Not the one you spoke to previously, but the original. You should feel honored.”

  “Really?” Marrins asked. “ ’Cause all I feel right now is a strong urge to punch you. Do you know what time it is?”

  “Time for a change, Agent Marrins. I’m sure you know this world desperately needs one. History has betrayed you.”

  There was a speculative pause, filled by the whirring of grasshopper wings and the saw of cicadas. “What are you going on about, Emir?”

  “I understand you have pr
oblems with the way the government is currently being run?”

  Donovan flicked away a beetle with a glowing back.

  “What are you suggesting?” Marrins asked.

  “A simple trade,” Emir said. “You remove an inconvenience from my life, and I give you the keys to staging your revolution.”

  “Can’t have a revolution now. It’s too late.”

  “No, not now,” Emir agreed. “But think what you could do if you had the knowledge of these past years when your nation was voting to keep their independence or give it away.”

  Donovan frowned over his shoulder at Emir. He couldn’t honestly be suggesting this iteration move further away from the history of Prime. The vote for government control was an einselected node. It had to happen. He took a deep breath and reminded himself that this iteration had a future that could be counted in hours, not years. Even Emir couldn’t frag it up that bad.

  “That’s what your kooky machine is?” Marrins asked. “A time machine?”

  “Something like that,” Emir said with a lethal smile. “Not as crude as you might imagine, but very similar.”

  “What do you want done?”

  “Come to the labs,” Emir said. “And shoot the man you know as Emir.”

  Marrins huffed; it might have been amusement or annoyance, Donovan couldn’t tell.

  “You realize I’m an agent of the Commonwealth Bureau of Investigation, and you’ve just asked me to commit a federal crime? That’s not going to look good on your record, Mr. Emir.” Marrins dragged the name out so it became a slur.

  “It’s your choice, Agent Marrins. Would you like to continue living in the Commonwealth, or would you like your United States back?”

  “You already know what I want,” Marrins said. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  Donovan bent over to check the faux-­Emir’s pulse. “Dead.”

  “The bullet hole between the eyes should have been enough,” Emir said as he stepped over and looked at his discarded other self. “What a horrible little man.”

  “This whole iteration is awful,” Donovan said. The colors were too bright, the noises too strange. Even the bright crimson blood seemed to glow like fire in the light of the orange sunrise.

  The only thing everyone seemed to agree on was that this iteration needed to end.

  Then the Prime would shift again, and he already had the new Prime picked out. It wasn’t as radically different as this place, but not too similar to the current situation, either. Senturi had found it on one of his runs, took a bullet in the shoulder to protect it, and was using the anomalies to jump between the two and maintain the Shadow Prime. Acting like a node in defiance of all of Emir’s expectations.

  Emir sighed. “Let’s leave before this iteration causes us another headache.”

  Donovan looked down the rolling hill to the building and the white police car pulling out of the parking lot. One thing still bothered him. “Sir, why did you tell him that you could change his history?”

  “Because ten minutes from now, he’ll cease to exist.”

  “You set a date to meet again.”

  Emir shrugged and started walking into the trees.

  “I could have done this,” Donovan persisted. The rogue iteration had to fall to make room for the Shadow Prime. His plan was running on a tight timetable. Emir’s ego couldn’t be allowed to destroy his future. The red-­haired woman was there. Senturi had seen her. She was waiting for Donovan.

  “You could have,” Emir agreed. “Rose, Senturi, Bennet—­any of you could have disposed of this Emir. But the other nodes weren’t here. There is a chance, however slight, that this iteration may continue for a day or two. With luck, we’ll never need to worry about this place again. If we do, we now have an asset here. He won’t dare tell anyone about us, not with his precious country at stake.” Emir put so much contempt into the word that Donovan grimaced.

  That needed to change. Emir thought he ran the world, and he did it with no thought to anyone else. When Donovan’s plan came to fruition, Emir would be a footnote, not the headline, of history.

  Up ahead, a soft glow between two trees signaled the portal was opening. Donovan stepped over a branch broken by their intrusion and checked his locator. Only he, Emir, and Rose were still in this iteration.

  “Everyone else is gone?” Emir asked.

  Donovan looked at Rose’s location, nearly fifty meters away in a thicket that obscured her from Emir’s view. It was time for step one. “All clear, sir. I’m reading no other signals.” He shut off the volume on his comm just as Rose pinged him.

  Emir stepped through the portal with a happy smile.

  Rose pinged again, demanding an update with the flashing yellow light on his comm.

  He could picture her, eyes widening with fear and confusion as she realized the portal location had changed. She hadn’t known about the second jump or the new calculations. He’d planned to have Senturi take her out here, leave her corpse to rot in the woods while this iteration imploded, but this was better. More satisfying.

  She moved, starting to walk into view as the portal dimmed.

  Donovan stood there for a moment, waiting for the light of the portal to turn navy. At the last possible moment, he called her name, “Rose!”

  She turned. The look of horror on her face was everything he’d ever wanted. The stupid, witch. She was the means to her own downfall. She had brought MacKenzie to her world, replaced herself, and made all of this possible.

  Donovan stepped through the portal and watched it snap shut on her betrayed and anguished face.

  CHAPTER 27

  Day 200/365

  Year 5 of Progress

  (July 19, 2069)

  Central Command

  Third Continent

  Prime Reality

  Mac watched Emir pace the floor. He’d counted the returning assassins twice with a look of frustration. Now they both watched as the portal darkened to an abyssal blue and faded into black.

  “Everyone out!” Emir roared.

  The soldiers and techs fled as Emir glared at their retreat.

  Mac stood his ground. If he’d understood half of Jane’s notes, they were going to his iteration. Back to July of 2069, which was a long way from home in many ways, but he could make it work. The guards had kept him locked in the observation room when the portal was open. They’d been polite about it, of course. Offered him a meal that made his stomach clench in disgust and tepid water that tasted of poor filtration. Now they were gone. He opened the door and walked into the jump room.

  Emir glowered. “I told everyone to leave.”

  “They did,” Mac said. “But it’s obvious even to an outsider that something went wrong. You’re missing three ­people.”

  “Yes. Commander Rose, Captain Donovan, and Mr. Senturi. I can live without Senturi, but the other two I need back.” Emir crossed his arms and regarded the closed portal. “This is unfortunate timing.”

  “Yeah,” Mac said. “Everyone likes the battle cry, ‘Today is a good day to die.’ But the truth is there’s never a good day to die.” He tapped the top of one of the computers. “I could get them back for you.”

  Emir turned to him. “What?”

  “You want your ­people back. I was trained to extract soldiers from behind enemy lines. It seems to me that we could help each other out.”

  Emir snorted in dismissal. “I’m to trust you? You must be intelligent enough to realize how unlikely that is.”

  “Your ­people are in July 2069 in Alabama. I want to go back to December 2069 in Australia. You may not realize how far a walk that is, but I do. So I figure we can make a trade. Let me retrieve Jane and Donovan for you, then you can send me back to the moment after your commander abducted me. We all walk away happy.”

  “That would be suicide.”

&nbs
p; “For me or you?” Mac asked.

  Emir’s face was frustratingly placid. “The decoherence is coming. You would return only to die.”

  “We only have your word for this,” Mac said. “It seems to me you can’t even pinpoint how to pick the arrival date in an iteration. If you can’t do that, how could you possibly calculate decoherence?”

  “No one can calculate an exact timetable like that.” Emir waved his hand, dismissing the problem. “I’ve worked on the problem for years with no success.”

  “No success here you mean.” Mac twisted the knife into Emir’s ego. “The Emir in the Federated States of Mexico figured it out. I didn’t meet him, but I met some killers who used his machine. They had interesting things to say. In their timeline, the portal is used for vacations. You can jump back to watch your own wedding. Or go watch your parents meet. Sappy things like that.”

  “Impossible!” Emir turned, eyes blazing with fury. “That sort of thing isn’t possible. If it were, I would be the first to know. This iteration is the base for all others. The bedrock of humanity.”

  Mac shook his head. “And you base that on what? Your ability to kill other ­people better than someone else?”

  “That is the basis of evolution.” Emir lifted his chin with pride.

  Mac shrugged. “Survival of the fittest. ­People always get that concept wrong. It’s not survival of the strongest, it’s survival of those who pass on the most genes. If an animal doesn’t reproduce, it isn’t genetically fit according to biologists. Same thing happens to cultures. If you don’t create, if there’s no art, music, or architecture, the culture doesn’t just go extinct, it is forgotten entirely. I imagine it’s the same thing with iterations. Except you’ve been busy killing every seedling.” He rapped the computer with his knuckles once more for emphasis. “What happens when there are no more branches of history spawned by your iteration, Emir? Do you think that’s what causes decoherence? Because I do.”